Oh, happy day! Here's a vocabulary lesson.

And it's all because I got fact-checked. By Facebook. Happy Day indeed!

They have no sense of humour. The video I reposted was the one making the rounds showing the confrontation between President Zelensky of Ukraine and the current occupants of the US White House where the foreign dignitary was subjected to insulting tirades by President Trump and his vice president. The cartoon shows a video mock-up of Zelensky rapping Trump on the head who then falls backwards in a tearful tantrum. Funny, but intended only for amusement, or upset if you were a supporter of the current US administration, and certainly hardly in need of a fact-checking admonishment. I'll get to the vocab in a bit.

The term "fact-checking" has the connotation of a serious assessment of data - that someone or some algorithm has searched databanks for elements of the suspect data and is giving an evaluation. Snopes is one very respected site for fact-checking and there are others - 411 is another I have used although they are heavy on ads. Fact-checking sites typically give the statement under consideration and then describe which componets are accurate, which are demonstrably false and which are unknowable because of vague or insufficient data. Meta/Facebook just told me my post was wrong, but everyone knew that - it was a joke.

And when we are confronted with irrefutable facts which contradict the basis for our belief system on which we have built a life, what do we do? Well, the psych people tell us that we often double down on our beliefs. I don't like to think that I wouldn't be a rational person, but reflections on my own life story offer no such comfort.

I just knew that being stoic and not discussing upsetting things would allow us all to ride through rough spots in marriage; then Pat left. Twice.

I thought addicts were weak, sick and had chosen their life trajectories; then Judy died.

Epiphanies are supposed to be Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus style but mine were slow to come. The experience (and the word for the day) is "anagnorisis" pronounced an-nuhg-náw-ruh-sis. Freud, with a bit of help from Aristotle, based a whole theory of family constellation on it as you will see.

by Nathan Goldman (managing editor Jewish Currents):

Novelist Isabella Hammad’s new book, Recognizing the Stranger, is a searching meditation on narrative turning points—not only in literature but in relation to Palestine … The speech focuses on the particular literary technique of the “recognition scene.” She traces the form back to Aristotle’s notion of anagnorisis, “the moment when the truth of a matter dawns on a character,” famously and tragically exemplified in Oedipus’s realization that he has killed his father and married his mother. Hammad sees anagnorisis as a phenomenon intricately bound up with the Palestinian struggle. Palestinians, she writes, are well acquainted with scenes of outsiders suddenly discovering the justice of the Palestinian cause: “apparent blindness followed by staggering realization.” 

Reflecting on a conversation with an Israeli man she met on a kibbutz in the Galilee—a deserter who, after encountering a Palestinian man approaching the Gaza border fence entirely naked, fled rather than follow his orders to shoot— “How many Palestinians . . . need to die for one soldier to have their epiphany?” And what, Hammad asks, does it mean that in such paradigmatic recognition scenes about Palestine, the Palestinian is always only the occasion for another’s insight and never the center of their own narrative, their humanity made an object even as it’s finally seen?

In a different world, the book might have ended just as Hammad’s lecture did. But of course, nine days after her September 28th talk, everything changed.

I ordered Hammad's little book - a lecture and additional reflection after the events of Oct 7, 2023. It was a lecture, but it wasn't a fast read. She delivered it at Columbia University and that should ring a few bells if the name Mahmoud Khalil means anything, and she references work by the Palestinian academic, Edward Said among others to advance her enquiry, best expressed by that Israeli deserter who could not shoot an unarmed man:

He kept asking me whether I thought we humans could ever act in the world purely as individuals, and not on behalf of groups. ‘For ourselves, alone,’ he kept saying, ‘and not for our groups.’

There are lots of other pieces of data to come under the scrutiny of Facebook and its Meta overseer, and I have just ordered one. The book Careless People is written by Sarah Wynn-Williams who was for many years a top executive at Facebook and who finally had her own anagnorisis and left. Meta has been actively downplaying the significance of the book and attempting to discredit the author.

Wynn-Williams took her title from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which tells of the wealthy New Englanders of the early 20th Century who "were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Who do we know would fit that description today? If Facebook/Meta aren't fact-checking them, we should.

And just before we go, this coda regarding Facebook postings. If you scroll along the FB posts when you have some free time, past the nice baby-pet videos and the helpful bits of home-repair advice, you will eventually come to a cleverly-designed fake news story. I found one that purported to be Mark Carney interviewed by Rosemary Barton in which he revealed a fantastic get-rich-quick investment opportunity and she tried it and made money even while the interview was ongoing. It had appeared previously as videos about Trudeau's ex, Sophie Grégoire, revealing her secret reason for leaving the marriage and her new-found wealth; also David Suzuki telling Peter Mansbridge how he had become very rich by investing in the same scheme. Those ones needed some checking for sure.

We are heading into an election. Beware the source of your own news feeds and do some of your own fact-checking. It could save you from a nasty bout of anagnorisis down the road.