The stuff in the news continues to be perplexing. The Telegraph claims that Albanians posted as Serbs to commit some of the acts which sparked the violence. If this is indeed the case (and why would they lie, right?</sarcasm>) one would have to greatly mourn a society where people utterly indistinguishable in any other way, hate one another so greatly. In most of these kinds of situations, a member of one of the groups can clearly distinguish a member of the other group by characteristics that would be all but invisible to those of us outside the situation.

Regarding my remarks yesterday: Yes, I can see how they could have been taken as being callous, on another reading, and for that, I apologize to anyone whom I may have offended by those implications. I did not intend to deny the events. If anything I was acknowledging that they had surely happened, and was marvelling at their absense from news reports.

Yes, I did miss the remark acknowledging the retaliatory destruction of the mosque(s).

I suppose I don’t find it at all unusual to have one, or the other, or, more commonly, all parties, in any given situation, somewhat color the truth in order to make a horrible situation seem horrible only on one side. The media, then, will pick the bits of the story that they think will sell papers. I really don’t have any illusion that the media tells me the truth even as much as half of the time. It is for that reason that I don’t watch television news, don’t listen to radio news, and get my news by reading a selection of sources from news.google.com. Even then, it’s hard to miss that *most* of the stories come from the same sources, and most of the time even have the same phrasing. One comes to believe that it’s the news articles that contradict everyone else which are the true ones. And that, undoubtedly, leads me to some pretty radical views. Truth in media seems like an oxymoron most of the time.

And, inevitably, this skepticism extends to everything I read online. If it is on the internet, I question its veracity. I suppose that means I’m pretty much skeptical about everything I read. That’s pretty sad.

To a smaller extent I’m also questioning the interpretations of the motivation. Hatred, which was caused by religious differences centuries ago, has, in many cases, just become hatred, devoid of any religious motivation. Perhaps these people hate one another because they hate one another, because their parents hated one another, because *their* parents hated one another. This, combined with large groups of people that have the same history, leads to explosive events. Granted, this idea comes from out of US culture which is increasingly secular, and so may have nothing at all to do with what’s going on. But it was one of the ideas I was trying to air. The things that are happening certainly seem to have nothing to do with correct religious practice, on the part of either of the sides in the conflict. Yet it is happening. And, so, when people speak of a systematic, strategic, and planned destruction of particular targets, that smacks of conspiracy theory. Looks more like angry mobs to me. Angry mobs seek targets for their anger, and they do things that they regret when they are older.

The idea that Albanians posed as Serbs certainly supports the conspiracy theory. On the other hand, it could be teenage kids that got drunk, thought of a prank, and it got out of hand. I and always tend to attribute to stupidity, youth, and drunkenness things that many other folks tend to attribute to malicious planning and conspiracy.