Choices

 

It dawned on me, when I read that in the Hamas-Netanyahu deal to exchange hostages for prisoners, many of the "prisoners" were women and children, often arrested and held without charges, in indefinite military detention, that this was more of a "hostages for hostages" deal.  That if Hamas is to be condemned for taking innocent civilians hostage, then so too must Israel.  And we have to ask ourselves, what is the context in which Hamas specifically, and Palestinians generally, make their choices?  And what powers have the most agency in setting the parameters of those choices?

Un'altra incursione in una terra pazza

 

I've decided to only attempt a reply to one paragraph of Bob Bishop's crazy right-wing rant.  That should make it more manageable as a blog post.  Here is the paragraph in its entirety:

The modern-day Jacobins are a Malthusian death cult. Their goal is about control of your mind and behavior; not submitting makes you a dissident. They exclusively focus onfulfilling Maslow’s hierarchy of physiological needs of survival and safety (i.e., North Korea) to control the masses, leading to idleness and moral decay. At the same time, it ignores the human psyche that strives for psychological and self-actualization (top of Maslow’s pyramid), which creates a more vibrant and prosperous society.

Where to begin?  There Bishop goes mentioning the Jacobins again.  Bourgeois historians fixate on the violence of the French Revolutionary Jacobins.  This ignores the reality that it was the more "moderate" or, accurately, "middle-class" Girondins who initiated the war with Europe.  It's also a little known fact that it was the Jacobin-led government in France that outlawed slavery in France and all its colonies and which declared full racial equality as well.  In my experience, the sort of person who uses "Jacobin" as a pejorative are pompous old (usually male) fuddy-duddies.

Is Netanyahu a Psychopath?

 

Is it possible that he could have allowed the Hamas attack to happen so as to engineer the crisis that would allow him to destroy Gaza and save his political career and also avoid the consequences being found guilty of his corruption charges? I mean, the question in the post's title is rhetorical.  Of course he's a psychopath.  Every Israeli and US official saying that Israel is trying to minimize civilian casualties is a shameless, psychopathic liar.  Is Netanyahu capable of perpetrating a bloodbath to save his own sorry skin?  Of course he is.  His is the hand on the tiller of this genocidal slaughter.

I don't usually subscribe to false-flag theories.  I don't dismiss them out of hand, but generally, in the past, there has always been something implausible about them (usually the numbers of individuals who would have to go along with them and whose silence is therefore an ongoing requirement) that causes me to reject them.

That could also hold true in this instance.  But something in the back of my head, ... when I think about the insanely disproportionate level of violence being inflicted on the Palestinians, by an entirely racist political-military establishment, while they continue to lie about minimizing casualties, while they continue to present intelligence-insulting "evidence" of Hamas command centers, while they insanely tell Palestinians to move southwards and then bomb them when they do so, ... I can't help but wonder if the monster Netanyahu is as evil and depraved to have done what I'm thinking.

If you’re just tuning in, Israeli intelligence ignored mountains of information that the October 7 attack was coming and left Israelis completely undefended, then the IDF killed significant numbers of Israelis with indiscriminate fire and pinned the blame for 100% of Israeli deaths on Hamas, and all those deaths are now being used as justification to push Gazans off their land to the south and shoot them if they try to return while Israeli officials keep talking about how great it would be to get all Palestinians out of all of Gaza.

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Such a crazy coincidence how every single step of Israel’s military operations against Hamas in Gaza has looked exactly the same as what you’d expect to see if Israel was trying to permanently drive Palestinians off a large stretch of Palestinian land.

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This isn’t a war against Hamas. It’s not a war at all. It’s a military operation to facilitate an ethnic cleansing. 

Hamas isn’t the target, it’s the excuse.

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Israel isn’t bombing Gaza with the intention of wiping out Hamas, Israel is bombing Gaza with the intention of wiping out Gaza.

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A new Guardian article says “Israel’s military estimates it has killed between 1,000 and 2,000 Hamas fighters out of a military force it believes is about 30,000 strong.” 

If Hamas was using “human shields” as we’ve been told, killing civilians should also yield a huge Hamas fatality rate, since Hamas would be hiding among civilians. Yet the IDF has managed to kill massive numbers of civilians while barely touching Hamas. Maybe they’re just lying about human shields?

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The whole argument for displacing Gazans from the north to the south was to protect their lives, yet now if they try to return to the north they get shot and killed by Israeli forces. What’s the new argument for this one? Are they killing them to save their lives?

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Whenever I say Israel is deliberately killing civilians, half the Israel apologists in my comments are like “NO THEY’RE NOT YOU DAMN LIAR” and the other half are “Yes they are and it’s good.”

Why do we still live in a world governed by sick people capable of such actions?  Forget about a "false-flag."  The supposed reality of this slaughter and Biden and the US political establishment's support for it, (and the Canadian political establishment as well) is disgusting enough.  More people need to sit down and think about ways to actually change this state of affairs.

Inny świat, część trzecia

This is Part III of my look at right-winger Bob Bishop's diatribe about how the "far-left" (which in Bishop's mind includes everyone from corporate tools like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, through to AOC all the way to actual leftists) is trying to destroy US-American society from within through ideological subversion.  In Part I I looked at the Soviet defector who inspired Bishop's article.  In Part II I started looking at Bishop's claims about far-left domination of the media, the universities and the Justice Department.  In this post I'll continue with Bishop's loony-tunes claim that the "far-left" also controls the USA's intelligence agencies.  

Taking Stock: Gaza

 

I plan on continuing with my series discussing Bob Bishop's paranoid right-wing rant.  Because the political successes of anti-immigrant, racist, right-wing politicians around the world seems to me to be indicative of the vulnerability of significant portions of the human race to his sort of scapegoating politics. 

But I just thought that it needs to be said that Israel's genocidal rampage in Gaza is a litmus test for one's humanity.  When Anglo-American writers wax philosophical about the failures of the societies of Germany, Russia, Japan, for their descent into totalitarianism or militarism, there's this unstated premise that our societies have successfully avoided such errors.  This notion is erroneous.  When one really takes stock of the amount of blood and trauma unleashed upon countries (mainly in the Middle East) in the USA's "Great Bullshit War on Terror," ... the millions of lives arrogantly destroyed and forgotten by the US imperialists and their lickspittle "alllies," and then add to that the murderous, racist criminality of Israel's assault on Gaza (and on Palestinians in the West Bank) it is clear that these are failed, rotten societies.

Nazi Germany was a totalitarian dictatorship.  People risked their lives to protest against it.  And quite a few did.  We in the Anglo-American countries don't risk as much as opponents of Hitler did.  We have, though, stupidly allowed our governments and our states to restrict our rights in their GBWT with things like the Patriot Act (in the USA) or the Anti-Terrorism Act (here in Canada).  But we still don't risk concentration camps or executions for speaking-out against our governments.  Even though the mainstream media is a useless, propagandistic joke, we do have access to other media sources that reveal the extent of the lies and the corruption and the cruelty of our actions in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Yemen and Israel.

Most of the (small number of) people who read my blog don't support these policies or make apologies for Zionist mass-murder, but significant portions of our societies do.  And we do very little to stop them.  The Trudeau Liberals' failure to utterly condemn Israel's inhuman slaughter in Gaza is a disgrace.  A greater disgrace than their disgraceful standing ovation for a former Ukrainian SS soldier.

If you want to know how civilizations collapse into militarist, racist dictatorships, keep watching our own country.  Keep watching our fellow Canadians as they delude and debase themselves, and us.

Another World Part Deux

Greetings and salutations!  Last time I managed to say that I wonder how people of at least average intelligence can end up believing things so far apart from each other.  If there is a dispute and two people have widely divergent opinions and one of them is right and the other one is clearly wrong and is refuted by obvious realities, how is it that the wrong person in this scenario will still cling to their beliefs?  To illustrate this I took an unhinged right-wing rant that I'd recently read and decided to go through it line-by-line.  

Another World Part Uno

It's actually the case that I doubt that I possess the unique ability to successfully navigate all the big questions that I deal with.  That while other people fall off the tightrope to the left or the right, I myself have managed to stay on the straight and narrow path of truth as the facts show it.  Just because Jimmy Dore and Glenn Greenwald were right about "Russiagate" it doesn't mean that I'll follow them to COVID-denialism like Dore or to seriously downplay the fascist tendencies of Trump and his followers as Greenwald does.

Just because a website presents a more accurate depiction of the Russia vs. Ukraine War doesn't mean that I fall into their incoherent Putin worship (praising his "de-nazification" aims while maintaining that this whole war has been cooked-up by the Jews).  Just because a blogger presents a compelling, fact-based feminist analysis, it doesn't have to mean that I must follow her into her racist Islamophobia and support for Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza.

You get the picture.  On and on I go on the lonely path of wherever the truth takes me.  Others succumbed to their particular delusions.  But not me.  As I said here, there are reasons why I subscribe to some beliefs while rejecting others.  But I'll state right here that I doubt myself and I agonize about where I might actually be wrong about some important subjects.