A response to an unusually helpful comment to my post about Americans' compulsory support for Israel
Thank God I was never programmed to embrace genocidal overlords, be they celestial or terrestrial
Someone left a comment to a post I made the other day concerning the freewheeling crackdown on American free speech by inappropriately entitled actors. I found the comment worth responding to in a stand-alone post because it achieved a rare and encouraging trifecta:
It was well-intentioned. The person who posted this comment has left other comments here, some of these agreeing with the content and others dissenting. This is a sign of someone who is both honest about their opinions and believes I’m trying to be honest even when I appear to toss an air ball. This brand of interlocutor is as welcome as it is scarce among members of the rumbling Internet herd. As much as I can’t help but be buoyed by enthusiastic reviews from reliably sympatico commenters, these don’t challenge me in any way.
It seems to represent the majority view among Americans, or at least Americans who watch cable news or its online equivalent.
It’s both largely mistaken and easily corrected.
I have broken the comment into quoted segments. Here’s the first part:
Oh so Israel is just supposed to be chill with the Palestinian government beheading their children and parading the raped corpses of Jewish women through the streets of Gaza. Got it.
No national government should be expected to sit on its hands when it is attacked and invaded. But at the same time, no national government on a mission the world at large is supposed to see as righteous should have to spew lie after lie in support of that mission. This is not how remotely noble people or systems operate.
And the claims about “beheaded babies” and “raped corpses” were dubious from the start and were pretty much laid to rest within days. And if you think this is still in question, then perhaps the farrago of undeniable falsehoods Israel loosed in a recent one-week period will convince you these people are as untrustworthy as they are homicidally racist.
Just this week, official Israeli government accounts have tweeted, then deleted, the following:
- Video of a fake nurse claiming that Hamas took over the Al-Shifa hospital
- False claim that “AP, CNN, NY Times, and Reuters had journalists embedded with Hamas terrorists on October 7th massacre”
- Video with fake captions claiming a crying elderly Gaza woman blames Hamas for the siege
- Graphic asserting Israeli ownership of all the occupied territories, including Syria’s Golan Heights
- False claim that Israel is “facilitating the supply of humanitarian aid to Gazan civilians.”
- Assertion that hospitals and ambulances constitute "legitimate military targets."
And yes, all of this lying does make a difference, because the alleged savagery of the October 7 attack has been used as grounds for both the genocide-in-progress in Gaza and the ramping up of censorship and its consequences in the United States by the usual malignant set of gaslighting-frenzied people and organizations, notably Media Matters.
“Good guys” throwing gasoline on an already raging blaze is among the crudest and most effective tricks bent and broken governments pull.
Frankly when it comes to the Democracy of Israel…
Israel, from my perspective, is no democracy. The nearly two million Palestinians—and try to think of these people as humans—who live in Israel don’t have the same rights as others. And Jews are routinely and unpretentiously beaten by Israeli police for disagreeing with the thuggeries promulgated by Bibi’s minions, going far back in time before the onset of recent mutual atrocities.
Imagine an America where blacks couldn’t marry whites and the police could openly smash you with clubs for disagreeing with the sewage-stream gushing from the White House on the daily. No democracy is perfect, and I complain about the one I live in almost nonstop, but who would want to live in a place like that after being exposed to real freedom? I guess the fact that most of the world’s most financially successful American Jews choose to live in the United States instead of Israel pretty much answers that one.
vs the terrorist-run sh*t hole country where women are beaten to death for not wearing headscarves…
Agreed, I have no desire to live under Sharia law. The chances of this happening anytime soon in the United States, however, are considerably less than the chances of Donald Trump (either one) being named the U.S. Ambassador to Israel next week. Or even Ivanka Trump.
As much of a shame as it is that some Muslims are currently a dire threat to Israel, the Zionists inarguably brought this on themselves 75 years ago and continue to do so now. With a full-throated push from a suddenly rejuvenated and repurposed American militia of Bible-banging, toad-faced congressional rednecks, they are marching all of us toward collective death, be this demise fast or drawn-out. And I’m not alone in understanding this. I haven’t been on social media per se lately—I’m sent links to certain tweets or posts, and see a few others embedded in Substack or other articles, but otherwise keep my distance. But I’m told #genocidejoe is now trending.
I'm taking the side of the former.
As I explain below, I’m not taking sides because I’m American and self-interest compels me to regard Americans who want to fund what’s happening in the Middle East, or of any kind of optional human slaughter and degradation, as morbid, broken souls best avoided if possible. I still want to see manic subgenius and permanent child-actor Ben Shapiro squeeze himself into a vintage Golda Meir costume meant for a preteen girl and go take up arms in Gaza himself, or at least zip his yaplet and listen to someone else just one time.
Free Palestine from Hamas and from the evils of Islamic fundamentalism.
If solving all of this is as easy as acting on sloganized imperative, then add to this “free Israeli children (and Americans who grow up in rabidly pro-Israel households) from the evils of Zionist fundamentalism.”
In my post the other day, I suggested that brainwashing is an issue on more than just one side this bilateral annihilation-campaign. Yet when I saw this yesterday. I thought it was rank propaganda, similar in reckless fervor to something the Israelis would generate.
Perhaps some of the girls in these inspiring choral groups go on years later to take part in meditative exercises like these:
I’m just not able to shoehorn the mentalities of any of the actors involved in this endless nightmare into any kind of sane worldview. For all my untrammeled rhetorical causticity, I can barely imagine despising any one individual in a lasting way as much as some of these people hate one another as a largely unseen mass (the mutual enmity is far from universal)1. And apart from differences in dress styles, a lot of Israeli Jews with ancestral ties to the region—which isn’t many of them now—and Palestinian Muslims wouldn’t even know from looking at each other face-to-face that they were enemies unless they started quizzing one another on their respective mythological deities of choice. (My stance as an ignostic or “igheist” is that if there is a conscious intelligence underlying the cosmos, the people who have authored civilization’s predominant holy texts clearly came nowhere close in their projections of human vanities to describing however that intelligence maps onto or encodes human experience.)
I also wonder where the people who feel that the bombing in Gaza has to continue unabated believe this will end. Even if I wanted all 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza wiped out, I would be hard-pressed to coherently frame this as a permanent solution to the problem of Israel’s various permanent—as things stand today—mortal enemies nearby.
Besides, at last notice, and not for the first time, the leaders of Hamas were resting comfortably not in tunnels under the surface of Gaza, but in Doha.
Will the 150,000 or so members of Hezbollah forget that they have enough raw firepower to lay waste to Tel Aviv, Israel’s “Iron Dome” notwithstanding? The U.S. has installed friendly leaders in all of those shithole Middle Eastern Muslim countries except for Syria—and I admit that they do all look like purposefully debased shitholes from here, an observation I make with stark pity for their residents and equally stark contempt for those leaders. Thus, were Israel attacked, we would have no time to appreciate the horror. This would set off a widespread, multi-pronged, trans-continental war. But this wouldn’t be the first time in history the human monkey did a really stupid thing under considerable duress.
I worry about this kind of outcome a lot more than I do the granular geopolitics. Doesn’t anyone else?
But as I noted the other day, my main concern isn’t adjudicating the dispute or making policy recommendations. My concern is the ultimate effect this latest explosion of U.S-aided violence is likely to have on my relatively uncomplicated life. The more money the government prints for these wars, the more things will cost. My only fixed expenses are food, rent, and a trivial amount of gasoline. The only reason I require any of these things is a dog and a few precious people whose lives are intertwined with my own. And when I imagine the faltering voice of Joe Biden or that of an associated liar blaming inflation on external or ineffable factors, or flat-out denying it’s even an issue, it makes me inclined to perceive any nation asking for American bombs for no defensible purpose as not just a lowbrow nation but a personal enemy.
You might see why I am more than a little inclined to laugh at someone like hedge-fund plunder-boss Bill Ackman, who is worth $3.5 billion, has spent considerable energy condemning cancel-culture on Ivy League campuses, and now wants anti-Israel protesters expelled from Harvard because his precious daughter—probably zonked on designer antidepressants and synapse-enhancers since she was about four years old—was exposed to this terrible, fully legal mayhem. And a few days ago, I saw a CNN clip in which some blinkered ninny from MIT with an ostensibly stratospheric IQ (or, just as likely, a wealthy father) was telling an appropriately mortified and twat-faced Jake Tapper that such protests on campus made her “feel unsafe.”
I admit it is consoling that in 100 years, probably far less, the average person will devote approximately as much thought to creatures like Bill Ackman and his swath of inglorious, Hamptons-housed offspring as they will to the likes of me and my impecunious friends. Despite my affection for unspooling detailed scenarios of the demises of deserving psychopaths, I find it surprisingly easy to not hate or consciously wish ill on people because I know all of them are going to die no matter what, often in states of considerable discomfort and—unlike me, even at this moment—still desperately wanting to remain a conscious component of this disparaging display of mass theft, nonstop deceits, insensible extinctions, and triumphant, gibbering displays of megatardation everywhere one looks, or squints, whether it’s a 300-pound sociopathic plumbing-abuser planted in the first corral of the New York City Marathon or some loopy lass toting her very own biological schlong to a sixth-place finish in the 2023 New England Girls’ High-School Cross-Country Championships.
One last thing specific to these brutalities: The current narrative out of Israel, which has metastasized effectively throughout much the battered American consciousness, is that Palestinians are subhuman animals and the like. It has to be this way, or else the entire world would be screaming about how thousands of children, some too young to possibly be harboring antipathy toward anyone alive, are being killed every day.
Didn’t people say that Jewish people were mongrels and so forth in the 1930s and 1940s? I assume no one stood up for them, either, because I really don’t see how all of Europe was coerced into going along with the Nazis during that time without sufficient wholesale demonization of Jews as a “race.” You would think for this reason alone a few people would consider putting the brakes on the instinctive rhetoric and looking into exactly how the seeds for today’s conditions were sown.
Ah, but that’s different.
I’m behind on responding to both comments and direct e-mails, partly because my daily schedule has been different for much of the fall and partly because I would rather just let stuff pile up. When not running, playing my keyboard, or doing what’s necessary to keep my minimal spot, I prefer to read old books or watch old movies and television series. Fewer and fewer of the world’s burgeoning inanities and idiocies seem funny or even worth moping over. The complete takeover of American culture by anti-intellectuals with disordered thinking and the support of this lunacy by people who know better is too much. Most everyday people are perilously close to functional mental compromise; most of this is owed to a combination of incidentally massive appetites for media lies and organically inept thinking, and too many people exacerbate their self-inflicted hazes of ignorance by staring at cell phones whether walking, driving, or copulating, rendering them ignorant about their immediate surroundings as well.
Worse, the entire under-forty American professional-managerial class grew up in environments—think subdivisions heavy in virtue-signaling signage and second BMWs—that allowed them to maintain social IQs in the low teens even as some of the galactically enfeebled among them were shuttled on clouds of nepotism through once-respected colleges and universities, gaining grandiose notions of self and wildly exaggerated senses of their own applicable knowledge and processing capabilities. One glaring and, on this site, thematically persistent result of this social balkanization is the popularity of the spasmodically inept “coaching” duo of David and Megan Roche, whose slapstick enterprise simply could not exist without a cohort of similarly mush-minded and privileged libtards eager to inhale, and pay for, not athletic wisdom but bawdy virtue-signaling and superficially impressive academic credentials.
I find myself abandoning most of my attempts to write posts about three sentences in, if I even get beyond the conceptual stage. Nothing has really changed about the kinds of posts I feel inclined to write, or at least imagine. I just find myself with fewer and fewer reasons to broadly engage with the external world, and so when I get an idea for a topic and realize it will require doing any sort of online research, I just give up and move on to things that don’t require me to think about what anyone else is doing. I have lost interest in most of the human circus and its banal, shambling participants.
I actually consider myself unusually fortunate for having what most people consider a bleak outlook because I don’t have to worry about retirement savings, the progressive infirmities of old age, or anything else about the collective future past a few more rips around the sun. If I can pay my way through the end of a great dog’s life, stay healthy enough to run, and remain a positive influence in the lives of the few people I enjoy being around, then I will have contributed about all I want to or am capable of to the roiling and stinking fracas.
Otherwise, this is your project, and Clark Griswold summarized decades ago my feelings on what this project would come to look like c. 2023.
(Social-share image/thumbnail: “Blood On Our Hands" by Caitlin Johnstone.)
The most unethical company I ever worked for—and correspondingly, the most unethical work I ever performed—was owned by a U.S.-born Egyptian Muslim man whose chief executive was an Israeli-born Jewish woman; both spent most of their time in the same large U,S. city. These two could not have liked and respected each other more, and the whole Skinny Legs and All-like nature of the arrangement was a recurrent source of humor, if only because I mentioned it as often as possible. I don’t know which of the pair was smarter, but these may have been the two most intelligent people I ever met.
As for the work itself, I might still be doing it had I not intentionally incinerated my own value to the firm—which I had to do several times, each under a different supervisor—and thereby exchanged a steady paycheck for my escape from minor but growing twinges of conscience and ennui. Loosely speaking, what I did involved, via the systematic infiltration of esteemed institutions, punking Wokish activists without their knowledge or, obviously, their consent. I’ve done some interesting writing and editing for money over the years, my favorite perhaps being assisting in the creation of about 170 pages’ worth of marijuana-related literature.