Excuses

 “They war crimed us first.:”

“What’s your non-war-crime solution, smart guy?”

“If they didn’t want to be war crimed they should have overthrown their government.”

“If they didn’t want to be war crimed they should have heeded the logistically impossible warning.”

“They created the conditions under which a war crime is the easiest solution. It’s their fault.:”

“If they just complied, they wouldn’t be war crimed.”

I don’t know, it kind of seems like you have a boner for war crimes. Or at least some of them.

Notes On The Current Discourse

This is not a commentary on the things that have happened, but something that’s important to note when perusing the discourse around the things that have happened.

For a few decades now, some of the absolute worst people in the world have been demonizing Hamas. They weren’t doing this in a good-faith attempt to warn us about how bad Hamas was and is. They were spelling it Hamas, but they were pronouncing it, to varying degrees, “Palestinians”, “Arabs”, Muslims”, and “brown people”. They were running a playbook built on disingenuousness to enhance their own power, influence, and geopolitical agendas.

The fact that they were technically correct doesn’t change this.

One of the things these people do is they take a thing that should be fine for everyone, and they poison it so that you have to qualify it. For example, you can’t just make an “OK” symbol anymore, you have to say “And I mean this in the traditional sense, not the white power sense that also now exists because white nationalists have co-opted the hand gesture.”

Similarly, the very simple, true statement “Hamas are monsters who need to be stopped” now carries with it a metric ton of extra baggage, because even now, people are using “Hamas” to mean the terrorist organization, people who voted for them 17 years ago, people who live next door to people who voted for them 17 years ago, and the children of people who lived next door to people who voted for them 17 years ago. 

There’s been a lot of clumsy navigating of these waters. And a certain amount of wildly inappropriate tribalist “Bad people hate them so they must be good” splashing around in those waters too. None of that negates the fact that the waters started choppy as fuck to begin with, and how and why they got choppy in the first place.

The most common, most terrifying viewpoint I’ve been seeing on the socials in the past few days is “well, they were attacked, and now they’re at war, and when you’re at war, you have no choice but to do war crimes. That’s what war is all about.” I suppose 9/11 is 22 years old and was long overdue for a reboot. But I don’t have to like it  

Roamin’

In case you were curious, I’ve been in Italy for four days and I’m still only thinking about the Roman Empire when I’m directly being confronted by it.

Project Whole Ass

As someone who was actively paying attention to and writing about James O’Keefe and Project Veritas since I first couldn’t believe anyone was taking them seriously, it’s with mixed emotions that I mark their passing, thirteen years later.

I mean, obviously, the only emotion I’m feeling hearing that they’ve shuttered is unmitigated, gloating glee. Fuck all of them. 

But the fact that they lasted for thirteen years, and the amount of damage they did thanks to mainstream media and centrist Dems acting like Something Needed To Be Done about their phony fucking revelations? That shit was an absolute harbinger of our current dystopia, so fuck all of them.

And yes, “fuck all of them” “fuck all of them” can be two different emotions. 

It was one of the earlier instances of blatantly weaponized optics, leveraging the knowledge that Democrats still felt like if things looked bad they had to fix it regardless of the truth, while their counterparts on the other side embarked on their current path of pushing through everything no matter how bad it looked or actually was, leading up to now where Lauren Boaebert’s real video is producing far less outrage and infinitely fewer consequences than PV’s fake videos. 

So even if they’ve been completely irrelevant for years once even the slowest Chuck Todds in the media stopped biting on their bullshit, I’m glad their dead and I invite all of us to piss on their grave. 

Vision Boared

 Was Don Jr.’s X account “hacked”?

Or is that just easier to say than “I was using my Drafts folder to do some casual manifesting and accidentally posted it when I was trying to call Kamala Harris trans”?

Boebert Boebert Boebert

All the good Boebert groping jokes already got made by the time I found out about it, but I gotta say, taken in isolation from the massive systemic problems her continued career and existence represent? Whatever statement she makes to explain the fondle-footage is going to.be the single funniest thing that happens all year.

Remembering 9/12

Gotta say, I think it’s more important to never forget September 12.