sethshead

[sethshead]

Ah, contagious delusion. Why does this feel particularly relevant these days?

[sethshead]

Plato screams to the heavens.

[sethshead]

the weed dispensaries should ask if you would like to round up your purchase to donate to PBS. and if you say yes you get to scan a QR code that gives you 30-day free access to the full run of antiques roadshow. this is how drugs can win the war on drugs again.

[sethshead]

Fellow Gen-Xers, I present you with your rusty, burning, gravel-strewn, blood-soaked, compound-fractured, concussion-addled playground nostalgia for the evening.

[sethshead]

I look forward to finding room for Michael W. Twitty books in my kitchen.

[sethshead]

No you don't get it, I'm a Good Person. You don't understand. I'm a Good Person which makes it okay for me to think violently about the Enemy, who is Bad Person. I'm commenting "you should be violently murdered" because I'm Good Person and you're Bad Person. You think saying that to someone is fucked up?? You should be violently murdered, you're probably Bad Person anyway

[sethshead]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Raihaana Adira (@raihaana.adira)

This is much like academic BDS, which seeks to ban any relationships with Israeli scholar and artists, and prevent any study or research activities in Israel or the Occupied Territories.

The goal is not to help Palestinians. It’s simply to silence any counter-narrative to, and objective analysis of, the claims made by the most extreme and unhinged campus activists.

Classifying any independent review or disagreement as “violence” and “genocide” is the sort of illiberal, authoritarian political correctness that has undermined education and inquiry in many an ideological state — ideological states that have their own records of very real genocide.

[sethshead]

War is hell. War is inherently unjust. The innocent will always suffer in war. These are the facts. The cleanest, most sanitized war will nevertheless cause untold human hardship and loss. This must be minimized, but it can never be totally avoided.

I hesitate taking the IDF narrative fully. Yes, the IDF is the only military that conducts roof knocks and mass telephone calls/messages to convince civilians to evacuate the area of a strike, even at the cost of the strike’s full effectiveness. But Israel will also drop SDBs on civilian-heavy areas to neutralize a few mid-level militants. Sometimes Israel goes insanely beyond the needs of proportionality; sometimes its activities are reckless.

We see this especially among jumpy, low-morale soldiers scarred by fighting an enemy who abides by none of the laws of armed conflict, militarizing civilian facilities and fighting in street clothes. That results in a callous shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach that has cost the lives of hostages and of civilians waiting for aid.

There isn’t length enough to describe Hamas war crimes, but Israel has committed some of its own. It takes Palestinian captives (suspected militants and sometimes regular civilians) and uses them as human shields, to protect patrols from ambush. Israel has also committed acts of wanton destruction, destroying whole rows of houses some clicks into Gaza. There were no tunnels under these homes. Ostensibly this was to create a clear line of fire against militants, but this was territory Israel clearly controlled. They were doing it to create a buffer inside Gaza, which is not a legal action in war. I’m sure the cruelty of destroying houses was also the point.

Israel also has right-wing politicians calling openly for the ghettoization and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza. This would constitute not only a war crime, but a crime against humanity. This is terrifying and disgraceful rhetoric, a shameful stain on Israel. At the moment it is just talk, but if Israel follows through on these threats, everyone in power these will belong in the Hague. It would be nice if Israel’s strongest ally had a president that could communicate such to them, but “pro-Palestine” Americans decided that such a president was more “genocidal” than the guy who wants to turn Gaza into a gilded resort sans Palestinians.

Nonetheless, this does not constitute genocide in the here and now. What it constitutes is a complex and grinding war, one that has empowered the worst among Israelis and Palestinians. Calling it a genocide derails any conversation on how to end the war in the most humane way possible. Instead, such hyperbole descends into a shouting match of mutual delegitimization, of parochial maximalism. That only convinces the other side to fight harder and to be less compromising. That is not the way of peace, nor is it the way of victory; it is only the way of perpetual death and mourning.

[sethshead]

This is what happens when a Palestinian goes through official and reliable channels to feed desperate Gazans: she winds up with a target on her back for pushing profiteers and terrorists out of the loop — the very profiteers and terrorists with whom the UN insists on cooperating. This is proof that humanitarians don’t care about feeding Gazans; they just care about blaming Israel for mass death, even if it’s the “humanitarians” who have a hand in those deaths.

One thing that struck me, if Awaidah is to be believed (this is Fox, after all): the calm and patience of those on line to receive aid. Standing quietly on queue is not a cultural norm for anyone in the MENA, save the few British tourists who stay sober. Whatever vetting and reassuring Awaidah’s group is doing should be immediately adopted by the GHF as a necessary improvement over performing crowd control with live ammunition.

The IDF itself cutting ties with criminal gangs would also be desirable.

[sethshead]

Rego Park (where I lived very close to this restaurant for several years) is not the kind of neighborhood that will take well to an antisemitic attack in a supposedly Bukharan restaurant.

More evidence that, despite New York’s large and mostly integrated Jewish population, the city also remains a hotbed of antisemitism.

[sethshead]

At least it wasn’t Luke and Leia (Lick and Labia for the purposes of the parody).

people needdddd to wear headphones in public because while on an otherwise very lovely walk in the park today i saw a guy sitting under a tree watching a porn parody of the star wars prequels

[sethshead]

Grasshopper's Dream Cafe Located: Jeongseon, South Korea

[sethshead]

Genuinely I'm so fucking sick of leftists doing horrible shit and then other leftists pretending they didn't.

No, it's not the feds. No, it's not the cops or Mossad or anything else.

It's you.

Your movement is toxic.

Leftism is completely and utterly engulfed by Jew hate. Leftists are the people attacking Jews in the streets. Leftists are the ones lighting synagogues on fire. Leftists are the ones vandalizing our homes and restaurants. Leftists are the people murdering a couple leaving a peace conference. Leftists are the ones lighting Jewish marchers on fire. Leftists are the ones killing us.

You can say "it's not antisemitic; it's antizionist" until the cows come home, but it's not. You're not attacking Israel or Israelis. You're not attacking the Israeli military or government. You're attacking regular Jews, most of whom have nothing to do with Israel. You don't care if the Jews you attack are antizionist and don't support Israel. You don't care if you kill Holocaust survivors or make children afraid of going to school. You just care that they're the wrong religion. You're attacking Jews.

We told you this would happen. We did. We said repeatedly that allowing swastikas in your marches would leave Jews dead and you insisted we were overreacting.

Take responsibility for the rot you've allowed to fester.

[sethshead]

i think eventually we're all just gonna have to come to terms with the fact that it's impossible to tell a story with any degree of subtlety or nuance without risking a portion of the audience taking the "wrong message", and that's ok. art isn't meant to be strictly a teaching tool, and if you're goal is just to convince people or critique an idea, just write an essay or a polemic

[sethshead]

it does not matter if you think it’s “badly prioritized,” most people are going to see the bigotry that they face as their number one priority. they will not throw in with people who mock and demean and belittle their concerns, who say they are jumping at shadows, and why should they?

[sethshead]

“If autism isn’t caused by environmental factors and is natural why didn’t we ever see it in the past?”

We did, except it wasn’t called autism it was called “Little Jonathan is a r*tarded halfwit who bangs his head on things and can’t speak so we’re taking him into the middle of the cold dark forest and leaving him there to die.”

[sethshead]

True