[update here]

Ok. Bear with me. We’re starting to get into real absurdity time here. Things were already ridiculous. And it looks like we’re unlocking whole new levels every day! You realize there is a non-zero number of Christians (and maybe even Muslims, and maybe even Jews!) who think this is the beginning of Armageddon! (I swear there is a point to this digression!) You can say people are stupid, but, just like with everything else, it kinda depends on how you look at it. In a sense, it’s actually impressive, in my opinion, because in other senses, we’re not stupid. Like, we were smart enough to figure out how to extract energy from fossil fuels, but not (collectively?) smart enough to figure out (though a few people did figure it out, since, really, at a certain point, it’s only a matter of making a certain, yes, very large number of calculations, which Arrhenius was able to painstakingly perform by hand in the 1800s!) that if we based our whole economy on this for many hundreds of years while only a few brave people dared to seek out an alternative, it would cause, among other things, global environmental catastrophes not previously visited on earth for dozens of millions of years, including, yes, global warming and mass extinctions!

This, periods of global environmental catastrophes lasting millions of years, is a natural cycle, but we unlocked it by being so smart that we figured out how to extract energy from fossil fuels. I know she said something like this in the video, but, yes, it’s almost like there were a real devil and we actually made a deal with him (except the earth and everything else will eventually end, fortunately)! AND WE’RE LOSING! BIG TIME! Yes, when the descendants of the raccoons take over, hopefully they’ll be able to take a lesson from all our Ls!

In fact, humans are so smart that we invented ideology! Ideology is a tool we created so we could have a way of ignoring what was obvious to anyone with even the most basic comprehension skills! Ideology is the smarter brother of common sense! Lowly Common Sense is such an incompetent system of thought that it believes in stuff like creationism and race and gender and human rights! Noble Ideology believes in stuff like theistic evolution and scientific racism (e.g., phrenology) and classical liberalism and imperialism! Some of the smartest people in the 1500s still believed in phlogiston and ether! These people were not idiots in their day, but now any school child knows that’s not how things work! Some of the smartest people today believe in stuff like dark matter and artificial intelligence and neoclassical economics! But even school children a hundred years from now (if we’re lucky) will have a better idea how all that stuff actually works. But this isn’t always ideology creeping in and corrupting science. Sometimes we are just stupid. All that stuff is really hard to disaggregate, though. What makes this so complicated is the other thing ideology does, which is to “program” our brains to see only what’s on the surface and not look at things any deeper. So it’s very important to realize how ideology is being used in each circumstance, to conceal things that are obvious via bullshit “complications” or to point to something that seems simple and claim there’s nothing under the surface to complicate things. This makes EVERY ISSUE EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING to talk about!

So how does this apply to the Israel-Palestine “conflict”? Again, there are simple things that a lot of people are trying to say are complicated and complicated things that a lot of people are trying to say are simple. One thing I’ve heard people say is that the recent attack on Israel by Hamas was “Israel’s 9/11.” OK. Sure. That is definitely A thing a person COULD say. But what follows from that? I’m not sure it’s universally recognized as such just yet, but, for however bad 9/11 was, (and, yes, it was extremely bad!!!), our response to it was by far THE greatest crime of the 21st century (so far *crosses fingers*)! Like, I just saw a very short clip of Joe Rogan talking about this, and even he knows our response to 9/11 was way worse than 9/11 itself! But most people don’t learn! It’s too easy to condemn atrocities 20 years later. But I think it’s actually pretty easy to condemn them now too.

BUT WE’RE AN ENTIRE SPECIES OF CHILDREN! WE LOOK AT EVERYTHING LIKE IT’S SPORTS! LIKE WE WANT SOMEONE TO ROOT FOR AND AGAINST! LIKE THERE ARE GOOD GUYS AND BAD GUYS! THAT’S NOT HOW THINGS WORK! GROW THE FUCK UP! I’M BEGGING YOU!!!

Look, it’s pretty easy to condemn Hamas. Aside from the vicious, indiscriminate (though often exaggerated, you know “beheading babies”) attacks on civilians (let’s not argue about the definition of “civilians” here — I concede that civilians are being, you know, attacked, targeted, murdered, whatever word you want to use), another thing that makes it REALLY easy to condemn Hamas is that Netanyahu and his coalition literally supports them as part of their n-dimensional chess-ass “strategy” to make a two-state plan impossible. IT’S RIGHT HERE IN THIS HAARETZ ARTICLE!

The article quotes Netanyahu himself, on his approval of transfers of a billion dollars from Qatar to Gaza (about half of which, the article states, went to Hamas) between 2012 and 2018: “Anyone who opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state needs to support the transfer of the money from Qatar to Hamas. In that way, we will foil the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

The article further quotes Gershon Hacohen, a “major general in reserves,” who, on May 5th, 2019, told news site Ynet: “We need to tell the truth. Netanyahu’s strategy is to prevent the option of two states, so he is turning Hamas into his closest partner. Openly Hamas is an enemy. Covertly, it’s an ally.”

Now, the article blames Netanyahu for the attack (“on the Israeli side, the person bearing the fundamental responsibility […] is Benjamin Netanyahu”), for having shifted focus away from Hamas, for both the reasons that he was too focused on making life for Palestinians in the West Bank as close as possible to the sheer living Hell of their Gazan counterparts, and that he was too focused on keeping himself out of prison, and, clearly, yes, if there’s any semblance of justice in the world, this series of events should result in, at least, the end of Netanyahu’s political career (and, with hope, the careers of his close acolytes as well), but whenever anything like this happens, it always seems to me the sort of “success” that could’ve only come about with “a thousand fathers.” It’s not like Netanyahu is universally beloved in Israel! In fact, recently, he’s become quite unpopular (a recent head-to-head poll puts him behind Narcissism-of-small-differences candidate Benny Gantz 48 – 29, while Bibi’s approval rating has sunk to a still unbelievably high 42%), but, still, it’s not like he could have committed every single one of his innumerable crimes all by himself! The impulse to lay so much of the blame at the feet of a single person in these sorts of situations always struck me as a particularly distasteful form of libbery.

So, you see, this attack does have a lot in common with 9/11, because it was made possible (in part) by “Western” governments’ funding (or approval of funding) of Islamist jihadist terrorists! And it was the result of (a reaction to) decades of Western governments’ unconscionable imperialist crimes against brown people in the Middle East. Congratulations, Western governments! Let’s be clear. It’s not “victim-blaming” to point out how the actions of a country’s government led to things that ended up harming that country’s citizens.

So I hope Israel learned from our example how NOT to respond to something like this, but, unfortunately, that might be a bit too much to expect.

Just a couple of final points: I was talking to someone recently who made the “human shields” accusation (I still don’t understand exactly whom is being blamed for what when that accusation is made — can’t really tie my brain in those knots), which I think you’d have to be more ideology than human to believe, in addition to the fact that it’s kinda victim blamey, considering that Israel definitely targets civilians, and they’ve been doing it since at least 2006! The second and final point is about a “two-state solution.” It’s not going to happen. It never made any sense. It was an imperialist, paternalistic, cut-the-baby-in-half, Britbonger-in-pith-helmet-and-khakis, Risk-with-real-people’s-lives-ass fantasy from the beginning! It’s not actually popular in the region (with a significant decline in popularity particularly among those classified as “Arab Israelis” or “Palestinian Citizens of Israel” in the past 10 years, according to Pew, in surveys conducted most recently in April 2023 and, of course, Palestinians outside of “Israel Proper” were not asked — this time), and, to reiterate, the State of Israel (particularly Netanyahu, but not just him!) has been doing everything it can think of to make it impossible! Do you think the native people of “Rhodesia” or apartheid South Africa would’ve accepted a “two-state solution”? Fuck off!

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA! PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!

Oh. Shit. I think I just realized that there might be some parallels between this “conflict” and a certain “Judgment of Solomon.” Well, if I’m on the right track, that means there will have been, like, 20 academic papers written about it already, right? HIT SEND!!!!!!!!!