Heebie's Hut of Half-Baked Thoughts

"Well, after 75 years of how the Palestinians have been treated, can you blame them for the 7/10 attack?"

And the response that I've been itching to give to that...

"So, you're saying that the Nakba was acceptable back in 1948? Because after 1000+ years of mistreatment by Muslim Arabs, including multiple massacres and ethnic cleansing in living memory, that means that the Jews were justified with the Nakba--indeed, they were restrained, because they could have easily done so much worse, and the Palestinians Arabs hadn't had any mistreatment yet at the hands of the Jews. There was a clear side who had been the victims (the Jews) and a clear side who had been the victimizers for over a thousand years, as the Muslims been the ones doing the mistreatment to the Jews. If you're saying that 75 years of marginalization justifies mass rape and murder, then the Israelis in 1948 would have been justified in killing every single proto-Palestinian Arab by that same metric.

"No? That's different? How? How is it different? Explain to me how it's different without using the word 'colonizer', because a vast number of the Jews who lived there were unquestionably native and had never been living elsewhere. Sure, they were just a portion of the Jewish population as a whole, but so are the Palestinian militants. Would someone whose family had been butchered in the 1929 Hebron Massacre not be justified in taking out their hate on other Arabs? Because that's the standard you're promoting now. How is it different?

"On what ethical grounds is it okay to say that the Palestinians deserve to get to rape and murder for 75 years of marginalization, and yet that the Jews simply displacing them but allowing them to continue living, sparing their lives after 1200+ years of brutal suppression... that act is somehow the most horrendous and monstrous act in the entire history of mankind, as some Pro-Palestinian activists have explicitly said?"

Specifically, the response to pogroms in the Pale.

Just to be clear for anyone who doesn't know: the Pale was the area in the Russian empire where Jews were legally allowed to live. It was, in the terminology of today's Hamasniks, an open-air concentration camp, and we were locked up with our murderers.

The policy of the Russian government was genocidal. I'm not kidding; their official goal was to convert a third of us to Christianity, force a third of us to leave, and kill the remaining third. Children were forced into army service to try to convert them, often literally snatched from their parents. Jews were expelled at various times and places, taxed additionally (all of these vanished if we converted), forbidden to wear traditional clothing.

And the general public by and large supported this, as evidenced by their antisemitism after any real excuse had disappeared – look up the Kielce pogrom, for instance.

In response to these pogroms, Jews organized self-defense groups. We did not retaliate further. We did not kill those who were not actively engaged in killing us. We did not commit mass rape. We did not take hostages.

In conditions every bit as bad and in fact significantly worse than Gaza pre-2023, Ashkenazi Jews managed to not do anything remotely like October 7.

So, what's the explanation?

Are Ashkenazim somehow better? Is that your conclusion?

Is that extra death and destruction good? Is that your conclusion, that it's okay to go well beyond what you need to in order to cause more death, more destruction? (Why do you condemn Israel, then? Isn't that precisely what you accuse them of doing?)

Or is the conclusion that Palestinians are not responsible for their own actions? That they cannot be grown adults and take responsibility for their actions?

Did the Inca have exquisite building techniques, efficient messengers, and quality waterworks? Yes. They were also an expansionist empire built on violent conquest and the splitting up and relocating of conquered peoples.

Did the Aztecs have a gorgeous capital city built at the heart of a lake, with floating farms and towering temples honoring their fascinating pantheon? Yes. Guess what tho. They were also a violent expansionist empire who practiced ritual sacrifice of prisoners of war.

The Iroquois confederacy had one of the most unique representative political systems I’ve ever heard of, with women taking a forefront in most local government matters too. But their internal peace allowed them to redirect violence to their neighbors, as so often happens with tribal confederations, and they eventually violently conquered the Ohio valley and destroyed or displaced dozens of other indigenous groups.

Even my beloved Cahokia has the graves of sacrifice victims amidst its ruins.

The Passover Haggadah speaks of four children: the wise, the wicked, the simple, and the one who does not know how to ask

The wise child asks: What form does the hatred of our people take? And you shall answer them: There they called us capitalists, here they call us communists. To some, we are Middle Eastern foreigners, to others, the whitest of white. We are miserly aristocracy and/or beggars on the street, we are whatever is convenient to hate. We are always on trial. We never know what for.

The wicked child asks: What have you done to deserve all of this hatred? And you will answer them: Being a people is no crime by any metric worth considering. And there is nothing more my birthright than refusing to bow down.

The simple child asks: What is this? And you shall answer them: We are so much more than a memory of history. We dance even as the glass shatters. We know pain as thick as honey and we know happiness as sweet, we are, and always remain, Solomon’s riddle and the answer to Samson’s. We stand as angels. We are no ghosts.

And for the child who does not know how to ask You will tell them: Look, my dear, this is your birthright. The wind howls softer than you. We have known so many unmarked graves, but still, we name the living. There is nothing to a home but a family and books and I swear to you, my child, that the Alef-Bet will form the words even when yours tongue stumbles.

The original push behind naming cultural appropriation and having these conversations were so that we as a society could evaluate why we were punished for our heritage while white People were not. It was supposed to be about seeking solutions. The idea was to create a society where we could celebrate our cultures with impunity. It was never about telling white people that they “weren’t allowed” to do certain things. We did ask that white People stop doing certain things because they weren’t doing them respectfully and were not invited to do them, but the primary reason we asked them to desist was to reclaim the things they had stolen and to reassign them culturally back where they belonged.

White “allies” saw these conversations happening and instead of trying to aplify our own voices or even try to learn about the complexities behind why we were saying what we were saying, they instead began screaming over us and creating a narrative that was hardly even the bones of what we originally set out to say. It was like they took the conversation we were trying to have, completely decontextualized it, and stripped it of all it’s nuance in order to gain social currency by seeming progressive.

So the conversation around cultural appropriation went from “This aspect of our heritage belongs to us and we find it egregious that we are shamed for it. What steps can we take to address the racism that’s creating this situation as well as rehome the things that have been stolen” to “you’re not allowed to do that because if you do that you’re racist, we don’t really understand why that’s racist but you’re not allowed to do that and if you do that you’re a klansman no exceptions. So you’re not allowed because because”

At the end of the day, did I like the fact that sally was wearing dreads? No. But my primary concern was not that sally was wearing dreads but rather that sally could wear dreads and I couldn’t. THAT was the intended focus of those conversations. It was about addressing the inequality. It was about us. Now the conversation is just about sally and were completely forgotten.

Trans people don't have to smile through transphobia and gently correct you

Nonbinary people don't have to smile through exorsexism and gently correct you

Intersex people don't have to smile through intersexism and gently correct you

People don't have to smile through their oppression and correct you with gentle voice and simple words. A black woman getting angry and loud at anti-black racism is not less deserving of your attention. A trans man being rude to someone spreading transphobia is not less deserving of your attention.

Like if they’re used to store weapons for one of the parties involved, or are used as a recon/intel gathering site, or are used to launch an attack. The other party should still be doing its utmost to protect and avoid harm to civilians and medical staff, but the otherwise protected status of the hospital is lost.

(via bsky)

In case anyone hasn't heard, the cyclospora outbreak affecting tons of people in the US right now is coming from Taylor Farms produce. Best to stay away from bagged lettuce and prepared salads completely right now, but especially the ones mentioned in the screenshot:

Taylor Farms Earthbound Farms Little Salad Bar (Aldi) Marketside (Walmart) Kroger House Brand Target private label greens Costco salads and greens etc Trader Joe's chopped salad kits and fresh produce Fast food: McDonalds, Taco Bell, (Yum! Brands), Chipotle, Subway, Pizza Hut, KFC, Olive Garden, Top Golf, Red Lobster, Burger King, etc.

This is not the first time I've heard about a Taylor Farms foodborne illness outbreak. I stopped eating their salads after reading a description of the conditions in their facilities. Doesn't sound like they've improved anything.

Known unknowns are a bad reason to say you shouldn't take measures to protect your health

this article

"Six days after October 7th, a genocide studies professor declared Israel's response "textbook genocide" — before a single independent casualty count existed and week before an IDF soldier entered Gaza. A year later Amnesty admitted, on page 101 of its own report, that it was rejecting the ICJ's actual legal standard because that standard "would effectively preclude a finding of genocide." Internal staff at Amnesty revealed the report was called "the genocide report" before the research even began. None of this happened to Myanmar, Syria, or Sudan — all more brutal, all with clearer evidence of intent, all treated with years of caution before anyone reached for the word. Only Israel gets convicted first and investigated after.

I think one of the moments it was clearest to me is when I saw someone I used to go to school with post a paragraphs-long screed about how the Jews- I mean Israel- is doing a genocide and how EVIL it is how amazingly uniquely EVIL this is...

And all I could remember was how, in grade school. This guy told me that as a "good German" he would put me "in an oven with the rest of the Jewish pigs" because "it is what my grandfather would have wanted".

And I think that just about sums up how I view everyone gleefully declaring that now the Jews are the genociders.

I used to think it was that these people were using Jews as an outlet for their white guilt.

Glad everyone realized that we pioneered a superior cooking method though.