HellsBels

Committed Burgundian 🍷 🍱 🎊 I Marvel a lot more than I Rage

[HellsBels @BelsHeather]

@bryan_johnson Seasoned properly, those look like they could be quite good

[HellsBels @BelsHeather]

@ryanvaughan I’ve done this tour too! It was super fun.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

You can keep telling yourself this, but you're simply wrong. I'm a left-leaning liberal who's fiercely anti-authoritarian, and if you couldn't deduce that from my work you haven't understood a word of it.

I'm not an ideologue. I mistrust ideologies. I've never met an ideologue who wasn't prepared to deny a bit of inconvenient truth to keep their world view intact and I include ideologies with which I find myself in broad sympathy. On the other hand, I am an idealist. I believe in human beings. We are undeniably capable of terrible acts, but the evidence is that we are astoundingly collaborative and mutually supportive, especially when times are hard.

My values haven't changed; what's changed is the political landscape. What was once my natural home (a pragmatic centre-left party focused on dealing with economic disparity, championing social liberalism and equal rights) is now dominated by an illiberal, identity-based strain of politics I consider elitist, harmful and out of touch with the day-to-day concerns of regular people, particularly women (and I've still lived more than half of my life as a non-wealthy woman, and some of that time was spent in poverty).

There are women with whom I make common cause in the TERF wars I disagree with on other things. Within obvious limits (sucking up to literal Nazis) I don't particularly care about their personal politics. The reality is that there's currently an assault on women's rights unparalleled in my lifetime, and it's coming from both left and right. If ever there was a time for women across the political spectrum to come together, it is now.

[The Jewish Chronicle @JewishChron]

"For the past decade, progressives have been obsessed with finding a single source for all oppression." | @HadleyFreeman

https://t.co/NrjywEi9cY

[Christiane Amanpour @amanpour]

Does Tucker really think we journalists haven't been trying to interview President Putin every day since his full scale invasion of Ukraine? It's absurd -- we'll continue to ask for an interview, just as we have for years now.

[Richard Chizmar @RichardChizmar]

GIVEAWAY TIME: Next weekend I will select 10 random winners and sign them up for a 5 issue subscription to Cemetery Dance, starting with the below issue, coming this spring. Just have to Follow and RT to be eligible. Good luck, everyone!

[HellsBels @BelsHeather]

@ryanvaughan You can come eat dinner with me and my family. You are a VIP at our house. 😀

[HellsBels @BelsHeather]

@ryanvaughan 😆🫶

[Josh Glancy @joshglancy]

"On Monday I go to work. How are your family, a colleague asks. When I answer, she squirms. Can’t they just leave, my colleague says. No, they can’t actually."

This is an extraordinary piece from a Jewish employee at The Guardian

https://t.co/egbUTTD8mE

[Claire Lehmann @clairlemon]

"This enthusiasm of people at the spectacle of a mass pogrom against the Jews, the excitement it arouses—this is indescribably shocking. But it was foreseeable."

Paul Berman in @Quillette

https://t.co/QqBxvQykfl

[NYScanner @nyscanner]

Friday morning in Forest Hills, Queens. Seems like some good old New Yorkers are pissed.

[Stas Olenchenko @StasOlenchenko]

As a Ukrainian person looking at everything that’s been happening in the world lately, here’s what I really, REALLY need people living in liberal democracies to understand as soon as possible.

This isn’t a pleasant conversation.

A thread.
1/

[Victor Davis Hanson @VDHanson]

Israel vs. a Death Cult

Here are three critical considerations that must be understood about the current Israel-Hamas conflict. It is a sort of half-war. It consists of a military trying to defeat an organized clique of passive-aggressive, media-obsessed tribal murderers.

It is not really a war. This ‘war’ did not begin with a military assault. It is nothing like the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars, or indeed most other conflicts. It broke out with a surprise assault by between 1,500 and 2,500 gunmen of the Hamas death squads.

During peace and on a holiday, they entered Israel in a long-planned hit operation to murder civilians and take captives, focusing specifically on butchering the most vulnerable—the elderly, women, children, and infants—and in the most grotesque fashion imaginable.

Their desire was to be as savagely pre-civilizational as possible—the more macabre the manner of murder, the more fertile their sophistry that they were reduced to such repulsive blood lust by their worse “oppressors”. It would be as though gruesome Mafia hitmen had claimed they were forced to become animal-like due to even worse systemic anti-Italian bias. Even the Mexican cartels do not claim they are led to behead because of the injustice of the Mexican government.

By preplanned design, women were raped, and children and infants were burned alive, bound and executed, and (yes) beheaded. The dead were often mutilated. Some 1,400 Israelis were butchered, the vast majority civilians. Some 3,500-4,500 were wounded.

Hamas never planned to stage a preemptive war against the Israeli military. Its only agenda was to send killers to unprotected villages to murder the unarmed as they slept—in the manner of Nazi Einsatzgruppen and other mobile death squads on the Eastern Front. Almost immediately they counted on using hostages, human shields, and the media to avoid any accounting from the IDF.

To distract from the murder mission, Hamas launched some 5,000 rockets—all intended as terror weapons to strike civilians, in the fashion of the V-1 and V-2 attacks on London. What followed is the most asymmetrical “war” in memory. The IDF is the only military in the world told to be “proportionate” in its use of retaliatory force—not the U.S. after 9/11, and not Ukraine after February 24, 2022. No Arab army or terrorist cadre has ever waged a war under the rules of “proportionality”.

Can anyone remember a conflict, other than ones involving the U.S. or Britain, in which the attacked in its response is expected to first phone or drop leaflets warning its target areas? Does Hamas do that when it launches its rockets at Israeli cities?

It is not an anti-colonial struggle. Gaza is not anyone’s“colony”. It has been autonomous since 2006-7. No free Israeli Arab Muslim citizen would willingly emigrate there to live under the dictatorship of Hamas. And for good reason. Gaza has been the recipient of aggregate billions in cash from the Gulf monarchies, Europe, the US, the UN. and expatriate remittances. The more money came in, the less Hamas had any intention of using it to serve its people.

Most of the gifted funds were used to build the world’s largest subterranean city of death, to buy drones and rockets, and to pay gunmen to kill Jews. Essentially Hamas is an enormous mafia-like, shakedown and hostage-taking operation that threatens the general peace, the moderate Arab nations, the Western democracies, and Israel with terrorist operations and kidnapping unless sufficiently bribed to behave. Usually, soldiers wear uniforms in battle and their far away civilian overseers do not; Hamas killers in action wear anything, but their distant leaders in safety often prefer uniforms.

So, Hamas is primarily neither a government nor even an armed force designed to fight other soldiers, but rather some eerie updated SS or Mexican-like cartel. Was that reality at the time unknown to Gazans who once voted them into power, or to its unhinged supporters on the streets and campuses of the US who celebrated its murder missions and damned Israel—even before Israel responded?

Only Hamas is deliberately targeting civilians. Hamas fires its rockets at Israeli civilians from hospitals, schools, UN facilities, and mosques. Again, note the logic: Hamas assumes that Israel fights wars more humanely than Hamas itself does, and so will both try to avoid Hamas’s Palestinian human shields, and of course never itself employ such a barbaric tactic—since, among other humane reasons, Israeli civilians would attract, rather than deflect a Hamas rocket.

The Israelis avoid collateral damage; there is not even such a concept for Hamas: all of its attacks are primarily aimed at civilians. Collateral damage for Hamas follows from accidently encountering the IDF.

How Orwellian that the world demands that Israel, in its efforts to prevent Hamas rocket launches aimed exclusively at its civilian population, must not hurt a single civilian who is impressed to shield the rocket launchers. Note well: Hamas’s air campaign is specifically designed to kill civilians—Israel’s to avoid them. In Israel rockets are used to shield civilians; in Gaza civilians are used to shield rockets.

Hamas seeks to force the Israeli military to violate the rules of war; Israel accepts that there are no rules that Hamas gunman would ever follow. The odd result is that a sick world is more accepting of deliberate mass murdering by Hamas than occasional accidental collateral damage by Israel.

[Jotam Confino @mrconfino]

I just saw indescribable, raw footage of Hamas’ massacre along with 100 other international journalists, provided by Israeli authorities. Here are the notes I took: 

1: Hamas terrorist screaming Allah Akhbah as he frantically tries to behead a dead man with a shovel.

[Bethany S. Mandel @bethanyshondark]

Interesting choice of words from Washington Post. “detained” 🤔

[Zlatan Ibrahimović @Ibra_official]

LIBRA

[HellsBels @BelsHeather]

@StylingDutchman Yes, I do too. Hopefully having this knowledge even before she enters the workforce will inspire her to make careful and smart choices for her future. 🤞

[HellsBels @BelsHeather]

I don’t have a lot of followers so I don’t know if I’ll get many answers. But my 17 year old asked me what is the point of life if you spend most of your time working and can only do what you want on weekends. My answer did not make her happy. Anybody got a good answer?

[HellsBels @BelsHeather]

@StylingDutchman That’s a good answer!