How sick would it be to be a gibbon and you wrap your freaky hand around some mango and eat it with your mouth open and then swing around that would be so tight
I’ve now listened to half of this and I can say that my esteem for @normfinkelstein has dropped precipitously.
1) he asks incredulously and rhetorically whether anyone can possibly believe right wingers care about suffering and oppression, dismissively concluding they don’t and all ostensible concern for Palestine is really just about antisemitism. I know a number of right wingers, including @Villgecrazylady and @CurtMills reasonably well and I guarantee they are driven by Palestinian suffering more than concern for America first. They are also driven more by genuine concern than many left-wingers who simply use Palestine to virtue signal and are willing to destroy the pro Palestine movement from within in order to do so.
2) Finkelstein posits America first and concern for Palestinian suffering as antithetical values. Actually, the point I’ve heard many right wingers cogently make, including @TuckerCarlson and @RealCandaceO (who I disagree with on many other issues, btw) is that it is automatically detrimental to America to enable and ratify gross human rights violations. So the two are complementary. We can’t advance our values when we are actively destroying them in other parts of the world.
3) apparently, right wingers do not talk about the holocaust enough for Finkelstein’s satisfaction, which he believes evinces inherent antisemitism. Isn’t this the same guy who wrote the book of the Holocaust industry? Maybe it’s time to concentrate on the holocaust happening now, not the one that happened 80 years ago, with many others in between, by the way. And given how the Nazi holocaust has been weaponized to kill Palestinians and ironically commit a new Holocaust, I think it’s reasonable to determine we’ve discussed it enough and the right lessons haven’t been learned
4) Finkelstein warns about handing your enemies their arguments on a silver platter. He did just that in this podcast.
In CCW class they tell you you have a heightened duty to avoid potential fights while armed, as a matter of legal and practical self-preservation. You don't want to raise the stakes to death in a fight, and you don't want to have to argue to a jury later about whether you provoked a fight while armed to bait someone into a self-defense situation.
The anti-ICE protestors have inverted the duties of being an armed citizen (or a citizen in control of a lethal instrument, like a car in a traffic stop). They are deliberately creating situations of maximum ambiguity with a low level threat of lethal danger to bait law enforcement into making them heroic victims or martyrs.
Being an "observer" of law enforcement, while also armed and getting into shoving distance with them, is just a bad idea, even if you think the law empowers you to play the "I'm not touching you" game with acts of defiance or minor assaults. It's also hazardous to the public trust to create a situation in which every protestor is regarded as a potential threat, and every cop seen to be on the edge of shooting someone.
I can't tell from the video whether this guy drew his gun at any point in the struggle. Regardless, getting into a struggle with a cop while armed has a serious chance of ending in your death. Even if the resulting shoot is ruled unjustified or in error, you're still dead, which is only good for people who profit from chaos and mistrust (protestors who cause is bad).
The shooting will not have been *unjust* or criminal, just a tragedy. It's also not proof of government oppression, because every government has to enforce laws, and you can't use the chaos of choosing to interfere with law enforcement as proof that having laws is unjust.