Of moral equivalencies

Hamas is a terrorist organization.

There, I said it. They’re a terrorist organization.

What makes them a terrorist organization? Simple: They target unarmed civilians. That is what makes them a terrorist organization.

So a friend of mine posted a photograph on her Facebook page of Razan al-Najjar, the 21 year old paramedic who was targeted and killed by an Israeli sniper from close to 300 yards away while helping people who had been injured. And an Israel defender said: “Why don’t you post Israeli victims of Hamas?” I.e., the Israeli government isn’t doing anything that Hamas doesn’t do.

So he was saying that a terrorist organization targeting civilians is exactly equivalent to the Israeli government targeting civilians so we should post photos of both?

Well, I suppose we could. But the tens of thousands of unarmed civilians killed by Israel far outnumber the hundreds of unarmed civilians killed by Hamas, so we’d mostly be posting photos of Palestinian civilian faces anyhow.

Besides, I thought the Israeli government wasn’t supposed to be a terrorist organization. Even though they’re killing unarmed civilians, unarmed medical personnel even, which is exactly what terrorist organizations do.

But this person apparently believes that because Hamas is a terrorist organization, the fact that Israel’s government is behaving like a terrorist organization is fine and dandy.

So there you have it, straight from an Israel defender: Israel’s government is a terrorist organization. Hey, he said it first — though he apparently didn’t realize what it was that he was saying!

– Badtux the Snarky Penguin

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Disappeared down the Memory Hole: Orwell was right

Her name was Nasim Najafi Aghdam. She claimed to be a vegan body builder, though with her tall thin physique you couldn’t really tell it unless she was actually flexing, like in this photo from her now-disappeared web site:

And on Tuesday she snapped and took a California-legal handgun (i.e. 10 round limit) onto the YouTube campus, managed to injure four people (consider what she would have done with an AR-15 with a 30 round magazine! But those are illegal in California), and then committed suicide.

All of her social media accounts have been disappeared down the Orwellian memory hole. All of her writings on the Internet have been disappeared down the Orwellian memory hole. Only fragments can be found in various caches and archives on the Internet.

What is interesting is that, in the few writings that I can find, she claims that there is no freedom on the Internet and that the big Internet media companies dictate what you will see or not see. It is interesting that then the big Internet media companies immediately validate her thesis by disappearing her social media presence Orwellian fashion after she snaps. It’s almost as if they don’t want you to see what she was saying. Interesting how they prove her thesis. Too bad about Nasim though, she committed suicide for no real reason, since virtually nobody actually decided to go look for what she was actually saying as versus what the big media companies claim she said. Not that it’s easy to do so — I expect even those various caches and archives to be cleaned out shortly to finish “disappearing” her down the Orwellian memory hole, leaving us only with the prefabricated image of her generated by the big media companies rather than her own words.

2018. It’s 1984+34. War is peace. Tyranny is freedom. Censorship is patriotic. I love Big Brother, he wants only the best for me. Don’t you love Big Brother too?

– Badtux the “Hmmmm…..” Penguin

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They sacrificed their childhood for nothing

A little over sixty years ago, nine teenagers, fifteen years of age, were looking forward to attending high school. It was going to be scary, they knew, being in a big new school with lots of kids they’d never seen before. But they weren’t thinking much beyond that. One of the kids dreamed of all the things she’d do at this fine new school she was about to start, about the classroom discussions she’d have with interesting new people, about attending the prom. They were kids, after all. They were innocent.

They did not stay innocent. They lost their innocence hard.

And it was all in vain. Today’s schools are as segregated as they were in 1957. Even in cases where they’re supposedly desegregated, the white kids attend white classes, and the black kids attend black classes, and never the twain shall meet. At the elementary school I taught at in inner city Houston, supposedly 1/3rd of the students were white. I never saw them. They had their own wing of the building. They ate lunch at a different time from the black kids. They had recess at a different time than my kids. I could walk out my classroom door into the hallway and look out at the playground and see them playing, but that’s the closest I ever got to any of the white kids. My kids, of course, were all brown. Us Teach for America interns were the ones thrown into the classrooms with brown kids, because the school board figured that their parents didn’t have the political pull to complain about untrained novice teachers in the classrooms. They were right.

Segregation and violence. Those are America’s heritage. Says Minnijean Brown Trickey bitterly from her home in Canada, where she has lived for most of the past thirty years after the election of Ronald Reagan convinced her that America would never change: “What kind of country doesn’t see education for all children to be the primary value? I think the US has two values: segregation, which they do so well, and violence.”

I can’t say she’s wrong.

– Badtux the Somber Penguin

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So when is it okay to kill Nazis?

I’m pretty sure that everybody here is okay with the fact that these people killed Nazis, lotsa Nazis:

U.S. and Soviet soldiers meet up in the middle of Germany on 26 April 1945 as they clean out Nazi holdouts

So hey, let’s quit that bullshit about “it’s not okay to kill Nazis!”. Because clearly, under some circumstances, it is okay to kill Nazis. (And if you disagree that the folks up above were right to kill Nazis, please don’t post it here… I’m not interested in a debate about the virtues of Nazis, they lost any moral high ground they might have ever occupied when they exterminated millions of Jews, gays, Roma, and others).

So the question is, when did it start becoming okay to kill Nazis? Was it in 1939, when Britain and France declared war against Nazi Germany? Was it just the British and French who were justified in killing Nazis at that time? There were American volunteers who flowed into Canada and formed military units that fought Nazis before the U.S. entered the war, were they justified in killing Nazis? What about Jews, if they killed Nazis after the Nazis started killing Jews, would it have been morally defensible? What if they had killed Nazis before the Nazis started killing them, but after Kristallnacht? Would they have been justified in killing Nazis then based on the theory that the Nazis were a direct threat to their physical safety? What about even earlier, after Hitler had stated in his book Mein Kampf that the Jew must be exterminated? Would they have been justified in killing Nazis based on the theory of preemptive self defense?

When did it become okay to kill Nazis? And do those conditions still apply today?

I know there’s a lot of knee-jerking about “violence is never right!” and all that. That’s bullshit. It took violence to get rid of that murderous bastard Adolph Hitler, a lot of violence, a level of violence unprecedented in human history, a level of violence that has never been matched or surpassed before or since. No amount of pacifism would have stopped Hitler from killing those millions of people that his regime murdered in cold blood. So let’s dismiss the notion of “violence is never right!” — because as Hitler shows, sometimes it’s not only right, but the only moral thing to do — and answer the question: when is violence against Nazis right? Note that I say right, as in, morally right, not legal. Law and morality are two different fields. Law is what’s written in law books. Morality is what kind of person you are, what kind of society you live in, and whether you’re doing things that are morally right or morally wrong. It is legal to be a Nazi here in the United States, and illegal to punch a Nazi here in the United States. That’s not the question. The question is whether it is morally justified to use violence to prevent Nazis from doing the morally reprehensible things that they claim they want to do.

– Badtux the Morality Penguin

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Too goddamn hot

I’ve been baking the past few days because we *finally* got summer here in the SF Bay area — and boy howdy, we got it with a vengeance. Broke records all around the Bay area on Sunday, and Saturday wasn’t much cooler.

So anyhow, in the aftermath of a lesbian black woman saving the life of an anti-gay David Duke supporting bigot who was attacked by what appears to have been a lone wolf white Bernie Bro, the tighty righties have their panties in a bunch about how those mean lefties are coarsening the public discourse. Like this leftie threatening violence:

Err, yeah.

Or this liberal threatening violence:

Err, ah. Okay. Well, I’m sure this guy has to be a liberal:

No? Okay, so how about this guy who shot someone outside a Milo Yiannopoulos speech? He was clearly a liberal, right.

Uhm, no. He was wearing a Trump hat and had told his wife he was carrying his gun with him to the event so he could kill some liberals.

Okay, so let’s get this straight. You have some liberals saying that we should impeach Trump, one of whom, out of all the millions saying that, decided to start taking potshots at Republicans. Then you got right wingers saying that killing liberals is a great idea, *lots* of right wingers saying that, you can’t throw a rock at Stormfront or Brietbart or the Fox News comment section without hitting one of the right wingers saying that, and that means that liberals are the ones advocating violence.

Yeah, global warming is real, and it’s apparently baked the fucking brains out of half of America. Just sayin’.

– Badtux the Too-warm Penguin

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The most important heroes in the world are those who simply do their job

Attack the ambush.

That’s what our soldiers are trained to do. And, increasingly, our cops too. It’s what two Capitol Police officers did today. Two black Capitol Police officers. Who were there as the security detail for a white Congressman who has made his career running his mouth about how lazy stupid etc. black people are. They were ambushed at a baseball field, and the two black police officers immediately attacked the ambush and killed the ambusher. Because that’s what they do. That’s what they signed up to do. Even if it means defending the life of a bigot.

Capitol Police officers Crystal Griner and David Bailey did their job. It’s a dirty job, but it’s a necessary one. Regardless of what various right-wing assholes (and a few lefties too) say about Second Amendment remedies, it’s a damn nasty idea. Because once we start down that route, we’re talking about rule of gun — and rule of gun always favors the most evil, the most venal, the most willing to murder in cold blood.

And nations ruled by cold blooded murderers are not good places to be.

Just sayin’.

– Badtux the Rule of Law Penguin

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In which the Twitter Troll in Chief trolls from atop a pile of dead bodies:

Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now? That's because they used knives and a truck!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 4, 2017

Really?

So how’s about this, Twitter Troll in Chief: If the terrorists who struck at the London Bridge / Borough Market had been carrying guns, a lot more people would have died. If they’d had guns, it would have looked a lot like the Bataclan Theater attack in Paris, where 89 people died. But because they only had knives and a truck, only 7 people died.

In short, yeah, this was a victory for UK gun control. A total of 130 people died in the Paris attack, where the attackers were heavily armed with semiautomatic weapons and a lot of rounds of ammunition. A total of 7 people died in the London attack where the attackers were armed with knives and a van. That’s a helluva lot less people than 130.

Of course, His Fraudulency Donald the Trump isn’t the only person trolling. Both of the candidates for Prime Minister in the UK are trolling, hard. Corbyn claims that this shows that the UK interventions in the Middle East are having blowback that endangers British lives for no gain for Britain. May claims that Corbyn is playing politics with the lives of innocent British citizens, while at the same time claiming that the solution to terrorism in the UK is to censor the Internet. Which is, uhm, playing politics with the lives of innocent British citizens — this is something she’s wanted to do for a long time as the “Queen of Mean”.

Meanwhile, here in the United States our copycat terrorists are right wing terrorists, like that nutjob in Portland who killed two men who interfered with his harassment of two Muslim girls and then yelled in court, “You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism. You hear me? Die.” And what does the Twitter Troll In Chief have to say about that?

CRICKETS

But he *does* have this to say:

We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 3, 2017

Which travel ban would have stopped the Portland terrorist, uhm, how? And the “rights” he’s talking about appear to be the right to, uhm, say nasty things to Muslims. Exactly the same right that the Portland terrorist exercised to the point of killing two men who were interfering with his right to terrorize two young Muslim girls.

What a fucking asshole.

That’s all.

– Badtux the Asshole-despising Penguin

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