Call it whatever you want, Israel is starving babies

The images from Gaza are so gruesome, it seems like the tide of opinion shifting even more against Israel internationally. Honestly, it's pretty sad that it took this long but it really does seems like there has been a major shift in the past week. The signs are everywhere. Even Trump has "urged" Israel to stop the famine that Israel created. B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, is now calling what is happening in Gaza a genocide. We have articles like this.

I don't see how the Israeli-made famine in Gaza can possibly be addressed without a total end of the war in Gaza. Once a famine gets to this stage, there needs to be a huge influx of food and medical assistance into Gaza to reverse it. The point where hunger can be alleviated just with pauses in the fighting or by letting in more trucks in between military offensives has passed. For the past year, Israeli defenders have ignored the warnings about starvation and now, I think, we have reached the tipping point. The only way to solve this problem is to end the war, or at least have an extended durable ceasefire.

But the governing coalition of Israel does not want to end the war no matter what. I don't know if the current wave of extra international concern will get into serious stuff that might force a change in Israel's behavior--something like a cut off American military assistance. Short of that, I'm not sure if the Netanyahu government will stop.

Deals are meaningless in the era of Trump

Of course the EU should retaliate against U.S. tariffs, even if there was a better prospect for a tariff deal. Deals are meaningless because Trump doesn't honor his own deals. Trump made a deal with Mexico a few months ago an earlier time that he threatened tariffs. And then, after a few months of Mexico abiding by the agreement, Trump announced even more tariffs against Mexico.

The only way to get Trump to back down is to retaliate hard against the U.S. in the hopes it will trigger a market meltdown, then Trump will back down.

It will end some day but there is no end in sight

We really are going to have an unrelenting firehose of really shitty news every single day for the next three and a half years, right? At least!

What will this country be like at the other end of this?

Major policy changes thinly disguised as a budget bill

 

Yesterday, the Senate passed the President's Big Bullshit Bill using a parliamentary process called "reconciliation." The advantage to reconciliation is a bill can be passed with a straight majority. It cannot be filibustered, so to pass it only needs 51 votes, not 60. Reconciliation is a special process that is reserved only for passing a budget, not bills to make substantive law or policy. 

So it's funny that the New York Times headline calls this a "Policy Bill."

Stuff that drives me crazy

People who assume that Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, various Iraqi Shi'ite militant groups, etc., are just pawns of Iran and anything they do counts as Iran's actions.  You see it over and over again. Right now, it is used by war-mongers who want to justify Israel's current war of choice against Iran by spinning it into a defensive war rather than a blatant act of aggression. Attacking Iran out of the blue is just defensive, you see, because Iran is responsible for everything that its so-called "prxoies" do. So Israel's latest monstrous violation of international law can be viewed as legitimate self-defense.

That way of thinking is just stupid. It assumes that any group that Iran supports does not have any agency. It also is a kind of reasoning that is never used on any of the groups that the U.S. supports. Like Israel, for example. The U.S. is the main funder of the Israeli military. But I bet that most of the people who are now claiming that Iran is responsible for October 7 do not believe that Israeli leaders are pawns of the U.S., and that the Netanyahu government isn't making its own decisions.

In a sense this issue is just another manifestation of the Shiites have no agency unless they are Persian theory (I have obsessed about that theory for years!) Except Hamas are not Shiites (they are also not solely supported by Iran. It is funny how no one calls them "proxies" of Qatar and Turkey!) But it is the same basic idea. Iran is always the evil puppet master.

Anytime I see someone use that framing, I just assume they don't know anything about the conflict.

Finally, actual evidence of a lab leak

When she's not shooting puppies, getting banned from wide swaths of her own state, or taking glamour shots in concentration camps, ICE Barbie is getting mysterious illnesses after visiting a biohazard lab.

If Iranians didn't want to get killed maybe they should have considered being born somewhere richer

This is your periodic reminder that the world is divided into "bombable" and "not-bombable" places. Bombing, for example, Paris, or anywhere in Western Europe for that matter, or North America, Australia, and a handful of other places, is an atrocity. Bombing places like Tehran is, well, maybe will elicit some statement of mild regret. But the decision to kill Iranians is seen as legitimate even while it may be a little distasteful.

The only way to make sense of this is as a kind of bigotry. Iranian lives are simply not worth as much as the lives of "first world" people.