Do I think this will end in more positive results than negative for Palestinians? No. Does that mean I'll condemn the Palestinian resistance for fighting back? Also no. This is because doing so would be nonsensical, for a couple of different reasons. Firstly, because nobody can tell me what the Palestinians should do instead that is both realistic and reasonable. It would be easy for me to sit here in my armchair and say the Palestinians should either maintain the status quo or lie down, relinquish their homes and homeland and accept whatever table scraps they're able to get, but we can see from the Palestinian perspective that that's not reasonable. It would be easy for me to sit in my armchair and argue that Palestinians should just focus on securing a one-state or two-state solution, but we can see from the Israeli political landscape that that's not realistic. So what else can they do? What reasonable and realistic options do they have? No one can provide me a satisfactory answer. Secondly, it would be nonsensical for me to condemn the actions of Hamas on the grounds that it will make things worse for the Palestinians because the fact that Israel always responds to Palestinian resistance by killing a lot of Palestinians is itself a very concrete manifestation of the abuses the Palestinians are resisting. It would not be legitimate for me to sit in my armchair and tell someone to stop resisting their abuser just because it will cause them to receive more abuse; that's not a valid reason to condemn resistance. Ultimately this is just Palestinians doing what they feel they need to do out of total desperation, because they feel backed into a corner with no other options. And they feel backed into a corner with no other options because that does appear to be the case. There are a lot of people I could blame for their being in those circumstances, but the very last on that list would be the victims of the abuse themselves.

Mitch McConnell froze up in public again, the second such incident in the last few weeks. He just stood there silently — a gentle, childlike smile flickering across his face, probably for the first time since the Truman administration. In that moment, while Mitch McConnell’s dying brain struggled and failed to make sense of its present reality, all the dourness was gone from his face. All the downward gravitational pull from a lifetime in the DC swamp. All the seriousness. All the scheming. All the warmongering, tyranny and abusiveness. In that moment of amnesiac innocence, you’d never be able to tell from looking at Mitch McConnell how many people he’s helped kill. How much suffering he’s helped cause. How much health and thriving he’s frozen out of humanity in his joyless facilitation of corporate dystopia. All you’d see is a man. A cute, harmless, befuddled old man. All the dark, dense, contracted energy gone from his form in a sweet tender moment of intimate indivisibility. Capitol Hill is where warmongers and principles go to die. It’s an assisted living facility for psychopaths — a nursing home where people who receive sexual gratification from dropping military explosives on foreigners go to wait for their decomposition. The whole place smells like night terrors and urine. Capitol Hill is gerontocratic command center where miserable octogenarians in wheelchairs and adult diapers keep pulling the levers of ecocide and nuclear brinkmanship like retirees at a Vegas slot machine as a final fuck you to younger generations who are still capable of enjoying life on this planet. It’s where they warehouse souls too atrophied and mummified to take a stand against the empire in order to give Americans the illusion of living in a democracy. Joe Biden called McConnell his good friend, and of course they are good friends; they are the same kind of monster. The same variety of spent, half-dead Beltway flotsam made of corporate logos and plastic donor class dinner parties held together by nothing but Aricept and wood glue who’ve been pushing war, militarism, austerity and authoritarianism since the instant they were able to claw their way into elected office. This is the hub of the global empire. This is what it looks like. Corrupt. Decrepit. Blood-spattered. Shitting itself. And then Hollywood perception managers come in and dress it up as something pretty. But it all faded away in that one moment of neurological misfire. Not even a distant memory as colors, sounds and feelings swirled ineffably in McConnell’s bewildered mind. Perhaps one day this will happen to the entire empire. The whole thing suddenly vanishing for the lie it always was, all its managers left blinking stupidly in the sunlight, reaching for tools that aren’t there anymore and word magic that no longer has any power. Perhaps one day all the illusions will disappear like the network of conceptual constructs in Mitch McConnell’s head. Perhaps one day the empire will call upon its servants and no one will answer, and it will be left there anxiously repeating the call, like an actor trapped onstage repeating a line from the script, awaiting a fellow cast member who missed their cue.