This is worth a listen, about an hour long…
She seems like a wonderful Rabbi. Her congregation is lucky to have her.
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Jews have to bury within 2 days. The people that prepare the bodies for burial are usually quite conservative people. They weren’t trained for crime documentation, just for treating bodies with dignity. A lot of the women preparing women’s bodies for burial covered up evidence of rape and didn’t document it, because that’s what they saw as respectful - and also, they were being forced to deal with a very ugly situation they were not trained to handle.
It makes documenting what happened really hard that all these bodies were buried so quickly without even photo evidence of what the bodies looked like, much less testing for evidence of rape.
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If it were only a matter of lack of physical evidence, that would be one thing. But there has been so much weight put on reports that then turn out to be flawed or even outright refuted by the physical evidence that does exist. It makes it really difficult to credit the idea that there were widespread, systematic actions attributable to an organization.
Which, I should stress, should not be taken as evidence that it didn’t happen at all, or in any way lessens the horror of what there is solid evidence for.
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This is why I don’t like the “multi-party” parliamentary system. It always means the same as a one-party or two-party joke version of the U.S., but with even greater control over elections due to their ability to schedule snap elections. Britain, the individual European countries who do the “every five years without fail” as well as the ability to call snap elections and even worse, sometimes reset the clock? Not quite sure if the resetting of the clock is actually done anywhere. Either way, 5 years is too long for wait for feedback from year 3. Remember, the ruling party controls both the legislature and the executive ministries and is usually able to fall back on the monarch and the military establishment if the ruling party is explicitly feudal enough.
For its other flaws, the rapid schedule of representative elections in U.S. constitution effectively limits the ability of the party in charge of the executive to simultaneously rewrite all the laws and administer them to their absolute worst effect. The rules governing things like the filibustering minority rule in the House and Senate, gerrymandering in the states, the ability to have large populations of unrepresented people… these are all systemic bad things that are not really in the Constitution. The 3/5s rule and other things were there, yes, and remain as a history lesson for everyone to read. But between amendments and statute and happy shifts in precedent to more decent rules, there is a legitimate, real resilience against the kinds of astroturfed social and economic feudalism that takes down Europe, Britain, Israel, and the rest of the post-colonial world.
While those democracies have their Nixon, Harding, Wilson… moments, they often devolve into Ceaușescu, Netanyahu, Borisjohnsoggoroth … moments, and the party in power keep chugging along as the place turns into a shithole worse than anything a democracy can devolve into while remaining a democracy with a free press.
The shifts in precedent, though, can be rewritten by asserting enough control of the media for enough generations. Norms of doing business in the Senate can be tossed at any time, so can Sullivan.
Still they let us vote on the lege every two years and the Resident every four. No way a numbnuts weirdo like Trump, Netanyahu, or Putin survives a real set of election cycles. The billionaire class has always been real strongmad at not being able to really, finally, shut Americans up.
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Chuck’s not wrong… I suspect that many Israelis absolutely agree that Netanyahu needs to go. But as long as he can cobble together a slim majority among the far right parties, he’s in charge.
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A call-in show with comentary.
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This may be an event that has been gestating for longer than I’ve been alive.
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Pogromists often insist they’re just searching for missing children (and have to search everywhere and everyone).
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In the groups I was in, they knew it was coming in the middle of the night, so there were a lot of questions like, “Should I wake up my 94 year old mom who has dementia to get her to the shelter?” “Should I wake up my sleeping baby to get him to the shelter?” It was really hard for everyone. I’m glad it mostly was deflected, but with Iran directly getting into the war, it’s only getting uglier.
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