Brief Aside On Cancel Culture
Alisdare Hickson from Canterbury, United Kingdom [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)]
Following the whole Israel/Palestine thing, a whole bunch of various students at various institutions released various statements indicating support for The Underdog in this particular fight.
A particularly egregious example came from a handful of solidarity groups at Harvard:
Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine
We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.
Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to “open the gates of hell,” and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.
The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years. From systematized land seizures to routine airstrikes, arbitrary detentions to military checkpoints, and enforced family separations to targeted killings, Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death, both slow and sudden.
Today, the Palestinian ordeal enters into uncharted territory. The coming days will require a firm stand against colonial retaliation. We call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.
And then there’s a whole bunch of Student Organizations listed.
At NYU, the president of the student bar association sent out a newsletter:
Well, wouldn’t you know it, there was a lot of pushback to these various statements.
The NYU Student was someone who had an offer of employment after a successful summer internship but it was yanked once the employers saw the newsletter:
— Winston & Strawn LLP (@WinstonLaw) October 10, 2023
And stuff quickly started snowballing from there.
I have been asked by a number of CEOs if @harvard would release a list of the members of each of the Harvard organizations that have issued the letter assigning sole responsibility for Hamas’ heinous acts to Israel, so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their… https://t.co/7kzGOAGwp9
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) October 10, 2023
A handful of enterprising people put together a Google Doc (since pulled for violating Terms of Service) listing out the members of some of the organizations listed.
And, following that, there has been a notable number of students and student orgs coming out and saying “HEY WAIT HEY WAIT WE DIDN’T MEAN THAT!!!”
Harvard Nepali students retract their signature. pic.twitter.com/0ffGg38XJy
— 𑆩𑆳𑆬𑆴𑆤𑆵 Sarah L Gates (@SarahLGates1) October 10, 2023
(I had more examples of people prominently resigning from the student organizations and denouncing the letter but several of them have since gone private.)
There have also been multiple calls for understanding and clarification about how these Joint Statements actually work in practice:
I'm a @Harvard_Law student. So I know many members had no say in whether their orgs signed either letter. Many weren't even notified that their orgs were considering doing so. No need for this level of harassment. https://t.co/m0VkTmAUvk
— XXXXXXX (@XXXXXXXXX) October 11, 2023
(Editor’s note, After this tweet was deleted, the tweeter asked me to remove their name from this post. So I removed it. –Jaybird)
This, of course, has sparked a debate about whether it is appropriate to lash out against students and effectively punish them for something that they had nothing to do with but they merely happened to be members of a group that had its leadership do something really, really stupid and the extent to which that should be held against all of the members rather than against the people who actively participated in the acts.
Which, if you think about it, is really funny.
Back in 2019, we discussed Kyle Kashuv getting his invitation to Harvard rescinded.
Back in 2017, we discussed the 10 students that Harvard rescinded their invites from following their posting of offensive memes to what they thought was a private facebook group.
My take then:
Maybe we could put up posters in the quad at the various elite colleges.
“IT’S ONE THING TO QUOTE FANON SYMPATHETICALLY. IT’S QUITE ANOTHER TO DO SO ON TWITTER AFTER A MASSACRE WHERE FUTURE EMPLOYERS CAN SEE IT. BE SMART! DON’T QUOTE FANON EXCEPT PRIVATELY!”
Something like that.Report
I’ll quote myself from 2019:
But on the broader point we need to be better at forgiveness even of people not like us or who we disagree with. There are plenty of people whose worst moments randomly went viral (that recent valedictorian speech for example). No people can’t be free from consequences of their actions but there’s an arbitrariness, holier than thou-ness, and disproportion to it that I think is wrong.
I also think jr’s point sticks out in the 2017 discussion. It has been clear to every person watching this with a little objectivity that a day would come when the winds would change. The question, on principle, that everyone has to answer, is whether they favor the planet of cops mindset or not, on its own merits, and separate from whatever the zeitgeist or vibes or whatever happen to be at any given time.Report
The actual text of the First Amendment would seem set against the planet of cops approach.Report
Private companies can do whatever they want, though.Report
The “planet of cops” approach is all about people reacting to (often terrible) speech with even more (often terrible) speech.
“You shouldn’t hire this guy because he wrote a letter only an asshole would write!” is very much speech, and not actually hiring the guy is a pretty close cousin of speech, and none of that really changes even if you think the letter wasn’t so bad, or if “writing the letter” in this case consisted of joining a student group without being able to predict how its leadership would react to literally unimaginable atrocities committed by Hamas.Report
Switching to the question of “do you favor the planet of cops mindset?” will have me shrugging and saying “of course we should defund”.
But having failed to defund, we’re stuck in the prisoner’s dilemma.
Do we cooperate or do we defect?
What if they defected against us last time?
What if they defected against us the last two times?
What if they defected against us the last three times?
And now here we are.
What does cooperation look like in this particular dilemma anyway?
How do we best support these enthusiastic, if misguided, Harvard students?Report
All of us have to exemplify the change we want to see in the world. On a more practical level, I think the issue starts with suggesting that the administration s that run these hallowed places with ivy growing up the steeples are really serving their charges well. For public universities, I’d say it starts with a reminder that everyone working at one is a civil servant, and accordingly should govern themselves with the humility necessitated by that role.Report
There have definitely been cases where you can lay the consequences at the feet of the administration, but there’s only so much they can (and should) do to protect their students from the consequences of their own misguided enthusiasm.Report
Are you still calling them “volunteer Stasi”?Report
People who do stuff like ask for the names of the members of the Palestine Solidarity Groups that signed the Joint Statement so they may be publicized that they be less likely to be accidentally hired by the various big guns employers out there?
Sure.
But, looking back, I think that I conceded the point that a better term would be “Informeller Mitarbeiter”.Report
You mean the people who report the names of teachers who are allowing students to change clothing in a classroom to a gender they prefer?
Those sorts of people?
No, I would call them busybodies, the sort who have always been with us.Report
Oh, is that what we’re talking about now?
Perhaps we could talk about the Pinkertons instead?
19th Century Spiritualism?Report
Libs of TikTok.Report
Lemme check. It strikes me as very likely that she publicized some enthusiastic students…
Yep.
Man, these Informeller Mitarbeiters, huh?
What would you like to change the topic to next in our little “do you denounce *THIS*?” game?
What would you like me to denouce next?
Pick the topic! (Don’t pick another prominent Jewish person, though… it might start to look like a pattern if you pick two in a row.)Report
I call her a busybody, you call her an “Informeller Mitarbeiter”
I still prefer busybody.Report
I’m glad we were able to hammer that out.Report
George Mason U, home to various institutes founded by the Koch Brothers and the Antonin Scalia School of Law.
Libs of Tik Tok is homophobe and transphobe. There are better sources. You are picking right-wing trolls and provocateurs and I think doing it on purpose. You could be looking at the very nuanced article Lee pointed out below or Michelle Goldberg’s column in the Times. Both of whom are Jews. But you go straight to a partisan right-wing source with a long history of homophobia and transphobia.
Why is that?Report
Saul, *CHIP* brought her up.
Seriously. Scroll up. Read it.
I merely wandered over after Chip brought her up to see if she also posted about the various celebrations of Kinetic Decolonization. As it turns out, she did.
But that’s why I went to a partisan right-wing source.
Because Chip brought her up.Report
If your scorn for Informeller Mitarbeiters causes you to never post her again, I think everyone here at OT would applaud.Report
“If your scorn for Informeller Mitarbeiters causes you to never post her again, I think everyone here at OT would applaud.”
CHIP
YOU ARE THE ONE WHO BROUGHT HER UPReport
The stupid games and stupid prizes involved differ in nuanced ways, but the underlying principle remains the same.Report
As long as we’re quoting ourselves:
“The underlying issue with this entire issue seems to be that the way we as a society enforce our social norms is frequently arbitrary and unfair, needlessly cruel with a focus more on punishment than rehabilitation.
In other words, our justice system as applied to our personal lives.
When we (myself included) write things like “we should …” there is this assumption that there is some Book of Common Wisdom and Council of Social Adjudicators who wisely and impartially decide which viral meme is Bad, or Just Sorta Bad, and mete out a course of penance.
Its the same way that people (myself especially) lapse into fantasies of righteous violence where the people storm the Bastille and punish the wrongdoers.
But it never works that way. Wars and revolutions, justice systems and social norms are never enforced with precision fairness. And since people are complex, every guilty person has a plausible case for mercy and forgiveness.”
And:
“I’ve stated a few times that I support the creation and enforcement of modern etiquette, a shared and understood set of social norms of what is sacred, or taboo, and those things are enforced by some form of social disapproval.
Having said that…I am reminded of 19th century literature by Twain, Dickens, Austin and Wharton which describe how the existing etiquette was often gamed and cynically manipulated to produce exactly the opposite result intended.
I wouldn’t expect a modern form to be enforced any differently.
All of which is to say…I support Nazi-punching, and shaming of white supremacists and disapproval of racism, but cautious about letting its enforcement be unchallenged, for the same reason that criminals- (especially criminals) do deserve a vigorous defense.”Report
I’d definitely hire someone who signed that letter if he’s got a commercial driver’s license and I’m looking for a trucker. If I’m hiring someone to coordinate humanitarian aid, I wouldn’t. If one of the top candidates for a humanitarian aid job was a member of one of the groups who signed such a letter, then I’d want to sit down with him and talk it over.
The distinct feature of “cancelling”, to my thinking at least, is the punishment. But I have no problem with using a person’s mistake to provide insight into his thinking.Report
comment in modReport
Quoted yourself using one of the forbidden words :^)Report
Chip cancelled himself?Report
There’s probably a nuanced note to strike about this, but people generally don’t do nuance well in the best of circumstances. These are not the best of circumstances. (I do not claim to know this note, nor how it might be articulated.)
You might think that lawyers of all people might be able to do nuance well but that’s giving lawyers too much credit, at least as a group. But if you think students are going to be able to do nuance well, you’re as naïve as they.
There’s this Manichean impulse to assume that every conflict has a bad guy and therefore the side opposing that bad guy must be a good guy. And the bad guy is 100% bad and the good guy is 100% good. The nuance that one who has done moral wrong can be morally wronged by another is hard to accept, and harder to communicate.
Far easier to let labels do your thinking for you. Especially when facts underneath those labels are hard to know, and uncomfortably likely to be ambiguous. Gods know everyone else around you, just as angry and upset as you, are going to think with labels and not facts and you can find yourself ostracized if not condemned for failing to publicly cry at your mother’s funeral the way everyone else did. (A weighted literary reference in this case, I know, but it is the best-known one and one that demonstrates that maybe this isn’t a new phenomenon if Camus wrote about it more than 80 years ago.)Report
Oh, is that what he was on trial for in that book? It’s been a while.
I will say that some people have hinted that they’ve noticed something called “isolated demands for rigor“.
Who gets the whole “THIS IS A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE!” and who gets the “well… you have to understand…” treatment?
If there’s a pattern, you may find that the calls you’re making for nuance get interpreted differently than you want them to.Report
No, it’s not what he was on trial for (it was a murder that he admitted that could likely have been portrayed as self-defense). But because he didn’t deny the murder, the prosecution focused on his lack of public expressions of emotion, most particularly when he didn’t cry at his mother’s funeral. This was used as evidence of his lack of remorse and compassion for other human beings. The result was where the defense attorney expected a light sentence, the court instead imposed a sentence of capital punishment. The distinct impression is that had the protagonist participated in the expected set of public emotions, he’d not have been sentenced to death.Report
An early depiction of autism, maybe.Report
You know, I never thought of that!Report
Looking at pictures of Gaza this morning, I am reminded of pictures of German cities after Allied bombing.
Which is probably a good example of the nuance we should be holding. We can and should recoil in horror at the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who were killed in these raids. And we can and should demand of our leaders to explain why this was the least violent of possible measures taken.
And we can also grasp that defending the world against genocide necessarily requires doing awful things.
We can note the abuses and injustices perpetrated by the Israeli government while also noting their right to exist in peace.
Notice there is no “but” in these sentences.
Grieving for the Palestinian civilians isn’t in opposition with a determination to destroy Hamas, but complementary to it. Noting the Israeli right to exist isn’t in opposition to demanding accountability for what their government does.Report
Since people have been getting cancelled in this country for decades for daring to care about the plight of the Palestinians, this doesn’t seem at all surprising. I mean, there are actual black lists in certain academic fields for academics for those who question the morality or legality of the Occupation.Report
I think that part of the problem is that a lot of people conflate “caring about the plight of the Palestinians” with “quoting Fanon when hippiechicks get kinetically decolonized at a dance party”.Report
I think the main problem is actually the equating of caring about the plight of the Palestinians with antisemitism (which you’ll see in pretty much every thread on the subject on this blog going back over a decade). The statements above were strong, but I see nothing wrong with them. You could say that they’re blaming the victim for atrocities, but I don’t read them that way, and given how pretty much everyone has, is on this very day, and will continue indefinitely to blame Israeli atrocities on the victims of those atrocities, I’m not sure many supporters of Israel have much standing to make that accusation anyway.
Also, Fanon is great, and people should read him more carefully.Report
There is a *HUGE* smearing of “caring about the plight of the Palestinians” with “hates Jews”.
Seriously.
There are a lot of people who use this smearing opportunistically and dishonestly. Absolutely.
But there are also a lot of people out there who hate Jews. And they use this dishonest smearing to excuse atrocity.
Sometimes, when that becomes a little *TOO* obvious… well, we start getting into who/whom stuff all over again and asking questions like “but I thought you believed in the First Amendment?”
So much for the tolerant left, I guess.Report
I think it is fair to say that there are a number of critics of Israel who beclown themselves, or in fact, show their true colors, that the issue for them is about hatred of Jews. No self respecting person should make common cause with that.
I also think Israel’s most fanatical supporters never cease in their attempt to use the existence of such people to derail any possible conversation on the merits of what is going on and the United States’ sponsorship of it, not to mention to hide at all costs the fact that a material chunk of support in America comes from hard right fundamentalist Christians for reasons of crazy millenarian beliefs totally divorced from geopolitical interests, or what many of us might call objective reality.Report
But that’s the problem, innit?
We’re stuck picking between the Hamas supporters and the Red Heifer Project.Report
I kinda think a rough rule-of-thumb as to ‘what is acceptable’ could be ‘If the same things are printed in the opinion pages of Haaretz, those opinions are _probably_ not something we should think are somehow out-of-bounds antisemitism in the US’. Just a thought.
Those opinion pages, for the record, are full of scathing attacks on Netanyahu and the behavior of Israel in response to Hamas. Including calling things out as war crimes.
Although, obviously, Israeli newspapers are obviously going to be full of what the Israeli government is doing. I’m kinda reminded of the whataboutism where, when Americans complain about something bad the US government does, and other people are like ‘But what about the bad thing in some other country’, and the proper answer is ‘But I have literally no power over there to fix that thing, whereas I do elect people here and can vaguely control what happen here’.
Likewise, it’s the same with the Israeli people, in that they will criticize their own government’s actions the most of all, because their own government is supposed to listen to them. Whereas Hamas won’t. (Hamas doesn’t even have to listen to the people in Gaza!)
OTOH, where that analog falls apart is that the US government actually gives their government a hell of a lot money, and thus is perfectly reasonable for US citizens to say ‘Hey, we should put some conditions on that about the committing of war crimes’.Report
Was there a “We, the undersigned editors, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” kinda editorial at Haaretz?
Dang. That’s cold. I can’t find it with a quick search, though.Report
Not entire editorial staff, no, but, yes, one of their staff did write an editorial titled ‘Netanyahu’s Government Is Responsible for the ’23 Israel-Gaza Debacle’, although that mostly seems to be about how incompetent his government is. (As I’ve said, a lot of the articles are _extremely_ anti-Netanyahu. For pretty obvious reason if anyone followed Israeli politics before two weeks ago.)
I was actually referring to the letters they had merely printed, though, which, while not the views of the paper, were presumably within bounds of discussion and not horrifically antisemitic, with the assumption the paper would not have printed them otherwise.
Things like this, which I suspect that if American groups published they’d be in trouble, but this is, uh, an Israeli Jew talking: https://archive.ph/ioIsT
Oh, and let’s not pretend I’m saying _nothing_ is out of bounds. Obviously antisemitism exists. I’m saying ‘Americans are being called antisemitic for saying the same thing being written by Israeli Jews and being published in the pages of major Israeli newspapers’.Report
I’m pretty sure that a “BSDI” essay would be within the bounds of acceptable discourse in most places. Certainly at Harvard and the NYU.
It’s the “the slaughter of the hippiechicks is Israel’s fault and not the fault of the Palestinians” that appears to have gotten the most dander up.Report
I think it is partially a matter of reading the room for lack of a better term.
You are absolutely right that people were cancelled for voicing the Palestinian cause. This was especially bad when done in times of relative peace also for lack of a better term.
However, there is a difference between raising the cause of Palestine and raising the cause of Hamas/Hezzbolah. Sometimes they overlap, often they don’t and Hamas’ leadership is largely based in Qatar and outside of the daily misery of Gaza. The violence on Saturday was truly atrocious and it was not against settlers unless a person views all Israelis as settlers. The music festival was at a left-wing kibbutz and were critical of Hamas.
And as LeeEsq points out, the violence was truly horrific and it is not merely propaganda to state so.
None of this is to dismiss the suffering of the people in Gaza currently or ever. However, it does make the gleeful tone of some of the recent protests questionableReport
A lot of the people who released these statements believe that every Israeli Jew is a settler and them going home and the Palestinians coming back is a just solution to the I/P conflict. Never mind what is home for most of them. They really thought that not only is every Israeli Jew a settler-colonialist but everybody will agree with them and not push back.Report
See, I think these groups did read the room, and when they did, they saw the blood lust that is now manifest in Israel’s war crimes and the U.S. government and media’s support of them, and they chose to express solidarity with a people who have for decades been the subject of a violent, deadly occupation at the hands of a state that is now run by an increasingly openly racist far right government, a government has pushed that violence and the ethnic cleansing it results to new heights. They knew they would be condemned for it — on the subject of the Middle East, those who side against the U.S. and Israel almost always are — and they did it anyway. Maybe that’s stupid, but I see it as quite brave, and if there is any reason for hope amidst all this horror, it’s that there are young people who, through all the propaganda and blinding hatred, can still act on principle and a sense of justice.Report
Is support for the Palestinian people equal to support for Hamas, and is that equal to the support for the slaughter of civilians?
Is there any way to express solidarity for the oppression of Palestinians while condemning Hamas as a genocidal evil?
You’re aware that there are plenty of Palestinians who hate Hamas for that very reason. Do these Palestinians deserve our support?Report
I don’t see support for Hamas in any of the statements in the post, and I don’t recall saying anything in support of Hamas. I have never liked Hamas, not only because I find their targeting of civilians heinous, but because I don’t like their ideology. It looks like the only people equating Hamas with Palestinian solidarity and resistance are Hamas and y’all.
This got retweeted into my timeline yesterday, and though it’s from the time when Hamas was more into suicide bombings than paragliding into concerts, I think the take applies here, and it’s effectively what I’m getting at as well, and also what I think the statements in the OP were getting at:
https://twitter.com/OmarBaddar/status/1712649097893532070?t=7s2xaGfaCEeB7ICyNI2rWg&s=19Report
I’m just repeating what Saul is saying, that while its true that people who showed support for the Palestinian people have been blacklisted, the students in this example were showing support for Hamas, in the immediate aftermath of the attack.
They are literally saying that Israel alone bears responsibility for the bloodshed of this attack, completely exonerating Hamas of any agency or responsibility for their own actions.
If they express “solidarity with Palestinians” but refuse to condemn Hamas as genocidal, they are equating Hamas with Palestinians as one and the same. Like standing “in solidarity with the Americans” after 9-11, without condemning Abu Ghraib and the Bush Administration.
I don’t have much respect for this sort of fiery absolutism, whether it is the self-professed “free speech absolutists” or the “by any means necessary” type of revolutionaries.
Its meant to be read as taking the moral high ground but it is actually cowardly.
Its a way to judge things without the bravery of wrangling with the moral complexities where right and wrong demand complex navigation, where both sides can be guilty of wrongs, but ultimately one more than the other.
I don’t disagree with any of your criticisms of the Israeli government, but I have yet to see any road to peace that doesn’t lead through the complete elimination and discrediting of Hamas and its supporters.Report
Accusing them of supporting Hamas is ridiculous.
if you want to see people on the American left who support Hamas, you can find them on Twitter. They’re a fairly small minority even if the small American left, but they’re there.
Or a more common, though still minority view on the left: not supporting Hamas, but not condemning them either. The most prominent proponent of this view I know of is Norm Finkelstein, whose name is is appropriate to mention in a thread about people getting cancelled for their criticism of Israel. I don’t agree with him, either, but I know a handful of people personally who agree with him.Report
All well and good. I think the retractions are a healthy sign and generally a positive development.
I’d like to refer, also, to an excellent post on the other blog that is pertinent to the subject:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/10/the-myth-of-the-american-left
To wit: the “left” we are talking about doing and expressing these sentiments is a tiny, marginalized fringe of the actual operational left in this country.
That contrasts starkly with the other side where the deranged statements and nuttiness is literally coming from the GOP’s most recent elected President, the rights’ most likely future Presidential nominee and many many political actors who are currently members in good standing of the GOP.Report
These people are marginal, yes. They haven’t been marginalized. They, instead, have a gimungous megaphone and, sure, they’re crazy and not representative of anything.
Except they have a gimungous megaphone.
They won’t be marginalized until they only have a phone.Report
The megaphone, in this case just to be clear, is a phone that connects to a twitter account for an assortment of student associations or, in the largest case, the DSA? Yes?
I mean, they mostly just have only a phone already, and a bunch of credulous (on the center) or desperate (on the right) media amplifiers.Report
They also have a bunch of tepid defenders, a bunch of anti-antis more than happy to scream “whatabout”, and “fellow travelers” who decide how to fight based not on any vague principle but on waiting to see where people line up first.
I suppose that that is one of the things that makes this particular kind of pushback so useful.
At the very least, it helps distinguish between the dangerous people who use these statements because they actually reflect some sort of internal state and the harmless people who only say them in order to communicate loyal ingroup membership.Report
They also have a bunch of tepid defenders, a bunch of anti-antis more than happy to scream “whatabout”, and “fellow travelers” who decide how to fight based not on any vague principle but on waiting to see where people line up first.
For various values of “they”.Report
I was using the same “they” as North.
In this case, the “tiny, marginalized fringe of the actual operational left in this country.”
Are there any other terms I’ve used that you feel I haven’t sufficiently defined?Report
I’m just pointing out how “They” can apply to many other tiny marginalized fringes.
But surely there are good people on both sides.Report
One would hope.
The other option is “there are no good people on the other side”.
(With a third, hidden, option being “there aren’t good people on either side.”)
Which of those do you think is true?Report
There are many other options, one of which is to not indulge in weighing people’s souls, but judging their actions.
Hamas, the Proud Boys, and other groups all contain people who can fairly be described as good. Indeed, some of these people eat at Panera Bread.
What is useful is to discern their goal, and judge accordingly.
If their goals are hateful then we can firmly oppose them without bothering to weigh their souls.Report
So let’s say that there’s a student group that performs the action of releasing a statement saying “We support Active Decolonization!” following the murder of hippiechicks at a dance party.
Theoretically.
Would it make sense for biglaw corporations to refuse to hire the students who engaged in such an action?
No weighing of souls or anything.
Theoretically, I mean.Report
Absolutely, and I would say this even if it were at the urging of an Informeller Mitarbeiter.Report
That’s the thing about tattletales.
Sometimes little Billy *IS* breaking the rules.Report
Yep.
So maybe tattling and punishment for speech can be a good thing, or bad thing, depending on whether the speech in question is itself worthy of protection.Report
I have little to object to in your analysis here.Report
I’d like to share the optimism but my read of the message is not that we finally need to start tapping the brakes on encouraging the forms of wild eyed illiberal leftism run amok in the university, it’s that the nuttery is still fine and dandy, except with respect to Israel. I wouldn’t necessarily say that is less healthy, but I struggle to call it an improvement.Report
Nuttery has a lot of definitions, my friend, but with the case of Israel its general unacceptability on the wider left is unambiguous and, that when they crossed the line, those nuts got smacked down is healthy if you ask me. Nuts from the other direction get coddled and elected to national office.
But nuttery in general shouldn’t be widely smacked down because a lot of it may be wrong headed or impractical but it isn’t necessarily abhorrent wrong.Report
On the other blog, a poster had a great point that in the past supporting Palestinian hardliners was easy because they looked cool in their military garb and evidence that they had the capability or will to say what they were going to do was non-existent. Then the Simchat Torah massacre happened and Hamas showed the capability and murder people simply for being Jews. Many groups and people were able to quickly address their priors but others kept to the script.Report
By the way, has anyone checked in with Bari Weiss and the other free speech absolutists?
Will Quillette be publishing fiery defenses of the Hamas supporters’ right to speak openly and decry the “climate of fear” and self-censorship on college campuses?Report
Chip, what did I say about going for a second example?Report
You hinted that it might be construed as anti-Semitic . . . but you didn’t actually say anything outright . . . .Report
Well, I suppose I could google it. Here’s what she wrote about campus issues.
She rattles off a bunch of people who got fired for microaggressions and builds up to:
So it looks like she’s engaging in whataboutery.Report
So, the Hamas supporters shouldn’t be checking their inboxes for an invite to her platform to speak freely, is what I’m hearing.
Now I’m wondering if Quillette will have to create a new slogan other than “Where Free Speech Lives!”Report
I think that it might be more optimal to hold up an example of her engaging in the action of denying an op-ed written in support of Kinetic Decolonialism rather than finding her hypocritical for failing to do so.
I can dig up her email, if you’d like to write her with one.Report
But according to the prevailing ideology that rules the free speech absolutists, censorious acts include “withdrawing speaking engagements” and “declining to publish,” and so these acts must be condemned publicly in the strongest possible terms, the perpetrators punished.
When it comes to the threat of expulsion and termination of employment for supporters of things Bari doesn’t like however, such condemnations and consequences are curiously absent.
But I could be wrong. Maybe she will make a statement.
And lets be clear. I fully support the suppression of speech which falls outside a certain boundary of norms, and have said this repeatedly.
I’m just asking everyone to grasp that this is pretty much how everyone feels, without exception, including you Bari, and the Quillette crowd.Report
But she hasn’t declined yet.
She’s merely not extended.
Here you go: tips@thefp.com.
Let us know what you write. Maybe we can post it here if she declines to print it.Report
That’s ok.
We can wait for her to break her silence.
I would just like it to be acknowledged that every single person here supports boundaries on speech, and punishment of various forms of those who trespass across them.
To be blunt- anyone who describes themselves as a “free speech absolutist” is full of sh!t and should be ignored.Report
This is what’s going on at the University of Washington today:
Honestly, some people are just hysterical, don’t you think?Report
I don’t agree with the protestors stating this is all on Israel’s hands and I still think you are trying to be a chaos agent with bad faith motives. Isn’t that something?Report
Sure. I don’t doubt your perspective.
But at the end of the day, my statements actually reflect an internal state rather than a desire to be seen as a member in good standing.
Which is one of those things that has gotten me in trouble in the past and, I’m sure, will get me in trouble in the future.Report
That’s just the sort of thing a chaos agent would say. You’re not fooling anyone.Report
” I still think you are trying to be a chaos agent with bad faith motives.”
So those videos of protests he posted, those are fake? The protests didn’t happen, the videos are lies, the editing is deceptive, it was a different protest, something? There *wasn’t* a pro-Palestinian rally at UW?Report
Speaking of boundaries on speech…
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Like I said back a few years ago, that may be a good thing.
Or maybe not.
It kinda depends on the particulars, don’t you think?Report
WE NEED SOME MUSCLE OVER HERE!
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Ibid.Report
This seems to go both ways, and as Chris noted above, pro-Palestinian critics of Israel are in many ways the OG targets of cancelation in higher ed.
The real question for Bari is if she is comfortable with the harsh, up to and including insane, criticism of Israel, or if she’s just mad about being left out of the official victim hierarchy. It is not at all clear to me which it is, but then this is what I mean when I keep saying there is no principle here or even consistency in where the lines are. The only answer is to tear the whole shoddy complex of sophistry down by refusing to participate.Report
The issue I pointed out to Chris is that it is a matter of reading the room and there is a big difference between supporting the plight of the Palestinians and supporting Hamas.
I have no problem with people who argue that the people of Palestine will suffer even more because of Israel’s blockade and that is not right or just. Or who point out that conditions in Gaza are pretty crummy.
But as Z.B. pointed out in Vox and others have noticed the protests of the last few days have been anti-anti Hamas at best and actively pro-Hamas at worse and downplaying the really vile atrocities of Saturday including denying that Hamas mutilated/decapitated babies.Report
It is hard for me to get in the head space of people deciding to do this now, and if I was going to do it I would feel it had to be with the utmost tact, decorum, and sensitivity. It is impossible for me to get in the head space of those engaging in really in your face stuff, including of course displaying swastikas and doing anti Semitic chants.
I also operate under the assumption that most people are just really stupid. That is an understatement of what I think about any Westerners that believe Hamas would do anything other than saw their heads off on YouTube if given the opportunity.Report
I think Drezner puts his finger on how one should view most of these left wing indulgences.
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/a-brief-note-regarding-the-publicReport
As someone with a different answer to “would you want people to read your stupid (crap) from college?”, I suppose I’m not the best person to ask.
I appreciate the argument that these kids need elbow room to figure out what they believe. Sure.
But it also seems that they’re not getting good pushback. They don’t seem to be learning how to deal with people who don’t agree.
I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb by saying that the reason there is as much turnaround as there is — is due to the pushback being given by “the real world”.
They should be a *LOT* more experienced with pushback than they are.
And I see that as (yet) another failing of the modern university.Report
Training the minds of young people is much harder when the customer is always right.Report
If the kid pays $2000/semester, you better believe he’s going to be told he’s wrong.
If he’s paying $7500/semester? Oh, yeah! You’re so insightful for your age! Man, when I went to school, I was surrounded by people who were wrong all the time!Report
My comment seems to have been eaten. I think the reason this stuff is not ignored is because the internet makes it very easy to find and broadcast more, it doesn’t stay on campus. Plus negative partisanship provides all sorts of incentives for broadcasting it.Report
Potentially good advice but I understand why it is hard to make it so and that is the internet.
When I was in college, there were plenty of arguments made at various time in the loudest, most passionate, and potentially stupidest terms as Drezner notes.
The big difference was negative partisanship was not quite as high (this was the Clinton I-Bush II years and mainly before 9/11) and there was no social media to go trowling for this stuff. Fox News was in relative infancy.
Now we live in an area with much more heightened negative partisanship, many more outlets for partisan especially right-wing media, and apparently a distrust of college in general based on recent discussions here. Basically, there are too many incentivesReport
Almost every time my friends and I get together for beers someone mentions how glad they are social media did not exist when we were in college.
I think that Jaybird’s sentiment is absolutely right that in higher ed there needs to be both freedom to say dumb things but also a firm hand correcting. To the extent the rumors that we have eliminated the latter are true it is a problem.
Having kids of my own has provided a lot of perspective. I really despise a lot of the illiberal leftist stuff but I also don’t think it’s right to make examples of regular people in their worst moments and what most will come to see as serious errors in judgment.Report
I agree completely, Saul, the internet changed absolutely everything.Report
There are a few things going on here:
1. College students are still basically teenagers who we consider adults legally. College students have traditionally not been able to distinguish between arguing with a fine-point pen and a sledgehammer.
1a. Neither can many adults.
2.Ryna Workman couldn’t quite figure out that the BigLaw firm that offered her a job are not into revolutionary praxis.
3. This is not my observation but for a long time the Western left could sympathize or express solidarity with the Palestinian hardlines like Hamas because of the atrocious behavior of the Israeli right and because terrorism was not a common occurrence. The suffering of the Palestinians was well known. Hamas broke this on Saturday and people are not quite updating their priors yet.Report
“College students are still basically teenagers who we consider adults legally.” If your unable to “distinguish between arguing with a fine-point pen and a sledgehammer” then I submit to you that they should not be allowed to vote. As you said, “neither can many adults”, but we’re stuck with them. The college kids, yeah, we can exclude them.
2 Maybe there should be more consequences for saying stupid stuff on social media. This seems like a perfect example for learning.Report
I think related to 3 is that many people on the Left really did see all Israelis as the equivalent of the Pied-Noirs of Algeria and believed the just solution was for the Jews to go home. The ones best able to update their priors are the ones that always realized this would be ridiculous could update their priors and those that can not believed all Jews leaving was a realistic outcome.Report
Zac Beauchamp at Vox has a good essay on the Leftists cheering on Hamas:
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/23911550/israel-hamas-war-gaza-palestine-leftist-democratsReport
TRIGGER WARNING. TRIGGER WARNING.
The Times of Israel released three very blurred photos from Netanyahu’s Office that show the aftermath of the Kfar Aza aftermath. They are extraordinarily horrible. Just google yourself if you want to look.Report
My imagination is quite enough, thank you.Report
“This awful thing happened.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“No, this awful thing happened.”
“That’s propaganda.”
“Seriously, this awful thing happened.”
“Has anyone independently confirmed that?”
“We brought in some people who independently confirmed it.”
“Who? I want a list of names.”
“Here is the list of names.”
“I’m not going to read that, those people could be made up. Just like the war propaganda.”
“Here are pictures of the atrocities.”
“Israel releases images of slain children to rally support after Hamas attack“Report
I find it noteworthy that there is all this harumphing over a handful of college students saying stupid sh!t while middle aged very prominent people are giving lectures and writing policy with the premise “Slavery- Was It Really As Bad As All That, Though?” and “Lets Shoot Shoplifters!”Report
Yeah, you’d think that Winston & Strawn LLP never said anything dumb back when they went to law school back when Goldwater was running for president.
Lighten up, man!Report
Well this is awkward timing:
Trump Doral event with Eric Trump will feature a Hitler-promoting antisemite who killed someone
Trump National Doral Miami is scheduled to host a ReAwaken America tour event featuring Eric Trump, Lara Trump, Trump lawyer Alina Habba, and antisemitic fitness influencer Ian Smith this week. Smith has recommended neo-Na.zi and pro-Hitler propaganda, shared social media posts denying the Holocaust, suggested the “good guys” didn’t win World War 2, and complained that Jewish people are behind “all of these things that are used to control us” and that more people aren’t questioning why “everybody that” President Joe Biden “surrounds himself with is Jewish.”
https://www.mediamatters.org/eric-trump/trump-doral-event-eric-trump-will-feature-ian-smith-hitler-promoting-antisemite-who
Those crazy college kids!Report
This is horrible too but it doesn’t mean I need to accept what has happened in some parts of the left as harmless or the least badReport
I wouldn’t accept it either.
My point is that this isn’t some stupid college kids, this is the head of the Republican Party, who, unlike the Democrats, are studying their shoes and pretending not to notice.Report
It still seems kind of whataboutery.Report
I don’t see any real operational difference between pro-Palestinian American supporters who refuse to disavow the atrocities, and committed white supremacists like Ian Smith.
It doesn’t matter if the alleged goal is the “liberation of Palestine” or the “Re-Awakening of America”, when one’s politics allows them to ignore or celebrate genocide it needs to be called out.
Which is why the students need to be criticized as if they were goose stepping rightists, because in the end they can be just as dangerous if they ever got their hands on power.
Having said that, we can’t take our eyes off the ones who actually ARE in positions of power. In a year and a half, Ian Smith may be sitting in the Oval Office giving policy advice.Report
Your point was a bit opaque at first.Report
I remember reading about how some of the 60’s radical organizations- Black Panthers, Weathermen and others devolved into either cults or just nihilist violence like the Symbionese Liberation Army or just outright grifts.
And from the excerpts from memoirs I’ve read, what they all had in common was this righteous stance which admitted no acceptance of legitimate opposition.
This is what makes me lump seemingly disparate groups like the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, various white supremacy groups, and extreme leftists like the RevComs and Green Party and half the people I met in Occupy together, as all just different manifestations of illiberalism.
To their credit I also read some comments from people like Joan Baez who publicly stated that she was wrong about the Viet Cong, that they weren’t the freedom fighters she imagined them to be. I admired that, it took courage to publicly say that.Report
Many Western Pro-Palestinian advocates are just in a state of incomprehension about how much damage the Simchat Torah massacre did to the Palestinians cause overnight. Most of the sympathies in non-Muslim majority countries are with Israel now. The scale and sheer brutality of the massacre was so great that even most Muslim majority countries are qualifying their support for Hamas rather than going full throttle against Israel. Israel’s public messaging has been great with posting pictures of the dead or wounded and some details about their lives. The Palestinian side is reduced to misleading uses of Mandatory Palestine maps, out of context political cartoons, and other such stuff. That the Kfar Aza massacre turned out to be true is even more damaging.
Hamas was engaging in Magic Underwear Pants thinking:
1. Commit the Simchat Torah massacre
2. XXXX
3. Palestine is free from the river to the sea.Report
I’ve seen some folks call it a “catastrophic success”. They had planned on being intercepted and… they weren’t? So, hey. We’ve got guns. We’ve got bullets. Let’s get going! And they committed atrocities against people who weren’t prepared.
The dog caught the car.
Did you know that Hamas is now denying that they had anything to do with it?
That’s how bad it is. They’re blaming bloodthirsty Gazans.
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Now that is chutzpah if I ever saw it.Report
That’s because he knows him and every other member of Hamas is probably going to be dead in the coming weeks. Looking at these pictures I can’t imagine the Israelis using any restraint or allowing surrender.Report
Most of them live in Qatar.Report
Amazing.Report
Welp.
Maybe they could explain how these plans were fake and planted by Mossad.
Pretty sneaky!Report
The dumbest thing about this are the Pro-Palestinian Westerners who are shocked by Israel and it’s advocates using photographs of the aftermath of the Simchat Torah massacre for advocacy purposes and saying “that’s not fair” basically. I can somewhat understand operating on priors in the immediate aftermath but not adjusting this when the full details emerge and true horror of the attack on Kfar Aza turned out to be true just makes the world think you are an anti-Semite that likes their Jews dead. Pro-Palestinian activists just don’t seem to get it.
ETA: On the other blog, a poster was outraged that the Israeli government is buying YouTube time in order to post videos advocating for it’s cause. I mean that is what governments do in this day and age or even before the Internet. Its like asking Israel to fight with severe handicaps.Report
What is “the other blog”?Report
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/Report
This is why you don’t hear many Palestinian voices and spokespeople in the mainstream media. They always end up putting their foots in their mouths. Chotiner of the New Yorker interviewed Tareq Baconi, Palestinian activist. Chotiner was in his sincere and sympathetic rather than rope a dope mode. He still ended up not believing what he was hearing, which was a full fledged defense of the Simchat Torah massacre. This is similar to the earlier Palestinian functionary that Jaybird posted on CNN who in his nice suit made bold faced lies about Hamas mainly attacking military installations.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/where-the-palestinian-political-project-goes-from-here
Eventually some interview of a Palestinian functionary is going to go something like this:
Palestinian functionary: Hamas targeted soldiers and military installations.
Western interviewer: They did not, they murdered were Israeli citizens going about their business on a weekend. Here are the phots.
Palestinian functionary: All Israeli Jews are occupying soldiers and prison guards.
Western Interviewer: Even the babies killed at this place.
Palestinian functionary: They are future soldiers and prison guards.
There is an essential dehumanizing radicalism that causes them to always come across very anti-Semitic.Report
The ideological battle over Israel-Hamas seems particularly intense at Stanford University.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/opinion/stanford-israel-hamas-gaza.htmlReport
Stanford Professor placed on leave for making Jewish students identify themselves and attacked them as colonizers, downplaying the Holocaust.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/13/us/stanford-instructor-jewish-holocaust-comments-reaj/index.html#:~:text=An%20instructor%20at%20Stanford%20University,on%20their%20backgrounds%20and%20identities.%E2%80%9DReport
So what we have seen in the aftermath of the Simchat Torah massacre:
1. Hamas leadership in Qatar disavow it and blame it on the Palestinians in Gaza.
2. Palestinian functionaries putting their foots in their mouths.
3. Pro-Palestinian Westerners go on and on about how this is all Israel’s fault
4. All four groups shocked when most normal people do not believe them.Report