Campus Insurrections?
Photo by ProudFarmerScholar, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
It was a peaceful crowd at first. At least on the surface. We now know that members of the crowd were armed with everything from bats and knives to bear spray and bombs. There were even a few guns sprinkled throughout the crowd despite the area’s designation as a gun-free zone.
The speakers whipped the crowd into an angry frenzy and they moved off to occupy administrative buildings to force those in charge to accede to their demands. Leaders looked the other way as the crowd attacked police because they shared the political views of the crowd. In the end, hundreds were arrested. The protesters complained loudly that they were mistreated and their rights were violated because the demonstration was mostly peaceful.
If that sounds like the ongoing campus protests, I was actually describing the crowd on January 6. The two incidents do have a lot in common, however. If there is one thing that comparing the two violent protests can show us, it is that both parties are filled with radical hypocrites.
It is true that some of the student protesters say that orders to remove their encampments and stand down are illegitimate and infringe on their rights. It is also true that January 6 protesters claimed that they had a right to visit the Capitol and that people arrested in the riot were political prisoners.
The core truth underlying both events is that rights are not unlimited. A desire to protest does not include the right to trespass or occupy a campus indefinitely or cross police lines and enter the Capitol to halt the tabulating of electoral votes. Potato, po-tah-to. It’s all criminal behavior.
In the case of the colleges, the leadership is derelict in their duty to control the student population. These campuses are under the jurisdiction of collegiate officials and campus police forces, not Joe Biden, but they have an obligation to protect the rights of non-protesting students who want to engage in radical behaviors like going to class and graduating. Failing to protect students from harassment and bullying by the protesters can put the colleges in violation of federal law.Restricting the time, place, and manner of student protests is not an infringement of the First Amendment, but letting demonstrators run wild can violate the rights of other students.
The analogy between the college presidents and Donald Trump on January 6 is a strong one. Like the college presidents, Trump failed to intervene in a timely fashion to halt the protests and restore order. Like the college presidents, Trump sympathized with the protesters running amok in his jurisdiction.
Unlike the college presidents, Trump gave a keynote speech at the rally that kicked off the attack on the Capitol. While the college presidents are afraid of offending their students and having the demonstrators turn against them, Trump lit the fire and fanned the flames of the January 6 insurrection.
So, if the student protests are so similar to the January 6 riot, you might ask, are the student protests insurrections? To answer that question, let’s examine what an insurrection is.
Federal law does not define “insurrection,” but in its simplest terms, the word means “an act or instance of rising in revolt, rebellion, or resistance against civil authority or an established government” (per dictionary.com). You might say that college leaders are an example of a civil authority, but students are not rising in rebellion against that authority. They defy the college leaders and police, but they aren’t trying to overthrow them.
Calling the college protests an insurrection would stretch the meaning of the word beyond recognition. If the campus protests are insurrections then pretty much any violation of the law is an insurrection.
As someone said (and I can’t locate the source of the quote), “An insurrection is more than a riot and less than a revolution.”
And that fits January 6. The MAGA crowd that day violently rose against the government’s authority to designate the winner of the 2020 election. The January 6 protesters were trying to overthrow the established constitutional order and interrupt a constitutional process. This was an attack on the Constitution itself.
The campus protests may not be an insurrection, but would they qualify as a riot? The Anti-Riot Act of 1968 defines a riot as “a public disturbance involving… an act or acts of violence by one or more persons part of an assemblage of three or more persons, which act or acts shall constitute a clear and present danger of, or shall result in, damage or injury to the property of any other person or to the person of any other individual.” \
As the demonstrators become more violent, they may represent a “clear and present danger” to life and property. By the way, the law defines a “clear and present danger” with two requirements: a real threat of substantive evil which must be imminent. The lack of immediate danger means no riot is occurring, but the protests are well on their way to becoming one.
The point of all this is not that one side is right and one side is wrong. It’s that both sides have extremists who are wrong in certain situations. Neither side has a monopoly on law and order and both are filled with hypocrites when it comes to covering for their partisans.
There are (a few) Republicans (left) who are willing to call out the party for its rationalization of the attack on the Capitol and the Constitution. There are a larger number of Democrats who are critical of the way that the colleges are handling the pro-Palestinian protesters. These are not left and right issues as much as they are issues where moderates are confronting the radicals of both parties.
That’s the appropriate place to be these days. We are reaching a point where the moderates of both sides have more in common with each other than with the fringes of their own party. And they are starting to realize that.
Whether you’re liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, it’s time to call out the fringes on both sides for the lawless demagogues that they are and embrace the sanity of the middle.
Please check out the signs we’ve made. The first is “‘While you read, Gaza bleeds'”
“Cute”
“Here’s another: “‘While you sleep, Gaza weeps'”
“Hey, that’s not bad.”
“While you study, Gaza’s muddy”
“I guess you guys got into a groove?”
“Yeah. This next one… well, ‘While you eat, Gaza’s feet'”
“Gaza’s *FEET*?”
“Yeah. Wally made that. He’s got a foot thing. We took a vote and he’s no longer allowed on the quad during the protest.”
“There’s one in every insurrection.”Report
Everything depends upon local conditions, about which most of us know next to nothing solid, and sound judgment, which is rare. A few general thoughts:
Students camping out on a quad and chanting is, of course, against college rules. But if that’s all they’re doing, and they’re not impeding peoples’ access to facilities or threatening people, the smart play is to let it go on for a while. Obviously, at some point, they have to go, but there’s no need to announce a hard, short deadline or bring in the cops — especially when you’re so close to the end of the term.
Students (or interlopers) who actively interfere with other peoples’ use of the facilities or who threaten others, or engage in something properly called harassment, and not merely the expression of unpleasant or hurtful ideas (I remember people defending frat boys who chanted outside a women’s dorm: “No means yes, yes means anal.”), can properly be busted. Preferably by campus security, with outside law enforcement only if needed.
When students occupy buildings, even peacefully, for enough time to be seriously inconvenient, they can be removed. Whether to go beyond that will depend in large part on how hard they made the removal.
When students vandalize, they can be busted, disciplined, and charged.
The college administration should be open to talking with the students about what they want, but, ultimately, they do not have to agree on anything substantive. Transparency, however, would be something an administration might well accept.
I realize this is boring, and that hippie-punching is much more fun, but there it is.Report
Look at the responses – and outcomes and Brown vs. NYC. One of those universities modeled what you call for; one didn’t. Its telling what the students did in response in each case.Report
This seems about right.Report
The problem with transparency is that it leads to stuff like the list of demands being printed.
What we need is an intermediary to keep stuff like this away from the prying eyes of the greater public.
You can get the Boycat app for your phone here.Report
I think that cuts both ways. The evidence is high that the vast majority of these protesters are not… particularly serious people. Certainly not the threat they are made out to be. Most of the videos I see are of weepy women and almost comically wussy dudes, self seriously standing around with all the risible pomp of youth in spring. There’s no reason to send in the riot police on that.
Let the drum circle go on until they get bored, and politely arrest and expel anyone that occupies buildings in violation of the rules and/or destroys property. This isn’t rocket science.Report
The eternal problem is that this could have been fixed if only something was done differently last week. Maybe last month. Definitely last year. Probably during the George Floyd campus protests. Or during the whole “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” thing. Maybe prior to that…
But because it was allowed to reach this point, it’s reached the point where there are fights between protestors and counter-protestors and there’s (reportedly) actual violence.
And because a Jewish girl was beaten up by protestors two days ago, it looks like Jewish students beating students up yesterday was an escalation and now the cops need to get involved…
But a *LOT* of folks are pointing out the parallels between that and the Gaza thing.
Gaza strikes Israel? Well, you have to understand…
Israel strikes Gaza? CEASEFIRE! CEASEFIRE!!!
Game it out for a while. It doesn’t end up someplace particularly good.Report
The eternal problem is that this could have been fixed if only something was done differently last week.
Well, yes. And there were people around last week explaining how things should have been done then. Some of them were here.Report
Yeah, but nobody listened to the people who said stuff like “Students (or interlopers) who actively interfere with other peoples’ use of the facilities or who threaten others, or engage in something properly called harassment, and not merely the expression of unpleasant or hurtful ideas, can properly be busted.”
Those folks were ignored.
Maybe not here… but by people in authority.
And so now we’re here instead of where we would have been instead.Report
Interesting point: A lot of the ‘interfere with other peoples’ use of the facilities’ claims are actually talking about how the protestors at various places are barring people from _entering the protest_.
You apparently have to have someone inside vouch for you, and get turned away if you don’t. Some videos of this have been deliberately misleadingly filmed trying to pretend that protestors are keeping out ‘Jews’, but they’re actually just keeping out unknown people in general. And they are being kept out of the _protest_, not random parts of campus.
Why?
Well, because in _past_ protests there have been a lot of infiltration by people deliberately trying to make protestors look bad, be it the other side or police provocateur. Anyone who has ever tried to point out the ‘bad behavior’ of someone in a protest and tried to ascribe it to all the protesters should be _happy_ these protests are attempting to filter themselves, to keep out the bad people.
Now, this isn’t to say that no parts of the protests at various places are interfering with peoples’ use of the facilities…obviously, occupying a building does interfere. I just want to point out that that there were a lot of lies running around about ‘Protestors won’t let Jewish students walk freely around on campus’, and the actual thing was ‘Protestors will not let unknown students walk freely into the protest area’.
These protestors are notable smarter and more savvy than in the past. BLM taught a lot of lessons…as did, hilariously, decades of active shooter drills did WRT how to barricade a school building.Report
Good for them.Report
‘Protestors will not let unknown students walk freely into the protest area’.
This makes sense, I guess.
You have to establish borders and keep bad actors out. By force, if necessary.Report
Usually it’s by barricades and people just physically standing in the few available paths, so anyone who wants to get in is the one who has to use force.
If someone unchecked does get in or someone does get in and later proves themselves to be a bad actor, they get immediately surrounded so they can’t go anywhere (except out) by other people who then proceed to attempt to jeer them out. Via entirely legal actions.
Campus protestors and the left in general has gotten _smart_, man, I don’t know what to tell you. They realized just how much infiltration there was in BLM, and how many actions of bad actors or even _the opposing side_ making them look bad. So the policy is to deny entry without being vouched for, and if that fails, surround and attempt to contain, so if someone actually tries to get video of that, it’s not only hard to do, but makes it incredibly clear the protestors do not agree.
Which is why these protests have had astonishingly little bad actors, and basically no video of bad actors…on the protester’s side.
In fact, one of the more notable things in that regard is that one of the leaders at Columbia, Khymani James, was found to have said ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live’ and ‘Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists’ and things like that, in an online video not at the protest, and he immediately apologized and resigned from the protests, and the protest issued a statement disavowing his views. That’s the sort of thing you expect from entities with PR divisions, not a protest.
This isn’t to say that their message is…good. They’re doing a lot of extremely silly things that the youth always do (No, you are not in any sort of liberation zone or whatever, sheesh.), but it’s become increasingly hard for the media to portray them as it wants to portray them, as people screaming antisemitic hate.
On the other side, of course, there has been repeated violence and threats of violence that the police generally just ignored. And stuff that is legal but looks incredibly bad *waves to Ole Miss and their traditional good ole fashioned anti-Black racism*.
But, of course, the conservative side never gets judged by the actions of a mere few, or even, like, 30% of people.Report
Did you see Daddy Milagro’s video?
Personally, I think that if he was a student there and those kids were blocking him from passing through, they were violating his rights.
Now, you may say, “I don’t care if people’s rights get violated if they are my political opponents!” and that’s fair, but if that attitude gets normalized, you’re going to find yourself asking questions that involve appealing to the importance of people’s rights and if they remember you saying that you don’t care about people’s rights being violated, they may hold that against you.Report
Is that the actual stand you want to make, that there is no such thing as freedom of assembly?
Freedom of assembly must include freedom of _refusal_ of assembly. It must include the ability to draw a line around a group of people and say ‘This is the assembly, we are all assembled here, and other people are not invited to be within this assembly’.
Otherwise, if they cannot do that, only does that impact freedom of assembly, but freedom of speech, or rather freedom of lack of speech, because if people physically within the assembly are saying certain things, it is attributed to the assembly. This gives ultimate heckler’s veto by allowing people waving Na.zi flags into any group, pretending to be part of that group, and no one can stop that.
So, if you believe that people have the right to use public spaces for assembly, then there are only two options: They are either _allowed_ to exclude others from using the specific space they are currently using, or they are not and there functionally is no such thing as freedom of assembly in public.
There are, obviously, time and place and other access concerns here, you can’t just claim entire campuses or wherever. ‘The specific space they are currently using’ is important here.
Which is normally the job of the police, who say things like ‘This is your area, and this is is the counter-protest area, and this is the area we keep clear for everyone else’.
But, of course, they won’t actually do that for these protests, they only do that for protests they like.Report
Is that the actual stand you want to make, that there is no such thing as freedom of assembly?
I’m more than happy enough to ask you if the 1st Amendment contains the string “freedom of assembly”.
Because, if it contains a different one, we may have ourselves a different conversation here when it comes to public gatherings in public places than the one you wanted to have.Report
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.Report
Huh. That seems to contain a different string.Report
“Freedom of assembly” is widely, though not universally, used as a convenient shorthand for “the right of the people peaceably to assemble,” much as “color of law” is standard shorthand for “under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia” in discussing federal civil rights cases.
It is possible, of course, that DavidTC is using the phrase not as shorthand, but in some other way, and means something else by it. The best way to find that out is to ask him.Report
Had you said “freedom of peaceful assembly”, I’d have agreed that the string (or concept, anyway) is in there.
And then we could hammer out whether preventing someone from passing through is “peaceful” or not.
Maybe even draw a line.Report
So the answer then is ‘no’, got it.
Or the answer is technically ‘They do, but I am pretending that actually attempting to use that right makes things automatically not peaceful’.
Including this video, which includes…no non-peaceful elements at all. Or, and this is interesting, _no attempt to stop someone from entering the assemble_, which makes it kinda of irrelevant here. But is is still peaceful.
Indeed, I feel it’s rather obvious that if someone is actually being non-peaceful towards you, you don’t stand about four inches away from them and let them wave their arms around you. Everyone there was peaceful.
He’s pretending to be upset because people have asked him to stop filming, a thing that it is not even slightly illegal to ask of someone, and he’s claiming he was assaulted when…he wasn’t.
If we want to talk about the _technicalities_ of assault, he appears to have ran a stroller into someone’s foot, and then claimed they are ‘blocking’ the stroller. That’s the only assault I see…actually battery. Remember, battery has to be _deliberate_ contact, not ‘accidentally brush someone’, and that’s the only deliberate contact I see. (To be clear, I don’t see any accidental contact either, I’m just saying that it wouldn’t be.)
I don’t think that lightly running a stroller into someone’s foot, even on purpose, should actually be considered battery, but it’s the closest thing to it I see. Those students are clearly not actually doing anything illegal, which is why the person doing the filming has to pretend he doesn’t know what is going on and make a lot of random accusations. (Specifically, they are trying to stop him from filming other protestor’s faces, as protestors have been harassed, threatened, and expelled.).
It’s why he keeps talking about ‘weird’ things they are doing like standing in front of them (No, they are not following someone, and also following someone isn’t generally illegal.) and trying to make it about race. When in actuality the reason those two are out in front is that they are using their privilege as white men to protect minority students. You’ll notice the people he manages to film, and even zoom in on, are minority students.
It’s a PR trick, and the entire point is to make people fail to notice that none of the student’s behavior is illegal, or even that the students are not actually stopping him from moving (Because he’s not actually in the encampment, he’s on the path past, where anyone can walk), they are merely told him to go around or stop filming, and, barring him doing either of those, are blocking his filming with their bodies.Report
They have the right to ask him to stop filming in a public place he has the right to be…
Does the first amendment have anything that might cover his right to keep filming despite their asking him to stop filming in a public place he has the right to be?Report
Yes, and he has a right to keep filming, which he did.
And they kept putting their hands up to block him from being able to film certain things well, which _they_ have a right to do.
Everyone has a right to do what they did in that video.Report
So the video was fine and the actions of everybody involved in the video were fine.
Good vid, all around.
I think that it will make for a good video to watch next year as well, once Israel/Palestine goes down to a more North Korean level of noise.Report
Oh, and this is a bit rich coming from people who have no problem with conservative groups inviting speakers onto campus and _closing those meetings_ to those who do not agree politically with them. They weirdly _don’t_ allow people who don’t agree with them inside the assemblies. How can this be allowed?
Surely students have a right to use public areas…yes, the school has said it is off limits except to certain people, but those people are then allowing or disallowing certain other people based on politics. The campus can’t just outsource viewpoint discrimination!
Except it can be allowed because _people have a right to assemble, solely with people they choose_ without other people forcing themselves in.
And before anyone goes ‘DavidTC, you don’t approve of colleges doing that’…no, I haven’t disapproved of _that_. I disapprove of campuses inviting external political speakers that are functionally trolls, and of colleges exempting those speakers (invited by college students) from the rules about conduct that college students have to follow.
While I will admit I fine it funny if a heckler or something gets in and disrupts things, I don’t argue they have a _right_ to do that.
…or is the idea that the pro-Palestinian protestors should just lease the quad and keep people out, and that would be fine? (It sure is amazing how many conservative arguments are ‘people with money get to do things others don’t’.)Report
I am more than happy enough to make distinctions between “Armstrong Hall” and “The Quad”. Some of them are even meaningful distinctions.
If it’s possible for the folks in the Quad to say to a student “you aren’t allowed here”, is the college allowed to say that to the students in the Quad?
If the college has said that to the students in the Quad, are the students in the Quad still allowed to tell people “you aren’t allowed here”?
I’m wondering how we’re hammering this out… I mean, if we’re talking about “freedom of assembly”.Report
If students say ‘You are not allowed to enter _the Quad_’, that is a problem.
If there is a group of organized students occupying _an area_ of the quad, it is entirely reasonable to say ‘They get to control that area of the quad, other students get to use the other areas of the quad’.
You have a right to peacefully protest, I have a right to peacefully protest your peaceful protest, but I don’t have a right to _stand inside your peaceful protest_ and protest it. You see how allowing that functionally cannot work as a sheer practical matter, right?
If we allow that, we might as well disallow protesting at all, because, again, every protest is going to have people show up waving Na.zi flags and screaming racial slurs…either because they legitimately think the group supports that, or because they are working on the other side to make the group look back. It’s the heckler’s veto, except it’s like if you allowed the hecklers _on stage_ to pretend to be speaker.
We can argue what size area a protest could claim that is ‘reasonable’, but colleges generally have pretty large areas like this for a reason, including parts that need to be kept clear because they are the actual paths. This is not something we need to or are qualified to hash out, and it would obviously vary between schools.
As far as I know, there is no school where the encampment is in the way of anything. (If the protestors want to get in the way, they do that by hijacking a building.)Report
You have a right to peacefully protest, I have a right to peacefully protest your peaceful protest, but I don’t have a right to _stand inside your peaceful protest_ and protest it. You see how allowing that functionally cannot work as a sheer practical matter, right?
I do, actually. What happens when the “authorities” say “okay, the protest is over now… everybody is allowed in here”.
Will the black guy be allowed to pass through?
Or does peaceful assembly allow for them to keep black folks out in perpetuity?Report
The black guy was literally allowed to pass though in the actual video he made pretending he wasn’t allowed to pass through.
It’s why he made a big deal about ‘racism’ and ‘being followed’ because he was told to stop filming…it’s because he didn’t have anything else to complain about.
That, and he pretending that running a stroller into someone’s foot was somehow the other person’s problem, instead of, ya know, technically assault.
…you do understand he wasn’t trying to enter the encampment, right? Like, this is not an example of the thing you think it is.
What he was trying to do was _film_ people in the encampment as he went past.Report
And he’s allowed to film people in the encampment.
It’s in the same place where you find the stuff about “freedom of assembly” (sic).Report
Oh, and if our concern is the ‘peaceful’ part of peaceful protests, then allowing counter-protestors into the protest area, or vis versa, would be _extremely stupid_ and counterproductive. That is exactly how you get fist-fights.
Which is why in a world with competent neutral police, we’d have them policing this, just like they police who can get into a rented-out Armstrong Hall, running names past the organizers and enforcing things.
Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in at all, and the police almost certainly are on the side of Israel…hell, there’s a good chance any random police trained with the IDF.Report
brother, in the past when you’ve become very wordsy about protestors forming a block and threatening outsiders and refusing to speak to the press, you did not suggest that it would be OK if they were doing it about The Jews.Report
I think that’s true, but if the first best time to come to Jesus was yesterday the second best time is today. This is the opportunity to start to behave like adults, and treat the students like adults too.Report
It actually looks like that was a lie.
I’m not going to try to track it down right now, but there’s a video of that, and what appears to have happened is that she and some pro-Palestine protestors got in an argument, her _friends_ tried to pull her back, she fell backwards and hit her head.
The absolute worst case is that she was possibly pushed backwards by the people she was in an argument and that’s why she fell. The video is not super clear, it really does look like people on her side were pulling her backwards and she went down from that, but maybe not.
But the worst case is ‘someone pushed her and she fell over’. She certainly was not ‘beaten up’ as she has run around claiming, especially her implication that it was some process that happened as opposed to ‘falling backwards and hitting her head’.Report
“But the worst case is ‘someone pushed her and she fell over’.”
I will cheerfully amend my statement. A Jewish girl fell over near some human rights protestors and the pro-Israeli protestors went crazy and started beating up the human rights protestors.
Which is totally unfair.
Ceasefire! Ceasefire!Report
This is not in any way what happened, but I fully recognize that you need it to be what happened.Report
it’s pretty clear she didn’t fall because of a push. There was pushing and shoving at the barrier, because the pro-genocide crowd, including the woman in question, ran up to it and started trying to push through, but she fell after being pulled several steps away from the barrier, and well into the pro-genocide crowd, by her fellow pro-genocide counterprotesters.
See this thread for further debunking: https://twitter.com/TrevorSutcliffe/status/1785850241536901515?t=WMpuumHKAv3jspOxN7BVAw&s=19Report
I hadn’t seen that thread! I am pleased that she wasn’t beaten.
The thread even points out that the violence wasn’t blamed on the Jewish girl falling over but on the whole “Jews not being allowed to go to class” thing.
So it’s good that the girl falling over and hitting her head due to her own side wasn’t used as justification for violence.
It does seem that it’s reached the point where there are fights between protestors and counter-protestors and there’s (reportedly) actual violence, though.
And it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better.Report
And none the “outside agitators” who physically assaulted students while chanting pro-Israel slogans have been arrested, while many of the students have. Huh…
https://twitter.com/CarolLeonnig/status/1786797283918454855?t=6dgtAtP9cqDjcruxI2lzEA&s=19Report
The administration really need to have the cops come on campus to make sure that stuff like this just doesn’t happen.Report
Or maybe the Palestinian protesters need to arm themselves…
…
Said no one, in this particular instance only.Report
I’m pretty sure that the people running around Kenosa were armed, Chip. Gaige Grosskreutz testified that he was going to shoot Rittenhouse.
Though having Israelis argue for gun control in Gaza?
That might take off. You should float that.Report
They have cops. The cops do not do anything, mysteriously, it’s almost like the cops exist to enforce whatever is the farthest right position at any particular time.Report
Maybe the Israelis should use the cops to enforce gun control in Gaza. Imagine the lives that could be saved!Report
InMD: There’s no reason to send in the riot police on that.
We thought that about abortion protesters until they started killing doctors. We thought that about various other people and then discovered they were more serious than expected. We had 911 because we weren’t taking AQ seriously or at it’s word.
Most of these protesters are LARPing. We still have to take them seriously because they’re making serious claims.
Some of those “serious claims” amount to “no Jews”.Report
No, we cannot operate that way. Words are words, violence is violence. Conflating the two is what got us to this place.Report
Universities being unable to trust that their Jewish students will be safe because they expect the “peaceful” protesters will attack them suggests multiple lines have been crossed.
The counter argument that “we don’t think they’re serious” is true. However we still have the issue on what to do about Jewish students and Professors.
Asking Jews to live with terrorism (i.e. threats of violence) seems like a failure. If the protestors are making threats then they should be taken seriously.Report
That sort of safetyism is exactly what created these dilettantes to begin with. The mistake is the belief that anyone needs protection from mere words.Report
InMD: The mistake is the belief that anyone needs protection from mere words.
I am not a lawyer, but my impression is it’s illegal to tell people that you’re going to kill them or otherwise threaten them. When I check the internet I see various protesters being arrested for exactly that.
If you’re protesting a cause you’re fine. Ditto if you’re protesting a country. If you’re protesting a people then you’re likely evil and getting really close to the edge but you’re still fine…
…but if one of those people is walking by and you single them out then we’re back to it being illegal to threaten people.Report
Yes, a person can be arrested and prosecuted for a true threat, but look how far we’ve narrowed it. Which was my point about the nature of the protesters.
Are you truly threatened by a crying coed, or some histrionic manbaby that sounds like Jim Carey in the Cable Guy? The ones who, apparently, per Jaybird’s screen shot, cry that the university administration isn’t providing them their gluten free vegan catering and epipens, like their mothers do at home? These people threaten you just because they use vulgar words and slurs that if directed their way would have them demanding a safe space with a puppy room and a hearing with the dean of diversity and ass wiping?
I’m not saying that there is no line in which protest can cross into criminality. Just suggesting we need to maintain perspective.Report
Yes well the time to maintain perspective was … checks notes … apparently October 6th. The university Presidents are making the same political mistake that most liberals make that “showing strength” involves riot police, not dialogue.Report
That’s another mistake. There’s nothing to talk to the protesters about. If a student doesn’t like what a school does with its endowment they are free to leave. Or if it’s a public school they can use their votes to support candidates that will mandate changes via the legislative process. They have the right to speak not a right to a response.Report
Well they are getting a response now aren’t they?Report
My way or the highway is a position one can take, but it is unlikely to produce good results — unless good results are irrelevant and hippie-punching is the point.Report
Who in your opinion is in charge of these institutions? Or maybe the more apt question is, who should be?Report
Who should be in charge is people with good judgment, who think that dealing sensibly an actual situation is more important than pounding one’s chest.Report
InMD: …but look how far we’ve narrowed it.
This is Rittenhouse territory. The protesters are “mostly peaceful”. The vast bulk of the protesters are crying coeds and the like.
Large protests attract nuts and create intense emotions. They easily step into territory that they shouldn’t. They enable behavior that is unacceptable and outright illegal.
If you have a large enough crowd of people upset at Jews, the odds someone will go over the line is decently high.Report
Still don’t buy that logic. You could say it about any remotely controversial topic.
To the extent the creed of the country is encapsulated in Amendment 1 I would say the most core American value is a rejection of where that thought process leads. There’s even a rhyme about the distinction between sticks, stones, and words.Report
if “we” are in Rittenhouse territory, would that logically mean that “we” would staunchly advocate for the Palestinian protesters to be fully armed with semiautomatic rifles?
Y’know, in case some comes at them with a skateboard.Report
Wouldn’t the protestors be better analogized to Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber?Report
Isn’t it obvious who is who?Report
It seems somewhat obvious that the protestors are best analogized to the protestors.
Or is there a different obvious?Report
I agree.
So when the pro-Israeli protesters attacked the pro-Palestinian protesters, who was the Rittenhouse and who was the Rosenbaum?Report
The pro-Israeli protesters would be the Rittenhousen. The Palestinians the Rosenbaumen.Report
With Rittenhouse, the first guy he shot had no politics and was a random lunatic there for the chaos. His history of 5x sex crimes against boys probably had something to do with him attacking Rittenhouse.
After that the Protesters wanted to back him up because he was one of their own. Three of them attacked Rittenhouse (all three having a history of violence) and two got shot.
This was all reasonably predictable. Rittenhouse wanting to put out fires and supply medical care are good reasons to be there anyway.
The current protests are going to attract anti-Semites and others who enjoy violence and chaos.
We’re also going to have Jewish students there because it’s a college.
So… is it acceptable for the college Presidents to force the Jewish students to not be there because they’re Jews?Report
So…when the pro-Israeli protesters attacked the pro-Palestinian protesters, who was the Rittenhouse and who was the Rosenbaum?
You see what I’m driving at here, right?Report
Chip: You see what I’m driving at here, right?
Sure. You’re trying to claim Rittenhouse should have not had a firearm.
That society would be better off if he’d been raped or killed by a random lunatic because it was during a protest.Report
Not at all what I’m driving at.
Would the clash at UCLA between supporters of Israel and Palestine have been made better if both sides had been armed with guns instead of sticks?
Or would the claims of gun enthusiasts be validated, that due to the presence of everyone carrying a gun, everyone would have behaved politely?
Gun supporters often use the phrase about how “in a democracy the government should fear the people”.
Should the Palestinian protesters arm themselves, so as to make the government hesitant about using force? Everyone here remembers the Bundy occupation of that nature center, and how they held off the government due to fears of another Waco.
Would everyone here advise the Palestinian protesters to copy that tactic?
All the cliches and tropes about the 2nd Amendment are being put to the test here and from what I can see, failing miserably.Report
Maybe there are politicians that could work that into ads. “I support gun control to keep college protestors safer.”Report
8% of the adult population conceal carry, or 10% if we exclude California and New York. That’s an overcount because it’s “active licenses”.
We have had protests nationwide.
The number of CC people shooting rival protesters has apparently been zero.
Rittenhouse, the poster child for the out-of-control-gun-carrier, shot an apolitical insane serial pedophile rapist who attacked him. Then the situation got worse when the protesters jumped in to back up the pedophile.
Far as I can tell the behavior of the gun carrying people in all this has been fine. It’s the protesters who behave like entitled children.Report
None of which addresses my question.Report
Pointing to how things work in the real world is absolutely an answer to a hypothetical.
Now it could be that selecting CC is also selecting for serious people while selecting protesters is also selecting for emotional nonsense.Report
Hypotheticals like “An armed society is a polite society”?
Or “If only the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had been armed!”?
How are those hypotheticals working out in the real world?Report
The part of the society that is armed is polite. The part of the society that isn’t polite isn’t armed.
If we picture Israel as being unarmed at any point in it’s history, the strong expectation should be a second holocaust.Report
The rural part of our society is polite and armed. The suburbs are polite and unarmed. The cities are impolite and armed.Report
Maybe urban areas just need more guns then.
Like, we should just be handing out assault rifles on every streetcorner.
That should make things more polite.Report
My actual position is people should be able to judge for themselves whether having a gun decreases or increases their risk.
It changes your risk(s) profile by a lot.
The bottom line is people have the Right to defend themselves. They should walk away if they can, but that’s not always possible or reasonable.
Where it can get really nasty is if the gov refuses to supply order then people will supply it themselves.Report
Rittenhouse “shot an apolitical insane serial pedophile rapist.” And Rittenhouse knew this ahead of time how? Then “the protesters jumped in to back up the pedophile.” The protesters knew Rosenbaum was a pedophile how?Report
What Rittenhouse knew at the time was he was being chased down and attacked.
The “protesters” (“rioters” is a better word) knew very little and were in lynch mob territory.
After the fact we found out that Rosenbaum was a lunatic freshly released from a mental hospital with a history of attacking boys, and the media still insisted he was an innocent protester.
We also found out Rittenhouse was a local. The media insisted he was from “out of state” but the state line was very close. He worked there and his dad’s house was there.Report
Of course, without a firearm, he wouldn’t have gone there in the first place.Report
And then Rosenbaum would have attacked someone else.
Why is all of the moral judgement supposed to be on Rittenhouse and not Rosenbaum?Report
They actually aren’t making those ‘serious claims’ and even if the position was ‘No Jews in Israel’ (Which it isn’t), that is not any sort of threat to…well, anyone at all, considering where they are.
Trying to pretend the protestors are saying ‘No Jews at all’ is just…basically hallucinating, the campus protestors have been extremely clear and well-disciplined about their message, which is why a lot of the nonsense the media has been showing are random off-campus things the student protestors have no control over.Report
DavidTC: Trying to pretend the protestors are saying ‘No Jews at all’ is just…basically hallucinating,
If they are supporting Hamas, which some of them are, then keep in mind that Hamas’ charter says “no Jews at all” and they have the habit of killing or kidnaping every Jew they can.
Every time a protester chants “from the river to the sea” we have the problem that this would involve a 2nd holocaust if they were serious.
Of course the vast bulk of them aren’t calling for Israel to be Jew free. They haven’t seen a map, don’t understand what they’re saying, and are not serious.Report
Is this a bug or a feature of transparency?Report
In the Marchmaine house:
Food:
Hot food for lunch!!! (IMPORTANT)
NO packaged food
NO cold cuts, unless warmed on fresh bread with mayo and mustard and a bubbies pickle on the side. Cubano’s are a-ok.
NO leftovers without the accompanying starch: Rice, Pasta, Potatoes… as appropriate.
NO Eggs, unless its part of an McMuffin arrangement: bagels, biscuits, english muffins, etc.
NO Veggies (except afore mentioned pickles, or pickled jalepanos)NO UNPICKLED Veggies.
NO MIRACLEWHIP (non-negotiable)Report
Protestors at Brown were listened to by their administration, and are being given a forum to make their divestment case.
Protestors at UNC are being attacked and taunted by their leaders – who deployed riot cops so the President could take down a Palestinian Flag and run up the stars and stripes. And then a number of student organizations were shut down with no explanation and thrown out of their campus spaces.
The universities are bringing this on themselves with rapid unnecessary escalations. You’d think they would have learned this lesson over Vietnam, but apparently not.Report
I’m amazed college administrators don’t know this and have it part of “lessons learned” somewhere. Or maybe they do and it only hits the news when one of the thousands of Presidents drops the ball.Report
They already had ways to make their divestment case. Student newspapers, writing letters to the administration, petitioning, swastika armbands, etc.Report
Instead of requiring them to go through existing channels, Brown rewarded them for throwing a tantrum. The correct way to deal with this would have been just to ignore students not causing problems until they got bored, and start failing or expelling students who were causing problems.Report
By offering a forum to be heard, Brown short circuited the tantrum without pepper spray or aggression. Ignoring them would probably have worked as well – but no university seems to be taking that path. I’d also note that all those other avenues you highlight generally prove ineffective at getting university administrators to acknowledge the existence of student issues, much less motivate action.Report
But you have to understand. The point isn’t to deal with issues sensibly or pragmatically; the point is to punch hippies for the sake of punching hippies.Report
The point is to discourage, rather than encouraging, bad behavior. You teach these children that this is the way to get what they want, and they’ll keep doing it every time they want something.Report
And how’s that working for you?Report
We’ve been over this before: You need to think about whether what you’re saying makes any sense before you hit the Post button. As I am not in charge of a university, I’m not really in a position to implement this.
If I have children, I do not intend to make a habit of rewarding tantrums—to the best of my knowledge, there’s a pretty strong consensus that this only leads to more tantrums.
The question is how doing the opposite for years is working out for universities. It looks like not well, so far. For Brown, appeasement may work in the short term, which is why people do it, but let’s see how it goes in the future. What happens if they vote against divestment later this year? What happens the next time the students have some grievance?Report
As I am not in charge of a university, I’m not really in a position to implement this.
For which we should all be grateful. We’ve seen what happens when people who should have their wits about them adopt this approach instead.Report
Because student opinions on political issues are generally stupid, and should not be acted on by administrators. A small group of jackasses not getting its way by going through normal channels is not evidence that the system has failed.Report
The opening paragraphs described about 900 incidents in the past decade. 898 were instigated by the left.Report
It’s nice to know conservatives are so content.Report
I’ve re-read the post. Those numbers aren’t there.Report
1 of the 2 tried to overturn a presidential election.Report
The obvious way to get the students to stop protesting was to talk to them. Short of that, the best way to keep them from spreading (at the same university and to other universities) would have been to pretty much ignore them. Instead, university administrators sicced cops on their own peacefully protesting students (with, at least in one case, counter-protestors attacking student protestors while police watched!), so here we are, right where the admins and reactionaries like OP didn’t want us to be.Report
How soon we forget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper_spray_incidentReport
We talked about it at the time.
Twice, even.Report
and what’s amazing to me is that the end of that story was “the cop who did it got his job back, and he was paid more money as an apology for having been fired than any of the people he blasted in the face with bear spray got for having been blasted in the face with bear spray”.
and there are still people who think the problem in California is the tech industry.Report
I’m constantly surprised at who gets the union protections and who doesn’t.
There are multiple stories about cops who blow the whistle and get fired and other stories about cops that pepper spray children.
The cops who get fired after blowing the whistle? That gets a response of “we don’t know the whole story!”
The cops who don’t get fired after pepper spraying a handcuffed girl in the back of a police cruiser? “We don’t know the whole story!”
It’s sort of a weaponized ignorance. Insurmountable.
Goes hand in hand overlooking people screaming “DEFUND! DEFUND!” while asking stuff like “How *EXACTLY* would that work?” when someone suggests reforming QI.Report
This is a police union problem, not a California problem.Report
I used to think so, then discovered that citizen review boards are oftentimes more lenient with cops than the police chiefs are.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-05-16/police-review-board-failure
I think the idea of holding police accountable for bad behavior is still a minority opinion.Report
“Got his job back”?
Pike (cop #1 and the guy in the picture) was fired and wasn’t taken back.
He wasn’t criminally charged. Because of the 17k death threats he received he got some workman’s comp.
Lee (cop #2) wasn’t on the state database for people employed there a year later. Might have quit before he could be fired but we don’t know.Report
Joe Biden is the face of reason:
(You probably want to avoid reading the replies and the quote tweets.)Report
That is his superpower, being able to find the political center of gravity in almost any situation.Report
I think he’s found that political center here, actually. Normies — no one posting here is a normie, we’re all hyper-informed and hyper-active and hyper-opinionated compared to normies — are going to be somewhere around “Protest, yes, whether I agree with you or not; but violence and shutting down the universities, that’s going too far.”Report
It’s funny, I specifically come here these days because it’s the closest I can find to normie political banter on the internet.Report
It’s almost like decades of legislative experience make you good at finding an effective compromise position.Report
If ol’ Uncle Joe has lost twitter then… … … he’s probably in the right place.Report
Karine Jean-Pierre compares the student protests to Charlottesville.
In that, the administration is probably close to the political center as well.Report
Looked like a somewhat bland but solid exchange for the Press Sec to me.Report
I tend to agree. I am now waiting to see if even the bland part is walked back…
But using this as a yardstick for where the political center is seems to indicate that the political center is far, far away from these nutter butters.
Report
OK, yes, I’m willing to entertain the possibility that a tier of our educational system can’t produce anyone better or brighter. Let’s have the conversation.Report
“Surely people that stupid shouldn’t be forced to pay off their college debt.”Report
Yeah those kids, and our lawns. *shakes head* Back in our day we walked uphill both directions to get to college.Report
I actually did have to walk up a pretty steep hill to get to classes, but only in one direction. We had one of those newfangled Euclidean campuses.Report
Dude, I feel you. My university was on the side of an extremely steep glacial drumlin hill that faced onto the east coasts largest harbour. It was some cardio going from my dorms near the top of the hill to classes at the bottom and then back up again.Report
Back in my day we were drunk all the time and flunked out. Or maybe that was just me. I don’t remember. It was a long time ago, and I was drunk a lot. I still never charged a police line in the name of anti-Semitism. Too drunk, and also not a racist moron.
ETA: I’ve never been impressed by the supposed top-tier, and we’ve had conversations over the years here about the potential collapse of the reputation of the university system. I’ve had a sense that the only reason it hadn’t fallen was inertia. If these protests get us one step closer to recognizing the problem in the universities, I’m all for it.Report
I don’t think you’re wrong about the quality of the people. Of course any conversation in that direction IMO requires acknowledging that they are very much the products of the environments the leadership at these institutions has created.
My biases of course may come from not ever seeing any kind of sympathy for going berserk and fighting police, which I did witness a good bit of in college. It’s just that the cause was booz fueled exuberance for the basketball team.Report
“Of course any conversation in that direction IMO requires acknowledging that they are very much the products of the environments the leadership at these institutions has created.”
Yes, tons of that. I’m not trying to assign blame to the kids, who are just as stupid as any other group of kids. I can’t blame all of this on the universities either. (Well, they’ve been favoring applicants named Ali over those named Jacob for a while, but I doubt that the students are even aware of that.) There are a lot of things wrong right now, and I hope there’s enough decency left in us that we can recognize these protests as a sign of our problems.Report
Exhibit #a billion of the case that the true villains of the University story are the administrations. I genuinely wonder if it’s not gotten so bad that it’ll take the institutions down completely.Report
At this point, it’s mostly a positional top tier, not an actual top tier. Scarcity of input, not excellence of output.
And for the purposes of the endowment and institutional reputation, that’s good enough.Report
I was kind of amazed at how easily the first guy went down. He even had momentum on his side!Report
I still can’t believe that the protestors at Columbia are demanding catering.Report
For what it’s worth… I would like catering.Report
The true heroes of any film production: Craft Services!Report
One of the arguments made on why there isn’t any anti-Semitism in the current protests is that they have Jewish protestors there. This argument is made by people who state that token African-Americans in the Far Right does not make the Far Right not racist or that women in the anti-abortion movement doesn’t mean that the anti-abortion movement is not misogynist. When you point out the fallacy to them, they double down.Report
There’s a strange phenomenon out there where certain values seem to be more important than Truth values.
A proposition P is phrased in such a way that it is either True or False. The problem is that the proposition P is both True and politically inconvenient.
We’ve found a way to say that people who acknowledge P to be True are bad people. “P is racist!” or “P is antisemitic!”
Does it matter if P is true? Not as much as if it’s racist or anti semitic, I guess.Report
“One of the arguments made on why there isn’t any anti-Semitism in the current protests is that they have Jewish protestors there.”
This is just ass backwards. The general argument isn’t that there isn’t any or couldn’t be any anti-Semitism in the protests because they have Jewish protestors there. The argument is that if you are going to dismiss any support of Palestinians or criticism of Israel as inherently anti-Semitic and only grounded in hating Jews, what do you make for the many, many, many (e.g., not token) Jewish people who are taking that stance?
I mean, I know you’re perspective is that they’re “treacherous” but most people recognize that Jewish people are capable of having differing ideas from one another.Report
I think the term “anti-Semitism” is a bit off the mark in all this.
Based on the comments I’m seeing around the intertubes, there is a sizable number of people who are perfectly comfortable with Jewish people but who detest the nation of Israel and see it as illegitimate.
Now to be clear, the ones that I’ve seen and interacted with don’t appear to have completely thought this through, that adopting the “rive to the sea” approach would by definition result in a mass slaughter of Jews. Or maybe they have and are just being coy, I really don’t know. It doesn’t seem to proceed from the usual starting place of Jew-hatred.
But at the end of the day, (IMO) it ends up being a distinction without a difference. If the opposition to “settler- colonialism” isn’t rooted in a desire for a liberal multicultural democracy, then it really might as well be rooted in Mein Kampf for al that it matters.Report
As somebody on the other blog mentioned, it is very difficult for secular to people to believe that really religious people, or believers in hardcore austere ideologies sincerely believe in what they profess. It just seems like such an unpleasant way to live for the brunch going/recreational sex set that they can’t imagine any human willingly embrace such a belief system let alone hundreds of millions of humans eagerly take up mass ascetic practices essentially.
Even among people more like them than not, like Secular Whites dealing White Evangelicals in the United States, there is a tendency to go Secret Disney Liberalism and believe that most people are being misled by a few bad eggs. With just the right argument, education, and music we can melt away the hate. It becomes even more incomprehensible when dealing with other cultures, especially if the other culture that operates as an oppressive majority elsewhere is a persecuted minority where you live.
So when some Hamas functionary goes “we believe in the Islamic Republic of Palestine” and “No Israel, No Jews”, it gets scrambled in the brains of the Western activists and comes out as “Hamas is fighting for a multicultural secular Palestine.” They really believe that if you can somehow create one country it would end up as some food, festival, and fabric PBS kids show but with Muslims and Ramadan rather than Christians and Christmas as the majority motiff.
I am getting increasingly cranky and frustrated at the Secret Disney world view because it is useless and only gets a lot of people killed by refusing to recognize the crazy.Report
Another observation is that a lot of the Further Left, especially in Anglohphone countries, really doesn’t get Jewish identity. They are so used to everything being white vs. non-white and Jews being merely a kind of wypipo with a funny religion, part of this is our own fault, that anything else is incomprehensible. Like they really don’t understand why Jews would find being subsidiary citizens in an officially Muslim country any different than being Jews in the United States or Canada. It’s just the same thing but with different majority holidays, ain’t it? You can explain all of this very carefully and at great detail and people still refuse to get it.Report
Hamas and others have spent a lot of time and energy claiming things that fit the Left’s worldview nicely. White vs Non-white. Colonialism is bad. Power is bad. Lack of power is virtue.
However these are emotional arguments. There are facts that are really jarring if we pay attention. Hamas targeting and killing civilians. Israel’s “colonial backer” keeps changing.
Most damning at the moment, we have the argument that Israel is deliberately targeting civilians. They can even present various dead bodies, and they claim there are a lot more.
However, for every dead body in Gaza, Israel has dropped two bombs. That suggests the Israeli army is going out of it’s way to not kill civilians.Report
Eh, I’m sympathetic towards Israel but they have gone somewhat berserk in their response. I don’t think it is as much as the critics say but there is a definite element of teach Hamas and the Gazan Palestinians a lesson they would never forget here.Report
“Eh, I’m sympathetic towards Israel but they have gone somewhat berserk in their response.”
Treacherous.Report
LeeEsq: they have gone somewhat berserk in their response
Have they? We know of lots of dead civilians because Hamas tells us… except Hamas claims all of the dead have been civilians and most women and children.
The local media there are so in bed with Hamas that I watched a local “reporter” get very upset at the suggestion that “both sides” were committing war crimes and not just Israel.
Big picture Israel wants Hamas gone, and any war that is going to attempt that will require them to attack hospitals and other civilian areas because Hamas is there.
The local population strongly supports Hamas and their efforts. Hamas has been running the media, the charities, and the educational system for a long time. Their option is they should be able to commit mass murder without suffering from a war.
Within the (very, very large) margin of error, it is possible Israel is fighting a civilized war to the extent it can. To be fair they also might be needlessly punitive and brutal.
Given Israel has dropped a lot more bombs than they’ve killed people, they’re probably making some effort to avoid civilian deaths.Report
On Hamas and the Left, I think this is more of an accident than anything intentional. As noted above, it is really really difficult for many secular people to accept that religious people are utterly sincere in what they claim to believe. There is always an element of “nobody can really believe that” even when dealing with relatively close religious people. It is part of the Secret Disney Liberal cosmology that many adapt. So a lot of Leftists in the West just scramble what Hamas says into something more left-leaning rather than assume Hamas is serious.Report
Yes. Or even my opinion, ‘See the current and past behavior of the nation of Israel has been very morally wrong, but Israel does currently exist and I am not sure how to fix things, but the absolute first thing is that Israel needs to behave according to international law and stop killing civilians and stop constantly trying to gain more territory, both of which it has for literally its entire existence. Then we can figure out the second thing, which is probably to do something about Hamas.’
The thing is, there are the actual demands that protests officially want, and there are aspirational random desires stated by some protestors that they have literally no way of causing to happen, and. Protests are not some vague utopia concept, they make concrete demands on the specific entities they are protesting, aka, the people standing right in front of them.
The actual demands of these protestors are local stuff like ‘college divestment’ and ‘enroll some Palestinian refugees’ and maybe ‘write a letter condemning war crimes’ and whatever other random things. You know, stuff the college could do! I’m not going to bother looking them all up, but it’s literally demands _on the college_.
The actual demands sure as hell doesn’t include ‘Until that entire area is united under one government’. That simply isn’t how protests work. The protestors might dislike Israel, but the protests are not protesting Israel, they are protesting a _college_ about how it is behaving WRT Israel.
So it doesn’t really matter if they’ve thought out those demands or not.Report
I get it and could agree to some of those local demands.
When the conversation turns to the state of Israel being illegitimate that’s when the needle scratches and the record stops playing.Report
A nice little twitter essay here.
Report
From what professors at non-elite universities have said, the Pro-Palestinian protests seem a lot more grounded at Directional State than at the elite schools. Less antics, more directed messaging, and no overt anti-Semitic out of their language. My guess is that this because of a combination of coming from a non-privileged background and there not being enough Jewish students to harass. The way that privilege is working out at the more elite campuses is darkly funny.Report
Great analysis.Report
I dunno. There’s clearly a LARP aspect but I don’t think the root cause is the neurosis of the students themselves, even if it is adding a lot of fuel to the fire. The real story IMO is the administrators steeped in PoMo mumbo jumbo and the professors of low rigor areas of study that have embraced phoney forms of activism, safetyism, and bizarre histrionics as a form of pedagogy. The students are doing what they’ve been taught to do and of course the people at elite schools are the best at doing it.Report
It seems to be a weird simulacrum of protest. Like, it has nothing to do with Israel or Palestine anymore (though those words show up).
An undercurrent of this is what one does so one is doing it for some mixture of its own sake and obligation without comprehension of the referent.
It’s pointing at this, it’ll point at something else tomorrow, something else the day after.
It’s a plastic apple.Report
A tangential observation:
I’m old enough to recall how sneering at student protesters as elite and effete is a perennial critique which is implemented as a tool of convenience.
That is, it only ever gets deployed when the students do something to anger the speaker, as opposed to a criticism of elite status itself.
If the elite and effete students plod along in docile conformance to university and societal rules, somehow their elite status and effete natures just don’t seem to be a problem.
And I don’t see anyone , anywhere, making a sincere attempt to create a more egalitarian educational system in fact quite the opposite.
It reminds me of all those Facebook posts from middle aged parents bewildered at how their children managed to raise themselves into becoming coddled spoiled and ignorant.Report
And I don’t see anyone , anywhere, making a sincere attempt to create a more egalitarian educational system in fact quite the opposite.
(What does this have to do with the protests? Is he hoping to turn this into a discussion of semi-literate and semi-numerate students deliberately kept ignorant as a policy choice? Does he think that this will work to the advantage of discussing the earnestness of the students demanding “NO BAGELS” during their sit in?)Report
The essay you quoted explains it.
Maybe read it again.Report
Wait, this part? You don’t see this in lower tier schools from kids of lower socio-economic standing
You see that as a call to action for creating more egalitarian educational systems?Report
No I don’t.
As I said, I don’t see anyone , anywhere, making a sincere attempt to create a more egalitarian educational system in fact quite the opposite.
But a whole lotta sneering about how the students are elite, which apparently is a bad thing but only when the students piss us off. The rest of the time being elite is OK.Report
Chip, part of the problem is that the student’s *AREN’T* Elite.
Part of the bargain with the Elite is that the Elite get to be Elite… but they have to be Elite. If they’re dumbasses that are even dumber than the dumbasses who don’t get into the “Elite” schools, what the hell is going on?
These guys aren’t Elite. If this were Fortnite, they’d be ranked Silver.Report
Yes you are sort of restating my point in a different way.
That elite young people are given permission to be elite and enjoy all sorts of privilege, but only so long as they conform to our expectations of behavior and norms.
If they violate those expectations, then we revoke those permissions.
As I said, if these very same students were to plod along in docile conformance, no one would be criticizing them.Report
The behavior and norms have to be elite, though. They can’t be dumbasses. If they’re occupying the elite spot and it turns out that it’s obvious that they’re dumbasses, that’s bad.
Like, “the emperor is wearing no clothing” bad.
“They have the right to wear skimpy clothing!”, you may argue.
“NOBODY IS SAYING THAT THEY DON’T HAVE THE RIGHT TO WEAR SKIMPY CLOTHING, CHIP!!!! THE PROBLEM WITH THE EMPEROR BEING NAKED IS NOT A LACK OF BODY POSITIVITY ON MY PART!!!”Report
Uh huh.
In this case “dumbass” doesn’t mean they get poor grades or low SAT scores because well, they wouldn’t be at an elite college if they did.
And “dumbass” doesn’t mean spoiled and entitled to misbehave because we’ve already established that this is permitted.
And “dumbass” doesn’t mean naive and ignorant of the world because virtually every student on campus is likewise.
After all, the student who walks by the protest and doesn’t join in because they just want to get high and get laid isn’t being criticized here as a dumbass. Again, that sort of naivete is expressly permitted.
It seems that “dumbass” here just means what we already said, “Elite young person who doesn’t do what we want them to do.”Report
It seems that “dumbass” here just means what we already said, “Elite young person who doesn’t do what we want them to do.”
“What we want them to do is ‘act elite’.”
“That’s what I said.”Report
Chip Daniels wrote:
“In this case “dumbass” doesn’t mean they get poor grades or low SAT scores because well, they wouldn’t be at an elite college if they did.”
Makes you wonder what these grades and SAT scores are measuring. Given the students’ habit of reciting mindless slogans, I gotta suspect it isn’t the propensity for deep thinking.Report
“You only like people when they do prosocial things and not when they do antisocial things” is not the gotcha you think it is.Report
Back when we were a less egalitarian society than we are now, I believe that part of the (at least theoretical) roles of these institutions was to instill virtue in the elite by toughening them up a little. After all they tended to come from backgrounds where it was easy to dodge any sort of adversity. I wonder if the kind of consumer culture we’ve moved to hasn’t done serious damage to the idea that virtue is something built.Report
When was this period you refer to?
From what I can see, the caricature of Ivy League students has been one of effete pampered little sheepwitted fools since Mark Twain was parodying them.Report
More than one thing can be true at the same time. But I’m less interested in debating whether our elites were ever in fact better or more virtuous than they are now than I am in understanding what our goals are or should be.
I think too many people have come to think that falling short of aspirations defeats the purpose of aspirations altogether. The fact that there have always been jokes about how you can spot a Harvard (or Yale, or whatever) man isn’t responsive to that problem.Report
I think the idea that elite universities should instill virtue is a very good goal.
Obviously what constitutes “virtue” will always be hotly contested.
For example, in one view, the protesters are demanding that the university itself adhere to a set of virtues which include promoting democracy and human rights.
I myself would hotly contest the student’s views, but you can’t accuse them of being indifferent to virtue.Report
They’re taking the claims of a genocidal terror organization as the black letter truth. “Virtue” isn’t the word I’d use.
Further, there will be departments where everyone is involved in the protests and others were none are.
My expectation is the serious students with serious majors are less on the lines and the “is that really a major” departments are more.Report
I think most of them are basically pretending that Hamas doesn’t exist personally rather than taking Hamas’ word as literal truth. The different factions of the Western Pro-Palestinian movement tend to solidairty thinking and engage in a code of silence to keep the “No Israel, No Jews” faction* and the more reasonable Two State faction together. This contrasts how liberal and hard right edges of the Pro-Israel faction fight with each other.
*There were apparently people who thought that the Simchat Torah massacre would get all Israeli Jews on airplanes and flying to JFK. We have the same anti-Semitic trope about Jews being simultaneously weak and yet deadly murderous strong at the same time. These people are incredibly dumb and vile.Report
Like the Vietnam war, this war has taken on a proxy war dimension where a lot of the positions are rooted in domestic politics using the foreign actors as proxies.
To be fair, we can’t entirely disregard the motivations of the people involved, but we need to accept our own blindness and internal motivations.
For every leftwing idiot burbling about “kinetic decolonization” there is another rightwing idiot demanding troops crush the rabble and make them obey.
At the same time, a posture of smug “pox on both houses” is simplistic and convenient, a way of refusing to come to terms with our responsibility as citizens in a republic.
Both Israel and the Palestinians have their own agendas which are separate and apart from ours and they don’t have any desire to mold themselves into our desired configurations.Report
This seems spot on. The actual events in the Israel-Hamas War don’t matter anymore. It’s all about domestic politics. Jews are the monkey in the middle.Report
There is always the danger with liberal tolerance of constructing others as we wish them to be instead of accepting them as they really are.
And a positive stereotype is as pernicious as a negative one.
I’ve said before that there is nothing you can say about Israel that couldn’t also have been said a (and WAS said) about France in 1940.
But somehow we can accept that France is complex and multifaceted, being both a brutal colonizer and also having an inherent right to exist.Report
The Palestinian narrative is the Jews were dropped on the country of Palestine by Western Powers because of guilt over the holocaust.
That Israel is literally a colony; the Jews are foreigners; this state couldn’t exist without that support.
This is their grand narrative, and if we believe it then Israel doesn’t have any right to exist any more than India-as-English had a right to exist. The moment the West walks away, Israel is gone.
The problems are none of that is true and that narrative causes serious problems in resolving the conflict.Report
The French aren’t the great villains of the global imagination like the Jews are. The Palestinian narrative, as Dark Matter refers to, is that Ottoman Palestine was a multicultural place where the Palestinian Muslims and their Jewish pet citizens existed in harmony. Than Jews from Europe arrived and started fighting and disturbing the social order where the local Jews were righteous Dhimmis who accepted their place.Report
Sounds like the Southern narrative were all the slaves were happy.Report
It is exactly the Southern narrative regarding slavery and Civil Rights, where the Blacks were happy and everything work but then outside agitators came. That people recognize this with the South and African-Americans as nonsense but not with the Jews in the MEAN countries isn’t great.
I believe the current Arab relatively liberal narrative is that the Jews of the MENA area were completely Arabized and did not see any association or bond with the Jews of Europe at all until the “evil” Zionists changed this. Besides being completely wrong and not based on any reality, even if the above was true it would fall under the international definition of genocide since it would be cultural obliteration. That would make the Zionists heroes because they restored the Jewish identity of the MENA Jews. These people are such putzes and it drives me mad that they get away with their nonsense.Report
The problem that West runs into is that there seem to be hundreds of millions of Muslims that see Israel as blight on the Dar al-Islam. I always have a feeling that there is some sort of unspoken pragmatism when it comes to the Western “get rid of Israel” crowd. They know that Jews will bitch and moan a lot of Israel is destroyed or Jews are forced to live in second class status under Islam but they won’t actually do anything threatening to the global order. Hundreds of millions or billions of Muslims angry at Israel’s mere existence is scary and the feeling is that it is best to assuage them by destroying Israel and making all the Jews go away. Nobody says it in these terms because it just sounds bad.Report
Part of it is scale. It’s like the big lie, if you repeat something often enough, then it must have some truth to it.
There are hundreds of millions of Muslims who believe Israel shouldn’t exist because of reasons.
Israel is a lightning rod. Anything that is wrong in the Middle East and/or any horrible act that someone wants to do gets put onto it existing.
Various other leaders have said they can’t stop abusing their own citizens until Israel does whatever.
Saddam invaded a fellow Arabic country and claimed he’d give it back if the Israelis would do whatever.
OBL claimed 911 was because of Israel. The number of Jews his organization attempted to kill was zero.Report
I think there are several reasons why people talk about ending Israel in a way that they don’t other bad behaving countries. Dark Matter lays out a big one. Tens or hundreds of millions of Muslims see Israel as a front to Islam to one extent or another. Even if we solve the I/P conflict, there is no guarantee that this will go away. Many in the West see getting rid of Israel as a way to calm down Muslim majority countries.
Another issue is that the Palestinians are seen as the proxies for all the displaced indigenous people of the world. Get rid of Israel and the Native Americans, Indigenous Australians, and Maori of New Zealand, etc. will be avenged. When you combine this with really bad ideas on how Israel was created, a lot of people think it was by UN vote so can be easily reversed, than you get the idea that Israel can and should be destroyed easily.Report
I’m not convinced the Muslim populations actually care at all about the Palestinians.
Other than lip service, what are they willing to do for them?
Not blood or treasure, that’s for sure.Report
I don’t think they care about the Palestinians that much either. That doesn’t mean they don’t see Israel as a blot on all of Islam though. It is perfectly possible not to like Israel from an Islamic theological perspective and also not care about the Palestinians.Report
Participation trophies don’t hand themselves out, that’s for sure.Report
The problem with “elite” is that it has two different meanings, one referring to social status and the other referring to ability. These are somewhat correlated, but not nearly as well as they should be.Report
They have never been well correlated. Ever. In all of human history. Why anyone expects the Ivy’s to be different is beyond me.Report
“They have never been well correlated.”
That’s a bold claim, and I don’t see any reason to make it. In primitive societies, where the only abilities needed are hunting and killing, you’re definitely going to find the most able rise to the top. In competitive societies or scenarios, like the Old West or trading cultures, ability leads to success which leads to clout. Most relevant would be Confucian China, with its testing system designed to create a meritocracy. That’s what we’re aiming for, and if the top-tier universities aren’t producing elite talent, it’s a problem.Report
Confucian China, during the reign of the Emperors?
How did primitive societies apportion land and resources?
Why was it illegal in some medieval societies to wear clothing above your status?Report
It depends on what you mean by well-correlated. By social science standards, they’re pretty strongly correlated. As a lower bound, permanent income and IQ are correlated at about 0.5 for men. The correlation between more comprehensive measures of ability and SES is likely significantly stronger.
But that wasn’t really my point. I’m just saying that when people rail against the “elite,” they’re talking more about midwits with high social status than about extraordinarily competent people.Report
A correlation coefficient f 0.5 is likely not significant even with an extraordinary sample size. And it bears repeating that two things occurring together (correlation) doesn’t prove one caused the other (Causation).
And yeah – when people rail against elites – especially others who either call themselves elite or are in elite SES Groups – they are often railing against competent people who aren’t doing what the railer want them to do.Report
The protestors who occupied the library at PSU have basically wrecked it:
https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2024/05/police-move-to-end-portland-state-standoff.htmlReport