232 thoughts on “Open Mic for the week of 4/15/2024”

  1. Okay, Riddhi Patel, a mostly peaceful activist, went in front of the Bakersfield City Council telling them that they needed to vote for a ceasefire resolution for someplace overseas. She allegedly concluded her remarks by saying “We’ll see you at your house. We’ll murder you.”

    No harm, no foul, right?

    Well, the Bakersfield City Council didn’t agree. They had *ZERO* chill. They had Riddhi Patel arrested and charged with 18 felony counts of terroristic threats or something like that. 10 counts of “threatening with the intent to terrorize a public official” and 8 counts of “threatening specific public officials”.

    She pled “Not Guilty“, of course.

    I imagine that she’ll be using the “aw, cmon” defense.Report

    1. Yep, and on behalf of liberals everywhere, people who issue threats to government officials should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

      That’s what separates us from Republicans.Report

        1. Prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. What, there’s no law against a duly authorized governmental body passing resolutions someone doesn’t like? OK, then point and laugh. And if your comedy chops are good enough maybe others will laugh too. But no guarantees.Report

        2. Jaybird, the number of city councils that issued symbolic ceasefire resolutions has been under 10 to my knowledge. In fact I only know about three city councils that did so. These are Oakland, Berkeley, and Cambridge.Report

    2. What is your point? No one here doubts that there are lots of dumb s**ts who are shocked when their actions have consequences and then act defiant. The world is filled with them.Report

      1. Well, without getting into misogynistic slurs against Women of Color, I think that the issue is one of how governments seem to have less of a sense of humor about this sort of thing than they did a few years back.Report

        1. Were there instances of point blank threats of murder? i don’t recall any (except for maybe the nitwits of Jan. 6, and they are being/have been with appropriately.)Report

          1. She threatened the City Council? Do you want to see the footage? I can dig up the footage.

            Here you go. Enjoy.

            Report

            1. I didn’t mean to reply under this comment thread. I seem to recall reading somewhere on these pages a comment as to whether similar pro-Israel threats have been made. Maybe I’m just hallucinating.Report

          1. You know, I’ve seen at least one person theorize that that is the problem.

            People get used to typing “We’ll see you at your house. We’ll murder you.”

            Then they get used to saying it out loud.

            It’s one thing to type it. Even to type it in all caps. Hey. It’s the internet. It’s social media. People threaten to kill each other all the time. It’s how they say “hello”.

            But there’s a thing where you can’t act like how you act online when you’re standing in front of a microphone in front of the City Council.

            Keep it to the Helldivers 2 lobby, Riddhi!Report

  3. Speaking of protests, I spent 90 minutes in traffic this morning because protestors shut down the GGP and the 880 into and out of SF. They call it an economic blockade: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/protesters-block-880-oakland-19403632.php

    Now I realize that this is going to get Jaybird doing is Boff Sides “comedy” routine but I do think there should be kind of nexus between cause and protest action. I’m not sure what disrupting commuter traffic thousands of miles away from the event does for a cause.Report

    1. I’m not sure what disrupting commuter traffic thousands of miles away from the event does for a cause.

      The argument that “sanctions” do more harm to hoi polloi than they do to the ruling class is one with a long pedigree.

      I think that the argument is that the people who are being sanctioned will work harder to change their government to one that is less likely to be sanctioned.Report

      1. There was a similar road blockage on the highway into O’Hare this morning. If someone tried to think of a protest guaranteed to generate the least sympathy for one’s cause, this one might be too outlandish to even consider.Report

    2. According to a commentator on the Other Blog and a google search, similar pro-test actions are planned for the evening commute home in NYC today. Now that is truly stupid. Making it hard to get to work on a Monday is one thing but preventing people from going home is another. Sympathy for Israel might be quite a bit lower now than it was on October 8th or early on in the Israel-Hamas War but Iran just sent a drone attack into Israel, an intentionally ineffective drone attack, but still a drone attack. So commuters are going to be unlikely to become more sympathetic to the Palestinians because of a bunch of kids making their ride to or from work difficult.Report

    3. I’m not sure what disrupting commuter traffic thousands of miles away from the event does for a cause.

      First you have “the cause”. This quickly becomes a group thing. Then it becomes multiple groups.

      And then the groups have a problem. Your group needs to be more devoted than that other group which also supports “the cause”, or you’ll lose people to them.

      So your group needs to be more in the news than the other groups and to be seen as more devoted.

      Shutting down a city doesn’t convince anyone who isn’t already convinced, but it does attract more people to that specific group by raising their profile. Ergo their leadership will personally do better.Report

    4. “I’m not sure what disrupting commuter traffic thousands of miles away from the event does for a cause.”

      That’s because in high school, you were the bully and not the bullied.Report

    2. I don’t want to assume too much but I took a look at her Wikipedia page.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Maher

      The thing that jumps out at me is how little experience she has doing anything that sounds journalistic or even that is remotely serious. She seems to have rose to her position from a series of internships at global, think tank-ey type places followed by a few roles as a communications (read- marketing) officer at a handful of NPOs before getting a CEO job at a similarly fluffy organization. Nothing about her screams ‘put this person in charge of a major news outlet.’Report

      1. She is a serious DEI gal. DEI insists there is one ideological answer for lots of serious questions.

        Of course she was going to insist that the lack of diversity of opinion at NPR was a strength and not a weakness. From her point of view “diversity” means “gender and race”.Report

        1. Yea, I increasingly think the biggest knock on that stuff in corporate and NGO America isn’t all of the obviously negative second order effects, bad as those are. It’s the consistent elevation of people who look a certain way on a power point or leadership page but that aren’t actually good at anything. Other than I guess looking and sounding a certain way. It’s a recipe for weak leadership and poor performance on the metrics that actually matter.Report

          1. It’s a recipe for weak leadership and poor performance on the metrics that actually matter.

            You know what else is a recipe for weak leadership? Promoting old white men simply because they have bene there the longest. Which we do in spades in the federal government.Report

              1. In the federal workforce unions have zero to do with promotions . . . frankly if the unions had power then the old white guy who was here the longest cycle would have been broken long ago.Report

              2. Hmm I admit I don’t know the details… promotions & retention based on seniority are pretty standard in union shops and in government, I assumed it was all ultimately driven by unions. But it’s certainly not because of a cabal of white men supporting their own — the main reason AFAIK for seniority rules is to provide an objective standard rather than relying on potentially-biased managers to decide.Report

              3. The old white guys get their jobs based on seniority and publication record (and thus scientific prestige) in my agency – not ability to actually lead or manage. Most of them actually disdain the leadership that gets foisted on them by such promotions, but absent a strong DEI culture, there would be no way to go around it.Report

              4. “A strong DEI culture” isn’t the same thing as “insisting that we hire people qualified for the actual work”.

                All too often, the most qualified person isn’t going to have a DEI approved background, race, and/or ideology.Report

              6. Where we should be trying to go to is color blind.

                If there are problems focusing on qualifications rather than skin color, the solution isn’t to focus on a different skin color over qualifications.

                That’s over and above DEI’s serious ideological issues. Redefining truth and evidence. Claiming that racism is still the defining force in results to the same degree as in the 50s. Claiming that all racial imbalances are the result of racism.

                DEI is about ideology and not about diversity nor equity.Report

      1. I would’ve too — that’s not something you do as an active senior employee of an organization. 5 day suspension is pretty light considering the reputational hit this caused.Report

        1. reputational hit

          Thinking about this.

          The story includes this sentence early on:

          It angered many of his colleagues, led NPR leaders to announce monthly internal reviews of the network’s coverage, and gave fresh ammunition to conservative and partisan Republican critics of NPR, including former President Donald Trump.

          “and gave fresh ammunition to conservative and partisan Republican critics of NPR.”

          Is it true?
          Is it not true?

          Eh. Perspectives differ. Who can say what’s true, after all?

          But it definitely gave ammo to people who had a different one.Report

          1. Personally I’d like to think that the essay will have some beneficial impact — but NPR as a business entity has the right to expect its employees, especially those with “senior” in their title, to speak in public about the entity within certain constraints.Report

            1. Absolutely. Lemme tell ya: I do not hold the position that NPR does not have the “right” to suspend him without pay. It absolutely does. And Berliner didn’t give them much of a choice.

              And even the NPR reporting about the internal issues point out that Berliner’s criticism gave ammo to conservatives.

              The only victories available are pyrrhic. Which is kind of funny.Report

              1. Someone pointed out that NPR takes public monies and that gives it a higher standard when it comes to punishing reporters for talking about journalism stuff.

                “Private Companies can do whatever they want” is absolutely true for pretty much every single use case.

                Publicly Funded companies have a smaller list of things they can do.Report

              2. Is that actually true? Does NPR have any restrictions at all on personnel management imposed due to its receipt of government funding?

                I would be more inclined to suspect that this is related either to concerns over optics, or to union protections.Report

              3. I think it’s all optics. NPR isn’t an American equivalent of something like the BBC. It was created by act of Congress and has a public service mission but something like 90% of its funding comes from a combination of licensing fees from local affiliates, various grants, and donations. On the employment side I think it is like any other NPO.Report

              4. On the other blog, NPR is joked to stand for Nice Polite Republicans. This piece was circulated in Bari Weiss’ graft rag and should not be taken seriously. NPR is not a hard left organization dedicated to bringing the revolution to America but something that bougie people listen to because they want to hear things told in dulcet tones.Report

              5. Pretty much this.

                The bias that Berliner claimed is just the underlying bias of all media, where they have a worldview and presumption of what is true or not.

                In that, NPR isn’t any more biased than any other media outlet. They aren’t the Fox news of the left.

                For instance, it would be interesting to have someone provide an example of a media outlet which is less biased than NPR.Report

              6. I think that’s a misread of Berliner, or at least the steel man version of Berliner’s argument. The problem Berliner is raising is that the bias is serving the listener poorly, and making them worse informed, in direct contravention of the mission. The core problem is a quality issue.Report

              8. Yes, he clearly states in the piece that he thinks the one they were following circa 2011 was better, with the changes implemented during the Trump presidency being what derailed them.Report

              9. If the change can fairly be described as “Openly opposed to Trump” then it exemplifies the problem facing journalism in general.

                Does objectivity demand being ambivalent about the idea of liberal democracy?

                Is the modern Republican Party under Trump objectively bad, such that there isn’t any need to present “the opposing view”?

                ETA:
                Feel free to ponder the similar question:
                Is the modern pro-Palestinian protest objectively bad, such that there isn’t any need to present “the opposing view”?Report

              11. As I said on last week’s thread I’m one of the former listeners that has been turned off. But I also said that the conservative characterization of NPR as this crazed bastion of looney leftism was always much more discrediting to conservatives than to NPR. All you had to do was listen to a little of it to realize that whatever NPR’s failings it has never been what conservatives, and especially conservative media, say it is. But we know this. Conservative media is Sauron. It can mock and pervert but it can’t create, and so it mistakes anything that does create for a mirror image of itself.

                That said, while I have found Bari Weiss’ project to be underwhelming, and something more likely to be a gimmick than anything enduring, it really sounds like the people on the other blog need to get out more. Or at minimum examine whether their own revolutionary politics are based in anything in radio contact with reality. I mean the tote bag set annoys me too but they’re nowhere near as far down the path to rationalizing their own lazy thinking and letting themselves off the hook through self serving, self marginalization.Report

          2. Re reputation hit — Rufo tweeted about NPR now being in a “reputation spiral”, but one of his commenters reacted something like “didn’t everyone already know NPR was very liberal?”. This is kind of like the Island of Green Eyes puzzle, where a figure of authority says out loud what everyone already can see for themselves, and that changes everything.Report

            1. I think Berliner’s point was that NPR has shifted from a liberal bias to leftist doctrine. A listener might not pick it up from one or two stories, but there’s now a common motivation behind each story.Report

              1. Do you think the impact is from people reading the article who didn’t realize what NPR has become? Perhaps… it seemed to me more like insider confirmation of what many people already suspected.Report

              2. I’m pretty sure it has been getting knocked around on this in a way that is credible to actual or potential listeners since at least 2016. The type of conservative that would say ‘didn’t everyone already know’ probably isn’t a very useful barometer of the change.Report

              3. I guess i didn’t communicate my point well — nothing to do with conservatives, just saying that there was nothing revelatory in Berliner’s essay — it was consistent with how one would expect NPR to operate based just on listening to the content, whether you like that content or not (and we see from other conversation at this site, those who are happy enough with current-state NPR didn’t find anything damning in the essay). So (and maybe this was where Jaybird was going with his initial response to me), among whom exactly has NPR’s reputation been hurt by it?Report

  5. In related activist antics, a professor at a small liberal arts college in New York named Jodi Dean has been revealed of her teaching duties for calling Hamas a radical revolutionary organization and praising the Simchat Torah massacre in an April 9, 2024 article. The usual suspects like Democracy Now and Jacobin are screaming bloody murder that a professor is being relieved of her teaching duties from praising the mass murder of Jews.

    This is what North called Group B in a previous Open Mic. They just can’t help themselves and don’t understand why people might view Hamas, including Hamas themselves, very differently than they do. I really don’t understand how Hamas can openly say their goal is a Jew free Islamic Republic of Palestine and it goes into the ears of people like Butler and Dean and comes out Hamas is a radical anti-imperial organization dedicated to fighting imperialism and establishing capitalism.

    I know that these people are basically powerless in the real world but what they say is extremely offensive, treacherous towards Jews in and outside Israel, and also rather ineffective in helping the Palestinians.Report

    1. I saw a picture of a tweet of hers and nearly choked laughing at her little twee communist cap icon. I bet actual socialists/communists are rolling their eyes at her so hard their necks hurt.Report

      1. She is basically a Fox News caricature of a radical professor made real as my brother would put it. When dealing with these types I always have a few questions that they never seem to answer or even grapple with.

        1. Even if we assume for the sake of argument that Zionism is a form of settler-colonialism, the hundreds of thousands of settler-colonialists who moved to Israel/Palestine between 1881 and 1939 would have faced certain death if they stayed in Europe. Is an alternative timeline with a much bigger Holocaust but no Israel a more moral timeline? If yes, they should be at least brave enough to come out and say so.

        2. The population of Israel/Palestine was about 400,000 Arabs and 25,000 Jews in 1881. Why are the 400,000 proto-Palestinians the real true inhabitants of the land and the 25,000 pro-Israelis are not?

        3. Did the Proto-Palestinians have any duty to incorporate the Jews into the national body or did they merely have to give them Basic Citizenship Rights and were otherwise entitled to push them to the side and not include them at all?Report

        1. This link is long but worth listening to.
          The history prof does a deep dive, blow by blow, on why the Palestinians think (emotionally) that Zionism is colonialism.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlK2mfYYm4U

          One of his points is the alternative is they have to realize the Palestinians were beaten by a bunch of weak refugees. And since the Palestinians really want to believe that, a lot of their propaganda claims that, which is in turn repeated by various Westerners.Report

          1. I actually think that one reason why it is taking so long for the Palestinians and really the rest of the Arab and Muslim world to come to terms with Israel was because the Arabs were beaten by Jews. This is the equivalent of being a fit and muscular young man with a head full of hair beaten by a middle-aged pudgy account with a receding hairline and a bad mustache.

            Losing to Christians? Sure, we don’t like losing but the Christians have a long military tradition and real armies for thousands of years. But Jews? Who loses to the Jews? People who haven’t won a war since before the Roman Empire was a thing.Report

        2. It’s weird how bad-faith caricatures of leftists keep magically coming to life like this, complete with documented employment histories at universities, schools, mainstream media outlets, and city governments.

          What could be causing this to happen, in violation of all known laws of science?Report

      2. If JB posted about but from a Daily Mail article, I would have assumed a distortion but I saw it first on Jonathan Ganz’ substack and he can be trusted because his leftist bonafides can’t be doubted.Report

        1. Why post a Daily Mail article when you can post something from the horse’s mouth?

          The struggle for Palestinian liberation today is led by the Islamic Resistance Movement — Hamas. Hamas is supported by the entirety of the organized Palestinian left. One might have expected that the left in the imperial core would follow the leadership of the Palestinian left in supporting Hamas. More often than not, though, left intellectuals echo the condemnations that imperialist states make the condition for speaking about Palestine. In so doing, they take a side against the Palestinian revolution, giving a progressive face to the repression of the Palestinian political project, and betraying the anti-imperialist aspirations of a previous generation.

          Are you on the left, Saul?Report

    2. I found myself idly wondering if the essay was online and It is!

      Eh. It’s puerile.

      It reminds me of the CU Boulder guy. It wasn’t until 2003 that “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” or whatever it was was published (despite my being sure that it was early 2002) and so now here we are with another Ward Churchill.

      To be honest, it’s kind of tacky to fire her for publishing this. She has tenure, after all. (Though I have been assured that private companies can do whatever they want.)

      They should just bust out the fine tooth combs and find some plagiarism. I understand that it’s endemic up around where she is.Report

            1. Would you come to a similar defense of a professor acting from the Further Right or would you say that going after such a professor would be legitimate?Report

              2. Dunno who that is, but after a very brief googling, it looks like she’s being sanctioned by the university for her views, and if that’s the case, then yeah, I would, so long as she hasn’t openly threatened students, staff, or other faculty (doesn’t seem like she has, but the one article I skimmed was very low on details of what she’s said, so I want to throw in that caveat).Report

              3. so long as she hasn’t openly threatened students, staff, or other faculty

                Hamas is an openly genocidal organization. It’s one of the few organizations we should equate to Na.zis. They just proved that in 10/7.

                Professors who openly give support for Hamas are therefore supporting threats of murder of their Jewish students.

                That is nasty, grim, logic that various groups don’t want to face. Wishfully thinking that Hamas will mello out if they got a country is just that, wishful thinking.

                We also have the problem that Hamas is popular enough to win elections, which doesn’t say good things about the Palestinians and their political goals.

                Professors have a fine line to dance between “supporting the Palestinians” and “not calling for the deaths of all Jews” and if they blow that then we should be fine with them being fired.Report

      2. I don’t think she should be fired for no reason other than expressing controversial political views.

        One does however have to wonder about the scholarship produced by people like this. I googled where she teaches and it appears to be a private school, at the end of the day they can do what they want. However I wonder if someone taking a hard look at her career, from an outside perspective, would conclude that she has produced something (anything?) useful in her years of study.Report

        1. I’m guessing that if you busted out the fine-tooth comb, you’d find something. Plagiarism is the obvious thing to look for given the prominent recent examples at Harvard and the success for going after Ward Churchill. (Have you ever read the Ward Churchill’s Twelve Excuses for Plagiarism report? It’s a treat! My favorite: Excuse Number Nine: “I, like, did it on behalf of ‘The Movement,’ man.”)

          You can’t just come out and fire people with tenure for having expressed controversial (even odious!) views, though. It looks bad.

          You have to find some sort of pretense.

          This encourages the others.Report

  6. There seems to have been a coordinated attempt by Pro-Palestinian protestors to make life inconvenient for travelers across the United States. I’ve seen reports of stories in Sea-Tac, NYC, Chicago, and San Francisco. I don’t think the Illinois you know who technique from the Blues Brothers but from the Left would be any more endearing to commuters.Report

    1. From Right-Wing Propaganda Site ABC 7 News:

      After the 2023 Bay Bridge demonstration, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins charged 80 protesters with five misdemeanors.

      …

      Recently, DA Jenkins agreed to dismiss the criminal case against those 80 protesters. In exchange, protesters would need to complete five hours of community service. Their attorney says they are following the agreement.

      These Pro-Palestinian protestors better get at least 10 hours of community service. I want their weekend *RUINED*.Report

  7. What isn’t said enough is that rural whites are being told to blame all the wrong people for their very real problems. As we argue in the book, Hollywood liberals didn’t destroy the family farm, college professors didn’t move manufacturing jobs overseas, immigrants didn’t pour opioids into rural communities, and critical race theory didn’t close hundreds of rural hospitals. When Republican politicians and the conservative media tell rural whites to aim their anger at those targets, it’s so they won’t ask why the people they keep electing haven’t done anything to improve life in their communities.

    https://newrepublic.com/article/180570/trump-rural-white-resentment-honest-assessmentReport

    1. The white rural rage has been chewed on endlessly and what’s apparent is it has no solution.

      When you read analysis about it, they always define the terms in vague vacuous terms about respect or messaging, but never anything that can be addressed by any sort of policy.Report

      1. That’s sort of the point by the authors in the New Republic article, though there are in fact policy solutions in their book.

        Expanding Medicaid under the ACA is a policy solution that would positively impact rural communities, but rural GOP led states are still reluctant to embrace it – my own state included. Rural Broadband is a policy solution that brings new economic opportunities to rural areas, but it took a Democrat jamming down the throats of the GOP for that to begin happening. Rebuilding roads and bridges through the BIL is a policy solution that can add income to rural areas – and again it was a Democrat who made it happen, Fox News coverage not withstanding.Report

  8. And once again, SCOTUS punts on important constitutional issues because it thinks it has already settled the challenge – if only the lower courts would listen:

    The nation’s highest court decided Monday not to hear Mckesson v. Doe, leaving in place a decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that punishes protest organizers with extreme financial consequences if even one participant commits an illegal act. The decision, which now stands as law in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, makes it dangerous and practically impossible to organize mass protests.

    https://newrepublic.com/post/180705/supreme-court-massive-blow-right-protestReport

  9. Welp, down at USC: Provost announces valedictorian won’t speak at graduation in May

    Andrew T. Guzman, the provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, said the decision was based on maintaining “campus security and safety” in the email. The valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, said in a public statement later Monday she feels the university has “abandoned” her.

    “This decision is not only necessary to maintain the safety of our campus and students, but is consistent with the fundamental legal obligation – including the expectations of federal regulators – that universities act to protect students and keep our campus community safe,” said Guzman in the message to the USC community.

    That heckler’s veto, man.

    Though I don’t blame the college for doing what they can to keep the campus community safe. God only knows how many dead we’d have if she spoke at the graduation.

    But it’s not just white rural rage we have to worry about. We have to worry about white urban rage at college campuses.Report

    1. Right, because a Jewish person expressing similar sentiments would have been equally threatened?

      I agree with the heckler’s veto assessment, but by howdy this isn’t want you want it to be.Report

        1. I’m sure somewhere in the world there are. I wouldn’t know how to frame the Google question to get an accurate answer.

          I think my assertion is still sound though – a pro-Muslim person calling for uniform human rights – extensible to Muslims and Palestinians – is being silenced by the institution where other on opposing sides of the issue would not be. Just goes to show that universities are neither hotbeds of wokism nor defenders of free speech as conservatives keep screeching they are.Report

            1. That’s something people who take flak from both (or other multiple) sides find comforting to believe. It seems equally likely that the multi-directional flak catchers are merely comprehensively awful.Report

    2. This is what happened:

      1. South Asian-American Muslim student is selected to be valedictorian.

      2. Somebody notices that five years ago said student, while a junior in high school, said something about a current hot button political issue that some would regard as bad and others as good.

      3. Admin freaks out.

      4. They react in the worse way possible.Report

        1. From ideas people may disagree with, sure. From actual violence – maybe, maybe not.

          And that’s the key. If some drunk frat boy is going to heckle this student while they are speaking, that’s not a threat to safety. If a known domestic terrorist group like the 3%’ers says we will attack the campus if she speaks and kill XXX number of people that’s a threat to safety.

          Problem is the university by making its choice puts us in the position of equating the two because they are not telling the full story.

          And that’s the second worst part of this.Report

          1. What should the school do when they think the Valedictorian is going to give a speech that amounts to “from the River to the Sea”? Should they still give her that platform?Report

            1. The fear was that she was going to give a speech that would be 15 minutes of “From the River to the Sea” and “Death to the Jews.” That was certainly a strong possibility but it could also end up being something banal. We don’t know because the proposed script was not seen by anybody.Report

      2. Her current Instagram links to a website that states “Zionism is a racist settler-colonial ideology that advocates for a Jewish ethnostate built on Palestinian land.” and then goes into a desire to “Decolonize Palestine”

        I didn’t do a deep dive but my strong expectation is at some point that means “no Jews” and/or the message comes from people who believe that.Report

        1. I am not inclined to be very sympathetic to people like her. These are people who talk about the greatness of decolonialization and the oppressed of the earth doing things for themselves and finding institutions for themselves for the benefit of all humankind. But then they look towards the Jews and see not a fellow oppressed group seeking national liberaltion and they scream “wypipo doing wypipo” things.Report

    1. I can understand why people in the West would be sympathetic or even pro-Palestinian. What I don’t understand is how some very clear rhetoric from at least some Palestinian groups like Hamas or really just the lot of them can go in one and come out the other side of the head as “the Palestinians want multicultural rainbow Palestine” when they can’t find any actual example of this among real actual Palestinians or at least ones with power on the ground. Hamas is not using ANC rhetoric but people can’t help but project Western characterization onto the I/P conflict and it doesn’t help anybody. These Western activists will be utterly powerless to determine what happens on the ground but believes that the Palestinians want multicultural rainbow Palestine because reasons.Report

      1. Leftism is basically a pathological pro-underdog bias. In people with who tend towards a more feels-based epistemology, this can lead to things like the idea that since Palestinians are worse off than Israelis, they must be better than Israelis in all ways.Report

        1. The 2002 essay Oppressed People Suck is relevant here as a counterexample. I think Hogan was still under the influence of underdog bias, and as a result got the direction of some of the causal arrows wrong, but at least he wasn’t pants-on-head stupid about it.Report

            1. You read the same essay but came to radically different conclusions about the meaning because of you two have divergent ideological priors. You two also probably saw different points as being important.Report

  12. Pro-Palestinian protestors at UC Berkeley disrupted a dinner party for first year law students held by Dean Chemerinsky because he is a Jew who doesn’t totally denounce Israel and Zionism as is ritually required by them. One of the signs held by the protestors was a caricature of Chemereinsky holding a bloody knife and fork. This is blood libel imagery and when people point the repeated use of well known anti-Semitic tropes get pointed out, Pro-Palestinian supporters and people prone to be sympathetic to them cast their eyes innocently about. These are people who could easily identify other racist dog whistles but when it comes to anti-Semitism get deliberately dense.

    https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-797210Report

    1. Maybe it’s just because he’s the dean of the law school. Remember Ronald Sullivan? He was a dean at Harvard and his deanship got yanked because he was one of Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers. He didn’t get fired from Harvard or anything. He’s just not a dean anymore.

      We’ve been holding deans to higher ethical standards for years now.Report

      1. Sullivan wasn’t what most schools would call a dean. He was, to quote his page on Harvard’s website, “Faculty Dean (formerly, “Master”) of Winthrop House at Harvard College.” He was a kind of glorified house mother (male) to a bunch of undergraduates living in a particular campus house, not the usual responsibilities that a deanship connotes. Whether his representation of a sexual predator was relevant to his duties in that position was thoroughly ventilated at the time, and little purpose would be served by re-litigating it now.Report

          1. I don’t know that the bar is so much “higher” as “different,” maybe even lower. Faculty have tenure and academic freedom; administrators, as administrators, don’t. A tenured faculty member with whacko views on some subject in the ballpark of his or her expertise can’t be fired (as a faculty member) for extramurally indulging in his idiocy. If the same tenured whacko is a department chair, or a dean, he or she can be removed — as an administrator, but not as a faculty member — simply because he (or she) is an embarrassment.Report

        1. It’s awful but we’re reaching the point where “antisemitic” doesn’t hit as hard as it used to.

          It gets trotted out for criticisms of Israeli policy in the occupied territories and then it gets used to criticize blue stuffed octopuses showing up in a Greta Thunberg photoshoot and now we’ve got a photo of the Dean holding a bloody knife and fork and that can call up blood libel… but the Village Voice famously had a cover with Bush as a vampire, there was the Barackula mask during that weird period, and Jim Carrey famously talked about Trump eating immigrant babies.

          Accusations of this sort of thing have been around for a while.

          An attack that you can use against Bush and Obama and Trump might be antisemitic when used against a Jewish guy… but maybe the whole “this person is a bloodthirsty monster who eats his enemies” cigar is just a cigar from time to time.

          That’s the problem with normalizing the whole “this person is a bloodthirsty monster who eats his enemies”. Occasionally it’ll get used against someone who is Jewish.

          And that sucks.

          But if the person was deliberately using Blood Libel imagery and not just resorting to a lazy “this person is a bloodthirsty monster who eats his enemies” attack, that’s absolutely reprehensible and they should be charged with one of California’s hate crime laws.Report

          1. We Jews might see the repeated use of anti-Semitic imagery against Jews a bit differently than gentiles. That the anti-Zionists claim not to be anti-Semitic but keep falling back on the blood libel imagery doesn’t really convince us of their claims not to be anti-Semitic.Report

            1. It’s weird what gets normalized.

              Anyway, I suspect that you’re going to need to toughen up if you’re going to be white.Report

              2. I’m just going to repeat this line because it’s funny: She was Loyola’s Anti Racism Center Fellow for 2022-2023.

                Remember: It’s not enough to just not be racist. You have to be *ANTI* racist.Report

              4. How so? We have had repeated use of anti-Semitic imagery and language from certain quarters of the Diversity Coalition in the past few years. The usual tactic seems to be at best slightly acknowledging it while remaining silent to keep the coalition together.Report

              7. Cite? A google search revealed a bunch of calls for her to be kicked off campus but nothing saying so. It did note her linkedin profile was deleted in one source.Report

              8. “Shocklingly?”

                Something I think is really telling is that for a decade or more, DEI departments have been running a grift where they claim to fight imaginary bigotry at universities. Then when colleges were faced with an undeniable problem with actual bigotry against Jews, they had to create separate anti-antisemitism task forces, because their DEI departments were at best unfit to do the job they were ostensibly created to do, and at worst actively contributing to the problem.Report

            2. Repeated accusations aren’t the same thing as repeated use. The genuinely good people on the right will still stand by you when you make fair accusations though.Report

    2. I suspect that he was planning to quit or get fired all along. He can’t have been so naive that he expected NPR to mend their wicked ways just because he called them out in The Free Press.Report

      1. Given his repeated statements about trying to raise this inside the house and being ignored, I read the Free Press essay as a last exasperated gasp of trying to right the ship. And as a line in the sand that h felt he needed to draw because his seniority wasn’t being respected in his organization.

        Meaning he pitched a tantrum because he didn’t get his way. As tantrums are irrational, he was likely not expecting the blowback he got.Report

            1. The recent Google protest, in which a bunch of people sat on the floor of an executive’s office, chanted stupid slogans, and refused to leave, was a tantrum. The BLM and Jan. 6th riots were tantrums.

              Berliner politely stated his objections to the path NPR has been on for the past several years, and then quit when he saw that no corrective actions would be forthcoming. There’s really not a less tantrum-like approach he could have taken to dealing with irreconcilable differences between his view of how journalism should be done and what the NPR is doing.

              Your true objection is to the substance of his criticism, not the style. Perhaps by characterizing his actions as a “tantrum” you hope to avoid having to address the substance of his criticisms. You did something similar above when you claimed that he was motivated by people failing to respect his seniority. Saul tries to pull crap like this all the time, too.Report

              1. In his Free Press article, he pointedly repeats the multi-year time line of seeking management action on his concerns. He writes about his growing frustration, and their growing willingness to simply ignore him. In short, he wanted his bosses to run NPR the way he thought it should be run. When they didn’t, he published the Free Press essay, and when that resulted in sanction – as it would have for any NPP journalist who did something without prior notice to NPR (as he was apparently required by his contract to do) – he resigned rather then face that punishment, remain at NPR and move on. Text book tantrum in a white collar setting.

                As to the substance – given the number of conservatives who are regularly heard on NPR – and often go uncorrected by NPR hosts and interviewers when they lie – I’d say his criticism had and has little merit. You don’t actually need conservatives in the news room to seek conservative voice for stories (the much ballyhooed fair and balanced approach) but you do need conservatives in the real world to report on who aren’t whack jobs. Those are becoming harder and harder to find.Report

              4. When mostly peaceful activists blocked a bridge, you asked me “You just aren’t big on protests as a political tool are you?”

                Do you remember that?

                Would you object to the bridge protests and the various college occupation protests being described as a “tantrum”?

                Because, seriously, you should know that we are experiencing epistemic divorce.

                The stuff that seems so very obvious to you (Berliner’s essay == tantrum/shutting down a bridge == political tool) strikes me as being topsy turvy (I’m closer to Berliner’s essay == political tool/shutting down a bridge == tantrum).

                Now, I am not asking you to agree.

                Heaven forbid!

                I’m asking you if you have the capability to see how your framing here could be interpreted as other than obvious.Report

              5. Generally speaking, a tantrum implies a protest without merit and usually regarding something petty.

                So reasonable people can look at two protests and disagree as to which is a tantrum and which is a protest depending on their underlying ideas of which is merited and which isn’t.

                Do you have the capability to see how other people can see your framing differently?Report

              7. Would you object to the bridge protests and the various college occupation protests being described as a “tantrum”?

                Yes.

                Tantrums are about the person tantruming and getting or not getting what they want.

                Protests – whether they are on a bridge or in CEO’s office – are about improvement for others.

                inward (tantrum) vs. outward.

                Clear enough?Report

              8. So his essay wasn’t about improving things for others but was a selfish act for his own benefit?

                Do you have the capability to see how your framing here could be interpreted as other than obvious?Report

              9. Do you have the capability to see how your framing here could be interpreted as other than obvious?

                Do you have the capability to understand this reads as a word salad devoid of meaning?Report

              10. Well, let me explain a little bit more.

                You say that his essay was about how Berliner wasn’t getting his way.

                When I read his essay, I, instead, am grateful to him because I saw him making a principled stand on behalf of not only his own interests but his own principles and not only his own benefit but also my benefit but not, you know, “Jaybird’s benefit” but to the benefit of the society at large. And to the extent that I am a member of the society at large, I saw him doing things for the benefit of the society at large as also benefitting me.

                And you. And Chip, for that matter.

                Like, *JOURNALISM* is important. Not “activism” that uses journalism as a skinsuit.

                And so I see his essay (and resignation) as being about, let me copy and paste this, “improvement for others.”

                And, like, that doesn’t even *OCCUR* to you. You look at what he did and see someone acting selfishly and not getting his way and throwing a “tantrum” without comprehending how someone else could easily see this as being in service to something greater.

                The hint that someone does reads as “word salad”.Report

              11. This:

                Do you have the capability to see how your framing here could be interpreted as other than obvious?

                In no way, shape or form points to this:

                You look at what he did and see someone acting selfishly and not getting his way and throwing a “tantrum” without comprehending how someone else could easily see this as being in service to something greater.

                The hint that someone does reads as “word salad”.

                The only thing linking them as concepts is that you wrote them. Had you use the word opposition instead of obvious in the first quote you might have been on to something. But you didn’t. Multiple times. I stand by my word salad assertion.

                As to the substance of the second quote – Berliner’s assertions that the alleged lossof conservative voices in the newsroom was impacting coverage and thus audience might have been plausible – and even seen by me through the “make the organization better” lens if he had been willing to concede that NPR still and regularly runs stories focused on conservatives and their views. And generally does so without pushback on the statements of the conservatives included. They were and are still one of the chief media practitioners of “Let’s try to understand why MAGA/Trumpists vote and think they way they do.” But Berliner didn’t go there. Ever. he jus made claims ever more stridently about his observations and recommendations being dismissed, then ignored. The Free Press essay and his subsequent resignation in the face of sanctions for violating his contract were thus not about anything relating to improving NPR. Nor would reasonable people think so. Because again, the content hasn’t really changed all that much even with newsroom changes.Report

              12. I stand by my word salad assertion.

                It’s cool. I understand now.

                if he had been willing to concede that NPR still and regularly runs stories focused on conservatives and their views

                That’s not his criticism in the essay.

                You didn’t understand it. You translated it into something you could understand. That’s what you ended up with.

                And it’s not obvious to you how anyone could reach a different conclusion.Report

              13. I will repeat that his criticism is a lack of conservative voices in the news room – meaning among his colleagues – was causing audience loss because the coverage was becoming dogmatically focused on one side of the political argument. His prescribed solution was to rehire those voices, even when rehiring them meant more old white men in the news room. That’s it in a nutshell, isn’t it?

                And he’s wrong because the amount and depth and breadth of coverage of conservative viewpoints hasn’t much changed in the NPR broadcast sphere. Its just not being done by old white men.Report

              14. That wasn’t his argument. For example, he said nothing about the diversity of the workplace. It’s really important that you can read the article and recognize that fact. Can you identify the article’s thesis statement?Report

              15. His thesis – which I think I am now writing out for the fifth or maybe sixth time – is that a lack of viewpoint diversity in the newsroom has had a strong, identifiable negative impact on reporting, which in turn is having a demonstrable negative impact on audience size and composition because of both the way stories are selected and reported. He believes this is the fault of NPR corporately, and he postulates that it must be corrected.

                For example, he said nothing about the diversity of the workplace.

                Right:

                In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.

                When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile.

                I wrote to the captain of ship North Star—CEO John Lansing—about the lack of viewpoint diversity and asked if we could have a conversation about it.

                But what’s indisputable is that no one in a C-suite or upper management position has chosen to deal with the lack of viewpoint diversity at NPR and how that affects our journalism. “

                And how prey tell, do you think that newsroom arrived at its alleged lack of viewpoint diversity in his opinion?Report

              16. which in turn is having a demonstrable negative impact on audience size and composition because of both the way stories are selected and reported

                It’s not just that. Here, let me copy and paste part of what you copied and pasted:

                no one in a C-suite or upper management position has chosen to deal with the lack of viewpoint diversity at NPR and how that affects our journalism.

                “Our journalism”.

                Like, he sees that as impacting the journalism.

                It’s not the negative impact on the reporting that is, in turn, impacting the audience size and composition.

                It’s that the lack of viewpoint diversity in the newsroom is impacting the journalism itself.

                As if the journalism was an end in itself.

                Like there’s some higher principle to what journalism is and ought to be.Report

              17. “Like there’s some higher principle to what journalism is and ought to be.”

                I don’t think this is quite the right criticism. The new journalists do have a higher principle — it’s just a different one than the older crew’s. Similar to what’s happened at universities, the new principle is activist — basically the attitude “we know what’s right, and it’s our job to change the world to match”.Report

              18. But that echoes what Berliner’s criticism happens to be.

                Berliner believes that journalism should be some weird “telling people what happened” thing. The Five Double-Us.

                The new folks are the ones who understand that we need to use the institutional capital that “journalism” has built up and *SPEND IT*.

                And different people have different people about whether that’s happening.

                Berliner thinks it is.
                Others think that it’s kind of racist to notice.Report

              19. I’m glad Jaybird and Dark Matter jumped in on this. I felt like our conversation wasn’t going anywhere. I noticed that your sixth statement of the thesis was very different from previous ones, and I should have been able to follow up on that, but I messed up earlier by using the word “diversity”.

                There’s a world of difference between genetic or identity types of diversity and viewpoint diversity. Berliner distinguished between them – he actually never talked about the identity diversity within the newsroom. But you don’t distinguish between them. So in your earlier descriptions of the article you phrased it as “old white men” or whatever, then in this one you phrased it as diversity, and that gives you the freedom to pivot between ideology and race/sex stuff as if they’re the same thing.Report

              20. I think there’s a bit more nuance on this point that would have me push back a little bit on both ends. Diversity of viewpoint and people has a certain value to it. But it’s less valuable than things like merit, accuracy, evidentiary basis, and strength of ideas and argument. It would not be valuable for NPR to entertain QAnon ideas, or assertions that climate change is a hoax, or that the 2020 election was rigged, even if doing so would increase viewpoint diversity. While different these are poorly substantiated viewpoints, low on logic and evidence and therefore low on value.

                Of course similar types of criticisms apply to racial and ethnic diversity, particularly the highly cynical version of it that prevails in any number of institutions. On an org chart or power point someone like Claudine Gay at a superficial level looks no different than any other black woman, and that allows for a checking of a box suggesting a certain type of background and cultural diversity. But the reality is that she’s the daughter of extremely well to do immigrants from the Caribbean, and while almost certainly a descendant of slaves has virtually nothing in common with the average black American she’s treated as somehow representing. The similarity is literally skin deep. I only mention her because she’s a recent example but the upper echelons of media and academia are full of this kind of ‘diversity’ even if 2 seconds of research will show it’s mostly sleight of hand.

                Anyway point being there are real limits to diversity and treating it as the end all be all. We don’t need diversity of stupid ideas and the value of diversity of skin tone in the upper echelons of elite society is grossly overstated. It’s all become a kind of joke and a type of intellectual laziness that’s embedded itself in far too many places.Report

              21. OK, for ease of conversation, let’s refer to Q-Anon, 2020 election rigging, and the claim that climate change is a hoax as “bailey”, and Russian collusion, the Hunter Biden laptop, and covid origin theories as “motte”.Report

              22. Happily conceded.

                To me the most concerning part of the Berliner essay was the assertion that they were uncritically taking the word of Adam Schiff. Which certainly doesn’t mean Adam Schiff is wrong about everything, but a core journalistic principle should be willingness to scrutinize the claims of an elected official.

                But I still think it’s fair to ask how much right of center criticism of media bias doesn’t come down to something like failure to take seriously the weakest and or craziest conservative ideas. In the era of the MAGA/Trumpified GOP I think that’s a very fair counterpoint. It’s not like we’re talking Jack Kemp or even W Bush in terms of mainstream conservative ideas and perspectives getting short shrift.Report

              23. Which is the nut of it.
                The goal of journalism is to report on objective facts as facts, not opinion.

                And one big objective fact is that Donald Trump and the MAGA movement is a threat to democracy.

                Any news organization which presents him as merely a normal politician with eclectic ideas is telling a lie.Report

              24. The goal of journalism is to report on objective facts as facts, not opinion.

                Yes, agreed.

                And one big objective fact is that Donald Trump and the MAGA movement is a threat to democracy.

                No, this is a conclusion, not a “fact”. It’s a correct conclusion for various reasons that could and should be presented.

                The conclusion, that he really shouldn’t be in office, should be left to the listener. The “facts” should be presented. That includes his behavior on 1/7, the fake electors, the various legal issues he faces, and so on.Report

              25. You need to explain why this conclusion is not a fact.

                It is an objective fact that he actively tried to overthrow a free and fair election.
                And further it is an objective fact that he shows every intent of doing it again if it doesn’t go his way.

                Neither one of these is an argument or opinion, but simple observable facts.Report

              26. Go look up the definition of a “fact”.

                The moment we need to say “from this evidence I make conclusions”, then we’ve left the realm of “facts”.

                Trump being unfit for office is an opinion.

                Similarly putting a fox in a hen house being a bad idea also isn’t a fact no mater how foreseeable the outcome is.Report

              27. Given that definition, things like “The earth is round” or “It is raining today” or “The House passed a bill today” are conclusions not facts.Report

              28. No. Facts are facts, and conclusions are conclusions.

                In order to conclude that Trump is a threat to democracy we need to make predictions about his future behavior.

                Predictions about the future are mostly opinions and predictions about behavior even more so.

                This is an opinion, it’s one I share, but it’s a conclusion and not a “fact”. All foxes aren’t homicidal chicken killers even if that’s the way to bet.Report

              29. It’s not like we’re talking Jack Kemp or even W Bush in terms of mainstream conservative ideas and perspectives getting short shrift.

                It’s the liberal white elephants that NPR is avoiding.

                For example I heard a news report that Biden’s White House is thinking about bringing back “all men can be assumed to be guilty of sex crimes” as part of Title 9 for colleges again.

                If this is true, then it deserves more attention than it’s getting, and I hear silence from NPR.

                After that we have, Biden’s treatment of immigrants, whether his policies fueled inflation, DEI being fueled by ideology and not facts, and so on.Report

              30. Hey I come at the matter of NPR and similar issues as a liberal critic of the flavor(s) of faddish, illiberal leftism I see underlying this stuff. But I don’t think that’s true of, say, Chris Rufo, or really anyone in the larger conservative media ecosystem. It can be a lonely place on the internet but not really anywhere else.Report

              33. InMD I think what I’m conceding is that mainstream conservatism is in a really bad place right now.

                The parties are multifactional. Every now and then the parties reshuffle their core factions.

                Trump went big time populism. He added unions and the xenophobes to Team Red but he didn’t have a place for economic conservatism.

                So mainstream conservatism may be in the process of becoming swing voters after having been kicked out of Team Red. They might even end up joining Team Blue.

                This is over and above the issue that journalism is in a bad place. NPR is just a reflection of that.Report

              34. Definition of “Tantrum” : an uncontrolled outburst of anger and frustration

                His prescribed solution was to rehire those voices, even when rehiring them meant more old white men in the news room. That’s it in a nutshell, isn’t it?

                You are stating all conservatives are old white men. That Blacks and the young can’t be Conservatives.

                the amount and depth and breadth of coverage of conservative viewpoints hasn’t much changed in the NPR broadcast sphere.

                Why would you say that?Report

              35. “the amount and depth and breadth of coverage of conservative viewpoints hasn’t much changed in the NPR broadcast sphere.”

                That statement is not my experience. I listed to NPR up until about 2022 and regularly listened to it during my hour long commute for over 25 years. I listened to them move slowly from a more neutral presentation of the news to a much more liberal position. It was obvious.Report

              38. If you can duplicate the internal structure of something, it’s very likely you understand its internal structure. I have to think he used the term “word salad” as well as “tantrum” almost randomly, to express disrespect. He could have said that they were oversalted. Which kind of makes them one-word word salad.Report

              41. Ah yes, we are back to your theory of the mind discussions.

                You assume because I didn’t agree with his perspective, and don’t agree with his conclusions I don’t see why he’d be where he is.

                What you keep whistling by is that I think he’s wrong. Not that he didn’t see things a certain way. Or I didn’t see things a certain way. He’s wrong. On the facts. And he pitched a tantrum.Report

              42. You assume because I didn’t agree with his perspective, and don’t agree with his conclusions I don’t see why he’d be where he is.

                No, you misunderstand.

                That is *NOT* my criticism.

                He’s wrong. On the facts. And he pitched a tantrum.

                Perhaps you meant to use all caps? Because you’re not making an argument. Just repeating your assertions. All caps might help with that.Report

              43. I think I’m dealing with someone like that right now.

                Like, you ask Phillip if he is capable of seeing things from other’s perspective, then literally minutes later, you note that he doesn’t see things the way you do, and conclude he must be blind.Report

              44. No, it’s not that he doesn’t agree with me. There are plenty of people who don’t agree with me.

                It’s that he can’t see how someone else might look at what Berliner did and see someone working to make things better.

                Can *I* imagine someone who looks at Berliner’s actions and sees a megalomaniacal jerk who threw a tantrum? Sure. I’m pretty sure I’m imagining one right now.

                But I disagree with that take.

                I disagree with it because it doesn’t have the explanatory power of actually reading his essay and taking it somewhere in the ballpark of face value.

                Where he was not throwing a tantrum.
                But, instead, doing something in service to higher principles (and principles that are legible to others… or, at least, there are others that claim that the principles are legible to them).

                Do you see the difference between “not agreeing with person X” and “not seeing how someone could hold the position that person X claims to be holding”?

                I can explain it at length, if you like.Report

              49. But you have denied that as a possibility. Blocking traffic is a perfect example of a tantrum, but you denied that it’s a tantrum on only one specified basis: that it was altruistic.Report

              50. A tantrum by definition is an individual selfish act. A Protest – such as blocking traffic, or crossing the Edmund Pettis Bridge – is an altruistic act undertaken by multiple people with a united objective.Report

              51. Then you can’t say “I have yet to see a person pitch a tantrum, for altruistic reasons.”

                ETA: At least, you shouldn’t say that without admitting that you deny the possibility of it. Also, that’s not the definition of a tantrum.Report

              52. That is not the dictionary definition of tantrum.

                A tantrum is “an uncontrolled outburst of anger and frustration, typically in a small child”.

                Those protester might be “altruistic” but they fit the definition better than the reporter.Report

  14. San Francisco District Attorney Not Chesa Boudin has released a statement about the bridge protest from the other day.

    On top of that, she wants you to know:

    If you were trapped on the Golden Gate Bridge on 4/15/24, please contact
    @CHPMarin
    w/ a statement detailing what happened to you + contact info so you can be alleged as a victim.

    You may be entitled to restitution + have other victim rights guaranteed under Marsy’s law.

    What the hell is Marsy’s Law?

    I suppose I can google that. Oh.

    Marsy’s Law ensures that victims of crime have equal, constitutional rights on the same level as those accused and convicted of crimes.

    Have they even done a study as to whether this will have disparate impact?!?Report

  15. Secret Russian foreign policy document urges action to weaken the U.S.

    The academic, Vladimir Zharikhin, called for Russia to “continue to facilitate the coming to power of isolationist right-wing forces in America,” “enable the destabilization of Latin American countries and the rise to power of extremist forces on the far left and far right there”…Report

  16. Monday Republicans: “Its slander to suggest we support the 1864 law on abortion!”

    Tuesday Republicans: “Ummm…about that…”Report

  18. Expanding on my comment above, the Gaza protests and Trumpists are each testing the limits of our media and norms on speech.

    For as long as everyone here has been alive, it was easy and cost-free to adhere to the idea of free speech absolutism, that all viewpoints deserve a fair and respectful hearing.

    I say cost-free because the range of viewpoints always had boundaries, but they were most often hidden behind social stigma.
    That is, you didn’t see people openly calling for the destruction of Israel or a permanent dictator, because social stigma kept these sorts of people safely marginalized.

    But now they aren’t. The fences are down and the raptor are running free, and there is the very real possibility that one or both of these viewpoints could become policy.

    At some point the hidden boundaries need to become visible.Report

    2. Considering the current political moment, I don’t think we are going to come to an agreement on what the boundaries are at all. On the other blog, there were people who should know better who defended Jodi Dean, after previously calling for Amy Wax to be stripped of tenure, and are being really disingenuous with some of the more shockingly overt anti-Semitism from the Gaza protestors because their political priors are generally both against Israel and for academics. I’m pretty sure that the people on the Right won’t agree to things that bind Trumpists even if they also bind the Further Left that they hate.

      The hidden boundaries of the past worked because there were gatekeepers with enforcement powers and the gatekeepers were in general agreement on what was or was not permitted in the mainstream and what had to be regulated to spaces normies deemed couck-coo land like universities or small radical organizations. Now the gatekeepers are gone and a lot of people decided they aren’t going to follow the leads of the gatekeepers anymore.Report

    3. The Israel-Hamas War is having a much bigger domestic impact than any previously flare up in my life. There were previous tensions on campus or elsewhere but nothing like this matter. Now there is a lot more overt Left anti-Semitism directed against American or other Diaspora Jews from different groups of Pro-Palestinian activists and organizations in the United States. Like the blood libel imagery used against Erwin Chereminsky is something new. There are lots of other similar incidents that just simply did not happen in the past conflicts. This is shocking to many American Jews because this the first time they are encountering Left anti-Semitism and also because the Simchat Torah massacre was so big, it is incomprehensible to many of us on how people can celebrate it or pretend it didn’t happen.Report

      1. is something new

        It’s not new. It has been normalized over the past couple of decades.

        it is incomprehensible to many of us on how people can celebrate it or pretend it didn’t happen.

        What do you think “decolonization” meant? Papers? Vibes? Essays?Report

      2. I admit there is a tendency of liberals to harbor the Secret Disney Liberal view of the Palestinian protestors, the way many did about the Trumpists.

        “Surely, they are just using hyperbole! Surely they can’t mean what it sounds like!”

        But if we use the same metric of Palestinian protesters as we use for the Charlottesville Na.zis, that is, taking them at face value we have to conclude that there needs to be a break between liberals and them.

        ETA : Recall when I asked once if we were open to the idea that nearly half of the American electorate would willingly vote for an open fascist I got a lot of pushback.Report

        2. Some of the more darkly comedic comments is when you get a Western Pro-Palestinian activist saying something like “we favor a democratic multicultural secular Palestine.” My internal mental response is “that’s great but you aren’t the Palestinian leadership on the ground and none of them are saying anything like you are saying.” I really don’t know how Palestinian leadership can say things very clearly and it just goes in one activist ear and gets scrambled around to something that Nelson Mandela would say when it goes out the other ear.Report

        3. I ran into a Pro-Palestinian protest today in Palo Alto. They were just going up and down the main drag chanting slogans like “Israel is a terrorist state” or “We are all Palestinians.” I lost it a bit and shouldn’t back at them “No we fishing aren’t.” A local woman, an Asian-American with a young son, remarked that she finds them to be super annoying to and doesn’t like how high school students skip class to join them. They just can’t deal with any other interpretation besides their own. I sometimes wonder what would happen if they encounter a person wearing an Israel T-shirt. Would they be able to control themselves or would things just get out of hand fast because they could not.Report

          1. Hamas propaganda, often repeated by the UN and/or various news sources, says Israel is committing genocide. Every time a bomb goes off it only kills children and Israel is doing this deliberately.

            This would be seriously inflaming even if they don’t believe Jews shouldn’t be there in the first place.Report

            1. Yeah, well nobody has any idea what to do about Hamas. They just keep in their unwavering demands and too many people take what they say at face value. Iran is the same. The great strength of the anti-Semites is that they know they outnumber Jews and can just raise their hand in blood thirsty defiance forever. Nobody will do anything about it ever.Report

              1. If we’re going to use WW2 standards and consider Hamas Islamic Na.zis, then what to do about them is obvious.

                Make them lose the war. No matter how many civilians die. No matter how much squeaking there is. Then occupy Gaza, rebuild without the Na.zis infrastructure and reeducate the population for 20 years.

                That “infrastructure” includes any “charity” or UN group that is educating them that the Right of Return is a thing.

                Problems:
                1) No one wants to occupy Gaza and deal with the security issues that will instantly happen.
                2) The hostages will mostly die.
                3) More brutal war in getting there and more claims of genocide.

                It would be a lot easier to just drive them into Egypt and let the Egyptians kill them when they either try to overthrow the government or otherwise showcase that they’re terrorists.Report

    4. Most of the crackdowns are against things that aren’t speech. As they should be. We need to get away from this dumb idea that things like vandalism and denying people the use of their own property or public property are okay when they’re done for the purpose of advancing some kind of political agenda.

      I don’t want to hear another word about content restrictions until time, place, and manner restrictions are properly enforced.Report

  20. You know, I was going to have some wine tomorrow but maybe I’ll have it tonight:

    Report

  21. Someone just set themselves on fire in front of Trump’s trial.

    Personally, I infinitely prefer this form of protest to murder/suicide. I say that without irony or sarcasm or anything like that.Report

  22. Life under Republican rule:

    WASHINGTON (AP) — One woman miscarried in the lobby restroom of a Texas emergency room as front desk staff refused to check her in. Another woman learned that her fetus had no heartbeat at a Florida hospital, the day after a security guard turned her away from the facility. And in North Carolina, a woman gave birth in a car after an emergency room couldn’t offer an ultrasound. The baby later died.
    …
    Pregnant patients have “become radioactive to emergency departments” in states with extreme abortion restrictions, said Sara Rosenbaum, a George Washington University health law and policy professor.

    “They are so scared of a pregnant patient, that the emergency medicine staff won’t even look. They just want these people gone,” Rosenbaum said.
    https://apnews.com/article/pregnancy-emergency-care-abortion-supreme-court-roe-9ce6c87c8fc653c840654de1ae5f7a1c

    The Party Of Life, y’all.Report

    1. This is a Work-To-Rule protest. It’ll be useful to remember the next time doctors start telling us about how we ought to listen to them because they really care about their patients.Report

      1. I guess that’s why Republicans are filing a lawsuit to force hospitals like Sacred Heart to provide emergency care, including abortions.

        Oh wait, I’m getting a correction…Report

  24. Ukraine aid passes the house, along with a lot of other aid. What is especially delightful is that it has been passed as an amendment to the Senate Ukraine aid bill- which means when it goes back to the Senate it gets an up/down vote- no worries about cloture. That means that, unless the bill suffers a defection of 27 republicans AND two dems from its previous support, it’s going to pass this week.

    I’ve been uncertain about Bidens low key approach to a lot of this stuff but it seems like he can, eventually, get things that he needs and have broad based support through congress with this approach so perhaps greater confidence is warranted.

    Putin must be furious.Report

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