So, the DoD has delete their page about Medal of Honor winner Charles Calvin Rodgers. If you search for 'Charles Calvin Rodgers site:defense.gov' on duckduckgo, you'll see where it's supposed to be as the first result, which is this:
This now (Very slowly in my browser?) redirects to almost the same US, but the last part is now: /deimedal-of-honor-monday-army-maj-gen-charles-calvin-rogers/ Which doesn't actually seem to exist, so weird redirect.
But he's apparently a DEI Medal of Honor! Let's check the Wayback for what the page used to say about his DEI Medal of Honor:
Rogers ran through a hail of exploding shells to rally his dazed crewmen into firing their howitzers back at the much larger enemy. Despite being hit by an exploding round, he led some of those men in a ground battle against enemy soldiers who'd breached the howitzer's position. Rogers was again wounded during that foray, but he continued fighting, killing several enemy soldiers and driving the rest back.
Rogers refused medical attention and instead worked to get the defensive perimeter set back up.
When more enemy troops poured through a different section of the defensive line, Rogers directed that artillery fire, too, and led another successful counterattack on the charging forces, encouraging his men throughout the difficult endeavor.
At dawn, the enemy tried to overrun the base a third time, so Rogers continued directing his unit's fire. He even joined a struggling howitzer crew after several men were hit by enemy fire and the gun had been rendered inoperable. Rogers helped the crew get the massive gun operating again, but in doing so, he was hit a third time. He could no longer physically help his men, but he continued to direct and encourage them.
Rogers' valor helped push back the enemy that day, which finally retreated for good. Twelve U.S. soldiers died and dozens more were wounded; however, Army records show that the casualties on the enemy's side were much higher.
I'm not entirely sure what people are calling DEI these days, but...I don't think that's it. Is there something else...got a bridge named after him...given a Medal of Honor by President Nixon, Nixon doesn't sound very DEI...man, I am completely baffled. I wonder if it's this first sentence:
From the 1950's to the 1980's, a lot changed in America and abroad, and Army Maj. Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers served through all of it. As a Black man, he worked for gender and race equality while in the service.
You know what? This is probably more malicious compliance.
The protesters weren’t disrupting the University over settlements, they were upset the Jews won’t tolerate terrorism and were fighting a war.
The protest was literally over the fact that the university was investing in companies that profited off the conflict.
You can't just invent what the protests were over. And, also, protests of a university are about the behavior _of the university_. People do understand that, right? When someone protests an entity, it's because they want _that specific entity_ to do something different. Otherwise, it's just a rally.
We have an actual list of demands...which no one seems to have bothered to reprint and the websites removed, so let me instead like to the _response_ to these demands, where it's made extremely clear everyone understands what the protestors are asking for:
I don’t see why the openly genocidal Palestinians should be assumed to have good intentions.
But you're fine with the openly genocidal Israeli government, which is literally, at this very moment, talking to other countries about removing Palestinians from Gaza?
Urban warfare is “genocide” if Jews do it, but not if anyone else does.
Urban warfare is extremely prone to causing violence against civilians, a fact which is very well know. Which is why almost no country actually does it, and the ones that do generally don't use any of the sort of tactics Israel does, like long-range bombing, and instead focus more on close-quarter battles.
The ones that do bombing like that are places like _Syria_. Which, last I checked, was also roundly condemned for it.
Israel shouldn’t be an ethnostate because ethnostates are bad, however all non-Jewish ethnostates get a pass.
Get a pass from _who_? Who do you think are defending ethnostates? Which ones?
Saudi Arabia? Do you think it's the _left_ saying that we should work with Saudi Arabia?
And you do understand there is a difference between an ethnostate as a general concept, and one that is _actively holds territory containing people it does not extend rights to_, right?
Do you know what the last ethnostate like that was? Apartheid South Africa. And if you look into for ten second, you might realize it's the same people defending Israel, and that Israel itself was a huge defender of that place. In fact, Israel is the reason it took so long to do anything about that place!
Israel should put up with terrorism that non-Jews would never tolerate.
Dude, Islamic terrorists have killed, over the specific issue of Israel, more _Americans_ than Israelis in the past 25 years. They killed more on a single day! Granted, the US is larger so that's proportionally less.
But you know, here's the list of a general estimate of how much terrorism effects a country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Terrorism_Index
You'll notice Israel is second (Now, after Oct 7th), but you'll also notice how many other countries are within spitting distance. Plenty of people who have much more restrained behavior, along with some psychopaths we don't have anything to do with or don't even have functional countries. (Does anyone even know what's going on in Burkina Faso?)
Do you know where Israel was _before_ Oct 7th? It was below the US. For 2022, we were 28th, they were 30th.
It almost feels like the level of terrorism couldn't actually justify any of their behavior at that point.
Israel is expected to deal with a generational Right to Return.
It really is amazing how people do not understand 'Abstract demands that exist as a resistance rally point and are used as opening for negotiation' are not the same as 'things people would actually need done to accept something'.
I have pointed out before how general cries of protest are interpreted as explicit demands by Palestine in a way that _literally no others are_. The same way that general talk of having a struggle against people is a holy war, because we've decided not to translate the word jihad so that being in a fight is called being in a jihad and literally all fighters are 'jihadists' And we've apparently completely decided to just invent a new meaning of martyr, despite that being an English word.
Waving keys around and talking about reclaim houses is a _rallying cry_, in the same way that 'pry my gun from my cold death hands' or 'give me liberty or give me death' is. 'Remember the Alamo' on Texas license plates is not a battlecry to go kill Mexicans, one hopes. And talking about 'continuing the fight' is not demanding violence.
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Anyway, Israel is not 'expected' to actually let people return. What is expected is that the right of return will be used as _concessions_ in negotiation. That Israel will go 'We won't give you back your houses, instead we will pay for new houses' or something like that. And maybe, allow some small symbolic return of very historic communities it uprooted, or even trade some land and call that 'returning'.
But that would only work if Israel was, at any point, trying to fix this situation. They are perfectly happen with this situation, because allows them to continue their plans to end up with all of what they consider as their birthright.
Zionism is the idea that the Jews should have a country. Ergo anti-Zionism is the idea that they shouldn’t, i.e. Israel should be destroyed as a Jewish state.
Zionism is still an active political idea, not something that happened decades ago and finished. It is a political philosophy that is constantly taking land in the West Bank. It is what drives the illegal settlements. Do you think people have a right to oppose that political philosophy?
Also, 'destroyed' is doing an insane amount of work there. It's very interesting how you had to qualify the destruction 'as a Jewish state'.
Governments govern by consent of the governed. The concern should be protecting right of minorities, not demanding the ability to exclude entire sections of the population because they will vote wrong, but having control over them anyway via occupation and imprisonment.
Israel can either choose to be a democracy over the entire area (Which will probably peacefully vote to change it in a lot of ways), or they can withdraw to areas that only has the people they want in them.
That seems seriously antisemitic on the face of it,
The idea that opposing the nation of Israel is antisemitic assigns the goals and behavior of Israel to the Jewish people as a whole.
and that’s without the real world likelihood that it would require a second holocaust.
I find it interesting how we can't call an actual thing that is happening to people a genocide, but somehow it's fine to call a totally imaginary thing that isn't even close to happening a holocaust.
I’ve pointed this out on this thread before that many of the “arguments” used against Israel are never used against non-Jews.
Let me guess. You're going to bring up examples of small population replacements that happened and _ended_. Aka, you're going to try to justify the Nakba. Which was a bunch of violence and isn't really the same thing as a war settlement, but, sure, let's pretend it was the same. Let's pretend that should been the end of it. Indeed, that's the difference. Those _ended_.
You know, a thing that _could_ have happened at any point after 1967 after Israel found itself occupying Palestine? Israel could have said 'Okay, line drawn here, and we're gone'...and no, before you start talking terrorism, it took a good two decades for Palestinians to ramped up to even throwing-rocks-at-soldiers levels of violence, the first Intifada, in 1987. And that started because Israel refused to leave and was settling the place and talking, very openly, about how the entire area was theirs.
Or, alternately, Israel could have simply declared that entire area was Israel, in 1967. I honestly doubt anyone would have done anything about it. Jordan did the same thing a decade earlier with the West Bank and no one did. No country really owned that land, there was no one to say no. People would have grumbled, but it would have quickly disappeared.
But...that would have let all those Palestinians vote. Which Zionism does not allow.
That's what Zionism is. It requires a _Jewish_ state, which requires a Jewish majority so that the Jewishness of the state cannot change by democracy, but it also claims, via mythos, ownership of an territorial area that _is not majority Jewish_. There's no way to square that circle. Except by removing some of the non-Jews.
That's that side that requires a holocaust, or at least ethnic cleansing. The other side is just a democracy.
Columbia is not punishing the students for what they’ve said, just for the things that are normally illegal. Almost like the things which are normally illegal are still illegal, even if you call it “speech”.
What Columbia is doing is completely legal and entirely within their rights as a private university. What they are doing probably would be legal even if they were a public university, but as a private university, it certainly is legal. I don't particularly think it's a _good_ idea, but it is certainly something they are allowed to do. (Although I do think it might actually be good idea to have laws that stop universities from refusing to confirm already-issued degrees, because that seems ripe for abuse and extortion. But there are no such laws, I just think they'd be good to have.)
The problem is what the Trump administration is demanding they do under the threat of the Federal government.
Including, perhaps, some of what Columbia just did because of those demands.
It's one thing for Columbia to do things because of their own free will, it's another to do things because they were extorted into it by the unconstitutional actions of the Trump administration. It's fair to not only complain about the Federal government doing that, but Columbia, a respected university with a long history of protests that they pretend they are proud of, caving to that without a whimper.
That said, we do not know if what they just did _was_ due to the Trump administration. We're just sorta guessing on that. It very much looks like it due to the timing, but extremely bad timing does sometimes happen.
Oh, is that the case? Man, I sure hope that a precedent wasn’t set earlier! It might result in absolutely *ZERO* sympathy!
Jaybird, you say sh*t like this assuming people know what the f*ck you're talking about, but no one ever does, because the thing you have linked it to when you evidentially end up having to explain is _extremely obviously_ not the same thing at all.
I am getting extremely tired of these conversations with you where you have to be repeatedly prompted to say what you mean. Something like half your posts here are implications that NO ONE FOLLOWS.
“Guys, why are you insisting on using the same rules we insisted on when we won the argument last time?”
Pointing out that public universities are not the exact same thing as 'the government' and thus can restrict certain things for proper functioning and safety with rules is not the same thing as _the actual government_ demanding they restrict things like that under the threat of legal punishment.
And none of that is the same thing as the Federal government making demands of private university.
Also, and I know everyone here is used to the quiet parts being said quietly, but that's not happening anymore, because we've move from crypto-fascism to open fascism. So they're just straight up it's about speech. Literally just saying that.
Read the bulleted item there about anti-"Zionist" discrimination, and tell me if you agree that is something that the government can demand a _private organization_ take the position of and enforce upon students.
The beatings will continue until morale improves. Going to war with their students is possibly the stupidest thing Columbia could possibly do.
Incidentally, weird how no one seems to be talking about the implications of the Federal Government forcing a private university to punish students, because the Federal Government objected to the speech of those students.
I remind people, the government has no ability to demand a private organization punish people for violating the law. That would be utterly insane, on top of violating freedom of association.
We can sidestep the question here of to what extent Columbia _could_ punish speech, a thing that gets blurry at private universities, because we all agree they can punish actual crimes like vandalism and trespass. Hell, I think it's reasonable to punish those things even if there is no criminal convictions.
But I also I think we can all agree that they can _choose not to_ punish those things, and the government has no right to interfere, including no right to extort them with government money until they do. If the government wishes to punish students for that, they can (and did) charge them with crimes.
This is on top of the fact that the government is clearly doing this because of the content of the _speech_ and openly admits as much, claiming the problem is antisemitism. And I'm just going sidestep the whole discussion as to if it actually was antisemitism was by pointing out that the Federal government has _absolutely no power_ to punish antisemitic speech, and in fact is constitutionally barred from doing so, just like it is barred from punishing all speech. And it certainly doesn't have the power to extort private entities into punishing it!
This used to be something that a lot of people here worried about, how public universities would have codes of conduct that stopped this sort of thing, and it was pointed out that public universities are not really 'the government', they are organizations that happen to owned by the government but have to have the same sort of rules as any sort of housing and workplaces and education, general rules about harassment and safety and things.
Yes, I get what you were talking about, how Kash's tweet was received. I was pointing out how manipulative it was to start with.
It failed at accomplishing anything, but only because the the Republican base is sorta on a hilarious tangent that I hope they continue to be on. Please, Republicans on Twitter, keep insisting that the Trump administration do something it cannot possible do, because there is no real 'list' that hasn't been released. (I have no idea why anyone thinks there is going to be some actual itemized documentation of 'People who have taken advantage of Epstein's underaged girls'.)
But I'm allowed to point out propaganda, even if it completely fails due to unrelated things. Especially since it actually did make it outside of Twitter, it's all over the far-right news.
And yes, it's nice that people are not falling for it and still pointing out the Epstein stuff, but I felt I had to point out this incredibly obvious manipulation being done by the press, where 'US government employee arrested for completely unrelated fraud done to the government' is being used to help Trump's dismantling of government and vague allegations of fraud within the government.
Honestly, look the wording that Jaybird just used: FEMA fraud.
Why would anyone talk about 'defrauding FEMA' in that incredibly ambiguous way? Imagine if I said we need to defund the police and said there had been an example of 'cop murder', by which I actually meant killing a cop.
I like how you, and presumably everyone you read, phrased 'Director at Customs and Border Protection being arrested for FEMA fraud'. This has absolutely nothing to do with fraud _in_ the government, and is just someone _defrauding_ the government who happens to also work for the government. But people are happy yo imply otherwise.
And before you say 'They're not implying that', I will point out a trivial search on my part found there were three others literally charged with the same thing this week, announced at the same time, including one that did literally the same thing of defrauding FEMA for temporary living expenses for a house that was not destroyed:
Yet for some mysterious reason, it's this one person that is getting all the press. It's the only one _you_ even know about, because you are hooked directly into right-wing pipelines. And that's because she works for the government, and people can imply this is something to do with finding fraud in the government, despite the fact it is not.
The sheer amount of people who have confidently predicted that Trump will not do exactly what he has repeated said he would do, and still have jobs after he has done that thing, is amazing. You truly cannot fail at your actual One Job in quite a lot of high-paying jobs that exist almost entirely to make predictions.
For everyone saying 'But he didn't do it the first time he was in office', yeah, and there were literally books written about how a bunch of people constantly had to stop him from doing those disastrous/illegal/horrific things.
And I'm not talking just about the market. I'm talking about _everything_.
Everything Trump is doing now he tried to do the first term, _except_ some of the stuff that Heritage Foundation lined up with Project 2025 when they realized that Trump was an idiot and was willing to do almost anything people asked him to do in the right way. Other than that stuff, which hadn't been properly written down yet, and some of the Elon-specific stuff, there is absolutely nothing now that he didn't _attempt_ to do back then.
Which means we should probably start taking serious the stuff he tried to do back then but hasn't tried yet. Like ordering the military to shoot protestors. (Don't worry, he's going to have them shoot at their knees.) Or suspending the election or all the dozens of ways he plotted to stay in office before finally settling on the convoluted plan of 'Attempt to pretend there is confusion about electoral votes to throw the election to the House, while declaring martial law and attempt to frame antifa for the disorder in Washington'. (People _really_ do not understand just how lucky we got that the left and antifa and everyone realized that trying to counterprotest what Trump was doing Jan 6th was a trap, and didn't show up at all.)
The Trump administration attempted to be utterly lawless and extreme fascistic last time they were in power, and _literally a bunch of random Republican politicians_ in the Cabinet and around him in other ways saved the day and stopped him. It's why he fired so many, it's why half of them wrote books afterward. Career political Republicans talking about 'Yeah, Trump was constantly trying to do illegal things and under no circumstances should be president'. Ant one of which should be a career-ending scandal in politics if the media would just pay attention to it.
And yet somehow...we are all constantly very surprised when he attempts the same thing this time, and this time, the people to stop him aren't there.
Actually, let me clarify: When I say 'Can be challenged in court', what I mean is 'This has to be proven in court'.
Khalil doesn't have to affirmatively challenge it and force them to go to court, there already will be a hearing, in court, to verify this determination made by the Secretary of State.
Often those hearings are so pro-forma that they barely happen, because (idiotically) people in them have no right to a court-appointed lawyer(1), so often barely understand what is going on. But they do exist, and Khalil does have a lawyer.
1) Please note there are organizations who will represent these people for free, at least enough to present some options to them, but the fascists that are ICE (and the police used to be this way before Miranda), will not bother to _inform_ anyone of their rights.
“serious adverse foreign policy consequences” could be defined as “pissing off an ally we want to maintain good relations with” in my opinion.
So here's the actual rule:
An alien whose entry or proposed activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is inadmissible.
But there's an exception that applies
An alien, not described in clause (ii), shall not be excludable or subject to restrictions or conditions on entry into the United States under clause (i) because of the alien’s past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations, if such beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United States, unless the Secretary of State personally determines that the alien’s admission would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.
So, to explain that: There's two different thresholds there that are similar. The first is much easier to reach, and can be done automatically across an entire group of people, and is probably meant to apply when 'People from X being in the country' or whatever could hypothetically present some foreign policy consequence. This is a very low bar that just requires a vague 'belief'.
This also can apply to specific people and things they do specifically, but _only_ when there are no 1st amendment issues. It doesn't say the words 1st amendment explicitly, but that's what 'beliefs, statements, or associations' would be. It's actually hard to think of a good example of this. Like...you could deport Superman under it, I guess, assuming he was otherwise legal. It's pretty easy to believe that his existence would have foreign policy implications.
But, there's an exception when there are 1st amendment issues, which would be here, because the issue is his speech and association. That requires the Secretary of State to determine that it would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.
The phrase 'would compromise' (not 'believe', but 'would' actually compromise) is important. What he does has to actually do it, or be demonstrated that it will, not that someone vaguely believes it can.
The phrase 'compelling...government interest' is equally important, and a lot of people just realized that phrasing (Which I bet people recognize) was secretly in there...and not only does it have to be a compelling government interest, which narrows things down, it has to be one about _foreign policy_, which narrows it down even more. It cannot, for example, be a 'compelling government interest' to allow students to attend and freely move about Colombia University, or to allow Colombia to invest money where it wants.
The exception then goes on to state that that 'the Secretary of State must notify on a timely basis the chairmen of the Committees on the Judiciary and Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives and of the Committees on the Judiciary and Foreign Relations of the Senate of the identity of the alien and the reasons for the determination.'
Moreover, this determination can be challenged in immigration court. (Actually, all this can, but if the determination didn't trigger the exception, all that would accomplish is requiring the State Department to prove it 'believes' something.)
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...also, kind of important: This rational for deporting Khalil means he not alleged to have commented a crime. And did not violate his immigration status. There's literally no wrongdoing asserted here, just that his (apparently entirely legal) actions have impacted US foreign policy to the extent the US government wishes him removed. Which they can do possibly do, we'll see what the immigration court says, but it's insane they think they can _arrest_ him for 'We have decided that we don't like you and don't want you here anymore'. Tell him, schedule him in front of a court, and then if he refuses to attend the court or then refuses to leave if he court says he has to go, at _that_ point you can arrest him.
But immigration law has always been extremely fascist, and I'm not sure they can't do what they did. I'm just saying it's absurd if they can.
Yeah, it sure is amazing how all the people talking about how trans people should compromise over 'sports' do not seem to notice how Republicans will literally take anti-trans bills as far as they can, and in fact openly and explicitly wish to outlaw being trans.
Did he protest in support of 10/7, or just in opposition to the then ongoing genocide? Do you have evidence he specifically supported the former? The Columbia protests were explicitly about the genocide, not 10/7.
I mean, technically speaking, no, they were about not any behavior of Israel.
I'm sure protestors were saying things about Israel's behavior, but the actual protests, the demands of the protestors, were explicitly about the fact that Colombia, a private school, was investing money in companies that benefited from the situation in Israel, or even were funding what was happening.
Those were the demands of the protest, that a private school stop doing actions with their investments.
This may seem a technical distinction, but it does matter if we start hypothesizing where the line of 'supporting terrorism' is. Because 'You, a private company, are doing crappy things and I'm protesting you until you stop', is...well, let's just say that it's hard to distinguish that from civil-rights sit-in. That's basically all protests.
So there's basically two choices:
Either the act of organizing the protest of Colombia (Not Israel, not US foreign policy, but _Colombia_) itself is what he's being punished for. Aka, protests are illegal. (And before anyone says 'No, only ones that do illegal things', please spend like fifteen seconds googling how easy it is for the police to make a protest 'illegal' by randomly defining what is legal in situations where it is literally impossible for a group of people to obey or even know what they're being told to do.)
Or he's being punished for what certain people have _said_ at the protest, because some people might have hypothetically said things that were supportive of Hamas. A thing he has very little control of, was not the actual point of the protest, and can easily be used to make any protest illegal simply be undercover people slipping in and saying those things.
Incidentally, the next time I point out that the markets are incoherent gibberish that have absolutely no bearing on the value of companies, everyone needs to remember it took 4 months for the stock market to realize what was actually happening.
Literally nothing that is going on here is new or isn't what Trump promised. This was obviously going to happen the moment Trump got elected. The stock market is just full of hallucinatory morons who have just now noticed, cartoon style, that they've been standing in mid-air for four months
Criticism increased when a January 2024 recording of one organizer, Khymani James, saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live” was release
That's a sentence, not discrimination, and was said months before the protests even started. When it came to light, he was forced out by other protest groups.
And that's kind of important, not just in this specific example, but as a pretty good representation of how this protests _actually_ were: When one guy who had helped organize the thing was revealed to have said, in an Instagram months earlier, that sentence, he was removed.
So it's extremely clear this _wasn't_ the sort of of rhetoric that was normally happening or even allowed at the protests, and in fact was considered wildly out of bounds.
Another protester was recorded holding a sign reading “Al-Qassam’s next targets” in front of student counter-protesters holding Israeli flags.
Dark, this is the exactly the sort of lie that the media is good at feeding people. That guy was not on the pro-Palestinian side. He was doing the thing that the anti-Palestinians counter-protestors seemed to love to do, which is create exaggerations of what they think the other side thinks. Which then get repeated as things actually being said by that side. (You can call this a false flag, but I question how purposeful it is.)
You can actually read that sentence and figure it out yourself. The pro-Palestinian protestors were not 'in front' of the counter-protestors. They had their own little encampment.
And people wonder why they were so incredibly careful as to who got allowed into the encampment. It's literally this.
Firstly, not letting people through unless they denounced Israel is _not_ discrimination against any sort of protected class.
And this is one of the 'Did _you_ read the thing you linked?' questions:
In another instance, “One student described an altercation in which a woman was verbally attacked because she was holding a sign saying she was both Jewish and anti-Zionist. A Jewish student who had been on the pro-Palestine side of protests was called ‘Judenrat,’ ‘token Jew,’ ‘self-hating Jew,’ ‘disgrace,’ and more. Another recounted seeing a female student wearing both a star of David and a keffiyeh being verbally assaulted.”
Hey, um, who do you think was _calling_ that middle example a 'token Jew'? You think it was the people _in the protest with them_? You think that's how how it works? Or, is to much more likely she was being called that by other people who do not like the protest?
It sure is weird how all these examples of actual horrific antisemitic and violent behavior directed at Jewish people coincidentally are only directed at _Jewish people supporting the protestors_. It's almost as if a fairly notable amount of the open antisemitism happening on that campus are anti-Palestinian people _screaming hatred at Jewish pro-Palestinian protestors_, and yet somehow it is the pro-Palestinian protestors at fault.
another said there was a feeling of having to ‘constantly qualify who we are’ in order to participate in organizations.”
That sounds like microaggressions to me, aka, completely fake and we don't need to worry about them, I have been assured.
“The painful and distressing incidents of antisemitism recounted in this report are completely unacceptable. They are antithetical to our values and go against the principles of open inquiry, tolerance, and inclusivity that define us.”
That sounds like DEI to me. In fact, almost everything the administration says about antisemitism sounds like DEI to me, it's very startling to find certain people defending this.
And before anyone accuses me of the same hypocrisy in reverse: I actually do think the campus should be a safe environment for everyone, and the way to make it is so is to _do what the protestors ask_ and for Columbia to stop investing those protestor's tuition in market positions that support Israel and thus support what it is doing, which is, after all, the premise of this entire thing.
I don't think private universities should make investments that support ethnic cleansing, and I think people at those universities, who are giving them that money, have a right to protest that. Because that makes _them_ feel unsafe.
Once that has been stopped, the protests stop. Once the protests stop, we can worry about individual behaviors, of which there have been bad actors on both sides who need to be reprimanded and possibly even punished harshly.
But right now, we are only talking about pro-Palestinian side (Or even talking about anti-Palestinian side while pretending it's the pro-Palestinian side!) and somehow making that be about the _protests_, which, I remind people, has Jewish students in it.
As I said in the comment rescue about that, as the jurisdiction cannot possibly be anywhere _except_ DC over 'a bunch of decisions made in DC about paying organizations which are mostly overseas', his comment about jurisdiction can really only be understood as 'Do we, the courts, have jurisdiction over this at all?', which is exceptionally absurd considering he just dismantled Chevron.
Things Alito thinks the courts have jurisdiction over: When the Legislative tells the Executive that they want X done, so the Legislature order the Executive to build an entire regulatory process to decide how to do X with public comment processes and all sorts of procedure. This, the Court should feel free to leap in decide what the Legislative Really Meant, instead of, uh, doing the thing the actual Legislative said to do to figure that out, which is the regulatory process.
Things Alito thinks the courts do not have jurisdiction over: The Executive blatantly and obviously ignoring actual laws passed by the Legislature directly requiring the Executive to do things like 'We order you to directly gives this much money to this specific organization'. Some things that even appear to be literally unconstitutional under the 'debts authorized by law must not be questioned' clause. That sort of thing, the court cannot weigh in on.
The amount of import/export that China controls, banking, and infrastructure in Panama increases the economic control they have on Panama.
We are not talking about hypothetical economic control of 'Panama'. We are talking about the control of the Panama Canal.
Also, the word you are talking about is 'influence', not 'control'. Economic influence over Panama.
Leveling that out so one country does not control a large chunk of the purse strings to Panama is good and a win for Trump.
Threatening to attack and seize part of a country so that China has less economic influence over them is not, in fact, a win. It is actually a loss, because it means they are less likely to consider us friendly and more likely to distance themselves from us, and thus give China more economic influence. When people threaten you because you're hanging out with people they don't like, you usually don't let the people making the threats into your life more.
This sale also doesn't have anything to do with Trump's threat. CK Hutchison are selling all 43 of their non-Chinese ports to Blackrock. This deal not only has obviously been well in the works for months, but also has absolutely nothing to do with Panama specifically.
In fact, it's sorta incredibly stupid to think that a multinational company would care that the US was threatening Panama cause they were running something. They have a contract, if Panama broke it, they'd massively sue.
So basically the threat was for basically nothing, all it did was harm the Panama people and government's opinion of the US. Well, not for nothing, it got dumbasses talking about how it was a Trump victory, and all it did was harm American on the global stage, so, hey, exactly what Trump wanted.
Also, the judge has has asked questions that indicate he thinks the government's case is incredibly weak, and that it does not have any authority to cut off specific appropriations like that.
I think the Trump Administration accidentally wandered into the wrong battlefield here. It is one thing to pretend that you are simply cutting back unneeded things, spending less money while continuing its mission. It is another thing to walk in and announce are fully dismantling an organization that exists by law, and by law was handed money that it is supposed to give to explicitedly-listed other organizations.
Ie, if an appropriation bill, aka the law, says that USAID is to pay X million dollars to the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition a year in return for specific services, the executive cannot just refuse to do it and dismantle the agency.
There might be some certain level of fudge around appropriation, some fudge of which exist by law, some of which is perhaps even more malleable than that, but that is so for outside of it that the judge isn't going to go for it.
One can imagine a universe in where a different Administration was canny and sort of tried to work its way up to that point.
Meanwhile, in other news, the executive has announced that it is going to try to start prosecuting U SAID workers. 'Why' appears to be unclear except that, you know, the poem 'First they came for' needs a couple of stances, and 'foreign aid worker' should fit quite nicely in there.
In case anyone is wondering what eliminating DEI actually means, it means searching through your files and finding ones that have the word gay in the name.
And yes, this is stupid, but I want to take a step back and let's pretend that they're correctly eliminating photos that refer to someone being gay. This does appear to have just been a preliminary search, presumably they would be smart enough to ignore things that were not actual references...to....homosexuality. huh.
Wait. This removal doesn't seem to be eliminating any sort of bias in employment or giving preferential rights to certain people over other people which is, I am told, the thing we're trying to get rid of. It doesn't seem to be about any indoctrination or thought policing, these are just pictures. An extremely wide search of all pictures, including ones that are just historic pictures.
The military used to bar gay people from joining it, and then it stopped doing that. And if some member of the military talks about the fact he was only able to join after that ban went away, or how he was in the closet until it did, and that ended up on a military website in some speech he gives for a medal that he got, is that DEI? Is a picture of him with his husband DEI or not.
That is not a rhetorical question, I want someone to legitimately answer whether such a quote and photo of someone should be removed from the military's website because it is DEI, yes or no.
If your answer is no, then you have to admit what is going on is not merely the removal of 'DEI', it is just bigotry.
If your answer is yes, if the mere mention of the existence of gay people is what you have been wanting removed, well... I don't even think I need to say anything there.
Hey, I wonder if people here are also going to call this one malicious compliance. I wonder if at any point this stops being malicious compliance and just _is_ the system that has been set up.
Alito: The executive can make 'regulations' all they want, but Chevron is dead, we will no longer defer to to those regulations. Instead, the courts themselves will look at the law, the actual code passed by Congress and signed into law., which the executive has to follow, without paying much attention to 'regulations' that the executive has invented to go on top of that.
This will result in a lot of people (including the most important people, corporations) that are bound by those regulations suing, to try to get them overturned. And if this happens, the court will direct the executive to stop enforcing those regulations and do something else.
This is clearly what we want and understand will happen.
*one year later*
Alito: Yes, the executive has chosen to do things that appear in violation of the plain letter of law, and court decided that it was in violation.
But, like, let's ask ourselves, what are we really talking about here: Does that court even have the _jurisdiction_ decide something like that? Do we, as the courts, even have a right to comment on how they understand the law with regard to themselves? That seems like an internal matter for the executive branch.
--
I guess it's not really the same thing, in that DOGE is operate entirely outside the entire regulatory system set up by law, and moreover is operating in complete violation of basically every law and even the constitutional 'advise and consent' clause. (Is Elon in charge of this thing, or not?!). Instead of Congress explicitly delegating power by making a law that says 'Hey, Executive branch, we want you to enforce rules to accomplish X, a thing that is way outside our scope of knowledge, so we won't make the specific rules. Instead, here is a system for that that will take people with expertise and a bunch of outside comment to make some regulations regulating X in a long careful process. Do that, and then enforce those regulations'.
The Executive coming up the exact amount of fire resistance a building needs, and requiring that: Conservatives on the Supreme Court say no, only _they_ get to decide how much a building needs.
The Executive driving down the road shooting off shotguns and hurtling Molotov cocktails at buildings: Conservatives on the Supreme Court say 'Are we really allowed to say they can't do that?'
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/10/25”
So, the DoD has delete their page about Medal of Honor winner Charles Calvin Rodgers. If you search for 'Charles Calvin Rodgers site:defense.gov' on duckduckgo, you'll see where it's supposed to be as the first result, which is this:
https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/Story/Article/2824721/medal-of-honor-monday-army-maj-gen-charles-calvin-rogers/
This now (Very slowly in my browser?) redirects to almost the same US, but the last part is now: /deimedal-of-honor-monday-army-maj-gen-charles-calvin-rogers/ Which doesn't actually seem to exist, so weird redirect.
But he's apparently a DEI Medal of Honor! Let's check the Wayback for what the page used to say about his DEI Medal of Honor:
I'm not entirely sure what people are calling DEI these days, but...I don't think that's it. Is there something else...got a bridge named after him...given a Medal of Honor by President Nixon, Nixon doesn't sound very DEI...man, I am completely baffled. I wonder if it's this first sentence:
You know what? This is probably more malicious compliance.
"
The protest was literally over the fact that the university was investing in companies that profited off the conflict.
You can't just invent what the protests were over. And, also, protests of a university are about the behavior _of the university_. People do understand that, right? When someone protests an entity, it's because they want _that specific entity_ to do something different. Otherwise, it's just a rally.
We have an actual list of demands...which no one seems to have bothered to reprint and the websites removed, so let me instead like to the _response_ to these demands, where it's made extremely clear everyone understands what the protestors are asking for:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/college-pro-palestine-protest-demands_n_662c2672e4b0c2fde1a5b467
But you're fine with the openly genocidal Israeli government, which is literally, at this very moment, talking to other countries about removing Palestinians from Gaza?
Urban warfare is extremely prone to causing violence against civilians, a fact which is very well know. Which is why almost no country actually does it, and the ones that do generally don't use any of the sort of tactics Israel does, like long-range bombing, and instead focus more on close-quarter battles.
The ones that do bombing like that are places like _Syria_. Which, last I checked, was also roundly condemned for it.
Get a pass from _who_? Who do you think are defending ethnostates? Which ones?
Saudi Arabia? Do you think it's the _left_ saying that we should work with Saudi Arabia?
And you do understand there is a difference between an ethnostate as a general concept, and one that is _actively holds territory containing people it does not extend rights to_, right?
Do you know what the last ethnostate like that was? Apartheid South Africa. And if you look into for ten second, you might realize it's the same people defending Israel, and that Israel itself was a huge defender of that place. In fact, Israel is the reason it took so long to do anything about that place!
Dude, Islamic terrorists have killed, over the specific issue of Israel, more _Americans_ than Israelis in the past 25 years. They killed more on a single day! Granted, the US is larger so that's proportionally less.
But you know, here's the list of a general estimate of how much terrorism effects a country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Terrorism_Index
You'll notice Israel is second (Now, after Oct 7th), but you'll also notice how many other countries are within spitting distance. Plenty of people who have much more restrained behavior, along with some psychopaths we don't have anything to do with or don't even have functional countries. (Does anyone even know what's going on in Burkina Faso?)
Do you know where Israel was _before_ Oct 7th? It was below the US. For 2022, we were 28th, they were 30th.
It almost feels like the level of terrorism couldn't actually justify any of their behavior at that point.
It really is amazing how people do not understand 'Abstract demands that exist as a resistance rally point and are used as opening for negotiation' are not the same as 'things people would actually need done to accept something'.
I have pointed out before how general cries of protest are interpreted as explicit demands by Palestine in a way that _literally no others are_. The same way that general talk of having a struggle against people is a holy war, because we've decided not to translate the word jihad so that being in a fight is called being in a jihad and literally all fighters are 'jihadists' And we've apparently completely decided to just invent a new meaning of martyr, despite that being an English word.
Waving keys around and talking about reclaim houses is a _rallying cry_, in the same way that 'pry my gun from my cold death hands' or 'give me liberty or give me death' is. 'Remember the Alamo' on Texas license plates is not a battlecry to go kill Mexicans, one hopes. And talking about 'continuing the fight' is not demanding violence.
--
Anyway, Israel is not 'expected' to actually let people return. What is expected is that the right of return will be used as _concessions_ in negotiation. That Israel will go 'We won't give you back your houses, instead we will pay for new houses' or something like that. And maybe, allow some small symbolic return of very historic communities it uprooted, or even trade some land and call that 'returning'.
But that would only work if Israel was, at any point, trying to fix this situation. They are perfectly happen with this situation, because allows them to continue their plans to end up with all of what they consider as their birthright.
"
Zionism is still an active political idea, not something that happened decades ago and finished. It is a political philosophy that is constantly taking land in the West Bank. It is what drives the illegal settlements. Do you think people have a right to oppose that political philosophy?
Also, 'destroyed' is doing an insane amount of work there. It's very interesting how you had to qualify the destruction 'as a Jewish state'.
Governments govern by consent of the governed. The concern should be protecting right of minorities, not demanding the ability to exclude entire sections of the population because they will vote wrong, but having control over them anyway via occupation and imprisonment.
Israel can either choose to be a democracy over the entire area (Which will probably peacefully vote to change it in a lot of ways), or they can withdraw to areas that only has the people they want in them.
The idea that opposing the nation of Israel is antisemitic assigns the goals and behavior of Israel to the Jewish people as a whole.
I find it interesting how we can't call an actual thing that is happening to people a genocide, but somehow it's fine to call a totally imaginary thing that isn't even close to happening a holocaust.
Let me guess. You're going to bring up examples of small population replacements that happened and _ended_. Aka, you're going to try to justify the Nakba. Which was a bunch of violence and isn't really the same thing as a war settlement, but, sure, let's pretend it was the same. Let's pretend that should been the end of it. Indeed, that's the difference. Those _ended_.
You know, a thing that _could_ have happened at any point after 1967 after Israel found itself occupying Palestine? Israel could have said 'Okay, line drawn here, and we're gone'...and no, before you start talking terrorism, it took a good two decades for Palestinians to ramped up to even throwing-rocks-at-soldiers levels of violence, the first Intifada, in 1987. And that started because Israel refused to leave and was settling the place and talking, very openly, about how the entire area was theirs.
Or, alternately, Israel could have simply declared that entire area was Israel, in 1967. I honestly doubt anyone would have done anything about it. Jordan did the same thing a decade earlier with the West Bank and no one did. No country really owned that land, there was no one to say no. People would have grumbled, but it would have quickly disappeared.
But...that would have let all those Palestinians vote. Which Zionism does not allow.
That's what Zionism is. It requires a _Jewish_ state, which requires a Jewish majority so that the Jewishness of the state cannot change by democracy, but it also claims, via mythos, ownership of an territorial area that _is not majority Jewish_. There's no way to square that circle. Except by removing some of the non-Jews.
That's that side that requires a holocaust, or at least ethnic cleansing. The other side is just a democracy.
"
What Columbia is doing is completely legal and entirely within their rights as a private university. What they are doing probably would be legal even if they were a public university, but as a private university, it certainly is legal. I don't particularly think it's a _good_ idea, but it is certainly something they are allowed to do. (Although I do think it might actually be good idea to have laws that stop universities from refusing to confirm already-issued degrees, because that seems ripe for abuse and extortion. But there are no such laws, I just think they'd be good to have.)
The problem is what the Trump administration is demanding they do under the threat of the Federal government.
Including, perhaps, some of what Columbia just did because of those demands.
It's one thing for Columbia to do things because of their own free will, it's another to do things because they were extorted into it by the unconstitutional actions of the Trump administration. It's fair to not only complain about the Federal government doing that, but Columbia, a respected university with a long history of protests that they pretend they are proud of, caving to that without a whimper.
That said, we do not know if what they just did _was_ due to the Trump administration. We're just sorta guessing on that. It very much looks like it due to the timing, but extremely bad timing does sometimes happen.
"
Jaybird, you say sh*t like this assuming people know what the f*ck you're talking about, but no one ever does, because the thing you have linked it to when you evidentially end up having to explain is _extremely obviously_ not the same thing at all.
I am getting extremely tired of these conversations with you where you have to be repeatedly prompted to say what you mean. Something like half your posts here are implications that NO ONE FOLLOWS.
Pointing out that public universities are not the exact same thing as 'the government' and thus can restrict certain things for proper functioning and safety with rules is not the same thing as _the actual government_ demanding they restrict things like that under the threat of legal punishment.
And none of that is the same thing as the Federal government making demands of private university.
Also, and I know everyone here is used to the quiet parts being said quietly, but that's not happening anymore, because we've move from crypto-fascism to open fascism. So they're just straight up it's about speech. Literally just saying that.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/14/nyregion/columbia-letter.html
Read the bulleted item there about anti-"Zionist" discrimination, and tell me if you agree that is something that the government can demand a _private organization_ take the position of and enforce upon students.
"
That argument might be more persuasive if the government hadn't explicitly named anti-Zionism in the letter of demands it just sent to them.
Not antisemitism, mind you. Anti-Zionism.
"
The beatings will continue until morale improves. Going to war with their students is possibly the stupidest thing Columbia could possibly do.
Incidentally, weird how no one seems to be talking about the implications of the Federal Government forcing a private university to punish students, because the Federal Government objected to the speech of those students.
I remind people, the government has no ability to demand a private organization punish people for violating the law. That would be utterly insane, on top of violating freedom of association.
We can sidestep the question here of to what extent Columbia _could_ punish speech, a thing that gets blurry at private universities, because we all agree they can punish actual crimes like vandalism and trespass. Hell, I think it's reasonable to punish those things even if there is no criminal convictions.
But I also I think we can all agree that they can _choose not to_ punish those things, and the government has no right to interfere, including no right to extort them with government money until they do. If the government wishes to punish students for that, they can (and did) charge them with crimes.
This is on top of the fact that the government is clearly doing this because of the content of the _speech_ and openly admits as much, claiming the problem is antisemitism. And I'm just going sidestep the whole discussion as to if it actually was antisemitism was by pointing out that the Federal government has _absolutely no power_ to punish antisemitic speech, and in fact is constitutionally barred from doing so, just like it is barred from punishing all speech. And it certainly doesn't have the power to extort private entities into punishing it!
This used to be something that a lot of people here worried about, how public universities would have codes of conduct that stopped this sort of thing, and it was pointed out that public universities are not really 'the government', they are organizations that happen to owned by the government but have to have the same sort of rules as any sort of housing and workplaces and education, general rules about harassment and safety and things.
And a lot of people here objected to that logic.
"
Yes, I get what you were talking about, how Kash's tweet was received. I was pointing out how manipulative it was to start with.
It failed at accomplishing anything, but only because the the Republican base is sorta on a hilarious tangent that I hope they continue to be on. Please, Republicans on Twitter, keep insisting that the Trump administration do something it cannot possible do, because there is no real 'list' that hasn't been released. (I have no idea why anyone thinks there is going to be some actual itemized documentation of 'People who have taken advantage of Epstein's underaged girls'.)
But I'm allowed to point out propaganda, even if it completely fails due to unrelated things. Especially since it actually did make it outside of Twitter, it's all over the far-right news.
"
And yes, it's nice that people are not falling for it and still pointing out the Epstein stuff, but I felt I had to point out this incredibly obvious manipulation being done by the press, where 'US government employee arrested for completely unrelated fraud done to the government' is being used to help Trump's dismantling of government and vague allegations of fraud within the government.
Honestly, look the wording that Jaybird just used: FEMA fraud.
Why would anyone talk about 'defrauding FEMA' in that incredibly ambiguous way? Imagine if I said we need to defund the police and said there had been an example of 'cop murder', by which I actually meant killing a cop.
"
I like how you, and presumably everyone you read, phrased 'Director at Customs and Border Protection being arrested for FEMA fraud'. This has absolutely nothing to do with fraud _in_ the government, and is just someone _defrauding_ the government who happens to also work for the government. But people are happy yo imply otherwise.
And before you say 'They're not implying that', I will point out a trivial search on my part found there were three others literally charged with the same thing this week, announced at the same time, including one that did literally the same thing of defrauding FEMA for temporary living expenses for a house that was not destroyed:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/three-defendants-face-federal-charges-bilking-and-attempting-defraud-fema-fraudulent
Yet for some mysterious reason, it's this one person that is getting all the press. It's the only one _you_ even know about, because you are hooked directly into right-wing pipelines. And that's because she works for the government, and people can imply this is something to do with finding fraud in the government, despite the fact it is not.
On “The Trump Crash”
The sheer amount of people who have confidently predicted that Trump will not do exactly what he has repeated said he would do, and still have jobs after he has done that thing, is amazing. You truly cannot fail at your actual One Job in quite a lot of high-paying jobs that exist almost entirely to make predictions.
For everyone saying 'But he didn't do it the first time he was in office', yeah, and there were literally books written about how a bunch of people constantly had to stop him from doing those disastrous/illegal/horrific things.
And I'm not talking just about the market. I'm talking about _everything_.
Everything Trump is doing now he tried to do the first term, _except_ some of the stuff that Heritage Foundation lined up with Project 2025 when they realized that Trump was an idiot and was willing to do almost anything people asked him to do in the right way. Other than that stuff, which hadn't been properly written down yet, and some of the Elon-specific stuff, there is absolutely nothing now that he didn't _attempt_ to do back then.
Which means we should probably start taking serious the stuff he tried to do back then but hasn't tried yet. Like ordering the military to shoot protestors. (Don't worry, he's going to have them shoot at their knees.) Or suspending the election or all the dozens of ways he plotted to stay in office before finally settling on the convoluted plan of 'Attempt to pretend there is confusion about electoral votes to throw the election to the House, while declaring martial law and attempt to frame antifa for the disorder in Washington'. (People _really_ do not understand just how lucky we got that the left and antifa and everyone realized that trying to counterprotest what Trump was doing Jan 6th was a trap, and didn't show up at all.)
The Trump administration attempted to be utterly lawless and extreme fascistic last time they were in power, and _literally a bunch of random Republican politicians_ in the Cabinet and around him in other ways saved the day and stopped him. It's why he fired so many, it's why half of them wrote books afterward. Career political Republicans talking about 'Yeah, Trump was constantly trying to do illegal things and under no circumstances should be president'. Ant one of which should be a career-ending scandal in politics if the media would just pay attention to it.
And yet somehow...we are all constantly very surprised when he attempts the same thing this time, and this time, the people to stop him aren't there.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/10/25”
Actually, let me clarify: When I say 'Can be challenged in court', what I mean is 'This has to be proven in court'.
Khalil doesn't have to affirmatively challenge it and force them to go to court, there already will be a hearing, in court, to verify this determination made by the Secretary of State.
Often those hearings are so pro-forma that they barely happen, because (idiotically) people in them have no right to a court-appointed lawyer(1), so often barely understand what is going on. But they do exist, and Khalil does have a lawyer.
1) Please note there are organizations who will represent these people for free, at least enough to present some options to them, but the fascists that are ICE (and the police used to be this way before Miranda), will not bother to _inform_ anyone of their rights.
"
So here's the actual rule:
But there's an exception that applies
So, to explain that: There's two different thresholds there that are similar. The first is much easier to reach, and can be done automatically across an entire group of people, and is probably meant to apply when 'People from X being in the country' or whatever could hypothetically present some foreign policy consequence. This is a very low bar that just requires a vague 'belief'.
This also can apply to specific people and things they do specifically, but _only_ when there are no 1st amendment issues. It doesn't say the words 1st amendment explicitly, but that's what 'beliefs, statements, or associations' would be. It's actually hard to think of a good example of this. Like...you could deport Superman under it, I guess, assuming he was otherwise legal. It's pretty easy to believe that his existence would have foreign policy implications.
But, there's an exception when there are 1st amendment issues, which would be here, because the issue is his speech and association. That requires the Secretary of State to determine that it would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.
The phrase 'would compromise' (not 'believe', but 'would' actually compromise) is important. What he does has to actually do it, or be demonstrated that it will, not that someone vaguely believes it can.
The phrase 'compelling...government interest' is equally important, and a lot of people just realized that phrasing (Which I bet people recognize) was secretly in there...and not only does it have to be a compelling government interest, which narrows things down, it has to be one about _foreign policy_, which narrows it down even more. It cannot, for example, be a 'compelling government interest' to allow students to attend and freely move about Colombia University, or to allow Colombia to invest money where it wants.
The exception then goes on to state that that 'the Secretary of State must notify on a timely basis the chairmen of the Committees on the Judiciary and Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives and of the Committees on the Judiciary and Foreign Relations of the Senate of the identity of the alien and the reasons for the determination.'
Moreover, this determination can be challenged in immigration court. (Actually, all this can, but if the determination didn't trigger the exception, all that would accomplish is requiring the State Department to prove it 'believes' something.)
--
...also, kind of important: This rational for deporting Khalil means he not alleged to have commented a crime. And did not violate his immigration status. There's literally no wrongdoing asserted here, just that his (apparently entirely legal) actions have impacted US foreign policy to the extent the US government wishes him removed. Which they can do possibly do, we'll see what the immigration court says, but it's insane they think they can _arrest_ him for 'We have decided that we don't like you and don't want you here anymore'. Tell him, schedule him in front of a court, and then if he refuses to attend the court or then refuses to leave if he court says he has to go, at _that_ point you can arrest him.
But immigration law has always been extremely fascist, and I'm not sure they can't do what they did. I'm just saying it's absurd if they can.
"
Yeah, it sure is amazing how all the people talking about how trans people should compromise over 'sports' do not seem to notice how Republicans will literally take anti-trans bills as far as they can, and in fact openly and explicitly wish to outlaw being trans.
"
I mean, technically speaking, no, they were about not any behavior of Israel.
I'm sure protestors were saying things about Israel's behavior, but the actual protests, the demands of the protestors, were explicitly about the fact that Colombia, a private school, was investing money in companies that benefited from the situation in Israel, or even were funding what was happening.
Those were the demands of the protest, that a private school stop doing actions with their investments.
This may seem a technical distinction, but it does matter if we start hypothesizing where the line of 'supporting terrorism' is. Because 'You, a private company, are doing crappy things and I'm protesting you until you stop', is...well, let's just say that it's hard to distinguish that from civil-rights sit-in. That's basically all protests.
So there's basically two choices:
Either the act of organizing the protest of Colombia (Not Israel, not US foreign policy, but _Colombia_) itself is what he's being punished for. Aka, protests are illegal. (And before anyone says 'No, only ones that do illegal things', please spend like fifteen seconds googling how easy it is for the police to make a protest 'illegal' by randomly defining what is legal in situations where it is literally impossible for a group of people to obey or even know what they're being told to do.)
Or he's being punished for what certain people have _said_ at the protest, because some people might have hypothetically said things that were supportive of Hamas. A thing he has very little control of, was not the actual point of the protest, and can easily be used to make any protest illegal simply be undercover people slipping in and saying those things.
On “The Trump Crash”
Incidentally, the next time I point out that the markets are incoherent gibberish that have absolutely no bearing on the value of companies, everyone needs to remember it took 4 months for the stock market to realize what was actually happening.
Literally nothing that is going on here is new or isn't what Trump promised. This was obviously going to happen the moment Trump got elected. The stock market is just full of hallucinatory morons who have just now noticed, cartoon style, that they've been standing in mid-air for four months
"
Trump has started hurting The Money.
Everyone should start expecting Democrats to suddenly and instantly grow a spine and start standing up to him, some Republicans too.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/3/2025”
That's a sentence, not discrimination, and was said months before the protests even started. When it came to light, he was forced out by other protest groups.
And that's kind of important, not just in this specific example, but as a pretty good representation of how this protests _actually_ were: When one guy who had helped organize the thing was revealed to have said, in an Instagram months earlier, that sentence, he was removed.
So it's extremely clear this _wasn't_ the sort of of rhetoric that was normally happening or even allowed at the protests, and in fact was considered wildly out of bounds.
Dark, this is the exactly the sort of lie that the media is good at feeding people. That guy was not on the pro-Palestinian side. He was doing the thing that the anti-Palestinians counter-protestors seemed to love to do, which is create exaggerations of what they think the other side thinks. Which then get repeated as things actually being said by that side. (You can call this a false flag, but I question how purposeful it is.)
You can actually read that sentence and figure it out yourself. The pro-Palestinian protestors were not 'in front' of the counter-protestors. They had their own little encampment.
And people wonder why they were so incredibly careful as to who got allowed into the encampment. It's literally this.
"
Firstly, not letting people through unless they denounced Israel is _not_ discrimination against any sort of protected class.
And this is one of the 'Did _you_ read the thing you linked?' questions:
Hey, um, who do you think was _calling_ that middle example a 'token Jew'? You think it was the people _in the protest with them_? You think that's how how it works? Or, is to much more likely she was being called that by other people who do not like the protest?
It sure is weird how all these examples of actual horrific antisemitic and violent behavior directed at Jewish people coincidentally are only directed at _Jewish people supporting the protestors_. It's almost as if a fairly notable amount of the open antisemitism happening on that campus are anti-Palestinian people _screaming hatred at Jewish pro-Palestinian protestors_, and yet somehow it is the pro-Palestinian protestors at fault.
another said there was a feeling of having to ‘constantly qualify who we are’ in order to participate in organizations.”
That sounds like microaggressions to me, aka, completely fake and we don't need to worry about them, I have been assured.
“The painful and distressing incidents of antisemitism recounted in this report are completely unacceptable. They are antithetical to our values and go against the principles of open inquiry, tolerance, and inclusivity that define us.”
That sounds like DEI to me. In fact, almost everything the administration says about antisemitism sounds like DEI to me, it's very startling to find certain people defending this.
And before anyone accuses me of the same hypocrisy in reverse: I actually do think the campus should be a safe environment for everyone, and the way to make it is so is to _do what the protestors ask_ and for Columbia to stop investing those protestor's tuition in market positions that support Israel and thus support what it is doing, which is, after all, the premise of this entire thing.
I don't think private universities should make investments that support ethnic cleansing, and I think people at those universities, who are giving them that money, have a right to protest that. Because that makes _them_ feel unsafe.
Once that has been stopped, the protests stop. Once the protests stop, we can worry about individual behaviors, of which there have been bad actors on both sides who need to be reprimanded and possibly even punished harshly.
But right now, we are only talking about pro-Palestinian side (Or even talking about anti-Palestinian side while pretending it's the pro-Palestinian side!) and somehow making that be about the _protests_, which, I remind people, has Jewish students in it.
"
As I said in the comment rescue about that, as the jurisdiction cannot possibly be anywhere _except_ DC over 'a bunch of decisions made in DC about paying organizations which are mostly overseas', his comment about jurisdiction can really only be understood as 'Do we, the courts, have jurisdiction over this at all?', which is exceptionally absurd considering he just dismantled Chevron.
Things Alito thinks the courts have jurisdiction over: When the Legislative tells the Executive that they want X done, so the Legislature order the Executive to build an entire regulatory process to decide how to do X with public comment processes and all sorts of procedure. This, the Court should feel free to leap in decide what the Legislative Really Meant, instead of, uh, doing the thing the actual Legislative said to do to figure that out, which is the regulatory process.
Things Alito thinks the courts do not have jurisdiction over: The Executive blatantly and obviously ignoring actual laws passed by the Legislature directly requiring the Executive to do things like 'We order you to directly gives this much money to this specific organization'. Some things that even appear to be literally unconstitutional under the 'debts authorized by law must not be questioned' clause. That sort of thing, the court cannot weigh in on.
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We are not talking about hypothetical economic control of 'Panama'. We are talking about the control of the Panama Canal.
Also, the word you are talking about is 'influence', not 'control'. Economic influence over Panama.
Threatening to attack and seize part of a country so that China has less economic influence over them is not, in fact, a win. It is actually a loss, because it means they are less likely to consider us friendly and more likely to distance themselves from us, and thus give China more economic influence. When people threaten you because you're hanging out with people they don't like, you usually don't let the people making the threats into your life more.
This sale also doesn't have anything to do with Trump's threat. CK Hutchison are selling all 43 of their non-Chinese ports to Blackrock. This deal not only has obviously been well in the works for months, but also has absolutely nothing to do with Panama specifically.
In fact, it's sorta incredibly stupid to think that a multinational company would care that the US was threatening Panama cause they were running something. They have a contract, if Panama broke it, they'd massively sue.
So basically the threat was for basically nothing, all it did was harm the Panama people and government's opinion of the US. Well, not for nothing, it got dumbasses talking about how it was a Trump victory, and all it did was harm American on the global stage, so, hey, exactly what Trump wanted.
On “Comment Rescue: DavidTC on the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Unfreezing of Funds”
Well, yesterday the judge gave them until Monday to release already incurred costs.
https://apnews.com/article/usaid-trump-foreign-aid-funding-freeze-02e8ed553e55c79c43fe8811de952d02
Let's see if they manage to hit the deadline.
Also, the judge has has asked questions that indicate he thinks the government's case is incredibly weak, and that it does not have any authority to cut off specific appropriations like that.
I think the Trump Administration accidentally wandered into the wrong battlefield here. It is one thing to pretend that you are simply cutting back unneeded things, spending less money while continuing its mission. It is another thing to walk in and announce are fully dismantling an organization that exists by law, and by law was handed money that it is supposed to give to explicitedly-listed other organizations.
Ie, if an appropriation bill, aka the law, says that USAID is to pay X million dollars to the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition a year in return for specific services, the executive cannot just refuse to do it and dismantle the agency.
There might be some certain level of fudge around appropriation, some fudge of which exist by law, some of which is perhaps even more malleable than that, but that is so for outside of it that the judge isn't going to go for it.
One can imagine a universe in where a different Administration was canny and sort of tried to work its way up to that point.
Meanwhile, in other news, the executive has announced that it is going to try to start prosecuting U SAID workers. 'Why' appears to be unclear except that, you know, the poem 'First they came for' needs a couple of stances, and 'foreign aid worker' should fit quite nicely in there.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/3/2025”
In case anyone is wondering what eliminating DEI actually means, it means searching through your files and finding ones that have the word gay in the name.
https://www.oregonlive.com/nation/2025/03/photo-of-enola-gay-aircraft-among-26000-images-flagged-for-removal-in-pentagons-dei-purge.html
And yes, this is stupid, but I want to take a step back and let's pretend that they're correctly eliminating photos that refer to someone being gay. This does appear to have just been a preliminary search, presumably they would be smart enough to ignore things that were not actual references...to....homosexuality. huh.
Wait. This removal doesn't seem to be eliminating any sort of bias in employment or giving preferential rights to certain people over other people which is, I am told, the thing we're trying to get rid of. It doesn't seem to be about any indoctrination or thought policing, these are just pictures. An extremely wide search of all pictures, including ones that are just historic pictures.
The military used to bar gay people from joining it, and then it stopped doing that. And if some member of the military talks about the fact he was only able to join after that ban went away, or how he was in the closet until it did, and that ended up on a military website in some speech he gives for a medal that he got, is that DEI? Is a picture of him with his husband DEI or not.
That is not a rhetorical question, I want someone to legitimately answer whether such a quote and photo of someone should be removed from the military's website because it is DEI, yes or no.
If your answer is no, then you have to admit what is going on is not merely the removal of 'DEI', it is just bigotry.
If your answer is yes, if the mere mention of the existence of gay people is what you have been wanting removed, well... I don't even think I need to say anything there.
Hey, I wonder if people here are also going to call this one malicious compliance. I wonder if at any point this stops being malicious compliance and just _is_ the system that has been set up.
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Literally all points of that are gibberish.
Harris, for one, wasn't on the 20 side, and also that polling is utter nonsense.
On “Comment Rescue: DavidTC on the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Unfreezing of Funds”
Alito: The executive can make 'regulations' all they want, but Chevron is dead, we will no longer defer to to those regulations. Instead, the courts themselves will look at the law, the actual code passed by Congress and signed into law., which the executive has to follow, without paying much attention to 'regulations' that the executive has invented to go on top of that.
This will result in a lot of people (including the most important people, corporations) that are bound by those regulations suing, to try to get them overturned. And if this happens, the court will direct the executive to stop enforcing those regulations and do something else.
This is clearly what we want and understand will happen.
*one year later*
Alito: Yes, the executive has chosen to do things that appear in violation of the plain letter of law, and court decided that it was in violation.
But, like, let's ask ourselves, what are we really talking about here: Does that court even have the _jurisdiction_ decide something like that? Do we, as the courts, even have a right to comment on how they understand the law with regard to themselves? That seems like an internal matter for the executive branch.
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I guess it's not really the same thing, in that DOGE is operate entirely outside the entire regulatory system set up by law, and moreover is operating in complete violation of basically every law and even the constitutional 'advise and consent' clause. (Is Elon in charge of this thing, or not?!). Instead of Congress explicitly delegating power by making a law that says 'Hey, Executive branch, we want you to enforce rules to accomplish X, a thing that is way outside our scope of knowledge, so we won't make the specific rules. Instead, here is a system for that that will take people with expertise and a bunch of outside comment to make some regulations regulating X in a long careful process. Do that, and then enforce those regulations'.
The Executive coming up the exact amount of fire resistance a building needs, and requiring that: Conservatives on the Supreme Court say no, only _they_ get to decide how much a building needs.
The Executive driving down the road shooting off shotguns and hurtling Molotov cocktails at buildings: Conservatives on the Supreme Court say 'Are we really allowed to say they can't do that?'
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.