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.
2025-03-07 03:50:47
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.
So, we have a bunch of Supreme Court justices showing their true colors there.
For those who do not remember what happened, a lawsuit was filed about USAID about the failure to pay debts that were already incurred and mandated by law, and Judge Amir Ali of the U.S. District Court issued an order saying 'No, you have to keep paying those for now, the law provides a way to claw back fraudulent purchases and it gives absolutely no ability to do what you are doing'.
They were given a deadline of fifteen days. Fifteen days passed.
The judge issued _another_ order, saying 'I am not kidding, do this in the next two days, or I will start throwing lawyers in jail for content'.
The government, having failed to follow the first court order, then panicked and tried to get the Supreme Court to step in. (Like, we're already at a bad place here. You can't fail to follow court orders for two weeks and then, at the deadline, run somewhere else.)
The Supremes did, pausing that order for a week, until they ruled. Well, that just happened, they said 'Of course you have to follow that, it's a judge, you're in a lawsuit, you have to do what he says.'. ...or at least, the people on the court who believe in some sort of rule of law did.
From others, you get this nonsense:
“Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars? The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this Court apparently thinks otherwise,” Alito wrote. “I am stunned.”
Hey, Alito, pssst: What compels the US government to release the funds is the _law_. Both appropriations and, perhaps more relevantly, normal contract law. They did the work, the government has to pay them. Which a judge just ruled on.
And they _did_ appeal it. To literally the Supreme Court. Were you not paying attention?
And how does a District of Columbia district court judge not have jurisdiction over 'Someone suing the Federal government for not getting paid, which was apparently done by decisions at the White House'? What are you talking about? Who has jurisdiction instead?!
Also, aren't you the same people who have no problem with a single Texas judge issuing restraining orders outlawing medications across the entire US?
--
Anyway, we have two fun questions here:
Will the US government decide to comply with this?
Who knows.
The second question is funnier: Can the US government comply with this, or is it so dysfunctional that it cannot put this stuff together in time?
They are already a week past the second deadline, which itself was a few days after the actual original deadline. The Supreme Court just said the judge should 'clarify what obligations the Government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order, with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines.', but honestly, as the Government has made absolutely no effort at any point to actually met any deadline, I suspect we're going to get Judge Amir Ali saying 'The first order of business today is where I make up a list of people who go to jail tomorrow if it is not done by then.'
The really really funny thing is if the US government cannot actually manage to do it in that timeframe, because the power to do it is in the hands of some 25-year-old techbro who does not actually understand the magnitude of what is going on, and possibly cannot be located in the timeframe because he's ran off to fire all gay people at the NSA or whatever.
Which sounds unfair, but I remind everyone the government had two weeks to do this, in which they did nothing, then had another week do to this, and if they again did nothing, and are not ready to actually do this, they deserve to be pretty strongly sanctioned by the court.
The Panama Canal is operated, entirely, by the nation of Panama. This operation of the canal, as far as we can tell, has been done in a completely neutral manner, with absolutely no bias or political influence at all.
Is everyone on the right very very drunk?
The Panamanian ports are Panama's business, and have _nothing_ to do with operating the canal. They are merely located near the ends of it, but that has essentially nothing to do with the canal, which is generally moving traffic that is not going to either port.
The commenter archive features may be temporarily disabled at times.
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.
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.
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.
Literally all points of that are gibberish.
Harris, for one, wasn't on the 20 side, and also that polling is utter nonsense.
https://rollcall.com/2025/03/05/supreme-court-orders-clarity-on-order-unfreezing-usaid-funds/
So, we have a bunch of Supreme Court justices showing their true colors there.
For those who do not remember what happened, a lawsuit was filed about USAID about the failure to pay debts that were already incurred and mandated by law, and Judge Amir Ali of the U.S. District Court issued an order saying 'No, you have to keep paying those for now, the law provides a way to claw back fraudulent purchases and it gives absolutely no ability to do what you are doing'.
They were given a deadline of fifteen days. Fifteen days passed.
The judge issued _another_ order, saying 'I am not kidding, do this in the next two days, or I will start throwing lawyers in jail for content'.
The government, having failed to follow the first court order, then panicked and tried to get the Supreme Court to step in. (Like, we're already at a bad place here. You can't fail to follow court orders for two weeks and then, at the deadline, run somewhere else.)
The Supremes did, pausing that order for a week, until they ruled. Well, that just happened, they said 'Of course you have to follow that, it's a judge, you're in a lawsuit, you have to do what he says.'. ...or at least, the people on the court who believe in some sort of rule of law did.
From others, you get this nonsense:
Hey, Alito, pssst: What compels the US government to release the funds is the _law_. Both appropriations and, perhaps more relevantly, normal contract law. They did the work, the government has to pay them. Which a judge just ruled on.
And they _did_ appeal it. To literally the Supreme Court. Were you not paying attention?
And how does a District of Columbia district court judge not have jurisdiction over 'Someone suing the Federal government for not getting paid, which was apparently done by decisions at the White House'? What are you talking about? Who has jurisdiction instead?!
Also, aren't you the same people who have no problem with a single Texas judge issuing restraining orders outlawing medications across the entire US?
--
Anyway, we have two fun questions here:
Will the US government decide to comply with this?
Who knows.
The second question is funnier: Can the US government comply with this, or is it so dysfunctional that it cannot put this stuff together in time?
They are already a week past the second deadline, which itself was a few days after the actual original deadline. The Supreme Court just said the judge should 'clarify what obligations the Government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order, with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines.', but honestly, as the Government has made absolutely no effort at any point to actually met any deadline, I suspect we're going to get Judge Amir Ali saying 'The first order of business today is where I make up a list of people who go to jail tomorrow if it is not done by then.'
The really really funny thing is if the US government cannot actually manage to do it in that timeframe, because the power to do it is in the hands of some 25-year-old techbro who does not actually understand the magnitude of what is going on, and possibly cannot be located in the timeframe because he's ran off to fire all gay people at the NSA or whatever.
Which sounds unfair, but I remind everyone the government had two weeks to do this, in which they did nothing, then had another week do to this, and if they again did nothing, and are not ready to actually do this, they deserve to be pretty strongly sanctioned by the court.
What does the word 'control' mean to you?
The Panama Canal is operated, entirely, by the nation of Panama. This operation of the canal, as far as we can tell, has been done in a completely neutral manner, with absolutely no bias or political influence at all.
Is everyone on the right very very drunk?
The Panamanian ports are Panama's business, and have _nothing_ to do with operating the canal. They are merely located near the ends of it, but that has essentially nothing to do with the canal, which is generally moving traffic that is not going to either port.