State of the Discussion

Some are, some aren't, depending on why they "refuse" to watch it. ("Refuse" is an interesting word choice, suggesting some reason other than mere lack of interest. And what might that be?) I'm not going to see it -- not refuse, just not going to see it -- simply because I have no interest in the entire Harry Potter story.

Is this really hard to understand?

People were warned by the Democratic Party during the 2024 elections. Too many people did not believe what the Democratic Party said would happen and voted for Trump or decided to do KDP cosplay and say the Democrats were worse. The people in defiance are still raising their fists in blood thirsty defiance.

Over-defining "support for terrorism" has downsides?

My goodness gracious! You'd think that the people who defended the cadets playing the circle game would be at the front of the line arguing that people should be allowed to speak freely.

Because we've been fed a constant stream of "wolf" accusations for decades. There's nothing you can say about Trump that you haven't said about all other GOP presidents during my lifetime.

The republic is always going to end if Team Blue doesn't get it's way.

Agreed that this isn't a big deal yet but the fact that any right wing justices are willing to walk the walk they've been talking for the past 3 decades is better than them all going Alito right off the bat.

I mean, she's right, the movie is dated. There aren't many movies made in the 1930s that aren't.

To me, her comments sound like an artist pointing out the reasons why a modern retelling of the story is justified, which would I would consider good PR. But that's probably because I don't have 1930s views on gender, so I'm not offended when someone points out that they weren't great.

I admit I'm not much of a fan of the original, though I have seen it too many times thanks to my two children, and I assume most of the audience for the new movie will be children who also won't care that she's criticized aspects of the almost 90-year old version. I'm not really sure what to make of adults who do think criticizing the original is out of bounds for someone making a new version of it, though. I definitely don't think it speaks well of them.

In 2024, I saw 4 movies in the theater:

The Taste of Things: Really enjoyed it, but it also made me very hungry.

Sleeping Beauty: I have seen this so many times at this point that even the wonderful animation has ceased to impress me, but we did see it in a theater I love (The Paramount on Congress Ave, for folks who know Austin), so there's that.

Paddington 2: Also saw it at the Paramount (they do a summer classic film series, with kids movie matinees on the weekends). Good movie, and my partner's first time seeing it, so she cried a lot, as did the then 4 year-old.

Moana 2: I damn near fell asleep, but the then 4yo loves all things Moana, she has a Moana outfit, she frequently wears Moana's necklace, and as a result, she loved the movie, and keeps asking me when we can watch it on Disney Plus.

I didn't see it in theaters, unfortunately, but if you haven't seen Flow, it's a (sort of) kids movie I recommend for adults. I enjoyed watching it with the 5yo, but I do warn parents of kids that young: she cried so hard, and for so long (basically from about 5 minutes in until the end) that she looked like she had the beginnings of two black eyes.

University of Michigan Professor Don Moynihan has a good run down of the chilling effects going on against dissent currently: https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/real-chilling-effects

"Normally I record the classes I teach. It gives students who miss class a chance to catch up. I also make space in my classes to talk about what is happening in government right now. A couple of weeks ago, students asked we keep the discussions, but stop recording the class. They worried about any record of their words that might be viewed as criticism of the current administration, and somehow weaponized against them."

They're busy screaming about how it should have been Adam Driver. "ADAM DRIVER WAS RIGHT THERE!"

Seriously, he was trending for two days on Twitter.

I, personally, am curious as to how they're going to handle James bullying Snape in high school or exploring how Lily didn't want to date Snape.

To be honest, I'm less expecting "I REFUSE TO WATCH THIS BECAUSE A BLACK ACTOR WAS CAST!" and more expecting a "Meh. Not for me..." response.

At which point the studios will pull a good, old-fashioned "YOU ONLY THINK IT WASN'T FOR YOU BECAUSE WE CAST A BLACK GUY!" and we can have an argument over the dark and unsettling reasons that other people aren't consuming a show that we ourselves also aren't consuming.

I would *LOVE* a review!

I've reached the point where I see maybe one movie a year in the theater and I can already tell that it ain't gonna be that one.

Sure. We can immediately talk about how the fans of the franchise are bad people.

I mean, they're fans of something created by JK Rowling so that goes without saying but now we can *REALLY* lean into how they shouldn't care about this silly thing.

"Why do you care? This is stupid and what you like is stupid. Why do you care?"

Maybe we can get the people actually creating the show to ask that.

Then, psychologically, France lacks the crippling sense of historical guilt that still pervades Germany

There's much in that piece that gives away the game, but this one might be the largest, given France's near complete lack of reckoning with its own fascist and brutal colonial history, its collaboration with the Nazis, and its complicity in the Holocaust.

To write that sentence in a piece calling for increased European nationalism comes very close to saying the quiet part loud, as the kids say.

The lines I normally draw are...

1) Can an otherwise uninvolved student still function?

If the protesters are shutting down the U then they're preventing other people from getting educations.

That very much would include setting up lines and insisting that anyone attempting to cross them "denounce Israel". Whether that's a protected class or not is irrelevant.

2) Violence and the threat of violence.

The normally illegal things are still illegal. That would include calling for genocide... which I would think includes calls to destroy Israel.

It seems to me that "certain ways" is doing a lot of work there. I was surprised that Douthat brought up the Notre Dame repairs. As I recall, all of the cathedrals in France are owned by the government, maintained by the government, the Notre Dame repairs were paid for by the government (although contributions were accepted). The Church is allowed to lease space for services.

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.

There's still a cultural Catholicism to France that I think is helpful in certain ways. It isn't a mystery why all of the post modern thought that's made American academia and progressivism stupider is a lot less popular in France despite much of it originating there. Catholicism has strong anti-bodies for that kind of stuff. But I agree that any resurgence is unlikely to be specifically Catholic in the way he suggests.

Germany I read a bit more cynically. Obviously 'Never Again' should be part of their national character but there are very real ways in which it's used as a convenient excuse to shirk responsibility and maturing into a constructive world power. The only structural force for actual revanchism is the mainstream parties who have insisted that the only way a normal person with conservative views on immigration can voice those preferences is to consort with the tiny faction that also believes the Third Reich is due for re-appraisal.