State of the Discussion

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.

Welp, here are the deets:

Paapa Essiedu has now been cast as Severus Snape in the ‘HARRY POTTER’ series.

(Source: Deadline) pic.twitter.com/Vs45MjTTF8

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) March 7, 2025

The question is whether people who refuse to watch the new one are racist.

I mean... are you going to watch it?

I appreciate that, Europe has been taking advantage of the US for a long time now (not just the military, but paying for drug research as well). And if this whole thing wakes up European leaders from their decades-long stupor then something positive will have come from it.

If Trump was merely pushing Europe to step up more on defense spending, and get serious about cutting back on fossil fuels to starve Russia of funds, than I'd be applauding. But it is clear to me that Europe's complacency is just a justification. Trump is even stopping support to Ukraine that is essentially free, like intelligence sharing. Trump is cutting Ukraine loose because he wants Putin to win. And that mean the coalition of free nations needs new leadership. I'm not sure Macron's ready, but I don't think we have a lot of alternatives.

Refusing to see it because Gal Gadot is in it is also bad.

See, that's remarkably easy! I didn't have to beat around the bush, or defend racists. I can just say: Yeah, those people are bad.

I realize that the world is a complicated place, full of gray areas, but when people are upset about a movie because of someone's acting in it's, ethnicity, religion, or nationality, I think things are pretty black and white. That you feel the need to defend it for tribal reasons puts you in a tribe defined explicitly by its racism, and man, that's just not where I'd want to be.

I get it... but there's a fine line between a shared world order without an Empire, and free riding your way into the need for imperial fees.

Not that I think Trump isn't bungling his way deeper into a Thucydides trap... but a reset on the costs of the empire we liked to pretend didn't exist was inevitable.

Don't think people should be getting excited about a procedural ruling from the SCOTUS. Assuming the case gets back on an appeal of the preliminary injunction (which is referenced in the SCOTUS order), then we would see how Barrett and others rule on the merits. We just know how four of them would rule right now. OTOH, the government now says they are exercising cancellation provisions in the contracts, which would probably make the whole case moot.

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.

To answer Chris' question, the University is under pressure from the student activists to treat that sort of thing and the shutting down of various educational buildings as a normal student protest and largely does.

Various other groups (including Trump) see it as deeply antisemitic and/or criminal and think the University should be using criminal charges and the law to deal with it.

This, but unironically.

I think Harris would have been a fairly mediocre choice for President, but she wouldn't be throwing the entire global order into chaos out of a combination of stupidity and malice.

it's not enough for you to destroy yourselves, you have to try and take the rest of us with you.

I saw that "Whistle While You Work", a cheery song where Snow White cleans up the house while the guys are at work turned into a cheery song where she teaches the guys how to do their own housecleaning.

"SOMEONE STOLE OUR DISHES!"
"They ain't stole, they're hid in the cupboard."

That's an *AWESOME* exchange.

And now it's gone. Like tears in the rain.