Guess who is no longer pretending he wants Democratic votes?
Like mother fucker you bet your ass access to abortion is existential if you’re having a miscarriage that requires intervention. The fucking gall.
— Jean-Michel Connard 좆됐어 (@torriangray) April 22, 2024
New: After I asked RFK Jr.'s campaign about his abortion position, the campaign added an abortion policy page to its site, proposing “a massive subsidized daycare initiative” paid for by funds Kennedy would reroute from Ukraine war aid. https://t.co/zEujVcO4ru
— Meryl Kornfield (@MerylKornfield) April 22, 2024
RFK Jr.'s advisor who helped him with social media and brought in a major TikTok following is out: https://t.co/WFu1unsWEo
— Meryl Kornfield (@MerylKornfield) April 22, 2024
Second poll in a row showing RFK hurting Trump more than Biden. https://t.co/Yq5vYWkuVg
— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) April 22, 2024
Natural Law Party began in 1992 by charlatans affiliated w transcendental meditation guy Maharishi & espousing new age blather. Previous nominees incl a TM guy, Nader, a socialist, & perennial candidate Rocky D L Fuente
MI is the last remaining chapter. They’re nominating RFKJr https://t.co/xdnkAmBpYa
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) April 18, 2024
Incase you were wondering how RFK Jr plans on getting ballot access in all 50 states…
He’s scraping the bottom of the barrel — resurrecting old parties that no one has ever heard of, and starting up random new parties. ?? pic.twitter.com/kdLYJS3MJD
— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline) April 19, 2024
Conjuring word: BLOCKCHAIN!
RFK Jr. at Michigan rally: “I’m gonna put the entire US budget on blockchain”
“Every American can look at every budget item in the entire budget, anytime they want, 24 hours a day.”
“We’re gonna have 300 million eyeballs on our budget, and if somebody is spending $16,000 for a… pic.twitter.com/aqJ1JNUpxc
— Holden Culotta (@Holden_Culotta) April 22, 2024
Seemingly everyone in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s personal life is coming out of the woodwork to urge him to drop out of the 2024 presidential race. More: https://t.co/ORQpO2o6qm https://t.co/ORQpO2o6qm
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) April 20, 2024
Signage for the Kennedy family endorsement of President Biden in Philadelphia today: “We’re on board” pic.twitter.com/x4lbN3H6Oo
— Monica Alba (@albamonica) April 18, 2024
President Biden: Your family, the Kennedy family has endured such violence. Trump denying January 6 and whitewashing what happened is absolutely outrageous. I have a very different view of America, of hope and optimism, as Bobby Kennedy embodied. I see an America where we defend… pic.twitter.com/SN2RZFDd2A
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 18, 2024
Joe Biden told aides that Thursday's event with the Kennedys was one of the best days of his campaign.
Meanwhile, in private conversations, the Kennedys have tried to get RFK Jr. to reconsider. It hasn't worked.
On Biden and the Kennedys:https://t.co/pBozBFaz00
— Tyler Pager (@tylerpager) April 21, 2024
topclimber
I finally get to be frist and it is about this joker. Life sucks.
Villago Delenda Est
Bobby the Lesser reminds me of Ralph Nader’s tone deafness on social issues…you know, things like civil rights and gay rights were sideshows to him.
Jackie
I mistook DOA for RIP.
Parfigliano
@Villago Delenda Est: Kenndy is a sideshow
SiubhanDuinne
RFK Jr went from quirky-but-basically-harmless to full-blown-batshit-deranged in pretty short order.
Scout211
I try to avoid news stories about RFK,jr. That’s actually not that hard to do because he doesn’t get a lot of coverage in the media. But the pictures I have seen of him always make him look like he is irritated, angry, disgusted or maybe constipated.
Does he even know how to smile? I guess not or maybe he is getting tips from Trump and his “mean” pose that he uses all the time.
Harrison Wesley
This bro really baffles me. I have no idea why he’s doing this, or even would want to be doing it. It’s not even a vanity run.
Leto
I honestly believe if Teddy were still here, he’d straight up punch Jr in the mouth, tell him to get his shit together, and drop the fuck out. In lieu of Teddy, I suggest the rest of his family do it.
SpaceUnit
I’ve been saying all along that RFK is going to hurt trump more than Biden. Vlad needs different spoiler and he’s running out of time.
SpaceUnit
@Scout211:
Yeah, he’s one weird looking dude. Creepy weird.
SiubhanDuinne
@Scout211:
¿Porqué no los cuatros?
wjca
Waiting for the explicit QAnon endorsement.
p.a.
Is he example x^n of someone who has never heard the word “no” in his life before now?
Chet Murthy
@Villago Delenda Est: His big policy issues are (apparently) anti-vaxx and anti-Ukraine. And that’s it ? really? really, Bobby? That’s the best you could do? Sheesh.
Leto
@Scout211: I kind of wonder about his voice? How it’s both warbly and gravelly? Because his sister kind of has it too, so is it a family thing? It’s just a thing I’ve noticed and thought about.
Chet Murthy
@Leto: https://theconversation.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-reveals-why-he-has-a-raspy-voice-spasmodic-dysphonia-explained-227500#:~:text=Kennedy%20Jr.%20has%20a%20particularly,tight%20or%20strained%2Dsounding%20voice.
Kennedy Jr. has a particularly harsh-sounding voice. The cause is a neurological condition called spasmodic dysphonia. Spasmodic dysphonia, also known as laryngeal dysphonia, often results in a shaky, tight or strained-sounding voice.
Jeffro
RFK Jr running as “even dumber trump” is really something…but hey, two-party monopoly, amirite?!?
LOL
He’s going to end up in the 5-6% range wherever he’s on the ballot, and most of that will be from the trump wing. Dems know what’s what.
Jeffro
@Harrison Wesley: $$$
Well that, and he’s an attention whore
Jackie
@SpaceUnit:
Which reminds me; where did Tulsi Gabbard disappear to?
Elizabelle
RFK Jr is just gross. Haven’t read a full article on him for several years. Last one was on his (ex-) wife Mary’s suicide.
Get out of the spotlight, Bozo.
Anne Laurie
From what I’m reading, he’s been full-blown batsh*t since forever, but his family provided a deep protective layer & very few people outside his family knew anything about him.
The way Donald Trump was a big pest to a certain layer of NYC ‘society’, until NBC made him a tv star.
From what I read, he’s had so much filler & botox injected into his face, the closest he can get to a smile is that primate-bared-fangs expression. But at least (he tells himself) he doesn’t look old!
Jackie
@Leto: RFK jr and Kerry both suffer from spasmodic dysphonia.
I wonder if it’s hereditary?
Anne Laurie
Still campaigning to be TFG’s new improved VP candidate, last I heard.
(Main argument against her, from the GOP side, is that she’d use her military training to dispose of him within hours of the inauguration ceremony.)
Melancholy Jaques
@topclimber:
Seeing “frist” brings back memories of the Bush/Cheney years and I remember that those Republicans were also horrible people.
Villago Delenda Est
@Jackie: Rura Penthe, it is to be hoped.
SpaceUnit
@Jackie:
Don’t know, don’t care. She’ll probably show up on Joe Rogan’s YouTube channel to talk about Bigfoot and alien moon bases.
Jackie
@SpaceUnit: Rivaling with MTG 😁
Martin
@Jackie: She’s on one of the right-wing Fox also-rans as the ‘liberal’, IIRC.
Scout211
@Anne Laurie:
Oooh, cool plot twist.
sdhays
@Villago Delenda Est: Alas, I don’t think so. I’ve see her mentioned as angling to be Trump’s VP (on the D-list, I’m guessing).
Chet Murthy
@Scout211: And then she’d pardon herself!
wjca
We could start a pool on which segment of Those People would be set up as scapegoats for the hit….
BR
Don’t forget this one:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/robert-f-kennedy-jr-tweet_n_64c3fab7e4b021e2f29310ba
BR
Also folks need to remind Michigan voters that RFK jr is as bad as Trump on supporting Palestinian civilians. He mocked Biden’s idea of any kind of ceasefire.
Balconesfault
Anybody who doesn’t view climate change as an existential issue has pretty much proven that they’re too stupid to pay attention to.
kindness
I didn’t know he was anti-Ukraine. I wonder how Putin got to him?
CaseyL
That apple fell so far from the tree it’s in a different orchard. In another country. Quite possibly on another planet.
It’s easy to blame the numerous traumas of his youth – uncle murdered, father murdered, heroine addiction, brother dies of drug OD – but he has siblings and lots of cousins who went through the same or similar traumas, and they didn’t turn out like he did.
SpaceUnit
You know, this is neither here nor there but why is it standard to capitalize the word Bigfoot? I used the word in an earlier comment and it was autocorrected to a capitalization. I did a quick check on my computer’s dictionary, and it too showed the word capitalized.
I mean, even if they were real one shouldn’t need to capitalize. You wouldn’t capitalize the word chimpanzee or woodchuck or banana slug. WTF??
Yeah, it’s this sort of shit that keeps me up at night.
delphinium
@Anne Laurie: So in the cartoon at top, looks like bats around his head (bats in the belfry?) perhaps implying that RFK jr is so beyond nuts that even they don’t wanna stick around.
Marmot
@SpaceUnit: There’s only the one.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Well sometimes it’s capitalized.
Chet Murthy
Bobby’s so fucking nuts i fully expect his running mate shanahan to quit. She’s a little crazy too, but she didn’t get where she is by being delusional. A Grifter’s got to know when the game is up.
Suzanne
I will never really understand why people with wealth court this kind of attention. They ruin their reputations, destroy the comfort of anonymity or at least a low profile. It has to be some kind of disorder.
Marmot
@Suzanne: I know, right? Delusion? Thinking you really are that awesome, and hey, you’ve got the money to take it a little farther, so why not?
Mr. Bemused Senior
@CaseyL: oops, somehow I clicked the wrong “reply.” I meant that for @SpaceUnit
allium
@Jackie: I mistook “Kennedy Shanahan” in the photo for “Kennedy Shmennedy”.
RevRick
@Balconesfault: Bill McKibben at the 2nd Annual UCC Earth Summit:
You can have policy disputes with Libertarians over the minimum wage and negotiate some kind of compromise. You can’t have a policy dispute with physics (over the greenhouse gas effect of carbon dioxide), because physics just is.
prostratedragon
@p.a.: Pretty sure he’s heard it. But didn’t believe it.
Martin
Someone asked last night after I comment I made about my take on how universities were handling the protests, how other campuses were handling it. Apologies for not recalling who asked.
I’ve only checked in with a few people but other campuses are seeing protests, including where I worked, where there were pretty close to non-stop protests between Jewish and Palestinian students for the last 15 years.
Starting with my campus – things are pretty much status quo. The protests have more participants – it’s a bit more diverse on the Palestinian side, and it’s occasionally a little spicy, but overall it’s fine. Now, we spent those 15 years teaching students how to do this respectfully, where the lines were, and holding them accountable when they crossed them. We had the ‘heckler veto’ lesson and consequences a few times. You can’t shout down speakers – that violates our free speech policy. You can’t threaten, but you also can’t imply a threat where none is intended, so we’d talk out statements like ‘from the river to the sea’, and what ‘destroy Israel’ means. It’s easy to imply a threat there, but when you give the students a chance to express their thoughts here, it’s pretty straightforward. They see Israel as a South African-like ethnostate that presents a permanent threat to the region for a two-state solution because it implies the supremacy of jewish people over muslim people, and what these students would like to see is a United States of the Levant where Jewish and Muslim and Christians can all live peacefully, but where (for instance) American settlers can’t just parachute in under the cover of ‘Jewish homeland’ and through violence displace Muslims that have lived there for centuries. They don’t want to displace Jews that have the same historic connection to the region that Palestinians do, they want a place where there are protections for all of them.
Now, you can argue this is wildly idealistic and has no possibility of happening, and I would agree with you. But that doesn’t make it a threat, or antisemitic, or undeserving of being in the public discussion. A lot of our work was focused on getting the students to talk before they yell, and to explain before they slogan, and to be explicit that they don’t seek harm to each other. They can disagree, but they don’t want harm. Over time a culture of this develops and it brings the temperature down. After all, they’re going to see each other in classes in the dorms, etc. They may even wind up on the same student project. They don’t need to hate each other to express differing views.
Now, the *real* problem for us were the non-campus voices. They were the actual radicals. They were the ones that called for violence, and our student discourse and discipline team couldn’t do anything about them except to remind students that these were outside voices looking to exploit this situation at their expense. And to a decent degree this worked. And that’s really why we always had cops there – and we worked really closely with the police to make sure that they don’t move on students unless an administrator gives them the go ahead. They’re really there to deal with the outsiders. And it did help for the students to see that interaction. Whenever there was an organized protest, we had a staff person observing who had authority to address student conduct and instruct the police (it did boil over a few times). I participated in that tangentially and the campus police were always more tense than the staff were and needed assurances from the staff that things weren’t spilling over. We knew the students, we talked to them a lot.
And my understanding is that culture has held quite well. Their protests are larger than the ones at the Ivys that we are hearing about, but the students are reminded they are part of a community and the community is there with them. We had hunger strikes, and encampments and all that jazz. Pretty much all the time. We also had constant bomb threats from the outside community and had to lock down every commencement as a result. That sucked, but we were practiced at it.
Other universities are also seeing protests and the like, and it’s a mixed bag. Many are calling them offensive, and to my ear its not that something offensive was said, it’s that the _concept_ is offensive. That’s going to backfire. Others are just sort of playing out.
A lot of the attention on the Ivies is because they are the safe spaces for the ruling class, and particularly the conservative class. They are not liberal institutions – they are pretty deeply conservative in a lot of ways. It’s not that the situation there is bigger, or louder, or more dangerous – just that it’s more political. And conservatives have managed to get the upper hand on the narrative which puts these institutions in a defensive position which they are pretty unaccustomed to being VERY reputation sensitive. But the random Cal State campus isn’t nearly so sensitive or political and so approaches this stuff a lot more pragmatically.
Mainly I think most universities don’t spend enough time talking to their own students, building that community, building mutual respect, and when possible bringing these issues into the classroom. I attended a school that did a lot of that stuff really well, so I naturally helped push my campus in that same direction, and we had a number of other leaders that saw the value in that approach and did it in an earnest way. It’s a lot of work. It requires treating students like adults. Both of those are hard for institutions to do. You’ll note Berkeley isn’t having much trouble either – they have even more experience than we did and they have much weirder shit to cope with, and mostly they keep their student protest activity to an eye-roll level. Their current problem is that parents of jewish students have started hiring private (unarmed) security to patrol the campus and that’s really inviting trouble.
This is probably a biased view, but parents almost always make these situations worse. You do kind of need an energy sink for parents though, and if you don’t have that, they’ll do shit like this because they struggle to just sit back and do nothing. That was a whole other category of staff work that you have to invest to keep things running okay. Sometimes it’s little more than a make-work effort, but with a bit more work it can be something meaningful.
Jackie
Heh! We’re not the only ones who think Bobby jr is a threat to TIFG!
WE know! 😉
RevRick
@CaseyL: According to Family Systems Theory the same cause can produce opposite effects*. Just because they have not manifested his dysfunction doesn’t mean the trauma he and they experienced couldn’t be the cause.
*A child raised by an abuser can become an abuser or someone who invites abuse, for example.
NotMax
@SpaceUnit
Moon bears!
:)
Another Scott
@Martin: Interesting.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
wjca
I’d be interested in a bit more about what works for this, and how you go about it. I can definitely see the need. Just too little experience to (re)invent a solution.
SpaceUnit
@NotMax:
As a certified SpaceUnit I can confirm that Moon Bears are real and that they suck. Fuck Moon Bears.
JGreen
@Mr. Bemused Senior: I went to UC Santa Cruz for a couple of years when we only had club sports teams. I once saw a UCSC soccer player with a sweatshirt with a banana slug holding a can of beer and the caption “The Fightin’ Slugs of UCSC”. I am proud that the school kept the Banana Slugs as the name for all the teams. By the way, the motto of the UC system is “Fiat Lux” or “Let There Be Light”, but at Santa Cruz, it’s “Fiat Slug” or “Let There Be Slugs”. A sentiment shared by all.
Sally
@Martin: Thank you for this. A most enlightening piece
Ed: Speaking as one, parents are always the problem !
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Martin: I add my thanks.
prostratedragon
In short, @Martin:
Teach-ins? I’ve been thinking along these lines. It’s a sad commentary that no one at Columbia (or elsewhere, thst I’ve heard) has tried to engage students with something like this, even if hastily assembled. Such a waste of resources and violation of the alleged mission of the institutions, and likely to lead to further waste of opportunities for many of the students resourceful enough to get in.
Redshift
The replies to the Magic Word Blockchain tweet are something else. “This would be transformational!” “It’ll never happen under Trump or Biden!”
Dudes have apparently never googled “federal government budget.” It’s not a secret; it’s literally available for anyone to read at any time (plus some great summaries and explainers from the Treasury Department.)
SFAW
If RatFucKerJR thinks the various issues mentioned at the top are NOT “existential,” which issues does he believe ARE “existential”?
Chet Murthy
@Redshift: haha, and The Congressional Record. And the various publications where federal agencies announce proposed and final regulations.
West of the Rockies
RFK Jr. is just so damn miserable looking. By which I mean he looks miserable, pained, bored, and like he’s sitting directly behind the trumpeting Trump in court.
Is he incapable of smiling?
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
Except that bobby seems to have tone deafness to everything except the insane voices swirling around in what the hell ever it is that makes up his brain. You know, those voices that few others ever hear and only when they are on some pretty strong, strange drugs. Now I’m not saying that bobby is on strange drugs, only that he gives the impression that he is. At least he does to me….
Ruckus
@Scout211:
But the pictures I have seen of him always make him look like he is irritated, angry, disgusted or maybe constipated.
Quite possibly it’s all of the above.
HumboldtBlue
@SpaceUnit:
It’s the name of a fictional character and therefore a proper noun? Superman and Batman are capitalized.
Martin
@wjca: It depends a lot of the nature of the parents. We didn’t have ‘karens’. We catered primarily to low-income and first generation students, so parents quite often just didn’t know what to do, what to expect. There was no backseat driving. So a lot of this was just organizing events around the student activities so they could see how the place works. Having parents spend a night in the dorms is always fun – at least half of the parent never went to college. Mostly for them it’s communication and sharing what’s happening. They didn’t really challenge what the administration was doing. I found it pretty delightful. I’d go out on move-in day and just answer questions and help parents feel okay and start to build that relationship.
Berkeley is a very different place. A lot more active legacies, so you can do more ‘back to campus’ style events around sporting events, homecoming, stuff like that. They have more helicopter parents and you can have activities directed to the student body that you ask parents to organize (this is the make-work stuff). It just soaks up energy, which is sometimes all everyone needs. They have some entitled parents, but it’s not too bad. Their parents are a lot more likely to know what to expect in college – they can fill in a lot of gaps.
Jump over to USC and it’s a lot more legacies and entitled parents. Not that most parents are entitled, but some are VERY entitled and they will organize disruption. USC has the benefit that parents are just physically farther away as they draw more from across the country. But they need proper PR, parent outreach, a lot of hand-holding, in part because USC has a lot more money attached to each family. The family knows this and expects something in return (they expect their calls to be answered) and there can be a little bit of hostage taking here from the parents that either are or will become big donors or can influence big gifts – executives, etc. Where we tended to have the same people working with students interact with parents and mange that because it was more focused on informing the parents, at USC it’s more PR/donor relations handholding stuff. That can sometimes backfire when the parent is just genuinely concerned about their kid and they get a suit on the phone. The Ivies are just USC++ because you now have a bunch of parents that are members of congress, foreign heads of state, celebrities, etc. There was zero chance something I would talk to parents about would make it in to the news. There’s a huge chance a Yale staffer’s message will make the news – maybe not directly, but that conversation gets forwarded as a tip to a newsroom, shows up as a comment in a hearing, etc. There’s a lot more ‘I’ll have the dean or president call you right back’ kind of stuff there and that’s how you engage.
Omnes Omnibus
@SpaceUnit: You capitalize Cher, Adele, Bono, and Sting, right? Right?
Frankensteinbeck
@SpaceUnit:
Because it’s not a species or a type of creature, it’s the name of a specific cryptid. Thus, a proper noun and capitalized. It’s not a bigfoot, it’s Bigfoot.
Ruckus
@CaseyL:
Quite possibly on another planet.
No quite possibly about it. I heard that he was from a small planet way, way far away from earth called planet Strange. The story I heard was that the beings that populate planet Strange are. And they have been traveling throughout space looking for another planet like theirs but haven’t found it yet and he is one of those looking for life forms like them but his ship crashed here and he has no way to contact his home planet or return and he took what he thought was a human like quality to attempt to fit in. I’d give his success rate as around 15%
Aussie sheila
@Villago Delenda Est:
I remember Nader’s run. At the time I had a lot of contact with US union Cdes. I couldn’t effing believe any lefty would dream of voting for him in a FPTP voting system. Political suicide for anything left of centre. JFC on a cracker. That election was a shocker. On a number of levels including the USSC determining the outcome and the meek acceptance of the Dems. Anyhow.
Have I told you lately how much I agree with the nominative determinism of your nym?
Keep up the work. Between you and the pitchbot I know I’m not going mad.
Redshift
@SiubhanDuinne:
He’s been a major anti-vaxxer for years, so I’d say he was pretty damn harmful way before this.
Ruckus
@CaseyL:
I’m going from a different universe.
Chet Murthy
@Redshift: i think we used to be a lot more forgiving of that kind of batshit insanity. We used to think, well people can make up their own mind, etc. Now we know just how harmful that shit can be, and I think lots of us are just not willing to put up with it anymore. I sure know I’m not.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
It has to be some kind of disorder.
As someone who long ago used to be a mental health counselor I’d say BINGO!
Ruckus
@prostratedragon:
But didn’t believe it.
I’d bet it’s didn’t understand it.
Princess
@Martin: There’s a lot of weaseling here, especially in the word “settlers” :
”They see Israel as a South African-like ethnostate that presents a permanent threat to the region for a two-state solution because it implies the supremacy of jewish people over muslim people, and what these students would like to see is a United States of the Levant where Jewish and Muslim and Christians can all live peacefully, but where (for instance) American settlers can’t just parachute in under the cover of ‘Jewish homeland’ and through violence displace Muslims that have lived there for centuries. They don’t want to displace Jews that have the same historic connection to the region that Palestinians do, they want a place where there are protections for all of them.”
By using the term “settlers” you want us to think the pro-Palestinian side are concerned with the contemporary move of settlers into the West Bank — which most of BJ including me will agree with. You elide the millions of Jews in Israel and their descendants who came between those “with the same historic connection” as the Palestinians , however you define that, and the most contemporary settlers. The majority of these Jews were driven out of Muslim countries after 1948. And you tell your Jewish students, most of who will have personal connections to that huge middle group that they aren’t allowed to feel threatened or see protests using terms like “destroy Israel” as a threat?
Pro-Palestinian protestors for the most part want all Jews who arrived after 48 and their descendants, gone from Israel. They are very open about this. It is not a secret. You seem to have achieved peace by gaslighting your Jewish students.
Prescott Cactus
@Jackie: Give it time.
prostratedragon
Such a good question!:
coin operated
@SpaceUnit:
OK…I’ve taken a bong rip or two and was giggling at this for a good 15 minutes.
piratedan
@prostratedragon: this is the shit I don’t want swept under the rug post the J6 trial. Maybe I am being a vindictive shill, but I REALLY want everyone who was involved in these events outed at a minimum, convicted of a crime if proven.
There’s a whole lotta shit that simply doesn’t pass the smell test.
Loudermilks video recon
MOC tours including would be rioters
knowing where to attack
secret service texts
the apparent coordination between those introducing challenges to the votes and those attacking the Capitol.
texts between the WH and members of Congress
who made the call to reduce Capitol Police staffing?
why didn’t the FBI take it seriously?
Jay
@piratedan:
Don’t forget Flynn’s brother,…..
pat
@Leto:
I believe they already have.
Jay
@Princess:
And the majority of the Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan and a few dozen other refugee camps in the Middle East were driven out of Israel during and after 1948.
And yet, Palestinian are still being driven out of Israel proper and their villages and camps in the West Bank.
Funny that.
Moshe Dayan, CBC, on the conquest of Gaza. 1967.
“See what a garden we will make out of this place!”
Joey Maloney
FTFY, I think.
Joey Maloney
Excellent that Jay’s and my post adjoin each other. It shows the deep, intractable nature of “no, I’m the bigger victim here” that governs too much of I/P discourse.
You know what? Everybody got fucked. We can whinge about that endlessly or we can try to find some way to actually live next door without constantly being at each other’s throats.
Unfortunately there is no one in the leadership on either side who is interested in that (and no one in the wings that I can see, either). The rejectionists on each side need each other – the provide the mutual excuse for continued violence and their own cushy positions, whether in Doha or in their favorite billionaire’s bunker-equipped Jerusalem mansion.
Jay
@Joey Maloney:
Yup. And those on both sides willing to make peace, are murdered. By their own, or by others.
sab
@Joey Maloney: My long since ex husband was Jewish with an Israeli mentor, long since dead of old age. His mentor was one of those unicorns you dream of, hopeful for a two state solution. He was hopeful about Oslo accords. Then there were the Be’er Sheva bus bombings. He said at the time that if they could just tough it out there was hope, but that if they didn’t (and they probably wouldn’t) that the violence would spiral on forever until both sides were gone.
Jay
@sab:
You are up late, with everything you have going on, are you okay, or just busy trying to kill your brain with other stuff?
Aussie sheila
@Jay:
Like Northern Ireland since 1923. A solution can be forged, but not until the US grows up and acts as an honest interlocutor. The unending sentimentality towards only one side of this conflict is nauseating, and dangerous.
sab
@Jay: Both of same. Also, being old and on the spectrum, I am almost always up late. Always have been.
sab
@Aussie sheila: I think the locals deserve some blame for the Irish Troubles. USA Irish didn’t help, but I will never believe outsiders were the prime motivators.
David 🏀Caitlin Clark🏀 Koch
I would vote for him if he put the budget on Pornhub
Jay
@sab:
Take care of yourself Sab. We al love you.
Martin
@prostratedragon: Yeah, faculty mostly reject this approach – which is a shame because it’s really effective. We had some pretty good faculty that would engage but not quite that way. The incentive structure at research universities has pretty much killed that sort of thing.
More likely to get it at smaller publics and privates. Different incentive structure, easier to improvise, students and faculty more likely to all know one another so you lose some of the anonymity of large institutions that can incentivize uncivil behavior. The Ivies are all pretty small so there is at least an opportunity for that kind of community building. USC is not. It’s hard there. My school was small when I started and was big when I retired. We worked hard to retain as much of that as we could but you could feel it unravelling.
Urban campuses have a harder time because it’s less territorial, I’ll say. Having a defined campus that doesn’t spill into a city, especially if you have a lot of on-campus residential housing makes that community tighter. A campus that spills into a city tends to be less cohesive, less protective. Having that community really helps with this stuff. Having the faculty feel part of the community helps as well. We had a lot of on-campus faculty housing so just being present seemed to help keep the faculty a bit more engaged.
Jay
@sab:
Neither did the Brit’s, help that is.
sab
When have they ever, help, that is.
TrainedWreck
@spaceunit:
@coin operated:
I loooved it from same state of Being & actually googled Yeti see if capitalized or undercase, assuming undercase… Yeti as abominable snowman ( not just drink container brand) is also too capitalized 🌬😂🤩🌀🎶
i don’t know how link multiple BJ posters lols
Aussie sheila
@sab:
Of course. In Ireland it was the determination of the Tories in Britain to accede to a carve out of Ireland in the North for a revanchist Protestant population after the successful independence struggle of the rest of Ireland.
In Palestine it’s the determination of the US not to pressure the Israeli state to either grant Palestinians full citizenship status in the Israeli state, or to withdraw from the territories occupied since 1967 and grant the Palestinian people the full rights to a sovereign state. Either way, it will take a strong outside sovereign to impose its weight on Israel.
Only the US has this capacity. Unfortunately.
In the same way that the Good Friday Agreement would have been impossible absent the goodwill and cooperation of the UK Labour govt of the time.
sab
@Jay: Solitary jackal that I love also loves me. I love the internet that lets me know that.
I am fine. Dad was 99. He had an amazingly good life until his last year. I wish we could have done better protecting him but we did try a lot.
My siblings have issues, but that is with them. Like where the fuck were you for the last ten years. Only one of them even checked in.
TrainedWreck
@TrainedWreck: I don’t know how link multiple BJ posts lols
Aussie sheila
@Aussie sheila:
And none of the above absolves the various Arab and Iranian meddlers in the situation from their wholly self serving and nihilist approach to this tragedy.
Jay
@sab:
Family is often tough, not stepping up.
Chet Murthy
@Aussie sheila:
I don’t think Israel and Israel’s defenders understand how they look to the rest of the world. For the longest time, I was a strong partisan of Israel, even as I believed that Israel must withdraw from all *all* *ALL* of the Occupied Territories. But after Oct 7, what became clear to me is that Israel wasn’t fighting to get back its people, nor to militarily end Hamas. Instead, it was fighting to ethnically cleanse Gaza. And the rest of the world sees this too. It adds to what the rest of the world has been seeing for the last three *decades*: slow-motion ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
It’s like Israel thinks that if they just do it bureaucratically enough, with bulldozers instead of bombers, they can get away with ethnically cleansing the Palestinians off their land, out of their homes. And nobody will notice. Or maybe by the time it’s accomplished, so much time will have passed, that people will just agree to it. And hey, it worked last time: there’s ample evidence that during Israel’s War for Independence, they ethnically cleansed many Palestinian villages. Ample evidence. And after some number of decades, hey, the international community accepted that that land was Israel’s, and that those Palestinians had no right to return. So hey, maybe it’ll work.
But the youth of the West see thru it now, and I don’t think they’re for changing on this. They see that this is just slow-motion ethnic cleansing, and they can see that what’s happening in Gaza is the same, only with bombers and tanks instead of bureaucrats and bulldozers.
And every time this comes up, Israel and their defenders just point at Oct 7, or the latest suicide bombing, or the latest rocket attack, as if somehow that excuses the *decades* of land theft, of penning up Gazans in an open-air prison. It won’t wash.
Last: whenever the question of returning the Occupied Territories arises, it’s instantly dismissed as a non-starter. But nobody ever points out *why* it’s a non-starter: because *Israel* would never give up their settlements — settlements they built on stolen land. Instead, people always point at the Palestinians’ not relinquishing the “right of return”, and argue that that’s what makes things an impasse. But the thing is, the only time Israel tried to reach peace (the 2000 peace talks), Israel offered Arafat a bunch of bantustans, riven thru with Israeli restricted highways, hemmed-in with Israeli forts, on a fraction of the Occupied Territories. It’s not even surprising Arafat rejected it.
Israel’s never actually tried to offer the full return of the Occupied Territories. And it’s not surprising why not: Israel fully intends to take all that land for its own. To make it “a land without a people”.
sab
@Jay: One sister did step up. Other sister had same issues with her mother in law and was busy with that.
Brother was just the useless waste of space jerk he has always been.
Mom adored him and he missed that boat (acknowleging her adoration) fourteen years ago. Came to the house and completely ignored her. He was her favorite child and he ignored her.
Dad was on to him and didn’t much care if he turned up or not.
Not looking forward to funeral when we all have to meet each other again.
Martin
@Princess: Again – this is not my position, and I don’t pretend to have fully represented it. But your reaction, very defensive against an argument that you haven’t heard, is what we try and address.
‘For the most part’ is also doing a lot of work here given that we’ve not been able to hear the majority of their views because they get shut down so quickly. I suspect that’s also true of you. And If they do have that view, that doesn’t mean it’s a view we need to enact into policy. That view can be countered with the displacement of Jews from other muslim countries, Russia, etc. I would add in that both Jews and Muslims have largely been pitted against each other by the American and European Christians who could have responded to these horrors by making their own countries welcoming to Jews, and routinely failed to do so (and continue to fail to do so). Much easier to carve out a space in the Middle East at the expense of the people who lived there and export that problem elsewhere.
My point is that you’ll never get anywhere constantly shouting at each other. At some point you have to engage, listen, discuss, add information and context. That’s what you do with students. They’re young and idealistic, and I as an administrator don’t have the answers or solution to this problem. They probably don’t either, but they can share and see if they can find common ground and maybe help find that solution. Your response is why this is still a problem because you’re responding as though these 19 year olds are Hamas fighters and not sociology majors. Don’t talk down to them – inform them, listen to them (not what you think they are probably saying, what they are actually saying). That discussion is part of the process of considering an idea.
Neither you nor I are entitled to speak on behalf of the Jewish students. And they have plenty to say on this matter as well. They’re sympathetic to a great deal of the issues the Muslim students raise, and ask if the Jews who came to Israel because they were displaced from these other countries – where are they supposed to go? They’re perfectly capable of making their own arguments, and they do. And the Muslim students do listen to these arguments and start to seek a more collegial approach. The Jewish students are just as outspoken as the Palestinian students are – and actually outnumber them, but they do have the benefit of a more organized, more formal basis of support. There will be a more consistent flow of speakers to the campus on Jewish issues, drawing the faculty in a more formal manner (more high-level invites, more funding for these speakers, etc.) than you see with speakers on Muslim issues. That’s hardly unique to this area, and it’s a point of frustration for the Muslim students that they feel it’s a bunch of 19 year olds trying to hold a debate with a member of the Knesset, and no matter the quality of the arguments on one side or another, one party will get a larger audience, more deference, be taken more credibly, than the other. These kinds of power imbalances aren’t just important in this context, but in all of them. Black students have the same problem. Queer students have the same problem. Indigenous students, undocumented students, etc. And Jewish students have that same imbalance relative to other groups.
You seem to think we resolved this by taking a side and forcing it on the other. We absolutely did not. We resolved it by keeping outsiders from poisoning the well, helping the students talk to each other rather than yell at each other, and reminding them that they’re all here for the same purpose – to learn from each other, to grow, to make the world a better place, and to not forget that. We had to remind the Jewish students that the reason our commencement was locked down was because the level of death threats toward the muslim students was so high, often by name. They weren’t facing that. And we’d have to remind the Muslim students that the Jewish center across from campus had armed security because they too got regular bomb and death threats (more than the mosques nearby would get). We appealed to both groups to not make that situations worse for the other, because other parties would take even minor conflicts between them as an excuse to escalate violence, and often those parties didn’t really care which of them got harmed, so long as one of them did.
So don’t drag me into your us vs them view of the world.
Aussie sheila
@Chet Murthy:
I agree with everything you wrote. The US is about to discover how hard it is to impose a just solution in a situation riven with injustice from before WW1.
Nevertheless it has proclaimed to the world its undying fealty to Israel as an ethnically Jewish state, contra all traditions in the region. Now it’s the US’s turn to try what the UK managed in NI.
And BTW, I’m fully aware of Britain’s mischief in this whole mishegas. And France for that matter. But it’s the US that nailed its colours to this terrible wall, and now it’s their responsibility to assist Israel to extract itself from this utterly untenable situation.
And soon. Time has run out for the ‘special dispensation’ for Israel. Even in Australia
Oh and before I forget. Heaven save me from US students who have just discovered the Middle East. There is plenty of anti semitism on the fringes of these demo’s and my feeling is that a good number can’t police it because they can’t recognise it.
Martin
@Princess: I didn’t address my use of ‘American settlers’. You know exactly what this means, so don’t give us the line that I was referring to post-48 settlers to Israel proper. I was clearly referring to the 20% of so of West Bank settlers that carry a US passport, who keep arriving, sometimes funded by American Christian groups.
Tony Jay
@Martin:
QFT. The very idea that protests opposing the Israeli state’s long term project of cleansing Palestine of actual Palestinians are popular and have wide support is horrifying to some people for reasons that brook no rational argument.
So we get ‘They’re lying. It doesn’t matter what they say, they just want all Jews dead”, like that’s not a deeply weird and offensive thing to say about every single solitary person involved in the protests. Just bizarrely hostile. About as justifiable as screaming ‘Babykiller!” at anyone supporting the right to abortion. I don’t really know what can be done about that level of extremism except to keep on pushing for peaceful solutions and equitable treatment for the victims on all sides.
Chet Murthy
@Aussie sheila:
This is the thing that really, really stands out. Israel is becoming today’s version of South Africa, and if it completes that transformation, it won’t be pretty, nor pleasant for Israelis. The really sad thing is that if they’d been serious about peace in the late 90s, and actually offered back the Occupied Territories, I have no doubt that today Palestine and Israel would be good neighbors. I mean, Mohammed Dahlan’s security services were working hand-in-glove with Shin Bet (to the point that more militant Palestinian activists were complaining about him, calling him a Quisling) before Oslo fell apart in the Second Intifada. It could have been different. But Israel just wanted that land, so they kept on building settlements, and ….. well, the rest is history.
Aussie sheila
@Chet Murthy:
History is made by people, but not without the weight of the past. Israelis and Palestinians have to be assisted to find a way forward and like in NI, that assistance will need to come from the Ur coloniser of the region.
Jay
@Martin:
thank you Martin for your posts.
Aussie sheila
@Aussie sheila:
And I don’t doubt that there are plenty of anti Semites drawn to the Free Palestine demos. But I don’t think most of those organising the demo’s know enough to recognise it and police it. And even if they did their efforts would be ignored anyway.
scribbler
@Martin: Thank you for all your comments in this thread. I’m learning a lot.
Geminid
@Jackie: RFK Junior’s campaign can shape its messaging to target Democratic voters if it wants to. I don’t see them making substantial inroads among Biden voters that way, but they’d at least attract some Republican donors if they did.
One piece of campaign news: RFK Jr. said a week ago (per Axios) that he was no longer interested in the Libertarian Party nomination. He said he doesn’t need the ballot access the LP brings, that he can get qualify for state ballots on his own, but he may have been told the nomination was not forthcoming. The party convention is next month, with 30 announced candidates.
Martin
@Tony Jay: At a university it’s important to allow students to express their ideas even when you know they’re wrong. That’s a part of learning. If you shut that down, they just develop those ideas in their heads or in an echo chamber, and those ideas perpetuate. If you let those ideas go out and without any interaction, something similar happens. The administration doesn’t need to respond to the expressions – the text, other students can do that just fine. Now you have two groups learning. What you do is keep things in the bounds of reasonable discourse. And if they’re open to a lesson, you provide a lesson.
A lot of this is just getting them to stop yelling. That takes some work. We invited our students to put up educational displays – most students weren’t familiar with what was happening – write about it, put up posters, photos. Not yelling. Jewish groups were invited to do the same, to educate students on their view, what Israelis faced, Jews in other nations, etc. Feedback would be provided if that looked dishonest, incorrect, etc. Universities always have scholars on these matters. Usually these groups are required to have an advisor the students choose – have some accountability there.
When you get them talking instead of yelling, you can probe – what do the other students think about this matter (settlements, infidata, etc.) Usually, they want to tell you what they think the other group thinks. No. We’re going to walk over and ask them, and hear it from them. Don’t assume what they think. Dialogue ensues. You repeat this. And when I say you repeat this, you repeat it daily, for weeks, for months, for years. You keep pulling them to dialogue. You keep pulling them to asking not assuming. You keep pulling them to sharing their names and majors, to common interests. It’s a LOT of work. But it keeps the kinds of headlines CNN is running right now from your campus. It’s not good for the students. And if you get this in your culture, it sustains to other protests, etc. so when the next thing pops up, it doesn’t instantly go to shit, because you have a culture.
Jay
@Aussie sheila:
It works, (sadly) both ways.
I have a keffiyeh*, that I wear as a scarf. I had some ADL moron grab it and spray foaming lather in my face on Skytrain.
I wrist locked him and arm barred him, and while waiting for the Police, pointed out he was a moron. It was woven by Kurdish Royjova members in “independent” Syria and given to me as thanks for drilling fresh water wells in a combat zone.
The Police asked me if I wanted to press charges and my response was a hearty yes.
*keffiyeh’s are common in the Middle East, the patterns of decorations, weaving and colours define “what they may mean”. Other than that, they are just a comfortable scarf/head covering/dust mask sold in tens of thousands of stalls all across the Middle East,
Ksmiami
@Aussie sheila: Sorry- I call BS. The Irish weren’t an existential threat to the English while most Palestinians want the entire state of Israel destroyed. Do I empathize with some of their demands and feel that Bibi has massively overreached? yes. Does that mean I think the Palestinians are innocent victims? not really. As Golda Meir said, there can be peace once the Palestinians love their kids more than they hate Jews.
Ksmiami
@Chet Murthy: moderation on both sides was squeezed out and squandered. And the results have been predictable.
Martin
@Aussie sheila: There are. In our experience that was pretty rare among the student body. But these things are a magnet for outside agitators. Most of the threats we got against students didn’t come from Jewish or Muslim groups/individuals, but from Christians (at least when we could identify them). Like I said, a lot of these people didn’t care which side got hurt so long as one did. A death threat hurts the target group and accuses the other one of being the source of the threat. When we revealed muslim groups were receiving death threats there were a lot of people jumping to the conclusion that it was jewish groups issuing the threats – because that was the tension. Nope.
You have to keep the outsiders out of this because they are _so_ destructive – they have no investment in the campus, don’t care what wreckage they leave behind – they’ll drive home. That was pretty easy for us – we have a very clearly defined and distinct campus. Columbia does not. It really is hard for them to do that part.
We did work with the student group to get them to self-police. Sometimes they liked the extra mass, the extra energy, and we’d have to remind them that they will be held to some degree accountable for those outsiders. If they communicate with us, and say ‘hey, we don’t know these people, we didn’t invite them’, we could work from that and we could protect the students.
But again the administration has to put in the work.
Jay
@Ksmiami:
Nice Hasbera.
Tony Jay
@Martin:
Yup. It’s good work you’re doing, and necessary, but I can easily imagine it being hard and often uphill, but once the red-mist of righteous anger gets parked most people want to make connections, and that’s where solutions – actionable or not – come from.
Not helped at all by the fuckery of all kinds of outside agitators, and I’m definitely including the click-bait hungry News Media and their Narrative driven lust for easily framed conflict.
Aussie Sheila
@Martin:
Thank you. Yes I agree. You are doing yeoman’s work there. Anti imperialism is a tricky subject anywhere. In the Middle East it’s a topic that requires a lot of reading, talking and a wide understanding of a region that doesn’t get a lot of attention unless some fuckwit is jumping up and down about how Israelis are all ‘settler colonists’ or some other fuckwit is opining that Palestinians don’t love their children the way everyone else does.
I’m afraid that the current situation on the Left in the US is akin to the blind leading the addled to the edge.
Part of the problem is that a sizeable portion of the US Left have identified Israel’s existence with the history US imperialism in the region while being blissfully unaware of the role of Britain and France. The US role is very important, but relatively recent in the scheme of things.
Aussie Sheila
@Ksmiami:
Your response shows why you are unable to be part of any solution. What rubbish. And racist rubbish to boot.
Martin
In your opinion.
Polling in Palestine and Israel indicated they had pretty even support for both a 2 state solution and 1 state solution, and policies like right to return, as of 2022. Where those view were high they were high for both groups. Where those views were low they were low for both groups.
From this polling, it’s safe to say that Israeli citizens have about as much interest in the destruction of Palestine as Palestinians have of the destruction of Israel. If that’s a majority, it’s a pox on both houses.
I think we should agree that collective blame isn’t a favorable position to stake out.
Jay
@Aussie Sheila:
@Martin:
I generally try to stay out of I/P threads, you know,……. for reasons.
Aussie Sheila
@Jay:
I do usually as well. It’s not a topic I opine on on blogs, for reasons. But I am very worried about the US Left’s understandable reaction to Biden’s foolish and emotional embrace of Netanyahu. He has manoeuvred himself into an untenable situation. Lacking the power to make the Israeli state comport itself in a civilised manner, he is now hostage to a quasi fascist government there and while Bibi acts, Biden is caught between the anger of his own base and the execrable philo/anti semitism of the US Right.
He needs to extract himself and his government fast. The Republicans have had no problem in the past telling the Israelis to pull their heads in.
Biden needs to do the same.
Liminal Owl
@Martin: Thank you. This is really interesting, and helpful.
However, there are definitely reports (on some campuses—I don’t know where you are) of Jewish students being physically attacked in serious ways. I’m guessing those are elsewhere, and maybe actions from the “non-campus voices,” but still scary. And I have not heard/read any similar stories of attacks on pro-Palestinian students, though of course that may be a failure of the info.
Martin
@Aussie Sheila: I think a lot of the left, particularly the young left, have correctly identified that American democracy is pretty corrupt (not in the GOP is bad sense, in the we sell out the voters for the powerful sense). They are looking for some kind of moral vision for this country after a serious psychic wound imposed by Trump. Whatever doubts they had about America as a force for good before Trump were not only confirmed but magnified. We taught them that their cynicism needed to go up a few notches. Not the first time we’ve done that to a generation, either. And while they praise Biden for quite a bit, it’s not enough to make up for what was lost. They’re desperate for the US to do something good. We aren’t mobilizing to fix the homeless situation. We’re mostly just pissing around with Trump, and Thomas. We totally stalled out on Ukraine. We’re losing ground on civil rights. Climate change mostly proceeds apace. Everything is excuses for inaction.
And I don’t think it’s fair to put all of that on Biden. And I don’t think the situation in Israel/Gaza has a clear moral message – I think Bibi and Hamas both wanted a conflict, and then both got more than they bargained for. But they need some justice somewhere from the US.
Liminal Owl
@RevRick: Mostly good point, but might I request that you reconsider the wording “someone who invites abuse”? (Email me if you want a copy of my favorite reframing article, the “Shark Cage” metaphor.)
Aussie Sheila
@Martin:
For what it’s worth from here, I agree with you completely. It isn’t all Biden’s fault of course. The structures and US government are ineffable to anyone who cares about democracy.
But while your efforts are admirable something more needs to emerge to take the ‘conversation’ up a notch politically.
If student leftists in the US won’t or can’t recognise anti semitic provocateurs the Left is in a world of trouble. And if US Liberals can’t or won’t drop their idiotic and racist sentimentality towards Israel at the expense of the humanity and rights of Palestinians, we are all in for a world of trouble.
Once again, thank you for your thoughtful responses and your valuable work.
Jay
@Aussie Sheila:
Remember Bibi feeding the Party of Putin all the bs about “CBW” and Nukes in Iraq?
President Joe Biden is trying to thread a hard needle.
Yes, he has squelches in his Admin, and people who are fixated on the past, (Ukraine), but, there are no easy answers.
There is no green lantern.
He has sanctioned some, (there will be more coming) of The Settlers,
He has Leahy Acted an IDF Battalion.
He has pushed aid for Gaza, (and been given a big F/U from Israel).
Bit by bit,
Canada suspended all aid to UNHRWA,………
Until Israel refused to produce any evidence,
So aid is back on, and I am not talking about the Colonna Report of late, this was months ago. When Canada takes the position that you are lying liars,………..
Well,………
Uncle Cosmo
@SpaceUnit: That face – It looks like someone crept up on him while he was napping, doused it in lighter fluid, tossed in a lit match, and tried to put it out with a tire iron. And it appears that the lit fluid trickled down his throat and into his brain by way of the ears.
(FTR I hold the Kennedy clan of the early 2000s in utter contempt after they and their big-buck$-bagmen bullied and threatened the MD Democratic party into anointing his politically-tone-deaf sister Kathleen as their candidate for Governor in 2002, and her terminally-inept campaign gave our spozedly-true-blue state its first four years this millennium of GOP misrule. Fuckem each & every one.)
Kay
@Aussie sheila:
Ugh. I tire of this sneering at the students. I would venture most of the people who protested the Iraq war “just discovered” Iraq yet no one told them they weren’t allowed to have an opinion.
Young people are young, with less experience than older people. This is just a fact. There’s no qualifying test for political action – if there were most of the opposition to any war would never qualify.
Jay
@Liminal Owl:
I, (not a student) old white man in his 60’s, have been attacked several times for wearing a keffiyeh as a scarf,
Kay
If I had quizzed the Iraq war protestors on Iraqi history and the US role in Iraq prior to the invasion I wonder how many would pass my qualifying test? 10%? Maybe?
This requirement for protesting seems to be new. I don’t recall it being applied to college students in 2003. The people who are now in their early 40’s.
Aussie Sheila
@Kay:
I’m not sneering at US students’ anti war position. I’m querying the quality of the anti war leadership of the movement for a ceasefire in Gaza and for Palestinian emancipation.
It’s naive to think that there’s no leadership to be had in these movements. When passionate and well intentioned students allow their movement to be linked to anti semitism, someone is doing something wrong. Seriously. And I get the disingenuousness of the ‘anti semitic’ smear from people who are right wing ratbags.
But right wing ratbags are everywhere. Anti semitic slogans and threats of violence can only come close when people either don’t care to police themselves or don’t know how.
Mossad sent a an agent provocateur into an Australian trade union demonstration against the bombing of Gaza nearly twenty years ago. He was pinged. Right away. And sent on his way.
Don’t underestimate the forces being trained against both Students and the wider Left on this issue. They are considerable, and highly skilled.
Uncle Cosmo
Depends. If against all odds the GQP had managed to retain control of the HoR. some true believer in the SS would hose her down with lead immediately afterwards (and save the last bullet for himself) to promote the ascension of Bastard Pastor Johnson to God-Emperorhood (emphasis on the “hood”). If Hakeem Jeffries is the new SotH, the hosedown would wait until a proper & suitable Thuglican had been elevated to VPOTUS via the 25th amendment.
Kay
@Aussie Sheila:
I agree it is the students responsibility to denounce the anti semites around the protests.
I just get really, really tired of the propensity for people to see a protest and immediately anounce the people protesting are doing it wrong. Iraq war protestors didn’t know the whole history of Iraq. Vietnam war protestors didnt know the whole history of Vietnam. It wasn’t a requirement for objecting to the US role in those wars.
Israel has lots of supporters on the US Right. They’re horrible, anti Muslim bigots. I don’t hold this against Israel and I don’t demand Israel somehow rid itself of the support of some of the worst people in Congress.
Aussie Sheila
@Kay:
Agree.
Martin
@Liminal Owl: I won’t in any way deny or diminish any such attacks, but it’s worth trying to identify if those are attacks from within the community or from without. We had a LOT of problems and threats from outside (we worked pretty closely with our Joint Terrorism Task Force on that) and very few within the community. The reports I’ve seen are completely ambiguous as to the relationships leading the reader to assume it’s student on student violence, and it may well be, but in my experience that’s pretty unlikely.
We had more threats and property damage attacks against Palestinian students on campus, and more threats and property damage attacks against the Jewish community off campus. Our terrorism experts believed that was because the perception was that the Jewish students had more support from the community on campus than the Muslim students so the Muslim students were perceived to be an easier target on campus. The media reporting reinforced that – they were much more heavily focused on the Muslim students (this interaction started not all that long after 9/11, so, you know…). The Jewish students weren’t easier to reach off campus but the Jewish synagogues and community centers were a lot more visible than the Muslim equivalents, so that’s where those threats went.
My guess is every place will be different on this front. I can only relay our experiences. And few places will have the kind of access to a resource like the Joint Terrorism Task Force. We are one of only two counties to have their own (Manhattan being the other), and this county only has two major universities, so we got a lot more bandwidth than any other university gets.
Liminal Owl
@Martin: And thank you for this, too. And all your posts on this thread.
Liminal Owl
@Jay: Thanks for the data point, and I’m sorry that happened.
(FWIW, as a younger woman I was attacked more than once by people who looked at me and said/yelled something about Jews. I don’t wear a Star of David or anything else culturally connected with the identity, but my appearance pretty well matches Ashkenazi stereotypes.)
Martin
@Kay: Students don’t have a lot of experience at this sort of thing. They are easy marks for bad actors. They roll out of high school and suddenly find themselves doing this and once they get decent at it they graduate and move on. We tried pretty hard to help get them up to speed – all of them, make sure they were aware that all kinds of bad actors were going to try and use them and then pin the blame on them.
Getting the administration to change their view from ‘protesting is bad’ to ‘teach them how to protest responsibly’ took some work.
Uncle Cosmo
Prime lubricators, more like. As I observed when I was hanging out with the local Irish late last millennium, Irish Northern Aid took full advantage of the overwhelmingly-Catholic emigres’ romanticized view of the situation and lustily banged the bloody drum for $$$ for the “widows and orphans.” Some of which may have gone to those unfortunates – but it only served to free up the IRA’s haul of cash from bank robberies and drug dealing to buy Armalites and gelignite.
What I observed as a frequent visitor to (& briefly a house owner in) the Emeralid Isle was that many if not most of Ulster was profoundly weary of the Troubles and just wanted to live normal lives. I sat with a NI Protestant businessmen on a train from Newry to Dublin who waxed enthusiastic over their new operations in the Republic – the crossborder projects, he thought, would do more to bring the two sides together than anything else. Damn shame David Fucking Cameron and his stewpid gits had to fuck it all up by facilitating a vote on Brexit,,,
Kay
@Martin:
It’s a real conceit of older people to think they were somehow “serious and well informed” at twenty. No, they were not. I was at Iraq protests. Half of the protestors couldn’t find Iraq on a map. That they’re now in their 40s and 50s and tsk tsking at kids these days who don’t know enough to protest is amusing, I must say.
They don’t need a doctorate in international relations to object to US policy in Gaza. They should denounce the anti semites and refuse to appear with or around them but they’re not responsible for the existence of anti semitism.
Chris
Honestly, the vast majority of so-called “culture war” issues are this. All of them add up to whether or not X, Y, or Z segment of the population is actually fully human and deserving of all the same rights as others, making them a lot more existential than the so-called “bread and butter” issues. “Culture war” is a term invented by the pundits, in order to reduce the whole thing to a slapfight between white liberal men and white conservative men, with the people actually affected being objects rather than subjects.
(Or to put it another way, a term invented by pundits because in the “white liberal men versus white conservative men” equation, they’re the white conservative men).
wjca
@Martin: Thanks again.
I suspect that another thing Berkeley has going for it is a lot of parents who not only went to college, but went to college there. (Not as much as the Ivies, but a lot of us with parents, siblings, etc. who also went there.) And a reputation for a variety of foci of student activism. Not as great as the late 60s, but still a tradition — and parents tend to be more braced for it, especially if they have been there themselves.
wjca
And that right there is a major problem. Around the world, but especially in the Middle East, there are centuries of invasions and counter-invasions and trade and other interactions. And, often, resentments that go back generations. (Speak to an Armenian about their genocide by Turkey.)
Anyone who gets involved without knowing the history of a region is just asking for trouble. I wonder if the Americans driving the Vietnam War had a clue about the history of Vietnamese-Chinese
interactionswars. Or that Ho Chi Minh had pleaded for US help, and only accepted Chinese help and support, reluctantly, when US support was refused. Knowing that sort of thing, before developing a policy, could avoid a world of problems.I don’t know if the US is the worst on this. But we sure seem to be worse than most. The kind of parochialism we display probably indicates some serious flaws in our education system.
Miss Bianca
@Martin: way late to the thread, but thanks for this little explainer
Chip Daniels
I can’t help but think that the Connor Roy in Succession was based on RFK.
Subsole
@SpaceUnit:
The miracles of pharmacology-based workout routines…