Being a veteran of the 60s antiwar protests I am convinced that these kids have a point, a point that needs to be heard. And that if university administrators need to send in cops armed and armored as if they are going into Fallujah to bash heads and arrest college kids, both the administrators and the cops need to rethink their career choices.
I applaud students from expensive schools taking an interest in the weak and vulnerable. I salute them. But I do wonder why the protests are about the Palestinians, not the people in Sudan and Myanmar who are being slaughtered, starved and raped as well. Or Ukraine. Maybe I have become paranoid but somehow this smells like the Hillary's emails revelations right before the 2016 election. It likely will harm Biden's reelection.
Why not Sudan and Myanmar? I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the protesters see Gaza as a proxy for things like income inequality, the war on women, anti-LGBTQ+, erosion of Black voting rights and so forth. Israel’s biggest supporters in the US are conservatives, especially Christian ones, and they are the ones backing many of those other things - white-skinned men abusing their power. For the protesters, Gaza might be more of the same.
The Christian conservatives who treat Israelis as honorary Christians may also see Gaza as white-skinned people acting against dark-skinned people, but of course they support the objective of the former controlling and dominating the latter.
In Canada, the head Conservative is adopting a slogan that "Everything is broken". In spite of only the USA beating Canada at economic vigour right now, we're beating the rest of the G7; in spite of the world-class pandemic response.
It's called "declinism" and was also used by fascist groups going back many decades.
As to the "chaos" strategy, it has some challenges:
- Campus protests were almost unheard of in 1968, previous generations of students had all been rich; now they're old hat. The parents of the 1968 protesters were horrified.
- It was 3 years after Jim Crow was ended, and LBJ said it would cost them for generations. It was the Tea Party two years after Obama's election, but much worse.
We need to change the subject on campus, and everywhere from Israel-Palestine, not engage deeper in it, get "good trouble" about other things, women's rights, freedoms, health:
Background: We haven’t yet seen the kind of coordinated, deliberately staged acts of civil disobedience that can sometimes transform politics, on the abortion issue. But this topic is well suited to this kind of aggressive strategy. People hate the rules Republicans are making Republicans themselves are embarrassed to talk about enforcing them, and the biggest substantive risk to abortion rights isn’t that people don’t agree with the cause, it’s that many people may just not be thinking about it enough. Anything that forces more attention to the issue and prevents it from fading from view is constructive, and dramatic events that make real-word news are much more impactful than paid television ads. The fact is, we *are* seeing deliberately staged acts of civil disobedience to try to transform politics on the Israel-Palestine issue, that will not succeed in doing so, in the intended manner at least (ie, it would help elect Trump who would just tell Netanyahu to do what he wants in the region, and tell the religious wrong to do what it wants in America). And Republican politicians and the Republican message machine sense the opportunity in playing it up in fissuring the Democratic coalition so much they play up coverage, and, like Mike Johnson at Columbia, bodily throw themselves into the controversy. And non-conservative media can’t strategically control its substantive fascination with the issue. Democrats or anyone interested in the prospering of center-left politics desperately need to change the subject, and abortion rights would fit the bill perfectly to be the new story to change it to.
Question: What types of acts of civil disobedience have “the groups” and citizens that care about reproductive freedom, women’s rights and health been forgetting to do in the half dozen or so prosecutorial or regulatory nightmare stories going on at any given time downstream of Dobbs that make Republicans at state, federal, local, judicial or activist levels look terrible, keep the story alive in national media, and "unignorable"? What events and stories could Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and other politicians and candidates throw their whole bodies into, to reinforce and direct news media eyeballs, whether inclined or not, onto Republican responsibility for the anti-abortion and anti-woman prosecutions and decisions?
The Republican message for the past 55 years is that white people are in mortal danger from dark-skinned people. That’s the implied message with the current protests - they want the Fox News audience to see the students as either Muslim terroists or as terrorist sympathizers.
"The solution to the protests is for the kids saying things conservatives don’t like to shut up, and if they won’t, some good old-fashioned skull-cracking is necessary to protect the rest of us from their anarchic criminality. "
It's the same old shit from 1968-70 and the Nixon-Mitchell-Haldeman-Erlichman days: dissent met with repression and state-sponsored violence, and fearmongering and pandering to the white middle and working classes.
What's old is new again. The oppressors are still the oppressors; the oligarchic power structure hasn't changed except in name. We as a supposedly open, democratic, intellectually capable society again prove that we really haven't advanced much in the last 60 or 120 years.
I’ve been wanting to write about this all week. So much distraction and obfuscation. Overreaction by law enforcement. Vague concerns about “safety”. Blurring distinctions between pro-Palestinian slogans (some of which have an anti-Israel history) and actions taken against Jewish students. Not focusing on outside agitators. Sharing stories of arrests while eliding the fact that all of the trespassing charges are dropped later. So frustrating to see many journalists take college administrators, police, and the Republicans at face value. Will probably get to this on my SubStack on Friday when I calm down a little.
Being a veteran of the 60s antiwar protests I am convinced that these kids have a point, a point that needs to be heard. And that if university administrators need to send in cops armed and armored as if they are going into Fallujah to bash heads and arrest college kids, both the administrators and the cops need to rethink their career choices.
I applaud students from expensive schools taking an interest in the weak and vulnerable. I salute them. But I do wonder why the protests are about the Palestinians, not the people in Sudan and Myanmar who are being slaughtered, starved and raped as well. Or Ukraine. Maybe I have become paranoid but somehow this smells like the Hillary's emails revelations right before the 2016 election. It likely will harm Biden's reelection.
Why not Sudan and Myanmar? I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the protesters see Gaza as a proxy for things like income inequality, the war on women, anti-LGBTQ+, erosion of Black voting rights and so forth. Israel’s biggest supporters in the US are conservatives, especially Christian ones, and they are the ones backing many of those other things - white-skinned men abusing their power. For the protesters, Gaza might be more of the same.
The Christian conservatives who treat Israelis as honorary Christians may also see Gaza as white-skinned people acting against dark-skinned people, but of course they support the objective of the former controlling and dominating the latter.
In Canada, the head Conservative is adopting a slogan that "Everything is broken". In spite of only the USA beating Canada at economic vigour right now, we're beating the rest of the G7; in spite of the world-class pandemic response.
It's called "declinism" and was also used by fascist groups going back many decades.
As to the "chaos" strategy, it has some challenges:
- Campus protests were almost unheard of in 1968, previous generations of students had all been rich; now they're old hat. The parents of the 1968 protesters were horrified.
- It was 3 years after Jim Crow was ended, and LBJ said it would cost them for generations. It was the Tea Party two years after Obama's election, but much worse.
We need to change the subject on campus, and everywhere from Israel-Palestine, not engage deeper in it, get "good trouble" about other things, women's rights, freedoms, health:
Background: We haven’t yet seen the kind of coordinated, deliberately staged acts of civil disobedience that can sometimes transform politics, on the abortion issue. But this topic is well suited to this kind of aggressive strategy. People hate the rules Republicans are making Republicans themselves are embarrassed to talk about enforcing them, and the biggest substantive risk to abortion rights isn’t that people don’t agree with the cause, it’s that many people may just not be thinking about it enough. Anything that forces more attention to the issue and prevents it from fading from view is constructive, and dramatic events that make real-word news are much more impactful than paid television ads. The fact is, we *are* seeing deliberately staged acts of civil disobedience to try to transform politics on the Israel-Palestine issue, that will not succeed in doing so, in the intended manner at least (ie, it would help elect Trump who would just tell Netanyahu to do what he wants in the region, and tell the religious wrong to do what it wants in America). And Republican politicians and the Republican message machine sense the opportunity in playing it up in fissuring the Democratic coalition so much they play up coverage, and, like Mike Johnson at Columbia, bodily throw themselves into the controversy. And non-conservative media can’t strategically control its substantive fascination with the issue. Democrats or anyone interested in the prospering of center-left politics desperately need to change the subject, and abortion rights would fit the bill perfectly to be the new story to change it to.
Question: What types of acts of civil disobedience have “the groups” and citizens that care about reproductive freedom, women’s rights and health been forgetting to do in the half dozen or so prosecutorial or regulatory nightmare stories going on at any given time downstream of Dobbs that make Republicans at state, federal, local, judicial or activist levels look terrible, keep the story alive in national media, and "unignorable"? What events and stories could Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and other politicians and candidates throw their whole bodies into, to reinforce and direct news media eyeballs, whether inclined or not, onto Republican responsibility for the anti-abortion and anti-woman prosecutions and decisions?
The Republican message for the past 55 years is that white people are in mortal danger from dark-skinned people. That’s the implied message with the current protests - they want the Fox News audience to see the students as either Muslim terroists or as terrorist sympathizers.
"America is in chaos....
"The solution to the protests is for the kids saying things conservatives don’t like to shut up, and if they won’t, some good old-fashioned skull-cracking is necessary to protect the rest of us from their anarchic criminality. "
It's the same old shit from 1968-70 and the Nixon-Mitchell-Haldeman-Erlichman days: dissent met with repression and state-sponsored violence, and fearmongering and pandering to the white middle and working classes.
What's old is new again. The oppressors are still the oppressors; the oligarchic power structure hasn't changed except in name. We as a supposedly open, democratic, intellectually capable society again prove that we really haven't advanced much in the last 60 or 120 years.
Remember Kent State.
Tru dat, I was protesting OUR genocide in SEA, and now I support protesting genocide in Israeli civil war
I’ve been wanting to write about this all week. So much distraction and obfuscation. Overreaction by law enforcement. Vague concerns about “safety”. Blurring distinctions between pro-Palestinian slogans (some of which have an anti-Israel history) and actions taken against Jewish students. Not focusing on outside agitators. Sharing stories of arrests while eliding the fact that all of the trespassing charges are dropped later. So frustrating to see many journalists take college administrators, police, and the Republicans at face value. Will probably get to this on my SubStack on Friday when I calm down a little.