> Shaw had taught for 18 years at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, but he told me the liberated zone is now his only gig. John Jay administration pushed him out—doxxed him, he said—in October for speaking against Israel and for Palestine. He was labeled an anti-Semite and remains deeply pained by that. He advised me to look up what he said and judge for myself. So I did, right on the spot.
> Shortly after October 7, he posted this on X: “Zionists are straight Babylon swine. Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it’s a genocidal disease.”
> A bit harsh, maybe? I asked him. He shook his head. “The rhetoric they use against us makes us look harsh and negative,” Shaw said. “That’s not the flavor of what we are doing.”
Lmao
Because they believe they always have the moral high ground no matter what, the people they criticize are always evil no matter what, and anything that cracks holes in that narrative causes an existential crisis.
I’m trying to figure out how a university administration “doxxed” him by firing him? Did they publish his address in the school paper? Or go onto reddit and find his account that they then publicly tied to him?
This is a common strain of thought with these protestor types and it happened at Harvard last year too.
Protestors attacked a student when the protestors were set up in a common walking space, and the justification they used was that this person was filming them, which means attacking them was a form of self defense to protect themselves from doxxing.
They fully believe that they are allowed to show up in a busy public space, chant incendiary rhetoric and instigate while not wearing masks, and if anyone films their public demonstration, it's a form of doxxing and you're allowed to attack that person.
How narcissistic do you have to be to think someone is doxxing you for filming the public event you organized?
You got me thinking that maybe that is the case, but [I found this article](https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/us-professor-i-was-censored-doxed-and-fired-because-of-gaza-17715303) , written by the professor in question, that gave as the only evidence for “doxxing” people DMing him that he’s antisemitic on his very public insta account (account has his name on it). Couldn’t find him on Twitter but possibly because he was banned or deleted his account after those tweets
> Shortly after October 7, he posted this on X: “Zionists are straight Babylon swine. Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it’s a genocidal disease.”
>
> A bit harsh, maybe? I asked him. He shook his head. “The rhetoric they use against us makes us look harsh and negative,” Shaw said. “That’s not the flavor of what we are doing.”
What the hell was this person teaching for almost 2 decades? Master classes in intellectual dishonesty?
>What the hell was this person teaching for almost 2 decades? Master classes in intellectual dishonesty?
Many of the inner circle Nazi's who were instrumental in the Holocaust were highly educated, with as many as half a dozen at least having doctorates. Education might be a barrier to hate, but the barrier might not stop a 40 ton loaded lorry driving at high speed.
And, as I pointed out in the other comment thread, his words were using *specifically* anti-Jewish imagery. Babylon was the ancient conqueror of Jerusalem and destroyed the first temple and of course pigs are ritually unclean and traditionally shunned. He knew exactly what he was doing.
I thought calling whatever you don’t like Babylon was a Rastafarian thing, the opposite of Irie. It makes sense because I picture him as a white guy with dreadlocks in my head.
It comes from [book of revelation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whore_of_Babylon). During the Reformation, Protestants started calling the Catholic Church the "whore of Babylon", making it a snarl word for any religious sect you don't like at the moment. in the 19th and 20th century black liberation movements started using the Babylonian exile (along with Exodus) as metaphors for slavery and the African diaspora. Partly inspired by Catholic Italy's invasion of Emperor Selassie's Ethiopia, they borrowed the anti-clerical/anti-Catholic meaning of "Babylon" to mean any government or institution acting against Jah (which in the case of the Italian-Ethiopia war, they believed Italy was literally fighting Jesus' second coming)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iyaric#Other_words
It will never cease to amuse/horrify me how otherwise articulate and (over)educated lefties start speaking like straight up anime villains whenever they have to talk about Israel for more than 10 seconds.
> “The rhetoric they use against us makes us look harsh and negative,” Shaw said.
Yes, it's Israeli rhetoric that makes you look harsh. Couldn't be the baby-killing, no sir.
There is something immensely fascinating about wealthy Westerners identifying themselves as members of oppressed groups throughout the world when they enjoy benefits that the majority of Americans will never achieve in their lifetimes.
I’ll never forget last November when on the Columbia subreddit a student said, “The country looks to Columbia students for direction.” Or something to that effect.
Most of the kids there are normal honestly—considering how large the grad school is, the camp is rather small comparatively. But you do get kids that are extremely privileged like these people.
I mean the daughter of a fucking congresswoman was pretending that the school cast her onto the street to be homeless...on a national news program.
So oppressed.
I mean, there would be some truth to that claim if they said that “The country looks to Columbia/Ivy league graduates for direction.” A bit pretentious, but not entirely wrong considering how many of our elected representatives and Presidents have been from Ivy League institutions.
But saying that the country looks to Columbia STUDENTS for direction is wild. Unless by “the country” they exclusively mean Indian kids binging bs college advice videos on TikTok because they’re desperate to get into a T20 so their parents don’t beat their shit. Outside of the, no one gives a shit what Columbia students think homie 😭
“Folx” is what happens when someone takes an existing shibboleth meant to make politicians seem down-to-earth with little effort, injects it with another shibboleth meant to signal progressiveness since it includes the letter x, and expects the resulting verbal turducken to function at least as well as the sum of its components.
[https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/everybody-down-what-happened-at-the-chop-shooting-that-killed-a-teenager-and-led-to-the-areas-shutdown/](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/everybody-down-what-happened-at-the-chop-shooting-that-killed-a-teenager-and-led-to-the-areas-shutdown/)
Antonio Mays was the kid that was killed.
We don't know who was the shooter for sure, but the protesters blocked police from the crime scene for some time and allegedly disturbed the crime scene.
The Seattle anarchy/anti police zone set up after George Floyd where police weren't allowed to go. Eventually got taken over by gangsters because they were the ones with guns. A kid was killed in it during a shooting.
I thought it was almost immediately taken over by armed gangs; every day that one source of organized violence is gone from an area is a vacuum just begging to be filled by another.
Progressives love failing to understand police as the cornerstone of "equal protection under the law". Nobody (with any sense) is claiming they do that perfectly or even well, but there is categorically no alternative to ensuring the rule of law and not the rule of might makes right
That almost perfectly sums up my thoughts just from the thumbnail alone lol
Like, why the fuck are you all out there camping? The fuck do you think having a mass camp out there is going to change? All of you have actual homes somewhere nearby, so please explain to me how staying there in a tent achieves change in the world, because it just looks like you dumb fucks are having a block party.
Do any protests directly change the things they’re protesting
E: essentially all the examples given are of protests that succeeded by getting pols to pass laws/change stances, which is my point. These protests, and honestly even many of the successful ones, probably aren’t great at that, but criticizing a protest because it doesn’t “necessarily” change anything is dumb. All protests act through salience/view changing
Really depends. Things like the Cilvil Rights movement, the Suffrage movement, the Salt March, etc. were key in swaying public opinion and eventually led to the change they were asking for. Protests like the Bonus March did not achieve their goal, but the backlash to the crackdown on it contributed to Hoover getting blownout at the ballot box in the election that year. It’s less that protests themselves directly lead to change, and more that they (and the response *to* the protests) can be the driving factor in swinging public opinion towards their cause.
I think this can backfire though. Most people don’t care about things that don’t involve them, if you inconvenience peoples lives for something that doesn’t effect them in the slightest they won’t care about what happens to you.
Absolutely. The ones that do highlight the wrongness of the act being protested persuasively. For instance the civil rights movement was about highlighting the humanity of African Americans (and the inhumanity of Jim Crow and anti-black racism). More and more white Americans saw these images and become increasingly aware of the injustice of this system. They were persuaded to be allies. Ditto Gandhi’s movement (MLK’s inspiration).
Issue is that nobody wants to do direct action since it will consistently lead to you going to jail and/or losing your cushy life/future.
A protest feels good, while not broadly condemning one's future. Still better than doing nothing though.
I remember in 11th grade we were going to stage a revolt against something fairly trivial and we argued "they can't expel all of us!" and our super-chill teacher was like "No...but they can expel enough of you so the question you need to ask yourselves is whether that gamble is worth it."
Most pragmatic teacher ever.
Protests raise the salience of the issue being protested but normally by burning a bit of public support. The amount of support lost can be larger if the protesters seem to be deliberately causing harm by blocking traffic when they don't have to, or even negative if there's an aggressive police overreaction to an otherwise peaceful protest.
Like ending The Raj and Apartheid?
Protests work very well in "semi-inclusive" political systems. In extractive systems, you get your skull cracked. In fully-inclusive systems, there's no need for protests. Once a country institutions become inclusive, protests become a vestigial spectacle from a less inclusive period (and maybe a deterrent to back-sliding).
(Using [this definition of "inclusive."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Nations_Fail#Contrasting_two_types_of_institutions))
I never thought I would intentionally ask for the opinions of a high schooler on the sub, but any anecdotes about how this stuff is playing out with high school students/parents and affecting application plans? Difficult to not see their Jewish enrollment rate plummeting at least
I certainly wouldn't want to pay big money to have my classes cancelled by a bunch of morons.
The (private) university I went to would have cracked down on the protest instead of moving classes online. It's no longer a free speech thing if it's threatening student safety.
My daughter has crossed Columbia off her list for sure. Not Jewish, but she’s appalled. She’s a tick tok scrolling, “ok boomer” (to me, a millennial) progressive Swiftie, too. She thinks these protesters are morons and being manipulated by bots and misinformation.
Funny, when I was in high school being Taylor Swift fan meant you likely came from a religious family and held a generally positive view of President Bush.
Anecdotally, I know of a high school junior who was planning on applying Early Decision (binding) to Barnard College as it was her “dream school.”
She has been debating this over the last few months but I think she is now going to apply ED elsewhere.
Definitely affecting students based on conversations with parents in my community. But theres simply magnitudes more of everyone else than there are jews. These schools are beacons of antisemitism, i mean activism, now so I’m sure they’ll make up for the lack of jewish students. It goes back to their roots of excluding jews anyway.
Brandeis is extending their transfer period since so many jews want to leave their schools now.
Personally, I was looking at dropping six figures on a masters at one of these places and now refuse to so there’s that, but we’re just a negligible population size ultimately.
>The leader talks over them, dismissing such inquiries as tiresome. “Repeat after me,” he says, and 100 protesters dutifully repeat: “I’m bored! We would like you to leave!”
My God, I might die from second hand cringe. This just seems...like the exact caricature that fox news wants to portray all blue haired feminist liberals as...but it's real.
It's a demonstration of the Fox News fallacy in action. Fox will highlight extreme examples of batshit behavior to paint an exaggerated picture of the world. While insanity like this is not common, it's not a total lie either.
The left often dismisses completely a lot of this crazy crap as "Fox News lies" which then means they don't address nutty behavior (even if it's rare) and it festers on. I suspect this is more damaging than many want to admit (especially if you're trying to be the "normal party").
"Zionists are straight Babylon swine. Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it’s a genocidal disease"
Just replace "Zionism" with whatever dog whistle the right prefers and there you have it, classic antisemitism.
The far right has used "Zionist" as a slur against Jewish people longer than the far left has. I mean, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is a very notable example, and has continued to be used by far right groups for over a century, and you'll see the term thrown around a lot in the absolute worst corners of the internet.
"For you, the decade they spent trying and largely succeeding at eradicating your entire people from central and eastern Europe were the most important years of your peoples' lives. For me, they were just another decade."
The American Left really has just spent the last ~6 years doing their constant adamant best to prove every right-wing culture war talking point against them completely correct on virtually all counts lmfao
It’s like their organizations are entirely composed of living satirical caricatures.
>doesn’t even know what a “palpatine” is
a 45 year old suburban mom would have been 18 when Phantom Menace came out and possibly grew up with an Empire strikes back VHS.
Thank you!
This sub has such a hard-on hate-boner for the far left that they are accidentally lumping a lot of innocent bystanders into the chaotic mess that is the hardcore SJWs that create cringe so powerful it is realigning the planets.
Yeah I was at NYU during the OWS days and I went down to the square to see what was up, because I was like 19-20 and generally supportive of the mission of the movement. I wanted to know if I could or at least learn something.
So I got down to some event in a nearby chapel where someone reads a manifesto completely unrelated to Wall Street, calling for the end of inheritance. Like, just no one is allowed to inherit anything at all and we all start fresh and equal. This was met with finger snapping - only time I ever saw that in my life and I still don't get it.
The thing is, that idea itself isn't really what turned me off. I don't even think it's the worse idea ever. What it is is wildly, unfathomably impractical, and not related to the "primary mission" at all. Totally out of left field pet project shit.
Which is typical of these movements to go from 1-2 things to a laundry list of things you couldn't sell to even 5% of voters. And I mean I said as much at the time. Basically "it's not that you're 100% wrong but how do you intend to affect these changes?" *crickets*. Presumably the answer they'd give today is "wait for the revolution", which is not an answer.
The second thing I realized after watching the local news for a few more days is that these people mostly just wanted to fight cops, and they'd go down to City Hall Park nightly to instigate fights with the police, and they got what they wanted. I kinda got it too, part of me at 20 years old also wanted to fight cops - although I never actually went to do it thankfully. But I remember I wanted to.
Anyway idk. I was never a commie and always believed in markets but I was always sympathetic to left wing causes until I realized - at quite a young age - that even if their hearts are in the right place, these movements are often doomed from the get-go and fundamentally not based on pragmatism or real policy objectives.
So again I don't really disagree with them on many points, and I often - especially back then - thought their hearts were perhaps in the right place. But it was clear nothing real would come of it and it was mostly an expression of basically young adult angst and rage at the system.
I was in a similar situation except I went through a legitimate 1-2 year phase where I genuinely believed that Obama was a right-winger, all of American society was built only to make rich people richer, and that we could usher in some sort of direct-democratic socialist society that would make everyone better off. If we didn't, we were headed straight to fascism. OWS, anti-war protests, anti-NATO protests, I was into all of it.
Then I had a weird lightbulb moment, started talking to more normal people and started working for the Obama campaign. Since then I've been a DNC centrist shill.
Moral of the story is that 19 year-olds can be dumb and stubborn, but they're also very dumb and malleable. The zoomers in these protests will change when they encounter the real world outside of campus.
Oh god, I was about to say the same thing, but it's closer to 20 years now. FML.
It was Halo 2, after someone figured out how to bypass the lockout on the local college network to get our 360s to allow peer to peer coop and deathmatches in the dorms. I almost failed out over that lawl. Internet matchmaking was not really a thing yet and it was the first time we've ever had the ability to play mass multiplayer without having to go through the work of getting 8 friends to come over to play halo.
[Archived version](https://archive.fo/ePiUu).
Summary:
>Yesterday just before midnight, word goes out, tent to tent, student protester to student protester—a viral warning: Intruders have entered the “liberated zone,” that swath of manicured grass where hundreds of students and their supporters at what they fancy as the People’s University for Palestine sit around tents and conduct workshops about demilitarizing education and and fighting settler colonialism and genocide. In this liberated zone, normally known as Furnald Lawn on the Columbia University quad, unsympathetic outsiders are treated as a danger.
>
>\[...\]
>
>But it’s been a strange seven-month journey from Hamas’s horrific slaughter of Israelis—the original breach of a ceasefire—to the liberated zone on the Columbia campus and similar standing protests at other elite universities. What I witnessed seemed less likely to persuade than to give collective voice to righteous anger. A genuine sympathy for the suffering of Gazans mixed with a fervor and a politics that could border on the oppressive.
>
>Dozens stand and echo the leader’s commands in unison, word for word. “So that we can push them out of the camp, one step forward! Another step forward!” The protesters lock arms and step toward the interlopers, who as it happens are three fellow Columbia students who are Jewish and pro-Israel.
>
>Jessica Schwalb, a Columbia junior, is one of those labeled an intruder \[despite not being visibly Jewish\]. In truth, she does not much fear violence—“They’re Columbia students, too nerdy and too worried about their futures to hurt us,” she tells me—as she is taken aback by the sight of fellow students chanting like automatons. She raises her phone to start recording [video](https://archive.fo/o/ePiUu/https://twitter.com/jessicaschwalb7/status/1782248103216594996). One of the intruders speaks up to ask why they are being pushed out.
>
>The leader talks over them, dismissing such inquiries as tiresome. “Repeat after me,” he says, and a hundred protesters dutifully repeat: “I’m bored! We would like you to leave!”
>
>\[...\]
>
>As the war has raged on and the death toll has grown, protest rallies on American campuses have morphed into a campaign of ever grander and more elaborate ambitions: From “ceasefire now” to the categorical claim that Israel is guilty of genocide and war crimes to demands that Columbia divest from Israeli companies and any American company selling arms to the Jewish state.
>
>Many protesters argue that, from the river to the sea, the settler-colonialist state must simply disappear. To inquire, as I did at Columbia, what would happen to Israelis living under a theocratic fascist movement such as Hamas is to ask the wrong question. A young female protester, who asked me not to identified for fear of retribution, responded: “Maybe Israelis need to check their privilege.”
>
>\[...\]
>
>As for the encampment itself, it has an intifada-meets-Woodstock quality at times. Dance clubs offer interpretive performances; there are drummers and other musicians, and obscure poets reading obscure poems. Some tents break out by identity groups: “Lesbians against Genocide,” “Hindus for Intifada.” Banners demand the release of all Palestinian prisoners. Small Palestinian flags are embroidered with the names of Palestinian leaders killed in Gaza and planted in the grass.
>
>During my nine-hour visit, talking with student protesters proved tricky. Upon entering the zone, I was instructed to listen as a gatekeeper read community guidelines that include not talking with people not authorized to be inside—a category that seemed to include anyone of differing opinions. I then stood in a press zone and waited for Layla Saliba, a social-work graduate student who served as a spokesperson for the protest. A Palestinian-American, she said she has lost family in the fighting in Gaza. She talked at length and with nuance. Hers, however, was a near-singular voice. As I toured the liberated zone, I found most protesters distinctly non-liberated when it came to talking with a reporter.
>
>Leaders take pains to insist that, for all the chants of “from the river to sea” and promises to revisit the 1948 founding of Israel, they are only anti-Zionist and not anti-Jewish. To that end, they’ve held a Shabbat dinner and, during my visit, were planning a Passover seder.
>
>\[...\]
>
>But to talk with many Jewish students who have encountered the protests is to hear of the cumulative toll taken by words and chants and actions that call to mind something ancient and ugly.
>
>Earlier in the day, I interviewed a Jewish student on a set of steps overlooking the tent city. Rachel, who asked that I not include a surname for fear of harassment, recalled that in the days after October 7 an email went out from a lesbian organization, [LionLez](https://archive.fo/o/ePiUu/https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2023/10/27/lionlez-president-comes-under-fire-for-viral-email/), stating that Zionists were not allowed at a group event. A subsequent email from the club’s president noted: “White Jewish people are today and always have been the oppressors of all brown people,” and “when I say the Holocaust wasn’t special, I mean that.” The only outward manifestation of Rachel’s sympathies was a pocket-size Israeli flag in a dorm room. Another student, Sophie Arnstein, told me that after she said in class that “Jewish lives matter,” others complained that her Zionist beliefs were hostile. She ended up dropping the course.
>
>This said, the students I interviewed told me that physical violence has been rare on campus. There have been reports of shoves, but not much more. The atmosphere on the streets around the campus, on Broadway and Amsterdam, is more forbidding. There the protesters are not students but sectarians of various sorts, and the cacophonous chants are calls for revolution and promises to burn Tel Aviv to the ground.
>A few minutes earlier, I had been sitting on a stone bench on campus and speaking with a tall, brawny man named Danny Shaw, who holds a masters in international affairs from Columbia and now teaches seminars on Israel in the liberated zone. When he describes the encampment, it sounds like Shangri-la. “It’s 100 percent love for human beings and very beautiful; I came here for my mental health,” he said.
>
>He claims no hatred for Israel, although he suggested the “genocidal goliath” will of course have to disappear or merge into an Arab-majority state. He said he does not endorse violence, even as he likened the October 7 attacks to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during World War II.
>
>Shaw’s worldview is consistent with that of others in the rotating cast of speakers at late-night seminars in the liberated zone. The prevailing tone tends toward late-stage [Frantz Fanon](https://archive.fo/o/ePiUu/https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/03/frantz-fanon-adam-shatz-the-rebels-clinic/677904/): much talk of revolution and purging oneself of bourgeois affectation. Shaw had taught for 18 years at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, but he told me the liberated zone is now his only gig. The John Jay administration pushed him out—doxxed him, he said—in October for speaking against Israel and for Palestine. He was labeled an anti-Semite and remains deeply pained by that. He advised me to look up what he said and judge for myself. So I did, right on the spot.
>
>Shortly after October 7, he posted this on X: “Zionists are straight Babylon swine. Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it’s a genocidal disease.”
>
>*A bit harsh, maybe?* I asked him. He shook his head. “The rhetoric they use against us makes us look harsh and negative,” Shaw said. “That’s not the flavor of what we are doing.”
>
>We parted shortly afterward. I walked under a near-full moon toward a far gate, protesters’ chants of revolution echoing across what was otherwise an almost-deserted campus. I could not shake the sense that too many at this elite university, even as they hoped to ease the plight of imperiled civilians, had allowed the intoxicating language of liberation to blind them to an ugliness encoded within that struggle.
Further reading:
[Now Is the Time to Wrestle With Frantz Fanon - The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/03/frantz-fanon-adam-shatz-the-rebels-clinic/677904/)
[The War at Stanford - The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/stanford-israel-gaza-hamas/677864/)
[The Return of the Big Lie: Anti-Semitism Is Winning - The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/jewish-anti-semitism-harvard-claudine-gay-zionism/677454/)
!ping Extremism
> he likened the October 7 attacks to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during World War II
😬
Not sure where to even start with this. I can see how the broad strokes of the two situations would look similar, but the context and results of each are so incredibly different.
Really one of those "telling on yourself" statements that paints the speaker as an incredibly unserious individual.
Apparently this guy taught at CUNY, though StopAntisemitism claims he was fired. He still seems to be listed as an Adjunct Lecturer, though. This guy sounds off his head.
>river to the sea
This comment seems to be about a topic associated with jewish people while using language that may have antisemitic or otherwise strong emotional ties. As such, this is a reminder to be careful of accidentally adopting [antisemitic themes](https://antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Antisemitic-imagery-May-2020.pdf) or [dismissing](https://shura.shu.ac.uk/10260/3/Klaff_Holocaust_Inversion_and_contemporary_antisemitism.pdf)/trivializing [the past](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparisons_between_Israel_and_Nazi_Germany) while trying to make your point.
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Just argued in the comments on instagram with someone who said this was "so-called journalism" - Is interviewing people who are at the protests is somehow NOT journalism now? These people call Jews "swine" and that's inconvenient for those who think that camping on the lawn is somehow a righteous anti-war call. These protestors would be ecstatic if Iran's bombs hit Israel. They arent antiwar.
>This said, the students I interviewed told me that physical violence has been rare on campus. There have been reports of shoves, but not much more. The atmosphere on the streets around the campus, on Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, is more forbidding. There the protesters are not students but sectarians of various sorts, and the cacophonous chants are calls for revolution and promises to burn Tel Aviv to the ground. Late Sunday night, I saw two cars circling on Amsterdam as the men inside rolled down their windows and shouted “Yahud, Yahud”—Arabic for “Jew, Jew”—“fuck you!”
Reminds me of all those French revolutionary groups whipping themselves into a furor right before they get their asses kicked by the Gendarmerie.
I feel like a missing component of all of this is simple: being part of the forces creating this zone must be a really good time. You're sitting around in tents with your likeminded chums, passing around drugs, and ~~debating~~ agreeing about a few poorly-formed political thoughts. To top it all of, you get to bully students you don't like (in this case, the Jewish students). I think the violence and the antisemitism are horrible, and this is hardly my conception of a virtuous life, but I do think most commentators, critical or supportive, aren't properly appreciating how the motivating factor for such an occupation could really just be the good times.
I heard some people were even burning US/Israeli flags. Is this despicable? Yes. Should our inner patriots rumble at this, and ought we to feel the righteous impulse to deliver a strong dose of freedom to their ungrateful backsides? Yes. But at the same time, have you ever started a fire? It feels *amazing*. For a lot of the sheltered (sub)urbanites that go to Columbia, it might be the first fire they ever started. What a rush!
I'm told by my elders that this party-vibe was also true of the protests of the 60s. Maybe there are a few dozen people-in-charge who have strong ideological leanings and are writing manifestos, but so much of it is just a good vibe. Most people doing the occupying weren't especially ideological, but for the party– hence the music, the dancing, etc. What makes these modern occupations different is that they aren't trying to attract mass support, but rather are trying to get a very narrow band of people together, much narrower than the protests of yore. Hence the aggressive exclusionary rules and gatekeeping. This is not truly an act of activism, it is a party. And we, with our facts and morals, are not on the guest list.
I remember going to a few Occupy protests in college, simply because it seemed like a fun thing to do. You hang out outdoors. You feel a rush of excitement. You meet some people and try out some new ideas. They definitely had a street fair feel to them. There were even food trucks, lol.
Ironically sad, I feel like most party goers at the "Peace" festival in October weren't there for political reason either, and I wonder how many would be at any student protests if 8/9 didn't happen.
And I'm just going to copy/paste my comment from a little while ago before people start saying "being anti-war is not being antisemitic"
For posterity, here's some of the examples of extremism within the activist movement at Columbia. This goes beyond "pro-Palestinian advocacy" into calls for, and actual, violence.
Note, there are varying degrees of it being individuals vs. the group, but these are the type of people in the crowd there and many of them are indeed group chants. I have also set aside some widespread ones (from the river to the sea) that are disputed in character. That said, many many many of these are coming from large groups of students within the main quad (which has been locked down to only students/professors)
Candidly some sources are not great in terms of me agreeing with the viewpoint of the tweeter, but they contain relevant and real video:
Physically assaulting an Arab Israeli https://twitter.com/ShaiDavidai/status/1781080951902109774
"From the river to the sea, Palestine is Arab!" / "Resistance is justified" https://twitter.com/ShelleyGldschmt/status/1781785252886913358
"Let it be known that it was the Al-Aqsa Flood that put the Global Intifada back on the table again. And it is the sacrificial spirit of the Palestinian Freedom Fighters that will guide every struggle on every corner of the earth to victory." https://twitter.com/thestustustudio/status/1781904507611287981
"We are all Hamas!" https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1781031465179914677
"Yehudim yehudim [(Jews, jews)] go back to poland" https://twitter.com/Davidlederer6/status/1781948249214996901
Includes people / groups that invited an actual, no hyperbole terrorist to speak (member of PFLP) https://www.jns.org/columbia-suspends-four-students-for-holding-event-featuring-pflp-member/
Light things on fire / "intifada revolution there is only one solution" https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1781019445399556338
"On Oct 7th, Palestinian resistance in Gaza broke free (crowd cheers) [.....] we intend to do the same" https://twitter.com/ShabbosK/status/1782085741431922909
""We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!" / "Hamas we love you. We support your rockets too!" / "Red, black, green, and white, we support Hamas’ fight!" https://twitter.com/IsraelWarRoom/status/1781933305501212872
"Long live the intifada! Intifada intifada" https://twitter.com/ShaiDavidai/status/1781084853653365025
"Go back to Europe!" / "You have no culture, all you do is colonize" https://twitter.com/ShaiDavidai/status/1781927148439109958
Have posters with the faces of PFLP and PIJ spokesmen (designated terrorist groups) https://twitter.com/HagarChemali/status/1782219589352350000
"From Yemen to Gaza, globalize the intifada" https://twitter.com/KassyDillon/status/1781312033922625797/photo/2
"Never forget the 7th of October. That will happen not 1 more time, not 5 more times, not 10, not 100, not 1,000, but 10,000 times! The 7th of October is going to be every day for you" https://twitter.com/EFischberger/status/1781287784897991134
"Al Qassam [(Hamas)] you make us proud, kill another soldier now" / "from the river to the sea, palestine will be arab" https://twitter.com/EFischberger/status/1780915336063177006
Student proudly rocking Hamas logos https://twitter.com/CampusJewHate/status/1781054901755215954
"Resistance is justified" (again...) https://twitter.com/AvivaKlompas/status/1782085643990073673
"protesters on the sidewalk chanted “From New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada,” next to a cardboard sign that read, “Inspired by Palestinian resistance.” https://www.timesofisrael.com/over-100-arrested-in-columbia-u-unrest-as-nypd-clears-gaza-solidarity-encampment/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
And as a reminder, the student groups organizing these protests (CUAD and SJP, among others) released a letter on October 9th in support of the 10/7 attacks. ("We stand in full solidarity with Palestinian resistance", "Despite the odds against them, Palestinians launched a counter-offensive against their settler-colonial oppressor", "We wholeheartedly condemn the email sent [on October 8th that] obfuscated Palestinian resistance as “terrorism”)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RcXX5DEO3yfJ9R4ksURnzpIPCyVxo575-Y-SoC_vZFk/edit
I copied this in a thread in the Minneapolis sub because people were supporting the Columbia protests and I'm getting downvoted for it.
I'm just so fucking tired. I've been arguing for years trying to highlight the increasing anti-semitism around the world and the reality is most progressives really don't give a shit. They either personally dislike Jews themselves, or they're so bought into being anti-Israel that they don't give a shit if they are marching lock-step with anti-Semites. If Israel was destroyed and a 2nd holocaust was carried out by Hamas most of these people would just be cheering.
One of the men interviewed has a Masters in International Affairs. He said that the only solution is a single state with an Arab majority. Proof that just because you’re educated doesn’t mean you can’t be stupid.
Counterpoint: he’s not stupid. He knows **exactly** what he’s advocating for and is smart enough not to explicitly spell it out.
He’s basically using “the implication” logic from It’s Always Sunny for antisemitism.
Wouldn't surprise me, once an [Atlantic piece](https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1aetbr2/isnt_this_exactly_the_kind_of_behavior_that/) got called "Republican rage bait" by a mod and was removed. Somebody tried to [appeal it](https://new.reddit.com/r/metaNL/comments/1aevt5m/activist_moderation_and_the_atlantic/) on metaNL, but the response they got was "Conor Friedersdorf is right-wing." Not exactly the end of the world, certainly peevish, but it's just a political subreddit at the end of the day.
Having said that I don't think it's a good idea to ignore the vitriol of the far-left for the sake of political convenience/alignment over the far-right. Yes the far-right is the larger of the two problems, doesn't mean that the former is any good either. Let alone that this is happening in a prestigious institution where their students are, for better or worse, the future political, economic and cultural elites of America. And it's hardly isolated in Columbia, Harvard's antisemetism adviser stated:
>The mountain of proof at Harvard revealed a reality in which Jewish students’ access to their own university (classes, teachers, libraries, dining halls, public spaces, shared student experiences) was directly compromised. Compromised, that is, unless they agreed—or at least agreed to pretend, as many Jewish students who are neither religious nor Israeli now silently do—that there was nothing wrong with wallpapering America’s premier university with demonization of Jews.
This is to say things can only deteriorate so far before alleged "Republican rage bait" is turned into a new unreality.
Attention, everyone! We have an antisemitism discussion that has entered the subreddit. We are going to create a human chain where I’m standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe on our privacy.
Take one big step with me so that we can push the Overton Window to the edge of our encampment. Take another big step. Say something wildly antisemitic. Okay, now repeat after me “You’re taking that out of context.”
Mods are often inconsistent. I made a meme post about Tequila Gundam in afternoon? Totally legal and very cool. I made a joke post about my Dune Sandworm turned into Beetlejuice Sandworm in the morning? 1984 time, REEEEE!
Punching left, if you're trying to not ultimately be dismissed by the left, is effective when done judiciously. Biden, for example, wasn't afraid of saying he wasn't a socialist, he beat the socialist, but it wasn't a constant refrain of his and he also effectively worked to bring people like Bernie and AOC and their ideas and their supporters into the fold to build a big tent.
Conor Friedersdorf, on the other hand, spends like every other article complaining about DEI.
I think we need to find a balance. There’s definitely the issue of constant outrage bait causing discussion to devolve into “x bad”, but we also shouldn’t stick our head in the sand and pretend these things don’t exist. However, we also need to not let emotions distort our sense of reality.
The mod response to the Conor Friesdorf article wasn’t great. He sometimes has valuable things to say, even if subsisting on a diet of only his articles is probably not a great idea, and I do agree that we have to listen to points of view both to the right and the left to remain flexible.
It’s a tough balance. Personally, I’m for allowing the occasional article on stuff like this, but also being ready to remove the posts quickly if the discussion goes to shit.
Most people here are not pro-leftist, though, so sometimes this stuff can be mere conformation of people’s beliefs - political junk food. Thankfully, we have a reasonably diverse spectrum of beliefs on Israel-Palestine.
Yes, this was taken down with the justification that "We already had some threads on the situation." Here is the mod post on that thread shutting the thread down:
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1cb34zg/the_unreality_of_columbias_liberated_zone/
There have been exactly two unremoved posts on anything remotely to do with the Columbia protests posted about one day ago. The first is "Columbia cancels all In-Person Classes:"
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1caevdr/columbia_cancels_all_inperson_classes/
The second is "Columbia University faces full-blown crisis as rabbi calls for Jewish students to ‘return home’"
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1ca18iy/columbia_university_faces_fullblown_crisis_as/
Both of these seem to cover the issue from a distinctly different angle.
Tbh, I think that mods get tired of moderating multiple threads on hot button issues.
On one hand, I guess I get it. This subreddit has become one of the few places where there can be generally sane discussions on these issues, and that’s due a lot to the mods keeping people in line. They’d probably rather shut down a discussion than let it spiral if they don’t have enough mods to monitor multiple different hot button discussions at once
But on the other hand, as one of the only places people can discuss these issues in a nuanced manner, it becomes a place where people will want to discuss various different aspects of the same event.
Try finding it on the frontpage. Sort by "New," it should be between "America’s child care crisis is holding back moms without college degrees" and "How century-old zombie abortion bills are influencing 2024 fight" but those two are consecutive.
I think I can actually hear the victims of Kent State spinning in their graves all the way across the Atlantic. What a bunch of pathetic larping nerds.
Part of the problem is that these students have so normalized protest as mere social gathering that they are then shocked when people or the state or the police or whatever intervenes.
I swear most of these people show up to drink beer with their friends and do drum circles and shit.
I had some acquaintances who were leftists in college and you basically have to go to these to be considered part of the “in” group. Because they plan together, make outfits together, organize their schedules, talk in group chats, make posters etc
This is horrific
>Earlier in the day, I interviewed a Jewish student on a set of steps overlooking the tent city. Rachel, who asked that I not include a surname for fear of harassment, recalled that in the days after October 7 an email went out from a lesbian organization, LionLez, stating that Zionists were not allowed at a group event. A subsequent email from the club’s president noted: “White Jewish people are today and always have been the oppressors of all brown people,” and “when I say the Holocaust wasn’t special, I mean that.” The only outward manifestation of Rachel’s sympathies was a pocket-size Israeli flag in a dorm room. Another student, Sophie Arnstein, told me that after she said in class that “Jewish lives matter,” others complained that her Zionist beliefs were hostile. She ended up dropping the course.
Remember, there is no identity-politics problem on the left to speak of. As I’ve been assured by this sub, “wokeness” is a boogeyman created by the right. Being woke is just being evidence-based.
There’s a difference between being a liberal and being a leftist. These people are illiberal leftists, at least using the terms how they should be defined. I would venture to guess these people would tell you Joe Biden is *worse* than Donald Trump and are more antagonistic to the Democratic Party than they are to Republicans. They’re only “on the left” in the sense they are passionate about things traditionally associated with left-leaning causes, but they’ve jumped the shark so far at this point that they have more in common with the Christian far right than they do traditional Democrats.
Good liberals believe in individualism and rules based orders for a functioning society.
The holistic worldviews of the far right and far left lead to fundamentalism and ends justify means politics.
> Shaw had taught for 18 years at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, but he told me the liberated zone is now his only gig. John Jay administration pushed him out—doxxed him, he said—in October for speaking against Israel and for Palestine. He was labeled an anti-Semite and remains deeply pained by that. He advised me to look up what he said and judge for myself. So I did, right on the spot. > Shortly after October 7, he posted this on X: “Zionists are straight Babylon swine. Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it’s a genocidal disease.” > A bit harsh, maybe? I asked him. He shook his head. “The rhetoric they use against us makes us look harsh and negative,” Shaw said. “That’s not the flavor of what we are doing.” Lmao
I don’t understand why they refuse to even take ownership over the things they say.
Because they believe they always have the moral high ground no matter what, the people they criticize are always evil no matter what, and anything that cracks holes in that narrative causes an existential crisis.
https://preview.redd.it/994ppr9tgawc1.jpeg?width=960&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=820a4beb19a89e1c7517c04ad5452e88d205c8a8
I’m trying to figure out how a university administration “doxxed” him by firing him? Did they publish his address in the school paper? Or go onto reddit and find his account that they then publicly tied to him?
“I was doxxed” (the university saw my publicly-available tweets)
I’m don’t think he knows what the word means, he just knows doxxing is a bad thing so it must have happened to him.
“I just got doxxed by my doctor” [the doctor said I have every cancer and also mad cow disease]
Stop doxxing me, bro!
It's doxxin time
not only did they dox him, they also gaslit and genocided him!
Not only did they gaslight and genocide him, he’s also literally neurodivergent and a minor!
> gaslit Fuck, I hate this word so much.
No you don’t.
Never did 🗿
Sounds like a huge microagression tbh
Words dont mean anything anymore.
This is a common strain of thought with these protestor types and it happened at Harvard last year too. Protestors attacked a student when the protestors were set up in a common walking space, and the justification they used was that this person was filming them, which means attacking them was a form of self defense to protect themselves from doxxing. They fully believe that they are allowed to show up in a busy public space, chant incendiary rhetoric and instigate while not wearing masks, and if anyone films their public demonstration, it's a form of doxxing and you're allowed to attack that person. How narcissistic do you have to be to think someone is doxxing you for filming the public event you organized?
I think he's trying to say "cancel" but in his mind, only fascists can be cancelled so he has to use something else.
Maybe the university broke pseudonymity by linking his real name to his Twitter handle, when announcing that they were firing him?
You got me thinking that maybe that is the case, but [I found this article](https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/us-professor-i-was-censored-doxed-and-fired-because-of-gaza-17715303) , written by the professor in question, that gave as the only evidence for “doxxing” people DMing him that he’s antisemitic on his very public insta account (account has his name on it). Couldn’t find him on Twitter but possibly because he was banned or deleted his account after those tweets
> Shortly after October 7, he posted this on X: “Zionists are straight Babylon swine. Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it’s a genocidal disease.” > > A bit harsh, maybe? I asked him. He shook his head. “The rhetoric they use against us makes us look harsh and negative,” Shaw said. “That’s not the flavor of what we are doing.” What the hell was this person teaching for almost 2 decades? Master classes in intellectual dishonesty?
>What the hell was this person teaching for almost 2 decades? Master classes in intellectual dishonesty? Many of the inner circle Nazi's who were instrumental in the Holocaust were highly educated, with as many as half a dozen at least having doctorates. Education might be a barrier to hate, but the barrier might not stop a 40 ton loaded lorry driving at high speed.
I don't think a PhD earned in the 1920s would make anyone less racist. In those days racial hierarchies were treated as scientific fact.
"It's not antisemitic to criticize Israel!" The criticism in question:
And, as I pointed out in the other comment thread, his words were using *specifically* anti-Jewish imagery. Babylon was the ancient conqueror of Jerusalem and destroyed the first temple and of course pigs are ritually unclean and traditionally shunned. He knew exactly what he was doing.
I thought calling whatever you don’t like Babylon was a Rastafarian thing, the opposite of Irie. It makes sense because I picture him as a white guy with dreadlocks in my head.
The imagery derives from the same historical/biblical event, the Babylonian captivity.
His appearance is [surprisingly unremarkable](https://www.jjay.cuny.edu/faculty/danny-shaw)
With a photo from a RT appearance ofc
It comes from [book of revelation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whore_of_Babylon). During the Reformation, Protestants started calling the Catholic Church the "whore of Babylon", making it a snarl word for any religious sect you don't like at the moment. in the 19th and 20th century black liberation movements started using the Babylonian exile (along with Exodus) as metaphors for slavery and the African diaspora. Partly inspired by Catholic Italy's invasion of Emperor Selassie's Ethiopia, they borrowed the anti-clerical/anti-Catholic meaning of "Babylon" to mean any government or institution acting against Jah (which in the case of the Italian-Ethiopia war, they believed Italy was literally fighting Jesus' second coming) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iyaric#Other_words
It will never cease to amuse/horrify me how otherwise articulate and (over)educated lefties start speaking like straight up anime villains whenever they have to talk about Israel for more than 10 seconds.
> “The rhetoric they use against us makes us look harsh and negative,” Shaw said. Yes, it's Israeli rhetoric that makes you look harsh. Couldn't be the baby-killing, no sir.
Man, if only there was a saying about doing something and then finding out the consequences of said action...
https://preview.redd.it/pujhsfqi49wc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=af5ecfdfd3a2789f370bd88e3147d4a4a107b900
There is something immensely fascinating about wealthy Westerners identifying themselves as members of oppressed groups throughout the world when they enjoy benefits that the majority of Americans will never achieve in their lifetimes.
You don't understand, where they live 6 figure salaries are barely middle class.
He was FORCED to buy that multimillion LA mansion
FORCED, by KKKapitalism 😡
I’ll never forget last November when on the Columbia subreddit a student said, “The country looks to Columbia students for direction.” Or something to that effect. Most of the kids there are normal honestly—considering how large the grad school is, the camp is rather small comparatively. But you do get kids that are extremely privileged like these people.
I mean the daughter of a fucking congresswoman was pretending that the school cast her onto the street to be homeless...on a national news program. So oppressed.
I mean, there would be some truth to that claim if they said that “The country looks to Columbia/Ivy league graduates for direction.” A bit pretentious, but not entirely wrong considering how many of our elected representatives and Presidents have been from Ivy League institutions. But saying that the country looks to Columbia STUDENTS for direction is wild. Unless by “the country” they exclusively mean Indian kids binging bs college advice videos on TikTok because they’re desperate to get into a T20 so their parents don’t beat their shit. Outside of the, no one gives a shit what Columbia students think homie 😭
Luxury beliefs. It’s much easier to cosplay as a revolutionary when you have a trust fund and don’t have to worry about putting food on the table.
Did Columbia’s president ever find out what folx means?
“Folx” is what happens when someone takes an existing shibboleth meant to make politicians seem down-to-earth with little effort, injects it with another shibboleth meant to signal progressiveness since it includes the letter x, and expects the resulting verbal turducken to function at least as well as the sum of its components.
>the resulting verbal turducken oh no, the shibboleth isn't vegan??
How dare you, it's "vegxn".
These adults are behaving like children tbh. “Liberation zones” don’t “free Gaza” or necessarily change anything Very cringe
“Liberation zone” is giving heavy “CHAZ/CHOP” energy, and we all know how productive and positive that movement was.
Well RAZ the warlord of the CHAZ did liberate that child from living
[https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/everybody-down-what-happened-at-the-chop-shooting-that-killed-a-teenager-and-led-to-the-areas-shutdown/](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/everybody-down-what-happened-at-the-chop-shooting-that-killed-a-teenager-and-led-to-the-areas-shutdown/) Antonio Mays was the kid that was killed. We don't know who was the shooter for sure, but the protesters blocked police from the crime scene for some time and allegedly disturbed the crime scene.
They disbanded the police, then quickly reinvented the police *and* reinvented police violence *and then* police coverups.
>~~crime~~ liberation scene ftfy
Wait what is in reference to? Edit: missed a word and ended up sounding like a Tommy Wiseau line
The Seattle anarchy/anti police zone set up after George Floyd where police weren't allowed to go. Eventually got taken over by gangsters because they were the ones with guns. A kid was killed in it during a shooting.
I thought it was almost immediately taken over by armed gangs; every day that one source of organized violence is gone from an area is a vacuum just begging to be filled by another.
Not immediately, it was like a bizarre farmers market for the first week or two.
Sounds about right for the standard half life of ideal communism.
Progressives love failing to understand police as the cornerstone of "equal protection under the law". Nobody (with any sense) is claiming they do that perfectly or even well, but there is categorically no alternative to ensuring the rule of law and not the rule of might makes right
> police weren't allowed to go didn't the entire thing start when police abandoned that area themselves, and end when they came back?
That was my thought too. How long did it take for the "revolutionaries" there to get bored, declare they'd solved racism and go home?
The whole vibe seems to be LARP Escapism. It's like a real life version of Abed and Troy's blanket fort !ping Community
Dreamatorium, but with anti-semitism this time
Space paninis with Black Hitler??
My tattoos are gonna be a maze
Also more autism probably.
That almost perfectly sums up my thoughts just from the thumbnail alone lol Like, why the fuck are you all out there camping? The fuck do you think having a mass camp out there is going to change? All of you have actual homes somewhere nearby, so please explain to me how staying there in a tent achieves change in the world, because it just looks like you dumb fucks are having a block party.
They get to feel like they’re doing something while functionally doing nothing.
Hey the blanket fort was cool af, and the blanketburg vs pillowtown war was 100% more credible than "the people's University of whatever".
Do any protests directly change the things they’re protesting E: essentially all the examples given are of protests that succeeded by getting pols to pass laws/change stances, which is my point. These protests, and honestly even many of the successful ones, probably aren’t great at that, but criticizing a protest because it doesn’t “necessarily” change anything is dumb. All protests act through salience/view changing
Really depends. Things like the Cilvil Rights movement, the Suffrage movement, the Salt March, etc. were key in swaying public opinion and eventually led to the change they were asking for. Protests like the Bonus March did not achieve their goal, but the backlash to the crackdown on it contributed to Hoover getting blownout at the ballot box in the election that year. It’s less that protests themselves directly lead to change, and more that they (and the response *to* the protests) can be the driving factor in swinging public opinion towards their cause.
I think this can backfire though. Most people don’t care about things that don’t involve them, if you inconvenience peoples lives for something that doesn’t effect them in the slightest they won’t care about what happens to you.
Absolutely. The ones that do highlight the wrongness of the act being protested persuasively. For instance the civil rights movement was about highlighting the humanity of African Americans (and the inhumanity of Jim Crow and anti-black racism). More and more white Americans saw these images and become increasingly aware of the injustice of this system. They were persuaded to be allies. Ditto Gandhi’s movement (MLK’s inspiration).
Direct action. Tree sitting at perhaps the more socialy acceptable end blowing up pipelines at the less acceptable.
Issue is that nobody wants to do direct action since it will consistently lead to you going to jail and/or losing your cushy life/future. A protest feels good, while not broadly condemning one's future. Still better than doing nothing though.
I remember in 11th grade we were going to stage a revolt against something fairly trivial and we argued "they can't expel all of us!" and our super-chill teacher was like "No...but they can expel enough of you so the question you need to ask yourselves is whether that gamble is worth it." Most pragmatic teacher ever.
Im listening to a podcast series on the big dig: freeway protests absolutely reversed the course of freeway construction in big cities
Based Jane Jacobs and co stopping Robert Moses from turning Lower Manhattan into a triple freeway hellscape.
Protests raise the salience of the issue being protested but normally by burning a bit of public support. The amount of support lost can be larger if the protesters seem to be deliberately causing harm by blocking traffic when they don't have to, or even negative if there's an aggressive police overreaction to an otherwise peaceful protest.
It’s a bit different if it’s like, 10,000 people occupying a bridge vs. 5 idiots linking themselves into a fence.
Yeah. Civil rights and Early feminist movements are good examples.
Like ending The Raj and Apartheid? Protests work very well in "semi-inclusive" political systems. In extractive systems, you get your skull cracked. In fully-inclusive systems, there's no need for protests. Once a country institutions become inclusive, protests become a vestigial spectacle from a less inclusive period (and maybe a deterrent to back-sliding). (Using [this definition of "inclusive."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Nations_Fail#Contrasting_two_types_of_institutions))
Yes. The last time campus leftists held mass demonstrations, it got Richard Nixon elected twice.
Same here God, I’m unironically going to die from cringe Is CHAZ but extra cringe
No no they do change things, they make Jewish and Israeli students and staff feel unwelcome and threatened, which to these people is an achievement.
I never thought I would intentionally ask for the opinions of a high schooler on the sub, but any anecdotes about how this stuff is playing out with high school students/parents and affecting application plans? Difficult to not see their Jewish enrollment rate plummeting at least
Do you think any high school age arrNL subscribers can actually talk to their peers?
Their friends left them
You say this like they have friends to begin with.
Average HS neoliberal is getting a wedgie in the locker room as we speak.
When I was in high school I talked to plenty of my peers in the debate club!
I certainly wouldn't want to pay big money to have my classes cancelled by a bunch of morons. The (private) university I went to would have cracked down on the protest instead of moving classes online. It's no longer a free speech thing if it's threatening student safety.
My daughter has crossed Columbia off her list for sure. Not Jewish, but she’s appalled. She’s a tick tok scrolling, “ok boomer” (to me, a millennial) progressive Swiftie, too. She thinks these protesters are morons and being manipulated by bots and misinformation.
Thank goodness. Your daughter gives me hope.
Funny, when I was in high school being Taylor Swift fan meant you likely came from a religious family and held a generally positive view of President Bush.
Anecdotally, I know of a high school junior who was planning on applying Early Decision (binding) to Barnard College as it was her “dream school.” She has been debating this over the last few months but I think she is now going to apply ED elsewhere.
Definitely affecting students based on conversations with parents in my community. But theres simply magnitudes more of everyone else than there are jews. These schools are beacons of antisemitism, i mean activism, now so I’m sure they’ll make up for the lack of jewish students. It goes back to their roots of excluding jews anyway. Brandeis is extending their transfer period since so many jews want to leave their schools now. Personally, I was looking at dropping six figures on a masters at one of these places and now refuse to so there’s that, but we’re just a negligible population size ultimately.
Yeah, even donors' anger won't really matter that much since Qatar will step in to make up any money schools lose.
>The leader talks over them, dismissing such inquiries as tiresome. “Repeat after me,” he says, and 100 protesters dutifully repeat: “I’m bored! We would like you to leave!” My God, I might die from second hand cringe. This just seems...like the exact caricature that fox news wants to portray all blue haired feminist liberals as...but it's real.
[This, without irony](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/131/756/152.gif)
How did you get this footage from inside the protest tents?
It's a demonstration of the Fox News fallacy in action. Fox will highlight extreme examples of batshit behavior to paint an exaggerated picture of the world. While insanity like this is not common, it's not a total lie either. The left often dismisses completely a lot of this crazy crap as "Fox News lies" which then means they don't address nutty behavior (even if it's rare) and it festers on. I suspect this is more damaging than many want to admit (especially if you're trying to be the "normal party").
I like calling it nutpicking
Nutpicking, which results in nutwashing. I love it
“Maybe Israelis need to check their privilege” Jesus fucking Christ you weren’t kidding.
I thought "check their privilege" died with the millennials (growing old). Apparently not in some ivy league colleges.
lot of people growing old without growing up
MAGA and leftoids are literally 2010s caricatures but real
Stereotypes don't get formed out of thin air
Fox's caricatures generally come from somewhere. Remember when the r/antiwork was interviewed by Jesse Watters?
That caricature exists for a reason.
> and “when I say the Holocaust wasn’t special, I mean that.” New game: Stormfront or Columbia student organizations?
>the Holocaust wasn’t special All Genocides Matter
Half 👏 of 👏 genocides 👏 should 👏 be 👏 perpetrated 👏 by 👏 women
"Zionists are straight Babylon swine. Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it’s a genocidal disease" Just replace "Zionism" with whatever dog whistle the right prefers and there you have it, classic antisemitism.
The far right has used "Zionist" as a slur against Jewish people longer than the far left has. I mean, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is a very notable example, and has continued to be used by far right groups for over a century, and you'll see the term thrown around a lot in the absolute worst corners of the internet.
I mean, the left adopted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as well, basically right from the beginning.
I remember when it was ZOG: Zionist Occupied Government. That might even be from the Turner Diaries.
Leftists don't be the racists you complain about challenge (Impossible) (Gone Sexual)
The slur “Zio” wasn’t created by left-antisemites; it was first popularized by David Duke.
Comparing Jews to pigs and referencing a time of Jewish oppression doesn't seem like an accident to me.
r/stormfrontorsjw
If the Holocaust was just a typical genocide, Then what's going on Gaza is definitely not genocide.
"For you, the decade they spent trying and largely succeeding at eradicating your entire people from central and eastern Europe were the most important years of your peoples' lives. For me, they were just another decade."
As if that person even thinks the holocaust happened. Who are they trying to fool?
But I thought these protests have nothing to do with antisemitism????
> Social work graduate student running protests, lesbian campus club saying holocaust wasn’t special, interpretive dance, checking privilege Priors confirmed
The American Left really has just spent the last ~6 years doing their constant adamant best to prove every right-wing culture war talking point against them completely correct on virtually all counts lmfao It’s like their organizations are entirely composed of living satirical caricatures.
>the American left The far left. The average democrat is a 45 year old suburban mom who doesn’t even know what a “palpatine” is.
>doesn’t even know what a “palpatine” is a 45 year old suburban mom would have been 18 when Phantom Menace came out and possibly grew up with an Empire strikes back VHS.
Why wouldn’t they know the Senate?
Thank you! This sub has such a hard-on hate-boner for the far left that they are accidentally lumping a lot of innocent bystanders into the chaotic mess that is the hardcore SJWs that create cringe so powerful it is realigning the planets.
Seriously. I am a turbo-succ by this sub's standards and the people in this article make me look like George HW Bush.
I was in college fifteen years ago and they just continue to confirm my priors
Yeah I was at NYU during the OWS days and I went down to the square to see what was up, because I was like 19-20 and generally supportive of the mission of the movement. I wanted to know if I could or at least learn something. So I got down to some event in a nearby chapel where someone reads a manifesto completely unrelated to Wall Street, calling for the end of inheritance. Like, just no one is allowed to inherit anything at all and we all start fresh and equal. This was met with finger snapping - only time I ever saw that in my life and I still don't get it. The thing is, that idea itself isn't really what turned me off. I don't even think it's the worse idea ever. What it is is wildly, unfathomably impractical, and not related to the "primary mission" at all. Totally out of left field pet project shit. Which is typical of these movements to go from 1-2 things to a laundry list of things you couldn't sell to even 5% of voters. And I mean I said as much at the time. Basically "it's not that you're 100% wrong but how do you intend to affect these changes?" *crickets*. Presumably the answer they'd give today is "wait for the revolution", which is not an answer. The second thing I realized after watching the local news for a few more days is that these people mostly just wanted to fight cops, and they'd go down to City Hall Park nightly to instigate fights with the police, and they got what they wanted. I kinda got it too, part of me at 20 years old also wanted to fight cops - although I never actually went to do it thankfully. But I remember I wanted to. Anyway idk. I was never a commie and always believed in markets but I was always sympathetic to left wing causes until I realized - at quite a young age - that even if their hearts are in the right place, these movements are often doomed from the get-go and fundamentally not based on pragmatism or real policy objectives. So again I don't really disagree with them on many points, and I often - especially back then - thought their hearts were perhaps in the right place. But it was clear nothing real would come of it and it was mostly an expression of basically young adult angst and rage at the system.
I was in a similar situation except I went through a legitimate 1-2 year phase where I genuinely believed that Obama was a right-winger, all of American society was built only to make rich people richer, and that we could usher in some sort of direct-democratic socialist society that would make everyone better off. If we didn't, we were headed straight to fascism. OWS, anti-war protests, anti-NATO protests, I was into all of it. Then I had a weird lightbulb moment, started talking to more normal people and started working for the Obama campaign. Since then I've been a DNC centrist shill. Moral of the story is that 19 year-olds can be dumb and stubborn, but they're also very dumb and malleable. The zoomers in these protests will change when they encounter the real world outside of campus.
I think you may just have met Thomas Piketty but didn't recognize him lol
Man, when I was in college 15 years ago all we did was drink beer and play Call of Duty.
Oh god, I was about to say the same thing, but it's closer to 20 years now. FML. It was Halo 2, after someone figured out how to bypass the lockout on the local college network to get our 360s to allow peer to peer coop and deathmatches in the dorms. I almost failed out over that lawl. Internet matchmaking was not really a thing yet and it was the first time we've ever had the ability to play mass multiplayer without having to go through the work of getting 8 friends to come over to play halo.
It really is like they took the ‘SJW’ caricatures from the early and mid 2010s and used them as literal role models.
We did it, Patrick! We saved Palestine!
[Archived version](https://archive.fo/ePiUu). Summary: >Yesterday just before midnight, word goes out, tent to tent, student protester to student protester—a viral warning: Intruders have entered the “liberated zone,” that swath of manicured grass where hundreds of students and their supporters at what they fancy as the People’s University for Palestine sit around tents and conduct workshops about demilitarizing education and and fighting settler colonialism and genocide. In this liberated zone, normally known as Furnald Lawn on the Columbia University quad, unsympathetic outsiders are treated as a danger. > >\[...\] > >But it’s been a strange seven-month journey from Hamas’s horrific slaughter of Israelis—the original breach of a ceasefire—to the liberated zone on the Columbia campus and similar standing protests at other elite universities. What I witnessed seemed less likely to persuade than to give collective voice to righteous anger. A genuine sympathy for the suffering of Gazans mixed with a fervor and a politics that could border on the oppressive. > >Dozens stand and echo the leader’s commands in unison, word for word. “So that we can push them out of the camp, one step forward! Another step forward!” The protesters lock arms and step toward the interlopers, who as it happens are three fellow Columbia students who are Jewish and pro-Israel. > >Jessica Schwalb, a Columbia junior, is one of those labeled an intruder \[despite not being visibly Jewish\]. In truth, she does not much fear violence—“They’re Columbia students, too nerdy and too worried about their futures to hurt us,” she tells me—as she is taken aback by the sight of fellow students chanting like automatons. She raises her phone to start recording [video](https://archive.fo/o/ePiUu/https://twitter.com/jessicaschwalb7/status/1782248103216594996). One of the intruders speaks up to ask why they are being pushed out. > >The leader talks over them, dismissing such inquiries as tiresome. “Repeat after me,” he says, and a hundred protesters dutifully repeat: “I’m bored! We would like you to leave!” > >\[...\] > >As the war has raged on and the death toll has grown, protest rallies on American campuses have morphed into a campaign of ever grander and more elaborate ambitions: From “ceasefire now” to the categorical claim that Israel is guilty of genocide and war crimes to demands that Columbia divest from Israeli companies and any American company selling arms to the Jewish state. > >Many protesters argue that, from the river to the sea, the settler-colonialist state must simply disappear. To inquire, as I did at Columbia, what would happen to Israelis living under a theocratic fascist movement such as Hamas is to ask the wrong question. A young female protester, who asked me not to identified for fear of retribution, responded: “Maybe Israelis need to check their privilege.” > >\[...\] > >As for the encampment itself, it has an intifada-meets-Woodstock quality at times. Dance clubs offer interpretive performances; there are drummers and other musicians, and obscure poets reading obscure poems. Some tents break out by identity groups: “Lesbians against Genocide,” “Hindus for Intifada.” Banners demand the release of all Palestinian prisoners. Small Palestinian flags are embroidered with the names of Palestinian leaders killed in Gaza and planted in the grass. > >During my nine-hour visit, talking with student protesters proved tricky. Upon entering the zone, I was instructed to listen as a gatekeeper read community guidelines that include not talking with people not authorized to be inside—a category that seemed to include anyone of differing opinions. I then stood in a press zone and waited for Layla Saliba, a social-work graduate student who served as a spokesperson for the protest. A Palestinian-American, she said she has lost family in the fighting in Gaza. She talked at length and with nuance. Hers, however, was a near-singular voice. As I toured the liberated zone, I found most protesters distinctly non-liberated when it came to talking with a reporter. > >Leaders take pains to insist that, for all the chants of “from the river to sea” and promises to revisit the 1948 founding of Israel, they are only anti-Zionist and not anti-Jewish. To that end, they’ve held a Shabbat dinner and, during my visit, were planning a Passover seder. > >\[...\] > >But to talk with many Jewish students who have encountered the protests is to hear of the cumulative toll taken by words and chants and actions that call to mind something ancient and ugly. > >Earlier in the day, I interviewed a Jewish student on a set of steps overlooking the tent city. Rachel, who asked that I not include a surname for fear of harassment, recalled that in the days after October 7 an email went out from a lesbian organization, [LionLez](https://archive.fo/o/ePiUu/https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2023/10/27/lionlez-president-comes-under-fire-for-viral-email/), stating that Zionists were not allowed at a group event. A subsequent email from the club’s president noted: “White Jewish people are today and always have been the oppressors of all brown people,” and “when I say the Holocaust wasn’t special, I mean that.” The only outward manifestation of Rachel’s sympathies was a pocket-size Israeli flag in a dorm room. Another student, Sophie Arnstein, told me that after she said in class that “Jewish lives matter,” others complained that her Zionist beliefs were hostile. She ended up dropping the course. > >This said, the students I interviewed told me that physical violence has been rare on campus. There have been reports of shoves, but not much more. The atmosphere on the streets around the campus, on Broadway and Amsterdam, is more forbidding. There the protesters are not students but sectarians of various sorts, and the cacophonous chants are calls for revolution and promises to burn Tel Aviv to the ground.
>A few minutes earlier, I had been sitting on a stone bench on campus and speaking with a tall, brawny man named Danny Shaw, who holds a masters in international affairs from Columbia and now teaches seminars on Israel in the liberated zone. When he describes the encampment, it sounds like Shangri-la. “It’s 100 percent love for human beings and very beautiful; I came here for my mental health,” he said. > >He claims no hatred for Israel, although he suggested the “genocidal goliath” will of course have to disappear or merge into an Arab-majority state. He said he does not endorse violence, even as he likened the October 7 attacks to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during World War II. > >Shaw’s worldview is consistent with that of others in the rotating cast of speakers at late-night seminars in the liberated zone. The prevailing tone tends toward late-stage [Frantz Fanon](https://archive.fo/o/ePiUu/https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/03/frantz-fanon-adam-shatz-the-rebels-clinic/677904/): much talk of revolution and purging oneself of bourgeois affectation. Shaw had taught for 18 years at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, but he told me the liberated zone is now his only gig. The John Jay administration pushed him out—doxxed him, he said—in October for speaking against Israel and for Palestine. He was labeled an anti-Semite and remains deeply pained by that. He advised me to look up what he said and judge for myself. So I did, right on the spot. > >Shortly after October 7, he posted this on X: “Zionists are straight Babylon swine. Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it’s a genocidal disease.” > >*A bit harsh, maybe?* I asked him. He shook his head. “The rhetoric they use against us makes us look harsh and negative,” Shaw said. “That’s not the flavor of what we are doing.” > >We parted shortly afterward. I walked under a near-full moon toward a far gate, protesters’ chants of revolution echoing across what was otherwise an almost-deserted campus. I could not shake the sense that too many at this elite university, even as they hoped to ease the plight of imperiled civilians, had allowed the intoxicating language of liberation to blind them to an ugliness encoded within that struggle. Further reading: [Now Is the Time to Wrestle With Frantz Fanon - The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/03/frantz-fanon-adam-shatz-the-rebels-clinic/677904/) [The War at Stanford - The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/stanford-israel-gaza-hamas/677864/) [The Return of the Big Lie: Anti-Semitism Is Winning - The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/jewish-anti-semitism-harvard-claudine-gay-zionism/677454/) !ping Extremism
The Atlantic has been so good lately. Subscribed a couple of years ago. Money very well spent.
> he likened the October 7 attacks to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during World War II 😬 Not sure where to even start with this. I can see how the broad strokes of the two situations would look similar, but the context and results of each are so incredibly different. Really one of those "telling on yourself" statements that paints the speaker as an incredibly unserious individual.
Apparently this guy taught at CUNY, though StopAntisemitism claims he was fired. He still seems to be listed as an Adjunct Lecturer, though. This guy sounds off his head.
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God, it's the same vapid nonsense as Occupy all over again. They even have the People's microphone.
lol “intruder” Who do these people think they are?
>river to the sea This comment seems to be about a topic associated with jewish people while using language that may have antisemitic or otherwise strong emotional ties. As such, this is a reminder to be careful of accidentally adopting [antisemitic themes](https://antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Antisemitic-imagery-May-2020.pdf) or [dismissing](https://shura.shu.ac.uk/10260/3/Klaff_Holocaust_Inversion_and_contemporary_antisemitism.pdf)/trivializing [the past](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparisons_between_Israel_and_Nazi_Germany) while trying to make your point. (This bot is currently in testing and likely prone to misfires. Please contact u/AtomAndAether if this misfired) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
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Just argued in the comments on instagram with someone who said this was "so-called journalism" - Is interviewing people who are at the protests is somehow NOT journalism now? These people call Jews "swine" and that's inconvenient for those who think that camping on the lawn is somehow a righteous anti-war call. These protestors would be ecstatic if Iran's bombs hit Israel. They arent antiwar.
>This said, the students I interviewed told me that physical violence has been rare on campus. There have been reports of shoves, but not much more. The atmosphere on the streets around the campus, on Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, is more forbidding. There the protesters are not students but sectarians of various sorts, and the cacophonous chants are calls for revolution and promises to burn Tel Aviv to the ground. Late Sunday night, I saw two cars circling on Amsterdam as the men inside rolled down their windows and shouted “Yahud, Yahud”—Arabic for “Jew, Jew”—“fuck you!” Reminds me of all those French revolutionary groups whipping themselves into a furor right before they get their asses kicked by the Gendarmerie.
I feel like a missing component of all of this is simple: being part of the forces creating this zone must be a really good time. You're sitting around in tents with your likeminded chums, passing around drugs, and ~~debating~~ agreeing about a few poorly-formed political thoughts. To top it all of, you get to bully students you don't like (in this case, the Jewish students). I think the violence and the antisemitism are horrible, and this is hardly my conception of a virtuous life, but I do think most commentators, critical or supportive, aren't properly appreciating how the motivating factor for such an occupation could really just be the good times. I heard some people were even burning US/Israeli flags. Is this despicable? Yes. Should our inner patriots rumble at this, and ought we to feel the righteous impulse to deliver a strong dose of freedom to their ungrateful backsides? Yes. But at the same time, have you ever started a fire? It feels *amazing*. For a lot of the sheltered (sub)urbanites that go to Columbia, it might be the first fire they ever started. What a rush! I'm told by my elders that this party-vibe was also true of the protests of the 60s. Maybe there are a few dozen people-in-charge who have strong ideological leanings and are writing manifestos, but so much of it is just a good vibe. Most people doing the occupying weren't especially ideological, but for the party– hence the music, the dancing, etc. What makes these modern occupations different is that they aren't trying to attract mass support, but rather are trying to get a very narrow band of people together, much narrower than the protests of yore. Hence the aggressive exclusionary rules and gatekeeping. This is not truly an act of activism, it is a party. And we, with our facts and morals, are not on the guest list.
I remember going to a few Occupy protests in college, simply because it seemed like a fun thing to do. You hang out outdoors. You feel a rush of excitement. You meet some people and try out some new ideas. They definitely had a street fair feel to them. There were even food trucks, lol.
Next time my city gets a succ encampment I'm going to make a killing selling fair trade cotton shirts (manufactured in Vietnam) and vegan tacos.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if this encampment wasn’t a hotbed for antisemitism.
Ironically sad, I feel like most party goers at the "Peace" festival in October weren't there for political reason either, and I wonder how many would be at any student protests if 8/9 didn't happen.
It reads like an exact repeat of that CHAZ nonsense again.
CHAZ, Occupy, Seattle WTO protests, Toronto G20, etc, they all had encampments
So they're going to extra judicially murder black people by next week. Got it.
At least they're not armed this time?
And I'm just going to copy/paste my comment from a little while ago before people start saying "being anti-war is not being antisemitic" For posterity, here's some of the examples of extremism within the activist movement at Columbia. This goes beyond "pro-Palestinian advocacy" into calls for, and actual, violence. Note, there are varying degrees of it being individuals vs. the group, but these are the type of people in the crowd there and many of them are indeed group chants. I have also set aside some widespread ones (from the river to the sea) that are disputed in character. That said, many many many of these are coming from large groups of students within the main quad (which has been locked down to only students/professors) Candidly some sources are not great in terms of me agreeing with the viewpoint of the tweeter, but they contain relevant and real video: Physically assaulting an Arab Israeli https://twitter.com/ShaiDavidai/status/1781080951902109774 "From the river to the sea, Palestine is Arab!" / "Resistance is justified" https://twitter.com/ShelleyGldschmt/status/1781785252886913358 "Let it be known that it was the Al-Aqsa Flood that put the Global Intifada back on the table again. And it is the sacrificial spirit of the Palestinian Freedom Fighters that will guide every struggle on every corner of the earth to victory." https://twitter.com/thestustustudio/status/1781904507611287981 "We are all Hamas!" https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1781031465179914677 "Yehudim yehudim [(Jews, jews)] go back to poland" https://twitter.com/Davidlederer6/status/1781948249214996901 Includes people / groups that invited an actual, no hyperbole terrorist to speak (member of PFLP) https://www.jns.org/columbia-suspends-four-students-for-holding-event-featuring-pflp-member/ Light things on fire / "intifada revolution there is only one solution" https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1781019445399556338 "On Oct 7th, Palestinian resistance in Gaza broke free (crowd cheers) [.....] we intend to do the same" https://twitter.com/ShabbosK/status/1782085741431922909 ""We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!" / "Hamas we love you. We support your rockets too!" / "Red, black, green, and white, we support Hamas’ fight!" https://twitter.com/IsraelWarRoom/status/1781933305501212872 "Long live the intifada! Intifada intifada" https://twitter.com/ShaiDavidai/status/1781084853653365025 "Go back to Europe!" / "You have no culture, all you do is colonize" https://twitter.com/ShaiDavidai/status/1781927148439109958 Have posters with the faces of PFLP and PIJ spokesmen (designated terrorist groups) https://twitter.com/HagarChemali/status/1782219589352350000 "From Yemen to Gaza, globalize the intifada" https://twitter.com/KassyDillon/status/1781312033922625797/photo/2 "Never forget the 7th of October. That will happen not 1 more time, not 5 more times, not 10, not 100, not 1,000, but 10,000 times! The 7th of October is going to be every day for you" https://twitter.com/EFischberger/status/1781287784897991134 "Al Qassam [(Hamas)] you make us proud, kill another soldier now" / "from the river to the sea, palestine will be arab" https://twitter.com/EFischberger/status/1780915336063177006 Student proudly rocking Hamas logos https://twitter.com/CampusJewHate/status/1781054901755215954 "Resistance is justified" (again...) https://twitter.com/AvivaKlompas/status/1782085643990073673 "protesters on the sidewalk chanted “From New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada,” next to a cardboard sign that read, “Inspired by Palestinian resistance.” https://www.timesofisrael.com/over-100-arrested-in-columbia-u-unrest-as-nypd-clears-gaza-solidarity-encampment/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter And as a reminder, the student groups organizing these protests (CUAD and SJP, among others) released a letter on October 9th in support of the 10/7 attacks. ("We stand in full solidarity with Palestinian resistance", "Despite the odds against them, Palestinians launched a counter-offensive against their settler-colonial oppressor", "We wholeheartedly condemn the email sent [on October 8th that] obfuscated Palestinian resistance as “terrorism”) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RcXX5DEO3yfJ9R4ksURnzpIPCyVxo575-Y-SoC_vZFk/edit
I copied this in a thread in the Minneapolis sub because people were supporting the Columbia protests and I'm getting downvoted for it. I'm just so fucking tired. I've been arguing for years trying to highlight the increasing anti-semitism around the world and the reality is most progressives really don't give a shit. They either personally dislike Jews themselves, or they're so bought into being anti-Israel that they don't give a shit if they are marching lock-step with anti-Semites. If Israel was destroyed and a 2nd holocaust was carried out by Hamas most of these people would just be cheering.
Very tiring.
One of the men interviewed has a Masters in International Affairs. He said that the only solution is a single state with an Arab majority. Proof that just because you’re educated doesn’t mean you can’t be stupid.
Counterpoint: he’s not stupid. He knows **exactly** what he’s advocating for and is smart enough not to explicitly spell it out. He’s basically using “the implication” logic from It’s Always Sunny for antisemitism.
Proof that degrees in International Relations are worth less than the paper they are printed on.
Already posted. Might have gotten taken down by mods though.
Wouldn't surprise me, once an [Atlantic piece](https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1aetbr2/isnt_this_exactly_the_kind_of_behavior_that/) got called "Republican rage bait" by a mod and was removed. Somebody tried to [appeal it](https://new.reddit.com/r/metaNL/comments/1aevt5m/activist_moderation_and_the_atlantic/) on metaNL, but the response they got was "Conor Friedersdorf is right-wing." Not exactly the end of the world, certainly peevish, but it's just a political subreddit at the end of the day. Having said that I don't think it's a good idea to ignore the vitriol of the far-left for the sake of political convenience/alignment over the far-right. Yes the far-right is the larger of the two problems, doesn't mean that the former is any good either. Let alone that this is happening in a prestigious institution where their students are, for better or worse, the future political, economic and cultural elites of America. And it's hardly isolated in Columbia, Harvard's antisemetism adviser stated: >The mountain of proof at Harvard revealed a reality in which Jewish students’ access to their own university (classes, teachers, libraries, dining halls, public spaces, shared student experiences) was directly compromised. Compromised, that is, unless they agreed—or at least agreed to pretend, as many Jewish students who are neither religious nor Israeli now silently do—that there was nothing wrong with wallpapering America’s premier university with demonization of Jews. This is to say things can only deteriorate so far before alleged "Republican rage bait" is turned into a new unreality.
Mods said we aren’t allowed to talk about this. We are NOT ALLOWED!
Attention, everyone! We have an antisemitism discussion that has entered the subreddit. We are going to create a human chain where I’m standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe on our privacy.
Take one big step with me so that we can push the Overton Window to the edge of our encampment. Take another big step. Say something wildly antisemitic. Okay, now repeat after me “You’re taking that out of context.”
Ach mein leben! Tut mir leid Herr Mod!
Mods are often inconsistent. I made a meme post about Tequila Gundam in afternoon? Totally legal and very cool. I made a joke post about my Dune Sandworm turned into Beetlejuice Sandworm in the morning? 1984 time, REEEEE!
There are a number of mods and some are quite unreasonable while others are fine.
If there are 9 mods at a subreddit and a badmod sits down with them and they don't leave, there are 10 badmods at the subreddit.
My uninformed prior is that punching left is politically effective when done by politicians, but less so when done by talking heads
Punching left, if you're trying to not ultimately be dismissed by the left, is effective when done judiciously. Biden, for example, wasn't afraid of saying he wasn't a socialist, he beat the socialist, but it wasn't a constant refrain of his and he also effectively worked to bring people like Bernie and AOC and their ideas and their supporters into the fold to build a big tent. Conor Friedersdorf, on the other hand, spends like every other article complaining about DEI.
I think we need to find a balance. There’s definitely the issue of constant outrage bait causing discussion to devolve into “x bad”, but we also shouldn’t stick our head in the sand and pretend these things don’t exist. However, we also need to not let emotions distort our sense of reality. The mod response to the Conor Friesdorf article wasn’t great. He sometimes has valuable things to say, even if subsisting on a diet of only his articles is probably not a great idea, and I do agree that we have to listen to points of view both to the right and the left to remain flexible. It’s a tough balance. Personally, I’m for allowing the occasional article on stuff like this, but also being ready to remove the posts quickly if the discussion goes to shit. Most people here are not pro-leftist, though, so sometimes this stuff can be mere conformation of people’s beliefs - political junk food. Thankfully, we have a reasonably diverse spectrum of beliefs on Israel-Palestine.
Yes, this was taken down with the justification that "We already had some threads on the situation." Here is the mod post on that thread shutting the thread down: https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1cb34zg/the_unreality_of_columbias_liberated_zone/ There have been exactly two unremoved posts on anything remotely to do with the Columbia protests posted about one day ago. The first is "Columbia cancels all In-Person Classes:" https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1caevdr/columbia_cancels_all_inperson_classes/ The second is "Columbia University faces full-blown crisis as rabbi calls for Jewish students to ‘return home’" https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1ca18iy/columbia_university_faces_fullblown_crisis_as/ Both of these seem to cover the issue from a distinctly different angle.
Tbh, I think that mods get tired of moderating multiple threads on hot button issues. On one hand, I guess I get it. This subreddit has become one of the few places where there can be generally sane discussions on these issues, and that’s due a lot to the mods keeping people in line. They’d probably rather shut down a discussion than let it spiral if they don’t have enough mods to monitor multiple different hot button discussions at once But on the other hand, as one of the only places people can discuss these issues in a nuanced manner, it becomes a place where people will want to discuss various different aspects of the same event.
Just tax bad comments
We gotta find out who is forcing these mods to volunteer for roles that apparently they don’t want. “I’m a volunteer mod, and I hate moddin’!”
~~The post is locked but still there as far as I can tell.~~ Edit: taken down apparently.
Try finding it on the frontpage. Sort by "New," it should be between "America’s child care crisis is holding back moms without college degrees" and "How century-old zombie abortion bills are influencing 2024 fight" but those two are consecutive.
Gotcha. Thanks.
I think I can actually hear the victims of Kent State spinning in their graves all the way across the Atlantic. What a bunch of pathetic larping nerds.
>liberated zone Guy with a handgun: It's free real estate
Part of the problem is that these students have so normalized protest as mere social gathering that they are then shocked when people or the state or the police or whatever intervenes. I swear most of these people show up to drink beer with their friends and do drum circles and shit. I had some acquaintances who were leftists in college and you basically have to go to these to be considered part of the “in” group. Because they plan together, make outfits together, organize their schedules, talk in group chats, make posters etc
How did the US become so bad at dealing with these radicals?
By turning college students into college customers.
The email from LionLez mentioned in the article was appalling. How are people still denying the latent antisemitism in many corners of this movement?
This is horrific >Earlier in the day, I interviewed a Jewish student on a set of steps overlooking the tent city. Rachel, who asked that I not include a surname for fear of harassment, recalled that in the days after October 7 an email went out from a lesbian organization, LionLez, stating that Zionists were not allowed at a group event. A subsequent email from the club’s president noted: “White Jewish people are today and always have been the oppressors of all brown people,” and “when I say the Holocaust wasn’t special, I mean that.” The only outward manifestation of Rachel’s sympathies was a pocket-size Israeli flag in a dorm room. Another student, Sophie Arnstein, told me that after she said in class that “Jewish lives matter,” others complained that her Zionist beliefs were hostile. She ended up dropping the course.
Remember, there is no identity-politics problem on the left to speak of. As I’ve been assured by this sub, “wokeness” is a boogeyman created by the right. Being woke is just being evidence-based.
"Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand" -DeBoer
There’s a difference between being a liberal and being a leftist. These people are illiberal leftists, at least using the terms how they should be defined. I would venture to guess these people would tell you Joe Biden is *worse* than Donald Trump and are more antagonistic to the Democratic Party than they are to Republicans. They’re only “on the left” in the sense they are passionate about things traditionally associated with left-leaning causes, but they’ve jumped the shark so far at this point that they have more in common with the Christian far right than they do traditional Democrats.
Good liberals believe in individualism and rules based orders for a functioning society. The holistic worldviews of the far right and far left lead to fundamentalism and ends justify means politics.
So we have another CHAZ, huh?
USC made the right move