MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7hr ago
On one hand this is fair. Elon definitely has more strings to pull than the protestors right now, but that's a pretty short-sighted view. In 20 years, the current class of Columbia isn't going to have access to the corridors of power, they're going to occupy them. The attitudes at Columbia are going to be beltway consensus in 20 years. That's a much bigger issue than people mouthing off on twitter.
If the situation in the Ivies is anything like my experience of Oxbridge, students who are going to grow up as pillars of the establishment have always LARPed as anti-establishment rebels on campus, and "Free Palestine" has been the hardy perennial of anti-establishment left issues since I was in primary school. The views of the pro-establishment left in the US on the I-P conflict have not materially changed during this time, despite the modern pro-establishment left incorporating a generation of kids who went on Free Palestine marches for campus-left clout as undergraduates 20-40 years ago. There is a lot of media coverage indicating that the average non-Arab attendee at the pro-Palestine protests doesn't understand the conflict and is just showing up in order to support the Current Thing - this is an example of social copying, not successful indoctrination.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
Anyway, I’d argue that colleges still pursue the latter goal. Even for pie-in-the-sky pure science. But I suppose I’m rather biased, seeing as my sister and I both did our Master’s degrees in these kind of labs. There are two media narratives about university research. And neither “breathless futurism” nor “absurd political sinecures” captures the quiet tide of NSF and corporate money.
I agree with you that there are plenty of people doing good research in hard science departments - in my foolish youth I wanted to join them* and I still have both the PhD and the physical and emotional scars of getting it. But even in the noughties, most of the good university scientists I worked with were complaining that the incentives were increasingly borked and were driving them towards running their research groups like Fordist paper-factories. There is a lot of useful work that can be done in Fordist paper-factories (the research group next to mine were generating multiple drug leads a year using sweated grad student and postdoc labour), but it is the comparative advantage of government and commercial labs, not universities.
The story I was told by my mentors was that in some unspecified pre-lapsarian golden age the academic career structure had given all scientists the level of academic freedom that (for example) Watson and Crick used to discover DNA even though Bragg would have preferred Crick to work on haemoglobin, but that this was no longer the case and the only way to get that level of research flexibility was to join one of a small number of special institutions like the Cambridge Laboratory of Molecular Biology (the famous LMB, aka the "Nobel Prize factory"). Based on what people are saying online things have got significantly worse since then.
* Solid state physics - the area I worked in (although not the specific problem I was working on) was widely considered cool-but-useless at the time, but is now being used by multiple commercial fusion startups.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
Blocking $26 billion in aid to an extremely wealthy country that also has the wealthiest per capita diaspora community is now anti-semitism?
No, but it is something that rich centrist American Jews care about. There is a reason why AIPAC is as powerful as it is. The sort of Jews who might switch from D to R in response to left-wing campus idiocy are exactly the sort of Jews who support aid to Israel most.
I support third countries getting the feck out of the I-P conflict (my gut feeling is that foreign support for both sides is net escalatory, although I understand the argument that the US paying for Iron Dome specifically is de-escalatory). But I am not American, and my views on this issue are not socially acceptable in elite American social circles. Apart from short-term humanitarian aid while the mess made by the current war is being cleaned up, the only use of donor money in the area I would support is bribing other majority-Muslim countries to take in Palestinian refugees.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
I'm equally sure that pro-Israel Jews would prefer someone who moves aid forward while delivering a mild dressing-down for PR purposes to someone who praises Netanyahu to the skies while using aid as a lever to extract concessions elsewhere from his domestic political opponents. The Biden administration is significantly less critical of Netanyahu's policy in Gaza than the Israeli opposition, which most centrist American Jews find a lot more sympathetic than Likud.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
Note that the argument that the students are making for "Columbia is profiting from Israel's US backed war in Gaza" is not the sane version of that argument. They are going after Columbia for holding index funds which contain regular American companies which do business in Israel. Apparently Microsoft is "providing surveillance infrastructure to the IDF" and therefore QQQQ is a hate stock. The kind of divestment the students are asking for is not a serious demand that they want met.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
Mainstream leftists (including Joe Biden) still are staunchly pro-Israel. Congress just passed a bill to provide military aid to Israel with mostly-Democratic votes.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
In my experience it could be best stated as there's a subculture of anarchists/communists who basically participate in every left-aligned protest, but many of the protests (particularly bigger ones on popular subjects like anti-austerity or LGBTQ+ rights) will also attract a changing crowd of other, more normie types, which means the anarchist/communist contigent is less notable.
From a UK perspective, the problem is that the SWP crowd have the necessary skills to organise large protests which skirt the boundaries of legality, and the normies don't. So unless the protest is organised by some other group with access to those skills (like a union), it inevitably becomes a SWP-led protest. I became something of a meme in left-wing student circles after I was identified as "the Lib Dem who turned up at a demo in a black cab" - I had 50 protest signs with Lib Dem sympathetic messages to dish out to Lib Dem supporters and a taxi was the only way to get them from the sign printer to the protest in the time available. The SWP had pre-distributed 2 or 3 protest signs each with SWP-sympathetic messages to the 100+ activists they had milling around the start, and lots of non-SWP-supporters ended up carrying because they thought they were just picking up a spare sign from another protestor.
Also the folks who bring Palestine flags to every protest tend to be Middle-Easterners, often actual Palestinians, themselves.
In the 1990s most of the Middle Easterners in the UK were either rich Arabs (who didn't go on protests) or Turkish Cypriots (who don't care about Palestine). The "every demo is about Palestine" dynamic back then was definitely driven by white British lefties. Looking at media coverage, I think that 2024-vintage pro-Palestine protests in the UK are dominated by people from predominantly-Muslim ethnic groups, although I see more South Asians than Middle Easterners.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
In a general sense, I think university leftists have done a great job convincing college students that being anti-Israel, pro-Palestine is the default "leftist" "intellectual" position.
I think this is the wrong level of generality to look at it. Someone has convinced the students that the default leftist intellectual alignment is anti-establishment, despite Columbia being an establishment institution that largely exists to train the pro-establishment left. The pro-establishment left has been mostly pro-Israel since the Holocaust and solidly pro-Israel since before I was born. The anti-establishment left has been mostly pro-Palestine since the Nabka and solidly pro-Palestine since kibbutzim stopped being a useful example of really existing socialism. The changing views of leftwing students on Israel-Palestine is downstream of their changing views on the centre-left establishment.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
The critical point here is the meaning of "lower intelligence". Having IQ 90-100 servants with a good attitude is life-enriching because they do the crapwork so you don't have to. Having IQ 80-90 people in your space is just a problem because they can't even operate a washing machine correctly.
The other problem is that your servants won't retain a good attitude if they are going home to a place dominated by a violent oppositional culture where displaying any sign of servility is putting a target on you.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
It’s not the same people protesting every time.
I'm not directly familiar with US protest culture, but in the UK it so is. Sometimes they forget to change the protest signs and people march against student funding cuts behind a "Free Palestine" banner. We have a single-digit number of activist groups experienced in organising this kind of noisy, disruptive protest, and until the SWP collapsed due to sex scandals most of them were SWP front organisations.
Even if you look at people rather than orgs, we are talking about a subculture (strictly two subcultures because the socialist-anarchist split hasn't gone anywhere) involving a few thousand people split between a small number of big cities (mostly London and Bristol in the UK) which is cohesive to have its own values. The tribal values of the subculture that is socialist protest includes a hierarchy of issues, and Palestine is number 2 on the list after opposing US foreign policy.
I don't. Jews who are paying attention can see the rising anti-semitism on the right. (And in particular, Jews who care about Israel know who was blocking the aid bill). Left-wing anti-semites are more dangerous individually (because they are more violent) but the anti-semitic right arguably includes people like Elon Musk and has far more access to the corridors of power than the Columbia protestors do.
Will more anti-semites be invited to the White House in a second Trump term or a second Biden term (not counting Gulf Arab diplomats etc. who are discreet about their anti-semitism)? It is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
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