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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   25323 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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Students from various campuses have occupied the Columbia University campus in New York City in protest of Israel. There reports and videos circulating of protestors harassing Jewish students on or near campus grounds. The NYPD has deployed officers to surround the campus and has established filtration checkpoints to prevent outside agitators from entering campus. Various Columbia alumni have expressed concern with Columbia’s handling of the situation. All classes are now online at least for today. Similar protests are happening at Yale and various other campuses across the country.

Edit: Congressman Josh Hawley has called on President Joe Biden to deploy the National Guard to Columbia and other universities to protect Jewish students on campus.

Edit: NYU has ordered their encampment to disperse and the NYPD is moving in to clear the demonstrators.

Edit: I’m seeing footage of NYU professors being marched out of the campus in zip ties. Cal Poly Humbolt students have barricaded themselves inside a campus building with furniture.

Edit: University of Texas, Austin student protestors are being dispersed by police. And possibly vanned. Protests now seem to be nationwide.

Edit: Mass arrests beginning at USC protests.

Edit: Tasers and rubber bullets being deployed against protestors at Emory University in Georgia.

Edit: There appear to be police snipers monitoring protests at Ohio State University.

I wonder how much of this is just boredom? It’s a slow news cycle. The Iran stuff turned out to be a nothingburger. What are the politically-active class supposed to get riled up at this week, Trump’s courtroom farts? (I’m not kidding. That was the other option here.) The masses demand a current thing at all times. I mean really, endowment divesture? Would anyone care about this if there were a salient mass shooting anywhere in the country over the weekend?

Something like that…maybe. Evidence: the number of alternate topics in this thread.

Calling it class interest or even a cohesive demand is a bit much, though. It’s not the same people protesting every time. I’d say there’s a background temperature of discontent which, this week, happened to be hottest around Columbia. Even if we had known that Iran’s launch would blow over, we could never have predicted that this was going to top the leaderboard for today.

During the BLM protests in 2020+, a lot of ... extremely enthusiastic partisans ... from both sides converged on Portland (OR). It seemed like the cause was President Trump choosing Portland as an example in a speech, which caused people who wanted to fight the good fight (whichever fight it was) to converge on Portland like a Schelling point. I wonder if somehow Columbia has fallen into the same role? The reports of activity on other campuses argue against it, but then, college students and faculty are tied to their location in ways that random street fighters aren't.

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