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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33117 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Columbia Student Hunted by ICE Sues to Prevent Deportation

A 21-year old, third year Columbia student is wanted by ICE. She's a legal permanent resident who has lived in the United States since she was 7 years old. This is different from the case of Mahmoud Khalil in very notable regards:

  • Chung is herself Korean and not Arab like Mahmoud Khalil, there is no accusation that Chung herself "supports terrorism" which was the justification that was going around when Khalil was arrested.
  • According to NYT the Trump administration justification is:

The Trump administration is arguing that her presence in the United States hinders the administration’s foreign policy agenda of halting the spread of antisemitism...

The involvement of federal prosecutors was particularly notable. According to Ms. Chung’s lawsuit, agents apparently seeking her searched two residences on the Columbia campus with warrants that cited a criminal law known as the harboring statute, aimed at those who give shelter to noncitizens present in the United States illegally.

That signaled that the searches were related to a broader criminal investigation by federal prosecutors into Columbia University. Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, has said that the school is under investigation “for harboring and concealing illegal aliens on its campus.”

  • So the arrest/deportation order is based on the accusation of antisemitism and not support for terrorism. If you are wondering what Chung did that the US government would consider antisemitic- the DHS and United States has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's working definition of Antisemitism.
  • There is no accusation that Chung organized the protests or was a leader of the protests in any form, and did not speak to reporters, she was merely a participant.

As someone who has been very aware of the growing body of European hate speech laws making antisemitism illegal, and the regulatory and legal tactics which are being pursued to tacitly put Americans under the same rules, even I underestimated the extent to which antisemitism would be overtly criminalized in the United States. Although I warned of the US adopting the IHRA definition of anti-semitism years ago on TheMotte, even at the time I didn't think it would form the basis for arresting protestors.

This is clearly just against the positive value of free speech. Arresting or deporting people for expressing political opinions makes people less willing to share political opinions. Whether or not the First Amendment allows it isn't the main point. It's bad because of the same core logic that makes it bad for us to ban all nazis or leftists, even if both are evil.

Is being deported a punishment?

Those who feel yes:

  • want due-process to be followed
  • want everyone treated equally

Those who feel no:

Perhaps:

  • Deportation is not a punishment
  • Due process does not apply since it is not a punishment
  • The state has ultimate authority to deport anyone, including its own citizens
  • "Citizen" is the status of being a friend to the state. Why would the state deport its own citizen?
  • A Democratic (the party) administration could just deport Trump supporters, if not for ...
  • The state may choose to bind itself by giving citizens the right to not be deported

Disclaimer: I don't know anything about law, so this line of thought must be wrong. This post is just theoretical musing.

I mean, in the US (according to our legal tradition):

  • Denaturalization of a citizen is a punishment

    • This punishment is cruel and unusual and hence categorically forbidden under the 8th amendment
    • Citizens, broadly, have the right to enter the country

  • Deporting a non-citizen is not a punishment

    • Nevertheless, the non-citizen is due some amount of process, not a full trial or anything of the sort, but something approximating a neutral magistrate in which the government must assert under what specific congressional authority the deportation is occurring and so forth
    • At the same time, the deportee can make specific claims of legality to be in the country, for example having been granted certain lawful status, against pursuant to specific congressional authority. Or maybe on the simple basis that the government has gotten the wrong individual (an order pertaining to John Smith is not applicable to Jacob Smitty).

Great! American visa policy should be based on the principle that visa or permanent residency approvals are intended to further the interests of Americans and the United States. Removing people whose presence does not advance those goals should be normal and routine. Admittedly, I'm aware of the argument that this sort of thing just serves the interests of a particular ethnic group of Middle Eastern descent, rather than those of the United States more generally. Ultimately, I see the general principle as more important. Let's agree on this before fighting among ourselves over who exactly ought to profit the most from this way of doing things!

Keren Yarhi-Milo, the current dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, is a former Israeli intelligence officer. Do you think she is “advancing American interests”?

I think you're missing the point which is that this violates her first amendment right to freedom of speech.

Something I can't identify sticks in my craw. I think it's the "interests of Americans and the United States" bit.

Like, what even is that? Who could possibly agree on what it is? I think by your definition we'd be deporting (non-citizen) supporters of Israel too.

Frankly, I thought coming to the US and saying whatever hot garbage you wanted to say was part of the allure. I am finding it impossible to see this issue as something that we can somehow carve out from the broader mission of liberty. I think people are just mad they can't punch college students in the face for being wankers.

Why is speech the problem anyway? Isn't the actual problem that there is criminality--vandalism, attacks, things that clearly counter school policies. Why not focus on that?

Then I would ask what is your vision of the first amendment? What principle(s) underline how we enforce it? What limitations are acceptable and how do we determine when a line has been crossed?

The problem isn't just speech, although that is part of it. It's also the fragmented culture and supercharged social media algorithms that allow bad-faith actors to exploit our free speech norms that undermine the society that protects them in the first place. It's a constant stress test for free speech. It's not really a healthy culture anymore. It's hyper-partisan factions or individuals, often times anti-Western ones, operating freely within a cultural bubble that was designed for good-faith debate and disagreement without totally trashing our society. We do not maintain that bubble anymore. We either need to get back to maintaining that bubble by enforcing a double standard against foreign, anti-Western dissenters, or we can slide toward some form of soft authoritarianism just to keep the wheels on. We are trying both it seems:

• The Dems and the left played their totalitarianism-light method by policing speech and suppressing right leaning ideas to achieve a more egalitarian one-size fits all environment, aka equity.

• The Republicans and the right are more keen on re-establishing and applying a double standard when it comes to Westerners and Western ideals in general. They're especially this way when it comes to Israel-Palestine.

I believe both societal trajectories are authoritarian, except one prioritizes the well being of its people while the other prioritizes an idea that ultimately suppresses its people. I prefer the double standard method. It's imperfect, but it establishes a national identity and what is and is not accepted on a cultural level. I do find it highly irritating though that this double standard is applied selectively for one ethnic group and one country that isn't this one.

We're reading a news article. One from the New York Times no less. Who's to say that there wasn't criminality at the root of this case?

The New York Times and SecureSignals, who are selecting what you see here, did not focus on that because it doesn't make a good story.

EDIT: She was charged with "obstructing governmental administration", so there was some criminality here. It was very likely against school policies, but I'm not sure if that's enough to count next to vandalism or attacks.

I was speaking broadly. The criminality is what bothers people, not the speech.

William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

The ideal degree of lawfulness may be neither "not at all" nor "unconditionally".

Taking that to the logical conclusion, we shouldn't be able to deport immigrants for anything whatsoever, since that would be unequal treatment that is analogous to treating the Devil unequally.

The Devil must be punished not for being the Devil, but for the crimes he's committed that break the law.

Note that illegal immigrants have already broken the law and are usually the group that is the target of deportation, not legal immigrants.

The quote doesn't really address the question of if the degree of punishment can or should differ between categorically different individuals. One could argue that the law should treat everyone equally, but in reality punishment for law is different depending on the individual e.g. children vs adults. Similarly, a citizen and a permanent resident are not equivalent, and a citizen and an illegal immigrant even less so.

But this isn't talking about a criminal thing. Congress has the right to set immigration policy and has vested discretion in the Executive on who to admit and whether to revoke that admission.

It seems punitive, sure, and maybe it is in practice, but "we have a choice which foreigners we award visas" is the the same as "we punish those we don't select".

I'm not sure what your point is. By "this" are you referring to the quote or to Chung's situation? Does the justification for deportation not have any basis on law and crime, and if there isn't is there no attempt to make it so?

Same in what aspect? If I give Kid A a candy for acing his test but don't give Kid B anything because he failed it, is that punishing Kid B?

"This" here refers to the status of non-citizens. It's not a criminal matter.

I think you are confusing "law" more generally with a subset of it which is "criminal law". And in this case, the law is not criminal in nature, and it vests in the Executive discretion to award and revoke different statuses within the US according to certain processes, none of which involve a criminal trial (like, with charges and a jury). Some of it involves different kinds of judicial review (a good thing).

Okay, I see your point. So you are just clarifying that the act of revoking a visa or permanent residency status is not a matter of criminal law.

But if a non-citizen commits a crime, and as a result gets deported due to the crime, is that not in a way punishment for committing said crime? An additional punishment granted to a non-citizen that would not be granted to a citizen?

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Would this argument also work to defend a hypothetical instance of a Democratic administration revoking the visa of pro-Trump (and hence, in particular, in favour of Trump's current Ukraine/Russia policy) students?

Yes, I view this as being an acceptable consequence of the policy I support.

Sure, if you could find any. And if the Democrats got into a deporting-immigrants mood. And they had publicized their views enough. And...

I don't think this particular type of argument is very convincing given the number of years of abuse of due process, misuse of government agencies, NGOs, the cathedral, etc etc by the woke and the left.

The left has been doing more or less this kind of thing for years (just not this specific thing because they care less about deportation).

It's just asking for unilateral disarmament at this point and worse - at a time when the winner of the war is starting to change just a bit.

It's an asymmetric weapon; campus protests, and especially administration-tolerated or -supported campus protests, tend very much to the left.

Who said this weapon only works on campus protesters?

Well, it only works for protesters who protest in areas where the police and/or the prosecutors are instructed to be friendly to them.

Essentially, this means Blues can protest anywhere they want under this sort of ruleset, because they dont want to protest in the suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas. Because Red voting in cities has been expelled by paramilitaries and general crime they dont have political power in those areas, despite being essential for the survival thereof.

Have a little imagination. People post all kinds of things under their real names online these days.

How far can it stretch before it stops being "this weapon", and shifts to being a different one? If the standard is "...her[/his] presence in the United States hinders the administration’s foreign policy agenda.", then campus protesters (or rally organizers, or similar) are pretty much the only valid targets.

The right-wing base doesn't generally shout their opinions from a soapbox in the same way, and therefore isn't as vulnerable to this.

The right-wing base doesn't generally shout their opinions from a soapbox in the same way, and therefore isn't as vulnerable to this.

Other than, you know, that one time in DC. And that one time in Charlottesville. And if they own a pickup truck, the bumper stickers and flags. Or the T Shirts. And the rallies.

If the most right-wing examples you can think of literally contain more left-wingers than right- (such as Charlottesville, if you include counter-protesters), then I'm comfortable calling them less vulnerable.

Other than, you know, that one time in DC. And that one time in Charlottesville. And if they own a pickup truck, the bumper stickers and flags. Or the T Shirts. And the rallies.

  1. Those mostly weren't foreigners and thus would not be affected by this particular weapon.

  2. The asymmetric weapons the left had were already quite sufficient to deal with the DC and Charlottesville people.

I think that "hindering a policy agenda of an administration" could be applied much more broadly than that.

For example, a Harris administration could have decided to deport all Tesla or Twitter employees without US passport on the pretext of them harming their economic agenda. Or an administration could deport all foreign journalists which lean a way the regime does not like. Or you could kick out all foreign professors who do not fall in line with the administration. Or prevent international conferences on topics which you would rather not see discussed. Or deprive areas where the other party is in power of international tourism.

At the end of the day, it benefits a nation greatly if it can make binding commitments about permanent residence being revoked only with due process. In the past, the US was able to attract the very best immigrants. If a highly qualified immigrant is willing to forgo political expression as a condition of their residency they might as well immigrate to China -- getting deported from there as a Westerner is likely less of an ordeal than getting deported from the US is.

For example, a Harris administration could have decided to deport all Tesla or Twitter employees without US passport on the pretext of them harming their economic agenda. Or an administration could deport all foreign journalists which lean a way the regime does not like. Or you could kick out all foreign professors who do not fall in line with the administration. Or prevent international conferences on topics which you would rather not see discussed. Or deprive areas where the other party is in power of international tourism.

Yes, with the caveat is that if the reason for kicking them out is activity that would be protected under the First Amendment, the Secretary of State would have to personally approve each deportation. This is statute law; Trump isn't making stuff up here. It appears this was involved for Khalil; it doesn't look like it for Chung since they're accusing her of criminal activity, the details of which presumably they'll have to give when this gets to court. Again, deporting aliens who commit crimes is legal by statute.

At the end of the day, it benefits a nation greatly if it can make binding commitments about permanent residence being revoked only with due process.

Due process for being revoked also hinges on due process that does revoke, or deny, being honored and not undermined or circumvented willfully or publicly. Otherwise, there is no due process- there is only the binding commitments by those who are able to get away with not honoring commitments against those expected to be bound by them.

If you want a demos to be publicly on board with, say, refugee acceptance, then you need refugee criteria that are not transparently redefined and gamed to facilitate acceptance of people beyond the original concept of refugees. Similarly, if you want there to be public expectation of a judicial review of immigration cases, then there needs to be a basis for there to be an expectation of timely resolution and that migrants won't simply be let go and disappear into the interior. Absent a basis for public trust that the system would work properly, there is likely to be little political traction over concerns that the system won't work properly in other ways. It may be true, but it was already true.

This is not, to be clear, an endorsement. It is, however, an observation.

What we are seeing is a consequence of policy tools that can benefit a nation greatly being changed in ways that destroy public trust and legitimacy in said tools, often because said tools were used for partisan advantage or even abuse. The partisan utilization of said tools, often at the public advocacy of members of those very institutions due to ideological capture overriding professionalism, has led them to no longer being seen as great benefits for the nation as much as benefits to the partisans at the expense of their opponents. That things can benefit the partisans and the country alike has become outweighed by the desire to defy partisan impositions and the who-whom distinction of who has the power to get away with it.

This applies to other beneficial things as well. I think higher education is a good thing. But if you want cross-partisan support of public universities that employ talented foreign professors, then you need to maintain cross-partisan support. This is harder when public universities take open and consistently partisan stances on public issues and their own employment / admission processes. It becomes even harder when said partisans attempt to overtly and covertly circumvent unambiguous legal prohibitions to their partisan preferences. The demonstrated interest in such cases is not 'let's prioritize the public interest'- it is the preservation of partisan interest.

As partisan prioritization prevails, appeals to the broader nation grow weaker. 'Think of the good to the nation from tourism,' for example, will often fall flat if it comes a few years after tourist-centers were attempting to organize boycotts of other parts of the nation over ideological differences.

It might be 'beneficial' to have high public trust in public institutions, but trust does not follow the benefit of having trust. Trust follows from the actions. The more partisan the actions, the more partisan the trust, and thus subject to revocation / reversal with partisan changes.

Yes, this does mean things will get worse before they get better. This is an observation, not an endorsement. But it will not avoid getting worse / get better faster to simply respect an imposed a partisan preference system... particularly when the partisan coalition in question is not a social majority, but has/had conflated institutional capture with social persuasion.

At the end of the day, it benefits a nation greatly if it can make binding commitments about permanent residence being revoked only with due process.

This is the hard core of the debate. It's the same with treaties: on the one hand, how do you make a binding commitment when your government potentially switches between factions every four years? On the other hand, how do you make democracy work if you permit governments to bind the hands of their successors?

How fair is it that Biden or Starmer or Boris Johnson can import 600k immigrants in a program that has a guaranteed citizenship at the end of it and then say, "Har har, it benefits the nation that we can make binding commitments about permanent residence, suck it."

Don't get me wrong, your point is legitimate, which is what makes it complicated. I will go so far to say that I think it is a genuine flaw in democracy as a system, which only survived as long as it did because power was firmly reserved to an elite who tended to agree, and who were careful about issues of genuine contention.

how do you make democracy work if you permit governments to bind the hands of their successors?

With legislative supermajorities. If you can get 51% agreement on something, good for you, but there's no reason to expect that to bind others once a slight shift of political winds leaves you at 49%. But if you can get 60% (or 67%?)? That might be something worth hanging on to for longer, if it's not so soundly refuted that support drops to 40% (or 33%).

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The justification doesn't require it only apply to campus protesters, though. One could easily imagine a Dem deporting Jordan Peterson and other non-citizens for "interfering with foreign policy"

Deporting Jordan Peterson would be a lot less harsh than what happened to him. But yes, Democrats could do something with it; it's an asymmetric weapon but not an utterly one-sided one.

I'm personally willing to bite the bullet and say that I think foreign nationals should generally avoid making themselves part of American politics.

Well, I mean, the implied problem is that only foreigners who have the wrong kind of politics as far as the administration in power is concerned will run into trouble - so as long as you admit international students at all, under this principle, they become a way to bolster the numbers of the pro-government camp on American campuses. Due to the nature of the "marketplace of ideas" at university, this is bound to have adverse effects on the political expression even of native students who happen to oppose the government line.

(On the other hand, if international students are actually all forced to be completely apolitical, this may not make people happy either - I remember hearing complaints about Chinese MA students on this basis from both tribes during my US grad school period)

Well, so don’t go to big protests when you’re not a citizen, problem solved. It’s not even a permanent thing, just until you are granted us citizenship. It’s not asking them to take sides, to the contrary, it’s asking them to not take sides. Which I think is reasonable because you’re not a citizen, can’t vote and have literally no stake in the outcome of the political process in the USA.

But they kinda do have a stake, no?

If the green-card holders and legal residents (who have never needed to fear deportation for speech acts--to the best of my knowledge) knew Trump was going to go after them, then they would have a very real stake in the outcome of the political process.

have literally no stake in the outcome of the political process in the USA.

I would argue that foreigners have very much a stake in the political process -- they are the ones getting deported, or bombed for that matter. Having no say is different from having no stake.

Also, I do not think that "don't go to big protests" makes a good Schelling fence. There is nothing fundamentally different between going to a protest and having re-tweeted a meme which the regime decides is Not Funny. So what you end up with is that foreigners in the US should behave like people in China. Only it is even worse because with the CCP you at least know beforehand what will likely piss them off, and you can only guess if the next administration will kick you out for having owned a cybertruck, or a bluesky account or being a member of the German AfD or whatever.

If you want naturalized citizens to take part in the political process, training them to keep their head down before they have their citizenship seems obviously counter-productive.

There is nothing fundamentally different between going to a protest and having re-tweeted a meme which the regime decides is Not Funny.

Which administration was it who jailed an American citizen (to the applause of the Serious People Who Worry About Such Things) for sending out a "text to vote" meme? A Man for All Seasons was quoted elsethread; the fact is, the laws have ALREADY been knocked down, and now the Devil has turned tail.

False statements of fact have always enjoyed reduced 1st amendment protection. Black-letter law says that deliberately sharing false information about voting procedures is a crime. There is no "it was a meme" exception in the law, and there shouldn't be.

This was a fairly simple case of "Don't do the crime if you won't do the time."

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If you want naturalized citizens to take part in the political process, training them to keep their head down before they have their citizenship seems obviously counter-productive.

Do we? One of the reasons immigration has been so controversial is by being openly a way for the Left to rig politics by importing paid-up foot soldiers. They were entirely open about this, see “The Emerging Democratic Majority” or Tony Blair’s staffer remarking that the purpose of their immigration policy was to render British conservatism “irrelevant and out of date”.

I think that first-generation immigrants are essentially guests and should refrain from any public criticism of their host - a policy that I follow myself.

Do we? One of the reasons immigration has been so controversial is by being openly a way for the Left to rig politics by importing paid-up foot soldiers.

At the object level, the person this thread is talking about is Asian-American, a demographic that is hardly solidly left.

I think that first-generation immigrants are essentially guests and should refrain from any public criticism of their host - a policy that I follow myself.

If you are invited to the home of a kid (to be clear, in this metaphor, this is the university community) who has an ongoing conflict with their parents, and the kid brings up the topic, do you side with the kid, the parents, or do you try to awkwardly stay neutral saying it's not your place to meddle?

If you are invited to the home of an adult with roommates (with a jointly held lease) who has an ongoing conflict with their other roommates (say, the majority of them), [same question]?

(Up to you to decide which one of these is a closer model of the situation at hand, though the choice would also reveal something about your understanding of nations.)

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Does “making themselves part of American politics” mean “engaging in any visible form of political expression whatsoever”?

We can nitpick on what we mean by “visible”, but at the end of the day, that’s really not a high bar to meet. The only visible form of political expression I ever engaged in was anonymous posting on SSC/TheMotte. Most of my friends don’t do even that.

I'm not sure exactly where the line is, but I think it stops well short of organizing building occupations like Mahmoud did. I don't really care what their cause is, foreigners that organize the occupation of university buildings should be deported.

At this time, it's not clear what exactly this girl did; it seems likely to be much closer to any reasonable line than the Mahmoud example. The administration testing where the line is does concern me.

Great! American visa policy should be based on the principle that visa or permanent residency approvals are intended to further the interests of Americans and the United States.

I entirely agree with this, but these people aren't being deported on behalf of the interests of the United States, they are being deported on behalf of the interests of Israel and the Jewish lobby. If you remember, it was only a few years ago mass riots and protests were permitted - under the Trump administration - against White Amerikkka. But once it's Israel being criticized it's an entirely different story.

I mean putting a disclaimer that you are going to ignore the obvious valid counter to your argument doesn't really work.

College campuses have been riddled with death to America and racism towards whites for ages. It's not until they start shouting death to Israel that the government takes action. It's clearly has nothing to do with furthering American interests and we should point this out.

They've been shouting "death to Israel" for a while too; elite colleges being anti-zionist and "anti-colonial" isn't some new development.

Moreover, the anti-white attitudes haven't recently coalesced into the types of encampments, campus takeovers, and outright militancy that the recent Gaza demonstrations have. Do you really think that the folks in the Trump administration would have refused to go after Columbia if it had "just" been anti-white or anti-Christian encampments and campus takeovers? They're pulling funding from schools for permitting single transgender athletes to compete outside their biological sex; I'm pretty sure they'd jump at the chance to take any plausible reason to strike at the universities.

Relatedly, Texas A&M had its chancellor replaced with a partisan republican, very plausibly over drag queensz

Humiliating leftists for anti-Jewish bigotry stings and leaves them dumbfounded. Whereas doing this for anti-white bigotry gets them all riled up to rally against "white supremacy".

In other words lets defend the interests of AIPAC and the ADL while allowing free speech for attacking white people. Funny how cancel culture was so problematic for republicans until it went against AIPAC interests.

... Yes? I said I agree with you on the general principle we should revoke visas or permanent residency, IMO even revoke citizenship, of people who subvert the United States on behalf of foreign interests. So now we can move on to that question, right, after acknowledging we agree on the principle?

How exactly does protesting the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from Gaza threaten the United States?

The reason for these deportations is that these people threaten the interests of American Jews. You prefer to focus on the word Jews, while I'm focusing on the fact that their interests are the interests of Americans.

Why should Americans care about the cycle of violence in the Middle East? Their lives are of no relevance to those who reject banal Christian platitudes about the brotherhood of man or the universal value of human life, which I know you don’t share. Dispense with the fake tears for the Arabs; if they were being killed by someone other than the Jews you wouldn’t care at all for their suffering, even performatively.

Americans should care about it because they've been taught that national socialists declaring themselves the master race and committing genocide is bad, actually, and both their personal and political will ought to be bent/pulled forcibly toward the end of preventing such an occurrence. Seems to me that per the national mythos Americans ought to be ferociously outraged about people who believe themselves to be "god's chosen" ethnically cleansing their hated neighbors for Lebensraum.

The person I’m replying to thinks that mythos is perhaps the greatest fraud and/or mistake of the 20th century.

All of this rhetorical tap-dancing of course boiling down to the idea that SS believes that Zionists ought to be held to account for their vicious criticism of post-Weimar German behavior and their simultaneous total embrace of it while you believe they should never answer to anyone for anything.

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They're of no relevance until an Arab enraged at unconditional American support for their enemies flies a plane into a building, kills over a thousand Americans and provokes a multi-decade forever war

The Anglo-American presence in and involvement with the house of Saud predates Israel.

The US oil and global trade interests are going to keep us involved in the region and they’re going to do so in a way that angers the most terrorist-y Muslims. That can’t actually be stopped.

That was because of US presence in Saudi Arabia.

I wanted Khalil deported on the I Don't Really Care Margaret heuristic but my immediate impression with regard to Chung does not match that. I strongly suspect that there are going to be some specifics that make this much less clear once they're available, but it certainly isn't obvious at the moment.

Look, I'm a supporter of free speech as much as anybody but I'm not going to run into the buzzsaw that is the Jewish lobby. People who have been calling my fellow travellers anti-semitic nazis for years - decades, even - suddenly need my help? I'm not a fan of the Jewish lobby in the current Trump administration but neither am I a fan of the pro-Palestinians. Perhaps conservatives would be more concerned about freedom of thought in the academia if there were any left in the university institutions. I gain nothing by standing on principle and lose nothing by standing out of the way. I don't need to take a side in this conflict: there are more than enough domestic windwills to shake a lance at.

I'd link to the XCKD comic about free speech and its consequences, but everyone here probably has seen it already.

Neutrality isn’t good simply because the needle is so fa to the left on campus that I think using antisemitism to clean house, even if overzealous, cannot help but make things better. Colleges should be places of learning and research, not places where kids become leftist anarchists. Unless those anarchic elements are removed, you really cannot get to free thought or speech. Kids are afraid of blowback from expressing even mildly conservative opinions on campus because of those mobs and in class because the professors are leftists and they need the degree for their future careers. Removing the leftists from college campuses is a good thing for free speech.

Why not just defund the schools, shut down students' access to loans and grants, tax the shit out of endowments and work to obliterate the university scene altogether? Why is speech the problem and not the schools?

In what sense is switching the polarity on which side gets systematically silenced "a good thing for free speech"? I'm very sympathetic to the view that the status quo is very far from free speech, and this is bad, but if your proposed solution is "censor another set of political beliefs" then you aren't restoring free speech. And maybe it's worth doing anyway, if, say, you decide free speech is a lost cause anyway, and that restoring conservative discourse is important in itself. But don't pretend you're restoring free speech by doing so. "Removing [half the political compass] from college campuses is a good thing for free speech" is a hilariously self-contradictory statement on the face of it.

Surely the US doesn't need any more wars in the Middle East?

The trouble is that the Jewish lobby in the US is a gigantic colossus and the Palestinian lobby is a shrieking buzzard. So we see strong US support for Israel and all kinds of negative consequences for the US. It's not like the Israelis are ever going to send troops to help the US in any war, they've never done so before.

False Israeli intelligence about WMDs helped to motivate the Iraq War, the Jewish lobby was eager for that particular disaster. They clearly aren't advancing US interests.

At this moment, the US military surely has more important tasks than bombing Yemen, bombing Yemen has been tried and found wanting. It didn't work when Biden and the Saudis tried it and probably won't work when Trump does it. It's a waste of ordnance and air defences. World sea lanes need to be secured but it's clearly quite difficult for the US to do so militarily. Diplomacy should be tried.

A better solution would be to cut off the Israelis from the military aid teat and make a deal with Yemen. This principle of jettisoning Israel isn't limited to Yemen, it would reduce many problems. It would reduce tension with Iran, it would make diplomacy with the Arab states and Turkey easier, it'd improve relations with Indonesia and Pakistan too. This doesn't mean favouring Palestine or anything, jettisoning them would be fine too. China's cordial Middle East relations should be the target: trade with the sheikhs and get along with them, build some infrastructure, get some oil.

But to achieve this, the Jewish lobby would need to be defanged in the US. Getting to neutrality requires moving in a direction.

Bombing Yemen is unlikely to be a great long term strategy but the U.S. government which makes peace with the Houthis is one which does not care about oil. This seems unlikely.

The Houthi slogan is

"Allah is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam."

I do not expect any US government to be able to make peace with them any time soon, oil or no oil.

Regarding Yemen, I believe it all started with the Saudis. Anyway, American interests there go deeper than Israel.

Surely the US doesn't need any more wars in the Middle East?

Israel was against the Iraq war FWIW. So there. They understood what was going to happen and it came to pass.

This is laughable, the WMD intelligence was laundered from Israel direct to the White House through a special office composed of ultra-Zionists. You can even watch Netanyahu give the hard sell directly to the American Congress on the Iraq War "taking out Saddam" in 2002! This is the exact same man influencing Trump by the way, who Trump considers to be America's greatest ally.

"If you take out Saddam, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran will say... the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone." Netanyahu to the Congress in 2002.

This is the man who OUR AMERICAN CONGRESS gave 58 standing ovations in his Congressional visit last year. From Grok:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received the most standing ovations in a single speech in U.S. Congressional history during his address to a joint session of Congress on July 24, 2024. According to reports, he was given 55 standing ovations throughout his one-hour speech, surpassing all previous records for a single address. This figure is notably higher than other historically significant speeches, such as those by Winston Churchill or previous addresses by Netanyahu himself.

this is laughable, the WMD intelligence was laundered from Israel direct to the White House through a special office composed of ultra-Zionists.

It was a full office of neocons, and the intel wasn't from Israelis. It was various bullshit from dodgy Arab sources being interviewed by Americans, interpreted in a maximally positive way to make the case. In addition, Americans trusted that Chalabi idiot.

Netanyahu give the hard sell directly to the American Congress on the Iraq War "taking out Saddam" in 2002! This is

He was not the prime minister of Israel at the time. Israeli officials were against it in private, although the GOI did not give a statement against it.

As The Guardian reported:

The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.

"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.

The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.

In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.

The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.

The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House. The primary customers were Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally on the national security council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy.

In turn, they leaked some of the claims to the press, and used others as a stick with which to beat the CIA and the state department analysts, demanding they investigate the OSP leads

Douglas Feith, on whose authority the Israelis were cleared into the Pentagon, is a Zionist Jew who co-authored the Clean Break Memo as part of an advisory group directly to Netanyahu himself. The memo calls for removing Saddam as an important objective:

Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.

So you have Doug Feith working directly with the Likud party to provide plans for securing Israeli objectives in the Middle East. Then you get Doug Feith on the OSP, who laundered false Israeli intelligence from a clandestine office of the Israeli Prime Minister directly to the White House. Then you have Netanyahu himself giving a hard sell to the American Congress.

Israel was only 'against' the Iraq War insofar that they wanted the US to invade Iran first. The Bush admin said they'd do Iraq and Afghanistan quickly before Iran, who would similarly be a cake walk. Well, we know how that turned out. Israel still wanted the US to invade the whole Middle East (on their behalf) in the long run anyway, they just disagreed about the order.

No.

They're not utter retards, so I highly doubt they wanted US to invade Iran either because that would go very badly.

Iran is a much larger country than Iraq, it has rugged terrain, ties with Russia and China and a somewhat more technologically capable population that is fiercely nationalistic.

US might have been able to topple mullahs with a color revolution, might get lucky and Iranians do it themeselves but an inevitably brutal invasion would have resulted in people rallying to the flag and something that'd make the worst of Iraq look like a cakewalk.

This is not speculation on my part. Israel did, in fact, ask the US to invade Iran first and not Iraq.

There's various sources for this including from US officials such as Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Colin Powell. It's also stated in Mearsheimer's Israel Lobby book from memory.

Look, I'm a supporter of free speech as much as anybody but I'm not going to run into the buzzsaw that is the Jewish lobby. People who have been calling my fellow travellers anti-semitic nazis for years - decades, even - suddenly need my help?

It's not about helping it's about building bridges on important issues. A lot of left-wing commentators on X are sounding more Right Wing on the question of the Jewish lobby every single day.

The actions that Columbia have announced will have an immediate effect on combating anti-Semitism, holding those responsible for the harassment of Jewish students accountable, and reorienting Columbia to its academic mission. Columbia has committed to: Reviewing admissions procedures to ensure an unbiased admissions process and specifically studying the decline in admissions of Jewish students.

https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/columbia-comply-anti-semitism-task-force-preconditions-met.html

Everything has and always will be pure tribalism. One must simply long for his tribe and dedicate his life to hardening it.

Hillel reports that 22.8% of Columbia undergraduates are Jewish, by the way.

There will be no investigations regarding the decline of Gentile Whites at Harvard, who only make up 20% of the Harvard class of 2028 despite making up over 60% of the country. And despite being the people that actually founded the institution and the country in its entirety.

How did the people who founded these institutions get kicked out of them within a single generation? Hmmm, there will be no investigations there. Let's investigate why Columbia is only 22.8% Jewish, should be higher...

How did the people who founded these institutions get kicked out of them within a single generation?

They didn't get kicked out, they got outcompeted. The average European IQ is 100, the average Ashkenazi IQ is 114. In an institution that selects for IQ people, you shouldn't expect representation to match the census, any more than you should expect a room full of physicists to be 50% female.

Blacks are 14.5% of the American population, about equal to their 14% representation in the Harvard class of 2028. Likewise Latinos constitute 16% of the Harvard class compared to about 20% representation in the population.

Too bad Whites only have about a third of their population representation, giving them the worst representation among any other demographic. I guess blacks and Latinos are just outcompeting whites right?

Well no, you're well aware that they benefit from race discrimination in their favour.

You're also well aware that Jews are classified along with all other European ethnic groups as white. All that's happening is that the places being allocated to white students are being allocated to the most intelligent ones. This doesn't bother most people because most people don't hate Jews.

So you concede the level of admissions of Latinos is due to race discrimination, as well as blacks, whites, and Asians. But they totally got it right with Jews, their representation is driven by merit unlike every single other group. Except we are now faced with a plain example of the sort of group organization, networking, and advocacy Jews have always done in promoting their own admission into these institutions.

Columbia's investigation it will be carrying out is about the admission of Jews and not the admission of Whites. If that investigation leads to an increase in the admission of Jews and a decline in the admission of White non-Jews would you also say that is just non-Jewish whites being outcompeted? Or would it be an example of exactly what drives the level of admission in every other ethnic group?

If you have evidence that universities are unfairly prioritising Jews, then present it. Insinuation isn't enough.

Meanwhile, we have actual concrete evidence and explicit admission by universities that they were favouring Africans and Latinos while penalising Asians (Euros are a wash, from what I recall). Asians were appearing less than their GPAs would suggest they should, while blacks and hispanics were appearing more than their GPAs suggested they should. Jews being particularly prevelant at some universities isn't shocking, because they are literally the most intelligent ethnic group on the planet.

The pressure on Columbia is not insinuation, it is proof of unfairly prioritizing Jews. Not that even I'm clamoring for "fairness", which does not exist. It's a racial spoils system. It's incredibly naive to think it's about IQ and GPA.

More comments

If Jews' representation is inflated the same way Blacks and Latinos' allegedly is, then how come Jews allegedly rule the world?

I can't tell if pro-Palestinianism already had its moment of immoderate greatness or if philosemitism is having its own.

From a purely cynical perspective, it seems like it would be easier to tamp down on certain attitudes about Jews if there's a general woke regime that reacts horrifically to any perceived attack against any victim of history, the more the merrier.

Having an administration or people hellbent on dismantling that entire system (and whose main talent is exacerbating negative polarization)make exceptions for one group seems suboptimal in comparison. This is how normal people get ideas.

I mean, pro-palestinians largely are the woke. Like literally the same people in many cases(no, most of them are not Arabs). You can't go after the woke without going after pro-palestinians.

Going after the woke =/= going after them for being anti-Israel .

I see the appeal from a Trump/anti-woke perspective, all the enemies lined up behind an unpopular position they probably can beat universities into punishing relatively easily. I'm wondering where this goes afterwards.

I see the appeal from a Trump/anti-woke perspective, all the enemies lined up behind an unpopular position they we probably can beat universities into punishing relatively easily. I'm wondering where this goes afterwards.

The question in my mind is where you situate anti-semitism discourse relative to wokeness.

One framing of this is that the Trump admin and rightists are using anti-semitism to Judo-throw the woke, using the Woke's own narratives of protecting besieged minorities to destroy the Woke, and ultimately in the process discrediting the idea of protecting minority fee-fees and removing it from the discourse. Like Treize Khushrenada, the anti-woke will use the Woke's weapons against them, and in the process the weapons will all be destroyed and we'll have peace.

Alternatively, the anti-Woke are reifying the Woke narrative by utilizing it. We're all embedded in the narrative of protecting the feelings of minority students from the political positions of their fellow students. We're valorizing the idea that students can and should be expelled, arrested, their degrees revoked, for saying something "offensive" to a minority group. Rather than the Republicans engaging in clever Judo to reverse-flip the Woke into a bad position, rather the Woke have trapped the Republicans into fighting in their paradigm: Republicans have no engaged the Woke in their own field, where the Woke have the advantage.

We'll have to see what happens.

Third option: it's a glaring exception to an otherwise anti-woke paradigm driven by short term political considerations rather than ideology. For now a lot of Republicans don't really care about the contradiction but as time passes the status quo will be untenable and they'll have to chose between returning to the woke paradigm to defend the concept of anti-semitism or abandon it entirely

I don't think "Republicans" or "Democrats" are the right unit of analysis. The Anti-Woke are just a portion of Republicans, and the philosemitic and Woke are just portions of Democrats. The Anti-Woke see an opportunity to use the weapons developed by the Woke against them by mobilizing the normie Republicans and the Philosemitic Democrats against the Woke. There's a risk that when the Anti-Woke seek to abandon the tactic, that they'll have accustomed the normies to the idea that college kids can suffer grave consequences for making people uncomfortable.

The Anti-Woke see an opportunity to use the weapons developed by the Woke against them by mobilizing the normie Republicans and the Philosemitic Democrats against the Woke.

I'll believe this when I see any "Woke weapons" used other than anti-semitism.

We've seen this song and dance before with the university admins: right wingers were played into pushing against "anti-semitic Woke" administrators, the admins were fired and they were pretty much universally replaced by "Zionist Woke" instead. There was no wider victory for "anti-Woke" forces, they were simply played into fighting a battle that's basically orthogonal to their real interests.

Exactly.

None of this actually increased the rights I had in college, instead it narrows them further.

There's a risk that when the Anti-Woke seek to abandon the tactic, that they'll have accustomed the normies to the idea that college kids can suffer grave consequences for making people uncomfortable.

Things that have already happened are not risks. College kids already routinely suffer grave consequences for making people uncomfortable, and in fact such consequences have been deeply imbedded in longstanding policy. Given this reality, having these rules at least apply more fairly than they currently do is an obvious positive.

Right, the Free Palestine and BLM Venn diagram will have an almost complete overlap.

Frankly, I would be fine with deporting aliens that protest for far right causes as well. I think guests should simply not be shit-stirrers, regardless of my agreement or lack thereof with their positions.

Rather the opposite. The ADL position is open borders, wokeness and diversity in the west, Israeli nationalism for Israel. The same billionaires who happily funded woke univerities and were pushing DEI in their companies want Likud running their own country.

The ADL is backing Netanyahu now? Israel does have a left, you know.

ADL is changing course now, no?

Venn diagrams don't use areas

They do:

A Venn diagram, also called a set diagram or logic diagram, shows all possible logical relations between a finite collection of different sets. These diagrams depict elements as points in the plane, and sets as regions inside closed curves. A Venn diagram consists of multiple overlapping closed curves, usually circles, each representing a set. The points inside a curve labelled S represent elements of the set S, while points outside the boundary represent elements not in the set S. This lends itself to intuitive visualizations; for example, the set of all elements that are members of both sets S and T, denoted S ∩ T and read "the intersection of S and T", is represented visually by the area of overlap of the regions S and T.[1]

In Venn diagrams, the curves are overlapped in every possible way, showing all possible relations between the sets. They are thus a special case of Euler diagrams, which do not necessarily show all relations. Venn diagrams were conceived around 1880 by John Venn. They are used to teach elementary set theory, as well as illustrate simple set relationships in probability, logic, statistics, linguistics, and computer science.

A Venn diagram in which the area of each shape is proportional to the number of elements it contains is called an area-proportional (or scaled) Venn diagram.

If you're going to be pedantic, at least be right! The complaint that I should have said "an area-proportional Venn diagram would have an almost complete overlap" is just about maximally pointless.

A Venn diagram in which the area of each shape is proportional to the number of elements it contains is called an area-proportional (or scaled) Venn diagram.

I don't think it is pedantic to point out that just because a niche generalization shares the name with a common concept, the common concept itself is fully general. Note the area-proportional (or scaled) part, if Venn diagrams wouldn't encode just boolean relarions, this addition would be superfluous.

Please explain.

Venn diagram will have an almost complete overlap

The colloquial use of Venn diagrams overlapping more or less are nonsensical. Venn Diagrams encode set conjunction and disjunction/intersection, not how much of a set is the same as another.

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