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I'm in grad school at Penn, which has recently hit the news for former Penn president Liz Magill's responses to the congressional hearing on anti-Semitism (even making it to the SNL cold open!!). The question about genocide wasn't even supposed to be the "gotcha" question in the hearing; the follow up was going to be "is the river to the sea advocating for genocide", which was where things were going to get dicey. Instead, Liz and the presidents of Harvard and MIT did not get past the first question.
Liz was under fire for a bit, starting with the "Palestine Writes" festival back in September. The recent confessional hearing was more so the straw that broke the camel's back, as it were. Since September, we've lost almost $1b in donations, from donors with names adorning buildings such as Huntsman, Lauder, and more. The most recent is $100m joint venture that included a non-discrimination clause, and a lawsuit by two Penn students about their experiences (which, even before Oct. 7, included swastikas drawn on campus buildings and an individual breaking into the Jewish center on the campus; we had a day of solidarity on campus to stand against antisemetic hatred, and the progressives who participated have all quietly removed those pictures from their social media).
Liz's administration has also refused to show the pro-Palestine movie "Israelism" and has changed certain policies to make an ongoing pro-Palestine "teach in" more difficult at Houston Hall. The middle east director resigned in protest. It isn't that Liz is pro-Palestine; she's just... Not doing a good job of attempting neutrality.
Penn is ranked the second worst school for freedom of speech by FIRE, a ranking that focuses less on stated policies and more on students' subjective experiences. Liz will stay on until a replacement is announced, and remains a tenured law professor at Penn regardless.
The new YikYak, known as sidechat, has provided a not-so-scientific look into the undergrads' anonymous processing of events. The following stand out to me:
It baffles me how much students (specifically, students without a personal connection to the conflict; those with a personal connection I completely understand) are getting so emotionally frothy about a conflict halfway around the world that Penn has zero influence over. Instead, we are able to influence how students, here on campus, are treated, and we are willing to sacrifice that to rant about the Middle East. Why?
I think it hits a sweet spot for virtue signaling. It’s a big newsworthy event that everyone is talking about, and that has very bad optics (the war footage is bad, although probably no worse than what happens in other wars we clearly don’t care about). The government is clearly on Israel’s side, and thus being against Israel is also opposing the us government and military intervention. The Christian’s are mostly pro-Israel for religious end-times reasons. All of this means that the “bad Americans” the deplorables are on one side. So there’s good aesthetic and political reasons to oppose it. At the same time, it’s pretty consequence free from the prospective of the students (who don’t yet have jobs). They aren’t going to be drafted, they don’t have to worry about being targeted by opponents, they aren’t going to seriously influence what happens in Israel.
That’s the sweet spot of divisive politics. No personal consequences, little chance of changing the policy, lots of news coverage, and enemies on a single side. Basically any issues that you can’t control through the political process, cost nothing to support, and are viral work for signaling.
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Alright, I'll say it. Advocating for genocide is political speech. It does not incite imminent lawless action. It should not be categorically banned. Genocide could conceivably be a good policy option in certain hypothetical situations. Also most things labeled "genocide" are actually ethnic cleansing or forced assimilation.
America used to have entire political parties advocating for 'genocide.' The American Colonization Society comes to mind. The first amendment seems to just get whittled away over time, not unlike the second, not to mention the rest
Isn't that the group that set up Liberia? That's not genocide.
'Just take the people and move them somewhere else' is (one) absolutely 100% rock-solid acting definition of genocide these days.
No, that's "ethnic cleansing". Even the UN definition of genocide doesn't include that.
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Unfortunately even Raphael Lemkin, after coining the term, quickly pivoted to including cultural cleansing or race-based eviction as "genocide".
God forbid we have a word for the uniquely evil act of cēdō-ing a genus!
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I take a view that "genocide" rhetoric has been diluted to be meaningless.
No moral politics can accept genocide. But nowadays genocide is thrown about so casually that it's a meaningless term. The Jewish genocide, the Palestinian genocide, the Xinjiang genocide, the white genocide, the trans genocide.
Genocide is the mass slaughter of people based purely on their ancestral heritage. No one--not Israelis, and not Hamas--either publically or privately wants or plans for genocide. There are bad things outside genocide different sides may want, but they are desires centered on power, not murder as an end in itself. The fact that Hamas wants an Islamic caliphate from river to sea (to sea and sea again) is about as far from actual genocide as can be imagined: if Jews peacefully accepted Islamic dominance (and ideally converted), Hamas would be plenty content and wouldn't kill anyone.
Israeli culture, despite its flaws, is better than Palestinian culture, so many people want it to win. But they're uncomfortable acknowledging that some cultures are better than others, so they feel the need to frame Israeli desires as desires to avoid genocide. They're not: they're a desire to maintain Israeli dominance over Palestine because the alternative is worse, and that's a good thing.
Hamas's charter publicly advocates for genocide.
That's their defunct charter from 1988; they dropped that language and their current charter from 2017 states their war is not with the Jewish religion but against Zionists occupying Palestine. Not saying they are lovely human beings, but they don't have that in their charter now.
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Note that's a direct quote from an Islamic hadith.
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I agree. The problem is that universities, especially the ones that were represented in the hearing, have not been enforcing this policy. Further, their policy has been nearly the exact opposite. "Silence is violence" after all. So please don't begrudge me a little bit of delectable schadenfreude.
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And, indeed, it is generally protected speech under the first amendment - including at public colleges!
Part of the (in large part correct) justification for this is that strongly motivated political activism from all sides often comes along with calls for mass violence, and that criminalizing such calls would be an easy tool to shut down political speech one disagrees with.
Even without that, and even if you believe genocide is Always Bad, I still find it very personally valuable to let ideas circulate and grow and mutate and see what people advocate for and why without restrictions. Banning advocacy for various kinds of bad things stifles that.
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Yeah, but it's pretty hard to make a free speech stand when you've been expelling students and revoking offers for racism, not to mention shaking your fist futilely at those damn kids who post the "It's OK to be white" papers.
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Why am I supposed to care about this when anti-white and anti-Christian rhetoric has been coming out of these institutions for decades? It's especially hilarious considering Jews are between 20-25% of some of the student population of Ivies. Jews are also massively over represented in the faculty. I didn't hear a peep from them until Jews started being targeted.
I have to admit that Hamas has really succeeded here in terms or PR. I was initially very supportive of Israel (you can go back and check my post history) and my bias against Islam makes me extremely reluctant to support Muslims in any conflict. This has probably been exacerbated by the fact that I've been reading books about the 1960's and 1970's New Left radicals like the Weathermen (which I consider to be the proto-SJWs and anti-Whites of today) and realizing how many of these people were Jewish. And how many of the people who they were influenced by like Herbert Marcuse were also Jewish. Then you combine this with the contradictions of Zionism and Israel's behavior, and I really don't feel like I have any responsibility to care or speak up about any of this stuff.
Now if these big time Jewish donors want to add some protections for White Christians too and start pushing back against that narrative, then I might start listening. Until then, it's really not my problem. I just see different factions of people who are either my enemies or at best neutral towards me fighting it out and tearing each other apart. And again, that's really just not my problem or something I'm going to care about.
https://etgarkeret.substack.com/p/boohoo-to-you-too
Well for the record, here's a non-fiction short story/essay written by an Israeli Jew named Etgar Keret that you would approve of.
"A few days ago, I met an old friend. Like most Israelis I’ve seen since October 7, she looked broken and anguished. But in addition to the familiar feelings of grief, terror and loss, I picked up on something else she projected: a sense of betrayal.
As a staunch progressive, this had come out of nowhere for her. After all, she’d always been one of the good ones, she’d done all the right things: joined the most righteous protests, refused to use plastic straws, cancelled everyone that deserved to be cancelled. She was the first to switch her Facebook profile to the Ukrainian flag, the first to share the cartoon of Putin with a little Hitler moustache. For years, she stood with the weak and the oppressed, always identified with their pain and derided anyone else’s. And then, on the worst day of her life, on that bloody Saturday when a brutal terrorist organization murdered and kidnapped hundreds of her people, all those American and European partners to the struggle – the ones who’d always been at her side in various protest movements – were now suddenly giving her the cold shoulder.
“I don’t understand,” she lamented, her voice cracking, “don’t they have eyes? Can’t they see the massacre? The cruelty? The inhumanity? Can’t they understand that in the horrific story of October 7, we were actually the good guys?”
The answer is no. They can’t see that we’re the good guys because, in the world we now live in, there are no good guys: there are only bad guys and worse guys. The progressive paradigm has come to mean that you decide who the victims are, and you identify with them so completely that you utterly disregard the claims and suffering of the alleged perpetrator. And in that mode of thinking, it’s very easy to find yourself on the side that gets cancelled. Especially when you’ve been occupying another people for over 56 years. Reality is complex and ambiguous, while the progressive worldview is simplified, unequivocal and righteous—or at least it can appear that way when you’re part of the well-meaning crowd gathered for a public stoning."
(it continues)
Some background on Etgar Keret: not a hardcore Zionist, but also not in the "Israeli Jews are colonizers" perspective. A mind capable of nuance.
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You never heard a peep from e.g. Jonathan Haidt (upenn)? How about Brett Weinstein (also upenn)? Ben Shapiro (Harvard)?
In the same way that blacks are less likely, Jews are more likely.
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You would have to be trapped in an incredibly toxic and paranoid environment to be worried about getting cancelled for opposing hatred.
Not necessarily. Or rather, such environments aren't all That rare these days unfortunately. All it takes is that opposing hatred is interpreted to mean opposing hatred of and off you go.
Some time ago I shared on FB an IMO particularly well written letter to the editor from the local newspaper of record where the writer advocated for more tolerance of differing opinions (and was clearly very careful to frame it completely neutral). This resulted in several progressive leaning acquaitances unfriending me and we're all middle aged or close to that, so they were hardly even people enmeshed in ideologically pure student circles.
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Are they? That sounds illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Of course, so are all those "POC" set-asides, but the EEOC and courts like to sing "la la la" loudly when those are brought up.
Palantir the other day, being cheered on by Chief Anti-Identity Politics Influencer, Ben Shapiro:
Liz was one of the few remaining non-Jewish Ivy presidents, so presumably she will be replaced by a Jew or half-Jew of color.
There is this meme that's been going around about how, now that push comes to shove, Jews are being treated like White people in the oppression Olympics. No they aren't. None of what is happening in response to these student protests is at all thinkable if we assume that Jews are "in the same boat" as White people. They absolutely are not, so the faux attempt at solidarity between some of those on the right, like the BAP sphere, is just so obviously wrong.
I hope my ADHD diagnosis doesn't relegate me to the Oppression Paralympics.
I'll have to think deep and hard whether outrunning the people with Chronic Fatigue syndrome would be a good or bad thing in that context.
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Looks like they ran that by their lawyers:
Emphasis mine. Ideological tests are not covered by the CRA, as progressives like to point out.
What if my ideology is that I prefer being around being like me?
Theoretically, there could be an ideological test which allowed only racists, but they'd have to allow racists of all races.
A compelling argument can be made that the quality of academia would greatly improve, if we replaced the current batch of professors with Jared Taylor and Gazi Kodzo locked in a room.
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You're allowed that motte.
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As an European coming from the outside, I had no idea how much power is in the hands of Jewish and pro-Zionist donors in the matters of american academia. And, reasoning about it, I think that for European-Americans it should be a clear bell of alarm; the Jewish donors will tolerate whatever anti-European, child mauling or intersectional feminism, but will never falter at Jewish interests.
Jews basically got it declared that talking about Jewish success is antisemitic.
I’ll note Jewish success as an acknowledgement of their success but it’s also done by some right wing antisemitism.
They get 40% of Nobels, at one point 30-40% of Ivy league spots (now lower due to affirmative action), I would guess 25-30% of US billionaires.
Their success is suppressed in the media but when things like this happen they definitely have the ability to hit back.
Yet another consequence of the western belief in equality. If your society was set up in such a way that accepting that certain groups are better than others was completely mundane and unremarkable Jews wouldn't need to pull levers so that talking about Jewish successes became antisemitic. They only do that because they have correctly reasoned that in the modern western world people noticing their disproportionate success rate in society would lead to them becoming disfavoured compared to other groups, which is something nobody wants.
Another factor that I've heard and think is probably somewhat accurate is that they also want to avoid any pressure to feel a sense of noblesse oblige towards poorer whites.
You should see how much income tax they pay on those nobel prizes...
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I don’t think the desire to suppress Jewish success is coming from modern wokism. I think it’s a legitimate fear that when you are 2-3% of population but 30-40% of elites it leaves you extremely exposed to becoming a scapegoat if something bad happens. I believe that is sort of what happened after WW1 Germany. Jews had a lot of people in elite positions in Germany so when they lost WW1 it was easy to pin the loss on them.
Yeah, but the people who lost the war were Ludendorff and Hindenburg, Prussian Junkers both.
The real problem was the attempted communist revolutions in Bavaria and elsewhere, where you had massive Jewish representation amongst their leaders: Ernst Toller, Eugene Levine, Luxembourg and so on.
That wasn't how a lot of Germans saw it at the time. The noble German army had been "stabbed in the back" by the elites.
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Yes, the sprint to Paris through Belgium failed and lead to an extended trench war. Big L on the German high command.
But no one on planet earth could have guessed that America would get involved with the war. The Balfour Declaration was very openly made in response to the zionist promise that they'd bring America in to win the war. Who could been blamed for not seeing that coming?
This makes zero sense. By the time of the balfour declaration, the US had already declared war.
Everyone, first of all the germans, predicted it.
A: If you get the US involved we will make the balfour declaration
B: Okay, we will get the US involved.
US gets involved
A: We make the balfour declaration
What about this makes zero sense?
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This has been the biggest complaint albeit some donors said something to the effective of “I failed when I was silent when woke wasn’t hitting my group.” Question will be whether they put their money where their mouth is today
"First they came for the _____, but I was not _____, so I stayed silent."
"I never thought the leopard would eat my face!"
"Do not call up that which you can not put down."
Nothing new under the sun....
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Like who? Whom dost thou quote?
Update — Ackman’s open letter re firing of Gay specifically targets DEI and notes that it discriminates against, inter alia, straight white males.
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My recollection which I will try to dig up is one of the Apollo founders
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My money is firmly on "some will, some won't, but plenty of woke organizations will just refuse to stop calling for genocide so lots of these donors will continue to take a more anti-woke track, because after all these are mostly normie libs not ultraprogressives".
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