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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   25230 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 mean, what do these people hope to accomplish? Like what are their demands?

Surely they know that Columbia university can’t actually affect any Israeli policies.

Hopefully, they can pull US military aid out of Israel. Israel will have to resort to using more dumb bombs, until local industry catches up with demand. With less leverage on Israel, the Arabs in Gaza will suffer more - and hopefully some will be forced out, though that’s more of a longshot.

Since the American defense lobby likes money, all this probably won’t happen.

They're going to pull US military aid out of Israel...by protesting at Columbia?

Even if their protest is successful, how is Columbia University going to pull that off?

In theory, they could get Columbia to completely cave and put out a sufficiently groveling statement that it triggers a respectability cascade, causing all the other universities to cave and put out groveling statements. This would be followed by major media outlets, and finally the White House.

It's unlikely, but theoretically possible. It would be less crazy than the stuff that happened in 2020.

Except Columbia can't do that because they've got pressure from the pro-Israel left which would result in the ouster of Columbia's Muslim female president, the Baroness (yes really) Nemat Shafik, if they did so. She doesn't want to be treated like Claudine Gay.

It's unlikely, but theoretically possible. It would be less crazy than the stuff that happened in 2020.

...a university putting out a statement that causes a chain reaction that leads to the President of the United States and a majority of Congress to change their position on providing military aid to Israel?

What happened in 2020 that was crazier than that?

I don't see a world where the US decides to stop providing military aid to Israel within the next decade, let alone in time to have an effect on the current conflict. Even if literally all the universities put out statements saying that they should! In my experience a university statement on a hot button political issue has never come close to anything like that kind of impact.

What happened in 2020 that was crazier than that?

American sports was completely canceled for 48 hours because a domestic abuser in the process of kidnapping a child and holding a knife was shot by police.

Who was that?

here ya go. He just gave the cliffs notes for the shooting that started the Kenosha riot which Kyle Rittenhouse more or less ended.

See though, that strikes me as much more probable than the university statement thing. That fits within my understanding of how the world works. American sports has a recent history of doing stupid stuff, and people freak out about criminals being killed by police all the time. When was the last time a statement from a university affected anything?

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