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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   28425 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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You can't really talk about protests like they're a unified group with a specific plan. It's like asking "what are those people on the Motte hoping to accomplish?" There's a lot of them, and they're all different.

I think a big part of protests is to improve the cohesion of the protestors. They start out as just a mob of dissatisfied individuals who hate the current status quo, but they'll talk to each other, march together, chant slogans together, and eventually figure something out. Over time they turn into a unified, coherent political activist group. They might alienate a lot of neutrals, but those random neutrals don't have much political power either. A small, committed activist group can wield disproportionate power. See for example: AIPAC on the other side.

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. That's going to have ripple effects down the line.

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.

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. That's going to have ripple effects down the line.

I actually disagree here - that is and always has been the default "leftist" "intellectual" position (sic). You don't need to posit some conspiracy among campus left-wing activists to explain why modern left wing political thought takes a dim view of white-passing ethnostates that convert American tax dollars/weapons into dead brown people.

modern left wing political thought takes a dim view of white-passing ethnostates that convert American tax dollars/weapons into dead brown people

True, but I don't think they were so anti-Israel as they are today. Maybe some of the more radical leftists were, but most mainstream democrats (like Joe Biden) were still staunchly pro-Israel, and of course anti-semitism is one of the great bogeymen of leftists everywhere.

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.

Those college campuses still had actual conservatives on them, don't forget that. The radical left and leftists in general, were a minority of a minority then. Conservatives and centrists still dominated the campus. Now the radicals are the minority of the leftist majority, bolstered by the foreign and immigrant Islamic student population.

Also, the radical minority from before is now running the asylum. They pushed for the creation of 'studies' programs that could only accept leftist professors and pushed out conservatives and moderates wherever they could. They use DEI initiatives to further marginalize anyone who would go against them even in STEM fields.

The march through the institutions is almost complete, now we just have to wait for perestroika and glastnov in 3 generations, if we're lucky, maybe I'll still be alive then.

For the most part I agree, but there are still quite a few old Jewish faculty and administrators in the institutions to put a check on this. And I'm sure Sergey Brin and Larry Page have a few connections at Google they can use to help clamp down on the protests there.

You can't really talk about protests like they're a unified group with a specific plan.

Of course they are. This is all planned.

By whom?

I'm sure you can find any number of groups who are proud to participate. I don't think any of them deserve much credit.

If the signs are like those at other student protests, A.N.S.W.E.R. has something to do with it.

Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, along with a couple other umbrella groups, have jointly claimed credit for both the Columbia-specific protest and the follow-on encampments at a number of other schools. There's a fair criticism that there's at least a few rando Garbage People in the hradzka sense running around, or even agent provacateurs, but this isn't some Stand Alone Complex where the simulacrum had no real original version.

((The less charitable take on 'umbrella group' is that they're both just front groups for the actual coordinating organizations, but by definition I can only point to the subchapters and related organizations giving extremely similar messaging on short notice, or other more subtle signs that they've got intercampus communication going on that doesn't match the paper or training from the public faces.))

By whom?

I don't know, I'm not on their mailing lists (or Discords as the case may be)

Then how do you know it exists?

The bailey, I mean, where these discord servers somehow distinguish their members from "a mob of dissatisfied individuals." Anyone can give out an email address. That puts them roughly on par with a local HOA. Scary.

I see what appears to be co-ordinated protests, I know protests have been co-ordinated in the past, I infer the existence of a co-ordinator. It's not rocket science.

I would gently posit that your level of conscientious organization is slightly higher effort than these flash mobs. Occupy Wall Street and Chaz exhibit hallmarks of being coalescing of disparate bedfellows rather than a coordinated mobilization effort. Coordinated efforts if anything exhibit geographical dispersion to maximize visibility, like deliberate disruptions of uninvolved parties and events by the pro-pal protestors. Staying in a single region to protest dance is just a magnet attracting the crazies, and those tend to dissolve the moment a power struggle arises.

The CHAZ/CHOP in particular had 3 phases, at least to my eye. The first had a lot of influence from the local anarchist community, and had some rhetoric about seceding from the US and suchlike, hence the name "autonomous zone". Then there was some sort of low-key power struggle, possibly just the natural result of all the anarchist-style meetings that were going on, and the BLM faction came out on top, and ditched the more abstract stuff in favor of focusing on police interactions with black people, and changed the name to "occupied protest". Then the police backed off, and there was no resistance, and the normie-lefty contingent kept growing, and it turned into a giant homeless encampment, resembling Hamsterdam from "The Wire" but with smartphones and guns. And then enough people died there that public opinion soured and the mayor felt comfortable shutting it down.

After the first few days, the CHAZ was just where you went if you were a lefty. At first it was the core protestors against the police (the East Precinct substation being right there), but it spread out to people who liked to protest in general, and people who wanted to change something about America's police or America's treatment of black people, and also people who got bored of sitting around in lockdown. I was regularly in the area for other reasons, but one time I think I heard someone talk about "coming down to the protest to see what was happening today".

There didn't need to be a co-ordinator, it just became a Schelling point for every protestor in the city.

I've seen antifa show up to events a couple of times, and I don't doubt that they've got some form of co-ordination, although it might not be very centralized. The earlier riots and looting in Seattle might have had some co-ordination like that, where people passed the word on to friends, and then everyone showed up that evening to a march that rapidly degenerated. But the CHAZ/CHOP thing seemed organic.

Your assessment largely tracks with what I read, with a single point I'll raise about Raz Simone turning warlord at phase 3 being the major trigger for a violence spiral, instead of armed lefties suddenly finding their christiania.

Calling it a schelling point really reminds me of OWS, just where people WENT if they had nothing better to do. I was at Zucotti and there was this bartender from Georgia who quit his job to live a crust-punk existence with the other OWS. This was like 2 days before the crazies started using the park as their bully pulpit and the progressive stack became implemented to manage the crazies, only for that to morph into its own retarded beast.

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The vast, top-secret sinister conspiracy of... college student protesters?

It is at least 80 years too late to sneer at that in the United States alone.

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