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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.
Can't you ask that about most protests?
I never really "got" protesting. I have to assume that the main purpose of it is just to serve as a social activity for the protesters themselves. If it's something like workers going on strike, where the group in question actually has some leverage, that's a different story, but a bunch of random people just gathering in public to "support a cause"? It doesn't make a lot of sense.
Sometimes I've heard it justified as a way of building positive publicity. You're supposed to see the police or other authority figures mistreating the protesters, and that's supposed to make you support their cause more. But usually it just makes me end up supporting the cause less, because the protesters are obnoxious. Their own actions make me want them to lose more.
There's all sorts of goals one could have. Often the goal is to make enough of a nuisance of yourselves so that you force the news to mention your cause, maybe sparking some conversations in the public. Sometimes, as you say, it's specifically to taunt the police so you can get some pictures of them hitting you in an attempt to take the moral high ground reserved for those oppressed by authority. Some protests are pure practice, every year here there a day of protest "against police brutality" and it's just a rallying cry for all the people who want to practice rioting (and for the police to practice their riot suppression) for when they'll have an actual cause they want to strategically riot for. If your protest is elite-supported, it can be to intimidate or to launder unpopular opinions for the elite by making them seem a lot more popular than they are.
Except that I’ve never ever seen this drive more people to support these causes. In fact, it’s almost always a negative publicity to the point that it would often do the cause better to not protest at all. Your protest blocked a road, now everyone is pissed because they were late to work, or missed a flight, or other activities they needed to get to. Are people talking about the cause as in “does this idea have merit” or in terms of “what a bunch of inconsiderate losers making people late for work and making people miss their flights. It’s negative at least around me. People outright cheered when the people blocking roads in Europe got pushed out of the way by SUVs or were manhandled to the side of the road by outraged drivers. Not one person seeing the souping of the Louvre paintings got curious about the cause, they were upset about the destruction of the art. So on net, it’s more likely to turn people away.
It's often negative in the short term, but there are a lot of small causes that the news just doesn't care about and wouldn't mention if it weren't that some people made themselves a nuisance. It's a long term play, to not let your cause be forgotten or ignored. It's better to make people angry about you than let them ignore you.
For those specific examples, climate protestors have full elite backing now, the strategy is different. It's intimidation, they're used by the elites to show what they are willing to destroy if people don't bow down.
Hasn’t climate protest worked because the earth has actually gotten warmer the last 20 years so it feels true?
PETA hasn’t taken off. The only real change in that space is picking up some rationalists.
And environmentalist have benefited from tech costs curves while nothing like that has kicked in for PETA (cheap lab meat).
Something being true doesn't explain the dynamic he's describing. On one hand there's plenty of things that are true and feel true, and are opposed by the elites, rather than having their full backing. On the other hand the climate protest movement offers no solutions, and as he said are only used as a way to consolidate power, and to show what the elites are willing to destroy.
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