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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   25254 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.

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.

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