Meanwhile on the International front....

They're required by law to have one by January. Sunak and the Tories know they're fucked, so they're probably going to hang on as long as they can. The last election was at least partially over Christmas (vote took place on Dec. 12), but that's the only one that's been that late in the year in the last 100 years.

Sentimentally you are right, but I think the people involved would say protesting at a time and location that is inconvenient and disruptive to the parties being protested is a big part of the point of having a protest and that the urgency of "doing something" about thousands of people dying is far more important than a bunch of 22-year-olds and their families being comfortable.

USC probably has a pretty vested interest in thousands of future alumni and their family not having their last memory of the alma mater being "ruined" by that protest. It's a lame attempt to defuse what is, for them, a terrible situation. Either the right wing is going to accuse them of a "woke" capitulation to a group that has common cause with murderous terrorists, or the left wing is going to accuse them of being complicit in a genocide.

 

Nobody wants the US military to be unleashed on US citizens as much at Tom Cotton. Dude probably whacks it watching footage from Kent State in 1970.

 

Exaggeration is the vocabulary of politics. Agreed.

But I'm old enough to remember the 60s antiwar protests very vividly. In fact I'm old enough to have covered campus apartheid / divestiture protests beginning in the mid-1970s.

This is all pretty tame by comparison.

The problem with Cotton's specific exaggeration is that it leads to tragedies like Kent State.

 

In the spring of 1977, I got kicked in the left shin by an apartheid protester at a small boycott / divestiture rally on campus.

In September of 1977, dateline Hibbing, Minnesota, I was kicked in the same shin in exactly the same spot by a striking mine worker.

 

Hibbing, Minnesota. Birthplace of Vince Bugliosi.

 

Antifa got you!

 

Hometown of Bob Dylan

 

Sadly, I wasn't smart enough for that. The shin-kicking continued through the presidential campaign of 1980, at which point I learned it was better to be on camera than to carry one.

Only my family has had shin-kicking privileges since.

 

I know where to go if you want an ass-kicking.

Best towns for an A*& whipping