Meanwhile on the International front....

How Counterprotesters at U.C.L.A. Provoked Violence, Unchecked for Hours

 

Oh well

 

I teach democracy at Princeton. Student protesters are getting an education like no other | Razia Iqbal

Teaching an undergraduate class on democracy at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs this semester has felt urgent and clarifying. In the classroom, we’ve been looking at backsliding and the slow corrosion of democratic norms in so-called democratic countries. Meanwhile, what’s been happening outside the classroom in more than 120 universities around the US and the world tells us a more ominous story about democracy.

For two weeks, we focused on the United States; there were lively discussions on political polarization, January 6 and the threat posed by supporters of Donald Trump, as well as how robust or fragile US democracy currently is. Looking at each democracy involved criticism of the state. In the class on Israel, we examined, among other areas, controversial proposed judicial reforms, as well as the incarceration of Palestinian minors held in administrative detention, as examples where democratic values might be defined as absent.

But before we did that, we talked about the current debates around criticism of Israel; we agreed that what we were doing was not antisemitic. Students go to college to learn broadly and in depth, to debate, engage with intellectual rigor and agree and disagree. Free speech as a pillar of democracy means you are willing to protect that with which you do not agree. And that the world in all its difficulty can be brought into the classroom. And so it was in my class.

 

Bezos!!!

 

Better toss it in a bonfire. Y’know, just to be safe.

The barbarian age is at hand.

 

oh ffs

 

goin' great

‘They’re sending a message’: harsh police tactics questioned amid US campus protest crackdowns

“It is a level of repression of campuses in the United States that I have not seen in my lifetime,” said Annelise Orleck, a 65-year-old Dartmouth labor historian who was arrested on Wednesday as she attempted to protect her students from lines of heavily armed riot police.

Orleck, a former head of Dartmouth’s Jewish studies department, was grabbed by police, thrown to the ground and then dragged along the grass after she demanded that a police officer give her back her phone, which she had been using to record arrests. A video of the incident, which showed officers manhandling the white-haired older woman, went viral.

For Orleck, who was teaching a US politics class on the civil rights movement hours before she became one of 90 people arrested at Dartmouth, the degree of violence that has accompanied the campus arrests has been shocking.

“They’re sending a message to American students,” she said.

 

I don't have much use for the campus protestors. I understand and share their horror over casualties in Gaza, but the protests stopped being about that almost as soon as they started. Now they're about demonizing and delegitimizing Israel, pushing this bullshit binary oppressor/oppressed worldview, spinning conspiracy theories about Jewish power and money, intimidating visibly Jewish students while tokenizing the "good" Jews who join their cause of calling for the end of Israel and pushing this idiotic "divest" mantra while engaging in revolutionary cosplay. They're fucking clowns. And they're honestly doing a better job salvaging Israel's image than its own inept press office could ever do. Still, this display from "counter-protestors" at Ole Miss (read fraternity row) is racist as shit and fucking gross. Where's Wright Thompson when we need a thinkpiece about the "deeply layered" and "complex" racial history in the Magnolia State? Sure looks complex to me.

Hotty Toddy:

 

I liked this version:

 

Come on. Seriously? These are students who decided to join a protest about something because they think something. A reporter asked them to sit down and tell her what they think. They're not an employee being asked to speak on behalf of the billion-dollar enterprise they work for. They were also admitted to one of the most selective, expensive schools in the country presumably in large part because of their thinking abilities. If they can't articulate what they think and need their "trained" commander to speak for them, then they deserve every bit of scorn and derision these protests are generating.

 

Peggy Noonan's not a reporter. She's been a hack since the Reagan years.