Popehat: Protip: if you don’t want people to ovrergeneralize your protest as being violent and bigoted, don’t choose violent bigots as your public face. www.nytimes.com/2024/04/26/n...

Protip: if you don’t want people to ovrergeneralize your protest as being violent and bigoted, don’t choose violent bigots as your public face. www.nytimes.com/2024/04/26/n...

Columbia Bars Student Protester Who Said ‘Zionists Don’t Deserve to Live’www.nytimes.com After video surfaced on social media, the student, Khymani James, said on Friday that his comments were wrong.

People seem more interested in pretending this person is nobody than saying "this is an abhorrent thing that has no place in our movement" It's exactly what the right wing does with Nazis who are on campaign staffs and maybe the left shouldn't do that, too.

And to be very clear: I SUPPORT THE PROTESTS. But people like this need to be called out for abhorrent beliefs and shunned.

One of the Cornell protesters wrote about his plight being suspended, but referred to "Zionist donors" as the reason the administration won't engage with them. I pointed out that even in a good cause there is an undercurrent of racist anti-semitic tropes. He blocked me.

Yep, I've been saying since 10/7 "hey I know it's technically the correct term but pretending that saying 'Zionist' doesn't immediately set off alarm bells among even non-Zionist Jews is either naive, stupid, or telling."

Like, maybe lets say "Israeli nationalists" or something. Because then I know you're NOT talking about me.

Every group does this with any visibility really these days. It develops into very linear samethink and people set it up like a cool kids table and the problem with cool kids tables is nobody checks each other for bad behaviour in fear the cool kids will reject them tomorrow.🤷‍♀️

You seem to have a lot of replies from people who have me blocked, I’m on a fair few Don’t Vote For Biden blocklists. How’s the tenor?

I'm blocking people who want to argue with me. When I block a reply, nobody can see it.

Ah gotcha, ta for clarifying and also too: smart. I’m not going to excuse people on my side making the same justifications for bullshit behaviour that the Right use. I know how to think.

the fundamental struggle I have in processing all this is that in the rush to prove everyone is more pro-Palestine than the other person folks ARE gobbling up antisemitic sentiment and just regurgitating and boosting it carelessly because they haven’t thought about this all before October

Like I feel absolutely heartbroken for everyone in Gaza and am disgusted by Israel’s behavior but you cannot have a discussion with nuance about how Some Stuff Being Parroted Is Harmful To Jews and not be seen as a fascist supporter in this environment

Oh absolutely. There’s overt intentional antisemitism and there’s juvenile ignorant antisemitism.

But hasn't a university failed if someone makes it to senior year with such juvenile ignorance that they demonstrate performatively, for likes and clout? Like people who claim they aren't racist but vote for politicians who pass racist policies (thus are racist) when does it become intentional?

It was not my experience that education stopped dipshits from being dipshits

Socrates, basically the quintessential ethics teacher, had Alcibiades, a traitor and Critias, a murderous tyrant as pupils, so no, arseholes will arsehole.

Although if *all* of a guy's students are assholes or tyrants, or Spartan sympathizers, or spend hours holed up in their rooms designing authoritarian societies ... well, you can see where people might start asking some questions.

But then, if you look up how Socrates behaved under the Thirty Tyrants, his ethics are actually questionable.

Almost every single member of congress has at least a bachelor’s degree, so yeah, this definitely checks out.

Same. It just channeled them into charging upwards of $800/hour for being dipshits.

We have many examples of politicians from elite colleges behaving poorly

It often exacerbates the condition.

See: SCOTUS

Ted Cruz sends his regards

I have personally compiled enough anecdotal evidence of graduates from Ivy League schools alone indicating that education does not prevent dipshittery

I think the problem is that they care and understand a narrow slice (the obvious immediate and urgent problem that must be addressed) and there is, for better or worse, the entire history of humanity’s worth of context to understand here.

Look I mean I don’t know enough about pedagogy or human development to speculate but I do remember being in college and social pressure combined with not having a fully developed brain can be quite a combination. I don’t think the demonstration is inherently performative; they care.

I agree that the demonstration is not inherently performative. I hope that Khymani James's video from earlier this year was performative and not literal.

He/She/They said she wouldn’t object to killing Zionists. I see no reason not to take Him/Her/Them at His/Her/Their word.

I said some wildly dumb shit as a kid but I didn’t live in a system where I could blast that around the world and news agencies could pick it up. What he said is vile but I’d still place my bet he’ll grow up a decent person. Tensions are high right now.

“We won’t give degrees to kids with juvenile politics” is the strawman the right-wing anti-academia crowd is looking for.

It's not entirely the students' fault. Columbia sets its general curriculum and chooses who will teach it. They can choose to do better. bulletin.columbia.edu/columbia-col...

Academic Requirements < Columbia College | Columbia Universitybulletin.columbia.edu

I mean, they *can,* but I completed my BS at a pretty middle of the road public university two years ago & I was repeatedly struck by the HUGE juxtaposition between what I (a 42 year old) took away from my polisci senior seminar class on polarization vs. what my younger, especially activist >

If someone wants to spend tuition to merely sit through rather than actually obtaining an education that’s not the university’s problem. Think proverbs about horses and drinking.

No matter how educated you are, you can still have bad opinions.

No. Unless we agree that a university or two failed with J.D. Vance, Alito, Cotton, DeSantis, ... People, including college kids, have agency.

The unfortunate consequence of so much bad-faith trolling on social media is that folk are far too ready to dismiss valid criticism. After years of "BLM = white lives don't matter" nonsense, some well-meaning folk mistakenly assume "from the river to see has a troubling origin" is nonsense too.

And folk have gotten too used to using accusations of things like logical fallacies as a thought-terminating method to avoid considering whether an opposing argument has merit.

which it is.

"From the River to the Sea" has been used by those who wish to genocide all the Jews in that region. So I think it's fair to say it has a troubling past.

No, it hasn't. You're blaming the victims of the actual genocide for the fact their oppressors are Jews.

Do you agree that "from the river to the sea" refers to the area that includes the whole of Israel? What do you think Hamas' plans for the Jewish citizens of Israel would be if Hamas had control over the entire region? Do you see why some folk would be concerned about this?

They are. My 18-year old was giving us examples of the materials circulating and seems to me that this was part of the point—to make actual antisemitism normal by claiming that pretty much everything is antisemitism.

Yeah, there's a whole contingent of tankies that subscribe to incredibly harmful rhetoric that is indistinguishable from alt right rhetoric. They point to Israeli nationalist rhetoric as an excuse for it, but like bro, do you really want to be like them?

It has really revealed a lot of people’s characters to me. People I suspected as being bigoted have really let it shine lately. Even here on Bluesky.

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