Polite Politics

[Anti Marine Layer]

If the Native Americans were to blow up Mount Rushmore, would the radical leftists and brainwashed college students be cheering them on like they are cheering on the Hamas terrorists? I assume they might because most visitors would be patriotic Americans.

BTW, no one here said Happy Indigenous People's Day for October 9.

[Rubus Leucodermis]

39 minutes ago, Anti Marine Layer said:

If the Native Americans were to blow up Mount Rushmore, would the radical leftists and brainwashed college students be cheering them on like they are cheering on the Hamas terrorists?

Almost inevitably some would — and almost inevitably you would be posting about it here as if this minority of left voices was the dominant left narrative (see second part of the sentence above).

P.S. The mountain, being solid granite, would be difficult to damage significantly by explosives unless those planting them had A LOT of time to drill into the granite and set the charges (which they wouldn’t, because if they tried they would get found out). Blowing up the visitor center there would be a much more realistic scenario. Far easier to destroy a building than a mountain.

[SilverFallsAndrew]

8 minutes ago, Anti Marine Layer said:

If the Native Americans were to blow up Mount Rushmore, would the radical leftists and brainwashed college students be cheering them on like they are cheering on the Hamas terrorists? I assume they might because most visitors would be patriotic Americans.

BTW, no one here said Happy Indigenous People's Day for October 9.

This is the most BS argument ever. People groups move and supplant others constantly through history. But Ben and Jerry are a couple of Vermont idiots. I went to Vermont for the first time last week and it was exactly what I expected, very beautiful, quaint towns full of dreadlocked white people and bums pushing shopping carts. Thought I was back in the PNW. 

[Andie]

1 hour ago, SnarkyGoblin said:

@hawkstwelveI don't know if we want to have a (strictly) middle eastern conflict topic so we can better sort politics with other discussion topics.  Aside from 1 particular individual, all of us on here can adhere to having 2 topics and mostly on topic. lol

On that note, here's an article that definitely doesn't have me thinking @MossMan has the right idea around prepping.  What is this going to evolve into?  WW3?  Can't help but draw parallels between the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Hamas attack.

https://wapo.st/46xTiaC

 

Sobering article.   
The region is ripe for all out war.  It’s very concerning that we’ll see the region on fire.  How big will it get?

And the US made some bad mistakes.  
We left all that machinery of war in Afghanistan and they said this morning on the news we’ve depleted out bombs, etc. defending Ukraine and will take 2 yrs to restore the warehouses.  That leaves really awful weapons such as mini nukes, and MOABs as last resorts. 

As far as US security we’ve already screwed the pooch with non existent enforcement on the southern borders. They know that thousands of unknowns are here. Some are bad actors (cartel and terrorists). They slipped across at areas where the border patrol is unavailable. Many Border agents are being used to do paperwork.   So we are vulnerable. 
I’m sure there are many more weaknesses but you get the idea.  We best hope cooler heads prevail.  

[SilverFallsAndrew]

Just now, Andie said:

Sobering article.   
The region is ripe for all out war.  It’s very concerning that we’ll see the region on fire.  How big will it get?

And the US made some bad mistakes.  
We left all that machinery of war in Afghanistan and they said this morning on the news we’ve depleted out bombs, etc. defending Ukraine.  That leaves really awful weapons such as mini nukes, and MOABs as last resorts. 

As far as US security we’ve already screwed the pooch with non existent enforcement on the southern borders. They know that thousands of unknowns are here. Some are bad actors (cartel and terrorists). They slipped across at areas where the border patrol is unavailable. Many Border agents are being used to do paperwork.   So we are vulnerable. 
I’m sure there are many more weaknesses but you get the idea.  We best hope cooler heads prevail.  

I dropped a MOAB this morning. The septic system could barely handle it!

[Rubus Leucodermis]

17 minutes ago, SilverFallsAndrew said:

But Ben and Jerry are a couple of Vermont idiots.

Ben and Jerry don’t own Ben and Jerry’s anymore. They haven’t owned it since 2000, when they sold it to Unilever.

It’s marketing. Unilever knows its customers’ demographics.

[hawkstwelve]

21 minutes ago, Rubus Leucodermis said:

Ben and Jerry don’t own Ben and Jerry’s anymore. They haven’t owned it since 2000, when they sold it to Unilever.

It’s marketing. Unilever knows its customers’ demographics.

Ah yes, because only people who identify with the struggles of Indigenous People and recognize the white man's inherently oppressive characteristics enjoy ice cream.

[Rubus Leucodermis]

22 minutes ago, hawkstwelve said:

Ah yes, because only people who identify with the struggles of Indigenous People and recognize the white man's inherently oppressive characteristics enjoy ice cream.

https://hbr.org/2018/06/how-liberals-and-conservatives-shop-differently

[SnarkyGoblin]

27 minutes ago, hawkstwelve said:

Ah yes, because only people who identify with the struggles of Indigenous People and recognize the white man's inherently oppressive characteristics enjoy ice cream.

Ask Bud Light if it's smart to slight their core customer base.

[SilverFallsAndrew]

43 minutes ago, SnarkyGoblin said:

Ask Bud Light if it's smart to slight their core customer base.

It would be suicidal for Ben and Jerry's to come out against Hamas. 

[SilverFallsAndrew]

1 hour ago, Rubus Leucodermis said:

https://hbr.org/2018/06/how-liberals-and-conservatives-shop-differently

I won't buy NIKE shoes or apparel. 

[Iceresistance]

3 hours ago, hawkstwelve said:

@Iceresistance messaged me about creating a Middle Eastern Conflict thread too. I'm good with it, since apparently me trying to stop it in this thread didn't work. That way if it gets out of hand I can just shutter that thread and not the main politics one for the umpteenth time.

Feel free to get it started if you want. 

Alright, I will do it

[SilverFallsAndrew]

Dave Wasserman

 

@Redistrict

 

How is it Dems are cleaning up in special elections/referendums if their national poll numbers are so bad? Because in the Trump era, Dems are excelling w/ the most civic-minded, highly-engaged voters. Their biggest weakness? Peripheral voters who only show up in presidentials.

 

 

6:18 AM · Oct 14, 2023

·

1.9M

Views

[SilverFallsAndrew]

Thoughts? I do not support violence, but I do believe "OUR" democracy is a bit of a farce at this point. 

https://news.yahoo.com/large-portion-americans-doubt-democracy-160659069.html

[Rubus Leucodermis]

Ukraine deploys US-supplied ATACMS missiles for first time, Zelenskiy says

[Iceresistance]

52 minutes ago, Rubus Leucodermis said:

Ukraine deploys US-supplied ATACMS missiles for first time, Zelenskiy says

I saw video clips, has a longer range than HIMARS

[Rubus Leucodermis]

Thought MML (and others) would be interested in what an actual academic Marxist has to say about… academic radicalism, amongst other things. (I broke the paywall so you all don’t have to.)

What Conservatives Misunderstand About Radicalism at Universities

Elite schools are floundering in their attempts to navigate the Israel-Palestine conflict because they have passed the better part of a decade making themselves political.

By Tyler Austin Harper

October 18, 2023, 7 AM ET

Since William F. Buckley published God and Man at Yale--a best-selling book that criticized the "collectivist" sympathies of professors at Buckley's alma mater--in 1951, conservatives have argued that prestigious American universities are hotbeds of dangerous Marxist brainwashing. Whether espoused by Buckley in the '50s or by conservative firebrands today, the assertion that elite universities are sites of far-left indoctrination is and has always been a fantasy. The most popular major at Harvard, Yale, and many other supposedly leftist universities is economics--not exactly the subject of choice for aspiring anti-capitalists. At the University of Pennsylvania, 50 percent of graduating students take jobs in finance or consulting. The figures at other Ivies aren't much lower. If these institutions are trying to produce Marxists, they are failing spectacularly.

Yet conservatives are right when they say that the Ivory Tower is a breeding ground for ideological extremism. The politics on offer at elite universities are not leftist in any substantive sense--at least if by "leftist" you mean redistributive--but they are radical. We might call it "corporate radicalism": a political sensibility that blends what the late writer Mark Fisher derisively referred to as "capitalist realism"--the conviction that free-market neoliberalism is broken but that there is no better alternative so we might as well embrace it--with performative social justice that is as loud as it is toothless. Although academia has always been a haven for leftists, freethinkers, and creatives as well as crackpots, there used to be a kind of separation of church and state: Universities were refuges for radicals, but they were not themselves radical. (Consider the tensions between faculty and administrations during the campus protest movements of the 1960s.)

In recent years, however, college presidents, deans, and HR professionals have cribbed the language of edgy politics, openly framing their institutions and initiatives as aspirationally "anti-racist" and "decolonial" enterprises while welcoming "scholar-activists": professors who see their research, political militancy, and pedagogy as mutually constitutive. You can see the fruit of this shift in a number of faculty members' responses to Hamas's attack on Israel earlier this month. Zareena Grewal, an American-studies professor at Yale, tweeted, "Settlers are not civilians," implying that massacred Israelis couldn't be considered innocent. She also asserted that a young Israeli engineering student who had been kidnapped during a massacre at a rave shouldn't count as a noncombatant because she was "an IDF soldier/Israeli police officer." (Grewal has since locked her Twitter account.) Tenured and tenure-track professors at prestigious research institutions hastened to remind their Twitter followers that "decolonization is not a metaphor." The posts--dated the same day as Hamas's attack--quite plainly implied that decolonization necessarily entails terroristic violence.

The situation has proved to be a fiasco for elite colleges and universities, opening a new front in the ongoing culture war in higher education. The tension bursting into view right now--between a majority of scholars, for whom "decolonization" means putting fewer white Europeans on their syllabi, and a small minority who believe it entails anything-goes violent revolution--is the unwelcome and unsurprising result of universities wanting to cosplay rebellion while still churning out Wall Street-executive alumni who will one day pad endowments that are larger than Israel's annual defense budget.

In short, elite universities are in a bind, floundering in their attempts to navigate the Israel-Palestine conflict, because they have passed the better part of a decade making themselves political. If college presidents had not spent the past few years issuing watery, say-nothing statements about every crisis in current affairs, they would not now be expected to register their opinion on the conflagration in the Middle East. If they had not slapped the words decolonization and anti-racism on so many campus initiatives, they would not now be implicated as ideological co-conspirators every time one of their faculty members labels a terrorist attack "decolonization," or whenever an "anti-racist" research institute is hit with a major scandal. And above all, if they had not indulged the preposterous notion that unpopular or even offensive ideas are a form of "violence" that their students must be protected from, they would not now look so hypocritical when members of their campus community voice enthusiasm for actual violence. If universities had been more circumspect in the past, they could credibly say that they believe in academic freedom--regardless of whatever administrators themselves may think of the ideas that their students and faculty champion--and leave it at that.

Instead, deluded into believing that the Ivory Tower could be both a site of social justice and a factory for finance bros, elite universities bit the poison apple of politics. Enter corporate radicalism.

I often describe myself as a "soft Marxist." I say that because my politics slouch toward reformist social democracy, not revolutionary overhaul. But I am nonetheless a Marxist, because I hold the traditionally Marxist view that the ideas that dominate at a given place and time tend not to be the ideas of the working classes--the humble majority--but rather of the elites. "The class which is the ruling material force of society," Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared, "is at the same time its ruling intellectual force." Though the conservative accusation that prestigious universities are "culturally Marxist" is little more than a conspiracy theory, ironically, Marxism can help us understand the ideologies that prevail at these institutions.

From a Marxist perspective, there are only two possible explanations for the radical politics emerging out of Harvard and company: Either, against all odds, a genuinely revolutionary political project--decolonization, anti-racism, etc.--has been secreted out of the inner sanctum of the American elite to destabilize it from within, or these "radical" political ideologies are in fact little more than wallpaper serving the interests of the ruling class by morally laundering an education system that doles out advantages to the mediocre rich and then calls this process a "meritocracy." Although miracles are certainly possible, history--and common sense--militates in favor of the latter.

This brings us back to that suddenly troublesome slogan--"decolonization is not a metaphor"--tweeted out by American academics only hours after Hamas militants gunned down men, women, and children in what we now know was the greatest loss of Jewish life on a single day since the Holocaust. That phrase is a reference to the title of a landmark work in decolonial theory, a celebrated 2012 article by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, who skewered the way mainstream progressives had co-opted the term decolonization and started using it as a catchall synonym for social justice. "The absorption of decolonization by settler social justice frameworks," the pair observed, "is one way the settler, disturbed by her own settler status, tries to escape or contain the unbearable searchlight of complicity."

Tuck and Yang argued that the impulse to turn decolonization into a metaphor for "things we want to do to improve our society and schools"--such as providing better mental-health care or adding Native authors to the English curriculum--allows good white liberals to alleviate their guilt. By making decolonization about everything except the actual repatriation of stolen land, "settlers" can rhetorically align themselves with Indigenous rights while retaining the spoils won by their colonizing ancestors. The stolen land, constantly acknowledged, never actually has to be given back. The problem for some in the decolonial-theory crowd is that decolonization is necessarily about repatriation.

And it is this fact that brings us to the ugly truth that we must reckon with if we are to fully understand the performative bloodlust currently issuing from a small cadre of American academics and activists. That truth is this: Few serious people in the United States actually advocate giving the land back to its own native tribes. The idea is both politically intractable and logistically tortuous to the point that the very notion is patently absurd.

Yet, rather than have a serious conversation about what can be done to improve the lives of Native Americans, who have been systematically mistreated by federal neglect, enforced poverty, and drug addiction--and whose murders and disappearances typically fail to elicit even the barest theater of police investigation or journalistic curiosity--American academics and administrators at elite universities have instead taken to playacting metaphorical "decolonization" exercises. Of course, these exercises possess little political utility but great institutional utility: They serve to distract from the new science centers and gleaming football stadiums being built right on top of that stolen, un-decolonized land with all of that management-consultant-alumni money. Meanwhile, our more "radical" colleagues huff and puff and write articles filled with jargon that continue to indulge, implicitly or explicitly, the fantasy of a literal decolonization that will never come to pass in the U.S.

It is in light of the obvious impotence of American decolonization that we should interpret the enthusiasm of a handful of elite academics for Hamas's recent attempt at "decolonization" via terrorism. Unlike the settling of the United States, the settling of Israel is both much more recent and--so the thinking goes--more susceptible to actual land-repatriation attempts, whether political or military. Decolonization can only be a metaphor in the United States, but perhaps it remains a literal possibility abroad--and from this darkling plain issues all the excitement. If tweedy Ph.D.s have to cheer the death of innocents to keep the rush of political possibility flowing, it must seem a small price--or at least one they don't have to pay.

Meanwhile, conservatives are handed yet another win: Chris Rufo is already telling his followers, "Conservatives need to create a strong association between Hamas, BLM, DSA, and academic `decolonization' in the public mind." The inconvenient truth that the majority of academic "decolonization" discourse is either sober scholarship or toothless corporate university pablum--not a threat to anyone in either case--will not prevent the Rufo crowd from steering the narrative. Universities and academics, having spent the past decade branding themselves as radical agents of social change, will be taken by segments of the public at their word. The fact that the most "radical" thing such institutions have accomplished in the 21st century is hiking their tuition rates and plunging millions of Americans further into debt won't prevent conservatives from leveraging the Israel-Palestine war to add fuel to the "cultural Marxism" fire. More grist for their defund-the-humanities mill.

So here we are. An American-studies professor at Yale gets to play armchair revolutionary for a weekend, tweeting "Settlers are not civilians" from the comfort and safety of New Haven, Connecticut, while a world away Jewish children are torn apart by terrorists and Muslim children are buried under rubble once more, in recompense. Now the future of Gaza, with a population of 2 million, hangs in the balance while Israel's defense minister--in language far more dehumanizing than anything issued from the Ivy League--asserts, "We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly."

"History repeats itself," Marx famously observed, "first as tragedy, then as farce." Yet in the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict, it appears that history repeats itself simply as tragedy, a tale of two peoples locked in a spiral from which there would seem to be no exit, as a minority composed of religious extremists on either side of a smart fence call for genocide, and as war, possessed as always of its own inertia, eats away at the horizon. Israeli eye for Palestinian eye. Israeli tooth for Palestinian tooth. And who would now say that decolonization is a metaphor? Certainly not the professor who will show up to class on Monday and teach decolonial theory to bored economics majors in need of one last humanities credit before they head off to McKinsey & Company, where they will manage, as the American elite always has, the class war at home and real wars abroad.

[Andie]

William F. Buckley had a huge crush on my late mother in law - back in the day!

 

[Anti Marine Layer]

يشكو اليساريون دائما من مدى ظلم كل شيء.

[Anti Marine Layer]

1 hour ago, Rubus Leucodermis said:

Thought MML (and others) would be interested in what an actual academic Marxist has to say about… academic radicalism, amongst other things. (I broke the paywall so you all don’t have to.)

What Conservatives Misunderstand About Radicalism at Universities

Elite schools are floundering in their attempts to navigate the Israel-Palestine conflict because they have passed the better part of a decade making themselves political.

By Tyler Austin Harper

October 18, 2023, 7 AM ET

Since William F. Buckley published God and Man at Yale--a best-selling book that criticized the "collectivist" sympathies of professors at Buckley's alma mater--in 1951, conservatives have argued that prestigious American universities are hotbeds of dangerous Marxist brainwashing. Whether espoused by Buckley in the '50s or by conservative firebrands today, the assertion that elite universities are sites of far-left indoctrination is and has always been a fantasy. The most popular major at Harvard, Yale, and many other supposedly leftist universities is economics--not exactly the subject of choice for aspiring anti-capitalists. At the University of Pennsylvania, 50 percent of graduating students take jobs in finance or consulting. The figures at other Ivies aren't much lower. If these institutions are trying to produce Marxists, they are failing spectacularly.

Yet conservatives are right when they say that the Ivory Tower is a breeding ground for ideological extremism. The politics on offer at elite universities are not leftist in any substantive sense--at least if by "leftist" you mean redistributive--but they are radical. We might call it "corporate radicalism": a political sensibility that blends what the late writer Mark Fisher derisively referred to as "capitalist realism"--the conviction that free-market neoliberalism is broken but that there is no better alternative so we might as well embrace it--with performative social justice that is as loud as it is toothless. Although academia has always been a haven for leftists, freethinkers, and creatives as well as crackpots, there used to be a kind of separation of church and state: Universities were refuges for radicals, but they were not themselves radical. (Consider the tensions between faculty and administrations during the campus protest movements of the 1960s.)

In recent years, however, college presidents, deans, and HR professionals have cribbed the language of edgy politics, openly framing their institutions and initiatives as aspirationally "anti-racist" and "decolonial" enterprises while welcoming "scholar-activists": professors who see their research, political militancy, and pedagogy as mutually constitutive. You can see the fruit of this shift in a number of faculty members' responses to Hamas's attack on Israel earlier this month. Zareena Grewal, an American-studies professor at Yale, tweeted, "Settlers are not civilians," implying that massacred Israelis couldn't be considered innocent. She also asserted that a young Israeli engineering student who had been kidnapped during a massacre at a rave shouldn't count as a noncombatant because she was "an IDF soldier/Israeli police officer." (Grewal has since locked her Twitter account.) Tenured and tenure-track professors at prestigious research institutions hastened to remind their Twitter followers that "decolonization is not a metaphor." The posts--dated the same day as Hamas's attack--quite plainly implied that decolonization necessarily entails terroristic violence.

The situation has proved to be a fiasco for elite colleges and universities, opening a new front in the ongoing culture war in higher education. The tension bursting into view right now--between a majority of scholars, for whom "decolonization" means putting fewer white Europeans on their syllabi, and a small minority who believe it entails anything-goes violent revolution--is the unwelcome and unsurprising result of universities wanting to cosplay rebellion while still churning out Wall Street-executive alumni who will one day pad endowments that are larger than Israel's annual defense budget.

In short, elite universities are in a bind, floundering in their attempts to navigate the Israel-Palestine conflict, because they have passed the better part of a decade making themselves political. If college presidents had not spent the past few years issuing watery, say-nothing statements about every crisis in current affairs, they would not now be expected to register their opinion on the conflagration in the Middle East. If they had not slapped the words decolonization and anti-racism on so many campus initiatives, they would not now be implicated as ideological co-conspirators every time one of their faculty members labels a terrorist attack "decolonization," or whenever an "anti-racist" research institute is hit with a major scandal. And above all, if they had not indulged the preposterous notion that unpopular or even offensive ideas are a form of "violence" that their students must be protected from, they would not now look so hypocritical when members of their campus community voice enthusiasm for actual violence. If universities had been more circumspect in the past, they could credibly say that they believe in academic freedom--regardless of whatever administrators themselves may think of the ideas that their students and faculty champion--and leave it at that.

Instead, deluded into believing that the Ivory Tower could be both a site of social justice and a factory for finance bros, elite universities bit the poison apple of politics. Enter corporate radicalism.

I often describe myself as a "soft Marxist." I say that because my politics slouch toward reformist social democracy, not revolutionary overhaul. But I am nonetheless a Marxist, because I hold the traditionally Marxist view that the ideas that dominate at a given place and time tend not to be the ideas of the working classes--the humble majority--but rather of the elites. "The class which is the ruling material force of society," Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared, "is at the same time its ruling intellectual force." Though the conservative accusation that prestigious universities are "culturally Marxist" is little more than a conspiracy theory, ironically, Marxism can help us understand the ideologies that prevail at these institutions.

From a Marxist perspective, there are only two possible explanations for the radical politics emerging out of Harvard and company: Either, against all odds, a genuinely revolutionary political project--decolonization, anti-racism, etc.--has been secreted out of the inner sanctum of the American elite to destabilize it from within, or these "radical" political ideologies are in fact little more than wallpaper serving the interests of the ruling class by morally laundering an education system that doles out advantages to the mediocre rich and then calls this process a "meritocracy." Although miracles are certainly possible, history--and common sense--militates in favor of the latter.

This brings us back to that suddenly troublesome slogan--"decolonization is not a metaphor"--tweeted out by American academics only hours after Hamas militants gunned down men, women, and children in what we now know was the greatest loss of Jewish life on a single day since the Holocaust. That phrase is a reference to the title of a landmark work in decolonial theory, a celebrated 2012 article by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, who skewered the way mainstream progressives had co-opted the term decolonization and started using it as a catchall synonym for social justice. "The absorption of decolonization by settler social justice frameworks," the pair observed, "is one way the settler, disturbed by her own settler status, tries to escape or contain the unbearable searchlight of complicity."

Tuck and Yang argued that the impulse to turn decolonization into a metaphor for "things we want to do to improve our society and schools"--such as providing better mental-health care or adding Native authors to the English curriculum--allows good white liberals to alleviate their guilt. By making decolonization about everything except the actual repatriation of stolen land, "settlers" can rhetorically align themselves with Indigenous rights while retaining the spoils won by their colonizing ancestors. The stolen land, constantly acknowledged, never actually has to be given back. The problem for some in the decolonial-theory crowd is that decolonization is necessarily about repatriation.

And it is this fact that brings us to the ugly truth that we must reckon with if we are to fully understand the performative bloodlust currently issuing from a small cadre of American academics and activists. That truth is this: Few serious people in the United States actually advocate giving the land back to its own native tribes. The idea is both politically intractable and logistically tortuous to the point that the very notion is patently absurd.

Yet, rather than have a serious conversation about what can be done to improve the lives of Native Americans, who have been systematically mistreated by federal neglect, enforced poverty, and drug addiction--and whose murders and disappearances typically fail to elicit even the barest theater of police investigation or journalistic curiosity--American academics and administrators at elite universities have instead taken to playacting metaphorical "decolonization" exercises. Of course, these exercises possess little political utility but great institutional utility: They serve to distract from the new science centers and gleaming football stadiums being built right on top of that stolen, un-decolonized land with all of that management-consultant-alumni money. Meanwhile, our more "radical" colleagues huff and puff and write articles filled with jargon that continue to indulge, implicitly or explicitly, the fantasy of a literal decolonization that will never come to pass in the U.S.

It is in light of the obvious impotence of American decolonization that we should interpret the enthusiasm of a handful of elite academics for Hamas's recent attempt at "decolonization" via terrorism. Unlike the settling of the United States, the settling of Israel is both much more recent and--so the thinking goes--more susceptible to actual land-repatriation attempts, whether political or military. Decolonization can only be a metaphor in the United States, but perhaps it remains a literal possibility abroad--and from this darkling plain issues all the excitement. If tweedy Ph.D.s have to cheer the death of innocents to keep the rush of political possibility flowing, it must seem a small price--or at least one they don't have to pay.

Meanwhile, conservatives are handed yet another win: Chris Rufo is already telling his followers, "Conservatives need to create a strong association between Hamas, BLM, DSA, and academic `decolonization' in the public mind." The inconvenient truth that the majority of academic "decolonization" discourse is either sober scholarship or toothless corporate university pablum--not a threat to anyone in either case--will not prevent the Rufo crowd from steering the narrative. Universities and academics, having spent the past decade branding themselves as radical agents of social change, will be taken by segments of the public at their word. The fact that the most "radical" thing such institutions have accomplished in the 21st century is hiking their tuition rates and plunging millions of Americans further into debt won't prevent conservatives from leveraging the Israel-Palestine war to add fuel to the "cultural Marxism" fire. More grist for their defund-the-humanities mill.

So here we are. An American-studies professor at Yale gets to play armchair revolutionary for a weekend, tweeting "Settlers are not civilians" from the comfort and safety of New Haven, Connecticut, while a world away Jewish children are torn apart by terrorists and Muslim children are buried under rubble once more, in recompense. Now the future of Gaza, with a population of 2 million, hangs in the balance while Israel's defense minister--in language far more dehumanizing than anything issued from the Ivy League--asserts, "We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly."

"History repeats itself," Marx famously observed, "first as tragedy, then as farce." Yet in the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict, it appears that history repeats itself simply as tragedy, a tale of two peoples locked in a spiral from which there would seem to be no exit, as a minority composed of religious extremists on either side of a smart fence call for genocide, and as war, possessed as always of its own inertia, eats away at the horizon. Israeli eye for Palestinian eye. Israeli tooth for Palestinian tooth. And who would now say that decolonization is a metaphor? Certainly not the professor who will show up to class on Monday and teach decolonial theory to bored economics majors in need of one last humanities credit before they head off to McKinsey & Company, where they will manage, as the American elite always has, the class war at home and real wars abroad.

منذ أن نشر ويليام ف. باكلي كتاب "الله والإنسان في جامعة ييل" - وهو الكتاب الأكثر مبيعا الذي انتقد التعاطف "الجماعي" للأساتذة في جامعة باكلي - في عام 1951 ، جادل المحافظون بأن الجامعات الأمريكية المرموقة هي بؤر لغسيل الدماغ الماركسي الخطير. سواء تبناها باكلي في 50s أو من قبل المحافظين اليوم ، فإن التأكيد على أن جامعات النخبة هي مواقع للتلقين اليساري المتطرف كان ولا يزال دائما خيالا. إن التخصص الأكثر شعبية في هارفارد وييل والعديد من الجامعات الأخرى التي يفترض أنها يسارية هو الاقتصاد - وليس بالضبط الموضوع المفضل للطموحين المناهضين للرأسمالية. في جامعة بنسلفانيا ، يشغل 50 بالمائة من الطلاب المتخرجين وظائف في مجال التمويل أو الاستشارات. الأرقام في Ivies الأخرى ليست أقل من ذلك بكثير. إذا كانت هذه المؤسسات تحاول إنتاج ماركسيين، فإنها تفشل فشلا ذريعا.

[Andie]

Interesting thoughts from Victor Davis Hansen Sr Fellow of the Hoover Institute  

Are Biden & Co. Sane?
 
Joe Biden just announced “$100 million for humanitarian assistance” in Gaza and the West Bank”.
 
Despite his idiotic caveat that “we will have mechanisms in place so this aid reaches those in need —not Hamas or terrorist groups,” even Biden knows all too well that all money sent to the West Bank and Gaza is fungible and will reach Hamas one way or another. That is, we’ll keep funding “humanitarian aid” to Gaza so that Iran’s money can be better focused on tunnels, rockets, and drones. 
 
And the timing?
 
Our taxpayers’ cash follows riots and anti-American protests after Hamas et al. falsely claimed that Israel slaughtered 500 civilians. But Biden himself conceded today that the Iran-backed, Hamas-affiliated terrorist group Islamic Jihad was in fact responsible for these innocent Palestinian deaths, when it misfired one of its rockets into a hospital parking lot—a strike that was intended to kill Jewish civilians. (In other words, had the rocket just stayed on course and wiped out some Jews in Tel Aviv, the U.S. would likely have not sent a check to Gaza).
 
So the U.S. concludes its “humanitarian” aid can be entrusted to those who started the war, keep perpetuating it, and lie and deceive nonstop.
 
Had Biden really wanted to deflate Iranian-Hamas-Hezbollah aggression and end the war, he would cancel his US-sanctioned $6 billion headed to Iran, cut cash flows to Gaza, cease being snubbed and humiliated by Arab autocrats and skedaddle home, stay put in the basement, and let the IDF deal with Hamas. 
 
Finally, how will Biden’s largess be interpreted by Hamas? Something like: ‘Send out 2,500 murderers to invade Israel and once there butcher, rape, torture, or capture 1,000 Israelis, use Gaza’s civilians as shields to protect killers—and thereby win $100 million more in American aid.’
 
And in the wider Middle East? Something like: ‘Somehow the pathetic, appeasing Americans have topped their Afghanistan debacle, the opportunistic Russian invasion of Ukraine, their prior protection payoffs to radical Palestinians, their cash infusions to the Iranians, their crazy open border, and their Chinese balloon embarrassment—and so really are too dangerous to be allied with.’

[roadtonowhere08]

Threats fly as Jim Jordan's bid to be US House Speaker turns ugly:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67153625

[Andie]

https://x.com/megynkelly/status/1714620717092778338?s=20
 

We need more chill politicians like this. 
Canadian listens and gently takes down his opponent.  
I don’t know if I would agree with him, but I’d listen with an open mind  

 

 

 

[Stormy]

I sure miss the 4 - year era of no new wars! It's just sick what's all going on and about to happen. And now we have an insurrection of the White House by leftists! And with all the unvetted military aged young men coming in across our border it's not unreasonable to say it's not if, but when we'll have a terrorist attack on our soils! 

This guy's about ready to head out to his safe place. I usually don't listen much to him, but he may be right this time. Signs of the end of time... wars rumors of wars, etc 

https://youtu.be/s3aGA9autDc?si=2ZfqT5HJzgBqvXx6

[Chewbacca Defense]

8 hours ago, roadtonowhere08 said:

Threats fly as Jim Jordan's bid to be US House Speaker turns ugly:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67153625

It's getting to the point where dumpster fires are going to start turning to the Republican party to learn how to do a better job of being dumpster fires.

It also slays me how there are several "high profile" Republicans who are trying to blame the Democrats on all of this.  Absolutely insane and could not be further from the truth!

[SnarkyGoblin]

Not a good thing for trump.  I honestly don't think he'll lose more than 10 percentage points even if he were found guilty on all counts.

Everything is rigged.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/19/politics/sidney-powell-fulton-county-georgia-2020-election-subversion

[Chewbacca Defense]

2 hours ago, SnarkyGoblin said:

Not a good thing for trump.  I honestly don't think he'll lose more than 10 percentage points even if he were found guilty on all counts.

Everything is rigged.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/19/politics/sidney-powell-fulton-county-georgia-2020-election-subversion

It will be interesting to see who is next to flip, and how many more flip.

That is one thing that Trump thing has been very good at, and very successful at....propaganda....Master Class....

 

 

[hawkstwelve]

A record 39% of Americans have no trust at all in the news media, according to the latest Gallup poll. 

Do we think they will ever actually change to try and gain the trust of the public again? Or will CBS/CNN/MSNBC/Fox News/WaPo/NY Times just keep beating the same ol drum? 

https://news.gallup.com/poll/512861/media-confidence-matches-2016-record-low.aspx

[Rubus Leucodermis]

8 hours ago, Andie said:

https://x.com/megynkelly/status/1714620717092778338?s=20

We need more chill politicians like this. 
Canadian listens and gently takes down his opponent.  
I don’t know if I would agree with him, but I’d listen with an open mind 

Not generally a fan of his politics but he’s way, way, waaay better than you-know-who.

Just look at his pet issue: the housing crisis. He’s not picking on minorities about it, or lobbing cheap insults, or claiming that he’s the only one that can restore a mythical lost era of Canadian greatness. He’s merely proposing liberalizing regulations and making it easier to build. Which actually comes pretty close to the chief source of the problem: increasing amounts of red tape has made it significantly harder to add housing supply in recent decades. I have long been surprised that US conservatives are taking a pass on wedging this issue; it could offer them a very real chance to appeal to urban voters.

He will probably be the next PM up here. Again, I won’t personally be happy about that, but I also won’t regard it as an existential crisis for Canadian democracy. He is squarely within the norm for a conservative politician in a democratic system. If, after getting into office, his party loses an election, he will simply step aside and let the new PM take his place. No muss, no fuss, no instigation of insurrection. I have no doubt about this.

[Rubus Leucodermis]

5 hours ago, Chewbacca Defense said:

It also slays me how there are several "high profile" Republicans who are trying to blame the Democrats on all of this.  Absolutely insane and could not be further from the truth!

Apparently some of them think it is the Democrats’ responsibility, in the lack of getting sufficient votes from their own side of the aisle, to back McCarthy or whomever in return for exactly zero substantive concessions of power.

[Andie]

1 hour ago, Rubus Leucodermis said:

Not generally a fan of his politics but he’s way, way, waaay better than you-know-who.

Just look at his pet issue: the housing crisis. He’s not picking on minorities about it, or lobbing cheap insults, or claiming that he’s the only one that can restore a mythical lost era of Canadian greatness. He’s merely proposing liberalizing regulations and making it easier to build. Which actually comes pretty close to the chief source of the problem: increasing amounts of red tape has made it significantly harder to add housing supply in recent decades. I have long been surprised that US conservatives are taking a pass on wedging this issue; it could offer them a very real chance to appeal to urban voters.

He will probably be the next PM up here. Again, I won’t personally be happy about that, but I also won’t regard it as an existential crisis for Canadian democracy. He is squarely within the norm for a conservative politician in a democratic system. If, after getting into office, his party loses an election, he will simply step aside and let the new PM take his place. No muss, no fuss, no instigation of insurrection. I have no doubt about this.

So tired of everyone running around with their hair on fire.  We could all use a lot more “chill” in the world. 

[Chewbacca Defense]

1 hour ago, Rubus Leucodermis said:

Apparently some of them think it is the Democrats’ responsibility, in the lack of getting sufficient votes from their own side of the aisle, to back McCarthy or whomever in return for exactly zero substantive concessions of power.

As more than one commentator I watch has said, "It's not the job of the democrats to vote for the Republican majority speaker"

I think I caught this morning that Jordan's vote tally was the LOWEST vote tally of any Speaker nominee in history.

Putting up Jordan is a slap in the face for this country.  Putting him up 3 times......dumpster fire on steroids.

 

[Rubus Leucodermis]

14 minutes ago, Chewbacca Defense said:

As more than one commentator I watch has said, "It's not the job of the democrats to vote for the Republican majority speaker"

I think I caught this morning that Jordan's vote tally was the LOWEST vote tally of any Speaker nominee in history.

Putting up Jordan is a slap in the face for this country.  Putting him up 3 times......dumpster fire on steroids.

Hakeem Jeffries is on the record as being willing to cut a compromise with the GOP and support a moderate Republican as speaker if they change House rules to give the minority party significant power. The GOP has so far ignored that offer.

[roadtonowhere08]

14 hours ago, Chewbacca Defense said:

It's getting to the point where dumpster fires are going to start turning to the Republican party to learn how to do a better job of being dumpster fires.

It also slays me how there are several "high profile" Republicans who are trying to blame the Democrats on all of this.  Absolutely insane and could not be further from the truth!

 

8 hours ago, Rubus Leucodermis said:

Apparently some of them think it is the Democrats’ responsibility, in the lack of getting sufficient votes from their own side of the aisle, to back McCarthy or whomever in return for exactly zero substantive concessions of power.

Wanna play games? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrick_Garland_Supreme_Court_nomination

The GOP can eat merde.

[Chewbacca Defense]

Looks like things are going well  for Jordan and his speaker vote. 

 

 

[SnarkyGoblin]

38 minutes ago, Chewbacca Defense said:

Looks like things are going well  for Jordan and his speaker vote. 

 

 

lol.  He's losing votes after every vote.  Bizarre.

[Rubus Leucodermis]

28 minutes ago, SnarkyGoblin said:

lol.  He's losing votes after every vote.  Bizarre.

Excellent that he continues to lose votes.

Maybe, just maybe, this will all end in a power-sharing agreement. Which could be the start of a retreat from anti-democracy extremism. Hey, I can dream, can’t I?

[Chewbacca Defense]

28 minutes ago, SnarkyGoblin said:

lol.  He's losing votes after every vote.  Bizarre.

I really thought he was gonna make it through this time, especially with the harassment and death threats to certain congressmen/women and their spouses. 

 

 

[Chewbacca Defense]

Just now, Rubus Leucodermis said:

Excellent that he continues to lose votes.

Maybe, just maybe, this will all end in a power-sharing agreement. Which could be the start of a retreat from anti-democracy extremism. Hey, I can dream, can’t I?

Sadly, that is nothing more than a dream

[roadtonowhere08]

5 minutes ago, Rubus Leucodermis said:

Excellent that he continues to lose votes.

Maybe, just maybe, this will all end in a power-sharing agreement. Which could be the start of a retreat from anti-democracy extremism. Hey, I can dream, can’t I?