“To even admit you are acting out of a perception of potential liability is thought in some circles to create a risk of liability. But this thinking in some cases creates enormous risk because the people who are articulating risk only think along one line of vulnerability, the one they understand—or because their logic is easily bent towards a pre-determined conclusion by ideologues prepared to manipulate it.” #TimothyBurkehttps://timothyburke.substack.com/p/academia-on-the-inside
@BenRossTransit@djc (i think we'd probably disagree on what counts at "racist invective" under these circumstances. as do different factions among Jewish students on campus.)
@BenRossTransit@djc (i think it a true point that, for example, many campuses would find ways not to have Charles Murray come on campus to offer, however politely, views about likely genetic group differences in IQ. even politely expressed arguments that Israel is conducting a genocide might make some Jewish students feel discomfort as real as some Black students encountering Murray. my view would be both conversations have to be tolerated regardless. i agree that has not been the practice.)
@djc@BenRossTransit i can assure you both can make Jewish kids with strong identification and attachment to Israel feel pretty horrible! and also that Jewish kids (and adults) do not universally agree on either question. (a difficult thing in the US Jewish community now is that a large group who previously had squish mixed feelings about zionism are becoming polarized towards outright antizionism, which might make this passover worse than any proverbial thanksgiving.)
@Alon@BenRossTransit@djc obviously people targeting epithets directly at people walking by is more visceral than a Charles Murray talk.
but (referring back to the #TimothyBurke piece that inspired the thread), the vast majority of the protest is not that at all, but might still be uncomfortable, disturbing, hurtful to people simply by virtue of its content. and that should be tolerated, even though i agree in practice there have been less-than-uniform standards of that sort of toleration.
@ikentcpel@Alon@BenRossTransit@djc no, it doesn’t. some fool says outrageous things. it’s not incumbent on everyone in the drum circle to take a break + publicly denounce it. all this started with a real, less dumb, question—do Jewish kids just going about their lives, dressing and acting like they did before all this—face pervasive harrassment. i think the answer is no, but it’s an empirical question we can’t definitively answer.
@BenRossTransit@ikentcpel@Alon@djc (oh and leaders are often nuts. they are almost always weirdoes, the opposite of representative. it’s one of the paradoxes of “representative democracy” that the elected class may be called upon to represent, but they can never be representative.)
@ikentcpel@BenRossTransit@Alon@djc absolutely, tarring Americans with Trump’s pathologies while he was President is a form of unjust collective responsibility akin to racism. even Americans who for whatever reason elect not to disavow their President when some third party demands it. Netanyahu is a grifter and war criminal, but Israelis don’t inherit that status, though he is their leader, even if they won’t disavow on demand.
@Alon@ikentcpel@BenRossTransit@djc no. protesters in general have little organizational association with groups that coordinate and organize them. ANSWER was involved in many anti Iraq War protests. protesters do not have to answer for them. and even US Trump voters and Likud voters do not bear the sins of the leaders they vote for. i voted for Obama, who innovated and routinized assassination. he is a murderer. but i am not.
@Alon@ikentcpel@BenRossTransit@djc the conversation in which he said his main stupidities was in January, long before the much larger protests now. he’s a dude from one campus (these protests are now a national phenomenon), made a “leader” long before the scale of participation is what it is now. he’s nothing more than a well picked nut. you can find others too. but they are not typical.
@Alon@ikentcpel@BenRossTransit@djc many of the protesters are antizionist. that is the position from which they are protesting. if you hold dear and deeply the opposite position, exposure to any of what they are doing may be painful. that is quite distinct from racist or antisemitic, however. a growing fraction of American Jews is antizionist. a remarkable accomplishment of Israel’s leadership.
A fundamental question that cross-cuts left and right is whether the fight for human floursihing is a fight against the state, or a fight for the state, over who and what values control it.
leftish anarchists and right-ish libertarians share the fight-against frame. social democrats on the left and social conservatives on the right share the fight-for frame.
@Alon will they won’t they is an important story, and i care lots more about what big US media pays attention to than what Palestinian advocacy does. the problem is that too much media pays more attention to domestic Palestinian advocacy than whatever is and isn’t happening in Gaza. it’s a ridiculous own goal, if we take activists as sincere, that US advocacy is leaning into its own visibility and the domestic university policy debates it engenders. total eclipse.
it would be better if, when people advocate for a right, they explicitly describe the obligation on the part of others that would be its dual.
health care is a right, i say. it’s dual is not that doctors are slaves obligated to provide health care for free, but that states are obligated to fund doctors and other providers to ensure health care for all.
every meaningful rights assertion carries as its dual some other party’s obligation.
The main injustice the government perpetrated in its response to the Great Financial Crisis amounted to no more than basically suspending "margin calls" on some "systematically important" financial institutions — allowing them effectively an indefinite credit line — while continuing to enforce limits on households and other institutions.
@Alon i don’t think that’s informative. USians don’t have positive views of a cause they associate with Islamist terrorism. the issue isn’t Americans supporting the Palestinian national project or God forbid Hamas. of course we support Israel more. but we don’t support bombing trapped civilians or starving children, even for a cause we’d otherwise feel warmly towards. we increasingly resent becoming at best “complicit” in the moral catastrophe Israel has allowed itself to become.
the practice many browsers have adopted of truncating URLs in the address bar to the hostname is emblematic of the decline and commercially driven infantilization of the web.
understanding URLs — their roles and the ways and whys of how they are constructed — was an elementary skill of the original view-source web.
hiding complete URLs encourages people to become ignorant consumers of mysterious information services, rather than informed participants in a public forum.
@aliceif@kura atm i’m on a phone. so blame ios maybe (this trend unsurprisingly began as an apple “innovation”). browsers are chrome, firefox, safari, brave.
@aliceif@kura safari on desktop does it by default, as does at least one other browser — brave i think. it was having to dig to find the setting to turn truncated urls off in desktop brave i think that provoked the microrant. but i can’t check right now.
UPDATE: It looks like Brave on desktop does the right thing (does not truncate). Contrary to what I misremembered above, on desktop (MacOS), truncation remains uniquely a Safari pathology.
