@FlashMobOfOne I think quite the opposite. Peaceful political activity accomplishes pretty much everything actually virtuous and desirable. There is perhaps some role for the threat of disorder, but its actuality beyond a very limited degree provokes segregation into warring camps and fascist hierarchy. All that rioting discredited the post George Floyd movement. Once nothing happened in the immediate aftermath, there’s nothing politically viable to build from.
@FlashMobOfOne I guess I disagree. Armed protests would either be violently crushed, or if widely accommodated while violating the law, would so weaken state authority any hope of a decent society would be impossible. if you’re an anarchist, you’ll see that last as nonsequitur, but i think anarchists very badly mistaken. i do not support Waco / Bundy style resistance, and think “sovereign citizens” who occupy Federal land unlawfully should be held to account.
@FlashMobOfOne are Columbia students not largely rich people? do you see the Palestinian cause as somehow socialist/redistributionist? do you think armed challenge of state authority Waco / Ammon Bundy style a path forward for your values and causes that you support?
@pants @jalefkowit he threatened something to get the Erez Crossing opened I think and trucks suddenly through I think. obviously not enough, and as soon as the melee with Iran began, then the protests, he effectively lost interest. he clearly has to be pushed to put pressure on Israel. the dispute here is about what constitutes effective pushing. and yes, someone will tell you anything, like ‘vote uncommitted’, like me + these protests, is the wrong thing. we all have to use actual judgment.
@pants @jalefkowit ‘inclined to listen’ in the sense of genuinely concerned about the politics. Biden’s attitude at and just following the State of the Union address was extraordinarily about pressuring Netanyahu, and he apparently threatened something after the WCK killings. but now his stronger political incentives are to distance himself from these protests.
@pants @jalefkowit i guess we’ll just disagree. to learn capability rather than helplessness, i think you have to act capably, intelligently. acting for the sake of acting in ways likely to be ineffective will just drive home helplessness.
@emma if you think that people aren’t persuadable, then what is it that you think you are doing? we have to win over people to do the right thing and vote for the less terrible people. probably calling anyone garbage won’t help much, but sure there may be groups that are unreachable. if you don’t think winning people over possible, what’s the plan? create so much pain they are compelled to do what you want? do you think that’s the likely response?
@pants @jalefkowit disorder and protest aren’t the same thing! these protests may be mild, but they are purposefully adopting tactics that will lead to forcible removal. on the one hand that gets media attention, but on the other hand, it’s costly to protesters and doesn’t win the sympathy of less engaged bystanders. 1/
@pants @jalefkowit in today’s argumentation ACT UP came up a bunch. their protests (mostly) were targeted to institutions that could do something about their problem, and they were performative — die ins, ashes of the cremated. they attracted attention by clever dramatization rather than generalized disruption of bystanders’ lives. their free speech rights did not eclipse the issues they were trying to call attention to. 2/
@pants @jalefkowit over the last few months, activists in places like Michigan pursued a brilliant “uncommitted” campaign in Democratic primaries. no on-the-street protest, no new culture war fronts, no inward-directed free speech debate. just plain demonstration of political risk if Biden’s course does not change. for a minute, until Iran and now this, they seemed inclined to listen. 3/
@pants @jalefkowit just because people are doing something doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. it certainly does not mean it’s the only or the best thing that can be done. /fin
@kentwillard oh shoot. this was supposed to have been a response.
@emma no. but we should act with care.
@scott it could be that too, for sure!
there are interesting things. both parties like to talk about Jan 6, but in very different ways, kind of the inverse of stereotypes. (you'd think it'd be lefties valorizing imprisoned activists as heroes and martyrs, while righties talk up law and order.)
identities really matter in these things. Rs define threat in terms of who, a "good guy" (white, conservative) with a gun makes you safer. Kyle Rittenhouse does the circuit.
@scott i think Democrats are trying to go for a "there are white nationalist lunatics you should fear" take and Republicans with their traditional "there are poor immigrant minority criminals you should fear" but now also adding "radical left movements".
@scott there is a kind of bipartisanship of fear these days.
but i still think the traditional relationship between being afraid on the streets, over crime or political streetfighting, and yearning for authoritarian control holds. (i always could be wrong!)
@scott i guess i'd want more evidence than one interpretation of survey data to be persuaded of that. early on post George Floyd polling sympathetic to protests struck me remarkably resilient, despite the disorder. the video was pretty horrible, shocking. maybe there was still that effect by November? 1/
@scott but the behavior of political campaigns suggests to me pretty strongly a different story, at least more recently. it's Republican politicians who want to talk about the "riots" of 2020. maybe that's just dogmatism on the part of campaigns and they actually misunderstand how the public perceives those events? but i wouldn't bank on it. /fin
@divya "always" is *always* overstated. social affairs are complicated. but very very often! disorder on the streets is not the same as street protest. die-ins can be awesome. but street action has to be careful, disciplined, should appeal not just disrupt, unless the cause is already super popular.
melees, brawls, circumstances that lead less engaged outsiders come to fear play into the core fascist trope, there are enemies among us who will hurt you, we will provide order and protect you. 1/
@divya i've written a piece that people sometimes read as making the opposite case. i don't disown it. but i intend a view a bit more nuanced. as from our Civil Rights Movement discussion, i do think sometimes some degree of fear things fall may fall apart serves a role in motivating positive reform. but i think it very dangerous as prescription, because it's hard to titrate and very often yields backlash, crackdown, or apartheid solutions. https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5911.html /fin
@divya Is Kissinger not a war criminal? “He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. … It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies, on anything that moves. You got that?” Bombing of Laos and Cambodia, and obviously Vietnam, had begun under LBJ. But boy, at least in Cambodia, did the new guys ramp it up. 214 tons under LBJ out of 2,756,941 tons. Do you think LBJ would have done the same? Do you think the protests had something to do his not contesting or winning the 1968 election?
Yes! Exactly! Ashes! Die ins! They blocked the Queens-Midtown tunnel once, the clearest example I could find of generalized disruption. But they mostly targeted specific institutions — FDA, the White House, NYSE, in clever, performative ways. No one feels their safety is at risk at a die-in. (I guess there may have been people paranoid enough to think they could get AIDS from ashes?) Their actions were powerful! But by performance more than just sand in the gears.
@divya I haven't read Schulman's history, but I think there's no dispute the outside track played a crucial role. (I think the inside track did too.) But Act Up protest was mostly (not always) pretty targeted at powerful institutions. Act Up was not a disruptive or frightening force for bystanders going about their lives. Act Up largely substituted brilliant performance for generalized disruption as a way of attracting media attention. Outsiders could sympathize without having been messed with.
@divya There was a lot going on, sure. And there was violence. You can make a case that a generalized sense of threat played bad cop to the ostentatious virtue of MLK's nonviolent movement. Riots sometime lead to change. But they often lead to reaction. 1/
@divya You can tell lots of stories about the 60s. But I don't think you can fairly look at the world and conclude that violent chaos frequently births leftish or liberal or just orders. You can maybe claim CRM as a counterexample, if you want to emphasize the sense of threat. But then the political aftermath of the 60s was mostly reaction. Vietnam War protests just picked off LBJ, which did not redound to the benefit of people in Indochina. /fin
@Alon @asayeed @BenRossTransit I mean is the claim that the US ought to have become the military of the Arab Spring throughout the region, that we needed more and more follow through on the Libya model? Obama dithered, abandoned Assad but shirked from enforcing his "red line". But even if he had, that would be a far cry from prosecuting the revolution. Is that what the US ought to have done, before ISIS and the often very cynical alliances that resulted from countering it?
@Alon @asayeed @BenRossTransit naturalization of Palestinians where they live is a universal position among Jewish Israelis. except, of course, for the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. it is regarding those populations that differences emerge.
@Alon @asayeed @BenRossTransit It's hard to distinguish between what is cynical and what is structural with respect to Iran's behavior. You may be right that, under some future hypothetical settlement, their inclination would become Westphalian. or perhaps they are pan-Islamist, and would have a Tehran based new metropole for that. (obviously, very longstanding intra-Islam sectarian distinctions complicate that.) for now, they are profoundly an anti-Westphalian force.
@Alon @asayeed @BenRossTransit Western Islamophobia, Wester ethnic identities, lots of Western strands are anti-Westphalian. the state system lives or dies only because states manage and monitor evershifting allegiances and constantly emerging currents to maintain national identities "artificially" coterminous with state boundaries as primary.