a reality that socialist or progressive protestors must take into account is that disorder on the streets always works to the political advantage of fascists, who credibly promise order at all costs even while they cynically ensure protest becomes disorderly.

it’s not fair, but it is reality. in the ecstasy of genuine righteousness one may not give a fuck, but then a morning after comes.

@tb i mean, i guess higher-ed was already a tinderbox, but columbia really has made a unique contribution this year setting the world on fire. had the school simply been indulgent, it’s not impossible this academic year could have come to a mostly uneventful close nationwide, just some very understandable protests in the ordinary course of things. a bit of groveling before ideologues that you try to back up with ill-considered action and *blammo*.

at a certain point, true and false come to matter much less than us and them.

This is madness.

i already think we’re paying too much attention to this stuff and too little to what’s actually going on in israel/palestine, but does anybody do any data journalism about campus protests, logging and tallying chants and activities at different locations?

the people who crush the university student protests will always be on the wrong side of history. it will become a settled matter twenty to thirty years later, when the former students are the ones writing the history.

someone put me on their mailing lists a couple of days ago, and i have to say that it's AMAZING.

what #RonDeSantis never understood is he was popular not because he's "conservative", but because he was perceived as chill, as letting people live and do their thing, during the pandemic when media portrayed other places as under the jackboots of some COVID gestapo.

anti-abortion, anti-pot, don't-say-anything-in-front-of-the-children Ron is not chill. and not, i think, broadly that popular anymore.

@Alon @asayeed @BenRossTransit i'm just gonna call you "pharaoh", Alon. 😛

this one reminds me a lot of Nancy Pelosi communications i used to get.

even a bad seed can with care and time grow into a wonderful tree.

@Alon @BenRossTransit (i don’t think theocratic strictness is the aspect of polical Islam Egypt fears. rather there’s a strand of political Islam that might be less strict in those ways but that sees life ordered under disjoint contemporary states as illegitimate. it hearkens to a more encompassing Dar al-Islam, which constructs like Egypt and elites who benefit from it undermine. the Saudis, for example, use strictness precisely to substitute for and mollify this more dangerous strand.)

@_dm (unintentional in the sense i don't think she foresaw the full consequences, like a pool shot that impressively sinks several of your balls when you’d planned on just one.)

i’ve got to admit, Elise Stefanik performed an unintentionally brilliant act of partisan politics when she got the Presidents of Penn and Harvard fired, encouraging their colleagues to jump straight to the kind of repressive overreaction that is a match to the kerosene mix of student idealism and narcissism.

now the Democratic coalition is bitterly divided, and the most salient issues are public disorder and student entitlement, both of which strongly favor Republicans.

does anyone have any idea what’s been going on in Gaza over the last week? i feel pretty up to date on American university campuses, thx.

@Alon @BenRossTransit (i won't comment on whether it's racist or not for them to think so, but my understanding is Egypt's elites in particular genuinely fear Gaza's populations would add to sometimes violent strands of political Islam they already find difficult to manage, even with a willingness to indulge in, um, lapses of liberalism. Sinai itself is perhaps not a fully integrated province of a modern developed state, and though most Gazans aren't habitually Bedouin, they are a complication.)

"How Movements Win" by Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli https://www.liberalcurrents.com/how-movements-win/

@Alon @BenRossTransit If we can get past this shitty war to a world in which Israel's integration with the Arab Middle East can continue, lifting old taboos on naturalization of Palestinians by Arab states is an obvious thing to pursue. Gulf allies no longer want to foment the instability those taboos were imposed to foment. Unfortunately, though there may be linguistic + cultural fit, the past half century has left all parties nervous about populations like Gaza's on security grounds, I think.

@BenRossTransit @Alon (I don't think the US is playing a meaningful military logistics role in the Sudan conflict. UAE is a US ally and allegedly supporting to some uncertain degree one party to the conflict, but even if it is, that remains very far from the direct US support than both Israel and KSA have received in their conflicts.)