as soon as flags are involved, you know it is going to be stupid.
@BenRossTransit how anti-Bibi?
@BenRossTransit i don’t think most actual participants are clear on having that agenda, though i suspect their participation and the escalations now surrounding the protest movement are likely polarizing them that way.
@KimSJ have the physical protests done a lot of good, beyond getting polarizing press whose net effect might go either way? “something must be done, this is something” is not a great way forward.
persuasion, political pressure (like the recent, very brilliant “uncommitted” campaign) are first tools.
if you are trying to increase your numbers, you have to present yourself sympathetically. if you have numbers, you can exercise influence passively, by eg not showing up, striking. 1/
@KimSJ if you are trying to skip the numbers part, get your way without recruiting widespread agreement, well unfortunately too many mainly rich people succeed at that but it’s no great failure that it’s hard. no matter how strongly you believe in a cause, action without persuasion or democratic accountability is not legitimate. /fin
another paradoxical effect of the current protests is to have restored the vitality of liberal zionism in america. speaking strictly anecdotally, from my own community, people who two weeks ago were facing an identity crisis over israeli actions they recognized as indefensible are today comfortably crouched behind accusations of antisemitism and terrorist supporters to blame for it all.
we’re about to defeat LBJ all over again. how did that work out for us the last time?
@phillmv @tb it was the best possible response for fascist accelerationists in the US and the most genocidal elements of the Israeli polity.
they say never let a crisis go to waste, but for a burgeoning fascist movement, the catchphrase is never waste an opportunity to create a crisis.
the socialist left imagines it owns crisis, because contradictions of capitalism theory predicts it. but there’s an underpants gnome btw predicting correctly and benefiting from.
@MisuseCase @williampietri they might have been right, they might have been wrong. we think it worked out in retrospect, but that was very contingent (on rather extraordinary work by LBJ and God knows what else). 1/
@MisuseCase @williampietri 60s era protest broadly left us with Nixon making “peace with honor”. between 1968 to 1992 we get one four-year interlude of weak and unpopular less right-wing government, American social democracy is largely undone, then Democrats believe they must become “new” — economically neoliberal and “tough on crime” — to contest elections in America. 2/
@MisuseCase @williampietri yet people with leftish stripes broadly look back upon the era nostalgically, and lionize those movements — which did in LBJ, our most social democratic president — as somehow successful, as example social movements to be emulated. 3/
@MisuseCase @williampietri it is a bit insane. /fin
@williampietri MLK had the advantage that his audience was spectators, publics of a north that actively disidentified with Jim Crow fascism and were willing to blame southern leadership rather than protesters for disorder. had the relevant public been only the people of the US south, it would have been a much riskier strategy. and MLK paid exceptional care in public to the manner of protest and discipline within its ranks, hard, esp in the presence of provocateurs, hard to keep up.
@djc if there’s extraordinary opposition to an existing right-wing state, maybe. but when control of the state is simultaneously contested by popular fascist and “left” movements, the streets are fascists’ best terrain.
people on the left tend to imagine that taking the streets is their ultimate backstop, but that’s like thinking ocean water the ultimate backstop for thirst.
@BrianRAlexander yes. of course they do, and are.
@danjac@masto.ai yes. there are real constraints on what forms of political action can be effective in the context of a fascist movement.
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.