Saturday: Hili dialogue

May 4, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to  CaturSaturday, May 4, 2024, shabbos for Jewish cats, and National Homebrew Day. It’s legal in the U.S., and here from Wikipedia is “A homebrewing kit consisting of hopped malt extract, yeast and instructions.” Americans can brew up to 100 gallons of beer per year per person. I thought of doing this, but it seems like too much trouble.

KVDP, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Anti-Bullying Day, International Firefighters’ Day, Beer Pong Day, Bird Day, National Orange Juice Day, National Candied Orange Peel Day (I love the stuff!), International Respect for Chickens Day, World Give Day, and Star Wars Day (International observance).

Re Star Wars:

The date originated from the pun “May the Fourth be with you”, from the Star Wars catchphrase “May the Force be with you.” Even though the holiday was not created or declared by Lucasfilm, many Star Wars fans have chosen to celebrate the holiday.[3] It has since been embraced by Lucasfilm and the Walt Disney Company as an annual celebration of Star Wars.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 4 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The WSJ analyzes the risks of college protests to Biden’s campaign, “For Biden, college protests mean few good options, lots of risks.”

President Biden’s fragile bid for a second term is under new threat from the powerful combination of two conflicts he has little direct control over: Israel’s war with Hamas and the deepening rift in the U.S. over America’s role in it.

The two crises, unfolding thousands of miles from each other, are merging to crystallize a wider set of divisions in U.S. society that are challenging Biden’s already shaky political standing. Americans had already been debating the limits of free speech on campus, the balance between protest and public order and the U.S. alliance with an obstinate Israeli government.

Now, the barricades, encampments and police in riot gear on campuses across the country have dramatically magnified those tensions, as well as competing grievances that spring in part from America’s growing diversity.

The situation holds many risks and few good options for Biden, who faces the prospect of continued protests this summer. Those could culminate in big demonstrations at the Democrats’ national nominating convention in Chicago in August, undermining an event intended to show the party’s unity and competence to lead the nation.

The president has focused on pressing Israel and Hamas to accept a cease-fire that could both save lives in the region and quell protests in the U.S. Failure could prompt the Israeli government to start a long-planned operation against Hamas fighters in Rafah, where roughly 1.4 million Palestinians are sheltering and the prospect of high civilian casualties has sparked international concern.

But his cautious approach, to policymaking and public statements, has drawn criticism even among some in his party who hoped for more muscular efforts to shape events.

*But Andrew Sullivan’s new piece, “How to re-elect Donald Trump“, is even stronger, saying that Biden’s mishandling of college protests, combined with his increasingly “progressive” stand on other issues, all but guarantees a Trump victory:

His core issue — mass fraudulent immigration — is stronger than it was in 2016, when it catapulted him to the presidency. Gallup’s open-ended question about the most important issue to voters has now had immigration at the top of the list for three successive months — more salient that at any point in the poll’s history. In April 2016, 5 percent of Democrats, 7 percent of Independents, and 13 percent of Republicans named immigration as their top issue. In April 2024, those numbers are 8, 25 and 48 percent, respectively. That’s a big Trump gain.

The Biden administration’s chaotic border policies and enabling of several million migrants to enter the country — with zero-to-minimal chances of deportation — are the proximate cause. Biden had an opportunity to move to the center on illegal immigration — his core vulnerability — and decided to move, with his entire party, to the extreme left. Yes, his proposed bill earlier this year was a vast improvement. But it was far too late to gain him any serious cred on the question — and his blaming the GOP for mass illegal migration of the last four years is risible.

The same goes, I’m afraid to say, about his speech yesterday decrying lawlessness in the campus protests against Israel’s obliteration of Gaza. It was fine so far as it went, but it was given only when he had no choice, after Trump goaded him, and it reminded me of his sad attempts to distance himself and his party from the rioting and looting in the hellish summer of 2020. He was reactive, not proactive. His quiet words were overwhelmed with the noise of the streets.

As readers know, I’m deeply sympathetic to the argument that Israel has over-reached, over-bombed, and over-reacted in its near-unhinged overkill of Palestinian civilians, especially children, in the wake of 10/7’s horrors. It has been truly horrifying. I begrudge no one demonstrating passionately to protest this. But as I watch the rhetoric and tactics of many — but not all — of these students, I’m struck by how this humane concern is less prominent than the rank illiberalism and ideological extremism among many.

. . .Preventing students from attending classes, taking exams, or even walking around their own campus freely is not a protest; it’s a crime. So is the destruction of property, and the use of physical intimidation and violence against dissenting students. The use of masks to conceal identity is reminiscent of the Klan, and antithetical to non-violent civil disobedience. It’s a way for outsiders to easily infiltrate and a way to escape responsibility for thuggishness. It’s menacing, ugly and cowardly.

It did not have to be this way. Imagine if students simply demonstrated peacefully for a cease-fire, placed the victims and hostages at the forefront of the narrative, and allowed themselves to be arrested proudly on camera and face legal consequences for their actions, as the civil rights movement did. Imagine if they were emphatically non-violent and always open to debate.

But they aren’t, because they are not the inheritors of the Christian, universalist civil rights movement but its illiberal, blood-and-soil nemesis, long curated in the Ivy League. The key group behind the protests, Students For Justice in Palestine, doesn’t mince words. It celebrated the explicitly genocidal murder of Jews on October 7. . .

SJP has got to be sanctioned on campuses, or removed as a student organization. It’s not their speech that worries me, but the activities they engage in. Sullivan’s piece is quite good this week, and builds to this crescendo:

This is how you re-elect Trump: keep pandering to the far left, suck up to wealthy college grads, allow millions of fraudulent “asylum-seekers” to enter the country, insist that men are women, discriminate against whites and Asians and men, while constantly appearing as merely reacting to events rather than creating new political realities. Biden is losing this election, deservedly. And if he cannot pull off an almighty pivot — and I suspect at this point, he really can’t — this election really is Trump’s to lose.

*At the NYT, John McWhorter decries how the Columbia protests degenerated in a way similar to those of the civil rights protests of the Sixties. “The Columbia protests made the same mistake the civil rights movement did.”

What happened this week was not just a rise in the temperature. The [Columbia University] protests took a wrong turn, of a kind I have seen too many other activist movements take. It’s the same wrong turn that the civil rights movement took in the late 1960s.

After the concrete victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, a conflict arose within the movement between those who sought to keep the focus on changing laws and institutions and those who cherished more symbolic confrontations as a chance to speak truth to power.

The conflict played out most visibly in what became of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC began with grass-roots activism in the form of sit-ins and voter registration, but in 1966 John Lewis, a veteran of the Selma demonstrations who spoke at the March on Washington, was replaced as the group’s leader by Stokely Carmichael, who spoke charismatically of Black Power but whose political plans tended to be fuzzy at best. The term “Black Power” often seemed to mean something different to each person espousing it. It was, in essence, a slogan rather than a program.

This new idea — that gesture and performance were, in themselves, a form of action — worried the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who regarded some of the group’s demonstrations as “expressions of rivalry and rage, without constructive purpose,” according to the historian Taylor Branch.

. . .I share the campus protesters’ opinion that the war in Gaza has become an atrocity. Israel had every right to defend itself after Hamas’s massacre, which itself was an atrocity. However, the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, with uncountable more left maimed or homeless, cannot be justified. I am increasingly dismayed that President Biden does not simply deny Benjamin Netanyahu any further arms.

Beyond a certain point, however, we must ask whether the escalating protests are helping to change those circumstances. Columbia’s administration agreed to review proposals about divestment, shareholder activism and other issues and to create health and education programs in Gaza and the West Bank. But the protesters were unmoved and a subgroup of them, apparently, further enraged.

Who among the protesters really thought that Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, and the board of trustees would view the occupation of Hamilton Hall — and the visible destruction of property — and say, “Oh, if the students feel that strongly, then let’s divest from Israel immediately”? The point seemed less to make change than to manifest anger for its own sake, with the encampment having become old news.

The similarity, then, is a concentration on performance and not results, and I think McWhorter is right, though I’d like to see him tell me how Israel can defeat Hamas by reducing the death ratio of civilians to combatants to below 1, as the ratio is also much lower than the U.S. had in Iraq or Afghanistan. Yes, the death of civilians is a tragedy for all, but those who decry it never suggest how Israel can defeat Hamas without civilian casualties. But McWhorter’s main point is this:

The initial protest was an effective way to show how fervently a great many people oppose the war, but the time had come for another phase: slow, steady suasion. This is not capitulation but a change in tactics, with the goal of making the activists’ work pay off. We recall King most vividly in protests, including being imprisoned for his participation. However, his daily life as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was about endless and often frustrating negotiations with people in power, which eventually bore fruit. In this, as much as in marches, he and his comrades created the America we know today. Smoking hot orations about Black Power might have instilled some pride but created little beyond that.

*As always, I’ll steal three items from Nellie Bowles hilarious and informative weekly news summary, called this week: “TGIF: Don’t tread on me, bro.”

→ A star is born: The protests were a cacophony of faces and voices but one stood out among the rest. Her name is Johannah King-Slutzky. And after Columbia students had smashed through the glass doors to break into a building on campus where they were going to camp until Israel disbanded as a nation and gave all the land back, Johannah King-Slutzky had a request from the liberators. They needed the protest catered. They were hungry. Fine, maybe not starving, but they wouldn’t say no to an arugula salad and fries for the table. Like so many of us, they wanted a late lunch. And sure, the school didn’t stop food from going in, exactly, she admitted. In response to a question about why the university should be obligated to bring food and water to protesters, King-Slutzky explained,

I guess it’s ultimately a question of what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students? Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill even if they disagree with you? If the answer is no, then you should allow basic—I mean, it’s crazy to say because we’re on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid. We’re asking for, like, could people please have a glass of water?

. . . In another moment focused on the food-insecure Columbia Resistance, a news crew held a camera on a group of fighters as they figured out how to get a large rectangular pizza box into a square crate that would then be hoisted to the second floor. Gosh, it was hard. The pizza box was big. The crate was small. Listen closely and you can almost hear the students: “I told you we should’ve gotten the mozzarella sticks!” The camera lingers for a while, the anchor trying to fill the air assuming she was going to capture this moment of pizza delivery, before giving up. The show cuts before they manage it, which I assume resulted in multiple deaths.

→ Squad stop: After a leader of the Columbia encampment movement was outed for saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” the Squad thought it would be a perfect time for a visit. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez stopped by to show support for the encampment. And so did Ilhan Omar, who had this to say about some of the, ahem, antisemitism on display: “We should protect all Jewish students whether they are pro-genocide or anti-genocide.” So gracious. Very congressional. Thank you, ma’am.

If you wonder why all the kids instantly had matching tents, the Resistance is very organized, funded by a bunch of big charities, some of which are “Hamas-linked” according to the Daily Mail, though that could mean anything. Maybe those charities should pay for the millions in damages these students are causing? Or is that on the taxpayers too?

→ Get these kids running the Southern border: As soon as the pro-Palestine protesters took over UCLA, they set up a border system that I want to take a minute and appreciate here. They put up loads of metal barricades (they built, you might say, a wall) and gave out wristbands to friendlies (very Coachella). If you wanted to pass through to like, go to class on the taxpayer-funded campus, you had to answer a few real normal questions such as: “Are you a Zionist?” Wearing a large Jewish star was a problem. Wanna get into the newly staffed UCLA library? Again, the new border patrol has a quick question: “Are you a Zionist?” If yes, then sorry, no library today. UCLA campus guards helped enforce the new walls and blocked a young Jewish student from getting to class. Protesters also made a call for supplies—specifically, and even as a Californian I blushed, vegan food, gluten-free food, rope, and zip ties. Which, yes, sounds like a sex party at the commune, but I promise you they instead want to zip-tie themselves to library carts and probably a statue. Anyway, get these kids running the border. Asking immigrants to do American loyalty oaths is a little hardcore for me, and I don’t know if I love the sound of zip ties without any body cams around, but it’s a wild time down there, and we could use the organization. Good luck to my Bruins.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej suggests some costume changes. When I asked why Andrzej suggested a hat, Malgorzata said, “She doesn’t need a hat but she was complaining about being underappreciated and Andrzej (typical old, white male) thought that a new hat will cheer her up.”

Hili: I feel underappreciated.
A: Buy yourself a new hat.
Hili: Nobody does that anymore. That’s so old hat.
In Polish:
Hili: Czuję się niedoceniona.
Ja: Kup sobie nowy kapelusz.
Hili: Zgłupiałeś, to już takie niemodne.

*******************

From reader Pliny the in Between’s Far Corner Cafe. That’s our encampment!

From Not Another Science Cat Page:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy. This person is apparently a Lamarckian!

From Masih, another Iranian woman strike back at the regime. Apparently the harassment occurred before this video. The woman is pissed off!

From cesar: I think this is at UCLA: students blocking and intimidating a student who simply wants to walk across the campus:

From Barry; the second tweet shows a huge liger (hybrid between male lions and female tigers), nearly always larger than either parent. This one’s the largest cat in the world. Ligers are also usually sterile, but one fertile liger has been found, And guess the bird!

From Simon: Larry the Cat disses Boris Johnson, whom he dislikes:

From the Auschwitz Memorial: one I retweeted (re-Xed?):

Two tweets from Doctor Cobb.  First, a gorilla preparing for a haymaker:

Look at that twitching nose!

 

28 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Homebrew became all the rage among faculty and nth year grad students in our physics dept in the early 70’s (long before today’s wonderful selection of microbrews). It was disgusting stuff…like really bad champale for the most part…as I remember it, but because of the labor and attention involved, everyone pronounced it to be very good.

    “Sullivan’s piece is quite good this week”….+1

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  2. Maybe the Jewish kids on the quad could add a poster of your daily Auschwitz Memorial recognition. A stark and sobering moment for me every morning.

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  4. King Slut(sky) and her cohorts at Columbia are cosplaying “oppressed Gazans” with the university staff and NYPD (in their mind) cosplaying “evil zionists.”

    Naturally, like all six-year-olds, they want mommy to give them snacks as they declare those snacks, as part of the game, to be “humanitarian aid.”

    Remember when mom’s snacks were “really” astronaut food when you were playing in your backyard?

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    1. Do NOT refer to the President of Columbia as “King Slut(sky)”, which is sexist. The tone of your comments here has been uncivil, and please make your comments in grown-up language. One more like this and you’ll lose your commenting privileges. Please read “Da Roolz” on the left sidebar before commenting further.

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      1. Slutsky isn’t the Columbia president. She’s the protester-occupier who was demanding Columbia cater meals to them. Not civil to call her a slut, no matter.

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    2. I think you’re right about their role-playing themselves as being in a situation just like the people in Ganza. The protests are escalating due to a tendency to catastrophize their own situation as participants — but still reality intrudes enough that they literally expect to be catered to.

      ” Oh, if the students feel that strongly, then let’s divest from Israel immediately”?

      I expect a surprising proportion of the protesters do indeed think that’s what will happen — which would suggest they’re the product of parents who caved in for tantrums and pleas that they’re starving.

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      1. A keffiyeh-draped protestor-occupier at McGill told a reporter (in unaccented English) that he and his fellow activists had tried and tried through dialogue to get McGill to sever all ties with Israel, academic not just investment, and darn it, the university just wouldn’t accede to their demands. So damn it they were stepping up the pressure through occupation to force the university to change its mind. If you won’t listen to reason, our reasons, you have left us no choice but to use force.

        As I’m sure everyone here is aware, this is not freedom of speech. It’s using force when speech fails to give me what I want, because other speech won out.

        This where I think Sullivan has it wrong (as well as in his views about Israel’s war effort.) He’s right about the illiberal mentality of the occupiers. But it isn’t that they are afraid to be arrested for breaking an unjust law. They are trying to break a just law, and get away with it, in order to force some other action unrelated to the laws they are breaking. (Unless they think that the law of trespass, being a colonial concept, is itself unjust and they seek to make it unenforceable, which has pretty much already happened in Canada.)

        This is actually the entire history of the street protests in the United States, save the civil rights protests under Dr. Martin Luther King et al. What has been demanded has always been some political or diplomatic goal other than to change the laws being broken. (No one blocks traffic just to force repeal of the law against blocking traffic.) To make this kind of protest sustainable, the organizers have to keep their soldiers out of jail, as few have the stomach for it.

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  5. As I’ve said before, the DOJ should be investigating the extent to which these protests are coordinated and who is paying for them as a potential criminal conspiracy. This level of activity, especially since it is clear that many of the “protestors” are not students, cannot have been got together without planning, and those non-students wouldn’t be there without being banked. There have been numerous stories linked these protests to Soros-funded NGOs. Unfortunately, Soros is tied to so much other chicanery in this country, that it would be the same as asking him to investigate himself.

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  6. There are so many good craft breweries nowadays that at least one doesn’t have to homebrew to get a beer that isn’t available. But, it’s great fun, especially watching fermentation start. And the results can be surprisingly good. It’s not that much trouble to be honest. A lot of the time is spent cleaning, true. But still. I’ve been doing it for a number of years now (still with malt extracts) and the results have been quite satisfactory. I’ll have my latest, an ESB, tonight …

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  7. There is a Guardian piece on May 3 about antisemitism in the campus protests. It quotes Norman Finkelstein talking to protesting students about the counter-productiveness of their use of antisemitic chants and slogans. He tells them that if one is concerned to help the people of Gaza, one needs to get out of one’s navel, crawl out of one’s ego. As soon as he finishes talking, they crawl right back up again, and continue the antisemitic chanting.

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    1. I believe it’s actually a boat-billed heron (Cochlearius cochlearius), a South American rather than an African bird, and within the heron family rather than being closely related to Pelicans. They are both very cool birds however!

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  10. I’m troubled by Sully’s language here, viz., that “Biden is losing this election, deservedly.” This implies that the reverse is true, to wit, that if Trump wins, he deserves to win. This betrays Sully’s longtime and ongoing prejudice against Biden. Witness how many articles in which he’s harped on Biden’s age, physical appearance, and perceived feebleness over the past couple of years.
    I also think Sully is making a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to the importance of the immigration issue. Obsessive opposition to immigration is fundamentally a MAGA Republican issue, and this is even born out in the figures he gives and his link to the Gallup poll. The percentage of Democrats who think immigration is an issue is a very small number. Sully wants to alarm us out of proportion to the actual numbers.
    Contra Sully, I offer the recent articles of two writers that I think are his equals.
    Matthew Yglesias https://www.slowboring.com/p/young-voters-care-about-the-same
    Judd Legum https://popular.info/p/immigrants-are-saving-the-american
    In closing, Trump is ignorant, incompetent, indecent, and immoral. Anyone who votes for him is endorsing his evildoing. There is no good reason or excuse for voting for Trump.

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  12. I fully agree with Jerry’s statement that the protests didn’t need to go the way they did:
    “Imagine if students simply demonstrated peacefully for a cease-fire, placed the victims and the hostages at the forefront of the narrative… ”
    Precisely! Instead, they turned the story into their own personal drama. I’ve found this off-putting from the beginning.

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    1. You’re not meant to feel good about it, Debi. They have lots of sympathizers already. It’s meant to arouse feelings of revulsion in those who oppose it for exactly the reasons you and Jerry adduce. The whole point is to try to goad the authorities into making a violent response, which will make them look bad and extract a promise never to do it again. It’s being stage-managed so that the only response that the university can make without violence, if it wants its campus back, is to give them what they want. What they get will have no bearing on what happens in Gaza. They know that. But it will show who’s boss.

      The Chicago Police are keeping their political powder dry for the Democratic Convention when they may have to break heads to protect the city. Similarly, the police in Montreal have long bitter memories of being hung out to dry when they suppressed violent protests at McGill and what was then Sir George Williams University in the 1970s.

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      1. My father was a police officer at the 1968 convention in Chicago. From his retelling, he was grateful that Mayor Daley granted approval to “break heads,” as you call it. I suspect that any bad behavior by protestors this year will go unpunished. Arrests? Sure. Prosecutions? Don’t hold your breath.

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      2. I suppose you’re right, Leslie. That’s a hard pill to swallow. I suppose that’s why I find it hard to live in today’s world.

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  13. I usually find Andrew Sullivan’s arguments well thought out. This bit, though, is a real clunker:
    “As readers know, I’m deeply sympathetic to the argument that Israel has over-reached, over-bombed, and over-reacted in its near-unhinged overkill of Palestinian civilians, especially children, in the wake of 10/7’s horrors. It has been truly horrifying.”

    In fact, the IDF has taken extreme measures to protect civilians, resulting in the lowest ratio of civilian casualties in modern urban warfare (see this opinion piece for links: https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urban-warfare-why-will-no-one-admit-it-opinion-1883286).

    The deaths of Palestinian civilians in Gaza are entirely the fault of Hamas.

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  14. May 4 has been put forward multiple times in Congress as a “National Day of Reason.” (See link below.) May 4 is also “Star Wars Day” (“May the 4th be with you”).

    But the National Day of Reason is sort of the opposite of Star Wars Day, given that the Jedi-filled cinematic universe is permeated by a supernatural “Force” mediated by sentient “midichlorians.” (The term is an allusion to the real energy centers in biological cells, which are called mitochondria.)

    National Day of Reason (press release):
    https://raskin.house.gov/2024/5/raskin-huffman-reintroduce-resolution-designating-may-4th-national-day-of-reason

    Mitochondria & “midichlorians”:
    https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Midichloria_mitochondrii

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