I haven't dig too much in TikTok but some people say that the bill opens the door for future ban of social media at will, i.e., anybody can be accused that acts as foreign agent this kind of thing.
Let me be clear that I think it's perfectly fine for other countries to make comparable demands upon Google and Meta, whose whole existences revolve around exploiting user data. The GDPR and comparable state legislation in California were great steps toward putting this more in check, and in fact forced Meta to rethink their entire business model in some ways -- but in countries that see the U.S. as an adversary in particular, they are perfectly justified in being concerned about what U.S. companies choose to do with this data, especially if anything fishy is going on between these companies and the U.S. government, which there appears to be. Same deal with using Microsoft OS and software in adversarial countries.
Could bad actors in the U.S. government try to piggyback off the TikTok bill to create a slippery slope and start curtailing freedom of expression in an unconstitutional way? Yes, of course they could try. And we would have to remain vigilant and prevent them from doing so, because that would be crossing a line that the divestment order does not, IMO.
Just discovered: 1977 charter of Likud (Netanyahu's) party in Israel was claiming exactly that, from the river to the sea. Clean of Palestinian people. This is a major party not some niche extremists.
Yep, it's garbage coming from either side. Israel is here to stay, and so are the Palestinians. You either need a viable two-state solution with security guarantees for both groups, or you need a non-apartheid one-state solution with one-person, one-vote representation, which I don't think the Israelis would ever go for.
I was expecting you would be somehow critical on the crack on first Amendment issues with the antisemitism awareness bill & violent resolve of the protests. Almost surprised that you didn't.
The Antisemitism Awareness Act is pretty tame, it just explicitly calls out discrimination against ethnic Jews and Americans of Israeli origin in programs receiving any federal funding as being unlawful, since you could argue that it's in a grey area of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It also very explicitly states that it doesn't supersede any First Amendment rights.
As for breaking up the protests on college campuses, I think the colleges have been more than fair with these groups. The rules for what the protesters are and are not allowed to do were made very clear, giving them plenty of leeway to express their views fully, but the protesters have chosen to step over those boundaries by blocking off passage between different parts of the campus, setting up tents and staying in them overnight, and in some cases bullying and harassing students who are just trying to go to class. They were warned that they needed to stop doing these things, then explicitly told that if they didn't stop violating the rules that the police would be brought in and they would be charged with trespassing, and then they followed through on their word. As a general rule, the only protesters who were arrested were the ones that
wanted to get arrested and intentionally provoked that response after multiple warnings. I have no sympathy for those people, and they forfeited any right to whine about their arrests -- they chose their own consequences.
Anyway, the protests have nothing to do with Hamas
Well,
the ISGAP report cited by The Daily Mail strongly suggests otherwise (yes, this is an arguably partisan non-profit, and yes, this is The Daily Mail, so take it with an appropriate amount of sodium), and there are
more widespread reports of people being paid to show up at these protests, with their funding coming from a variety of questionable sources.
students have the decency to risk their future and careers* to protest about killings and starving (we tend to omit that) of Palestinian people. [...] *This is huge and might be unprecedented. US students pay large fees and still risk of getting banned from school for being arrested and they do it regardless. One has to give it to them that they have values in their life. They should be proud.
...and yet when you ask these students basic contextual questions about what's going on in Israel and Palestine, many of them aren't even aware of the significance of October 7th, let alone that the Palestinians elected Hamas to be their leaders ~18 years ago, and that Hamas intentionally embedded their military compounds in and under civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques, as well as tunnel systems running under all of Gaza, so that any counterstrike by Israel was guaranteed to cause mass civilian casualties.
Has Israel's counteroffensive gone too far? In terms of civilian casualties the answer is clearly yes, even by the basic "eye for an eye" measure. But Hamas is responsible for sparking this, and Hamas shares some portion of the blame for the sheer number of Palestinian casualties because that's exactly the outcome they've been planning for decades. Hamas has also refused any kind of surrender or cease fire agreement that would have any hope of addressing Israel's very real security concerns, so at the end of the day they are still majorly culpable for the ongoing situation.
Unfortunately, many U.S. college students these days don't do well with nuance, and require everything to be viewed through an oppressor/oppressed lens, where oppressor = 100% BAD and oppressed = 100% GOOD. At the moment Israel is the oppressor and the Palestinians are the oppressed in that laughably binary view of the world, but if these same students had been paying attention on October 7th the calculation would have been very different indeed. And the ones who got arrested and as a result suspended or expelled have nothing to feel proud about -- they could have protested within the rules, still gotten their point across, and still remained in school. But they didn't.
I'm pretty sure back in Paris, May 1968, there wasn't a risk to getting barred from University if you were caught. Or in US for that matter.
Just a
risk of
getting shot.
No matter if one agrees with the protesters or not, this is a great moment that people show at last some resistance to political ugliness. Those are not desperate people, those are children with a future who risk their future to protest. Some tomorrow's leaders will be forged there and maybe the world will become eventually a better place even a little bit. I have a big respect for them.
It would be one thing if the laws they were violating were the issue that they were protesting -- then it would make sense and fall under the realm of civil disobedience, since the best way to draw attention to unfair laws when other methods have failed is to calmly and clearly break those laws in a manner where everyone can see how unjust the laws are, and draw attention to your plight throughout the judicial process. That's not what's going on here at all.
These protesters are breaking trespassing laws as political theater. Whether you block other people's passage or keep your tent on the ground overnight vs. packing it up and repitching it the next day has nothing at all to do with your message about Gaza. If you got arrested after ignoring all of the warnings about exactly what consequences your behavior would incur, then you're either an idiot (risking your future when it was completely unnecessary to do so to achieve the same goal) or you just get off on acting like a jerk.
