I especially appreciate the comment contrasting what the NYPD did to students protesting against Israel's war policy and the lack of such a presence at Charlottesville. This reminds me of the false equivalency trotted out by right-wing talk radio (is there another kind of talk radio?) between the Portland protests regarding the material evidence of what happens because of thug cops and the 1/6 insurrection that protested something utterly fictional.
When the Klan wants to protest, the police stand parallel to their march and watch them pass, protecting them from potential reprisal. When "liberals" want to protest, the police stand perpendicular to the march and preemptively retaliate, then arrest people for assaulting police officers or resisting arrest. The First Amendment apparently protects opinion media personalities above and before it protects poor individuals lacking a sufficient public engine behind them. It is being warped to severely punish someone for an imperfect argument about responsible behavior and make celebrities out of rabble rousers whose only argument is for opportunistic irresponsibility.
Right-wing spin doctors espousing obvious and infamous antisemitic politics are able to sell the lie that one's support for Israel proves that one must not be antisemitic. From liberals who aren't liberals, we get absurd conflations of Hamas with the Warsaw ghetto uprising. From Christians who aren't Christians we get a weird and inchoate McCarthyism that diverts a discussion about foreign and military policy to a smear campaign against a non-existent liberal conspiracy. Zionist-obsessed conspiracy theorists had a lot to say about Hollywood Jews yesterday before they went on a campaign to somehow protect all Jews from liberalism (or "Biden") by defending Israel today.
Sadly, polarization has been the guiding force behind Republican political strategy at least since Rush Limbaugh got on the air. Polarization crushes complexity, contextualization, and nuance. It uses arguments opportunistically rather than ingenuously. It's the low-hanging fruit for bad rebuttals employed by (for instance) impassioned neophytes on (for instance) college campuses.
The MeToo movement is an example of dangerous and liberalist polarization, because it has all but eliminated, at least in many state legal codes, the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof. Mere allegation can wreck someone's life before the courts "sort it out" and determine whether or not the allegations have any substance. Whether or not I believe Christine Blasey Ford (I do) is irrelevant to whether or not she could prove what she alleged (she couldn't). So liberals aren't above opportunism over a claim-to-evidence relationship. The garden variety globalist, DEI-belabored liberal desperately wants Hamas to be something it isn't, because it's harder to argue against collateral damage than against "the state." Ironically and terribly, those anti-government arguments are sometimes all that brings together the wrong right and the wrong left. Anarchy's defining feature might be the way it shrinks the social darwinist arena. It brings people together so they can better destroy one other. Anarchy loves pluralism.
We're seeing arguments with several moving parts reduced to slogans and whitewashing. The sharp decline in journalistic integrity subjects us to constant bifurcation fallacies such as declaring that all Palestinians may as well be Hamas or that Hamas is irrelevant (or, worse, laudable). We stop discussing collateral damage and the definition of terrorism and start choosing which team we want to win the Super Bowl, even if the team we choose isn't playing (e.g. Hamas as the jews of the Warsaw ghetto or Israel as a representative entity for Judaism).
One irony here is that if more people were to actually attend college, and could afford to do so, then more people would probably recognize and be able to articulate better arguments *about* civil disobedience as well as from within it. At least the protesters (and college administrators, who are far more accountable) have immediate access to professors--of whom, in my experience, both students and administrators have made too little use.
Great post. You cover all the bases.
I especially appreciate the comment contrasting what the NYPD did to students protesting against Israel's war policy and the lack of such a presence at Charlottesville. This reminds me of the false equivalency trotted out by right-wing talk radio (is there another kind of talk radio?) between the Portland protests regarding the material evidence of what happens because of thug cops and the 1/6 insurrection that protested something utterly fictional.
When the Klan wants to protest, the police stand parallel to their march and watch them pass, protecting them from potential reprisal. When "liberals" want to protest, the police stand perpendicular to the march and preemptively retaliate, then arrest people for assaulting police officers or resisting arrest. The First Amendment apparently protects opinion media personalities above and before it protects poor individuals lacking a sufficient public engine behind them. It is being warped to severely punish someone for an imperfect argument about responsible behavior and make celebrities out of rabble rousers whose only argument is for opportunistic irresponsibility.
Right-wing spin doctors espousing obvious and infamous antisemitic politics are able to sell the lie that one's support for Israel proves that one must not be antisemitic. From liberals who aren't liberals, we get absurd conflations of Hamas with the Warsaw ghetto uprising. From Christians who aren't Christians we get a weird and inchoate McCarthyism that diverts a discussion about foreign and military policy to a smear campaign against a non-existent liberal conspiracy. Zionist-obsessed conspiracy theorists had a lot to say about Hollywood Jews yesterday before they went on a campaign to somehow protect all Jews from liberalism (or "Biden") by defending Israel today.
Sadly, polarization has been the guiding force behind Republican political strategy at least since Rush Limbaugh got on the air. Polarization crushes complexity, contextualization, and nuance. It uses arguments opportunistically rather than ingenuously. It's the low-hanging fruit for bad rebuttals employed by (for instance) impassioned neophytes on (for instance) college campuses.
The MeToo movement is an example of dangerous and liberalist polarization, because it has all but eliminated, at least in many state legal codes, the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof. Mere allegation can wreck someone's life before the courts "sort it out" and determine whether or not the allegations have any substance. Whether or not I believe Christine Blasey Ford (I do) is irrelevant to whether or not she could prove what she alleged (she couldn't). So liberals aren't above opportunism over a claim-to-evidence relationship. The garden variety globalist, DEI-belabored liberal desperately wants Hamas to be something it isn't, because it's harder to argue against collateral damage than against "the state." Ironically and terribly, those anti-government arguments are sometimes all that brings together the wrong right and the wrong left. Anarchy's defining feature might be the way it shrinks the social darwinist arena. It brings people together so they can better destroy one other. Anarchy loves pluralism.
We're seeing arguments with several moving parts reduced to slogans and whitewashing. The sharp decline in journalistic integrity subjects us to constant bifurcation fallacies such as declaring that all Palestinians may as well be Hamas or that Hamas is irrelevant (or, worse, laudable). We stop discussing collateral damage and the definition of terrorism and start choosing which team we want to win the Super Bowl, even if the team we choose isn't playing (e.g. Hamas as the jews of the Warsaw ghetto or Israel as a representative entity for Judaism).
One irony here is that if more people were to actually attend college, and could afford to do so, then more people would probably recognize and be able to articulate better arguments *about* civil disobedience as well as from within it. At least the protesters (and college administrators, who are far more accountable) have immediate access to professors--of whom, in my experience, both students and administrators have made too little use.