I'm very tired of ignorant generalizations about THE Ivy League. The Ivy League is more than Harvard and Columbia. Furthermore, most of the Ivy universities have ten thousand students or more. They didn't all turn out for the demonstrations. As for elitism - I was the first in my family to go to college and I attended Cornell University, known as the Cow College of the Ivy League because of its large Agriculture college. If I'm an elitist now, it's because of the stupidity and brutality of the nearly half of the electorate who support Trump even though he revealed himself from the very beginning of his first campaign. And, by the way, I'm an elderly white man on a fixed income.
Reading "Outflanking MTG on Faith" and the whole Posner piece makes me think there is something else going on with Johnson. I don't think it just a flipping of a moral switch. It feels like the moves are part of some sort of long play to counter, as Speaker Johnson says, the Democrats' "crazy woke agenda".
The first high speed rail is going between LA and Vegas. I guess it's better than private jets, but I am beyond fed-up with everything in this country being for the rich. If you don't want an angry mob of citizens, then take care of them.
These Ivy League and other "elite" university students supporting Hamas remind me of the Iranian students in 1979 who aided and abetted taking American hostages. Both groups are sworn enemies of America.
I totally agree with Bill about rejecting the mob, always and everywhere. In the specific instance of the current right-wing attacks on the campus unrest in New York, however, I think caution is important. Academic institutions are a special case. One of the first things authoritarians do when they come to power is seize control of the universities and purge their faculties and students. As Jonathan Last has been saying frequently (most recently yesterday), our country is in the midst of an authoritarian attempt. As we've seen most clearly in Florida, academic freedom is in the MAGA cross-hairs. This is what the extremist school-board takeovers and book bans are about nationwide.
Make no mistake: academic institutions have a major responsibility to ensure that they themselves respect and protect the liberty they claim as their right. If the university has a mob within, it must give the mob no quarter.
Your words certainly apply to any mob riled to immediate, violent action. But I’m not sure you adequately delineated between such a mob and non-violent throngs simply pleading for change. Responsible citizens can disagree about “encampments” in common areas of college campuses. I’m no young firebrand, yet I remain skeptical of the need for the police response to the demonstrators at Columbia.
So much for "What's so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding?" Certainly not gonna find any of that on today's elite college campuses. If anything, the apparent prevalence of intellectual laziness continues to fuel the inability or unwillingness to delve deeper than a child's inflatable swimming pool. At this rate, the ascent of man may find the caveman back on top...
The David McCormick story is quite revealing about the cul-de-sac to which Republican politics have led the party. Because of Citizens United, the institutional GOP has to favor wealthy, self-funding candidates, particularly for statewide offices in states with expensive urban media markets (Pennsylvania has two). Because of trump, however, those candidates have to masquerade as avatars of the MAGA base stereotype: rural, church-going, bootstrapping populists who succeeded despite their education. The disconnect is so enormous that bogus claims become inevitable--and the political hypocrisy is in plain sight.
I'm pretty sure healthy monarchists and aristocrats reject the mob, too. Just saying.
I was very disappointed when the late Shah of Iran didn't order his troops to fire on mass demonstrations by Khomeini supporters. But for all I know, the army might have turned its guns on him instead. Eh, he was kind of a faux-Shah anyway.
There was a time in this country when numbers of people both large and small could - and would - gather to peacefully protest injustice, and act like people instead of a damned mob while doing so, from a few young people sitting at a drug store lunch counter to hundreds peacefully walking over the Edmund Pettis bridge, all subjecting themselves to possible harm for calmly and peacefully exercising their right to protest injustices right here at home. Had *they* been the ones screaming hateful and stupid rhetoric, had *they* been the ones engaging in threatening and even violent behavior, how far would their cause have been propelled by those actions? How many minds would have been changed in a positive way, and how much positive change would have come from that?
While supposedly learning to be independent thinkers, the best these college kids can seem to muster is a bad case of monkey see, monkey do from campus to campus. But is that really their fault or the fault of some of their learned professors who are supposed to be educating them? Or is it that their education is happening on their smart phones from social media as much as it is in the classroom. Hard to tell the diff I'd say.
And what the fuck are they learning? How to be loud, hateful and hostile and even more tribal in their outlooks? Well, if that's their goal, give 'em an A. But if they actually want to do something other than create even more division while calling a lot of attention to themselves, an F pretty much covers their effort. However, I expect the habit of grading students on a curve will mostly prevent that from happening in the end.
It's always been easier to be a part of the mob than to think for oneself, especially in the digital age, where nearly all choices have become binary: yes / no; right / wrong; us / them. Anything more than that in the way of nuance or gradation - especially in the world of politics - like a desire to find common ground and apply common sense instead of simply finding another battle ground on which to fight and become part of a mob has been pretty much discarded as a way to accomplish...anything. Anything at all.
Does a spectrum exist between protest and mob? If so, where do the women who descended upon Trump wearing pussy hats fit in? Protestors or mob? What about me individually? I watched and approved of this as a demonstration, though I was not vocal about it. This is as opposed to the ”Not My President” nonsense. That was when Trump was president seven years ago, and history books still record it. So my position was right then to say, ”No, the reality is that he is your President, and you must decide what to do about that.”
What about patriots? I do not believe a patriot can be a protestor. A group of patriots is not a mob but rather our armed forces.
Trump's attorney in his "hush money trial" said yesterday in court "There's nothing wrong with trying to influence an election. It's called democracy." No, that is called political warfare. Democracy is (supposed to be) giving the people the FACTS and letting them decide. Feeding the people an endless firehose of lies is called a con game. The real voter fraud isn't at the ballot box, it's in the voters' minds. May the best information warfare campaign win.
Meanwhile, Trump's North Carolina campaign rally on Saturday had to be cancelled due to bad weather. Take a hint, Donald. God is sick of your bullshit. He just wants you to shut the f up.
Also, just because whenever you walk into a room people say "Oh, Jesus" does NOT mean you ARE Jesus!
I'm very tired of ignorant generalizations about THE Ivy League. The Ivy League is more than Harvard and Columbia. Furthermore, most of the Ivy universities have ten thousand students or more. They didn't all turn out for the demonstrations. As for elitism - I was the first in my family to go to college and I attended Cornell University, known as the Cow College of the Ivy League because of its large Agriculture college. If I'm an elitist now, it's because of the stupidity and brutality of the nearly half of the electorate who support Trump even though he revealed himself from the very beginning of his first campaign. And, by the way, I'm an elderly white man on a fixed income.
Reading "Outflanking MTG on Faith" and the whole Posner piece makes me think there is something else going on with Johnson. I don't think it just a flipping of a moral switch. It feels like the moves are part of some sort of long play to counter, as Speaker Johnson says, the Democrats' "crazy woke agenda".
The first high speed rail is going between LA and Vegas. I guess it's better than private jets, but I am beyond fed-up with everything in this country being for the rich. If you don't want an angry mob of citizens, then take care of them.
These Ivy League and other "elite" university students supporting Hamas remind me of the Iranian students in 1979 who aided and abetted taking American hostages. Both groups are sworn enemies of America.
Unrest does not necessarily equate violence.
One additional comment, if I may. RE: The mob.
I totally agree with Bill about rejecting the mob, always and everywhere. In the specific instance of the current right-wing attacks on the campus unrest in New York, however, I think caution is important. Academic institutions are a special case. One of the first things authoritarians do when they come to power is seize control of the universities and purge their faculties and students. As Jonathan Last has been saying frequently (most recently yesterday), our country is in the midst of an authoritarian attempt. As we've seen most clearly in Florida, academic freedom is in the MAGA cross-hairs. This is what the extremist school-board takeovers and book bans are about nationwide.
Make no mistake: academic institutions have a major responsibility to ensure that they themselves respect and protect the liberty they claim as their right. If the university has a mob within, it must give the mob no quarter.
Bill:
Your words certainly apply to any mob riled to immediate, violent action. But I’m not sure you adequately delineated between such a mob and non-violent throngs simply pleading for change. Responsible citizens can disagree about “encampments” in common areas of college campuses. I’m no young firebrand, yet I remain skeptical of the need for the police response to the demonstrators at Columbia.
So much for "What's so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding?" Certainly not gonna find any of that on today's elite college campuses. If anything, the apparent prevalence of intellectual laziness continues to fuel the inability or unwillingness to delve deeper than a child's inflatable swimming pool. At this rate, the ascent of man may find the caveman back on top...
Bill - your comments on the ever-present dangers of the "mob spirit" are spot-on. Thank you for the reminder of what really matters.
The David McCormick story is quite revealing about the cul-de-sac to which Republican politics have led the party. Because of Citizens United, the institutional GOP has to favor wealthy, self-funding candidates, particularly for statewide offices in states with expensive urban media markets (Pennsylvania has two). Because of trump, however, those candidates have to masquerade as avatars of the MAGA base stereotype: rural, church-going, bootstrapping populists who succeeded despite their education. The disconnect is so enormous that bogus claims become inevitable--and the political hypocrisy is in plain sight.
I'm pretty sure healthy monarchists and aristocrats reject the mob, too. Just saying.
I was very disappointed when the late Shah of Iran didn't order his troops to fire on mass demonstrations by Khomeini supporters. But for all I know, the army might have turned its guns on him instead. Eh, he was kind of a faux-Shah anyway.
RE: Reject the Mob
There was a time in this country when numbers of people both large and small could - and would - gather to peacefully protest injustice, and act like people instead of a damned mob while doing so, from a few young people sitting at a drug store lunch counter to hundreds peacefully walking over the Edmund Pettis bridge, all subjecting themselves to possible harm for calmly and peacefully exercising their right to protest injustices right here at home. Had *they* been the ones screaming hateful and stupid rhetoric, had *they* been the ones engaging in threatening and even violent behavior, how far would their cause have been propelled by those actions? How many minds would have been changed in a positive way, and how much positive change would have come from that?
While supposedly learning to be independent thinkers, the best these college kids can seem to muster is a bad case of monkey see, monkey do from campus to campus. But is that really their fault or the fault of some of their learned professors who are supposed to be educating them? Or is it that their education is happening on their smart phones from social media as much as it is in the classroom. Hard to tell the diff I'd say.
And what the fuck are they learning? How to be loud, hateful and hostile and even more tribal in their outlooks? Well, if that's their goal, give 'em an A. But if they actually want to do something other than create even more division while calling a lot of attention to themselves, an F pretty much covers their effort. However, I expect the habit of grading students on a curve will mostly prevent that from happening in the end.
It's always been easier to be a part of the mob than to think for oneself, especially in the digital age, where nearly all choices have become binary: yes / no; right / wrong; us / them. Anything more than that in the way of nuance or gradation - especially in the world of politics - like a desire to find common ground and apply common sense instead of simply finding another battle ground on which to fight and become part of a mob has been pretty much discarded as a way to accomplish...anything. Anything at all.
Does a spectrum exist between protest and mob? If so, where do the women who descended upon Trump wearing pussy hats fit in? Protestors or mob? What about me individually? I watched and approved of this as a demonstration, though I was not vocal about it. This is as opposed to the ”Not My President” nonsense. That was when Trump was president seven years ago, and history books still record it. So my position was right then to say, ”No, the reality is that he is your President, and you must decide what to do about that.”
What about patriots? I do not believe a patriot can be a protestor. A group of patriots is not a mob but rather our armed forces.
Trump's attorney in his "hush money trial" said yesterday in court "There's nothing wrong with trying to influence an election. It's called democracy." No, that is called political warfare. Democracy is (supposed to be) giving the people the FACTS and letting them decide. Feeding the people an endless firehose of lies is called a con game. The real voter fraud isn't at the ballot box, it's in the voters' minds. May the best information warfare campaign win.
Meanwhile, Trump's North Carolina campaign rally on Saturday had to be cancelled due to bad weather. Take a hint, Donald. God is sick of your bullshit. He just wants you to shut the f up.
Also, just because whenever you walk into a room people say "Oh, Jesus" does NOT mean you ARE Jesus!
#SaveAmerica #NeverMAGA #NeverFraudsters #NeverConMen
Exactly
Our founding Fathers (read James Madison) were equally fearful if King Mob and the King. Perhaps we are now getting both.