#and free speech for my mass media one
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I have so many writing assignments due by Monday, my brain has decided to not let me focus on them. I'm just gonna try to get part of my history assessment done, then I'll work through my mass media one.
#college#homework#online classes#assignmentwriting#Just gotta write a paper explaining economic expansion for my history one#and free speech for my mass media one#fuck my life
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One of the section leaders for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed. “I’m not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should,” the 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month. “I’d be happy if Biden was dead.” He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and that Biden is not only complicit but responsible for it. “I’m not calling for a vigilante to do it,” he later clarified, “but I’m saying he is guilty of mass murder and should be treated in the same way that a terrorist with darker skin would be (and we all know terrorists with dark skin are typically bombed and drone striked by American planes).” El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). When you ask him what his cause is, he answers: “Peace.”
I switched to a different computer-science section.
Israel is 7,500 miles away from Stanford’s campus, where I am a sophomore. But the Hamas invasion and the Israeli counterinvasion have fractured my university, a place typically less focused on geopolitics than on venture-capital funding for the latest dorm-based tech start-up. Few students would call for Biden’s head—I think—but many of the same young people who say they want peace in Gaza don’t seem to realize that they are in fact advocating for violence. Extremism has swept through classrooms and dorms, and it is becoming normal for students to be harassed and intimidated for their faith, heritage, or appearance—they have been called perpetrators of genocide for wearing kippahs, and accused of supporting terrorism for wearing keffiyehs. The extremism and anti-Semitism at Ivy League universities on the East Coast have attracted so much media and congressional attention that two Ivy presidents have lost their jobs. But few people seem to have noticed the culture war that has taken over our California campus.
For four months, two rival groups of protesters, separated by a narrow bike path, faced off on Stanford’s palm-covered grounds. The “Sit-In to Stop Genocide” encampment was erected by students in mid-October, even before Israeli troops had crossed into Gaza, to demand that the university divest from Israel and condemn its behavior. Posters were hung equating Hamas with Ukraine and Nelson Mandela. Across from the sit-in, a rival group of pro-Israel students eventually set up the “Blue and White Tent” to provide, as one activist put it, a “safe space” to “be a proud Jew on campus.” Soon it became the center of its own cluster of tents, with photos of Hamas’s victims sitting opposite the rubble-ridden images of Gaza and a long (and incomplete) list of the names of slain Palestinians displayed by the students at the sit-in.
Some days the dueling encampments would host only a few people each, but on a sunny weekday afternoon, there could be dozens. Most of the time, the groups tolerated each other. But not always. Students on both sides were reportedly spit on and yelled at, and had their belongings destroyed. (The perpetrators in many cases seemed to be adults who weren’t affiliated with Stanford, a security guard told me.) The university put in place round-the-clock security, but when something actually happened, no one quite knew what to do.
Stanford has a policy barring overnight camping, but for months didn’t enforce it, “out of a desire to support the peaceful expression of free speech in the ways that students choose to exercise that expression”—and, the administration told alumni, because the university feared that confronting the students would only make the conflict worse. When the school finally said the tents had to go last month, enormous protests against the university administration, and against Israel, followed.
“We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” students chanted, a slogan advocating that Israel be dismantled and replaced by a single Arab nation. Palestinian flags flew alongside bright “Welcome!” banners left over from new-student orientation. A young woman gave a speech that seemed to capture the sense of urgency and power that so many students here feel. “We are Stanford University!” she shouted. “We control things!”
“We’ve had protests in the past,” Richard Saller, the university’s interim president, told me in November—about the environment, and apartheid, and Vietnam. But they didn’t pit “students against each other” the way that this conflict has.
I’ve spoken with Saller, a scholar of Roman history, a few times over the past six months in my capacity as a student journalist. We first met in September, a few weeks into his tenure. His predecessor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had resigned as president after my reporting for The Stanford Daily exposed misconduct in his academic research. (Tessier-Lavigne had failed to retract papers with faked data over the course of 20 years. In his resignation statement, he denied allegations of fraud and misconduct; a Stanford investigation determined that he had not personally manipulated data or ordered any manipulation but that he had repeatedly “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes” from his lab.)
In that first conversation, Saller told me that everyone was “eager to move on” from the Tessier-Lavigne scandal. He was cheerful and upbeat. He knew he wasn’t staying in the job long; he hadn’t even bothered to move into the recently vacated presidential manor. In any case, campus, at that time, was serene. Then, a week later, came October 7.
The attack was as clear a litmus test as one could imagine for the Middle East conflict. Hamas insurgents raided homes and a music festival with the goal of slaughtering as many civilians as possible. Some victims were raped and mutilated, several independent investigations found. Hundreds of hostages were taken into Gaza and many have been tortured.
This, of course, was bad. Saying this was bad does not negate or marginalize the abuses and suffering Palestinians have experienced in Gaza and elsewhere. Everyone, of every ideology, should be able to say that this was bad. But much of this campus failed that simple test.
Two days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Stanford released milquetoast statements marking the “moment of intense emotion” and declaring “deep concern” over “the crisis in Israel and Palestine.” The official statements did not use the words Hamas or violence.
The absence of a clear institutional response led some teachers to take matters into their own hands. During a mandatory freshman seminar on October 10, a lecturer named Ameer Loggins tossed out his lesson plan to tell students that the actions of the Palestinian “military force” had been justified, that Israelis were colonizers, and that the Holocaust had been overemphasized, according to interviews I conducted with students in the class. Loggins then asked the Jewish students to identify themselves. He instructed one of them to “stand up, face the window, and he kind of kicked away his chair,” a witness told me. Loggins described this as an effort to demonstrate Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. (Loggins did not reply to a request for comment; a spokesperson for Stanford said that there were “different recollections of the details regarding what happened” in the class.)
“We’re only in our third week of college, and we’re afraid to be here,” three students in the class wrote in an email that night to administrators. “This isn’t what Stanford was supposed to be.” The class Loggins taught is called COLLEGE, short for “Civic, Liberal, and Global Education,” and it is billed as an effort to develop “the skills that empower and enable us to live together.”
Loggins was suspended from teaching duties and an investigation was opened; this angered pro-Palestine activists, who organized a petition that garnered more than 1,700 signatures contesting the suspension. A pamphlet from the petitioners argued that Loggins’s behavior had not been out of bounds.
The day after the class, Stanford put out a statement written by Saller and Jenny Martinez, the university provost, more forcefully condemning the Hamas attack. Immediately, this new statement generated backlash.
Pro-Palestine activists complained about it during an event held the same day, the first of several “teach-ins” about the conflict. Students gathered in one of Stanford’s dorms to “bear witness to the struggles of decolonization.” The grievances and pain shared by Palestinian students were real. They told of discrimination and violence, of frightened family members subjected to harsh conditions. But the most raucous reaction from the crowd was in response to a young woman who said, “You ask us, do we condemn Hamas? Fuck you!” She added that she was “so proud of my resistance.”
David Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature with a focus on postcolonial studies, also spoke at the teach-in, explaining to the crowd that “European settlers” had come to “replace” Palestine’s “native population.”
Palumbo-Liu is known as an intelligent and supportive professor, and is popular among students, who call him by his initials, DPL. I wanted to ask him about his involvement in the teach-in, so we met one day in a café a few hundred feet away from the tents. I asked if he could elaborate on what he’d said at the event about Palestine’s native population. He was happy to expand: This was “one of those discussions that could go on forever. Like, who is actually native? At what point does nativism lapse, right? Well, you haven’t been native for X number of years, so …” In the end, he said, “you have two people who both feel they have a claim to the land,” and “they have to live together. Both sides have to cede something.”
The struggle at Stanford, he told me, “is to find a way in which open discussions can be had that allow people to disagree.” It’s true that Stanford has utterly failed in its efforts to encourage productive dialogue. But I still found it hard to reconcile DPL’s words with his public statements on Israel, which he’d recently said on Facebook should be “the most hated nation in the world.” He also wrote: “When Zionists say they don’t feel ‘safe’ on campus, I’ve come to see that as they no longer feel immune to criticism of Israel.” He continued: “Well as the saying goes, get used to it.”
Zionists, and indeed Jewish students of all political beliefs, have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets. At least one was told he was a “dirty Jew.” At least twice, mezuzahs have been ripped from students’ doors, and swastikas have been drawn in dorms. Arab and Muslim students also face alarming threats. The computer-science section leader, El Boudali, a pro-Palestine activist, told me he felt “safe personally,” but knew others who did not: “Some people have reported feeling like they’re followed, especially women who wear the hijab.”
In a remarkably short period of time, aggression and abuse have become commonplace, an accepted part of campus activism. In January, Jewish students organized an event dedicated to ameliorating anti-Semitism. It marked one of Saller’s first public appearances in the new year. Its topic seemed uncontroversial, and I thought it would generate little backlash.
Protests began before the panel discussion even started, with activists lining the stairs leading to the auditorium. During the event they drowned out the panelists, one of whom was Israel’s special envoy for combating anti-Semitism, by demanding a cease-fire. After participants began cycling out into the dark, things got ugly.
Activists, their faces covered by keffiyehs or medical masks, confronted attendees. “Go back to Brooklyn!” a young woman shouted at Jewish students. One protester, who emerged as the leader of the group, said that she and her compatriots would “take all of your places and ensure Israel falls.” She told attendees to get “off our fucking campus” and launched into conspiracy theories about Jews being involved in “child trafficking.” As a rabbi tried to leave the event, protesters pursued him, chanting, “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”
At one point, some members of the group turned on a few Stanford employees, including another rabbi, an imam, and a chaplain, telling them, “We know your names and we know where you work.” The ringleader added: “And we’ll soon find out where you live.” The religious leaders formed a protective barrier in front of the Jewish students. The rabbi and the imam appeared to be crying.
Saller avoided the protest by leaving through another door. Early that morning, his private residence had been vandalized. Protesters frequently tell him he “can’t hide” and shout him down. “We charge you with genocide!” they chant, demanding that Stanford divest from Israel. (When asked whether Stanford actually invested in Israel, a spokesperson replied that, beyond small exposures from passive funds that track indexes such as the S&P 500, the university’s endowment “has no direct holdings in Israeli companies, or direct holdings in defense contractors.”)
When the university finally said the protest tents had to be removed, students responded by accusing Saller of suppressing their right to free speech. This is probably the last charge he expected to face. Saller once served as provost at the University of Chicago, which is known for holding itself to a position of strict institutional neutrality so that its students can freely explore ideas for themselves. Saller has a lifelong belief in First Amendment rights. But that conviction in impartial college governance does not align with Stanford’s behavior in recent years. Despite the fact that many students seemed largely uninterested in the headlines before this year, Stanford’s administrative leadership has often taken positions on political issues and events, such as the Paris climate conference and the murder of George Floyd. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Stanford’s Hoover Tower was lit up in blue and yellow, and the school released a statement in solidarity.
When we first met, a week before October 7, I asked Saller about this. Did Stanford have a moral duty to denounce the war in Ukraine, for example, or the ethnic cleansing of Uyghur Muslims in China? “On international political issues, no,” he said. “That’s not a responsibility for the university as a whole, as an institution.”
But when Saller tried to apply his convictions on neutrality for the first time as president, dozens of faculty members condemned the response, many pro-Israel alumni were outraged, donors had private discussions about pulling funding, and an Israeli university sent an open letter to Saller and Martinez saying, “Stanford’s administration has failed us.” The initial statement had tried to make clear that the school’s policy was not Israel-specific: It noted that the university would not take a position on the turmoil in Nagorno-Karabakh (where Armenians are undergoing ethnic cleansing) either. But the message didn’t get through.
Saller had to beat an awkward retreat or risk the exact sort of public humiliation that he, as caretaker president, had presumably been hired to avoid. He came up with a compromise that landed somewhere in the middle: an unequivocal condemnation of Hamas’s “intolerable atrocities” paired with a statement making clear that Stanford would commit to institutional neutrality going forward.
“The events in Israel and Gaza this week have affected and engaged large numbers of students on our campus in ways that many other events have not,” the statement read. “This is why we feel compelled to both address the impact of these events on our campus and to explain why our general policy of not issuing statements about news events not directly connected to campus has limited the breadth of our comments thus far, and why you should not expect frequent commentary from us in the future.”
I asked Saller why he had changed tack on Israel and not on Nagorno-Karabakh. “We don’t feel as if we should be making statements on every war crime and atrocity,” he told me. This felt like a statement in and of itself.
In making such decisions, Saller works closely with Martinez, Stanford’s provost. I happened to interview her, too, a few days before October 7, not long after she’d been appointed. When I asked about her hopes for the job, she said that a “priority is ensuring an environment in which free speech and academic freedom are preserved.”
We talked about the so-called Leonard Law—a provision unique to California that requires private universities to be governed by the same First Amendment protections as public ones. This restricts what Stanford can do in terms of penalizing speech, putting it in a stricter bind than Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, or any of the other elite private institutions that have more latitude to set the standards for their campus (whether or not they have done so).
So I was surprised when, in December, the university announced that abstract calls for genocide “clearly violate Stanford’s Fundamental Standard, the code of conduct for all students at the university.” The statement was a response to the outrage following the congressional testimony of three university presidents—outrage that eventually led to the resignation of two of them, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill. Gay and Magill, who had both previously held positions at Stanford, did not commit to punishing calls for the genocide of Jews.
Experts told me that Stanford’s policy is impossible to enforce—and Saller himself acknowledged as much in our March interview.
“Liz Magill is a good friend,” Saller told me, adding, “Having watched what happened at Harvard and Penn, it seemed prudent” to publicly state that Stanford rejected calls for genocide. But saying that those calls violate the code of conduct “is not the same thing as to say that we could actually punish it.”
Stanford’s leaders seem to be trying their best while adapting to the situation in real time. But the muddled messaging has created a policy of neutrality that does not feel neutral at all.
When we met back in November, I tried to get Saller to open up about his experience running an institution in turmoil. What’s it like to know that so many students seem to believe that he—a mild-mannered 71-year-old classicist who swing-dances with his anthropologist wife—is a warmonger? Saller was more candid than I expected—perhaps more candid than any prominent university president has been yet. We sat in the same conference room as we had in September. The weather hadn’t really changed. Yet I felt like I was sitting in front of a different person. He was hunched over and looked exhausted, and his voice broke when he talked about the loss of life in Gaza and Israel and “the fact that we’re caught up in it.” A capable administrator with decades of experience, Saller seemed almost at a loss. “It’s been a kind of roller coaster, to be honest.”
He said he hadn’t anticipated the deluge of the emails “blaming me for lack of moral courage.” Anything the university says seems bound to be wrong: “If I say that our position is that we grieve over the loss of innocent lives, that in itself will draw some hostile reactions.”
“I find that really difficult to navigate,” he said with a sigh.
By March, it seemed that his views had solidified. He said he knew he was “a target,” but he was not going to be pushed into issuing any more statements. The continuing crisis seems to have granted him new insight. “I am certain that whatever I say will not have any material effect on the war in Gaza.” It’s hard to argue with that.
People tend to blame the campus wars on two villains: dithering administrators and radical student activists. But colleges have always had dithering administrators and radical student activists. To my mind, it’s the average students who have changed.
Elite universities attract a certain kind of student: the overachieving striver who has won all the right accolades for all the right activities. Is it such a surprise that the kids who are trained in the constant pursuit of perfect scores think they have to look at the world like a series of multiple-choice questions, with clearly right or wrong answers? Or that they think they can gamify a political cause in the same way they ace a standardized test?
Everyone knows that the only reliable way to get into a school like Stanford is to be really good at looking really good. Now that they’re here, students know that one easy way to keep looking good is to side with the majority of protesters, and condemn Israel.
It’s not that there isn’t real anger and anxiety over what is happening in Gaza—there is, and justifiably so. I know that among the protesters are many people who are deeply connected to this issue. But they are not the majority. What really activates the crowds now seems less a principled devotion to Palestine or to pacifism than a desire for collective action, to fit in by embracing the fashionable cause of the moment—as if a centuries-old conflict in which both sides have stolen and killed could ever be a simple matter of right and wrong. In their haste to exhibit moral righteousness, many of the least informed protesters end up being the loudest and most uncompromising.
Today’s students grew up in the Trump era, in which violent rhetoric has become a normal part of political discourse and activism is as easy as reposting an infographic. Many young people have come to feel that being angry is enough to foment change. Furious at the world’s injustices and desperate for a simple way to express that fury, they don’t seem interested in any form of engagement more nuanced than backing a pure protagonist and denouncing an evil enemy. They don’t, always, seem that concerned with the truth.
At the protest last month to prevent the removal of the sit-in, an activist in a pink Women’s March “pussy hat” shouted that no rape was committed by Hamas on October 7. “There hasn’t been proof of these rape accusations,” a student told me in a separate conversation, criticizing the Blue and White Tent for spreading what he considered to be misinformation about sexual violence. (In March, a United Nations report found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence,” including “rape and gang rape,” occurred in multiple locations on October 7, as well as “clear and convincing information” on the “rape and sexualized torture” of hostages.) “The level of propaganda” surrounding Hamas, he told me, “is just unbelievable.”
The real story at Stanford is not about the malicious actors who endorse sexual assault and murder as forms of resistance, but about those who passively enable them because they believe their side can do no wrong. You don’t have to understand what you’re arguing for in order to argue for it. You don’t have to be able to name the river or the sea under discussion to chant “From the river to the sea.” This kind of obliviousness explains how one of my friends, a gay activist, can justify Hamas’s actions, even though it would have the two of us—an outspoken queer person and a Jewish reporter—killed in a heartbeat. A similar mentality can exist on the other side: I have heard students insist on the absolute righteousness of Israel yet seem uninterested in learning anything about what life is like in Gaza.
I’m familiar with the pull of achievement culture—after all, I’m a product of the same system. I fell in love with Stanford as a 7-year-old, lying on the floor of an East Coast library and picturing all the cool technology those West Coast geniuses were dreaming up. I cried when I was accepted; I spent the next few months scrolling through the course catalog, giddy with anticipation. I wanted to learn everything.
I learned more than I expected. Within my first week here, someone asked me: “Why are all Jews so rich?” In 2016, when Stanford’s undergraduate senate had debated a resolution against anti-Semitism, one of its members argued that the idea of “Jews controlling the media, economy, government, and other societal institutions” represented “a very valid discussion.” (He apologized, and the resolution passed.) In my dorm last year, a student discussed being Jewish and awoke the next day to swastikas and a portrait of Hitler affixed to his door.
I grew up secularly, with no strong affiliation to Jewish culture. When I found out as a teenager that some of my ancestors had hidden their identity from their children and that dozens of my relatives had died in the Holocaust (something no living member of my family had known), I felt the barest tremor of identity. After I saw so many people I know cheering after October 7, I felt something stronger stir. I know others have experienced something similar. Even a professor texted me to say that she felt Jewish in a way she never had before.
But my frustration with the conflict on campus has little to do with my own identity. Across the many conversations and hours of formal interviews I conducted for this article, I’ve encountered a persistent anti-intellectual streak. I’ve watched many of my classmates treat death so cavalierly that they can protest as a pregame to a party. Indeed, two parties at Stanford were reported to the university this fall for allegedly making people say “Fuck Israel” or “Free Palestine” to get in the door. A spokesperson for the university said it was “unable to confirm the facts of what occurred,” but that it had “met with students involved in both parties to make clear that Stanford’s nondiscrimination policy applies to parties.” As a friend emailed me not long ago: “A place that was supposed to be a sanctuary from such unreason has become a factory for it.”
Readers may be tempted to discount the conduct displayed at Stanford. After all, the thinking goes, these are privileged kids doing what they always do: embracing faux-radicalism in college before taking jobs in fintech or consulting. These students, some might say, aren’t representative of America.
And yet they are representative of something: of the conduct many of the most accomplished students in my generation have accepted as tolerable, and what that means for the future of our country. I admire activism. We need people willing to protest what they see as wrong and take on entrenched systems of repression. But we also need to read, learn, discuss, accept the existence of nuance, embrace diversity of thought, and hold our own allies to high standards. More than ever, we need universities to teach young people how to do all of this.
For so long, Stanford’s physical standoff seemed intractable. Then, in early February, a storm swept in, and the natural world dictated its own conclusion.
Heavy rains flooded campus. For hours, the students battled to save their tents. The sit-in activists used sandbags and anything else they could find to hold back the water—at one point, David Palumbo-Liu, the professor, told me he stood in the lashing downpour to anchor one of the sit-in’s tents with his own body. When the storm hit, many of the Jewish activists had been attending a discussion on anti-Semitism. They raced back and struggled to salvage the Blue and White Tent, but it was too late—the wind had ripped it out of the ground.
The next day, the weary Jewish protesters returned to discover that their space had been taken.
A new collection of tents had been set up by El Boudali, the pro-Palestine activist, and a dozen friends. He said they were there to protest Islamophobia and to teach about Islam and jihad, and that they were a separate entity from the Sit-In to Stop Genocide, though I observed students cycling between the tents. Palestinian flags now flew from the bookstore to the quad.
Administrators told me they’d quickly informed El Boudali and his allies that the space had been reserved by the Jewish advocates, and offered to help move them to a different location. But the protesters told me they had no intention of going. (El Boudali later said that they did not take over the entire space, and would have been “happy to exist side by side, but they wanted to kick us off entirely from that lawn.”)
When it was clear that the area where they’d set up their tents would not be ceded back to the pro-Israel group willingly, Stanford changed course and decided to clear everyone out in one fell swoop. On February 8, school officials ordered all students to vacate the plaza overnight. The university was finally going to enforce its rule prohibiting people from sleeping outside on campus and requiring the removal of belongings from the plaza between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. The order cited the danger posed by the storm as a justification for changing course and, probably hoping to avoid allegations of bias, described the decision as “viewpoint-neutral.”
That didn’t work.
About a week of protests, led by the sit-in organizers, followed. Chants were chanted. More demands for a “river to the sea” solution to the Israel problem were made. A friend boasted to me about her willingness to be arrested. Stanford sent a handful of staff members, who stood near balloons left over from an event earlier in the day. They were there, one of them told me, to “make students feel supported and safe.”
In the end, Saller and Martinez agreed to talk with the leaders of the sit-in about their demands to divest the university and condemn Israel, under the proviso that the activists comply with Stanford’s anti-camping guidelines “regardless of the outcome of discussions.” Eight days after they were first instructed to leave, 120 days after setting up camp, the sit-in protesters slept in their own beds. In defiance of the university’s instructions, they left behind their tents. But sometime in the very early hours of the morning, law-enforcement officers confiscated the structures. The area was cordoned off without any violence and the plaza filled once more with electric skateboards and farmers’ markets.
The conflict continues in its own way. Saller was just shouted down by protesters chanting “No peace on stolen land” at a Family Weekend event, and protesters later displayed an effigy of him covered in blood. Students still feel tense; Saller still seems worried. He told me that the university is planning to change all manner of things—residential-assistant training, new-student orientation, even the acceptance letters that students receive—in hopes of fostering a culture of greater tolerance. But no campus edict or panel discussion can address a problem that is so much bigger than our university.
At one rally last fall, a speaker expressed disillusionment about the power of “peaceful resistance” on college campuses. “What is there left to do but to take up arms?” The crowd cheered as he said Israel must be destroyed. But what would happen to its citizens? I’d prefer to believe that most protesters chanting “Palestine is Arab” and shouting that we must “smash the Zionist settler state” don’t actually think Jews should be killed en masse. But can one truly be so ignorant as to advocate widespread violence in the name of peace?
When the world is rendered in black-and-white—portrayed as a simple fight between colonizer and colonized—the answer is yes. Solutions, by this logic, are absolute: Israel or Palestine, nothing in between. Either you support liberation of the oppressed or you support genocide. Either Stanford is all good or all bad; all in favor of free speech or all authoritarian; all anti-Semitic or all Islamophobic.
At January’s anti-anti-Semitism event, I watched an exchange between a Jewish attendee and a protester from a few feet away. “Are you pro-Palestine?” the protester asked.
“Yes,” the attendee responded, and he went on to describe his disgust with the human-rights abuses Palestinians have faced for years.
“But are you a Zionist?”
“Yes.”
“Then we are enemies.”
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What are your favorite brushes?
Ha, you timed that well as I was considering making a 'what tools do I use' post. information wants to be free and all of that ~
Before I get into specific brushes, I need to mention hardware. Two years ago i switched permanently to linux (Ubuntu distro), via a system76 laptop. Linux isn't for the tech-fainthearted, but if you hav a passion for playing with computers and are feeling increasingly constricted with the subscription BS that mac/win is pushing, consider giving it a trial run.
Krita is an open-sourced free paint/vector program that's available on all major OS's (win/mac/linux), but is by far the best one for linux. Frankly, I adore Krita; it reminds me of the best of paint tool SAI way back in the day, a little of photoshop CS2, and I just discovered in the past two weeks it's got some deceptively powerful vector tools for speech bubbles and comics. open source programs used to be pretty pathetic compared to "professional" ones but the gap between krita and say, CSP is pretty nil.
Now to talk brushes: I uploaded a slightly older version of my go-to brushes here on mediafire, some which have been slightly tweaked from krita defaults. there's a solid pen one, a halftone brush, and some watercolor ones.
however, I discovered these brushes (thanks to @am-herrington) a few months ago and am convinced the linked newer brushes are going to make everything else I have obsolete - the natural/textural inking is just that good. tl;dr - just grab these.
some other odds and ends to my process: i could not draw without the hydrus network which is essentially a booru-esque media organizing program. stores gifs, images, can mass-download images, and has a robust tagging ability. taco's drawing book is one of the one I'll also reliably flip through when my brain's trying to figure out a piece of tricky anatomy. lastly, blambot is my trusted go-to font store when I'm in need of a manga/comics related font; there's some very generous pricing and freebies for indie comics.
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Schrödinger’s genocide
In Gaza, as in Bosnia, a genocide is denied only to be glorified.
Bosnians have experience with genocide. Not just the signs of it coming. Not just the fact of it happening. But also this strange phenomenon we call “Schrödinger’s genocide”: the simultaneous glorification and denial of genocide. There is a cruel dance between the systematic relativisation of the legal qualification of genocide and the continuous pursuit of genocidal politics and its results.
Despite the verdicts issued by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), we have not healed. The ethnically cleansed Republika Srpska still stands as the triumph of the Serb genocidal project.
Bosnian history has demonstrated the futility of the “never again” mantra and Gaza is now confirming it. The genocide of my people was accompanied by the same rhetoric that Israeli officials now espouse: a genocidal army is the only thing standing between Europe and “Muslim barbarians”, they claim.
I have often lamented how the Jews, who struggled for years after World War II to globalise the knowledge about the Holocaust, started facing serious Holocaust denial as the number of living survivors started to dwindle. Swedish survivors Hédi Fried (98) and Emerich Roth (97) died recently – a major loss for the Jewish community and those working to uphold the “never again” vow.
By contrast, Bosnians are experiencing genocide denial while most of us, survivors, are still alive. Genocide scholar Gregory Stanton argued there are 10 stages of genocide, the last one being denial, but we are effectively experiencing the 11th phase: glorification and triumphalism.
There are people who not only invest resources into historical revisionism of the genocide they committed in the 1990s, but are de facto threatening to repeat it. The Bosnian “final solution” was not properly finalised, they often say. In my home city, Banja Luka, the administrative capital of Republika Srpska, you can buy T-shirts with the faces of war criminals Radovan Karadžić, Ratko Mladić, Biljana Plavšić, and Slobodan Milošević. And Russian President Vladimir Putin, too.
In the case of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has already characterised as a plausible genocide, we see denial among Israeli politicians and propagandists while it is still going on. There is even more denial in Western countries with histories of horrific genocides, especially Germany.
Western governments and media are engaged in a systematic cover-up of Israeli war crimes and bullying of those who try to expose them. Laws are proposed on short notice that aim to criminalise free speech and criticism of Israel.
At the same time, the glorification of this genocide is broadcast in real time on social media. Accounts with thousands of followers post footage of Israeli soldiers committing war crimes. People want credit even for discrediting content. The Palestinians have been dehumanised to such an extent that their executioners are deeply convinced that their violent acts are not just morally justified but also noble, and they must take pride in their “good work”.
The Serb authorities did much to hide the concentration camps from foreign journalists. They tried to cover up massacres, moving mass graves multiple times. By contrast, the hubris of Israeli soldiers drives them to produce countless images and videos of their work: endearing messages to loved ones from sites of destruction, the mocking of everything Palestinian, proud repetitions of the genocidal discourse.
[keep reading]
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🚨🚨🚨THE ORGANIZERS THAT DISRUPTED PRESIDENT BIDEN’S SPEECH AT MOTHER EMANUEL AME CHURCH IN CHARLESTON, TO DEMAND A CEASE FIRE ON GAZA, HAVE RELEASED A STATEMENT WITH DEMANDS. (amplifying the statement)🚨🚨🚨
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact: Marcus McDonald
UPDATED STATEMENT ON PRES. BIDEN CAMPAIGN DISRUPTION IN CHARLESTON
PRESENTED BY FREE PALESTINE CHARLESTON
JAN 8, 1:00 PM EST, CHARLESTON - Six members of Free Palestine Charleston on Jan. 8 participated in a disruption to call for a ceasefire in Gaza during Pres. Joe Biden's speech at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. A crowd of over 100 people simultaneously gathered at a permitted event in Marion Square to show our support for Palestine.
Biden's refusal to call for a ceasefire, ongoing arms transfers to Israel without Congress approval, and failure to acknowledge that Israel's actions constitute genocide as outlined in the U.N. Genocide Convention a treaty that the United States is a signatory to) demonstrate that he is more than complicit in genocide; he is an active participant.
Free Palestine CHS recognizes the delicate nature of this action given the Mother Emanuel AME massacre less than a decade prior and the sanctity of the church itself to many members of the community. The nonviolent demonstration was planned by local Black and Palestinian leaders in consultation with members of the AME community to respect the church's history.
We decided the best way to honor the church's mass shooting victims and its long history as a site of civil disobedience would be to wait until Pres. Joe Biden began his speech to disrupt, rather than detracting from any of the church's esteemed Black elders or devaluing a place of worship.
But to be clear, this was not a church service; it was a political campaign event.
Several Black congregants associated with Free Palestine CHS were also singled out and denied entry to the event, including lead Charleston Black Lives Matter organizer Marcus McDonald.
"We find it so disrespectful that President Biden has come to the place of a massacre while actively benefiting and promoting a genocide and a massacre in Gaza," McDonald said.
"My church missed the mark. It missed the call of Jesus to choose the oppressed the orphan, the widow, and the refugee over the empire. President Biden has no place speaking from our pulpit to invoke the lives lost at Emanuel while simultaneously ignoring the thousands of lives lost in Gaza, the bombing of Bethlehem, and apartheid in the Holy Land. I stand in the heritage of protest that birthed the AME church to issue the only righteous call: to "study war no more." We are not free until Palestine is free," said Pastor Darien Jones of Moncks Corner AME.
As residents and community members of Charleston, we know that all struggles for liberation are intertwined. Atrocities committed against Black folks in the U.S. and Palestinians in Gaza have always belonged to the same system of violence. Bishop Samuel L. Green spoke of Malcolm X and James Baldwin as two righteous leaders in his introductory remarks — both famously strongly supported Palestine for their entire lives and careers as civil right activists.
So, as one of our members said to begin the disruption: "If you really care about the lives lost here, then you should honor the lives lost and call for a ceasefire in Palestine!"
We must pressure our elected officials at the local, state and federal levels. But our work doesn't begin or end with a ceasefire. We believe liberation means freedom and justice for all those living in occupied Palestine.
We believe in humanity and joy — not only an end to this horrific genocide, but a world in which Palestinians can grow old alongside their friends and family. We acknowledge the absurdity of having to even make this ask.
Our demands consist of the following:
I. An end to the deadly exchange - the transfer and manufacturing of weapons among the Israeli government, the United States government and oppressive government regimes throughout the world. Among the exchange 2022 program participants was Deputy Chief Dustin Thompson, Operations Bureau Commander. Charleston Police
Department Charleston ex-chief of police, the late Luther Reynolds, participated in
2018. And former sheriff Al Cannon attended a similar summit in Israel in 2009. His trip cost $3,000 and was financed via "seized drug funds," the S.C. Post & Courier wrote.
2. An end to the normalization of Zionism and violence against Palestinians in every aspect of our lives, including but not limited to media narratives, institutional support, and government backing. Zionism is a political ideology, rooted in white supremacy and Western imperialism that promotes the belief in the establishment of a Jewish state on historic Palestinian land. Evangelical Zionism funds the majority of contributions to Israel and is one of the most powerful lobbies in politics.
3. Accountability for elected officials who actively support - and even praise - Israel's war crimes. Our State Treasurer recently signed a bond allotting $30 million of our tax dollars to further Israel's mass murder of Palestinian men, women and children.
We do not want our tax dollars supporting genocide!
4. An end to Elbit Systems, a facility manufacturing weapons the 1OF currently uses to commit its crimes against humanity, operating in Ladson, South Carolina. Elbit Systems, invested $35 million in the relocation and recently opened its 135,000 square foot plant in Ladson. It receives tax cuts for its investment: "A 2019 fiscal year report disclosed that companies' extra revenue diverted $423 million from public schools across the state, disproportionately low-income schools with mostly Black and brown students."
5. A Free Palestine.
We refuse to remain silent. Our peaceful act of disruption during Biden's speech - including our full compliance with US Secret Service agents - and the demonstration at Marion Square were committed to that end drawing attention to the horrors our elected officials want us to forget about, despite funding them with our tax dollars. Pres. Biden responded to our action with a vague mumbling about how he is negotiating with the Israeli government: we need more than empty promises and ambiguous words.
From Holy City to Holy City: Charleston demands a ceasefire, a free Palestine, and an end to Charleston taxpayer money funding Israel.
###
Free Palestine CHS is a multicultural, grassroots collective committed to an anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and anti-Zionist framework for Palestinian liberation. We believe in the dignity and sovereignty of all people in occupied Palestine. You can find out more about our work here: www.linktr.ee/freepalestinechs
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By: Theo Baker
Published: Mar 26, 2024
One of the section leaders for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed. “I’m not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should,” the 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month. “I’d be happy if Biden was dead.” He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and that Biden is not only complicit but responsible for it. “I’m not calling for a vigilante to do it,” he later clarified, “but I’m saying he is guilty of mass murder and should be treated in the same way that a terrorist with darker skin would be (and we all know terrorists with dark skin are typically bombed and drone striked by American planes).” El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). When you ask him what his cause is, he answers: “Peace.”
I switched to a different computer-science section.
Israel is 7,500 miles away from Stanford’s campus, where I am a sophomore. But the Hamas invasion and the Israeli counterinvasion have fractured my university, a place typically less focused on geopolitics than on venture-capital funding for the latest dorm-based tech start-up. Few students would call for Biden’s head—I think—but many of the same young people who say they want peace in Gaza don’t seem to realize that they are in fact advocating for violence. Extremism has swept through classrooms and dorms, and it is becoming normal for students to be harassed and intimidated for their faith, heritage, or appearance—they have been called perpetrators of genocide for wearing kippahs, and accused of supporting terrorism for wearing keffiyehs. The extremism and anti-Semitism at Ivy League universities on the East Coast have attracted so much media and congressional attention that two Ivy presidents have lost their jobs. But few people seem to have noticed the culture war that has taken over our California campus.
For four months, two rival groups of protesters, separated by a narrow bike path, faced off on Stanford’s palm-covered grounds. The “Sit-In to Stop Genocide” encampment was erected by students in mid-October, even before Israeli troops had crossed into Gaza, to demand that the university divest from Israel and condemn its behavior. Posters were hung equating Hamas with Ukraine and Nelson Mandela. Across from the sit-in, a rival group of pro-Israel students eventually set up the “Blue and White Tent” to provide, as one activist put it, a “safe space” to “be a proud Jew on campus.” Soon it became the center of its own cluster of tents, with photos of Hamas’s victims sitting opposite the rubble-ridden images of Gaza and a long (and incomplete) list of the names of slain Palestinians displayed by the students at the sit-in.
Some days the dueling encampments would host only a few people each, but on a sunny weekday afternoon, there could be dozens. Most of the time, the groups tolerated each other. But not always. Students on both sides were reportedly spit on and yelled at, and had their belongings destroyed. (The perpetrators in many cases seemed to be adults who weren’t affiliated with Stanford, a security guard told me.) The university put in place round-the-clock security, but when something actually happened, no one quite knew what to do.
Stanford has a policy barring overnight camping, but for months didn’t enforce it, “out of a desire to support the peaceful expression of free speech in the ways that students choose to exercise that expression”—and, the administration told alumni, because the university feared that confronting the students would only make the conflict worse. When the school finally said the tents had to go last month, enormous protests against the university administration, and against Israel, followed.
“We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” students chanted, a slogan advocating that Israel be dismantled and replaced by a single Arab nation. Palestinian flags flew alongside bright “Welcome!” banners left over from new-student orientation. A young woman gave a speech that seemed to capture the sense of urgency and power that so many students here feel. “We are Stanford University!” she shouted. “We control things!”
“We’ve had protests in the past,” Richard Saller, the university’s interim president, told me in November—about the environment, and apartheid, and Vietnam. But they didn’t pit “students against each other” the way that this conflict has.
I’ve spoken with Saller, a scholar of Roman history, a few times over the past six months in my capacity as a student journalist. We first met in September, a few weeks into his tenure. His predecessor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had resigned as president after my reporting for The Stanford Daily exposed misconduct in his academic research. (Tessier-Lavigne had failed to retract papers with faked data over the course of 20 years. In his resignation statement, he denied allegations of fraud and misconduct; a Stanford investigation determined that he had not personally manipulated data or ordered any manipulation but that he had repeatedly “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes” from his lab.)
In that first conversation, Saller told me that everyone was “eager to move on” from the Tessier-Lavigne scandal. He was cheerful and upbeat. He knew he wasn’t staying in the job long; he hadn’t even bothered to move into the recently vacated presidential manor. In any case, campus, at that time, was serene. Then, a week later, came October 7.
The attack was as clear a litmus test as one could imagine for the Middle East conflict. Hamas insurgents raided homes and a music festival with the goal of slaughtering as many civilians as possible. Some victims were raped and mutilated, several independent investigations found. Hundreds of hostages were taken into Gaza and many have been tortured.
This, of course, was bad. Saying this was bad does not negate or marginalize the abuses and suffering Palestinians have experienced in Gaza and elsewhere. Everyone, of every ideology, should be able to say that this was bad. But much of this campus failed that simple test.
Two days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Stanford released milquetoast statements marking the “moment of intense emotion” and declaring “deep concern” over “the crisis in Israel and Palestine.” The official statements did not use the words Hamas or violence.
The absence of a clear institutional response led some teachers to take matters into their own hands. During a mandatory freshman seminar on October 10, a lecturer named Ameer Loggins tossed out his lesson plan to tell students that the actions of the Palestinian “military force” had been justified, that Israelis were colonizers, and that the Holocaust had been overemphasized, according to interviews I conducted with students in the class. Loggins then asked the Jewish students to identify themselves. He instructed one of them to “stand up, face the window, and he kind of kicked away his chair,” a witness told me. Loggins described this as an effort to demonstrate Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. (Loggins did not reply to a request for comment; a spokesperson for Stanford said that there were “different recollections of the details regarding what happened” in the class.)
“We’re only in our third week of college, and we’re afraid to be here,” three students in the class wrote in an email that night to administrators. “This isn’t what Stanford was supposed to be.” The class Loggins taught is called COLLEGE, short for “Civic, Liberal, and Global Education,” and it is billed as an effort to develop “the skills that empower and enable us to live together.”
Loggins was suspended from teaching duties and an investigation was opened; this angered pro-Palestine activists, who organized a petition that garnered more than 1,700 signatures contesting the suspension. A pamphlet from the petitioners argued that Loggins’s behavior had not been out of bounds.
The day after the class, Stanford put out a statement written by Saller and Jenny Martinez, the university provost, more forcefully condemning the Hamas attack. Immediately, this new statement generated backlash.
Pro-Palestine activists complained about it during an event held the same day, the first of several “teach-ins” about the conflict. Students gathered in one of Stanford’s dorms to “bear witness to the struggles of decolonization.” The grievances and pain shared by Palestinian students were real. They told of discrimination and violence, of frightened family members subjected to harsh conditions. But the most raucous reaction from the crowd was in response to a young woman who said, “You ask us, do we condemn Hamas? Fuck you!” She added that she was “so proud of my resistance.”
David Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature with a focus on postcolonial studies, also spoke at the teach-in, explaining to the crowd that “European settlers” had come to “replace” Palestine’s “native population.”
Palumbo-Liu is known as an intelligent and supportive professor, and is popular among students, who call him by his initials, DPL. I wanted to ask him about his involvement in the teach-in, so we met one day in a café a few hundred feet away from the tents. I asked if he could elaborate on what he’d said at the event about Palestine’s native population. He was happy to expand: This was “one of those discussions that could go on forever. Like, who is actually native? At what point does nativism lapse, right? Well, you haven’t been native for X number of years, so …” In the end, he said, “you have two people who both feel they have a claim to the land,” and “they have to live together. Both sides have to cede something.”
The struggle at Stanford, he told me, “is to find a way in which open discussions can be had that allow people to disagree.” It’s true that Stanford has utterly failed in its efforts to encourage productive dialogue. But I still found it hard to reconcile DPL’s words with his public statements on Israel, which he’d recently said on Facebook should be “the most hated nation in the world.” He also wrote: “When Zionists say they don’t feel ‘safe’ on campus, I’ve come to see that as they no longer feel immune to criticism of Israel.” He continued: “Well as the saying goes, get used to it.”
Zionists, and indeed Jewish students of all political beliefs, have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets. At least one was told he was a “dirty Jew.” At least twice, mezuzahs have been ripped from students’ doors, and swastikas have been drawn in dorms. Arab and Muslim students also face alarming threats. The computer-science section leader, El Boudali, a pro-Palestine activist, told me he felt “safe personally,” but knew others who did not: “Some people have reported feeling like they’re followed, especially women who wear the hijab.”
In a remarkably short period of time, aggression and abuse have become commonplace, an accepted part of campus activism. In January, Jewish students organized an event dedicated to ameliorating anti-Semitism. It marked one of Saller’s first public appearances in the new year. Its topic seemed uncontroversial, and I thought it would generate little backlash.
Protests began before the panel discussion even started, with activists lining the stairs leading to the auditorium. During the event they drowned out the panelists, one of whom was Israel’s special envoy for combating anti-Semitism, by demanding a cease-fire. After participants began cycling out into the dark, things got ugly.
Activists, their faces covered by keffiyehs or medical masks, confronted attendees. “Go back to Brooklyn!” a young woman shouted at Jewish students. One protester, who emerged as the leader of the group, said that she and her compatriots would “take all of your places and ensure Israel falls.” She told attendees to get “off our fucking campus” and launched into conspiracy theories about Jews being involved in “child trafficking.” As a rabbi tried to leave the event, protesters pursued him, chanting, “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”
At one point, some members of the group turned on a few Stanford employees, including another rabbi, an imam, and a chaplain, telling them, “We know your names and we know where you work.” The ringleader added: “And we’ll soon find out where you live.” The religious leaders formed a protective barrier in front of the Jewish students. The rabbi and the imam appeared to be crying.
Saller avoided the protest by leaving through another door. Early that morning, his private residence had been vandalized. Protesters frequently tell him he “can’t hide” and shout him down. “We charge you with genocide!” they chant, demanding that Stanford divest from Israel. (When asked whether Stanford actually invested in Israel, a spokesperson replied that, beyond small exposures from passive funds that track indexes such as the S&P 500, the university’s endowment “has no direct holdings in Israeli companies, or direct holdings in defense contractors.”)
When the university finally said the protest tents had to be removed, students responded by accusing Saller of suppressing their right to free speech. This is probably the last charge he expected to face. Saller once served as provost at the University of Chicago, which is known for holding itself to a position of strict institutional neutrality so that its students can freely explore ideas for themselves. Saller has a lifelong belief in First Amendment rights. But that conviction in impartial college governance does not align with Stanford’s behavior in recent years. Despite the fact that many students seemed largely uninterested in the headlines before this year, Stanford’s administrative leadership has often taken positions on political issues and events, such as the Paris climate conference and the murder of George Floyd. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Stanford’s Hoover Tower was lit up in blue and yellow, and the school released a statement in solidarity.
When we first met, a week before October 7, I asked Saller about this. Did Stanford have a moral duty to denounce the war in Ukraine, for example, or the ethnic cleansing of Uyghur Muslims in China? “On international political issues, no,” he said. “That’s not a responsibility for the university as a whole, as an institution.”
But when Saller tried to apply his convictions on neutrality for the first time as president, dozens of faculty members condemned the response, many pro-Israel alumni were outraged, donors had private discussions about pulling funding, and an Israeli university sent an open letter to Saller and Martinez saying, “Stanford’s administration has failed us.” The initial statement had tried to make clear that the school’s policy was not Israel-specific: It noted that the university would not take a position on the turmoil in Nagorno-Karabakh (where Armenians are undergoing ethnic cleansing) either. But the message didn’t get through.
Saller had to beat an awkward retreat or risk the exact sort of public humiliation that he, as caretaker president, had presumably been hired to avoid. He came up with a compromise that landed somewhere in the middle: an unequivocal condemnation of Hamas’s “intolerable atrocities” paired with a statement making clear that Stanford would commit to institutional neutrality going forward.
“The events in Israel and Gaza this week have affected and engaged large numbers of students on our campus in ways that many other events have not,” the statement read. “This is why we feel compelled to both address the impact of these events on our campus and to explain why our general policy of not issuing statements about news events not directly connected to campus has limited the breadth of our comments thus far, and why you should not expect frequent commentary from us in the future.”
I asked Saller why he had changed tack on Israel and not on Nagorno-Karabakh. “We don’t feel as if we should be making statements on every war crime and atrocity,” he told me. This felt like a statement in and of itself.
In making such decisions, Saller works closely with Martinez, Stanford’s provost. I happened to interview her, too, a few days before October 7, not long after she’d been appointed. When I asked about her hopes for the job, she said that a “priority is ensuring an environment in which free speech and academic freedom are preserved.”
We talked about the so-called Leonard Law—a provision unique to California that requires private universities to be governed by the same First Amendment protections as public ones. This restricts what Stanford can do in terms of penalizing speech, putting it in a stricter bind than Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, or any of the other elite private institutions that have more latitude to set the standards for their campus (whether or not they have done so).
So I was surprised when, in December, the university announced that abstract calls for genocide “clearly violate Stanford’s Fundamental Standard, the code of conduct for all students at the university.” The statement was a response to the outrage following the congressional testimony of three university presidents—outrage that eventually led to the resignation of two of them, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill. Gay and Magill, who had both previously held positions at Stanford, did not commit to punishing calls for the genocide of Jews.
Experts told me that Stanford’s policy is impossible to enforce—and Saller himself acknowledged as much in our March interview.
“Liz Magill is a good friend,” Saller told me, adding, “Having watched what happened at Harvard and Penn, it seemed prudent” to publicly state that Stanford rejected calls for genocide. But saying that those calls violate the code of conduct “is not the same thing as to say that we could actually punish it.”
Stanford’s leaders seem to be trying their best while adapting to the situation in real time. But the muddled messaging has created a policy of neutrality that does not feel neutral at all.
When we met back in November, I tried to get Saller to open up about his experience running an institution in turmoil. What’s it like to know that so many students seem to believe that he—a mild-mannered 71-year-old classicist who swing-dances with his anthropologist wife—is a warmonger? Saller was more candid than I expected—perhaps more candid than any prominent university president has been yet. We sat in the same conference room as we had in September. The weather hadn’t really changed. Yet I felt like I was sitting in front of a different person. He was hunched over and looked exhausted, and his voice broke when he talked about the loss of life in Gaza and Israel and “the fact that we’re caught up in it.” A capable administrator with decades of experience, Saller seemed almost at a loss. “It’s been a kind of roller coaster, to be honest.”
He said he hadn’t anticipated the deluge of the emails “blaming me for lack of moral courage.” Anything the university says seems bound to be wrong: “If I say that our position is that we grieve over the loss of innocent lives, that in itself will draw some hostile reactions.”
“I find that really difficult to navigate,” he said with a sigh.
By March, it seemed that his views had solidified. He said he knew he was “a target,” but he was not going to be pushed into issuing any more statements. The continuing crisis seems to have granted him new insight. “I am certain that whatever I say will not have any material effect on the war in Gaza.” It’s hard to argue with that.
People tend to blame the campus wars on two villains: dithering administrators and radical student activists. But colleges have always had dithering administrators and radical student activists. To my mind, it’s the average students who have changed.
Elite universities attract a certain kind of student: the overachieving striver who has won all the right accolades for all the right activities. Is it such a surprise that the kids who are trained in the constant pursuit of perfect scores think they have to look at the world like a series of multiple-choice questions, with clearly right or wrong answers? Or that they think they can gamify a political cause in the same way they ace a standardized test?
Everyone knows that the only reliable way to get into a school like Stanford is to be really good at looking really good. Now that they’re here, students know that one easy way to keep looking good is to side with the majority of protesters, and condemn Israel.
It’s not that there isn’t real anger and anxiety over what is happening in Gaza—there is, and justifiably so. I know that among the protesters are many people who are deeply connected to this issue. But they are not the majority. What really activates the crowds now seems less a principled devotion to Palestine or to pacifism than a desire for collective action, to fit in by embracing the fashionable cause of the moment—as if a centuries-old conflict in which both sides have stolen and killed could ever be a simple matter of right and wrong. In their haste to exhibit moral righteousness, many of the least informed protesters end up being the loudest and most uncompromising.
Today’s students grew up in the Trump era, in which violent rhetoric has become a normal part of political discourse and activism is as easy as reposting an infographic. Many young people have come to feel that being angry is enough to foment change. Furious at the world’s injustices and desperate for a simple way to express that fury, they don’t seem interested in any form of engagement more nuanced than backing a pure protagonist and denouncing an evil enemy. They don’t, always, seem that concerned with the truth.
At the protest last month to prevent the removal of the sit-in, an activist in a pink Women’s March “pussy hat” shouted that no rape was committed by Hamas on October 7. “There hasn’t been proof of these rape accusations,” a student told me in a separate conversation, criticizing the Blue and White Tent for spreading what he considered to be misinformation about sexual violence. (In March, a United Nations report found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence,” including “rape and gang rape,” occurred in multiple locations on October 7, as well as “clear and convincing information” on the “rape and sexualized torture” of hostages.) “The level of propaganda” surrounding Hamas, he told me, “is just unbelievable.”
The real story at Stanford is not about the malicious actors who endorse sexual assault and murder as forms of resistance, but about those who passively enable them because they believe their side can do no wrong. You don’t have to understand what you’re arguing for in order to argue for it. You don’t have to be able to name the river or the sea under discussion to chant “From the river to the sea.” This kind of obliviousness explains how one of my friends, a gay activist, can justify Hamas’s actions, even though it would have the two of us—an outspoken queer person and a Jewish reporter—killed in a heartbeat. A similar mentality can exist on the other side: I have heard students insist on the absolute righteousness of Israel yet seem uninterested in learning anything about what life is like in Gaza.
I’m familiar with the pull of achievement culture—after all, I’m a product of the same system. I fell in love with Stanford as a 7-year-old, lying on the floor of an East Coast library and picturing all the cool technology those West Coast geniuses were dreaming up. I cried when I was accepted; I spent the next few months scrolling through the course catalog, giddy with anticipation. I wanted to learn everything.
I learned more than I expected. Within my first week here, someone asked me: “Why are all Jews so rich?” In 2016, when Stanford’s undergraduate senate had debated a resolution against anti-Semitism, one of its members argued that the idea of “Jews controlling the media, economy, government, and other societal institutions” represented “a very valid discussion.” (He apologized, and the resolution passed.) In my dorm last year, a student discussed being Jewish and awoke the next day to swastikas and a portrait of Hitler affixed to his door.
I grew up secularly, with no strong affiliation to Jewish culture. When I found out as a teenager that some of my ancestors had hidden their identity from their children and that dozens of my relatives had died in the Holocaust (something no living member of my family had known), I felt the barest tremor of identity. After I saw so many people I know cheering after October 7, I felt something stronger stir. I know others have experienced something similar. Even a professor texted me to say that she felt Jewish in a way she never had before.
But my frustration with the conflict on campus has little to do with my own identity. Across the many conversations and hours of formal interviews I conducted for this article, I’ve encountered a persistent anti-intellectual streak. I’ve watched many of my classmates treat death so cavalierly that they can protest as a pregame to a party. Indeed, two parties at Stanford were reported to the university this fall for allegedly making people say “Fuck Israel” or “Free Palestine” to get in the door. A spokesperson for the university said it was “unable to confirm the facts of what occurred,” but that it had “met with students involved in both parties to make clear that Stanford’s nondiscrimination policy applies to parties.” As a friend emailed me not long ago: “A place that was supposed to be a sanctuary from such unreason has become a factory for it.”
Readers may be tempted to discount the conduct displayed at Stanford. After all, the thinking goes, these are privileged kids doing what they always do: embracing faux-radicalism in college before taking jobs in fintech or consulting. These students, some might say, aren’t representative of America.
And yet they are representative of something: of the conduct many of the most accomplished students in my generation have accepted as tolerable, and what that means for the future of our country. I admire activism. We need people willing to protest what they see as wrong and take on entrenched systems of repression. But we also need to read, learn, discuss, accept the existence of nuance, embrace diversity of thought, and hold our own allies to high standards. More than ever, we need universities to teach young people how to do all of this.
For so long, Stanford’s physical standoff seemed intractable. Then, in early February, a storm swept in, and the natural world dictated its own conclusion.
Heavy rains flooded campus. For hours, the students battled to save their tents. The sit-in activists used sandbags and anything else they could find to hold back the water—at one point, David Palumbo-Liu, the professor, told me he stood in the lashing downpour to anchor one of the sit-in’s tents with his own body. When the storm hit, many of the Jewish activists had been attending a discussion on anti-Semitism. They raced back and struggled to salvage the Blue and White Tent, but it was too late—the wind had ripped it out of the ground.
The next day, the weary Jewish protesters returned to discover that their space had been taken.
A new collection of tents had been set up by El Boudali, the pro-Palestine activist, and a dozen friends. He said they were there to protest Islamophobia and to teach about Islam and jihad, and that they were a separate entity from the Sit-In to Stop Genocide, though I observed students cycling between the tents. Palestinian flags now flew from the bookstore to the quad.
Administrators told me they’d quickly informed El Boudali and his allies that the space had been reserved by the Jewish advocates, and offered to help move them to a different location. But the protesters told me they had no intention of going. (El Boudali later said that they did not take over the entire space, and would have been “happy to exist side by side, but they wanted to kick us off entirely from that lawn.”)
When it was clear that the area where they’d set up their tents would not be ceded back to the pro-Israel group willingly, Stanford changed course and decided to clear everyone out in one fell swoop. On February 8, school officials ordered all students to vacate the plaza overnight. The university was finally going to enforce its rule prohibiting people from sleeping outside on campus and requiring the removal of belongings from the plaza between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. The order cited the danger posed by the storm as a justification for changing course and, probably hoping to avoid allegations of bias, described the decision as “viewpoint-neutral.”
That didn’t work.
About a week of protests, led by the sit-in organizers, followed. Chants were chanted. More demands for a “river to the sea” solution to the Israel problem were made. A friend boasted to me about her willingness to be arrested. Stanford sent a handful of staff members, who stood near balloons left over from an event earlier in the day. They were there, one of them told me, to “make students feel supported and safe.”
In the end, Saller and Martinez agreed to talk with the leaders of the sit-in about their demands to divest the university and condemn Israel, under the proviso that the activists comply with Stanford’s anti-camping guidelines “regardless of the outcome of discussions.” Eight days after they were first instructed to leave, 120 days after setting up camp, the sit-in protesters slept in their own beds. In defiance of the university’s instructions, they left behind their tents. But sometime in the very early hours of the morning, law-enforcement officers confiscated the structures. The area was cordoned off without any violence and the plaza filled once more with electric skateboards and farmers’ markets.
The conflict continues in its own way. Saller was just shouted down by protesters chanting “No peace on stolen land” at a Family Weekend event, and protesters later displayed an effigy of him covered in blood. Students still feel tense; Saller still seems worried. He told me that the university is planning to change all manner of things—residential-assistant training, new-student orientation, even the acceptance letters that students receive—in hopes of fostering a culture of greater tolerance. But no campus edict or panel discussion can address a problem that is so much bigger than our university.
At one rally last fall, a speaker expressed disillusionment about the power of “peaceful resistance” on college campuses. “What is there left to do but to take up arms?” The crowd cheered as he said Israel must be destroyed. But what would happen to its citizens? I’d prefer to believe that most protesters chanting “Palestine is Arab” and shouting that we must “smash the Zionist settler state” don’t actually think Jews should be killed en masse. But can one truly be so ignorant as to advocate widespread violence in the name of peace?
When the world is rendered in black-and-white—portrayed as a simple fight between colonizer and colonized—the answer is yes. Solutions, by this logic, are absolute: Israel or Palestine, nothing in between. Either you support liberation of the oppressed or you support genocide. Either Stanford is all good or all bad; all in favor of free speech or all authoritarian; all anti-Semitic or all Islamophobic.
At January’s anti-anti-Semitism event, I watched an exchange between a Jewish attendee and a protester from a few feet away. “Are you pro-Palestine?” the protester asked.
“Yes,” the attendee responded, and he went on to describe his disgust with the human-rights abuses Palestinians have faced for years.
“But are you a Zionist?”
“Yes.”
“Then we are enemies.”
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Don't I know it 🙄 I had a german dog originating from right before ww1, trained in german, in a german sport that was developed by german police and military in the 1920s, from a breed with a *serious* neonazi problem. My block list is miles long because whenever one of these fuckos gets ahold of my posts I just instantly block/report them into oblivion. Noooooo thank you.
Phoebe has not attracted their attention just yet- and in fairness a lot of these types prefer the cropped/docked look so perhaps her floppy ears will keep them off my blog for longer- but I'm sure whenever I throw her at bitesports if she's any good I'll get at least a little fresh blood to add to the meat grinder that is my block list.
I do think though that the difference is that reddit was started by folks who did not like the moderation system of 4chan, believing it was restricting free speech (lol, it's 4chan, what moderation), which is why reddit became known as THE alt-right social media for a long time since many of the people involved in the creation and popularization of reddit were folks who were kicked off 4chan for being too extreme. However since they've gone through their own purges due to increasing legal issues with manifestos and shooting/bomb threats being posted and not taken down or reported to police until days after a mass shooting, the site has certainly become significantly more tame. Not saying there's none on there but it's a shadow compared to its hey-day.
Tumblr was by comparison started by folks who wanted to make effectively xanga and livejournal but without the anti-porn rules that killed those two sites- ironic since again legal pressure instituted a porn ban anyway, but there is still more freedom on this site than there was on the other two even once the ban came down.
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There’s something about every alpha masculinity account that screams “fed” to me. I really think these account are fake and ran by the fbi to monitor men online and who would be likely to commit mass violence. Other times it’s bots.
But really, look at how they cry about how men are gods on earth for women to forcibly worship them (idolatry God will strike down every man who calls himself the lord) and the need to protect children from leftist but will welcome Kevin spacey and man who preyed upon children openly all because they don’t believe in “cancel culture” unless it’s them. This is such a insidious agenda happening and it requires a lot of attention from Christians to avoid this.
That's an interesting theory
I also heart the one saying that the incel movement was incepted by old scrote trying to make younger men look as stupid & insane as possible so that women of their age be repulsed by them and instead consider dating older men on the basis they won't be as unhinged. It would make sense if older redpiller weren't as much demented as the younger ones. And it's not like they were good concealing their "opinions" those scrote are unable to have a normam conversation with a women not involving sex, breeding, female's "role" or some other redpill bs
These old scrote are much more cunning and calculating than they will admit. Andrew Tate proudly admits he has no issue lying and deceptive tactics with the girls he's trafficking so why his fans think he wouldn't do the same to them? 🤔
Now to come back to your theory, I definitely think the redpill movement is indeed a psy-op to divide society. What irks me so bad is that so called 'free thinker' media wil have no issue seeing this when it comes to race, and call the BLM movement "divisive" and breeding hate among society, but will say absolutely nothing about redpiller and their visceral hate against women. I'm thinking about Vigilant Citizen especially.. it's been a while I realized dude was shady but I realized he was definitely full of shit when he made an entire article to dunk on Barbie and its feminist propaganda that will destroy society🙄 (btw I didn't forget he never approved my comment on that article calling him out lmao Mind you, he's one of those whiny people asking for more fReEdoM oF sPeEch/truthers are cEnsOreD, but is unable to apply that freedom of speech on his own website🤡). Meanwhile he has yet to address the redpill movement and the well documented femicide attacks/shootings perpetuated by men who explicitly expressed their hatred against women. Is that enough to finally call the redpiller/mra movement "divisive" too?
VC loves making articles pointing out the occult symbolism anywhere he can, so...why didn't he say shit about Andrew Tate Russian guru who happens to be a black warlock? Or Tate xitter handle being COBRA Tate? If you look into it, dude has whole thing going on with snakes... What about his weird triangular hand symbol too. VC would've a field day making an article developing the theory that Tate is actually a plant seeking to breed chaos and gender wars - it would have made a lot of sense bc there's a lot of shady shit going on with Tate and how he's being wk'ed by the Conservative right when he's a British pimp living in Romania. Also wasn't his dad CIA? Reaaal shady shit going on... But VC won't cover that shit bc he's of his bias.. but don't worry he'll make a 567th article about celebrities hiding one eye and the awful LBGT+ propaganda because lf *checks notes* rainbow on a note book🙃
You'd think the way these people talk about feminism women were out there turning society upside down, hounding & harassing men....but nope. IDK for being so dangerous & radical, feminists seem to be very quiet 🤔 there's a reason those men have to look into movies and video games to claim oppression. The so called oppression they get from women doesn't translate IRL.
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I really get overwhelmed by something that I saw on tl today...i guess an au writer, dont knw just saw the post..was asking suggestions for their fic about cheating...like is it okay to cheat someone for being with his true love or smthng..the matter is cheating here..
Does that mean whoever read that fic enjoyed the cheating? Nd if they enjoyed it who should we actually blame it on...the reader or the writer?
Just like what happens in ty's matter...I have seen lot au nd fanfics authors criticized him that if he read it that means he enjoyed evry word that written on it...they should sit nd think where do they stand when they write something like this..even if u think it's a minor sin, that doesnt matter...the point is when u write something gore, isnt that just to aware ppl there is lot of similar things happening in the world,nd u should knw these things through these stories...nd dont make prejudice that ppl actually enjoying it nd they r bad...when u persue literature in a good way u should feel nd think it in the same way too....
Tbh, I want to convey what's on my mind in a lot clearer way..but lang is a big wall to write...if u get the point that's it...I just want to share it with u...thanku
It depends. If a radio host spreads propaganda and urges to kill other people, he is up to a trial. He spreads dangerous ideas, brainwashes people with lies and installs hatred. If a reader of Crime and Punishment takes an axe and goes and kills a woman, the author is not to blame, he only explored human nature and contemplated about guilt.
If a story describes how justifiable cheating is, how wonderful is the experience, how it can be a test to the relationship and "true love" because "if he/she really loves you, you'll be forgiven", the author is partially to blame. Partially because in the end it was the reader who read the story till the end and made the decision to cheat, who acted in the real world. The author just played the devil and used the right for free speech.
As a rule, fanfiction is not a propaganda media, it is low class literature for fun to spend the time and get distracted from everyday life and chores. The author' only responsibility is to provide correct tags and warnigns, to make the reader aware of what is inside their story for an informed choice. Everything else is on the reader.
What people consume, what stories they read, what scenarios they fantasize about often have little ties to reality. You can't judge a person's real character on what he/she reads or what video games he/she plays. Like take the horror movie genre for example. People who watch it want a little bit of thrill, a scare to satisfy the primitive part of our brains that evolved to look out for predators and find joy in escaping danger (people feel more alive going through hardships or danger). Those people (most of them at least, can't vouch for sociopaths and mass murderers) don't watch the horror movies to enjoy teen girls being brutally killed or kids being devoured by aliens.
Stranger things is also a series about the charm of 80-s, friendship and family. Deaths, experiments on kids and maiming by creatures is in the plot as a story-telling tool designed to bring the best out of the protagonists, not to treat viewers with gore.
Back to cheating. Many people feel bored with their daily life, so they want some "spice". This makes them look for stories with "not vanilla"/"forbidden" themes. It's because they didn't experience the thing in real life which makes them be able to read about it. Even gang rape is a kink.
It is well known that once a couple gets together in a tv-series, it becomes dead. Writers know how to write romance, but not married couple interestingly. Same could be the case with "true love". So they live happily ever after, and what can one write about them? Kids and domestic fluff, or "trouble in paradise" - cheating and break up. If fanfic writers were as smart and creative as they like to think of themselves, they'd be earning acclaimed authors with prizes in literature.
There is a mangaka Hiroaki Samura. He likes gore. He incorporates it in his mainstream series, he also draws niche artbooks and short-stories with nude and very graphically tortured women. You can be narrow-minded and prejusticed and jump to a conclusion that he needs to be cancelled. In reality, he is one of the rare authors who writes women as real characters, who does the "strong woman" trope correctly. He also has great sense of humour, he brings all his characters to life. And I have a suspicion that his oneshot about orphaned women being gang raped was an attempt to digest the history of "war brides", something that Japanese try to pretend never happened. Hiroaki doesn't give interviews with deep self-exploration for me to know why he is into gore, but I can see whatever it is (dealing with trauma, artistic exploration of human sins, whatever) it doesn't make him a "bad human" with "bad influence". On the contrary, I'd like Japan to offer more authors like him.
Showing violence can be a way to teach about compassion or serve as a warning. Like the old fairytales were Cinderella sisters' toes were actually cut off or sibings burned a witch alive.
The art of drawing is especially detached from reality. Even though the brain matches the drawn objects to the real ones, without smell and sound, 3D-ness and other information signals of "the real world", the drawn things stay unreal. A drawing of a dead person can be considered beautiful art (Ophelia). It certainly wasn't meant to evoke those realistic feelings of disgust and fear that a real smelling, bloated and floating in water corpse will do. And the painters who decided to make their own version of the famous scene certainly weren't into dead women as sexual objects.
I think Tae being dragged into that manga controvesry in the end will bring him new fans, lol. He is too anime looking to not pick up anime folks' interest.
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The Role of Memes in Politics
What is a meme? According to Galipeau (2022), a meme is essentially an intertextual mashup of a screenshot, GIF, or image from pop culture, finished with some text. Memes have evolved from being a mainstay of sorts on social platforms such as 4chan to being an essential and necessary component of visual communication in the realm of political debate and conflict in the past few years (Mortensen & Neumayer 2021). If you ask me, memes can be seen as the sambal to the nasi lemak that is politics; they give it a certain flavour and add some spice to it. However, this raises the question: do memes — as popular as they are in politics, Malaysian or not — help people to have a better grasp on their local political scene?
The way I see it, memes are able to achieve this due to certain attributes that they possess. For one, memes are widely available and simple to post on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter/X, and Instagram, which makes them a powerful tool for capturing the attention of a wider audience, in particular the younger generation. The results of a study by Mihailidis (2020) indicate that the participants of said study (mainly comprised of young people) were all familiar with memes and frequently used them in their online communication. Some memes also have the potential and ability to simplify complicated political topics so that a wider range of individuals can understand and relate to them. This aligns with how more and more research suggest that memes can have an influence on political communication at local and national levels (Mihailidis 2020), which goes to show just how influential memes can be in regards to politics.
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Besides that, memes provide an avenue of sorts for people to exercise free speech. Mortensen & Neumayer (2021) suggest that it is important to consider memes as a continuation of political humour such as comics and/or cartoons, which are commonly rife with satire, comedy, and parody. Bulatovic (2019) reiterates this by pointing out that politics has always been filled with humour and satire, but ever since the Internet's inception, everyone has had the opportunity to express their opinions in a comedic and sarcastic manner, one way or another. What differentiates memes from the previous forms of political humour is that they are more remixable in terms of their context and substance, and are produced by anonymous groups of media users as a component of participatory digital culture (Mortensen & Neumayer 2021). In a hilarious and memorable fashion, they can draw attention to political oddities, contradictions, and hypocrisy. Through this, memes can serve to check on political authority and allow people to express their displeasure with the political system or particular politicians and political parties (Bulatovic 2019).
In addition, politics can occasionally benefit from the strategic usage of memes. Memes can function as effective rhetorical tools in political disputes, in which political authority and hierarchy are either affirmed, contested, or challenged, as stated by Mortensen & Neumayer (2021). Through widespread replication, memes have been turned into a potent weapon for waging political conflict with adversaries in a “memetic warfare” of sorts (Bulatovic 2019). Similarly, a study by Galipeau (2022) demonstrates that memes can have an impact on a key factor that voters use to make their decisions during a political campaign. This can result in memes being created and distributed by politicians and political parties in an effort to sway public opinion, discredit their rivals, or reinforce their own message in an effort to win over public support.
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Now, with all that’s been said, does it make memes a worthwhile tool in understanding politics, even in a Malaysian context? Sure, they have the ability to make politics more relatable to the masses, but to a certain extent. In my opinion, it takes a more comprehensive approach to properly comprehend politics as a whole. Memes may be a helpful and entertaining method to engage in political discussion, but they should be viewed as a tool for deconstructing, criticising, or mocking politics, rather than as a complete source of political knowledge and information. As stated by Edwards (2021), there is every reason to expect that memes will continue to influence political debates and communities in the near future, as they have evolved into constitutive sources of political speech, for better or worse.
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Making a heavenly sauerkraut casserole with actual healing qualities 4 tonite in my kitchen.... 🍲 and felt suddenly so overcome with darn gratitude about the (in this case positive!) power of free speech on social media in the light of the current and ongoing devastating Palestine-Israel conflict ! Like , damn
How social media unlocks the craved multiple sides to the story (instead of 1 biased narrative), boosts knowledge, fights the spread of disinformation and shows the multiple viewpoints otherwise not highlighted by the traditional biased one-way mass media broadcasters (usually neoliberal, rightist-oriented senders, with a bent of brainwashing the public). While I think we're still sheep, we're a tad bit more liberated sheep :)) hope it wakes the sleeping mass
#old skool dad tv is over and I'm in this case so happy it is#personal#thoughts#also the sauerkraut casserole is mouth-watering good! it's the laurel and the herbs
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Long post. Press j to skip.
I AM SICK OF THE STUPID AI DEBATES, does it imagine, is it based on copyrightable material, are my patterns in there?
That's not the point.
I briefly got into website design freelancing (less than 3 months) before burn out.
The main reason was that automation had begun for generating stylesheets in somewhat tasteful palettes, for automatically making html/xml (they really haven't learned to simplify and tidy code though, they just load 50 divs instead of one), for batch colourising design elements to match and savvy designers weren't building graphics from scratch and to spec unless it was their day job.
Custom php and database design died with the free bundled CMS packages that come with your host with massive mostly empty unused values.
No-one has talked about the previous waves of people automated out of work by website design generators, code generators, the fiverr atomisation of what would have been a designers job into 1 logo and a swatch inserted into a CMS by an unpaid intern. Reviews, tutorials, explanations and articles are generated by stealing youtube video captions, scraping fan sites and putting them on a webpage. Digitally processing images got automated with scripts stolen from fan creators who shared. Screencaps went from curated processed images made by a person to machine produced once half a second and uploaded indiscriminately. Media recaps get run into google translate and back which is why they often read as a little odd when you look up the first results.
This was people's work, some of it done out of love, some done for pay. It's all automated and any paid work is immediately copied/co-opted for 20 different half baked articles on sites with more traffic now. Another area of expertise I'd cultivated was deep dive research, poring over scans of magazines and analysing papers, fact checking. I manually checked people's code for errors or simplifications, you can get generators to do that too, even for php. I used to be an english-french translator.
The generators got renamed AI and slightly better at picture making and writing but it's the same concept.
The artists that designed the web templates are obscured, paid a flat fee by the CMS developpers, the CMS coders are obscured, paid for their code often in flat fees by a company that owns all copyright over the code and all the design elements that go with. That would have been me if I hadn't had further health issues, hiding a layer in one of the graphics or a joke in the code that may or may not make it through to the final product. Or I could be a proof reader and fact checker for articles that get barely enough traffic while they run as "multi snippets" in other publications.
The problem isn't that the machines got smarter, it's that they now encroach on a new much larger area of workers. I'd like to ask why the text to speech folks got a flat fee for their work for example: it's mass usage it should be residual based. So many coders and artists and writers got screwed into flat fee gigs instead of jobs that pay a minimum and more if it gets mass use.
The people willing to pay an artist for a rendition of their pet in the artist's style are the same willing to pay for me to rewrite a machine translation to have the same nuances as the original text. The same people who want free are going to push forward so they keep free if a little less special cats and translations. They're the same people who make clocks that last 5 years instead of the ones my great uncle made that outlived him. The same computer chips my aunt assembled in the UK for a basic wage are made with a lot more damaged tossed chips in a factory far away that you live in with suicide nets on the stairs.
There is so much more to 'AI' than the narrow snake oil you are being sold: it is the classic and ancient automation of work by replacing a human with a limited machine. Robot from serf (forced work for a small living)
It's a large scale generator just like ye olde glitter text generators except that threw a few pennies at the coders who made the generator and glitter text only matters when a human with a spark of imagination knows when to deploy it to funny effect. The issue is that artists and writers are being forced to gig already. We have already toppled into precariousness. We are already half way down the slippery slope if you can get paid a flat fee of $300 for something that could make 300k for the company. The generators are the big threat keeping folks afraid and looking at the *wrong* thing.
We need art and companies can afford to pay you for art. Gig work for artists isn't a safe stable living. The fact that they want to make machines to take that pittance isn't the point. There is money, lots of money. It's not being sent to the people who make art. It's not supporting artists to mess around and create something new. It's not a fight between you and a machine, it's a fight to have artists and artisans valued as deserving a living wage not surviving between gigs.
#saf#Rantings#Yes but can the machine think#I don't care. I don't care. I really don't care if the machine is more precise than the artisan#What happens to all our artisans?#Long post#Press j to skip
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A member of Viktor Orban's inner circle has resigned after the Hungarian prime minister spoke out against becoming "peoples of mixed race".
Zsuzsa Hegedus, who has known the nationalist Mr Orban for 20 years, described the speech as a "pure Nazi text", according to Hungarian media.
The International Auschwitz Committee of Holocaust survivors called the speech "stupid and dangerous".
Mr Orban's spokesman said the media had misrepresented the comments.
The speech took place on Saturday in a region of Romania which has a large Hungarian community.
In it, Mr Orban said European peoples should be free to mix with one another, but that mixing with non-Europeans created a "mixed-race world".
"We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed race," he said.
Mr Orban's anti-migration views are well known, but for Ms Hegedus, Saturday's speech crossed a line.
"I don't know how you didn't notice that the speech you delivered is a purely Nazi diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels," she wrote in her resignation letter, according to the Hungarian hvg.hu news website.
Goebbels was the head of Adolf Hitler's propaganda ministry.
Mr Orban's remarks on race have been bitterly criticised by some in Hungary and equally vehemently defended by others.
"Only one race inhabits this earth, Homo Sapiens. And it is unique and undivided," chief rabbi Robert Fröhlich commented.
Opposition politicians, decisively defeated by Mr Orban's Fidesz party in the April elections, said his remarks were "beyond the pale... unworthy of a European statesman".
Government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs tried to dampen the growing chorus of condemnation, arguing that the prime minister had been outspoken on the topics of immigration and assimilation for years.
In the government flagship daily, Magyar Nemzet, an article praised Mr Orban for defending the idea of nationhood against a drive to mix all nations "into a grey, indistinguishable mass".
At best, Mr Orban appears confused, sometimes speaking of the Hungarians as "the most mixed society", at other times, appearing to suggest he believes in ethnic purity.
Zsuzsa Hegedus's resignation is unlikely to have further repercussions in Hungary. Party discipline is tight and resignations almost unheard of.
During his speech, the Hungarian leader also appeared to make light of the Nazi gas chambers in World War Two when he criticised the EU's plan to cut gas demand by 15% by pointing out that "the past shows us German know-how on that".
Hungary's largest Jewish group condemned the speech and called for a meeting with Mr Orban. More than half a million Hungarian Jews were murdered in the final months of World War Two, many of them at Auschwitz.
The International Auschwitz Committee said his words were "grist to the mill to all racist and far-right forces in Europe" and they reminded Holocaust survivors of the dark times of their persecution.
Romania's foreign minister said the remarks were unacceptable and it was regrettable they were spoken on Romanian territory.
Responding by letter to his long-standing adviser, Mr Orban defended his words.
"You know better than anyone that in Hungary, my government follows a zero-tolerance policy on both anti-Semitism and racism," he wrote.
His spokesman, Zoltan Kovacs, said the mainstream media was "hyperventilating about a couple of tough lines about immigration and assimilation", but had stayed silent on the main points of the speech.
Addressing the war in Ukraine in his speech, Mr Orban argued that the West's support of the country had failed, sanctions against Russia were not working and a negotiated peace deal should be the priority.
Viktor Orban won a historic fourth term in office in April, but his stance on Russia's war has been out of step with every other EU country. He has maintained good relations with Russia's President Vladimir Putin and is the only EU leader to openly criticise Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky.
While the rest of the EU was agreeing to cut its reliance on Russian gas, Hungary's foreign minister visited Moscow last week to discuss buying more of it. Budapest currently imports 80% of its gas from Russia.
Despite receiving large amounts of EU funds, the Hungarian government has frequently clashed with the EU over rule-of-law issues such as press freedom and migration.
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Is It Worse to Ban a Book, or Never Publish It?
Cancellation Nation
In a debate too often characterized by partisan hypocrisy and bereft of rigorous definitions, Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder shine, drawing useful distinctions while voicing this lament:
In the United States today, the left and right alike have aggressively embraced cancelation campaigns. Each side has its own distinctive objectives, strategies, initiatives and networks—as well as its own particular strongholds. The left and liberals are ascendant on most college campuses and predominate in the arts, culture and publishing industries. The right, of course, has the Fox News bullhorn and other like-minded media outlets. But its most vital sites of power are state legislatures. Fueled by alarm surrounding critical race theory and LGBTQ+ hysteria, Red State legislatures are in the midst of a frenzied, mass cancelation spree.
I’m often asked, “But which side is worse?” If two candidates are facing each other in an election that forces a binary choice, I’m happy to answer. Last time around, for example, I thought Donald Trump was the inferior candidate for people who are concerned about illiberalism. In general, however, I tend to think that right and left illiberalism fuel each other, such that asking which is worse is the wrong question. Regardless of the answer, both should be opposed.
For an example, consider the world of books. In my ideal scenario, no one would stand between an author and a willing reader, because I value freedom of expression and freedom of inquiry, even in cases, like The Communist Manifesto, where the ideas in a book led to real-world deaths.
In the Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik expresses alarm at right-wing illiberalism in this realm:
Attacks on books occupy a special place among the signposts of philistinism and anti-democratic suppression.
So it’s proper to be alarmed at the upsurge of efforts to ban books from public schools and libraries, largely because they represent political views, lifestyles and life experiences that organized groups characterize as objectionable.
“It’s not that book banning itself is new,” says Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at the free-speech group PEN America. “The biggest trend is the force and the coordination around the country. What’s different is how school districts are giving in to these demands so quickly, in some cases without much due process whatsoever.”
Another disturbing aspect is how campaigns to ban books are linked to partisan political goals. “These are deliberate campaigns being waged with the support of political groups ... who use them as a new and promising front in our political and cultural battles,” Suzanne Nossel, chief executive of PEN America, told me.
So far, I agree. But later in the column Hiltzik writes:
It’s tempting to both-sides book-banning campaigns. After all, it’s said, just as politically motivated groups agitate for the removal of certain books from schools and libraries, book publishers face pressure—sometimes from their own staffs—to refuse or rescind contracts with certain authors. Is there really any difference?
Yes, of course there is—and it’s a qualitative difference. On one side are orchestrated campaigns, often employing government authority, aimed at large categories of works. On the other, objections from people questioning whether a book deal really fits the character that a publishing house is trying to project.
Sometimes a publisher sees things the staff’s way, sometimes not: When staff members of Simon & Schuster objected to that house’s deal with former Vice President Mike Pence, who was closely identified with discriminatory policies aimed at women and members of the LGBTQ+ community, executives decided that the company’s commitment to publish “a diversity of voices and perspectives” outweighed the objections and went ahead with the deal.
Mainstream publishers canceled publication plans for Woody Allen’s memoir “Apropos of Nothing” and Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth because of accusations of sexual misdeeds aimed at both authors; both books soon found a home with Skyhorse Publishing, an independent company that … has become known as what The Times described as “a publisher of last resort.”
Those cases are one-offs, targeted at specific books or authors. The right-wing campaigns are mass assaults.
READ MORE
A well reasoned editorial that takes all sides into account. ~ eP
#cancel culture#censorship#book publishing#banned books#librarians#book publishers#indie publishing#booksellers#bookstores
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I, for one, urgently feel the democratic problem with technology becoming ever more complex and hence ever more inaccessible to the masses. We live in a society where we consume unparallelled amounts of information, but cannot reasonably be expected to have the technological competence to modify or adapt the platforms delivering it, leaving us at the mercy of the digital clergy of programmers or the people with the funds to pay them.
Free speech is only guaranteed if we control the medium carrying it, and the fact that apps and more and more of the platforms on the web rely on technical expertise for anything beyond the mere production of pure text and simple images is inherently problematic. In the age of social media, we've been reduced to content creators publishing at the mercy of big money.
Where creating a private space on the web was once feasible with a bare understanding of how hyperlinks work and a minimal mastery of HTML, today's internet is dominated by platforms where even the simplest of data must be assimillated to fit a uniform design and exist in a both desktop-and-mobile-friendly version. The only realistic way to make my words accessible to the world is to adhere to the platforms that dominate traffic on the web, and I find it profoundly annoying that I have to use CSS to specify the font displayed in my fanfic on AO3
#yes it's been a while since I was last making websites#how come you're asking#fanfic#the internet#blah
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Malaysian politicians trying hard to stay relevant on Social Media
Social Media has become that platform, where politicians love to spread their propaganda and messages to their beloved followers, attacking the opposition with the manifestos and agendas they listed down during their time in office.
They will use social media as their main mass medium of choice, as messages and posts are faster to reach their targeted audience. This can be backed when during the Barrack Obama presidential election in 2008, his team used social media to its full potential to ensure all of his followers gained the information that he and his team wanted to spread around in a short period.
The question is, do Malaysian politicians trying so hard to be relevant in social media?
Indeed, they are.
I mean, look what they are posting on their personal Twitter, even back in 2014 (context: it was 2014, and Germany just beat Brazil 7-1 in the FIFA World Cup 2014)
As the General Elections for Malaysia are just around the corner, politicians tend to make "normal-looking people" posts where they show that they are people-oriented instead of living lavishly as they usually do. Hishammuddin Hussein, the Minister of Defence, had tried SOOOOO hard to be as humble as he could be; as Malaysian tend to know, politicians will do everything to gain attention during the General Election campaign period.
Only during the election phase, can you see them trying so hard to become relevant and purposely being active on social media to "take note" of the groans of the people, which they need to help on daily life basis, not just during the election phase.
They will use social media as their main mass medium of choice, as messages and posts are faster reach their targeted audience. This can be backed, when during the Barrack Obama presidential election in 2008, his team had used social media to its full potential, to ensure all of his followers to gain the information that he and his team wanted to spread around in a short period of time.
Of course, they can use their social media account freely as it is one of the best free speech mediums to be part of, and of course, you will have the backing from their followers based on what they share in their accounts.
In my personal opinion, politicians who are active in social media, tend to include their personal life to guilt trip their followers on how naive and humble they are as a normal human beings, when most of the time, you can see them barking and shouting in the parliament sittings, provoking each other when discussing on matters relating to the country.
Indeed we, the taxpayers, need to see whether they can do their jobs well or not, and not become social media celebrities, and not take their official jobs seriously. Of course, there are multiple politicians, such as Khairy Jamaluddin, and Syed Saddiq, who are the ones who actually hold to the "Do What You Say��& Say What You Do" principle..
I really do hope that all Malaysian do take part in the upcoming General Election, as we are the ones who suffer from their stupid behaviours both in social media and in the parliament sitting session.
Even with the current state of politcal scandals and corruption, we as the nation of Malaysia, have the power to choose for those who are really willing to do their jobs.
You don't need to be relevant in social media by posting everything as how a normal human being usually goes by their normal day.
Reference:
https://twitter.com/mykinabatangan/status/486623436052381697?lang=en
https://worldofbuzz.com/only-happens-when-election-is-near-msians-divided-over-viral-video-of-humble-defence-minister-eating-kfc/
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