This is just your subtle was of bring up the Harrison Ford plane crash. Let the man heal in peace.
That really is remarkably bad. I'd love a chatty, nonthreatening interview with the student who was asking the questions, to figure out what was going on in her head.
Wait, the woman who was being anti-Semitic was named Roth? Was she trying to resurrect the German American Bund or something?
I don't quite understand: was the student questioning whether Beyda could or would be capable of skepticism regarding Israeli policies?
It's likely I'm being dense here, but if that's the case, I'm not sure how it's anti-semitic, quite, but rather a question about whether a given person is capable of skepticism regarding Israeli policies. Because that person is Jewish, so what is their position re: Israel?
(Does the UCLA Student Council's Judicial Board frequently address questions regarding Israeli policy?)
Their apologies, or at least the portions printed in the NYT, are of the "I'm sorry I said that wrong" sort of apologies.
The NYT article seems to be missing some huge chunk of context around the massive involvement of outside groups with campus I/P politics. Maybe that's because the students wisely are not trying to contextualize what was going on, just retreating to abject apologies.
UCLA has had hot fights around student representatives and Birthright. My guess is this is spillover from that -- drastic slippage from "student representatives shouldn't go on Birthright" with is pretty bold to start with to "Hillel members shouldn't be in student government."
6: From the article: "I swear the word Israel was not said once," she said Thursday. "It was all about Jewish affiliations."
This adds some of the context I was talking about.
10: Except Hillel, ostensibly a center for Jewish student life, has become extremely partisan on questions about Israel.
ostensibly a center for Jewish student life
Did they stop doing student stuff?
For example, see the case of the Irvine 11. (Which, NB, was sent to trial in Orange County.) It would be fair to ask a student who had Hillel on her resume if she could be impartial if students were facing charges for protesting a speech by an Israeli government official.
But then, ask that question.
13: No, they still do student stuff, but they also have taken activist positions around BDS, promulgated those positions through the organization nationally, and prohibited local Hillels from hosting Jewish speakers with anti-Zionist positions. Though they may be beginning to moderate that.
I don't understand what's wrong the prosecuting the students for that.
Oh, huh. So, if I'm following you, a possibly legit question would have been:
Given that the judicial counsel frequently adjudicates cases relating to divestment and the Israel-Palestine conflict, and given that you are very active in Jewish student organizations that have taken a strong position on one side of these issues, how would you deal with any resulting conflicts of interest in cases where you had to consider an issue that one of the organizations you're active in has a strong position?
That actually might get the question asked into the "Whoops, I said that wrong" category. It'd depend on how fair the underlying assumptions were, but it's not selfevidently totally out of line.
Thanks, k-sky. I hadn't been paying a lot of attention to the divestment drive, I guess more or less figuring that it hadn't a hope of gaining any momentum.
Total grammar fail. I am ashamed.
18 is exactly my generous interpretation of what happened. I'm not ruling out that the same context resulted in a much nastier omelette that can't be entirely uncooked into those rational arguments. But it's definitely the case that UC student groups are fighting out I/P issues at the level of student government.
6: From the article: "I swear the word Israel was not said once," she said Thursday. "It was all about Jewish affiliations."
I guess some kids today see "Jewish" and "Israeli" as precise synonyms.
"Given that you are an Armenian student and very active in the Armenian community"
"Given that you are a Serbian student and very active in the Serb community"
"Given that you are an Taiwanese student and very active in the Taiwanese community"
Although... also not appropriate.
I guess some kids today see "Jewish" and "Israeli" as precise synonyms.
A lot of Americans do, unfortunately. Fucking Netanyahu doesn't help in this regard (not that he wants to) with his "I speak for all Jews" rhetoric. The chattering classes don't help much in this regard either.
much nastier omelette that can't be entirely uncooked
is there a common figure of speech along those lines? I couldn't think of it.
Lots of people talk about not being able to unbreak the eggs used in the omelette you can't uncook.
I was pwned because of a conspiracy.
And because I couldn't decide if I wanted to spell omelette like k-sky did or like my spell checker wants me to spell it.
I've mentioned before that I'm still surprised at how often even fairly liberal Jews I know are pretty stridently Zionist*. I'd imagine that a mildly informed Gentile could very easily come to the conclusion that Jewish==Israeli, because basically every public voice on the subject says so, and whatever Jews they know probably seem to agree (the Jews themselves presumably have more nuanced views, but they wouldn't likely be showily ambivalent about current Israeli policies).
*used as a shorthand for, not exactly Likudnik, but not anti-Likudnik either. I don't just mean "in favor of the existence of Israel as a political entity."
Yeah, there's a bit of a boobytrap -- not an unfair one, but something that a student could fall afoul of innocently -- in that there is a not necessarily true but in fact actually existing connection between "Jewish student organizations" and "Organizations with a strongly held position on Israel/Palestine issues." At which point using one as shorthand for the other would be reasonable and fine if anti-Semitism weren't a real thing, both historically and now, but it's not fine because anti-Semitism is a real enough thing that it requires carefully precise speech if you don't want to sound like Hitler.
Requiring the carefully precise speech seems absolutely reasonable to me, but I can also see the potential for innocent errors. (Which should be corrected so they don't happen again, but maybe don't indicate a serious underlying problem.)
At my college Hillel seemed to be dedicated to
A) convincing students to visit Israel, and
B) hosting performances by left-wing comedians.
Is it not so much of the latter, 10 years later?
What does anyone know about the J-Street project these days? Wasn't that supposed to be an outspoken American Jewish voice that was more in line with the Israeli left than with Likud?
I'm afraid I'm not seeing the student's questioning as anti-Semitic, since I consider it to have been a version of 18. I'm not sure I consider it anti-Semitic to draw an equation, however erroneous, between Jews and pro-Israel thinkers.
But...you'd have to have some pretty strong evidence that anyone up for student government was stridently whatever before you questioned their ability to be impartial. "Given that you're Muslim, etc." We'd all see that as outrageous. In other words, the problem isn't thinking that some people, for demonstrable reasons, might not be impartial about issues before the board, but assuming that someone of any particular group couldn't be impartial when that group's interests were at stake. As the advisor says in the meeting, no one would pass that test. I guess you could say that the real problem here isn't anti-Semitism, but unhinged identity politics, but I'm not going to slice it that fine.
32: Only that there was a guy from J Street on Diane Rehm the other day who was not at all pleased about Netanyahu's recent behavior.
I'd imagine that a mildly informed Gentile could very easily come to the conclusion that Jewish==Israeli, because basically every public voice on the subject says so, and whatever Jews they know probably seem to agree (the Jews themselves presumably have more nuanced views, but they wouldn't likely be showily ambivalent about current Israeli policies).
I imagine that it's possible that calling such a tremendously (mis)informed Gentile -- who apparently didn't take even a moment to learn about an issue of significant complexity before arriving at a thoroughly stupid conclusion -- an anti-Semite would be wrong-headed, but it's hard for me to see why. I mean, after all, surely JFK must have been ready to abase himself before Pope Paul VI, because people at the time didn't realize that American Catholics weren't monolithic.
I guess you could say that the real problem here isn't anti-Semitism, but unhinged identity politics
Sure.
I'm not sure I consider it anti-Semitic to draw an equation, however erroneous, between Jews and pro-Israel thinkers.
Oh, for fuck's sake, you really don't? You think it's okay to assume that a given group of people -- demonstrably diverse in its background and views -- is both monolithic and uniformly loyal to a foreign nation?
34: Depends. If that question wouldn't have been asked of the head of the Muslim Students Union, antisemitic. If the question would have been asked of a Jewish kid who wasn't active in Hillel, anti-Semitic. If Hillel hadn't been taking active positions on issues that were coming up for action by the student government, anti-Semitic. The wording of the question, which uses Jewish as a shorthand for right-wing-Zionist? Kinda anti-Semitic, but plausibly an innocent mistake.
I've mentioned my parents, whose politics on class/economic issues I generally think are great, but who have some generational problems on social issues. And I mostly agree with them concretely on Israel/Palestine issues. But they're also anti-Semites -- the polite kind you can take out in public without their saying anything offensive, and some of whose best friends are so on and so forth, but really, there's anti-Semitism going on there.
When someone slips into an unfortunate turn of phrase like the questioner, even if you think they're probably fine in their heart of hearts, it makes sense to make a bit of a fuss anyway to keep the genteel anti-Semites clearly aware that their feelings about Jews are not publicly acceptable.
Sorry, that should have been to 33.
32: My sense is that J Street has had some success cracking open AIPAC's lock on public debate but is losing steam to Jewish Voice for Peace now that no one really believes it's possible to engage with Israel to resolve the Palestinian question. I was going to say something about the Mensheviks but it would have required me to ban myself.
32: According to the emails they send me, they are doing great! And they are very angry at Netanyahu!
36 and 38 seem to be deliberately downplaying the role played by Israeli politicians and Jewish organizations in obscuring the diversity of those views.
34, 38: Yeah, to clear the questioner of anti-Semitism, you have to assume that she's saying "Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community" as a unitary phrase, and that "active in the Jewish community" was specifically meant to convey "an active member of organizations with strong positions on these issues". If "a Jewish student" had any meaningful weight in the sentence by itself, rather than as throatclearing before "active in the Jewish community", that seems like a real problem to me.
Even if we concede parsimon's point about the veritable impossibility of disentangling Jewish identity from Likudnik politics, that would indicate we have an even bigger anti-Semitism problem: when the man in the street assumes that someone of a particular religion is disloyal in some way or on some topic, you have a societal/systemic bias. I don't care what was in Roth's heart: what she said was anti-Semitic.
43: no, I'm not downplaying that. I'm saying that people who don't want to be called bigots should understand that it serves the interests of the Israeli right to claim to speak for all Jews, just as it serves the American right to claim to speak for all real Americans.
Back in the day, there was an agitprop movement around the universities called "Jewish Students Against Zionism." I'm guessing this never made it accross the pond and accross the years. Ms Roth and UCLA, it would seem, would profit from them. That or implode in a cognisance vortex.
45: Hey, I never claimed that it was veritably impossible to disentangle Jewish ... identity? ... well, being Jewish ... from Likudnik politics.
46: Roger that. VW have you seen any of the Hillel vs Muslim Students stuff play out on campus?
the role played by Israeli politicians and Jewish organizations in obscuring the diversity of those views
True but irrelevant, no?
Well, you said you didn't see anti-Semitism in the questioner's conflation of the two. And while I'm with you as far as believing that it's a verbal mistake that could be innocently made by someone being insensitive about their wording, that doesn't mean that the questioner actually thinks of all Jews as a Likudnik monolith, that conflation, if it were being made on a conceptual rather than a purely verbal level, is straightforwardly anti-Semitic.
49: I was still at Davis last year, so yes, of course I have. And? You're conflating separate issues.
51 to 48.
To 50, not totally irrelevant. If Hillel, whose mission was, I thought, supposed to be sort of a general support for all Jewish students and life on campus (hosting seders and so on), is taking a strong, one-sided position on political issues that are contested among actual Jews, it seems to me to be claiming that the right-wing Israeli position on Palestine isn't contested among Jews, but that it is the only Jewish position. No one should fall for that claim, but making it does seem to set people up to make exactly the error the questioner made (assuming it was an error).
Here's the relevant stuff from 11:
While the council has recently voted on resolutions related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the judicial board is not involved in those types of decisions. Instead, the board reviews the actions of the officers and funding bodies of the students association. Last November, the judicial board did decide a conflict of interest case brought against two students who were accused of committing ethical violations by voting on a divestment resolution after taking part in educational trips to Israel with certain pro-Israel groups.
But, the Bruin editorial board argued, "the extent of Beyda's involvement in Jewish community groups is irrelevant to her ability" to be an effective judge even in those kinds of cases.
"Suggesting otherwise implies that any person with any kind of community identity cannot make objective decisions on the board," the board wrote. "If Beyda cannot make decisions about issues that affect her community, can a Muslim student in the Muslim Student Association or a black student in the Afrikan Student Union do so?"
I think it would have been appropriate for an interviewer to ask, "Given your involvement in Hillel, could you be impartial in a case involving ethical questions such as the Birthright/divestment one" and to take a "yes" at face value. That's not what happened; what happened was inappropriate.
49: that said, "just as" in 46 is wrong. It's not the same thing, which is why analogies are banned, I suppose.
52: I meant it by way of asking if your personal experience sheds any light on the issue. I don't think they're entirely separate issues, per 54 and 14 and 21 previously, but I'd be eager to know what you observed, since I'm just following it in the papers.
I don't know what Hadassah does but I associate the name with good things because they have their sign right above the liquor store.
58 to me stopping for a beer on the next block up.
56: I think it would have been appropriate for an interviewer to ask, "Given your involvement in Hillel, could you be impartial in a case involving ethical questions such as the Birthright/divestment one" and to take a "yes" at face value. That's not what happened; what happened was inappropriate.
For what it's worth, I agree with what you've said here. It's just that this is entirely different from what JRoth and parsimon (and I thought you in a couple of places) said above. You're talking about an individual embracing exactly the kind of nuance that's missing from some of the earlier statements here.
Also, my observations at Davis suggested that national Hillel was far more divided than many people seemed to assume, and that insofar as Hillel came closer than in the past to hewing to the Likkud line, that shift divided campus Jewish communities. But then, in all honesty, I stopped paying attention, because the whole thing made me want to puke -- not least because it was obvious that the politicization of Hillel was yet another moment in which it was becoming possible for assholes to cloak their casual anti-Semitism in the raiment of principled anti-Zionism.
yet another moment in which it was becoming possible for assholes to cloak their casual anti-Semitism in the raiment of principled anti-Zionism.
Let me reiterate that people like this do exist, I'm related to them, and even if the questioner was innocently misspeaking, I still think this kind of language policing is a good thing because it keeps casual anti-Semites polite in public. At which point they're still there, but at least they're not proselytizing.
57: the thing that makes me grumpy is that Israel has become such a shande fur die goyim. Maybe it was always destined to be thus? Maybe Zionism was a doomed project from the get-go? I don't know and don't think I care very much at the moment. I do, though, know that you, my brother, do not make my grumpy at all.
Anyway, I did develop a bit of a negative stereotype of Israelis because of some asshole real estating. One of the guys went to prison just this week for trying to jump bail after pleading guilty to fraud. Maybe Israelis hold negative stereotypes of Pittsburgh because this guy was cheating a bunch of them.
Also, 61 is right. I don't know that from my parents, fortunately, but it's true.
62: more besos.
61-60: I may have a fairly high comfort level with an anti-Zionist coalition that includes politely restrained anti-Semites. Maybe higher than it should be.
65.last: You're in a different position as a Jewish anti-Zionist -- unless it's really egregious, tolerating anti-Semites doesn't implicate you personally in their weirdness. For the goyim, it's a little more directly fraught.
Anyway, I did develop a bit of a negative stereotype of Israelis because of some asshole real estating. One of the guys went to prison just this week for trying to jump bail after pleading guilty to fraud. Maybe Israelis hold negative stereotypes of Pittsburgh because this guy was cheating a bunch of them.
My negative stereotype of Israelis is based entirely on the assholes at mall kiosks who used extremely aggressive sales tactics to try to push their stupid fingernail-hardening manicure products. But I hope they aren't representative.
If you made your fingernails harder, wouldn't that hurt your teeth?
The Hillel President's quote at the end of the article indicates a willingness/happiness to view anti-Israel sentiment as the root cause and the real problem here.
36: In my own non-defense, I erred in not posting my first thought on the subject, which is that any group-identity assumption of position/blame/whatever is inherently problematic/racist/bad. I didn't mean to say that people who vaguely assume that all X people think in a certain way are acting in good faith, let alone good practice.
OTOH (and you had to know that was coming), 90% of public discourse about Israel in the US consists of Jews in mass media saying that anyone who disagrees with Likud is an anti-Semite. That's not the fault of anti-Likud Jews, here or abroad, but it strikes me as being not dissimilar to evangelical Christians who are upset that a lot of Americans view evangelical Christianity as a hateful religion.
IOW, #NotAllJews. On preview, 46 kind of addresses this, but seems to pretend that it exists in a world where Democrats aren't presumed to be traitors. The right is, in all societies, very effective at suggesting that the left are borderline traitors. If J Street are self-hating Jews, then any real Jews are Likudniks. QED.
I don't have a solution here, any more than I know how non-hateful Christians can save Christianity, but I don't see how quick-draw accusations of anti-Semitism help. It's the job of non-Jews to call out anti-Semitism among themselves; is it also their job to call it out among Jews?
70 is exactly what you'd expect from someone with that last name.
Just to follow on that last phrase, I'm thinking specifically of Netanyahu's slander against victims of the Shoah as unwilling/able to defend themselves. Attacking that line doesn't strike me as something that I can credibly undertake as a Gentile. But why aren't there 14 million Jewish voices decrying that slander? I get that Jews making Jewish jokes is OK*, but why is flagrant anti-Semitism acceptable when voiced by Jews but even colorable anti-Semitism by Gentiles presumed near-genocidal?
And I'm typing too quickly, and should shut up.
*just like any group making in-group jokes
7 to 71.
When we lived-in Miami, we got lots of junk mail from various synagogues inviting us to join under mistaken assumptions...
70: for what it's worth, I assumed you didn't endorse that position. Beyond that, it seems patently stupid in a country in which 75-80% of Jews who vote (and last I checked, Jews had higher rates of political engagement than any other ethnicity/race in the United States) do so for the relatively progressive party, the party that's ostensibly anti-Israel, the party whose current leader is a Kenyan Muslim, to assume that all Jews are Likkudniks or reflexive Zionists. Regardless, yes, I understand that the right-wing noise machine makes it hard (for idiots and anti-Semites) to realize that not all Jews are moral monsters. And I'm sure that such a perception has nothing whatsoever to do with historical anti-Semitism. It really is up to progressive Jews to combat such broad-brush characterizations of the tribe!
Nearly every American* Jew I know -- and to be sure, I acknowledge that I'm in a bubble -- has given up on having any impact whatsoever on Israeli politics. In fact, nearly every American Jew I know considers Bibi an embarrassment, but also recognizes, finally, after years of deluding themselves, that Israeli politics have become completely toxic since the Russian aliyah (it's always the Russians who are at fault), and that there's nothing to be done. The sense of futility and despair that pervades the American Jewish communities that I frequent is really something to behold. A utopian experiment that seemed to have a shot of working as recently as the 90s has now completely failed. And that experiment really matters, because many of these Jews have immediate family that lived through (or didn't) WWII. Good times!
* Not Canadians, mind you. Canadian Jews are, in my experience, considerably more conservative than their American cousins, probably because polite anti-Semitism is still relatively common north of the border.
74 seems a bit needlessly dickish. Certainly here in the not-at-all Jewish world of West Coast entertainment law, it's fairly safe to assume that everyone is reflexively at least a mainstream Democrat, probably a fairly liberal one, and also reflexively Zionist (to be clear, I don't think at all that being Zionist or even reflexively pro-Israel makes one a moral monster, unless taken to extremes). But maybe you mean something different.
Well, I'm not a West Coast entertainment lawyer, so I wouldn't know. But I'm certainly not surprised to hear that. I was careful to note that I was talking about the American Jews I know -- and also that I'm in a bubble. But you are one of the internet's foremost experts on needless dickishness, so I'll take your word for it.
77 before seeing 75, but you seem determined to be kind of an asshole about this topic, perhaps out of understandable frustration with other assholes.
Just to be clear, 78 was written with tongue in cheek. Regardless, it seems like my tone is being read as hostile in this thread. I'm assuming that's because, as I said above, this topic makes me completely miserable. But not miserable or angry at anyone here. My anger emerges directly out of my aforementioned sense of futility and despair about the future of I/P and what that future portends for Jews around the world, including probably my kids.
And 79 before seeing 78. Yes I am having trouble reading tone, why do you ask.
I mean 80. Whatever. Anyhow, totally misread your tone.
79: like I said, it's obvious that people are reading my ambient and impotent rage about this issue as directed at them. That's not the case. I think people are generally pretty stupid and ignorant about I/P, and I'm certainly getting increasingly sick of public displays of ostensibly righteous anti-Zionism on the part of colleagues and friends who don't have the first fucking clue what they're talking about, but it's genuinely not personal here.
77 seems right more generally: "progressive liberal views but not when it comes to Israel" is a really, really recognizable kind of view and one that I tend to see among the Jewish people I know (though less and less as the years go on*). I don't think there's much you can get about attitudes regarding Israel from the fact that Jewish people generally vote in strongly progressive ways, especially because most progressive politicians are strongly pro-Israel or at least don't care much one way or the other.
*The "strongly/loudly pro-Israel to ambivalently/quietly opposed" transition is really noticeable as things continue to get more and more nasty/right-wing in Israel.
OTOH (and you had to know that was coming), 90% of public discourse about Israel in the US consists of Jews in mass media saying that anyone who disagrees with Likud is an anti-Semite.
Actually, a very healthy dose of the particular strain of public discourse you're referencing consists of right wing Protestants saying that anyone who disagrees with Likud is an anti-Semite.
86 gets it right. And brings along a red heifer for good measure.
86 was in part what I meant when I wrote, Regardless, yes, I understand that the right-wing noise machine makes it hard (for idiots and anti-Semites) to realize that not all Jews are moral monsters.
It's impossible to imagine why anyone here thinks I'm being a dick.
She's a red fox. My god, Josh.
I do want to note that you're all discussing whether Jews are responsible for anti-Semitism.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised to be pwned. You people really do have it in for the Jews.
It might even be possible that American Jews who are likely to take a strongly pro-Israel stance receive more media attention than their numbers warrant, rather like black Republicans.
... yes, my pseud surname is lernr ... want to make something of it, goyim?
It's interesting to read the meeting minutes, linked at the article. It does appear like they're fumbling inarticulately around the kind of thing LB was suggesting in 18:
-Roth says given that you are an active member of the Jewish sorority how would you maintain an unbiased
-Baral says I don't know if its necessarily appropriate and feel like it was comfortable asking other students and I want to cut it off.
-Sadeghi-Movahed says maybe possible to rephrase the question. Given that the recent judicial board cases dealt with conflicts of interests leaning a particular way, how would you be able to keep an unbiased view?
-Beyda says anyone who is qualified is likely to have opinions on campus manners and the laws are not a matter of opinion. If I felt like I could not be unbiased I would remove myself but I don't think I would be in that position.
Those minutes certainly reveal one thing: the Bruins need a better student council secretary.
Alternate USC minutes:
-- Stubbins says moar beer bro
-- Wakefield says hey Peterson nice rack hey Stubbins do you even lift
-- Peterson says yes it is a nice rack I've been working out but hey whatevs Wakefield why are we even here it's like 9:15 already
96: you of all people should know that working out won't do crap for your rack.
Are you saying he has a shitty rack?
My first move as Supreme Dictator of the Internet will be to firewall the entire Middle East. No news will come out of it. No mention will be made of it. No one will be allowed to have any opinion on it at all who does not live there, and anyone engaging on either side will be forced to move there in real life.
The temptation to live a fantasy life, in which you are by day a mild-mannered accountancy student, but at the keyboard in the evenings a warrior for truth, justice and freedom/justice (delete as appropriate) against the Muslim/Zionist threat is one that should be resisted by anyone who can and where failure to resist should be punished by social death. In my professional life, and in Yurp generally, I think it is more problematic on the Palestinian side of the war where it glides very easily into genuine anti-Semitism. Certainly, taking that side in the keyboard war is far more common in Sweden and has done some real damage to society there. I mean, no one needed to care when half the population of Sweden was pretending to be North Vietnamese, but there are actual Jews living in Scandiwegia whose lives are made much worse by these games. From a distance, it looks as if the problem in the States is mostly people pretending to be heroic Israelis instead.
Firewalling the whole region, banning all news from it, banning all pictures of atrocities on either side ... there may be some small difficulties of implementation, but it still strikes me as more likely now than a viable two state solution, and what else is there?
In other words, I think I share VW's despair.
I'm sure that as the changing climate makes for less water in the region, people will come to cooperate in the face of dwindling resources.
I'm sure that as the changing climate makes for less water in the region, people will come to cooperate in the face of dwindling resources. wisely stop moving there.
99: From a distance, it looks as if the problem in the States is mostly people pretending to be heroic Israelis instead.
From inside the States, it looks about the same, at least to me. I was utterly shocked a few years ago when a good friend flatly declared that if he had his wish, all Palestinians would be wiped off the face of the earth. Our friendship is now distant and carefully formal when we do communicate.
Nonetheless, I can't say that I'd rather not have known his views on the matter.
I'm delighted that this hasn't come up in my social media. Two shares on FB and no discussions requiring me to someones-wrong-on-the-Internet. And nowhere in my Twitter.
You're talking about an individual embracing exactly the kind of nuance that's missing from some of the earlier statements here.
There's a bit of an "undergrad fails at nuance, film at 11" element here. But now this young woman is at the center of a digital lynch mob (riled up over, god help her, Israel/Palestine issue.) And she will forever have the online reputation as an anti-Semite. That really, really sucks for her.
this young woman is at the center of a digital lynch mob
A phrase with a proud history, to be sure. And so apt!
This seems downright high-minded, under the circumstances.
Rabbi Aaron Lerner, the incoming executive director of the UCLA campus Hillel organization, said he did not ascribe anti-Semitic motives to the student government officials who initially questioned whether a Jewish student could impartially review all judicial cases. The matter was more an extension of the anti-Israel stance of some campus groups, he said.
The protests against Israel at UC and campuses nationwide "have descended into a misunderstanding about where the line is between politics and hatred," according to Lerner.
Really? It seems pretty opportunistic to me. Let's act forgiving while tarring legitimate political grievance with the brush of the transgression we're supposedly forgiving.
Sure. You can't expect him to maintain an unbiased view.
it seems patently stupid in a country in which 75-80% of Jews who vote (and last I checked, Jews had higher rates of political engagement than any other ethnicity/race in the United States) do so for the relatively progressive party, the party that's ostensibly anti-Israel, the party whose current leader is a Kenyan Muslim, to assume that all Jews are Likkudniks or reflexive Zionists.
I admittedly live in an east coast liberal Utopian bubble, but I don't think I know many people (IRL, which is different from the Internets) who would make such an assumption. In my bubble, the default setting for American Jewish is liberal, progressive, registered Democrat, and uncomfortable-to-tortured about Israel.
A phrase with a proud history, to be sure. And so apt!
I was hesitant to use that phase, and I really don't like it, but what other phrase in common usage explains the concept when a whole bunch of random internet people gang up one someone far out or proportion to the original transgression?
Yeah, I dunno, at this point, 18+ years of internet discussions on Israel/Palestine has basically gotten me to the point of completely writing off anyone with even the slightest hint of sympathy for Israel. What's the point of even engaging with those fascists? None that I can see.
110 - I believe "shitstorm", per the current German-language usage.
112: So are you voting to keep her off J-comm?
109: we live in very similar bubbles.
I'm not too crazy about electoral politics either.
Most of the people I know IRL who ever talk about Israel are strongly supportive of the Israeli government and strongly critical of the US government for not acting harshly enough toward Iran. But there's a strong selection bias there: I assume that most people I know IRL have other opinions and just don't talk about htem.
My former boss was on the boards of various Jewish organizations and attended meetings with Israeli ministers when they were in the States, and starting about 7 (8?) years ago, he said that the meetings changed from a regular agenda of goals and challenges to being 100% about Iran. He told me that as a measure of the seriousness of the threat to Israel from Iran, and for some reason my eyerolling wasn't more convincing than his briefings.
All that by way of saying that there's been a serious propaganda push on this issue for about a decade now, and it's surely had an effect among Jews who are active in the community. And I'd assume that the farther someone is from that crowd, the more they'll see it as regular warmongering from Israel.
Are we springing forward tonight? Or tomorrow night?
Oh, damn. I hate it when we lose an hour.
Whether to go off DST is actually an issue currently being debated in the Alaska legislature. It's pretty contentious.
Permanently, I mean. We'll still go off this time.
Israel seemed like a pretty nice place when I was there. Orange trees all over an academic campus are a nice innovation. Why can't everybody just get along and eat fresh oranges? They need to do something about the lines at the airport, though.
I can't understand why we don't just stick with the longer days year round. Kids having to take the bus to school in the dark during winter? Surely it's worth it in exchange for an extra hour of daylight.
They're not actually longer. We just shift the light around a bit.
You should also check your smoke detector batteries if you are gentile and thus not immune to fire.
We need a strategic daylight reserve, to be tapped during winter and replenished during summer.
126 has reminded me of Ghassan Kanafani's incredibly depressing stories, including the one called something like "The Land of Sad Oranges" in which a displaced Palestinian family lose their orange grove, then catch a glimpse of it again, and everyone cries. I think there was more to it than that, but it seemed to be the point at which he'd decided to take a pretty strong "fuck complexity and ambiguity" line. ("Returning to Haifa" was the one that made me read others in college.)
It's also the centennial of the Armenian genocide this year! Wheee, happy 2015, everyone.
On the student council members: well, they're definitely paying for their mistakes now, right? This is a kind of mistake you can be made to pay for? I hope the insulted student is at least getting some comfort and not just vastly more harassment. It's fucked up that she would pretty much have to turn off her inbox once a story like this hit the national media, though.
We just shift the light around a bit.
Why should the tropics hog it all? Giant mirrors, positioned just so: we can do this, right?
Giant mirrors, positioned just so: we can do this, right?
You're the physicist, you tell us.
Would the giant mirrors I have in geosynchronous help?
Tonight is maybe my favorite holiday. Losing an hour of daylight when the days are already short, leaving work in the dark for two months, it makes me less pleasant to be around than usual even.
If there were but some stratagem available to counter that loss of daylight ... must try to think.
74 and 109. Is it really the case that people in the liberal, progressive left coast believe Obama is a Muslim? Or was the tongue in the cheek there.
The Middle East firewall idea is a good one, if we can manage to wall off the radiation from the upcoming nuke exchange(s).
Yes, I really like returning to the mode of light in the evenings.
For nearly all of life, I've lived mostly among people where there were so few Jews that the anti-semitism was not really this well-developed. It's more the try-to-say-Hanukkah-with-the-most-gutteral-chet-throat-growling-ever!! variety. Jews are sort of the mythical people necessary for religious people to bring about rapture.
I think Delegar's kid has a story about trying to convince her classmates that Jews are real?
137. When he was particularly enraged by the news, my father occasionally used to declare that he was a consistent antisemite: he hated the Arabs and the Israelis equally and without distinction. I asked him what he had against Ethiopians and he conceded the point.
139: You don't have to get far out of the city here to be where people are always throwing "Jesus" at each other.
140: Stubbing their toes is traditional.
I want clocks to adjust daily so that the sun sets at the same time all year. We'd get used to it, and most people are at school or work during the day anyway, so let it be dark then. Around here the shortest day of the year is 9.5 hours. Make sunset a reasonable 7:30pm, and sunrise on the worst day would be 10am. That's fine.
What I like about DST is that I have no idea which time is "standard", the winter or summer time. And neither do most people, I think. In the spring you hear "Remember, set your clocks forward! Daylight saving time!" and in the fall you hear "Remember set your clocks back! Daylight saving time!"
"Daylight saving time" is the name for the societal paradigm in which we have two different time systems... it's not the name for one or the other of the time systems.
The "savings" is in the winter, I think? That's the intuitive answer, but I somehow have it in my head that the "savings" is actually the counter-intuitive summertime. Or what you said about no one knowing.
I'm pretty sure it's the latter. Winter time is set to 12:00 as solar noon (somewhere in the time zone) and summer time is 1pm as solar noon.
The whole thing feels like a sham, to me - there's plenty of sunlight in the summer, and not enough around the winter solstice, and DST feels like a shell game. If you wake up when it's dark and go to sleep when it's dark, why does shifting the light hours allegedly help?
I think 148 is right, but why is the summertime what needs fixing?
Standard time is the winter time. Daylight Savings Time is the summer innovation designed to help urban retailers sell more at the expense of those of us who go crazy having to switch clocks and wake up in the dark. Everyone should know this.
I'm trying to do this from memory, without looking it up, but I think the idea is that you can't do much of anything about the winter: there's just not enough sunlight to go around. But in the summer, you can steal an hour of daylight from before most people are awake, and move it to the evenings, so you've got one more hour of daylight overlapped with conventional waking time where you don't need to use artificial light.
(I hate it and want it to die, but I think that's the theory.)
I am 100% on board with anti daylight savings time right wing cranks. Is there a fund I can contribute to to help the cause in Alaska?
DST was invented, at least here, in WWI to boost agricultural productivity. Why it wasn't rescinded by the same act that ratified the Treaty of Versailles defeats me.
These guys are right the hell on. Endalaskadaylightsavingstime.com is the best.
155: because everyone knew you'd need it again in 20 years.
144 - In Minnesota this would mean there were days when sunrise was after 11 in the morning. That would almost certainly be worse than what we have now.
I have a vague memory that it was originally Benjamin Franklin's idea. Stoves, fire departments, and the post office are still in his favor, I guess.
154: Yeah. DST is a pain in the ass and needs to go.
#DSTDELENDAEST
Are you all a bunch of shut ins or something? DST kicks ass. Drunken evenings playing HORSE in the driveway! Flyfishing at 8pm!
158: Nope, sounds like winter is not affected.
If there's one thing the last two years have taught me, it's that I have much weaker opinions on DST vs. Standard Time when I'm not working.
161 is right, but 160.2 is great.
I'm trying to do this from memory, without looking it up, but I think the idea is that you can't do much of anything about the winter: there's just not enough sunlight to go around. But in the summer, you can steal an hour of daylight from before most people are awake, and move it to the evenings, so you've got one more hour of daylight overlapped with conventional waking time where you don't need to use artificial light.
Right you are.
Plus, kids wake up with the sun and not waking at 5 am is great.
If daylight savings time ends, we'll have to buy heavier window shades.
What I like about DST is that I have no idea which time is "standard", the winter or summer time.
I learned in Germany, where the changed time in summer is called Sommerzeit and the time in the winter doesn't have a particular name, because it's just regular.
I really dislike the two recently added extra weeks of DST at either end. They don't feel right at all.
162: 144
I want clocks to adjust daily so that the sun sets at the same time all year. We'd get used to it, and most people are at school or work during the day anyway, so let it be dark then. Around here the shortest day of the year is 9.5 hours. Make sunset a reasonable 7:30pm, and sunrise on the worst day would be 10am. That's fine.
This is one of those think/thing divisions where I didn't even realize there was another side, which is to say, 161 is obviously right. Who cares if it's dark in the morning? Morning time is a bleak hellscape of souls stretched thin silently weeping into coffee mugs. Much like sex with your sister, that's best done in the dark.
There was a really long and informative metafilter comment about this, IIRC!
168.2: Yeah, I don't mind DST but the switchovers now seem too early/too late.
Mostly, I can see the arguments for longer daylight in the summer evenings, but if that's what we want, couldn't we just keep the same schedule year round? I hate the switch.
Of course 161 is right. Not just flyfishing at 8 p.m., but watering the garden, picking vegetables, taking a stroll, actually watching a sunset.
The real problem, as ever, is work. If we were free all day, an earlier sunset would be less depressing. Throw off your chains, my friends.
173: Do you also hate schoolchildren traveling in the dark in the morning?
159: Yes, An idea that Franklin proposed. William Willet pushed it in 1907 in England with a proposal for 4 20-minute moves.
It is futile to say these can be secured by early rising. The exceptional exercise of this virtue usually calls forth more sarcasm than admiration or imitation. Leisure must follow, not precede, work, and compulsory earlier business hours are quite unattainable.He was generally mocked*, but a few years late during the war the hour one was instituted (but I think the Germans got there first). Double Summer Time was a thing in Great Britain. This site has a lot of material on it.
Franklin had the idea when abruptly awakened at 6 Am after being asleep for a few hours:
Your readers, who with me have never seen any signs of sunshine before noon, and seldom regard the astronomical part of the almanac, will be as much astonished as I was, when they hear of his rising so early; and especially when I assure them, that he gives light as soon as he rises. I am convinced of this. I am certain of my fact. One cannot be more certain of any fact. I saw it with my own eyes. And, having repeated this observation the three following mornings, I found always precisely the same result.
*Lord Balfour had a concern: "Supposing some unfortunate lady was confined with twins and one child was born 10 minutes before 1 o'clock. ... the time of birth of the two children would be reversed. ... Such an alteration might conceivably affect the property and titles in that House."
The link in 174 is indeed good and makes the important point that the timing of the light is also sensitive to where you are within a timezone.
176: I don't think it's a lack of desire that's the problem there.
Throw off your chains Get yourself a sugar momma, my friends.
177: That doesn't seem like a problem to me at all. I mean, they wake up before sunrise even on solar time at this latitude -- what's the problem with having them leave the house before sunrise? But this may be an urban perspective, based on copious streetlighting. Maybe it's really a practical problem I can't see when you get out on poorly lit suburban and rural roads. Would it be dangerous to wait for schoolbusses before sunrise?
179: Yes, and that is something that strikes me about New York--not only do things tend to run later, it is relatively far east in the time zone. During the winter in NYC I have gotten out of brunch close to sunset in the winter.
During the winter in NYC I have gotten out of brunch close to sunset in the winter.
This gave me a pang in my heart.
Indiana truly has the best, most pleasing relationship with DST and time zones. County specific!
One pet peeve I have is people from other time zones scheduling calls for "PST" or "EST" when they actually mean "PDT" or "EDT," etc. Morons!
The list from Halford's Alaska link begins in truly awesome fashion:
1. We live in the "Land of the Midnight Sun"
with plenty of daylight for everyone
Can Alaska also propose switching national anthems to "The Immigrant Song"?
All of this strikes me as so much whining, I'm afraid. I don't know why we have to go through it every year, or every half year, when the clock setting changes. Is it really, really that hard to adjust yourself and your patterns to just an hour long change? It's one hour. Isn't it, rather, a refreshing change?
Well, apparently not. Apparently it's an egregious affront. I just feel that there other more serious concerns.
Didn't Lord Castock have an eyerolling index? I forget how the scale was set up, but (making it up on the fly) this is a 4-level eyeroll.
187 seems pretty high on the *yawn* index. Probably because I lost an hour this morning.
It seems like it would be much more important to choose which hours were daylight when there are fewer of them. At the summer solstice, when there are 16 hours of daylight, it kind of doesn't matter which ones you pick, but at the Winter Solstice, when there are only 8 hours, you want to choose wisely. I humbly suggest that daylight in winter should run from 10a-6p. Then when summer rolls around you get 6a-10p. Perfect.
Also high on the grumpy index. Possibly because I lost an hour this morning.
Just move north in the summer, so that you have the delicious extremely late summer sunsets, and south in the winter. Bonus, your summers aren't too hot and your winters aren't too cold. Nomads have it right.
(I have discovered that I do adore the light until 10 pm thing up here. However, I don't really enjoy the corresponding light at 3 am thing. God forbid I move to the real North.)
Whereas I cherish the times when someone has taken the time to point out others' errors re pst vs pdt etc to large groups of people scheduling conf calls for projects / negotiations crossing time zones as invariably that person is a complete dick and by that one ineradicable move helpfully has clarified his/her dickishness for everyone.
In the olden days, people marked important seasonal changes with festivals that had costumes and food and human sacrifice and other neat stuff.
If someone would just design some cool "spring forward" and "fall back" rituals, I'm sure people would stop complaining.
Hell yeah. When I am rich enough to live my life of ease, I will just go back and forth between summers in Seattle and Melbourne. Or maybe Auckland.
This thread reminds me that yesterday I went to a store where the owner sounded just like Carol Kane.
You're supposed to change them? I thought it was just a testing of them.
We have hard wired smoke and CO now. Are you still supposed to replace the backup batteries every year?
I don't have a very strong opinion about DST, but I'm mildly opposed, especially when it comes to Alaska where the arguments for it based on how nice it is to have more light in the evening are just silly. The link in 156 is a great example of a certain type of Alaskan right-wing crankiness that is typically applied to much less reasonable arguments than this one.
If you tested them by setting fire to a baby who woke up early ...
OK, there can be an exception to DST when the only landmass in an entire time zone is located farther north than Lake Baikal.
Even when I lived further south, though, I never really got the appeal of DST. I've never paid much attention to when it gets light or dark, though, unless I had a specific reason to, so I'm probably just atypical.
155. Your theory fails in the face of the fact that the US never ratified the Treaty of Versailles.
As the folks at Endalaskadaylightsavingstime.com say, "Instant time change disturbs sleep patterns,impacting health and lifestyle,so who needs 'state sponsored jet lag' twice each year."
I say the hell with state-sponsored jet lag.
Calling anything less than four hours "jet lag" is bullshit.
I'm far south enough that there is no daylight savings time because days don't change in length all that much. But I do like DST because it means that the all my peeps on the East Coast have their clocks set the same as mine, wear-as the rest of the year they are an hour behind.
I'm going to an appointment and the office next door has a sign that says "Trapped In A Room With A Zombie Corporate Team Builder." There are a lot of shouts and screams leaking into the hallway.|>
You owe it to the blog to investigate.
Why not just move the workday/shift times as desired? Management sends an email and it's done. I've worked several 6 to 3 gigs, had lots daylight left to go trout fishing, never found any in the middle of L.A. though.
Boringly it seems to be what it says it is. Lots of screaming though.
http://roomescapeadventures.com
Daylight savings time really reveals a lack of creativity. I mean, the progression of hours in a day is an entirely human invention so we can do whatever we want. Why not have the daylight hours be 5-7PM, 4:30-5 AM, and, somewhere around 6 AM to noon? The other hours could all be dark.
I know it sounds odd, but imagine how many nap breaks you could take if you were working a normal 9 to 5 shift.
Best shift schedule I ever worked was 4AM to noon for a week. Long sunny afternoons!
Who cares if it's dark in the morning?
Last time abolishing DST was discussed in Britain, there was concern in Scotland that children walking to school in the dark would be endangered. I appreciate that as an American, this would be incomprehensible to you.
In reality, Arthur Balfour's concern in 178 is about as important as any other.
214.1: presumably incomprehensible because a) most Americans live well south of the latitude of Scotland b) most American kids don't walk to school c) Americans believe Scots of all sizes are essentially unkillable d) other?
We'll save the children, but not the Scottish children.
ttaM got hit by a truck walking to school in the dark when he was ten. His parents made him pay for the damage to the truck out of his own pocket money. Harsh but fair.
215. While it may be true that "most" American kids don't walk to school, they do walk to their bus stops and wait for the bus by the side of the road. However, due to the uniquely American can-do attitude and problem-solving ability, a lot of kids are instead driven to their bus stops, where they wait for the bus in their parents' car.
All but those of Scots descent, of course.
However, due to the uniquely American can-do attitude and problem-solving ability, a lot of kids are instead driven to their bus stops, where they wait for the bus in their parents' car.
Can you blame them, what with all those Scottish children prowling about?
205
I had a French friend complaining about the time difference when he moved to Wales. I said, "Isn't it just an hour difference? That's barely noticeable!" He responded, "Well yes, but they eat dinner 2 hours earlier, so it's really more like a 3 hour time difference."
Also, don't all Scottish children carry cleavers for self-defense? Or is that just Glasgow?
"spring forward" and "fall back" rituals
During "fall back," a lot of bars stay open an extra hour. So there's that.
Losing an hour of drinking lead to riots at bars near Ohio U.
Daylight Saving Time, people. Not "Savings". Cryptic Ned is not banned.