Quick Updates: April 27th, 2024 - “Protests Rarely Yield To Police”
Wherein we do a quick roundup of some ongoing news stories, especially if we’ve covered them in the past.
Hello, friends,
Last week, we talked about the U.S. and Israeli militaries testing - and even using - artificial intelligence the likes of which we see in science fiction movies like The Terminator.
This week, due in part to some health issues yesterday (I mean, today’s Saturday as I write this, sooo), we just cover a couple of quick stories that are at the top of the docket. We’re going to start with colleges and universities all over the place, “Solidarity Encampments,” and abuses of power.
The Kids Are Mostly Alright, Why Aren’t The Adults?
When the 10/7 atrocity took place, we made a simple plea: That the leadership on all sides of the issue step back and try to avoid the unreasonable use of force in order to break the cycles of violence that keep innocent people caught up in the middle trapped in perpetual hell.
Since then, well, it’s been hard to measure the devastation.
NPR says that by February 29th (it was a leap year), the number of dead hit 30,000. Ana Batrawy, the article’s author, argues that this is an incomplete count. Jones Hayden of Politico suggests that the count recently crossed into the 34,000’s, citing local health sources, but that’s just the issue: Local health sources are hard pressed to report deaths when there are so many trapped under rubble, so many blasted into unrecognizable bits, and so many healthcare resources having been eradicated by atrocities committed by both sides.
And that’s just the death count, not the wounded count, which is probably way higher.
In solidarity with Gazan civilians subjected to homelessness, bombing, and military campaigns, student-led encampments have started forming on campuses nationwide. This sort of campus organizing isn’t exactly new, and it’s ended in tragedy before: Take the May 4th Kent State and May 15th Jackson State massacres in 1970, for starters.
Now, I’m not going to pretend these students have had perfect behavior. They haven’t. There’s credible reporting of actual terror group flags showing up on some campuses, for example. That’s pretty bad, right? That’s the whole “perpetuation of the cycles of violence” issue right there in a nutshell. Terrorists are still terrorists.
But let’s contrast how Columbia University is treating this group of protestors as compared to, say, a Nazi group occupying Columbia’s grounds about a year ago. The Nazis were allowed to just go on and do their march and, more or less, that was it. The Nazis got away with terrorizing students. But when students protest a genocide? The police are called and students get arrested.
Weird, huh?
Now, the Nazis marched and then kind of disappeared and nobody blinked twice. Maybe if Columbia had let its students protest, that would’ve been that. Columbia wasn’t the first, but a quick and uneventful protest might have died out. Instead, the crackdown has led to a much broader spectrum of protest nation-wide.
As always, police crackdowns drive the “center” out of the protest, leaving a much higher percentage of radicals behind to actively engage with police forces and generally make havoc. It’s a very short step from “we bullied out the average concerned protestor” to “why are there all these’ radical protests?!”
Then again, maybe that appearance of radicalization is what some policy-makers are aiming for. After all, it’s easy to condemn a radical protest, and not so easy to explain why a good cause got swept up by radicals, now, isn’t it? Just say “Anti-Semitism is bad” and you sound like some kind of magical enlightened centrist, even if a significant number of those you arrest are Jewish people celebrating Seder.
Funny, that.
In fact, as I wrote this, in Charleston, West Virginia there was a white supremacist march. No cops in sight. (Well, except - as Twitter users ‘joked,’ - for maybe the ones behind the masks)
Joe Biden Signed A Forced Divestment/TikTok “Ban,” And That’s Insane - And The Supreme Court Probably Won’t Save It Because It’s Crazier, Still!
Last week, in our ‘In Other News’ segment, we talked about the House passing a TikTok ban:
The Senate passed the bill and Joe Biden signed it not too long ago. So that’s it, it’s law, right? And the clock is ticking, right?
Well, ByteDance is saying it is going to refuse to sell. And, sure, it’s got room to maneuver in the courts. I’m fairly certain a case of forced divestment from a media group is going to make it’s way pretty far in the court system, possibly even to the Supreme Court.
The problem is that our Supreme Court is mental.
Court observers have noted how the lines of questioning in Trump’s immunity case have gone. I’m not one to count votes before they’re cast, but when you read what questions were asked, what the answers were, and just how sweeping Trump’s assertions of immunity are…The fact that they weren’t laughed out of the courtroom is horrifying enough on its own.
Why, no! The President can’t order his rivals assassinated and call it an “official act” for which they are immune from prosecution.
Honestly, if the Court dared to make that legal, I would tell Joe Biden his only option is to immediately off a bunch of SCOTUS justices as well as every Republican he dislikes. Just because he can. After all, they are an actual threat to the country’s government, so at least it’d be an official “protecting the country” action. Especially if SCOTUS signs off on the “murder opponents” option.
In other words, it’d be bad.
So, I can’t imagine ByteDance winning in court. Not with a Fascist-dominated outfit that would loooveee to see Mnuchin or someone like him end up with control over TikTok.
And they’d looooveeeee to know that Joe Biden shares blame for killing the app that’s mostly beloved by mostly young people in this country. You know, that demographic Biden really needs to come out and vote for him? Those folks!
Canton, Ohio Police Killed Frank Tyson
Here we are again: Another Black man handcuffed, pressed into the ground, pleading “I can’t breathe” as his life is snuffed out.
What more do I need to say? As reported by NBC News, Canton, Ohio police released bodycam footage of the April 18th death of Frank Tyson, a Black man accused of…Honestly the article isn’t sure? Having a car accident? Fleeing the scene of one, maybe? But it doesn’t appear that anyone died, so it’s not a life-for-a-life situation - not that the police would decide that, anyway.
Nope. You can apparently hear people on the camera warning the cops not to take actions they intended to take, and Tyson apparently told everyone in the room they were coming to kill him.
And he was right. They came and killed him.
As if this country didn’t have enough of a flash-point taking place, now we can add this to the mix. After all, a man is dead despite the cops knowing full well what they were doing, and being told as much by bystanders.
Some Good News: Conservation Efforts Pay Off
There are some conservation efforts taking place worldwide that are slowly, but surely, stemming the loss of biodiversity across the planet.
Biodiversity is complicated and important. It’s essential for things like food webs to survive. Ecology is complex, and that species we don’t think does much for a given environmental area might actually be really important, we might just not have figured out why yet.
It’s good to know that if we try, we can succeed at limiting bad ecological stuff.
Thank you for reading The Progressive Cafe. If this article has helped you, please consider signing up for our mailing list. This article is by Jesse Pohlman, a former hyperlocal journalist and sci-fi/fantasy author from Long Island, New York, whose website you can check out here.