I was thinking more of the villains, but I got a little tired of Mel’s screaming. Her and Victoria (from the 2nd Doctor era) are not my favorite. Ace, however, was quite… er, ACE!!!
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Lovely. 6 months from now, we’ll be wrong for having a problem with her response.
IMHO, seeing her do that was the moment when I said, “I get it. I get why some people say allies suck. It’s all about the white woman now.”
To be clear, I’m not defending her actions in this matter - I’m trying to bring a bit more nuance into the issue. Others have pointed out the contentious relationship between the media and protesters more generally. I’m not happy about the response to her actions, however. Do we really all think that in everything that is going on in America, at this moment, what she did deserved this response? The snickering at her areas of study and her looks are probably one thing that enrages me the most. Why do people need to constantly justify their passions? They shouldn’t have to do so. I can understand the anger at her, but I can’t understand this.
But maybe something good will come out of this clusterfuck around this, if it’s “allies can suck”, then maybe it will make people rethink some things. I doubt it, because human beings are more likely to double down. But we can hope.
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For God’s sake, she flipped the fuck out for coming to cover a story, after she had sent out an open invitation for the press to cover the story. And also, for God’s sake, just because right-wing media is covering doesn’t mean you have to circle the wagons. If Rush fuckin’ Limbaugh says that murder is wrong, you don’t go out on a killing spree, do ya?
It’s okay to acknowledge that something was wrong about this, even if people you don’t like are using it to spin a narrative. It’s okay.
I’ve seen some of the rebuttals to the “poop swastika was a hoax” stories, and they tend to run along the lines of, “No, it’s not a hoax, there’s photographic evidence!” Unfortunately…any asshole (sorry) can draw with their own feces. 7 years of working retail reminds me of the swastikas, pentagrams, etc. I had to paint over or scrub off, and the scatological art I had to scrub off of walls, and there was overlap between the two. Any time one of them was caught, it was usually one of those people that Reagan-era policies “set free” from institutions. But I digress…
I’m also thinking of how the average college campus is laid out. I’m thinking about the small uni down the road from me; any knucklehead group of rednecks could load up in a pickup, drive to town, drive around campus, holler racial slurs, and unless they get caught on campus, there’s not much the uni can do about it. Really, not anything at all, unless they’re stupid enough to also jump out of the pickup and beat up the person they hurled the slur at.
Now, I don’t doubt that they have racists on campus, and that they need to take some serious steps to curb that. However, given that the student body president was caught spreading false rumors about the KKK’s active presence on the campus…they may have a tough row to hoe now. Where I live, and by being subscribed to social media of Missouri media outlets…holy fuck, they’ve got an uphill battle, and people like Melissa Click and Payton Head made it a hell of a lot harder.
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Yeah being from that state and having spent more time than I care to in small town Missouri. I will guaranfreakingtee you there are racists on that campus. Maybe not card carrying organized KKK racists but they are most certainly there.
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When this story broke, my initial reaction - along with almost everyone else here - was definitely that Click and the protesters had done the wrong thing. I still think so. But it’s interesting to see pushback developing now in the comments. I think it’s because your rhetoric has heated up but your analysis has remained shallow.
I mean, clearly you think Tai was in the right and Click was in the wrong. OK, I’m there with ya. But your characterization ranges from over the top to actually wrong. It was not polite for Tai to deliberately disregard the privacy wishes of protesters. In fact, he made a fairly aggressive move in the first place, to insist on going somewhere he wasn’t wanted just because the law said he could. And nobody was deprived of their First Amendment rights, because the First Amendment doesn’t work that way. You could say he was “deprived of journalistic access”, but that just doesn’t have the same punch, outrage-wise.
Anyway, I suspect you’re using such overblown rhetoric to express just how completely wrong Click was and how completely right Tai was. But rather than convincing me more strongly, it makes me more keenly aware of how simplistic that view is, and how much interesting nuance there actually is in the conflict.
I still think the protesters were wrong, but I wish that we could have a different, deeper conversation about it than the one happening at redstate.
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I’m surprised that so many people whipping up on Click in the guise of supporting the 1st amendment aren’t pausing to consider Click’s motives. She’s just an “aggressive bullying asshole.” For the most part, when that’s your response, it’s good to reflect. Not that there aren’t aggressive bullying assholes. Far from it. But I don’t really want to be one myself. Anyway. Anyway, very few people are asking “Gosh, why would this professor do this?” What harm could possible come to students whose names and faces are in the media, in an environment of rampant racist threats and a seemingly somewhat corrupt administration? Could there be some possibility of, I dunno, violence or administrative retribution?
It’s easy to be all abstract and outraged and libertarian when you’re safe.
This isn’t to defend Click and say she’s the greatest. She may well be a complete shit, maybe a grandstanding exploiter of student drama, or even an aggressive bullying asshole. But that’s on her. Her actions don’t oblige the rest of us to think and speak like our biggest thought fits on a bumper sticker.
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“I do not think you are sufficiently committed to the revolution, comrade!”
You cannot protest in a public place and still demand privacy. That’s what “public” means.
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That’s an interesting topic! These activists had made an encampment - they took land that didn’t belong to them and turned it into their living space. They pitched tents, ate, slept, changed clothes, held personal discussions and strategy meetings, etc all in that space. At what point do they gain the right to ask for privacy in their living space? Is it just a question of who holds the deed to the property? Is the government’s declaration that it’s public the only consideration? This would seem to have implications for landless political movements. For example, the KKK has been able to avoid undesirable exposure through the media because some members own large estates at which they can stage their meetings and rallies. By contrast, movements of students, the unemployed and the homeless, such as Occupy, have no escape or control over when the media can and can’t monitor them, because they cannot afford access to private space.
And separately but related, should civilians really have no expectation of privacy when they leave their property? Is privacy only a legal concept, or is it also a social concept? That is, could Tai have been legally in the clear, but still at risk of violating privacy in a social sense?
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I don’t doubt some were. I do doubt anyone could or would read 2000 actual threatening emails. But one death or rape threat is one too many, and I strongly doubt there wasn’t a good deal more.
Click might be a complete asshat, and I think it is and should be the right of the student body and faculty to judge whether they want her to stick around and in what capacity. But I find the self-righteous opportunistic outrage of the internet, both here on BB and elsewhere, to ring quite hollow. At this point it’s become little more than a massive pile-on.
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It’s not “their living space.” It’s land specifically set aside as a “public forum.” You can’t unilaterally declare it otherwise.
Privacy in a public setting means saying “no comment” and refusing to engage. Privacy is not forcibly ejecting a member of the public from a public space.
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The tipping point for me was how the crowd kept pushing Tim Tai and shouting “STOP RESISTING”.
Why didn’t he respect their authority? If he had just backed down he would have saved himself a whole bunch of trouble.
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For the sake of argument, let’s assume that individuals do have the right to usurp public space for themselves and expect to keep it private.
Does everybody have this right, or is it first-come-first-served?
That is – why would Tim Tai have less rights to enter that public space and make it his own?
If the protesters could declare it private, so could he.
If he could not, neither could they.
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Outside capitalism, there are many ways of deciding who has the right to space, and it’s often pretty complicated and contextual. For example, one might say that a poor peasant who has been farming a plot of land has the right to continue farming it, even if someone holding the deed wants them to stop. Or that a family living in an apartment should be able to stay in their home, even though the landlord wants to kick them out.
I think one of the reasons people are drawn to a capitalist framework for understanding property is that it’s so straightforward. It allows you to make a simple and inflexible judgement about who’s in and who’s out, who’s in charge and who’s not. But often this simplicity leads to results that are obviously unreasonable, unfair, or inhumane. For example, the protesters in Occupy Wall Street built a shanty-town and were depending on it for both shelter and as a platform for political expression. But they were arrested because the property owner didn’t want them there. In that case, I think they had the right to stay. If someone came and started building a McDonalds in your front yard, I would probably feel they did not have the right to claim that space. But if someone was sleeping in a doorway on a freezing night, I would feel they had a right to that space regardless of the owner’s wishes.
So let’s ignore the question of who has a legal right to the campus courtyard, because in my opinion it should be considered irrelevant. Who has the social or moral right to the campus courtyard? I think the protesters have a pretty strong claim to it based on what they’re using it for and the needs they have. I think the university and the government have incredibly weak claims. I think the journalists have a claim of sorts, but it’s not necessarily as absolute as the First Amendment crowd would argue. Basically, the situation requires more careful consideration when you take capitalism and traditional property rights out of the equation.
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