queermunist she/her

But what if their primary purpose is to cultivate propaganda, gatekeep social clubs, grant bragging rights to fail kids, and provide sinecures to elite alumni and their friends.

And what do you think the purpose of foreign students was? To propagandize foreigners and gatekeep their ruling class. The compradores are trained in US universities, not in schools in their home countries.

New Haven, CT has one of the highest poverty rates in New England, despite being next door to Yale, home of an elite business school.

Elite universities are like fortress towns all to themselves, so New Haven doesn’t get business from Yale. That’s going to be very different for the relationship between Iowa City and the University of Iowa.

Sure, but it will seriously hurt universities by making them lose tuition and talent. By extension it’ll hurt university towns by making them lose business and labor.

We’re going to see an exodus of foreign born students and it’s going to hit college towns hard.

Saying “You don’t seem like you have good intentions” is, itself, extremely subjective in a very combative way.

Different administration controlled by a different party and before they reformulated the Hannibal Directive in 2016.

That said, Hamas probably did make a strategic mistake by thinking Israel would give a shit about its people, but in so doing they also achieved another strategic objective - the heightening of contradictions within Israeli society by showing Israeli citizens how little their government cares about them and how willing it is to kill them for a strategic advantage. They also managed to show the world that Israel is a rogue state and it has become more isolated than ever before as a direct result.

We’ll see how this works out in the long run, but don’t discount Oct 7th as a failure just yet.

Israel doesn’t give a fuck about any of its people, whether they’re civilians or soldiers. There’d be no difference if the kidnapped were all soldiers.

Also the thing about international law is it has to apply to everyone or it doesn’t exist. Israel, by not following internatonal law, has forfeited its protections. Hamas simply followed the same rules of war that Israel does. Israel brought this on themselves.

the rest mindless slaughter

Hasbara. Hamas wanted hostages and had no incentive to commit “mindless slaughter” - they’re not mindless demons. It’s likely the majority of the deaths were from the Hannibal Directive, which is why Israel won’t let the UN conduct an investigation.

They’re nasty pieces of shit when they don’t have to look at the person they’re hurting or putting in danger, but that only supports my theory. There’s an empathy disconnect that’s created when there isn’t a human face or voice immediately in front of them. Once they aren’t in danger of an in-person interaction all the venom comes out. Online, that’s basically all of our interactions.

I should point out the phenomenon where a minority in a community will magically become “one of the good ones” so that the bigots can continue hating minorities while empathizing with their neighbor. This is also becoming less common as we grow more isolated from each other and everyone moves online, destroying the potential for that face-to-face interaction.

But people are polite to your face. On the internet there’s no face, so that goes away.

I think part of that comes from empathy, though obviously part also comes from fear of confrontation and habit. It all adds up to offline interactions being far less hostile than on the Internet because they’re not face-to-face.

This is also known as Internet Fuckwad Theory.

I think you can overcome the empathy gap caused by the anonymous text format if you make the effort to empathize with people on the internet, but it requires you to want to make the effort in the first place.

Empathy offline or over video or on the phone is much more instinctual - in fact, it requires effort to resist empathy.

Why are people so vindictive and personal, and why do they double down so enthusiastically about taking it to this personal place where this person involved is being bad on purpose and needs to be attacked for being horrible, instead of just being a normal person with a variety of normal human failings as we all have?

I have a pet theory about this!

Humans can’t easily empathize with strings of text the way they do with voices and faces. When you read my posts you read it in your voice; I might as well be a figment of your imagination. As far as your subconscious is concerned, I am not actually a person. I’m an imaginary friend at best and an imaginary enemy at worst.

When someone beats up on me it’s because they’re imagining me as an enemy NPC, not a person with thoughts and feelings.

This is why arguing on the internet is basically pointless. We’re all just random encounters in the posting RPG.