Many of the UC campuses, including UCLA, are having protests in support of Gaza. Many of these protests are coming under attack from outside forces and police.
A number of faculty at universities all over the nation have signed open letters supporting the student and condemning the police actions. Since LANL and LLNL are partially under UC management, should they also create an open letter in support of the protests? Should the labs also have some encampments?
I looked at the open letters; thousands of faculty members signed the letters, but I needed more from the physics or engineering departments. You get 95% of the anthropology department to sign these letters and zero from EE. Weird.
11 comments:
Well something is going on in Los Alamos. Every Saturday there are a few protestors by the pond. There is also a giant rock in White Rock which is essentially part of Los Alamos and someone painted a swastika on in. Just looking at the pictures I would guess it is one of those fake hate crimes that are so common now but who knows.
In any case I am all for peaceful and legal protests but I think I will skip signing a letter at this point. I do worry about infringements on free speech.
Things are not looking good
https://www.the-express.com/news/us-news/136485/america-civil-war-five-years-poll
41% of Americans believe there will be a civil war in the next 5 years.
This is on top of other polls that show an increasing shift in how elites see American and
the rest of the population where up to 50% of the most elite Americans think we have too much freedom
https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_stephen_moore/the_real_story_of_the_two_americas
Somthing is going to break.
There's an interesting history behind Gaza and conflicts with Israel. Gaza is mentioned a number of times in the old testament, the enmity between them and the Israelites evidently goes back thousands of years -- that is long before Christ, before Islam, and of course, before the Buddha reached enlightment in another part of the world. One would assume it was also before Alexander the Great or the Romans were in the middle east, before the rise of the Persian empire and so forth.
Gaza was the place of course, where the Samson and Delilah story occured, it was conquered by King David, and so forth. It seems, the land had been promised to Israel but they never gained complete control of Gaza or drove the people out -- some of whom were at the time known as "philistines" I believe, rather than Palestians.
There is also of course, an analogy with World War 2, as you known Hitler seized power after a popular vote in 1933, afterwards giving himself power and ending democracy. Hamas of course, was elected in 2006 and then similarly abolished democratic rule in Gaza. Just as many German citizens died in armed conflict (several percent of the civilian population) partly through bombing of cities and infrastructure with high explosives and incindiary weapons, we are now seeing destruction of cities in Gaza with significant civilian casualties. Just as in Nazi Germany, the war will probably continue until Hamas is removed just as the Nazis were removed.
In my opinion the war is not genocidal, just as World War 2 did not represent a genocide of the German people. Also the civilians in Gaza bear moral responsibility for Hamas's crimes, as they voted for them, just as the German people bear some moral responsibility for the Holocaust. So the Gazans are not really "innocent civilians" in fact, to some degree they are responsible for their own misfortune in fact.
5/05/2024 5:59 PM
Too many words to read the whole thing. If you want to make a point make it in 4000 characters or less, otherwise no one is going to read it.
You need to just say "Free Palestine" or "Stop Hamas terror at any cost", that gets the essential points across. In your case you are pro Israel. That is fine but why have long drawn out thing about history, ww2, crimes or moral responsibility. It adds nothing to the
conversation and it is not in the current form that ones uses in modern dialogue.
10:33 -- Look, I want only good things for the people in Gaza but we have to understand what is going on there. Once Hamas is out, I hope the Palestinians can rebuild and there can be lasting peace for both them and Israel. It is sad all this is happening, and understandable perhaps that some people with ties to the region wish to protest ongoing events.
The OP states that it was "Weird" that faculty from EE and Physics departments were not signing petitions. It may be folks from those departments with a rigor based in science and facts were not swayed by emotion.
Where should the labs allow encampments? HR or Superblock, tell me how it goes if you attempt the latter.
4:41 -- I personally think it's up to Israel to decide how to respond since they were the ones attacked, but it seems there are debates in Israel about negotiating various ceasefire deals and concessions in order to secure the safe return of more hostages as well as hostage remains.
That's a good debate to have I think for the Israeli public and the protests going on internally in Israel by the hostage's families, but all we can do is help facilitate whatever diplomatic possibilities present themselves, if the Israelis are interested.
And certainly working on a post-Hamas plan to build prosperity in Gaza after the war, where foreign nations aid in reconstruction of the cities in Gaza is worthwhile, and develop better governance and institutions in such a way this cannot happen again : perhaps some peacekeeping force that will maintain Gaza as a permanently demilitarized entity, with martial law in the beginning?
4:41 -- By the way, there is a viewpoint that humans do not have free will in any meaningful sense:
https://phys.org/news/2023-10-scientist-decades-dont-free.html
Obviously, this might mean that neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis are responsible for anything that now takes place. It might seem like a nihilistic point of view, but certainly this point of view has the advantage that the long history of the conflict can be discarded -- as nobody had a choice in the matter.
So certainly, there can be utility in not being "swayed by emotion" and cultivating an objective point of view.
"Obviously, this might mean that neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis are responsible for anything that now takes place."
I was just following orders.
or
The Devil made me do it.
Ultimately, if we accept the premise that humans don't have free will, we would carve the words in stone uttered by Han Solo:
"It's Not My Fault"
Well, I suppose there could be free will, but many of the arguments commonly put forth are problematic -- it is not even clear to some people how to define free will, as a definition would be needed in order to make it a testable proposition:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/one-among-many/201803/five-arguments-free-will
Of course, there is always the possibility that the "self" does not exist as a coherent entity, so there can be no choices made by it, thus disproving free will:
https://youtu.be/5k7I77VHBWE?si=4tFpbhp4L3OzpB3F
By the way, there is a new treatment for alcoholism in which the alcoholics are graciously treated to an open bar. This is of course based on the modern scientific understanding of humans' lack of free will, and of course, a desire to "follow the science".
https://www.foxnews.com/us/san-francisco-buys-vodka-shots-homeless-alcoholics-taxpayer-funded-program
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