I stand with Palestine, and the rare spaces our public can spend time and educate themselves. Genocide is depressing. Hurting books makes me sad.
Source: Portland State in midst of expensive, ‘marathon’ race to repair damaged library before fall classes begin
PS: we appreciate the smartass answers as well for much-needed comic relief
Feels like a Zionist attempt at framing anti-genociders as childish and misguided.
Right? I’m too jaded. Portland anarchists are kinda cringe sometimes, that seems maybe more plausible than a Jewish street gang false flagging it.
This thread has enlightened me on how biased and irrational lemmy is (more than usual). So far you guys have claimed it’s:
- false flag operators
- valid because the college “supports” Israel
- just dumb teenagers that don’t really care about the cause and just wanna destroy property
- okay to deface “private” stuff like bank walls but not books for a “private” library?
- really dumb people that can’t possibly be on your side
- people that just want to destroy
- somewhat justified because it brought attention to the most talked about issue? 🤣
- “a joy of punching down on people/institutions I guess?” that’s a direct quote, holy shit 😂
- “I appreciate the spirit, but people who read books are probably the wrong demographic to aim this kind of messaging at.” holy moly the cope is unreal
There’s some that are actually being honest and saying there’s no good reason because there isn’t. I appreciate those commenters.
I look forward to being banned for trolling AKA disagreeing with you guys!
If the library were a filthy Roman construct then Vandalizing it is the only correct option. Hail Gunderic!
False flag op?
Housing a fuck ton of maga paraphernalia
The only justification I can think of for vandalizing a library is that the books are all guides on how to commit vandalism.
I wouldn’t jump to conclusions on who did this, could be false flag
This feels like spray painting “Trump 2024” on an evangelical church.
Yeah, like the priest already did it, just in a different font.
This just reminded me of the graffiti I saw in the park bathroom. It said “Trum! 2024” the troglodyte couldn’t even spell his name right.
Somehow, this made me care about Palestine just a little bit less.
As said in other comments, perhaps that is the point.
Too much time in an echo chamber with a hint of anti-semitism
The forces out there wishing to divide Americans continue to post here. They will not work.
Yeah good message, but permanently ruining something that benefits society is not the way. Spray painting a wall is fine, but a book is not. You’re just doing the job of fascists for then when you destroy knowledge.
good message
It’s a good message only when it is used in a proper context and place. In this case, it’s not “good” at all.
Spray painting a wall is fine,
Yeah. Particularly when private bank walls are right there prominently on many corners just asking to be painted.
I’ve started calling this stuff “commercial Leftism”. It doesn’t care if it gets results, and it absolutely will not look for a way to interface with the power structure to change laws or force actions. It just keeps running the same ineffective, counterproductive playbook again and again and again because all it cares about is attention, and never results.
This situation and Ukraine are both filthy with propaganda, the real thing, backed by governments or their adversaries, and they already caught The Guardian using a fake AI picture of a weapons cave under a Gaza hospital that isn’t real so why would I believe this? I can’t afford to intake anything about this war/genocide as actual information.
Trash a bank if you got real balls
They did in my city. Barclays got wrecked and closed. Good shit.
In the real First Reich you’d be the first to go
Well, you wouldn’t know it from the article, but the protestors had a specific goal: get the university to divest its investments in Intel due to their close ties to Israel. The threat of it being fucking expensive and disruptive if they don’t do that is one of many possible tactics they had available.
Whether or not that’s a good idea or an effective one is a completely different discussion, but they’re not doing it because they hate books. They’re doing it because the books cost a lot to replace and it’s very disruptive to business as usual.
If it makes you feel any better, in sections where current information changes rapidly (law, technology, medicine, etc) these books were destined to be discarded and destroyed within a few years anyway. Universities throw away or recycle a ton of books every year, often because literally nobody wants them.
It’s not what I would have chosen to do, but I also can’t really fault teenagers and young adults being a little over the top about an ongoing genocide that in their view their university is indirectly financially benefiting from.
Excellent and much needed context, compared to just seeing images of contextually devoid book vandalism, and being trusted to assume a kind of naive, perhaps bad faith idiocy.
I legitimately wonder if there’s really any level of protest that people will tolerate. If you throw soup on the protective glass that covers a painting, prepare to get slammed with a 20 minute protracted conversation about whether or not soup can leak between the gaps in the fixtures that secure a painting to the wall, and whether or not that amount of soup can do damage, and how much money we’re all paying for it to be cleaned up, and how seeing a painting is a once in a lifetime thing which is now ruined for the people who went and so on and so on. If you block traffic, well, now I’ve had to spend 2 or 3 hours in delays, and there’s no cause that’s really worth a minor inconvenience. The protesting crowd should all get gunned down for that. At the very least, they all deserve to know that nothing they’re doing can every really matter or change anything ever.
Then of course, none of that’s actually related to the issue we really want to discuss, there, that’s all just tangential, complicated political issues, that we’re primed to bellyache and whine about. We can only show how much we care by donating to some nonprofit, while we go about our lives ideally uninterrupted an uninconvinienced by the protesters. I feel like I must’ve stumbled on this thread dozens of times already, and it never really gets any better.
I think what drives the root cause of this is some kind of nihilism, some sense that nothing can ever get any better, and if you think otherwise, you’re naive. That we really just exist to keep everything in a permanent deadlock. If you were to take more extreme action than this, well, no, that’s morally abhorrent, whomever will just get replaced by the institutional successor, and oh, you’re causing X amount of property destruction, which is X amount of economic value, thus, X amount of time, and thus, X amount of lifespan for someone. Then you’ve basically committed murder, if not mass murder, by wasting so many lifetimes. The many, sometimes literal, murders of the status quo otherwise need not apply, or else are assumed to be inevitable. Even if your actions here were somehow directly materially related to the conflict, right, it would be all too easy to just dismiss it out of hand as being not really effective, or as being adventurism or a waste of everyone’s time. Can’t I just get back to the perennial Big Game? I just wanna grill for God’s sake!
