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
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!