Huh?

UPDATE (1 PM): Cambridge Common knows more and has some discomfiting stories. I think there are two issues here; the first is the macro question, of whether HUPD and the authorities create an environment that welcomes dissent. (Fairly obviously not.) The second is the micro question, of whether our privacy rights are being directly violated, and whether (this seems to be the ACLU's concern) information is being fed by HUPD to the federal government, specifically the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. This second one is the potentially explosive issue we should focus on.

Nothing yet on the MA-ACLU website, I'll try to keep an eye on it. Hopefully this won't be a one-day story.

Crimson:

The nation’s preeminent civil liberties group is accusing the University of maintaining a political intelligence unit within the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD), an allegation that comes after two protesters were arrested during a demonstration in the Square.

The protesters allege that undercover HUPD officers were photographing the demonstration, according to John Reinstein, the legal director of the Massachusetts division of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“What we found really quite surprising and disturbing is that the Harvard police department has an undercover, plainclothes, political intelligence unit which so far as I know has never been acknowledged by them before,” Reinstein said.

...Reinstein said that the ACLU has filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act to discover whether Harvard shares the intelligence it gathers with the federal government. Other schools have connections with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), local teams of law enforcement and intelligence specialists formed to investigate terrorism...

Reinstein said that Nieves noticed a bystander in plainclothes taking photos of the protest and decided to go photograph him. When she did, the man informed her that he was an undercover police officer with HUPD and placed her under arrest for refusing to delete the photos. Kearney said that the officer would have to arrest him if he was going to arrest Nieves and so Kearney was also arrested, according to both Fam and Reinstein.

“It’s a little unnerving to find Harvard undercover police spying and taking pictures of Harvard students on public property,” Fam said.

WTF? Has anybody heard anything about this? I know Katie posted some questions back in March when those people got arrested, but... the ACLU? "Political intelligence"? The FBI? This is some weirdness. If HUPD (a private organization paid for by our tuition) is secretly monitoring student activism on behalf of the federal government, that's pretty obviously unacceptable...

My exciting spring break plans

Spring forecast? More winter

...climatologist David Phillips is forecasting that the next 30 days will be colder than normal in the Toronto area. "People are tired of winter and it's wearing them down," said the senior climatologist with Environment Canada...

At this time of year, we should be seeing daytime highs of 6C, but "we'll be lucky to get above freezing," he said. Phillips expects the first month of spring to be colder than normal across the country.

Incredibly, this was not the most exciting article in the Toronto Star today -- that title goes to the heartbreaking "Police Shoot Runaway Cow". (Nut graf: "Two of the animals ended up in the backyard of a home where they calmly munched on shrubs and bushes." Story of my life.)

But yeah, that's what I'm doing over "spring" break. Expect little more than radio silence until we're back in 10 days -- although I will be employing the latest and greatest in Canadian telecommunications, which I gather have progressed these recent decades. Hope everyone has a good break, and feel free to share your equally exciting plans in comments.

P.S. Here is some video Kyle took of yesterday's antiwar rally, which was lent a certain dramatic quality by the rain and misery everywhere. I also expect our old friend the guy by the door, who took copious photographs, will post some shortly.

P.P.S. Congratulations to all the freshmen who were granted admission to Mather University today -- including Dem Apples' own Will Weingarten, now a made man. And my condolences to all of you who were assigned to other, inferior houses.

Sometimes you open up the Harvard Crimson--

--and a smile comes to your face, because you have glimpsed something so incredibly asinine that the blogpost practically writes itself. Read:

The parade that wound its way down JFK Street in celebration of Oktoberbest last weekend was an altogether standard procession, featuring energetic marching bands, costumed dancers, awkward stilt-walkers, and left-leaning political dissent. Nothing unusual or controversial—just jovial calls for the impeachment of the President, signs to the effect of “Honk if You Think Iraq is the Greatest Travesty in the History of the World,” and other meaningful jabs at our evil Commander-in-Chief.

[...]Unfortunately, this attitude points to a troubling dilution of political protest and a lack of serious dialogue in Cambridge and in many parts of this country today. There is a fine line between amusing political satire and impassioned political statements, a line which is frequently and haphazardly crossed.[...]

The parade participants last Sunday were not informed and serious political dissenters—or if they were their discourse gave no indication of it. But their approach was problematic and narrow-minded: “We Are All The Same,” one banner proclaimed, implying that no one could possibly disagree with them. As long as we are all the same in our opinions, the expression of them amounts not to protest but to a shameless venting of sentiment.

Those bastards.

[...]The protesters clearly viewed themselves as innocuous jesters, and certainly many of the spectators viewed them the same way. But, intended or not, this message was an aggressive political protest, and a completely inappropriate abuse of the public arena.

If we have learned anything from the shocking images of brutality in Burma it is that our right to publicly disagree with our leadership is an extremely precious one, a privilege that we too often take for granted. We must exercise it responsibly lest it lose its power.

I will leave aside for the time being the question of how something is simultaneously a "right" and a "privilege"...

...it's kind of stunning how easily this piece falls right into blogosphere stereotypes about mainstream media attitudes. It is actually -- not even obliquely, but literally -- an argument that, while we presumably do face an irresponsible president causing continued deaths of innocents in an unjustified war of choice, what's most offensive is that protesters are having too much fun. "Shameless venting of sentiment". "Abuse of the public arena." Dude even uses the word "serious" without a trace of irony (paging Joe Klein!). This reads like something from, I don't know, Harper's circa 1967 -- "we might have concerns about President Johnson and the war in Vietnam, but nobody wants to be one of those rude unwashed radicals with their long hair and their 'rock' music." And it's of course the same reasoning that led all such "sensible" people to support the Iraq War in the first place, because all those No Blood For Oil types were clearly just protesting for kicks. Silly hippies!

Plus, check out the aversion that's on display here toward the intersection of humor and politics. "There is a fine line between amusing political satire and impassioned political statements" -- huh? Satire is political argument, in one of its most refined and powerful forms. Besides, who declared that protests weren't allowed to be any fun? How is that possibly a good idea? If modern protests (especially student protests) were really as pompous and ponderous as this op-ed seems to demand, maybe they'd attract more Crimson writers, but they'd be insufferable and they'd accomplish nothing. Real change requires you to motivate people, which in today's world requires you to be entertaining and (yes) a little bit radical. But instead from the Crimson we get an attitude that, all too typically, confuses the appearance of gravitas for actual intellectual value and promotes reflexive moderation over real productive thought. Sound familiar?

Yes, what we have here is Harvard pseudointellectual elitism in its purest form, I-Banker Journalism in the flesh. No matter what the topic, these people must keep up appearances; they cannot possibly associate with the mob, and uncomfortable things like irony simply cannot be permitted. In this rather extreme case, even public protest is apparently reserved only for the qualified, educated elite; and if the rabble continues to misuse it, then -- presumably by the sovereign authority of the Harvard Crimson -- it will somehow "lose its meaning" and have to be taken away. No ice cream until you eat your vegetables!

...I feel bad for this writer, and for the sake of Google I won't reprint his name; he's just a comper, and for all I know this op-ed might just be some crap you have to do to please the Crimson's overlords. But it's just such a perfect example of the toxic establishmentarian culture that pervades this place, and the extent of our journalists' disconnect with the real world; these are the Pundits of Tomorrow, friends, better learn to deal with them.

This generation of zealots is producing the next

Some of you may have heard about the disruption of the first Hindi invocation in the US Senate. Three people in the gallery started shouting about 'idolatry' until they were dragged out. 

Anyway, it turns out that that shameful behavior was sponsored by Flip Benham and his group Operation Save America.

Operation Save America has a significant presence in Kansas, and I wrote a story  on the group for my school newspaper (tried to make it objective, but my disgust probably seeps through.)

Flip Benham and his followers set up outside a local high school, accosting high school girls who they thought were dressed too revealingly and harassing gays. They aimed bullhorns at the school and disrupted classes. So it's not exactly surprising that Benham and his organization would add one more illegal act to their list.

I've spent a fair amount of time around these extremists-- Phelps followers, Benham followers, and run-of-the-mill zealots--but I still can't figure out whether they are doing it because of authentic belief (in my opinion, authentic insanity) or because of a desire for fame.  For the Phelps clan, it is obviously fame, which is why local media doesn't cover their daily outrageous acts. The same goes for Flip.

But I also met followers at various protests, people my own age and younger, who spouted the same lines and put on the same attitude as their parents. I couldn't help thinking,"What kind of chance do they have for a normal life?" One kid I spoke to said that he was home-schooled and that he spent all of his time driving from protest to protest. He seemed perfectly nice, but a conspiracy of adults was systematically wrecking his mind.

While of course I'm angry with these three shouters in the Senate chamber, I also feel pity for them. They've probably always occupied a kind of parallel universe where every adult they know and respect affirms insanity, and everything outside of the cult is deemed the temptation of the devil.

This generation of religious radicals is producing the next as we speak, and I've spent enough time observing the camps, the conferences, and the protests to say with confidence that they couldn't be said to be failing. And there isn't any really good way to break up the party. The current methods of fundamentalists are very effective and are used on the very young.

So we should get used to behavior like what we saw in the Senate. These radicals aren't going away any time soon. 

Roundup -- Now With Exclamation Points! (!)

Boy oh boy has it been a rolling start here on campus -- Spring Break was all well and good, but there's nothing to get that blood pumping like good old-fashioned grey Cambridge drizzle for fucking days on end! Woo-eee! I'm so excited I'm mixing up my ironic exclamations!

Seriously, great roundup for you tonight. First a note -- to your left is the Peace Dollar, issued in the 1920s and 30s. I got one from my late grandfather last week; it's the most remarkable piece of currency I've come across (and I say this coming from a country that routinely puts beavers on its money). There's something comforting in the knowledge that, at one point, our government had no qualms about printing such hippie-ish designs; hopefully, in the next few years, we'll be able to use this wonderful image less wistfully. (And I'm sure President Kucinich would be up for a reissue.)

Meanwhile though -- to arms!

--Josh Marshall thinks that photo of John McCain in Baghdad is a latter-day Dukakis tank moment -- except way more substantial and significant. As usual Marshall's quite right. (Here's a sentence we never thought we'd find ourselves saying about John McCain: "if only they'd nominated him first...")

--In case you still need convincing that the electability argument is bullshit, Sifu Tweety of Poor Man has your back. Read it all. Then for dessert read the next post down, The Editors' hilarious demolition of Jonah Goldberg:

...in my head, I have a brain. Using this “brain”, I am able to determine that the conservative movement - meaning the people who control the White House, who until recently controlled the Congress, their political operatives, seamlessly integrated with the media apparatchiks who “work” at places like National Review - is a lot more important than what some dude I never heard of said this one time, particularly when the only reason I know this dude exists is because you douchebags won’t shut the fuck up about him. Hence my lack of interest.

--Speaking of The Corner: I guess when conservatives say "support our troops," they mean "support our troops, not the British troops, those pansies." I wish I were making this up. And I still haven't quite parsed Derbyshire's whopping statement that "whether or not I could stand up well to torture, I expect Marines to."

--Of course perhaps I'm just expecting too much from these people. We are talking about men whose reaction to the Iran crisis is -- quoting verbatim from Fred Barnes -- "Hey, they could use American ships!" (Kondracke later added that we should "put the whammy on them." Honestly, FOX News could just replace all its commentators with eight-year-old Hulk Hogan fans, it'd be a lot cheaper.)

--I was struck by this graph, posted by Jerome a Paris in an excellent Kos diary. Note that the last time the top few had such a large share of national income was the late 1920s, roughly 1928. History concentrators: what happened to our economy right after that? Hmm...

--Speaking of crashes, Chris Matthews has gone off the deep end. (Well... *further* off the deep end.)

--I should have known it existed: grammar blogging. Sample quote: "the understood verb phrase inside the though-clause has to mean something that does not correspond to a syntactic constituent in the antecedent main clause." I barely understand 1/3 of this blog and yet I can't stop reading it. For instance -- and here's another sentence I never expected to write -- this discussion of gerunds is hilarious.

--Over at Slate, hidden behind a sensationalistic title about Grand Theft Auto, is a thought-provoking article about liberal activist culture and the need for individual empowerment. This one will require some digesting.

--Fred Thompson's campaign is over; if he even hints at running, executives from Bravo will have to personally assassinate him. This is America, TV comes first.

--Did you know that Lee Atwater destroyed funk and invented gansta rap? Me neither! (Apparently MC Rove is just part of a long Republican tradition.)

--OK, one more shameless link to mockery of conservative bloggers -- Michelle Malkin has been reduced to delusional fantasies about Frank Capra, and it's really just too easy. HuffPo's Chris Kelly does a great job though ("Stirring words. It's like Pat Benatar wrote Braveheart").

--Apparently our generation is called "millenials," and there's a whole group of people dedicated to getting us more involved in politics. This introduction to the issues involved is worth a read, particularly in the way it (correctly) characterizes our understanding of community and and the public. More detailed writing is at Future Majority, a blog dedicated to youth-voter issues. Look forward to more from these people.

AND that's all I got. Let me close with a wonderful quote from Richard Nixon, as revealed in Henry Kissinger's secret transcripts; his wisdom still rings true today.

"Goddamn newspapers—they're a bunch of sluts," Nixon said. In another taped conversation, two weeks later, he said, "I don't give a goddamn about repression, do you?" "No," Kissinger replied.

Our President, ladies and gentlemen! (Slow clap.)

This is an open thread.

On Protest, Majority, and the Value of Bitterness

Update (April 5): Katie responds and I respond back. Hooray for dialogue! --

(WARNING: long and serious post. If you don't want to deal with this abstruse quasi-intellectual shit on Spring Break, I understand. Here's a game instead.)

Katie Loncke at Cambridge Common has written the most interesting, important, and generally noteworthy blogpost I've seen at Harvard in quite some time. You need to read it all, but the key is:

Let's face it: at this point we are rallied and marched and vigiled out. Maybe these familiar variants of mass protests haven't completely outlived their usefulness (they still tap into an important legacy within our "repertoire" of collective action), but for the most part, they won't generate considerable energy even though the majority of college students here oppose the war. We can do better, and we must... Where are the weekly teach-ins? Where's the constant stream of consciousness-raising film screenings? Where's the urgency that pushes us beyond a cursory commemoration when the end of March rolls around?

After the jump I will argue that this entire perspective is counterproductive, and that a new attitude is called for in our (progressives') relation with protest and the public. Also I will discuss my cat.

Read more »

Clearing Your Eyes

Thanks to everyone who came to tonight's Candlelight Vigil, and especially to Jill and Garrett for putting it together. I'm glad we could share that; it wound up being a lot more emotional (and a lot colder) than I expected, but the experience was well worth it. Hope you were as touched as I am. (I was also pleased to run into The Guy By The Door -- he might have a post up about it in the near future, so keep an eye on his place.)

Anyway, I think a lot of us left with an unusually clear, crisp, and unironic sense of the tragedy this disastrous war has brought. That of course cannot be allowed to last; unirony will kill you these days if you're not careful with it. So first, friends, cheer yourselves up with some great new music -- Andrew Bird has stood out for years, and what I've heard of this new album might be his best yet -- and then, head over to the Onion, where in "honor" of the war's anniversary they've collected all their Iraq coverage. These articles, when stacked next to each other, bring just the right mix of bitter fury and overwhelming frustration to make your complete 21st century breakfast.

The highlight is this prescient Point-Counterpoint from March 2003, which effectively sums up the mental processes of the time:

Point: This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism.

Counterpoint: No It Won't.

It'd be funny if it wasn't so depressing. (Not to mention that, if this were real, today the "Point" guy would still be writing embittered blogposts, while the "Counterpoint" guy would be explaining to the McLaughlin Group how he opposed the war from the beginning and isn't it nice that he just got syndicated across Tribune Media. Bah.)

...well, I have a midterm to study for; Paul Gauguin demands my attention so I guess we'll have to end the war tomorrow. This is an open thread. And I'm really interested to hear about everyone else's experiences at the vigil -- please tell your story.

The questionable rhetorical value of 'my dear boy'

Lately my blog diet has been made up mostly of a number of blogs (Alicublog, Sadly, No!, Whiskey Fire, World-O-Crap, et al.) that make a profitable living off of the stinkiest dredge and sludge from the bottom of Wingnut River. It's amusing stuff, and they hardly have to do much work to make it look hilarious—that part of the job is largely taken care of the wingnuts themselves. It's not pleasant work all the time (Roy Edroso compares his work to being "addicted to dogshit smoothies"), but somebody's got to do it.

So I was somewhat jealous, wondering why no craptastic drawls full of English-mangling bluster make their way to my corner of the blog world. And that's exactly when sonnybobiche over at RedIvy hurled this beautiful pop-fly of a post right into my hands. It was like a stenchy nugget dropping from heaven.

Shall we don the gloves and enter Bizarro Land?

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Ji-Harvard

"OHH FUCK NO NO THEY'RE GONNA SHOOT ME NO NO DON'T PUT ME IN THERE NO" is what the crazy guy in the Metallica T-shirt screamed, as at least seven or eight police officers wrestled him onto a bench outside the Charles Hotel and hauled him feet-first into a waiting Cambridge PD wagon. "AAAAAAAA FUCK!"

Behind him, a man with unwashed long hair chanted "Down with Christians, Down with Jews" repeatedly, as the photographers and cameramen swarmed. The WRKO reporter standing beside me asked if I'd seen what started it, and I gave him the same answer as everybody else: "no, although I noticed that guy earlier because he was wearing chains on his shirt." Such great insight on our part.

And that was pretty much the highlight of today's protest. Whatever President Khatami said inside the Forum -- I didn't go in, and I don't really care -- the nature of the protest outside paints a much grimmer picture for the Iranian question. Thoughts and experiences after the jump (click "read more").

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