Why is student activism so absolutely hateful and horrible

Why is student activism so absolutely hateful and horrible

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youtube.com/watch?v=OJAuVQlLxD0
theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-painful-truth-about-affirmative-action/263122/
libcom.org/library/activism-amadeo-bordiga
goodreads.com/quotes/915420-better-to-do-nothing-than-to-engage-in-localized-acts
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most of the people involved are young and new to politics.
Don't pretend like you weren't a cringy faggot when you were younger.

Because they are rich kids who equate activism with race struggle

They're young, the fuck you want from them, a polite and professional attitude?

yeah

A lot of them are young, naive and still have that angsty 16 year old "RAAR EVERYONE BUT ME IS WROOONG" mindset, despite being in their 20s.

Plenty are also manipulated into viewpoints in their groups, or tolerate them and partake in them because they view the other ideals of the group as more important. Happens with our local 'DIE CIS SCUM' Trot parties.

Too bad, prepare for continuous disappointment.

Because most campus radicals these days are fucking COINTELPRO level radlib idpol shills. They have no appreciation for the material causes of social issues so they all develop obnoxious neuroses about the performance of guilt and shame

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prepare for the pigs you pseud

Jokes on you, I eat pork all day raw or cook, it's all the same to me.

Wrong because when I was their age (and I'm the age of many of them) I already thought they were ludicrous. That was also an opinion I remember being shared by most people of our age group I talked to.

These people are not the majority by any means, let alone representative of anything. It's a very particular type of person that is attracted to student activism as it is

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when you join your local BLM chapter at your Ivy league school and agitate for more black owned businesses and urban entrepeneurs, then start your career at Goldman as a diversity hire, after which you receive and MBA from HBS and branch into nonprofit NGOs en route to a political career

das it mane

this, honestly. why disrupt people actually trying to learn with your facile new left bullshit?

it could be homeless people printing off jerk off material, youre supposed to not be a loud cunt in libraries period

The white man's learning is inherently racist. Libraries must be decolonized to create a space for black bodies.

I think they actually attacked white students who didn't join in and even called someone a white bitch. There were lot of stories circulating about it, but I don't know what is right-wing propaganda and what's fact.

what is this referencing?

lol I love how easily the language of radlib identitarianism can be appropriated. It's almost as if it's utterly meaningless pap devoid of any rigorous theory

youtube.com/watch?v=OJAuVQlLxD0

I love the one or two dopey white strike breakers chanting with them. I have absolute fucking certainty that they're despised by the black BLM protesters.

Not to sound like a reactionary but IMO affirmative action is a significant part of the problem. Many minority students have academic abilities badly mismatched to the school they attend and thus end up having academic problems.
About half of black college students rank in the bottom 20 percent of their classes (and the bottom 10 percent in law school).
theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-painful-truth-about-affirmative-action/263122/

Many minorities end up feeling like socially isolated academic failures and blame these problems on white muh privilege, lack of safe spaces, too few minority faculty members etc. and end up advocating for these things in an aggressive way.

Then there is the students who are actually in gender, race, queer studies etc. All day they are taught about the injustices faced by their in group and told inspiring stories about heroic activists. This creates a desire in these students to "do something" about the very real identity based injustice people face. Unfortunately bc they are on extremely socially liberal campuses their isn't much real oppression to fight back against. Thus they end up focusing on trivial non issues like cultural appropriation, building named after slave owners, curriculum that need less white males etc.

Campus activism is cancer nowadays but in some places its actually pretty legit. For example in Quebec students are radical af and they've managed to win and maintain tuition fees like 1/8th of the rest of Canada. For some reason campus activism in the anglosphere is dominated by idpol.

If that was the case then non-identitarian left-wing protests made by students would be less cringeworthy, and they're not. Campus radicals are a joke.

And other movements where the majority are white and young, like OWS, also turn out to be idiotic.

it was hopeless from the start

Adam Curtis' latest documentary has a good segment about the failure of OWS and how it relates to the broader post-war decline of the left

many people at around the age they are likely to be attending college are right in the middle of their "messianic phase" where they believe they in particular have special knowledge and all the solutions to the world's problems if only everybody else would listen and do what they say. Many young people have this phase, especially well-to-do middle/upper strata young people whose upbringing has been saturated with "you can do anything", self-esteem boosting parenting and schooling techniques and little in the way of material hardship or personal challenge.

Moreover, the atmosphere of many colleges appears to be ideal for the cultivation of this kind of attitude. Some is probably due to academia being made up largely of the adults who used to be this kind of kid as their skills they acquired during their own time at college are useful in academia, so they gravitated there. Perhaps a greater part because encouraging and being seen to encourage this kind of thing is a fantastic marketing exercise that will motivate kids in that phase to indebt themselves in order to attend these colleges and pay their exorbitant tuition.

Funny thing is, I remember already being politically minded and defending the occupiers everywhere when OWS happened, and what I always heard was something along the lines of


Some in tones of genuine disappointment and others in tone of mockery and dismissal, sure, but no one just said they were wrong and that the american financial system and global inequality are good and fine.

There is a lot of genuine left-wing feeling among serious working people who simply has no outlet because everything left-wing is created for and by the young nowadays.

Idk there are many places where student radicals accomplish things I gave the example of Quebec. They just focus on the issue of lowering tuition which is the equivalent of just focusing on class for students. They are able to mobilize huge numbers of people and successfully faced down numerous attempts to raise the tuition. Students and radicals in general in the anglosphere get bogged down in idpol.

I'm honestly not sure what non-identitarian left-wing protests made by students you are talking about. I was a communist while in uni but I didn't join student organizations bc they were dominated by idpol. The only people attracted to student politics in the anglosphere are identatarians and many of them are narcissists with victim complexes of course everything they do is going to be a joke.

Honestly this is a really good point. We focus on idpol as a problem on this board but its part of a larger issue. People view activism as something to get cheap thrills from before they grow out of it. There is no attempt to build a sustainable and accessible movement people just want to belong to an in-group in their youth. There was a great line in the most recent article of Jacobin something like "we need to stop thinking of socialism as a sub-culture to defend and start thinking of it as a mass movement to build." Its terrible how far from this attitude many socialists are.

From tankies cirlejerking about mao and hohxa, people waving hammer and sickle flags, anti-fa beating up random trump supporters, identatarians screeching about muh privilege, the progressive stack and the need for black/chicano nationalism it just seem like everything modern day leftists do is calibrated to be as unappealing to Americans as possible.

Everyone always talks about wanting revolution but seems totally unwilling their calibrate their message to make it possible. We should never compromise on our goals, but its simply good politics to try and appeal to people. We are so far from doing that and we dont even have a good reason not to besides self-righteousness, pride, edginess, and racial/gender tribalism.

Amen, comrade

I think this is why those traditions and subcultures survived. The more popular and dangerous ones had to be fought and dismantled, but no one is bothered by Maoist cults saying Al-Qaeda should be given critical support for its anti-imperialism.

It's not even created by and for "the young" so much as the relatively well-off or "aspirational" segment of the young.

I think I agree with you. On my campus(Alabama) the leftist students helped organize the bus drivers for a better contract. Big deal for a state where labor is so weak. They also did a "simulated" military raid on the Ferguson center to protest the war in Iraq. People even got arrested. There was some identity retarded students(fat and proud, liberal feminists, etc.), but they were a minority. Sadly, the SDS chapter died and idpol got more power in the LGBT group. Point I'm making is that the campus had/has real issues so rather than focusing on virtue signaling and meaningless bullshit they focused on stuff that mattered.

As far as the affirmative action bs I'm a little more hesitant to draw any conclusions. We should focus more on making public schools good anyway so that black people can be better students and get into better colleges of their own merit for sure. Affirmative action doesn't actually fix the problem whatever the intentions were.

Hm that's an interesting point and I definitely think there's some truth to it. In US history every group that aims to create a multi-racial working class coalition bears the full brunt of porkies wrath see Baker's Rebellion, The IWW, Fred Hampton and I'm sure countless other examples. Meanwhile the KKK, Nation of Islam and other reactionary groups get treated with kid gloves.

Sort of like how the PLO was cracked down on hard by Israel while at the same time they were giving money to Hamas.

Yeah I feel the US, and Israel in general have tried to empower radical islamist groups. Despite their ability to spook people with violent barbarism Islamists are actually a bunch of ineffective retards. The Secular regimes were much more of a real threat to Israel and actually capable of gaining international sympathy.

Idk if this is actually true but I've also read things about Assad intentionally empowering Isis and the more extreme parts of the opposition.

Our enemies are so crafty and people are so easily manipulated, it makes things feel a bit hopeless. The only thing that keeps me going is looking at leftist history and knowing others kept fighting when they had it much worse.

No wonder shitwriter extraordinaire, Saint Max, is so popular here.

That's actually true. If you look at Adam Curtis' "Nightmares", he actually points out that as a whole the jihadi thing is a huge meme. Sunni revolutionaries basically haven't won anything significant or topped any major governments without significant Western aid. Even in Afghanistan, the salafis were relatively marginal in the fighting forces compared to the nationalists like Ahmad Shah Massoud and only were able to take power when the civil war started immediately afterwards. As a whole, it's an ideology of total failure. That's why the West is so keen on it - it's incapable of creating a genuine challenge to Western political and ideological hegemony.

Because it's safe, so in order to mask it's tepid nature wraps itself in an obnoxious cloak to look radical. Think of it like Holla Forums, but with college kids who don't need a job to pay for classes instead of teenage virgins.

Oh, almost forgot - Assad actually did let a lot of the extreme Islamists out of jail to fuck with the FSA, and most of those guys probably ended up either with Jabhat Al-Nusra or joined Daesh. The anti-regime resistance at this point is completely fucked up, which is why the whole "critical support" meme has become pretty consensus excepting trots, but anyone blaming it on Syria's inherent cultural character or deep-seated Islamist sympathies is fucked in the head.

I'm glad we can depend on third wordlists to defend Assad.

Because at the ages 15-25, it means you're literally fucking retarded and are prone to group think rather than developing your own set of ethics, interests and morals based on logic.

It isn't until you hit your late 20's/early 30"s where you develop your strongest sense of self and self-awareness.

Plus, academia is nothing more than an engine of capitalism to turn youth into mind-numbing wagecuck cogs drowning in debt.

Was he right?

Their hatred of books is manifested in the library glorious uprising, theory doesn't do it for them, they want validation, that is all, they are teenagers in mind and behavior.

Awful "best friend" parenting that brought up spoiled monsters and, even worse, leadership from professors and administration that indulges in this madness instead of putting them in their place.

They need the Borg-pill

Who ever make this needs to get fucked in the mouth.

Literal CIA propaganda. He let prisoners out as part of negotiations. The FSA was full of terrorists from the beginning.

ayoo hol up

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not really

people like this have always put me off getting involved in politics. just full of people on a feel good crusade

Student activism is extremely fertile ground for spreading genuine socialist ideas.

This is right , Islamists released from Saidnaya were released as part of negotiations with the nascent opposition

Not to say that Assad is completely blameless, he basically provided Eastern Syria as support hub for jihadis fighting US in Iraq which later fucked him over when these same jihadis use their local connections to easily take over Eastern Syria

It's more

kek

Because muh students totally didn't result in the left being buttfucked into irrelevancy in the sixties.

This is a bigger problem than most people are willing to give it credit for.
A "liberal arts education" is supposed to be about "examining unexamined beliefs, challenging biases, and broadening oneself" but here it is sheer pretense.

I mean as long as "diversity" is such a major marketing chip, due to subconscious association of ruling class ideology and social mores with financial and career success, this problem will always exist to various degrees

Because student activism attracts the hot pocket archetype, in the past those people were contained in seminaries.

They on some dumb shit

I'm trying to find the picture of that old 76 year old maga hat wearing fuck screaming his lungs out because he got pepper sprayed right in the eyes at Berkley

did he look like this, or did i just stumble on your family photo album?

I'm confused isn't this leftypol?

Aren't you meant to buy into affirmative action and the multicultural dream?

Honestly I cannot distinguish between some of the posts in this thread and /pol. Apart from the fact fact that you refrain from using the word nigger.

When they run out of mild

Lurk more nigger. And read a book

You don't get to decide who anyone is or reality for that matter.

We believe in solving the root causes of social problems and not merely treating the symptoms. The true emancipatory horizon for racial minorities is an end to capitalism and class rule. Simply ensuring that the exploiting class has proportional black representation does nothing to help the broad majority of blacks, just as a Holla Forums white ethnostate would not liberate your averge white guy from exploitation and wage labor.
The politics of identity have played a key diversionary role against workers struggles of the past fifty years, and the liberal focus on "identity" and cultural critique has come at the expense of a real understanding of the fundamental material forces of society, ultimately to the benefit of the bourgeoisie.
While I believe people should have the right to live and work where they'd most prefer, I also support the right of groups to collective sociocultural self-determination and understand that "free association" is a two-way street.
It's important to recognize that the neoliberal project requires a certain level of immigration and produces the "globalism" Holla Forums detests. But most important is that the perceived zero sum tradeoff between immigrants and natives, where you can't immigrate for better employment, wages and conditions without depressing all three in the host country, implying an adversarial relationship, is not a fundamental fact of nature but instead a product of capitalism. That is, that the same, fixed level of socially necessary labor is "gated" by the private owners of the means of production and while your job is never "created" or destroyed without actual structural economic change, your "right" to do it is subject to bourgeois self-interest. We don't want to "mediate" this conflict, whether in the interest of immigrants over native workers (clinton) or vice versa (trump,) but to eliminate it, because it's unnecessary and damaging.
Absent these economic incentives, for instance if all workers retained the full product of their labor and there was no need to seek a society with higher wages, all immigration would be due to genuine appreciation and identification with the culture and its people.
Holla Forums talking points like "why does an islamic fundamentalist want to live in a liberal democracy instead of a country that holds his own values?" are on to something. Pushing people into societies they resent through economic forces is inhumane towards everyone involved.

always relevant

That's where you're wrong you dumb nigger.

Goddamn, Fred Hampton is such a likable guy. No wonder he got zapped.

Affirmative action is not something that recieves universal support from the left at all. It's used as a sort of racial bribe: elites avoid addressing Black's wider socioeconomic concerns and instead just give them the meaningless concession of representation at the top of oppressive societal structures. This isn't even a fringe position its talked about in The New Jim Crow which many consider to be the bible of the new social movements against police brutality and mass incarceration. The only ones who dogmatically defend affirmative action are petty-bourgeois blacks trying to join the professional classes and white liberal trying to assuage their guilt without making any spooky radical changes to society.

As for multiculturalism I'm pretty indifferent as long as immigrants learn the countries language and follow its laws (as they do in my country though im aware things might be different in Europe). Liberals are the ones who hold multiculturalism up as something that inherently improves a society when really its just an aesthetic change.

This. We hardly "refrain" from saying it. We just don't go out of our way to be edgier-than-thou with it like Holla Forums.
Anyone have that "Holla Forums are the furfags of politics" cap?

Anyways its silly to claim that the words we use are some font of oppression and therefore we should use different words and control language, and can in so doing solve social problems. Oppression is a material thing, all the way.

Ranking at the bottom 20% of your class doesn't mean much as to detriment. Elite colleges have a steep grading curve, the good students get the A's, everyone else carries a B or B- at worst. The curriculum is also generally not challenging, relative to the academic skills of the student body (at least for undergrad).

Because communists have basically no presence on university campuses anymore so the only people who are organizing these activists are "radical" liberals who only care about muh idpol and nothing else.

All activism is. Nothing short of proper working class ignition and revolutionary activity is worth it. Read Bordiga and Adorno. And Zizek.

libcom.org/library/activism-amadeo-bordiga
goodreads.com/quotes/915420-better-to-do-nothing-than-to-engage-in-localized-acts

Failing required courses and having to pay for another semester or year is a material detriment. Failing classes and having to switch majors to less remunerative ones is a material detriment, and to ones they're less personally interested in, a psychological detriment.
Attrition rates are another issue. Failing to complete a degree is materially worse than never going to college, because you're out several thousand dollars and several years of missed work. There's also bound to be a lot of angst wrapped up with feelings of failure for not conforming to the "correct plan" society has decided upon.
Besides that, seeing yourself and people that look like you disproportionately among the lower-achieving section of your class is in itself a very demoralizing and psychologically taxing thing.
School mismatchment is a very powerful thing, especially under neoliberal fetishism of "personal responsibility." "You were handed the world, it was yours to lose, and you lost it through ineptitude" isn't a pleasant thought. So people naturally externalize it to a crusade against perceived racism.

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Upboat. Seriously though, look into "alter-globalism". I fear a period of populist isolationism is the only way out of neoliberalism right now, but after that, a efforts of genuine mutual aid may become politically viable.