My observation of rioters, admittedly from a distance and refracted through cameras, is that they enjoy rioting. Pride is not the only thing that goeth before destruction; human nature does too. I certainly know myself the pleasures of destruction, and knew them as a child: still when I dispose of my bottles in the bottle bank I am disappointed if a few of them do not break with a gratifying tinkle. When I am in a temper (which is not often these days), I know the momentary relief and pleasure that a broken window would bring me. But I have a duty not to relieve myself in this way; everyone does.
When the destructive urge is allied to a sense of purpose and righteousness, it is at its most dangerous, for then one denies that one is deriving pleasure from one’s actions — one is only doing what is right.
There is more that might be said about the violent protesters in Ferguson, as elsewhere. It is true, of course, that no one can be equally moved by all the injustices in the world; if such a person existed, his life would be one long protest against injustice and he would have no time for the enjoyment of the ordinary things of life. The best way to be a bore, said Voltaire, is to say everything; and the second best way would be to protest about everything. But still one has a duty to keep one’s wrath in bounds.
I am not against protest as such. But where someone’s protest against one thing is very much greater than against another that is equally near and in aggregate as serious, one may suspect his dishonesty or bad faith. It is true, of course, that a killing by an agent of the state is particularly heinous, especially if part of a pattern, but it is not infinitely serious by comparison with other killings, nor is it the only serious killing. Though Ferguson is not a particularly violent town (its rate of crimes of violence is about average for that of the United States), five people were murdered there in 2011 without arousing the kind of agitation that has captured, and perhaps even captivated, the attention of the world for the last few days. There are places near Ferguson where the violent crime rate is four times higher than in Ferguson, but there has never been a protest of the same order against the depredations of criminals there.
I try to imagine what it would take to make me throw bricks through windows, ransack buildings, and so forth. Having myself suffered only minor injustices and been responsible for my own failures in life, it takes a special effort of the imagination. But even after I have made that effort, I still cannot see a logical or justifiable connection between protest at injustice and looting a store.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Indulging in Destruction”, Taki’s Magazine, 2014-08-24.
August 10, 2015
QotD: Rioters
July 27, 2015
The “Ferguson Effect”
Radley Balko explains why the concerns and worries of police officials have been totally upheld by the rising tide of violence against police officers in the wake of the events in Ferguson … oh, wait. No, that’s not what happened at all:
The “Ferguson effect,” you might remember, is a phenomenon law-and-order types have been throwing around in an effort to blame police brutality on protesters and public officials who actually try to hold bad cops accountable for an alleged increase in violence, both general violence and violence against police officers.
The problem is that there’s no real evidence to suggest it exists. As I and others pointed out in June, while there have been some increases in crime in a few cities, including Baltimore and St. Louis County, there’s just no empirical data to support the notion that we’re in the middle of some national crime wave. And while there was an increase in killings of police officers in 2014, that came after a year in which such killings were at a historic low. And in any case, the bulk of killings of police officers last year came before the Ferguson protests in August and well before the nationwide Eric Garner protests in December.
Now, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund has released its mid-year report on police officers’ deaths in 2015. Through the end of June, the number of officers killed by gunfire has dropped 25 percent from last year, from 24 to 18. Two of those incidents were accidental shootings (by other cops), so the number killed by hostile gunfire is 16. (As of today, the news is even better: Police deaths due to firearms through July 23 are down 30 percent from last year.)
[…]
A typical officer on a typical stop is far more likely to die of a heart attack than to be shot by someone inside that car.
It’s important to note here that we’re also talking about very small numbers overall. Police officer deaths have been in such rapid decline since the 1990s that when taken as percentages, even statistical noise in the raw figures can look like a large swing one way or the other. And if we look at the rate of officer fatalities (as opposed to the raw data), the degree to which policing has gotten safer over the last 20 years is only magnified.
But the main takeaway from the first-half figures of 2015 is this: If we really were in the midst of a nationwide “Ferguson effect,” we’d expect to see attacks on police officers increasing. Instead, we’re seeing the opposite. That’s good news for cops. It’s bad news for people who want to blame protesters and reform advocates for the deaths of police officers.
July 21, 2015
QotD: The feminist movement
As entertaining as these little vignettes may be, they’re also indicative of a more dispiriting and concerning philosophy that has overtaken a great many young people, both men and women, at the beginning of the 21st century. The early Western feminist movements generally possessed a nobility and righteousness that rendered the ideology both powerful and admirable. It is no small feat, after all, to reverse several millennia’s worth of systematic oppression and discrimination, and the women’s rights campaigns of the 19th and 20th centuries are some of the crown jewels of Western civilization. Emmeline Pankhurst may have been a bit radical here and there, but at least she was right. Nowadays among the ranks of feminism you’re less likely to find a principled zealot like Pankhurst and more likely to find a repellant, theory-drenched curmudgeon like Andrea Dworkin.
There is a word that embodies the kind of single-minded fanaticism of modern feminism: a cult. […]
It’s fashionable these days for feminists to try and convince others of their own latent feminism; “You’re a feminist,” they claim, “if you believe in equality between the sexes.” Political and social equality between the sexes is one of the most worthwhile and noble goals to which a society can aspire, but as we’ve seen, modern feminism is about so much more than that: it’s a neurotic, insular, self-aggrandizing, and paranoid ideology that aims to spread fear, small-mindedness and agonistic self-criticism and self-doubt over even an uncomplicated and enjoyable idea such as the bouquet toss. Is it any surprise that many prominent young women are rejecting the label altogether?
Daniel Payne, “The Many Fabricated Enemies of Feminists”, The Federalist, 2014-07-22.
July 20, 2015
QotD: Good rioting weather
I slept through the only riot I was ever sent to cover as a reporter. Having traveled a long way I was very tired, and by the time I woke the riot was almost over. Still, I was able to describe with some vividness the acrid smell of burning rubber in the streets and the smashed glass and emptied shelves of the storefronts, and I did see a few people adding fuel to the flames of a barricade not far from my hotel (I later saw one of the perpetrators in an expensive restaurant). Such was my description that no reader would have guessed that I had slept peacefully through the violent proceedings. Strangely enough, my experience of being a foreign correspondent, if that is what it was, has never caused me to doubt the veracity of what I read in the newspapers, which I swallow as a boa constrictor swallows a goat.
However, I have followed riots around the world vicariously ever since, and it seems to me that the principal precondition of such events in the modern world is clement weather. The association is much stronger than with, say, injustice, partly because there is complete agreement as to what constitutes clement weather, whereas what constitutes justice has been in dispute since at least the time of Plato. We all recognize good rioting weather when we see it, but injustice — well, we could go on arguing about it for days. Everyone can contain his anger in the rain.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Indulging in Destruction”, Taki’s Magazine, 2014-08-24.
June 23, 2015
“Being skunked” takes on a new meaning
At Defence One, Patrick Tucker looks at an “improved” stink bomb now available to American police departments:
As protestors and police officers clash on the streets of Baltimore and other divided cities, some police departments are stockpiling a highly controversial weapon to control civil unrest.
It’s called Skunk, a type of “malodorant,” or in plainer language, a foul-smelling liquid. Technically nontoxic but incredibly disgusting, it has been described as a cross between “dead animal and human excrement.” Untreated, the smell lingers for weeks.
The Israeli Defense Forces developed Skunk in 2008 as a crowd-control weapon for use against Palestinians. Now Mistral, a company out of Bethesda, Md., says they are providing it to police departments in the United States.
Skunk is composed of a combination of baking soda and amino acids, Mistral general manager Stephen Rust said at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Armament Systems Forum on April 20. “You can drink it, but you wouldn’t want to,” said Rust, a retired U.S. Army project manager.
The Israelis first used it in 2008 to disperse Palestinians protesting in the West Bank. A BBC video shows its first use in action, sprayed by a hose, a system that has come to be known as the “crap cannon.”
May 20, 2015
QotD: The forward-looker
You know the type as well as I do. Give the forward-looker the direct primary, and he demands the short ballot. Give him the initiative and referendum, and he bawls for the recall of judges. Give him Christian Science, and he proceeds to the swamis and yogis. Give him the Mann Act, and he wants laws providing for the castration of fornicators. Give him Prohibition, and he launches a new crusade against cigarettes, coffee, jazz, and custard pies.
I have a wide acquaintance among such sad, mad, glad folks, and know some of them very well. It is my belief that the majority of them are absolutely honest — that they believe as fully in their baroque gospels as I believe in the dishonesty of politicians — that their myriad and amazing faiths sit upon them as heavily as the fear of hell sits upon a Methodist deacon who has degraded the vestry-room to carnal uses. All that may be justly said against them is that they are chronically full of hope, and hence chronically uneasy and indignant — that they belong to the less sinful and comfortable of the two grand divisions of the human race. Call them the tender-minded, as the late William James used to do, and you have pretty well described them. They are, on the one hand, pathologically sensitive to the sorrows of the world, and, on the other hand, pathologically susceptible to the eloquence of quacks. What seems to lie in all of them is the doctrine that evils so vast as those they see about them must and will be laid — that it would be an insult to a just God to think of them as permanent and irremediable.
H.L. Mencken, “The Forward-Looker”, Prejudices, Third Series, 1922.
May 16, 2015
Charles Murray and Jonah Goldberg on civil disobedience in America
Published on 11 May 2015
The American ideal of limited government on life support. Is it time for civil disobedience? Charles Murray says yes. Murray has been writing on government overreach for more than 30 years. His new book, By The People, is a blueprint for taking back American liberty. Jonah Goldberg sits down with Murray to discuss civil unrest in Baltimore, the scope of the government, and why bureaucrats should wear body cameras.
According to AEI scholar, acclaimed social scientist, and bestselling author Charles Murray, American liberty is under assault. The federal government has unilaterally decided that it can and should tell us how to live our lives. If we object, it threatens, “Fight this, and we’ll ruin you.” How can we overcome regulatory tyranny and live free once again? In his new book, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission (Crown Forum, May 2015), Murray offers provocative solutions.
February 12, 2015
Petty fines and “public safety” charges fall heaviest on the poor
Megan McArdle on the incredibly regressive way that American municipalities are raising money through fines and other costs imposed disproportionally on the poorest members of the community:
During last summer’s riots in Ferguson, Missouri, reporters began to highlight one reason that relations between the town’s police and its citizens are so fraught: heavy reliance on tickets and fines to cover the town’s budget. The city gets more than $3 million of its $20 million budget from “fines and public safety,” with almost $2 million more coming from various other user fees.
The problem with using your police force as a stealth tax-collection agency is that this functions as a highly regressive tax on people who are already having a hard time of things. Financially marginal people who can’t afford to, say, renew their auto registration get caught up in a cascading nightmare of fees piled upon fees that often ends in bench warrants and nights spent in jail … not for posing a threat to the public order, but for lacking the ready funds to legally operate a motor vehicle in our car-dependent society.
So why do municipalities go this route? The glib answer is “racism and hatred of the poor.” And, quite possibly, that plays a large part, if only in the sense that voters tend to discount costs that fall on other people. But having spent some time plowing through town budgets and reading up on the subject this afternoon, I don’t think that’s the only reason. I suspect that Ferguson is leaning so heavily on fines because it doesn’t have a lot of other terrific options.
January 18, 2015
The [f]utility of mass demonstrations
David Warren had a short essay get out of hand on him the other day:
Everything is coming out of Egypt these days, just like in the Bible. The Paris demonstrations were a throwback not only to the grand gatherings of a century ago, when the masses in each European capital were demanding war, but also to the recent “Arab spring,” when the masses in Egypt and every Middle Eastern capital were demanding “democracy.” Mobs often get what they want. The best that can be said for the Jesuischarlies, is they haven’t a clew what they want, beyond making an emotional display of their own vaunted goodness.
And yet, large demonstrations are expressions of despair. They bring momentary relief in a false exhilaration: the idea that something can be done, by men; something that will not cost them vastly more than they are now paying. Verily, it is the counsel of despair. I don’t think I can provide any example from history in which mass political demonstrations did any good; only examples when they did not end as badly as they could have.
I hardly expect agreement on this point, especially on non-violent demonstrations that affirm some simple moral point, such as the wrongness of racial prejudice, or of the slaughter of unborn children. But these must necessarily politicize something which should be above politics, and cannot help bringing an element of intimidation into what must finally be communicated cor ad cor. Pressure politics change everything, such that even when the cause is indisputably elevated — the American civil rights marches of the 1960s are a good example — the effect is dubious. What came out in that case was not simply the destruction of an evil, but its replacement with new evils: welfare provisions which undermined the black family, the poison of race quotas and “reverse discrimination,” the canting and excuse-making and radical posturing that has wreaked more aggregate damage to black people — both spiritual and material — than the wicked humiliations they suffered before. (Read Thomas Sowell.)
“Be careful what you wish for.” Be mindful of what comes with that wish. Be careful whom you ask to deliver it.
January 9, 2015
“Time is running out to do something stupid and irreversible. Act now!”
Kevin D. Williamson on the childish cry of “Now!”
“Now!” is a rhetorical short circuit, a way to preempt anyone’s thinking too deeply about a proposition. In Bill de Blasio’s New York, the streets are full of idiotic riff-raff chanting: “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it [sic]? Now!” When the country is convulsed by the shooting of a petty criminal in the suburbs of St. Louis, the answer, according to the sort of people who made de Blasio mayor, is dead cops in New York. Don’t bother pointing out how little sense that makes — the “Now!” punctuating that murderous sentiment is all you need to know. Not that killing police in Missouri is any more sensible, but I was puzzled about why New York City had become the locus of anti-police protests until I tightened in and asked further why within New York it is the site around Union Square, rather than One Police Plaza or Staten Island, the scene of Eric Garner’s death at the hands of the NYPD, that is the center of the scene. The answer, so near as I can tell, is: better bars.
“What do we want? Craft beers! When do we want them? Now!”
“Now!” is the eternal cry of the infantile — “What does baby want? Diaper change! When does baby want it? Now!” — and Barack Obama, who has a keen appreciation of that fact, has made immediacy the hallmark of his style. Executive amnesty, minimum wage, climate change — these are all within the realm of the holy Now!, the sort of thing that cannot wait. (Wait for what? Democracy.) The president does his stentorian best to beat some meaning into “the fierce urgency of now,” the phrase from Martin Luther King Jr. around which he once organized a famous speech almost entirely devoid of content. That this is so effective a strategy is despair-inducing. Grown men, and facsimiles thereof, are routinely taken in by this sort of thing; consider Andrew Sullivan’s soft spot for Obama’s dopey “fierce urgency of now” shtick, taking it as evidence that the empty suit from Chicago “meets a moment in history.”
November 26, 2014
The rising tide of microaggression activism at UCLA
Heather Mac Donald looks at what she calls “The Microaggression Farce” at UCLA:
In November 2013, two dozen graduate students at the University of California at Los Angeles marched into an education class and announced a protest against its “hostile and unsafe climate for Scholars of Color.” The students had been victimized, they claimed, by racial “microaggression” — the hottest concept on campuses today, used to call out racism otherwise invisible to the naked eye. UCLA’s response to the sit-in was a travesty of justice. The education school sacrificed the reputation of a beloved and respected professor in order to placate a group of ignorant students making a specious charge of racism.
The pattern would repeat itself twice more at UCLA that fall: students would allege that they were victimized by racism, and the administration, rather than correcting the students’ misapprehension, penitently acceded to it. Colleges across the country behave no differently. As student claims of racial and gender mistreatment grow ever more unmoored from reality, campus grown-ups have abdicated their responsibility to cultivate an adult sense of perspective and common sense in their students. Instead, they are creating what tort law calls “eggshell plaintiffs” — preternaturally fragile individuals injured by the slightest collisions with life. The consequences will affect us for years to come.
UCLA education professor emeritus Val Rust was involved in multiculturalism long before the concept even existed. A pioneer in the field of comparative education, which studies different countries’ educational systems, Rust has spent over four decades mentoring students from around the world and assisting in international development efforts. He has received virtually every honor awarded by the Society of Comparative and International Education. His former students are unanimous in their praise for his compassion and integrity. “He’s been an amazing mentor to me,” says Cathryn Dhanatya, an assistant dean for research at the USC Rossiter School of Education. “I’ve never experienced anything remotely malicious or negative in terms of how he views students and how he wants them to succeed.” Rosalind Raby, director of the California Colleges for International Education, says that Rust pushes you to “reexamine your own thought processes. There is no one more sensitive to the issue of cross-cultural understanding.” A spring 2013 newsletter from UCLA’s ed school celebrated Rust’s career and featured numerous testimonials about his warmth and support for students.
It was therefore ironic that Rust’s graduate-level class in dissertation preparation was the target of student protest just a few months later — ironic, but in the fevered context of the UCLA education school, not surprising. The school, which trumpets its “social-justice” mission at every opportunity, is a cauldron of simmering racial tensions. Students specializing in “critical race theory” — an intellectually vacuous import from law schools — play the race card incessantly against their fellow students and their professors, leading to an atmosphere of nervous self-censorship. Foreign students are particularly shell-shocked by the school’s climate. “The Asians are just terrified,” says a recent graduate. “They walk into this hyper-racialized environment and have no idea what’s going on. Their attitude in class is: ‘I don’t want to talk. Please don’t make me talk!’”
November 2, 2014
Pre-game program in Minneapolis
The Washington Redskins are in Minneapolis today to face the Minnesota Vikings. Both teams have 3-5 win/loss records and both are coming off wins last weekend. However, this weekend’s pregame festivities will include protests against the Washington team name:
People who want Washington to abandon the Redskins nickname are taking their protest to the streets.
After a rally at David Lilly Plaza, several hundred people are marching through the University of Minnesota campus to TCF Bank Stadium, where Washington plays the Minnesota Vikings. Four men banging a traditional drum and women carrying a banner reading, “No Honor in Racist Nicknames or Imagery” are leading the March to the stadium, about a mile away.
“Today it’s going to stop,” Clyde Bellcourt, co-founder of the American Indian Movement, said before the march began.
Update:
Wow. @MikeWiseguy: This is the scene of the largest ever physical gathering against the Wash. NFL team. pic.twitter.com/dEG2o01soW"
— Steve Wyche (@wyche89) November 2, 2014
The people protesting the non-bird friendliness of #Vikings new stadium drawing slightly less attention. pic.twitter.com/zWFkhhB5gS
— Tom Pelissero (@TomPelissero) November 2, 2014
October 5, 2014
Protest locations in Hong Kong
In The Atlantic, Bourree Lam looks at where the Hong Kong protests tend to be located:
Hong Kong’s “umbrella revolution” — an anticipated protest movement with unanticipated mass turnout — is currently spreading across an island slightly bigger than Manhattan.
The Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP) campaign, whose main demands are the resignation of Chief Executive CY Leung and true democracy for Hong Kong, announced months ago that it planned to shut down Hong Kong’s Central District — the city’s financial hub, which also houses government offices (including the Legislative Council’s buildings and the chief executive’s residence) and a luxury-shopping strip featuring a city block-wide Louis Vuitton store (by night it’s where tourist and locals go drinking and clubbing, especially in the Lan Kwai Fong area). Beginning with British colonial rule in 1841, the district has gradually become the main artery of Hong Kong’s business and social life.
But the protest movement, of which the OCLP is now just one part, has expanded in the last few days to the districts of Admiralty, Causeway Bay, and Mongkok — some of the city’s most bustling commercial sectors. On Tuesday, the protests encompassed the areas of Tsim Sha Tsui and Wan Chai. And, in a twist on the ‘Occupy’ movement in the United States, the demonstrations haven’t been confined to public squares; they’ve also spread to intersections, forcing road closures. Protesters, for instance, are currently holding their positions on Connaught Road Central, a major six-lane throughway that connects four districts on the island.
[…]
Update: Zachary Keck is quite pessimistic on the chances for success.
As covered extensively in The Diplomat, tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of Hong Kong demanding democratic reforms. Specifically, the protesters want free and fair elections and universal suffrage to select the city’s government, which Beijing promised as part of the condition for the U.K. handing back the city to mainland China.
Sadly, Occupy Central is doomed to fail. The Chinese government will not accept the protesters’ demands.
Beijing has already made it clear that it views free and fair elections in Hong Kong to be a threat to one-party rule in the country. At most, it will allow Hongkongers to select one of the candidates that it pre-approves. It has also deemed Occupy Central illegal. In other words, the Chinese Communist Party views the issue as one of its “core interests,” and it hasn’t stayed in power this long by compromising on issues that it views as threats to its survival.
[…]
The massive protests that have swept through Hong Kong in recent days have only made it more urgent that the CCP hold the line on the issue. The Party can ill afford an example of mass demonstrations forcing it to compromise on an issue deemed to be of core importance. Before the protests, it was possible the CCP might have assessed that free and fair elections in Hong Kong would not threaten one-Party rule on the mainland because of the “one country, two systems” mantra. However, the Party giving in on a core issue because of mass protests would, without question, set a dangerous precedent for the CCP’s grip on power in mainland China. It therefore will not be done.
This isn’t to say that a violent crackdown is coming. Indeed, as is almost always the case, the CCP will want the local government on the frontlines in handling the protesters, while Beijing directs things from behind the scenes. As Steve Hess has pointed out in The Diplomat, using local governments as scapegoats has long been an effective tool of the CCP. If it means the restoration of stability, that could very well mean the end of CY Leung’s career. It’s also possible some sort of “compromise” will be worked out that allows the protesters to claim some sort of victory without compromising the CCP’s ability to maintain a large degree of control over the chief executive of Hong Kong.
October 2, 2014
Russian TV claims Hong Kong protests are US/UK plot against … Russia
We’re used to Russian talking points being a bit off-centre, but as Karoun Demirjian reports, the Russians are now seeing things like the Hong Kong student protests as “really” being directed against Russian interests by shadowy American and British puppetmasters:
Here in Russia, the umbrella-wielding demonstrators of Hong Kong are being presented as pawns in a Western plot to foment instability in yet another one of Moscow’s allies — and Russia wonders if it could be the ultimate target.
“Was the student protest organized by Great Britain and the USA?” state television station Russia 24 asked Tuesday, citing reports in the Chinese media that “the leaders of the movement received special training from the American intelligence services.”
[…]
“The tactics of the protesters are exactly the same as at the beginning of all ‘orange’ revolutions, which in fact were state coups,” a Russia 24 news presenter said Tuesday, referring to the signature color of Ukraine’s 2004 protests. “Besides, the White House officially confirmed through its spokesman that Washington supports the intentions of the citizens of Hong Kong to protect their basic rights and freedoms.”
Russian state media have also suggested that Britain supports the protests as a way of safeguarding its business interests in Hong Kong, especially as Beijing is “gradually abolishing benefits” for British companies located there.
Yet there is one thing missing in the Russian analysis: Any specific advice as to how China’s government should proceed. Russia’s leaders have neither cautioned China’s leaders to show restraint nor urged them toward a crackdown.
September 23, 2014
This is what a genuinely ethical oil divestment plan for universities would look like
Megan McArdle explains why universities are not in a particularly righteous position when they push for divesting out of fossil fuels:
I understand that universities are exploring sustainability. Just the same, they consume huge amounts of fossil fuels: To heat and cool their buildings. To power their labs and computer networks. Maintenance and landscaping. Cooking all that food. Lighting all those rooms. Every year, they put on many large events to which people fly or drive long distances. Their students travel to and from their premises multiple times a year, rarely on foot. Their faculty fly to do research or attend conferences; many of my friends in academics have much better frequent-flier status than I could ever dream of. Their admissions officers fly hither and yon to recruit students. Their teams fly or drive to games. But you get the idea. The point is that the fossil-fuel consumption of every university in the country dwarfs the impact of their investments on climate change.
[…]
If divestment activists were serious about making a difference, setting an example, and drawing the full weight of America’s moral opprobrium onto the makers and consumers of fossil fuels, they’d be pushing a University Agenda that looked more like this:
- Require administrators, faculty, sports teams and other student groups to travel exclusively by boat and rail, except for “last mile” journeys.
- Cease construction of new buildings on campus.
- Stop air conditioning buildings, except for laboratories and archives that require climate control. Keep the heat no higher than 60 degrees in winter.
- Put strict caps on power consumption by students, keeping it to enough electricity to power one computer and one study lamp. Remove power outlets from classrooms, except for one at the front for the teacher.
- Ban meat from campus eateries and require full-time students to be on a meal plan.
- Remove all parking spots from campus.
- Stop operating campus shuttles, except for disabled students.
- Divest the endowment from fossil-fuel companies, if it makes you feel better.
Why has No. 8 jumped to No. 1? Because it’s easy. Because a group of students pushing endowment divestiture can shut down a public meeting and be rewarded with the opportunity to hold a teach-in; a group of students pushing a faculty flying ban and the end of campus parking would find the powers that be considerably more unfriendly. Not to mention their fellow students. Or, for that matter, their fellow activists, few of whom are actually ready to commit to never in their lives traveling out of America’s pitiful passenger rail network.
