Fear and Love (we're fucked)
We're in deep shit. The world is being steered by fear and love, the two most irrational emotions humans feel. Total lizard brain.
The not terminally online may not have heard of Shai Davidai, an Israeli business professor at Columbia. Davidai has the itchy Twitter fingers of a Bill Ackman and the paranoia of a schizophrenic you see screaming on the train.
Davidai is convinced the peaceful protestors are Hamas. He regularly attacks and reveals the identities of student activists. The other day he posted a video of a Muslim prayer on campus, beseeching his followers to share the horror far and wide. Even the right-wing fascist Mike Cernovich was confused about what he was supposed to be scared and outraged about. It is utterly insane that Columbia hasn’t fired him, even as they suspend and sick the NYPD on their own students.
Today, Davidai announced, with the weighty, somber tone appropriate to a lunch counter protest in the South, that he and other Jewish faculty and students would be staging a sit-in in the middle of the pro-Palestine encampment. He said he is demanding ten NYPD officers for protection.
Presumably, keeping Davidai safe from 18-year-old poli sci majors will involve a lot of overtime.
How much of your money will go to this? How much of your money went to the arrests? Even an NYPD official said that protestors were peaceful and arresting them was pointless (unless the point is to rack up overrtime doing the easiest, least dangerous work the police can do). From Bloomberg:
Even before applying for a job, potential recruits to the New York City Police Department learn of a way to double their pay.
Annual salaries start at $42,500, but the job description explains that overtime can help bump that up to $100,000 a year. While New York City has lower average starting salaries than cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, the pattern persists to the highest levels.
The NYPD has blown past annual budgets every year for at least two decades, almost entirely due to overtime costs. Those extra hours also drive up the city’s pension obligations. In fiscal 2020, New York City police officers logged more overtime hours than any other big city in the U.S., and violent crime rates still went up.
New York’s public libraries are now closed on Sunday because of budget shortfalls.
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