Kumbaya

This is not really that important, but I couldn´t help noticing the bizarre antics of the anti-Israeli protesters in the United States. Yes, their "encampments" and "occupations" demand free food deliveries (but no bananas or nuts), HIV tests, dental dams (apparently for "safe oral sex"?!), and god knows what else. The whole thing reminds of the Seattle Autonomous Zone during the BLM summer in 2020, which also requested outside aid in the form of drugs used for transitioning, et cetera.

Since the optics of the above are disastrous on a number of levels, this raises the question: why on earth are the protestors doing it? The fact that they are doing it everywhere and always suggests that we´re not dealing with a logistics problem - apart from the food, who the heck needs items of this sort on a political protest anyway? As for the optics, the Woke activists don´t care what ordinary people think about them anyway - as long as university faculty or the Democratic Party apparatus listens. Which they often do. 

So what´s going on here? I think it´s rather obviously a kind of political-subcultural signaling within the Woke milieu itself. It´s a coded way of showing that the protests and occupations are "safe spaces", and send messages about who is or isn´t welcome. For "HIV tests", read "gays". For "dental dams", read "lesbians". The meaning of the request for trans-gender drugs is pretty obvious. 

What really gives the game away are the COVID masks. That these kids couldn´t care less about the actual virus became obvious already in 2020, when they defied the lockdowns to protest the Trump administration (with tacit or explicit support from the Dem Party). So why are they *still* wearing COVID masks? It´s obviously another in-house political marker, and the one that most clearly shows the purpose of this "protests": to lobby the liberal establishment (who ordered the masks to be worn). 

Note also the curious fact that the activists aren´t requesting COVID vaccines - perhaps because you can´t see somebody´s vaccination status, or perhaps because it would make the masks superfluous. In 2024, masks worn at a political protest by the people least likely to catch or die from the corona virus are "flags".

Of course, there is still the 10,000 dollar question. Are the protests really about the Gaza War, except in the most superficial manner? And if not, what are they about instead?

Pondering.