this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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Yeah that's actually not that bad. but he'll miss out on a lot of his daughter's life and his dog's which is probably the saddest part of it. I'm surprised people don't care about this case, like there are students protesting in Universities about something going on in the middle east something they will have very little influence over. No such protests over David McBride.
note: I'm not saying I disagree with the free Palestine protests.
I dunno about other universities, but I'd say the UQ protests actually are focused on something they have more ability to change than McBride's conviction. Boeing has a very cosy relationship with UQ, and their core demand is to end that partnership and stop their own university being complicit in genocide by association.
A UQ student has more ability to change what corporations UQ partners with than they do to change court decisions made in Canberra.
Yeah that's fair, I mean I hate Boeing as well because of their dodgy safety record. But getting UQ to dissociate with Boeing is hardly likely to actually achieve anything in the context of war. Weapons companies don't give a shit about morals - otherwise they wouldn't exist. When students protest something it makes the news, and making the news is not something David McBride has been doing
Absolutely fair. But it's the one thing UQ students have the most ability to affect, and if Boeing and other weapons manufacturers lost their associations with every research institution because of similar protests, that would have a much more sizeable impact.
Indeed, even if you don't care about the war, I don't like the idea of foreign companies influencing our taxpayer-funded research
The understanding young people have of the world around them is so heavily influenced by algorithm-based social media now, and English-based social media is in-turn heavily influenced by American current affairs which tends to dominate the algorithms. It is very hard for the trial of one Australian whistleblower to compete with that and even if students are aware of it the pro-Palestine/pro-Israel student movements are so much more appealing. They give those young people the opportunity to become part of a global movement and feel like they are effecting real change beyond their own borders. Additionally I'm not sure if the Afghanistan War is actually relevant to the current generation of undergraduate students. They were very young during the period in which it was something Australians felt strongly about and likely can't connect to the historic war crimes committed by Australian soldiers there in the same way they can connect to the war crimes they are seeing in their feeds now.
As a young person who is also an undergraduate student (so no excuses I guess for not starting a movement myself) I fully agree, and even though I nuked my social media except Facebook (that is a work in progress), we even have that problem here. I become so disenfranchised when I switch from 'local' to 'all' because it's just US politics --mostly identity politics-- and I manifest on those problems which I feel like they will be an endless debate, and it is very distracting from the very real problems of today, especially in Australia. Like who actually gives a fuck about Taylor Swift? or Joe Biden? or whether someone shouldn't be used in a meme template because they said something we don't like?
Sidetracked a bit there, what I'm really trying to say is. Yes. Shut up about America and give a fuck about Australia