Yesterday evening we got a phonecall in the house, from some charity organisation to sollicit (financial) support for “our troops”. Strange to get such a call at home, especially when the only answer i could come up with on the phone is: the only thing about “our troops” we support at this stage, is immediate withdrawal, like NOW. Was it really a charity that called us? Does this mean our house now features in the TALON database?<\/p>\n
Technologies and mentality of surveillance and control are spreading at such a speed that sometimes one can only make fun of them. Time to play. This morning: a funny follow-up mail on the War on Terror teach-in at Santa Cruz two weeks ago. The message let us know that, while the Pentagon eventually got the UCSC protest against military recruitement on the campus out of TALON, a conservative blog writer published all the kids’ names and emails and guess what – they all received death-threats. Okay, not a very funny game, but it does get better. The message included a letter from UC Davis to the Pentagon, concerning their upcoming teach-in against the war. (and note that i’m not the only one connecting the surfing “fun-loving” culture of this place with a profound lack of political passion and activity…)<\/p>\n
———————————————————————————-
\nLt. Col. Gary Testut
\nThreat and Local Observation Notice Database (TALON)
\nPentagon
\nWashington, DC<\/p>\n
Dear Lt. Col. Testut,
\nWe, faculty and students of the University of California at Davis, would like to Call your attention to an upcoming teach-in at our campus titled \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Connecting the Dots: The War on Terror and You.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d In particular, we urge you to consider designating our teach-in a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153credible threat\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in your TALON database.<\/p>\n
As you may be aware, the different campuses of the University of California compete vigorously with each other to attract students, faculty, and research funds. Your designation of protests at UC Santa Cruz as a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153credible threat\u00e2\u20ac\u009d bestows considerable prestige on that campus. In the interest of fairness, we believe you owe it to us to seriously consider our teach-in for the same honor.<\/p>\n
Though you have never made public what criteria you use to judge what constitutes a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153credible threat,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d we are certain that, by any criteria you may be secretly using, our activities here at Davis constitute a threat at least as credible as any in Santa Cruz.
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 Demonstrations: our students have held numerous, vibrant, and well-attended demonstrations, including demonstrations against military recruiters on campus.
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 Radical student groups: our campus takes just as much pride in promoting freedom of speech and scholarship that Santa Cruz does, and you will find student political groups here from across the entire political spectrum.
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 Diversity: our faculty and student body include many people of color and foreign nationals, including people from the Middle East.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, there are factors which we believe make our activities at Davis a more<\/em> credible threat than anything in Santa Cruz:<\/p>\n Our campus not only has the same mix of freedom of speech, anti-war groups, and immigrants and minorities, but we also host significant military research. This combination of immigrants, freedom of speech, and military research should be enough to conjure up a credible threat in the mind of even the most complacent TALON investigator.<\/p>\n Finally, please note that Santa Cruz is the site of one of the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s best surf breaks. No matter how passionate their students may be about political causes, if the surf is up they will run for their boards, giving your recruiters ample opportunity to present their message to the non-surfing student body. Here at Davis, having no such diversions, our students are more serious and focused. Thank you for your consideration. We look forward to hearing from you at the earliest opportunity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday evening we got a phonecall in the house, from some charity organisation to sollicit (financial) support for “our troops”. Strange to get such a call at home, especially when the only answer i could come up with on the phone is: the only thing about “our troops” we support at this stage, is immediate … Continue reading “if there’s a black list, i wanna be on it”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16,34,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}