As much as we enjoy deriding communism, anti-Americanism and childish victimism, hypocrisy definitely takes the cake; if you’re going to spout morally and ideologically bankrupt drivel, then at least do so genuinely. That is, don’t be like the wannabe commies at Keep Building Brown (KBB), who, it turns out, fashioned their utopian Ivy League manifesto for a class.

So kids, will you share your project with the rest of homeroom?:

KBB is a critique of capitalism and the University system as a manifestation and a manufacturer of that system.

But not so fast proletarians! In Brown’s classes server for “Course MCM 1700: Radical Media,” we find the “Anti-Capitalist Group” responsible for KBB, describing their project in the “Student Work” section. Personal statements, laudatory website stats (self-promotion whee!) and hilarious pics abound.

The Red Menace has no clothes: Keep Building Brown are just academia-enslaved attention-whores in denial. Check the wiki for a deeper and even more inane summary of the ridiculous revolutionaries’ improbable and incongruous mission, which manifested in lame protests, disruptively loud “audio detournement” (what?), and general 9th-grade angst earlier this year.

So, Gabriel Doss, Monica Garcia, Crow Jonah Norlander, Julian Park and Tracy Szatan (web-celebs!), why did you fight the law, and who won?

Our project was initially conceived of as a timely disruption intended to trivialize the importance students give to finals period, grades, education, success, wealth, and so on

The irony—of so-called anti-academic provocateurs, decrying grade-grubbing and the monolithic “system” for a graded class project, posted on a student wiki—is so very delicious. But apparently, the hypocritical/hipolitical Brunonians are smarmy enough to admit it. Check out how trendy and ironic these kids’ political views are after the jump.

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A tipster points us to Keep Building Brown, a mysterious/compelling site put together in darkness by a team of (we guess) Brunonians. The site is vaguely Marxist, but at a kind of ninth-grader-reading-The Communist Manifesto-in-Starbucks level; it says that students in Ivy League schools are all alienated from their labor as simultaneous “producers,” “consumers,” and “products.” Well, hm! Citing finals period as a time when students’ deference to the machine-like nature of university labor is especially cast into relief, the Brown Builders write:

Sure, some of us are more productive than others – and that’s what college is about: finding your place in the division of labor, picking your path, and gathering skills to make you a more effective cog in the machine.

It’s too bad that all the people behind Keep Building Brown get nothing more out of their travails than the sense that they are, personally, victims of some Matrix-like enterprise meant to keep them crushed under the boot. While finals are, yes, regimented, these people will have had four years of pursuing whatever it is that they enjoy, likely on someone else’s dime, responsible only for passing. Brown is many things, but an “assembly line of knowledge” only rings true for a reader who has never thought about the lives of people who work on assembly lines.

Along similar lines, Bwog reports that a very … poetic … poem recited by a “Students for a Radical Democracy” course forced a Public Safety intervention. An excerpt:

Columbia, Columbia!  I’m forever shouting your name but you’re hard of hearing.  In fact, I’m howling your name into the darkness at night as I collapse over my books, strung out, frantic even.

Tom Wolfe couldn’t write it better. But what change do these students want? The Brown kids link to The Coming Insurrection, which portends spookiness until you realize that the Keep Building Brown method of affecting change is a website with language so convoluted that for 10 minutes, I thought they were praising Brown. And the Columbians — who were, ironically, removed from the Low Library steps by the very security workers with whose plight they identify — will live to recite poetry another day. We’ve known many kids who lived in a state of nebulous protest, many of whom have graduated. Half of them live with their parents; the other half are in consulting.

The long-named Columbia University Chinese Student and Scholars Association: United for China’s Peaceful Rising (CUCSSA) has taken the stance, as of a few weeks ago, that “Anyone who offends China will be executed no matter how far away they are!” and said so on their website for all to see. That’s what ‘peaceful rising’ means in Mandarin, right? Someone translate for me.

Luckily for most of us, the Epoch Times tells us that ‘anyone’ just means Falun Gong practitioners. The Columbia University Falun Dafa Club is understandably upset. This was only the latest escalation in CUCSSA’s extremist rhetoric in the months since the Falun Dafa Club hosted a panel discussion in April about China’s spotty human rights record.

The April panel, titled “China’s New Genocide-Organ Harvesting from Live Falun Gong Practitioners,” caused an indignant CUCSSA to try to take disruptive action. They were not yet at the death-threat stage, instead:

The CUCSSA responded by sending out an email to its members the night before that referred to using “flags dyed red in blood to beat” the “high spirits” of Falun Gong. The email also repeated slanders of Falun Gong typically used in the Chinese regime’s propaganda.

The Falun Dafa Club received a copy of the inflammatory e-mail and Columbia University police were on hand the next day when 20 to 30 CUCSSA members showed up carrying large red flags, which they were forced to leave outside the lecture hall.

During the panel discussion CUCSSA students held up small placards attacking Falun Gong using terms borrowed from the Chinese regime’s anti-Falun Gong propaganda, flew paper airplanes in the direction of the speakers, and in other ways acted in a disruptive manner. Two students from the CUCSSA group were prevented from reentering the lecture hall because of their inappropriate behavior.

First question: Were the red flags actually dyed in blood? All of your questions answered after the break. Read the rest of this entry »