quiet_NaN
1d ago
Agreed. I think culpability should be assigned on a case by case basis. Someone jumps off a highway bridge in front of a moving truck, you can hardly blame the truck for not going slow enough so that it could come to a stop within a meter. Someone went 50km/h in a 30km/h zone and runs over some kid? Whole different story.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
"Don't hand out recipes for methamphetamine" sounds pretty straightforward and coherent, though, much more than "Don't Murder", which per Wikipedia "is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse committed with the necessary intention as defined by the law in a specific jurisdiction."
I mean, some of the best (worst) CW stories are about a killing where all sides more or less agree on the facts but their interpretation of what they think is (or should be) the law is different.
"Don't kill any humans, directly or indirectly, ever" might be simpler, but to phrase it so that our AI can't lock up people and let them die of thirst without it also being compelled to round up people and force them to take their cancer screenings or stop smoking or whatever will be complicated. There is every reason to believe that our collective ideas about these things is not particularly coherent either.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Virtually everyone sees their ingroup as a victim who is treated unjustly by their outgroup. If we apply that standard, then virtually qualifies as woke. Hamas? Woke. Fundamentalist Israeli settlers? Woke. Third gen feminist? Woke. MRA? Woke. A medieval knight following an honor code of protecting the weak from oppression? Woke.
MAGA contains the narrative that the US was taken over by the coastal elites with their pronouns who are completely out of touch with the hardworking, down-to-earth (possibly white) Americans who are actually the backbone of the country, with DJT as a hero of these downtrodden draining the swamp and making the world right again. By your definition, this makes Trump about as woke as Biden.
Very few political parties have the slogan "things are swell right now, let's keep everything exactly as it is", because this does not mobilize voters much. The very least one needs is "keep us in power or you will become the oppressed", which makes one the champion of the people who would otherwise be oppressed in the future, which is also a big part of the classic hero of the downtrodden movement.
I think a definition of woke which includes practically every political movement ever is not a very useful definition and flies in the face of common usage. It would be like defining 'porn' wide enough that it includes the Muppet Show (furries!), then arguing that most school shooters were exposed to 'porn' in their childhood and that therefore we need to do more to keep porn (see what I did there) from kids by forcing onlyfans to do age verification.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Originally I picked uniforms kind of at random, but thinking more about it, it seems like a fun hill to die on.
Uniforms have been part of most armies for centuries. Kind of weird as a fashion choice? I think that the reason is that uniforms serve a useful purpose in the military: they erase differences in class and culture between the troops, and emphasize the difference between the troops and the enemy or civilians. This increases group cohesion: instead of seeing Bob the bully lying bleeding in the barbed wires in their stupid blue sweater, you see a fellow brother in arms. This unit cohesion and the sublimation of individual responsibility to the chain of command are then useful for military operations such as winning a battle or murdering a village.
"beliefs they are fighting for the oppressed" and "wears uniforms" are both Bayesian evidence for someone being more likely to drag you from your home and murdering you. Of course, there are some important difference in details between the postmen and the Einsatzgruppen, but there are also some important differences in details between the Stalinists and campus protesters.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
"What religious practices do you have to follow to not go to hell? -- Trick question, you are all going to hell unless you accept Christ, who will be born in another few hundred years or so" seems like the kind of shit the old testament god would pull, right.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I think current LLMs are not remotely reliable enough to serve as politicians. Adversarial examples are a thing, after all. If we can not train an LLM to reliably avoid saying bad words, how can we expect it to reliably not vote for bad laws? And anything of truly human level intelligence would get us into alignment territory.
Then there might be a game theoretical cost if your opponents can just run your executive to determine what the reply to a provocation would be. If PresGPT was the head of the US executive, and China got their hands on a copy (one of the backups, or just a replication of the fine-tuning used on GPT5), they could have hard numerical probabilities on what the US response would be if they attacked Taiwan.
The problem with tyrants is that is attracts exactly the wrong people for the job even more than the office of president does. When Rome switched its political system from Republic to Empire, they certainly increased the variance of their leadership a lot.
And precommitting to following the policies of an assassination victim removes the incentives to kill them from the opponents of the policies, but might provide new incentives of supporters to throw them under the bus. I mean, if it is public knowledge that policy X will supported by politician P will pass with some probability p, then all you need to do is make sure that p does not change if they are killed. In practice, there is no such common knowledge, so situations where one side could act on private information will dominate.
And depending on the capabilities of the assassins, changing the mind of the successor on the policy might not be even their end goal. The end goal could be to change the mind of changing the mind of the one who succeeds the fifth murder victim or something.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I think replying "That seems like a pretty controversial claim, do you have any evidence to back it up, my evidence for it not being true is so-and-so".
The (I guess) inflammatory statement was part of the top level post, which to me seems like a clear example of an effort-post. If the post was just this one statement, I think our mods would likely have asked the submitter to put more effort in by proactively providing evidence. But if one cancels every lengthy post which contains some claim which might be controversial and is not backed by evidence then there will be very few posts left.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
The Oxford English Dictionary defines wokeness as being alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism. To be woke, by that definition, is to be a noble thing indeed: a defender of the oppressed and downtrodden. This is the ethos of a fairy tale hero like Robin Hood, or Prince Charming, or the valiant huntsman who vanquishes the big bad wolf and saves Little Red Riding Hood and her sick, old grandma. Not coincidentally, it has also been the stated agenda of every mass murdering tyrant in modern history.
There are some possible interpretations of this paragraph:
- A. Woke implies an agenda of defending the oppressed, mass murdering tyrant also implies an agenda of defending the oppressed. In this case, there is very little to link wokes to tyrants -- if we observe that Nazis frequently wear uniforms, and postmen frequently wear uniforms that tells us very little if there is any unexpected overlap between Nazis and postmen -- anything from 'postmen and Nazis are exactly the same group' to 'there is no postman who is also a Nazi' remains possible.
- B. 'Every mass murdering tyrant in modern history had a stated agenda which was woke'. This is a much stronger statement. Unfortunately, even if I were to not dispute that every left-wing or communist regime from the Republican side of the Spanish civil war to the Khmer Rouge qualifies as woke there are a few counterexamples -- for example the Nazis, Imperial Japan, Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah or the Young Turks all committed their worst atrocities for explicitly racist or religious reasons. (WP List) For convenience and tradition, let us focus on the Holocaust. If you prefer interpretation B, what is your explanation? Does Hitler not qualify as a tyrant? Was the Shoah the product of an anti-racist agenda? Do we start with our weekly epistemic discussion about the Holocaust?
That being said, I think your overall point is not wrong. Left wing ideologies could be classified on a splintered-dogmatic axis. The splintered left might agree on hating fascism and strongly disliking capitalism, but have a multitude of opinions on what kind (if any) of state they want, if feminism was a distraction from the class struggle or an essential problem to be solved first and so on. The central example of the dogmatic left would be the communist parties. I am not sure how the ratio of contrarians to dogmatists was at the best of times (say Western students in the 1960ies), but I think there were some genuine object level discussions not entirely unlike in the ratsphere. I was not born back then, so I can not say for sure.
Of course, the big atrocities of the left have mostly been committed by the dogmatists following the party line with a comical overconfidence that what they did was right.
I find social justice progressivism firmly on the dogmatic side. Where 20 years ago the Israel-Palestine conflict would have ripped apart leftist groups in the middle, today the consensus of SJP seems to be that Israel are the 'white' colonizers and therefore in the wrong, end of story.
And unlike my own Grey Tribe, the left (especially the dogmatic left) has never been very great at noticing the skulls.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think that there is a significant correlation between being an American football player and being physically imposing. As a proxy for 'this guy looks buff, better not mess with him', you could do worse than football player.
A 'complete non-sequitur' would have been if they had said 'blacks are strongly over-represented in /chess/, hence they are more physically imposing'.
Of course, there are a zillion confounders. Getting into the NFL probably means specializing in football in college, which is a decision hinging not only on other cultural factors. And it is not like most black males end up in the NFL either, so it could be that blacks simply have a larger variance.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
The current SC is not exactly shy about overturning precedent, have they recently affirmed this position or is it an older decision?
quiet_NaN
4d ago
adolescent boys and young single men are no longer vetted by fathers, elders, brothers, uncles and other pre-vetted eligible men
From the context of 'manhood initiation rituals', I would assume that you primarily mean vetting by the family of the male, not the female? I think that in many patriarchal cultures, not being especially rapey was not part of the vetting process on the side of the man. I mean, if you are a medieval woman encountering an adolescent male Scandinavian in the woods, and notice that he bears the signs of a fully initiated viking warrior, that should probably be cause for more concern, not less.
The causal chain might go like this:
- Claim 1: Modern dating is frustrating for a lot of people, compared to patriarchal mating strategies.
- Claim 2: For women, this manifests as being more worried about rape in a dating context.
- Claim 3: This generalizes to being more worried about rape in general, hence the preference for the bear.
The patriarchal vetting process / manhood initiation clearly varied from society from society, Apache, Jane-Austin-England, ancient Rome, fucking Sparta and Aztec all did their own thing. If there was a common denominator, it was perhaps to certify that the male was able to fulfill their expected role in society and support one or more wives and their children. (Of course, such vetting processes are also heavier on the upper end of societies. I am not sure how it was on the lower end: "This helot man has managed to survive for two decades without starving or being slaughtered or maimed by the Spartans, that makes him husband material?")
I am also skeptical of claims that the female's male relatives filtered especially for a kind man. In societies where marital violence and rape were considered normal, why would they? They men were probably more concerned with political implications or making sure that the husband was not some wimp who would get himself killed in the first battle, leaving the woman a penniless widow.
If I were a woman, I would take tinder et al any day over a random pre-1900 mating system.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I don't see it.
America’s weak point is clearly potential civic disunity which could result in balkanization along racial, religious, or cultural lines.
You can claim that Social Justice Progressivism aims to kit racial and ethnic cultural fault lines in society, perhaps.
However, the main fault lines I see today in the US are not Black vs White or New Immigrant Culture vs Traditional US Culture, but rural vs urban and SJP vs MAGA. If any religions are involved in fault lines, it is Christianity! (Notably, rich vs poor is not a big rift.)
While I can not disprove that Hari Seldon looked at the civil rights movement in the 1970s and saw that despite the racial barriers slowly falling, the end result would paradoxically be an increase in racial tensions, and set up SJP as a way to avoid a race war, I find this highly unlikely.
I think the roots of SJP in the civil rights movement started with relatable, noble goals and had the bad luck to mostly achieve their goals. So they did what any movement would do and picked further goals. Some, like gay rights, were again noble enough. Some, like insisting on equality of outcomes instead of color-blindness were IMHO harmful, some were mostly silly empty symbolism (like Confederate statues -- if you have the majority to blow them up, whatever, but this is not a decisive battle for the future of the US in any case.).
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I am a utilitarian, numbers matter to me. The main difference between gitmo and the gulags are the scale. Now, I thought gitmo was an abomination when it was first established by GWB and I think the same to that day.
We have two options to compare these systems. One is to count every act of state violence against members of the population. Of course, this puts us in morally ultra-relativist territory: "Some states have the death penalty for murder, rape, gay sex, criticizing the party, theft, not bowing deep enough, apostasy, listening to enemy radio stations, arson. All of these serve to keep the regime in power, therefore all of the acts forbidden are morally equal as forms of political dissent." Or we could claim that some of these acts are intrinsically more political than others. States not (at least in principle) punishing murders leads to a bad equilibrium (feuds), so almost all states at least notionally have laws against murder on the book.
But even if you count the whole US prison industrial system as pure repression, by the numbers I would gladly pick the US over the 1940s USSR even through a veil of ignorance where I materialize as a random citizen. And that is before we even go to the indirect advantages of having less repression, like
As for the quantity of the repression, it's a function of how secure the regime is and essentially nothing else.
The version I could agree on is 'every system of government has a minimum of repression it requires to stay in power'.
Some governments deal out too little repression and are overthrown, like the Weimar Republic.
But a common feature of the more repressive governments is that they overdo repression. Almost no organization ever declares that its mission is accomplished and disbands itself. The secret police is no exception. There will always be someone who is the first to stop applauding after Comrade Stalin gives a speech, some intellectual who is the least aligned with the party line.
And some ideologies are more accepting of repression than others. A communist who declared that the class struggle is over, all the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries are defeated would have to answer uncomfortable questions about when exactly the communist utopia will become reality, while in a liberal democracy a lack of life-or-death conflict should be the default state.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Repression of dissidents is a feature of every political regime. No exceptions.
The motte: To the degree that this is true, it is so vague that it is useless. It is like saying "every animal can survive outside water", implying (a) for some non-zero time span (b) in microgravity (c) with the correct air pressure.
The bailey: To the degree that it is non-vague, falsifiable it hints at 'repression is a key element in any regime', or 'the amount of repression is similar between regimes' this is false.
If someone asked you 'I want to have a system with minimal political repression, should I pick Stalin's Russia or Obama's US?' and you reply 'Repression is universal, so it does not matter', that is akin to answering 'what would make a good pet for my terrarium, a hamster or a gold fish?' with 'every animal can survive outside the water, so it does not matter'.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
A large number of parties making coalitions more difficult in Weimar was at least the excuse the Grundgesetz used to impose a 5% limit on votes. And I think that argument has a bit of a point. I mean, in the 1928 elections in Germany.
Percentage of Reichstag seats:
- Far-Left:
- KPD (Communists): 11%
- Democratic:
- SPD (Social democrats): 31.2%
- Zentrum (Catholics): 12.4%
- DVP (Right liberal): 9.1%
- DDP (Left liberal): 5.1% (but below 5% of the popular vote!)
- BVP (Bavarians): 3.4%
- Far Right:
- DNVP (Monarchists): 14.8%
- NSDAP (Nazis): 2.4%
- Others (some probably also democratic):
- WP (middle class Saxons?): 4.6%
- Smaller parties: 5.7%
Here, the five parties under the heading democratic formed a coalition with had a whopping 61.2% majority. I am not sure why they did it that way. They obviously needed SPD and Zentrum. Perhaps a coalition with the DVP only would have resulted in the them being more vulnerable to threats of the DVP to walk out. Instead with the five party coalition, none of the three junior partners could threaten to break the government by walking out. Or they wanted to share power among the democratic parties to ensure that none of them would profit more by defecting to the anti-democrats. From a modern German perspective, this seems weird. Top politicians generally want to become ministers. Anyone suggesting that a coalition should give up 19% of the minister posts to parties which they don't require to form a majority to be more inclusive towards fellow democratic-minded parties would be laughed out of the room.
Did I have a point to make? Hm... if the Reichstag had a 5% barrier to entry, then 21.2% of the seats would not have gone to smaller parties. But 8.5% of them would just have been shuffled around among the coalition (BVP going to Zentrum, DDP perhaps forming a general liberal party with DVP). At the the ~10% of seats of the Others might have bolstered the ranks of the bigger democratic parties.
For democracy to thrive, you need both a viable coalition of democratic parties and a credible opposition of democratic parties offering another option. If 11% of the seats are taken by people who want to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and some 17% are by people who want to restore the monarchy or establish a Fuehrerstaat, then you are in trouble perhaps not immediately but in the next elections, as people disillusioned with the previous government end decide to vote them out, and will likely turn to the extremist parties.
It is a bit of a catch-22: if the democrats don't form coalitions with the toxic extremist parties, the extremist parties won't get blamed for bad outcomes while the democrats will, and if they form coalitions with them they might just enable a Machtergreifung.
Having ten or percent of the seats occupied by sub-5% small parties which can not form stable coalitions due to scaling issues is making the problem a bit worse, but the main problem is the extremist parties.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
The nice thing about democracies is that there is a peaceful path forward if you are unhappy with an administration. Canvas for your issue, change the mind of the voters, change the stance of politicians or get elected yourself. Not an easy path forward, but with some notable benefits over the alternative.
This Calvin and Hobbes comic illustrates the position the bureaucracy would find itself in if they decided to do their thing without the blessings of President, SC and Congress.
And while this is getting deep into silly "could Darth Vader take Superman in a fight?" hypotheticals territory, there is the fact that the federal police agencies are not the strongest kid on the block. The US military seems kind of big on following a chain of command which ultimately ends with the president. They obviously will be reluctant to interfere within the US, but if the constitutional organs of the US are in agreement that a part of the DC bureaucracy is in rebellion, I strongly expect them to intercede on the side of the constitution. And a battle of federal law enforcement vs the US army would be even more lopsided that a battle of Feds versus Trump militias.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
While I can not speak for HR panels, I want to emphasize that I do not think that men enjoy any biological specialization which makes them relevantly better at STEM than their female colleagues. At my workplace, we have perhaps 40% women and for whatever weird subsubpopulation ends up in my field (a non-booming field of physics), I do not see gender being correlated with competence. (There are significant variances within specialties, FWIW. The small subset of colleagues who I consider to be good or great programmers are mostly male. On the other hand, women are more likely to actually ask for help. Just the other day, I chased a crash down the entirely wrong rabbit hole with a debugger and might have wasted hours which my female colleague in the end solved in five minutes with an email.)
While I think that there are certainly degrees and occupations which have more or less objective usefulness (e.g. medicine vs grievance studies), I do not believe there is much in the way of correlation between gender-codedness and objective usefulness.
I mean, I consider woke studies -- which are coded female -- to be net negative, but I also consider marginal contributions to the capabilities of the world's militaries to be net negative, with the security dilemma being a prime example of an inadequate equilibrium if there ever was one.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I think the bad-tasteness of it depends on the group size. Three people can keep a secret (if two of them are dead) and all that. If three boys want to spend their time fantasizing about their classmates, that is very different than if three quarters of the class participate in the ranking, in my mind. (I don't know what the participation rate for that spreadsheet thing was, I am trying to make a general point.)
I don't think having rankings is necessarily bad taste. I am fine with men ranking porn stars (or participants of a dating show) by their hotness, or athletes by their speeds, or competitive eaters by how many burgers they can eat, or students by how well they did on their last math test (even though I would prefer to just tell everyone their outcome and the overall statistics in that case). In all these cases, the ranking is kind of relevant to the job. Don't want to be judged by your genitals? Then don't become a porn star.
I agree that not every inappropriate ranking implies bullying and victimization. If the bottom of the list gets rated a 4/10, the whole endeavor would still be slightly ill-advised, but victim-free. (Some feminists might disagree with me here, whatever.) If half the class coordinates to agree on an 1/10 rating for one classmate especially based on politics and this strongly influences how they subsequently treat them, that would be bullying.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
You can't DEI your way to being able to do math, physics, or chemistry that actually works. Other departments are perfectly safe to keep using these political statements though - sociology departments produces can net-negative knowledge, there is no requirement that they ever do anything that actually works, and nothing about their funding relies on that changing.
Sounds like you are saying that the STEM subjects are intrinsically white and racist, while the social sciences are sufficiently enlightened.
I kid, I kid.
In my model of reality, the STEM-powered industrial revolution did more to (ultimately and mostly inadvertetly) improve the lot of formerly non-free underclasses in two centuries than the humanities and social sciences did in two millennia.
For what it's worth, I share your ideal of being color-blind instead of putting one's hand on the scales to ensure equality of outcomes. The ultimate arbitrator of what constitutes good physics should be reality, not a HR panel.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
The degree to which a government decision is about budget exists on a sliding spectrum.
Consider two extremes:
- The government wants to provide better care for kittens, so they nationalize Facebook and pay animal shelters from the income. Equivalently, they make a law requiring Facebook to house a certain amount of kittens.
- The government allows or forbids abortions, gay sex or gun ownership.
ADA is somewhere in between these extremes. It is clearly has a direct monetary impact on businesses. And sometimes as with the free videos, the outcomes are clearly bad.
But I don't think it is 100% only about money.
Consider a community of 10k of people with 20 wheelchair users and a single non-wheelchair supermarket. Say the owner has done the math and building a wheelchair ramp would not be cost-effective. I see the following options:
A) The government shrugs. B) The government pays some allowance to the wheelchair users. They try to pool together to get that ramp. The owner agrees. Good outcome. C) Like B, but the owner still not want the ramp. The ramp would take one of the spots of the parking lot (in fact, the best spot!), and he wants rent for that. Eventually the government overpays severely for that ramp. D) Like B, but the government forces the owner to allow that ramp. The owner mumbles something about commies. E-G) Like B-D, but the money comes from the government directly based on general rules instead of the actual demand. This bypasses coordination problems, but risks being less cost-effective. H) The government forces the owner to pay for the ramp out of his own pocket. Again he grumbles something about land of the free. In the end, everyone pays through increased supermarket prices and the general costs of having to follow more laws. I) Some kind of technical solution. Exo-skeletons, shopping-as-a-service, whatever.
Most of these options are not great. Excluding wheelchair users whenever the market forces are not in their favor is not nice. Creating more regulations is also not nice. Having a bureaucracy which figures out how much the supermarket should be paid for allowing that wheelchair ramp also is not nice. Relying on technological solutions will not always work.
Making the supermarket owner pay for the ramp has at least the advantage that there is little bureaucratic overhead. You do not need to figure out a fair price for getting the owner to allow that ramp, or if the government should pay for a ramp in the primary color of the market, and how much the government should pay if the owner also uses that ramp to move carts of goods, or employ wheelchair ramp inspectors. Pay for the ramp or get sued is not the simplest law there could be, but it is not the most complicated either.
This does not mean that the pathologies you mentioned (e.g. that it is easier to sell hidden costs than visible costs) don't play a role, though.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
From my limited understanding, the president is the head of the executive, and any democratic legitimacy of the federal bureaucracy ultimately comes from the fact that the bureaucrats are enacting the will of a democratically (or however you call the electoral college system) elected president. While there are certainly mid-level bureaucrats who would do everything legal in their power to thwart his preferred policies (and some might even risk their job by going beyond that), I think the rest of DC pretending that Trump does not exist will not be an option. For one thing, do you really suppose the Supreme Court would play along with that? If they do not, should the rest of DC also pretend that the Supreme Court does not exist?
We already had four years of Trump. He was not my favorite president, but contrary to predictions from the left he turned out not to be the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. I don't think he would build death camps in his second presidency. It would not be the end of the world.
On the other hand, democracy in the US had (with one notable exception) been a great success in avoiding conflicts being resolved by force of arms. Even if Trump's supporters would idly stand by while the executive defected, the long term effects of establishing that the federal bureaucracy is independent of the president would likely be violent.
Trump's second term would not be about replacing the constitution with the Fuehrerprinzip. If he gets the EC votes, he may get out of legal troubles which may or may not have been politically motivated in the first place. This will not be the end of the world any more than Nixon getting pardoned about Watergate was the end of the world.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
It is bad taste for any group whose primary purpose is not a dating pool to systematically rate the hotness of that pool, no matter the gender.
These lists tend to become common knowledge, and some people will end up on the bottom part of the list or being rated an average of 1.3 out of ten (but people -- especially people going through puberty -- might also be uncomfortable being rated really high). If the victim had actually asked to be rated, this would be different, but in all likelihood, they do not prefer an supposedly objective (it's a number! numbers don't lie!) rating of their hotness to become common knowledge.
The outcome of these lists is not so different from writing "X is an ugly pig" on the blackboard. As that is bullying, I would classify creating such lists as at least likely to lead to bullying.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
From the article, it is clear that the rate of both men and women being murdered by intimate partners has decreased by a factor of about two since the 1990s.
To be sure, of the 0.45 Non-Indigenous women killed per 100k, 0.32 are killed by an intimate partner, who is very likely to be male. I am not sure what could be done about that, though. Encourage more women to join gangs so that they are more likely to be killed in gang warfare, like presumably the males (for whom the murder rate is twice as high, but only with a small fraction being perpetrated by intimate partners)?
In general, the price we pay for freedom is that sometimes people elect to do bad stuff with it. In theory, we could save a few women's lives by outlawing heterosexual relationships or locking up all men. In practice, that would not be worth it on a QALY basis.
If being murdered is among the ten leading causes of death, then we could consider talking about an epidemic. Traffic deaths are between four and five per 100k. We should roughly care five times as much about that than we care about murders (which should still not be a lot).
Also, Indigenous women are murdered at six times the rate of their non-Indigenous peers!!111 Should the intersectionist woke crowd be all over that fact?
quiet_NaN
10d ago
I think there is a world of a difference between camping illegally and detaining others.
Believing in the rule of the law does not imply believing that every law should be rigorously enforced all the time. Just like I don't think you should go after every kid's lemonade stand for lack of a business licence, I also think that universities should have some leeway in deciding which of their student groups they tolerate having protest camps on campus.
I think as long as it is not the government deciding that would not be unconstitutional.
For example, a university might tolerate a protest camp to Save The Whales (as long as they do not single out Japanese students or something) but might decide not to tolerate a protest camp about God Hates Fags.
So the amount of antisemitism and especially the attitude towards Jewish students might matter a lot to the universities -- who I imagine are doing damage control. The question for them is if it is worse PR to call the police to dissolve the camp or to continue to tolerate it and thus to some degree be endorsing the messages they spread.
To keep such a system fair, you would also need a lot more crosswalks perhaps one every 50 meters in dense cities. As others have implied, you would have to sacrifice one lane per side plus change for parking so that drivers can get out of their car without stepping out onto the death zone. Or you just make parking on the side of the road illegal.
I think the result would be rather hellish for drivers.
More options
Context Copy link