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Recording a public assembly is harassment now? I am having serious trouble imagining you apply the same standard towards any situation where your sympathies are reversed.
I can help you imagine. If a group of BLM protestors have sequestered themselves into a square to do their BLM chants and so forth, then someone dressed in a police uniform with his phone out to record is clearly the provocateur if he attempts to enter the zone when there is clearly no interest in the zone other than provocation. (Notice the square is densely packed and it is evening.) It is crybullying to call it harassment if the BLM people hold their arms to prevent your incursion. Of course, I’m saying this as someone who thinks BLM was the height of American stupidity. This is why it’s ubiquitous during protests to separate the two sides, and the police will often prevent a member of one side from entering the other side.
So you're saying that refusing to let students enter common areas that they have a right to be in is not harassment, but recording video in a public area (as is your right) is harassment?
A Muslim man in a Palestinian keffiyeh and thobe is attempting to enter the sequestered area of a vigil held by Jewish students for October 7th victims, desiring to record all of their faces on his phone. It’s 8pm and there’s no other reason for him entering the area. If Jewish students passively prevent him from entering the grounds of the protest, do you want the Jewish students charged for harassment?
Yes, obviously (assuming that harassment is a chargeable offence, which I don't think it is).
Ah ok. My intuition is different: in either case, the one actively attempting to enter the de facto designated area intends to harass the people in the area, whether or not it meets a legal standard of harassment. There is no plausible reason for their entrance into the area which doesn’t involve starting a confrontation. It should be discouraged because that’s how confrontations begin, and as evidence for this the police routinely separate protesting camps for this exact reason (and whether or not the protests are legally done).
That seems a near-universal recipe to surrender any and every public to whatever jackass is willing to occupy it first, and then insist that they feel unsafe because The Wrong Person walked close to them or took pictures of their public protest. Dissolving 'starting a confrontation' at all makes the fundamental flaws of this framework, if anything, more apparent.
Not at all, we can ask reasonable questions like:
does the protest movement actually represent a serious concern among a significant number of students? (Concerns like: segregation, corruption, genocide, or etc?) (Yes)
does the protest movement occupy a small space, and are there a sufficient number of protesters to occupy that space? (Yes)
is the space unnecessary for reasonable facility at the university? (Yes)
If you don’t want this textbook example of protesting, you are saying you only want protests when they get permission by the party in power (state and/or administrators or an institution). You would be denying, for instance, the implicit right of Jewish students to protest if (hypothetically) a university would ban their synagogues. You would be denying the utility and morality of all the protests that occurred to end segregation. Genocide is as serious as any of these concerns, and apparently a number of students — with negative financial interest and negligible social interest at play, students at our top university — want to protest about it. There are a lot of ramifications to that belief and it involves a superstitious belief in the omnibenevolence of those in power.
That’s a moderate argument in favor of unsanctioned protest, if somewhat marred by one of its (first!) prongs turning into whether people like the protest goals or not.
But I don’t need an argument in favor of unsanctioned protest: my metrics there are far simpler. My problem here is not the presence of a protest, but your advocacy of a norm where whatever protest group that takes a public forum first gets to exclude people who disagree with their message.
There might be some edge cases where that’s an unfortunate compromise we have to take, but under vague concerns about ‘confrontation’ are little more than carte blanche
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