"They’re excellent schools, and they have excellent scientists, and if one of Vice-President Vance’s kids is sick, he’s going to want the doctor to have gone to one of these schools; he’s not going to want them to have gone to Viktor Orbán’s university."
"People have said to me, “Well, you take all that money from the government, why don’t you listen to them?” The answer is, because the money doesn’t come with a loyalty oath."
"I don’t have to agree with the mayor to get the fire department to come put out a fire. And that’s what they’re saying to these international students: “Well, you came to this country. What makes you think you can write an op-ed in the newspaper?” Well, what makes you think that is, this is a free country. "
I'm not sure I understand. If I want a medical doctor, I'm not looking for someone based on his political views or spirited independence from the Hungarian government, but for someone with training in a very narrow discipline, namely medicine. I really don't want someone who is more interested in "the modern and the postmodern" prescribing me meds, but I do want someone who conforms to the current pharmacological standards.
The University President in question does not even run a medical school; Wesleyan does not, to my knowledge, teach anyone the art of medicine, however highly it might rank as a liberal arts institution. Semmelweis University in Budapest, however, is older than the United States, is the largest healthcare provider in Hungary, and is ranked among the top 300 universities in the world. Therefore, if I had to chose between someone who went to Wesleyan and someone who went to Semmelweis, which I'll take as "Viktor Orbán's university," I should much rather have the Hungarian who actually knows medicine rather than the liberal arts PhD who might be able to lecture me on what postmodernism should mean to me.
The OP is expressing dismay at this obviously compromised position. There is no purportment or strawmen that I can detect.
Regardless, I absolutely agree with you, except for one thing: I would have no problem being under care of a Hungarian, but I doubt you’d ever see a MAGA enthusiast saying he prefers that than an American doctor.
Also, economic decline is a much greater threat to the US than military decline. China is eager to dethrone us economically; an invasion of the US would be extremely costly and highly unlikely even if the US' military were significantly smaller.
We should expect better rhetoric from the rector of a liberal arts university.
Unfortunately I can't read the actual article to see what the rest of his argument was like. I wish that HN would automatically provide links to bypass paywalls.
Edit: and by the way Orbán is not Hungary, in the same way that Trump is not America, although they would very much like you to think so. I wonder why?
On the other hand, while the US is bombing civilians in Yemen, revoking womens' rights and moving towards persecuting lgbt people, it would seem that ironically the the US is exactly the jam for that. A perfect fit.
To be clear I am not attempting to defend war crimes or terrorist activity or anything like that. I'm just pointing out that simply valuing Palestinian lives is rather meaningless and empty unless it translates into action.
>Should Israel be allowed to attack terrorist organizations in Palestine?
yes. I think actual terrorists should be eligible for being attacked anywhere. The real question you didn't ask is who gets to label what is and is not a terrorist? Black Panthers were considered terrorists in the US in the 60s and 70s but heros to the Black community now. In the US, again, our founding fathers were all considered terrorists by Britain.
>If so, is there an "acceptable" level of civilian casualties (collateral damage)?
The "acceptable" level of civilian casualties or collateral damage is zero. With the understanding that accidents happen, but all plans should be for zero.
>Does that level change if the terrorists intentionally use civilians as human shields
No. This routinely happens in the US over the years where criminals or even terrorists take hostages on a plane, bank, school, hospital, or other place with innocent people. We do not drop bombs on the building killing all the innocents to get at the evil-doers. Have you noticed that no country in the Western civilized world would even consider that? Modern military should be able to go in and do surgical strikes or a surrender. Hell, in the US, we have small towns with volunteer SWAT teams that do this routinely with basically 100% success rate.
I think the biggest problem, which is covered in most war-time conventions, is that you should treat civilians and innocent people the same as you would treat your own innocent civilians. This is somehow being argued that it does not apply in the middle East or Ukraine or Russia where people just remotely drop bombs and blame "human shields".
Not too long ago the US would be ashamed to admit it even did something like this, because it seems like incompetence or cowardice, but now we support it somehow?
Hamas is a terrorist organization. There can be no possible debate about that point.
Real life is not like what you see in the movies. Modern militaries are in no way able to consistently do surgical strikes with no collateral damage. That is magical thinking.
Your comparison with civilian law enforcement is so specious that I suspect you're not even commenting in good faith. There no "volunteer SWAT teams", that's not a real thing (the officers on those teams do volunteer for the duty but they get paid). SWAT teams aren't tasked with fighting their way through hundreds of terrorists to capture a suspect; they're generally up against no more than a few criminals armed with small arms. And it's unfortunately fairly common for law enforcement to accidentally shoot innocent bystanders or hostages.
It's cheap easy to criticize and claim the moral high ground when you don't have to make hard choices or deal with the consequences. Again I'm not attempting to justify war crimes but the decisions get a lot messier when you step away from your computer and operate in the real world.
Yes, we saw what happened and labeled them as war crimes. We don’t consider them to be acceptable anymore.
"Before we're through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell."
-Admiral William "Bull" Halsey, Jr. 1941
I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment, but his was quite a popular opinion at the time.
That aside, I have seen a loony fringe of revisionist historians and lawyers level spurious claims of "war crimes" against Allied leaders who are no longer even alive to defend themselves. They had no moral or legal duty to protect enemy civilians, and any amount of enemy civilian deaths were acceptable to save Allied lives.
If you're looking for war criminals, start with Tojo, Hitler, and Mussolini and work your way down the list of Axis leaders. The Allied powers were always clear that they would stop the attacks as soon as their adversaries issued unconditional surrenders. Therefore all enemy civilian deaths were 100% the fault of Axis leaders who started and continued the war.
Problem solved, right?
Thus you have a lot of Palestinian supporters advocating for Hamas, and that is effectively "supporting" terrorism.
Thats a dangerous line of argument to make. Zionists work VERY hard to promote the idea that they represent all jews. I for one would take great offense to the idea that all jews are land stealing colonialist savages. Its just as dangerous to normalize the idea that hammas represents palestinians
So, frankly, why not treat these people the same we treated like these other folk-- a trial and then appropriate punishment proven in the court of law. If an immigrant is violating the terms of their visa, the US gov't can prove it in their own courts and then deport them appropriately.
From a political standpoint, why should US citizens pay taxes to educate people who are apparently hostile to our fundamental values?
Because that's where Americans come from - the educated and acculturated sons and daughters of immigrants who came bearing all manner of prejudice.
This is a phenomenal example of a non-sequitur argument.
Or did Trump add “disregard for human decency” and “imposing widespread fear through arbitrary state violence” to the list of fundamental values with one of his executive decisions?
Indeed, I agree with you. There are US citizens who want to do reprehensible things, and I still say: maybe the US is not their jam. No, I'm not advocating exile or illegal detention. Just stating a fact.
Whataboutism would be something like, "what about Nazi Germany, where even more people got sent to foreign prison camps without due process: look, the US isn't so bad!".
But it does come with some reasonable level of consideration and appreciation.
Maybe the government should appreciate them not the other way around.
All my high school and college education was at free schools/colleges in my home country, paid for by taxpayer money. All incredibly competitive places, with very high maintenance costs compared to the other colleges around, not a single US dollar was invested in me and here I am paying taxes and improving this place.
The bargain the US gets from this is one of the biggest reasons it can do what it does, the investments it makes are compounded by the work of the people that it never put a dime for.
I literally don't know anybody who has any desire of expressing gratitude to their boss for the "opportunity" given to them. What kind of servile lapdogs do consider their work an "opportunity"? How about the bosses realize that without workers, their businesses will implode, and thank their workers for the "opportunity" to have a working business instead?
Jobs are an exchange of a worker's time and skills for a wage. If you expect workers with a touch servility on top, I suggest you go back to the medieval times of lords and servants.
Hard disagree on both needing each other.
Employers can't exist or build their own riches without workers, while workers have existed for thousands of years, much before employers. If we are considering the relationship in adversarial terms, always remember that workers are the only ones actually producing anything of value.
Without workers, garbage won't be collected, water won't be delivered to households, buildings won't be built, and food won't be grown.
The people pushing the paternalistic narrative telling us that we should be "grateful" for the "opportunity" to merely work for a wage have forgotten the French Revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, and all the strikes and revolutions of workers that have advanced our rights to where we have them today. The 5 day work week and the 9-to-5, child labor protections, and workers' rights were not brought to you by the employers. In fact, employers often actively resisted those, and had to be put in their rightful place by their workers.
> It’s nice for wellbeing to be grateful for everything good that happens
Judging by what happened to the employers and the rich during the workers' revolutions, it's probably a good advice for the wellbeing of the work-givers to start practicing daily gratitude towards their own employees. You see, it's just the workers that find themselves more often in the possession of pitchforks and torches.
Again I agree with everything you say but disagree on the part about needing each other/gratitude. The worker also wants all that, and for it to happen, they need collaboration and exchange/division of labor, for which they are allowed to be grateful for.
In many skilled professions, you are more likely to see the boss thanking the worker, for chossing to work there and provide their badly needed skills, than the other way around.
It probably depends on the local unemployment rate.
You’re applying social norms that exist between humans, based on feelings, to a completely different relationship that includes no feelings at all. Would you like another government, with another political direction opposed to yours, to start asking you for appreciation?
Guess which category "reasonable ... consideration and appreciation" falls into.
Put another way, if you read North Korean state media, you will find that they always have a reasonable level of consideration and appreciation for their government.
I’ve had a few opportunities to speak with Roth since the Gaza war started, and I’ve always found him particularly thoughtful about balancing freedom of expression with a need to provide a safe and open learning environment for everyone on campus. In particular, he never gave in to the unlimited demands of protestors while still defending their right to protest.
In part, he had the moral weight to do that because—unlike many university presidents—he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020, which then were turned against the left over the past year.
I don’t see any particularly good outcome from any of this; the risk of damaging the incredibly successful American university system is high. Certainly smart foreign students who long dreamed of studying in the US will be having second thoughts if they can be arbitrarily and indefinitely detained.
But I hope the universities that do make it through do with a stronger commitment to the (small l) liberal values of freedom of expression , academic freedom, and intellectual diversity.
Like, c'mon, are we really still doing this now? Roth himself is sensible enough to not be, in his words, "blaming the victim" at this point, what calls you to essentially do it for him anyway? It's nothing but out of touch at this point, and adds nothing to the discourse but conspiratorial noise. If I may assume a rough age based on your forthrightness, any single kid in school in 2020 was and is a lot less culpable for this current moment than you or I. We can set an example and be mature enough to own that, instead of, I don't know, forever being tortured by the real or perceived condescension of kids.
Exactly. Its a communications problem.
Its hard to have a decent critical conversation when one side has a biased view about $symbol. Both communicating parties need to reach the same interpretation of a message, otherwise the conversation is broken. Thats why you shouldnt say the N-word or throw out a heil heart on stage (unless you want to hide behind this ambiguity). Or why its so difficult to have critical conversations with strong believers, for you its just evolution or vaccines but for the other side it may affect the core of their identity and the ape goes defense mode.
The result is that the discourse does not deal with differentiated cases but _only_ with simplistic labels like "chill speech", "woke", etc. because the more biased side drags it down into the mud.
For instance, the "chill speech" label is actually dependent on the "racist" label that initiated it. If a case shows clear racist behavior, then dismissing the lefts reaction as censorship is unjustified or biased. The other way works too, if there is no racist behavior, the censorship blame would be justified.
And since you cant look into peoples heads to clearly identify racist intentions, it falls back to interpreting messages. The problem with biased people is, they are not aware even of their unawareness. If you would ask Musk whether he is a neo-nazi, his response would be something like "hell no". Fast forward the dystopian timeline and his response might be "always have been".
The left has IMO more unbiased awareness about systemic issues -- but is not free of bias either. The right is in its core biased indentity politics about $culture -- but is not totally host to tribalism either.
My advise, avoid popular symbols at all cost and if you come close to using one, augment it with case specific background, even a vague "_unjustified_ chill of speech" would suffice. If someone opens with "the woke left" and shows no signs of differentiation -- or even better, acknowledgement of core leftist topics -- i mentally turn away. The comment you replied to was about personal anekdotes and projections and the one symbol that rubs me the wrong way too, even before trumps abuse.
I obviously don't support terrorism, but people unambiguously have the right to protest in favour of terrorist groups. It's only when they provide material support to these groups that they actually commit a crime.
People conflating supporting Palestine with supporting terrorism should be ashamed of themselves, as Israel is the biggest terror state in the world.
Thus either you apply your conflating standard equally, Palestine and Israel are both terror states, and any support of them is supporting terrorism. Or you rather differentiate, and separate Palestine as an abstract concept of a hypothetical future homestead of the Palestinians from the Hamas, the Fatah and other (mostly terrorist) organisations that govern it, and the population that, in parts, is governed by them and elects and supports or opposes them and their actions. But if you do that, you will also have to differentiate between Israel as a state, its military, government, parties, population and their respective support and actions.
In that second case you can support Palestine as an abstract idea without supporting terrorism, you can support the population and their rights, hopes and struggle. As you can do with Israel and their people. However, on pro-Palestine protests, I've never really seen this kind of differentiation applied, I've seen far too many Hamas flags, heard far too many calls to wipe Israel from the map, far too many praises for terrorists (called "martyrs"). Thus, in practically all cases, I'd without hesitation call supporters of Palestine supporters of terrorism.
According to the New York Times, Netanhayu was propping up Hamas in the weeks and months before the current conflict ( https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q... ). This has been happening since the beginning of Hamas.
The government over there has been supporting Hamas since the beginning, because they don't want to deal with Fatah going to the UN. Everything recently is the result of that. So don't come around talking about Hamas. Especially since Netanyahu and his US counterparts are trying to sideline Fatah, and are persecuting secular Palestinians like Samidoun and the PFLP more than Hamas. The US, Canada, Germany etc. crack down on the seculat, left-leaning Samidoun so that only Hamas is left standing in Gaza.
Although I laud your unassailable argument highlighting yet another instance of double standards against Jews, ultimately there is little upside in engaging with the "no, no, technically there is a difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism" crowd. I am sad that Hacker News is rife with this kind of bigotry, but I don't see the tide of this battle turning anytime soon.
In case, dear reader, you are one of the intellectually curious ones who holds the opposing viewpoint, ask yourself why you demand that only the Jews lack the right to self determination?
Most demands for self-determination were for self-rule on land already inhabited by the group in question.
Zionism was unique in that it demanded self-determination on land inhabited almost 100% by a different group of people.
1. Deny Jews the right to self-determination altogether, continuing the dispossession of an actively persecuted people, indeed, the same one that was about to face the Holocaust in Europe, thereby punishing them for their own historical victimization, or
2. Acknowledge the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination, even if it takes root in their historical homeland and entails negotiating with and sharing the land with other peoples, thereby accepting that historical justice often requires grappling with imperfect realities, and that two national claims can coexist without one invalidating the other.
Or are you arguing that self-determination only applies to groups of people who haven't been exiled from their homeland (i.e. the people that need self determination the least)?
[0] Before Zionism, the population of Mandatory Palestine was 98% smaller than the same region today. Even the Arab population has increased 26-fold. So, yes, technically it was inhabited, but dramatically less developed. And even then, Jerusalem was 60% Jewish.
2000 years ago.
You're saying that events from millennia in the past mean that the Palestinians should have had to cede the land they lived on to a group of outsiders from Europe.
People can make of that what they may (I think it's ridiculous), but you at least have to admit that it completely invalidates your argument that Zionism is just like any other demand for self-determination. We're talking about a demand for other people's land, based on appeals to events from thousands of years ago.
So are you arguing that the Jews are not a people that merit self determination? Or are you saying that because they were expelled from their homeland so long ago, they forfeited the legitimate claim to self determination?
You're saying the same thing with different words. In order to "re-establish" that nation, they had to take over control of Palestine, against the will of the people who actually lived there.
> no Zionist demanded land or induced anyone to cede their land prior to 1947 anyway
That's not true at all. The entire point of Zionism was to take over political control of Palestine and found a Jewish state there. The mainstream Zionist movement wanted all of Palestine, and the radical right wing of Zionism (the "Revisionists," who eventually became Likud, Netanyahu's party) even wanted what is now Jordan.
> all Zionist land acquisition was through voluntary purchases and legal land transfers
That's formally correct before 1947, but the goal was to take over all of Palestine. The leadership of the Jewish Agency (the Zionist quasi-government in British-run Palestine until early 1948) knew that ultimately, it would come down to war with the Arabs, and they prepared for it. They were also very interested in forced "population transfer" (which today would be called "ethnic cleansing"), which they hoped the major powers would agree to.
Even the land purchases were extremely predatory. Imagine the worst aspects of gentrification, but at the scale of a country and enacted for explicitly racist reasons. The Zionists bought up land from landlords who didn't even live in Palestine, and then forcibly removed the Palestinian farmers who lived on the land.
Even so, they never purchased more than about 6% of Palestine, before they forcibly took most of the rest in 1947-48.
> So are you arguing that the Jews are not a people that merit self determination?
First, the obvious question, as I've said, is "where?" Is easy and relatively harmless to say in the abstract that "this group of people is a nation and deserves self-determination." But when you start laying claims to other people's lands, that becomes a problem.
I don't really want to get into who is "a people," but I'll just point out that what you're saying implies that American Jews are just Israelis who happen to live abroad. I think that's incredibly wrong. Jews belong to many different nationalities.
As we have already established, the population in the land of the historical mandate has exploded, including a manifold increase of Arabs (living peacefully within the borders of modern Israel as equal citizens, I might add), so clearly it is possible to accommodate this diverse population in a Jewish state.
Are you against all national self determination? Or is there some threshold of homogeneous concentration of one people after which it becomes legitimate? If the Zionist pioneers had managed to achieve a 99% majority of Jewish population in Palestine through legal immigration before asserting sovereignty, would that pass your test?
Or would you just prefer to see the European Jewry perish in toto under the Holocaust and Eastern European pogroms?
The whole enterprise was illegitimate, because it was carried out against the will of the population of Palestine. The population did not want a foreign group of people to come in, settle the land and take over. The British colonial rulers forced Zionism on the Palestinian population undemocratically.
You keep on appealing to self-determination, but you completely ignore the Palestinians' right to self-determination on the land they had inhabited for centuries.
> Or would you just prefer to see the European Jewry perish in toto under the Holocaust and Eastern European pogroms?
The way to avert the Holocaust would have been to prevent the rise of fascism in Europe. The vast majority of Jews were anti-Zionist, and did not want to leave their home countries. The idea that Polish Jews would have all left Poland for the Middle East before WWII is just fanciful. Only a small percentage of them wanted to pack up and go to Palestine, a far-away place they knew nothing about.
> Only a small percentage of them wanted to pack up and go to Palestine, a far-away place they knew nothing about.
And pray tell, what happened to the ones who stayed?
I think it's much more serious than arguing that they had the right to take over land already inhabited by another group of people, because of events from 2000 years ago. It just doesn't seem to occur to you that the Palestinians also have rights, and shouldn't have been forced to give up their land.
> or can will into existence powers like militarily defeating the Nazis despite lacking even a basic police force.
You're supposing that Jews would have left Europe en masse for Palestine. They wouldn't have. Most Jews before WWII did not accept Zionism. For example, in Poland, the dominant Jewish political movement was the Jewish Labour Bund, which was hostile to Zionism and which strove for Jewish civil rights inside the Polish Republic. In the real world, the only way the Jews of Europe could have been saved would have been by preventing the rise of fascism.
To get back to your original point, you still haven't acknowledged that Zionism was fundamentally different from other movements for self-determination. It was a movement for self-determination on land that the group in question did not inhabit, and which an entirely different group of people already inhabited. When Zionism succeeded, it created a massive refugee population (the previous inhabitants of the land the Zionists wanted for their own "self-determination") and sparked a conflict that has been going on for nearly a century now.
> The alternative you're proposing amounts to telling the Jews: stay stateless, stay vulnerable
Jews were not stateless. They were Polish, German, French, Russian, English, American, etc. You mean to say that there was no Jewish state, which is something entirely different from being stateless. American Jews today, for example, are "stateless" by your loose terminology, but arguably have more rights than and are safer than Israeli Jews.
> Jews didn't have the option to stay in Europe: Europe made that brutally clear.
Without the rise of Hitler, Jews would have been able to remain in Europe. The rise of fascism and WWII were a catastrophe for civilization, which could have been averted.
> magically prevent fascism
There's nothing magic about it. For example, if the Social Democrats and Communists had coordinated against fascism, they might have been able to prevent Hilter's rise. If France and Britain had decided to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938 or prevent the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, there may very well have been no WWII and no Holocaust. However, one thing I can tell you for certain is that the chance that most Jews would have decided to move to the Middle East is basically zero. They weren't Zionists and didn't want to leave their home countries.
> Every nationalist movement has had to contend with messy realities.
You're hiding a lot behind that phrase, "messy realities."
I have yet to see you acknowledge the Palestinians and their rights in any way. You're asserting the right of Jews to take over control of Palestine, depriving the Palestinians not only of the right of self-determination, but taking their land and expelling them. You've now justified this in two completely different ways: first by an appeal to ancient history, and then by an appeal to the Holocaust.
> That's not a serious moral position; at best it's an abdication, at worst a double standard against the Jews (i.e. antisemitism).
I was wondering how long it would take you to explicity come out and start accusing me of antisemitism. But if you really want to choose the right insult, you should call me a "self-hating Jew."
You dress up your objection to Zionism behind a pseudomoralistic veneer of Palestinian rights, but your real position is that Jewish survival was a problem because it confuses your personal narrative of Palestinian nationalism. That’s not a serious moral argument. That’s historical cruelty crudely disguised as moral purity.
And no, I never insulted you, but the position that European Jews should have just tried harder against the Nazis is a laughably sadistic viewpoint regardless of who holds it.
> the position that European Jews should have just tried harder against the Nazis
If you think I wrote anything like that, you have a serious lack of reading comprehension.
> your real position is that Jewish survival was a problem because it confuses your personal narrative of Palestinian nationalism.
Oh gee, thanks for informing me that my "real" position is that I shouldn't survive.
There is a difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. The former is condemning a land-grab because of some 2000 year old claim. The latter is hating Jews because they are Jews. There is a world of difference there.
The forefathers of everyone in Europe, with very few exceptions, occupied a different strip of land 2000 years ago and were driven out by romans, goths, huns, germans or whomever. Most pieces of land changed hands a dozen times or more. Should we now rearrange all the maps and revert to our 2000 year old original national lands and identities? Why 2000 years, why not 500, 5000 or 10000? The maps looked different in those periods as well.
Anti-Zionism is antisemitic because it declares that no, it is preferable for Jews to continue to face the Holocaust and other attempts at their genocide than to concede their right to self defense as a people.
Yes, there is a moral right and necessity for self-determination and self-defense for the Jews after the Holocaust. But there is no necessity or justification for that to happen in Palestine, especially when this means displacing and slaughtering the Palestinians who have lived there for quite a few centuries. And indeed Palestinians do have a moral right of self-determination and self-defense as well. So the essence of Zionism, which is the idea of taking over Palestine for a Jewish state, is deeply immoral because of that. And this immorality doesn't simply disappear because of the wrongs that were done to the Jews by non-Palestinians. And because of that, anti-Zionism is a moral imperative, because it aims to correct an immorality. Whereas antisemitism is something completely different.
> Anti-Zionism is antisemitic because it declares that no, it is preferable for Jews to continue to face the Holocaust and other attempts at their genocide than to concede their right to self defense as a people.
Which means that you think the only possible way to avoid a genocide of Jews and for Jews to defend themselves is to settle in Palestine? Nothing else would have done? Given that there were quite a few wars around the establishment of Israel which could have very well wiped Israel off the map that is quite a bold statement.
I rather think this idea of self-defense and self-determination of the Jewish people being only possible in Israel/Palestine is a religiously derived idea, nothing that has any basis in political and military facts or morals. It was just a "wouldn't it be nice to do this in Gods Promised Land?" kind of thing, current inhabitants be damned...
Care to suggest a superior choice of venue for Jewish sovereignty where the Jews had a better claim to the land, and the locals were prepared to welcome their national project?
- "The democratically elected government of Gaza-Palestine is the Hamas" Hamas is not a democratic government, period. Elections you're talking about were almost 20 years ago. It's like calling Trumpistan 20 years from now a democracy, if Trump today declares he'll live forever, and that there will be no more elections, and enough MAGA Americans help him persevering.
- Israel's struggle is the Zionist dream of creating a Jewish state by any means. Means have been pretty violent and treacherous, from international terrorism, assassinations of diplomats, to mass killings and violent displacement of 100s of thousands of indigenous people, unilateral declaration of statehood over someone else's land, etc. Indigenous people have been revolting against this since way before Hamas even existed. It's quite something to bothside this, or even invert this, and call indigenous people terrorists, while violent immigrant invaders and land thieves are somehow legitimate state.
- Martyr != terrorist, it's anyone killed in some manner in relation to the above political context. If a child is shot in the head by Israel's soldiers, it will be called a martyr. Executed ICRC workers were called martyrs, etc.
Indigenous people (legitimately imho) started a war over that territory and lost it. Started a few more and lost those as well, together with some neighboring states. If you lost the war for that land, it isn't your land anymore. Simple as that. And terrorism isn't an acceptable means of warfare.
They did not really win either, given that indigenous people, and their descendants, did not yet settle for their complete submission. Unless you call victory as having to hide behind walls and running to shelters every once in a while, and constantly making new enemies by bombing shit out of everyone around you.
As to the fault of the voters for what happened after elections. Yeah, that's easily debatable, given the massive foreign interference into the post-election Palestine's politics and society from occupation, and third countries, and attempts to coopt oposition for violent overthrow of elected government. Also Palestinians did not vote for terrorism, but for "change and reform" at the time http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4606482.stm
What Hamas did or does, doesn't give any right to Israel to ethnically cleanse, forcibly displace, massacre 100+ people every day and commit a genocide in Gaza. 100 people, most of them kids!
These are people with lives, families, hope and compassion. Just imagine if the Ukrainian war came even close to this. People are not numbers.
And these are WARCRIMES, the entire global system was built to stop such things from happening, letting the occupation do whatever it wants while making a joke of any and every concept of the "international rule based order" will come back to bite the west, hard.
If this is allowed to happen, what's different about Taiwan and Ukraine then? Let the stronger one win right?
So as in all the other areas of life, rules are for the small, puny ones, not for the big or well-connected ones. If you are big or have big supporters, might makes right. Morals and rules are then only relevant for propaganda, not for actual behavior
They literally shot ambulances a few days ago on purpose:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
Now Israel can do whatever they want because “nobody” is going to support what seamed like a terrorist state.
They chose violence and violence they get. It didn’t pay off. Not many people want to get involved into Palestine now. Not even the Arab states.
Which ones?
Protest marches - no wait, the term is less specific: "public processions" - can have restrictions imposed for basically any reason. Restrictions can be imposed if (this is just a selection):
- They basically generate noise
- May cause prolonged disruption of access to any essential goods or any essential service
- May cause the prevention of, or a hindrance that is more than minor to, the carrying out of day-to-day activities
- May cause the prevention of, or a delay that is more than minor to, the delivery of a time-sensitive product to consumers of that product
Not forgetting there are probably 10-20 general Public Order Offences that can be used against a person, such as wilful obstruction of a highway or public nuisance.
Then we also have Serious Disruption Prevention Orders (SDPOs). SDPOs are civil orders that enable courts to place conditions or restrictions on an individual aged over 18 (such as restrictions on where they can go and when) with the aim of preventing them from engaging in protest-related activity that could cause disruption. Breaching an SDPO is a criminal offence.
And the cherry on the cake: by law you must tell the police in writing 6 days before a public march if you're the organiser (which is to say, get the police's permission)
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_subject :
"Currently, it refers to people possessing a class of British nationality largely granted under limited circumstances to those connected with Ireland or British India born before 1949. Individuals with this nationality are British nationals and Commonwealth citizens, but not British citizens."
Also, the right to protest in public only applies to German citizens: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_8.html
Foreigners are usually still free to do it, but they don't have a constitutionally protected right to public protests.
Yes, that's correct. Anyone who protests and grabs the attention of the police is accused of supporting a terrorist organisation. That's why I added the information that although they protest completely legally, they still get arrested and deported. The pretense for the arrest and deportation is that protesting to stop the carpet bombing of Gaza supports Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organisation.
Those who were usually did something more than protest, like showing support for terrorist organizations like Hamas or ISIS by showing the respective flag, harassing counter-protesters, shouting controversial slogans like "from the river to the sea..." (which is thought to imply destroying Israel and therefore "Volksverhetzung", although I'm not sure if the courts are already through with that one) or just plainly calling for the killing of Jews or the eradication of Israel.
Actually, the police was very patient and tame with those protests, too patient and too tame for the taste of many. A common, not totally unjustified opinion was that if those protests were just Germans protesting about a strictly German issue (like "Stuttgart21" or "Startbahn West" back in the day) and behaving like the pro-Palestine protestors did, there would have been riot police tear-gassing and bludgeoning everyone within half an hour.
That's quite different from protesting, since you're not making anyone listen to you. Lecture/conference is an offer, that Germans and others may take out of their own interest to learn about what you have to say.
That also infringes on the German citizens, because you're attempting to limit them from what they may choose to learn.
No, the right to utter your opinion in Germany applies to everyone, not only Germans. The constitution has two categories of people, Germans and Everyone, some rights apply only to Germans, some to Everyone. The right to assembly and public protests is one just for Germans, the right to freely utter your opinion applies to everyone.
However, that right isn't what Americans think when they hear "free speech" (which is why I avoided the term earlier): There are far more limits to it, like the criminalization of giving offense ("Beleidigung"), promoting or misinforming about Nazism and other crimes against humanity ("Volksverhetzung"), deadnaming, speaking ill of foreign heads of state or domestic politicians, and condoning criminal acts. Also, only an opinion is protected, not a statement of fact, no matter if it is right or wrong. For example, a journalist was fined for writing about chancellor Schroeder dying his hair. The court didn't even try to find out if it was right or wrong, it was a statement of fact, so unprotected, and it was offensive to Schroeder, so an offense ("Beleidigung").
So in conclusion you are kind of right in that there is actually no freedom of speech for anyone in Germany, not even Germans, that right simply doesn't exist. Its just that foreigners are treated the same as Germans, there is no difference in rights there.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/video-donald-trump-germany-cr...
22:20 ("social center raid for a progressive resistance flyer") 26:20 ("hate crimes") 30:25 (shutting down a congress) ...
What I don't know about is the turn of things in the US, US laws didn't include those kinds of crimes and used to protect freedom of speech in a far more comprehensive manner. Things seem to have changed there, I don't know.
Btw. my personal opinion is that Germany should have US-like free speech and that the only limits to free speech should be where someone is directly and immediately put in danger of physical harm by it. (e.g. shouting "Jump!" to a suicidal person on a railing, or shouting "Fire!" in a dense crowd)
Not many people in Germany dare to bring this up, because suggesting that German's antisemitism detector could be miscalibrated, is, itself, something which Germany detects as antisemitism. Which, if you think for more than five milliseconds, is further evidence that it might be the case.
> Non-citizens in Germany have no free speech rights period. You get banned and deported even for making lectures about unfavorable topics, as it seems.
and neither do citizens, who get fined and imprisoned instead of banned and deported.
Some restrictions on speech are reasonable, including the ones Germany claims to have, but not the ones it actually has.
There is a fight over this being done with or without due process.
"They are accused of indirectly supporting Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organization in Germany."
2nd sentence from your link.
Supporting terrorist organizations is not legal in Germany. Supporting terrorist organizations is not the same a being Pro-Palestinian. Unless you think that all Palestinians are terrorists, which I do not.
That's why I told you: officially, protesting is legal, but they still arrest and deport people for protesting.
This newspaper may not think they're the same thing, but the police do.
This is patently untrue.
I live in Berlin and constantly see protests. Far from being too strict, the police are way to lax in enforcing applicable laws.
The Jewish community in Berlin is scared, because they feel completely left alone by the authorities. We have people running around freely in effin Berlin, right next to the Holocaust memorial calling of the extermination of the Jewish state and all Jews. And virtually nothing is being done about it.
It's perverse.
I've observed street marchse too. Police are required to let these happen provided they are registered in advance. Nonetheless I see police barge into crowds (again being violent against everyone who happens to be standing in the straight line between A and B), grab someone seemingly at random, and haul them off to who knows where. One time I tried to film such a thing happening, and was shouted at, then kicked until I put my phone down, so. I won't be releasing that video for fear of further retaliation.
I don't believe Jews are feeling scared, but I don't actually know any Jews (or Muslims), so feel free to prove me wrong. Every synagogue has a permanent police watch outside it, even before the 2023 escalation of the Gaza genocide, and I don't hear of any crimes or attempted crimes there. Now look at the other side, and it's people getting assaulted, arrested and deported for protesting. I sure would be scared if I believed that Netanyahu did something wrong, because if the government thought I disliked Israel's genocide on Gaza, it certainly seems like I could be deported for that.
Interestingly enough, I heard of one cultural institution (but I forgot which) that's hosting a lot of anti-genocide events... because the government had already set a date for it to shut down, so it had nothing to lose. Something in the general vicinity of Möckernbrücke.
There was another cultural institution somewhere in Neukölln that was shut down, immediately, following the choice to host one speech one time about Gaza.
And there was a *Jewish center* that was raided by police for hosting a Yanis Varoufakis speech by video call. If Jewish centers should be afraid of anything right now, it seems to be the police.
It makes me angry when people continually deny police misbehaviour that I have seen with my own eyes, heard with my ears and felt on my skin. I have to wonder if it's a particular kind of terminal online-ness where things one reads on the internet feel absolutely true because it's the closest to truth that one ever engages with. The alternative is that I'm clinically insane and shouldn't trust my own lying eyes, which I don't think is true. I never go to protests any more, even to observe, because I am afraid of the police. Most of the pro-Palestine protestors (as opposed to the COVID-19 protestors) I've ever talked with have seemed like relatively reasonable people, and I never saw violence instigated by anyone other than the police. Unless, of course, you believe that signs and chants are violent terrorism, as Germany apparently does.
Someone told me it's not Germany-wide, and not federal thing, but specifically the Berlin police who are ruthless with Palestine protests, and that there's no problem with Palestine protests in any other part of Germany. I wouldn't know, since my eyeballs don't reach Germany-wide. Given the disconnect between media and observed reality in Berlin, I don't rely on the media for information about how the rest of Germany is doing on this issue.
What is your rebuttal?
Incorrect. That was a court order, because people were quite obviously subverting the prohibition of calling for genocide by using languages law enforcement does not understand.
> I don't actually know any Jews (or Muslims),
I know both Jews and Muslins: you are incredibly wrong.
My rebuttal to your rebuttal: You are incredibly wrong.
(And who cares if it was the police or the courts? Both are branches of the government. And if the court order was as you described, then why did the police march someone off in handcuffs for speaking Arabic privately to another person who spoke Arabic?)
And if you can't tell, or don't care about, the difference between police overreach and the police enforcing the law of the land, we don't have anything further to discuss.
Have a good day.
And yes, if you are a guest in a country, supporting genocide and terrorism can get you deported.
But the police has been extremely lax in enforcement. These protests still basically always have these characteristics and there is no action by the police.
It is pathetic.
Are you aware that people were chanting "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", because it rhymes, and they were not chanting "from the river to the sea, let's gas all the Jews again"?
No it is not. Even if it almost certainly is. These protests used to run almost daily, and were often allowed to proceed even if actual calls for genocide were included.
And of course you are also wrong on the content: those accusations are largely untrue, and Israel is an absolute leader in avoiding civilian casualties in urban combat, achieving a 1:1 ratio of civilian to combatant deaths, whereas the world average is 10:1. And this despite Hamas's openly stated and obviously carried out policy of creating as many civilian casualties in their own population as possible.
And no, calling for genocide does not become legal if it rhymes.
https://www.euronews.com/2025/04/03/hamas-run-health-ministr...
How many killed would have been "not too many"?
If you accept the mainstream Palestinian viewpoint, i.e. the one that endorses Hamas and the Simchat Torah massacre, there is no such thing as too many, because every Palestinian death furthers the jihadist cause of demonizing Israel.
If you accept the mainstream Israeli viewpoint, all of these deaths were unnecessary because they directly resulted from an unprovoked onslaught against innocent civilians, and all of the casualties could have been avoided but for the Gazan misadventure of October 7th.
I'm not sure which camp GP subscribes to, however.
2. Even Hamas now admits most deaths have been military aged males: https://m.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-848592
3. How can you argue that Gaza has been starved and ethnically cleansed when the population of the Gaza strip has increased since the start of the war?
Arson is not protest. Arson is a VIOLENT type of activism, which is legally classified as terrorism.
Trump (or anybody) shouldn't be allowed to punish folks for speech or peaceful protest. Unfortunately, folks are calling VIOLENT acts like arson and battery "protest", and threats of bodily harm "speech" ("harassment" or "assault" under most US criminal law) -- we should be in favor of the government stepping in to protect people from arson, battery, and assault/ harassment.
> he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020,
Roth has been president since 2007. What was his response to Nick Christakis's struggle session (plenty of video of that) or Erika Christakis leaving Yale, after she penned an e-mail that students should be able to handle Halloween costumes they find offensive?
The American Left has been illiberal and going after speech for decades; it didn't start post-2020.
As an outsider it's always funny to see people write about the "American Left", as if there were any leftist movements of national importance in the US. As if Food Not Bombs had at some point had a majority in congress or something, it's just a ridiculous idea. If that happened there would be a bloody purge, Pinochet style but bigger.
Good that the free-speech absolutist Musk is there to ban everyone on Twitter who calls him out on his lies, trying to buy democratic elections, and do nazi salutes.
> Arson is a VIOLENT type of activism, which is legally classified as terrorism.
Lithium-ion batteries in badly made cars are prone to ...combustion.
Well, it is, isn't it? They required complete loyalty to the ideology before accepting any faculty: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/us/ucla-dei-statement.htm...
They shouldn't have gone that far.
I understand you’re fighting for what you believe in. Keep going, you’re almost there.
In your mind, what do you think I believe in?
I ask this because the only point I made in that message was in response to the "bend the knee" comment.
The one side required "bend the knee". Now the other side requires it. Why be surprised?
Roth says the Wesleyan board is supportive; maybe they are just lucky.
Except the alternatives! No form of government is more effective, competent, just, or free of corruption.
The problems are two fold. The first is vetoing of bad ideas. No leader is right 100% of the time, and when they are wrong, someone must have the power to veto. There must be some way for reason to triumph over power, and a leader who chooses to be responsible is capable of deferring to expertise.
The second is succession. A good leader today may be succeeded by rotten leader tomorrow, but both have the same legitimacy, because the legitimacy comes from power alone and not reason.
> effective, competent, just, or free of corruption.
These things are a result of culture, not a result of the government itself. The government influences culture, but they are first and foremost functions of culture, specifically a culture of tolerating speaking truth to power, dissent, critical thinking, tolerance, and solidarity.
Which makes a lot of sense if you say the same thing about Christianity. Christian isn't something you are, Christianity is something you do.
Both have hallowed dogmas that are poorly understood by their followers, the constitution and the bible/teachings of jesus respectively.
Voting is the definition and core mechanism of democracy: Government by the consent of the governed, to protect their rights, their lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
What's bizarre is, probably in a place where you have the benefits of centuries of overwhelming success, your extreme attempts to redefine it.
cui bono?, other than dictators. What has worked better than democracy?
> if your culture does not support the concept of good "democratic" governance, and no one strives for the institutions and constitutions to support it, you might be better off with a benevolent dictator, for as long as they last before a not-so-benevolent one.
Which culture? Democracy has been an incredible success all over the world - unprecedented success in history in most places it's taken hold.
Yours are the old propaganda of dictators - our 'culture', that undefined nonsense people cite for their prejudices, isn't compatible. The question is, why do you take up their cause?
They also love that you are sitting on the sidelines distracted, criticizing, rather than acting as a democratic citizen.
Even avoiding things like gerrymandering, are voters choosing politicians or are politicians choosing voters?
Do candidates send out emails asking for you to talk to your friends, or do they ask for more money? Do candidates have principled stances founded on an underlying philosophy, or do they focus on issues that are emotional in order to drum up support.
I think "why do candidates ask for money" is a very very important question to ruminate on as is "why are we talking about abortion and race rather than health and housing"?
Before a general election there is a primary and before a primary there is fundraising. In order to succeed in a primary, in general, you have to do OK at fundraising. Fundraising is not dissimilar to an election and it happens before primaries. This means money votes first, which is why it feels like we have a "democracy" approved of by those with money, we literally do.
Money votes first.
Also, fundraising is a signal of democratic appeal. Some fundraise with mass collections of smaller donations.
Still, I agree that money has too much influence. So what do you think, as a democratic citizen, should we do about the influence of money? It's our country. The moneyed influences love that you are distracted, on the sidelines, debating rather than acting.
Can you name a monarchy that is nearly as free, safe, and prosperous as advanced democracies? That is less corrupt? Is China? (No.)
> These things are a result of culture, not a result of the government itself.
How do you explain all the cultures around the world with successful democracies that meet my descriptions? How about Taiwan and (formerly) Hong Kong - same cultures as communist China, far more free, prosperous, non-corrupt, safe ....
There is also the issue of rights. What right does someone have to rule me without my consent? Who the heck are they, other than thugs with guns?
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom.
Andorra, Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden.
Liechtenstein and Monaco.
Once you start electing other jobs, like judges or plumbers, then you get whoever you elected, rather than necessarily a person able to do the job.
In other words, getting elected is a specific skill set. Doing the job is a different skill set. In most fields those skill sets do not overlap.
Even in govt the overlap is marginal. Which is why some elected officials are pretty useless at actually "governing".
To my American friends all I can say is "you voted for this".
What method do you prefer?Trust in the market and chose the one with the highest price, or, choose the one recommended by most, aka the popular choice or the elected?
"popularity" does not imply competence. Popularity is easily gamed and bought. Given that unlimited business money can be spent on elections, it's mostly bought.
I'm not sure what you mean by market, or highest price, but I assume you mean the above?
The opposite of elections is appointment. Based on competence. So, for example, in my company I want job x done well, so I appoint a person based on their ability to do x.
Of course this assumes I want x done well. If I'm elected, and I want x done badly, then I can appoint someone based on other factors, like ideology or loyalty etc.
There are just plenty examples of corruption among the people we elect, everywhere.
Look I'm not saying we don't have these but the set of positions that are neutral is much smaller. Thanks to the political whipping boys de jour any position of power within academic or educational institutions has become politicized.
The whole purpose of elections is tangential to merit. There's important reasons to have them, but finding the 'best' candidate isn't one of them.
How they got there from jesus saying rich people can't go to heaven is one of those theological acrobacies they criticise so much in catholics, but don't disregard doing themselves when suits them.
They kowtowed to some of the militant Zionist interests involved in that endowment in order to attain a fractionally higher return, and betrayed their students.
They kowtowed to the fascist administration on the grounds that it was threatening 400 million dollars in grants, and betrayed their students to the point of facilitating a project to unilaterally deport many of them based on Constitutionally protected quasi-private speech.
At this point I don't think they want or deserve to be called a university. Let's go with "Tax-exempt investment fund".
Regardless we shouldn’t be rounding up and imprisoning folks if they disagree with your politics. This is what is getting lost in this specific case.
I'm guessing the motte associated with this particular bailey won't be nearly as clear in its violation of such codes.
Just so we're clear, people are still losing their minds when someone "finds" a noose-like knot in the vicinity.
There is no baily here.
Does that qualify? No? Now replace Jewish with African American. Is that still OK in your book?
Jewish Students Sheltered Inside College Library During Protest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eFbKViNrMo
35 percent of of Jewish students say there has been violence or acts of hate targeting Jews on their campus https://www.hillel.org/more-than-one-third-of-jewish-college...
But sure, all good. The apologist for the violent maniacs says it's all good. So then it must be good.
The bailey is: "they are calling for the genocide of Jews!!!"
Once challenged, you will retreat to the more easily proven: "they are advocating for the return the land to the Palestinian people", as you just did there. I can promise you that no group of people needs to be allowed to occupy a previously settled region with violence in order to continue to exist. I've heard this argument from white nationalists who call for a white nation to similarly preserve their people from perceived threats, as well as heard it numerous times in African settler colonies (Rhodesia, South Africa, etc.) It's a standard ethnostate talking point, and none of us are fooled by it.
Care to explain how Kristallnacht is in any way different from an intifada? They are literally the same thing, a disorganized mob raping, murdering and attacking innocent civilians. The Arabs have done two intifadas, both resulted in countless dead and injured Jews who were attacked solely for being "el-yahud" aka "yuden" aka Jews.
As I said above, there is no motte and bailey fallacy here. You're the one making false claims about harassment of hamas supporters.
Calls for a "global intifada" are simply calls to oppose the existence of the state of Israel as a settler colony in the land formerly known as Palestine. That's it. It is an immoral country, built by settlers as an ethnostate, and its existence is a moral stain on the world. Has literally nothing to do with "Jews" (I feel the same way about the Muslims in Nagorno-Karabakh right now) and everything to do with a bunch of jack boot fascists who ethnically cleansed an area and continue to oppress the remainder of the people there at gunpoint in massive concentration camps.
Calling for an intifada (which just means "resistance") against that is no difference than calling for the end of Rhodesia. This is a nation that made a man into a celebrity for raping prisoners.
Really, you right now are guilty of the motte and bailey fallacy, because as you just made up a bunch of indefensible claims so I really am interested to know what your motte is here. how turn the tables...
But am I to understand from your comment that the current campaign in Gaza is intrinsically tied to Judaism?
Why not answer the original question instead of speaking in non sequiturs?
Many of the pro-Palestinian protesters are also Jewish. Equating all Jewish people with Israel and Zionism is insidious and misleading.
What we are seeing at Colombia University (as well as the country at large) is the continual abridgement of these rights. Note that for the fifth amendendment specifically, the constitution refers to any person, not just citizens. Those here legally are entitled to due process protections under the law.
The following argument relies on the following: (1) Universities historically have been the the catalysts of change through student protest. (2) Peaceful protest is a right of the people that shall not be abridged. (3) Public Universities (being government institutuions themselves; see campus police and jurisdiction) have a duty of care to protect their students.
With the above holding true, the argument against this being a "betrayal" falls facially flat, as it is a severe consequence that the university capitulated to, and had a duty to prevent. The arument boiled down to "they were being disruptive, so we should get rid of them," because the betrayal amounted to the jailing and deportations (or attempted deportations, in some cases) for the "crime" of being nonviolently disruptive in a public place.
Without articulating a legally rationed basis for a criminally sanctionable offense, an equivalent is threatening to jail and deport construction workers when they block a business entryway. In general, you do not have a right to be merely inconvienced by others in a public space.
https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/jewish-voice-peac...
And you're laundering what the linked page says--they try to paint a picture of JVP being anti-semitic, but don't specifically accuse them of that. They do call them anti-Israel and anti-Zionist but you must not conflate that with anti-Semitism.
Do you find the ADL credible anyway. Seems they themselves could be accused of anti-semitism: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5097676-elon-mus...
Saying Musk's anti-semitic behavior isn't anti-semitic is definitely stretching the truth.
Classic straw-manning. You should know better than that.
I'm also wondering why the ADL would defend Musk at all. Can someone explain their motivation for that?
Those who defend Israeli colonialism actually increase anti-semitism in the world and no amount of intentional conflation of Judaism and Zionism will erase that. Maybe you'll realize that one day.
GTFO about Israeli colonialism. Jews are the indigenous people of the land. The archaeological record is clear on this.
> Jews are the indigenous people of the land
Rank propaganda. Enjoy your genocide.
Nearly every person who claims to be jewish, when pushed turns out to be "jewish" it's essentially a strange version of blackface and fairly bigoted.
The university quad, a multipurpose public space designated for students, is basically the only type of public, physical town square left in this entire country.
I'm an American, thankyouverymuch. I've been to Israel once. I don't care a whole lot about the place either way. Acting like I must be aggrieved when someone attacks that country is doing far more damage to me than the attack.
I watched this narrative get created and promoted without any evidence; Video after video showed peaceful and surprisingly media-savvy students (I mean, it is Columbia). Every politician and most media organizations taking direct input from Israeli government officials or AIPAC. On MSNBC and CNN we heard voice after voice after voice pronouncing expert opinions on the shame of this protest/terrorism in an Israeli accent. Administration officials trying to expel anybody caught on camera who was identifiable. While the bombs dropped on Gaza.
I can't say with any confidence that there was absolutely zero conflict, but the absolute confidence that every figure of authority immediately brought to bear on the subject of all Jews being purged by Hamas terrorists from Columbia and needing the National Guard to be called out to protect them? It was beyond the pale.
All of the video I watched of actual Zionist students (or student-aged people) had them victim-posing for social media after throwing themselves into the protest and being largely ignored.
Against a liberal university.
And ICE is picking students up.
—
I mean… this isn’t the kind of liberal university I think of; places which have fought regularly for their ideas and for advancement.
Harvard chose to roll over for Trump, and I think the main reason is that the board of the Harvard Corporation largely agrees with him.
1) Despite an appearance of being "left leaning" (according to polls of faculty political sentiment) they continue to gatekeep education behind prohibitively expensive tuition that is out of reach of lower economic strata without crippling debt, and have simultaneously struggled to produce graduates whose economic differential easily makes up for that expense and lost work time.
2) They enjoy a tax free status while receiving significant tax money despite many failing to grow their student bodies in tandem with the growth of the US population, leading to people questioning whether they deserve those benefits as institutions that serve the public.
3) There is a sentiment that basic literacy and numeracy of graduates has dropped over the last decades outside of a narrow area of studies, because of a shift to a model where students are customers buying a credential instead of getting an education.
(These are all interrelated, of course.)
In reality I don’t think people’s political opinions change very much and they are just mad that their children individuated.
I think this probably the case as well. If I look back at how my own views shifted, the shift very likely would’ve happened regardless of if I’d attended university, assuming everything else was the same. It wasn’t the university that resulted in the shift as much as it was my getting out of my local bubble out into the world and experiencing it for myself.
Basically any kind of life experience that brings a young person to actually think and more deeply consider the world around them is likely to result in some level of individuation and shift away from inherited views. It’s perfectly natural and healthy.
I don't think you're wrong about the axes for "academic intelligence" or "political outlook". But those are just two of many. Geographic, racial, economic, class (in the European sense), language, culture .. these are all equally valid, and likely to vary more in a university than in a workplace (even in the military).
That seems to be missing the elephant in the room - they sent kids in their most formative intellectual years to immerse themselves in a culture where there is a very high child:adult ratio. Then the kids come back with this wild culture that would make a lot of sense to a bunch of teenagers and young adults. It isn't just that the kids individuating, it is dumping them into one of the most elitist, authoritarian and artificial subcultures society maintains - populated mostly by near-juveniles I repeat - giving them independence to form themselves and discovering that dislocates them from their parents subculture.
It should be obvious that will happen but parents tend to be pretty dumb. No real training course for parenting I suppose.
Chinese industry is not known for caring overly much about the long term effects on the bodies of their workers. They have more.
And yes, I find it scary to think of what the world is competing with in China. It is hard to compete with their brutal workforce ethics (or lack thereof) and as they seem to be getting well on top of technology too the future is theirs it seems.
Chinese working hours are mostly long to balance out low productivity. This worked for Japan until it did not; Japanese growth stalled until Japanese workers were poorer than Taiwanese or South Koreans by some measures. And China is racing fastest towards demographic collapse, particularly in its largest, most productive cities by. People 60 and older make up 37% of the population in Shanghai, and there the TFR is 0.6.
(Yes, yes, there's vapor-ware, and useless products, and certainly "fake jobs". Those existed in the '40s, too, and in any other time period or economy you care to look at.)
In my view, the problem is that white collar workers stopped thinking of themselves as Workers. Any of us who rely on a company for a paycheck (and, perniciously, in the US for health insurance) aren't Capital, even if we make high salaries. Maybe we're aspiring to join that class - we'll hit the startup lottery, or FIRE, or our IRA portfolio will go up forever - but we ain't yet. (That's fine, by the way: I'm using Marxist terms, but I'm not a Marxist. Pursuing financial independence, and the real - even if remote - possibility of attaining it is what's made the US such a dynamic economy.)
However, allowing our aspirations for wealth, or the relative comfort of white-collar jobs, to lead us to identify with the political goals of Capital - or worse, to adopt an elitist attitude towards people who work in what you call the "real economy" - is what's got the US into the mess we're currently in. That's the "genius" you identify in the present system, and the origin of the cruelty within it.
In reality, we're all Working Class (well, 99% of us are - although that proportion is way out of whack on this board, of all places!), and we need to (politically) act like it.
However, I don't think you can ignore politics! "Changing what's in your heart", does diddly if you're, say, working in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. It took a +century of dedicated labor activism and political effort to get to a point where any workers at all could dream of breaking free, and in the US we've arguably backslid in recent decades. Continued political action and worker solidarity are desperately needed.
I live my life palms down, not palms up.
I think there are more valuable things you can give people than money. I like to enrich others by writing open source code and blogging about it. It's scalable. It doesn't make me poorer. It provides others with entertainment, useful tools, and most importantly knowledge.
Giving money to the desperate offers a bad return on investment for society. Money is better given to people who are having the most impact enriching society.
Voting is about as impactful as praying.
Every altruistic person has a responsibility to look after their self-interests first. Since if you're not strong and healthy, then you won't be capable of giving to others.
Finally, you don't owe anyone anything. The moment people expect you to give, it stops being a gift.
I do agree with you about that. In the context of labor law (where this discussion started), the most important - a 40-hour work-week, overtime, minimum wage, worker-safety protections, the right to unionize, federal holidays - don't directly redistribute money, but they make life better for everyone. Public education, state-funded universities and health-care systems: same. Public roads and bridges. Research institutions. I will vote to raise my own taxes to support all of those things. More directly, I am a YIMBY (google it, if you're not familiar with the term), even if it hurts my home's value.
Like you say, you and I have very different moral frameworks. Yours is certainly ascendant in the US right now. I don't think it's going to go well, but let's check back in a few years and see if either of us have changed our minds?
this is mostly true of elite schools (who nowadays are mostly selling a brand more than an education), not so much of state schools
[edit: I should admit that it's been 20 years, things may have shifted a lot]
My interpretation: As the country has entered the post-industrial era, holding a college degree has increasingly become a table-stakes credential for entering the white collar labor force. The higher education system has struggled or failed to grow to meet increased demand for these credentials, which both drives up the cost and increases selectivity of higher-ed institutions. A lot of people get burned by this and become locked out of and, crucially, geographically separated from labor markets that now constitute the majority of US GDP. This split causes non degree holders to view degree holders as their class enemies, and the universities as the class gateway that divides them.
[1] https://thebaffler.com/latest/one-elite-two-elites-red-elite...
True othering comes from people living in different worlds and hating the other person’s world.
[1] I did not read the the article but I’ve read this argument in a Graeber article.
Why has that shifted? Can we blame the university system and their "marketing" that has pushed a degree as the One True Way of leaving the working class? If so, that's an understandable reason to be anti-university.
I’m not sure Universities are to blame for this so much as lazy ass HR departments looking for an easy filter.
That's still nearly true, if not true. 60% of jobs are white collar. 40% of the workforce has a degree. Data quality starts to decline somewhat here, but it is expected that 20% of degree holders work in trades or manual labour jobs. So, degree holders only just barely make up a majority on that basis. And maybe not even that as blue collar is usually considered to be more than just trades and manual labour, not to mention that we haven't even delved into other collars (e.g. pink collar) that further take from the degree holding population.
I don't think the OP actually said this specifically. But the economy truly had, for a while, bifurcated in outcomes for people with degrees vs. everybody else. You shouldn't need a degree to live a decent life, but now we are in a timeline where you can put DoorDash on Klarna installments.
I think the fair comparison isn't they have a degree and I don't, it's they have a better life/savings/house/car than me, which is enabled in general by getting a degree, which becomes the common contention point.
It's bizarre to see it all playing out in the open.
Maybe the elites. State schools and small colleges are not flush with cash and many have been shuttered or severely downsized recently. Though they could still spend their limited funds better.
They will shutter academic departments but continue to pay a football coach more than the University president.
Not all schools do this but it is part of the conversation, sports spending has grown out of control along with everything else.
It's an inferred promise, not an implicit promise. Lots of schools do try to make it an explicit, qualified promise (e.g. "80% of grads work in their field!"), and even more are shifting towards becoming what are effectively vocational schools, but this was never the intended purpose of a liberal arts education.
I see this a lot and it’s a concerningly reductive argument. Say what you want about a lot of colleges but when you talk about that mission you are talking about public colleges. Most have far lower endowments and most are very reasonably priced or free for instate students.
Georgia and California are great examples of this. The support for these institutions that used to come from states has gone down enormously while the cost of goods has gone up.
As a result it is not unreasonable to me for them to charge out of state and international students much much more. Georgia shouldn’t be subsidizing the college degrees of Alabamans, nor California of Arizonans.
All that to say the economics here are far more variable than people give much thought to and it’s easy to point at headline grabbing numbers that don’t reflect reality.
Schools rent the ones pressuring kids…their parents and society is.
But that is true of everything we do loans for, nowadays. The amount of consumer debt that people contort themselves into justifying is insane. If you want to use that as evidence that grade schools are failing in education, I can largely agree with you.
I can largely agree that it, similar to other things, has become too expensive. I cannot agree that it is not worth it for folks that can do it.
Totally inverted? Of course not. But there is a very real portion of individuals for whom debts exceed earnings and it is very much in the data. But if you want to ignore reality to win on semantics go right ahead.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-relationship-between-...
Again, I can agree if you are claiming it is of diminishing benefits. I'll go further and agree that there have been predatory practices to get people to take out loans they shouldn't take out. This is directly addressed by your source. Which, notably, still supports that people have higher incomes after graduation.
What I cannot at all agree with is it being "inverted." Nor can I agree that they are failing to educate people. By the stats I have seen, this just isn't the case.
Protesting attracts reprisals. Universities taught people, both explicitly and by example, to stand up for what they believed in, but have undersold students on how dangerous that is. Universities could have done a better job explaining that certain injustices are load-bearing, and that calling them out will make half the country hate you.
This is an excellent way of explaining why some injustices are ignored and others decried. Thank you
1. They are institutions of "indoctrination" by the other side. Faculty are something like 98% registered democrats and many subjects ("X studies") have an explicitly left-leaning bent.
2. They have tax advantages and other significant government subsidies.
3. They exercise significant amounts of ideological control over the narrative for their groups of people.
4. They are exclusionary of people outside the club.
Add to that the fact that universities are getting increasingly expensive and real life outcomes for college-educated people are getting worse. The perceived costs used to come with significant benefits, but the costs are getting higher and the benefits are reducing, so there is less tolerance for giving them favored status.
People with a more authoritarian bent view dissent itself as objectionable. That's central to their whole worldview. Any institution or social organization that allows debate or questioning things is a problem for them.
It's almost like they produce something of actual value.
The political landscape also changes regularly - I don't think the Republicans of a few decades ago were attacking schools so vigorously, so I'm not sure going further back than that for examples is relevant either.
> efforts of left-wing people in the 60's-90's to reduce their influence on society.
Can you elaborate on this?
> Universities today, though, have a status that religious organizations have never reached. Not only being tax free but also heavily taxpayer-funded, and with a university credential being virtually required for most jobs.
I suspect that if you go back not even that long ago, you'd find religious institutions having nearly as much importance, particularly in how faiths would prevent others from joining the workforce or society itself. In any case, I wonder what % of jobs actually do require a university education these days. I would not expect a majority of them to, but maybe I'm wrong.
In terms of soft power: Huge cultural movements (driven by left-leaning people) against church attendance and in favor of atheism really began in the 1960-1990 period. The hippie movement and all things associated with it, as well as the new age movement are big parts of this.
In general, I think you underestimate how much power religion had in 1950's America. It was constantly pushed on young people, and if you wanted to get a good job, you had to have "strong moral character" that was demonstrated by where you went on Sundays.
> In general, I think you underestimate how much power religion had in 1950's America. It was constantly pushed on young people, and if you wanted to get a good job, you had to have "strong moral character" that was demonstrated by where you went on Sundays.
I don't think I do, because that is basically what I said in my last paragraph :) My point was that religious institutions certainly had a tremendous amount of power and influence not that long ago - in disagreement with you saying that universities have reached a point that religious institutions never have.
What I meant there was about the level of state funding and state support. The bachelor's requirement is also more universal than the church requirement was.
Any decent History Prof. could have explained to the U's that openly taking one side in long-term cultural wars was not a viable long-term strategy.
(Or, maybe that's why so many universities cut their History Dept's so brutally? Though "just shoot inconvenient messengers" is also not a viable long-term strategy.)
I wonder if that’s related to universities often being places where ‘reasoning’ is taught.
And then by extension, that tells you a lot about the arguments on either side…
Such as?
The Overton Window moves. Upper marginal tax rates above 90% were not just a position but the actual law in USA during the 1960s, but now are seen here as "far left". Seatbelt requirements were initially felt to be over-intrusion by government, and are now seen by almost everyone as just common sense. And so on and so forth.
Painted? Historically, there is a bunch of groups that were opposed to homosexual rights. I wonder how do you think those organization are "painted" on the political spectrum?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_homosexuals_in_...
- https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230294158_9
- https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-00994-6
> Policy positions that were mainstream in 2000 are now painted as far-right.
Maybe that speaks something about a country that still has the KKK, and allowed its African American population to vote in 1965, not even 40 years before 2000.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation
- https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/white-supremacist-ideals-o...
If you look at the people on the actual political left in the US (Bernie, AOC, etc) are they talking about identity politics? Last time I checked they were talking about the problems that impact non-billionaire Americans: Healthcare, Social Security, Raising Minimum Wage, and other efforts to improve quality of life for Americans.
The only times I ever hear about identity politics is when I listen to conservatives describe what people on the left are talking about.
Great example! So... what happened to Bernie in the Democratic party?
The majority of the Democratic party is the group being actually shifted by the Overton window away from the actual political left. They are mostly centrists, and not leftists. Frequently they are conservatives. I wish Harris suggested half of the policies that got ascribed to her, but she was honestly to the right of Clinton.
But then why are they supported, for the most part, not by the most oppressed masses, but by the oppressive elites?
Musk, Trump and the billionaires in their administration sure look like "oppressive elites" to me. Can you name multiple oppressive elites?
Edit: I think you answer your own question here. The actual oppressive elites have convinced the masses (and you) that there's a different amorphous group of "oppressive elites" that aren't the obvious ones standing right in front of your eyes. Obligatory https://xkcd.com/1013/
Worker vs Employer aren't actually 2 groups of people, unless you really consider corporations as people.
Every company has a board of directors who are natural persons, and ownership eventually is traceable back to natural persons, and their officers are natural persons. Grouping people up doesn't make them unpersons.
Worker and employer not your preferred languahe? Call it worker and manager, worker and executive, worker and CEO. Whatever you want. But the sentiment is very real. It is about treating the workplace as an antagonistic, conflict-driven, zero-sum environment. If I win, you lose. If you win, I lose.
I don't think that is how real workplaces actually work. I like my employer and I like my boss. Without them, I'd be out if a job. Without me, they'd be out of a worker. I don't think we have opposing interests at all.
It is definitely identity politics. It is the original identity politics: Marxism. The proletariat against the bourgeoisie and all that rubbish.
But there's an entire other set of equivalently bad-faith exclusionary and authoritarian ones that presented as in opposition of them. Those weren't actually very powerful before, but may get empowered depending on how things go.
But that might be counter to their whole nature. Doesn't mean anyone's being irrational though. They're now de-facto gatekeepers on entering the professional class. I don't think it's unreasonable for the gate-kept to have opinions about the -keepers.
If you're a billion-dollar company that only hires college grads, it feels like there's gotta be value to you in making sure there's more meritocracy in the process of getting degrees.
It would also change who the customer is so that the university doesn't "owe" the student a degree which makes the evaluation that universities do a little less rigorous.
(Companies do subsidize that limited set of schools, and pretty heavily, but it probably has more to do with social connections than economic merit.)
The system might break down to the point that what you're suggesting makes sense. On the other hand, "Indebted Worker" (from any of the three types above) allows companies a lot of power over their employees, so it might not.
I think a lot of companies like to appeal to the idea of a meritocracy. I'm just saying this could make it a convincing appeal.
For example, universities burned a lot of political capital, and opened themselves up to a great deal of legal liability, with aggressively pursing affirmative action policies. When you depend on public grants, it’s probably a bad idea to publicly discriminate against the racial group that comprises the majority of taxpayers.
As to what universities should have done, the answer is “just dribble.” Universities should be places that are just as eager to research effective approaches to mass deportations as all the DEI stuff they do.
Meanwhile, 68% support the Supreme Court’s ban on Harvard’s affirmative action admissions policies: https://thehill.com/homenews/education/4411246-majority-supp...
Universities, as institutions, were actively working against the public on both of these issues, from legal clinics trying to block deportations to extensive programs of racial preferences. It’s not surprising many people don’t want the taxpayer to subsidize that.
Popularity is a poor barometer for educational value and policy.
As for things that aren't "facts," but are nonetheless extensively studied and have wide consensus: should universities, for example, teach that the Civil War was actually about states' rights and that slaves benefitted from slavery? There is no historical evidence for these claims, yet a large percentage of the public believes them due to punditry, party loyalty, and other truth-distorting forces.
> In 2023, Florida banned DEI initiatives in its public university system. The ban resulted in changes to the state’s African American history curriculum, including a reinterpretation of the effects of chattel slavery to include that enslaved people gained beneficial skills.
Should universities fall in line with this kind of thinking, or is there a moral imperative for educators and academics to push back against propaganda? I think it's clearly the latter. Otherwise, the university system just becomes a Soviet-style state organ, good for only certain kinds of STEM.
Second, you said:
> As to what universities should have done, the answer is “just dribble.” Universities should be places that are just as eager to research effective approaches to mass deportations as all the DEI stuff they do.
That sounds like you're saying that universities should be blank slates, essentially devoid of values. But they should also kowtow to the values and ideology of the public...? So which is it?
In my opinion, given that academia is (by definition) the vanguard of knowledge, it must hold to its own set of internal values and principles, not ones delivered by outside forces. Pursuit of knowledge should be the primary driving force and not, for example, commercial pressure to bolster "clean coal" at the expense of sustainable energy.
Third, I should remind you that, in all likelihood, at least 50% of the population believes that universities today are pursuing activities consistent with their values and ideology. They pay taxes, too — perhaps even more taxes than conservatives. In a democracy, the plurality should not have dictatorial control over things like university policy; it's tantamount to taxation without representation. These things must be decided by consensus-building, not royal decree.
Also, as an aside, I suspect that when affirmative action was first introduced, a majority of the public still opposed civil rights and desegregation. Was that "DEI"? Barring direct state intervention, should universities have acquiesced to the masses? I stand by what I said: popularity is a poor barometer for educational value and policy.
The reason that it happens is that these institutions have been captured by a new ideology. Facts, evidence, reason: these don't matter any more. All that matters is conformity with the ideology that has no better name than "woke" (If I knew a better name I'd use it, because the term does upset people.) But the fundamental issue isn't the woke teaching, it is WHY it happens: the median humanities lecturer in the West is either far-left or completely incapable or unwilling to challenge far-left ideology.
A coordinate result is that they also use their judgement and teach a lot of woke rubbish. There is little internal pressure within the university not to teach courses with descriptions like this:
> This course examines the representations, contexts, and politics of gender, sexuality and the media. By interrogating the discourses of gender and sexuality as they are 'mediated' in a variety of forms (including television, film, popular music, social media, advertising), we will examine the construction and disruption of categories of gender and sexual identity, and their intersection with other identity frameworks.
If you talked this way in real life, you would be ridiculed and rightly so. Interrogating the discourses? Really? Construction and disruption of categories of sexual and gender identity?
Yet there are no classes taught by people with equivalently ridiculous fringe views on the other end of the spectrum. In fact, not even centrist perspectives are tolerated. Can you imagine a course at a public American university that looked at the development of gender ideology neutrally, covering founding figures like John Money and the cruel experiments he did on young boys?
The Overton window of the university barely overlaps with the Overton window of the real world.
Also I take issue with your 50% claim. I think it is likely that the vast majority of the public is opposed to using public money to teach far-left politics (Marxism, gender ideology, etc.) to young impressionable minds.
am·biv·a·lence /amˈbiv(ə)ləns/ noun
the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone.
>A lot of Americans support these attacks on universities. Why do people harbour this much animosity towards these institutions?
There are a lot of very real things that are rotten in academia if you exclude the social politics center to this article.
So when people see they're loosing federal funding... yeah, some will think along the lines of "eh, whatever, fuck 'em, maybe they'll figure out how to clean their own house." Especially if the university is also known for both sitting on a large endowment and for prioritizing self-serving administrators over doing academics.
The ideas that it’s ok if your child becomes a liberal, or that there might be good reasons why people who undertake higher education often become less conservative, are too horrible to contemplate. So they settle for “universities are bad.”
It's the little things like tv shows or movies with characters who seem to glorify ignorance, people who state self deprecating things like "I'm bad at math" and wear it like a bizarre badge of honor, etc.
> not used race to discriminate on certain out groups ( https://asianamericanforeducation.org/en/issue/discriminatio... )
Since we have documentation of discrimination in university admissions for over a century, I don't think this particular issue produces "broader sympathy now".
In fact, I will be speechless if I ever learn the new administration policies do not lead to even higher levels of, but I suppose different, discrimination. Check back in 6 months.
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p...
https://www.thedoe.com/article/conservative-college-professo...
A lot of these examples have been pretty thoroughly debunked as either non-existent, or about something other than the professors expressing "conservative views".
This one is, I assume intentionally, anonymized and so we can't actually verify that it happened or what the circumstances around it were. But I'll call out one of the most common "views" I've heard on college campuses from professors that got in trouble for something was that "professors should be allowed to sleep with their students." So if professors are taking heat for thinking that they should be able to take advantage of barely legal kids... I don't really care.
If there are legitimate examples of professors just expressing that they have conservative beliefs, then that is suspicious because school administrators and alumni tend to lean pretty conservative themselves, and often make the final decisions on such issues after a frustrating amount of investigation.
The other side is just part of the worldview of the rampant anti-intellectualism which Trump rode to power.
This really feels like bad phrasing, when people read that they roll their eyes. Basically every major republican politician went to college, nobody is attacking universities, they're trying to help the students.
They agenda was either openly the opposite or they ignored the students. Except when they think they are too progressive and attack then verbally.
In this case, they're trying to make universities more fair and to reduce government waste in universities by removing DEI programs. There's lots of logic to that.
Why not? One thing is the campaign, another one is exercising his power. To quote a famous Argentinian President: "If I said what I would do, they wouldn't have voted for me".
I don't think your "quote" says what you think it says.
A more recent Argentinian president (Mauricio Macri) said a similar thing though: " If I had told them everything I was going to do, they would have voted to lock me up in an asylum" (Tl mine).
Original [2]: "Si les decía todo lo que iba a hacer, votaban por encerrarme en el manicomio"
[1]: https://www.infobae.com/sociedad/2023/11/12/si-decia-lo-que-...
[2] https://www.cronista.com/economia-politica/Macri-Si-les-deci...
Yet, that's what they did. Repeatedly. After he already demonstrated how much worse he would make things.
Oh yeah, he denied that he would execute the planes for how he would make things much, much, MUCH worse, that had been very openly stated by his close associates.
That's enough for it to "make sense" to you, I suppose.
Should they be doing these things?
Maybe I've read too much Caplan, but credential inflation seems to be wasting the new generation's best years.
I don't accept an argument of personal responsibility in this case, because student loans target one of the most vulnerable groups: Inexperienced and with a great need. To me, this is malicious.
I'm all for personal responsibility, in this point I'm more on the conservative side, but reality also includes that humans are not perfect machines, and targeting their weaknesses is easy and impossible to avoid as an individual. This principle does not work when it's an individual against sophisticated well-funded organization (here, there is not one but many who influenced policy), even worse when it's someone too young or too old for their brains to be at their best (not yet experienced enough in the one case, the brain no longer working at its best in the other).
Students want to feel like their time spent studying is worth it, not a weird blend of trivia, online classes you finish in a week or useless skills that you spend months practicing and lose 6 months after the class.
Millions of people could be working productive manufacturing jobs, instead they are doing effectively nothing all because of a disproven belief from 100 years ago that if you study enough you will increase your innate intelligence.
To tip my hand: I personally think universities don't have more people rallying to their defence because they have abdicated their responsibilities to provide space for open inquiry, and have instead allowed themselves to be institutionally & ideologically captured by a group of people with activist leanings and fringe beliefs not held by 90+% of Americans.
My answer to my question above is "in the past two decades, the universities could have done more to protect speech across the board and not pick favourites to protect and others to abandon, as they have clearly done. In the last two years they could have refused to tolerate lawlessness on their campuses (not just 'speech' but actual law-breaking, including assaults, going unprosecuted) instead of turning a blind eye when the criminality was from a favoured cause du jour." I think if Universities had not abandoned their leadership duties, they wouldn't have Trump bringing the hammer down on them with so much public support.
None of which is to say that mistakes weren't made in the institutions. They were. Mistakes were also made by the critics. Populism, sadly, has a habit of celebrating their worst and elevating them to heights they flat out can't handle.
The right witnessed riots over the past decade. These riots were in response to police brutality and perceived racism. The ideas behind anti-racism spawned a perceived new ideology - "wokism". This frightened the right. Intellectuals on the right mapped the origins of this new ideology to philosophies from elite institutions. Therefore, these institutions must be punished to be kept in check.
It's really that simple..
What I find interesting about this guy is that in a way he actually is "caving" to the demands of the administration. This uni president advocates for more heterodox thinking - which is in alignment with what the Trump admin wants as well... maybe that's why Wesleyan won't be punished..
But this kind of political talk is against the guidelines. Good hackers don't care about any of this. So Javascript is getting crazy, huh?
The regime could be rolling dissidents into mass graves and the only valid point of discussion for most people here would be packing algorithms.
The US's universities are one of its greatest assets, if not the greatest. The repercussions of this are highly damaging.
If governments granted rights then they would be privileges not rights. In western tradition governments exist to protect rights, such as the freedom of expression, not to grant them. If you believe these are human rights, rather than your privilege as an American, then you must protect their rights to seek justice too.
People are already being robbed of due process, which means they are robbed of the process that determines their right to "protections" and citizenship status. Almost all authoritarian regimes presume the right to rob people of the protections of their state. You perceive citizenship to be some indelible legal status, but citizenship can be revoked either tacitly or explicitly which is a prelude to the violation of someone else's rights and their human dignity.
The law can't protect or enforce itself. If the ruling regime chooses not to be bound by law then what should happen or what is supposed to happen is supplanted by what can happen. Even a cursory look of what can happen in authoritarian regimes should turn anyone's stomach.
You can try to design systems where one group of people don't have all the might, and so those who balance them are somewhat adversarial in their goals and desires. We always thought the US had such a system, but when you put law enforcement and the military under a single group, and give the other two groups no teeth, you really don't have that sort of system.
Wrong! The people are ultimately responsible for reigning-in their governments and are the ultimate source of any rules or rights that the governments end up enforcing.
If you think that the ultimate authority is with the government, then you have justified every authoritarian regime out there.
One is based on order and rule. You have a leviathan, an absolute ruler, who imposes order on society.
The other is one based on freedom and law/justice. A society based on affirmative mutual consent and a system orthogonal to power to handle disputes.
Unfortunately, power determining the outcome of disputes is the default, and a system of law or justice cannot enforce itself without the participation of those bound by it. The core founding principle of western society is solidarity via collective bargaining, what other option is there than other than to submit to someone more powerful than any individual?
Do you want to submit to a man, or submit to an idea? If you submit to an idea you must defend it. If you submit to a man, you deny your own agency and your own rights.
What is the basis of that assertion? If you go back as far as the Greeks, this only holds true if you focus on one specific city-state, and ignore that said city-state disenfranchised foreigners and legally permitted the ownership of slaves. Similar problems occur if we attribute western civilization to the Romans.
Out of the enlightenment we get John Locke who provided much of America's founding philosophy:
Locke argued that a government's legitimacy comes from the citizens' delegation to the government of their absolute right of violence (reserving the inalienable right of self-defense or "self-preservation"), along with elements of other rights (e.g. property will be liable to taxation) as necessary to achieve the goal of security through granting the state a monopoly of violence, whereby the government, as an impartial judge, may use the collective force of the populace to administer and enforce the law, rather than each man acting as his own judge, jury, and executioner—the condition in the state of nature.
My claim is that this is isomorphic to solidarity via collective bargaining when you account for the idea that the government being an impartial judge is not black and white but grey.
I think it's fair not to say that it is not the core founding principle. I think it's probably more correct to say that it's the theory of power that must be true to support human rights or ideas of freedom.
I can see where you're getting this, but I would disagree. Western civilization is inseparable from the Greeks and Romans. What you are describing sounds more like a particular development that occurred in Northern Europe which resulted in a radical re-engineering of social structures, ultimately culminating in parliamentary democracy. I don't know enough of the history well enough to determine whether this happened because of the reformation, a scientific revolution, economic changes, or whatever other reason we could come up with, but I do understand the trend that you're talking about. Today we would broadly associate it with Anglo-American liberal democracy. The issue I took with your comment was that I don't think there's a compelling case to be made that "the West" is predicated on these values, since historically speaking they are comparatively new.
There is some scholarship that tries to make this argument (e.g. I can remember reading an article many years ago which tried to argue that western civilization originates in the Near East after the adoption of massed-infantry by the Hittites), but the more of it that I read, the more convinced I became that it was simply an attempt to view history through the lens of contemporary attitudes (e.g. of Anglo-American liberal democracy being the culmination of all historical development).
> I think it's fair not to say that it is not the core founding principle. I think it's probably more correct to say that it's the theory of power that must be true to support human rights or ideas of freedom.
I don't have a strong opinion on this one way or the other, but you may be interested to know that there is a considerable tradition which rejects this conclusion in the reactionaries. Some element of the tradition rejects the premise of human rights entirely, but others are rooted in a far more critical reading of power and how it (ostensibly) must operate. Most people who have read into these issues will be familiar with the reactionaries who reject human rights as a principle, but very few are even aware of the sort who reject the prescriptions of the sort of governance you are describing while (at least nominally) sharing its aims re: justice and freedom.
The idea of the social contract has issues. For one, the fundamental of contract is consent, which is missing.
Realism tells us that we do not delegate anything to the state.
The parent comment has a definition of “rights” that admits their existence… and I think what you’ve demonstrated is that you have a different definition of “rights”. In other words, you’ve demonstrated that you haven’t really grasped the underlying meaning that the parent comment is getting at, and you’re instead responding to the words that they used to express it.
If you start with a definition for “rights” you can make arguments about whether they exist. But if you start with a different definition and get to a different conclusion, it doesn’t mean you’ve discovered some logical flaw in the argument, it just means that the two of you have failed to communicate with each other.
These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER" and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God. Thomas Paine - The Crisis
Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God - Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson (https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...)
If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come. It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death! John Henry -- Give me liberty or give me death.
You say you have no power and so let the world inflict itself on you, these were men that inflicted themselves upon the world. These men chose reason over comfort. These men chose not to be slaves through their action.
More like the two other groups (the elected group more so than the appointed judges) willingly gave up their teeth.
You may be overgeneralizing here, only the US has enshrined freedom of expression in their constitution. Pretty much in any other western government such protections do not exist and freedom of expression has been under attack for a long time
(Edit: Oh, and the Bill of Rights gives parliamentarians quite an extreme version)
it's enforced nowhere, since the European Convention on Human Rights has never attacked any of its members for putting people in jail or fining them for what they posted online. So, you can have all the laws on paper that you want, if nobody respects them, they might as well not exist.
Are you talking about the US at the moment?
- https://www.context.news/big-tech/us-prison-social-media-cra...
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rnzp4ye5zo
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/04/un-human-rig...
Basically freedom of expression is fine, as long as you don't:
- criticize the genocide that the US government is partial to (and funds) in Palestine
- criticize the US government for backing out of all climate deals
- criticize Trump for being orange and weird and Musk for being a robot?
I wonder if in recent political history we can find a parallel with some parties in Germany and Italy in the past century.
Sounds very progressive considering voting for the African American population came about in 1965, and having McCarthyism in the 50s (which was basically persecution of free speech and freedom of expression, the same thing the Trump administration is doing atm).
Freedom of expression being "enshrined" in the Constitution sounds good, but if it comes with no voting if I am black, and with being persecuted for leaning left, maybe that's not exactly "freedom of expression".
The rule of law is crucial to a free, just, and good society but you conflate the rule of law with the law saying what you would have it say. If the law is changed or the powers given under law are used in a way you do not like then that is not unlawful.
Dictators vary in how much they rely on law. Some have used law to do their evil: take Hitler. Some do their evil outside the law. This tells us that in truth the rule of law is but one part of what we need to have a good society.
Most other private universities could have easily managed the relationship, but a mix of inertia and vindictiveness from certain alumni (eg. Ackman) messed it up.
Mind you, Dartmouth is also kind of unique in that their alumni relations team actually TRY to maintain a relationship. The other high prestige colleges (excluding USC) ignore you until they need to hit fundraising KPIs.
A Tuck or Dartmouth College grad will always fight for an alum if they make it to the shortlist - most other Ivy grads don't (Wharton kinda, but that's only for Wharton). This really helps build loyalty.
[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/19/trump-is-bombarding...
Dartmouth, sure, it may have a high energy protest scene and be smart and whatever. But no-one knows about it - not because they are crafty - but because it's in freakin Hanover.
Yale and Dartmouth are similar in student body size, yet Yale has been hit by investigations [0] while Dartmouth has been spared.
[0] - https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/office-civil-rig...
The Israel-Palestine protests (which sparked this whole university culture war issue) were fairly active at Dartmouth as well, but messaging around it was better handled by their admin.
The only conservative-ish and kinda prestigious college (not university) I can think of is Claremont McKenna, but they are drowned out within the larger Claremont community.
[0] - https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2024/11/2024-election-a...
[1] - https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2023/11/2023-election-s...
Wesleyan has a $250 million operating budget, so the (from what REPORTER indicates) $1.6 million in NIH funding represents 0.6% of their budget. In contrast, the $600 million in NIH funding to Columbia represents about 10% of its $6 billion operating budget.
So both in terms of absolute numbers and relative numbers, the NIH contributions to Wesleyan are de minimis.
>"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"
What does "general Welfare" mean in this context? Are those words just meaningless filler, or should they be interpreted to indicate that the spending must be in furtherance of another specifically enumerated power? I believe the latter (Madisonian take), but this is a contentious subject:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxing_and_Spending_Clause#Gen...
of course we do - but we're sadly discovering how easy it is for the government to target and coerce these universities, with nobody stepping up to stop them
If you were to go the most direct route, you might want to let the actual "customers", the students, pay for it all, delayed until they have a job of course?
A different version of student loans, it's the university itself that lets them study for free to collect later. I have no idea how that would turn out, I'm sure there would be so many different cases, impossible for me to tell what this would mean and look like.
The biggest problem I can see right away is that it's probably going to increase inequality between institutions. Ever more sorting of the rich and the poor into different places, with huge disparity of funding. So, probably a terrible idea unless the goal is dystopia.
Which leads me back to my question: What is your alternative? I think the government is better than pretty much all others. Private donors are quite problematic to rely on, and you only get the 1% to have even more power over education.
If you take money from an entity, you become an extension of that entity.
You can drill down and infer some of the details about the funding programs.
I think this is the full list, NIH looks like a subset of overall HHS funding, and NSF is the actual single largest (around $2.5M)
https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=report&tin=U3...
Wesleyan falls into a really weird bucket: a private liberal arts university, generally considered a "little Ivy" with a modest, slightly better than its competitors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ivies) in terms of research clout. The impact of losing all scientific federal funding would be noticeable, but presumably, not fatal; I don't think they structured the operating costs of the university to be dependent on federal research funding like many other schools.
I grew up at Wesleyan- both my parents worked there, it paid for my university education, gave me access to the internet in the 1980s (via NSF funding), and gave me insight into liberal education, all of which prepared me to go off to a California university, maximize my education, and deploy that into my career. I think many people don't recognize the intense second order effects (mostly positive) of federal funding of research.
Given how many stories there are about children seriously at odds with their parents about political issues, I don't think that is a good idea. At all.
Do you want to be judged by how your parents think or behave, or think that is acceptable?
We've always heard that the college tenure system encourages freedom of expression and academic freedom without the pressure of potential job loss. Instead what we have iscollege professors and administrations who move is absolute lockstep and have acted like jack-booted Gestapos to crush and punish First Amendment expression where some people merely said "maybe we shouldn't bomb children".
Norm Finkelstein, who is a national treasure, does not have tenure. He is a world-authority on these issues. Why doesn't he have tenure? Because he embarrassed Alan Dershowtiz by exposing him as a rampant plagiarist and general fraud.
Int he 1960s we had the National Guard open fire on anti-Vietnam protestors at Kent State, killing several, to repress anti-government speech. I swear we're not far from college administrators open firing on protestors directly.
The collaboration between colleges (particularly Columbia) and the administration pales in comparison to the anti-Vietnam era. Colleges are standing by letting agitators attack protestors (ie UCLA) and then later using that violence as an excuse to crush the protest. They're cooperating with law enforcement to crush protests.
But they're going beyond that. These protestors who have been illegally deported have largely been named and targeted by college administrations as well as organizations like the Canary Mission.
Think about that: colleges are knowingly cooperating with people who are black-bagging people protesting against genocide, fully knowing they will end up in places like prisons in El Salvadore.
I’m 60, and I have a fair bit of learning to do yet. And as the father of a student in roughly the 18-22 I would be proud to see her standing up for views that she feels strongly about whether her knowledge is fully complete or not.
It would be even more useful if you were able to show that the effect of such student protests moving progress forward exceeded the effect of the student protests moving progress backward, like the Cultural or Iranian Revolutions. I think you'd not be able to show it.
Universities, like many institutions, have also become more like large incumbent businesses than previously - e.g. perpetuating their own existence over having strong core values.
Things like this are why Hillsdale College rejects all federal funds. So they can do what they want without threat of the government revoking funding[4].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-vaccines-delta...
[2] https://www.texastribune.org/2024/06/12/texas-title-ix-lgbtq...
[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/13/477896804...
[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/07/the-co...
Biden/Obama: We want you to accept and protect everyone
Trump: I want you to deliberately reject certain races and nationalities, and close all the departments studying stuff I don’t like.
Which race are colleges not allowed to accept? Source for this?
See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/17/defense-depa... for one example where it's particularly blatant.
I call bullshit on them wanting to ban women and black people from colleges, that is not what they mean when they say end "DEI", you are crazy.
Can you post a single link where they even hinted at wanting to ban black people and women from colleges? That is such an egregious accusation that you need more than just that they took down a page about a black guy.
Oh I’m sure it’s not as egregious as them wanting to ‘literally’ ban them. There’s no need for something quite that drastic. But think of how much nicer the place would be (not to mention more useful for networking) if none of these poor people were ever accepted in the first place.
Much like 90s rockers, they now rage exclusively on behalf of the machine.
I think this language policing may be because people don't want to allow opposition to these things, rather than out of honor for the dead. The way to honor the dead is to prevent the circumstances of their deaths from happening again.
Which is exactly why we must stand up against the disappearances, the camps, the collaborators, the secret police.
We’re already at the point where one side is openly arguing that due process isn’t guaranteed by the Constitution—because it's inconvenient. So how many rights do we have to give up before it’s acceptable to call it out? How many norms have to be broken? How many lines crossed?
It's not like (other than Elon) they're going to show up in Hugo Boss suits one day and announce 'we have crossed the line to where you can criticize us now'.
The time to stand up was actually way before the extreme actions of the left inspired this extreme reactionary overcorrection from the right. You're supposed to stand up while you're still in power, not after you've lost it, it's a bit late. I still remember people insisting "but deplatforming works!" as they justified mass censorship of conservatives. Honestly if you have not stood up for the people you politically disagreed with as the noose tightened over the last 10 years you are part of the cause of this terrible over-correction.
I can only hope that people start noticing this pattern and the inevitable next "correction" is not so extreme and we get some damping on the seemingly accelerating pendulum back and fourth.
So called "conservatives" were soooo close to being able to have this realization before they regained the power of the government, vested it all in a unitary execuking, and went back to seeing that extraconstitutional coercion as a feature (like many "progressives" had for ~10 years or so).
The reason I judge The Twitter Files as a rightist talking point is that it's trying to pigeonhole the motivation for censorship solely onto the government. If an argument is simply about the coercive power wielded by corporations and governments, you don't need a smoking gun of cooperation/direction to tie the two - seeing them as similar organizations with similar top-down motivations suffices. That evidence is only important if you're aiming for reform using the first amendment (an understandable desire, but the wrong tool for the job), or trying to absolve the corpos as mere victims of the de jure government (delusional).
The fact that current 'conservatives' kicked out pretty much all the historical conservatives I know as being not actual conservative/rinos tell us that this isn't about 'conservative' speech but something much, much different that is being labeled as 'conservative' speech when it is not.
I was a (hippie) libertarian at one point. Today the party of 'merit' has as their figure head... a nepo baby. They can't even be bothered to pretend to be 'conservative' or 'libertarian' anymore.
I don't shop where Confederate flags are sold. Requiring stores I shop at not to celebrate/promote racist anti-american losers by selling Confederate flags isn't me deplatforming anyone (BTW Amazon? Lots of Confederate flags FYI) it's me having standards for how I use my time/attention/money.
But then, that's what usually happen to the people that the government decides to kidnap. So the OP's usage is perfectly correct, and the expectation that those people are dead should exist. Including the people that we know that were sent to the concentration camp, because despite nobody claiming it's an extermination camp the leading one does strongly tend to morph into the later.
that's because universities are now businesses first, research institutions second, and academic institutions third
What we are seeing now is entirely the fault of university administrators who failed to deal with the issue when it started.
"the protesters created a “Jew Exclusion Zone” where in order to pass “a person had to make a statement pledging their allegiance to the activists’ view.” Those who complied with the protesters’ view were issued wristbands to allow them to pass through, the complaint says, which effectively barred Jewish students who supported Israel and denied them access to the heart of campus."
> You have prominent Jewish figures around the country who get comfortable with Trump, it seems to me, because they can say he’s fighting antisemitism: “He’s good for the Jews.” It’s pathetic. It’s a travesty of Jewish values, in my view.
But I'm not sure how that is connected to what you wrote.
They literally couldn't say "black man fighting against racism" about a civil rights icon without losing millions in funding. I have no idea how someone can argue that this kind of censorship targeting universities is acceptable
Just my 2 euro cents.
And what do you propose instead? I'm not seeing the EU doing any better than the US with their lowest socioeconomic class groups.
Talking points are nifty. But, at some point, you have to propose an actual solution that does something.
Bigotry exists. What are you going to do about it? It seems that the most popular answers right now vary from "Not a goddamn thing" to "Fuck those bastards."
(In reality, I'm pessimistic that there is much that can be actively done. The bigots who threw slurs at my immigrant ancestors didn't so much get better as much as just change epithets and targets. Sadly, so it goes.)
Key word „socioeconomic“ groups. It should not be racist policies based on skin color. Help poor people, help people growing up in shitty neighbourhods. True diversity is people with different life experiences. Sometimes it correlates with skin color, sometimes it doesn't. Just like poor economic situation and shitty upbringing.
> Bigotry exists. What are you going to do about it? It seems that the most popular answers right now vary from "Not a goddamn thing" to "Fuck those bastards."
Of course. Including among those so-called „anti racists“.
Slightly offtoic, but it's funny that modern „antifa“ is one of the most authoritarian-minded people I've met. While a good chunk of far-right people are full-on anarchistic-minded people. With about equal amount of bigotry on either side. People loooove abusing labels to further their agenda.
> (In reality, I'm pessimistic that there is much that can be actively done. The bigots who threw slurs at my immigrant ancestors didn't so much get better as much as just change epithets and targets. Sadly, so it goes.)
And then there're bigot immigrants who talk shit about locals. My country was a major source of migration two decades ago and it's horrible what our people would say about locals. Now tables switched and we got more incoming migration. And now we're on the other side of the same transaction guests not respecting our culture. Bigots are everywhere. But current policies tend to focus on one side of bigots which just breeds more resent on the other side.
That is, in fact, what a lot of those DEI programs did. The problem is that "lower socioeconomic status" is a high correlate proxy for "minority" in the US. There are simply a lot more minorities in the US in the lower socioeconomic brackets.
The problem, at the end of the day, is that the a lot of the market became zero sum. When there were lots of jobs and lots of college slots, nobody cared so much about affirmative action-type programs.
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
Sounds like they are being forced to take the Morgan Freeman Approach to Ending Racism: stop talking about race. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2RwJlQdzpE
They could. They just preferred to play the victim.
Being annoyed, inconvenienced, or even negatively impacted by the speech acts of others is by design. To throw that out is to make a calculation that without freedom of speech, your perspective will be the natural default without activism to upset it. A dangerous assumption.
(Picking two random groups:) If you are Pakistani and are in a room of all Indian people, and the others say how horrible Pakistanis are and how research shows that Pakistanis are less intelligent or prone to violence, that is a very intimidating atmosphere and it would be hard to endure, much less speak up.
If that one Pakistani says the same about Indians, it's obnoxious and annoying, but it's no threat to anyone. The many Indians are not vulnerable. That's the difference.
Furthermore, the dominant groups in a culture tend to create systems and knowledge that support them to the exclusion of others - sometimes explicitly and intentionally. That's systemic discrimination - the system naturally generates it if you follow the usual path. It takes some effort to create space for other points of view.
Whether the typical DEI policies are optimal is another question. I haven't heard anyone come up with a great solution. Some pretend it's not a problem and there is no prejudice, which is absurd and not a solution; it's just sticking one's head in the sand - because they can, because they are not vulnerable.
Much like a right-winger or a Christian at one of these universities.
The policies didn't help the groups they were supposedly about helping, they helped the groups that were already dominant (race and religion matter a lot less in a group that's all upper class), whether by design or because they evolved to.
Do you have any evidence?
> Much like a right-winger or a Christian at one of these universities.
So is the first quote not based on evidence, but based on your ideology? There's no reason any vulnerable minority shouldn't be protected, though 'right-wingers' and Christians (usually meaning conservative Christians) are hardly vulnerable in the US, even if they are a minority on many campuses. They rule the country and always have, have access to every job and privilege.
The absolute narcissism on display here is crazy.
It destroys social trust, which is what the real radicals aim at. If you want to fight the far right, work to build it.
I think the DEI rule should be simply to ban intolerance, with some education about how norms can be intolerant of minorities, and the experience of being a vulnerable minority in a room of majority.
Weird how those specific Christians who think women and LGBT are people don't feel discriminated against.
It isn't just the dominate group, it is everyone.
So simplifying, if you have only 2 groups, one being 30% and the other 70% of the population, it would at first appear the 70% group has an advantage for finding jobs, but in reality they do not, as while they are favored at 70% of jobs, they are also competing against an equivalently larger group of people.
Anyway the implementation of racial preferences in college applications, and DEI has led to a system that systematical favors certain groups, and gaslighting that somehow this isn't the case.
I don't support Trump but liberals denying this reality, along with various other incredibly stupid woke positions, has led to the current situation, where we have a complete and utter imbecile running the country, because hey, at least he doesn't deny reality in regards DIE/social issues.
Never a smart thing to write; only a reflection on the author's blindness and arrogance - a toxic combination that is, indeed, what you describe.
> has led to the current situation
> he doesn't deny reality in regards DIE/social issues.
You have that right. But doing this is not always wise. Labeling people as immoral and ostracizing them, especially on 50/50 issues, is one of the reason why the American political system is so radicalized at the moment.
In his Second Inaugural, Lincoln threads the needle in a way that is frankly unachievable for even most skilled politicians. "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other" seems like an acknowledgement of moral nuance, but he follows it up with, "It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces but let us judge not that we be not judged."
Speaking to a nation in which a part of it is in open revolt over the right to keep other humans as slaves is certainly an extreme case. But it isn't categorically different from any other political struggle. People are going to accuse one another of being immoral. It's the human condition. A legal system that protects this behavior is the bedrock of democracy. It doesn't matter how annoying you find the people doing the judging.
I guess some people were never in favor of freedom of speech, they just wanted a world where they faced minimal interpersonal conflict, and the current order for a while was serving that purpose.
Sure, agreed. But groups and institutions taking even a dime of tax money should not get to place a thumb on the scales of those arguments. US universities, in particular, chose a side and then silenced all opposing viewpoints.
It was inevitable that the silenced would eventually mobilise, and they did. And now the group has to abandon their arguments about allowing "punching up" and instead pontificate on "free speech".
Myself (and many others) argued over the last decade and more that the pendulum always swings back, so lets be a little less extreme in the left/right argument. I, on this site, got labeled a non-thinking right-winger apologist for pointing out that the mainstream views on transgender for minors does not match the views that the powers-that-be were pushing.
You can't push for normalising the silencing of views for well over a decade without you yourself eventually falling victim to the same normalisation.
Yes actually! Almost every presigious/non public college has speech codes. And those speech codes have consequences. Up to, and including, expulsion if you keep breaking them.
Check out how well each college is doing here: https://www.thefire.org/colleges
Your comment surprises me, because at this point, there really isn't any contention over the fact that universities have been doing exactly this.
So while I am assuming that you don't actually know, I'll give you a short list of links (I'm not doing research that takes me more than 5m).
> What did US universities do to "silence all opposing viewpoints" on any issues?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/musbahshaheen/2024/06/05/stop-r...
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/diversity-statemen...
https://www.thefire.org/news/anti-free-speech-trends-campus-...
https://www.thefire.org/facultyreport
https://www.hrdive.com/news/stop-requiring-diversity-stateme...
(UK, but still the same idea) https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/kathleen-stock...
https://www.thefire.org/news/speaker-disinvited-uncomfortabl...
https://www.businessinsider.com/list-of-disinvited-speakers-...
And, finally, some charts: https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/ne...
Analysis of the data FIRE has collected reveals a clear political trend in the likelihood that a speaker will be targeted with a disinvitation effort. Speakers are far more likely to face disinvitation efforts from opponents to their political left than from those to their right. Since 2000, those behind the disinvitation efforts targeted speakers with views more conservative than their own nearly three times more frequently (97 attempts) than they targeted speakers with views more liberal than their own (36 attempts).
It pains me to say it, but it aligns with my experience.
> Did they kick students out of school because of their viewports? Claw back their financial aid? Get them deported? Physically harm them?
None of that is required to silence opposing views.
> I sure don't remember things like that happening in widespread manner to conservative students, let alone happening in a way that was organized top-down by the universities' leadership.
"Allowing only one viewpoint" doesn't require that the university administration has a top-down directive to expel students, only that they allow one viewpoint and silence the other.
Once again, that this happened is not in dispute, so I am left wondering where you were going with this response.
The article makes the point that it's cowardly to cave to administration pressure to limit the activities of anti-Israel/Pro-Palestine protesters.
Someone on the other side of the issue could make the argument "it is cowardly to kowtow to a small but vocal minority who justifies interfering with other students' ability to learn, as 'free speech'".
It is dishonest to describe non-speech activity such as intimidation and forceful prevention of access, as "speech", even if you like the motivation or outcome. "Speech" is talking with words. Physically using your body to prevent someone else from acting in a desired way, is something other than "speech".
Now you are proposing this work doing/training aspect be cut off. What is your replacement? You have to come up with one that gets trainees hands on experience, as well as provides economies of scale benefits for expensive experimental apparatus or sample or data/compute resources, fosters collaboration and idea generation, and shares this work with other grant funded researchers in the field so that they might further their own efforts.
Or, you could just not blow the whole system apart with a broadside strike, and enjoy the striking benefits in fields like medicine we have enjoyed over the decades.
Take for instance University of Pennsylvania. In 2023, student anonymously projected "Let Gaza Live" onto a building. The next day then-college president Liz Magill publicly called in the FBI to investigate this as an "antisemitic hate crime". She was later forced to resign for "not doing enough" to combat alleged antisemitism.
Give me a break.
Why don't they just make the special interests pay their own multi-trillion dollar war bills instead of sabotaging US universities with surprise taxes?
If you increase expenses and cut revenue, what should you expect for your companies?
Comparing your ideal flat income tax with the current system is apples to oranges.
>Either compare ideal tax structures with “no loopholes” (none of these exist in the real world) or compare actually-existing tax structures.
Hence I cannot compare your suggestion with the current system as it is apple to oranges because loopholes would exist.
My thesis is a flat tax would help to minimize the very loopholes you damn. The larger the tax code and the more it panders to particular interest, generally the more opportunity for 'loopholes.'
A tax code with fewer loopholes would be more flat (or progressive).
I believe in a strong middle class and upward mobility for all.
I don't think we want businesses that are dependent on war, hate, fear, and division for continued profitability.
I don't know whether a flat or a regressive or a progressive tax system is more fair or more total society optimal.
I suspect it is true that, Higher income individuals receive more total subsidies than lower-income individuals.
You don't want a job at a firm that an already-wealthy founder could only pull off due to short-term tax breaks and wouldn't have founded if taxes go any higher.
You want a job at a firm run by people who are going to keep solving for their mission regardless of high taxes due to immediately necessary war expenses, for example.
In the interests of long-term economic health and national security of the United States, I don't think they should be cutting science and medical research funding.
Science funding has positive returns. Science funding has greater returns than illegal wars (that still aren't paid for).
Find 1980 on these charts of tax receipts, GDP, and income inequality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43140500 :
> "Federal Receipts as Percent of Gross Domestic Product" https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
> "Federal Debt: Total Public Debt as Percent of Gross Domestic Product" https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43220833 re: income inequality:
> GINI Index for the United States: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA
Find 1980 on a GINI index chart.
I think there’s too many confounding economic factors to look at GINI alone and conclude the 1980 turning point was caused by nerfing the top income tax bracket. But a compelling argument could probably be made with more supporting data, which of course this margin is too narrow to contain and etc.
Harvard generally uses the interest on the fund principal to pay for things and it was a massive internal controversy when folks proposed drawing down the (absolutely enormous) principal as payment for capital expenditures (among other controversies).
And yes you are right acceptability, because polls show that the government bailing out students making poor career choices and schools paying for bloated staff is definitely not acceptable to the majority of Americans.
He's saying that the universities are out of touch with the general population, which is never a good thing.
I suspect all of the example(s) you might have are going to be overblown news storie(s) But if there are decades of this, I'd love to see the evidence.
Remember when people lost their shit when it came out that the Biden administration was leaning on social media platforms to stop the spread of certain ideas? Yet now we see the current administration openly and flagrantly punishing and extorting private universities and law firms, even disappearing people for attending rallies, to thunderous silence from the right. It's as if all the outrage about free speech was a farce.
yes, the left doing that was pretty bad and I have gotten into many arguments over my left leaning friends over it. But it was largely private companies capitulating to pressure. To compare that to people being abducted and incarcerated by the government without trial or even an actual law being broken is worse.
You do understand why thats worse right?
The left side got people fired. This is objectively not as bad as getting people disappeared. You can get a new fucking job. You can’t get freedom from detention and you cannot easily return to the country (if at all)
Additionally there is the motivational factor behind both sides:
The lefts argument in policing language was to reduce harm to marginalized groups. You may not agree with it, but that is the rational.
The rights argument is to erase those marginalized groups.
These are extremely different in motivation. Asking you to respect a persons gender identity in professional contexts is far different than forcing someone to not be able to express it on federal documentation.
One side of this was “we want to create inclusive spaces that make people comfortable and if you don’t want to participate in that there is the door”. The other side is “we did not want to participate in that so go fuck yourself and we will do whatever we can to deny your right to express your identity”
“Any attempt to control speech” is an absolutist statement that is absurd in its fallacy. So I can say I can murder you? I can say you’re planning a terrorist attack? I can say you want to kill the president? Of course not. Speech is limited contextually and by law
Also, I'll add that the "there is the door" comment is entirely wrong. There are countless stories of open source maintainers being harassed to make language changes to their code base, master/slave, whitelist/blacklist. The harassers never offered to do the work themselves just demanded it be done for them or they'll keep harassing. These were people matching into someone else's "safe space" to police their private language.
The government disappearing people and dismantling the country is very bad, and nothing good can be said about it. What I'm talking about are the individuals on both sides not formally in power, and their equal efforts to stifle what they see as "bad speech". It's that mentality, on both sides, that led us to where we are.
The illiberal left must be held accountable for their role in the Democratic defeats of 2024, expelled and publicly repudiated, and then the Democratic Party can work on rebuilding trust with voters.
By this logic if one member of my family makes you feel unwelcome then its my own fault that you got the cops to beat me up?
There are evil people on both sides, always have been, always will be. It always looks like the other side is more evil than your side because you have a human bias to assume people who agree with your are not evil with a few small exceptions. Because of this bias it is always wrong to try to paint the other side worse than yours.
The important take away: power shifts, it always has and always will. Next time your side is in power how will you recognize where they are doing evil and oppose them. The first is at least something you can partially train yourself to do with great effort - I have no clue what you can usefully do about it though.
My whole point is both sides deserve the rebutes and criticism they have earned, and at this moment one side is objectively far, far worse. Which doesn't excuse faults on the left. But it certainly is not the left who has embraced facism and kleptocracy, nor has anyone except the Republican party and their voters caused this.
> There are a lot of people on the "right" who are horrified about how Trump is doing anything
Citation needed
versus
I was abducted by ICE agents and shipped to a supermax prison in El Salvador without due process.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man-trump-accidentally-...
[1] why is this relevant? Because anyone who shoots a puppy that they considered untrainable and then brags about it in their own book is a stone-cold sociopath.
I mean if you've worked much in open source, that is pretty much how nearly every feature request and bug report goes unfortunately.
People are being shipped to a Salvadorean mega-prison for having autism awareness tattoos. Law-abiding students who write peaceful op-eds are being disappeared to a facility in Louisiana. Yes it sucks to lose your job, but it sucks a lot more to be indefinitely detained without even seeing a judge.
> "Your side" isn't any better than the other's.
Your argument reminds me of high schoolers that argue the US was just as bad as the Nazis for operating Japanese internment camps. Yes, both were wrong, but one was much, much worse.
You do not have to defend the free speech rights of people who are themselves attacking free speech (and free life). In fact, it is foolish to do so.
Someone can firmly believe that the existence of the state of Israel is a mistake that should be corrected while still also believing that the Jewish people have every right to their own existence and freedom of religion.
In theory, someone might distinguish between opposing the state of Israel and supporting Jewish rights. But in practice, that distinction tends to collapse. History shows that denying Jews a national homeland often leads to denying their safety and identity as well. Before 1948, Jews were stateless and vulnerable, culminating in the Holocaust. After Israel's founding, over 800,000 Jews were expelled or fled from Arab countries where they had lived for centuries. Efforts like the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism blurred the line between criticism of Israeli policy and rejection of Jewish nationhood. During the Second Intifada, what began as political resistance often turned into violence targeting civilians and Jewish institutions. More recently, anti-Zionist protests have featured explicitly anti-Jewish chants like "Khaybar, Khaybar ya Yahud," invoking historical violence. The Western assumption that "Free Palestine" implies peaceful self-determination doesn't reflect the goals of many movements where "freedom" often means dismantling Israel entirely and expelling Jews or allowing them to live only in a state of dhimmitude. In reality, it's nearly impossible to separate these ideas cleanly.
Who taught you to argue like this? They didn't do you any favors.
The Nazis did not rise because of an excess of free speech. During the Weimar Republic, there were hate speech laws and Nazi publications were censored or banned multiple times. Hitler himself was banned from public speaking in several German states in the 1920s. Despite that, the Nazi movement grew, driven not by open dialogue but by a mix of economic despair, nationalism, violent intimidation, and institutional weakness.
Far from championing free speech, the Nazis used paramilitary violence to silence opponents even before seizing power. Once in control, they moved quickly to eliminate all free expression, banning parties, censoring the press, imprisoning dissenters.
So if anything, the historical lesson is that censorship and suppression didn’t stop fascism, and that once authoritarians gain power, their first move is often to destroy free speech entirely.
Free speech is a super power. Strong free speech rights require defending the rights of terrible people to say terrible things. That doesn’t mean what they’re saying is good. It just means that it's easy to defend the rights of meaningless or popular speech, but your own right to truly speak your mind is only as strong as the rights of those you disagree with most. Someday, something you believe passionately might be seen as reprehensible by the majority.
edit: Holy mackarel, I am this close to accepting the argument that the people on 'the left' need to be treated that exact way you described just so that they can understand why 'the right' feel aggrevied. I simply cannot accept Soviet Union style 'do not employ this man' brand. I feel dirty just thinking about it as an option.
Yup, I’ve lost patience with the far left as well. This is in practice happening with e.g. nutters who openly supported Hamas, though as these things always go, the only people actually willing to do this to people go too far both in their metric and treatment. (The left, to its credit, was never deporting people for their views.)
> Have you learned nothing from the past 10 years?
Yes. I spent too much time treating everyone’s views as valid. The paradox of tolerance is real, and if someone insists on being an idiot I’m basically at the point of taking them at their word.
> cannot accept Soviet Union style 'do not employ this man' brand
It’s not. It’s do not put this person in a position of responsibility or visibility. They can make a livelihood. It just shouldn’t be one from which they do harm.
Everybody protests over losing jobs. Currently, the MAGA crowd is busily putting itself out of work, so this really only comes down to taking action in the cities.
Apologies for the "two sidesism".
For example, imagine some CEO says something politically objectionable, as is their right granted by allowing free speech. Do I have the right to protest or boycott their company as part of my free speech rights or would that be illegal because I'm rendering a consequence for the CEO's speech?
I just have trouble conceptualizing what you think a world with consequence free speech would actually look like.
- Every entity except the US govt is allowed to enforce consequences for speech
- there should never ever be any consequences for any speech ever
i don't know how you enforce the above though.
SCOTUS affirmed his conviction, saying that "the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils".
Here's the flyer itself, in case you want to read those very dangerous words for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States#/medi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States#/medi...
So, all in all, a good reminder that not only the slippery slope very real, but sometimes it's there from the get go.
I object to people casually paraphrasing, you have a right to free speech but not consequences of that speech. "Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences" Aside from sounding vaguely like a threat, it's a paradoxical attack on freedom of speech. Here's my point again:
Freedom of speech means a lot of things. One of them is the American-centric perspective of "1st Amendment" + Supreme Court precedent, which is that the government should not be involved in unduly prohibiting speech, and we define a bunch of speech as protected. For example, we exclude imminent threat, which in the U.S. is not protected - I can't go up in a speech and rile people up to go attack another race tomorrow. But I can rail against a race (which in most of Europe would be prohibited speech as it's Incitement)).
Now that I've established it means a few things, let's talk about 'consequences.'. The 1st Amendment protects you from government prosecution for protected speech. It doesn't protect you from getting fired, people following you around with placards because of your speech, Instagram banning you, your ISP blocking you, your bank canceling your accounts, etc.
Yet these are the (non-1st-Amendment-centric) attacks on Freedom of Speech. You can argue they're good, they're not good, whatever.
Summary of my argument: freedom of speech CAN mean freedom from SOME consequences.
Consequences are the WHOLE point. In the U.S. we had McCarthyism, where if you were vaguely left-wing you would lose your job, you would lose your life. In the USSR if you didn't follow party lines you'd lose your job, or be reassigned a shitty job. These are Consequences.
In the Reign of the last decade of a new racialized political activism, some people lost jobs for reasons that were dubious, because they had unpopular views. The Left did it.
Today, the Right is doing it, and they're taking in an extra step.
When does it stop? Ahh, good question! It stops when we begin respecting Freedom of Speech as a principle and not a recycled way to attack our enemies.
Again, apologies for both-sides-ism, as someone who believes in civil liberties, I am a both-sides-ist.
The way some people use the internet truly puzzle me. A username is on each comment. I made a comment, you replied, and I replied back. I wasn't arguing with myself. You took the time to reiterate your philosophy in more depth without even bothering to first take the literal second to check the usernames to clear up your confusion or pausing for a moment to actually engage with anything actually said in my last comment? I wasn't asking you for more details on your philosophy, I was asking you direct and specific questions on how this philosophy meshes with the complexities of the real world. I frankly don't know how to respond beyond just referring you back to the questions in my previous comment.
I re-iterated my point that freedom of speech is loosely defined and we have a problem with weaponizing protection of one side at the expense of the other. The Consequences argument. I maintain that consequences of speech are the issue. Let me phrase it like this: the general principle of respecting differing views, however repugnant, has fallen by the wayside. The ACLU of the 20th century has excellent arguments for why we should consider respecting repugnant views. You're throwing in a curve ball of defining speech as also potentially blocking or causing 'consequences', but that's missing the bigger picture.
You don't agree, but does that better address the problem you raised?
No, because you still aren't addressing the underlying point. Protesting is protected speech. Protesting in response to speech is therefore also protected speech despite it being a consequence. You are refusing to engage with this simple example that shows the inherent contradiction of your philosophy.
Can you be specific here? What part isn't protesting? Should it be illegal to stand outside a business with a protest sign? What about organizing a boycott? Or even a decentralized and completely grassroots boycott? Should it be illegal to make the personal decision to not buy a company's product due to something said by one of their employees? Or would it be the company listening to protesters and firing the employee that should be illegal? What if the boycotts gain traction and it becomes the prudent financial decision to fire the employee? Does the company have an obligation to keep that employee forever even if it eventually leads to them going out of business?
>are resisting taking a step back and thinking about freedom of speech as an abstract principle or tenet.
Yes, that is what I have been trying to communicate to you. This principle you have of consequence free speech can only exist as a principle. Once it interacts with the complexities of the real world it becomes impossible to actually define, legislate, and enforce fairly. Your refusal to actually engage with my specific questions and examples suggests that you know this at least subconsciously. You don't want to say that protesting should be illegal, so instead you relabel it as "to blackball someone from a job". That relabeling makes it acceptable to be against it.
Your paragraph 1, though, has the thoughtful query of exploring what is and isn't freedom of speech, and throwing out some scenarios to mull over. I agree that This principle you have of consequence free speech can only exist as a principle. Once it interacts with the complexities of the real world it becomes impossible to actually define, legislate, and enforce fairly.. How about, the spirit of the principle of freedom of speech could be that we don't strike fear in people who express opposing views.
Should it be illegal to make a personal decision not to buy a company's product? Reductio ad absurdum fail. No, because aside from being stupidly unenforceable, it has nothing to do with shutting down opposing views. Company listening to protesters and firing a company? Should it be illegal? It should be illegal on the basis of workers' rights, but I don't consider it freedom of speech to fire anyone or to keep them. It's another category of problem. Basically: it sounds like you're trying to defend shutting down speech by looking for ways to say that it's freedom of speech to do so.
Since you are fishing for 'first principles' (as a tech-centric board I can see how sexy it is to try to re-invent the concepts and throw them out as unworkable, as if law were mathematical), how about we think about the abstract 'spirit of the law' so-to-speak, and break out of the idea that since the idea of freedom of speech is imperfect, it should be thrown out. Because if you consider SUPPRESSING speech to be an 'expression' of speech, then it sounds like you're attacking the entire foundation of it, and we just don't align on values. We're in the realm of the social, the legal, cultural, not in the realm of absolute principles or foundational mathematical notions. I am not suggesting that, again, it should be ILLEGAL or LEGAL to do very specific things (we can spend forever mulling through scenarios), I'm suggesting - a few messages up in the thread - that if we don't CARE about freedom of expression, things like blackballing people from a job or deporting someone on a green card are perfectly OK. And I 'both sides-istically' purposely showed examples of the Right doing it, and the Left doing it, in order to provoke people to go back to thinking about the abstract principle of it.
The LEGAL matter is a different category, and super interesting to talk about. It's philosophy, it's Supreme Court precedent in the U.S., there are some fascinating speeches by ACLU figures like Ira Glasser, their arguments in the old 1st Amendment cases of the 20th century.
You don't see any discrepancy between those two scenarios?
And you don't see anything wrong with the former scenario?
Practical example: the employer is an LGBTQ+ friendly establishment, the employee is on social media saying that LGBTQ+ people are all deviants and will all burn in hell for their sins. I think the employer should have the freedom to fire the person, right?
Forcing the employer to keep the employee is the equivalent of compelled speech.
Edit: fixed - no joke - pronouns
I want to know where their values are and if they contradict.
I'm re-presenting the original scenario being discussed and the scenario they introduced.
Comparing the two while also redirecting back to the original moral dilemma.
Maybe we can have a strawman party after.
The irony of saying "maybe you'll figure out how to have a real debate." after a string of personal attacks is *chef's kiss*.
>yet you complain when you get a meta level comment about your behavior.
I'm not complaining. And you're not giving me a "meta level comment about my behavior". You're just attempting to insult me.
And it turns out that wasn't sustainable.
I know it's glib and coarse and lacking in nuance but when I hear American conservatives complain about the ways of the liberal countrymen I can't help but think, "That's how you guys sounded for a long time. Now they're doing it, lo and behold: everyone loses."
Put otherwise, it’s very possible that your livelihood is trivial.
"If you get deported for saying something stupid, you may want to consider the notion that you do not deserve to live in the US. They’re called consequences, and if you don’t like them, remaining silent is free."
Both arguments are ridiculous because they present no evidence as to whether someone deserves a job or a visa stay.
Your argument can be used to support consequences for every single one of these scenarios because it's just "maybe when a bad thing happens it was deserved". Sure, yeah, sometimes people deserve things and sometimes they don't, but pointing this out is a useless addition to a conversation.
If somebody in their off hours says something assinine, and telling (some might call that "snitching to") their employer in a public forum like Twitter (in a clear attempt to get a social media frenzy going to ultimately get them fired) is a good thing, then wouldn't it logically follow that an employer should not only be permitted but actively encouraged to monitor employees 100% of the time so they can fire them if they ever step out of the corporate line? Amazon does this to many low-level employees just on-the-job and most people think that's creepy and unfair, I can't imagine extending that to off-hours as well. At a minimum wouldn't it follow that it would be great for employers to set up a snitch line so anybody could (even anonymously) call to make reports on people? Is that a world you'd want to live in?
On the next line, let's say the person is fired from their job for a gross tweet. Should they be able to get a new job after that? If so, how does the previous history get erased so the prospective new employers don't see it and avoid them (this very type of thing is by the way, a huge problem for formerly incarcerated people especially felons). Add in that there was no trial, no standard of evidence, no due process, just a swinging axe from an executioner. Should this person (and often their families) just be relegated to extreme poverty the rest of their lives? Blacklisted from employment like the communists in Hollywood were?
In a free country, citizens should be allowed to read what other citizens write in public.
Those both seem pretty obvious, but put the two of them together and it means people can lose their jobs or not be hired for stuff they tweet. How do you resolve that?
IMO the real issue isn’t that employers can make decisions based on this stuff. It’s that employers are far too big. If we had 20 Amazons, getting fired from one of them wouldn’t be such a big deal.
Private parties (including companies) largely have freedom of association. There are (theoretically) protections in "commerce" against a company discriminating against a person or group based on "innate" factors (such as skin color or gender).
But largely, people and companies have a wide degree of latitude about what they are and are not allowed to do.
The government, on the other hand, (theoretically) is largely not allowed to stop people from saying things or associating with each other, and when these prohibitions are in effect they're subject to both documentation and review. This is "theory" because the government has done lots of shady things.
The government, similarly (and theoretically), is bound by a variety of procedural constraints, such as due process, right to see an attorney, right of the attorney to request your presence, right to a trial, etc.
There's a categorical distinction between:
I, a private party, am offended that I face consequences of offending someone else when I would prefer not to face any consequences.
and
I, a private party, am abducted by the organization in this country with a monopoly on violence and which interprets all laws, and I vanish with no recourse from anyone.
> Those both seem pretty obvious, but put the two of them together and it means people can lose their jobs or not be hired for stuff they tweet. How do you resolve that?
If the employer happened to see it, then yes I think that's well within rights. But I think having some random stranger see something and actively campaign against the employee to their employer is a little bit different. It's not illegal, nor should it be, but there are plenty of things that are legal but still not good behavior. I would consider this under that umbrella.
No, freedom of speech doesn't mean that you can engage in serious harassment of people, their workplace, or their children or family.
The question was about "to get a social media frenzy going".
And this is never just an employer randomly looking at a tweet, for which they are almost never going to do anything about it. Most employers don't care.
Instead, the much more likely scenario is mass points of harassment, stalking, and death threats targeted at people's friends and family, when such a "social media frenzy" happens.
You cannot ignore the actual mostly likely result of your advocacy. And when you just say that this is all "free speech" you are doing disservice to the massive amount of illegal harassment that these internet mobs cause.
You do not control the mob, yet you are response for its harm anyway if you try to start one.
You cannot pick and chose the consequences of your social media frenzy. It all happens at once, and you don't control the mob. And you are at fault for all of the consequences of that hate mob.
Regardless of your motivation, when you gather up a social media frenzy, you can't control the mob. It just ends with everyone being harassed en mass by the mob.
And you are still responsible for the consequences of that internet hate mob, if you use it.
Of course, that's not my view. I think political affiliation should probably be protected, but it needs to be very narrow. You shouldn't be able to be fired for being a Republican. But if you post "Gay people should be executed," you shouldn't be able to hide behind "I'm a Republican, that's a political view!" any more than you should be able to hide behind "I'm a Christian, that's a religious view!"
But as long as they can still say the n word on twitter and call of duty everything will be okay. Who cares about those disappeared people anyway, they weren’t even citizens
And, I might add, in US, your work is not just your work. It is your healthcare, your network, your family's wellbeing. If you do not see why some of us consider it an issue, you, if you allow this blatant repetition of your phrase for a specific effect, are blind.
Or are these people having the things they've said repeated widely, perhaps out of context, to other people, who then decide "sheesh, maybe I don't want to hang out with / work with this dude." ?
The other sends you to a Salvadoran gulag. (The silence from all the 'free speech' folks on this point is deafening.)
It's odd that one ban operates within the constraints of freedom (the freedom to associate requires the exercise of the freedom to not associate), while the other does not. It's almost like there's a categorical distinction.
It's utterly pointless to say that the starting point is the same, when one is an utter sabotage of all of society's rights and values... While the other is people affirming those rights.
As one of the 'Free Speech folks', I'll bite.
I absolutely condemn the administration rounding up someone like Mahmoud Khalil if the only thing he did was speak a rallies. If you look up Uncivil Law's video on Mahmoud Khalil Deportation, he is saying the same thing.
Now, let's flip this around. Where are all my left wing friends willing to condemn the investigation into Trump for his Jan. 6th speech? Are you willing to join us now?
It's not his speech that gave him trouble with the DOJ (before he dismissed all charges against himself), it's all the other parts of his conspiracy to steal the election.
Notice how none of the talking heads on TV were in legal trouble over their speech on the matter.
Every one of the cases against him had a bit more to it than 'well he said some bad words', the same way that a conman doesn't go to prison just for saying some bad words, or the same way that a war criminal gets a noose, despite simply saying words - giving orders.
Yesterday the House January 6 Committee unanimously voted to recommend that former President Donald Trump be criminally prosecuted, for charges including conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstructing an act of Congress, and, the most serious, insurrection. A congressional criminal referral of a former president is unprecedented, and if Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Department of Justice decide to prosecute Trump, they will have to address a formidable defense: that Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021, no matter how irresponsible or how full of lies about a “stolen” 2020 election, was, after all, a political speech and thus protected by the First Amendment.
Prominent legal scholars—and one lower-court judge—have rejected that argument, countering that Trump’s speech, in which he urged his supporters to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell,” was sufficiently inflammatory to permit criminal prosecution.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/january-6-...
When Congress' January 6 select committee asked the Justice Department to prosecute Trump in connection to the Capitol riot
>https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-january-6-criminal-ind...
Here is some other ink that has been spilled on the topic as well:
>Trump impeached for 'inciting' US Capitol riot https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55656385
>Trump ‘lit that fire’ of Capitol insurrection, Jan 6 Committee report says https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-lit-that-fire-of...
>Trump incites mob in violent end to presidency | CNN Politics https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/06/politics/donald-trump-capitol...
So I will ask again, Do you condemn all those who called for Trumps prosecution for his Jan 6th speech?
I still call the charges and prosecution of Mahmoud Khalil as a first amendment violation, why will you not join me?
Or, do you believe that Trump incited the Jan. 6th riots? If so then the same fact pattern holds for Mahmoud Khalil.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/04/30/p...
Many people have been fired / expelled / and many more silenced by those examples. If you can't tell the truth about your side (from how you're writing I assume you think in sides) then there's no point saying it.
> The other sends you to a Salvadoran gulag. (The silence from all the 'free speech' folks on this point is deafening.)
I haven't heard about this. Who has been sent to a Salvadoran gulag for speech?
Here's one case where the deportation seems to be based mainly on having worn sports branded merch and a hoodie, and some supposed anonymous snitch, which the state has agreed was an error:
https://www.newsweek.com/kilmar-armando-abrego-garcia-deport...
he is an illegal and his deportation defense in 2019 was he feared for his life from a "rival gang" indicating he was in the MS-13 gang that the feds and judge found him to be part of.
he's not just some "father", as the left leaning news likes to portray. he participated in human trafficking and himself admitted he was a gang member.
it seemed that the left did not care about vetting when gang members were coming into the country.
...but now they're being deported, it seems vetting is crucial (which is being done, but you're not always privy to (or aware of) the information)
and "anonymous snitch" is quite derogatory. you do know how evil MS-13 is right? listen to yourself.
they chop people up without blinking an eye. the fact someone risked their life to "snitch" saved so many people. this isn't playground shit.
What precisely changed between the granting of that protected status and his arrest that warranted the change of status?
'His attorneys claimed, and ICE later confirmed, that the only verification came from a form filled out by the Prince George County Police Department, which based his membership on the fact that "he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie; and that a confidential informant advised that he was an active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique" – a group based out of Long Island, New York.'
The state has confirmed to the press that it doesn't have any evidence of the claims you're making.
MS-13 is less evil than the Biden and current Trump administrations, who are guilty of genocide. I think you're part of an attempt to distract from that and other crimes, as well as the ongoing turmoil in the financial system.
For (allegedly) being so persecuted and silenced, it's weird how so many of them have so much more power, reach, and wealth than ever before.
Perhaps getting booed at in the last college campus they held a rally at is not quite the yellow star, or the mark of Cain that they convinced you it is.
There’s no way for them to clarify, no way for them to “have their day in court,” apologizing just makes the mob smell blood. The only point is revenge and sadism, there’s no redemption, no point other than pain, pure and simple.
People are complicated and I don’t want a video of me on a bad day edited and then posted online for everyone to see.
Precociously exclaiming "Well, personally I don't like horrible people!" isn't likely to be relevant above quite a young age.
I say the same to people who assume everyone going to an El Salvadorean jail is guilty. They're the same person as you, just in the other tribe.
Oh the right say that some things are bad? Well the left say that some things are bad too!
These lazy equivalencies only breed cynicism and give intellectual cover to the Trump administration’s executive power grab. By all means criticize the left as much as you like. But the specifics are important. The current administration’s deportation of green card holders without due process isn’t somehow a mirror image of whatever excesses of left wing ‘cancel culture’ you may be upset about.
The ‘left’ has identified speech that is likely used to belittle or negate someone else’s existence and will appropriately label it as hate speech. Any structural changes to make these words frowned upon have taken years to get into place; people were allowed to adjust (and the length of time to do so is ridiculous in its own right), and what little change has happened did so in a way where the people who must change are barely inconvenienced. There have been few legal repercussions for the use of hate speech by anyone with a modicum of power. Sure, you could identify a few, but there are a ludicrous number of flagrant violations of any such laws (which are few) which go unpunished. The ‘left’ here being any sane member of society which has publicly pointed out that certain words are singularly incendiary.
Meanwhile, the grifters of this ‘right’ have conned the honest conservatives into believing that DEI is a term of hatred against conservatives. The ‘right’ has identified that they wish to say whatever without punishment and are structurally creating a cost for using inclusive language in any official capacity. The grifting part of the ‘right’ also doesn’t mind breaking any semblance of stability for everyone else. The ‘right’ here being the near-narcissistic people who have happened upon positions of privilege and believe that they are superior, have earned it, and that only those similar to themselves should ever attain such a position in the future.
But no, you have reduced your observation to ‘two sides are banning words.’
They are two sides of the same monster, like Jekyll & Hyde.
Civilized western countries do it all the time.
You are correct - one is objectively worse than the other.
The unfortunate truth is that, also, one is a consequence of the other.
Trump is simply doing what his voters wanted[1]. And they voted for him precisely because `of the illiberal behavior of the radical left was yelling and "cancel culture"`.
Had the first thing not happened, then the consequence would have been a fictional story in an alternate timeline.
But here we are, and we don't get to say "Sure, we were assholes to 50% of the population, but your response is worse".
[1] Spoiler - they may not even want it anymore!
This is just the 'you made me do it' defense argued by every abuser ever. Someone is behaving as an ass, they get told 'you're an ass, stop that' and then they escalate and say 'you made me do this'. It happens in families, it happens in schoolyards, it happens on streets, it happens in business, it happens in dictatorships. Just yesterday, the president of South Korea was formally removed from office after trying to stage a military coup and this was his whole defense.
Meh. You can say that about every consequence ever if you determine a priori, like you have, that consequences are only performed by abusers.
In any case, it's not a defense when many many people were saying this before it happened.
IOW, it was a prediction before the fact, not a defense after the fact.
In many countries in Europe we have hate speech and defamation laws, we don't have at-will employment and many of our universities are public. This means there is less freedom to make others upset, questioning someone's character, firing them and ways to affect our education. This is by definition illiberal. (Worse or not is an open question). In Europe we can't say that "I might have offended 50% of the population, but sending me to prison is worse" because our laws says it isn't. In the US you can.
Does US law also say that the government can do all kinds of things, including pardoning criminals? Yes, but it still goes against the credibility of free speech in the US. One of the things the US still had over other countries.
If a mob harasses you, your friends, you family, your workplace and your children with mass amounts of harassment and death threats, I would say that the target of the harassment has had their rights infringed on even though it wasn't literally the government.
No, you cannot have a mob send mass death threats to people, stalk them, and harass them because you didn't like a tweet that they made a decade ago.
The person who called it "cancel culture" chose the wrong word.
They should have called it "death threat culture" or "illegal mob harassment culture", as that would really drive the point home about what the issue is.
But, of course, you don't care about that or what happens to people's families when they are targeted. Instead, the only thing people care about is "Oh, but what was in that tweet that they made 10 years ago? I need to figure out if their family deserved it!" ("it" being the death threats and harassment, of course)
I made an effort to have a conversation. This breaks the rules of Hacker News by assuming bad faith.
I didn't say it was a legitimate consequence. I was aiming for "it was a predictable consequence".
Being in a car crash might be the consequence of driving a car. But if someone drives at high speed in the wrong lane and then crashes into you it is a consequence of them not respecting traffic laws and not of you just being in a car. That is why we have traffic laws, so you are able to be in a car without someone crashing into you.
You could never be in a car, and you could also never speak. But then you wouldn't need free speech. Free speech exist so you can speak. In the US without consequences from the government. If you then speak the consequences of that speech aren't a consequence of you speaking but of the government not respecting free speech. Because to not have consequences you would have to not speak and then you wouldn't have free speech.
Someone getting deported by the democrats once they get into power would now be a predictable consequence. They then equally can't say "Sure, we were assholes to the other 50% of the population, but your response is worse". So then you have no free speech.
For instance, "GamerGate", where a bunch of anonymous people on the internet tried to get a number of women in the game industry fired, predates "cancel culture" by a year or two.
Or how the whole #MeToo movement was, you know, a response to powerful people abusing people in their power, and firing or otherwise limiting their careers if they resisted.
If <insert famous talking head from ten years ago> didn't want to be "canceled", well, he could have always just not sexually harassed his underlings.
I'm not trying to "prove" anything; I'm merely pointing out that while it is true that $BAR is objectively worse than $FOO, it is equally true that $FOO is a direct consequence of $BAR.
In my other response to another poster I pointed out that many of us on forums that effectively silenced opposing viewpoints reminded readers that it's best to refrain from going to extremes because the pendulum always swings back, and that is what we are seeing now.
In much the same way, I'll point out that the pendulum always swings back and we are going to see a return to the previous extremes when people get tired of this extreme.
However, it's pointing out that the general principle has been established: "People whose opinion I don't like can be banned from society." At first, it's only removing individuals from public discourse (cancel culture), then it's removing people physically (deportation).
This is always the endgame of eroding core liberal values. This has been pointed out to the illiberal left time and time again, to no avail.
Strawman. The fired people you're talking about weren't banned from society by the people pointing them out on the internet. If someone's on an international flight yelling racial slurs and causing a commotion, and someone else publishes video of that person yelling racial slurs on an international flight, it's not the people commenting on the video who fired that person from their job. It's their employers. What would be the alternative? No one takes video of the person yelling racial slurs? Or, if the video is posted, no one comments on it? Or, maybe, the person yelling racial slurs could simply avoid losing their employment by not yelling racial slurs on a flight full of people with their phones out? Or maybe the employer could choose to ignore the negative publicity and keep the person on staff despite the risk to their revenue? Who exactly is the responsible party here?
I generally find it pointless to point out that 'right' perspectives suffer from a lack of practical logic--pointing out the fundamental irrationality of a position rarely changes the mind of the person holding that position. But, your position ignores power differential between people--your argument is a matter of 'principle,' but this isn't fundamentally about principles.
Is your argument then that a person yelling racial slurs on a full airplane shouldn't have their employment threatened by their behavior? That their employer shouldn't fire them?
just a quick reminder, the ghettos which had far better living conditions than concentration camps (not death camps), had people living on 180 calories a day and ended with more than a half a million dead
so please, proportions, this is an insult to history
Can you provide examples of people getting abducted and sent to "overseas slave camps" purely for their speech?
> whatbaoutisms, pedantry, and goalpost moving
All three of these things are false. You know very well that 2 instances out of 346 million is none of those things. I don't know what to call this other than malice, because it's extremely clear to anyone with basic reading skills that the two data points provided do in no way support the claim "the present behavior of the illiberal right is abductions and overseas slave camps".
just like you, we are all aware of how the sides are different, it is valid to be more annoyed by the ways they are the same
Is it? One side has a vocal minority who took defense of minorities to the point of harassment and was ultimately rebuffed. The other side controls the government and is enthusiastically renditioning legal residents to prisons and defying the constitution and courts to keep doing it.
To be more upset about both sides being imperfect than the injustice of irreversible deportations to foreign prison seems ... absurd.
so the things you are bothered by and demand everyone to prioritize are actually solved by addressing the underlying mechanisms, as opposed to simply trying to propagate your preferred party's numbers
something... both sides... might actually be into. if the other party is afraid of the opposition party doing the same thing to different people, then there might actually be overwhelming consensus to change the thing that a "both sides" person is trying to point out
Change to the polarizing system would be great. I doubt that will happen by softening protests to obscene injustice. Rather it's likely to reenforce the shifting Overton window further into authoritarianism and kleptocracy.
To break the two party system we need things a large portion of the populous has been (falsely) taught are bad for them: same day primaries, ranked choice voting, making campaign bribery illegal, unwinding corporate personhood, etc. Can you guess which side is most attached to the system of political machines and the lies that reinforce them?
Perhaps you can enlighten me what these enabling factors are? Because I thought vigorous debate, a free press, and a balance of power between branches of government were the controls; not what enables problematic politics.
Yet it would appear criticism is increasingly cause for expulsion, journalism seen as a justification for lawfare, and that 2.5 of the 3 branches have been captured by an irrational fear and a cult-like trust in a second rate celebrity.
> we can bridge consensus on what everyone is afraid the other party might leverage
Can we? Within my circle those leaning right are too wedded to their tribe affiliation to see the hypocrisy and inconsistencies in their conclusions. If they are unwilling to agree on a consistent set of rules for all then there won't be consensus.
Sure, yeah
So both parties accept campaign donations and quid pro quo for the support of Political Action Committees that support them.
Both parties are beneficiaries of a toothless Federal Election Committee enabling non-compliance with the stated regulations, with any remaining accountability existing upon shaky legal ground, completely nullified when in front of a court like with Citizens United. there might be enough consensus for a constitutional amendment though.
Both parties trade securities with material non public information that they can influence, representatives and constituents of any affiliation are not pleased with this. But it is a prisoner's dilemma in the legislative process, there might be enough consensus for a constitutional amendment though.
Presidents of both parties have leveraged the pardon power preemptively and at their discretion, unsettling constituents and representatives on all sides. Revealing a discomfort that is enabled by an archaic aspect of the constitution. Go for it, prioritize a campaign to amend that.
You see the common theme here is that you have to prioritize these causes, over simply being a powerless opposition party going to marches for things that will never gain consensus or that the current power in power will never be held accountable for.
The 17th amendment for directly electing our senators was done in a vacuum. And this likely broke many pillars of our constitution by not also addressing what the senators do, and how that chamber interfaces with the rest of the country. Being appointed likely wasn't better, just more cohesive with the rest of this constitution. Right now we see the folly and redundancy of the Presidential nomination and Senate confirmation process to federal agencies and other position. Should probably amend that too.
given that I’m surrounded by partisans and you are more familiar with being one, how would you reword my point
the commonality I see is that the partisan wants to only talk about things that potentially add power to their party and are offended by talk that doesn’t suggest an interest in doing that
to me that seems like its not working and is unproductive, but to you, how would you cut through that filter towards doing something that is productive and would affect both parties
I welcome any and all persons from anywhere in the world if they want to come and protest the American war machine
Our forefathers would be absolutely ashamed at what you just said. Protesting a totalitarian government that lacks proper representation is the most American thing you can possibly do, and that makes these immigrants more American than you will ever be, as long as you hold such views.
Edit: It seems you have edited your post in order to remove the extremely distasteful language you originally expressed. I assume you still hold such views or you'd not have expressed them to begin with, and as such my comment still stands.
Well, like half of our forefathers. Maybe 30%.
America has always been this weird combined project of Hopeless Idealists and The Worst People In The World. Our forefathers sought independence for freedom and self-determination and all sorts of other noble things, but also because many of them owned a bunch of slaves and were worried that was going to be outlawed in the near future. And then sought independence again a century later out of the same fear.
For one, whether or not they supported abolition.
I also will not engage in a debate with a poisoned premise: To be clear, supporting Israel today means supporting genocide. That is the beginning and end of it. You can denounce Israel and still denounce Hamas. You can support an individual Jewish person's right to life and liberty without making the mistake of supporting their genocidal government.
Given that my own government, the United States, is also genocidal and has a history of bloody colonialism, I appreciate when people can make this distinction. I condemn my own government and still support my fellow countrymen.
None of this needs pointing out. Any attempt to paint an anti-Israel stance as an antisemitic stance is deliberately deceitful and wholly reprehensible. Israel the government is illegitimate and Netanyahu is wanted in the International Criminal Court for genocidal crimes.
I am more interested in knowing how someone decides what is moral and immoral, i.e. which causes they choose to support. I have my theories. I have very mixed feelings towards the pro-Palestine protestors on campuses stemming from the tactics used, how they directed protests at universities themselves and not Israel, and the subtle implications that universities were "Zionist" for vague reasons. I guess that by extension most Americans are Zionist also?? I am not sure if that's fair and then obviously there's an element of conspiracy theory that is also kind of nasty.
I note you mentioned abolition, colonialism, and genocide so I think it's not a stretch to say you decide based on anti-Fascism which I'll leave open to definition.
I do believe it's clear that if you support the American-Israeli war machine, you support colonialism and Zionism intrinsically. So I don't know if most Americans are Zionist or not, but I do personally know a frightening amount of Zionists.
A confused bunch, as I am originally from the Deep South and most of these Zionists I speak of were shitting on Jews and making light of the Holocaust just a few years ago. It seems paradoxical until you realize the common thread is the support of fascism.
> I note you mentioned abolition, colonialism, and genocide so I think it's not a stretch to say you decide based on anti-Fascism which I'll leave open to definition.
Absolutely. Specifically, I start from the Golden Rule, or a modified version of it, I also back the spirit of the Constitution, which in my mind should have always extended to protect not just white, land-owning Americans, but the entire world, rich and poor, given that the rights it recognizes are considered inalienable for all humans.
I also find solidarity within some of the views of most of our founding fathers, especially regarding basic things such as taxation without representation, even if I don't agree with their views on slavery or certain economic positions.
We have this thing called the First Amendment. It applies to all people under the jurisdiction of the United States. There’s no exception for “guests.” Criticizing the government is a time-honored American tradition. Throwing people out for it is absolutely vile.
Not according to the Supreme Court it doesn't.
Sadly, his comment has been flagged.
But in general I think the case made by the pro-Palestinian side was that somehow universities bore responsibility for what Israel did because of vague investments in their endowments. I didn't think owning an ETF that held a weapons manufacturer or some Israeli company on the stock market was explicitly Zionist but this was the premise for protests. Why not protest the US or Israel directly? It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
It felt like they were asking universities to explicitly be pro-Palestine which is a strange thing to ask for in America.
Do you think the first amendment means the government has to allow in immigrants that are Nazi sympathizers? What about Communists?
Americans have free speech. But Americans can also decide which foreigners are allowed the privilege of being on American soil. In fact, I would say that it’s precisely because we have free speech that we must carefully guard who is allowed into the tent.
What comes before “filter[ing] immigrants” is due process. Resident aliens have the right to due process which the current US administration is not providing.
Alien residents with every right to be here are being removed from the US illegally and mistakenly.
The best argument I have heard is that visa revocation may be like firing: the US can do it for almost any reason and you can fire someone for no reason, but can't do it for specific prohibited reasons. Speech would probably be one of those bad reasons under the US's civil rights framework.
No, the U.S. has the prerogative to pick and choose foreigners who are allowed to immigrate based on categories that would be impermissible for employers. That includes nationality, e.g. our green card quota system, as well as speech and affiliation. The Supreme Court has upheld deporting communists who are foreign nationals: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/342/580/.
This is reflected in the statute. Aliens can specifically be excluded for political beliefs and views if the Secretary of State determines that is necessary: "An alien, not described in clause (ii), shall not be excludable or subject to restrictions or conditions on entry into the United States under clause (i) because of the alien's past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations, if such beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United States, unless the Secretary of State personally determines that the alien's admission would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest." 8 USC 1182(a)(4)(C)(iii).
What, exactly, about Rumeysa Ozturk's student newspaper contributions[1] could possibly justify the notion that her _residence in America_ is compromising a compelling US foreign policy interest?
The clear purpose of that statute including a long list of properties which would not normally be grounds for exclusion is to set a reasonably high bar for the Secretary of State's 'personal opinion' about a compromising admission. If the intent were to grant a broad, beyond question license to deport Fulbright scholars for _engagement in society_, it would just say they can do whatever the fuck they want and skip the salad.
Dozens of citizens could have been sent into slave labor for all we know, and no judge has been able to provide the constitutionally mandated oversight. It has been upheld many times and for hundreds of years that the Due Process clause applies to non-citizens for this reason.
In some cases, “due process” is “Your name made it into a spreadsheet, the President can drone strike you”
(See link for footnotes.)
> Non-Judicial Proceedings.—A court proceeding is not a requisite of due process.745 Administrative and executive proceedings are not judicial, yet they may satisfy the Due Process Clause.746 Moreover, the Due Process Clause does not require de novo judicial review of the factual conclusions of state regulatory agencies,747 and may not require judicial review at all.748 Nor does the Fourteenth Amendment prohibit a state from conferring judicial functions upon non-judicial bodies, or from delegating powers to a court that are legislative in nature.749 Further, it is up to a state to determine to what extent its legislative, executive, and judicial powers should be kept distinct and separate.750
Just to point, the prerogative to "filter" immigrants does not allow the US to keep them in jail, torture, or send them to foreign countries non-supervised labor camps.
Almost no healthy people died from COVID, most had co-morbidities and they should have been the only ones forced to vax and stay home.
Hospitals were absolutely overwhelmed at many points during parts of the pandemic, outside of the first month. That was a major concern during the "surges" and spread of new variants.
I know this because my state routinely publishes hospital census levels and at many points during the pandemic elective and even non-elective procedures had to be cancelled due to lack of bed and staff capacity. The facility I work at was regularly impacted.
Search hospital related COVID stories during 2021 and 2022 and you'll find plenty.
The people who voluntarily glued themselves to propaganda TV never paid attention to it in the first place. They'll believe whatever they need to because they're mad about lockdowns.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-coronavirus-hospitalizat...
It varies widely by state/county, etc, but in most of the US, hospitalizations were pretty low still in April. The first peak was around August which was my experience, and the second peak was around January 2021.
So as far as "A bunch of medical professionals shaking in their shoes waiting for something that never came", they were waiting for what was actually coming.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/figures/mm7112e2-F1-l...
https://calmatters.org/health/coronavirus/2020/06/california...
Number of patients in April peaked around 3000, then August around 7000, then Jan 2021 around 21,000.
It’s extremely poor reasoning to rely on your individual anecdotal experience of your hospital visit to conclude that there is a global conspiracy on a massive scale. Was all the footage of overflowing hospitals and makeshift morgues fabricated?
Fwiw, I went to a Boston hospital in April or May of 2020 to get tested for a Covid exposure and they kept non-covid patients quite separate. They relocated entire offices to different buildings to avoid cross-exposure. They don’t want to put Covid patients near people giving birth or their infants for obvious reasons. Also our emergency department had a million signs up telling people who had certain respiratory symptoms to go to a different location (which I went to and was indeed much busier).
…But I didn’t base my belief on the things I was hearing from literally every source on that experience. I did it because that many people simply can’t coordinate a lie on that scale that convincingly. Skepticism is good, but respectfully and in my opinion, believing it was all a hoax requires a great deal of arrogance and gullibility.
There was so much bad data and propoganda coming in at the beginning thar ultimately the only thing I could depend on was what I personally investigated. I'm not using it to sign off on a research paper.
And you generalized this to the world as a whole? I admit I don’t have a citation for this, but I’d be shocked if small towns didn’t have markedly slower spread rates than cities. I feel like this was brought up frequently during the pandemic.
> There was so much bad data and propoganda coming in at the beginning thar ultimately the only thing I could depend on was what I personally investigated.
How and which things did you decide were propaganda and bad data?
I don’t really feel like continuing this argument, so the last thing I’ll say is that I don’t know how else experts are supposed to have made decisions at the time. Makeshift morgues were opening to handle the overflow of bodies. They acted on the evidence they had at the time, and readjusted recommendations as new evidence came to light. This is part of why social distancing protocols changed so much during the first year of the pandemic.
Experts should be free to advise the public. Thankfully the health director issuing the order that jailed and charged this man with a felony had to resign in disgrace.
The same is true of mortality/severity rates by vaccination status in hospitals. People who opt in to a vaccine are generally going to be more inclined to seek hospital treatment than those who opt out of such. So if somebody unvaccinated went to the hospital for COVID it would naturally be, on average, a much more severe case than a vaccinated person going to the hospital, with worse overall outcomes. And so you skew the results when looking at hospital data.
These biases and trends are facts most people may not be aware of, but big pharma certainly is.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#/media/File:1918_s...
I have a hard time believing that “most people” also means “most epidemiologists” or “most medical organizations” would be unaware of such an obvious problem. It seems like it would be day one of school stuff.
It seems trivially obvious to me, someone whose closest qualification to being able to debate the actual science here is having a bachelor’s in physics and very technically being involved in some academic research. I’m not going to second guess the overwhelming majority of scientists and medical professionals I’ve heard comment on this because of something like that.
- "confounding might exist because the study did not measure or adjust for behavioral differences between the comparison groups"
- "these results might not be generalizable to nonhospitalized patients who have ... different health care–seeking behaviors"
Along with many more. The problem is that there was no meaningful public debate whatsoever. You were on board with absolutely anything and everything, or you must be an "anti-vaxer" and just wanted everybody's grandmother to die, and probably also thought COVID was caused by 5G.
We knew perfectly well back then that bad cases of Covid were rare in teenagers.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6...
> Full vaccination of household contacts reduced the odds to acquire infection with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant in household settings by two thirds for mRNA vaccines and by one third for vector vaccines. For index cases, being fully vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine reduced the odds of onwards transmission by four-fifths compared to unvaccinated index cases.
"illiberal" or not, the COVID 19 vaccination mandates were good decisions that saved countless lives.
How many people died because of COVID?
You don't know. No one knows.
Meanwhile, everyone who knows better pretends that the most fundamental data about the subject, on top of which all other data and decsions were built ... is garbage.
[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores...
Was there another pandemic where 94-95% of all deaths involved at least one comorbidity, and 77% involved three or more underlying conditions?
TLDR: Those comorbidities are often complications caused by Covid in the first place – like pneumonia or respiratory failure. Sometimes they also include risk factors that could never be treated as a direct cause of death on their own, like obesity (which also happens to be extremely widespread in the US so it gets reported on many death certificates for many illnesses, not just Covid).
--- Common comorbidities associated with COVID-19 deaths have been well-documented across various studies and data sources, primarily reflecting conditions that increase vulnerability to severe outcomes. Based on extensive data, especially from the U.S. and other heavily impacted regions, the most frequent comorbidities include:
- *Hypertension (High Blood Pressure):* This tops the list in many analyses. In the U.S., CDC data from March to October 2020 showed 56% of adults hospitalized with COVID-19 had hypertension [1], and it’s consistently cited in mortality stats. A New York City study of 5,700 hospitalized patients in early 2020 reported it in 56.6% of cases [2], while globally, a meta-analysis pegged its prevalence at 32% among all COVID-19 patients and 35% in fatal cases [3].
- *Diabetes:* Another major player, often linked to worse outcomes due to impaired immune response and blood sugar control issues. The same NYC study found it in 33.8% of patients [2], and CDC data noted 41% of hospitalized adults had metabolic diseases, including diabetes [4]. Globally, it ranged from 8.2% in China (early 2020 data) to 17.4% across broader reviews, with higher rates (up to 33%) in severe or fatal cases [5].
- *Cardiovascular Disease:* This includes conditions like coronary heart disease and heart failure. It appeared in 11.7% of cases in a 2020 meta-analysis [3] and was notably prevalent in fatal outcomes—26% of 814 COVID-19 deaths in Romania, for instance [6]. In the U.S., myocardial infarction and congestive heart failure were tied to higher mortality odds in a 2020 study of 31,461 patients [7].
- *Obesity:* A significant risk factor, especially in Western populations. The NYC cohort reported it in 41.7% of patients [2], and a 2021 CDC report flagged it as one of the strongest chronic risk factors for COVID-19 death among hospitalized adults, alongside diabetes with complications [8].
- *Chronic Pulmonary Disease:* Conditions like COPD or asthma showed up in 17.5% of U.S. patients in the 2020 Charlson comorbidity study [7] and were linked to higher mortality risk (e.g., HR 2.68 in China’s early data) [9]. Respiratory failure, often a direct result of COVID-19, complicates this category but underscores lung vulnerability.
- *Renal Disease:* Chronic kidney disease was a standout in multiple reviews, with a hazard ratio of 3.48 for death in a UK study [10]. It’s less prevalent overall (0.8% in some global data) but deadly when present, especially in older patients [3].
- *Cancer:* Malignancies, particularly metastatic ones, increased mortality odds (HR 3.50 in China, 2020) [9]. Prevalence was lower (1.5% globally), but the impact was outsized in fatal cases [11].
Other notable mentions include dementia, liver disease (mild to severe), and immunosuppression, though these were less common. Age amplifies these risks—over 65s with comorbidities faced death rates 4 to 10 times higher than those under 40, per UK data from 2021 [12]. Multimorbidity (multiple conditions) was also a game-changer; over half of fatal cases in some studies had two or more comorbidities, with one U.S. analysis noting an average of 2.6 to 4 additional conditions per death [13].
These patterns held steady from 2020 through 2023, with the CDC reporting that 94-95% of U.S. COVID-19 deaths involved comorbidities [14]. The virus didn’t just exploit these conditions—it often triggered acute complications (e.g., pneumonia, ARDS) that were listed alongside chronic issues, muddying the “cause of death” debate. Still, the data’s clear: these comorbidities didn’t just coexist; they stacked the deck against survival.
### References [1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6943e3.htm [2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2765184 [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7365650/ [4] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e4.htm [5] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8... [6] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-84705-8 [7] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7439986/ [8] https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2021/21_0123.htm [9] https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/55/5/2000547 [10] https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1648 [11] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2... [12] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... [13] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/health_disparitie... [14] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
94-95% involved at least one comorbidity.
Over 75% had at least four comorbidities.
> A COVID-19 death is defined for surveillance purposes as a death resulting from a clinically compatible illness in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID-19 disease (e.g. trauma). There should be no period of complete recovery between illness and death
It does not include cases like someone dying in a car crash who happened to be COVID-positive.
Maybe not, but it definitely includes millions of elderly or otherwise comorbid subjects who developed pneumonia and never recovered. Sad is it is, that happens year-in and year-out when the initial virus doesn't have a household name.
It also happens with the influenza virus ... except 2020 and 2021, where we had a miraculous reprieve from flu deaths.
It's not so miraculous to think that lockdowns, distancing and mask-wearing affected flu prevalence as well as COVID prevalence.
We don’t know how many people live in the United States at any particular moment, but the Census is still useful.
Even in more arguable cases, preexisting conditions and extreme senescence are ubiquitous in deaths "of" COVID, and at this point there's probably no real chance of ever untangling the mess we created and figuring out what happened. For instance Colin Powell died at 84 with terminal cancer, Parkinson's, and a whole host of other health issues. His eventual death was flagged as 'caused by complications of COVID.' I mean maybe it really was, but I think the asterisk you'd put there is quite important when looking at these stats.
[1] - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/florida-motorcyclist-covid...
To contextualize this: my position is “weak signals are possible even with noisy data”; I read your response as “but the data is really noisy,” which, sure, agreed; the user I was responding to seems closer to the solipsistic position “there is effectively no data at all.”
Do you know how many people are saved by antibiotics RIGHT NOW? You don't know?! NO ONE KNOWS!
Give me a break, we don't need to dissect every corpse to see how effective the vaccine is.
How many people were jailed or disappeared for their dissent?
Being able to dissent doesn't mean that people accept your opinion, it means that you are allowed to make your point using your own means.
People still get to disagree with you, point out where you are dishonest or mistaken, etc. etc. etc.
The idea that dissent wasn't tolerated is absolute BS. It was tolerated far more than it should have been, far more accommodations were made than necessary, such as in the military, which injects people with all sorts of vaccines but somehow decided that this well-tested one didn't have to be because some people were scared.
He was briefly an unpaid intern.
https://studyinthestates.dhs.gov/2015/11/uscis-explains-if-u...
> USCIS is frequently asked whether an unpaid intern needs to complete Form I-9. In general, an unpaid intern does not need to complete Form I-9 unless he or she will receive remuneration, which is something of value such as no-cost or reduced-cost meals, lodging or other benefits in exchange for his or her labor or services.
I can see how someone'd leave that off a green card application for that reason, which is more plausible than hiding an association with a UN agency while applying for a green card during the Biden years. (If anything, work for the UN and a close ally's embassy should increase trust here.)
Given https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/forms/i-4... says things like "Have you EVER been a member of, involved in, or in any way associated with any organization, association, fund, foundation, party, club, society, or similar group in the United States or in any other location in the world?" there's a good chance every single green card applicant has forgotten to list something. Do I include my kindergarten? The music club I was in as a toddler? Joining a political party's subreddit? Donating $10 to a charity ten years ago?
Hell, I'm "associated with" Hacker News, but it wouldn't go on my I-485. Should that get me deported to an El Salvadorean slave camp?
Mahmoud Khalil is in an American jail awaiting trial. A New Jersey court will rule on his status.
He might wind up there; a judge has halted the deportation process for now. The administration is demonstrably sending folks (some with no criminal record: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...) there, including via "clerical error" they can't undo (https://apnews.com/video/white-house-says-maryland-resident-...). Oopsie daisy!
> He's being charged with being in violation of his Visa.
He has not been charged at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Mahmoud_Khalil
"Khalil has not been charged with a crime and is not alleged to have engaged in any activity legally prohibited to U.S. residents... Removal procedures were initiated under section 237(a)(4)(C)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which permits deportation of lawful residents if the Secretary of State believes their presence risks "potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences"."
> I don't need to know about your affiliations with hackernews, because hackernews is not closely affiliated with designated terror organizations.
The form doesn't say that. It says anything, ever.
> Now that the UNRWA is properly designated as a terrorist organization itself, do you think it would be appropriate to lie about your affiliations with them on a visa application?
When did the US designate UNRWA as a terrorist organization?
I don't think they ever have, but they certainly hadn't back in 2023 when he applied.
(The US was UNRWA's single largest donor that year, in fact. https://www.unrwa.org/sites/default/files/top_20_donors_over...)
> Mahmoud Khalil is in an American jail awaiting trial.
Having not been charged with any crimes, he is in immigration detention awaiting a court hearing.
The judicial process will now determine if that was a willful oversight on the permanent residency application, and if it would have had material impact on the application.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/doj-says-mahmoud-khalil...
> However, the government will have to prove to the immigration judge that Khalil willfully failed to disclose that information, and whether that disclosure would have impacted his eligibility for permanent residency.
It may even be that the administration is lying. They do that.
Easy
"Alarming proportions of students self-censor, report worry or discomfort about expressing their ideas in a variety of contexts, find controversial ideas hard to discuss, show intolerance for controversial speakers, find their administrations unclear or worse regarding support for free speech, and even report that disruption of events or violence are, to some degree, acceptable tactics for shutting down the speech of others."
"Less than one-in-four students (22%) reported that they felt “very comfortable” expressing their views on a controversial political topic in a discussion with other students in a common campusspace. Even fewer (20%) reported feeling “very comfortable” expressing disagreement with one of their professors about a controversial topic in a written assignment; 17% said the same about expressing their views on a controversial political topic during an in-class discussion; 14%, about expressing an unpopular opinion to their peers on a social media account tied to their name; and 13%, about publicly disagreeing with a professor about a controversial political topic. "
And as for examples, the sitting NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, who in hindsight was far more correct on everything COVID-related than the CDC was: had this to say about his experience at Stanford: https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-censorship-an-interview...
" I presented the results in a seminar in the medical school, and I was viciously attacked. ... It was really nasty: allegations of research misconduct, undeclared conflicts of interest… In reality, the whole study was funded by small-dollar donations."
"It was very stressful. I had to hire lawyers. I've been at Stanford for 38 years and I felt it was really, really out of character. At one point, the Chair of Medicine ordered me to stop going on media and to stop giving interviews about COVID policy. They were trying to totally silence me."
Bhattacharya who signed the Great Barrington Delaration, advocating for herd immunity and "focused protection" for the elderly? Just imagine how much larger the death toll would have been.
This page has a good list of concerns about Bhattacharya, including how the study mentioned in your link was flawed and one of the co-authors went on to admit the results were wrong: https://www.zmescience.com/medicine/jay-bhattacharya-has-a-h...
And as far as the great Barrington declaration is concerned, it is widely accepted now that the lockdown strategy failed, and that focused protection would have saved far more lives and caused far less economic harm and educational harm, which by the way, correlate with loss of life and loss of years of life. Even far left news outlets admit this now: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/covid-lockdowns-big-...
Is it?
https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/impact-non-...
The constitutional republic was designed to protect from one person's whims but that ideal seems to have crumbled when the rest of the republic has been co-opted, controlled or simply ignored. In Europe we always knew that US claims to have the best democratic system were hubristic nonsense, no maybe more in the US realise the fragility of government.
Who is going to buy this?
Winning elections could work.
> Watching the video of this poor woman at Tufts who was abducted by federal agents —I wrote my blog today about that. I think the government is spreading terror, and that’s what they mean to do.
Brother, a blog post is, quoting you, a “nice conversation.” A New Yorker interview is a nice conversation.
Getting rid of legacy admissions… guess who wins elections? The sons and daughters of politicians! Whereas grandstanding on X or Y achieves nothing.
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