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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26781 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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So you're saying that refusing to let students enter common areas that they have a right to be in is not harassment, but recording video in a public area (as is your right) is harassment?

A Muslim man in a Palestinian keffiyeh and thobe is attempting to enter the sequestered area of a vigil held by Jewish students for October 7th victims, desiring to record all of their faces on his phone. It’s 8pm and there’s no other reason for him entering the area. If Jewish students passively prevent him from entering the grounds of the protest, do you want the Jewish students charged for harassment?

In both of those examples, you've added implicitly threatening traits to the "trespasser" (a cop protected and abetted by the power of the state; "desiring to record all of their faces") that weren't as present in the original scenario.

desiring to record all of their faces

What do you think the devout Jewish man was attempting to do by walking into the small, dense protesting square with his phone recording? We can make rational inferences here, this isn’t an SAT problem. His compatriots online are threatening to ensure none of them get a job after graduating.

cop uniform

That’s my fault, replace that with a pro-cop outfit

Ironically, a pro-cop guy sounds like the least threatening one, here. The connotations of a Muslim getting someone's faces on camera for personal retribution... let's just say losing the future job would be the least of your concerns.

I concede that recording your opponents for the purposes of knowing who to launch a harassment campaign against later is a part of harassment, but not recording an assembly in itself.

"recording a video in public while being Palestinian" is not a crime, last I checked.

There is no way to "passively" prevent someone from going where they please, and if that place is a public place, you have no right to do so. You also have no right to claim a public place, and in doing so deny it to your ethnic, religious or political enemies.

On the other hand, walking while openly Jewish will get you threatened with arrest in the UK. After all, he could have caused a breach of the peace if he was attacked.

Your view (which I share) is not the consensus in the West.

Yes, obviously (assuming that harassment is a chargeable offence, which I don't think it is).

Ah ok. My intuition is different: in either case, the one actively attempting to enter the de facto designated area intends to harass the people in the area, whether or not it meets a legal standard of harassment. There is no plausible reason for their entrance into the area which doesn’t involve starting a confrontation. It should be discouraged because that’s how confrontations begin, and as evidence for this the police routinely separate protesting camps for this exact reason (and whether or not the protests are legally done).

the one actively attempting to enter the de facto designated area intends to harass the people in the area

I'd say it's not. The protestors have no right to have a defacto designated area. You can't "harass" by interfering with something that someone doesn't have a right to in the first place. If you enter a bank while someone's robbing it you aren't intending to harass the bank robbers.

That seems a near-universal recipe to surrender any and every public to whatever jackass is willing to occupy it first, and then insist that they feel unsafe because The Wrong Person walked close to them or took pictures of their public protest. Dissolving 'starting a confrontation' at all makes the fundamental flaws of this framework, if anything, more apparent.

Not at all, we can ask reasonable questions like:

  • does the protest movement actually represent a serious concern among a significant number of students? (Concerns like: segregation, corruption, genocide, or etc?) (Yes)

  • does the protest movement occupy a small space, and are there a sufficient number of protesters to occupy that space? (Yes)

  • is the space unnecessary for reasonable facility at the university? (Yes)

If you don’t want this textbook example of protesting, you are saying you only want protests when they get permission by the party in power (state and/or administrators or an institution). You would be denying, for instance, the implicit right of Jewish students to protest if (hypothetically) a university would ban their synagogues. You would be denying the utility and morality of all the protests that occurred to end segregation. Genocide is as serious as any of these concerns, and apparently a number of students — with negative financial interest and negligible social interest at play, students at our top university — want to protest about it. There are a lot of ramifications to that belief and it involves a superstitious belief in the omnibenevolence of those in power.

That’s a moderate argument in favor of unsanctioned protest, if somewhat marred by one of its (first!) prongs turning into whether people like the protest goals or not.

But I don’t need an argument in favor of unsanctioned protest: my metrics there are far simpler. My problem here is not the presence of a protest, but your advocacy of a norm where whatever protest group that takes a public forum first gets to exclude people who disagree with their message.

There might be some edge cases where that’s an unfortunate compromise we have to take, but under vague concerns about ‘confrontation’ are little more than carte blanche

norm where whatever protest group that takes a public forum first gets to exclude people who disagree with their message

This is already the norm for legally-sanctioned protests, though, right? As I mentioned in other replies, it is common for police to prevent counter protestors from intruding on the space of protestors and vice versa.

a public forum

The video looks like it is taken at a courtyard, one of a dozen around the University. They aren’t holding captive the main amphitheater at Columbia or something, where yeah there would be a concern regarding the reasonable use of university amenities. Ironically, you could even argue that the courtyard is seeing greater facility during this protest, given the population density from the looks of it. But I’m not familiar with the layout of the university and where the video is taken.

This is already the norm for legally-sanctioned protests, though, right? As I mentioned in other replies, it is common for police to prevent counter protestors from intruding on the space of protestors and vice versa.

That's actually a fun question! The rules for how police can separate protestors and counterprotestors are complex. And this clearly flops many important prongs of that test.

The video looks like it is taken at a courtyard, one of a dozen around the University. They aren’t holding captive the main amphitheater at Columbia or something, where yeah there would be a concern regarding the reasonable use of university amenities.

This thread is south of this video, which was from Yale, about access to a building. And I buy people being blocked from just a few public fora about as much as I buy someone being a 'little bit pregnant'.

Ironically, you could even argue that the courtyard is seeing greater facility during this protest, given the population density from the looks of it.

It was great, for the one side able to use it, isn't the most compelling argument for neutral access to public fora.

More comments

My intuition is that people should not be allowed to turn public spaces into de facto designated areas, only de jure ones. And keeping people out of areas they have a right to be in because you disagree with their politics, or don't like the way they look, is harassment if anything is.

If we're concerned about confrontations then the protests themselves should be discouraged, because that's how confrontations begin.

Nonviolent protesting is historically treated as a legal grey area in American history, which the admins of Columbia are well aware of, their own university having a history of it. It’s treated that way because the alternative is non-nonviolent protesting, which is much worse. Not everything moral and immoral is codified in law

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