Pilot error is one of the most common reasons for crashes.
Pilot error is one of the most common results from NTSB investigations, but that doesn't mean pilot error was actually the cause. PE is what the NTSB hangs things on unless they can find good evidence of something else -- because the manufacturers of any hardware or software blamed for a crash have lawyers who make good money defending them, while the dead pilot cannot pay anyone to defend him.
"Leaking" the contents of an unclassified memo that you wrote is no different that simply calling the press and saying "Hey, I had a private conversation with Trump about xyz".
Right. When it's the content of a private meeting between the chief of the executive branch and the chief law enforcement officer, it's BUSINESS, not PERSONAL, and it is not Comey's memo to release.
It just carries a bit more weight when it is written up and dated appropriately.
It carries no more weight. Anyone can write a "memo" and put a "date" on it and have it say whatever he wants it to. I could have a memo here that says clong83 told me he was the mastermind behind the assassination of JFK, and it has a date just a week after that shooting took place. Does it carry any more weight than my just saying that you told me that? Of course not.
If you aren't divulging classified info, then there is absolutely nothing illegal about publishing it.
Ummm, it wouldn't be a violation of secrecy regulations, but it isn't just a plain old piece of paper that you can pass around to anyone you might want to. Internal work product of the FBI, not just Comey's little memo to himself about what his wife wants him to pick up on the way home.
And if Comey truly thought it was perfectly acceptable to leak this information, why didn't he call the NYT himself, instead of trying to distance himself from the issue by using his friend?
Athought for all the people who want to complain that Trump was "obstructing justice": if Trump wanted to make the investigation go away, he could have done so in the same way every President prior to him could make investigations go away. Think about it for a minute and maybe you'll figure out what I'm referring to. It's something that is explicitly granted to him in the Constitution.
To get around that, they'd simply record the fact that you are gate checking something and the boarding pass reader would have yet another reason to beep when you went through. "Are you ok in an exit row, and where's the gate-check computer you went through security with?"
And then you'd just go through into the bathroom while waiting to board, remove the explosives from the hacked computer, gate-check the shell, and carry your bomb on board with you.
Here's the real issue. What happens to all the people who use electronic boarding passes when they have to check their boarding pass before going through security?
Jets can't recover from sudden depressurization via gaping hole in the cabin.
Have you seen pictures of Aloha 243? That seems like it would fit anyone's definition of "a gaping hole", and there was just one fatality in that incident. And the aircraft landed.
If revealing top-secret information can "harm political enemies," isn't that exactly what whistle-blowing is for?
I'm sorry, but that question truly is stupid.
If it does, it's because the person whom it would harm did something wrong.
You have a very limited view of what constitutes harm. Here's a simple example: the leader of the free world (President of the US in case you missed the reference) is in the middle of negotiation with another county on some treaty matter that you happen to oppose. The discussions are secret so that all parties can speak openly and frankly about their concerns. The location of the next round of discussions is secret to protect the safety of the participants. YOU leak the information because you oppose the President's position and want the treaty to fail. Who did the wrong thing, and who exposed secret information to harm a political opponent? Then try to cloak your action as "whistleblowing" and see how well that works.
A report that states people were spear phished by a foreign government is nearly a daily event for many of us,
This. Oh, so much this.
All the people trying to excuse Winner because she was exposing US government wrongdoing have yet to explain how a document discussing RUSSIAN spear phishing of public election officials is US government wrongdoing. Is it because the Russians allegedly hacked a voting machine company database? Sorry, but the email addresses of many elections officials are publicly available from their own election's department websites. I don't have to hack anything to find out the email address of my local election official, I just go to the county website and there it is.
For those who cry "1st Amendment", the 1st does not protect you from consequences.
It also does not protect you when you are reproducing someone elses speech (copyright, e.g.), or when you are part of the government and have signed agreements not to reveal the speech that you receive (NDA, e.g).
So, if telling a foreign government that we have intel about a common enemy that suggests an increased likelyhood of a certain kind of terrorist attack is treason, why is this not the same? Consider both that the likelyhood of a certain kind of attack was being broadcast every day by the news media when they reported on increasing limits on carry-on electronics, and that spear phishing attacks by Russians are well-known and resulted in the public disgrace of a certain DNC official when he handed over his email credentials after getting one.
Whether or not material *is* classified is irrelevant - what matters is if it *should* be classified.
Nonsense. It is not the job of every NSA contractor to make decisions about the classification level of the material they have access to. What you are saying, in effect, is that every person who handles a piece of classified material has the authority to declassify it if they want to. Really? I worked in a government comm center that sometimes handled top secret material. Was I authorized to declassify and disseminate that information if I felt like it was inappropriately classified?
He is right. Snowden is not a disinterested party, but he is still right.
Actually, he is quite wrong, starting with his initial representation of the matter.
"Winner is accused of serving as a journalistic source for a leading American news outlet about a matter of critical public importance. For this act, she has been charged with violating the Espionage Act..."
No. She was not charged with espionage for being a journalistic source, she was charged with espionage for releasing classified material. She could have been a journalistic source all day every day for ten years and been untouched by the Espionage Act, if she had not deliberately mishandled classified material. That, and not "acting as a journalistic source", is the act for which she is charged.
The problem with the excuse that it was "inappropriately classified" is that Winner did not have the authority to reclassify it, and did not have the background necessary to know if it was properly classified or not.
What is it these days? Some people cry "treason" when an authorized representative of the US government tells another government intel about a common enemy, and excuses when an unauthorized flunky releases actual classified material.
Well, you can win any argument if you get to redefine the words other people are using. I made it clear what my definitions were, so at best you're just making an unrelated point.
No. I read your "definition" that tried to claim that there were inclusive safe spaces, and that's specifically what I replied to. Your "first sense" inclusive safe space truly is not. It is as exclusive as any other "safe space". Here's how you defined it:
The first sense is inclusive: it's about minority or disparaged groups being free from intimidation or threats of violence in a community.
Being "free from intimidation or threats of violence" requires excluding those who they fear from their "safe space". This exclusion applies not only to people who are true threats because they intend violence, it includes stereotypes that they see as oppressors. When you have a "safe space" for women's issues, you must exclude men simply because they are "oppressors" no matter what their actual views or actions are. If you need to create "safe space" when a conservative speaker comes to campus and the ideas he expresses are "threatening", you must, by default, exclude anyone who is or may be supportive of those ideas, too.
As for the reasonable person standard, it is a long-established legal concept in the United States which you clearly don't understand
I understand very well the "reasonable man" standard in law. Unfortunately for your arguments, such "reasonable man" standards are not used by those who seek "safe space" from anything that disagrees with them. They adopt a personal "reasonable man" standard, to the point that their opinion is "reasonable" and everything else is not. That's the exclusionary principle of "safe space" in action yet again.
I will point again to the example of "safe space" that our campus demonstrated not long ago. A night was set aside for minority concerns on campus, because a few idiots had misbehaved and the University was falling on their sword taking responsibility for the acts of presumed adults. A white male walked to the microphone and expressed his support and concern for the issues of the night. The next day, he was being excoriated in the school paper and on campus for daring to invade the space that belonged to the minorities. It was a "public space" that was not open to the public in reality. His opinion was irrelevant; his lack of threatening opinions was irrelevant. He should have been excluded from speaking because of what he was, not what he thought. That's your idea of "inclusive" safe spaces in action in real life.
You can talk about "safe spaces" in the context of the legal "reasonable man" and "inclusion", but the real world implementation of such spaces does not match your definition. It is not my definition that is at odds with reality, and if you choose to use your personal definition then it is you that is talking about fictional situations. "Safe space" always requires exclusion and never allows true inclusivity. This is true even if your "space" is a nebulous "public speech" arena. You cannot remove the "threats" from a public space without excluding parts of the public, which turns them into a private space.
ISPs are able to selectively throttle Internet traffic to/from certain websites because they enjoy a government-granted monopoly.
Not in the US. Where do you live that this happens? (Yes, I am once again pointing out that the government-granted CABLE monopolies that no longer exist do not apply to ISP service and never have. Please stop spreading this misinformation.)
(while both vehicles fall into the same class and go the same distance) , that's what people are up in arms about.
And yet, that isn't what often happens. Netflix traffic crosses at least one border gateway into Comcast's network; Comcast's video services use a non-Internet delivery system and are almost always delivered from the local headend, for example. Very different distances and classes. T-Mobile's zero-rated video streaming is done at 480p and uses a lot less bandwidth than arbitrary video streaming from a non-participating content provider. Different.
In any case, the statement I replied to was that we cannot charge Bob and Larry differently. Yes, we can. It happens every minute of every day all over the planet.
I am cool with anyone making a private safe space, so long as they don't try to extend the rules of their private space to public safe spaces.
There is no such thing as a "public safe space" and no such thing as an inclusive safe space. Safe spaces are by design places where certain thoughts and their thinkers (and through stereotyping, people who are expected to think such things) are excluded. It is an environment of exclusion. It is most obvious when dealing with women's issues' safe spaces, where being a man automatically disqualifies one from participating. Or any of the "cultural centers" on college campuses which serve as "safe spaces" for minorities.
I draw the line at intimidation -- things a reasonable person would find threatening.
Thus "exclusion" based on an interpretation of "reasonable" that would define anyone who thinks certain things as "unreasonable". A "reasonable person" thinks X, therefore thinking not-X is not-reasonable. How dare you think not-X?
If someone can maintain a hateful opinion
"Hateful opinion" defined by whom? To some, any opinion that they deem "unreasonable" (see above) is "hateful".
Those terms have become useless buzzwords through mis- and over-use.
Most real-world "random" events are not "random", but are "normal".
And when you are doing a clinical trial on some potential new drug, your test population is never "random" or "normal". It is selected for the disease or condition that you are trying to fix. It will not be unusual for 100% of test population to have a BMI of 50 when you're testing a new diet drug for significantly overweight people, for example. The fact that a very large proportion of those same people will also have high blood pressure and high cholesterol is not unusual, it is to be expected. And oh, my, an unusual percentage of them also have diabetes.
In fact, if you find a drug trial that IS completely random in baseline characteristics, THAT would be the fraud.
Mozilla, for example, will change what users see on their screens when they open a new browser window.
I get tired of Google popping up the notice that I can make Google my default search engine (when it already is) and I can make Google my home page (which it will never be.) Imagine if Mozilla somehow hijacks the "about:blank" home page I have configured so I start seeing crap from Mozilla.org instead of a blank page.
Oh, wait, Firefox ALREADY ignores my home page setting on a regular basis, depositing me at a CentOS welcome, even after being configured to a blank home. And when you first start it up, it automatically runs home to momma and reports the installation details before you have any option of telling it not to.
What you cannot do is charge more to Bob than Larry to drive over that toll road.
Really? Bob, who drives an 18-wheeler, always pays more to drive on the local toll roads than does Larry, who drives a motorcycle. Kind of like being charged more for more bandwidth.
Certainly they don't want to pay more for electricity depending on its use...
I don't disagree with anything you said, but wanted to lend some more data to your viewpoint. Here, we DO pay more for electricity depending on its use
And here we actually pay more for electricity depending on its SOURCE. We have the option of signing up for "green energy" from a couple of different companies, both of which cost more than the electricity from the normal hydro-based electric company. Nobody I know of complains about this as being a lack of "electric neutrality", even though there is a very strong incentive to buy the electrons from the power company and not from the specialized "content" sources.
My parents also paid different amounts for electricity based on the use, for a residence. They had two meters. One for the mains, one for the power that went to the electric heat. Electric heat electrons cost less than TV electrons.
So the problem is that you went and assumed that I'd conceded that Harvard had really changed anything.
I haven't assumed you conceded anything. I know they changed something, and that's not much in doubt. What you think, well, going from "didn't do that before" to "did it today" is a change, and the direction of the slope, if not the actual value, can easily be determined from two data points. You said you can't do that, but math says you can.
you'd assume that I'd have several thousand wives by now.
You're probably one of those people who tries to draw a continuous function through a set of integer measurements. If only the "number of wives" could legally increase from "one", then such an extrapolation on your marriage status might be reasonable. We would, of course, have data points from each day of your life prior to your wedding day. Assuming you didn't get married the day after you were born, we'd have many many data points. If you did manage to get married on day 2 of your life, then perhaps "thousands" would not be an inaccurate extrapolation? As it stands, if you got married at 20, then by 40 you would have married twice. To get to "thousands of wives" you'd need to live more than 20,000 years.
However, the direction of the slope is the question, and even in your case the slope becomes positive as soon as you marry once. We can tell the direction of the slope, if not the final value it will have at your death, from two data points, just as we can tell the direction of the "slippery slope" of Harvard admission from two data points.
Perhaps I confused you by referring to 'm' instead of 'the sign of m' which was what was really the question.
Math is hard, isn't it?
The question was "Who gets to define what an "asshole" is?" which is a proxy for "Who gets to decide who is worthy of disassociation?".
No. The statement I replied to, which I quoted in my reply so that there would be no question what I was replying to, was:
If a private institution is deciding whether ot not to do business with a client (e.g. a food vendor, a student/customer, etc), then they get to decide
Whether or not to do business with a client.
They are not eliminated from public discourse.
The context of "public discourse" is "on the Harvard campus and community".
At the most extreme, they are eliminated from Harvard, but probably not even close to that.
Oh, please. You know better than that. If you're a Harvard student and you know that Harvard is yanking acceptance from anyone who says something offensive, then what is the likelyhood you are going to try to say anything offensive? You've got a lot of money invested in going to Harvard, are you going to risk being expelled for exercising your right to free speech? Come on.
It doesn't even require this specific instance to know there is a chilling effect. There are too many other cases of the ton of bricks University falling down on people who say the wrong things on campus for anyone to think that this example won't be a warning to existing Harvard students. We had a student on campus here get up and speak at a campus student meeting on minority issues, and he was excoriated in public and felt the need to fall on his sword apologizing just so he could continue here. What was the awful think he said? Nothing at all. He was supportive of the issues being discussed, but he wasn't one of the minorities the night was intended to highlight so he had no right to speak.
If I were running Harvard, I would simply want a better sort of person attending my university in that now rejected person's place.
Who better to educate than the ignorant, especially for an institution of higher learning?
I don't see them lobbying against the first amendment.
Why should they? It doesn't apply to them.
Of course it does. It applies to everyone in the United States.
No, the first amendment is specific in limiting what the government can do. I am not the government. You've already said that Harvard has the right to do what it did because Harvard is not the government, which means you think it does not apply to them. Why would Harvard rally to rescind the first amendment when it does not apply to them?
Sure, you can also hear opposing views from people outside of Harvard.
There is a difference between what appears on campus in front of the student body in the campus environment and what students actively seek by going off campus.
You might have noticed that I never accused you of denying Harvard's right to do this.
You felt compelled to tell me that you were defending the right of Harvard to do this, as if I was somehow not defending the right of Harvard to do this. If you thought I agreed, why are you arguing with me about it?
A university's job is not just to throw every point of view good, bad, smart, dumb, nice, mean, etc at their students.
Non sequitor. This is not a case of the University speaking, it is a case of the University acting against already-accepted incoming students for the students' speech. A University that allows their students to make offensive comments is not "throwing" anything at their students.
The comments that were made are not even original.
So protections should apply only to original comments and not to anything that is a repeat of something else? We don't know what the comments were, at l
On the other hand, you can't tell the direction of the slope from a single data point.
Interesting argument. It isn't a slippery slope, now it is but we can't tell which way the slope is going.
We have at least two data points. A year ago Harvard didn't do this. Today they did. Two points define a line, and 'm' can be trivially determined from those two points.
If I'm paying to go to Harvard I don't want to have to spend my time contending with these kinds of shitbags.
Exactly. If I'm paying for a degree from Harvard, I should not have to spend my time dealing with anything I don't agree with or anything I find offensive. I will happily allow Harvard to determine what can and cannot be said on campus because it will save me a lot of time learning what I don't want to hear and why I disagree with anything I don't want to agree with. "In loco parentis" means exactly that. Mummy and Daddy had parental filtering on the TV and computer when I lived at home; Harvard is remiss if they do not continue that service.
And when I graduate, I expect my employer to do the same thing on my behalf, and my government to deal with offensive things outside my workplace.
I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express.
You should forget what you heard as well as where you heard it. Nobody is defending the concepts contained in the offensive speech by claiming the right to free speech, they are defending the right of the people who produce offensive speech -- whatever the contents -- by defending the idea of free speech. You need to learn to differentiate the two concepts.
Perhaps if major universities weren't so quick to stifle offensive speech whenever they can the students might get better at identifying truly offensive ideas and learn how to differentiate between the ideas themselves and the right of a free people to express them.
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By that logic there is freedom of murder as well.
No, because there are conspiracy or attempted laws which do not apply to speech.
Pilot error is one of the most common reasons for crashes.
Pilot error is one of the most common results from NTSB investigations, but that doesn't mean pilot error was actually the cause. PE is what the NTSB hangs things on unless they can find good evidence of something else -- because the manufacturers of any hardware or software blamed for a crash have lawyers who make good money defending them, while the dead pilot cannot pay anyone to defend him.
"Leaking" the contents of an unclassified memo that you wrote is no different that simply calling the press and saying "Hey, I had a private conversation with Trump about xyz".
Right. When it's the content of a private meeting between the chief of the executive branch and the chief law enforcement officer, it's BUSINESS, not PERSONAL, and it is not Comey's memo to release.
It just carries a bit more weight when it is written up and dated appropriately.
It carries no more weight. Anyone can write a "memo" and put a "date" on it and have it say whatever he wants it to. I could have a memo here that says clong83 told me he was the mastermind behind the assassination of JFK, and it has a date just a week after that shooting took place. Does it carry any more weight than my just saying that you told me that? Of course not.
If you aren't divulging classified info, then there is absolutely nothing illegal about publishing it.
Ummm, it wouldn't be a violation of secrecy regulations, but it isn't just a plain old piece of paper that you can pass around to anyone you might want to. Internal work product of the FBI, not just Comey's little memo to himself about what his wife wants him to pick up on the way home.
And if Comey truly thought it was perfectly acceptable to leak this information, why didn't he call the NYT himself, instead of trying to distance himself from the issue by using his friend?
Athought for all the people who want to complain that Trump was "obstructing justice": if Trump wanted to make the investigation go away, he could have done so in the same way every President prior to him could make investigations go away. Think about it for a minute and maybe you'll figure out what I'm referring to. It's something that is explicitly granted to him in the Constitution.
And then you'd just go through into the bathroom while waiting to board, remove the explosives from the hacked computer, gate-check the shell, and carry your bomb on board with you.
Here's the real issue. What happens to all the people who use electronic boarding passes when they have to check their boarding pass before going through security?
Jets can't recover from sudden depressurization via gaping hole in the cabin.
Have you seen pictures of Aloha 243? That seems like it would fit anyone's definition of "a gaping hole", and there was just one fatality in that incident. And the aircraft landed.
If revealing top-secret information can "harm political enemies," isn't that exactly what whistle-blowing is for?
I'm sorry, but that question truly is stupid.
If it does, it's because the person whom it would harm did something wrong.
You have a very limited view of what constitutes harm. Here's a simple example: the leader of the free world (President of the US in case you missed the reference) is in the middle of negotiation with another county on some treaty matter that you happen to oppose. The discussions are secret so that all parties can speak openly and frankly about their concerns. The location of the next round of discussions is secret to protect the safety of the participants. YOU leak the information because you oppose the President's position and want the treaty to fail. Who did the wrong thing, and who exposed secret information to harm a political opponent? Then try to cloak your action as "whistleblowing" and see how well that works.
A report that states people were spear phished by a foreign government is nearly a daily event for many of us,
This. Oh, so much this.
All the people trying to excuse Winner because she was exposing US government wrongdoing have yet to explain how a document discussing RUSSIAN spear phishing of public election officials is US government wrongdoing. Is it because the Russians allegedly hacked a voting machine company database? Sorry, but the email addresses of many elections officials are publicly available from their own election's department websites. I don't have to hack anything to find out the email address of my local election official, I just go to the county website and there it is.
For those who cry "1st Amendment", the 1st does not protect you from consequences.
It also does not protect you when you are reproducing someone elses speech (copyright, e.g.), or when you are part of the government and have signed agreements not to reveal the speech that you receive (NDA, e.g).
So, if telling a foreign government that we have intel about a common enemy that suggests an increased likelyhood of a certain kind of terrorist attack is treason, why is this not the same? Consider both that the likelyhood of a certain kind of attack was being broadcast every day by the news media when they reported on increasing limits on carry-on electronics, and that spear phishing attacks by Russians are well-known and resulted in the public disgrace of a certain DNC official when he handed over his email credentials after getting one.
Whether or not material *is* classified is irrelevant - what matters is if it *should* be classified.
Nonsense. It is not the job of every NSA contractor to make decisions about the classification level of the material they have access to. What you are saying, in effect, is that every person who handles a piece of classified material has the authority to declassify it if they want to. Really? I worked in a government comm center that sometimes handled top secret material. Was I authorized to declassify and disseminate that information if I felt like it was inappropriately classified?
He is right. Snowden is not a disinterested party, but he is still right.
Actually, he is quite wrong, starting with his initial representation of the matter.
No. She was not charged with espionage for being a journalistic source, she was charged with espionage for releasing classified material. She could have been a journalistic source all day every day for ten years and been untouched by the Espionage Act, if she had not deliberately mishandled classified material. That, and not "acting as a journalistic source", is the act for which she is charged.
The problem with the excuse that it was "inappropriately classified" is that Winner did not have the authority to reclassify it, and did not have the background necessary to know if it was properly classified or not.
What is it these days? Some people cry "treason" when an authorized representative of the US government tells another government intel about a common enemy, and excuses when an unauthorized flunky releases actual classified material.
Packets are all the same size (MTU/MSS) when the traverse a carrier's network.
No, they aren't.
Well, you can win any argument if you get to redefine the words other people are using. I made it clear what my definitions were, so at best you're just making an unrelated point.
No. I read your "definition" that tried to claim that there were inclusive safe spaces, and that's specifically what I replied to. Your "first sense" inclusive safe space truly is not. It is as exclusive as any other "safe space". Here's how you defined it:
The first sense is inclusive: it's about minority or disparaged groups being free from intimidation or threats of violence in a community.
Being "free from intimidation or threats of violence" requires excluding those who they fear from their "safe space". This exclusion applies not only to people who are true threats because they intend violence, it includes stereotypes that they see as oppressors. When you have a "safe space" for women's issues, you must exclude men simply because they are "oppressors" no matter what their actual views or actions are. If you need to create "safe space" when a conservative speaker comes to campus and the ideas he expresses are "threatening", you must, by default, exclude anyone who is or may be supportive of those ideas, too.
As for the reasonable person standard, it is a long-established legal concept in the United States which you clearly don't understand
I understand very well the "reasonable man" standard in law. Unfortunately for your arguments, such "reasonable man" standards are not used by those who seek "safe space" from anything that disagrees with them. They adopt a personal "reasonable man" standard, to the point that their opinion is "reasonable" and everything else is not. That's the exclusionary principle of "safe space" in action yet again.
I will point again to the example of "safe space" that our campus demonstrated not long ago. A night was set aside for minority concerns on campus, because a few idiots had misbehaved and the University was falling on their sword taking responsibility for the acts of presumed adults. A white male walked to the microphone and expressed his support and concern for the issues of the night. The next day, he was being excoriated in the school paper and on campus for daring to invade the space that belonged to the minorities. It was a "public space" that was not open to the public in reality. His opinion was irrelevant; his lack of threatening opinions was irrelevant. He should have been excluded from speaking because of what he was, not what he thought. That's your idea of "inclusive" safe spaces in action in real life.
You can talk about "safe spaces" in the context of the legal "reasonable man" and "inclusion", but the real world implementation of such spaces does not match your definition. It is not my definition that is at odds with reality, and if you choose to use your personal definition then it is you that is talking about fictional situations. "Safe space" always requires exclusion and never allows true inclusivity. This is true even if your "space" is a nebulous "public speech" arena. You cannot remove the "threats" from a public space without excluding parts of the public, which turns them into a private space.
ISPs are able to selectively throttle Internet traffic to/from certain websites because they enjoy a government-granted monopoly.
Not in the US. Where do you live that this happens? (Yes, I am once again pointing out that the government-granted CABLE monopolies that no longer exist do not apply to ISP service and never have. Please stop spreading this misinformation.)
(while both vehicles fall into the same class and go the same distance) , that's what people are up in arms about.
And yet, that isn't what often happens. Netflix traffic crosses at least one border gateway into Comcast's network; Comcast's video services use a non-Internet delivery system and are almost always delivered from the local headend, for example. Very different distances and classes. T-Mobile's zero-rated video streaming is done at 480p and uses a lot less bandwidth than arbitrary video streaming from a non-participating content provider. Different.
In any case, the statement I replied to was that we cannot charge Bob and Larry differently. Yes, we can. It happens every minute of every day all over the planet.
I am cool with anyone making a private safe space, so long as they don't try to extend the rules of their private space to public safe spaces.
There is no such thing as a "public safe space" and no such thing as an inclusive safe space. Safe spaces are by design places where certain thoughts and their thinkers (and through stereotyping, people who are expected to think such things) are excluded. It is an environment of exclusion. It is most obvious when dealing with women's issues' safe spaces, where being a man automatically disqualifies one from participating. Or any of the "cultural centers" on college campuses which serve as "safe spaces" for minorities.
I draw the line at intimidation -- things a reasonable person would find threatening.
Thus "exclusion" based on an interpretation of "reasonable" that would define anyone who thinks certain things as "unreasonable". A "reasonable person" thinks X, therefore thinking not-X is not-reasonable. How dare you think not-X?
If someone can maintain a hateful opinion
"Hateful opinion" defined by whom? To some, any opinion that they deem "unreasonable" (see above) is "hateful".
Those terms have become useless buzzwords through mis- and over-use.
Most real-world "random" events are not "random", but are "normal".
And when you are doing a clinical trial on some potential new drug, your test population is never "random" or "normal". It is selected for the disease or condition that you are trying to fix. It will not be unusual for 100% of test population to have a BMI of 50 when you're testing a new diet drug for significantly overweight people, for example. The fact that a very large proportion of those same people will also have high blood pressure and high cholesterol is not unusual, it is to be expected. And oh, my, an unusual percentage of them also have diabetes.
In fact, if you find a drug trial that IS completely random in baseline characteristics, THAT would be the fraud.
Mozilla, for example, will change what users see on their screens when they open a new browser window.
I get tired of Google popping up the notice that I can make Google my default search engine (when it already is) and I can make Google my home page (which it will never be.) Imagine if Mozilla somehow hijacks the "about:blank" home page I have configured so I start seeing crap from Mozilla.org instead of a blank page.
Oh, wait, Firefox ALREADY ignores my home page setting on a regular basis, depositing me at a CentOS welcome, even after being configured to a blank home. And when you first start it up, it automatically runs home to momma and reports the installation details before you have any option of telling it not to.
What you cannot do is charge more to Bob than Larry to drive over that toll road.
Really? Bob, who drives an 18-wheeler, always pays more to drive on the local toll roads than does Larry, who drives a motorcycle. Kind of like being charged more for more bandwidth.
Certainly they don't want to pay more for electricity depending on its use...
I don't disagree with anything you said, but wanted to lend some more data to your viewpoint. Here, we DO pay more for electricity depending on its use
And here we actually pay more for electricity depending on its SOURCE. We have the option of signing up for "green energy" from a couple of different companies, both of which cost more than the electricity from the normal hydro-based electric company. Nobody I know of complains about this as being a lack of "electric neutrality", even though there is a very strong incentive to buy the electrons from the power company and not from the specialized "content" sources.
My parents also paid different amounts for electricity based on the use, for a residence. They had two meters. One for the mains, one for the power that went to the electric heat. Electric heat electrons cost less than TV electrons.
Then I think it's perfectly fine for certain voices to be excluded from *that* public discourse. ... Sometimes chilling effects are a good thing.
In this context, then, we have nothing else to talk about.
So the problem is that you went and assumed that I'd conceded that Harvard had really changed anything.
I haven't assumed you conceded anything. I know they changed something, and that's not much in doubt. What you think, well, going from "didn't do that before" to "did it today" is a change, and the direction of the slope, if not the actual value, can easily be determined from two data points. You said you can't do that, but math says you can.
you'd assume that I'd have several thousand wives by now.
You're probably one of those people who tries to draw a continuous function through a set of integer measurements. If only the "number of wives" could legally increase from "one", then such an extrapolation on your marriage status might be reasonable. We would, of course, have data points from each day of your life prior to your wedding day. Assuming you didn't get married the day after you were born, we'd have many many data points. If you did manage to get married on day 2 of your life, then perhaps "thousands" would not be an inaccurate extrapolation? As it stands, if you got married at 20, then by 40 you would have married twice. To get to "thousands of wives" you'd need to live more than 20,000 years.
However, the direction of the slope is the question, and even in your case the slope becomes positive as soon as you marry once. We can tell the direction of the slope, if not the final value it will have at your death, from two data points, just as we can tell the direction of the "slippery slope" of Harvard admission from two data points.
Perhaps I confused you by referring to 'm' instead of 'the sign of m' which was what was really the question. Math is hard, isn't it?
The question was "Who gets to define what an "asshole" is?" which is a proxy for "Who gets to decide who is worthy of disassociation?".
No. The statement I replied to, which I quoted in my reply so that there would be no question what I was replying to, was:
If a private institution is deciding whether ot not to do business with a client (e.g. a food vendor, a student/customer, etc), then they get to decide
Whether or not to do business with a client.
They are not eliminated from public discourse.
The context of "public discourse" is "on the Harvard campus and community".
At the most extreme, they are eliminated from Harvard, but probably not even close to that.
Oh, please. You know better than that. If you're a Harvard student and you know that Harvard is yanking acceptance from anyone who says something offensive, then what is the likelyhood you are going to try to say anything offensive? You've got a lot of money invested in going to Harvard, are you going to risk being expelled for exercising your right to free speech? Come on.
It doesn't even require this specific instance to know there is a chilling effect. There are too many other cases of the ton of bricks University falling down on people who say the wrong things on campus for anyone to think that this example won't be a warning to existing Harvard students. We had a student on campus here get up and speak at a campus student meeting on minority issues, and he was excoriated in public and felt the need to fall on his sword apologizing just so he could continue here. What was the awful think he said? Nothing at all. He was supportive of the issues being discussed, but he wasn't one of the minorities the night was intended to highlight so he had no right to speak.
If I were running Harvard, I would simply want a better sort of person attending my university in that now rejected person's place.
Who better to educate than the ignorant, especially for an institution of higher learning?
I don't see them lobbying against the first amendment.
Why should they? It doesn't apply to them.
Of course it does. It applies to everyone in the United States.
No, the first amendment is specific in limiting what the government can do. I am not the government. You've already said that Harvard has the right to do what it did because Harvard is not the government, which means you think it does not apply to them. Why would Harvard rally to rescind the first amendment when it does not apply to them?
Sure, you can also hear opposing views from people outside of Harvard.
There is a difference between what appears on campus in front of the student body in the campus environment and what students actively seek by going off campus.
You might have noticed that I never accused you of denying Harvard's right to do this.
You felt compelled to tell me that you were defending the right of Harvard to do this, as if I was somehow not defending the right of Harvard to do this. If you thought I agreed, why are you arguing with me about it?
A university's job is not just to throw every point of view good, bad, smart, dumb, nice, mean, etc at their students.
Non sequitor. This is not a case of the University speaking, it is a case of the University acting against already-accepted incoming students for the students' speech. A University that allows their students to make offensive comments is not "throwing" anything at their students.
The comments that were made are not even original.
So protections should apply only to original comments and not to anything that is a repeat of something else? We don't know what the comments were, at l
On the other hand, you can't tell the direction of the slope from a single data point.
Interesting argument. It isn't a slippery slope, now it is but we can't tell which way the slope is going.
We have at least two data points. A year ago Harvard didn't do this. Today they did. Two points define a line, and 'm' can be trivially determined from those two points.
If I'm paying to go to Harvard I don't want to have to spend my time contending with these kinds of shitbags.
Exactly. If I'm paying for a degree from Harvard, I should not have to spend my time dealing with anything I don't agree with or anything I find offensive. I will happily allow Harvard to determine what can and cannot be said on campus because it will save me a lot of time learning what I don't want to hear and why I disagree with anything I don't want to agree with. "In loco parentis" means exactly that. Mummy and Daddy had parental filtering on the TV and computer when I lived at home; Harvard is remiss if they do not continue that service.
And when I graduate, I expect my employer to do the same thing on my behalf, and my government to deal with offensive things outside my workplace.
I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express.
You should forget what you heard as well as where you heard it. Nobody is defending the concepts contained in the offensive speech by claiming the right to free speech, they are defending the right of the people who produce offensive speech -- whatever the contents -- by defending the idea of free speech. You need to learn to differentiate the two concepts.
Perhaps if major universities weren't so quick to stifle offensive speech whenever they can the students might get better at identifying truly offensive ideas and learn how to differentiate between the ideas themselves and the right of a free people to express them.