I think you have to keep in mind what getting unreasonable would look like in this country. We aren't only talking about regulating here, we'd be creating a new series of criminal offenses and incarcerating even more people. I see no reason to think that repeal of the 2nd Amendment and replacement with a large number of new criminal offenses wouldn't play itself out along the same class and racial lines our current criminal justice system does, replete with violence and new reasons to curb civil liberties.

The types of gun control proposals out there I think put far too much faith in well-meaning legislation and take too little consideration of what law enforcement actually looks like in America. In addition to putting the guy on the corner of the ghetto who sells weed because there arent many other options in jail we'd now be adding the single mother who keeps a firearm in her nightstand because she lives in a bad part of town where the cops won't come, even if they're called. Much like prohibition if drugs we're trying to treat the symptom (gun violence) instead of the cause (generational poverty and economic exclusion).

I will say I'd be open to certain new regulations (I am a firearm owner) but I think that the gun control crowd is largely arguing in bad faith. It makes it very hard to compromise.

The probation report I think is the big missing fact in the discussions I've seen of the case. The sentence was consistent with that recommendation which, as I understand it, was based at least in some part on statements made by the victim during her interview which seemed to oppose substantial jail time.

I still see plenty of room to disagree with the sentence and criticize the arbitrariness of the system but it provides important context for why the judge sentenced the way he did.

Changing the subject is exactly the point of the accusation. You don't even need to be an anti-Zionist to wonder why it's in the interest of American citizens for our government to give cover for Israel's construction projects in the West Bank.

I think that sentiment is well intentioned and see utility in it to a point. It'd be impossible to try to address the racial disparities in this country without listening to the people who are most often victims of them. However youre also assuming that black people arent just as capable as everyone else of holding irrational fears or other misconceptions about where threats lie.

You're absolutely right about where they got it from. Whenever this topic comes up, as frustrating as I find the college kids themselves, I think the real culprits are the people who raised them to be both so afraid and so narcissistic. The administrators who cater to it are just doing what all the other authority figures in their lives have always done.

Maybe it's just those memories of seeing self proclaimed members of the KKK brawling it out on Jerry Springer back in the 90s but I had a similar reaction to the IU story. Given the reality of what the Klan is now I struggle to see how anyone could see those few remaining adherents as anything other than absurd.

I don't endorse any conspiracy theories either but I do think this idea of learned helplessness doesn't serve anyone well except those with power. Why people who claim to speak for the marginalized are so eager to play into narratives of fear and danger is baffling to me.

I'm sure they'll start policing their side for anti-semitism the same day the Israel can do no wrong side starts policing their own for making spurious accusations of anti-semitism to stifle legitimate policy debate. That is to say, never.

I actually think that, absent a major and unforeseen shift in how America views it's relationship with Israel, this will not hurt either Cuomo or Schumer much politically (if at all) on any stage.

I can certainly see why that would alienate people, and I agree that endorsing anti-semitic conspiracy theories rightly undermines the credibility of any organization. That said, and I hate to play the BSDI card, but I do think there is a quickness from the establishment and pro-Israeli colonization/annexation crowd (do not read this as Jews, I just mean mainstream politicians and media regardless of religion or ethnicity) to treat any questions about American policy towards Israel as anti-semitism which I think is similarly unhelpful. Of course its the latter who hold the cards in the media and mainstream political discourse and shape the debate for most citizens who, again, don't care that much, and therefore accept the status quo. Meanwhile we continue to provide military, economic, and political support to another Middle-Eastern country whose policies (like Saudi Arabia's and Egypt's) create instability and resentment that periodically manifests in blowback towards the United States.

I think it's less culture war and more establishment versus various left wing and libertarian groups who are largely outside of normal partisan allegiances. The vast majority of Americans I'd imagine don't know and/or care enough about the issue. That's really the only way I could see this backfiring on Cuomo, is if it makes more people take notice and realize how (trying to chose my words carefully) unhealthy our relationship is with Israel. More likely though I think it will just reinforce the self imposed restrictions our media and polity have on discussing the issue.

I think you're probably right that doing nothing may have been politically impossible but I think that point dodges the issue. I mean, where did bin Laden come from? Oh yea, that other civil war in the 80s where we fed weapons to a bunch of fanatics because they were the enemy of our enemy's friend (and ultimately our enemy himself). That intervention laid the seeds for our current intervention which with mission creep has become a 15 year long nation building project that the supposed beneficiaries of probably don't even want and is certainly going to fail.

At some point we have to break the chain and stop going in. Maybe that won't work out either or will come with other tough moral quandaries but let's not pretend that we've actually tried it and that such a position has any real establishment political support. Even Obama who was advertised as smarter than this has given God knows how many weapons to God knows who in Syria. When one of those people uses those weapons and training against Americans in some capacity will it be cause for another intervention? As always, it will be politically impossible not to intervene. And do it again and again and again.

I call BS on the equivocation of a preference for intervention with a preference for non intervention. Maybe that would make sense if we lived in a country that had largely stayed out of other people's business but it isn't. The history of post-war American foreign policy is messy interventions in simmering civil wars and messy ethnic disputes in the developing world. The morality of a given intervention may vary somewhat but the result has always been to set the stage for reprisals and mass killing by the victorious side. More often than not one intervention lays the seeds for the next crisis which naturally will require yet another intervention.

The Rwanda situation is an outlier only because we did not intervene. However, given the results in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan there is no reason to think that American military force would have resulted in a better long term outcome. Instead of this type of hand-wringing we should try to be more humble and grapple with the limitations of what military force can achieve, not stage a make-believe debate in the establishment press before sending in the war machines.

If people are really going to give up the value of a degree from Yale over something like this then I'd say they've lost perspective but that's of course their right. My answer to their argument is if you want to study, say, black literature, then take a black literature course. Maybe even major in African American Studies. If this was 30 or 40 years ago and that wasn't an option I would see your point but we now live in a world where programs focused on women and various minority groups are widely available. Overall I think that's a good thing.

What I don't think is a good thing is demanding that a traditional program be repurposed, not for pedagogical reasons, but to validate currently prevailing political views on campus. Like I said to Alan above, I don't think they're asking to be challenged or to expand the canon. If that were the case then I would be agreeing with them. What they're asking is for someone to tell them that everything they already know is true and that all information is presented through the lense of intersectionality, regardless of relevance. I mean, are we really at a point where we expect a class about literature written in a European language by Europeans in Europe to focus on non-European perspectives? I'm not saying there should never be a class on that subject but that's a different course than the one being discussed.

I've never said there aren't value judgments made, though I'm guessing most professors would come up with something a bit more convincing than 'it makes my white ass happy' if asked to justify the content of their courses.

Regarding quantifying harm, I don't believe the professors are the ones saying they're being harmed. If they were it would make sense to ask if that harm can be quantified but that's not what's going on here.

If someone is truly being harmed in some manner by taking a poetry class there are an abundance of ways to deal with that, starting with finding a different major more suited to them and their interests.

If that's the case then they should make that argument, not an argument about people suffering some intangible harm that can't be quantified.

I think we're largely in agreement. I guess I have trouble believing that there aren't plenty of classes with diverse viewpoints available for students. I was never anywhere close to ivy league material but when I was in college there were diversity credit requirements for graduation. Even students in more technical fields were required to take them.

I think it's always been a rhetorical tactic and my point is that it's one we should be skeptical of especially when it results in extra protection for some. Every group can come up with some reason they deserve extra protection under the law, merited or not, and that's the reason I oppose hate crime laws generally. They make the types of laws that are the subject of this post inevitable.

Regarding your examples I don't think victimization is the rationale behind most of the changes, even if people were victimized by previous public policy. The rationale is equality before the law, individual autonomy, and keeping the state from invading people's personal lives. Those are ideas I can get behind.

Well I defer to your expertise on the politics of math class (even typing that makes me shudder). It isn't something I have any kind of experience with or expertise on.

I agree that college should be challenging and force people to confront new ideas. Maybe I'm wrong but my contention here is that the students at Yale seem to be demanding exactly the opposite. They are demanding perspectives that reinforce ideas they already have about race, gender, and sexuality arising from a very particular political viewpoint. It isn't included in this instance but a regular refrain from movements of this sort isn't that they want a challenge, it's that they want validation.

Now my view is that all types of ideas should have a place at the university but I can't help but find the idea that minorities and women are being 'harmed' (the students' term) by starting off with the standard Western canon to be absurd. Even if its true, it is a contention that I think requires a lot of proving before being accepted.

What if the professors say 'look, we will get to numerous critiques of the traditional Western perspective but first students need to have a basic foundation of what that perspective is that they usually don't get here with.' My suspicion is that the students would not accept that answer, and while I'm rarely one to defer to authority, I bet the professors on the whole tend to know better about how to approach these topics than a bunch of people right out of high school.

I agree that it always has been. And that is precisely why we need to be circumspect about it when we set public policy.

Better off? Who knows. That analysis probably depends a lot on how precisely we want to define the powerless.

Continuing to keep a nice safe distance from any type of accountability though? Absolutely.

That's a substantial part if it and it's also what we get for couching so many political debates in the language of victim-hood instead of rationality. When being able to characterize oneself as a victim is a shortcut to power we shouldn't be surprised when the powerful start using it.

I appreciate the insight (no sarcasm intended) and i didn't mean to imply that there shouldn't be any engagement. That said I think it's very telling that you used math in your hypothetical as opposed to the liberal arts. As noted in the rest of the thread, math at the level the vast majority of people will ever learn it isn't subjective and certainly isn't political. It's learning processes and equations and how to apply them to different problems.

The way I read these sorts of demands isn't 'we don't want to read and discuss x dead white poet because we already understand it and want to work harder on what we don't understand.' The demand is 'x dead white poet does not reinforce my political opinions and therefore we should replace the reading with something that does.'

I think you're right that there are always value judgments being made when setting a curriculum. What I don't understand is why the students feel they're entitled to any say in that process. I majored in history for undergrad and I remember there was a particular class on modern Japanese history which I (unfortunately) had to drop for reasons related to my job.

That particular professor required a far heavier and more diverse array of reading assignments than any other upper level history course I took and would test on what, in my mind, were obscure points of the most peripheral material. To me this was a poor way to teach the subject but it never would have dawned on me to challenge her pedagogy or ask her to cater to my opinions about the content.

Though the complaints discussed in the article are painted as far left I think there is an even stronger element of narcissistic consumerism at play. If there is a pedagogical reason to alter the content of the specific courses then by all means the professors ought to have the ability to do it. But are changes related to fleeting political trends among a certain subset of the student body really consistent with successfully educating people? I'm just not so sure about that.

That would be considered a microaggression. Possibly a macroaggression depending on the size of the dictionary.

One that comes up often in my line of work are criminal statutes related to bribery and other kickbacks. In some jurisdictions wiretapping and similar interception of communication type activities can also be crimes regardless of intent. We can of course all debate the merits of those examples from a public policy perspective but it does happen.