That doesn't follow from what I said. And family members for better or worse have been on-limits since at least Billy Carter. And what did I say that led you to infer that I was admitting anything? Or is "basically" supposed to provide some kind of justification for what you said. Lastly, I was being descriptive. Slow down there, cowboy.
I'm sorry, Claudine Gay didn't just "criticize Israel", she testified before congress that calling for genocide against Jews was okay under the Harvard speech codes. I guess you could technically argue that she's just a hardcore free speech absolutist, but then you'd have to ignore literally everything else you know about Harvard's attitude towards controversial free speech.
Mostly just come on, we know she would never say that with another group. If someone with a track record of being a principled free speech supporter (like Scott) said the same thing I'd hear him out, but given Gay's track record...
I guess she might be okay with saying that about ex-colonial powers/European powers... :)
I am not saying she's intellectually honest. I am saying her position was not idiotic or automatically antisemitic. Basically, what Silverax said - she handled terribly but her answer is technically correct.
Yes, I agree that she herself likely doesn't care much about Jews one way or the other and is just appeasing the political blocs around her, and her antisemitism is just downstream of antisemitism being the net consensus of those blocks (some of which actively like it and most of which don't care either way).
Despite not being Jewish, I disagree with your position. Gay came out against hypothetical speech against specific groups earlier. That she places context around speech about Jews, but not around the same speech concerning other groups is the troubling part.
I believe we should allow contextual speech of all stripes: Nazis, Klansmen, etc. But to place a limit on the monsters is troubling, favoritism.
Agreed. If Gay had had a consistent history of treating apologists for Hamas and apologists for the KKK in the same way - either permitting both, in which case she could have claimed that free speech trumped other concerns, or banning both, in which case she could have claimed that maintaining civility trumped other concerns, then she would have been honorable. She was not.
I'm not happy with using the selective enforcement of plagiarism rules against her. Targeting reminds me too much of Cardinal Richelieu's "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." I prefer that laws and other rules either be uniformly enforced or repealed - though I recognize that this will never happen, and selective enforcement is something the powerful regularly use.
I agree her answer wasn't antisemitic, in the sense of expressing hate for Jews. But it wasn't just a misstep either. Her statements, compared to Harvard's usual stance on these topics, reveals that she *doesn't mind* antisemitism. At least, she doesn't mind it enough to act against students who really are antisemitic. That's not exactly antisemitism, but it's still very concerning and below the standard that I hold for leaders of our institutions.
If it depends on context, and you're testifying before Congress, and you don't say "it depends on context," that's perjury
You're acting like she wrote Harvard's code of conduct herself, or endorsed it, instead of accurately describing it when asked
I'm pretty sure she did ansolutely nothing wrong *in the specific moment you're referring to*. I am in no way a supporter of Gay. I'm actually immune to political bias here because I'm too dumb to understand how it all fits in the big picture and can only take individual claims on their individual merits. Yours seems to lack merit
"I'm pretty sure she did ansolutely nothing wrong *in the specific moment you're referring to*."
I disagree, but I'm not sure my position is coherent. I would appreciate a gut check if you have a moment:
The moment in congress was exactly where she errored. She as the president of Harvard represents the establishment. Her job is to beg money from the 0.001% to keep an institution that is 140 years older then the republic (for which I stand) rich. She's a sales-person; there's no shame in that, they are the folks who make the checks show up, but still that's her vocation.
The aforementioned establishment heard some things it didn't like coming from a college campus like direction. It then called three of it's officers to the mat and demanded an oath of fealty. Claudine didn't feel inclined to bow, whether out of pride or ignorance. So it became clear to the persons (committee?) that assigns / removes presidents at Harvard that Miss Gay is no longer capable of doing her job well.
QED she found herself moved to the Harvard equivalent of special projects; you know, same plush salary, same shiny lab, none of the responsibility to deliver. She even gets a pious martyrdom in trade for all the power she lost. Let us all bask in the knowledge that if you play your cards right sometimes the system hands out $878,000 a year for failure, wow, go Claudine!
As to the establishment hearing something it didn't like, yes the establishment is still very much committed to 1 the state of Israel's existence and 2 the idea that we ostracize people who won't kowtow to congress. The state of Israel is supported cynically now but it is supported. The US has many entanglements in the middle east but can't trust any of them to back us whenever we call like the Israelis will. If the Palestinians 1 had a leader who controlled them, 2 had the economic or military power to hold land and feed themselves and their army and 3 would honor deals made with said leader then, only then things might be different. But they don't, they can't, and they won't.
It does not matter how powerful the radical left gets or how loudly they yell things these are the facts. We ally with the partners that exist not the partners we would like to exist.
Now the hard part:
I hate the establishment. It tells me how to think and I must suffer this in silence or risk losing everything and leading a life in prison. But I do love to watch it eat it's own, I see Claudine Gay as deserving what she got because she forgot that to get the benefits of power she has to pay the price. I hate that the establishment wields it's terrible corrupt power but I love to see it cutting it's officers down when they step out of line. I understand what happened and why but I am troubled by being happy about a cynical hatchet job committed against a genocide agnostic sales woman. Everything here is sad... what do what do /holds head and starts rocking back and forth in corner....
I disagree with this reading that she refused to kiss the ring
She was not offered a ring to kiss. She was walked off a plank, and her options were to drown or be stabbed
Because the fact is that some students have called for genocide (in the eyes of many) but they have not, in fact, violated the code of conduct. If she says that they didn't call for genocide, everyone is angry. If she says they have but doesn't violate the code, everyone is angry. If she says they have called for genocide and it's not allowed, the next question is "why haven't you expelled them" and we're back at square one. If she tries to explain that it's nuanced and while calling for genocide certainly can violate the code, there may be instances where it wouldn't (which is exactly what she said), then nobody will listen and everyone will be angry (because that's exactly what happened).
Once the question was asked, the game was lost
Now, it's possible the backlash was deserved, in the grand scheme. I actually do not know how she responded to any of the other questions, I literally haven't seen the rest of the hearing and I know zero things about this person. I'm only referring to that one question
To say 'context' means that we can study say Nazis and Klansmen, and read their speeches without condoning their meaning. But Gay placed limits around studying the speech of select groups.
If students had recently called for genocide of Africans in a manner which factually did not violate the code of conduct, she'd have no choice
She can't expell all the students who call for genocide, many of them don't deserve expulsion or any discipline. She can't claim they haven't called for genocide, the people who interpret their words as calls for genocide would be incensed and call her an lying idiot. As long as those two facts are true, she can't claim that calls for genocide violate the code of conduct, she'd just get the obvious follow-up question and be back where she started
Now, maybe if it were Africans instead of Jews she would have been more forceful in explaining that the school doesn't approve of such things and they shouldn't be tolerated etc. Did she say those things forcefully in this hearing about Jews? I have no idea, I haven't seen it. If you have seen it and think she failed to support her Jewish students, say that. Make that claim if it's true. So far, we're only discussing the one piece of evidence, and it's bad evidence
Guys, c'mon, she literally said exactly that in the hearing. People are only pissed at her because Ackman and others straw-manned her position (insinuating that she didn't condemn genocide) and because most people have tyrannical hearts and want to see speech they don't like suppressed: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5097070/user-clip-claudine-gay-free-speech-hero
Academics and activists can and do say genocidal-sounding things about white people fairly often and get away with it.
The confusion or debate (whatever you want to call it) basically seems to revolve around the question: should the rules for what you can say about Jews be the rules applied to ‘marginalized groups’ (women, black people, gay people) which are very restrictive, or should they get the treatment given to oppressor/perpetrator groups (men, white people, most specific European ethnicities or nationalities) which permit a great deal of hostility.
Some people like myself would like a consistent etiquette that regards broad derogation of ethnic groups or nationalities to be in bad taste in general rather than based on some stratification of victim/oppressor groups, but I think this position isn’t the most popular one.
I mostly agree. An asterisk here about Jews specifically is that they kinda get the worst of both worlds: most white people (and most leftist activists are white) are at least sane enough to realize the problems with calling for violence against white people as a group since it includes them. But Jews are in the uncomfortable position of being (mostly) classified as an oppressor group but also being enough of a minority that you don't have a large class of people protecting them out of self interest.
The point is not that calling for genocide is OK. It's whether the speech is calling for genocide or not.
That was basically them setting her up for a gotcha where if she says "no", then they say she has to stop people from saying "from the river to the sea...".
They she should just have said, "Calling for genocide is always against Harvard's speech codes. Whether 'From the river to the sea...' counts as a call for genocide depends on the context in which it's said."
The river in the couplet is the Jordan River, Israel's western border. The sea is the Mediterranean Sea, Israel's eastern border. "Will be free" is not a call to freedom, but free of Jews. "From Israel's western border to Israel's eastern border, the territory will be Judenfrei" isn't as catchy, but conveys the same meaning.
It is, at minimum, a call for ethnic cleansing, if it is not a call for genocide.
Do you think every single person who has ever said "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" has meant "Palestinians will ethnically cleanse all Jews in Greater Israel"? That not one has meant, just for example, "There will be a singular liberal democratic state between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean, called Palestine, with people living there more-or-less being the same as right now"? I mean, do you ACTUALLY think that?
She does not want to take a position on "From the river to the sea," because she knows full well that if she says it either is or is not a call for genocide (in any circumstance), then pro-Israel partisans will accuse her of saying it's sometimes okay to get rid of Jews "from the river to the sea."
Do you think she would have had any trouble responding to the question "Is it ok to call for the genocide of Palestinians?"
And if she says "no" she doesn't have to stop people from speaking their mind. The only reason she couldn't answer that way is because they have stopped people from speaking their mind. It was a trap of her own making.
It is absolutely relevant and it's part of the "nuance" you are hanging your hat on. Seriously.
While it is unfortunate that the game today is played as "if you aren't against something you must be for it", but that is reality. This tack is used against conservatives with glee and regularity. A good example of that is when Trump said "There are good people on both sides." and that was reported as "Trump supports racism."
I disagree on the "nuance" issue. She twisted herself in knots trying to provide a non-answer because she knew an honest answer would bite her. It's a fairly easy question to answer: "Genocide is never ok, but free speech is always ok." The trouble is, if she would have provided that answer, she would have been called out on the obvious.
The problem is that there is nuance which might exist here, but any such nuance would be a lie coming from her.
This is just a matter of semantics. If there's nuance, but the nuance is a lie, does that count as having nuance? Maybe on a strictly logical level it would, but that's not what most people mean by "does it have nuance". It doesn't have truthful nuance. And the fact that she wouldn't say the same thing about calling to genocide Palestinians indicates that the nuance wouldn't be truthful.
I think I remember a CEO losing his job b/c he used the n word while trying to make the case that his employees should be sensitive and not use bad/taboo language.
So he used the taboo word as example and got (iirc) summarily fired? That's a case of context not being taken into account.
Pedantically, he didn't use the n word, he mentioned it. This was an obvious distinction to our wiser forebears like... ten years ago, and we've somehow lost it. (For another case, Donald McNeil at the Times.) Mentioning "from the river to the sea," as I did just now, is okay regardless of context.
Calling for genocide is okay. It's free speech. It's legal unless it's both intended to and likely to incite imminent lawlessness.
The problem is that Harvard couldn't say that, because Harvard knows it doesn't support free speech. It routinely punishes people for speech that falls squarely within 1A protections. It revoked admissions to people who said dumb things on Twitter years before they were admitted. It fired a law professor for defending a client it didn't like. So Harvard can't turn around and say what it should have said "Yes, calling for genocide is generally protected speech. Even things we *really really don't like* can be protected speech, and Harvard will not punish or penalize students or faculty for protected speech just because we find it distasteful or even disgusting. That is what the First Amendment specifically and more broadly freedom of expression mean, and it is Harvard's mission as a place of learning to protect and nurture such ideals."
It couldn't say that, so it had to blather about context.
She wasn't asked if it was "ok", she asked if it was "harassment" under Harvard's policy, and harassment always depends on context; who are you saying it to, under what circumstances, etc.
It's very easy to. Imagine someone writes a paper for their "Law, Human Rights, and Social Justice in Israel-Palestine" class. In this paper, they argue that, long-term, Palestinian birthrates are high enough that, unchecked, the increase in Arab population between Israel and the occupied territories will lead to political instability and violence. As such, they argue that slavish adherence to traditional human rights law leads to suboptimal outcomes, and Israel should begin instituting concrete population control measures to cut down on the Palestinian Arab population. In addition, they advise Israel work out deals with surrounding Arab regimes and adopt ethnically-targeted financial incentives to encourage Palestinians to emigrate to them.
This paper constitutes a textbook call for genocide. Should the student be subject to disciplinary action for writing it?
It depends on what you mean by "genocide". For example, if you say something like "The Anti-Defamation League is a terrible organization that does terrible things", you may or may not be correct; however, in this case you are definitely *not* calling for genocide. However, an argument can (and has) been made that since the ADL's primary goal is to prevent genocide, by speaking out against them you are implicitly endorsing genocide, and therefore you should be silenced.
You can call for the eradication of a group like Al Qaida and Hamas and Nazis…and so a group like the Nazis was pretty large although probably not large enough to characterize their eradication as “genocide”. What about WW2 Japanese? Was dropping the bomb on them getting close to “genocide”?
She was caught between a rock and a hard place of her own ideological making. It was shocking that someone like her who had existed within this ideology her entire life could not formulate an appropriate answer in this context, given the lead time she had to prepare. Even at this moment right now, the obvious answer is something along the lines of: “This is is a complicated issue as our previous stances on free speech were formed in the context of protecting an oppressed class. However, now we are in a situation where we have two oppressed classes at war, and we don’t feel that it’s our place to pick a side. While we absolutely cannot allow the advocacy of violence, we have to balance that with not silencing an oppressed group. Calling for genocide is absolutely not allowed by our student code, but in the interest of the protestors, we will be very fluid as we determine what statesmen’s rise to the level of “violent speech” and we’ll encourage our students to make sure that as they protest, they don’t speak flippantly, and imbue their words with nuance and respect as students at our esteemed university have been trained to do.”
She can't, unless they change the written policies of Harvard. The written policies protects free speech, their actions show they don't care about those, but she can't admit it directly, or she would be contravening her written policies.
"An oppressed class (as I define it) can say or do whatever they want, including calls for genocide and violence against an oppressor class. Jews (like whites) are not an oppressed class."
If pressed, she could have elaborated about oppressor classes!
"An oppressor class (such as Jews or whites) are not allowed to say or do anything unless every single member of an oppressed class explicitly gives permission to speak or act."
It would still have endeared her to the psychopaths on the authoritarian left, so she probably should have said something like this.
The Harvard students never called for genocide against the Jews, and President Gay never supported a call for genocide.
Sample quotes from the internet.
What do you think about Harvard President Claudine Gay's apology for her remarks about calling for the genocide of Jews?
Do you agree with Harvard President Claudine Gay that calling for the genocide of Jews on campus depends on the "context"?
After witnessing the Congressional testimony of Claudine Gay, the President of Harvard, I am ashamed of my alma mater. How should Harvard respond to a call for the genocide of Jews on its campus?
When asked if calling for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard's code of conduct, Gay wouldn't give a yes or no answer. Harvard constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe called her testimony hesitant, formulaic and evasive. But he was among hundreds of faculty members who rallied behind Gay, urging Harvard to keep its president.
So exactly what was the testimony?
ELISE STEFANIK: It’s a yes or no question. Let me ask you this. You are president of Harvard, so I assume you’re familiar with the term intifada, correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I’ve heard that term, yes.
ELISE STEFANIK: And you understand that the use of the term intifada in the context of the Israeli Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?
CLAUDINE GAY: That type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
ELISE STEFANIK: And there have been multiple marches at Harvard with students chanting quote, “there is only one solution intifada revolution.” And quote, “globalize the intifada.” Is that correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I’ve heard that thoughtless, reckless and hateful language on our campus, yes.
ELISE STEFANIK: So, based upon your testimony, you understand that this call for intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally, correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I will say again that type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
ELISE STEFANIK: Do you believe that type of hateful speech is contrary to Harvard’s code of conduct or is it allowed at Harvard?
CLAUDINE GAY: It is at odds with the values of Harvard. But our values also —
ELISE STEFANIK: Can you not say here that it is against the code of conduct at Harvard?
CLAUDINE GAY: We embrace a commitment to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful. It’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment —
ELISE STEFANIK: Does that speech not cross that barrier? Does that speech not call for the genocide of Jews and the elimination of Israel?
CLAUDINE GAY: When —
ELISE STEFANIK: You testify that you understand that it’s the definition of intifada. Is that speech according to the code of conduct or not?
CLAUDINE GAY: We embrace a commitment to free expression and give a wide berth to free expression even of views that are objectionable —
It's worth mentioning that she was specifically being asked about Harvard's "harassment policy". The definition of "harassment" usually depends a great deal on context, and it should.
The entre question was a setup; they were trying to make her either say something they could blacklist her for or get her to lie under oath so they could hit her with perjury charges. She was never asked what she thought, and that was deliberate.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for her or for Harvard here, but this is basically McCarthyist tactics from Congress.
Trying to get someone to tell the truth, in the knowledge that if they tell the truth it would reflect unfavorably on them, isn't a setup, it's just questioning.
This is untrue. She gives a straightforward answer on when it would constitute harassment. Posting on facebook that all jews should be exterminated is not harassment. Posting a sign in a jewish student's window is harassment. You can disagree with this definition or with the policy, but she was not unclear.
If you need to use a word "technically" while explaining somebody's position on genocide of Jews, chances are it's not a good position. It's not some hard, hotly contested question where both sides have good arguments and you need to get deep into technical intricacies to get it right. Or at least it shouldn't be. And she wouldn't go for "context" if she were asked about whether anti-gay, anti-black or anti-trans statements - even not raising to the level of genocidal calls - are agains Harvard policy. She'd drop on it like a hawk on a mouse. So *for her* it's a complex question, which shows how far she - and American academia - has fallen.
But context still matters. OK, let's say I'm comparing the outcome for American colonizers and, say, the fate of the colonizers in Algeria or South Africa or Zimbabwe. I could easily end up saying something like "genociding Native Americans seems to have been a pretty positive step for the colonizers".
Am I supporting Native Americans' genocide? No. There are no moral grounds for invading and murdering people in order to steal their stuff/their lands. But historically it happened a lot. And that's the context that allows me to discuss it without being branded a warmonger, or wannabe war criminal etc.
Nobody disputes that context matters. But the action the context is attached to also matters! There could be millions of scenarios where it's hard to tell. Genocide of Jews is not one of them. She was asked if calling to genocide is against the Harvard policy. And if there was no *"of Jews"* attached to it, I am absolutely confident she wouldn't spent more than a second on it - she'd clearly and forcefully answer it, that yes, this is unacceptable and against every policy. But "in context" - specifically in context of significant share of her party and her peer circle being openly antisemitic or extremely-thinly-velied antisemitic (like "we don't support murder of Jews, we only support Hamas and too bad some people did something to Jews, but it's their own fault") - she is not able or does not want to exercise the same moral clarity that she would if "of Jews" were omitted from the question. Yes, we all know this context, and this context is exactly the reason her behavior is so appalling. Not that she "technically" misquoted some policy. The problem is not that she said "context" - the problem is we understand perfectly what kind of "context" she means, and how it is applied, and that is exactly the problem.
I'm under the impression that their (the university presidents') controversial response was to "is calling for genocide of Jews harassment", saying "no, unless it's [legal definition of harassment]". I guess this is technically(??) correct but I don't know why they chose to frame it in this way, especially since at least at MIT the administration has not been sympathetic to pro-Palestine protestors (and I'd assumed the situation was approximately the same at Harvard). Maybe because otherwise, under some interpretation of protest calls, they'd have to discipline literally hundreds of students.
> they'd have to discipline literally hundreds of students.
So, they are afraid to apply the anti-harassment policy because too many of their students engage in harassment? And that's somehow an *excuse* for them, not the reason for deep soul searching and mass layoffs of those responsible? It's like a bank robber would say "well, obviously I can't stop robbing banks because they I wouldn't have the money!".
If there's any good thing to come out of the whole mess in Israel... well, it's the in-progress eradication of Hamas. That's been sorely needed for a long time. But if there's *another* good thing to come out of it, it's been the clear exposure for all to see, of just how much of modern academia and journalism plays by "rules" that are nothing more than Calvinball. A lot of people have been claiming this for a good while, but now it's become impossible to ignore or deny.
I have to disagree as IIRC both Calvin and Hobbes could change the rules whenever they wanted so it was fair in that regard. Whereas the rules that Scott is talking about are basically we can do or say anything to protect the in group and hurt the out group.
The technique that is working for Rufo and others right now is breaking past the obfuscation and attempted chaff of racism/sexism accusations and make them explicitly state a rule (almost any rule really) and then show that they flout it.
The amorphous rules are sort of a defense from the Alinsky technique of "make your opponent follow their own rules" and this is a counter to that defense.
I always liked that particular story, but I just now realized that the moment Rosalyn bonded with Calvin was in the one arena where he had complete control. And he let her end the game on her own terms, instead of making up a new rule to counter "the baby-sitter flag".
To clarify, it would not be if she were a known free speech absolutist, or even showed any signs of valuing free speech that would harm other oppressed minorities, but she isn't and doesn't.
Yeah, it seemed to me that her answer was the right one, but didn't track with her actions in power or the actions of Harvard wrt speech they didn't like for the last couple decades.
2. It's got to fall into 1 because of a group's' protected status
3. It's got to be "objectively offensive"
4. It's got to be "create a work, educational or living environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile or abusive"
5. It's got to "den[y] the individual an equal opportunity to participate in the benefits of the workplace or the institution's programs or activities."
It looks like it will satisfy 1 and 2, assuming 1 is subjective. I'm not sure 3 is a coherent idea. I'd come down on the side of 4 and 5 being a "no," but I think the criteria for satisfying them is "I reasonably believe that a substantial portion of my classmates hate me." Probably not in practice, but I'm basing that on contextual assumptions that different people would make different calls on.
I kind of wish she was someone with a long legacy of free speech defense, and that it had protected her. But yeah, she tore down all the traditional protections around her and then got eaten when she finally said something awful. Hard to feel sympathetic but wish there was some integrity in those places.
It's dead-on the scene from A Man for All Seasons, really.
"And, when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and, if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake."
Mind explaining to slowly why that quote applies given I'm an outcast who skipped applying for jobs because they said "antivaxx need not apply" while she's a diversity hire who's *still employed* of whats considered to be the worse university for free speech, and she did just factually and obviously commit plagiarism?
I will need it to be very slow since Im very very dumb, but the way I see it its not me, not my community, and not in my power to effect.
You have to honor principles even when they are unpopular because popularity changes and principles are eternal.
Editing this to be nicer:
You have a right to bodily autonomy because in principle everyone has the right to make their own health choices. Not sure what I wrote made you think I would not support that.
My position on abortion swaped when it became painfully clear that "my body my choice"/medical privacy was a way to extract my compliance while giving nothing in return shortly before the supreme court re opened the issue.
While I will never intend to force people to take alex johns approved pills, I'm not sheading any tears over calling 9-mouth abortions murder, because its always been a grey area and difficult position to hold.
I don't have a simple answer of how to hold principals in the face of a political enemy. But I'm damn sure its not a naive assume your endless goodness will convince everyone, and something towards letting grey areas go while your weak. While fascism is gaining power I do not wish to allow fascists to speak at the "jews sending their children to america" meeting, kernels of power and decision making must be immune form outsiders, somehow, and in-power and hostile ones especially.
It has nothing to do with whether you feel sympathetic for her. A win against her was a win by people whose goal is to restrict speech targeting Israel. She stood up for that sort of speech in her testimony, and her opponents got her scalp for it, and every university president in the country took notice. "These are the stakes for allowing free speech on Israel." The next time they address this issue on their own campuses, they will be less likely to defend students protesting Israel.
I am aware. While I see the concrete and practical reality, there is a human reality where people will always cheer to see someone subjected to the consequences of their own actions.
I agree. I just think it's odd that, on this issue, I keep seeing commentary in the form of, "Well, she's right on the issues, but she didn't put her best foot forward in those hearings," or "It's definitely a loss for free speech, but it's hard to defend someone so unsympathetic." People should have the strength of their convictions. If people disagree with what happened, they should say that, not act like jaded PR people, tut-tutting about their candidates performance in front of the cameras.
I think the unspoken truth there is that personal integrity is the first bulwark to these principles being compromised. People won’t live with hypocrisy so if you’re hypocritical on a bedrock principle you’re a severe danger.
It exposed different rules for different identity groups and no amount of graduate level obfuscation was going to get her out of it. Nobody believes that calls for genocide against favored identity groups would have gone unpunished in the age of microaggressions, preferred pronouns, bias response teams, and trigger warnings. This so called trap was laid by the incoherent ideology and has little to do with Israel itself.
It's not really even that she said calling for genocide against Jews was okay. It's that Harvard isn't (or isn't seen as) consistently in favor of free speech. They are in favor of free speech when it comes to genocide against Jews, but not so much on other controversial positions.
> Fortunately the ICJ ruling indicates that era is ending.
What are you talking about? The ICJ hasn't reached a verdict on whether Israel's military operation constitutes genocide, and it probably won't for several years.
I think words have power if people care about them. Israel doesn't care because they have the US backing them up, and the US doesn't care because it is by far the most powerful country in the world. The governments have no practical obligation to give a single shit about calls of genocide.
Sorry, but she was specifically asked about "calling for the genocide of Jews" and she refused to say that was a violation of the Harvard code of conduct. See the transcript:
I don't mean to be rude. I'm just trying to simulate the pressure Dr. Gay was under.
Back up a step. She had aleady agreed (by silence) that intifada means genocide. (Which I strenuously dispute.) The students were clearly calling for intifada and global support for intifada. So in Stefanik's mind they were calling for genocide. This was the immediate context at the hearing where Stephanik asked her question about the Harvard code of conduct. Given that framing, agreeing that calling for genocide violates the Harvard code of contact immediately implies that these students should be disciplined. (Do you think the student should be disciplined?) Dr Gay didn't want to agree that they should be disciplined.
That's the first reason to resist answering the question. Now let's say she actually does want to answer the question. And what if the truth is that it depends on the context. Imagine that in a classroom discussion a student contends that the world would be better off without Israel. Has that student violated the code of conduct? I'm no expert, but my gut tells me not. This is an abstract idea and protected speech.
Is there a way to advocate eliminating Israel that does violate the code of conduct. Probably so. So the truth is: it depends on the context.
It was that statement, "depends on the context," that infuriated millions of ignorant simple-minded people.
That's ridiculous. She was repeatedly asked whether calling for genocide of Jews is necessarily against the code of conduct. She refused to say that it was. I don't know what Harvard's policy is, but if I were setting policy I would have no difficulty in immediately saying that calling for genocide of any group is unacceptable. (For the record, calling for genocide is a crime against humanity under the Genocide Convention, which has been ratified by the US and thus is also US law.) If Gay's position was "calling for genocide is a violation of the code of conduct, but calling for intifada is not calling for genocide", she should have said so. She had many chances to say that, and refused to.
Harvard College strives to maintain a safe and secure environment for all members of the
community and thus does not tolerate physical violence or threats of physical violence used by or against the members of the community. Students are expected to avoid all physical conflicts, confrontations, and altercations unless their own safety or that of another is at extreme jeopardy. Failure to do so will ordinarily result in disciplinary action, including, but not limited to, requirement to withdraw from the College.
Here is the link. I quoted the section on physical violence.
What do you say? Does calling for genocide violate the Harvard code of conduct?
I think a possibility here is that you care about what Claudine Gay said about Israel and Jewish people, and you support actions that hold her accountable for that, but the truth is, those actors holding her accountable could care less about Israel, and are just using your morals (and everyone who thinks like you) as a weapon against Claudine Gay to disempower her.
You are sincere, the accusers are not. To me, that wouldn't feel right.
It could be any number of things, but usually when I've been proximate to these situations, it more petty than you would think. Do you think that Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet do not benefit professionally from this, by getting more money, deals, recognition or power? They could be interested in scoring points for their side or personal brand - whether or not they personally care about the issues they are yelling about.
I do not think these people give a wild hoot about plagiarism. They are using public outrage about plagiarism to target an enemy to win, for either personal advancement or tribal thinking reasons. They are leveraging public outrage about Israel to target a Black woman in a position of power as an avatar of DEI. Theoretically, all they had to do was wait for the right kind of uproar to attack their favorite targets.
Just like Claudine Gay didn't care about academia when she plagiarized. And she didn't care about freedom of speech in a number of cases before the Israel controversy - she's been wildly inconsistent in applying this principle.
Both sides selectively use morality to advance their agendas. The public cares about these morals a lot, and the leaders leverage that power for their own gain.
Why do you think there is public outrage about plagiarism in the first place? Because it's a kind of cheating or stealing, no? Is it so hard to believe Chris Rufo doesn't like cheating any more than the next guy?
I didn't say cheating wasn't bad. Most people think that. I think the leaders you follow say that in public, but their actions show they are hypocrites. That's the whole point of Scott's piece, about the dishonesty and lack of character of powerful leaders that leverage moral accusations (that the general public cares very much about) to win culture wars points, when those leaders do not consistently apply those principles (which shows they don't really care).
That's the whole thing about Neri Oxman. The team that accused Claudine Gay of plagiarism had a known plagiarist in their midst, and they didn't care.
Which totally checks out.
I think something that sucks about power dynamics - I don't know if this is new or if its always been this way - but you can't be in power and not play this way, at least sometimes.
But in the bottom line, this bad publicity is an assymetric weapon that only worked against Gay because she genuinely was bad enough for people who were neutral in whatever personal dispute she has with Chris Rufo to come down against her. In a sense Rufo doesn't matter here - anyone in a high profile position like that will have some people who are interested in making her look bad, and what we want is to have it only succeed when she actually is bad. In this case this was the system working as intended.
I edited to say: I think your take here is one without integrity. Either academic honesty and Israel mean something, or they do not. Letting a figurehead manipulate your earnest morals for their own personal gain to get an outcome that you are both aligned with is, I think, a selling out of the value of your own morality.
I truly believe that until the majority of US citizens can get beyond this thinking, and support leaders that have actual values, we will be stuck in a endless loop of ineffectual governments, lackluster politicians, and vapid culture wars.
I think Shaked's point is that the specifics of who found dirt on Gay are irrelevant. It could have been a graduate student studying her work or a friendly news outlet, or her political enemies as appears to be the case. What we, those reading about this story on the outside, should care about is whether she broke a rule/norm/cultural expectation/whatever that is relevant to us. If we do not doubt that the accusations are true, then the messenger is almost meaningless (I care a lot about the messenger when I have to consider whether the accusations are accurate in the first place).
Will this norm result in a lot of people losing their positions in society? Potentially - but that's where we consider whether the sanctions for bad behavior are properly calibrated. Getting fired for a 10+year old mild to moderate offense does not seem to be properly calibrated, but that's where society seems to be at the moment.
In the interest of making explicit things that are obvious to everyone, as Scott says ... this isn't motivated by concern for the Jews in general. It's motivated by the idea that Universities don't crack down on criticism of/protest against Israel in the name of fighting anti-Semitism.
It's like when all the people who care oh-so-much about anti-Semitism, rallied to Elon Musk's defense when he agreed with someone who said "Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them". It's not about concern for Jews, it's about concern for Israel.
That blatantly ridiculous, it's that people take "guy who constantly shitposts liked a random offensive tweet" less seriously than "mobs marching down the street calling for genocide against the Jews while the leaders of elite institutions support them".
"it's that people take 'guy who constantly shitposts liked a random offensive tweet' less seriously"
There's a question of "how seriously should you take Elon Musk's tweets", one response might be to take it very seriously, and one response might be to treat him the same as a random nobody.
But people (including in this case Bill Ackman) weren't treating him as a random nobody - they were actively defending him!
"less seriously than 'mobs marching down the street calling for genocide against the Jews while the leaders of elite institutions support them'."
Don't have time to write more right now, but again, I don't think "calling for genocide against the Jews" is actually what the people involved here found objectionable. It was the question that was asked at the Congressional hearing, but not the actual motivation.
In fact, I don't think she criticized Israel at all in that Congressional testimony. She did defend calling for genocide against Jews. And so do I, because I'm close to a free speech absolutist! But as you said, Gay is very much not, at least on woke issues.
It *is* okay under the free speech codes. You're accusing her of *NOT* lying to Congress
Or rather, it's a complicated question, which is what she said. I'm pretty sure lying to Congress is a crime, if she had said anything other than what she did say, she'd be in jail
The underlying issue of whether or not Harvard should have stronger/less strong free speech protections is a fair point of contention, but I honestly can't tell what exactly your real issue is, and the thing you mention explicitly is... absolutely not a bad thing that Gay did
Look, we all know if she'd been asked the same thing about, say, black people or trans people, she would have replied differently. I do know she has excuses constructed after the fact to try to make her statement sound reasonable.
Yes, and would you support her answers in that case? If not, maybe just admit that your actual position on free speech is "I'm against it when being against it benefits my preferred causes and for it when being for it benefits my preferred causes."
Okay, since you're not a hypocrite, then my assumption is that you your long-held position must be that Harvard should crack down on anti-Black rhetoric, anti-trans rhetoric, and so on. This is very good to know.
The thing is that all three presidents were coached by the same lawyers and they all parsed essentially in the same way presumably based on how they were legally prepped.
The questioning was a minefield and they all stepped on the same mine in following their legal coaching.
I don’t think anything Gay said was about her personal opinion. She was being an institutional mouthpiece in the same way they all were.
Notice how this is irrelevant to anything I said, and doesn't change the truth of the emotionally-related-but-distinct claim the original commenter was making
It's not at all irrelevant. Harvard's free speech codes obviously don't prevent it cracking down on speech it doesn't like, so it absolutely could crack down on calls for Jewish genocide, if it wanted to.
It's wild hearing people describe these issues who have only heard about them filtered through a few layers of propaganda. There were of course no calls for genocide against Jews at Harvard, that is nuts.
You're quoting Harvard's Hillel house's characterization of the word "intifada," which means, quite literally, "revolution." Saying that the Arabic word for "revolution" is necessarily a call for genocide is totally unserious.
If someone chants about how Palestinians should have a violent uprising right after October 7th happened, it's not hard to understand what they actually mean.
There is no "Palestinian definition of 'Intifada.'" 'Intifada' is an Arabic word. It is the word for revolution. When Palestinian students learn about the Warsaw Uprising, their textbooks call it the انتفاضة وارسو, aka the "Warsaw Intifada."
What you're actually arguing, implicitly, is that any call for armed Palestinian resistance to the Israelis is a de facto call for genocide. This is difficult to square with both logic and international law, but also with the fact that the First Palestinian Intifada resulted in the most dramatic and effective push for Palestinian/Israeli peace that has ever occurred.
Yeah I'm sure the people shouting that *right after* Palestinians went on a rampage of murdering babies and grandmas, raping women to death and carving out people's eyes were advocating for peaceful resistance.
The organisers (including the guy who led the chant) quite directly explained, in the article you linked, how they were using the word - to denote "liberation" and "the right to resist."
Had they desired the actual genocide of Jews (which is a desire several orders removed from a territorial modification of the state of Israel), surely there were plenty of punchier slogans available.
I do wonder whether Gay would have fared better if she went fully to the mat with Stefanik on the linguistic/previous usage question of intifada instead of giving her "depends on context" reply. My hunch is yes.
I'm aware they later tried to pretend they said something else to avoid getting in trouble. I took once got in trouble in elementary school for calling someone a bitch and then tried to explain that actually I was just talking about her dog.
The only reference to genocide in that article is in an email from a campus group claiming that chants that included the word "intifada" were genocidal, which in the next paragraph the article explains is a clearly incorrect interpretation of those chants.
Calling for a violent uprising against the Jews right after a terrorist group started one which killed hundreds of people and abducted hundreds more is absolutely genocidal. You don't get to go "oh it's just an Arabic word for struggle" any more that you get to say that about me in kampf. I mean you can say it if you want to pretend to pretend to mean something else, but the real meaning isn't ambiguous.
I'm having a hard time understanding how you could believe that. Surely you get that even to the very arguable extent that the chant implies support for the 10/7 attack, that doesn't imply any endorsement of genocide?
How is supporting attempted genocide different than supporting genocide? "I support attempts at X" does, in general, imply that you actually want X to happen, it's not some unreasonable conclusion to jump to.
She did not testify to this. You're adopting a partisan framing which deliberately misunderstands her words in a way you would not do for any other issue.
There's a difference between debating the validity of her words (and the right of people to use them against her) and engaging in the culture war. The This thread has devolved into the latter.
It's not unrelated dirt. On the contrary, the theory is that Gay was appointed as a result of a 'woke' agenda, which prioritizes ideology, specifically the oppressor / oppressed narrative, over merit. Her anti-Semitism responses go directly to the first of the theory and her plagiarism (and more broadly weak academic credentials) go to the second half. The two parts of the theory are closely linked, as an important part of the anti-woke argument is that merit is being sacrificed in the name of ideology.
The president of Harvard isn't a name chosen out of a hat. Presumably they checked out her credentials and found them adequate. She wasn't a distinguished scholar (or anywhere close), but presumably she was what they were looking for.
> Would anyone have investigated the weak academic credentials if she hadn't made anti-Semitic responses?
Yes they would have. The accusations of plagiarism came from before the hearing. Jesse Singal talks about getting an email about it on 12/4, the day before the hearing.
I don't mean to nitpick, but I have heard this brought up several times by other people covering this story and I really wish they would stop. I'm not saying her academic credentials are good -- I'm in no position to judge them one way or the other. But I don't think they are very relevant to her role as an administrator. Some of the world's best academics might make terrible college presidents, while they best college presidents might have pretty mediocre academic records. If there is any correlation at all, I suspect it is pretty weak. I do think a college presidents needs to have a very good understanding of academia -- the culture, the research and teaching process, the accompanying bureaucracy -- but they don't have to have a stellar h-index. And, of course, the academic aspects of college are just one of the broad categories of things that college presidents have to manage. There's also donors, relationships with local/state/federal governments, student life, physical infrastructure, safety and security, personnel management....the list goes on.
While I totally agree that academic credentials aren't necessarily relevant for the President's actual job functions, in a university environment, scholarship buys a lot of political currency. Basically, if you want a bunch of tenured Harvard professors to really respect your leadership, it's necessary to have some academic status.
In the case of Gay, I think a (over)simplified way to think of it is: she lost her reputation with the public with the antisemitism business, and lost her reputation with the academe for the plagiarism. She couldn't survive losing both.
1. Even if that were true, her own academic merit being questionable wouldn't hurt the argument any more than any other minority elite's academic merit being questionable. Going after her specifically instead of any other, possibly more egregious target, or just doing the work of finding statistics, isn't a *stronger* knock against her argument. It's just dramatic irony.
2. As Scott touched, there's no evidence that her plagiarism was unrepresentative for people in her position. The reason you use statistics instead of cherry-picked anecdotes is that an anecdote like this provides no evidence that minorities have worse academic records; white men could plagiarize much more and no one ever bothers to investigate. The fact that the target was chosen for reasons of making a satisfying narrative, rather than chosen at random or w/e, is pretty strong evidence of this just being a cherry-picked anecdote that shouldn't reflect on the larger argument, rather than the reverse.
>The reason you use statistics instead of cherry-picked anecdotes is that an anecdote like this provides no evidence that minorities have worse academic records; white men could plagiarize much more and no one ever bothers to investigate.
Maybe AI could help? If we could automate doing forensic scholarship at scale, perhaps
a) We would have accurate statistics (and could adjust the penalties in light of them)
b) If we caught this _early_ in someone's life, maybe we could dissuade them from doing it frequently?
I feel like that just incentivizes the creation of an AI for 'rephrase this without changing its meaning so it passes the AI plagiarism filter', which probably already exists or if not is less than a year away anyways.
Which, you might think, 'ok, so it's an arms race between paraphrasing AIs and plagiarism-detecting AIs, that's fine.'
But I think that pretty quickly has us running up against the rocks of confronting the fact that people very often need to say the same thing that someone else has said previously, a million different phrasings that communicate the exact same concept are still the same unit of communication, and forcing academics to spend their time paraphrasing sentences to try to convey the same information using different words has always been kind of a dumb waste of time.
When you have children write 'scientific' papers in class, a large part of your objective is to make sure they can write well at all, so having them copy sentences would defeat the purpose. But hopefully we're not trying to prove that actual scientists know how to write well; plagiarizing results and conclusions would undermine their actual job description, but copying sentences needed in the introduction to explain background concepts to the audience? How does that make their science worse?
So, yeah, AI systems like that might drive us into confronting how dumb our ideas about plagiarism are to begin with. If your filter can detect an AI just rephrasing the same concept someone else uses, we'll have to admit that this is all humans were ever doing anyway, and humans can't ever beat that filter without making the text itself less coherent and useful.
Many Thanks! That's a good point. I wasn't thinking in terms of paraphrasing, but just in terms of direct copying. As you pointed out, there are potential arms races, and murky question of when it stops being plagiarism, and wasted effort in doing the paraphrasing.
I certainly agree with your point re
>but copying sentences needed in the introduction to explain background concepts to the audience? How does that make their science worse?
( though presumably they _could_ do this in a transparent way by putting the copied text in a quote and attributing it to the original author )
This starts to sound like some very muddy issues in IP law, where trying to disentangle what ideas are "generally known to someone skilled in the art", what are ideas that are specifically protected as someone else's patent claim, and what ideas are novel, can get to be _more_ work than coming up with the novel ideas and debugging the complex mixture into something actually useful.
I’m reminded of how dramatically coverage of Elon Musk changed between pre buying Twitter and post. Headlines about him used to be “Eccentric Tech Guy Successfully Launches Rocket,” now they’re “Hateful Billionaire Is Actually Conspiracy Theorist And Anti Semite.” And now apparently they’re going after him for him for being too successful at Tesla, ugh.
That's kind of surprising; I vaguely recall people turning against him for the whole birther thing. Having said that, I can't remember when people started saying "white supremacist" by default instead of "racist."
After decades of targeted propaganda and harassment by leftist media and institutions, and "principled conservatives" not reciprocating in kind due to the nature of their beliefs in the "marketplace of ideas" and "independent institutions", both of which turned out to be illusions, kvetching about exposing egregious cases like Claudine Gay is rich.
The time of controlled opposition has come and passed.
I think media converge on a narrative wrt people and movements and industries, and the almost every news story sticks to the narrative, omitting contradictory facts and quotes, and digging for supporting facts and quotes. Thus, once the narrative was established that W was a dimwitted good old boy, it almost didn't matter what they did-if W was reading Dostoyevsky in the original Russian, it was going to somehow be spun into the narrative that he was a dimwitted overpromoted good old boy. You could see this in the way the shooting of Michael Brown was reported--the initial narrative was innocent black kid murdered by a racist cop, and by God, the recalcitrant facts of the case were going to be hammered into that narrative. And most people still think Brown was an innocent kid murdered by a racist cop, and always will think that, so mission accomplished.
Do you have any specific examples of this? It seems pretty normal for coverage of someone to focus a lot more on their political views once they start running for president.
It’s normal for coverage to increase but pre 2015 everyone thought of Trump as an ego driven real estate billionaire/TV personality/embodiment of the American Dream. It makes sense for his flaws to be more exposed in the setting of his presidential run - he’s certainly an egomaniac - but the spin that he’s somehow racist (Scott wrote about this) or wants to start World War 3 (extensively claimed pre 2016, he was the most peaceful president of this century) or collaborated with Russia or committed impeachable offences in the phone call with Ukraine… I believed it all at the time and now looking back I can see that it was BS. Which significantly lowers my trust in the media.
Nah, that's just CNN taking one tweet completely out of context which then gets amplified across all the media platforms and leads to reasonable people getting confused. It's weaponisation of the media against Elon. Actually what he said was, if anything, Islamophobic, CNN should get its claims of racism straight. He was saying that the Jewish Anti Defamation League should be more concerned with Islamists than with European whites. Which is just very straightforwardly true.
If you listen to what Elon actually says, he's the least anti-Semitic it's possible to be (and I say this as someone of Jewish heritage who listens to a lot of what Elon has to say.) At least half of his friends are Jewish. He recently visited Auschwitz with Ben Shapiro. He describes himself as "philosemitic" (Greek for likes Jews a lot).
Let's separate the concepts of saying antisemitic things and being antisemitic. For example, an AI that says maximally offensive things might say antisemitic things, but would not be antisemitic.
Musk has said antisemitic things, endorsing conspiracy theories. However, it seems like he's more of a troll than a serious antisemite, so resembles that AI.
I think Musk was shitposting on Twitter for many years before buying it. He would be far better off handing off his Twitter account to some social media manager and never touching it again. But then, so would most other people, and maybe as owner of Twitter Musk would rather not say so....
Yeah; I would say the inflection point was roughly late 2015 or so, with an acceleration of that trend around 2017. Before that he really wasn’t notable for being that weird or that publicly contrarian.
Yeah. Something like Futurism seems to have utterly change the tone of its coverage.
That said, you could argue that acquiring Twitter further outed Elon's... err... personality quirks. I personally think it actually accentuated them but hey that's close to being a distinction without a difference ...
He is definitely a weird dude, but in his own words, "I founded six companies and I'm sending rockets to Mars, did you really expect me to be a chill, normal guy?"
The back an forth coverage of Musk and his companies went on before then. You can see this in how people freaked out when he smoked a joint on Joe Rogan, which I believe was before the Twitter buy.
Yeah, Elon caught a lot of flack before Twitter because he ruffled feathers in the auto industry with Tesla. The UAW wasn't happy that he had no union representation in his factories, and the dealerships were gunning for him because he does direct vehicle sales. Both of those groups STILL hate him, even more so now that he has two very successful vehicle models. I don't think that passion has anything to do with his penchant for saying things that fall outside the Overton window. Their biggest nightmare is if his truck is popular enough to cannibalize sales in the top-selling vehicle category in the US.
Are those groups politically influential? Obviously the UAW are, but so are the dealerships. It is illegal to buy a Tesla in 13 states (including Tesla's headquarters in Texas!), and in three of those states they're not even allowed to have service centers to fix your car. Plus 9 other states place limits on how many stores Tesla can have. If dealerships have enough political power to keep Tesla from selling in Texas - with its massive Texas-sized factory stoking the Texas economy - they have the power to ensure Elon gets bad press.
I think it had been on its way down for a while, but I don't know why. Around 2019ish, I recall hearing some fairly-left friends mention him and roll their eyes, as though there was common knowledge that rendered him ridiculous and pathetic. Of note, one of them owned a Tesla. But I didn't ask what the story was, and mostly I remember it because I didn't follow his doings, so to me he was just the guy behind Tesla's mass production and SpaceX, who also started the much more dubious Boring Company and hyperloop ... thing. And it was a clear illustration of how disconnected I'd become from the "public narrative".
You're right of course that the Twitter acquisition made it a lot worse, but I think it was already underway.
That could be the effect, yeah. But my impression was that it had something to do with Elon specifically, some pattern of things he in particular did. Maybe the media was just focusing on him at the time, I dunno. He certainly seems to have "Kanye West spectrum disorder".
As I recall, a year or so ago, Kelsey Tuoc commented on Twitter about the NYT's editorial decision to be hostile to tech companies, and several other prominent journalists (I think Matt Yglesias was one) agreed that this had happened and had influenced coverage across the media ecosystem.
And Scholars Stage has talked about how the NYT specifically is a newsroom that decides on their narrative and then goes out and tries to find stories to fit it
"We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line. "
I really really wish people would analyze more culture war through the lens of Tech v. Media rather than Red v. Blue. It's a lesser battle to be sure, but still a *really* big driver of IMO blue-tinted bad behavior that doesn't reduce to conventional politics.
There was a nice t-shirt with "Some Assembly Required" I've liked ever since I saw it.. I think of its uplifting message from time to time.
Which type? x86?
"Rope. Tree. Journalist." https://jeffcarlson.com/2016/11/06/rope-tree-journalist/
Ackman is a public figure, though, and he was among those attacking Gay.
That doesn't follow from what I said. And family members for better or worse have been on-limits since at least Billy Carter. And what did I say that led you to infer that I was admitting anything? Or is "basically" supposed to provide some kind of justification for what you said. Lastly, I was being descriptive. Slow down there, cowboy.
Neri Oxman is definitely a public figure.
I'm sorry, Claudine Gay didn't just "criticize Israel", she testified before congress that calling for genocide against Jews was okay under the Harvard speech codes. I guess you could technically argue that she's just a hardcore free speech absolutist, but then you'd have to ignore literally everything else you know about Harvard's attitude towards controversial free speech.
She didn't say it was okay, she said it depended on context.
Technically, it's true. Everything always depends on context. But she was utterly unable to elaborate further or make the case that context matters.
Anyhow, none of that is central to Scott's point.
Mostly just come on, we know she would never say that with another group. If someone with a track record of being a principled free speech supporter (like Scott) said the same thing I'd hear him out, but given Gay's track record...
I guess she might be okay with saying that about ex-colonial powers/European powers... :)
I am not saying she's intellectually honest. I am saying her position was not idiotic or automatically antisemitic. Basically, what Silverax said - she handled terribly but her answer is technically correct.
Yes, I agree that she herself likely doesn't care much about Jews one way or the other and is just appeasing the political blocs around her, and her antisemitism is just downstream of antisemitism being the net consensus of those blocks (some of which actively like it and most of which don't care either way).
Oddly enough I agree, and I'm even (technically) Jewish. But she really did handle the answer in the worst way possible.
Despite not being Jewish, I disagree with your position. Gay came out against hypothetical speech against specific groups earlier. That she places context around speech about Jews, but not around the same speech concerning other groups is the troubling part.
I believe we should allow contextual speech of all stripes: Nazis, Klansmen, etc. But to place a limit on the monsters is troubling, favoritism.
Agreed. If Gay had had a consistent history of treating apologists for Hamas and apologists for the KKK in the same way - either permitting both, in which case she could have claimed that free speech trumped other concerns, or banning both, in which case she could have claimed that maintaining civility trumped other concerns, then she would have been honorable. She was not.
I'm not happy with using the selective enforcement of plagiarism rules against her. Targeting reminds me too much of Cardinal Richelieu's "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." I prefer that laws and other rules either be uniformly enforced or repealed - though I recognize that this will never happen, and selective enforcement is something the powerful regularly use.
Intellectual dishonesty IS THE DEFINITION of idiotic.
I agree her answer wasn't antisemitic, in the sense of expressing hate for Jews. But it wasn't just a misstep either. Her statements, compared to Harvard's usual stance on these topics, reveals that she *doesn't mind* antisemitism. At least, she doesn't mind it enough to act against students who really are antisemitic. That's not exactly antisemitism, but it's still very concerning and below the standard that I hold for leaders of our institutions.
I don't see your issue
If it depends on context, and you're testifying before Congress, and you don't say "it depends on context," that's perjury
You're acting like she wrote Harvard's code of conduct herself, or endorsed it, instead of accurately describing it when asked
I'm pretty sure she did ansolutely nothing wrong *in the specific moment you're referring to*. I am in no way a supporter of Gay. I'm actually immune to political bias here because I'm too dumb to understand how it all fits in the big picture and can only take individual claims on their individual merits. Yours seems to lack merit
"I'm pretty sure she did ansolutely nothing wrong *in the specific moment you're referring to*."
I disagree, but I'm not sure my position is coherent. I would appreciate a gut check if you have a moment:
The moment in congress was exactly where she errored. She as the president of Harvard represents the establishment. Her job is to beg money from the 0.001% to keep an institution that is 140 years older then the republic (for which I stand) rich. She's a sales-person; there's no shame in that, they are the folks who make the checks show up, but still that's her vocation.
The aforementioned establishment heard some things it didn't like coming from a college campus like direction. It then called three of it's officers to the mat and demanded an oath of fealty. Claudine didn't feel inclined to bow, whether out of pride or ignorance. So it became clear to the persons (committee?) that assigns / removes presidents at Harvard that Miss Gay is no longer capable of doing her job well.
QED she found herself moved to the Harvard equivalent of special projects; you know, same plush salary, same shiny lab, none of the responsibility to deliver. She even gets a pious martyrdom in trade for all the power she lost. Let us all bask in the knowledge that if you play your cards right sometimes the system hands out $878,000 a year for failure, wow, go Claudine!
As to the establishment hearing something it didn't like, yes the establishment is still very much committed to 1 the state of Israel's existence and 2 the idea that we ostracize people who won't kowtow to congress. The state of Israel is supported cynically now but it is supported. The US has many entanglements in the middle east but can't trust any of them to back us whenever we call like the Israelis will. If the Palestinians 1 had a leader who controlled them, 2 had the economic or military power to hold land and feed themselves and their army and 3 would honor deals made with said leader then, only then things might be different. But they don't, they can't, and they won't.
It does not matter how powerful the radical left gets or how loudly they yell things these are the facts. We ally with the partners that exist not the partners we would like to exist.
Now the hard part:
I hate the establishment. It tells me how to think and I must suffer this in silence or risk losing everything and leading a life in prison. But I do love to watch it eat it's own, I see Claudine Gay as deserving what she got because she forgot that to get the benefits of power she has to pay the price. I hate that the establishment wields it's terrible corrupt power but I love to see it cutting it's officers down when they step out of line. I understand what happened and why but I am troubled by being happy about a cynical hatchet job committed against a genocide agnostic sales woman. Everything here is sad... what do what do /holds head and starts rocking back and forth in corner....
I disagree with this reading that she refused to kiss the ring
She was not offered a ring to kiss. She was walked off a plank, and her options were to drown or be stabbed
Because the fact is that some students have called for genocide (in the eyes of many) but they have not, in fact, violated the code of conduct. If she says that they didn't call for genocide, everyone is angry. If she says they have but doesn't violate the code, everyone is angry. If she says they have called for genocide and it's not allowed, the next question is "why haven't you expelled them" and we're back at square one. If she tries to explain that it's nuanced and while calling for genocide certainly can violate the code, there may be instances where it wouldn't (which is exactly what she said), then nobody will listen and everyone will be angry (because that's exactly what happened).
Once the question was asked, the game was lost
Now, it's possible the backlash was deserved, in the grand scheme. I actually do not know how she responded to any of the other questions, I literally haven't seen the rest of the hearing and I know zero things about this person. I'm only referring to that one question
To say 'context' means that we can study say Nazis and Klansmen, and read their speeches without condoning their meaning. But Gay placed limits around studying the speech of select groups.
So she would say calls to genocide africans are only banned depending on the context?
If students had recently called for genocide of Africans in a manner which factually did not violate the code of conduct, she'd have no choice
She can't expell all the students who call for genocide, many of them don't deserve expulsion or any discipline. She can't claim they haven't called for genocide, the people who interpret their words as calls for genocide would be incensed and call her an lying idiot. As long as those two facts are true, she can't claim that calls for genocide violate the code of conduct, she'd just get the obvious follow-up question and be back where she started
Now, maybe if it were Africans instead of Jews she would have been more forceful in explaining that the school doesn't approve of such things and they shouldn't be tolerated etc. Did she say those things forcefully in this hearing about Jews? I have no idea, I haven't seen it. If you have seen it and think she failed to support her Jewish students, say that. Make that claim if it's true. So far, we're only discussing the one piece of evidence, and it's bad evidence
Perhaps watch the damn testimony before commenting
Not in casual conversation, but under oath she wouldn't be allowed to claim otherwise
Guys, c'mon, she literally said exactly that in the hearing. People are only pissed at her because Ackman and others straw-manned her position (insinuating that she didn't condemn genocide) and because most people have tyrannical hearts and want to see speech they don't like suppressed: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5097070/user-clip-claudine-gay-free-speech-hero
Academics and activists can and do say genocidal-sounding things about white people fairly often and get away with it.
The confusion or debate (whatever you want to call it) basically seems to revolve around the question: should the rules for what you can say about Jews be the rules applied to ‘marginalized groups’ (women, black people, gay people) which are very restrictive, or should they get the treatment given to oppressor/perpetrator groups (men, white people, most specific European ethnicities or nationalities) which permit a great deal of hostility.
Some people like myself would like a consistent etiquette that regards broad derogation of ethnic groups or nationalities to be in bad taste in general rather than based on some stratification of victim/oppressor groups, but I think this position isn’t the most popular one.
I mostly agree. An asterisk here about Jews specifically is that they kinda get the worst of both worlds: most white people (and most leftist activists are white) are at least sane enough to realize the problems with calling for violence against white people as a group since it includes them. But Jews are in the uncomfortable position of being (mostly) classified as an oppressor group but also being enough of a minority that you don't have a large class of people protecting them out of self interest.
She said it earlier in the same hearing about black people
I have a very hard time coming up with an example of context where calling for genocide is ok.
The point is not that calling for genocide is OK. It's whether the speech is calling for genocide or not.
That was basically them setting her up for a gotcha where if she says "no", then they say she has to stop people from saying "from the river to the sea...".
They she should just have said, "Calling for genocide is always against Harvard's speech codes. Whether 'From the river to the sea...' counts as a call for genocide depends on the context in which it's said."
Fine. I don't think anyone disagrees that she handled that terribly.
I'm just giving an example of the context.
I haven’t watched her entire testimony but I imagine the out of context part she said was itself taken out of context.
The river in the couplet is the Jordan River, Israel's western border. The sea is the Mediterranean Sea, Israel's eastern border. "Will be free" is not a call to freedom, but free of Jews. "From Israel's western border to Israel's eastern border, the territory will be Judenfrei" isn't as catchy, but conveys the same meaning.
It is, at minimum, a call for ethnic cleansing, if it is not a call for genocide.
Do you think every single person who has ever said "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" has meant "Palestinians will ethnically cleanse all Jews in Greater Israel"? That not one has meant, just for example, "There will be a singular liberal democratic state between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean, called Palestine, with people living there more-or-less being the same as right now"? I mean, do you ACTUALLY think that?
"Will be free" is not a call to freedom, but free of Jews.
False.
She does not want to take a position on "From the river to the sea," because she knows full well that if she says it either is or is not a call for genocide (in any circumstance), then pro-Israel partisans will accuse her of saying it's sometimes okay to get rid of Jews "from the river to the sea."
Well, that could be one way of looking at it.
Do you think she would have had any trouble responding to the question "Is it ok to call for the genocide of Palestinians?"
And if she says "no" she doesn't have to stop people from speaking their mind. The only reason she couldn't answer that way is because they have stopped people from speaking their mind. It was a trap of her own making.
That's irrelevant. I don't care about Gay, whether she's a raging antisemite or persecuted or whatever. Seriously.
It's just plain obvious that there's more nuance to what she said than she's saying genocide is OK depending on context.
ACX is supposed to have high standards of discourse, so it annoys me that people don't actually make decent arguments against Gay.
I just keep reading the same old bullshit "she thinks genocide is OK depending on context".
There's obviously more nuance than that. Make an actual intelligent argument against her (or in favour!). Don't repeat the same old vacuous bullshit.
It is absolutely relevant and it's part of the "nuance" you are hanging your hat on. Seriously.
While it is unfortunate that the game today is played as "if you aren't against something you must be for it", but that is reality. This tack is used against conservatives with glee and regularity. A good example of that is when Trump said "There are good people on both sides." and that was reported as "Trump supports racism."
I disagree on the "nuance" issue. She twisted herself in knots trying to provide a non-answer because she knew an honest answer would bite her. It's a fairly easy question to answer: "Genocide is never ok, but free speech is always ok." The trouble is, if she would have provided that answer, she would have been called out on the obvious.
The problem is that there is nuance which might exist here, but any such nuance would be a lie coming from her.
This is just a matter of semantics. If there's nuance, but the nuance is a lie, does that count as having nuance? Maybe on a strictly logical level it would, but that's not what most people mean by "does it have nuance". It doesn't have truthful nuance. And the fact that she wouldn't say the same thing about calling to genocide Palestinians indicates that the nuance wouldn't be truthful.
> an example of context where calling for genocide is ok.
a)
One teenager telling it to another as a joke in private (but someone else overheard).
In my opinion, not something that authorities should investigate.
b)
Something that according to some people is a "dog whistle" for calling for genocide, and according to other people it is not.
That's another good one.
I think I remember a CEO losing his job b/c he used the n word while trying to make the case that his employees should be sensitive and not use bad/taboo language.
So he used the taboo word as example and got (iirc) summarily fired? That's a case of context not being taken into account.
Pedantically, he didn't use the n word, he mentioned it. This was an obvious distinction to our wiser forebears like... ten years ago, and we've somehow lost it. (For another case, Donald McNeil at the Times.) Mentioning "from the river to the sea," as I did just now, is okay regardless of context.
As I said, I couldn't recall the details but remembered it seemed wrong - given the context... :)
Calling for genocide is okay. It's free speech. It's legal unless it's both intended to and likely to incite imminent lawlessness.
The problem is that Harvard couldn't say that, because Harvard knows it doesn't support free speech. It routinely punishes people for speech that falls squarely within 1A protections. It revoked admissions to people who said dumb things on Twitter years before they were admitted. It fired a law professor for defending a client it didn't like. So Harvard can't turn around and say what it should have said "Yes, calling for genocide is generally protected speech. Even things we *really really don't like* can be protected speech, and Harvard will not punish or penalize students or faculty for protected speech just because we find it distasteful or even disgusting. That is what the First Amendment specifically and more broadly freedom of expression mean, and it is Harvard's mission as a place of learning to protect and nurture such ideals."
It couldn't say that, so it had to blather about context.
Exactly.
Nobody believes Harvard is concerned with free speech for ideas they dislike.
She wasn't asked if it was "ok", she asked if it was "harassment" under Harvard's policy, and harassment always depends on context; who are you saying it to, under what circumstances, etc.
But everyone suspects context doesn’t matter at Harvard if you were talking much less inflammatory speech about protected classes.
It's very easy to. Imagine someone writes a paper for their "Law, Human Rights, and Social Justice in Israel-Palestine" class. In this paper, they argue that, long-term, Palestinian birthrates are high enough that, unchecked, the increase in Arab population between Israel and the occupied territories will lead to political instability and violence. As such, they argue that slavish adherence to traditional human rights law leads to suboptimal outcomes, and Israel should begin instituting concrete population control measures to cut down on the Palestinian Arab population. In addition, they advise Israel work out deals with surrounding Arab regimes and adopt ethnically-targeted financial incentives to encourage Palestinians to emigrate to them.
This paper constitutes a textbook call for genocide. Should the student be subject to disciplinary action for writing it?
This is getting away from the topic, but that is not what genocide means. At all.
It is, quite literally, the definition of genocide as defined under international law.
It depends on what you mean by "genocide". For example, if you say something like "The Anti-Defamation League is a terrible organization that does terrible things", you may or may not be correct; however, in this case you are definitely *not* calling for genocide. However, an argument can (and has) been made that since the ADL's primary goal is to prevent genocide, by speaking out against them you are implicitly endorsing genocide, and therefore you should be silenced.
You can call for the eradication of a group like Al Qaida and Hamas and Nazis…and so a group like the Nazis was pretty large although probably not large enough to characterize their eradication as “genocide”. What about WW2 Japanese? Was dropping the bomb on them getting close to “genocide”?
She was caught between a rock and a hard place of her own ideological making. It was shocking that someone like her who had existed within this ideology her entire life could not formulate an appropriate answer in this context, given the lead time she had to prepare. Even at this moment right now, the obvious answer is something along the lines of: “This is is a complicated issue as our previous stances on free speech were formed in the context of protecting an oppressed class. However, now we are in a situation where we have two oppressed classes at war, and we don’t feel that it’s our place to pick a side. While we absolutely cannot allow the advocacy of violence, we have to balance that with not silencing an oppressed group. Calling for genocide is absolutely not allowed by our student code, but in the interest of the protestors, we will be very fluid as we determine what statesmen’s rise to the level of “violent speech” and we’ll encourage our students to make sure that as they protest, they don’t speak flippantly, and imbue their words with nuance and respect as students at our esteemed university have been trained to do.”
She can't, unless they change the written policies of Harvard. The written policies protects free speech, their actions show they don't care about those, but she can't admit it directly, or she would be contravening her written policies.
That's a pretty good answer, tbh. Maybe you want to apply for university president? I've been hearing there's a couple of openings... :)
That's a lot of words. Let's simplify it.
"An oppressed class (as I define it) can say or do whatever they want, including calls for genocide and violence against an oppressor class. Jews (like whites) are not an oppressed class."
If pressed, she could have elaborated about oppressor classes!
"An oppressor class (such as Jews or whites) are not allowed to say or do anything unless every single member of an oppressed class explicitly gives permission to speak or act."
It would still have endeared her to the psychopaths on the authoritarian left, so she probably should have said something like this.
This is not in any way, shape or form a “simplification” or summary of what I wrote.
Of course not.
It is, however, an accurate and complete characterisation of Harvard's free speech policy.
The Harvard students never called for genocide against the Jews, and President Gay never supported a call for genocide.
Sample quotes from the internet.
What do you think about Harvard President Claudine Gay's apology for her remarks about calling for the genocide of Jews?
Do you agree with Harvard President Claudine Gay that calling for the genocide of Jews on campus depends on the "context"?
After witnessing the Congressional testimony of Claudine Gay, the President of Harvard, I am ashamed of my alma mater. How should Harvard respond to a call for the genocide of Jews on its campus?
When asked if calling for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard's code of conduct, Gay wouldn't give a yes or no answer. Harvard constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe called her testimony hesitant, formulaic and evasive. But he was among hundreds of faculty members who rallied behind Gay, urging Harvard to keep its president.
So exactly what was the testimony?
ELISE STEFANIK: It’s a yes or no question. Let me ask you this. You are president of Harvard, so I assume you’re familiar with the term intifada, correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I’ve heard that term, yes.
ELISE STEFANIK: And you understand that the use of the term intifada in the context of the Israeli Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?
CLAUDINE GAY: That type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
ELISE STEFANIK: And there have been multiple marches at Harvard with students chanting quote, “there is only one solution intifada revolution.” And quote, “globalize the intifada.” Is that correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I’ve heard that thoughtless, reckless and hateful language on our campus, yes.
ELISE STEFANIK: So, based upon your testimony, you understand that this call for intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally, correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I will say again that type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
ELISE STEFANIK: Do you believe that type of hateful speech is contrary to Harvard’s code of conduct or is it allowed at Harvard?
CLAUDINE GAY: It is at odds with the values of Harvard. But our values also —
ELISE STEFANIK: Can you not say here that it is against the code of conduct at Harvard?
CLAUDINE GAY: We embrace a commitment to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful. It’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment —
ELISE STEFANIK: Does that speech not cross that barrier? Does that speech not call for the genocide of Jews and the elimination of Israel?
CLAUDINE GAY: When —
ELISE STEFANIK: You testify that you understand that it’s the definition of intifada. Is that speech according to the code of conduct or not?
CLAUDINE GAY: We embrace a commitment to free expression and give a wide berth to free expression even of views that are objectionable —
https://rollcall.com/2023/12/13/transcript-what-harvard-mit-and-penn-presidents-said-at-antisemitism-hearing/
So what IS the definition of "intifada"?
>>intifada
noun
: UPRISING, REBELLION
specifically : an armed uprising of Palestinians against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip<<
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intifada
>>The right to resist is a human right<<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_resist
"Intifada" means armed resistance to occupation. It does not mean "genocide". When Dr. Gay accepted Stefanik's definition, she was trapped.
Stefanik maneuvered Gay into declarating that support for a human right is:
"thoughtless, reckless and hateful language"
So sad.
You posted this twice. That's not the relevant part of the testimony, and your posting it is very clearly a deliberate attempt at misleading people.
(My response, including a transcript of the actual relevant statements from the testimony, is at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/seems-like-targeting/comment/48562195 )
agree the claims against her don't seem to be made in good faith
Pretty good. I would add "and we will protect the right to protest of people who want to protest against Hamas".
But she would not be able to say that without being run out of her job by the faculty senate.
It's worth mentioning that she was specifically being asked about Harvard's "harassment policy". The definition of "harassment" usually depends a great deal on context, and it should.
The entre question was a setup; they were trying to make her either say something they could blacklist her for or get her to lie under oath so they could hit her with perjury charges. She was never asked what she thought, and that was deliberate.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for her or for Harvard here, but this is basically McCarthyist tactics from Congress.
Trying to get someone to tell the truth, in the knowledge that if they tell the truth it would reflect unfavorably on them, isn't a setup, it's just questioning.
You reap what you sow.
This is untrue. She gives a straightforward answer on when it would constitute harassment. Posting on facebook that all jews should be exterminated is not harassment. Posting a sign in a jewish student's window is harassment. You can disagree with this definition or with the policy, but she was not unclear.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=1jBHvx7POz8 (Harvard Section begins @ 1:30)
If you need to use a word "technically" while explaining somebody's position on genocide of Jews, chances are it's not a good position. It's not some hard, hotly contested question where both sides have good arguments and you need to get deep into technical intricacies to get it right. Or at least it shouldn't be. And she wouldn't go for "context" if she were asked about whether anti-gay, anti-black or anti-trans statements - even not raising to the level of genocidal calls - are agains Harvard policy. She'd drop on it like a hawk on a mouse. So *for her* it's a complex question, which shows how far she - and American academia - has fallen.
That's a fair point and I don't really disagree.
But context still matters. OK, let's say I'm comparing the outcome for American colonizers and, say, the fate of the colonizers in Algeria or South Africa or Zimbabwe. I could easily end up saying something like "genociding Native Americans seems to have been a pretty positive step for the colonizers".
Am I supporting Native Americans' genocide? No. There are no moral grounds for invading and murdering people in order to steal their stuff/their lands. But historically it happened a lot. And that's the context that allows me to discuss it without being branded a warmonger, or wannabe war criminal etc.
Nobody disputes that context matters. But the action the context is attached to also matters! There could be millions of scenarios where it's hard to tell. Genocide of Jews is not one of them. She was asked if calling to genocide is against the Harvard policy. And if there was no *"of Jews"* attached to it, I am absolutely confident she wouldn't spent more than a second on it - she'd clearly and forcefully answer it, that yes, this is unacceptable and against every policy. But "in context" - specifically in context of significant share of her party and her peer circle being openly antisemitic or extremely-thinly-velied antisemitic (like "we don't support murder of Jews, we only support Hamas and too bad some people did something to Jews, but it's their own fault") - she is not able or does not want to exercise the same moral clarity that she would if "of Jews" were omitted from the question. Yes, we all know this context, and this context is exactly the reason her behavior is so appalling. Not that she "technically" misquoted some policy. The problem is not that she said "context" - the problem is we understand perfectly what kind of "context" she means, and how it is applied, and that is exactly the problem.
I'm under the impression that their (the university presidents') controversial response was to "is calling for genocide of Jews harassment", saying "no, unless it's [legal definition of harassment]". I guess this is technically(??) correct but I don't know why they chose to frame it in this way, especially since at least at MIT the administration has not been sympathetic to pro-Palestine protestors (and I'd assumed the situation was approximately the same at Harvard). Maybe because otherwise, under some interpretation of protest calls, they'd have to discipline literally hundreds of students.
> they'd have to discipline literally hundreds of students.
So, they are afraid to apply the anti-harassment policy because too many of their students engage in harassment? And that's somehow an *excuse* for them, not the reason for deep soul searching and mass layoffs of those responsible? It's like a bank robber would say "well, obviously I can't stop robbing banks because they I wouldn't have the money!".
If there's any good thing to come out of the whole mess in Israel... well, it's the in-progress eradication of Hamas. That's been sorely needed for a long time. But if there's *another* good thing to come out of it, it's been the clear exposure for all to see, of just how much of modern academia and journalism plays by "rules" that are nothing more than Calvinball. A lot of people have been claiming this for a good while, but now it's become impossible to ignore or deny.
Seriously
I have to disagree as IIRC both Calvin and Hobbes could change the rules whenever they wanted so it was fair in that regard. Whereas the rules that Scott is talking about are basically we can do or say anything to protect the in group and hurt the out group.
The technique that is working for Rufo and others right now is breaking past the obfuscation and attempted chaff of racism/sexism accusations and make them explicitly state a rule (almost any rule really) and then show that they flout it.
The amorphous rules are sort of a defense from the Alinsky technique of "make your opponent follow their own rules" and this is a counter to that defense.
Indeed, Calvinball is such a scrupulously fair game, that *Rosalyn* was allowed to change the rules, once she figured out how to play!
I always liked that particular story, but I just now realized that the moment Rosalyn bonded with Calvin was in the one arena where he had complete control. And he let her end the game on her own terms, instead of making up a new rule to counter "the baby-sitter flag".
They shouldn't have had to go for plagiarism. Testifying that calling for genocide against Jews is okay is dirt, or at least it should be.
To clarify, it would not be if she were a known free speech absolutist, or even showed any signs of valuing free speech that would harm other oppressed minorities, but she isn't and doesn't.
Well said! If Gay were a consistent free speech absolutist she would be honorable, but she is not.
Yeah, it seemed to me that her answer was the right one, but didn't track with her actions in power or the actions of Harvard wrt speech they didn't like for the last couple decades.
Actually looking at the Harvard Speech Code, I think she was right but it's a hard call: (https://www.thefire.org/colleges/harvard-university/harvard-university-non-discrimination-policy-discriminatory-harassment - I'm assuming FIRE's version is right and was in force at the time). The elements are:
1. It's got to be unwelcome and offensive
2. It's got to fall into 1 because of a group's' protected status
3. It's got to be "objectively offensive"
4. It's got to be "create a work, educational or living environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile or abusive"
5. It's got to "den[y] the individual an equal opportunity to participate in the benefits of the workplace or the institution's programs or activities."
It looks like it will satisfy 1 and 2, assuming 1 is subjective. I'm not sure 3 is a coherent idea. I'd come down on the side of 4 and 5 being a "no," but I think the criteria for satisfying them is "I reasonably believe that a substantial portion of my classmates hate me." Probably not in practice, but I'm basing that on contextual assumptions that different people would make different calls on.
I would think that any call for genocide would be "objectively offensive" if anything is.
I kind of wish she was someone with a long legacy of free speech defense, and that it had protected her. But yeah, she tore down all the traditional protections around her and then got eaten when she finally said something awful. Hard to feel sympathetic but wish there was some integrity in those places.
It's dead-on the scene from A Man for All Seasons, really.
"And, when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and, if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake."
Lots of people too dumb to see the simple wisdom in this. What an age.
hello Im too dumb
Mind explaining to slowly why that quote applies given I'm an outcast who skipped applying for jobs because they said "antivaxx need not apply" while she's a diversity hire who's *still employed* of whats considered to be the worse university for free speech, and she did just factually and obviously commit plagiarism?
I will need it to be very slow since Im very very dumb, but the way I see it its not me, not my community, and not in my power to effect.
You have to honor principles even when they are unpopular because popularity changes and principles are eternal.
Editing this to be nicer:
You have a right to bodily autonomy because in principle everyone has the right to make their own health choices. Not sure what I wrote made you think I would not support that.
> bodily autonomy
My position on abortion swaped when it became painfully clear that "my body my choice"/medical privacy was a way to extract my compliance while giving nothing in return shortly before the supreme court re opened the issue.
While I will never intend to force people to take alex johns approved pills, I'm not sheading any tears over calling 9-mouth abortions murder, because its always been a grey area and difficult position to hold.
I don't have a simple answer of how to hold principals in the face of a political enemy. But I'm damn sure its not a naive assume your endless goodness will convince everyone, and something towards letting grey areas go while your weak. While fascism is gaining power I do not wish to allow fascists to speak at the "jews sending their children to america" meeting, kernels of power and decision making must be immune form outsiders, somehow, and in-power and hostile ones especially.
It has nothing to do with whether you feel sympathetic for her. A win against her was a win by people whose goal is to restrict speech targeting Israel. She stood up for that sort of speech in her testimony, and her opponents got her scalp for it, and every university president in the country took notice. "These are the stakes for allowing free speech on Israel." The next time they address this issue on their own campuses, they will be less likely to defend students protesting Israel.
I am aware. While I see the concrete and practical reality, there is a human reality where people will always cheer to see someone subjected to the consequences of their own actions.
I agree. I just think it's odd that, on this issue, I keep seeing commentary in the form of, "Well, she's right on the issues, but she didn't put her best foot forward in those hearings," or "It's definitely a loss for free speech, but it's hard to defend someone so unsympathetic." People should have the strength of their convictions. If people disagree with what happened, they should say that, not act like jaded PR people, tut-tutting about their candidates performance in front of the cameras.
I think the unspoken truth there is that personal integrity is the first bulwark to these principles being compromised. People won’t live with hypocrisy so if you’re hypocritical on a bedrock principle you’re a severe danger.
It exposed different rules for different identity groups and no amount of graduate level obfuscation was going to get her out of it. Nobody believes that calls for genocide against favored identity groups would have gone unpunished in the age of microaggressions, preferred pronouns, bias response teams, and trigger warnings. This so called trap was laid by the incoherent ideology and has little to do with Israel itself.
It's not really even that she said calling for genocide against Jews was okay. It's that Harvard isn't (or isn't seen as) consistently in favor of free speech. They are in favor of free speech when it comes to genocide against Jews, but not so much on other controversial positions.
She never supported a call for genocide because THERE WAS NEVER A CALL FOR GENOCIDE. The call was for INTIFADA which means "resistance to occupation."
A resistance which is exercised via genocide.
I can tell immediately that you give Israel a pass. Fortunately the ICJ ruling indicates that era is ending.
> Fortunately the ICJ ruling indicates that era is ending.
What are you talking about? The ICJ hasn't reached a verdict on whether Israel's military operation constitutes genocide, and it probably won't for several years.
The ICJ spoke. Do you know what they said?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-importance-of-the-icj-ruling-on-israel
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/01/gaza-icj-ruling-offers-hope-protection-civilians-enduring-apocalyptic
> Do you know what they said?
I do. I also know what they didn't say. Which is why this claim:
> "Fortunately the ICJ ruling indicates that era is ending."
is misleading.
Okay come on, surely even you don't believe that the ICJ or UN or other international courts actually have any meaningful power.
Clearly no enforcement power. Do you believe words have power?
Many MSM publications have previously banned the use of the word "genocide" in regard to Israel. That's a little harder to do now.
I think words have power if people care about them. Israel doesn't care because they have the US backing them up, and the US doesn't care because it is by far the most powerful country in the world. The governments have no practical obligation to give a single shit about calls of genocide.
Advocating a Third Intifada is incitement to imminent violence.
So is a call for a violent response to the October 7th attack. Actually calls for violence are old hat in the US.
"Imminent", as in encouraging your audience to become violent then & there.
Of the two cases, only Intifadans meet that criterion.
So the Harvard students were encouraging (who ?) to get guns and start shooting...
Don't be obtuse.
Sorry, but she was specifically asked about "calling for the genocide of Jews" and she refused to say that was a violation of the Harvard code of conduct. See the transcript:
https://rollcall.com/2023/12/13/transcript-what-harvard-mit-and-penn-presidents-said-at-antisemitism-hearing/
Is it?
Please tell me, Mark, is it a violation? Right now! Yes or no!
I'm waiting...
I don't mean to be rude. I'm just trying to simulate the pressure Dr. Gay was under.
Back up a step. She had aleady agreed (by silence) that intifada means genocide. (Which I strenuously dispute.) The students were clearly calling for intifada and global support for intifada. So in Stefanik's mind they were calling for genocide. This was the immediate context at the hearing where Stephanik asked her question about the Harvard code of conduct. Given that framing, agreeing that calling for genocide violates the Harvard code of contact immediately implies that these students should be disciplined. (Do you think the student should be disciplined?) Dr Gay didn't want to agree that they should be disciplined.
That's the first reason to resist answering the question. Now let's say she actually does want to answer the question. And what if the truth is that it depends on the context. Imagine that in a classroom discussion a student contends that the world would be better off without Israel. Has that student violated the code of conduct? I'm no expert, but my gut tells me not. This is an abstract idea and protected speech.
Is there a way to advocate eliminating Israel that does violate the code of conduct. Probably so. So the truth is: it depends on the context.
It was that statement, "depends on the context," that infuriated millions of ignorant simple-minded people.
That's ridiculous. She was repeatedly asked whether calling for genocide of Jews is necessarily against the code of conduct. She refused to say that it was. I don't know what Harvard's policy is, but if I were setting policy I would have no difficulty in immediately saying that calling for genocide of any group is unacceptable. (For the record, calling for genocide is a crime against humanity under the Genocide Convention, which has been ratified by the US and thus is also US law.) If Gay's position was "calling for genocide is a violation of the code of conduct, but calling for intifada is not calling for genocide", she should have said so. She had many chances to say that, and refused to.
https://studenthandbook.summer.harvard.edu/student-conduct
Physical Violence
Harvard College strives to maintain a safe and secure environment for all members of the
community and thus does not tolerate physical violence or threats of physical violence used by or against the members of the community. Students are expected to avoid all physical conflicts, confrontations, and altercations unless their own safety or that of another is at extreme jeopardy. Failure to do so will ordinarily result in disciplinary action, including, but not limited to, requirement to withdraw from the College.
Here is the link. I quoted the section on physical violence.
What do you say? Does calling for genocide violate the Harvard code of conduct?
Dr Gay said "It depends on the context."
Was she wrong?
Yes. Clearly. A call to genocide is a threat of physical violence against members of the community.
>>She should have said so.<<
Yes, I agree. That was my original point.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1100439661108725?mibextid=jaSYs6&s=yWDuG2&fs=e
I think a possibility here is that you care about what Claudine Gay said about Israel and Jewish people, and you support actions that hold her accountable for that, but the truth is, those actors holding her accountable could care less about Israel, and are just using your morals (and everyone who thinks like you) as a weapon against Claudine Gay to disempower her.
You are sincere, the accusers are not. To me, that wouldn't feel right.
What, in your theory, do they actually care about?
It could be any number of things, but usually when I've been proximate to these situations, it more petty than you would think. Do you think that Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet do not benefit professionally from this, by getting more money, deals, recognition or power? They could be interested in scoring points for their side or personal brand - whether or not they personally care about the issues they are yelling about.
I do not think these people give a wild hoot about plagiarism. They are using public outrage about plagiarism to target an enemy to win, for either personal advancement or tribal thinking reasons. They are leveraging public outrage about Israel to target a Black woman in a position of power as an avatar of DEI. Theoretically, all they had to do was wait for the right kind of uproar to attack their favorite targets.
Just like Claudine Gay didn't care about academia when she plagiarized. And she didn't care about freedom of speech in a number of cases before the Israel controversy - she's been wildly inconsistent in applying this principle.
Both sides selectively use morality to advance their agendas. The public cares about these morals a lot, and the leaders leverage that power for their own gain.
Why do you think there is public outrage about plagiarism in the first place? Because it's a kind of cheating or stealing, no? Is it so hard to believe Chris Rufo doesn't like cheating any more than the next guy?
I didn't say cheating wasn't bad. Most people think that. I think the leaders you follow say that in public, but their actions show they are hypocrites. That's the whole point of Scott's piece, about the dishonesty and lack of character of powerful leaders that leverage moral accusations (that the general public cares very much about) to win culture wars points, when those leaders do not consistently apply those principles (which shows they don't really care).
That's the whole thing about Neri Oxman. The team that accused Claudine Gay of plagiarism had a known plagiarist in their midst, and they didn't care.
Which totally checks out.
I think something that sucks about power dynamics - I don't know if this is new or if its always been this way - but you can't be in power and not play this way, at least sometimes.
Hmm...okay, well suffice to say my reading was rather different than yours.
But in the bottom line, this bad publicity is an assymetric weapon that only worked against Gay because she genuinely was bad enough for people who were neutral in whatever personal dispute she has with Chris Rufo to come down against her. In a sense Rufo doesn't matter here - anyone in a high profile position like that will have some people who are interested in making her look bad, and what we want is to have it only succeed when she actually is bad. In this case this was the system working as intended.
Until its your guy.
I edited to say: I think your take here is one without integrity. Either academic honesty and Israel mean something, or they do not. Letting a figurehead manipulate your earnest morals for their own personal gain to get an outcome that you are both aligned with is, I think, a selling out of the value of your own morality.
I truly believe that until the majority of US citizens can get beyond this thinking, and support leaders that have actual values, we will be stuck in a endless loop of ineffectual governments, lackluster politicians, and vapid culture wars.
I think Shaked's point is that the specifics of who found dirt on Gay are irrelevant. It could have been a graduate student studying her work or a friendly news outlet, or her political enemies as appears to be the case. What we, those reading about this story on the outside, should care about is whether she broke a rule/norm/cultural expectation/whatever that is relevant to us. If we do not doubt that the accusations are true, then the messenger is almost meaningless (I care a lot about the messenger when I have to consider whether the accusations are accurate in the first place).
Will this norm result in a lot of people losing their positions in society? Potentially - but that's where we consider whether the sanctions for bad behavior are properly calibrated. Getting fired for a 10+year old mild to moderate offense does not seem to be properly calibrated, but that's where society seems to be at the moment.
In the interest of making explicit things that are obvious to everyone, as Scott says ... this isn't motivated by concern for the Jews in general. It's motivated by the idea that Universities don't crack down on criticism of/protest against Israel in the name of fighting anti-Semitism.
It's like when all the people who care oh-so-much about anti-Semitism, rallied to Elon Musk's defense when he agreed with someone who said "Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them". It's not about concern for Jews, it's about concern for Israel.
That blatantly ridiculous, it's that people take "guy who constantly shitposts liked a random offensive tweet" less seriously than "mobs marching down the street calling for genocide against the Jews while the leaders of elite institutions support them".
"it's that people take 'guy who constantly shitposts liked a random offensive tweet' less seriously"
There's a question of "how seriously should you take Elon Musk's tweets", one response might be to take it very seriously, and one response might be to treat him the same as a random nobody.
But people (including in this case Bill Ackman) weren't treating him as a random nobody - they were actively defending him!
"less seriously than 'mobs marching down the street calling for genocide against the Jews while the leaders of elite institutions support them'."
Don't have time to write more right now, but again, I don't think "calling for genocide against the Jews" is actually what the people involved here found objectionable. It was the question that was asked at the Congressional hearing, but not the actual motivation.
In fact, I don't think she criticized Israel at all in that Congressional testimony. She did defend calling for genocide against Jews. And so do I, because I'm close to a free speech absolutist! But as you said, Gay is very much not, at least on woke issues.
It *is* okay under the free speech codes. You're accusing her of *NOT* lying to Congress
Or rather, it's a complicated question, which is what she said. I'm pretty sure lying to Congress is a crime, if she had said anything other than what she did say, she'd be in jail
The underlying issue of whether or not Harvard should have stronger/less strong free speech protections is a fair point of contention, but I honestly can't tell what exactly your real issue is, and the thing you mention explicitly is... absolutely not a bad thing that Gay did
Look, we all know if she'd been asked the same thing about, say, black people or trans people, she would have replied differently. I do know she has excuses constructed after the fact to try to make her statement sound reasonable.
Yes, and would you support her answers in that case? If not, maybe just admit that your actual position on free speech is "I'm against it when being against it benefits my preferred causes and for it when being for it benefits my preferred causes."
"you only oppose my hypocrisy because you're hypocritical in the opposite direction" is something people who can't imagine having integrity say.
Okay, since you're not a hypocrite, then my assumption is that you your long-held position must be that Harvard should crack down on anti-Black rhetoric, anti-trans rhetoric, and so on. This is very good to know.
The thing is that all three presidents were coached by the same lawyers and they all parsed essentially in the same way presumably based on how they were legally prepped.
The questioning was a minefield and they all stepped on the same mine in following their legal coaching.
I don’t think anything Gay said was about her personal opinion. She was being an institutional mouthpiece in the same way they all were.
Harvard was recently named the worst university in America for free speech: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/harvard-is-named-worst-school-for-free-speech-scoring-zero-out-of-possible-100/ar-AA1gjVdf
Notice how this is irrelevant to anything I said, and doesn't change the truth of the emotionally-related-but-distinct claim the original commenter was making
It's not at all irrelevant. Harvard's free speech codes obviously don't prevent it cracking down on speech it doesn't like, so it absolutely could crack down on calls for Jewish genocide, if it wanted to.
It's wild hearing people describe these issues who have only heard about them filtered through a few layers of propaganda. There were of course no calls for genocide against Jews at Harvard, that is nuts.
Yes there were, per Harvard's own newspaper
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/4/pro-palestine-week-of-action/#:~:text=The%20chant%20%E2%80%9Cintifada%2C%E2%80%9D%20which,as%20%E2%80%9Cabhorrent%20antisemetic%20calls.%E2%80%9D
You're quoting Harvard's Hillel house's characterization of the word "intifada," which means, quite literally, "revolution." Saying that the Arabic word for "revolution" is necessarily a call for genocide is totally unserious.
No, I'm quoting the Palestinian definition of it (which is what the organizers there used)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Intifada?wprov=sfla1
If someone chants about how Palestinians should have a violent uprising right after October 7th happened, it's not hard to understand what they actually mean.
There is no "Palestinian definition of 'Intifada.'" 'Intifada' is an Arabic word. It is the word for revolution. When Palestinian students learn about the Warsaw Uprising, their textbooks call it the انتفاضة وارسو, aka the "Warsaw Intifada."
What you're actually arguing, implicitly, is that any call for armed Palestinian resistance to the Israelis is a de facto call for genocide. This is difficult to square with both logic and international law, but also with the fact that the First Palestinian Intifada resulted in the most dramatic and effective push for Palestinian/Israeli peace that has ever occurred.
Yeah I'm sure the people shouting that *right after* Palestinians went on a rampage of murdering babies and grandmas, raping women to death and carving out people's eyes were advocating for peaceful resistance.
The organisers (including the guy who led the chant) quite directly explained, in the article you linked, how they were using the word - to denote "liberation" and "the right to resist."
Had they desired the actual genocide of Jews (which is a desire several orders removed from a territorial modification of the state of Israel), surely there were plenty of punchier slogans available.
I do wonder whether Gay would have fared better if she went fully to the mat with Stefanik on the linguistic/previous usage question of intifada instead of giving her "depends on context" reply. My hunch is yes.
I'm aware they later tried to pretend they said something else to avoid getting in trouble. I took once got in trouble in elementary school for calling someone a bitch and then tried to explain that actually I was just talking about her dog.
The only reference to genocide in that article is in an email from a campus group claiming that chants that included the word "intifada" were genocidal, which in the next paragraph the article explains is a clearly incorrect interpretation of those chants.
Calling for a violent uprising against the Jews right after a terrorist group started one which killed hundreds of people and abducted hundreds more is absolutely genocidal. You don't get to go "oh it's just an Arabic word for struggle" any more that you get to say that about me in kampf. I mean you can say it if you want to pretend to pretend to mean something else, but the real meaning isn't ambiguous.
I'm having a hard time understanding how you could believe that. Surely you get that even to the very arguable extent that the chant implies support for the 10/7 attack, that doesn't imply any endorsement of genocide?
How is supporting attempted genocide different than supporting genocide? "I support attempts at X" does, in general, imply that you actually want X to happen, it's not some unreasonable conclusion to jump to.
She did not testify to this. You're adopting a partisan framing which deliberately misunderstands her words in a way you would not do for any other issue.
Do we need to start having a Middle East quarantine subthread for non-Open-Thread posts as well?
its *the* debate its why she was in the news
There's a difference between debating the validity of her words (and the right of people to use them against her) and engaging in the culture war. The This thread has devolved into the latter.
People are grouping the testimony of the 3 together. She was by far the least bad but still bad.
Another example of targeting in this case is me. I wrote a critique of Claudine Gay's research, which I think is quite strong. (https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1749546447811277119 and https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1740324971430154471)
And for this I was attacked by the Guardian for things completely unrelated, such as my views on immigration, and previous coauthors.
It can obviously have a chilling effect if you write a critique of a scientific paper, you risk being called racist by a major newspaper.
I think I actually wrote a post of about the Guardian article in question for the culture war thread of the motte here:
https://www.themotte.org/post/832/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/179451?context=8#context
It's not unrelated dirt. On the contrary, the theory is that Gay was appointed as a result of a 'woke' agenda, which prioritizes ideology, specifically the oppressor / oppressed narrative, over merit. Her anti-Semitism responses go directly to the first of the theory and her plagiarism (and more broadly weak academic credentials) go to the second half. The two parts of the theory are closely linked, as an important part of the anti-woke argument is that merit is being sacrificed in the name of ideology.
I think it's unrelated. Would anyone have investigated the weak academic credentials if she hadn't made anti-Semitic responses?
It speaks to the Harvard investigative initiatives that they never looked closer at her actual academic credentials.
"Wokeness" is SUPPOSED to sacrifice merit, in the name of equality. See affirmative action, etc.
The president of Harvard isn't a name chosen out of a hat. Presumably they checked out her credentials and found them adequate. She wasn't a distinguished scholar (or anywhere close), but presumably she was what they were looking for.
> Would anyone have investigated the weak academic credentials if she hadn't made anti-Semitic responses?
Yes they would have. The accusations of plagiarism came from before the hearing. Jesse Singal talks about getting an email about it on 12/4, the day before the hearing.
"weak academic credentials"
I don't mean to nitpick, but I have heard this brought up several times by other people covering this story and I really wish they would stop. I'm not saying her academic credentials are good -- I'm in no position to judge them one way or the other. But I don't think they are very relevant to her role as an administrator. Some of the world's best academics might make terrible college presidents, while they best college presidents might have pretty mediocre academic records. If there is any correlation at all, I suspect it is pretty weak. I do think a college presidents needs to have a very good understanding of academia -- the culture, the research and teaching process, the accompanying bureaucracy -- but they don't have to have a stellar h-index. And, of course, the academic aspects of college are just one of the broad categories of things that college presidents have to manage. There's also donors, relationships with local/state/federal governments, student life, physical infrastructure, safety and security, personnel management....the list goes on.
Being a serial liar is far worse than weak credentials as an academic and it's in fact a huge failing in an administrator.
While I totally agree that academic credentials aren't necessarily relevant for the President's actual job functions, in a university environment, scholarship buys a lot of political currency. Basically, if you want a bunch of tenured Harvard professors to really respect your leadership, it's necessary to have some academic status.
In the case of Gay, I think a (over)simplified way to think of it is: she lost her reputation with the public with the antisemitism business, and lost her reputation with the academe for the plagiarism. She couldn't survive losing both.
Two points:
1. Even if that were true, her own academic merit being questionable wouldn't hurt the argument any more than any other minority elite's academic merit being questionable. Going after her specifically instead of any other, possibly more egregious target, or just doing the work of finding statistics, isn't a *stronger* knock against her argument. It's just dramatic irony.
2. As Scott touched, there's no evidence that her plagiarism was unrepresentative for people in her position. The reason you use statistics instead of cherry-picked anecdotes is that an anecdote like this provides no evidence that minorities have worse academic records; white men could plagiarize much more and no one ever bothers to investigate. The fact that the target was chosen for reasons of making a satisfying narrative, rather than chosen at random or w/e, is pretty strong evidence of this just being a cherry-picked anecdote that shouldn't reflect on the larger argument, rather than the reverse.
>The reason you use statistics instead of cherry-picked anecdotes is that an anecdote like this provides no evidence that minorities have worse academic records; white men could plagiarize much more and no one ever bothers to investigate.
Maybe AI could help? If we could automate doing forensic scholarship at scale, perhaps
a) We would have accurate statistics (and could adjust the penalties in light of them)
b) If we caught this _early_ in someone's life, maybe we could dissuade them from doing it frequently?
I feel like that just incentivizes the creation of an AI for 'rephrase this without changing its meaning so it passes the AI plagiarism filter', which probably already exists or if not is less than a year away anyways.
Which, you might think, 'ok, so it's an arms race between paraphrasing AIs and plagiarism-detecting AIs, that's fine.'
But I think that pretty quickly has us running up against the rocks of confronting the fact that people very often need to say the same thing that someone else has said previously, a million different phrasings that communicate the exact same concept are still the same unit of communication, and forcing academics to spend their time paraphrasing sentences to try to convey the same information using different words has always been kind of a dumb waste of time.
When you have children write 'scientific' papers in class, a large part of your objective is to make sure they can write well at all, so having them copy sentences would defeat the purpose. But hopefully we're not trying to prove that actual scientists know how to write well; plagiarizing results and conclusions would undermine their actual job description, but copying sentences needed in the introduction to explain background concepts to the audience? How does that make their science worse?
So, yeah, AI systems like that might drive us into confronting how dumb our ideas about plagiarism are to begin with. If your filter can detect an AI just rephrasing the same concept someone else uses, we'll have to admit that this is all humans were ever doing anyway, and humans can't ever beat that filter without making the text itself less coherent and useful.
Many Thanks! That's a good point. I wasn't thinking in terms of paraphrasing, but just in terms of direct copying. As you pointed out, there are potential arms races, and murky question of when it stops being plagiarism, and wasted effort in doing the paraphrasing.
I certainly agree with your point re
>but copying sentences needed in the introduction to explain background concepts to the audience? How does that make their science worse?
( though presumably they _could_ do this in a transparent way by putting the copied text in a quote and attributing it to the original author )
This starts to sound like some very muddy issues in IP law, where trying to disentangle what ideas are "generally known to someone skilled in the art", what are ideas that are specifically protected as someone else's patent claim, and what ideas are novel, can get to be _more_ work than coming up with the novel ideas and debugging the complex mixture into something actually useful.
I’m reminded of how dramatically coverage of Elon Musk changed between pre buying Twitter and post. Headlines about him used to be “Eccentric Tech Guy Successfully Launches Rocket,” now they’re “Hateful Billionaire Is Actually Conspiracy Theorist And Anti Semite.” And now apparently they’re going after him for him for being too successful at Tesla, ugh.
Not to mention (dare I say it) how dramatically coverage of Donald Trump changed pre and post launching presidential runs.
It’s almost like the mainstream media has an agenda other than providing the truth and letting the viewer decide.
That's kind of surprising; I vaguely recall people turning against him for the whole birther thing. Having said that, I can't remember when people started saying "white supremacist" by default instead of "racist."
After decades of targeted propaganda and harassment by leftist media and institutions, and "principled conservatives" not reciprocating in kind due to the nature of their beliefs in the "marketplace of ideas" and "independent institutions", both of which turned out to be illusions, kvetching about exposing egregious cases like Claudine Gay is rich.
The time of controlled opposition has come and passed.
"almost"? nah..."definitely"
I think media converge on a narrative wrt people and movements and industries, and the almost every news story sticks to the narrative, omitting contradictory facts and quotes, and digging for supporting facts and quotes. Thus, once the narrative was established that W was a dimwitted good old boy, it almost didn't matter what they did-if W was reading Dostoyevsky in the original Russian, it was going to somehow be spun into the narrative that he was a dimwitted overpromoted good old boy. You could see this in the way the shooting of Michael Brown was reported--the initial narrative was innocent black kid murdered by a racist cop, and by God, the recalcitrant facts of the case were going to be hammered into that narrative. And most people still think Brown was an innocent kid murdered by a racist cop, and always will think that, so mission accomplished.
Yeah, coupled with the fact that people will go after you if you disagree with the narrative, this is very alarming
Do you have any specific examples of this? It seems pretty normal for coverage of someone to focus a lot more on their political views once they start running for president.
It’s normal for coverage to increase but pre 2015 everyone thought of Trump as an ego driven real estate billionaire/TV personality/embodiment of the American Dream. It makes sense for his flaws to be more exposed in the setting of his presidential run - he’s certainly an egomaniac - but the spin that he’s somehow racist (Scott wrote about this) or wants to start World War 3 (extensively claimed pre 2016, he was the most peaceful president of this century) or collaborated with Russia or committed impeachable offences in the phone call with Ukraine… I believed it all at the time and now looking back I can see that it was BS. Which significantly lowers my trust in the media.
Sure, this makes sense if you ignore the fact that his behavior also changed after buying twitter ... like, he mostly wasn't doing this sort of thing pre buying twitter? https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/15/media/elon-musk-antisemitism-white-people/index.html
Behavior of the subjects involved is a BIG driver of coverage, even though it's fair to say other factors can come into play...
Nah, that's just CNN taking one tweet completely out of context which then gets amplified across all the media platforms and leads to reasonable people getting confused. It's weaponisation of the media against Elon. Actually what he said was, if anything, Islamophobic, CNN should get its claims of racism straight. He was saying that the Jewish Anti Defamation League should be more concerned with Islamists than with European whites. Which is just very straightforwardly true.
If you listen to what Elon actually says, he's the least anti-Semitic it's possible to be (and I say this as someone of Jewish heritage who listens to a lot of what Elon has to say.) At least half of his friends are Jewish. He recently visited Auschwitz with Ben Shapiro. He describes himself as "philosemitic" (Greek for likes Jews a lot).
Let's separate the concepts of saying antisemitic things and being antisemitic. For example, an AI that says maximally offensive things might say antisemitic things, but would not be antisemitic.
Musk has said antisemitic things, endorsing conspiracy theories. However, it seems like he's more of a troll than a serious antisemite, so resembles that AI.
This term 'antisemitic' has gotten really weird.
I think Musk was shitposting on Twitter for many years before buying it. He would be far better off handing off his Twitter account to some social media manager and never touching it again. But then, so would most other people, and maybe as owner of Twitter Musk would rather not say so....
Yeah; I would say the inflection point was roughly late 2015 or so, with an acceleration of that trend around 2017. Before that he really wasn’t notable for being that weird or that publicly contrarian.
Yeah. Something like Futurism seems to have utterly change the tone of its coverage.
That said, you could argue that acquiring Twitter further outed Elon's... err... personality quirks. I personally think it actually accentuated them but hey that's close to being a distinction without a difference ...
He is definitely a weird dude, but in his own words, "I founded six companies and I'm sending rockets to Mars, did you really expect me to be a chill, normal guy?"
Yeah. For my money, so far, I'd rather have a world with Elon than one without.
But, yeah, if someone could tell him to fucking drop his phone and stop twitting, it'd do wonder for his mental state...
The back an forth coverage of Musk and his companies went on before then. You can see this in how people freaked out when he smoked a joint on Joe Rogan, which I believe was before the Twitter buy.
Yeah, Elon caught a lot of flack before Twitter because he ruffled feathers in the auto industry with Tesla. The UAW wasn't happy that he had no union representation in his factories, and the dealerships were gunning for him because he does direct vehicle sales. Both of those groups STILL hate him, even more so now that he has two very successful vehicle models. I don't think that passion has anything to do with his penchant for saying things that fall outside the Overton window. Their biggest nightmare is if his truck is popular enough to cannibalize sales in the top-selling vehicle category in the US.
Are those groups politically influential? Obviously the UAW are, but so are the dealerships. It is illegal to buy a Tesla in 13 states (including Tesla's headquarters in Texas!), and in three of those states they're not even allowed to have service centers to fix your car. Plus 9 other states place limits on how many stores Tesla can have. If dealerships have enough political power to keep Tesla from selling in Texas - with its massive Texas-sized factory stoking the Texas economy - they have the power to ensure Elon gets bad press.
I would believe there's a lot of bots with fake negative views of Tesla on social media.
I think it had been on its way down for a while, but I don't know why. Around 2019ish, I recall hearing some fairly-left friends mention him and roll their eyes, as though there was common knowledge that rendered him ridiculous and pathetic. Of note, one of them owned a Tesla. But I didn't ask what the story was, and mostly I remember it because I didn't follow his doings, so to me he was just the guy behind Tesla's mass production and SpaceX, who also started the much more dubious Boring Company and hyperloop ... thing. And it was a clear illustration of how disconnected I'd become from the "public narrative".
You're right of course that the Twitter acquisition made it a lot worse, but I think it was already underway.
A few years ago he posted this
https://nypost.com/2022/04/29/elon-musk-says-woke-progressive-extremists-make-him-look-right-wing/
That could be the effect, yeah. But my impression was that it had something to do with Elon specifically, some pattern of things he in particular did. Maybe the media was just focusing on him at the time, I dunno. He certainly seems to have "Kanye West spectrum disorder".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPcEqA9wS4Y
One should also probably not underestimate the influence of editorial staff in these sorts of investigative reports.
As I recall, a year or so ago, Kelsey Tuoc commented on Twitter about the NYT's editorial decision to be hostile to tech companies, and several other prominent journalists (I think Matt Yglesias was one) agreed that this had happened and had influenced coverage across the media ecosystem.
And Scholars Stage has talked about how the NYT specifically is a newsroom that decides on their narrative and then goes out and tries to find stories to fit it
"We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line. "
Screenshot:
https://twitter.com/DaCaveOfWonders/status/1366168277676920832
Original Post:
https://scholars-stage.org/the-framers-and-the-framed-notes-on-the-slate-star-codex-controversy/
I really really wish people would analyze more culture war through the lens of Tech v. Media rather than Red v. Blue. It's a lesser battle to be sure, but still a *really* big driver of IMO blue-tinted bad behavior that doesn't reduce to conventional politics.