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Upon hearing the news that the Onion had been sold off yet again this past week, the Babylon Bee has decided to step in and help the floundering satire site by lending them one of its two jokes.
ELAH VALLEY — A young boy named David has found himself under intense scrutiny and condemnation for his alleged violence against a kindly Palestinian giant named Goliath. Those critical of the young boy's action call this yet another tragic case of disproportionate force and cultural insensitivity.
Here's the transcript; on balance, the message seems to me to be correct (though I would be inclined to say that such encampments, if they violate content-neutral rules—as they usually do—should be removed more promptly):
Hello, everyone.
As you surely know, campus communities across the country are struggling to cope with strongly contending views on the war in the Middle East – and MIT is too.
So I want to let you know what I see here, and what I believe is at a stake.
Last Sunday night, 30 or so students set up around 15 tents on the Kresge lawn. They also put up signs – some deeply critical of Israel, some expressing their support for the Palestinian people and their demands that MIT cut research ties with Israel. They have repeatedly stated their commitment to these views.
From the start, this encampment has been a clear violation of our procedures for registering and reserving space for campus demonstrations – rules that are independent of content – rules that help make sure that everyone can have freedom of speech.
Over the course of the week, several more tents have been added. The students have sometimes been noisy – but the situation has so far been peaceful. For instance, after the first day, the demonstrators agreed not make noise after 7:30 pm, as students across campus are focused on end-of-semester assignments.
That said, there have been rallies that include bullhorns and loud chanting. Some of these chants are heard by members of our community as calling for the elimination of the state of Israel. More pointed chants have been added that I find quite disturbing.
I believe these chants are protected speech, under our principles of free expression. But as I've said many times, there's a distinction between what we can say – what we have a right to say – and what we should say as members of one community.
But this is what makes this situation different from past protest movements, and uniquely difficult: the fact of two opposing groups on campus, both grieving, – and both painfully at odds with each another. These opposing allegiances extend to faculty and staff as well.
As you'd expect, to avoid any further escalation, we're working closely and constantly with our Student Life team, the faculty members who are advising the students, and our own campus police. Out of an abundance of caution, at my direction, the MITPD is on the scene 24 hours a day.
The situation is not static, of course, but that's the current picture.
I and other senior leaders have also spent hours in intense meetings with people across a broad range of views. We've received scores of messages from students, alumni, parents, faculty, and staff.We are being pressed to take sides – and we're being accused of taking sides. We've been told that the encampment must be torn down immediately, and that it must be allowed to stay; that discipline is not the answer, and that it is the only answer.
I can only describe the range of views as irreconcilable.
Under the circumstances, what I must continue to do, here on our campus, is to take every step in my power to protect the physical safety of our community – and to strive to make sure everyone at MIT feels free to do the work they came here for.
In support of that goal, I want to be clear about certain aspects of how we operate at MIT, and about guardrails that will allow us to live together.
- First: I appreciate very much that the situation has so far been peaceful. But this has not been the case at several schools across the country where different groups have clashed.
To be clear to everyone concerned: violence and threats of violence on our campus are utterly unacceptable. Anyone who breaks that trust should expect serious consequences.- Second: Rules have already been broken. Those who break our rules – including rules around the time, place and manner of protest – will face disciplinary action.
- Third: I am not going to compromise the academic freedom of our faculty, in any field of study. Our faculty represent a wide range of viewpoints that are appropriately expressed in a university dedicated to broadening our students' minds. And faculty routinely work with colleagues around the world, including in Israel – and all sponsored research on our campus is openly shared, publishable, and freely available to investigators everywhere.
MIT relies on rigorous processes to ensure that all funded research complies with MIT policies and with US law. Within those standards, MIT faculty have the fundamental academic freedom to pursue funding for research of interest in their fields.
In an open academic community, it is certainly acceptable to ask questions about someone's research and funding sources. But that should never rise to the level of intimidation or harassment.
- Fourth and finally, I want to speak directly about the encampment.
We have heard the views of our protesting students. The grief and pain over the terrible loss of life and suffering in Gaza are palpable.
Out of respect for the principles of free expression, we have not interfered with the encampment.
But it is creating a potential magnet for disruptive outside protestors.
It is commandeering space that was properly reserved by other members of our community.
And keeping the encampment safe and secure for this set of students is diverting hundreds of staff hours, around the clock, away from other essential duties.
We have a responsibility to the entire MIT community – and it is not possible to safely sustain this level of effort.
We are open to further discussion about the means of ending the encampment.
But this particular form of expression needs to end soon.
For why I think that such encampments should generally not be viewed as protected free speech, at public universities or private ones, see this post.
Disclosure: One of my sons is an MIT student, but is not involved in the Israeli-Palestinian debate, so I don't think my judgment about this is being affected by his being on campus.
The post MIT President's Statement on the Anti-Israel Students' Encampment appeared first on Reason.com.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Dr. Anthony Fauci has come out as a major supporter of Governor Kristi Noem after learning that she, too, is a puppy murderer.
Given academia’s nearly monochrome culture, most universities have many infantile adults. These are faculty members who have glided from kindergarten through postdoctoral fellowships (these often support surplus PhDs, who are being manufactured faster than the academic job market can absorb them). To such professors, the 99.9 percent of the world adjacent to campuses is as foreign as Mongolia.
Still, suppose you want to hire a recent college graduate for your business. Suppose one of your applicants attended Harvard while it was becoming an incubator of antisemitic agitations. And suppose the other applicant attended a large public university. The public-university graduate is at least marginally less apt to be enthusiastic about Hamas, which aspires to complete the Holocaust.
Or suppose you seek a young doctor to join your medical practice. You might reasonably hesitate before hiring someone from UCLA’s medical school. There a recent pro-Hamas guest lecturer in a mandatory course on “Structural Racism and Health Equity” led students in a “Free Palestine” chant, directed them to get on their knees and touch the floor in a “prayer” to “mama earth,” and warned the future doctors against the “crapitalist lie” of “private property.”
The leakage of prestige from politicized universities is overdue and wholesome. Those schools that once were preeminent and now are punchlines might soon have a bruising rendezvous with real politics, which, unlike the sandbox radicalism of campus playgrounds, can be serious.
Iain Murray describes the U.S. administrative state as hitting “warp speed.”
GMU Law alum Jeremy Kidd reports on “the wasteful cruelty of ‘stakeholder capitalism.'” Two slices:
Capitalism has raised millions, if not billions, of people out of poverty. It is the greatest engine of human flourishing that has ever existed. It is worth defending, but those willing to do so are few and far between, even in the societies that have most benefitted from the wealth that capitalism has generated. In the late twentieth century, economist Milton Friedman stood against the tide of anti-capitalist propaganda that flourished in the halls of academia.
Friedman is gone but anti-capitalism remains, and it is no longer constrained to academia. It is common in the halls of Congress (Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren come readily to mind) and even in corporate boardrooms, with the modern push for corporations to engage in ESG — Environmental, Social, and Governance — efforts. Champions of capitalism have never been more needed, and Professor R. David McLean’s 2023 book, The Case for Shareholder Capitalism: How the Pursuit of Profit Benefits All makes a strong case for inclusion in that category.
McLean begins, as a defender of capitalism should, with an explanation of profit. Not the profit that anti-capitalists caricature, some dark motive of dastardly villains, twirling their mustaches or adjusting their monocles as they plan to exploit yet another widow or orphan. McLean counters the false melodrama of the anti-capitalist with the mundane “profit” of Adam Smith. It is the (sometimes surprising) pile of money left after the small business owner has paid all of the bills for the month. It is the signal that the value a business owner creates in the lives of his fellow citizens is high enough to pay for all the inputs and have something left over.
…..
The mistake is not that corporations should obey the law — they should — but that all regulations impose legal or moral obligations on US citizens, including as aggregated into a corporate form. McLean’s mistake arises from an all-too-common source: failure to consider institutional structure. The US government’s power is constrained by the Constitution, so any regulation that violates the Constitution would be unenforceable. Regulatory agencies have limited discretion, and cannot impose a moral or legal obligation on corporations. McLean knows that, and may have even intended to imply it, but institutions matter, and their inadvertent omission could easily confuse. McLean effectively attacks the flaws of Corporate Social Responsibility and its ESG incarnation, calling out activists for pursuing ideological preferences at the expense of shareholders. He traces the flawed, Malthusian lineage of Corporate Social Responsibility to such historical abominations as forced abortions and sterilizations. For all these excellent and needed efforts, McLean misses the institutional questions often enough to fall just short of a complete analysis.
“Is nationalism bad for your health?”
J.D. Tuccille warns that “local hostility to free speech may become a global problem.”
Bruce Yandle ponders today’s inflation.
The post Some Links appeared first on Cafe Hayek.
I mentioned in a previous post that The Economist appears to lose all rationality when one specific topic is broached. The writer of the magazine’s April 20 newsletter “The World in Brief” gave another illustration in the section “The Day Ahead”: he could not mention the 25th anniversary of the horrible Columbine school massacre without doing the rhetorical equivalent of a child hiding behind the couch to stop watching a horror movie—which is the horror of guns in the hands of peaceful citizens:
Gun-rights supporters often say, nonsensically, that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
It is not the only way, but often the most efficient. This is why cops are armed (more and more apparently even in the UK) and why mass murderers never attack shooting ranges or gun club meetings. It is a simple matter of incentives. Even if you want to die while killing people, you still want to do the killing. The efficiency of guns against violent criminals comes not only from their deterrent effects but also from their usefulness in self-defense when deterrence has not worked perfectly.
“Nonsensically”? We know of many documented cases where an armed ordinary citizen saved his own life and the lives of others. The FBI publishes an annual report on events where “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” Many of these cases fit the federal definition of mass shootings. The latest of those reports covers 2022 and the 50 cases that occurred during that year, with 313 injured or killed victims. (People who count hundreds of mass shootings per year in the United States include many other sorts of gun incidents.) Three or 6% of the 50 cases documented by the FBI were stopped by an armed ordinary citizen. In two of those cases (4% of the total), a mass murderer was fatally shot by an ordinary citizen, compared with seven cases (14%) by law enforcement. The two cases are summarized as follows in the FBI report (p. 11):
In one incident [Charleston, West Virginia], an armed bystander engaged the shooter, killing him, after the shooter fired into a crowd attending a party outside an apartment complex.
In one incident [Greenwood, Indiana], an armed citizen killed the shooter as he began firing in a mall food court.
In this last incident, 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken had just come to the mall with his girlfriend when a mass shooting started. Three people had already been killed and two wounded. Dicken drew his pistol and exchanged fire with the mass murderer, whom he fatally shot. Greenwood’s police chief declared that “many more people would have died if not for a responsible armed citizen that took action very quickly” (“Elisjsha Dicken Stops a Mass Shooting,” Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2022).
Reported cases of armed self-defense in individual aggressions are more numerous. Note that all school shootings have occurred in places where teachers or staff were banned from having a gun under penalty of felony.
We also know, by following murder cases and their investigations in the press, that in at least some of them, peaceful individuals who were murdered could conceivably have stopped their murderers if they had been armed. We can suspect that in many cases, the victim’s last thought must have been “If only I had a gun.” There are real, identifiable individuals who lose their lives or are severely injured and who were forbidden by their own benevolent governments to carry means of protection.
One intuitive objection claims that, even if armed self-defense works, the greater availability of guns on which it is predicated will lead to more murders or aggressions with firearms. Historical and other empirical evidence exists against this objection, but assume for a moment that the latter is valid. Consider what it amounts to claiming: that it is morally acceptable to forbid a peaceful and innocent person to defend himself or herself against a violent aggressor in order to reduce the probability that some unknown person in the future will be the victim of a criminal armed with a gun. It is analogous to a policy that would jail all young men between the age of 17 and 24 in order to prevent 39% of murders (see my post “A Simplistic Model of Public Policy”; see also “The Purpose of a Gun is Not to Kill.”)
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Hiding behind the couch not to see the non-horror movie
The post <i>The Economist</i>‘s Irrational Fear appeared first on Econlib.
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