baked_beanz's comments

You're claiming that every building destroyed by an Israeli airstrike was booby trapped by Hamas...?

Even if that were the case, destroying those buildings with civilians inside is still a war crime

...and destroying or damaging >2/3rds of all structures in Gaza and killing tens of thousands of civilians with airstrikes isn't?

Obviously yes, Hamas and Hezbollah indiscriminately firing rockets at Israel consistute war crimes. I assume you must agree that Israel's systematic targeting of schools, hospitals, mosques, and refugee camps would also qualify?

Ethnic cleansing involves forcible expulsion of a population -- not just mass killing -- with the goal of achieving cultural or racial homogeneity in a given territory.

Israel is guilty of both the forcible expulsion and mass killing of Palestinians, so the definition certainly applies.

The title is causing horizontal scrolling, at least on mobile...

Maybe I should create a passive-aggressive webpage about sites that don't check their formatting on different screen sizes? ;)

I really appreciate respectful interactions like this on HN. It's easy to misinterpret things in text!

More Republican politicians have been convicted of sexual misconduct in bathrooms than trans people. Perhaps we can start with the real issue, and ban them from public bathrooms first? Remember, facts don't care about your feelings!

Source: https://www.complex.com/life/a/amanda-wicks/republican-legis...

My main objections are to the following points:

- Specifically calling out protecting "conservative ideas" in their section on creating an "intellectually open campus environment". This is a dog whistle that makes it patently clear which viewpoints will be protected, and which won't. See what happened to Mahmoud Khalil for a recent example of how this will work in practice.

- Preventing admissions of foreign students based on "hostility to America or our allies", which is obviously an attempt to silence dissent. Who is responsible for defining what "hostility" means? If a foreign student supports boycotting Israel due to their ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people, would they be barred from admission to an American university?

I would contend that threatening to annex Canada and Greenland constitutes "hostility to American allies", but since those talking points are being espoused by the sitting president, it stands to reason that this administration's justice department wouldn't intervene to prevent a potential student with similar views from from admitted to an American school.

- Forcing institutions to define bathroom usage criteria based on biological sex. Putting aside for a moment the fact that this is a blatant attempt to humiliate trans people -- how does this work in practice? Do you hire someone to stand at every bathroom door and prevent people from entering if they don't fit your notion of what that gender is "supposed" to look like? Do you demand identity documents before letting someone use the toilet?

There are plenty of videos online of cisgender people being accosted in the bathroom that aligns with their biological sex simply because other people _assume_ based on their appearance that they are trans.

You have come to the realization that systemic racism exists, and it grants privileges to the dominant socioeconomic groups. Congratulations, you are now "woke"!

That's what the term originally meant, before it was turned into a strawman for "anything I don't like" by the conservative media machine and weaponized to divide people.

I think the meaning of "free speech" is critically important here.

Being free to say what you want without government reprisal is (and should be) a fundamental right. In the US, there is significant legal precedent around this, and the instances where your right to free speech is impinged is limited to things like directly inciting violence.

However, if you get "cancelled" by society for something you have said (i.e. you lose business opportunities, friends, your job, you get banned from a forum, etc) then that doesn't qualify as impingement on your "free speech". That's just other people exercising their freedom of speech to tell you that they don't like what you said. Having "freedom of speech" does not mean other people are obligated to listen to what you have to say.

Freedom of speech != Freedom from all consequence for anything you say