Sunday, September 15, 2013

Student destroys 9/11 memorial flag display, citing US imperialism
...“At first, I thought the group was comprised of College Democrats helping put the flags away before the rain rolled in, but then I realized what they were doing,” said Kinney in a statement to The Middlebury Campus.

The protesters — at least one of whom was a student — explained that they were “confiscating” the flags in order to take a stand against U.S. imperialism.

They also claimed the area was a Native American burial ground, and that planting flags there was disrespectful....

...“My intention was not to cause pain but to visibilize the necessity of honoring all human life and to help a friend heal from the violence of genocide that she carries with her on a daily basis as an indigenous person,” she wrote in a statement. “While the American flags on the Middlebury hillside symbolize to some the loss of innocent lives in New York, to others they represent centuries of bloody conquest and mass murder. As a settler on stolen land, I do not have the luxury of grieving without an eye to power. Three thousand flags is a lot, but the campus is not big enough to hold a marker for every life sacrificed in the history of American conquest and colonialism.”...

The Anti-Male Craziness at Yale
What is "nonconsensual sex"? Rape, right? Not at Yale, where the term can be applied to a variety of acts generally accepted as minor offenses or non-offenses in the real world. Since 2010 Yale has become the national center of efforts to whittle away the due process rights of students accused of sexual assault in campus hearings. Those efforts, undertaken to appease "activists" who want more males convicted in campus proceedings, have included Orwellian word games to expand the definition of rape. One of the first signs that this was happening came in 2011, when Yale concluded that causing someone to worry could come under the heading of sexual assault. In a footnote in a lengthy 2012 report on this new process, issued by deputy provost Stephanie Spangler, Yale conceded that the university uses "a more expansive definition of sexual assault than is commonly understood." Claiming that a "worry" constitutes sexual assault is expansive indeed.

The national norm for campus sexual hearings is bad enough (no right to an attorney for accused students, determination of guilt by a very low 50.01 threshold--slightly more likely than unlikely that the alleged offense occurred). But Yale made these procedures worse, allowing accusers to file "informal" complaints that deny accused students the right to cross-examine their accuser, be represented by counsel, or even present evidence of innocence, all in the name of allowing an accuser to retain maximum control over the process. As Yale guidelines say, "the goal is to achieve a resolution that is desired by the [accuser]." Generally, we do not have processes in which the goal is to benefit the accuser, and this procedure is designed to give the accuser choice of and control over the process. ...