"Students form a perimeter around the #ConcernedStudent1950 tent village and ask media to leave."

"This is what civic-level censorship looks like at a university with the largest and oldest public college for journalism."



ADDED: The protesting students are making many rudimentary PR mistakes here and could use some training in basic protest technique. They end up looking repressive and brutish, right in front of a camera, and they keep cranking up the intimidation. The photographer knows he's getting video that he'll be able to put up on the internet, and he's using a very effective technique of remaining calm and standing his ground in the face of what looks like scary intimidation. I have walked with a camera into big, passionate protests here in Wisconsin, and — with a few exceptions — the protesters were much better prepared to resist making the photographer seem like a sympathetic victim.

As for the First Amendment: The students and the photographers have free speech rights against the government, but not against each other. At 1:43, the photographer calmly cites the First Amendment, which, he says, gives all of them all "right to be here," in the public space, which is true. One of the black female protesters says "We do have our space as human beings," to which the photographer responds, emphasizing each word: "There's not a law about that." The woman then makes what I think is the most interesting statement in the video: "Forget a law. How about humanity? Respect?" He says, "How about documenting this for posterity?"

That's right where a good conversation could have begun. The law is not the beginning and end of how people treat each other. There is etiquette and there is respect. There is even love. As human beings, we want all of that. Please respect our space is an understandable request that a person should evaluate in ways that go beyond legal rights. The photographer did engage on that level when he offered a counter-value, documentation for posterity.

Unfortunately, that one-to-one conversation ended when another woman barged in and started yelling, precluding the development of the issues about photographing people who don't want to be photographed, and the crowd —which probably didn't notice the touching moment when Respect and Documentation stood face to face —  got going with the old "Hey hey ho ho" chant format: "Hey hey ho ho/Reporters have got to go."

"Sometime in the near future, a transgender teenager in Texas will attempt suicide — and maybe succeed — because vilifying people for their gender identity remains politically acceptable in America."

The first sentence of a NYT editorial titled "In Houston, Hate Trumped Fairness."

The language is so extreme — "vilifying," "hate." It seems to me that the focus on access to women's bathrooms wasn't aimed at the transgendered at all, but on males who might take advantage of a new opportunity to engage in voyeurism and sexual assault.

Elsewhere in the NYT, I see empathy for women who are sensitive and perhaps over-sensitive to matters involving their bodily privacy and safety and encouragement to men to become more sensitive.

Is this sensitivity supposed to shut off when a more treasured/trendy interest appears on the other side of the balance?

"I'm here trying to clear her name and let them know I consented to that, I just didn't finish the job as you could say."

"Everyone wants to do something spontaneous. I'm not being disrespectful to you. Have you ever done anything spontaneous?"

A man defends his woman, who was arrested for after having sex with squatting on top of him when he was unconscious...  on a parking lot... in broad daylight.

ADDED: The way the article (in The Daily News) is written, I pictured them on the surface of the parking lot, but — after I said they both should have been arrested — Meade says, "They were in a car!" Public lewdness is a crime, but when do the police actually arrest people for it? How exposed to other people were they? Have you ever done anything spontaneous? If so where? Perhaps in a car. Probably not on the surface of a parking lot.

Now, I've clicked through the link within the link, and I can clearly see that they were on the surface of the parking lot. They were also fully clothed. And the woman was charged not with anything in the realm of sexual assault, but only public drunkenness.

UPDATE: I've been pointed to the Daily Mail article and, as a result, crossed out "They were also fully clothed."

"Religious rituals don’t need any practical justification for the believers who perform them voluntarily."

"But many recyclers want more than just the freedom to practice their religion. They want to make these rituals mandatory for everyone else, too, with stiff fines for sinners who don’t sort properly. Seattle has become so aggressive that the city is being sued by residents who maintain that the inspectors rooting through their trash are violating their constitutional right to privacy."

Writes John Tierney in "The Reign of Recycling," explaining why we should favor the age-old practice of simply burying garbage. That's at The NYT. Tierney is also writing about this at Instapundit, where he says:

I realize that true believers don’t need rational reasons for their religion, but it would be nice to see a little soul-searching in regard to some stats in the article: To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach. If you sit in the front of the plane, it’s more like 100,000 bottles — and you have to make sure not to rinse any of them with hot water, because that little extra energy could more than cancel out any greenhouse benefit of your labors....

The boldface is mine. Why doesn't everyone who wants carbon dioxide emissions taken seriously radically curtail air travel? Why aren't people ashamed to fly (other than when it's absolutely necessary, such as to visit a distant loved one who's about to die)? It's like the way religious people focus on one sin but not another and don't calibrate their effort at sin-avoidance to the seriousness or harmfulness of the various sins.