It's not about money it's about making sure things are accessible. The ADA is one of the reasons America is more accessible then Europe. Lawsuits are the enforcement mechanism
For context: I have cerebral palsy. Play the smallest fiddle for me, it only affects my left hand and slightly my left foot. But I’ve been a part time fitness instructor, properly conditioned I have run decently (10 minute mile) up to a 15K before my slight favoring of my right leg takes it’s toll and I’ve been a gym rat since 1990 and I just left the gym.
But I would never expect someone giving out a free service to spend extra money to make accommodations for me.
Edit: Just realized the library discussion was in another thread - but the discussion was still with you so I'm keeping it in this comment.
> So how did that work out for the hypothetical “disabled person”?
He didn't have access before, and he doesn't have access now. Nothing is worse for him.
It's not his responsibility to provide the service to others. It is the library's, and they clearly failed and are rightfully blamed for no one having access. If I were a normal person in the town, I would blame them, not the person filing the lawsuit.
If the library shut down because they had clear mold issues they refused to pay to fix, would you blame the immunocompromised, at risk person who filed the lawsuit? Or would you say the library should get its act together and provide a safe/healthy environment?
Imagine a school shutting down because they cannot afford all these new colored students that they could exclude before. Are you going to blame the colored students for insisting on their rights?
This is basic Civil Rights 101. You can't use the excuse of "we don't have money" to discriminate, which UCBerkeley was clearly doing.
> Now they nor anyone else has access to the free content.
Nothing is free. The library patron paid for it via taxes, as did everyone else. Just as everyone pays federal taxes, as did the person in another state who sued UC Berkeley. He's paying, and not getting what he is owed.
If you don't like it, just don't take federal funds. Many organizations' web sites are inaccessible, and that's totally OK and legal.
Did the federal funds cover making it accessible? Was the person suing a student or prospective student of UC Berkeley who couldn’t get in because of accessibility?
If the student had been blind and deaf should they hace flown someone out to personally communicate with them like was done with Helen Keller?
> Did the federal funds cover making it accessible?
All federal funds that go to universities have strings attached. One of them is the requirement that all services to the public must be accessible. Not "try to be" or "make a good effort". It's up to the university to budget appropriately.
As a faculty member, a big percentage of any research grant I get goes straight to the department - I cannot use it for my research. It's up to the department to use the money appropriately, and if they're not budgeting for accessibility, it's on them.
> Was the person suing a student or prospective student of UC Berkeley who couldn’t get in because of accessibility?
For someone arguing so passionately, perhaps you should actually go learn something about the case?
> If the student had been blind and deaf should they hace flown someone out to personally communicate with them like was done with Helen Keller?
Great question. What does the law require for such a person?
Many interest groups in the US are for hire. Meaning, if you don't like a piece of upcoming legislation, you can give them a donation and they'll find out a way the upcoming legislation hurts their demographic. These groups have overwhelmingly passive members, who don't run the organization in any meaningful way.
There are even more mercenary groups, whose business model is basically extorting organizations for donations, threatening with expensive lawsuits and bad publicity.
It seems pretty likely to me that NAD's lawsuits are more about this, and less about actually caring about deaf access. There are a lot of them, and they seem to go for big pockets. Probably the efforts Berkeley went to to offer accessibility would have been deemed good enough to not sue over (for now) if they had donated.
It doesn't mean the causes such orgs ostensibly fight for aren't good. It's just that when enforcement is by lawsuit, it's inevitably selective enforcement, and that just creates a huge business opportunity for unscrupulous lawyers (which there is no shortage of).
> It seems pretty likely to me that NAD's lawsuits are more about this, and less about actually caring about deaf access. There are a lot of them, and they seem to go for big pockets. Probably the efforts Berkeley went to to offer accessibility would have been deemed good enough to not sue over (for now) if they had donated.
It's a convenient narrative. Here's another one: Senior administrator at the university doesn't like the project. It costs money to provide as it is, and money is always tight at a public university. They should be more focused on income generating patents (which, BTW, UC Berkeley is/was good at). And now they want us to spend even more money? Let's kill the project.
I spent a long time at universities, and I also worked for 1.5 years in the university's disability division, so I somewhat know the needs of the disabled. Part of that division's role was "policing" professors' course pages (albeit only when a student complained), so I'm familiar with the territory. Our position was clear: It's the law.
I also know how university administrator's think - they rarely like initiatives meant for the public good for free.
Finally: How much money did they make suing UC Berkeley? Did anyone (other than the lawyers) make money out of it? Why are people so certain this was a money grabbing lawsuit?
If I wrote something for my own use and decided to open source it and then someone hypothetically decided to sue me because it wasn’t accessible, I would say f%%%. them too and take it down.
> If I wrote something for my own use and decided to open source it and then someone hypothetically decided to sue me because it wasn’t accessible, I would say f%%%. them too and take it down.
The difference is that they won't win in court. There's no law requiring you to make your open source work accessible - unless that open source work was part of a project for which you got federal grants.
Sorry, but it's clear that many commenters to this thread no almost nothing about what happened, and are merely engaging in outrage mania.
In the real world, though, when people ask for grant money, they justify how the money will be used. If you didn't put a line item for accessibility, and didn't budget for it, it's on you.
If a city has a public library, but refuses to build a wheelchair ramp, and an elevator to upper floors, and doesn't provide reasonable alternatives to these deficiencies, they can (and should) get sued. If the city then throws up their hand and says "Too expensive" and shuts down the library (everyone suffers), I will not be siding with the library.
But in this case, the complaint was that the transcription wasn’t perfect. Should they also be forced to take down the website if the speaker didn’t speak perfect English?
> But in this case, the complaint was that the transcription wasn’t perfect.
This is a falsehood. The complaint was that some videos had no transcription at all.
There were other complaints, BTW - it wasn't just subtitles. There were complaints about blind people not being able to read the docs.
Edit: I think one of the (multiple) complaints was poor transcription. What I meant by "falsehood" was actually referring to an earlier comment that said something to the effect of "they provided subtitles". In some cases they did not provide subtitles.
Just doing a little research - I haven’t looked too deeply into- Google live caption has been built into Chrome since 2021 and there have been third party tools for accessibility since 2016.
But the overall question, is the world a better place now that the information isn’t available to anyone?
> By this logic, because helen keller cant see or hear, we should eliminate all educational materials using written text and spoken word.
I'll reiterate my comment earlier: Most people in this thread don't seem to have any idea how any of this works.
No - if someone cannot see, the law doesn't say eliminate visual material. It's more like "Provide alternative means for them to understand the same concepts (while keeping the same material)."
There are standards on what accommodations to provide for which disabilities. This isn't something everyone has to figure out on their own. If the standards dictate something for people who are both blind and deaf, it's because it is not technically onerous to provide for them.
I don't know if the standards do for this case, though.
> This is simply an insane, bad-faith take.
What I find to be bad faith is people skirting around the issue that the problem (if any), is not those who complained, but the law. This isn't an isolated case. Both Harvard and MIT were also sued. And just like Berkeley, both ultimately settled. If 3 of the top universities can't fight this, it means that if you want change, lobby to change the law. Start looking into how these universities are pushing to change the law. If they aren't, you'll get a good sense of why these laws exist.
Your argument is that someone sued Berkeley for posting free education materials online purely in the name of accessibility and not to make a quick buck?
Free education provided at zero profit to Berkeley, to great benefit to the public, and it was just the wholesome desire for subtitles that made the case?
The idea that only criminals or terorists have pagers is ridiculous(you mentined doctors). But Israel didnt target pagers in Lebanon. They sold equipment for Hezbollah internal use om their own network (they convinced Hezbollah to pay a front company for the walkies).
That is the opposite of indicrimante.
as for
> white Judeo-Christian variety
Judeo Christian is a silly concept. Either say christian or say Abrahamic. While most casulties were affiliated with Hezbollah and therefore overwhelmingly Shia Muslim enough of the general public of Lebanon is Christian that they would make at least some of civilian bystanders injured. Also Lebanese people aren't any whiter in average skin color then the average Israeli
That's not the argument. Presumably a broad cross-section of Lebanese people have pagers. But only Hezbollah combatants had these pagers, which were specifically procured by Hezbollah through an idiosyncratic suppler, linked to Hezbollah's own military encrypted network, and triggered by a pager message encrypted to that network.
> linked to Hezbollah's own military encrypted network, and triggered by a pager message encrypted to that network.
I am not sure where you’re getting this information from. For instance, you seem confident that this network used exclusively by the armed wing.
Regardless, absolutely none of this negates the fact that this was an indiscriminate terrorist attack.
If the sides were reversed, or if virtually any other state executed this kind of attack, it would be rightfully condemned. But Israel, as always, gets a pass. And it was indeed a brilliant plan, but only in how comically evil it was.
The most obvious citation is Reuters, which did a whole article on this, including the specific circumstances in which the pagers exchanged hands. And, whatever the rest of the moral circumstances of the strike may have been, the fact of the devices being combatant communication equipment does mean that it was neither indiscriminate (it was in fact very discriminate) nor terroristic (it had combatant targets, not civilians).
The attacks can still be immoral for a host of other reasons. Pearl Harbor was deeply immoral. It was also not an indiscriminate terrorist attack. Words mean things.
I have expanded in other comments in this same tree, but it was indiscriminate in timing, location, and possession (unless Israel individually verified possession).
If it were a “discriminate” attack as you claim, then we wouldn’t have seen thousands of civilians (non-combatants, Hezbollah affiliated or otherwise) being injured.
> Words mean things.
Small aside: not saying this applies to you specifically, but I have found that most people who use this adage (if you will) are quick to apply it to situations they don’t agree with, but become more flexible when it aligns with their interests.
The typical example I use is how Western politicians vehemently deny/denied usage of the term “genocide” or even “war crimes” for Gaza, but apply it liberally to Ukraine, even though the latter is objectively (by any metric) “less” of a genocide than Gaza is. Bernie Sanders only came around just a few months ago.
I don't love "words mean things" and winced after I typed it, but I think we both understand what I meant by it.
My contention is that we did not in fact see thousands of noncombatants injured. I went into some pretty serious depth on this point elsewhere on the thread.
I think, for what it's worth, that I can pretty easily make the argument that Ukraine is a genocide and Gaza is not. In fact, I could say that about the Al Aqsa Flood as well! That argument will annoy the shit out of you. But I'd say that's because you've affixed undeserved gravity or finality to the term "genocide", as a sort of "worst possible crime". What Israel is doing in Gaza can be as bad as what Russia is doing in Ukraine without establishing genocidal intent (which Russia pretty clearly does have).
I think the push to label the Gaza campaign as a "genocide" has been a fairly spectacular own goal on the part of western Palestinian rights activists. Unless the situation on the ground changes (I grant that it could), people are just going to keep shooting that claim down, and advocates for Palestinians will be stuck explaining instead of persuading, against relatively powerful countervailing arguments.
The case for ethnic cleansing, atrocities, and widespread war crimes is trivial to make. It's just not enough for online advocates; it's like they're trying to get an in-game trophy for the term "genocide".
I understand we won’t come to an agreement here, but I wanted to respond to two of your points:
1. Re: the term genocide, do you know why Palestinians have been insisting on this specific word to be used? Because genocidal intent was clearly communicated from virtually day 1, and was backed by actions to prove this intent. Cabinet members were calling Palestinians “human animals” and “amalek” for God’s sake - and that’s not even close to the worst of it! Palestinians didn’t just wake up one day and say “well, it’s arbitrarily a genocide, and we want everyone to call it that”. And South Africa rightfully pursued a case at the ICJ. Firstly, because they recognized the shared suffering from their experience with apartheid, but most importantly, because they saw that there was a mountain of incontrovertible legal evidence to support their case.
1. Re: Ukraine, you simply cannot make that argument in good faith. Russia’s goals in Ukraine are in direct opposition to Israel’s goals in Gaza and the West Bank.
Russia ultimately wants to annex Ukraine to expand its influence and reinstate its past glory with the USSR. This requires that it absorb Ukrainians into Russia proper. Russia uses the shared culture and language as a justification in its propaganda, but I think there is a kernel of truth there when it comes to Russia’s motivations, particularly in eastern Ukraine. Given all this, genocide is a non-starter for Russia - how can you claim annexation when you are also working to genocide the local population?
On the other hand, Israel wants to cleanse the land of its people - in fact, the absolute last thing it wants to do is absorb Palestinians into Israel proper. From day 1, its intentions were crystal clear: Palestinians as a racial/ethnic group cannot remain in Gaza. They used all tools at their disposal in pursuit of this goal, including mass starvation, collective punishment, mass bombardment, forced relocation, and so on. Taken together with the statements made by top gov officials, this constitutes genocide.
This is all setting aside that Ukraine is a fully sovereign nation with an equipped and supported conventional military fighting a conventional war against a nation state aggressor.
Let me say first of all: super chill response and I really appreciate that.
On point (1), I've got reason to question the claims of genocidal intent that get bandied about in these kinds of conversations. Yair Rosenberg wrote a piece for The Atlantic debunking one of the most frequently cited "amalek" claims. It's easy to find people on either side of the conflict espousing genocidal views, but harder to map specific actions to realistically genocidal intent (especially when the views are ascribed to people with no decisionmaking authority over how the campaign is being waged).
I hate having to be so hedgy but I'll do it anyways: none of that is to say that the Gaza campaign was waged ethically or with meaningful concern for civilian life, and I fervently hope many of its architects end up imprisoned for their roles in it. But that's a cards-on-the-table statement, not a clinical assessment.
On point (2) about Ukraine: Russian decisionmakers at the highest level have repudiated the existence of Ukrainian ethnicity; Russia has deliberately --- in ways I don't think map cleanly to how the IAF has prosecuted the war in Gaza --- targeted civilian populations (Bucha is an obvious example), and, most damningly, Russia embarked on a campaign of family separation and coerced adoption with the specific intent of disrupting Ukraining ethnicity.
You point out that Israel wants to "cleanse" the land (call it Greater Israel, from the Jordan river and including the Gaza strip) of Palestinians. I'm not as sure about that, but I can stipulate to it. That by itself does not constitute genocide!† (Ethnic cleansing? A crime against humanity? Very possibly!) Genocide as a concept does not encompass any link between blood and soil.
It really pisses Palestinian advocates off to hear this, and I get why, but there is by rights already a Palestinian state in the Levant: it's called Jordan, where Palestinians have, at multiple points over the last 50 years, made up a majority of the resident population. Similarly, if we're doing comparative statecraft, Assadist Syria successfully cleansed itself of its concentrated Palestinian population, over just the last 10-15 years. See how often you see Palestinian advocates make claims about Yarmouk camp, though. You start to understand why advocates for Israel (I am not one of those) are jaded about this whole thing.
† You get a similar thing about "apartheid", a term I'm more comfortable using with Israel, from people who correctly observe that Israeli Arab citizens, of whom there are a great many, have vastly more rights than black Africans had under apartheid, to the point where the term makes more sense applied to other larger, more salient ethnic divides elsewhere in the world. But like, preemptively: I'm with you, it's effectively an apartheid system in the West Bank.
This is the kind of discussion that I feel would be better to have in-person; I am not a great writer :)
Re: Israel & the term genocide, if you closely look at the combination of:
(1) the words that came/are coming out of the mouths of Israeli cabinet members, Knesset members, and the Israeli media (especially in Hebrew!)
(2) the policies enacted on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank
(3) the actions taken by the IDF in Gaza since Oct 7 (I won't enumerate them here)
(4) the clear cut plans for a "greater Israel"
(5) the extra-territorial conflicts & attacks (esp. the 12 day war and Qatar strike), and the ground invasions in Lebanon & Syria, the latter under the guise of "minority protection" (a tale as old as time)
You must conclude that Israel is at the very least committing war crimes, and is the least rational actor in the Middle East. Palestinians, their allies, and (at the nation state level) South Africa & observers took it a step further and argued that the sum of the above constitutes genocide.
> Russian decisionmakers at the highest level have repudiated the existence of Ukrainian ethnicity
What Russia is doing here - and what it did with the USSR - may constitute "cultural genocide", but this is not legally defined. Keep in mind that Israel also denies the existence of Palestinians and reduces them instead to "Arabs".
> in ways I don't think map cleanly to how the IAF has prosecuted the war in Gaza
Three questions that I find helpful when comparing the two situations generally:
1. Does Hamas have an air force or access to air defense systems? If not, does that make it easier or harder for mass killing to take place when compared to the situation in Ukraine?
2. Does Russia regularly level entire buildings - with civilians present - in exchange for so-called "high-value targets"? All AI-driven btw, giving us a glimpse into the future of warfare.
3. Does Russia control the entire border of Ukraine? And has it ever enforced a total blockade on all goods entering Ukraine?
> but there is by rights already a Palestinian state in the Levant: it's called Jordan, where Palestinians have, at multiple points over the last 50 years, made up a majority of the resident population.
It pisses off advocates because it actually ties back into how Israel erases the Palestinian national identity, and is a common hasbara talking point :)
From day 1, Jordan has been a malicious actor of sorts in opposition to the Palestinian national movement. The West Bank post-partition was supposed to be given to a Palestinian ("Arab") state, but Jordan invaded under the guise of protection, which was a valid excuse, but also an excellent opportunity to establish Transjordan. The Jordanians held control until 1967. In 1967, many Palestinians were forced to relocate to Jordan in a second Nakba (called the Naksa[1]). Soon after this, the PLO escalated its fight against the Jordanian monarchy, culminating in Black September. Today, there are a large number of self-described (very important!) Jordanian-Palestinians residing in Jordan, but they still have ties to Palestine, and claim it as their homeland even after multiple rounds of expulsion. In other words, even in Jordan, there still is a separate Palestinian national identity that lives on.
As far as the camps go in Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, that's a separate topic of discussion. A big part of the continued existence of these refugee camps in Arab countries throughout modern history is the optimism of Palestinians & the host Arab states that a solution will be reached soon.
> from people who correctly observe that Israeli Arab citizens, of whom there are a great many, have vastly more rights than black Africans had under apartheid
South African apartheid is the model, but not the only form. I believe that there is sufficient evidence for the argument that Israeli Arab citizens do indeed live under apartheid, mainly due to the ethno-religious nature of citizenship in Israel proper.
I think you're doing great, but I'll keep my response brief to avoid dragging you into a longer thread.
* I agree, Israel appears to me to be guilty of war crimes; quite a great many.
* We disagree about the black-letter genocidal intent Russia has exhibited in Ukraine. Organized mass kidnapping and coerced adoption of children is a per se genocidal action under the 1948 Genocide Convention.
* The US outclasses almost every armed service in the world to the same extent Israel outclassed Hamas (which no longer exists as a military force). That doesn't make US involvement in any given armed conflict genocidal or immoral.
* If your point was simply that Israel is capable of putting into practice genocidal intent, of course, I agree with that. They have a mechanical advantage in doing that, to the point where they shoulder additional burdens to avoid genocidal outcomes, and I preemptively agree they haven't satisfied those obligations. But flip it: Hamas has essentially no capability to successfully commit a genocide of Israelis. And yet their attack, under the Convention, was more clearly genocidal.
* I agree with you about the governance of Jordan! I think all the surrounding states share significant moral burden with regards to the Palestinian people,and launder it through Arab enmity towards Israel and Jewish ethnicity.
* I want to be very clear: I also believe the Palestinians have a moral claim to Gaza and the West Bank, and that there is no practical resolution to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict that won't involve two states on land Israel now controls. When I bring up the Jordan thing, I'm making a broader claim about the sustainability of Palestinian ethnic identity, not the "Palestinians should be remigrated into Jordan" argument the neo-Kahanists make. Kahanism is vile.
> If you attack a military target that is surrounded by civilians, and that attack injures or kills those civilians, then those civilians were also targeted.
They are not targeted.
You could say that depending on number of innocent casualties or the likely number the attacked could be reckless and/or disproportionate in attacking in a way that was likely to cause such injuries. In certain cases you could claim they broke the laws of war although the laws of war are practical (they're not meant to prevent all deaths of civilians, the countries who agreed to them didn't intentionally make it impossible to fight including in defense).
And even if something is not a war crime you could still claim it might be immoral but that is a more complex argument.
I agree with your last point, but tbh, the exact idea of "targeted" is splitting hairs IMO. I'm not arguing that civilians were the primary target, but not caring that they were around, and being fine with their death as long as the combatant was dead, in my view makes it seem that Israel's enemies are not the combatants of Hezbollah, but generally just the Lebanese people.
If someone droped a nuke on a city to kill 1 person, does it matter who that person was specifically targeting? Does the distinction if his intended target matter at all? I would think you and I would agree that obviously it doesn't matter at that point, but then I ask, at what point does that distinction matter?
It's not splitting hairs it gets to the point when people falsely accuse them of every single thing in the book. Weapons have always been imprecise but things that don't have any benefit to the war effort and target innocent civilian deaths are war crimes. You may ask how much the difference matters morally(it still does matter a lot intent it rule based vs consequences based morality systems I'd argue for somewhere in between) but yes targeting matters when it comes to usually false claims of crimes
They do care about not killing civilians the question is how much? And is that enough? There will almost never be any operation near cities without civilian casualties.
This particular operation was an extremely Targeted operation that included tricking Hezbollah into selling pagers meant for Hezbollah internal military use and only deploying small explosions minimizing any unnecessary casualties.
It's not a very good piece of rhetoric asking about nukes because Israel actually has nukes. They didn't use them.
They have carried out other heavier strikes on Lebanon that had worse ratios but were justified by military targets such as Hezbollah leader Nasrallah.
Your suggestion also seems to totally not understand how Israelis view Lebanon. Until recently and still Lebanon does not control violence within it's borders.
Hezbollah (a militia/terrorist group that takes orders from Iran) was more powerful then the Lebanese army and decided what happened on the ground. Iran which had a countdown clock counting down to the destruction of Israel.
Of course they were supposed to be disarmed after the Lebanese but unsurprisingly the UN resolution didn't have any effect so when they attacked and threatened to invade Israel did what they could to take them out. Israel would love to have peace with Lebanon but that's not likely if Iran and Hezbollah have anything to do with it.
There's Clickbait and then this awful headline designed to give people heart attacks.
Who care about fonts? Boring.
Why not jazz it up by mentioning coups during an administration that previously tried to pull of a coup attempt. Any administration officials names and coup should not be in the same sentence unless they attempt another one(or unless it's talking about the previous one).
You literally do not understand antisemitism or semitic people or genetics or ethnic and national identity.
Israel's goal since the beginning was to exist, to be able to live. Antisemitism has literally never meant hatred against various semitic people such as Ethiopian semites or Assyrians it has always been a term to describe Jew hatred, coined by a German Jew hater. Also semitic is not a genetic thing, its a language thing and various identities tied to various semitic languages largely do not see it as a useful grouping. I have never heard of pan-semitic movement similar to pan Germanic or pan Slavic ones(those were not universally popular when they existed but they did exist and had some popularity). About half of Israeli Jews ancestors didn't recently live in Europe (and most of those had ancestors who lived elsewhere in MENA). Finally when it comes to genetics both Jews and Palestinians have substantial overlapping ancestry to the ancient Levant region as well as ancestry from outside of it, but that doesn't really change people's minds on ethnic identity and nationalism
The idea that it's a war crime is ridiculous. They specifically inserted it into the Hezbollah supply chain specifically Hezbollah internal use. They didn't just sell them at Lebanons markets they specifically sold the entire special order to Hezbollah directly. I think if any one other then Israel pulled it off a lot fewer people would be baselessly claiming it was a war crime
Pagers are used by more then just criminals(see doctors) and targeting random criminals as opposed to millitants wouldn't be justifiable. But these particular pager that were wired up were specifically intended only for Hezbollah internal use and were sold to Hezbollah by Israel through a third party front.
Most sides in most wars aren't expected to classify every person they killed. Identifying certain people as Hamas(and they could be wrong about some of them) doesn't mean that every single other person is not a member of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or other millitant
I don't see how. It was intended to paralyze and undermine a militia which it did. A lot of war actions create terror that doesn't make most war terrorism
Corbyn failed because he was a bad politician with extreme views. It was Corbyn not the media who covered him that chose to defend every antisemite they could find. If anything the media was too nice to him(the media is often too worried about false balance you get similar things with Trump). It's entirely unsurprising that he lost what would have been a labor victory without him
I don't think there is a single point there that is not an assertion. You should become a BBC reporter.. although their assertions are usually reported as "xxx said..."
