Hacker News Reader

Comment by jleyank | Hacker News Reader

Can have fun with this particularly if it’s a 20th century European history course assignment. If books cause harm, then pretty much any religious text will be (very) offensive to another as it’s heretical etc. psychology texts probably really offend Scientologists, and I’m sure you can come up with other combinations without too much effort.

Das Kapital, any civil war history covering the western campaign and it’s generals, anything covering civil rights, the Vietnam period…

View on HN

Indeed, but, we all know that in those circles nobody cares about Scientologists' feelings getting hurt.

There's a well-established hierarchy of sacred victim groups that have to be protected from "harm" (for an arbitrary and nebulous definition of the word) at all costs, and whose defense is one of the most pious expressions of in-group belonging.

Scientologists, Christians, members of political groups on the other side of the spectrum, and many others are not recipients of such benefits. Any form of affiliation with them, including consuming their respective literature, would likely get you excommunicated unless you do sufficient public penance once caught.

{Scientologists, Christians, members of political groups}

No one likes ugly sets.

Does the set of all sets include itself? And is the universal set beautiful even if it contains a pointer or recursion?

You would have to ask the individual(s) who profess to have been harmed. Claiming "it must be X" and then dismissing X is approaching a straw man.

Restorative justice practices are notoriously antithetical to the adversarial justice system we're used to dealing with. Assumptions we make in adversarial justice systems like open observation to ensure a public check on proceedings are not part of restorative practices. Even "there is one objective truth" are not implicitly part of restorative justice systems.

The existence and practice of alternative justice systems bring to light the mechanical sympathy between reality perception and justice systems. For those who subscribe to an ideology that contains a single objective reality, the idea that not everyone believes the same way can cause an intense counter reaction. I've seen this happen to people myself.

At the interaction between these two, there exists a sliver where we can say, if the book reader didn't want to be beholden to such systems, they could have voted with their feet and chose to educate themselves at a university which practiced a system of justice compatible with their beliefs. By choosing Stanford, they implicitly consented to the system Stanford uses, restorative justice ~et al~ etc.

This is a long way of saying, we may never know the nature of the harm.

> by choosing Stanford, they implicitly consented to the system Stanford uses, restorative justice et al.

And other people, including Stanford alumni and donors and other constituents, are saying that if this is the result of restorative justice, it's perhaps an experiment that has run its course in its current form.

Wasn't this an anonymous tip, precluding the possibility of any form of dialogue?

"Hi, I'm not revealing my identity, but my friend John spoke to me about how upset he was about Jane doing X and I thought I should bring it to your attention."

Anonymous tip, possible to bring the parties together. No contradiction.

Just a minor nitpick:

et al is only used when listing people. When listing things we use etc.

Thank you! You made it click for me :)

Indeed, similar logic was often used by Communist states to justify their judicial systems. The adversarial justice system of the US was an example of bourgeoisie justice, designed to uphold bourgeoisie capital relations. The Soviet judicial system was thought to be an instance of Proletarian Justice [1].

[1]: Vyshinskii on Proletarian Justice: https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1924-2/socialist-legality/soci...

That's funny. The reality is that restorative justice today has its roots in specific indigenous justice practices. Specifically the Kitchener experiment in Ontario, Canada in the 1970s[1].

More than happy to hear your critique about indigenous justice systems though, since it's more relevant.

1. http://www.brattleborocjc.org/blog/indigenous-roots-of-resto...

I wasn't being glib. I think the observation that liberal courts often favor richer entities is true. The idea that bourgeoisie capital relations need to be suppressed for true justice to occur isn't that hard to believe. The problem when justice systems try to seek some form of restitution based on an unaccountable definition of harm is a consequence. I'm of the opinion that justice requires some form of agreed standard, norms should be left up to discretion as little as possible.

If you're interested in why the idea of harms and complete community based justice can have unintended side effects, I highly recommend reading Rawls (Theory of Justice.) A really fun essay in this vein that I enjoy is Joreen's Tyranny of the Structureless if you're not familiar with it already.

I can't recall the quote, but "A book worth burning is a book worth reading."

No one has to support or agree with ideas to delve into them, find their flaws and strengths (reality and people are mixtures of gray), and consider other perspectives. To avoid topics is one path to ignorance and decline.

- Das Kapital

- Understanding Socialism

- The God Delusion

- Bible

- Quran

- Mein Kampf

- Atlas Shrugged

- (numerous critiques of objectivism and its political-economic brand: libertarianism)

- Critique of Pure Reason

- The Social Contract

- Industrial Society and Its Future

- A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

- Guns, Germs, and Steel

== And some fiction ===

- Howl

- Tropic of Cancer

- Four Past Midnight (yes, Stephen King)

- Maus

Reply on news.ycombinator.com