131–140 of 219 posts
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They should do like Saudi Arabia and cut off their hands.
I'm going to be charitable, because I recognize the username since you usually comment with more verbose and thought-out text, and assume you meant to say "They should be thankful that Gibson's doesn't do like Saudi Arabia and cut off their hands".
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Well, I just looked on Twitter and see many, many Oberlin grads lamenting the Gibson's judgement and claiming that "everyone always knew" Gibson's was "racist" without any hard facts. Just one example: https://twitter.com/ejdickson/status/1566061809500622848 She's still calling people who pled guilty to shoplifting "alleged shoplifters." That's dishonest. Let's just say I don't hold by that school's accreditation.
Unrelated to your reply, but that twitter thread is truly bizarre. >The one thing about this that has always struck me as ludicrous is the argument that the student body serves as a tool of the colleges whims. Students fucking hate the administration and resist it at every turn, & always have…much like 19 yos at any liberal arts college Then why go to these schools? I don't understand why you'd pay $80k a year (just…
From the nytimes article, the judgment will be paid by Oberlin's insurance company, it will not come out of the endowment, they have not apologized, they are not accepting they were wrong, there have been no resignations. Meredith Raimondo, the Dean of Students at the time, who was passing out flyers and far more, nine months ago to accept a position as Vice President of Student Affairs at Oglethorpe University https…
It is an enormous defamation award, regardless of how you feel about where it leaves Oberlin.
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I hired and worked with an Oberlin graduate. Great person. Talented engineer. What specifically puts you off their entire student body; past, present, and future?
Well, I just looked on Twitter and see many, many Oberlin grads lamenting the Gibson's judgement and claiming that "everyone always knew" Gibson's was "racist" without any hard facts. Just one example: https://twitter.com/ejdickson/status/1566061809500622848 She's still calling people who pled guilty to shoplifting "alleged shoplifters." That's dishonest. Let's just say I don't hold by that school's accreditation.
You’re not going to hire somebody because other people who went to the same school said dumb things on Twitter? Even the most hyper-PC liberals don’t go that far
Out of its three comma endowment, it will pay a settlement of about six hundred student's annual tuition, which is a little less than a quarter of their undergrad population. After a six year smear campaign, sounds like money well spent!
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That is what punitive damages are - they are not required to be connected to the size of the damage, they are meant to punish the defendant for royally (in the judge's view) fucking up, and send a message to other similar defendants to not do such things And $5M in compensatory damages seems about right for 2 years of a successful small bakery
Honestly I'm not very keen on pinning blame/monetary responsibility on single individuals/companies to 'prevent/deter' unknown future crimes. We shouldn't be signaling with big punishments bigger than the crimes call for. We should carefully consider the crime based on the individual and how much punishment is appropriate for that individual to compensate the victim/deter that single individual/company from continuin…
That doesn't make a lot of sense. The whole point of the criminal-justice system is to attempt to deter criminal behavior. It's practically definitional.
Although the systems have often been merged in recent times, many places (including some parts of the US) had two entirely separate court systems: a "court of law" for the enforcement of laws by the government, and the imposition of punitive sanctions to discourage behaviors by making them unprofitable to engage in, and "courts of equity" wherein individuals could bring suits directly against each other and where the judges had broad discretion to impose various remedies (e.g. specific performance).
An example would be if your neighbor stole one of your cows: the government (often in the form of a sheriff or magistrate or similar) could decide to go after them in a court of law, because having people stealing each others' livestock is socially corrosive, hence why it's illegal. But you as the owner of the cow could petition a court of equity for relief, independently of the government's decision to pursue action in a court of law. The court of equity's remedy might basically be "give back the cow", or if they had already eaten the cow, maybe they'd tell them to give you an equivalent cow instead.
There are a few US states that still maintain these dual systems: Delaware is the most well-known one, and its Court of Chancery deals with lots of contract disputes and such between private parties. Tennessee and a few other states are similar.
AFAICT the existence of courts of law (or their equivalents) are almost universal features of complex civilizations and probably governments generally.
If there's no punishment for breaking the law, you don't have laws, merely polite suggestions.
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The rationale you provide downthread, that you found a Twitter thread with Oberlin students complaining about the verdict, doesn't help your argument much.
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I'm going to be charitable, because I recognize the username since you usually comment with more verbose and thought-out text, and assume you meant to say "They should be thankful that Gibson's doesn't do like Saudi Arabia and cut off their hands".
I would have thought the same thing, a year ago. It's a low-effort provocation either way, though. The thread has nothing whatsoever to do with Saudi Arabia.
The affluent, privileged Oberlin students profiled in the article don’t even feel shame about stealing from local small businesses. That suggests not only something about them, but the moral context they inhabit. And these are our next generation of leaders! What if we have made a mistake and ratcheting down punishments for theft had the effect of weakening social taboos against it? What if the students aren’t the product of something that can be called progress? What if the Saudis are on to something?
Oberlin is now responsible for the speech of its adult students and now must censor them in a Ministry of Truth like role to avoid civil liability. Must they also censor researchers debunking the efficacy of drugs in trials causing financial harm to Big Pharma?
Gibson's may even be right morally, they are unfairly maligned as racists, but free speech doesn't hinge on morality, but liberty.
Is there more to this story? I'm honestly pretty shocked by this. The college basically got into hot water for having its Dean show up at a protest holding a flyer.
Oberlin drove the bakery out of business while knowing full well that the bakery did nothing wrong. The kid that got caught shoplifting plead guilty and he also outright stated that racism was not involved.
School administrators at Oberlin pretty clearly believed that Gibson's racially profiled students and victimized lower-income non-white students. And, here's the important thing about that: to some extent, Oberlin is entitled to believe that and say so, regardless of what the "facts" are. That's because, to an extent, those are subjective statements, and defamation consists of false statements of fact.
Where Oberlin screwed up royally was in recklessly presenting facts that supported their preconceived (and constitutionally protected) notions about Gibson's moral failings. But it's easy to see how someone could do that: you see it in HN arguments every day, if not every hour. People believe things that confirm the rest of their beliefs.
It turns out, if you casually do that while running a university, you can end up costing your university tens of millions of dollars. And rightly so. But the story you want to tell, about Oberlin's administrators simply manufacturing a story about Gibson's for the hell of it --- no, that's almost certainly not what happened.