Innermost Parts

I was reading back issues of The Justice and I came across this story. It’s really touching – I advise you to read it.

I was reading back issues of The Justice and I came across this story. It’s really touching – I advise you to read it.

Last year, when MJ Rosenberg ‘72 attended a conference for the pro-peace, pro-Israel lobby group J Street in Washington, he expected to mingle among upper-middle-class politicians and peacemakers from the United States and diplomatic officials from the Middle East. Instead, Rosenberg spent time with someone who was neither an American nor a diplomatic official. Rosenberg forged a relationship with Yousef Bashir, a 20-year-old Palestinian who had been shot by an Israeli soldier at the age of 15 and was the only person at the conference from Gaza.

“[Bashir looked] like a prosperous, athletic Jewish kid; like any Brandeis student,” thought Rosenberg, who is a writer for Media Matters, “a web based, not-for-profit, progressive research and information center,” according to its Web site.

…
Bashir wanted to go to Brandeis to prove to fellow Palestinians that Jews and Arabs can learn together in peace.

“I wanted to be a Palestinian who graduated from a Jewish school to go back and help his own people,” Bashir says.
…

Bashir’s was motivated by an interest in politics and his father’s message of peace to interview for a spot at a Seeds of Peace camp in Maine. Seeds of Peace is an organization that, according to the mission statement on its Web site, “[empowers youth] from regions of conflict with the leadership skills required to advance reconciliation and coexistence.”

In summer 2005, Bashir attended the camp with 12 other teenagers from Gaza.

The camp houses teens from all over the Middle East, specifically from areas of conflict. The camp also houses American students who are interested in learning about international conflict.

That summer Bashir lived in a cabin with Daniel Acheampong ‘11. At the beginning of the summer, Acheampong said that he felt a lot of hatred among his peers in his cabin made up of Israelis, Jordanians, Palestinians and Americans. Bashir’s message of peace immediately transformed the feeling of animosity in his and Acheampong’s cabin.

“Speaking to Yousef and [hearing] his ability to forgive really inspired me,” says Acheampong.

Acheampong and Bashir are still close friends today and see each other often.

Inspiring! Read it!

So it looks like we were hacked by some sort of spam robot thing. All should be normal now, but I’m checking to see if any nasty stuff is left, how this happened, etc/

Polls just closed for the Associate Justice position on the Union Judiciary. Here are the results:
Read more…

In case you weren’t aware, we just had ourselves an election.

The results:
Say hello to your new Senators:
Charles River: Abaham “Abby” Berin
East: Melissa Skolnik
2012: Abby Kulawitz
Village: Albert Feldman

Heading into the run-off for Associate Justice:
Ryan D. Martin and Deena Glucksman.

Full results:

Read more…

An Anecdote:
On February 5, 1946, Albert Einstein agreed to the establishment of the Albert Einstein Foundation for Higher Learning, Inc., but on June 22, 1947, he ended his association with the institute, and refused the board’s offer to name it after him. Instead, the university was named after Justice Louis D. Brandeis.
In 1953 Brandeis University offered Einstein an honorary degree, but he declined.

….Does anyone know what made Einstein decide to cut his ties with what would later become our near and dear Brandeis University?

Hi readers,
Going to today’s Activist (Dis)Orientation hosted by ARC made me think about why I participate in activist groups, and what I hope to get out of them. There were so many tables, each for a club with a noble cause, that it was hard to choose where to commit, and which ones need your help the most. Beyond that, I realized that the purpose behind activism is to engage people in activities, ideas, fights they feel passionate about, with the goal in mind of making a change. I’m still struggling with the question myself, that’s why I want to know, what causes are important to YOU? If YOU could change one thing at Brandeis, what would it be?
Forget that, if you could change ANYTHING and EVERYTHING about Brandeis, where would you start? I want to write about problems YOU have, tidbits YOU want to hear about, solutions YOU would suggest. So please, let me know what it is you care about.

I’m back in my Social Movements class. We’re talking about collective action problems – if you’re interested in a collective goal, there will be free riders: people who think “if I bother helping out towards this goal, it won’t make much difference, but I will have to sacrifice. Therefore, I can just not join in working towards this goal, and reap the benefits if it is reaped.”

Does that make sense? Ask your econ friends about the free rider problems: that’s what’s going on.

In the context of social movements, however, there have arisen a class of tools that try to deal with this.

One way: “Why don’t Americans litter as much as others?” A foreign student remarked about how she was surprised that in the US there is a lot less littering. Why? The key insight – littering is observable, and tied to morality. You don’t want to litter because its thought of as a morally wrong thing, and you don’t want others to castigate you as a litterer.

Same thing with, say, the Montgomery Bus Boycott. When you ride on the bus, it’s very visible! Your peers will look down on you!

Unions are good at dealing with this: in any given shop, you don’t need 100% of the workers to be part of the union for the union to have bargaining power. If 10% of the workers not in the union get raises as well as the union workers (and they don’t have to pay dues), that’s another example of the free rider problem. Unions deal with this by offering union-only health care plans, cookouts, etc.

In general, the way to deal with a free rider problem is to give selective incentives to those in the “in-group” (of those actually working for teh broader social good). That way, the focus is not on the overriding social goal, but in the intermediate benefits that accrue to the participants. These benefits might be psychic, social, etc, but they are important.
Anyways, I was thinking about voting. Voting is a big example of the free rider problem: your individual vote is very unlikely to be decisive, yet it takes a lot of hassle (and lost work time) to vote. Yet clearly if a bunch of people didn’t vote for this reason, we’d have problems. And this does happen!

Why not make pacts? Take 10 non-votes. Introduce them all (through the internet?) to each other, and perhaps they will make a pact that either all 10 of them vote, or none of them do. Now, in a sense, they’ve each increased their individual voting power by 10.

It’s also harder to explain to your 9 new acquaintences that you’ve let them down re-voting than to feel vaguely guilty about not voting.

Just a thought.