It’s important to note that today’s ruling did not concern itself with the specifics of the allegations against him. Those issues were addressed by a lower court, which found that the acts Assange is alleged to have committed would be illegal, and would in some cases be considered rape, under British law.

Today’s ruling addressed the narrow question of whether the Swedish prosecutors who have requested Assange’s extradition constitute a legitimate “judicial authority,” and the court ruled that it did. Assange’s lawyers have been given two weeks to file any further appeals they may wish to lodge.

For background, it was a march of about three hundred people, give or take. Ebullient, given today’s events to the north, but not raucous. We started at Union Square, meandered around for about an hour and a half, and ended where we began. Pretty standard stuff.

I arrived at Union Square about 8:30, and headed south looking for the march. Within a couple of blocks I caught it circling back toward me, and joined up. Folks were walking on the sidewalks and in the streets, without incident — on the side streets we were mostly facing traffic, and parting when lights turned green. On the avenues we generally hugged the parked cars, taking part of a lane when there was traffic, more when there wasn’t.

Cops occasionally herded us back onto the sidewalks, and we uniformly complied when they did. (I never saw a person refuse to leave the street all night long.) But then when the cops moved on, the people did too, and folks wound up in the streets again.

It was probably something like 8:45 when I saw a white-shirted cop, a supervisor, point at a small group of people in the street a ways ahead, pretty much on their own, and say, “let’s get those kids.” He and a couple of other cops broke into a trot, quietly closing the distance. I yelled to the group to watch out, as did several other people, but we were too far back for them to hear, and so a couple of them got grabbed. When a woman got upset with the cops for busting her friends, she was grabbed too.

I want to be clear: The people I saw arrested weren’t blocking traffic. They weren’t disrupting anything. They weren’t refusing to comply with police orders. They’d just wandered onto an uncrowded street like tens of thousands of New Yorkers do every day. (A little while later, a cop stopped a few of us from crossing an empty crosswalk on a red. He actually said “don’t you see the red light?,” a phrase which, since I’m from here, left me giggling in his face.)

Folks who go to Occupy marches know all about these kinds of arrests. They’re commonplace at this point. But folks who don’t do the Occupy thing — New Yorkers who would never think twice about jaywalking in front of a cop, who’d never even notice that they were doing so — are missing something weird and unsettling in the life of the city.

I said earlier that the mood of the march was ebullient, but after every arrest, every small, unnecessary act of police violence, things turned uglier and angrier. At one point, on St. Marks Place, cops were being rough with a guy on the ground, and a bunch of us were taping to make sure that there was a record. A cop with a steroid body suddenly flew out of the group around the guy and started grabbing people, shoving them, telling them to keep walking. (None of us were blocking the sidewalk or interfering with the cops in any way.) The cop kept on that way for half a block at least, just putting his hands on whichever protesters were in arms’ reach, including people who had no idea what he wanted from them. He was clearly wound up, and physically aggressive in a completely unprovoked way, but he wasn’t out of control — he was a guy who wanted to do some shoving, and he knew for sure that he could do it without consequences.

And something occurred to me as he was doing it. Here’s someone walking down a New York City street, just assaulting people. Just pushing and shoving and yelling. He knocked one guy’s phone out of his hands, and almost sent a woman sprawling. And this miscreant was surrounded by cops. And they did nothing. Didn’t intervene, didn’t stop him, didn’t try to calm him down. They just let their guy go ahead and blithely break the law right in front of them.

If you want to know why people get in cops’ faces on these marches, this is why. If you want to know why people get amped up, this is why. If you want to know why folks chant “fuck the police,” this is why.

Is this justice?

Many people are saying no. Compared to the ten years (or, depending on who you ask, several times that) which he could have received, it certainly seems light, and it’s left a lot of folks I respect quite angry. But I’m not sure I’m among them.

Let me start by saying that I consider what Ravi did a serious crime. He spied, he attempted to spy again, he tried to share private sexual acts with the internet. He did all this in such a way as to tip off his victim to the abuse, and he did it with a giddy indifference to the pain he was causing. In the wake of Clementi’s suicide he compounded his crimes by attempting to destroy evidence and asking others to do the same. And even after he was tried and convicted he displayed an ugly, dismissive refusal to come to terms with his acts.

In an impact statement read to the court this morning, “MB” — the young man who Ravi watched with Clementi — offered a powerful account of the “embarrassment, emptiness and fear” Ravi had put him through:

For the past year I was filled with anxiety and hurt as the trial approached. I felt like I was continuously walking in a mine field, waiting for the sudden explosion. I kept my secret from my family because I did not want them to go through the same emotional turmoil that I was experiencing. With each news article I read or saw on television, this feeling of uncertainty and unsteadiness only became worse.

From the beginning, MB said, he “just wanted [Ravi] to acknowledge that he had done wrong and take responsibility for his conduct, but instead Ravi and his lawyers compounded his trauma:

I do not believe that he has taken responsibility for his conduct, and to this day he seems to blame me for the actions he took. His attorney made it very clear at the trial as did Mr. Ravi in his gratuitous media appearances that I was to be his scapegoat. He wants everyone to believe that his conduct was prompted on each occasion by his concern that I may be a thief and his possessions were at risk as a result of my presence. He even went to go so far as to say that when he learned about Tyler’s death, he thought I might have been involved so videoing me might have been a good thing.

Ravi does not bear responsibility for Clementi’s suicide, but he does bear responsibility for his actions both before and after that night, and those actions have been appalling.

But is he getting off easy? I’m not sure.

As disgusting as what Ravi’s actions were, for him to even have been arrested for them is extremely unusual. Untold numbers of college students have treated gay roommates as badly or worse and never been made to pay for their crimes at all.

In contrast, Ravi has been forced to leave college. He has been entangled in the legal system for nearly two years. He’ll go to jail for 30 days, spend three years on probation, and pay ten thousand dollar fine on top of the presumptive hundreds of thousands his family have paid in legal bills. And unless he somehow manages to get it set aside, he’ll have a felony record for the rest of his life.

Compared to what he could have received, this may not seem like much. But I think it may be enough, and here’s why.

First, there’s the question of prison itself. While I’m not an abolitionist, I do believe that in most cases sentencing someone to prison does them — and society — more harm than good. I can’t imagine that Ravi would walk out of a year in state prison a better person or less likely to re-offend.

And then there’s the question of setting an example. As I said above, I don’t regard Ravi as a particular outlier. The kind of crime that he engaged in is prosecuted rarely not because it is rare, but because it’s not treated as a serious crime. Moderate, rather than draconian, punishment is the best way to change that perception.

Finally, there’s the issue of culpability. As the judge noted in his sentencing hearing, Ravi wasn’t convicted of causing Clementi’s death, and in fact the evidence for a link between Ravi’s acts and Clementi’s suicide is largely inferential. I’m not saying that Ravi didn’t contribute to Clementi’s decision, but I will say that we don’t know exactly how — or how much — he did.

Ravi did something horrible, and his life has been pretty much ruined. I think it’s enough.

“If the [Education] Minister notes that [a college or university] is unable to deliver instructional services as a result of a failure by a student association to comply with an obligation imposed by this Act, the Minister may … order the institution to cease collecting the assessment established by the student association or any successor student association and to cease providing premises, furniture, notice boards, and display stands to the student association or any successor student association free of charge.

“The cessation is effective for a period equal to one term per day or part of a day during which the institution was unable to provide instructional services as a result of the failure to comply.”

What does this mean? It means that if Quebec’s education minister concludes that a campus student association contributed to a disruption of classes, he or she will have the power to cut that student association’s funding, at a rate of one semester’s funding for every day (or part of a day) disrupted.

So let’s say that at four o’clock one afternoon the provincial government announces a new tuition hike, and the student association calls a rally that evening. Because Bill 78 requires organizers of any protest to provide police with eight hours notice, the rally — even if it’s peaceful and non-disruptive — represents “a failure by a student association to comply with an obligation imposed by” the law.

And let’s say that as the rally is breaking up, a group of students decide, on their own, to march off campus. They take over a street, causing a traffic jam. A professor gets caught in that traffic jam and can’t make it to class. That professor is thus rendered “unable to to deliver instructional services.”

According to the text of the law, that student association could have its student activity fee funds withheld for an entire semester. All funds, for all the association’s activities, gone.

And note how quickly the length of the suspensions mount. If, say, a student association officer calls for a blockade that drags on for two weeks, and the Education Minister finds the student association liable, that student association would see its funds withheld for seven years.

For the next seven years, that campus would — because of the actions of one officer — have no student association funding whatsoever. No money for officer stipends, or support staff, or printing. No office space, no speakers or concerts or other programming. And any clubs funded through the association would be similarly cut off — the women’s center, the cultural unions, the chess club. All gone.

And under the law the students of the campus would be prohibited from establishing another student association to replace the one they’ve lost. If a group of students, years later, after everyone involved in the original incident had long since graduated, wanted to set up a new student association, and the students of the campus voted overwhelmingly to fund the new group through their fees, they wouldn’t be allowed to.

Like so much in this law, it’s really quite astonishing.

Bill 78 was drafted on Thursday, introduced on Thursday night, and debated for 21 straight hours before passage. The amendments in question were adopted on a single party-line vote, as was the bill itself. (The opposition offered a number of laudable amendments, in typewritten form, but all were rejected by the majority.)

What makes this haste extraordinary is the sweeping character of the bill, which regulates not only student strike actions but also any demonstration of any kind at which more than fifty people are in attendance. Several provisions of the bill are so vague that critics of the government have expressed doubt that they can be coherently interpreted — and when asked about these provisions, government officials waved them off with airy expressions of confidence in police and judges’ judgment.

This is big stuff, in other words. A major, controversial law in a delicate area. And it was written and passed on the fly.

You can’t look at these scribbled documents, festooned with false starts and marginal insertions — documents which, again, as of this morning make up a part of the official public text of a law which is even now in force in a province of eight million people — and have any confidence in the sobriety of the process that produced them. You can’t look at these amendments and believe that their authors took the fundamental questions of freedom of speech and assembly at stake with any kind of seriousness.

It’s an embarrassment.

“And in my opinion, the young generation of whites, blacks, browns, whatever else there is, you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. People in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change and a better world has to be built, and the only way it’s going to be built is with extreme methods. And I, for one, will join in with anyone — I don’t care what color you are — as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.”

—Malcolm X, speaking at Oxford University on December 3, 1964, eighty days before his death.

The legislation, known as Bill 78, would mandate an end to the strike, impose extraordinary restrictions on demonstrations and impel local student associations to prevent their members from engaging in illegal protest. It would impose harsh fines for violations of provisions one legal experts say “are written so vaguely they’re impossible to respect,” while threatening student activists with the dissolution of their student unions in the case of non-compliance.

Key provisions of the bill as presented to the legislature:

• All classes at campuses currently participating in the student strike will be immediately suspended, with the remainder of the spring semester delayed until August.
• It would become a crime for an individual or organization to “directly or indirectly contribute” to the blocking of a campus, with those terms left undefined in the bill. Organizations would be held responsible for the actions of their members in this regard, whether those members were acting with organizational sanction or not.
• Student associations and federations would be required to “employ appropriate means to induce” their members to comply with the law.
• Student associations and regional federations that violated the law would have their funding and use of campus facilities cut for one semester for each day of campus closure.
• Campuses whose student associations were shuttered under this provision would not be permitted to establish interim associations while the suspensions were in place.
• “Any form of gathering that could result” in an interference with the functioning of a college would be banned at all campuses, and for a 50-meter radius surrounding them.
• Organizers of any demonstration larger than ten people would be required to submit the time, location, duration, and other information to the police eight hours in advance. The police would have the authority to amend any of the proposed parameters.
• Organizers of such demonstrations would be held criminally liable if the demonstrators deviated from police-approved parameters, as would associations participating in such demonstrations, even if they were not the organizers.
• Students who violated the act could be fined as much as $5,000. Representatives of student groups that did so could face personal fines of as much as $35,000. Organizations violating the act could face fines of up to $125,000.All such fines would be doubled for subsequent offenses.

Wow.

3:20 pm update | The president of Quebec’s largest faculty union says the implementation of Bill 78 would make the province “a totalitarian society.”

3:40 pm | An open letter from a group of prominent Quebecois historians says Bill 78 “calls into question the principle of the rule of law.” (Link in French, Google translation here.)

3:45 pm | According to activist Kevin Harding, Quebec’s education minister was asked this afternoon whether wearing the red square fabric swatches that have been adopted by activists as a symbol of the student strike would constitute a violation of Bill 78. Her reply? “I trust our prosecutors and judges.”

That’s not a no. That’s quite pointedly not a no.

5:20 pm | Multiple reports on Twitter say the law has passed, and that it wasn’t even close — 68-48. Fasten your seat belts.

6:20 pm | It’s not immediately clear when the law will go into effect, but if it’s anytime in the near future, I expect large-scale mass defiance of the demonstration-notice provisions in the first day. In other news, tweets from @GadflyQuebec indicate that there were some amendments to the bill prior to the vote, but that the core provisions remain intact. More when I get it.

6:55 pm | According to this, ten amendments were made before the bill’s passage, including one that raised the threshold at which a demonstration needs to be cleared with the police from ten participants to fifty. (Link in French, Google translation here.)

Saturday | According to the website of the Quebec legislature, Bill 78 was put into effect yesterday night. It’s still not completely clear what the final text of the law is, though, because as of now the formal public version of the bill includes nine pages of hand-written amendments, some of which are considerably less legible than others. As I noted in a follow-up post, this is an embarrassment.

The pranksters included the school’s valedictorian, salutatorian, and senior class president. The key came from the mother of one of the students, who was a school board member and was aware of their plans. A custodian kept an eye out to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. The group even planned to take down the Post-Its themselves.

But when school officials arrived the next morning, they suspended all six for trespassing, and moved to fire the custodian (also the mother of a student, as it happens). When supportive students staged a gym sit-in protest, another 57 were suspended.

I’ve always found this kind of trespassing charge ridiculous, and more than a little chilling. A school (or a college) is a community as much as it is an institution, and these students’ acts were grounded in that sense of community — the sense that the school is their school. When administrators use the language of trespass to punish behavior like a prank or a demonstration they do casual violence to that vision of community.

This particular story, I’m glad to report, has a mostly happy ending. After students, parents, and alumni protested, the six pranksters’ suspensions were revoked and expunged from their records. The plan to fire the custodian has been abandoned. The 57 protesters’ suspensions were reduced to a single day’s after-school detention.

And with a little luck next year’s seniors will pull an even better prank.

Done? Cool. Because I had a thing or two to say about the comments.

One common theme among Scalzi’s critics is the idea that white guys used to have it good, but affirmative action has put an end to that, and now the deck is stacked in favor of women and people of color. Here’s a snippet of a representative argument (from commenter bpmitche) to that effect:

In the case of academia, for instance, the admittance guidelines often restrict the number of applicants who will be accepted according to their stated race and their declared major.

For instance, let’s say that the Engineering program at Cal Poly is only going to accept 450 students in a given year; of those 450 openings 200 are set aside for whites, 100 for blacks, 100 for hispanics, and 50 for asians. There are also gender standards – let’s be generous and assume that the goal is pairity between admitted student genders. Now, let’s look at our pool of applicants: although Cal Poly gets applicants from all over the country, there are some demographic truths involved here. First, white males will be the overwhelming majority of applicants to the Engineering program, based simply on the racial demographics of the US (wikipedia). Out of any given 1000 applicants to the Engineering program 637 of them will be white, 163 will be hispanic, 122 will be black and 48 will be asian (with a total of 30 “other or mixed”).

Bpmitche goes on from there to report admission rates for various demographic categories to the nearest tenth of a percent. (“as a white male, your chances … are at best 31.8% … for a black male or female, 81.9%; for a hispanic male 61.7%, female 60.9%; and 100% for both asian males and females.”)

Damning, right? There’s only one problem with this analysis. It’s completely made up.

To start, race-based affirmative action in California’s public universities is illegal, and has been since 1996. Under the California state constitution, the state may not consider “race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” Period. At Cal Poly, admissions officials aren’t even told applicants’ race or gender.

And even outside of California, the kind of quotas this guy describes are illegal nationwide, and have been since the Supreme Court’s 1978  Bakke decision. Since 2003, moreover, it’s been illegal to give college applicants any quantifiable numerical advantage in admissions on the basis of race. (Colleges are still allowed — though not required — to consider a student’s race on a case-by-case basis, for now.)

Bpmitche also errs in assuming that applicants to an elite engineering program will reflect the demographics of the country as a whole. If that were the case — if people of all races and genders were getting the kind of preparation and training that would render them viable candidates for admission to a school like Cal Poly — then any sort of affirmative action would of course be absurd. But they’re not.

Finally, there’s the issue of Cal Poly’s engineering school’s demographics, perhaps the simplest relevant fact to uncover. Bpmitche estimates that about 45% of the school’s students are white, while the true number is above 60%. He figures the school’s Latino enrollment at 22%, when in fact it’s just 13%. And black students, who bpmitche likewise estimates at 22% of the school’s enrollment, amount to just 0.9% — just 47 students in a school of more than five thousand.

And this, ultimately, is why folks like bpmitche think they’re oppressed.

It’s because they have literally no idea what the facts are.

As SG President, I realized that as great as it is to work on issues of fairness, it only highlighted my own struggles. It didn’t bring the completeness that I sought. By mid-fall, it had gotten to the point where I was living in my own head. With everything I did, from the mundane to the exciting, the only way I was able to enjoy it was if I re-imagined doing it as a girl. My life was passing me by, and I was done wasting it as someone I wasn’t.

I told my family and some of my closest friends over winter break. My brothers and parents greeted me with immediate support and unconditional love. This was the first time that my parents have had to worry about my safety, my job prospects and my acceptance. This story is my experience and my experience alone. There is no one-size-fits-all narrative; everyone’s path winds in different ways.

The experience highlights my own privilege. I grew up in an upper-income household, in an accepting environment and with incredible educational opportunities. I never worried about my family’s reaction.

But those worries are all too common for most. For far too many trans individuals, the reality is far bleaker; coming out oftentimes means getting kicked out of your home. I say this not to diminish my own experience, but to acknowledge the privilege and opportunities which have been afforded to me.

Today is the next day of the life I’ve already had, but at the same time, the first day of the life I always knew I wanted to lead. Starting on Saturday, I will present as my true self. Going forward, I ask that you use female pronouns (she/her) and my chosen name, Sarah.

Congrats, Sarah, and good luck.