The Bangus Ultimatum

(Slightly updated)

The law school (and the University in general) is ablaze with news of another dead student – apparently due to hazing. Initial reports suggest that the Sigma Rho, a law-based fraternity priding itself to be “a campus force” and “a national force”, is involved. The backlash will be temporary as it is predictable. There will be statements and press conferences. Interviews and features and forum exchanges about what violent low-life scum-bags these frat men are. The argument will be raised that not all of them are the sort of sadistic murdering bastards that the media has portrayed them. And that would appeal to our moral intuition, being, at a certain level, almost self-evident. Passions will cool down, and we’d be back to our own merry ways. That is, until the next dead student.

Professor Te once wrote in his blog that he considered all frat men equally guilty. It was a hard position to support. Professor Te himself taught me Criminal Law, and I found it difficult to reconcile his statement with what he told us about the presumption of innocence, criminal intent, and the burden of proof. Surely my teacher was overreacting, perhaps even oversimplifying the problem. Surely this was a generalization, and I often find generalizations awkward tools for problem solving. From where I stood at that time, what I saw was a paradox: the individual frat men that I know are pretty decent individuals. They’re smart, capable, courteous and man, are they funny. Every other frat man I know is a Sigma Rhoan – and they’re not exactly a lineup of Huns. Senator Salonga, a man who I deeply admire, is an alumnus of Sigma Rho. And yet fraternities have been involved in the most ghastly episodes of violence in campus, and I sense a morbid fear whenever I see a cluster of them in the hallways. What mediates between the individuals that I know and the roving death squads of my darkest nightmares?

A vogue explanation is that frat men and fraternities aren’t the problem per se, but the “culture of violence”. It has a nice ring to it, and the notion that we’re up against a culture (the way we must wage war against “terror”) bypasses the tiresome and inconvenient business of actually assigning blame or, in a non-judicial setting, determining contributions to the problem. As a student of social science, I can’t buy into the idea of an amorphous, autonomously brooding omnipresence directing these frat men to beat another human being to death. It takes individual agency to adopt and reinforce and sustain and propagate the symbols and practices that comprise a culture. It is individuals who, having been failed by intellect or imagination, resort to violence to achieve their ends.

Cultures don’t kill people, people do.

The lack of blog posts was due to enrollment madness in UP. It’s almost over now.
One of the new things this semester: the bulk of my workflow will be done around Emacs (or specifically, XEmacs). I finally have an office computer that can run it. Here’s how it looks like:

If you’re someone whose computer experience is limited to the candy-colored confines of Windows or MacOS, it looks like a retarded text editor. What’s so cool about that?

Except that Emacs really doesn’t give a fuck about cool. It’s currently version 21.x, and the code and concepts behind it have been around since the 1970’s. You don’t get to be that old and grizzly by thinking about cool. You get to reach that number of iterations by being neurotic about function. It’s a text editor, indeed - but this text editor can surf the web, read and write email, do math and databases, handle your calendar, remotely control computers in the network, among many many many many things. It’s not a killer app - it’s a pissed homicidal maniac, but chances are, you’ll never find out.

Right now it’s keeping my to-do list, and churning out beautiful pdf’s of legal pleadings (via LaTex and ghostscript). Yes, these things make me happy.

No sleep for the weekend, thanks to UP Bar Operations. I signed up for Night Ops, easily one of the more “real-time/mission critical” aspects of the affair. Dead tired after the whole thing but came back with interesting pictures and side stories - click on the barops pictures for some of my notes (link goes to latest picture, just backtrack from there). I’ll definitely be back next weekend for more. Because I’m such a sucker for punishment.

“None of us is as smart as all of us.”
- Ken Blanchard

The shallow, practical version of the project: We want to build a wikipedia (or wiki-law)-like resource where law students can stash, revise, and retrieve stuff to make their lives easier: notes, reviewers, digests, that obscure municipal ordinance only their professor cares about.

The deep, philosophical version: We want to harness the power of smart people working together. To transform the way the law is learned and imagined: as a conversation rather than a lecture. To make sure that there is no space for fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the way we study and review the law. To trade in hierarchies for hyperlinks.

To do this, we’ll need your help. Any contribution will be welcome: Materials, skills, your time and effort. We have no grade, year-level, or height requirement. We will teach you how to use the tools you need.

To join the Openlaw Project, simply write your name and contact info on one of the sign-up sheets on the LSG Board, or write: lsg_openlaw[that-ubiquitous-at-sign]yahoo.com

And this time he dispenses wisdom to distraught law school freshmen. A friend/classmate of mine couldn’t help but notice that it’s so much darker and pessimistic. Compared especially to the one immediately preceding it (on love and romance).

I guess I couldn’t help it. Comedy is hard, and harder still when you’re nursing a gaping chest wound.

Now is still funny. And happy, in its own twisted way. Someday it will be May again.

Fraternity violence casts its long shadow in law school (The 2nd, maybe 3rd time since classes began). But I feel so much safer, what with everyone condemning the whole thing with statements and we have banners of who to call in case the shit hits the fan.

Dear Lazyweb, (or maybe this one’s for Yahoo Answers): How can we deal with the problem of frat violence, taking into account that fratboys are people too and are often nice and decent individuals?

One of the reasons why I hadn’t been blogging much is that I’ve been taking my Evidence class this summer, under Professor Te (I passed). It wasn’t exactly CSI, but the subject was fascinating nevertheless. I geeked out on this one, and ended up mapping the relevant rules visually. It’s under a Creative Commons License (the way the rest of this blog is), so just download and remix away. I’m open to suggestions on how to expand and improve it.