“It’s been very cathartic making my mental health troubles everyone else’s problem” says man who can afford to pay an entire team to listen to his unhinged rants if he wants.

Worryingly we may all be both types. The problem is that we’re typically the first when the new information aligns with the world as we think we understand it, and the second when it conflicts. Information that calls into question our understanding of the world around us makes us feel threatened and through that threat activates our fight or flight instincts. Since we can’t run from information we’ve already heard the only choice is to fight back against it either publicly or in our own minds.

I would imagine that Columbia’s disciplinary process creates records that are maintained for a number of years. If they weren’t created, or have since been destroyed that would be evidence towards improper procedures. Certainly any destruction now would be highly illegal and might result in a presumption against the university. As to the tenant laws I assume the order that the students received should be proof enough unless New York tenant laws have a carve out for universities.

Bare in mind that the Constitution is just a piece of paper. It only has power when the government and the will of the people give it power.

There’s a scene from The West Wing that really impressed upon me the great challenge of holding even the seemingly most stable democracies together. Toby Ziegler was working with representatives of a newly forming government and a constitutional scholar played by Christopher Lloyd to craft a constitution. Toby takes issue with the amount of power they are considering vesting in their executive branch, preferring instead a parliamentary system. Christopher Lloyd’s character responds to him with almost this exact point, telling him that their work just then was to instill a democratic spirit in those leaders and through them the broader populace of their country.

Oddly, this exact scenario is a major reason why they fail to issue some warrants. The biggest hurdle for any supranational organization is maintenance of its legitimacy, which takes a huge blow when members refuse to abide by its decisions. This leaves such organizations with very few options. The easiest and most common is to weigh the cost, in lost legitimacy, of not acting against the probability of member defection and only take an action if defection is unlikely or inaction would cost even more legitimacy. In that light issuing the arrest warrant in the first place arguably indicates that the ICC believes either that the legitimacy lost by not acting is greater than that lost to defection, or that labeling Netanyahu and his ilk war criminals is more important than any legitimacy lost in defection.