Sandbox Politico

I was raised with three heroes, two of them fictional: Joe Montana, Barry Bonds and Batman. So like many northern Californians, this past Sunday’s Super Bowl loss still lingers on my palate, barely dulled by the beer I attempted to chase it away with.

“But Justin,” you cry, “this column is about ASUCD, who cares about sports?” I do friends, and to a degree so does your senate.

You may recall Senate Resolution 2, calling for aggressive overhauls in transparency for the $18 million we send in student fees to UC Davis athletics. That resolution was vetoed and died.

Last Thursday, the Senate saw another bill, SR 6, a redux of 2, calling for far milder and aggressively polite reforms to athletics. That bill skated by with a 9-3 vote, two more dissenting votes than the original, more assertive resolution.

This whole argument sounds extremely trivial. It’s a nonbinding resolution about intercollegiate athletics (ICA) — a rhetorical slap on the wrist by ASUCD asking ICA to be a little more student friendly. But upon closer examination, there are actually several interesting themes.

First, why do resolutions have value? I refer you back to last week’s column where I talked about the power of titles (yes, I know self-references are douchey). Resolutions are effective because they consolidate titles with the entirety of the senate backing them — if one title is good, twelve titles are better.

Which is why resolutions are only worth anything if they pass unanimously. Any dissent makes ASUCD look divided and fractious, sending a poor message to the administration.

Second, why did this specific resolution matter? The average UC Davis student isn’t particularly concerned with our sports teams. Yes, we’re Division I, but our last major football victory came in 2005 when we upset Stanford; not the most impressive body of work.

Sadly, sports are trapped in a vicious cycle. Students are indifferent to athletics because we don’t win, but we don’t win because students don’t care. Many top-tier athletes only want to go to schools with thriving sports programs … problematic.

How do we break the cycle?

People (and students are people, albeit slightly less washed, more haggard ones) care about issues when they have information, and a stake in the matter. Well, students have an $18 million stake in athletics, that’s big enough to wipe out the cast of Twilight (god willing), and yet we still don’t care. Why not?

Because we lack information and transparency on the issue. Gee, if only there existed some rhetorically forceful document calling for just that. Oh wait.

Which brings us to the largest issue at hand: Senators putting their own egos above student welfare.

Say what you want, athletics are important. Yes, sports are shallow, vapid and at times brutish, but there’s something beautiful about being a fan.

This Sunday was proof-positive a group of athletes can bring together a room of strangers, living breath-to-breath with the success or failure of their team. A strong UC Davis ICA could go a long way towards reviving the elusive entity known as Aggie Pride, and fostering a broader sense of campus community.

Dissenting Senators Ong, Bottoms and Topf, why would you vote to kill such a worthy effort?

Senator Ong informed me by email that she only votes for bills she is “110 percent in agreeance…and support of.”

Not good enough, not even close. What about the 110’s of students you represent; how did they feel? And if the Senator only feels confident backing rhetorical statements she’s that confident in, I would advise her to never open her mouth.

Forgive me for flippancy, but a no-vote is akin to saying, “No, I want less transparency; no, I want less control over my money.”

Couple that with Senator Don Gilbert, former athlete, emailing me, “I took some time to ask how athletes and coaches felt … they were bewildered at why … the president would veto such a message and how senate could uphold the veto.”

I never thought I’d see the day when ASUCD behaved like disconnected Washington politicians, and cast votes with themselves in mind ahead of student welfare.

The naysayers ought to be ashamed. Not merely for offering no reasonable arguments against the resolution, but also for failing to consider just how much was on the line.

I beseech the Senate to overturn the veto from President Sterling when it comes, and it will.

Let’s not allow SR 6 to conclude as the Niners’ quest did on Sunday: hard-fought, but inevitably just a little bit short of the goal.

JUSTIN GOSS dares you to condemn him for his one-sided analysis and, in so doing, legitimate his arguments. You can do so at jjgoss@ucdavis.edu.

Question: My lease ended on Jan. 1. My landlord is refusing to return my security deposit. He says I need to collect it from the new tenant who’s replacing me. I don’t want to have to deal with whoever the new person is. Can the landlord make me do this?
— Kalin M., Sacramento.

Answer: No, your landlord can’t make you chase after the new tenants for the security deposit. That’s messed up. And illegal.

As I said in this column a couple weeks ago, within 21 days of you vacating the apartment, the landlord must refund your security deposit. If he doesn’t, or he refunds only part of it, he has to tell you why he did that. He needs to mail or personally hand to you an itemized list of the amounts of any deductions and the reasons for the deductions. He should also include copies of documents showing the charges incurred to clean or repair the apartment.

This list of deductions must be reasonable. He can’t just deduct for anything he wants.

Before you move out, you’re supposed to restore the apartment to the same level of cleanliness as it was in at the time you first moved in. Does the landlord want to steam clean the whole place? He can’t charge you for that, unless steam-cleaning is indeed necessary to return it to the previous level of cleanliness.

The portion of the security deposit that wasn’t necessary to return the apartment to its original condition must be returned to you by the landlord.

Why can’t the landlord tell you to get this from the new tenant?

Because you don’t have a contract with the new tenant. You’ve probably never met the new tenant. The new tenant has no idea how clean the apartment was when you first moved in, so he has no way of refunding you the correct amount.

You have a contract with your landlord. That means that if something goes wrong with that contract, you can sue only the landlord.

The law requires the landlord to hang onto that security deposit during the entire time you live there. California Civil Code Section 1950.5(D) states that any security deposit “shall be held by the landlord for the tenant who is party to the lease or agreement.”

Get your refund from the landlord, not the new tenant. He’s the one with the security deposit, so he’s the one who should give you the refund. A landlord who withholds your deposit in bad faith is liable for triple damages plus your attorney fees.

Question: I hate my boss and I hate the customers where I work. My boss can’t fire me if I flip him off (or flip off the customer), right? Isn’t that free speech?
—Tatiana K.

Answer: Unless you’ve got a contract with your employer that says it’s cool to flip the bird, no, you don’t have a free speech right to flip off your boss. Or the customers.

In fact, the First Amendment — the “free speech” part of the Constitution — doesn’t apply at all in a private workplace.

That’s why radio host Don Imus got fired for making derogatory comments about a women’s basketball team a couple years ago.

And if the First Amendment applied to private employers, Rush Limbaugh might have been the Superbowl announcer this year. He had a brief stint as a football commentator in 2003 but was fired for controversial comments. Free speech? Not for private employers.

A public employer is a different matter.

The Constitution restrains the government, not private employers, which means the University of California needs to tread lightly when deciding whether to fire its employees for something they say. This, along with union-sponsored contractual protections, is why the Occupy-friendly professors still work here. The administration doesn’t like rabble rousers, but they can’t easily get rid of them.

Your boss can fire you for flipping off customers, posting drunken photos on Facebook or tweeting threats to Justin Bieber. Restrain yourself, because the First Amendment will not restrain your boss.

Daniel is a Sacramento attorney, former Davis City Council candidate and graduate of UC Davis School of Law. He’ll answer questions sent to him at governorwatts@gmail.com or tweeted to @governorwatts.

On occasion you’ve likely seen a handful of people relaxing outside on campus, doing what appears to be tightrope walking. We are not members of the circus, we are not performing stunts for spare change, we’re simply a few students that love to appreciate Davis sunshine.

What we’re up to is called slacklining, and I’ll give you the crash course description so that you can understand why anti-slacklining policy is unfounded. Slacklining was created some seven years ago by climbers in Yosemite as a pasttime, consisting of climbing equipment and the desire for a new way to unwind.

Around Davis, the typical slackline is essentially a span of nylon webbing (ranging between 20 to 60 feet long and 1 to 2 inches wide) connected to two trees and tensioned to be able to hold a person’s weight.

From that description, you’re probably thinking two things: 1) “Isn’t that going to hurt tree trunks?” and 2) “Isn’t that super dangerous?” These are the two questions that UC Davis Facilities Management and Campus Counsel went ahead and answered for themselves before being informed.

Here’s why the answer to both the questions above is no, and why prevention of campus slacklining needs to be replaced with regulation.

Yosemite Camp 4, the very origin of slacklining, where the activity has been going on longer than anywhere else, allows it to this day. That’s right, Yosemite National Park recognizes that with proper use of padding around the tree, the circulation of the tree is not restricted and the bark is not abraded.

Tree padding is not something that slackliners argue against, it just makes sense to protect equipment from rough bark, and the bark from equipment. Additionally, slackliners take consideration to set up using large hard-bark trees, which are the vast majority in Davis, because after all, it is in our best interest for the trees to not be harmed.

Born from a community of people that trust their lives on the strength of equipment, slacklining harbors the same discipline. Every type of equipment involved in the setup has been tested to its breaking strength, which is multiple times the force being applied while slacklining. My personal equipment combines webbing rated at 4,400 pound-force and carabiners rated at 5,300 pound-force, while the tension applied very rarely exceeds 1,000 pounds. Given the use of reliable equipment, which is always used, the likelihood of injury that presents liability to the campus is almost nonexistent.

Let’s not forget that slacklining occurs only a handful of feet off of soft ground and at a pace slower than walking. A student biking on campus or in a chemistry lab is under higher likelihood of injury, but these are both allowed within safety regulations like speed limits and protective gear. Slacklining, on the other hand, is met with heavy-handedness regardless of existing precaution.

Additionally, the assumption that an uninstructed person will spontaneously approach a slackline and injure themselves is an unrealistic dramatization. Would you yourself walk up and jump on a slackline without preparation? Of course not, and that is why people never give it a shot without being taught how. Plus, a slackline isn’t exactly cheap, and simply out of concern for my property I wouldn’t allow someone to use it unsafely.

I urge that given the innocuous nature of slacklining, policy regarding its presence on campus be revisited.

What the campus needs are simple rules to ensure that slacklining continues to be done in good form, such as requiring the use of tree-padding and preventing the obstruction of walking or biking paths (both practices that are already in place).

Slackliners really are just looking for a peaceful atmosphere, and it’s unfortunate that instead of approaching slackliners to reasonably discuss policy, the administration chooses instead to use the police department as a tool of intimidation.

For more information on slacklining, there are boundless resources online.

SAM RUSOFF is a second-year evolution, ecology and biodiversity major. He can be reached at serusoff@ucdavis.edu.

The Anarchist

Before having any political discussion, it is obvious that we need to be clear about what our terms mean. This is some critical thinking 101, something everyone knows.

Well, sometimes it seems like everyone knows it, but there is one sense in which a very large segment of the population fails to apply this rule, this seemingly elementary rule.

You may be quite clear and quite sure about what you mean when you say a word like “capitalism,” but the major mistake lies in the very common assumption that others necessarily mean the same thing that you do when they use that word. Instead of getting what they mean to say, you instead hear something else.

This makes it so that people cannot communicate. Let’s say there is some new great idea that someone writes — some idea that challenges real, illegitimate power. Now let’s say that when you read this great new idea, you fail to get the message because you ascribe different meanings to the words. This could easily happen. Changing the meaning of only one word in an argument can change the entire message.

Human beings have probably been making this mistake in interpreting each other for a long time. Powerful groups, though, have cashed in on this mistake and used it to quelch dissenting ideas, and it has been an extremely effective tool in instilling pro-hierarchy ideology.

Remember, only a small faction of the society, the elite class, owns the institutional mechanisms which distribute information, and their interests are naturally most prevalent. So, what we get is a way of using words that upholds their interests.

We get a framework of discourse. The entire way of talking and understanding words is set out so that we can never really hear those arguments that would undermine their power. We would simply write them off because we would only understand a straw-man version of them.

We are taught, by the language-use imposed by the elite classes, to treat language this way. Once again, the parallels to Newspeak are overwhelming.

This whole problem becomes very clear when looking at a very bothersome scenario which frequently befalls me. People say, “If you are an anarchist, you could not possibly be a socialist!”

It’s such a shining example of the problem of people simply assuming that the way they define a term is the only definition.

It is an especially funny example, because people sooner assume that another rational adult would hold as core beliefs two extremely contradictory views, than they would guess that the other person is using the terms in another way. I think that the anarchism/socialism case is a striking example of how people fail to understand each other, and they do it in just the way that they are taught.

First I want to explain just how it is possible to be a socialist and an anarchist at the same time, and then I want to push further on how this shows that elite groups use this to their advantage.

Many people hear “anarchism” and think “no government.” Furthermore, they take that to be the only meaning. This would seem very strange to anyone who reads the foundational literature on the subject. Emma Goldman, considered a foundational figure in anarchism, would not have described anarchism as “no government,” but instead would have described it as “freedom from (private) property.”

Socialism, contrary to the popular conception, does not mean “total government control of industry.” That is one thing that the term is used to pick out. Just as in the case of anarchism, the main advocates of this view do not endorse the popular conception.

Socialism means that people own the industry, as in the people who work for the company, rather than a single capitalist. It can be a matter of degree as well. A mostly capitalistic society might have small socialist tendencies, such as collective bargaining of workers.

Since anarchism generally means the reduction or elimination of hierarchies — not “no government” — it does, in fact, naturally lead us to socialism. Capitalist industry is naturally hierarchical, with the capitalist class at the top of the hierarchy, and since anarchism wants to eliminate hierarchies, replacing them with equality in negotiation, anarchism demands the elimination of capitalist hierarchies.

So, how did the general population come to regard these terms in such a different way than the people who have historically identified with them? Simple: that is how the terms were used in the primary discourse that people were exposed to, the barrage of information provided by the institutions owned by the elite classes.

Furthermore, the discourse imposed by the elite class encourages us to treat terms as though they only have one meaning. We are taught to think of a term in a way that neutralizes its threat to power, while we are also taught to treat it only that way.

We do speak Newspeak.

BRIAN MOEN thinks that he is doing “meta-politics,” but realizes that the term is annoying. He can be reached at bkmoen@ucdavis.edu.