I stopped reading at this point. No, actually, I read the next bold sentence and rolled my eyes. Then I definitely stopped reading. Edit: Can I get a citation on the UC system hypothesis? bioemerl: I agree with some of the explicit and implicit points you make in between, but you probably see what I'm getting at, though I acknowledge it's 100% strawman. C'mon, this dude exhibits severe ADHD through his sentence structure alone, not to mention his inclination towards a 140 character limit. Edit2: thenewgreen, I'm sorry if this is someone you know, but I just found the piece to be entirely too reactionary.Not to mention that Berkeley is the flagship institution for the University of California system, which is unquestionably the foundation of public higher education in the world and receives $8.5 billion in federal funding every year.
...unquestionably... in the world...
Does anyone here seriously believe that trump took the time to understand the full situation?...
...trump is the threat to democracy?
One of the hardest things I've watched my friends do is go steadily from "trump is a moron who has no idea what he's doing" to "trump is a machiavellian overlord whose every move is just a feint to make us not notice his life-long desire for fascism." I'm not saying we shouldn't be frightened and appalled that a sitting president threatened to defund a college via Tweet. But I think it's far more likely he did it because it felt good and would make waves, not because he thought about it for more than fifteen seconds. Every Trump conspiracy I've seen woven depends on the man having an attention span equal to or greater than Dick Cheney and I'm pretty sure I can buy a budgie that's more task-oriented than Donald Trump.
Exactly. I'm not saying putting a child at the wheel isn't an extremely dangerous situation, but everyone's giving him far too much credit. Ooh, maybe the left will birth their own Alex Jones type character soon.
Does anyone here seriously believe that trump took the time to understand the full situation? He sees "University cancels speech' and reacts with "well, if you are going to cancel, what if we started pulling your funds?" If he did see that the university did their best to allow the speech to happen, he is likely going to say that the threat of funds withdraw is to force the university and local towns to ramp up security and ensure that these protests are able to shut down people's ability to give talks. I can't see that as a huge deal. Should universities sit by and "defend" free speech in theory while allowing rioters to go unchecked? Not at all. We shouldn't have violent protesters shutting down speeches in the US, anywhere. Whatever it takes to reach that goal is perfectly justified, because the threat of violence becoming a valid tactic of silencing one's opponents in open debate are far worse than universities having more security. How does a bunch of people organizing violent protest in order to shut down a speech result in people saying that trump is the threat to democracy?