Open Mic for the week of 3/10/25
It’s unofficially “Super Mario” day due to it being March 10 (“MAR 10”). So please have a SUPER MAR 10!
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
University of Michigan Professor Don Moynihan has a good run down of the chilling effects going on against dissent currently: https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/real-chilling-effects
“Normally I record the classes I teach. It gives students who miss class a chance to catch up. I also make space in my classes to talk about what is happening in government right now. A couple of weeks ago, students asked we keep the discussions, but stop recording the class. They worried about any record of their words that might be viewed as criticism of the current administration, and somehow weaponized against them.”Report
From The Harvard Crimson: Librarian Who Removed Chabad Poster Is No Longer Employed at Harvard
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ICE arrested a pro-Palestinian protestor with a Green Card and his precise whereabouts are not known currently: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/nyregion/ice-arrests-palestinian-activist-columbia-protests.html
This is bad.Report
This is classic dictator stuff. People need to take warning.Report
And yet they won’t. Because reasons.Report
I’ve already seen people whom I personally witnessed warn of the risk of the security state built up during the Bush administration under the guise of the “War on Terror” being used for political persecution domestically go out of their way to justify this detention because they disagree with his politics, so yeah, I’m not confident we’ll heed the warning.Report
Over-defining “support for terrorism” has downsides?
My goodness gracious! You’d think that the people who defended the cadets playing the circle game would be at the front of the line arguing that people should be allowed to speak freely.Report
It must get exhausting trying to make these comparisons, instead of just saying, “You know what, this is bad!” Especially when it involves comparing kids who ultimately were not punished by their college to a permanent resident who was detained, shipped who knows where (no seriously, his family didn’t know where), and who may be deported, for political speech. Did people overreact to those kids? Absolutely. Is it related to political persecution by the government? Dude, you are gonna need to write a coherent (I mean, by ordinary standards, not your own) essay with many thousands of words to make that argument, and I am 99.9999% certain you’re gonna fail.
I don’t even know, man. You thoroughly dominate this site’s comment section; pretty much all of it is a dialogue with you. This would be a better place to hang out, in an internet world in chaos right now, if you’d cut this bullsh*t out.Report
Because we’ve been fed a constant stream of “wolf” accusations for decades. There’s nothing you can say about Trump that you haven’t said about all other GOP presidents during my lifetime.
The republic is always going to end if Team Blue doesn’t get it’s way.Report
You really aren’t paying attention are you?Report