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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Maybe if she had tried to remove a book……………..Report
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
I’ve thought a lot about this comment (went for a run soon after, so I had time). I realize what I said was harsh, and while I stand by every part of it, I want to add some context.
For those of you who haven’t been around for 15 years, between 2009 and 2016, I commented on this site pretty much daily, so Jaybird and I have known each other for a very long time in internet time. We’ve had many conversations on and off of this site, and while I disagree strongly with this politics, that’s true of literally every single person on this site and always has been (there were some strong new deal/social democrats, and of course Freddie, once upon a time), so it doesn’t for the most part affect my respect for him, or my ability to recognize that he’s a very smart person who often has interesting things to say. Which is part of why I find this sort of Scheiße so fottutamente disappointing.Report
Let me… clarify? With a bunch of premises that strike me as being not only true but uncontroversial.
Over the past few years (decades, maybe?) there has been a fairly raucous argument involving, among other things, “Free Speech” in our culture and it bubbles up especially on campuses. Maybe it bubbles up the most there.
Campuses, and the people who graduate from them, have an outsized influence on the culture.
In recent years, the most vocal have… what’s the most non-judgmental way to put this… let’s say that they got a little over their skis.
Sometimes in defenses of the indefensible while crying “Free Speech!” (for example, the protests against Gibson’s Bakery) and, other times, screaming about “hate speech” or similar terms to call for people to be punished for speech. “Freedom of Speech Doesn’t Mean Freedom from Consequences” is one of the ways this manifested… but another was the whole distinction made between punching up and punching down. I’m sure you remember those distinctions as well.
From people on the outside, a lot of these distinctions presented pretty identically to “*I* can do whatever I want while *YOU* have to stay in line.”
There were a handful of idealistic types who argued stuff like “we should have a culture that allows a broad space for this sort of thing and we should err on the side of giving a lot of leeway” and that sort of thing got responses of “why are you defending scoundrels?”
And this is where the whole “getting over their skis” thing comes into play.
People who were used to being able to say “Freedom of Speech doesn’t mean Freedom from Consequences” are going through a rough time while talking about the importance of a Culture of Free Speech.
While I agree that it is important that we have a Culture of Free Speech, it also seems to me that we’re well within experiencing the consequences of *I* can do whatever I want while *YOU* have to stay in line” when the person holding the whip changes.
For what it’s worth, I think that it is important that we have a Culture of Free Speech that allows for a lot of leeway when it comes to what people say, even on campus.
I’m pretty sure that the Palestinian Activist made sure that his acts and speech did not provide material support to groups that the federal government has marked as “terrorist”.
It’s 100% possible to criticize Israel without being anti-Semitic. And, heck, even if the guy skirted the edges of anti-Semitism, that’s not illegal either.
And it really sucks that we’ve reached the point where something like this happens and the response is cheers that something is finally being done than a full-throated defense of the importance of a Culture of Free Speech.
It’d be nice if our universities had an environment that fostered more of an Enlightenment Culture, don’t you think?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
You were being a constant stream of wolf allegations because they were the correct allegations to make.Report
The people crying wolf 20 years ago weren’t just liberals and the left. There were tons of libertarians who, if they voted for one of the two parties, almost certainly voted for Republicans. In fact, in the wake of the Patriot Act, increased domestic surveillance, and the invasion of Iraq, a bunch of libertarians spent half a decade trying to convince themselves and their fellow travelers that they should abandon the libertarian-conservative alliance and build an at least tenuous libertarian-liberal alliance. In some ways, I think it was the aftermath of 9/11, and the split it caused among libertarians, between those who remained with the right and those who looked to the political center or alliances, that ultimately resulted in the end of libertarianism as an American political faction, and perhaps even as a political ideology altogether.Report
People were warned by the Democratic Party during the 2024 elections. Too many people did not believe what the Democratic Party said would happen and voted for Trump or decided to do KDP cosplay and say the Democrats were worse. The people in defiance are still raising their fists in blood thirsty defiance.Report
Serious question. Does holding a Green Card mean you can’t be deported for supporting Hamas and Oct 7th?Report
One of our immigration lawyers would need to step in but I believe involuntary loss of status requires being convicted of a felony. Saying Hamas is the greatest thing since sliced bread or that the Israelis had it coming or whatever isn’t a crime.Report
This guy is a leader of the Columbian protests, which has repeatedly resulted in the police arresting them. I’m not a lawyer and I haven’t been following those protests in detail, but I am wondering which lines have been crossed.Report
If they have grounds under the law so be it but from the reporting so far it is not clear that they do. At minimum they need to convict him first, and (again, based on my limited understanding) convict him of something pretty serious.Report
What I suspect the DHS argument is going to be is that this guy made a material misrepresentation on his green card application for not disclosing his support of Hamas on it, which is a terrorist group.Report
Is that enough to deport him?Report
Kevin Drum died on Friday after a long battle with cancerReport
Really long. He publicly announced his diagnosis in 2014. I wasn’t a consistent reader, so after five years or so, when he kept turning up alive, I figured he had beaten it, but I guess that’s not really a thing with multiple myeloma.
It’s a shame. I had my political differences with him, but he was smart, and interesting, and I preferred a world and a blogosphere with him to one without him.Report
He was one of the OG Blogfathers way back in the early oughts when he was “Calpundit”.
I liked reading him and quoted him a lot. The world is worse off without him.Report
One of my new theories and it is mine is that a decent chunk of the left remains politically ineffectual because they want to be tribunes of the oppressed rather than leaders of a majority. You don’t need to compromise on your positions if you are a tribune of the oppressed but can remain strident and adamant on every issue. When seeking to lead a majority, you need to compromise quit a bit to get the majority cobbled together.Report
Nothing says authoritarian like making freedom itself a felony.
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/texas-bill-identify-transgender-state-felony-rcna195642?cid=sm_npd_nn_fb_ma&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&_branch_referrer=H4sIAAAAAAAAAwXBSw6CMBAA0Nu4UxrjQk2MAaT%2BAgjUqGwIA8NPGJqCqWw8u%2B9V4yiHrWEQZIR6WKRSLtqa3san%2BVLjTxs7hH0BWVvnu7OOnxWD0qviB7Nd4ZhmyLxWyhMg1i5dony5Cj7rJiJL8GtKwIbWLyxyBQZHeom5k3cHpDsfyU1S7JKLfxSM28Hm2pUT90oNt6WpZz%2BFBSpVU5mA6vWAasfTDKHv33%2FlWNdJsAAAAA%3D%3D&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0NlppHbeeiMnJSd24Qu8jSnBTFKanb0slOfBnMTeQGnYT-EdmDenUFtnM_aem_JOGT0FCQ9KmgyFNgwbP2Aw&_branch_match_id=1281224086309622960Report