Commenter Archive

Comments by Brandon Berg in reply to Brandon Berg*

On “Open Mic for the week of 4/29/2024

There are only very limited circumstances under which police can enter private property without permission of the owner or a warrant.

I don't know much about the requirements for getting a warrant, but I assume that it's hard to get one when the victim of the crime you're investigating is the owner of the property and doesn't want to let you in. If they were investigating a murder or burglary of a dorm or something, the police could probably get a warrant.

On “Open Mic for the week of 4/22/2024

If she's that concerned, just taking it out without replacing it is an option. Nobody ever died from free-bleeding.

On “Music Monday: A Great, If Flawed, Musical

There is an unsubtle anti-capitalist theme to the show

As the saying goes, reality has a well-known neoliberal bias, and fiction has a well-known socialist bias.

On “Dog Gone

I met a girl from the ethnically Korean part of China (either the Jilin or Liaoning provinces) who said she liked dog meat. When we passed by a pet store I asked her which one she thought looked the most delicious, and she, scandalized at the thought, explained to me that some dog breeds were pets, and others were meat, and she would never want to eat a pet breed.

I guess it's not that different from the American idea that, e.g., cows are for food and horses are pets.

On “Open Mic for the week of 4/22/2024

Did you not hear about the girl at Vanderbilt who risked her life by going hours without changing her tampon?

On “The Shifting Politics of Abortion

I meant that the legislature and government should have passed a new law immediately after the ruling. Judges are supposed to rule on what the law is, not what they think it should be. Making law is the legislators' job.

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Federalist Society judges who will do whacky things like decide an 1864 law is governing precedent

Is that wacky? Maybe laws should expire and need renewal every twenty years, but as of now they don't. As policy, I don't like the law any more than you do, but if it is, in fact, a legally enacted part of the state code that has not been overridden by any more recent legislative action, then that seems like the correct ruling. I'm not familiar with Arizona law on abortion; is there a tenable argument that this is not, in fact, the most applicable law on the issue in Arizona?

If the legislature or governor are refusing to amend the law, that's on them, not the court.

On “More Campus Palestine Protests, More Arrests, More Viral Video

Not on private property without permission of the property owners. And even on public property, there are time, place, and manner restrictions. You can't nullify crime by attaching a speech act to it, or by calling it one.

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Depends on the class:

Police Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry told Fox 5 New York that about 10 to 15 faculty members had “their hands tied together in a chain” and that they were “most aggressive” toward police officers. “They would not move, they would not let go,” he said, adding that staff were “physical” toward police.

On “Open Mic for the week of 4/15/2024

Most of the crackdowns are against things that aren't speech. As they should be. We need to get away from this dumb idea that things like vandalism and denying people the use of their own property or public property are okay when they're done for the purpose of advancing some kind of political agenda.

I don't want to hear another word about content restrictions until time, place, and manner restrictions are properly enforced.

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The recent Google protest, in which a bunch of people sat on the floor of an executive's office, chanted stupid slogans, and refused to leave, was a tantrum. The BLM and Jan. 6th riots were tantrums.

Berliner politely stated his objections to the path NPR has been on for the past several years, and then quit when he saw that no corrective actions would be forthcoming. There's really not a less tantrum-like approach he could have taken to dealing with irreconcilable differences between his view of how journalism should be done and what the NPR is doing.

Your true objection is to the substance of his criticism, not the style. Perhaps by characterizing his actions as a "tantrum" you hope to avoid having to address the substance of his criticisms. You did something similar above when you claimed that he was motivated by people failing to respect his seniority. Saul tries to pull crap like this all the time, too.

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They probably domesticated staple food grains because the cannabis gave them the munchies.

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"Pitched a tantrum," of course, being the third-ideology conjugation of "spoke truth to power."

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I suspect that he was planning to quit or get fired all along. He can't have been so naive that he expected NPR to mend their wicked ways just because he called them out in The Free Press.

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"Shocklingly?"

Something I think is really telling is that for a decade or more, DEI departments have been running a grift where they claim to fight imaginary bigotry at universities. Then when colleges were faced with an undeniable problem with actual bigotry against Jews, they had to create separate anti-antisemitism task forces, because their DEI departments were at best unfit to do the job they were ostensibly created to do, and at worst actively contributing to the problem.

On “Fear and Loathing in Aisle Eight

I'm pretty full right now. I don't foresee that happening.

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I'm just wondering why Mike Pence wasn't there.

On “Open Mic for the week of 4/15/2024

It's weird how bad-faith caricatures of leftists keep magically coming to life like this, complete with documented employment histories at universities, schools, mainstream media outlets, and city governments.

What could be causing this to happen, in violation of all known laws of science?

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The 2002 essay Oppressed People Suck is relevant here as a counterexample. I think Hogan was still under the influence of underdog bias, and as a result got the direction of some of the causal arrows wrong, but at least he wasn't pants-on-head stupid about it.

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Leftism is basically a pathological pro-underdog bias. In people with who tend towards a more feels-based epistemology, this can lead to things like the idea that since Palestinians are worse off than Israelis, they must be better than Israelis in all ways.

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Is that actually true? Does NPR have any restrictions at all on personnel management imposed due to its receipt of government funding?

I would be more inclined to suspect that this is related either to concerns over optics, or to union protections.

On “Open Mic for the week of 4/8/2024

I've definitely seen Latinx at work, and I don't even work in education. I just checked my e-mail and more recently it's been Latine, so we're on the cutting edge, by private industry standards!

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The gender-neutral version of Latino is Latino.

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That's a weird takeaway from that article, but I suppose that when seething resentment of (((people who make more money than you))) is the foundation of your political ideology, you'll get there however you can.

That aside, I think the reasonable take on this is that she was making the best pitch she could think of to get blue-state Republicans to vote for her boss. This isn't a leak of some top-secret conspiracy that she chose to discuss in a huge auditorium. Presumably the actual plan, in the extremely unlikely event of RFK getting the entire blue-state Republican base and enough Democrats and independents to vote for him and thereby winning some blue states and throwing the election to the House, is to turn on Trump and try to cobble together a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans to choose him over Trump.

It's just crazy enough not to work.

Also, why link to the Infowars of the left when the CNN article it was cribbing from was better?

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/08/politics/rfk-jr-new-york-biden-trump/index.html

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