Well one thing is for sure: it's not a coincidence that after they determined that it was impossible to get him back, they've changed the narrative to "no mistake was made" (and begun throwing around the magic word "terrorist" which justifies all sorts of things).

Yeah, this is not going to end well for all y'all:

https://bsky.app/profile/pbump.com/post/3lmryeyuj6s2v

"Bad" citizen can end up meaning anything Trump doesn't like, such as criticism. Even the most conservative person should be worried about this.

Actually I stand corrected--he was ALSO caught on tape with a much more chilling version of this statement.

I've posted here before that this idea that we just have rights is actually problematic, not the least reason for which is that whether we have such rights or not, their mere existence has never and will never actually defend anyone from any violation of them.

Rights are just the concessions that the less powerful have extracted from the powerful by virtue and utilization of power. This perspective has the double benefit not relying on the imaginary and making it clear that if you don't fight for your rights you will not get to keep them. Rights may be God given, but God isn't going to come down and rescue you from a concentration camp if you get put there by an autocrat who doesn't like your "free speech."

All that matters is whether we will personally tolerate abuses against human beings and what we are willing to do to prevent them. If I had my way, talk of rights qua rights would be swept into the dustbin of history with other imaginary stuff like religion in favor of concrete, ideally evidence based, free human discussion about what human beings want from the universe and what we are willing to endure to get it.

Precisely. If only the people who worship the Declaration of Independence and recite it like parrots singing a psalm, actually understood what the document was saying.

>Within such a framework, it should be impossible to disenfranchise people by denying them due process.

Yet, US was systematically disenfranchising people for centuries

Respect for rule of law and democratic norms. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Distinction without a difference, but it’s 3/5.

That judge was against the interment of Japanese Americans. He took a stand against anyone deprived of due process throughout his life.

The US came close to losing its democracy status with FDR, which is why after he died, the 22nd Amendment was quickly created - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-second_Amendment_to_the...

As soon as you carve out exceptions for who should and shouldn't have their basic rights, you've lost the plot. Someone with a little bit of authority only needs to claim that you are a part of that group that shouldn't have their rights, and then you get to experience a flight to El Salvador wondering where it all went wrong.

Question for you - if you don't exercise due process, how do you know if any individual is one of those 10 million you speak of, or someone who is here legally, or for that matter, a citizen?

    How do you exercise due process on the 10 million people imported into the country over the last 4-5 years?

    The court system simply isn't built for it, nor the detainment facilities to house them while the courts take months to process each person. The housing market is already under too much stress and low cost housing and free housing has gone to them instead of citizens who were already here and in need.

The same way you exercise it for 320 million other people. The same way it has been exercised for every person who immigrated to American soil. Including your ancestors.

Let's be clear about what you're actually saying and you're advocating for, you are advocating for the suspension of due process and fundamental rights to an entire class of human beings you see as the other.

If history has taught us anything, the definition of who and what is other changes over time. One day, you too shall be the other. And that day you will beg for the due process and fundamental rights you wish to deprive these people.

When the Benjamin Franklin said, "... if you can keep it." This type of thought process is precisely what he meant.

Just to be clear, you are suggesting that it is fine to kidnap and send American citizens, ANY AMERICAN CITIZEN, to foreign prisons. They could come take you or any family member for any reason, and all they have to say is they thought you are a dangerous gang member. They don't even have to say anything! Once you are on that plane, it is a black hole, and they are grinning about the fact that you can't do a thing about it. That is why we have due process. This isn't about immigrants or cheap labor or anything. This is about disappearing political enemies for any reason. Flick off a Tesla driver? Gulag. Post on facebook that maybe we should be nice to gay people? Gulag. Trying to enter the USA on vacation with too much melanin? Guess what, gulag.

If you want to reverse exploitation of cheap labor I suggest you turn to strategies which do not treat human beings like cattle or some kind of infestation to be shipped en mass elsewhere.

An economically viable solution to this problem would be simply force companies to pay all laborers, foreign or domestic, legal or illegal, a living wage, eliminating the benefits of bringing in illegal labor and maintaining a humane society. Furthermore, we should probably only trade with countries which have equal labor protections as our own, so as to ensure that jobs aren't offshored to save money, at least at the expense of human rights.

I'm sorry, I just can't buy that "treat a bunch of people like animals" is the humanist, labor friendly, perspective.

> because Wall Street wanted cheap exploitable labor

totally a ton of illegal immigrants running across the trading room floor yelling put orders and putting the real, American stock brokers out of jobs they deserve!

Wtf you talking about bro? Cmon buddy.

Every law firm is hyperbole but I meant what other universities other than Columbia?

It would have been water under the bridge if him and his cronies all got perpetuity starting jan 7th and we never heard of them ever again. Instead the dems chose a demonstration of weakness, and showed that an attempt on our democracy would be punished by a strong worded reprimand, at best.

Disagree. Polarisation existed long before Trump. America was going to face this sooner or later. The culture war was always coming.

> By this logic it was “over already” at the end of the Civil War.

That may be true. The North won the war, but let the ideology that caused it fester.

The good things (and the promises of more) are what make them compelling for a while. Fascism is appealing because top-down directives from an absolute leader can work… for a bit.

Eventually you run out of the low hanging fruit that can be messed with by executive fiat, and then you have to find enemies to blame.

Reminds me of the venerable Dril:

issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. you do not, under any circumstances, 'gotta hand it to them.'

Apologies. Did by no means try to mean it as a compliment to the Nazis - I just intended it as a comparison to help explain the justification at the time.

I was speaking in probabilities, not making a judgment myself (I wouldn't be qualified to do so anyway). Numerous mental health professionals have made the assertion that he is, and he has a family history of it, so at the very least it can't reasonably be claimed with 100% certainty that he's not in the early-to-mid stages of dementia.

Furthermore, my statement was very clearly presented as a massive stretch in the first place; noting that it might slightly increase the chance that he'll be unable to make an attempt at a third term (even if by 0.01%). Sometimes squinting hard enough that the resulting bokeh resemble a silver lining is all you can do to muster hope.

You should really read those articles that you linked instead of ignorantly pointing at them in outrage, against something you clearly never engaged with other than through conservative media. At least read the Nature one, damn. It's directly addressed to people like you, who might think they have issues with this stuff, for reasons.

No one is out to cancel theorems or whatever other bullshit. Also those concerns over the freedom of science are rich coming from the party that's actually defunding labs, arresting researchers on ideological grounds and burning books.

Would you like to further colonise mathematics?

Algebra could be renamed Chestering, to credit the Englishman who did the real work of translating Al-Khwarizmi's text from Arabic into Latin.

Goodness gracious. Invoking religious self-harm imagery in response to mild criticism feels wildly out of pocket. Do you genuinely think anti-colonial activism demands this or anything even resembling this of post-colonial states?

It feels like a really silly way to deflect from the concept that maybe average UK citizens do benefit in some way from their colonial past.

And don't forget people who like me are in the UK but weren't born there.

Who hates you in particular? What do you mean by that? Also, that's fine to have a conversation about funding, but it's fairly different from arrests, deportations, and shipping individuals to foreign prisons. Rather motte and bailey to earlier suggest that the government was going to go "Henry VII" on universities, and then say that you just want to change funding. These are very different positions.

Which people do you think "hate you in particular"? Why do they hate you - what have you done to them?

Well you claimed they are violating "the fourteenth amendment" which hardly makes sense. How could they be doing that? Is Harvard a Government agency? A state unto itself?

Can you please elaborate on the “radicalization” of academia? What “radical” actions have they been taking, exactly? And are these actions pervasive or situational?

They hate you because you're a useful idiot, not because of your skin color, for the record.

You only used one of the magical thought-stopping phrases.

You're supposed to say that it will help the children too.

Well yes.. an attempt by pseudo-fascists to takeover universities and other public institutions is indeed a matter of national security.

What specifical threat to our nation are they trying to defend against?

The problem with your questions (if the one above is an example) is that you're asking what can be seen as an insulting question that doesn't really add any nuance or analysis itself.

You could have asked the question while highlighting points in the governments letter that you thought were valid policy goals that you wanted more discussion about. You could have asked if they'd read the government letter and pointed out that the government telling the university that it both had to consider who it hired with regard to political and ethnic and to make personnel changes to demonstrate they didn't consider political and ethnic considerations going forward was particularly ridiculous.

You may still get downvoted for emotional(which you shouldn't) or other reasons but it would be less likely to be the case as it showed you made some effort (which can indicate good faith) and more importantly you're comment might inform someone reading the comments more about the topic as well.

It's because you sounded like a sealion. That and whataboutism are just adding refuting noises without substance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

Because you sound like a concern troll/sea lion. Ask your question better.

So not a comparable situation.

In this intra-elite competition, the previous winners might deserve to lose. The current regime and its allies absolutely cannot be allowed to be winners.

> universities should probably be concerned with their credibility among democratically elected political representatives if they are going to be accepting public funds

Agree. I don’t think they should accept federal funds to the extent that they do. Maybe it’s time for elite institutions to get past the 70s camp era and start behaving (and wielding the power of) being elite.

> there would be much more push back against this type of action if Harvard and other universities didn't alienate a large chunk of the population

Not in any meaningful way. And not in a way that would have mattered.

The elite universities got into this hole by trying to court pedestrian approval. Trump is at war with the professional managerial class, not the elites. Harvard’s brand remains unimpeached among the latter. Return to serving that group and ignore the broader population.

Is there any evidence that we've been "blindly" pumping money into academia? Funding agencies are part of the federal budget and don't just get everything they ask for. Then those agencies have all sorts of review procedures for choosing grant awardees.

There isn't just some big slush fund labeled "dumb science ideas" that everybody grabs from.

No need for that. There is more than enough money being funnelled into defense to fund Harvard + everything else you can think of and still have the largest defense spending in the world.

Arguing that Harvard gets too much while ignoring 99% of the budget is not a reasonable stance.

The people who want to hurt Harvard also want to hurt the local schools.

First, it's not blind. These big universities are where a ton of research happens. It makes sense that research dollars will end up there.

Second, I agree that local schools (I guess you mean K-12?) should get more money. DOGE is busy cutting that also.

We can have a discussion on if the money we spend is worth it sure. That's not what's happening now, Trumps not asking if this is the best way to fund research, he's demanding Harvard ban masks and punish students for engaging in political behavior he doesn't like. You're bringing up an entirely separate issue.

Massachusetts has some of the best public schools in the nation.

You seem to be missing the point that federal research grants are not gifts, but instead paying for a service.

If you are looking for someone to take this money and redirect it to local schools I have some bad news for you.

I invite you to write or read a proposal for a multi $M grant before saying that money is being blindly pumped.

I promise you right now that no one in the Trump administration is interested into providing more books to local schools. Quite the opposite

even partially agreeing with anything the trump administration does on this forum makes you a target for downvotes.

let me cred fall. idgaDANG

> More explicitly the letter demands that tenured professors be given more decision making power than non academic activists.

1) Granting that giving more power to tenured professors would be a good thing, in what way is it legal, wise, or good for the executive branch to achieve this in the absence of any law by strong arming individual private institutions that it has decided to target on ad hoc basis?

2) You are reading selectively, it says "fostering clear lines of authority and accountability; empowering tenured professors and senior leadership, and, from among the tenured professoriate and senior leadership, exclusively those most devoted to the scholarly mission of the University and committed to the changes indicated in this letter" [emphasis mine]. So in other words, it is a requirement that the university give power to those ideologically-aligned with the Trump administration. This is a very clear and alarming violation of the first amendment.

In toto, the letter is an attempt to impose ideological reform in a private institution, and is part of a wider attempt by the current administration to browbeat or subvert every institution that might act to curtail (or even speak out against) its actions.

And the salaries for DOGE employees that are higher than the highest pay band.

You also forgot the birthday military parade he wants that's been estimated to cost ~$100M.

that's 10 cents per american (still crazy!), but not $30, and $30 is only for Harvard much less how much federal funds go to other schools

Obviously I'd rather that 10 cents go to something productive, but on the national stage trump golfing feels like just a distraction from much more important topics

Small towns overwhelmingly get more federal dollars than they put in. Big cities subsidize small towns.

>it's hard for me to not think that's crazy and why can't that money go to average americans

Because Americans in small towns overwhelmingly vote for people who lower taxes for rich people and promise not reduce the scope of government. Instead of blaming Harvard, why don't you ask your neighbors why they like to vote for people who refuse to help them?

> it's hard for me to not think that's crazy and why can't that money go to average americans

Are there world-class research facilities in your small town? Why would it be hard for you to see it makes sense for billions to be spent on research at world-class facilities with world-class scientists?

FWIW, chances are whatever local state university nearby also receives quite a bit from federal grants as well. But it probably scales based on the research facilities and staff actually there. Do you think it would be better management of federal resources to instead spend the same amount at facilities that don't do nearly as impactful or nearly as much research?

These are grants for specific research. Researchers put together proposals to study things, the federal government decides that's something worth looking into, and funding gets cut (simplified). Harvard has a lot of people doing pretty fancy research, so it makes sense they'd have a lot of grant proposals requiring fancy and expensive things. Complain to your state legislature for not focusing on making your local university a research university if you feel your area should be getting more of these grants. But let me guess, you probably voted for people who argued for lower taxes. Gee, I wonder what they found to cut...

And FWIW the federal government spends a bunch on a lot of small-town America. FEMA grants for emergency preparedness comes to mind. A higher percentage of populations of small-town America live off federal aid programs. Small-town America also sees more of its school funding from federal sources and grants.

> it's hard for me to not think that's crazy and why can't that money go to average americans

The democrats have been trying to pass universal healthcare and free higher education it feels like forever. UBI has even come up a few times. Nothing that Trump is doing is for anyone but himself and his rich friends.