All, I’m sorry for abusing you with posts concerning the Berkeley Tree Sitters. For those of us at UC, this has been an enduring pain. And it’s been embarrassing. Why? In part, because this is the type of rhetoric common to the debate:
And of course…
I promise, this is the last posting on the tree sitters. Thanks be to Zombietime.
ARGHHH!!! Please don’t Godwin that grove, dudes!
Funny to see the campus that is known as the home of leftist goofballs be plagued by people so extreme that even Berkley can’t embrace them.
This is why I have a hard time with the Left in general, it all-to-quickly dissolves into this sort of crankery.
And please, if something like this happens again – I’d love to hear about it, it was quite interesting. I enjoyed it.
Yeah, it’s a good thing we don’t get much crankery from the right…
I’m gonna go out on a limb (heh) and say this is why they call us moonbats. Not much humility in their cause.
Now I feel old. I haven’t seen such ridiculous, self-absorbed, hand-wringing asshattery since I was a wee undergrad almost a quarter-century ago. The poor kids need a nice long hot bath, a fluffy towel, some footie jammies, a fruit smoothie, and a hug (in that order – remember: first bath, then hug.)
Get them a passport, put them on a plane to Prague, and let them get it out of their system over a semester or two abroad. Their trust funds will hardly show a dent and they’ll be less likely to get cracked in the skull doing something idiotic, presuming they drop their self-righteous prattishness once they hit the Czech Republic. With luck they’ll develop a sense of perspective of how big and diverse the world really is and grasp the scope and magnitude of problems people all over face every day. If anything – hey – it’s a trip to Prague. Life’s short – wring what joy you can out of your limited existence.
Back in the day I’d have suggested water-cannoning the lot of them and hauling them off to the pokey; the footie-jammie/Prague tactic might be more effective. They don’t get the status bump among their peers by being Oppressed by the Man and really, it’s hard to take someone in footie jammies too seriously.
Ah, this brings back memories of my days at the University of Michigan in the early 1980s. At that time, a bunch of students, in order to protest apartheid in South Africa, decided they wanted to build a shantytown right on the Diag (the central courtyard of the main campus), and they did. At least then, apartheid was something worth protesting, but the same sort of idiotic rhetoric showed up on signs painted on the sides of the shacks about nuclear weapons, environmentalism, and the Vast Conspiracy To Do Bad Things That The Protesters Didn’t Like. The only difference was that they didn’t mention animal research (the animal rights movement hadn’t really achieved much prominence then) or Native American bones (mainly because there weren’t, to the best of my knowledge, any Native American tribal burial grounds anywhere on the campus).
This brings back memories of the early 1980s for me as well. On a certain Midwest college campus, there was a front group for Lyndon LaRouche called The Platonic Society. They had a very bizarre collection of views. At one point they were in danger of losing their student group funding due to a membership shortage, so they put up recruiting booths around campus with slogans such as Nuclear Energy – Safer than Sex and Feed Jane Fonda to the Whales.
At least they seem to be properly spelt.
I have the urge to kick a hippie…
Orac- I’m going to guess they’re not talking about a burial ground. They’re probably referring to the controversy regarding archaeologists studying the remains of early Native Americans over objections from tribal leaders.
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