761–770 of 1001 posts
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Seems like it could mean death for Columbia as a desirable college honestly
Probably not, they'll just pump up international student numbers to recoup and basically gut the domestic student experience. There's near infinite demand for American universities overseas even now.
We can debate about specific requests from the Trump administration, but it is pretty clear that Harvard has been horrible. The previous administrations completely failed to fix it. - Harvard has been discriminating against Whites and Asians in admissions for decades. - Harvard deliberately refused to protect Jewish students against intimidation and harassment. Students camped in school property for weeks against Har…
If you are downvoting simply because you disagree politically with what I commented, you are going against the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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>>- a new diversity initiative for diverse points of view I'm sure we both know what this one means though. Forcing the university to hire people who think the earth is flat and that climate change isn't real - for the sake of diversity of course.
But also diversity is banned.
As information, the current administration is doing similar demands to foreign universities, trying to impose the point of view of the world in a president we didn't vote for. Here is an article about the Trump administration demands to our universities. https://www-publico-pt.translate.goog/2025/04/11/ciencia/not...
The other stuff is hard to make sense of, but this part is crystal clear: The authoritarian government is asking the university to restructure itself along more authoritarian lines. ...essentially Trump wants continuity of reporting lines ultimately leading up to him, and going down to the individual faculty member, student, and foreign collaborating partner. That sort of thing could come in handy for all kinds of things in the future, not just the silly demands of the present.
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I'm not sure what "agree with the Palestinians" would mean. Like they are not happy with being genocided? I think that would be most people's feeling in that situation, though that doesn't show any proximity in belief, value or principle.
The world is really a lot more interesting if you try to understand everyone’s actual perspective. It also becomes much more coherent. Nobody is evil, they just have different interests and viewpoints.
In what I’ve seen of “race realist” writings online, they tend to be very anti Israel. So to associate the admin with “race realists” for cracking down on anti Israel protests strikes me as lacking an understanding of either the admin or of the “race realists” perspective.
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I wrote this on another thread recently, reposting here: Things started to make more sense to me once I realized that by nature, human beings hate freedom and love tyranny. Once you accept this, it all falls in place. Deporting citizens to foreign prisons? Sounds great. Incoherent foreign and economic policy? Love it. Freedom of the press? Who needs it! Destruction of democracy? Own the libs! Legalize bribery of fore…
Seems like this could also be explained by short memories. Most westerners, me included, have never lived through true tyranny, we don't know the signs and probably are just too comfortable coasting along, thinking what we have now won't suddenly disappear [1]. We can read history, but it's nothing compared to actually living through it. And I think most American voters don't know their history, and don't bother to i…
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I'm not sure what "agree with the Palestinians" would mean. Like they are not happy with being genocided? I think that would be most people's feeling in that situation, though that doesn't show any proximity in belief, value or principle.
Yeah I guess this is what happens to censored viewpoints. Most people have only heard a caricature of it. The world is really a lot more interesting if you try to understand everyone’s actual perspective. It also becomes much more coherent. Nobody is evil, they just have different interests and viewpoints. In what I’ve seen of “race realist” writings online, they tend to be very anti Israel. So to associate the admin…
Also, seeing people whose goals are cruelty to others or harm to me as neutral is wrong.
The aggregate demands of the administration are confusing and contradictory. They seem to be simultaneously asking for: - an end to diversity initiatives - a new diversity initiative for diverse points of view - a new policy of not admitting international students with certain points of view - ending speech-control policies - auditing the speech of certain departments and programs - ending discipline of students who…
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Trump is our Caesar, we have ceased to be a constitutional republic, and you defend this with blithely pretending that 2 months of pure power-madness have not been occurring in plain view of the entire world?
I suspect that such discourse as we have will not be "permitted" indefinitely.
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They don't care about taxes - they are happy to implement regressive taxes that disproportionately burden the middle class and poor, such as sales taxes, Social Security, etc. They just don't want to pay taxes themselves.
> They don't care about taxes - they are happy to implement regressive taxes that disproportionately burden the middle class and poor, such as sales taxes, Social Security, etc. They just don't want to pay taxes themselves. A very large portion of the country vote Republican, and I would be surprised if they are by and large the most well-off part of the American public.