252 Comments

Oh, poor Columbia University law students. Too shaken up to take exams. If they can't handle "violence" on their own campus, I fear what they will encounter when they emerge from their cocoons into the real world. I would not hire any one of them. Pitiful.

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founding

I’ve been using this handle for years as a play off of Jim Hightower’s vivid and memorable aphorism. This armadillo is standing his ground, right here in the middle of the road, and God help the cars that try to squash me!

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Pretty funny that Desancto bows the knee to fake tan, fake hair color, fake biology, yet wants to ban what he calls fake meat. Wait till Meathead meets lab grown chocolate.

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Thanks for including so much of the Biden speech - it was spot on!

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I hope all the future lawyers who are "irrevocably shaken" and "unable to focus" by 'violence' plan on going into corporate law. I'd hate to see them deal with the real world as prosecutors or defense attorneys. 🙄

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About military recruitment: 1) For decades, the recruitment advertising has emphasized travel and portable job skills. Sure, they understood deployment was a possibility, but people were not signing up for a 20-year war and multiple deployments to battlefield theaters, especially reservists and the National Guard who got put on active duty. The AVF is pretty forgettable for most Americans. If the wars directly touched a greater swath of American society, there would have been protests a la 1968. Politicians putting people into harm's way based on the WMD lie is hideous.

2) A person's experience in the military is directly influenced by the commander. Get a bad commander and the whole unit devolves. If you doubt it, just look at what happened to ethics, norms and morale of the White House under Trump.

3) A major source of family stress not mentioned in the article is spousal unfailthfulness.

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There were no reported injuries on the Columbia campus as a result of the police intervention.

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All this focus on The Students has done one thing for sure, it's taken the focus of the media off of what's happening in Gaza.

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It's painfully distressing to slowly but surely find myself wanting the kids to get off my lawn.

Listen. You're at Columbia law. You're on your way to big important, stressful, highly remunerative careers. You kinda have to be able to work even when your "shaken".

I am an aging welder. My job is stressful, painful, dangerous, far less important and almost unimaginably less remunerative.

I'm shaken all the damn time and yet I must go to work because people rely on me and I have a sense of duty and I take honor from doing my job well under less than ideal circumstances.

Aristotle has a "kids today are lazy and effeminate and will ruin Greek culture" section in his most important book so I'm loathe to say it but.... damn dude. Kids today amirite?

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I really,really hope you’re right about Cricket. Maybe we could go-fund-me a trip to North Korea for poor Cricket’s former owner.

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There was a lot of good news today, but woefully, it was overshadowed by the TFG trials. All day long, you couldn't get away from it. But earth two - Jim Hightower is still alive. The jobs numbers were good, if down a bit. Unemployment is still under four percent. And on the not so good side, not all college students are protesting and those who aren't are the ones who will suffer canceled graduation ceremonies and having to take finals on-line. As for those religious organizations and churches, tax them, already!

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I wonder how many times that Columbia Law Review letter has already been circulated around influential law firms with a list of the names of the "Administrative Board of Student Editors" attached.

Those are going to be some interesting interviews.

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founding

It probably won't make much difference in the long run. The top tier law firms are addicted to Ivy Law School grads, especially the Law Review crowd. Also, they sprinkled enough "everybody is concerned about something" in their letter (i.e., "the growing distress that many of us have felt for months as the humanitarian crisis abroad continues to unfold, and as the blatant antisemitism, islamophobia, and racism on campus have escalated") to please everyone and no one, and as best as i cant tell the letter did not identify specific law review editors or staff.

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May 4·edited May 4

Could be, but there are plenty of other Ivy Law Review editors who aren't publicly fainting from Performative PTSD, and while big law firms DO love Ivy pedigrees and pay new associates a lot of money, they also insist on getting their money's worth in work. The members of the specific group that took responsibility for that letter are probably easy to identify by name.

*ETA* https://columbialawreview.org/announcements-2023-2024/

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It's not often that a cheap shot serves as an alarm bell. The Columbia Law Review's student administrative board basically called all NYPD a white supremacist neo-fascist hate group. It seemed like they did not learn basic reasoning skills in law school. The so-called cream of the crop. In honor of New York's Finest, perhaps this board should be called New York's dumbest.

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Woodrow Wilson once famously said, "There's such a thing as being too proud to fight." I wonder what he would have thought, as either of wartime leader or a former university president, if he learned that apparently "There's such a thing as being too fragile to flunk." 😂

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Re: Taking joy at the idea of DeSantis donors burning $100 million for nine delegates.

For a long time, I've shook my head at the idea of anyone donating really large sums of money to political campaigns, although I know many wealthy people see it as an investment. But something about seeing the idea of burning all this cash as schadenfreude struck me today. You see - that's OUR money. All of this money being spent has to come from somewhere. And these wealthy people - who have gone to great lengths to make sure we don't know who they are - run businesses the general public purchases stuff from.

A quick search for DeSantis donors revealed one - an executive with FedEx who hosted a fundraiser for him. Where does this guy get his money? A little from each of us who use FedEx to ship packages or make copies or use a computer in a pinch. And there are hundreds - thousands ? - of these business owners or executives who build political activism funding benefiting themselves into the cost of doing business and then make sure their customers don't know about it.

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To the extent that they received the money in voluntary payment for goods or services rendered, that makes it their money, not "ours": I don't feel personally cheated.

I am appalled at the amoral waste, though. How many lives could $50 million for bombed-out civilians in Ukraine and $50 million for bombed-out kids in Gaza save right now? Those nine DeSantis delegates are going to be trailing blood at the convention, and it won't be from lab-grown meat.

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founding

The donors who gave that 100 million to DeSantis don't care about the bombed-out civilians in Ukraine and the bombed-out kids in Gaza.

They just want to make sure their tax cuts don't get rescinded.

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I agree in the sense that what a person does with money earned is their business. Where I have a problem is that much of this money is dark, so the average consumer has no idea that in purchasing the goods or services, they're helping to fund this creeping authoritarianism. For example, many engaged people are aware that Wisconsin billionaires Dick & Elizabeth Uihlein are Trumpist GOP mega-donors. How many are aware that if they purchase shipping supplies from a U-Line catalog, they're helping to fund the end of democracy.

I admit, I'm far enough center-left to have donated to Bernie in 2016 and agree with the statement that every billionaire is an example of a policy failure, although I appreciate those who have taken The Giving Pledge. I live next to the Tijuana River and think about how much more good Elon Musk could have done with his $44 billion helping Tijuana build a functional sewage system instead of throwing it away on a social media network.

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Awfully glad to hear that reports of Jim Hightower's demise were greatly exaggerated!

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So, I imagine, is Jim Hightower.

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When I read the quoted section of Biden's remarks I noticed something that was very important to say was missing, so I went to the transcript and found that he had covered it in his remarks:

"Dissent is essential to democracy. But dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education."

I wanted and expected him to speak to the students who are not participating in the protest, because their lives, plans, education, are getting disrupted for something they are not a part of. I'm glad he addressed this and would wish that it would get more notice. What is happening now to non-particpating students could lead to deep, long standing resentment. I know this from friends who to this day are still angry at the disruption they endured at San Francisco State in the 60s. Violent protest is not just bad now but for the long term.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/05/02/remarks-by-president-biden-on-recent-events-on-college-campuses/

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