And Now You May Cringe

Posted by: Avinash on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

[youtube t9ZdNA36ulI]

This treesitting farce and the comical way the UCPD has decided to combat this particular incidents (allowing hippies to intrude onto campus ground again and bang up their bongos to disturb the classrooms) makes me requestion our tactics in the war on terror. You know, waterboarding people with frayed ponytails and tye-dye shirts. I’m thinking the cutoff age for the program should be around 75.

In any case, we’ve gone long past the point of the University not embarrassing itself with this tree nonsense. The wasteful erection of fences and the staging of security personnel has been more than enough. Now we have bongos drumming and screaming activists yelling throughout. Pathetic.

It makes strategic sense to remove them immediately. Hippies are the laziest people on Earth–Lindsey Bluthe has nothing on them. Remove them by force and they’ll be too petrified to return. Leave them up there and they feel validated in their struggle. They’re passive-aggressive; knock them out and they’ll disappear. Additionally you can take the focus off the circus and place it solely on the infrastructure argument. Re-frame the situation by eliminating the sideshow and you’ll make it easier to win.

And finally, I’ll channel my inner Obama–do we want the Berkeley of the past, or the Berkeley of the future? A Cal that promotes or allows loser activism to promulgate on its campus, or a Cal that promotes a tradition of winning and scholarship that shows the brightest to succeed on it? We can make the change to the future, and we need to do it today. YES WE CAN!

Please suggest how you’d deal with the treesitters. Hoses? Horse tranquilizers? Tear gas?

Topics: Berkeley, Hippies

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Calfan98 · 889 weeks ago

Cal is a special place with a special history that has a lot to do with what you call “loser activism”. I am proud of that history and that activism.

You frame it as a choice between that history and “a tradition of winning and scholarship”, which is inaccurate. It’s the #1 public school in the nation and that history is a big part of why. And it’s not just the university, it’s the city. Berkeley is like no other place in the world.

There are many, many other fine institutions of higher learning, including the ‘furd, where winning scholarship can be had. They are only special because of that winning scholarship. Berkeley is special because it has the winning scholarship and it has the proud history of “loser activism” that makes it Berkeley.

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Avinash · 889 weeks ago

Loser activism from its students? Or from the disgruntled crazies and dopes who roam Telegraph?

I'm all for the former, if it's organized and well thought-out; this is activism at its best. I'm not for the latter, which is activism at its worst.

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Calfan98 · 889 weeks ago

No, I don't support dividing them into little groups and then assigning relative value to their activism based on my predetermined notions of their relative value as people. Students have these rights and "disgruntled crazies" have these rights? No. It doesn't work that way in the America I love or the Berkeley I love.

Most of the famous Berkeley anti-war protests in the the past were not led by students.

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Avinash · 889 weeks ago

Could you please enlighten me about the noble aims of these activists? There doesn't seem to be anything for them to gain, and their own issues have minimal or no impact on the outcome. The activism of the 60s dealt with far greater social and political issues that had maximal importance on the national stage. The current activism with the stadium deals with cutting down a few trees and unrelated vagaries concerning corporate imperialism. It's a farce.

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