That was priceless...

However, there were symptoms of your Berkley-boy that any outsider would have recognized in YOU when I first met you.

Not symptoms of liberalism, or leftist ideology, or blanket indoctrination from your educational experiences... but you did have a nasty habit all those years ago of basing your initial opinions on someone else's observations (admittedly, most were conservative pundits... but not all).

Now, the biggest difference here (and I am NOT bashing Ryan... far from) is that Ryan has shown a capacity... nay, a passionate drive... to develop and improve his perspective on all things political. Berkley-boy will not begin to do that until he admits that neither he, nor his "sources", are the end-all authorities on political, economic, or social topics. He is basing his ENTIRE political and (probably) historical point-of-view on someone else's observations and commentary, and has no objective, personal hand in gaining insight into the topics he professes to be an expert in because he "wrote a paper".

By the way, if only I could express to anyone reading this how often I have "written papers" (both for myself and others... hehe) on topics that I literally knew NOTHING about and still got 3.8 or greater grades each and every time, I'd go a long way to making this Berkley-boy seem rather tame in his "authority"... but I can't adequately express how my mild ability in the realm of "fiction-writing" has earned me more A+ grades than anything my research ability got me. I mean, really... I once took a class in college called "A Political History of Post-War Poland, from 1945 to 1985" and I guaranty you there was never a drier, more boring class taught in all of human history. I attended the first two or three lectures on the class, then decided I was more likely to learn something by watching ALF or CHEERS, so I stopped going altogether. Come the end of the term, I walked in, took the final exam (which was three hours of essay questions) and passed with an A-. That alone would make me stop listening to Berkley-boy upon hearing him expostulate on his expertise due to writing a paper... sheesh.

Anyway... back to the topic... Berkley-boy will only stand successful in his ability to defend his position if he remains surrounded by like-minded idiots, particularly those that graduated from the same school. His encounter with you should have taught him just how vulnerable his "opinion" is when faced with someone that has the ability to balance political opinion with an historical perspective and an objective eye. He will never be able to do that AND maintain his radical opinions, because his radical opinions do not stand up to the kind of yardstick history holds up.

So, to make a long post longer...

Well done, Ryan! That's one Berkley graduate down... 350,000 more to go before you've hit them all since 1999.