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Although this thread does not function under the same strict guidelines as the USPMT, it is still a general practice on TL to provide a source with an explanation on why it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion. Failure to do so will result in a mod action. |
On April 22 2017 08:15 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On April 22 2017 07:43 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 07:37 Simberto wrote:On April 22 2017 07:31 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 07:24 Simberto wrote:On April 22 2017 00:57 Danglars wrote:On April 22 2017 00:25 Ppjack wrote:On April 22 2017 00:23 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 00:15 Mohdoo wrote:On April 22 2017 00:09 bardtown wrote:
[quote]
When did I equate leftist ideas to communism? Communism is an extreme left position, though. What I am explaining to you is that the worst ideas in the world are still actively discussed on university campuses. There is no reason to shut down right wing conversations that people on the right want to have. Any university that does that is selling out its values. If you're talking about ANTIFA, you won't see any disagreement from me. I doubt any left-leaning posters here support ANTIFA at all. ANTIFA is seriously bad and causes a lot of violence wherever they go. I am not saying it is right to cancel ring-wing speakers. No one is saying it is appropriate to shut down right-wing speakers. I will say that whenever ANTIFA is involved, it is worthwhile to make sure they are not involved. I honestly don't know what the ring thing for Berkeley to do is. When large groups are going to attempt to inspire violence to their fullest ability, you've kinda got your hands tied. I am not going to pretend I understand the legality associated with trying to get campus police to get rid of ANTIFA. I'm just assuming you're talking about ANTIFA-muddied protests. Is that what you mean, or is there something else? I'm not talking about Berkeley; at least, not specifically. This is the European thread after all. Antifa are the extreme end of a general trend, though. All sorts of speakers have been shut down at universities across the UK (and the US, Canada, Australia, etc) because left wing students don't like their views. Look up the Warren Farrell protest and then watch him speak and see if you can find any justification for their actions. Protest has become a means for shutting down legitimate and reasonable conversation, and it is creating a backlash. People didn't hold 'free speech rallies' before because they didn't feel that their free speech was under threat until recently. Couldn't agree more. And events in recent years just proved that this is a trend. Now what I'm trying to get a handle on is people like Mohdoo that float to good-faith argument regularly. "Universities *are* open" arguments evolve to "ideas ... have already been gone over" and "Archaic ideas perpetuated by the right had their place at one point. Then we moved forward." If he truly believes universities are open, the rest of that paragraph would be non-sequitur. Who cares which person declares we've moved in another direction if they're open for them to be brought up again? If it's relevant, that's because he supports and is happy that universities are closed to certain ideas that we've left behind as we "moved forward." It's entirely dishonest and highly delusional. Next comes the bob and weave more typical from other kinds of posters. He says certain right-wing beliefs have been abandoned, yet can't see the relevance of communism still being debated. He can only see that as a smear of leftists. Is this a true act of misunderstanding or pretense? He says that nobody defends wanting to shut down right-wing speakers, but current events show the trend of one speaker after another being shut down, not the reverse trend of a movement lacking defenders petering out. Communism is still being debated in universities? I assume you mean outside of history lessons and as a valid political ideology? I would like some evidence to that happening, because i don't actually think that is happening. People see the communism comment as a smear of leftists in general because they don't believe you actually mean that literal communism is being debated as a good idea in modern universities. You always feel like everyone is censoring and prosecuting you unfairly. You also constantly complain about being lumped together with people you don't feel belong to your group. Meanwhile everyone who is not as rightwing as you are a homogenous group of "the leftists", and when any one of those people does or says something, that is obviously something that all the other "leftists" also believe, because all leftists are only one person. http://communists.soc.srcf.net/In my city. Most universities have a communist group, or at least a socialist society, and they are often indistinguishable. By the way, read the first sentence on their website and think about it for a second. It really cracked me up :D. How many people are actually in that society, though? When i click on the "Meetings" page of that website, the first result is "Meetings: Michaelmas 2014". I don't exactly know what Michaelmas is, but if the last meeting they bothered to put on that page was in 2014, that group is probably not exactly a thriving community. The facebook link to the Cambridge Communist party seems to be broken, too. Who knows. The point is simply that they don't get shut down or blocked from bringing their speakers, etc. By the way, the intersection between radical feminists and communism is huge, so if you actually want to find large groups of communists that is where you need to look. They are also the same people who are blocking events and speakers (and I know you have them in Germany too). That's just not true. FPÖ shut down a school event with a (green-affiliated) speaker, because he called student connections close to the FPÖ out for extremist views. We have identitaries' actionism all the time, often disrupting events etc. We have Nazi groups attacking and burning refugee homes or blackmailing people, even identitairies threatening people on reddit from personal experience. How the fuck are those not right-wingers trying and sometimes succeeding to shut down others views and free speech? You have to be blind to believe this is not happening both ways.
I don't know enough to comment about Austria, but in the UK that simply does not happen. The right wing has almost no presence on university campuses here.
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In German speaking countries "Burschenschaften" (basically fraternities) are quite well organised and very right-wing-ish. They basically go from traditionalist to far-right and they can be quite populous depending on the city. It's not so surprising that this isn't big in the Anglo-sphere because you don't really have this 'völkisch' part on the political spectrum.
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On April 22 2017 08:33 Nyxisto wrote:
In German speaking countries "Burschenschaften" (basically fraternities) are quite well organised and very right-wing-ish. They basically go from traditionalist to far-right and they can be quite populous depending on the city. It's not so surprising that this isn't big in the Anglo-sphere because you don't really have this 'völkisch' part on the political spectrum.
What do you consider as "quite populous dependng on the city"? I didnt find any hard number, but an article I found (in german) estimates that about 2-3% of all students are members of what one might consider "Burschenschaften". When I was studying, even this number appeared far too high, but then again I studied mathematics, and I guess most of these people tend to study stuff like law, economics, etc, so I would rarely ever meet them. While there tend to be more of them At the moment, I llive in a city with a relatively young university, 25000 students and I could only find 2 of them here, and frankly, they seem to be pretty dead according to the internet.
In any case, I feel that in germany, politics might be not as much of a topic at universities as it is elsewhere.
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Incidentally the only guy I know who's in a Burschenschaft is a (really smart) mathematician. I'd put him in the traditionalist bag if I had to.
But yeah, I don't think politics is that big of a thing at german universities. Hell people get pissed when you have to listen to someone else who's only talking about something barely related to your field of study and start asking why they have to endure whatever kind of "advertisement-session" it was you were made to listen to.
But then again, I'm the kind of guy who really couldn't care less about those kind of events so chances are that's just bias for me and the people around me while people who really do like to engange in those kind of things exist.
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On April 22 2017 08:33 Nyxisto wrote:
In German speaking countries "Burschenschaften" (basically fraternities) are quite well organised and very right-wing-ish. They basically go from traditionalist to far-right and they can be quite populous depending on the city. It's not so surprising that this isn't big in the Anglo-sphere because you don't really have this 'völkisch' part on the political spectrum.
I had a friend very active in a fraternity in a german university, he seemed to say that there were all kind of fraternities, going from far right to left leaning. He is a rather left wing guy and his fraternity had a clear humanist and liberal ideal. It didn't seem to me that as a whole the fraternity structure was traditionalist or especially right wing.
All I know about fraternities is through him, so it's pretty limited really. But the guys I met when i went there appeared to be super smart, very reflected and generally very kind.
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On April 22 2017 08:28 bardtown wrote:Show nested quote +On April 22 2017 08:15 Big J wrote:On April 22 2017 07:43 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 07:37 Simberto wrote:On April 22 2017 07:31 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 07:24 Simberto wrote:On April 22 2017 00:57 Danglars wrote:On April 22 2017 00:25 Ppjack wrote:On April 22 2017 00:23 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 00:15 Mohdoo wrote:
[quote]
If you're talking about ANTIFA, you won't see any disagreement from me. I doubt any left-leaning posters here support ANTIFA at all. ANTIFA is seriously bad and causes a lot of violence wherever they go. I am not saying it is right to cancel ring-wing speakers. No one is saying it is appropriate to shut down right-wing speakers. I will say that whenever ANTIFA is involved, it is worthwhile to make sure they are not involved.
I honestly don't know what the ring thing for Berkeley to do is. When large groups are going to attempt to inspire violence to their fullest ability, you've kinda got your hands tied. I am not going to pretend I understand the legality associated with trying to get campus police to get rid of ANTIFA. I'm just assuming you're talking about ANTIFA-muddied protests. Is that what you mean, or is there something else? I'm not talking about Berkeley; at least, not specifically. This is the European thread after all. Antifa are the extreme end of a general trend, though. All sorts of speakers have been shut down at universities across the UK (and the US, Canada, Australia, etc) because left wing students don't like their views. Look up the Warren Farrell protest and then watch him speak and see if you can find any justification for their actions. Protest has become a means for shutting down legitimate and reasonable conversation, and it is creating a backlash. People didn't hold 'free speech rallies' before because they didn't feel that their free speech was under threat until recently. Couldn't agree more. And events in recent years just proved that this is a trend. Now what I'm trying to get a handle on is people like Mohdoo that float to good-faith argument regularly. "Universities *are* open" arguments evolve to "ideas ... have already been gone over" and "Archaic ideas perpetuated by the right had their place at one point. Then we moved forward." If he truly believes universities are open, the rest of that paragraph would be non-sequitur. Who cares which person declares we've moved in another direction if they're open for them to be brought up again? If it's relevant, that's because he supports and is happy that universities are closed to certain ideas that we've left behind as we "moved forward." It's entirely dishonest and highly delusional. Next comes the bob and weave more typical from other kinds of posters. He says certain right-wing beliefs have been abandoned, yet can't see the relevance of communism still being debated. He can only see that as a smear of leftists. Is this a true act of misunderstanding or pretense? He says that nobody defends wanting to shut down right-wing speakers, but current events show the trend of one speaker after another being shut down, not the reverse trend of a movement lacking defenders petering out. Communism is still being debated in universities? I assume you mean outside of history lessons and as a valid political ideology? I would like some evidence to that happening, because i don't actually think that is happening. People see the communism comment as a smear of leftists in general because they don't believe you actually mean that literal communism is being debated as a good idea in modern universities. You always feel like everyone is censoring and prosecuting you unfairly. You also constantly complain about being lumped together with people you don't feel belong to your group. Meanwhile everyone who is not as rightwing as you are a homogenous group of "the leftists", and when any one of those people does or says something, that is obviously something that all the other "leftists" also believe, because all leftists are only one person. http://communists.soc.srcf.net/In my city. Most universities have a communist group, or at least a socialist society, and they are often indistinguishable. By the way, read the first sentence on their website and think about it for a second. It really cracked me up :D. How many people are actually in that society, though? When i click on the "Meetings" page of that website, the first result is "Meetings: Michaelmas 2014". I don't exactly know what Michaelmas is, but if the last meeting they bothered to put on that page was in 2014, that group is probably not exactly a thriving community. The facebook link to the Cambridge Communist party seems to be broken, too. Who knows. The point is simply that they don't get shut down or blocked from bringing their speakers, etc. By the way, the intersection between radical feminists and communism is huge, so if you actually want to find large groups of communists that is where you need to look. They are also the same people who are blocking events and speakers (and I know you have them in Germany too). That's just not true. FPÖ shut down a school event with a (green-affiliated) speaker, because he called student connections close to the FPÖ out for extremist views. We have identitaries' actionism all the time, often disrupting events etc. We have Nazi groups attacking and burning refugee homes or blackmailing people, even identitairies threatening people on reddit from personal experience. How the fuck are those not right-wingers trying and sometimes succeeding to shut down others views and free speech? You have to be blind to believe this is not happening both ways. I don't know enough to comment about Austria, but in the UK that simply does not happen. The right wing has almost no presence on university campuses here.
More in America so than in the UK, it always amazes me that the hard and far right winger complain so often that they are absent from universities, but never reflect about why that would be. You hear so often republican pest against those liberal university professors, but maybe if their ideas were a bit more appealing to vastly knowledgable, very curious and very smart people, they wouldn't be completely absent from the intellectual centres of the country.
I don't know. It's obvious that virtually no one in the university system in the US would support the GOP, these days they essentially represent closed mindness, lack of curiosity, intellectual dishonesty and alternative facts. It's pretty damn hard to become a university professor if those are your values really. Same goes with UKIP. You run a demagogic, anti intellectual platform, why complain that university people don't like you?
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On April 22 2017 17:31 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On April 22 2017 08:28 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 08:15 Big J wrote:On April 22 2017 07:43 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 07:37 Simberto wrote:On April 22 2017 07:31 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 07:24 Simberto wrote:On April 22 2017 00:57 Danglars wrote:On April 22 2017 00:25 Ppjack wrote:On April 22 2017 00:23 bardtown wrote:
[quote]
I'm not talking about Berkeley; at least, not specifically. This is the European thread after all. Antifa are the extreme end of a general trend, though. All sorts of speakers have been shut down at universities across the UK (and the US, Canada, Australia, etc) because left wing students don't like their views. Look up the Warren Farrell protest and then watch him speak and see if you can find any justification for their actions. Protest has become a means for shutting down legitimate and reasonable conversation, and it is creating a backlash. People didn't hold 'free speech rallies' before because they didn't feel that their free speech was under threat until recently. Couldn't agree more. And events in recent years just proved that this is a trend. Now what I'm trying to get a handle on is people like Mohdoo that float to good-faith argument regularly. "Universities *are* open" arguments evolve to "ideas ... have already been gone over" and "Archaic ideas perpetuated by the right had their place at one point. Then we moved forward." If he truly believes universities are open, the rest of that paragraph would be non-sequitur. Who cares which person declares we've moved in another direction if they're open for them to be brought up again? If it's relevant, that's because he supports and is happy that universities are closed to certain ideas that we've left behind as we "moved forward." It's entirely dishonest and highly delusional. Next comes the bob and weave more typical from other kinds of posters. He says certain right-wing beliefs have been abandoned, yet can't see the relevance of communism still being debated. He can only see that as a smear of leftists. Is this a true act of misunderstanding or pretense? He says that nobody defends wanting to shut down right-wing speakers, but current events show the trend of one speaker after another being shut down, not the reverse trend of a movement lacking defenders petering out. Communism is still being debated in universities? I assume you mean outside of history lessons and as a valid political ideology? I would like some evidence to that happening, because i don't actually think that is happening. People see the communism comment as a smear of leftists in general because they don't believe you actually mean that literal communism is being debated as a good idea in modern universities. You always feel like everyone is censoring and prosecuting you unfairly. You also constantly complain about being lumped together with people you don't feel belong to your group. Meanwhile everyone who is not as rightwing as you are a homogenous group of "the leftists", and when any one of those people does or says something, that is obviously something that all the other "leftists" also believe, because all leftists are only one person. http://communists.soc.srcf.net/In my city. Most universities have a communist group, or at least a socialist society, and they are often indistinguishable. By the way, read the first sentence on their website and think about it for a second. It really cracked me up :D. How many people are actually in that society, though? When i click on the "Meetings" page of that website, the first result is "Meetings: Michaelmas 2014". I don't exactly know what Michaelmas is, but if the last meeting they bothered to put on that page was in 2014, that group is probably not exactly a thriving community. The facebook link to the Cambridge Communist party seems to be broken, too. Who knows. The point is simply that they don't get shut down or blocked from bringing their speakers, etc. By the way, the intersection between radical feminists and communism is huge, so if you actually want to find large groups of communists that is where you need to look. They are also the same people who are blocking events and speakers (and I know you have them in Germany too). That's just not true. FPÖ shut down a school event with a (green-affiliated) speaker, because he called student connections close to the FPÖ out for extremist views. We have identitaries' actionism all the time, often disrupting events etc. We have Nazi groups attacking and burning refugee homes or blackmailing people, even identitairies threatening people on reddit from personal experience. How the fuck are those not right-wingers trying and sometimes succeeding to shut down others views and free speech? You have to be blind to believe this is not happening both ways. I don't know enough to comment about Austria, but in the UK that simply does not happen. The right wing has almost no presence on university campuses here. More in America so than in the UK, it always amazes me that the hard and far right winger complain so often that they are absent from universities, but never reflect about why that would be. You hear so often republican pest against those liberal university professors, but maybe if their ideas were a bit more appealing to vastly knowledgable, very curious and very smart people, they wouldn't be completely absent from the intellectual centres of the country. I don't know. It's obvious that virtually no one in the university system in the US would support the GOP, these days they essentially represent closed mindness, lack of curiosity, intellectual dishonesty and alternative facts. It's pretty damn hard to become a university professor if those are your values really. Same goes with UKIP. You run a demagogic, anti intellectual platform, why complain that university people don't like you?
Biff if that's how you categorize everyone in the right then it must be impossible for you to have any meaningful debate with anyone.
You also assume universities are purely meritocratic institutions which is really not the case - it never is when you have humans recruiting other humans, with the incentive to hire humans similar to you so that you can Co-author and cite a lot of papers together. Meanwhile the overwhelming majorities of liberals in universities happen in fields that should be unrelated to politics or where the merit of political ideas should not be relevant as are most fields in the humanities departments.
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On April 22 2017 17:43 warding wrote:Show nested quote +On April 22 2017 17:31 Biff The Understudy wrote:On April 22 2017 08:28 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 08:15 Big J wrote:On April 22 2017 07:43 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 07:37 Simberto wrote:On April 22 2017 07:31 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 07:24 Simberto wrote:On April 22 2017 00:57 Danglars wrote:On April 22 2017 00:25 Ppjack wrote:
[quote]
Couldn't agree more. And events in recent years just proved that this is a trend. Now what I'm trying to get a handle on is people like Mohdoo that float to good-faith argument regularly. "Universities *are* open" arguments evolve to "ideas ... have already been gone over" and "Archaic ideas perpetuated by the right had their place at one point. Then we moved forward." If he truly believes universities are open, the rest of that paragraph would be non-sequitur. Who cares which person declares we've moved in another direction if they're open for them to be brought up again? If it's relevant, that's because he supports and is happy that universities are closed to certain ideas that we've left behind as we "moved forward." It's entirely dishonest and highly delusional. Next comes the bob and weave more typical from other kinds of posters. He says certain right-wing beliefs have been abandoned, yet can't see the relevance of communism still being debated. He can only see that as a smear of leftists. Is this a true act of misunderstanding or pretense? He says that nobody defends wanting to shut down right-wing speakers, but current events show the trend of one speaker after another being shut down, not the reverse trend of a movement lacking defenders petering out. Communism is still being debated in universities? I assume you mean outside of history lessons and as a valid political ideology? I would like some evidence to that happening, because i don't actually think that is happening. People see the communism comment as a smear of leftists in general because they don't believe you actually mean that literal communism is being debated as a good idea in modern universities. You always feel like everyone is censoring and prosecuting you unfairly. You also constantly complain about being lumped together with people you don't feel belong to your group. Meanwhile everyone who is not as rightwing as you are a homogenous group of "the leftists", and when any one of those people does or says something, that is obviously something that all the other "leftists" also believe, because all leftists are only one person. http://communists.soc.srcf.net/In my city. Most universities have a communist group, or at least a socialist society, and they are often indistinguishable. By the way, read the first sentence on their website and think about it for a second. It really cracked me up :D. How many people are actually in that society, though? When i click on the "Meetings" page of that website, the first result is "Meetings: Michaelmas 2014". I don't exactly know what Michaelmas is, but if the last meeting they bothered to put on that page was in 2014, that group is probably not exactly a thriving community. The facebook link to the Cambridge Communist party seems to be broken, too. Who knows. The point is simply that they don't get shut down or blocked from bringing their speakers, etc. By the way, the intersection between radical feminists and communism is huge, so if you actually want to find large groups of communists that is where you need to look. They are also the same people who are blocking events and speakers (and I know you have them in Germany too). That's just not true. FPÖ shut down a school event with a (green-affiliated) speaker, because he called student connections close to the FPÖ out for extremist views. We have identitaries' actionism all the time, often disrupting events etc. We have Nazi groups attacking and burning refugee homes or blackmailing people, even identitairies threatening people on reddit from personal experience. How the fuck are those not right-wingers trying and sometimes succeeding to shut down others views and free speech? You have to be blind to believe this is not happening both ways. I don't know enough to comment about Austria, but in the UK that simply does not happen. The right wing has almost no presence on university campuses here. More in America so than in the UK, it always amazes me that the hard and far right winger complain so often that they are absent from universities, but never reflect about why that would be. You hear so often republican pest against those liberal university professors, but maybe if their ideas were a bit more appealing to vastly knowledgable, very curious and very smart people, they wouldn't be completely absent from the intellectual centres of the country. I don't know. It's obvious that virtually no one in the university system in the US would support the GOP, these days they essentially represent closed mindness, lack of curiosity, intellectual dishonesty and alternative facts. It's pretty damn hard to become a university professor if those are your values really. Same goes with UKIP. You run a demagogic, anti intellectual platform, why complain that university people don't like you? Biff if that's how you categorize everyone in the right then it must be impossible for you to have any meaningful debate with anyone. You also assume universities are purely meritocratic institutions which is really not the case - it never is when you have humans recruiting other humans, with the incentive to hire humans similar to you so that you can Co-author and cite a lot of papers together. Meanwhile the overwhelming majorities of liberals in universities happen in fields that should be unrelated to politics or where the merit of political ideas should not be relevant as are most fields in the humanities departments.
he clearly said something different. It's not about people on the right but about the famous people who lead the movement in whatever way you want to think of. That doesn't mean everyone on the right is anti-intellectual but think back to the US debates on the republican side and maybe you remember stuff like the question of who believes in evolution.
If you have lots of people saying they don't that's just not very appealing to the kind of people we're talking about.
That doesn't mean everyone on the right is that way but if you ask that question and the only person to raise his hand (iirc) and state that he believes in evolution ends up being Jeb Bush that's an issue.
Really, just who would be willing to proudly say "yep, I totally like those guys and think like they do about a lot of things!" in a university environment after hearing that.
Edit: Hence the statement that we probably don't have those things to that degree over here. I just couldn't imagine that kind of stuff on a large scale. Sure you have some crazies everywhere but if you go on TV and do something like that you'd be politically dead (I hope).
And since the right doesn't go that far when it comes to being anti-science I don't think we have that issue of universities being super leftist here.
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On April 22 2017 17:43 warding wrote:Show nested quote +On April 22 2017 17:31 Biff The Understudy wrote:On April 22 2017 08:28 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 08:15 Big J wrote:On April 22 2017 07:43 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 07:37 Simberto wrote:On April 22 2017 07:31 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 07:24 Simberto wrote:On April 22 2017 00:57 Danglars wrote:On April 22 2017 00:25 Ppjack wrote:
[quote]
Couldn't agree more. And events in recent years just proved that this is a trend. Now what I'm trying to get a handle on is people like Mohdoo that float to good-faith argument regularly. "Universities *are* open" arguments evolve to "ideas ... have already been gone over" and "Archaic ideas perpetuated by the right had their place at one point. Then we moved forward." If he truly believes universities are open, the rest of that paragraph would be non-sequitur. Who cares which person declares we've moved in another direction if they're open for them to be brought up again? If it's relevant, that's because he supports and is happy that universities are closed to certain ideas that we've left behind as we "moved forward." It's entirely dishonest and highly delusional. Next comes the bob and weave more typical from other kinds of posters. He says certain right-wing beliefs have been abandoned, yet can't see the relevance of communism still being debated. He can only see that as a smear of leftists. Is this a true act of misunderstanding or pretense? He says that nobody defends wanting to shut down right-wing speakers, but current events show the trend of one speaker after another being shut down, not the reverse trend of a movement lacking defenders petering out. Communism is still being debated in universities? I assume you mean outside of history lessons and as a valid political ideology? I would like some evidence to that happening, because i don't actually think that is happening. People see the communism comment as a smear of leftists in general because they don't believe you actually mean that literal communism is being debated as a good idea in modern universities. You always feel like everyone is censoring and prosecuting you unfairly. You also constantly complain about being lumped together with people you don't feel belong to your group. Meanwhile everyone who is not as rightwing as you are a homogenous group of "the leftists", and when any one of those people does or says something, that is obviously something that all the other "leftists" also believe, because all leftists are only one person. http://communists.soc.srcf.net/In my city. Most universities have a communist group, or at least a socialist society, and they are often indistinguishable. By the way, read the first sentence on their website and think about it for a second. It really cracked me up :D. How many people are actually in that society, though? When i click on the "Meetings" page of that website, the first result is "Meetings: Michaelmas 2014". I don't exactly know what Michaelmas is, but if the last meeting they bothered to put on that page was in 2014, that group is probably not exactly a thriving community. The facebook link to the Cambridge Communist party seems to be broken, too. Who knows. The point is simply that they don't get shut down or blocked from bringing their speakers, etc. By the way, the intersection between radical feminists and communism is huge, so if you actually want to find large groups of communists that is where you need to look. They are also the same people who are blocking events and speakers (and I know you have them in Germany too). That's just not true. FPÖ shut down a school event with a (green-affiliated) speaker, because he called student connections close to the FPÖ out for extremist views. We have identitaries' actionism all the time, often disrupting events etc. We have Nazi groups attacking and burning refugee homes or blackmailing people, even identitairies threatening people on reddit from personal experience. How the fuck are those not right-wingers trying and sometimes succeeding to shut down others views and free speech? You have to be blind to believe this is not happening both ways. I don't know enough to comment about Austria, but in the UK that simply does not happen. The right wing has almost no presence on university campuses here. More in America so than in the UK, it always amazes me that the hard and far right winger complain so often that they are absent from universities, but never reflect about why that would be. You hear so often republican pest against those liberal university professors, but maybe if their ideas were a bit more appealing to vastly knowledgable, very curious and very smart people, they wouldn't be completely absent from the intellectual centres of the country. I don't know. It's obvious that virtually no one in the university system in the US would support the GOP, these days they essentially represent closed mindness, lack of curiosity, intellectual dishonesty and alternative facts. It's pretty damn hard to become a university professor if those are your values really. Same goes with UKIP. You run a demagogic, anti intellectual platform, why complain that university people don't like you? Biff if that's how you categorize everyone in the right then it must be impossible for you to have any meaningful debate with anyone. You also assume universities are purely meritocratic institutions which is really not the case - it never is when you have humans recruiting other humans, with the incentive to hire humans similar to you so that you can Co-author and cite a lot of papers together. Meanwhile the overwhelming majorities of liberals in universities happen in fields that should be unrelated to politics or where the merit of political ideas should not be relevant as are most fields in the humanities departments.
It is very possible to have right-wing views and still not be a complete jackass. Harvey Mansfield, Donald and Robert Kagan, Leo Strauss, Hayek, and Francis Fukuyama are conservatives who are still very much respected and authors I would highly recommend to anyone regardless of political affiliation.
If anything, I am more surprised by how many nationalist and Eurasianist academics are in Europe, people that would never even be accepted by most conservative American academics.
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What Biff was arguing is a caricature/strawman of the right, not the actual right. Hence why we're talking about different things. My point is that the majority of people on the right aren't represented by that caricature and I'm not even sure that the majority of the republican party is - it might be that the evangelicals are the most vocal when it comes to those issues.
EDIT: Hayek was not a conservative. Also, not everyone on the right is conservative - ie. libertarians. I obviously agree and especially in the field of economics, it tends to be painted as more right wing precisely because views generally held by progressive democrats go against the general knowledge of the field. With the current context and US president that may not be the case anymore.
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On April 22 2017 18:21 warding wrote:
What Biff was arguing is a caricature/strawman of the right, not the actual right. Hence why we're talking about different things. My point is that the majority of people on the right aren't represented by that caricature and I'm not even sure that the majority of the republican party is - it might be that the evangelicals are the most vocal when it comes to those issues.
EDIT: Hayek was not a conservative. Also, not everyone on the right is conservative - ie. libertarians.
No I strongly disagree, that's not what he seemed to be talking about at all. He wasn't talking about people on the right and never intended to, but about how people who go to universities would perceive "the right", whatever that is. That's a pretty big difference
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On April 22 2017 18:21 warding wrote:
What Biff was arguing is a caricature/strawman of the right, not the actual right. Hence why we're talking about different things. My point is that the majority of people on the right aren't represented by that caricature and I'm not even sure that the majority of the republican party is - it might be that the evangelicals are the most vocal when it comes to those issues.
EDIT: Hayek was not a conservative. Also, not everyone on the right is conservative - ie. libertarians.
In America, Hayek is most seen and understood and taught as a conservative. I do not really see him as one and associate him with the liberal tradition most of the time, but the point I was making is that people can have views that are associated with conservative or libertarian ideas while still being respected.
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On April 22 2017 18:24 Toadesstern wrote:Show nested quote +On April 22 2017 18:21 warding wrote:
What Biff was arguing is a caricature/strawman of the right, not the actual right. Hence why we're talking about different things. My point is that the majority of people on the right aren't represented by that caricature and I'm not even sure that the majority of the republican party is - it might be that the evangelicals are the most vocal when it comes to those issues.
EDIT: Hayek was not a conservative. Also, not everyone on the right is conservative - ie. libertarians. No I strongly disagree, that's not what he seemed to be talking about at all. He wasn't talking about people on the right and never intended to, but about how people who go to universities would perceive "the right", whatever that is. That's a pretty big difference
Mmmaybe that's what he meant. He's clearly talking about republicans and the GOP as a whole, though. My point, in agreement with Shiragaku, is that there are very respectable intellectual ideas on the right to be had. Now, Biff might argue that those are completely absent from the GOP nowadays. That might be true, but I'd be skeptical of it - we're both Europeans so maybe someone based in the US would have more insight on that. I think there is a bias due to the nature of political discourse and the fact that in order to win the republican primaries you essentially need to pander to evangelicals - hence republican candidates and primary figures come across as anti-intellectual.
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tbh, now that I think about it, Biff is correct seeing that the list of conservative academics I gave that are still alive today voted for Clinton and some of them voted for Obama in both 2008 and 2012. On top of that, Republican economics is just so batshit insane that it is near impossible to find one that will gladly defend any of it, especially their tactic of shutting down the government in face of passing a yearly budget.
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On April 22 2017 18:31 warding wrote:Show nested quote +On April 22 2017 18:24 Toadesstern wrote:On April 22 2017 18:21 warding wrote:
What Biff was arguing is a caricature/strawman of the right, not the actual right. Hence why we're talking about different things. My point is that the majority of people on the right aren't represented by that caricature and I'm not even sure that the majority of the republican party is - it might be that the evangelicals are the most vocal when it comes to those issues.
EDIT: Hayek was not a conservative. Also, not everyone on the right is conservative - ie. libertarians. No I strongly disagree, that's not what he seemed to be talking about at all. He wasn't talking about people on the right and never intended to, but about how people who go to universities would perceive "the right", whatever that is. That's a pretty big difference Mmmaybe that's what he meant. He's clearly talking about republicans and the GOP as a whole, though. My point, in agreement with Shiragaku, is that there are very respectable intellectual ideas on the right to be had. Now, Biff might argue that those are completely absent from the GOP nowadays. That might be true, but I'd be skeptical of it - we're both Europeans so maybe someone based in the US would have more insight on that. I think there is a bias due to the nature of political discourse and the fact that in order to win the republican primaries you essentially need to pander to evangelicals - hence republican candidates and primary figures come across as anti-intellectual.
no, I think you completely misunderstand what he said.
Let's take my example from the US debates on evolution up again. Let's just assume my statement that Jeb Bush was the only one to raise his hand and say he believes in evolution is correct for a second because I don't remember it clearly but it was either just him or maybe 1-2 people willing to raise their hands. And the numbers don't really matter here.
That's the point he was talking about. Let me stress this as clearly as I can: I don't believe for a second that only 10% of the people on the right believe in evolution while 90% don't. And I as well as everyone else is aware that there are smart people on both sides. Most fields have absolutely nothing to do with politics. If you're a physicist noone gives a fuck if you identify with the left or the right.
The point is that if you have that image (that word is important!) like mentioned above, because that's what you see on TV and everywhere else, people who are going to university or considering to go are not going to like you. Or at least more likely thatn not. It's that simple. It doesn't matter what the "real right" looks like at that point.
If you have a bunch of people who bring snowballs into congress to show that climate change is a hoax to make America give up its fossil fuels etc being broadcasted on TV, it really shouldn't surprise anyone that people who end up in universities tend to identify less likely with the GOP. That's the point he was making imo. Not that people on the right themselves are anti-science, just that the figureheads that you hear and see a lot about on a daily basis happen to be those wackos. And as a result you don't have a lot of people who are willing to say they identify with the right in a university setting.
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I would like to understand more where is the problem and what is the desired outcome. I come from academic environment, but from particle physics, where there obviously isn't a correlation between your research findings and political opinions, the Higgs boson isn't a liberal construct ... yet still we have a fair share of "oppressed voices", people who believe that the establishment physics is a huge conspiracy to cover up the real truths about the Universe. Those people are lunatics and I don't feel bad for not including them in the discussion. Everyone who is a little public receives plenty of e-mails from these misunderstood geniuses and my colleagues are usually inclined to politely argue with them, while I just reply that it's bullshit and that they should go bother someone else, which is a really effective strategy of not being bothered by those people anymore. If someone wants to talk to me about science in a sane way, express doubts about specific experiments or models, I am more than happy to do so, but such people are really rare amidst a sea of idiots who start their mails with "Einstein was wrong and here is why" and "here is the obvious theory of everything which modern science refuses to hear" followed by incoherent rambling made up from words they heard in a TV show on science. The obvious problem here is that particle physics is complicated and everything that could be elaborated by just a couple of hours of sitting in a chair and thinking has been done a long time ago, thus there isn't really much room for an "open mic" type of discussion. You also probably aren't gonna build an accelerator in your basement and come up with some groundbreaking data...
But this also means that it's a little hard for me to imagine, how actually is this open-minded university supposed to work in practice in other fields. I get it that for example in economics, it is much harder to conduct scientific experiments in the classical sense and that the data is a little murky at times, leading to possibly contradicting conclusions, but isn't it a pretty complex and developed field anyway? Meaning that the opinion of someone who studied it and practices research for years is still much more relevant than that of someone who just has a strong opinion about how things should be? Is there really so much room for political opinion in academia? If there are topics where the answers are strictly dictated by the political views of the researcher, should those be even pursued and presented in universities?
I just don't know much about the current trends in humanities (or however you call the sum of sciences that concern people and thus are liable to politics), but couldn't it be that the "oppressed" views are just disfavored by data, not just political views of those in power (who however might have such views just because those are supported by the same data)?
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On April 22 2017 18:21 warding wrote:
What Biff was arguing is a caricature/strawman of the right, not the actual right. Hence why we're talking about different things. My point is that the majority of people on the right aren't represented by that caricature and I'm not even sure that the majority of the republican party is - it might be that the evangelicals are the most vocal when it comes to those issues.
EDIT: Hayek was not a conservative. Also, not everyone on the right is conservative - ie. libertarians. I obviously agree and especially in the field of economics, it tends to be painted as more right wing precisely because views generally held by progressive democrats go against the general knowledge of the field. With the current context and US president that may not be the case anymore.
Not at all.
What I am saying is that when a party or movement embrasses anti intellectualism, hatred of the "elites", promotes alternative facts and simply reject scientific conclusions, there is no wonder it's not very well represented amongst academics.
Of course you can be a conservative and an intellectual. But if you are a serious academic and support the party of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Sarah Palin, you must be dealing with some hardcore intellectual dissonances.
If conservative ideology has become so amazingly unattractive to scientists, researchers, artists and kntellectuals, its promoters should maybe wonder why, instead of whining about the liberal universities. You can't say that "we have had enough of experts", run campaigns based on bogus numbers, ignore and dismiss everyone who knows what he talks about, and then complain that all those people don't like you and don't support your ideas.
That's it. I am not dismissing all conservatives, I am just advocating a bit more introspection and a bit less whining.
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On April 22 2017 17:31 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On April 22 2017 08:28 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 08:15 Big J wrote:On April 22 2017 07:43 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 07:37 Simberto wrote:On April 22 2017 07:31 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 07:24 Simberto wrote:On April 22 2017 00:57 Danglars wrote:On April 22 2017 00:25 Ppjack wrote:On April 22 2017 00:23 bardtown wrote:
[quote]
I'm not talking about Berkeley; at least, not specifically. This is the European thread after all. Antifa are the extreme end of a general trend, though. All sorts of speakers have been shut down at universities across the UK (and the US, Canada, Australia, etc) because left wing students don't like their views. Look up the Warren Farrell protest and then watch him speak and see if you can find any justification for their actions. Protest has become a means for shutting down legitimate and reasonable conversation, and it is creating a backlash. People didn't hold 'free speech rallies' before because they didn't feel that their free speech was under threat until recently. Couldn't agree more. And events in recent years just proved that this is a trend. Now what I'm trying to get a handle on is people like Mohdoo that float to good-faith argument regularly. "Universities *are* open" arguments evolve to "ideas ... have already been gone over" and "Archaic ideas perpetuated by the right had their place at one point. Then we moved forward." If he truly believes universities are open, the rest of that paragraph would be non-sequitur. Who cares which person declares we've moved in another direction if they're open for them to be brought up again? If it's relevant, that's because he supports and is happy that universities are closed to certain ideas that we've left behind as we "moved forward." It's entirely dishonest and highly delusional. Next comes the bob and weave more typical from other kinds of posters. He says certain right-wing beliefs have been abandoned, yet can't see the relevance of communism still being debated. He can only see that as a smear of leftists. Is this a true act of misunderstanding or pretense? He says that nobody defends wanting to shut down right-wing speakers, but current events show the trend of one speaker after another being shut down, not the reverse trend of a movement lacking defenders petering out. Communism is still being debated in universities? I assume you mean outside of history lessons and as a valid political ideology? I would like some evidence to that happening, because i don't actually think that is happening. People see the communism comment as a smear of leftists in general because they don't believe you actually mean that literal communism is being debated as a good idea in modern universities. You always feel like everyone is censoring and prosecuting you unfairly. You also constantly complain about being lumped together with people you don't feel belong to your group. Meanwhile everyone who is not as rightwing as you are a homogenous group of "the leftists", and when any one of those people does or says something, that is obviously something that all the other "leftists" also believe, because all leftists are only one person. http://communists.soc.srcf.net/In my city. Most universities have a communist group, or at least a socialist society, and they are often indistinguishable. By the way, read the first sentence on their website and think about it for a second. It really cracked me up :D. How many people are actually in that society, though? When i click on the "Meetings" page of that website, the first result is "Meetings: Michaelmas 2014". I don't exactly know what Michaelmas is, but if the last meeting they bothered to put on that page was in 2014, that group is probably not exactly a thriving community. The facebook link to the Cambridge Communist party seems to be broken, too. Who knows. The point is simply that they don't get shut down or blocked from bringing their speakers, etc. By the way, the intersection between radical feminists and communism is huge, so if you actually want to find large groups of communists that is where you need to look. They are also the same people who are blocking events and speakers (and I know you have them in Germany too). That's just not true. FPÖ shut down a school event with a (green-affiliated) speaker, because he called student connections close to the FPÖ out for extremist views. We have identitaries' actionism all the time, often disrupting events etc. We have Nazi groups attacking and burning refugee homes or blackmailing people, even identitairies threatening people on reddit from personal experience. How the fuck are those not right-wingers trying and sometimes succeeding to shut down others views and free speech? You have to be blind to believe this is not happening both ways. I don't know enough to comment about Austria, but in the UK that simply does not happen. The right wing has almost no presence on university campuses here. More in America so than in the UK, it always amazes me that the hard and far right winger complain so often that they are absent from universities, but never reflect about why that would be. You hear so often republican pest against those liberal university professors, but maybe if their ideas were a bit more appealing to vastly knowledgable, very curious and very smart people, they wouldn't be completely absent from the intellectual centres of the country. I don't know. It's obvious that virtually no one in the university system in the US would support the GOP, these days they essentially represent closed mindness, lack of curiosity, intellectual dishonesty and alternative facts. It's pretty damn hard to become a university professor if those are your values really. Same goes with UKIP. You run a demagogic, anti intellectual platform, why complain that university people don't like you?
The thing about politics is that neither the left nor the right is more correct than the other. It's a matter of what you prioritise and how you think the world should work. You will find just as many intelligent people in the private sector who lean right, so it's not the case that all intelligent people go one way. I'm not complaining about it, anyway. I'm just stating a fact. That said, campuses often feel like hotbeds of group think as a result.
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On April 22 2017 19:34 bardtown wrote:Show nested quote +On April 22 2017 17:31 Biff The Understudy wrote:On April 22 2017 08:28 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 08:15 Big J wrote:On April 22 2017 07:43 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 07:37 Simberto wrote:On April 22 2017 07:31 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 07:24 Simberto wrote:On April 22 2017 00:57 Danglars wrote:On April 22 2017 00:25 Ppjack wrote:
[quote]
Couldn't agree more. And events in recent years just proved that this is a trend. Now what I'm trying to get a handle on is people like Mohdoo that float to good-faith argument regularly. "Universities *are* open" arguments evolve to "ideas ... have already been gone over" and "Archaic ideas perpetuated by the right had their place at one point. Then we moved forward." If he truly believes universities are open, the rest of that paragraph would be non-sequitur. Who cares which person declares we've moved in another direction if they're open for them to be brought up again? If it's relevant, that's because he supports and is happy that universities are closed to certain ideas that we've left behind as we "moved forward." It's entirely dishonest and highly delusional. Next comes the bob and weave more typical from other kinds of posters. He says certain right-wing beliefs have been abandoned, yet can't see the relevance of communism still being debated. He can only see that as a smear of leftists. Is this a true act of misunderstanding or pretense? He says that nobody defends wanting to shut down right-wing speakers, but current events show the trend of one speaker after another being shut down, not the reverse trend of a movement lacking defenders petering out. Communism is still being debated in universities? I assume you mean outside of history lessons and as a valid political ideology? I would like some evidence to that happening, because i don't actually think that is happening. People see the communism comment as a smear of leftists in general because they don't believe you actually mean that literal communism is being debated as a good idea in modern universities. You always feel like everyone is censoring and prosecuting you unfairly. You also constantly complain about being lumped together with people you don't feel belong to your group. Meanwhile everyone who is not as rightwing as you are a homogenous group of "the leftists", and when any one of those people does or says something, that is obviously something that all the other "leftists" also believe, because all leftists are only one person. http://communists.soc.srcf.net/In my city. Most universities have a communist group, or at least a socialist society, and they are often indistinguishable. By the way, read the first sentence on their website and think about it for a second. It really cracked me up :D. How many people are actually in that society, though? When i click on the "Meetings" page of that website, the first result is "Meetings: Michaelmas 2014". I don't exactly know what Michaelmas is, but if the last meeting they bothered to put on that page was in 2014, that group is probably not exactly a thriving community. The facebook link to the Cambridge Communist party seems to be broken, too. Who knows. The point is simply that they don't get shut down or blocked from bringing their speakers, etc. By the way, the intersection between radical feminists and communism is huge, so if you actually want to find large groups of communists that is where you need to look. They are also the same people who are blocking events and speakers (and I know you have them in Germany too). That's just not true. FPÖ shut down a school event with a (green-affiliated) speaker, because he called student connections close to the FPÖ out for extremist views. We have identitaries' actionism all the time, often disrupting events etc. We have Nazi groups attacking and burning refugee homes or blackmailing people, even identitairies threatening people on reddit from personal experience. How the fuck are those not right-wingers trying and sometimes succeeding to shut down others views and free speech? You have to be blind to believe this is not happening both ways. I don't know enough to comment about Austria, but in the UK that simply does not happen. The right wing has almost no presence on university campuses here. More in America so than in the UK, it always amazes me that the hard and far right winger complain so often that they are absent from universities, but never reflect about why that would be. You hear so often republican pest against those liberal university professors, but maybe if their ideas were a bit more appealing to vastly knowledgable, very curious and very smart people, they wouldn't be completely absent from the intellectual centres of the country. I don't know. It's obvious that virtually no one in the university system in the US would support the GOP, these days they essentially represent closed mindness, lack of curiosity, intellectual dishonesty and alternative facts. It's pretty damn hard to become a university professor if those are your values really. Same goes with UKIP. You run a demagogic, anti intellectual platform, why complain that university people don't like you? The thing about politics is that neither the left nor the right is more correct than the other. It's a matter of what you prioritise and how you think the world should work. You will find just as many intelligent people in the private sector who lean right, so it's not the case that all intelligent people go one way. I'm not complaining about it, anyway. I'm just stating a fact. That said, campuses often feel like hotbeds of group think as a result.
About political opinion, no. But it's not purely political opinion, but a relationship to the truth, to science and to intellectualism that turn academic people off.
When the GOP promotes creationism in school, elect a serial liar, fight an open war against climate science and so, it loses smart people, academics and university students.
That's all I'm saying. Support creationism or make friends in universities. The GOP has made its choice, now I ask its supporters not to whine about the consequences. We'll have a serious discussion about the GOP under representation in universities the day it stops being the party of stupid.
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On April 22 2017 19:40 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On April 22 2017 19:34 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 17:31 Biff The Understudy wrote:On April 22 2017 08:28 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 08:15 Big J wrote:On April 22 2017 07:43 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 07:37 Simberto wrote:On April 22 2017 07:31 bardtown wrote:On April 22 2017 07:24 Simberto wrote:On April 22 2017 00:57 Danglars wrote:
[quote]
Now what I'm trying to get a handle on is people like Mohdoo that float to good-faith argument regularly. "Universities *are* open" arguments evolve to "ideas ... have already been gone over" and "Archaic ideas perpetuated by the right had their place at one point. Then we moved forward." If he truly believes universities are open, the rest of that paragraph would be non-sequitur. Who cares which person declares we've moved in another direction if they're open for them to be brought up again? If it's relevant, that's because he supports and is happy that universities are closed to certain ideas that we've left behind as we "moved forward." It's entirely dishonest and highly delusional.
Next comes the bob and weave more typical from other kinds of posters. He says certain right-wing beliefs have been abandoned, yet can't see the relevance of communism still being debated. He can only see that as a smear of leftists. Is this a true act of misunderstanding or pretense? He says that nobody defends wanting to shut down right-wing speakers, but current events show the trend of one speaker after another being shut down, not the reverse trend of a movement lacking defenders petering out. Communism is still being debated in universities? I assume you mean outside of history lessons and as a valid political ideology? I would like some evidence to that happening, because i don't actually think that is happening. People see the communism comment as a smear of leftists in general because they don't believe you actually mean that literal communism is being debated as a good idea in modern universities. You always feel like everyone is censoring and prosecuting you unfairly. You also constantly complain about being lumped together with people you don't feel belong to your group. Meanwhile everyone who is not as rightwing as you are a homogenous group of "the leftists", and when any one of those people does or says something, that is obviously something that all the other "leftists" also believe, because all leftists are only one person. http://communists.soc.srcf.net/In my city. Most universities have a communist group, or at least a socialist society, and they are often indistinguishable. By the way, read the first sentence on their website and think about it for a second. It really cracked me up :D. How many people are actually in that society, though? When i click on the "Meetings" page of that website, the first result is "Meetings: Michaelmas 2014". I don't exactly know what Michaelmas is, but if the last meeting they bothered to put on that page was in 2014, that group is probably not exactly a thriving community. The facebook link to the Cambridge Communist party seems to be broken, too. Who knows. The point is simply that they don't get shut down or blocked from bringing their speakers, etc. By the way, the intersection between radical feminists and communism is huge, so if you actually want to find large groups of communists that is where you need to look. They are also the same people who are blocking events and speakers (and I know you have them in Germany too). That's just not true. FPÖ shut down a school event with a (green-affiliated) speaker, because he called student connections close to the FPÖ out for extremist views. We have identitaries' actionism all the time, often disrupting events etc. We have Nazi groups attacking and burning refugee homes or blackmailing people, even identitairies threatening people on reddit from personal experience. How the fuck are those not right-wingers trying and sometimes succeeding to shut down others views and free speech? You have to be blind to believe this is not happening both ways. I don't know enough to comment about Austria, but in the UK that simply does not happen. The right wing has almost no presence on university campuses here. More in America so than in the UK, it always amazes me that the hard and far right winger complain so often that they are absent from universities, but never reflect about why that would be. You hear so often republican pest against those liberal university professors, but maybe if their ideas were a bit more appealing to vastly knowledgable, very curious and very smart people, they wouldn't be completely absent from the intellectual centres of the country. I don't know. It's obvious that virtually no one in the university system in the US would support the GOP, these days they essentially represent closed mindness, lack of curiosity, intellectual dishonesty and alternative facts. It's pretty damn hard to become a university professor if those are your values really. Same goes with UKIP. You run a demagogic, anti intellectual platform, why complain that university people don't like you? The thing about politics is that neither the left nor the right is more correct than the other. It's a matter of what you prioritise and how you think the world should work. You will find just as many intelligent people in the private sector who lean right, so it's not the case that all intelligent people go one way. I'm not complaining about it, anyway. I'm just stating a fact. That said, campuses often feel like hotbeds of group think as a result. About political opinion, no. But it's not purely political opinion, but a relationship to the truth, to science and to intellectualism that turn academic people off. When the GOP promotes creationism in school, elect a serial liar, fight an open war against climate science and so, it loses smart people, academics and university students. That's all I'm saying. Support creationism or make friends in universities. The GOP has made its choice, now I ask its supporters not to whine about the consequences. We'll have a serious discussion about the GOP under representation in universities the day it stops being the party of stupid.
Yeah, I don't know a single creationist in the UK, so I don't think that's it. It's all about a desire to be moral, in my opinion. But I don't believe left wing politics are more moral than right wing politics, they just appear so at face value. Things like 'Refugees welcome!' that don't consider the actual consequences of this stance, etc.
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