Illiberalism on the Left

[Speaker to Animals]

Liberal professors discuss counters to the intolerance of the marxists who have taken over so much of the left. Very interesting discussion.



Could use a bit of discussion about that here. Flooding a thread with cat pics and insults is essentially the same thing as trying to shutdown speeches and voices one does not like. It's fundamentally illiberal and totalitarian to the core.

I liked their ideas of universities pushing back by declaring themselves "unsafe campuses".

[Speaker to Animals]

Here is the kind of marxist that is indoctrinating youth to hate western civilization and advocate for genocide.

A professor at Philadelphia’s Drexel University has a heartwarming Christmas message: Associate Professor of Politics and Global Studies George Ciccariello-Maher is wishing for a “white genocide.”

Taking to his Twitter account on Christmas eve, Ciccariello-Maher, himself a white man, tweeted, “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.” He later deleted the tweet.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government ... -genocide/


We are subsidizing revolution and, if successful, the kind of mass slaughter seen in history every other time marxists take control of government.

The way the left defends this type of shit is (1) to deny this is an issue, (2) pretend as though they don't condone it while doing absolutely nothing about it, and (3) viciously and slanderously attack anybody who dares to persist in challenging it. It seems to me the correct strategy is to never back down and to confront them with this horrific stench emanating from the left these days. Force them to acknowledge it.

Note how these leftists will shame every conservative for the most extreme right wing group out there, pretending as though everybody on the right is directly responsible for it, demanding that conservative politicians apologize for shit that has nothing to do with them. And yet they so often defend and run cover for truly heinous people who now control academia and media.

The left operates under the principle that they have no enemies on to their left. Thus a person who calls himself a "moderate progressive" will do absolutely nothing about challenging marxists like this character in the linked article, while claiming he opposes what the man says. But if he opposed what this professor says, he would do as much to counterthis hatred and bile as progressives otherwise do to save sea turtles, to pay for ridiculous vote recounts, and to pay for street thugs to attack conservatives at Trump rallies. The obvious conclusion is that they either support this kind of hate or they simply don't care -- all while they attempt to blame you for the craziest shit they can find on the right. Yet, unlike their examples, nobody in the far right fringe holds power of any kind. Nazis don't control the universities. The KKK doesn't run the media. But their crazies do.

[clubgop]

I liked their ideas of universities pushing back by declaring themselves "unsafe campuses".

I don't. Can't use that language, that's their language. Campuses should be safe, speech and ideas should be free, not dangerous or safe.

[Calculus Man]

I liked their ideas of universities pushing back by declaring themselves "unsafe campuses".

I don't. Can't use that language, that's their language. Campuses should be safe, speech and ideas should be free, not dangerous or safe.

Hit the nail on the head. We need to stop pretending that mere words are threatening.

If hearing a nasty word or an opposong viewpoint causes someone trauma, the problem lies within that person, not within the free speech that "triggered" them.

[TheReal_ND]

Like I've said though, I hear what you're saying but co-opting their words is also an effective strategy imo. A lot of people use the word triggered now to be derisive. That's good.

[BjornP]

I've pointed out before how crazy it is for public colleges to fund SJWy courses that are only about personal development and activism for how a small segment of society want the rest of society to look like. While having politicians directly determine the content of higher education is, of course, a dangerous slippery slope, one could instead set down a panel of the relevant professionals to determine if a given public college subject is actually an academic course, or a course in circle-jerking ideological navel-gazing.

Then one can use those recommendations to determine if private colleges who apply for grants for their social science and humanities courses, should get those grants or not based on wether or not they live up to those recommendations.

Parents of kids in private colleges somehow tolerate paying alot of money for sending their kids to study at colleges where academic discipline takes a backseat to politicial activism, where living in isolationist social bubbles is the norm. I think the reason they tolerate that, is because that's what's becoming the norm for everyone of any age, social group, of any country. Personalized or customized news aggregators are simply the digital equivalent of living in safe spaces, with more and more people only getting the selection of news that validate the reality of their own, isolated news bubble. I wouldn't be too surprised if the college safe spaces are really a consequence of the digital ones. Safety and comfort understood as only having your own views on reality reflected back at you.

I hope it changes things, but I think that whole SJW'y nutter culture in your colleges is a symptom of a wider cultural trend, rather than an ideological one. Panicking about dissenting voices, blowing them out of proportion isn't restricted to the left, after all. An arms race of hyperbole, fear, hysteria and the idea that you're "winning" an argument if you've succesfully painted yourself as the "victim" of your opponent's "oppression". Gonna take more than just one college taking a stand against anti-academic intellectuals to change that, I think. But hopefully, they can start a trend.

[Speaker to Animals]

It's more complicated than that. This professor discusses the problem further.

[Speaker to Animals]

Worth a read:

http://heterodoxacademy.org/problems/

[BjornP]

It's more complicated than that. This professor discusses the problem further.

I'm just 4 and a half minutes in, and I'm already nodding to everything he says. Also counting myself lucky that we don't have your problem in our universities. Sweden just across the sound does, but it is a national sport to make fun of the Swedes for excatly their, usually patronizing, PC culture - even amongst our farthest leftists.

A cultural issue is usually more complex than an ideological one. It's not just your leftists that argue as if victimhood equals victory in an argument, after all. Being a victim is even economically lucrative, cash settlements for when you drop your coffee and sue the company for two million dollars for ruining your shoes and the like. No doubt that your leftists are more extreme in their victim/offender mentality, that they live in more of a bubble, but there's a reason that they are or became - how best to frame it? - socially allowed by wider society to suddenly enter and influence college life to the extent they get tenure teaching pseudo-scientific activism. The latter link you posted simply offers a generational difference, but not an explanation for why a prestigious private college or university would allow and accept the teaching of Social Justice ideology into their institutions.

[Martin Hash]

SJWism is fashionable to the young, and SJWism in universities is extremely "illiberal." It's an example of the neobullyhood practiced by the weak.

"SJWers practice an Orwellian notion of liberalism." - me

"The minority has leveraged the majority." - me