Should the public subsidize Left-wing curriculum at colleges

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Not to mention that most undergraduates don't even make that money employed in their field of study.

I think you'll enjoy this read lol

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the- ... rts-degree

Oh, I wasn't claiming that academia isn't liberal. Of course it is, and almost all academics are left-wing. I was disagreeing with the persecution complex mentality. We don't typically see people fired for expressing right-wing views; the most recent high-profile firing for having "wrong" political views was the guy who spoke against Israel.[/quote]


I don't know. Where are these "right-wing" professors for you to fire in the first place? You know, they don't even invite right-wingers to give commencement addresses, and right-wingers don't even constitute a majority in most business departments(which as a department doesn't constitute a majority in terms of influencing the student body). What % of most state schools employ conservative republicans...

Now you can say that Republicans don't generally enter academia and the kind of person who would be interested in researching 17th century German Literature tends to naturally be a democrat, but I don't know if that's true.

That person who spoke out against Israel was a selective bigot who doesn't actually believe the charges she libels the Jewish state with.

I think whites smoke even more pot then blacks. In California many years back, legalizing pot legislation was shot down not by whites, who were actually the majority who supported legalization, but by blacks and other minority groups. I think the reason for blacks receiving higher sentences, which is true and undeniable, is to proactively dissuade other blacks from engaging in these same crimes, not to mention that to let these blacks off would just be a headache not only for law enforcement whose runins with these repeat criminals are incredibly high(runins that often add up anyways to the same exxagerated prison sentence except now they've had a chance to hurt more people), but more importantly, to keep them away from the larger (Black) public who they'll likely hurt and corrupt.

I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but blacks of slave ancestry punch well above their weight in terms of crimes committed, most of which aimed at fellow blacks. I mean, 13% of the population, and almost 50% of the murders. This isn't a healthy group, and the state solution to this, inadequate as it has been, has been to just incarcerate them, as the only way to keep them from cannibalizing their own. It isn't right, and it will need a non-police solution to this problem, but that's just the reality on the ground. And this has nothing to do with racism.



Point out the distortions.

And the two you cite as being real aren't an example of Liberal insularity? You have to live in a bubble to believe that rape culture on the college campus is real, that 1:5 women are the victims of sexual assault. If you didn't live in an echo-chamber, you may have had one someone point out the fact that no one is stupid enough to send their child somewhere where they have a 1:5 chance of being raped, so you, the believer in this myth, don't even believe your own myth. And if this myth in fact a reality, well then why is the University still open, given the dangerous environment it has become lol. I mean 1:5 man... that's a ton of sexual assault.

You also have to manufacture a perverted caricature of conservatives to believe that those of us who oppose same-sex marriage only do so because of hate. We're just all haters, there's no rational case against changing the societal ideal that has guided Western civilization for 1,200 years.



No, that you hold all of them simultaneously means that - for as long as you've held all of those positions simultaneously - you've only heard a liberal angle on everything in life, that once you've bought in wholly to progressive values and thought, you've rarely, if ever, entertained opposing arguments. I can understand a leftie who accepts 3/4 of core progressive values and positions and dissents ideologically(not just on tactics) with 1/4 of the rest, which itself is rare amongst progressives because, well, then you'd no longer be a progressive. Folk of that variety are much more believable to have actually struggled with dissenting view points, then someone who is an ideologue, towing the orthodoxy on every point where progressive thought differs from alternative views.



Yeah but the globe warms and cools, like, throughout its entire history. The global warming theory is threefold anyways, and I'm not sure if we're the primary contributor to this warming, or that it will lead to disaster. If any of these three things are not true, well then theory is pointless/irrelevant and/or untrue.



Biology is only one of the three branches of the hard sciences. Opposing one theory in biology does not make you anti-science.




Yes but climate change is based on forecasts of what may happen 80 years from now.

And while you're obsessing about what may happen 80 years from now(as if we won't have invented and engineered a solution within the next 20 years), theoretical evil off in the distance, the climate change and DestroyMonsanto and SaveTheWhales and anti-Nuclear power and Rape Culture crowd won't fight real evil today, in our time, around the world and here at home. It seems that when you focus on distant or trivial/manufactured evils, it preoccupies too much of your time to the point where you don't have the time to speak out against women/girls/boys being raped and gays being hanged and children being abused into being child soldiers and rapists, throughout the world, today, during the times in which we live. I mean, the intensity, the passion, it just isn't there, but we bring up nuclear power plants or global warming or the opening up of a Walmart somewhere in America, and suddenly you're battle-ready to form the frontlines in squaring down that evil.




That's true, but virtually all of them are also all global warming believers, also engaging in the same tactics of dehumanizing climate-change dissenters.



I personally don't think that's an issue, we don't dehumanize you anywhere near what Leftists do to those who oppose them. You're just people who are wrong, and at worst, even idiotic or delusional. But we don't think you're inherently bad, acting out of bad intentions in order to screw over the world and the innocent living in it. I mean come on now lol, bizarre conspiracy theories holds a candle to "you don't care if your children have clean drinking water."? Conspiracy theories about biologists trying to undermine Christianity is anything comparable to "you were paid off by big-oil," or "you just want children to go to bed hungry at night."?



Well I read the NYTimes, TheNation, MotherJones, GoodIs, the DailyKos. I both have to, and it's also a hobby. It may help your chances of running into persuasive right-wing thought if you read the WSJ editorial, Commentary, TheAmericanThinker, The American Interest, The Weekly Standard, occasionally NationalReview, etc. You may not always agree with the opinions given, but the works done by people at the Manhattan Institute, Hoover, AEI, CATO, Hertog/Tikvah, etc are actually pretty decent. I use a feedly account to quickly browse through a ton of articles in my mourning commute.



How are they not? When they focus all of their attention on Israel for the reasons they cite, and say nothing about wherever else those same offenses occur, especially in the Middle East, plus say nothing about the antisemitic libels against the Jewish state, then yes. They are bigoted against the Jewish state, precisely because they are Jewish(European), and the victim of this Jewish State(European outpost) are brown muslim easterners.

We know what the outcome would have been, had we invaded. We were first-hand witnesses to it on our Island-hopping that beat back the Japanese. Burning corpses alive in fox holes because they refused to surrender. Shooting down kamekazi planes flying suicidal missions. The carnage was just awful. The Japanese are an honor society. They would have fought to great casualties to preserve their stupid honor. And all of the Japanese generals were intent on taking that course of action. It was only when the emperor acted against his generals that wanted the citizenry to fight to the death, because he wanted no more bloodshed, that Japan surrendered.

You should check this out. http://www.fallen.io/ww2/ The Brits bombed the crap out of innocent german civilians intentionally to bring Germany to its knees.

You should also think about the millions of Chinese who were massacred by the Japanese before you criticize our ending the war they started. Japan caused all of those massacres in the Pacific, including that which take place against their citizens by US forces. You can't dismiss everything that contextualizes an event, just so you can maintain your moral highground lol. You're basically saying that only the things that keep your point true, matter, as you dismiss all other considerations. Context determines morality, and given the circumstances at the time, circumstances you refuse to consider, this was the only humane option on the table.



No, I don't know whether or not you think that way. I was just wondering why it was that you thought colleges weren't Liberal, and thought it was maybe for the same reason that most liberals don't think the mainstream media of having a leftwing bias, at all. Because maybe you agree with many of their opinions, even if they don't cover all of the issues you care about.

And Fox News, to the extant that it is conservative, is the one Right-leaning news/media source out there. You have ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, Comedy Central, HBO, to cover news in a left-leaning manner, and we have our only conservative-leaning source on television, Fox News, a channel I don't even like one bit. In established media, you're the one with options. It's only when we include online sources that we conservatives also have options.



Except for the first one, only because I think my biblical values should guide my decisions at the voting booth, I don't want any of those other things, and most conservatives don't either. It's just that we disagree on whether to more fairly divide up the economic pie, or to grow everybody's share of it. You value equality independent of results and probably think that rich people got rich by stealing their wealth from the poor, so it would make sense why might want to more fairly divide up the economic pie, as opposed to a focus that favors growing everyone's share of it.

By the way, most of the world was a third world country until America brought our ways to them. And they're getting more prosperous by moving away from socialism and towards capitalism. Look at Europe west of the Communist-occupied eastern half. Look how far they've come adding a capitalist engine of growth to their socialist models.

You don't think might just be setting up strawmen, inventing a caricature of how conservatives behave, or are treated, in the college classroom?

You really think we're that ret*d, disgusting uncultured slobs who just spout off such mean, obscenities?

An honest leftie would defend the one-sided presentation of facts/opinions and the hostile environment they create for dissenters, not deny it. That it's for the greater good, and that it will produce good students in the end, and that conservative values are bad and people who hold them should be reeducated in the enlightened brilliance of the Left.

Aren't you doing the much the same? Pot kettle black.

Seriously people are way too obsessed with the political poles. Like they are supporting a football team or something.

my tribe is better than your tribe so we [my tribe] should get all the meat and you can just die, or vice-versa. but each side is also embracing the meme, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." it is a matter of "whose ox is gored?"

This is by far and away the dumbest strategy around. Just ask the sunni tribes in parts of Iraq. Oh wait some still haven't learnt from their mistake in welcoming ISIS, and surrendering arms.

Well none of them have disagreed with any or even a quarter of the items on the original list. They deny its prevalence on the college campus, but they don't disagree with the position itself, so no, I'm not doing the same. They call them distortions and identify them as mischaracterizations / strawmen, but don't identify why, or how.

If you don't like wrestling with these ideas, that's fine. Maybe I can start another thread where we can talk about stuff you want to talk about.

Well that's sort of the strategy of the Left... how do you think they've made themselves fellow-travlers with so many dictators and tyrants: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-an ... ouble-bind

As they hate America, Christianity, or Western Civilization, they are our allies no matter their human rights abuses.

That person was male. You're evidently not familiar with the case. During the most recent Gaza war a scholar on race relations made some overly impassioned tweets, at which point the upper admin at UIUC rescinded a job offer (ordinarily they serve as a rubber stamp on the department's hiring decisions).


So we have to be disproportionately harsh on black criminals to protect them from themselves? You seriously don't see the problem with that sort of statement?


Much of that disparity is linked to poverty, failing schools, lack of access to jobs, an erosion of trust between police and the communities they're meant to serve, etc. Now this is not necessarily hoods and lynching sort of racism, but it most certainly is a part of America's racial legacy. You're much more likely to turn to crime if you grew up in a sh***y environment; you're statistically more likely to have been stuck in a sh***y environment if your parents were part of some marginalized group in the past. Redlining and housing segregation is still a thing that happens, trapping large fractions of America's black population in toxic environments. Many of these problems aren't even things that anyone is deliberately doing to "keep black people down" or whatever, which is why it raises hackles on the right to bring them up as examples of racism. What right-wingers miss is that you don't have to be deliberately malicious for there to be a problem.



Or if you live on a college campus and see example of rape culture every week.

Few or no academics take the 1/5 statistic seriously, including the professors who initially published it with a heavy disclaimer that it was from a limited sample and almost certainly not representative of the situation nationally. That's just an example of media sensationalism. Cute job attempting to ascribe ridiculous views no one actually holds to me, though.


There are reports of sexual assault damn near every week on my campus, sometimes several in one week. Of course most assaults are never reported.


I have never seen a case against gay rights that was not animated by simple animus. The federal judiciary agrees that no one has been able to make one.


The evidence is clear on all of this. If you wish to disagree, you'll need an awfully good explanation for why everyone better informed and smarter than you is wrong. Good luck.


When you're in a biology class, yes it does. And those who subscribe to the young Earth notion must also deny important parts of physics, chemistry, geology, etc.



Wrong. Climate change is having real and serious consequences. right now. Ocean acidification is wrecking the coral reefs and other marine life. The Everglades are in huge trouble. Species' ranges and developmental lifecycles are being impacted, throwing a wrench into the complex system of interactions between them. There's no good way to predict what all the consequences will be in the long run, but we are already seeing some and it's bad.


Sure, thanks for making entirely unfounded (and, for the record, wrong) assumptions about where my priorities lie and what I do with my life.

OK, I don't care how bright his mind is. It doesn't matter who he is, what matters is what he did - and this is by no means good science.


Quite. I think those things are opinions that most feminists would hold, "even" in academia. Admittedly, I don't know about Native American issues, but it is certainly feminists who speak out loudest against female genital mutilation, women being second-class citizens in many Middle Eastern countries, rape and abuse across all ethnicities. Feminists generally acknowledge that men and women are not biologically identical (or else their philosophy would come crashing down) - indeed, the course I looked up above seemed to have a whole lecture dedicated to the fundamental biological differences between males and females generally and how that results in many of the differences between human men and women. Your final point seems to be little more than a straw man.
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I don't know about this.

Firstly, most Americans have very little idea what is happening on the other side of the country. You've only been to eight colleges and I'm sure you're an outlier.

I think you probably have a skewed view of how "left" these views are. Many of the views listed are either apolitical (Death of the Author, non-existence of God), objective facts ("in some important ways, America is worse than many countries", creationism, climate change, poverty causes crime), or not "left" opinions ("war is ignoble", "West Bank settlements are the cause of conflict"). These things aren't associated with distrust of authority or a desire for workers to seize ownership of businesses.

Furthermore, America is generally much further to the right than Europe, no matter how tightly you define "left" and "right". Your government is very small, not even providing basic services like universal healthcare or the free/cheap tuition that most Europeans enjoy. There's not even guaranteed paid parental leave which is pretty much Feminism 102 (after women's rights to own property, vote, choose a partner, avoid violence, get divorced, etc.). Are you saying that your academic left is unusually radical in order to "balance out" the relatively conservative, uneducated South which can block progress? If they're so good at brainwashing, why are you still electing huge numbers of Republicans and Democrats - even in hugely college educated states like Colorado, California, and Massachusetts?

Finally, I think you're doing college students generally a huge disservice. They're largely intelligent people. They generally have familiarity with the topics they choose to study. Again, I know your system is crazy and forces people to study things they're not interested in, but generally philosophy majors are going to have a good grasp on the subject anyway, and will be able to talk Kant and Aquinas as well as Mill and Hume. Even if they do have a particularly bad teacher, they've got access to an unprecedented amount of information, even without the internet. They can look things up for themselves. I've seen students correct the mistakes of tenured professors because they've been fact-checking everything as it is said (usually it's the improvised throwaways that get corrected, however). I know many American college students and they're a mixed bag, but I know several of them support Bernie Sanders but wish he'd change this or that policy for a more centrist one...

So nothing is true unless it's scientifically provable? Just out of curiosity, are you requiring of a study before you accept something you disagree with politically/emotionally? And do you not think that maybe you're prostituting your scientific credentials, to disqualify a non-scientific observation that forms the general consensus of students leaving college? Most college students just happened to arrive at these conclusions on their own during their 4-9 years of undergraduate work? And that virtually all graduate students, outside of the hard sciences, holding these views do so out of their own exploration outside of their schooling? Because that seems to be where you're leading to with your responses, that students don't hold these views as a result of their college education, and, if they do, it wasn't the product of their college education.



It's worse then opinion. It's dogma. Because you aren't allowed to critique those opinions without being told that you're creating a hostile work environment, which is their cover for "don't step on my beliefs." To say out loud "come on guys.. all men are rapists is perverted stupidity," inside of a womens/gender studies program will be met with harshly by not just your peers and faculty, but by the department and the greater school itself.

They don't speak out much against female genital mutilation because one of their most important victim groups, Muslims, would then be perceived in a negative light. You have feminists who do, but they're not only in the minority but ostracized for bringing shame to the good name of Islam.

And again, you're not from America so you don't know how bad it is over here... you can't challenge the notion that men and women aren't biologically the same.

My final point would only be a strawmen if dissenting voices were invited to academia without the need for trigger warnings, scaring people that they might have to hear an opinion they don't like, and establishing a "safe" space where they can go to if they lose self-control and behave rabidly from hearing opinions they don't agree with.

My experience isn't an outlier, it's actually the normative experience throughout the American academic landscape.



The non-existence of God is the base assumption underlying the Leftist worldview. I don't know whose death you're referring to.

Poverty causing crime is leftwing dogma, and stating America is worse then other countries is a tenant of faith. If poverty causes crime then affluence should increase moral behavior and decency, but that's not an argument the Left makes either. Climate Change is not objective fact because the climate has always changed and we don't know whether it'll continue to warm, and if that's of our doing, or whether it'll lead to world-ending disaster.

War being ignoble is as leftwing as it gets. Pacifism is the globally accepted solution/substitution, on the part of the Left, for war. War not only makes the state engage in violence, but drains money from social programs.

The world Left is virtually in lock-step in opposing not only Israel, but it's settlements in the West Bank.



So what? The Left can't evolve, it can't grow its body of thinking, beyond economics and power? It can't flesh out economics and power, to elucidate their fuller ramifications and societal reach.



The condition of our "State," used to be to the Right of Europe. Now, that's not no longer the case. We just don't enjoy free/cheap tuition and universal healthcare because we subsidize the military you're not paying for. We spend 8 billion dollars a year just to house troops and arms in Germany, not to mention the bases we have and the equipment it carries, that we have over in the European theater. So our economy is now really close to half-private activity and half state spending, in the neighborhood of Sweden and the UK.



I'm not saying that they're radical for that reason. I'm saying that to be a believer of the ideas of the Left, makes you rabid and destructive, the farther you are away from creating the heaven on earth you'd like to live in. We're still electing republicans because not everyone goes to college or are perverted by the Left-dominated culture. We're still electing democrats, because the Left still wants to appear "American," and need more time to finish converting a larger % of society in order to win uncontested control. Give it another 5 years, and these closet socialist/commies will be unapologetic about their true colors, with the policy positions to back up their beliefs.



Yeah I don't know. Outside of the hard sciences, intelligence tends to drop off rather severely, especially as you approach the liberal arts, especially the social sciences and the humanities. Look, Shakespeare isn't even standard required reading at many American Universities, including UCLA, because why require students to know the opinions of dead white Europeans... which would suggest that dead white Europeans produced better literature then other races. I don't even enjoy Shakespeare that much but no one can deny the brilliance of his/their work, or the timeless wisdom housed within it that goes unrivaled by most author(s).

But put aside the students, this is about the insular institution of higher education in America. There should be both sides of the argument presented to students, from non-biased teachers. This would happen more frequently if academia didn't only hire people who agree with their leftwing views.

Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiixed !

Our children.

I am undecided on this left though.

I need to give it more thought and would appreciate any feed back gentlemen.



Regards
DL