Happily agreed!

Good! Very happy about that.

Reid, are you interested in an Eversor-Reid reset? Put an end to a lot of the combativeness and the sparring that happens between us? Have more conversations that are more open, try not to insult each other for each other's opinions, and try to do a better job handling misunderstandings?

I'm down for a Krokodile-saberopus reset

Only if it's the 'forget we ever knew each other' kind of reset. :angry: :frown:

so we can relive the thrill of meeting for the first time <3

Shame and aggressiveness play a very important role in human society.

You shame people who fall out of line and do wrong things. It's so common in primates that these sort of societal structures virtually what define the order. And more broadly speaking, I think you underestimate the capabilities and importance of civil discussion. I don't think it can achieve the ends you seem to think it does.

You see, politics isn't where people get together and hash out differences to come to a conclusion for the better of us all. Politics is more like a power struggle. Class struggle, ethnic struggle, geographical struggle, they're all part of it, and it's all really complicated, but politics simply don't work based on discussion, politics work on who holds power.

Which is why I find discussions about college campuses so disturbing. I don't think anyone here actually supports people acting stupid on college campuses. The problem I have is the specifically manufactured set of images and outrage culture on the right, that's exists teleologically to suppress left-wing thoughts in culture at large. However, like government regulation, there are many things where it's much easier to see and reproduce images of things which happen rather than things that don't, so people overestimate how often things happen.

It's exactly like violent crime. The rise of 24/7 news channels gives people the impression that violent crime is increasing, because the hyperreal nature of video makes it easy to loop back and repeat images. But it stands in contradiction to base fact, which is that violent crime is very low. It's 100% the same with universities. There are a few nasty events, which get reproduced and pushed far and wide to present a wholly unrepresentative narrative. And the teleology of this narrative is one that's not dissimilar to the messages the Nazis pushed about Jewish indoctrination in German academia.

Despite just giving an argument against what I'm about to do, I'm fine resetting the clock and being more civil. We can definitely do more to get along better.

Re this:



That the left is subverting academia to indoctrinate the youth in left-wing thought.

I don't know if you remember, but like 4-5 years ago I was sort of into the whole "universities are dominated by feminist totalitarians and that's so awful!" thing. I remember making a thread and complaining about it.

Then I worked my ass off to get through school. After actually spending time in universities, and getting to know people, and having spent time having dialogues with the sort of person I thought was awful, I realized the narratives I had been told were a dramatic overstatement of the reality around me. I never once was told to check my privilege, I never once ran into anyone who did or said anything about my race or gender, and learned quite a bit about the different struggles of people with different backgrounds.

I've also spoke negatively to people I know about their struggles. After Trump was elected, some people I know decided to go protest his election. In southern California. I told them straight up that I felt it was a waste of time, that the protest had no goal and wouldn't accomplish anything, and that there were more effective forms of activism one could do. And I wasn't shunned, or had anything bad happen.

The more I experience academia, frankly, the more I realize the people who experience the most trouble are people with completely stupid, ****ty arguments that they refuse to acknowledge the weakness of, or are intentionally controversial, vacuous thinkers who simply want to agitate people. And yes, that counts liberals too.

So I guess what I mean is, I feel my social understanding was shaped by my experiences with academic life through the very context of conservative hysteria about campuses, so I feel agitated when I feel someone makes broad accusatory statements about universities that are not in line with my lived experiences.

That's good; I'm glad to hear it. Whatever philosophical differences we have about the nature of political discourse (and I very much disagree with what you said), I hope that can avoid making it personal and argue in good faith.

Re: Jordan Peterson and the gender thing. I've had quite a few good conversations about gender. I've argued before that gender essentialism (i.e., besides the physical manifestations of our bodies, that there exists some kind of ethereal gender that's actually ours), in context of skepticism against trans people. I don't really think it makes sense, that if the binary between male and female is too restrictive, that turning it into a gradient or some other geometric interpretation even makes sense. That people are still thinking in terms of essence, that we all have a "true" self that just needs some time to work out. And I argued that this pursuit of "true gender" is therefore not a worthwhile pursuit. To transgender people.

And again, I had counterarguments, but never was I treated poorly or made to feel bad for arguing against people's entire apparatus of thought about gender, who were trans. I guess because I put enough time into thinking about it, and was respectful, and didn't make broad, stupid assertions about beliefs that I didn't understand, that maybe it was fine. Not sure why, but I've never found myself getting into controversial engagements with these sorts of people.

OTOH, I did get into a yelling match with a conservative friend once about definition, who insisted all words must be defined in a debate before they can be used. I told them that's a stupid notion, and that we can't accurately define even trivial words like "white" or "and" sufficiently. He got pretty upset when he was unable to do that. So I guess I am at odds with conservative people more, but that's often because they tend to shut the debate down before I can bring them to be skeptical enough of their beliefs to really bring about any change in understanding.

My lived experiences may differ from yours quite a bit, then. I spent almost a decade on university campuses, and watched, at various institutions, as the nature of discourse on campuses changed significantly. It became narrower, and students seemed to have more settled orthodoxies that made learning, as I understood it, impossible. For me, the experience of studying the humanities -- and, subsequently, learning -- had everything to do with being exposed to perspectives that had almost nothing to do with my own world view, and that seemed deeply counter-intuitive to me, and trying to understand why those perspectives were compelling, or even obvious, and natural, to the people who the advocated them. It meant bracketing any beliefs that I may have had, and considering world views that clashed and were deeply opposed to my own.

I came away from that thinking that that is what a liberal education is, and that is what a liberal education is supposed to do: it's supposed to make you think thoughts that aren't your own, and, in doing so, expand your understanding of what humanity is. The presupposition of a liberal education is that reading works of literature and philosophy is to experience something both universal and deeply personal: great works of literature render in poetic imagery and in prose aspects of what it means to be human that have shaped the lives of people all over the world at different times in history, but that individuals can also find in their own personal lives. But being able to appreciate that requires a willingness to go outside yourself, and to engage with something foreign. I become really frustrated, then, when I increasingly see students approach material with contempt, when it didn't conform to their prejudices, or reflect their sensibilities (really, their political opinions). Over the years, I've seen more and more cynicism when it comes to what students think is and isn't worthy of students' attention. Those students are being robbed, I think, of a liberal education, and that makes me sad, for their sake.

Yeah, I guess I disagree with this pretty strongly here. To my mind, that sort of naked conflict and struggle for power isn't politics at all, but rather, precisely the boundary at which the sphere of politics ends. The competition for power so you can vanquish and annihilate another person, and so that they can no longer impose a limit on your will and your desires, is precisely what politics was invented to avoid. Politics is a system that has to do with the legitimate dispensation and use of power, and that requires speech, cooperation, and, at times, deference to others. Which isn't to say that violence and competition for power aren't unavoidable parts of life. It's just to they that they aren't politics. And not only are they not a manifestation of politics, they're a threat to politics.

But, whatever, I think about this like an Arendtian.

So, to give a more concrete example: if the GOP gerrymanders states and rolls back voting rights, the party isn't engaging in politics. Very far from being politics, such activity actually producing the circumstances where politics can no longer exist. It's tyranny; it's rule which is secured through manipulation and through destroying the possibility of being opposed. I don't know what it would mean to say that that sort of thing is political. If politics comprises annihilating your enemies, then animals are political when they slaughter each other for food. If that's what politics means, then it's difficult to imagine what would distinguish politics from other non-political aspects of life.

I think one source of conflict at universities is the question of whether or not students should be engaging in learning or activism. The two are really not compatible at all, but the Vietnam War inexorably made activism a core component of university life.

That is a little uncomfortable to contemplate, but still a red herring in my mind when you consider what Jon`C said about the Overton window being shifted by more and more insane generations of conservatives, who increasingly look like whiny little fascist children who can't justify their own increasingly wrong ideas and get angry about it.

That leaves very little which can be accurately described as politics, and what is left would be mere formalism.

thats a good ****in movie

One of my favorites

How so (especially the formalism part)?

True

Hahahaha

http://babylonbee.com/news/trump-merely-sharing-gospel-porn-star-explains-jim-bakker/



That's.. amazing.

Oh, woah. It's satire. Well... fooled me.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/labor-unions-job-report-density-job-report

Here's a reminder that union membership disproportionally benefits women and minority races. Here's also a reminder that the Democrats undervalue the role of labor struggle in their politics.

Do you have a theory as to what caused this shift? The recession, decline of the middle class, etc..? Identifying the root causes of a shift seems important.

I also can't testify as to what universities were like that long ago, so I'm useless there.

I would really, really recommend reading a book like "Selling Free Enterprise" by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf. It's not a crazy left-wing work, or some kind of propaganda, it's a neutral-sounding history of the development of unions and labor from 1945-1960.

That period was a good period for labor. But it was also a period of shift in the tactics of the powerful and wealthy. It's the kind of book that will shape your understanding of how you see American politics, because the reality of how those decades went down truly is cynical. The people with money and power, they themselves are super cynical. Their goal is to acquire for themselves, at the expense of everyone else. They don't care about "America", they care about having for themselves. And it's not a secret, like, this book talks about it, and it's all there in history, in documents. This stuff can be seen, that there is an active, horrifyingly relentless class war that is waged on Americans daily.

Sometimes the people on that side are honest about it:



Warren was wrong, because the war was going on long before that.

The problem with American society isn't some philosophical essence we have about who we are. The reason we tend to believe in a sort of Protestant individualism is because people with power want to prevent collective action. And the way you do that is by making people feel they have to go at it alone. And there's lots of plain, open historical evidence to support these ideas.

It's been a successful campaign run by the elites to con Americans into thinking it's all just Marxist conspiracy theory. Which is how most Americans tend to perceive this story. But the more you look into the historical works, the more apparent it becomes.

Because the issues most Americans care about will fall into that realm of a-political things rather than political things. Most Americans don't care about the exact amount of money congress allots to each part of the federal government, but they do care about whether they can actually vote.

In other words, politics is a dirty game. It's always been dirty, and the game's always been rigged (granted, to varying degrees). That's why I don't think talks and peaceful negotiations with the far right works: they aren't playing that game.

True that. That's one thing the right doesn't seem to recognize, though: these ""thinkers"" the right keeps harassing campuses with, aren't genuine, they aren't there in good faith. Okay, maybe some, but many are simply there to bodycheck to Overton window.

I.E. Ben "bite-sized" Shapiro, Milo.



Never thought about this. The corollary would seem to be that university professors are, on average, younger (or, professors would be older, but people doing the jobs traditionally filled by professors would be younger).



Sounds about right.



Yeah, like you discussed previously with Koch anti-education and Mike Rowe bull. Mike Rowe, the special snowflake theater arts graduate, who never worked a hard day in his life, who goes around to tell people "there are no bad jobs" and to advocate for low-skill labor at abysmal wages.

I'm glad I found someone else who identifies the ideology behind Mike Rowe's shtick, many people seem defensive or otherwise uncritical of the views he espouses.

**** it, I'll just say it: basically 90% of everything conservatives believe comes from some propaganda outlet directly tied to this sort of political/money backing. I guess they don't have the ability to work through ideology and think a bit more for themselves, or something.

To be fair to Mike Rowe, I don't think he understands what's happening. I think he's in a bubble. I think he's professionally dealt with a lot of low skill employers who shared the same hiring sob story, but never had a genuine interaction with someone who actually works for them. Employers give him a curated experience; they're trying to put their best food forward, they don't want to show anything embarrassing on TV, and their employees are under implicit threat of firing should they ever give TV host Mike Rowe a reason why people shouldn't work for them. That means Mike Rowe has never heard of the guy who had to quit and move away, never heard from the guy who got fired because he wanted to unionize, never heard from the woman who's on food stamps even though she works full time.

I also think Mike Rowe has crawled up his own ass a bit. Dirty Jobs purported to glorify gross jobs that need doing, as though the only reason more people don't do that work is because they've never heard of the job, or because they think the job is disgusting. And I think Mike Rowe actually believes that those are the only reasons people don't want to do those jobs, that the economics and the people don't matter. But they do matter. I've worked dirty jobs, and the things that always mattered most to me were pay and whether my boss was a ****head. In that order. Past that, it didn't really matter whether I was scrubbing tile, picking up trash, or hand-bombing cement. You turn your brain off, and it's all the same.

I also think he was a tad star-struck when the Koch brothers ascended from their eternal thrones of hell, presenting their true forms as flame-wreathed hellfiends, and paid him equal weights of Judas Iscariot's silver and the stolen gold fillings of holocaust victims to convince America's youth to surrender themselves to the oblivion of mindless minimum wage work.

Yeah. Also, liberals. The real problem isn't what you believe socially, it's what you believe economically. That's why conservative brainwashers had to make capitalism a social issue, to make it compatible with Christianity and traditional family values which would otherwise deem it repugnant. Liberals just don't think about economics at all. They think they do, but they don't. So you get this situation where conservatives can't disentangle their moral position from economic liberalism, where every tweak and correction is impugned as theft or worse; liberals are mostly consumed by ensuring that labor is exploited by a sufficiently diverse oligarchy, to pretend that this engine isn't powered by persecution; and every single real issue is left by the wayside.

Mike Rowe... Mike Rowe... I remember him, he's the guy who started MikeRoweSoft.com and got a free Xbox.

Sure, identifying the causes of a phenomenon is valuable. But one doesn't need to know the causes of a phenomenon in order to acknowledge that it happens. Not having a theory why something happens doesn't make a phenomenon any less real.



My contention was never that there isn't class conflict, or that it doesn’t happen. My contention was that class conflict, and other forms of conflict where people compete for power by destroying the conditions that make it possible for their opponents to compete with them, isn't the definitive example of political conflict. I might go as far as to say that class conflict isn’t political conflict at all, in fact, but rather, social conflict.

The question I was posing is, what is politics? And no, by posing that question, I'm not trying to initiate a semantic debate. The question has nothing to do with what we mean when we use this word, and what phenomena do people intend to demarcate by it. In fact, to the contrary, people do use the word politics to refer to class conflict in common usage. No: to the contrary, i'm trying to have a philosophical discussion here, because I thought you made an interesting philosophical argument when you said that, effectively, warfare is politics par excellence, or, in other words, warfare most fully embodies what politics is. (Or that what most fully characterizes politics is winner-take-all conflict over power between different groups.)

I know you've written a lot already and we're all adults here with other **** to do. But "read this book and you'd agree with me" or "this is what historians say" isn't a very compelling argument. I wouldn't mind hearing from you what that book says, but, as I said, we’re all busy, so I don’t want to saddle you with work. But I also take your point that, during the period, the wealthy and powerful didn't even try to conceal that they were engaged in class warfare.



Yeah, this may be a point where we're not going to find much common ground. I'm not persuaded by the Marxian idea that all ideology is designed by the ruling economic classes to make subordinate classes serve the economic interests of the ruling classes unwittingly, leading them to believe that they're pursuing their own interests when in fact they're pursuing those of the ruling economic classes. Sure, it does happen, and there's plenty of propanganda out there in our media that is designed to subtly persuade people into believing things that do benefit the dominant economic classes within society. But there are also ideas that shape who we are and how we understand ourselves that don’t fit that mold, and I’d say that rugged individualism is one of them. I think Americans still haven’t escaped the influence of the religious traditions of our founders, and the collective historical experience of being a settler nation. But I doubt either of us will get very far convincing the other on this subject, because it seems to be a debate about first principles.



In terms of correlating demographic traits that professors generally fall into with being liberal, here’s another one: the more advanced degrees a person has, the more likely a person is to be liberal. Being a professor these days effectively guarantees that you have an advanced degree, so it’s really no surprise that so many professors self-identify as liberal.

As Stephen Colbert said, reality has a well known liberal bias.

Damn, I didn't realize he coined that phrase before. The man deserves to be compared to Mark Twain.

IIRC, he said it to George Bush's face during the White House correspondence dinner, just after a rant on truthiness and WMD's. Ballsy.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article195678009.html

Barf

https://i.imgur.com/KP21Ctg.png

Hmmm

If your fanbase continually turns out to be literal Nazis, it's time to rethink the kind of platform you advocate. Or at least begin pondering why that happens.

lol. refusing audits because you're "resisting the banking system".

Literally guilt by association.

Edit: nm, shouldn't have skimmed the last bit where you softened it up a bit. I agree that he should think about why he is attracting their support.