And yeah, you better believe conservatives are terrified that their own kids might have kernels of liberal beliefs, ready to be nurtured by leftist professors. That's why they are afraid to send them to college at all. Kids are impressionable like that, and idiots are afraid that their kids might grow up to be different than themselves.

"Send your kids to trade school!"

I'll say it again: yes, the general political opinions skew left. However, this does not mean much for conservatives in academia. The assertion keeps being brought up that because more people are left-leaning, there's pressure against conservative ideas. Of course there are incidences of this, but I really disagree that the general leftist sentiment translates into a culture *against* conservative scholarship. This is where I'm disagreeing, you seem to think people can't get published or hired if they're conservative, that there's some legitimate systemic bias against these people, and I'm saying it's all self-selection. Conservatives simply don't care about gender or ____, so they don't study those topics. Nobody is stopping them from going in and writing good, scholarly work contradicting these things.

What's unnerving to many left-leaning people is now conservatives seem to want to censor these fields rather than engage in them critically. So long as your narrative is that conservative ideas on gender are blocked from academia, it feels fuzzier and easier to agree with than "conservatives don't like these ideas but don't want to read enough to write a decent response".

If you think this isn't a relevant concern, countries like Hungary are legitimately trying to censor gender studies.

OK, I think I understand how you are defining "university culture". By culture you mean something that is rigidly enforced. I just assumed you were talking about trends in beliefs.

I never said that no culture exists in general, I was saying was no culture of doctrination exists.

Doctrination isn't when people self-select to hang out and agree on things.

At any rate, why would a conservative want to spend their life becoming a professor of Women's Studies anyway?

The problem with academics like Reid is that that their language lacks referential transparency, making it impossible for them to be wrong so long as they privately define their terms in a way that can never be inconsistent. It would be nice next time if you tell is what you mean with this ultra concise language.

Okay, I think we have come to an understanding then. Yeah, there's a culture of general leftist sentiment due to more people having left-wing beliefs, sure.

Incidentally in an earlier post (that was ignored) I made the very same distinction he ended up making. (The one I made about NASCAR on the previous page of this thread.)

Smart people club intolerant to retards?? But then how do you explain.

You keep saying this, and I'm really tempted to ask you what "radical views" is to you.

.

To be fair, this is kind of a lie. Conservatives do care alot about gender. Like a massive amount. But only the particular notions they feel are right to have about gender.

Anything that conservatives would find sufficiently left of center, including many things I would agree with (since I am not a conservative), and many more I would cringe at.

There is no shortage of poorly thought out but extremely expressed ideas on the left and the right.

The seeming ridiculousness and weakness of students+university administration behavior in this incident comes to mind, but I only have a passing familiarity with the events so I can't say what really happened here.

At lot of campus politics are exceedingly silly, petty, and founded in some bizarre worldviews.

As opposed to liberals who think charitably about the views that conservatives hold about gender?

You don't think that liberals who think about gender have arrived at normative views about gender, and judge other people's views according to those norms?

"Weinstein says he was told that campus police could not protect him and that they encouraged him not to be on campus"

N.B. what this means: "we can't protect you" doesn't mean "oh my god the horde is so wild we can't stop them", it means "we can't reasonably protect you against anything people might do so we can't guarantee anything, so now you can't sue us if you get shot". People tend to hear that kind of phrasing as more than what it is. The encouragment to not be on campus was probably that he admitted concern.

In other words, I think it's easy to imagine there was a greater threat to him than there really was by using phrasing and framing the situation in a certain way.

Well I wasn't going to be so bold, but.

Why was he asked to leave again?

Nah, to be clear: I think the whole "leave day" thing was stupid. I just don't buy into the notion that he was in serious danger.

It's kind of preposterous that you assert that liberals are tolerant of conservative views and while you're this intolerant and dismissive of conservative views.

And was it right for students to verbally threaten and harass him?

Note that I was responding to Xzero.

Just so we’re all on the same page, here are some of the things conservatives think are sufficiently left of center in 2018:

- Universal suffrage
- Interracial marriage
- Desegregation
- Marital rape
- Carbon dioxide
- That it’s rape even if she gets pregnant

And that's really the crux of the problem here, isn't it? What is political discourse going to look like in a country where the only mainstream political opposition is even more radical than your own party (in the opposite direction)?

Like bullets

If there were legitimate opposition to the left in the United States instead of the reactionaries we are stuck with, then Reid could have been addressing their legitimate critiques of the excesses of the left, in contrast to the situation we have today, where the opposition is so laughably immoral and and anti-intellectual that he is free to split hairs enough times that pretty much any serious criticism of the actions and ideas of people identifying as leftist, by comparison, look more like rounding errors, and he can shrug it off and continue with his loyalty tests.

My problem with this is: where does it stop? If you give an inch to "conservative demands", I'm pretty sure they're just going to ask for more. And given that many influencers on the right are acting on sinister motives, they'll probably take us all the way to hell before they give up.

I'd be more inclined to listen to a very select group of moderate conservatives, who make intelligent critiques, and just ignore the loudmouths and wannabe fascists. The funny thing is, though, that such "moderate conservatives" are, more and more, not seen as conservatives at all by those on the right (in fact, the very existence of writers who identify conservative but are not radical reactionaries is infuriating to the now-mainstream far right conservative movement, to the point that such writers are publicly tarred and feathered on the blogs, social media, AM radio, where they are denigrated as "RINO's", phony conservatives, etc.).

But hey, it's more convenient to pretend that all conservatives are pure evil (since it's partly true).

Yeah, this is exactly what I believe, too, I actually try my best to censor conservatives in all shapes and forms.

It's worth remembering, though, that dividing American politics up in to left and right is nothing more than a heuristic. The divide isn't quite so black and white.

There are people who identify as being "on the left" who are critical of current trends that are happening on the left (I mean, you and I surely are not the only ones?). You can look at someone like Jonathan Chait, for instance, who can sometimes seem someone who's only a critic of certain leftist trends because he has effectively remained an Obama-era Democrat and a liberal (in the European sense of the word) while the party has moved further to the left. There are intramural debates that are happening, but they're not having the constraining effect on politics that one would hope that such discourse would have. I think that's in part because Democrats have decided that decorum in politics is nothing but a liability.



A similar trend is happening on the left. Just look at how the label "centrist" has become a term of censure amongst many on the left. Many on the left call others on the left "centrists" in order to mark them as a sham leftist/liberal.

I'm not saying that to say, "look, the left does it too!" I'm just trying to draw an analogy. From you own position, as someone who identifies with the left, when someone else marks someone as a traitor to the left or as ideologically mistaken it doesn't really speak highly of the person who's throwing the label around, and it doesn't really make you identify any less with the left, or make you identify any more with the right. I think you can assume that moderate conservatives probably feel the same way when someone like Lindsay Graham or Ben Sasse is called a RINO.

Here's the thing that just kills me.

Why does it matter one ****ing iota whether someone identifies as a conservative or a left or a liberal or a socialist or a communist or whatever?

If someone's views are worth taking seriously, take them seriously. If they're not serious, then don't take them seriously. It's wildly evident that people can believe preposterous things and be driven by motivated reasoning no matter how they identify. You can read an opinion piece on the WSJ and it will be full of motivated reasoning, untruths, and grave errors of omission. But the same thing is is true of the NYT. It's pretty clear to me that wearing a jersey just doesn't mean **** about how likely you are to be saying something that's true or not.

I admire your bravery hazarding to say that sarcastically.

Reading Eversor's posts, it strikes me just how individualistic his attitude toward politics is. In fact it suggests to me that Americans are not nearly as individualistic in their beliefs (when it comes to politics) as they famously claim to be in all things. Perhaps Eversor you have been away from the United States long enough that you are simply too intelligent to be understood by subscribers to the prevailing ideologies of the day.

This is genuinely the funniest post anyone has posted here in a long time

By the way, I had thought to mention that I actually wasn't attempting to compare Eversor to anybody on this board, but to American political discourse as a whole. Since he has been living abroad, it's possible that his attitudes have drifted to conform with the level of discourse in democracies outside the United States.

But it's abundantly clear by now (even without the childish memes) that you don't lend too much credibility to the kind of attitudes his disposition lends itself to.

In other words, in your cartoon, the people drowning in their own piss and **** are Americans, and braniac is representative of the folks living in places like Canada and Israel.

Don't think I'm presuming Americans were born this way. It's only on account of an implicit divide-and-conquer dynamic which is entailed by the momentum carried by the two-party system, by which we are kept divided, ignorant, and without access to adequate representation or even language to acknowledge, let alone solve, the structural problems facing our democracy.

That said, this remark certainly leaves me wide open to satire, since I am certain that though the grass may always appear greener (as they say), surely things aren't entirely peachy in the two democracies I listed either.

Come to think of it, Canada and Israel both do have one feature in common that I really admire, that the US lacks. They both have a culture of comprehensive national identity which individuals throughout the political spectrum are able to identify with. Canada has all sorts of symbols and institutions —whether it’s hockey or Tim Horton’s or even just the maple leaf - that are seen as cornerstones of Canadian identity. Similarly, in Israel, I see protests against the right-wing government where left-wing protesters bring the Israeli flag. It’s as if the protesters are saying that the right doesn’t get to define what the flag means. The left in the US doesn’t really do that as much. The American left has, to some extent, surrendered patriotism to the right (never mind that the right has become increasingly less patriotic since the Obama administration began).

That being said, if living abroad has done anything to my political perspective, I think it’s just made me take for granted that there are multiple ways of looking at the world, and made me kind of skeptical of assumptions that I had about the world based on living in the US alone. And living in multiple countries abroad rather than only one added something too. They complemented each other in all sorts of ways. For example, Canada and Israel also contrast with each other in all sorts of ways. Canada is a profoundly anti-American country. When I lived there, I thought I was getting a more true perspective about the US than was available to people who actually live in the US, largely because cynicism often has the ring of truth to it. But Israel is a profoundly pro-American country. Living in Israel made me see the more idealistic side of how America’s reputation is projected abroad. It’s not that one is right and the other is wrong. Just different perspectives that exist in different places throughout the world, representing two sides of America’s global image.