1801

To an extent, I do agree, however it’s not the whacky ideas that the youth are coming up with for themselves that’s the problem. e.g. in the 60s the whacky ideas were bubbling up in opposition to a more staid, establishment university system. Nowadays, the whacky ideas are entrenched in the Univerities themselves, and whatever opposition is against the University establishment, it’s more in the nature of purging the old guard for not being whacky enough.

There’s a long history to this. It starts with Lenin’s essay on “Imperialism” as a response to the predictive failure of Communist doctrine at the turn of the century, and Gramsci’s farsighted musings in the 1920s. It continues with the split of the Left during the 30s and 40s into the three major factions of Communism (the old internationalist socialism), Fascism (nationalist socialism, socialism in one country, a socialism of the Right, taking advantage of already-existing nativist sentiment as its people-moving motor, as opposed to the non-existent internationalist class solidarity of Communist mythology), and the kind of Social Democracy that’s grudgingly accepting of capitalism, but just wants to milk it to benefit the poor and disadvantaged.

It continues with the re-tooling of Communist ideology by the Frankfurt school in the late 50s and early 60s, as a response to the no-longer-ignorable failure of Communism after Khruschev’s secret speech about Stalin (i.e. before that, it was possible to do William Seabrook-style cheerleading of Soviet Russia, after that, no longer possible), it continues with the American New Left boomers (formerly the whacky upstarts, now the whacky establishment) in their partial response to the events in the Sixties (both Vietnam as a failure of the West, and things like Prague, etc., as continuing evidence of failures of Communism). It continues with the importation of Frankfurt school ideology to the US, its crossing streams with the strains of mainly French philosophical nihilism (Sartre, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lacan, Badiou, etc.), and continues on down to the rise of “grievance-based” politics, and more latterly ideas like “intersectionalism”.

Perhaps because I’m a former socialist myself, I’ve always cherished the luxuriant garden of whacky Left-wing ideology and maintained an interest in following its twisty path down the decades. That’s why I can tell you straight up that the lunatics are now thoroughly in charge of the asylum. The social sciences and humanities are now rotten with quasi-religious ideological twaddle.

1802

But are universities actually like that? We’ve already seen that the trigger-warning panic is completely overblown and that 99.8% (or whatever) of courses do not have issues with students freaking out over content, so perhaps your deep fears of Marxist-feminist domination of education are a little exaggerated.

1803

Yes, yes, my “deep fears” come from the stain of evil on my soul. You’ve spotted it. Well done. Here’s a “Heresy Hunter” badge.

1804

My god, I saw a young lady wearing pants, and another wanting to become a Doctor. These changes will cause the ruin of society I tell you.

1805

Hillary is late to the party, as always. She sees an opportunity to get votes. I doubt her sincerity.

However, the issues she’s talking about are legitimate issues. In my opinion, police brutality, gender bias, LGBT rights, these are all important fights that need to continue to be fought. We’ve made a great deal of progress on many of these things recently, LGBT rights in particular, but there’s a lot more to do. But there’s a difference between believing that Black Lives Matter and advocating for censorship over jiggly tits in a video game. One is a serious issue, the other is nonsense.

The best defense against SJWs is to simply ignore them. They’re narcissists, they crave attention and validation. When they don’t get enough of it, they scream and cry about how unfair the world is. They’re right when they say they’re powerless, but it’s not because they’re some repressed minority. It’s because they’re children throwing tantrums. Adults learn very quickly that you don’t validate a tantrum with attention or anger, you calmly ignore it and wait until it’s over.

1806

Surely I did not call you either heretical or evil? I am not sure how you get to that.

I’m saying you read some articles and generalized them to all universities all the time (like pwk did with trigger warnings and safe spaces), even though it’s almost certainly not the case (conspiracy theories tend to jump off from bad assumptions and leaps of logic).

Like with gamergate there were the infamous gamers are dead coordinated media article blitz which turned out to be bunk but was nonetheless inflated by gg supporters to be a feminist conspiracy to destroy them and an existential threat to all gamers.

When you are hip deep in a “movement” that kind of thing can seem very persuasive even if it’s 99% bullshit. I guess what I am saying is, be objective and skeptical; extraordinary claims like radical feminists are dominating all US universities do require some extraordinary proof (like if you claimed we had been visited by aliens or ghosts were real or the moon landings were a hoax; you really need to back that up big time and stand up to scrutiny without you melting down and screaming that everyone who disagrees with you is part of the conspiracy).

1807

Most aren’t outside of a few professors and students with outsized influence. Generally you see more of it at liberal arts schools instead of enginerring schools.

1808

Won’t someone please think of the liberal arts majors??

1809

How often do you follow your own advice?

1810

“The sky isn’t falling” is not an extraordinary claim.

1811

I am not the one positing conspiracies nor am I the one afflicted by a cassandra complex. But I suppose at this point you just see me as an agent of the impending Feminocracy.

1812

It can be. I’ll give you an example: global warming isn’t anthropogenic.

1813

On the contrary, “global warming is anthropogenic” is the extraordinary claim. And it’s supported by extraordinary evidence.

1814

Neither am I.

1815

Well then it’s hard to understand what you are afraid of; your quasi-religious ideology that is supposedly exerting control over our lives (or even over “most universities”) is not in evidence, so it’s either a conspiracy or it’s not happening at all. Secondly if you are saying it’s in the FUTURE, the marxist-feminists who wield no power and control nothing will eventually take control (like communism!!), then that is covered by your Cassandra complex, where you are predicting a dark future that is completely implausible so nobody believes you.

If it’s any comfort though, Cassandra was right.

1816

I disagree. Anthropogenic climate change is widely accepted. To deny it - or to say the sky isn’t falling - has become the extraordinary claim. Just look at the ridicule leveled at the skeptics.

I guess it depends on how you choose to look at the statement “the sky isn’t falling”.

1817

But that’s because there is extraordinary evidence to show it’s happening. To say it’s not is to go against that mountain of evidence.

Even in that case though, the sky is falling really quite slowly. Feminists are clearly a more imminent existential threat ;)

1818

Which doesn’t matter. If your house is on fire,who cares if it was lightning or your neighbor, you fix it.

1819

You seem to be equating “extraordinary” with “wrong”. But sometimes the truth is extraordinary, and it’s ordinary intuition that’s wrong.

A single paper arguing for anthropogenic climate change would likely have been dismissed. It is indeed an extraordinary claim, running counter to our intuition. But we got a lot more than a single paper, and they nearly all pointed the same way.

1820

Wow, I didn’t think this thread could become worse but a climate change denier debate managed it.