Der Trihs says many things I agree with from time to time. The problem is he sometimes says things as quoted in the OP. Also, he has difficulty, in my view, separating the responsbility of the population of a country with the responsibility of the government. It’s true to an extent that a democratic country gets the government it deserves. But there is often a large disconnect between the wishes of the population and the actual policies put into place. There are certainly innumerable examples where the public is buried in an avalanche of propaganda and thus could be labeled ignorant or irrational but, on the whole, you’d have to lay the blame at the government and the media apparatus that serves them, not the population itself.
Besides Der Trihs, if the U.S. sunk into the ocean I wouldn’t have a place to put all my stuff.
I thought about mentioning Fu Manchu. But that was a long time ago. I live in the Bay Area, so I’m pretty much up on this stuff. I can go into the tensions between the older, white, residents of the area and the newer immigrants who work in Silicon Valley and have lots of money. There is some degree of prejudice on both sides.
But I happen to live only a few blocks where a young Afghan mother got shot and killed for no reason at all that anyone can figure out except that she was dressed differently. They have the suspect, but I haven’t heard any other motive - there was no connection. So I think I’m going to have to go with the position that Arab-looking people still have it worse - right now, anyway.
You can guarantee that a thread like this won’t go for more than a page before some moron connects anti-Americanism and college campuses.
Of course, for many such morons, anti-Americanism encompasses anyone who shows the slightest willingness to accept that America might, in fact, bear some responsibility for the world’s problems.
While Der Trihs’ loud anti-American statements really put me off at first, I’ve found myself agreeing with him on a few things lately. Here’s to hoping that the guy is branching out.
I think you’re reading way too much into athela’s post. I didn’t see it as a knee-jerk equating of “liberal” and “anti-American”-- just that DT’s type of knee-jerk anti-Americanism is often found on college campuses. You left out the part of the post that referred to “the tiny fringe of the far left”. Note: tiny fringe.
Hey, moron, when did i (or anyone else, for that matter) say the US was “responsible for the world’s problems as a whole”? If i lost you, it’s probably because you were too slow to keep up.
In my experience, people who equate college campuses with knee-jerk anti-Americanism often equate liberalism in general with anti-Americanism. It’s not that unreflective anti-Americanism doesn’t exist at all on college campuses; it’s just that it’s nowhere near as prevalent as the constant complaints about it imply. Sure, the term “tiny fringe” was used, but the sentence about hearing this sort of thing “quite frequently” on college campuses is right in line with knee-jerk assholes who see nothing but anti-American hysteria on campuses. I just get a little sick of the trope, is all.
Also, to the extent that anti-Americanism (whatever the hell that is, anyway) exists on campuses, it’s often not knee-jerk at all, but the result of deeply held and closely considered convictions and ideals. In my experience, those who feel the need to bring up college campuses for no reason in debates like this, and to complain about “blame-America-first blather,” tend to be of the “blame-America-never” school of “thought.”
**hijack] That guy, according to his multiple past crimes, was mentally ill. Yes, he could have done it just because she was dressed that way, but I don’t think so, Just my HO.[end hijack]
Well, I’ll let athelas defend himself/herself on this, but there was not an attempt to **equate **college campuses with blame-America-first types, only a statement that you can often find that on college campuses, which I think is about right.
But what purpose did that serve, in the context of this thread? It’s nothing but a cheap shot. You can also find a bunch of reactionary Christian zealots on a bunch of college campuses. So fucking what?
Yes, deeply held and closely considered convictions and ideals engendered by the overwhelmingly liberal college environment that prevails in this country?
Just wondering, you know…given that one rarely encounters these impassioned convictions and ideals among your typical high school population.
An inaccurate meme, indeed. My guess is that it’s merely born of the observation that one rarely hears anything positive about America coming from liberalism.
I am heartened, however, to see that the U.S. college system is beginning to come under scrutiny for having become the hotbed of liberal indoctrination that it has become over the last forty or fifty years. For the longest time I blamed the media and Hollywood for the ever-increasing percentage of the population adopting the liberal mindset, never realizing that their influence was minimal at best and that the real damage was being done quietly and stealthily throughout this country’s college and university system.
I’m heartened also by the fact that this county’s populace is more hip to this kind of thing than I for the longest time thought. Liberal media influence and liberal Hollywood influence have virtually evaporated now that their bias has finally been recognized for what it is, and now perhaps the same will begin to occur once the bright light of day begins to shine on the bias that exists in this country’s college system.
Indeed. It’s almost as though they were never that prevalent or influential to begin with, but rather ludicrously exaggerated!
I share your vision of a bright future where our educational landscape is choked with Bob Jonesesque universities, and right-thinking parents will finally have the choice of whether to send their doe-eyed progeny to the America-hating, liberal indoctrination school, or to the fair, balanced campus where the real truth is bequeathed.
Yes, because as we all know, those are the only two alternatives. :rolleyes:
Oh, wait!
Perhaps one bright, shining day colleges will simply be content to teach things like math, science, engineering, et. al and leave political indoctrination to others.
You act like it’s only right and good that college be a place where people go to be indoctrinated to politics, and the only question is which philosophy will be espoused. Where the hell is it written that it’s a college’s job to indoctrinate it’s students to a particular political view to begin with?
Of course, we all know that it isn’t. It’s just that college professors over the last forty or fifty years have been overwhelmingly liberal in their politics, and given that people of college age are ripe both emotionally and intellectually to succumb to anti-establishment rabble-rousing, what better time to indocrinate them into good little lefties with “deeply held and closely considered [liberal] convictions and ideals”.
I’d much prefer to let parents, life experience and common sense determine an individual’s political philosophy myself, but then that would be counter-productive to your purposes, wouldn’t it?
The only way anyone could possibly believe this is if you get all of your information about what liberals think from reactionary rightards like Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly.
::checks poster’s name::
Oh.
Nevermind.
Dude, if you listened to actual liberals, instead of taking without question the filtered liberal message as [del]spun[/del] explained to you by wingnut entertainers, you might have a more accurate picture of reality.
Well, to be fair to Starving Artist, i think he’d be happy if the product of American universities were merely good Republicans; they need not necessarily be fundamentalist Christian Republicans.
He has a vision of a society, and a teaching environment, where it is possible to be truly apolitical. You’ll notice that the examples he gives of subjects that colleges should teach include only math, science, and engineering. He hasn’t quite yet been able to formulate a process for teaching subjects like history, sociology, economics, or political science in a way that might be truly apolitical. We can, of course, only speculate on what an apolitical humanities or social science course would look like to SA, but his “arguments” and “reasoning” on this message board suggest that apolitical would, for him, be anything that conforms to his own worldview.
The really funny thing about the sort of rant that SA makes against the evil liberal institutions of our society is that, while he spends so much time worrying about this stuff, if he actually took more than a few seconds to look around at what actually happens in America, he’d see that, even if his arguments about liberal domination of universities were right, this terrible situation hasn’t exactly led to the downfall of modern American civilization, or even downfall of conservatism within it.
Hell, in the period since 1967 (the last four decades), the US President has been a Republican for 27 of those years, while there have been only 13 years with a Democratic President. Republicans have also controlled one or both houses of Congress for considerable periods, including control of both houses from 1994 to 2006. All this in a period when, if you believe SA, millions of liberal-indoctrinated students have been pouring forth, zombie-like, from colleges and universities, ready to put their brainwashing into action and ensure leftist control of the nation. As a lefty/liberal, i could only wish that liberal propaganda had been as pervasive and effective as SA seems to believe.
Note that i’m not disputing SA’s assertion that liberalism tends to flourish on college campuses, although conservative institutions, and conservative voices within non-conservative institutions are conveniently ignored by morons like SA who see only liberal propaganda in higher education. As someone who spends most of his time inside the halls of higher education, i’m happy to admit that the majority of the people i know who teach in my discipline (history) and in related humanities disciplines probably lean to the liberal side of the political spectrum. Hell, my own university’s newspaper did a study recently and found that far more faculty members at my school donate to Democrats than to Republicans.
The problem with arguments about liberal domination on campus isn’t that they’re always wrong; it’s that they miss the point. I’ve made this argument before, and the more i teach the more i believe it: as someone who teaches undergrads, i can assure you that about the biggest concern facing many faculty is not conservatism and how to turn students into good liberals; it’s apathy, and how to turn students into keen scholars. I’m one of this board’s more leftist people, and i can tell you without word of a lie that i’d prefer a class full of keen and engaged conservatives over a class full of apathetic liberals every time. Getting students to read all the texts, and to engage in class discussion, is one of the biggest challenges i face, and if a student is a conservative who disagrees with me, or with other students, so much the better as it makes for a livelier and more engaging class discussion.
Furthermore, the simplistic ranting about “indoctrination” peddled by the drooling idiots of the world demonstrates profound ignorance about what the process of learning is all about, and what it is that students take away from their studies. Implicit in SA’s argument is the notion that students merely act as sponges, absorbing everything we tell them uncritically and without reference to their own family background, social position, prior education, and personal political preferences. I have no doubt that some students do, in fact, have their ideas and their politics changed or influenced by what they hear in college classrooms, but the idea that this occurs in all students, and that it somehow occurs independently of the students’ own cognitive abilities and rational calculations, is ridiculous. We don’t just get to hold students down, inject them with liberalism, and send them out into the world to do our bidding.
The students we get in colleges and universities are adults, here by choice. Why should our own political positions be off limits, or subordinated to the ideas of parents or “common sense” (if that term even has any meaning when it comes to politics). I don’t hold the same politics as my parents, and i know plenty of people in the same boat. I wasn’t aware that young adults were somehow required to think and vote Republican just because mom and dad do.
I know this will probably come as a surprise to people like SA who see a lefty propagandist behind every college lectern, but plenty of college teachers take very seriously their responsibility as educators, and are committed to providing the best possible education for the students whom they teach. I’m not denying that our political views influence how we teach, but the professional duty to educate is uppermost in our minds.
Perhaps the most intellectually bankrupt part of SA’s argument is the idea that political objectivity, some sort of ideal neutrality, is possible. There seems to be a belief that, if certain aspects of demeanor and “balance” are adhered to, students will get an apolitical and objective education. But ideology can quite easily mask itself with the pieties of balance and objectivity, while continuing to push a particular political position. Better, i think, to acknowledge the fact that educators are human beings, and as such are political creatures who cannot avoid incorporating their political beliefs into their teaching in some way or other. If students and society in general are aware of this, then they will both be better equipped to confront and evaluate other people’s politics, and make their own decisions about what they believe to be right.
