You are right Dave. All of us white middle class liberals hate ourselves and want nothing more than to vote for people to increase our taxes merely for the sake of raising taxes and then we want them to take our jobs and give them to illegal aliens then to pass laws forcing our children to participate in diversity workshops where they are taught that because they are white they are evil and deserve ridicule and punishment. Yep you got us all figured out…
Obviously, you can’t see the forest for Der Trihs.
Why on God’s green earth should any Administration be hiring anyone to lecture people about racial diversity, for goodness sake? 
Because most administrations, including the current one, think racial intolerance is bad. Racial diversity training is basically telling people that just because other people are different they are not better or worse. The government is going to hire and serve people from a variety of races and cultures - it behooves it to train its employees on how to deal with such people effectively and respectfully.
Total bullshit. You are a liar. STOP LYING.
We have spent the last three pages demonstrating to you that this is not the case. All the self-professed liberals posting here have said that the woman in the OP is loony and does not at all represent the liberal POV.
But you know better. Don’t listen to liberals telling you what their point of view is, you tell them what their point of view is?
Madness. Sheer, self-aggrandising madness. You presume to put opinions into other people’s mouths when they are telling you straight up that you are wrong about their opinions. You end your last post with ‘I really don’t see any other possibilities’. Well, of course you don’t. You refuse to see the possibility which IS IN FACT THE CASE, namely, that people are getting mad at you because you are bullshitting about their political ideas.
You really are an arrogant shit.
So the government is telling people what to think, and you believe this is a good thing, why?
Oh god it’s late, I’d better go to bed, but just quickly… governments have always told people what to think, and they always will. I tell people what to think. You tell people what to think. It’s neither a particularly good nor a particularly bad thing. It only becomes bad if it is backed up by coercion. Which diversity training is manifestly not.
[Golf clapping]
Brilliant, simply brilliant.
[/Golf clapping]
The idea you refer to is this:
That’s a Liberal idea?
Then conservatism is worse than I thought. :eek: :mad:
-FrL-
It’s not a distortion of core liberal principles any more than the doctrine of the Khmer Rouge is a distortion of core conservative principles.
It’s not a distortion of liberal principles. It’s just different than liberal principles.
-FrL-
That’s the worst part. He’s probably not lying. He probably really does believe that all “liberals” hate white people and God and America and themselves. Just like Der Trihs probably really does believe that all “conservatives” hate black people and women and foreigners and everyone else.
Of course the government is telling you what to think. Schools tell you what to think. Churches tell you what to think. Your family and friends tell you what to think. Books and movies and TV tell you what to think. Everybody in this thread is telling you what to think. Thousands of people tell you what to think all day long. That’s why around the age of two, most people learn to start saying “no” to most of the things people are telling them to think.
I might find this more comforting if speakers like David Horowitz weren’t shouted down and threatened when they try to speak at colleges and universities, as so recently happened at Emory University here in Atlanta.
I’d love to hear about more cases of speakers being hounded by those evil liberals. (In order to gain a more balanced view, of course. Not to cheer myself up about Kids These Days!)
Look! David Horowitz works with with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education–the source of the OP.
Here’s SourceWatch’s article on that august group. Anti-feminist women, opponents of “multiculturalism”–& funding from names like Coors & Scaife. Surprise, surprise!
I dunno if I agree that it’s reasonable.
I think it’s popular for to blame conventions, institutions, parties, etc, for every thing a hired speaker spouts. However, in reality, I think it is very rare for an invited speaker to be vetted so carefully. I’ve worked on conventions (for higher ed professionals) and when it came to finding a keynote speaker, we’d go off word-of-mouth, websites, etc. I would never have thought to ask a speaker to submit all handouts to us and to send us a transcript of their planned speech. I would imagine that something similar goes on over in the student affairs office when they hire diversity trainers.
Although on the one hand, you could argue that to protect precious young minds, universities should definitely vet all outside speakers to this degree. But when you think about higher ed’s historical emphasis on ideas and intellectual freedom, that really isn’t a good fit.
So, U of D and other places take a chance that someone won’t suck, and they take a chance that someone won’t go off the rails and say crazy shit they’d rather not have said to their gathered assembly. Sometimes they lose that gamble.
In my experience as someone who HAS hired someone as a speaker who later turned out to be not all that great, the audience members seemed savvy enough to understand that we were not endorsing every word. I think we’d be wrong to do otherwise.
Furthermore, I’m guessing that most U of D students, even new freshmen, are well-versed in rolling their eyes and calling “bullshit” when some nutter starts suggesting that all white people are one thing or another.
A few other thoughts–it’s possible that the people at U of D who hired this speaker loved her. Maybe they found her thought-provoking, and maybe they’re not worried about “brainwashing” because they know their students. It’s still hard to condemn the whole institution (IMO). In my experience there is far less uniformity of thought/word/deed than people outside suppose. While they usually manage to lasso a mission together and present some uniform institutional “values” when it comes to press releases, in truth a lot of departments and people on campus disagree about priorities and other things. It’s not accurate to suggest that this speaker embodies the values of the WHOLE institution.
There’s no real argument about this. Conservatives have been complaining about this literally for decades, and you’d have to be incredibly dense not to be aware that these things happen. Just plug the words “campus free speech” into a search engine, and you’ll find plenty of examples. And in the future, do your own homework. Don’t expect me to do it for you.
Perhaps you’d care to come up with some examples of left wing speakers attempting to speak at a podium who have been shouted down and hounded from the podium by right wingers.
Are you really as shallow as you sound?
Cranky, I agree with everything you say here. However, this wasn’t a case of a woman with questionable views being asked to speak at the university, it was a case of her being hired to train university staff how to administer their diversity program, and that’s a little different in my mind. Do you see the distinction I’m drawing?
Is there a particular reason for specifying a podium?
Because if we can remove that piece of bric-a-brac, I’ve got examples. Hell, I was considering starting a thread.
FIRE is a watch group whose mission is to protect free speech on campus. As you can see in this link, from their website, they protect liberal speech as well as conservative speech, on the relatively rare occasions when liberal speech is oppressed on campuses.
You’re wrong. I accept that these might not be the views that you hold, and are not what you consider “liberal” ideas. I can even accept the notion that nobody else on the boards would defend them either. The problem is that that a No True Scotsman fallacy. This IS the face of liberal “diversity training” as it exists in practice in America today. If, as you say, this is a radical fringe ideology, where are the voices from the left condemning it? Not you specifically, but mainstream. Can you point to one Democratic who has come out against it? Where are your Pat Buchanans speaking against the distortion of core values? Where are your Ron Pauls, wanting to take things back to the way they should be? If this is so far off the mainstream of liberal thought, where is the condemnation from that mainstream? Where is your Cato Institute publishing papers supporting core ideological values, including ones criticizing the policies of the current administration? I have seen none of these things from the liberal leadership.