[Yyaqyped]

Originally posted by Koyaanisqatsi
*sigh* So, uh, anybody got an end date for this whole "culture war" thing? It's getting old. 2012

[Hixinfineedom]

You Canadians and your music...

[Nidsstese]

I know somebody that does. But it really never ends until then. In fact, expect it to get much worse.

[reiruviartugs]

Since when do we care about normal people's days?

[tiereenny]

Still doesn't do it for me... sanity is highly overrated...

[xanaxnewtrader]

Who?

[bp9QxekG]

FIRE - Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

[Figelac]

DRoseDARS

[wmirkru]

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php...s_in_Education

FIRE is a major proponent of the intellectual diversity movement which aims to dismantle the so-called liberal bias in higher academia.

[Cgnebksb]

There is no liberal bias in universities. There's a "pro reason" and "anti-idiocy" bias, which is often mistaken by conservatives for a liberal bias.

Conservatives don't really belong at universities. They belong in the army or other places where we need mindless cannon fodder.

[Goodwin]

Professors like Aggy are exactly why groups like FIRE exist.

[Forex Autopilot]

Ozzykp, yes, idiots exists because of someone who challenges contemporary idiocy, yes?

I mean if you can't look pass the fact that a flag is a piece of cloth and a symbol at most, if you also have guaranteed to have it in your freedom of speech to burn it, what's the problem?

There is no problem, unless a person is so stuck up, that he believes all the laws equals moral equals good person equals my people equals **** the rest. Maybe higher education has a point in teaching people how to think. It's not necessarily that the thing X here is good and thing Y here isn't. It's to be able to ask the right questions, to challenge the norms, to seek new ways. Conforming people are the ones who submit and make things like nazis work. I know it's a Godwin but it's true as well. Nobody ever died for a symbol, or if they did, maybe that symbol was the Darwin Awards.

We call these people commiefascists.

[DenisMoor]

Originally posted by OzzyKP
Professors like Aggy are exactly why groups like FIRE exist. Hardly, I don't believe I've ever talked about my personal politics in any of my classes. I occasionally make fun of Bush, but that just means that I do it about one time for every twenty that students in the class do.

There's a number of reasons that conservatives don't get taken seriously at universities.

The first is that a great many of them predicate their arguments upon religious belief. Unfortunately, that is useless in open debate, since religious beliefs are almost all unprovable, and university people have this nasty habit of not accepting claims unargued for. Without such justification, conservative moral beliefs tend to collapse like a house of cards.

The second is that the secular beliefs that conservatives have are often crazy or easily refutable. For example, there are the crazy people who believe in the cracktard Austrian school of economics or insane weird **** like the Laffer Curve, both of which are completely crazed and obviously false. Or they tend to engage in ridiculous denial of established facts. I have never seen anyone in a class dispute the fact that Stalin was a bloodthirsty tyrant, but I've seen plenty attempt to defend the US record in Latin America (despite the fact that it is by and large indefensible on moral grounds).

The third is that universities are places where theories are expected to be well-defined, and conservatism just isn't. As I've proved on this forum numerous times, conservatives cannot even tell you what conservatism is without making it sound completely idiotic or trivial. Universities are set up in accord with the values of the Enlightenment: and those are liberal values.

The truth is, that if you put a bunch of smart people together and tell them to study the world's problems, you tend to produce people on the liberal left end of the spectrum (even if there is much disagreement over the details). Of course the rest of society tends to resent this, because they get told things that they don't want to hear, but that doesn't change the facts.

I've seen conservative students try to disrupt seminars time and time again with their uninformed claptrap or ridiculous conspiracy theories, and the result is always the same: they get assraped by people who know what they are talking about. It's like some hick farm team trying to play the Yankees and complaining that it's a conspiracy when they get beaten.

Conservatives have responded to this by opening up their own whackjob universities and think tanks, which are specifically funded to produce partisan material. Ordinary universities do not exercise such control over their faculty. The truth is that conservatism tends to fair badly in environments where truth, honesty and peer review are valued.

[JonatonM]

It's clear to anybody who's ever taken the course, though. Yeah, it seems like that now, but in doesn't look like that was the way he said it in the beginning. I'd imagine if it was she would not have been all up in arms like that.

Hell, she could have gotten extra credit for protesting the flag burning of the other students from the last line there.

[mashabox]

Pat, exactly, but she was an idiot. She got what she deserved. We should all spit on her face. If the professor was clear up front, which it looks like he wasn't, sure she is an idiot.

If the professor was not, then he was an idiot.

[sleepergun]

Originally posted by Patroklos
Yeah, it seems like that now, but in doesn't look like that was the way he said it in the beginning. I'd imagine if it was she would not have been all up in arms like that.

Hell, she could have gotten extra credit for protesting the flag burning of the other students from the last line there. No, it was pretty clear. Those were examples of the things they could do, not an exhaustive list. It was never presented as anything else. If anything, those were presented as unrealistic (though acceptable) extremes or a joke. It seems she just took them a bit too seriously after some comments earlier in the class about free speech being restricted under the current administration got her nose out of joint and now she can't even back out of it because of this group that pounced on her.

[TyncTyncSah]

Originally posted by Patroklos


If the professor was clear up front, which it looks like he wasn't, sure she is an idiot.

If the professor was not, then he was an idiot. Regardless the girl was an idiot. The professor might be an idiot as well.

[JonnLeejsp]

I think Aggie is a commie who grudgingly accepts that social democrats are the best viable option.

-Arrian

[muBXvWIC]

So the teacher said, "dont conform, now go out and burn a flag or something to show how you dont conform"

[dafodilkemmy]

Perhaps I'm confused, but that all sounds an awful lot like

"Aggie is a commie who grudgingly accepts that social democrats are the best viable option [at this stage]."

-Arrian