Post: #1

Well it looks like two progressive professors at public colleges in the states have finally stopped drinking the cool-aid, and are admitting that SJW insanity with it's "trigger warnings", "safe spaces", "speech codes", ended up backfiring and played a role in Trump winning the election. One of the profs is even suggesting the left do away with "identity politics" altogether.

This could be marking the beginning of the end of the SJW fad, which is no longer 'hip and cool' like it was back in the 1960s - in fact today a straight, white male identifying as a 'feminist or SJW' is about as cool as being the fundie Baptist kid in HS who spends his spring breaks at Jesus Camp.

Hopefully this will help to wake some of these loonies up from the SJW cult, but I have a feeling some are too far gone to help, and will just label these professors a traitor; just as progs in the "skeptic community" have turned against actual scientists like Richard Dawkins in favor of feminist loonies who think everything is "racist sexist homophobic".

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/10/opinion/sunday/the-dangers-of-echo-chambers-on-campus.html?_r=0

After Donald Trump’s election, some universities echoed with primal howls. Faculty members canceled classes for weeping, terrified students who asked: How could this possibly be happening?

I share apprehensions about President-elect Trump, but I also fear the reaction was evidence of how insular universities have become. When students inhabit liberal bubbles, they’re not learning much about their own country. To be fully educated, students should encounter not only Plato, but also Republicans.

We liberals are adept at pointing out the hypocrisies of Trump, but we should also address our own hypocrisy in terrain we govern, such as most universities: Too often, we embrace diversity of all kinds except for ideological. Repeated studies have found that about 10 percent of professors in the social sciences or the humanities are Republicans.

We champion tolerance, except for conservatives and evangelical Christians. We want to be inclusive of people who don’t look like us — so long as they think like us.

I fear that liberal outrage at Trump’s presidency will exacerbate the problem of liberal echo chambers, by creating a more hostile environment for conservatives and evangelicals. Already, the lack of ideological diversity on campuses is a disservice to the students and to liberalism itself, with liberalism collapsing on some campuses into self-parody.

At Oberlin College soon after the election, students erupted in protests after a local bakery was accused of racial profiling of a black student in a shoplifting case. The student senate endorsed a boycott of the bakery, and demonstrators carried signs calling the owner a racist.

But allegations of a pattern of racist behavior were undermined by police records showing the overwhelming share of people detained for shoplifting at the bakery were white. This may actually have been a case of liberal hysteria.

Some of you are saying that it’s O.K. to be intolerant of intolerance, to discriminate against bigots who acquiesce in Trump’s record of racism and misogyny. By all means, stand up to the bigots. But do we really want to caricature half of Americans, some of whom voted for President Obama twice, as racist bigots? Maybe if we knew more Trump voters we’d be less inclined to stereotype them.

Whatever our politics, inhabiting a bubble makes us more shrill. Cass Sunstein, a Harvard professor, conducted a fascinating study of how groupthink shapes federal judges when they are randomly assigned to three-judge panels.

When liberal judges happened to be temporarily put on a panel with other liberals, they usually swung leftward. Conversely, conservative judges usually moved rightward when randomly grouped with other conservatives.

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nt of a mob mentality. And if this happens to judges, imagine what happens to you and me.
Sunstein, a liberal and a Democrat who worked in the Obama administration, concluded that the best judicial decisions arose from divided panels, where judges had to confront counterarguments.

Yet universities are often the equivalent of three-judge liberal panels, and the traditional Democratic dominance has greatly increased since the mid-1990s — apparently because of a combination of discrimination and self-selection. Half of academics in some fields said in a survey that they would discriminate in hiring decisions against an evangelical.

The weakest argument against intellectual diversity is that conservatives or evangelicals have nothing to add to the conversation. “The idea that conservative ideas are dumb is so preposterous that you have to live in an echo chamber to think of it,” Sunstein told me.

Of course, we shouldn’t empower racists and misogynists on campuses. But whatever some liberals think, “conservative” and “bigot” are not synonyms.

One of America’s most eminent scientists is Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian who is director of the National Institutes of Health. Few scholars had as much impact on modern thought as Gary Becker, the conservative University of Chicago economist. Condoleezza Rice, a secretary of state for George W. Bush, would add value to any campus.

I’m not arguing for affirmative action for conservatives — partly because conservative academics say they don’t want preferences. But I do think we can try harder to recruit job applicants who represent diverse views, to bring conservative speakers to campuses and to avoid a hostile work environment for conservatives and evangelicals.

We’re seeing an uptick in hate crimes in society tied to Trump’s rise, and the last thing we need on campuses is reciprocal illiberalism, this time led by liberals.

As individuals, we can also follow smart people on social media whom we disagree with. In my latest email newsletter, I suggest some conservatives to follow.

I fear the damage a Trump administration will do, from health care to foreign policy. But this election also underscores that we were out of touch with much of America, and we will fight back more effectively if we are less isolated.

When universities are echo chambers, they become conservative punch lines, and liberal hand-wringing may be one reason Trump’s popularity has jumped since his election.

It’s ineffably sad that today “that’s academic” often means “that’s irrelevant.” One step to correcting that is for us liberals to embrace the diversity we supposedly champion.

Mark Lilla, Columbia professor, slams ‘narcissistic,’ ‘isolating’ identity liberalism

A humanities professor at Columbia University in New York City says Donald Trump’s presidential win should signal the end of liberal identity politics.

Speaking with NPR Friday morning, Mark Lilla argued that Mr. Trump’s election victory was due to American voters being “disaffected with the liberal message.”

“Democrats have simply lost the country,” he said. “They have lost the capacity to speak to the vast middle of America, an America that is, in large part, white, very religious and not highly educated.


“Ever since Reagan, [Republicans have] been able to capture the message and an understanding — or persuade people of a certain understanding of what the nation is about and what’s good for it,” he added.

Mr. Lilla, author of “The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction,” described identity liberalism as “expressive rather than persuasive.”

“It’s about recognition and self-definition,” he said. “It’s narcissistic. It’s isolating. It looks within. And it also makes two contradictory claims on people. It says, on the one hand, you can never understand me because you are not exactly the kind of person I’ve defined myself to be. And on the other hand, you must recognize me and feel for me. Well, if you’re so different that I’m not able to get into your head and I’m not able to experience or sympathize with what you experience, why should I care?

Post: #2

They'll probbaly be ousted by their more degenerate colleagues. However, when the gauntlet comes down on the more degenerate elements of higher education these moderate elements will probably survive the purge.

This is only a good thing.

Post: #3

(12-27-2016 01:50 PM)The Beast1 Wrote:  They'll probbaly be ousted by their more degenerate colleagues. However, when the gauntlet comes down on the more degenerate elements of higher education these moderate elements will probably survive the purge.

This is only a good thing.

Yeah, either way it works out for us, either they'll wake up to their own insanity, best case scenario - or eat each other alive from infighting and become entirely impotent due to disorganization, much like Rome did before the fall.

They've gone so far to the fringe today, that some SJWs are even advocating abolishing the scientific method because it's "racist". That's what happens when you let anti-intellectual degenerates who think "feelings" matter more than fact into places for higher learning:

Post: #4

Note that he still doesn't give any actual credit to intellectual conservatives that they might actually be right in some cases. The "valuable" conservatives to which he refers are neocons or cucks, and he still liberally (pun intended) virtue signals about Trump. What he wants on his campus is something like a debate between pundits on a partisan news network, where they trot out a retard to argue poorly for the opposition as a strawman.

Post: #5

Quote:At Oberlin College soon after the election, students erupted in protests after a local bakery was accused of racial profiling of a black student in a shoplifting case. The student senate endorsed a boycott of the bakery, and demonstrators carried signs calling the owner a racist.

But allegations of a pattern of racist behavior were undermined by police records showing the overwhelming share of people detained for shoplifting at the bakery were white. This may actually have been a case of liberal hysteria.

Ah, Oberlin, the school which gave us:

1. Lena Durnam
2. Cultural appropriation of cafeteria food
3. Fake KKK sighting (girl in blanket)
4. Fake Nazi/racist flyers, leading to campus-wide cancellation of classes: administration discovered they were fake but said nothing
5. Petition of demands/threats by anonymous Black student group: campus activists shall receive an hourly wage for their activism
6. Triggering by Christina Hoff Sommers visit

Post: #6

The colleges will not incur any major shift in thinking or tolerance of opposing viewpoints. Aint gonna happen.

The bottom line is that liberal college staffers (I repeat myself) are 100% addicts to student loan programs and taxes. They are dependant in a slave class of students who underwrite their fat salaries. Many college administrators make $200k+ a year just to push papers, and attend conferences. They are literally worthless ticks sucking at the blood of the American Taxpayer. The bubble will come crashing down as more graduates become unemployable with their soft studies degrees. Already several colleges are seeing a drop in admissions. Can you imagine how crazy it will be if Trump finds a way to pull large amounts of college student loans from being issued for degrees that don't matter?

Post: #7

(12-27-2016 04:45 PM)John Michael Kane Wrote:  The colleges will not incur any major shift in thinking or tolerance of opposing viewpoints. Aint gonna happen.

The bottom line is that liberal college staffers (I repeat myself) are 100% addicts to student loan programs and taxes. They are dependant in a slave class of students who underwrite their fat salaries. Many college administrators make $200k+ a year just to push papers, and attend conferences. They are literally worthless ticks sucking at the blood of the American Taxpayer. The bubble will come crashing down as more graduates become unemployable with their soft studies degrees. Already several colleges are seeing a drop in admissions. Can you imagine how crazy it will be if Trump finds a way to pull large amounts of college student loans from being issued for degrees that don't matter?

In some countries they stop teaching particular careers if they have a massive amount of people with degrees on these careers and jobless, or sometimes they reduce the amount colleges that are allowed to teach it.

Trump can reduce and cut the amount of federal money many of these colleges get, lefty ideology is totally dependent of taxpayer money.
Student loan is not bad if people were graduating in electrical engineering.

But crap like liberal arts is not useful for for anybody. The so called "women are getting more degrees than men" is a weak statement when you consider most women graduate in useless careers.

Post: #8

Make no mistake. This is the point where the commissars have sensed that their offensive is losing momentum. They have ordered the troops to cease advancing and begin digging in for the counter assault.

They will go on the defensive and sue for peace for the next 3 years, 7 if they lose the next election. They will play the role of the victim of aggression for that time over every inch of stolen ground they now hold.

Always hold in your heart the truth of what these monsters have planned for you. There will never be any peace. Only victory or defeat.

Post: #9

(12-27-2016 10:53 PM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  Make no mistake. This is the point where the commissars have sensed that their offensive is losing momentum. They have ordered the troops to cease advancing and begin digging in for the counter assault.

They will go on the defensive and sue for peace for the next 3 years, 7 if they lose the next election. They will play the role of the victim of aggression for that time over every inch of stolen ground they now hold.

Always hold in your heart the truth of what these monsters have planned for you. There will never be any peace. Only victory or defeat.

They now want mercy and "understanding" and lots of "treating each other with kindness", because they are not longer in position of power they hoped for, the same people are have not mercy to destroy lives of other now are all about loving each others.

We should never let our guards down, this people have not empathy, they will go to the extreme, heck, they wanted to go to war with Russia. Like putting two nuclear powers against each others is not serious matter.

By just electing Trump we saved millions of lives.

Post: #10

Remember when it was the left that advocated for free speech and the right to express one's opinions and having diverse viewpoints? They were doing so when they were on the losing side of the cultural war. Then in the last 8 years they started winning so it became time to shut down opposing opinions because "there's only one side when it comes to racism and hatred and sexism and oppression". I think lefties realize they're about to be on the losing side of culture once again hence they are starting to get back on the free speech and diversity of opinion train.

Post: #11

Related:

Post: #12

DAMN.

I had hoped they'd figure it out later.

Never interrupt an enemy making a mistake.

Post: #13

(12-28-2016 07:39 PM)Vicious Wrote:  DAMN.

I had hoped they'd figure it out later.

Never interrupt an enemy making a mistake.

Not to worry. These guys are like the Sorcerer's Apprentice: leftie scum still in or straight out of college aren't quite sufficiently schooled in doublethink to change course that easily. Leftist bigotry is going to be washing through the system for quite some time to come -- which is going to keep fuelling the conservative swing in larger society. Trump's inauguration will be triggering them all over again for a few months, long enough for the next freshman class to get into college and drink deep of the poisoned chalice that is university politics.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #14

(12-28-2016 10:32 PM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

(12-28-2016 07:39 PM)Vicious Wrote:  DAMN.

I had hoped they'd figure it out later.

Never interrupt an enemy making a mistake.

Not to worry. These guys are like the Sorcerer's Apprentice: leftie scum still in or straight out of college aren't quite sufficiently schooled in doublethink to change course that easily. Leftist bigotry is going to be washing through the system for quite some time to come -- which is going to keep fuelling the conservative swing in larger society. Trump's inauguration will be triggering them all over again for a few months, long enough for the next freshman class to get into college and drink deep of the poisoned chalice that is university politics.

Bingo. Your average leftist isn't intellectually curious enough to consider contrary opinions. That's why they will always be dogmatic blowhards. Worry not, these few professors are truly in the minority. The rest will continue the circus apace.

Post: #15

I'm not sure at which university these liberal professors teach, but after reading this I'm willing to bet on this being their school mascot:

   

Post: #16

http://www.the-american-interest.com/201...mps-world/

Paywalled behind a website that only lets you view one free article a month so here it is quoted:

For many of us liberal academic types, the feeling of waking up in America on Wednesday morning resembled that of receiving an invitation to the funeral of a friend who was inexplicably shot walking down the street the night before.

Once we process this grief, it will be time to reflect on what happened. How we explain the electoral outcome is crucially important, because it will shape our understanding of how we move forward. A popular knee-jerk reaction has been to attribute the outcome exclusively to bigotry, misogyny, the Electoral College, uneducated white males, and voter identification laws. This is usually followed by a vow to “fight sexism and racism in all its forms.”

There is nothing prima facie objectionable with such a reaction. However, just below its surface lies the proposition that nearly half of American voters have finally shown us their true bigoted, misogynist colors, and the implication that it is up to us, liberal savants, to show them why they are wrong. Going down this route means going about liberal “business as usual.” It means digging in our heels in the face of an external threat and doubling down on our positions, taking them even more for granted than before.

A more productive response would be to engage in thoughtful soul-searching about what we missed. This will require recognizing that tens of millions of Americans voted for Trump despite his bigotry, not because of it. Our demand that they simply put universal values above their own perceived self-interest was a step too far, and their refusal to comply does not automatically make them racists. But it does say something about the moment we live in that we have so far failed to put our finger on.

This failure speaks as much to our brand of liberalism as it does to Trump’s populism. Within our privileged, cosseted circles we have gotten used to not only thinking that we are right, but that we are obviously so. By putting down “straight white men” with gleeful impunity, we gave poor white voters everything to apologize for, and nothing to believe in. By ignoring those women who do not see in Hillary Clinton the triumph of feminism but the triumph of insider privilege over female disadvantage, we lost the 42 percent of women who voted for Trump, as well as the many who stayed at home. In all, we missed the writing on the wall about shifting patterns of exclusion and alienation, and ended up with a paradoxically antiquated and incomplete version of “progressivism.”

Nowhere has this benevolent but ultimately self-defeating myopia been more pronounced than on college campuses. We have dismissed our conservative peers in the classroom and taunted them on social media all while refusing to seriously engage their views. We have taken hard questions like affirmative action and abortion entirely off the table, as if we had already provided an answer that should be immediately convincing to all. We have refused to consider a diversity of viewpoints on what constitutes “diversity.” We have resolutely resisted paying more than lip service to socioeconomic inequality, rural alienation, and shifting patterns of exclusion while still purporting to speak on behalf of all marginalized people. We have proclaimed that the only reasonable way to respond to racial and gender inequality is to entrench pre-existing identities rather than overcoming them through what unites us all.

When it comes to political action, we also got a lot wrong. In our only true activist foray into the world—protesting racialized police brutality—we often pursued legitimate goals with divisive means, and reproduced the same “us versus them” rhetoric that subsequently was picked up in the election in inverted form. Otherwise, we remained largely preoccupied with our own petty local versions of larger social struggles, and we insisted that these versions somehow spoke to the country as a whole. We demanded the world pay attention to the names of our buildings, Halloween costumes, and microaggressions while ignoring the more troubling question of who gains access to our communities in the first place. We put sexual assault on college campuses on the national agenda, but failed to note how much safer women who attend college are, compared to those who do not. And we entirely ignored a whole cadre of problems associated with not being part of the global elite, precisely because these problems made no echo in our insular world. We justified our inward-looking focus with implausible expressions of faith in “trickle-down” social change from the campus to the society. In doing so, we missed the lessons of both socialist and civil rights movements before us in reimagining not just a better university but also a better world.

No, it is not “our fault” for losing this election, whose outcome signals something much bigger than a revolt against the discourse that dominates American universities. We primarily lost this election because of our flawed electoral system, a compromised candidate, and the resurgence of nationalistic intolerance around the world. But the limits of our vision and the condescending tone of our attitudes played a role.
And this is the part of the puzzle liberal academia is best positioned to solve. Instead of being the avatars of liberal condescension, we can work to preserve liberal values while updating them for the modern world. We can disagree with our conservative colleagues without discriminating against them. We can redouble our dedication to fighting racism and sexism, but also find ways to bring in those we have hitherto ignored because they did not fit in our pre-existing notions of marginalization. We can find new, creative ways to think about inequality, difference, and alienation. We can confront head-on difficult questions, such as those arising from the complex relationship between immigration and employment patterns, rather than pretending they do not exist at all. Most important, we can build intellectually honest spaces that encourage diverse opinions, rather than simply permitting uniform opinions articulated by diverse-looking faces.

Shifting how we conceive the university’s role in political life is only a first step; much more work still lies ahead in fighting for equality, resisting old-fashioned racism and sexism, and addressing the new divides brought about by globalization. And moderate conservatives also have to work hard to help create a common front against extremism and populism.

But reconceiving the role of the academy is no longer just sensible, but necessary. Unless we build outward looking, socially attentive, and intellectually open universities, our “safe” spaces on liberal campuses will become isolated islets, leaving us to try to resist the rising tide of right-wing politics by reassuring each other of the correctness of our beliefs and trying in vain to attract the attention of an ever-elusive world.

Post: #17

(12-28-2016 10:04 AM)Wutang Wrote:  Remember when it was the left that advocated for free speech and the right to express one's opinions and having diverse viewpoints? They were doing so when they were on the losing side of the cultural war. Then in the last 8 years they started winning so it became time to shut down opposing opinions because "there's only one side when it comes to racism and hatred and sexism and oppression". I think lefties realize they're about to be on the losing side of culture once again hence they are starting to get back on the free speech and diversity of opinion train.

This is an interesting point, but keep in mind that even Obama was criticizing the antics of college SJWs long before Trump's rise. I think we're guilty of overestimating how popular they were to begin with.

Post: #18

(01-03-2017 07:14 PM)Delta Wrote:  This is an interesting point, but keep in mind that even Obama was criticizing the antics of college SJWs long before Trump's rise. I think we're guilty of overestimating how popular they were to begin with.

I think at this point, the Southern Baptist kid who spends his HS spring breaks at "Jesus Camp" and wears a chastity ring is beginning to look cooler than any male with the self-loathe to identify as a "SJW", lol.