Brainwashing 101

[Agathon]

Originally posted by binTravkin

Maybe you need some staging at the proffessionals in your country?
Im sure you can get an opportunity if you express enough PCness..

Once again, in English please...

[Fake Boris]

Re healthcare, a private system has the deficiency of shifting the burden of the lack of available care to the poor, because it 'solves' the shortage by increasing the costs.
A public system also results in some shortage of available offer, but generally this shortage is more evenly distributed amongst all classes of society.

[Fake Boris]

Conservatives need to get over this whole idea that colleges are too biased. The hard truth is that most conservative arguments and ideals fall to rigorous academic investigation, and that's what universities are all about.

[Sandman]

It's correct that 'socialized' healthcare systems tend to have a problem with waiting lists. However, the vast bulk of hospital visits are unplanned emergencies.

[Fake Boris]

Cite?

[OzzyKP]

@Ag, you may not be pushing your views (and I'd imagine many professors try not to) but they still seep through, its inevitable. The real question would be whether your students consider you to be a leftist or not. Any school I've ever been in the students were remarkably perceptive about those things.

I don't know if its in that video or not, but the percentage of liberals vs. conservatives in higher ed is terribly slanted. Conservative professors have trouble getting hired, and conservative views have trouble being heard on campus. I think that's an issue worth being concerned about.

[Fake Boris]

By definition conservative thought is ethnocentric (because appeal to tradition usually requires the specific customs of a sociegty to be upheld). Ethnocentrism usually doesn't get along very well with academic rationalism. You know, there's a reason why trash politics call liberals 'America-haters'. It's a clash of two ways of thinking.

[Nostromo]

Originally posted by Agathon
Is that guy on crack?

"Universities never used to have a political bias."

I don't remember him saying that. But he probably thinks its true. Of course, I'm not denying that universities were biased in the past. Bias is certainly not a new thing. But the point is they shouldn't be biased.

So what if other students rip down posters. How is this the university's fault? A philosophy student at my old school had his own anti-abortion organization. He used to complain that people would tear down his posters, but he wasn't so whacked out as to blame this on the university.

He didn't say that it was the university's fault. But did you miss the part where the university tried to gag him and his group? The part where the dude from FIRE got involved?

These whackjobs are just sore because most people at college don't want to put up with their crap.

Even if you or me don't agree with them, they still have a right for free speech. And the guy from FIRE seems to think that there is a problem with free speech on campus. The speechcodes crap could easily get out of hand.

And this whole indoctrination thing is bull****. I'd love it if it was possible for professors to make their students believe things. I'd start by making them believe the course materials in my Presocratic Philosophy course. It would be awesome if I had the power to get them to remember everything in the book and everything I said. It would make my job as an educator so much easier.

Most students tend not to be swayed by the politics of their teachers, and resent being hectored about it. That's why I never bother trying to get students to agree with me.

On the other hand, when I taught Rousseau a couple of years back, most of the students ended up agreeing with the communist implications of his thought. I thought it was funny as they didn't know about my own views, so I was jokingly accusing them of being "a bunch of commies" in lecture, and their response was "so what?"

And I had my best evaluation ever that year. One student wrote: "Congratulations! You did what I thought was impossible. I am now an agnostic and I no longer believe in the value of democracy."

I didn't do anything. I just got him to read various books and make up his own mind.

But the 100% Marxism all the time economics curiculum, if its true, is a bit disquieting. They should be reading Hayek, instead of the chic radical lesbian-marxist crap. If they never get to read intelligent conservative thinkers like Hayek or Burke, they'll never get a balanced view. If all they hear about are the evils of Capitalism, and never hear a peep about the evils of Communism, they'll never get a balanced view.

But, I admit, I never personally experienced indoctrination per se. From what I experienced, things were somewhat balanced.

[Last Conformist]

Originally posted by OzzyKP

I don't know if its in that video or not, but the percentage of liberals vs. conservatives in higher ed is terribly slanted.

More proof that consies are dumber.

[Japher]

uh, TLC, you misspelled "commies"

[Az]

even if commies are dumber, that wouldn't be considered proof. so toss off.

[Kidlicious]

Why are conservatives always so afraid of people who have different view points?

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

This from the man advocating police state enforcement of the marxist utopia come the grand revolucion.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe


This from the man advocating police state enforcement of the marxist utopia come the grand revolucion.

That's only a prisoner's perspective.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by nostromo

I don't remember him saying that. But he probably thinks its true. Of course, I'm not denying that universities were biased in the past. Bias is certainly not a new thing. But the point is they shouldn't be biased.

From his film it doesn't seem that they are. This is the same crap as O'Reilly's war on Christmas - take a few incidents and manufacture it into a worldwide conspiracy.

He didn't say that it was the university's fault. But did you miss the part where the university tried to gag him and his group? The part where the dude from FIRE got involved?

What happened there happens a lot in universities, and not necessarily to right wing people. If you've ever dealt with university administrators, you will know what it is like. A friend of mine sued my old college over an academic matter, and his story reads a lot like that guy's. The faculty get the same treatment - my friend's supervisor got fired in similar circumstances. Once the university administrators make a decision, however bad, there will be rapid ass covering on all fronts, and they won't be averse to threatening people who fight back. It sucks, but it's not particularly directed at right wing people (in fact it is aimed at anyone who rocks the boat - student or faculty).

Here's some examples: my old college found that its computer disk space (this was back in the days of VAX) was running low, so they went through and examined what every student who had a VAX account had stored on it. This was against the university's own rules, since VAX space was considered private and confidential (people kept their secret research data on it and other confidential information). My friend and a few others kept some girly pics on theirs. The university officials were annoyed by this, but there was no rule specifically against it, so the university charged them under the campus sexual harassment policy. Any clown who read the policy could see that if they were guilty, then it would set a ridiculous precedent, such that anyone who carried a Playboy in his schoolbag would be guilty of sexual harassment.

So they hired a lawyer to fight it. The university's response was to threaten them by saying that even if they won, a note saying they had been charged with sexual harassment would be attached to their records and read to any employer who contacted the university.

In another more famous case, a girl accused her RA of raping her in their hall of residence. The guy got turfed out of uni and was labelled a sex criminal, even though he said he wasn't in the city on the night of the alleged attack. The police hadn't charged him, but the university just chucked him out.

Luckily for him, his parents were private investigators and managed to prove that it couldn't have been him (they found video of him in Auckland buying smokes at a gas station at the time). It turned out that she was under stress before exams and someone had told her that you didn't have to take the final exams if you had been sexually assaulted, so she made it up.

There are countless other stories like this at every college. It's just life on campus. It sucks, but it ain't directed towards righties exclusively.

Even if you or me don't agree with them, they still have a right for free speech. And the guy from FIRE seems to think that there is a problem with free speech on campus. The speechcodes crap could easily get out of hand.

Actually, I wondered about this until I saw his flyer. No wonder people were ripping it down. On the face of it, it looks like a racist pamphlet. There should have been more information on it. Perhaps this was an honest mistake, or perhaps he deliberately made it like that in order to cause a ruckus. It wouldn't be the first time that has happened.

Of course the speech codes crap can get out of hand, just like the application of any other rule. But that doesn't mean that there doesn't need to be a rule against people posting anti-semitic flyers or calling other students "******".

But the 100% Marxism all the time economics curiculum, if its true, is a bit disquieting. They should be reading Hayek, instead of the chic radical lesbian-marxist crap. If they never get to read intelligent conservative thinkers like Hayek or Burke, they'll never get a balanced view. If all they hear about are the evils of Capitalism, and never hear a peep about the evils of Communism, they'll never get a balanced view.

You got suckered here. It's not clear from the film that the curriculum is 100% Marxist. Even if it was, it would be a refreshing change - there are many college economics departments that do no Marx. If it is anything like normal, there will be classes on regular market economics and specialist classes on Marx and other "deviant" theories. That's why you don't get to read Hayek (he's a moron and a bore anyway): you get to read some vanilla textbook that contains the same ideas.

But, I admit, I never personally experienced indoctrination per se. From what I experienced, things were somewhat balanced.

Of course they were. You have a political action group trying to make it look different.

What has happened is that universities have become rather more liberal than they used to be. There is no grand conspiracy here - it is just that the liberals won most of the debates a long time ago. For example: religious authority has no place in most university subjects. It didn't used to have a direct place, but there was an implicit understanding that framed discussion (you can see it if you read old papers) - that is no longer the case.

The reason conservatives feel left out on campus is the same reason that proponents of intelligent design feel left out - the majority of educated people simply do not take their ideas seriously. And it's their own fault. They don't really have a coherent worldview and their intellectual heroes tend to be second rate bores like Rand, Burke and Hayek.

We can see exactly the same thing here on Apolyton. For years now I have challenged conservatives to provide an account of what conservatism is - i.e. what moral principles it is committed to and why. The only people who stepped up were the Libertarians. The rest of them produced guff that didn't withstand obvious objections. And apart from libertarianism (which is coherent, but rather impractical) conservatism is just a collection of prejudices - the prejudices that wealthy white male people tend to have.