"Students for Academic Freedom"

[Patroklos]

I would like to point out for everyone here, though I am sure everyone but Aggie was thinking this when they read his latest rant up there, that Aggie is a communist.

Apply, laugh your ass off.

[Koyaanisqatsi]

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.

[Main_Brain]

I thought this was more a case of_

[Pekka]

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.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by Patroklos
I would like to point out for everyone here, though I am sure everyone but Aggie was thinking this when they read his latest rant up there, that Aggie is a communist.

Aggie is more of a Social Democrat.

[Arrian]

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

-Arrian

[Odin]

Originally posted by OzzyKP
Professors like Aggy are exactly why groups like FIRE exist.

Reality has a well known liberal bias. Front groups like FIRE exist because the Right is allergic to facts and objective truth.

[Berzerker]

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

[Agathon]

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

-Arrian

No. Aggie is a somewhat unorthodox Marxist who thinks that the Scandinavian model is the optimal form of social organization at this particular point in history, but that the communist society is a somewhat likely (and the only desirable) development from advanced capitalism (either that happens or it's a dark age and we're all likely dead).

I'm not one of those communists who believe that a communist society can be instituted by overthrowing the oligarchy or dictatorship of a feudal or agrarian economy and establishing a proletarian dictatorship (in other words, I'm not like 99% of the world's communists who seem to have forgotten that detail in Marx).

So you can sum up my political beliefs as a balance of probabilities between communism or political nihilism. Understandably, events in recent years have tended to ratchet up the Bayesian number for nihilism.

Plato and Marx are the only political philosophers who have ever really understood the subject IMHO. Everyone else is just arguing about the decorations on the funeral casket.

[Arrian]

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

[Kidlicious]

You can still be a communist and discuss what will and will not work better with the capitalist system. Capitalism must run it's course. Communists like myself have no feelings about that.

[Straybow]

Will the Real Karl Marx please stand up?

Originally posted by Agathon
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.

Conservatives are more concerned with actual results, rather than fawning over the latest "well defined theory." So, go ahead. Define your ideas all you want. Come to Poly and whine about how Communism always gets hijacked by the dictatorship of the Proletariat. If we'd all try it again enlightenment would burst out of the dungeons of capitalism and solve all the world's problems. This time it will be different, and come the revolution you'll killl show all those annoying conservatives who's right.

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice..."

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.

You mean a bunch of smart people like Robbespierre? If only one little thing everything had been different [insert favorite theory here] the world could've been saved 200 years ago. Global warming would never have happened. Wars would've been no more. Hunger and disease eliminated.

If, instead of "studying the world's problems" those "smart people" have to make a working system involving real people: they fail. And then complain that the real people didn't do it right, and we should repeat the experiment and listen to the smart people more carefully.

As I recall, one group of liberals joined with conservatives and formed a country called The United States of America. The liberals realized that holding up some faddish philosophy wouldn't gain a consensus. Together they made a few practical changes to what was already working fairly well.

In your own country, the Common Law system was later updated by some of the same ideas implemented in that "cracktard" system to your south, things like presumption of innocence, protection from self-incrimination, the right to face accusers, etc.

These ideas were considered liberal in the eighteenth century because they put power into the hands of the people. Modern liberals have decided that the people aren't peoply enough and should be guided by the real people. Those who call themselves Real Marxists™, for example.

The truth is that conservatism tends to fair badly in environments where truth, honesty and peer review are valued.

Ah, the University... an environment where kissing the asses of the cognocenti is considered "career development" and dubbed "peer review." An environment where, by your own description, you define success as conformity to group-think. An environment where people who think differently from the self-proclaimed "tolerant and enlightened" are marginalized, attacked, and pilloried.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Arrian
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

So you changed it.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Odin
Reality has a well known liberal bias. Front groups like FIRE exist because the Right is allergic to facts and objective truth.

Reality has an even better-known anti-Communist bias.

[Agathon]

Re: Will the Real Karl Marx please stand up?

Originally posted by Straybow

Conservatives are <..endless pile of ill-argued bull**** redacted..> and pilloried.

I thought about responding to this. But I got bored after the first paragraph made it obvious that you didn't know what you were talking about.

I really just don't give a **** what you believe, and your continuing to remain an ignoramus is really of no consequence to me.

Welcome to my ignore list.

Go bother someone else. Your post is merely a collection of confused and idiotic ravings that have little to do with the topic at hand, or with any of my political beliefs.