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from the protect-yourself-'cuz-no-one-else-will dept.
Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
Concealed handgun license holders in Texas can carry their weapons into public university buildings, classrooms and dorms starting Monday, a day that also marks 50 years after the mass shooting at the University of Texas' landmark clock tower.
The campus-carry law pushed by Gov. Greg Abbott and the Republican legislative majority makes Texas one of a handful of states guaranteeing the right to carry concealed handguns on campus.
Texas has allowed concealed handguns in public for 20 years. Gun rights advocates consider it an important protection, given the constitutional right to bear arms, as well as a key self-defense measure in cases of campus violence, such as the 1966 UT shootings and the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech.
Opponents of the law fear it will chill free speech on campus and lead to more campus suicide. The former dean of the University of Texas School of Architecture left for a position at the University of Pennsylvania because of his opposition to allowing guns on campus.
Officials told the Austin American-Statesman it was a coincidence that the law took effect 50 years to the day after the UT shooting. Marine-trained sniper Charles Whitman climbed to the observation deck of the 27-story clock tower in the heart of UT's flagship Austin campus, armed with rifles, pistols and a sawed-off shotgun on Aug. 1, 1966, killing 13 people and wounding more than 30 others before officers gunned him down.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday August 13 2016, @12:46AM
Just as education will always involve not only the transfer of the positive values (knowledge, skills, moral value) from one generation to the other, but also repressing what the societal group sees as negatives.
Voila - imperfect freedom of thought is inherent to education.
So, in this imperfect world, what's the best one can expect from education as a system?
Why getting aside the punishment side resulted from lack of sufficient funding?
(this wasn't evident for me - at least until now.
I suspect aristarchus - bless his magisterial-authoritative soul - didn't see it either)
Would you mind to explain what you mean by 'progressives'? What's their specific difference when considering them and liberals?
By the same measure, maybe it would be good for me to see the specific traits of what you call conservatives?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @04:45AM
That's a moral question. Tell me what you find to be good, and I can answer what the best possibility is that I can see within your moral axioms.
I'm not ignoring it. It's implicit. If a resource is an implicit good, then the absence of that resource is an implicit evil. It's a symmetrical situation. Either way, carrot/stick combinations can deal with one resource being supplied or withheld, or two different reactions constituting reward and punishment - the nature of the situation is largely unchanged.
The definitions I use are pretty familiar in the field of political science.
Conservative is the opposite of radical. Radicals wish to make radical (i.e. striking at the roots) changes, big changes at once, and attach little value to continuity or consistency or the status quo. Many of Trump's proposals (assuming he actually means them) are in no way conservative, but rather radical. Conservatives tend to make small, incremental, carefully justified changes, and assume that the status quo has intrinsic value if only because large changes are dangerous, disruptive and hence costly. I, as I said above, sit between the two. Disruptions are costly, but there are circumstances where they are justified, or where a clean break is more efficient than incrementalism.
Liberals contrast with authoritarians. Liberals tend to maximise individual choice, favour personal responsibility and avoid dictatorial approaches to policy-making. Authoritarians are comfortable with dictating conduct, attach little value to individual liberty and instead value conformity, usually on the grounds that security and efficiency are easier to guarantee where conformity is assured; and thus also to justify oppression of nonconformists on the grounds that they put the efficiency and security of society at large at risk.
America's constitution is a pretty liberal document, because it outlines a lot of things government can not (or isn't supposed to) do. The official position of Singapore is quite authoritarian, and they justify it by referring to the blessings of a carefully managed society which has large and deep divisions.
Progressives are those who seek to implement and benefit from the insights and advances of the enlightenment and the industrial era. Notable progressives include Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill (a lot of people think of him as an imperialist - and he was - but he was also instrumental in things like disability pensions and similar workers' benefits, and in his writings he was quite clear about the benefits he saw in Progress as a social good) and Tony Benn. The opposite of a progressive approach is a reactionary approach perhaps best summarised as "old ways are best". Please note that progressive isn't anti-conservative, any more than reactionary is conservative. It's quite possible to implement a progressive platform in a conservative way, or to be a radical reactionary.
It's also important to observe that progressivism is often orthogonal to liberty as a value, or often antithetical to it. There are times and ways in which progressives and liberals were in agreement (constructing a classless society is one of those ways, hence the alliance of progressives and liberals in the civil rights movement in the USA) but there are times when progressives and liberals are completely at odds with each other (such as the debate around the CDA, or Tipper Gore and the PMRC). At these times it's quite possible to have a conservative, authoritarian progressive standing in opposition to a radical, reactionary liberal.
Since you say that you're in the computer field, you can doubtless see that there are three different axes of political description in play here. If I were to classify the broad sweep of american academia, politically, it would be radical, authoritarian and progressive. The progressivism is often bound to their optimism about their studies, the march of progress in diverse fields and so on, the authoritarianism appears to be a habit of telling others what to think and how to conduct themselves, and I surmise that the radicalism stems from being divorced from the immediate consequences of their own pronouncements. After all, academics mostly produce papers, and rarely are judged on their ability to carry extensive projects through. But that is only surmise on my part.
Hope that helps clarify it. If you want to know more, I recommend reading up on the foundations of political science. You could do this before or after your checking up on the three types of power I referred to above, as analysed in political economics.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday August 15 2016, @12:03AM
Thanks. Really.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford