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posted by CoolHand on Monday August 29 2016, @01:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the it-takes-all-kinds dept.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confession-of-liberal-intolerance.html?_r=0

WE progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren't conservatives. Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We're fine with people who don't look like us, as long as they think like us.

O.K., that's a little harsh. But consider George Yancey, a sociologist who is black and evangelical. "Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black," he told me. "But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close."

I've been thinking about this because on Facebook recently I wondered aloud whether universities stigmatize conservatives and undermine intellectual diversity. The scornful reaction from my fellow liberals proved the point.

"Much of the 'conservative' worldview consists of ideas that are known empirically to be false," said Carmi. "The truth has a liberal slant," wrote Michelle. "Why stop there?" asked Steven. "How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots?"

To me, the conversation illuminated primarily liberal arrogance — the implication that conservatives don't have anything significant to add to the discussion. My Facebook followers have incredible compassion for war victims in South Sudan, for kids who have been trafficked, even for abused chickens, but no obvious empathy for conservative scholars facing discrimination.

The stakes involve not just fairness to conservatives or evangelical Christians, not just whether progressives will be true to their own values, not just the benefits that come from diversity (and diversity of thought is arguably among the most important kinds), but also the quality of education itself. When perspectives are unrepresented in discussions, when some kinds of thinkers aren't at the table, classrooms become echo chambers rather than sounding boards — and we all lose.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday August 29 2016, @01:19PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 29 2016, @01:19PM (#394646)

    Conservative == Christian

    Because they're uneducated and/or kids. Old people remember that before the civil rights era and the end of Jim Crow laws and "the southern strategy", your average white religious-nut evangelical in Mississippi was a Democrat. Politics makes strange bedfellows so from the civil war until 1960 or so, the creationist wing of American Christianity was pretty much 100% Democrat. There's vestiges of it today, the Catholics still poll somewhat leftie and there are black baptist churches in the deep south that have been D party supporters since the civil war reconstruction era.

    The next problem is confusion of liberal vs conservative. If you define it as traditional party membership and all R are conservative and all D are liberal you're in for a huge impact with reality, as the 60s hippies ARE the conservatives in 2016. The lefties from 1960 ARE "the man" in 2016. The crazy liberals who want to think about new ideas and try new things are all on the right wing, reactionaries, alt right etc. Hillary for example is the establishment candidate this year and she's channeling Johnson from the 60s and she's never seen a country full of brown people that she doesn't want to bomb, whereas Trump is the only seriously anti-war candidate we've had in decades (well, serious as in made it to nomination, srry Bern-victims). The hippies have made a disaster of things for 50 years, so by conservative do you mean going back to 1970 or 1950? The progressives have been in charge for a long time and they've really Fed everything up and its time to replace them. Prog ideas are simply obsolete, old ways of thinking that no longer model the real world successfully. What in the 60s were brave new ideas are in the 10s obsolete, failed, discredited, and low energy, although they're the very popular establishment ... today ... for a little while longer, but not much longer.

    Try a scientific analogy. There's nothing wrong with trying on the theory of epicycles on and walking around and seeing how it feels for a couple decades. Now the longer you use it, the worse it seems to fit reality. You can punish people for measuring the position of the planets and getting results that don't fit the epicyclical theory all you want, but that doesn't make the world go away. And Copernicus has crazy new ideas about elliptical orbits that are Very non-establishment ... but ... they aren't the failed system, and they seem to work when rubbed up against both present AND past data. Huh. Now its not a moral or ethical failing to have tried epicyclical theory for awhile. The people that tried it were not necessarily evil. They happened to be wrong and its an obsolete worldview in 2016. Ditto progressivism. The Cathedral has failed. Oh well. Time to move on. We have better ideas that model reality more closely to use now. In 2016 its a moral and ethical failing not to use Copernicus to predict planetary orbits, or to not use post-progressive politics to understand how the world works. Sorry, Woodstock is over. It mostly failed. Well thats OK, we have better new plans and better time tested plans.

    Another confusion is the neocon merger of crony capitalism and evangelical Christianity is dying in the republican party. Assuming you mean the R party when you say "conservative". So the radical alt right Trump etc no longer needs to be creationist. Furthermore you seem to have the bizarre idea that conservative views only come from holy books. Most conservative views are best defined by a dead dude named "Robert Conquest". Yeah I know it sounds like a pen name. But he's got some friggin awesome quotes:

    “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.”

    He has some awesome Dilbertian or Menckenian commentary. Worth the time to at least read a list of his quotes.

    The point I'm trying to make is I don't need Jesus to know murder is bad, nor do I need Jesus to know abortion is best avoided or minimized as much as possible. Government regulated marriage (including gay)? Probably as bad of an idea as government regulated baptism or government regulated last rites. Folks on the radical or far or alt right don't need a holy book to identify stupid ideas. To describe them charitably, the "highly religious" are getting laughed out of the R party and either are demographically dying out or are moving to the D party. The majority of people on the right today in 2016 with new and interesting ideas are either atheists or are atheist compatible (like America should be a Catholic nation but with extremely strong separation of church and state, culturally Catholic not governmentally Catholic, as a non believer myself, I kinda like that idea... Culturally I like the Catholic worldview, I just don't want them in charge of my taxes or kids education or the DoD)

    The final section is its possible to build elaborate pipe dream mechanisms to explain the behavior of some lefties as progressive political with elaborate rationalizations of policy. However, a much simpler predictive model that matches observed reality much closer is to simply assume they're racists who are anti-white and sexists who are anti-male. Occams razor and all that. Its a simpler model with a higher correlation when compared to actual behavior. A similar analogy can be made around the Civil War WRT southerners trying to erect elaborate and ridiculous theoretical models of insane complexity to explain why their behavior which vaguely resembles anti-black racism is actually a mere figment of capitalist theory or a distortion of observation. Naw, you can build all this distracting rationalization but it boils down to racism. Ditto progs in 2016 and the Democratic Party and BLM and all that, they talk a big game and make elaborate rationalizations but it boils down to they're racists and sexists who hate white males. I'm not trying to argue if its justified or not. I'm just describing what is, and what helps predict their behavior more accurately than elaborate psuedotheory inspired by astrology and rationalization. Then you got to decide if you want to hang out with people who are 1) racists 2) anti-white racists. So I've got three reasons not to be a leftie D party progressive, they hate me for what I was born as, I somewhat dislike racists (depends a lot on your definition of the word and the actions of those identified), and I don't like anti-white people for obvious personal reasons.

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  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday August 30 2016, @05:11AM

    by Reziac (2489) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @05:11AM (#395137) Homepage

    Someone pointed out that the regressive left, behaving as a religion, is just filling the void left by the decline of Christian culture -- that as humans we're gonna have SOME sort of "guiding principle" and if it's not one, it'll be another.

    This remark made me rethink the value of Christianity to Western civilization, and I say that as a nonbeliever.

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday August 30 2016, @11:55AM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 30 2016, @11:55AM (#395217)

      is just filling the void left by the decline of Christian culture

      There's been an ongoing discussion for some years, more so recently, on the "ascending the tower" podcast where a simplification and distillation of modern alt-right thought could be summarized to the American revolution was a continuation of the English civil war between the Puritans and, well, the sane people, and progressiveism, under any name, is a degenerate evolved form of that Puritanism. So its not really a decline in terms of influence or followers but more a degeneration (or evolution) of specifically Puritan beliefs.

      Obviously that's a huge simplification, like trying to explain the French Revolution or WW1/2 in one line, you can get some insight but obviously there's a lot going on...

      • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday August 30 2016, @03:41PM

        by Reziac (2489) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @03:41PM (#395307) Homepage

        Yeah, that's a reasonable way to look at it. There will always be a subset of people who think if only they could dictate terms for everyone, the world would be perfect. Western civilization has been perhaps unique in generally keeping such types out of power.

        I'm reminded that the reason America wound up with the Puritans is because they kept imposing their beliefs on their neighbors and as a result were kicked out of the most tolerant countries of their era.

        --
        And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.