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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: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @12:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @12:22PM (#394615)

    Regarding your idiocy conflating gays getting married with pedophilia

    No, that was your idiocy. To repeat, there was not a single statue written that stated specifically that gays could not marry. There were ones that specified partner selection, and as far back as the dark ages of the 1980s, a 12 year old could marry with parental consent. Now it's around 16, well within the general consensus for pedophilia.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_marriage_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]

    Perhaps you should actually learn the history of the laws before proceeding to lecture me?

    Moving on...

    the question here is one of harm.

    Which is exactly why you couldn't be bothered to learn the age requirements for marriage, and have been tirelessly advocating for raising the minimum age?

    Or maybe you are just self-serving, I'm-alright-Jack, while bringing up a point that was never broached in the first place?

    A child, and indeed a teenager, is not ready for and cannot understand sex or relationships.

    Which is why you are against sex education that starts in grade schools now, you closet conservative you, right? Or that even a brief survey of married men would make clear that sex and marriage is mutually exclusive, otherwise you'd be arguing for raising the age of consent across the board, not exclusive to marriage.

    Incest: usually involves a massive power differential and/or blackmail

    That's a nice fairytale. Got any actual proof to justify your assertion?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_regarding_incest_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]

    As you can see, marriage isn't prohibited in all jurisdictions either in cases of incest, so in your quest for harm reduction, you are 0 out of 2.

    Boy, you've really got a handle on this marriage thing, don't you?

    Bestiality: Again, animals cannot meaningfully consent.

    Ah, so it is okay to kill and eat an animal, but damnit, they can't consent to marriage. That's just obscene.

    And has been the running theme in this exchange-

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoophilia_and_the_law_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]

    So again, can you point me towards your exhaustive research on the subject before you reached your conclusions, because your very conservative approach to sex and marriage is clearly out-of-step with a large portion of the US.

    See how easy it is to be very conservative about marriage, especially when it doesn't directly affect you?

    And while this very selective, doesn't-stand-to-benefit-me-at-all notion of consent is amusing, you are also restricting mentally retarded people from sex and marriage.

    Do I have to cue the information on this as well, or can we establish by this point you haven't the foggiest idea of what you are talking about?

    Do you get it now?

    Yes, you're basically a hypocrite who will make the most tenuous justifications excreted directly from your nether regions to make a claim.

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  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday August 30 2016, @05:27AM

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @05:27AM (#395145) Journal

    This is one long list of fallacies. I'm not even sure I should attempt to correct you, but there seems to be a masochistic streak here, so here goes...

    First off, I'm actually all for sex education early on. I learned about the birds and the bees at four. 4. Quatro. Count 'em, four years old. The result of this? I stayed a virgin by choice until 21, despite having had the option to lose it earlier. Yes, some of what held me back was fear; I didn't feel right coming out to anyone but family before college. It also doesn't help that I haaaaaaated teenagers, especially other girls, while I was one. Seriously, high school is only some magical fantasy land on TV, and God teenage girls are awful.

    As to the rest of your bullshit: your objection to the age of consent going up because "as late as the 80s it was 12 in some places" is a non-sequitur. So it was lower until a few decades ago. So fucking what? 400 years ago they would hang you or worse for blasphemy against the Holy Ghost; should we go back to THAT too?

    Concerning nature's tendency to make us hit puberty early (don't fucking start; I was bleeding at 10 and my sister was barely past her 9th birthday), this is a naturalistic fallacy. The same mechanisms that make us hit puberty in early to mid teens also expected us to die at 30 of some horrible disease or starve to death or bleed out pushing kid #7 out. The entire POINT of being an intelligent species is so we can tell Mother Nature and her abusive pimp Malthus where they can go, what they can do when they get there, with whom, and for how long.

    "Hurr hurr meat is fine but not fucking animals ur a hypocrite" is another non-sequitur. Also, how do you know I'm not a vegetarian? :) You assume rather a lot here.

    I don't know what else to say concerning incest; you SHOULD, if you actually bothered to read my post, have noticed the part where I said I'm aware that "eww gross" does not a law make, and withhold judgement beyond "eww gross" in non-fertile cases like, for example, a pair of sisters.

    You really, really suck at this :(

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...