C
CivU
Guest
Though I'm not to sure this board continues to represent "What's wrong with University campuses today"
What's Wrong with University Campuses Today?
- Thread starter Infanteer
- Start date
- Status
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 410
CivU said:
I think you'd have a tough time selling that one to either the Palestinian or Israeli government.
CivU said:
Statistics:
Israel:
Land Area: 20,770km sq
Population: 6,236,253
People/sq km: 300
Palestine:
Land Area: 10,435km sq
Population: 3,693,776
People/sq km: 353
Highly congested huh?
Deplorable? You'd think maybe they'd try to secure a lasting peace so they can go about improving their living conditions.
Homeland being taken from them?
"Israel was established on May 14, 1948. Five Arab armies , coming to the aid of the Palestinians , immediately attacked it. Uncoordinated and outnumbered, they were defeated by Israeli forces. Israel enlarged its territory . Jordan took the West Bank of the Jordan River, and Egypt took the Gaza Strip. ( Israel occupied these lands after the Six Day War of 1967. ) The war produced 780,000 Palestinian refugees."
Shouldn't they be blowing themselves up in Egypt and Jordan?
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 410
48th
(voice dripping with sarcasm)
Just what makes you think that using facts will have any effect on these people what-so-ever?
I mean, come on man, they are students, aren't they. Isn't it written someplace they automatically know this already...!?
Ohh, they didn't know...Well how about that!
(dripping complete)
Slim
(voice dripping with sarcasm)
Just what makes you think that using facts will have any effect on these people what-so-ever?
I mean, come on man, they are students, aren't they. Isn't it written someplace they automatically know this already...!?
Ohh, they didn't know...Well how about that!
(dripping complete)Slim
- Reaction score
- 5,604
- Points
- 1,360
Quote from civ u,
Perhaps their homeland being taken from them and their being forced to live in deplorable, highly congested ghetto-ized areas is enough for a person to determine they have little to live for...?
Quote from 48th highlander,
Israel:
Land Area: 20,770km sq
Population: 6,236,253
People/sq km: 300
Palestine:
Land Area: 10,435km sq
Population: 3,693,776
People/sq km: 353
civ u....So what exactly DID you mean???
Perhaps their homeland being taken from them and their being forced to live in deplorable, highly congested ghetto-ized areas is enough for a person to determine they have little to live for...?
Quote from 48th highlander,
Israel:
Land Area: 20,770km sq
Population: 6,236,253
People/sq km: 300
Palestine:
Land Area: 10,435km sq
Population: 3,693,776
People/sq km: 353
civ u....So what exactly DID you mean???
C
CivU
Guest
I don't know that statistics about physical geography are representative of the conditions Palestinians live in each and everyday. If you gave statistics on the number of persons per sq/km in Canada it would seem as though nobody lives in congested low income housing as we all have an immense amoung of space according to the data...
"Israel was established on May 14, 1948. Five Arab armies , coming to the aid of the Palestinians , immediately attacked it. Uncoordinated and outnumbered, they were defeated by Israeli forces. Israel enlarged its territory . Jordan took the West Bank of the Jordan River, and Egypt took the Gaza Strip. ( Israel occupied these lands after the Six Day War of 1967. ) The war produced 780,000 Palestinian refugees."
I don't know how this refutes the Palestinian homeland being taken from the Palestinians...
"Just what makes you think that using facts will have any effect on these people what-so-ever?"
Who are "these people" exactly? The way you so quickly draw superiority/inferiority distinctions makes me question how you can fucntion in society with so many differing opinions and points of view.
"If thats the case then another country would see the plight of those people and help them out"
How is Iraq presently being helped out? What about the conditions in that country suggest life for the average person has improved since March 2003...
"Israel was established on May 14, 1948. Five Arab armies , coming to the aid of the Palestinians , immediately attacked it. Uncoordinated and outnumbered, they were defeated by Israeli forces. Israel enlarged its territory . Jordan took the West Bank of the Jordan River, and Egypt took the Gaza Strip. ( Israel occupied these lands after the Six Day War of 1967. ) The war produced 780,000 Palestinian refugees."
I don't know how this refutes the Palestinian homeland being taken from the Palestinians...
"Just what makes you think that using facts will have any effect on these people what-so-ever?"
Who are "these people" exactly? The way you so quickly draw superiority/inferiority distinctions makes me question how you can fucntion in society with so many differing opinions and points of view.
"If thats the case then another country would see the plight of those people and help them out"
How is Iraq presently being helped out? What about the conditions in that country suggest life for the average person has improved since March 2003...
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 410
CivU said:
Dammit, here we go again.
Listen, if Palestine has enough land, how is Israel responsible for them living in "congested" areas? Is Israel also responsible for Canadian ghettos?
CivU said:
It refutes the idea that Israel was responsible for taking their homeland, and suggest that Palestinians picked the wrong target.
CivU said:
How are they being helped out? Oh, I don't know, how about American forces fighting to implement a fair democratic regime instead of letting Iraq be run by extrimists?
What suggests life has improved? Nothing. What's the point of your question? Did you expect life for them to improve the day the first American tank rolled over the border? Or do you suppose it's a proccess which, like most things in life, will take a lot of hard work and time before it has a positive effect?
- Reaction score
- 33
- Points
- 560
December 17, 2004, 8:39 a.m.
Cracked Icons
Why the Left has lost credibility.
There is much talk of post-election reorganization and rethinking among demoralized liberals, especially in matters of foreign policy. They could start by accepting that the demise of many of their cherished beliefs and institutions was not the fault of others. More often, the problems are fundamental flaws in their own thinking â †such as the ends of good intentions justifying the means of expediency and untruth, and forced equality being a higher moral good than individual liberty and freedom. Whether we call such notions â Å“political correctnessâ ? or â Å“progressivism,â ? the practice of privileging race, class, and gender over basic ethical considerations has earned the moralists of the Left not merely hypocrisy, but virtual incoherence.
Democratic leaders are never going to be trusted in matters of foreign policy unless they can convince Americans that they once more believe in American exceptionalism and are the proper co-custodians of values such as freedom and individual liberty. If in the 1950s rightists were criticized as cynical Cold Warriors who never met a right-wing thug they wouldn't support, as long as he mouthed a few anti-Soviet platitudes, then in the last two decades almost any thug from Latin America to the Middle East who professed concern for â Å“the peopleâ ? â †from Castro and the Noriega Brothers to Yasser Arafat and the Iranian mullahs â †was likely to earn a pass from the American and European cultural elite and media. To regain credibility, the Left must start to apply the same standard of moral outrage to a number of its favorite causes that it does to the United States government, the corporations, and the Christian Right. Here are a few places to start.
1. There really isn't a phenomenon like â Å“Islamophobiaâ ? â †at least no more than there was a â Å“Germanophobiaâ ? in hating Hitler or â Å“Russophobiaâ ? in detesting Stalinism. Any unfairness or rudeness that accrues from the â Å“security profilingâ ? of Middle Eastern young males is dwarfed by efforts of Islamic fascists themselves â †here in the U.S., in the U.K., the Netherlands, France, Turkey, and Israel â †to murder Westerners and blow up civilians. The real danger to thousands of innocents is not an occasional evangelical zealot or uncouth politician spouting off about Islam, but the deliberately orchestrated and very sick anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism that floods the airways worldwide, emanating from Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, to be sure, but also from our erstwhile â Å“alliesâ ? in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
So both here and abroad, the Western public believes that there is a double standard in the moral judgment of our left-leaning media, universities, and politicians â †that we are not to supposed to ask how Christians are treated in Muslim societies, only how free Islamists in Western mosques are to damn their hosts; or that we are to think beheading, suicide murdering, and car bombing moral equivalents to the sexual humiliation and roguery of Abu Ghraib â †apparently because the former involves post-colonial victims and the latter privileged, exploitive Americans. Most sane people, however, privately disagree, and distinguish between a civilian's head rolling on the ground and a snap shot of an American guard pointing at the genitalia of her terrorist ward.
Moreover, few of any note in the Arab Middle East speak out against the racial hatred of Jews. Almost no major Islamic religious figure castigates extreme Muslim clerics for their Dark-age misogyny, anti-Semitism, and venom against the West; and no Arab government admonishes its citizenry to look to itself for solutions rather than falling prey to conspiracy theories and ago-old superstitions. It would be as if the a state-subsidized Ku Klux Klan or the American Nazi party were to be tolerated for purportedly voicing the frustrations of poor working-class whites who â Å“sufferedâ ? under a number of supposed grievances.
What is preached in the madrassas on the West Bank, in Pakistan, and throughout the Gulf is no different from the Nazi doctrine of racial hatred. What has changed, of course, is that unlike our grandfathers, we have lost the courage to speak out against it. In one of the strangest political transformations of our age, the fascist Islamic Right has grafted its cause onto that of the Left's boutique â Å“multiculturalism,â ? hoping to earn a pass for its hate by posing as the â Å“otherâ ? and reaping the benefits of liberal guilt due to purported victimization. By any empirical standard, what various Palestinian cliques have done on the West Bank â †suicide murdering, lynching without trial of their own people, teaching small children to hate and kill Jews â †should have earned them all Hitlerian sobriquets rather than U.N. praise.
2. â Å“Imperialismâ ? and â Å“hegemonyâ ? explain nothing about recent American intervention abroad â †not when dictators such as Noriega, Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein were taken out by the U.S. military. There are no shahs and Your Excellencies in their places, but rather consensual governments whose only sin was that they came on the heels of American arms rather than U.N. collective snoozing. There really was no secret Afghan pipeline behind toppling the Taliban, nor a French-like oil concession to be had for the United States from the new Iraqi interim government. Many of Michael Moore's heroic â Å“Minutemenâ ? of the Sunni Triangle are hired killers â †hooded fascists in the pay of ex-Baathists and Saddamites, along with Islamic terrorists and jihadists who hate the very idea of democracy in the heart of the Arab world. The collective cursus honorum of these Saddamite holdovers during the last two decades â †gassing the Kurds, committing atrocities against the Iranians, looting and pillaging in Kuwait, launching missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia, slaughtering Shiites and again Kurds, and assassinating Western and U.N. aid workers â †rank right up there with the work of the SS and KGB.
Reformers like Allawi and Yawar of Iraq are not â Å“puppetsâ ? but far better advocates of democratic reform than anyone else in the Arab world. Nor does â Å“no blood for oilâ ? mean anything when an increasingly small percentage of American-imported petroleum comes from the Gulf, and when an oil-hungry China â †without much deference to liberal sensibilities â †is driving up the world price, eyeing every well it can for future exploitation without regard for political or environmental niceties.
3. It won't do any longer to attribute American outrage over the U.N. to a vast right-wing conspiracy led by red-state senators and Fox News. All the standing ovations for Kofi Annan cannot hide the truth that the Oil-for-Food scandal exceeds Enron. Indeed, Ken Lay's malfeasance never involved the deaths of thousands, while cronies siphoned off food and supplies from a starving populace. The U.S. military does not tolerate mass rape and plunder among its troops, as is true of the U.N. peacekeepers throughout Africa. There can be no serious U.N. moral sense as long as illiberal regimes â †a Syria, Iran, or Cuba â †vote in the General Assembly and the Security Council stymies solutions out of concern for an autocratic China that swallowed Tibet. Millions were slaughtered in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur while New York bureaucrats either condemned Israel or damned anyone who censured their own inaction and corruption. Rather than faulting those who fault the U.N., leftists should lament the betrayal of the spirit of the liberal U.N. Charter by regimes that are neither democratic nor liberal but who seek legitimacy solely on their ability to win concessions and sympathy from guilt-ridden Westerners.
4. So it is also time to take a hard look at the heroes and villains of Hollywood, liberal Democrats, and the Euro elites. Many are as obsessed with damning the senile dictator of Chile as they are with excusing the unelected President for Life Fidel Castro. But let us be frank. A murderous Pinochet probably killed fewer of his own than did a mass-murdering Castro, and left Chile in better shape than contemporary Cuba is in. And the former is long gone, while the latter is still long in power.
Similarly, Nobel Prizes increasingly go to either unsavory or unhinged characters. Yasser Arafat was a known killer and terrorist, not a global peacemaker. Wangari Maathai's public statements about AIDS are puerile and ipso facto would have eliminated any Westerner from consideration for anything. Rigoberta Menchu Tum herself was a half-truth, her story mostly a creation of a westernized academic publishing elite. Jimmy Carter's 2002 award was not predicated on his past work on housing for the poor, but his critically timed and calculated opposition to George W. Bush's effort to topple Saddam Hussein â †as was confirmed by the receptive Nobel Committee itself. Recent winners Kofi Annan and Kim Dae-jung are now better known for having their own sons involved in influence-peddling and bribery while they oversaw bureaucrats who trafficked in millions with unsavory murderers like Kim Jong-Il and Saddam Hussein. In short, such an august prize has come a long way from Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr. â †and precisely because it has privileged leftist rhetoric over real morality.
If the moralizing Left wants to be taken seriously, it is going have to become serious about its own moral issues, since that is the professed currency of contemporary liberalism. Otherwise, the spiritual leaders who lecture us all on social justice, poverty, and truth will remain the money-speculator George Soros, the Reverend Jesse Jackson of dubious personal and professional ethics, and the mythographer Michael Moore. And we all know where that leads...
â †Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.
Cracked Icons
Why the Left has lost credibility.
There is much talk of post-election reorganization and rethinking among demoralized liberals, especially in matters of foreign policy. They could start by accepting that the demise of many of their cherished beliefs and institutions was not the fault of others. More often, the problems are fundamental flaws in their own thinking â †such as the ends of good intentions justifying the means of expediency and untruth, and forced equality being a higher moral good than individual liberty and freedom. Whether we call such notions â Å“political correctnessâ ? or â Å“progressivism,â ? the practice of privileging race, class, and gender over basic ethical considerations has earned the moralists of the Left not merely hypocrisy, but virtual incoherence.
Democratic leaders are never going to be trusted in matters of foreign policy unless they can convince Americans that they once more believe in American exceptionalism and are the proper co-custodians of values such as freedom and individual liberty. If in the 1950s rightists were criticized as cynical Cold Warriors who never met a right-wing thug they wouldn't support, as long as he mouthed a few anti-Soviet platitudes, then in the last two decades almost any thug from Latin America to the Middle East who professed concern for â Å“the peopleâ ? â †from Castro and the Noriega Brothers to Yasser Arafat and the Iranian mullahs â †was likely to earn a pass from the American and European cultural elite and media. To regain credibility, the Left must start to apply the same standard of moral outrage to a number of its favorite causes that it does to the United States government, the corporations, and the Christian Right. Here are a few places to start.
1. There really isn't a phenomenon like â Å“Islamophobiaâ ? â †at least no more than there was a â Å“Germanophobiaâ ? in hating Hitler or â Å“Russophobiaâ ? in detesting Stalinism. Any unfairness or rudeness that accrues from the â Å“security profilingâ ? of Middle Eastern young males is dwarfed by efforts of Islamic fascists themselves â †here in the U.S., in the U.K., the Netherlands, France, Turkey, and Israel â †to murder Westerners and blow up civilians. The real danger to thousands of innocents is not an occasional evangelical zealot or uncouth politician spouting off about Islam, but the deliberately orchestrated and very sick anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism that floods the airways worldwide, emanating from Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, to be sure, but also from our erstwhile â Å“alliesâ ? in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
So both here and abroad, the Western public believes that there is a double standard in the moral judgment of our left-leaning media, universities, and politicians â †that we are not to supposed to ask how Christians are treated in Muslim societies, only how free Islamists in Western mosques are to damn their hosts; or that we are to think beheading, suicide murdering, and car bombing moral equivalents to the sexual humiliation and roguery of Abu Ghraib â †apparently because the former involves post-colonial victims and the latter privileged, exploitive Americans. Most sane people, however, privately disagree, and distinguish between a civilian's head rolling on the ground and a snap shot of an American guard pointing at the genitalia of her terrorist ward.
Moreover, few of any note in the Arab Middle East speak out against the racial hatred of Jews. Almost no major Islamic religious figure castigates extreme Muslim clerics for their Dark-age misogyny, anti-Semitism, and venom against the West; and no Arab government admonishes its citizenry to look to itself for solutions rather than falling prey to conspiracy theories and ago-old superstitions. It would be as if the a state-subsidized Ku Klux Klan or the American Nazi party were to be tolerated for purportedly voicing the frustrations of poor working-class whites who â Å“sufferedâ ? under a number of supposed grievances.
What is preached in the madrassas on the West Bank, in Pakistan, and throughout the Gulf is no different from the Nazi doctrine of racial hatred. What has changed, of course, is that unlike our grandfathers, we have lost the courage to speak out against it. In one of the strangest political transformations of our age, the fascist Islamic Right has grafted its cause onto that of the Left's boutique â Å“multiculturalism,â ? hoping to earn a pass for its hate by posing as the â Å“otherâ ? and reaping the benefits of liberal guilt due to purported victimization. By any empirical standard, what various Palestinian cliques have done on the West Bank â †suicide murdering, lynching without trial of their own people, teaching small children to hate and kill Jews â †should have earned them all Hitlerian sobriquets rather than U.N. praise.
2. â Å“Imperialismâ ? and â Å“hegemonyâ ? explain nothing about recent American intervention abroad â †not when dictators such as Noriega, Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein were taken out by the U.S. military. There are no shahs and Your Excellencies in their places, but rather consensual governments whose only sin was that they came on the heels of American arms rather than U.N. collective snoozing. There really was no secret Afghan pipeline behind toppling the Taliban, nor a French-like oil concession to be had for the United States from the new Iraqi interim government. Many of Michael Moore's heroic â Å“Minutemenâ ? of the Sunni Triangle are hired killers â †hooded fascists in the pay of ex-Baathists and Saddamites, along with Islamic terrorists and jihadists who hate the very idea of democracy in the heart of the Arab world. The collective cursus honorum of these Saddamite holdovers during the last two decades â †gassing the Kurds, committing atrocities against the Iranians, looting and pillaging in Kuwait, launching missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia, slaughtering Shiites and again Kurds, and assassinating Western and U.N. aid workers â †rank right up there with the work of the SS and KGB.
Reformers like Allawi and Yawar of Iraq are not â Å“puppetsâ ? but far better advocates of democratic reform than anyone else in the Arab world. Nor does â Å“no blood for oilâ ? mean anything when an increasingly small percentage of American-imported petroleum comes from the Gulf, and when an oil-hungry China â †without much deference to liberal sensibilities â †is driving up the world price, eyeing every well it can for future exploitation without regard for political or environmental niceties.
3. It won't do any longer to attribute American outrage over the U.N. to a vast right-wing conspiracy led by red-state senators and Fox News. All the standing ovations for Kofi Annan cannot hide the truth that the Oil-for-Food scandal exceeds Enron. Indeed, Ken Lay's malfeasance never involved the deaths of thousands, while cronies siphoned off food and supplies from a starving populace. The U.S. military does not tolerate mass rape and plunder among its troops, as is true of the U.N. peacekeepers throughout Africa. There can be no serious U.N. moral sense as long as illiberal regimes â †a Syria, Iran, or Cuba â †vote in the General Assembly and the Security Council stymies solutions out of concern for an autocratic China that swallowed Tibet. Millions were slaughtered in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur while New York bureaucrats either condemned Israel or damned anyone who censured their own inaction and corruption. Rather than faulting those who fault the U.N., leftists should lament the betrayal of the spirit of the liberal U.N. Charter by regimes that are neither democratic nor liberal but who seek legitimacy solely on their ability to win concessions and sympathy from guilt-ridden Westerners.
4. So it is also time to take a hard look at the heroes and villains of Hollywood, liberal Democrats, and the Euro elites. Many are as obsessed with damning the senile dictator of Chile as they are with excusing the unelected President for Life Fidel Castro. But let us be frank. A murderous Pinochet probably killed fewer of his own than did a mass-murdering Castro, and left Chile in better shape than contemporary Cuba is in. And the former is long gone, while the latter is still long in power.
Similarly, Nobel Prizes increasingly go to either unsavory or unhinged characters. Yasser Arafat was a known killer and terrorist, not a global peacemaker. Wangari Maathai's public statements about AIDS are puerile and ipso facto would have eliminated any Westerner from consideration for anything. Rigoberta Menchu Tum herself was a half-truth, her story mostly a creation of a westernized academic publishing elite. Jimmy Carter's 2002 award was not predicated on his past work on housing for the poor, but his critically timed and calculated opposition to George W. Bush's effort to topple Saddam Hussein â †as was confirmed by the receptive Nobel Committee itself. Recent winners Kofi Annan and Kim Dae-jung are now better known for having their own sons involved in influence-peddling and bribery while they oversaw bureaucrats who trafficked in millions with unsavory murderers like Kim Jong-Il and Saddam Hussein. In short, such an august prize has come a long way from Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr. â †and precisely because it has privileged leftist rhetoric over real morality.
If the moralizing Left wants to be taken seriously, it is going have to become serious about its own moral issues, since that is the professed currency of contemporary liberalism. Otherwise, the spiritual leaders who lecture us all on social justice, poverty, and truth will remain the money-speculator George Soros, the Reverend Jesse Jackson of dubious personal and professional ethics, and the mythographer Michael Moore. And we all know where that leads...
â †Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.
- Reaction score
- 33
- Points
- 560
The best feature of Okrent's July column on media bias was his recognition that bias inadvertently informs the way reporters see the world. Liberal bias, Okrent wrote, "has not occurred because of management fiat, but because getting outside one's own value system takes a great deal of self-questioning." Why not apply this insight not only to reporters, but to the experts they quote? Then the issue wouldn't be whether experts are honest; it would be, as it is with reporters, whether experts are likely to be so self-critical that they can get past their own interpretive biases.
There is every reason to think that experts aren't capable of such inhuman objectivity. Consider the unmentioned elephant in Okrent's room: the legions of pedigreed academic experts quoted ad nauseam in the media, but who work for no interest group. Daniel Klein of UC Santa Clara has shown that Democrats outnumber Republicans in the humanities and social sciences by roughly seven to one, so it shouldn't be surprising that the faculties of Harvard and the University of California were the biggest group donors to the Kerry campaign. But measures of Democratic partisanship just scratch the surface, since a professor doesn't have to advocate voting Democratic in order to inculcate ideas that lead to such a vote as a matter of logic.
It gets worse. Modern reporters almost all have college degrees. This means that they tend to have gotten their interpretive lenses from the very type of professor they end up quoting once they become journalists. This is a point that conservative media-bias critics are reluctant to acknowledge, for it implies that the left-wing views professors teach aren't so contrary to common sense that their students are immune to being influenced by them. But that's the way it is, especially when what the professors teach is assumptions rather than conclusions. Biased professors don't have to deliberately teach a lopsided view of the world for their students to absorb a lopsided bias. All the professors have to do is teach the world as they honestly see it â †colored by their own, often-unrecognized ideological lenses.
It's not lying experts who should worry us, any more than we should fear a vast left-wing conspiracy of journalists deliberately scheming to spread liberal propaganda. The more insidious problem is experts who tell us how they think the world "undeniably" is â †and the journalists who credulously quote experts' opinions as anything more than that.
â †Jeffrey Friedman is the editor of Critical Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Politics and Culture
There is every reason to think that experts aren't capable of such inhuman objectivity. Consider the unmentioned elephant in Okrent's room: the legions of pedigreed academic experts quoted ad nauseam in the media, but who work for no interest group. Daniel Klein of UC Santa Clara has shown that Democrats outnumber Republicans in the humanities and social sciences by roughly seven to one, so it shouldn't be surprising that the faculties of Harvard and the University of California were the biggest group donors to the Kerry campaign. But measures of Democratic partisanship just scratch the surface, since a professor doesn't have to advocate voting Democratic in order to inculcate ideas that lead to such a vote as a matter of logic.
It gets worse. Modern reporters almost all have college degrees. This means that they tend to have gotten their interpretive lenses from the very type of professor they end up quoting once they become journalists. This is a point that conservative media-bias critics are reluctant to acknowledge, for it implies that the left-wing views professors teach aren't so contrary to common sense that their students are immune to being influenced by them. But that's the way it is, especially when what the professors teach is assumptions rather than conclusions. Biased professors don't have to deliberately teach a lopsided view of the world for their students to absorb a lopsided bias. All the professors have to do is teach the world as they honestly see it â †colored by their own, often-unrecognized ideological lenses.
It's not lying experts who should worry us, any more than we should fear a vast left-wing conspiracy of journalists deliberately scheming to spread liberal propaganda. The more insidious problem is experts who tell us how they think the world "undeniably" is â †and the journalists who credulously quote experts' opinions as anything more than that.
â †Jeffrey Friedman is the editor of Critical Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Politics and Culture
- Reaction score
- 33
- Points
- 560
In the U.S., the law calls this a "heckler's veto," and it's considered an unconstitutional infringement on freedom of speech. Locally, we had a protest group composed of people of Mexican ancestry/citzenship. They were objecting to a local citizen's group which was trying to pressure airlines to check IDs on ALL people boarding flights (this was pre-9/11), since some airlines had been spotted letting large groups of presumably illegal aliens board without an ID check.The pro-Hispanic protestors showed up at the airport and essentially rioted, throwing full soft drink cans and other objects at the ci tizen's group, and trying to attack them. A judge issued a restraining order against the citizen's group, forbidding them from coming to the airport, saying the reaction of the rioters to them endangered other people. Another judge, citing the "heckler's veto," vacated the order, saying the citizens had a right to peacefully assemble and that it was the cop's job to handle anyone who tried to keep them from their lawful purpose. Good for us. Sounds like some of this common sense could be used elsewhere.
- Reaction score
- 33
- Points
- 560
Another example of a cowardly administration allowing toxic ideas free reign on campus and inverting morality. I would suggest American readers send their objections directly to Duke University, and perhaps a "Boycott Duke" campaign might get their attention as well
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11901058_1
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11901058_1
- Reaction score
- 9,343
- Points
- 1,260
Funny, it seems that, like Wilhelmine Germany, that Universities have again become a haven for Anti-Semitism. And you wonder why the Jewish People are defensive - How can you say "Never Again" when academic institutions are tacitly supporting your eventual destruction at the hands of organizations like the Hamas?
Shame on Duke University. Israel should have hit the convention with a Hellfire, it would of saved us all down the road....
PS: I figured out a litmus test for this sort of behaviour. Someone should have invited the local Stormfront chapter (along with any other White Supremacist organization) to the local "Anti-Jewish Fair". Eager to get their message out, the fair would have a good stock of guys with shaved heads, white laces, and SA uniforms hanging around giving out leaflets. The kicker is that the same anti-semitic, eugenic, and hateful message that seemed to be promoted by the speakers would be alongside the swastika on the leaflets the skinheads were giving out.
Invite all the media you can, national if possible - they would love to see a major American university give approval to a "Stormfront" meeting. Watch as the federal funding is cut, the president is suddenly out of the job, and the group involved looks like the assholes they are....
Shame on Duke University. Israel should have hit the convention with a Hellfire, it would of saved us all down the road....
PS: I figured out a litmus test for this sort of behaviour. Someone should have invited the local Stormfront chapter (along with any other White Supremacist organization) to the local "Anti-Jewish Fair". Eager to get their message out, the fair would have a good stock of guys with shaved heads, white laces, and SA uniforms hanging around giving out leaflets. The kicker is that the same anti-semitic, eugenic, and hateful message that seemed to be promoted by the speakers would be alongside the swastika on the leaflets the skinheads were giving out.
Invite all the media you can, national if possible - they would love to see a major American university give approval to a "Stormfront" meeting. Watch as the federal funding is cut, the president is suddenly out of the job, and the group involved looks like the assholes they are....
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 410
Oddly enough this example is 100% valid...with the exception of the fact that these "student groups" would never be so stupid as too use that symbol to promote themselves. However that doesn't mean that's not whats going on. These are weapons of propaganda to be sure and seemingly being used in a very effective manner.
The average Joe on the street wants (or seems to want) to believe that they are "doing some good" by assisting these rights groups with their cause...And I'm sure in most cases they are. But the education system, and the universities specifically, have become haven for this type of negative behaviour and the people who propagate it.
It is racism as assuredly as the 60's in the Mississippi...
Slim
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 210
The vast majority of the students and nearly all the Instructors/Professors at today's Universities are COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY DIVORCED FROM REALITY! Most of them have never spent even a day in the REAL WORLD. In fact if the Profs had to make a living in the real world, most of them would starve to death.
When I was at University in the late sixties, there was still a significant minority of Profs and students that had been brought up on farms or in circumstances where they didn't have everything handed to them, so there was at least some semblance of reality. However, even then there was a healthy supply of kooks and misfits.
The systemic anti-semitism that we are seeing today had it's rise in the seventies. This vile, baseless anti-Israel attitude is not to be equated with the racism one sees directed toward blacks, Orientals etc. It is much deeper and evil than that. Much (if not all) the vehemence directed toward Bush is just plain anti-semitism because he has the courage to support a little, valient DEMOCRATIC country that is surrounded by it's enemies that are bent on it's destruction. What is the most anti-semitic country in western Europe? That's right; it is the most useless and deadbeat country as well.
BTW: I'm not Jewish. (Irish-Catholic and French-Canadian). I got just one thing out of 4 years of University and for that I'm eternally grateful........A great wife out of the PE dept!
To Gen. Moshe Dyan, one of my greatest heros, (second only to my WW II, Inf. Sgt. Dad)
When I was at University in the late sixties, there was still a significant minority of Profs and students that had been brought up on farms or in circumstances where they didn't have everything handed to them, so there was at least some semblance of reality. However, even then there was a healthy supply of kooks and misfits.
The systemic anti-semitism that we are seeing today had it's rise in the seventies. This vile, baseless anti-Israel attitude is not to be equated with the racism one sees directed toward blacks, Orientals etc. It is much deeper and evil than that. Much (if not all) the vehemence directed toward Bush is just plain anti-semitism because he has the courage to support a little, valient DEMOCRATIC country that is surrounded by it's enemies that are bent on it's destruction. What is the most anti-semitic country in western Europe? That's right; it is the most useless and deadbeat country as well.
BTW: I'm not Jewish. (Irish-Catholic and French-Canadian). I got just one thing out of 4 years of University and for that I'm eternally grateful........A great wife out of the PE dept!
To Gen. Moshe Dyan, one of my greatest heros, (second only to my WW II, Inf. Sgt. Dad)
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Torlyn said:
I'm not trying to defend their treatment of those involved AFTER the fact, I'm taking issue with people accusing the university of "letting the riot happen" when there was nothing that they could have done but let the police do their job. Perhaps you should try reading my post, friend, since you seem to have drawn a conclusion that I was claiming no police were present when I said no such thing. I know there were police present - I was there. None of this justifies any accusation that Concordia let the riot happen. If you want to blame someone for the riot, blame the rioters or, at worst, the police - not the univsersity.
As for myopic, intolerant and ingorant(!) people, you'll find them both in, and outside the universities, generally in equal numbers. It's heart-warming to see that you've both done the real world experience and the university thing (as I have) and yet still didn't take the time to fully read the article, and yet bash people who didn't go to university for being ignorant... Interesting. Very interesting. :
What's more interesting is your inability to comprehend what you've read (university educated, eh? Suspect.) Where did I accuse people who didn't go to university for being ignorant or myopic? I said that I found the incidence of myopia and ignorance outside universities greater than within them - wherein is the accusation that all non-academics are myopic and ignorant?. It appears you've read what you wanted to hear, not what was written. I'll thank you to refrain from doing it again.
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Quote,
It appears you've read what you wanted to hear, not what was written. I'll thank you to refrain from doing it again.
Actually I just went back and read your post and it READS exactly like Torlyn stated, perhaps your wording is suspect?
Quote,
blame the rioters or, at worst, the police - not the univsersity.
...the rioters, yes, but the police?......what should they have done?...pulled an Ohio State?
It appears you've read what you wanted to hear, not what was written. I'll thank you to refrain from doing it again.
Actually I just went back and read your post and it READS exactly like Torlyn stated, perhaps your wording is suspect?
Quote,
blame the rioters or, at worst, the police - not the univsersity.
...the rioters, yes, but the police?......what should they have done?...pulled an Ohio State?
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Bruce Monkhouse said:
This might not be fully on-topic, but could you explain what you are referring to about Ohio State?
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Infanteer said:
Oh wow. If that wasn't so tasteless it might even be funny. You've actually SEEN that?
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