There is now more systematic evidence linking DEI to worsening campus speech environments. Combining FIRE's survey data with a novel measure of the size of campus DEI bureaucracies, this report (https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/is-dei-causing-the-crisis-of-free-speech-on-campus/) shows that "universities with larger DEI bureaucracies are less tolerant of conservative speakers and more supportive of disruptive actions to prevent campus speech."
For example, "support for preventing a speaker who once said “Black Lives Matter is a hate group” is predicted to jump from 66% at universities with the smallest DEI bureaucracies to nearly 80% at universities with the largest DEI bureaucracies."
Heather Mac Donald's 2018 book The Diversity Delusion is well worth a look on all this. An extract from my review of the book: "The evidence she marshals, about the pointless but self-serving antics of a vast and ever expanding multi-billion dollar campus ‘diversity’ bureaucracy, comes so thick and fast that one needs to put down the book for regular head-scratching breaks to ponder just how this pampered world of the academy managed to so disappear up itself without the wider public calling time on it. She takes the words from your mouth when she asks “are there any grown-ups left on campus, at least in the administrative offices?” She makes a convincing case that this multi-billion campus bureaucracy is likely to have harmed the interests of as many students of colour as it has helped." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
As an Xer I hated Jar Jar, but my Millenial friends, for whom the prequels are their primary Star Wars media, liked him when they were kids. So I came to accept that yeah, these are kids movies primarily so there will be stuff that adults will roll their eyes at. Jar Jar, I don't love ya but I accept your right to exist.
Around minute 10 Briahna argues that DEI is not a "left mechanism," and is basically status quo, so why is she defending it and its representatives? There is a basic refusal of the DEI apologists to engage with an analytic of class. Why? Because then they would have to broaden their coalition and admit that race does not define and explain away everything. My guess is the reason that someone like Ackerman can challenge Harvard elites is because he can afford to, and many of us can't. This sounds like disguised class warfare to me...Harvard is allows it to enable their elitism. Bri taking deep breaths....lol. The House of Cards is coming down.
Also, it's intellectually dishonest to use BYU as an example...it is not a secular institution.
This is precisely the conclusion I come to in the book I just finished, "American Insanity." I didn't have the data you base your conclusion on; I simply reached this conclusion logically, by discussing the concept of the bureaucrat in both Communist Romania (where I grew up) and Capitalist America. In Communism, a bureaucrat was called an "apparatchik" (ie., machinery). Bureaucrats have the impersonal, soulless ethos of a Machine--this is one of the reasons they want to purify language of any pathos and make it "neutral" (like a machine). A bureaucrat takes an idea and sharpens it until its most extreme form--that's why an environment full of bureaucrats creates extremism. (Note to GL: I am looking for intellectuals with a similar mindset willing to read my manuscript and write an "endorsement". I need this to find a publisher.)
Did you look into why Jeffrey Epstein had an office on Harvard's campus, even though he never attended nor graduated from Harvard (or indeed any college)? How come Harvard never gave back the millions he donated?
Why do Bill Ackman and Len Blavatnik get to decide what can be said at Harvard? Whose money controls these campuses and determines acceptable speech? Do you look into that and speak honestly on it?
No, because none of these alleged issues fall under FIRE’s mission. The Constitution determines what is acceptable speech and FIRE upholds that. You should direct your absurd queries elsewhere.
Oh I see. So when a black woman gets fired for allowing anti-Israel demonstrations, none of you idiots are to be seen since showing up would involve criticizing who's really in charge, and you can't do that.
Who made the decisions to hire her in the first place? Could this be discussed at the height of BLM mania after the death of Prophet Floyd? Who is making these decisions, and who decided it's okay to criticize black people as affirmative action hires? Who threatened to pull their money from Harvard if this didn't occur?
Thanks for this. I am in California and have a kid who has gone through a dual enrollment high school program at our local CC - she is now a senior and is done with lower division for CSU and UC. She encountered some DEI "strategies" and questioned them with me (so proud), namely in a photography class in which she had to write a short essay explaining how "we" stole the land on which the college is located and why. It was absurd. She did not complete that assignment because well, fuck that.
However, when I looked into DEI for the college district, I found very little in direct statements about DEI, and everything on their website is from 2021. In fact, the 2021 - 2027 Strategic Goals are the only current statements I could find and include:
1. Increase access and student success.
2. Close academic achievement and support services equity gaps across all racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and gender groups.
3. Actively support workforce and economic development in Ventura County through partnerships and relevant programs and pathways leading from education to careers.
4. Develop a culture that values students, collaboration, and the success of each employee.
While there are certainly problems in the system - I am a high school teacher myself and my kid is in a district school (not mine) - I am happy to report that at least in her experience the last 4 years, the only real DEI threat has come from individual teachers, not a platform. And that's OK with me.
My biggest issue is looking at how to pay for college - it's still outrageously expensive, and still nothing is even remotely changing. While my kid (my only kid) and I will make it happen, I worry for my senior students who find the cost frighteningly prohibitive in a world that I find not only continues to value overpriced bachelor's degrees but also appears to WANT to prohibit many students from even attempting to get them. I think mega corporations (and their lobbyists) want higher ed to stay cost prohibitive so they can hire cheap labor and underpay them. I realize this is a toe-dip into a larger and more complex issue than I've stated here, but I think it's worth mentioning.
Corporations are between a rock and a hard place. They need good workers. They need not to run afoul of a discrimination lawsuit. They can’t do aptitude testing anymore without risking a lawsuit.
Instead they tend to use a college degree as a proxy. It’s not a good proxy. It’s expensive and time consuming for the workers. It’s only an indirect indicator.
That a Hamas cheerleader/mass rape denier like this individual has this kind of platform is about as effective an indictment of D.E.I. as one could imagine.
I will say to Brihanna's credit that calling yourself, or accusing others, of being a Marxist doesn't really mean anything about economic class relations anymore. Marxism now just means a framework for considering power structures. Note James Lindsey throws the word Marxism around to describe gender identity theory. There is no constituency for worker ownership of the means of production and I've never heard any of these people show any interest in the labor theory of value. Marxism is also conflated in this discourse with Leninism or Maoism which are political tactics.
I’m gonna second this. I would also add that words like “socialism”, “abolish capitalism”, etc. have become trendy in the post-2016 era. I don’t know to what extent Briahna’s impression is correct overall, but I can tell you that I have a lot of classmates (I’m a college junior; I chatted briefly with Greg at the FIRE summer conference in July) who self-identify as anticapitalists of some kind, but at the end of the day their worldview is still very much based in the free market. The idea is that the average respondent to a survey like the one you cited isn’t necessarily ABLE to accurately characterize their own political philosophy.
Another anecdote that I’ve heard a few times now is of actual committed socialists and communists who have seen a huge influx of new members to their political organizations, only to find that, to their dismay, most of these members are indifferent or even hostile to the actual ideological principles of the organizations, and generally try to turn the organizations into either group therapy sessions or vehicles for progressive identitarian causes, rather than the Communist Party chapters that they are supposed to be.
A helpful alternative to the usual capitalism/socialism viewpoint choices in economics is offered by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey in her three books: The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality. She explains how the modern economy was not created by capitalism, but by the development of the middle class (the bourgeois), first in Holland then in England, and then in many parts of the world.
The series is about 2000 pages, but very engaging (to me at least), and you can skip around to find interesting developments.
Classical Marxism is based on economic oppressor/victim theory.
But what people quickly learned in the last century was that they could work their way out of being economic victims and didn't need (the typically totally useless and authoritarian) Marxist political class.
So the Marxists invented victim classes that are genetic (sex, race, etc) that people can't ever escape, so that these people would require the (now racist and authoritarian) Marxist political class "to save the people" from this faux victim status.
Leftists are still Marxists. They are still victim/oppressor peddlers for personal power.
And I might add I'm a relative hawk on Israel's behalf vis a vis Iran or Hezbollah. But Palestinians are completely under Israel's complete control. As long as this is the case, Israel's posture toward Iran and foreign actors is a different category tha toward those whose lives are at the complete whim of Israelis and who clearly have no rights. Palestinians are to the Israelis what Helots were to the Spartans and calling a people an existential threat when. if roles were reversed. it would be quite obvious the direction of threat valence requires a shocking level of myopia.
So contextualizing the Haiti Revolution or Nat Turner, do you just say "Hey the Fench/people of Virginia just want to live in peace - what's wrong with these deranged revolutionaries?" And of course neither the French nor the State of Virginia could olerate armed marauders venting their rage on random people. But then you should wonder about the context. I'm not justifying Nat Turner or Desalines murdering captives to understand this shit happens in a context. We are constantly, and rightly, asked to put the events of 1948 in the context of the Holocaust to understand how regular people could make the moral choices they did.
The key to being a revolutionary is that you need to be right. You need to actually be oppressed.
Today, there is almost no valid excuse for leftism and its associated violence and stupidity.
In the case of Palestinians that is precisely the debate. Are they victims or are they the entire problem.
And the mistake of leftists is they believe that any idea that pops into their head - automatically makes them right. A good example is you claiming to know precisely that Hamas are the victims today.
The numbers of Marxist inspired unjustified murders (Stalin, Mau, Pol Pot, etc) far outnumber the numbers of just ones (Haiti). Mostly because leftists are conceited and self-aggrandizing and always think they are right - when they very very rarely are.
Plenty of non-leftists are skeptical of Zionism including me. Weird you'd assume I'm a leftist. I'm anti-Zionism for the same reasons I'm anti-woke and that is a consistent position. Zionism is the woke ideology here. I'm not remotely in favor of the destruction of Israel. One need not validate a founding mythology or the bad shit done to ww it through to get that modern people aren't a legitimate target of relitigating the past. But Zionism's claims go far beyond this. They seem to pretend some route was possible that would have satisfied them.that would not have required dispossessing Palestinians. Uniquely among the human species they can't just admit they wanted something and took it (as every culture has done St one time or another) but must preserve the moral victim high ground while just taking shit.
Did I say Hamas are victims? I said historically Palestinians are the ones who got screwed by immigrants who didn't fight the Turks to liberate Palestine then cam waltzing in demanding it as a right amd proceeded through cocktail party politicking to do just that. Zionist offer the same cartoonish view of history as other sacred victimhood identity movements. No logical reason in 1917 Paestiniand lshoukd have been required to just move to make way for a Jewish majority state. Anti-Zionism is hardly pro-Hamas any more than anti-slavery is pro-Nat Turner. Sure, kill any Hamas person you can find, but stop pretending that if ethnic roles were reversed and the rest of the conflict the same you'd have the same view. I would, but no Zionists would.
“Briahna also claimed that ‘most young people have a left-leaning political bent’.”
Left-leaning youth have been an important narrative in mainstream media for more than half a century now, but it’s worth noting that — in the 1972 presidential election — more 18-29 y.o.s picked Nixon than picked McGovern. The counterculture has never been bigger than the regular culture, and that has held true across age groups.
The problem with the hosts on that show is that they are trapped in their own beliefs and can never imagine themselves into lives or ways of thinking unlike their own. In some cases, it even leads them to make false claims that defy what polls and data show to be the case.
ANY President (thinking 2025) could very simply put a stop to most campus free speech violations. Do you all recall how you can't offer a public prayer at a public school? All because it's supposedly a violation of 1A. Well so are all of these speech violations. They could all be sued by DOJ and as well as threatened with the loss of ALL federal funds (that would apply also to private schools too).
Correct. Leftism is very clearly a logic-free religion. It should be treated exactly like other religions. No crosses in the classrooms and no pride iconography either. All of it needs to go.
Speaking to you as someone on a paid suspension because I called out (on Linkedin) Hamas supporters as Nazis and now have human rights complaints that might (haha) lead to discipline (based on the report of their handpicked lawyer/investigator who might (haha) say that I made some people feel “unsafe” and that she/he might (haha) recommend discipline, and that the person doing the discipline who also happens to be the Claimant on the human rights accusation (but welcome to my magic world where that is not deemed a conflict of interest) because she promises to be impartial or to farm out the decision to someone who has spent the last two years grovelling beneath her and implementing every suggestion, which I understand because she can’t write her speeches or lift her head when she talks; but I’m sure that the fairness and truth fairies will sprinkle their magic dust and the justice will triumph. And I’m sure they will be fair and won’t fire me because I’ve been sounding alarms on massive academic cheating scandals and other issues. Such administrators have mastered the ability to be a bully but hide behind lots of letterheads, please and thank yous, proper memos, just never answering questions and making sure their communication people put their smiling faces on posters or create videos that play endlessly with the volume off on monitors around the school.
I don’t think that many senior admins I know have deep convictions about anything other than wanting a pay raise, a solid oak desk, or how important it is that they can tell people what to do, you know, standard ego gratification.
At my old university, Schulich, the dean, Dezo Horvath, was a master builder with no ego, a brilliant man with deep convictions about learning and who could develop a vision around them. But only a few like him. That man got things done.
Today, I see most administrators as living examples of the Peter Principle. They are so driven by ambition and love of attention that they don’t have time to focus on that weird old learning, critical thinking, application, and development nonsense. They can’t differentiate between a credential factory, where they sit in on meetings to maintain and create processes to make credentials, vs. a learning institution. When the credential machinery groans, their standard rule is to tell instructors to raise grades. A high grade is like an academic Zanax. It just chills everyone out.
What will happen when companies go, “We want someone accepted to college or university (you didn’t need to attend as we have noted that critical thinking levels don’t improve anyway), and we will test you in-house to see if you can work here.” Maybe that will wake some people up.
School should be an academic process to learning to grades. Three things. But that middle portion is often forgotten or taken for granted and becomes only two things. That’s bad.
As I was becoming a speech case law nerd, I came to the conclusion that the biggest problem wasn't any political agenda so much as administrators who didn't want to have to work harder.
Now that I'm also a lethal injection case law nerd, I'm noticing a pattern.
There is now more systematic evidence linking DEI to worsening campus speech environments. Combining FIRE's survey data with a novel measure of the size of campus DEI bureaucracies, this report (https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/is-dei-causing-the-crisis-of-free-speech-on-campus/) shows that "universities with larger DEI bureaucracies are less tolerant of conservative speakers and more supportive of disruptive actions to prevent campus speech."
For example, "support for preventing a speaker who once said “Black Lives Matter is a hate group” is predicted to jump from 66% at universities with the smallest DEI bureaucracies to nearly 80% at universities with the largest DEI bureaucracies."
Heather Mac Donald's 2018 book The Diversity Delusion is well worth a look on all this. An extract from my review of the book: "The evidence she marshals, about the pointless but self-serving antics of a vast and ever expanding multi-billion dollar campus ‘diversity’ bureaucracy, comes so thick and fast that one needs to put down the book for regular head-scratching breaks to ponder just how this pampered world of the academy managed to so disappear up itself without the wider public calling time on it. She takes the words from your mouth when she asks “are there any grown-ups left on campus, at least in the administrative offices?” She makes a convincing case that this multi-billion campus bureaucracy is likely to have harmed the interests of as many students of colour as it has helped." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
Is there also a relationship with cost since tuition is paying endless salary?
+10 Substack cool points for working in a Star Wars reference. Of course Han shot first, duh
Han was the only one who shot. And yes, 10+ points for that one, Greg.
About Star Wars, let me voice an unpopular opinion : If you remove Jar Jar, episode 1 is quite good 😊.
Oh dear.
Yeah well you need to remove Anakin's line about the sand also 😁.
As an Xer I hated Jar Jar, but my Millenial friends, for whom the prequels are their primary Star Wars media, liked him when they were kids. So I came to accept that yeah, these are kids movies primarily so there will be stuff that adults will roll their eyes at. Jar Jar, I don't love ya but I accept your right to exist.
OMG that long pause before BJG - grudgingly - admits that UVA could be considered an elite school... *chef’s kiss* (around 14:56)
Around minute 10 Briahna argues that DEI is not a "left mechanism," and is basically status quo, so why is she defending it and its representatives? There is a basic refusal of the DEI apologists to engage with an analytic of class. Why? Because then they would have to broaden their coalition and admit that race does not define and explain away everything. My guess is the reason that someone like Ackerman can challenge Harvard elites is because he can afford to, and many of us can't. This sounds like disguised class warfare to me...Harvard is allows it to enable their elitism. Bri taking deep breaths....lol. The House of Cards is coming down.
Also, it's intellectually dishonest to use BYU as an example...it is not a secular institution.
So Briahna Joy Gray was wrong on major points.
Good work.
She is unacceptable.
This is precisely the conclusion I come to in the book I just finished, "American Insanity." I didn't have the data you base your conclusion on; I simply reached this conclusion logically, by discussing the concept of the bureaucrat in both Communist Romania (where I grew up) and Capitalist America. In Communism, a bureaucrat was called an "apparatchik" (ie., machinery). Bureaucrats have the impersonal, soulless ethos of a Machine--this is one of the reasons they want to purify language of any pathos and make it "neutral" (like a machine). A bureaucrat takes an idea and sharpens it until its most extreme form--that's why an environment full of bureaucrats creates extremism. (Note to GL: I am looking for intellectuals with a similar mindset willing to read my manuscript and write an "endorsement". I need this to find a publisher.)
Great article! Do you know of any universities that have actively reduced their bureaucratic bloat?
Some have. Purdue I believe did and it helped in many ways, including keeping cost down!
Did you look into why Jeffrey Epstein had an office on Harvard's campus, even though he never attended nor graduated from Harvard (or indeed any college)? How come Harvard never gave back the millions he donated?
Why do Bill Ackman and Len Blavatnik get to decide what can be said at Harvard? Whose money controls these campuses and determines acceptable speech? Do you look into that and speak honestly on it?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/07/11/harvard-has-no-plans-return-jeffrey-epsteins-6-5-m-gift/1702047001/
There is always one in these comments - found it!
It’s the Joos Kate! Get to poison your wells!!! Blame those Joos.
No, because none of these alleged issues fall under FIRE’s mission. The Constitution determines what is acceptable speech and FIRE upholds that. You should direct your absurd queries elsewhere.
Oh I see. So when a black woman gets fired for allowing anti-Israel demonstrations, none of you idiots are to be seen since showing up would involve criticizing who's really in charge, and you can't do that.
Lol, just like I thought.
A black woman who would never have been granted tenure if she were white. Whatever floats your boat, Kat. We’re coming to poison your well!
Who made the decisions to hire her in the first place? Could this be discussed at the height of BLM mania after the death of Prophet Floyd? Who is making these decisions, and who decided it's okay to criticize black people as affirmative action hires? Who threatened to pull their money from Harvard if this didn't occur?
Thanks for this. I am in California and have a kid who has gone through a dual enrollment high school program at our local CC - she is now a senior and is done with lower division for CSU and UC. She encountered some DEI "strategies" and questioned them with me (so proud), namely in a photography class in which she had to write a short essay explaining how "we" stole the land on which the college is located and why. It was absurd. She did not complete that assignment because well, fuck that.
However, when I looked into DEI for the college district, I found very little in direct statements about DEI, and everything on their website is from 2021. In fact, the 2021 - 2027 Strategic Goals are the only current statements I could find and include:
1. Increase access and student success.
2. Close academic achievement and support services equity gaps across all racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and gender groups.
3. Actively support workforce and economic development in Ventura County through partnerships and relevant programs and pathways leading from education to careers.
4. Develop a culture that values students, collaboration, and the success of each employee.
While there are certainly problems in the system - I am a high school teacher myself and my kid is in a district school (not mine) - I am happy to report that at least in her experience the last 4 years, the only real DEI threat has come from individual teachers, not a platform. And that's OK with me.
My biggest issue is looking at how to pay for college - it's still outrageously expensive, and still nothing is even remotely changing. While my kid (my only kid) and I will make it happen, I worry for my senior students who find the cost frighteningly prohibitive in a world that I find not only continues to value overpriced bachelor's degrees but also appears to WANT to prohibit many students from even attempting to get them. I think mega corporations (and their lobbyists) want higher ed to stay cost prohibitive so they can hire cheap labor and underpay them. I realize this is a toe-dip into a larger and more complex issue than I've stated here, but I think it's worth mentioning.
Corporations are between a rock and a hard place. They need good workers. They need not to run afoul of a discrimination lawsuit. They can’t do aptitude testing anymore without risking a lawsuit.
Instead they tend to use a college degree as a proxy. It’s not a good proxy. It’s expensive and time consuming for the workers. It’s only an indirect indicator.
That a Hamas cheerleader/mass rape denier like this individual has this kind of platform is about as effective an indictment of D.E.I. as one could imagine.
Yes of course. Thanks for pointing out that she is a depraved individual. She’s open about it. Unlike,say, Michelle Obama.
I will say to Brihanna's credit that calling yourself, or accusing others, of being a Marxist doesn't really mean anything about economic class relations anymore. Marxism now just means a framework for considering power structures. Note James Lindsey throws the word Marxism around to describe gender identity theory. There is no constituency for worker ownership of the means of production and I've never heard any of these people show any interest in the labor theory of value. Marxism is also conflated in this discourse with Leninism or Maoism which are political tactics.
I’m gonna second this. I would also add that words like “socialism”, “abolish capitalism”, etc. have become trendy in the post-2016 era. I don’t know to what extent Briahna’s impression is correct overall, but I can tell you that I have a lot of classmates (I’m a college junior; I chatted briefly with Greg at the FIRE summer conference in July) who self-identify as anticapitalists of some kind, but at the end of the day their worldview is still very much based in the free market. The idea is that the average respondent to a survey like the one you cited isn’t necessarily ABLE to accurately characterize their own political philosophy.
Another anecdote that I’ve heard a few times now is of actual committed socialists and communists who have seen a huge influx of new members to their political organizations, only to find that, to their dismay, most of these members are indifferent or even hostile to the actual ideological principles of the organizations, and generally try to turn the organizations into either group therapy sessions or vehicles for progressive identitarian causes, rather than the Communist Party chapters that they are supposed to be.
A helpful alternative to the usual capitalism/socialism viewpoint choices in economics is offered by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey in her three books: The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality. She explains how the modern economy was not created by capitalism, but by the development of the middle class (the bourgeois), first in Holland then in England, and then in many parts of the world.
The series is about 2000 pages, but very engaging (to me at least), and you can skip around to find interesting developments.
I’ll have to check it out. As someone who sees very few redeeming qualities in either capitalism OR socialism, it sounds like it’d be up my alley!
That's a man, and his real name is Donald McCloskey, not Deirdre.
He's delusional. And if you go along with it, that means you're coddling delusion. Grow a backbone.
Classical Marxism is based on economic oppressor/victim theory.
But what people quickly learned in the last century was that they could work their way out of being economic victims and didn't need (the typically totally useless and authoritarian) Marxist political class.
So the Marxists invented victim classes that are genetic (sex, race, etc) that people can't ever escape, so that these people would require the (now racist and authoritarian) Marxist political class "to save the people" from this faux victim status.
Leftists are still Marxists. They are still victim/oppressor peddlers for personal power.
And I might add I'm a relative hawk on Israel's behalf vis a vis Iran or Hezbollah. But Palestinians are completely under Israel's complete control. As long as this is the case, Israel's posture toward Iran and foreign actors is a different category tha toward those whose lives are at the complete whim of Israelis and who clearly have no rights. Palestinians are to the Israelis what Helots were to the Spartans and calling a people an existential threat when. if roles were reversed. it would be quite obvious the direction of threat valence requires a shocking level of myopia.
So contextualizing the Haiti Revolution or Nat Turner, do you just say "Hey the Fench/people of Virginia just want to live in peace - what's wrong with these deranged revolutionaries?" And of course neither the French nor the State of Virginia could olerate armed marauders venting their rage on random people. But then you should wonder about the context. I'm not justifying Nat Turner or Desalines murdering captives to understand this shit happens in a context. We are constantly, and rightly, asked to put the events of 1948 in the context of the Holocaust to understand how regular people could make the moral choices they did.
The key to being a revolutionary is that you need to be right. You need to actually be oppressed.
Today, there is almost no valid excuse for leftism and its associated violence and stupidity.
In the case of Palestinians that is precisely the debate. Are they victims or are they the entire problem.
And the mistake of leftists is they believe that any idea that pops into their head - automatically makes them right. A good example is you claiming to know precisely that Hamas are the victims today.
The numbers of Marxist inspired unjustified murders (Stalin, Mau, Pol Pot, etc) far outnumber the numbers of just ones (Haiti). Mostly because leftists are conceited and self-aggrandizing and always think they are right - when they very very rarely are.
Plenty of non-leftists are skeptical of Zionism including me. Weird you'd assume I'm a leftist. I'm anti-Zionism for the same reasons I'm anti-woke and that is a consistent position. Zionism is the woke ideology here. I'm not remotely in favor of the destruction of Israel. One need not validate a founding mythology or the bad shit done to ww it through to get that modern people aren't a legitimate target of relitigating the past. But Zionism's claims go far beyond this. They seem to pretend some route was possible that would have satisfied them.that would not have required dispossessing Palestinians. Uniquely among the human species they can't just admit they wanted something and took it (as every culture has done St one time or another) but must preserve the moral victim high ground while just taking shit.
Did I say Hamas are victims? I said historically Palestinians are the ones who got screwed by immigrants who didn't fight the Turks to liberate Palestine then cam waltzing in demanding it as a right amd proceeded through cocktail party politicking to do just that. Zionist offer the same cartoonish view of history as other sacred victimhood identity movements. No logical reason in 1917 Paestiniand lshoukd have been required to just move to make way for a Jewish majority state. Anti-Zionism is hardly pro-Hamas any more than anti-slavery is pro-Nat Turner. Sure, kill any Hamas person you can find, but stop pretending that if ethnic roles were reversed and the rest of the conflict the same you'd have the same view. I would, but no Zionists would.
Chemistry doesn’t embody Exclusion? This is a discipline that founds itself on dividing elements by how much they weigh!
STOP FAT-SHAMING PLUTONIUM!
HEALTHY AT ANY ATOMIC WEIGHT!
“Briahna also claimed that ‘most young people have a left-leaning political bent’.”
Left-leaning youth have been an important narrative in mainstream media for more than half a century now, but it’s worth noting that — in the 1972 presidential election — more 18-29 y.o.s picked Nixon than picked McGovern. The counterculture has never been bigger than the regular culture, and that has held true across age groups.
Has something changed? BJG’s own outfit, The Hill, recently noted: “Pollsters found Trump performing better than Biden among the youngest voters, leading the incumbent among 18-to-29-year-olds by about 2 points, 45.2 percent to 42.9 percent.” (https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4265622-trump-leads-biden-builds-support-among-young-voters-poll/)
The problem with the hosts on that show is that they are trapped in their own beliefs and can never imagine themselves into lives or ways of thinking unlike their own. In some cases, it even leads them to make false claims that defy what polls and data show to be the case.
ANY President (thinking 2025) could very simply put a stop to most campus free speech violations. Do you all recall how you can't offer a public prayer at a public school? All because it's supposedly a violation of 1A. Well so are all of these speech violations. They could all be sued by DOJ and as well as threatened with the loss of ALL federal funds (that would apply also to private schools too).
Correct. Leftism is very clearly a logic-free religion. It should be treated exactly like other religions. No crosses in the classrooms and no pride iconography either. All of it needs to go.
Speaking to you as someone on a paid suspension because I called out (on Linkedin) Hamas supporters as Nazis and now have human rights complaints that might (haha) lead to discipline (based on the report of their handpicked lawyer/investigator who might (haha) say that I made some people feel “unsafe” and that she/he might (haha) recommend discipline, and that the person doing the discipline who also happens to be the Claimant on the human rights accusation (but welcome to my magic world where that is not deemed a conflict of interest) because she promises to be impartial or to farm out the decision to someone who has spent the last two years grovelling beneath her and implementing every suggestion, which I understand because she can’t write her speeches or lift her head when she talks; but I’m sure that the fairness and truth fairies will sprinkle their magic dust and the justice will triumph. And I’m sure they will be fair and won’t fire me because I’ve been sounding alarms on massive academic cheating scandals and other issues. Such administrators have mastered the ability to be a bully but hide behind lots of letterheads, please and thank yous, proper memos, just never answering questions and making sure their communication people put their smiling faces on posters or create videos that play endlessly with the volume off on monitors around the school.
I don’t think that many senior admins I know have deep convictions about anything other than wanting a pay raise, a solid oak desk, or how important it is that they can tell people what to do, you know, standard ego gratification.
At my old university, Schulich, the dean, Dezo Horvath, was a master builder with no ego, a brilliant man with deep convictions about learning and who could develop a vision around them. But only a few like him. That man got things done.
Today, I see most administrators as living examples of the Peter Principle. They are so driven by ambition and love of attention that they don’t have time to focus on that weird old learning, critical thinking, application, and development nonsense. They can’t differentiate between a credential factory, where they sit in on meetings to maintain and create processes to make credentials, vs. a learning institution. When the credential machinery groans, their standard rule is to tell instructors to raise grades. A high grade is like an academic Zanax. It just chills everyone out.
What will happen when companies go, “We want someone accepted to college or university (you didn’t need to attend as we have noted that critical thinking levels don’t improve anyway), and we will test you in-house to see if you can work here.” Maybe that will wake some people up.
School should be an academic process to learning to grades. Three things. But that middle portion is often forgotten or taken for granted and becomes only two things. That’s bad.
You should boycott Brihana Joy. She’s a Hamas rape denier. This should not be an acceptable stance. It should be like a slavery denier.
As I was becoming a speech case law nerd, I came to the conclusion that the biggest problem wasn't any political agenda so much as administrators who didn't want to have to work harder.
Now that I'm also a lethal injection case law nerd, I'm noticing a pattern.