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Post by Amadan on Aug 28, 2017 9:01:39 GMT -5
I miss my laptop. I need the pic with the enraged female student holding up her sign: "I spent $100K on my degree in female, lesbian, and transgender studies, and I can't find a job." Poor snowflake. This is a spinoff of the "everybody needs a degree" bullshit. People who should be in trade school studying culinary delivery are instead off to a four-year vacation at daddy's expense. They need fields of study that are totally subjective and based on parroting the currently-accepted memes. Anything that required objective analysis and critical thought, and they'd be out on their asses halfway through their first.semester. Economic illiteracy and moral relativism both play a big part too. Both thing drummed into them five days a week for the preceding twelve years. I'll defend them in part. I was right at the tipping point where "Just having a college degree makes you employable" became no longer true. Up until my generation, everyone was told that and it was generally true. I graduated with a liberal arts degree from a good school, and ended up in a recession. I worked at a CopyMat, then joined the Army. High school guidance counselors should have stopped selling this shit with my generation. But they haven't. That doesn't excuse not doing due diligence, and you are totally correct that most people going to college really shouldn't, and various Grievance Studies degrees are useless. But kids are still being told that a college degree, any college degree, is the paper you need to get a job. By the time they are old enough to do a cost-benefit analysis of going into debt for a useless degree, they are already in debt with a useless degree.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 28, 2017 9:25:26 GMT -5
I agree kids should at least have a notion of how much or how little their degree might help them be employable, and how their student debt will affect them.
I knew my English major would give me limited career paths outside of teaching and all would require advanced degrees. At the time, I really wanted to teach.
But it also, as it turns out, was a pretty good major for someone going into law school. Strong writing skills and the kind of in depth analysis of poetry and literature I've always reveled in were excellent preparation for the kind of analysis and persuasive writing I do as a lawyer. Most lawyers don't write particularly well. It's definitely an advantage to be able to easily turn out clean, fluent English rather than over-worked legalese.
Some irony -- my Mr. Practical college boyfriend (a conservative, btw) was constantly harping at me about my useless English degree. A few years later, I was out-earning him...
So just to say, a liberal arts degree that has some measure of academic rigor can help prepare you for a job or a more advanced degree that will get you a job.
Of course, I'm talking the course of study, not the degree itself. Now everyone and their cousin has a college degree, so they are now the equivalent of what a high school degree once was.
I do agree that you need to think about all this before you are six figures in debt.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 28, 2017 10:19:05 GMT -5
A side note:
There's a tendency in these sorts of discussions to toss all conservatives in a bin and all liberals in another bin as though there are only two bins and not a continuum.
And real life people aren't quite like that. Center left and center right often have more in common with each other than with the extremes on "their sides". And there's cross-over. Many economically right-leaning people lean left with regard to social issues, for example. There is an immense abyss between, say, Evan McMullin, and the Charlottesville protesters waving Nazi flags and screeching "Blood and soil!" And there's an immense abyss between Barack Obama and the extreme left who use pepper spray to make their points. Evan and Barack could sit down, debate their differences, and come to a reasonable consensus. The extremes on either side? Not a chance.
When we talk about clashes between right and left, I get the feeling we are most often talking about the extreme left and the extreme right. We aren't talking about Angie and Vince, who would be hanging out at the local pub together, occasionally having lively but amiable disagreements. (Angie, of course, would also be setting things on fire, but that's just who she is, not a function of her politics.)
I do rather wonder whether at some point a centrist party will emerge.
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Post by celawson on Aug 28, 2017 12:49:54 GMT -5
Thank you to Opty for linking and quoting from and discussing the same study I linked to earlier when Amadan asked for proof discimination of conservatives in academia. I neglected to quote from it. (I may have been worried about worsening my reputation for cutting and pasting, who knows?) Apparently no one arguing with me clicked on the link. In the same vein, the other link I provided has an excellent and research-based discussion about how, once the numbers with regards to ideology are not balanced, the imbalance is reinforced due to phenomena like group think etc. I will link this again, in case anyone missed it. www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=731This seems to be borne out by the consistent increasing imbalance in certain academic departments over the last decade or two. I'm still trying to find the article with the graphs illustrating this increase which I mentioned earlier. As far as conservatives not going into some sorts of liberal arts areas due to their own preferences, I don't disagree with that. And I wouldn't be concerned with that if the left side of academia was as open to presenting and discussing and respecting valid opposing viewpoints as conservatives are. But it seems in very many instances they are not. Especially in our more elite universities like Ivy League. And I gave an example of the philosophy at Hillsdale College, a conservative liberal arts college that greatly values free speech and emphasizes college as a place to immerse oneself in opposing views, so as to best critically examine and better develop one's own views. That is what a university should be, as I said above.
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Post by nighttimer on Aug 28, 2017 15:08:10 GMT -5
Google the company has recently fired someone over a point of view. Google has recently fired someone not over a point of view, but for a violation of company policy. The same way any company can fire an employee for violating company policy. Conservatives have tried to conflate a personnel matter into a free speech crisis. Try harder. If the "free exchange of ideas" means there are less safe zones on the Internet for racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance and other diseases of the human spirit, I'm fine with it and would happily accelerate the process until these dirtbags only feel welcome on 4chan, Stormfront or some dank, dark corner of the Deep Web. I've had quite enough of the assertion you are a bad person who is choking off the free exchange of ideas if you refuse to tolerate the intolerant. Someone is going to be deciding what qualifies as "hate, and what does not, and it's going to be a subjective standard as a matter of course. Someone is already deciding what qualifies as "hate" material and like pornography it's a purely subjective process. As Justice Potter Stewart famously quipped, "You know it when you see it." Some people need more help with that than others.
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Post by robeiae on Aug 28, 2017 17:33:02 GMT -5
Someone is already deciding what qualifies as "hate" material and like pornography it's a purely subjective process. As Justice Potter Stewart famously quipped, "You know it when you see it." Some people need more help with that than others. I don't disagree with this at all. Unfortunately, the people who need that additional help seem be the ones doing the "deciding" right now.
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Post by nighttimer on Aug 28, 2017 19:42:20 GMT -5
Cassandra, the administration is not "right-wing". Trump is not "right-wing". Trump's blowhard statements are not anywhere near as damaging or concerning as a giant tech company's (Google's) actions which reach into the vast majority of our households, privacy, behaviors, etc. And Trump has raised important issues about the bias in mainstream news, which for the public, is actually a good thing to help us be more aware and more wary of what we're reading. I don't agree with Trump a lot of the time, and I am disappointed at some of the things he's done, but the MSM HAS been unfairly biased against him in many instances, and in many instances has exaggerated or misrepresented the facts in order to make him look bad. When you find a journalist whom Trump has jailed for faithfully reporting the news or even an opinion piece, please let me know and I will join you in your concern and outrage. Annnnnnnnd now, a word for a Trump apologist and normalizer. Trump has raised NO important issues about the bias in the mainstream news. "Fake news" is any news about Trump he doesn't like. "Alternative facts" is another phrase for lying. You don't bring flotsam and jetsam like Scott Pruitt, Kris Kobach, Michael Flynn, Kelly Anne Conway, Sebastian Gorka and the reptilian Steve Bannon in your administration unless you're a right-winger. And if you don't think Trump is "right-wing" what would you call an administration that is attacking the environment, voting rights, transgender soldiers, demanding web hosts reveal who visited a site, tried to talk more smack than a mad North Korea dictator, fired a FBI director who refused to pledge his loyalty, and has an approval rating in the low thirties? If the Trump Misadministration isn't right-wing, it'll do until Ted Cruz or Ted Nugent is elected president. If you want "unfailrly biased" just run to the nearest mirror and anytime you think the mainstream media HAS been unfairly (that word has been rendered null and void by Trump's characterization of ANY criticism of him and his allies as "unfair") and exaggerated or misrepresented the facts in order to make him look bad, I will refer you yet again to the most disgusting words Donald Trump--- YOUR PRESIDENT, NOT MINE---has ever uttered about anyone of your gender, celawson. You are a proud, decent, thoughtful and rational conservative, celawson and I respect you for that even though I do not agree with you. However, it is an endless source of bafflement to me how you would throw ALL of that aside to defend an indecent, thoughtless and irrational man who demeans and degrades the conservative cause. I understand after eight years of a president you thought was all wrong for America, you would be glad to have one you're more comfortable with. However, you have cast your lot with a man who would take one look at you and instantly size you up as someone he'd put the moves on or dismiss as a pig. How do you sleep knowing that?
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Post by celawson on Aug 28, 2017 21:39:01 GMT -5
You've made some good points and asked me some tough questions, NT. I'm going to make dinner and think hard on this, and I'll come back and give you some honest answers.
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Post by Don on Aug 29, 2017 7:30:39 GMT -5
Nice strawman. It's perhaps worth noting that what I actually argued was that governments make the rules under which corporations operate. They can throttle free speech because the laws that created them allow them to do so. An immediate legislative solution is possible... if the political class perceived it to be to their advantage. It's no accident that corporations have the powers they have. Every single power has been granted by lawmakers. There's something out of whack about expecting Dr. Frankenstein to protect you from his greatest creations. How is it a strawman when you keep repeating that corporations were created by government? Like I said, outside of the legal-status aspect, corporations are the result of the free market. They operate according to the rules of the free market; i.e., owners of these businesses can do whatever they want to do, hire or fire whoever they want to, provide or deny services to whomever they want to. That's freedom. But okay, if you're arguing that government should intervene more in the free market, regulate more to prevent free-market excesses, I'm cool with that. WTF is this "free market" you keep claiming is at the root of all this corporate evil? If you have to have a specific legal status to participate in the marketplace, it's not a free market, is it? If you can go to jail for braiding hair, selling "unapproved" products, or even selling legal good for the wrong price, WTF does "free" market mean? Governments have erected vast regulatory structures relating to nearly every aspect of production and trade. The highly-regulated markets we have today are overwhelmingly designed to protect the status quo. Some corporations are even deemed "too big to fail" and bailed out at taxpayer expense. Claiming that "owners of these businesses can do whatever they want to do, hire or fire whoever they want to, provide or deny services to whomever they want to" is one of the funniest things I've read in a long time. Seriously. Have the FDA, EPA, USDA, EEOC, DOC, DOE, and the rest of the alphabet agencies been disbanded and I missed the announcement? Have bakers been absolved of refusal to bake cakes? The markets (dis)function today precisely as various legislatures and their crony crapitolist owners want them to function. Very little of anything that goes on today has anything to do with free markets. Blaming it on free markets is unfathomable to me.
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Post by Amadan on Aug 29, 2017 9:09:34 GMT -5
WTF is this "free market" you keep claiming is at the root of all this corporate evil? If you have to have a specific legal status to participate in the marketplace, it's not a free market, is it? If you can go to jail for braiding hair, selling "unapproved" products, or even selling legal good for the wrong price, WTF does "free" market mean? Governments have erected vast regulatory structures relating to nearly every aspect of production and trade. The highly-regulated markets we have today are overwhelmingly designed to protect the status quo. Some corporations are even deemed "too big to fail" and bailed out at taxpayer expense. Claiming that "owners of these businesses can do whatever they want to do, hire or fire whoever they want to, provide or deny services to whomever they want to" is one of the funniest things I've read in a long time. Seriously. Have the FDA, EPA, USDA, EEOC, DOC, DOE, and the rest of the alphabet agencies been disbanded and I missed the announcement? Have bakers been absolved of refusal to bake cakes? The markets (dis)function today precisely as various legislatures and their crony crapitolist owners want them to function. Very little of anything that goes on today has anything to do with free markets. Blaming it on free markets is unfathomable to me. Your definition of "free market" appears to be "a complete absence of laws or regulations." If the government has any power whatsoever, it's not a free market. That's not the definition rational people use.
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Post by Vince524 on Aug 29, 2017 10:04:30 GMT -5
A side note: There's a tendency in these sorts of discussions to toss all conservatives in a bin and all liberals in another bin as though there are only two bins and not a continuum. And real life people aren't quite like that. Center left and center right often have more in common with each other than with the extremes on "their sides". And there's cross-over. Many economically right-leaning people lean left with regard to social issues, for example. There is an immense abyss between, say, Evan McMullin, and the Charlottesville protesters waving Nazi flags and screeching "Blood and soil!" And there's an immense abyss between Barack Obama and the extreme left who use pepper spray to make their points. Evan and Barack could sit down, debate their differences, and come to a reasonable consensus. The extremes on either side? Not a chance. When we talk about clashes between right and left, I get the feeling we are most often talking about the extreme left and the extreme right. We aren't talking about Angie and Vince, who would be hanging out at the local pub together, occasionally having lively but amiable disagreements. (Angie, of course, would also be setting things on fire, but that's just who she is, not a function of her politics.) I do rather wonder whether at some point a centrist party will emerge. You'd think now would be a great time. We just came from an election with the 2 least likable candidates. Let's get another viable option
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Post by Don on Aug 29, 2017 10:10:23 GMT -5
WTF is this "free market" you keep claiming is at the root of all this corporate evil? If you have to have a specific legal status to participate in the marketplace, it's not a free market, is it? If you can go to jail for braiding hair, selling "unapproved" products, or even selling legal good for the wrong price, WTF does "free" market mean? Governments have erected vast regulatory structures relating to nearly every aspect of production and trade. The highly-regulated markets we have today are overwhelmingly designed to protect the status quo. Some corporations are even deemed "too big to fail" and bailed out at taxpayer expense. Claiming that "owners of these businesses can do whatever they want to do, hire or fire whoever they want to, provide or deny services to whomever they want to" is one of the funniest things I've read in a long time. Seriously. Have the FDA, EPA, USDA, EEOC, DOC, DOE, and the rest of the alphabet agencies been disbanded and I missed the announcement? Have bakers been absolved of refusal to bake cakes? The markets (dis)function today precisely as various legislatures and their crony crapitolist owners want them to function. Very little of anything that goes on today has anything to do with free markets. Blaming it on free markets is unfathomable to me. Your definition of "free market" appears to be "a complete absence of laws or regulations." If the government has any power whatsoever, it's not a free market. That's not the definition rational people use. Apparently it's the definition a lot of people use, and they further believe that's what we have today. See the quote above about "owners of these businesses?" Christine's not the only one who believes that's what we have today, in the face of literally millions of regulations that prove otherwise. And they believe it so thoroughly that they blame that imaginary freedom to "do anything" on the "free" market and claim if only this "free" market were regulated, things would be better... while pretending it's the Wild West out there today. It's pure bullshit.
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Post by Amadan on Aug 29, 2017 11:55:52 GMT -5
Apparently it's the definition a lot of people use, and they further believe that's what we have today. See the quote above about "owners of these businesses?" Christine's not the only one who believes that's what we have today, in the face of literally millions of regulations that prove otherwise. And they believe it so thoroughly that they blame that imaginary freedom to "do anything" on the "free" market and claim if only this "free" market were regulated, things would be better... while pretending it's the Wild West out there today. It's pure bullshit. You are seeing things as a binary: either we have free markets or we don't. If government regulations interfere at all, we don't have free markets. In reality, it is a continuum. We are certainly not the Wild West. We are also not a fascist or socialist regime. Businesses are more heavily regulated than you'd like, and less heavily regulated than Christine would like. That does not mean the degree of freedom is either 0% or 100%. I doubt anyone, including Christine, believes that businesses can "do anything."
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Post by Vince524 on Aug 29, 2017 11:59:27 GMT -5
Indeed, the arguments are very similar. Are there fewer women in STEM because STEM is full of raging misogynists trying to keep women out? Or because STEM is inherently unfriendly to women? Or because fewer women actually seek careers in STEM? It's likely a combination of those factors, but your insistence that universities have been taken over by leftists and they keep all the non-leftists out is identical to the argument by some feminists that any gender disparity in STEM can only be because of institutional sexism, without which we'd see 50% of all computer programmers and engineers and nuclear physicists being women. Maybe that is true, but I am skeptical. Do conservatives tend to find academia an unfriendly environment? Probably, but I think conservatives tend to be less interested in going into academia in the first place. Why on earth would conservatives tend to be less interested in going into academia? Honest question. There are Christian and other private universities which are overwhelmingly staffed by conservative-minded educators, for example. I think celawson is correct: most universities are dominated by liberal-minded people, and it can be an unwelcome place for conservatives. Side note, though it's slightly similar to the argument re: STEM, where I believe women also feel unwelcome, it's not really the same, because a person's genitals (eta: sorry, their "female brains") are not the same as their ideological positions. Unless the argument is that the conservative brain is not adept at academia, which seems rather ridiculous. www.thecollegefix.com/post/32384/
What Lexie Kaufman loves most about Emerson College is its academics. A journalism major, she praised that department and its impressive television studios on campus.
But she won’t be returning for her sophomore year to the small, Boston-based liberal arts school, what she considered her “dream college” when she entered as a freshman.
“It’s a shame, in the end,” she said in a recent interview with The College Fix. “It’s been nothing but awful to me.”
Why so? Because she’s a conservative, and the constant bullying from peers she received over her freshman year sent her packing.
It started during her first days on campus, when Kaufman faced the wrath of her classmates simply because of her political views. In high school, she wrote for The Odyssey Online and the conservative opinions she proffered therein made her disliked immediately at Emerson, she said. www.thecollegefix.com/post/31735/
Of the 12 students interviewed by the Manitou Messenger, several have been violently threatened because of their political beliefs, and almost all of them feel as though they can’t speak up about politics on campus – in class, online or with their friends. …
On the night of the election, a student in the Pause threatened to beat up [College Republicans President Emily] Schaller, calling her a “f***ing moron.” Over the next couple of days, she overheard multiple students threaten to hurt the next conservative or Republican they saw. Vice President of St. Olaf College Republicans Kathryn Hinderaker ’19 had a similar experience.
“I think one of the hardest things was, the second day, I went into Buntrock and someone yelled from the bottom, ‘if you voted for Trump, you better be f***ing scared.’ Everyone clapped and applauded,” Hinderaker said. “Obviously, it didn’t feel super safe.”
www.campusreform.org/?ID=9656
A conservative student at the University of California, Berkeley says that she was targeted and stalked during an Antifa march that left several people injured this weekend.
Video footage reviewed by Campus Reform appears to show Antifa members stalking Ashton Whitty, a prominent conservative student at the university and Campus Reform Campus Correspondent, as she was being interviewed by the American Freedom Keepers. www.foxnews.com/us/2014/07/25/university-california-santa-barbara-professor-pleads-no-contest-to-assault-on.html
A feminist studies professor at a California state university accused of forcibly grabbing an anti-abortion activist’s poster and assaulting the 16-year-old girl has pleaded no contest to three misdemeanor charges.
University of California at Santa Barbara Associate Professor Mireille Miller-Young was charged with one count each of grand theft, vandalism and battery in connection to the March 4 incident involving 16-year-old Thrin Short, her older sister, Joan, and other pro-life activists who were holding signs in a free speech zone on the campus when the professor went berserk. www.foxnews.com/us/2017/08/29/florida-professor-who-tweeted-texans-deserved-harvey-for-supporting-trump-is-relieved-teaching-duties.html A University of Tampa professor of sociology was relieved of his duties Tuesday after he tweeted Sunday that the Texans deserved Hurricane Harvey because of their support for President Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
The University of Tampa sent out a statement Tuesday stating: "On Sunday, Aug. 27, visiting assistant professor of sociology Kenneth Storey made comments on a private Twitter account that do not reflect UT's community views or values. We condemn the comments and the sentiment behind them, and understand the pain this irresponsible act has caused."
These are of course the more outrageous cases. But imagine being a student in a very liberal minded school that has no tolerance for anything outside of the group think. Imagine sitting in a class with that sort of atmosphere.
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Post by Don on Aug 30, 2017 7:58:35 GMT -5
Apparently it's the definition a lot of people use, and they further believe that's what we have today. See the quote above about "owners of these businesses?" Christine's not the only one who believes that's what we have today, in the face of literally millions of regulations that prove otherwise. And they believe it so thoroughly that they blame that imaginary freedom to "do anything" on the "free" market and claim if only this "free" market were regulated, things would be better... while pretending it's the Wild West out there today. It's pure bullshit. You are seeing things as a binary: either we have free markets or we don't. If government regulations interfere at all, we don't have free markets. In reality, it is a continuum. We are certainly not the Wild West. We are also not a fascist or socialist regime. Businesses are more heavily regulated than you'd like, and less heavily regulated than Christine would like. That does not mean the degree of freedom is either 0% or 100%. I doubt anyone, including Christine, believes that businesses can "do anything." No, I'm seeing things on a continuum, and until someone can point out to me the vast unregulated portions of the economy where one can participate in unregulated trade with others, I'll continue to point out that claiming what we have is a "free market" is pure unadulterated bullshit. AAMOF, forget "vast" and point out to me any areas of the economy one may participate in without regulatory intervention. Flea markets, perhaps, in a few places. It's those who claim that "owners can do anything" and we have "free markets" in the face of today's regulatory structure who are engaging not only in binary thinking, but strikingly erroneous binary thinking. Failing to point that out in excruciating detail is part of how we've ended up where we are today. Words have meanings. "Free" and "heavily regulated" are antonyms, not synonyms.
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