So, as most of your probably know, I recently made the transition to university. And--again, as most of you probably know--I am a Conservative, in the sense that I tend to prefer the Tories over any other political party in the UK. I usually don't describe myself as a "conservative",but the label is sufficient for my point here.

I've already gotten into a few discussions, one with a girl who was a third-wave feminist and a Labour voter (who, the next day, I heard drunkenly say "All Tories should kill themselves) and a couple of other people who also voted Labour. We all know that students have a tendency to be more left-of-centre, progressive and to have attitudes of social justice. Already I have encountered people calling me a "wanker" or "scum" for voting Conservative, although most of the time it's done in a light-hearted manner and is actually pretty funny. But it's a useful segue into a point I've been wanting to make for a long time.

On college campuses--the one place which should be devoted to intellectual diversity and freedom of speech--we are seeing a worrying trend towards intolerance of these things (and, indeed, among younger people in general). Occurrences such as this, where speakers are shouted down or somehow silenced on or removed from a campus are becoming increasingly common. In fact, there was a case at my own university two years ago when students effectively removed Israel's deputy ambassador when he was scheduled to give a talk.

The first example, though, is particularly interesting. The speaker who was shouted down was done so for recently publishing some literature which questioned the whole "rape culture on college campuses" meme--which, by now, is pretty well known to be false. He was, as far as it matters, prevented from speaking for committing heresy; he was shouted down and silenced for questioning the dominant narrative, with no respect from the people upholding that narrative for his point of view. It's rather an insult to whole point of higher education: the one place you should indeed have the freedom to speak and listen, the freedom to have your views challenged, the freedom to feel uncomfortable and the freedom to be offended.

Why do I call these things freedoms? Social psychologists--particularly Jonathan Haidt--have documented how humans are rather "anti-fragile". Facing resistance and obstacles is good for you and it develops you as a person; yet we have calls for things like trigger warnings and safe spaces. Keeping in mind, by the way, that the best way to deal with post-traumatic stress is to face your triggers and harden yourself to them. Again, humans are generally anti-fragile in nature. It's also dangerous as it seems to be breeding a generation of students who have no respect for the fact that the world around them will not change because they shout down people they disagree with--often something they mistake for strength, when it is in fact a sign of significant weakness. Ancient philosophers from the stoics to Buddha and even Jesus recognised it makes far more sense to change yourself to deal with the world around you, than to try and change the world extrospectively.

This shouting down of speakers to a more benign way of non-participation in intellectual fora belies a class of people unwilling to have their assumptions and their dogma challenged. It is the kind of anti-intellectualism that has always accompanied intolerant regimes or ways of thinking. It is a situation that has led to the actual shunning of students. It's not a case of the majority thinking the minority incorrect; it's a case of them believing them to be also evil, malicious or immoral in some form or another. This sort of moralising attitude kills discourse in the very place it ought to be protected. It's similar to the "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" narrative regarding Michael Brown which was pushed by progressives and social justice activists--and, funnily enough, I discussed this with the aforementioned girl. People who disagreed with the narrative were sometimes labelled racist, and this continued after the Justice Dept. (and, IIRC, an independent report commissioned by the family) disproved that narrative.

Now, let me be clear, the issue is not that these "progressives" were wrong about Michael Brown. The issue is that they approached the issue in such a way as to stifle discussion and, ironically, genuine progress on that case. Of course, when it comes to college campuses, the fault doesn't lie squarely with the students; if anything, the professors and academics facilitating this behaviour--and indeed those who do nothing to encourage intellectual diversity in homogeneous fields--are primarily to blame. All students should have their assumptions and pre-conceived ideas challenged: from the conservative to the progressive.

And this is rather an endemic problem in academia. Particularly social psychology and sociology. Indeed psychology, there has been a worrying trend leftwards with most respondents describing themselves as "liberal" (although, in this post, I am using the term "progressive" synonymously); prior to the 1990s, academic psychology leaned left, whereas today it is overwhelmingly devoid of conservatives, libertarians or even moderates. The current ratio of liberals and Democrats to conservatives and Republicans is around 14:1, being just 4:1 before the '90s. The paper I linked goes on to describe a number of "risk points" that come with this political monoculture, one being the assumption of progressive values in research. Which, indeed, we do see--this paper finds that individuals who are high in either right-wing authoritarianism or social dominance orientation tend to make more unethical decisions, yet the things considered unethical are decisions such as not formally taking the side of a female colleague in a sexual harassment complaint while having limited information. Researchers may also follow "progressive-friendly" lines of research while ignoring those with 'uncouth' connotations; for instance, there was starkly little research into stereotypes between the 1930s and 1980s--just assumed by psychologists to be false--until a conservative psychologist in 1978 put it to the test and sparked a litany of literature which indeed confirmed the opposite to be true. Stereotypes, it so happens, actually have a pretty decent chance of being broadly correct.

Such monoculture in psychology has also led to the mischaracterisation of opponent conservatives, by calling them more intolerant--or, perhaps, rigid is a better word. Despite the fact we now know that this cognitive failure arises in both liberals and conservatives pretty much equally. We can also see numerous other examples, such as the prevalence of confirmation bias which is worsened in ideological echo chambers.

Of course, you could offer explanations for this which have little to do with the political homogeneity of psychology--and social sciences in general. Maybe conservatives are just less intelligent and thus less likely to get a PhD and find a place in academia? While social conservatism is indeed correlated with lower cognitive ability, economic conservatism is correlated with higher cognitive ability, while libertarians have the highest IQ of any group while being severely under-represented. It's also probably not the case that education makes future academics so overwhelmingly liberal. The biggest factors that seem to influence the lack of conservatives heading into psychology tends to be the existence of disproportionate self-selection, a general hostile climate and genuine discrimination.

While the issue with the politicisation of psychology has been raised as early as 1994, this is a disease afflicted social science more broadly. And, personally, I find it scary when this bleeds into campuses; the infection of academia is a cancer worthy of fear all by itself, but when 55pc of colleges have restrictive speech codes in some sense, it becomes very worrying. Indeed, it is probably true that hearing other viewpoints is one of the most important process in making us more tolerant people (there's that anti-fragility again), and yet the trend we clearly see is moving away from that. When we have this kind of attitude to opposing ideas, we can't face the evidence against us even if we ultimately turn out to be correct; take this example from sociology:

[E]xamples of inconvenient facts abound. Blacks (and Asians) have better mental health than Whites, an effect labeled the Black–White paradox (Keyes 2009). Hispanics have better physical health and lower mortality than Whites, an effect known as the Hispanic paradox (Markides and Eschbach 2005). And Asians have a higher average education level than Whites (Sakamoto et al. 2009), an effect which is as yet unnamed. The use of “paradox” rather than “falsification” for these effects is telling, given that a robust theory should have no paradoxes. In other cases, no clear ranking can be made. Although Asians have the highest median household income, Whites have the highest median net worth (Kochhar, Taylor, and Fry 2011). Black men are perceived as both highly attractive and highly dangerous (Lewis 2011; Sadler et al. 2012). And Blacks have the highest risk of being a victim of a hate crime, but Blacks also commit hate crimes at the highest per capita rate (Chorba 2001; Rubenstein 2003). Meanwhile, Jews and Asians and are almost exclusively victims rather than perpetrators of hate crimes (Chorba 2001; Rubenstein 2003), which seems to put them at bottom of a racial hierarchy, but their education and income put them at the top of the racial hierarchy.

TL;DR: We are fucking goosestepping towards a world of academic echo-chambers, intellectually intolerant students, young people who have no idea how to face the world and a general attitude of the prioritisation of emotional and social justice over fundamental liberties and empirical rigor. Fuck me.

now that im done, i think this is due to the massive amounts of young people now entering academia who might otherwise be better suited for technical college/skilled labor, and the overall de-valuation (through many different systems) of universities' statuses as centers for the constant evolution of knowledge and perception. im not sure how public education is in your country but the public education in america is bad enough to carry a lot of fault for these sorts of things as well.

Quote from: Meta as Fuck on October 07, 2015, 08:22:10 PM

Quote from: Azumarill on October 07, 2015, 08:20:08 PM

but the public education in america is bad enough to carry a lot of fault for these sorts of things as well.

Both US and UK universities are highly competitive on a global scale; they really are rather good.

oh, i mean the primary and secondary schooling, like ages 6-18 or whatever age kids start school at. i know our postsecondary/graduate institutions are good.

I don't see how poor primary and secondary schooling (which has been poor for a while) would contribute to the dominance of progressives in academia and on campuses.

I'm in what is essentially a social justice class.

Every time I open my mouth I'm a target but I fucking love it.

I feel naughty, like a kid who broke some arbitrary rule for the fun of it.

Yesterday I called out a bullshit statistic some pink-haired hambeast (dude) was shilling, got a serious death glare. Couldn't fucking hide my grin. People told me today that he was bitching about it for hours.

My politics classes are gonna be POP.

I recently made the transition

wow what a brave and progressive thing to do.

It is a situation that has led to the actual shunning of students. It's not a case of the majority thinking the minority incorrect; it's a case of them believing them to be also evil, malicious or immoral in some form or another. This sort of moralising attitude kills discourse in the very place it ought to be protected.

I know you're not explicitly expressing everything this article is expressing but I'm going to just rail this.

To this list of offenses — normally reserved only for bigots and criminals — we can now apparently add opposing same-sex marriage.

It really seems to be satisfied with the prior status quo, accepting that universities will shun some folks for their actions/beliefs/etc that reflect negatively on the insitution. Why are gay-marriage opponents seen as people who are in league with those other groups? Probably because they are characteristically ignorant, inconsistent, and do so at the cost of continued discriminating against large groups of people.

A gay marriage opponent can propose an idea as long as it isn't "fuck fags" and suddenly they're acceptable public dialogue, while any rationalization a neo-nazi could produce would be kicked out. And this article seems fine with that.

Obviously the real solution here is to give platform to anyone who's ideas can hold up to themselves, but this article seems to act under the premise that gay-marriage opponents aren't fueled by bigoted, or just plain retarded agendas like other retarded groups that aren't given platform are. Which is fucking stupid. Because they fail to present anything resembling an point that holds water, such as when I followed the first link in the article and found this gem of a truly airtight defense to sacred marriage:

“We argue that marriage really exists to unite a man and a woman as husband and wife to then be mother and father to any children that that union creates,” Anderson says to the voice on the other end of the line.

“This is based on anthropological truths that men and women are distinct and complementary. It’s based on a biological fact that reproduction requires both a man and a woman. It’s based on a social reality that children deserve a mom and a dad.”

He barely needs a breath. “Our argument is that this is what gets the government in the marriage business,” he says. “It’s not because the state cares about consenting adult romance.”

He spits the same substanceless trite all anti-marriage proponents do: circular reasoning that fails to uphold its own established values (marriage is specifically meant to foster procreation, yet marriage has never necessitated childbearing from the parties involved). Unless he starts saying old folks shouldn't marry, or you can't get your tubes tied unless you've got two kids already, he's just targetting homosexuals because he's a bigot. He's plain stupid, and nothing is learned from him.

Obviously the real solution here is to give platform to anyone who's ideas can hold up to themselves, but this article seems to act under the premise that gay-marriage opponents aren't fueled by bigoted, or just plain retarded agendas like other retarded groups that aren't given platform are. Which is fucking stupid. Because they fail to present anything resembling an point that holds water, such as when I followed the first link in the article and found this gem of a truly airtight defense to sacred marriage

He spits the same substanceless trite all anti-marriage proponents do: circular reasoning that fails to uphold its own established values (marriage is specifically meant to foster procreation, yet marriage has never necessitated childbearing from the parties involved). Unless he starts saying old folks shouldn't marry, or you can't get your tubes tied unless you've got two kids already, he's just targetting homosexuals because he's a bigot. He's plain stupid, and nothing is learned from him.

Point is though, you can't just stick your fingers in your ears and pretend these kind of facile opinions don't exist. Nothing of intellectual value is gained from it, and all it's going to do is galvanize people into believing these types of titillating ideas.

The only way you can beat problematic ideals is within open discourse, rational arguments and mockery. Simply denying someone a platform, regardless of how retarded their beliefs might be, will only invigorate said opinion and give them a victim status to latch on to.

Quote from: eggsalad on October 08, 2015, 01:09:06 AM

Obviously the real solution here is to give platform to anyone who's ideas can hold up to themselves, but this article seems to act under the premise that gay-marriage opponents aren't fueled by bigoted, or just plain retarded agendas like other retarded groups that aren't given platform are. Which is fucking stupid. Because they fail to present anything resembling an point that holds water, such as when I followed the first link in the article and found this gem of a truly airtight defense to sacred marriage

He spits the same substanceless trite all anti-marriage proponents do: circular reasoning that fails to uphold its own established values (marriage is specifically meant to foster procreation, yet marriage has never necessitated childbearing from the parties involved). Unless he starts saying old folks shouldn't marry, or you can't get your tubes tied unless you've got two kids already, he's just targetting homosexuals because he's a bigot. He's plain stupid, and nothing is learned from him.

Point is though, you can't just stick your fingers in your ears and pretend these kind of facile opinions don't exist. Nothing of intellectual value is gained from it, and all it's going to do is galvanize people into believing these types of titillating ideas.

The only way you can beat problematic ideals is within open discourse, rational arguments and mockery. Simply denying someone a platform, regardless of how retarded their beliefs might be, will only invigorate said opinion and give them a victim status to latch on to.

Which is why I said that the article should extend it's sympathy to everyone, not just marriage opponents if it claims to value those things. I think it tells stories about the author's actual priorities.

Quote from: eggsalad on October 08, 2015, 08:19:38 AM

Quote from: Madman Mordo on October 08, 2015, 07:33:48 AM

Quote from: eggsalad on October 08, 2015, 01:09:06 AM

Obviously the real solution here is to give platform to anyone who's ideas can hold up to themselves, but this article seems to act under the premise that gay-marriage opponents aren't fueled by bigoted, or just plain retarded agendas like other retarded groups that aren't given platform are. Which is fucking stupid. Because they fail to present anything resembling an point that holds water, such as when I followed the first link in the article and found this gem of a truly airtight defense to sacred marriage

He spits the same substanceless trite all anti-marriage proponents do: circular reasoning that fails to uphold its own established values (marriage is specifically meant to foster procreation, yet marriage has never necessitated childbearing from the parties involved). Unless he starts saying old folks shouldn't marry, or you can't get your tubes tied unless you've got two kids already, he's just targetting homosexuals because he's a bigot. He's plain stupid, and nothing is learned from him.

Point is though, you can't just stick your fingers in your ears and pretend these kind of facile opinions don't exist. Nothing of intellectual value is gained from it, and all it's going to do is galvanize people into believing these types of titillating ideas.

The only way you can beat problematic ideals is within open discourse, rational arguments and mockery. Simply denying someone a platform, regardless of how retarded their beliefs might be, will only invigorate said opinion and give them a victim status to latch on to.

Which is why I said that the article should extend it's sympathy to everyone, not just marriage opponents if it claims to value those things. I think it tells stories about the author's actual priorities.

But gay marriage opponents are the ones that usually get shut down though, which is the whole point of the article.

Comfortable speech doesn't need protected. Uncomfortable speech does.

Everyone including neonazis, KKK rallies, WBC and etc in this context.