There is no left, there is no right. There are two levers, connected to nothing, which we pull occasionally to quell dissent and give the illusion of self-determination.

We are like children in a shopping cart, pretending we're at the helm - we aren't.

You're not wrong, but you're being a little rude. Your OP raised an earnest concern: people are being excluded from academia who shouldn't be. You responded by basically saying "the group of people you are alluding to doesn't even exist, the only purpose of that label is someone else's nefarious one".

It's quite likely there's another label besides "Right" which would point towards the group of people in question in a way you would accept. What is really gained by trying to enforce this nefarios depiction of what "Right" means?

We're like children in a shopping cart, some of whom are hogging all the books. Or at least all the good tenure-track jobs.

Where is the evidence for this? What are the points where Barack Obama and Donald Trump are actually colluding by supporting something that the average American would oppose?

You don't need a conspiracy for that to work. Elected officials in any country have different incentives to pass laws that will favour different groups. If some groups are more persuasive (or coercitive - "think of employment") than others (eg, the public at large), this leads to these groups having an influence out of proportion with their membership.

I didn't mean to imply a conspiracy with "colluding". Just tell me what the issues are where Barack Obama and Donald Trump are actually on the same side and the American people would really want someone on the other side. What was your point about employment, for example?

Haven't you got the causation wrong? Isn't it the more educated people become the more left leaning they are? It's not the left captured academia, it's academia created the left.

Yeah. Because the right is a bastion of free thought and introspection these days.

I said no such thing. I gave an explanation for

>they find that a disproportionate share of Islamist radicals come from an engineering background, and that Islamist and right-wing extremism have more in common than either does with left-wing extremism, in which engineers are absent while social scientists and humanities students are prominent.

Like a conspiracy?