The right likes to push this idea of universities as brainwashing factories, but there's very little of that going on given that its usually a struggle to get everyone to do the assigned reading, let alone try to brainwash people.
I understand some students are lazy. But that's what an F is for. Even in undergrad, I valued my time and tuition dollars more than that.
As my father told a student who complained about a D in his course: "No, I didn't give you a D. You earned a D. I would have given you an F."
(Went to GT and had family who taught undergrad and grad, so might have different perspective on expectations)
Wow. I would say IME people were transformed from unengaged and ignorant to skilled critical thinkers. YMMV, and it it may depend on college and major, but they couldn't make it through liberal arts classes "brainless and all thinking the same things"; they'd fail.
People do realize that you don't have to choose between the regressive, anti-intellectual right and the regressive, anti-intellectual left, correct? Every time someone criticizes the left, some left-wing person argues that the right-wing is worse as though there isn't a moderate option. We have to choose between overt left-wing propaganda and overt right-wing propaganda--we can't have a media apparatus that at least pays lip service to objectivity and neutrality like we have had for the last few decades.
I agree with 'don't'; the idea that everything is politicized propaganda is a tool of the propagandists, like a liar saying 'everyone lies'.
The right-wing opinion on universities and college graduates shifted around the same time that college graduates stopped being a strong GOP constituency.
I personally think both of these have happened. I bristle at the inference that only one of them is taking place.
Many, including possibly you based on comments so far, are enchanted with the idea that one side is correct always and another side is wrong always.
I think this is the root of the problem - a meta problem where communication has broken down - because the go-to discussion technique is to quote a gish-like succession of cherry-picked examples so the conclusion of the conversation can be one side is always wrong and another side is always right.
Said another way, any conclusion that ascribes traits to "the left" or "the right" is exactly the sort of stuff I would hope a News Literacy course teaches you to discredit.
I think the problem is twofold, political parties are followed as if they are sports teams, and due to shrinking advertising revenues the news media dishes everything with a massive helping of hyperbole. For example, which US political party has a majority of its registered votes in support of gay marriage? The answer is both, but that doesn't get acknowledged in the media.
The article is a few years old, but by most measures, the Democratic party has been moving from the center-right toward the center-left, making it a relatively centrist party on the global stage, while the Republican party has remained firmly right-wing.
Your comment appears to be true, but what we're seeing may simply be America rebalancing herself for the first time since the lead-up to the Cold War.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/solutions-to-political-...
It would seem unsurprising that the end result of this, upon pulling the "center" of each party towards its own extreme, is essentially what we've seen -- ~50% of conservatives now believe in vaccine/pandemic conspiracy theories, vs liberals support some extremists at the local level, but also continue to support centrists like Biden at the national level.
They wouldn't be pulled to extremes, they'd already be there. However, most research shows it's the right that's moved far. Look at Trumpism and compare that to prior conservative leaders, such as GW Bush, GHW Bush, Reagan, Ford .... Biden fits right in with Clinton and Obama.
> liberals support some extremists at the local level
What extremists? There are people farther left than Biden, but nobody trying to seize power from the people, letting a deadly pandemic spread for political reasons, backing arrest and brutality toward their political enemies, etc.
It's not balanced; if Amy punches Bob, it's not even-handed to blame both of them. If Amy burns down the house, it's not even-handed to say 'we're all crazy'.
I see Trumpism as a cause, not a symptom.
The right was casting about for a leader after McCain and Romney (both centrists) lost to Obama. Trump (and allies) spoke loudest, and so pulled the "party truth" to the right for the Republican party.
Those Republicans who disagreed (of whom there were many) left politics or stopped speaking publicly about their disagreement. Or, over time, began to agree with the party line. Little tent politics.
> What extremists?
There's a well known group, who you can probably find by seeing who's on the Fox News homepage right now, who says things would would be considered far left.
And yet, Biden still calls these people crazy and says no to the more extreme policy proposals. Big tent politics.
My comment wasn't sharing blame. It was remarking on the fundamentally different organizations that the right and the left run, and who they allow to speak.
Fair enough, and I think that's a valuable point. However, I think the following is too:
>> What extremists?
> There's a well known group, who you can probably find by seeing who's on the Fox News homepage right now, who says things would would be considered far left.
> And yet, Biden still calls these people crazy and says no to the more extreme policy proposals. Big tent politics.
I don't think they are extremists, but if you can name some and their extreme policies, I'd go with it. Fox isn't a great source for deciding what is 'far left'.
But to talk about policies, I would call defunding all police, complete student loan forgiveness, banning nuclear power and crude exports, and opposing market based carbon taxes extremist.
This post is an excellent example of information to not trust.
That depends on all of the time frame (are you talking from the height of the mid-to-late-1990s “neoliberal consensus” where the DNC had shifted sharply right on economic issues compared to its previous positions, and when—due in part to the economic boom, broader in reach down the distributional ladder than subsequent expansions—racial issues were at a historically low salience, or some other time), and your political frame of reference (a fix set of policy stands defining degree of left/right-ness, or comparison to evolving global or developed-world standards), and what you are calling “the left” and “the right” that have moved (are you talking about the nth-percentile position in the electorate, are you talking the median position in each of the major parties [and, if so, are you looking at the party-in-the-electorate or the party-in-government], etc.)
And, as with most identity-charged issues, standard selection tends to be biased by the desired outcome (either directly and consciously, or because of worldview, e.g., a conservative will be biased toward the constant-policy rather than evolving-international-norms standard in measuring how far to the right or left things in the US are.)
It doesn't take too long in research-land to appreciate that ideologies are merely abstractions; they're tools to help us understand and discuss the real world.
The people with blind ideological faith are mostly uneducated (and perhaps undergrads), but the academics know how messy the world actually is and love to talk about the jagged, contradictory bits that don't line up with our current models of thought.
What if it's not?
> What if cutting taxes doesn't pay for itself?
If only we had some kind of experiments in the 20th century that showed what systems lead to impoverishment and hunger. Or better yet two centuries of scientific inquiries and refutations of crank economics on logical grounds. Like you know, Marxism, whose incoherency is shown by left, right, and center authors alike. Or imagine, we knew MMT is neither a theory nor modern but a reincarnation of some disproved ideas of old.
It’s basically the same logic as selling merchandise at low cost. How does the government make money? Volume!
Seriously. The argument is that cutting taxes will spur economic growth that will grow the economy so much, that the loss in revenues will be made up by economic growth. i.e Tax cuts pay for themselves.
There is actually ample evidence that this doesn’t actually work, or at least hasn’t worked in 40 years. (Diminishing returns and whatnot.) I’d go so far as to argue that some supporters of this policy even know this because it gave cover for their real goal of simply cutting social programs under the guise of “we can’t afford it”.
> The argument is that cutting taxes will spur economic growth
So what do I care for some abstract growth? If my well-being isn't rising, and it isn't if you take away through taxes, excises, indirect taxes half of what I earn with hard toil, not interested.
> cover for their real goal of simply cutting social programs under the guise of “we can’t afford it”
And that's a good thing.
I find the government functions very well given it's necessarily a large institution (which all are bureaucratic and inefficient, including businesses) and perpetual (it can't go out of business and be replaced, but we do replace management!). Transportation infrastructure (roads, airports, etc.), food safety, education, science (NASA, NSF, NIH), courts, military, regulation of banks, national parks, etc. etc. Think of NASA - the greatest explorers in the history of humanity, with nobody even close - is a government agency.
Government's biggest problem is the lack of participation from citizens and obstruction from the GOP. The post office delivered my mail fine for my entire life until the neo-reactionaries got hold of it and (intentionally, I think) ruined it.
"Too bad, but it's your monarch. He's anointed by God. You must care about him".
Not really a very strong argument.
> Think of NASA - the greatest explorers in the history of humanity, with nobody even close - is a government agency.
USSR had dozens of space projects, all by a government ministry. Doesn't mean you'd want to cherish the regime and all its inefficiencies & injustices.
And the Chinese government was building huge ghost cities where no-one lives at the greatest pace in human history, with nobody even close. Yet that isn't considered a positive achievement.
The thing is governments are taking resources out of economy. People don't devour money, they'd spend them or invest anyway (using their own scale of preferences). They could go to a cafe, sponsoring this industry, to a journey, buy a new car, start a new business. But after the central authority takes that much away, there will be that much less for the industries of people's preference. That means new people wouldn't be hired, new car models created and produced, new enterprises started; no new building would appear that otherwise could. And the central authority will at best build something useful at twice the price; because private citizens are motivated to be efficient, the state bureaucrats don't. And at worst, the funds will be squandered, directed to their oligarchic pals, stolen.
> "Too bad, but it's your monarch. He's anointed by God. You must care about him".
It's not a monarch. I assume you live in a democracy. The reason you think people are anointed is that you don't participate. I promise: Participate, especially in local politics, and you'll see how much government depends on citizen participation, and how powerless most people make themselves by bizarrely excluding themselves.
Get off Parler, or whatever and read a history book, because Reagan’s economic policies echo even today. Even without a labeled time axis, there are countless economic charts where you can easily pick out 1981.
If you don't want to be banned on HN, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, use the site as intended from now on, and drop the ideological warfare please. (No, we don't care which ideology you like or dislike. Either way, it destroys what this site is supposed to be for.
Actually you're way, way over the bannable line already but I don't want to ban you and not the other person when as far as this thread goes you were behaving equally badly. If you don't want to be banned on HN, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, use the site as intended from now on, and drop the ideological warfare please. (No, we don't care which ideology you like or dislike. Either way, it destroys what this site is supposed to be for.
I can afford to be more consistent. What attracted my attention to your post specifically (knock at conservative values aside) is the mentioning of tax cuts as if that's something terribly wrong. It's not.
The paper you've linked that allegedly is supposed to impress Americans, wouldn't anyone else. Authors' assumption for some reason (was it what Republicans promoted?) is that government doesn't have to be more thrifty and less wasteful. It reads: look, the government was just an inefficient juggernaut as usual, and the tax cuts put this behavior under risk.
Insatiable appetites of governments aside, tax cuts do pay off. And not only economically, but also in terms of bringing greater justice and better satisfaction of all but communists.
What do they mean by 'left-leaning'?: My professors might have been left-leaning, but I rarely knew their politics. The question is what the students are learning.
Also, conservatives have moved far rightward, which might make others relatively more leftish.
Also, reactionaries politicize lots of things, such as climate change. Education and research isn't affirmative action for conservatives - they need to prove their ideas. Climate change denial lacks the science behind it; it shouldn't be taught. That doesn't make climate change education biased toward liberals.
How does the book address those issues? Also, why do you trust that book (an honest question - I haven't heard of it)?
I don't think this is true, I think the left-wing media has fixated increasingly on the far-right or exaggerating the extent to which individuals on the right are "far-right" which gives the impression that the right is drifting, but it's just the media changing how it represents the right. To be clear, the right is changing, but it's not perceptibly drifting to the right.
> Also, reactionaries politicize lots of things, such as climate change. Education and research isn't affirmative action for conservatives - they need to prove their ideas. Climate change denial lacks the science behind it; it shouldn't be taught. That doesn't make climate change education biased toward liberals.
2 things:
1. We don't even need to invoke conservative beliefs (certainly we don't need to cherry-pick the most overtly anti-science of conservative beliefs), we can look at moderate liberal beliefs, like colorblind approaches to combatting racism which are equally vilified and actively suppressed.
2. If we're talking about "ideas competing in some marketplace" then why are the left so frequently resorting to cancellation of intellectuals rather than debate? E.g., consider all of the petitions to have professors fired or to have papers deleted from journals. And I'm not talking about dumb kids circulating petitions to have their professors fired, but university faculty circulating petitions to have their colleagues fired for ideological (not factual) transgressions.
But every time we talk about this, left-wing folks pretend that the debate is whether or not to allow creationism or climate denial in the classroom. This seems transparently disingenuous to me.
It would be convenient to denigrate those facts in some way, but they are there: Conservatives (generally) back climate change denial, which will cause generations of catastrophe.
> colorblind approaches to combatting racism which are equally vilified and actively suppressed
I don't agree they are "equally vilified" as the overt and covert racism of many on the right. I think "actively suppressed" lacks much basis or meaning except conservative repetition.
There is debate on left, that's true, and that's a good thing.
> why are the left so frequently resorting to cancellation of intellectuals rather than debate?
I don't agree that it's a phenomenon of the left; conservatives repeating that claim doesn't make it true (any more than climate change denial). Look at the conservative efforts to silence protestors (laws limiting protests, legalizing striking them with cars), professors (such as the right-wing donor at UNC, threats to and reductions of tenure at major universities), students (e.g., the football players at U of Texas), etc. Look at Colin Kaepernick, who the President of the United States attacked and who lost his career. Look at many executive branch employees, in Washington and the states, who were fired for telling the truth and following the law, and judges who were attacked for the same. Right-wing politicians and journalists who are destroyed for challenging Trump or reactionary dogma. Etc.
On the left, far-left voices are also getting louder, but I don't think the centrist-left voices have gotten quieter as much as their centrist-right counterparts.
The end result is that "the right" seems more right (in terms of speech) while "the left" seems... conflicted (in terms of speech).
Even if that's masking the underlying counts and beliefs.
I don't know if it's more or less charitable to suggest that they're primarily driven by revenue. The incentives are basically the same in that model, except the lean is audience-generated rather than centrally controlled. You'd expect more extreme positions on both sides, which is consistent with what you're saying.
A combination of both best fits the evidence, I think. You write controversial articles about both sides to get clicks, and write about the center of your side to get political support. So you get people on both sides with very skewed views (the far) of the other, and who think of their own side as idealogically diverse (the far) but grounded in reality (the center). If the media landscape is primarily liberal, you'd expect it to look the way you're describing it.
I really like that conclusion, because it's perfectly consistent with my experience. I don't really have evidence to support this, though, and I'm not sure how to go about getting any.
The "your centrist, but no other" political motivation (even if not economic) is a piece I missed.