Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

I think it's more about the social class affiliation. the elite protect thier own.
edit: half formed thought. long day, etc....

 

I mean... some people discuss the deep ramifications of the trolley problem and how that coincides with their political philosophical ideological beliefs. I don't care about that, I only grade my students on whether they could properly design the braking system for the trolley in the first place.

... or the cyclical failure load on the axles, or the number of leafs required in the suspension, etc. Y'know, the important stuff.

 

They don’t have to spend ANY time calculating their students political leanings at those schools; they are all almost uniformly and monolithically uber-leftist. The real effort would be involved in ferreting out the non sheeple in those flocks.

My Aunt used to be the head of the English Department at Harvard (we’re talking in the 1970’s into 80’s). She ultimately quit because the administration refused to comport with her governing her department such that only MERIT was graded. The proximate final straw was she demanded to NOT flunk out a certain athlete…

Even as the near (yes, literally) communist she and especially her husband were were appalled at the corruption of the “system” to favor anything other than pure merit. The beginnings of the “identity first” politics that has infested our civilization so horribly today….

Alas, that was a bright point in a rather dark canvas overall…

I had so many argument with her and her husband for decades AFTER that event about how their views didn’t comport with reality and actual consequences… but at least they got THAT part right (Probably because they were both so very intellectual - he was an Endocrinologist at Mass General.. I have fond memories of when I first moved (from Arizona) to Massachusetts in the winter of 1980/81 to start work for Digital Equipment. They lived in Wellesly Hills (IYKYK) and would have me for dinner; she was a fabulous cook, and this then-22 year old LOVED free food… we actually had an argument where they argued that there was a significant moral difference between my hunting and eating a deer, and their purchasing ground beef…
(We were eating Spaghetti Bolognese at the time)… they hated guns, abhorred hunting… you can “do the maths”…

Yeah, what can you say, there is something about those kinda brains… but, hey, always remember, everyone’s brains ARE wired very differently, and the thing to put energy into is not “fixing” the differences, but celebrating the “shared”. Always.

@purr1n you wanted stories…

 

You, may I point out, are increasingly an anachronism…

Just look at what the AMA recently did to their “standards”…

But, I salute you for fighting the good, proper, and right, fight.

 

Not a protest, but I remember being in college and having our professor let the whole class out to see Obama speak when he was running the first time. She asked at the next class who had gone, and it turned out not a single one of us had. I suspect most of us who voted ending up voting for Obama (I did), but I went to school in the DC area and grew up around there, probably along with most people in the class, and I think growing up in that area instills a certain cynicism about politics in general.

 

I'm honestly not presupposing anything with regards to your views on the morality of hunting versus purchasing ground beef, but since I come from a family of cattle ranchers, i'm interested in what "do the maths" means - I'm not sure I understand.

 

The idea that professors would game students’ grades because they went to the protests and all the professors are just as “uber-left” as the students because of broader culture war tribalism just sounds like a right wing caricature of higher education, to me, and not grounded in the reality of what it’s like to teach, as was pointed out in another post.

Regardless, there’s professors who are a lot further to the center than the protestors, that doesn’t seem particularly controversial to me. There was a Columbia professor complaining about the protests in an op-Ed in the last couple of weeks. There’s another from Berkeley now (rightfully in that case, I think) upset at some of them protesting outside his home. People get more “liberal” vs. uber-left along familiar generational lines in academia in a similar way to how those outside of academia get more conservative with age, generally. Sure, it trends left in upper education versus the general population, but if you’re an “Uber-leftist” tankie student heavily involved in community organizing or whatever, the monied tenured Vote Blue No Matter Who professor on your campus might as well be from another planet.

 

This is pretty much how I see all of y'all's yammerings...

 

I took the quiz knowing where I would likely end up. Even with a few neutral answers I ended up on one of the extremes. The quiz is kinda shite as many questions have all bad options if you aren't entwined in the left/right camps. There aren't any allowances for someone who may lean more Libertarian than Right, and there was no room for Classic Liberalism either.

I usually just stay out of these discussions. It really serves no purpose other than to give others a reason to label you, which leads to all sorts of assumptions depending on what degree of propaganda the reader has accepted.

 

I was referring to their sheer hypocrisy of being staunchly against any and all hunting, yet consumers of meat as long as it “comes in those packages” in the store. They saw NO moral equivalence whatsoever, and refused to acknowledge they were just as “guilty” (if such a word should be used) of causing the death of an animal as any hunter.

THAT “maths”… (simple logic actually)

 

I’m with @crazychile on this: that test is utter shite. So typical of pretty much any/all polling; it’s designed to divide and be divisive. Life, choices, and believes are not so “black and white” (If one can still use that phrase) as those questions tried to force,

Nonetheless, I came out “Ambivalent Right” What evs…

 

Please excuse the rather extreme selective quote here.

They grew up to be bankers. And if they didn't, their kids did.

I'm very sad that the flame of the sixties was so easily dulled, if not extinguished. Although, perhaps it literally went up in smoke.

Nicky my child he stands there with the wind in his hair
Wondering whether the water the wind of the where
I fear that someday he might ask me if mine is the blame
And I've got no reply save to tell him it's all just a game



Went up in smoke or... got remastered, hahaha.

 

Sort of sums up our political culture today. I am straining to think of representatives of Classical Liberalism today. Maybe Bill Maher on the left, Vivek Ramaswamy on the right?? The fact that I'm straining reveals just how far from our Classical Liberal roots we have fallen. Small minorities like the Jews are finding out what happens when the ground (of Classical Liberalism) has been swept away underneath them when they weren't paying attention.

The energy of the cultural revolution of the sixties is still as bright as ever in its step children (e.g. DEI, transhumanism, etc.). Your right however that the internal principals of that generation turned out to be shallow and baseless, but this is understandable as they rested on nothing more than each individuals peculiar expression of, well their own peculiar individualism (i.e. the Cartesian Self - the "Radical Self"). @Bowmoreman's Aunt & uncle were such archetypal expressions of the confident-yet-incoherent and in the end very disintegrating spirit of those times/peoples.

 

Y, I took it for fun, the test is a laundry list of what establishment left would want you to be. My score would, and should, automaticaly cause a lifetime ban on, for example, preElon Twitter. Good that I have never been on any social media.

 

Yeah, it’s Pew. The questions are intentional and super basic/generalized to feed a specific formula or algorithm that lets them do broader analysis of groups that they then can tweak to see if they’re predictive of anything in polling - everything there is a work in progress because they have a financial incentive to try and demonstrate they have some amount of accuracy to outside groups. It’s not meant to be some hard and fast identification of your ideological nuances. I’m as left as can be and it made my eyes roll too, but it’s not a surprise.

 

I don't agree with that! Immature, maybe; naive perhaps...

 

That's not a point. You take naive, baseless, immature, whatever ideas and march them through the institutions.
What you get is what Yuri Beznmenow described so well.
These days the value of ideas can be eveluated only in the context of how they can be,and will be, used to make people deny what they know, what they can see, and totally surrender everything, even their senses. to the narrative.

 

I agree, guilty is not the right word, but consciousness of the value of life, and gratitude for the value being provided by taking life for sustenance of another life doesn't quite roll off the tongue. My uncle took me bow hunting several times, and although I never really got into it, it did appeal to me as an appropriate measure of force. If I'm to tie it back in to Thad's defense of hippy's, my uncle who took me bow hunting, he is a big hippy (that makes excellent venison summer sausage).

 

Funny, that's how I feel about churches.