Politics and university study

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[Mugwump]

^ You're confusing an Arts degree with Left-wing propaganda (which, to be fair, is not surprising, since they are, sadly, intimately related nowadays).

Nowadays, laws are designed to reflect the will of parliament, which is elected via universal adult suffrage - hardly the simple conspiracy against the poor your Arts degree may have taught you.

What you wrote was somewhat true in the 19th Century, though even then the laws that protected the rights of property owners also provided a basis for protection of ordinary working people against theft and thuggery, and for economic development.

The example you gave does not seem to be to do with laws and law-making, but with very poor government and indifferent service delivery. Plus ca change.

[stui magpie]

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[Mugwump]

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[Wokko]

Having recently delved into the cesspool of the Arts faculty they are overwhelmingly run, taught and studied by leftist/progressives and this line of thought is pushed very strongly. Any conservative opinion is devalued or shouted down and identity politics permeates everything they do.

University has become a breeding ground of progressive brainwashing to the point where they ban and censor opinions they don't like; the exact opposite of what university should be about.

Of course there are 'Good' professors, courses and institutions that still follow the Western tradition of thought, discussion, debate and respect for others opinions but finding those is like heading out to Creswick state forest hoping to find gold nuggets.

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[Mugwump]

^ WPT, if the discussion is now about whether there is left wing bias in the Arts faculties, then I think there is a great deal of evidence, both systematic and anecdotal, to support this. The Wikipedia entry on the subject, which is pretty dispassionate and tries to avoid ideological town criers, describes the various reputable studies which document the fact that academics are significantly more liberal than the community.

I think this is borne out by the various points of contact that most of us have with humanities at tertiary level. My own experience is very dated (early 1980s in literature and Psychology), but even then the preponderance of Marxist and feminist and �structuralist� theory over conservative and Leavisite was striking. With two children studying Arts subjects now at two different UK universities, they report to me that a certain game must be played to avoid �assessment risk.� Fashionable liberal opinions are safest, touching �diversity�, secularism, relativism, gender fluidity, �privilege�, post-patriotism, anti-Capitalism, etc etc as these dominate the discourse. The forces of order and tradition are always on trial, while the new orthodoxies are given a free pass.

Like most young people, of course, they just accept it, though they know, deep-down, that the edifice of the new orthodoxy is more contingent than it seems.

Final note - nowhere have I said that �we are all rooned� and that the past was golden. The past had many injustices and darknesses, and there is no reason to want it back as it was, even if that were possible. However, many things in the 1950s and 1960s were demonstrably safer and more secure for ordinary people than they are today ; and unlike �progressive� thought, the past is (broadly) not speculative, and it can teach us about concrete human possibility.

As a people, we are always in the process of choosing a future. My view is that we chose a future which entails far more derangement and misery for the less advantaged members of society than we needed to, and so-called �progressive� voices are far too complacent about their ideology and its effects. As, by the way, are the libertarian Right, who have prevailed in economics with the same damaging results.

[stui magpie]

Universities nowdays are little more than glorified tech schools, turning over qualifications .

I'm glad i never went and had people trying to tell me how to think, it wouldnhave eb ded well.

People who need to go to uni at 18 to learn how to think are a worry. People with brains had already figured that out.

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[Mugwump]

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[Pies4shaw]

You don�t want the trash getting above themselves, wpt. If they learn to read, they might read dangerous things.