Yep. But now that their nonsense is captured on smartphone videos and dumped on Youtube for all to say, we've convinced ourselves that this latest crop is somehow different, that the culture is doomed, and that safe spaces are going to end the world.

The one big difference now is that there's very little protection or job security for faculty and universities and colleges have become competitive, lucrative businesses that are first and foremost concerned with protecting their brand, so the stupidity of a single student can potentially end a career, which is making professors self-censor to protect their livelihoods.

Well, because students being stupid isn't new, that doesn't mean we shouldn't highlight how stupid safe spaces are.

That baffler article OZ posted a while back is definitely worth a read. Also, it's great the only reasonable voice at the meeting had to apologize 3 times.

Aristotle, if I recall, said in his defense of rhetoric that rhetoric could be used for good or ill and it is important that the rhetor use it for good. The problem here seems to be what happens to most college students; they get a new, powerful hammer in their intellectual toolbox and lo everything looks like a nail.

I honestly have no idea how to use rhetoric for good, I am broken that way.

Even if I rhetorically convinced someone to behave in a way that helps the world for the actual better, I still lied to them like they were trained animals, which strikes me as wrong. Like I utilized them as a beast of cognitive burden for my will over theirs, instead of treating them like a person.

That is my hangup, however, and I have to cope with the world in spite of it.

I want the good rhetoric to be true, but I lack the eyes to see it and the will to use it without certainty of its goodness.

I kind of suck.

At least he wasn't terrified of beans.

He must have gotten really tired of people telling him he was full of beans. Hence the phobia.

That's a fair worry. Tell me how this response sits with you: People have beliefs and sets of nested beliefs and these beliefs are either true of the world or false. When I'm engaged in conversation with someone, these beliefs serve as sort of a metaphysical constraint on what they think is appropriate/acceptable in the conversation. For instance, let's say you and I are talking about an object, a cube, and I then I say something about the circumference of the cube. Here you would likely reject what I have to say because my contribution to the conversation about the cube was incompatible with your beliefs about the properties of cubes. In this way, if I'm going to talk to you about cubes, I need to do it in terms that are compatible with your beliefs about cubes, whether they are true or false beliefs.

Now, let's say you reject my talk about the circumference of cubes because you take talk about circumferences to have a scope limited to spheres. Well, given the metaphysical constraints on my speech, what options do I have available? Well, I would need to engage with your circumference belief since this belief is what is limiting my contribution, and specifically I need to engage your belief about circumference in way that expands the scope of circumference talk to be wider than it is and to include talk about cubes. So, I say to you, circumference applies to any symmetrical three dimensional shape and just means the way around the shape along a line of symmetry (I just made this up). Now let's say you were persuaded by what I said. Why were you? Well, one answer is that my explanation allowed you to make sense of my circumference-cube talk in a way that was compatible with your existing beliefs about circumferences.

This would be a bad kind of rhetoric since my talk is untrue and maybe my motivations are amoral. But its contrapositive highlights why rhetoric is useful. Let's say you have some false belief about climate change, that climate change is a lefty conspiracy to take away your freedom and it climate change can't be the case because of god. Well, this false belief serves as a metaphysical constraint on the kind of speech I can use when trying to convince you that climate change is really just a theory about planetary warming the consequences of which are dire. Given this constraint, maybe I have to strategies to convince you otherwise. First, might be to find some biblical verses and make the case that god would let climate change happen and that it is man's responsibility to take care of the earth. Second, I might appeal to another belief you hold about the importance of national defense and note that military wants to move away from fossil fuels toward renewables for security reasons. In both cases, I'm not persuading you by the truth of the matter, but by the demands your existing belief systems places on me.

Further, if my goal is to persuade you away from an entire false belief system, I cannot simply present a new system for you to adopt wholesale. I'll have to show you piecemeal how to adopt the new one, bit by bit. And to do that, I must engage with your existing beliefs, bit by bit, until you can accept the new beliefs/belief system. Let me appeal to a metaphor here. One's existing beliefs are like the ship of Theseus. I can't give you all new boards and replace them all at once so you have a new hull instantly. Boards must be taken out one or a few at a time, and must be taken out and replaced mostly in the pattern in which they were originally assembled.

The point of this long reply is to suggest that if there are objective rights and wrongs, we cannot always appeal to the rights and wrongs themselves to convince people of their value. We must first engage their false beliefs in a way compatible with their beliefs, which may include advocating false things ourselves, to slowly persuade them to a place where we can appeal to the rights and wrongs directly and they will accept such appeals as persuasive. The good rhetor engages in this kind of work.

Weren't the Pythagoreans also afraid of beans? The Pythagorean sect that shunned the math for the more religious practices of Pythagoras.

Yes, I think we were all talking about Pythagoras.

Such a spirited defense of rhetoric! Where is your zen motorcycle? You're the Devils only friend, Simon.

https://youtu.be/XacvydVrhuI

If you mean String Theory, you may find that the LHC has made some of it testable. It failed the tests, but tests did happen. Extra dimensions are ruled out at certain distances now, which is a start.

But yeah, theoretically physics is video game engine programming for people with lots of college debt. It is very close to alchemy to say a model of a galaxy is the same as the galaxy because the math made the pixels look like it on the screen, and the code makes the physics remind you of real physics. UnReal wept.

Quantum computing is going to end the whole field in a few decades when mathematical models use real physics. This has me super stoked! https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160822100705.htm

Our understanding of the physical world goes through cycles of delusion and awakening. Consider the Ptolemaic model of epicycles, for example, as both a physical example of the problem and a psychic description of same.

I guess if I had to answer this woman I would suggest to her that if we could separate the corpus of knowledge from the method, perhaps we could agree on the method? I'm not so picky about which pile of rocks needs a few more stones, whether African Shamans or Western Boffins, so long as the method is scientific. Otherwise you'll never make that connection to the physical world that pops the soap bubble of one's latest delusions. Epicycles.

Prove to me that epicycles are false.

Maybe it's YOU who needs awakening, or at least re-sleeping. Think about it, man.

If you sit down and calculate the planets for a while with epicycles, and do the same with Kepler's laws of motion, you will find at the end of your calculations that Kepler's laws are more accurate. The people who used epicycles saw the errors stacking up first, no one forced it on them.

Falsifying something shows the presence of something else in the area of your theory, not the absence of the thing you theorized. Emptiness is never a thing you look for. The epicyclists noticed that planets showed up somewhere else than predicted, instead of just failing to show up. Otherwise, invisible planet theory videos for all (please kamlem no, stay away from the search bar, please)!

Oscar, I am all about teaching method over content. The scientific method can be used to regain lost knowledge, it's the method that makes us the most bad ass animals in the known universe. That is the flame from the lamp.

It's not so much that they're false, as that the model is insufficient to capture all of the observed effects. This is the physical world's way of telling you there is a delusion on your end. In this case, it was the pride of the researchers who wanted to put themselves at the center of the universe. Sadly, they were mistaken.

Insufficient to capture because it was false, or insufficient to capture because we needed to add a few more epicycles...?

If you jump out a ten story window and hit a cafe awning on the way down and the tourists beneath it break your fall, did you survive because gravity is false?

I guess what disappoints me the most about this video is the usual postcolonial emphasis on dissecting, separating, and incinerating existing knowledge and histories instead of adding cool lighting-wizard shit to what's already here. Again and again, vague allusions are made to all the wonderful knowledge our current narratives don't give us room to experience. Again and again, a call is made to discredit and dismantle existing knowledge, as if a vacuum first needs to be created in order to attract all of this unimaginable parallel knowledge. As if European Christianity first had to be destroyed before logic, math, and medicine could be introduced by scholars from the Middle East.

When I hear these sorts of arguments, even when they're made less ideologically and more reasonably than in this video, part of me is thinking: c'mon, if you've got something different to say, just say it. We can handle it. Tell us how to call down lightning.

Yes, that is how we lost concrete for a thousand years.

AFAIK concrete was 'lost' because the market dried up for it.

Only the Romans were using it for enormous state-sponsored edifices after all. Once their power was broken, there was no demand (for the architects, engineers and skilled tradesmen involved also), and the passing on of the skills involved were no longer passed from father to son. Purely economics from what histories I've read of the period.

It only took a generation or two for such trades to be lost.

...to be clear though, we lost a particular 'recipe' of concrete rather than the idea entirely.

Glad to have that cleared up.

I blame wine.

Or we just stop telling them about antibiotics...

Left wing terrorism in the name of social justice is a real thing, complete with tons of bombings throughout the 70's, a lot of them done on campuses by goofy college kids. The right wing only caught up with the new cool trend of international religious terrorism in the 80's and 90's, by becoming the Christian equivalent of a Taliban social occupation with an Al-Qaeda militant outreach.

I am left of Jesus and Kropotkin, but I am under no illusion about humans using violence as a component of any ideology. The left can be terrorists again, which is why I hate rhetoric, because only rhetoric makes any of that shit sound like a good idea to anyone.

It's dangerous to assume any individual leftie or rightie is more or less predisposed to terrorism based on the jargon of their rhetoric, it is natural for humans to kill for their ideologies as plan A, and only reason can undo that instinct.

It is unwise to forget the Weathermen just because Al-Bubba votes Trump.

>>I am under no illusion about humans using violence as a component of any ideology.

Yes, big time.

I find examples of idiocy, violence and hypocrisy stemming from the fringes of beliefs that I share to be much more interesting and useful than examples from the other side of the coin.
There is a common thread that runs through both.

If a particular group of people has appeared to monopolize bad behavior, it is likely circumstantial. Unfortunately, many people, of all stripes, bang out whatever belief system they feel is just and then immediately get to work using it to be vile towards others.

bawbag, could you plz point to the original claim you're refuting that college kids are equally capable of inciting violence as--I'm assuming--Tea Party types or Trump voters? I've read through this thread and haven't found it yet.

Even the most virulent good ol' boys are less of a threat to liberal values than Islam is, but that doesn't stop regressive leftists from using the the permissiveness of Western culture to abet a far more repressive culture in its ambition to conquer the West. The great irony is that they do this in the name of tolerance while 'fucking white male-ing' the people who maintain the only culture in the world they're able to exist in.

They will never conquer the West, the West is mightier and its foundational philosophies more robust. Most of the East is indistinguishable from foundational Western civilization now, and you only make the distinction as one of physical territory, which respects no culture, only capacity for violence. No skin color or religion lacks an equal philosophy of violence, but the Chinese people seek pleasure and knowledge like the best of Greeks.

Secularism shows that humans who interact with each other daily develop solidarity over generations that defy standard visually based animal prejudice, even if it's rough at the start, it is done for our own personal interests. American secularism is based on Greek selfishness with a sharp reduction in Greek civil obedience, long before Ayn Rand showed up. We talk this talk because it actually destroys the barbarian world when we can be assed to be something other than barbarians towards the world.

The culture you praise for our civilization only exists in the skin color you praise for our civilization because of the brown people. Whitey lost the ability to make concrete for a thousand years. Good job.

The white man fucked up concrete.

Meme, "since 1980 or so" was pretty specific I thought. I was born in '78 so I'm going with my lifetime as a frame of reference.

"It's dangerous to assume any individual leftie or rightie is more or less predisposed to terrorism..."
That may be so hypothetically, but I'm going to go with actual evidence of such incidents occurring, most of which in the last 40-ish years have been right-wing in origin.

As for the weathermen, compare the bodycount. I think that should put it in perspective. Doesn't make what they did 'right' but certainly shows that the two 'wings' aren't really comparable.

Two Jar Slave: I'm heading it off at the pass, it's-a-comin.

void71: faarrrt /pol/ is that way >>>>>>>>

Sure about that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Pettus_Bridge#Civil_right s_flashpoint

(that was a response to Void's "Even the most virulent good ol' boys are less of a threat to liberal values than Islam is")

So long as you understand your chosen frame of reference is a bias that is counter to a bigger picture's reality.

Your rejection of the bigger picture with the word "hypothetically" is a reinforcement of your previous bias that runs counter to reality. It is not a hypothesis, it is observable fact less than a decade outside your date of birth domestic terrorist incidents were higher than now. This is true of the United States and Europe.

Even your own bias contradicts your conclusion.
https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_AmericanTerrorismDeaths_F actSheet_Oct2015.pdf

Given the sharp spike on 9-11, calling Islamic terrorism a bigger threat sounds more reasonable, even though it is unreasonable too.

Your prejudice is irrational and its source is a reliance on the rhetoric of using your own personal experience as objective data.

You probably think I'm ROUSing you, and I am sorry. I just want us all to find what will actually work, we need all the data for our understanding if this nightmare world can be stopped.

Ah! Response to bawbag! I took too long to type!

"Your rejection of the bigger picture with the word "hypothetically" is a reinforcement of your previous bias that runs counter to reality."

The reality is that within that time frame, you'd be hard-pressed to point to a 'left-wing terror attack' that caused anything more than material damage. There's certainly no comparable bodycount to speak of.

You could however point to decades of right-wing incitement to violence that ended up in actual violence and death. That's the reality we live in.

The hypothetical 'well the left are capable of it too' is an argument about potential and one in which you'd find no disagreement from me, but let's not conflate the lived reality of the last 4 decades with a thought experiment in 'could the left also do this?'.

Sure they could, but they haven't.

Do we consider the Toronto Maple Leafs equal to NHL winners even though they haven't won since the 60s? That they also play ice hockey isn't in dispute. ;)

"Sure about that?"

Yeah, Islam is a greater threat not only to liberal values but to life in general in the 21st century than a de-facto defunct white nationalist organization. You can throw National Socialism in that deplorable basket, too. White nationalists wage meme wars on Twitter now, not racial holy wars. Unlike Islam, they can be beaten with better arguments, and you generally don't have to worry about them murdering you if you draw a nasty picture of Adolf Hitler.

"Secularism shows that humans who interact with each other daily develop solidarity over generations that defy standard visually based animal prejudice, even if it's rough at the start, it is done for our own personal interests."

I don't think tribalism will ever be bred out of the human species. Human society always breaks down into groups of people with similar interests. Where it isn't overtly racial (Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe), it's ideological, religious, resource-based, etc. This rough start you're talking about, which will involve plenty of blood, will exist as long as competing groups of people are forced into close proximity with each other.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jun/24/majority-of-fatal- attacks-on-us-soil-carried-out-b/

http://europe.newsweek.com/right-wing-extremists-militants-bigger- threat-america-isis-jihadists-422743?rm=eu

If you're going to start comparing body counts, those numbers are out of date. Go to the 'Post-2001' section here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_terrorism

So muslims, a 1% minority population, are responsible for almost twice as many terror-related deaths in America as the 63% majority population, assuming all of those right-wing extremists were non-hispanic white.

"assuming".

Nice try. I'm sure the figures love that massage. :^]

What I meant Void is that I see liberal values as under greater threat by American conservatives than another group. They're here on the ground, they're numerous, and half of the government represents them.

It's taken great effort, including loss of life, to advance liberalism in the face of their efforts to preserve a status quo which denies equal treatment or full legal rights to this or that group.

The Stonewall Inn raid wasn't the Shah, it was the police. MLK wasn't assassinated by a mujahideen, but by a George Wallace supporter.

And racial segregation was once (and not that long ago) defended using the same "rights of the individual" rhetoric as the latest crop of laws designed to allow business owners to create spaces that are essentially straights-only.

I will grant you this -- here in California, Prop 8 was overturned, but no one can undo the loss of life San Bernardino.

Still, which did more to set back the cause of liberalism -- an attack by people we already all view as an enemy, or half the state voting to enforce their religious beliefs on the other half?

meant to say ayatollah, not shah

Hopefully it goes without saying that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism scares me. I'm just saying that this is one of those cases where charity starts at home.

ALSO !!! to continue the novel and address bawbag's original comment -- I don't think it's useful to bring up lefty science denial and then compare it to terrorism on the other hand. The better analogy is climate change denial.

Maher argued with NdT about this somewhat recently: IIRC Neil was adamant that both sides distort and vilify science, Maher was saying that republicans are worse. Basically, they're both right. The anti-vaxxers and acupuncturists of the world probably don't do as much money as the tobacco lobby did or the energy lobby continues to do.

But it's important that liberals don't think of themselves as categorically pro-science, because there's no way that shit is true.

as much damage*

"it's important that liberals don't think of themselves as categorically pro-science, because there's no way that shit is true."

Agreed.

Elseworlds is DC, not Marvel! Get out of my comic book store!

You can see their feet and they lack multitudes of pouches, so that rules out a Liefeld original.

Sorry, I meant to say is this one of those Earth-52 series

Also I realize this is from South Africa, so it's weird seeing people frame it in the American "can you believe what's going on in our Universities???" hyperbole.

Dude.

A place where nobody dared to go,
the love that we came to know
They call it Dinidu