Age of Amnesia

[TheGreenHornet]

'We live, as the Indian essayist Saeed Akhter Mirza has put it, in “an age of amnesia.” Across the world, most notably in the West, we are discarding the knowledge and insights passed down over millennia and replacing it with politically correct bromides cooked up in the media and the academy. In some ways, this process recalls, albeit in digital form, the Middle Ages. Conscious shaping of thought—and the manipulation of the past to serve political purposes—is becoming commonplace and pervasive.'


Age of Amnesia - Quillette

 

[Dekster]

Eh, a bit too dramatic. Social Media is deplatforming far more than conservatives. This has always been a back and forth by them. In an effort to crack down on porn on their sites, a lot of those companies deplatformed LGBT+'s first that weren't even posting porn. It took them awhile to sort those algorithms out.

 

[TheGreenHornet]

Eh, a bit too dramatic. Social Media is deplatforming far more than conservatives. This has always been a back and forth by them. In an effort to crack down on porn on their sites, a lot of those companies deplatformed LGBT+'s first that weren't even posting porn. It took them awhile to sort those algorithms out.

You made it to the 2nd paragraph, quite unusual for the readers of this board.

Here are a couple of more paragraphs if you can fit it in your schedule. I am sure the board would find your analysis of the following to be interesting.


'Critical to this devolution is the absence of conflicting views. The faculties of universities in the West are increasingly afflicted with troubling levels of unanimity. In 1990, according to survey data by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA, 42 percent of professors identified as “liberal” or “far-Left.” By 2014, that number had jumped to 60 percent. Another study of 51 top colleges found that the ratio of liberals to conservatives can be as high as 70 to one and is usually at least eight to one. At elite liberal arts universities like Wellesley, Swarthmore, and Williams, the proportion reaches an astonishing 120 to 1.

These trends are particularly acute in fields that most impact public policy and opinion. Well under 10 percent of faculty at leading law schools—such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, and Berkeley—describe themselves as conservative. These patterns can also be seen in the United Kingdom. Although roughly half of British voters lean to the Right, only 12 percent of academics do so. Such gaps are common both in Canada and across Europe. Professors who criticize multiculturalism, mass migration, or even the utility of “bourgeois values,” can find their employment threatened'.

 

[Dekster]

Eh, a bit too dramatic. Social Media is deplatforming far more than conservatives. This has always been a back and forth by them. In an effort to crack down on porn on their sites, a lot of those companies deplatformed LGBT+'s first that weren't even posting porn. It took them awhile to sort those algorithms out.

You made it to the 2nd paragraph, quite unusual for the readers of this board.

Here are a couple of more paragraphs if you can fit it in your schedule. I am sure the board would find your analysis of the following to be interesting.


'Critical to this devolution is the absence of conflicting views. The faculties of universities in the West are increasingly afflicted with troubling levels of unanimity. In 1990, according to survey data by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA, 42 percent of professors identified as “liberal” or “far-Left.” By 2014, that number had jumped to 60 percent. Another study of 51 top colleges found that the ratio of liberals to conservatives can be as high as 70 to one and is usually at least eight to one. At elite liberal arts universities like Wellesley, Swarthmore, and Williams, the proportion reaches an astonishing 120 to 1.

These trends are particularly acute in fields that most impact public policy and opinion. Well under 10 percent of faculty at leading law schools—such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, and Berkeley—describe themselves as conservative. These patterns can also be seen in the United Kingdom. Although roughly half of British voters lean to the Right, only 12 percent of academics do so. Such gaps are common both in Canada and across Europe. Professors who criticize multiculturalism, mass migration, or even the utility of “bourgeois values,” can find their employment threatened'.

I read the whole thing the first time and just wanted to comment on the deplatforming issue because of the promulgation of the idea that this is being confined to conservatives isn't exactly correct.

Professors in the 90's came up in the 60's when "liberal" was associated with hippies/summer of love stuff. Those professors have since retired or are in the process of it, being replaced by professors who largely came up since the 80's when "liberal" is associated with other things. Comparing other countries to the US though is apple and oranges as their laws on speech are a lot less accommodating than America's and has been for some time. I don't particularly like or defend some of the things going on at universities regarding speech, but those are mostly administrative decisions to deal with administrative problems. Cheap photocopying lead to regulating where things could be posted that lead to free speech zones. Personal computing lead to social networks that lead to university computer systems that lead to regulating their uses due to drama. A lot of the policies that people now are offended by were always there in some shape or form. They are just more fully fleshed out and aggressively applied in some places because "out of sight, out of mind" doesn't work in the digital age.