Oh ffs. "If a man isn't a socialist at age 20, he has no heart" - Winston Churchill, arch-conservative. Kids have the energy to be activists. Where were you in the sixties? Berkeley has ALWAYS been like that in living memory.
Winston S. Churchill supposedly once observed that anyone who was not a liberal at 20 years of age had no heart, while anyone who was still a liberal at 40 had no head.
I deliberately left that bit out, because Atlee refuted it: "I'm still a socialist because memory is a function of the brain. I remember why I was a socialist thirty years ago, and NOTHING HAS CHANGED."
The Ivies, two of which I personally experienced as a student, also foster lefty opinion and activism. Brown, Columbia, Harvard, and Yale probably are the best examples.
This post was edited by Stu Spelling Bee at August 8, 2018 2:48 PM MDT
Hardly an objective assertion about universities. Blanket generalizatons are not worth the breath that carries them.
We should be aware that what one person or group considers “extremist” may not be the most prevalent view. It is possible some would consider your view extremist. Opinions are subjective.
“The freethinkers of one generation create the common sense of the next“ — Matthew Arnold
This post was edited by Don Barzini at August 6, 2018 10:24 PM MDT
You can’t simply blame universities. It starts at home. It continues with society. It’s a cultural problem. This isn’t exclusive to these times. Mankind has been violent since its existence. Wars, concentration camps, dictatorships, tyrannical governments, terrorists, and crime.
More like indoctrination camps. That left-wing stuff and Marxism has been taught in colleges since the 1930s at least. What you have is a lot of teachers who have never really had to work for a living who have idealized and systematized their resentment of people who are successful and their disdain for bourgeois values. Which makes a very potent mix when they work their poison on their students.
Some of the hallmarks of tyrants and despots are to demonize the intellectuals, higher learning, and free speech, and invoke fearful conspiracy. All of which you just did.
This post was edited by Don Barzini at August 7, 2018 8:42 AM MDT
And you know what? I walked my dog the other day? And there were people who were talking about what you are just saying right now here and now, so it must be true.
And, what the heck ARE you saying? Any facts? I have been a student all my life. Went to many types of schools.
Never saw any teachers trying to indoctrinate anyone. I saw a lot of them trying to feed their families on a salary that would not feed a starving dog.
But, I digress. I do, HOWEVER, have facts to back me up.
Well, they have to compete with Right wingers and they pale in comparison.
What effect do left wing extremists have against an entire faction of NORMAL Republicans who are so stupid they will follow the dictates of a RACIST PIG in office.
No extremes needed when you have Paul Ryan at the helm, incidentally, running for the hills as soon as his pathetic term is over.
There is no difference between Left wing extremists and Trump's base. The only thing is they are insane and hate Trump as opposed to Republicans who are insane and love him.
What is worse? NAZI EXTREMIST HATERS OF HITLER OR NAZIS WHO LOVE HITLER?
Unbalanced is unbalanced. No matter what you call them.
Would you rather unite with TRUMP haters or TRUMP's BASE? Because this is what you are aligning yourself with right now being PRO TRUMP.
Read every word and then I dare you to tell me you either finally see the light or that you have an argument that in any way justifies the idea that this man and his followers are being unfairly tormented.
What kind of HELL do you exist in where this kind of ideology seems normal?
You cannot understand how mad I am. I am sure you don't see what I am raving about. That is the scariest thing to me. You think this hellish way of hating and doubting the WRONG PEOPLE is sane.
In May, a few dozen white supremacists gathered after dark in a park in Charlottesville, Virginia. They had brought garden torches and candles, and they set them aflame while posing in front of a statue of confederate general Robert E Lee that Charlottesville was trying to remove.
The demonstration in front of the statue lasted about 10 minutes, according to one local report. But before the police arrived and dispersed the provocateurs, who were led by Richard Spencer, a white nationalist most famous for getting punched in the face, the flames had attracted the attention of local TV news cameras and a local newspaper reporter, who took a photograph of the men with their flaming torches and shared it on Twitter. The photo, with the outline of the slave-owning general rising out of the smoke, was widely republished around the world. Advertisement
The May torch rally was one of the first of a series of increasingly violent white supremacist provocations that culminated in an 12 August rally that brought hundreds of white supremacists to march in the streets of Charlottesville and engage in open clashes with counter-protesters. By the afternoon, a car attack on peaceful demonstrators left 32-year-old Heather Heyer dead and dozens more injured. A young white man who marched with the white nationalists was charged with murder.
The violence in Charlottesville forced city leaders and law enforcement officials to re-examine what they did, and failed to do, to prevent neo-Nazis from terrorizing an entire town. The city’s police chief resigned in December after a public report faulted the police for making choices that failed to keep the city safe.
Media organizations have faced their own reckoning over their coverage of white supremacist groups. Some critics have argued that it is dangerous and unnecessary to give fringe racists prominent coverage, and that simply ignoring their public stunts would be a safer choice. Others have argued that in a country where the president responded to a violence neo-Nazi march by condemning the violence of “both sides,” and suggested that there were “very fine people” who marched alongside the Nazis, media organizations have treated open white supremacists too much as freaks or aberrations, failing to investigate their ties to America’s systemic racism and its more circumspect and powerful racists.
For the past year, news organizations have struggled to strike the right balance: when is covering of fringe far-right groups necessary, and when does coverage serve only to heighten the profile, and the influence, of conspiracy theorists and racist extremists? Advertisement
The coverage of the August rallies in Charlottesville – which clearly documented the extremism and the violence of white supremacist groups – was widely seen as newsworthy. On 11 August, a coalition of white supremacists led a larger torch march across the University of Virginia’s campus, chanting “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!” By August, the young white men with torches were not posing briefly in the shadows. They were marching so openly that they could be easily identified – and many were, prompting some families and employers to publicly repudiate their racist advocacy. White supremacists march with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia on 11 August 2017. Facebook Twitter Pinterest White supremacists march with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia on 11 August 2017. Photograph: Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
But the photograph of the earlier torch protest in May, which was reproduced almost universally by major news outlets, including The Guardian, provides a more complex case study in the difficulties of covering media-savvy extremists. Sign up to the Media Briefing: news for the news-makers Read more
The May rally clearly invoked the flaming torches wielded by the Ku Klux Klan, even though Spencer tried to claim in an interview that the torches were simply “a beautiful aesthetic” and “kind of mystical”. It was an image of resurgent racist violence, and it spoke to one of the biggest news stories of the year, the way that Donald Trump’s presidency had energized far-right racist groups.
The photograph was also an expert piece of white supremacist propaganda, an image staged by a racist provocateur to generate exactly the kind of media coverage that it received, said Joan Donovan, a researcher at the Data and Society Institute who studies media manipulation. By spreading that image across the world, Donovan argues, news organizations were not simply covering white supremacists, they were amplifying their message – and helping to fuel their later protests. Advertisement
Jessie Daniels, a sociologist who has studied American white supremacist groups for decades, said she believes it was important for news organizations to feature the May photo of the torch protest around the Lee statue in Charlottesville.
“Run the photo. How could you not?” she said. “To me, it makes the case that this is dangerous, that they’re dangerous, that they’re a threat to a democracy and a threat to other people.”
Michael Shaw, the publisher and founder of Reading the Pictures, a site that analyzes news photos and media images, drew a similar conclusion. Shaw has repeatedly criticized media images that present neo-Nazi activists as just ordinary folks, which he calls “mainstreaming hate by casting it in a softer light”.
Slartibartfast 