Have any of you ever been stuck with a real demogogue of a professor/teacher? I have this one Writing professor who is incredibly irritating. He’s 68 years old, a former biker, musician, and former national guardsman. Day in and day out, he rants about corporations and government.
Reading the last statement, you may be thinking “well what’s wrong with this guy? He seems perfectly fine to me.” Well, he’ll walk over to the window all dramatically, look out of it with his hands on his hips, and say “You know, we still don’t have a single-payer healthcare system in this country…My son is a musician and he lives in Amsterdam. For $140 a month he gets full health coverage…He’ll never come back to America.”
Then he’ll go on: “You know, some people say we need a free market in this country…Well look around you. The free market is failing. Even Milton Friedman said so. Just because something is more free doesn’t mean something its good.”
He will sometimes give an example of something bad, such as the poor paying more taxes overall than the rich, and he’ll end the statement with “This is America?” and look at all of us for a few seconds for a seemingly dramatic effect.
For the textbooks, he required Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture by Thom Hartmann. He described the book as “revolutionary” with “eye-opening ideas.” Now, someone might believe that until they actually read the book. The chapter on the economy fallaciously attacks Hayek and Friedman. It’s nothing new or revolutionary, it’s a typical leftist “progressive” book warning about climate change, the “failings of the free market,” and most other “progressive” talking points.
The professors describes himself as a “revolutionary” who is only teaching to “cause trouble” and because he can do more productive work than being “out there with a rifle waiting for the corporations to come get him.”
I wonder how red-faced he’ll get when my essays start coming in
He sounds really funny. What’s funnier is I keep hearing about old leftists, while most of the austrians I hear about (outside the staff at the institute) are younger. That’s gotta be a good thing.
Not unusual, really. The Left has more or less “won” the war for social influence in state-society.
The culmination of this was Obama winning the election (albeit, he betrayed many progressives doing so, but he still stands as a victory for the New Left of the 1960’s).
The previous anti-estblishment became the establishment, & probably didn’t know about it until it was too late for them (i.e. electing Obama, whom has angered most progressive supporters / friends that I know a great deal).
^While the old establishment is still part of the establishment. I honestly feel like this free market movement is just a renewed left movement. It’s just corrected it’s ideological mistakes (coercion).
^George Carlin doesn’t have enviromentalism under his belt though.
Epicurus: Carlin did speak of the leaders of the nation being bought and paid for, and that us having choice is merely an illusion, but I don’t recall him ever being as “progressive” as my professor.
But I didn’t mention Carlin’s politics. I said my professor looks like Carlin.
It’s a very American notion, that there is a “liberal media”.
It’s similar to Indians who complain about the “neoliberal, free market mainstream”.
There is no such thing as a mainstream. You don’t know what millions personally believe. There is no way of knowing who dominates what discussion, unless you cherrypick and look at one side or the other.
Conservative Americans still can’t accept their large (and disastrous) effect on foreign policy, especially with their Cold War politics leading them to befriending Pol Pot of all people. Neither can many university Indians, who don’t understand that they, just as much as Hindu fundamentalists and Congress state-industrialists, have all had effect on national politics in their own small way and all have contributed to ruining India in their own small way.
Sounds like a fun professor to have really. No doubt most of his arguments will be fallacies, as you put it, but I’m sure he might have something more substantive later on. If nothing else you can say you gave the otherside of the argument a chance.
Have you ever wondered why Republicans are so interested in encouraging people to volunteer in their communities? It’s because volunteers work for no pay. Republicans have been trying to get people to work for no pay for a long time
Once you leave the womb, conservatives don’t care about you until you reach military age. Then you’re just what they’re looking for. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers
Property is theft. Nobody “owns” anything. When you die, it all stays here
Whoever coined the term “Buyer Beware” was probably bleeding from the asshole
The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe i
Capitalism tries for a delicate balance: It attempts to work things out so that everyone gets just enough stuff to keep them from getting violent and trying to take other people’s stuff.
"Conservatives say if you don’t give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they’ve lost all incentive because we’ve given them too much money
“The difference between left and right of center…originated in the French parliament. The people left of center were liberals; the people right of center were conservatives. Broadly speaking. And generally speaking, people on…the right of center, are interested in property values, property, property rights. The rights and the rights of property. And generally speaking again – it’s all generalized – the left-of-center people are more concerned with humans and human beings and human concerns; to the care of humans, not the care and worry about property rights. That’s generally been true. And Bush is pushing this country farther down the hill, faster than anyone has before.”
I don’t think he was belittling the suggestion, just adding the detail that a good deal of the Army probably isn’t in bed with the New Left ideals.
The hijacking of the education system is vitally important, though. The master-slave relationship between students & educational institutions, along with a current societal fetish for credentialism, reinforces a subtle obedience to many ideas passed on by professors, counselors, etc.
The effects of the left may be less immediate the further you go from a majority of campuses, but they are still there & people migrate across states, as well.
I don’t make an exception to the right, however. I’d imagine they have similar influences within the established army, courts, and other campuses as well. IMO, I’ve seen enough use of this tactic by both “sides”, that I can;t imagine it being more effective without the two feeding off of one another.
Ironically, if you picked up on Hegel in a philosophy class on campus, none of this should be surprising to you. It is a great irony that the state very well may end up creating it’s own resistance, much in the way it trained Osama Bin Laden in the 80’s.
I was trying to say that while the left has hijacked certain state or close-to-the-state institutions for basicaly their own partisan needs, the same is true of the right in regard to other institutions. Your social workers and your professors are bound to be leftists by a high margin, but you policemen and your military officers are bound to be rightists by nearly the same margins. I came across about some stuff for example how the army is being taken over by the religious right, which is starting to dictate its internal culture. Yes many people receive their indoctrination in the univerities, but also millions of people go through the military and receive their indoctrination - of a different slant - there. I would probably agree with you that the leftists are more active in the race to put forth and spread their ideas about the organisation of society. However I do not think that the rightists are less influential in the end, because they can feed off the reaction against the leftists. They win all the folk who are alienatied by the leftists by default and once they have their claws in them they fill their heads with their own brand of evil nonsense.
At least that is my interpretation from watching Happy Days and the Huxtables.
Ya I had a micro econ professor going on and on about the evils of for-profit healthcare. It just doesn’t make sense to have a for-profit health care system. Why can’t we have a non-profit health care system etc.
So one day I got sick of it and raised my hand and said…“If you get rid of the profit motive, what is going to be the incentive to create new and better drugs and medical devices that will heal people and improve people’s lives?”
Honest to God she says…
“Huh…Never thought about that before”
She never mentioned it again the rest of the semester.