Sorry. I misspoke. How would the idea have harmed the Trump campaign?
Election meddling is an attack worth starting a war
- Thread starter ClimateSanity
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Sorry. I misspoke. How would the idea have harmed the Trump campaign?
ClimateSanity
New member
From my experience and from the anecdotes I've read, it seems to me college purposefully trains Young folks to avoid critical thinking at all costs.
ClimateSanity
New member
Is this the kind of critical thinking you were referring to??
Last week, the New York Times named tech writer Sarah Jeong to its editorial board with apparent knowledge of her long history of racist tweets, as well as verbal attacks on police and males in general. Perhaps such gutter venom was proof of militant orthodoxy to be appreciated rather than medieval racism to be shunned. Her mostly empty résumé seems compensated by her identity and her politics—as the Times more or less confessed in its sad defense of her racist outbursts.
Jeong claimed that white people smelled like wet dogs. She had bragged that she hated them, and hoped that soon they would become childless and disappear. Her final solution of demographic extinction was, she said (in historically dense fashion), “my plan all along.”
One wonders whether she will canonize her collected tweets into something like “My Struggle,” replete with less abstract territorial theories how to reify her “plan” or add pseudo-scientific details explaining why and how whites, as she alleges, smell or have had no cultural or scientific achievements.
Lots of her other tweets about toxic white people and culturally repugnant white heterosexual males suggest that Jeong’s twitter corpus is not, as alleged, one of flippant jest, counterpunches to trolls, or accidental streaming.
Rather it is consistent with the profile of an embittered but otherwise mostly undistinguished social justice warrior who had fueled her bias at Harvard Law School and honed its expression in the no-consequences world of left-wing blogs.
Of course, once caught, Jeong predictably retreated to victim status: she was simply replying to hateful trolls. (One wonders whether her venom against police was likewise supposedly prompted by police attacks on her?)
The Times, which claims it has a practice of calling out hate speech, and blackballing any with Jeong-like skeletons, suddenly tsk-tsked its hiring by claiming that she was merely overzealous in her eliminationist response to Internet trolls. More likely, the Times liked her verve and smiled at the click-bait attention she earned. It’s a free country, after all, and the Times is perfectly free to hire all the progressive racists it wishes to enhance its brand.
That's anecdotal thinking, something a good education would have warned you off of accepting. We use the anecdote to illustrate the rule, but never to fashion it.
She's actually distinguished in a number of ways, beginning with acceptance into Harvard law. Beyond that she's noted in her industry, where she wrote a book about the topic she was hired to address by the Times, one Forbes put on their 30 under 30 list. And she was a Poynter Fellow at Yale.
Back to the more general point: did you know that the BTK killer was a deacon in his church? Had a Bible, had read it and even passed muster in being examined on the point. Do you think the problem was the Bible or the twisted fellow who ignored what he'd read to serve something else in him?
Most of the Nazi leadership were educated men. So were most of the leaders who fought them. Or, you can liberate the surviving Jews in Germany during WWII with enough guns. You can also knock over a taco stand with one.
Critical thinking can be used to make the truth, however uncomfortable, apparent. And it can be used to fool others if the person is sufficiently lacking in character. You can even defraud folks after attending Wharton, one of the most prestigious schools of business, a school my brother attended (without attempting to defraud anyone). And sometimes people with a fine education can choose to ignore the benefit and go another way. That's unfortunate, but it's no condemnation of the instrument.
So education isn't a panacea. Nazis, and so saints can be well educated men and women. But a saint armed with it and a person striving to impact the world to the good will do more of it with a well trained noggin on their shoulders than they could without it. It's an arrow in a quiver that needs to include others, like character.
Back to the particular woman in question. Her response to charges regarding her past emails was this:
"I engaged in what I thought of at the time as counter trolling. While it was intended as satire, I deeply regret that I mimicked the language of my harassers. These comments were not aimed at a general audience, because general audiences do not engage in harassment campaigns. I can understand how hurtful these posts are, out of context, and I would not do it again."
It's possible. Maybe she decided, coldly, to give the barking dogs a taste of their treatment and watch their heads explode and didn't consider the larger context. Or maybe she just read one too many, "Shut the (redacted) up you dog eating gook" and said the most hurtful thing she could think to say. I don't know. All I do know is that she received many of those sorts of Tweets and failed to take the high road in response several years ago, when she was in her 20s.
In my 20s I once woke up in a fountain and got into a fight with a guy in Morocco for making a less offensive comment about a girl at a disco. So who knows? We don't always live up to our highest ideas, especially early on in our growth as human beings.
To sum, no, an anecdote where you find someone with a solid education doing something that offends you, whatever you think of the context, is not a larger argument against that education any more than finding out BTK was a deacon is an argument against organized religion, or the use of a gun to rob a little old lady on her way to give blood is an argument against gun ownership.
A good education will make you less likely to accept things handed to you as truth. It will give you the tools to consider and extract the Shinola and make you a better, more effective participant in the life of our Republic. But it isn't a magical talisman that will rid you of every human impulse or safeguard others from the use of that education for ill.
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When I started university, one of the first lectures I sat down in featured a professor who declared that the Earth is 4 billion years old and there is no debate over the issue.
So much for a good education.
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No, but thanks for illustrating the same problem CS had, confusing your anecdote with a rule. Both you and your professor are mistaken. :e4e:
Yeah, and I was doing a science degree. :noid:
Which is exactly what we did.
Rule: A university education is not guaranteed to be useful.
Anecdote: Illustrates the rule.
No to the larger point you attempted to establish by it, not the anecdote you thought to use. His mistake, or arrogance didn't settle his point or make your own.
That's not what you actually did, but it's a better stab at the thing. And it's an interesting point to ponder. Who would say any human endeavor is guaranteed to be useful? I don't know. I do know too many people who become well versed in a thing only to completely abandon it and seemingly the benefit of it also...but I suspect that any serious education is useful, even if not in the way we intend. It changes you, and not simply methodologically. We are the sum of our experiences in part and if those experiences are worthwhile then the effect of them is as well, however we choose to express their value and even if that expression is purely, singularly found in the imprint on what came before it.
Election meddling is an attack worth starting a war
Unfortunately, its the Republican Party, not the Russians, who are the Number 1 offender when it comes to meddling in the US electoral process - how else does one explain the GOP's repeated retention of the reigns of power despite receiving fewer votes than its opponents?
The Republicans have elevated the art of "gerrymandering" political boundaries into an "art form," while diverting away public scrutiny with their sanctimoniously assertions that its the Democrats who are subverting the political system by engaging in "illegal voting!"
Logistically, It would require a monumental political conspiracy on a national scale for "illegal voting" to match the same political impact that the Republicans currently enjoy through their "gerrymandering!"
Nobody has the faintest idea what you're arguing against.
Universities have huge issues dealing with what people believe. My story backs that idea up.
Of course it is.
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I don't know what it is about some of you that makes you feel inclined to speak for large numbers of people. What's that about anyway? You seemed clear enough to quote a point and attempt to answer it.
I was shaking my head at CL for confusing anecdote with argument, a bad habit not unusual among those who, for any number of reasons, lack a fundamentally solid educational experience that would instruct them in the process of critical thinking and approach. Stripe chimed in with this bit after quoting me on that point:
The professor's apparent mistake was in not addressing difference using the scientific method and hard scientific data on the point of potential challenge. I say apparent because I understand the professor might be inclined to answer that there are all sorts of notions by all sorts of people and stopping to attempt to deal with all of them might not allow him the time to teach his course, that where there is a scientific consensus on a point and supportive data abounds, it's better to teach the principles and note the data, not debate people as yet insufficiently educated to understand or advanced to the point where they've come to that data---but in a perfect world he'd at least have tried.
When Stripe uses the professor's response to set up, "So much for a good education" which on its face purports a rule by way of that anecdote (one that even in the particular isn't necessarily what Stripe believes it is, as per my above) he errs by resting that rule on nothing more or less than the singular anecdote. It's a curious variation on the post hoc ergo hoc logical fallacy, which purports causation without more than the appearance of connection causally. In this case it's a claim that X will not cause Y because where X was found, X being that sufficient education, Y was not found. Y in this case would be...well, Stripe doesn't really stipulate. Apparently the willingness to debate anyone on any point, or believing a point closed to debate. If the latter, why Stripe thinks critical thinking never leads to a singular conclusion is anyone's guess.
Which universities and what issues? You're a long way from establishing the existence of a uniformity of agreement on unstated "issues" with equally vague "beliefs."
You created or related an anecdote to illustrate your belief. That's not the same thing as providing evidence or meaningful argument.
A declaration isn't an argument, counter, or even necessarily an expression of rational thought.
Good point.
The idea is that universities are bad for you.
My story backs that up.
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No, it's just another way of stating a belief. Anecdote isn't evidence and conclusions based on anecdote aren't distinguishable from simply believing a thing.
You'd get that if you read my last and tried to answer on it or the questions and argument I raised in rebuttal and response.
That's not a difference. When you provide an anecdote that illustrates your belief it's really just restating the belief, given the anecdote can only evidence the belief and not a rule established by objective means and argument.
Again, a thing you'd understand had you attempted to answer the actual rebuttal to your advance a couple of posts ago.
Since he'll likely continue to bury that under more of his quick declaratives, here's a link to it for anyone interested. I'll repost this and the link from here on.
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Arthur Brain
Well-known member
It's just typical Stripe. You've taken his argument apart and he addresses less than a tenth of it and then sound bites that don't mean anything.
Of course it is.
The story is a data point. You declaring it to be not evidence is one of those declaration things you seem to hate so much.
Again, a thing you'd understand had you attempted to answer the actual rebuttal to your advance a couple of posts ago.
:spam:
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