Comment by TimTheTinker
5 days ago
One of the central problems of left-wing ideology is placing (or more accurately, weaponizing) subjective emotion over objective truth, moral or otherwise. I'm sorry if that's painful to hear, but it is true.
> science and rational thinking that you seem to abhor.
What did I say that gave you that impression? Au contraire.
Modern life, science, rational thinking -- these are not products of left-wing political, moral, or social ideology, not even a little bit. I'm curious how you arrived at that viewpoint, which is incoherent.
Perhaps that which is not currently right-coded is leftist to you, but political coding is a disparate concept from the propositions upon which worldviews are built.
You brought up the right-left dichotomy, I'm just following your lead.
It's undeniable that, right now, the right wing is anti-intellectual and anti-science. They constantly seek to censor speech, defund research and privatize public goods.
Where's a prominent politician saying "no actually, we should keep funding public research"? Or defending free speech? They're awfully quiet on the matter.
Frankly, I don't know how to define "left wing ideology", I've yet to hear anyone give a particularly good definition, but if we assume that what people who self-identify as right wing hate and fear is considered to be left wing, then it seems like I'm in favor of most of that.
Gender/transgender is a trivial subject to demonstrate the point. People thought "male" and "female" was a super specific binary that was trivial to separate people into. Then people did Science and found out it was considerably more complicated and closer to a spectrum with people crossing over at various points.
Now look at which group of people is rejecting that research by calling it a lie and shouting loudly and which group of people are changing their world views.
I have thoughts to share about the topics you brought up, but you're not demonstrating any curiosity in this comment section, so I don't think continuing the discussion here will be helpful.
My email is in my bio if you'd like to discuss there.
So I did some introspection and I want to go up a few levels to make a broader point to end this conversation.
First off, universities, including harvard and stanford or anyone else, are absolutely not perfect or above criticism. I'm sure they make tons of bad decisions and mistakes at all levels of their system and those deserve to be pointed out and complained about.
A subtle point is that I think it's useful to look at what someone was trying to accomplish, even if they did it badly or in a way that hurt people. Motive usually matters.
The more important point is that I want people to look at what happens when their agreement gives people more power. Donald trump is an easy example, a man who is literally famous for lying, could theoretically point out an actual mistake or even crime being committed by a university and be right. It's possible! But what actually happens when you agree with his position and start supporting it? He uses it to gain more power for him self, commit more corrupt actions and in general hurt society.
So yes, harvard or the faa or whoever did bad things and should be criticized. The solution is probably not anything involving trump or his cronies though.