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ythn

Libertarians are the new advocates for small government.

Libertarians = Arch Linux (lean, mean, minimal)

Everybody else = Windows or Mac (i.e. huge operating system that tries to protect users from everything under the sun)

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This is what happens when engineers receive very little formal liberal arts education.

Cringe.

My experience with liberal arts education is that it teaches you how to talk and what to say, but not how to think.

That's the anti-college talking point that republicans like to preach to the uneducated masses. It's absolutely designed to devalue what is actually being taught in higher education, allow for the easy dismissal of soft sciences. And once you can dismiss soft sciences, you can certainly dismiss the hard sciences with guilt by association.

I earned my CS degree from a liberal arts college and took my share of liberal arts classes. But the name doesn't directly infer a political slant - there isn't an indoctrination that the right would like to say happens. Certainly some departments will have slants to them (women's studies, african american studies, etc.) but that doesn't mean that the scientific method gets forgotten at the door. Research still gets done and still gets reviewed. Certainly moreso than what happens on Fox News.

Majoring in a soft science is one of the least helpful things a human can do to themselves and society. As an engineer, sitting in on the required liberal arts classes felt like a seminar on group think and what aboutism

It's not so bad if you stick to some of the harder, or at least more rigidly defined liberal arts areas. Philosophy, Classics, and History (if you pick your way carefully) can be among the less squishy. If you go back to things that are at least 100, 150 years old, but not so far back that written records no longer exist, you can avoid most of the worst excesses of critical theory and similar politicized stances.

You know, there's a certain classist dismissal here of people who just plain did not attend university, let alone take "liberal arts classes" (someone please tell me what the normative value of my Chinese mythology course was!). How about we stop assuming the working class can't think for itself, eh?

It's not a dismissal of those who 'did not attend university'. It's a dismissal of people who are devaluing a university education because they did not attend university. There is no reason to believe that 'the working class' (not sure what that means really, many of us all work for a living) can't think for itself, but we have to be honest in an uneducated person thinking they know more about economics, climate change, business, etc., than those who have studied it and/or had careers in it.

Look at net neutrality, it's been completely framed by the republicans as anti-business, and they have appealed to the masses that are uneducated in how the internet works and why it was successful in the first place. But what would those of us who are educated and/or do development know? We just work using the internet all day, every day.

>and they have appealed to the masses that are uneducated in how the internet works and why it was successful in the first place.

I question this premise. How much of the public actually buys the Republican line on net neutrality?