How do you decide what's anti-american and pro-american? The Iraq invasion for example, anti or pro-american?
The red scare didn't need Facebook to get started.
Claiming something is un-American is fine. We're (mostly?) red-blooded Americans here.
However, pointing at something and saying it's un-American and expecting the crowd to gasp in horror and join you in denouncing it, is a very clear signal of a Fox-news-or-something-deadened brain.
If I didn't use the Internet I wouldn't know what the term 'anti-American" meant. Nobody I know uses that word and no books I read or movies I watch mention it too. It is a term that I've encountered only on the internet. As a result, my connotation of the word depends largely on how the internet uses it.
On the websites I visit, the term "anti-American" is usually used to justify hate against minorities or some other segment of society. I'm sure it is used in different contexts too (in other parts of the internet), but not on the parts of internet I usually browse.
I think Americans would have a different association with the word though.
If that isn't indoctrination, I'm not sure what is.
Indoctrination isn't bad, and students should be able to have a choice between whether they want to get indoctrinated by the types of people who created the nuclear bomb, if they want to get indoctrinated by hippies, or if they want to get indoctrinated by a church-funded university.
Education is inherently ideological, and the market is really leaning toward hippie faculty at the moment. Allowing market forces to do what they will seems fine. It'll come back around eventually, and in the meantime, state school kids are doing what prestigious university students are too good for. Look at Anduril, which is far more impressive a defense achievement than anything that's come out of Caltech since before you were a student.
Sure. But I draw the line when people try to force their anti-American agenda on people.
> Look at Anduril, which is far more impressive a defense achievement than anything that's come out of Caltech since before you were a student.
Caltech is a very small university.
> Education is inherently ideological
My education at Caltech was nearly entirely math, science, engineering, etc. I don't see that as ideological. I did get a palpable sense from the profs that these subjects were exciting.
I never heard any defense propaganda from the Caltech faculty, none at all. JPL was there, but not a single soul pushed me to apply for a job there.
The only propaganda I recall was my economics professor pushing Marxism, and if you didn't regurgitate his Marxist views on the exams, you received a bad grade. I learned my lesson, and instead satisfied the social studies requirement by taking business accounting - something useful.
This doesn't happen, though; there are a lot of universities that love pro-American sentiment in professors. A university deciding to be anti-American seems fine, and quite American. As an employer, it should be able to choose who it wants to offer positions. No one is forced, they just fail to incentivize prestigious universities in maintaining their employment under conditions they desire.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that the university as an institution should maintain neutrality. However, at the same time, individual professors, students, and even administrators should be protected by the university when engaging in speech.
1. shouting down anyone with a different view
2. requiring "loyalty oaths" from the staff
3. harassing others who disagree with them
4. trying to block roads and otherwise impede people from going about their business
that is anti-American.
And who are you to tell other Americans what's American or not? That assertion is what is fundamentally un-American. It's everyone else's country as much as yours.
> 4. trying to block roads and otherwise impede people from going about their business
That is the fundamental nature of protest, stopping people from going about their business. The whole point is that the issue is being ignored.
Suddenly, all protest is suspect in our great democracy.
They infringe on our rights. Do you really believe there is a right to harass others?
> What does it have to do with the US in particular?
It's the US that has a Constitution, a Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, etc. Of course, any other nation is free to adopt them as well, and become American.
> And who are you to tell other Americans what's American or not?
I'm an American. I have relatives that fought in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, WW1, WW2, and the Korean War. In particular, these are my father's opinions, very strongly held by him. I did not earn them like he did in combat, but he's gone now and so I carry on. He told me once that he fought so I wouldn't have to. Never forget that our freedoms were all paid for with blood, lots of blood.
> It's everyone else's country as much as yours.
Yes. I see people all the time eager to throw away our rights that were so bitterly fought for. The Constitution also has a lot of checks and balances meant to make it difficult to for people to throw it away.
> all protest is suspect in our great democracy
You can protest all you like. But our freedoms do not include the right to impede other peoples' rights to go about their business.
If somebody tried that today, they would (and should) be liable for the cost of the tea. There is no right to destroy other peoples' property.
It depends on your definition of "harass", but yes, absolutely. You have a right to express, including through protest, your opinions to others who don't want to hear them.
Specifically, there is no right to not be harassed. There are laws against certain forms of it, but that's not a 'right' in a traditional sense, like the right to free speech, or 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'.
Obviously, 'harassment' is such a broad term, it's a way to censor and oppress and especially to silence anyone who disagrees with the status quo. They must allow the status quo to continue or they are harassers.
>> And who are you to tell other Americans what's American or not?
> I'm an American. I have relatives that fought in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, WW1, WW2, and the Korean War.
The other people are Americans too; you have no extra rights there. What you or your relatives did gives you no extra rights at all under any law or democratic custom.
> I see people all the time eager to throw away our rights that were so bitterly fought for.
That's what I see you advocating, trying to suppress dissent that you don't like.
> our freedoms do not include the right to impede other peoples' rights to go about their business.
They absolutely do, again depending the definition of "impede". That's what protest is, and you can see it in protests going back centuries. It's a free country and you're going to have to deal with people doing things you don't like.
Also, it's an argument for the status quo - going about their business may mean impeding others' rights. As the admittedly over-simplistic example, slave merchants impeded others' rights, and impeding the merchants protected rights.
I explicitly wrote otherwise.
> slave merchants impeded others' rights, and impeding the merchants protected rights.
I'm sadly amused that you interpret an assertion that all have a right to liberty is a right to enslave people. It's not a very clever argument, I see it all the time. I was hoping for better from you.
It would have been less surprising if the out-group started using it as an insult and the in-group still claimed it as a badge of honor. I wouldn't have guessed that the in-group would have abandoned it so readily.
maga
You never understood the meaning of the word, then. Woke is a synonym for "enlightenment." Indeed, the notions of wokeness echo an earlier philosophical revolution we continue to call the Age of Enlightenment.
Who, with a serious face, will claim to be enlightened? According to the Buddhism I studied, there was never a surer method to identify a fool.
Wokeness was never worn as a serious label. Wokeness may be acknowledged, be that applied to a person or a concept. The only time I've heard anybody self-proclaim wokeness is literally in self-mockery. He's woke, she's woke, that's woke, stay woke, but never I'm woke. So I'd make one edit to your first sentence: it was not uttered with pride, it was uttered with respect. And people still do that today.
So there was nothing to abandon. Nobody identified that way. And now wokeness is now a boogeyman. It means whatever anybody wants it to mean. Nevermind that this fight has been raging since the 17th century, but it's got a new name now and hey you can sell fear with that.
This made laugh.
Don't be surprised: It's standard conservative messaging tactics going back years. Take something valuable to their enemies an demonize it through endless repetition. The Democrats and liberals have tried to avoid every fight, and so it works every time. I'm not exaggerating to say that I predicted 'woke' would be demonized too.
IIRC, someone recently published conversations among some conservative groups where they planned their messaging around it (not an unusual tactic) and specifically what would be effective.
What are some other examples? "Politically correct" comes to mind, but IIRC that didn't turn nearly as fast, or as definitively.
I never heard it uttered with pride. I saw it graffiti'd on walls.
When conservatives attack liberal institutions, like they are now attacking universities, is that un-American?
> making it hard for an elite institution like Harvard to adequately address an extreme anti-semitism problem
It is just one partisan side's claim there is some extreme problem, and that Harvard is not addressing it. I haven't heard the claim that someone is preventing them - the conservatives have been blaming Harvard.
(I'll note that the conservatives couldn't give rats ass about anti-semitism; they heavily trafficked in it for years, many prominently. They are only trying to attack an 'American institution', higher education.)
> If it makes people feel worse about living in the United States and tries to impose any concept of original sin onto an American citizen, as is the case with a lot of "woke" propaganda, it is anti-American.
It's un-American to make people feel bad? What about the people you are making feel bad? If the original sin is true, should we hide from the truth? We can't admit our mistakes?