This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
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Notes -
I think it's important to remember that while conservatives and the right have complained about college campuses for a long time, they really didn't do anything to address it until the past few years. Liberals were still in the coping stage of they'll grow up and become more reasonable once they get a job and a family that conservatives had for a very long time. Plus that kind of activism was useful to them. However, now they are in the stage where they are realizing that this is a real problem and are freaking out, but they can't admit the right was right because the Trump threat is looming. Politicians are in the habit of letting things get so bad and continually kicking them down the road until it gets so bad they can't ignore it. I think this is one of those moments for them. I don't think there's much they can do though because this has been a problem since the 1960's. Nobody has the stones to do what would actually need to be done to root this out of our institutions.
That would be to bring back loco parentis. And in turn that would entail cracking down on the idea of universities as 1-star resorts that also have classes which everyone is entitled to go to for four years.
Not going to happen.
No, the only way to deal with "this" would be to completely replace the entire teaching staff, most of the curriculums, and vast swathes of left-wing political theory. Opposition to Israel is the logical and inevitable outcome of taking left-wing politics seriously - left-wingers don't actually like ethnostates in general, and ones that that murder brown people even less so. This isn't some weird bug in education, but the logical outcome of the political ideas and doctrines which motivate the left.
If you want to stop the left from being anti-Israel, you're going to have to completely rework their entire belief system. Israel is a white supremacist ethnostate that was founded with the help of a brutal terrorist campaign (ever read what Irgun and Lehi got up to?) and continues to enact racist, conservative and nationalist policies. The current leader of Israel was famously a huge fan of Donald Trump(who is not particularly well-liked in left-wing politics) and support for Israel is a famously republican priority. Even if you got rid of every single muslim on the left, every single person who had a direct, personal and nonpolitical reason to hate Israel, the left would oppose Israel anyway due to their own political values.
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What is loco parentis? Why would it help?
The legal principle(now abolished) that colleges have some parental rights and responsibilities over their students(and even in the west parents usually have some added rights of control over very young adult children).
College kids do not jump at these extreme ideologies because the adults not supervising them push it, they do it because they're unsupervised teenagers being catered to in a compound full of unsupervised teenagers who are following peer pressure. And fixing that requires going back to the prior legal regime granting universities wide latitude in regulating student's personal lives.
You should never hand someone a gun unless you're sure where they'll point it. While in this one highly-specific case universities would probably act as you want, out of fear of the Zionist lobby getting their donations pulled, outside of that they have no real interest in stopping SJ lunacy and a huge amount of interest in purging themselves of rightists.
And the academy didn’t used to be so left. In fact the lurch to the left came when in loco parentis became illegal.
This is because it is much more appealing for unsupervised leisure class teenagers(which is what college kids are) to join up with the ideology that lets them fornicate and experiment with substances. The lurch to the left is entirely predictable on that basis when you add peer pressure and signaling dynamics. Even in Greece and Rome the conservative elites of the day complained about the unsupervised leisure class teens of the day shifting in ways that are certainly reminiscent of university leftism even if they don’t match 100%.
That doesn't mean that reinstating ILP will cause a reversal of the academy's politics!
This is a loaded analogy, but I can't think of a better one, so: if there are rabbits in the east and no rabbits in the west due to a fence, you tear the fence down, and then you put it back up fifty years later, that won't disintegrate the rabbits that are now in the west.
No, it does not, but in order to make your eradication of rabbits in the west stick you need that fence- as NZ's quixotic obsession with getting rid of invasive species has found. ILP is the fence; not sufficient in itself, but very definitely the precondition for making any of your efforts work.
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In loco parentis.
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It means that their parents are just as crazy?
If you don't know, Duck Duck Go is just an https call away. It's a legal phrase that means that the schools have broader authority and act in place of the parents since the parents aren't there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_loco_parentis
This means no authority at all, students over 18 are adults and their parents have no longer any (legal) power over them.
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The implication is that irresponsible parents are offloading parenting to institutions which aren’t up for the task. If only they’d chosen traditional marriage instead of (dual-income/single parenthood/homosexuality/etc.), we wouldn’t be in this mess.
I think there are some obvious holes in the theory, starting perhaps with the Beat generation. But it has a certain appeal.
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