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Bryan Caplan complaining on X that Mason U is introducing mandatory Just Society courses; https://twitter.com/bryan_caplan/status/1760048714847064146
It looks Conquest's Second Law is still strong as ever. And I guess Caplan's libertarianism will ask for some intervention against it that will never work.
I went to George Mason Econ, still live nearby, and had lots of interactions with various parts of the university over the years.
The common online reputation of George Mason is basically totally wrong. People see it as a libertarian bastion of economic and legal research. That is basically just a portion of the economics college and the graduate law department. Its a tiny minority of the university. A very online and very prominent minority that most people know about, but if you are actually on campus or working there its very different. The density of libertarian students was pretty awesome when I went there, but it is still only like 5-10% of them. The Campus Democrats and even Campus Republican organizations were still much larger.
Most of the university is your traditional state school. If anything, its a little more diverse than most state schools, because of where it is located. The Language department is still mostly as crazy as any other school. But instead of having to go anywhere to protest things, they just step next door and make trouble for conservative or libertarian econ speakers that they don't like.
The Econ department and Law departments mostly survive because they have semi-independent funding form the rest of the university. There have been multiple attempts by other departments and the university in general to impose certain hiring restrictions, or to cut off those parts of the university. Those attempts have all failed, but they were still made. The "UnKoch my campus" organization has been in an ongoing battle with GMU Econ for over a decade at this point.
So basically it is entirely unsurprising that GMU would introduce some kind of woke required course. Or it is as surprising as any random State School introducing this sort of thing.
Considering your pro open borders ideas, you see a microcosm of how that would work demographically! Dominated by non libertarians imposing their woke ideals.
Interesting.
I sympathize with actual conservatives or Ron Paul style libertarians there but you kind of are asking to be dominated by the more authoritarian left due to what you prioritize.
For that to be true, wouldn’t the arriving demographics have to be less libertarian and more woke? The latter doesn’t seem to be the case so far. The former, maybe, but I also wouldn’t describe our immigrants as particularly authoritarian.
Polling data clearly show that migrants are less libertarian and more left wing and that they are more supportive of the woke agenda than white demographic.
The current Democrat party and some republicans go along and greater share fail to oppose it, are very much authoritarian cultural far left/woke party. So even just voting for the current Democrats helps transform society in very radical ways.
We live also in an age of mass migration and illegal migrant. The bulk of the migrants are also poorer and greatly benefiting from subsidies from the goverment.
They are also incentivized to become even more so, since for the primarilly non white migrants this ideology plays into their tribalism against white americans. if you benefit from discrimination against another group and it treats your identity as a foreigner, migrant and descendands as special, then you are more likely to support it.
Same with restricting their speech to be critical and negative and opposing to identity groups the migrants come from.
Even successful groups within the USA like Indian Americans are shown through their responses in polls to very very culturally far to the left.
However the problem is even worse because mass migration aids the faction already in a country that has those politics and helps transform those who are closer to that, to become themselves more far left and authoritarian. Why? Because replacement is a key part of the agenda and its supporters are promoting it due to the logic of the replaced deserving it, being historical oppressors. Very directly connected with demonization, replacement in institutions and discrimination.
So the people supporting this thing either doing it overtly, or more subtly and especially in the past the more dominant form was of downplaying. While now we see more cellebration paralax and also being hateful directly. In any case, one idea crosses over the other. It is inherent within the idea of supporting what leads to the destruction of one group and replacement by other groups, that the replaced are less worthy/undeserving (of even their own inheritance) and the replacers more worthy of (gaining what was originally the inheritance of the replaced).
It is also the case that those supporting such mass migration are going to find themselves very directly racist/hateful allies which they are incentivized to downplay, because it will reflect poorly on them.
Cultural marxism is going to lead to more redistribution obviously with redistribution towards the poorer global south flooding in richer countries.
Additionally, it helps promote the idea of permanent left wing/uniparty transformation which makes the left more arrogant, authoritarian and more willing to trample over their outgroup's rights.
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