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Stick around, new kid. Time in this community will thoroughly disabuse you of that notion, presuming you can avoid the traditional leftwinger meltdown and flounce-out when you realize that other people are going to continue to be allowed to argue back.
Prospiracy with significant conspiracy elements. Something like a third of professors openly admit they would refuse to approve of the hiring of a conservative, no matter how qualified. Iterate that attitude for the better part of a century and here we are.
No, I think people with that view do indeed tend toward liberalism.
The mistake is in assigning the word "liberal" incorrectly; social justice isn't liberal, it just (in the USA) has been wearing the word (and Officially Designated Intellectualism) like a skin-suit.
I very much agree, as a personal idiosyncrasy. In most cases, I just mentally replace all liberal->progressive whenever it's used by someone who isn't e.g. Glenn Greenwald.
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The existence of a niche forum whose membership selects for right-wing views and truth-seeking does not disprove the idea that all else being equal people who strongly value truth for its own sake will be more likely to be liberals.
I dunno, I am pretty left wing (by the standards of the Motte) and while there are certain brands of bullshit popular here, it's more that this forum selects for truth-seeking regardless of who it offends, and that, as a side effect, selects for contrary rightist or dissident leftist opinions. I literally don't know of any other left-leaning or so-called "neutral" forum, for example, that would let someone argue that trans women are men or that IQ is both hereditary and has a racial component, or that deporting illegal immigrants is good, or that Trump is not a fascist. I don't mean that any of those propositions are necessarily true: I'm saying almost anywhere else, you can't even debate it. You might get away with suggesting it, but after the subsequent dogpile, if you persist, you will be banned as a Nazi. No exaggeration, I've seen that happen... almost everywhere else.
As a liberal it's disheartening and annoying. I don't think rightists actually have a closer relationship with the truth, per se. But they do put a higher value on truth as a terminal value, whereas leftists today regard truth as secondary to social approval and psychological comfort.
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Thanks, bro. Genuinely, I'd like to. It would be far too easy to comment somewhere that I receive no push-back, but then I wouldn't be sharpening my mind at all, would I? Unless you're not interested in also sharpening your mind, I would imagine you wouldn't want this to devolve into a reactionary circlejerk?
I'd buy it. But I'd also push-back that it was a one-way street and that conservatives had no agency in the matter. It's almost as if it would be convenient that academic institutions were one day able to be simply "deleted" for wrong-think.
The situation seems to model as a cooperate/defect situation. Leftists were able to gain a foothold precisely because enough of the old guard were swayed by arguments about academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas. And enough of those leftists do not return that consideration that they were able to slowly grind out their outgroup.
We've seen the same dynamic play out in a thousand venues, from forums to corporations.
And we were warned! The usual formulation nowadays is from 1976's Children of Dune
but the sentiment goes back to at least 1843,
-- Thomas Babington MacCauley.
The MacCauley quote is, I think, a better representation of the woke position.
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