#1
political car tune
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hard hitting stuff here. guess we gotta pack it in.
#2
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was anyone here radicalized by a professor? it's such a popular trope but i've never met anyone for which it is true
#3
Dont Mess With Sucess
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thirdplace posted:

was anyone here radicalized by a professor? it's such a popular trope but i've never met anyone for which it is true


I took a class on demography in college that ended with a really good lecture on how to avoid a bad life in America: "don't be black". Also a professor who taught a class on personality spent a lot of time shitting on trait theory, and that was helpful.

#4
[account deactivated]
#5
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I could only sit through 45 seconds of that guy's voice and mannerisms before hitting the Alex Jones video on the same topic, and managed to make it through 5 out of 6 minutes of that, even though Jones didn't start talking about the book itself until 3 minutes into the video.
#6
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thirdplace posted:

was anyone here radicalized by a professor? it's such a popular trope but i've never met anyone for which it is true



I feel like I was radicalized in spite of my professors? I took an 'International Relations' class from a former spook in my freshman year but I still came away hating Amerikkka just from the facts presented lol. I also took a European History class from a prof who assigns 'Bloodlands' by Timothy Snyder yet the class mostly just helped me read Lenin better.

#7
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colddays posted:

I could only sit through 45 seconds of that guy's voice and mannerisms before



if you just watch after 5:40 everything turns out great

#8
Online
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thirdplace posted:

was anyone here radicalized by a professor? it's such a popular trope but i've never met anyone for which it is true


I was radicalized by the works of Professor Grover Furr.

#9
Online
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Hat tip to radical professor Ward Churchill as well, and also to union rep Joe Ligotti.
#10
UNUSUALY COOL
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a professor had me read Manifesto for Philosophy when i was young and a that led to a lot of stuff that helped me hop tracks from anarchism to Marx. to a lot of my friends that was me being de-radicalized though so w/e... i don't really think about it in those terms, i just started reading more.
#11
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The most basic bitch liberal professor in the world is still telling 18 year olds who don't know jack crap but what they daddy said that history is an applied process of theory and not a list of things that happened in order & for the teen who listen, he may open the door in his mind what leads to Truth.
#12
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thirdplace posted:

was anyone here radicalized by a professor? it's such a popular trope but i've never met anyone for which it is true



my entire political worldview is a direct result of how fucking atrociously stupid every single professor in my philosophy program was

#13
UNUSUALY COOL
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Taking IR classes helped me later because in contrast to my earlier life as a fuzzy skeptic of the U.S., those made clear that every country the U.S. attacked over the following years had already been marked as a target by the nexus of academia and Washington political advisers in decades previous, and also their naked reasoning for marking them as targets, which was usually because those countries were potential loci of resistance to a future unipolar or faux-"multipolar", Washington-led order (depending mostly on whether the writer was a Republican or Democrat).

That made it much easier for me to understand how the proximate reasons the U.S. government would later give for attacking those countries were always complete bullshit, rather than just suspecting that's what they were, and gave me some hints as to the real reasons and how, e.g. recent events might have accelerated the existing timeline in Washington to eliminate those countries' governments, or how this was an opportune time for those folks to achieve a long-standing goal, etc. And that made it a lot easier to explain to other people.
#14
UNUSUALY COOL
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It also taught that far from representing a worldwide conspiracy of decades-in-the-making perfect planning, the U.S. bourgeois intelligentsia tended to be sluggish and reactionary in adjusting their goals and targets and so a lot of those attacks, while they had real political goals at the time, also reflected ideas and policy that had become nothing more than convention.

Like, I think the current policy of "foment chaos because it's easier than propping up dictators" you see coming from Washington now grew out of the real results of policy in post-2nd-Gulf-War Iraq, where the people in charge of that in the U.S., following decades of supposed serious thinking by serious people, believed that the high standard of living of the Iraqis under a secular Ba'athist state and the crisis after a war would translate necessarily into market openings, stable spontaneous U.S.-friendly governance and provide a natural defense against militant resistance. They saw those states as sowing their own demise because they were supposedly creating people who were all Americans on the inside and didn't want to be part of a locus of resistance when they could get rich joining world markets in a privileged way. What we see now is a lot of making the best of a bad situation by turning policy to meet initially undesired results that weren't what was predicted.