Peter George Stewart Royal Conser Jonah, Jonah, you're a smart guy, but I don't think you quite realize just how bad the situation in education and academia has gotten. People have been educated in confirmation bias, doublethink and projection for 30 years or so. The academy, the education system, the entertainment industry, the media - all of it is an engine for the destruction of the ability to reason, replacing it with rationalization and compliance. The only thing standing against that is the fact that in their heart of hearts, most people don't believe the bullshit, they just virtue signal assent and go along with it for fear of social shaming, so there's always hope. But my God, how long and well the termites have dined. Like · Reply · Mark as spam · 11 · Nov 16, 2016 11:09pm · Edited Amy Goedicke George Washington High School Academia in America is the conservative's achilles heel; the left were left to take it over and it's proving destructive -- but the second amendment is the liberal's achilles heel -- and they can salivate all they want for total centralized control, but their tyrannical forebearers in other countries had to disarm the citizens first, and this will be perhaps the American liberals bridge too far. Like · Reply · Mark as spam · 2 · Nov 17, 2016 4:18pm Peter George Stewart Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Amy Goedicke I've always firmly believed that the 2nd Amendment is the entire world's last bastion against total global tyranny. If that goes, it's Great Filter time - you'll have 2 or 3 memetic monocultures (ideologies, dogmatic religions and/or quasi-religions) duking it out with nuclear weapons, till there's only 1 left on a blasted planet, and then there will be the inevitable internal strife and schism, which will finish the job. Like · Reply · Mark as spam · Nov 17, 2016 5:15pm Amy Goedicke George Washington High School Peter George Stewart Be of good cheer then becasue it will be easier to transform Acadamia then for liberals to take American's right to bear arms, it won't just be the dead white cold hands they have to get guns from, it will be the dead cold hands of every color. Like · Reply · Mark as spam · 1 · Nov 19, 2016 3:07am Peter George Stewart Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Amy Goedicke Yeah, I think there's still enough respect for, and cognizance of the fundamental importance of, free speech, among enough people of varied political persuasions, that, now Trump's election has relaxed peoples' internal mental barriers against speaking freely, you're going to see lots of liberal professors who have been uncomfortable with what's been going on starting to kick back, and less lockstep thinking. It's one of those "tipping point" things, and I think we're on a better trajectory now wrt the academy. The trouble is, the aftereffects of the past 30 years or so indoctrination in schools are going to linger for quite some time. Of course the counterweight to that is the fact that people have to use logic in their daily lives and jobs once they leave the education system, so the logic/evidence-based reasoning meme-cluster is still alive enough to enable people to quietly shuck off the conditioning in time. We just have to keep logic alive, keep replicating it, at the level of journalism and commentary, so that feeds back to the general populace and encourages them to keep thinking independently.