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Killswitch's avatar

Yes, college kids are the problem. They're the ones with all the power to stifle speech. The university administrations have been the biggest advocates for free speech, they let anyone say anything they want and never use police violence to quell speech that threatens state department narratives. Speaking of free speech. fuck Israel and all the zionazi scum that support its genocide.

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SPC-98503's avatar

I can't help but think that we've failed to bring students to appreciate the genesis of free speech and political tolerance, as these ideas were born and refined over an immense period of bloodshed. Our failure to make centuries of European wars, the English Civil War, the French Revolution and Empire as being something more than a bunch of angry and dead white dudes (Hobbes, Burke, Locke Hume, et all), as opposed to profound thinkers seeking to transcend the brutality of those times by centering a shared humanism over the 'moral clarity' that a faction offers.

Moreover, one may contrast Europe effort to transcend ceaseless brutality against the rest of the world at the time. There were no transcendental concepts of a generalized humanity being developed in the Ottoman and other Islamic regions: Islam was the superior culture (unless, of course, you were on the wrong side). China never transcended the cycles of Buddhism and Confucianism. India and Japan were stuck in feudalistic funk. And sub-saharan Africa was perfectly comfortable justifying various the imperial dynasties raiding competitors to secure the supply of their top export: slaves. I'm not suggesting that Europe was a bastion of inquiry and reason, but inquiry and reason existed to the degree that they eventually set root in personal and public morality standards. Everyone else? Not even close.

I'm not a teacher/professor/instructor so I can't offer a pedagogy and I do appreciate that there is a generation of university 'academics' that are either ignorant re: above or simply not smart enough to understand it. These ideas emerged from the reality of humanities ability to act horrifically, and they only arose within the European Enlightenment. It's rank to just dismiss this time and its thinkers as dead white men.

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