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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (90447)	12/2/2004 7:55:24 PM
From: cosmicforce	Respond to of 108807

<Most college professors are liberals because when one is extremely intelligent AND highly educated, and understands art and history and literature, one knows the truth, and that is that LIBERALISM IS THE ONLY RATIONAL AND COMPASSIONATE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE.> As much as I'd like to agree with you, I feel that the longer term data supports the opposite. If you add up all the decades in which educational elite were liberal vs. conservative, you'd have many more decades with reactionary forces at the helm. The whole pomp and circumstance aspect of education is designed to let everyone know their place and newcomers or radicals are expunged, denied tenure or just plain isolated. It was changing from the 1930's on (a brief purge occurred in the 1950's) and liberalism has found its way into mainstream Academia, but I think it is hanging by a thread these days (sorry to say) and is probably in decline. Students, on the other hand, do meet with your criteria and have always hung out at universities. Ant societies (which I tend to think of as late stage fascist organizational microcosms) tend to ostracize, eat or kill those who don't toe the line. They have been killing and eating dissidents and uncooperative students for at least 90 MM years. Now that neocons are in ascendency, we may be faced with ant-like destructive forces for those who aren't ready to be identical robots serving the hive. Ants aren't quick witted but they make up for it with dogged determination.

To: Grainne who wrote (90447)	12/2/2004 8:15:13 PM
From: Oeconomicus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

"LIBERALISM IS THE ONLY RATIONAL AND COMPASSIONATE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE." The rudeness of shouting aside, can you define "liberalism"?

To: Grainne who wrote (90447)	12/3/2004 12:10:06 AM
From: J. C. Dithers	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

Extremely intelligent? Highly educated? Remember Grainne when the Scarecrow asked the Wizard of Oz for a brain? And the Wizard (not having a brain handy) said, "What you need is a DIPLOMA!" Diplomas confer neither high intelligence nor (true) education. A Ph.D. is 50% grunt work, 40% politics, and 10% learning. And just what is intelligence anyway? Woodrow Wilson (Ph.D.) was a brilliant scholar and had beautiful dreams of world equality and peace, but had both feet planted squarely in the air. That placed him on the same level as most "intellectuals" and predictably caused his presidency to be a failure. He could not sell the League of Nations, he could not broker an effective peace, and thus guaranteed a new world war many times worse than the first one. So much for "extreme intelligence" and "high education." If you were going to be marooned on desert island, would you like your company to be a dozen intellectuals who could read poetry and the classics to you -- or one good mechanic?