General > General Technical Chat
"Training out the stupid"
Cerebus:
--- Quote from: coppice on December 20, 2020, 10:00:25 pm ---What has the student's union got to do with anything beyond the small number who have any involvement in the students union? Compulsory payments to the student's union have always been a scam pumping money to activists working against the interests of those making the payments. When I was at university the activists used to tour the refectories every lunchtime in the run up to students union elections, because the turnout was so small it made them look bad. Nothing happened in my time at university on which anything about my political views could be assessed, other than perhaps the rude way we told those trying to get us to vote to leave us alone to enjoy our lunch.
--- End quote ---
As usual, you're focusing on the supplementary illustration about the Student Union, that you hope is arguable, and ignoring the main point. My judgement of the political sympathies of the student body as a whole is based on direct personal experience of the hundreds of individuals I knew, at exactly the point in time you're trying to say that there were next to no people with soft left tendencies in the student body, not on the composition of the SU's elected officials. It might be a bit tricky for me to jump back in time and get an affidavit from each of them to provide material support for my case, but I think most people would agree that there's a tendency for the young voter to be left leaning (and I could quantify that if forced to), and that tendency is stronger in university students.
Just to drum the point home, voting intentions by age and by education for the last general election:
The broad left always gets more votes from the young and well educated and that's been true for as long as I've taken note of politics. The question here is would a political party be cynical enough to take note of that, and re-engineer higher education to include people who would not otherwise have gone into tertiary education by encouraging the creation of syllabi and courses that would accept people who hitherto where not thought of, or likely to think of themselves as 'university material' in a bid to create more 'natural' voters for themselves? Given the sort of unprincipled power hungry chancers that are naturally attracted to politics, I'd say yes.
Are you really telling us that you were so socially isolated at university that "nothing happened in my time at university on which anything about my political views could be assessed". I find that unlikely given how quickly you'll offer an opinion nowadays. For that to be true you'd have to either have talked to no one, or talked about nothing interesting - half the fun of being at university is sitting up way too late at night arguing about how to set the world to rights with friends and people who were strangers at the start of the evening.
coppice:
--- Quote from: Cerebus on December 20, 2020, 11:03:58 pm ---Are you really telling us that you were so socially isolated at university that "nothing happened in my time at university on which anything about my political views could be assessed". I find that unlikely given how quickly you'll offer an opinion nowadays. For that to be true you'd have to either have talked to no one, or talked about nothing interesting - half the fun of being at university is sitting up way too late at night arguing about how to set the world to rights with friends and people who were strangers at the start of the evening.
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I know my experience of college is not typical, because I studied in London. We went to college. We studied. We went home. We very rarely socialised beyond chatting at lunch or in break periods. One of my friends spent one year in a hall of residence. I can't think of anyone else who did. In private discussions most of us were pretty much middle ground politically. We were STEM students, and that's where the maths takes you. :) You'll notice how much bigger the Lib Dem percentage is for the highly educated in your chart. However, unless there were spies watching our every move we did nothing that would have left a record of our political views. These days the internet means all sorts of things get inadvertently recorded, but in the 70s?
SilverSolder:
You know the old saying:
If you don't lean to the left when you are young, you don't have a heart.
If you don't lean to the right as you get old, you don't have a brain!
JohnG:
There's another saying: It's not a line, it's a circle.
Too far left or right, you begin to believe you understand the world better than everyone else, and will resort to violence to make them understand your brilliance. You're just arriving at the same place from a different direction.
I prefer the immortal words of Bud: https://youtu.be/Zn5lEuiwtfQ
Cheers,
John
coppice:
--- Quote from: JohnG on December 21, 2020, 03:58:27 am ---There's another saying: It's not a line, it's a circle.
Too far left or right, you begin to believe you understand the world better than everyone else, and will resort to violence to make them understand your brilliance. You're just arriving at the same place from a different direction.
I prefer the immortal words of Bud: https://youtu.be/Zn5lEuiwtfQ
Cheers,
John
--- End quote ---
Its more like a sphere. Start at the point on the sphere facing the light. You can go up for authoritarian, or down for libertarian. You can go left for economically centralised or right for economically diverse. However, go too far in any direction and you end up in the same dark place.
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