Remember the kinds of “argument” that prevails on campus:
I respectfully ask that this would be our last correspondence on this issue
And this one:
I will continue to stand with the faculty that I sincerely believe will benefit from unionization and I am disappointed that you could not respect my right to or reasoning for supporting them in the first place. …
For that reason, I ask that you do not reach out to me again (electronic or otherwise). If you do not respect this request, I will contact the University Intercessor so that the University can mediate this on our behalf, if that’s what you would prefer
Wholly vacuous. I’ve long been confused by the complete inability to use logic and reasoning skills in discussions. I have also been puzzled by my inability to communicate ideas even to people who don’t have a fundamental dislike for me like these two students do. Now, via Coyote, Popehat really does capture it perfectly:
We’re in the middle of a modest conservative backlash and a resurgence of bigotry, both actual and arrested-adolescent-poseur. I believe a large part of this backlash results from the low quality of advocacy for progressive ideas. Much of that advocacy has become characterized by petulant whining and empty dogmatism. The message conveyed by too many of your generation is not that people should adopt progressive ideas because they are right or just, but that they should adopt them because that is what they are supposed to adopt because that is what right-thinking people adopt. That is irritating and ineffectual. Faced with an idea, I don’t expect your generation to confront it. I don’t expect you to explain how it’s wrong, and win hearts and minds that your ideas are better. Rather, I expect you to assert that you should be protected from being exposed to the idea in the first place. That’s disappointing and doesn’t bode well for the success of progressive ideas (many of which I admire) in society. In short: if this is how you’re going to fight for what you think is right, you’re going to lose. Do better.
For those of you wanting an update on the union nonsense here, the SEIU has not communicated with us/me about the process, if there are enough votes for an election, anything for about a month. The faculty senate at UR has convened a couple of sessions to discuss the union drive. I don’t think the few students who started all of this had any understanding for what exactly they were advocating for, and for whom they might be impacting. Needless to say, I am not the only person who is frustrated, or more. Stay tuned for an update, it will be interesting.
“I don’t think the few students who started all of this had any understanding for what exactly they were advocating for, and for whom they might be impacting.”
Not wholly unlike the white, upwardly-mobile college kids agitating for a higher minimum wage – symbolic leftism being, after all, a self-selected bundle of meretricious goods.