There’s actually some useful information here if you ignore the hyperbole.
If you act like a jerk and are mean to people, you will drive people away from your causes, even if you are taking a position that is strongly defensible from a moral and ethical view. If you take the view that “I don’t have to do the emotional labor to educate you, OMG read some theory, you’re fucking stupid if you can’t understand this, you don’t deserve to live if you think Y,” etc. you aren’t going to win people over. And yes, if you are always acting like an asshole, you’re probably going to drive people away that believe similarly to you, because they won’t want to be associated with assholes. That’s human nature, and something that you need to learn to contend with if you want to win adherents to any political or social position.
In other words: leftists and feminists, fucking get over yourselves.. You may not want to put in the emotional labor because it’s exhausting, but you know who will? Fascists, nationalists, misogynists, and religious fundamentalists. If you just want to make fun of and vent at people on the right, you’re only creating a more insular group that more and more people are going to end up hating. See also: hexbear,
No; adjunct faculty can also rightly be called professor without having achieved a doctorate. I’ve had a few professors that had BAs and MFAs (esp. since I’m not sure that there are PhD programs for fine arts).
I was being serious. She made art history–which is normally a fairly dry subject, particularly when you’re covering art before 1100CE–a really fun and engaging subject.
I had an art history professor that insisted on being called doctor; she said she’d put in a lot of time and spent a lot of money to get that degree, and so she wanted to get her money’s worth.
…You’re really saying that one party where you have no functional choice is better than a multi-party system, just because you think that Republicans and Dems are too alike, while ignoriing the plethora of other parties that not only actually exist in the US, but hold office at local and state level?
The problem with China being that it’s authoritarian, not that it’s capitalist or communist. There’s no choice other than the Communist Party, so when the party is wildly corrupt, you have no recourse at all short of revolution. And we all know what China does to counter-revolutionaries.
While it is true that there was inexpensive housing available in the USSR, and that rents were quite reasonable compared to anything that currently exists in the US, and people couldn’t readily be evicted if they lacked the ability to pay, it’s a flat-out lie to say that that was the “solution” to homelessness, or that it eliminated the problem. Rather, the USSR criminalized being homeless and not being engaged in socially-productive labor; people that were homeless ended up in prisons and were labelled as parasites. The problem that we have now is that the official records simply didn’t record the problem, in much the same way that Stalin had histories and photos revised to eliminate people that had become enemies of the state.
Aside from an episode of Strange New Worlds (and possible in Wrath of Khan, depending on your perspective), space pirates aren’t brought up as a risk to the Federation starships, presumably because they usually aren’t. Shields alone should be sufficient for debris and asteroids, since shields appear to stop physical objects as well as certain forms of energy (obvs. not certain bands of light though, or whatever bands their sensors use). Non- and quasi-sentient species shouldn’t pose any risk to a starship at all (aside from possibly omniscient comets, thank you Stanislaw Lem). The weapons on a starship are appropriate to direct against planetary settlements, bases, and other starships.
Fundamentally, I believe Mao was correct on this; the ability to use violence effectively is the lowest common denominator for all power. Everything else is a veneer of civility intended to disguise the violence that is inherent to all forms of coercive rule.
…And yet, the Enterprise is armed. If power does not come from the ability to effectively use violence, but from some other means, then why would the Federation arm it’s flagship?
I don’t think that the issue is that people don’t know; people don’t care. They don’t understand how horrible the loss of privacy is, and think that the marginal convenience of being able to control your thermostat from your workplace, or have your refrigerator add milk to your shopping list outweighs the negatives of them being turned into botnets, or monetizing all of your data to squeeze every last penny out of you.
The conspiracy theory behind this is that Jews control everything, and that’s why anti-BDS laws exist. Jewish media overlords don’t like mean things being said about Israel, so they pull the strings on their puppet politicians, and make them dance.
The reality is a couple of things. First, Israel is an ally of the US, and politicians have burned a lot of political capital propping the country up for the last 60-odd years. There’s a bit of a sunk-cost fallacy there; we need to keep supporting Israel, rather than finding new and less-sucky friends in the middle east (like, I dunno, maybe apologizing to Iraq for fucking their whole country over with the shah?, not that they’re great, but we def. made that particular pile of shit). The other one is that evangelical Christians need to support Israel, because they believe that Jesus is going to return as the Messiah in Jerusalem, to the Jews. Anything that can potentially threaten the possibility of Israel controlling Jerusalem would undercut their religious beliefs, so they really want to dump money into Israel. (No, that’s not a bad joke, or conspiracy theory itself; I can probably find links to sermons of guys like Greg Locke saying as much; they don’t like Jews, since Jews are Christ-killers, but they need Jews to usher in the apocalypse. AFAIK, this is pretty mainstream evangelical stuff.) Evangelicals have a lot of power in this country, even if they’re not that large of a population any more. Republicans are largely controlled by them, which is part of the reason that you won’t see any republicans opposing aid to Israel.
Anyway, BDS would threaten the support for Israel; therefore, anti-BDS is generally favored by Dems, and completely supported by Republicans.
The fact that there are anti-BDS laws doesn’t make this not a conspiracy. Moreover, anti-BDS laws haven’t yet been tested in courts; given that groups like the ACLU oppose them as infringing on legitimate political speech, I think that there’s solid reason to say that they’re unconstitutional. Esp. since BDS is intended to target the country, and not the people.