451–460 of 934 posts
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They do change to some degree, but I believe that age and wealth are not nearly as strong of factors as popular culture might have one think.
I guess it depends. 40 years later, I vote completely opposite to what I did when I was 18-20 years old.
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Why not just make a flat tax for everyone and end all the special interest pandering and exceptions for the rich. It is a poisonous misapplication of the time of our government to constantly be fiddling with tax code to favor one group or another.
Better would be to remove inheritance after death, instead distributing that wealth among the citizenship equally.
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> The best argument I have heard is that visa revocation may be like firing: the US can do it for almost any reason and you can fire someone for no reason, but can't do it for specific prohibited reasons. Speech would probably be one of those bad reasons under the US's civil rights framework. No, the U.S. has the prerogative to pick and choose foreigners who are allowed to immigrate based on categories that would be…
I think the real argument here is a constitutional one about that statute, not about the statute itself. It is unlikely, though, that the supreme court would reverse its stance here.
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Took me all of 5 seconds to find an example. Tattoos are a form of protected speech: https://archive.is/2025.04.03-041258/https://www.theatlantic...
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Nothing in that article implies supporting terrorism. They support Palestine. People conflating supporting Palestine with supporting terrorism should be ashamed of themselves, as Israel is the biggest terror state in the world.
Well, when it comes to conflating, I'll take your calling Israel a terror state as a standard: The democratically elected government of Gaza-Palestine is the Hamas, which is a terrorist organisation. Thus by your conflation regarding Israel to be a terror state, the Gaza strip part of Palestine is as well. Its population chose a known terrorist organisation, everything is run by a terrorist organisation, they did ter…
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But the most likely life experiences to do that are ones that put a person in touch with new ideas and new situations. Universities are much better positioned to generate such experiences than, say, most jobs. To some degree, those that have attempted to be at least nominally more diverse (economically/racially/...) are also the sorts of places where students are more likely to meet other people who are not like them…
I believe students are much more homogenic than you find in school (eg dumb people are around) or in joining the military (you meet conservative people).
I don't think you're wrong about the axes for "academic intelligence" or "political outlook". But those are just two of many. Geographic, racial, economic, class (in the European sense), language, culture .. these are all equally valid, and likely to vary more in a university than in a workplace (even in the military).
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Also to some degree there is anti-elitist backlash after being told you need to have a bachelor's, which is very expensive at these universities, but also it's basically impossible to get an entry-level white collar job without one these days; and for a while the economy bifurcated with different outcomes for white-collar knowledge vs. blue-collar workers.
60% of the US workforce these days is white collar, and it's one of the great illusions of our time. Most of these jobs only exist to keep busy the 60% of the US workforce that has a degree. In the 1940's about 30% of the US workforce was white collar and only 5% had degrees. What caused this change? It's probably because blue collar workers made so much money and had so much leverage that businesses shipped all thei…
(Yes, yes, there's vapor-ware, and useless products, and certainly "fake jobs". Those existed in the '40s, too, and in any other time period or economy you care to look at.)
In my view, the problem is that white collar workers stopped thinking of themselves as Workers. Any of us who rely on a company for a paycheck (and, perniciously, in the US for health insurance) aren't Capital, even if we make high salaries. Maybe we're aspiring to join that class - we'll hit the startup lottery, or FIRE, or our IRA portfolio will go up forever - but we ain't yet. (That's fine, by the way: I'm using Marxist terms, but I'm not a Marxist. Pursuing financial independence, and the real - even if remote - possibility of attaining it is what's made the US such a dynamic economy.)
However, allowing our aspirations for wealth, or the relative comfort of white-collar jobs, to lead us to identify with the political goals of Capital - or worse, to adopt an elitist attitude towards people who work in what you call the "real economy" - is what's got the US into the mess we're currently in. That's the "genius" you identify in the present system, and the origin of the cruelty within it.
In reality, we're all Working Class (well, 99% of us are - although that proportion is way out of whack on this board, of all places!), and we need to (politically) act like it.
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Presumably you mean opposition to gay marriage?
Yes, opposition to gay marriage was so mainstream that even Barack Obama campaigned supporting Clinton's Defense of Marriage Act. Even in the Democratic primaries, as late as 2008, being pro gay marriage was seen as a liability.
The Overton Window moves. Upper marginal tax rates above 90% were not just a position but the actual law in USA during the 1960s, but now are seen here as "far left". Seatbelt requirements were initially felt to be over-intrusion by government, and are now seen by almost everyone as just common sense. And so on and so forth.
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