It’s the same old BS. USians have never made a convincing case of why or how Russia was supposedly an enemy, apart from lots of ideological handwaving. The adversarial relationship has never had any substance. And even in the 50s-70s US conservatives were eager to use the same broad brush to tar artists, hippies, and anyone else who challenged the local hegemony. FWIW liberals are an easy target because they typically petition somebody else with “real power” for change instead of implementing it themselves. This is why most people think of the left as well-off academics who merely comment rather than a political/social force with any agency.
It goes back at least to the communist and anarchist labor movements of the early 20th century. The liberals were the comfy bourgeois people who were frightened into accepting hollow assurances from heads of industry and finance to police themselves, instead of instituting anything fundamentally different. It arguably hasn’t turned out very well!
That’s not true at all. The Soviet leadership, during the Cold War, was pretty damn committed to attacking the United States and being the adversary. It was mutual.
I agree that it was mutual, but it still seems to have been quite hollow. Real enemies IMO have some actual conflict. Even on the purely ideological front, the US was never really about liberal democracy, and the USSR was never really about communism. As a dispute over territory, it has been rather abstract.
Whenever I make the mistake of reading comments on Facebook or other sites that have news about Drumpf, there is always people in there who revel in the “liberals” being butthurt. The only thing that makes me do is not want to speak to those people at all.
Sure, but WTF was it actually about? That’s what I mean by “hollow”, it seems like a vague rivalry with little by way of clear political or military objectives. There has definitely been conflict, but it seems to be lacking in substance.
But bringing that back to the OP, that is very much like conservative USians complaints about the left. Their objections are phrased strongly, but can somehow never be nailed down in practical terms.
Thought: to what extent is the slide towards adjunctification in academia a response to feminisation of the wokforce? Is it another case of “prestigious profession loses prestige once it is no longer male-identified”?
Dismissed by whom? If all it takes to fizzle out a social movement is to say that it doesn’t matter, then it isn’t much of a movement. The Panthers were an actual leftist organization, and were forcibly destroyed because their real community actions couldn’t be explained away. When broadcast media dismisses the very people who fed your kids breakfast before school, and guarded your spouse against the police - it’s hard to believe the claims of irrelevance.
I hope my appraisal is incorrect, but most of what I have heard about BLM and Occupy sounds much more liberal, petitioning somebody else with “real power” to act with equity. Raising awareness and getting people’s stories out there is still important, but that functions more like alternative journalism than activism in the direct sense.
Is it just a brand name given to the threat conservatives feel over the changing world? What are all the different aspects of the supposed culture war, and are any of them valid? This might be one way to get conservatives to reconsider this whole right-left dichotomy.
Example: whenever someone talks about “the War On Christmas” I point out that every liberal I know celebrates Christmas (including some atheists and Jews), and the phrase “Happy Holidays” is a friendly greeting, not some evil curse (and it’s decades old, popularized in song by Bing Crosby in the 1940’s.)
I mean, if conservatives just want to always be at war with liberals then there is no solution here.
Or the other way around? The lower status and added hassle in the job and the increasing cost of achieving it means that it’s no longer worthwhile bothering? There has been a similar shift in school teachers in the UK, and I remember being approached by an older male teacher looking for possible applicants at a jobs fair. The thing is that I already have some idea of what teaching in the UK is like and the direction it’s going as a profession, so I just noped out of there. The same goes for something like nursing if I happened to be interested in it – I have friends in both professions and you have to be pretty altruistic to put up with it. There are more male nurses than ever, but it’s hardly gaining status.
I am really not sure that a large disparity is a good thing at all. In the past women with a lower education could get married and have a role, even if it didn’t represent equality. This looks more like it would result in a lot of men with at least insecure employment and without family ties, which is generally not a great thing for a country.
A a liberal I’m very rarely butthurt by these actions or news. I live in New York. I have friends of all creeds and colors. Any hurt I feel is called “empathy” and it’s because I know that my friends of other creeds and colors are more likely to be hurt in the future, typically including the morons saying that I’m butthurt, when financial ruin comes for them and their lack of union protections.
I’m always kind of like, “well, we call it empathy, as I’m personally going to be perfectly fine. Best of luck with your increased tax burden.”
“My taxes just went up and I don’t have health insurance anymore, but all of that pales in comparison to the problem that I lost my home when my job went overseas!”
Sure, but that’s probably most true in less prestigious institutions… I bet white men still dominate TT positions and those positions in the more powerful institutions/Ivy league schools, etc.
Indeed. And it was a great way for both sides to justify their aggression towards the rest of the world and to control and direct their own populations…
"NO!!! ONLY THE LIBERALS ARE BUTTHURT ABOUT A REAL PATRIOT BEING ELECTED AS PRESIDENT!! SO WHAT IF I HAVE TO LEARN RUSSIAN AND WATCH OUT FOR GOLDEN SHOWERS FROM THE 1%!!’
