posted
Nor that many of the "discreditings" also turned out to be lies put out into the public by a true movement of people putting a huge amount of money into trying to convince the public that the reported incidents were all phony, when many, many, many of them were true.
And your imagination notwithstanding, it still happens frequently.
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In general, from what I understand, there were some attempts by the universities to say "Hey, that's not what happened at all. They were discussion Egyptian mythology, not saying how men should be castrated." or "This incident never occured.", but there was such a deluge of fraudulent/manipulated charges that they couldn't keep up and many just gave up.
I have never heard of there being a huge group of people trying to defend universities from charges of Political Correctness. If the stuff I'm saying is unfounded propoganda, why would they? Under that supposition, these people were the ones saying the PC was the way to go.
It does happen, but I think you'd be unable to show that defense of colleges is a huge PR undertaking. And I'll tell you, from the evidence of this thread, anecdotally, people aren't seeing it. Especially not what OSC describes (by the way, do you agree with him) as being akin to learning to keep your head down and fake the group opinions as per under a totalitarian regime.
Christians are sometimes insulted and/or denied their rights. There are people (groups of them even) bent on attacking them. But the idea that they are under large scale persecution is a fable put out by the unscrupulous.
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posted
I witnessed Planned Parenthood spend a lot of PR resources on false denials of attempts by the University to curtail pro-life activities and NOW issue false denials of attempts to silence a particular viewpoint on date rape. I recall something similar by the Rainbow Coalition, but can't remember the details of the situation. All 3 involved attempts to disprove things that I saw happen firsthand.
That's 3 very large, very power national organizations who did it during 4 pariticular years at one particular school.
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posted
Huh. Darn, those are good points. I wasn't considering individual issues. I'd hold that they are pretty small potatoes (you know, ever since the Dan Quayle think, I get apprehensive about the spelling of that word) in regards to the larger whole. The analyses I've read of the phenomena were on the whole, the idea of "PC" and how overmatched the people who tried to dispell the lies about it were. For example, most people think that Poltically Correct is a label that people assumed for themselves as opposed to a term made up to by PR people to foster a sinister, communist/totalitarian impression.
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Also, man, what was up with UVA? You're experiences don't seem to match most other people's here on Hatrack or that I know in real life. It sounds almost like Berkley. The only thing I know about the school is that I hooked up with a girl from their at a party on Long Island.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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I pretty much only consider individual issues. *sigh* We have very, very different brains.
quote:Also, man, what was up with UVA?
I still have fond memories of it. And all these things worked out, eventually. Compared to what I heard first hand from other schools, I considered us very lucky.
I bring these up not to create an impression of believers being hunted down constantly (as I said on the previous page), but because I don't want broad refutations to be used against the specific incidents. One area where the U.S. really does have a general advantage over most of the rest of the world is in areas of freedom of speech and religious worship. But one of the reasons we have it is because people fight attacks at the margins. That includes the ACLU and the Center for Individual Rights (the people who took our case). And both sides try to minimize those attacks at the margin that don't align with their own opinion on where the dividing line should be.
posted
PR and manipulation of the public is one of my major concerns. One of the projects I'm involved in (it's still unofficial, though) is a gourp of people loooking into ways to change attitudes without resulting to trickery and base appeals, which are the traditional methods of social psych, marketing, and PR - and I hate them sooo much.
The PC thing was a huge, and pretty well documented, exercise of these things. Take, for example, a John LEo column from that period and very few of his examples were both legitimate and presented accurately. There was an enormous propoganda machine taking anything, rumors, the uncorroborated word of someone with an axe to grind, and, yes, legitimate accounts and pushing them hard as they could into the public consciousness without regard for responsibility or general truthfulness.
This increasing (and increasingly sophisticated) marketing approach to public thinking bugs the holy heck out of me. I honestly believe it's one of the major sources of bad stuff in our society.
I could be what pases for objective nowadays and show the things the democrats/"liberals" did, especially during the Clinton years, but, let's face it, while they've the same will to manipulate and deceive the public their counterparts have, they suck at it and their endevours generally lack the scale and (failing that) the quality of the conservative PR movements.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote: Many atheists, for example, assume without argument that asserting the nonexistance of God should be a default or axiomatic position.
This is conflating two of Antony Flew's arguments:
1. Atheism is the default position because a person needs to be taught of about God in order to believe in him.
2. The burden of proof falls to the person who makes an extraordinary claim. Since atheists make no claim other than that we lack belief in God, demanding that we prove the non-existence of God is shifting the burden of proof (a fallacy), whereas theists are making an extraordinary claim when they claim God exists, so the burden of proof falls on them.
Also note from the language in #2, that being an atheist does not require the assertion of God's nonexistence.
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