The first talk of the second day of the conference was openly conservative. A Spanish academic said that the Left has created a hive mentality that is not in the least more open or less ideological than that of the Franco dictatorship. And it’s time to let go of the Civil War era resentments instead of stoking them with “historical memory initiatives.” Let’s get over our addiction to feeling virtuous by condemning the past and let’s concentrate on the actual problems our society faces, he said.
This might sound like the most boring of commonsensical approaches but I never thought I’d hear something like this at an academic conference. Of course, several Latin American women started henpecking the speaker for thought crimes but the next speaker said similar things and I nodded so much my head almost flew off into outer space.
After the session, I asked the Ukrainian organizer to tell me honestly if I’d died abs was now in an intellectual heaven. “What did you expect?” he said. “That I’d gather a group of leftist twaddlers?”
Clarissa's Blog 
This is excellent news. Of course it will take time for academia to recover its sanity entirely. I’m betting that it will be about twenty years, but who knows?
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It’s slow, painstaking work but that’s the only way. On the positive side, academics hate not being original, and the rejection of groupthink is unavoidable the moment they feel that they no longer stand out by parroting it.
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In SA, the academic Leninist socialist left was always distinct from the working class unionist left. The breakdown of the big tent anti-apartheid coalition has made this distinction more obvious.
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It was like that in the US but the working class was destroyed by deindustrialization, so now it’s just the wine spritzer class left.
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The big change in the US was that the working class got old and retired. Instead of worrying about the UAW for their jobs they care about BlackRock for their pensions.
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Blackrock, which is funding their pensions by ensnaring their grandkids in perpetual rental serfdom.
Whee!
Tried to keep my husband from enrolling in the company 401k, because there is no “stop giving money to our evil REI overlords” option in the booklet.
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Actually, massive immigration is destroying the working class, deindustrialization prevented the normal working classes rise to the lower middle class. Military DEI reduced the other traditional route.
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