16 sats \ 9 replies \ @kepford OP 8 Oct \ parent \ on: What is a resolution to the divisions in the USA? mostly_harmless
Yep, well put. You see this in the fear mongering that all sides do. Its rather absurd to me as I have friends on both extremes. Since checking out of the red/blue scam its become even more clear how it works.
I sometimes operate as a therapist to friends that are freaking out.
Yeah, I've often had to talk conservative friends off the ledge.
Weird because I live in California, and I absolutely agree with my conservative friends that progressive policies are horrible and damaging the state and country.
Yet I often find myself steelmanning the liberals. If I had more liberal friends I'd probably be doing the opposite.
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How do you steel man radical left policies in California lol
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I think I do less steelmanning and more just telling them that the situation isn't as dire as it sometimes seems.
I speak from experience within a large public university. Yes, there are woke people and woke administrators, and yes the woke policies are getting in the way of education. But the amount of wokeness is a lot less than many people think. It's usually a handful of true believers in key positions, coupled with lipservice by the non-believers. If you can just navigate around the true believers, it's usually okay.
At a macro level though, these small margins eat away at the efficiency of our organizations, so it's still a big problem overall.
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I think I do less steelmanning and more just telling them that the situation isn't as dire as it sometimes seems.I speak from experience within a large public university. Yes, there are woke people and woke administrators, and yes the woke policies are getting in the way of education. But the amount of wokeness is a lot less than many people think. It's usually a handful of true believers in key positions, coupled with lipservice by the non-believers. If you can just navigate around the true believers, it's usually okay.At a macro level though, these small margins eat away at the efficiency of our organizations, so it's still a big problem overall.
interesting -- do you see these handful of true believers
a) going away?
b) holding their ground?
c) expanding their influence and/or recruiting more peeps to their ideas?
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a) Within the university, I don't see them going away, because a lot have tenure and universities aren't subject to the brutality of market forces as much as private sector. (They're not totally immune either, so when budget cuts come I do think some of the DEI positions will be the first to get cut. The positions will get cut, but the faculty staffing those positions will likely remain on faculty.)
b/c) I think they are losing influence. I've seen more and more people get comfortable speaking out openly against DEI. At first, it was fine to pay lip service when it didn't affect operations too much. But I think they pushed too hard and now people are pushing back. At my own institutions they introduced some really insane and productivity-hampering hiring policies and many departments are quite upset about it, including my own.
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University can’t be saved or reformed
We need to build something new
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I concur.
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Both sides exaggerate for effect. I often hear ridiculous things from family that are listening to the news. Covid was a great example. On the ground things were different from the way they were portrayed on TV. Things may be factually correct but also over-simplified and over-generalized. Treating movements and even states like monoliths is easier than nuance.
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Yep, happens to me often as well as with my liberal friends.
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