One in five college students say …
Actually, I’m a bit surprised that it’s that low. Today’s college students have no personal memory of 9/11; it’s just something they learned about in school. And the vast majority of today’s college students have gone to schools dominated by leftist thought.
The pollsters didn’t ask the students who thought 9/11 was deserved why they thought it was deserved. Here’s more about the poll; the results are broken down by political affiliation but not by, for example, ethnicity or religion, which might have been informative.
I find this interesting and not the least bit surprising:
Some students in this survey expressed intolerance for contrary opinions. A significant minority (42%) believe that hearing opinions they disagree with can be harmful to their mental health, the highest percentage in the five years the question has been asked. 44% would avoid taking a class with a professor who publicly shares opinions they disagree with, and 48% would not be able to be close friends with someone of a different political party. Liberal students led moderates and conservatives in all 3 categories with 51% believing contradictory political opinions are harmful to their mental health, 55% saying they wouldn’t take a class with a professor with contrary opinions, and 65% being unwilling to have close friends across the aisle. Conservatives sat at just 31%, 33%, and 27% respectively.
That conforms to my own observations, and not just of students but across the age groups.
I had two very close friends, both of them Irish immigrants and both naturalized American citizens, who told me in the immediate aftermath of 911 that America deserved it. I immediately cut myself off from them. I wanted nothing more to do with them. I felt that way then and I still do. They can go to hell for all I care.
There is a slight logic to those intolerant folks in neo’s blockquote. Not that I agree with it. The logic is that persuasive people or very well written arguments can persuade. The corollary to that is the old saw, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”
However…, open your mind. Please. Now that I’m older, I don’t see a lot of that.
The related saying that is popular with the left is, “Silence is violence.” No. Hell no. Violence is violence. Silence is just someone minding their own business.
That saying really pisses me off! It is the ultimate in intolerance. They are essentially demanding group think. It is the lowest bunk imaginable.
How many of them even know what happened (other than the abstract “The US was attacked”) on that day?
I know those “man on the street” interviews you see all the time are curated to provide a particular point of view, but even so, the fact that they can find so many people so ignorant of historical and political facts boggles my mind.
Yet violent speech — like wishing Trump or all white people dead — isn’t violence but righteousness.
huxley, Yes. I suspect that the overarching motive is the cultivation of tribal behavior. (And they call themselves progressives! How about regressives??)
I have a friend who likes these long running series with fantasy or sci-fi themes. We have dinner once a week and watch 2 or 3 episodes. Now we’re watching Game of Thrones, which I’d never seen.
Clearly, either the novelist or show creators see quite a bit of politics and political parallels in the plotline. Brutal tribal thinking and behavior is in the fore, but more advanced political thinking is there as well.
“…Today’s college students have no personal memory of 9/11…”
A lot of them don’t seem to have very much memory of anything at all.
I think I told this story once before but it would have been a very long time ago, so here goes again.
One of my favorite 9/11 stories – because it’s so over-the-top quirky – is a friend of mine who was in Istanbul on 9/11. Much of the staff at the hotel they were staying at knew they were Americans, and approached them to express their condolences. But, they wanted to know, why would the Japanese do this? At this point, you’re rightfully thinking WTF? You see, all that day it kept getting reported – this is just like Pearl Harbor. I’m convinced there is something highly significant about the fact that the Turkish staff did not immediately associate this with Islamic terrorism, but it would take someone with a lot more knowledge of the Middle East than me to interpret it.
Mike, I think the staff at that hotel were f-ing with your friend. They knew that their team was responsible and took great glee in pretending they were being empathetic (by posing as ignoramuses). You’re probably a bit of a dupe for believing this story at face value for 25 years.
Entirely possible.
Goes to show the Cultural Marxism Seminaries are working pushing Propaganda
“48% would not be able to be close friends with someone of a different political party”
Include me in that list. How can I be friends with someone that supports – actively or passively – the “ideals” of the present Democrat party? Doesn’t much matter though as most of my former Democratic friends cut me off long ago for supporting Trump and not supporting Climate what-ever-it-is this week.
Golden oldies quotes always come around again.
Scroll down through the leading tweet for context, but I suspect most of you have seen the current news on Rep. Omar’s woes..
https://x.com/SamAntar/status/2109677764412371377
As an elder Millennial, I have vivid memories of 9/11; but I’m trying to put myself in their shoes.
The only thing I can try to equate it to, I suppose, is the attack on Pearl Harbor. I was obviously not born when that happened, so it’s meaning and significance is lost on me beyond the, “Oh, yeah, I bet that was just awful when it happened.” I can understand it was a horrible event, but I can’t imagine believing we “deserved” it. I can’t even imagine thinking that the Japanese “deserved” the bombs dropped on them. In my head, we were in a war, and war is just a heavy, awful thing for so many people.
But we weren’t at war during 9/11. And it wasn’t even our military/government who was targeted (beyond the pentagon and WH/Capitol) – it was normal people going about their every day lives. So while I can understand today’s college kids not feeling the deep sting and horror of 9/11, just as I can’t feel it for Pearl Harbor, I still cannot wrap my head around feeling that our own country – friends, neighbors, and average Joes – deserved it. That is as incomprehensible to me as telling me that a man who cuts his d*ck off is suddenly a woman.
So WHAT are they doing to these kids that they are so easily able to warp their brains in such horrifying ways?
You must remember that the IQ of college students has been declining for 50 years according to studies. They aren’t getting smarter but dumber.
I remember one if those mic on campus interviews and the college student (!) thought the US deserved Pearl Harbor for dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yes.
They’re a bunch of ill educated idiots. Good help us.
@NS: So WHAT are they doing to these kids that they are so easily able to warp their brains in such horrifying ways?
I’ll take a shot. I don’t think humans have have yet evolved to handle social media as we have, within a reasonable degree, to handle newspaper, radio, television and even alcohol. All four of those have driven us crazy in the past.
Those four still drive us crazy, but we’ve learned to take much of the sting out of them. In the case of alcohol the adjustment, I believe, was partly genetic.
Some analysts have argued that Hitler’s rise to power was in part fueled by the new radio technology. He was an early adopter and exploiter of radio.
Since the young use social media far more than their elders and they have not yet fully matured, they are particularly vulnerable.
Some analysts have argued that Hitler’s rise to power was in part fueled by the new radio technology. He was an early adopter and exploiter of radio.
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I wouldn’t deny Hitler’s rhetorical talents.
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Volkisch sentiment was more common during Weimar than during the Wilhelmine period. The thing is, the median performance of volkisch parties amounted to 6.5% of the electorate. The National People’s Party, a conservative party infected with volkisch sentiment had an electoral base which bounced around 10% of the total. You had after 1928 and abrupt and intense spike in favor of such sentiments.
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Now look at the pre-war German establishment and look at their Social Democratic successors. They lost the war (which was the occasion not only of a seven digit population of dead soldiers but also of escalatingly severe malnutrition in Germany), they were left holding the bag at Versailles, they trashed the currency in 1922-23, and they presided over a catastrophic decline in production and real income during 1928-32. The Nazi Party and the Communist Party were notable for never having participated in a ministry and the National People’s Party had only one brief stint in government. Suggest that more salient than anything else the German establishment and the Social Democratic Party were self-discredited by a series of bad decisions.
I think Scott Adams offered that about 25% of those surveyed would routinely assent to propositions which were insane w/o regard to what the question was. There may be lest here than meets the eye.
You must remember that the IQ of college students has been declining for 50 years according to studies.
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Shy of 6% of each cohort were awarded bacclaureate degrees ca. 1928. About 16% were so awarded ca. 1960. About 20% were so awarded in 1980. About 27% were so awarded in 1995. As we speak, the share so awarded is running at 47%. You capture larger and larger shares of the youth population, you’re bound to see a decline in median psychometric scores among them unless the probability of entering the collegiate population was always uncorrelated with measures of general intelligence.
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With primary, secondary, and tertiary schooling, the core issue is that schools are ordered to serve various constituencies for whom imparting knowledge and skills are not a priority. You have tremendous waste of manpower due to shizzy teacher training programs, disciplinary issues which are never effectively addressed, union contracts, the strictures imposed by judges working with the public interest bar, the ideological disinclination to sort students into tracks, resistance to frequent standardized testing to distribute credentials. teaching methods meant to please teachers or fad-generators, unfocused curricula, antique conventions such as the 180 day school year, and the preference for half-assed academic instruction over voTech among high school students. Tertiary schooling suffers the same. We would benefit from briefer and more focused tertiary credentials and more emphasis on occupational training. The learning curve of both state legislators and the educational apparat is flat.
Please note that high psychometric scores are also correlated with an affection for rubbish.
I agree. I would have thought that at least 50% believe we deserved it.
Please note that high psychometric scores are also correlated with an affection for rubbish.
Huh? What specifically are you talking about? What are your sources? Why the contempt? I’m pretty sure that “affection for rubbish” is not a technical term.
huxley
My guess would be that a fair number of bright people go into higher ed. Thus, taking more tests than bright people who don’t. And the former are, by being higherly educated, exposed to more rubbish. Just spitballing.
What was the percentage of 9-11 denialist around that number right?