The student left’s broken moral compass
I’m taking the liberty of reblogging this post about the dire state of student politics – and of the far left generally. The problems described within the post are not confined to Goldsmiths College, nor indeed to Islamists, but I’d encourage you to watch the video here, which shows the disruption of the talk referred to in this post and which gives you an idea of the contempt some people have for the idea of free speech. Goldsmiths Student Union have asked for the video to be taken down. I hope it stays.
In the Dark 
December 13, 2015 at 2:27 pm
We also saw the same tension within the Left between (a) free-speechers and (b) politically correct types who wish to gag critics of human rights abuses that are worse in some communities, in the response to the Charlie Hebdo murders.
December 13, 2015 at 2:56 pm
A similar phenomenon in a different context was the attempt to stop Germaine Greer from speaking at Cardiff University. I think it would have been wrong to ban her, although I would not myself have gone to her talk as she hasn’t said anything interesting in decades…
December 17, 2015 at 2:31 pm
After some reading and reflection, I think that what is going on is this. The Left has an agreed form of society but differences about how to reach it. There are communists who wish to reach it by violent revolution. (That is the only way that Marx himself believed was feasible.) There are socialists who want to reach it via the ballot box, since the traditional working class easily outnumber the rest. And there are Gramsci/Marcusians (the “Frankfurt School”) who want to progressively subvert the organs of capitalist society. Political correctness is a child of this third group, and what we are seeing is a tension between them and more traditionalist leftists.
That is perhaps an over-simplification and more could certainly be said, but I think it is a reasonable first approximation.
December 19, 2015 at 10:26 am
It’s not about stupidity, Philip. It’s about the heart rather than the head. Peter was right about the broken *moral* compass.