It’s a well-known fact that the Earth is round and I can show you evidence with about two seconds of Googling.

You established that a well-known fact like the Earth being round is easy to prove in mere seconds by Googling. I did exactly what you suggested and the search results are plentiful with links in the first page confirming that there’s a left-leaning bias in USA universities. In the suggested images they even list survey results showing most students lean left.

The fact is so well-known that a simple Google search gives multiples articles confirming it. You suggested this criteria yourself. 🤔

Okay, if a Google search will make you believe me, here goes:

Does USA university students and faculty have a left-leaning bias?

Most search results confirm what I said. And remember: this is not an exact science, but a subjective assessment. Certainly there are university students that didn’t notice that bias because their institution was more politically neutral, or said person was not enrolled in humanities courses so the political activism was not very close to their day-to-day lives. But, in general, the bias is real and is only getting more intense as political polarization is on the rise globally.

This is just a conversation on the internet. We aren’t here presenting an undergraduate thesis. I try to limit things to empirical evidence and appeal to common experiences between us so I don’t have to make everyone read a huge wall of text. That’s why I said we can just agree to disagree. There’s nothing wrong about it. 👽

There’s some variation in this. The humanities courses have a higher concentration of left-leaning individuals than other areas. But it might also be explained that the left-leaning are more vocal about their concerns. I know there’s a significant silent population of students that might be right-leaning, but they just aren’t interested in discussing politics in the unniverity: they just want to finish their course with the minimum trouble possible.

No, it’s empirical evidence. It’s a well known fact that western universities have a left-leaning bias. And by extension, a pro-Hamas and/or pro-Palestine bias. This one is supported by the 3 points in my previous comment.

You don’t believe me? Those who are immersed in islamist ideology think quite differently from people of christian heritage (even if they’re not christian themselves, but they inherit a set of values). For the islamists, self-sacrifice if a good thing if done for a holy cause. That’s what motivated the plane terrorists from 9/11: their religion made them believe that what they were doing was just. And as a reward, they’d have the company of multiple virgins in paradise.

In the western countries, due to the inherited christain values, people value life and reject self-sacrifice. Suicide is considered a sin, because the person is throwing away the body given by God, which is a holy thing. That’s why the USA and other west-aligned countries pressure Israel to preserve the life of innocent Gazans: that’s what best aligns with their moral values. If a bank is being robbed with the use of hostages, the police will do its best to preserve the life of the innocent, even negotiate with the robbers if necessary.

That’s a way of thinking that’s the polar opposite of the muslims. For them, if the cause is holy, self-sacrifice is allowed and encouraged. They’re indoctrinated in these values since they’re children. What the Hamas is doing is exploiting the western values for their benefit. That’s why they took hostages, because they knew it would be a huge leverage against Israel. And that’s why they’re always flaunting the number of casualities (which are obviously inflated, because it helps their goals), in an attempt to reach the western countries’ moral values and turn it into pressure for Isreal accept an indefinite ceasefire agreement, even a bad one.

Consider this: if the roles were reversed: Gaza had immense millitary strenght and Israel was the poor country, the Gazans would invade Isreal in a heartbeat and would care much less about Isrealli innocent civilians: for them the cause is holy, so it is justified to kill indiscriminately.

I don’t live in the cities that have the universities that held pro-Hamas protests so I can’t name them, sorry.

I’m just arriving at this conclusion because:

1. The main doctrine among students and faculty is being pro-Hamas, or at minimum agreeing on things like: Isreal is causing a genocide, Isreal is an apartheid state, Israel makes living in Gaza feel like an open prison, etc.

2. If any student goes over the line and is explicitly pro-Hamas, or advocates the extermination of all Jews (“to the river to the sea…”), harasses jewish students or blocks them from entering the building, protest in a way to disrupt the right of the non-protesting students to attend class, litter the common areas, etc. If they do this, the faculty just do nothing or reprimend them with a slap on the wrist. In other words, they condone this stuff.

3. The presidents of those universities often are beholden by the opinion of the pro-Hamas students. There’s a famous episode where the president of Havard, Claudine Gay, when asked if “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate the college’s code of conduct, was evasive and said “it depends on context”.

And I’m sorry if I originally said they’re mostly pro-Hamas. What I really meant is that they’re either pro-Hamas or Pro-Palestine. If they’re not, they’d fell intimidated to express their pro-Isreael opinions, just like most pro-Israel students would when they see the treatment their jewish colleagues receive, so it creates the illusion that 99% of the faculty and students are pro-Hamas or pro-Palestine, but it’s the social and institutional pressure that I cited above that makes it seem so.

When I see how easily the Hamas uses their own population as sacrifices, I have doubts they really value their lives. Remember: the Gazan population elected the Hamas with more than 60% of the votes. It’s not too farfetched to say a significant part of the Gazans think like the Hamas in terms of sacrifice, and by extension, how they value their lives.

As a said, even if the professor isn’t pro-Hamas, he’s beholden by institutional pressure to either hide his pro-Isreal views, or be lax on the pro-Hamas views of the students. No matter the side they are, it’s controversial either way. But just the pro-Hamas or Pro-Palestien side are allowed to express themselves freely without some kind of pushback or retaliation.

No. What I’m saying is that the pro-Palestine protesters in the western countries are, knowingly or unknowingly, boosting the pro-Hamas message in many cases. There are probably very few (if any) pro-Palestine protests that don’t include the presence of some degree of pro-Hamas (and by extension, pro-Extermination of all Jews) people. This manifests either in the form of Hamas Flags, explicit anti-Israel flags and demonstrations, or chants of “from the river to the sea”.

On the other hand, the pro-Israel protests are very focused on the defense of Israel territory/citizens and anti-discrimation against people of Jewish heritage. There’s no explicit call to kill/expell all Palestinians. If there is, it is very fringe and the protestors themselves would certainly eject said person from the protest. At most, the most aggressive remarks are reserved specifically to the Hamas only.

When they chant “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free”, what do you think they want? Israel is located between said river and sea, so they want to exterminate all Israeli so the land is all theirs. The extermination of all Jews is codified in written form in the Hamas Constitution.

If there are people there who only want to advocate for the Two State Solution for Israel/Palestine, that’s a fair point to make. But when these people, knowingly or unknowingly, mix themselves with people that carry Hamas flags and chant “from the river to the sea”, then they’re either useful idiots, or they’re pro-Hamas while using the pro-Palestine cause as a cop out.

But I know what’s the dominant doctrine in western universities related to the Israel/Hamas war. They’re mostly pro-Hamas. I know there are students that don’t condone this worldview, but they’re strongly penalized by peer pressure and institutional pressure (try being pro-Israel knowing your professor is pro-Hamas… Your grades will surely be affected negatively). When there’s incidents of students suffering antisemitism, the administration of those universities have shown they’re extremely lax on the perpetrators. It’s a systemic failure in respecting different worldviews, because there’s an “official” one already.

That’s why I’m saying these universities have lost a lot of credibility regarding anything related to this Israel/Hamas conflict, given the pro-Hamas protests occuring in university grounds, and the lack of any condemnation by faculty staff.

Yeah, like being affiliated to universities is some kind of stamp of trustworthiness at this point… After the pro-Hamas protests that took place in said universities, and the persecution of Jewish students who were basically blocked from attending school.

Maybe the Palestinians themselves devalue their own lives compared to Israeli lives. Just look at when they agreed to a ceasefire and traded hostages for prisoners: each hostage was worth multiple prisoners released by Israel.

This is also noticeable when Hamas use their own population as human shields, exemplified by when they hide their soldiers and weapons in hospitals and schools. Or when they blend in with civilians on purpose by not using any combatant uniform like the IDF do. They really don’t care for their own civilians. These are only useful for acting as human shields and, if they’re killed or injured, strike a pose for NatGeo-style photos in their attempts to appeal to western sentiment.

This is extremely true for modern social media sites. Normal news sites used to push their apps too, but I guess this fad has passed.

Ars Technica recently published an article very critical of Mastodon. The main takeaway is the argument that Mastodon won’t scale well to a large userbase, as the more instances there are, the bigger the server burden to everyone. And as most users are against corporate funded instances (they’d defederate from any that emerge), it may be unsustainable mid/long-term.

I wonder if these scaling-issues apply to Lemmy too? The instances make copies of posts/comments from other instances. They copy images too? And videos? If so, I imagine a future where only the bigger and wealthiest instances will survive.

And concerning moderation tools, I know they’ll improve with time. But how can a federated system like Lemmy do certain tasks that Reddit’s Pushshift enabled? Example: bots detecting and deleting re-posts, spam, bad actors across multiple communities, etc.