Taylor Lorenz Is a Crybully

While I ascribe to the renaissance ideal of a well-rounded person, and therefore studied liberal arts at the same time as engineering, I struggle with liberal arts. Perhaps we expect too much from a university education. Challenges include: ** Learning vs. indoctrination. You want a good grade, you have to please the professor. That gives those "educating" you power and influence over your conclusions; not to mention peer pressure. How do you "open your mind" without becoming indoctrinated? ** Contrariness, the other side of the coin. Some of us pride ourselves on being different. The "bad" boy in grade school does it to get attention. At what point do we adopt philosophies that are contrary to the grain, not because we find them meaningful, but to set us apart from others? ** Focus. What if, after all my studies, instead of becoming an open-minded well-rounded individual, I become a close-minded activist whose dogma is never challenged? Instead of pursuing objectivity, I give in to the tendency of simply "proving" my ideas are right and yours are wrong, like Marx and Engels, who cloaked their theories as "scientific socialism" to give them credibility, akin to when Obama called global warming "settled science" and therefore no longer subject to question.

It is pretty hard for Israel to negotiate some type of peace with the Palestinians when they won't even recognize Israel's right to exist.

Ask any Ivy league senior about these men and all you will get are blank looks, almost as if you asked them to define a Woman.

A "progressive conservative" is an oxymoron. Conservatives values are fundamentally the same as Classical Liberalism: 1. The primacy of individual rights, unless an extremely high bar is passed for national need benefiting everyone. 2. Small government primarily focused on protecting individual rights. 3. Low taxes 4. The objective rule of law. Progressives invert this. The State is all; so called "Collective Rights" immediately trump Individual Rights; Big Government; High Taxes; the Subjective rule of man. Only a Progressive would bother to create such a label as yet another form of propaganda. It's not the first time, either. So-called "Social Liberalism" (a regurgitation of Marx and literal refutation of Liberalism) was fabricated around 1900 by Marxists to blunt the value of "Liberalism" and, by calling THEMSELVES "Liberals," confuse people. That propaganda worked so well that the word "Liberal" today is associated with Marxists while actual Liberals are relegated to "Classical Liberals."