Cure liberal kiddos by sending them to the third world!

[antares]

Is it just be or is this just one big straw-man/right-wing canard? :roll:

I don't know any people who are actually as naive as he describes. And who dosen't realize that many things are worse in developing countries.

Also has the "it's worse there so stop complaining about things here!!" fallacy

mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/10/a_sure-fire_cure_for_anti-amer.html

As a side-note, apparently this guy is some 'genteel' white nationalist who writes for VDARE and American Renaissance :/

By Robert Weissberg

Is it possible to stop the relentless promoting of anti-Americanism on campus? Let's forget about donating millions for a patriotic "American Studies" program. Recall the Bass family's sad experience at Yale--the $20 million donation for this purpose was eventually returned. Similarly forget about a governor (e.g., Mitch Daniels) or trustees trying to meddle in classroom instruction. "Academic freedom" will end that. The obdurate reality is that today's faculty and their mendacious leftish pontifications are beyond reach. Better to target students and bypass the faculty.

Begin with a familiar reality--few appreciate the U.S. until traveling overseas, especially if returning from a squalid Third World country. Better yet, ask Russian or Cuban escapees about what it means to be an American.

Now here's my plan. The Koch brothers will secretly underwrite a version of the traditional "Junior Year Abroad" with a strong Peace Corp component. Have students live among the locals, on small stipends, eat their food and so on. University credit will be given and everything will be totally free, including transportation. Meanwhile, there will generous "supervision" fees (i.e., bribes) to the university and professors. For a start, send out perhaps a hundred students from each of the top 25 universities.

Rapists of Mother Earth

The program will target smart, idealistic youngsters convinced that capitalism is evil, corporations are raping Mother Earth, America is hopelessly racist, primitive people are in intimate contact with nature, the police are brutal oppressors and all the other evils condemned by today's trendy professor.

We'll use a seductive name --"Promoting Economic Justice, One Village at a Time" or "Peace Through Understanding." What could be more multicultural? Put campuses in rural Somalia, Bolivia, Uzbekistan, Namibia and Cambodia, to mention just a few possibilities. Locals, including the wise village elders will teach the courses with lots of hands-on experience working in the fields harvesting crops, clearing brush and similar Peace Corps-like activities (recall the early 1960s glory years of helping in the Cuban sugar cane harvest was the ultimate liberal status symbol). For pedagogical purposes, illnesses will be exclusively treated with traditional, natural remedies (no Big Pharma pills, no greedy doctors!) while all disputes will likewise be settled in accord with indigenous customs. Critically, students will be told that they are there to learn, not proselytize Western values, and so if men beat their wives, don't criticize; try to understand. The model is participant-observer anthropology, not the Western missionary.

Academic credit will be based on summarizing these experiences and contrasting them to what now occurs in the U.S. This formula is standard for off-campus internships. For example, a professor might ask students to compare access to village health care in Angola where everybody is treated equally to American cities where the poor must wait hours in chaotic public hospital emergency rooms. Required essays will surely touch on economic policy, for example, how local self-sufficiency outshines elaborate carbon-heavy transportations networks.

Diseases the Few Can Spell

What might be impact of these Third World experiences? I'd guess they would be transformative, and many students would surely remember them fondly. They would certainly be learning experiences. But, idyllic remembrances aside, this Third World reality encounter will cure any utopian Socialist fantasy.

Many students would return home not only with a much needed dose of reality, but conceivably with malaria, leishmaniasis, schistoosomiasis, onchocerciasis, lymphatic filariasis, Chegas disease and dengue (among many others) all acquired thanks to filthy water, horrific sanitary practices and all else that makes millions of Third Worlders risk their lives fleeing to Europe or the U.S. No doubt, upon clearing customs, the stampede would be to the airport McDonalds for calorie-rich Big Macs and salty super-sized fries. Sadly, however, this would quickly bring a race to the bathroom followed by a steady diet of bananas, yogurt and antibiotics but the Big Mac and fries would be cherished, never again to be condemned.

Back in school they would regale still naive classmates with horror stories of corrupt police, rampant petty thievery, daily bribery, garbage everywhere and a world where few things actually work and kleptocratic governance gives " economic inequality" a whole new meaning-- a nearly starving people while top leaders toured in chauffeured Mercedes. Similar tales would be told of inept foreign aid and officials made fat by selling off oil drilling rights without any regard for environmental protection. Then add lurid tales of violent ethnic rivalries. And on and on.

All and all, not only would these returning students be more appreciative of the good old USA, but they would surely make their new-found views known in class. Picture their reaction to a professor raving and ranting about capitalist medical care ("profits not people"). A graduate of the Promoting Justice program would quickly respond with--just try buying aspirin in Namibia let alone prescription medicine!! Others might add, "If you think water pollution under capitalism is bad, just visit the community well in rural Cambodia. Dead cats!"And so on and so on.

I'd predict an uptick in xenophobia and patriotic fever. The oft-repeated school messages about appreciating "differences" and diversity would be a hard sell to those who've decided that it's better to live among one's own, especially where there's law and order, are relatively honest public officials and big Macs.

Then We Send the Professors

Now for the extra bonus. After encountering a few of these disruptive reformed idealists in their classes, alarmed faculty might call for abolishing the program. No problem. Just expand everything to include sending angry faculty to rural Zambia or Bolivia and, of the utmost importance, make it economically worthwhile. Radical feminists might be enticed to spend a few years in Yemen preaching the Gender Gospel. Don't dismiss the power of academic bribery. Take my word, few professors, especially hard-core Marxists, can resist an extra $20,000 for a few years and no teaching. Yes, this will create a hardship for students deprived of ideologically trendy, grade-inflated courses, but a small price to pay for all the improved off-campus people-to-people understanding and friendships. Happily, within a few years half the Sociology Department may be gone or in the hospital recovering from strongyloidiasis or, better yet, lost in the jungles of Borneo. Who would have believed that curing the problems of the modern university would be so simple?

[socalrules]

I would guess that if you send a bunch of "liberal" kids to third world countries, they will come back wanting to help the poor and downtrodden more than ever. They are more likely to say that we have too much here and need to give more to others in need. It is likely to have the opposite effect than intended. The guy really has no idea what it means to be a liberal. Does he know that people voluntarily go third world nations to help? I don't mean help them find your religion.

Of course, this guy has or would write the same type of thing about convincing blacks to go back to the "motherland" or hispanics to self-deport to their homeland, even the ones born in the U.S. It's like a crazy tea party wet dream.

[notsocommon]

My daughter would want to bring everyone home with her. We already had that conversation after a save the children kind of commercial.

[keen23]

My sister, who is already quite liberal did two six month stints in orphanages in South Africa. She came back an almost rabid advocate for birth control for everyone, access to safe and legal abortions, and the understanding that everyone needs prenatal care.

[Megan]

This explains why all the returned Peace Corps volunteers I know turned radically republican.

Wait, sorry. None of them did. They're all just as liberal, if not more so, than when they left. Oops!

I'm also trying to figure out where some of the underlying notions he gets are coming from. Most people criticizing ~Big Pharma~ are doing so because of unequal access, including the global inequality that prevents cheap medicines, many of which could be life saving, from reaching individuals in the global south. Experiencing even greater difficulty accessing medicine would probably bolster my belief in socialized healthcare - it'd be a greater reminder of how unequal access impacts individuals, including millions here at home.

Additionally, he's completely undermining himself by even mentioning the Peace Corps. One of the underlying missions of the Peace Corps is to improve the image of the US abroad while serving and assisting in foreign countries. Not sure why he thinks us dirty libruls are so Anti-American... many of us just want a better America.

[Rachel333]

Yeah, if anything my time in developing countries has only made me more liberal. It has also made me very cynical about mission trips and volunteering trips, though.

[FloraKitty35]

Thankfully, I hadn't had my morning cup of tea, otherwise I would have spit it out all over the monitor.

[August]

There's nothing like a trip to the third world to show you how fucking wonderful welfare and government regulations are.

[artschooldropout]

We in the third world are poor because we want to be, and hate America :roll: :roll: :roll:

[mamallama]

What a wonderful idea! Get the Koch brothers to underwrite the Peace Corps. Let's run with it.

[August]

We in the third world are poor because we want to be, and hate America :roll: :roll: :roll:

No, it's because you're lazy, remember?

[treemom]

First I had both the terms third world and developing nation.

I have both lived in a country with less uniform economic prosperity than the US and visited lots of them. Let me assure you they made me more liberal.

I asked my pain in the ass teenager (who used to be an adorable boy who answered these questions) and he said I don't know, I was in those countries to do cool stuff. I noticed the poor people like I noticed them in Memphis.

[GolightlyGrrl]

What a wonderful idea! Get the Koch brothers to underwrite the Peace Corps. Let's run with it.

Then they'd probably change the name of the Peace Corps to "Give Me a Piece Corps and Fuck Everybody Else."

[realist51]

I might be exhibit A for his experiment. When I was in high school, I was an exchange student in a South American country. I lived with a lovely "middle-class" family in their beautiful home. The home was cleaned every day by the two illiterate housekeepers who lived with them. The yard was cleaned by the illiterate pool man. The streets were patrolled by solders carrying machine guns. When I went downtown, I saw people with no eyes begging, children whose families had intentionally burned them so they could get more sympathy handouts, and dozens of kids hanging outside of every restaurant hoping for someone's leftovers. Meanwhile, back at home, the mother of the family, who apparently had little to do, spent every morning getting dressed and putting on makeup and every afternoon having a headache.

A few years later, I went to Europe to study. There, I saw relative equality in income distribution, NO abject poverty, NO homelessness, a functioning education system that worked to provide ALL kids with trade skills, and women who were smart, independent, and engaged (and who, by the way, were able to be full participants in the economy because there was decent child care available). Granted, there were things about societies in which everyone had to agree about everything that lead to more conformity than I was comfortable with and slower-moving processes than I was accustomed to. Nevertheless, when, in our current political climate, I feel as if I am being asked to choose between the US becoming more like South America or more like Europe, the choice for me is easy.

As for university professors espousing extremely leftist beliefs, I have to admit that, being a university professor myself, I HAVE heard things coming through the walls from the room next door that made me stop and ask my students, "Do you think that's true?" This happened in a community college setting, though. When I have worked at universities, I have found most of my colleagues to be more driven by evidence. If enough research supported one position or another, they tended to lean toward what was supported by empirical evidence.

I think that what really irks people like our "Cure Liberals" guy is that the empirical evidence so often doesn't match their "truths."

[louisa05]

A college student from our church went to a small village in India to help build a chapel with the Jesuits. He is an engineering major who was planning a wealthy life pursuing corporate money. India made him decide he wants to join the Peace Corps and use his talents to help with building and other projects in the third world.

Seems a bit liberal to me!

[crassy]

I've been all over the 'third world' (holy crap I feel awful just using that term. It is just not used anymore) and I came back WAY more liberal and socialist than I was before going.

[JMarie]

One of my professors started life as a math teacher. He joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Africa. When he got home, he decided to study African history, and now teaches African history (but no math). He's not conservative at all.

[slickcat79]

I think a trip to the "third world" would benefit crazy right-wingers a lot more. Maybe they would stop with their QF, anti-birth control, anti-vaxx bullshit if they could see first hand how that plays out in areas where they don't have a choice.

Oh, who am I kidding? :roll:

[Jana814]

I think a trip to the "third world" would benefit crazy right-wingers a lot more. Maybe they would stop with their QF, anti-birth control, anti-vaxx bullshit if they could see first hand how that plays out in areas where they don't have a choice.

Oh, who am I kidding? :roll:

Agree!

[docmom]

Who says liberals aren't acutely aware of the many advantages we have living where we do? That's what makes most of us liberal. If I see inequality, unequal access to health care, corrupt police, etc. I want to change things. I see these things in this country and I want to change them. Going (and I have been) to developing nations just strengthens my desire to promote equality. I'll also bet that if you took a survey of which professors had actually visited a developing nation in the type of circumstances this guy describes, you'd find most of them were liberal...

[Sobeknofret]

I would guess that if you send a bunch of "liberal" kids to third world countries, they will come back wanting to help the poor and downtrodden more than ever. They are more likely to say that we have too much here and need to give more to others in need. It is likely to have the opposite effect than intended.

I spent time in Kenya, and this is what happened to me. I came back wanting to help people even more than I did before. I feel especially strongly about education in third-world countries, and I support a number of charities/microloans that help kids get a good solid education.

[Talitha Cumi]

Put campuses in rural Somalia, Bolivia, Uzbekistan, Namibia and Cambodia, to mention just a few possibilities.

Funny, that's where I want right-wingers to settle so they can experience a glorious libertarian utopia for themselves.