In response to #Metoo, this year's Geneva Motor Show has replaced its "booth babes"

[Peter]

Academia has been powerful in pushing post-modernist ideas, some of which complement the current women's movement, but equally some of which also come into direct conflict with it.

Do I believe what? All I really believe that puts me on "their" side is that a lot of men should treat women better than they do. Of course, a lot of women should also treat men better than they do, and a lot of women should treat other women better than they do.

But then we are into whataboutery territory, at which point you insist on silencing me

Only one part of academia, and even then not wholesale. People studying engineering, accounting, medicine, optometry, geology, physics, biomedical science, law, architecture, computing, graphic design, podiatry, audiology- they tend to be fairly immune from the worst excesses of what B refers to as the identity politics-driven left.

What I see every day is a generation of students desperate to find something to be angry about, stripped of their birthright of outrage and feeling particularly inferior to their predecessors who fought civil rights, clause 28, burned their bras and banned the bomb.

Its a natural drive for the young generation to want to fight for change. Academia, in the social sciences and humanities, does a lot of pandering to this and of course modern academics feel the constant need to challenge something.

I dont really find any of this sinister. Just pathetic. It is potentially damaging though....

[Burney]

Only one part of academia, and even then not wholesale. People studying engineering, accounting, medicine, optometry, geology, physics, biomedical science, law, architecture, computing, graphic design, podiatry, audiology- they tend to be fairly immune from the worst excesses of what B refers to as the identity politics-driven left.

What I see every day is a generation of students desperate to find something to be angry about, stripped of their birthright of outrage and feeling particularly inferior to their predecessors who fought civil rights, clause 28, burned their bras and banned the bomb.

Its a natural drive for the young generation to want to fight for change. Academia, in the social sciences and humanities, does a lot of pandering to this and of course modern academics feel the constant need to challenge something.

I dont really find any of this sinister. Just pathetic. It is potentially damaging though....

But they aren't fighting for change or freedom. They're fighting for rigid intellectual orthodoxy and the silencing of those who disagree.

And the hard sciences are not immune to this stuff. We're already seeing scientific studies of certain hot potatoes (transgenderism and climate science for instance) being denied funding for fear they'll come to the 'wrong' conclusions. A couple of years back, we saw a man who had been intimately involved in the Rosetta space programme forced to make a grovelling, tearful apology on television because he had dared to wear a shirt with bare ladies on it. Nobody is safe from this stuff.

[redgunamo]

It is potentially damaging though....

No, everyone eventually grows up. Or dies childless, so no real harm done.