"Politically correct universities 'are killing free speech'"

[Deleted]

It's a bit of a false equivalence, comparing random accidental deaths with deaths that are intentional and more often than not, preventable due to them having the means to protect themselves.

Think you misunderstood said tangent, and my post.

[Sama-81]

Yes, the answer is complex, but not in the way you think it is. If anything, Islam acted as a unifying and stabilizing factor in the Arab world, and that stability caused the Arab/Turkish world to SURPASS the Western world for hundreds of years. The Western world only shot ahead when we suddenly made a lot of huge technological advancements and managed to develop the colonial model, which the Arab/Turkish world had just failed to do. Their model was very, very different, and the notion of going into an area simply to extract natural resources was unheard of. That resource extraction model is what allowed the West to develop so quickly.

If you want to bring this back down to the 101 answer, we can, because I've taught those classes for years.

You give way too much credence to colonialism in this regard (which I'm not surprised to hear, considering your political stance), as opposed to the huge technological advancements and the like the western world came up with (and particularly WHY it was the west that came up with them). It was really a no brainer that the breakthroughs would arise there, of course, and not the arab world, since the latter had entered a climate which greatly hindered any such notion. You don't really have to excel, when you're awarded the 'victory' by walkover. Which obviously puts things in stark contrast to the centuries before. I am well versed in the history of science, actually, and even without colonialism the same pattern and outcome would emerge, although perhaps not to the same extreme degree. Obviously colonialism played an important part in history, but not really in regards to the climate in the west as compared to the arab world. It's pointless to discuss though, since things are getting off-topic and won't lead to us agreeing in the end anywho.

[Warbrand]

Fanatics took over because the West plunged the region into a century of despotism and violence. Britain was supposed to establish a pan-Arab state in the Middle East, and instead they (along with France) carved it up and put proxy dictators in charge. Iran had a secular, democratically elected government, and then the US (at the behest of Britain) instigated a coup and put a monarchy in place. Radical Islam is a PRODUCT of the violence and instability in the region. It is something that arose in response to geopolitical, economic, etc. issues.

And we carved it up in response to what each ethnic group wanted. Turns out, they're all as xenophobic as each other.

- - - Updated - - -

As long as it's only society, it can be reversed. It becomes a nightmare once you introduce such legislation. But that's so much like a dystopian science fiction novel that I'm not sure anyone could actually do that.

Equilibrium is a science fiction movie for a reason.

So is 1984, yet that's exactly where we are heading.

[GennGreymane]

pretty sure only the government can do that.

[Wells]

Political correctness is the cancer that is slowly killing society today. When people have to practice self-censorship out of fear of getting strung up in the social medias, then it's in effect the same as a dictatorship that bans dissent.

By what metric is society being "killed"?