Ryan Hammill: "How [Occidental] Turned Me Into A Conservative"

   Needless to say, there's a lot here I don't agree with, including the gratuitous gestures at digs at Obama and all the Christian mythology. But there's enough good stuff in there to make it maybe worth a read.
   It's along the same lines as the first chapter of The Republican Noise Machine, in which Brock explains how the left-wing lunacy of Berkeley turned him into a conservative. Conservatives on campus are roughly in the position liberals were when I was a kid: a ridiculed minority. That's why I kind of admire non-lunatic campus conservatives--they're often the kids who refuse to be told what to think, refuse to knuckle under to campus groupthink.
   Anyway, some things Hammill writes are also consistent with the point, made most poignantly to me by the Mystic, that the postpostmodern mishmash, which is something like the orthodoxy in the leftier parts of academia, actually makes people dumber. Where they could be engaging with ideas and analyzing reasoning, instead they simply make the same postpostmodern identity politics moves over and over and over. There's a template, and it's easy to apply. Also, its outputs will rarely be questioned. And it doesn't just stall the development of actual thought, it replaces it--with something worse.