Gulags were 'compassionate', 'educational' institutions say morons on Twitter - Polidicks

Since the original title didn't fit, I thought I'd make it appropriate https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/09/11/soviet-labour-camps-compassionate-educational-institutions-say/ During a bizarre exchange on Twitter the LGBTQ group at Goldsmiths Student Union described life in the Gulags as “rehabilitatory” and “educational”. Paradoxically the thread was written as an apparent justification for an earlier post by the same group which threatened to send a political opponent “to the gulag”. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2018/09/11/TELEMMGLPICT000174169374_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq4-fs-jWb3f9XP86nIBrzpHi3vIJpXDfIiKRNt04kBWg.jpeg?imwidth=1240 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2018/09/11/TELEMMGLPICT000174169378_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqHUTpFSp6HqooHfdZuy1iZJlMory3UStWm3GoGBE0kXY.jpeg?imwidth=1240

Torygraph looking for something to be angry about as usual.

is it an error that the sources cited part is empty or is that part of the joke

Please tell me this is a false flag operation and that people aren’t this monumentally retarded.

Not surprising from a shit uni like Goldsmiths.

Yeah this reeks of bullshit.

I'll be honest: I'll totally believe this about a British university's group, because I've already heard so many dumb things come out of those...

What a moron.

"Person who never experienced thing, completely misunderstands said thing, more at 11!"

Arent there like, gulag victims that are still alive? Why dont you ask them how nice it was?

i dunno man, with the people i've seen on twitter this isn't the craziest claim i've seen made.

Yeah, no. There are more than enough primary sources to verify this as 100% bullshit and the fact that this person didn't seem to bother even finding them says a lot. This is no better than holocaust denial.

I ask why random people on Twitter saying things is news

We must have seen the same things, because reading your post and having seen the stupid shit I've seen on twitter, it comes off as a non-statement.

Because stupid shit like this can thoroughly poison the well of liberal thought

You're not really having a valuable discussion anyway if you're lending any credit to random tankies on the internet.

Well see, if you take one to three random twitter posts you statistically have what people these days are saying And that's bad Also universities and the left and stuff

anyone can use random morons from twitter to make any side look bad. stuff like this shouldnt be news

who says this person is even liberal?

Not all of them are like this, also it's not a university group it's a Student Union group, which means while they receive money from the uni they are an entirely separate entity technically. Second, they're specifically the LGBTQ+ Society from the SU, which means that most likely the gatekeeping has been done to foster only the most socially rejected of people are going to be there because seriously, no society that's about politics, or other shit that isn't a hobby, sport or interest, is filled with generally okay people. A society requires the leadership and people in it to be active in keeping the society not full of shitlords. Third, Goldsmiths is ranked like 60+, so they're honestly a trash Uni. Even Essex is better lmao.

Yes you'd almost think substituting a list of sources with 12 - 15 newlines is what you do when you make fun of something

Well, there is one point they bring up that's correct: Allowing privatized prisons really was one of the worst decisions we made. Broken clocks and what not.

Tonight's news: Dumb comment made on internet. More at eleven.

I don't think the news here is "retard posts stupid opinion to twitter", it's more of a "student association gets canned due to terrible social media posts", and I'm not sure I like that. As incredibly stupid those posts were, they're no reason to close down the entire thing - if anything, blame the people responsible and take action against them, not the entire group. You could argue that "with people like this at the helm, there's no way there's anything salvageable from the association", sure, but I'd much prefer a more nuanced approach like closing down the group temporarily while holding new elections or whatever to restructure its internal hierarchy.

The problem is that you can't just close down the society temporarily to hold elections. Elections for a society only allow for people inside that society to vote for their leadership. The SU literally had no choice but to cancel their endorsement, funding, etc for the society. It doesn't mean the society can't come back later, or exist as a society outside the SU, they'll have to petition the SU to make them an official SU society again, and they won't get SU funding, but that's their own fault really. The SU is there to represent students as a whole, and a society causing problems like that, making the SU look bad, etc, is bad for the students as a whole. It's understandable the SU would be unhappy with them and shut them down.

Anyone who ends a claim with "got that? okay good" should be ignored

Totally with you, it's perfectly understandable that they'd have to do something, including shutting them down - it WAS that bad. This isn't a bad move, I'm just unsure the fire-and-forget tactic is the best one though.

The British equivalent of Fox News.

Why wouldn't a university LGBT group's social media manager be a liberal person?

Possibly so. The problem is that who ever is going to be elected would have to already be part of that society, a double edged sword here because in the case of my society and many others, the current society members are what we want from the society, so they'll either keep the society static in quality or improve it for the most part. But here it means that in this case you could end up with more of the same crazy shit as before, and then the SU is seen as doing too little or god forbid, they're seen as complacent in the actions of this society and any action is just "oh no we got caught" type shit. The issue is that to be eligible for society elections you have to have paid your society membership, at least my SU did it this way, idk if all of them do it, I assume so. All societies are technically free for any student, you can attend events, etc, but you're expected to pay your membership fee to be able to actually be part of the society and get any perks of being in said society. Which is oddly enough does a bit of gate keeping for the society. Even for us where society membership was a fucking fiver and you'd easily see a return on investment if you were in most societies. For example, my society had a deal where we would reimburse train tickets to society members when we'd organise a trip to a gig somewhere if they turned in the receipt to us or whatever proof of purchase they could. Non-paying members didn't get that deal of course. So you paid the fiver for society membership and for example we went to Brighton to see Birdskulls and a few other bands once, and that was like, easily a massive return on investment just going one way.