MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Anyway, I’d argue that colleges still pursue the latter goal. Even for pie-in-the-sky pure science. But I suppose I’m rather biased, seeing as my sister and I both did our Master’s degrees in these kind of labs. There are two media narratives about university research. And neither “breathless futurism” nor “absurd political sinecures” captures the quiet tide of NSF and corporate money.
I agree with you that there are plenty of people doing good research in hard science departments - in my foolish youth I wanted to join them* and I still have both the PhD and the physical and emotional scars of getting it. But even in the noughties, most of the good university scientists I worked with were complaining that the incentives were increasingly borked and were driving them towards running their research groups like Fordist paper-factories. There is a lot of useful work that can be done in Fordist paper-factories (the research group next to mine were generating multiple drug leads a year using sweated grad student and postdoc labour), but it is the comparative advantage of government and commercial labs, not universities.
The story I was told by my mentors was that in some unspecified pre-lapsarian golden age the academic career structure had given all scientists the level of academic freedom that (for example) Watson and Crick used to discover DNA even though Bragg would have preferred Crick to work on haemoglobin, but that this was no longer the case and the only way to get that level of research flexibility was to join one of a small number of special institutions like the Cambridge Laboratory of Molecular Biology (the famous LMB, aka the "Nobel Prize factory"). Based on what people are saying online things have got significantly worse since then.
* Solid state physics - the area I worked in (although not the specific problem I was working on) was widely considered cool-but-useless at the time, but is now being used by multiple commercial fusion startups.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
In my experience it could be best stated as there's a subculture of anarchists/communists who basically participate in every left-aligned protest, but many of the protests (particularly bigger ones on popular subjects like anti-austerity or LGBTQ+ rights) will also attract a changing crowd of other, more normie types, which means the anarchist/communist contigent is less notable.
From a UK perspective, the problem is that the SWP crowd have the necessary skills to organise large protests which skirt the boundaries of legality, and the normies don't. So unless the protest is organised by some other group with access to those skills (like a union), it inevitably becomes a SWP-led protest. I became something of a meme in left-wing student circles after I was identified as "the Lib Dem who turned up at a demo in a black cab" - I had 50 protest signs with Lib Dem sympathetic messages to dish out to Lib Dem supporters and a taxi was the only way to get them from the sign printer to the protest in the time available. The SWP had pre-distributed 2 or 3 protest signs each with SWP-sympathetic messages to the 100+ activists they had milling around the start, and lots of non-SWP-supporters ended up carrying because they thought they were just picking up a spare sign from another protestor.
Also the folks who bring Palestine flags to every protest tend to be Middle-Easterners, often actual Palestinians, themselves.
In the 1990s most of the Middle Easterners in the UK were either rich Arabs (who didn't go on protests) or Turkish Cypriots (who don't care about Palestine). The "every demo is about Palestine" dynamic back then was definitely driven by white British lefties. Looking at media coverage, I think that 2024-vintage pro-Palestine protests in the UK are dominated by people from predominantly-Muslim ethnic groups, although I see more South Asians than Middle Easterners.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Blocking $26 billion in aid to an extremely wealthy country that also has the wealthiest per capita diaspora community is now anti-semitism?
No, but it is something that rich centrist American Jews care about. There is a reason why AIPAC is as powerful as it is. The sort of Jews who might switch from D to R in response to left-wing campus idiocy are exactly the sort of Jews who support aid to Israel most.
I support third countries getting the feck out of the I-P conflict (my gut feeling is that foreign support for both sides is net escalatory, although I understand the argument that the US paying for Iron Dome specifically is de-escalatory). But I am not American, and my views on this issue are not socially acceptable in elite American social circles. Apart from short-term humanitarian aid while the mess made by the current war is being cleaned up, the only use of donor money in the area I would support is bribing other majority-Muslim countries to take in Palestinian refugees.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Note that the argument that the students are making for "Columbia is profiting from Israel's US backed war in Gaza" is not the sane version of that argument. They are going after Columbia for holding index funds which contain regular American companies which do business in Israel. Apparently Microsoft is "providing surveillance infrastructure to the IDF" and therefore QQQQ is a hate stock. The kind of divestment the students are asking for is not a serious demand that they want met.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Mainstream leftists (including Joe Biden) still are staunchly pro-Israel. Congress just passed a bill to provide military aid to Israel with mostly-Democratic votes.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
In a general sense, I think university leftists have done a great job convincing college students that being anti-Israel, pro-Palestine is the default "leftist" "intellectual" position.
I think this is the wrong level of generality to look at it. Someone has convinced the students that the default leftist intellectual alignment is anti-establishment, despite Columbia being an establishment institution that largely exists to train the pro-establishment left. The pro-establishment left has been mostly pro-Israel since the Holocaust and solidly pro-Israel since before I was born. The anti-establishment left has been mostly pro-Palestine since the Nabka and solidly pro-Palestine since kibbutzim stopped being a useful example of really existing socialism. The changing views of leftwing students on Israel-Palestine is downstream of their changing views on the centre-left establishment.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
It’s not the same people protesting every time.
I'm not directly familiar with US protest culture, but in the UK it so is. Sometimes they forget to change the protest signs and people march against student funding cuts behind a "Free Palestine" banner. We have a single-digit number of activist groups experienced in organising this kind of noisy, disruptive protest, and until the SWP collapsed due to sex scandals most of them were SWP front organisations.
Even if you look at people rather than orgs, we are talking about a subculture (strictly two subcultures because the socialist-anarchist split hasn't gone anywhere) involving a few thousand people split between a small number of big cities (mostly London and Bristol in the UK) which is cohesive to have its own values. The tribal values of the subculture that is socialist protest includes a hierarchy of issues, and Palestine is number 2 on the list after opposing US foreign policy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
I don't. Jews who are paying attention can see the rising anti-semitism on the right. (And in particular, Jews who care about Israel know who was blocking the aid bill). Left-wing anti-semites are more dangerous individually (because they are more violent) but the anti-semitic right arguably includes people like Elon Musk and has far more access to the corridors of power than the Columbia protestors do.
Will more anti-semites be invited to the White House in a second Trump term or a second Biden term (not counting Gulf Arab diplomats etc. who are discreet about their anti-semitism)? It is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
The critical point here is the meaning of "lower intelligence". Having IQ 90-100 servants with a good attitude is life-enriching because they do the crapwork so you don't have to. Having IQ 80-90 people in your space is just a problem because they can't even operate a washing machine correctly.
The other problem is that your servants won't retain a good attitude if they are going home to a place dominated by a violent oppositional culture where displaying any sign of servility is putting a target on you.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
Older whites with below-average education are now the core right-wing constituency in every historically-white democracy, and hatred for people like Hilary Clinton is a large part of the reason they got that way. In the US, non-College whites started swinging to Republicans as soon as Obama was elected. Taking advantage of a pre-existing trend is exactly the sort of thing empty suits are good at.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
Two important roles that universities successfully fulfilled in the past, still could, but don't:
- The Liberal Arts College. Elite formation based on a combination of rigorous study of difficult subjects and directed socialisation with other young elites. The original reason why this stopped happening was grade inflation, but to bring it back you also need to fix wokestupid, and to end the rampant dishonesty about young elites imagining themselves as self-made meritocratic strivers. Potential gains: a more cohesive elite that knows important things and has a stronger sense of noblesse oblige.
- The Research University. The type of curiosity-driven research which is too high-risk for professional (government or corporate) labs without tenure and too remote from practical application for VC-funded startups. Getting this back means fixing publish-or-perish incentives and the PhD overproduction which enables them. Potential gain: the base of pure science that makes spectacular applications low-hanging fruit.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
Don't even think about doing a PhD.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
Seconded. It really is a hoot. If the guy had been alive today his YouTube channel would be popping.
Not really - he wasn't a self-promoter in that way. SYJ happened because Leighton and Sands made it happen, not because Feynman wanted to do the work of writing a memoir.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
What do you mean by this? I thought Trump just executed the Sailor strategy and appealed to the neglected Republican base.
I don't think he even did that (at least not in the general - I think the case that he successfully executed a Sailer-like strategy in the primary is quite strong, but Steve Sailer presented the strategy as a way for Republicans to beat Democrats, not each other). Trump was the second least popular major-party Presidential candidate in my lifetime, and Hilary was the least popular. Even so, Trump only won because Hilary's e-mails turned up on her secretary's kiddie-fiddling husband's laptop shortly before polling day. It is reasonably clear from the opinion polling that either candidate could have walked the 2016 election by putting up an empty suit.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
Whatever it takes to get rid of the Dolores Umbridges, the Carol Beers, even the Hermes Conrads.
It is worth noting that Dolores Umbridge and Carol Beer are very different phenomena, and the only thing they have in common is that they use femininity as a way of making their obnoxiousness less obvious. But you are not the first person to lump them together - the comments to Scott Aaronson's "blankface" post are a dumpster fire because Scott chooses a word that suggests he is talking about Carol Beer and then writes a long post insisting he is talking about Umbridge.
The basic difference is that Dolores Umbridge does, in fact, have agency, and is abusing it. In Order of the Phoenix Umbridge is a senior official who is given broad discretionary authority by Fudge to root out Hogwarts-based opposition to the regime, and does in fact try to do that (ultimately unsuccessfully) while treating the opportunity to sadistically abuse Harry as a fringe benefit. In Half-Blood Prince she fails upwards to become Senior Undersecretary to the Minister of Magic - which to someone familiar with British bureaucratic titles is a high-level policy making role at the same level on the org chart as a Deputy Secretary or Assistant Secretary in the US executive branch. (The equivalence is complicated by the complete absence of political appointees in the Ministry of Magic), although in so far as we see the internal workings of the Ministry she actually appears to be functioning as Scrimgeour's chief of staff. Umbridge is useful to Power, and Power supports her in her abuse of Harry, and would continue to do so even if they knew everything.
If Curtis Yarvin or Peter Theil was critiquing Fudge's performance, they would see his decision to appoint Umbridge and let her get on with it (including backing her up as necessary when she is e.g. accused by Dumbledore of sadistically abusing students) as a relative high point in his career - he actually tried something that could have worked, and would have worked if Fudge hadn't been forced to resign because Voldemort showed up in person around the time Umbridge was completing her takeover of Hogwarts.
Carol Beer, on the other hand, is a shit-tier grunt with no authority. Her only source of power is that she can refuse to do her job some non-zero fraction of the time without getting fired - and it isn't even clear if she is refusing to do her job, or if she is unable to do it because she does not even have sufficient authority to override the computer. But assuming the unfavourable interpretation, Beer is useless to everyone, and the only reason she gets away with her petty sadism is because her uselessness is beneath the notice of Power. If Karen managed to speak to the manager, Beer would be fired. I suspect if Curtis Yarvin wrote a review of Little Britain, he would say that someone in Beer's reporting line was asleep at the wheel, and needed some encouragement.
The two failure modes (evil backed by Power, and evil operating beneath the notice of Power) both function in the same way regardless of whether Power is personal or bureaucratic. The fundamental case for the Rule of Law and bureaucratic process is that it constrains Dolores Umbridge. The case being made against it in this thread is that it creates Carol Beers. This is a trade-off, and the trade-off is real and is not one-sided in the real world. To give a recent notorious example in the UK, Dominic Cummings noticed and has repeatedly blogged about the legal-accountability-driven incompetence of UK government procurement, including how it was likely to kill people during the COVID-19 pandemic. So during the pandemic he used emergency powers to throw out procurement law and allow the government to just buy PPE from willing sellers. The result was a spectacular feeding frenzy of peculation as people with the right connections realised that selling to the government was now a pure matter of getting into the ministers' in-tray, and that anyone who could do that could buy non-working PPE at retail from dodgy Chinese websites and mark it up even further to the government. The total loss to the taxpayer was c. £4 billion, with the £200 million paid to shell companies linked to lingerie entrepreneur and Tory peer Michelle Mone for unusable PPE being the headline example
There are two sayings I sometimes to use to think about this trade-off:
The Cossacks Work for the Czar. To paraphrase Brad de Long, it isn't immediately obvious if the Cossacks who raided your village are:
- working for the Czar, and fucking with you because the Czar wants them to
- working for the Czar, and fucking with you because they want to, and fucking with people like you is within the scope of their delegated authority
- bandits who the Czar has for some reason failed to hang, who are fucking with you because they can.
What de Long means by "The Cossacks work for the Czar" is that above a certain level of sophistication (which a band of raiding Cossacks crosses), Carol Beers have been weeded out, and you can assume that what the system does or fails to do is the result of (often foolish) choices made by the people in charge of it.
It cannot deal with plain error. The full quote from Conrad Russell's An Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism is about the necessity for both political and legal accountability.
Political accountability must deal with gross errors of judgement, unworkably drafted legislation, and measures which cannot be enforced. Legal accountability can deal with gross abuses of power and with breaches of clear legal principles. It cannot deal with plain error.
Not firing Carol Beer is an example of plain error. An awful lot of what goes wrong with modern bureaucracies (State and private sector) is that trying to create legal remedies for plain error creates more problems than it solves. But the world where the local Boyar enjoys a de facto droit de seigneur over the peasants as long as he remains useful to the Czar is worse.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
Russia waited until after the pandemic, then waited a bit longer because the Chinese wouldn't support an invasion that could disrupt the Beijing Winter Olympics. I don't think we can draw any conclusions about their preferred timing via-a-viz US domestic politics. Pre-pandemic conventional wisdom among the "Trump will let the Ruzzians invade NATO because Putin owns him" crowd was that the best time for Putin to start shit was after the 2020 election.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
The step-up basis makes sense to avoid double taxation in a world where there is a meaningful inheritance tax - the estate pays IHT instead of CGT on the gain from acquisition to death, and the heir's cost basis is the value on which IHT was paid.
In a world with no inheritance taxes, there is a reasonable argument that heirs should have zero cost basis in inherited assets - they didn't pay anything for them!
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
The big deal here is salmon fishing, which is a perennial (though again, died down in recent years) tussle between the holder of the fishing rights on the river (who is selling them as part of the package of tourism to overseas fishermen for the whole experience) and the local guys fishing the river (poaching) and selling on the salmon.
There is a reason why the UK will send you to jail for 2 years for handling a salmon in suspicious circumstances.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
FWIW, there is a lot less persecution of gingers in the UK now than there was when I was a kid. My red-headed son is the most popular kid in his class. Was gingerism ever a big deal in the US?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
I don't know why Russia attacked a nuclear-armed NATO member with WMD, twice, but they did.
You go to war with the enemies you have, not the enemies you would like to have. In particular, we are facing an enemy whose tactics include psyops with the basic theme of "I have escalation dominance because I am a nuclear madman and you are not." Compared to the considered effort that the US and Soviet Union put into not doing that during the OG Cold War post-Cuban Missile Crisis, or the US and China put into not doing that now, I don't trust Putin to make risk-reward calculations about nuclear escalation that I would consider rational.
If Putin really is a nuclear madman and his enemies are not, then French and British nukes don't deter a Russian invasion of Poland, and probably don't deter a Russian invasion of Germany. Unless Russian policy changes, NATO has the choice of nuclear brinkmanship or massive nuclear proliferation. (Polish nukes probably deter a Russian invasion of Poland under any reasonable assumptions). The Russians have involved us in a game of high-stakes iterated chicken whether we like it or not, and iterated chicken 101 is that you should defend Schelling points like, well, a nuclear madman.
From a realist perspective the interesting question is which Schelling point do you defend, and how. The two big options are "Rules-based International Order" - i.e. you defend Ukraine once it becomes clear that Russia is waging an aggressive war of conquest (which it was by 2022, if not earlier), and "Article 5" - i.e. you defend NATO countries only. The "lesson of Munich" is that the stronger but less crazy side should defend the first Schelling point, not the most defensible one, because every Schelling point you fail to defend makes a promise to defend the later ones less credible. We can have an argument about whether the lesson of Munich applies to this conflict - it might even be productive in a way which arguments about who started it are not.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
20d ago
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
22d ago
Per Wikipedia, Bourdain looks like he was a serially relapsing druggie, which suggests deeper problems he was trying to self-medicate for. He was probably clean when he died, but the police never said what the prescribed medicine found in his system was, and in any case withdrawal is a bitch.
"Hard-living troubled artist" is a lifestyle trope which has a script, including a dramatic premature death. Perhaps Bourdain had always planned to die before he got old, and realised that he was running out of time and needed to take matters into his own hands. If you know why Kurt Cobain killed himself, Anthony Bourdain probably did it for the same reason, plus some semi-conscious desire to copy people like Cobain. The fact that Bourdain was 61 and Cobain was 27 is a comment on rockstardom being an even less healthy culture than celebrity chefdom.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
22d ago
In general the interplay of devolution and the judiciary is fascinating. It’s like the UK is cherry-picking bits and pieces of US- or Canadian-style federalism without a real guiding principle of who exactly has authority over what. No British constitution indeed.
Not really, no - that England and Scotland have had separate legal systems despite being part of the same sovereign state predates US-style federalism - the Act of Union was in 1707, and it explicitly left Scots law unchanged. The fact that Scotland had its own legal system but no legislature pre-devolution was one of the constitutional weirdnesses that so offended Tony Blair.
Technically the Supreme Court of the UK (mostly just England, Wales and NI) has ultimate jurisdiction over the Scottish Courts, but cases are vanishingly rare and generally relate to ‘devolution issues’ where controversy over the Scottish government’s authority lies.
The Supreme Court of the UK can't hear direct appeals of Scottish criminal cases (this was part of the deal made in 1707), but you are right that this one could be litigated as a devolution issue - the powers of the Scottish Parliament (like every other UK body with delegated legislative powers) are limited by the Human Rights Act, so if the Scottish law JK Rowling was being prosecuted under violated a ECHR right, it would be ultra vires. If the bad actor here was activist Scottish judges rather than politicians and she was prosecuted under Scots common law then there would be no appeal to a UK court, only to the ECtHR in Strasbourg.
That's Tony Blair for you. Same reason the UK now has a "Supreme Court" despite doing just fine without one for centuries.
"Doing fine without one" is misleading. The UK Supreme Court doesn't have a materially different role to the old Judicial Committee of the House of Lords (i.e. the Law Lords) - it just meets in a different building. I agree with you about Tony Blair feeling the need to rationalise things when there was no practical benefit.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
22d ago
Scotland also has an abundance of natural resources and low population density. The SNPs two-faced messaging of "Taking back the North Sea Oil from the thieving English will allow an independent Scotland to have Scandinavian public services with British taxes" and "Independent Scotland will be a green superpower" is darkly amusing.
I'm equally sure that pro-Israel Jews would prefer someone who moves aid forward while delivering a mild dressing-down for PR purposes to someone who praises Netanyahu to the skies while using aid as a lever to extract concessions elsewhere from his domestic political opponents. The Biden administration is significantly less critical of Netanyahu's policy in Gaza than the Israeli opposition, which most centrist American Jews find a lot more sympathetic than Likud.
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