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Today, Jesse Singal wrote an opinion for the New York Times where he argued that Trump defunding youth gender research was a bad thing, despite the terrible research coming out of that part of science. He thinks that reform is in order, not slash-and-burn practices. In my opinion, there is definitely enough research out there by now that you can confidently release something like a Cass Report without anything new. Certainly, funding bad actors makes no sense, but to me, reform is little gain, and even a good new study must follow around minors that have gone through the unethical transgender science grinder.
It reminds me of an (unpopular) opinion Trace shared the other day on Twitter regarding the axing of funds for museums and libraries. Even if anthropology is 99% leftist, well, the institutions belong to those who show up, so right wingers just need to get in there and fix it themselves. While I appreciated that stance as it related to conservative law organizations, and as it related to Twitter when left-wingers were leaving the site en masse, I find it pretty distasteful to give up anthropology to positive feedback loops, and let our history become a mockery when it is within one's power to just raze it.
Deus Ex took a look at this perspective. Spoilers for Deus Ex:General Carter, after the UNATCO plot is exposed, decides to stay within the organization, because institutions are only as good as the people that comprise them. Later in the game, you see him in the Vandenburg compound. He has given up on his idea of reform and joined the resistance.
I'm going to guess most of this forum disagrees with Trace and Jesse on this matter in pretty much the same way that I do. Can you name any areas in government or other organizations where you do agree with them?
The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance. They can't or won't produce knowledge and they distrust anyone who does. They don't want to become librarians or museum curators or anthropologists. The best they can manage is the occasional court historian or renegade economist, chosen more for partisan loyalty than academic achievement and quite likely to be a defector. The effect is this bizarre arrangement where rather than produce conservative thought, they are demanding liberals think conservative thoughts for them.
Occasionally rightists will plead weakness to rationalize their lack of intellectual productivity, but this is nonsense. They have had plenty of money, plenty of political power, and a broad base of support. Unless we accept the Trace-Hanania thesis that they literally just lack human capital, we're left with the conclusion that the right-wing withdrawal from intellectual spaces is a sort of distributed choice. Razing institutions because you can't be bothered to make your case is just barbarism.
The red tribe produces plenty of petroleum geologists, clergy are generally quite intelligent, has successfully engineered affirmative action for themselves in the legal profession despite the legal profession trying to do the exact opposite.
What you’ll notice is access to status from non-academic sources(money, religion, conservative activism). This is a consistent pattern- the red tribe does not care about status within the school system for its own sake(which is the main reward for anthropologists).
All of this just seems to me to be implicitly conceding the point. My contention, contra Hanania, is not that Red Tribers are literally stupid. It is that Red Tribers are somewhere between uninterested in and actively hostile to intellectual/cultural production (by which I mean things like scholarship or art). But they are still very much interested in those products, hence my remark that they want liberals to think conservative thoughts for them. They want (liberal) artists to create conservative-inflected art, (liberal) historians to write conservative historical narratives, etc...
I think it's correct to say that conservatives don't care about academic status and prioritize income/general social status - that's my point. Nothing wrong with that on an individual scale (I'm certainly not one to talk), but a side effect of this taken across a whole society is an extraordinarily vulgar* culture that produces little thought, little art, and can't handle critical perspectives.
*for lack of a better term. I do not mean that it is rude/inappropriate.
Sad Puppies says hello.
You are looking at the empty buildings and barren fields and conflating it with a lack of interest, refusing to acknowledged that the bodies have already been buried and the survivors herded away elsewhere.
I would have to agree with this, although some more explanation would be nice.
@Skibboleth: I don't have personal experience* (yet; I suspect this'll show up when I do my MEd) but I strongly suspect that in the arts/humanities side of things, expressing conservative views/tastes in assessments will literally often get you marked down (when you aren't thrown out), which literally makes it harder to become legibly "a historian" or "an architect" as a conservative than as a progressive. If you want to see the prior ratio, you need to either enforce political neutrality in the current universities' assessments, or enforce that degrees from those universities be held to be of negligible credential value (as in, "I hired this architect because he got a Harvard degree in architecture" becomes identical in legal ramifications to "I hired this architect because he's white").
I suspect that that ratio does favour progressives, but not remotely to the current extent.
*Well, I do have personal experience that there are opportunities open to progressives and not conservatives in university, just not in the academic side - specifically, I wasn't able to become an RA in my dorm because "spread SJ propaganda" was part of the job description. Would have been nice to not have to pay rent, particularly since I was doing much of the rest of the job anyway!
I don't find this to be true except in one very particular sense: there are a subset of bigots who are also conservatives who define conservatism in terms of their own prejudices, who arrive in a space that is extremely hostile to those prejudices and find that expressing them gets them in trouble. You're not going to get marked down for saying we should lower taxes or be tougher on crime, for using nationalistic iconography, taking a pro-American stance in history class etc... If you study philosophy, there's a good chance there will be literal fascists on the curriculum. You may find yourself as a distinct minority opinion and arguing with your peers a lot, which is undeniably an unpleasant experience, but the actual landmines tend to be homophobia and racism.
I think you should be more specific about the subset you have in mind.
My first thought was “Civil Rights era Southern Democrats,” a group which unapologetically grounded their racism in conservative thought. But those people are mostly dead now, and their legacy is a good bit more complicated.
If you’re accusing Bob Jones fundamentalists or scientific racists or based post-Christian vitalists of confusing prejudice for conservatism, you’ve got to do more work to establish it.
It's not a unified subset. It's a disparate collection of individuals with discriminatory beliefs which they nevertheless consider to be an integral part of their political identity, though you can point to specific groups in some cases. Religious conservatives are a big standout on the gender and sexuality front, but they're hardly exclusive. Insofar as there's a real unifying theme, it's the "facts don't care about your feelings" aesthetic that many conservatives (especially younger ones) adopt, which IME mostly ends up glossing prejudice as "realism".
To put it as plainly as I can: whenever you find right-wingers saying "I don't think I can be open about my political beliefs because I'll be ostracized", it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice. You can think we should slash welfare or defend aggressive foreign policy or declare that Christianity is the one true religion and your left-wing peers at college may think you're an asshole (or a rube), but you're not going to be a pariah (nor is the TA going to mark you down on your essay). The sticking point is basically always about either gender/sexuality or race, and often beliefs that would be considered boundary-pushing even in conservative milieus. For example.
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