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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?
It's Edmund Burke vs. Thomas Paine for the 50 millionth time. "Slowly and carefully prune away the rot" vs "Revolt and replace the institutions entirely". Jesse/Trace are advocating for the former, and interestingly enough much of the current conservative crop falls into the latter mindset, despite Burke being probably one of the most central figures to Anglosphere conservatism.
Not to go all Hlynka, but the modern right somewhat dovetails with the left in the sense that they have largely shifted from a Burkeian mindset to a Paine-like one overtime. I partially think this is the right seeing how successful revolutionary, scorched-earth tactics were on the left, and realising that advocating tactics characterised by stability and moderation don't work when you're fighting with people who really would like to (possibly violently) overhaul society. But more broadly, I think revolution is attractive to a general political coalition when they're heavily ousted from institutions and placed on the back foot, whereas gradual change that prioritises stability is preferred when these coalitions' beliefs are tolerated within said institutions - the risks and costs of overhauling the system in such a case just outweighs the potential benefit of marginal status gains. The likes of Trace are attempting to appeal to a gradualist version of conservatism that looks like a worse and worse value proposition as time goes on and the left's Long March through the institutions becomes increasingly apparent.
Personally, despite differing with conservatives on many things, I espouse a lot of heterodoxy that's anathema to progressives and would happily warm my hands on the embers of the torched institutions.
I'll just point out here that if you don't want to build a mountain of skulls, some of those institutions will need a replacement at least moderately close to ready before you torch them.
How is torching these institutions going to produce a mountain of skulls?
There are certain institutions which, if removed for an extended period, will result in a modern society rapidly depopulating due to the heavy optimisation required to sustain modern population densities. Military, police, public utilities, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, plus the tax collection apparatus to fund some of these, and a pipeline to train people to do these things. I'm not saying you have to preserve the specific institutions that currently do these things, but "torch them all now and then start figuring out how to replace them" won't cut it. You cannot take them all offline for months without a mountain of skulls; it'd be the Great Leap Forward all over again.
Not coincidentally, most of the institutions you've mentioned are least-penetrated by wokeness. Police, particularly outside cities, are notoriously not woke. Burning down the police in cities gets you the 1980s back again... but so does letting the wokeness continue to spread. Public utilities and agriculture... not woke at all, so far as I know, except perhaps marketing departments. Burning down hospitals and pharmaceuticals gets you a small pile of mostly old skulls at worst. In pharma's case you probably just have to burn down the marketing department anyway.
Burning down pharmaceuticals means that a bunch of currently-negligible bacterial infections become big threats again, and illnesses mostly-eliminated by vaccination start to come back. The worst-case scenario is probably another plague epidemic with non-modern fatality rates (there is plague in the USA; it's just very treatable with antibiotics), although modern garbage disposal might be enough to keep that at bay (pneumonic plague does spread human -> human, though).
Do not underestimate their value just because you don't have to use them all that often; IRL, maintaining a good state can be really, really cheap compared to the bad state (see: iron lung argument).
And you do still need university-equivalents to train the chemists, although this is admittedly far less urgent.
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