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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6884 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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rather than something that genuinely would be the best move for the country

professors and students who tried to make the department officially pro-Palestine, admit a bunch of diversity PhD students who aren't up to snuff, and antagonize the administration

This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research.

So to avoid politicizing scientific research, we should water down the quality of the researchers and let a bunch of activists take over the institutions, and that would genuinely be the best move for the country?

Am I reading that right?

Sorry I think my response was a bit confusing because I don't want to pin the blame solely on Trump for this. Universities have played with fire for a long time and somehow seem surprised to be getting burnt. I just lament that the administration seems to be cutting down the tree rather than pruning some of the worst branches. We can punish woke without destroying the research apparatus.

Your problem is thinking there is a healthy tree at all. There are a tiny number of healthy branches. The roots and trunk are diseased and rotten.

The tree needs to go, dig up the dirt, salt the hole and burn anything still crawling.

There are no good branches. APAB.

There's a colourable argument that trying to sort the good from the bad - particularly within the uni bureaucracy as it exists - is a poor cost-benefit.

There's not a colourable argument that there is no good. That's just pretending the debate is one-sided. A third of voters with postgrad degrees voted for Trump. Those people are probably not on-board with the SJ agenda. There will also be SJ-opponents among those who did not vote, and even among those who voted for Harris; if I were a US citizen, I would probably have voted for Harris simply because I think Trump is too old to lead the free world in a potential WWIII and because WWIII almost certainly implies the semi-permanent fall of SJ anyway.

The institutions are weaponised against you; that's true. Many, perhaps most, of the people there are your enemies; that's true. God knows I feel like I'm in enemy territory every time I pass a bulletin board in a university and it's plastered with SJ signs. But that's just it; I do pass bulletin boards in universities, and I despise those signs. Not literally everyone in academia is your enemy.

Not literally everyone in academia is your enemy.

I'll be the judge of who my enemies are. Literally every single person in that status hierarchy is my enemy. They belong to a heretical cult of a now-dead social religion and nothing short of full destruction will slow their war on science, reason and western civ. In the same manner that a hostile military must be broken before peace terms can be decided, so must academia be levelled before the social contract can be redrawn.

My advice is not to go down with such a leaky, corrupt and evil ship. Academia declared war on society. Society has started to notice. And people like me are just waiting for the right time to hole this bitch below the waterline, sling the grappling hooks and raise the Jolly Roger.

Not literally everyone in academia is your enemy.

And?

I try to avoid enemy/friend distinctions for many reasons. I am not adopting or revealing any preference here. This is a specific point about the metaphor.

But if you are going to adopt/concede an 'enemy institution' paradigm in the first place, there's no particular relevance of 'not literally everyone is your enemy' beyond the utility of those not-enemies to help target the enemies. If they aren't, or can't, then even if they better qualify as collateral rather than collaborators, neither category is enough to merit any principle against targeting the enemy institution. If their presence is used to claim the institution cannot be targeted because of the damage to the non-enemies, this is merely the use of human shields. Human shields are not protection of legitimate military targets. This is especially true if they are willing human shields, voluntary or paid or otherwise.

If their presence is used to claim the institution cannot be targeted because of the damage to the non-enemies, this is merely the use of human shields. Human shields are not protection of legitimate military targets.

I believe I said that.

There's a colourable argument that trying to sort the good from the bad - particularly within the uni bureaucracy as it exists - is a poor cost-benefit.

But @JTarrou made a very specific claim that the others on team "burn it all down" have not made in this thread:

There are no good branches. APAB.

This is why I responded to him and not to the others on that team, because that claim is false; not all professors are, in fact, "bastards". I claim the right to, as politely as I can, correct those on this board who say false things (NB: I have no strong opinions about whether JTarrou is lying vs. hyperbolising vs. ignorant), even when those false things are not especially relevant.

When you’re a marine in Iwo Jima, you light fires at every cave entrance after you’ve thrown 3-4 grenades in. Then you move onto the next one. And the next one.

There’s nothing worth saving in there that just won’t slow you down and get your people killed.

That’s just where we are in the culture war. How could anyone be surprised at this point?

If you were part of the Trump administration, how would you punish academics for their woke excesses without negatively impacting useful research? The federal government does not directly control how universities manage their own affairs and any penalties assessed on the universities as a whole can be cast as damaging research in some way.

The only thing that I can think of is some sort of rule like "any university that violates XYZ policy automatically becomes federal property", which would allow the federal government to directly fire and hire, but nationalizing the universities comes with a million other problems.

That makes more sense. Thank you.

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