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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25679 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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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.

You must be well aware that comments such as yours are clear examples of "waging the culture war", something the thread rules explicitly ask users to avoid.

This also falls under the rule against making "sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike."

You've been warned in the past for doing this, but it's been a while, so I'll leave it at this.

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.

A third of voters with postgrad degrees voted for Trump. Those people are probably not on-board with the SJ agenda.

While JT may well be opposed to everyone that went through college, I'm guessing the percentage that works for universities is much, much lower than 1/3.

But that's just it; I do pass bulletin boards in universities, and I despise those signs.

I am glad to have gone to university in less fraught times, and that I do not have the daily temptation to just remove the signs.

While JT may well be opposed to everyone that went through college, I'm guessing the percentage that works for universities is much, much lower than 1/3.

That is fair, somewhat; I would anticipate the split among professors being somewhat more tilted (though not as much as you'd expect, at least among the STEM faculty).

However, I didn't say "college degree". I said "postgrad degree". As in, basic tertiary degree and then another degree on top (e.g. PhD, Masters, MD, and whatever law is).

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.

This is not a war and no one is participating in some holy revolution. This is not what war looks like. Social institutions do not function like militaries, nor is it wise/necessary to 'break' or 'level' the ones you don't like or which have issues. This is the same fallacy that leftists who want to defund the police engage in.

The leftists who thought it was a war were routing their opposition right up until the right decided it was one as well. Perhaps they were correct that it was a war -- or perhaps if one side treats it as a war, it is one.

That's one way to interpret events, sure. I don't subscribe to it

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.

All professors contribute to and derive their living from participating in a fundamentally hostile institution, and the financial indenture of the student body and taxpayers which fund it.

A lot of plumbers and housewives and kindergarten teachers died in Dresden. They were all the enemy. Those who can't grasp this basic concept have no business in war.

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?

Dude, chill

You aren't on Iwo Jima. You're on an Internet board with rules against waging the culture war.

Dial it back, please.

Huh. I rated that one Neutral, because I read it as an obvious metaphor for "raze the institution quickly, ignore the regrettable collateral damage, move on to the next head of the hydra", which is a solid - if bitter - policy prescription and doesn't go the "YOU WERE ALL GUILTY AND YOU WERE ALL LEGITIMATE TARGETS!" route of indiscriminately demonising whole groups.

On reflection, I can see that if one read it literally, or even as ambiguous, that puts a very different spin on things.

Don’t worry; I could tell that it was metaphor. Nobody wants to waste hand grenades in this economy.

But if you don’t think “there’s nothing worth saving in there” counts as indiscriminate demonization, what does?

Well, the actual sentence was:

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

It's a bit broken, but I interpreted that as roughly

"There might be friendlies in there, but the time and (expected-value) expense in lives of going in there outweighs the value of saving them."

There's a saying that "the exception proves the rule", i.e. if you note that no X are not Y (contrapositive: all X are Y), then this implies the existence of X that are Y. This is not how formal logic defines things, but most people consider it implicit in common parlance (indeed, one of the most common exact-words tricks is to violate this convention). And certainly, even in formal logic, saying that all X are Y does not imply that there aren't X that are Y. Hence, it's not saying there's nothing... saveable? Good? ...in there, just nothing worth the cost of saving.

Nobody wants to waste hand grenades in this economy.

Well, I mean, not quite nobody.

You’re interpretation is the correct one, which I thought was rather obvious. It was a paraphrase of an earlier comment I made about a similar subject;

There comes a point when a house is so pockmarked with termites and water damage that the only sensible solution is the wrecking ball.

Are there some sections still good and salvageable? Yes. Could you theoretically save sections of the house? Yes but the time and effort needed makes the opportunity cost too high.

Or to put it in more bloody terms it’s like Iwo Jima; eventually you just learn to throw grenades in every cave and light fires at every entrance. Sometimes there’s enemies there and sometimes not. There may or may not be scant civilians clinging to life in the caves.

The rational conclusion is to not care, and go forward in a workmanlike manner and get it done, and quickly. Delays only serve to weaken you.

Which is why I found this ban to be particularly annoying even if it was so brief.

But I’m a bit surprised that it’s against the rules to say something to the effect of it being rational to consider an entire institution including every single member a target. That’s not what I was saying exactly but that’s a perfectly legitimate point of view.

I mean, there's that point up in the thread OP:

Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

There are cases where one can actually pull the "yes, ALL OF THEM" card and make it stick, and those are all right AFAIK assuming the logic's either laid out or obvious. Like, for instance, "all serial killers are hostis humani generis"; a serial killer is someone who kills people for no reason other than liking killing people, and that really does create a fundamental conflict between a serial killer and any society he belongs to. It's just, most sweeping generalisations that get said are exaggerations, and exaggerations about people are high-heat-low-light because their translation matrices are not the identity matrix (causing confusion) and because people really hate false negative claims about themselves (causing flared tempers).

Or in less words, it's to avoid dishonest debating and the usual result of such i.e. degeneration into a poo-flinging contest.

This is by no means super important but usually when you guys ban someone you put the length of the ban in the mod tag comment, didn't see one here but he does have the "user was banned for this comment" flag.

Not sure if in error or what but wanted to call attention.

Toa is correct. It's a one-day ban.

It shows up in the moderation log as a one-day ban.

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.

Cut federal grants for diversity, withhold federal grant money from universities that don't toe the line on controlling the woke issues on campus. This is the stance that the admin took with Harvard and has served to keep Hopkins from acting up too much.

Pair this with maintaining the levels of federal funding support and you get reallocation of funds to less woke universities and less woke academics at woke-er universities putting pressure on their departments to crack down on dissidents. This is what we had here at Hopkins where the pro-Palestinian protests were shut down by the President because he was scared that this would result in a Harvard-like situation.

Cut federal grants for diversity, withhold federal grant money from universities that don't toe the line on controlling the woke issues on campus. This is the stance that the admin took with Harvard and has served to keep Hopkins from acting up too much.

I'm confused. Is this not the exact thing that this whole deal with Tao and UCLA is about? The federal government revoking a DEI grant? It may have kept Hopkins from acting up, but it definitely hasn't stopped Tao from kicking up a storm.

I agree with you that this is a decent approach, but to me it seems that it is also more or less what the Trump administration is currently doing.

Yes this does seem to be the case with UCLA. I'm complaining about axing the NSF and reducing the NIH budget.

That makes sense. I think I lost track of the thread's context at some point.

I don't know much about changes to the NSF and NIH so I won't comment there.

That makes more sense. Thank you.

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