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If you don't want to fall prey to politics, don't let your institution get stacked by political actors.
Most long lived institutions have to learn this. Universities used to understand it. And then they didn't. Here's the outcome.
It doesn't matter that Tao's smart, it doesn't even matter that his work is useful to humanity. Universities aligned themselves with one side of the friend-enemy distinction, that side lost, therefore they must suffer. There is no other way that this can go. This isn't me saying that it is good that this happens, merely that it is a law of nature.
Next time, fight the militants that are trying to use your university for political ends and win. Defeat has consequences.
They won't understand it, because they're convinced that this doesn't count as 'politics' but as the principle of basic human dignity, or some BS like that.
You have been warned repeatedly to stop putting words in other peoples' mouths. Especially when it comes to low-effort dismissals like this. Or like half of your comments over the last month.
Three day ban.
Without “some BS” this seems like a clearly true and factual statement. I can certainly dig up a number of “‘political correctness’ is just basic decency” quotes.
Yes, there were a number of things he could have done to make his comment more accurate, charitable, or defensible.
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People understand it's political. That's why the claim is often that science is always political so you're either for good things or for bad things.
But simply stating "I thought we were on the verge of a thousand year woke reich and would never face consequences (but I certainly would if I defected)" is unflattering.
I mean, not all of them. There are definitely SJWs who believe that SJ doesn't count as politics but indeed "just common fucking decency"*, although there are certainly others who'll yell at anyone who thinks it's possible to be apolitical.
And, of course, it's practically a defining attribute of the social justice movement that it considers basically all its positions not just mere political issues.
*You've got to remember - until Musk broke the dam by buying Twitter, SJ's massive gaslighting operation to manufacture apparent consensus by banning everyone who disagreed from the virtual public square was actually working pretty well on a lot of people. Something that "everyone" agrees on doesn't look very political.
I think the "personal/everything is political" is a better explanation of the mindset than "just common fucking decency". Especially because it's paired with a sort of almost gnostic/mystery cult mentality. The Onion parody of the general mindet of "if only you were educated as I was" is instructive: "just decency" doesn't require induction into a political discipline.
"It's just decency" can be taken as an attempt to build consensus that ran out of control, precisely because of the dynamics you note.
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