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Doesn't that just incentive all the smart intellectuals (including those who just want to
grillresearch) to hate you for being the worse of two evils? If one is saying "just add this line of text to your grants" and the other is saying "we will destroy you and your ability to do science and math", I'm not sure why they'd start siding with the second.Yeah, seems like it will persuade them that conservatives are actively dangerous to scientific research.
And what would they do? Move to China, lol? They're too self-interested for that, and China censors even more things they'd be inclined to make noise about. Move to allied nations, maybe Australia in Tao's case? It's not such a strategic loss given their political alignment with the US. Just hate conservatives? Don't they already? If you're going to be hated, it's common sense that there's an advantage in also being feared and taken seriously. For now, they're not taking Trump and his allies seriously. A DEI enforcer on campus is a greater and more viscerally formidable authority. It will take certain costly signals to change that.
I think it's legitimate to treat them with disdain and disregard. Americans can afford it, and people who opportunistically accepted braindead woke narratives don't deserve much better treatment. The sanctity of folks like Tao is a strange notion. They themselves believe in equity more than in meritocracy.
Oh so what you're saying is that the Dems should go nuclear next election and cut funding for all conservatives unless they go woke and we should go into an arms war of being the Serious Threat each time one group is in power?
Or are only conservatives morally justified in destroying science for culture war issues?
You seem to think that there is a tit for tat MAD argument to be made for restraint. Uh, no, there isn't. A politician promising to punish the hicks for having the audacity to touch the academy is less a political platform and more the hysterical overreaction of a crazy person. There's a popular thread of argument that goes 'but imagine if it was happening to you'. In this case, I don't have to imagine: conservatives have been driven out of everything from literature to knitting to table-top RPG games. Your consequences have already happened. Deterrence doesn't work if the opposing side uses the imagined bad end as a frequently-executed goal that often succeeds.
So yes, we are justified. Oderint dum metuant.
This really does seem to be the basic "it's ok when I do it, crazy when the enemy does it" statement. Not uncommon, but as a principled person who has fought against censorship from all directions I disagree with it.
No, I want to go further then that. I fully hated it when it was done to me: and no amount of principled pleading ever got them to stop. What is happening right now is wrong and you know what? I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.
Certainly, my enemies never did.
So I abandoned the principles. "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" Having principled people like you on my side amounted to jack and squat in the past two decades. So why should I care?
I don't want to make peace with them. I don't want to return to 'neutrality', whatever that means. I want to make peace with the dust and the ash, with the sand of the desert: with desolation and ruin. I am Hulegu sacking Baghdad: let the rivers run black with the knowledge I am destroying. Better my rules enforced unfairly, because the ideal neutral is impossible.
This is the compromise you are seeing, a game of defunding and well-written lawfare. What I actually want is the books burned and the scholars that wrote them alongside. Anyone who even knows who Foucault is should have their frontal lobes lobotomized. But I can take what I can get. If my intellectual enemies live in fear and deprivation that is good enough.
Your attempts to appeal to liberal sensibilities fall on deaf ears because I don't have them. Not anymore.
Because there are such things as moral imperatives which you should follow even if they do not bring you material benefits; indeed, even if following them costs you dear. Having been persecuted does not give you a license to persecute in turn, any more than having been raped give you a license to rape your rapist. It's not about what it gets you - it's about right and wrong.
If you are in fact devoid of moral principles (on this topic), then so it goes. No arguing with demons. But don't say that you used to have principles, and now you don't have them "anymore" because they got you nothing tangible. If your moral principles were conditional on beneficial outcomes for you, then you never had any in the first place.
By this standard no one except dead martyrs have moral principles.
No, that doesn't follow. You can still exercise good faith, ie trust that people's stated moral principles as real unless proven otherwise, no martyrdom necessary.
To put it another way, it's fine to hold moral principles that do bring you material benefits as a bonus. It's just that if the benefits dry up, and you give up on the principles, then we can state pretty confidently that you never held them for moral reasons in the first place.
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