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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12371 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Punishing legitimate and important academic work is the best way to go about deterrence, as it motivates normal academics to police their extremist colleagues, rather than acquiescing again.

Doesn't that just incentive all the smart intellectuals (including those who just want to grill research) 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.

“Conservatives will harm valuable research” is an argument that will persuade an elite and effete academic,

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?

  • -13

cut funding for all conservatives

Are you referring to conservative academics? Then sure, let them cut federal funding for the approximately n=0 research universities that are as institutionally aligned to conservatism as the current targets are to progressivism.

If you’re referring to cutting federal funding to conservatives in other domains, though, then that’s a more complex story. Let’s say that the U.S. military is just as conservative as academia is progressive (even though I do not believe that this is actually the case): should Dems cut all federal funding to the military then as retaliation? Clearly not, since by protecting global trade alone, the U.S. military already earns its keep (and I say this as someone opposed to all its interventionist adventures). You may disagree, but I think that the effect of cutting all federal funding to any universities was cut tomorrow would be far less ruinous than doing the same to the military.

Now, since I can’t think of any other institutions that receive federal funding that are as conservative as universities are progressive, the only remaining targets would be governments of red states (which, as we are often reminded by progressives, take in more federal dollars than they give). So do we cut infrastructure funding to these states? Do we cut Medicare and Medicaid? This does seem crueler to me than cutting funding to universities. This is because the telos of federal funding to state governments is (or at least, seems to me, to a first approximation) to be to improve the quality of life of their citizens. If a Dem government would cut funding to red states, that seems tantamount to saying “We want to make the lives of all conservatives significantly worse off.” It’s essentially a declaration of total culture war, an action against “civilians”. In contrast, the telos of universities (or at least, what they say to justify their receipt of my taxpayer money) is something more like “we produce knowledge that benefits the country and the world”. If a Republican government says “no, we don’t think that you’re producing knowledge that benefits the country, but rather, primarily fighting ideological battles” and turns off the spigot of funding, then continuing the previous analogy, this is more akin to attacking a military target like a munitions factory or an airstrip.

To make the point even clearer: even if funding is cut to all universities, there’s still a story that can be told that goes like “Universities currently aren’t serving the best interests of Americans as a nation, so we are no longer giving the money earned by Americans to these institutions.” The equivalent story when cutting funding to all red states would be “Conservative states currently aren’t serving the best interests of Americans as a nation, so we are no longer giving the money earned by Americans to them.” It’s hard for me to see how that isn’t an implicit declaration that conservatives aren’t American, and thus, as a prelude to civil war!

If a Republican government says “no, we don’t think that you’re producing knowledge that benefits the country, but rather, primarily fighting ideological battles” and turns off the spigot of funding, then continuing the previous analogy, this is more akin to attacking a military target like a munitions factory or an airstrip.

So it's wrong to cut funding to conservative areas for wrongthink because it's a prelude to civil war but in your example where the right wing literally attacks the left in a war analogy it's okay?

  • -11

There’s already a war going on, one that the universities have been waging since long before the funding cuts. The difference here is whether that war should be a limited war or a total one. Even putting aside the fractions of people implicated—conservatives are ~50% of the U.S. population, while academics are a fraction of a percent (or maybe slightly larger)—there’s a difference in the purpose of cutting funding to progressive universities versus cutting funding to conservative Americans.

Even if I want funding to these universities to be cut, I still don’t want some PhD student, writing their thesis on the inescapable legacy of white male oppression or whatever, to be unable to find a job, or to be unable to be treated for disease. I just don’t want to pay money for the purpose of letting people who hate me spread that hate. They can do that on their own time, with their own money, and even if taxpayer-funded infrastructure helps them do that on their own time better because money is fungible, so be it; it still is qualitatively different from me directly funding their Hate Whitey theses.

[EDIT: I realize that this might seem like a bit of a motte-and-bailey, since there are lots of people whose funding is getting cut whose research is not the maximally-inflammatory Hate Whitey thesis. Here we’d have to get into specifics about whether we’re talking about funding cuts for specific projects or funding cuts for the entire university. The former seem entirely defensible to me. The latter does seem a bit more morally fraught, since there’s more “collateral damage”, but only a bit, in part because there is far less collateral damage than targeting literally all American conservatives, and in part because the collateral damage is not the whole point (whereas it is in the case of targeting literally all American conservatives).]

Can’t you see how that’s qualitatively different from me saying “I don’t want these people to be happy, work, or live at all”?

(P.S. This whole discussion is assuming that we should be funding things federally at all. If you want to argue that we should end all federal taxes, then that’s a whole other story.)

conservatives are ~50% of the U.S. population, while academics are a fraction of a percent (or maybe slightly larger)

Quality > quantity.

Is there a reason to believe a cross-section of the society that has been causing the replication crisis for the professional careers of most of its members is 'quality?'

Who would you rather live next to, a randomly chosen elite college faculty member, or a randomly chosen MAGA?

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