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So we just had an emergency lab meeting about the Charlie Kirk situation. Someone screenshotted an instagram story from one of my fellow lab members and sent in anonymous email to my PI (professor/supervisor). The instagram story said basically that Charlie Kirk's death was a good thing, actually. PI didn't name names, and it was also unclear what exactly the anonymous emailer wanted, but did caution us that this is a dangerous environment to be posting this kind of thing. EDIT: He also said that he STRONGLY disagrees with this position, but he's very in favor of free speech and would defend unnamed individual from the university/public if push came to shove, despite disagreeing with their politics.
I have a couple thoughts about this. Firstly, it's legitimately pretty scary that internet posting is now important enough to warrant an emergency lab meeting. It feels like we rapidly are descending into an authoritarian anti-free speech environment (not that universities were bastions of this to begin with). My own social media and blog are extremely clean, but it's trivially easy to link this account with my real name, and I've posted some not kosher things here before.
Secondly, universities/leftists have kind of done this to themselves. This is the old Cory Doctrow/ Freddie DeBoer stick. Trigger warnings, anti-racism and cancel culture have all led to this kind of environment where speech can be policed in this way by the state and doesn't look hypocritical.
Thirdly, and I hate to say this, but whichever one of my colleagues posted this is a fucking idiot, along with most of the left in my generation. I still think of myself as a socialist, perhaps less so recently, and I want to shake this person and ask what good this kind of statement actually does for our cause. Do you want more vigilante killings? The right is going to come up on top with that one, as most lefties in this country are strangely anti-gun. Do you want to win elections? Advocating for murder isn't very popular with most of the electorate. Do you want continued science funding so you can have a job and accomplish the things that you think are so important you dedicated 8-12 hours of your day to, every day? Then stop tarnishing the reputation of universities and science in general with your crazy politics: our stipends come from taxpayer money. As I've written on earlier, scientists are woefully naive about politics. This is not how you win political victories, which makes me think that the goal isn't actually political victory, but some kind of LARP/ in-group signaling game.
There's a specific critique I've seen about smart people on the left, which is something like there's this overabundance of book smart people who have extreme problems modeling second order social effects.
That critique definitely rings true for me with what I've watched up close and personal the last 15 years (being off and on quite close to a lot of professors, grad students, and professional class people especially).
To make an analogy, I think most of us would recognize that when parents get together to talk about their children, you would avoid discussion about whose children are objectively smart, and whose children are objectively homely, for example. You wouldn't do this because it would be impossible to make this case; you would do this because you would have enough theory of mind to recognize that no good can come of such a discussion. Other people are invested in their kids because their kids are theirs, and it is entirely reasonable for parents to be partisans of their kids. I don't think this means embracing a kind of relativism, exactly. You can recognize that some kids are just brighter than other kids, for example. But it's about a recognition of something like a theory of mind. There's a large social system you're a part of, that has iterated cause and effect, and that has certain needs to remain stable and functional.
But a lot of smart professors, grad students, and professional class people I know seem to be totally incapable of a similar line of thought when it comes to politics and larger groups in society. There's this stance I run into a lot which has the general tone of "Those people are dogs who have shit on the floor, and our job is to loudly and performatively rub their nose in it". It's people acting like they're Jesus whipping the money changers out of the temple. And even if you skip over the amount of completely unjustified arrogance and ignorance is often lurking behind the scenes (I know a lot of people who are very smart about a narrow band of specialist knowledge and then extrapolate from there to everything else in the world that someone might know), it's just intensely counterproductive, particularly when waved around in public... but honestly, even in more limited contexts, it's really counterproductive there too.
I think this is especially so when it comes to these theories about oppressor-oppressed dynamics. The public assertion "black people can't be racist" fundamentally doesn't work in game theory terms, if you want "racist" to continue being a powerful social sin and taboo. And that's because of second order dynamics. But the stance I've run into by the kinds of people I'm critiquing is that it is "true", as a universal intellectual matter, that black people can't be racist... just like gravity exists and the earth is round. So other people need to be made to accept that "fact". They need to be called out.
And I feel like that kind of deformed reasoning lurks behind observations like "the oppressed have a right to violent resist their oppressors" and "we should provocatively publicly celebrate violence against our enemies who are still part of the same polity". It's treated as something like a dogma and a provocative "truth". But as far as I am concerned, it betrays a total, pathological collapse of theory of mind.
Very good comment, and very true. The most sane graduate students and professors I know completely stay out of politics (or are some kind of milquetoast abundance liberals, which I find problematic for other reasons). Those slightly less sane think of people outside of academia as children to be reasoned with using patronizing arguments. The least sane think that they are shit that needs to be wiped off the floor. This would maybe be coherent (yet still abhorrent imo) if they were authoritarian ubermenschen who controlled all the levers of political and personal violence. But these people are usually terribly out of shape, gun-hating, "democracy" loving keyboard warriors. Say what you will about the revolutionaries of the 20th century, they actually had the cojones and physical abilities to enact and enforce their political ideas.
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