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I think that you are spot-on that @2rafa's proposal is exactly affirmative action, and it will work out just as badly, while also destroying any credibility of MAGA as a principled opponent to affirmative action and setting the precedent for the left to do the same when they come back into power.
I am all for hiring without regard to the applicants political positions, just as I am for hiring color-blind, but I am doubtful if the right has the academic manpower to restore political balance to the academic system with merit-based hiring.
Basically, certain occupations select for certain political leanings. For example, I would expect pacifists to be severely underrepresented in the military.
The road to tenure is long, hard, and not particularly rewarding, financially. While there are some walking it purely for the love of science (or humanities or whatever), most will at least partly have some ideological reason for preferring academics to industry. For the left, there are plenty of reasons to prefer academics:
By contrast, a conservative researcher will likely believe that earning a lot of money is generally good and will detest the lefty academic environment. If he is doing research, he will be more likely be motivated by the competitive advantage of his country, which makes working in industry or restricted government facilities more attractive.
So if the fallacy of the left is to expect that any inequality of the racial distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness, the fallacy of the right is to believe that any inequality of the political distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness.
What are you talking about?? Do you honestly expect “the left” to not hit the defect button the instant MAGA-style conservatives are out of power? “Wow, looks like Trump restrained his base from using affirmative action and remaking educational institutions to benefit their side! What a noble precedent—now we will also abandon DEI and uphold Trump’s lofty ideals of meritocratic achievement.”
Somehow I doubt that too. Also, what does merit mean in academia? A cultural institution so totally dominated by neoliberal progressives that merit can only mean being published in one of their journals, or speaking at one of their conferences, or getting tenure at one of their blue blooded Ivy League schools.
Hey I have an idea: let’s make journalism merit based! We’ll measure merit by how many articles you’ve written for the Epoch Times, or your number of appearances on One America News network!
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There's a distinct asymmetry here, though. In that there are loads of documented recent evidence of people in power explicitly and openly encouraging unfairness of the latter kind, while you have to go back quite a few decades before you encounter anywhere near the same density of such official documentation (well, at least in the direction that is being discussed, anyway; certainly there's no shortage of recent official documentation that explicitly calls for discriminating against members of white/Asian races in academia). Perhaps, more importantly, diversity of political orientation is material to an organization's ability to perform academic research (and more generally to discover truth) in a way that one's race isn't. As such, there's an argument in favor of AA in cases of political orientation that doesn't exist for race or other immutable-characteristic-based ones.
I still think this would cast MAGA as hypocrites and unprincipled, but mainly because (a) they're unprincipled hypocrites anyway for independent reasons and (b) the people who would judge MAGA as unprincipled based on this are motivated to be sloppy in their thinking in order to judge as such no matter what, anyway.
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Nobody gives MAGA any credit for principles anyway, and the precedent is long since set.
If the best anyone can do is balance left-wing wokeys with right-wing Q people, it's STILL better than the status quo ante.
It won’t be Q people. There’s a reservoir of right wingers trying to do science already- creationism(and climate change skeptics). You would have to make universities hire people like Ken ham and give them tenure.
if giving Ken Ham is the solution to left wing bias in universities' I think I'll just stick with annoying liberal groupthink.
It is at the very least less harmful to broader society than grievance studies.
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As someone who doesn't regret his "obnoxious atheist" phase of his online life from about 15 years ago, it saddens me to say that I'd take that tradeoff in a heartbeat, because I can't honestly judge Ham's "scholarship" as any worse than the mountains of "scholarship" that is produced by modern academia. And, unlike the latter, the Hams of the world don't actively try to subvert the ability of other fields to do good scholarship by denigrating basic concepts like "logic" and "empirical evidence" as tools of White Supremacy that must be discarded for us to get at the truth. So if we can reduce the latter at the cost of increasing the former, I'd see it as an absolute win.
But I don't think increasing the former would reduce the latter anyway, so I think the plan would be bad if implemented with Creationism. As someone else alluded to, if we could get good HBD research along with the nonsense critical theory "research," it would be a strict improvement, since it'd be helping to reduce the dilution of academia's truth discovery by the critical theory nonsense.
If you believe the truth of HBD, this claim is objectively correct.
It is not in the short-term (or even medium-term) group interest of non-white groups to abandon the critical theory frame, even putting the matter of group dignity aside. If nonsense is the only thing keeping Liberia at bay, then nonsense shall be spread.
If you believe in logic, then no, that is not the case.
But it's not the only thing keeping Liberia at bay. In fact, it's doing the exact opposite.
1a. HBD posits that certain traits critical to functioning on an individual and civilizational level are substantially heritable. Further, it posits that these traits are most common/developed in Whites/Asians.
1b. White supremacy is belief in the superiority of White people over other races.
1c. Ergo, HBD substantially justifies White supremacy.
2a. HBD research uses scientific modes of inquiry, including logic and empirical evidence, to support its conclusions.
2b. HBD substantially justifies White supremacy.
2c. Ergo, logic and empirical evidence are tools of White supremacy.
If Blacks and Whites are equal in their civilizational capacity, (insert the entire civil rights project here). If Blacks' civilizational capacity is substantially inferior to that of Whites, there is little reason to keep a large population of them in a White society; in fact, there is a strong incentive to kick them out of said society. Said Blacks would suffer greatly by being removed from the White society they inhabit, so they deny HBD and push their own counter-memes.
This requires a few jumps. Very few people are not willing to admit that stupid people exist and that they tend to have stupid children. And yet there isn't a mass movement to remove stupid people from society. It's a long way to go from HBD theories proven right to strip all Black Americans of citizenship and ship them to Africa. And when people widely believed in Black inferiority they didn't actually do that Liberia was a failed utopian experiment one of many for it's time.
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White supremacy is almost never so watered down as "the bell curve of whites is centered around halfway between the bell curve of black and asians on a plotting of many desirable measures." It's a belief that whites as a class as superior to other races as a class which requires an additional very important racial consciousness layer that is not necessarily present. That I'm closer to the center of a bellcurve of my race than my equally qualified colleague Milton is a curious bit of trivia that need not concern either of us.
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1a isn't accurate. Sure, some versions of HBD posits stuff ab out civilizational level stuff. That's not what I mean by HBD, and I don't intend to defend that at all, as I don't find it scientific and, as such, entirely inappropriate in academia. The version I meant was studying associations between genetics, race, and intelligence (and other traits, obviously, but also obviously intelligence is the big one that causes most of the controversy). In any case, the point of studying HBD in academia would be to discover if that's true WITHOUT pre-emptively biasing oneself to either side (to the best of one's ability to remove one's biases, anyway). The point would be to actually do what academia is supposed to be doing.
I have issues with 1b as well, but that's moot given 1a.
Furthermore, the chain of logic in 2 is a fully general argument about anyone using logic and empirical evidence to support anything, which seems to be based on a misunderstanding of my statement. The full sentence from my earlier comment is this:
If you believe that the supposition being made here about "logic," "empirical evidence" and "White Supremacy" was that the former 2 are sometimes used as tools to justify the latter, then I apologize for not being clear in my sentence, though I admit I thought the meaning was fairly clear in context. I shall restate it as below, and I completely disavow entirely the notion that people never use logic and empirical evidence as tools in service of White Supremacy or Critical Race Theory or socialism or Nazism or egalitarianism or Creationism. I that's akin to what I stated, then I misstated and should have tried to clarify with you before defending my earlier statement:
And, unlike the latter, the Hams of the world don't actively try to subvert the ability of other fields to do good scholarship by denigrating basic concepts like "logic" and "empirical evidence" as inventions of White Supremacy that must be discarded for us to get at the truth.
This kind of thinking seems to reflect a particular set of values that I don't think is anywhere near universal enough in modern Western society to make these logical jumps actually take place. Maybe I'm wrong on that, but I don't think that's been proven to any reasonable extent.
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There's actually an even bigger and much more interesting cohort of right wingers trying to do science - HBD, evo psych, etc. I'd put money on them getting in as representatives of the right rather than the creationists. Personally I'd be looking forward to mandatory "diversity" classes that are actually HBD rather than the regular tripe.
But no one likes them. Trump has no reason to favor dissident right science. Their supporters are a negligible group of people who aren’t enthusiastic about him. They are incredibly unpopular with the general public.
Hey, I like them! I think he does in fact have a reason to favor dissident right science, because the political environment for the right becomes substantially better when HBD is the universally accepted wisdom with regards to differences in group achievement. The supporters of "woke" were incredibly unpopular with the general public too - that didn't stop them from using academia to change the world.
And the backlash against woke is a non-trivial amount of the democrat’s being fairly likely to lose an off year election in New Jersey.
That and the Democrats turn against Israel, and the Democratic candidate's little cheating scandal likely doesn't help. Right now I'm getting constant ads about how the Republican candidate will raise taxes... which is probably true, but what am I going to do to stop it, vote for the Democrat? LOL.
I mean, isn’t wokeness at least partially responsible for the dems turn away from Israel?
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I was thinking about making a post on those ads. That's the only thing I'm seeing Sherril hit him on, that quote about raising taxes and energy prices, and that just seems as bizarre to me as the Fetterman-Oz Mirrorverse campaign. Especially when he has the much juicier quote from her about how your energy prices are going to go way up, but if you're a good person you'll pay it.
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"OK class, we're going to start with a little exercise. How many of you -- raise your hands -- have parents who are dumb?" (Half the hands go up, with a little laughter). "Now, I don't mean they don't understand you, or can't figure out the new apps on the iPhone 20. I mean really dumb. Like they can't read, or understand compound interest... at least enough to pay for this school" (all the hands go down but one). "Ms. Johnson? Really? By any chance were you adopted?"
"<gasp> How did you know?"
The most unrealistic part of this is that illiterate morons could ever navigate the insane paperwork to adopt a kid.
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Well, certainly not him, he's Australian. I'm sure we can find some American creationists. Maybe Anthony Watts would like a sinecure in the Climate Studies department.
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