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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24829 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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This could conceivably work, but the more-likely result is the same thing that always happens with affirmative-action, where there is a clique of “real” researchers doing “real” science, and then a bunch of affirmative-action hires producing slop that no one actually cares about.

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:

  • A dislike for capitalism and thus industry. A company working to make a profit might be seen as at least evil-adjacent. By contrast, being funded by taxes of people who work for such companies might seem cleaner.
  • Academics being somewhat of a lefty echo chamber, which they can feel at home in (and play their stupid status games).
  • A genuine desire to make the world better through basic research.
  • A belief that education is a bottleneck to human welfare, and a willingness to spread their knowledge to as many people as they can (especially the disadvantaged ones).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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