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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29209 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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Desantis showed willingness to attack the actual centers of power currently occupied by leftists.

He went directly after DEI programs in the colleges and the Universities in his state.

And they signaled that they're going to comply.

It seems like he understands the nature and magnitude of the problem and the places where pressure needs to be applied in order to even begin to unwind the Gordian knot of special interests, diversity hires, grifters, and activists that act as the ground troops for the Cathedral.

Of course this all hinges on whether you believe it is possible to reverse the decline or if the only way out is through, but nobody ever said you have to buy into the hope in order to cast a vote for hope.

And Trump went after 'Sanctuary Cities' or whatever. Which ultimately amounted to very little since the root cause wasn't the cities, they were just a symptom. Very similar to the situation in academia. I mean, how did a 'Sanctuary City' come to be? Extremely lax immigration laws/enforcement? How did 'leftist' academia come to be? E.O. Wilson had a choice remark with regards to that:

We had a meeting to take the final vote on Lewontin at Harvard, and a group of the older professors said they were worried about reports of his behavior at Chicago—that he might be disruptive or might have gotten away from genetics, and so would not be the right sort of person to be at Harvard. I made the speech I will regret for the rest of my life: I said we should never accept or reject someone because of their political views. I felt so good about myself making that political speech!

Lewontin becoming one of the prime figures in the fraudulent Boasian anthropology cult that reigns supreme in every major institution in the western world to this day.

In essence, 'academic freedom' is worth about as much as a 'closed border' with an open gate. The decline is not irreversible, but reversing back to an earlier point of decline won't do much to prevent one from sliding down again.

Very similar to the situation in academia.

Academia ultimately is the root cause though, at least from a practical perspective and not counting abstract social forces.

You can have perfectly fine academic institutions that are not bloated with useless crap. My point is that these institutions in the west became bloated precisely because of the kind of attitude is being expressed by the DeSantis 'attack' on colleges and universities in Florida. The root cause is not academia in and of itself. It's instead whatever process that bloats it.

The root cause is not academia in and of itself. It's instead whatever process that bloats its.

What bloats it is part of academia. It's coming from inside the ivory tower. Before it got bloated, this tendency was kept in check by external forces (e.g. not enough resources to waste on it) which are now gone.

We keep returning to 'academia' as a current thing. Sure, current academia suffers from all the ills. My point is that an academic institution doesn't have to. To point at current academia and say that it had to become this way because it did is not very pertinent. Stricter oversight over what can be taught, rather than promises of more 'academic freedom' would be a step in the right direction, which is the opposite of the DeSantis rhetoric. Which at best deflates a small part of academia without removing its ability to inflate itself again.

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