domain:mgautreau.substack.com
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
1d ago
Of course. I believe we need another 30 years war like cycle to remind everyone why the tech of liberal tolerance was developed in the first place.
Supah_Schmendrick
1d ago
The other position is that the academics forced to parrot spurious diversity statements to keep their jobs are, you know, the victims, with ideologically-captured admin as the bad guys. The second position seems trivially the correct framing to me, and wanting to punish the academics as collaborators looks about as absurd as saying you're going to topple a tyrant to liberate the people, then executing anyone who ever saluted the tyrant at gunpoint.
Well, how is it not also a reasonable approximation of the Red Tribe also?
I don't think so, but I am exceedingly aware that I have no way to prove it to skeptical Blues or Greys. My perception of the Red side is that what we want is to not be ruled by Blues, rather than to rule Blues. I've been advocating for a national divorce for many years now, and I'm hopeful that this is the direction we're currently moving in. I don't want to fight Blues for control of social institutions. To the degree that institutions are shared and therefore must be fought over, I would rather deconstruct those institutions and allow the value that fed them to be diverted to new institutions that are not shared. That applies to Academia, the education system generally, the courts, the police, entertainment, everything.
I believe that the whole culture war, everything we're seeing, is because we can't get away from each other. And an unfortunate consequence is that much is shared, and must be fought over; there's only one presidency, only one congressional majority, only one Supreme Court. All of those have to go away, and it seems clear to me that the most straightforward way to make them go away is to capture them, contaminating them with Redness from the Blue perspective and thus mobilizing Blue Tribe to attack their legitimacy. More unfortunately, this is likely indistinguishable from seizure of power from anyone who doesn't already buy it, even without inherent human bias. If there were a way to avoid that, I'd be for it. It doesn't seem to me that there is, though.
For what it's worth, I try at least to be straightforward as I can in my own communication. I don't believe in "freedom" or "human rights", "free speech" or any of the old liberal touchstones. I don't recognize appeals to these ideas when others make them, and I try my best to avoid appealing to them for my own side as well. I believe they are fundamentally incoherent concepts outside an environment of values-coherence; they are never going to work across tribal lines. Both Reds and Blues want good things and not bad things. Expecting otherwise is foolishness.
dukeleto
1d ago
That argument would be a lot stronger if the dems hadn’t already done this, multiple times. There is a reason that all of the conservative leaning talent leaves for industry (it isn’t just about money)
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
You got thorough responses from multiple people here. You could have made one reply pinging the others (@[username]). Or even made all the replies you did, but link them back to this one: "see discussion here." I recognize it's kind of awkward either way.
The problem is that most people who copy-paste a response in 8 different spots are not interested in holding 8 nigh-identical conversations. Better to pull them back into one location.
If the main observable action when in power is to further the downward trend against academic freedom, why should anyone trust the claims being made? Actions speak louder than words after all.
Yes, exactly. This is why current complaints about the lack of academic freedom cannot be taken seriously.
If we want academic freedom we should make moves towards academic freedom, not be indistinguishable from the censors.
If Ukraine wants peace, they should make moves towards peace, not shoot missiles into Russian territory.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1d ago
it is the right to keep your non-political job whatever political opinions you espouse outside of that job
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. Open letters signed as part of UCLA faculty are "part of the job," and complaining about his funding is... job-adjacent, surely?
If he was being attacked and defunded for attending a protest off campus and explicitly not as a university representative, you'd have a stronger point.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1d ago
Define "bad opinions."
I don't think Tao should be defunded for this alone, but neither should he be defended as a neutral apolitical little guy.
Every academic that has used the word "whiteness" should be treated the same way the universities would treat, say, David Duke.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Only commiseration here. The worst is when the sleeves are so slim, I can't even roll them up. That just feels insulting.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
A totally rational civilization will never explore the stars, because the actual use cases for space are not that far. Yes, satellites and 0-g manufacturing are real things but you DON’T go past the orbit for them. Maybe asteroid mining but that’s still not interstellar travel.
Theres game theoretic reasons for interstellar WMDs, but not for much actual exploration.
Why not? You could structure the economy such that it wasn't just a few chaebols who dominate everything. You could give affirmative action to applicants with siblings. There are any number of things that a country could do. They could give the top students in exam a harem and tell him to produce 50 kids.
And it doesn’t address that when kids are optimized, parents want something back from that, which leads to grinding hangwon helicopter parenting into zero sum competitions. Notably higher tfr strata are the ones that are OK with their kids becoming plumbers- republicans in the US, yankis in Japan, and so on. We can reasonably expect the adoption of literal designer babies to have the same effect on people who optimize for IQ as selective college admissions.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1d ago
I have no doubt that there are some true-believers. Though actually, I suspect that what academia has, ultimately, is a supermajority of normie liberals
Varies by department, of course, but at some point the ratios are so extreme I don't think it's reasonable to really consider them normie. Many are, sure, but cutting off half the normal curve suggests the left tail is going to be significant.
And I can't get the full text at the moment, but helluva statement from the abstract of this paper:
Third, conservatives fear negative consequences of revealing their political beliefs to their colleagues. Finally, they are right to do so: In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists said that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents were, the more they said they would discriminate.
Ioper
1d ago
Anything that fits the chest/shoulders has a waist big enough for putting away a 12pack a day.
There are v-shaped slim fits. They have not been hard for me to find.
I guess It could be an issue if you're specifically looking for a form fitted but loose shirt.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1d ago
There is an "@" function to send alerts to people you're not replying to. For instance, you can summon me by saying "@magic9mushroom" (quotes not required).
Then they could all respond to the single post.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
They've gone so far towards being egalitarian they've become anti-egalitarian.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
- George Orwell, Animal Farm
magicalkittycat
1d ago
If the main observable action when in power is to further the downward trend against academic freedom, why should anyone trust the claims being made? Actions speak louder than words after all.
If we want academic freedom we should make moves towards academic freedom, not be indistinguishable from the censors.
TK-421
1d ago
Because the metaphorical imagery employed by science is fundamentally arbitrary, Irigaray's contention is that the fundamental choice of which parts of physics to label as "solid" mechanics and "fluid" mechanics in the first place reveals something sociologically and psychologically about the people doing the labeling (obviously, she would say that it reveals a fundamental aversion to or discomfort with fluid imagery and feminine imagery in general).
Whether it's true that the scientific metaphorical imagery is fundamentally arbitrary and/or the degree to which it is/isn't is an interesting question. It's somewhat analogous to phonemes / morphemes. In most (maybe all?) structuralist linguistic models, phonemes are defined as lacking information individually. They're the sub-components of higher level objects that do convey information but they're interchangeable building blocks. Studying natural languages as used, though, seems to show that phonemes can have information: round sounds are associated with words involving the concept of roundness or fullness, sharp sounds are associated with spiky objects or violent concepts.
The associations seem somewhat universal and somewhat arbitrary and are not absolutes, every language has counter-examples. They also aren't necessary for a language's expressiveness so they are optional and to some degree interchangeable.
If the metaphors that tend to be used in scientific imagery are / are not potentially tied to some lower level structure in how humans form concepts, we could maybe learn more about the process of cognition. The degree to which they're socially mediated would still be interesting.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1d ago
People understand it's political.
I mean, not all of them. There are definitely SJWs who believe that SJ doesn't count as politics but indeed "just common fucking decency"*, although there are certainly others who'll yell at anyone who thinks it's possible to be apolitical.
And, of course, it's practically a defining attribute of the social justice movement that it considers basically all its positions not just mere political issues.
*You've got to remember - until Musk broke the dam by buying Twitter, SJ's massive gaslighting operation to manufacture apparent consensus by banning everyone who disagreed from the virtual public square was actually working pretty well on a lot of people. Something that "everyone" agrees on doesn't look very political.
ThenElection
1d ago
or do you want more academic freedom
You left out a third option: I want a magical pink unicorn who shits gold and whose farts cure cancer. I genuinely see that as more plausible than getting our current university system to support academic freedom.
It's all quite unfortunate, and I suspect there is some genius way to get from where we are to a healthy higher education system without use of a flamethrower. But, no one, and certainly not Trump, knows that genius way, so this is maybe the best of a bunch of bad options.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
What are you positing as the mechanism to get from here to there?
The mechanism is that instead of limiting free speech and punishing academics for wrongthink, we win at free speech by fighting for the principle. This is what principled libertarian first amendment groups like FIRE are doing.
Allowing shitflinging competitions and "you started it" accusations to consume our freedoms will not restore our freedoms, it just creates a downward spiral. As we can see right now, we're even creating new theories of legal harassment.
There’s nothing new about the idea that we need to ban the expression of certain opinions in order to fight discrimination — that’s the reasoning behind a vast number of speech codes that FIRE has fought since 1999. The new, destructive twist on this is what we at FIRE call the cumulative theory of harassment. That’s the notion that while myriad individual instances of expression by unrelated individuals may be fully protected under the First Amendment, they can together create a cumulative harm, even to those not present and not targeted by the speech, that justifies overriding the Constitution.
We're downward spiraling already when principles are abandoned for revenge grievances. Defending freedom is not and never will be easy.
Thoroughlygruntled
1d ago
The point is to rescue the students, and therefore the next generation of professors. To the extent it's convenient to save the careers of the good ones, we should try to do so, but I'm not overly concerned about mathematicians who just kept their heads down catching strays. We need to take academia back down to the foundations before rebuilding. That's inevitably going to result in some collateral damage. The non-crazy professors had literally decades to set their house in order. If they wanted moderation they should have advocated for moderation sometime before social justice started lapping McCarthyism in terms of body count.
I care more about the educations of my future children than I do the careers of some scientists too timid to stand up against the last decade-plus of woke star chambers. I'm perfectly happy to sacrifice an entire generation of academics to this project.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1d ago
Vance has referenced Scott Alexander's essays indirectly and is familiar with other ratsphere memes and terminology, not sure if there's anything more specific than that.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
So how do you feel about a situation like this? https://x.com/pjaicomo/status/1958124476001861948
Do you believe the left would be justified with removing Tom Macdonald for his "the devil is a democrat" speech because the right wing started with saying legal residents don't have protections?
It seems to me that this line of logic would be just as valid.
not punishing any legal residents for political opinions is best, but punishing legal residents of all teams for political opinions is second best.
Personally I think no, but "the other side started it" being a valid reason to betray claimed principles would justify the next Dem admin removing Tom from the country.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1d ago
do you want more academic freedom?
What are you positing as the mechanism to get from here to there?
It doesn't seem to have been an option of the last several decades. Supreme Court cases do nothing, black-letter civil rights law does nothing, hitting them in the wallet might have an effect.
There were probably better ways to do it than this, I would agree. But if the alternative is doing nothing and letting progressives keep degrading the institutions, so be it
Feel free to reread my prior posts, and the other ones people are posting in response to you.
Quite probably yes, except some strains of conservationism.
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