domain:pedestrianobservations.com
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Though actually, I suspect that what academia has, ultimately, is a supermajority of normie liberals - people don't like cancel culture or having to parrot meaningless diversity statements, but agree with the left more than the right overall, and with a deep-seated distaste for Trump.
Then they have chosen their side, and are correctly considered collaborators.
If everyone in academia is in fact a true believer in wokeism, then by definition cancel culture in academia would be a nonissue: there would be no wrongthink for cancel mobs to punish, and no free speech would be infringed.
Those who cancel are perfectly happy to go after those who are only perceived to commit wrongthink, or to change the definition of wrongthink to catch those who were formerly right-thinkers, and thus to even cancel true believers.
Attacking cancel culture in academia is only a worthy endeavor if you presuppose that there are, in fact, people currently forced to mouth insincere diversity statements that you want to rescue.
As I said above, certainly not. If cancel culture has already pushed out everyone who is not a true believer, or I can't rescue those who have not been pushed out, it is still good to destroy cancel culture in academia as a step in either re-populating academia with non-wokes, or destroying academia in its entirety so the wokes cannot use whatever power and influence academia has to cause trouble in other areas.
An attack vector which hurts such people as much as their oppressors - even if they are a minority - inherently loses its justification.
No, it doesn't. If there's one oppressed person per 1000 in academia, and they are hurt as much as the 1000 by some measure, this is what's called collateral damage. No one is required to use a perfectly precise weapon.
Say I, a closet conservative in academia, happen to believe he will fail, hard, with, say, >80% confidence. Wouldn't it be idiotic of me to throw off the mask now? You say craven, I say survival instincts.
Trump, however, must act as if he will succeed. And if he does, they were craven.
Don't online right-wingers tend to approve of hiding your power level?
A phrase I associate mostly with the dissident right/neo-Nazis, actually. But keeping your head down when you're totally outclassed may be merely prudent. Keeping your head down when you have a chance at success is cowardly.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1d ago
I don't think Trump was running as a classical liberal. Those guys were pretty much successfully extinguished by the last decade. The joke is no longer "imagine if the roles we're reversed", it's "we're going to kill you".
If you successfully destroy the disarmament party, you can't object that the nukemback party wins.
Goodguy
1d ago
Just because I find it obnoxious doesn't mean that I don't find it innocuous. I observe obnoxious political activities all the time, coming from both the left and the right, without necessarily thinking that it is any sort of serious political threat.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
It would be nice if you answered his question before asking a follow-up. Particularly when it has nothing to do with the case we're discussing.
ChickenOverlord
1d ago
Probably something from Oracle
magicalkittycat
1d ago
So you explicitly agree with the woke leftists that professors and researchers with "bad opinions" should be punished even if it's not irrelevant to their work?
magicalkittycat
1d ago
So you explicitly agree with the woke leftists that professors and researchers with "bad opinions" should be punished even if it's not irrelevant to their work?
magicalkittycat
1d ago
So you explicitly agree with the woke leftists that professors and researchers with "bad opinions" should be punished even if it's not irrelevant to their work?
magicalkittycat
1d ago
So you explicitly agree with the woke leftists that professors and researchers with "bad opinions" should be punished even if it's not irrelevant to their work?
Will you be upset if the left comes back into power and explicitly targets all conservatives with funding cuts after you've said it's now ok to do?
magicalkittycat
1d ago
So you agree with the woke leftists that professors and researchers with "bad opinions" should be punished even if it's not irrelevant to their work?
magicalkittycat
1d ago
You agree with the woke leftists that professors and researchers with "bad opinions" should be punished even if it's not irrelevant to their work?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
This is isomorphic to left-wing cancel culture, equally morally bankrupt, and equally un-American.
No, it isn't.
The only ethically justifiable mandate for fighting cancel culture is to restore intellectual freedom and freedom of speech.
Probably not true, but even assuming it is, restoring intellectual freedom and freedom of speech does not require rescuing anyone.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Oh so what you're saying is that the Dems should go nuclear next election and cut funding for all conservatives unless they go woke and we should go into an arms war of being the Serious Threat each time one group is in power?
Or are only conservatives morally justified in destroying science for culture war issues?
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1d ago
I don't mean it literally. I mean that same level of scrutiny for the new dissident ideology that ostensibly attempts to subvert the order of the United States. Senate commissions hunting down people who ever took part in a DEI program and retiring them early so they never participate in high level anything again, that sort of thing.
You know, denazification.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Yes, there were a number of things he could have done to make his comment more accurate, charitable, or defensible.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Heh, I'm pretty sure I've used software packages more expensive per seat than the engineers to run them. But yes, salaries are generally the largest. I'm sure pure mathematicians use a lot of chalk too.
Nonsense, academics have to walk on eggshells when publishing on topics related to things like biological sex and gender identity, race, and many more topics lest they face consequences to their careers.
An example that comes to mind that I read a few years ago (and will try to dig up) was an economics paper that worked together with a utility company in some third world shithole. The research in question: whether cutting off water to non-paying customers would result in more payments to the utility company, resulting in the utility company being able to invest in their infrastructure and provide more and better water service overall, leading to fewer people being without water service overall than a system that treats water access as a "human right".
The research reached the obvious conclusion that anyone who has taken econ 101 would have expected, and the researchers didn't lie about this, but they couched everything they said in tons of trigger-warning type language to avoid conflict. It absolutely had an effect on the strength of their conclusions, how strong of a stance they were willing to take, etc.
Edit: Turns out it was Kenya. Found the paper with its milquetoast conclusions that any econ 101 student could have told you - https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27569/w27569.pdf
And here's one (of many) articles from the "water access is a human right" faction going after the paper and its authors: https://developingeconomics.org/2023/12/11/when-economists-shut-off-your-water/
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
You can't (in a morally consistent way) nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then call "no nukes" when the Japanese take out New York and Chicago.
But I can object when the previously-nuked side runs on a platform of nuclear disarmament (i.e. cancel culture is bad, free speech must be protected), and then, the moment it wins, starts nuking its enemies instead (i.e. just try to cancel the left harder)
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
1d ago
I am not a “Rationalist” and my habits are very much my own.
I approach every text with the level of respect it deserves. Nothing more, nothing less.
Long term, a truce. For a long time we had free speech because everyone understood that policing speech was a double-edged sword - even if it works for you today, it’s going to cut your head off tomorrow.
When everyone understands this, then you’re safe because nobody seriously demands loyalty tests because everyone understands how that ends. All of this came about because the woke thought they were able to escape that and win permanent victory.
MAD requires demonstrating that you are actually willing to fire off your nukes.
(Note also that Trump isn’t demanding a loyalty test. There is no requirement that universities be Trumpist, only that they not openly discriminate against white, Jewish and Asian students. Which seems fair to me.)
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Inflammatory claims require evidence. This is still not a place to air your grievances without doing any work to back them up.
Your mod log is a long, long series of similar comments. One week ban.
ThenElection
1d ago
I learned analysis from his excellent textbook on it. Felt it gave me much more solid intuitions than Rudin, which I was struggling with. (To be fair, I don't glaze Axler, so there's still a gap.)
UCLA isn't being punished for its speech. The grants are being revoked in accordance with a long-standing legal precedent that allows the Federal government to take away public money from institutions that illegally discriminate on the basis of race. The only difference between previous applications of this strategy and the present one is the race of the people being illegally discriminated against.
The First Amendment does not actually guarantee the rights of large institutions to discriminate against Asian kids.
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