domain:inv.nadeko.net
magicalkittycat
2d ago
Well if you no longer believe in freedom, ironically that's your free right to do so. American society is powerful enough to withstand anti-American values such as yours as we have been since the foundation of our country.
Far more powerful threats to freedom have tried to take down the constitutional rights, the freedom fighters who don't give up keep pushing it back up.
magicalkittycat
2d ago
Oh ok, are you gonna use force to start enforcing free speech rights being targeted by the government now?
For the purpose of discussion I'm just taking his assertions at face value and assuming they're sincere. If you ask me though, I'm cynical enough about academia and the kind of environment it fosters that I don't think it's a given that any of the statements he's made about politics can be assumed to be genuinely held (including this writeup that's attracted so much controversy). It's possible they're all informally coerced in one way or another.
Somebody with a profile like him probably gets harangued by colleagues to "speak up" and "do some good" a lot, and it's not hard for me to believe that making the right mouth sounds is a low enough price for him to pay to keep doing the maths he likes.
I went for a run on Sunday to break in my new runners. I was hoping to do 5k, but I'd barely made it 400 metres when I tripped coming off the footpath and fell over. In the past whenever I've tripped while on a run, I've just gotten back up and kept going, but this time felt different. After getting to my feet and hobbling across the road, for a moment I actually thought I was going to burst into tears from the pain.
I managed to limp home and laid down on the couch for a bit. By the evening my foot and ankle had swelled up like a balloon and I was limping heavily. I tried to keep it elevated when I went to bed, and didn't get much sleep. On Monday morning I was genuinely considered going to the hospital, as I wasn't sure if it was a sprain or a fracture. Fortunately I had a compression sleeve to put on it, and by Monday afternoon the pain had mostly subsided and I could put weight on it. Three days later the swelling is starting to go down, it barely hurts at all and I'm walking normally - but large parts of my foot are covered in dark purple bruises. It's sort of fascinating to look at, actually. I had no idea a sprain could look so dramatic.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
"White America" received its worst ever cultural hostility and abysmal political achievements from the Trump administration
This is...dubious.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
I concur with this. I sing my eldest to sleep every night, and it is consistently one of the happiest experiences I have each day. It's gonna hurt when they get too old for it.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
I was in a half price books this weekend and saw a couple about my age looking at Anathem. I mentioned it was my favorite Stephenson book; they ended up buying it.
On the way out, I learned they’d come to the store looking for Dungeon Crawler Carl. I could only wish them luck.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
2d ago
FtttG
2d ago
The other scandal.
Dirty_DemSoc
Registered Demoncrat
2d ago
(Un)fortunately I am a pretty standard-issue Rootless Cosmopolitan, so I guess I’ll have to make do with my cat, for now!
Sloot
2d ago
There was also when Nature or some other large, prestigious journal (might had been Science itself) yes_chad.jpg'd it in reaffirming that, indeed, protecting and/or advancing the interests of Vulnerable Groups takes precedence over impartial truth-seeking. It's not political nor bias-inducing, of course; it's called being a decent scientist. Whether it be on Reddit or on here we discussed this one when it happened, but I couldn't find the discussion upon a brief searching.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2d ago
Having kids is pretty awesome and generally brightens my day, no matter how retarded things get out in the real world.
Lorian_Aristedes
2d ago
I didn’t even see that controversy, I was hooked by the insane statements on green lighting LLM use and how complaints around this had ‘classist and ableist undertones’. What a shit show.
Dirty_DemSoc
Registered Demoncrat
2d ago
Well, it’s a solution!
Dirty_DemSoc
Registered Demoncrat
2d ago
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Well, you’re not wrong.
It’s a tricky proposition, though. I rarely have the will to actually bother engaging here, and the pushback I’d doubtlessly get from pushing unpopular talking points creates a very real risk that I’d burn out shortly after making the initial post (which, on a related note, is why I still have 29 other responses from my last post that I really should have responded to)- and since dropping top-line drive-by posts is bad form, I typically figure that not commenting at all is the least-bad option available.
TowardsPanna
2d ago
Tilt your head back and laugh at how perfectly retarded everything is.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
2d ago
No, I want to go further then that. I fully hated it when it was done to me: and no amount of principled pleading ever got them to stop. What is happening right now is wrong and you know what? I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.
Certainly, my enemies never did.
So I abandoned the principles. "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" Having principled people like you on my side amounted to jack and squat in the past two decades. So why should I care?
I don't want to make peace with them. I don't want to return to 'neutrality', whatever that means. I want to make peace with the dust and the ash, with the sand of the desert: with desolation and ruin. I am Hulegu sacking Baghdad: let the rivers run black with the knowledge I am destroying. Better my rules enforced unfairly, because the ideal neutral is impossible.
This is the compromise you are seeing, a game of defunding and well-written lawfare. What I actually want is the books burned and the scholars that wrote them alongside. Anyone who even knows who Foucault is should have their frontal lobes lobotomized. But I can take what I can get. If my intellectual enemies live in fear and deprivation that is good enough.
Your attempts to appeal to liberal sensibilities fall on deaf ears because I don't have them. Not anymore.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Uh, what conservative science gets government grants?
Surely people are Goodhart'ing it, but either they're not very good at it yet or they're not trying very hard. The first two math department heads I looked up, at a large top-50 research university, were at [edit: approximately] 1.5 (for a relatively young guy, to be fair) and [edit: approximately] 2.5.
It's a metric that's somewhat designed to counter Goodharting of simpler "publication count" metrics. Divide your research up into "Least Publishable Unit" chunks, and you get more papers, but then the people who want to cite you end up only citing the most relevant chunk and killing your citations-per-paper.
[edit: the "Formatting help" link says you need to double up the ~ character on both sides of text to create a strikethrough, and the preview text rendered fine, but in the thread my pair of single tildes turned into a strikethrough...]
hydroacetylene
2d ago
UCLA is alleged to be violating actual black letter law. Do you think Bob jones shouldn’t’ve been forced to integrate?
hydroacetylene
2d ago
And they failed.
Principled free speech defenders strongly benefit from the shoe on the other foot.
thejdizzler
2d ago
This was a really great comment and I think highlights to me why it is so frustrating that science has backed itself into this particular failure mode. Science is supposed to be this system that helps you actually discover truth, and although it doesn't always do so in the most direct fashion (see Kuhn) the truth usually wins out. Scientists with the proper training should be able to apply this epistemic openness to their lives outside of the laboratory, but it seems like the opposite actually occurs. But instead I find many scientists to be incredibly dogmatic and close-minded. Which is what I suppose the system rewards.
birb_cromble
2d ago
assume that’s why there’s been minimal discussion
Be the change you want to see in the world. I'd be interested in a thread on any of those things.
The modern ACLU continues to employ a prominent lawyer who has literally gone on the record supporting banning certain books.
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