domain:papyrusrampant.substack.com
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
7hr ago
You must be well aware that comments such as yours are clear examples of "waging the culture war", something the thread rules explicitly ask users to avoid.
This also falls under the rule against making "sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike."
You've been warned in the past for doing this, but it's been a while, so I'll leave it at this.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7hr ago
Partially I think I must have communicated very poorly, as most of this is way off track to what I was saying, and partially I disagree with some of the inferences you're making.
- I wasn't making a grand, universal, iron-law of anything-and-everything that can be vaguely described as Blue Tribe. While I am under the impression that western people with ideas belonging in the Blue Tribe cluster seem to be uniquely susceptible to the idea of "we cannot allow other people to suffer under the way of life we don't approve of" I explicitly said #NotAll.
- I don't understand how you're making the leap from "Commies" to "literally every communist that has ever existed, including (especially) the Soviets". I was thinking of a particular type of western marxist, please don't tell me you don't know the exact type I'm talking about.
- I disagree with the statement "If the actual (historical) Commies count as Blue, then surely their Yankee rivals should count as Red". If we consider American commies / marxists, as well as American liberals, "Blue", there's no contradiction in saying the USA was "Blue" during the Cold War as well.
- In any case I would generally be cautious about slapping a Blue/Red label on an entire country, especially ones as big as the USA or the USSR. Both had factions in power with quite different cultures. I'm not sure if the Blue/Red labels, the way we talk about them today, would fit into the USSR, but whatever I can bite that bullet for the sake of argument - yes, there were Soviet Blues, and Soviet Reds.
- Therefore by the time you're asking me "but then how do you disprove the same statement about the Commies?" all I can say is "but why should I?!".
- I don't know much about the American occupation of Japan, so can't comment, sorry.
- The way I remember it, for the Red Tribe, the invasion of Iraq was a war of revenge. "Muh democracy and freedom" was a neocon justification, and I don't particularly care about whether they were being utopian or cynical, as I don't recognize them as Red.
- If you wanted to throw a curve-ball at me, I'd pick radical Muslims. Hard to describe them as "Blue" and they have the same burning desire to bring the entire world under their way of life.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7hr ago
It shows up in the moderation log as a one-day ban.
Throwaway05
7hr ago
Do we know Tao is just mouthing the words? Some of the stuff I saw linked made an argument he is 100% down with such things.
Throwaway05
7hr ago
This is by no means super important but usually when you guys ban someone you put the length of the ban in the mod tag comment, didn't see one here but he does have the "user was banned for this comment" flag.
Not sure if in error or what but wanted to call attention.
magicalkittycat
7hr ago
As others have already noted, Terrence Tao isn't specifically targeted here.
I agree! So it's really odd that everyone keeps seeming to mention his personal political beliefs. It feels like they want it to be a story of suppressing the wrongthinkers so they can justify why their censorship is special.
Corvos
7hr ago
But AFAIK that's not what this is. I have complicated feelings about that and will happily discuss another time, but that's not what this is.
wemptronics
7hr ago
Maybe not on the Continent, but there is some limited demand for this American export in the UK. This guy found space at the University of Edinburgh and got to work Confronting The University of Edinburgh's History and Legacies of Enslavement and Colonialism.
I don't think anywhere is going to welcome a significant influx of Very American academics. "They're taking our jobs!"
magicalkittycat
7hr ago
I believe in free speech and other such natural rights, so it should not happen. I also think that
Well you say that and yet nothing in the following sentences expresses any idea that it is wrong to target researchers and scientists for their personal political beliefs. In fact all the effort seems dedicated to defending the idea of targeted wrongthink suppression.
magicalkittycat
7hr ago
If a Republican government says “no, we don’t think that you’re producing knowledge that benefits the country, but rather, primarily fighting ideological battles” and turns off the spigot of funding, then continuing the previous analogy, this is more akin to attacking a military target like a munitions factory or an airstrip.
So it's wrong to cut funding to conservative areas for wrongthink because it's a prelude to civil war but in your example where the right wing literally attacks the left in a war analogy it's okay?
magicalkittycat
7hr ago
So do you think there should be a censorship arms war or do you want more academic freedom?
As others have already noted, Tao isn't specifically targeted here. UCLA got its funding cut on the basis that it was illegally discriminating on the basis of race in admissions and creating an anti-semitic environment (among other things, UCLA sat back and allowed pro-Palestinian protestors to block Jewish students' access to classes, something which it resolved with a settlement of $6 million dollars). Then Tao throws a shitfit.
The broader issue here is that academia serves a couple of interrelated functions. The first is performing research and discovering truths about the world that can be used to help others down the line. The second is one of using academia to "liberate" people socially based on a certain political ideology, which the proponents of said political ideology conflate with the first aim because they have already subscribed to a number of tenets their opponents don't hold. This kind of thing has serious knock-on effects in academia, where people will often discriminate against conservative candidates - in fact only 18% of respondents within academia state they would not discriminate against conservatives, and that's only capturing what they are explicitly willing to state; the actual prevalence of bias against conservatives is probably higher. Papers that support the liberal instead of the conservative view are more likely to be published instead of file-drawered. Etc.
In effect the left turned academia into their political tool, and made it such that it was impossible for conservatives to defang them of their influence without also indirectly crippling knowledge-producing institutions. This puts conservatives in quite the bind - every time they wage war on the institutions that also serve as factories for leftist propaganda, they also run the risk of stopping up legitimate research and can be attacked on that basis. It's a situation the left created, not the right, and one can hardly blame the right for deciding "fuck it, we're going to flamethrower everything anyway".
magicalkittycat
7hr ago
No. As I just said, the point is irrespective of if they should be punished. The point is that regardless of whether or not they should be punished, they have no right to object on principle.
Tao was part of the government and was cutting grants to wrongthinkers? I didn't know that. I guess he got what was coming to him then.
bonsaii
7hr ago
and may include the vice president
Is this facetious or did I miss something?
magicalkittycat
7hr ago
There's no point in explaining why it's another level of wrong for government to target scientists and researchers funding over wrongthink if they're perfectly fine with that level of government suppression over academic freedom to begin with.
07mk
7hr ago
You are fighting the hypothetical in a way that seems in bad faith. The ideology in question that refuses to be named does not share this characteristic of "anywhere near as far away from taking over US as Nazis or Communists;" it has already taken over the institution in question, i.e. academia, and if it hasn't, then it's certainly caused severe transformations to it, with plans to make even more. If signing off on Nazism or Communism is "innocuous" only or primarily due to circumstance of these ideologies being so weak as to be unworthy of consideration, that certainly doesn't apply to this real case.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
7hr ago
I believe in free speech and other such natural rights, so it should not happen. I also think that
This isn't about moral rectitude, it's about what's possible. You can't start shooting kulaks and demand they not shoot back because God commanded that thou shalt not kill.
I'm simply informing you of what's possible in the political climate created by such acts. Which is exactly what I was warning everyone would happen ten years ago.
The left wing has thoroughly destroyed the classical liberal fort on its advance, and now that the advance has stopped, it can't hide behind its walls whilst retreating. Actions have consequences.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7hr ago
Note also that Trump isn’t demanding a loyalty test. There is no requirement that universities be Trumpist
The Trump administration has explicitly been angling for commissars DEI for conservatives View Point Diversity Ensurers to supervise the ideological composition of faculty.
WandererintheWilderness
7hr ago
No, it isn't.
How so?
restoring intellectual freedom and freedom of speech does not require rescuing anyone.
"Rescuing such-and-such people" was just a fancy way of saying "lift restrictions on freedom of speech currently affecting such-and-such people". Imposing new restrictions on those same people, policing for the opposite quadrant of political speech, is… not that.
John_Doe_Fletcher
anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy
7hr ago
Uh, rescuing the students?
cut funding for all conservatives
Are you referring to conservative academics? Then sure, let them cut federal funding for the approximately n=0 research universities that are as institutionally aligned to conservatism as the current targets are to progressivism.
If you’re referring to cutting federal funding to conservatives in other domains, though, then that’s a more complex story. Let’s say that the U.S. military is just as conservative as academia is progressive (even though I do not believe that this is actually the case): should Dems cut all federal funding to the military then as retaliation? Clearly not, since by protecting global trade alone, the U.S. military already earns its keep (and I say this as someone opposed to all its interventionist adventures). You may disagree, but I think that the effect of cutting all federal funding to any universities was cut tomorrow would be far less ruinous than doing the same to the military.
Now, since I can’t think of any other institutions that receive federal funding that are as conservative as universities are progressive, the only remaining targets would be governments of red states (which, as we are often reminded by progressives, take in more federal dollars than they give). So do we cut infrastructure funding to these states? Do we cut Medicare and Medicaid? This does seem crueler to me than cutting funding to universities. This is because the telos of federal funding to state governments is (or at least, seems to me, to a first approximation) to be to improve the quality of life of their citizens. If a Dem government would cut funding to red states, that seems tantamount to saying “We want to make the lives of all conservatives significantly worse off.” It’s essentially a declaration of total culture war, an action against “civilians”. In contrast, the telos of universities (or at least, what they say to justify their receipt of my taxpayer money) is something more like “we produce knowledge that benefits the country and the world”. If a Republican government says “no, we don’t think that you’re producing knowledge that benefits the country, but rather, primarily fighting ideological battles” and turns off the spigot of funding, then continuing the previous analogy, this is more akin to attacking a military target like a munitions factory or an airstrip.
To make the point even clearer: even if funding is cut to all universities, there’s still a story that can be told that goes like “Universities currently aren’t serving the best interests of Americans as a nation, so we are no longer giving the money earned by Americans to these institutions.” The equivalent story when cutting funding to all red states would be “Conservative states currently aren’t serving the best interests of Americans as a nation, so we are no longer giving the money earned by Americans to them.” It’s hard for me to see how that isn’t an implicit declaration that conservatives aren’t American, and thus, as a prelude to civil war!
WandererintheWilderness
7hr ago
Oh, I was arguing under the premise that Tao was indeed being targeted for signing the open letter etc., with the discrimination thing as a handy cudgel. I am open to a factual argument that this is not the case, and have no objection to UCLA being punished for discrimination against Asian kids; I am generally against affirmative action. But lots of people in this conversation were saying "well if Tao was punished for signing the letter, it serves him right" and I find that to be a position worth arguing against even if that's not the fact of the matter in this particular instance.
chains of "logic" that fall apart under the smallest scrutiny
This is kinda how your argument about the contents of the letter reads to me. It is certainly how it would read to anyone to my left. The impossibility of neutrally adjudicating which "chains of logic" of that type hold up, and which don't, is precisely why we need a society-wide norm that no arguments of that form will be considered, under any circumstances. I could as easily argue that no religious people should be allowed to work in STEM, because if they believe in miracles, their epistemology is clearly compromised in a way that is fundamentally incompatible with scientific truth-seeking. That's an argument that feels true to me on a deep level. I really think we'd have better science if all science was done by committed atheists. But I have never and will never advocate for setting such a policy. Arguments of this form are an indiscriminate superweapon that unravels societal trust when anyone starts breaking them out.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
8hr ago
This is abusing your moderatorship to win an argument.
War is preferable to the one-sided "academic freedom" that previously prevailed.
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