This is truly perplexing perspective. I’d like to understand how you arrived at it given how carefully you think, and how long you have faced and called out the corruption of the academy.
As I see it: for every case where a person with integrity and courage has held on within academia, there are dozens, maybe hundreds, who decided not to attend, left or were driven out over wrong think. And most of the exceptions will privately admit, they have been forced to regularly hold their tongues.
The academy champions diversity while cultivating conformity, and the faculty has absorbed the lesson at its core. It has become the endemic culture.
No biology department in the US made a statement affirming the binary and inflexible nature of sex in humans. No medical school challenged the atrocities done in the name of “gender affirming care”. No psychology department dissented from the spreading lunacy of the chemical imbalance model of mental illness. No university stood up for informed consent over the obviously dangerous COVID shots.
All of these failures maimed innocent people. And that’s far from a complete list of jaw dropping instances of anti-scientific consensus. Your own field is held hostage by an untestable intuition falsely called a “theory”. Mine refuses to admit the inadequacy of allelic variation to account for morphological diversity, or the obvious evolutionary explanation for racism and genocide.
Science is fine, as you say. But it lives amongst the rebels in the hills, not in the institutions built to facilitate it.
The idea that the academy is full of great people who can simply be unshackled to do the work we need done seems preposterous to me, and I would have thought to you as well. The culture of science is actively discouraged in the academy and has been for generations. The culture needs to be rebuilt by the keepers of the scientific flame, and even if that work began in earnest today, you and I would not live long enough to see it completed.
Hiring managers should understand this - one of the best opportunities to market an organization to the local community lies in properly debriefing people who were interviewed but didn’t get the job.
If you do this well, those people continue to want to work with you.
If you ghost these people or send them an email to inform them they weren’t chosen, they can rightly become people who speak against you around town.
Believe me when I say it’s worth the time and effort to give these people a personal call.
Who wants to chat about what happens when AI takes all jobs? If you have something to add to prepare the world for this, let me know!
https://t.co/KNzVuib3Ns
Think about it as contract enforcement.
It's foolish to give big donations for political favors without a way to get the politician to keep their side of the deal. Why would you trust a politician with your money, with no recourse? Many of the big donors don't.
You can't enforce the deal in a court, because that would make it look like an illegal bribe, and contracts for illegal subject matter are void.
In some cases it's sufficient to rely on the politician's incentive to want future donations. But when this is not sufficient, that's when you need the mafia arts, for example blackmail, assassination, or more commonly credible threats of same.
So whenever you see a big political donation by a sophisticated player, along with ongoing political contact, seemingly in expectation of certain outcomes, there is often more involved than just the money.
Ever met a child who flat-out refuses to go to school?
They aren’t lazy or defiant; they’re protesting a broken system that drains their souls with rigid schedules, constant testing, and limited freedom.
@GavinNewsom Don’t forget the “liberty and justice for all” is a continuation of the sentence, applying only to all who are legally part of the nation.
@SenSanders Curious about the beginning if that graph. What were the possible reasons that Polio became an epidemic in the first place? Also, what other things were happening other than the proliferation of the vaccine that could explain the reduction of cases?
@tveitdal@nytimes Except it isn't due to human impact. Magnetic pole shifts are weakening our shield from the sun, and there's nothing we can do about it.
One thing I’m reflecting on about Charlie Kirk: he stood as the antithesis of “Third-Wayism” and the Faithful Presence posture of evangelical witness that tries to blur political distinctions between the parties. He knew there was a difference—and he refused to pretend otherwise. And there was an audience for that, because they, too, recognized that progressive ideology is wholly incompatible with biblical Christianity. This does not mean conservatism is itself “Christian.” But conservatism, sharing certain metaphysical commonalities with Christianity, offers a more natural alignment than anything resembling progressive thought ever could.
We should stop the grand act of moral equivocation.