MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
Intellectually rigorous humanities study teaches skills which are valuable in the workplace (rapid assimilation of unstructured information, critical evaluation of qualitative arguments, persuasive writing). I learned to write in history class, not by writing lab reports as part of my physics degree, and definitely not from preparing for the compulsory essay questions in the capstone physics paper.
The problem is that humanities courses are the easiest to grade-inflate without it being obvious what you have done, so most students with high GPAs in humanities majors never actually engaged in intellectually rigorous humanities study. Employers will only hire humanities graduates if they are sufficiently clued in to know which are the intellectually rigorous schools and programmes. Harvard philosophy majors are as hireable for a MBB or Wall Street analyst role as the STEMlords.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
heredi Jews, the Amish, Mennonites, and other similar groups.
Two very different models. The Haredim have a social model based on parasitism (both in Israel and the US) and the main source of income in Haredi communities is fiscal transfers. The Mennonites and Amish (which are descended from the same Swiss Anabaptist sect) are probably slightly fiscally negative at the margin but social model values economic self-sufficiency at the community level.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
The big difference between British and American Jews is religion. Per Wikipedia, 46% of American Jews are synagogue members, but only 22% of the 46% are Orthodox. 56% of British Jews are synagogue members, and 69% of the 56% are some flavour of Orthodox. (The difference appears to be even higher based on survey data, but I think the synagogue membership numbers are more reliable because maintaining synagogue membership is a costly signal).
British secular (and Reform, although there are not enough regular synagogue-going Reform Jews in the UK to matter) Jews are as left-wing as American ones - the most significant secular Jewish family in the UK at the moment is probably the Milibands, where Ralph was a WW2-era Polish Jewish refugee who became a famous communist academic, and his sons David and Edward were respectively the leading centrist and left-wing candidates for the Labour leadership after the 2010 election defeat. (Both are also visibly happier living in the US - this is consistent with my experience of my school/university social circle where secular Jews who had the opportunity mostly moved to the US.) But Orthodox Jews are much higher percentage of the Jewish population, and they are right-wing for the obvious reasons.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
If we only consider women who were indisputably real, I suspect the most famous woman in history would be Queen Elizabeth II.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
Straight men having a lot of sex is praiseworthy,
"Rake", "Cad", "Bounder", "Fuckboi" and "Manwhore" are all insults (though not as severe as the equivalent insults for promiscuous women). "Swordsman", "Ladykiller" and "Stud" all imply respect for competence without expressing moral approval or disapproval. The only common term for a successfully promiscuous man that suggests moral approval is "Alpha", and the person who coined the modern usage of the term (Roissy/Heartiste) was entirely comfortable that he was stealing positive moral valence from the older use of "alpha" to refer to a man feared and respected by other men.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
Bears might not attack you. Bears are more afraid of you than you are of them!
Bears seem to be one of the very few kinds of animal where this is not true. When I was hiking in Sequoia/King's Canyon National Park, the bears did not seem to be avoiding me, but I was definitely avoiding them. Both a sensible bear and a sensible human will run away if the other makes a credible threat display, but bears will ignore people who are not particularly threatening.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
Very little of Europe - probably just Berlin, which is the crunchiest city in Continental Europe, driven by some combination of the west Germans who moved there during the Cold War to dodge the draft and the hippies who moved there to take advantage of cheap rents immediately after the Wall came down.
In formerly-Catholic Europe (I have personal experience with France, Spain, Italy and Poland) vegetarianism is seen as a weird Anglosphere perversion (veganism even more so) and the only decent vegetarian food is traditional cuisine-of-the-poor which typically uses cheese as the main protein. A fond memory of my trip to Naples was seeing a solo American female who appeared to be EPLing being shown the door after bothering the only English-speaking waiter about her "intolerances" and being told that there were only three vegetarian items on the menu (two of which were the margherita pizza and the arrabbiata pasta) and she could take or leave them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11d ago
Jaywalking is okay though. I always joke that the most serious crime I have ever committed was jaywalking in Singapore. Londoners like me jaywalk as routinely as New Yorkers, and it didn't actually cause a problem. (I believe there is technically a S$1000 fine, but it isn't enforced).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11d ago
Apart from anti-Civil Rights political violence in the south, of which there was a lot (the rioters were right-wing, but would have been registered Democrats), the Hardhat riots are the most obvious example of right-wing political violence in the time period you are looking at. Over 100 people, including 7 cops, were hospitalised. Given the partisan politics of NYC construction unions, you can call it a Democratic riot on a technicality (the ringleaders were construction union officers who were registered Democrats, and they were protesting the decision of liberal Republican mayor James Lindsay to fly a flag at half-mast after the Kent State shootings), the rioters were condemned by national Democratic leaders and praised by the Nixon administration.
Opposition to forced bussing was mostly peaceful, but anti-bussing riots in Louisville in 1975 involved police cars being torched and widespread use of tear gas, so I assume there were multiple injuries. Again, given the partisan politics of the white South, the rioters were probably registered Democrats.
But my google-fu is telling me that
- The vast majority of political violence in the US during this period was race-related.
- After 1963 or so, the vast majority of the race-related violence is black urban riots.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11d ago
Agreed - the story here is that Christian right has, consistently with the broader "pro-life" memeplex, always been sincere in their opposition to eugenics, and the links between Darwin and Margaret Sanger (and the early C20 Progressive memeplex more broadly) and support for eugenics are absolutely real - in the modern world where "eugenics bad" is near-universally accepted, this creates an open goal for the religious right which they are happy to kick the ball through at every opportunity.
There are not many cases where the religious right was on the right side of history by the woke left's own standards in living memory, but this is legitimately one of them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12d ago
On one hand this is fair. Elon definitely has more strings to pull than the protestors right now, but that's a pretty short-sighted view. In 20 years, the current class of Columbia isn't going to have access to the corridors of power, they're going to occupy them. The attitudes at Columbia are going to be beltway consensus in 20 years. That's a much bigger issue than people mouthing off on twitter.
If the situation in the Ivies is anything like my experience of Oxbridge, students who are going to grow up as pillars of the establishment have always LARPed as anti-establishment rebels on campus, and "Free Palestine" has been the hardy perennial of anti-establishment left issues since I was in primary school. The views of the pro-establishment left in the US on the I-P conflict have not materially changed during this time, despite the modern pro-establishment left incorporating a generation of kids who went on Free Palestine marches for campus-left clout as undergraduates 20-40 years ago. There is a lot of media coverage indicating that the average non-Arab attendee at the pro-Palestine protests doesn't understand the conflict and is just showing up in order to support the Current Thing - this is an example of social copying, not successful indoctrination.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
17d ago
I'm equally sure that pro-Israel Jews would prefer someone who moves aid forward while delivering a mild dressing-down for PR purposes to someone who praises Netanyahu to the skies while using aid as a lever to extract concessions elsewhere from his domestic political opponents. The Biden administration is significantly less critical of Netanyahu's policy in Gaza than the Israeli opposition, which most centrist American Jews find a lot more sympathetic than Likud.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
17d ago
Anyway, I’d argue that colleges still pursue the latter goal. Even for pie-in-the-sky pure science. But I suppose I’m rather biased, seeing as my sister and I both did our Master’s degrees in these kind of labs. There are two media narratives about university research. And neither “breathless futurism” nor “absurd political sinecures” captures the quiet tide of NSF and corporate money.
I agree with you that there are plenty of people doing good research in hard science departments - in my foolish youth I wanted to join them* and I still have both the PhD and the physical and emotional scars of getting it. But even in the noughties, most of the good university scientists I worked with were complaining that the incentives were increasingly borked and were driving them towards running their research groups like Fordist paper-factories. There is a lot of useful work that can be done in Fordist paper-factories (the research group next to mine were generating multiple drug leads a year using sweated grad student and postdoc labour), but it is the comparative advantage of government and commercial labs, not universities.
The story I was told by my mentors was that in some unspecified pre-lapsarian golden age the academic career structure had given all scientists the level of academic freedom that (for example) Watson and Crick used to discover DNA even though Bragg would have preferred Crick to work on haemoglobin, but that this was no longer the case and the only way to get that level of research flexibility was to join one of a small number of special institutions like the Cambridge Laboratory of Molecular Biology (the famous LMB, aka the "Nobel Prize factory"). Based on what people are saying online things have got significantly worse since then.
* Solid state physics - the area I worked in (although not the specific problem I was working on) was widely considered cool-but-useless at the time, but is now being used by multiple commercial fusion startups.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18d ago
In my experience it could be best stated as there's a subculture of anarchists/communists who basically participate in every left-aligned protest, but many of the protests (particularly bigger ones on popular subjects like anti-austerity or LGBTQ+ rights) will also attract a changing crowd of other, more normie types, which means the anarchist/communist contigent is less notable.
From a UK perspective, the problem is that the SWP crowd have the necessary skills to organise large protests which skirt the boundaries of legality, and the normies don't. So unless the protest is organised by some other group with access to those skills (like a union), it inevitably becomes a SWP-led protest. I became something of a meme in left-wing student circles after I was identified as "the Lib Dem who turned up at a demo in a black cab" - I had 50 protest signs with Lib Dem sympathetic messages to dish out to Lib Dem supporters and a taxi was the only way to get them from the sign printer to the protest in the time available. The SWP had pre-distributed 2 or 3 protest signs each with SWP-sympathetic messages to the 100+ activists they had milling around the start, and lots of non-SWP-supporters ended up carrying because they thought they were just picking up a spare sign from another protestor.
Also the folks who bring Palestine flags to every protest tend to be Middle-Easterners, often actual Palestinians, themselves.
In the 1990s most of the Middle Easterners in the UK were either rich Arabs (who didn't go on protests) or Turkish Cypriots (who don't care about Palestine). The "every demo is about Palestine" dynamic back then was definitely driven by white British lefties. Looking at media coverage, I think that 2024-vintage pro-Palestine protests in the UK are dominated by people from predominantly-Muslim ethnic groups, although I see more South Asians than Middle Easterners.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18d ago
Blocking $26 billion in aid to an extremely wealthy country that also has the wealthiest per capita diaspora community is now anti-semitism?
No, but it is something that rich centrist American Jews care about. There is a reason why AIPAC is as powerful as it is. The sort of Jews who might switch from D to R in response to left-wing campus idiocy are exactly the sort of Jews who support aid to Israel most.
I support third countries getting the feck out of the I-P conflict (my gut feeling is that foreign support for both sides is net escalatory, although I understand the argument that the US paying for Iron Dome specifically is de-escalatory). But I am not American, and my views on this issue are not socially acceptable in elite American social circles. Apart from short-term humanitarian aid while the mess made by the current war is being cleaned up, the only use of donor money in the area I would support is bribing other majority-Muslim countries to take in Palestinian refugees.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18d ago
Note that the argument that the students are making for "Columbia is profiting from Israel's US backed war in Gaza" is not the sane version of that argument. They are going after Columbia for holding index funds which contain regular American companies which do business in Israel. Apparently Microsoft is "providing surveillance infrastructure to the IDF" and therefore QQQQ is a hate stock. The kind of divestment the students are asking for is not a serious demand that they want met.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18d ago
Mainstream leftists (including Joe Biden) still are staunchly pro-Israel. Congress just passed a bill to provide military aid to Israel with mostly-Democratic votes.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18d ago
In a general sense, I think university leftists have done a great job convincing college students that being anti-Israel, pro-Palestine is the default "leftist" "intellectual" position.
I think this is the wrong level of generality to look at it. Someone has convinced the students that the default leftist intellectual alignment is anti-establishment, despite Columbia being an establishment institution that largely exists to train the pro-establishment left. The pro-establishment left has been mostly pro-Israel since the Holocaust and solidly pro-Israel since before I was born. The anti-establishment left has been mostly pro-Palestine since the Nabka and solidly pro-Palestine since kibbutzim stopped being a useful example of really existing socialism. The changing views of leftwing students on Israel-Palestine is downstream of their changing views on the centre-left establishment.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18d ago
It’s not the same people protesting every time.
I'm not directly familiar with US protest culture, but in the UK it so is. Sometimes they forget to change the protest signs and people march against student funding cuts behind a "Free Palestine" banner. We have a single-digit number of activist groups experienced in organising this kind of noisy, disruptive protest, and until the SWP collapsed due to sex scandals most of them were SWP front organisations.
Even if you look at people rather than orgs, we are talking about a subculture (strictly two subcultures because the socialist-anarchist split hasn't gone anywhere) involving a few thousand people split between a small number of big cities (mostly London and Bristol in the UK) which is cohesive to have its own values. The tribal values of the subculture that is socialist protest includes a hierarchy of issues, and Palestine is number 2 on the list after opposing US foreign policy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18d ago
I don't. Jews who are paying attention can see the rising anti-semitism on the right. (And in particular, Jews who care about Israel know who was blocking the aid bill). Left-wing anti-semites are more dangerous individually (because they are more violent) but the anti-semitic right arguably includes people like Elon Musk and has far more access to the corridors of power than the Columbia protestors do.
Will more anti-semites be invited to the White House in a second Trump term or a second Biden term (not counting Gulf Arab diplomats etc. who are discreet about their anti-semitism)? It is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18d ago
The critical point here is the meaning of "lower intelligence". Having IQ 90-100 servants with a good attitude is life-enriching because they do the crapwork so you don't have to. Having IQ 80-90 people in your space is just a problem because they can't even operate a washing machine correctly.
The other problem is that your servants won't retain a good attitude if they are going home to a place dominated by a violent oppositional culture where displaying any sign of servility is putting a target on you.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19d ago
Older whites with below-average education are now the core right-wing constituency in every historically-white democracy, and hatred for people like Hilary Clinton is a large part of the reason they got that way. In the US, non-College whites started swinging to Republicans as soon as Obama was elected. Taking advantage of a pre-existing trend is exactly the sort of thing empty suits are good at.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19d ago
Two important roles that universities successfully fulfilled in the past, still could, but don't:
- The Liberal Arts College. Elite formation based on a combination of rigorous study of difficult subjects and directed socialisation with other young elites. The original reason why this stopped happening was grade inflation, but to bring it back you also need to fix wokestupid, and to end the rampant dishonesty about young elites imagining themselves as self-made meritocratic strivers. Potential gains: a more cohesive elite that knows important things and has a stronger sense of noblesse oblige.
- The Research University. The type of curiosity-driven research which is too high-risk for professional (government or corporate) labs without tenure and too remote from practical application for VC-funded startups. Getting this back means fixing publish-or-perish incentives and the PhD overproduction which enables them. Potential gain: the base of pure science that makes spectacular applications low-hanging fruit.
"Job in your field" is the wrong metric - there are a lot of jobs which require "any degree" which are clearly graduate-class jobs with the social standing that implies but which are not "in your field" for most of the people doing them. The relevant test is "Job which requires a degree".
The social contract was that university guaranteed a white-collar job and middle-class status, not that it guaranteed that you could follow your dream. Middle managers at Proctor & Gamble (back in the days when that was the typical non-specialist graduate career path) were not chasing a dream, other than the two-car suburban lifestyle.
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