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The specific issue was actually feminist glaciology, but you are being deliberately obtuse by pretending to not know what he means.
"I cannot fail by now to recognize the tactic of wholly emptying out one's head when put on the defensive" really stuck with me because of how often you see it.
"I don't remember, I've never seen that, I don't know what you could possibly be talking about, why do you keep causing Culture War by bringing up examples?"
I in fact did not know that, because I don't keep a comprehensive list of petty far-right bugbears in my head.
Whenever I see people going off about ridiculousness in academia, I am unavoidably reminded of Twitter Smell Lady, who was held up as an example of silly research only to be repeatedly vindicated. The core problem here is that most of the would-be critics of academia are fundamentally incurious, which is why about half the time their cherry-picked examples turn out to be totally reasonable and only sound "dumb" either because the reader lacks the education to understand what they're talking about or has an ideological blindspot.
Quite.
Was she? How?
It turned out that smells really do have social and class connotations.
I don't want to be glib, but this isn't new. It's a significant plot point of a recent Oscar winning movie.
Does this paper provide a useful taxonomy? A relevant analysis? An unexplored perspective?
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And yet who exactly laughed at Alex Jones for saying chemicals in the water turned the frogs gay?
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I've been saying it since we were on reddit - the left's primary argument tactic is pretending to be retarded.
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It probably was glaciology I was thinking of, but similar volcano-related things are around too, e.g.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/earth-science/articles/10.3389/feart.2023.1172867/full
...this paper seems entirely unobjectionable. I'm genuinely baffled as to what the problem is here.
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I am one of those people against the treatment Matt Taylor was given in 2014, and even so, I don't think "reduce obnoxious wokeishness in science" is worth a lazily-indiscriminate defunding campaign.
You're buying into it being lazily-indiscriminate, but the case in the OP was literally about "we will use this federal money to exclude white boys from internships for the crime of other white men being a lot of scientists."
That's not indiscriminate, that's a precision guided bomb lobbed through a window at the enemy general smoking a cigar.
All they have to do to stop it is stop trying to kick white boys out of the science career pipeline, but they won't ever stop because for some reason it's the most important thing in the world.
The prevailing sentiment of the comments here are calling for it to be intentionally indiscriminate. This is a clear motte-and-bailey. The motte is, "We can stop some of the most egregious wokeness going on, including outright discrimination on the basis of race/gender," and the bailey is, "We've completely lost the ability to extend a single shred of trust or faith, so we're going to indiscriminately shut it all down, like we're performing chemotherapy."
FWIW, I proposed pretty damn harsh coercive measures to force universities to fix shit a while back. It would cause them vastly more pain at an organizational level, with almost no need to interrogate individual grants much. One might even say that the stick behind such coercion would be 'indiscriminate' (why should someone who is researching the material properties of some new alloy structure or whatever lose their funding because the fru-frus on the other side of campus are discriminating based on race/gender?), but it would be applying significant leverage with a clear demand. It would be vastly more effective at driving plenary change, with clear game theory involved. Rather than random, indiscriminate shutting down of everything, such that no one has any idea how they can change behavior in order to benefit, it would be clear that institutions which manage to clean house are going to make bank, especially since those institutions which can't manage to clean house are going to be shut out entirely. Moreover, it also changes the individual incentives. If you're a hard sciencer who doesn't give a shit about wokeness, you might still find yourself accepting a job at a woke-ass uni, because that might be the place that really enables you to get grants, have equipment/space, top students, whatever. If suddenly, it doesn't matter what you personally do/don't do in your research, but staying at a woke uni means you're forbidden from getting grants, while moving to a cleaned up uni means gravy train, the unis that manage to clean house are going to get showered in top tier talent. No more unis managing to somehow attract some set of possibly politically-neutral, bank-making talent that they skim from to fund their crazy wokies.
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