Thirteen U.S. troops died trying to get these people to safety — Afghan interpreters, soldiers, and the families of our service members. Veterans spent sleepless nights during the chaotic withdrawal fighting to keep them alive. Now our own government is going to abandon them.
I would watch the hell out of this one.
That was not at all my point. But thanks for misreading.
Seeing politics as a 'system' to be managed, fine-tuned, controlled, if only you can know it well enough, will unlock the key to human happiness, for liberal technocrats (as for communists before them).
It took me some years to realize that Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics was about this.
Also see James Scott on high modernism/seeing like a state.
Yes, and - liberals are feminized, meaning that other people are comfortable telling them everything is their fault, they must fix things, look what you made me do, etc.
flipping through a proof of yet another book from a somewhat well known liberal voice diagnosing “where the left went wrong” and i’m struck, again, by the fact that a large part (if not most) of the liberal commentariat simply does not believe that the political right has agency.
if the right is successful, it must be because the liberals possess some fatal shortcoming or overreached in a way that mechanically produced backlash. the idea that the political right is its own thing with its own aims, can harness discontent and take advantage of contingency is verboten i guess
What!! I didn't know.
This doesn't look like a person who took fencing lessons in college. He should have taken those lessons.
Niche LA reference, and I am HERE for it.
Sweet James!! LA icon par excellence.
Estimates show the 1918 flu epidemic killed about 45,000 US soldiers, about 38% of the total US military deaths in WWI. The flu and its secondary illnesses made up the majority of death by disease. Thousands (possibly as many as 36,000) died before making it from basic training to the battlefield.
Also, rising social inequality, the cost of elite education, and the fact that a college degree is no longer a guarantee of a middle class life, also mean that people focus resentment on universities. Rather than those who are responsible for increasing inequality/job enshittification.
Nonprofit work is something that most people don't come into contact with in the US, I find - whereas education is something everyone has an opinion on. As I've long said, people sit in a car and think they're all mechanics.
...and a lot of men in academe play along.
Again, who constantly has to prove themselves to skeptics, accept gaslighting about their work being worthless and low pay being the best they can hope for, while being fundamental to a knowledge economy?
Look back at writing about professors and the teaching profession when it was still majority male. Track when it changed.
Sexists hate that teachers are the one group that exercised power over men while not being male, or that women now do better in school than men. They want it both ways: to get the education that will help them succeed, while insisting it's exploitative and teachers don't really deserve good pay.
Because it's gendered.
On Bluesky he did - he went over to twitter to whine about how people were far left mobbish radicals and to get nods of soothing approval from wealthy tech bros.
I'm sure this makes him a really excellent faculty member and intellectual interlocutor.
His strategy has been: say provocative things about how AI is the future & others are dumb; say the argument was written by AI, haha gotcha; no I didnt really say those things, you're being mean to me; you've sent people to harass me now; well you see you're being very US-centric and I'm Russian.
The article's existence negates its own argument. The fact that the easiest way for an academic to land an opinion piece in The Chronicle or Inside Higher Ed is by offering contrarian takes about how awful academia is suggests a strong desire to look in the mirror.
Also, "I grew up in Soviet Russia and you people don't know how much human slop there is too"/"I just got back from a conference where I personally thought the research was crap so let's use AI" is the kind of whataboutism you'd gently rebuke an undergrad for.
"everyone thinks these tools are nonsense but I still use them" is a hell of a tell.
This is what he initially posted on Bluesky. He got considerable pushback to his asinine thesis, amended it quietly, and the Chronicle decides to give him the chance to avoid acknowledging this, pretend he is reasonable and anyone irritated with him unreasonable/hysterical.
bsky.app/profile/disa...
...and who equated 'research' with 'mechanized calculations.'
Attention-seeking, intellectually dishonest, kept deleting things he wrote and then pretending people were responding to nothing.
I wouldn't trust him with a peer review.
Decentralization all the way, in the US...
Politics by lawsuit-pushback.