It's Hard Out Here For a …

Pangolin? Yeah, probably. They are considered endangered. And they are prominently mentioned in Robert Graboyes' essay: Pangolins, Bats, Zionism, and Patriarchy. But first:

Universities are society’s contaminated water pump—the focus of infection saturating the soil beneath one institution after another with hatred for Jews, Israel, Asians, whites, males, capitalism, egalitarianism, federalism, individualism, patriotism, religion, open discourse, constitutional norms, due process, personal responsibility, financial achievement, civility, Western Civilization, and objective science. University research percolates into politics, government, journalism, business, technology, law, medicine, K-12 education, entertainment, sports, religion, and the military. These institutions bow to intricate, ever-shifting academic fetishes and catechisms—CRT, DEI, ESG, intersectionality, oppressor/oppressed hierarchies, microaggressions, safe spaces, cultural appropriation, subjective truth(s), hate speech, scientific fundamentalism, land acknowledgements, and byzantine linguistic do’s and don’ts. Universities regularly offer radicals a heckler’s veto over who can speak on campus and what they can say. During COVID, academe pressured tech platforms, journalists, and bureaucrats to suppress legitimate paths of inquiry and override constitutional rights.

The national mood is primed to strike at this long march through the institutions. Academe’s “Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up” moment came shortly after Hamas’s barbaric attack on Israel, when the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT couldn’t muster a coherent opinion on whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated campus rules of decorum. Today, love-struck professors make goo-goo eyes at CEO Brian Thompson’s (alleged) cold-blooded murderer.

What Robert's essay is actually about is "the central mechanism by which academicians impose ideological conformity—the doctoral dissertation." And, even as someone who never managed to generate mine, it's interesting.

And, for another take on What's Wrong With Our Cherished Institutions, Michael Shermer offers his view: Wokeness Poisons Science. An excerpt from his long and infuriating essay:

The infiltration of wokeness into the sciences is now well documented, from the hiring practices of academic science departments based on a bingo-card of intersecting identities (race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc.) to granting agencies demanding statements explaining how the proposed research project will be supportive of or sensitive to oppressed minorities—even for scientific fields that have nothing to do with the woke focus on politics, economics, and social policies, such as astrophysics. Case in point: the German physicist Sabine Hössenfelder went out to her Twitter/X followers in 2022 to inquire what woke formulaic language she should plug into her grant proposal for studying black holes:

I wrote a research proposal about inflation (in the early universe, not in your supermarket) and it bounced back because I didn’t explain its relevance to “sex, gender, and diversity.” I need to add a paragraph on this. Anyone has an idea what to write?

The pushback she experienced in the comments section of the post led her to delete the tweet, as apparently even asking the question challenged the woke agenda, which must never be allowed. Another physicist and cosmologist, Lawrence Krauss, has carefully documented the extensive politicization of the sciences, for example a Physical Review Physics Education Research paper titled “Observing Whiteness in Introductory Physics: A Case Study,” that includes an objection to the use of “whiteboards” in classrooms because:

Though whiteboards have been shown to have a number of affordances when they are used as a collaborative tool that all members have access to, in this episode, they also play a role in reconstituting whiteness as social organization. In particular, whiteboards display written information for public consumption; they draw attention to themselves and in this case support the centering of an abstract representation and the person standing next to it, presenting. They collaborate with white organizational culture, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.2

Shermer provides plenty more examples of scientific wokeness. If you care about science, you might want to double up on your blood pressure meds before reading.

Also of note:

  • [Amazon Link]
    (paid link)

    Speaking of bad science… Megan McArdle is not a Junior fan, and the reason is simple: RFK Jr.’s vaccine half-truths tell a great, dangerous lie.

    I suppose it is good news that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he supports polio vaccination. But only in comparison to the alternative, like finding out that your cancer is “only” Stage 3.

    Sure, it’s nice for him to acknowledge that polio is worth preventing. But when it comes to the proposed head of the Department of Health and Human Services, you’d rather that went without saying. The reason it doesn’t is that Kennedy has spent much of his life casting doubt upon one of the greatest public health achievements in human history.

    We’ve eradicated smallpox, brought polio to near extinction, and made various other killing, blinding and crippling diseases into rare curiosities. Yet that victory remains fragile thanks to the efforts of people like Kennedy. Vaccination rates are declining, and diseases such as measles, which used to kill hundreds of people a year, are rising: In 2023, the United States had four measles outbreaks and 59 cases, while this year, we had 16 outbreaks and 283 cases. Only 92.6 percent of kindergartners had received the full four doses of polio vaccine in the most recent data, and though this is still above the 80 percent vaccination rate thought to provide herd immunity, several states, such as Indiana and Idaho, are inching close to that line.

    Megan looks at Junior's co-authored book Vax-Unvax (Amazon link at your right, "#1 Best Seller in Epidemiology" as I type); she finds the book "Pushing conspiracy theories [as] part of a broader pattern of weak evidence bolstered by dubious assertions."

  • Why the worst get on top. Arnold Kling has an interesting and persuasive explanation in his essay: If the doctrine fits, ...

    So why do Communist regimes turn out to be so evil? My hypothesis is that the Manichean nature of the ideology selects for leaders who are psychopaths and for followers who are willing to rationalize the cruelty of the leaders.

    Because you are fighting for utopia against enemies who are trying to maintain the illegitimate status quo, the ends justify violent, repressive means. But I speculate that it is the violent means that appeal to the men who rise to the top of the Communist pyramid. The psychopaths who attain leadership positions claim to be aiming for the ends, but in fact what appeals to them is the moral license to engage in cruelty. What their followers think of as temporary and unfortunate is what the leaders find intoxicating.

    Communism works out badly because it provides diabolical men with a moral license and an avenue to obtain power.

    I think Arnold could apply this observation more broadly to many non-Commie political ideologies.

  • A good idea for the LFOD-mottoed state. Drew Cline proposes a New Year Resolution for state government: N.H. should prioritize deregulation in 2025.

    New Hampshire is the freest state in the country and on the continent. But on some measures of economic freedom, we do poorly. Most Granite Staters would probably be surprised to learn that New Hampshire is in the top 20 most regulated states in the nation.

    Researchers at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University have tracked the growth of state regulations since 2019. New Hampshire ranks as the 18th most heavily regulated state. We are more heavily regulated than every other New England state save Massachusetts, which ranks 9th.

    Plenty of room for improvement, in other words. (Yes, for some reason, I'm feeling optimistic today.) You can get some detail on the Mercatus Center's take on New Hampshire here.

  • Did I just say I was optimistic? Well… Yascha Mounk takes a look at Bluesky and finds: The Cruelty Is the Point.

    After Donald Trump won reelection, scores of Americans once again failed to make good on their loudly shared and oft-repeated plan of moving to Canada; but a good number of them did partake in a different, rather less cumbersome, exodus. Complaining that Twitter had been unrecognizably transformed under the ownership of Elon Musk—whom they also blame for supporting Trump—hundreds of thousands of progressives decamped to Bluesky.

    […]

    In accordance with the platform’s policy of moderating content much more aggressively than X has done under Musk, Bluesky’s moderators have been quick to act when users flout the site’s ideological consensus. In the last weeks, both small accounts with few followers and well-known writers with an established audience have seemingly been banned for such trivial “infractions” as suggesting that the Democratic Party leaving X would be a counterproductive form of “purity politics.” And yet, it was on Bluesky that prominent journalists—including, but not limited to, the infamous Taylor Lorenz—openly rejoiced in the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. As long as progressives perceive the victims of a crime to be morally evil, the moderators on Bluesky appear to believe that threatening violence against them is justifiable.

    More recently, Bluesky users with major followings reveled in the prospect of violence against Jesse Singal, a center-left journalist who has ended up in progressive crosshairs because of his reporting about detransitioners and involvement in other heated debates regarding trans issues. Some consisted in crude death threats: “I think Jesse Singal should be beat to death in the streets,” one wrote. But a surprising number explicitly justified calls for violence as being necessary to defend themselves against the ways in which he supposedly put them at risk. “Jesse Singal and assorted grifters want us dead so i similarly want him dead,” another user wrote.

    I got a Bluesky account just to see what was going on. Not very interesting; a lot of folks reposting the Gospel According to MSNBC and Jacobin, though.