I don’t really get why anybody would want to rule over an uneducated populace. What’s the long term plan? Modern industry is high tech. Modern war is high tech. Even modern propaganda is high tech!
I guess you only need a couple educated people to mind the social media bots.
>I don’t really get why anybody would want to rule over an uneducated populace.
I would guess (I am not in that cohort) that they would claim that their argument is that they are not arguing for an uneducated populace, but arguing against a "mis-educated" or "indoctrinated" populace.
>What’s the long term plan?
My guess here would be that the long term plan is to return to a "nicer" before-time that doesn't include things they don't like but does include things like helpful new technologies.
I have found that people can rationalize nearly anything if they are allowed to define the constraints of their argument.
> I don’t really get why anybody would want to rule over an uneducated populace. What’s the long term plan? Modern industry is high tech. Modern war is high tech. Even modern propaganda is high tech!
I think that, for exactly this reason, it makes it easier to have a caste system, with a small educated elite that can exert essentially unchecked control over a populace that is too uneducated to master any of the levers of resistance.
That's among people who think it through. I also think that there are plenty of leaders who don't think it through, and just let expert opinion against them, or whatever other factor, guide them into destruction without any real consideration of what comes after.
This is how autocrats consolidate control and destroy freedom. Destroy all the institutions and the autocrat is the only source of truth, leadership, or organization. Classic Mao.
Sample sentences below from recent work by the authors.
> Anticolonial thought and praxis offer education scholars, activists, and practitioners an intellectual and political framework of connectivity and anticolonial solidarity that neither erases differences between decolonization and other political projects, nor fails to foreground community building between fields, approaches, and geographical regions.
> This article addresses this gap by introducing the original concept of decolonial chronopolitics, a framework critiquing dominant temporalities underpinning the coloniality of knowledge.
I can’t stand Trump or Orban and I’m aware of the dangers both people and their political styles pose to democracy writ large. But if this type of “research” is what we have to defend to protect higher ed, I don’t know if we are going to make it.
Yeah - one can simply feel it, where these people are coming from. I can't imagine anyone would be missing anything if they never published a single thing. I am exhausted of this type of journalism and activism.
I'd love to have efficient, relevant, balanced, trustworthy academic institutions. I think we all want that. But IMO we're far from that ideal, and given where we are relative to where we'd like to be, one of the steps along the way is going to look a lot like "owning the libs".
Actually what's happening now isn't owning the libs. The tenured leftwing social science professors are mostly fine. They weren't getting a lot of federal grant money anyway. But the labs that study, say, brain cancer, are dependent on federal grant money. Now they're dealing with huge, often arbitrary budget cuts.
So you get to feel like you're owning the libs, but really you're just hurting everyone.
I don't know enough to judge one way or the other, but I wouldn't be surprised if this were true (unfortunately).
On the other hand, some changes have been pretty focused, as far as I can tell (e.g. DEI rollbacks, protecting women's sports, restarting student loan repayments).
While I was aware this issue existed in Hungary and the US, and was aware of the rise of nationalism in India (intensified by regional conflicts), I never made the connection that India would have a similar disdain towards higher education as the other countries.
Over 4 in 10 US and Canadian academics would not hire a Trump supporter, and 1 in 3 British academics would not hire a Brexit supporter.
In the US, over a third of conservative academics and PhD students have been threatened with disciplinary action for their views while 70% of conservative academics report a hostile departmental climate for their beliefs. - https://www.cspicenter.com/p/academic-freedom-in-crisis-puni...
Are Protests Dangerous? What Experts Say May Depend on Who’s Protesting What; Public health experts decried the anti-lockdown protests as dangerous gatherings in a pandemic. Health experts seem less comfortable doing so now that the marches are against racism. - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/us/Epidemiologists-corona...
Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. - published in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000306512110085...
Fourth-graders must “identify the processes and impacts of colonization and examine how discrimination and the oppression of various racial and ethnic groups have produced resistance movements.” High-school students are told to “develop an analysis of racial capitalism” and “anti-Blackness” and are taught to view themselves as members of “racialized hierarchies” based on “dominant European beauty standards.” - https://www.wsj.com/opinion/tim-walz-brings-liberated-ethnic...
The Biden-Harris administration has been conditioning funding at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to advance research in Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Medicine (STEMM) on “diversity statements” and equity requirements in what academics are calling a “politicized litmus test.” - https://www.foxnews.com/media/biden-harris-admin-requires-co...
Mega-Study Finds That Minorities Don’t Receive Harsher Criminal Punishments, But That Academics Said So Anyway [..] A prior meta-study looking for racial bias in juvenile criminal sentences, for example, also found no statistically significant evidence of racism. Yet the Northeastern University professor who was its lead author, writing in the Journal of Criminal Justice, did not make that finding the paper’s takeaway. Instead, he disputed his own evidence, writing: “However, simple claims that race does not matter are also not supported by existing knowledge,” concluding the situation was “nuanced,” because, in certain sub-categories, the numbers differed slightly by race—even though if racism were actually to blame, such factors would be across the board, and all in one direction. - https://www.dailywire.com/news/mega-study-finds-that-minorit... (If you think that the Daily Wire is unreliable, have a look at the studies themselves then: Study from the title of that article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13591... Study referred to in the quote: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
Gee I wonder why academia is under attack.. must be because they're so principled and objective, speaking truth to power. And the explicitly ideological purges, sorry, hiring decisions, are never referred to as "attacks" - if they're referred to at all.
> n the US, over a third of conservative academics and PhD students have been threatened with disciplinary action for their views
Hmm, what views do you think those might be? Do you think they're views on whether or not the capital gains tax should go up or down by 1%? Or maybe they're... other.. views.
I miss when I believed that conservatism meant making slow but effective changes to society. It was a simpler life.
> In 1954, directly confronting the practice of rigid racial segregation of residential neighborhoods, the Bradens assisted an African-American couple, Andrew and Charlotte Wade, who wanted to buy a suburban home but had been unable to do so due to housing discrimination
[...]
> White segregationists immediately lashed out – initially by throwing rocks through the windows of the house, burning a cross in front of it, and firing gunshots into the home – and then bombed the house (setting off explosives under the bedroom of the Wades' young daughter while the home was occupied), driving the Wades out and destroying the home. As a result of their actions, Carl Braden was charged with sedition. Although housing discrimination was illegal, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling specifically on a case in Louisville, Buchanan v. Warley, in 1917, charges were brought against Braden for hatching a communist plot to stir up a race war.
This was in NINTEEN FIFTY FOUR. Like, yes, that is now 70 years ago, but all of our recent presidents and a significant number of politicans are older than that. They were literally alive and party of the society that allowed these things to happen.
I'm pretty sure everyone agrees that things are in fact better now, we've improved on a lot of things, but that really isn't some kind of excuse to pretend that none of these awful things happened OR that they aren't still affecting us right now.
It's not the only thing by any means, but just imagine the difference it makes when your grand parents bought a cheap home in a nice neighborhood that you're now inheriting in 2025 and is worth millions, compared to the black people denied that opportunity, and had to rent this entire time.
(Could every white person buy a nice home in 1950 and leave it to their grandchildren? Obviously not. Were they denied this chance specifically because of their skin color? No.)
It's reasonable to criticize the excesses of academics. But let's be really clear about what's happening. The vast majority of federal funding for research goes to medical science and the hard sciences. Relatively little goes to the social sciences. The vast majority of the foreign students and researchers are going into STEM fields. So when the Trump administration makes huge cuts to research funding (something like a 40% cut at NIH and even bigger at NASA) there is a huge, huge impact on scientific and medical research that has absolutely nothing to do with any of the topics that you listed. Same with the arrests and threats to foreign students. The tenured left-wing social science professors will be fine. The young Chinese computer scientist will probably just stay in China and China will get the benefit of their work. The young American neuroscientist will just not have a career in the sciences because funding isn't available and so instead of working on curing brain cancer, they'll be working on data analysis for a marketing company.
Cutting research on ovarian cancer because you don't like the fact that the researchers used terms like "women's health" is stupid. Cutting brain cancer research because you don't like the fact that some completely unrelated people at universities are "woke" is even more stupid.
You don't like something that Noel Ignatiev said? OK, fair enough. But do you really want to kill the careers of young apolitical cancer researchers because you don't like something that a guy who died in 2019 said 20+ years ago?
There is no contradiction between patriotism, nationalism and science or progress.
Every time I read this kind of leftist propaganda, I lose hope for the world. The very people who present themselves as intelligent and morally superior fail to recognize the most basic contradictions within themselves: they claim that autocrats and populists sow fear and nostalgia, while they themselves are driven by fear of autocrats and long for utopia, while polarizing and dividing society for neglecting real problems and worries, due to idealization and generalization. It’s simply absurd, and I urge every leftist to stop this. I myself left university because of the moralistic and toxic irrationality and ideology I encountered. Isn't it strange that empirical sciences are not in dispute? It is always the same "circle" - the social justice circle. Social justice is not a scientific category.
Just as the paradoxes of quantum mechanics have no direct consequences for politics, we should not treat the humanities as if they do either. Life is not a question or problem to be solved at the university...
Look, in theory you're fine. In practice, the nationalists are dismantling the scientific research required to study climate change (which is happening, because, you know, carbon heating the atmosphere is basic physics). They are claiming that tax cuts and austerity improve the economy, which is not only counter to economics but has been proven wrong over 50 years. And don't get me started on pollution, healthcare, and sexuality. All of these may be studied but are being actively defunded, because they are perceived as leftist for some reason. Without getting moralistic, I can tell you that my children's future is getting worse every day because of this science denialism. As Yogi Berra once said "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."
And the problem with this whole discussion is that I'm not necessarily trying to defend conservatives, but rather to confront progressives with a reality that might, hopefully, prompt some self-reflection. But any criticism of progressives is immediately projected onto conservatives, making genuine self-awareness impossible. And as long as progressives show no forbearance toward conservatives, conservatives will make them pay for it politically. I can't understand why this is ignored, especially in academia. It's completely beyond me how the free West has turned into this ideological hell — in just 30 years.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11098838-oligarchies-throug...
> There is no contradiction between patriotism, nationalism and science or progress.
In the abstract, no, I don't believe there is a conflict between nationalism and science. However, nationalism and populism can lead to belief systems and policies that are absolutely in conflict with science. For instance, when nationalism means "our universities should only be for our people", that is directly in conflict with science. Most famously, Hitler purged Jews from German universities, after which David Hilbert said "there is no mathematics at Gottingen". The Trump administration is trying to prevent universities from recruiting foreign students and researchers, and even arresting researchers who advocate for ideas they disagree with. Fundamentally this is incompatible with science. Limiting who can do the research to a small percentage of the world's population, and intimidating and persecuting researchers who express unfavored opinions does not produce good science.
But did this "brain drain" throw Germany back into the Stone Age?
I'm not too familiar with the historical details, but I don't know of any reports suggesting that Germany was scientifically damaged in the post-war period.
Why do we need to start at the post-war period? Germany under the Nazis was obviously bad at science. This is a pretty obvious consequence of being rewarded for parroting the party line and adherence to dogma over actual investigations.
Because National Socialism has become an irrefutable foundation — and I don't want to discuss that. I actually see it as a step backward that the next generations are now necessarily forced to live and think under its shadow, when they could in fact be thinking free.
The US was decisive in defeating Nazi Germany, in no small part due to its science and mathematics. And if Nazi Germany had held on for longer, the atomic bomb would have defeated them too, with a large number of exiled scientists.
Pre-war, much of the scientific literature was in German, especially chemistry. These days it's all in English.
And now it’s falling apart from within due to ideas from the humanities? Where do we even place the temporal benchmark for progress and why do we call it progress in the first place?
Let’s be concrete: Since when has science been driven by the fear of being left behind? And since when has knowledge become the only thing that holds value in a society?
Because unlike many others, I don't pretend to be all-knowing and all-good.
Overconfidence, assertive dominance, and shared convictions often stem from, or lead to, ignorance.
Just one step from Soviet style intelligentsia purges.
I don’t really get why anybody would want to rule over an uneducated populace. What’s the long term plan? Modern industry is high tech. Modern war is high tech. Even modern propaganda is high tech!
I guess you only need a couple educated people to mind the social media bots.
>I don’t really get why anybody would want to rule over an uneducated populace.
I would guess (I am not in that cohort) that they would claim that their argument is that they are not arguing for an uneducated populace, but arguing against a "mis-educated" or "indoctrinated" populace.
>What’s the long term plan?
My guess here would be that the long term plan is to return to a "nicer" before-time that doesn't include things they don't like but does include things like helpful new technologies.
I have found that people can rationalize nearly anything if they are allowed to define the constraints of their argument.
Control. Uneducated people are easier to control and manipulate.
I wouldn't assume there is a long term plan...
> I don’t really get why anybody would want to rule over an uneducated populace. What’s the long term plan? Modern industry is high tech. Modern war is high tech. Even modern propaganda is high tech!
I think that, for exactly this reason, it makes it easier to have a caste system, with a small educated elite that can exert essentially unchecked control over a populace that is too uneducated to master any of the levers of resistance.
That's among people who think it through. I also think that there are plenty of leaders who don't think it through, and just let expert opinion against them, or whatever other factor, guide them into destruction without any real consideration of what comes after.
This is how autocrats consolidate control and destroy freedom. Destroy all the institutions and the autocrat is the only source of truth, leadership, or organization. Classic Mao.
A very bold title but not much to back it up. The so called "war" and "attack" is apparently banning gender studies.
No, it's also banning and in some cases arresting foreign STEM students, and making billions of dollars of cuts to scientific and medical research.
You are trying to do the lifting for an article that fails to make its own case. It got flagged anyway for being bait.
Sample sentences below from recent work by the authors.
> Anticolonial thought and praxis offer education scholars, activists, and practitioners an intellectual and political framework of connectivity and anticolonial solidarity that neither erases differences between decolonization and other political projects, nor fails to foreground community building between fields, approaches, and geographical regions.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/edth.12660
> This article addresses this gap by introducing the original concept of decolonial chronopolitics, a framework critiquing dominant temporalities underpinning the coloniality of knowledge.
https://www.academia.edu/130467732/Decolonial_chronopolitics...
I can’t stand Trump or Orban and I’m aware of the dangers both people and their political styles pose to democracy writ large. But if this type of “research” is what we have to defend to protect higher ed, I don’t know if we are going to make it.
Yeah - one can simply feel it, where these people are coming from. I can't imagine anyone would be missing anything if they never published a single thing. I am exhausted of this type of journalism and activism.
> It’s part of a global trend: universities cast as enemies and institutions in need of reform.
They are in need of reform.
> As scholars who study nationalism, emotion and higher education, we explore the emotional politics behind these attacks.
I don't think I trust you to diagnose your own condition.
Some of the Trump administration's actions in this area are misguided, but I am enjoying watching them challenge some of the left's sacred cows.
> Some of the Trump administration's actions in this area are misguided, but I am enjoying watching them challenge some of the left's sacred cows.
That's a weird way to phrase "using governmental power to coerce speech from universities". What happened to freedom of speech?
So you'd accept losing billions of dollars of cancer research a year so you can own the libs. Lovely.
I'd love to have efficient, relevant, balanced, trustworthy academic institutions. I think we all want that. But IMO we're far from that ideal, and given where we are relative to where we'd like to be, one of the steps along the way is going to look a lot like "owning the libs".
Actually what's happening now isn't owning the libs. The tenured leftwing social science professors are mostly fine. They weren't getting a lot of federal grant money anyway. But the labs that study, say, brain cancer, are dependent on federal grant money. Now they're dealing with huge, often arbitrary budget cuts.
So you get to feel like you're owning the libs, but really you're just hurting everyone.
I don't know enough to judge one way or the other, but I wouldn't be surprised if this were true (unfortunately).
On the other hand, some changes have been pretty focused, as far as I can tell (e.g. DEI rollbacks, protecting women's sports, restarting student loan repayments).
While I was aware this issue existed in Hungary and the US, and was aware of the rise of nationalism in India (intensified by regional conflicts), I never made the connection that India would have a similar disdain towards higher education as the other countries.
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Over 4 in 10 US and Canadian academics would not hire a Trump supporter, and 1 in 3 British academics would not hire a Brexit supporter.
In the US, over a third of conservative academics and PhD students have been threatened with disciplinary action for their views while 70% of conservative academics report a hostile departmental climate for their beliefs. - https://www.cspicenter.com/p/academic-freedom-in-crisis-puni...
Are Protests Dangerous? What Experts Say May Depend on Who’s Protesting What; Public health experts decried the anti-lockdown protests as dangerous gatherings in a pandemic. Health experts seem less comfortable doing so now that the marches are against racism. - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/us/Epidemiologists-corona...
Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. - published in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000306512110085...
‘American Political Thought’ course at CU Denver removes all white men from curriculum - https://www.thecollegefix.com/american-political-thought-cou...
Fourth-graders must “identify the processes and impacts of colonization and examine how discrimination and the oppression of various racial and ethnic groups have produced resistance movements.” High-school students are told to “develop an analysis of racial capitalism” and “anti-Blackness” and are taught to view themselves as members of “racialized hierarchies” based on “dominant European beauty standards.” - https://www.wsj.com/opinion/tim-walz-brings-liberated-ethnic...
Guidance aims to encourage ‘anti-racist’ teacher training to maintain diverse educator workforce - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/25/teachers-taught-...
The Biden-Harris administration has been conditioning funding at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to advance research in Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Medicine (STEMM) on “diversity statements” and equity requirements in what academics are calling a “politicized litmus test.” - https://www.foxnews.com/media/biden-harris-admin-requires-co...
Masters course renamed as academics worry term suggests ‘nationalist narratives’ - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/31/anglo-saxon-canc...
University of South Carolina Requires Students to Affirm Value of ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ - https://freebeacon.com/campus/university-of-south-carolina-r...
"treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity" - Harvard University professor Noel Ignatiev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Ignatiev
Abolish the White Race - Harvard Magazine https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2002/09/abolish-the-white-ra...
Mega-Study Finds That Minorities Don’t Receive Harsher Criminal Punishments, But That Academics Said So Anyway [..] A prior meta-study looking for racial bias in juvenile criminal sentences, for example, also found no statistically significant evidence of racism. Yet the Northeastern University professor who was its lead author, writing in the Journal of Criminal Justice, did not make that finding the paper’s takeaway. Instead, he disputed his own evidence, writing: “However, simple claims that race does not matter are also not supported by existing knowledge,” concluding the situation was “nuanced,” because, in certain sub-categories, the numbers differed slightly by race—even though if racism were actually to blame, such factors would be across the board, and all in one direction. - https://www.dailywire.com/news/mega-study-finds-that-minorit... (If you think that the Daily Wire is unreliable, have a look at the studies themselves then: Study from the title of that article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13591... Study referred to in the quote: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
Gee I wonder why academia is under attack.. must be because they're so principled and objective, speaking truth to power. And the explicitly ideological purges, sorry, hiring decisions, are never referred to as "attacks" - if they're referred to at all.
> n the US, over a third of conservative academics and PhD students have been threatened with disciplinary action for their views
Hmm, what views do you think those might be? Do you think they're views on whether or not the capital gains tax should go up or down by 1%? Or maybe they're... other.. views.
I miss when I believed that conservatism meant making slow but effective changes to society. It was a simpler life.
On a slightly related note, someone linked this article a little while ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Braden
Let me quote from it:
> In 1954, directly confronting the practice of rigid racial segregation of residential neighborhoods, the Bradens assisted an African-American couple, Andrew and Charlotte Wade, who wanted to buy a suburban home but had been unable to do so due to housing discrimination
[...]
> White segregationists immediately lashed out – initially by throwing rocks through the windows of the house, burning a cross in front of it, and firing gunshots into the home – and then bombed the house (setting off explosives under the bedroom of the Wades' young daughter while the home was occupied), driving the Wades out and destroying the home. As a result of their actions, Carl Braden was charged with sedition. Although housing discrimination was illegal, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling specifically on a case in Louisville, Buchanan v. Warley, in 1917, charges were brought against Braden for hatching a communist plot to stir up a race war.
This was in NINTEEN FIFTY FOUR. Like, yes, that is now 70 years ago, but all of our recent presidents and a significant number of politicans are older than that. They were literally alive and party of the society that allowed these things to happen.
I'm pretty sure everyone agrees that things are in fact better now, we've improved on a lot of things, but that really isn't some kind of excuse to pretend that none of these awful things happened OR that they aren't still affecting us right now.
It's not the only thing by any means, but just imagine the difference it makes when your grand parents bought a cheap home in a nice neighborhood that you're now inheriting in 2025 and is worth millions, compared to the black people denied that opportunity, and had to rent this entire time.
(Could every white person buy a nice home in 1950 and leave it to their grandchildren? Obviously not. Were they denied this chance specifically because of their skin color? No.)
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> They're nice because we made them nice
I don't know how to explain to you that white people did not in fact make beaches or beautiful streams or pleasant climates. It seems so obvious.
Also, you were pushed out of your town because a mob burned crosses and shot up your house? Really? Seems unlikely.
It's weird how the people who start talking about racial superiority are always incredibly inferior themselves.
It's reasonable to criticize the excesses of academics. But let's be really clear about what's happening. The vast majority of federal funding for research goes to medical science and the hard sciences. Relatively little goes to the social sciences. The vast majority of the foreign students and researchers are going into STEM fields. So when the Trump administration makes huge cuts to research funding (something like a 40% cut at NIH and even bigger at NASA) there is a huge, huge impact on scientific and medical research that has absolutely nothing to do with any of the topics that you listed. Same with the arrests and threats to foreign students. The tenured left-wing social science professors will be fine. The young Chinese computer scientist will probably just stay in China and China will get the benefit of their work. The young American neuroscientist will just not have a career in the sciences because funding isn't available and so instead of working on curing brain cancer, they'll be working on data analysis for a marketing company.
Cutting research on ovarian cancer because you don't like the fact that the researchers used terms like "women's health" is stupid. Cutting brain cancer research because you don't like the fact that some completely unrelated people at universities are "woke" is even more stupid.
You don't like something that Noel Ignatiev said? OK, fair enough. But do you really want to kill the careers of young apolitical cancer researchers because you don't like something that a guy who died in 2019 said 20+ years ago?
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There is no contradiction between patriotism, nationalism and science or progress. Every time I read this kind of leftist propaganda, I lose hope for the world. The very people who present themselves as intelligent and morally superior fail to recognize the most basic contradictions within themselves: they claim that autocrats and populists sow fear and nostalgia, while they themselves are driven by fear of autocrats and long for utopia, while polarizing and dividing society for neglecting real problems and worries, due to idealization and generalization. It’s simply absurd, and I urge every leftist to stop this. I myself left university because of the moralistic and toxic irrationality and ideology I encountered. Isn't it strange that empirical sciences are not in dispute? It is always the same "circle" - the social justice circle. Social justice is not a scientific category.
Just as the paradoxes of quantum mechanics have no direct consequences for politics, we should not treat the humanities as if they do either. Life is not a question or problem to be solved at the university...
Look, in theory you're fine. In practice, the nationalists are dismantling the scientific research required to study climate change (which is happening, because, you know, carbon heating the atmosphere is basic physics). They are claiming that tax cuts and austerity improve the economy, which is not only counter to economics but has been proven wrong over 50 years. And don't get me started on pollution, healthcare, and sexuality. All of these may be studied but are being actively defunded, because they are perceived as leftist for some reason. Without getting moralistic, I can tell you that my children's future is getting worse every day because of this science denialism. As Yogi Berra once said "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."
And the problem with this whole discussion is that I'm not necessarily trying to defend conservatives, but rather to confront progressives with a reality that might, hopefully, prompt some self-reflection. But any criticism of progressives is immediately projected onto conservatives, making genuine self-awareness impossible. And as long as progressives show no forbearance toward conservatives, conservatives will make them pay for it politically. I can't understand why this is ignored, especially in academia. It's completely beyond me how the free West has turned into this ideological hell — in just 30 years. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11098838-oligarchies-throug...
> There is no contradiction between patriotism, nationalism and science or progress.
In the abstract, no, I don't believe there is a conflict between nationalism and science. However, nationalism and populism can lead to belief systems and policies that are absolutely in conflict with science. For instance, when nationalism means "our universities should only be for our people", that is directly in conflict with science. Most famously, Hitler purged Jews from German universities, after which David Hilbert said "there is no mathematics at Gottingen". The Trump administration is trying to prevent universities from recruiting foreign students and researchers, and even arresting researchers who advocate for ideas they disagree with. Fundamentally this is incompatible with science. Limiting who can do the research to a small percentage of the world's population, and intimidating and persecuting researchers who express unfavored opinions does not produce good science.
But did this "brain drain" throw Germany back into the Stone Age? I'm not too familiar with the historical details, but I don't know of any reports suggesting that Germany was scientifically damaged in the post-war period.
Why do we need to start at the post-war period? Germany under the Nazis was obviously bad at science. This is a pretty obvious consequence of being rewarded for parroting the party line and adherence to dogma over actual investigations.
Because National Socialism has become an irrefutable foundation — and I don't want to discuss that. I actually see it as a step backward that the next generations are now necessarily forced to live and think under its shadow, when they could in fact be thinking free.
The US was decisive in defeating Nazi Germany, in no small part due to its science and mathematics. And if Nazi Germany had held on for longer, the atomic bomb would have defeated them too, with a large number of exiled scientists.
Pre-war, much of the scientific literature was in German, especially chemistry. These days it's all in English.
And now it’s falling apart from within due to ideas from the humanities? Where do we even place the temporal benchmark for progress and why do we call it progress in the first place? Let’s be concrete: Since when has science been driven by the fear of being left behind? And since when has knowledge become the only thing that holds value in a society?
> And now it’s falling apart from within due to ideas from the humanities?
No, absolutely not.
> Since when has science been driven by the fear of being left behind?
That has been one of the major driving forces of science throughout the 20th century, whether by hot or Cold War.
> And since when has knowledge become the only thing that holds value in a society?
It has never need the case, and this statement is a complete straw man.
This is a very strange comment, completely disconnected from any reality that I can recognize.
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You yourself said that you don't know basic 20th century history, and you're calling other people ignorant? Unbelievable.
Because unlike many others, I don't pretend to be all-knowing and all-good. Overconfidence, assertive dominance, and shared convictions often stem from, or lead to, ignorance.
But if you don't believe me, than check out this powerful quote by Bertrand Russell: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11098838-oligarchies-throug...
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