Unthreaded
I see shit is about to start hitting the fan in America;
https://twitchy.com/samj/2025/02/20/operation-whirlwind-trump-n2408657
What I would love to see is the same tactics used against Democrats that they used against Trump, full on armed attack at each of their residences with no quarter given. Give these people back what they meted out to Trump and conservatives across America.
Gonna be lovely watching them all squeal like piggies! :)
Mailman
Robert
I used to enjoy the RS public lectures at the dawn and early days of YouTube.
In my experience it's been dumbed down and some truly very tiresome egotistical narcissists have been given platforms... The march through the institutions incarnate, allied to indulging a procession of truly pompous jerks on the rostrum treating the audience like 3 year olds...
If Dr. Who goes (insh'allah) the BBC Wales crew will be mightily pissed off, it using a large slab of Cardiff city centre along with the grim woke Casualty medical soap.... The BBC's output is now routinely simply awful - I rarely can bear more than 20 seconds of what used to be a reliable travel companion - Radio 4 - it normally ends abruptly with me saying oh, ferfuckssake to myself in the car - or something fruitier prior to jabbing the "OFF" button.
tomo
tomo,
True enough. There are both vultures and jackals, though I think the vultures got there first and attracted the jackals to the carcass.
The Imperial College scandals and Prof. Grimm suicide in particular keep bumping into the fact that knowledge is secondary to money. Much the same as Jo Nova's piece on the Royal Society yesterday (a drive to kick Musk out of the RS because he poses a threat to funding).
I've given up on the Josh Szeps podcast. Way too self-absorbed (calls to mind Little Britain and the only gay boy in the village).
Comments today at Jo Nova's point out that Doctor Who might be for the axe. Honestly didn't know it was still going. I think even the ABC hasn't bothered with the recent ones.
Robert Swan
Robert
I think you're only partially correct about the monetisation and commoditisation of academia - there's certainly money grubbing everywhere - but the cult of managerialism / self serving middle class "professional" apparatchiks is in there - certainly in the UK the indulgence of political activists of the very far left (whatever that is) has been significant with the social soft scientists et al getting to dictate policy for everyone. .
My sometime colleague was stuck in a European university where actual communists were ruling the roost using vocabulary familiar to anyone who's read around the rise of Boshevism and Lenin's thugs - I was agog at the stock phrases from 1917 being used! Any dissent about policy had a troupe of commissars dispatched to enforce ideological rectitude.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/imperial-college-scandals-krzysztof-potempa/
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/stefan-grimm-death-prompts-questions-for-imperial-president/2019747.article
dusty academia....
tomo
tomo,
I'm certainly well out of touch with academia. It does seem a remarkable transformation. My recollections from '70s and '80s was of bookish places where nothing seemed to matter all that much. Research scientists were fascinated with their research and, while office politics might have had a role, there was no deep political ideology.
A guess at the transformation to the present situation:
Governments are bothered by youth unemployment figures.
If only young people would stay in education so the figures will look better.
How about making this or that qualification essential to employment?
People see opportunity for making money from this qualification lark.
Such people elbow out the previous dusty occupants of the chairs.
Universities are thus transformed from boffin storage facilities to ruthless money machines.
Skimmed the Tucker/Benz video. All sounds believable enough. As you say, TC is getting a bit on the loopy side. These interviews that last for hours: I know they're becoming popular, but I think people are confusing length with depth.
Today Jo has more DOGE discoveries. A quick scrut of the social security numbers finds about 2800 associated with people born over 200 years ago, but still being counted as alive. Presumably these could be looked up to see when they last (drew a pension| voted | ...).
It'd be nice to think our governments might take a leaf from their book. From the reaction to Vance's presentation in Munich, I'm guessing they won't feel that way inclined.
Robert Swan
Mike Benz: “USAID is effectively a rent-a-riot operation. That raises questions about the Black Lives Matter protests.”
https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1888054969145651464
TC seems to be wandering off into some slightly crazy stuff these days but Mr. Benz is sound.... his interviews are the tip of an iceberg - the stuff he produces himself is mind-meltingly dense....
tomo
Robert
about 10 years ago I met up with a guy I met first 30 years ago - he was then a principal scientist, we chatted about AGW and ludicrous manipulation of polar data and he was scathing about that and the associated politics but also paranoid about the vindictiveness in lefty (watermelon) academia in allied science fields - persecution was mentioned as a serious threat to professional survival it's not just accepting mediocrity and flim-flammery and taking the money. "I'm not sticking my head over the parapet to get it shot off" was the gist of it (English not first language) Academia is actually quite a nasty business where Manns etc. are two a penny....
tomo
tomo,
Enjoyed the Christine Anderson link, but the Sabine Hossenfelder one was terrific. Gave my quite limber cynicism faculties a good stretching. The anonymous academic's attitude of Sure it's crap, but keep your head down and take the money isn't confined to academia. Could be used as the middle-level bureaucrat's creed.
Took the liberty of posting the link to Jo Nova's today. Give them something worth watching.
I kept another of your interesting links from back in the COVID days: Spurious Correlations. It tickled my funny bone back then and I've occasionally shared it with people when excessive reverence for statistical significance is evident. Revisiting today, somehow the site is less striking that I remember it, but there's one nice addition. Not only do they give you the lock-step relationship of (say) associate degrees in health and number of vending machine repairers in Mississippi, they also give you an AI-generated rationale for the relationship and a scientific paper similarly generated.
Makes the site even more valuable, now discouraging blind acceptance of both statistics and AI.
Robert Swan
Mailman
yeah, quite a spectacle that is.... the German Greens really irritate me - irrelevant hardly covers it. The scripts being used by the EU politicians seem rather obvious... I see TTK is on the case
I see Christine Anderson shouting into the sterile void of fakery that is EU official politics.
Elsewhere Sabine Hossenfelder takes a swipe at the increasingly sad circus of academic science
tomo
Additionally, Europe seems determined to keep the war in the Ukraine going at any cost...especially if that cost is dead Ukrainians.
They blather on about a sustainable and enduring peace but not once did those same people ever demand a sustainable and enduring peace in Gaza.
Boy, if the left didnt have double standards they really wouldn't have any standards at all.