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I'm an adjunct prof/lecturer in Canada and our universities - because they don't have involved alumni - (no sports programs to speak of) are better at staying out of the media glare. I have been suspended since Nov. 27 of last year for responding to a Pakistani 'academic' on LI and saying I stood with Israel and Hamas are Nazis. Unfortunately, I set off a very influencial Palestinian professor who is well connected to Guelph and Humber administration and has the V Provost signing a claim against me. His anti-semitism? He posts at least five times a day and his top hits are Jews are not human, exterminate Israel, Jews are satanists, Jews shot all their hostages, there are no tunnels in Gaza, genocide etc. The HRC against him was rejected, his against me has left me banned, banished, slandered, libeled by both faculty and staff, I have had no chance to offer a defence. Their investigator is another Jew hating zealot. Today, I received what seems to be the pre-sacking payout, a 14 year career finished. Yes, at the U of Guelph anti semitism is the baseline, saying you stand with Israel will get you a HRC and get you fired. Hamas University or the University of Guelph (they prefer the latter) is breaking new ground! There are far more Muslim students than Jewish at my Uni and the administration has granted them all anonymity to fire vitriol at me, admin have encouraged verbal attacks at me, they have surrendered to the mob and the few Jewish faculty and students have become very good and hiding avoiding attention. I am not officially canned but they stopped paying me, cancelled my courses, ended my benefits, and disabled all my passwords, I am not allowed to even look at my paystubs. The Jewish and Free Speech Community is not happy but they are keeping their powder dry until I am officially sacked. Then we will see. This is Canada.

https://www.freedomtoffend.com/p/to-the-chanting-boy-wearing-a-keffiyeh?r=iy2ds. https://www.freedomtoffend.com/p/i-am-being-thrown-in-the-slowly-grinding?lli=1

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Hey man, sorry to hear that but your sacking doesn't mean the end of your career. You're better off out of that environment and looking for somewhere that can better use your talents. You might discover that your best career days are still ahead of you.

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Academia really doesn't prep you for anything outside of academia, sadly; this is why everyone clings to their job so tightly. He could be one of these bloggers who crunches statistics if he's got quantitative chops.

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Hey, I'm in the UPenn encampment, and I've been reading your blog for a few months (came from ACX). I don't speak for anyone else in the encampment, but since I want to assume you wrote this in good faith, I have to note that some things you said are just not true:

- No one (reasonable) is concerned about COVID anymore. The masks are only to protect students' identities. Police and agitators continually shove phones and cameras into the encampment to identify faces, and some of us have had their entire family's background researched and published. Yes, there are some paranoid types at the encampment, because protesting is a honeypot for those kinds of people, and those people will wear masks. Very few do otherwise.

- Hamas committed unspeakable atrocities. I can't say that everyone in the camp will say this out of context, but I think people who won't should leave, and many of the people spouting the kinds of stupid shit that news networks pick up are not Penn students. Unfortunately, anti-Israel sentiment has always been a honeypot for antisemites, but let's shake hands: Republicans aren't racist simply because they're a honeypot for racists, and protesters aren't antisemites just because there's a common hot-button issue at the moment. (And let me reiterate that, statistically, an obscenely huge part of the encampment is Jewish.)

- Related to both of the points I've made so far, the protests are not "open displays of sympathy for Hamas." Again, let's shake hands: you're not a secret racist just because you occasionally mention IQ, and the encampments aren't secretly racist because they take issue with their tuition funding bombs that have so far killed 2% of an entire region's population(!) and counting(!). I'm not advocating for any particular solution; I'm there solely because wars should not involve this unimaginable level of suffering for innocent families, no matter how just the cause. (And if they must, I cannot consent to my tax dollars and tuition paying for it.) Personally, if the university simply disclosed whether they invest in anything directly related to selling weapons to Israel and committed to reducing those investments over some reasonable time, I'd leave, and (in my experience) many share a similar sentiment. Yes, there are unreasonable people who don't understand economics, but who cares? You're not arguing against them; trust me, you're smart, and your time is far too valuable for that. They're just clickbait. That's fine, but I respect you less every time I read a paragraph I expect to contain an informative point and get . . . this instead.

Last, let me note that this all relates to classic stuff that neoliberals have been dealing with since the dawn of time. Frédéric Bastiat said in 1845 that “the worst thing that can happen to a good cause is, not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.” What you're doing by reiterating these misleading accounts of (very hateable!) people, conflating them with the rest of us, does no one good. Additionally, if universities do crack down on peaceful protests, it sets a dangerous precedent for unconditional free speech, and I will defend unconditional free speech to the grave. (Incidentally, I was excited for leftists to wake up and start defending free speech again once establishments tried to silence discussion of Palestine, but unfortunately that hasn't happened yet.) I'm surprised that reasonable libertarians/neoconservatives are not outraged that their tax dollars are being used to fuel an unimaginably destructive and wasteful military campaign overseas, and I have to think that these unfavorable accounts of the "culture" of the encampments contribute to this distortion of reason. So go ahead, skewer these people who are admittedly very fun to skewer. But once that's been milked dry, there are some reasonable beliefs across the aisle. Not everyone in these encampments is insane.

P.S.: yes, this is a new account; sorry but I don't trust you all yet <3

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OK couple issues:

1) Your tuition is not funding the war in Gaza, in fact if anything it's the opposite. The college investment portfolio generates returns that subsidizes operational costs, so to the extent those investments include anything related to the Israeli war machine, you're not paying for the war the war is paying for you.

2) US tax dollars are being used to bribe Israel into being at least somewhat lenient towards Palestinian civilians. If Israel wasn't getting so much weaponry thrown at them, no way they would have opened any crossings for humanitarian aid. So, careful what you wish for with getting the funding cut off. That just eliminates the incentive for Israel to hold back (which is what they're doing).

3) Leftists by this point are fully committed to the punching up/punching down view of ethics, so free speech for oppressed groups is good but free speech for privileged groups is bad. Leftists can't defend free speech or defend anything else as intrinsically good, because the moral value of X is entirely relative to whether they think X is currently being used to punch up or punch down. See https://www.thefp.com/p/abigail-shrier-there-are-two-sets for where we're at. As the saying goes, if leftists didn't have double standards they'd have no standards at all.

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Thanks for engaging on the merits (really). I think we agree on a lot. Responding to your points, though:

(1) Yes, I understand that the war is making Penn money, but that's irrelevant. I'm on financial aid, so this has nothing to do with my self-interest, but even if it did, do you trust such a sprawling bureaucracy to change pricing based on operational costs? They'd probably hire a few more DEI czars, pay the president more, and call it a day. (We already have more than the GDP of Jamaica.) And to your point that it's actually the other way around, I don't think that's the full picture: investment hands a company capital, and that capital means more weapons right now, rather than amortized business as usual. Plus, we host a few companies directly on campus that directly produce autonomous weapons for Israel (e.g. Ghost Robotics). So, yeah, maybe some other universities don't exert such gravity over the industry, but I think we do.

(2) I would have disagreed with you a few days ago, since the White House walks back everything Biden says about conditioning support, but the Rafah comments sounded different. Maybe you're right. We'll see. At any rate, if that really were our goal this whole time, we've done an inexcusably bad job so far. Who has to unilaterally airdrop in food and build a dock to clean up a . . . job well done?

(3) I mean, I roughly agree. My whole point is that people who really think this way aren't thinking straight and don't matter to what *you* should think on this issue. When you use them as a foil, be aware that you're using them as a foil, not as the actual alternate opinion you should be considering.

Again, thanks for being eminently reasonable. I appreciate that you took the time to write a reply.

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Not sure it's a "foil" so much as the tone from the top

https://twitter.com/jonathanchait/status/1788196842875838675

Also, if you're on financial aid, then the returns/income generated by investments definitely subsidizes your tuition, so yes it's the other way around.

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I appreciate the reference, but I'm not sure why Jon Chait would have better data than someone on the ground (not literally anymore, since riot police forcibly evicted us this morning and arrested 33 students, but still in contact). Possibly the reason these encampments "never" criticize Hamas is that we do, but news networks and articles don't print the fine print; they have every incentive to print only the most inflammatory comments. Sure, I think we should do so more often, but not every speech can have a disclaimer longer than the speech itself; sometimes you have to cut to the chase on focus on who's suffering *now.* I absolutely condemn Hamas's actions, and anyone who expresses sympathy toward Hamas within the encampment is (out of their minds and) asked to leave. I can't speak for Columbia, but again, if they really are insane, fine; say they're insane, ignore them, and try to steelman the view instead. (Not for me, but so you can maintain the most informed view of the world you can.)

About the financial aid part, the TL;DR is that universities evaluate how much you "should" be paying and ask for exactly that number. So I have to disagree: it doesn't affect my tuition at all. And we've seen that it doesn't even affect people not on financial aid: tuition has made record jumps despite a booming endowment. I don't see how you can say it's the other way around without addressing my points about funding via investing capital. My aim is to reduce the suffering in both Israel and Gaza as effectively as possible (far more than I want to debate for its own sake), and so if there's a better way, I'll do that. If we're really not funding the war, show me, and I'll drop it, but I think it's clearly true that we are.

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Certainly up here in Canada (and in most if not all of the US) the encampments tend to be organized by groups like Samidoun and Students for Justice in Palestine, who support Hamas. That's not to say every student protester necessarily reads the fine print of who they are hanging out with, but all the rhetoric about "go back to Poland", "from the river to the sea", "globalize the intifada", "glory to the martyrs", etc. happens far too often to be written off as outliers.

The difference between investing capital and donating capital is an investment is supposed to generate returns. I'm only investing $1000 of capital in order to get $1050 of capital back. So over the long term the net capital flows aren't "subsidizing" the war effort. To the extent any investments are tangentially related to the war effort, those investments would be expected to generate returns that flow back to the school in excess of the capital invested.

As for the most effective way to reduce suffering in both Israel and Gaza, that would be to push for a speedy Hamas surrender. Israel cannot, will not, and should not tolerate a group like that on their borders, anymore than the US was willing to tolerate the Empire of Japan in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor. The longer Hamas resists surrender, the more the suffering will continue.

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I appreciate your points, but I never mentioned "donating," and there's no need to rehash the basics of investment: I think we both agree that Penn is successfully profiting (in the long term) by investing capital (in the short term). What I'm arguing is that the long-term benefits don't matter (because Penn is bloated and university pricing does not depend on operating costs) and the short-term leverage is precisely what counts (because it means more weapons right now). I want to clarify that this is what I mean and that I understand the proverbial Econ 101 :)

The Penn encampment is not a subsidiary of any group, and if any group tries to claim us, there's no reason for you to believe them. We of course share a cause with many groups, just as this Substack is similar to some others, but an attack on one is not an attack on all, and it's sloppy reasoning to pretend that it is. There is no fine print to read. Yes, there are a lot of stupid people saying a lot of stupid crap, because (as I noted in my initial comment) protests attract those kinds of people. There's nothing special about this encampment that makes people more stupid than usual, and any protest will have stupid people at a more-than-outlier rate. The idea that any group with a sufficient quota of idiots can be shut down is dangerous and irresponsible, and, if we really took that seriously, I don't think any political group would last long. This is exactly why the reason that ostensibly small-government people are fully okay with sending riot police into universities: it's okay when the group is funny and hateable, but you don't realize that they'll come for you next.

Yes, Hamas is Bad, and they should surrender. They won't. They're either going to surrender or die, and so, tragically, they're taking the second option and using the general population as human shields. This is awful, and it makes Israel's job incredibly hard. I realize this. However, Israel is fully leaning into this excuse and killing civilians at an absolutely unbelievable rate. The most tragic part of this is that these civilians have no exit, and the overwhelming majority are far too young to have ever supported Hamas when they first grabbed power (and they've never held an election since). These people are going through experiences that I can't possibly imagine, even as we're writing this debate, and some Gazans will make the mistake of blaming these experiences on innocent Israelis. Many of those people will then become the next wave of terrorists themselves. The only way to stop this cycle is to end the "open-air prison" of the Gaza Strip by making a good-faith effort at an agreement (and, yes, Hamas is dropping the ball on this right now). So, yes, Hamas should surrender, but you know very well that that will never happen, and as so many people say to us in the encampment, let's not make unreasonable demands. The band-aid fix that will nonetheless do the most good *right now* is to stop the unrestricted flow of weapons.

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I have been assured repeatedly that if one Nazi sits down at a table with ten normal people and they do nothing, there are now eleven Nazis. By that argument, you are a Hamasnik a hundred times over, regardless of your whimpering protests to the contrary. If you really believed what you say, you would be pushing the Hamasniks out of the camp. You do not, so you do not.

In conclusion, everybody hates you. Go home and think about where your life went so wrong.

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The fundamental problem here isn't what you think you're defending; it's what the actual effects are likely to be. Hamas's strategy is to deliberately maximize civilian casualties to solicit western sympathy. When you set up your encampments (even in a hypothetical perfect world where everyone is as peaceful and moral as you claim to be), you validate and incentivise that strategy. And since it's that strategy that's responsible for most of the deaths (and not something avoidable Israel could do - Israel really is keeping civilian casualties historically low by urban warfare standards and there's not much they could change short of giving up and letting Hamas stay in power, which is a non-option). So in practice, your protest encourages the war *even under ideal assumptions*.

(And of course the real protests aren't that ideal - there's plenty of outright antisemitism and genocidal antizionism involved, even if you personally don't support that).

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You shouldn't trust people ideologically opposed to you. Paranoia is wise here.

Now to your comments:

1. That's pretty much what I thought about masks. The COVID thing was a nice way to take advantage of what everyone on all sides has known for a while: masks hide your identity. There are some older people arguing that part of the point of civil disobedience was to bear the risks of supporting your cause openly, but nobody seems to take that seriously anymore. I'm cynical, so to me it just makes sense.

2. I'm not sure Hamas atrocities are really the point here. Opponents are mostly conservatives who don't like leftist campus protesters, who have been the 'tip of the spear'...er, revolutionary vanguard since at least the sixties. It's not too hard to see a bunch of kids shutting down a campus and think 'there they go again, get them!'. Net-for-net they are probably helping Trump, though from what I read that's a common problem leftists have to face. (That and a lot of college kids just like to protest--it's part of college like going to parties and hooking up.)

Now neoliberalism/classical liberalism is one of the most Jewish parts of the political quadrant (or at least the right half of it), not to mention neoconservatism, so I think you have a lot of people engaging in either tribalism or going along with their friends. Right-wingers of Jewish ancestry are overjoyed to be on the anti-leftist side and not have to apologize for the actions of Chuck Schumer and Michelle Goldberg for the millionth time. I'd know, I am one :) The *supporters* of the protests on the right are largely antisemites who just want to see Israel taken down. Conservatives don't really care about human rights; that's more of a lefty thing. It's about God, family, country, and tradition. This orientation exists in every civilization and acts as a brake on social change (IMHO).

3. You are definitely a free thinker, I have to say. My impression was leftists would excommunicate you for even *reading* Hanania. And I don't think anyone expected leftists to defend free speech since about 2014; it's our speech versus your speech, for any value of 'our' and 'your' that's relevant, all over the map now. You had a few Bari Weiss types who opposed the recent conservative 'don't say gay' laws, but even they ran around to do everything to support Israel.

Honestly, do a 23andme test and pick your side. Or you can do like me and mouth the appropriate official platitudes until you've saved enough to FIRE.

And whatever you do longterm, don't let ideology run your life. For every closeted gay conservative there's a feminist who puts off childbearing until too late. Leaders come, leaders go, but they all take your chickens.

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"Additionally, if universities do crack down on peaceful protests, it sets a dangerous precedent for unconditional free speech"

Blocking educational facilities and preventing people from getting an education is beyond the scope of free speech

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Waiting for “government to act” will be slow, and patchwork in nature, depending on the color of the state. As you note, even in a red state, how big an item is “idiot protest camps on college lawns” on the radar of average voters?

It’s the soft influence where I think the effects will be felt. Once the real world stops giving preference and deference to graduates of “elite schools”…they will no longer be perceived as elite. The threat of the potential loss of that status will be the bigger impetus for change. And it’s great that places like U of Chicago are leading that charge, and MIT is turning things around. It’s not going to fix things entirely, but hopefully will rein it back from “abject moron” level to merely “generically stupid”.

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I don't see a realistic alternative to Universities in the STEM arena - the depth of sequential classes to master will bar all but the most persistent and gifted auto-didact. My youngest daughter did her MS in structural engineering and my son did Business - MIS and then his MS in MIS - Data Security, both at the University of Washingon. The engineering is more of a defined field and my daughter did her PE license. But in neither case can you easily start as an assistant and learn on the job. I did a Physics degree and worked as a research physcist before doing my Engineering PhD and moved into computer security on my own - establishing my creds by publishing articles in the area, doing a few startups, and at this point almost 40 years experience in the field.

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Not all STEM is the same. Computing is full of people who are fully self taught. A CS degree is of no particular value in this industry as nobody trusts them (you get interviewed the same regardless of credentials), and you don't really need universities to learn. As you said, you moved to a very different field just through your own efforts.

So that leaves science, eng and maths. A lot of science can be self taught as well and there aren't many jobs there anyway. The few companies that genuinely need scientists could train them (e.g. pharma, finance). Maybe only stuff like engineering needs it and they could have dedicated eng schools.

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Agree with you in computing, having grown up with a lot of guys who became programmers. They regard their CS degrees as mostly useless theory; they learned to code on their own starting in middle school, and then further improved on the job.

>companies...could train them

Companies could train everyone, but in some cases you would need enforceable contracts that basically amount to indentured servitude in order for them to get their investment back. It would probably be a net gain for society if we could work this out, but some people would be losers under this system, might not be a way to make it popular enough to survive.

The thing about science is the main purpose of the whole enterprise isn't to train scientists and send them out into the world, it's to conduct research. Some research is highly marketable, but there probably is such a thing as "basic research" that has positive externalities and isn't profitable for companies to pursue, and it's probably good to have something like a university to conduct it and apprentice undergrads into it. At which point, you might as well attach it to an engineering school since any future scientist or mathematician will take many of the same classes, and now you've reinvented the tech school.

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There used to be this thing called "apprenticeships" in which people were trained... and they were often indeed enforceable contracts. Of course, you had to pay to become an apprentice. Nowadays, you have to pay far more to attend university and not learn nearly as much. It's as though there is a solution just waiting to be applied.

The biggest problem, I think, is that most business are really bad at training workers. Often "training" means paying for employees to attend a couple of courses a year and then not having them apply those skills.

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Yes, I thought I used the word "apprenticeship" but I left it out. My point is there will probably be both good and bad actors in the system. My prediction is that someone, somewhere, would be (or feel) exploited and say, "This is like a college from hell that I can't drop out of!" Which results in regulatory safeguards that will kill the system.

Training employees might be something companies are worse at the less specialized the work, I'm not sure. If Coca-Cola makes its middle-managers go to a course called "Principles of Leadership", yeah, probably useless.

One of my programmer friends had a company send him to some specialized course to learn an obscure programming language. It sounded like it was time well-spent.

I work in finance, and the boutique investment bank where I started my career had a pair of Associates give us all an Excel course for 5 afternoons. Which might not sound like much time, but it was easily more valuable to my career and my productivity than any semester-long class I took in college aside from Accounting 101. Excel is something that traditional schools are very bad at teaching. Probably all software. There's a group called Training the Street that specializes in this now; I think the Associates who taught the class were mostly regurgitating TTS material.

Of course, in my industry we also have the autodidact route, the CFA designation, which I earned. My company paid for the 3 tests and the materials, which IIRC was maybe $500 per test. Also much cheaper than college, and more useful, but not something everyone can do.

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The key is that programming is a craft, and much of it involves working on code written tests so by a number of previous coders. It isn’t learned by sitting in lectures and handing in assignments on tiny (by professional standards) projects that you always write from scratch. By far the best way to learn it is on-the-job training with motivated mentors.

Few companies seem to understand this.

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Programming is a craft, but CS / CE is not. Most people do the 'craft' work, but a lot of the issues related to security, reliability, high assurance, side channels, .... require a background far deeper than straightforward programming. The LLM's will have interesting impacts on practice.

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The fact is, there’s absolutely no reason why motivated STEM educators and students need to tie themselves to “quality” American universities. There’s probably 20 million young adults on this planet who can learn a great deal, e.g., from J.D. Jackson’s Into to Quantum Electrodynamics while having no opinion on the history of Palestinians and Israelis.

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Companies are NOT interested in long term education - they pay the universities for that. All you need to do is to split Econ, math, and the hard sciences from the arts and sciences, engineering is already in its own college, and in some places, programming / CS is as well. I am reading geometric algebra on my own at this point and I tend to read astrophysics preprints for amusement.

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Companies are literally legally forbidden in the US from directly screening applicants for general intelligence. Thanks to Griggs v. Duke, they've been using college as a proxy for decades. A far lengthier, far more expensive replacement which has only diminished in value since we made it the only way you could screen for g without getting sued.

It's high past time we see this absurd law challenged.

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I agree. As a design engineer in my early career

In energy systems, there is no way to master the underlying theory and math on one’s own. One has to go through formal education which means college. Which in turn means one has to put up with a certain amount of leftist force feeding. Which could create a backlash.

An anecdote. I was recently visiting a nephew who moved to Texas a few years back. He invited me to attend a poker game with 3 of his buddies. All in their mid ‘20’s. All STEM types. I was shocked at their level of hate and vitriol for DEI and leftism. (I’m more of a libertarian type, have some sympathy for social causes, and see the Palestinians as victims of victims) What also surprised me was how vocal they were in their workplaces and would push back at work when there was any hint of DEI stuff.

They were generally indifferent to the Gaza mess. But here’s the key. They knew it was deeply complicated, lots of history. An enormous amount of false information flying around, and lots of lying by all sides. Since they knew the issues were really complicated and tangled, their view then was that the protesters were just a general bunch of anti US lefties and they all should be sent to Russia to test out their protesting skills. In summary, because these guys had bad experiences in college with activist censorious students and some professors, they just assumed the student protestors were just “mini totalitarians” and should be “stepped on like bugs”. I was surprised. Now an evening with 4 guys does not constitute a movement. But it is an interesting data point and may be a warning to the Gaza and leftist protestors that their support is very thin. And further, the leftist orthodoxy that is in the campus water may be creating an allergic reaction in a significant student subset to all things leftist, even if it is for a good cause.

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"For conservatives and moderates, it’s easy to be disillusioned by recent anti-Israel protests at universities across the country. For many of us, the moral outrage we feel..."

The moral outrage we feel should be squarely focused on Israel's terrorism against Palestinians & other neighboring states over the last 76 years (& before). You shouldn't for one minute assume all conservatives & moderates give automatic. support to the Jewish state's present genocidal war on Gaza or for the decades of occupation & siege which preceded it; nor support America's blanket backing for it. While It is easy to be disillusioned by the continued backing of our government for Israel's endless war crimes, the recent anti-Israel protests at universities (& elsewhere) across the country, give some small cause for hope of future change. For many of us, the moral stand these brave protesters are making is putting their universities' best foot forward.

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Go trip on your shoelaces while trying to suicidebomb a pizza restaraunt, Mahmoud. Your depraved, backwards compatriots will be the death of human civilization if they're allowed to get their way.

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Right after wasting 7 years of my life getting a PhD

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I really do think some form of civil disobedience will be needed to make significant gains against wokeness. I have an idea as to how it could be started, and shall outline such in a later piece of mine.

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I am wondering how somebody from the other side of the culture wars might react to this article. What about the following? "This article reveals the right's acknowledgment of using free market ideology as a tool to destroy public goods and to strengthen the grip that corporate power has over us the people." What would be the best reply to this accusation?

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DEI has ruined the reputation and value of universities. Republicans haven't done much more than notice, and even that they're only now doing at a very late stage when the problem has gotten very bad

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Republicans are generally incompetent bums. They’re the Washington Capitals to the Democrats’ Globetrotters. Hopefully as time rolls on a few courageous non-idiots like Hanania will sacrifice any guaranteed $300k salaries for standing up for something besides Amazon and Walmart.

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I agree that the focus on the Republican Party is outputting. But I certainly do not agree that DEI is a public good.

Our society is based on the private sector. I studied Marxism for many years. If you start with the assumption that Capitalism is bad, then DEI makes sense. If we had a true Marxist model to compare against, it might be possible to address that issue. But whether it is a private sector firm or the public sector, they want people who are ready to contribute almost immediately. I think that is the answer.

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DEI is a quasi-Marxist solution to the reality of unequal distribution of abilities between races and sexes. Hence why prior socialist states constantly waged terror on overachieving classes. Especially Jews. If you believe all peoples are about equal in average ability, all peoples should be represented in all fields roughly in proportion to their percentage of the population.

Now, many prior socialist states were still less radical on this than modern DEI zombies, given that they were almost uniformally more sexually conservative than the present-day Occident. But this is hardly a completely new development. MLK put it best in his last non-posthumously-published book: “If a city has a 30% Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30% of the jobs in any particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas.” Which is absolutely the logical position if there were indeed no average cognitive differences between races, but there are, so any attempt to gain equality of outcome must punish overachievement, compromise standards, and reward unfitness in perpetuity.

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Hard to disagree with you but abilities are not stagnant. I am not suggesting that the World is Lamarckian. But we know that some groups go through an evolutionary cycle when they immigrate.

But even lower achieving groups need to be accommodated. It is not good for society if they are not accommodated.

A better solution than DEI is to increase the supply. Then you do not need to ration it.

It is better to assist people than to use a system like DEI to spread the supply around.

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Except the worst-performing group, the reason why DEI was created in the first place, is the one we in America have had here for nearly the longest.

Also, training is not an unlimited resource. It costs time and money to teach someone how to be anything, and said costs increases relative to the complexity of the job. So the ideal should be to maximize the degree to which those whom you expend these limited resources on will be able to live up to the expense. Which we have, but said results are uneven between races and sexes, so they're attacked with jihadistic fervor, especially by social-justice leftists.

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Haven't we had plenty of Marxist models against which to compare? What makes one of them a "true" Marxist model?

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Richard, Explain to me how Hamas's killing is any worse than Israel's killing. In fact my scorecard shows that since Oct 7, the IDF has killed 35,000+ and counting. What does your scorecard show for how many Hamas has killed since then?

Hamas is just fighting back against the Israeli colonialist predators. Tell me why you think that's wrong.

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