The Destruction of the American Academy ...
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3prosfilaes
The ideological takeover of my university has ruined academic life for anyone who still believes in freedom of thought. ... Gradually, one hire at a time, practitioners of “critical” (i.e. leftist, postmodernist) anthropology, some of them lying about their beliefs during job interviews, came to comprise the department’s most influential clique.
Yep, that's a organization right there that believes in freedom of thought, one that interrogates the beliefs of its employees and bemoans the fact that crimethink managed to escape the interrogation.
Jeff had developed simulation models of the geographic and temporal patterning of urban crime, and had created predictive software that he marketed to law enforcement agencies.
Cf. https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/26/17285058/predictive-policing-predpol-pentagon... for one discussion of one of his programs. The professor was making money selling a product to a public agency; citizens should feel free to be critical of his ideas and his products.
Computer predictions are notorious for encoding our biases and selling them as pure mathematical truth. The Rand program saving NYC money on firefighters is notorious for causing half of NYC to look bombed out in the 1980s; they effectively just removed firestations in poor parts of town (all results that would remove firestations where the Mayor or other powerful people lived were rejected), but with computer justification.
In Spring 2018, the department’s Anthropology Graduate Students Association passed a resolution accusing Jeff’s research of, among other counter-revolutionary sins, “entrenching and naturalizing the criminalization of Blackness in the United States” and calling for “referring” his research to UCLA’s Vice Chancellor for Research, presumably for some sort of investigation. This document contained no trace of scholarly argument, but instead resembled a religious proclamation of anathema.
From the resolution:
Whereas, Professor Brantingham’s research further entrenches and naturalizes the criminalization of Blackness in the United States and converts state racism into mathematical models by employing police reports and demarcated spaces as putatively neutral—though in fact highly racialized—data inputs for a model that generates predictions of criminality;
That seems to encapsulate a scholarly objection. An anthropology professor who can't or won't understand that objection isn't doing much freedom of thought.
(Image of flier organizing a group discussion of why algorithmic policing, including Predpol, is bad) “Predpol” is the name of Jeff’s predictive software. The sponsoring “Institute for Inequality and Democracy” is a far-left UCLA unit whose associate director is Hannah Appel, who also holds a faculty position in anthropology. That is, a professor tried to organize a mob to demand the professional destruction of a colleague.
So now algorithmic policing can't be discussed? I'm missing how he's pro-freedom of thought.
Once again, Jeff is taking taxpayer dollars for a tool that people believe makes policing actively worse. How is silencing objectors pro-freedom or pro-democracy?
Also typical of elite U.S. universities, UCLA is awash in Jew-hatred thinly disguised as anti-Zionism. ... More recently, the Asian-American Studies Department posted to its website a statement accusing Israel of settler colonialism, racial apartheid, and so on.
https://asianam.ucla.edu/2021/05/21/asian-american-studies-departments-statement...
At this moment of historical juncture, we call for the end of evictions of Palestinians from their homes, especially in the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, and in the South Hebron hills. While we commend the ceasefire of airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, which as of May 19th, 2021 have killed hundreds, injured thousands, and displaced over 40,000, we insist that the 15-year-old blockade on Gaza must be lifted immediately. We call for an immediate end to state and settler violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel, including mob lynchings, imprisonments, and the beatings of protestors. We demand an end to the military occupation of the West Bank and the renewed assault against Palestinians who have joined the protest. We implore the Biden administration to halt all funding to Israel until it complies with international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention, and stops its crimes against humanity and human rights violations. We condemn the 735 million dollar weapons sale to Israel that the Biden administration has recently approved.
Again, the professor doesn't seem to be a fan of free speech much. Israel is a mess, and certainly some criticisms of it are anti-Semitic, but he seems to be dismissing completely normal arguments about Israel's actions as Jew-hatred.
I don't approve of everything he complains about, but I'm only getting one side here. I'm certainly not getting the feeling that he loves freedom of speech. Again, criticizing a product being sold to public sector for being actively harmful is the some of the most core free speech in a capitalist democracy.
Yep, that's a organization right there that believes in freedom of thought, one that interrogates the beliefs of its employees and bemoans the fact that crimethink managed to escape the interrogation.
Jeff had developed simulation models of the geographic and temporal patterning of urban crime, and had created predictive software that he marketed to law enforcement agencies.
Cf. https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/26/17285058/predictive-policing-predpol-pentagon... for one discussion of one of his programs. The professor was making money selling a product to a public agency; citizens should feel free to be critical of his ideas and his products.
Computer predictions are notorious for encoding our biases and selling them as pure mathematical truth. The Rand program saving NYC money on firefighters is notorious for causing half of NYC to look bombed out in the 1980s; they effectively just removed firestations in poor parts of town (all results that would remove firestations where the Mayor or other powerful people lived were rejected), but with computer justification.
In Spring 2018, the department’s Anthropology Graduate Students Association passed a resolution accusing Jeff’s research of, among other counter-revolutionary sins, “entrenching and naturalizing the criminalization of Blackness in the United States” and calling for “referring” his research to UCLA’s Vice Chancellor for Research, presumably for some sort of investigation. This document contained no trace of scholarly argument, but instead resembled a religious proclamation of anathema.
From the resolution:
Whereas, Professor Brantingham’s research further entrenches and naturalizes the criminalization of Blackness in the United States and converts state racism into mathematical models by employing police reports and demarcated spaces as putatively neutral—though in fact highly racialized—data inputs for a model that generates predictions of criminality;
That seems to encapsulate a scholarly objection. An anthropology professor who can't or won't understand that objection isn't doing much freedom of thought.
(Image of flier organizing a group discussion of why algorithmic policing, including Predpol, is bad) “Predpol” is the name of Jeff’s predictive software. The sponsoring “Institute for Inequality and Democracy” is a far-left UCLA unit whose associate director is Hannah Appel, who also holds a faculty position in anthropology. That is, a professor tried to organize a mob to demand the professional destruction of a colleague.
So now algorithmic policing can't be discussed? I'm missing how he's pro-freedom of thought.
Once again, Jeff is taking taxpayer dollars for a tool that people believe makes policing actively worse. How is silencing objectors pro-freedom or pro-democracy?
Also typical of elite U.S. universities, UCLA is awash in Jew-hatred thinly disguised as anti-Zionism. ... More recently, the Asian-American Studies Department posted to its website a statement accusing Israel of settler colonialism, racial apartheid, and so on.
https://asianam.ucla.edu/2021/05/21/asian-american-studies-departments-statement...
At this moment of historical juncture, we call for the end of evictions of Palestinians from their homes, especially in the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, and in the South Hebron hills. While we commend the ceasefire of airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, which as of May 19th, 2021 have killed hundreds, injured thousands, and displaced over 40,000, we insist that the 15-year-old blockade on Gaza must be lifted immediately. We call for an immediate end to state and settler violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel, including mob lynchings, imprisonments, and the beatings of protestors. We demand an end to the military occupation of the West Bank and the renewed assault against Palestinians who have joined the protest. We implore the Biden administration to halt all funding to Israel until it complies with international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention, and stops its crimes against humanity and human rights violations. We condemn the 735 million dollar weapons sale to Israel that the Biden administration has recently approved.
Again, the professor doesn't seem to be a fan of free speech much. Israel is a mess, and certainly some criticisms of it are anti-Semitic, but he seems to be dismissing completely normal arguments about Israel's actions as Jew-hatred.
I don't approve of everything he complains about, but I'm only getting one side here. I'm certainly not getting the feeling that he loves freedom of speech. Again, criticizing a product being sold to public sector for being actively harmful is the some of the most core free speech in a capitalist democracy.
4lriley
Just speaking of the Gaza Strip…..you would think that there might be a better solution for its 2 million inhabitants than just turning it into an open air prison blockaded by air, land and sea with shortages of potable water, medicine and food etc. and the almost impossible restrictions on its residents to leave freely and those few that do to return.
It would be nice if the govt. that oversees this would do a rethink. If we’re talking about closed minded here I think this policy of Israel’s is a great example of that.
It would be nice if the govt. that oversees this would do a rethink. If we’re talking about closed minded here I think this policy of Israel’s is a great example of that.
52wonderY
In a truly on-the-nose representation of what Republicanism wants America to become, libraries in at least 28 Houston public schools are being repurposed into "disciplinary centers."
No, that's not satire. ABC13 has a story on the reform ordered by the brand-new, state-appointed superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, and it consists of eliminating librarian and media specialist positions at the schools and turning the libraries into detention rooms.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/27/2183655/-Houston-school-libraries-are...
No, that's not satire. ABC13 has a story on the reform ordered by the brand-new, state-appointed superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, and it consists of eliminating librarian and media specialist positions at the schools and turning the libraries into detention rooms.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/27/2183655/-Houston-school-libraries-are...
6lriley
>5 2wonderY: It's kind of like a contest between DeSantis and Abbott to see who is the most reactionary and fascist. This kind of shit keeps happening in their states.
7brone
For some time now the governing Democratic party has imposed on the American people the new state religion the globalist cult, with its climate idiocy, woke dogmas, condemnation and cancel culture its priests are in the WHO, WEF, Vatican curia, parliaments, and white House. it even has its own prophets of gloom and doom, a religion in all respects, encompassing those who practice it and publicly confess it. It adapts laws and inspires education. The Davos Sanhedrin demands that all citizens behave according to this new morality defined as ex cathedra by the elite. This religion even has commandments. Thou shalt not contest the psychopandemic, thou shalt not criticize the vaccine, thou shalt not argue groundless climate alarms, thou shalt not oppose evidence of Nato's, Neo-cons, forever war monger's and Marxist's provocations in the Ukraine. Thou shalt not ask for investigations of corruption in any of our globalist churches, thou shalt standby while your children are groomed and corrupted by LGQBT++ obscenities. You must give up part of your anesthesia to reduce your carbon footprint and "save the planet" this is but one of the penances you will gladly do. This new religion tries to mass convert by forcing things like masks (which are useless) Of course we have to offer ourselves up publicly to the state by submitting to questionable vaccines a sort of "baptism" in the faith of globalist initiation into its worship. This religion like many of its forebearers demands human sacrifice, bloody ones, abortion, euthanasia, they are required for the common good we can't have an overcrowded planet or be burdened with social security. Mutilations are required for those who profess the rite of gender doctrine. The acceptance of the holy global church is not optional all must conform....."It forced all people, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to be given a stamped image on their right hand or forehead, no one could buy or sell except for those who had the stamped image, that is, the name of the beast or the number that corresponds to his name" (Rev 13: 16-17) ....JMJ....
9prosfilaes
>7 brone: I've got to wonder, who did you expect to convince with that? Or even engage with that?
10lriley
I kind of get it. God's messenger on Earth is looking at his 3rd and 4th indictment and they're even adding more charges to his second indictment. Meadows is taking on the role of Iscariot and Rudy's denying this shitbird (he's even admitted to lying about the election) and it's not a wonder that all the faithful are seeing dark omens because there's a crucifixion for sure on the horizon.....so get ready for Vesuvius to blow, earthquakes and floods and plagues of locusts and all kinds of such shit. Demons will be afoot so lock your doors. board up your windows, load up the blunderbuss and keep a fire going at all times in the fireplace.
11brone
Ours is an age of spiritual aridity, dissolution, a "dark night" of history. And the Church and anyone with any sensitivity to culture can see for himself that we are "the hollow men" in Eliot's poem, like stiched dolls walking mindless among discarded masks, needles, and crack pipes. Nobody in his right mind would want to be "original" or "innovative" in this velvet Marxist World. Which is why there is every reason for hope, because the saints all say that nights like these are the darkest before dawn; these days are but the stages of growth, The great Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins says it best, " OH! through the last lights of the black west went, morning, at the brown brink eastward springs because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with AH! bright wings....JMJ....JMJ....
12John5918
>11 brone: Ours is an age of spiritual aridity, dissolution, a "dark night" of history
You omitted to cite the source of this opening quote. It can be found at The Catholic Thing, which describes itself as "a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary", although one might question that description as it appears to be a platform for right wing political ideology rather than Catholic thought.
You omitted to cite the source of this opening quote. It can be found at The Catholic Thing, which describes itself as "a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary", although one might question that description as it appears to be a platform for right wing political ideology rather than Catholic thought.
13lriley
>12 John5918: Speaking of the End of the Times of Nations that your link references.....it seems to have easily bypassed the lives of all the poets therein mentioned. Might mentioned that a number of them were upper class elitists. But speaking as an older person (65) the world is always going somewhere where we are not and if you feel less relevant as you get older that's kind of the history of a world that's technologically moving at a faster and faster rate.....that those poets, writers etc. would hardly recognize the world as it's become....will we could say the same for the so called founders (or constitution writers) of the nation and other countries the same. I mean Hopkins, Housman, Hardy and some of the others were Brits.....(could almost call T.S. that too) a country who we shrugged off to get to the point of our constitution writers and ironically many of our constitution happy conservatives seem at the same time seem to yearn for that kind of monarchical rule.....some magical time and place where everyone knows their place and nothing ever changes.