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Nils Gilman Profile picture
@nils_gilman
Aug 3, 2020 • 3 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
Just as the most effective form of censorship is to keep people illiterate, so the most effective form of disenfranchisement is keep people from being counted. washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump…
“These appointees reportedly have been spending their time in senior strategy meetings questioning the need for Census operations that focus on the hardest to reach communities… casting doubt on whether they truly want to count everyone.” sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/m…
Two and a half years ago I wrote about how corrupting government statistics, and the Census specifically, was a central strategy for gaining dictatorial control over shared reality. Onward and upwards with the #EpistemicCrisis: the-american-interest.com/2018/04/17/dic…

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More from @nils_gilman

Nils Gilman Profile picture
Jul 19
I think most of my friends in academia haven't really wrapped their head around what is coming down the pike if Trump gets a second term.

A brief 🧵
First off: universities are likely to be in the direct cross-hairs of a second Trump administration, aiming to defund the perceived power center of the “cultural Marxist” opposition to Trumpian neo-Know-Nothingism.

Think what Chris Rufo is doing in Florida, at national scale.
Stripping NGOs with more than $5B in assets of their nonprofit status would be a first step—this would be popular in several ideological quarters—but the larger strategy would be to perform a “cashectomy” on universities, especially humanities and social science departments.
Read 6 tweets
Nils Gilman Profile picture
Mar 24
There is no discipline that hates itself more than anthropology (and rightly so). A brief thread:
The origin of the problem began with what was at first a crucial and good idea: that all human groups are equally imbued with “culture” that defines and integrates those who belong to it. But this initially good idea over time developed an unfortunate consequence…
Cultural relativism, as it became known, was effective at pricking the (often racist) idea that only some people (mostly, the upper classes of northwest Europe) had capital-C Culture, whereas everyone else was culturally inferior — a barbarian or a savage.
Read 8 tweets
Nils Gilman Profile picture
Sep 22, 2023
It’s really not hard to define “woke” — it’s “social justice”-focused culture warriors, e.g. people who seek to disrupt the hegemony of patriarchal, heteronormative, white-centered institutions — especially by policing cultural codes of various sorts. lareviewofbooks.org/article/critic…
By contrast, the central focus of “the left” is about *promoting economic leveling.*

Both left and woke aim to de-privilege incumbents — which is why the party of incumbent power restoration often conflates them — but their social ontologies of privilege are radically different.
The concept of “intersectionality” was invented quite precisely to bring these orthogonal political ontologies of oppression and liberation into, if not alignment, then at least productive, collaboration-oriented dialog. YMMV on how well this has worked.
Read 4 tweets
Nils Gilman Profile picture
Sep 3, 2023
What are "planetary politics"? A thread:
The basic units of politics frame who belongs to a political community, which in turn define what Chinese political philosopher Zhao Tingyang describes as “what sorts of political actions and political problems are possible or impossible.”
Political units establish the limits of politics in two senses: in a jurisdictional sense, they define where, who & what is ours to rule (and who & what is someone else’s); and in a conceptual sense, they outline what counts as politics, that is, what questions are up for debate.
Read 25 tweets
Nils Gilman Profile picture
May 20, 2023
Beijing is about to discover, just as DC did in the 1970s/80s, that loans to the Global South for infrastructure, made during a time of low real interest rates & a commodity boom, are not going to be paid back. As before, this will be painful for everyone. fortune.com/2023/05/18/chi…
This is why I’ve been saying for years that BRI is less of a dastardly plan that an act of supreme and pernicious foolishness
What’s truly incredible to me is that over the last couple of decades China looked very carefully at the postwar American approach to steering development in the Global South — which ended in disaster (I wrote a book about it) — and decided essentially to replicate it wholesale:
Read 10 tweets
Nils Gilman Profile picture
Mar 25, 2023
So yesterday I had one of the hands-down weirdest experiences of my life. Bear with me, for a longish thread. 1/16
The setting: Fort Irwin, in the Mojave desert. Irwin is one of two main CONUS sites for training U.S. soldiers for land combat, which involves LARPing highly elaborated simulated combat scenarios. More on Ft. Irwin here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Irwi… 2/16
This was billed as a chance for a small, hand-selected group of us to "observe" how simulated combat training takes place. (My group was interested in this because we're current studying the phenomenon & effects of "recursive simulations.")

But that's not exactly what we got...
Read 16 tweets

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