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Wesley Yang Profile picture
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31 Mar, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Defending free speech is a precondition of restoring the integrity of truth-seeking within academia, but it is only a precondition. Forms of discipline and abnegation constitutive of the dignity of the vocation must also be resuscitated. patreon.com/posts/on-acade…
It is a bizarre irony that these principles have to be stated at all, and a compounding irony that they must be stated under the cover of pseudonymity. patreon.com/posts/on-acade…
But so it is these days. Some regimes protect the autonomy of truth seeking while others subordinate it to political agendas; in this sense truth seeking is always political. But the integrity of the act itself, where it is permitted, always transcends politics.
The vestigial authority of the academic vocation is now used to launder political ideology by those whose ideology explicitly rejects the underlying forms of discipline constitutive of that authority -- post-Foucauldians insisting we "believe the science"

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More from @wesyang

Wesley Yang Profile picture
2 Apr
Non-BIPOC Vermonters presently have to be over the age of 50 to sign up for the vaccine.

Vt Governor just announced that any BIPOC person over the age of 16 can sign up.
CDC withdrew guidance that would prioritized essential workers before the elderly (who are the by far the most likely to die from covid) because the latter group was disproportionately white after the guidance attracted controversy.

But here's Scott just going for it.
This is how it works...a tentative trial balloon, then tactical retreat in the face of pushback...then you barrel over the finish line in defiance of the Equal Protection clause because the new elite consensus supports it and nothing ultimately hems in elite consensus
Read 7 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
1 Apr
This thread is interesting because it describes academics constrained from speaking what they believe to be true for fear of social consequence while denying that they are “afraid of being canceled” or that such a development is a “crisis of free speech”
It shows how one may describe precisely X but still being constrained from calling it X, thereby...underscoring the depth and intensity of X in the very act...
Thread about my Chronicle of Higher Education piece on this subject:
Read 4 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
26 Mar
Haidt: helicoptering, anti bullying initiatives, and social media psychologically weakened the millennial generation.

Middle schools must discourage use of Instagram.
In Haidt’s view, “anti-bullying” in practice turned into adults hovering over kids and not allowing them to deal with conflict on their own, thus leaving a generation bereft of that crucial social skill and inuring them to demand that authority figures resolve conflict for them
This is an area where I do think discussion of “the marginalized” is merited as there is a differential impact on different sorts of people (including studious, introverted kids) of the free range approach; it’s about striking a certain balance
Read 17 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
21 Mar
People want this conversation to be about certain approved things and not about other forbidden things
Q: Is the reason Stuyvesant High School was more than 70 percent Asian and that Lowell High School in SF was 56 percent Asian before the SF school board dismantled its admissions test "white supremacy"?
Virtually everyone authorized to answer this question will tell you "yes", since the "model minority myth" is used to make Asians a "wedge" to justify continued oppression of blacks and Hispanics
Read 9 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
21 Mar
The biggest Substack accounts tend to belong to people who started blogging in the early 2000's, accruing large email lists over the decades. Writers that didn't do that can't hope to compete.
They are fulfilling an essential function and mostly doing it quite ably:
Those who want the independence of Substack but don't have enormous pre-existing mailing lists can't be merely duplicative of what the big fish do.

There are other areas besides challenging the narrative enforcement that need doing.
Read 7 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
21 Mar
Once you see the media as the orchestrators of an ongoing passion play expressing the values of a new quasi-theological monoculture that it has become, its behavior becomes more readily explicable andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/when-the-nar…
What's interesting is that in addition to the 16 pieces of propaganda restating the dogma, there is still that one piece of reporting that undermines the other 16 that still runs in their pages. You can still reconstruct reality based on what appears in the mainstream press.
It just takes a lot of effort of critical analysis that is most visibly being done these days on four Substacks -- Greenwald, Taibbi, Sullivan, and Yglesias
Read 16 tweets

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