Inside Higher Ed covers that godawful conference.
One attendee of the conference, who asked to speak anonymously as not to run afoul of the event’s supporters or critics, said the room “was not simply full of right-wingers there to hear fringe right-wingers,” as “many from around the country are alarmed at intolerance on both sides of the political spectrum.”
“Both sides do it”. I’ve heard that somewhere before. Maybe they should have included a few people who weren’t fired for sexism or racism or misogyny to show off the Intolerant Left.
At the same time, the attendee said, the meeting “required no scholarly rigor or counterargument, rather it proved mostly a feel-good session for an unfortunate mix of many powerful public voices who deserve criticism, and a few brave people who take unpopular positions and actually deserve to be heard. Clearly, the conference organizers were trying to be provocative in letting the most outrageous be heard, but that undermined the seriousness of harm done to the less outrageous but equally censored speakers.”
The most hilarious comment comes from Jonathan Haidt.
Referencing Cochrane’s additional complaint that liberals had been invited to speak but refused, speaker Jonathan Haidt, Heterodox Academy co-founder and Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, said that there was nevertheless
more diversity, more ideological and political diversity, in the room today than in probably any other room anywhere in any of America’s top 100 universities this year.
He is correct that diversity is underrepresented in academia. However, here is a candid photo of the attendees at the con:
I think most universities do better than that room full of old white men. Not better enough, but much better than that.
Also, yeesh, that was a tiny conference.
“ideological diversity” – does that include support for Flat Earth theories? Cuz yeah, I bet that is under-represented at legitimate, academically respectable universities. Some viewpoints have been discarded by academia – with cause.
“Oh, we got both kinds – Country and Western!”
I don’t believe that for a second.
Whoever anonymous is is flat out lying.
The partial list I saw from the previous thread were all far right wingnut cranks.
They were also old almost all white males.
In the unusual cases where the old almost all white males bothered to make testable claims, they turned out to be wrong.
Examples.
John Ioannidis said the Covid-19 virus wasn’t serious and no big deal.
He also said, “Ioannidis expressed doubt that vaccines or treatments would be developed and tested in time to affect how the pandemic would unfold.”
Both completely wrong.
The Covid-19 pandemic, which is still going on, killed 1.4 million Americans and permanently harmed millions of Long Covid victims.
The drugs and vaccines were rapidly developed and made a huge difference. The vaccines saved around 2 million US lives.
Wikipedia: Jay Bhattacharya has been an opponent of lockdowns and mask mandates.[5][6] With Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, he was a co-author in 2020 of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated letting the virus spread in lower-risk groups with the aim of herd immunity, with “focused protection” of those most at risk.
Jay Bhattacharya was both stupid and completely wrong as well.
He was one of those herd immunity guys.
In the few places where that was tried, it failed i.e. Sweden.
And, here we are almost to year 3 of the pandemic, with multiple vaccines and drugs and we aren’t even close to herd immunity yet
We may never get there.
If we had followed The Cuckoo Barrington Dumb Guess, a lot more people would have died and we still wouldn’t be done fighting the pandemic.
Another crackpot who was at the conference is Scot Atlas.
Scot Atlas is a quack doctor at Hoover-Stanford.
Scot Atlas was wrong about everything to do with the Covid-19 virus pandemic.
If we had followed the advice of Ionnidis, Bhattacharya, and Atlas, it would have been a disaster as millions more died from the Covid-19 virus.
These quacks are wannabe mass murderers.
Another kook at the conference is Amy Wax.
Wax is a racist white Supremacist.
This is cosmically stupid.
She is claiming here that culture is hereditary and nonwhites can’t be Western Americans.
I’ve seen enough and had enough of looking at who was actually there.
This conference isn’t just all right wingnut kooks but some of the worst of a bad lot.
Amy Wax is at least an equal opportunity hater and bigot.
She doesn’t like Asians or Indians either.
Tell me again anonymous, that this conference was not all right wingnut kooks and racists.
“Shithole”?
Their phraseology needs improvement. Are they really true aryans?
.
To be specific, the Swedish approach did not aim for herd immunity per se, although the authorities certainly underestimated just how contagious the virus turned out to be. The restrictions had to be strenghtened.
(The details are complex and would warrant a big book)
-I was in the middle of it and everyone among the authorities took it seriously.
One big concern was that the public eventually would get ‘restriction fatigue’ and ignore the rules altogether. This was one of the reasons for a “soft” approach.
Restriction fatigue did happen, but fortunately at the very end of the “critical” phase of the epidemic.
Today the rollout of vaccines in new phases occur without any drama so even though the virus remains it is kept at a quite low level (at least until a new malign mutation creates a new virus variant).
these “patriots” talk all about freedom and such but nary a one of them would have gone against the Crown back 1776. unless of course their slave holdings were threatened.
Maybe anonymous is counting themselves as someone in the room who was not a right-wing conspiracy devotee? I read bits of their talks, and sympathize with anyone who went to this meeting as a covert journalist. It would be hard to refrain from laughing and eye-rolling at pretty much every word uttered by the excrescence known as Amy Wax.
There was also a couple on anarchists who went along to see what the bigots were up to. And the room was clearly not full!
I’m assuming the freedom most of those people want is the freedom to harass others out of shared spaces
A few days ago, a high school teacher was fired from her job for putting up butcher paper in front of a bookshelf that said “banned books”. They also considered taking her teaching license away. Now that’s real canceling! But she’s a nobody, so those rich assholes at that stupid conference could not care less.
I was once at a grad school symposium at U of MN Rochester, and we broke out into discussion groups. Ours was on diversity. The first words out of my mouth were, ‘Well, if there’s anyone qualified to talk about diversity, it’s 4 white men.’. A friend spit coffee out of her nose when I told her about it. :)