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How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

nytimes.com

41–50 of 224 posts

Re: How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

#41
post #38

The USA is purging intellectuals as well through outrage culture, online mobs, and the weaponization of political correctness. Both the far right and far left do it routinely to their advantage, they both seem to think the ends justify the means. Whoever has the loudest megaphone and can effectively stir up a sufficiently large outrage mob is the winner. Facts do not matter, evidence can be deemed "offensive" and is…

Do you have any sources for this purge of US intelectuals?

Re: How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

#42
post #7

"People have had enough of experts" - Michael Gove God help us

Many experts are just preachers in different attire. Honestly, should we really listen to scientist who gets labeled experts based non replicable studies? The problem is that all of them gets the same doctors titles but only some of them are doing honest research, and our current society has no good way to deal with this. As a result laymen notice that significant parts of science is pure bullshit, no wonder there are trust issues!

Re: How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

#43
post #38

The USA is purging intellectuals as well through outrage culture, online mobs, and the weaponization of political correctness. Both the far right and far left do it routinely to their advantage, they both seem to think the ends justify the means. Whoever has the loudest megaphone and can effectively stir up a sufficiently large outrage mob is the winner. Facts do not matter, evidence can be deemed "offensive" and is…

In the intellectual field it's a far more of a left-wing based issue than right-wing. Universities in the US have skewed left for a longtime. Which has meant they are hit the hardest when it comes to the eat-your-own outrage culture engulfing the American left.

Re: How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

#44
Turkey's GDP peaked at $950 billion in 2013, just before Erdogan became president. By 2017, it had slid to $850 billion, and after the intellectual purges, slid to just $766 billion in 2018. [1]

People may argue from ideology for or against politics like these, but I can think of no clearer indication of these policies' failure than the impoverishing of a country.

[1]: https://tradingeconomics.com/turkey/gdp

Re: How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

#45

So firing 6,000 academics and restructuring and a single major university counts as a purge? I mean a great many places are laying off professors with Liberal Arts Degrees many more than 6,000. In modern day the focus is shifting away from those careers. Even if that is a bad thing it is still the truth of the matter. This just seems like its trying to push a ham-fisted narrative. I'm no fan of Erdogan but this seems…

At least 100 000 people lost their jobs. 6000 is only the number of academics. We are talking about Stanford/MIT grad, >40 h-index young academics (at least in science which is not the focus of the article)

Some of these high-achieving people couldn't even leave the country even though there were a lot of positions waiting for them. Some people tried to go to Greece on boats which many of them died on the way.

Re: How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

#47
post #41
post #38

The USA is purging intellectuals as well through outrage culture, online mobs, and the weaponization of political correctness. Both the far right and far left do it routinely to their advantage, they both seem to think the ends justify the means. Whoever has the loudest megaphone and can effectively stir up a sufficiently large outrage mob is the winner. Facts do not matter, evidence can be deemed "offensive" and is…

Do you have any sources for this purge of US intelectuals?

A Harvard Law Professor was forced to step down due students feeling "Unsafe" over clients he was representing in court. There are many similar examples like this: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/opinion/harvard-ronald-su...

Re: How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

#48
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, not as long as human brains are made of meat.

More 'made using primate genes.' There are many perfectly good brains that could be made out of meat, they just need to have certain bits about social hierarchy from our primate past removed or tweaked.

and with those removals and tweaks, you erase the fundamental core of humanity - appreciation of beauty, fear of strength, and the journey of the hero to save the damsel.

Re: How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

#49
post #41
post #38

The USA is purging intellectuals as well through outrage culture, online mobs, and the weaponization of political correctness. Both the far right and far left do it routinely to their advantage, they both seem to think the ends justify the means. Whoever has the loudest megaphone and can effectively stir up a sufficiently large outrage mob is the winner. Facts do not matter, evidence can be deemed "offensive" and is…

Do you have any sources for this purge of US intelectuals?

The subservience of intellectualism to politics seems obvious to me. Typical public online discourse is shackled.

Goodhart's law is a big mechanic purging intellectual discussion.

If you're in a right leaning, 'non political' forum and you post about potential impacts of climate change, you'll almost certainly be put on blast.

If you're in a left leaning, 'non political' forum and someone posts 'climate change is going to turn Earth to Venus and we're all going to die choking' and you respond "that seems like unrealistic histrionics" you will almost certainly be put on blast.

There is verdant field of potential discussion between those two posts and it's very difficult to play there. You can, in certain sanctuaries.. but in public, 90% of the gradient causes someone to foam at the mouth if they suspect your political alignment is opposite theirs.

Re: How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

#50
post #36

We had something like this in 1968 in Poland with communist propaganda condemning intelectuals and cosmpolitans and workers activists beating students on the streets (like they do in HK these days). Sztoptanski called that Dictatorship of Dishrags. Generally the best weapon against such times is irony and a sense of humor and grotesque. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_Szpota%C5%84ski

After reading that article, I'm happy for the polish to live in a better state now, and I immediately started to think where people are now oppressed by their government whenever they are deemed 'harmful to the nation', and China came to my mind, and not just for the Chinese state cooperating with the organized crimes triads to attack protesters in Hong Kong. The situation there is different for now, because China is economically developing, so that may stabilize the government, but eventually China will get rid of its oppressive regime. I wonder when and how.
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