Good (or Bad) Faith Interlocutor (opinions vary)

@erasmuse @sfmcguire79 “With the driest naïveté he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man.”

@sfmcguire79 Economics professors do a lot of good sociology-- good methodology and statistical methods, with less politics. They're even largely liberal in politics. So just close down the field of sociology and the departments, and the topic will survive.

“Sociology’s relentless focus on race, gender and class, its emphasis on the need for social change over the benefits of social stability and its obsession with inequality amount to an abdication of scholarly duty.”

@CoachSwit What team do you coach?

If I could line up single 9-inning games on Saturdays and Sundays this FALL against quality teams from CT, MA, and RI, I’d skip tournaments altogether. Just good baseball, no rushed schedules or 3-game days. Any 16U teams interested? Let’s make it happen

@Angry_Sociology It’s never question of whether there will be inequality, it’s how much.

For those new here, I come from a place of emicipatory sociology. If our goals are to not improve quality of life, then we are not doing this discipline justice. If you think inequality isn't a bad thing, you've failed the first premise.

@timgill924 @alexwadecraig Have you read any intro texts? They all use it, alongside structural functionalism, and symbolic interactionism.

@alexwadecraig I don’t know one person who embraces the term ‘conflict theory’ any more. It’s very dated.

Ok, first of all, wow.... Extrapolating from one sociology book to the entire field is something. Second of all, there is a whole bunch of folks influenced by the work of Emile Durkheim, whose whole focus is societal integration. Jeffrey Alexander is a big one here.

@CivicChronicle1 @timgill924 Read Robert Nisbet.

@timgill924 For one, people that don't believe all of society should be analyzed through the lense of oppressor vs oppressed.

I don't think you have the answer. What are the different viewpoints that should exist among sociologists that are apparently missing?

@timgill924 The general absence of conservatives is not function of a failure to put out a call for their hiring. It’s a function of the informal processes of exclusion within the academy.

Contrarianism for its own sake seems like a silly position. Or do people want to see the university put out a call for ‘conservatives’? So much of this seems like noise to me with little that is well thought out.

What does ‘viewpoint diversity’ actually mean in practice? In biology, you hire someone who rejects evolution? In sociology, someone who denies the world is socially constructed? Or do you just reward whoever holds the most contrarian view and call it balance?

@timgill924 A scholar who identifies as a political conservative, observant Catholic, etc., will be ostracized as deviant within the culture of academia. That’s certainly part of the issue. Academia has a narrow view of acceptable political thought, which limits debate and scholarship.

@ChicagoNFT1 @JeffreyASachs Because some scholars and students are interested in gender and sexuality? 🤷🏻

@JeffreyASachs Sure, but explain why the right number is not zero.

Anyone who has worked at a university will immediately be able to identify the problem with this factoid. The WGS profs at Penn State are *overwhelmingly* cross appointed to other departments. Only 4 (1 prof and 3 teaching profs) are solely appointed to WGS. That's not extreme.

@petersavodnik Ok, now do the vast majority of human history (pre-Agricultural revolution).

Actually, leisure time was a byproduct of industrialization.

@fuller_brandon 28 professors tenured other deoartments who also contribute to interdisciplinary programs. Do your homework before casting aspersions.

Penn State has 42,000 undergrads. Exactly 10 graduated in women's, gender & sexuality studies (WGSS) in 2023–24. The department lists 28 professors. The "studies" department racket is real: every department combined—area, cultural, gender, black, Asian, Native American, Hispanic, ethnic—accounts for just 0.3% of all four-year graduates in the United States. How do departments with 10 majors justify 28 faculty? As @firstthingsmag's @mark_bauerlein points out in @WSJopinion, they do so by colonizing general education. If "Introduction to Queer Theory," "Fashion, Gender, and Identity," and a bevy of other WGSS courses didn't check the gen-ed box, enrollments would vanish. And so would the faculty lines in the department. Public universities are public institutions, answerable to public oversight. Legislatures and trustees should do more to exercise it: reset gen-ed policy by streamlining it back to essentials. wsj.com/opinion/free-e…

@TomeeJones31 $100 for multi day pass at PG WWBA 16u in ATL this month.

$3,400 bones for a team to enter to play the PBR 17u "National Championship" event this week in Lake Point. Then either a $60 Multi Day Pass or $15 per day for family members. Something"s wrong!!!

@CoachSwit That’s unfortunate, though without knowing WHY he left, it’s hard to come to any real conclusions.

15U tournament championship. Bottom of the 7th. Bang-bang play at 1st. Everyone looks for the field umpire… He’s gone. The plate umpire makes the call from a bad angle. I ask, “Where did the other umpire go?” “He left.”

@weiss_hadas Not sure, but “I came” is “I veni”.

how do you say "i woke up, i tweeted, i went back to sleep" in latin

@GadSaad @VDHanson

Some of the most unhinged hate that I receive comes from other academics. The soldiers, the corrections officers, the truckers, and all those from the muscular classes (to borrow @VDHanson's term) seem to greatly appreciate my work and style. The deeply leftist professors seem to have a deep visceral aversion to my personhood including my humour, my spicy sarcasm etc. Why is that? Hmmm.

@GadSaad @VDHanson The muscular classes are your natural intellectual constituency.

@GadSaad My impression of the collective intelligence of Canadians just took a hit!

Suicidal Empathy is #1 of all books in Canada for a second week in a row.

@JDStokes79 @VincentGeloso The OP did.

@GoodFaithInt @VincentGeloso I didn't call it one of the worst books ever written, and thanks for reinforcing my point with your parenthetical.

Second only to Karl Marx’s Das Kapital

@ConceptualJames Says one of the biggest ideologues on the platform….

I open the app. I scroll. I see critical theory and propaganda. I decide almost everything on the app is a lie. I go do something else. Every day now.

@JDStokes79 @VincentGeloso The meme is a joke. And I’m not an economist. And calling Marx’s Capital one of the “worst books” ever written is just stupid (and suggests you might do well to fill out the form!).

@GoodFaithInt @VincentGeloso The classic "anyone who disagrees with me is ipso facto ignorant, which automatically makes everything they say wrong regardless of facts or reasoning" approach. A great reminder of why I refer to your cult as the flat-earthers of economics.

@JohnJSSoriano @EconBerger Gramsci is top ten…

ChatGPT: 1. John Maynard Keynes 2. Friedrich Hayek 3. Milton Friedman 4. Karl Polanyi 5. Joseph Schumpeter 6. John Rawls 7. Hannah Arendt 8. Amartya Sen 9. James Buchanan 10. Michel Foucault Honorable mentions: Robert Nozick, Antonio Gramsci, Isaiah Berlin, Kenneth Arrow, Mancur Olson, Herbert Simon, Ronald Coase, H.L.A. Hart, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Mao, Lenin, von Mises, Samuelson, and Thomas Schelling.

For what it’s worth, I asked ChatGPT and Claude for the top 10 most important political and economic thinkers of the 20th century and they both had Hayek ranked #2 behind Keynes.