UPDATE: As is typical with alarmism, some people with a dislike for me and WUWT are spreading rumors on other blogs that these are my words, not of a commenter. And that I’m calling people on those blogs “cockroaches”. Not true. Of course they don’t take time to read the comments, they only run off and spread what they perceive at first, so I’m elevating yet another comment. In my response in comments here, I made it clear what this comment from Alexander Feht is about:
Anthony reply: It is an apt metaphor, one that caught attention of a lot of people prior to it being elevated, and you are reading way too much into it. He sees the USSR politics and Socialism as that. Do I think cockroaches accurately describes people I and many other here disagree with, no. Is it a metaphor for the instruments and actions that oppose freedom, tolerance, and open discourse, yes. Of course it doesn’t matter what I answer, some people will happily run off and distort it. In fact they already are.
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This may or may not become a new weekly feature, but I thought this comment was worth elevating to post status:
Alexander Feht says:
July 14, 2010 at 11:18 pm
I completely understand, why Christopher Monckton felt a need to make an example of a typical reprehensible representative of modern Academia. People like Christopher Monckton make me hope again that not everything is lost yet under the Moon.
And yet… I spent first half of my life battling liars and cockroaches in the former USSR. I would win against any individual liar or cockroach, no sweat. But year after year after year, I was getting more and more convinced that I didn’t want to die in this battle, overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of my enemies.
So. I live in a quiet valley now, in Colorado Rockies. Grass is green, air is fresh, sky is huge. But what is this constant swish and rustle coming from the East Coast and from the Left Coast? I know this sound well! There is no escape from the battle: cockroaches are coming.
He adds in comments:
I am completely embarrassed by all this attention.
My heartfelt thanks to Mr. Watts and all the commentators.
The only thing I would like to add:
I’ve noticed that many comments on WUWT (and in other places) are based on the unshaken assumption that the existing framework of democracy, including the established peer-review and other mechanisms in Academia, would somehow, even if only in a long run, fix our worst problems, and extricate the good name of science from the rotten mire it has found itself in today.
The question is obvious:
How the same framework and the same mechanisms that resulted in today’s lamentable situation, are going to have a healing effect?
In other words, are you sure that we have at hand something to populate the house with, after we would have “cleaned the house”? Where are Mozarts, Darwins, Teslas and Rembrandts in our cherished established institutions? And, most importantly, what fundamental (and, preferably, bloodless) changes in our society are necessary to bring Mozarts, Darwins, Teslas and Rembrandts up, and to bring Bushes, Obamas, Blairs and Prince-Charleses down into oblivion? That is the question.
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Greetings from former Eastern block to Mr Feht.
The fight for freedom is never over, but it is worth fighting.
Brendan H,
Wrong again. Abraham threw the first punch, now all of his lickspittles are hand-wrining over the fact that he got hit back. And Abraham still tiptoes around in his Ivory Tower, afraid to come out and face a real man.
Your self-righteous con word ‘judgements’ is completely inappropriate. Who elected you, or Abraham, to pass judgment? How about if I pass judgment on you? Will you turn the other cheek?
The correct term is ad hominem..
Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
Abraham pulled the trigger unprovoked. So all the bleating about what has happened since then should be properly dealt with here.
Fried just seconds, and with mango sauce. Peanut oil.
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Smokey: “Who elected you, or Abraham, to pass judgment?”
No election needed. Abraham judged the quality of Monckton’s presentation. Happens. It’s called debate, and debate is all about making judgements.
“So all the bleating about what has happened since then…”
What has happened is that Monckton was critiqued. In response he ran around in circles squealing about the injustice of it all and tried to shut down the debate with threats and intimidation.
His actions were contrary to the spirit of free enquiry, a stain on his character, and a testament to his poor judgement.
Fortunately for climate scepticism, many sceptics have kept their distance from Monckton’s childish tantruns, and can see clearly that his attempts to shut down opposing views and threaten critics are counter-productive and potentially damaging to their cause.
Theo Goodwin says:
July 15, 2010 at 12:37 pm
Alexander,
I continue to work among the cockroaches. I am eagerly awaiting the day that I can escape to surf, sand, and sun. When I was a youngster, academia in the USA was not dominated by cockroaches. Professors took pride in being open-minded and critical. Also, they taught and fostered open-mindedness and a critical attitude in many ways. The beginning of the end was the institutionalization of radical feminism. When someone publishes her twentieth book in support of the thesis that there is in nature something called “maleness” and it is the root of all evil, you know that open-mindedness and a critical attitude are officially on the Dean’s ash pile. We see exactly the same thing in Climategate, a small group of so-called scientists who declare themselves the authority in all matters pertaining to their science and who impose that authority through the peer review process. That is total corruption or “merde,” as the Portuguese so poetically say. As for the IPCC, that is just the UN trying to get in on the action.
I think you are making the usual mistake : correlation is not causation. That the feminist movement became strong during the time where the academe became completely dependent into centralized government funding decisions is a good correlation.
The causation goes the other way.
I have posted about this before here. I started my academic career back in 1962 as a graduate student in Greece and watched the deterioration of funding decisions through the years.
Of course government funded the academic institutions. But the funding was given directly to the institutions. They requested every year a budget, and usually most of it was approved, and the judges were elected representatives sitting on committees, not peers or other scientists. Then the institutions had internal reviews of research necessities and distributed the funds within.
Second step came when funds became available from the “development budget”. There, if one had the right political connections and push/respect one could get a lot of money for a project to kick start an activity outside the institutional budgeting. It happened in my field in 1966 when prof Ypsilantis, one of those involved in the discovery of the antiproton , wanted to work in Greece and he was given enough of a budget to set up a high energy group in Greece working with CERN. It was pure political influence, no peer review or bureaucrats, I think even the queen at the time was involved. Note here that the power distribution was haphazard, no centralized bureaucrats deciding on projects.
Then came the EU and the format of centralized bureaucracy. It completely took away the power of decisions on research from the institutes and turned it into a power structure in the ministry with committees etc funding individuals and projects . The bureaucrats controlling the flow of decisions and committees were usually not so successful PhD holders in various disciplines who got a job in the administration.
This had three effects.
a) Hierarchy within the academe was destroyed, because young brash researchers/professors could get a lot more funding than the ones with high academic standing.
b) The institutes were taking cuts and became hooked to the extra money ( Mann et al) these young brash academics brought.
c) the most important, research could be centrally controlled and guided, as we see that it happened with the AGW wagon of fools.
When research decisions were being taken independently by different institutions in the country, the randomization of the process assured good academic competition.
It is not an efficient way to use the money for a business, but in research where serendipity plays a huge role the variety of decision processes is very important.
This was lost more and more during the years , when EU funding became dominant and the whole of Europe is being orchestrated from a central menagerie of decision takers on what research is funded.
I believe the situation in the US is similar.
The feminist movement support is just an example of the centralized decision making dominance , because of the money , which of course is the root of all evil 🙂 .
Also the power. The more centralized are decisions, the more the power, and that attracts not the best of researchers to the centralized decision making process, because researchers search for truth, not power.
I think a first step out of this one way street is to start funding institutions and let them decide how and what research to support. It will break the chorus.