David Decosimo @DavidDecosimo Twitter profile

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David Decosimo

1 year

I’ve been off this platform almost entirely. That’s because three months ago, I almost died. I’ve wrestled with what to say or whether to say anything at all. But what happened has so profoundly impacted my family & me that silence would be false.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

OK, everyone, all at once: “PR work for the world’s richest man!”

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

To clarify: Harris thinks he’s debunking Christianity (& all religions w/ an idea of heaven), in virtue of the fact that telescopes have not spotted heaven. Yes. He’s actually that incredibly mistaken & confused. He thinks people believe heaven is some place in outer space.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

The BU Center for Antiracist Research debacle is about far more than Kendi. It's about a university, caught in cultural hysteria, subordinating every norm of oversight, inquiry, & excellence to ideology. It was entirely predictable. I said as much to BU's President in fall 2020.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

Support cancelling student loan debt if you like but don’t claim for a second to be progressive, for the poor, on the side of workers, lol. Go tell someone who pursued a trade, chose a cheap school, or joined the army how their paying your NYU debt is actually solidarity, comrade

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

In all seriousness, this is what happens when you don’t have around you & don’t listen & engage w/ smart, thoughtful people who deeply disagree with you about the most important things. As Harris is w/ religion, so are many highly educated folks when it comes to ethics & politics

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

Let’s be real. If a group of conservative Stanford law students shouted down a federal judge w/ obscenities & mocked their sex life while a Dean watched & praised them, there’d be front page stories on fascism, the Dean would be fired, & they’d be expelled & banished from big law

David Lat

@DavidLat

1 year

1/ 🧵If you are willing to get down into the weeds, here is my deep dive into the disruptive protest of Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford Law School (originally reported on by @EdWhelanEPPC ).

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

11 months

If you are a university donor, this is a key moment. You're seeing the bad fruit of 2 related things: 1. Years of faculty searches that have been explicitly ideological & partisan, prizing & hiring for the illiberal radicalism on display in the Kendi debacle & Hamas-praise alike.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

I'm still figuring this gift out. But, as a Christian scholar, I feel deeper clarity in my vocation, more freedom from the fear, status-seeking, & unworthy devotion that can corrupt academia, & firmer resolve to love, seek, & stand for what is beautiful, good, & true. Dei gratia.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

“Where is heaven exactly, given that we have multiple telescopes up there beaming back information.” - Sam Harris

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

Local man reports “no problems with free speech” in institution where everyone agrees with him about politics, ethics, race, gender, & religion & anyone who doesn’t is exiled or denied entry.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

3 years

Now that so many people seem to care about viewpoint discrimination in academia, let's talk about it. It's common, unethical, intellectually dishonest, & betrays the whole purpose of a university. And it almost always runs one way: against those seen as not 'progressive.' 🧵1/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

Why is it not just "using your own free expression" to shout someone down or block entrance to a talk on campus? Some scholars & journalists who should know better are confused or deliberately obfuscate about this. Yet the difference is clear & essential to our democracy. 1/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

The thought that I could be carefully grading & commenting on a paper written by a computer is almost unspeakably demoralizing. It goes beyond the idea that it’s merely an utterly futile waste of time to something much deeper that I can’t yet put in words.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

We don’t think we will leave on a run & never return, our kids never seeing us again. How could we live that way? And yet it is the truth. Our life & every life really is that fragile. That I did wake up, that I did come home is sheer grace, sheer gift. It is so every time.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

3 years

Absolutely, no true reformation of the church could possibly begin by making a long list of complaints and then placing them in such a public venue where just anybody could read them.

Hunter Baker

@hunterbaker

3 years

I'm sorry, but I simply don't agree that the way to reform the church is to go tell the NYT why the church is terrible.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

3 years

A 🧵 on how there’s absolutely NO CRT or Kendiism in VA schools. As you’ll see by perusing the VA DOE there is *zero* evidence for CRT ideas, such as the idea that racism is normal, pervasive, & shapeshifting. Or that colorblind policy is racist. 1/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

Even though we might deny it, I think nearly all of us operate with the idea that we will live a complete life - seeing our kids grow & marry, become grandparents, grow old. Or at least we think our death will be meaningful & foreseen, with ample time for closure & goodbyes.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

11 months

We are seeing the utter ethical degeneracy of an ideology in which all that matters is finding the single most oppressed identity & then worshipping it, claiming anything done by it & on its behalf in the name of liberation, no matter how horrendous, is actually righteous & just.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

Realizing your life would have ended if you hadn't awoken, that your last breath could be so terribly banal &, for those who love you, so impossibly devastating, clarifies what matters most. It is the brutal & priceless gift no one seeks but for which you cannot be more grateful.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

Protesting at the homes of public officials is morally wrong & democratically destructive, even if it's legal. Same goes for bathrooms & restaurants w/ friends. It targets people's family's, destroys essential boundaries, & denies our common humanity. 1/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

Yeah, man, cancel culture is so overblown! Just be the world’s most famous author, biggest podcaster, greatest comedian, richest man, or a Supreme Court justice & you’ll be totally fine.

Nicholas Grossman

@NGrossman81

2 years

When I say cancel culture isn't nothing, but complaints are hyperbolic and misunderstand power, here's what I mean: 550 workers at multiple publishers say don't print. Publisher still is. This somehow shows not only that the workers run the publisher, but that they run everything

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

26 days

Under Tim Walz, an infant born perfectly healthy after an attempted abortion is denied medical care & simply left to die. This is according to Minnesota's own data & definition of "comfort care." This is infanticide. It happened twice in 2021.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

It is absolutely & utterly insane that Yoel Roth held the role he did at twitter: leading decisions about censorship, moderation, disinformation, etc. We are talking about someone whose lack of commitment to core principles free speech seems matched only by his ignorance of them.

Bari Weiss

@bariweiss

2 years

25. Roth wrote: “The hypothesis underlying much of what we’ve implemented is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do that.”

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

You can blame Kendi. But the real story is institutional, cultural, & still unfolding. Be it from moral hysteria, cynicism, or fear, to pretend false is true, punish questions, or exalt some as sages above critique is to betray the norms of human flourishing & to court disaster.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

Why is it wrong to protest at Kavanaugh's (or Sotomayor's) home? Many say: "Because it's an act of intimidation, it threatens violence." There's something to that. But why is a protest outside SCOTUS any different? Why is that not 'threatening' too? What's the principle here? 1/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

You write a dissertation on Grindr, *a primary research prong of which is using your personal Grindr account daily from 2009-2013,* and a few years later you are making policy decisions about what constitutes ‘harm’ & ‘disinformation’ for many millions of people? How can this be?

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

11 months

If your only ethics are Foucault & Fanon, you’re wholly unequipped to make the distinctions necessary to recognize justice & uphold dignity in relation to political violence. Just war theory, an ancient tradition of ethical inquiry, offers a better way. It is relevant just now.🧵

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

3 years

Give these folks credit for saying it out loud: CRT is being preached in K-12 & they love it. Consider just one case: Durham City Council demands 'critical race theory' evangelism continue in their schools. What do they mean by that?🧵1/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

3 years

Here’s the reality about the @DorianAbbot situation. What happened was an *aberration.* Not the cancelling; Abbot being invited to begin with. The hiring process in many places is now *deliberately designed* to keep an Abbot from ever getting a faculty job in the first place. 1/

David Romps

@romps

3 years

I am resigning as Director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center (BASC) @BerkeleyAtmo . To reduce the odds of being mischaracterized, I want to explain my decision here.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

11 months

What you see from faculty exhilarated by murder or who require all teaching be antiracist & decolonial is a feature not a bug. It's the fruit of hiring in ideological fields that normalize & prize radicalism. They're outliers, but they're doing just what they've been paid to do.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

The twisted path from equity to neo-equity - and neo-equity's bankruptcy - can be traced in this image. Let's see how ideas of fairness are twisted into the destructive idea that disparity of outcomes is always unjust, due to injustice, & must be fixed by any means necessary. 1/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

Few recent shifts have been more consequential than the deliberate transformation & obfuscation around "equity." What once named a key dimension of justice has been redefined & repurposed as a tool for culture-warring, institutional capture, & unearned privilege & favors. 1/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

Instead, the chief cardiologist said, 'You should buy a lottery ticket because you're the luckiest man alive. You’ve been given a second chance. You came back. It’s a miracle you’re alive. I don't know if you believe in God, but somebody up there must have plans for you.'

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

The doctor explained that I’d had a heart attack &, further, that when I had passed out I had actually undergone "sudden cardiac death." Had I not somehow woken up, I would be dead. As they left, another doctor patted my wife’s arm & whispered to her, 'You are so, so lucky.'

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

11 months

2. Senior administrators, who've spent a decade violating due institutional neutrality, brashly speaking on divisive political topics, always in one partisan direction & always lockstep with ideological DEI, which they've made both normative & as important as teaching & research.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

Note what cultural power is (as distinct from political power) & who has it: Fired from Princeton, Joshua Katz doesn’t get hired by Harvard or Yale, he ends up at a conservative think tank outside academia entirely, whereas Walker *ascends* multiple rungs on the prestige ladder.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

If ‘looking like America’ *in Kagan’s sense* is to be a goal for admissions at elite universities, then students will need to be 50% Trump supporters, 35% evangelical, & 10% Texan.

Leah Litman

@LeahLitman

2 years

Justice Kagan to the lawyer challenging affirmative action: All over your brief is the claim that "it just doesn't matter if our institutions look like America ... uh... DOESN'T IT???"

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

As the doc described what happened & what was next, I felt everything turn upside down. I’m in my early 40’s, don’t smoke, eat healthy, lift, run 30 miles/week, & have no family history of early heart issues. When I’d been sick, I’d thrown up steel cut oats. This wasn’t the plan.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

What more will it take for you to recognize that a widespread vision of ‘harm reduction,’ ‘compassion,’ & ‘affirmative care’ is actually a maximally cruel & predatory form of profit-seeking, life-hating, misanthropic nihilism?

The Globe and Mail

@globeandmail

2 years

Canada will allow assisted dying for mental illness starting in March. Has there been enough time to get it right?

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

Scholars have long created artificial silos with their own journals, conferences, book series, etc, where they simply publish one another’s work in total isolation from due scrutiny & criticism by other qualified scholars. Peer review stays within the group & is close to a sham.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

11 months

Presidents were silent on Hamas terrorism b/c the same DEI folks who told them what to say every time before told them what to do now. Much DEI is expressly anti-Israel (settler colonialism/whiteness) & conflates mandatory support for Palestine (liberation) w/ supporting Hamas.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

My wife & I cried & prayed & held each other. I felt the terrifying nearness of death & thought of everything I hadn’t done & might never do, especially as a dad & husband. But also as a Christian, a writer, & simply a person. It was too much. Then I was being rushed to the OR.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

When you shout someone down or prevent her from being heard, you're not participating in argument or free exchange of reason. You've forsaken it. But it's not only that *you* have quit the game of reason-exchange, you are actively preventing *other people* from participating. 2/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

11 months

Many are still working tirelessly to impose Kendi's broken vision. Their anger is not at his ideology or its corruption of a university, but at his failure to make it even more hegemonic & unquestionable. How Ibram X Kendi Broke Boston University:

Opinion | How Ibram X. Kendi Broke Boston University

The university totally committed itself to his ideology. It hasn’t backed off despite the scandal.

www.wsj.com

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

Basically, I think the wrongness of protesting at someone's home has everything to do with deliberately violating all sorts of boundaries worth caring about. Boundaries that help preserve fundamental relations in which we stand to one another as democratic citizens & humans. 2/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

It was in 2022 that WPATH declared “eunuch” a gender identity & recommended that doctors castrate people who want their body to “match” this self-image. They cited 9 sources, counting Daily Beast & a self-published book on fictional eunuch villains by a poet-journalist.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

3 years

Turns out there are a hell of a lot of people who, if they’re ever on a jury, won’t care about the actual law or facts, but will just impose their ideology & filter everything thru their views on history, race, & what happened in other, unrelated cases. It’s kind of terrifying.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

11 months

You can change things. Here's what I urge you to demand, all of which universities should do regardless: ❌An end to institutional statements & partisanship on contested political & ethical topics ✅Endorsement *and practical enforcement* of the Kalven Report & Chicago Principles

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

You are using *coercion* & *force* rather than argument, criticism, or reason-giving & you are trying to silence others, shut down conversation, & impose your own views on them. Rather than making an argument, you are *intending* to stop a conversation from even happening. 3/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

This is bogus & destructive of inquiry. A physics prof & DIE consultant published this in a physics education journal. The prof's publications are mostly like this: not on physics but on teaching from this explicitly ideological, dogmatic perspective. 🧵1/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

3 months

There's lots to say about the lack of non-progressives in academia. I began at BU in 2015. Theology has hired over a dozen faculty since. Despite repeatedly asking to serve, I've not only been kept off every search committee but even the committees that draft job descriptions.

Musa al-Gharbi

@Musa_alGharbi

3 months

Why are there so few conservative or religious scholars in academia? Two popular theories: 1. They face discrimination on the job market, and a hostile work climate if they are employed 2. They would rather do other things with their lives. There is some evidence in both

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

1) Target: Protesting at a home deliberately targets *a person's family.* It says 'I'll make your family suffer & pay.' Like threatening to kill someone's kids, it wrongs the innocent, treats them as mere means, & leverages a person's good, loving relationships against her. 3/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

2) Personhood: Protesting at a home targets someone *as a person* rather than as *occupant of a role.* It denies a person's full humanity by erasing any boundary between professional/political role & the fullness of their human identity & life. It makes politics totalizing. 4/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

11 months

A class in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, our leading public university, offering extra credit for students to *march in an anti-Israel/anti-‘settler-colonial’ protest or write their representative denouncing Israel* epitomizes the ideological corruption detailed in my thread.

David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

11 months

If you are a university donor, this is a key moment. You're seeing the bad fruit of 2 related things: 1. Years of faculty searches that have been explicitly ideological & partisan, prizing & hiring for the illiberal radicalism on display in the Kendi debacle & Hamas-praise alike.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

In May, I went for a routine four mile run. A mile & a half in, I paused to stretch. Suddenly, I felt extremely lightheaded. The next thing I knew I was waking up, flat on the sidewalk, with a woman kneeling over me.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

11 months

❌Defund & de-radicalize DEI. Millions to pay faculty to cheer terror & presidents not to condemn it. There are real goods of diversity. DEI has little to do w/ them & can be as ideological as Marxism & MAGA. Stop funding a mission-undermining, hyper-partisan, cultural super-PAC.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

Even minimal historical knowledge suffices for someone to know that in the 20th century doctors & hospitals advanced practices, ideas, & treatments we now regard as barbaric & even horrendous. We look back & ask ‘How could this possibly have happened? Who thought this was ok?’ 1/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

She told me I’d been unconscious & said several people had called 911. Help was on the way. I felt incredibly embarrassed. Apologizing & thanking her profusely, I said I was fine & that she didn't need to stay. I tried to sit up but couldn’t. She was incredibly kind.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

Besides being deeply unjust, these policies will fuel an ever more toxic & volatile form of racial resentment & division. Giving people good reason to think they or their children are being systemically denied equal opportunity has major political effects.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

After tests all that night & next day, including a stress test in which I’d run 2 miles to the target HR, all of which seemed to go well, my wife & I expected a discharge in time for after school pick up. We saw a team of doctors heading for us. I expected a lecture on hydration.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

When the ambulance arrived she told the EMT I’d vomited while unconscious. I had no idea. But then I saw the evidence. I realized music was still going in the earbud that hadn’t come out. I thought I just needed a moment, but suddenly felt very ill. They sped me to the hospital.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

This is key. Protest is about *making a claim & making it heard* Silencing is about *keeping others from making a claim & having it heard* Now, whether silencers silence with sheer yelling or real claims, what matters is their aim *to silence others,* that's what they try for. 4/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

3 years

At the heart of the ascendant ideology are three insidious moves: 1. The reduction of strictly every relationship & institution to power dynamics, and the concomitant erasure of realities of goodness, beauty, & love. But we all know there is more to life than power. 🧵1/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

Speaking to the bereaved parents from the witness stand, the surgeon insisted that the devastating outcome of her horribly & inexcusably botched procedure was “not an accurate reflection of the time & effort” she had put into it.

At N.Y.U., Students Were Failing Organic Chemistry. Who Was to Blame? (Published 2022)

Maitland Jones Jr., a respected professor, defended his standards. But students started a petition, and the university dismissed him.

www.nytimes.com

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

How should we think about how to use Twitter? My own thinking has been deeply shaped by @HSJSpeaks ’s argument in ‘Why it’s OK to speak your mind.’ His basic claim is that we have an ethical duty to share our arguments, evidence, & views *the more there is social pressure not to.*

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

4 years

The only remedy to past discrimination is *justice.* The only remedy to present discrimination is *justice.* The only remedy to future discrimination is *justice.*

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

By fall, as Academic Freedom Committee Chair, I was hearing from faculty (who all identified as progressive), who were very troubled by what they saw but terrified to speak up: they had seen colleagues falsely denounced as 'racist' & face major professional damage & even fired.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

@joachim_voth Yes! When the robots can fully live our lives, make our art & music, & have our relationships for us, that will free us up to… to… It will give us time for…. uh… so we can… oh.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

The Associate Dean here gives a master class in abuse of power & betrayal of fiduciary duty. The video & her cant display almost every trope of the regnant anti-intellectualism. Like many, she treats her university admin job as identical to running a hyper-partisan activist NGO.

Ed Whelan

@EdWhelanEPPC

1 year

Here's video of Stanford DEI dean Steinbach's remarks slamming Judge Duncan and setting forth university policy on free speech while calling its soundness into question and stating that it might need to be reconsidered. /8

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

In June, BU had hired Kendi, created the Center, & cancelled classes & work for a quasi-religious "Day of Collective Engagement" where Kendi & his now critics were treated like sages. I was newly tenured, a member of BU Faculty Council, & Chair of the Academic Freedom Committee.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

3 years

Just unreal, from an actual professor: ‘You are absolutely permitted to have political views I disagree with! You just aren’t allowed to express them. If you do, we will punish you professionally & prevent you from giving talks in your research area.’

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

That summer many departments had published Kendi-ist 'antiracist' statements, limiting academic freedom, subordinating inquiry & the entire curriculum to his ideology, & even promising task forces to police syllabi & classroom speech. One program published racial hiring quotas.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

I do understand. But seeing another case of institutional capture enabled by people elevating to the max someone whose primary qualification is unwavering devotion to the worst excesses of safetyist identitarianism & improvisational fluency in copypasta is still breathtaking.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

11 months

✅Creation of academic centers, chairs, & curricula focused on civil discourse, virtue, & the common good. Centers whose aim is research & teaching on these & liberty & citizenship amidst pluralism. Pulling this off well is tricky but there are models & strategies I'd point to.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

Instead it anticipates perfectly the regime of ideologically driven censorship he enacted. I don’t begrudge him his views, uninformed, ill-considered, & utterly reflexive though they may be. What I can’t understand is how you go from this diss in 2016 to de facto king of twitter.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

Some will respond: 'But this is existential. It's an emergency. Our democracy is at stake!' So said the insurrectionists. If you care about our democracy, show it in your pursuit. You can't destroy the fabric & norms of our democratic life while credibly claiming to save it. 8/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

3 years

She'll need to spend well over $30,000 & years in court. Even then, she'll likely lose. No one will know or care. So, take viewpoint discrimination seriously. But be real about how & to whom it usually happens. They're rarely famous, powerful, & still employed at NYT. /fin

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

In the past, when religious fanatics destroyed art & other beautiful things, it was because they wrongly thought the art itself was sinful & bad. Our contemporary religious fanatics *know* the art is beautiful & good, and that is exactly why they try to destroy it!

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

It’s laughable to think of an elite law Dean telling, say, a pro-abortion federal judge that they have ‘torn the community apart,’ harmed students, etc & allowing anti-abortion students to attack, mock her sex life, silence her, & then saying free speech policy should be revised.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

Many are claiming the state has 'no business interfering in public universities' & that doing so violates academic freedom. State interference can certainly destroy academic freedom, but the blanket 'no state interference' principle is no less of a threat to academic freedom.🧵

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

The dissertation mentions ‘free speech’ exactly one time, cites zero work on the topic (not even a throwaway citation to Mill), & does absolutely nothing in the way of grappling with the importance & meaning of free expression in the digital age.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

11 months

❌Stop ideological hiring & audit programs that pursue it. Some searches require & select for radical politics/activism, not scholarly excellence. Those hired reject open inquiry & aim to transform the uni in their image. Meanwhile, non-ideological searches/fields go unfunded.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

But this is unimaginable, above all the idea that a Dean, let alone a DEI Dean, would idly watch, then attack the judge & praise the students to FedSoc’s snaps. There’s not even a pretense of due neutrality. No analysis of this story that doesn’t address this reality is complete.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

11 months

✅Creation of Free Speech & Academic Freedom Offices. While DEI gets millions, there is ZERO funding admin, or intention related to free speech & academic freedom. We desperately need dedicated staffing & institutionalization to advance, defend, & educate on free speech & AF.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

Copypasta evangelism destroying public safety; every crime is due to historic oppression, so abolish the police: Deranged man attacks woman & dog with urine & beats dog to death, but “400 years of racism has prevented black people from generating wealth through home ownership.”

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

3 years

‘He never should have been invited’ *That* is what the cancellation was about & makes crystal clear. Somehow he slipped thru the cracks. MIT won’t soon revoke an invitation again. But only because they’ll never again make the mistake of inviting an Abbot in the first place. 8/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

11 months

❌No sanctions for *protected* faculty speech, however offensive. Unis are bad & biased on this front. That must stop. Don't demand sanctions yourself. Yes, many of these folks should never have been hired, but trying to fire them is bad, in principle & strategically. What to do?

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

Could there be exceptions where protesting at someone's home was just? Maybe. But *reducing a next-door neighbor & law-abiding citizen* *to nothing but a partisan enemy* *in virtue of their judicial vote* *by targeting their family & their love for their family*? Hell no. //

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 months

Last May, my life changed forever when I somehow woke from sudden cardiac death. I was grateful beyond measure to be able to hold my wife & three children again. I never imagined that a year later I'd be welcoming a new baby boy into the world. Meet Paul Benedict Decosimo!

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

I said: Beyond civil right's law & common sense, what counts as 'racism' is essentially contested & reflects competing ethical & political views. Any notion of 'antiracism' presupposes a definition of racism. So, whose notion of 'racism' will guide the BU task force? Dr. Kendi's?

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

Whose definition of racism will BU use? Who decides? The President said it was a good question & gave a non-answer. Immediately, two Deans went after me in the chat: I was clearly uninformed & confused, now was not the time for intellectual debate, I did oppose racism...didn't I?

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

1 year

It sounds like BU is officially endorsing & enforcing Kendi's view. But his view that every disparate outcome is caused by & constitutes racism is very controversial & rejected by conservatives like @GlennLoury & progressives like Adolph Reed, Jr. & my former teacher @CornelWest .

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

On this MLK day, don’t let anyone tell you that King didn’t really mean it when he said he dreamed of a day when his kids & our nation's people wouldn’t be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character. That was indeed his dream & he gave his life for it.

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

3 years

All it takes is 1 or 2 ideologically corrupt faculty to: - Deny doctoral admission - Blackball a job candidate - Derail a tenure case. It happens all the time. 4/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

Those who say silencing is the same as protest or just another form of free speech, no different than the speech & claim-making it aims to silence are wrong. They show themselves either disqualifyingly confused or actively opposed to the democratic practice of reason exchange. //

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

2 years

A judge is a fellow citizen & more fundamentally a fellow human. To protest at a home erases this. It subordinates & reduces human relations to agonistic partisanship & human identity to partisan identity. The protestor does this to himself as much as to his victims! 5/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

3 years

But these days, the most effective enforcers of viewpoint discrimination are militantly 'progressive' and *internal* to academia: the faculty. 3/

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David Decosimo

@DavidDecosimo

3 years

It is literally impossible to teach the basic ideas/framework of CRT & Kendiism to anyone but Yale Law students. Just like it’s impossible to teach kids the basic ideas of exponentially more complex & sophisticated things, like real religions. That’s why Sunday school is a myth.

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