| > But that wasn't who he was referring to by the phrase "radical right who all but destroyed America", was it? He specifically differentiates between the 32% you are referring to and the "radical right" by saying that one was fueled by the other. I think he's saying that (possibly) Roe radicalized the right, convincing them that democracy was a dead end. It isn't clear that he intends to exclude any anti-abortionists from his "radical right"; certainly the anti-abortionists could be mostly radical right. > The "radical right" is so tiny that it's hard to even get numbers on them. If that were true, Trump wouldn't have even been nominated, much less elected. > Okay then, how do you start with premise that "Abortion banned for all practical purposes" results in the conclusion that "Computer Science is threatened"? You made up the quote "Computer Science is threatened". Aaronson didn't say that, or anything like it; you're just falsely claiming that he did. The only mention of computer science in the post or any of his comments is when he says that he often uses the blog to "advertise positions in quantum information and theoretical computer science at the University of Texas at Austin," mentions "a Berkeley CS student named Pratyush Mishra", says he was once "a CS theory PhD student at Berkeley", and mentions a requirement for "a Masters in CS" to apply for CS grad school at a different university in another country. (Unlike your fabricated quotes, those are things Aaronson actually wrote, which is why I put them in quotation marks.) > Sure, but I didn't hallucinate his fear that lack of legal abortion threatens computer science. There's certainly nothing in his post suggesting such a fear. I do think you can make a reasonable case that academics will tend to flee places where they are being denied basic human rights, given the opportunity, and that this will impede research in those places, not only in computer science but in any field. There are definitely exceptions; the Soviet Union had many excellent academicians throughout the Cold War, for example, in part because they weren't legally allowed to emigrate. But that doesn't impede any field as a whole, because the refugees keep doing research in whatever they were doing research in before, just somewhere else. And, if there's nowhere available for them to flee to, they'll stay put and keep doing research, perhaps with the occasional promising research career cut short by death from pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes, or execution by stoning for walking in public with non-related men. |