[circus1540]

What if the root cause is that because we stopped labeling villains, they no longer fear being labeled as such. The consequences for the average lying academic have never been lower (in fact they usually don’t get caught and benefit from their lie).

[fc417fc802]

Actually the risks for academic misconduct have never been higher. For quite a while now there's been borderline activism to go out and search the literature for it - various custom software solutions have been written specifically to that end. We're also rapidly approaching a reality in which automated cross checking of the literature for contradictions will be possible.

Unfortunately academia as a pursuit has never had a larger headcount and the incentives to engage in misconduct have likely never been higher (and appear to be steadily increasing).

[tomtomtom777]

Are we living on the same planet?

Surely the public discourse over the past decades has been steadily moving from substantive towards labeling each other villains, not the other way around.

[Levitz]

But that kind of labeling happens because of having the wrong political stances, not because of the moral character of the person.

[fc417fc802]

Most people seem to think that holding the "wrong" political stance is a failure of moral character so I'm having difficulty making sense of your point.

[Levitz]

They truly don't. That's just part of the alienation.

When the opposition is called evil it's not because logic dictates it must be evil, it's called evil for the same reason it's called ugly, unintelligent, weak, cowardly and every other sort of derogatory adjective under the sun.

These accusations have little to do with how often people consider others things such as "ugly" or "weak", it's just signaling.

[AnimalMuppet]

I disagree. There's an awful lot of "my position is obviously based on the data, so if you disagree it must be because you want to be evil". (In my opinion, the left does this more than the right, for whatever that's worth.)

[fc417fc802]

If we expand "based on the data" to also include "based on my obviously correct ethical framework dictated by my obviously correct religion" then I figure the score is probably pretty close to even. The weird thing to me is how the far left has adopted behaviors that appear to be fundamentally religious in nature (imo) while fervently denying any such parallel.

[bethekidyouwant]

For activist, politicians scientists, civilians? be specific