Comments on M.Jacques post

In a recent post, I rebutted a few absurdities penned by somebody named Martin Jacques. How cruel of me to pick on the mentally challenged like that, and why am I wasting the reader's time by focusing on the rantings of some nobody on the Net like that, some might ask? Let's take a look at the bottom of the article linked to in that previous post: Martin Jacques is a senior visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore While Jacques may deserve to be nobody, in terms of status he very much is somebody and this means that he does get heard. As I keep saying, read and be amazed. Many conservatives have complained about the politicization and resultant intellectual downgrading of much of academic life, only to be told to stop exaggerating and overdramatizing the situation. Look at that article I linked to, which reads so much like the diary entry of a freshman who needs to spend a little less time at the peace rallies and a little more time in the library, and think about the position of the man posting it, and what he was hired to do. What you've been hearing from some of those annoyed (and sometimes greatly distressed) conservatives is not exaggeration or overdramatization, it is a recognition of the sad truth that an academic tradition that has taken centuries to create is being coopted by those who engage in politics as a fashion statement, and is thus being prostituted along the way. One need not look all of the way to Singapore to find this being done, either. One of these days, I'll get around to ranting about the use of Bayesian methodology in social statistics by those with blatantly activist agendas, much of which is just absolute fraud and can be rigorously be shown to be such. ("Choose whichever a priori distribution best meets your personal needs"). Yet there the practitioners are in a variety of departments, holding tenured chairs and deciding who the next faculty hires will be. There is a serious need for some serious housekeeping in Academia, but with the cranks having as entrenched a position as they do, at present, I wonder where reform would even begin.