2023-10-26

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Qatar’s War for Young American Minds.

According to a 2022 study from the National Association of Scholars, Qatar today is the largest foreign donor to American universities. The study found that between 2001 and 2021, the petrostate donated a whopping $4.7 billion to U.S. colleges. The largest recipients are some of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. These schools have partnered with the regime to build campuses in Doha’s “education city,” a special district of the capital that hosts satellite colleges for American universities.
Is the sudden discovery by campus leaders of political neutrality and freedom of speech for real?

Given the events on campus the last two weeks, it seems clear that some university leaders — as well as students and faculty — were too afraid to disagree with professor and student activists who take for granted that the pro-Palestinian position, and even the pro-Hamas position, is the only acceptable one. Given the number of vociferous past statements regarding issues like Black Lives Matter or the war in Ukraine, the sudden silence of university presidents and professors who may be sympathetic to Israel as well as the seeming certainty of student activists that everyone should agree with their anti-Israel opinions, is itself the product of years of cancel culture and fear.

The beautiful mind of Sam Bankman-Fried

He goes on to name a specific rationalist, Kelsey Piper of Vox — the journalist that Sam later shot his mouth off to — as someone who really should have gotten onto Adderall for greatest effectiveness in her altruism: “by my calculations, that decreased Kelsey’s effectiveness by 20%, thus costing approximately 54 billion lives.” Yeah, rationalists really do say that sort of thing as if it’s normal. Siskind discusses the medical nuances and risks of ADHD drugs at great length with many cited studies. But we can assure you that the rationalist subculture took that Slate Star Codex post as a starter’s pistol to get on Adderall by any means possible — convinced that it would turn them into geniuses of finance and Effective Altruism. We’ve even seen anecdotal reports of some rationalists who “microdosed” street meth, hoping for the same effect.
Hamas just learned a brutal lesson about Bitcoin. Can senators also learn it?