peak hostage puppy - harvard pleads poor

bad cattitude ^ | 19 May, 2025 | EL GATO MALO

[MtnClimber]

we’re getting very close to peak hostage puppy.

you can tell by how hysterical and badly framed the ejaculations of outrage have become and the hilariously wobbly foundations upon which they are being erected. the whole of this enterprise seems to have become one massive sleight of hand rooted in passing off bad logic and worse equivalences. let’s look:

if one is seeking misbegotten regime hysteria, richard hanania is always a good place to start, and this one is a doozie even by his august standards:

ooh, “levels of nihilism i didn’t think were possible!”

catchy, but it’s pure projection.

here we see the classic hostage puppy framing. “if you cancel the 3,000 awful and stupid things we are doing you must also cancel these 3 things that we will point to and say ‘well what about this wonderful thing? are you trying to kill the puppy?’” as if this is the whole of the matter.

it’s grandstanding to select a few points to stand for a whole.

the implication is obvious: you want women to die of breast cancer! this work will all be lost! it’s too important!

it’s just the national lampoon cover, over and over:

it’s also still an entirely vapid and dishonest presentation of facts and choices.

let’s take dr willett at face value and assume that indeed, this is important, critical work that could be lost. he’s quite literally saying that the freezers might need to be shut off and all the tissue samples from this decades long term cancer study would wind up destroyed.

sounds dreadful, no?

probably not so much, no.

now, i’m no appliance economist, but i have a sneaking suspicion that a $53 billion tax-free endowment is enough money to fund “electricity to keep some freezers plugged in” if this work is really so important and irreplaceable.

in fact, i might even go so far as to venture that if the university (or some other backer) could not come up with a $100/freezer/year to “save this research” then perhaps some pointy questions about just how important they actually think this data to be ought be raised.

a $53bn endowment throws off $4.9bn per year, literally $563k per hour in returns (using 9.3% return, harvard’s 7 year historical rate). that’s ~$1,600 per second. surely if this work is as critical as claimed, harvard could spare a handful of seconds from its annual return to pay the electrical bill for these freezers full of precious cargo. the fact that this proposition of “having to shut off the fridge” is even on the table at all is pretty ridiculous.

this is an unserious claim made by unserious people.

dr willet tells us “these are priceless” in his breathless quotes, but it seems to me like if they will not pay a couple grand in freezer bills to preserve the study samples, then they are quite literally putting a price on it and that price is very, very low.

if they will not make such a meager investment to preserve such groundbreaking work, then surely one must question either how important it really is or harvard’s priorities.

SNIP

---

TOPICS: Education; Society
KEYWORDS: crappywriting; governmentfunding; learntocapitalize; unreadable

[MtnClimber]

If Harvard is not ripping off taxpayers to throw it away on DEI and CRT then they cannot go to sleep happy at night.

[9YearLurker]

I’m sure reversing ageing is a top priority for elite/rich mice.

[nopardons]

BTTT

[MikelTackNailer]

Writer EL GATO MALO managed to all-cap his pseudonym but couldn’t bother using any for the article. How ee cummings of him or her.

It’s also helpful to use basic outline and description of a subject without requiring the reader to get halfway through just to discern what he’s reading about, without having to decrypt the latest popular jargon (i.e.:hostage puppy).

But I’m just a simple cave man. Your modern ways alarm and frighten me.

[spankalib]

But I’m just a simple cave man. Your modern ways alarm and frighten me.

Lol!