The director of New College of Florida's applied data science program has offered his resignation in a letter that accused Governor Ron DeSantis of being a "fascist" over his conservative overhaul of the school.
Aaron Hillegass has worked at New College—a public liberal arts institution in Sarasota, Florida—since November 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile. His role has been to recruit students and professors, help students find jobs after leaving school, and teach machine learning. On April 8, he offered his resignation, decrying alleged attempts to transform the school into the "Hillsdale of the South."
DeSantis and other Republican politicians have for months been pointing to Hillsdale College, a private conservative Christian institution in Michigan, as a model for what they want education nationwide to look like.
In his letter, Hillegass protested DeSantis' alleged moves to transform New College into a new Hillsdale, stating that the Michigan school is "bad for America" because it "cultivates prejudice" towards minorities, the LGBTQ+ community, and non-Christians.
"When a governor guts the leadership of a state school in an effort to make a facsimile of Hillsdale, that is fascism. Not the shocking Kristallnacht-style fascism, but the banal fascism that always precedes it," the academic wrote.
This is just some more evidence of the deep animosity that Christian nationalist elites have toward secular education and education about inconvenient subject matter. This is not just public schools at risk. This theocratic attitude includes post high school education institutions. Specifically, they want to entirely get rid of both and replace them with (i) Christian fundamentalism and myths, and (ii) Whitewashed false history.
The MSM, Newsweek here, keeps referring to this kind of politics as conservative. The MSM still does not get it. This kind of politics is not conservative. It is radical right for the politically correct, or fascism or Christofascism for the more blunt.
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Boring physics - electrons are very, very round: Quanta Magazine writes:
Imagine an electron as a spherical cloud of negative charge. If that ball were ever so slightly less round, it could help explain fundamental gaps in our understanding of physics, including why the universe contains something rather than nothing.**
Given the stakes, a small community of physicists has been doggedly hunting for any asymmetry in the shape of the electron for the past few decades. The experiments are now so sensitive that if an electron were the size of Earth, they could detect a bump on the North Pole the height of a single sugar molecule.
The latest results are in: The electron is rounder than that.
The updated measurement disappoints anyone hoping for signs of new physics. But it still helps theorists to constrain their models for what unknown particles and forces may be missing from the current picture.
Jeez, the height of a sugar molecule on a ball the size of Earth? That seems to be pretty darned sensitive.
** Current theory posits that we should not exist because the big bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and anti-matter. When matter and anti-matter collide, they mutually annihilate and release a lot of energy, and particles like neutrinos and various flavors of quarks. Obviously since we're made of matter and doing human stuff, there's still some things we don't understand about the universe.
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Radicalization of the Democratic Party: Radicalization of the left in response to the radicalization of the right is an ongoing process according to some observers. A 2019 article in The Atlantic pointed to the rise of Bernie Sanders, a socialist who calls himself a democratic socialist. That was cited as evidence of a movement in the Democratic Party toward the far left. Socialism really is far left, so that could be called radicalization. Despite Bernie's popularity, the Democratic Party is still mostly controlled by neoliberal capitalists. Socialism is not going to happen with that crowd in charge.
A WaPo opinion cites the effects that radicalized Republican politics in red states is having on young Democrats who are active in politics. The WaPo opinion comments:
The reactionary turn underway in many red states is beginning to shape a new generation of young Democratic officials, many of whom will one day be the party’s leaders.
In these red states, young Democrats are entering local politics and developing public presences in response to the far-right culture-warring unleashed by GOP majorities. New restrictions on abortion and the growing right-wing backlash to LGBTQ rights are radicalizing a wave of Democratic public servants who mostly hail from the Gen Z and millennial generations.
“We’re seeing this across the country,” said Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run For Something, which recruits progressive candidates for state and local office. “It’s no coincidence that some of the loudest voices pushing back are young leaders in red states, often from urban environments, often people of color, often LGBTQ themselves.”Last week, after the GOP-controlled state legislature in Tennessee expelled two young Black lawmakers for protesting gun violence, and after a Texas judge invalidated federal approval of abortion medication, Run For Something’s candidate recruitment spiked. Litman says more than half the new candidates are from red states.
What binds these lawmakers and candidates together is an acute sense that the character of the country is on the line and it could determine their own futures. “For them, every part of this conversation is personal,” Litman says.
As one would expect, this is an issue that radical right propaganda plays on and spins into a narrative of a hellscape run by communists, socialists, strange, dangerous people like people of color, atheists or LGBTQ people. Republican elites and leadership now routinely refer to the left as the radical left. That is standard American fascist rhetoric.
Despite a movement to the left of some of the Democratic Party, Pew Research data from 2022 indicates that congress has generally become more conservative over the last 50 years. So at least at the level of congress and red state legislatures, the drift to the left in those places apparently has not made much of a difference yet.
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