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As it so happens, my credentialled function at UC Santa Cruz is to be a senior technocrat in Big Science. I am leaving the institution -- among other reasons -- because I've come to the end of my rope w/that culture :-) The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
Let me put it this way: buried within the innards of the main library are reels of film of Upton Sinclair and other luminaries of EPIC giving speeches, interviews, & so on. This archival material is one-of-a-kind. It exists nowhere else. This film is slowly disintegrating. In the not too far distant future this film will no longer be able to be preserved. The librarians would rather see the film disintegrate than allow outsiders to come into their precious stacks (gollum, gollum) and save it.
This kind of insularity causes people at UCSC to reinforce each others neurosis' until they all turn crazy. She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre
Anyway, gratuitious (and puzzling) discourtesy aside, I'm still not understanding what the point is. Far from reinforcement, I don't know anyone w/in my institution or my social circle here who feels the same sense of personal urgency that I do about demand reduction, relocalisation etc; this is yet another reason why I'm heading out -- to find a (to my way of thinking) more reality-based community. If there is a collective neurosis in effect at my institution, it manifests (e.g.) as a blind faith that fossil fuel will be cheap forever, so we should go on underfunding the local bus system and building more parking structures :-)
The fate of the film archive you mention is very sad indeed, but NIH and turf behaviour are hardly unique to any one campus or org -- seems pretty universal in my experience. I could tell some tales out of school about the inter-institutional politics of my own line of work, but perhaps better not to :-) The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
The choices are now:
If everyone in the subthread agrees, the comments can be hidden by a FPer making them "editorial". Oye, vatos, dees English sink todos mi ships, chinga sus madres, so escuche: el fleet es ahora refloated, OK? — The War Nerd
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