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FastRerandomize unites batched candidate generation, key-only storage & design-respecting inference, while using the SoTA in accelerated computing (T/GPU). That design delivers order‑of‑mag speedups & enables tighter covariate balance in high-dim experiments⇢more precise causal estimates, lower cost

Parenti’s legacy is not only what he argued about power, but what he demanded of the political science discipline itself: look at how boundaries are drawn, careers rewarded, and questions deemed to count. Few pushed that critique from inside top journals, and fewer did so at such personal cost.

In that memoir, he describes how, despite strong faculty support, the U of Vermont trustees and state legislators moved to let his contract expire, citing “unprofessional conduct” linked to his anti-war activity. It was a concrete case of professionalism operating as a boundary.

Because of his activism, he also faced the costs of dissent. In “Struggles in Academe,” Parenti recounts being beaten, arrested, and convicted after anti-war activism in 1970, then carrying those consequences into academic life rather than leaving them at the campus gates.

Parenti would likely add that this shift is not neutral in its effects. When ideology recedes from view and method becomes the main battleground, it becomes easier to treat power, class, and imperialism as background conditions rather than central objects of inquiry.

Parenti’s diagnosis has also become easier to recognize in hindsight, even if harder to confront in practice. As John Gerring writes, social scientists “are all social democrats now, for better, or for worse,” and methodological disputes often displace substantive ones.

In “Reviewing the Reviewers” (PS, 1974), Parenti reads APSR’s book reviews as discipline-making. What looks like neutral evaluation, he argues, often does ideological boundary work, treating Cold War common sense as neutrality and sorting heterodoxy out.

Parenti was not strictly anti-quantitative. In “The State of the Discipline” (PS, 1983), he insists that statistical methods should not be discredited. He argues that methodological rigour was tied to centrist assumptions, narrowing what counted as scientific scholarship.

That APSR essay also traces how “political science without the politics” took shape. Behavioralism promised scientific rigor, but it also helped relocate normative conflict out of the discipline, treating questions of power and justice as philosophers’ problems.

In “Patricians, Professionals, and Political Science” (APSR, 2006), Parenti argues that academia achieved some ethno-class diversity, but ideological diversity lagged. Political heterodoxy, he says, was often discouraged and suppressed.

His core critique was simple and striking: political science as a discipline increasingly learned to look away from power. Not because politics disappeared, but because professional norms, funding, and methodological fashions rewarded safe questions and punished heterodoxy.

Beyond being a Marxist critic of capitalism, the Vietnam War, and U.S. anti-communism, Michael Parenti was one of the rare political scientists who directly critiqued the discipline’s depoliticisation from the inside, in leading venues like APSR and PS since the 1970s.

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The US ends lifesaving food aid for millions. The World Food Program calls it a 'death sentence' The Trump administration has ended funding to U.N. World Food Program emergency programs helping keep millions alive in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and 11 other impoverished countries, many of them stru...

The US ends lifesaving food aid for millions in 14 countries, including Syria, Afghanistan, & Yemen. The World Food Program calls it a ‘death sentence’

These life-saving programs, some of the last humanitarian aid to these countries, were being canceled “for the convenience of the US Government”

This morning, I was shocked to read the news from Harvard—the university where I completed my doctorate and which once felt like home. The director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies was removed from his position amidst a political purge led by the Trump administration. That director is one of my doctoral advisors, Professor Cemal Kafadar. Professor Kafadar is a distinguished scholar, a true intellectual, and a kind and generous person. As his former student and a current colleague, I can say that I never once heard him say anything that made me feel uncomfortable as an Israeli—quite the opposite. He always spoke with great respect about his Israeli colleagues and consistently made sure to avoid engaging in “sensitive” political topics, both in class and in personal meetings. Three years ago, the Israeli Historical Society invited Professor Kafadar to deliver a lecture series at the prestigious Stern Forum in Jerusalem, and I had the privilege of interviewing him for History, the journal of the Israeli Historical Society.

I’ve been familiar with the vile crusades led by some Jewish and Israeli individuals against anyone who dares utter a word of criticism about Israel. In my Harvard years I first encountered the cynical manipulation of the term “antisemitism,” stripped of all meaning and weaponized for right-wing agendas. Now some group of Harvard alumni (I have no idea who they are) published a report that cites an anonymous student who claimed Professor Kafadar expressed a pro-Palestinian sentiment. In the twisted conceptual universe of these antisemitism hunters, most of my posts and opinions would earn me the label of “antisemite.” This is how autocracies—and autocracies in the making—operate. Everyone is a target, even those who think they’re safe because they’ve always made sure to stay outside the danger zone.

Professor Avi Rubin of Ben Gurion University, on Harvard's shameful removal of Professor Cemal Kafadar from his role as head of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. (Statement from Facebook).

Trump, the state and the revolution To say that Trump in his new incarnation is different from the Trump No.

My today's Substack:
Trump, the state and the revolution
branko2f7.substack.com/p/trump-the-...