Whether "the system" won't punish you depends on which system. If you're in academia or paid-by-feds research (e.g. NIH), I would expect the system to punish you (not necessarily in immediately obvious ways).
I guess that depends on whether you are in the humanities or the hard sciences. I've heard several maths professors often making politically incorrect remarks and jokes in lectures where they couldn't have known that nobody was recording them. You wouldn't speak out against Socialism in a similar venue in the Soviet Union. (Or are web forums held to a higher standard than university lectures?)
I guess that depends on whether you are in the humanities or the hard sciences.
That's probably true. I suspect it also depends on whether you are a tenured professor, rather hard to dislodge, or a mere tenure-track larva terrified of not getting tenure...
People want to tell everything instead of telling the best 15 words. They want to learn everything instead of the best 15 words. In this thread, instead post the best 15-words from a book you've read recently (or anything else). It has to stand on its own. It's not a summary, the whole value needs to be contained in those words.
I'll start in the comments below.
(Voted by the Schelling study group as the best exercise of the meeting.)