The war on STEM: when post-modernism says that there is no real truth…
…then why not erase history, ignore facts, and create your own truth? Especially in the cause of fighting whatever is defined as racism these days. The definition has become extraordinarily broad amidst the paroxysms of rage and the demands for special treatment that we currently see.
I’m not just talking about pulling down monuments. STEM is a focus at the moment:
Professors, researchers, and students in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics field from around the country are taking part Wednesday in the #ShutDownSTEM movement to combat what they say is systemic racism in academia. They argue that the STEM field itself creates technology that is “weaponized against black people.”
One scholar and self-proclaimed “leading expert on wokeness,” James Lindsay, who is best known for his participation in a project that exposed the faulty review process of academic journals by submitting hoax papers that were ultimately published by such publications, tweeted, that “one point of #ShutDownSTEM is to find out who doesn’t do it (maybe they’re working on a Covid-19 vaccine?) and to use that against them later, just like happened at Evergreen State College with its Day of Absence.”…
Members of the science academic community are “call[ing]on people who are not Black to spend a day undertaking discussion and action that furthers this work, while providing Black scientists with a day of rest.”
It will be a day where they “#ShutDownAcademia, #ShutDownSTEM, and #Strike4BlackLives.”
Scientists and researchers subscribing to the movement will not do any work for the entire day, and any class or research group meetings “should be cancelled [sic] or replaced with discussions with colleagues about anti-Black bias in the world and in academia.”
I don’t know how big this movement is, but it will probably grow if it’s not big enough right now to get what it wants. One of the goals – as was the case at Evergreen and so many other schools (such as Harvard against Larry Summers as far back as 2005), and not limited to academia – is to make you come forward and declare yourself part of the movement, as well as to serve as a warning about how science can be used and how it must not be used. Join the movement or a campaign might be mounted against you. If not today, then at some future date when it’s more useful to the left.
The crocodile gets fed periodically, but then it gets hungry again. After all, silence is violence, which is one of the most pernicious mottos of the movement so far.
It’s ironic – but again, not at all unexpected if you study history – that the universities that once championed (or pretended to champion) liberty and freedom of speech as vital values stopped teaching that some time ago, and have become centers for tyranny. Someone my age has seen the enormity of the change from a time when it really was the basic stance of almost everyone in academia to defend different points of view, to a time when expressing a view that wasn’t to the extreme left could get you fired. That’s why freedom of speech and liberty are so important to guard and nurture – because the human race has a strong pull in the other direction, a force that must be resisted actively or people will succumb to its siren call.
The Founding Fathers knew this. They knew it in their bones. But our generation either forgot to teach it or didn’t even know that it was being so heavily undermined right along. I saw the signs when I returned to school about thirty years ago and they alarmed me, and I did speak out against them in class. But I was met with glazed stares from my younger classmates; they couldn’t be bothered already, that early on. They just didn’t care what the old dinosaur was saying, so I didn’t even have to be answered. I could just be ignored.
I’ll close with this:
[NOTE: Please see Havel’s Greengrocer.]
[ADDENDUM: I’m not the first one to say this, but it’s an important thought: one of the reasons the trend towards closing down free speech often goes unnoticed is that initially the left seems like it’s championing free speech. The leftist does this as long as the left is the beneficiary. When leftist thought is unpopular, the right in the US (not everywhere) lets it have a forum, in the interests of free speech. The left pretends that it would return the favor. Maybe even some people on the left at that point think that really would be the case. But they are sadly mistaken, and when the left has gained majority and control, those people will be shouted down and ostracized themselves if they fight free speech’s curtailment for the right.
It’s a clever game. And it’s the one that’s been played.]
Nature (one of the oldest and most influential scientific magazines in the world) joined the fashionable cause of the moment yesterday when it pledged to fight against anti-Black racism in academia and STEM. Aside from the question of what evidence (if any at all) exists for this moralizing (and highly dubious) accusation, how is it within the purview of a serious periodical to be subservient to the whims of current politics? On a related note, John McWhorter (who is neither white nor conservative) is apparently planning to expand his famous article on the cult (his word is religion) of “anti-racism” into a book.
When my tin foil hat shrinks and puts pressure on my brain I sometimes believe that US teacher unions purposely are dumbing down American kids in order to weaken our country. Because AmeriKKKa is evil and stuff.
Remember how back in the Pres Carter days Dems believed that US imperialism was responsible for all evil in the world? If only the US military was weakened then the world would become a paradise. After events like the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran embassy hostage they were perplexed to learn that wasn’t true. There truly were non-US “bad actors” in our world.
When they launched a helicopter rescue mission to get the hostages back, they learned of their success in one area. They had crippled the US military. That mission was a disaster which thankfully fell apart very early so that few lives were lost.
STEM has been the last bastion of sanity in the infiltration of SJWs into the various departments of our educational establishments.
Because it has resisted for so long, the SJWs have decided to CANCEL those departments and all resistant faculty within them. The holy flag of racism has been raised and the call for no quarter has been sounded.
I warned about this 4 years ago (I know I sound like Art). I mentioned this was comiong several times here at Neo’s. At that time we were told in the physics department we had to stop teaching physics “constructed by old white guys” as it was racist. We needed to start teaching only physics by black people. I asked the accusers back then if a ball dropped from a building in Africa somehow did not accelerate at 9.8 m/s2 as it did in England when Newton came up with the theor of gravity or as Galileo measured it in Italy? They, of course, had no idea what I was talking about as none of them ever took such a science course. Sadly, if they deny the reality of STEM knowledge then we really have lost everything. Lysenkoism here we come.
Oh for goodness sakes!!! I work in tech (STEM) and have for 25 years. You would not believe how racially diverse it actually is. I work with a huge team that is part of a Fortune 10 company that is almost exclusively black and has a ton of women. Shutdown STEM my tush! FWIW…most people in IT are raging leftists. With all the BLM stuff lately being so in your face and toxic, I have started unfollowing and muting many professionals in my field on social media just to be less stressed. It is maddening to watch them jump on the bandwagon and see data driven people pay no attention to actual data. I am one of the few conservative thinkers in my field and have to take care to not broadcast my views because I have seen fellow professionals go personally after someone who does not toe the liberal dogma line to their liking. They basically blackball you. Sad. Such smart people to be so stupid.
I’ve never understood the belief that STEM subjects would be immune. Many in the sciences have been taking a pragmatist view of truth, for quite some time. And that very easily moves to a denial of objective truth. (See Richard Rorty). There are also plenty who tend toward eliminativism, which goes further to denial of all meaning.
The only reason they were late on the menu was that their reach was less than, say, English. Chemistry departments don’t set the intellectual tone of a campus. And THAT is something that seeps into peoples’ minds, often quite unconsciously. In those cases where they seemed immediately useful to the left, as in climatology, the conquest was swift.
And the notion that such training somehow immunizes one’s ideas would seem to go against the experience of Russia and Germany.
Cherchez le communiste.
physicsguy:
Larry Summers was forced out of Harvard in 2006, not long after making a politically incorrect scientific statement that was really rather mild. I wrote about it several times here. The issue wasn’t supposed racism, it was supposed sexism. But the principal was the same. What he said was scientifically accurate but upset the protected group (in this case, women) so it was not allowed and he would not be allowed at Harvard.
That was enough for me to realize the writing was on the wall, and it wasn’t hard to read. Fourteen years ago.
This is hilarious because university campuses all over the country, including and especially the hoitiest and toitiest, are chock full of people in the hard sciences who, in many cases, are generating WAY more money for the schools than anyone from the Humanities or other departments. These people remained silent while this craziness sprouted and grew. They remained silent while it destroyed the lives of others. They thought it would never affect them.
Welcome back to reality! Hope you enjoy your stay!
Mike
We’ve all watched 3 toddlers happily playing and what happens when you give one of them a toy. The other two feel bad. And what do they do? They grab and generally throw a tantrum.
My theory about all this is it’s about status. As white achievement is head and shoulders above non-white achievement when it comes to the modern world, whites have higher status.
Jordan Petersen talks about status and how deeply it’s in ingrained in animals and how much it affects our interaction.
The non-white world, IMO, would love to bring whitey down. There’s not much they can do to overtake whitey, so they’re left with one option. And it feels good and right.
What’s in the minds of the useful idiot whites, I don’t know. Not much self-understanding, I guess.
I started college in 1960 and remember the so called free speech riots. What I especially remember is that the administration collapsed like a wet paper bag and gave the rioters what they wanted. We joked that there was nothing more craven and cowardly than a college president. The college administration giving in to the mob is SOP.
“What’s in the minds of the useful idiot whites, I don’t know.”
Distinguishing themselves from their unwoke white inferiors.
Mike
I wonder what Cival War 2.0 will look. I think it will fought block by block, county by county, in other words ugly and vicious. Ir will not end well.
” … initially the left seems like it’s championing free speech. The leftist does this as long as the left is the beneficiary. When leftist thought is unpopular, the right in the US (not everywhere) lets it have a forum, in the interests of free speech. The left pretends that it would return the favor. Maybe even some people on the left at that point think that really would be the case.”
No, not if they are committed leftists. Marcuse, and Repressive Tolerance.
“Larry Summers was forced out of Harvard in 2006, not long after making a politically incorrect scientific statement that was really rather mild.”
IIRC, it wasn’t even a statement. It was part of a list of hypotheses which might have gone some way to explaining [something which must not be discussed].
Sonny Wayz:
Summers made a number of statements in his speech, not just a list of explanatory hypotheses. He stated that research indicates that there are fewer women than men who test way way way above the mean in certain sciences. And he also stated that it would be useful to research that, as well as other possible reasons for the disparity between the number of women in high positions in science and the number of men, in order to understand the reasons for the phenomenon.
Even by 2005 it had become sacrilege to suggest that there are disparities that are not simply due to discrimination, and it also had already become sacrilege to suggest that the possible other reasons should be studied.
“Summers made a number of statements in his speech, not just a list of explanatory hypotheses. ”
Thanks for that. It has been a while, and I didn’t delve *that* deeply into it at the time. Note to self: Google, um, Bing, um, DuckDuckGo is your friend.
Yeah, Bing has gone all glossy Prog lately.
I’ve switched to DuckDuckGo
James Lindsey was one of the three scholars who set out to do to race, gender, and class studies – driven by alleged “social justice” – what physicist Alan Sokal did to PoMo nonsense during the 1990s.That is, punk them with a hoax they could not rationalise away.
Dubbed the Sokal hoax redux in 2018, James Lindsey, philosopher Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose, recycled Mein Kampf for feminist gynocrats and dog rape for queer-phones into publishing and even best of awards.
Here’s an establishment Leftist take at the Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-hoax/572212/
But better still is hearing from the proverbial horses mouths.
Video interview “Social Justice is a Mind Virus”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9pl2eP7X7w
“Helen Pluckrose on Grievance Studies, Social Justice and Post Modernism”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiXGp2VykaE
Their fields are math for James, philosophy for Peter, and English for Helen, if I recall correctly.
ArmyMom writes:
How the Hell did this radicalisation of IT happen?
Thirty and forty years ago, computer science and emerging IT was strongly influenced by libertarian ideas and values. How did this culture of classical liberalism collapse, fade or transform?
I’ve always thought that the post Cold War teaching movement into neo-Marxist educrats was fundamental, somehow.
But at the university level, through the 1990s, I saw no indication that the coming storm of hyper-radicalisation was going to occur – despite living in a university town, well connected to campus and student life, and a major university.
Any ideas, ArmyMom? Others?
To ArmyMom, et al, re the above question. James and Peter, et al, kick around a few explanations to answer why Social Justice notions exploded during the late Obama years. SEE link above to “Social Justice is a Mind Virus” at 25minutes, ff.
It’s an intriguing check list of ideas.
They, of course, had no idea what I was talking about as none of them ever took such a science course.
Yes, physics prof, you had no idea what I was talking about. and yes you do sound like Y.
I do not know if your incomprehension of Newton’s gravity theory, Einstein, classical physics, and quantum physics is a result of your personal biases or just because you have never taken a sufficiently advanced physics course, prof. Nonetheless, you did not comprehend or at least you comprehended that Ymar needed to take science courses at these Leftist institutions, in order for you to talk to Y.
Just give all BLM folk a phD in whatever STEM they want and forget about any dumb test or research project. We don’t need no stinckin’ badges and we don’t need no stinckin’ requirements. Great-they can go out and be in charge of building bridges, designing chemical plants, making new microchips; heck, let them all be neurosurgeons…this is the logical conclusion. Anyone see a problem with this? Oy veh.
Way back when I was an undergraduate I took the senior level physics course in analytical mechanics. This notoriously difficult course was taught by Dr. Miller, AKA Dr. Death. Dr. Miller didn’t perform gruesome medical experiments on the students, he just expected you to get the right answer, no partial credit. 36 students started the course and 6 of us finished the course, all white guys. Today Dr. Miller would probably be fired for not being welcoming and inclusive and only passing white males. Obviously those physics courses are sexist and racist.
I’ve long said that the first amendment is one Supreme Court justice away from being circumvented. Unfortunately, that one judge may be John Roberts.
I warned this when Obama gave the overt cry..
Now i am out of work since September…
after 15 years in STEM..
its going to get a lot worse in many ways
brick by brick they are creating a future situation that they wont be able to handle
one can figure it out by taking inventory…
T J on June 12, 2020 at 12:22 am said: ArmyMom writes: [snip]
How the Hell did this radicalisation of IT happen?
It didnt… the geeks are posing to stay out of trouble… ie. they are chicken…they stand up for nothing… they bend like grass in the wind… so they all know to put up a front and toe that line just not to have to look for work as most programmers and techs are so so… the better ones (like me) get in trouble… we felt we could find work, but that is less so than it was given the oddities in kick backs for h1b visas and other things… now companies are afraid that their work force may be noticed and the mob may show up… but engineers, techs, and such are people who work with a unforgiving reality, they do not have the luxury of delusion, but they do know enough to pander pander pander..
this is how so many people followed the freaky German guy, but really didn’t like it… many many many didnt, which is why he had such elaborate structures to prevent his being removed… he knew they were pandering and pretending in many ways, but he also knew that as long as they did, they were demonstrating who had control, and how beautiful a horse the deer he showed..
they know the level of the power they have by the numbers that pretend..
they do not care if they really believe it, its enough to feel the power of forcing people to do something they dont want to… thats the negative power people… the people who have to feel it… they do more and more just to find a way to show they have it… after all, doing what people want is supported and you never know if they are doing it because you have the power to compel them or they want to and you have no power at all.
Artfldgr:
Right before I read the comments you made in this thread, I was reading, in a book I have (and have written about before, here), a passage about that very topic. The author Haffner was a young man in Germany during the 30s, ended up escaping to England, but he wrote a memoir of the Nazi takeover times in Germany. Among other things, he wrote this on the subject of a lot of people joining the Nazi Party in March 1933:
I made a tour of the STEM buildings at UNM and noticed how many professors’ office doors had “Diversity” posters or excerpted articles on diversifying STEM.
I was not amused.
My cafe across from the university is gradually coming back to life. So this morning I’m sitting at a table with a window view and I see a van, pulling an open trailer, park on the main drag (which used to be Route 66). Then a man carrying a giant American flag gets out, stands on the trailer platform and starts waving the flag while yelling things.
I’m a curious fellow so I left the cafe to go listen to the man and see what he was up to.
Well, he was a patriotic Trump supporter, so he was shouting things like, “Trump is my President” and “I love America.” I told him I agreed but wanted to know why he was doing it. He said he goes to all protests this way to have his say. I smiled at him and went back into the cafe.
Not too long later I saw a big guy in a red shirt came up and interact with flag man. I went back to work on my laptop. Next thing I knew, I looked up and saw red shirt swinging at flag man. Some people nearby pulled them apart.
I went outside and listened to the cafe regulars who were talking. Even the liberals agreed that flag guy had his right to speak.
“If not today, then at some future date when it’s more useful to the left.” – Neo
Only the left spends time combing through old social media posts, or deep-archives of news studios, to come up with damning evidence of wrong-think.
The right has more productive things to do.
There are interesting books and stories of the period..
much of what the left has done has copied many things of that time
with the idea that they are not like that, they are the good people
that their motives are pure…
but gone with the wind is gone with the wind
cancel culture is removing cartoons, books, all manner of things
including magic the gathering game cards
they are social dictators…
Which is what Florence nightingale said the women s movement would become
and it has given they are some of the makers and staunchest allies of what is going on, the creators, and facilitators of the changes needed…
i wonder if you remember when i pointed out the date the last anti communist law was struck down… that was a good place to mark the book as when the end would come…
Seems like a good place to link this post as having general applicability — the different leftist causes are all running together anyway.
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-6-6-some-progressive-bad-ideas-to-make-things-worse-for-black-americans
Speaking of tyranny — it isn’t just about enacting laws, it’s about who gets exempted from obeying them.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1270329369874046978.html
Companion piece: Judicial Watch wants to paint the streets of DC too.
https://www.cnsnews.com/index.php/article/washington/michael-w-chapman/judicial-watch-asks-dc-mayor-permission-paint-no-one-above-law
As many people point out in Neo’s salons, the events unfolding in the wake of the killing of George Floyd are the implementation of plans to enact a revolution long in the making.
https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2020/06/06/hayward-democrats-embrace-the-four-stages-of-ideological-subversion/
JOHN HAYWARD6 Jun 2020
Each stage is detailed at the link, with examples.
Artfldgr – I think this one was written for you!
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/06/thoughts-from-the-ammo-line-328.php
POSTED ON JUNE 12, 2020 BY SCOTT JOHNSON
THOUGHTS FROM THE AMMO LINE
Ammo Grrrll chronicles the FEMINIST BLUES, AND A SHORT HISTORY. She writes: