[NYP] George Orwell famously said that "there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them."
His adage now applies to anyone associated with academia in any capacity.
The New York Times ran a report the other day on the canceling of University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot for his dissenting views on affirmative action. The paper quoted a Williams College geosciences professor, Phoebe A. Cohen, who supports Abbot’s shunning. She explained her dim view of academic freedom thusly: "This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated."
Ah, yes, that poisoned fruit of the patriarchy — intellectual debate and rigor.
This idea isn’t new, even if Cohen expressed it in a memorably pithy and direct way. Of all the faddish notions blighting college campuses and the broader culture, it is among the most indefensible and self-destructive.
Start with the fact that to reason is deeply human.
Steven Pinker points out in his new book "Rationality" that one of the world’s oldest people, the San of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, don’t survive by happenstance. These hunter-gatherers make closely reasoned, evidence-based judgments about their prey; without the use of logic, they wouldn’t be successful. If someone told them they needed to give up all this reasoning and cede it to white males, they’d presumably react with fury and incomprehension.
Needless to say, other cultures and civilizations are capable of great intellectual rigor. It doesn’t require endorsing the fashionable theories that the West invented nothing and rose to preeminence through colonialism and theft to acknowledge the historic achievements of China, India and the Islamic world.
It was Muslims who transmitted Arabic numerals and various important mathematical concepts to the West and played an outsized part in preserving the legacy of the classic Greeks.
The West did indeed forge the Scientific and Industrial revolutions, along with the Enlightenment, that shaped the modern world, and it did so at a time when white males occupied a privileged position in society through law and custom.
It seems WOKE is on a Joe Biden Ventilator and is only kept alive by Media.
Something I also have noticed Many that whine and pant "woke" seem to have done extremely well for themselves, in this so called racist society. eg. PHD University of Chicago Geophysicist, Obama, NFL has been's, NBL, Hollywood and etc...
What have any of these given back out of their OWN POCKETS?
#2
Nice to see pushback against Identity-Marxism, but even this author feels compelled to defend reason and logic by means of soft Wokery: obligatory references to the glory that is aboriginal reasoning and the grandeur that was the Arabs.
Enough with the virtue signaling. We are fighting a deranged, violent cultural movement whose goal is to take power from white males. It's just a con, a grift. A shakedown. That is all.
#4
Label me as tired. Strip them of their clothes, housing, food access, transportation, et al so they don't have to be touched by Western Civilization. Oppressed Euros pulled up stakes and went to another continent. Try Africa or Asia if you feel oppressed here but skip the countries in Asia that have adopted 'western institutions' and left the third world.
#13
A good comment always bears repeating, repeating, repeating... Echoes through the ages... until society goes deaf, academia goes blind, and ordinary people go dumb.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] Shocking data shows country is the world's second-largest cumulative polluter since 1850 - despite Beijing insisting the West is to blame
Who said the global Green New Grift was rational or aimed at actually reducing carbon emissions? It's just another excuse to shake down Whitey. Nothing more, nothing less.
The country with the largest population on earth
surely is the MOST responsible.
But also need to remember the USA Economy, as it stands today, could not survive 30 days without the CCP making what we buy.
Seriously why use China when we have all of Latin America south of us and it uses far less fossil fuels to produce and transport anything to the USA markets.
Plus it could deeply reduce Illegal Immigration if NAFTA is used like it was sold to us by the Politicians.
#4
Seriously why use China when we have all of Latin America south of us and it uses far less fossil fuels to produce and transport anything to the USA markets.
Because our kakocrats perceive the grifting opportunities to be orders of magnitude larger in China.
#5
I was a Democrat until 9/11, and way back then I knew that "the planet" wasn't REALLY anyone's focus so long as China was given free reign to do whatever the hell they wanted to do environmentally.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[NYP] George Orwell famously said that "there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them."
