Wednesday, February 28, 2024

LInks - 28th February 2024 (1 - General Wokeness)

Say it loudly—'I am not a racist.' - "It started when the UW College Republicans organized an affirmative action bake sale where they sold cookies at different prices depending upon the customer’s race.  It was a political stunt meant to make people angry and they succeeded.  Hundreds of protestors gathered around their booth along with a dozen police officers.  I stopped by and tried to have a conversation with a young protestor but it degenerated into a situation where she loudly denounced me to a mob of several dozen students that surrounded me.  At one point I said that I didn’t see rampant racism on campus and the crowd burst into laughter.  A local paper called The Stranger wrote about the incident and a local TV station included it on the evening news.  I was surprised to find that this single incident branded me as a racist to many students and colleagues.  After one of our students complained, the director of my school reprimanded me for a “lack of sensitivity to minority students.”  A student experience survey conducted at the time generated several angry comments about me including one that said that I am “a garbage person and should not be teaching in this institution” and that I am, “the symbol of hate, ignorance, racism, and white supremacy. I would not be surprised if they were in the KKK.”  Last summer when I posted a message to a faculty mailing I was accused of being a racist for defending police officers during our summer of riots.  One faculty member wrote that, “What Stuart has shared is racist, trolling behavior from a faculty member with a long history of documented racial biases.”  In my lifetime I have seen this country make incredible progress on the race issue, so I was confused to find myself accused of being a racist.  Shelby Steele provided an answer.  In his book Shame he writes that in our divided society liberals pursue “poetic truth” that “disregards the actual truth in order to assert a larger essential truth that supports one’s ideological position” and that poetic truths “work by moral intimidation rather than by reason, so that even to question them is heresy.”... Overt racism has all but disappeared from modern life, especially on college campuses, but progressives have concocted various explanations for hidden forms of racism.  One accusation is that we have bias that we aren’t even aware of.  In reviewing the many decisions I have made in my 35-year university career for admissions, hiring, and grading, I can’t find even one incident of negative racial bias.  The only examples of bias were in the opposite direction with minority candidates treated more favorably.  The euphemism is that they are “diversity” candidates as in, “We can hire three faculty this year, but the dean said that we can hire up to two more if they are diversity hires.” Another accusation has been the claim of systemic racism, the idea that white men built our society so that it favors them.  This idea should not be dismissed out of hand.  I still remember when I first visited a store for left-handed people.  I was amazed to find how much our society has been designed to work well for right-handed people.  I didn’t realize that can openers and desks and notebooks had all been designed for right-handed people like me.  To take this idea seriously, though, the proponents would have to produce examples of how the system has been tilted in favor of white people.  Where is the equivalent of the left-handed can opener?  Many people have taken a stab at this although there are few convincing examples and many cases where people who make this argument have had to retract their claims.  For example, The Smithsonian quickly apologized for producing a poster that indicated that white culture includes rugged individualism, the nuclear family, and the scientific method. The only solid evidence for systemic racism is the fact that there are differences in outcomes across races with whites and Asians generally performing better.  But this argument falls apart when you consider alternate explanations.  In my own courses I have found that course grades are highly correlated with lecture attendance and that mathematical background seems to be an issue for many students who struggle.  So to the extent that some minority students perform less well in my courses, it seems most likely that this stems from factors other than race including a weak math background and students putting in less effort than others."

Barbara Kay: U of T student faces petition to revoke academic award because he is conservative - "Academia is so dominated by progressive dogmas that most students and professors who hold conservative views keep them on the “down low” to avoid being censured by the thought police. But a diminishing few still boldly thrust their heads above the parapet.  We find an example of this endangered species in Arjun Singh, a University of Toronto political science student whose extracurricular activities include work as a compliance analyst with the U of T-affiliated G7 Research Group and serving as the deputy director of the Canadian Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. He’s clearly a highly intelligent and ambitious young man. Singh is a recipient of the Department of Political Science’s David Rayside award, which gives preference to “students who have demonstrated commitment and leadership in co-curricular activities, on or off campus,” and who have contributed “to greater public understanding of social and cultural diversity and enhanced inclusion of historically marginalized populations.” The latter criterion is where the canker gnaws for the U of T Equity Studies Student Union. It is calling for the revocation of the scholarship and urging students to sign a Change.org petition to that effect... 13 2019-20 political science awards beneficiaries, including five Rayside recipients, penned a letter to various U of T honchos voicing their indignation and requesting the scholarship be rescinded. They claim Singh’s writings and social media postings, as well as his actions and beliefs, are “exclusionary and harmful” to “racialized minorities, women, Indigenous communities, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities (and) sexual minorities.”... As Singh himself tweeted in accompaniment to the second petition mentioned above, “It’s quite odd that white progressives are the first to, ostensibly, ‘defend minorities’ on issues — even when most minorities themselves are indifferent or see no problem, with the actions critiqued.”"
The left like to mock white men who point out the injustice of their being censored, but even minorities are only allowed to spout liberal opinions

The Post Millennial on X - "Children watch a dildo ring toss game be played at Capital Pride in Ottawa. Footage by @BethBaisch"
Weird. The left keep telling us this never happens

Russians propaganda mocking those leaving Russia for America🤦😂 - YouTube

Lawrence Krauss: Saying 'words matter' is code for 'coddle me' - "At the bottom of the copyright page of the latest editions of Roald Dahl’s books, a new notice now appears. “Words matter … The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvellous characters.” On the surface, it seems whimsical and innocuous. However, it signals a recent effort carried out by his publisher, Puffin, to rewrite his classic texts to make them less “offensive.” Words like “fat” and “ugly” have been culled, whole phrases rewritten, and, of course, gender-neutral terms have been added in places. While highly reported on in the media, this rewriting of classic literature is just the most recent manifestation of a central facet of the new dangerous trend to label language as a form of violence, under the guise of the very mantra that introduced the new bastardization of Dahl’s work: Words Matter. As a writer, one might think I would be more sympathetic to this claim, but I am not. I recognize and celebrate the potential power of words, but I understand that whether this potential is manifested depends completely on the recipient. The pen may be more powerful than the sword, but only if the words reach a receptive audience. There is a fundamental difference between verbal assault and physical assault. The impact of the former, as potentially harmful as it may seem, lies purely in the mind of the listener. Not so for physical violence. Saying “Words Matter” or “Words have Power” is like repeating the old mantra “Knowledge is Power.” But that doesn’t make any of them true. Knowledge alone confers no power, however much we might wish it were so. Ask most environmental scientists, or reflect on the fate of the ancient Librarians of Alexandria. It is what you do with the knowledge that matters. The same is true for words. T.S. Eliot also wrote, in his masterful poem Four Quartets 1, “Words, after speech, reach Into the silence.” Words disappear after they are spoken. The only place they may persist is in the mind of the listener. What we do with the words we hear is uniquely determined by a combination of culture, experience, education, and conscious or subconscious reflection. At a very basic level, each of us has the power, at least in principle, to parse and interpret what we hear, and, if necessary, to do so in ways that positively benefit our psyches and our lives, or, alternatively, in ways that may cause emotional pain and trauma. Noam Chomsky once said to me, when we were discussing religious beliefs, “I don’t care what people believe. It is what they do that matters.”... This notion is anathema in the modern world, however, because it implies that if you feel traumatized or offended by what you hear or read, it is primarily your problem to deal with. The trauma may be very real, but the underlying psychological issues and healing processes are ones that you, not others, need to take primary ownership of. You have not been victimized; you have been traumatized. There is a difference... While I was young, whenever I saw signs of antisemitic exclusion, like some club not accepting Jews, it seemed that Jews had banded together to build a nicer club down the road. The response to antisemitism was not a sense of victimization, but rather an incentive to be better and do better. Such a material response may be a luxury of circumstances that is not available to all, but the psychic response is always available. Die Gedanken Sind Frei (“Thoughts are free”), after all. It is also important to note that words are not static. Their meanings evolve over time as language and culture evolve. Rewriting the words of speakers or writers of the 17th century, or the 1950s, so that they adhere to the cultural sensitivities of the present time robs us not only of great literature but also of historical perspective. Repeating the mantra “Words Matter” as a rationale for censoring words or silencing others, is often simply code for “Coddle Me.” To edit Roald Dahl or Ian Fleming, so that young adults are never exposed to words or situations that might not be considered appropriate for popular discourse today is to stunt their intellectual and emotional growth. Censoring and other strictures on language are not the solutions. Rational discussion and even ridicule are. Words themselves can be the greatest tools to alter the impacts of other words. After all, words aren’t, or shouldn’t be, treated as if they are sacred. Allowing them to be said out loud often robs them of their power. In 1972, the comedian George Carlin was arrested for disturbing the peace for performing a routine in which he described the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”:  “shit,” “piss,” “fuck,” “cunt,” “cocksucker,” “motherfucker,” and “tits,” expressing amazement that they could not be used regardless of context"

Lawrence Krauss: Concordia University 'decolonizes' engineering - "Concordia may be located on land that was once the Six Nations Confederacy, but for better or worse, it is now part of Quebec, a province within a country called Canada, which was confederated in 1867 under laws that have governed society for the past 157 years. As much as one might bemoan the fate of Canada’s Indigenous peoples, universities like Concordia exist precisely because they embody educational structures created to encourage study, learning, and research aimed at unravelling the true nature of reality and using that knowledge to help guide our modern society. Imposing political criteria like decolonization and indigenization on curricula that include physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, and so on is to shackle these fields to fantasies. Goodleaf is quite clear about the intent of the new curriculum. It “creates a path where everyone is equal and no worldview is superior.”... (I bet that the peoples of the Six Nations Confederacy also recognized that individuals differ in their skills and abilities and therefore probably did   not   consider everyone to be equal — especially people outside the Confederacy.) Indeed, the very notion Goodleaf espouses — that people should be considered equals, and their differing worldviews should all be granted equal consideration — is uniquely western. In fact, it could be seen as one of the western cultural norms that she is supposedly critiquing. And some worldviews   are   superior to others: especially those that conform to reality, rather than myth. Some people still believe that the Earth is flat, but that view is not consistent with building and launching of satellites that help us predict the weather, guide our travel, and save many lives. A worldview that helps create knowledge, including a better understanding of the realities of being human and of the laws that govern the cosmos, will help produce structures and technologies that improve our lives. A worldview based on myth and superstition, governed by ideological strictures that discourage or punish open questioning will diminish the quality of human existence. Human history has demonstrated this time and again. Concordia’s Vice-Provost of Innovation in Teaching and Learning, Sandra Gabriele, offers the following explanation in defence of the new program: “To truly decolonize demands a willingness from all of our community members to think about how systems have been in place for centuries to support a particular worldview, and how those injustices and that discrimination became embedded in the ways we think and work.” The “particular worldview” she is describing here is probably that of the Western Enlightenment: a philosophy based on empiricism, which fosters a fascination with exploring new ideas and cultures and discovering nature’s secrets, and — most importantly — allows free and open questioning and discussion. These are the principles that led to the development of modern institutions of higher learning. This worldview has helped us combat myth, superstition, and ideologically based discrimination and injustice. To label support for that worldview as unjust and discriminatory is to misunderstand the importance of Enlightenment principles and the value of modern scholarship. The damage this initiative could cause to the global reputation of the university — and to the opportunities it offers its graduates — is exemplified by developments within the School of Engineering. If talk of a new initiative in engineering leads you to expect exciting new technological developments in robotics, material structures, aeronautical improvements, or computational tools, you will be sadly disappointed. Instead, this involves showcasing something called the “EDI Lab.” Led by an engineering faculty member who holds a “Concordia University Research Chair in Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Science,” the project is not about studying engineering per se, but about studying Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in STEM disciplines. A serious research program that focused on these issues would surely be better suited to the social sciences than to the engineering curriculum.  And this is not the only concern it raises. The program does not appear to be designed to promote open questioning and research into even these questions — research that might, for example, find that systemic racism is   not   endemic to engineering — but rather to promote standard postmodern critical race theory jargon and tropes... Whatever one’s views as to the scholarly validity of a course like this, it does not seem likely to provide students with skills that will be attractive on the job market. Will firms that hire electrical engineering graduates from Concordia be more inclined to select students who have spent time researching EDI, or will they prefer those who have concentrated on, say, advanced semiconductors or new battery technologies?"  
A bridge that is built on alternative engineering which collapses is not a problem, because no worldview is superior

Meme - Sunny Hostin @sunny: "Really @KRMD3? My great grandmother was a slave and then a sharecropper. My ancestors are slaves. I have no affiliation to the enslaved? My family who built this country for free - and which you still benefit from - isn't owed reparations. Ignorant and disrespectful and expected."
YAF @yaf: "After repeatedly calling for slavery reparations, The View's Sunny Hostin says she was "deeply disappointed" after she discovered her ancestors were slaveholders from Spain."

'The View' host Sunny Hostin still believes in reparations after slaveholder ancestry revelation - "Despite initially feeling "deeply disappointed" at the revelations, Hostin remarked that she now feels "enriched" knowing her family’s history.   "I'm enriched by knowing that my family has come so far from being enslavers to my mother marrying my father in 1968," Hostin said.  "You're not responsible for what they did," Behar responded. During the show, Hostin also described her mother’s reaction. "She was deeply disappointed. She actually cried about it. And then she said maybe that's why I have been so connected to Black culture because it's an atonement in my spirit. And I received that. I also found out – and there were slaves on both sides of our family, mother’s and father’s. But we are seven percent indigenous Puerto Rican!" Hostin said. She added that her mother "really identified as Puerto Rican" prior to the news, but now Hostin argues the findings proved she was "White."... "It's weird because when you look at her, my mother is blond, and she has light eyes and my whole family looks like that. So, I think inside I sort of knew this was my history and that's probably why I didn't want to do it," Hostin said.  Hostin also discovered that her third great-grandfather registered to vote in Georgia back in 1867 despite being born into slavery in 1835."
Black people are not responsible for what their ancestors did - only white people. Families can come far - but not white nations
When hating people based on their race boomerangs back on you

Ben Shapiro on X - "Condolences to VA on becoming radically racist again according to the media...by electing by electing a black female lieutenant governor and a Cuban-American attorney general, rejecting racial essentialism in schools, and replacing a Dem governor who wore an actual KKK outfit."
From 2021

Reminder that we were taking in 1/4 of the migrants under Harper that we are taking in right now : CanadaHousing2 - "How many more subs do fragile white Canadians need to cry in?"
Reminder that we were taking in 1/4 of the migrants under Harper that we are taking in right now : CanadaHousing2 - "Most of reddit is a leftist circlejerk. A few right wing subreddits? “oH mY gOd whAT sNoWfLaKes”"
Left wingers keep complaining about right wing echo chambers, because any view that's not left wing is so shocking to them

Park Service retracts decision to take down William Penn statue at Philadelphia historical site - "The National Park Service withdrew a proposal Monday to take down a statue of William Penn at a Philadelphia historical site as part of a renovation that touched off a torrent of criticism over the legacy of the man who founded the province of Pennsylvania."
First, they came for the Confederate generals...

Meme - Wilfred Reilly @wilda_beast630: "He literally spelled "principles" wrong, and no one was brave enough to correct him"
The Woke Temple @WokeTemple: "Gibberish."
"To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals. The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials (with “racist ideas” and “public official” clearly defined). It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers"
Cavalry Scout: "Suicide rates haven't been close to "equitable" among races for decades, and if Kendi were logically consistent, would prove some sort of systemic racism against Whites and Native Americans. "Equity" would work to achieve similar rates among all ethnicities - not a good thing."
Power relations means statistical inequities favouring "minorities" are insignificant (or worse, the "powerful" need to be mocked for falling behind for doing badly despite their "privilege"

Meme - "For AAPI month, I ask non-Asians reflect and research how yellow was codified, considered the default in many emoji sets, and how The Simpsons were yellow but codified as white. Please also examine your fear of using your own skin tone emojis and why that is-to yourself. Thanks!"
"Shigetaka Kurita: The man who invented emoji - A new book celebrates the original emoji set, created in just a matter of weeks in 1999 by Japanese designer ..."
This is also why having emojis for each race for "representation" was a bad idea

Marvel's Queer, Disabled Spider-Hero is Its Most Relatable New Hero in Years - "Charlie Webber is the Amazing Sun-Spider. Marvel's reintroduction of this queer, disabled Spider-Hero makes her the most relatable new hero in years."
???

Meme - Merry and Pippin: "Children arriving to learn Mathematics, Science and English"
Orc: "Purple haired Teacher"

Democratic Candidates Ignore Evidence On Crime And Ensure That Racial Disparities Persist. - "Joe Biden tried to suggest that some poor parents could benefit from instruction regarding optimal child-rearing practices: “We [should] bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t want — they don’t know quite what to do,” he said. Biden was invoking one of the Obama administration’s key anti-poverty initiatives. Home-visiting programs pair nurses and other social service workers with pregnant women and new mothers to teach them parenting skills. Progressive activists have demanded and won hundreds of millions of federal dollars for such programs, yet pundits have denounced Biden’s “horrifyingly racist answer,” in the words of The Intercept, and called for him to pull out of the presidential primary because of it. Buttigieg sniffed that Biden’s statement was “well-intentioned” but “bad,” since it ignored the fact that “racial inequity” in this country was “put into place on purpose.”   In today’s political climate, Barack Obama’s 2008 Father’s Day speech in Chicago would be deemed an unforgivable outburst of white supremacy. “If we are honest with ourselves,” Obama told his audience in a South Side church, Americans will admit that too many fathers are “missing—missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men.” In the current frenzy of intersectional rhetoric, any such reference to personal responsibility brands the speaker as irredeemably bigoted.   Yet key parts of the intersectional narrative are not born out by data. It is now a standard trope, implanted in freshmen summer reading lists through the works of Ta-Nehesi Coates and others, that whites pose a severe, if not mortal, threat to blacks... there were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations (excluding homicide) between blacks and whites last year, including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent. That ratio is becoming more skewed, despite the Democratic claim of Trump-inspired white violence. In 2012-13, blacks committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; whites committed 15 percent. From 2015 to 2018, the total number of white victims and the incidence of white victimization have grown as well.    Blacks are also overrepresented among perpetrators of hate crimes—by 50 percent—according to the most recent Justice Department data from 2017; whites are underrepresented by 24 percent. This is particularly true for anti-gay and anti-Semitic hate crimes.  You would never know such facts from the media or from Democratic talking points. This summer, three shockingly violent mob attacks on white victims in downtown Minneapolis were captured by surveillance video...   The Minneapolis media have paid fleeting attention to these videos; the mainstream national media, almost none (CNN blamed the attacks on police understaffing and ignored the evident racial hatred that was the most salient aspect of the attacks). This year’s installments of the usual flash mob rampages on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile and in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor have also been ignored. If the race of perpetrators and victims in any of these incidents were reversed, there would be a universal uproar, with public figures across the board denouncing “white supremacist” violence and calling for a national reckoning regarding white racism. But because the violence does not fit the standard narrative about American race relations, it is kept carefully off stage.  In 2008, Barack Obama was able to connect such lawlessness to family breakdown... Today’s taboo on acknowledging the behavioral roots of criminal-justice system involvement, multi-generational poverty, and the academic-achievement gap is not a civil rights advance. To the contrary, it will ensure that racial disparities persist, where they can be milked by opportunistic politicians and activists seeking to parade their own alleged racial sensitivity and to deflect attention away from the cultural changes that must occur for full racial parity to be realized."
From 2019
Clearly the moral arc of the universe has moved on and this is not the slippery slope fallacy

Meme - Peter Boghossian @peterboghossian: "Read the community note. This is a great example of ideological capture of a legacy media institution-which is a primary cause of the crisis of legitimacy. The public does not trust our institutions because they are not worthy of our trust. @BBCNews"
BBC News (UK) @BBCNews: "Black women most likely to die in medieval London plague"
Readers added context: "A previous study "failed to identify any health disparities". The current unpublished research found 9/49 of plague burials and 8/96 non- plague burials had African cranial measurements. This is not a statistically significant difference, even without cluster effects."

Black women most likely to die in medieval plague, Museum of London says - "This primary data was then examined by applying a forensic anthropological toolkit to estimate whether the bones were likely to have come from someone with African heritage.  The report also acknowledges the sample size is small and that it has been careful to avoid what it termed as "the incorrect and harmful implication that there is a biological basis of race and we actively oppose the incorrect inference that there is something inherent to people assigned to a certain racial category that makes them more vulnerable to disease". It goes on to state: "Instead, we emphasize here that variation by race in susceptibility to and hazard of dying from disease reflects the biological and psychosocial effects of racism, which was present in the medieval world (Heng 2018a); race is a social classification and is not based in biological reality, but it does have biological consequences.""
Weird how there is no biological basis for race, yet they can tell from the bones what heritage the person had.
I guess either people of African heritage are not vulnerable to sickle cell disease, so we shouldn't target campaigns or screening for the disease at them, or "the biological and psychosocial effects of racism" are so powerful they can cause blood cells to mutate in shape
Strange how we are told that the concept of race was invented to justify colonialism, but the effects of racism show up in the 14th century

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