Links - 8th January 2024 (1 - Colonialism)

Mythinformed on X - "“The goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States. For the freedom and future of all life on this planet depends on that.” University of Minnesota professor Melanie Yazzie admits the Woke quiet part out loud."
Konstantin Kisin on X - "This is actually a very good explanation of what they mean by decolonisation: people who won in the battle of civilisations many centuries ago should voluntarily participate in their own annihilation because a small number of overeducated morons have decided winning is bad."
We are still told that liberals don't hate their countries

Meme - "Elephants outcompeted the Bantu for thousands of years and were only driven out with help from colonizers"
"The distribution of elephants is thus an indicator of the relationship between African populations and their natural environment during historical times. The changing pattern of town and village sites in Ghana, for instance, suggests that communities there never quite succeeded in establishing a long-term equilibrium with their environment. Instead, 'a sort of chessboard effect' developed, with people occupying one set of squares and elephants the other. Each human settlement was surrounded by a zone of potential farmland, not more than one- sixth of which was in production at any one time, while the rest was lying fallow and steadily became covered in thick secondary bush. Elephants feeding on lush secondary growth on fallow land inevitably were also attracted to the fresh young crops sprouting from adjacent cultivated fields, and communities barely large enough to provide the labour needed to feed themselves would be incapable of keeping elephants from all their scattered fields, all the time. The result was that wherever people settled and began growing crops the elephant became a major constraint on agricultural expansion and human population growth."

As schools shift towards ‘decolonized’ curricula, historians say their job is to understand history, not judge it - "“Should he [Macdonald] be judged by the standards of his time, or by the changing standards of the present?” asked David Wilson, a professor of history at the University of Toronto. “If the former, he emerges as an impressive and admirable nation-builder. If the latter, he becomes an architect of cultural genocide and an agent of anti-Chinese racism. The contradictions remain an integral part of the Canadian story.” Christopher Dummitt, a professor of Canadian history at Trent University and host of the podcast 1867 & All That, said he is not opposed to fresh perspectives on the past, and that they should always be sought. “Obviously, history changes. Revisionist history is not bad history,” he said. “If you have new evidence, wouldn’t you want to incorporate that evidence…and offer a fresh perspective?”... Wilson did, however, offer a warning about the perils of a decolonial approach to history.   “Decolonization goes wrong when it becomes an ideological weapon. When in the service of a social justice agenda, characterized by absolute moral certainty, it falls prey to distortions, to presentism, and attempts to impose its worldview on academic pursuits in general,” he said.   As Macdonald and other historical figures have come under greater scrutiny, many universities and even governments have chosen to focus on their discriminatory policies and have renamed buildings honouring them or removed their statutes from public spaces. This is presentism in action—the interpretation of past events through modern-day standards.  In the face of these developments, Wilson said the role of a historian is not to serve an agenda, even if it is appealing. “Our task is to make the past more intelligible, not to dole out praise or blame,” he said. “It is not, or should not be, the historian’s role to act as John A. Macdonald’s defense attorney, just as it should not be the historian’s role to act as a prosecuting counsel.”  Dummitt believes curiosity is the skilled response for historians, and that stepping past initial reactions and denunciation requires time, caution, and reflection... Of concern to Dummitt is what he calls a betrayal of the “JFK principle,” which refers to the former U.S. president’s famous quotation: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Dummitt said the principle remains a noble sentiment, and he places it in the context of what he calls the “Historian’s Ethos”: “Ask not what does the past owes you, but what do you owe the past.”... Stewart critiqued the poor teaching of history in some Canadian provinces and lamented that students may be unaware of what are thought to be some of Canada’s most important and well-known prime ministers of the last two centuries. He singled out Ontario as a province in which history is often not prioritized, and where the brief lessons may often be poorly crafted and focused on condemnation of figures such as Macdonald."
The problem is the woke want the "decolonised" perspective to be the only acceptable one, and it's not new evidence that motivates them, but a new agenda

Meme - "AFRICA HAS NEVER NEEDED THE WORLD. THE WORLD HAS ALWAYS NEEDED AFRICA. "SHITHOLE" COUNTRIES? NEVA!"
*Crude Oil* *Gold* *Uranium* *Diamonds* *Petroleum & Natural Gas* *Iron Ore* *Etc*
"When you accidentally out your entire race as being the most useless people on the planet.. by showing the whole world that you've had more resources than any other race since the dawn of time, but were still living in mud huts when those other races were creating apex societies and advanced technology. The idea that Africans only struggle because of racism is a myth perpetuated to save them from humiliation over their utter lack of progress as a people."

Meme - Black Woman: "Decolonize this university"
*Grand university*
White man: "Okay I decolonized it"
*Mud hut*

Meme - Carl Benjamin @Sargon_of_Akkad: "We dug that stuff out of the ground after we conquered you. Then, for some reason, we lost confidence in ourselves after being on the winning side in the largest war in history, then we invented the internet so you could make feminine posts about how much you need our money."
Rich Emoji @Eng_emoji: "WELCOME TO THE BRITISH MUSEUM. DON'T ASK WHERE WE GOT ALL THIS STUFF"

Thread by @eyeslasho on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "At a South African university, an argument is made to eliminate science from study because it's a "product of Western modernity."  "We have to restart science from an African perspective."  As an example, the speaker suggests "Black magic." When a "science person" objects, he is scolded by the organizer for "disrespecting the sacredness of this space," and asked to apologize, which he does. But that doesn't stop the scolding. Opinions can only be expressed under rules that appear to guide outcomes. The "Black magic" advocate then adds that, despite the fact that she took some science in high school, she decided to not be on the science faculty because science stands in the way of "decolonization." [Note: Africa was decolonized over 50 years ago.] The speaker then finds Newton problematic because the only way to understand gravity in science, she claims, is through Newton, and then implies that gravity should only be understood as it occurs in Africa, "through an African perspective." She concludes: "Western knowledge is very pathetic to say the least," and universities should "do away with [Western] science entirely." Establishing strict rules for guiding parameters of discussion is something the activist left does everywhere. It's an admission that its ideas can't stand up under the scrutiny allowed in free and open discourse."

Aztec Dish - "Pozole is an Aztec recipe, with some substitutions. In ancient Aztec ceremonies we find this major difference. The indigenous ancestors used human flesh in the stew. Aztec priests would make human sacrifices to their gods, offering up the heart and using the rest of the flesh for a ceremonial pozole. After the Spanish conquest, Spanish rulers outlawed cannibalism, and so pork was used in replacement of human flesh in pozole."
Damn colonialism!

Breaking news: Europeans colonised Africa - "Ex-Labour MP Claudia Webbe has revealed a shocking fact: Western countries once colonised Africa.  Sharing a map showing how Africa was carved up by European powers in the 19th century, Webbe tweeted, ‘This map has been hidden from you all your life’...   ‘Anti-racist’ activists regularly claim that the horrors of imperialism are (intentionally) ignored in schools. But it simply isn’t true. The history of British imperialism is actually part of the national curriculum. Anyone who paid attention in history classes will know that Britain, like many other European countries, had an empire – and that it was nasty.  Only an ex-Labour MP could be so clueless as to think this is news."

Captain Cook and the Colonial Paradox - "In August 2017, a statue of Cook in Hyde Park was defaced with the slogans “Change the Date” and “No Pride in Genocide.” This was, without a doubt, directly inspired by the debate over Confederate memorials then taking place in the United States. Australian political protestors, of all sides of politics, tend to slavishly follow the lead of our American cousins but on a much smaller scale (see the recent COVID-19 lockdown protest in Melbourne for another example). Cook’s case, though, is not as simple. The Confederates fought the US Army to preserve a breakaway government which primarily existed to preserve slavery (as the Confederate vice president himself acknowledged). Cook died before Australia as a country even existed, and his chief claim to fame is as an explorer rather than a soldier or conqueror. Cook was not a King Leopold, known mainly for colonial repression. It would be much simpler if he had been...   There is ongoing debate as to whether the colonial treatment of Australian Aborigines would have constituted genocide under the modern definition. I am hesitant to accept this. The 1948 Genocide Convention requires “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” and the British government and its successors in Australia never intended to destroy the Aborigines... Aboriginal Australia was not some peaceful and harmonious idyll before European contact. Ironically, one of the first people who took this erroneous view was Cook himself... many Aboriginal groups practiced strict religious laws enforced through violence, punishments such as spearing, the arranged polygamous marriages of pubescent girls to older men, and other practices we find abhorrent today. Australia was no stranger to conflict before 1788, and Aboriginal groups had fought, dispossessed, and killed each other across the continent for millennia... Some Aboriginal cultural practices may contribute to problems faced in Aboriginal communities today. It is valid to ask, for example, the extent to which traditional views towards women contribute to the fact that indigenous women are 34 to 80 times more likely to experience domestic violence than non-indigenous women... Without the conquest and dispossession of the Aborigines, this country would not exist in any form recognisable to its inhabitants today. Any Australian who feels pride in Australia’s multicultural success story, high standards of living, peaceful politics, or liveable cities, feels pride in something which could never have come into existence without bloodshed... In its historic 1992 judgement on Aboriginal land rights, Mabo v Queensland (No 2), the High Court of Australia briefly considered whether the British acquisition of sovereignty over Australia was legal. But it then, quite rightly, pointed out the question was beyond its jurisdiction. If the British claim to Australia was not legal, then the British parliament had no authority to pass laws relating to Australia, including the act giving effect to the Australian Constitution which gives the High Court its power in the first place. Hence, if the court found the British colonisation of Australia illegal, it would be ruling that it was itself entirely illegitimate and its rulings should be ignored... Conquest is a fact of history. Modern Britain, for example, is a product of the Norman Conquest of 1066. But there’s no great separation in life outcomes between Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Normans today... So far, though, every high-level policy on indigenous affairs seems to have failed."

British Raj was beneficial: PM - "Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday acknowledged the "beneficial consequences" of British colonial rule like "free press, constitutional government, professional service, modern universities and research laboratories"... "Our notions of the rule of law, of a constitutional government, of a free press, of a professional civil service, of modern universities and research laboratories have all been fashioned in the crucible where an age-old civilisation met the dominant Empire of the day."  Dr. Singh said India's struggle for independence was more an assertion by Indians of their "natural right to self-governance" than an outright rejection of the "British claim to good governance."  Both India and Britain had "learnt" from each other and had much to teach the world. "This is perhaps the most enduring aspect of the Indo-British encounter""
Damn internalised white supremacy!

Anti-Colonialism's Bad History - "Marx admired capitalism, which he credited with destroying feudalism and the “idiocy” of rural life. The fly in the capitalist ointment, as Marx saw it, was competition, which he thought would drive down profits. To remain profitable, he averred, capitalists would be compelled to squeeze laborers’ wages, thus “immiserating” the working class. The more rational economic system Marx envisaged would do away with competition and replace it with central planning. That was a big mistake, but not the only one.  Between the time that Marx was born (1818) and the time he died (1883), British wages rose by 83 percent. There is some debate about the magnitude of the rise in working-class wages, but the improvement was visible enough to create a dilemma for Marx’s followers—how to reconcile the theory with what was actually happening in the real world. In 1917, Lenin updated Marx’s theory in his pamphlet, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in which he argued that colonial exploitation created super-profits that allowed Western capitalists to “bribe” Western governments, bureaucrats, and even workers. The improving living standards in the West, in other words, were a direct result of Europe’s imperial adventures. Lenin relied heavily on the writings of John Atkinson Hobson... Lenin transformed Hobson’s anti-Semitic ravings into an economic theory that would, a century later, still be used to “explain” the economic rise of the West.  Lenin’s theory proved to be a useful tool in the ideological struggle between the West and the communist bloc, because it purported to show that the superior living standards of ordinary Westerners were a result of Third World exploitation and not a result of commercially tested betterments in technology. The legacy of European imperialism also provided a convenient scapegoat for all the political instability and economic mismanagement that had plagued the newly independent countries in Africa and Asia after the Europeans had left. Lenin’s ideas received little support among economists and historians, and the collapse of the Soviet empire sent them into the intellectual wilderness for close to 30 years. The rise of the West has been scrutinized by thousands of scholars and been the subject of hundreds of books. Many economists agree with the Nobel Prize-winning economist Douglass North, who argued in The Rise of the Western World that changing institutions, including the evolution of constitutions, laws, and property rights, were instrumental to economic development.  More recently, the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has argued in her book Bourgeois Dignity that the origins of “the great enrichment,” which increased per capita incomes in advanced economies from $3 a day to $100 or more, were attributable to changes in values and attitudes... important questions about slavery and colonial exploitation are under-discussed or not discussed at all. Slavery, for example, made many individual slaveholders rich. Slave-holding societies, however, remained dirt poor... Colonial exploitation raises similar questions... African colonies did not make Europe rich—it was European wealth and power that enabled Europeans to colonize the rest of Africa.  At any rate, being a former colony does not equal perpetual impoverishment. At the time of the British handover of Hong Kong to China, the average GDP per capita in the colony was 12 percent higher than that in the United Kingdom... Between 1966, when it became independent, and 2019, Botswana grew five times faster than the global average. Lenin’s thesis ignores history and destroys all nuance and countervailing evidence. Contemporary racial discourse frequently suffers from similar shortcomings, belittling individual talent and hard work, thus ignoring the successes of millions of men and women of color... Crimes, no matter how heinous, cannot be passed onto the progeny like some modern variant of the original sin, condemning them to unending purgatory. That is why freedom of speech is so vital, and that is why “anti-colonialists” are so determined to snuff it out."

Wilfred Reilly on Twitter - "In one sentence, the problem with "anti-colonialism" is that it selectively applies a modern dorm-room standard of morality only to Westerners/whites. The relevant question for 1792 isn't whether British conquerors were good rulers by our standards, but how they stacked up the the actual alternatives - the Zulu, Marathi, Mughals, Malay Sultans, Boers, etc."
Anti-colonialism is only against Western colonialism

Meme - "Me after hearing about pre-colonial Americas in school  *Na'vi from Avatar*
Me after reading first hand accounts of pre-colonial Americas *Colonel Miles Quaritch from Avatar*"

Meme - Dr. Kristina Schierenbeck @BotanyRules: "l am trying to #decolonize my bio majors #Evolution course. Surely Darwin/Wallace ideas existed in other cultures? Any suggestions for readings? Some good resources in geography, zoology, botany, but specifically, evolution?"
Nicholas A. Christakis @NAChristakis: "In an effort to be inclusive, let's start teaching myths in science? Surely someone somewhere anticipated Galileo, Bohr, Einstein? I get that there may have been indigenous theories resembling such ideas. But they were not science."
Comments (elsewhere): "Better decolonise the other sciences while you're at it - surely the mathematics describing electromagnetism were known to indigenous cultures before Maxwell created his famous equations."
"Now now. students are allowed to ask questions even if those questions sound stoopid because they involve the word 'decolonising.' That's why they're at school. As it turns other cultures did tinker with evolutionary thought. The Ancient Greeks for one. Something about medieval Islamic Science - But tell her that Darwinki the Very Elder, indigineous Australian formulated the theory (fully formed) 40 000 years ago in the Northern Territory. And Captain Cook stole it and gave it to Darwin. That will keep her momentarily distracted from other activism and minimise damage on campus"
"The best way to decolonize is to abandon progressive thought all together and become conservative. Since that's what the vast majority of the "POC" population is. Progressivism is exclusive to white majority countries."
"Decolonization is a western philosophy."

Imperator Philippus Arabus on Twitter - "After 8 centuries of Muslim domination, the Catholic liberators of Spain expelled the recalcitrant descendants of its deposed North African overlords. And how do modern leftists feel about this? Was this a righteous act of natives reclaiming their homeland from colonizers?
NO.  Of course not. This was Spanish intolerance.  The Spaniards should have forgiven their former oppressors.  In fact, they want modern Spain to offer citizenship to the descendants of expelled Muslims.
And what about the former imperial subjects of European Empires?  How do leftists think they should treat Europeans?  Should they forgive and forget?  NO! Of course not.  They should demand reparations. They should colonize their colonizers and erase their sovereign existence.
Whatever Europeans do, it's the wrong thing.  The only right that Europeans have in the eyes of leftists is the right to be punished and destroyed."
Liberals just hate white people

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Idea of paying homage 'abhorrent' to King, says Jonathan Dimbleby - "I think the difficulty of a slavery and an apology for that is less of a problem than the idea of restitution. So the Koh I Noor Diamond will not be used in the ceremony. But the problem is many countries claim that, so which one of them do you give it back to?"

Niall Ferguson holds in own in a BBC debate - YouTube - "'In reality European empires... really were quite a short-lived presence in North Africa and the Middle East compared with say the Ottoman Empire which ruled over that region for more like 500 plus years... it's far more illuminating to talk about the long-term legacy of Ottoman rule than to talk about the relatively short term impacts of British French or Italian rule, much less American influence which has always been indirect rather than direct. There's a real problem here with this kind of perspective because we want to beat ourselves up and say oh it's all our fault you know that that these problems exist. They're far more deep-rooted than the consequences of European empire... I can't say it's the fault of imperialism and leave out the longest-living empire in the Middle East which was the Ottoman Empire, Muslim empire, which went back much farther than any of the European empires'...
'The legacy of the Ottoman empire was almost wiped out by the British'...
'The culture that exists in the greater Middle East and North Africa today bears very very few resemblances to the culture that the Europeans tried to implant there beginning in the late 19th century and carrying on through to the mid twentieth century. It owes far more to the long lasting impact of say Islam...  when you look at the problems that currently exist in a country like Egypt they have far more to do with the ways in which those countries have been governed in the last 30 years'"
If it was so easy to wipe out the legacy of the Ottoman Empire, how come the mess in the Middle East today is all the fault of European empires?

Meme - Then: *Clothed white people, half-naked Indians*
Now: *Clothed Indians, half-naked white people*

Postcolonial Astrology by Alice Sparkly Kat - "Fearless, radical, and fresh, Sparkly Kat’s Postcolonial Astrology ushers in a new wave of astrology revival, refusing to apologize for its magickism and connecting its power to the spirituality and politics we need now. Intersectional, inclusive, and geared towards queer and POC communities, it uses our historical and collective constructs of the planets, sun, and moon to re-chart our subconscious history, redefine the body in the world, and assert our politics of the personal, in astrology and all things."

Capitalism not slavery made Britain rich. It’s time we stopped apologising for our past - "there are strong historical links between monarchs and the slave trade. It’s just that the monarchs most deeply implicated are not British.  In the 1750s, King Tegbesu of Dahomey, in present-day Benin, was reported to be making £250,000 a year from selling slaves. That astronomical sum, equivalent to perhaps £45 million today, was vastly more than any British aristocrat.  While Tegbesu was trafficking human beings, the future George III, who had recently become Prince of Wales, was becoming a convinced abolitionist... He went on, as King, to free American slaves who opposed the Revolution – the vast majority of black Americans, unsurprisingly. Later in his reign, he signed the abolition of the slave trade into law in 1807.  That act prompted incredulous rage among West African chiefs. A Liverpool slave captain was told by the ruler of Bonny, now in Nigeria, “This trade must go on. That is the verdict of our oracle and the priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God himself.”  Those Africans who sold other human beings were not bandits or pirates. They were, in most cases, kings. Slavery was enforced by the coercive power of the state – right up to the moment when it was snuffed out under British pressure. In the 1840s, King Ghezo of Dahomey, played by John Boyega in the 2022 film, The Woman King, fiercely resisted such pressure.  “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth,” he complained. “The mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.”... How bizarre that, in a world where slavery was near-universal, we should train our ire almost exclusively on the country that distinguished itself by its abolitionism... during the eighteenth century, Britain had been heavily involved with the slave trade. At that time, human bondage was taken for granted almost everywhere. It had been practised by Aztecs and Incas, Arabs and Persians, Chinese and Koreans, Polynesians and Maori. Barbary slavers had seized more than a million Europeans, raiding as far as Cork and Cornwall. Some 17 million Africans were sold in the Arab world, a trade that continued well into the twentieth century.  What made Britain unusual was not that it had engaged in slavery, but that it went on to pour its blood and treasure into eradicating the foul business, diverting ships to hunt down the slavers even while it was engaged in a life-and-death struggle against Bonaparte... The oddest thing about our public discourse is that those who like to portray our history as a hateful chronicle of racism and exploitation seem genuinely to imagine that they are bravely challenging the consensus.  “Britain’s past, or a glorious version of it, is so central to maintaining the status quo that to question our history is to invite dramatic charges of vandalism and erasure,” writes Nesrine Malik in The Guardian... Does Britain strike you as a country where we refuse to discuss slavery? A country, to remind you, where even a chair in a self-portrait of Hogarth at his easel can be labelled by Tate Britain as a symbol of “unnamed black and brown enslaved people”?  You can find references to Tegbesu and Ghezo, but you will struggle to find new content about this pair of kings on any mainstream news website after 2014, when the Great Awokening gathered pace. Our public version of history is now a morality tale in which the villains are white British men. Critics talk of telling our nation’s story “warts and all”; but they rarely get around to the “and all”. The “and all” surely includes the vast sums devoted to stamping out slavery, calculated by Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape as 1.8 per cent annually of GDP between 1808 and 1867, the most expensive moral foreign policy in human history. Even if there were a case for reparations in principle (which there is not) that sum alone – not counting the billions given in aid – would surely have covered any debt.  The “and all” might even include the effort to eradicate slavery in Malik’s native Sudan, where the repression of the trade was one of the grievances of the Mahdist war against Britain, and where slavery made a significant come-back in the late twentieth century. That strikes me as a rather more overlooked story than the Atlantic trade, which is taught in every school.  What we are seeing is not a debate about history, but an argument about contemporary politics. Critics want to convince us that Britain became rich through exploitation rather than, as was actually the case, through private property, free contracts and independent courts. Imperial expansion happened haphazardly, and was usually resisted by London officials, who saw colonies as a fiscal burden and an administrative headache. A constant theme of Colonial Office memos throughout the nineteenth century is frustration at the missionaries and abolitionists who kept dragging Britain into unwanted responsibilities. Those running Britain knew that their taxes were higher than in the colonies... it was capitalism that did for slavery, by emphasising the sanctity of contract and by unleashing such technological innovation that human bondage became redundant. Why would anyone pay to feed and house fifty labourers when a barrel of oil could do their work?  The easiest way to demonstrate the negative correlation between capitalism and slavery is to look at the places where human bondage is most prevalent today – in order, North Korea, Eritrea, Burundi, the Central African Republic and Mauritania. If William III owning shares in the Royal African Company bothers you more than the continuing abomination of slavery in those places, you need to ask yourself some hard questions about your motives."
The liberals were very upset by this column, despite claiming that they are for teaching history. Ironic. But then, they just hate white people

Links - 7th January 2024 (2 - Claudine Gay at Harvard)

Jonatan Pallesen on X - "If we look at Claudine Gay's 2001 paper, there are some numbers that raises questions. This has been discussed on Econjobrumors.  The thesis is that Black representatives make White people vote less.  Looking at the the White Turnout in Clay's district it seems to be about middle of the pack: Image   But if we look at the regression results in Table 3, Bill Clay is listed as having a highly significant effect of a 16.8% reduction in voter turnout: Image   I took a look at her PhD thesis which looked at the same data. And here the coefficient is as expected for a data point in the middle of the pack: Image   I checked that her thesis and the paper have the same number of data points, 2827, so it is looking at the same thing.   So why did the result change so much between the thesis and the paper? A possibility is that is it caused by a change in control variables. But if the control variables are this crucial, then it is important whether they really should be included, or whether we risk a garden of forking paths. An impactful variable is the winning vote margin. But it has totally different impact in the different states. It seems kind of weird if people in Missouri strongly prefer to vote if the election is close, while the people in Tennessee strongly prefer to vote if the election is not close. I couldn't find any discussion about why this control variable was introduced, when it wasn't included originally.  In any case Claudine Gay should release her data. Especially since there is such discrepancy between her two publicized results. Making the data public should be standard scientific practice to begin with."

Ian Miles Cheong on X - "Using Harvard’s diversity hire for a president and the fallout from that whole fiasco, more organizations should be wary about hiring anyone people on the basis of their race especially if it means having to overlook their shortcomings—this application of incredibly low standards for black people just about says it all, doesn’t it?   All it shows is how one group of people can underperform and even cheat and get away with it. In the case of Harvard’s president, she is celebrated for her “duplicative scholarship” because it’s about all you can expect from a diversity hire.   What’s next? President Kamala?   Funny how one group of people is openly infantilized and given special treatment, but question it and you’re the bad guy."

Powerful donors managed to push out Harvard’s Claudine Gay. But at what cost?
"Left wing institutions are entitled to donors' money and donors must be forced to give money no matter what is done with it". Of course, if you point out that there is a targeted left wing campaign to defund Twitter of ad money...
I like that Robert Reich poisons the well and pretends that her plagiarism is made up by conservatives

Meme - "SORRY, WE MIGHT HAVE TO FIRE you..."
Claudine Gay: "Why?! 'Cuz I'm a BLACK WOMAN?!"
"What? No! THAT'S WHY WE HIRED you!"

Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "This is Claudine Gay's resignation letter. Rather than take responsibility for minimizing antisemitism, committing serial plagiarism, intimidating the free press, and damaging the institution, she calls her critics racist. This is the poison of DEI ideology. Glad she's gone."

Tom Elliott on X - "Gay's resignation letter includes zero apologies to all of the academics she ripped off to advance her own career, but more 3 dozen references to herself:
I: 17
Me: 7
My: 11
Myself: 1
She embodies everything wrong with academia today: So utterly self-absorbed by her own (unearned) biological traits, Gay cannot help but to interpret every external event through her own narrow prism of narcissism. Plagiarism is the cardinal sin of academia, and all she can think to do after getting caught red handed is to libel her critics as racist. When supposedly august institutions like @Harvard start ranking "equity" above excellence, it's perfectly predictable scam artists end up being elevated to the highest echelons in higher learning."

Meme - Western Lensman @WesternLensman: "The first individual grew up dirt poor, yet rose to become a pre-eminent legal mind and the second black person to serve as a Supreme Court Justice.  The second grew up with wealth and privilege, plagiarized other scholars’ work, and just resigned in disgrace.  The left hates the first, and celebrates the second.  To the Marxist, ideological purity is all that matters.
*Clarence Thomas* *Claudine Gay*"

Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "The funniest outcome of the Claudine Gay saga is all of the academics coming out in defense of plagiarism and all of the journalists coming out against journalism. Dutiful to the regime, until the bitter end."

Wilfred Reilly on X - "An awkward reality, and part of the reason people cling hard to affirmative action, is that the objectively best-qualified candidate for a specific elite position would quite rarely be a Black woman.  This isn't an "edgy" statement: Black women are 6% of the population, and 3-4% of most executive hiring pools (that I've seen) after you get into test scores. Eliminating 97% of all candidates before reviewing them is ~never the optimal way to pick a boss. It's interesting to compare these real figures - a "minority" group, almost by definition, generally will make up 5-15% of a national population - with the rate of minority appointments under Dem Presidents.  Last I looked, Biden had appointed 49 white judges (from 61% of the pop., 75+% of the lawyers) and 44 Black judges (12%, ~5%)."
Logic Illustrated 💚🤍💜🤍💛 on X - "Moreover, the 3-4% of black women who *do* truly excel on merit & are very qualified, will forever be looked down upon as "diversity hires". Racial segregation is a lose/lose situation. It benefits nobody but the losers."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "The idea that "white women benefit the most from AA" is a pure statistical artifact, btw.  Half of the white population is female, so MORE people in empirical terms benefit/have benefitted from the 20pt edge that used to exist for women than from the 150pt edge that exists for Blacks y Latinos. But, obviously, the second is 7.5x bigger."
Ian on X - "If AA is about remedying any sort of inequity or injustice, the largest 'disadvantaged' group, white women, must necessarily reap the greatest aggregate benefits. Any other outcome would be gross systemic injustice."

Eli Steele on X - "Claudine Gay blames her resignation from Harvard on "racial animus." Not plagiarism. Not antisemitism. Not betraying Harvard's mission. We are done with this excuse. From anyone. Period."

Jennifer A. Frey on X - "One reason Gay is being forced to resign is on full display in her resignation letter: an unwillingness to acknowledge any failures on her part. She is simply distressed that people have criticized her."

Opinion | Claudine Gay and the Limits of Social Engineering at Harvard - The New York Times - "the important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history. How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia? The answer, I think, is this: Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.  Why did that change happen? I’ve seen arguments that it goes back to the 1978 Bakke decision, when the Supreme Court effectively greenlit affirmative action in the name of diversity.  But the problem with Bakke isn’t that it allowed diversity to be a consideration in admissions decisions. It’s that university administrators turned an allowance into a requirement, so a kind of racial gerrymander now permeates nearly every aspect of academic life, from admissions decisions to faculty appointments to the racial makeup of contributors to essay collections. If affirmative action had been administered with a lighter hand — more nudge than mandate — it might have survived the court’s scrutiny last year. Instead, it became a pervasive regime that frequently got in the way of the universities’ higher goals, particularly the open exchange of ideas. In announcing Gay’s appointment, Harvard praised her leadership and scholarship. The work of a university president is also that of executive, fund-raiser and cheerleader for the institution, and maybe the Harvard Corporation thought she’d be good at that. But skin color was the first thing The Harvard Crimson noted in its story about her taking office, and her missteps and questions about her academic work gave ammunition to detractors who claimed she owed her position solely to her race. This is the poisoned pool in which Harvard now swims. Whenever it elevates someone like Gay, there’s an assumption by admirers and detractors alike that she’s a political symbol whose performance represents more than who she is as a person. The weight of expectations on her must have been crushing. But dehumanization is the price any institution pays when considerations of social engineering supplant those of individual achievement. It may take a generation after the end of affirmative action before someone like Gay can have the opportunity to be judged on her own merits, irrespective of her color. But the damage that the social-justice model has done to higher education will take longer to repair. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans expressed high confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup survey. Last year, the number had fallen to 36 percent, and that was before the wave of antisemitic campus outbursts. At Harvard, early admission applications fell by 17 percent last fall... One of the secrets of America’s postwar success wasn’t simply the caliber of U.S. universities. It was the respect they engendered among ordinary people who aspired to send their children to them.  That respect is now being eroded to the point of being erased. For good reason... Two hundred thousand dollars or more is a lot to pay for lessons in how to be an anti-racist... the intellectual rot is pervasive and won’t stop spreading until universities return to the idea that their central purpose is to identify and nurture and liberate the best minds, not to engineer social utopias."

Meme - Colin Wright @SwipeWright: "PREDICTION: Harvard president Claudine Gay will resign, but she will not admit any wrongdoing. Instead, she will claim to be the victim of a racist Right-wing witch hunt that is impacting her mental health and causing a needless distraction for students and faculty."
racist: "racial animus"
impacting her mental health: "it has been distressing"
distraction for students and faculty: "resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual"

Meme - AG @AGHamilton29: "Beyond parody..."
Rene Graham: "Accountability is not "cancel culture.""
Rene Graham @reneeygraham: "The anti-cancel culture folks are predictably quiet about what's happened to Claudine Gay. Of course."

Meme - The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole84: "Criteria that matter:
- Black
- Woman
Criteria that do not matter:
- Merit
See the issue? We really need to stop undermining our institutions to appease Woke Bigots. “Racist” and “Sexist” are entirely reasonable descriptions for someone who wants Harvard to select Claudine Gay’s replacement as president on the bases of race and sex instead of considering merit."
Marc Lamont Hill: "The next president of Harvard University MUST be a Black woman."
Of course, left-wing logic is that if you don't hire based on race and sex, you are racist and sexist, and that this is just to correct discrimination so everyone is on an equal footing (even though "majorities" are outright excluded sometimes now)

AP admits widely panned story on Harvard plagiarism didn't meet standards - "The Associated Press updated a headline on Wednesday that deemed plagiarism a "new conservative weapon," following widespread backlash to the post on X, admitting the story did not meet the outlet's standards.  "The story doesn’t meet our standards," Lauren Easton, the VP of AP Corporate Communications, told Fox News Digital. She said they were in the process of updating the headline.  The AP's original headline read, "Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism," which was widely mocked on social media, after Harvard President Claudine Gay announced she would be resigning from the position on Tuesday. "Plagiarism charges downed Harvard’s president. A conservative attack helped to fan the outrage," the AP's new headline reads. "American higher education has long viewed plagiarism as among the most serious of offenses. Accusations of plagiarism have ruined the careers of academics and undergraduates alike," the AP's updated lede reads... CNN political commentator Scott Jennings mocked the original AP headline and wrote that it was "remarkable" conservatives "had the time to invent the concept of plagiarism over the last couple months." Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle said the AP "buried the lede" and added, "the GOP stole this weapon from colleges, which for years punished people for plagiarism with little to no input from conservatives." Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., wondered what the AP would have published if Gay was "a male, Asian, white, outspoken Christian, or Republican.""

BBC deletes post claiming Harvard's Claudine Gay was victim of 'culture wars' - "The BBC drew scorn after a headline about the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay declared she was a “casualty of campus culture wars” on social media.  The post to the news division’s official X account, featuring the headline “Harvard’s Claudine Gay a casualty of campus culture wars,” neglected to mention that Gay quit after several instances of alleged plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation from the late 1990s surfaced...   “You sure you’ve got this headline right? What brought her down was her inability to say that calling for a holocaust would be offensive to Jewish students,” Sopel wrote.  He noted that Gay was “condemned by left and right” — adding that “calling it ‘culture wars’ is lazy and misleading methinks.”"

AP Criticized After Deeming Plagiarism Accusations a 'New Conservative Weapon' - "The X post from AP linking the article received a “community note” reading, “Plagiarism is a breach of rules for Harvard University. Claudine Gay was ultimately forced to resign for a series of breaches of this policy. Plagiarism - or application of the rules around plagiarism - therefore cannot be considered a ‘weapon.’...
How the Media Covered It: The backlash to the AP’s article was covered moderately in right-rated outlets and ignored in center-rated and left-rated outlets.”

Meme - Wilfred Reilly @wil_da_beast630: "Last on this, but: it's fascinating to see the Wokist quasi-religious frame operate here.  Whether Gay actually did anything wrong - and she....obviously did- is irrelevant to her defenders. Everything that happens inside facially neutral systems of "order" and "law" is just a cover for racist power relations, after all. So, the REAL story is that a Black woman is being attacked just for being Black, her attackers must ipso facto be racist, and all right-thinking people must rally to her!  Amazing to watch in the wild."
Ibram X. Kendi @ibramxk: "When a racist mob attacks a Black person, it finds a seemingly legitimate reason for the attack that allows for it to accrue popular support and credibility, and which allows the growing mob to deny they are attacking the person in this way because the person is Black. 1/4"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "Other presidents of elite universities (who are not black) lost their jobs for similar reasons in 2023:
Marc Tessier-Lavigne of Stanford resigned over research misconduct.
Liz Magill of Penn resigned over remarks regarding genocide that were substantially the same as Gay's."

Meme - The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole84: "Claudine Gay plagiarized, aka "stole", other people's work. How is that not reinforcing negative stereotypes about Blacks?"
Ibram X. Kendi @ibramxk: "Racist mobs won't stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism. What these racist mobs are doing should be obvious to any reporter who cares about truth or justice as opposed to conflicts and clicks."

Meme - Josh Barro @jbarro: "I'm astounded by how many academics are making an "everybody does it" argument. Not everybody does this! It's insulting to our intelligence to claim this is permitted or ordinary practice. Harvard requires undergrads who do this to withdraw."
Bradley Palmquist & Stephen Voss
Claudine Gay *over 90% identical*"

Claudine Gay wouldn't share data in 2001 paper when questioned - "Harvard University president Claudine Gay, who has come under fire over accusations of plagiarism and antisemitism, is now seeing her work further scrutinized after it was revealed two professors questioned a data method she used in a 2001 Stanford paper that often resulted in “logical inconsistencies” — and she refused to share her research with them.  The 2001 study, titled “The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation,” was one of four peer-reviewed articles that helped land Gay tenure at Stanford University, but its merit could not be properly reviewed by everyone, according to a post on the Dossier by Christopher Brunet.    In 2002, Michael C. Herron, the Remsen 1943 professor of quantitative social science at Dartmouth, and Kenneth W. Shotts, the David S. and Ann M. Barlow professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business, claimed to debunk the very foundation of Gay’s research.  At a conference of the Society for Political Methodology (PolMeth) that year, Herron and Shotts presented their research, finding inconsistencies in Gay’s paper where she concluded that the election of black Americans to Congress negatively affects white political involvement and rarely increases political engagement among black people...   Herron told The Post Tuesday that he and Shotts have published multiple reports between 2000 and 2004 looking into how researchers used El-R and the type of results it can produce... Brunet also noted that the 2002 PolMeth program that included Herron and Shotts’ paper was missing from the conference’s website — despite all other programs from 1984 to 2021 being available. PolMeth did not respond to The Post’s request for comment on the missing year."

Oilfield Rando on X - "The left owns every university top to bottom. A slush fund network, a base for assault on all institutions, a massive pillar of unchallenged power. 99% of Republicans are scared to even trim their funding. Yet look how furious they are over losing ONE insignificant battle."
Oilfield Rando on X - "Imagine if the right were that fervent and and hell-bent on conquest"

Wajahat Ali on X - "Chris Rufo and bad faith right wing actors win again."
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "This is how a child thinks, neatly dividing up the world into "good actors" and "bad actors," as in a Marvel film. If he were honest, Wajahat would simply say "people I don't like," rather than dressing up his preferences in fake moral terms. But yes, I did win again."

Kyle Smith on X - "Harvard’s current position: plagiarists can’t be president of the university but they can be full professors. She either committed plagiarism or she didn’t. If she didn’t, she should stay on as president! If she did, she has disqualified herself from ever serving on the faculty of any self-respecting uni. So which is it??? Plagiarism is a serious academic offense, not something that only counts against those in senior administrative posts."

Coleman Hughes on X - "Claudine Gay has no one to blame but herself. She chose to easy path of plagiarism—almost 50 times—over the hard path of writing original prose. It’s a pattern of serious fraud. Plain and simple.   This moment is a useful litmus test. Anyone who is blaming Gay’s resignation on other factors—e.g., right-wingers or racism—is nuts and can safely be ignored for the rest of time."

Nate Silver on X - "There's an order of operations here. 1) Keep your own house in order. 2) Get it in order when good-faith critics tell you that you have a problem. If you've already failed 1 and 2, I have less than zero sympathy if it's bad-faith critics who force your hand."
Rudolph Troha 🇺🇲🏳️‍🌈 on X - "I don't think any attempt to hold a powerful, esteemed organization accountable to its own supposed values is a bad-faith act, even if it comes from someone with a political lean you don't share. Integrity is a universal value and we should always demand it."
Joe Duarte 🏜️ on X - "What exactly does "bad faith" mean here, and in general? Insincere? Bad person? It's a smear used almost exclusively by leftists to tag outsiders. There's nothing insincere or ignoble about being a conservative, libertarian, etc. Leftists don't seem to comprehend *disagreement*."
Small Metal Owl on X - "The problem with 2) is that, as far as they are concerned, there is not and can never be any such thing as a "good-faith critic" of person such as Ms. Gay."

Claudine Gay Made a Career of Attacking Black Scholars. Don't Defend Her for Being Black | Opinion - "Claudine Gay during her Harvard career has repeatedly targeted and disrupted the careers of prominent Black male professors? As Dean of the College, Gay terminated Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr. as Faculty Dean of the Winthrop House. Professor Sullivan, Jr., a graduate of Morehouse College and Harvard Law School, was the first Black faculty dean of a house in the history of Harvard College.  What was Professor Sullivan's offense? Sullivan deigned to represent the disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein—an act of moral conscience, since all are entitled to legal representation in our legal system. Yet legal conscience mattered not to Claudine Gay, who terminated a race pioneer for doing his civic duty. You may excuse this heartless termination as a one-off. You would be wrong. Economics Professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr. was next in the sights of Dean Gay. Fryer was a top Black professor at Harvard. After having overcome all sorts of hardship and childhood deprivation, Professor Fryer joined the faculty at Harvard to become the second-youngest professor ever to be awarded tenure at Harvard, and went on to blaze a trail of distinction, including winning the MacArthur Fellowship and the John Bates Clark Medal. Yet when Fryer undertook research into the killings of unarmed Black men in Houston, Fryer's research found no racial disparities. He made the mistake of undercutting the racial narrative that the Left has adopted, and as a result, Gay did her best to remove all of his academic privileges, coordinating a witch hunt against him. Fryer survived Gay's crusade of discharge but Fryer's lab was shut down, his reputation tarnished.  No one in good faith should defend President Gay because she is the first Black president of Harvard. Even if you don't agree with me that our racial struggle is in our past, someone who has targeted Black male professors has waived any benefit of the "first Black" defense."

Wilfred Reilly on X - "Yup.  Just as with Hamas, Jordan Neeely, Jacob Blake, Jussie Smollett, Michael Brown, the BLM mansion scandals...Duke Lacrosse...OJ...Crown Heights...etc, every smart-ish leftist account really is going all-in on the Approved Narrative: Gay was ~fired because of "racism," for "being too Black and too good."  It's amazing to watch mythogenesis take place in real time."

Ian Miller on X - "The entire Harvard scandal just reinforces the same lesson we learned during COVID — elite institutions are filled with deeply unimpressive people whose one qualification is a commitment to advance the tenets of current consensus progressive ideology  And they will ALWAYS circle the wagons around protecting themselves instead of holding anyone in their political circle accountable"

Hugh Hewitt on X - "Attacks on @realchrisrufo  were to be expected because Rufo is an extremely effective public intellectual and activist.  Rufo is also, like Mark Levin, Mark Steyn, Peggy Noonan and many other conservative public intellectuals, a superb writer and communicator. He persuades people to consider ideas and to act in politics. Most academics are not widely read if read at all. Very few have impact beyond their faculty meetings. They have never been in anything resembling a real public debate that is decided on the merits. And many academics want no part of such debates and zero scrutiny of their “scholarship.” Anger at Rufo and Aaron Sibarium of the @FreeBeacon  is at least in part the product of the fear that scrutiny will fall on their “work” and its merits or lack thereof.   There is also no little jealousy behind the assaults on Rufo. I have not seen one critic of Rufo who has produced anything approaching the merits of Rufo’s intellectual history of the American left, “America’s Cultural Revolution,” a very fine and extremely well-researched book. The old cliche about flak when over the target applies here. Rufo will shrug it off but expect the attacks to continue. It is the way of the left and has been for decades."

Liz Wheeler on X - "I am loling. According to the left, @realchrisrufo is a: - Bigot (oldie but goodie) - Russian spy - Mafia - Mussolini - Fake Harvard grad All because the left won’t condemn Claudine Gay’s plagiarism because we all know she was a DEI hire. This is getting hilarious."

Coming Clean (Covid)

From 2022:

Coming Clean | Cory Zue

"How could an MIT-educated, well-meaning, rational (hopefully), Massachusetts-born, Democrat who works in public health still not have a Covid vaccine?...

Thus began a long, fraught, journey into the world of Covid science, data and policy. A journey that started months and months ago and slowly grew into what is now something of an obsession. While much of the world has moved on, I’m still here reading Covid preprint papers, following epidemiologists on Twitter, looking at Our World In Data graphs, etc. I’ve become one of those people...

I’m an American, but I live in South Africa. This put me in a relatively unique situation early in the vaccine rollout. I could simply be a bystander.

South Africa—like all of Africa—had to wait for everyone in the first world to get their shots before we’d be given any. And when we finally got vaccines, we prioritized the old, healthcare workers, and immunocompromised. I wasn’t eligible to get a shot until mid-July, 2021, more than 6 months after the vaccines were distributed to much of the developed world.

During this period I mostly waited and watched.

And a lot happened!

The Delta variant tore through India and spread to the rest of the world. Covid policy, and later vaccination policy created a fierce political divide in the US and much of Europe. Things went from “cutting in line to get the shot” to “here’s $100 to get the shot” to “get the shot or lose your job” in a surprisingly brief period of time. In a country that still had a 5% vaccination rate, the path to mandate was hard to imagine, but impossible to ignore.

We also learned a lot about Covid and the vaccines.

With Covid, it became clear that the impact of the disease was highly stratified. If you were old and/or sick, Covid was really scary, and if you were young and healthy it was relatively mild. I studied CDC mortality statistics, trying to figure out the chances that I—a 39-year-old who runs 5 miles a day—might die from Covid. I never got an exact answer but it was clear Covid was far less likely to kill me than a heart attack, and was perhaps on par with getting murdered.¹ I’d never worried about heart attacks and murder before, so it didn’t seem rational to worry about Covid. So I stopped.

I then applied the same exercise to my wife—similar to me—and two healthy children—whose odds of dying were orders of magnitudes lower than ours. For kids Covid was as dangerous as the flu—again, something I hadn’t ever worried about except as a mild inconvenience. I concluded our family was already safe enough from the disease and did not feel compelled to vaccinate for our own health.

So we were ok. But what about vaccinating to stop the spread and protect those around me?

Well, around this time, we also started seeing evidence that the vaccine protection against infection was waning pretty quickly. About a month after I became eligible for my shot, a paper came out of Israel indicating that vaccine effectiveness against infection dropped to 50 or 60% after 6 months. And on top of that we saw evidence that vaccinated people carry equal viral loads and spread the disease as much (though for a shorter duration) as unvaccinated people.

I concluded that there was a benefit to being vaccinated to protect those around me, but that it might be short-lived—or require boosting—to stay above a compelling threshold. And also that I could likely do just as much to protect those around me by continuing to only see people outside, wear a mask, etc.

The other thing that became clear during this time was that Covid would become endemic. That is—we would not be able to stop its spread, and would have to learn to live with it in our lives. This meant that most of the measures we were taking weren’t stopping people from getting the disease, they were just delaying it. If getting vaccinated meant I could prevent a Covid illness, that was pretty compelling. But if it only meant pushing the illness back a few months, that was a bit less remarkable. Still beneficial—by spreading the strain on health systems or allowing more time for new treatments to come out—just not nearly as much.

These factors created a backdrop where I could see that getting vaccinated meant stepping onto a treadmill of sorts. A treadmill that didn’t have any clear stopping criteria. The immunity would go, but the virus would stay. And to continue to be a responsible citizen I’d have to keep topping up my immunity.

Still, so what? Unless the vaccines were harmful, there was still no reason not to get vaccinated. And the vaccines were safe, right?

And the simple answer is “yes”. If I wasn’t worried about Covid then I should also not be worried about the vaccine. Yes, there were some rare side effects—some of which were quite serious—but these appeared to be less common than the serious problems associated with Covid itself. Statistically, the vaccines looked less dangerous than the disease.

But that seed of doubt lingered in the back of my mind. From what we knew, the vaccines were safe, but how much did we know? Did we have a complete picture of what the vaccines did, or were we standing on top of an iceberg with lots of information still lurking underneath?

What I could say definitively is we didn’t know everything. We’d been wrong about the vaccine effectiveness that was quoted when the shots were first released. There was no clinical trial data for boosters. The trials for kids were underpowered to demonstrate true risk/benefit from the intervention. And so on.

Did our lack of complete information mean the vaccines were bad? Of course not. Did it mean there was a chance the vaccines were bad? Maybe.

I tried to think about other times in history where it took a long time to learn that something was bad for us. Smoking and lung cancer. Asbestos. X-Rays and other cancers. I wondered, if the vaccine made people 1% more likely to develop cancer or heart problems sometime later in life, how long would it take to figure that out? I decided the answer was probably quite a while. I decided to wait.

You might find my choice to remain unvaccinated a selfish act. To some extent it was. Part of me felt guilty about not “doing my part” to protect those around me. I was torn. But, looking at the balance of evidence—I could live with myself. In life we constantly balance our selfish desires with the global good. If I were completely selfless, I’d be vegan, get rid of my car, and donate all my extra money to people with less than me. In the balance of selfish things I do every day, and the data as I understood it, I did not feel my decision to remain unvaccinated was wildly out of line with my own moral compass.

Still, my wife and I revisited the prospect of getting the shot regularly. But it was easier to put off the decision another day, another week, and so on than to take action. Perhaps, if we were less lazy we would have gotten it earlier.

And then we got Covid. And the picture changed again...

In my province, they didn’t recommend getting the shot within three months of a Covid infection, so I now had more time to think about the decision. Also, I now had some degree of future protection from the disease (a.k.a. natural immunity).

Now natural immunity is another funny topic with Covid. No one can seem to agree how much protection you get from it. Policies in some places—including most of the US—ignore natural immunity entirely. And yet, simultaneously, much of Europe includes it in the definition of “fully vaccinated” in terms of their restrictions—at least for some period of time after infection. This apparent lack of consensus seemed odd, so I found myself digging into the evidence.

Sadly, the evidence was just as confusing.

One study that came out of Israel in August claimed that previously infected people were 27 times less likely to get infected and 9 times less likely to be hospitalized than vaccinated people. But then, many other papers claimed that vaccines produced “a more consistent, and higher-titer initial antibody response”—whatever that meant. Then in November the CDC published a study that found the complete opposite of the Israel data: infected people were 5 times more likely to be hospitalized with Covid than the vaccinated. Huh?!

My background is in engineering and computer science. I’ve been a practicing software developer for 15 years and done my fair share of data science in my career. But I’m not a biologist. Making sense of these papers was slow-going.

So, I thought, “Well, I’ll do what I normally do in other fields—I’ll just look to the experts to tell me what the answer is.”

Unfortunately, the experts didn’t agree either!

Instead, the experts seemed to say whatever supported their own previously-held positions. Experts who favored vaccination loved the CDC study. Experts who thought Covid policy had become too extreme hated it. It was enough to make my head explode. How can we not know these things? How is there not consensus?

I went deep on this topic, trying to form as unbiased an opinion as I could based on reading as many papers and conflicting opinions as I could. My conclusion after many, many hours of research was that my natural immunity was at least as good as any vaccine.² Probably far better than one dose of J&J. Maybe not as good as two doses of Moderna. Either way, I was now as “protected” and as “safe to society” as anyone who’d been vaccinated.

The other conclusion I drew from this exercise was that our information ecosystem was pretty broken. I had tried to get an answer to what I thought was a simple question—”How protective is natural immunity vs vaccination?”—and found it to be a deep and complex rabbit hole of evidence and opinions. I also observed a serious disconnect between how confident people were and the body of contradictory evidence. To borrow a term from Wait But Why, everyone was operating in the Arrogant Zone.

The simplest answer was: we aren’t sure! But everyone was talking as if they knew everything, despite equally-credentialed people across the aisle saying the polar opposite. I had thought being scientifically-minded meant continually questioning consensus opinions with new information, but here things had turned on their head. Science was being used to affirm our previously-held beliefs, rather than help us see truth.

As I continued down the Covid rabbit hole, what did become clear is that I had to “correct for bias” in everything I read about Covid. I would see a study and immediately think “Ah the New York Times is gonna love that one”. Or another one and think “The Brownstone Institute is gonna be all over this”. Media outlets that I had trusted my whole life morphed into these predictable propaganda machines, amplifying the information they liked and ignoring the information they didn’t. I realized that to see the whole picture I had to follow a wide group of sources with a broad range of opinions and draw my own conclusions.

I also realized that almost no one around me was doing anything like what I was doing. Instead most people were living in an ideological echo chamber, certain that it represented the truth. I don’t blame people for this—getting a broad view takes a lot more time and effort—but it was troubling that this was the position we had gotten ourselves into.

What also became clear to me is that the downstream effects of these Covid information echo-chambers was having a big impact on policy and public opinion.

Here again, my position in South Africa provided a unique perspective into the things that started happening elsewhere in the world. Specifically, the politicization and polarization of all things pandemic, from masks to lockdowns to vaccines to mandates.

As I said, I’m American and most of my friends are still in the US. What became striking was how different the conversations I was having in South Africa were from the conversations people were having in the US...

The smallness of these interactions stayed with me. The casual way in which there were clear “sides” to this thing. In which it was obviously “right” to be on one side, and that the people who felt differently were somehow conspiracists, crazy, and worthy of mockery. The casualness of it all was the most striking.

I’ve seen this “othering” before in various forms. I’ve been a part of many conversations—some in the workplace—where it was perfectly acceptable to casually mock and dismiss anyone who supported Donald Trump. I wondered what it would be like to be a Trump supporter in a place like that. Whether you’d try to defend your position. Whether you’d keep silent. Or whether you’d eventually be shunned and forced out. And suddenly I was getting a taste of it. Vaccine status had become a “safe” place to mock and shame our fellow people.

Was this ok?

In South Africa our vaccination rate slowly climbed to 20%, then 30% of the population, but the vaccinated remained a minority. Most of my personal network was vaccinated, but the national picture was still quite different. And my interactions were quite different. Everyone was respectful. No one made assumptions. No one has shamed me. If my status comes up, it’s usually a level-headed and nuanced conversation. I’ve never had any of these “othering” experiences that became commonplace with the people in the west.

Something clearly different was happening in America. For reasons that were clearly not just about public health.

It didn’t sit well.

As time went by, I became increasingly confused by what appeared to be a growing divergence between science, common sense, and policy.

On the science side, the effectiveness of vaccines against infection continued to wane. The vaccines continued to do great at preventing hospitalizations and deaths, but there was now no doubt that they weren’t going to contain the spread. Countries with 80 or 90% of their adult populations vaccinated saw their largest waves ever. Israel redefined “fully vaccinated” to mean three shots instead of two, and people started talking about doing the same in Europe and the US. Natural immunity also waned over time, but appeared to last longer than vaccines.³

I looked at the global picture and thought, well it’s clear that the vaccines aren’t stopping the spread of disease. It looks like getting vaccinated is moving towards becoming more of a personal health decision than a public health necessity. So maybe mandates are no longer required? Or perhaps at a minimum we’ll recognize natural immunity is at least as good as these vaccines?

Oh you sweet summer child. This perspective turned out to be hopelessly naive.

Instead, mandates continued to be pushed, harder and harder, and with more and more tenuous logical reasoning. I became ineligible to enter Canada—my wife’s home-country—due to my vaccination status. I can no longer dine in many of the most popular cities in the US. The goal of pandemic policy seemed to have changed from “stop the virus at all cost” to “increase vaccination rates at all cost,” and so a policy that increased vaccination that was deemed “successful” even if it didn’t really…well…stop the virus.

And there was a cost. Thousands of people were losing their jobs. Hospitals were hurt by staff shortages in part because they had fired healthcare workers—people who risked their lives and got Covid early in the pandemic, but whose natural immunity wasn’t recognized. Students were being kicked out of universities. Long-tenured, celebrated doctors and professors were fired from their jobs.

The gap between policy and common sense didn’t just apply to vaccines. Mask policies in many places became a circus. People would put on their masks for 30 seconds walking through a restaurant, only to dine unmasked for 2 hours, and somehow everyone accepted this was helping. The US masked kids, often as young as 2, despite this being against WHO recommendations, and being based on a very tenuous base of circumstantial evidence. Did we have any idea what harm that was doing?

The decoupling of evidence from policy and public opinion created a fierce rift in society. It also created a group of people—people like me—who paid attention to the science and saw just how much our trusted institutions were getting wrong. This erosion of public trust will take a long, long time to repair.

I tried having conversations about this with people around me—people who were very smart, highly educated, and generally open and liberal-minded—and was consistently met with fierce resistance.

Usually we disagreed about the facts. How effective the vaccines were, how risky they were, whether it mattered if you were old, young, infected, etc. Fact-based disagreements were tricky because—like I found on the topic of natural immunity—the evidence base was overwhelmingly complex. I couldn’t bring everyone along my 100-hour research journey, and there was plenty of evidence out there to support whatever position anyone wanted to have.

What was most effective in these conversations was pointing out where there were clear differences of Covid policy globally. Pointing out that natural immunity was widely acknowledged in Europe’s Covid pass system, for example. Or that Germany and France suspended giving Moderna shots to anyone under 30 because of heart inflammation risks. But whenever I presented an opinion that diverged from most government policies the conversation became almost impossible.

I get it.

It’s pretty hard to fathom that most of the world might be operating on imperfect and incomplete information. It’s hard to believe that some random person who did some internet research has a more balanced, or nuanced position on Covid than Anthony Fauci. But Fauci sits on the edge of a complex spectrum of opinion related to Covid policy. Many equally-credentialed experts in public health and epidemiology think very differently. And there are even highly credentialed experts who believe the vaccines might be far more harmful than we believe. Somewhere in this mess lies the truth. The biggest difference between Fauci and the other experts is that Fauci has the biggest microphone.

It had become clear to me that we were spinning into a weirder and weirder place at faster and faster speeds with our Covid policies.

And then came Omicron.

And if pandemic policy had already become decoupled from science and common sense, Omicron put this divergence into hyperdrive.

Once again being in South Africa provided a unique perspective into what was going on with the pandemic. Where historically living here was like living four or five months in the past, now all of the sudden I was living in the future! We went through Omicron first and were weeks ahead of the rest of the world in terms of what the impact would be.

And Omicron turned the balance of pandemic policy upside-down in every way.

First, it was impossible to contain. It spread like wildfire and tore through populations regardless of what measures were put in place. Vaxxed? Previously infected? Masked? Don’t matter. Omicron finds you.

Second, it was much more mild. And I know that as of the time of this writing (January 4, 2022), some people don’t feel ready to admit that to be true even though it is getting more and more impossible to ignore. In South Africa—now on the downward slope of our Omicron wave—the “peak” of deaths has been only 1/10th as big as previous waves.

Third, it largely evades vaccines. Many of Omicron’s mutations are in the spike protein that is used by the vaccines to confer immunity. It appears the changes substantially reduce the effectiveness of the vaccines against infection to levels bordering on zero just a few months after the shot.⁴

So now we have an impossible-to-stop virus that looks a lot like the common cold. And we have a heavy-handed global mitigation strategy based on vaccination that does very little to stop it. Surely, I thought, we will now see that these policies, and especially vaccine mandates, do not make any logical sense?

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Instead, the mandate train kept right on coming. Universities started mandating boosters for healthy 20-year-olds. Kenya announced—two days before Christmas—that all airplane travelers would require vaccination to enter or exit the country. Because… the variant that evades vaccines was spreading. Kenya’s policy change forced us to cancel our planned holiday trip with less than two-weeks’ notice. In a fun twist of irony, the policies rolled out the same day I got my yellow fever vaccine for the trip.

The public opinion train steamed on as well. As cruise ships, parties, and weddings of fully-vaxxed, often boosted, people created massive spreading events, people continued to celebrate their cities’ vaccine mandates on Instagram, shame the unvaccinated on Twitter, and grow the ever-increasing divide among us.

Here in South Africa, we had all-but declared the pandemic over. The day after Kenya mandated vaccination for air travel, South Africa issued a remarkable update to its Covid guidelines. No more contact tracing. No more isolation or testing of Covid contacts. No more need to isolate even if you test positive for Covid, as long as you weren’t sick. And no different treatments for vaccinated or unvaccinated people. The government acknowledged what is now obvious: this virus is here to stay, it’s not that bad anymore, and we need to live with it and get back to our lives.

I was shocked. Not because I disagreed with the changes, but because I didn’t think the government would be willing to do something that would be so obviously controversial. I was never more proud to be in South Africa than I was at that moment.

And then just a few days later, they rolled back the guidelines. Citing “media, stakeholders and public enquiries”, they decided to take more time for comments...

You might be wondering, well why not just get the shot?...

I do genuinely believe that given my previous infection the risk/benefit of the vaccine is negative. That is—I think it is more likely to do harm than good. And I believe that any good it will do is temporary, and futile in the long term.

The overwhelmingly likely outcome is that the vaccine would do just what the virus did: maybe inconvenience me for a day or so, and then I’d be on with my life. Rationally, isn’t that worth being able to live “normally” again?

Yes. That would be worth it. But the issue is no longer the vaccine. The problem is the precedent.

I don’t believe it’s ok to live in a world in which medical procedures can be forced onto people without an impenetrable foundation of evidence to support them. And I’m just not seeing that from where I stand.

The world I want to live in is a world where we make and enforce rational, evidence-based policies based on the good of the population. A world in which we defer some autonmy to individuals to make their own decisions regarding their health, and don’t keep them from going out to dinner or getting on an airplane if we disagree with them.

I’d also like to live in a world where we stop shaming “the other”, and I’ve decided that one way I can do that is by declaring myself as part of “the other”.

Earlier I didn’t take the shot because I wasn’t sure it was good for me. But now? Now I’m not taking the shot because I’m taking a stand.

I’m taking a stand because if people like me don’t stand up against what’s going on in the world right now then things will only get harder and weirder and scarier for other people like me. I’m worried that if we don’t get off this path soon, it’s going to get harder and harder to turn back. And I don’t want to see where that ends up."

 

Clearly, doing your own research means watching YouTube videos.

This is like left wingers who won't get married until gay marriage becomes legal where they live. But of course that is brave and stunning and this is disgusting.

Addendum: I still saw people mock and shame the unvaccinated and gloat over them dying in late 2023, so

Links - 7th January 2024 (1 - Jordan Peterson)

Jordan Peterson Calls Out The "Pseudo-moralistic Stances" Of Activists | Q&A - YouTube - [On climate change etc] "Do you think that you're worse off than your grandparents?...  fundamentally I'm a psychologist and my experience has been that people can do a tremendous amount of good for themselves and for the people who are immediately around them by looking to their own inadequacies and their own flaws and the things that they're not doing in their lives and starting to build themselves up as more powerful individuals.  And if they're capable of doing that and then they're capable of expanding their career. And if they're capable of expanding their career and their competence then they're capable of taking their place in the community as effective leaders. And then they're capable of making wise decisions instead of unwise decisions when it comes to making collective political decisions. Not suggesting in the least and have never suggested that there's no domain for social action. I'm suggesting that people who don't have their own houses in order should be very careful before they go about reorganizing the world...  I think generally people have things that are more within their personal purview that are more difficult to deal with and that they're avoiding and that generally the way they avoid them is by adopting pseudo-moralistic stances on large-scale social issues so that they look good to their friends and their neighbors"

The feminist case for Jordan Peterson - "unfortunately, for all that Peterson is guilty of erecting straw (wo)men, I must unhappily admit that a great many contemporary feminists are made of straw.  My antipathy to Peterson when I first came across him was, I suspect, partly the result of embarrassment. I knew there were weaknesses within some feminist arguments and was reluctant to acknowledge the failures of my own in-group. Then there is the fact that Peterson’s analysis of human history does not sit easily with the simplistic understanding of sexism we often hear from progressives. It’s so much easier, and so much more appealing, to believe that if only men stopped behaving like arseholes for five minutes, then society would right itself, and we’d naturally settle at a point of harmonious equality between the sexes. This seems to be the view held by feminists who say, for instance, that sex inequality is just as harmful to men as it is to women, as if millennia of sexual and domestic violence were just a silly accident, easily rectified through education. There is even an increasingly influential bloc of trans-inclusive feminists who argue that biological sex is all a social construct and that “female” and “male” are not coherent categories at all.  The mainstream progressive view is that any differences we see between the sexes are entirely socialised, entirely irrational, and therefore entirely curable through cultural reform. There is a fear of confronting a hard question that Peterson brings to the fore: what if it’s not that easy? What if hierarchy, and viciousness, and violence are baked in? What if the feminist task is much, much harder than we’ve previously acknowledged?  There is a central issue which Peterson recognises, and which leading voices within mainstream feminism currently refuse to. Once we get past all the minor issues that dominate social media — from “man-spreading” to the Bechdel test — we get to a core problem that lies at the centre of the feminist project which no one is quite sure how to solve. Women are physically vulnerable to men, who are on average far bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than they are. They are made still more vulnerable by childbearing. This is true in every part of the world, and in every historical period we know of. Modern Western nations have come closer than any others to solving this problem through a combination of birth control and a sophisticated criminal justice system. But it is still the case that women and children are acutely vulnerable to what Second Wave feminists called “male violence” and Peterson just calls “violence”’ and the results are devastating”: 95 per cent of murders worldwide are committed by men; 99 per cent of sex offenders are male. No one knows how to properly restrain the (not insubstantial) minority of men who commit such acts, or even if we can... I now realise that, for all his bluster, and for all that I’m repulsed by some of his fans, Peterson’s work is valuable to feminists for the simple reason that he takes the origins of violence seriously. Which is more than can be said for self-described feminists who hand-wave the problem by insisting, as I heard one rape crisis colleague put it, that “people of all genders sexually assault people of all genders”. I am heartily sick of a feminist discourse that is totally lacking in seriousness. While Peterson may have many flaws, a lack of seriousness is not one of them...   In 2018, Peterson appeared on an episode of Question Time on the BBC. The panel were asked a question about knife crime, to which the regular suite of politicians and journalists gave the usual responses. It’s about cuts to youth services, they argued, or family dysfunction, or a lack of role models. Peterson’s answer was novel. He pointed to research which suggests that when young men are unable to advance themselves by pro-social means, they will often turn to anti-social means instead. Committing violent crime can be a way of achieving notoriety, increasing a young man’s status and pushing him to the top of his particular social hierarchy (you see, it’s those lobsters again).  You don’t have to agree with that analysis, but you do have to admit that it’s interesting. It’s also far more useful than any of the platitudes offered by the rest of the Question Time panel...   It’s not as though there are many others being presented. Influential feminists continue to insist that we should just “teach men not to rape” through consent workshops and privilege-checking, but thus far that strategy has produced nothing except confusion and resentment. At least Peterson is thinking hard about this issue — harder, in fact, than the authors of most of the pink-covered books stacked in the “gender and sexuality” section. I once dismissed his work because it forced me to question the assumptions of my in-group. Now, frankly, I’d rather read Peterson."

Dr Jordan B Peterson on Twitter - "Mark my words: A very large proportion of the insistence on the distinction between gender and sex is undiagnosed (and self serving) narcissism. But by the time this is revealed clinically many medical careers and innocent lives will be destroyed."
When Jordan Peterson says "mark my words," you'd better listen up, bucko - "When you think of it this way, suddenly all those weird Tik Tok videos make sense"

Charges against Peterson should be 'thrown out like a dead mouse' - "The latest of a dismal sequence of outrages and oppressive acts officiously imposed upon the very distinguished and widely admired academic, clinical psychologist and public intellectual, Jordan Peterson, is an intervention by the College of Psychologists of Ontario purporting to require Peterson to undergo a lengthy course of “media training,” in order that he might conduct his online communications “more appropriately.” This is a stupefying insolence from a professional body intent on pettifogging and harassing an extraordinarily successful colleague. Jordan Peterson has had an impeccable professional reputation throughout his 20 years as a research psychologist at Harvard University and the University of Toronto. He has immense clinical experience and his pioneering work in bringing psychology to a vast worldwide internet audience, including 15-million people all over the world who follow him on three different social media platforms, has made serious psychology much more accessible.  Peterson has very correctly rejected this request that he submit to re-education and will be required to appear at a disciplinary hearing where coercive measures will doubtless be invoked against him under threat of the revocation of his clinical licence in Ontario, with the resulting damage to his reputation, as well as a suspension of his right to practise as a psychologist within Ontario. The complaints against him were brought by people with whom he says he had zero clinical contact and have nothing to do with his function as a clinical psychologist. Instead, many of the complaints involve Peterson’s criticism of the Trudeau government, in each case a perfectly civilized expression of reasonable dissenting opinion, more learned certainly, but no more abrasive than the comments of opposition politicians and media critics of the government. In particular, Peterson is attacked for retweeting Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, for criticizing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his former chief of staff, Gerald Butts, as well as the prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, and an Ottawa city councillor, and objecting to the threat of the Ottawa police to take custody of the children of some of the Freedom Convoy protesters last winter. This is of a piece with parallel developments in the professional regulation of physicians and lawyers, curbing the expression of opinion and claiming authority over anything that a clinical psychologist or a member of other professions in Ontario may say or write to anybody on any subject. In a letter to Prime Minister Trudeau, Peterson explicitly blames on Trudeau this movement to empower the regulatory bodies governing the medical, legal and psychological professions with the ability to terrify their members over their “own conduct and the increasingly compulsion-based and ideologically pure policies that you (Trudeau) have promoted and legislated. I simply cannot resign myself to the fact that in my lifetime I am required to resort to a public letter to the leader of my country to point out that political criticism has now become such a crime in Canada that if professionals dare engage in such activity, government-appointed commissars will threaten their livelihood and present them with the spectacle of denouncement and political disgrace. There is simply and utterly no excuse whatsoever for such a state of affairs in a free country.”... Jordan Peterson is probably rivalled only by Justin Trudeau as the most famous Canadian in the world and he would undoubtedly surpass Trudeau in the esteem of the world. It is a scandalous reflection on the authoritarian philistinism of our society that several years ago, a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University was severely reprimanded for playing a clip of Peterson speaking on television in class. A supervising faculty member chastised the student and said it was an act as offensive as playing a speech of Hitler’s. The university eventually backed down, but the ignorant and dictatorial mindset had been revealed. Jordan Peterson does not share one single iota of political or social belief with Adolf Hitler, and in any case, given Hitler’s immense prominence as a historical figure, it would be perfectly in order to play a speech of his as an educational matter, and not with any suggestion that such an act was motivated by a desire to promote Nazism... The self-declared purpose of the College of Psychologists of Ontario is that it “ensures you receive competent and ethical professional psychological services from qualified providers.” It is impossible to reconcile this mission statement with the current persecution of Jordan Peterson."

Famous thinkers demand Ontario psychologist regulator drop case against Peterson - "The letter was signed by 75 intellectuals. Some of the signatories include New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, Harvard University psychology professor Steven Pinker, and Concordia University marketing professor Gad Saad... He has to take social media training, with reports documenting his progress. If he objects, he will face an in-person tribunal hearing and suspension of his right to practice as a licensed clinical psychologist.   The CPO alleges some of Peterson’s comments about topics such as gender ideology, climate change, overpopulation, and nuclear power appear to undermine public trust in the profession and raise questions about his ability to work as a psychologist. The intellectuals said they do not, “and the allegation they do is symptomatic of precisely the dogmatic victimhood ideology that Dr. Peterson is famous for criticizing.”  The letter said a person does not need to agree with all of his beliefs to realize the CPO’s concerns do not relate to his clinical practice. It said the CPO has presented no evidence he lacked professionalism, undermined public trust in the profession, or committed actions which would have raised questions about his ability to carry out his responsibilities as a psychologist. The letter went on to say Peterson has expressed opinions which he has every right to do without the threat of losing his licence. It added these opinions are shared by many psychotherapy patients, who would be ill-served by a profession demonizing their beliefs and purging a psychologist sharing them.   The intellectuals concluded by saying the CPO is “abusing its mandate for ensuring professional integrity to engage in thought policing, ideological indoctrination, and compelled speech, which is unacceptable in a liberal democracy.”   “We urge you to drop your inquisition and save what is left of the college’s moral and professional standing”"

College of Psychologists attacks Jordan Peterson in court - "he also was unfairly taken to task for a joke pointing out the hypocrisy of western progressive climate activists for ignoring harm to “poor children” and for describing a former client as “vindictive” because she had made false allegations against him — allegations for which he was exonerated by the college.  It is difficult to see how the last two comments could offend anyone. There is no principle of law that professionals cannot point out that allegations against them are false, or criticize certain types of politics using jokes. The complaints about those comments appear to be bad faith misinterpretations of Dr. Peterson’s intent. But even the other comments, which could lead to offence, do not fall within the scope of the regulator. There is no right not to be offended, and the potential to offend does not mean any harm has been caused. None of the people Dr. Peterson was commenting on were the source of the complaints. The complaints were mostly made informally by strangers to Dr. Peterson, who had tagged the college on Twitter. In two cases, formal complaints were made by people falsely claiming to be current or former clients of Dr. Peterson’s.   While professional regulators are entitled to regulate speech of their members to some degree, there must be a clear nexus between the speech and the profession. For example, a physician cannot prescribe and sell snake oil. A lawyer cannot lie to court. But there must be a connection to the profession, and the regulator must give weight to the right to freedom of expression. This issue was considered in a case called Strom v Saskatchewan Registered Nurses Association where a nurse, identifying herself as such, posted on Facebook about what she considered inadequate care her grandfather had received while in a long term care facility. The nurses’ regulator disciplined Strom, but the discipline was overturned on appeal, where the court found that the regulator had given little to no weight to Strom’s right to freedom of expression.  Like Strom, Dr. Peterson identifies himself as a professional. But this is not enough to put his comments within the scope of the regulator, as his comments did not relate to the practice of psychology. Although controversial, they are about social and political issues. Because these comments are not about the practice of psychology, they are just like everyone else’s speech: protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Professionals are entitled to private lives. A professional regulator, whether it be of psychologists, nurses, physicians, accountants or teachers, should not police its members’ political opinions.   While Dr. Peterson can afford this fight, most professionals cannot. And we do not want to create a world where regulated professionals must soft pedal their public speech for fear of activists weaponizing their professional regulator... The regulator’s lawyers’ listing of Dr. Peterson’s comments in court, and emphasizing how caustic or rude they may be, is a classic tactic of any government trying to suppress speech. It is always government’s argument that the speech they seek to silence is of little value and not worthy of protection.  But freedom of expression isn’t needed to protect popular speech. Speech that can offend is not at the periphery of protection. And when it engages political and social issues, it is at the core of freedom of expression even if it is caustic or rude. We cannot lose sight of that."

Ontario court rules against Jordan Peterson, upholds social media training order - "The Canadian Constitution Foundation, also granted intervener status in the case, said it thought the decision “could have a chilling effect on people in other regulated professions, like doctors, lawyers, teachers and accountants.”"

Eli 🔍 on Twitter - "Say what you want about Jordan Peterson, but the fact that he got protesters to leave him alone by holding his talks at 8:30 in the morning is hilarious."

Jordan Peterson - More Than 50% Of Women Are Childless At 30 - YouTube - "What what our society does to 19 year old women or 18 year old women... we just lie to them all the time. You know the first lie is there's nothing more important than your career... the second lie is there will be nothing more important to you in your life than your career... the third lie is there should be nothing more important in your life than their career... implicit in that is the idea that children are a burden and that the idea that women should have children is part of the oppressive patriarchy and should be resisted...  what i've seen is that as women progress towards their late 30s, no late 20s, they, there's a psychological transformation and what happens is that they place less emphasis on their career and way more emphasis particularly on having a child. And that really reaches a crisis point around 29 or 30 for the vast majority of women and, and their attitude flips and I've seen it very dramatically with many women... I worked with high-end lawyers in toronto for about 10 years. I was part of an organization. We went to law firms, high-end law firms, and said: send us your most productive people and we'll help them iron out whatever wrinkles there might still be in their life. And the advantage to them is that things will go better for them and the advantage to you is they'll be even more productive... these were women who were generally very attractive, well put together physically, pretty stable psychologically, extremely conscientious, very very smart and high achieving from like junior high all the way through high school, university, law school onto uh the top firms, rocketing up through the ranks, full partnership by the time they were 29 or 30 and all the law firms, all the women bailed out. All of them, the law firms couldn't keep them... we don't want to lose their high performing women because they're performing at the highest level and they couldn't keep them. The women wanted to have nine to five jobs. They wanted to bind the job, so they could have a life and that was especially true once they got interested in having a child or had one... there's only a small minority of human beings that are willing to do this, to work flat out eight[y] hours a week...  what about the rest of life? Well that's what the women asked. Why am I doing this? And that's a great question. Well for men there's a different answer than for women. It's a really different answer and it isn't like the men aren't exactly thinking this through. It's, it's more like this is an integral part of male motivation. The more successful you are as a man the more women like you...  countries that are willing to educate women, that's the best predictor of their future economic success...  women's educational status predicts their children's educational status but men's educational status doesn't... the comment section is unbelievably vitriolic because every single comment is vitriolic and it's all from women. It's like who is this old white bastard telling us what we should do with our bodies. You know when I wasn't being judgmental. I was just saying exactly what I said to you which is, well I've watched women over the entire course of my life with I would say an affectionate eye. You know, I love my sister, I love my wife, I have a daughter, I love my mother. I'm pretty happy about women all things considered... I don't even know how they should conduct their lives. I've watched what happens and I've also watched what happens to women who hit 29 or 30 and then can't conceive and that is not a fate i would wish on anyone, it's awful... it's very interesting to me to see how vitriolic those comments have been and how how uniform that is because usually on my youtube channel in particular ninety-five percent of the comments are positive"

Inside the Ontario court battle over Jordan Peterson’s tweets - "complaints to the Toronto-based college have multiplied, many from individuals with no clinical, professional or personal relationship with Peterson but who are offended by things they’ve read or heard him say online, in podcasts and in interviews... Peterson is now seeking a “judicial review” of the panel’s November 2022 decision, taking the case to Ontario’s Divisional Court.  Jordan Peterson v. the College of Psychologists of Ontario is being watched by free speech advocates and regulators from other professions.  The decision by the panel of three Superior Court judges could have a broad and possibly chilling effect on all regulated professionals, warned Jonah Arnold, a lawyer for the newly created Association of Aggrieved Regulated Professionals of Ontario, one of several groups granted intervener status at the June hearing. Arnold said he co-founded the organization in January after realizing many clients were “unjustly forced to leave their respective professions and had no voice”... A decision to uphold the college’s decision could deter people from joining regulated professions in Ontario, including teaching, medicine, or the law, if it emboldens regulators to police the expression of non-professional opinions and beliefs, Arnold argued... Other interveners included the Canadian Civil Liberties Association — its lawyers argued that regulatory oversight doesn’t extend to “expressive activity that is outside the scope of professional practice”... Lawyer John McIntyre, representing Egale Canada and JusticeTrans, argued a health professional’s right to freedom of expression is not unfettered. “It must be weighed against countervailing interests, including the Charter rights of vulnerable and marginalized stakeholders.” (Peterson’s lawyers note the college’s decision did not find his comments were transphobic or discriminatory.)... People who’ve taken offence to some of his statements or views have complained through the college’s formal complaints system or by posting their disdain on Twitter and “tagging” the regulator. Some purport to be colleagues. “Embarrassed to be in the same college as him,” one anonymous psychologist told a college staff member over the phone last year... Peterson responded to the criticism, noting he has “already implemented a solution to the problem of monitoring and modifying” his social media communication with guidance from a team of experts.  “I have consciously and carefully surrounded myself with people who have helped me monitor what I am doing and who provide me with continual feedback as to the appropriateness of the tone and the content of what I am purveying,” Peterson wrote. The vetting team comprises a “very wide network of expert thinkers” and includes “a set of messengers and strategists on the liberal left (for the Democrats) who have tried assiduously to pull that party toward the moderate middle for more than five years, and have produced billions of dollars of advertising on that front, and our conversations have been strenuous and difficult and careful in the extreme, as we have attempted to negotiate our way forward in peace, mutual understanding and tranquillity.”"

Letters: School board's book-ban zealots lose the plot - "Readers have bought over 10 million copies of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life at a cost of $16.96 (paperback) because, one would surmise, they all suspected they would feel better for reading it. Six people, none of whom knew Dr. Peterson personally or who had been treated by him, complained to the Ontario College of Psychologists, likely at the cost of sending an email and making a couple of phone calls, about a few of Peterson’s social media comments. Last time I checked, psychology was about making people healthier and happier. Do the needs of the few (six) outweigh the needs of the many (millions), or do the needs of the many (millions) outweigh the needs of the few (six)? The Ontario College of Psychologists needs to figure this out."
"Barbara Kay writes that in dismissing Jordan Peterson’s appeal of an Ontario College of Psychologists demand that he submit himself to social media retraining, the Ontario Divisional Court ruled that “demeaning, degrading and unprofessional” discourse constituted justification for limits on Peterson’s charter speech protection.  I would suggest that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh should be sanctioned and face the same retraining after their “demeaning, degrading and unprofessional” profanities hurled at supporters and participants in last year’s Freedom Convoy. Not surprisingly, only those on the right face sanctions while those tilting left are above reproach."

Opinion: What the Jordan Peterson case reveals about regulatory colleges - "Jordan Peterson’s recent legal skirmish with his professional regulator, the College of Psychologists of Ontario, is more than just a headline-grabbing story; it reveals a deeper conflict between professionals and their regulatory bodies. The key question here is whether regulators truly prioritize public well-being or if their primary interest is self-preservation...   The fulcrum of this case is not patient safety but the College’s concern about public perception. Notably, no active clients were part of this controversy; the College’s apprehension stemmed purely from comments Peterson made on a podcast and Twitter. The only entity truly at risk here is the College itself, not the public it claims to protect...   Regulatory colleges face a classic dilemma often discussed by economists as the “principal-agent problem.” Conflicts of interest arise when the agent (the colleges in this case) starts to act in their own best interests instead of acting in the interests of their clients. They are in the uncomfortable position of serving two masters. If college employees want to keep their jobs and protect their organizations, they must maintain a public image of pure devotion to patient safety, even though they are beholden to governmental oversight.  The Ontario court chose to ignore this fundamental conflict of interest, focusing solely on the College’s right to restrict Peterson’s speech outside of his professional responsibilities. (Presumably, the court is not immune to the principal-agent problem either.) This narrow perspective sidesteps an important institutional issue: regulatory colleges may say they serve the public, but they are clearly inclined to safeguard their own interests first...   The Peterson case is a revealing snapshot of a larger problem within regulatory bodies. It’s time we ask whether these organizations are genuinely custodians of public welfare or if they are primarily self-serving institutions masked under the guise of public protection"
Clearly, Shawn Whatley, a past President of the Ontario Medical Association, knows nothing

Canada is at the forefront of the woke assault on our essential human liberties - "Every single opinion was a political or psychological statement; every one devoid of genuinely documentable “harm”– except perhaps to the tender sensibility of certain Canadian moralists in whose mouths butter wouldn’t melt, in a country of fatal niceness and complacency. For context, there are many “regulated professions” in Western countries, including Canada; professions whose conduct is held to be crucial to the public interest, and whose practitioners must therefore uphold certain standards to protect the public. That idea worked for years. In Canada, as elsewhere, these professional colleges, with authority delegated from the government, limited their actions to situations of obvious professional misconduct.  In the last few years, however, such bodies – with their wide and untrammeled potential regulatory and punitive ability – have been weaponised by the same ideological radicals of the Left that have infiltrated and undermined higher education, media, judiciary, law, science and government. Any radical anywhere can submit the kind of complaint that can bring a professional’s life to a halt, and can increasingly rely on these captured colleges and other professional regulatory bodies to uphold and pursue their vexatious, vengeful, petty, spiteful and ideological motivated “complaints.” And this is regardless of how much good the target of their complaint has done –  independent of the training, reputation or standing of the target, and accompanied by the deep pockets and infinite amount of time available for the accusers and adversaries, abetted by the resources of the government itself... I know perfectly well that many professionals in Canada are cowed to the point where they are forced to lie; they tell me so repeatedly in private. And when professionals have to lie, they can no longer do their job properly, and the public suffers. I know, too, that this is increasingly true across the West... Why does the situation appear particularly grim, here in Maple Leaf Country? We were, for most of my country’s history, miraculously and thankfully dull: our constitution, ensconced safely under British authority until 1982, enshrined “peace, order and good government” as the most basic principles of our dominion. This was not the clarion call ringing out to rally our good friends south of the border, who aimed at the much more dramatic and libertarian “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It was good enough, however, to produce a reliable, safe, secure and free state, conservative in the classic small-c sense, with institutions both predictable and honest, and an economy both productive and generous.  That all started to change in the 1980s. Our dashing prime minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau – father of the current Prime Minister, our current clown prince – was searching desperately for a legacy and for a solution to the chronic problem posed by the Quebec separatists, who were genuinely threatening the integrity of the country... Trudeau senior, constitutionally displeased with the fundamental derivation of Canada from Britain, seized upon this opportunity to make his mark in history, and began to agitate to “bring the constitution home.” He did so, rewriting our primary legal agreement, and appending to it his much-vaunted Charter of Rights and Freedoms, paraded before Canadians as the ultimate guarantee of the freedoms we had enjoyed anyway under the much more reliable aegis of British Common Law. But Quebec put up its middle finger, refusing to become a signatory to the new agreement – even after Trudeau’s government abandoned both its spine and its principles to include a poison pill in the very Charter that hypothetically protected our citizens: the clause in Section 33 of that document, indicating that those very constitutional rights can be abridged more or less at will by any government in Canada, federal or provincial, if inclined to do so... Canada was a very early adopter of the idea of ‘group rights’. The Quebecois, again, began to obsess about the potential threat posed by English Canada (really, the English West, led by the culturally-dominant Americans) to the language and culture of their province... This bad situation is made worse by the naïve virtue-signalling of, ironically enough, Pierre Trudeau’s son: an unqualified part-time drama teacher who in a recent poll was found to be the country’s least-popular prime minister of the past 55 years. It was that same Justin Trudeau who famously proclaimed that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada’’ in 2015, insisting that the country has little uniting it except its embrace of cultural diversity and its putative values of openness and respect.  But what is a country without a central identity? Aimless, and therefore both anxious and hopeless; worse, prone to domination by the fractionated ideas that will fight necessarily for central place in the absence of the centre that must by one means or another be established. That is the shadow-side of the naïve “multiculturalism” that has doomed the world to continuous fractionalism and all its accompanying horrors."

Dr Jordan B Peterson on X - "One of the things I’ve told men over and over is if you’re being rejected by all the women that you approach, it’s not the women, it’s you."
Clearly, he's a King of the Incels!