Category: Authoritarian and Regressive Left

How American progressives have gone astray

November 19, 2023 • 11:30 am

Speaking of the moral weakness of the Western Left when it comes to the war between Israel and Hamas, Susie Linfield, a professor at NYU, has written in Quillette a thoughtful, thorough, and trenchant analysis of the situation.   She’s no unalloyed cheerleader for Israel, recognizing that any lasting peace will require the removal of Netanyahu, and she deplores the violence (and perhaps the presence) of West Bank settlers. But overall, she calls out the Western Left strongly for not adhering to the traditional values and tactics of their philosophy—features that brought them success with things like the civil rights movement. Throwing in your lot with the Palestinian cause and adopting a laissez-faire attitude towards violence, Linfield says, is the road to perdition.

Click to read:

I’m just going to give a few quotes as my insomnia hit me with a vengeance last night, I’ve been awake since 2 a.m. and I can’t brain. Fortunately, Dr. Linfield can.  Here she talks about true progressivism and how it was betrayed by its adherents’ response to the October 7 massacre:

The events of October 7th have clarified to Israelis from across the political spectrum—and should to everyone else—just what it means to make Palestine judenrein, as Hamas’s founding document and its current leaders promise. Indeed, the only way to “free Palestine from the river to sea,” as thousands of demonstrators worldwide are chanting, is to kill (or at best expel) all the Jews who live there, which is precisely what Hamas openly states is its primary goal. (Rep. Rashida Tlaib recently released a video in which she endorsed this demand, which she then ludicrously tried to spin as “an aspirational call for … peaceful coexistence.” Perhaps she imagines that the millions of Israelis expelled from Yemen, Morocco, Iraq, Syria, and a host of other Arab countries will be offered the “right of return.”) Hamas specifies that every Muslim, including women and “the slave,” is duty-bound to join in the eschatological struggle to cleanse Palestine of “the Jews,” whom it identifies as the world’s most powerful force and mankind’s greatest enemy. October 7th was the practice of that principle.

The determination of many on the Western Left to either ignore this program or refuse to believe it—despite Hamas’s consistent candor about its aims and means—is a sign of intellectual Orientalism: Palestinians are viewed only as helpless, reactive victims rather than people who generate ideas and actions for which they can be held accountable. But of course they do create political worldviews and programs, and Hamas has been especially voluble of late in explaining its future plans. Just last week, Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad affirmed that his organization planned many more October 7th-type attacks until it “annihilates” Israel; a week later, Hamas spokesman Taher El-Nounou told the New York Times, “I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders.” This makes calls for a “mutual ceasefire,” in Tlaib’s words, nonsensical.

What calls for a ceasefire are really demanding is for Israel to stop defending itself, stop trying to eliminate Hamas, withdraw to its previous borders, and probably = make reparations to Gaza for the destruction of the war.  (The calls never seem to mention the continuing firing of rockets at Israel by terrorists trying to kill civilians.) It is a call to return to the status quo, in which Israel will perpetually be attacked by terrorists—certainly more often than before—but will not be allowed to defend itself. Humanitarian pauses? Yes, of course.  Corridors that are truly safe to protect as many civilians as possible? Certainly. But a ceasefire? That’s only one step from the “river to the sea” mentality the mentality that chides Israel for defending itself against the most brutal of attacks. As Cary Nelson wrote in Fathom, in an article called “A ceasefire would normalise the pogrom,”

Those urging a ceasefire stand behind what appears to be the most basic humanitarian motive: prevent further loss of life; end the massacre of innocent civilians. And then the coup de grace is delivered in hypocritical feel good rhetoric: everyone should respect international humanitarian law. Except that Hamas never has and never will honour international humanitarian law.

Meanwhile, no reprisals for murdering men, women, and children are to follow. No sanctions. No punishments. No accountability. The barbaric intimacy of so many of the killings is to be met with stability, frozen in time. We are all to accept what happened and move on.

Fools, hypocrites, dreamers, and antisemites alike stand in solidarity. Except that if the crimes are allowed to stand unanswered they will be repeated or more likely horrifically reinvented within a few years at most. A new standard for monstrous assault on Israelis will be in place.

But I digress. Here’s long except from Linfield’s piece—in effect, a lecture to those on the Left who can’t be bothered by what Hamas did on October 7 or what it is doing now. I’ve inserted some links into the powerful last paragraph so you can look up the cited writers.

There is, and always has been, another tradition, another sense, of what it means to be “progressive” and to stand with the oppressed. In 2011, Fred Halliday wrote an essay titled “Terrorism in Historical Perspective.” It is the most intellectually and morally lucid work on the subject that I know. Halliday addressed himself to his comrades on the Left and made a crucial argument: Any movement that claims to represent an oppressed people must act in an ethical way even if it is not in power and perceives itself as weak. 

Oppression is not a carte blanche for severing heads from bodies, shooting hundreds of young festival-goers, bludgeoning people to death, murdering children in front of parents and vice versa, killing naked women point-blank, and kidnapping babies and the elderly; there is no universe in which these are revolutionary, emancipatory, or anticolonialist acts, much less “beautiful” ones. Sadism and violence are not synonyms. Sexual torture cannot be anti-imperialist—nor is it an understandable, much less inevitable, response to oppression. An eliminationist program is not a freedom charter. History has proved, again and again, that terrorists and freedom fighters aren’t the same, which is why the former never achieve anything approaching either liberation or justice. There is no room for “yes, but.” Why, when it comes to the deaths of Israelis, is this so hard to understand?

The Western Left’s response to October 7th will, I believe, be viewed as a moment of moral corruption on a par with the defense of Stalin’s purges, Czechoslovakia’s antisemitic show trials of 1952, the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and Poland’s antisemitic expulsions of 1968, along with the denial of the Khmer Rouge genocide (see under: Chomsky, Noam) and the adulation of China’s vicious Cultural Revolution. Since October 7th, there have been a handful of liberal and Left writers who have written bravely and honestly: Jonathan Freedland and Howard Jacobson in the Guardian, Michael Walzer in the Atlantic; Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times, Alan Johnson and Cary Nelson in Fathom, Seyla Benhabib on Medium. They are, alas, exceptions. Halliday’s leftism—the leftism of humane universalism rather than anti-imperialism—is in eclipse, as was Memmi’s.

Here’s why the Israeli Left outshines the American Left, a bit that immediately follows the paragraph above:

Except in Israel. Somehow, that nation of genocidal-white supremacist-fascist-settler-colonials has produced a Left that still adheres to the traditional principles of universalist dignity and equality, and that isn’t too squeamish to recognize terrorism for what it is. It rejects Manichean reductionism—something it can ill afford—and can therefore hold more than one thought at a time. It understands that Israel is a powerful country and that it is existentially threatened by its enemies. It understands that it is a perpetrator of the occupation and a victim of terrorism. It knows that one can oppose the way in which Netanyahu’s government is conducting the war while also avowing that a war must be fought. It understands that vanquishing Hamas and defeating the fanatical ultra-nationalists in its midst—and in its government—are not only related but utterly interdependent. It rejects the concept of collective guilt, whether of Israelis or Palestinians. It has a pretty good understanding of what antisemitism is. Of necessity, it comprehends tragedy. Its tone is sober rather than histrionic. These are the people who have done more to defend Palestinian rights and promote Palestinian sovereignty than all the West’s self-aggrandizing decolonialists, boycotters, and anti-imperialists combined.

More opprobrium for the Western Left:

The Western Left, basking in the safe, prosperous cities of the liberal democracies, lives in a very different world from the one Michael Sfard inhabits. Its moral rot may have suddenly become clear, but an ethical collapse takes time to develop. October 7th reveals the long-simmering theoretical confusions, and the moral void, that dominates many of today’s “progressive” movements. A Left that is fixated on “decolonization” mistakes a death cult for a liberation movement and is unable to recognize a bloodbath, even one that was filmed, and publicized worldwide, by the killers themselves. A Left that, rightly, demands absolute condemnation of white-nationalist supremacy refuses to disassociate itself from Islamist supremacy. A Left that divides the world between racists and antiracists and is obsessed with “people who look like me” can’t understand that the clash of two national movements has nothing to do with color or race.

A Left that celebrates diversity vilifies one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse countries in the world. A Left that prizes itself on defending refugees castigates a nation founded almost entirely by refugees—among the most immiserated and persecuted in history—as “settler-colonial.” A Left that divides the world between noble “native” peoples and the aliens who pollute them reproduces the neo-fascist worldview of the far-Right, from Donald Trump to Marine Le Pen. A Left that lauds intersectionality hasn’t noticed that Hamas’s axis of support consists of Iran, famous most recently for killing hundreds of protestors demanding women’s freedom; the homicidal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad; and Hezbollah, another fundamentalist Islamic group that is dedicated to Israel’s destruction and that terrorizes, and sometimes assassinates, fellow Lebanese who oppose it. What kind of Left gets into bed with such forces? Nor has it noticed that, since October 7th, ISIS and al-Qaeda have urged Muslims to step up worldwide “operations against the Jews” in solidarity with Hamas.

. . . The Left in Israel, unlike the global Left, recognizes that Hamas must be eliminated, not appeased. “A country that doesn’t kill the people who tried to murder my daughters, and those who sent them, has lost its right to exist,” Tibon wrote. Civilians in Gaza must be protected whenever possible, but Hamas’s concealment of fighters and weapons within the civilian population and civilian sites guarantees that the war will be extremely ugly. Postwar, new political landscapes will emerge, though only a fool would predict what they’ll be. (One thing is clear: the political leaderships of both peoples have led them, and each other, to ruin.) October 7th, Tibon wrote, “hasn’t changed my belief, based on a cold, calculated reading of reality, that in the long run we must find ways to share this land. … But first we must survive.” It has become obvious that there are many on the Left who dispute that last sentence.

If you’re ashamed of how “progressives” have behaved in America, failing to adhere to the principles of classical liberalism, you should be even more ashamed now that they’re getting into bed with terrorism. Those who call for a ceasefire are simply blackguards who doesn’t know what a ceasefire means or, if they do, know it means Israel will be forever menaced by terrorists, but even worse than before.

Note that the whole “squad” is in this list.  I can only wonder what these people think a ceasefire means. And the proportion of Americans who want a ceasefire means little to me, for I don’t think they know what they’re calling for. The Biden administration does, and that’s why we don’t have one.

The ignorance is metastasizing:

And what about the death of Gazan civilians? Here’s her take, which is mournful but alert to the fact that those deaths would be much fewer if Hamas didn’t use people as human shields.  It’s hard to argue with the proposition that, indeed, Hamas wants and needs dead Palestinians to carry out its program, which is to get the world to allow them to kill Jews. Linfield’s take:

The Left in Israel, unlike the global Left, recognizes that Hamas must be eliminated, not appeased. “A country that doesn’t kill the people who tried to murder my daughters, and those who sent them, has lost its right to exist,” Tibon wrote. Civilians in Gaza must be protected whenever possible, but Hamas’s concealment of fighters and weapons within the civilian population and civilian sites guarantees that the war will be extremely ugly. Postwar, new political landscapes will emerge, though only a fool would predict what they’ll be. (One thing is clear: the political leaderships of both peoples have led them, and each other, to ruin.) October 7th, Tibon wrote, “hasn’t changed my belief, based on a cold, calculated reading of reality, that in the long run we must find ways to share this land. … But first we must survive.” It has become obvious that there are many on the Left who dispute that last sentence.

On “whiteness in physics”, its rebuttal, and a symposium of papers about the dangers of authoritarian control to science

October 20, 2023 • 12:15 pm

In April of last year I posted about the paper below, “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study” (published in Physical Review and Physics Education Research). and I wrote this (tweaked a tiny bit for publication now):

I cannot emphasize enough how bad the paper is. Have a butcher’s [look]. First, read the abstract above, and then have a look here [there was a link to the preliminary version, which is gone now].

The first paragraph sets the tone:

Critical Race Theory names that racism and white supremacy are endemic to all aspects of U.S. society, from employment to schooling to the law [1–7]. We see the outcomes of this in, for example, differential incarceration rates, rates of infection and death in the era of COVID, and police brutality. We also see the outcomes of this in physics.

. . . and in the short incident analyzed at great length in this paper. The entire paper is, in fact, a lengthy and tendentious exegesis of six minutes of observing a presentation by three physics students, seen as “a case of whiteness”:

In this paper, we analyze a case of whiteness as social organization from an introductory physics course at a large public institution in the Western United States. We use the analytic markers from Sec. II to illustrate how whiteness shows up in this context, and we identify and discuss a number of mechanisms of control that co-produce whiteness in the six-minute episode of classroom interaction. We draw on tools of interaction analysis [59], including discourse, gesture, and gaze analysis, to unpack how whiteness is being constituted locally or interactionally. Our hope is that illustrating whiteness as social organization can contribute to readers’ awareness of and vision for disrupting and transforming this social organization in their own contexts [56,60] and support other researchers who want to do similar analyses.

You can read it for yourself by clicking on the screenshot below, and I used it as an example of how “critical studies” was pushing science toward the drain, or at least coopting science for ideological purposes.

Lawrence Krauss also went after the paper on his “Critical Mass” Substack site, saying this:

That this got published in a peer-reviewed physics journal is what makes this so surprising.  It means there is something fundamentally wrong with the system, and it isn’t systemic racism.  It is sheer stupidity combined with lethargy.

The natural tendency of academics, and scientists in particular, is to ignore this kind of nonsense and focus on their own work.   But once the bar gets this low, and the flood waters are rising, you can be certain a lot of nasty effluence will be flowing out as well.    And with the pressing need for better physics education at all levels (that is, better ways to actually teach physics), this garbage filling up journals and taking away precious research resources means that there is less room for the good stuff.

The standards of a field are determined by the practitioners in the field.  That means it is about time that physicists started doing something about it.

But rebuttal on our websites isn’t as powerful as rebuttal in a peer-reviewed journal.  And that has finally happened. Three authors wrote a critique of the article, but of course the original journal wouldn’t even look at it.  They then added to the critique of Robertson’s and Hairston’s paper their own analysis of the difficulties they getting the rebuttal published.

And, mirabile dictu, it’s now published. The author said:

We spent a long time trying to get a critical comment published in the journal to no avail. However, with the help of Anna Krylov we managed to get an article published in European Review, discussing the “whiteness” article, our critique of it, and the journal’s resistance to our critique.

Anna is a real force in pushing back against ideologically-tainted science! And now you can read the rebuttal/recount, published in European Review, for free by clicking on the screenshot below:

And the abstract:

Research framed around issues of diversity and representation in STEM is often controversial. The question of what constitutes a valid critique of such research, or the appropriate manner of airing such a critique, thus has a heavy ideological and political subtext. Here, we outline an attempt to comment on a paper recently published in the research journal Physical Review – Physics Education Research (PRPER). The article in question claimed to find evidence of ‘whiteness’ in introductory physics from analysis of a six-minute video. We argue that even if one accepts the rather tenuous proposition that ‘whiteness’ is sufficiently well defined to observe, the study lacks the proper controls, checks and methodology to allow for confirmation or disconfirmation of the authors’ interpretation of the data. The authors of the whiteness study, however, make the stunning claim that their study cannot be judged by standards common in science. We summarize our written critique and its fate, along with a brief description of its genesis as a response to an article in which senior officers of the American Physical Society (which publishes PRPER) explained that the appropriate venue for addressing issues with the paper at hand is via normal editorial processes.

Read and enjoy!

In fact, this is only one of a bunch of papers in a special issue of the European Review, derived from a symposium in Israel on the dangers of ideology and politics to science.  Here is the screenshot of the contents, and you can see all the papers (and read them) by clicking anywhere below. The title of the issue is right at the top:

I’ll single out three papers of special interest, to me at least.  First, the paper by my Chicago colleague Dorian Abbot at the bottom is about the three “foundational” principles of the University of Chicago, which Dorian calls the “Chicago Trifecta”.  Its abstract:

The purpose of this article is to discuss practical solutions to the threat to free inquiry at universities coming from the illiberal left. Based on my experiences at the University of Chicago, I propose that all universities should adopt and enforce rules requiring that: (1) the university, and any unit of it, cannot take collective positions on social and political issues; (2) faculty hiring and promotion be done solely on the basis of research and teaching merit, with nothing else taken into consideration; and (3) free expression be guaranteed on campus, even if someone claims to be offended, hurt or harmed by it. Faculty need to work together with students, alumni, journalists and politicians to get this done.

Second, the article by Ahmad Mansour points out the dangers of authoritarianism in science using his own tortuous biography, involving growing up in Israel and Palestine, and connecting that with the “cancel culture” of Germany. It resonates with the present situation going on there, and is a courageous article.

Finally, Anna and Jay Tanzman have a piece on how scientific publishing is being corrupted by ideology. The abstract:

The politicization of science – the infusion of ideology into the scientific enterprise – threatens the ability of science to serve humanity. Today, the greatest such threat comes from a set of ideological viewpoints collectively referred to as Critical Social Justice (CSJ). This contribution describes how CSJ has detrimentally affected scientific publishing by means of social engineering, censorship, and the suppression of scholarship.

Just peruse the titles, click here or on the screenshots, and download what you’d like (or read on the screen, which I can’t do). If you think that science is immune to corruption by ideology (and it’s always been, but rarely more than now—except perhaps in the Soviet Union), then you should definitely read all the pieces.

More mishigas: Two anthropology societies cancel an accepted symposium on sex and gender because it would “harm” their members

September 27, 2023 • 12:30 pm

I’m probably late to the party, but the latest gossip about the Authoritarian Left involves the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) deciding to deplatform an entire symposium on sex and gender in anthropology—all because of the claim that it could cause mental “harm”to some people.

There are three letters involved, all of which you can see at a site set up by Elizabeth Weiss, a physical anthropologist at San Jose State (I’ve written about her before, as she’s been professionally demonized for wanting to scientifically study Native American remains).

You can see all the letters in the tweets below from Colin Wright, or at Weiss’s site.

Here’s the skinny in three parts

1.) Six women anthropologists proposed to hold a symposium at the AAA and CASCA’s joint meeting in Toronto called “Let’s Talk about sex, baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology.” (The title comes from a popular song by Salt N Pepa.) You can see their proposal here. It’s a mixed bag, with some intriguing talks, like Weiss’s, and some others that are postmodern or confusing.  But that’s irrelevant to what happened. At any rate, you might intuit from the title why the seminar got ditched. Guess!

Kathleen Lowery at the University of Alberta organized the symposium. Here’s the summary:

Session Descripton: While it has become increasingly common in anthropology and public life to substitute ‘sex’ with ‘gender’, there are multiple domains of research in which biological sex remains irreplaceably relevant to anthropological analysis. Contesting the transition from sex to gender in anthropological scholarship deserves much more critical consideration than it has hitherto received in major disciplinary fora like AAA / CASCA. This diverse international panel brings together scholars from socio-cultural anthropology, archaeology, and biological anthropology who describe why in their work gender is not helpful and only sex will do. This is particularly the case when the work is concerned with equity and the deep analysis of power, and which has as an aim the achievement of genuine inclusivity. With research foci from hominin evolution to contemporary artificial intelligence, from the anthropology of education to the debates within contemporary feminism about surrogacy, panelists make the case that while not all anthropologists need to talk about sex, baby, some absolutely do.

Elizabeth told me that the contributions, which you can see at the link, were so diverse and wide-ranging that it was likely that the six panelists would have disagreed with each other.

As I said, the proposal was accepted by the AAA and CASCA for the meeting. But then they has second thoughts—and rejected it (see below).  I suspect that the main issue was Weiss’s talk, which maintained that “skeletons are binary”, which is true, but not something that cultural anthropologists, at least, would find comfortable. THERE IS NO BINARY IN WOKEWORLD!

Here’s Elizabeth’s own proposed presentation, which I think helped scupper the symposium (not her fault!):

No bones about it: skeletons are binary; people may not be. Sex identification – whether an individual was male or female – using the skeleton is one of the most fundamental components in bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology. Anthropologists have improved their ability to determine sex since their initial studies on skeletal remains, which depended on subjective assessment of skeletal robusticity to say whether someone was male or female. An understanding of physical differences in the pelvis related to childbirth, hormonal impacts on bones, and extensive comparative studies have provided anthropologists with an array of traits, such as those in the Phenice Method, to determine sex using just bones. The use of DNA to identify sex in skeletons by their 23rd chromosomes enables anthropologists to say whether infants are male or female for use in both criminal abuse cases and archaeological cases, such as in recognizing infanticide practices. Anthropologists’ ability to determine whether a skeleton is male or female is not dependent on time or culture; the same traits can be used to make a sex estimate in a forensic case in Canada, or to estimate sex in a Paleoindian dated around 11,500 years ago in Brazil. As anthropologists study more remains from more cultures and time periods, sex identification has improved, because sex differences are biologically-determined. In forensics, however, anthropologists should be (and are) working on ways to ensure that skeletal finds are identified by both biological sex and their gender identity, which is essential due to the current rise in transitioning individuals and their overrepresentation as crime victims. —Elizabeth Weiss

Note that Weiss even mentions that there may be forensic ways to identify gender identity (e.g., she mentioned the presence of “signs of plastic surgery” to me). But I suspect the assertion of the binary nature of skeletons is what eventually raised hackles,

At any rate, the symposium was still accepted and scheduled for the meetings.

2.) But then, in November, the two societies decided to deep-six the panel, and here are the reasons they gave:

Dear panelists,

We write to inform you that at the request of numerous members the respective executive boards of AAA and CASCA reviewed the panel submission “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” and reached a decision to remove the session from the AAA/CASCA 2023 conference program(me). This decision was based on extensive consultation and was reached in the spirit of respect for our values, the safety and dignity of our members, and the scientific integrity of the program (me). The reason the session deserved further scrutiny was that the ideas were advanced in such a way as to cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large.

While there were those who disagree with this decision, we would hope they know their voice was heard and was very much a part of the conversation. It is our hope that we continue to work together so that we become stronger and more unified within each of our associations. Going forward, we will undertake a major review of the processes

There’s a lot to say about this, but you can see the problem: the assertion of “our values” (which of course are unstated and surely not shared by all), the ritual invocation that the panel would harm “the safety and dignity of our members” (you’d have to be a fool to buy that), and the ludicrous claim that the sessions would “harm” members of the trans and LGBTQ1 anthropology community and “the community at large” (my response is “no they wouldn’t”).

This is all nonsense, of course. If scientists can’t listen to presentations like the ones accepted without being “harmed”, they need therapy, not canceled talks.  And, of course, the societies are imposing ideological standards on the community that will chill dissent: exactly what you don’t want in science.  That’s clear from the last paragraph, which implies that all symposia will be vetted in the future for political correctness.

Here we see a good example of how science is being bowdlerized via some topics being declared taboo. It’s infuriating, and the two societies should be embarrassed.

3.) In a very good defense of their symposium, the panelists wrote back to the societies; you can see their letter here.

But of course despite their good objections, the AAA and CASCA aren’t going to move.  The symposium is considered “harmful”, and so it can’t go on.

How many of these things have to happen before scientists realize that the chilling of speech, the declaring of topics taboo to both research and discuss, and the ritual invocation of “harm” to minority groups by the to-and-fro discussion inherent in science—that all of this is going to kill off science as we know it? But they don’t care, for their main concern is not the discovery of scientific truth but adherence to the current liberal and orthodox ideology.

Colin’s tweets on the fracas:

 

Andrew Doyle: The culture war is not fake, but real and dangerous

July 28, 2023 • 9:20 am

Andrew Doyle, the creator of Titania McGrath (who hasn’t posted in ages), has a column in Unherd about the oft-heard claim that the “culture war” is a manufactured conflict that highlights only trivial excesses of wokeness.  Those like me who write about the “wars” are often accused of “whatboutery”, like “why don’t you write about real problems, like climate change or the persistent popularity of Trump?”

I’ve already explained why I don’t do this, the two main reasons being that there are plenty of people calling out the Right and because I see my brief as calling out the excesses of the Left, which could catapult someone like Trump into office. Plus wokeness interests me as a psychological phenomenon: how can people get worked up, for instance, by “Kimono Wednesdays” at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, or pile on a white artist just because she made a painting of Emmett Till?

Doyle supplies part of the answer in this column (click to read):

He first asserts not just the reality of the culture wars, but their importance, and also their danger as an “anti-liberal” force:

. . . these kinds of trivialities are often symptomatic of a much deeper cultural malaise. We may laugh at the university that appended a trigger warning to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, informing students that it contains scenes of “graphic fishing”, but the proliferation of such measures is an authentic concern. It points to an increasingly infantilising tendency in higher education, one that accepts the dubious premise that words can be a form of violence and that adults require protection from ugly ideas. Worse still, it is related to growing demands that certain forms of speech must be curtailed by the state. Only this month, a poll by Newsweek found that 44% of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 believe that “misgendering” should result in criminal prosecution.

That last statistic is frightening! 44%!  But the general thesis here is similar to that laid out by Gregg Lukianoff and Jon Haidt in their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting up a Generation for Failure.  As I wrote at the time, the new generation has three mantras (the words are from the authors)

1.)  We young people are fragile (“What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.”)

2.) We are prone to emotional reasoning and confirmation bias (“Always trust your feelings.”)

3.) We are prone to “dichotomous thinking and tribalism” (“Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”)

Put these together and you automatically get a culture war.  Doyle also connects it with postmodern ideas of “different truths”:

Such developments are anything but a distraction. What has become known colloquially as the “woke” movement is rooted in the postmodernist belief that our understanding of reality is entirely constructed through language, and therefore censorship by the state, big tech or mob pressure is fully justified. In addition, this group maintains that society operates according to invisible power structures that perpetuate inequality, and that these can only be redressed through an obsessive focus on group identity and the implementation of present discrimination to resolve past discrimination. This is why the most accurate synonym for woke is “anti-liberal”.

Yes, I could use “anti-liberal” instead of “woke” (readers are always chewing my tuchas for using a word that was once laudatory but is now pejorative), but “anti-liberal” could also mean “politically conservative”—not a good description of wokeness. I sometimes call woke people members of ” The Authoritarian Left,” a more accurate characterization, and one that Doyle notes in his article:

But our present culture war is not so simple. The goals are certainly oppositional, but the terms are vaguely defined and often muddied further through obfuscation. Rather than a reflection of antipathies between Right and Left, today’s culture war is a continuation of the age-old conflict between liberty and authoritarianism. John Stuart Mill opened On Liberty (1859) with an account of the “struggle between Liberty and Authority”; the only difference today is that the authoritarian impulse has been repackaged as “progressive”. This would help explain why a YouGov poll last week found that 24% of Labour voters believe that banks ought to be allowed to remove customers for their political views.

That’s another scary figure! Doyle notes that Mill could also have been accused of “whataboutery,” as there were more pressing issues at the time (e.g., the Franco-Austrian war), but of course it turns out that his short book has become a classic.  Why? Because it makes a fantastic case for free speech, including speech we find odious. And free speech is precisely what is under attack from the Left side of the culture wars.

However, Doyle does admit that we should be addressing some of these issues, but not exclusively:

That is not to suggest that there are not important issues that are being neglected. Matthew Syed has observed the curious lack of interest in the possibility that we are facing self-annihilation due to our rapidly advancing technology. As he points out, in an age when the full sequence of the Spanish flu can be uploaded online and reconstructed in a laboratory, “how long before it is possible for a solitary fanatic to design and release a pathogen capable of killing millions, perhaps billions?” And why, Syed asks, aren’t world leaders devoting time and money to confront these existential threats?

Syed writes persuasively, and I certainly share his concerns. But I part company when it comes to his diagnosis of our culture war as “a form of Freudian displacement”, that “the woke and anti-woke need each other to engage in their piffling spats as a diversion from realities they both find too psychologically threatening to confront”. Syed is right that there are some who specialise in the trivial, but there are many more who are undertaking in earnest the crucial task of halting the ongoing erosion of our freedoms.

. . . The liberal approach to redressing injustices, one now routinely dismissed as “anti-woke”, has a long and illustrious history. We might look to Mary Wollstonecraft, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King and many others who understood that freedom of speech and individual liberties were fundamental to human progress. Identity politics in its current form is directly opposed to the ideals of these great civil rights luminaries. While many of today’s culture warriors promote polarising narratives of distinct and incompatible group identities, the proponents of universal liberalism — as embodied in the movements for black emancipation, second-wave feminism and gay rights — have always advanced individual rights in the context of our shared humanity.

It is this authoritarianism that we must combat. It’s the authoritarianism that chills or bans speech, that creates a homogeneity of thought with “wrongthinkers” being ostracized, that has nearly ruined young adult literature by forcing it to conform to a Leftist ideological narrative, that rides herd on “cultural appropriation”, that bowdlerizes books, that makes nearly half of Americans think that misgendering should be a criminal offense, and, as Luana and I pointed out, has infected academic science, trying to turn it into an arm of Social Justice while downplaying merit.

Yes, postmodernism plays a role, but the censoriousness that we see on the Left comes from authoritarianism: a desire for power coupled with a deep-seated assurance that the activists are right. That is why Kimono Wednesdays were ended (only Japanese have the right to wear kimonos) and why a white woman can’t paint a picture of Emmett Till (only black people have a right to depict or analyze their culture). This authoritarianism has bred tribalism (point 3 in Lukianoff and Haidt’s book), a tribalism not seen in people like Douglass or Martin Luther King.

Protestors at the first “Kimono Wednesday” at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts

 

h/t: Luana

The Associated Press’s Orwellian recommendations for journalists

June 22, 2023 • 10:00 am

If you’re going to use the adjective “Orwellian” to refer to authoritarianism and unsavory manipulation of people’s thoughts, you must have read at least two of his pieces: the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and his essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946), free online from The Orwell Foundation. They are of course connected; both involve the psychological manipulation of people for bad political ends, the former by government actions and the latter by manipulation of words.  Here are two bits from his essay:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

. . . Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

I’m sure that investigative journalist Gerald Posner didn’t write this piece out of right-winged animus or transphobia (he used to be the investigative reporter for The Daily Beast), but rather out of outrage about how other people are trying to change language to achieve political ends. And, at any rate, what matters is not his politics, but the veracity of his reports, which you can check for yourself.  His issue is the language around coverage of transgender politics, and his object is the Associated Press Style Guide, which, as he notes, is

. . . . the leading style and usage guide for many newspapers, magazines, newsrooms, and public relations offices. Journalists and editors largely abide by its grammar, spelling, and punctuation rules and specific styles for everything from numbers to acronyms.  AP editors are supposed to regularly update the Stylebook in order to keep up with changes in language and societal norms.

Modern woke political language however, doesn’t undergo a natural evolution over time; rather, it is imposed from above, and here it’s imposed by the AP Style Guide.

Click to read the piece on his “Just the Facts” Substack site:

Posner is approaching the 3,000 word (!) article on “Transgender Coverage” as an investigative journalist, giving examples of recommended and un-recommended usages. But he does come to a conclusion: it’s ideological and inaccurate.  You can see the data at the “Transgender Coverage Topical Guide” entry at the AP Stylebook.

And here’s Posner’s take on it all. Most of it I agree with, but one or two of his criticisms seems to me not wrong, but a tad exaggerated.

The revised Transgender entry runs 3,000 words, setting forth what it says is the acceptable standard for journalists when “writ[ing] about and interview[ing] transgender people.”  It starts with what seems like a good rule, that reporters must use “accurate, sensitive and unbiased language.”

The editors then proceed to trash the concepts of accuracy and “no bias.” The guide dictates the use of language that in some cases is factually incorrect. Or, as Orwell might have said, the AP editors did their best “to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Language matters.  Unfortunately, those in charge of setting the rules for the use of it are titling the standards to affect the coverage.

Sometimes, the AP Stylebook contradicts established science, other times ignore inconvenient evidence to the contrary, and repeatedly adopts rules that endorse only one side of what is a vigorous ongoing controversy.

Here are two examples of bad recommendations and one that I think doesn’t matter all that much. Posner’s words are indented, and the AP Stylebook recommendations in bold, italic type. My words are flush left.

BAD ONES:

 “Use the term sex assigned at birth instead of biological sex, birth gender, was identified at birth as, born a girl and the like…. Avoid terms like biological sex, along with biological male and biological female.”

On the issue of biology being so passé, the AP is insistent. A dozen times the style guide reinforces that a person’s gender is “assigned” at birth.  Richard Ostling, a former AP national reporter (now a GetReligion contributor), notes that, “That’s central to LGBTQ+ insistence that each infant’s gender is arbitrarily imposed from outside and subject to change, so this word allies the news media with one outlook in an intense societal debate.”

Ditching biological sex in one species of animal but not in every other species is unconscionable.  Why is human “gender” (they of course mean “biological sex”) assigned at birth instead of recognized at birth? When I divide piles of fruit flies into sexes, I am not “assigning their sex”, but recognizing it based on sexually dimorphic characters that are nearly perfectly correlated with biological sex. (Remember biologists define sex by the nature of the reproductive system that produces either large, immobile gametes [“females’], or small, mobile gametes [“males’]). I’ve dissected gazillions of male and female flies, and I’ve never seen a “normal-appearing” male with ovaries. (We very rarely get gynandromorphs: flies that are part male and part female, produced when an X chromosome gets lost during cell division in an embryo. But these are developmental accidents, not a “third sex”, and gynandromorphs occur in many animal species).  It would be strange indeed if sex was defined and recognized in animals and plants—except in H. sapiens!

This wording in bold is, of course, there to reinforce the gender activists’ wrongheaded claim that sex a “spectrum” and not binary.  And they claim this because gender (social sex roles) are more of a spectrum—though still bimodal.  It’s the reverse naturalistic fallacy: what you want to be true in nature is what you must see in nature. This language is used to reinforce that fallacy.

Also,

If children meet guidelines and are showing signs of puberty, they can begin taking puberty blockers — fully reversible prescription medication that pauses sexual maturation, typically given in injections or skin implants.

The AP editors — without any supporting citation or caveat — set the rule that journalists writing transgender stories must remember that puberty blockers are “fully reversible.”  Mixing some incorrect science into the style guide might be simple enough but has serious consequences.  That is especially true when the science shows there is a litany of serious, long term adverse effects to children who have been on those drugs. I highlighted some of those side effects in my recent WJS piece, “The Truth About Puberty Blockers.”

At least the style guide admits that “the evidence is mixed” about whether hormone treatments and surgery resolve the “stress, depression and suicidal thoughts” to which “transgender youth and adults are prone.”

The effects of puberty blockers, as we are coming to learn, are almost certainly not “fully reversible.” Nor are they without side effects. Nor are they able to “pause” puberty fully and innocuously while a child makes up its mind. This language is straight-out deceptive, and again plays into the agenda of extreme gender activists, who argue that there’s no harm involved in stopping sexual maturation while you decide whether to assume a gender different from the one you have.

NOT HORRIBLE BUT STILL MISLEADING:

“[In reporting on transgender people in sports] Don’t refer to male or female hormones. All people have the same hormones; only their levels vary. If discussion of hormones is needed, name the specific hormone(s)…. If transgender players of any gender are banned from playing on teams in line with their gender, say that.”

This is embarrassingly disingenuous. Men and women do indeed produce estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone but the ways their bodies manufacture those hormones means they have completely different blood concentrations and interactions with organs and muscles.

By ignoring the differences between male and female hormones is to ignore the differences that are key to why biological males have a physical advantage over biological females in athletics. Bone size and strength, greater muscle mass, and higher rates of metabolizing and releasing energy cannot be fully reversed after puberty. Males are, among with biological advantages, are more powerful at kicking and hitting; jumping higher; extra endurance; faster swimming and running speeds.

The results of a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2020 showed that different hormones between transmen and transwomen made a significant difference in “body composition and athletic performance.”

I think by now people know this, but the levels of testosterone and estrogen do differ on average between males and premenopausal females, with average testosterone levels very different and the distributions virtually nonoverlapping.  Posner is right that hiding hormone names is a way to minimize the profound effects that different levels of testosterone and (to a lesser extent) estrogen have on secondary sex traits, especially those involved in sports like size and musculature.  But I don’t really care if they use “testosterone” instead of “male hormone” because, as the AP says, both hormones are found in both sexes. So long as writers emphasize the effect that different levels of these hormones (especially “T”) have on secondary sex traits, I’m satisfied.

I do recommend, by the way, that you read Carole Hooven’s book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. It’s a good, accurate, and enlightening read.

There are others recommendations from the A.P. that you can read and assess, and Posner finishes with the AP’s suggestions about how to use phrases that actually “present still contested concepts as settled,” like that it’s fine to use “pregnant people” instead of “pregnant women,”

Posner finishes with a two-sentence zinger that sums up his take on these Orwellian attempts to control language. He puts the AP recommendation in bold italics:

Of course, these rules are often more about following an ideology than acting as the premier style guide. If anyone doubts that, “Do not use the term transgenderism, which frames transgender identity as an ideology.”

Berkeley to change biology courses into social-justice courses

January 17, 2023 • 9:15 am

Well, here we go again. Unsurprisingly, the University of California at Berkeley has revamped its biology curriculum, turning courses in three departments into propaganda mills as well as vehicles for learning biology. This initiative was announced by Berkeley itself at the website below (click to read).

Here’s some of the announcement, showing that the revamping was at the request of the graduate diversity council of the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. Note that the courses are in three departments, and have large enrollments.

Ten large-enrollment courses in the Departments of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM), Integrative Biology, and Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology were substantially revamped over the summer to better incorporate inclusive and anti-racist approaches to course design and teaching practices.

Using the recently developed toolkit “Advancing Inclusion and Anti-Racism in the College Classroom: A rubric and resource guide for instructors,” graduate assistants with course background or pedagogy expertise were paired with instructors to develop specific and actionable plans for course improvement in future semesters. Revised courses include:

  • NUSCTX 166: Nutrition in the Community
  • NUSCTX 104AC: Food, Culture, and the Environment
  • ESPM 50AC: Introduction to Culture and Natural Resource Management
  • ENERES 160/ESPM 176: Climate Justice
  • ESPM C115C: Fish Ecology
  • ESPM C115A/IB C171: Freshwater Ecology
  • ESPM C114: Wildlife Ecology
  • BIO 1B: Introduction to Biology: Evolution/Ecology/Plant Diversity
  • ESPM C46: Climate Change and the Future of California
  • IB 35AC: Human Biological Variation

. . .”Our teaching practices, especially in large introductory classes that can act as gatekeepers, have a multiplicative impact on our students’ lives—for good, or for bad,” wrote the team that authored the toolkit. “As instructors, we have a unique opportunity and responsibility to move toward anti-racist teaching practices.”

Do these people really know how to improve the students’ lives? Shouldn’t that be by teaching them biology, not by brainwashing them? And who gave them the right to decide to “improve student lives” this way? It goes on:

The tool was developed in June 2020 after the ESPM Graduate Diversity Council called on department leadership to take anti-racist actions to address ways in which systemic anti-Black racism has permeated academia. In response, ESPM faculty and students collaborated with the UC Berkeley Center for Teaching and Learning to develop the resource as a way to foster inclusivity for Black students and other students of color in ESPM.

. . .Specific course modifications implemented include language and tone changes in syllabus, especially around basic needs and accessibility; greater inclusion of decolonial, justice-centered, and Indigenous perspectives in course materials; deeper community engagement in assignments; and adoption of community guidelines. The changes are currently being implemented, according to Blonder, and are already having an impact on student learning.

The efforts were supported by approximately $50,000 in funding from Rausser College of Natural Resources, ESPM, the Berkeley Food Institute, the Berkeley Life Sciences Faculty Diversity Initiative, and a Berkeley Discovery Initiative grant to the Department of Integrative Biology.

Read the full report for a list of instructor participants, graduate student bios, and a summary of the effort’s short-term outcomes.

If you look at the “full report”, you’ll see how the instructors—both faculty and grad-students—are tweaking the courses. Here are a few excerpts from the grad-student bios showing you the political direction of the courses:

a.) Rasmus Nielsen and I are developing a course, IB 35AC – Human Variation, which will discuss the role that genetics and societal norms play on human variation and identity. My main aim is to decolonize how we understand and teach human genetics by fostering inclusive and collaborative environments in the classroom and beyond. In addition, I hope to help expand biology to the global south by breaking down language barriers and ultimately reconstructing academia.

b.)  I hope to work in wetland and shoreline habitat restoration within social contexts, planning and designing for environmental justice and social equity issues.

c.) I love teaching (even more than research! shhh), particularly with methods rooted in contemplative and nonviolent pedagogy, disability justice, and alternative grading structures (e.g. specification grading or labor-based grading). [JAC: I’m not sure what “nonviolent pedagogy” is, as I’ve never since an instructor strike a student.]

d.) I aim to enhance the nutrition care process of vulnerable populations by using a decolonial lens which centers food as enclaves for healing, considers opportunities for communal food sovereignty, and constructs racially/culturally intersectional models within treatment interventions to erase Eurocentric barriers impeding behavioral success.

This decolonizing and Eurocentric emphases come from the guidance offered by the anti-racist toolkit, “Advancing inclusion and anti-racism in the college classroom,” a 39-page booklet telling students to infuse a woke perspective into all their courses.  It comes from the Zenodo site, and the guide was put together by twelve Berkeley faculty and graduate students. Its stated aim is this (my emphasis):

This tool aims to support instructors in developing anti-racist approaches to course design and teaching practices in the undergraduate and graduate setting. It offers an accessible, and user-friendly entry-point for instructors interested in considering how their instructional choices impact student outcomes. The resource guide provides instructors a range of ideas and options to help instructors through a process of modifying their courses. The guide is meant for self-assessment, rather than for others to score courses or instructors, and is designed to facilitate progressive refinement toward anti-racist teaching over time.

Now one could question the wisdom of infusing ideology into biology (as I do)—even anti-racist ideology. While of course I oppose racism, I am not on board with every bit of antiracist philosophy (I diverge from Kendi’s claim, for example, that if you or your program is not explicitly infused with antiracist activism, it is itself racist). More important, the brand of anti-racism suggested for these courses (have a look at the “Advancing Inclusion” booklet) is extreme authoritarian Leftist, and brooks no dissent.

But the biology class is not the place to propagandize students. It is a place to learn biology.  As Stanley Fish wrote in his eponymous and very relevant book, “Save the World on Your Own Time.”

As one example, here’s some guidance about how to “decolonize” the curriculum taken from chapter VIII of the “Advancing Inclusion” book:

Here they suggest not only that you suggest “alternative epistemologies” (i.e., alternative “ways of knowing”), but present them respectfully. I suspect this means that you cannot say that some “other ways of knowing” are either wrong or not “ways of knowing” at all.

The emphasis on storytelling, legend, and poetry is characteristic of “ways of knowing” that are really “ways of feeling,” including New Zealand’s Mātauranga Māori , which I’ve written about here many times. before.

“Dominant approaches,” of course, are “Eurocentric ones,” sometimes known as “science.”

While one of the courses listed above—Climate Justice—is built around an ideological view (and I’m not sure that’s wise), the rest of the courses, offered in three biology departments, really have nothing to do with politics. The reason politics is being injected into these courses is simply because the people who promoted this initiative are from the progressive Left, and they want to jam their views down the throats of their students.

Of course I object strongly to this. The biology classroom is the place to learn biology, not to be propagandized to adhere to the politics of your instructors. Every minute devoted to “other ways of knowing” and similar ideological diversions is a minute less of biology you can learn. “Anti-racist fish ecology”—really? And I cringe when I think of what will be taught in “Human Biological Variation.”

Of course my carping on this post will have exactly zero influence on these initiatives, for the professors are adhering to a form of ideological religion, and, like Eric Hedin at Ball State, cannot resist sneaking that religion into science class. These classes will produce students who know less biology than students who took earlier versions of the class, but they’ll sure be more vociferous and political!

h/t: Bruce

Stanford’s IT language police back off, but only about one word

December 21, 2022 • 9:30 am

This morning I mentioned in Da Nooz that, according to the Wall Street Journal, Stanford University had undertaken an 18-month “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative”, which gave a long list of words deemed harmful or offensive and suggesting replacements. Some of the words were ones I wouldn’t use, while many others are on the border of risible. You can see the whole language guide at this site, which even comes with its own trigger warning:

(I love the “please engage with this website at your own pace”, suggesting that “normally, you’d hurry through this list but we’re being nice by advising you to take it slow”.)  I recommend that you have a look at the list and see which words you also find offensive.

They also suggest alternatives, like using “person who is/was incarcerated” instead of “prisoner”, the grounds being “using person-first language helps to not define people by just one of their characteristics”. Of course if you take that seriously, then you can’t use the terms “professor,” “baseball player,” or “jackass” to refer to people.

At any rate, and probably due to the WSJ editorial, Stanford got a lot of blowback, and decided to remove one word—but only one—off the list. I’ve put a red rectangle around it in the announcement below, hastily issued yesterday. Notice that the language guide was also intended to apply only to the IT community, though there’s no reason why it shouldn’t—if you approve of Language Fascism—apply to Stanford as a whole.

Click to enlarge:

Why did they recommend deep-sixing “American” in the first place? It’s still there, and here’s what they said:

Yeah, that’s pretty stupid, because everyone knows that “American” means “someone from the U.S.,” and I’ve never heard anybody say that’s offensive. (You can say “Canadian”, “Brazilian,” “Colombian”, and other words to narrow down countries.) At least they admit that they “missed the mark”.

Now maybe they should look at other words too, like “submit”, which is offensive because “Depending on the context, the term can imply allowing others to have power over you.”  Which they do, of course: “I submitted to their punishment.”  The fact is that some people do have power over you—that’s life. I doubt that “accede” would be any more acceptable, but they suggest using the word “process”, which makes no sense at all.

Now’s a good time to read or reread Orwell’s great essay, “Politics and the English language.”