Category: Authoritarian Left

UBC cancels free speech event on grounds of “risk”

January 6, 2020 • 12:15 pm

Andy Ngo is a photographer and journalist who is widely viewed as a conservative. At least that’s what Wikipedia says, and so I’ll go with it, though he describes himself, when pressed, as “center-right”. But I also know he’s documented the excesses of Antifa, was beaten up by them, and has provided some useful coverage of an organization that is supposed to be progressive but acts more like a gang of fascist thugs. At any rate, Ngo’s not somebody I would think would be the subject of left-wing protests, as he’s no white supremacist. But of course he’s antagonized Antifa, and that’s a recipe for disaster if you’re supposed to speak.

And so it was, dear readers, that when Ngo was supposed to speak on January 29 at the University of British Columbia on “Understanding Antifa (Anti-fascist) Violence”, the University canceled the event because of “campus safety and security”, which of course means they were worried about Antifa not only deplatforming Ngo, but trashing the place. Read about it at this article from the Vancouver Sun (click on screenshot):

Now in the University’s defense, the group sponsoring Ngo’s talk, the Free Speech Club, is “not funded by the school’s Alma Mater Society and is considred independent of the university.” But balance that against the fact that UBC is a public university and, especially, that the Free Speech Club had already booked the event on the UBC campus and paid a booking deposit, with the talk confirmed by the University. The University’s cancellation occurred on December 20.

And the reasons for the cancellation are that UBC not only feared for the safety of its people, but couldn’t afford the cost of security. Statements like these don’t make me feel good about their commitment to free speech:

. . . a free expression expert said he believes the school isn’t stifling free speech, as The Free Speech Club is alleging, and doesn’t have a duty to host an event if it isn’t part of the university’s academic mission.

“The speaker has every freedom of expression right to express his views. This group of students has every freedom of expression right to find a place to hold an event to let him express his views. It’s just the university doesn’t have an obligation to be that place,” said James Turk, director of Ryerson University’s Centre for Free Expression.

Except that the University had already agreed to host the talk, and took a deposit for it. It’s weaselly to renege on that commitment because you’re afraid of trouble. Canceling talks in such a way is a terrible precedent, sending the message to everyone—but especially the Left, which is responsible lately for most disruptions and deplatformings—that if you threaten to make trouble, you can shut up your opponents.

Ron Holton, the university’s chief risk officer, said in an emailed statement that campus safety and security is the primary concern, and the school does risk assessments to evaluate the impact that event bookings could have on the campus community.

“The assessment in this case determined the safety and security of UBC students, faculty, staff and infrastructure was at risk if the event was allowed to proceed,” he said, noting the event was cancelled “in order to safeguard the safety and security of our community.”

This is an open message from UBC to Antifa that “if you make enough threats, we’ll shut down any speaker you oppose.”  After all, what does it matter if a club is private or public if the University has the view that if a talk is “dangerous”, it can be canceled? My own view is if the University commits to holding a talk, it is responsible for security, and shouldn’t saddle those who schedule “controversial” speakers with the extra costs. After all, the Free Speech Club has hosted people from all sides of the political spectrum, including UBC professors. But, as the Free Speech Club director said, “It’s just whenever we host a right winger, it turns into this huge volcano.”

And that’s true. If you look at FIRE’s “disinvitation database”, which tallies all campus deplatformings and disruptions in the U.S., you’ll find that when the ideology of the deplatformers ideologues could be identified, 17 came from the Right and 31 from the Left—almost a 2:1 ratio. This has been the case for a decade or more.

It’s shameful that UBC, once committed to hosting a speaker who, after all, has something to say to people (Ngo is no Milo Yiannopoulos), decides to renege on grounds of “safety.” But the Free Speech Club isn’t letting this rest:

The club is represented by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, which issued a letter to UBC president Santa Ono on Dec. 31, asking that the event be reinstated. The centre gave the university until Jan. 10 to respond.

In the letter to Ono, lawyer Marty Moore called the university’s decision “unreasonable.”

“It is an alarming betrayal of the foundational pillar of higher education — the freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression. Furthermore, it signals automatic acquiescence to the ‘heckler’s veto,’ which will embolden threats from those who oppose the very notion of free expression,” Moore wrote.

The letter emphasizes UBC’s avowed commitment to academic freedom, but ends with a sting: “Freedom must not be sacrificed to fear. We request that UBC act immediately to reinstate the Event. Please respond no later than January 10,2A20. Failure to reinstate the Event will necessitate legal recourse.”

Finally, it looks as if there have been several deplatformings or attempted incidents of censorship in Canada recently. The Sun describes a few:

The university’s policies came under scrutiny last summer when it hosted an event with Jenn Smith, who has campaigned against the use of the sexual orientation and gender identity, or SOGI, resources in B.C. schools. The program is designed to promote a more inclusive environment for queer students.

Smith, who is transgender but uses masculine pronouns, has said he doesn’t promote hate. His events are hosted by the Canadian Christian Lobby.

Similar talks were cancelled at Douglas College and Trinity Western University, but the university defended its decision to hold the talk, citing its “commitment to freedom of expression.”

The debate about free expression hit Simon Fraser University this fall, after a faculty member booked an event at its downtown Vancouver campus called “How media bias shapes the gender debate.” The event was criticized because it featured writer Meghan Murphy, who espouses anti-transgender views.

Although university provost John Driver said in a statement that while the school didn’t endorse the views expressed, it supported the right of faculty and other SFU community members to engage in free speech within the limits of the law.

In the end, the SFU event was cancelled by the sponsor “for security reasons” and relocated.

Earlier in the year, a speaking event with Murphy at the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library drew protesters and prompted the Vancouver Pride Society to ban the library from entering the 2019 pride parade.

The library’s policy states that it “will not restrict freedom of expression beyond the limits prescribed by Canadian law,” even if those who use the library’s spaces express ideas that are contrary to the library’s vision and values.

I tend to think of Canada as more liberal than the U.S., and by “liberal” I mean that they should tolerate free speech more readily. I should have known better because, after all, Canada does have “hate speech” laws. These are stricter than U.S. laws, for Canadian law prohibits publicly inciting hatred against any identifiable group, with “identifiable groups” including “any section of the public distinguished by colour, race, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression or mental or physical disability”.

While hatred like that is reprehensible, I don’t advocate its abolition because this is truly a slippery slope. For example, Ernst Zündel was convicted twice in Canada for Holocaust denialism, though both convictions were eventually overturned. I happen to think that it’s useful to allow Holocaust denialists a platform, and a platform without disruption, so that they can present their case. As I’ve often said, it’s only by hearing their arguments, which are slippery and can be superficially convincing, that we ourselves are able to find counterevidence that of course shows the Holocaust happened and that Hitler wanted it. And every generation needs to understand the arguments and counterarguments. You don’t eliminate Holocaust denialism by banning it; you eliminate it by allowing it to be publicly challenged. 

And likewise with any argument that is not completely wacko but doesn’t comport with the prevailing ideology. They should be heard, and then met with counterspeech.

O Canada!

 

Sarah Haider on how Western liberals impede Muslim reform

January 4, 2020 • 1:00 pm

The Stranger is an “alternative” biweekly newspaper in Seattle, and contains a blog called “The Slog”. And it is there that, last June, ex-Muslim activist Sarah Haider was interviewed about the troubles that Western liberals cause for her agenda. What is that agenda? Haider is Executive Director of Ex-Muslims of North America (ExMNA), and her organization “advocates for acceptance of religious dissent, promotes secular values, and aims to reduce discrimination faced by those who leave Islam.”

Haider, born in Pakistan but brought up since age 7 in the U.S., was raised as a Muslim but gave up the faith as a teen, since nothing about it made sense to her. Since then, she and ExMNA President Muhammad Syed have campaigned tirelessly and strategically to call out the dangers of Islamic doctrine as well as provide support and welcome to those who become apostates.

I hadn’t seen this interview, but was intrigued since its headline implied that it would be a criticism about how Western liberalism makes Haider’s job tougher. And indeed, most of the article, after Haider describes her de-conversion, is about that. We’ve talked a lot on this site about the cognitive dissonance that Islamic doctrine provides to the Left, as their liberal values and sympathy for the underdog collide with cultural relativism and the palpably oppressive doctrines that Islam holds towards women, gays, apostates, atheists, and those of other faiths. In the case of Islam, the perceived “underdog” status of Muslims has apparently won, causing the American Left to either neglect or—in the case of forced hijab-wearing—celebrate oppressive religious doctrine.

But it’s good to hear these things from someone who was once a believer, and can’t be accused of not knowing whereof she speaks. Haider is also a liberal, and though she’s been called  a right-winger and a bigot simply because she criticizes Islam, her liberalism is incontestable.

I’ll put up some indented excerpts from her interview below the screenshot.

I assume you get plenty of criticism from Muslims but how is your work received among non-Muslims, especially in the West?

I think foreign policy colors the conversations around Islam in the West. This is what makes things difficult for people on the left. When I first started this back in 2013, 2014, when we were first launching as an organization, I started to get pushback in a few different ways. I got it from secularist and atheists who were concerned that we were taking too harsh an approach towards religion. They wanted us to be humanist Muslims. They didn’t want us to say, “This is not true. This is not real.” They cringed at the idea that we would even want to call ourselves ex-Muslims. They thought that was a very harsh term. I remember being surprised by that. This was the same group of people who were very actively criticizing Christianity—not just criticizing but ridiculing Christianity. And some of those same people were hesitant to do that with Islam. That was very surprising to me. These were my people. I expected them to understand where we were coming from and understand why it was important to tackle religion head on and be unafraid to piss some people off, particularly religious conservatives. I was surprised that some of the people who wouldn’t have hesitated to do that in regard to Western religions were hesitating when it came to Islam.

In the broader left outside of the secular, atheist context, things are so much worse in that it’s assumed right from the beginning that I must be a bigot, I must be right-wing, I must have some kind of war-mongering, imperialist agenda. I get very frustrated. It’s gotten to the point that I take for granted that I’m not going to be accepted by the broader progressive left.

I have a sense that something has changed in the progressive left but I am not one of these people who is going to leave the left and not be progressive anymore. I don’t believe that. What this means is that I have to get involved, I have to change hearts and minds, I have to talk to people. No one said this was going to be easy. There’s a reason we need people to be courageous in social discourse. It’s so easy to fall into political tribes and tribal thinking. Now I see my role has to be to educate people on the left on what’s going on here and how we need to get back on course.

Haider is then asked whether she resents being used by the Right as a weapon against the Left, and avers that the harms of that usage are less than the harms of remaining silent about Islam. She then has a few choice words about the hijab (a pet peeve of mine, since many Left-wing outlets seem to see hijabis as some kind of empowered heroes, and celebrate them regularly). It was thus refreshing to read stuff like this:

What you think about brands like Nike or the Women’s March using models in the hijab?

It frustrates me, of course. I don’t get as mad about it as other people do and that might be because I have a very deep-seated cynicism of corporations in general. I don’t understand the appeal of woke capitalism. I don’t understand why anyone cheers when corporations take these political stances. I don’t know what they think is happening. To me, it’s very clear that they are going to make money off it. It doesn’t mean anything else. It’s sort of like what happens when all these corporations get involved in LGBT activism for a month. I feel the same way about it. If they think they can profit off it, they will do it. I don’t see them as moral creatures so I’m not that mad about it, but I do think it reflects something in the broader culture. By the time a corporation has gotten to the point where they think they can put a hijabi model on the cover of a magazine, they have calculated that something in the broader culture has changed enough that they can profit off it, which means there is a broad sympathy for that view. From that perspective, it’s kind of upsetting to see that there is this broader acceptance of practices like hijab.

I’m sure a lot of Muslim women and non-Muslims who consider themselves allies would say it’s empowering. What’s your response to that, if someone says, “This is my choice, I’m empowered, and I want to be represented on the cover of Sports Illustrated or in Nike ads”?

[JAC: I’ve bolded a statement below that underlines the hypocrisy of liberals when it comes to Islam.]

If we were talking about Christian conservative practices, we would not be having this conversation. I feel sure of it. I feel sure that if a fundamentalist Mormon woman was saying that she is empowered in her long skirt and bonnet or whatever, you would view that with some level of suspicion, especially people who are of the left and who are feminist. And I think they would be right to do that. But when hijabis do the same, the response is totally different. It reveals a lot about our political climate and the ideological emptiness of the left and the degree to which it is very superficial. But it also reveals a latent racism. When Muslim women talk about modesty, it’s seen as this immutable characteristic, like their superstitions are a deep part of them in a way that we don’t see in the West.

Like people are trying so hard not to be racist that they are being racist?

It absolutely is racism. If the hijab is wonderful in all contexts, then you should be happy for it to be something that is forced upon your daughter. If you tomorrow your husband converts to Islam and forces your 8-year-old to put on a hijab and change the way she is dressed and refuse to talk to boys, if this wouldn’t be acceptable to a Western woman when it comes to her own daughter, it should not be acceptable for any girl across the world.

But of course it is acceptable, or at least Western feminists don’t waste a lot of breath on Muslim oppression of women. They might respond that we have problems with women’s rights here in the U.S., and that’s true, but the oppression is less severe than in, say, Afghanistan. They would then respond that “we can fight oppression both here and in the Middle East,” to which I’d respond, “Fine. Then why don’t you do anything about the oppression of women by Muslims?”

One more quote. I’m in danger of violating “fair usage” here, but there’s a lot more to the article than I’ve excerpted.

A lot of people in the West are afraid of being imperialists, that we are just imposing our values on another population.

The idea of cultural imperialism is… I’m finding it hard to speak politely about it, but I think it’s the most nonsensical thing. It’s historically illiterate. This is what happens. The world has always been shaped by other cultures. We’ve seen the flow of cultural values forever. It’s always happened. I don’t know why all of a sudden it’s this negative thing. We’re not imposing liberal values on the East. We’re saying, “Hey, look, equality of the sexes? It’s fantastic. It’s worked out well for us. Women are empowered this way, and it’s morally right.” If they had a choice to adopt it, I think many of them would. I’m baffled by the idea that it’s an “erasure” of culture. Why is my culture defined by how horribly women are treated? If the culture in Victorian England can evolve into what it is and still be an interesting, vibrant place, why can’t that happen in Pakistan or Libya or Saudi?

The piece below, from the Dec. 24 HuffPost, is the kind of stuff that drives me nuts, especially because it implies that wearing the hijab is some kind of virtue.

I’ve supported ExMNA, and, like the FFRF, they don’t waste time or money on non-essential activities. You can donate, if you wish, at this site. 

NY Times op-ed dismisses Obama’s critique of “woke culture” because he’s an uncomprehending and privileged “Boomer”

November 4, 2019 • 1:32 pm

I’m too busy watching glaciers go by in the Beagle Channel to post much today. The Channel was in fact where Darwin saw his first glacier, and it’s cool to think that I’m seeing the same glaciers that he did.

But on to the opinion of the day. This time it’s a beef about Obama’s recent critique of “cancel culture.” You might remember that the ex-Prez said stuff like this at a meeting of the Obama Foundation in Chicago:

Mr Obama told the audience: “I get a sense among certain young people on social media that the way of making change is to be as judgemental as possible about other people.

“If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself because ‘Man did you see how woke I was? I called you out!’”

“That’s enough,” he said. “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you are probably not going to get that far.”

Mr Obama added that “people who do really good stuff have flaws”.

This set up a severe bout of cognitive dissonance within the Authoritarian Left, who worship Obama (and for sure he was a good President and a good man), but suddenly heard him taking out after wokeness. What is an Antifarian to do?

It was inevitable that they decided to put their own emotions and penchant for calling out others on social media above the views of the ex-President. They can’t criticize him as a racist, but they can (and did) say that he’s simply old, grumpy, privileged, and not in tune with the young people. And that’s what journalist Ernest Owens said in a New York Times op-ed (click on screenshot; you can see Owens’s HuffPost biography  here)

As you see from the subtitle, Owens dismisses Obama’s views because he’s “old” (for chrissake, the man is 58) and “powerful”. Owens doesn’t tell us why his power—now much less than four years ago—should be important. But let us make no mistake, Owens practices the very form of bigotry denigrated by his cohort—ageism:

[Obama’s] eagerness to dismiss one part of what happens when young people stand up for what they believe in as “casting stones” is a reminder of a largely generational divide about whether it’s impolite to speak out in favor of the most vulnerable among us and the world we’d like to live in. While there’s some debate about which generation Mr. Obama belongs to, he’s solidly in the older camp.

Big fricking deal! “Older” does not always mean “worse”.

Okay, fine. But let’s ignore Obama’s demographics rather than do what the woke regularly do: concentrate on someone’s age, identity, and ethnicity as a substitute for engaging their arguments. What, says Owens, is Obama doing wrong? Apparently dismissing real concern for social justice, manifested as online “activism” ostensibly trying to repair society’s inequalities.

What members of older generations now dismiss as “cancel culture” — or, as Mr. Obama put it, “being judgmental”— is actually one of many modern-day iterations of protests they took part in when they were younger. Students at the University of Pennsylvania using social media to push for the cancellation of a campus event including a former Trump administration Immigration and Customs Enforcement director is not totally unlike college students using bullhorns to criticize apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s.

This is ridiculous. Using a bullhorn to cancel a campus event is a disruptive violation of free speech. You can criticize someone or their views without silencing them. Martin Luther King silenced nobody; he was eloquent in both his speech and his actions, and often practiced counterspeech against Southern racists. But he didn’t demand that anybody shut up.

Now that we know which side Owens is on, we can proceed:

Hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter, #MuteRKelly, #MeToo and others that were created by black women online aren’t all that different from the picket signs and petitions our parents used to demand racial and gender justice. Of course, we take part in more traditional activism, too. But today we have additional tools. Why wouldn’t we use them?

It’s almost as if Owen didn’t even absorb what Obama was getting at. There’s nothing wrong with using social media as a tool to rectify injustice. What Obama emphasized was that the way the tools are used are often impotent or counterproductive at rectifying the problems addressed. They’re used to demonize opponents, cast oneself as a victim who cannot be criticized, and promote a Manichaean view of the universe in which opponents aren’t lured into the Big Tent, but cast out of it into the lowest circle of hell. I, for one, can’t imagine Martin Luther King calling out dreadlocks, hoop earrings, or those who fail to censor themselves when singing along to rap music. King had, as they say, his eyes on the prize: civil rights legislation.

Then Owens goes after Obama’s “privilege”, linking him to white straight men and ultra-right conservatives who are most “agitated by this form of online activism”. I’m not sure whether that’s true, as there are plenty in the center and on the Left, as well as the poor, who are turned off by cancel culture. Just look at leftists who object to the Islamist views of Ilhan Omar, or the Jews who don’t like cancel culture’s demonization of Israel and the Jews in general. And it’s not just Republicans who were upset when Al Franken became a victim of cancel culture. The problem with that culture is that it can’t distinguish between the meaningful and the trivial.

The objection to cancel culture, then, is several fold: it is based on emotion, the idea of oneself as a victim, the view that one’s opponents must be demonized permanently, the histrionic idea that one’s ideological opponents must be racists, misogynists, or alt-righters, and, above all, promotes the kind of activism that accomplishes almost nothing. It one thing to sit at lunch counters or put oneself under the truncheon of an Alabama cop, another thing entirely to emit a splenetic tweet.

Owens goes on, and started to give me a pain my kishkes when he tries to lump Obama in with Trump, the Koch Brothers, Mitch McConnell, and other Old White Privileged Men:

It’s telling that it’s the powerful and privileged people in society who are most agitated by this form of online activism, and most convinced that it represents unnecessary evil that is tearing away at our civil discourse. The group that Mr. Obama joins in his scolding of outspoken young people is dominated by white straight men, far-right conservative talking heads, and celebrities who feel entitled to audiences who appreciate their art and dutifully ignore their missteps. It’s no surprise that Fox News fretted that his comments were “snubbed” and didn’t receive sufficient coverage from broadcast television networks.

This really burns my onions. It’s not an answer to Obama’s arguments, but a claim that he deserves no attention because of the company he keeps. And so Owens himself shows the weakness of the very culture he espouses.

What people of Obama’s generation don’t understand — or don’t want to understand — about the ways in which younger people use the internet to make our values known, is that we’re not bullies going after people with “different opinions” for sport. Rather, we’re trying to push back against the bullies — influential people who have real potential to cause harm, or have already caused it.

. . . We have a tool that has helped democratize public debates about these issues, and we hope it will move us to a more just world.

It’s called social media. And we’re going to keep using it.

Fine. Keep using your social media to call out “harms” like reading Huckleberry Finn without bowdlerization, of writing literature from the point of view of members of other cultures, of making General Tso’s chicken the wrong way, of showing Westerners what it’s like to wear a kimono, of allowing free speech at the University of Chicago (that speech, of course, causes the “harm” of hurting people’s sentiments), and of casting every offense, however slight, as “violence.” Keep using your social media, and we will tell you when you’re using it in a ludicrous manner, which is often.

I wouldn’t trade a thousand social justice warriors hammering away on their keyboards for one ex-President Jimmy Carter, hammering away building houses for Habitat for Humanity. Typing is easy, but unless you’re Karl Marx or Martin Luther King, with their passion for big issues, your efforts are lame.

Here’s one comment on the NYT piece that gets it pretty much right:

Today’s reading: Pinker in Skeptic magazine on rationality and “post-truth” culture

November 3, 2019 • 11:30 am

The much- (and unjustly) maligned Steven Pinker wrote the cover story for this month’s Skeptic Magazine, which is available free at the link below (click on screenshot).

The topic is the so-called “post-truth” era in which we live: an era in which reason is said to be expendable and the truth is only what is presented as truth.

Steve begins with an argument he’s made before but bears repeating, and is relevant on the claim of postmodernism is that “truth” is determined solely by those who have power or hegemony:

In his book The Last Word, the philosopher Thomas Nagel showed that truth, objectivity, and reason are not negotiable. As soon as you start making a case against them, you are making a case, which means you are implicitly committed to reason. Nagel calls this argument Cartesian, after Descartes’ famous argument that just as the very fact that one is pondering one’s existence shows that one must exist, the very fact that one is examining the validity of reason shows that one is committed to reason. A corollary is that we don’t defend or justify or believe in reason, and we certainly do not, as it is sometimes claimed, have faith in reason. As Nagel puts it, each of these is “one thought too many.” We don’t believe in reason; we use reason.

. . . As soon as you try to argue that we should believe things by any route other than reason, you’ve lost the argument, because you’ve appealed to reason. That is why a defense of reason is unnecessary, perhaps even impossible.

The “post-truth” era simply means, according to Pinker, that politicians lie, and that sometimes their lies are not only adamantly represented as truth, but also widely accepted as truth. I’ve known this personally since the repeated lies of our government in Vietnam. But those lies didn’t last: they were shown to be false by the very process of rational examination that is now maligned. The only genuine post-truth climate is one represented by Orwell in his book Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the government deliberately expunges any data that could be used to falsify its claims. And even in that novel, Winston Smith—whose job is to revise printed history—and his inamorata Julia clearly realize that the government is constantly lying.

But the main reason we should retire the posttruth cliché is that it’s corrosive, perhaps self-fulfilling. The implication is we may as well give up on reason and truth and just fight the bad guys’ lies and intimidation with lies and intimidation of our own. We can aim higher.

Steve goes on to explain why humans evolved to seek truth, giving several examples from hunter-gatherer societies, succinctly summed up with the aphorism “reality is a powerful selection pressure”, and explains why he persists in using data to persuade people to change their minds, an effort that many deem futile.

Humans are of course irrational in some ways: we have cognitive biases that make us cling to what’s palpably false, there are optical illusions and false conclusions drawn from what we experience in everyday life (e.g., the belief that a spiraling tetherball cut free will continue to move in a spiral path), and so on. Pinker gives a long laundry list of weaknesses in our rationality. But we’re still descended from humans whose existence depended on apprehending truth, and still retain the faculties and dependence on evidence that enables us to find truth.

The weaknesses in reason include what Pinker calls pluralistic ignorance, which he defines as “the spiral of silence, in which everyone believes that everyone else believes something but no one actually believes it.” To wit:

How does a false belief keep itself levitated in midair? Michael Macy and his colleagues show that a key factor is enforcement. Not only does the belief never get challenged, but group members believe they must punish or condemn those who don’t hold it—out of the equally mistaken belief that they themselves may be denounced for failing to denounce. Denunciation is a signal of solidarity with the group, which can lead to a cascade of pre-emptive, self-reinforcing denunciation, and sometimes to “extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds” like witch hunts and other bubbles and manias. Sometimes the bubble can be punctured by a public exclamation that the emperor is naked, but it takes an innocent boy or a brave truth-teller.

When I read this, it immediately brought to mind the behavior of the “cancel culture”, particularly on college campuses, a culture that thrives on denunciation and demonization. I’ll give an example in a later post today: the palpably false belief by some students and faculty at Williams College that the college, and its English department in particular, are infested with “structural racism.” There is not a scintilla of evidence for this, but many students believe it so firmly that they are now demanding the firing of English professors and are about to engage in a student boycott of all English classes.

Pinker goes on to give ways to counteract these mass delusions, including adopting “the technique discovered long ago by rabbis: first have your yeshiva students make the strongest possible argument on one side of a Talmudic dispute, then force them to switch sides.” (This in fact is a tactic I used when I taught “Evolution vs. Creationism” as a non-majors course at the University of Maryland. I assigned a series of debates on areas of evolution, and then assigned students to argue the position that was the opposite of their own.) In Pinker’s view, the counters to falsity are becoming stronger, so, as the many fact-checking sites attest, it becomes easier to show up widespread untruths for what they are. The Internet has been immensely valuable in this way:

Even everyday fact-checking has been has been revolutionized by the urban legend tracking site snopes.com and by Wikipedia, which is now 80 times the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica and pretty much as accurate. (A recent cartoon captioned “Life before Google” shows a man on a barstool musing, “I wonder who played the skipper on Gilligan’s Island,” and his companion answering, “I guess we’ll never know.”)

LOL, as they say. But I remember those times. And so, says Pinker, we live in an area in which rationality is in general growing, but is also bimodal, so there are outliers in which delusion dominates (this is also the argument he makes for well-being and morality in The Better Angels of Our Nature).

One of those outliers comprises American colleges and universities, which in theory should be the guardians not only of truth, but also of methods for seeking truth. Professors have tenure, students pay lots of money for their education, and these institutions have credentialing abilities that make students seek them out for certification in knowledge and skills. But, as you know if you read here, things aren’t all beer and skittles on campus:

Yet despite these perquisites, universities have become notorious as monocultures of left-wing orthodoxy and the illiberal suppression of heterodox ideas (I won’t review the latest follies, but will mention just two words: Halloween costumes). As the civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate has put it, “You can say things in Harvard Square that you can’t say in Harvard Yard.”

(See here, here, here, and here for just a few examples of this year’s College Costume Policing.)

Disinvitations and deplatforming are rife—mainly by students and alumni from the Left—and certain areas of the humanities have become so invested in Regressive Leftist ideology that it becomes impossible to even mention some ideas. Pinker discusses the causes of this conundrum, but whatever the cause the results are clear:

Some of this regression is a paradoxical byproduct of the fantastic progress we have made in equality. Vanishingly few people in universities actually hold racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic attitudes (though they may have different views on the nature of these categories or the causes of group differences). That means that accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia can be weaponized: since everyone reviles these bigotries, they can be used to demonize adversaries, which in turn spreads a terror of being demonized. The accusations are uniquely noxious because it is virtually impossible to defend oneself against them.

Most of us, I think, including me, have to constantly police our views lest they lead to us being called out as bigots or tainted as impure. For example, despite my interest in cleaning up the excesses of the Left rather than repeating the endless denunciations of Trump (views I share, but which are so ubiquitous that it bores me to repeat them), I’m often chastised for bashing the Left instead of making this website into a clone of HuffPost. The result is that when I’m about to criticize Democrats, for instance, I’m obliged to repeat that I hate Republicans and would never vote for any.

And although many readers have said that we needn’t pay much attention to “PC follies” in universities, Pinker gives at least three reasons why we should, one being Andrew Sullivan’s statement that “We all live on campus now.” The result is this:

The regressive left is an incubator of the alt-right. I’ve seen it happen, including to former students. When they see that certain opinions are unexpressable, when they see speakers being deplatformed and people being assaulted or demonized for citing certain facts or advancing certain ideas, they conclude, “You can’t handle the truth!” Since they can’t discuss heterodox ideas with students and faculty in universities, they retreat into an alternative universe of discourse, mainly internet discussion groups, in which these ideas harden and grow more extreme in the absence of critical engagement. When the nuanced, statistical, multifactorial, qualified, tentative and ethically sensitive versions of taboo hypotheses are squelched on campus, the simplistic, all or- none, single-factor, exaggerated, invidious versions blossom outside it. This happens in discussions of capitalism, the causes of being transgender, and differences between ethnic groups and sexes

It’s Pinker’s own willingness to call out the follies of the Regressive Left that has led to his own demonization as a member of the alt-right (not to mention his characterization as a misogynist and white supremacist), despite the fact that he’s a Democrat who donated a sizable sum to that party. He’s also chastised for his conviction that we can progress both materially and morally—a conviction that angers the Chicken Littles of the Left, whose motivating belief is that things are not only getting worse (or at least are as bad as ever), but create a situation that can’t be fixed except by adopting their own remedies.

Williams College students call for a boycott of English courses

November 3, 2019 • 9:30 am

After the follies at Williams College last year (a college rated at the very top of undergraduate liberal arts institutions in America), I predicted that things would get even worse this year. Well, it’s been delayed a bit, but the hurling of dung at the fan has begun.

The promised free-speech policy, which was supposed to have been released over a month ago, hasn’t appeared, I suspect because various groups are intervening to tweak it to reduce the freedom part and increase the “inclusivity.” And now, in an unprecedented act of misguided “activism”, a group of Williams students and alumni, posting at a Google site, are indicting the College and its English department for structural racism, transphobia, racism, and the usual laundry list of sins. The conclusion the students draw is that they must boycott nearly all English classes.

I’d be more sympathetic if I thought any of their accusations were true, but, from what I know, none of them are. They are confections of an Outrage Culture perpetuated and coddled by the Williams administration and many of the faculty.

You can read the Marxist-like manifesto by clicking on the screenshot below:

The long document contains an indictment of the English Department for “a long, well-documented, disturbing history of racism, sexism, transphobia, and other violences [sic],” with virtually none of that “history” consisting of more than anecdotes, second-hand statements that students heard, and a list of faculty of color (“FOC”) who, it’s claimed, have been mistreated and have left the college.

Let’s take the “exodus of faculty of color” first. Here’s the list and the reasons for “exodus” (all indented matter comes from the document):

The following professors of color have recently left the College or will be leaving at the end of 2019:

Shanti Singham (retired), Kenda Mutongi (moving to MIT), Anjuli Raza-Kolb (moving to University of Toronto), Joy James (on personal leave), Nimu Njoya (on leave Spring 2020), Kai Green (“violent practices,” returned in SY 2019-20), Kimberly Love (“violent practices,” returned in SY 2019-20), Rhon Manigault-Bryant (on leave), James Manigault-Bryant (on leave), Kasumi Yamamoto (on sabbatical), Jinhwa Chang (received offer at Mount Holyoke College), Mamoru Hatakeyama (received offer at a university in Canada), Mérida Rúa (moving to Northwestern), Amal Eqeiq (on sabbatical), Lama Nassif (on sabbatical), Man He (on sabbatical).

There are 16 faculty here. One is retired, 5 got offers at other schools (faculty of color are much in demand and often receive multiple offers), 6 are or were on leave (and have returned or will return), and the remaining four are on sabbatical (and will presumably return). As far as I know, the sabbaticals (and all the leaves, including those based on medical issues) were paid leaves. Nobody’s salary was taken away, and nobody was denied tenure.

The list is what’s known as “fake news”. As I discussed in an earlier post, the oft-claimed “mass exodus” of faculty of color didn’t exist. Those faculty left at the same rate as did white faculty.

I’ve discussed the cases of Kai Green and Kimberly Love before (see here); these faculty have never suffered any racism or bigotry at Williams College. The article that they wrote to recount their “suffering’ cites only one incident, a peevish car mechanic who, they claim, discriminated against them. To see the toxic combination of offense culture and mental instability unleashed by these two, which has led them to indict their College for their treatment by a single (non-College) car mechanic, see one of the links at the bottom of the post, “LESSONS FROM THE DAMNED, 2018, OR WHY WE CANNOT WAIT FOR TENURE TO INSIST UPON OUR DIGNITY, RESPECT, POWER, AND VALUE (2019)”.

Further, despite there having been lots of courses in “ethnic literature” taught in interdisciplinary concentrations like Africana Studies, the students now demand a tenured position in “ethnic literature” in the English Department.  Yet the concentration of Africana Studies already lists at least 24 courses in ethnic literature (including Latinx literature), as well as a dozen or so courses in ethnic music and film.

I won’t go on except to list the students’ demands and one bit of unintentional humor. Until the demands are met, the students threaten to boycott all classes in the English Department save those that already “engage substantially with race” (students’ bolding):

  1. We demand a faculty search for a senior faculty specializing in Ethnic Literature (African American, Native American, Latinx, Asian American) from outside Williams College to chair the English Department.
  2. We demand that the Department immediately run a search for four new faculty tenure-track hires– one in African American literature, one in Latinx literature, one in Native American literature, and one in Asian American literature.
  3. We demand that there be an external investigation of the English Department.

And if the College doesn’t give in? Then the students are already calling for this to pressure the administration (their emphasis):

As such, we have no choice but to call for an indefinite boycott of all English Department classes (ENGL) that do not engage substantially with race. A token assignment of ethnic literature in an otherwise whitewashed syllabus is not enough. Refusing to enroll in English classes is one way that we can create the pressures necessary to promote change.

I can only imagine how the English professors—or, for that matter, the Williams administration—regard this threat. If students don’t sign up for English classes, what will happen? I don’t know if they’re required to take such classes, but if they are, and don’t take the classes, they should be expelled.

At any rate, the demand is ludicrous, and should be met with raspberries by the faculty and administration. That won’t happen, of course, because almost none of those individuals have a backbone.

After all this kerfuffle—and this is only the beginning, as segregated housing is next on the student agenda—the website has the nerve to say this (their emphasis):

We are not arguing for a policed classroom. We are not trying to police your classrooms. We are demanding that you examine and then dismantle the academic environments you’ve created or allowed to be made. The existing discussion spaces are not just hostile but also uninteresting – you too often frame material such that we can’t address sexual or racial violence in meaningful and ethical ways. When you pretend that we are trying to police you, that we are the ones who set the agendas for discussion, it only distracts yourself and your students from the truth: you are the ones who wield power in the classroom. You police what can be said and who can speak.

This would be hilarious doublethink if it weren’t so absurd and disruptive. “We’re not trying to police your classrooms, but your professors must teach certain courses, you must hire at least four more professors, English professors must not speak in certain ways, and, above all, they must be evaluated by an external body”—probably one whose constitution is approved by the students. Do the students even know what “policing” means?

And so the once-venerable Williams College goes down the path trodden in the past few years by The Evergreen State College and Oberlin College. Down that road leads impecuniousness, a declining reputation of the institution, and reduced enrollment. Good luck, Williams!

The Annual College Halloween Follies: The University of Texas

October 30, 2019 • 11:30 am

Tomorrow is Halloween, and what better way to celebrate than by scaring you about how it’s celebrated at some American colleges? The institution at hand happens to be the venerable University of Texas at Austin, a public university and one of America’s better state schools.

For Halloween, however, the Dean of Students Office chose to treat the students like young children by issuing a four-page pamphlet (pdf here, or click on screenshot below) telling students which costumes are offensive and which are recommended—and why. Objecting to this kind of paternal behavior is what got Nicholas and Erika Christakis harassed and demonized at Yale and, ultimately, led to their resignations as residential house heads.

Read and weep:

Before they start in on the chiding and patronizing lectures, the administrators added a First-Amendment disclaimer, which only makes what follows more ludicrous.

No, they don’t “regulate speech or enforce costume guidelines,” but they sure as hell tell you which costumes will offend other people, and they helpfully provide a list of bland and inoffensive costumes that will offend nobody.

Now of course there are costumes that will be considered generally offensive, like blackface or attire that blatantly mocks some groups. I wouldn’t wear such costumes, but neither would I tell others not to wear them—unless they ask my advice. One of the things students should learn—on their own—is that their actions may have consequences.

But the list of party themes and costumes proscribed by the Dean’s Office includes Hawaiians, gypsies (Roma), anybody in the Southern New World (offenseive to Latinxs), hobos, anything Asian, and “around-the-world” costumes, whatever those are. These are deemed “harmful” by the Dean of Students’ Office.

The pamphlet also gives six questions to consider when planning a Halloween party or considering a costume to wear. Implicit in these questions is that you must always consider the educational mission of your party or costume, assuming it has even the merest potential to offend. These two questions, for example, offend me:

Sorry, but since when are Halloween costumes supposed to educate people? The “educational” question seems in fact to be a last resort for those miscreants who persist in their decision that a costume or party will have a theme about “a culture”. In that case, you must ensure that the costume or event somehow tells people about its authenticity and, presumably, about why other costumes harm groups that have been oppressed. But how the deuce can you be “educational” with a costume?

And here’s the bit where if you think that anyone might be offended by a costume, don’t do it! (The “we” here is the organization or individual considering a costume or party.) Note the dark words about “the consequences”.

Since all costumes about cutlures or history are apparently verboten, the University recommends a list of appropriate and inoffensive costumes. Cast your eyes on this anodyne list:

“Letters of the alphabet”? “When I grow up”? “Rubix Cube” costumes? (It’s spelled “Rubik’s Cube”, by the way.) You as a “high school hero”? This is guaranteed to take the fun out of Halloween by scaring you into not being at all edgy. The last thing I’d want to be on Halloween is a Rubik’s cube. And if I dressed as a nerd—my “glory days” in high school—would that not be offensive to nerds?

As I said, some costumes are in terrible taste and will tick off other people. But we should also remember that some people are constantly scrutinizing others for the least sign of ideological impurity, and some of those people seemingly want to be offended, for it gives them not only victim credit but also the right to chew out other people. The idea of being charitable and not automatically assuming the worst is, as they say, “erased.”

My own recommendation is to use your own judgment. But that, of course, was what Erika Christakis said in her email to Yale students that caused such a fracas. You simply can no longer tell students to use their own judgement as adults. For—at least at Yale and The University of Texas—the students are seen not as adults, but as children roughly eight years old.

And this will only get worse. In a decade or so, you’ll be allowed to dress only as yourself.

Oxford student union mandates that its authorities promote “jazz hands” as a substitute for applause

October 25, 2019 • 11:30 am

I don’t know why, but stuff like this depresses me and makes me wonder what the world will be like in 20 years, when students who passed this resolution are running the UK—and maybe the US. But I’ll most likely be dead then.

This event not nearly as bad as the Right supporting Trump, of course, but everybody writes about Trump while the mainstream and liberal media are reluctant to documenting the Authoritarian Left. (If you’re a reader, by the way, please don’t tell me to write more about the perfidy of Republicans. You can see that kind of discourse, whose sentiments I share, on every other site.)

So the latest occurrence is that Oxford University’s student council voted three days ago not to mandate the use of jazz hands in place of applause, but to “mandate Sabbatical Officers to encourage the use” of “jazz hands”, the British Sign Language equivalent of clapping. In other words, it’s not an absolute stricture but a strong recommendation as well as a requirement for officers.

There are three links below (click on screenshots); the indented bit here is from the Oxford Student.

The first Student Council meeting of the academic year, yesterday, passed the motion to mandate the Sabbatical Officers to encourage the use of British Sign Language (BSL) clapping, otherwise known as ‘silent jazz hands’ at Student Council meetings and other official SU events.

The motion was presented to Council last year by Ellie Macdonald (former VP Welfare and Equal Opportunities) and Ebie Edwards Cole (Chair for Oxford SU Disabilities Campaign), presented again this year by Ebie and Roisin McCallion (VP Welfare & Equal Opportunity).

BSL clapping is used by the National Union of Students since loud noises, including whooping and traditional applause, are argued to present an access issue for some disabled students who have anxiety disorders, sensory sensitivity, and/or those who use hearing impairment aids.

The proposers pointed out that alternatives to traditional clapping have been in place to aid accessibility in some organisations since 2015, when The New York Times for instance declared snapping is the new clapping.

Manchester Students Union made headlines when they led the way in passing a motion in September 2018 to use BSL clapping at their own student council.

Here’s what jazz hands look like:

And a peevish response from comedian Graham Linehan.

https://twitter.com/Glinner/status/1187686408774934528

This is from the Oxford Student:

From the Times of London:

Now I understand that the desire of the Oxford student council here was admirable: to be inclusive. But catering to what “triggers” people is not a way to deal with the issue of triggering. As far as I understand, exposure therapy is what psychologists use to eliminate triggering, and in this case exposure would mean listening to applause.

Second, “jazz hands” can easily be construed as a racist gesture, even if it is part of British Sign Language. The Atlas Obscura, for examples, describes one proposed origin for the gesture in its article “The Fabulous History of Jazz Hands!”

The exact origins of jazz hands are a bit murky, but as with most performative dance, it likely has its roots in African dance traditions. “I see one thread of it coming up through the African-American foundation of jazz dance, and that authentic jazz tradition,” says Rebecca Katz Harwood, Associate Professor of Musical Theater at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. ”In as much as vaudeville grows out of minstrelsy, that’s another step backwards on the family tree of jazz hands.”

It’s likely that the simple act of shaking your hands as part of the performance came into use when vaudeville performers began taking their cues from these traditions. As vaudeville began evolving into film, it brought jazz hands with it. Some people contend that jazz hands can be traced back to Al Jolson’s 1927 film, The Jazz Singer. . . 

. . . Some of Jolson’s moves are reminiscent of what we would call jazz hands, with arms outstretched and hands extended pleadingly to the audience, but his moves lack the signature shake. “When I think of Al Jolson, I think of the blackface and the white gloves over his hands. And of course part of what those white gloves do is draw attention to the hands,” says Katz Harwood.

Remember that The Jazz Singer features Jolson, a white man, in blackface. That, as I’ve said many times before, is reprehensible bigotry and not “cultural appropriation.” If “jazz hands” has its origin in African dance, then its use is “cultural appropriation,” and according to Woke Standards, cannot be used without simultaneous acknowledgment and apology.

Finally, while jazz hands may placate the small minority of people who get triggered by applause, it also disenfranchises the visually challenged, who wouldn’t know when people are displaying approbation for a speech or performance. How you do you weigh those off against each other?

As I said, it’s a small issue, but also a telling sign of the times. Anybody applauding at Oxford will likely be demonized.

Oxford and Cambridge are the UK’s equivalent of Harvard, and all three places are slipping inexorably to an intolerant and authoritarian Leftism. That’s better than authoritarian Rightism, but do we need this brand of authoritarian Diktat at all?  Inclusivity—which I view as conferring respect and equal opportunity on everyone, including access for the disabled and free speech for everyone—does not mean that an entire student body must always cater to what “triggers” a tiny minority. As we all know, this leads to a deadening uniformity of discourse, a uniformity that undermines the very purpose of a university.