Cambridge philosophy prof, Arif Ahmed, fills us in. If your alma mater isn’t following Cambridge’s lead, stop giving. We don’t need finishing schools for censorious ignoramuses and dunces, often on the verge of violence.
academic freedom
At Mind Matters News: Historian supports new anti-Cancel Culture university
At COSM 2021, he noted that proposed faculty had spent the last 48 hours dealing with a tidal wave of Twitter hate. So, he said, they are over the target…
And now… David Hume Cancelled? Jerry Coyne reports.
Jerry, what goes around, comes around. You did to Eric Hedin what the Woke are doing to your faves. They’ll Cancel them all. Then they won’t have to do any homework. We didn’t tell them to. You did. We could all help stop it now but then you have to stop too.
First recipient of the Lysenko Award was one of Dorian Abbot’s Cancellers
The winner!: “This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated,” she replied.
Canceled exoplanets prof Dorian Abbot at the Wall Street Journal
The thing is, in 2017, it was ultra-progressive places like Evergreen where the liberal biology teachers could be run off campus. Now it’s MIT, folks… Either Woke goes or science does. But bureaucrats find it easier to cater to Woke than to resist. The more bureaucrats there are, the less university there will be.
Berkeley scientist and center director resigns over MIT’s deplatforming of exoplanet scientist
Note how little difference facts of science make in these matters — whether Abbot has anything to say that contributes to our knowledge does not matter of the Woke are displeased. Darwinism was the original Wokeness in science — immune to fact-based critique. The people who thought that that didn’t concern them are now formally wrong. It’s everywhere now.
Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne learns s thing or three about censorship – when he’s not doling it out
The explanation for Coyne’s sudden support for academic freedom might be fairly simple: He thought that Cancel Culture would only ever be deployed against people who think that nature shows evidence of design. He never expected it to come for people HE values.
Expert in exoplanets gets the better of Outrage, Inc.
One thing that’s coming out of all these stories is that those who do NOT cower and mumble abject apologies to the gleefully unlettered tend to do better. Mobs have only the authority they seize from cowards. And who wants to defend an abject coward? He’ll sell you out too. A person who takes a stand can be defended.
Jerry Coyne as opponent of Cancel Culture
One used to hear many people say “Cancel Culture is so ridiculous, it will go away soon.” Well, that’s not happening. Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, who usually writes about other matters, discusses two representative incidents.
L&FP, 47: The credibility of the concept and existence of God
I see from News, that Egnor and Dillahunty have had a debate on the reality of God. Egnor has put on the table ten arguments to God and Dillahunty has rebutted, as News reports. Some of this caught my eye and I took pause from an ongoing life crisis to comment on some things that Read More…
Peter Boghossian has quit at “ideas go to die here” Portland U
Would any readers who pay taxes in the state of Oregon like to write in and explain what they pay taxes for? Is this how you think your tax money should be spent?
Apparently, some people have noticed the nonsense at Nature Communications about geology as not a safe field for persons of color
About that third comment above: There is no reason to put “scholarship” and “Nature Communications” in the same sentence if this “paper” is supposed to be an example of the type of thing it produces.
Bret Weinstein now smeared at Wikipedia?
Readers may well remember biology teacher Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying, a progressive teacher couple at Evergreen State College, early victims of the very Woke they had themselves encouraged, without realizing where it must end.
A panel on CV19 with a co-inventor of mRNA technology
See here: Okay, embed seems to work. If not please click the link. This is a FYI news item, no discussion. END
L&FP, 47: The challenge of “proof” in a world of radical doubt and hyperskepticism
“Prove it . . .” is a familiar challenge, one, often strengthened to “unless you prove it I can disregard what you claim.” However, ever since Epictetus, c. 100 AD, it has met its match: DISCOURSESCHAPTER XXV How is logic necessary? When someone in [Epictetus’] audience said, Convince me that logic is necessary, he answered: Read More…