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Academic Freedom

Fighting back against Big Tech? Take a leaf from Seattle

West: "Unlike most political jurisdictions in the United States, Seattle expressly forbids discrimination on the basis of “political ideology.” Seattle defines political ideology expansively" Big Tech, take heed. Read More ›

A geophysicist’s unconventional guide to surviving campus witch hunts: Show love

Let’s hope it continues to work for Abbot. A couple of difficulties: 1) It’s not clear that Cancel Culture is an academic community, as opposed to a mob running an academic racket. 2) Many Cancelers will interpret efforts to be nice as evidence of weakness, more or less as wolves do. But so long as the strategy really works, go with it. Read More ›

Should we recognise that “laws of nature” extend to laws of our human nature? (Which, would then frame civil law.)

Laws of Nature are a key part of the foundation of modern science. This reflects not only natural, law-like regularities such as the Law of Gravitation that promotes the Earth to the heavens (from being the sump of the cosmos) but also the perspective of many founders that they were thinking God’s creative, ordering providential and world-sustaining thoughts after him. The focal topic asks us whether our civil law is effectively an accident of power balances, or else, could it be accountable to a built in law that pivots on first duties coeval with our humanity. The issue becomes pivotal, once we ponder the premise that the typical, “natural” tendency of government is to open or veiled lawless oligarchy: So, Read More ›

How do we move civilisation (and especially science, tech and math) forward?

We are clearly in an age of reversion to oligarchic domination and lockout of dissent, so the issue is that of formation of a counter-culture, starting with the life of the mind. H’mm, as a preliminary, let us look briefly at a refresher on a more useful ideological/political spectrum than the usual LEFT/RIGHT (which has no coherent definition of centre and right, where also Nazism/Fascism is actually of the left . . . contrary to popular notions): This is necessary because, regrettably, power dominates over essentially anything, especially in a time of deep polarisation. We can map that through the seven mountains/pillars of influence model: This naturally points to the cliff metaphor and warning: Let me add, that with our Read More ›

Jerry Coyne seems to be coming to terms with the Woke endgame

We wondered what Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne was doing recently besides being nice to cats (a very fine habit and the sign of a true gentleman). So this now... Read More ›

Letter from Michael Behe that a chemistry journal wouldn’t publish in 2004

Behe: The authors imply that since no reason is known why, say, DNA should be synthesized discontinuously on the lagging strand, then no good reason in fact exists. Yet not long ago the same sort of fallacious argument from ignorance was made concerning “junk DNA.” Read More ›

Is a vast variety of new cichlid species in ten million years a “burst”?

One can talk about the cichlid "burst" that lasted ten million years but now, the term “explosion” has become politically incorrect usage to describe the Cambrian because shut up. Read More ›

Snowball Earth prof attacked by Cancel Culture

Jacobson warns, “What is so disturbing is the large number of graduate and post-doctoral students who signed the list of demands. I warned in 2017 that STEM would not be immune to the social justice (and racial) warfare tearing through universities.” Read More ›

Crybullies in publishing attack Jordan Peterson but not Mein Kampf

This would be off topic except that we may anticipate similar scenes played out in the future around books with any theme that Cancel Culture deems ID-friendly (or whatever their beech is). As it happens, Penguin’s UK branch publishes Hitler’s Mein Kampf but that’s okay with the Woke because shut up. Read More ›

Cancel Culture tries to get a Nature Communications paper retracted

We are informed that all science Twitter is in a ghastly rage over an open access paper in Nature Communications which seems to show that female scientists benefit more from male mentors than from female mentors. To a layperson with some life experience, that wouldn’t be a surprising outcome at all. In a system that has been male-dominated since forever, more guys would be higher up on the pole. And if you want to get ahead, it pays to know Top People… But, of course, the Outrage Mob is sharpening the guillotine. Their final enemy is, after all, reality in any of its forms. Read More ›