Hi — sorry — but who exactly do you think you are to demand censorship of speech? In America, we don’t even let our own politicians censor speech, much less foreign ones. Please consider reading the First Amendment to our Constitution AND BACK THE HELL OFF.
I agree with Michael Shellenberger.
And I'm also concerned that this EU attempted interference with how we have conversations over here might be an attempted end-around by our own federal government, which was recently excoriated by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Missouri v Biden (from p. 61):
If just any relationship with the government sufficed to transform a private entity into a state actor, a large swath of private entities in America would suddenly be turned into state actors and be subject to a variety of constitutional constraints on their activities. So, we do not take our decision today lightly. But, the Supreme Court has rarely been faced with a coordinated campaign of this magnitude orchestrated by federal officials that jeopardized a fundamental aspect of American life. Therefore, the district court was correct in its assessment—“unrelenting pressure” from certain government officials likely “had the intended result of suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens.” We see no error or abuse of discretion in that finding.
I wrote a letter to BU’s president that afternoon, stressing that beyond the problems with Mr. Kendi’s vision, the more fundamental issue concerned betraying the university’s research and teaching mission by making any ideology institutional orthodoxy. Nothing changed. Even now, BU is insisting it will “absolutely not” step back from its commitment to Mr. Kendi’s antiracism.
Mr. Kendi deserves some blame for the scandal, but the real culprit is institutional and cultural. It’s still unfolding and is far bigger than BU. In 2020, countless universities behaved as BU did. And to this day at universities everywhere, activist faculty and administrators are still quietly working to institutionalize Mr. Kendi’s vision. They have made embracing “diversity, equity and inclusion” a criterion for hiring and tenure, have rewritten disciplinary standards to privilege antiracist ideology, and are discerning ways to circumvent the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action ruling.
Most of those now attacking Mr. Kendi at BU don’t object to his vision. They embrace it. They don’t oppose its establishment in universities. That’s their goal. Their anger isn’t with his ideology’s intellectual and ethical poverty but with his personal failure to use the money and power given to him to institutionalize their vision across American universities, politics and culture.
Whether driven by moral hysteria, cynical careerism or fear of being labeled racist, this violation of scholarly ideals and liberal principles betrays the norms necessary for intellectual life and human flourishing. It courts disaster, at this moment especially, that universities can’t afford.
What is the telos of university? The most obvious answer is “truth” — the word appears on so many university crests. But increasingly, many of America’s top universities are embracing social justice as their telos, or as a second and equal telos. But can any institution or profession have two teloses (or teloi)? What happens if they conflict? ...
I am not saying that an individual student cannot pursue both goals. In the talk below I urge students to embrace truth as the only way that they can pursue activism that will effectively enhance social justice. But an institution such as a university must have one and only one highest and inviolable good. I am also not denying that many students encounter indignities, insults, and systemic obstacles because of their race, gender, or sexual identity. They do, and I favor some sort of norm setting or preparation for diversity for incoming students and faculty. But as I have argued elsewhere, many of the most common demands the protesters have made are likely to backfire and make experiences of marginalization more frequent and painful, not less. Why? Because they are not based on evidence of effectiveness; the demands are not constrained by an absolute commitment to truth.
September 25, 2023, my fellow panelists and I received a letter from the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) informing us that our conference panel, “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology”, which had been accepted, is being removed from the program due to the “harm” it will cause the “Trans and LGBTQI community”. We’ve responded to their accusation.
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 associated with vetting sessions at our annual meetings and will include our leadership in that discussion
Your suggestion that our panel would somehow compromise “…the scientific integrity of the programme” seems to us particularly egregious, as the decision to anathematize our panel looks very much like an anti-science response to a politicized lobbying campaign. Had our panel been allowed to go forward, we can assure you that lively contestation would have been welcomed by the panelists and may even have occurred between us, as our own political commitments are diverse. Instead, your letter expresses the alarming hope that the AAA and CASCA will become “more unified within each of our associations” to avoid future debates. Most disturbingly, following other organizations, such as the Society for American Archaeology, the AAA and CASCA have promised that “Going forward, we will undertake a major review of the processes associated with vetting sessions at our annual meetings and will include our leadership in that discussion.” Anthropologists around the world will quite rightly find chilling this declaration of war on dissent and on scholarly controversy. It is a profound betrayal of the AAA’s principle of “advancing human understanding and applying this understanding to the world’s most pressing problems”.
Open records investigations suggest the same academic researchers responsible for the infamous Alfa Server hoax were likely also the government's initial source that Russia did the "DNC Hack." The same Clinton-campaign-connected researchers who helped generate an infamous fake news story were likely the U.S. government’s source for the initial announcement that Russians hacked the Demcratic National Committee, according to documents produced across years of Open Records requests and congressional letters...
Dismissed, the Alfa fiasco added to a growing pile of elaborate media fakes, one that came to include the Steele dossier, the so-called “Project Birmingham” stunt in which a company called New Knowledge assigned fake Russian Twitter accounts to Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, and the “Hamilton 68” site funded by the German Marshall Fund which used a bogus tracking tool to make figures like Republican congressman Devin Nunes appear tied to “Russian bots.”
Thanks to years of those Freedom of Information filings, it seems clear now the government was relying upon many of the same people associated with these known fake news schemes when it identified Russia as the source of the DNC-DCCC “cyberattacks.”
[Gottlieb's] ascendency from an otherwise undistinguished internal medicine resident with a background in economics to highly lauded FDA commissioner at age 44 is quite remarkable. Even more remarkable has been his successful strong advocacy and lobbying in corporate media for the CIA to assume a dominant role in public health during the COVIDcrisis- despite never having an official government position involving CIA, DIA or other elements of the intelligence community. The depth of his involvement with the agency is unknown, but his advocacy for the interests of the CIA, Pfizer and the vaccine industry during the time of COVID have been consistent throughout the “pandemic.” . . .
What we do know is that the CIA and the five eyes intelligence alliance were deeply involved in almost every aspect of western nation mismanagement of the COVIDcrisis, from the engineering of the virus to the ensuing global harmonized propaganda, psyops and censorship campaigns.
Hello, I invite you to subscribe to Dangerous Intersection by entering your email below. You will have the option to receive emails notifying you of new posts once per week or more often.
