Excerpt from The Australian --
"'I am now very pessimistic,' Haidt said. 'I think there is a very good chance American democracy will fail, that in the next 30 years we will have a catastrophic failure of our democracy.'"
Why would Jonathan Haidt be so full of doom and Gloom. Maybe because of the dozens of cases of Woke malfeasance in the science departments of universities, as described by Lawrence Krauss:
Excerpts from a good review of the state of the news media, "Gender and the Media:
"The year 2022 saw some small breaks in the lock step uniformity with which the liberal and moderate conservative media in North America has covered gender medicine. There have been investigative reports and commentaries in the New York Times, the Washington Post and Reuters which discuss detransition and raise concerns about how teens as being given hormones and surgeries without adequate psychological assessment. The transgender activist community is furious and it is encouraging to see that their outrage is, so far, having little effect." . . .
The end game?
Once the media starts to understand the distinction between accepting same sex attraction (the LGB) and denying the material reality of sex (the TQ), the final step is a short one. That is to acknowledge that concern about gender medicine is not simply a right wing talking point and that there is concern at all points on the political spectrum.
From Michael Shellenberger's article: "Why A Shocking Number Of Crazy-Sounding Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories Turned About To Be True."
The World Economic Forum really does exercise a creepy influence over world leaders and it really does want “A Great Reset” whereby we’ll collectively move to living in low-energy, high-density, and low-privacy environments, having less physical wealth and, yes, eating insects for protein instead of meat.
The FBI really did spy on Donald Trump’s campaign, run brief-and-leak operations, and spread misinformation about the extent of Russian election interference in ways that led nearly all of the media, media platforms, and Democrats to believe that Hunter Biden’s laptop was fake and anyone who talked about it is a conspiracy theorist, and in a way that may have constituted election interference.
Facebook and Twitter really did censor accurate covid information at the behest of the White House and Twitter, and operate secret blacklists to censor and deplatform disfavored voices and opinions, even when their own internal teams said the people being censored had not actually broken any of the platform’s rules.
. . .
A growing number of people understand that they must pay for news and information from trustworthy and independent sources, ones without financials conflict of interest, and who make their values and beliefs explicit, rather than hide them. Ultimately, what threatens elites who are abusing their power, from WEF to the FBI to the White House, are not the people selling conspiracy theories but the ones exposing them.
Jesse Singal raises many red flags regarding DEI trainings in his article, "What if Diversity Trainings Are Doing More Harm Than Good?" I agree with many of his concerns, but I don't think it took any research to be wary of these trainings. In fact, the default should have been to not hold any such "trainings" until they could be shown to be effective in encouraging human flourishing. That was not done, of course, so now we have a multi-billion dollar industry that is self-interested in promoting these struggle sessions in order to maintain continued employment, often at absurd levels of compensation.
D.E.I. trainings are designed to help organizations become more welcoming to members of traditionally marginalized groups. Advocates make bold promises: Diversity workshops can foster better intergroup relations, improve the retention of minority employees, close recruitment gaps and so on. The only problem? There’s little evidence that many of these initiatives work. And the specific type of diversity training that is currently in vogue — mandatory trainings that blame dominant groups for D.E.I. problems — may well have a net-negative effect on the outcomes managers claim to care about." ....
Many popular contemporary D.E.I. approaches meet these criteria. They often seem geared more toward sparking a revolutionary re-understanding of race relations than solving organizations’ specific problems. And they often blame white people — or their culture — for harming people of color. For example, the activist Tema Okun’s work cites concepts like “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” Robin DiAngelo’s “white fragility” trainings are intentionally designed to make white participants uncomfortable. And microaggression trainings are based on an area of academic literature that claims, without quality evidence, that common utterances like “America is a melting pot” harm the mental health of people of color. Many of these trainings run counter to the views of most Americans — of any color — on race and equality. And they’re generating exactly the sort of backlash that research predicts.
This is an excerpt from article by highly regarded Stanford Researcher, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, whose account was shut down by Twitter, recently restored. An excerpt:
About a year later, after historian Phil Magness made a FOIA request, I learned a part of the story of how the U.S. government-sponsored propaganda campaign against the GBD came into being. Four days after we wrote the GBD, Francis Collins, the geneticist and lab scientist who was then the head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, wrote an email to Anthony Fauci, the immunologist and lab scientist who is the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In the email, Collins called Martin, Sunetra, and me “fringe epidemiologists” and called for a devastating public takedown. The attacks on the three of us, aided by the cooperation of supposedly private social media platforms like Twitter, were launched shortly after Collins sent that email.
But this is not an article about the ethics of social media companies whose profits depend to a large extent on the friendliness of government regulators and whose employees may see themselves as partisan political activists. This is a critique of our best universities, which are supposed to be dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge—yet which turn out to be no different than government propagandists and private corporations in their self-seeking, amoral behavior.
. . . .
Stanford failed to meet the higher standard of positive academic freedom, which would have required it to promote an environment where faculty members engage with each other respectfully despite fierce disagreement.
. . . .
The irony in this idea of “science” as a set of sacred doctrines and beliefs is that the Age of Enlightenment, which gave us our modern definitions of scientific methodology, was a reaction against a religious clerisy that claimed for itself the sole ability to distinguish truth from untruth. The COVID-19 pandemic has apparently brought us full circle, with a public health clerisy having replaced the religious one as the singular source of unassailable truth.
The analogy goes further, unfortunately. The same priests of public health that have the authority to distinguish heresy from orthodoxy also cast out heretics, just like the medieval Catholic Church did. Top universities, like Stanford, where I have been both student and professor since 1986, are supposed to protect against such orthodoxies, creating a safe space for scientists to think and to test their ideas. Sadly, Stanford has failed in this crucial aspect of its mission, as I can attest from personal experience.
The title to the article: "How Stanford Failed the Academic Freedom Test: For America’s new clerisy, scientific debate is a danger to be suppressed."