Scientific American Publishes False Information, Recklessly Stoking the Culture Wars

Three alleged specialists in communications who wrote this article at Scientific American could not be bothered to look up the easily available text of a Wisconsin bill that they are falsely criticizing. This is deeply troubling. This is magazine that purports to celebrate science, yet this article, which has nothing to do with science, blatantly misrepresents the facts (the text of a Wisconsin) bill in order to score political points. Here's the false information:

A bill passed by the Wisconsin Assembly, for instance, bans any books, educational materials, or classroom discussions that include terms like “racial prejudice,” “patriarchy,” “structural inequality,” “intersectionality” or, ironically, “critical self-reflection.”

It only takes 5 minutes to read Wisconsin bill 411 and clearly and immediately know that none of the above claims are true.  Jesse Singal comments.

I'm not taking a position on the above Wisconsin bill. Rather, I'm criticizing well-educated people in high places who deceive others from their perches in order to feel better about themselves.

This is not the first time Scientific American has run off the rails on cultural issues. See here, here and here.

RIP Scientific American.  I used to read and admire you because you tried to get your facts right and you wrote about science.

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Sizing up Diversity Training: Is it Education or is it Indoctrination?

At Counterweight, Chuck Almdale has offered a thoughtful list of ten warning signs in his article at Counterweight: "Ten Signs your Diversity Training Session is CSJ Indoctrination."

Here are the titles to the ten warning signs:

1. It’s mandatory.

2. “Listen with curiosity, without judgment.”

3. “Check your privilege.”

4. “How do you identify?”

5. “What are your pronouns?”

6. Black Allyship.

7. No humor.

8. Shaming for disagreement or critical questions.

9. Diversity of race, gender and ethnicity but not of thought or speech.

10. New terms, rarely supported or defined.

Here's an excerpt on point 8:

Questions are permitted only to increase your shame and acquiescence to their program, as in “How do I stop behaving as a privileged white woman?” Critical questions about their statements or behavior are not permitted. They’ll say, “You’re pulling a power play”—trying to resist them, trying to influence others, subverting the training, and your disagreement proves your racism, that you are “on the wrong side of history”; the future belongs to the Woke. Want to belong? “Do the Work.”

Don’t believe them if they say that the “still, small voice” of your inner self is your White Fragility, panicking at vanishing. If they succeed at inhibiting that voice, your psychological recovery from Wokeness becomes very difficult, as some psychological therapists and others have discovered. Psychotherapist Seerut K. Chawla, practicing in London, dislikes Wokeness for the damage it has caused to many of her patients. Mike Brooks writes in Psychology Today about how Woke shaming destroys compassion. Also in Psychology Today Rupert W Nacoste writes that name-calling is bigotry, not social justice. The pressure to conform from facilitators and other trainees can be overwhelming. Your ounce of resistance is worth a pound of cure. Resist. Question. Tell a joke. Humor subverts Wokeness. One voice of resistance can unleash a chorus of support.

I would add the following. If you are forced to attend such an indoctrination session, go in knowing that you are going to make a lot of people irritated by committing the sin of being honest.  You will be called names and you will be shamed.  You will survive and live another day.  In the middle of the shamefest remember that Martin Luther King put up with abuse a thousand times worse for a period of decades.  Talk loud, hold your head high and know that there are a lot of quiet people in that room who are proud of you and relieved that you are speaking up.

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In Deleted Tweet, Ibram Kendi Claims Minority Status Paves the Way for Successful Admissions

Stunning admission:

This is the same man who talks in circles on the concept of "racism," a concept upon which all of his writings depend: At the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2019, when asked to define racism, Kendi earnestly answered: “[It is] a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity, that are substantiated by racist ideas.”

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Bari Weiss Enumerates the Core Beliefs of Wokeness – Critical Race Theory – Social Justice

I've been posting ad nauseam about Wokeness over the past 18 months because it starkly contradicts many of my core beliefs. And it starkly contradicts basic principles deeply cherished by what I believe to be the great majority of Americans. I have categorized dozens of my articles with the label Wokeness. You can read them all by clicking on this link. I have carefully documented not only theories about why this movement has gained traction. I have also carefully collected many instances in which people have hurt, belittled, fired, tormented and rattled each other by embracing Woke Ideology while throwing long-established beliefs (including basic Enlightenment Principles and Martin Luther King's "content of character" aspirations into the trash.

Bari Weiss has be speaking loud lately, rallying the great majority of people--they tend to be afraid to speak up--to say what they believe and to not feel compelled to say things that they don't believe. It all sounds so simple, but the Twitter mobs are loud and vocal and they have thoroughly intimidated those who are in charge of our meaning-making institutions (e.g., schools, media, government, social media). Weiss argues that if we all just start speaking up, this insanity will diminish greatly because it will encourage others to speak up too. Here is an excerpt from Bari Weiss' article at Commentary. It is titled "We Got Here Because of Cowardice. We Get Out With Courage: Say no to the Woke Revolution." Here is Wokeness in a nutshell from her article:

It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools. And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.

So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings.

Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.

In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully.

In this ideology, if you do not tweet the right tweet or share the right slogan, your whole life can be ruined. . . . In this ideology, the past cannot be understood on its own terms, but must be judged through the morals and mores of the present. In this ideology, intentions don’t matter... In this ideology, the equality of opportunity is replaced with equality of outcome as a measure of fairness. If everyone doesn’t finish the race at the same time, the course must have been defective.... In this ideology, you are guilty for the sins of your fathers. In other words: You are not you. You are only a mere avatar of your race or your religion or your class....In this system, we are all placed neatly on a spectrum of “privileged” to “oppressed.” We are ranked somewhere on this spectrum in different categories: race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Then we are given an overall score, based on the sum of these rankings. Having privilege means that your character and your ideas are tainted.... Racism has been redefined. It is no longer about discrimination based on the color of someone’s skin. Racism is any system that allows for disparate outcomes between racial groups....skeptics of any part of this radical ideology are recast as heretics. Those who do not abide by every single aspect of its creed are tarnished as bigots, subjected to boycotts and their work to political litmus tests.

How in hell's name could anyone be drawn to such stupidity? Weiss points to several causes that have made fertile ground for this dysfunction:

All of this has taken place against the backdrop of major changes in American life—the tearing apart of our social fabric; the loss of religion and the decline of civic organizations; the opioid crisis; the collapse of American industries; the rise of big tech; successive financial crises; a toxic public discourse; crushing student debt. An epidemic of loneliness. A crisis of meaning. A pandemic of distrust. It has taken place against the backdrop of the American dream’s decline into what feels like a punchline, the inequalities of our supposedly fair, liberal meritocracy clearly rigged in favor of some people and against others.

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