About Trigger Warnings

First, a Tweet from Obaid Omer:

Yes, indeed. If we're going to abuse 10-year olds by telling them that they are oppressors (or victims of their oppressor-classmates), shouldn't we at least warn them first? And yes, many schools are abusing children like this.

I have no way of proving this, but I am imagining a group of woke young adults sitting around in the privacy of someone's apartment talking about sex, violence, rape, you-name-it. I doubt that any of them give each other "trigger warnings" in private. That demand is reserved for professors in public spaces only. Even though the "trigger warning" is supposedly about the topic, not the person mentioning the topic.

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“But Where is Critical Race Theory Actually Being Taught?”

When I deny that the current versions of CRT are related to the Civil Rights Movement, I assert this because:

A) CRT and antiracism are obsessed with dividing people into "colors" and treating them differently on the basis of "color."

B) The Platform of CRT and antiracism have no meaningful mechanism for improving the lives of the poor minority populations they pretend to serve.

C) CRT and antiracism excel at denying data relating to their mission (including police statistics and economic facts, such as the fact that 60% of Americans who identify as "black" are middle class or above).

D) CRT and antiracism advocates do not extol the teachings of Martin Luther King.  In fact, King's teachings are barely mentioned in training materials.

There are other difference too, but this is a sampling based upon some of the articles I've written recently.

Increasing numbers of people are starting to understand that CRT and "antiracism" have no meaning connection to do with the traditional Civil Rights Movement, but now they are increasingly denying that CRT and "antiracism" are being taught in schools. I see this as motivated reasoning based on the fact that most of these people (the ones I know) are only exposed to left-leaning legacy media. These people admit of only a few outliers and deny that CRT or antiracism is a significant problem in the U.S. I disagree, based on these resources:

The recent case of Dana stangel-Plowe, former teacher at a school in Englewood.

The recent case of Paul Rossi.

The observations of Andrew Gutmann, a former parent at Brearly School.

Christopher Rufo's reports based upon leaked training materials at numerous schools.

Chloe Valdary teaches a good-hearted program to diminish bigotry she compares to the CRT programs of which she is knowledgable.

Numerous reports by Parents Defending Education.

Numerous reports of attempted cancellation based on CRT here.

Reports at businesses by Counterweight.

Many more reports here, by Princetonians for Free Speech.

I have also been personally contacted by approximately a dozen people who work in academia who are afraid to speech honestly on issues because CRT permeates the campus

More reports here (Stanford) and here (Rutgers).

John McWhorter's receipt of numerous complaints (see the comments) here.

Another recent resource is Christopher Rufo's "Critical Race Theory Briefing Book." 

There are numerous other reports, more of them surfacing every week. I will try to update this list periodically.

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It’s Time for You to Speak Up

Because so many people often think as obedient members America's two political teams, those of us who are free-thinkers are commonly ostracized, scorned and censored for asking obvious questions and stating obvious facts. That is, until . . .  once in a while . . . on one-fine-day, the dam breaks and then it is suddenly appropriate to once again talk freely about a topic. I won't give many examples here because this is happening regarding almost every important national issue. Consider COVID masks and lab leaks, for example. This herky-jerky way of talking at each other is massively inefficient and the effect is to severely crimp human flourishing. It's like we are all attending Lord-of-the-Flies High School. I will offer three short points:

1. This has become an era of "truth infrastructures." Social teams, media operations, non-profit entities and bureaucracies on both the right and the left are coordinating together to maintain and defend their official narratives. The narrative much be honored, even if it lacks an evidentiary foundation and even if it contrary to the evidence. We need to push hard these days to get the team players to acknowledge obvious facts. Our public discourse now has the same dynamics that Thomas Kuhn attributed to science:

During the period of normal science, the failure of a result to conform to the paradigm is seen not as refuting the paradigm, but as the mistake of the researcher, contra Popper’s falsifiability criterion. As anomalous results build up, science reaches a crisis, at which point a new paradigm, which subsumes the old results along with the anomalous results into one framework, is accepted. This is termed revolutionary science.

In short, we free-thinkers need to grind away forcing evidentiary pressure build up until official narratives finally pop.  Again, what a terribly inefficient way to communicate as a society.

2. There is no easy solution to this national team sport of talking at each other. We free-thinkers need to have immense amounts of stamina and courage to speak up. We are often the victims of barrages of ad hominem attacks.  We need the courage to persevere in the repeated lack of apparent progress. We also need the courage to point out the mistakes of those who we might feel to be on our "own" team. Courage is the key. Nietzsche often wrote about the relationship between truth and courage. Here are several of his aphorisms on courage:

How much truth can a spirit stand, how much truth does it dare? For me that became more and more the real measure of value. Error (belief in the ideal) is not blindness, error is cowardice.

Every achievement, every step forward in knowledge, comes from courage, from harshness towards yourself, from cleanliness with respect to yourself. ..

[T]he forcefulness with which you approach truth is proportionate to the distance courage dares to advance. Knowledge, saying yes to reality, is just as necessary for the strong as cowardice and fleeing in the face of reality - which is to say the ‘ideal’ - is for the weak, who are inspired by weakness... They are not free to know: decadents need lies, it is one of the conditions for their preservation.

Even the bravest among us only rarely has courage for what he really knows . . .

Where to we get that courage and stamina?  There are brave free-thinkings who go out there every day and they are leading the way.  Some of my favorites include Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, John McWhorter, Sam Harris, Glenn Loury, The three hosts on The Fifth Column podcast, Abigail Shrier, Brett Weinstein, Heather Heying, Ed Snowden, Colin Wright, Claire Lehmann and the rest of the gang at Quillette, Andrew Sullivan, Eric Weinstein, New Discourses, Wilfred Reilly, Jesse Singal, Chloe Valdary, Peter Boghossian, Coleman Hughes, Bill Maher, Christina Sommers, Christopher Rufo, Benjamin Boyce, Aaron Mate, Krystal and Saagar at Breaking Points, Joe Rogan, Bari Weiss and Jodi Shaw. I'm sure that I've forgotten a couple dozen others. Bonus points to Brett Weinstein for his recent heroics. Just be brave like these people, even though you will be ridiculed and gaslit.  If you are a sincere and kind-hearted truth teller, you will often be called names. When that happens, wear those insults like a badge of honor! You need to speak up especially when no one else is speaking up, as Soloman Asch demonstrated in the 1950s.

3. Even when we know we are correct about our facts, we can't simply shout them from the mountaintops.  We also need immense amounts of patience to neutralize the tactics used by the members of America's two Team Thinkers. We free-thinkers can't just be right. We also need to be effective by picking our spots and navigating contorted arguments containing words with upside-down definitions. Why do we need to be patient?  Because our plan should be to prevail in the long run, not take snarky little shots in the short-run. Also consider that those who attack us often think that they are doing the right thing.  They are often as fired up as we are.  They are also convinced that the ends justifies the means, and the means include every logical and evidentiary fallacy in the book, though ad hominem attacks are the bread and butter. Our goals should be to recruit them to our side by showing them the error of their ways.  For the past year, I have been writing dozens of articles at this website in an attempt to patiently collect the lost sheep.

3. I am reminded of Mahatma Gandhi's quote:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Instead of cordial civil discourse where people follow the Heterodox Academy HxA Way, Our teams push and pull to win rather collaborating as individuals to tease out truths.

In sum, each of us needs the unbridled innocent curiosity of a child, the courage of a lion, and the calm patience of a diplomat. Now get out there, tell carefully articulated truths and get called names.  Over and over.  You will be making progress and when other quiet people see you taking some hits, they will be inspired to speak up too.

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Lenore Skenazy Discusses Fearful Childhoods

For a child, is the world mostly a big playroom or mostly something to fear? Writer (and parent) Lenore Skenazy tells us how dramatically things have changed:

Kids are being treated like babies for even longer stretches. When Jonathan Haidt, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, gives lectures, he often asks audience members born before 1982 to shout out what age they were first allowed to leave the house on their own. Many in the crowd answer eight, seven, or even six. (Personally, I shout "Five!")

Then, skipping the mishmash of Generation X, he asks everyone born after 1995 to answer the same question, and most of the millennials respond in the 10-13 age range. "The effect is always huge," says Haidt, a co-founder with me of Let Grow, the nonprofit dedicated to making childhood independence easy, normal, and legal.

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Whether to Hire Ivy League Graduates

This article relies on some generalizations, so we need to be careful.  Chemistry majors are probably much different than graduates in the social sciences. And every student should be judges on his or her own merits, not on the Zeitgeist of their school.

That said, I'm now wondering whether corporations are changing their views on the plusses and minuses of hiring ivy league graduates.  Here's an excerpt from R.R.Reno's article: "Why I Stopped Hiring Ivy League Graduates." The author is concerned that ivy league graduates have been "socialized to panic over pseudocrises." Here's an excerpt:

Haverford is a progressive hothouse. If students can be traumatized by “insensitivity” on that leafy campus, then they’re unlikely to function as effective team members in an organization that has to deal with everyday realities. And in any event, I don’t want to hire someone who makes inflammatory accusations at the drop of a hat.

Student activists don’t represent the majority of students. But I find myself wondering about the silent acquiescence of most students. They allow themselves to be cowed by charges of racism and other sins. I sympathize. The atmosphere of intimidation in elite higher education is intense. But I don’t want to hire a person well-practiced in remaining silent when it costs something to speak up.

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