Partisan Plagiarism
Corporate News Media Hard at Work. According to the Associated Press, plagiarism is now a "conservative weapon."
The Pandemic of Resegregation
Eli Steele, writing at the Daily Mail:
When I learned that Boston's mayor Michelle Wu hosted a racially segregated holiday party for the city council's 'Electeds of Color,' I wondered: would I have been invited? After all, my father is black, but my skin looks white. The 'no whites' gathering was exposed this week after a city employee accidentally emailed invitations to Caucasian council members before hurriedly rescinding the offers....
[Above: Instagram photo published by the Office of Boston Mayor Wu]
It is incredible that nearly 60 years after the Civil Rights Act outlawed segregation in America — the country is once again grappling with this vile practice.
Today, in the name of social justice, K-12 educators divide students by race. Whites are told they are the oppressors while students of color are the oppressed. Teachers and administrative staff are separated into racial 'affinity groups'.
Our universities are no better — everything from freshmen orientation to housing decisions are determined according to immutable characteristics.Some colleges, including Harvard, hold 'special' celebrations during graduation week — whites and Jews excluded.
Andrew Sullivan’s Prescription for Curing our Bad Case of DEI
We've got an enormous problem with DEI. It goes completely against what all of us seek when we need the best surgeon to operate on us, the best engineer to design a new bridge or the best pilot to safely fly us home. Even though we all know this, many of us have been afraid to say this lately. It is entirely rational and humane to seek out the best qualified people to fill jobs. Full stop. Although it is often a challenge to decide who is the best qualified person for the job, there is no close competitor to basing our decisions on merit.
Andrew Sullivan succinctly articulated the way forward:
End DEI in its entirety. Fire all the administrators whose only job is to enforce its toxic orthodoxy. Admit students on academic merit alone. Save standardized testing — which in fact helps minorities, and it’s “the best way to distinguish smart poor kids from stupid rich kids,” as Steven Pinker said this week. Restore grading so that it actually means something again. Expel students who shut or shout down speech or deplatform speakers. Pay no attention to the race or sex or orientation or gender identity of your students, and see them as free human beings with open minds. Treat them equally as individuals seeking to learn, if you can remember such a concept.
I've promoted this idea throughout the Great Awokening, hearing mostly crickets or criticism from intelligent people. Countless people I know have been sitting on their hands--refusing to say what they really think. They worry, often justifiably, that saying out loud what they really think will cost them their jobs and/or their reputations.
Speaking out in favor of merit as the only basis for hiring isn't just a platitude or an emotion. Consider, finally, this excellent article setting for the many reasons for hiring solely on the basis of merit: "In Defense of Merit in Science." Here is the abstract:
Merit is a central pillar of liberal epistemology, humanism, and democracy. The scientific enterprise, built on merit, has proven effective in generating scientific and technological advances, reducing suffering, narrowing social gaps, and improving the quality of life globally. This perspective documents the ongoing attempts to undermine the core principles of liberal epistemology and to replace merit with nonscientific, politically motivated criteria. We explain the philosophical origins of this conflict, document the intrusion of ideology into our scientific institutions, discuss the perils of abandoning merit, and offer an alternative, humancentered approach to address existing social inequalities.
Robin DiAngelo Redux
We should re-direct all the $ we spend on DEI and "misinformation" to a new national program that exposes and belittles all the people who try to divide us against each other, including hatemongers like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi, who ruin lives while enriching themselves.
Geophysicist Dorian Abbott Discusses the Immorality of DEI Programs
Peter Boghossian sat down to take about the immorality of DEI programs with Dorian Abbot. Intro:
In 2021, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) canceled a high-profile lecture by Dr. Dorian Abbot, a renowned geophysicist from the University of Chicago. The topic of the lecture was not the issue. Rather, Dorian was targeted by Social Justice activists because of his critique of DEI ideology. MIT buckled to the demands of a handful of ideologues, inadvertently contributing to discussions about academic censorship.
MIT did not expect the blowback it received for hobbling scientific inquiry in favor of ideological conformity. MIT alumni formed the Free Speech Alliance and its faculty overwhelmingly voted to adopt a university statement regarding freedom of expression. Since then, Dorian has become a leading figure in the fight for academic freedom of thought, speech, and inquiry.
In this conversation, Peter Boghossian and Dorian discuss the MIT fiasco, the proper aim of academia, the immorality of DEI, speech as “violence,” University of Chicago’s commitment to academic freedom, finding meaning through religion and naturalism, Dorian’s rejection of tyrannical “equality” mandates, and much more."
Abbott takes the position that DEI programs are immoral because they are based on racism. Instead, he proposes that hirings should be based on merit, fairness and equality, as he argues in a Newsweek article published August 12, 2021. Excerpt from that article:
DEI violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment. It entails treating people as members of a group rather than as individuals, repeating the mistake that made possible the atrocities of the 20th century. It requires being willing to tell an applicant "I will ignore your merits and qualifications and deny you admission because you belong to the wrong group, and I have defined a more important social objective that justifies doing so." It treats persons as merely means to an end, giving primacy to a statistic over the individuality of a human being.
DEI compromises the university's mission. The core business of the university is the search for truth. A university's intellectual environment depends fundamentally on its commitment to hiring the most talented and best trained minds: any departure from this commitment must come at the expense of academic excellence, and ultimately will compromise the university's contribution to society. This point is particularly urgent given that DEI considerations often reduce the pool of truly eligible candidates by a factor of two or more.