What is Passing for Science These Days at Scientific American . . .

If you are looking for science at Scientific American, you'll need to look a litter harder. This is from a Scientific American article titled "It's Time to Take the Penis off Its Pedestal: A culture of phallus worship has slanted the science in crucial and sometimes unexpected ways."

Yet thanks to the assumption that anything large and powerful must be male, a phallus with more imposing qualities—like the hyena’s—gets dubbed a “pseudopenis,” "masculinized" or “malelike.” Those who spend a lot of time with human genitalia see it differently. “What I’ve come to realize is that everything a man has a woman has; everything a woman has, a man has, anatomically,” says Dr. Marci Bowers, a gender affirmation surgeon in Palo Alto who has done more than 2,000 male-to-female surgeries. “The penis is just a large clitoris. In fact, I don’t know why they don’t just call it a large clitoris.” Here’s why: because human biases shape scientific knowledge, and much of what we know about our nether regions has been shaped by lazy, antiquated stereotypes about what men and women are.

On Twitter, biologist Colin Wright is barely holding it together after spotting this article. That's probably because he specializes in writing "old-fashioned" biology article suggesting antiquated things like his claim that there are two biological sexes and that men are different than women. And see here.

In the meantime, back at Twitter, "M" responded to Wright's Tweet with this:

And then "Prominent Public Figure responded with this:

And there were dozens of other responses whose witticisms rivaled in intensity their frustrations of seeing Scientific American's loss of respectability.

Finally, I wanted to know more about Rachel E. Gross, who wrote this "science" article. To my dismay, I noticed that she also wrote for Smithsonian Magazine, though (thankfully) not recently. She has even written about the challenge of getting evangelicals to understand evolution, but that was before her apparent conversation to the religion of Wokeness.

Continue ReadingWhat is Passing for Science These Days at Scientific American . . .

Dorian Abbott Offers Advice on How to Survive an Academic Witchhunt

Dorian Abbott's job as professor of geophysics was threatened at the University of Chicago for insisting that hiring decisions should be based on merit. He gives this overview of the situation at Quillette:

In the fall of 2020, I became the target of a cancellation campaign after I’d suggested that the best policy for a university seeking to support underrepresented groups, while staying true to its mission of producing knowledge, is to ensure that hiring and admissions decisions are based on merit. It’s an idea that directly reflects bedrock principles advanced during the Civil Rights movement, and which are still supported by a large majority of Americans. But to the mob, I was just an irredeemable enemy of progress and social justice. As part of the now-standard playbook, my attackers formed a Twitter mob and wrote a denunciatory public letter, cynically misrepresenting my views, demanding that my research and teaching at the University of Chicago be restricted, and urging that my department formally denounce me. Fortunately, at a crucial juncture in the proceedings, the Free Speech Union launched a change.org petition in my support, which was signed by more than 13,000 people. (The list probably includes many readers of this essay. Thank you so much for your support!) My university president, Robert Zimmer, subsequently issued a strong statement defending freedom of expression on campus. As a result, I seem to have survived my cancellation.
The full article is titled: "‘More Weight’: An Academic’s Guide to Surviving Campus Witch Hunts."

The brunt of his article consists of strategies for maintaining one's job when threatened by Woke mobs:

Love the people attacking you. Remember that they are human beings.

Determination:

Note that determination does not mean responding to every person attacking you. Many of the people who join a mob take the view that anyone who disagrees with them is presumptively evil, and they will not be interested in facts or reason. Once you realize that you are dealing with someone in this category, I recommend not engaging with them, especially on social media. Just let it go, continue to put your message out in a positive way, and move on to people interested in a discussion.
Courage: "The lesson is that a mob is a crowd of people who have lost their individuality in a frenzy of group madness, but who can be shocked back to their senses if you stand up to them with courage."

Support: Work as best you can with your organization. Also, "So get in touch with organizations such as the Free Speech Union, Quillette, Heterodox Academy, and FIRE, which can help rally some troops to support you."

Perspective: "One exercise that might help is to play out in your mind all of the negative scenarios you can imagine and show yourself that you can survive them."

Abbott ends his article cautioning that we might need to pick our battles, but suggesting that those in tenured faculty positions have a special responsibility for standing up to the Woke mobs.

Continue ReadingDorian Abbott Offers Advice on How to Survive an Academic Witchhunt

Abigail Shrier Discusses the Fact-Checking of her Opinion on White House Transgender Policy

Apparently, one can have a false opinion these days. Abigail Shrier explains in this Tweet Thread.

For the fallout, consider Shrier's additional tweets on this thread, including the following:

Continue ReadingAbigail Shrier Discusses the Fact-Checking of her Opinion on White House Transgender Policy

Camille Paglia: How Postmodernism (Woke ideology) is Destroying Education

I just finished reading Camille Paglia's essay, "Free Speech and the Modern Campus," from a collection of her prior writings, a book titled Provocations."  This essay takes aim at practices that were once called "Political Correctness," which now fall under the description of excesses of the Woke or Wokeness.  Paglia begins her essay by recounting how and why many colleges and universities founded niche studies departments, such as women's studies. Colleges made the mistake of allowing these departments to serve as singularities, unengaged with traditional core studies of, for example, history or psychology. These departments

were so hastily constructed in the 1970s, a process that not only compromised professional training in those fields over time but also isolated them in their own worlds and thus ultimately lessened their wider cultural impact.. . . Working on campus only with the like-minded, they treat dissent as a mortal offense that must be suppressed, because it threatens their entire career history and world-view. The ideology of those new programs and departments, predicated on victimology, has scarcely budged since the 1970s.

These new departments confused scholarship with ideology. They became like churches:

Teaching and research must strive to remain objective and detached. The teacher as an individual citizen may and should have strong political convictions and activities outside the classroom, but in the classroom, he or she should never take ideological positions without at the same time frankly acknowledging them as opinion to the students and emphasizing that all students are completely free to hold and express their own opinions on any issue, no matter how contested, from abortion, homosexuality, and global warming to the existence of God . . .

A familiar trio of Continental philosophers was carted into these niche curricula:

The Derrida and Lacan fad was followed by the cult of Michel Foucault, who remains a deity in the humanities but whom I regard as a derivative game-player whose theories make no sense whatever about any period preceding the Enlightenment. The first time I witnessed a continental theorist discoursing with professors at a Yale event, I said in exasperation to a fellow student, “They’re like high priests murmuring to each other.”

At p. 379, Paglia explains the main problem with poststructuralism:

Post-structuralism, in asserting that language forms reality, is a reactionary reversal of the authentic revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, when the arts had turned toward a radical liberation of the body and a reengagement with the sensory realm. By treating language as the definitive force in the world—a foolish thesis that could easily be refuted by the dance, music, or visual arts majors in my classes—poststructuralism set the groundwork for the present campus impasse where offensive language is conflated with material injury and alleged to have a magical power to create reality. Furthermore, poststructuralism treats history as a false narrative and encourages a random, fragmented, impressionistic approach that has given students a fancy technique but little actual knowledge of history itself.

Another problem with political correctness is the inability to interpret the significance of events in the context of the time period in which they occurred (see here for a recent example):

The problem of political correctness is intensified by the increasing fixation of humanities and even history departments on “presentism,”that is, a preoccupation with our own modem period.

What are the solutions? Paglia offers three:

[E]ducators must first turn away from the sprawling cafeteria menu of over-specialized electives and return to broad survey courses based in world history and culture, proceeding chronologically from antiquity to modernism. Students desperately need a historical framework to understand both past and present.

Second, universities should sponsor regular public colloquia on major topics where both sides of sensitive, hot-button controversies are frilly discussed. Any disruptions of free speech at such forums must be met with academic sanctions.

[C]olleges and universities must stay totally out of the private social lives of students.The intrusive paternalism o f American colleges in this area is an unacceptable infringement of student rights.If a crime is committed on campus, it must be reported to the police.There is no such thing as a perfectly “safe space” in real life. Risk and danger are intrinsic to human existence.

Continue ReadingCamille Paglia: How Postmodernism (Woke ideology) is Destroying Education

San Francisco Schools Will No Longer be Named After Racists Like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington

This is "progress" for San Francisco Board of Education." Per the article, it will cost $10,000 to rename each school. Excerpt from the NYT:

Following the unrest in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, which led to the killing of a protester by a white supremacist, the board moved in 2018 to establish a commission to evaluate renaming schools to “condemn any symbols of white supremacy and racism,” said Gabriela López, the board president.

The commission had decided that schools named after figures who fit the following criteria would be renamed: “engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

My question: How many of members of the SF BD of Educ thought this was a ridiculous idea, yet sat on their hands in silence, afraid to speak out?

Continue ReadingSan Francisco Schools Will No Longer be Named After Racists Like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington