More Concerns About that Well-Known Racist: Abraham Lincoln

I'm channelling the outrage of Thomas Chatterton Williams here. I agree with him completely. If this country can't have statues of Abraham Lincoln, can we have any statues at all?  Chicago now takes its place next to San Francisco as excelling in Woke-purity testing.

We would see a tsunami of opposition to this Chicago Commission's suggestion to remove Lincoln statues except good-hearted intelligent people are afraid that they will be called "racist." It's time to speak up when we hear nonsense like this anti-Lincoln nonsense. It's time to be called names. It's time to turn to put the Woke neoracists on the defensive. Wokeness = neoracism = "anti-racism" = racism = ignorance.

Continue ReadingMore Concerns About that Well-Known Racist: Abraham Lincoln

The Entirely Predictable Result of “Abolishing” the Police in Minneapolis

The statistics have been clear and unwavering for many years: Fewer police on the streets means more violent crime, young Black men will disproportionately be the homicide victims of this street violence and very few of these deaths will have anything to do with the police.

Minneapolis is finally figuring out the obvious, as described through a series of headlines assembled by Melissa Chen, with a cadenza by Peter Boghossian.

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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.

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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