About Team-Thinking

On this issue, I agree (more or less) with Helen Pluckrose. I consciously strive to gather my information and do my thinking à la carte. No team-thinking for me, because hypocrisy is ubiquitous. For me, it's issue by issue, person by person. This makes gathering and evaluating news stories much harder than permanently signing up for, e.g., e.g., NYT/NPR/CNN or e.g., FOX//Drudge/National Review. I admire Helen's courage, intellect, kind-heartedness and humility. She recently founded Counterweight, which I can generally support (but not always!).

I find this position easy to adapt, given that the first 20 years of my life forced me to develop deeply rooted defenses against my father trying to force/humiliate me into declaring allegiance to the Catholic Church as the "one true holy apostolic church.  Lots more on my journey here, in a five-part series I titled "Mending Fences." I think and hope that I am immune to anyone trying to get me to express belief in anything based on social pressure.  It has been a long, sometimes difficult, journey, given the anger many people express when you don't show loyalty to their "team."  That, however, is a small price to pay for the ability to look in the mirror and not see a sell-out.

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Jeopardy’s Wokeness Contagion

From the NYT, a Jeopardy story of liberal contagion following a contestant gesturing that he won three games with three fingers:

A full 595 former contestants eventually signed on to the final draft of the letter, asking why “Jeopardy!” hadn’t edited out the moment. It went on to proclaim: “We cannot stand up for hate. We cannot stand next to hate. We cannot stand onstage with something that looks like hate.”

.    .    .

So the element of this story that interests me most is how the beating heart of nerdy, liberal fact-mastery can pump blood into wild social media conspiracy, and send all these smart people down the sort of rabbit hole that leads other groups of Americans to believe that children are being transported inside refrigerators. And, I wanted to know, how they could remain committed to that point of view in the absence of any solid evidence.

What caused this insanity? It's a well-written article by Ben Smith, with applications far beyond Jeopardy. One of the reasons: "Social media turns just about everything into a kind of team sport, including analyzing the ills of social media."

This is a clear example of liberal contagion, in a world filled with both liberal and conservative contagion.

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The Most Bigoted Book . . .

From Titania McGrath, dedicated to keeping us all on track: And if you have any friends who are teetering from this vile poison spewed by dictionaries, by all means keep them away from Colin Wright:

Wright is a bad person because Wright lives in a fact-based world and reports on articles like this, which contain facts:

From the Daily Mail:

A student who said women were born with female genitals and the difference in physical strength between men and women 'was a fact' is facing disciplinary action by her university.

Lisa Keogh, 29, who studies law at Abertay University in Dundee was reported to university chiefs by her classmates after she said that women were not as physically strong as men.

The mature student, who is in her final year, is now facing a formal investigation by the university for the alleged 'offensive' and 'discriminatory' comments.

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Money Talks When Apple Starts Swinging the Hatchet

Apple fired Advertising Platform Specialist Antonio Garcia Martinez two days ago, convicting him of insensitivity to women after cherry picking a few sentences from his universally acclaimed 5-year old book, Chaos Monkeys, and giving those sentences the least-charitable readings possible. Apple announced:

At Apple, we have always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace where everyone is respected and accepted. Behavior that demeans or discriminates against people for who they are has no place here.

In the meantime (as Matt Taibbi points out), Dr. Dre remains on Apple's board despite authoring "such classics as “Bitches Ain’t Shit” and “Lyrical Gangbang,” who is also the subject of such articles as “Here’s What’s Missing from Straight Outta Compton: Me and the Other Women Dr. Dre Beat Up.” It sure helps to be a billionaire when you are hoping that your employer will stand up to the Woke mobs.

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Mount Allison University Suspends Tenured Professor for Disagreeing With Woke Narrative on her Personal Blog

What are the horrible things that tenured Professor Rima Azar stated on her personal blog?

When a local activist named Husoni Raymond opined that New Brunswick is “systemically racist,” Azar applied her comparative understanding of Lebanon and Canada to argue that, in relative terms, her adopted home isn’t racist at all, but is rather “a young country” that “wants to save the world.” (As evidence, she pointed to the fact that Raymond himself had been lavishly honoured for his anti-racism work, which is hardly consistent with white supremacism.) In a similar vein, she has argued down activists who claim Canada is a “patriarchy” afflicted by rape culture. If you want to see “real rape culture,” she’s noted archly, take a look at “ISIS practices in Syria.” Azar also has called Black Lives Matter a “radical” movement, which is an unfashionable thing to say, but isn’t remotely inaccurate given BLM’s stated goals of creating a “global liberation movement” that will “dismantle capitalism,” abolish prisons, and erase national borders.

Who is Professor Azar?  Jonathan Kay describes her in a March 2, 2021 post at National Post:

When Azar eventually immigrated to Canada, she developed expertise in helping parents who face complex child-care needs, and has gone on to found or supervise numerous acclaimed support programs in New Brunswick. In her personal life, Azar is a foster parent, a polyglot (Arabic is her mother tongue), and a blogger who writes passionately about classical liberal values and Lebanon’s ongoing challenges. She’s also a proud Canadian — writing that the Maple Leaf “means the world to me,” even while still being “moved” by the sight of a Lebanese flag. If you know of a more intersectional Canadian, I’d like to meet them.

Professor Azar has now been suspended by her University. Because she dares to express her own thoughts, she will also be required to take equity, diversity and inclusion training. On her blog she mentions that she has set up a GoFundMe account to pay for her legal defense. She states:

 I now have been suspended from my job without pay, based on false allegations. We are in a pandemic and times are tough on all. This is why your support means the world to me. I am so grateful for my union’s continuous support in dealing with Mount Allison University. However, the reputational damage already done (defamation, attack to my character) has implications beyond my employer and workplace. I will use the funds raised to cover my personal legal defence fund. I love my students, job, colleagues, university, province, and beautiful country beyond words. My story is beyond academic freedom. I precisely chose to move to Canada for democracy/freedom of expression.  Why are we doing this to ourselves?

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