It's amazing to watch the "progressive" media slip away and abandon one of the biggest First Amendment threats of our time. Not too long ago, progressive media outlets gave full-throated support for Assange. Are there any progressive voices still speaking out for a pardon for Julian Assange? There would be, except that thinking has clearly become a team sport these days.
Woke-thought, especially in the form of Critical Race Theory, has drilled deeply into many of our primary sense-making institutions: schools, government, corporations and news media. Cancel culture is its enforcement arm as you can read in many places including this website. Wokesters refuse to subject their ideas to public scrutiny, as Coleman Hughes recently discovered. How do we turn this ship around? How do we publicly and effectively shame people whose version of morality is to shove each other into color categories and treat some of those colors with scorn?
How do we pressure those who espouse these types of principles? Is there an end in sight?
James Lindsay, who created the above graphic (and who created the website New Discourses) recently wrote an article titled, "Wokeness will bring a second Renaissance," in which he argues that artists have just about had their fill of all of this political correctness:
What is it that artists across the arts have had enough of? Woke colonization. Woke censorship. Woke culture. Woke hegemony. Woke complaining. Woke negativity about everything. Wokeness. Period.Artists are telling me more and more frequently that they’ve had it with Woke control over their professions and their outlets. This is an interesting circumstance because artists who feel silenced, repressed, controlled, and dominated will, as reliably as day follows night in the morning, begin to produce incredible works of powerful, defiant, and subversive art. They will make art that will communicate the injustice of this oppression in a way that does something no amount of intellectual explaining can possibly do. They will make art to connect with people—and to connect people to the oppression they sense but don’t know how to make sense of. . . . What I’m hearing from artists is a cry to produce the beautiful again. The stirring. The unsettling. The hilarious. To get out of this stifling environment and throw off stagnation.
James argues that art is organic and artists are unstoppable. He believes that help is on the way in the form of art..
I'm more than ready for this to happen.
In his recent article, "Is Sex 'Assigned' at Birth?," evolutionary biologist Colin Wright criticizes Planned Parenthood's claims that a doctor "assigns" a baby's sex at the time of birth. As Wright points out, a doctor merely notices and reports the baby's sex. Planned Parenthood's website makes as much sense as claiming that an obstetrician "assigns" a baby's two-leggedness or "assigns" the eye color of a newborn.
There's good reason to believe that Planned Parenthood intentionally misused the word "assign," given that this word appears 19 times on Planned Parenthood's highly problematic webpage, "Sex and Gender Identity." Here is an excerpt:
Sex is a label — male or female — that you’re assigned by a doctor at birth based on the genitals you’re born with and the chromosomes you have. It goes on your birth certificate . . . . Instead of saying “biological sex,” some people use the phrase “assigned male at birth” or “assigned female at birth.” This acknowledges that someone (often a doctor) is making a decision for someone else. The assignment of a biological sex may or may not align with what’s going on with a person’s body, how they feel, or how they identify.
Wright's article is a patient and focused response to yet another instance where activists are 
attempting to use ideology to rewrite biology. Wright's counter-measure consists of serving up the kind of accurate biology lesson that most high school science teachers have uncontroversially delivered over many decades. That lesson goes something like this: "Here's a male mouse. Notice the penis. Here's a female mouse. Notice the vagina. Here's a diagram of a male human and a female human. Same thing. Quiz tomorrow."
Real-life biology is something that many Critical Justice Activists have self-trained themselves to find irrelevant. They also find real-life biology incomplete--those biology books keep forgetting to talk about feelings when they discuss gonads! Many of today's Woke students don't like hearing any blunt talk that they are human animals or that it is Nature (not a doctor) that calls the shots regard to a baby's sex. Wright explains:
The claim that biological sex is “assigned at birth” is very misleading as it draws a false equivalence between transgender and intersex people, and suggests that identity, as opposed to reproductive anatomy, defines one’s biological sex.Rather than being “assigned” at birth, sex is simply recorded at birth using genitalia as a very reliable predictor of underlying gonad type. The fact that doctors, on very rare occasions, are wrong in their assessment does not therefore immediately call everyone’s sex into question.
Planned Parenthood employs many highly educated and careful writers, so the wording on its website was not an accident. Planned Parenthood consciously decided to use the word "assigned" to falsely suggest that arrogant doctors steeped in scientism shoot from the hip whenever they designate a baby's sex. That's how I read their ideologically-laced webpage. They take this position despite the fact that the sex of almost every baby is determined about nine months prior to the birth. And once the baby is born, figuring out whether Nature chose pink versus blue is truly simple. Truly, a doctor merely needs to take a quick look. This process of sexing was perfected thousands of years before the patriarchy got around to inventing the multitudes of modern baby doctors, those people who arrogantly determine one's sex by looking at gonads.
I can feel Wright's frustration as he spells out the facts of life for activists (as well as for those of us who are unnerved by the vocal Woke mobs). This effort by Wright is merely the most recent of a series of basic sex-ed lessons he has been offering (see also here and here). It's unfortunate that any of his articles were necessary, but I'm relieved to see that he is out there offering accurate biology bit by bit, to try to keep us all on the rails.
What is my main reason for writing this article? Because new parents should never be made to feel any hesitation or shame when they announce "It's a girl!" or "It's a boy!" We have all heard many people announcing and celebrating the sex of their newborns. On every occasion that I've heard such an announcement, I'm certain that there was no hint of any animosity toward people who have undergone the process of transgendering. Announcing a baby's sex is always a perfectly appropriate thing to do, no footnotes and no asterisks needed. These joyous moments have no relevance to the hyper-sensitive feelings of transgender activists. In fact, if there were activists in my presence right now, I would urge them to each put one finger in one their own ears so the following information might stick: "When new parents joyously exclaim 'It's a girl!', this is an undeniable biological fact that has absolutely nothing to do with you. It's about the baby."
Since Planned Parenthood twice mentioned "intersex" on the above webpage, it's worth asking how often doctors get it wrong when they tell the parents what sex they have observed in the newborn baby. The answer: almost never. As Wright discusses, the reproductive anatomy of a baby is unambiguously male or female over 99.98 percent of the time. Many activists seem to think that it is insensitive to bluntly announce the sex of a baby because of "intersex." They claim this even when only 2 out of 10,000 newborns are diagnosed with intersex conditions. They claim this despite the fact that intersex conditions have absolutely nothing to do with the issue of transgendering. I suspect that transgender activists keep bringing up intersex conditions because it confuses and extends what would otherwise be swift endings to bad arguments.
Planned Parenthood, an organization claiming an expertise in medical matters, needs to get its medical facts right, then revise its webpage accordingly. There's a lot of work to do. One thing they desperately need to be add is this: For the great majority of people, biological sex robustly aligns with gender. This fact is not something shameful, insensitive or mean-spirited. It accurately describes most human beings, except in Planned Parenthood's namby-pamby world of biology where this is a fact that must not be uttered. [More . . . ]
Earlier this evening, I attended the five year celebration of Heterodox Academy (HxA). The lineup of illustrious speakers included:
We see the following threats to Open Inquiry within the academy today:
Across the political spectrum, we see protest and backlash against scholars that threaten a preferred narrative.
Expanding bureaucracies at many colleges and universities subject ever more of campus life to administrative oversight — and encourage people to resolve disputes through reporting, investigations, and academic reprisals rather than good-faith debate and discussion.
Concerns about placating donors, ensuring high enrollments or positive course evaluations can distort research and pedagogy — especially for the growing numbers of contingent faculty whose careers and livelihoods can be threatened by a single upset student, donor or colleague. Contingent faculty are statistically more likely to be women, people of color, and other equity seeking groups whose numbers are underrepresented in tenure track positions.
Many fear losing the esteem of, or being ostracized by, one’s peers for saying the “wrong” thing. Even in the absence of formal sanctions, social and professional isolation can make academic life difficult — and many prefer to self-censor rather than risk it. This is a significant concern among students, faculty, and administrators: our 2019 Campus Expression Survey found that roughly half of students, regardless of their political ideology, agreed that the climate on their campus prevents people from saying things because others may find them offensive.
What does HXA propose as a solution to this problem?
To improve the quality of research and education in universities by increasing open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement. We aspire to create college classrooms and campuses that welcome diverse people with diverse viewpoints and that equip learners with the habits of heart and mind to engage that diversity in open inquiry and constructive disagreement.
We see an academy eager to welcome professors, students, and speakers who approach problems and questions from different points of view, explicitly valuing the role such diversity plays in advancing the pursuit of knowledge, discovery, growth, innovation, and the exposure of falsehoods.
Heterodox Academy (HxA) is a nonpartisan collaborative of thousands of professors, administrators, and students committed to enhancing the quality of research and education by promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in institutions of higher learning. All of our members embrace a set of norms and values, which we call “The HxA Way.”
All of HxA's members embrace the following statement:
I support open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in research and education.
HXA proposes the "HxA Way" as the best way to support open inquiry. The four elements of the HxA Way are:
Who would have ever thought we would need an organization to help us learn how to talk to each other on important issues at colleges and universities? Well, we do. That's why I joined HxA tonight in my capacity as a law professor. I'm looking forward to getting increasingly involved in all the HxA does.
Note: There is some overlap in the concerns and missions of HxA and FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). If you support one of these organizations, you will probably also support the mission of the other.
People in STL call it "Bellefontaine Cemetery" but on its website you'll see this: "Bellefontaine Cemetery is a nonprofit, non-denominational cemetery and arboretum . . ." I know it best as an extraordinary place for getting lost on feng shui inner roads and for reveling at the 5,000 trees. And for reading the 87,000 graves and monuments for the meagre clues they offer about those who used to walk and talk like you and me.
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