Quotulatiousness

January 2, 2022

In 1978, E.O. Wilson was “the only scientist in modern times to be physically attacked for an idea”

Filed under: History, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the current year, I suspect many, many scientists have been physically attacked for advocating unpopular ideas. In Quillette, Alice Dreger publishes an interview she had with Wilson in 2009:

Edward O. Wilson in February 2003.
PLoS image by Jim Harrison via Wikimedia Commons.

Alice Dreger: I know you’ve spoken about it many times before, but I would like to begin by asking you about the session at the 1978 AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science] conference during which you were rushed on the stage and a protester emptied a pitcher of water onto your head. By all accounts, the talk you then gave was very measured. How on Earth were you able to remain so calm after being physically assaulted?

Edward O. Wilson: I think I may have been the only scientist in modern times to be physically attacked for an idea. The idea of a biological human nature was abhorrent to the demonstrators and was, in fact, too radical at the time for a lot of people — probably most social scientists and certainly many on the far-Left. They just accepted as dogma the blank-slate view of the human mind — that everything we do and think is due to contingency, rather than based upon instinct like bodily functions and the urge to keep reproducing. These people believe that everything we do is the result of historical accidents, the events of history, the development of personality through experience.

That was firmly believed in 1978 by a wide part of the population, but particularly by the political Left. And it was thought at the time that raising the specter of a biological basis for human behavior was not only wrong, but a justification for war, sexism, and racism. Biological gender differences could justify sexism, and any imputation that we evolved a human nature, or that human qualities might differ from one race to another, was dangerously racist.

So, furious ideologically based opposition had built up in 1978. That opposition had been fanned by a small number of academics including [paleontologist] Stephen Jay Gould and [evolutionary biologist] Richard Lewontin and two or three others on the Harvard faculty who thought this was a very dangerous idea and said so. These people helped organize the so-called “Science for the People” movement, or the branch of it called the “Sociobiology Study Group”. Their purpose was to discredit me personally for having brought up such a dangerous and destructive idea.

In fact, at that meeting, InCAR — the International Committee Against Racism — held up signs condemning me and sociobiology and racism in general. Of course, racism never even entered my thinking in developing these ideas. Anyway, after they dumped the water on me, amazingly, they returned to their seats while I was drying myself off. A couple of people then made short speeches — most notably Stephen Gould, of all people, the guy whose agitation and inflammatory essays had been partly responsible for all this. He addressed the demonstrators and said, in effect, that while he fully understood their motivation, violence was not the right way to achieve their goals.

As for me, I don’t know why, but I just get calm under a lot of stress. I’ve been in that sort of stressful situation many times, especially in the field. I started thinking to myself, this is probably going to be an historical moment, and it is very interesting. I wasn’t in the least doubt that my science was correct. I knew this was a kind of aberration. I understood the source because I knew the people who had been the chief thinkers, the ideological leaders. An astonishingly good percentage of them were on the faculty at Harvard. I wasn’t concerned this would come to anything in the long term.

So, someone found a paper towel and I dried my head. As soon as things settled down, I just read my talk. I knew things were going to work out — there was so much evidence accumulated already for a somewhat programmed human brain. By then, it was already coming from many directions, including genetics and neuroscience. There was no doubt about where things would go. There may be hold-outs but the inevitable conclusion from neuroscience and anthropology and genetics is for this way of thinking. [American anthropologist] Nap[oleon] Chagnon was present and he was certainly a leader in thinking about human nature and how valuable it is, and what its motivations are, by studying groups like the Yanomamö.

I knew history was on my side. I was young enough that I thought I would live through a good part of it. I was annoyed! But I wasn’t under stress in an extreme way. Before going home, I went to the next session, at which an anthropologist made the mistake of stating that I believe every cultural difference has a genetic basis, so that I am a racist. Of course, I rebutted that, but that was the kind of thing being exchanged at that meeting.

December 31, 2021

QotD: Justin Trudeau … “virtue-signalling made flesh”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Are there any photos of Canadian PM Justin Trudeau where he isn’t in blackface? I’m struggling to remember the last time I saw one. There he was again yesterday, this wokest of world leaders, this darling of centrist Twitter, covered in black facepaint and sticking his tongue out. You know, like those dark-skinned foreigners do. The pic is from an Arabian Nights fancy-dress party – man, the bourgeoisie are weird – that Trudeau attended in 2001, when he was 29. Twenty-nine. If you’re on the cusp of 30, at the dawn of this new millennium, and you still don’t know it’s wrong to don blackface, there’s something wrong with you.

This is only the latest in a long line of Trudeau blackface scandals, of course. The man appears to have spent a significant chunk of his younger years blacked up. There are three blackface incidents that we know of. There could be more. As one headline put it: “Trudeau says he can’t recall how many times he wore blackface make-up.” Imagine blacking up so often you can’t remember all the times you did it. Trudeau’s defenders say it was youthful daftness. Really? I don’t know a single person who has ever blacked up. I know people who have done daft things, of course. But not that.

Trudeau’s penchant for blackface is very odd. He puts it down to the fact that he has always been “more enthusiastic about costumes than is sometimes appropriate“. Riiight. It is mostly a matter for Mr Trudeau and his conscience, of course, as to why he was black-painting his face – and, in one incident, his tongue too – well into his twenties. But it’s a matter for all of us who inhabit the online world as to why Trudeau has never been cancelled, or even seriously threatened with cancellation, for doing something that would be ferociously denounced as racist if anyone else on earth had done it.

Brendan O’Neill, “The never-ending ridiculousness of Justin Trudeau”, Spiked, 2021-09-21.

December 17, 2021

QotD: The Kafkatrap that is known as “white feminism”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There is a logical fallacy called the Kafka Trap. It describes the condition of always being wrong. If you are accused of something, and you deny it, that denial is taken as an admission of guilt; only a guilty party would go out of their way to deny an allegation of wrongdoing. Alternatively, if you say nothing in the face of the allegation, that’s also an admission of guilt: your silence means you have accepted the allegation.

Many describe Franz Kafka’s disenchanted fables as tragic. And this is certainly true. But they are also farcical. To watch someone being relentlessly wrong can be grimly enjoyable — as long as you’re not the person in question.

The term white feminism, as it is commonly used today, is a classic example of the Kafka Trap. If you show too much interest in the lives of people of colour, you risk being accused of white saviourism — which is another way of saying you have a suspiciously condescending attitude to people of colour. But if you don’t show enough interest, you are insufficiently intersectional. You only care about the white, middle-class cisgendered women in your social circle.

White feminism is a classic example of the Kafka Trap because whatever you do is either too much or not enough. You are never right.

Tomiwa Owolade, “The problem with white saviours”, UnHerd.com, 2021-09-12.

December 15, 2021

QotD: Suppressing intellectual heresy

Filed under: Books, Education, Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Middlebury students acted to prevent Charles Murray from speaking on the relatively benign subject of the travails of the white working class because he had previously written work that some have categorized as racist. That label meant that they need not grapple with the substance of his earlier book, but it also meant that as a known heretic his subsequent work was likewise tainted.

The young people at Middlebury who shouted down Charles Murray and assaulted a faculty member who had tried to engage him in civil debate were, in effect, suppressing the ideas of a heretic. After all, a heretic’s ideas are too dangerous to be heard.

Dangerous ideas are, of course, interesting ideas, especially to young people. When we fail to address dangerous ideas in our courses, we add to their mystique. When activists shout down or assault heretical speakers they send two messages. The first and intended message is a display of righteous disapproval. The other, unintended message, is that there is something so menacing about the idea being expressed that it cannot simply be laughed off or even argued with, rather it cannot be allowed to be spoken.

Consider how that looks to someone who is starting to question the premises of the liberal orthodoxy on race, gender, diversity and so on. Why, our alt-right curious person might wonder, are there some ideas that are so laughably false that one need not even mount a counter argument (a flat earth or the financial benefits of college athletics), some ideas that are considered contentious but still open to debate (supply-side economics), and some ideas that are so outré that they can only be met with back turning, shouting, or by punches to the face?

Might it be, our waverer must wonder, that these people don’t want me to hear this idea because they don’t have a good answer to it?

Erik Gilbert, “Liberal Orthodoxy and the New Heresy”, Quillette, 2019-02-04.

December 12, 2021

“[T]oday’s antiracism paradoxically requires the crudest of racist categories to justify and explain itself”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Sullivan on the racism of modern “anti-racist” movements and his hope that Hispanic Americans may provide a way out of the current political deadlock:

Of all the acronyms, euphemisms and sophisms pioneered by critical theory, one of the most revealing is the term “black and brown people”. You hear it all the time now. Whether it’s about “the lack of Black and brown representation in Hollywood”, vaccine hesitancy in “Black and brown neighborhoods in large cities”, the right to vote for “Black and brown people”, or “allyship between Black and brown people”, the “B&b” formula is now yet another ubiquitous media virtue-signal. It’s subtler than some others. It doesn’t shriek woke like “BIPOC”; it isn’t as instantly risible as “2SLGBTQIA+”; it gives “Black” a Capital Letter, and “brown” feels a bit like a lower-case add-on — but at least it uses actual English words, and doesn’t end in an X.

Still: what does it tell you that a staggering and brilliant array of totally different ethnicities, races, religions, histories and cultures can now routinely be reduced to just two drab colors?

I think it speaks to two things. The first is that today’s antiracism paradoxically requires the crudest of racist categories to justify and explain itself. A whole kaleidoscope of immigrant difference — from Kurds and Mexicans and Somalis to Dominicans, Chileans, Nigerians, and Pakistanis — has now been turned into one monochrome racial “brown” — just to fit into an oppressor/oppressed, white/black narrative.

Equally, a diverse African diaspora — ranging from Nigerian immigrants to descendants of Southern slaves to biracial men and women with mainly European ancestry who go back to this country’s miscegenated origins — is now just “Black”. And this new racial unit has one politics: left-Democrat. Individuals disappear; diversity of opinion within groups evaporate; all that matters is a single skin color and oppression.

The second aspect of critical theory that “B&b” helps reveal is that the crude binary of “black” and “white” simply has less salience with every passing day, as more and more races, ethnicities and cultures complicate and enrich our society, and render it structurally, demographically and culturally unrecognizable from even the recent past. To give one example: 60 years ago, four percent of Americans approved of inter-racial marriage; today, it’s 94 percent. Or check out the rapid decline in the “white Christian” share of the population — from 80 percent in 1996 1976 to 44 percent today. Look around you and you’ll see how the crude rubric of “white supremacy” is, in fact, wildly out of date.

This is why so many of the most passionately woke are so obsessed with history in America, and the further back the better, as the 1619 Project shows. The past is a world they are much more comfortable in than the present, a place where the racial divide was infinitely simpler, and racial inequality both brutal and actively enforced by the government. Before the Civil Rights Act in 1964, before mass non-white immigration began in 1965, before mass non-white illegal immigration since the 1990s, the “white supremacy” rubric had some lingering traction.

But in the 21st Century, it’s been hopelessly compounded by layer upon layer of mass immigration from every conceivable corner of the planet. The Latino population in the US is now larger than the African-American one; and Asians, of many different varieties, are now immigrating in higher numbers than Latinos. Before too long, the black/white dynamic may disappear into the multi-colored, multi-hued background entirely.

December 11, 2021

Pretendians in Canadian academia may resemble “those legendary Klan gatherings where everyone is an uncover FBI agent”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

After recounting the rise and fall of Carrie Bourassa, Ed West looks at other examples of white people deliberately passing themselves off as members of First Nations groups and other disadvantaged groups:

Carrie Bourassa with media.
Lead photo in Geoff Leo’s article for the CBC – https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/carrie-bourassa-indigenous

… then some serious allegations came to light casting doubt on Morning Star Bear’s fitness for office: Bourassa, it turned out, was white. Her forebears were all Russian, Czech and Polish farmers, who while the Metis struggled with the arrival of the Europeans were back in Tsarist Russia, living lives of unbridled white privilege as agricultural workers.

The response was merciless anger. Bourassa’s colleague Winona Wheeler, an associate professor of Indigenous Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that what she did was “abuse” and “theft”, “colonialism in its worst form and it’s a gross form of white privilege.”

Another called her “the modern-day Grey Owl” in reference to the famous early 20th century English conservationist who had managed to convince the world he was Native American, rather than being Archibald from Hastings.

Bourassa’s outing was followed last weekend by that of Jessica Bardill, an “indigenous” language speaker at Montreal University who was reportedly suspended because of doubts about her race. And who could have suspected she was white?

Bourassa and Bardill are hardly exceptional: the past two years have seen at least half a dozen similar racial unmaskings, almost all female academics. Is this the result of the strange racial spoils system created by affirmative action, or does it reflect the cultural emptiness felt by some North Americans, the unbearableness whiteness of being?

Among them is Suzy Kies, an indigenous “expert” in – yet again – Canada, on whose advice a Catholic school district burned 30 library books about indigenous people, removing another 4,700. Kies had become quite a prominent figure on all matters indigenous; again, how could they have possibly noticed?

One suspects that a conference of Canada’s indigenous educators would turn out like those legendary Klan gatherings where everyone is an uncover FBI agent, or that meeting of Holocaust survivor memoir writers where both were fake.

Many of these “indigenous” experts had risen far by telling white liberals what they wanted to hear, confirming their worldview. The same was true of @Sciencing_Bi, who enthralled Twitter last spring with her powerful denunciations of sexual misconduct in higher education. The mysterious young woman had grown up in Alabama, a member of the Hopi tribe, but had “fled the south because of their oppression of queer folk”. Sadly, Sciencing Bi contracted Covid in April 2020, having been forced by her cruel university to do in-person teaching just at the point when that issue was becoming a culture war hot topic, and died, quite unusually for someone so young.

December 3, 2021

Australian-American War of 1942 – The Battle of Brisbane

Filed under: Australia, Britain, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 2 Dec 2021

America shares a language and large parts of its culture with Britain and Australia. But when tens of thousands of US troops arrive in 1942, things will be far from smooth. While the alliance remains firm, their soldiers will spend almost as much time fighting each other as they do the Axis.
(more…)

December 1, 2021

“To challenge individualism, we must suspend individual perceptions by exploring our collective racial identity, which is good because by disrupting individual identities, we challenge individualism”

Filed under: Books — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Matt Taibbi reviews Robin DiAngelo’s Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm.

Nice Racism, the booklike product just released by the “Vanilla Ice of Antiracism“, Robin DiAngelo, begins with an anecdote from the author’s past. She’s in college, gone out to a dinner party with her partner, where she discovers the other couple is, gasp, black. “I was excited and felt an immediate need to let them know I was not racist,” she explains, adding: “I proceeded to spend the evening telling them how racist my family was. I shared every racist joke, story, and comment I could remember my family ever making …”

Predictably, her behavior makes the couple uncomfortable, but, “I obliviously plowed ahead, ignoring their signals. I was having a great time regaling them with these anecdotes — the proverbial life of the party!” She goes on:

    My progressive credentials were impeccable: I was a minority myself — a woman in a committed relationship with another woman … I knew how to talk about patriarchy and heterosexism. I was a cool white progressive, not an ignorant racist. Of course, what I was actually demonstrating was how completely oblivious I was.

No kidding. Instead of trying to amp down her racial anxiety out of basic decency, this author fed hers steroids and protein shakes, growing it to brontosaurus size before dressing it in neon diapers and parading it across America for years in a juggernaut of cringe that’s already secured a place as one of the great carnival grifts of all time. Nice Racism, the rare book that’s unreadable and morally disgusting but somehow also important, is the latest stop on the tour.

DiAngelo is a unique writer, being dishonest, dangerous, and moronic in magnificent quantities, probably in that order. If you’re trying, which she clearly isn’t, a good trade rule is, “If you’ve already written a book once, don’t write it again.” Nice Racism is the same book as the 2018 bestseller White Fragility, and by “the same” I don’t mean generally, but word-for-word, line-by-line, chapter-by-chapter the same, a thunderous, admirably brazen exercise in self-plagiarism. Can you guess which of these passages is from Nice Racism, and which from White Fragility?

a) Individualism… allows white people to exempt ourselves personally from race-based advantage.

b) To challenge the ideologies of racism such as individualism and color blindness, we as white people must suspend our perception of ourselves as unique and/or outside race.

c) Exploring our collective racial identity interrupts a key privilege of dominance — the ability to see oneself only as an individual.

d) We need to discuss white people as a group — even if doing so jars us — in order to disrupt our unracialized identities … Talking about race and racism in general terms such as white people is constructive for whites because it interrupts individualism.

The first is from Nice Racism, the rest from White Fragility. The last three actually comprise a paragraph that moves in full circle: “To challenge individualism, we must suspend individual perceptions by exploring our collective racial identity, which is good because by disrupting individual identities, we challenge individualism.” A rhetorical palindrome! This isn’t writing, but vomiting up mounds of sentences that mean the same thing and mopping them on the page. Because this author only has two or three ideas — I was going to make a list but I think it stops after “denying racism is evidence of racism” — the effect is disorienting across one book, let alone two.

H/T to K.T. at Ace of Spades H.Q. for the link.

November 25, 2021

Are there any actual First Nations people on government commissions, or are they all Pretendians?

Filed under: Books, Cancon — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

There are few enough opportunities for First Nations people in Canada to be heard and for their efforts to matter on issues of concern to all First Nations people … so why do so many of those positions seem to be held by people who lie about their First Nations ancestry? (The original CBC story is from back in September, but I only found out about it today, with my usual great sense of timing.)

“Book burning” by pcorreia is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Suzy Kies, the co-chair of the Indigenous peoples’ commission of the Liberal Party, has resigned from the position after her claim to Indigenous ancestry was called into question.

Radio-Canada reported on Wednesday that it could not confirm Kies’s claims to Indigenous ancestry. Kies told Radio-Canada in an interview that her father is of European descent and her mother is of Indigenous descent.

“My mother’s family is from several communities,” she told Radio-Canada in an interview in French. “On my grandfather’s side, it’s the Maliseet, from St. Mary’s, New Brunswick, there are also the Laporte who are Innu. And my grandmother was Abenaki from Odanak.”

In Radio-Canada’s reporting, they consulted civil status records and the Abenaki Council of Odanak, who did not find Kies on the band list.

The story came following controversy over a book-burning project at a francophone Ontario school board in which Kies was involved. The event, which was carried out by the Conseil scolaire catholique Providence in 2019, has resurfaced during the election campaign and has attracted condemnation by federal leaders.

The event was meant to promote reconciliation by burning and disposing of books the school board deemed to contain outdated and inappropriate depictions of Indigenous people. The books included novels, comic books and encyclopedias, according to a documentary obtained by Radio-Canada. Nearly 5,000 books were disposed of, but only around 30 were burned.

H/T to halls of macadamia for the link.

Update: A disturbing number of white American college applicants are lying about their racial ancestry to (significantly) improve their chances of being accepted, so I guess Canadian Pretendians are just slightly ahead of the curve:

The survey of 1,250 white college applicants ages 16 and older found that the most popular racial claim was Native American. Out of the 34 percent of white college applicants who lied about their race, 77 percent were accepted.

“It’s the easiest lie to tell because you can’t get caught in it,” said Vijay Jojo Chokal-Ingam, an admissions consultant at SOSAdmissions.com and author of Almost Black: The True Story of How I Got Into Medical School By Pretending to Be Black.

“A lot of people, based on very flimsy reasons, claim to be either African-American, Hispanic or Native American because they know it’s going to improve their chances,” Chokal-Ingam said in an interview with The College Fix.

Though lying on college applications is frowned upon, universities typically do not push back on students about their race. Instead, they accept it regardless of what they look like, he said.

“It’s become a joke,” Chokal-Ingam said.

He cited Senator Elizabeth Warren, who famously “lied about her race to get a faculty position at Harvard.”

“If there was a degree to which people felt guilt about doing that, it died with Warren because the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Washington Post — they all ran to her defense,” he said. “This prompted an ‘if she can do it, I can do it too’ ideology.”

“When President Trump called Senator Elizabeth Warren ‘Pocahontas’, [the media] called him a racist. They said it was a racist thing. On the contrary, I think that he was bringing to attention a very important issue in the field of racial-race relations,” Chokal-Ingam said. “He was making people aware of the fact that people routinely, on a massive scale, lie about their race.”

H/T to Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, who pointed out, “If white supremacy were actually a thing, this wouldn’t be happening”.

November 15, 2021

“That is what I like about you Canadians … you are so ready to admit fault. It is a fine, if dangerous, national characteristic. You are all ashamed.”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

John E. MacKinnon on the world’s first admittedly genocidal, terminally apologetic, “post-national” state … the entity that used to be known as the Dominion of Canada:

During one broadcast, [late CBC Radio host Peter] Gzowski recalled an incident that had occurred at the annual invitational golf tournament he hosted to benefit adult literacy programs across Canada. As one participant, standing next to Gzowski, leaned thoughtfully on his club, another drove a golf cart over his toes. Although it was unclear from the telling whether the cart-driver was American, the first golfer was obviously Canadian, since, shifting gingerly from foot to aching foot, he could only plead, “sorry”. Gzowski shared this anecdote with evident delight, since it struck him as so endearingly, because emblematically, Canadian.

But Gzowski’s soaring contentment with this view of his country and countrymen was no less emblematic. To Canadian nationalists of Gzowski’s era and ilk, the representative Canadian is no hewer of wood or carrier of water, no builder of bridges, roads and railways, no stormer of barricades or keeper of the peace, but a hobbled guest on a verdant fairway, eagerly apologizing for the pleasure of having his toes crushed. “That is what I like about you Canadians,” says Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot in Robertson Davies’s novel The Lyre of Orpheus, “you are so ready to admit fault. It is a fine, if dangerous, national characteristic. You are all ashamed.”

Over the past 200 years, notes Hungarian-born Canadian writer George Jonas, “we have been misled by science. Medicine became our hubris. Having learned to fix appendices, we thought we could fix history.” Today, in Canada, there is no clearer manifestation of this urge to renovate and repair the past than the vogue for apology. And no one has struck this posture of national self-abasement with quite the alacrity of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Just months after taking office, he apologized for the Komagata Maru incident in 1914, in which a ship carrying Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus was sent back to Calcutta, where 20 died in a riot. In 2017, he apologized to Indigenous residential-school survivors in Newfoundland and Labrador, and, just days later, to LGBT Canadians for decades of “state-sponsored, systemic oppression.” A year later, he apologized for the execution, in 1864, of six Tsilhqot’in chiefs over a road-building dispute, and for a government refusal, in June, 1939, to allow into the port of Halifax the MS St. Louis, an ocean liner carrying more than 900 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. In March, 2019, he apologized for the inhumane manner in which Inuit in northern Canada were treated for tuberculosis in the mid-20th century. Two months later, he exonerated Chief Poundmaker of the Poundmaker Cree, apologizing for the Chief’s conviction for treason more than 130 years before. Still at it in the spring of 2021, Trudeau issued a formal apology in the House of Commons for the internment of Italian-Canadians during the Second World War, even though many, it was subsequently revealed, were indeed hardcore fascists, loyal to an enemy in a time of war. Two weeks later, he lowered the Canadian flag for five months to mark the discovery of the remains of Indigenous children who died at residential schools.

In the midst of this flurry of breathy performances, the BBC asked, with more than a touch of arch obviousness, whether the Canadian Prime Minister might not perhaps apologize too much. And yet, in Trudeau, we simply have the apotheosis of that habit of abject contrition celebrated by Gzowskian nationalists. Under his government, it has become fashionable, even necessary, to apologize, not just for egregious historical episodes or policies, but for the existence of Canada itself. In an interview with the New York Times, Trudeau witlessly described the country that had so favoured him through a lifetime of privilege as “post-national”, suggesting that Canada as we know it had somehow served its purpose, extended itself beyond any warrantable use. And recently, not to be outpaced by more current styles of denunciation, he described Canada, “in all our institutions,” as “built around a system of colonialism, of discrimination, of systemic racism.” When China, responding to criticism of its brutal treatment of Muslim Uyghurs, lashed out at Canada for committing “genocide” against its own Indigenous population and subjecting Asian-Canadians to “systemic racism”, Canada’s political class was in no position to quibble — as its prime minister had already muttered his agreement to the claim that he presided over a genocide state.

This note of cringing repentance now echoes in the pronouncements of all of our institutions. No matter how admired our country may remain internationally, no matter how ardently people around the world long to immigrate here for a chance at a better life, our presumptive leaders are eager to scorn Canada as a meagre and regrettable conceit. That the confessional mode they favour has become so prevalent confirms what Christopher Lasch long ago diagnosed as the strain of narcissism that courses through contemporary culture, lending ready appeal to all such facile gestures of self-reproach. There is, indeed, no cagier career move for any Canadian academic, journalist, bureaucrat, or politician these days than to repudiate Canada, and with feeling.

November 10, 2021

The organizational priorities of Canadian universities make for interesting reading

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Education, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay examines the 89-page agenda from a Universities Canada meeting, comparing the issues most people would identify as likely being of high urgency for a gathering of Canadian university administrators with the actual issues the organization considers urgent and important:

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

Last week, 53 top Canadian academic administrators convened in Ottawa for a biannual membership meeting of Universities Canada, a group dedicated to “providing university presidents with a unified voice for higher education.” The 89-page meeting agenda, which was leaked to me after the event, makes for an interesting read.

The pandemic has been a challenging period for Canadian universities, as the adoption of virtual classrooms has caused some families to wonder whether the traditional bricks-and-mortar education model is worth the price. Many Canadian schools are financially dependent on foreign students, an income source that’s now in flux thanks to COVID. In April, Laurentian University in Ontario declared itself insolvent, cut dozens of programs, and laid off about 100 professors — an unprecedented development.

And yet none of these issues is listed on the October 27th Universities Canada meeting agenda. Laurentian University isn’t mentioned at all, in fact. And the only substantive reference to the COVID pandemic consists of an aside to the effect that “women are disproportionately being impacted negatively during the pandemic”. Instead, all of the agenda’s main action items are dedicated to social justice.

The first item updates attendees on Universities Canada’s multi-year effort to draft a statement on “Social Impact Principles”. A subsequent action item details the “Scarborough National Charter”, a document aimed at “mov[ing] from rhetoric to meaningful concrete action to address anti-Black racism and to promote Black inclusion.” There’s also a related item titled “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion,” under which members were asked, by formal motion, to affirm their commitment to an affirmative-action doctrine known as “Inclusive Excellence”.

Later in the document, there appears an action item relating to “Principles of Indigenous Education”, detailing the by-now year-and-a-half-long consultation process aimed at renewing Universities Canada’s original Indigenous Education manifesto (which itself was announced with much fanfare in 2015 after a year of work). Among the proposed editing refinements are that language be added “recognizing [the] intersectionality of Indigenous identities”; and that a new preamble be added “acknowledging that Universities Canada and its member universities are located on Indigenous lands across Turtle Island.” The final version, it’s predicted, will be ready by April 2022.

But the agenda’s real centrepiece is a 46-page standalone report commissioned by Universities Canada, called Building a Race-Conscious Institution: A Guide and Toolkit for University Leaders Enacting Anti-Racist Organizational Change.

The report’s main theme is that university leaders must decisively reject the idea of “colour-blindness” (which the author asserts should properly be termed “colour evasion”) in favour of becoming “race-conscious individuals” who “explicitly reflect on their ethno-racial identity and group membership.” The author also exhorts university presidents to “actively examine their personally mediated racial biases, consider their individual experiences with respect to racism, and acknowledge their relative race-related marginalization or privilege in the larger society.” To persist in colour evasion, the author warns, is to erect “discursive barriers to antiracist organizational change.”

And colour evasion is just one of 10 listed “dominant ideologies and pervasive narratives [that] undermine efforts to counteract racism.” Among the other “barriers” listed by the author are “equal opportunity”, “tradition”, and “tolerance”. The report also contains tangents on “white fragility”, “allyship”, and the “ethics of care” prescribed by “critical feminist and antiracist scholars” — as well as instructions regarding the use of certain words and phrases. For instance: “Representation gaps among students, scholars, and staff in higher education are not ‘achievement’ gaps, but rather ‘opportunity’ gaps.”

October 29, 2021

The “third wave of anti-racist activism”

Filed under: Books, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Jared Marcel Pollen reviews John McWhorter’s new book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America:

McWhorter identifies three waves of anti-racist activism in the United States, the first of which was the fight against slavery and legalized segregation. The second was the struggle against racist attitudes, which sought to instill the idea that racial prejudice was a moral defect. The current strain of anti-racist activism constitutes a “third wave”, and like any movement in an advanced stage, it is characteristically decadent. The Elect’s ideology, like so much contemporary social justice, is a grotesque contest of elite moral exhibitionism, inordinately preoccupied with policing speech and regulating behavior. It is fundamentally performative and, above all, pretentious, in both the etymological sense of the word (to pretend) and in its common usage (attempting to impress).

This approach to battling racism tends to appeal to well-educated white people afflicted by a guilty conscience. The only remedy for them — the load-bearing pillar of white America’s new moral responsibility — is a declaration of one’s own “privilege”. This, McWhorter assures us, is not progress or even compassion, it is a form of self-help. “The issue,” he writes, “is not whether I or anyone else thinks white privilege is real, but what we consider the proper response to it.” [Italics in original.] Privilege is indeed real, and making oneself aware of it is morally important, but when employed as a cudgel, it becomes a monstrous prop.

Encouraging black people to see themselves as perpetual victims, while assigning to white people the task of becoming enlightened enough to recognize their own inherent and irredeemable racism creates a culture of soft-bigotry, furnished by polite lies and low expectations. “White people calling themselves our saviors,” McWhorter writes, “make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species, and teach black people to revel in that status and cherish it as making us special.”

This endless condescension is writ large in DiAngelo’s work, and we can see it in the training seminars now required by many companies, in which things like “logic” and “punctuality” are ascribed to “Whiteness”. Do the people running these seminars really believe that black people can’t be rational and on time? Do they think that science and math are things that only white kids are good at? And, McWhorter asks, if black students perform poorly on standardized tests, is it fair to assume that the test is racist, and should therefore be discontinued, as the Elect now propose? Would it not be better to ensure that those students have access to resources and tutoring? Far from helping anyone, these distortions of essence and aptitude actually hurt the advancement of what is now commonly referred to as “racial equity”.

The goal of third wave anti-racism is ostensibly concerned with “dismantling” racist “structures”, but it is actually an attempt to narrow the discourse and limit the range of honest thought in pursuit of a phony consensus. This is achieved through a ruthless evangelism, which McWhorter manages to condense as follows:

    Battling power relations and their discriminatory effects must be the central focus of all human endeavor, be it intellectual, moral, civic, or artistic. Those who resist this focus, or even evidence insufficient adherence to it, must be sharply condemned, deprived of influence, and ostracized.

For support, McWhorter offers a spate of scandals and PR nightmares that would signal, to an alien observer, a kind of collective insanity or Salem-esque panic. One of the salient and most stupefying examples is the case of Alison Roman, a (now-former) food critic at the New York Times. Roman ran into trouble when she criticized two of her contemporaries — model and food writer Chrissy Teigen, and life coach Marie Kondo — for their hypocritical commercialism. Despite coming from different ethnic backgrounds and cultural milieux (Teigen is half-white and half-Thai and was born in America; Kondo was born and raised in Japan), both are assimilable as “people of color” according to the progressive Weltanschauung, so Roman’s criticism placed her under suspicion. What reason could a white New York Times journalist have for criticizing two non-white celebrities, other than sublimated bigotry?

A few days later, singer Lana Del Rey responded to criticisms of her music’s use of sexual themes by pointing out that plenty of other artists, including Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé, also sing about sex. Del Rey was immediately attacked by social media mobs, who denounced her in an endorphin-rush of self-righteousness. These two cases make the Elect’s devotion to rooting out racial bias seem like a protean neurosis, which sees racism even when it isn’t there.

October 24, 2021

Andrew Sullivan – “They are the Dana Carvey church ladies of our time, except instead of saying ‘Could it be Satan?!’ when confronting some cultural or moral transgression, they turn to the camera, clutch their pearls, and say ‘Could it be whiteness?!'”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Sullivan on what he titles “The Betrayal Of Our Gay Inheritance”:

It was, as it turned out, a bit of a non-event. The walkout by transgender Netflix employees and their supporters to demand that the company take down and apologize for the latest Chappelle special attracted “dozens”, despite media hype.

But the scenes were nonetheless revealing. A self-promoting jokester showed up with a placard with the words “We Like Jokes” and “We Like Dave” to represent an opposing view. He was swiftly accosted by a man who ripped the poster apart, leaving the dude with just a stick, prompting the assailant to shout “He’s got a weapon!” Pushed back by other protestors, he was then confronted by a woman right in front of him — shaking a tambourine — and yelling repeatedly into his face: “Repent, motherfucker! Repent! Repent!”

This is the state of what’s left of the gay rights movement in America. Judgmental, absolutist, intolerant, and hysterical, it looks to shut down speech it dislikes, drive its foes out of the public square, compile enemies’ lists of dangerous writers, artists, and politicians, and cancel and protest anything that does not comport with every tiny aspect of their increasingly deranged ideology.

The generation that now leads the movement does not seem to know the actual history of the gay rights movement, or the centrality of free expression to gay identity. They also seem to have no idea of the history of the movement against gay rights. Because if they did, they might be shocked at the ironies involved.

Anti-gay forces, hegemonic for centuries, were just like these trans activists. They were just as intent on suppressing and stigmatizing magazines, shows, and movies they believed were harmful. They too targeted individual artists and writers for personal destruction. They too believed that movies and comedy needed to be reined in order to prevent social harm. They protested in front of movie theaters. They tried to get shows canceled. And if you’d marched in any gay demo or Pride in the 1990s, you’d always be prepared to confront a grimacing Christianist yelling “Repent! Repent!” in your face.

In fact, it’s hard not to see the trans far left as a farcical replay of the Religious Right of the past. They are the Dana Carvey church ladies of our time, except instead of saying “Could it be Satan?!” when confronting some cultural or moral transgression, they turn to the camera, clutch their pearls, and say “Could it be whiteness?!”

This was never, ever the spirit of the gay rights movement in the past. In fact, it was America’s guarantee of free expression and free association that made the gay rights movement possible. It was the First Amendment, and the spirit of the First Amendment, that was easily the most important right for gays for decades. From the fledgling Society for Human Rights, formed in Chicago in 1924, and its pioneering magazine, Friendship and Freedom, to the struggles against censorship in the 1950s, with One Magazine, and erotic Physique pamphlets under siege, it was the First Amendment that, especially under Oliver Wendell Holmes, allowed gay people to find each other, to develop arguments for their own dignity and self-worth, and to sustain free associations when the entire society viewed them as perverts and undesirables and child molesters.

October 11, 2021

The Line responds to charges that their reporting on China is “anti-Asian racism”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As an impoverished cheapskate, I can’t afford to subscribe to The Line‘s full service, but they do allow a sub-set of their work to appear to non-paying subscribers, like this response to a former subscriber who accused them of “anti-Asian racism” in their posts involving the People’s Republic of China:

China’s emergence as a global power is going to be one of the defining stories of the first half of the 21st century. We probably aren’t reading and writing about it enough. Late this week, however, we received a note from a now-former reader, who said that the pieces we had run, and the overall focus on China, reflected anti-Asian racism, and they would not be supporting us going forward.

Look, it’s your money, folks. We want more and more of you to subscribe all the time. But we certainly respect your right to decline, or to unsubscribe if you don’t like the offerings. However, we do have a word of reply to those who would suggest that publishing articles about China is racist: get bent.

There is indeed anti-Asian racism out there. We have seen a lot of disturbing signs of it during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Asians of any description have been subjected to harassment and even random acts of violence. In the United States, some of the more fiery anti-Chinese rhetoric favoured by the former president also undoubtedly contributed to that wave, and that has spilled over here. Further, the problem of anti-Asian racism of course isn’t new. We have a long history of anti-Asian discrimination in North America. This must be acknowledged. Anti-Asian hate was real before Trump and COVID, and it’ll remain long after both are finished.

But writing critically about the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese armed forces, the policies of the Chinese government, the actions of the Chinese government, and the increasingly overt meddling in the affairs of other nations by Chinese intelligence operations, does not reflect any discredit upon Asian-Canadians, or any Asian in general. The policies of the Chinese government are exactly that: policies of a government. Criticizing policies and governments is not just acceptable, it’s absolutely necessary.

Indeed, we noted with grim amusement during a recent conversation with a colleague, who is comfortably nestled within the left-leaning progressive side of Canada’s political spectrum, that progressives in particular ought to be 100 per cent comfortable criticizing Chinese government policy. After all, progressives have been loudly and correctly noting for generations that there is a difference between rank antisemitism and warranted criticism of Israeli government policy. We find it fascinating that some of the very same people who would be horrified to be accused of antisemitism for criticizing Israel get tongue-tied when the Chinese government starts throwing religious minority women into rape camps.

We suspect some of it is simply rooted in the rampant identitarian obsessions of Western political discourse. People who criticize white supremacist Western imperialism a dozen times before breakfast might find it intellectually discombobulating to acknowledge that Western liberal democracies are not the only big baddies on the global stage. We’ve witnessed the many mental gymnastics that have been deployed to minimize or wish away credible reports of genocide and concentration camps, as if they were merely a Western fantasy being used to concoct a pretext for war. This is an ahistoric argument, by the way. The West has not been angling for war with one of its most lucrative suppliers and customers, quite the opposite. Until recently, we’ve operated under a Fukuyama delusion: the ironclad belief that China would moderate and liberalize as it grew more prosperous. This was predicated on the arrogant assumption that the liberal democratic West was the end state of history and that China would eventually meet us here, thus allowing peace and profit for all. That optimism hasn’t panned out, and many Western countries — Canada among them — have spent the last few years trying to reconcile our economic interdependence with our collective “oh shit” epiphany.

October 10, 2021

“The NSBA letter is a blood libel against America’s dissenting parents”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In this Substack essay, C. Bradley Thompson calls the National School Boards Association’s (NSBA) demand that the federal government treat dissenting parents as “domestic terrorists” a declaration of war against ordinary American citizens:

On September 30, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent a letter to the Biden administration denouncing the nationwide parental protests taking place at school board meetings against Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender Theory, pornography in the classroom, mask mandates, vaccine requirements, and remote learning. It turns out that parents all over the country are upset about the indoctrination and censorship in America’s government schools. An army of moms (and dads) have been asserting their parental responsibilities and their constitutional rights by showing up to school board meetings and voicing — sometimes angrily — their contempt and disgust for those school boards and teachers promoting and sanctioning ideas and ideologies opposed by the parents.

The NSBA letter (see here) begins rather ominously by declaring that “America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat” and that “immediate assistance” is therefore “required to protect our students, school board members, and educators who are susceptible to acts of violence affecting interstate commerce because of threats to their districts, families, and personal safety.” The NSBA is essentially declaring a “State of Emergency” for America’s government school system. Let that sink in for a moment.

[…]

Let’s be clear about what the NSBA letter means in practice: first, it is dog-whistling a message which says that protesting parents are engaged in “domestic terrorism and hate crimes” (including, presumably, against their own children); and, second, it is requesting that the Biden administration use the full coercive power of the United States government — power that it has only previously been used against Islamic terrorists and foreign enemies of the United States — to monitor, investigate, arrest, interrogate, prosecute, convict and jail upset parents who are protesting AGAINST the teaching of systemic racism (i.e., CRT), pornography in the classroom, and the unscientific mask mandates for children.

The NSBA letter is saying, in effect, that complaining parents are the moral equivalent of jihadi terrorists, who are out to commit acts of violence and terror against America’s school board members, its teachers, and, yes, even the children. As such, these parents should be treated as a national security threat, and they must be dealt with by all means necessary.

The NSBA letter is a blood libel against America’s dissenting parents. In a decent, free, and just society such a letter would be condemned and dismissed out of hand, but that is not the kind of society in which we live today.

Rather than tossing the NSBA letter in the trash where it belongs, the Attorney General of the United States, Merrick Garland, read it and immediately ordered the FBI and America’s National Security State to mobilize its immense power against parents whose only real crime is to take seriously the education of their children. He did this within just a few days of receiving the NSBA letter.

I encourage you to read — and to read slowly — Garland’s official memorandum sent to the Director of the FBI and to various other law enforcement agencies, offices, and divisions.

Garland’s letter is a moral, political, and constitutional abomination. To say there are serious problems with the Attorney General’s Orwellian letter would be an understatement. The letter asserts, for instance, that “there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.” It claims as fact a “rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel”. Neither the NSBA nor the Justice Department have provided any credible or meaningful evidence to support this unfounded claim, nor does Garland’s passive-aggressive letter specify what it classifies as “criminal conduct” or “domestic terrorism”. (Not surprisingly, Garland’s letter neglects to mention that some school board members and the teachers’ unions have been harassing and threatening parents for months. See here, here, here, here, and here.) The simple fact of the matter is that virtually no violence has occurred at school board meetings this year.

In support of the NSBA request, Garland’s memorandum announced that he has directed the FBI and each U. S. Attorney to convene meetings immediately with “federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial leaders in each federal judicial district” in order to “facilitate the discussion of strategies” for dealing with threats against school officials. The Department of Justice will also “open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response”. In other words, the government will establish “snitch” lines against parents. If a school board member doesn’t like what they hear in a public meeting, they will be able to report (presumably anonymously) threats of harassment and intimidation.

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