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Giuseppe Stromboli's avatar

They came for the social sciences, and I said nothing, because I was not a social scientist …

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Thomas J. Snodgrass's avatar

As a Canadian currently residing in the "Evil Empire" south of the 49th parallel (which my father referred to as "The United Snakes"), I am distressed to see Canada falling prey to this latest example of US Imperialism, the "woke cult". Are Canadians so oblivious that they cannot see this social justice nonsense is imported cultural rot? And for some reason, Canucks, being generally kind and subservient to authority in a way that is not true of the Yanks, seem to love this self-destructive performance art, this Kabuki Theater. Canada's international reputation has suffered badly in recent years, and it is getting steadily worse with every new woke indignity that the mindless Canadian bureaucrats have adopted with great glee, and forced on the Canadian public.

I personally am of autochthonous extraction, that is to say, indigenous or aboriginal heritage. I also have a number of disabilities. In addition, I have suffered at the hands of those pushing ethnic purity in my R&D profession.

And yet, I am horrified to see this turn of events, that is, by the widespread adoption of DEI/DIE/IED policies and CEI and ESG and CRT and anti-racism (another term for blatant racism) and the special status of pro-alphabet people (who seem to be profoundly anti-homosexual, just as the Iranian Mullahs have created a society with the largest fraction of transpeople on earth because of their hatred of homosexuals) and the entire panoply of nonsensical policies. The goals of this movement might be admirable, or might have been somewhat positive at one point. But the means that are being adopted to achieve these goals risk creating dystopian hellscapes.

It is bad enough that this mindless phenomenon is rampaging throughout Western society (the Chinese, having the authoritarian power so many of the woke lust after, just declared that anyone holding these views would be put in a prison camp or executed, and it ended pretty rapidly). However, the danger of destroying STEM, this relatively feeble yet paradoxically powerful Enlightenment project that is in constant danger of being extinguished, is serious.

Humans have repeatedly destroyed or set back STEM progress in their abundant ignorance throughout history. What fate did Archimedes meet? How was Galileo treated? What happened to the Islamic Golden Age of science and technology that was destroyed for almost 1000 years and counting by the second most influential man in Islam, al Ghazali, who published the book "Incoherence of the Philosophers"? Does anyone recall what Mao's Cultural Revolution did to the intellectual and scientific foundation of China? How about Pol Pot's Killing Fields in Cambodia which resulted in the death of about 1/3 of their population before this anti-knowledge movement was forcefully stopped by external entities? This woke mind virus (as it has been dubbed by Elon Musk) is no less dangerous.

And there are few places where wokeness is more dominant and thriving more than in Canada.

Canada is a great place with many things to recommend it. But they are on the path to self-destruction currently. And we can see it in Canadian STEM and R&D, which is quite vulnerable to predation by weaponized compassion.

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