Amid the febrile ideological skirmishes that have begun to break out across Canadian university campuses, the impartial observer would quickly conclude that dark clouds are gathering over our modern society when they notice academic scientists contemplating ushering such counter-rational notions as “Indigenous science” into their classrooms. The thought that a new generation of physicians in Canada might qualify in the profession believing the ancestral knowledge and value systems of the Inuit and Métis should play as much a role in your diagnosis as an MRI scan seems at once risible and regressive to most Canadians. But, if you trace that doomsaying prediction back to today’s university quadrangles, you soon realise that it is merely a logical consequence of what we ungovernable, outspoken academics are now planning to teach.
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.
There was a time when the university was understood to be fundamentally a place of divisiveness via argument. Who the hell ever said the university experience was supposed to be akin to an excursion on placid waters?
And where are the acid-tongued brainiacs with their crushing responses to the asininity of dolts?
The cause of the wokery is for the argument made by a "mass formation" of individuals to mistake a "complex" physical system for a "non-complex" system, where a "complex" system exhibits one or more "emergent properties" each of which is a property of the whole system but not of the separate parts of this system whereas a "non-compelex" system exhibits no such properties. To eliminate the wokery we need to advise the members of the mass formation of what is wrong with their argument.
They came for the social sciences, and I said nothing, because I was not a social scientist …
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.
Wow. Just wow.
There was a time when the university was understood to be fundamentally a place of divisiveness via argument. Who the hell ever said the university experience was supposed to be akin to an excursion on placid waters?
And where are the acid-tongued brainiacs with their crushing responses to the asininity of dolts?
"Gaslighting themselves". That's it, right there. How did we come to this?
Don’t let the kids off the hook so easily, they’re fully indoctrinated and would cancel you in a heartbeat…
The woke left are dangerous.
All the best!
The cause of the wokery is for the argument made by a "mass formation" of individuals to mistake a "complex" physical system for a "non-complex" system, where a "complex" system exhibits one or more "emergent properties" each of which is a property of the whole system but not of the separate parts of this system whereas a "non-compelex" system exhibits no such properties. To eliminate the wokery we need to advise the members of the mass formation of what is wrong with their argument.
Terry Oldberg
Engineer/Scientist/Public Policy Researcher
Los Altos Hills, California
1-650-518-6636
terry_oldberg@yahoo.come
Canada has already passed away. It can no longer wake up. Vote with your feet. Move south.