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.
It seems there was a delay. "Look what's happening on the other side of campus, they're making fools of themselves!" In the 2000s, SJWs paused at the gates of the STEM departments, realising that prioritising feelings over facts and dogma over data would not go down well. But the gates came crashing down, and it seems that SJWs (and particularly feminists) were surprised at how _easy_ it was to confound and guilt-trip nerdy, socially awkward scientists into doing and saying whatever they wanted.
It started with an appeal to male chivalry ("You must help these poor girls who are intimidated by scary men like you"), from which it became easy to expand the reach to "Watch what you say, straight white man!" And now no-one dare say anything.
I am surprised daily by scientists who will metaphorically tear a colleague's paper to shreds in the refereeing process, but suspend all disbelief and go along unquestioningly with whatever the cultural Marxists tell them. Especially department chairs, but I suppose they are worried about their jobs, and so use their positions to throw young white men under the bus at every chance to show that they are "one of the _good_ ones".
I participated in a monthly Zoom call with a few fellow former students from MIT. Everything went along ok for quite a few months. Then finally I started to see more and more woke nonsense threatening STEM, including at our alma mater MIT. There was a massive push to destroy all standards for hiring and admission at MIT in the name of "fairness".
I complained about this, and one of my former colleagues posted links to a couple of published papers advocating the banning of ALL males from STEM. I objected pretty strenuously. And either the Zoom calls stopped, or my invitations to participate ended; I am not sure which.
What is curious is that this female who held a pretty prestigious chaired position at a snooty private school before she retired also is devoting most of her energy now to replacing all biological females in public life with biological males pretending to be females. So she wants men out of STEM, but encouraging the replacement of all women with men pretending to be women is just fine with her. Huh?
It strikes me as all virtue-signaling insanity.
I used to be kind of a pushover. But I have taken enough nonsense and seen enough of this garbage. If we do not draw a red line in the sand and hold our ground, STEM will evaporate. Period.
Could you please provide sources to those papers "advocating the banning of ALL males from STEM"? I wasn't able to find anything online quite that extreme.
I will see if I can dig them up. I believe they were published, but in minor journals. They are sort of annoying to read. The authors were people with marginal positions at 4th or 5th rate colleges.
If I recall, the implication of the suggestions of removing all males (or at least white males) from STEM was somewhat tangential, but it was at least clear to me. I might be overly sensitive, however, even though I am of mixed race. I have personally experienced plenty of targeting because of my ethnicity in the past during my R and D career.
Well in my DuckDuckGo search (since Google is primed to filter such queries) I did find this smarmy article (by a man of course!) advocating for men to be barred from holding public office for 10 years: https://unherd.com/2019/11/why-men-should-be-banned/
The articles I am referring to were written by several people, and the lead authors were women. Sorry for the delay.
I sent them to Professor Lawrence Krauss for inspection but he gets flooded with so much of this nonsense that he is overwhelmed. He has also experienced a tremendous amount of backlash for his letters and commentary, including copious numbers of death threats. So he is far more cautious now. He also advises any scientist or academic considering speaking out to be careful because of the tremendous amount of harassment they will be likely to face.
Someone else who documents similar views is Heather Mac Donald. But even mentioning her name to someone woke is like showing a vampire a cross.
The woman replacing true women no doubt needs both a cause and an identity ("I am fighting the good fight for trans people"). Take away traditional religion and people invent their own ways to be justified and righteous. Too bad such causes are so narrow in focus compared to the broad scope of say, Christianity, which further gives one the grounding to interrogate new ideas in the culture (even if you don't cling to the idea of biblical inerrancy).
I agree. This ideology is a sort of substitute religion or cult.
She is also Jewish, so I wonder what her position is now that the woke are targeting Jews.
It is also such a pointless waste of time and energy. It is astounding.
This person is very pretty and not that smart, in spite of all her success and rewards. She basically is the beneficiary of "pretty privilege". But somehow, she is just angry and bitter, even though "the system" bent over backwards to give her everything she could have ever wanted.
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?
They are terrorized and cowed into submission. This is a very dangerous game, and the dolts currently have all the power and momentum on their side.
The media sides almost exclusively with the dolts. The educational administration and establishment sides with the dolts. The politicians side with the dolts (in the UK, even the conservatives are on the side of the dolts, if you can imagine that; forget the Left...they are a completely lost cause). The bureaucracy is populated almost completely by dolts. The wealthy elites side with the dolts. The globalists side with the dolts. Increasingly, the law sides with the dolts. In addition, the medical establishment is mostly on the side of the dolts, or silent out of fear. The Left sides with the dolts and supports and promotes their cause. The youth side with the dolts, for the most part. The entertainment industry mostly supports the dolts. Increasingly, the churches side with the dolts. And so on and so forth.
Things are pretty far gone at the moment. It will be an uphill battle to balance things, if it is possible at all.
It's like a science fiction dystopia, where intelligence must be stamped out. I never liked Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" as far as short stories go; it seemed rather clumsily far-fetched. Now I see that it was frighteningly prescient.
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.
I hope you are wrong. But I fear you are correct. And by that measure, large parts of the US are already suffering rigor mortis (that is, the blue parts).
Can we possibly save these dead portions of the West? I am not sure. But time will tell.
They came for the social sciences, and I said nothing, because I was not a social scientist …
It seems there was a delay. "Look what's happening on the other side of campus, they're making fools of themselves!" In the 2000s, SJWs paused at the gates of the STEM departments, realising that prioritising feelings over facts and dogma over data would not go down well. But the gates came crashing down, and it seems that SJWs (and particularly feminists) were surprised at how _easy_ it was to confound and guilt-trip nerdy, socially awkward scientists into doing and saying whatever they wanted.
It started with an appeal to male chivalry ("You must help these poor girls who are intimidated by scary men like you"), from which it became easy to expand the reach to "Watch what you say, straight white man!" And now no-one dare say anything.
I am surprised daily by scientists who will metaphorically tear a colleague's paper to shreds in the refereeing process, but suspend all disbelief and go along unquestioningly with whatever the cultural Marxists tell them. Especially department chairs, but I suppose they are worried about their jobs, and so use their positions to throw young white men under the bus at every chance to show that they are "one of the _good_ ones".
I participated in a monthly Zoom call with a few fellow former students from MIT. Everything went along ok for quite a few months. Then finally I started to see more and more woke nonsense threatening STEM, including at our alma mater MIT. There was a massive push to destroy all standards for hiring and admission at MIT in the name of "fairness".
I complained about this, and one of my former colleagues posted links to a couple of published papers advocating the banning of ALL males from STEM. I objected pretty strenuously. And either the Zoom calls stopped, or my invitations to participate ended; I am not sure which.
What is curious is that this female who held a pretty prestigious chaired position at a snooty private school before she retired also is devoting most of her energy now to replacing all biological females in public life with biological males pretending to be females. So she wants men out of STEM, but encouraging the replacement of all women with men pretending to be women is just fine with her. Huh?
It strikes me as all virtue-signaling insanity.
I used to be kind of a pushover. But I have taken enough nonsense and seen enough of this garbage. If we do not draw a red line in the sand and hold our ground, STEM will evaporate. Period.
Could you please provide sources to those papers "advocating the banning of ALL males from STEM"? I wasn't able to find anything online quite that extreme.
I will see if I can dig them up. I believe they were published, but in minor journals. They are sort of annoying to read. The authors were people with marginal positions at 4th or 5th rate colleges.
If I recall, the implication of the suggestions of removing all males (or at least white males) from STEM was somewhat tangential, but it was at least clear to me. I might be overly sensitive, however, even though I am of mixed race. I have personally experienced plenty of targeting because of my ethnicity in the past during my R and D career.
Well in my DuckDuckGo search (since Google is primed to filter such queries) I did find this smarmy article (by a man of course!) advocating for men to be barred from holding public office for 10 years: https://unherd.com/2019/11/why-men-should-be-banned/
The articles I am referring to were written by several people, and the lead authors were women. Sorry for the delay.
I sent them to Professor Lawrence Krauss for inspection but he gets flooded with so much of this nonsense that he is overwhelmed. He has also experienced a tremendous amount of backlash for his letters and commentary, including copious numbers of death threats. So he is far more cautious now. He also advises any scientist or academic considering speaking out to be careful because of the tremendous amount of harassment they will be likely to face.
Someone else who documents similar views is Heather Mac Donald. But even mentioning her name to someone woke is like showing a vampire a cross.
The woman replacing true women no doubt needs both a cause and an identity ("I am fighting the good fight for trans people"). Take away traditional religion and people invent their own ways to be justified and righteous. Too bad such causes are so narrow in focus compared to the broad scope of say, Christianity, which further gives one the grounding to interrogate new ideas in the culture (even if you don't cling to the idea of biblical inerrancy).
I agree. This ideology is a sort of substitute religion or cult.
She is also Jewish, so I wonder what her position is now that the woke are targeting Jews.
It is also such a pointless waste of time and energy. It is astounding.
This person is very pretty and not that smart, in spite of all her success and rewards. She basically is the beneficiary of "pretty privilege". But somehow, she is just angry and bitter, even though "the system" bent over backwards to give her everything she could have ever wanted.
But, it was not enough. It is never enough...
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?
They are terrorized and cowed into submission. This is a very dangerous game, and the dolts currently have all the power and momentum on their side.
The media sides almost exclusively with the dolts. The educational administration and establishment sides with the dolts. The politicians side with the dolts (in the UK, even the conservatives are on the side of the dolts, if you can imagine that; forget the Left...they are a completely lost cause). The bureaucracy is populated almost completely by dolts. The wealthy elites side with the dolts. The globalists side with the dolts. Increasingly, the law sides with the dolts. In addition, the medical establishment is mostly on the side of the dolts, or silent out of fear. The Left sides with the dolts and supports and promotes their cause. The youth side with the dolts, for the most part. The entertainment industry mostly supports the dolts. Increasingly, the churches side with the dolts. And so on and so forth.
Things are pretty far gone at the moment. It will be an uphill battle to balance things, if it is possible at all.
It's like a science fiction dystopia, where intelligence must be stamped out. I never liked Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" as far as short stories go; it seemed rather clumsily far-fetched. Now I see that it was frighteningly prescient.
Yes. I can hardly believe this is reality. But, here we are.
"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.
I hope you are wrong. But I fear you are correct. And by that measure, large parts of the US are already suffering rigor mortis (that is, the blue parts).
Can we possibly save these dead portions of the West? I am not sure. But time will tell.