The war on STEM: when post-modernism says that there is no real truth…

The New Neo Posted on by

…then why not erase history, ignore facts, and create your own truth? Especially in the cause of fighting whatever is defined as racism these days. The definition has become extraordinarily broad amidst the paroxysms of rage and the demands for special treatment that we currently see.

I’m not just talking about pulling down monuments. STEM is a focus at the moment:

Professors, researchers, and students in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics field from around the country are taking part Wednesday in the #ShutDownSTEM movement to combat what they say is systemic racism in academia. They argue that the STEM field itself creates technology that is “weaponized against black people.”

One scholar and self-proclaimed “leading expert on wokeness,” James Lindsay, who is best known for his participation in a project that exposed the faulty review process of academic journals by submitting hoax papers that were ultimately published by such publications, tweeted, that “one point of #ShutDownSTEM is to find out who doesn’t do it (maybe they’re working on a Covid-19 vaccine?) and to use that against them later, just like happened at Evergreen State College with its Day of Absence.”…

Members of the science academic community are “call[ing]on people who are not Black to spend a day undertaking discussion and action that furthers this work, while providing Black scientists with a day of rest.”

It will be a day where they “#ShutDownAcademia, #ShutDownSTEM, and #Strike4BlackLives.”

Scientists and researchers subscribing to the movement will not do any work for the entire day, and any class or research group meetings “should be cancelled [sic] or replaced with discussions with colleagues about anti-Black bias in the world and in academia.”

I don’t know how big this movement is, but it will probably grow if it’s not big enough right now to get what it wants. One of the goals – as was the case at Evergreen and so many other schools (such as Harvard against Larry Summers as far back as 2005), and not limited to academia – is to make you come forward and declare yourself part of the movement, as well as to serve as a warning about how science can be used and how it must not be used. Join the movement or a campaign might be mounted against you. If not today, then at some future date when it’s more useful to the left.

The crocodile gets fed periodically, but then it gets hungry again. After all, silence is violence, which is one of the most pernicious mottos of the movement so far.

It’s ironic – but again, not at all unexpected if you study history – that the universities that once championed (or pretended to champion) liberty and freedom of speech as vital values stopped teaching that some time ago, and have become centers for tyranny. Someone my age has seen the enormity of the change from a time when it really was the basic stance of almost everyone in academia to defend different points of view, to a time when expressing a view that wasn’t to the extreme left could get you fired. That’s why freedom of speech and liberty are so important to guard and nurture – because the human race has a strong pull in the other direction, a force that must be resisted actively or people will succumb to its siren call.

The Founding Fathers knew this. They knew it in their bones. But our generation either forgot to teach it or didn’t even know that it was being so heavily undermined right along. I saw the signs when I returned to school about thirty years ago and they alarmed me, and I did speak out against them in class. But I was met with glazed stares from my younger classmates; they couldn’t be bothered already, that early on. They just didn’t care what the old dinosaur was saying, so I didn’t even have to be answered. I could just be ignored.

I’ll close with this:

[NOTE: Please see Havel’s Greengrocer.]

[ADDENDUM: I’m not the first one to say this, but it’s an important thought: one of the reasons the trend towards closing down free speech often goes unnoticed is that initially the left seems like it’s championing free speech. The leftist does this as long as the left is the beneficiary. When leftist thought is unpopular, the right in the US (not everywhere) lets it have a forum, in the interests of free speech. The left pretends that it would return the favor. Maybe even some people on the left at that point think that really would be the case. But they are sadly mistaken, and when the left has gained majority and control, those people will be shouted down and ostracized themselves if they fight free speech’s curtailment for the right.

It’s a clever game. And it’s the one that’s been played.]

Legal Insurrection: Professor Jacobson’s job at Cornell Law School is threatened by cancel culture

The New Neo Posted on by

[UPDATE: Professor Jacobson will be appearing on the Laura Ingraham show on Fox News at approximately 10:45 Eastern time.]

Professor Jacobson of Legal Insurrection (a blog for which I also write periodically) has announced that there’s a campaign to get him ousted from his post as a law professor because of his critiques of Black Lives Matter:

There is an effort underway to get me fired at Cornell Law School, where I’ve worked since November 2007, or if not fired, at least denounced publicly by the school.

Ever since I started Legal Insurrection in October 2008, it’s been an awkward relationship given the overwhelmingly liberal faculty and atmosphere. Living as a conservative on a liberal campus is like being the mouse waiting for the cat to pounce…

The impetus for the [current] effort was two posts I wrote at Legal Insurrection regarding the history and tactics of the Black Lives Matter Movement:

—Reminder: “Hands up, don’t shoot” is a fabricated narrative from the Michael Brown case (June 4, 2020)
—The Bloodletting and Wilding Is Part of An Agenda To Tear Down The Country (June 3, 2020)

Those posts accurately detail the history of how the Black Lives Matters Movement started, and the agenda of the founders which is playing out in the cultural purge and rioting taking place now.

From Saturday, June 6, through Monday, June 8, over 15 emails from CLS alumni were received by the Dean of the law school, demanding that action be taken against me ranging from an institutional statement denouncing me to firing. I don’t know whether and to what extent that number has increased since Monday. The Dean properly has defended my writings as protected within my academic freedom, although he strongly disagrees with my views…

My clinical faculty colleagues, apparently in consultation with the Black Law Students Association, drafted and then published in the Cornell Sun on June 9 a letter denouncing “commentators, some of them attached to Ivy League Institutions, who are leading a smear campaign against Black Lives Matter.” While I am not mentioned by name, based on what I’ve seen BLSA and possibly others were told it was about me. The letter is absurd name-calling, distorting and even misquoting my writings, to the extent it purports to be about me.

Please read the whole thing. Another article to read is this one.

This is not at all surprising, but it’s tremendously disturbing. If you would like to spread the word, that would be good. Also, letters to Cornell would be good, particular from Cornell alums – but Professor Jacobson has strongly requested that all letters remain polite and kindly. If you’re not going to be polite and kindly, please don’t write.

Thanks!!!

Governor Jay Inslee: useful idiot or mendacious enabler?

The New Neo Posted on by

Governor Jay Inslee of Washington state was interviewed about the crisis taking place Wednesday in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle. This is what he had to say:

That is one of the most shocking things I’ve ever heard a public figure say.

The first duty of government is to secure public safety. Does he literally have no idea what is happening in the largest city in his state, a story that’s been so heavily covered around the nation that even I, on the other side of the continent, made it my first story of the day at around 12:30 PM Seattle time?

Perhaps that clip is some sort of fake, doctored video. I actually hope that’s the case, because it’s preferable to the alternative.

Our very own Red Guards

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s happening now in the United States, at an ever-increasing pace, is rule by mob. But it’s a special sort of mob. The internet and social media, especially Twitter, facilitates the process. Its main practitioners are leftists, mostly but not entirely young.

History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes, and this movement bears a resemblance to the Maoist Cultural Revolution’s Red Guards.

I believe the first time I made that comparison was in this post from six years ago entitled: “Robert J. Birgeneau is the latest casualty of our embryonic Red Guards.” Six years! Obama was president, and you’d think they’d be happy. And perhaps they were – with the president. But not with anyone with whom they disagreed.

Before I re-read it, I no longer remembered who Robert J. Birgeneau was. But the pattern was familiar and already set – and in this case that includes the subject matter:

Another would-be commencement speaker bows out in response to pressure from students who deem him insufficiently pure for their tender sensibilities.

Birgeneau refused to say sufficient mea culpas, the price he would have had to pay for the privilege of addressing the august students and faculty of Haverford:

“Some students and faculty members at Haverford, a liberal arts college near Philadelphia, objected to the invitation to Mr. Birgeneau to speak and receive an honorary degree because, under him, the University of California police used batons to break up an Occupy protest in 2011. He first stated his support for the police, and then a few days later, saying that he was disturbed by videos of the confrontation, ordered an investigation.

“Those at Haverford who objected to his being honored asked Mr. Birgeneau to apologize and to meet a list of demands, including leading an effort to train campus security forces in handling protests better; he refused.”

I called the movement “embryonic” at the time – after all, it was six years ago. But looking back, I bet it was a lot more developed than I knew. Later in that post I added:

My comparison is hyperbole. The current crop of American students isn’t killing or beating anyone—yet. Nor is their target their professors, but that’s probably because their professors have for the most part already been purged and are pure. In fact, at Haverford and at other colleges where commencement speakers have been recently driven out, the protesting students are joined by professors. Or perhaps it’s the other way around, with professors leading the way.

Note the word “yet.” And note the participation and even leadership of the leftist professors. Some of them have found the movement has come back to bite them, but that’s what always happens when making a tasty leftist omelet.

Then in 2018, two years ago, I wrote another Red Guards piece. This time I made it clear I was not being hyperbolic.

Roger L. Simon isn’t nostalgic for the 60s, either

The New Neo Posted on by

As Roger Simon writes in the Epoch Times:

“Off the pig!” Sound familiar? Not quite “Dead cops now” but close. Marx, almost right for once, famously said, “History repeats itself. The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

Only this second time isn’t really so farcical and may end up more of a tragedy if we’re not careful.

As for how much fun the first version was, I had the proverbial bird’s eye view. My Dartmouth college roommate was one of Leary’s original LSD test cases at Harvard. A year after graduation, a brilliant grad student in semantics at Columbia, my roomie’s car flew off the road when he and the driver were high on acid. He ended up a paraplegic who, not long thereafter, committed suicide.

Another view came a few years later, when I was a very lucky young screenwriter and—to my shame— in my early version of white guilt became a small financier of the Black Panther breakfast program. I did this until I discovered the two of my contacts were heroin dealers and one was wanted for assault with a deadly weapon.

Please read the whole thing.

On this blog, we had a discussion about nostalgia – or lack thereof – for the 60s here (see the NOTE and the comments).

The politically correct bookshelf

The New Neo Posted on by

When the Red Guards come to your home to inspect your bookshelf, be prepared:

A woke NPR writer tells us to comb through our bookshelves and make sure we have enough books authored by people of color.

So my question is: does Thomas Sowell count? If so, I’ve got plenty.

Yes, I know, I know: Sowell isn’t an actual black person, even though he grew up in the South and then Harlem when discrimination against black people really was systemic, as well as overt.

Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to read Clarence Thomas’ autobiography. Sounds excellent.

Antifa takes over Seattle police station and environs – what it signifies

The New Neo Posted on by

Weakness and appeasement on the part of civic authorities are signals that give rise to the empowerment of those who would disrupt and overturn civil society:

Antifa, or their helpers, under the pretense of caring about black people, now has control of a police station, and more.

Seattle’s politicians have ceded control over one of the oldest police stations in the city to a group of leftists, who have used the death of George Floyd, to advance one of their long held goals, seizing government property in the name of a Marxist revolution.

One law enforcement source tells me third-shift officers still have personal belongings in the building:

“Officers went to the precinct, which is now patrolled by armed protesters. They asked if they could go into ‘our’ building to retrieve personal belongs. They were denied entry by the armed factions.”

This group, quite likely members of the Antifa-affiliated John Brown Gun Club, now controls, not just the station, but four blocks of the Capitol Hill area of Seattle, which they have renamed…

Reports are that the police haven’t a clue what to do next. That’s no surprise, either, considering that it’s the “progressive” city of Seattle where the leadership is far more aligned with Antifa than with the police.

It strikes me, and not for the first time, that Antifa has a brilliant name. The left knows that the group is made of leftist anarchists, but liberals think the name simply means what Antifa says it means: anti Fascist. So Orwellian.

The quote I offered from the Legal Insurrection article says Antifa is operating “under the pretense of caring about black people.” Actually, Antifa operates under many pretenses (including the “anti-Fascist” one), but helping black people is most definitely one of them. Make no mistake about it, black communities are being hurt the most right now, and defunding the police is not a popular position there. But Antifa could not care less.

Antifa is about power – and they are drunk with it right now. They will do as much as they are allowed to do. In the manner of Al Qaeda 9/11 planners who were surprised when the twin towers actually came down that day, Antifa is probably surprised that their targets so far have proven to be so soft. Although I doubt they thought that an especially strong fight would be put up – after all, the ground had been thoroughly prepared by the Gramscian march, the leftist mayors and AGs are in place, and Antifa has also wrapped itself in the cloak of anti-Fascism/anti-racism sanctity – I think Antifa was nevertheless surprised at the speed and extent of the capitulation.

It also strikes me that the recent brouhaha over the publication of the Senator Cotton op-ed in the NY Times, a skirmish that resulted in the resignation of the editorial page editor who allowed such heresy to be published in its sacred pages, is notable not just for the fact that it represents the victory of the new Red Guards over the older forces there, but also because of the subject matter of the Cotton piece. In it, Cotton had asserted the rather odinary idea that in times of civil unrest of great magnitude, the president is legally empowered to call out the military to subdue rioters (this has happened before, notably during the Rodney King riots). So it is significant that the group that ousted editor Bennett was also protesting the airing of the very idea that when blue city mayors and blue state governors cannot or will not put down an insurrection and protect ordinary citizens, the federal government can step in.

That leads in a straight line to events in Seattle, in which Antifa claims territory from what is seen as the enemy – the police – and the city government cannot muster the strength or will to stop them. The police are probably thoroughly disgusted by the fact that around the country, blue city governments have abandoned them and allowed them to be demonized for the actions of a very few.

Andrew C. McCarthy has this to say:

The Left’s plan is not to defund the police. It is to denude the police — to strip them of their capacity to act and their legitimacy as keepers of the peace.

The plan is not new. I outlined it many times during the Obama presidency, during which the Justice Department made it a priority to supplant the intelligence-based, broken-windows approach to policing — the approach that gave America an unprecedented generation of record low crime and safe urban streets.

Intelligence-based policing scrutinizes dynamic ranges of data points to deploy the police where the crime is. It is driven by offense behavior. In stark contrast, progressive-fantasy policing pretends that the police encounter minority suspects, particularly black men, because the police are institutionally racist, not because these suspects are responsible for a high percentage of crime — much higher than their demographics’ proportions of the total population.

Consequently, progressives theorize that police should back off from investigative activity in criminal hot spots, which is distorted into “racial profiling.” Instead, cops are told to rely on community leaders — typically allied with big-city Democrats — to be their eyes and ears. In this, Democrats can always rely on a mass of Republicans, who echo their tropes about our “carceral state” and the desperate need for “criminal-justice reform” — as if the prisons were teeming with non-violent marijuana tokers rather than hardened criminals with long records (reflecting the system’s practice of pleading serious offenses down to petty ones, the better to get criminals back on the street more rapidly).

The “defunding” rhetoric aside, the idea is not to make municipal police departments disappear. It is to bludgeon them with federal dollars collected from the taxpayers who most need competent policing. As I’ve detailed, a big part of the strategy is Justice Department civil-rights litigation. The Justice Department uses controversial police incidents as a pretext to open “pattern or practice” investigations and sue municipalities or their police departments under a pernicious Clinton-era civil-rights law. Since municipalities cannot afford to go toe-to-toe with the Justice Department’s $30 billion annual budget, they are pressured into consent decrees, often with federal monitors, in which they agree to adopt the Left’s approved police practices.

This had momentum during the Obama years, but it is a gradual process that can be slowed by the election of a more law-and-order–oriented administration (which tends to happen when the public has had its fill of what progressive policies yield on the streets). The more sweeping approach is percolating in Congress now: Washington-prescribed transformation of the nation’s police departments, using the threat that federal funds will be withheld if the Left’s preferred “reforms” are not made.

Is there a single blue-run city standing against it? I haven’t followed the course of the riots in all the cities they are affecting, so perhaps I’ve missed several exceptions to the capitulation rule, but I don’t think so.

In the meantime, Antifa is small in membership. But it is bold and it is flush with success right now. A small but determined group can do a lot of damage if the opposition is confused, cowardly, and/or not really all that strongly opposed.

Governor Beshear of Kentucky makes a healthcare proposal

The New Neo Posted on by

Privilege, anyone?:

Offering few specifics, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said his administration is committed to ensuring that 100% of the state’s black residents have health insurance.

State statistics released Monday indicate black Kentuckians account for 16.5% of Kentucky’s coronavirus deaths but make up just 8.4% of the state’s population, according to Census data.

“Every single individual in our African-American communities is to have a form of health-care coverage,” Beshear (D) said. “We’re going to put money into it, we’re going to put people into it, we’re going to make sure the community anchors are part of it.”

This guy is not only a governor, he’s also a lawyer and was the Attorney General of Kentucky for a while. So he’s not ignorant of what he’s saying here, and how illegal it is.

More:

Beshear didn’t immediately comment on how he would provide coverage to people who don’t currently qualify for expanded Medicaid and don’t have insurance through their employer.

He also didn’t comment on how the state would defend against a lawsuit should someone allege the action is illegal race-based discrimination.

Does he really intend to try to do this? Or is it just BS to placate the masses? I say it’s the latter, a shameless pandering from someone who’s quite aware of what he’s saying.

The essence of the left: equality of misery

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “AesopFan.”]

Jonathan Turley wrote, speaking of the remarks by Minneapolis city council president Lisa Bender that calling the police when your home is invaded “comes from a place of privilege”:

What I find odd is that the fear of being without police is a form of privilege but it is still viewed by Bender as somehow beneficial because it makes non-African Americans experience fear. Wouldn’t it be better (indeed a form of leadership) to seek to remove the fear from the African-American community rather than making the fear universal? It is likely (sic) solving the greater threat of fire in one community by telling another community to go without fire protection. You achieve equity but hardly the equity that you would want.

Yes, it would be better. But Turley doesn’t seem to have absorbed the fact that this is standard on the left – in fact you might say it’s a guiding principle of the left. The effect of their methods to achieve the equality of outcome they so desire is that everyone would be equally miserable (except for the leftist leaders, of course, who have special privileges). Did Turley never read Animal Farm?

Or did he never listen to Margaret Thatcher, who grasped the leftist principle quite well and articulated this critique three decades ago:

Or, if he pleases, Turley can study the words of Winston Churchill, whose statue was defaced in London the other day by rioters, because he’s considered a racist:

Social­ism is a phi­los­o­phy of fail­ure, the creed of igno­rance, and the gospel of envy, its inher­ent virtue is the equal shar­ing of misery.

Yes indeed: failure, ignorance, envy, and the equal sharing of misery. We’re seeing quite a bit of those things these days, aren’t we?