Remember “Woke Kindergarten”, a lesson plan for teachers to use in instructing propagandizing students in Hayward, California (see posts here and here)? The program was designed by an extreme “progressive” named Akiea “Ki” Gross, who was given $250,000 in taxpayer money by the school. And, lo and behold, performance in English and math actually dropped […]
Pielke Jr. argues like this: “The notion of consensus-as-truth has been operationalized in various forms: journalistic “fact checkers,” academic “misinformation” researchers, and content moderation on social media platforms. The practical effect is the creation of self-appointed arbiters of truth — journalists, academics, social media platforms, and even governments — who render judgments on acceptable and unacceptable speech according to conformance with an acceptable view.”
A while back, 26 pro-Palestinian protestors at the University of Chicago, along with two faculty members, were arrested and booked for holding an illegal sit-in in the admissions office. Later on, the city of Chicago dropped the charges of criminal trespass (I don’t know why this happened), and up to now I haven’t been able […]
The virus that has long infected New Zealand—the argument that indigenous “ways of knowing” should be taught alongside science in the science classroom—has now spread to America, with the help of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and its flagship journal, Science, often regarded as one of the world’s most prestigious venues. […]
A lot of academics who haven’t previously gone after DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives are coming out of the woodwork to criticize the philosophy and actions of DEI. New critics include Steve Pinker, who, in his Boston Globe article on how to fix the problems of Harvard, included “Disempowering DEI” as one of the […]
Here’s a new one-hour interview of Steve Pinker by John Tomasi, inaugural president of the Heterodox Academy. Here are the YouTube notes: Are our higher education institutions still nurturing true intellectual diversity? Our guest today is Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, and today, we’ll be exploring the growing concerns within higher ed that […]
Chris Trotter writes – THERE WAS A TIME when a leftist’s definition of “leftism” corresponded pretty closely to everybody else’s definition. The term identified a coherent worldview – to the point where knowing where someone stood on one issue enabled them to predict with surprising accuracy where they stood on a host of others. If […]
The jury awarded Mann $1 in compensatory damages from each plaintiff. It also awarded $1,000 in punitive damages from Simberg and $1 million from Steyn.
Here’s a headline at CNN Health that is seemingly confused about what a “woman” is. Note that the word, which means “adult human female” appears blatantly in the headlines, but perhaps the headline writer was ideologically different from the authors: (click on screenshot to read) This is the gist of the article, and, indeed, […]
This very short article appeared in Waatea News, which I gather is a purveyor of news related to the Māori of New Zealand. (It also runs, I believe, the country’s only Māori radio station.) I’m putting it up for one reason, and then we’ll get a break from the Kiwis and the iwi for a […]
Using textual analysis of 173,031 works printed in England between 1500 and 1900, we test whether British culture evolved to manifest a heightened belief in progress associated with science and industry. Our analysis yields three main findings. First, there was a separation in the language of science and religion beginning in the 17th century. Second, […]
I’ve written a lot about New Zealand lately, in particular the schools’ and government’s attempt to force the teaching of “indigenous ways of knowing” (mātauranga Māori) into the science classroom as a system coequal in value with modern science. That means not only equal classroom time, but equal respect, treating indigenous ways of knowing as […]
Over the last several months, I’ve seen and read about demonstrations on our campus by the pro-Palestinian group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which apparently has roughly 200 campus branches in the U.S., Canada, and New Zealand. SJP has been particularly active since last year’s October 7 massacre of Israelis and others, which they […]
The combination of Canadian wokeness and the migration across the Pacific of New Zealand’s “indigenous ways of knowing” trope has led to this ad by The University of Victoria. The U of V wants to hire three candidates in any branch of science with expertise “in either (a) working with Indigenous ways of knowing, or…
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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