181–190 of 247 posts
Its not unlike the travesty that has befallen our once informative channels: natgeo, discovery, animal planet...though perhaps not quite as extreme. And the National Geographic magazine has been obsessing over woke politics for a decade now as well. Its a damn shame to lose these institutions to such blatant politicking. Across society we seem to be regressing to the lowest common denominator. Entertainment, educatio…
Cue the film _Idiocracy_
I am not defending SJW in saying this, merely pointing out a clear and obvious fallacy and a shameful one considering those who submit and post here that use it. Employing the pejorative "woke" is an ad hominem fallacy because it doesn't speak to any argument, and it, in fact, says nothing at all. It ignores all argument for the sake of, I presume, insult. It is fundamentally tribalistic. Insulting or denigrating the…
But, like, the etymology of many words is obscure; sometimes we do use words as arbitrary references, whose semantics cannot be inferred from their form, no?
Self-censorship is the other half of this problem. How many of us here have self censored our writing out of fear of painting a bullseye on our backs? The more you have to lose, the more cautious you are. If you’ve spent a lifetime studying a certain field, building a business or becoming a well know expert, you risk having it all taken away if you provoke the ire of the mob. And the mob has nothing to lose and every…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What were their gripes with Lomberg?
Probably that his research shows there are more effective ways to spend resources than reducing CO2.
I am not defending SJW in saying this, merely pointing out a clear and obvious fallacy and a shameful one considering those who submit and post here that use it. Employing the pejorative "woke" is an ad hominem fallacy because it doesn't speak to any argument, and it, in fact, says nothing at all. It ignores all argument for the sake of, I presume, insult. It is fundamentally tribalistic. Insulting or denigrating the…
I think the problem is that "woke" ideology employs a lot of deliberately slippery language and rhetorical flourishes that make it difficult to argue with. It employs motte and bailey strategies everywhere.
I recently lost a friendship with someone who converted to wokeness. I say 'convert' because he was religious in his fervor. We were discussing a particular Netflix series fondly when he stopped and told me that he musn't get tied up enjoying it too much, because he knows it's just a ploy to get him to forget all the other ways that white people and white society "deliberately designed" to cause him to hate himself for being non-white.
"My anger allows me to think clearly. By making me forget it, this show is how a white supremacist society gives me a few breadcrumbs to just be happy for a moment. So even though it has some positive representations of my people, it really is just more white supremacy designed to make me hate myself."
I tried to tell him, as gently and empathetically as I could, that I was quite sure that, at least in this particular case, Netflix was not trying to get him to hate himself and he could maybe allow himself to enjoy the show. He told me that I was blinded by my white fragility.
I don't know how to argue with this, or what to call it. But his system of belief increasingly touched every topic in every conversation we had until he finally stopped talking to me for being white (although he framed it that I had "chosen the side of white supremacy").
What can I put in my house today that will let my children discover science and physics the way Scientific American let me discover them as a teenager?
An ipad with archive access to the old scientific americans. I have one from the 1890s I got in an antique store and it's great.
Something like 15 years ago I was at a conference and happened to sit at lunch table with a top editor of Scientific American. (Maybe the top one at the time, I don't remember.) I had been an enthusiastic subscriber for many years and still subscribed at that point, although I was concerned that it seemed to be dumbing itself down. I mentioned that to the editor. I forget the exact words I used, but they were an atte…
All things are ephemeral, especially in media. We're just marketed at to believe otherwise.
The opinion piece in question ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-complicated-l... ) strikes me as a restrained and sober attempt to explore the possibility that Wilson and others did bad science by presuming differences between races were due to genetics. Maybe you think the piece is wrong but it's just someone expressing some ideas, it's not intended to incite the woke mob or whatever. If anything, the…
The article called someone a racist, days after they passed away, without presenting any evidence of that fact. (The original article does not cite or refer to any of Wilson's work.) When asked on Twitter to provide some evidence of Wilson's racist views, the author of the article declined to provide any. She said that readers should look it up themselves. That isn't sober critique, it's slander.
Wilson was being called racist by many back in 1975. I agree with them. He was a racist who tried to dress his racist political views up in scientific jargon. Like William Shockley.
If you don't want people knocking you after your death, don't write books saying whites are genetically superior to oppressed races in the US and that slavery is natural.