Campuses across the United States have become ground zero for silencing free speech. Universities founded to encourage diversity of thought and debate have become incubators of intolerance where non-sanctioned views are silenced through bullying, speech codes, “free speech zones,” and other illiberal means.
The quote above is from The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech, by Kirsten Powers. Several conservative and libertarian authors have written about the cancel culture, but I wanted to get her perspective because she’s a liberal who worked for Bill Clinton. She says exactly what I hoped she’d say: true liberals should be fighting this nonsense. Throughout the book, she refers to the postmodernists who want to stifle speech as the illiberal left.
At the end of our previous episode, we saw this quote from postmodernist bigwig Herbert Marcuse, describing the policies needed to (ahem) restore freedom of thought:
They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions.
When Marcuse wrote those words in 1965, few people could imagine universities imposing “new and rigid restrictions on teachings” to somehow promote freedom of thought. After all, the first big campus protests in the 1960s weren’t about Vietnam; they were about the rights of students to engage in free speech.
Somewhere in hell, Marcuse is laughing himself silly. The big protests and riots on campuses today are certainly about speech, but the students are protesting and rioting because other people are saying things they don’t like — and the students want them to shut the hell up.
Perhaps you’ve heard about what happened to professor Bret Weinstein at Evergreen college in Washington state (bold emphasis mine):
Evergreen made headlines in May 2017 when biology professor Bret Weinstein drew student protests and threats of violence for refusing to leave campus on the “Day of Absence.” Weinstein had told the director of a campus multicultural office via an email that he was not leaving campus on a day when white students and faculty were asked to voluntarily leave campus.
He was surrounded by a student mob and yelled at for refusing to participate, with the crowd chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Bret Weinstein’s got to go.”
Weinstein was forced to hold class off campus because he was told that campus police could not protect him.
Those quotes don’t capture just how triggered Weinstein’s students were. This video should do the trick:
A self-described “deeply progressive” professor was hounded, threatened and called a racist because he politely refused to (ahem) “voluntarily” segregate himself on the basis of his race. Let’s see if we can follow the logic here:
I will not be identified by my race = he’s a racist!
So decided the twenty-something mental midgets at Evergreen college. When Weinstein attempted a civil conversation, the students cursed him, shouted him down, and told him to JUST SHUT UP AND LISTEN!
In postmodern-speak, this is known as “engaging in a dialog.” Or as Powers puts in her book: The illiberal left doesn’t desire debate; it wants a monologue on one side and silence on the other.
The labels the students apply to Weinstein in the video are absurdly illogical. But remember, we’re talking about students whose minds have been polluted by postmodernists. As we learned from Professor Stephen Hicks in his book Explaining Postmodernism, the postmodernists believe that:
- Reason and logic are irrelevant.
- Language is not a tool we use to discern the truth; it’s a weapon to be wielded.
- It’s perfectly acceptable to label those who disagree with you as racists, sexists, etc. – the charges need not be true, merely effective.
- In the hands of the “bad” people, free speech can cause actual harm.
- To restore “true freedom,” freedom of speech must be withdrawn from those who support the oppressors, even unwittingly..
Add it all up, and you have the prescription for the cancel culture. The appeal among college students is understandable. Sure, you’re a twenty-something who’s never actually accomplished anything. Sure, you’ll probably end up working at a coffee bar and living in your mom’s basement after you receive that oh-so-useful degree in Gender Studies or Art History. But in the meantime …
YOU get to elevate yourself in the eyes of your peers by declaring other people to be racists, sexists, homophobes, or whatever – and best of all, you’re not even required to present actual evidence supporting the charge!
YOU get to decide which speech is allowed and which speech is harmful to the oppressed and must be shut down.
YOU get to decide who should be fired, shouted down, de-platformed, etc. – because of course, YOU are qualified to make those decisions.
If you succeed in getting someone fired or de-platformed, YOU are elevated again in the eyes of your peers as a brave warrior because you “took a scalp” – while risking absolutely no harm to yourself.
It’s all about YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU!
After absurdly targeting him as a racist, the students took Weinstein’s scalp, thus depriving themselves of the opportunity to learn from a professor who was, by all accounts, a brilliant and dedicated educator. The only upside to the incident is that the following year, freshman enrollment at Evergreen dropped by 50%. Good to know there are still some college-bound students who want to be educated instead of indoctrinated.
It’s symbolic that Weinstein taught science — evolutionary biology, to be specific — because if there’s one area of academics you’d expect to be immune to postmodernist nonsense, it’s the hard sciences. Try telling a true scientist that there’s no objective reality, that logic and evidence have no relevance, or that feelings are more important than reason. A true scientists would laugh out loud.
Well, that used to be the case. Nowadays, thanks to the cancel culture, the true scientist might just keep quiet to avoid committing career suicide. Here’s a recent tweet from Weinstein himself:
The facts of human biology at odds with the entire history and diversity of life on Earth asserted by postmodernists are part of what’s often called The Narrative – a set of beliefs you must not question. You are required to simply accept them as true:
- The only differences between males and females are the genitalia — all other observed differences are the result of social conditioning.
- Male and female are nothing more than artificial social constructs — there are actually 57 genders. Or 112 genders. Or no genders. It depends on who you ask.
- If people belonging to officially recognized victim groups are underrepresented in certain academic or professional fields, the only possible explanation is deep-seated bias by the oppressors.
- Humans are causing the planet to become dangerously warm … uh, or if the planet isn’t exactly warming, the climate is still changing in some kind of bad way … and this has only been happening recently and is the result of capitalism.
If you are foolish or brave enough question any of these beliefs, the postmodernists will do everything in their power to destroy your reputation, your career and your life. As exhibit A, I present Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard. When asked why there are fewer women professors in fields like mathematics and astrophysics, Summers listed several possibilities … but made the ginormous mistake of suggesting that gender differences in aptitude may play a role. For this offense against The Narrative, he was forced to resign.
It didn’t matter that Summers was merely speculating that a known fact may be involved. IQ researchers have known for decades that while males and females have the same average IQ (100), there are far more males at both extremes of the bell curve. In other words, compared to females, males are several times more likely to be dunces or geniuses. Given this known fact, it shouldn’t be a surprise that there are more males in fields requiring a genius IQ.
But according to The Narrative, if fewer women choose a career in astrophysics, the only acceptable explanation is bias. So they took Summers’ scalp.
You’ve probably heard the statistic that 97 percent of scientists agree that humans are warming the planet. What you probably haven’t heard is that 1) the vast majority of those scientists aren’t climate scientists, and 2) the 97 percent figure is drawn from the scientists willing to express an opinion. Two-thirds of the scientists (including climate scientists) declined to offer an opinion.
Hmmm, now why might that be the case? Perhaps because scientists know if they dispute The Narrative, they’ll find themselves out of work? (Kind of like what happened to the scientists who publicly disputed the Lipid Hypothesis.)
What a great technique for manufacturing a consensus. First, you make it clear that any scientist who dares to disagree will be targeted for extinction. Then you ask scientists to offer an opinion. Lo and behold, almost all the scientists who offer an opinion agree with you! Ladies and gentlemen, we have a consensus, so that proves we’re right!
I don’t care whether you buy into the man-made-global-warming theory or not. If you care about science, you shouldn’t want dissenters (or DENIERS!) silenced. You shouldn’t want we have a consensus! to put a stop to inquiry and debate. (By the way, we have a consensus was one of McGovern’s justifications for pushing the dietary guidelines on the public.)
But surely scientists are still scientists, and even if they keep quiet about their findings, they still respect the scientific method, right? Well, that depends on whether the (ahem) “scientist” is a postmodernist or not. Back in this post, I wrote about the nonsense coming from fields like gender studies. Academics in these departments write papers declaring (in tortured English) that all differences between males and females are socially constructed. Amazingly, people buy into that nonsense.
Years ago, I mentioned to a female co-worker that when my sister was an adolescent, she was unusually strong for a girl. (A couple of boys who picked on her learned that the hard way.) Thanks to my co-worker’s postmodernist college education, she took offense and demanded, “What do you mean FOR A GIRL?!”
“I mean she was unusually strong for a girl. You do realize males are much stronger on average than females, don’t you?”
“That’s because men are encouraged to exercise their bodies and women aren’t.”
Yes, she actually believed that. It’s as logical as saying men are taller on average because they’re encouraged to grow taller, or that men have deeper voices on average because they’re encouraged to have deeper voices. It’s also as logical as saying our roosters and our hens behave differently because of social conditioning.
True scientists can point to many reasons (higher testosterone, to name just one) that males are stronger, faster and more aggressive on average than females. So how to the postmodernists deal with these proven biological differences?
Simple. They just just declare that 1) reason, logic and the scientific method are sexist and can therefore be dismissed, and 2) they have discovered “different ways of knowing.” Thanks to these “different ways of knowing,” the postmodernists can declare that male and female are simply social constructs, not biological realities, and that if a biological male declares himself to be a female, well by gosh, he IS a female — and anyone who says otherwise is a hateful bigot who must be silenced.
This has created the absurd situation where biological males are competing in women’s track events, setting all kinds of new records, and going home with all the medals … because to admit that biological males have an inborn advantage would violate The Narrative.
For an even more absurd example, here are some quotes from an article in the American Wire:
Biological males who identify as transgender women are wreaking havoc in women’s rugby in Great Britain.
Women’s rugby referees in England are quitting their jobs over the inclusion of the male athletes, according to a report in The Sunday Times this weekend.
“Being forced to prioritize hurt feelings over broken bones exposes me to personal litigation from female players who have been damaged by players who are biologically male. This is driving female players and referees out of the game,” one referee told the British paper under the condition of anonymity.
Of course the referee would only speak under the condition of anonymity. If she expressed her concern for women getting bashed by biological males without being anonymous, the postmodernist outrage mob would be all over social media, calling her a bigot, a hater, a transphobe, etc., etc., and demanding her head on a platter.
Ironic, isn’t it? Because they will never, ever allow mere facts to get in the way of The Narrative, feminist gender-studies professors have created situations where biological males are kicking the crap out of females.
Perhaps you don’t care about any of this stuff. Perhaps you don’t care if biological males are allowed to compete as females, or if scientists who dispute the man-made-global-warming theory lose their livelihoods.
You should care. Because sooner or later, the postmodernist cancel culture will pick a target that matters to you. The Narrative keeps growing and expanding into ever-more-ridiculous arenas. It will soon include (if it doesn’t already) no-questions-allowed beliefs such as:
- Raising animals for meat causes global warming
- The amount of meat we’re allowed to eat must be limited to save the planet
If you don’t believe me, go take another look at the EAT-Lancet manifesto.
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Thank you for this series. I find it enlightening, alarming, and some of it makes me super angry at the injustice and stupidity of these people that actually think they’re doing a good thing.
I have a question about global warming. I wonder if I’m being duped, because I believe the evidence of it, but I trust you enough to wonder why you think it’s not happening. I’ve seen the graphs, and the glaciers are melting. I suppose the question if whether this is caused by human activity, or whether it is just a natural change. Or do you think it’s not happening at all?
Here’s what I know for sure: in order to accurately predict what the climate will be in 30 years or whatever, scientists would have had to identify every variable that affects climate, accurately calculated the effect of each variable, and accurately measured each variable. We know that isn’t the case. So their predictions are nonsense.
The climate has never been stable. It’s been changing forever and will continue to change. Have humans altered it? Again, perhaps, but we don’t know, and certainly don’t know size of the effect if there is an effect.
The “rise” in global temperatures has been distorted by a number of factors. Measuring stations that used to be in rural areas are now surrounded by concrete that reflect heat. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, several stations in Siberia stopped reporting. Etc., etc.
Whenever I see a concerted effort to silence those who disagree with a theory, I suspect the theory doesn’t hold up well … it’s a “don’t look behind that curtain!” attitude. I’m also suspicious whenever scientists receive government grants to study a problem and conclude that yes, there is a huge problem, and the solution is to give more money to governments in the form of taxes.
I wrote about global warming a few times on my other (now dormant) blog:
http://www.tomnaughton.com/index.php/homework-help-on-global-warming/
http://www.tomnaughton.com/index.php/warming-up-to-another-record-cold-winter/
http://www.tomnaughton.com/index.php/the-weather-report/
http://www.tomnaughton.com/index.php/baby-its-cold-outside/
One of the temperatures they report around here is the airport temperature, which is influenced by the heat of the fuel being burned by all those planes landing and taking off. There are also reports that weather stations have their thermometers placed in spots around the building that are conducive to the higher temperature.
Consider: In the house I grew up in, the upstairs bedroom on the left was brutally hot in the summer. Walk downstairs and the temp could drop 10 degrees. Go to the basement and the temp could drop another 10 degrees. Put a thermometer in each one. Which one do you report?
I experience climate change every time I walk from the basement to my home office on the second floor.
Hi Laura;
we should all surely be able to look at differing views and reflect and evaluate. Friends of mine pointed me to various videos: I enclose a couple;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh-DNNIUjKU
and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FYiSzch294
and friends also pointed me to this site Laura: these are retired NASA engineers; (I know; all they did was successfully get rockets to the moon and back years ago ..)
https://www.therightclimatestuff.com/
as senior retired folks, they have sat down and evaluated the climate data; as they would have done it in NASA then;
Thank you all for the links. Now I’m off to do a bit of reading on this subject.
I am a rare person that loves winter the best, so dissenting opinions on this global warming thing put my mind at ease. Plus I need to stop worrying about the demise of the beloved sugar maple in my state.
I’m not trying to hammer you with anti-global warming facts but I’ll list a few things and of course it’s yours up to you to decide whether or not to look at them.
One quote I like is from Glenn Reynolds, “I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis act like it’s a crisis.” For instance, Obama just bought a $15 million dollar mansion on the beach in Martha’s Vineyard. I guess he’s not worried about the ocean rising. Harrison Ford owns several airplanes and brags about flying his helicopter a couple hundred miles to grab a hamburger at his favorite joint but lectures the rest of us about climate change. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2981991/amp/I-fly-coast-cheeseburger-Harrison-Ford-s-passion-flying-seen-amass-huge-collection-vintage-modern-aircraft.html You’ll find him saying this towards the end of the piece. Barbara Streisand harangues us likewise while she flies her cloned dog on a separate place to concerts in Europe. https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/pj-gladnick/2019/07/11/climate-alarmist-barbra-streisand-flies-her-dogs-10000-miles
Michael Mann, creator of the hockey stick graph recently lost in court because he refuses to release the data showing how the graph was constructed. Look up the East Anglia climategate scandal for more of his “tricks” in manipulating data. Hiding data is, or should be, anathema to science. I could go on, but everywhere you look you will find falsified data. And of course, the solution should scare everyone- give tax money and freedom to the government or you’ll die. It is a scam of giant proportions, whose goal is control.
Once you hear “the science is settled” and “scientific consensus” be very afraid. This is code for the science has ended. No real science will be allowed to be funded. Science is about facts and consensus is a pure political term. So in a sense, “scientific consensus” is an oxymoron. Just like many issues we see, correlation does not mean causation. The media makes a big deal about observed changes but the fact remains, we don’t really know what is the true root cause. If you quit looking for the cause you will never find it. There are some very smart climate scientists that have spoken out about this very issue but most are likely afraid to speak out. Without a doubt medical science and nutritional science have long suffered from the same issues and Tom has expertly pointed out how our human “feelings” for social justice drive the media and opinions away from reason and actual science. Our history is littered with similar epic failures.
Going back to the individual last week who told me that anyone who criticized Greta Thunberg (who is an actress with an IMDB page) should be burned at the stake…he wants to commit mass murder against anyone who is critical of her, and thus, since he agrees with her, makes that an extension of being critical of him — isn’t that what Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Amin, Pol Pot (for starters) did?
And they call anyone who disagrees with THEM “Nazis”. 🤦♂️
The charge need not be true, merely effective.
She’s not really an actress, she’s listed that way because she has taken part in a couple of documentaries.
A silly classification.
Greta and co are popular because they reflect what’s been going on for decades.
Except it hasn’t.
I lived in Seattle for 18 years. I had to move. This nonsense seeped into every facet of life there (Evergreen is less than 70 miles south). My son is a senior in high school with a 4.0 and near a perfect SAT score. I have implored him NOT to apply to the Ivy League or any of those small liberal arts ‘prestige’ schools and instead attend our big flagship state school because I don’t want him subjected to this garbage. I mean, there will some of it, but the student body is so large, it will be diluted by the many students who have not bought into this distorted world view. In theory, he thinks it would be cool to be a math professor, but acknowledges that academia in it’s present state would probably be a nightmare.
Watching those kids rant in the video makes me sad. While the tenured professors who brainwashed them won’t have to worry about starving or paying their mortgage, NONE of those students will find anything beyond low skilled work and will have a lifetime of economic struggle (unless they come from families of means that can indulge them). It’s not just because they are going to leave a four year university with no marketable skills and probably way too much student debt, but because their cognitive distortions will disallow them to learn from their mistakes and grow. Instead they will blame capitalism for their misfortune and insist that we need a bigger ‘safety net.’ They will be forever stuck in a place of adolescent thinking where they are bitter because they aren’t getting the world exactly as they want it, as they demand it, and it will be everybody else’s fault.
Yup, colleges that support this nonsense are doing a huge disservice to the students — whose tuition dollars are supporting an ever-growing bureaucracy that his nothing to do with actual teaching.
I wouldn’t send my daughters to an Ivy league university even if I had a billion dollars sitting in the bank. I’m not giving my money to postmodernist loons.
If I had kids, I’d be putting a bug in their ears about trade schools.
The notion that everyone should go to college is probably contributing to the problem, with all the people going into those oh-so-useful majors like gender studies.
Or Stand Up Philosopher.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoZ3bu23BMA
Nice.
Even STEM programs are cranking out two to three graduates for every available job.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth
I left engineering 20 years ago because I needed a steady job–even then the market, at least in Denver, was that glutted. Inflation-adjusted wages in the field have fallen so far that today, a bright young person would do better by fixing transmissions or cleaning teeth.
But at least I got a serious degree. A degree in grievance studies from Regressive U. will turn off potential employers, who try to avoid hiring drama queens and troublemakers.
When researching a post about gender-studies programs and the nonsense they teach, I came across a university web page claiming that gender-studies graduates are in high demand among employers because of their critical-thinking skills. I almost laughed myself silly. If I were an employer and saw “gender studies” as a major, I’d assume the applicant was highly trained to spot victims under every rock and had the logical-thinking capacity of a turnip.
I got an AS degree from a local community college, and then because I was so full of myself for being so damn smart, I transferred to Cornell. At least I got a degree in biochemistry and not gender studies, but I’m not using my degree for anything that makes me any money. I think my professors at the community college were every bit as good, and some were better, than those at this Ivy League school.
The only thing I don’t regret about it were the hockey games. The Harvard/ Cornell games were awesome where we threw fish on the ice. Occasionally there were sharks and octopus too. I hope somebody ate them and they didn’t go to waste.
In some book I read years ago (don’t remember which one), the author recounted a study that examined the claim that people with Ivy League degrees earn $30,000 more per year on average or something like that. The claim was true. But the study also looked at people who’d been accepted into Ivy League schools but chose not to attend for one reason or another. They earned …. wait for it … $30,000 more per year on average. In other words, the higher income was the result of being smart enough to be accepted at an Ivy League school, not the Ivy League degree itself.
Be not afraid. If you taught your child to think critically they will easily figure out the stupidity and not run off the tracks. My son graduated this past May from Boston University College of Engineering. At Convocation the dean of the college gave a speech about how the graduates had been trained in the scientific method and thus qualified so they should go out into the world and convince the public that humane activity is the cause of the biggest issue of their generation, climate change. Really!!! This is the poster child for the scientific method gone forever. My son’s first comment was “how did you like that dumb&^% speech”.
They won’t struggle. Don’t you know- everything is going to be free!
Thanks Tom. Interesting that the “red meat is bad for you” study came out this week that found there is umm, little proof red meat is truly bad for you.
Cue the anointed….
Already they have been met with fierce criticism by public health researchers. The American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and other groups have savaged the findings and the journal that published them…..
Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a group advocating a plant-based diet, on Wednesday filed a petition against the journal with the Federal Trade Commission. Dr. Frank Sacks, past chair of the American Heart Association’s nutrition committee, called the research “fatally flawed.”
what the study found…
If there are health benefits from eating less beef and pork, they are small, the researchers concluded. Indeed, the advantages are so faint that they can be discerned only when looking at large populations, the scientists said, and are not sufficient to tell individuals to change their meat-eating habits.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/health/red-meat-heart-cancer.html
Of course the PCRM wants the study retracted. They’re not interested in debate.
I was greatly relieved to find Allan Savory’s TED talk about “holistic land management”. Having spent most of his life fighting “desertification” of grasslands, he and others have concluded that it can actually be reversed. How? By turning back the clock to times when human beings were puny hunter-gatherers, and putting huge herds of wild and/or domestic herbivores back on the land. As we know, soil is not just “dirt”, but a whole vastly complex ecology produced by scores of species working in harmony. Well, it turns out that not all those species are smaller than worms: they include buffalo and other one-ton ungulates. It’s obvious that herbivores need grass to stay alive. Well, it seems that the grass also needs the herbivores. Whoda thunk it?
https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change
One interesting consequence of Savory’s work is that, to reverse desertification and global warming, we need to bring back huge numbers of animals whose meat we can eat.
Hey – not only do we NOT have to give up eating meat “to save the planet” – we should greatly increase the amount of meat we raise (whether people choose to eat it or not).
Although Savory observes that in many places, such as the Horn of Africa, 95% of the land can feed humans only by being used to graze animals which the humans then eat.
As Jared Diamond has suggested, the invention of agriculture may have been humanity’s biuggest single mistake. And now it looks as though it is harming us on an even vaster scale than we realised – by contributing hugely to global warming and food shortages.
Agreed, but the people who claim cattle cause global warming aren’t actually interested in saving the planet. They believe eating animals is immoral and will say whatever they need to say to put a stop to it.
indeed; they argue about methane: the level of methane I discover is 0.00017% .. if we round that up to 0.0002% it means 2 molecules in every 1,000,000 molecules in the atmosphere … so on that basis they want to abolish all grazing animals …… but do look after the polar bears;
Try looking at 10,000 dots on a single A4: ….. you can do it copy and pasting; .. it’s a lot; I tried it!!
then look at the first 4 dots; (4 in 10,000) are the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere; one has to reflect for a second …. does it look plausible that going from 3 dots to 4 dots; in 10,000 will be catastrophic? That’s up to you!
(there are 400ppm of CO2 in the air we breath; so 4 parts in 10,000)
seemingly we breath out 40,000ppm and in an average lecture theatre, the CO2 is 800-2000ppm .. friends have pointed out to me that glasshouse growers use CO2 to promote plant growth: they aim for 2000ppm of CO2;
I have to wonder where all of this is going to end. With tanking college enrollment, a populist backlash, and the left eating its own? Or a famine on a scale not seen since the Great Leap Forward?
I was going to say that all you have to do is look at hormone levels for men versus women to see that we’re different, but facts about hormones (i.e., insulin) didn’t stop vegan activists, lipophobes and others from pushing their agenda.
I’m 60, so I doubt I’ll see how this all ends in my lifetime. We can limp along with this nonsense for a long time.
a further nutrition article came out this week;
https://academic.oup.com/advances/article/10/5/917S/5569504
by Darius Mozaffarian; who is very well regarded by orthodox nutritional advisers. Sadly, it seems he has gone back and looked at the evidence; not a wise thing to do surely;
he concluded
“The present evidence suggests that whole-fat dairy foods do not cause weight gain, that overall dairy consumption increases lean body mass and reduces body fat, that yogurt consumption and probiotics reduce weight gain, that fermented dairy consumption including cheese is linked to lower CVD risk, and that yogurt, cheese, and even dairy fat may protect against type 2 diabetes. ”
This will undoubtedly unleash a storm of condemnation on him (stage 3 treatment). (He could just get the stage 2 treatment: ignored).
They’ll be calling for him to be silenced soon … to protect the people, of course.
“String him up!”
“Anybody got any string?”
“Lynch him!”
“Anybody got any lynch?”
(Firesign Theater)
Interesting coming straight after the red meat articles
https://cluelessdoctors.com/2019/10/01/where-is-the-beef-the-6-papers-that-turned-the-world-up-side-down/
links to them
Now here’s weird, when I went to
http://www.fathead-movie.com/
I went to the first of this sequence of articles and only found the following parts from the sidebar. Is this censorship or has WordPress fskd up?
I think it’s some kind of security thing blocking access. I need to ask my ISP about it.
Just finished a chat session with one of their techs. They fixed it.
For small values of fixed perhaps. Now it links to he latest article but I have to refresh the page to see all the comments. Perhaps you have been invaded by cows.
The whole postmodern thing looks to me like the return of religion. You may only believe what the High Priests dictate. And of course in terms of diet it literally is – the Seventh Day Adventists. Here’s something I’ve never seen answered – God told Ellen G White we must eat a vegetarian diet based on grains. Why didn’t he tick Jesus off when he did that thing with the loaves and fishes?
“Should have used the Tofu, son!”
Subjectivism began as an attempt to save religion from the onslaught of science, so yes, I believe postmodernism is akin to a religion. The beliefs — such as the only differences between males and females are the genitalia — don’t hold up to science, but aren’t supposed to be questioned. And those who do question them are treated like heretics who must be silenced.
Must be something in the water in Washington state. Have you seen the post over at WUWT by Cliff Mass?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/10/02/the-university-of-washington-should-not-censor-faculty-social-media/
I remember the controversy when Summers made his comments. One interesting things I read at the time was an interview with a female colleague of Summers. She made a comment along the lines of “when I heard Larry say that I almost fainted”. I can imagine how many males in the crowd had the same thought.
I remember that comment having the same thought myself.
“That’s because men are encouraged to exercise their bodies and women aren’t.”
Maybe, maybe not. As Gloria Steinem pointed out in The Politics of Food (1980) women and girls, especially the poor, are encouraged to put any meat on the table for men and eat starchy, sugary diets themselves. She also says this is why female thinness is prized in our culture, because it is rare.
Now just imagine how much worse this for women today, with the gendered commodification of veganism you wrote about last year and all the climate guilt-tripping and gaslighting so prevalent on both social and obsolescent media.
Interesting, but I don’t take much of what Gloria Steinem says seriously.
“Hard times create strong men,
Strong men create good times,
Good times create weak men,
Weak men create hard times.”
It’s a cycle. And it’s likely at the tipping point where the hard times begin.
So it’ll probably get worse before it gets better.
I like that quote. Do you know who said it?
Think it’s from a book titled Those Who Remain by G. Michael Hopf. Havent read it, but I also like the quote.
The link for the 97%
That Scientific Global Warming Consensus…Not!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/07/17/that-scientific-global-warming-consensus-not/#165b96ee3bb3
But let’s not forget the subjectivist mindset: If I believe it, it’s true. So if the climate hysterics believe 97% of all scientists agree that humans are warming the planet, then it’s true.
Poor Damon Gameau, the actor in “That Sugar Film!”. He has posted an article that refutes the letter from 500 scientists that say there is no Climate Emergency. Man, was Carl Sagan correct when he talked about the Bamboozle.
The left has declared war against conservative ideals and institutions, and no tactic is too despicable for them.
By the way, do you regret leaving the LA area?? 😁 https://twitter.com/santamonicaprob/status/1181310856975400960?s=21
Heh-heh … only wish I’d left sooner.
Have you ever happened to read anything from Mencious Moldbug? His Unqualified Reservations blog and specifically his An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives is an interesting read. He equates the system to Catholicism and calls it the Cathedral. You’re calling them the Anointed reminded me of that.
Here is a excerpt:
“So, as a progressive, here is how you see American democracy: as a contest in which truth and reason are pitted against a quasicriminal political machine built on propaganda, ignorance and misinformation. Perhaps a cynical view of the world, but if you believe that progressivism is right, you must believe that conservatism is wrong, and you have no other option.”
Haven’t heard of him.