Elsewhere (239)
July 10, 2017
Uri Harris on the ideological hegemony of the social sciences:
[In a survey of the political preferences of social psychologists,] there were almost as many people who chose the furthest possible point to the left as there were who chose all the conservative points, the centre-point and the most moderate left-of-centre point combined… People that freely self-identify as far-left in the abstract, in other words irrespective of specific political issues, seem to me to be signalling something: that they are committed to an ideology. The fact that such a large portion of the most influential people in academic social psychology do so suggests that this ideology is entrenched in their field.
Which in turn suggests that what they’re actually doing may not in fact be science.
Franklin Einspruch on free speech and the prattle of Lindy West:
West possesses a mysterious gift of psychic progressivism that lets her see into the hearts of men and unearth the real intentions behind their stated ones. Or so it would seem. These men are only pretending to care about freedom of speech, for example. They really want to harass marginalised people for having opinions… “They’re weaponising free speech to maintain their cultural dominance,” she says, obsequiously quoting Anita Sarkeesian, another psychic progressive. That flushing noise you hear is the sound of productive dialogue disappearing into the rhetorical toilet. Identitarians like West have never grasped that it is impossible to found a good-faith discussion on bad-faith premises such as these… The irony of [West’s] essay is that its main point – that all this defence of free speech is really about deflecting criticism – is coming out of a camp of left-identitarianism that spent much of the last decade answering criticism with charges of bigotry.
When not deliberately knocking sleeping passengers with her in-flight luggage and boasting about it in articles for feminist publications, and then complaining that no-one wants to sit next to her on a plane, Ms West, a “fat activist,” shares videos of herself eating biscuits.
And Ace’s CBD on the obliviousness of the protesting class:
At the Impeach Trump March in Chicago 7/2/17, a group of protesters applaud a speech comprised almost entirely of Adolf Hitler quotes given by Shad Daley. This was 20 seconds after saying they need to fight fascism. After the speech, the organising member of refusefascism.org was desperate to get Shad more involved.
As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.