How Academia Became a Breeding Ground for Extremism

It has only been a few months since I started to focus on secular social justice radicalism and we have already seen many examples that simply cannot be defended or justified by those who value reason and critical thinking. Whether it is the professor who celebrated the arrest and death of college student Otto Warmbier,  the faculty who helped instigate a witch hunt against evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein,  the professor who insists universities should stop hiring white males, the professor who bullied students by telling them college campuses are not free speech areas, the dean who maliciously smeared a faculty member for objecting to social justice training,  the professor who angrily tries to justify the censorship of someone who published a journal article that supposedly violated the tenets to social justice,  the college administrators who drove a student to commit suicide with their politically correct accusations, the sociologist who advocates for violence,or the various universities, like Middlebury College, McMaster University, and Berkeley, that shut down free speech by creating an environment that allows their radicalized students to engage in angry, even violent protests, all such activity is bizarre and unfitting for those who value reason and fairness.

Clearly, this is a widespread problem, as the small sampling above is a fraction of the cases that only happened to break into the wider public arena. What’s more, we’re looking at “rank and file” faculty who are not popular from universities all across the United States. We can expect many more examples once Fall Semester starts up. So how is it that the university system is undergoing an incremental transformation where ideology replaces objectivity and emotion-based thinking replaces critical thinking?

I think a huge causal factor behind the erosion of the universities is as follows:

American universities have leaned left for a long time. That is not a serious problem; as long as there are some people with a different political perspective in every field and every department, we can assume that eventually, someone will challenge claims that reflect ideology more than evidence.

But things began changing in the 1990s as the Greatest Generation (which had a fair number of Republicans) retired and were replaced by the Baby Boom generation (which did not). As the graph below shows, in the 15 years between 1995 and 2010 the academy went from leaning left to being almost entirely on the left. (The 12% in the red line for 2014 is mostly made up of professors in schools of engineering and other professional schools; the percent conservative for the major humanities and social science departments is closer to 5%. For more data on these trends and the rising imbalance, see Gross & Simmons, 2007; Inbar & Lammers, 2012; see latest study, Langbert et al. 2016, here; see many older links here). (emphasis added)

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words:

University of Delaware Professor Insists Otto Warmbier Got What He Deserved

I’m sure most of you have heard of the terrible tragedy concerning Otto Warmbier.  He was a college student from the  University of Virginia who visited North Korea in January 2016.   He was arrested and sentenced to 15 years hard labor after being accused of stealing a propaganda poster from his hotel.  Then, two months after his sentence,  he suffered a neurological injury and went into a coma. He was returned to his family last week and died shortly thereafter.

It turns out there is an social science professor from the University of Delaware who celebrated his death as getting “exactly what he deserved” because he represented an example of “white privilege”:

A University of Delaware professor claimed Wednesday that Otto Warmbier was typical of “rich, white, clueless males” and “got exactly what he deserved” at the hands of the North Koreans.

Katherine Dettwyler, an anthropology professor at UDel, expressed her feelings on the death of Warmbier in the comments section of an article published by National Review, as well as on her personal Facebook page.

Given the toxic nature of social justice ideology, I would not be surprised if this professor’s disgusting views are not unique to her.

More on University Indoctrination

In case you missed it in the comments, TFBW provided a video with new footage of Evergreen State president and faculty working hard to implement a Climate of Indoctrination:

When a university prioritizes indoctrination and groupthink, it ceases to function as a true university.  When it values “believing” over critical thinking, it ceases to function as a true university.  I would agree with the speaker that this postmodernist expression of social justice is indeed cultlike.

The sad thing is that there are many, many more colleges and universities which are and will be following in Evergreen State’s footsteps given the manner in which social justice activism has infiltrated the faculty and administration.  And this represents a true threat to science.  Since so much of science is done in a university setting, how long can it truly thrive in a climate of indoctrination?  How long can it thrive when its questions, methods, and results must be at home on their canoe?

Yet, the primary question to ask is, “how did we get to this point?”  What went wrong?

Are Postmodernism and Nazism Closely Related?

As more people in today’s postmodernist, social justice movement embrace violence as a valid means of political expression (and change), the similarities between this movement and Nazism are becoming more striking.  So I found it quite interesting when I stumbled upon this article yesterday, where Mark Musser highlights the ironic fact a program at Evergreen State University is using a book whose author who was an apologist for a Nazi philosopher.  Musser writes:

One of the mainstay courses at the recently newsworthy Evergreen State College is an all-year course entitled “The Human Condition.” This 36-credit course has its inspiration from a book of the same name written by Hannah Arendt (1906-75). Arendt was an assimilated German Jewess student in the Weimar Republic before the rise of National Socialism. In the 1930s she was forced to move around Europe before finally leaving for America in 1941 as World War II initially exploded in Germany’s favor. Considered one of the most important social theorists of the 20th century, much of Arendt’s worldview was absorbed from German existentialism that was presaged by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), but essentially rooted in the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and Karl Jaspers (1883-1969).

[….]

Heidegger himself was an actual Nazi who never repented of his fascist activities during the 1930s. In fact, Heidegger positioned himself to become the interpreter of Nietzsche for National Socialist consumption that continued until late in the war. More telling, Heidegger was a vehement anti-Semite.

The point about Heidegger was also raised by philosopher Stephen Hicks:

Heidegger is notorious for the obscurity of his prose and for his actions and inactions on behalf of the National Socialists during the 1930s, and he is unquestionably the leading twentieth-century philosopher for the postmodernists. Derrida and Foucault identify themselves as followers of Heidegger.[1] Rorty cites Heidegger as one of the three major influences on his thinking, the other two being Dewey and Wittgenstein.[2]

New Video on Evergreen State Crackpots and Snowflakes

Check out this video.  You’re going to love the interview with the university president, who doesn’t strongly object to being called a white supremicist.  And then there is the angry snowflake student and her oh so predictable talking points:

But the snowflake does raise an interesting point.  If we take Jerry Coyne’s ideas about determinism and responsibility, can we indeed say that Weinstein is responsible for the angry pushback the snowflakes talk about?

BTW, Evergreen’s response to all this is to launch a new master’s program in social justice. 

 

 

Hey! Teacher! Leave Them Kids Alone!

While the Atheist Activist community sells itself as a group of people who place priority on evidence and critical thinking, the community instead places priority on emotion that  thrives by peddling propaganda and negative stereotypes about religious people.  Activist Hemant Mehta effectively admitted this when offering advice on how to be an atheist activist by encouraging atheist journalists to “Write about problems within the church. Tell stories about people who deal with religious oppression.”  In other words, employ the propagandistic technique of cherry picking, which is not hard to do thanks to the internet’s ability to record every infraction or outrageous claim that occurs around the entire globe.

Mehta and his team of propagandists, of course, rely heavily on this technique as fodder for their popular activist atheist blog deceptively named, “The Friendly Atheist.”   For example, in a recent thread, Mehta posted a blog entry entitled: Triple-Murder Suspect Told Police He Didn’t “Know Where God Put” Victim’s Body.  I guess the message there is that if you become a Christian, you’ll end up becoming a murderer who eats parts of his victims.

To help us all understand how this propagandistic cherry picking works, imagine of this atheist activist approach was used against another large group of people – educators. What if I were to create a blog that sought to demonize educators?  Let’s call it, “Teacher! Leave Those Kids Alone!”  Would it be hard to follow Mehta’s advice and regularly find stories that put teachers in a bad light?  Not at all.  Let’s say, for example, my anti-teacher blog was trying to sell the message that teachers can’t be trusted around children.  One way to sell that message would be to post, on a fairly regular basis, stories about teachers being arrested for sexual misconduct with their students.  And then we could go from there.  Thanks to the internet, let me show you how easy it would be.

The Social Justice Defense of Violence

Dan Arel is a social justice atheist activist.  He is also a Christophobe, actually believing that “Christian terrorism is a bigger threat to U.S. freedom than Islamic terrorism.”
He is also one of the atheists who has been working hard to rationalize and justify the use of violence to help achieve his version of a utopia – Should we be okay with punching Nazis?

Thus, it’s not surprising that it looks like Arel is doing something of a victory dance after another social justice activist tried to gun down dozens of Republicans.

GOP weakens restrictions on gun ownership.

GOP relentlessly attacks the working class.

Then has balls to ask how today’s shooting happened

— Dan Arel 🏴 (@danarel) 15 June 2017

So let’s have a look at Arel’s atheistic attempt to justify punching nazis.

The Resistance Attempts Mass Murder

So it looks like the gunman who attempted to murder Republican congressmen was a hardcore Bernie Sander’s supporter.   Why just punch a nazi when you can kill a nazi, right?

Social justice atheist PZ Myers refers to this as “Poetic Injustice” and one of his atheist fans comments:

This particular incident is likely unjustified, but this kind of violence may be the only thing that saves us. The left has not reckoned with this correctly. The commonwealth is fundamentally, irrepairable broken. A non-trivial portion of the right would see millions of us dead.

Damn right violence may have a role to play.

Myers refers to the shooter as a “dangerous fanatic.”  The shooter was obsessed with writing letters to the editor of his local newspaper.  Those letters from the fanatic look like something  Myers himself could have written.

 

Social Justice Actvist Tries to Hurt Horse

It’s a minor story, but it speaks to the violent predispositions of so many of the social justice activists:

A Philadelphia woman attending an ACT for America rally in Harrisburg was arrested last weekend when she allegedly struck a Pennsylvania State Police horse in the side of the neck with a flag pole.

According to police, Lisa Joy Simon, 23, was arrested on Saturday after she “used a flag pole with a silver nail at the top of the pole” to strike a police horse named Sampson in the neck at about 11:32 a.m.

How digusting.  What kind of person actually tries to hurt a horse by stabbing it with a nail?

Answer: A social justice activist.

Lisa Joy Simon.  Aka HorseHater.

The Core Argument of the Social Justice Movement

The social justice activists seem to rely on one core argument to make their case – they refer to their intellectual opponents as a sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, fascist, and/or white supremacist nazis.

In other words, their core argument is the logical fallacy known as ad hominem:

Ad hominem (Latin for “to the man” or “to the person”, short for argumentum ad hominem, is now usually understood as a logical fallacy in which an argument is rebutted by attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.

This fallacy is often understood to be a personal attack.  And that makes sense given my hypothesis that the thinking of social justice activists is id-based.  Recall that the id is the place from where the aggression instinct is housed.  Personal attacks are simply verbal expressions of aggression.  So it would make sense that the primary argument of the social justice movement is verbal expressions of aggression.

What’s more, personal attacks are essentially childish arguments.  I’m sure most of us can remember that among the first arguments we developed as children on the playground came in the form name calling and personal attacks.  Because the id is basically an infantile impulse, it makes sense that social justice activists would retain this approach and express it through their ideology.

The bottom line here is that if you find yourself on the receiving end of some social justice tantrum, where the activist is calling you names like sexist, racist, homophobe, transphobe, Islamophobe, xenophobe, fascist, white supremacist nazi, etc., you should calmly respond by pointing out the activist is engaged in an ad hominem argument.  Point out that this is a fallacy and is thus irrational.  It won’t deter the social justice activist who is immune to the effects of critical thinking, but it will help any onlookers to appreciate what is happening.