Sullivan: Our Politics And The English Language: What would Orwell say about our debased discourse?

2021/06/07 Leave a comment

I also find it useful to re-read Orwell’s essay, and try to follow his general rules (leave readers to judge the extent to which I do). While he takes his arguments too far (e.g., on systemic racism), his fundamental point on the need for clarity and precision, and not “hiding” behind jargon, is valid:

From time to time, I make sure to re-read George Orwell’s classic essay, “Politics And The English Language.” It remains the best guide to writing non-fiction, and it usually prompts a wave of self-loathing even more piercing than my habitual kind. What it shows so brilliantly is how language itself is central to politics, that clarity is as hard as it is vital, and that blather is as lazy as it is dangerous. It’s dangerous because the relationship between our words and our politics goes both ways: “[The English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” We create language and language creates us. If the language is corrupted, so are we. 

Near the end of the essay, Orwell lists a few rules to keep writing clear, accessible and meaningful:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Originality, simplicity, brevity, active verbs, everyday language, decency: as simple as it is very, very hard. It’s a relief in a way to recall that Orwell thought things were pretty damn shitty in his day as well, but the more you read broadly across most elite media platforms these days, the more similar it all sounds. To reverse Orwell’s virtues: so much of it is repetition, complexity, length, passive verbs, endless jargon, barbarism. 

I was just reading about the panic that occurred in the American Medical Association, when their journal’s deputy editor argued on a podcast that socio-economic factors were more significant in poor outcomes for non-whites than “structural racism.” As you might imagine, any kind of questioning of this orthodoxy required the defenestration of the deputy editor and the resignation of the editor-in-chief. The episode was withdrawn from public viewing, and the top editor replaced it with a Maoist apology/confessionbefore he accepted his own fate. 

But I was most struck by the statement put out in response by a group called “The Institute for Antiracism in Medicine.” Here it is:

“The podcast and associated promotional message are extremely problematic for minoritized members of our medical community. Racism was created with intention and must therefore be undone with intention. Structural racism has deeply permeated the field of medicine and must be actively dissolved through proper antiracist education and purposeful equitable policy creation. The delivery of messages suggesting that racism is non-existent and therefore non-problematic within the medical field is harmful to both our underrepresented minoritized physicians and the marginalized communities served in this country.”

Consider the language for a moment. I don’t want to single out this group — they are merely representative of countless others, all engaged in the recitation of certain doctrines, and I just want an example. But I do want to say that this paragraph is effectively dead, drained of almost any meaning, nailed to the perch of pious pabulum. It is prose, in Orwell’s words, that “consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.” 

It is chock-full of long, compounded nouns and adjectives, riddled with the passive voice, lurching and leaning, like a passenger walking the aisle on a moving train, on pre-packaged phrases to keep itself going.

Notice the unnecessary longevity: a tweet becomes an “associated promotional message.” Notice the deadness of the neologisms: “minoritized”, “marginalized”, “non-problematic”. As Orwell noted: “the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatoryand so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning.” Go back and see if you can put the words “minoritized” or “non-problematic” into everyday English.

Part of the goal of this is political, of course. The more you repeat words like “proper antiracist education” or “systemic racism” or “racial inequity” or “lived experience” or “heteronormativity,” the more they become part of the landscape of words, designed to dull one’s curiosity about what on earth any of them can possible mean. A mass of ideological abstractions, in Orwell’s words, “falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.”

Then this: “Racism was created with intention.” Abstract noun, passive voice, vague meaning. Who “created” it? What was the intention exactly? Hasn’t racist tribalism been a feature of human society for tens of thousands of years? They never say. Or this phrase: “purposeful equitable policy creation.” Again: what are they talking about? It is as vague as “doing the work” — and as deliberate as the use of a highly contested term like “structural racism” to define objective reality. These are phrases not designed to say anything real. They are phrases designed to send a message of orthodoxy, and, as Orwell also noted, “orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.” Try reading Slate or Vox or the Huffington Post: the tedium you feel is the tedium of a language rendered lifeless by ideology.

I caught a glimpse of Ibram X. Kendi’s recent appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the annual woke, oxygen-deprived hajj for the left-media elites. He was asked to define racism — something you’d think he’d have thought a bit about. This was his response: “Racism is a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas.” He does this a lot. He repeats Yoda-stye formulae: “There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy … If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.” These maxims pepper his tomes like deep thoughts in a self-help book. When he proposes specific action to counter racism, for example, he suggests: “Deploy antiracist power to compel or drive from power the unsympathetic racist policymakers in order to institute the antiracist policy.” “Always vote for the leftist” is a bit blunter.

Orwell had Kendi’s number: “The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.” And that conformity is proven by the gawking, moneyed, largely white, Atlantic subscribers hanging on every one of this lightweight’s meaningless words — as if they really were in church.

The most dedicated abusers of the English language, of course, are the alphabet people. They have long since abandoned any pretense at speaking English and instead bombard us with new words: “cisheteropatriarchy”, “homonormativity”, “fraysexuality”, “neutrois”, “transmasculine”, “transmisogynoir”, and on and on. To give you a sense of the completely abstract bullshit involved here, take a style guide given out to journalists by trans activists, instructing them on how to cover transgender questions. (I’m wondering how Orwell would respond if given such a sheet of words he can and cannot use. Let’s just say: not like reporters for the Washington Post.) Here’s the guide’s definition of “gender nonconforming”: “[it] refers to gender presentations outside typical gendered expectations. Note that gender nonconforming is not a synonym for non-binary. While many non-binary people are gender nonconforming, many gender nonconforming people are also cisgender.”

This is a kind of bewildering, private language. But the whole point of the guide is to make it our public language, to force other people to use these invented words, to make the entire society learn and repeat the equivalent of their own post-modern sanskrit. This is our contemporary version of what Orwell went on to describe as “newspeak” in Nineteen Eighty-Four: a vocabulary designed to make certain ideas literally unthinkable because woke language has banished them from use. Repeat the words “structural racism” and “white supremacy” and “cisheteropatriarchy” often enough, and people come to believe these things exist unquestioningly. Talk about the LGBTQIA2S+ community and eventually, people will believe it exists (spoiler alert: it doesn’t).

And that is the only recourse an average citizen has when buried by this avalanche of abstraction: ask the language-launderers what they are really talking about. When some doofus apologizes for the “terrible pain” they have caused to the whatever community, ask them to give a specific example of that “pain.” When someone says “structural racism,” ask: what actual “structures” are you referring to? How do they actually work? Give concrete examples. 

When someone calls American society “white supremacy”, ask them how you could show that America is not a form of “white supremacy”. When someone uses the word “Latinx”, ask them which country does that refer to. When someone says something is “problematic”, ask them to whom? When you’re told you’re meeting with members of the BIPOC or AANHPI communities, ask them first to translate and then why this is in any way relevant, and why every single member of those communities are expected to have the same opinion. And when you’re told that today is IDAHOBIT Day, ask them if you can speak to Frodo.

Yes, some humor is key to fighting back. But the core truth is: we do not have to speak this debased and decadent language. It is designed to overwhelm and confuse and smother and subdue. And the more it is used by elites, the more normal Americans, still living in the real world, feel utterly alienated by their masters, and the deeper our divide goes. Reclaiming our discourse from these ideological contraptions will make our writing better. It will help us think more clearly. And it could help re-start a genuinely national conversation. In everyday English, the language of democracy.

Source: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/our-politics-and-the-english-language-8be?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxMDcxOTUwNywicG9zdF9pZCI6MzcxNDEzOTAsIl8iOiJ3SVY5SCIsImlhdCI6MTYyMjk2ODAzMywiZXhwIjoxNjIyOTcxNjMzLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNjEzNzEiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.57ZGzCTaBuXUq20SFD6jlwqwc0GY6FMUnpidhMqIqjI

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Why A.I. Should Be Afraid of Us: Because benevolent bots are suckers.

2021/06/07 Leave a comment

Of significance as AI becomes more prevalent. “Road rage” as the new Turing test!

Artificial intelligence is gradually catching up to ours. A.I. algorithms can now consistently beat us at chess, poker and multiplayer video games, generate images of human faces indistinguishable from real ones, write news articles (not this one!) and even love stories, and drive cars better than most teenagers do.

But A.I. isn’t perfect, yet, if Woebot is any indicator. Woebot, as Karen Brown wrote this week in Science Times, is an A.I.-powered smartphone app that aims to provide low-cost counseling, using dialogue to guide users through the basic techniques of cognitive-behavioral therapy. But many psychologists doubt whether an A.I. algorithm can ever express the kind of empathy required to make interpersonal therapy work.

“These apps really shortchange the essential ingredient that — mounds of evidence show — is what helps in therapy, which is the therapeutic relationship,” Linda Michaels, a Chicago-based therapist who is co-chair of the Psychotherapy Action Network, a professional group, told The Times.

Empathy, of course, is a two-way street, and we humans don’t exhibit a whole lot more of it for bots than bots do for us. Numerous studies have found that when people are placed in a situation where they can cooperate with a benevolent A.I., they are less likely to do so than if the bot were an actual person.

“There seems to be something missing regarding reciprocity,” Ophelia Deroy, a philosopher at Ludwig Maximilian University, in Munich, told me. “We basically would treat a perfect stranger better than A.I.”

In a recent study, Dr. Deroy and her neuroscientist colleagues set out to understand why that is. The researchers paired human subjects with unseen partners, sometimes human and sometimes A.I.; each pair then played a series of classic economic games — Trust, Prisoner’s Dilemma, Chicken and Stag Hunt, as well as one they created called Reciprocity — designed to gauge and reward cooperativeness.

Our lack of reciprocity toward A.I. is commonly assumed to reflect a lack of trust. It’s hyper-rational and unfeeling, after all, surely just out for itself, unlikely to cooperate, so why should we? Dr. Deroy and her colleagues reached a different and perhaps less comforting conclusion. Their study found that people were less likely to cooperate with a bot even when the bot was keen to cooperate. It’s not that we don’t trust the bot, it’s that we do: The bot is guaranteed benevolent, a capital-S sucker, so we exploit it.

That conclusion was borne out by conversations afterward with the study’s participants. “Not only did they tend to not reciprocate the cooperative intentions of the artificial agents,” Dr. Deroy said, “but when they basically betrayed the trust of the bot, they didn’t report guilt, whereas with humans they did.” She added, “You can just ignore the bot and there is no feeling that you have broken any mutual obligation.”

This could have real-world implications. When we think about A.I., we tend to think about the Alexas and Siris of our future world, with whom we might form some sort of faux-intimate relationship. But most of our interactions will be one-time, often wordless encounters. Imagine driving on the highway, and a car wants to merge in front of you. If you notice that the car is driverless, you’ll be far less likely to let it in. And if the A.I. doesn’t account for your bad behavior, an accident could ensue.

“What sustains cooperation in society at any scale is the establishment of certain norms,” Dr. Deroy said. “The social function of guilt is exactly to make people follow social norms that lead them to make compromises, to cooperate with others. And we have not evolved to have social or moral norms for non-sentient creatures and bots.”

That, of course, is half the premise of “Westworld.” (To my surprise Dr. Deroy had not heard of the HBO series.) But a landscape free of guilt could have consequences, she noted: “We are creatures of habit. So what guarantees that the behavior that gets repeated, and where you show less politeness, less moral obligation, less cooperativeness, will not color and contaminate the rest of your behavior when you interact with another human?”

There are similar consequences for A.I., too. “If people treat them badly, they’re programed to learn from what they experience,” she said. “An A.I. that was put on the road and programmed to be benevolent should start to be not that kind to humans, because otherwise it will be stuck in traffic forever.” (That’s the other half of the premise of “Westworld,” basically.)

There we have it: The true Turing test is road rage. When a self-driving car starts honking wildly from behind because you cut it off, you’ll know that humanity has reached the pinnacle of achievement. By then, hopefully, A.I therapy will be sophisticated enough to help driverless cars solve their anger-management issues.

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ICYMI: Fortress Europe: As Islam Expands, Should the US Imitate the ‘Christian’ Continent

2021/06/07 Leave a comment

Interesting discussion among European evangelicals along with related issues:

Within three decades, Muslims may comprise 14 percent of Europe.

The face of the historically Christian continent, tallied at 5 percent Muslim in 2016, may dramatically change by 2050 if high migration patterns hold.

And as Muslim families have a birth rate one child higher than the rest of the continent, the Pew Research Center projects nearly 1 in 5 people will be Muslim in the United Kingdom (17%), France (18%), and Germany (20%). Sweden is projected to become 30 percent Muslim.

And Austria, with its 20 percent projection, is on guard. The majority-Catholic nation recently published an online Islam Map, to identify mosques and other centers of politicized religion.

According to European religion experts, however, one-third of European Muslims do not practice their faith.

Conversely, this suggests that two-thirds of Muslims believe in and practice Islam. Contrast this with the 22 percent of Western European Christians who attend church at least once monthly and the 27 percent who believe in God according to the Bible.

Could the fear of some European Christians be plausible: an eventual Eurabia?

Or is it Islamophobia to say so?

Or, to the contrary, should Americans look across the ocean and consider French separatism laws and Swiss burqa bans in pursuit of a shared secularism?

For concerned evangelicals, Bert de Ruiter has his own questions—about their own faith.

“If Islam is taking over Europe, is that a problem?” asked the European Evangelical Alliance’s consultant on Muslim-Christian relations. “Will God suddenly be in a panic?”

Muslims will not take over the continent, he believes, noting Pew’s other 2050 Muslim population estimates of 7 percent if “zero” migration and 11 percent if “medium” migration.

But more important is that under any scenario, God will be faithful to his church, says de Ruiter. Once chairman of a Dutch political party, he has a “passion for Muslims, to reach out with the love of Christ.”

Yet too many European Christians, he said, act instead like politicians. Worse, they betray the love of Christ for neighbor.

According to statistics collected in the 2019 European Islamophobia Report (EIR), 37 percent of Europeans have negative views of Muslims, while 29 percent would not feel comfortable working with Muslims. And in Denmark, 28 percent at least partially agreed with the idea that Muslims should be deported.

But again, flip the statistics, and substantial majorities treat Muslims just fine.

Farid Hafez, coeditor of the EIR report, said that among the main drivers of Islamophobia is propaganda pushed by far-right networks seeking to create a scapegoat. Amplified by politicians and aided by counterterrorism narratives, perception then creates the reality.

“The more hostility people go through, the more they feel attached to their religious community,” said Hafez, also a lecturer at the university of Salzburg in Austria. “But I don’t see the problem that others do; Muslims are a part of society.”

Labels like “no-go zones” and “parallel societies,” he said, reflect Europe’s inability to adopt an American mentality that accepts multiple identities. And the relationship with Muslims is not fixed but boils down to a collective choice.

“Austria once suffered the siege of Vienna, but it also allied with the Ottoman Empire,” said Hafez. “History provides many options for how to tell your story. So will we choose a narrative of cooperation or conflict?”

In his column for Evangelical Focus, an online news site focused on Europe, de Ruiter said there are many actors trying to shape the narrative.

Among them are majority-Muslim nations such as Turkey and Morocco that build mosques and supply imams. Transnational networks such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Sufi orders compete to gain adherents and to define Islam. Wahhabi preachers on the internet break down traditional lines of authority. And state-linked Muslim councils strive for integration within secular society.

Muslims came to Europe largely as invited migrant labor in the 1950s, following the destruction of World War II. Over time, they brought their families, married, and had children. Initially isolated because of language, increasingly they put their stamp on society, building mosques and opening schools.

A European society that once welcomed them began to grow uncomfortable.

“We invited guest workers,” said de Ruiter, quoting a frequent saying. “But it turned out they were actually people.”

People created in the image of God.

Therefore, the task for Christians, he recently wrote in an analysis for Evangelical Focus, is fourfold:

  • Research: Matthew 10 speaks of finding the worthy person in a village you come to. Likewise, Christians must learn the real situation of actual Muslims, not media-driven images.
  • Reflect: Psalm 139 invites God to search our hearts. Anti-Muslim prejudice is often unconsciously ingrained, and with humility Christians can repent and develop attitudes of compassion.
  • Relate: In 1 Thessalonians 2, Paul describes how he shared his life with those he was trying to reach. Christians must develop relationships with Muslims, in hope of also sharing the gospel.
  • Relax: In Psalm 46, the Lord reminds believers to “be still, and know that I am God.” Whatever changes happen in Europe are according to God’s sovereignty, and he will be exalted among the nations.

In America, Warren Larson adds a fifth R: represent.

“As Christians, we must speak up in defense of persecuted Muslims,” said the senior research fellow and professor at the Zwemer Center for Muslim Studies at Columbia International University.

“We must take the initiative through acts of kindness, warmth, and generosity to Muslims, in our midst and around the world.”

A former missionary to Pakistan, Larson said his life was spared when Muslims defended his family against a mob that believed America was conspiring to undermine Islam. Today, he highlights the genocide underway against the Uighur Muslims in China’s northwest Xinjiang province.

But Larson has noticed something curious in his mentorship of Chinese Christians. Many are unaware of the atrocities or, like their government, deny them altogether. Some of it may be fear, he said, as China uses sophisticated technology to surveil its diaspora around the world.

But there may also be a parallel to Islamophobia in Europe and the United States. Chinese Christians from the mainland, he has noticed, speak out in defense of Hong Kong but not Xinjiang.

“One missionary to the Uighurs even said China was only dealing with terrorism,” said Larson. “Is it possible that she, along with most Chinese, fears what the Uighurs might do?”

Citing ethnic violence and acts of terrorism in Xinjiang that began in 2009, the Chinese media campaign against the Uighurs has been relentless. The United Nations has recognized a similar, though not state-run, pattern against Muslims in Europe.

A European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance report found that in the Netherlands, media descriptions most frequently call Dutch people “average,” even “beautiful.” Muslims, however, are predominantly described as “radical” and “terrorist.”

And in Switzerland, a federal commission found that news reports on Muslims focused on their failure to integrate, while only 2 percent of media coverage was of their normal lives and successful examples of integration.

In a statement supporting the UN report on Islamophobia, issued in March, the World Evangelical Alliance praised its Swiss branch for condemning an arson attack on a mosque and contributing financially to its repair. Similar efforts at solidarity were praised in India, Sri Lanka, and the Central African Republic.

“We reaffirm the unique value of each and every member of the human family,” it stated. “We believe each one of us is created in the image of God.”

But of Muslims, said Asma Uddin, there is a different image.

“Many evangelicals view Islam as a satanic deception, fundamentally violent and evil,” said the Muslim author of The Politics of Vulnerability: How to Heal Muslim-Christian Relations in a Post-Christian America. “They then mistake standing up for Muslims as standing up for a religion they despise or distrust.”

Evangelical advocates she has worked with are devoted, she said, but “outliers.”

Nearly 2 in 3 white evangelicals (63%) said Islam encourages violence more than other faiths, according to a 2017 Pew survey. This was the highest level among religious groups.

But the issue is also partisan.

Over half (56%) of Republicans said there was at least a “fair” amount of extremism among US Muslims. Only 22 percent of Democrats said the same.

Since liberals are associated with defending the rights of Muslims, Uddin said, political tribalism leads many conservatives to dismiss the severity of discrimination.

The setting is different in Europe, according to Hafez.

While Muslims in the UK are well represented in academia and politics, they also represent a disproportionate 16 percent of the prison population. Germany continues to have issues integrating its large migrant community.

And France’s vision of secularism separates not just church and state but also religion and society. Combined with a lingering colonial superiority, Hafez ranks the nation as Europe’s worst for Muslim communities.

But Islamophobia, he emphasizes, is not about anti-Muslim cartoons. Neither is it the critique of Islam or the criticism of Muhammad. It is the construction of a scapegoat with a generalized identity, which is then excluded from the rights afforded to all.

Protestants in Europe, he said, often feel it also. In Austria, only since 1861 were they allowed to build a steeple. Today, many of them sympathize when Muslims want a minaret.

And similarly, many are troubled by the publication of the Islam Map.

Michael Chalupka, bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Austria, said he would not accept this for his own community, joining the calls to take it down.

“When you are weak, you stand by the weak,” said Hafez, a Muslim. “Jesus also stood with the weak, and in Europe, Muslims are among the weakest.”

De Ruiter finds greater solidarity with Muslims on moral issues than he does with the secular Dutch. And he too knows the pain of generalization. Preaching once in Russia, he was queried repeatedly not about his sermon but about Holland’s lax laws on drugs and prostitution.

The state, he told CT, has a biblical obligation to provide security, justice, and human rights. But the believer is to welcome the stranger and love the neighbor. If the Christian values that shaped Europe are taken advantage of, the Christian cannot retreat.

After all, Jesus was crucified.

For this message, de Ruiter is often accused angrily: “Don’t you care to preserve what your grandfathers built?”

But the values they cherish, he said, usually center around materialism, identity, and place in society. If they desire instead to reverse the losses suffered in a post-Christian society, there is a better way than fearmongering of Muslims.

That fight employs the weapons of the world, and must be rejected.

It will lose the gospel, for all.

“If we want things to change, Muslims will have to see something real in us,” said de Ruiter. “But they cannot if we shut the door.”

Source: Fortress Europe: As Islam Expands, Should the US Imitate the ‘Christian’ Continent? | News & Reporting

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Representatives of Chinese dissident groups reject Trudeau’s comments on racism

2021/06/07 Leave a comment

Of note and legitimate call-out given that criticism of the Chinese regime’s repression and other practices is not racist, just as criticism of Israeli government policies is not anti-semitic. But, as always, one has to be careful in wording to ensure the distinction is made clear:

Witnesses who appeared before the Commons special committee on Canada-China relations this week said they were troubled by comments Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made about racism — comments that left Conservatives fuming.

During a debate last Wednesday about the dismissal of two Chinese scientists from the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg, Trudeau appeared to suggest that Conservative MPs were feeding anti-Asian sentiments by asking questions.

“I hope that my Conservative Party colleagues are not raising fears about Asian Canadians,” Trudeau told the Commons.

Three women appeared before the committee as representatives of Tibetan, Uyghur and Hong Kong pro-democracy groups. Two of the three said they had personally experienced hostility and abuse during a year that has seen a well-documented wave of anti-Asian racist violence across North America.

All three also warned against soft-pedalling criticism of the Chinese government, or throttling back on efforts to block Chinese state espionage, out of a fear of appearing racist.

“Folks who claim to be standing up against anti-Asian hatred and racism, please, listen to your constituents and Asian voices,” said Tibetan activist Chemi Lhamo, whose run for student president at the University of Toronto provoked hostility and threats from Chinese nationalists.

“As an Asian woman, there is a bigger target on my back, and conflating the idea of anti-CCP [Communist Party of China] with anti-Asian is actually a much bigger disrespect.”

“I think our prime minister is really confused,” said witness Rukiye Turdush of the Uyghur Research Institute. “If we’re against the CCP, it doesn’t mean we’re against the Chinese people. It has nothing to do with anti-Asian racism. I really didn’t get why he said that.”

Biosecurity, not diversity

The government has refused to explain in detail why Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng were fired, and why Qiu in 2019 sent samples of Ebola and Henipah virus to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Source: Representatives of Chinese dissident groups reject Trudeau’s comments on racism

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Why The US Is Losing Immigrant Entrepreneurs To Other Nations

2021/06/05 Leave a comment

Interesting longish read on how USA is becoming less attractive given immigration restrictions, and how other countries, including Canada, are benefitting:

John S. Kim, cofounder of Sendbird, which offers real-time chat and messaging for mobile apps and websites, relocated from his native South Korea to San Francisco five years ago.

He wanted to be close to his U.S. customers like Yahoo, Reddit and Headspace,have access to Silicon Valley venture capital, hire American engineers and expand his company here. He easily obtained an L-1 nonimmigrant visa for foreign executives, given that he’d first started the business in South Korea, but by 2019, he had only one extension left. He applied for a green card to get legal permanent residency—and received a letter that he’d likely be denied. “Notice of intent to deny is, ‘We’re going to kick you out; change our mind,’ ” he says. “We had raised $100 million–plus in financing, we had real revenue in the tens of millions of dollars, we were creating jobs. It was a slap in the face, for sure.”

Source: Why The US Is Losing Immigrant Entrepreneurs To Other Nations

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Multiculturalism in China from melting pot to pressure cooker

2021/06/05 Leave a comment

Interesting characterization of the different periods of recent Chinese history and approaches:

Headlines on re-education camps in Xinjiang and a forced switch to Mandarin as the language of instruction in Inner Mongolian primary schools have brought concern in the international community about the wellbeing of China’s ethnic minorities.

The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) minority policies have been evolving since 1949, but forced linguistic and cultural assimilation campaigns last peaked during the Cultural Revolution. In its early years, the PRC adopted the Soviet model of multinational state-building, in which being ‘Chinese’ meant ‘socialist in content while nationalist in form’. Minorities could maintain their indigenous languages and cultures in their autonomous areas so long as they remained loyal to the PRC.

Since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, China gradually switched to a Chinese model of a unified Chinese nation with diversity, largely imitating the US model. This model aims to assimilate minorities into the Chinese mainstream through economic development and cultural inclusion. The government is targeting the economic gap between minority communities and the majority Han ethnicity by opening up Western China while dispatching minorities to work in coastal China.

The cultural inclusion is theoretically two-way, requiring minorities to learn Mandarin and Han culture while elevating minority cultures as part of a unified Chinese culture in state television programs and at events such as the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. But some question whether China can become a melting pot. The Chinese model started to come under pressure during the leadership of Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, due to ethnic riots in Xinjiang and self-immolation protests in Tibet in 2009.

Shortly after succeeding Hu, Xi began showcasing what the unified Chinese nation should look like under his reign. At the Second Work Conference on Xinjiang in May 2014, he asked ethnic groups to develop an awareness of the state, citizenship and community of the unified Chinese nation. At the Sixth Work Conference on Tibet in 2015, he said this awareness involves five identifications: with the state, the unified Chinese nation, Chinese culture, the Party and Chinese socialism.

All aspects of Xi’s minority policies were elevated as a single working slogan, ‘to forge the awareness of the community of the unified Chinese nation’, a principle further espoused in an amendment to the PRC Constitution in 2018. The impact of this new policy is demonstrated in Xi’s speech at the Third Work Conference on Xinjiang in September 2020. There he told officials that, of the five identifications, Chinese culture is the most fundamental. Xi’s policy has been understood and implemented by the Chinese government in three essential ways.

First, learning to speak Mandarin is considered critical in the identification with the unified Chinese nation. In recent years, minorities in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Tibet and other minority communities have been coerced into learning Mandarin. Resistance to this approach leads to punishments, including re-education camps, detentions, job loss and financial retribution. Bilingual teaching and research has become a political taboo in Xinjiang and other minority areas, with the government forcing academic journals on the topic to close and scholars to instead research Mandarin education.

Second, Chinese culture is understood as being that of the Han majority culture, and it is increasingly criminal to suggest otherwise. The documentary The War in the Shadows describes how editors and publishers associated with Uyghur and Kazakh language textbooks for primary and secondary schools were recently sentenced to death or life in prison. Their alleged crime is to have included in the textbooks a high percentage of indigenous material and readings regarding historic figures who were not from today’s China or who rebelled against Han oppressors.

Third, earlier this year, the Legal Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress ruled unconstitutional any items in local autonomous laws which support the use of minority languages in local schools as a medium of instruction. In their first constitutionality ruling, the committee accused them of violating the constitutional article on Putonghua promotion.

These headlines are just the tip of the iceberg of China’s coercive and accelerated assimilation program. Under Xi, the country is becoming not so much a melting pot as a pressure cooker.

Minglang Zhou is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Chinese Program and the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.

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Douglas Todd: Young Chinese Communist revolutionized by move to Canada

2021/06/05 Leave a comment

Anecdotally, there are a number of visible minority women who have used beauty pageants as a means to develop their careers, one of the most prominent being Nazanin Afshin-Jan. Encountered at least one political staffer with a similar trajectory:

The world began opening up for Anastasia Lin after she arrived in Metro Vancouver as a 13-year-old from China, where she had been a fiercely patriotic leader in the Young Pioneers, a Communist organization.

Her discoveries have thrown her on an international roller-coaster ride, bringing both fear and fame.

Source: Douglas Todd: Young Chinese Communist revolutionized by move to Canada

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IRCC’s ‘arbitrary’ automatic extensions on information requests created ‘unfair playing field,’ say immigration agents

2021/06/05 Leave a comment

Understand the policy rationale given the volume of requests and limited capacity, but underlines the need in IRCC modernization to reduce the need for ATIP requests on the status of individual files:

Some immigration agents filing numerous access to information requests on behalf of their clients are feeling burned by a recently phased-out Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada practice that they say was “arbitrary” and akin to institutional targeting, harming their companies’ reputations and the confidence clients placed in them.

Five unnamed people were highlighted in a recent special report by Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard, who were identified by the department to be subject to automatic delays in requests they made through Canada’s access to information laws. The report, tabled in Parliament on May 25, found the IRCC was out of step with access to information rules. While the Office of the Information Commissioner’s (OIC) probe was triggered by an influx of requests to the department between 2017 to 2020, it learned that five individuals—consultants, agents, or lawyers specializing in immigration—were identified as frequent requesters by the department, which then “automatically” decided an extension was needed on their files.

Under the act, federal institutions have to respond to access requests within 30 calendar days or otherwise request an extension of 60 or 90 days as required. Rules dictate the head of an institution should help facilitate complete, timely, and accurate responses to requesters “without regard to the identity of a person making the request.” In place since 2019, the IRCC policy was scrapped in March 2021, shortly after the commissioner ruled it against the act and recommended it be ended.

The Hill Times spoke with several people who participated in Ms. Maynard’s investigation and said they faced challenges in getting information from the department over those years, some of whom said they filed thousands of requests for information from the IRCC.

Ms. Maynard’s office fields complaints from organizations, businesses, reporters, Parliamentarians, and individuals who encounter difficulties in their access to government records under the Access to Information Act. Complaints are typically related to delays or outright refusals from some institutions.

The Hill Times obtained documents that show IRCC identified the five people in a Sept. 19, 2019, email between IRCC and departmental ATIP workers and, the following day, officials suggested that “by looking at the numbers the first three” should be subject to a 90-day extension while the last two should receive a 60-day extension. The names were redacted, but The Hill Times has seen two names mentioned separately in two sets of documents.

Manmeet Rai, founder of getgcms.com, a website that helps clients request their immigration case files from the department, was listed in one of these emails as among the five. His requests appeared to be flagged to automatically have a 90-day extension added to them, effective Sept. 23, 2019, according to an internal email.

Mr. Rai said he received a “blanket” extension on all requests filed under his name since September 2019, and that development led him to be “concerned about what is going on inside the government.” He learned his name appeared on that IRCC list when he filed an access-to-information request on his own name.

Mr. Rai declined to delve into specific business information, like how many requests he filed each year, but said he submitted more than 7,000 requests in 2019 alone.

He said IRCC’s policy, also revealed in Ms. Maynard’s investigation, was “arbitrary.” Its application, he said, was “a targeted exercise toward a specific group of people who were filing requests to help immigrant applicants who were not otherwise entitled to obtain their information” under the act. His requests were “clumped together” when they should have been treated as independent files.

“Everyone wants the information as soon as possible, because if the information is available to them, they can take some corrective action if their application is in progress,” said Mr. Rai. “But if they are to wait for 120 days from the date they filed the request, that is just absolutely dreadful for anyone.” (As of publication, the department had not yet responded to requests for comment from The Hill Times.)

While Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino (Eglinton-Lawrence, Ont.) accepted and agreed with Ms. Maynard’s findings, he noted in his response to the report, that “bulk requesters take a significant amount of IRCC resources due to their sheer volume.” In 2019-20, an average of 6,157 pages of records per business day had to be pulled for the top five requesters, the minister said, amounting to more than 30,000 pages per week.

“These top five requestors alone made over 10,000 requests last year. Paired with the extraordinary growth in requests … it became apparent that IRCC needed to take steps to support broader access rights in an equitable manner.” He said “nevertheless,” the department would no longer be relying on its policy.

Mr. Rai, who took part in the OIC’s investigation, commended the office for being “co-operative and upfront.” That the policy no longer exists is a testament to it living up to its task as a watchdog, he said, but he still feels the policy damaged his business. Mr. Rai noted over the last several years, there have been a swath of websites offering similar services that have popped up, but which promised deadlines he could not meet given the automatic extension applied to his information requests.

“You don’t have to be licensed to do that, you just have to be in Canada,” he said, noting that may have been why the department saw an “influx of so many requests” in recent years.

According to the OIC’s report, IRCC received a total of 116,928 access requests in 2019-20, a figure 42 per cent greater than the year before. All other government institutions combined received a fraction of that figure, equalling 39,294 requests during the same fiscal year. Out of this figure, 98 per cent were related to immigration case files, coming from foreign nationals or immigration lawyers hoping to get more details on their clients’ files.

Typically, Mr. Rai said his organization serves two types of clients: people filing permanent residency applications, and those looking for temporary residence, like students or visitors.

“The outcome was that instead of the people who were already doing it, there were new websites which came out and said, ‘See, we are doing it better than others because these guys are being targeted and they get an extension, whereas we can provide you the same information within 30 days,’ ” he said.

IRCC should be ‘transparent’ with rejected applicants

IRCC should be more “transparent” with rejected applicants, who are often keen to know why (and file access-to-information requests) so they could course correct moving forward, added Mr. Rai.

“If IRCC is more transparent in giving out information to each individual … people would be happy and would get some solace out of it that something is happening, rather than just keeping quiet after the application is filed,” he said.

It’s a reality the OIC appeared to be aware of. In its report, the office noted the department’s MyAccount portal “provides little information on the status of the processing of an application,” with template letters used to let applicants know if they have been accepted or rejected. IRCC is now looking to do a “comprehensive review of various refusal letters,” with a new temporary resident refusal letter that could be used for the 2021-22 year, according to its response to Ms. Maynard’s report.

But according to the OIC’s report, the department still does not plan to offer excerpts of notes made by the immigration officers assigned to a person’s file, which is a “frequent” request in complaints it receives.

Prateek Sharma, founder of gcmsbuddy.com, also took part in the OIC’s investigation and said he suspected he’s one of the top five identified by IRCC for automatic extensions. Since starting the website in 2017, he said he has filed between 7,000 and 8,000 complaints against IRCC with the OIC.

The bulk of his clients hired him in 2018, and shortly after, the “majority” of his company’s requests started getting 90-day extensions. He agreed with Mr. Rai that the time period coincided with a steady rise in websites claiming they had faster turnaround times.

“Word spreads easily among a small community. There are forums and WhatsApp groups around, and people started complaining that this website is getting all the extensions and another website has just started that’s not getting [them],” he said. “It contributed to an unfair playing field for us, because it was not my fault. People wanted to know about their status, and it was not like I was requesting the same information for the same person again and again.”

Ms. Maynard noted in a May 25 interview that requesters were filing multiple requests for multiple clients; Mr. Sharma said as a result, he felt services like his were singled out and he took a reputational hit. (Citing privacy concerns and the nature of its investigations, the OIC declined to name the five identified requesters and how many each filed.)

“[Clients] are worried about their future because they have a lot of things to plan; moving to Canada and starting a new life,” he noted.

“If some business is doing good, you’re kind of targeting them. The more requests we are sending, that means we are a popular website and we are offering a good service.” According to Mr. Sharma, there were about three or four major websites offering a similar service before 2019, a figure he predicted has since grown to 10 or more. “That prompted people to start new websites and now they are on par with us. All our hard work and everything—our reputation was ruined because of this.” While “thankful” the policy is now phased out, he wasn’t sure “if there’s a way to measure those losses.”

Because of the repeated extensions, Mr. Sharma said his group was subject to “angry customers” who noted other websites were offering a quicker turnaround. “It was a hard time, because the number of emails we used to get asking for status updates increased a lot,” he said.

Think about applicants, not just workers, urges agent 

The Hill Times spoke to another requester who took part in the OIC’s investigation, an associate with gcmsnotes.com who also rancaipsnotes.com. They asked not to be identified by name, but their name was listed in a Sept. 20, 2019, document obtained by The Hill Times. The email named the associate as somebody whose files would be subject to a 60-day extension, effective Sept. 23, 2019, per an internal IRCC email.

The associate said from their clients’ perspective, it was “quite frustrating” not to know why their application may have been refused, especially if those applying are students. Because intake periods for colleges and universities can range from January, May, or September, the associate said many clients wanted to know how to tweak their applications so they could apply in time for the next period, while others may have punted their timelines to start classes to a later semester.

“People are falling behind in their careers, or in starting a career, because of this arbitrary decision on their file,” the associate said. “It had a pretty big impact. … For some of them, they had to make life-altering decisions about whether to postpone their intake. They were disappointed with that.”

The associate supported the OIC recommendation to beef up IRCC’s staff so there are more workers tasked with handling the volume of requests. Ms. Maynard earlier said there are some 200-plus analysts helping the IRCC, which ranks among the bigger units. Her office, which itself is subject to the act, has about three full-time workers.

Mr. Mendicino told her office he agreed with the recommendation, according to the report, though his written response fell short of committing to a number of workers or funding. The department is working to secure more resources “in conjunction with the departmental action plan, while implementing permanent technological solutions,” he wrote in his response to the OIC.

Asked for more information about the IRCC’s policy, IRCC spokesperson Peter Liang did not elaborate in a May 27 email. Thanking the OIC for its “thorough and thoughtful investigation,” Mr. Liang said the department has developed a management action plan in response to the report, though the link he referred to only mentioned that the policy no longer exists. The department did not respond in time for publication to follow up questions about Mr. Rai, the associate who said they were among the five targeted, or how the policy came to be.

“They are concerned about the well-being of the IRCC employees. … Who’s concerned about the well-being of the students and the families who are affected by this?” the associate asked.

Concerns about unlicensed immigration consultants have long persisted in the field, with legislation to set up a new College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants passing in 2019.

In her report, Ms. Maynard noted the department flagged “dishonest actors who are taking advantage of vulnerable” people by, among other things, charging clients high fees for access requests, though regulation of the industry is an issue beyond the office’s “legal jurisdiction” and is not addressed in the report.

When one requester asked for departmental communication “directing ATIP staff to seek time extensions for ATIP requests” between September and December 2019—when the phased-out policy was in effect—they were told there were no records but “all instructions were given verbally,” according to documents obtained by The Hill Times.

The associate questioned whether verbal instructions were appropriate.

“If you’re a large organization handling over 100,000 requests a year, and you are going to get instructions verbally, how are you going to make sure your employees in the department are consistent in their actions? How are you going to hold your people accountable?” the associate wondered. “Somebody has to write them down to make sure they’re consistently applied across the board.”

IRCC defended its practice to Ms. Maynard’s office, her report noted, arguing the Treasury Board Secretariat’s (TBS) policy on access to information, “endorse[s]” the practice they employed. But in her ruling, Ms. Maynard said while the TBS offers “guidance” to institutions on what is considered a large volume of records, “it in no way suggests that a series of unrelated access to information requests can be lumped together.” According to that guidance, a large number of records is generally considered such if it requires more than 500 pages to be pulled and if their production interferes with the institution’s operations.

Citing privacy concerns and the nature of its investigations, OIC spokesperson James Ellard said in an email the office does not identify requesters by name, nor can it offer a breakdown of requests made by each individual. Asked if it was aware of any other government institutions that have identified top requesters in this way, he said the circumstances were “unique” to the department.

“This type of dramatic increase [in access requests] has not been observed elsewhere, nor is the commissioner aware of any other department adopting the practice of grouping requests by individual and automatically claiming time extensions to all requests made by these individuals,” he said, adding Ms. Maynard is “pleased” to see the practice is no longer in effect.

The Hill Times has asked the IRCC who was responsible for the practice’s creation, implementation, and authorization, along with its justification, but did not hear back by publication. The paper also presented some of the sentiments expressed by the requesters to the department for comment.

Source: IRCC’s ‘arbitrary’ automatic extensions on information requests created ‘unfair playing field,’ say immigration agents

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Canadian citizenship oath could help newcomers learn more about Indigenous people

2021/06/05 1 Comment

Suspect the forthcoming guide along with news coverage will be more significant but nevertheless, important:

Sharon Nyangweso says she first heard of Indigenous people in Canada when she was eight years old. Her family had just moved to Canada for her mother’s job at the Kenya High Commission in Ottawa. At one of the gatherings, a guest approached her mom upon learning they just arrived in the city.

What happened next stuck with Nyangweso.

The person told her mom to avoid Rideau Street because Indigenous people were there and “they were always drunk.” This memory unsettles her to this day, because the comment came not from a naturalized Canadian but from someone in her own circle.

“That came from another immigrant,” she said in a telephone interview Thursday. “Not just another immigrant but one that had intimate knowledge of what it meant to be part of a colonized nation.”

Nyangweso said there’s a wide gap when it comes to dissemination of information to immigrants about Indigenous Peoples and cultures in Canada. One that, she said, causes the perpetuation of misconceptions resulting from the country’s history of colonialism.

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which examined the history and legacy of residential schools in Canada, issued 94 recommendations, or calls to action. Numbers 93 and 94 urged the federal government to update the Canadian citizenship guide and test, as well as the oath, to reflect a more inclusive history of Indigenous Peoples and a recognition of their treaties and rights. This way, newcomers and immigrants to Canada would have a more thorough understanding about First Nations, Metis and Inuit, as well as their cultures.

On Thursday, the House of Commons was set to adopt Bill C-8, which would amend the Citizenship Act to update the oath in line with what the TRC recommended.

The new oath would read: “I swear (or affirm) that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs and Successors, and that I will faithfully observe the laws of Canada, including the Constitution, which recognizes and affirms the Aboriginal and treaty rights of First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples, and fulfil my duties as a Canadian citizen.”

The House of Commons unanimously agreed to fast-track the proposed legislation, on Tuesday.

At a committee meeting Wednesday, Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino thanked all members of Parliament for supporting the passage of the bill, saying he looks forward to working with colleagues in the Senate to ensure it becomes law.

His press secretary, Alexander Cohen, said: “Reconciliation is a whole-of-government initiative.”

Cohen also said the Liberal government is still revamping the content of the new citizenship guide to make it more inclusive. The new guide will have 10 chapters and will paint a diverse image of Canada. It will include stories of Black Canadians, LGBTQ Canadians, francophones and Canadians with disabilities. It will also have a chapter on residential school. There’s still no schedule as to when the updated guide will be released.

Matthew Norris, board president of the Urban Native Youth Association in Vancouver, B.C., said recent immigrants to Canada are in a good position to be allies to Indigenous people.

“I think newcomers to Canada have a role to play to understand where the society has come, where to go, and to be voices of support for Indigenous people, as we’re constantly trying to fight for our rights,” said Norris.

Norris said he encourages people and stakeholders to also look at other TRC calls to action, particularly regarding the implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Bill C-15, which deals with that, is currently before the Senate.

Stronger calls to recommit to the project of reconciliation have emerged after Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation announced last week that ground-penetrating radar located what are believed to be the remains of 215 children in an unmarked burial site on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.

Over more than a century, some 150,000 First Nations, Metis and Inuit children were forcibly sent to government-funded, church-operated schools, where many suffered abuse and even death.

“We talk about Indigenous history but it’s also the Indigenous presence,” Norris said. “Residential schools weren’t that long ago. It’s affected our family members. It’s affected younger generations. Intergenerational trauma is continuing to rear its ugly head throughout our lives.”

Nyangweso, who just took her citizenship test recently, said adequate information about Indigenous lands, peoples and cultures will help newcomers and immigrants to better engage in civic processes and become better allies for Indigenous rights.

She added she hopes teaching newcomers about Indigenous people and cultures should not just start and end with the citizenship guide or the oath.

She said good information, that’s accessible outside of the citizenship guide, will equip immigrants and new Canadians to be more respectful inhabitants on Indigenous lands.

Source: Canadian citizenship oath could help newcomers learn more about Indigenous people

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Krauss: In Defense of the Universal Values of Science

2021/06/04 Leave a comment

Agree:

The progress of modern science has been a truly global phenomenon, a fact worth celebrating, just as the technological fruits of science have, to varying degrees, impacted the lives of everyone on the globe.

Scientific breakthroughs have paid no heed to geographic boundaries. Modern algebra owes its origins to 10th century Arabic mathematicians. Around the same time Chinese astronomers recorded an early supernova that formed the Crab Nebula, even when no record of this remarkable object was made in Europe. In spite of the attempts by British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington to quash the impact of an otherwise unheralded young Indian physicist, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the latter’s groundbreaking work on stellar evolution altered our picture of stars so significantly that he was later awarded the Nobel Prize for his work.

Nevertheless, the postmodern notion that empirical scientific knowledge is somehow culturally derived, with little or no objective underpinning, has continued to persist in various social science and literary corners of academia far removed from the rush of scientific progress.

Until recently, it seemed inconceivable to imagine that any physical or biological scientists could become so misguided as to argue against the empirical basis of their own fields. But we are living in strange times. This week, the Divisional Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Oregon sent an email to faculty “to encourage you all to attend this exciting presentation!”, by a visiting physicist, which was described as follows:

Title: Scientists vs. Science: Race, Gender, and Anti-Intellectualism in Science

Abstract: Black thought can help us free science from the white supremacist traditions of scientists. Scientists vs. Science will use Black feminist and anti-colonialist analyses to show that white supremacy is a total epistemic system that affects even our most “objective” areas of knowledge production. The talk hinges on the development of the concept of white empiricism, which I introduced to give a name to the way that anti-intellectual white supremacy plays a role in physicists’ analysis of when empirical data is important and what counts as empirical data. This white empiricism shapes both Black women’s (and other) experiences in physics and the actual knowledge produced about physics. Until this is understood and addressed directly, systems of domination will continue to play a major role in the practice of physics.

On its own, this racist nonsense would not deserve remarking on here, even if it does lead one to wonder how its author, who apparently doesn’t understand the empirical basis of her own discipline, could gain an appointment at a physics department. But the response it produced by the administrator at Oregon is more worrisome.

The Dean at U. of O. should know better, being a professor of Anthropology, although his specialization in Folklore and Public Culture suggests he might be particularly sympathetic to arguments that knowledge is culturally or racially derived.

The Dean’s email apparently received wide circulation beyond U. of O. in the academic community. A tweet from Bruce Gilley, who is a professor of Political Science and Public Policy and on the board of the National Association of Scholars saw what the U. of O. Dean had missed, namely that the underlying pretext of the talk was itself racist. As he remarked “Neo-racism is now spreading like wildfire in the academy with the normalization of racist and anti-scientific ‘research’ that freely denigrates people based on their race. This talk below will use ‘black feminist and anti-colonial analysis’ to debunk ‘white empiricisim [sic].’”

Galileo would have discovered four moons of Jupiter with his telescope regardless of his sex or pigment, and DNA is a double helix regardless of whether it was Rosalind Franklin’s crystallography that demonstrated it, or Watson and Crick’s analysis of that empirical data. Empirical evidence is not white, or black, and the term “black theory” makes no intellectual sense.

As it turns out, the U. of O. talk was abruptly cancelled, with no reason given in the announcement. I agree with Professor Gilley’s assessment that, having been announced, a better course would have been to have proceeded with the talk, and allowing those present to then ridicule its premise via intelligent rebuttal.

I wonder however, whether that would have happened, or whether there would have been polite applause, for fear of appearing racist by asking pointed questions. I happened to attend another online talk by this individual, in this case a physics seminar. Each slide shown also included a reference to a different racist incident that had happened in the US. Speaking to other colleagues after the seminar, I wasn’t the only one who questioned the appropriateness of this political commentary from beginning to end in a seminar on dark matter, as would I would have equally squirmed had each slide quoted a different lie uttered by Donald Trump when he was President. Yet none of us spoke up at the time to raise any concerns.

We need to be willing to be more vocal up front in our critical assessment of nonsense emerging in academic science settings. In more reasonable times, this nonsense would never have passed the selection criteria applied by seminar organizers in any serious academic department in the first place. In current times, such gibberish instead helps promote a dangerously distorted view of science that can fall upon receptive ears among even senior academic administrators.

Source: In Defense of the Universal Values of Science

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