Backlash over Congress Anti-Semitism Testimony

[Laan Yaa Mo]

Now you are acting silly again, Whistler. The banning of books and speakers, the introduction of radical courses, and the notion that Woke is right and everyone else is wrong are straight out of the Woke playbook. Is it any wonder that you are not taken seriously? Yes, I know you are just trying to have fun. Talk to some of the victims of Woke and ask them how they enjoy your humour.

[tamada]

Where's the "whooshhh!!!" emoji when you really, really need it.

In the meantime, tell us more about these "victims of woke" and if any of them inhabit the Isaanosphere.

[Whistler]

I have yet to see a description of woke beyond its original definition when used by African Americans.

In my mind, it undoubtedly this most hackneyed word in the right wing lexicon to the point it is meaningless. Look at Trump's rant last night calling the US Military woke as an example.

[tamada]

I have yet to see a description of woke beyond its original definition when used by African Americans.
...

Really?

https://www.google.com/search?client=fi ... +woke+mean

Hope this helps.

[Whistler]

I have yet to see a description of woke beyond its original definition when used by African Americans.
...

Really?

https://www.google.com/search?client=fi ... +woke+mean

Hope this helps.

Reaffirms my post this morning. It is a very imprecise word meaning different thing to different groups. Undoubtedly in the past few years it has been used as a pejorative term by conservatives to oppose ALL progressive views.

[tamada]

I have yet to see a description of woke beyond its original definition when used by African Americans.
...

Really?

https://www.google.com/search?client=fi ... +woke+mean

Hope this helps.

Reaffirms my post this morning. It is a very imprecise word meaning different thing to different groups. Undoubtedly in the past few years it has been used as a pejorative term by conservatives to oppose ALL progressive views.

Yes, I know and (are you sitting down readers?) I totally agree with you.

My take on what being woke means applies to people who have to express the perceived pain/hurt/loss/ridicule/shame/etc., of either someone else or some other group, be it race, politics, faith or ethnicity. This despite the fact that the other person/group either haven't expressed any sort of pain/hurt/loss/ridicule/shame/etc. themselves or, if they have, they're doing a grand job of it and don't need someone else's feelings to be expressed on their behalf.

[Whistler]

Tam,

What is your view for expressing support for those disadvantaged groups, especially if they are having trouble gaining traction for their cause?

As a for instance, supporting the referendum 50 odd years ago for Australian aboriginals wanting the right to vote?

[tamada]

Tam,

What is your view for expressing support for those disadvantaged groups, especially if they are having trouble gaining traction for their cause?

As a for instance, supporting the referendum 50 odd years ago for Australian aboriginals wanting the right to vote?

If I support their cause, I will support whatever support network they have but unless it's something that will directly or seriously affect me or my family, I'm not about to throw my hand in just because they lack traction. If I don't believe in their cause, or it's of little or no importance to me or my family, I won't bother. That's why I became an avowed Unionist after the SNP denied me and the vast majority of the Scots diaspora a vote on the independence referendum.

Not being Australian myself but having visited and worked there for the first time around forty years ago, at that time in the early 80's, I was more interested in preventing the unions getting a foot in our bit of the oil patch; ultimately a lost cause in the ensuing two or three years. At that time, I was unaware that Australian aboriginals had only recently won the right to vote. Well done to them and the non-indigenous that also voted for that right.

[Potamoi]

I have yet to see a description of woke beyond its original definition when used by African Americans.

Ricky's take on Wokeness



I tried my hand at a screen grab for video but I'm afraid it is not perfect. Don't mind the partial Windows taskbar at the bottom, 555. The point gets made in any case.

Good new Netflix stand-up to watch: Ricky Gervais: Armageddon

Well worth watching the entire routine.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

Claudine Gay resigns as Harvard president over handling of antisemitism
The shortest-serving leader in the university’s history equivocated when asked whether calling for genocide of Jews broke its rules.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/clau ... -sktkvczt2

This is welcome news and hopefully a sign of what will happen to elementary, high school and university administrators and professors who cave into woke/cancel culture. She has also been found guilty of plagiarism.

[Whistler]

It also shows that universities can conduct themselves with integrity, and are not necessarily hotbeds of left wing extremisism.

Now the GOP?

[Udon Map]

It also shows that universities can conduct themselves with integrity, and are not necessarily hotbeds of left wing extremisism.

That's less clear to me. She was actually fine until more and more of her published work was revealed to have been plagiarized.

[FrazeeDK]

just read a story saying she'll likely keep a Department Head job or a Professor position at Harvard making around $850,000 a year..

[Whistler]

It's called push sideways. Happens all the time. The University has however made a statement that is unequivocal, her statement is unacceptable

[Laan Yaa Mo]

Her removal as President is also a blow to the 'diversity, inclusion and equity' [read woke] crowd. it might well mean that the major reason she is ex-president is owing to her lack of scholarly credentials and her plagiarism; however, it also suggests that some people have awoken the dangers of the woke/cancel culture crowd's tactics.

Harvard head shows how far academia has sunk
Claudine Gay says she was a victim of discrimination but she is testament to the ideological conformity of higher education

Gerard Baker
Thursday January 04 2024, 9.00pm, The Times

In being ousted only six months into her tenure this week, Claudine Gay, the first black female president of Harvard, also became the shortest-serving leader in the 390-year history of America’s most prestigious university. The juxtaposition of these two standards has prompted a predictable effort to portray her academic early bath as an example of deep-rooted racism, to assign to her that most cherished status in the iconography of modern secular American sainthood: victim of white male oppression.

In a column published in The New York Times yesterday, Gay warned of dark forces at work. She denounced her critics for recycling “tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament”. Professional black activists and their allies raged. “Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence,” Ibram X Kendi, author of How to be an Antiracist, posted on X.

This attempt to anoint Gay, who, despite her defenestration gets to stay on at Harvard in a $900,000-a-year professorship, as a kind of latter-day Rosa Parks, the black seamstress who sparked a long-overdue civil rights revolution, is a nice try. But even in a nation that has been hijacked by a regnant narrative about embedded racial inequity and white supremacism, and cowed by the vocal proponents of an extremist, racially exclusionary ideology that is tearing the country apart, it won’t wash.

Unlike genuine victims of discrimination, Gay was hit with claims of being a serial offender against the most sacred rule of her profession: plagiarism. But she was always an academic lightweight, elevated to the pinnacle of American academia because of her skin colour and her facility with articulating the prevailing ideological nostrums.

Far from being a victim of discrimination, Gay is a testament to the intellectual corruption and monomania not only of American higher education but of the wider culture. And the desperate attempt to enrol her in the martyrology of racial discrimination is itself wholly discrediting of the very race-based ideology of oppression that has such a grip on American public discourse.

Gay’s downfall began when she appeared last month before a congressional committee with the heads of two other leading universities, and found herself unable to say whether anyone calling for the genocide of Jews on her campus should be disciplined. Despite protests from leading Harvard alumni, many of them Jewish, at this apparent insouciance to the plight of a genuinely persecuted class of students (in contrast with the protections offered those who need trigger warnings about hurtful language in Victorian literature) she would have comfortably survived. It was only when the episode prompted some enterprising journalists to do a little digging into Gay’s academic standing that the trouble started.

It would be an understatement to say Gay’s scholarly credentials are thin. In more than 20 years in academic life, she had published not one book and only 11 articles in scholarly journals. Some of her peers publish that much in a single year. Moreover, her specialism, such as it was — the sociology of black political representation — was as predictably fashionable as it was intellectually unrevealing. Yet the real problem was not the slender body of research nor the banality of its findings, but that much of it allegedly wasn’t her own work. News outlets found at least 40 instances where Gay appeared to have lifted passages and data from other academic work without proper attribution.

In a pure example of the level of intellectual corruption now rife at top colleges, Harvard’s protective board had previously cleared Gay of such allegations and had threatened legal action against The New York Post when it investigated. But as evidence mounted, it gradually dawned on the ideological obsessives and intellectual charlatans who run these places that clinging to the wreckage of Gay’s reputation was going to drag the university down with it and she was, as they say, let go, with a tearful handshake and a platinum goodbye.

Gay was the most prominent example — and beneficiary — of the wholesale takeover of higher education by the diversity, equity and inclusion craze that is crushing intellectual freedom, degrading academic standards and deepening the ruinous rifts in American society. The elevation of unqualified ideologues promoting unsupported ideas on the basis of dodgy scholarship has weakened the very foundations of American intellectual life.

As it happens, and of note to those who insist that only a black woman would be treated this way, the previous record for short-lived tenure as Harvard president belongs to Larry Summers, a brilliant but famously combative economist. Summers is no conservative, having been Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary and later Barack Obama’s chief economics adviser, but he is a stickler for intellectual rigour and fell out repeatedly with the Harvard faculty and its extreme identitarian orthodoxies. He was eventually ousted for daring to suggest that disparate gender performance in the hard sciences might be rooted in part in innate differences in mathematical ability.

Summers once told me that after one especially acrimonious session with top faculty he said to them: “At least I understand now where you and I differ. I believe achievement is the route to self-esteem. You believe self-esteem is the route to achievement.” But as he soon discovered, he was wrong — at least about this. Towering though it is, it’s not academic self-esteem that is the route to achievement in American universities, but rigid commitment to an ideological conformity that would make Joseph Stalin or Kim Jong-un proud.

Gay’s thoroughly merited and welcome departure won’t change that but it, and the highly questionable attempts to exculpate her, may offer a glimmer of hope.