You are of course talking about your experience in your field, but I can assure you, this has been going on like this for a lot longer in media and tech. It is the main driver of why I got out of the media industry, and moved almost completely off social media a decade ago.
I remember one particular incident back when my wife was working for Disney. She made an innocuous post about what she had for lunch on her personal social media account. Someone from her company then posted some flamboyantly virtuous response, questioning her commitment to LGBTQIA+ issues, that she would patronize an openly Christian establishment.
I made a somewhat off-color but light-hearted retort, and within seconds my wife was calling me on the phone in a panic. "You have to delete that comment! That's my boss you are making fun of!" And sure enough, despite being directly responsible for bringing in literally tens of millions in revenue, she didn't last another year at the company before being laid off.
Now I doubt that little exchange was the cause of her getting laid off, but it definitely was part of a more general shift in the company to judge employees less on work performance, and merit, and more on vaguely defined characteristics like "team fit and core values." My wife found other jobs, and moved on, but never ended up working directly for a big studio again, despite her career being extremely promising up to that point.
As for me, I realized then I didn't want anything to do with an information ecosystem so toxic, that you legitimately had to worry that getting the wrong sandwich for lunch, could cost you a six-figure job.
Here is the final comment, in full, by the anonymous rando posting under "John Locke" that got him banned permanently from Unsafe Science:
"Hi Jake can you tell you lap dog to stop deleting comments that might offend you so we can have a little chat? I'd love to know why you refuse to answer my question asking why you aren't condemning Israeli state repression and the repression of pro-Palestinian voices across the US?"
Grounds:
1. Repeat offender
2. Insults
3. Irrelevance.
4. Given a clear warning that this would happen if he kept it up.
5. He kept it up.
I do not bluff.
Consider "John Locke" an excellent example of how to get banned here.
If someone tells you that he is Napoleon are you required to agree with him? If you fail to endorse his delusions are you being Napoleonphobic? It it exactly the same situation if a man tells you that he is a woman. No one can change their biological sex. The mentally ill are entitled to freely live their lives with sympathy and care but not forced acceptance of their fantasies.
After reading this essay, I rummaged around for the rights words of comment. I nearly gave up until I found what I felt: "You must live, so that you have something to write about...you must be aware of life, feel it, observe it, immerse yourself in the experience of being alive, not protect yourself with blindness and numbness from the agony and joy of it. And then, you must have the courage to be honest about what you have lived...writing is like a sacred connection between you and what you have lived, and the God of Writing, and that connection should never be surrendered to self-consciousness or fear."
Your post was great. I love to hear life expressed with full honesty. Let the Preference Cascade commence/smile!
I have started deleted comments and am prepared to continue doing so. I might also ban particular individuals who keep it up. What "it"?, you ask.
1. Personal insults. Calling people names like something out of a middle school yard. To be distinguished from criticizing or even derogating, their actual comments.
2. Irrelevance. If you have pet issues you'd like to grandstand about that have nothing to do with Jake's post, go for it! Elsewhere. If you do it here, I'll take it down.
There are definitely grey areas requiring judgment calls. I will be making those judgment calls. There may also sometimes be exceptions. I will make those judgment calls, too. You do not need to like or agree with my judgment. I strongly recommend that you bag the insults, stay relevant, and try to minimize snark.
So "policing" dialogues, enforcing norms and standards appropriate to a productive discourse, is reasonable? I agree. Does kind of go against the whole thesis that doing so is somehow inherently repressive, though.
I am now giving you a warning, after having deleted several of your posts:
One more snarky, insulting, or irrelevant post, and I will ban you from posting on this site permanently.
The standards are now intentionally different for you and for everyone else. There will be no further warnings, and I am completely at peace with being judge, jury, and executioner.
Feel free to conduct your "dialogues" elsewhere. No one here is going to try to stop you or come for your job. Which is quite different from what Jake described and which I documented has occurred at unprecedented levels throughout academia and the wider society elsewhere in these comments.
Lee, you're a social scientist. You know that data is not the plural of anecdote. And that a claim to a generalized and wide-spread phenomenon needs to be supported by data. And you've had a good portion of your career focused on the vital issue of scientific integrity. So it's surprising to see you tolerating your colleague's use of the FIRE survey to support your anecdotes and personal beliefs. Bluntly, the FIRE survey is trash.
It is a voluntary response, grossly non-representative sample. If you compare survey responses to the National Center for Education Statistics on college faculty https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=61
You'll seethe the survey is grossly over representative of white males. I can't directly compare ages, but given that the FIRE survey is heavily weighted by older than 35 I'd suspect it over-represents tenured profs and associate profs - i.e., older folks.
Where it's clear is that you only have under-represented non-white faculty by about 8-10 percent - 20% in sample vs about 30% of all faculty. (Numbers are approximate because of different coding and my rough estimate process.)
More stunningly, your sample is 33% female, as opposed to the national faculty being about half female.
So solely on representativeness, the FIRE survey is basically meritless. When you add in the natural bias in responses - folks wanting to express their feelings on the topic because they agree with the political position of FIRE - the value of the survey becomes essentially nil.
BTW, I'll point out the the term "snowflake" in my original post was used ironically. I'm sure you'll recall it came to prominence as a term used by the right to critique the "overly sensitive" folks that your colleague now analogizes to the Cultural Revolution. https://theweek.com/news/955539/where-did-the-term-snowflake-come-from
Hi Jake I see you deleted my comments (so much for free speech!). So I'll pose the question again: If you're such a free-thinking renegade why don't you make a public post condemning the Israeli death cult?
I, not Jake, deleted your posts because they were filled with insults and personal attacks. And, I will keep doing so.
This one is merely stupid and snarky so I will leave it. Whereas I have no idea whether you, personally, are stupid, your post here is moronic in too many ways to count. It is moronic because, 1. even if Jake agreed with your characterization of Israel, that was not the topic here. 2. You are an anonymous rando posting under an anonymous pseudonym. So no one here can track whether you have ever accomplished anything of note. For an anon rando to criticize Jake, or anyone, for "not addressing my pet issue" is moronic nonsense. 3. Jake may not share your grim view of Israel anyway. Your post assumes he does, which is really assinine. 4. If you want to post something somewhere about ... whatever you like, do let us know. I could go on but listing all the ways in which most of your posts here have been assinine would get tedious. Till then, you might want to quit with the assinine posts.
Jesse Singal is still being pelted and crucified in any public square available, partially to scare off other still-curious journalists.
So, bless the hearts of my incurious journalist colleagues, editors removing inconvenient facts, and our AP Style guide correct-thought enforcers. The stories we could write, but don’t!
Still think higher ed had/have it worse, based on just my interviews with faculty.
When a large children’s hospital supposedly based on science states in a mandatory diversity training that a babies sex is ‘assigned at birth’ you know this idiocy has gone way too far. It’s a total embarrassment to the institution and is laughable if it wasn’t so pathetic.
From the little I've read about it, there actually is more nuance to the grey areas in which doctor's (or rules otherwise) are relied on to make the call. But, for all I remember, it still may be a small % of cases. Nonetheless, it's more than just intersex. Could I have read complete academic gobbily-gook? It's possible.
The author's analysis is very much correct though his fears of the Trump administration frankly are not. What he fails to address is the moral dilemma the nation faces in deciding what is to be done with academia given its collective conduct over decades allowing the left wing Democrat progressives to create the totalitarian situation the author describes. Tenured faculty have more job protections than virtually any other person in society yet failed to use that status as it was intended to protect due process and their peers from the woke lynch mob. Quite simply, most of the tenured faculty chose to aid and abet what was going on by their silence to protect themselves. As such, do they really deserve to hold the elite tenure protected positions they hold in society? My answer is no. Perhaps it's time to strip all faculty of tenure...and fire the existing faculty in favor of a new population of faculty who have demonstrated by their actions that they have the moral fiber to stand up for what is right in society. I know this will be unpopular in academia...but from the perspective of society and the national interest, perhaps the the opinions of academics no longer should be the deciding factor.
The trouble with getting rid of tenure is that people like me will be the first to go. The only reason you have 1 in 5000 faculty willing to speak up is because of tenure. Without it, you'll never hear another objection.
If 4999 of the 5000 are failing to live up to their obligations under tenure, then clearly the policy isn't working. What tenure actually does is a create a 2 tier system of faculty classes with those with tenure in a position to abuse those without tenure or prospect for it. Given that they are NOT using their tenure protections for what it was intended, then they should lose the privilege entirely and learn the importance of solidarity by sharing the risks with the "little" people. Sorry...but the faculty elite have done this to themselves and the day of judgement has arrived as far as society overall is concerned.
I'm certainly with you on the "two tier" critique and I'm highly sympathetic to the argument that tenured faculty brought deserved retribution down upon themselves. However, all of that is trumped by my certainty that without tenure, we will have an academic class constituted entirely of bootlickers and cowerers. As things stand, as bad as they are, genuine light can and still does break through the darkness regularly.
I am not sure we could distinguish the current situation from the cowering bootlickers a system without tenure would produce. Removing tenure would actually allow ALL those faculty who remain vertebrates with integrity to rise to the top without the tenured bootlickers using their protections to abuse the 75% of faculty lacking tenure protections. At this point, tenure does more harm than good even in insuring academic freedom.
This is a testable hypothesis. I think it would be valuable for a couple large public universities and small private colleges to eliminate tenure and then do a longitudinal study of the outcomes.
Giles Corey was a real person and he was executed in the way Miller described in his play. I grew up in a town adjacent to Salem, MA. I went to driving school in a building there that had a historical marker plaque reading, “On this spot in 1692, Giles Corey was pressed to death.” According to Wikipedia, he was 81 at the time of his execution.
I can't get too specific, but over 4 years I encountered all the stuff: Kendi, DiAngelo, Okun, CRT, Gender Theory, Intersectionality, Positionality, Privlege Preserving Epistemic Pushback, etc.
I asked questions. I made statements. For example, in a DiAngelo-centric training, I stated that I had a problem with her push to 'be less white', as I suffer from depression and don't need more reasons to hate myself. Wit and levity doesn't work on people without a sense of humor.
In a variety of setting, with various people within my field: I was told, 'You're white and he's black, so cultural humility.' I heard people use 'white men' as a curse word. I said, more than once, that I believe land acknowledgements are a prayer and I don't pray at work. I stated, 'there is a kool-aid going around, and I ain't drinking it.'
I was told I was ignorant for asking for evidence of anti-black and racist issues to be addressed. I objected to Implicit Bias and the IAT. I stated that 'not prioritizing the comfort of the dominant culture position' is anti white racism. I shared the issue regarding lack of evidence and unfalsifiable claims. Lastly, the Jew Hatred. Post Oct 7th, 2023 it just became scary.
What made it all the worst is the gaslighting. The denial of objective reality. The lack of.understanding from people who were not going through what I was going through. And the cowardice. I live and worked in San Francisco.
Yea, because understanding how social status works, how institutional processes differentially distribute life chances even in the absence of consciousness racism, or the history of the United States when we actually did conquer lands from native tribes is clearly wokeism, as opposed to understanding sociology and American history. And you could really look at the literature on implicit bias, the functioning of the preconscious, etc. But that would require a lot of work learning real
Of course it's complex, and victims can become persecutors. The world's complex, people are incoherent and inconsistent. So multiple over-simplified realities, including apparently contradictory "truths", can be both true and false. You use "objective reality" as if it is a synonym for "what I believe".
You are really good at bad faith misreading of others. You are demonstrating the very behavior that made my work toxic. I never stated my opinions are objective reality. When someone can't explain why, for instance, all of a given field is racist without evidence, that is within objective reality.
Gaslighting is also what you just did. You ignored all of my open, honest, and vulnerable words and projected your preprogrammed response. I am well aware of the history of the US. That doesn't make land acknowledgements morally or socially acceptable. I told people i thought it was a prayer, and therefore didn't belong at work. No one, and I mean no one, could explain what it was for other than, it made people feel better. Who? It became clear no one asked for them. There were no Native staff, nor affiliated Native groups that asked for this. Most tribes do not do land acknowledgements.
Note: "USF" didn't do SFA, except for, through its HR process. clear the individual in question. Some students and faculty acted based on their beliefs/biases/understandings/misunderstandings... Hand-waving, confusing organizational action with individual action within organizational frameworks is inaccurate and inflammatory.
"HR ultimately determined that I violated no policy, no rule, no regulation or law. Administratively, I was cleared. ....And as I said to my colleagues on multiple occasions, I agree with them that consulting with others before publishing the bibliography might have changed the tenor and direction of this situation.
I have learned that constructive disagreement is hard and clearly requires more practice."
Wow. Sounds like a disagreement in a university. Never heard of one of those before.
Although inflation and the clearly open border were the primary determinants of the November election I do believe that wokeness was also on the ballot.
My stock response to the question. If you have seen it before I’m sorry, if not enjoy.
After the election the Democratic Party (my party) must rethink many of its policies as it ponders its future.
To be entrusted with power again Democrats must start listening to the concerns of the working class for a change. As a lifelong moderate Democrat I share their disdain for many of the insane positions advocated by my party. We are no longer the patriotic, sensible party of FDR and JFK.
Democrat politicians defy biology by believing that men can actually become women and belong in women’s sports, rest rooms, locker rooms and prisons and that gay kids should be mutilated in pursuit of the impossible.
They believe borders should be open to millions of illegals which undermines workers’ wages and the affordability of housing when we can’t house our own citizens.
They discriminate against whites, Asians and men in a futile effort to counter past discrimination against others and undermine our economy by abandoning merit selection of students and employees.
Democratic mayors allow homelessness to destroy our beautiful cities because they won't say no to destructive behavior. No, you can’t camp in our city. No, you can’t shit in our streets. No, you can’t shoot up and leave your used needles everywhere. Many of our prosecutors will not take action against shoplifting unless a $1000 of goods are stolen leading to gangs destroying retail stores. They release criminals without bail to commit more crimes.
The average voter knows this is happening and outright reject our party. Enough.
“The Democratic Party” is not a God-created entity to which anyone owes anything. It can’t be fixed and should be euthanized. The Republican Party is not much better. We are, very unfortunately, now so populous and fragmented that it’s all but impossible for an independent thinking person to run for political office and represent independent-thinking people. The “dance” of “left, right, left, right, ad infinitum” is the best we can hope for, jerking ourselves to and from the extremes. I only have a couple more decades to live. Good luck, kids.
You are of course talking about your experience in your field, but I can assure you, this has been going on like this for a lot longer in media and tech. It is the main driver of why I got out of the media industry, and moved almost completely off social media a decade ago.
I remember one particular incident back when my wife was working for Disney. She made an innocuous post about what she had for lunch on her personal social media account. Someone from her company then posted some flamboyantly virtuous response, questioning her commitment to LGBTQIA+ issues, that she would patronize an openly Christian establishment.
I made a somewhat off-color but light-hearted retort, and within seconds my wife was calling me on the phone in a panic. "You have to delete that comment! That's my boss you are making fun of!" And sure enough, despite being directly responsible for bringing in literally tens of millions in revenue, she didn't last another year at the company before being laid off.
Now I doubt that little exchange was the cause of her getting laid off, but it definitely was part of a more general shift in the company to judge employees less on work performance, and merit, and more on vaguely defined characteristics like "team fit and core values." My wife found other jobs, and moved on, but never ended up working directly for a big studio again, despite her career being extremely promising up to that point.
As for me, I realized then I didn't want anything to do with an information ecosystem so toxic, that you legitimately had to worry that getting the wrong sandwich for lunch, could cost you a six-figure job.
I was also in academic fields as this time, on campus from 2018 to 2022. And had similar experiences. Especially after 2020.
Thanks for sharing this.
And here I thought socioeconomic problems was the real issue. What once was progressive is no more
Here is the final comment, in full, by the anonymous rando posting under "John Locke" that got him banned permanently from Unsafe Science:
"Hi Jake can you tell you lap dog to stop deleting comments that might offend you so we can have a little chat? I'd love to know why you refuse to answer my question asking why you aren't condemning Israeli state repression and the repression of pro-Palestinian voices across the US?"
Grounds:
1. Repeat offender
2. Insults
3. Irrelevance.
4. Given a clear warning that this would happen if he kept it up.
5. He kept it up.
I do not bluff.
Consider "John Locke" an excellent example of how to get banned here.
If someone tells you that he is Napoleon are you required to agree with him? If you fail to endorse his delusions are you being Napoleonphobic? It it exactly the same situation if a man tells you that he is a woman. No one can change their biological sex. The mentally ill are entitled to freely live their lives with sympathy and care but not forced acceptance of their fantasies.
After reading this essay, I rummaged around for the rights words of comment. I nearly gave up until I found what I felt: "You must live, so that you have something to write about...you must be aware of life, feel it, observe it, immerse yourself in the experience of being alive, not protect yourself with blindness and numbness from the agony and joy of it. And then, you must have the courage to be honest about what you have lived...writing is like a sacred connection between you and what you have lived, and the God of Writing, and that connection should never be surrendered to self-consciousness or fear."
Your post was great. I love to hear life expressed with full honesty. Let the Preference Cascade commence/smile!
Thanks, Wink!
I have started deleted comments and am prepared to continue doing so. I might also ban particular individuals who keep it up. What "it"?, you ask.
1. Personal insults. Calling people names like something out of a middle school yard. To be distinguished from criticizing or even derogating, their actual comments.
2. Irrelevance. If you have pet issues you'd like to grandstand about that have nothing to do with Jake's post, go for it! Elsewhere. If you do it here, I'll take it down.
There are definitely grey areas requiring judgment calls. I will be making those judgment calls. There may also sometimes be exceptions. I will make those judgment calls, too. You do not need to like or agree with my judgment. I strongly recommend that you bag the insults, stay relevant, and try to minimize snark.
So "policing" dialogues, enforcing norms and standards appropriate to a productive discourse, is reasonable? I agree. Does kind of go against the whole thesis that doing so is somehow inherently repressive, though.
Jake is a coward. He is more interested in silencing oppositional views than hearing those views
I am now giving you a warning, after having deleted several of your posts:
One more snarky, insulting, or irrelevant post, and I will ban you from posting on this site permanently.
The standards are now intentionally different for you and for everyone else. There will be no further warnings, and I am completely at peace with being judge, jury, and executioner.
Feel free to conduct your "dialogues" elsewhere. No one here is going to try to stop you or come for your job. Which is quite different from what Jake described and which I documented has occurred at unprecedented levels throughout academia and the wider society elsewhere in these comments.
Lee, you're a social scientist. You know that data is not the plural of anecdote. And that a claim to a generalized and wide-spread phenomenon needs to be supported by data. And you've had a good portion of your career focused on the vital issue of scientific integrity. So it's surprising to see you tolerating your colleague's use of the FIRE survey to support your anecdotes and personal beliefs. Bluntly, the FIRE survey is trash.
It is a voluntary response, grossly non-representative sample. If you compare survey responses to the National Center for Education Statistics on college faculty https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=61
You'll seethe the survey is grossly over representative of white males. I can't directly compare ages, but given that the FIRE survey is heavily weighted by older than 35 I'd suspect it over-represents tenured profs and associate profs - i.e., older folks.
Where it's clear is that you only have under-represented non-white faculty by about 8-10 percent - 20% in sample vs about 30% of all faculty. (Numbers are approximate because of different coding and my rough estimate process.)
More stunningly, your sample is 33% female, as opposed to the national faculty being about half female.
So solely on representativeness, the FIRE survey is basically meritless. When you add in the natural bias in responses - folks wanting to express their feelings on the topic because they agree with the political position of FIRE - the value of the survey becomes essentially nil.
BTW, I'll point out the the term "snowflake" in my original post was used ironically. I'm sure you'll recall it came to prominence as a term used by the right to critique the "overly sensitive" folks that your colleague now analogizes to the Cultural Revolution. https://theweek.com/news/955539/where-did-the-term-snowflake-come-from
Hi Jake I see you deleted my comments (so much for free speech!). So I'll pose the question again: If you're such a free-thinking renegade why don't you make a public post condemning the Israeli death cult?
I, not Jake, deleted your posts because they were filled with insults and personal attacks. And, I will keep doing so.
This one is merely stupid and snarky so I will leave it. Whereas I have no idea whether you, personally, are stupid, your post here is moronic in too many ways to count. It is moronic because, 1. even if Jake agreed with your characterization of Israel, that was not the topic here. 2. You are an anonymous rando posting under an anonymous pseudonym. So no one here can track whether you have ever accomplished anything of note. For an anon rando to criticize Jake, or anyone, for "not addressing my pet issue" is moronic nonsense. 3. Jake may not share your grim view of Israel anyway. Your post assumes he does, which is really assinine. 4. If you want to post something somewhere about ... whatever you like, do let us know. I could go on but listing all the ways in which most of your posts here have been assinine would get tedious. Till then, you might want to quit with the assinine posts.
I'm a college professor, does that lend me some repute? Can little Jakey answer my questions now, dear gatekeeper?
Thank you for this. I’m sure you can imagine what it’s been like within media as well. 🤐
I've heard about it. Sounds like it was completely insane.
Jesse Singal is still being pelted and crucified in any public square available, partially to scare off other still-curious journalists.
So, bless the hearts of my incurious journalist colleagues, editors removing inconvenient facts, and our AP Style guide correct-thought enforcers. The stories we could write, but don’t!
Still think higher ed had/have it worse, based on just my interviews with faculty.
When a large children’s hospital supposedly based on science states in a mandatory diversity training that a babies sex is ‘assigned at birth’ you know this idiocy has gone way too far. It’s a total embarrassment to the institution and is laughable if it wasn’t so pathetic.
From the little I've read about it, there actually is more nuance to the grey areas in which doctor's (or rules otherwise) are relied on to make the call. But, for all I remember, it still may be a small % of cases. Nonetheless, it's more than just intersex. Could I have read complete academic gobbily-gook? It's possible.
Sorry no. It’s observed. Not assigned. The intersex cases are vanishingly small and really don’t change this concept. Two sexes. No ‘assignment’.
ya, I very well could have read academic garbage.
The author's analysis is very much correct though his fears of the Trump administration frankly are not. What he fails to address is the moral dilemma the nation faces in deciding what is to be done with academia given its collective conduct over decades allowing the left wing Democrat progressives to create the totalitarian situation the author describes. Tenured faculty have more job protections than virtually any other person in society yet failed to use that status as it was intended to protect due process and their peers from the woke lynch mob. Quite simply, most of the tenured faculty chose to aid and abet what was going on by their silence to protect themselves. As such, do they really deserve to hold the elite tenure protected positions they hold in society? My answer is no. Perhaps it's time to strip all faculty of tenure...and fire the existing faculty in favor of a new population of faculty who have demonstrated by their actions that they have the moral fiber to stand up for what is right in society. I know this will be unpopular in academia...but from the perspective of society and the national interest, perhaps the the opinions of academics no longer should be the deciding factor.
The trouble with getting rid of tenure is that people like me will be the first to go. The only reason you have 1 in 5000 faculty willing to speak up is because of tenure. Without it, you'll never hear another objection.
Or it could by 4999 out of 5000 faculty disagree with you. You know about p values and such, right?
If 4999 of the 5000 are failing to live up to their obligations under tenure, then clearly the policy isn't working. What tenure actually does is a create a 2 tier system of faculty classes with those with tenure in a position to abuse those without tenure or prospect for it. Given that they are NOT using their tenure protections for what it was intended, then they should lose the privilege entirely and learn the importance of solidarity by sharing the risks with the "little" people. Sorry...but the faculty elite have done this to themselves and the day of judgement has arrived as far as society overall is concerned.
I'm certainly with you on the "two tier" critique and I'm highly sympathetic to the argument that tenured faculty brought deserved retribution down upon themselves. However, all of that is trumped by my certainty that without tenure, we will have an academic class constituted entirely of bootlickers and cowerers. As things stand, as bad as they are, genuine light can and still does break through the darkness regularly.
No romantic Casper David Friedrich lone man standing above the clouds self-aggrandizement here....
Perhaps you're seeing a real, though unrepresentative phenomenon characteristic of elite universities, where the spoiled children of privilege play?
I am not sure we could distinguish the current situation from the cowering bootlickers a system without tenure would produce. Removing tenure would actually allow ALL those faculty who remain vertebrates with integrity to rise to the top without the tenured bootlickers using their protections to abuse the 75% of faculty lacking tenure protections. At this point, tenure does more harm than good even in insuring academic freedom.
This is a testable hypothesis. I think it would be valuable for a couple large public universities and small private colleges to eliminate tenure and then do a longitudinal study of the outcomes.
Perhaps Governor DeSantis in Florida could oblige us in that regard.
Giles Corey is the biggest badass in all of literature.
Whether Miller intended it or not, The Crucible transcends its original purpose as a critique of McCarthyism. That’s what makes it a great work.
Giles Corey was a real person and he was executed in the way Miller described in his play. I grew up in a town adjacent to Salem, MA. I went to driving school in a building there that had a historical marker plaque reading, “On this spot in 1692, Giles Corey was pressed to death.” According to Wikipedia, he was 81 at the time of his execution.
That scene stuck with me my whole life from the first time I read the Crucible in High School.
The Salem Witch Trials were all about a land theft scheme so good for him not disinheriting his kids.
This is exactly what happened, but I spoke up, and no longer have a career.
Damn. I'd like to hear more, if you are willing to share.
I can't get too specific, but over 4 years I encountered all the stuff: Kendi, DiAngelo, Okun, CRT, Gender Theory, Intersectionality, Positionality, Privlege Preserving Epistemic Pushback, etc.
I asked questions. I made statements. For example, in a DiAngelo-centric training, I stated that I had a problem with her push to 'be less white', as I suffer from depression and don't need more reasons to hate myself. Wit and levity doesn't work on people without a sense of humor.
In a variety of setting, with various people within my field: I was told, 'You're white and he's black, so cultural humility.' I heard people use 'white men' as a curse word. I said, more than once, that I believe land acknowledgements are a prayer and I don't pray at work. I stated, 'there is a kool-aid going around, and I ain't drinking it.'
I was told I was ignorant for asking for evidence of anti-black and racist issues to be addressed. I objected to Implicit Bias and the IAT. I stated that 'not prioritizing the comfort of the dominant culture position' is anti white racism. I shared the issue regarding lack of evidence and unfalsifiable claims. Lastly, the Jew Hatred. Post Oct 7th, 2023 it just became scary.
What made it all the worst is the gaslighting. The denial of objective reality. The lack of.understanding from people who were not going through what I was going through. And the cowardice. I live and worked in San Francisco.
Having a backbone has its price.
Yea, because understanding how social status works, how institutional processes differentially distribute life chances even in the absence of consciousness racism, or the history of the United States when we actually did conquer lands from native tribes is clearly wokeism, as opposed to understanding sociology and American history. And you could really look at the literature on implicit bias, the functioning of the preconscious, etc. But that would require a lot of work learning real
Of course it's complex, and victims can become persecutors. The world's complex, people are incoherent and inconsistent. So multiple over-simplified realities, including apparently contradictory "truths", can be both true and false. You use "objective reality" as if it is a synonym for "what I believe".
You are really good at bad faith misreading of others. You are demonstrating the very behavior that made my work toxic. I never stated my opinions are objective reality. When someone can't explain why, for instance, all of a given field is racist without evidence, that is within objective reality.
Gaslighting is also what you just did. You ignored all of my open, honest, and vulnerable words and projected your preprogrammed response. I am well aware of the history of the US. That doesn't make land acknowledgements morally or socially acceptable. I told people i thought it was a prayer, and therefore didn't belong at work. No one, and I mean no one, could explain what it was for other than, it made people feel better. Who? It became clear no one asked for them. There were no Native staff, nor affiliated Native groups that asked for this. Most tribes do not do land acknowledgements.
Is this objective enough for you?
Dana Eyre is an almost perfect exemplification of the problem.
Yeah. Could you imagine having to work with people like Dana Eyre ... all the time?
Oh wait...
Thank you for having a backbone. SF was particularly hard hit. USF tried to destroy one of its librarians for posting a link to writing by heterodox black authors that my org put together. Yes, a man was subjected to an attempt to destroy him for asking people to read BLACK AUTHORS. https://psu.pb.unizin.org/hxlibraries24curiositycontroversycourage/chapter/the-cost-of-free-black-thought/
And yet.... HE WASN'T FIRED....
Note: "USF" didn't do SFA, except for, through its HR process. clear the individual in question. Some students and faculty acted based on their beliefs/biases/understandings/misunderstandings... Hand-waving, confusing organizational action with individual action within organizational frameworks is inaccurate and inflammatory.
"HR ultimately determined that I violated no policy, no rule, no regulation or law. Administratively, I was cleared. ....And as I said to my colleagues on multiple occasions, I agree with them that consulting with others before publishing the bibliography might have changed the tenor and direction of this situation.
I have learned that constructive disagreement is hard and clearly requires more practice."
Wow. Sounds like a disagreement in a university. Never heard of one of those before.
Thank you.
Although inflation and the clearly open border were the primary determinants of the November election I do believe that wokeness was also on the ballot.
My stock response to the question. If you have seen it before I’m sorry, if not enjoy.
After the election the Democratic Party (my party) must rethink many of its policies as it ponders its future.
To be entrusted with power again Democrats must start listening to the concerns of the working class for a change. As a lifelong moderate Democrat I share their disdain for many of the insane positions advocated by my party. We are no longer the patriotic, sensible party of FDR and JFK.
Democrat politicians defy biology by believing that men can actually become women and belong in women’s sports, rest rooms, locker rooms and prisons and that gay kids should be mutilated in pursuit of the impossible.
They believe borders should be open to millions of illegals which undermines workers’ wages and the affordability of housing when we can’t house our own citizens.
They discriminate against whites, Asians and men in a futile effort to counter past discrimination against others and undermine our economy by abandoning merit selection of students and employees.
Democratic mayors allow homelessness to destroy our beautiful cities because they won't say no to destructive behavior. No, you can’t camp in our city. No, you can’t shit in our streets. No, you can’t shoot up and leave your used needles everywhere. Many of our prosecutors will not take action against shoplifting unless a $1000 of goods are stolen leading to gangs destroying retail stores. They release criminals without bail to commit more crimes.
The average voter knows this is happening and outright reject our party. Enough.
“The Democratic Party” is not a God-created entity to which anyone owes anything. It can’t be fixed and should be euthanized. The Republican Party is not much better. We are, very unfortunately, now so populous and fragmented that it’s all but impossible for an independent thinking person to run for political office and represent independent-thinking people. The “dance” of “left, right, left, right, ad infinitum” is the best we can hope for, jerking ourselves to and from the extremes. I only have a couple more decades to live. Good luck, kids.