Educators From The United States

"But the important conclusion is that wokeness is here and ubiquitous, and seems entrenched in many areas. But whether or not it’s increasing, it needs to be fought at every turn. And that means that those of us who object to the invidious side of Social Justice—of course “social justice” is not all bad; I’m referring to the PERFORMATIVE AND NON-EFFECTIVE PRETENSE of fixing society by changing words, bird names, and monitoring speech and behavior—must stand up and call out this nonsense when we see it, It’s not pleasant, as you’ll be ostracized and demonized, if not fired, but since when was society ever improved without people taking flak from those who wrongly see themselves as the pinnacle of morality?"

"One of the purposes of a university is to find the truth, but that can’t be done if free discussion is banned."

"But why was the name “James Webb Space Telescope” attacked by Prescod-Weinstein and others? Because of the accusation that, as head of NASA, Webb allowed the demonization of gay employees and oversaw a purge of them from the agency. But as even the NYT reported (October 2022), those accusations are completely false. Will the Offended Woke Physicists give up in light of the evidence and shut their pie-holes about Webb? No, they will not. They still want the name “Webb” effaced. It’s insane. The main reason I think this is a tempest in a teapot is because this renaming accomplishes nothing: it is purely performative, which is why it’s woke, and ludicrously so."

"I would add that the kowtowing towards the excesses of Islam by many Westerners is craven, patronizing, and evinces “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” How dare Westerners excuse or ignore the behavior of countries that execute gays, atheists, and apostates, oppress women and deny them education, and force women to wear coverings so as not to excite the presumably uncontrollable lust of men, while at the same time demonizing Israel, which does none of these things. It’s because Arabs, even if genetically similar to Israelis, are seen as “people of color”, while Israelis are seen as “white adjacent.” It’s as if implied pigmentation conferred virtue! These differential views of Arab versus Jewish states constitute one of the most pernicious aspects of Authoritarian Leftism and Wokeism."

"There are no activists so authoritarian and unforgiving as gender activists."

"The U.S., for example, has made huge strides in racial equality and racial justice since 1940, but to listen to some Wokesters you’d think that racism now is as bad as—or even worse than—the days of Jim Crow. Wokesters claim that it’s just gone underground and has a different form. This, to me, is a ludicrous belief, refuted by tons of evidence."

"I continue to be amazed at how much dust is stirred up by simply asserting the biological observation that, in animals and vacular plants, there are but two sexes, and those sexes are defined by the reproductive equipment they have. Males are “designed” (I’m speaking teleologically: “evolved” is what I mean) to make small, mobile gametes, and females to make big immobile ones. For decades this has been uncontroversial: A truth universally acknowledged, to paraphrase Jane Austen. Now, however, for reasons known best to themselves, a small but vocal group of ideologues is denying the sex binary. In my coauthored paper coming out in late June, we hazard some guesses, but those of you following the controversy probably realize that it involves trying to impose one’s ideological views onto nature. This doesn’t work so easily with the sex binary, as even nonscientists can observe it with their own eyes. The result is that deniers of that binary, such as Agustín Fuentes and Laura Helmuth (editor of Scientific American who’s published several pieces denying a sex binary), face considerable pushback from both scientists—who work with male and female organisms—and “regular” people, who have eyes to see and neurons to analyze."

"The man has no conception of what empirical evidence really is, so strong is his will to believe."

"So because of this one word, used with every intent to be polite, the Easthampton Public Schools lost its best candidate. That’s simply asinine and ridiculous. Look at the tradeoff: they gave away their best candidate so that the word “ladies” could be publicly and eternally demonized. These DEI “experts” should be treated with the ridicule and contempt they deserve."

"Biblical scholarship is useful as a form of historical inquiry and literary exegesis, while theology is a remnant of our childhood as a species, a vestigial belief that’s the mental equivalent of adults holding blankets and sucking their thumbs."

"A lot of activism, of course, is sincere activism, and I see instances of that all the time. Some of my best friends from college are dedicated to true “social justice”, and have spent their lives doing social work, teaching English to immigrants, deliberately teaching in minority schools, and so on. But what distinguishes “wokeness” from genuine social justice advocates is that the woke are engaged in a performance—usually involved in showing what good people they are, and what a good tribe they belong to."

"But grifters gotta grift, so we’ll always have tarot, psychics, and other scammers."

"Religion and xenophobia go together like hot dogs and mustard."

"If “wokeness” is in some sense equivalent to “making useless performative gestures that at the same time show what a good person you are,” then land acknowledgments are its apogee. They are performances not for Native Americans, but for others who were also complicit in the theft. Put up or shut up. And if you really think you’re responsible for stealing land, give it back—or pay for it."

"Isn’t it time for us to stop taking this nonsense seriously? I regard panpsychists as I regard theologians: they both make stuff up, none of what they say is testable, and they both actually get paid to foist nonsense on the world."

"Christianity, and religion in general, is dying in America. (The exceptions are an increase in Islam, probably due to immigration, and in Buddhism, a basically godless religion.) The decline is due largely to a loss of faith among young people, as we’ve seen several times before. Religion wanes one corpse at a time."

"The GOP, with 100+ of its Congresspeople joining the crazy Texas lawsuit trying to overturn the election, has become a swarming beehive of truthers, conspiracy theorists, and, of course, gun nuts."

"The Woke are after Pinker again, and if he’s called a racist and misogynist, as he is in this latest attempt to demonize him, then nobody is safe. After all, Pinker is a liberal Democrat who’s donated a lot of dosh to the Democratic Party, and relentlessly preaches a message of moral, material, and “well-being” progress that’s been attained through reason and adherence to Enlightenment values. But that sermon alone is enough to render him an Unperson, for the Woke prize narrative and “lived experience” over data, denigrate reason, and absolutely despise the Enlightenment."

"This will not abate: wokeness is a one-way ratchet to pure authoritarianism."

"Yes, the claim that sex in humans is not a binary is pretty much a lie, and is made on ideological rather than scientific grounds."

"As we know, wokeness prizes ideology and narrative over truth."

"Everyone else besides the faithful already knows that religion has nothing useful to say to science."

"“Safety” and “harm” have become the new buzzwords to use when somebody does something you don’t like."

"There is no compromise possible between catering to woke students and maintaining journalistic standards. We all know that this is true. If you feed the beast, it only gets hungrier, and is never full."

"In other words, (Helen) Pluckrose et al. got a lot more attention than I did. And that’s fine. For they did, to my mind, expose a creeping rot in the floorboards of academic humanities, which has becoming increasingly solipsistic, tendentious, propagandistic, and devoid of critical thinking but besotted with intersectionalist ideology."

"What the comedy club in Montreal is doing is not only ridiculous, but is a prime example of virtue signaling: making a gesture to trumpet your own ideological purity, but a gesture that has no effect on society and no mitigation of injustice."

"This implicit denigration of objectivity, and of the way science is done, irritates me immensely. It privileges anecdotes over data, “lived experience” over objective tests, and confirmation bias over uncomfortable truths. But that is the way that many humanities scholars, corrupted by postmodernism, have operated. Denying or denigrating an objective search for truth, they’re free to say whatever they want, or “discover” whatever they find ideologically convenient."

"If Hawking’s world is “small,” well, at least what he found was testable, and might be true. Father de Souza’s claims are either untestable or have already been shown to be doubtful, and he has no evidence for any of them. In requiring people to believe fairy tales, de Souza’s world is not just small, but nonexistent."

"If religion makes a society happier, there’s no data to show that. All we see is that on average countries that are well off are less religious and are happier; and that goes for U.S. states as well. Checkmate, religionists."

"The truth is the truth, regardless of whether it fits your ideological biases."

"Guilt is the great weapon of the Authoritarian Left, and we must resist it when it comes to endorsing free expression."

"Remember three things about censorship. First, it doesn’t work to suppress art or words that you don’t like. Second, trying to censor something just arouses interest in it, as well as resentment towards those who try to tell others what they can or cannot see. Third, exhibiting art or recommending that students read a book does not mean an endorsement of the image or contents."

"The realization that God is not the source of morality is, I think, one of the great contributions of philosophy to clarifying human thought."

"Danger! Mushbrains and believers at work!"

"We needn’t take things like reasoning on faith. We use reason because it works. And science isn’t really based on axioms: it’s not math. It’s based on a method that, refined over time, leads us to widely accepted facts about the universe: the facts that we can rely on to do things like establish the genealogy of species, cure disease, and land probes on comets. You can’t accomplish such things through prayer."

"The editorial, very poorly written for a college full of smart students, shows how far this “hate speech” cancer has spread. Let me provide for you Coyne’s Glossary for the words at issue:"

"To Parker Bright, Hannah Black, and other critics of this painting, I say this: I completely reject your criticism. If only artists of the proper ethnicity can depict violence inflicted on their group, then only writers of the proper ethnicity can write about the same issues, and so on with all the arts. And what goes for ethnicity or race goes for gender: men cannot write about suffering inflicted on women, nor women about suffering inflicted on men. Gays cannot write about straight people and vice versa. The fact is that we are all human, and we are all capable of sharing, as well as depicting, the pain and suffering of others. I will not allow you to fracture art and literature the way you have fractured politics. Yes, horrible injustices have been visited on minority groups, on women, on gays, and on other marginalized people, but to allow that injustice to be conveyed only by “properly ethnic or gendered artists” is to deny us our common humanity and deprive us of emotional solidarity. No group, whatever its pigmentation or chromosomal constitution, has the exclusive right to create art or literature about their own subgroup. To deny others that right is to censor them. To those who say this painting has caused them “unnecessary hurt” because it is by a white artist about black pain, I say, “Your own pain about this artwork is gratuitous; I do not take it seriously. It’s the cry of a coddled child who simply wants attention.”"

"Faith is not a virtue, but a character flaw."

"On the Right we have a bunch of regressive conservatives who demonize minorities and women and have no sympathy for the downtrodden, while on the Left we have regressive Leftists who try to censor people’s speech, take the side of extremist Islamists against women and gays, and shut down disagreement by other Leftists who aren’t pure enough. What is a person to do? The answer, of course, is to call out both sides for regressive behavior."

"I’m not sure who’s in charge of “The Stone,” the New York Times‘s philosophy column, but that person is not doing their job. Imagine if some of our greatest living philosophers would post there about matters diverse: ethics, animal rights, abortion, drone strikes, and so on. But all too often the column is about God; that is, we have Great Minds lucubrating about nonexistent beings. Among all species of philosophy, the philosophy of religion is the most intellectually depauperate. It’s a waste of time."

"Theology schools are the wisdom teeth of academia: useless and sometimes injurious remnants of earlier times. If you want to teach comparative religion in college, you can do it in sociology departments, and if you want to teach the history of religion or of how scripture was confected, you can do it in history departments. There is no rationale for a modern secular university to teach theology, for it is the study of a nonexistent being and its supposed wants."

"He is the embodiment of greed, ambition, bigotry, and dislike of the marginalized. Of course, all that means is that he simply instantiates in a clear way the values of the GOP, but they don’t like those being so out in the open! Trump is in fact the very product of what Republicans stand for: he’s a monster they created, but now they don’t like it. They want those values, but expressed sotto voce, and by a slicker candidate."

"After all, by what lights can you see atheism as a “leap of faith”? What is the “faith” there? Failure to accept gods is no more a leap of faith than is doubting the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, or Santa Claus. It’s not “faith” when you refuse to accept a proposition for which there’s no evidence."

"I have to say that I find Ali’s argument truly revolting—not just because it’s intellectually weak and actually deceptive, but because it debases the entire realm of university scholarship of which I’m a member. When I see pieces like hers—lame apologetics that are meant from the outset to reinforce an opinion already held—I thank Ceiling Cat that I am a scientist: a member of the guild in which using your scholarship to reinforce emotional commitments is considered a sin."

"Postmodernism poisons everything."

"One child dead because of superstition is one too many."

"Atheism—at least the refusal to accept gods for which there’s no evidence—is a logical outgrowth of science, and explains (at least to me) why, compared to Americans as a whole, scientists are so much more atheistic. If your career depends on establishing your confidence in a phenomenon proportional to the degree of evidence supporting it, then God is a no-go. The climate of doubt that is endemic—and essential—to the scientific enterprise is a true disaster for religion. Religious people know this, and that largely explains the many ways they attack science."

"Even more than religious belief, acceptance or denial of evolution is a test of character. For if you deny evolution is true, you are either pandering to the public even though you know better (showing that you’re ambitious but lack character), are truly ignorant of the facts (which means you can’t be trusted to be informed about crucial issues), or are a flat-out creationist (showing that you’re batshit crazy)."

"Religion claims to help us understand things about the universe, but, unlike science has no way to test or verify its claims. Both science and religion compete to understand reality, but only science has the method to verify its findings, while religion merely buttresses emotional and epistemic commitments made in advance, commitments impervious to evidence."

"The justification for naturalism is that it works: we have never understood anything about the universe by assuming the supernatural, while assuming naturalism as a working hypothesis has moved our understanding ever forward."