We must guard against this sort of degenerate mob justice. See the entire article here.
“When talking to people about the state of universities in Canada, many deny the negative impact of “woke-ism.” My current “lived experience” in a province with a reputation for supporting free speech, however, indicates otherwise. It was challenging sacred cows associated with the “woke” character of Indigenization, trans activism and “anti-racist” initiatives, in fact, that led to my firing from my tenured position at Mount Royal University in December 2021.
For those unfamiliar with the word, “woke-ism” (spelled wokism in this publication) is the colloquial term for the postmodern tactic of reducing scientific objectivity to subjective authoritarianism, imposing its arbitrary interpretation of what is acceptable. Also referred to as “reified postmodernism” by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, the authors of the hilarious but revealing “grievance studies hoax,” this reactionary response to the intellectual progress driven by the Enlightenment tries to prevent certain ideas from being discussed under the auspices that the identities of oppressed groups must be “made real.”
Collision course: Frances Widdowson’s run-in with wokism got her fired from Mount Royal University in Calgary but she was still not prepared for the unruly mob of protest she faced in Lethbridge.
If, for example, a trans activist believes that they are completely debilitated as a result of “misgendering fatigue,” or if an Indigenous person is convinced that 215 students were murdered and dumped in a mass grave in a Kamloops Indian Residential School apple orchard, these views must not be contradicted because it is argued that such disagreement will “deny the humanity” of those who are oppressed, and disempower them. This, we are told, constitutes “hate speech” and “discrimination.”
Despite my costly collision with wokism at Mount Royal University in Calgary, I was still not prepared for what was to transpire at the University of Lethbridge earlier this month. I had been invited by philosophy professor Paul Viminitz to give a talk, to be entitled “How ‘Woke-ism’ Threatens Academic Freedom.” I was about to experience the fury of current wokism. UofL President Mike Mahon originally stated that the talk would be allowed to proceed because of the institution’s policy on freedom of expression. Woke faculty and students responded with intensifying pressure, leading Mahon to cancel my appearance a few days later.
Cancelled: University of Lethbridge (UofL) President Mike Mahon initially cited freedom of expression as the reason why Widdowson’s lecture should proceed; under pressure, he changed course and shut it down. (Source of photos: University of Lethbridge)
I remained adamant that I should go to the university to challenge Mahon’s assault on academic values (and repudiation of his institution’s freedom of expression policy). So on February 1 I arrived at the university to give my talk in a “Speakers’ Corner” type of format. But as I walked out of the elevator of University Hall and into The Atrium – a large public space on campus – I was amazed to see a crowd of about 700 people filling the main floor and upper level. While some in the audience had come to hear me speak, and a number were just curious onlookers, many were openly hostile to my presence, some brandishing signs declaring “RACISM IS NOT FREE SPEECH.”
This is a lens shattering essay by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò who asks us to put aside our current demarcations of African history – Precolonial, Colonial, and Post-Colonial because they obfuscate the rich tapestry that is the history of Africa.
“When ‘precolonial’ is used for describing African ideas, processes, institutions and practices, through time, it misrepresents them. When deployed to explain African experience and institutions, and characterise the logic of their evolution through history, it is worthless and theoretically vacuous. The concept of ‘precolonial’ anything hides, it never discloses; it obscures, it never illuminates; it does not aid understanding in any manner, shape or form.”
[…]
“Perhaps the most pernicious effect of deploying the various iterations of ‘precolonial’ is the way it marginalises ideas, especially philosophy, in Africa. Because ‘precolonial’ takes colonialism as the dividing line for organising ideas within its temporality and forces us to conceive of spaces relative to how they stand in the arrival and dispersal of colonialism in the continent, we, unwittingly for the most part, end up talking as if ideas, practices, processes and institutions can be understood within frameworks delineated by the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial schema. So, when we are looking at philosophy or modes of governance – to take two arbitrary examples – given our justifiable hostility to things colonial, we construe ‘precolonial’ as necessarily having nothing to do with the colonial, the latter understood as having ‘European’, ‘Western’ or ‘modern’ provenance while, simultaneously, interpreting it as ‘traditional’, ‘indigenous’ and the like.
The misdescription we identified above induces misinterpretation as well as a misrecognition of the genealogy and exchange of ideas, the evolution of institutions, and the identity of thinkers in the area. The problem is profound. Because of the primacy accorded to identity in the business of finding ideas and institutions that could be separated from anything European, Western or modern, African scholars for a long time contorted themselves into finding ‘African philosophy’ that was authentically ‘African’, were even willing to give up on the very term ‘philosophy’ and called their ideational production ‘African Traditional Thought’. The driving question was a matter of whether or not such ideas had been ‘contaminated’ by colonialism and its appurtenant practices, ideas, processes and institutions. When a scholar announces an interest in studying ‘Traditional African Political Thought’, in light of our analysis so far, the first question to ask is whether ‘traditional’ in this formulation has any room for evolution such that we can periodise ‘traditional thought’. Of course, I am assuming what should be obvious: is the thought involved the same throughout history, or were there changes induced by both exogenous and endogenous causes to it, and how are those changes to be understood? The other problem takes us to the next section of this discussion: the problem of facilely deploying an entire continent as a unit of analysis.
Let us recall the temporal framework adopted by Solanke above. Anyone reading his account is immediately enabled to situate his ideas about what transpired in medieval West Africa in relation to what was happening at other places in Africa, nay, the world, within the same temporal boundaries. This enables us to see how similar ideas found in different parts of our world do not have to be explained in terms of influences or common origins. That way, we would have no difficulty identifying African contributions to the global circuit of ideas in ancient times, in medieval times and right to the present. And such contributions would not be limited to so-called ‘authentic’, ‘indigenous’ or ‘traditional’ African fare. The tendency to treat Africa as a unit of analysis motivated by a wrong-headed approach, which took challenging Europe’s ignorant elucidations of African phenomena as the primary object, has issued in genealogies and narratives of intellectual history that bear no resemblance to how things really happened in history, or how African thinkers actually conducted themselves in the global circuit of ideas. This is why Africa hardly ever features in the annals of philosophy, and chronologies in philosophy anthologies do not carry African entries in frameworks demarcated by the Gregorian calendar.”
[…]
“All this would be invisible to the trinity of precolonial, colonial and postcolonial division of African history for organising states and ideas, practices and institutions, processes and thinkers and intellectual movements through time. Tossing the retrograde ‘precolonial’ epithet in the dustbin can bring only gains in expanding our knowledge, enriching our conceptual repertoires, and telling stories that are closer to the truth than the alternative.
It is time to say bye-bye to the idea of a ‘precolonial’ anything in our intellectual discourses respecting Africa.”
I recommend following the link and reading the entire essay, it’s a great read.
“Of course, logic and reason tell us that biological sex, like natural selection, is a fact of life that isn’t going anywhere, and also that that’s perfectly OK. We don’t need to rail against genetics or sex in order to grow better crops, teach future generations to be good citizens, or express our feminine and masculine sides freely. Lysenkoism and the denial of biological reality did not lead to prosperity, bounty, and social cohesion; just the opposite: it ripped societies apart, and Lysenko is probably responsible for the deaths of more people than any other scientist in the twentieth century. In fact, it is the acceptance of genetics that has taught us how to make hardier crops, feed more people, and cure countless diseases, advancing society by leaps and bounds. Likewise, gender ideology and the denial of biological reality is not leading to an era of free and healthy gender expression; it’s creating a vast population of disillusioned, distressed and severely harmed detransitioners; it’s creating so much hostility to gays and lesbians that our heroes can’t even attend Pride parades without being violently assaulted by ideological mobs; and it’s gutting the legal rights and protections for women and girls that feminists have built up over more than a century of struggle.
Just like with genetic denialism, every single one of the ideals that gender identity ideologues aspire to is harmed, not helped, by the denial of biological sex. The acceptance and understanding of same-sex attracted people is entirely dependent on the acknowledgement of the facts of biological sex. Understanding and accepting the variety of gender expression in humans, and how it relates to our sexuality and our attraction to each other, is entirely dependent on acknowledging the facts of biological sex. Ensuring that women and girls can live their lives with as much freedom and dignity as men and boys do is entirely dependent on the acknowledgement of the differences between male and female bodies.
Everyone’s got to start paying attention. This is all just history repeating.”
Joseph Haydn (1732 – 1809) was a genius and was celebrated during his lifetime – but to this day, he remains in the shadow of Mozart and Beethoven. Maybe that is because he lived a life without scandal or financial difficulties, so he did not fit the later picture of what a musical genius was. However, his works have certainly stood the test of time. His almost 100 symphonies, the two oratorios The Seasons and The Creation, the string quartets and his piano music served as templates for later composers and are an essential part of the repertoire of musicians today.
The documentary ‘Joseph Haydn: Libertine & His Master’s Servant’ from 2009 is a kind of road movie that follows the trail of Haydn and visits all the locations of his life and work. The result is a comprehensive picture of this great composer, which also integrates his works. The portrait of Haydn is complemented by informative descriptions from renowned musicologists and interpreters of Haydn such as conductor Sir Roger Norrington, baritone Thomas Quasthoff and pianist Ragna Schirmer.
This music documentary is an extensive source of material for anyone who would like to know who Joseph Haydn was, what role he played during his lifetime and what the nature of his continuing huge significance is. It gives almost a complete picture of this great composer of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Here’s Joseph Haydn in a 54-minute-long nutshell.
It’s easy to get caught up in day to day events, but let’s not forget the quietly ticking bomb of a nuclear *oops* that could end us all.
The Black Swan We Can Never See
Let us turn to the other (and traditional) concern of the atomic scientists who adjust the Doomsday Clock: nuclear weapons. The current threat of nuclear war amply justifies their January 2015 decision to advance the clock two minutes toward midnight. What has happened since reveals the growing threat even more clearly, a matter that elicits insufficient concern, in my opinion.
The last time the Doomsday Clock reached three minutes before midnight was in 1983, at the time of the Able Archer exercises of the Reagan administration; these exercises simulated attacks on the Soviet Union to test their defense systems. Recently released Russian archives reveal that the Russians were deeply concerned by the operations and were preparing to respond, which would have meant, simply: The End.
We have learned more about these rash and reckless exercises, and about how close the world was to disaster, from U.S. military and intelligence analyst Melvin Goodman, who was CIA division chief and senior analyst at the Office of Soviet Affairs at the time. “In addition to the Able Archer mobilization exercise that alarmed the Kremlin,” Goodman writes, “the Reagan administration authorized unusually aggressive military exercises near the Soviet border that, in some cases, violated Soviet territorial sovereignty. The Pentagon’s risky measures included sending U.S. strategic bombers over the North Pole to test Soviet radar, and naval exercises in wartime approaches to the USSR where U.S. warships had previously not entered. Additional secret operations simulated surprise naval attacks on Soviet targets.”
We now know that the world was saved from likely nuclear destruction in those frightening days by the decision of a Russian officer, Stanislav Petrov, not to transmit to higher authorities the report of automated detection systems that the USSR was under missile attack. Accordingly, Petrov takes his place alongside Russian submarine commander Vasili Arkhipov, who, at a dangerous moment of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, refused to authorize the launching of nuclear torpedoes when the subs were under attack by U.S. destroyers enforcing a quarantine.
Other recently revealed examples enrich the already frightening record. Nuclear security expert Bruce Blair reports that “the closest the U.S. came to an inadvertent strategic launch decision by the President happened in 1979, when a NORAD early warning training tape depicting a full-scale Soviet strategic strike inadvertently coursed through the actual early warning network. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was called twice in the night and told the U.S. was under attack, and he was just picking up the phone to persuade President Carter that a full-scale response needed to be authorized right away, when a third call told him it was a false alarm.”
This newly revealed example brings to mind a critical incident of 1995, when the trajectory of a U.S.-Norwegian rocket carrying scientific equipment resembled the path of a nuclear missile. This elicited Russian concerns that quickly reached President Boris Yeltsin, who had to decide whether to launch a nuclear strike.
Blair adds other examples from his own experience. In one case, at the time of the 1967 Middle East war, “a carrier nuclear-aircraft crew was sent an actual attack order instead of an exercise/training nuclear order.” A few years later, in the early 1970s, the Strategic Air Command in Omaha “retransmitted an exercise… launch order as an actual real-world launch order.” In both cases code checks had failed; human intervention prevented the launch. “But you get the drift here,” Blair adds. “It just wasn’t that rare for these kinds of snafus to occur.”
Blair made these comments in reaction to a report by airman John Bordne that has only recently been cleared by the U.S. Air Force. Bordne was serving on the U.S. military base in Okinawa in October 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and a moment of serious tensions in Asia as well. The U.S. nuclear alert system had been raised to DEFCON 2, one level below DEFCON 1, when nuclear missiles can be launched immediately. At the peak of the crisis, on October 28th, a missile crew received authorization to launch its nuclear missiles, in error. They decided not to, averting likely nuclear war and joining Petrov and Arkhipov in the pantheon of men who decided to disobey protocol and thereby saved the world.
As Blair observed, such incidents are not uncommon. One recent expert study found dozens of false alarms every year during the period reviewed, 1977 to 1983; the study concluded that the range is 43 to 255 per year. The author of the study, Seth Baum, summarizes with appropriate words: “Nuclear war is the black swan we can never see, except in that brief moment when it is killing us. We delay eliminating the risk at our own peril. Now is the time to address the threat, because now we are still alive.”
These reports, like those in Eric Schlosser’s book Command and Control, keep mostly to U.S. systems. The Russian ones are doubtless much more error-prone. That is not to mention the extreme danger posed by the systems of others, notably Pakistan.
9/11 and the resulting concurrent military debacle and ascendancy of the American Military Industrial Complex continues to haunt us to this day. Americans and the rest of the free world suffered severe setbacks to their individual liberties and privacy, and perhaps most importantly, the rule of law. Not that America was super good at following the rule of law when it’s own interests came into play, but perhaps the facade of us being the ‘good guys’ is an illusion that can never be restored.
Many military leaders in the US still parrot the GWB line trying to defend the indefensible War On Terror, nothing particularly surprising there. The military, institutionally speaking, will always prioritize its interests first. Looking further down the line though, we can see that people of conscience are coming forward with their stories about the horrors of the WoT and how they simply cannot continue business as usual.
Of course, these people will be punished by the state apparatus for violating the secrecy surrounding the acts of terror and bloodshed that the US is responsible for yet these individuals persisted. The two individuals both ended up losing their freedom because they were compelled by their conscience to do the right thing.
I’m not a big fan of the military industrial complex in the USA and their imperial spread across the globe – too many people in America and across the world are blind to the actions perpetrated in their name. In a democratic nation the truth must be known to the citizenry so they can be informed and equipped to make the best choice possible with regards to who will represent and lead them.
If I was an American and either of the following individuals ran for office, they would garner my vote. They spoke their mind to did what was right demonstrating an ethical and moral backbone that seems so rare in our body politic.
“Recently, some more minor players in the post-9/11 era have apologized in unique ways for the roles they played. For instance, Terry Albury, an FBI agent, would be convicted under the Espionage Act for leaking documents to the media, exposing the bureau’s policies of racial and religious profiling, as well as the staggering range of surveillance measures it conducted in the name of the war on terror. Sent to prison for four years, Albury recently completed his sentence. As Janet Reitman reported in the New York Times Magazine, feelings of guilt over the “human cost” of what he was involved in led to his act of revelation. It was, in other words, an apology in action.
As was the similar act of Daniel Hale, a former National Security Agency analyst who had worked at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan helping to identify human targets for drone attacks. He would receive a 45-month sentence under the Espionage Act for hisleaks— documents he had obtained on such strikes while working as a private contractor after his government service.
As Hale would explain, he acted out of a feeling of intense remorse. In his sentencing statement, he described watching “through a computer monitor when a sudden, terrifying flurry of Hellfire missiles came crashing down, splattering purple-colored crystal guts.” His version of an apology-in-action came from his regret that he had continued on at his post even after witnessing the horrors of those endless killings, often of civilians. “Nevertheless, in spite of my better instinct, I continued to follow orders.” Eventually, a drone attack on a woman and her two daughters led him over the brink. “How could I possibly continue to believe that I am a good person, deserving of my life and the right to pursue happiness” was the way he put it and so he leaked his apology and is now serving his time.”
The cost of a clear conscience shouldn’t have to be your freedom, but kudos to Terry Albury and Daniel Hale for being true to themselves and their country.
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