Demise of Weakism? ..Failure to Progress ..
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'" ~ Isaac Asimov (1980)
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Thursday, 31 October 2024
Wednesday, 23 October 2024
Wednesday, 21 April 2021
Sunday, 11 April 2021
Regressive Authoritarian Left
Psychology at the extremes seldom differs ...
2017 Roger Scruton: How Fake Subjects like Women Studies Invaded Academia > .
24-2-15 Real DEI (PRA) Program [Divisive Extremist Ideology] - New Discources > .
The Psychology of Progressive Hostility: Outbursts of emotional hostility from progressive activists – now described as Social Justice Warriors or SJWs – have come to be known as getting ‘triggered.’ This term originally applied to sufferers of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but activists have adopted it to describe the anxiety and discomfort they experience when they are exposed to views with which they disagree. “Fuck free speech!” one group of social justice advocates recently told Vice Media, as if this justified the growing belief among university students that conservatives should be prevented from speaking on college campuses. It’s no secret that, with the rise of the triggered progressive, university professors are increasingly intimidated by their own students.
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In 2014, one of the world’s leading scholars in the field of moral psychology was publicly accused of homophobia for showing his class a video about the phenomenon of ‘Moral Dumbfounding.’ A transcript of the video Jonathan Haidt showed his class can be read here, and a transcript of the apology he offered his class the next day can be found here. A subsequent investigation by the university’s Office of Equal Opportunity found no evidence of wrongdoing. But, rather than being put off by this brush with reputational disaster, Haidt became fascinated by the problem of hypersensitivity at university. “It’s a crazy time, but it’s also a fascinating time to be a social scientist,” he has since remarked, “It’s the dawn of a new religion, and I study moral psychology as though religion, politics, even sports, they’re all manifestations of a tribalism.”Wednesday, 13 January 2021
Personal Bias and Tribalism
Julia Galef is author of the Scout Mindset and host of the Rationally Speaking Podcast
Tuesday, 24 November 2020
Evangelical Science vs Political Religionism
.Evangelical Scientist Busts Myths on Christianity & Climate Crisis > .
22-5-21 Religious Extremists Mix tRUMP Worship With "Christian" Nationalism > .
Katharine Hayhoe is the co-director of the Climate Center at Texas Tech University and the co-founder of Science Moms, an organization formed by climate scientist moms ‘to help mothers who are concerned about their childrens’ planet.’ She’s also an evangelical Christian.
Katharine Hayhoe is the co-director of the Climate Center at Texas Tech University and the co-founder of Science Moms, an organization formed by climate scientist moms ‘to help mothers who are concerned about their childrens’ planet.’ She’s also an evangelical Christian.
Hayhoe says she cares about climate change because she’s Christian and that it’s been hard being both a Christian and a vocal climate scientist. But she says that the scientific community has welcomed her with open arms, and some have even told her that they share her faith.
Monday, 23 November 2020
Fire & Brimstone
Fire and Brimstone: A Giant Space Rock Demolished an Ancient Middle Eastern City and Everyone in It:
About 3,600 years ago [~1,650 BCE] a giant space rock, travelling at about 38,000 mph (61,000 kph), demolished an ancient Middle Eastern city, now called Tall el-Hammam, killing everyone in it. Accounts of the disaster probably generated the Biblical myth of Sodom, which describes the devastation of an urban center near the Dead Sea – stones and fire fell from the sky, more than one city was destroyed, thick smoke rose from the fires and city inhabitants were killed.
The rock exploded in a massive fireball about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) above the ground – a blast around 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Air temperatures would have rapidly risen above 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius). Clothing and wood burst into flames. Swords, spears, mudbricks, and pottery melted.
At the site, scientists found finely fractured sand grains called shocked quartz that only form at 725,000 pounds per square inch of pressure (5 gigapascals) – imagine six 68-ton Abrams military tanks stacked on your thumb.
The destruction layer also contains tiny diamonoids, as hard as diamonds, each smaller than a flu virus. Wood and plants were turned into this diamond-like material by the fireball’s high pressures and temperatures.
A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea nature .
The rock exploded in a massive fireball about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) above the ground – a blast around 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Air temperatures would have rapidly risen above 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius). Clothing and wood burst into flames. Swords, spears, mudbricks, and pottery melted.
Seconds later, a massive shockwave smashed into the city. Moving at about 740 mph (1,200 kph), it was more powerful than the worst tornado ever recorded. The deadly winds ripped through the city, demolishing every building. They sheared off the top 40 feet (12 m) of the 4-story palace and blew the jumbled debris into the next valley. None of the 8,000 people or any animals within the city survived – bodies torn apart and bones blasted into small fragments.
About a minute later, 14 miles (22 km) to the west of Tall el-Hammam, winds from the blast hit the biblical city of Jericho. Jericho’s walls came tumbling down and the city burned to the ground.
About a minute later, 14 miles (22 km) to the west of Tall el-Hammam, winds from the blast hit the biblical city of Jericho. Jericho’s walls came tumbling down and the city burned to the ground.
[Needless to say, religious nutters will attribute this natural phenomenon to "God" – punishment for activities of which they disapprove.]
The destruction layer also contains tiny diamonoids, as hard as diamonds, each smaller than a flu virus. Wood and plants were turned into this diamond-like material by the fireball’s high pressures and temperatures.
Thursday, 23 April 2020
Wednesday, 15 April 2020
Neoliberal Degradation of Education
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Wendy Brown on Education - NET > . Politics and Knowledge in Nihilistic Times (Max Weber “Knowledge”) > .
Unlike Émile Durkheim, Weber did not believe in monocausal explanations, proposing instead that for any outcome there can be multiple causes. As such, he was a key proponent of methodological anti-positivism, arguing for the study of social action through interpretive (rather than empiricist) methods, based on understanding the purpose and meanings that individuals attach to their own actions. Weber's main intellectual concern was in understanding the processes of rationalisation, secularisation, and "disenchantment", which he took to be the result of a new way of thinking about the world, associating such processes with the rise of capitalism and modernity.
Weber is best known for his thesis combining economic sociology and the sociology of religion, emphasising the importance of cultural influences embedded in religion as a means for understanding the genesis of capitalism (in contrast to Marx's historical materialism). Weber would first elaborate his theory in his seminal work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), where he attributed ascetic Protestantism as one of the major "elective affinities" involved in the rise of market-driven capitalism and the rational-legal nation-state in the Western world. Arguing the boosting of capitalism as a basic tenet of Protestantism, Weber suggested that the spirit of capitalism is inherent in Protestant religious values. Protestant Ethic would form the earliest part in Weber's broader investigations into world religion, as he later examined the religions of China and India, as well as ancient Judaism, with particular regard to their differing economic consequences and conditions of social stratification. In another major work, "Politics as a Vocation", Weber defined "the state" as an entity that successfully claims a "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory". He would also be the first to categorise social authority into distinct forms: charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal. Among these categories, Weber's analysis of bureaucracy emphasized that modern state institutions are increasingly based on the latter (rational-legal authority).
Weber also made a variety of other contributions in economic history, theory, and methodology. His analysis of modernity and rationalisation would significantly influence the critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School. After the First World War, he was among the founders of the liberal German Democratic Party. He also ran unsuccessfully for a seat in parliament and served as advisor to the committee that drafted the ill-fated democratic Weimar Constitution of 1919. After contracting Spanish flu, he died of pneumonia in 1920, aged 56.
Neoliberalism, warns Professor Wendy Brown, has created a form of reasoning in which human beings are reduced to their economic value and activity, and in which all fields of human activity are treated as markets and institutions, including the state, are increasingly run as if they were corporations. This logic is even applied to activities with no connection to wealth creation, such as education, dating, or physical exercise, which are increasingly governed according to market rules. People are treated in this schema, as units of human capital who must constantly tend to their own present and future value.
Maximilian Karl Emil Weber (21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920) was a German sociologist, historian, jurist, and political economist, who is regarded among the most important theorists on the development of modern Western society. His ideas would profoundly influence social theory and social research. Despite being recognized as one of the fathers of sociology, along with Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim, Weber saw himself not as a sociologist, but as a historian.
Unlike Émile Durkheim, Weber did not believe in monocausal explanations, proposing instead that for any outcome there can be multiple causes. As such, he was a key proponent of methodological anti-positivism, arguing for the study of social action through interpretive (rather than empiricist) methods, based on understanding the purpose and meanings that individuals attach to their own actions. Weber's main intellectual concern was in understanding the processes of rationalisation, secularisation, and "disenchantment", which he took to be the result of a new way of thinking about the world, associating such processes with the rise of capitalism and modernity.
Weber is best known for his thesis combining economic sociology and the sociology of religion, emphasising the importance of cultural influences embedded in religion as a means for understanding the genesis of capitalism (in contrast to Marx's historical materialism). Weber would first elaborate his theory in his seminal work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), where he attributed ascetic Protestantism as one of the major "elective affinities" involved in the rise of market-driven capitalism and the rational-legal nation-state in the Western world. Arguing the boosting of capitalism as a basic tenet of Protestantism, Weber suggested that the spirit of capitalism is inherent in Protestant religious values. Protestant Ethic would form the earliest part in Weber's broader investigations into world religion, as he later examined the religions of China and India, as well as ancient Judaism, with particular regard to their differing economic consequences and conditions of social stratification. In another major work, "Politics as a Vocation", Weber defined "the state" as an entity that successfully claims a "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory". He would also be the first to categorise social authority into distinct forms: charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal. Among these categories, Weber's analysis of bureaucracy emphasized that modern state institutions are increasingly based on the latter (rational-legal authority).
Weber also made a variety of other contributions in economic history, theory, and methodology. His analysis of modernity and rationalisation would significantly influence the critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School. After the First World War, he was among the founders of the liberal German Democratic Party. He also ran unsuccessfully for a seat in parliament and served as advisor to the committee that drafted the ill-fated democratic Weimar Constitution of 1919. After contracting Spanish flu, he died of pneumonia in 1920, aged 56.
Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Chair at UC Berkeley, where she teaches political theory. Drawing from Freudian, Weberian, Marxist, and Foucauldian angles of vision, she writes about the powers operating beneath the surface of liberalism and generating many of its limits and predicaments. She is best known for her interrogation of identity politics and state power in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995); her analyses of contemporary discourses of tolerance in Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (2006); her account of the inter-regnum between nation-states and globalization in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010); and her analyses of neoliberalism’s assault on democratic values, institutions, and citizenship in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015) and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (2019). Her work is translated into more than twenty languages, and she has held a number of visiting professorships as well as Guggenheim, ACLS, and Institute for Advanced Study fellowships. She credits her thinking life to the excellent, accessible public universities of her youth and has worked in recent years to prevent their extinction.
Arts and Humanities ..
Neoliberal Degradation of Education ..
Monday, 13 April 2020
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