So the defenders of Western Civ are now railing about noted anti-racist SJW, Napoleon.

Just like they rail about celebrated left-winger, Hitler.

Just like they praise that great anti-slavery movement, the British Empire.

Imagine if they put this energy into learning something.
Imagine treating an intellectual tradition you claim to revere in the shallowest, silliest way possible. Imagine making transparently ludicrous alternative histories the basis of your worldview.
Imagine the highest goal of your intellectual efforts being to waste other people's time, and perhaps make them a little more ignorant and a little less curious about the world.
Your career awaits!

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More from @mccormick_ted

10 Mar
It's probably no surprise to anyone familiar with the genre, but it's remarkable that in a piece supposedly worried about curriculum, almost every source for curricular content decisions is characterized at second hand, mostly via hostile sources. Image
(As an aside, it's also funny that in this purportedly skeptical, critical, free-thinking tale of rebellion against elitist orthodoxy, the idea that a handful of small, expensive private schools *should* be tasked with educating "America's elite" is assumed throughout.)
This bit of silliness has rightly come in for mockery -- there was always more to physics than Newton -- but it's worth noting that *at no point* is the actual source of the change identified, much less the rationale stated. We just get the student's impression... maybe Image
Read 12 tweets
9 Mar
To join the chorus: "socially constructed" does not mean "unreal" or "malleable at will." Among the many obvious social constructions anti-constructionists habitually discuss as real and durable are rights, progress, property, capitalism, science, the Enlightenment, and The West.
Others are money, law, interlibrary loan, and breakfast. Just about the only thing uniting these is that they are created by human beings acting in a social context. The contrast is not with what is "real," or with what is "malleable," but with what occurs outside such a context.
Not even Richard Dawkins, at least after some thought, maintains that scientific claims are made or tested outside of social context. No one thinks money predated society, nor that that makes it unreal. Conversely, all manner of natural things are "malleable" and studied as such.
Read 4 tweets
4 Mar
Loving truth and winning the culture wars by putting neo-Nazi words in Voltaire’s mouth
Punchline
Genius = spreading bullshit to a huge audience
Read 4 tweets
3 Mar
This is a clear and worthwhile thread.

But I wonder how one addresses the weaponization of ambiguity that occurs when ordinary academic uses of a term are condemned on the basis of the term's non-academic meaning(s). This is the stuff the culture war is made of, it seems to me.
It's not quite the same issue, but there's also a sleight-of-hand involved in -- for example -- smuggling specific, pseudo-scientific claims about race into public discourse under the cover of broader and more innocuous terms ("population", "demographics").
In both cases I think the divergence between academic and non-academic understandings of the terms is not simply a by-product of miscommunication but the necessary condition for attacking academic work as a danger to the public, civilization, etc, etc.
Read 5 tweets
27 Feb
Wow. "Anti-Wokeism" is tearing itself apart with tone policing, ideological purity tests, and cancellation
who could have seen this coming from people who think scanning texts for "postmodern" vocabulary is intelligent criticism
Anyway Young does indeed appear more concerned with Conversationalist James's hectoring tone and pandering manner than with the fact that he is a fraud who makes things up, so a plague on both your houses, etc, etc
Read 15 tweets
26 Feb
The last point is key and often gets lost. Running universities as brands first and academic institutions second will *always* mean sacrificing academic freedom to PR.
"Running it like a business" is antithetical to running it like a university.
Gauging concern about how and in what interests universities are actually run (as opposed to safe spaces, trigger warnings, etc) is, in my experience, a good way to tell who is concerned about academic freedom and who just wants to find the quickest way to shut other people up.
Read 4 tweets

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