Thread before the Gardening Thread: Thought Crimes Today [KT]

Hello, Horde. Hope your Saturday is going well. What with the "Practice Halloweens" on campus to help students pick inoffensive costumes and all, I have been thinking about how easy it is to commit a thought crime in America today.

I remember being horrified at the show trials in Life and Death in Shanghai, where proving your loyalty to communist thought could be a matter of life or death. What is happening in the USA today mostly seems stupider than those show trials. At least people sometimes had a chance to respond then.

In the case of the Boise State professor compared to a Nazi for saying that young children should not be empowered to choose their own gender, this is the part that bothers me the most:

While he has received withering personal attacks over his research, Yenor said that few have engaged with the ideas or have seriously attempted to refute his arguments.

Yenor said the personal attacks don't bother him, but he worries about the long-term impact on people worried that their views will not be argued with, but simply attacked on campus.

"That's been one of the most disappointing things," Yenor said. "Everyone in academia could live with having a debate about ideas, but a debate has to start with an understanding what the other person is arguing."

"It strikes me that there has really been, first of all, no effort to first understand what I'm arguing, and second of all, to get anywhere beyond name-calling and labeling," Yenor said.

Meanwhile, Peter Woods does a retrospective review of the essays of David Horowitz through about 2010: Battlefield Notes from a War Gone Unnoticed. Worth reading and thinking about. He had the right ideas. Why wasn't Horowitz more successful at stopping the advance of the Left on campus?

Below the fold, a video featuring Jordan Peterson on the dangers of unconscious bias testing by HR departments and governments: "You'd think we would learn from the 20th Century.

If you are doing something interesting today, why not let us know about it? Don't let anybody try to reprogram you. Not even Facebook.

posted by Open Blogger at 11:14 AM

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