Daily Sceptic contributor Noah Carl has written a must-read piece for UnHerd about the decline and fall of Nature, once the world’s most prestigious scientific journal. Here are the first three paragraphs:
Nature is a revered name in academic publishing. The journal was founded in London in 1869, and has since become one of the two main titles (the other being Science) that every academic wants to publish in. Having just one “Nature paper” on your CV can be enough to land a tenure-track job at a top department.
It’s all the more concerning then, that in the last few years, Nature has handed over an increasing amount of editorial space to social justice activism. In February of 2019, Jordan Peterson remarked that a once-great publication was going “farther down the social constructionist rabbit hole”.
The latest example comes in the form of a piece titled “Anti-racist interventions to transform ecology, evolution and conservation biology departments”, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. No less than twenty-six authors are listed under the title, suggesting this was not some trivial undertaking. It includes charts, tables and even a glossary of key terms (with entries such as “racial microaggressions” and “white privilege”).
Worth reading in full.
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Black lives don’t matter to other blacks. Black on black deaths are far higher than white on black murders.
Also, Black lives only Matter in the run up to US elections. After that they don’t matter again for another three years.
It’s almost as if black people are being used for political reasons.
If they really mattered, Western governments would not persue genocidal lockdown policies that force millions of people in the third world into extreme poverty.
Wokeism is just another leftie mind virus, which germinates in feeble and immature people, unable to handle life, humanity and reality.
Oikophobia (generally hate of western people who work for a living) is the SOLE form of racism in this country.
The main proponents are the coercion funded MSM.
A divided people are far more susceptible to totalitarianism. There is a genuine reason as to why ‘leftism’ is being pushed in the corridors of power.
Psychologically speaking, I believe that those that subscribe to the prevalent Marxist theory, would have been on the religious right 5-6 decades ago. And one of Stalin’s informers, a Nazi brown shirt etc. They seem very compliant to the narrative of the ‘common good’. And they confirm very easily. And I think it be genius of people like George Saros to turn the left into a vehicle that now rails for establishment/corporation goals.
Of course, there has to be an ‘evil’. Trump was a great poster boy for that. Brexit here. Now middle of the road Conservatives are ‘literally Hitler’, as so warped their views on the world. Warped views is what was needed to round up Jews into concentration camps… and now we have the unvaxxed. We can see where this could go. And it scares the s**t out of me. Not really for myself, but I have a 5 month old daughter. The world she could grow up in could well be hell on Earth.
“The world she could grow up in could well be hell on Earth.”
This is why the time to resist is right now, and not leave it to somebody else.
Why have you presumed I am not? If you think I am meekly keeping my head down and doing nothing, you are wrong. It wasn’t in me to stand idly by before my daughter was born. Her future has only emboldened me.
I have come to the conclusion the science, as in real science, is far too difficult for most of today’s ‘scientists’. So they would rather shelter behind ‘beliefs’. Its consistent with the general dumbing down of education over the last few decades.
Plenty of scientists do have beliefs, and not least Richard Dawkins, but science, real observational untainted science should always come first.
Excellent observation!
See also, The Lancet
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that…“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby becomes a monster.”
Woke claims to fight monsters when the fact is that it is a monster itself – the almost religious certainty in those who worship at the altar of woke could also be found in the ideology of both Mussolini and Hitlers fascism – their justification of violence against opponents and denial of free speech all smacks of fascism – the appeal to emotion and the almost child-like refusal to listen to an opposing view … woke is fascism under new management.
Yes, good piece. The poison of ideological antiracism is embedded deep in our culture. It has been working its way deeper for decades now, despite the utter defeat of organised actual racism in the 1970s/80s. What we now term “woke is just the modern full flowering of what began as “political correctness” in the 1980s/90s.
The problem is that conservatives tend to be too polite in response to these kinds of fanatic ideologies, that dress themselves in the clothes of decency. They spend too much time solemnly agreeing how nasty “racists” are and desperately trying to convince people that they aren’t “racists” themselves, and agreeing that “yes, “racism” is an inherent evil that must be cast into the outer darkness”, thereby conceding the fight before it begins
ALL the national institutions and all organisations of significance have been systematically infiltrated and re-purposed during the last 25 years by essentially Bolshevik agitators ( Bolshevik – professional revolutionary)
Meanwhile the bewildered majority stumble about unaware of the depth and scope of both the changes already enacted and the envisaged ongoing changes.
This isn’t about health, wholesale change to society is the aim . The younger generations are the target . The agenda goals for 2030 will not be seen by many of the readers here much less the 2050 goals. So the Bolshevik foot soldiers press on as directed with enthusiastic zeal for the Great Plan, eduction and knowledge won’t be needed for most in a world driven by AI, but brainwashing into the cult will be, so all that we have known must be erased and re written for that coming new age.
The majority in the West have been asleep at the wheel for the past 30+ years allowing the corrupted corrosive ideologies of international Marxism/communism to subtly infiltrate society. The majority have failed to respect, honour and secure the sacrifices of previous generations. The majority have failed to stand up to the evil vociferous minority peddling their simplistic utopian solutions.
The majority laughed on through gritted teeth as “new wave comedians” and the liberal intellegencia trashed the heritage of society. The majority, bribed with cheap credit were happy to go along with the blair/brown nwo agenda, happy to cheer young soldiers sent off to Iraq Afghanistan just to make money for the mic and secure the heroin trade for the intelligence agency. Where are the justice warriors calling for blair etc to be put on trial like pinoche ?
The majority have allowed their countries to be deliberately bankrupted and subsumed into the emerging global bio-technocratic governance structure , and now it’s too late. Your children will be indoctrinated against you, your beliefs will be demolished and your wealth will be leached from you until finally you succumb to the slow acting injectables and the state turns you into fertiliser.
These people talking about white privilege make my blood boil. I wish they would take a walk around the inner city poor predominantly white areas near where I live and discuss privilege with the folks who live in there!!!
The woke left is a movement of the wealthy elites and their manipulated stooges, and they despise the indigenous working classes. As Victor Davis Hanson pointed out a few weeks ago in reference to the US (but much the same applies here):
“Anybody who’s exempt from the consequences of their own ideology tends to be very left wing. It’s easy to say “let’s defund the police” if you live in a nice zipcode
….
these elites do not like [working classes], and you can see the vocabulary… remember it was Barack Obama who said “clingers”, Hilary added to that vocabulary with “irredeemables” and “deplorables”, and then Joe Biden trumped them all when he started to use words like “chumps” and “dregs”. And so they have nothing but contempt for the lower middle class and middle classes.”
[By the latter, he means the working classes, both “blue collar and “white collar”.]
At least in the US the Trump/”populist” wing of the Republican Party represents these people. In this country, the identikit political parties all represent the concerns of the Blairite elites.
“Anti-racist interventions to transform… evolution”.
I thought (macro) evolution was the main driver of racism (favoured races and all that) and a factor in the very thorough Tasmanian genocide.
There are a lot of parallels, I think, between the woke lunacy and the covid lunacy. The cultists in both areas here exaggerate the problem. You know the sort of thing – “cops are hunting down black people on the streets and killing them” and “covid is going to kill everyone and their pet budgies”.
Now, racism exists (even institutionally), of course it does. Covid exists, of course it does. It’s the extent and severity of the problem in both cases that is the question – and like covid, racism is something that we’ll never fully eradicate – there will always be unpleasant and dangerous idiots amongst us.
I think most people in their right mind abhor racism in all its forms and would like to see it minimised as much as humanly possible (eradicated would be better – but I think that’s impossible). I think most people in their right mind want to minimise deaths from covid – as much as is humanly possible (but only lockdown sceptics seem to be cognizant of the fact that this is minimisation subject to the constraint/requirement of also minimising non-covid harms).
The issue I have is that the cultists put themselves and their ideas forward as the only way to fight these things – and if you don’t agree you must be an evil person, or morally deficient in some way. If you don’t support lockdown – you’re a granny killer, being a prime example of this kind of nonsensical binary thinking. If you don’t take the knee, support BLM and do penance for your white guilt then you’re just perpetuating racism and other stuff, being an example from the woke wonderland of magical thinking.
“I think most people in their right mind abhor racism in all its forms and would like to see it minimised as much as humanly possible (eradicated would be better – but I think that’s impossible).”
Agree with your comment overall, but would just observe that this is an example of the kind of over-politeness to these antiracist fanatics that I mentioned above.
You use the term “racism”, as usual in our society, without properly defining it, which is a gift to the zealots. Unless it’s defined very tightly – to the extent that there is almost no such thing as “racism” in existence – “racism” is not some kind of elemental evil that must be hounded out of existence. Fundamentally, either racism is a genuinely awful thing, in which case there is almost none of it about, or it is something that is not necessarily bad at all, in which case there’s lots of it around.
At one extreme racism is wanting to murder everyone of a different race to yourself, and it’s pretty rare. At the other extreme, it’s just recognising that race is a relevant feature of human existence (as for instance doctors do when they look at problems that afflict particular genetic groups more frequently), and there’s loads of it around. Most are somewhere in between those two.
But casually using a term that has such a vast range of potential meanings is seriously problematic.
Until we stop demonising “racism” as something other than just another opinion, we will never be able to resist the woke and identitarian manipulators. But there is a huge industry of social parasites, whose power and wealth depends on this false demonisation of “racism” in our society.
This touches on something that I have tried to discuss with others over the years, usually to a puzzled response.
The word “racism” itself has been highjacked, it’s meaning constricted, almost in a 1884 Newspeak way.
Decades ago I was taught racism (like the other -isms), was the false attribution of characteristics or values on a person based on their race.
BUT…..in theory this was not always discriminatory, insulting or “bad”, but yes, in practice was usually so.
Examples, “All Irish people are thick”….(bad). “All Scottish people are mean”, (bad). “All gypsies are criminals” (bad).
So all untrue, insulting and casting a negative on the respective race.
BUT also consider; “All Swedish women are beautifull”. or “All Nordic men are tall and athletic”. or “All Swiss are peacefull, tidy and law adiding”.
These racial stereotypes are all also untrue, but confer no negative outcome or insult to the respective race in the way that the negative examples do.
So, not condoning any kind of racism; simply trying to explain what the 21st century public universally understand as “racism” is only a small slice of what the word actually means.
TLDR….Racism is not ALWAYS synonomous with discrimination, IMHO.
“These racial stereotypes are all also untrue“
Racial stereotypes, like most stereotypes, are usually, or perhaps often is better here, “true” as generalisations. That’s how stereotypes arise. Though in many cases they are untrue even as generalisations, because they are out of date, or malicious in origin.
Clearly as you worded them (“All..”), any stereotype is going to be false.But that’s not how stereotypes should be used. They serve as a shorthand to make decisions in limited information situations. The classic example was of black US race-baiter Jesse Jackson, iirc, famously saying that when he heard footsteps behind him in the dark, he felt relief if, when he turned to look, he saw white faces. That reflected the truth in the stereotype that violent street crime was disproportionately committed by blacks, in that context (US inner city culture).
The stereotype wasn’t always true, but it nevertheless gave a useful clue as to what type of reaction would be appropriate in a situation of limited information and potentially high urgency.
All of which basically reinforces your point, that “racism” has had many meanings, not all of them bad. Indeed many of the accusations of “racism” today are for things that just aren’t objectively bad.
The problem in modern terms came with the instrumentalising of the term as a political smear term by the “antiracist” identitarian left.
Maybe I’m just too old-fashioned, but I’m using the term “racism” in the way that someone like Martin Luther King would have understood the term. It used to be pretty clear what it meant – and without anyone trying to claim its meaning was “problematic”.
But I guess in these days where it seems impossible to accurately define what a “woman” is the term can mean many things to many people.
It’s the problem that Douglas Murray spoke about when he opines that only yesterday we all knew what these various terms meant.
The language has been hijacked, and deliberately so, by the wokerati. They have expanded the meaning of racism, at least in their own minds, but they definitely wish us all to remember what it used to mean – so that when they talk of “racism”, in all its new imaginary flavours, it has the same emotional impact that we all remember, back when its meaning and ugliness was clear.
“Maybe I’m just too old-fashioned, but I’m using the term “racism” in the way that someone like Martin Luther King would have understood the term. It used to be pretty clear what it meant – and without anyone trying to claim its meaning was “problematic”.“
The term was still as unclear, but its usage was less problematic because there was a real and substantial collection of attitudes, laws, and organised political groups that were being targeted as “racist”. But even then the term was misused, just less frequently. Opposition to mass immigration, for instance, was smeared as “racist” whether or not it was in the particular case.
“The language has been hijacked, and deliberately so, by the wokerati. They have expanded the meaning of racism, at least in their own minds, but they definitely wish us all to remember what it used to mean – so that when they talk of “racism”, in all its new imaginary flavours, it has the same emotional impact that we all remember, back when its meaning and ugliness was clear.“
Yes, it’s a smear term and that’s how smear terms are used. Focus on the most obviously nasty examples to establish the taboo-bearing status of the term, then expand it to target any political enemy or disliked political position that could remotely be associated with it. Return to the nastiest examples whenever necessary to properly demonise.
Same thing with other such smear terms, like homophobe, sexist, antisemite, islamophobe, etc.
Why is anyone surprised? Nature, like any other journal, is a commercial endeavour with the objective of making a return for its investors.
Even Richard Horton, the editor of the Lancet declared that up to 50% of medical studies are junk.
Are we then to consider covid research, hurriedly concocted over a matter of months any better than ‘climate science’ (THE science we are assured) which surely must have the largest bandwagon of snake oil salesmen of any science.
The IPCC represents what thee BBC would have turned Jackanory into given the money.
I wonder if the increasing politicisation of science is partly explained by the fact that there have been no major scientific breakthroughs this century – certainly nothing to compare with those achieved by Einstein, Heisenberg, Crick and Watson etc., in the previous century. The people who now control academic science are as narcissistic as anyone else and have to establish their importance somehow or other. Supporting woke ideology is one way they can make their voice heard. Like those “experts” who predicted the Taliban would need 90 days (not 90 hours) to capture Kabul, they are simply hopelessly wrong on a whole range of issues.
Maybe its worth reading in full but quite frankly, I couldn’t be arsed. I’m so sick of this woke shite, these people are fucking morons!!
Likewise
The ‘anti racists’ are the racists