Douglas Murray has written in the Telegraph about the University of Edinburgh’s excruciatingly woke decision to cancel one of Scotland’s greatest Enlightenment philosophers, David Hume, and the anti-woke backlash that led to a drop in donations to the university of £2 million.
David Hume’s work was crucial in moving our society out of the realm of superstition and into that of reason and rationalism. But in one fatal footnote to one fatal essay Hume said something that is certainly by modern standards racist.
I doubt any of his critics had ever read any of Hume’s works. Or at least, my strong suspicion is that they did not stumble upon this footnote during a routine read-through of Hume’s collected works. Outrage culture does not work like that.
But soon, searching for victims, the mob was after Hume, deemed him a racist and insisted his name be removed from the University of Edinburgh building. So it came to pass that the university authorities changed the building name to “40 George Square”. A name which is still far more poetic than the building in question.
And there it lay. Another victim of the latter-day culture war I described in my most recent book, The War on the West. But as I also pointed out there, these things can have unintended consequences. Weak, pusillanimous and ignorant officials, like those who lead most of our universities, thought it would be the easiest thing imaginable to spit on the memory of David Hume. Yet, as the Telegraph reported this week, there has in fact been a downside for them.
It turns out that in the wake of their auto-cancellation the University of Edinburgh saw a slump in donations. Indeed, the university lost almost £2 million, including 24 donations and 12 legacy donations that have either been “cancelled, amended or withdrawn” since the cancellation of Hume.
Personally, I am delighted to see this. David Hume is a figure that the university should take immense pride in. Naturally, working 250 years ago, he held some views that we do not hold today. Just as we doubtless hold views today that our successors will not hold in another 250 years.
But the point of institutions is not to judge the past and act as judge, jury and executioner over it. Nor is it to erase the past. The job of institutions is to preserve the past, educate the young about it and then pass that education along. In that process continuity is vital, so that a student today might realise that they could achieve even a portion of the heights of those who went before them. Judge a man on one footnote and “who should ‘scape whipping” (as Hamlet put it)?
Worth reading in full.
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Let it go. The money people let it go. Like they say millionaires don’t believe in astrology but billionaires do. Let it go. We are moving into a time in the next fifteen years which will make these discussions seem like quaint reminders of a bygone age. They call it Vargtimmen, the time of the wolf. We have the senses and the abilities to fight. If you have become too domesticated then it is sayonara baby, see you on the other side.
What are you talking about?
This foggy period over Europe is exerting huge pressures, in terms of energy consumption and hospital admissions, This is not going to decrease you will have ever increaing rain in spiring and ‘summer’. And then a transition to a cold fog in August. The western side of Europe is probably going to become a lot more unpleasant in years to come. You an go down with the ship but it is hard to go down with the ship when you are completely depleted. Make plans now if you want to live. The weather can rob you of your energies and ambition very quickly.
I’ve smoked some pretty strong weed tonight… But please elaborate..
The Hockey Stick fraud made its appearance circa 1998 by Mann – then studying for Painter and House Decorator degree. It was based on tree rings and was revealed as a fraud within months by McIntyre and McKitrick amongst many others. The algorithms simply produced a hockey stick no matter than the inputs – GBP vs USD; Car #s vs Bikes.
As Mann wrote in the climategate emails, ‘the powers that be’ want the medieval warm and little ice age periods to disappear.
Mann is no more a scientist than the midget Italian Fauci is a doctor.
https://climateaudit.org/
It took McIntyre about 5 years to expose the Hockey Stick as being statistically flawed and therefore not a true representation of global temperatures over the previous thousand years. The reason it took so long was that Mann would not release, data, computer code or methodology so that his work could be checked. —-We should ask the question WHY?
Can you imagine Einstein coming away with General relativity but not letting the scientific community have access to his work so they could check it for themselves? Yet the IPCC, desperate for anything that would show humans have warmed the planet, made it their centre piece and it was all over IPCC reports and TV news.
What is coming is way worse than their prediction in February after full coverage of the fog canopy. I don’t deal in bullshit I am here to tell you that 2025 will be very different. If you are thinking of leaving the country then you probably can’t. If you have to stay here then just keep your ears and eyes open. I can’t help you anymore because you lack the ability to take anything seriously. It is a case of bye ye and don’t ask me for assistnce when the horrorshow really begins. I recognise the sincere characters.
How do you measure the “surface temperature” of the Atlantic?
Using satellite radiometers I believe.
Interesting; thanks. I had not heard of those. It’s not clear to me how many sampling points they would use, which is where the whole “average temperature” thing falls down for me.
What I read also suggested that they have to correct for a whole bunch of stuff so the measurements are massaged. I suppose if what you are correcting for remains constant over time then the change is real even if the actual numbers might not be.
There are a number of buoy based systems doing this. The Argo System is one version, 4000 plus buoys spread across the oceans that report the range of temperatures and salinity from the surface to a depth of 2000 metres by sinking and raising the sensors. Prior to these methods, earlier methods used ship based methods, one being a bucket over the side and another being sensors on water inlets used for engine cooling. The UAH temperature data mentioned reports at different atmospheric layers, not sure it would be said to be surface level temperature.
Thanks. 4000 sounds a lot but the ocean is huge. How do they know it’s not getting colder in the places they are not measuring?
The Argo programme has really only been running 20 years with floats mainly measuring profiles down to 1000m for 9 days. But it produces a much denser grid of profiles than the older manually lowered sampling buckets. Ship seawater inlet temperature measurements are subject to draught fluctuations of 6-18m between loaded and lightship draughts. The surface 10-30m profiles have the most significant effect on weather but the total volume of the worlds oceans is about 1.4 billion cubic km. With 1 cubic km having a mass of 1 billion tonnes. So there are some real limitations on accuracy and consitency in long term large area measurement.
We are a nation of sheep and someone else owns the grass
The news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class — the people who run things.
Don’t just teach your children to read….Teach them to question everything they read. Teach them to question everything.
Life gets real simple once you cut out all the bullshit you learn at school.
I’ve set my own rules to live by. The first one is; never believe anything the government says.
If you vote and you elect a dishonest, incompetent people into office who screw you over, you are responsible for what they have done.
We don’t even know how to take care of ourselves….and we’re gonna save the fucking planet? the planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system.
George Carlin (1937 – 2008).
Looks like a malevolent cabbage patch kid.
Mann has been a very lucky recipient, of a burst of worldwide madness….luckily that madness is fading.
one notable climate scientist, Michael Mann,
I think not – a thin-skinned global warming activist more like.
This is what the face of an imposter looks like
Global warming – communisms greatest scam?
Green on the outside, red on the inside.
This bloke as got a face you’d just love to slap.. a wet slap at that!