A major theme here at the Daily Sceptic is the politicisation of the world’s ‘top’ scientific journals, Nature and Science. Over the last few years, both of these publications have handed over an increasing amount of editorial space to woke activism.
In the summer of 2022, Science ran a piece about how astrophysics helped the author embrace her “non-binary” gender identity. Meanwhile, Nature published an article claiming that fat people contribute to “diversity”.
Science has now run a piece on “systemic racism”, which has very much the same flavour. The author is Agustin Fuentes, who in 2021 wrote an article on Darwin’s The Descent of Man, which described Darwin as “an English man with injurious and unfounded prejudices”. Lest you doubted his credentials, Fuentes’s latest piece comes under the heading ‘Expert Voices’.
He begins by referring to “massive amounts of data” and “countless analyses” which “demonstrate unequivocally” that racism persists in the United States, including in higher education. Yet he laments that “six of the nine justices on the US Supreme Court recently chose to disregard these facts and argue for a “race neutral” approach in college admissions.”
Where to start with this one? Even if racism does persist in the United States, why would that imply colleges shouldn’t follow a race neutral approach to admissions?
After all, affirmative action is pretty much the definition of a racist policy. It says that two students with the same grades and test scores should be treated differently because of their races. For Fuentes, however, it’s being neutral with respect to race that is racist – or at least tantamount to ignoring racism.
He seems to think that because some black people face discrimination, Harvard is justified in discriminating against whites and Asians – none of whom had anything to do with the discrimination faced by black people. Which makes absolutely no sense. Has Fuentes never heard of the concept that two wrongs don’t make a right?
He goes on to say that “this same ideological approach” of “denying such massive evidence” is also present “among a not insignificant cluster of scientists”, before citing many studies which supposedly show there is “systemic racism” in science.
I’m sceptical, to say the least. This isn’t Fox News or NASCAR we’re talking about – academia leans overwhelmingly left. So what Fuentes is saying is that all these left-leaning scientists are going around engaging in “systemic racism”. I don’t buy it.
There’s also the small matter of Asian scientific success. According to Pew Research, Asians comprise 6% of all workers and 13% of STEM workers – so they’re overrepresented by 117%. By contrast, whites comprise 63% of all workers but 67% of STEM workers – so they’re overrepresented by only 6%. In short, Asians are far more overrepresented than whites.
It’s unclear how “systemic racism” can explain this pattern, unless it’s “systemic racism” against non-Asians. (Unsurprisingly, the word ‘Asian’ doesn’t appear in Fuentes’s article – presumably because it would undermine his narrative.)
Fuentes’s pièce de resistance comes in the final paragraph: “Some will decry this essay as “woke” and use it as an example of how the journal Science has fallen off the path of “true” science.” Err, yes I will do that. He continues:
If being “woke” means actively considering the available data and analyses and responding to them by considering the social contexts, histories, and processes that facilitated and created them, then being woke is just doing good 21st-century science
And if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike. That’s clearly not what “woke” means. It’s also incredibly vague: how do I “respond” to data by “considering the social contexts” that created them?
We all know what “woke” means: blaming group disparities on “systemic racism” and then refusing to explain why Asians come out on top. It’s the very opposite of doing good 21st-century science.
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No shame. Nothing to do with health.
Pure, authoritarian vindictiveness.
It’s going to backfire.
Certainly hope so. But decades of experience does not encourage me to believe that the inflictors of gross injustices and mass harms necessarily pay any price for it, this side of the grave.
It probably would have backfired in the past. But not in our “New Normal.” The corruption and groupthink is too comprehensive. I fear we have have passed a tipping point and Big Brother has probably won.
No – they have over-reached. 23.5 million people in the UK have not been jabbed! A bit more than the government have claimed!
Another one-and-a-half million have only had 1 jab. They’ll be plenty of double-jabbed who will refuse the booster – and more and more will refuse to have successive boosters. We just have to hold firm for another 12 months (maybe less).
I hope they have told their employers that they will be owed what ever has been deducted plus interest and penalties when this nightmare eventually ends.
Can’t these unvaccinated teachers club together and start a school? I can imagine enquiries from parents will be high.
This, huge market for it at the moment; teaching respect for individual agency and personal liberty.
A good idea. I used to be a teacher (high school Maths and English) and am so glad I am retired before all the vaxx tryanny hit. But if I was still a teacher and under threat of the sack, I would club together with other vaxx Resistants and set up private, individual or small group, teaching/coaching groups for kids of principled parents. It would be hard to formally make it an above-ground business, as the vaxx mandates would make it illegal to operate legitimately under penalty of severe fines for all, but such a teaching underground would have legs.
Underground schools. What has the world come to? This said, I like your idea. But “they” are going to find the principals/principles of this business venture, if for no other reason then to tax the tuition payments.
Union influence no doubt (as well as dodgy government). Interesting they say a testing regime is not sufficient. They’ll probably start one anyway once they catch up on the fact that viral load in the vaccinated is the same as in the unvaccinated. Just watch…
Well, this is certainly coercion.
Are there grounds for suing for attempted murder L
More recruits for Colonel Bosi.
I recommend watching the 1970s TV series ‘Secret Army’: about the Belgian resistance in World War Two. It’s kind of a serious version of ‘Allo Allo’.
Perhaps we all need to bone up on running an alternative state.
Hold out, sue for damages after the current government is removed.
Governments all around the world are becoming ever more desperate to remove the control groups of people who haven’t had vaccination.
So what exactly is the issue with these mRNA experimental jabs and exactly what have they done to people that they need to cover up?
There is NO question that the jabs are dangerous, AND MAKE THINGS WORSE – even the Lancet has realised this.
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/lancet-article-demolishes-vaccination
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/denmark-no-vax-is-protective-vax
Even if the jabs were perfectly safe, I would reject them on grounds of coercion.
Agreed.
My mother tried to blackmail me to eat sprouts forty years ago by withholding pocket money. I simply did without sweets and still don’t eat sprouts to this day.
Coercion didn’t work then and it never will on me.
Send all unwanted sprouts to me, then!
Was that yet another ruling from Brussels, one wonders??
I have the same attitude towards the similarly morally noxious seatbelt laws – I had no objection to wearing a seatbelt, in fact I had trained myself to put it on automatically when getting into a car.
Once it was coerced by law, I had to train myself out of doing that, so as to make a conscious rational decision each time whether I felt the risks of not wearing one outweighed the benefits. Now I only wear one for longer journeys on faster roads, or if there’s enforcement present.
Sadly the majority were happy to accept that law “for the greater good”. If people had held the line on that, it would have been that much more difficult for these mandates to be imposed.
I’d wear a seatbelt, but not a mask for 9 hours a day at work, or take a vaccine that enslaves not protects.
The issue isn’t (or shouldn’t be) the merits or not of the particular action, but the coercion.
And once you accept that coercion is acceptable in one case, you have sold the pass for the next case.
In the past 25yrs, the teaching profession has ramped-up interventions that counter bullying.
Now the very educationalists and education authorities that have conferred upon ‘bullying’ the status of ‘eighth deadly sin’………..have become bullies themselves.
Teachers’ unions should be up in arms…….but the will be short-sighted and mocking those they perceive as ‘uncooperative’.
Wonder if they realise that it’s not going to be just about 2 jabs…..it’ll be about 3,4,5+ jabs, and somewhere down the line, they are going to have their pay cut if the don’t comply.
What will they do when the authorities want to jab beyond the line that they have personally drawn?
Of course the people preaching an anti-bully message have become (or already were) bullies themselves. That’s the way it works.
Is that even legal?
Depends who’s staffing the courts and administering the law.
I’ve quite despondent now, we’re in their end game. I’m part of a fantasy football WhatsApp chat with 15 guys in their mid 20s. Today there was a discussion whereby a vocal few were baying for the blood of unvaccinated EPL players. Sometimes you lose hope and think the government has won the war.
I need to keep my job. I’m tied into a mortgage. I can’t move country because they’re all the same. I can’t hide forever, and that hurts. The reality is I’ll just have to live with the consequences of being vaccinated.
Ironically as I write this I’m isolating having finally caught covid. It was a mild flu. My instincts of why vaccination wasn’t appropriate for me have borne true.
Yet your football friends have regularly seen professional footballers collapse on the pitch – often on live television.
Are they so stupid that connections cannot be made?
Don’t have the vax! Especially now you’ve had COVID. I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that vax reactions are worse in those who have had the “virus”.
Is being vaccinated in your contract? I’m guessing not, so a strong case for unfair dismissal, just don’t resign.
Stay strong and sane.
ignore the pricks, every group has them. The silent ones probably have a different view. Dont do anything you dont want to do until you really have no other choice.
Don’t despair. It’s obviously illegal under about five pieces of legislation.
Prepare to hire a lawyer. Or if it can be done in the county courts, you don’t even need that.
I’m mostly retired and fear receiving the state pension and buying food will eventually depend on it. However, I’d investigate the legal defences before that happened. Bear in mind that all vac mandates in the USA seem to have been thrown out by judges and we also use the common law system so have slightly more protection than Germany.
I wonder what inducement could be offered to someone who is administering these jabs to persuade them to squirt them into the nearest sink?
You’re now immunised.
Don’t risk the jab now!
this will hurt them where it hurts them the most, in their pockets.
Politicians only know how to do more of the same.
We do have a problem in these times as the politicians have suppressed any talk of how they’re wrong.
Some people say that the only requirement to becoming a political representative should be for the individual to not have any formal training in politics and, even better, not actually want to be a political representative in the first place — I’m beginning to think they’re right.
I thought I’d coined a new word to cover the global coup – Pharmocracy, but I see the word was previously used as the title of a book by Kaushik Sunder Rajan, published in 2017. I’ll use it anyway, though I haven’t read the book.
Idiocracy works equally well, of course!
There doesn’t seem any form of legal redress for being penalised for delaying the jab, and it could be only a delay, once it is out of the experimentation phase, so far the pharma companies have refused to have liablity for anything that happens. Some people wouldnt even buy a toaster without a guarantee.
Further proving that this is not about anyone’s safety, this is purely about getting people vaccinated.
Surely all they have to do is produce a copy of their contract, accompanied by a union rep and a lawyer?
A medicine so good, you have to lie, bully, and torture people to have it. Sign me up!
They test for the flu since they’ve never isolated Covid-19. Which makes me wonder how they can tell there is a delta variant. They never isolated the virus but they use a test to show the damage of a solution does on monkey kidney cells then show the cellular debris as proof of the virus. So, they can use this method to claim an UNENDING! amount of variants. A lot of cancers and “viruses” are probably just different forms of parasites. Since the tests can’t differentiate between cold and flu and covid then doesn’t that mean ivermectin cures both the cold and the flu? Welcome to “they’ve been lying to us our entire lives about everything”. Get your Ivermectin while you still can! https://ivmpharmacy.com
More “freedom” still allowed for the vaccinated. I love the “compassion” for these soon-to-be broke teachers and their soon-to-be hungry and stressed out children.
I just don’t see how this is ever legal. What is the basis/justification for witholding their holiday pay? Just what is it – in real terms – about not having a jab … what is the justification, that this is warranted?
Because, if you are unvaccinated … what? What does that positively equate to? What does the contrary – being ‘vaccinated’ – positively equate to?
I know they can just make stuff law, but I don’t see how they can actually justify this in any way, shape or form. If law or punnishment is not justifiably reasonable and necessary, then it is invalid, and wrong. It’s not good enough to say ‘it’s law – because we say so’.
Just what is it that justifies such consequenses of being unjabbed, as witholding pay, fines, sacking, etc? I mean, actual justification – not simply because ‘we say so’?
About that “Bucket List” wish to visit the land down under … scratch through that one.
When did discrimatiin become acceptable?
The very idea that governments will mandate the acceptance of an unlicensed and experimental drug is deeply disturbing.
I wonder what’s happening in April 2022? Australian teachers and UK healthcare workers are getting sacked. Who else?
And yet the overwhelming majority of children will brush off any covid infection ‘case’ with ease and no ill effect. This is just not about health at all.
Don’t contract sof employment count anymore.
What we need is a revival of the hedge schools.
This might be the start.
Welcome to Grow Together School. We are a decentralised community network of teachers, parents and students. Driven by the need for change in the education system. We want a better future for our children, parents and teachers. Register to be connected to accredited teachers and to other parents who are seeking alternative education arrangements.
When the day of reckoning comes, and it will, I hope these put upon teachers, nurses, doctors, care home workers etc. are appointed to the juries at Nuremburg style courts to try these authoritarian bullies. Black cap at the ready, m’lud?
Australia is, truly, a fascist state.