Showing posts with label Berkeley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Berkeley. Show all posts

Sunday, June 14, 2020

UC Berkeley History Department Confirms It Is Staffed by Anti-White Bigots

Recently, an anonymous letter purporting to be from a colored member of the University of California, Berkeley History faculty began:

I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field.

In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them.

In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.

Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or 'Uncle Toms'. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders. Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques.

The claim that the difficulties that the black community faces are entirely causally explained by exogenous factors in the form of white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination remains a problematic hypothesis that should be vigorously challenged by historians. Instead, it is being treated as an axiomatic and actionable truth without serious consideration of its profound flaws, or its worrying implication of total black impotence. This hypothesis is transforming our institution and our culture, without any space for dissent outside of a tightly policed, narrow discourse.

A counternarrative exists...

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Absurdly, the University of California, Birkerley History Faculty confirmed the letter writer's thesis by issuing the following statement:

An anonymous letter has been circulating, purportedly written by a @UCBHistory professor. We have no evidence that this letter was written by a History faculty member. We condemn this letter: it goes against our values as a department and our commitment to equity and inclusion.

The implication is that to be an American University professor now requires slavish adherence to the PC narrative and hence a complete rejection of the ideals that underlie scholarship. America's academics are, evidently, no more than either dim-witted dupes of PC propaganda, or gutless conformists clinging to the easy life of a professor whatever the intellectual degradation, moral abandonment, and public ridicule such a position entails.

Time for smart young people to abandon the pursuit of so-called Higher Education, which has become mind-warping process of indoctrination in poisonous lies of political correctness.

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Do You Really Have a Mind?

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it "I refute it thus."

James Boswell: The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791)

The world is composed of matter: wind, water, and hard things like rocks that can be kicked by philosophers, whereas our awareness of the world seems to be of an altogether different character. Consciouslness, except our own, cannot be seen, heard, tasted, touched or smelled or otherwise directly shared, but can only be intimated by words, the meanings of which we learn ostensively, by reference to things that can be observed by both speaker and hearer.

The challenge of explaining consciousness has naturally attracted the attention of philosophers who seem almost as puzzled by the problem as anyone else. A solution that some philosophers have adopted is to assume that consciousness is inherent in all matter, not just brains, a theory called panpsychism.