Tuesday, May 03, 2016

When actual science becomes subservient to PC,

that definitely fits under 'Science: abuse of'.
The members of the American Anthropological Association are busy voting (until May 31) on a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The proposed resolution jumps off in its first sentence in universalist language, claiming that Israel has denied Palestinians “their fundamental rights of freedom, equality, and self-determination.”
...
The Declaration reflects a sentimental view of humanity, as though in our essence we are a tribe of suburban Californians dabbling in the human potential movement of the 1990s, eager to get our kids into good local schools and send them on to Berkeley or Reed.
That this could turn in 2016 to the thinly veiled anti-Semitism of a BDS-style resolution should not be too much of a surprise. Anti-Semitism is back in fashion.  It is this year’s Merlot. And academics whose minds are shaped mostly by intellectual fashion were bound to arrive there.
...
Allen and Jobson are perfectly explicit about their larger goal.  Their essay, though turgid, is clear enough in its lament for the fall of Soviet communism:  “The fall of the Soviet Union was of interest—and destabilizing—to anthropology.” That’s because the end of “state socialist projects […] foreclosed a moment of revolutionary optimism.”

Why do these idiots ALWAYS lament the fall of the Evil Empire?

Ah, found it: article from three years ago on this subject, specifically the attacks on a particular anthropologist because he wasn't speaking the proper words and the proper ways, and had a non-PC view.



1 comment:

jerseygirlangie said...

I seem to recall some other fanatical political group boycotting "Jewish science" back in the 1940's ....