guillotine
The cult is growing and strength and number. Most of our leaders cannot stand against it, being either cowards, true converts, or in on the would-be color revolution.

It is spreading to all areas of life, across most of Western culture. Few countries are escaping or avoiding it. No subject is immune. Not even the glory of popular imagination, Science™.


I'll say out loud that H Holden Thorp is an ass. He is either an opportunist or a cultist. I'm willing to believe either, but I'd bet the suck-up side. My guess is he's crammed his nose up the nether region of politics in order to signal his virtue.

But I allow he may be, like many of the useful idiots on our screens, a useful idiot himself. These days you just don't know.

Before we get to Throp's calculated maneuver to keep or enhance his job, here's something similar from the American Geophysical Union, an organization devoted to politics.

The article is "#GeoGRExit: Why Geosciences Programs Are Dropping the GRE". Before I tell you, can you guess why?

Yes! White supremacy!
Geoscience graduate programs are increasingly abandoning the controversial test as an admissions requirement, a welcome development for equity and inclusion in the field. How can your school be next?

A lot is changing this year in higher education. Amid the ongoing pandemic caused by the infectious coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), universities and graduate schools have had to adapt to entirely online instruction and have canceled fieldwork, closed labs, and faced declining revenues.
This is included only to prove to you, once again, how political coronadoom was — and still is. Machinations will be blamed on it for at least eighteen months past the last attributed death.

Anyway, they want to drop the GRE — for which I offer no defense and do not care about — "as a step toward equity and inclusivity in graduate admissions and education", asinine ideas we do care about.

Quote: "...the test is biased against women compared to men and against people of color compared to white and Asian people [Miller and Stassun, 2014]". Note the faux blessing the academic-style reference gives the sentence.

By "biased" they mean men and whites and Asians outdo other groups, which is impossible under the cult's belief in Equality. It is forbidden to think the consistent superior performance of white and Asian men on this quantitative test indicates genuine ability. Superior performance can thus only be due to nefarious causes. Whitness, and we suppose Asianness and testosterone, rays emanate from test takers, which depresses (somehow) the abilities of the female and "of colored".

We can't yet eliminate whites and Asians or men, but we can eliminate the tests. This is the only way to get more "black bodies" into Science. Which is to say, quotas.

This will necessarily cause inflation in science — and it already has, long ago, by pushing to up the percentage of non-males.

Back to to virtue-signalling Thorp:
It is easy to think that the problem is isolated to individual racists in the community and in the government, and that the scientific enterprise is immune to racism...

The U.S. scientific enterprise is predominantly white, as are the U.S. institutions that Science's authors are affiliated with. The evidence of systemic racism in science permeates this nation. Why are so few Science authors from historically black colleges and universities?
Thorp, like I do, believes the question is rhetorical. We differ on the expected answer.
It is time for the scientific establishment to confront this reality and to admit its role in perpetuating it. The first step is for science and scientists to say out loud that they have benefited from, and failed to acknowledge, white supremacy. And then science and scientists finally need to listen to, and make space for, people of color to lead laboratories that publish great science and produce influential scientists, run institutions and their scientific units, and propel Science and other journals to promote structurally underfunded scientists and areas of science.
In other words, hard quotas will be implemented.

Science is already on the ropes for imbibing far too much politics. Global warming, coronadoom, most of sociology, psychology, and on and on. These quotas will happen, and when they do, math and science, as we have warned many times, will be redefined into whatever it is the quota hires can do. Feelings, self-discoveries, anti-white-supremacy. Black holes are white supremacist. All difficult subjects will be under grave suspicion.

"Briggs, you fool. That's paranoia. People aren't going to give on science so easily. Look at all the great things it did!"

They're giving up on everything else great. Iconoclasm is now official policy.

Then there's this: The hot trending Twitter tag "#ShutDownSTEM".

All the best people are doing it:




The article that links to opens:
White supremacy is baked into science and academia, from racist language in textbooks to a culture that excludes Black scientists from innovating and advancing at the same pace as their colleagues. But rather than more milquetoast statements and diversity initiatives, researchers want action. Organizers are asking the scientific community to participate in a work stoppage on Wednesday, June 10 to bring attention to racism in the world of research...

Labs will still refer to various pairs of equipment as "master" and "slave," while the most commonly discussed milestone in quantum computing is "quantum supremacy;" few, if any publishing outlets are actively working to evaluate this kind of language.
We warned you for years scientists and mathematicians were not immune from the mob. It has now come for them. Hard to be too sorry for them. They had the chance to fight back, but were too fearful and too cocky.

Not uncoincidentally, Lavoisier's last words were "I can't breathe."

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Late addition SJWs are looting arXiv.org today This is from our friend Lubos.

Arxiv surrendered to the mob.