The times when scholars were persecuted for doing research, advancing the cause of knowledge and contradicting all kinds of ignorant orthodoxy are far from over, as Alice Dreger demonstrates in her brilliant book Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science.
Dreger investigated some of the most notorious controversies surrounding dissident academics in recent years and discovered that a scholar who happens to publish research that departs, even by half an inch, from the rigid formulations that the ignorant public is comfortable with should prepare for the most vicious persecution imaginable.
The scholars Dreger met in the course of writing the book received death threats, saw their minor children persecuted and abused, were accused of the most egregious crimes (including child rape and genocide) without a shred of proof, and saw their relatives viciously harassed and their careers destroyed for no other reason than publishing (or trying to publish) their academic research.
The saddest part of this story of persecution are the kinds of research that merited this horrible backlash. When you look at what the dissident scholars tried to argue, the most striking thing is how bland and I’d even say vapid their ideas are. Some examples of these supposedly scary controversial ideas are under the fold.
- an anthropologist who worked with an indigenous community in the Amazon described the violence, ritual drug use, infanticide and ecological indifference common among the indigenous. (This is considered a huge transgression in anthropology because the indigenous can only be described as ultra-feminist, gentle, enlightened and ecological.)
- two scholars demonstrated that there is a sexual component in the crime of rape. (The orthodoxy denies that rapists seek sexual gratification and insists that “rape is about power and control”, making it very hard to prosecute cases of rape where the “power and control” motivation cannot be proven.)
- a scientist argued that there are gradations in the degree of harm suffered by victims of pedophilia based on the circumstances of their victimization. For instance, a 5-year-old raped by a 60-year-old might suffer greater harm than a 16-year-old who had relations with a 20-year-old. (The orthodoxy is that if you say that some cases of sexual abuse are less damaging than others, you support pedophilia).
I almost died of boredom even listing these “controversial” ideas that are so lacking in shock value that they wouldn’t scare a bunch of kindergartners. Still, the scholars proposing them were vilified and persecuted not only by their fellow academics but by the mainstream media and politicians of both political camps. (One of these research pieces was even condemned by an Act of Congress.)
The greatest transgression of the persecuted academics described by Dreger lies in not repeating verbatim the comforting formulas the majority sees as gospel truth. And this is in no way a politically partisan problem. People are equally disturbed by hearing anything even remotely new irrespective of their political beliefs.
[To be continued. . .]
Clarissa's Blog 
interesting
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/12/31/political-correctness-teaches-humans-to-fail-the-turing-test/
funny quote: “Try to imagine a Turing test involving a campus activist and a computer, which the judge kicks off by declaring that Bruce Jenner is still a man. A savvy judge would spot the human by looking for the responses that least resemble human speech.”
sad quote: “One of the greatest progressive evils is tricking young people into thinking the loss of identity is liberating. On the contrary, it is devastating, for individual freedom and responsibility are impossible to sustain without individuality. The loss of identity is an essential component of slavery, not liberty.”
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I don’t get this. How can anybody be any more in thrall to identity than progressives who can’t even introduce themselves without listing every ridiculous identity label they have managed to pick up, “I’m a white, heterosexual, cissexual, middle-class, pansexual male”, etc?
Try telling campus feminists that there is no male or female essence that just exists irrespective of any societal conditioning, and they will take your head off. This could be done back in the 1970s but not today.
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He’s on to an interesting idea or two but his vocabulary is all wrong. Current progressives have a very weird distribution of inherent and chosen and social conditioned identities that keep changing.
What they don’t have is any understanding of biology (and people can fight biology all they want, but biology tends to win in the end).
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Try telling campus feminists that there is no male or female essence that just exists irrespective of any societal conditioning, and they will take your head off.
Really? I thought that anti-essentialism was the Unquestionable Truth among progressives. Is essentialism trendy again? I should try to keep up…
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Anti-essentialism was sacrificed to trans rights. Now everybody is endowed with an immutable male or female essence at birth, and woe be unto anybody who questions this. And it’s the same with sexual orientation. Nobody should even try to use to word “choice” anywhere around a discussion of orientation if they don’t want to be pilloried.
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“Now everybody is endowed with an immutable male or female essence at birth, and woe be unto anybody who questions this”
And this immutable essence just happens to look like very particularly north american stereotypes.
Having a penis or vagina is unrelated to people’s sexual-gender identity which is all about their underwear and not what’s in the underwear…..
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And I thought those controversial ideas would include global warning and efficiency of some drugs. Were those issues also mentioned?
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A story about drugs comes in the second part of the review and it’s absolutely shocking.
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Let me guess, they suggest that perhaps taking large amounts of mood altering substances is not always a wonderful thing?
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\ Let me guess, they suggest that perhaps taking large amounts of mood altering substances is not always a wonderful thing?
The particular case Clarissa read about may concern drugs against depression and the like, but I think it is true for entire drug industry, including drugs against not mental diseases such as (swine) flu.
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