Michael Shermer discovers that "science has a liberal bias"

[ericbarbour]

Brace yourself, this item will set off a lot of TRIGGERING. Why did Scientific American fire Shermer in 2019?

https://www.city-journal.org/article/un ... c-american

Shermer aside, this IS something I've noticed about current American progressives: a weird tendency to harp about how A*W*F*U*L everything is, and an instant kneejerk hatred of actual good news (and anyone delivering the good news). And now we have "identity politics" or "intersectionality" or whatever, which is directly opposed to a color-blind and egalitarian society, and fully in favor of a twisted form of "self segregation". People marched, suffered and died to improve civil rights in the USA for decades--just don't talk openly about it today, or someone will be OFFeNDEd.

Not to mention the ongoing shriek-fests over LGBTQ, climate change (I consider that one totally settled and the only people pushing the opposite view are the fossil-fuel industry and its supporters), etc. These are NOT traditional American "liberal" political positions any longer. They verge on authoritarian craziness and self-defeatism. I've met a lot of San Francisco leftists over the years, and they usually had this "personality feature" in common. Especially in recent years.

For progressives, admitting that any problem—racism, pollution, poverty—has improved means surrendering the rhetorical high ground. “They are committed to the idea that there is no cumulative progress,” Shermer says, and they angrily resist efforts to track the true prevalence, or the “base rate,” of a problem. Saying that “everything is wonderful and everyone should stop whining doesn’t really work,” his editor objected.

Shermer dug his grave deeper by quoting Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald and The Coddling of the American Mind authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, who argue that the rise of identity-group politics undermines the goal of equal rights for all. Shermer wrote that intersectional theory, which lumps individuals into aggregate identity groups based on race, sex, and other immutable characteristics, “is a perverse inversion” of Martin Luther King’s dream of a color-blind society. For Shermer’s editors, apparently, this was the last straw. The column was killed and Shermer’s contract terminated. Apparently, SciAm no longer had the ideological bandwidth to publish such a heterodox thinker.

Not mentioned: Shermer's ongoing "little problem" with people accusing him of sexual assault. Even his WP article now mentions it.....albeit dismissively.

Also, Wikipedia's City Journal article calls the publication "conservative" but fails to pigeonhole it as "far-right" or "neo-Nazi" or similar. That is something I would normally expect from Wikipedians. They clearly bear hate-boners for City Journal regular Christopher Rufo. You can thank fanatical left-leaner and Trump hater Thenightaway for much of that. (Another Cirt sock?)

Guys like Rufo are admittedly pests, but sometimes you need a few pests to keep the rest of the "activists" honest.

[Strelnikov]

Christopher Rufo is a grifter claiming that critical race theory is being taught in grade schools....when it is actually a Year Two or Year Three law school class, and an optional one at that. The dumbest governor in America (Ron DeSantis) put him on the board of the New College of Florida with some other mouthbreathers to wreck up the place, because DeSantis thinks that every college in his state should look like Pensacola Christian College. A real country would be charging Rufo for intellectual fraud. He is to academia what Kent "Dr. Dino" Hovind is to paleontology.

Never forget that Shermer once tried to sue a student newspaper at a COMMUNITY COLLEGE for an article that reported that the head of chemistry department had warned (by mass email) any female students to be wary of him because he was speaking at the college, and his leg to stand on was that the reporter screwed up and didn't contact him. It should be said that the writer got a quote from a dissenting professor who spoke up for Shermer.....my take is that the editor at the paper should have demanded a quote from Shermer (and a non-response, aka "at press time we have not heard from him" or a "no comment" also works.)

Shermer's deal is that he was Libertarian back when he joined Skepticism, Inc. and when he burned himself being a sex pest, so he jumped back into the Koch swimming pool but it was infected by Alt-Right ideas (because libertarianism is such a weak philosophy, it can be co-opted by open neo-Nazism), and now he's in that septic tank.