A veteran psychiatrist and professor at Tulane University School of Medicine condemned racially divisive and harmful diversity, equity and inclusion programming at his medical center.
Dean Robinson, a visiting fellow at Do No Harm, described an “outbreak of mass irrationality” at the prestigious medical school and hospital where he works and teaches.
“It now appears that Tulane School of Medicine has revised its mission to ensure that our faculty and students receive indoctrination that divides us into either ‘oppressors’ or ‘victims’,” Robinson wrote.
At a required DEI retreat, Robinson and his psychiatrist colleagues “were subjected to seven hours of stereotyping and shaming”.
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Thanks to our fascist government/corporate dictators, the entire country is being subjected to an “outbreak of mass irrationality”, whether we like it or not.
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Although I feel a bit guilty using words like “interesting” to describe aspects of the suicide of the West … it is interesting that the modern Left are now embracing ways of thinking to which, at one time, their political ancestors were quite hostile.
Until the last few decades, the Left prided itself on being rational, committed to truth, throwing off the shackles of custom and tradition. It was the Right who warned against trying to tear society up by the roots and reconstruct it according to abstract principles.
But now, Leftist intellectuals are openly embracing the idea of ‘multiple truths’ – putting science – or, as they would call it, ‘Western science’ – on an equal plane with ‘indigenous knowledges’, ie the superstitions of backward peoples.
This began with the academic post-modernists nearly fifty years ago, and has slowly metastacized. (Although a thorough investigation of the roots of Leftist irrationality would probably start with the Russian nihilists in the 19th Century, and then jump to the 1960s “counter-culture”. I recall how shocked I was, in the late 1960s, to discover that some new friends – all graduates of the Univeristy of Pennsylvania, and recent immigrants to Bezerkeley, where I was living – believed in astrology. Sort of. And Jillian Becker’s Hitler’s Children, which I am reading now, has an extensive description of the insanity of the German New Left, which celebrated the mass murder of innocent people. Like the modern Left, they had given up on ‘winning the working class’, and came to despise them.)
[ https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Children-Story-Baader-Meinhof-Terrorist-ebook/dp/B00H852B4S/ ]
Today, I believe that this embrace of superstition as equal to or better than modern science, comes from white guilt: modern science was created and nurtured for hundreds of years by white Europeans … so it cannot be something we celebrate.
Now … there is an opportunity for patriots here. Not everyone on the Left is happy about this turn. I’ve just finished reading an interesting editorial in Free Inquiry, the Journal of Secular Humanist Ideas. by the CEO and President of the Center for Inquiry. These people are mainly on the Left. But even they are worried by the lurch of their fellow Lefties towards irrationality. Their CEO, Robyn Blumner, writes as follows in the latest issue (Volume 43, No. 1):
“There are plenty of examples of how Ameria’s right wing is a danger to truth-seeking institutions and standards. That is not what I want to focus on.
Because there is also truth-slaying happening to progressive circles generally in the name of social justice. And because so many secular humanists lean toward liberalism, it is here that we need to shine a light and frankly, stop the insanity.
I commend to everyone Jerry Coyne’s terrific blog Why Evolution is True (https://whyevolutionisttrue.com/), which you can subscribe to for free. An emeritus biology professor at the University of Chicago and a classical liberal himself, Coyne has been closely following the excesses and illiberalism of the woke Left.”
And more in that vein. The whole article is here: [ The Truth Matters and Secular Humanists Should Defend It | Free Inquiry ]
In war, you seek to divide the enemy, and to gather allies. This is what we must do with the pro-rationality liberals. Exactly how, remains to be seen.
But as a first step, everyone should sign up to Professor Coyne’s blog … and maybe mention TheAtheistConservative if you have the chance to post something there.
I believe there are many decent liberals who are ‘secular humanists’ and who just take for granted that this is co-terminous with membership of the Left. They simply are not aware of the possibility that one could be an atheist, (and affirming the same basic values of support for civilization that motivate liberal secular humanists) and yet be on the Right. And as the Left goes progressively more insane, some of them may reconsider their committment to it. We need to help them in this.
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I’d say that the irrationality of the Left started with Marx himself, pushing his pseudo-scientific theory.
Both he and his followers prided themselves on being rational, but Marxism was a pie-in-the-sky, Utopian dream con-game from the beginning.
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Yes, you can be very rational, and advocate systems that do not work.
Our Libertarian/AnCap friends provide another example.
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From that article and just before Doug’s quote:
It was relatively easy for most of us to condemn the allergic-to-truth rantings of former President Donald Trump. His lies were so transparent and prodigious that anyone outside the MAGA-verse could easily see through them. Many of us collectively recoiled at the reality-distortions he spun and how they were lapped up with religious-like zeal by his followers.
We are at a disadvantage here already. They are calling for progressives to stand up to the insanity of woke culture. I am not sure they will welcome atheists who want to do this, but don’t otherwise agree with them.
In my experience, the instant that they sense right-leaning (now often branded Trump support) or conservative thinking, they lose their rationality and become our enemies, as we become “trolls”, “uneducated and/or ignorant boobs.” Or perhaps…gasp…agnostics, who might be considerate of believers, who share our conservatism, deny the global warming crisis, question the current “scientists” that have brought the country so low, believe the Clintons, Obamas and Bidens hate America, etc.
We are not going to sway anyone, because they are aware that there are atheists on the Right, and they believe that we should not be allowed to exist.
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This must be tested in practice.
I have certainly run into such people: at the ‘ProAndCon’ discussion forum at https://LibraryThing.com, I raised the possibility of a ‘united front’ between Left and Right against futher foreign wars … which should have been of special interest to the ‘Progressives’ there since most conservatives used to be enthusastic supporters of any foreign war the Deep State initiated, while most progressives were not. But no … they were almost hysterical in their rejection of the idea.
Unite with Stalin against Hitler? Sure. But unite with American conservatives on an issue where we agree? Never!
But there are exceptions. In fact, the sort of Leftists who post on the web are not typical of non-conservatives.
It is not true for the people around Quillette, for example, who are genuine intellectuals and who care about truth.
[ https://quillette.com/ ].
It wasn’t true for Matt Taibbi, now running riot at Twitter exposing its collaboration with the FBI to cover up for Biden. Nor for Glenn Greenwald, founder of the hard-left journal The Intercept.
These people were hard-core Lefties. But … for whatever reason, they couldn’t stomach the Left’s obeisance to the Biden machine. Their self-respect would not allow them to peddle lies, even for the good of their ‘cause’.
Glenn Greenwald - Wikipedia
Matt Taibbi - Wikipedia
In any case, I’m not really talking about highly political people, certainly not the ones who obsessively post on the Web. What we need to look for are opportunities at the local level to draw non-conservatives into common action.
For example, suppose your local school board is happily pushing Drag Queen story hour, and the sexual mutilation of confused children. There will be non-conservatives (let’s call them that, rather than ‘liberals’ or ‘progressives’) who will not be happy with this. (This has already happened, even in ultra-woke San Francisco.)
We would want to reach out to these people, and propose a joint slate for the School Board (unless we were in an overwhelmingly conservative area), consisting of some conservatives, and some common-sense patriotic non-conservatives.
Then we would want to try to carry on meeting with these people – even if just informally, for social occasions – after the election. Many non-conservatives have, thanks to the mass media, a very distorted image of conservatives. They have been taught that we are semi-literate Bible-thumping fundamentalist white supremacists. But when they have worked with a group of us, that false image will be dissolved.
(Imagine their surprise when they encounter the owner of this website!)
In war, you try to split the enemy. Literally, by attacking at those points in his defense line where command responsibility is not clear, where it may overlap between two units.
But also via propaganda: the Allies repeatedly Italians, during WWII, whether they really wanted to die for Hitler. And it turned out, that they didn’t, when their army in Northern Africa surrendered practially en masse.
But these people will not come to us. We have to look for them.
Right now, the worst thing we can be is passive. We need to build local organizations, with a hard core of trained, prepared people, and concentric layers of less committed people, and layers of those who only agree with us on one issue or another.
And we’ve got to start now. We atheists, of all people, know that there is not going to any heavenly intervention to save civilization. It’s up to us.
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Yes, well in local politics and community affairs all these people are my friends and aquaintances…most who do not even know I am an atheist. My husband has been a local leader, both elected and not elected…conservative straight shooter, whether Democrat or Republican.
I thought you were writing of online persuasion.
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Both, actually. I think we can make some inroads among non-conservatives there as well. But face-to-face, working-together is far more effective.
Have a look here: https://www.walkawaycampaign.com/
We need to spread this all over the internet. Each of us ought to be signed up to/registered with a dozen leftist/neutral forums, where we can post things like this. At worst, we’ll demoralize some of the enemy a bit.
Now … for about two years I’ve been searching for some people to work with on co ordinated online campaigns. Sexist old me called them ‘Republican Grandmothers’. The ‘Republican’ is obvious, and the ‘Grand’ means retired or at any rate with enough time on their hands to put in half an hour a day, on average, or more.
And the ‘mothers’ part comes from my experience in political organizing (okay, on the Left and long ago), which has been that while us men have our uses, women are, on average, far more practical. If you wanted to get something done – like organize a demonstration, or a big paper sale at a university campus – you would ask a female comrade. Now maybe this was the result of sexism, but my experience was that men would have to be prodded, asked daily how things were going, but women would just get on and get it done. Biology? Society? Both? I don’t know.
All I know is, at least with respect to conservatives-on-the-internet, there are tons and tons of men there, and they love to talk and argue and put each other down … but when it comes to actually doing something, like a coordinated ‘register to vote’ posting blitz on certain YouTube videos watched by young red-pilled (and not likely registered) males … they weren’t interested.
There are lots of things we can use the internet for which do not involve contact – friendly or otherwise – with progressives.
For example, there are a lot of online ‘hunting’ forums. (And many of them, given the geographic nature of hunting, have one sub-forum per state.) Now, before the election, some inspired person set up this website: https://huntthevote.org
From that site:
"Hunt The Vote - I Hunt I Vote. Our hunting lifestyle is under attack. A well organized, well-funded, anti-hunting cabal is pushing for outright bans on hunting. From Virginia to Wisconsin to Colorado and Arizona, these anti-hunting forces are uniting to kick us out of the woods and trample on our values of God, family, and country.
50% of Hunters do not vote."
That website should have been mentioned on all of the hunting forums in the country … of which there are dozens. And it should have been tweeted to hundreds of thousands of conservatives with admontion to pass it along to any hunters they knew. But … that would have taken a half-dozen or so people, working together, to do efficiently. (I did my best, but I was also doing voter registration things on line and there is just so much time in the day.)
By the way, forums like hunting forums, which may appear to be non-political, can surprise you. Look here: https://texashuntingforum.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/7465517/re-the-untold-story-of-the-battle-against-the-kkk-in-the-deep-south
(Note: I’ve talked about reaching out to, and pulling towards us, non-conservatives. But there are also a lot of ‘natural conservatives’, like hunters, who apparently do not vote. At least, that’s what the ‘Hunt the Vote’ people say. We need to pull these people into activity as well. )
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