Words matter. These are the best Bret Weinstein Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
At heart, human beings are what we may call ‘generalists,’ who have the ability to adapt their internal ‘software programs’ to different habitats or situations.
If one’s desire for change is an earnest desire to see things improve, then surely there is a state in which things have been improved to the point where you would hope to conserve a structure rather than alter it. At that point, you become a conservative.
What is occurring on college campuses is about power and control – speech is impeded as a last resort, used when people fail to self-censor in response to a threat of crippling stigma and the destruction of their capacity to earn.
When I talk about ‘apolitical’ or ‘nonpartisan’ change, I mean first and foremost exploring root causes with due seriousness and at least agreeing on what they are.
To the extent that the academy is producing people who are talking utter nonsense, and imagining that it is sophisticated and enlightened – that system is a failure.
Colleges have to be about discovering what we don’t yet know and that process will come to a screeching halt if we are leveling threats of bias over the way people phrase things.
If there’s one thing that people fail to appreciate about the social justice movement where it interfaces with the academy is that just because what is being said is crazy to the point of absurdity does not mean that the strategic plan is absurd.
The button-down empirical and deductive fields, including all the hard sciences, have lived side by side with ‘critical theory,’ postmodernism and its perception-based relatives. Since the creation in 1960s and ’70s of novel, justice-oriented fields, these incompatible worldviews have repelled one another.
On a college campus, people should be equally free to be on campus, irrespective of their skin color.
Is there a free speech crisis on college campuses? One can certainly make that argument, but that portrayal is at least as misleading as it is informative.
I don’t think that we can say that the entire educational apparatus is a failure. But we can say that the part of the apparatus that is a failure is taking over more and more territory.
So many of our institutions have been overtaken by schools of thought, which are inherently a dead end.
We have all been told that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I have long thought this is nonsense.
Since universities are funded in large parts by grants that depend on costly research, they have every incentive to free professors from their teaching duties as much as possible – as do the professors themselves, who tend to be recruited and promoted primarily based on research output.
The idea that we should prioritize a racial viewpoint on, who knows, maybe even organic chemistry, over somebody who is adept at understanding how to convey a difficult concept, is preposterous, just at an educational level.
The electorate is starved for honest debate and for the good governance that follows from it.
It is fair to say that the political duopoly we are forced to accept creates a set of problems that threaten the survival of the nation, problems that we need to fix with system-wide changes.
There was a time when the term liberal had been so thoroughly demonized by those on the right that I remember consciously choosing to call myself a progressive in order to evade the stigma. But there was no change in my perspective that accompanied it.
Day of Absence is a tradition at Evergreen.
Terrorism is a tactic in which the primary objective is to produce fear, rather than direct harm. Terrorist attacks are, first and foremost, psychological operations designed to alter behavior amongst the terrorized in a way that the actors believe will serve them.
We are now seeing a movement that wishes to place race back at the forefront of our political thinking and, frighteningly, that viewpoint seems to be shared by those on the far left and the far right. We cannot remain cohesive as a nation if we are attacking each other on the basis.
On a college campus, one’s right to speak – or to be – must never be based on skin color.
To women, Americans of color, and the citizens of the world, Donald Trump, if he is taken at his word, represents a threat to you all.
Equality of outcome is a discredited concept, failing on both logical and historical grounds, as anyone knows who has studied the misery of the 20th century.
We are not made safe from terrorists by helicopters, or missiles or boots on the ground. Nor is it drones, torture or digital dragnets that protect us. What makes us as individuals safe from a terror attack is the staggering probability that we will be elsewhere when one occurs.
