Oh yes, a big hat tip to Dr Robin DiAngelo who proposed the term "white fragility" to describe how few white people can address claims that 'we whites all benefit indirectly from systemic racism' without exhibiting extreme mental & emotional distress.
I feel some the same way as Dr DiAngelo, whenever I observe the reaction after I claim that Henry Dawson's scientific career was devoted to proving up the fact that life's simplest, smallest and weakest beings - the microbes - exhibit intelligent behavior.
And that many times and in many areas, they best the smartest humans in the Universe.
Dawson's key case in point - made during WWII - was when he demonstrated to the world that fungus-slime-made natural penicillin easily bested the failing efforts of the world's smartest chemists to synthesis man-made penicillin.
That's the science side of the issue : because - wait ! - yes there is plenty more.
Dawson's second key point was that if the fact that Life's smallest, weakest, simplest produced penicillin when we couldn't renders them worthy of dignity and respect from humanity, maybe humanity should follow that thought to its ultimate conclusion and show some of that respect to the smallest, weakest, simplest in the human species.
Please, he said to the Allies, please re-consider your Nazi-like decision to only give life-saving penicillin to the those you consider worthy and to deny it to who you judge unworthy.
After all the pond scum made their life-saving medicine for 'worthy' and 'unworthy' alike ---- maybe you should sink to their moral level ---- and do the same ...
Sunday, April 10, 2016
Saturday, April 9, 2016
North American-style ethnic cleansing
North America hardly needed to go all the way to South African style overt apartheid, or East European murderous ethnic cleansing campaigns, to keep its unwanted ethnic minorities out of nice WASP upper middle class suburbs.
Not when North American voters, courts and local governments winked at restrictive covenants and private sector red-lining, which together with federal government approved minority group mortgage denials did the trick when old-fashioned "sundown town" practises of implied and actual violence against minorities around after dark became too notorious to continue after about 1948.
In an Age of Exclusion,where great efforts were made to see that every bit of reality was kept separate and pure, why stop the process at the mortgage broker's door ?
Admittedly, over time, the unwanted ethnic minorities were greatly re-defined.
After WWII, racists reluctantly had to accept that half a loaf was better than none.
Better to let former "darkies" like Jews, Italians, Catholics and Eastern Europeans to have their own ethnically-cleansed working class neighbourhoods, where gangs of of their own teenage youths could be relied upon to keep potential families the still dark races from Asia, India, Mexico or North Carolina from moving into 'white' neighbourhoods.
Yes, I am including Canada in all this : no evidence they were any different in moral kind from their American cousins.
Only that the situation was far different in terms of the size of the various ethnic minorities between the two nations : Canada had far fewer blacks, jews, latinos, but far more east europeans, aboriginals and french catholics.
But God judges moral intent, not skin colors, and I feel sure God saw no different in that department between these nations....
Not when North American voters, courts and local governments winked at restrictive covenants and private sector red-lining, which together with federal government approved minority group mortgage denials did the trick when old-fashioned "sundown town" practises of implied and actual violence against minorities around after dark became too notorious to continue after about 1948.
In an Age of Exclusion,where great efforts were made to see that every bit of reality was kept separate and pure, why stop the process at the mortgage broker's door ?
Admittedly, over time, the unwanted ethnic minorities were greatly re-defined.
After WWII, racists reluctantly had to accept that half a loaf was better than none.
Better to let former "darkies" like Jews, Italians, Catholics and Eastern Europeans to have their own ethnically-cleansed working class neighbourhoods, where gangs of of their own teenage youths could be relied upon to keep potential families the still dark races from Asia, India, Mexico or North Carolina from moving into 'white' neighbourhoods.
Yes, I am including Canada in all this : no evidence they were any different in moral kind from their American cousins.
Only that the situation was far different in terms of the size of the various ethnic minorities between the two nations : Canada had far fewer blacks, jews, latinos, but far more east europeans, aboriginals and french catholics.
But God judges moral intent, not skin colors, and I feel sure God saw no different in that department between these nations....
faith-based Age of Exclusion (1875-1965) vs current fact-based Age of Inclusion
During WWII, Allied governments and virtually all of their voters took it as an article of faith that when those governments passed new wartime laws banning any form of discrimination, that ipso facto all such discrimination was yesterday.
They didn't bother to check to see if frontline decision makers actually obeyed the new law.
I argue this was because WWII was the very apogee of an age of faith and it saw no need to seek confirmation from mere facts.
Our present 'Era of Inclusion' is a more cynical age and while governments still piously pass new laws protecting civil rights, vigilant minority-oriented groups closely monitor whether the laws are just for show or have real teeth.
And they & their allies complain loudly and publicly, before the courts if need be, if the facts show it ain't so.
Henry Dawson's battle with his era was far less about his promoting workable fungus slime-made penicillin over unworkable patented man-made penicillin and more about a devotee of facts lonely battling a world largely content to trust merely in faith....
They didn't bother to check to see if frontline decision makers actually obeyed the new law.
I argue this was because WWII was the very apogee of an age of faith and it saw no need to seek confirmation from mere facts.
Our present 'Era of Inclusion' is a more cynical age and while governments still piously pass new laws protecting civil rights, vigilant minority-oriented groups closely monitor whether the laws are just for show or have real teeth.
And they & their allies complain loudly and publicly, before the courts if need be, if the facts show it ain't so.
Henry Dawson's battle with his era was far less about his promoting workable fungus slime-made penicillin over unworkable patented man-made penicillin and more about a devotee of facts lonely battling a world largely content to trust merely in faith....
Purity & Dirt always in a vertical hierarchy, not horizontal continuum
"Pure-ness", that rhetorical term much beloved by Scientism, is never in fact allowed to exist in the horizontal continuum that its definition implies.
That is, seeing a former mixture now separated into all its various pluralistic diversities ; 'pure but equal' substances in a chemically inclusive democracy.
No, in practise, a mixture is always separated, like a population of pre-1956 American school kids, into a vertical hierarchy of pure and dirty : 'separate and unequal'.
A chemical exclusive imperial hierarchy : worthy metropolitan master and unworthy colonial subject.
* Usefully confused with Jane Addams' "lateral progress"...
Lateral pure-ness *
That is, seeing a former mixture now separated into all its various pluralistic diversities ; 'pure but equal' substances in a chemically inclusive democracy.
No, in practise, a mixture is always separated, like a population of pre-1956 American school kids, into a vertical hierarchy of pure and dirty : 'separate and unequal'.
A chemical exclusive imperial hierarchy : worthy metropolitan master and unworthy colonial subject.
* Usefully confused with Jane Addams' "lateral progress"...
Friday, April 8, 2016
I was a child in the 196th decade, the Fifties years, from 1951 to 1960 - I became an adult in 1961
My childhood ended when I began reading grownup-oriented newspapers, magazines & books in early September 1961, just before my tenth birthday.
So my childhood was a Fifties childhood.
It is by far and away the decade I feel closest too.
I say so despite being a bona fide 'Youth in the Wild Sixties', because I always felt that the dramatic youth actions of the 1960s followed inevitably on from the unique times experienced by Fifties ankle-biters.
Note : because we count everything, including time , from 1 to 10 not from 0 to 9, there never was any "year 0" in any known calendar.
Still, despite this obvious fact, most people 'believe' the Fifties were from 1950 to 1959 ---- I go with the math guys and say it ran 1951-1960.
Suits me anyway - I was conceived in 1950, but only born in 1951....
So my childhood was a Fifties childhood.
It is by far and away the decade I feel closest too.
I say so despite being a bona fide 'Youth in the Wild Sixties', because I always felt that the dramatic youth actions of the 1960s followed inevitably on from the unique times experienced by Fifties ankle-biters.
Note : because we count everything, including time , from 1 to 10 not from 0 to 9, there never was any "year 0" in any known calendar.
Still, despite this obvious fact, most people 'believe' the Fifties were from 1950 to 1959 ---- I go with the math guys and say it ran 1951-1960.
Suits me anyway - I was conceived in 1950, but only born in 1951....
Age of Exclusion 1875--1965 ; Age of Inclusion 1965 --???
The Classical & Romantic Ages at least hint accurately of what they are all about.
Not so the Ages of Modernity & Post Modernity.
Because the Romans no doubt thought of themselves as fully modern - as will humanoids a million years from now, if our species is still around by then.
I think it much better to tag each of these slices of history as "the Age of Exclusion" (culminating with Auschwitz's exclusionary fires of racial purity) followed by "the Age of Inclusion" (beginning with the American Civil Rights Movements' biggest success, 1965's inclusive Voters Rights Act).
Only time will tell, if these terms have any legs....
Not so the Ages of Modernity & Post Modernity.
Because the Romans no doubt thought of themselves as fully modern - as will humanoids a million years from now, if our species is still around by then.
I think it much better to tag each of these slices of history as "the Age of Exclusion" (culminating with Auschwitz's exclusionary fires of racial purity) followed by "the Age of Inclusion" (beginning with the American Civil Rights Movements' biggest success, 1965's inclusive Voters Rights Act).
Only time will tell, if these terms have any legs....
queen of today's science is Biology : non-man-made chemistry & physics
That Vannevar Bush wanted no biologists on his wartime OSRD team went unremarked at the time, then at the very apogee of Modernity.
After all what could mere non-human living beings ever teach us humans - Masters of the Universe all - about serious chemistry & physics ?
Seventy five years on, it seems apparently quite a lot.
After years when university chemistry department staffing steadily shrunk the world over, it has become the turn of physics departments to start doing the same.
The kids - the customers - are always right in the big big marketplace that is the modern university and the kiddies see the money and the opportunities as being as much in micro technology as it is in synthetic chemistry and theoretical physics.
This 'turn' to thinking of the natural world as being co-worthy with humanity is a marked change from the thinking under Modernity and in fact one of the biggest markers of our new post-modern, globally inclusive and globally commensal age.
And to think it all began almost silently during WWII, at the very height of Modernity, when Henry Dawson's fungus-slime-made natural penicillin quietly & unexpectedly bested the OSRD's dreams of human-made penicillin ...
* If you don't used the term 'the turn to' at least once in every two thousand blog entries, how can you expect academics in the humanities and social sciences ever to take you seriously ?
After all what could mere non-human living beings ever teach us humans - Masters of the Universe all - about serious chemistry & physics ?
Seventy five years on, it seems apparently quite a lot.
After years when university chemistry department staffing steadily shrunk the world over, it has become the turn of physics departments to start doing the same.
The kids - the customers - are always right in the big big marketplace that is the modern university and the kiddies see the money and the opportunities as being as much in micro technology as it is in synthetic chemistry and theoretical physics.
the 'turn' to the natural *
This 'turn' to thinking of the natural world as being co-worthy with humanity is a marked change from the thinking under Modernity and in fact one of the biggest markers of our new post-modern, globally inclusive and globally commensal age.
And to think it all began almost silently during WWII, at the very height of Modernity, when Henry Dawson's fungus-slime-made natural penicillin quietly & unexpectedly bested the OSRD's dreams of human-made penicillin ...
* If you don't used the term 'the turn to' at least once in every two thousand blog entries, how can you expect academics in the humanities and social sciences ever to take you seriously ?
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