Will UT Austin and Texas A&M survive beyond this week?

It's a quest for victimhood to justify hate.

In December 2014, Scott posted a comment [0] in a discussion on his blog about how, as an adolescent, he had struggled greatly with anxiety issues, and how he believed that some messages some feminists were broadcasting had contributed to his mental health problems. And in response, a huge number of online feminists decided to publicly denounce him in a massive pile-on; Amanda Marcotte's contribution is representative [1]

Ever since then, some "woke" people have been convinced that he's a "bad person". And he's said other things to upset them since, e.g. publicly disagreeing with proposals that his field (quantum computing) abandon some of its technical terminology ("quantum supremacy"), which some claim "makes women and minorities uncomfortable in our field" [2]

So yes, Scott really is on the receiving end of a lot of online hate from certain people, and it has never stopped–including trolling campaigns against his blog [3], demands sent to his department that he be fired/disciplined, etc. And Scott calls the people behind this campaign against him "woke" (or even, as he does in this blog entry, "wokesters"). I know a lot of people have an allergy to that word, but can you see how it makes sense from his perspective? Why shouldn't he use it?

[0] https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2091#comment-326664

[1] https://www.rawstory.com/2014/12/mit-professor-explains-the-...

[2] https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4450

[3] https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6552

Yale invites speakers who talk about their fantasies of killing white people. Mainstream feminist websites do backflips trying to sugarcoat that they think every single man is a threat.

> Yale speaker says comment about killing White people was meant to spark deeper talk about race

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/06/09/yale-lec...

> But the socialization of men is such that even a good man – a supportive man, a respectful man, a trusted man – has within him the potential for violence and harm because these behaviors are normalized through patriarchy.

> And as such, we know that even the men that we love, never mind random men who we don’t know, have the potential to be dangerous. Surely, all people have that potential. But in a world divided into the oppressed and the oppressors, the former learn to fear the latter as a defense mechanism.

> So when you enter a space – any space – as a man, you carry with yourself the threat of harm.

https://everydayfeminism.com/2016/10/yes-actually-it-is-all-...

More narrowly the demographic that loves censorship is of the left now.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/professor-terminated-art-h...

> In a controversial move, an adjunct professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, has lost her job after showing her class Medieval paintings depicting the Prophet Muhammad, founder of the Islamic religion.

Ezra Klein supports laws he believes will lead to miscarriages of justice because of the political consequences.

> "Yes Means Yes" is a terrible law, and I completely support it

> For that reason, the law is only worth the paper it's written on if some of the critics' fears come true. Critics worry that colleges will fill with cases in which campus boards convict young men (and, occasionally, young women) of sexual assault for genuinely ambiguous situations. Sadly, that's necessary for the law's success. It's those cases — particularly the ones that feel genuinely unclear and maybe even unfair, the ones that become lore in frats and cautionary tales that fathers e-mail to their sons — that will convince men that they better Be Pretty Damn Sure.

https://www.vox.com/2014/10/13/6966847/yes-means-yes-is-a-te...

"Woke" is a synonym of "enlightened." Don't trust anybody who claims to be enlightened, or rails against enlightenment.

An arbitrary example I saw yesterday:

An elderly white man was leaving a parking lot with one-way traffic flow. A young white woman was standing in the road talking with a friend. He pulled few feet away from them, waited, then politely asked them to move when they didn't.

One woman started accosting him about entitlement, white privilege, male privilege, and refused to move. The scene went on for a while until he was able to reposition the car and barely drive by her brushing her with the car.

These are the "woke" people who are poisoning the well for others. They just use it as a pretext to rage and hate on strangers simply because of their race, age, or gender.

I'm not saying this is typical behavior, just an interaction where someone probably felt targeted.

In a more general sense, I have been told by hiring managers and recruiters that white males shouldn't bother applying for some jobs. That certainly made me feel angry and targeted by ideologs.

I don't like the way many people use the term "fundamentalism". It started out to describe an early 20th century movement in American Protestantism. And indeed, they were all about following scripture–or at least what they claimed it was saying, since other Christians have always disagreed with their interpretations of it. And I don't have a problem with calling them "Fundamentalists", since that is their own term they chose to describe themselves. Nor do I have a problem using the term to describe (ultra-)conservative Protestants who consciously continue the same approach today, and look back on the early 20th century Fundamentalists in admiration.

The problem is when the term "fundamentalism" gets extended to (ultra-)conservative factions within other religions such as Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, etc. None of those belief systems shares the Protestant belief in "Scripture Alone" (sola scriptura). All three believe in the binding nature of extra-scriptural/post-scriptural traditions. So while "the core they follow, scripture" is an accurate description of the basis of the original Protestant fundamentalism, it ends up misrepresenting "fundamentalism" in other religions, and distorting them through a Protestant-coloured lens. Which is why a lot of scholars of religion object to using the term "fundamentalist", and instead advocate using customised terminology for each religious tradition. Hence people speak of "Islamism" or "jihadist Salafism" or "Khomeinism" rather than "Islamic fundamentalism", for example. Instead of "Catholic fundamentalism", people speak of "Feeneyism" or "radical traditionalism" or "integralism" or so on. Instead of "Jewish fundamentalism", we have terms like "Kahanism". Instead of "Hindu fundamentalism", "Hindutva".

And I know by trying to talk about a "core principle", maybe you are acknowledging that for "non-Protestant fundamentalism", the core might not be "scripture". But, just because Protestant Fundamentalists might be said to have a single core principle, doesn't mean every other religion does. Sometimes there is no single core principle, just an assortment of views. People use "fundamentalism" to describe religious views which have a rather hostile attitude towards what we might call "modern scientific liberalism", and whether you have a single core principle or an amorphous blur of many principles is irrelevant to whether you have such a hostile attitude or not