News

Sociology professor orders students to only use feminist sources for assignment

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College tuition is rising: are you getting more for your money?
College tuition is rising: are you getting more for your money?

The Toronto Sun reports on a sociology professor who gave her students an assignment – an assignment with some very peculiar constraints.

Excerpt:

A Ryerson University student who wanted to write a paper on the “myth” of the male-female wage gap was told by her prof that not only was she wrong, she should only rely on feminist journals for her assignment instead of business sources which “blame women,” her sister says.

Josephine Mathias, 21, a fourth-year political science student at University of Toronto, took to YouTube Wednesday to criticize the assignment given her twin Jane for a sociology class.

[…]After Jane sent an email describing her intention to write about the wag gap, her instructor replied that her premise was wrong, Josephine said.

Here’s what the professor said:

“Perhaps you want to write your paper on the glass ceiling. You need to look at feminist sources on this issue…Do NOT use business sources. They blame women. The reality is patriarchy,” says the instructor’s email, posted online.

In a copy of the assignment provided to the Toronto Sun by Josephine, the instructor also notes that Ontario and Canada government websites and Statistics Canada will not be considered scholarly sources.

“Government websites state government policy that is devoid of analysis, and usually reproduces mainstream stereotypes, assumptions and misconceptions,” the assignment says.

So, that’s what you get when you enroll in non-STEM courses in a non-STEM program. What is interesting is that the professor makes about $167,000 a year. That’s more than I make, and I actually do useful work! It’s also higher than the average professor’s salary.

Here’s a video Josephine made about the assignment, and the so-called wage gap:

This is not the only political correctness going on in Toronto. A professor at the University of Toronto is also in trouble for refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns.

The Toronto Sun reports:

Dr. Jordan Peterson was bemused at my surprise. “I know, when you first discover it, you say ‘What the hell; what’s going on here?’” he acknowledged. “Unfortunately, it’s pretty par for the course. This is standard practice.”

He should know. The U of T psychology prof ignited a firestorm of criticism last fall from trans activists, faculty and students when he ran afoul of the PC police by posting a video on his YouTube channel saying that he wouldn’t use gender-neutral pronouns such as “they,” “ze” and “zir.” Protesters called for his dismissal and someone poured glue into the lock of his office door.

Where’s the intellectual discourse, the room for contrary views?

“This is the thing people don’t understand about postmodernism: postmodernists don’t debate. They don’t believe in debate, it’s not part of the creed,” Peterson argued.

“All these ethnic studies, gender studies, most of the humanities, a good chunk of the social sciences, it’s all gone down the postmodern rabbit hole. There’s no debate. It’s a political war. You don’t talk to the other side.”

Dialogue with those you don’t agree with would be giving them a platform — and respect — they don’t deserve. Instead, you just shut it down. “This is how it is. This is a university,” he sighed. “It sure would be nice if was unbelieveable, but unfortunately, it’s how it is.”

This is why I keep telling young people that they need to avoid non-STEM programs at secular universities. You’re borrowing a ton of money to become less intelligent. The professors tell you what to believe and you believe it and repeat it like a trained parrot, and then they give you a diploma and you’re $40,000 in debt with no job prospects. Don’t be stupid – understand that there are a lot of people at the university who have no business being there. They have no useful knowledge to give you. Pretty much every non-STEM professor or instructor at a secular university is an imbecile.

This is what college does to students:

You’re not learning anything from an imbecile, except how to ape an imbecile yourself.

This problem is only going to stop when we cut off the funding for universities and cut off the per-pupil funding from government as well. Funding for universities should come from loans made by companies to the individual students, who then promise to work for those companies for a certain number of years at graduation. The money should not be handed to students to go party, with no strings attached.

Videos

Robin Collins lectures on fine-tuning for discoverability from particle physics

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Christianity and the progress of science
Christianity and the progress of science

Here’s the lecture:

This lecture is 29 minutes long, the Q&A is 15 minutes. I highly recommend this lecture to all audiences of all levels of ability, for the simple reasons that apart from the content, this lecture is a how-to clinic in the tone, body language, slides and so on for you to use when trying to be persuasive when making your case. Science is king in this lecture. The scientific method is defined and applied in a winsome way. Making science understandable should be the bread and butter approach to Christian apologetics, and this lecture rivals the Mike Strauss lecture at Stanford University and the Mike Strauss lecture at the University of Texas – Dallas as the ideal lectures for showing that. It’s not just the scientific material that makes this lecture by Collins work, it’s the narrative and the style that make the lecture work.

About Robin Collins:

Robin Collins (PhD, University of Notre Dame, 1993), is professor of philosophy at Messiah College, Grantham, PA specializing in the area of science and religion.  He has written over twenty-five articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics, such as the fine-tuning of the cosmos as evidence for the existence of God, evolution and original sin, the Doctrine of Atonement, Asian religions and Christianity, and Bohm’s theory of quantum mechanics.  Some of his most recent articles/book chapters are “Philosophy of Science and Religion” in The Oxford Handbook of Science and Religion, “Divine Action and Evolution” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (2009)  “The Multiverse Hypothesis: A Theistic Perspective,” in Universe or Multiverse? (Cambridge University Press), and “God and the Laws of Nature,” in Theism or Naturalism: New Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).  He recently received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to finish a book that presents the case for design based on physics and cosmology,  tentatively entitled The Well-Tempered Universe: God, Cosmic Fine-tuning, and the Laws of Nature.

His thesis in one slide:

Fine-tuning for discoverability
Fine-tuning for discoverability – the DLO thesis

Summary:

  • Thesis: the universe is more intelligible than we would expect it by chance
  • The regular fine-tuning argument says that complex embodied observers are very rare
  • But the number of highly-discoverable universes that have complex embodied observers is rarer still
  • Why do we exist in a highly-discoverable universe?
  • Can we quantify and test discoverability?
  • Yes: by varying fundamental parameters and seeing how it affects discoverability
  • Conclusion of his calculations: The Discoverability-Liveability Optimality range is an even smaller range within the Liveablity Optimality range of the standard fine-tuning argument
  • Fine-tuning #1: the fine structure constant, governs the strength of the electro-magnetic force
  • If larger, wood-burning fire becomes impossible because fires won’t stay lit, and therefore forging metals becomes unlikely
  • If smaller, wood-burning fires won’t go out, e.g. – from lightning strikes, so that wood would be less accessible
  • Other constraints: smaller value decreases effectiveness of light microscopes, drastically lowers efficiency of transformers and motors
  • Fine-tuning #2: the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR), radiation left over from the Big Bang
  • humans need to discover the CMBR in order to confirm the Big Bang creation out of nothing, and it depends on baryon/pothon ratio
  • his calculations show that the actual value of CMBR is exactly at the peak for detectability by humans
  • if baryon/photon ratio larger, CMBR is less discoverable
  • if baryon/photon ratio smaller, CMBR is less discoverable
  • Fine-tuning #3: parameters related to subatomic particles are fine-tuned for their discovery and usefulness, e.g. – the bottom quark, the charm quark, the tau lepton and the Higgs Boson
  • the lifetime of the particles affects their usefulness to scientists who want to investigate the Standard Model of physics
  • decay rates of these subatomic particles are related to several of the finely-tuned parameters
  • for example, the mass of the bottom quark is finely-tuned for its discoverability by scientists
  • the tau lepton and the charm quark are similarly fine-tuned for disoverability
  • the mass of the Higgs boson is finely-tuned for discoverability and for making further discoveries
  • Conclusion: the DLO thesis is strongly confirmed – this is an even greater degree of fine-tuning that the already astonishing probabilities of the fine-tuning for complex, embodied intelligent beings
  • The formalized version of the philosophical argument based on this evidence is impervious with some of the traditional objections to the standard fine-tuning argument
  • #1 multiverse/selection effect: it is not subject to multiverse / observer selection objections
  • #2 normalizeability: it is not subject to the McGrew-Vestrup objection because the range of possible values is finite not infinite
  • #3 falsifiability: it makes falsifiable predictions, and in fact Collins’ earlier calculations of the CMBR discoverability contained an error that falsified the thesis – until he found the error and corrected for it
  • #4 usefulness: it gives clues about the Creator’s purpose for us, namely that the universe was created for us to be able to do science and find evidence of the Creator’s existence – there is no expectation for us to exercise blind faith, trust in God is meant to be a plausible deduction from the progress of experimental science

Sample slide:

Fine-tuning of the bottom quark for discoverability
Bottom quark lifetime is finely-tuned for discoverability

And another:

Higgs boson mass is finely-tuned for discoverability
Higgs boson mass is finely-tuned for discoverability

Earlier, I blogged about a Robin Collins lecture on the fine-tuning that allows complex, embodied life to exist. Another must-see lecture. If you are looking for something to study in university, and you have funding, then physics, mathematics and philosophy are the best places to be for a Christian scholar.

Commentary

What caused “a rising tide of personality disorders among millenials”?

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Rioters smash windows at a T-Mobile store during a protest against campus speaker
Rioters smash windows at a T-Mobile store during a protest against campus speaker

That quote about millenials in the title of this post comes from the American Counseling Association.

PJ Media reports: (H/T Curby)

If you were to come across someone who cried in the streets, who saw the world in terms of black and white and made death threats against strangers, who cowered in a special room and made public displays of naked self-harm and blood letting, you might conclude that they were suffering from a personality disorder.

All these symptoms can be found in the High Conflict Personality Disorder category known as Axis II in DSMV, including Anti-Social PD, Histrionic PD, Paranoid PD, Narcissistic PD, and Borderline PD.

[…]In 2014, a survey of 100,000 college students at 53 U.S. campuses by the American College Health Association found that 84% of U.S. students feel unable to cope, while more than half experience overwhelming anxiety.

The problems begin with how the children are raised. As the size and scope of government grew, taxes had to be raised to pay for the “social safety net”. When taxes go up, women can no longer afford to stay home with their young children during the first five years, which are critical to child development. Instead, the moms go out to work to pay for the new social welfare programs. And their children end up in day cares.

Look:

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has found:

Children in full-time day care were close to three times more likely to show behavior problems than those cared for by their mothers at home.

[…]The more time in child care of any kind or quality, the more aggressive the child.

The result is young people who, a decade and a half after daycare, scream at the parent/State for not protecting them sufficiently. It is no coincidence that “safe spaces” resemble daycare centers.

Day cares cause children to have increased anxiety and aggression. It used to be that this would be mitigated as the child grew up and encountered real life. Their narcissism would die because they would have to accept that they were not the center of the universe. They learned that hard work was not fun, and that they had to do things that they didn’t feel like doing in order to survive. But today, things are different – something else is happening to children in public schools and university classrooms.

More:

Faced with histrionic students, university staff end up behaving like “Helicopter Parents”: those largely absent, full-time working parents who overcompensated by flying in to fuss over their child. Attempting to assuage parental guilt, one of the tools they used was “positive parenting” — a philosophy created by social Progressives.

Parents were taught to not scold or punish, and instead to use “positive reinforcement” in an attempt to raise their children with “high self-esteem.” This ideology also became fashionable within an increasingly progressive school system that awarded children prizes for “non-competitive sports” and for merely taking part in school activities.

As they passed from day care to through high school, these children with artificially enforced high self-esteem were also told that they were morally superior to generations that came before. They were inducted into politically correct language and were even taught to lecture their own parents on racism, equality, and ecology. From the ages of six to eighteen, they took part in yearly multiculturalist “save the planet” projects. They were told they had a heroic destiny as “agents of change.”

A false picture of the world and a vastly inflated sense of self-importance did not compensate for the foundational trauma of parental neglect. Instead, as Dr. Jean Twenge has explained, Positive Parenting created young people with a “narcissistic wound” for whom the real world would be perceived as a threat to self-worth.

And this explains why college students today resort to violence when presented with ideas that they disagree with – even if the people are vastly more intelligent and experienced than they are themselves. They don’t care about free speech, because they already know everything. They claim to care about diversity, but they shout down or assault anyone who disagrees with them.

And that’s not the only contradiction:

SJW protests are awash with contradictions. SJWs claim to fight for freedom, but are opposed to freedom of speech, support banning videos and books, and support the violent disruption of public talks, as was seen with the riots at UC Berkeley, Middlebury College, and elsewhere.

SJWs believe in a world with “no boundaries” where “everyone is equal” — free immigration, open access to healthcare and education, etc. — but at the same time are obsessed with creating segregated spaces.

While they protest against the “fascist patriarchal state” they are, at the same time, fundamentally Statist, demanding that the government police language for them and punish their enemies. While SJWs claim to fight for human rights, they parade the symbol of the largest genocides in history — the Communist flag. They are pro-feminist, and at the same time defend Sharia law.

It’s a mess. People like to joke about the zombie apocalypse, but it’s a joke because there is no such thing as a zombie. Except that when I see what the secular left has produced on college campuses, it really does make me think of zombies. Do you think that people with no marketable skills could resist the urge to steal and kill when they find themselves in debt and unable to earn a living with their degree in Marxist-Feminist Studies? Where would a psychotic millennial draw the line? They don’t understand how successful mature people became successful – they only understand that their own failure is not their fault. It’s all the fault of white males, the patriarchy, straights, capitalists, etc. Where does a deluded secular leftist draw the line on violence? Can you expect moral behavior from someone who doesn’t believe in God, and doesn’t believe in personal responsibility?

I think we are going to see a lot more violence from these young leftist psychopaths – especially from the ones being raised without a married mother and father. I think we’re going to see something to rival the most horrifying of zombie apocalypse movies. There isn’t any foundation of empathy or morality inside them – it was never put into them by their own families or the godless schools.