News

Brainwashed by secular left radicals, college students reject freedom of speech

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No media allowed, because it's a "safe space"
No media allowed, because it’s a “safe space”

I can’t link to every article I’ve read about this topic in the last few days, but I thought that I’d better put up something about what is happening on university campuses, now that Judeo-Christian values have been driven out.

Moderate conservative David French posts this message from the University of Missouri in National Review:

The secular left's fascism on university campuses
The secular left’s fascism on university campuses

So, if you feel offended by someone else’s free speech, the laws of the United States do not allow you to punish them. But university campuses are their own little fascist societies, run by secular leftist tyrants. They have ways of getting around the laws of the United States, even as they grow fat from taxpayer subsidies. It’s just disgusting. This is why we need to either scale back non-STEM departments in universities. Indoctrination programs will stop when we remove all the subsidies they get. When students have to pay for an education that is actually useful, then these left-wing re-education camps will disappear.

What do students learn in these left-wing seminaries? How to earn a living by creating value for others? Oh no – they hate capitalism. They learn that the first amendment (free speech) is morally evil.

Here’s Breitbart News reporting on one of the little brainwashed fascists:

[University of Missouri Students Association Vice President Brenda Smith-Lezana] was asked, we have tensions simmering at Yale University, protests erupted at that university because an email was sent to students urging them not to wear racially offensive Halloween costumes, and one professor complained that universities are becoming places of ‘censure and prohibition.’ What’s your feeling? Do you believe that that’s a place that we’re heading for [on] American campuses now, a place of censure and prohibition?”

She responded, “I personally am tired of hearing that First Amendment rights protect students when they are creating a hostile and unsafe learning environment for myself and for other students here. I think that it’s important for us to create that distinction and create a space where we can all learn from one another, and start to create a place of healing rather than a place where we are experiencing a lot of hate, like we have in the past.”

Would you hire someone like that? I would not. But this is the kind of person the secular left produces. I cannot imagine that anyone in the private sector would want to hire someone like this who cannot bear to hear opinions that disagree with her own, and actually wants those who make her feel bad to be silenced, coerced and punished.

Who teaches these little secular left drones?

The US Herald reports:

Sounding more like a 1970’s version of teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, then an assistant professor of communications, Melissa Click was caught on video harassing a young student journalist who was attempting to report on the ongoing protests taking place at the University of Missouri.

Student Journalist Tim Tai, who was actually on assignment and freelancing for ESPN to cover the racially charged protests on Monday, was suddenly confronted by the agitated Assistant Professor Melissa Click blocking him from filming the protesters.

Professor Click is heard yelling for protesting students to help her stop Tai from taking photos, as the protesters push Tai as he tries to explain how the First Amendment actually works in a free society.

And Professor Click responds with a mind bogging retort; “I know, that’s a really good one, I’m a communication faculty and I really get that argument, but you need to go,” she says.

Tai is seen and heard trying to talk his way through the recalcitrant crowd who shouted at him, chanted “hey, hey, ho, ho, journalists have got to go” and generally made it impossible for Tai to carry out his First Amendment-protected assignment from ESPN to photograph the tent city.

The confrontation seems to heat up further as another student reporter, Mark Schierbecker, tries talking to Click. She tells him to “get out,” hits his camera and yells: “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here?

Ah yes, an assistant professor of communications. A useless clown hiding from the demands of a private sector job in her “safe space” in academia. Unemployable as she is, she is still capable of forcing her mindless little captives to accept her own fascistic values. And at taxpayer’s expense. And if they don’t accept her secular leftist views, well, that’s what suspensions, expulsions and campus police are for.

The Wall Street Journal comments on the meaning of it all:

What was evident at the University of Missouri, and in last weekend’s confrontation over free speech at Yale, is that political dialogue on universities is disintegrating to the level of 1968, when many schools became places of physical and intellectual chaos.

Missing today, as then, is adult leadership. Too often university presidents, their boards of trustees and leading political figures default, and quickly, to the most reactionary progressives in modern student bodies. We want to be clear about this, because so many of these university leaders regard themselves as principled liberals. But their timidity is putting at risk the classical liberal values that are the essence of the idea of a university.

Many of our readers by now have seen the video of the Missouri communications professor calling for “muscle” to ban a student reporter from covering their protest. Or last weekend’s video of a Yale student shrieking at a dean to resign for defending free speech. Professors increasingly acquiesce to student demands for “trigger warnings” about course material that might offend them. Small student minorities ban commencement speakers or boo them into silence.

Today’s progressive activists, unlike their liberal antecedents, believe that ideas with which they disagree or which they deem morally repugnant don’t deserve to be heard. And so they shout them down or tell their speakers to “shut up” or “resign.” They believe that free-speech protection is a quaint obstacle to getting what they want, which is control.

Please remember to never vote for Democrats. They are the ones who inundate these leftist seminaries with taxpayer money. If secular leftist administrators, professors and students have to sink or swim on their own strength, they would be far less politicized. We have to starve the left-wing seminaries and force them to focus on preparing students to work, instead of indoctrinating them in hatred and intolerance.

News

Tenured professor faces persecution for writing about being raised by two lesbians

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Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign
Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign

Here’s the latest story of secular leftist coercion from Breitbart News.

Excerpt:

The charges against Lopez shifted almost constantly and to this day he has never been shown the formal complaint from the still-unidentified former student. His understanding of the charges against him have been from meetings with university administrators and taking notes.

Her first complaint centered around a conference called The Bonds that Matter that Lopez organized at the Reagan Library, a forty-minute drive from the UC-Northridge campus. The conference featured noted speakers on divorce, third party reproduction, and adoption.

She says she was coerced into attending, that she was never informed of what the subject matter of the conference would be, and that she was offended by some of what she heard that day. She said the conference should have come with a trigger warning that it might cause trauma to gays and lesbians. She also said she broke down “in tears, crying.”

She says speakers explained that “all women who use sperm banks are evil” and that “gay people cannot be good parents.” She also complained about a brochure produced by the Ruth Institute she picked up at the conference aimed at the “victims of the sexual revolution” including those who tried the gay life and now want out.

Once the complaint was made, Lopez stepped beyond the Looking Glass and into the world of university investigations. For the next 378 days Lopez and his paid lawyers spent countless hours trying to keep up with the charges and investigations by multiple university administrates and their lawyers.

[…]He was formally charged with “discrimination,” one of the few charges that can result in revocation of tenure and dismissal.

[…]It should be noted that the speakers at the conference, while controversial, are not considered wild-eyed radicals. Jennifer Lahl speaks on the dangers to women of selling their eggs or renting their wombs. She’s from Berkley and is a frequent guest on liberal campuses. In fact, Lahl specializes in speaking to the left. Alana Newman spoke, a folk singer, who was born from surrogacy and is now an advocate against it. Perhaps the most controversial speaker was Jennifer Roback Morse who runs the Ruth Institute and who focuses broadly on what she calls the “victims of the sexual revolution.”

None of the speakers talked about gay issues and Lopez provided the tapes to prove it. There was one exchange between Newman and one student who asked about gays and surrogacy, but the student turned out to be the complainant. So, the only person who brought up the gay issue at the conference was the student who complained the conference slammed gays.

Lopez provided documents that also showed the students were not coerced. In fact, they didn’t even have to attend the conference. It was one of two options in the course. Most of the class chose the conference option.

The article alleges that the student was a plant by powerful LGBT groups who want to silence Lopez.

Marquette University

This reminds me of the other professor McAdams from Marquette who got into trouble for writing about how a student argued with his professor that he should be allowed to disagree with her about gay marriage. The left-leaning The Atlantic has the story, and surprisingly sides with professor McAdams.

Here are the details:

The incident that McAdams blogged about happened on October 28, 2014. Cheryl Abbate, a graduate student in philosophy who was leading a class called Theory of Ethics, was teaching undergraduates about John Rawls. She asked for examples of current events to which Rawlsian philosophy could be applied.

“One student offered the example of gay marriage as something that Rawls’ Equal Liberty Principle would allow because it would not restrict the liberty of others and therefore should not be illegal,” according to Holtz’s version of events. “Ms. Abbate noted that this was a correct way to apply Rawls’ Principle and is said to have asked ‘does anyone not agree with this?’ Ms. Abbate later added that if anyone did not agree that gay marriage was an example of something that fits the Rawls’ Equal Liberty Principle, they should see her after class.”

Sure enough, a student approached her after class, and in what was arguably an ethical breach, surreptitiously recorded their exchange.

[…]At this point, both the undergraduate and the grad student instructor spoke to various “superiors” about the incident. And the undergrad talked to McAdams, who decided to blog about it. He has been stripped of tenure for that blog post.

Marquette is a “Catholic” university, except it obviously is not.

Vanderbilt University

Meanwhile, here is yet another recent example of a professor getting into trouble for going against the secular left. National Review has that story, written by the famous civil rights expert Peter Kirsanow.

He writes:

The illiberal idiocy currently on display at the University of Missouri and Yale has now manifested itself at Vanderbilt, where an online student petition demanding the suspension of Professor of Law and Political Science Carol Swain for being “hateful” toward minorities has gotten more than 1,000 signatures. The fact that Professor Swain is black is no insulation from these charges.

Swain’s apostasy is that she has made politically incorrect statements about radical Islam and her traditional Christian beliefs, statements that the petitioners deem intolerant and which the University, therefore, must  not tolerate — tolerance, of course, being a one-way street.

That’s right. She’s a female, black professor. No one is safe from the secular left inquisition. They own the university, and if you want to go there, you have to get in, do your STEM degree, get out, and get to work. And vote to defund them completely when it’s election time.

The United States ought not have an official state church. But as Dennis Prager often says, universities and colleges are left-wing seminaries. They teach their secular left religious dogma, and God help you if you say one word to disagree with them. These are not people who handle disagreement and dissent well. These are not people who value free inquiry. These are not people who value truth.

Polemics

Luke Barnes reviews Victor Stenger’s critique of cosmic fine-tuning

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Apologetics and the progress of science
Apologetics and the progress of science

Victor Stenger is a famous “Internet Infidel” atheist, but what makes him different is that he is has a PhD in physics. He wrote a book published by the atheist publisher Prometheus Press where he explains why he thinks that the universe is not fine-tuned for embodied sentient life.

An Australian physicist named Luke Barnes decided to write a response to his book, and the response is summarized (without the math!) on Uncommon Descent. Barnes has a PhD in Astronomy from Cambridge. He did postdoctoral research in Switzerland at the Institute for Astonomy, and now he is doing more postdoctoral research at the University of Sydney . The response that he wrote does not talk about God, or explanations of why the fine-tuning happened. I have no idea where his convictions are on any of that, because his response just talks about the fine-tuning itself from a scientific point of view.

Here’s how Uncommon Descent explains Barnes’ response.

Summary:

Professor Victor Stenger is an American particle physicist and a noted atheist, who popularized the phrase, “Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings”. Professor Stenger is also the author of several books, including his recent best-seller, The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: How the Universe is Not Designed for Humanity (Prometheus Books, 2011). Stenger’s latest book has been received with great acclaim by atheists: “Stenger has demolished the fine-tuning proponents,” writes one enthusiastic Amazon reviewer, adding that the book tells us “how science is able to demonstrate the non-existence of god.”

Well, it seems that the great Stenger has finally met his match. Dr. Luke A. Barnes, a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Astronomy, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, has written a scathing critique of Stenger’s book. I’ve read refutations in my time, but I have to say, this one is devastating.

In his paper, Dr. Barnes takes care to avoid drawing any metaphysical conclusions from the fact of fine-tuning. He has no religious axe to grind. His main concern is simply to establish that the fine-tuning of the universe is real, contrary to the claims of Professor Stenger, who asserts that all of the alleged examples of fine-tuning in our universe can be explained without the need for a multiverse.

Dr. Barnes’ ARXIV paper, The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life (Version 1, December 21, 2011), is available online, and I shall be quoting from it below. Since the paper is quite technical at times, I’ve omitted mathematical equations and kept the references to physical parameters to a minimum, since I simply wish to give readers an overview of what Dr. Barnes perceives as the key flaws in Professor Stenger’s book.

First, the abstract:

The fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life has received a great deal of attention in recent years, both in the philosophical and scientific literature. The claim is that in the space of possible physical laws, parameters and initial conditions, the set that permits the evolution of intelligent life is very small. I present here a review of the scientific literature, outlining cases of fine-tuning in the classic works of Carter, Carr and Rees, and Barrow and Tipler, as well as more recent work. To sharpen the discussion, the role of the antagonist will be played by Victor Stenger’s recent book The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe is Not Designed for Us. Stenger claims that all known fine-tuning cases can be explained without the need for a multiverse. Many of Stenger’s claims will be found to be highly problematic. We will touch on such issues as the logical necessity of the laws of nature; objectivity, invariance and symmetry; theoretical physics and possible universes; entropy in cosmology; cosmic inflation and initial conditions; galaxy formation; the cosmological constant; stars and their formation; the properties of elementary particles and their effect on chemistry and the macroscopic world; the origin of mass; grand unified theories; and the dimensionality of space and time. I also provide an assessment of the multiverse, noting the significant challenges that it must face. I do not attempt to defend any conclusion based on the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. This paper can be viewed as a critique of Stenger’s book, or read independently.

Here’s a quote that I wanted to put out there from the paper about how widely accepted fine-tuning is among scientists:

There are a great many scientists, of varying religious persuasions, who accept that the universe is fine-tuned for life, e.g. Barrow, Carr, Carter, Davies, Dawkins, Deutsch, Ellis, Greene, Guth, Harrison, Hawking, Linde, Page, Penrose, Polkinghorne, Rees, Sandage, Smolin, Susskind, Tegmark, Tipler, Vilenkin, Weinberg, Wheeler, Wilczek. They differ, of course, on what conclusion we should draw from this fact. Stenger, on the other hand, claims that the universe is not fine-tuned.

That is a very diverse list. I know that Sandage, Ellis, Page, Tipler and Polkinghorne are theists. But I also know that Weinberg, Rees, Hawking, Greene, and Dawkins are atheists. So scientists all across the spectrum of worldview admit that the fine-tuning is real.

Now, let’s look at Barnes’ paper and see why Victor Stenger disagrees with the view of those scientists.

1) Stenger doesn’t show why the entropy at the beginning of the universe isn’t a case of fine-tuning:

Entropy

We turn now to cosmology. The problem of the apparently low entropy of the universe is one of the oldest problems of cosmology. The fact that the entropy of the universe is not at its theoretical maximum, coupled with the fact that entropy cannot decrease, means that the universe must have started in a very special, low entropy state. (p. 23)

Let’s return to Stenger’s proposed solution… Stenger takes it for granted that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic. We can see this also in his use of the Friedmann equation, which assumes that space-time is homogeneous and isotropic. Not surprisingly, once homogeneity and isotropy have been assumed, Stenger finds that the solution to the entropy problem is remarkably easy.

We conclude that Stenger has not only failed to solve the entropy problem; he has failed to comprehend it. He has presented the problem itself as its solution. Homogeneous, isotropic expansion cannot solve the entropy problem – it is the entropy problem. Stenger’s assertion that “the universe starts out with maximum entropy or complete disorder” is false. A homogeneous, isotropic spacetime is an incredibly low entropy state. Penrose (1989) warned of precisely this brand of failed solution two decades ago… (p. 26)

2) Stenger responds to calculations showing the need for fine-tuning by speculating that future calculations will overturn the ones we have now:

The Cosmological Constant, Lambda

The cosmological constant problem is described in the textbook of Burgess & Moore (2006) as “arguably the most severe theoretical problem in high-energy physics today, as measured by both the difference between observations and theoretical predictions, and by the lack of convincing theoretical ideas which address it”. A well-understood and well-tested theory of fundamental physics (Quantum Field Theory – QFT) predicts contributions to the vacuum energy of the universe that are [approx.] 10^120 times greater than the observed total value. Stenger’s reply is guided by the following principle:

Any calculation that disagrees with the data by 50 or 120 orders of magnitude is simply wrong and should not be taken seriously. We just have to await the correct calculation. [FOFT p. 219]

This seems indistinguishable from reasoning that the calculation must be wrong since otherwise the cosmological constant would have to be fine-tuned. One could not hope for a more perfect example of begging the question. More importantly, there is a misunderstanding in Stenger’s account of the cosmological constant problem. The problem is not that physicists have made an incorrect prediction. We can use the term dark energy for any form of energy that causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate, including a “bare” cosmological constant (see Barnes et al., 2005, for an introduction to dark energy). Cosmological observations constrain the total dark energy. QFT [quantum field theory – VJT] allows us to calculate a number of contributions to the total dark energy from matter fields in the universe. Each of these contributions turns out to be 10^120 times larger than the total. There is no direct theory-vs.-observation contradiction as one is calculating and measuring different things. The fine-tuning problem is that these different independent contributions, including perhaps some that we don’t know about, manage to cancel each other to such an alarming, life-permitting degree. This is not a straightforward case of Popperian falsification. (pp. 34-35)

3) Stenger doesn’t consider the full range of values when deciding if something is fine-tuned or not:

Protons, Neutrons, Electrons

We turn now to the relative masses of the three most important particles in our universe: the proton, neutron and electron, from which atoms are made. Consider first the ratio of the electron to the proton mass, … of which Stenger says: “…we can argue that the electron mass is going to be much smaller than the proton mass in any universe even remotely like ours.” [FOFT p. 164] (p. 50)

The fact that Stenger is comparing the electron mass in our universe with the electron mass in universes “like ours” is all the evidence one needs to conclude that Stenger doesn’t understand fine-tuning. The fact that universes like ours turn out to be rather similar to our universe isn’t particularly enlightening. (p. 50)

Finally, and most importantly, note carefully Stenger’s conclusion. He states that no fine-tuning is needed for the neutron-proton mass difference in our universe to be approximately equal to the up quark-down quark mass difference in our universe. Stenger has compared our universe with our universe and found no evidence of fine-tuning. There is no discussion of the life-permitting range, no discussion of the possible range of [mass(neutron) – mass(proton)] (or its relation to the possible range of [mass(down quark) – mass(up quark)], and thus no relevance to fine-tuning whatsoever. (p. 51)

Those are just a few of the examples in the paper, highlighted in the Uncommon Descent article (emphasis theirs).

Barnes’ paper has now been published in a peer-reviewed journal. The journal is published by Cambridge University.