A common thing that I see is people trying to wall off arguments they don’t like by stating a slogan, like “you shouldn’t push your moral rules on other people” or “that’s true for you, but not for me”. Those slogans are meant to get the person out of having to be reasonable about respecting moral obligations, or having to consider how the world really works when choosing what to do.
A self-defeating (or self-refuting) statement is one that fails to meet its own standard. In other words, it is a statement that cannot live up to its own criteria. Imagine if I were to say,
I cannot speak a word in English.
You intuitively see a problem here. I told you in English that I cannot speak a word in English. This statement is self-refuting. It does not meet its own standard or criteria. It self-destructs.
The important thing to remember with self-defeating statements is that they are necessarily false. In other words, there is no possible way for them to be true. This is because they violate a very fundamental law of logic, the law of non-contradiction. This law states that A and non-A cannot both be true at the same time and in the same sense. For example, it is not possible for God to exist and not exist at the same time and in the same sense. This would violate the law of non-contradiction. So if I were to say, “God told me He doesn’t exist” you would see intuitively the obvious self-refuting nature of this statement.
Aaron goes on to explain how to deal with self-refuting statements in the article.
Have you ever heard any of those? It’s amazing how often I hear statements like that when discussing interesting things like moral issues and politics with young people. The trick to being prepared to answer these is to learn lots of them. Then you recognize them when you hear them.
I’ve been following a situation at the University of Chicago, where a Christian scholar was researching scientific arguments for when life begins by surveying biologists across the nation. In this post, I want to focus on how biologists responded to being asked scientific questions about when life begins, and also how the University of Chicago tried to stop the scholar’s research and block his PhD.
Steven Jacobs has described some of his time in the academy as “agony.”
The University of Chicago PhD spent the last half-decade in a grueling fight to gather and publish research related to the American abortion debate. During that time he was ridiculed, mocked and defamed; accused of committing academic dishonesty, politicizing science and conducting his work with personal bias; compared to the Ku Klux Klan; and in general painted as an unprofessional radical who was, in one academic’s words, “not deserving of a PhD degree.”
All of this came about simply because Jacobs asked thousands of scientists several questions about when they believe human life begins – questions one respondent referred to as a “trap” and another called “horribly manipulative.”
The results of Jacobs’ work would eventually reveal a stunning fact about American academia in the field of biology: professors overwhelmingly agree with the pro-life position that human lives begin at conception. Gathering that data, arguing it, and getting it published, however, was a crushing and drawn-out affair.
The overwhelming consensus among these biologists (over 80%) was that life begins at fertilization, exactly as pro-life advocates say. But the vast majority of these biologists were pro-abortion, because they didn’t think that murder was morally wrong.
It really was an ordeal, because Jacobs is a white, Christian male. So he had everything against him in the university. You can tell from some of the responses he got how hostile most academic biologists are to Christianity and especially to the pro-life position.
The College Fix has some of the interesting details on the censorship from people at his own university:
At one point, Jacobs said, an academic specifically instructed him not to speak with The Fix, citing several articles it has published about the abortion debate on college campuses. The professor was concerned that any reporting done by The Fix on Jacobs’ work “could be used by pro-life advocates.”
[…]Jacobs’ advisor told him to halt his data-gathering, though eventually that advisor would defend Jacobs before the school’s ethics committee, after which the research was allowed to continue.
[…]However, after beginning the survey again, this time in September 2016, “my study was once again canceled within a week.” Jacobs’ advisor was beleaguered with accusations that he himself “had no integrity for even approving [the] research.”
[…][W]hen he approached his advisor to restart the study, he was shocked to find that the supervisor had changed his mind about the undertaking.
[…]That advisor would eventually step down from supervising Jacobs’ work.
[…]“I was told that my survey seemed like it was developed by the Ku Klux Klan; I was told that my work could expedite the extinction of the human race; I was told that I should be ashamed of myself since I was damaging the reputation of the University of Chicago,” Jacobs said.
[…]Eventually, after numerous rejections, Jacobs found a professor willing to serve as a principal investigator over his research. He continued to face relentless pushback from his academic community. At one point there was concern that the ethics committee “would not only stop my data collection, once and for all, but that they could invalidate all of the data I had collected,” rendering it useless for study.
Over the next year, while preparing his thesis, Jacobs continued to receive criticism from his former advisor, who claimed that the premise of the research was a “red herring.”
“In the days leading up to my defense, he made me remove any mention of that study from my dissertation’s abstract, accused me of sounding like a pro-life pundit, and said that he didn’t want to have his name on a document that could be cited by pro-life people,” Jacobs said.
At Jacobs’ dissertation defense, that advisor pushed back against Jacobs’ thesis, stating that he was “worried that pro-life people would use my work” and that “it would be a poor representation of the University of Chicago, if that were to happen.”
The comments from some of the respondents were interesting, revealing that many people in academia are filled with hate and rage against people they disagree with:
One respondent to Jacobs’ survey “accused me of nefarious intentions and threatened to sabotage my work by telling other biologists to not participate in my study,” the scholar said. That professor “ultimately reported me to my school’s ethics committee.”
[…] “Abortion has been legal for over 40 years. It’s time for all the religious nuts to get over it,” said another.
It’s certain that he won’t be able to find work in secular academia, because they are very intolerant of a diversity of ideas.
“I have gotten the sense that this has been talked about a lot,” he said. “I’ve been regularly told I can’t get a job in academia. I’ve been told don’t try. I’ve been told maybe a Christian school would hire me. “
Everyone who works in the secular academy has to agree with the Democrat party, otherwise, they are ejected from academia.
Google’s new motto – we really need to start calling them “Goolag”
It’s troubling to me when large corporations ally with one political party or another. The videos of Google executives mourning Hillary’s loss, Google’s firing of non-Democrat engineers, and documented bias in Google’s products clearly indicate that Google favors the Democrat party. So, it’s about time for the government to step in and stop the corporate fascism.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. Justice Department is preparing to begin an antitrust investigation into Google that could see the tech giant come under a new wave of scrutiny from regulators. According to people familiar with the matter, the antitrust division of the Justice Department has been gathering information and preparing for the investigation for weeks.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which shares antitrust authority with the Justice Department, has previously conducted antitrust investigations into Google on a broader scale but closed the investigation in 2013 with no action taken.
[…]The FTC and Justice Department have been discussing which group will oversee further antitrust investigations of Google, with the FTC agreeing to give the Justice Department full jurisdiction over Google. Now that an understanding has been reached between the two government bodies, the Justice Department is preparing to conduct an in-depth investigation into Google.
[…]Those familiar with the matter stated that the Justice Department has been in contact with third-party groups that have been critical of Google in the past.
Breitbart News had also reported on how Google used their products to influence elections:
New research from psychologist and search engine expert Dr. Robert Epstein shows that biased Google searches had a measurable impact on the 2018 midterm elections, pushing tens of thousands of votes towards the Democrat candidates in three key congressional races, and potentially millions more in races across the country.
The study, from Epstein and a team at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), analyzed Google searches related to three highly competitive congressional races in Southern California. In all three races, the Democrat won — and Epstein’s research suggests that Google search bias may have tipped them over the edge.
The research follows a previous study conducted in 2016 which showed that biased Google results pushed votes to Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. Democrats and Google executives have disputed these findings.
[…]Users performing Google searches related to the three congressional races the study focused on were significantly more likely to see pro-Democrat stories and links at the top of their results.
That’s now the only study that’s been done on Google’s pro-Democrat bias.
Google’s bias towards left-wing media outlets has been laid bare by an algorithm which detected that it favors sites including CNN and The New York Times over others.
According to data compiled by researchers from Northwestern University, the search engine promoted those sites over others repeatedly in November 2017.
Of the 6,302 articles that appeared in Google’s ‘top stories’ page that month after a term was searched, more than 10 percent were by CNN.
The New York Times was the second most favored and accounted for 6.5 percent of articles. The Washington Post was third with 5.6 percent.
By contrast, Fox News, the most right-wing outlet in mainstream media, was the source of just three percent of the stories which appeared.
See for yourself:
Study: Google uses its products and services to supports Democrat Party
Just this week, another story came out about Google discriminating against employees who do not support the Democrat Party.
A Republican Google software engineer has written an open letter describing a culture of left-wing “outrage mobs” that make use of the company’s anonymous bias reporting channels to shut down dissent.
The open letter, published Tuesday morning on Medium, was written by software engineer Mike Wacker, who was reported himself multiple times via the company’s anonymous reporting tools.
“If left unchecked,” Wacker wrote, “these outrage mobs will hunt down any conservative, any Christian, and any independent free thinker at Google who does not bow down to their agenda.”
In one case, Wacker describes a fellow Republican employee who was reported for saying nice things about the University of Toronto academic Jordan Peterson. He was given a note in writing that said, “One Googler raised a concern that you that you appeared to be promoting and defending Jordan Peterson’s comments about transgender pronouns, and this made them feel unsafe at work.”
Wacker himself was twice reported via the company’s anonymous reporting channels.
The full article by Wacker is here on Medium. Keep in mind that we have so many stories like this coming out of Google. The James D’Amore story was big, but it’s not the only one.
Google executives caught on film
Here are some highlights of that sting video that I mentioned featuring Google executives crying about the Democrat election loss:
Alone, the video would be damning, but it just the latest in a sequence of news stories showing Google’s anti-American bias.
Previously on this blog, I’ve covered the following stories of Google bias:
I personally have seen Google search engine traffic for this blog go down literally 90% since Trump’s election. My search engine referrals from DuckDuckGo are higher than what I get from Google. I believe that’s when they decided to get serious about helping their allies in the Democrat party. What I’d like to see is the company broken up into small-cap units, and the executives investigated for possible criminal activities, e.g. – collusion with the Democrat Party and unlawful termination of non-Democrat employees. They used American liberty and the free market to make their fortunes, but they’re anti-American.
WINTERY KNIGHT 