Quantum Physics Is ‘Oppressive’ to Marginalized People

How many soft willed young academics get into debt that they can never recover from on their own by majoring in gender studies.... then, the job market after graduation (???) is completely closed. The researcher, Whitney Stark, is fully involved in manufactured subjects to maintain her position as a serious researcher in a flimsy field... Katherine Timpf handles this beautifully. BH

Note.... the writer of this piece is Katherine Timpf and she is exposing the words of Whitney Stark, the gender studies researcher. Read the last paragraph.BH

Note 2... From Mike Walker

Ah, where to begin? Let me make just three points, 

(1) Galilean-Newtonian physics is essential for anyone hoping to become an engineer, scientist, medical doctor, veterinarian, architect or to enter into any other science-based career. 

The author should be cheerleading for girls and young women to enter those fields - not disparaging the heart and soul of the physical sciences.

(2) Almost everything we see around us is either explained by or - more importantly - created through the application of Galilean-Newtonian physics. 

Yes, there are apparent phenomenon and very important fields of study where quantum physics offers the only explanation and the application of quantum mechanics is demanded but in no way does that undermined the need for Galilean-Newtonian physics.

(3) Not to shock the under-informed but quantum physics clarifies, complements and completes Galilean-Newtonian physics. 

It explained troubling problems that plagued science for centuries and brought new harmony to - yes - the old physics (think Galilean relativity v. Einsteinian relativity).

In other words, you need to start with Galilean-Newtonian physics to get to quantum physics and you end in a world where Galilean-Newtonian physics is as relatively relevant (pun intended) as it ever was.

As the warden said in Cool Hand Luke, what we have here is a failure to communicate and using a tortured combination of inane social science doublespeak and stale Marxist jargon is no way to address the issue.

Academic Journal: Quantum Physics Is ‘Oppressive’ to Marginalized People

by Katherine Timpf, National Review

Culture and gender-studies researcher Whitney Stark argues that physics is oppressive.

A feminist scholar has published a paper claiming that quantum physics is oppressive and that we must use “quantum feminisms” to make the science more intersectional.

In a paper for The Minnesota Review, culture and gender-studies researcher Whitney Stark argues that physics is oppressive because it has “separated beings” based on their “binary and absolute differences” — a structure that she calls “hierarchical and exploitative” — and the same kind of system is “embedded in many structures of classification,” making it “part of the apparatus that enables oppression.” Stark explains:

This structural thinking of individualized separatism with binary and absolute differences as the basis for how the universe works seeped into/poured over/ is embedded in many structures of classification, which understand similarity and difference in the world, imposed in many hierarchical and exploitative organizational structures, whether through gender, life/nonlife, national borders, and so on.

According to Stark, the tendency to categorize in this way particularly hurts marginalized people because it can cause the activist efforts of minority groups to be “overshadowed” by the efforts of dominant groups.

“For instance, in many ‘official’ feminist histories of the United States, black/African American women’s organizing and writing are completely unaccounted for before the 1973 creation of the middle-class, professional National Black Feminist Organization,” Stark writes.

“Part of this absence is the frequent subsuming of intersectional identities under supposedly encompassing meta-identities more readily recognized by/as hegemonicized groupings,” she continues. “For instance, black women subsumed under ‘black,’ equated with male, or ‘feminist’ equated with white women.”

Thankfully, Stark has a solution to this very clearly serious problem: “quantum feminisms” and “intersectionality.”

“By taking a critical look at the noncentralized and multiple movements of quantum physics, and by dehierarchizing the necessity of linear bodies through time, it becomes possible to reconfigure structures of value, longevity, and subjectivity in ways explicitly aligned with anti-oppression practices and identity politics,” she writes. “Combining intersectionality and quantum physics can provide for differing perspectives on organizing practices long used by marginalized people, for enabling apparatuses that allow for new possibilities of safer spaces.”

Honestly, all of this makes perfect sense. Personally, whenever I think about oppression, the very first thing that comes to my mind is: “Damn it Isaac Newton! This is all your fault!” I’m just glad someone is finally writing about it. Maybe someday we can take it a step further, and replace all lessons on the outdated, sexist, racist concept of “quantum physics” in our schools with lessons on quantum feminisms. Ah, yes. Then, and only then, will our nation be truly great.

This story was initially covered by the College Fix.

– Katherine Timpf is a reporter for National Review Online.

California Campus Free Speech Act

Remember when "Free speech" and segregation were huge issues on campus, both issues have been reversed of late. Free speech is only available to a select few and racial segregation is being embraced by the the grandkids of those who fought for inclusion and diversity.

Melissa Melendez’s California Campus Free Speech Act
Stanley Kurtz, National review 

California Assemblywoman Melissa A. Melendez (R-Lake Elsinore) has just introduced the California Campus Free Speech Act. Melendez’s bill is based on the model campus free speech legislation I co-authored with Jim Manley and Jonathan Butcher of Arizona’s Goldwater Institute.

Upon introducing her legislation, Melendez released a statement that said: “Liberty cannot live without the freedom to speak and nowhere is that more important than on college campuses where we educate the leaders of tomorrow. The institutional silencing of individuals because of differing political ideology threatens the very foundation upon which our country was built.”

Although the California Campus Free Speech Act is closely based on the Goldwater proposal, it has a couple of strikingly distinctive features. While the Goldwater proposal and the bills based on it to date apply only to public universities, the California Campus Free Speech Act applies to both public and private colleges. That means this new legislation would apply not only to the University of California at Berkeley, where the Yiannopoulos and Coulter fiascos played out, but also to Claremont McKenna College, where Heather MacDonald’s talk was cut short.

The California Campus Free Speech Act accomplishes this by conditioning some (but not all) state aid to private colleges and universities on compliance with the Act (and by including an exemption for private religious colleges). In this, the legislation is clearly inspired by California’s Leonard Law, the only law in the country that extends First Amendment protections to private as well as public high schools and colleges.

The California Campus Free Speech Act is also framed as an amendment to California’s state constitution, which means that it can pass only with a two-thirds majority vote, and would then have to be ratified or rejected by a majority of state voters. A two-thirds majority requirement for a campus free speech bill is a high bar in a legislature dominated by Democrats. That said, I don’t think it will be easy for legislators of any party to openly oppose this bill.

There is also another route this proposed amendment could take. It’s relatively easy to place amendments to the California state constitution on the ballot. In lieu of a two-thirds majority in the legislature, signatures from the equivalent of 8% of the votes cast for all candidates in the last gubernatorial race suffice to place an amendment on the ballot. At that point, it requires only a simple majority vote for the measure to become part of California’s state constitution.

I wonder if some enterprising folks in California might decide to organize and finance an initiative campaign to place Melissa Melendez’s campus free-speech measure on the 2018 ballot. Once it got there, I believe it would have a very real prospect of passage. After the embarrassments of the last academic year, 50% plus one of California’s voters would likely act to restore freedom of speech to their state’s college campuses.

Momentum for state-level campus free speech bills based on the Goldwater model is clearly building. Late last week, Goldwater-inspired bills were introduced in Michigan and Wisconsin. With California now in the mix, the debate over the Goldwater proposal is becoming truly national. I much look forward to the battle over Melissa Melendez’s California Campus Free Speech Act. California has been ground zero for the campus free-speech crisis. Maybe now California can contribute to the solution.

Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He can be reached at comments.kurtz@nationalreview.com

Potemkin Universities

Potemkin Universities

 by Victor Davis Hanson, National Review

Behind the facades, universities have broken faith with a once-noble legacy of free inquiry. 

College campuses still appear superficially to be quiet, well-landscaped refuges from the bustle of real life.

But increasingly, their spires, quads, and ivy-covered walls are facades. They are now no more about free inquiry and unfettered learning than were the proverbial Potemkin fake buildings put up to convince the traveling Russian czarina Catherine II that her impoverished provinces were prosperous.

The university faces crises almost everywhere of student debt, university finances, free expression, and the very quality and value of a university education.

Take free speech. Without freedom of expression, there can be no university.

But if the recent examples at Berkeley, Claremont, Middlebury, and Yale are any indication, there is nothing much left to the idea of a free and civilized exchange of different ideas. At most universities, if a scheduled campus lecturer expressed scholarly doubt about the severity of man-caused global warming and the efficacy of its government remedies, or questioned the strategies of the Black Lives Matter movement, or suggested that sex is biologically determined rather than socially constructed, she likely would either be disinvited or have her speech physically disrupted. Campuses often now mimic the political street violence of the late Roman Republic.

Campus radicals have achieved what nuclear strategists call deterrence: Faculty and students now know precisely which speech will endanger their careers and which will earn them rewards.

The terrified campus community makes the necessary adjustments. As with the German universities of the 1930s, faculty keep quiet or offer politically correct speech through euphemisms. Toadies thrive; mavericks are hounded.

Shortchanged students collectively owe more than $1 trillion in student-loan debt — a sum that cannot be paid back by ill-prepared and often unemployed graduates.

Test scores have plummeted. Too many college students were never taught the basic referents of liberal education. Most supposedly aware, hip, and politically engaged students can’t identify the Battle of Gettysburg or the Parthenon, or explain the idea of compounded interest.

Many students simply cannot do the work that was routinely assigned in the past. In response, as proverbially delicate “snowflakes,” they insist that they are traumatized and can only find remedy in laxer standards, gut courses, and faculty deference.

“Studies” activist courses too often are therapeutic. They are neither inductive nor Socratic, and they rarely teach facts, methods and means of learning without insisting on predesignated conclusions. Instead, the student should leave the class with proper group-think and ideological race/class/gender fervor of the professor — a supposed new recruit for the larger progressive project.

Universities talk loudly of exploitation in America — in the abstract. But to address societal inequality, university communities need only look at how their own campuses operate. Part-time faculty with Ph.D.s are paid far less than tenured full professors for often teaching the same classes — and thus subsidize top-heavy administrations.

Graduate teaching assistantships, internships, and mentorships are designed to use inexpensive or free labor under the protocols of the medieval guild.

One reason that tuition is sky-high is because behind the facade of “trigger warnings,” “safe spaces,” and “culture appropriation” are costly legions of deputy associate provosts, special assistants to the dean, and race/class/gender “senior strategists” and facilitators (usually former faculty who no longer teach).

Few admit that a vastly expanding and politically correct administrative industry reflects a massive shift of resources away from physics, humanities, or biology — precisely the courses that non-traditional students need to become competitive.

One of the great mysteries of American life is nontransparent university admissions. No one knows quite how alumni legacies, deference to college athletics, or poorly defined affirmative action and haphazard diversity criteria actually operate. 

At the California State University system — the nation’s largest — nearly 40 percent of incoming students need remediation in math and English after failing basic competency tests. Universities are now scrambling to offer university credit for what are in truth remedial high-school courses, apparently to prevent eager (but entirely unprepared) students from hurt feelings when they butt up against the reality of college classes.

Careerist university administrators more often make the university change to accommodate the student rather than asking the incoming student to prepare to accommodate the time-honored university.

The results are watered-down classes, grade inflation, and student frustration and anger upon learning that entering college is not quite the same as graduating from college.

The way to ensure student confidence and self-reliance is not through identity-politics courses that emphasize racial, sexual, and religious fault lines. Instead, only classes ensuring that students are well trained in writing, speaking, computing, and inductive thinking will give assuredness of achievement — and, with it, self-confidence.

Apart from the sciences and the professional schools, campuses are a bubble of unearned self-congratulation — clueless that they have broken faith with a once-noble legacy of free inquiry and have lost the respect of most Americans.

The now-melodramatic university has become a classical tragedy.