Tim Hunt and the Unprincipled Left
Source: theden.tv
Freedom of speech was a rallying cry on American campuses during the leftist takeover of higher education. Students were encouraged to question authority, to rethink taboos, and to poke fun at the sacred cows of society at large. Nowadays, however, after the leftist takeover has been accomplished, it's a totally different story. Campus speech codes proliferate, strictly managing what can or can not be said. Students clamor for “trigger warnings” to protect their sensibilities. Scholars with dissenting views have their invitations to speak rescinded or are shouted down when they arrive. In retrospect, the advocation of freedom of speech was not the principled stand it was billed as. It was only a tool for fighting the culture war.
The same can be said about freedom of inquiry. People on the Left make a lot of noise about how much they “fucking love” science. And they cheer on personalities like Bill Nye, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Richard Dawkins as they “shatter the illusions” of conservatives, of Christians, and the like. The Left loves these personalities because they at least give off the appearance of using cold hard facts, logical reasoning, and empiricism to poke holes in the worldviews of people that the Left dislikes. Nye et. al. are not afraid to question cherished beliefs under the auspices of free scientific inquiry.
But once again, high minded liberals and progressives trip all over themselves to disavow any principle of freedom of inquiry as soon as it becomes ideologically inconvenient. Scientists should be free to mock creationists for denying that humans evolved. But scientists should not be allowed to mock liberals or progressives for believing that all human populations the world over evolved with identical mental capacities and inclinations. That’s beyond the pale.
The shallowness of the Left’s love for science can be seen in incidents like this week’s outrage over the comments of Nobel-Prize-winning scientist Tim Hunt.
Hunt, whose job involves making careful observations and drawing reasonable conclusions from them, noted that having co-ed laboratories comes with a raft of problems. He noted that, if women are in the lab: “[Men] fall in love with them,” that “they fall in love with [men],” and that women often cry when they are criticized.
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