Five quick points: 1) I have no belief as to whether anyone within the Gibson family is racist, nor does that matter as to the following propositions; 2) The Gibsons' owned a bakery and were sensibly concerned about shoplifting-- from people of any race, 3) The Gibsons' won their defamation lawsuit against Oberlin College, which AS AN INSTITUTION had defamed them over a confrontation over an alleged shoplifting; 4) Appeals have been exhausted -- Oberlin should pay up. 5) The black Oberlin students whom the Gibsons thought were shoplifting eventually pleaded guilty to ... shoplifting. This has become something more than the usual town-and-gown tension.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarring_and_feathering The photo here is of John Meints, a German-American farmer who was tarred and feathered in Minnesota in August 1918. Yes, I know today is Pearl Harbor day and my thoughts may seem to have turned to the 'wrong' World War. But hey, I can't tame them to obey a calender. I include Meints' photo here as a reminder that racism can victimize anyone, even those nasty "north Europeans." And to suggest that when it happens we should call it "racism," and not use word magic to try to say that Meints was the victim of something else, or wasn't really a victim at all.
What we nowadays call science is a specific practice that developed within a specific time and place, that is, within, Europe beginning around 1500, that is, during Columbus's voyages. This was also, I believe, around the time when a Polish fellow whose Latin name was Copernicus was taking up in a serious way the study of astronomy, where he would in time make a name for himself. So: what was this new thing? Any formulation draws debate. Sticking to a very abstract level, I think one can say that science is a self-corrective process in which hypotheses are developed and refined so that they can suggest experiment. (In the case of astronomy, since we can't haul planets into a laboratory, 'experiment' has generally meant targeted observation.) These experiments can then falsify some hypotheses, uphold others, and demand the refinement of still others. Scientific peers seek to confirm each other’s results and build on each other's f...
The fellow pictured at the top of yesterday's blog post was Taleb: the half-smiling fellow pictured here is Cernovich. They seem to be friends. The fact has lately come under a great deal of discussion, and Taleb has responded, on twitter. "When I have drinks with someone on the left ... nobody on the right bothers me. When I have drinks with someone on the right, the left goes wild. F*** them." The asterisks are in the original. Asked whether Cernovich was a racist, Taleb replied, "#SkinintheGame. He has a Persian Muslim wife (& a half Persian daughter) . Ignore talk (by ppl & abt ppl), observe what ppl do." The phrase "skin in the game" is in essence a "term of art" in Taleb's writings. Never trust anyone who tells you to buy Mattel stock who doesn't own Mattel stock, etc. More broadly, much of academia has isolated itself from the off-campus world, allowing its denizens to be "Intellectuals Yet Idiots,...