Paul Hawkins

Fan of Tennessee Williams, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Camille Paglia, Noam Chomsky, Jordan Peterson, and Woody Allen; rudeness/can't admit error=block

[Paul Hawkins @Paulrhawk]

An article of mine now in Quillette @Quillette.

[Quillette @Quillette]

Tennessee Williams and Woody Allen: Kindred Spirits to Illuminate our Tragicomic Existence | @Paulrhawk https://t.co/nq4pIMpzHC

[Bjorn Lomborg @BjornLomborg]

The Great Barrier Reef's “obituary” was written again and again.

But the patient didn’t comply: the five best years in the monitoring record are the five most recent.

The reason you may not have heard this: alarming predictions are prominently reported, but rarely revisited when catastrophe fails to arrive.

https://t.co/Mf2iJAfKPl

[Paul Hawkins @Paulrhawk]

@preta_6 An important statistic would also be, what percentage of declared transgender women were convicted of sex offenses prior to transitioning?

[Bjorn Lomborg @BjornLomborg]

Good news you probably haven't heard:

The Great Barrier Reef's five best years of coral cover in the 40-year record are the five most recent.

After decades of predictions of its imminent demise, the reef stubbornly refuses to die.

My new @latimes op-ed:
https://t.co/YWYdK7CKuJ

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

As another man who once worked with me declares himself saddened by my beliefs on gender and sex, I thought it might be useful to compile a list for handy reference. Which of the following do you imagine makes actors and directors who aren’t involved with the HBO reboot of Harry Potter so miserable?

Is it my belief that women and girls should have their own public changing rooms and bathrooms?

That women should retain female-only rape crisis centres?

That men don’t belong in women’s sport?

That female prisoners shouldn’t be incarcerated with violent men and male sex offenders?

That women should remain a protected class in law, because they have sex-specific needs and issues?

That language should reflect reality rather than ideological jargon, especially in a medical context?

That women shouldn’t be harassed, persecuted or fired for refusing to pretend humans can change sex?

That women should not be threatened with violence and rape when they assert their rights?

That freedom of speech and belief are essential to a pluralistic democratic society?

That troubled minors, especially those who are gay, autistic and trauma-experienced, should be given mental health support instead of irreversible surgeries and drug treatments on non-existent evidence of benefit?

That gay people shouldn’t be pressured to include the opposite sex in their dating pools, nor should they be smeared as ‘genital fetishists’ when they don’t?

That cross-dressing heterosexual male fetishists aren’t actually oppressed, but having the time of their lives piggybacking off gender identity ideology?

That said ideology, and the privileged, blinkered fools pushing it because they suffer zero consequences themselves, have done more damage to the political left’s credibility than Trump and Farage could have achieved in a century?

Let me have your thoughts.

[Paul Hawkins @Paulrhawk]

@ggreenwald He's taking it from Conservative PM Harper who said it back in 2014 or 15 after the takeover of Crimea.

So his "tough talk" is also borrowed.

[Paul Hawkins @Paulrhawk]

Accepting permanent, one-way tariffs on autos, aluminum, and steel (tariffs that could just keep ratcheting up), to say nothing of what then could be demanded during CUSMA renegotiations, would just a recipe for flight of capital and jobs from Canada on a scale greater than now, wouldn't it?

[Charles Murray @charlesmurray]

I’m from Iowa.

[Paul Hawkins @Paulrhawk]

But you don't turn against your country just b/c you don't like the present govt (even when it's kind of a perma-govt by one party). You work to get a different party elected.

I think what really burns the Cdn MAGA-adjacent types is the demographic weight of woke and Eastern Canada that condemns much of the country to suffer under govt that doesn't represent them. Hence the Alberta referendum.

Yeah, the Emergency Act, etc. really sucks. . .but the convoy has won all court challenges. One shouldn't have to fight these battles in court, but that's the country's institutions working for us, right?

[Natural Philosophy @Naturalphilosy]

“The world breaks every one… But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

— Ernest Hemingway

[i/o @avidseries]

Young black males murder and get murdered at rates that seem to exist in a whole other universe.

[Paul Hawkins @Paulrhawk]

Wonderful quotation and comment that both distill what I think is Dostoevsky's central theme.

[Dalton Henderson @D__Henderson]

Notes From Underground Note #3:

“Man, whoever he might be, has always and everywhere liked to act as he wants, and not at all as reason and profit dictate; and one can want even against one’s own profit, and one sometimes even positively must.”

Dostoevsky’s “underground man” argues that it’s a fools errand to create a formula for what mankind wants. That man’s free and voluntary wanting is the most profitable profit of them all - even if it’s against his own interests.

[Dalton Henderson @D__Henderson]

Notes From Underground Note #3:

“Man, whoever he might be, has always and everywhere liked to act as he wants, and not at all as reason and profit dictate; and one can want even against one’s own profit, and one sometimes even positively must.”

Dostoevsky’s “underground man” argues that it’s a fools errand to create a formula for what mankind wants. That man’s free and voluntary wanting is the most profitable profit of them all - even if it’s against his own interests.

[Michael Shermer @michaelshermer]

Wokeness is corrupting science from within. Nature went woke years ago with their support of trans pseudoscience (sex is binary, not a spectrum) and now they think the death of Jason Arday sends a wake-up to us: yeah, stop lying.

[Colin Wright @SwipeWright]

Seeing lots of surprised reactions to the absurd Nature editorial on Jason Arday. Frankly, I'm surprised people are surprised.

Nature has been totally captured by wokeness for a while now. I've been trying to call attention to this for nearly a decade. There are no serious scholars left there in influential positions capable of rescuing it.

The people in charge of Nature today are brazenly hostile to the foundational principles that made Nature a highly respected and trustworthy institution in the first place. Today, activists have hijacked it and are using the prestige associated with the Nature brand to push an ideological agenda.

They don't care that they're quickly burning through the immense trust that was slowly and painstakingly built by generations of competent scholars and stewardship.

They're willing to burn through it all in a decade for power. It's an absolute tragedy.

Nature has gone all-in on decoloniality, which holds that academic rigor and scientific objectivity are forms of colonial oppression rooted in white supremacy. It seeks to elevate Indigenous "ways of knowing," which amount to tribal myths and forms of religious mysticism, as an equally valid system of producing knowledge.

And they don't want this absurd notion to remain theoretical; they want to implement these principles in areas that deal with life and death—medicine and nursing.

I know what I'm saying sounds absurd. People can't possibly believe that. Like, I must be exaggerating, right?

I promise you that I'm not. If anything, I'm dramatically understating the problem.

We are in the midst of a total academic crisis, and we need to stop acting surprised and start taking action to delegitimize these journals and root these fields out of our public and publicly-funded institutions.

If we don't, it's only going to get worse.

[Paul Hawkins @Paulrhawk]

@fiend_data @jeremylybarger I think the comma splice rule can be flexibly applied in fiction; it aids clarity in expository writing.

[J.D. Haltigan, PhD 🏒👨‍💻 @JDHaltigan]

Absolutely something only the clown world of the Academy could offer up. After completing her PhD at Cambridge, Folayan obtained a position as lecturer in DEI at Arden University. Folayan explicitly disavows academic standards as "knowledge standards of coloniality."

[Bjorn Lomborg @BjornLomborg]

CO₂ and climate make world greener

1982-2023 world added leaves with total area equivalent to 4x Contiguous US

Yes, climate net problem

but breathless reporting ignores global greening "highly credible evidence of anthropogenic climate change"

https://t.co/Xci512qme6
https://t.co/wbAlcioH6l

You can see all the references in my Twitter thread:
https://t.co/aeGUnytzkh

[Jeffrey Sachs @JeffreyASachs]

I've lived in Canada for almost 20 years and been involved in academia for all of them, but I still find this shocking and deeply wrong.

[i/o @avidseries]

What exactly is the "discredited pseudoscience" that Nathan Cofnas argues for? Here are the main claims he's made that have offended people:

(1) Cofnas believes there are differences in average measured intelligence between population groups: Mainstream science fully agrees with him.

(2) Cofnas believes that recent human evolution outside Africa has increased human intelligence: Mainstream population genetics now mostly agrees with him.

(3) Cofnas believes that the measured differences in intelligence between population groups are at least partially due to genetic differences between those groups: Although this claim remains scientifically disputed and unresolved, the most recent published survey of intelligence scientists found that most agree with him.

The research that has been most often used to support a genetic explanation — and which has been published in established peer-reviewed scientific journals — is hardly pseudoscientific. You may not believe that it's convincing, but that's quite another thing than saying it's "pseudoscientific."

The people writing about Cofnas either know this or do not care to know it.

The vast majority of the public reading about Cofnas has no idea of the current status of intelligence research because its "dangerous" findings are rarely reported in the non-scientific media, and most people treat the subject as too icky to take the time to investigate.

[Bo Winegard @EPoe187]

The point is that if you have no explanation for the cause of racial disparities, people search for one. And progressives offer a toxic answer: pervasive racism. People become hostile to the West and rail against it. In other words, people become woke. Surely candor is better?