Frederick M. Dolan

Professor of Rhetoric, Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley.
Philosopher, political theorist, author, educator.

[Frederick M. Dolan @fmdolan]

On becoming less full of shit https://t.co/YJNtqUMJMA

[Jonathan Haidt @JonHaidt]

Here's the greatest example of a town coming together to give all of their kids a play-based childhood: Piedmont Unplugged. They're doing all 4 norms!

Check out their "free play Friday" -- kids just meet at a local park! Try it in your town.

https://t.co/NqVBJcxtLX

[Russell Berman @RussellBermanSF]

https://t.co/HKQ7sh3YXE

[Noah Rubin @NoahGRubin]

THREAD: The Double Standard at UPenn

UPenn sanctioned Amy Wax, a tenured professor, for "racism" and "unprofessional conduct."

Meanwhile, antisemitic, anti-American faculty face no similar consequences and have full classes next semester.

The hypocrisy is stunning 🧵

[Kevin Mitchell @WiringTheBrain]

A New Year's rant, for 2025 😊:

[Liam Bright @lastpositivist]

The one thing linguistic prescriptivists and pedants are correct on is that "begs the question" should not be used as a synonym for "raises the question". Hold the line comrades.

[Frederick M. Dolan @fmdolan]

Eva Hesse's work on display at the UC Berkeley Art Museum. Vicky said they were deliquescent. I said that like the narrator's "good" leg in Beckett's *Molloy*, they had begun to stiffen.

[Frederick M. Dolan @fmdolan]

Robert Irwin's Untitled (1968), at the UC Berkeley Art Museum.

[Frederick M. Dolan @fmdolan]

Be thankful for small mercies!

[Ashley St. Clair @stclairashley]

While slavery was common to all civilizations, only one civilization developed a moral revulsion against it: Western Civilization

“Rather than be ashamed as Westerners, we should stand proud for having led the world out of a mentality where slavery was the norm.”

🔥🔥🔥

[David Ulansey, PhD Princeton @dreamlion]

Here's a talk in which I tell the full story of how I discovered the central secret of the ancient "mystery religion" of Mithraism! Based on my book, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World (Oxford Univ. Press). https://t.co/5XePUb2IpI

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

The March of Dimes Syndrome | When a problem is mitigated, activists have to deny the progress, magnify micro-problems, or pivot to a new problem to stay in business. https://t.co/M6uPKSKC9X

[Heath Matheson @Heath_Matheson]

"Emotion...reflects the changing value of different actions given our bodily state...It is a kind of marker of our embodied attunement (or lack of it) to the world."
@CogsAndy shows us how predictive processing and embodiment give rise to experience:
https://t.co/QICkJFd8z9

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

Democrats Deny Basic Biology In Push To Change Gender Of Children

Governor Gavin Newsom’s allies have passed legislation to block schools from telling parents when their kids think they’re the opposite sex

For the last 30 years, Democrats have attacked Republicans and others as science deniers. They have pointed to skepticism about climate change, evolution, and the history of life on Earth as proof that Republicans are in the grip of a pseudoscientific religion.

But now it’s Democrats who are denying science. In California and across the United States, Democrats are demanding that schools teach children that they can change their sex. They say that boys can become girls, and girls can become boys through the magic of language. You’re a girl if you say you’re a girl, and vice versa, many Democrats believe.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with boys playing with dolls and girls playing with trucks. Very few people are truly “gender-conforming” if we define gender as stereotypes from the 1950s.

But I have a real problem with taxpayers funding schools to teach the pseudoscientific idea that there are more than two sexes and that they can be changed. There is no debate over this question. No amount of magic words, drugs, or cosmetic surgery can turn a boy into a girl or a girl into a boy. This is basic biology.

What’s happening is much more horrible than most people realize. Democratic Senators in California, including the main allies of Governor Gavin Newsom, not only want to teach sex science denialism in schools, they want to prevent schools and teachers from informing parents if their children start to believe that they are actually the opposite sex.

Just imagine for a moment what Democrats are proposing. They’re demanding that schools, on the one hand, teach basic human biology, which starts with the fact that there are two human sexes. Then, just minutes later, the very same schools are supposed to teach children that they can change their sex. Or that they might have been “born into the wrong body.” Whatever that means.

Now you might be thinking: what harm is there in a boy identifying as a girl and vice versa? Well, according to the best available science, there’s a lot of harm in it. Convincing children into thinking they were born into the wrong body and that they can do something to their bodies to change their sex has resulted in one of the worst medical mistreatment scandals in human history.

Children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults are being sterilized and losing their sexual function through drugs and surgeries. And according to a major scientific review by the British government that came out a few weeks ago, the first step down that road is the so-called “social transition” that schools encourage with their sex science denialism.

Every nation in Europe is moving away from so-called gender medicine because it’s not medicine. It’s mistreatment. And many of the victims are gay, anxious, autistic, or simply bothered by the experience of going through puberty.

The right way to deal with all of this is through cognitive behavioral therapy and “watchful waiting,” not promoting the delusion that anyone is “born into the wrong body,” much less blocking puberty, giving children testosterone or estrogen, or God forbid cutting into their bodies.

Nobody is born into the wrong body. We are all just born the way we are born. Yes, some people are attracted to people of the same sex. Fine. That doesn’t make them the opposite sex. It just makes them gay or bisexual.

What’s worse, many teachers and schools are promoting this pseudoscience. And so Democrats are proposing not only that schools miseducate children, they want to hide what they’re doing.

There is plenty of blame to go around for this awful state of affairs....

Please click on the link below to subscribe, watch the rest of the video, and read the rest of the article!

https://t.co/qQWMshQvnK

[Anita Leirfall @anitaleirfall]

Kant's public lectures. The painting is in the Kant Museum in Kaliningrad. Kant's open lectures were published. Among Kant's lectures that were open to everyone were on anthropology, moral philosophy, metaphysics, and pedagogy. #Kant #lectures

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

Talk at Heterodox Academy on astronomy (and its unfortunate politicization) by Beatriz Villarroel @DrBeaVillarroel

[Read some Piaget please! @prof_curiosity1]

What makes me laugh most loudly about the responses by gender ideologues to #CassReview is their protestations that the report cannot be evidence based, because Dr Cass and her team of academics rejected the evidence of so many substandard papers.

In their groping dimness, what they fail to understand that in order to make a report evidence based, you need to reject any input that is itself not itself rigorously evidence based🤦‍♀️

Otherwise, you end up with a polemic, which is the territory that these faux scientists have been operating from, and where they feel most comfortable.

"How dare that woman apply proper scientific standards and rigour to our snake oil business!"

[Frederick M. Dolan @fmdolan]

@RobertTalisse I stopped at his stuff on Stravinsky.

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

Would refusing to talk to Daniel Kahneman when he was at Hebrew U have made the world a better place? If I stopped corresponding with 93-year-old Nobelist Robert Aumann about his groundbreaking work in game theory, would Palestinians be better off? The Academic Boycott of Israel is academia at its worst: mindless, demonizing virtue signaling. Open letter for faculty here: https://t.co/XWo1lpIWaX

[Frederick M. Dolan @fmdolan]

@GavinNewsom https://t.co/fWJCZEgt3V