Pseudoscientific Racial Argle Bargle
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a whiteboard is just a whiteboard.
I read an article yesterday about an actual study, funded by your taxes, that discovered the use of whiteboards in the act of teaching physics was racist.
My first thought?
"What about when I grew up and we used blackboards and white chalk? Was that racist, too?"
My second thought?
"Bullshit. As Siggy Freud said, 'Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.'"
Except there is zero proof Freud ever said that.
It is another example of something we believe is true because it sounds like something Freud would have said, he smoked cigars, and it has been repeated by authority figures for over a century.
The idea that a cigar symbolized a phallus was first introduced in an article published in 1922 in “The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis”. The article made clear that the phallic symbolism of smoking was established by the 1920s.
The author of the article, Eric Hiller, wrote:
"Cigarettes and cigars can symbolise the penis. They are cylindrical and tubular. They have a hot, red end. They emit smoke that is fragant ( = flatus = semen). …
I refer to the reason, or at least one of the reasons, why people start smoking (and, of course, why they go on), that is the phallic significance of the cigarette, cigar and pipe. It is thus a substitute for the penis (mother’s breast) of which they have been deprived (castrated, weaned)."
Well....alrighty then.
Never mind the pressure to conform to a socially accepted behavior, that smoking produced a mild "high" and nicotine is addictive. Social science determined if you smoke, it could just be because you subconsciously crave having a penis in your mouth.
Sober minds also looked at this and simply called bullshit but even before Anthony Fauci became science, people believed "the science" and an authority figure was needed to refute this scientific "conclusion", and since Freud was a cigar smoker, the quote was born.
I guess my point is that we should be very cautious and skeptical about any conclusion drawn from the "soft sciences". I don't say that to demean the efforts to understand the human mind and human behavior, but all sciences are not equal. Some demand hard data, some are based entirely on inference.
Some, like most of the "everything is racist" research of today begin with the conclusion that everything is racist, we just need to find ways to show how they are racist.
It shouldn't be a surprise that when you begin with a desired conclusion, you will only discover things that support the conclusion and will ignore or reject anything that doesn't.
That's not science, that’s pseudoscience.
And pseudoscience is destroying real science.
In 1964, John R. Platt, a biophysicist at the University of Chicago. writing in what was perhaps the premier scientific journal, "Science", said:
“Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist's field and methods of study are as good as every other scientist's, and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it comes to recommending each other for government grants.”
There is a huge difference between true science and pseudoscience - but the contemporary tendency to treat all "science" as equally valid has led to "studies" like the "use of whiteboards is racist" idiocy.
Whiteboards were invented sometime in the 50's when it was noticed that ink could be easily wiped from enameled surfaces. White was chosen for the same reason paper is bleached white, it contrasted with every color ink so that multiple colors (other than black) could be used. The whiteboard didn't replace the old slates, black chalkboards and erasers until the invention of dry erase ink in 1975 that could be easily and cleanly wiped away.
Whiteboards became popular because they were a functional improvement over chalkboards, not because they were a racist indoctrination tool.
And yet this "research", completely constructed of unintelligible deconstructed argle bargle claims to satisfy the goals of something called "Critical Whiteness Studies", which is:
"...to make whiteness visible—to 'unmask the racial character of many of these [normative] practices and beliefs; to make visible what remains invisible.'"
Holy crap.
Yet, people believe this idiocy because it is produced by “scientists” and is repeated over and over.
For goodness sake, sometimes a whiteboard is just a whiteboard.
Thanks for setting straight the cigar thing. I usually have one a night out back while start gazing.