"Hiding The Ball": Liberals Take Over Professions, Then Cite "Expert Knowledge" To Support Their Positions
I've been trying to make this point (at the bottom of the overall-very-interesting quote) for about a year now...not sure "hiding the ball" is the best term for it, but it'll do for now. (Instapundit link b/c WSJ link is paywalled).
You see this chicanery all over the place. Liberals/progressives/the left/whatever takes over academic disciplines, and then basically cite themselves as the experts. Something similar goes on with the SPLC. This is one of the ways the left keeps control of Wikipedia--citing "expert opinion" in left-converged disciplines like women's studies and sociology. Just one example: arguments over the semantics of 'racism.' The term obviously means something like antipathy based on race. But the left has long hated the fact that non-whites are sometimes racist, and has tried various tactics to try to cover up this inconvenient fact. The current one is to assert that 'racism' actually means "prejudice + power"--so whites can be racist, but blacks can merely (!) be prejudiced against whites. Typical silly PC semantic shenanigans...but weirdly effective. At any rate, when challenged on this nonsense, they often cite sociology, and refer to it as the "scholarly" or "academic" definition. Wikipedia editors liberally deploy the argument that "expert opinion" about such a thing--the usage of "scholars" who often openly acknowledge that they are motivated by political aims--trumps ordinary usage.
They use similar arguments with respect to the question "is race a natural kind?" The answer is probably yes--the preponderance of better arguments seem to support that answer. But it's common to see people arguing, roughly: most contemporary anthropologists reject the biological reality of race, so... But anthropology isn't a neutral arbiter, having been, basically, "colonized" (as they might say) by the left.
Everybody does something like this--I mean, conservatives cite AEI and Cato. But it seems different when academia is involved. Academicians are supposed to be (and are often treated as) neutral arbiters.
You see this chicanery all over the place. Liberals/progressives/the left/whatever takes over academic disciplines, and then basically cite themselves as the experts. Something similar goes on with the SPLC. This is one of the ways the left keeps control of Wikipedia--citing "expert opinion" in left-converged disciplines like women's studies and sociology. Just one example: arguments over the semantics of 'racism.' The term obviously means something like antipathy based on race. But the left has long hated the fact that non-whites are sometimes racist, and has tried various tactics to try to cover up this inconvenient fact. The current one is to assert that 'racism' actually means "prejudice + power"--so whites can be racist, but blacks can merely (!) be prejudiced against whites. Typical silly PC semantic shenanigans...but weirdly effective. At any rate, when challenged on this nonsense, they often cite sociology, and refer to it as the "scholarly" or "academic" definition. Wikipedia editors liberally deploy the argument that "expert opinion" about such a thing--the usage of "scholars" who often openly acknowledge that they are motivated by political aims--trumps ordinary usage.
They use similar arguments with respect to the question "is race a natural kind?" The answer is probably yes--the preponderance of better arguments seem to support that answer. But it's common to see people arguing, roughly: most contemporary anthropologists reject the biological reality of race, so... But anthropology isn't a neutral arbiter, having been, basically, "colonized" (as they might say) by the left.
Everybody does something like this--I mean, conservatives cite AEI and Cato. But it seems different when academia is involved. Academicians are supposed to be (and are often treated as) neutral arbiters.
posted by Winston Smith at
9:08 AM
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