“My wife will often come nervously behind me when I’m working on my laptop and she looks nervous and ‘What are you writing?’. And I say, ‘Well, I am writing something, what is it?’ And she’ll say ‘Remember, we have two children.’
Now the fact that a mother could look to her husband in the 21st century in Canada, he’s a professor and she’s arguing: ‘Please be careful with the words you use, because we have young children’ — she’s not saying this because she’s some paranoid lady who’s unaware of the realities of life. That … that’s the proverbial … canary, singing in the coal mine. That’s saying something quite profound about the type of environment that we live in when you have someone somebody who is afraid for the safety of their children.”
Gad Saad
Gad Saad did an interesting lecture on “Thought Police and Political Correctness in Modern Academia” (full lecture), parts of which were subsequently illustrated by Matthew Drake. The topic is quite gruesome if you love freedom of thought and the free marketplace of ideas — to see just how far Academia has fallen. Saad shows the development and the consequences very well:
And yup, the attitude that some positions have to be silenced is spreading Academia. Including — and especially — those backed by arguments and evidence. Not only in Canada or the US, but in other countries as well. And if this goes on, it will turn universities into indoctrination places and stifle scientific and social progress.
And frankly, we need that progress that only comes out of a marketplace of ideas.
