Dirty words
Trump has ordered scientists to stop using the word “women.”
The word “men” is still allowed.
UC San Diego scientists say they’re still in “stop and start chaos” despite a recent pullback on a federal funding freeze. Researchers say their work is now at risk if it contains language deemed problematic by the White House, including the word “women.“
In his first week in office, President Donald Trump issued executive orders rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Now staff at the National Science Foundation are scouring thousands of research projects for dozens of words that could violate those orders. The agency already notified scientists to halt work that doesn’t adhere to Trump’s directives.
The list of banned words circulating at the National Science Foundation and science circles across the country includes: women, disability, bias, status, trauma, Black, Hispanic communities, as well as socioeconomic, ethnicity and systemic.
So…scientists can still do research on men, but not on women? And nobody in charge saw a problem with that?
H/t Piglet
New Lysenkoism the same as the old Lysenkoism… Only worse. Transing a few children is gonna seem quaint in the near future.
Um, that’s not really what’s going on, although the TRAs certainly want to spin it that way. Once you think about the goal and the process to get you there, it makes sense.
Assume it’s your job to find instances of DEI-based discrimination. The first step you’re likely to take is a keyword search for words typically associated with such. Since including the discriminated-against groups would just return all documents, you instead search for the discriminated-for groups. This means you search for “person of color” and not “white”, or for “woman” and not “man”, or “trans” and not “sane”. Every document returned has to be flagged for manual review, because all you can do in that first step is filter by keyword.
Also, the way the article refers to a list of “banned words” is dishonest in the extreme. Like, Pink News level propaganda.
See, I’d be quite willing to take that view if President Nikki Haley’s staff were doing it instead of Musk’s groypers… I assume malfeasance because the people doing it are cartoonishly evil and reckless. Intent matters, no matter what the Wokies think.