The long fingernail brigade....

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum......:

"Six days ago, Sir Tim [Professor Sir Tim Hunt, FRS.Nobel Laureate]  was in Seoul for some science conference and was required to make a few remarks, among which was a septuagenarian scientist's ill advised attempt at humor:

Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry.

Not the funniest joke in the world, but the genius of a scientist is often inversely proportional to his social ease. So he did not anticipate that a throwaway line about how girls are so emotional about these things would result in the girls getting so emotional about these things."

While he was on the flight back to London, University College told his wife, Professor Mary Collins (herself a prominent immunologist), that he could quit or be sacked. So he was forced to resign - from University College, and then from the Royal Society's Biological Sciences Awards Committee, and then from the European Research Council. There's not a lot left for him to resign from, although the Armies of the Outraged are optimistic they can get the Royal Society to expel him entirely. 

What is our culture doing to itself that we would allow such a travesty to take place?

We have reached the position historian Rodney Starck talks about when he declares that the the will to develop is equally important (perhaps even more?) than the development of the things themselves.

Our culture is busily destroying its will to progress (and most likely its survival!) because of a minority of shrill anarchists who want to rule unimpeded by democracy or mere good manners, just like the mandarins of the Imperial court of China:

Once we recognise the primacy of ideas, we realise the irrelevance of long-running scholarly debates about whether certain inventions were developed independently in Europe or imported from the East. The act of invention is obviously crucial, but just as important, societies must value innovations enough to use them. The Chinese for example, developed gunpowder very early on -  but centuries later they still lacked artillery and firearms. An iron industry flourished in northern China in the eleventh century - but then mandarins at the Imperial court declared a state monopoly on iron and seized everything, destroying China's iron production." (R Starck, How the West Won, pg.5)

UPDATE....an epilogue by Mark Steyn:

"As I've said, sometimes a society becomes too stupid to survive. What I found interesting was the instant demand for Tim Hunt's resignation, but the comparative ease with Rachel Dolezal's years of deception - not to say the vigorous pushback by the expert that she's more black than Clarence Thomas. Ms Dolezal may be white, but Sir Tim is beyond the pale."

.....and more evidence to indicate how stupid America (thus Western culture!) is becoming:

~Speaking of historical vandalism, an "award-winning" teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District has been suspended since March for reading Mark Twain to his class - specifically, this passage from Huckleberry Finn:

At last, when he'd built up everyone's expectations high enough, he rolled up the curtain. The next minute the king came prancing out on all fours, naked. He was painted in rings and stripes all over in all sorts of colors and looked as splendid as a rainbow.

Another teacher heard about it and complained. Presumably it's a "micro-aggression" and the pupils might be "triggered". The moronization of the republic is remorseless.