Diversity statements

[posic]

https://yigal-s.livejournal.com/1161647.html

My diversity statement -- http://posic.livejournal.com/1022545.html

Comments

[prorsus.livejournal.com]

Sure, we should abandon reason and words all together then and go on based on "reality" as you see it and your prophetic hallucinations about that "spectacular failure" . Makes sense.

[posic.livejournal.com]

No, but you should learn to use your reason, and to use your words properly. And the way you learn it is that, when you do not do it properly, you run with your head into a wall made of hard rock. That's what "reality reasserting itself" means.

You can't break through this wall, your head hurts, and so you are forced to do some real thinking, to search for mistakes in your logic. And your head will continue to hurt until you learn to see that wall in front of you, and the ones surrounding you, too. Until you learn to base your thinking on the hard facts of reality and not on pure smooth-sounding fantasy.

You install some sound thinking in place of your present fallacious one, and then you see a way to your destination, avoiding all the obstacles that abound in the difficult terrain in front of you. Then you no longer beat your head into hard rock, and so it stops hurting.

[prorsus.livejournal.com]

You know so much about reason and yet you cannot win an argument with a postmodernist. Teach me to use it properly then. You mean properly as in through some vague metaphors about heads and walls but not through the actual discourse? And nothing is hurting here but you seem to hurt about everything from Islam to non-binary people. Your sound thinking somehow failed to help with that pain (or shall we say butthurt)?

[posic.livejournal.com]

I am not here to teach you anything. I've proclaimed my diversity statement. The conversation with you that followed is to serve as a commentary to that. The power of it does not lie in it being particularly convincing to a person of your current persuasion. It lies in the real-world consequences of the fact of its publication, here in open access under my real name.

I am a research mathematician, a pure academic by calling. My research is being published as books, papers, and preprints, under the same real name which I have. I need some income in order to survive, just as everyone else. Now, there are basically two possible outcomes.

Either I get a job, or a sequence of jobs, in the Western academia, which will allow me to survive and continue both my mathematical research and my publication of political statements (like the above one) in my blogs. Which will mean that the Western academia will have to swallow its leftist pride and open some space for an explicitly politically incorrect person such as me on its campuses.

Or otherwise, skipping some or another more or less obvious development of subsequent events, I will not survive. Then, several decades from now, my name will be mentioned in political conversations as a way to illustrate certain historical phenomena, in a way not quite dissimilar to your mentioning of Alan Turing above, but with different, perhaps somewhat opposite, implications.

Either way, I become a part of the landscape on which this action develops. That is to say, one of those hard rocks into which the postmodernism will beat its head, breaking its neck.

That is how reality reasserts itself (among many other ways, of course) -- through purposeful human action designed to affect reality, including the hard facts of historical reality, and consequently to put these new aspects of reality in front of people, both those who like having such reality in front of them and those who don't like it.

That is what we do, with our white man fragility (among many other things that we do). My aim is not to avoid pain. This is a battle, and one has to endure. My aim is to relegate socialism to the dustbin of history -- in particular, by inflicting the postmodernists with more pain than they can endure. The victory will not come anytime soon, but it will in the end. It's a long way.