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-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jed Rothwell Sent: 14 September 2005 20:16 To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Due Diligence on CF [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Of course there are a million and one conspiracies against you when >you are having a bad time! YOU are the only one claiming there is a conspiracy! I say there is no conspiracy, and yet you persist in accusing me of conspiracy mongering. This is highly irrational. This is not surprising, You are not the first to accuse me of doing things I have not done, and saying things I have not said. This is a logical fallacy called a straw man argument. Yours is particularly egregious example because I am saying just the opposite of what you accuse me of saying. >May be you are in a rut and pissed off. The nation is in a rut. The scientific establishment is in a rut. I am standing outside the rut, looking down a clear road ahead, and urging people to join me. >Negativity is not going to help you is it? On the contrary, negativity may well help. After all else failed, it worked splendidly in the 1960s to promote integration and progress in race relations. My mother was working in the Bureau of Commerce back then, and she had many black colleagues. These were professionals -- statisticians, programmers and social science researchers. Many were first generation college graduates. As you would expect, they were thoroughly bourgeois in attitude, dress, manners, social mores and so on. No one is more firmly middle-class and respectable than a person who has escaped from poverty. In the 1960s Washington and the federal government was still quite segregated, and this group was still fighting for promotion to management and equal treatment. They were using oh-so-respectable techniques of reasoned negotiation and quiet diplomacy: no demonstrations, no threat of lawsuits, nothing that might be construed as "agitation." And as you would expect, they were getting nowhere. (They have been doing this sort of thing since 1865 without success.) Upper management would patronize them, pat them on the head, praise them for being such goody-goody upstanding people, and then ignore them. Finally around 1966 they took a lesson from black militants, and changed their style. They grew Afros, they wore dashikis, they started lecturing In Your Face about black power. They threatened to hold a demonstration in the cafeteria! Most important, they scared the hell out of the management all the way up the federal bureaucracy. Within months they achieved more progress than they had in the previous 20 years, and the change was permanent. The thing is, this was an act. It was a political performance. These were the same middle-class, middle-aged, staid people they had always been. Nobody listened to them until they threatened to break the rules and make a stink. Based on this incident, I have long recommended that CF researchers act up, make trouble, and maybe chain themselves to the White House fence. Anything to attract attention. Playing by the rules of peer review has not worked, and I doubt it ever will. - Jed
