Kali Tal

December 2, 2006

More on Racism and Citizendium

Here's Gina de Miranda's letter to Larry Sanger and Citizendium. I encourage others to write and express their opinions to Sanger as well.:

From: benet_gesserit@sbcglobal.net
Date: November 30, 2006 10:43:04 PM MST
Subject: Citizendium.org and real enlightenment
To: sanger@citizendium.org

Dear Mr. Sanger,

I read postings by Kali Tal and Florian Cramer that delineated their reasons for withdrawing from your project at Citizendium.org. Then, as is appropriate preparation for determining the merits of their allegations, I went to your site. They appear to have a credible basis for taking you to task for your decision as regards Ethnic groups and women.

You, sir, are not trying to put together a project that will add to the wisdom of the world. You are shrinking knowledge and thought to fit within the paradigm of the "PC" academia. I want you to know how that feels. You seem to believe that women have been given equal treatment in academia as regards what is written about them or by them. How did you arrive at this determination? Had you read medical literature, you would have discovered that the relatively recent requirements to include women in FDA studies revealed that men and women metabolize medication very differently. You would have discovered that the knowledge of these differences has changed treatment regimes and made them dependent upon gender. Is that politically correct? I think that it is actually appropriately neutral and efficacious.

If you had read literature about women in political science, sociology or half a dozen other disciplines, you would have discovered that women think and act differently from men in a wide variety of ways. Women are geared towards cooperation, fairness and building consensus in group settings. Women bring problem-analysis and problem-solving skills that are different from those of men. By virtue of these differences, the writing, thinking and analyses provide more varied ways of considering any issue. Surely, the significance of these facts is not lost upon a man who prides himself on neutrality. Why on earth would you wish to reduce the richness of thought that different genders and ethnic communities bring to interpretation, analyses and problem-solving? Instead of opening up the process to the vivid panoply of human perspectives that might result in a more robust cogitative activity, you've put blinders on.

How sad that we have learned nothing from the last 6 years where US policy was driven by a similar myopia.

Gina de Miranda

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"A brave heart is a powerful weapon"

maisoon

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Posted by kalital at 3:51 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack