Liberal society’s gnostic construction of an equal world

David P. writes:

I was reading your response on U.S. navy subs being redesigned to have female crew members. You wrote:

Anything, that is, to make blacks equal with whites, women equal with men, the less capable equal to the capable, the unproductive equal to the productive, the jihadist equal to the loyal citizen.

And then I remembered this story from Time, in a feature called “The Top 10 Everything of 2009,” about how a major mathematical puzzle called the Fundamental Lemma was solved in 2009.

Note the picture, and the almost subliminal desire who the mathematician should rightly have been.

LA replies:

That’s just wildly strange. The article is about Robert Langlands who developed the Fundamental Lemma, and about Ngo Bao Chau who solved it. Yet in the photo accompanying the article Time shows a black girl working on an equation. Even the actual Southeast Asian discoverer wasn’t sufficient. It had to be a black female.

It is blatant propaganda like this that has made me feel for at least the last 20 years that Time is a Soviet-like publication and its writers and editors are Soviet-like apparatchiks.

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David P. writes:

Further to my previous

I feel that Ngo Bao Chau had been treated badly and unfairly.

To be a mathematician requires talent, followed by hard work over many years. Finally, one gets an academic post in a discipline of intense competition, where it is difficult to hide.

The kind of problem that Ngo Bao Chau undertook, takes years to solve (Unless one is a Newton or Gauss). The effort is a dedication of one’s life, with no real rewards except an ovation from the few who know. Time magazine had the opportunity to acknowledge Ngo Bao Chau’s contribution in ‘The Top 10 Everything of 2009’ by putting his picture along with the article. By not doing so, they have deprived a brilliant person of the few accolades that are available to a mathematician, and put their prejudice ahead of fairness.

Jim C. writes:

Spot on Larry strikes again.

If anyone is interested in the genetic makeup of the greatest mathematicians, I suggest perusing the attached link that lists Fields Medal winners—the most prestigious award in pure mathematics.

But let’s be serious: who is this attractive black woman really? Is she Euclid? Newton? Aristotle? Euler? No, she is Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama, Spike Lee, Toni Morrison et al—the beneficiaries of de facto discrimination against Asians and Caucasians. The new upper-middle class—the new cognitive underclass.

Yes, Dorothy, there really is a Santa Claus.

OneSTDV writes:

Even worse, take a look at the actual mathematics in the accompanying picture, especially in the context of the pensive look on the black woman’s face. It’s humorously rudimentary, basically just elementary school arithmetic.

April 7

Mark Jaws writes:

Leave it to the white liberal media. In their rush to put a black face in a story involving math, the best they can come up with is a black girl handling an 8th grade problem. Is there not somewhere in America a black version of Good Will Hunting, standing in the wings, ready to apply his genius to our most pressing problems? Perhaps if white men were not so eager to put a basketball in the hand of a brother, to exploit his natural athletic ability, than blacks could achieve the intellectual level they think they are capable of reaching. After all, this demographic touts itself as the founders of math and science, who were able to build the pyramids. .

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 06, 2010 12:15 PM | Send