Human Fragility : why most people (white & colored) can't accept that small weak microbes can be as intelligent as them

Oh yes, a big hat tip to Dr Robin DiAngelo who proposed the term "white fragility" to describe how few white people can address claims that 'we whites all benefit indirectly from systemic racism' without exhibiting extreme mental & emotional distress.

I feel some the same way as Dr DiAngelo, whenever I observe the reaction after I claim that Henry Dawson's scientific career was devoted to proving up the fact that life's simplest, smallest and weakest beings - the microbes - exhibit intelligent behavior.

North American-style ethnic cleansing

North America hardly needed to go all the way to South African style overt apartheid, or East European murderous ethnic cleansing campaigns, to keep its unwanted ethnic minorities out of nice WASP upper middle class suburbs.

faith-based Age of Exclusion (1875-1965) vs current fact-based Age of Inclusion

During WWII, Allied governments and virtually all of their voters took it as an article of faith that when those governments passed new wartime laws banning any form of discrimination, that ipso facto all such discrimination was yesterday.

They didn't bother to check to see if frontline decision makers actually obeyed the new law.

Purity & Dirt always in a vertical hierarchy, not horizontal continuum

"Pure-ness", that rhetorical term much beloved by Scientism, is never in fact allowed to exist in the horizontal continuum that its definition implies.

Lateral pure-ness *

That is, seeing a former mixture now separated into all its various pluralistic diversities ; 'pure but equal' substances in a chemically inclusive democracy.

I was a child in the 196th decade, the Fifties years, from 1951 to 1960 - I became an adult in 1961

My childhood ended when I began reading grownup-oriented newspapers, magazines & books in early September 1961, just before my tenth birthday.

So my childhood was a Fifties childhood.

It is by far and away the decade I feel closest too.

I say so despite being a bona fide 'Youth in the Wild Sixties', because I always felt that the dramatic youth actions of the 1960s followed inevitably on from the unique times experienced by Fifties ankle-biters.

Note : because we count everything, including time , from 1 to 10 not from 0 to 9, there never was any "year 0" in any known calendar.

Still, despite this obvious fact, most people 'believe' the Fifties were from 1950 to 1959 ---- I go with the math guys and say it ran 1951-1960.

Suits me anyway - I was conceived in 1950, but only born in 1951....

Age of Exclusion 1875--1965 ; Age of Inclusion 1965 --???

The Classical & Romantic Ages at least hint accurately of what they are all about.

Not so the Ages of Modernity & Post Modernity.

Because the Romans no doubt thought of themselves as fully modern - as will humanoids a million years from now, if our species is still around by then.

I think it much better to tag each of these slices of history as "the Age of Exclusion" (culminating with Auschwitz's exclusionary fires of racial purity) followed by "the Age of Inclusion" (beginning with the American Civil Rights Movements' biggest success, 1965's inclusive Voters Rights Act).

Only time will tell, if these terms have any legs....

queen of today's science is Biology : non-man-made chemistry & physics

That Vannevar Bush wanted no biologists on his wartime OSRD team went unremarked at the time, then at the very apogee of Modernity.

After all what could mere non-human living beings ever teach us humans - Masters of the Universe all - about serious chemistry & physics ?

Seventy five years on, it seems apparently quite a lot.