Posted on 06/09/2015 7:09:40 AM PDT by Rummyfan
History is not static and it does not progress linearly. There was more free speech and unimpeded expression in 5th-century Athens than in Western Europe between 1934-45, or in Eastern Europe during 1946-1989. An American could speak his mind more freely in 1970 than now. Many in the United States had naively believed that the Enlightenment, the U.S. Constitution, and over two centuries of American customs and traditions had guaranteed that Americans could always take for granted free speech and unfettered inquiry
That is an ahistorical assumption. The wish to silence, censor, and impede thought is just as strong a human emotion as the desire for free expression — especially when censorship is cloaked in rhetoric about fairness, equality, justice, and all the other euphemisms for not allowing the free promulgation of ideas.
George Orwell devoted his later years to warning us that while the fascist method of destroying free expression was easily identified (albeit only with difficulty combatted), the leftwing totalitarian impulse to squelch unpopular speech was far harder to resist — couched as it was in sloganeering about the “people” and “social justice.” It is easy to object to the speech codes of a self-interested, corrupt dictator in sunglasses and epaulettes, but difficult to fight censorship that allegedly helps the poor, minorities, and the helpless.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as 'bad luck'.” - Robert Heinlein
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.” - Ronald Reagan
“the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
After making a 5000 year leap forward, we can easily make two 5000 year leaps backward. We’re having a good try at it.
No, no, you didn't get the memo - this is "Life's Lottery!"
Fallout Template ping.
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From the article:
“Trigger warning” is a euphemism for trying either to censure literature or to denigrate it. “Safe space” is another term for the segregation of campus areas by race, class, or ideology.
I can remember when our society had a special place for people who had ‘triggers’ and needed a ‘safe space’. It was lovingly referred to as a ‘looney bin’. I suggest we bring them back and put all of these people in them.
In the future we will be seen as prophets. The reality is that we simply paid attention and didn’t try excusing what was obvious to any who cared to look.
Of course, no one loves a prophet.
Bfl
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> we will spend our sunset years telling our children and
> our children’s children what it was once like in the United
> States where men were free.
This is exactly what I am doing now, because our freedom is just about all gone.
They want to be Caesar telling the Plebs what do and so forth.
Julius Caesar would rather have been Chief among a Tribe Wearing Goat Skins and Scalping people for Giggles than a mere Citizen in one of the Advanced Civilizations of it's time.
Plutarch-Having received the government of Farther Spain after his prætorship, he came to a little town in passing the Alps; and his friends, by way of mirth, took occasion to say, “Can there here be any disputes for offices, any contentions for precedency, or such envy and ambition as we see among the great?” To which Cæsar answered, with great seriousness, “I assure you I had rather be the first man here than the second man in Rome.”
Indeed.
VDH is always a good read.
The only thing required for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing
“In the future we will be seen as prophets.” Or possibly “martyrs.”
Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s us that history will remember well. We stood for America.
A pre-Enlightenment Age is not just the absence of uncomfortable free expression. It is also a sort of groupthink acceptance of a lie in place of the truth on grounds of social utility.
Expand "social utility" to include the personal validation and the pure joy felt by focusing hatred on a consensus target and you have a fair working description of today's toxic ideological environment on liberal campuses. Who would ever have thought that the ridiculous con game of absolving the hater of hatred by virtue of his or her race, and then encouraging that hatred to be expressed toward a target described on the basis of race and the entire process not being racism, would somehow be widely accepted by people purporting to be intelligent? Short of tattooing "Fool and Hypocrite" on the collective forehead of the Studies professors, it seems about as far as one can go. And yet it flourishes.
Science, logic, probability, evidence — all these cornerstones of the Enlightenment — now mean little in comparison to the race, class, and gender of those who offer narratives deemed socially useful.
Again the social utility - utility to society as a whole, or strictly for the benefit of the theoretically oppressed, who seem to the skeptical eye to be doing very nicely out of it? We are not told, but we know. And society knows as well, or it learns, when the bridges built on the premise that tensile strength is a manifestation of the white male patriarchy begin to collapse. The laws of physics are not, sadly, conformable to Advanced Social Thought.
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