“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.”
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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.
Bfl
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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.