Thursday, January 26, 2023

Constructs



When competition is working as a process, some competitors are almost certain to be hurt. Those for whom equality is not just an ideal but a dogma simply cannot accept this. Sinister theories are one result of their attempts to reconcile their dogma with a reality that repeatedly mocks it.--Sowell

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“If you undertake to divide all these appropriations and have many committees where there ought to be but one, you will enter upon a path of extravagance that you cannot foresee the length of or the depth of, until we find the treasury of the country bankrupt.”--Samuel Randall in 1885

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There’s always been an irony in the haughtiness of America’s coastal elites. These people look down on Middle Americans and their cranky beliefs – they ‘cling’ to religion, as Obama infamously said – and yet they themselves hold far wackier views. They think there’s a hundred genders. That racism is the original sin of the United States that will never be washed away. That whites must engage in the self-mortification of checking their privilege. And that climate change is Mother Nature’s punishment of mankind for his hubristic industrial antics. That last one is positively pre-modern. It makes the other religions in the US look perfectly sane.--O'Neill

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Constructs

According to a recently released report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, a center-right think tank that researches partisanship in academic and scientific fields, almost 40 percent of students at liberal arts colleges identify as LGBTQ.

The data used to compile the report show that overall 23 percent of U.S. college students identify as LGBTQ

At three of the 159 campuses surveyed, a majority of students identified as LGBTQ. This was true of 51 percent of students at Oberlin, 61 percent at Wellesley, and an incredible 70 percent at Smith College. The latter two are women-only schools.

What could this mean? We are strong enough to forge ourselves in any identity? We are shallow and rootless enough that any soil is nourishing? Identity is as thin as a chameleon's color? Are identities a simple matter of belief? Or declaration? And, if so, what about other doctrines?

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