Given the (this isn’t the right word) success of the last Roundup, this may become a semi-regular feature.
Headline Catholic College Students Push Expanded LGBTQ Acronym
Longtime readers know these “Catholic” students are far behind us. Why, it was three full years ago we opened betting on the next “orientation” letter. Even then, we were at LBGTQAI, more or less.
The student government at the College of the Holy Cross is pushing an expanded acronym in place of LGBT or LGBTQ: “LGBTQIAP+.”
The acronym stands for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, queer/questioning, intersex, asexual, pansexual,” and all the other non-heteronormative, non-cisgendered among us (that’s left-wing-speak for heterosexual people).
Defining yourself by your sexual desire is an axiom with these folks. You are your lust. It defines your existence. Since lust is endlessly various, it follows there must be a limitless supply of letters with which to express these lusts. People will not be satisfied with having their individual lust lumped into a “+”. Too degrading and existence denying.
English has far too few letters, I’m afraid. We could append Greek and Cyrillic, but we’d still fall shy. The only solution is numbering. Problem here is, even though there are an infinite supply of numbers, campus knotheads would immediately fall to arguing over precedence. Who gets “1”, sodomy or dog lovers? What an ugly fight it would be!
I’m out of ideas. What are yours?
Headline Why Colleges Have a Right to Reject Hateful Speakers Like Ann Coulter.
Before we begin, I want to remind readers that I have not received any invitations to speak at graduations this year. Again. The mind boggles.
As graduation season approaches, colleges across the country are locking down commencement speakers to address the class of 2017. Harvard got Mark Zuckerberg (a Harvard dropout). Hillary Clinton is speaking at Wellesley, Bernie Sanders at Brooklyn College. Joe Biden will speak to my seniors at Colby.
This was the opening, to prove that there are worse things than being uninvited.
When departments or groups arrange for a speaker, invitations are usually authorized by small committees or localized administrative offices without a campus-wide discussion or debate.
Do you see? Do you see? Campus-wide discussion. To this writer, a professor, the campus a monolithic entity, a modern-day monastery. Of course the campus should speak with one voice against the heresy of Reality!
Understanding this sequence of events is crucial, because no-platforming is as much a function of process as of politics. Instead of community-wide discussion and debate over the merits of bringing a given speaker to campus, the debate happens after the invitation, giving the misleading impression that no-platforming is about shutting down speech. Indeed, when savvier campus groups deliberately choose controversial speakers, they’ve already won half the battle by getting the speaker approved. After that, every value judgment against the speaker, however thoughtful, reasonable, or prudent, becomes an attempt to silence the speaker and “shield students from scary ideas.”
If you didn’t have it before, you have it now. The writer premises his argument on the belief that there is only one set of acceptable views, and that, sometimes, heretics and rogues sneak one past the goalie. These heretics and rogues, the author later implies, should be stopped. Bad invitations should never happen.
And this, you might be surprised to learn, I agree with. Heresy should be barred. Thus, the author is right that there is only one truth, and that it should be defended at all costs. He’s only wrong in thinking he’s identified it. The author, like the majority on campuses today, are all staunch realityophobes. If they thought the politics warranted it, they would deny the sun rises in the east. Campus disinvitations (their word) are not wrong because “free speech” is sacrosanct. They are wrong because they are removing the chance for students to hear the capital-T Truth.
Headline Violence, repression, and freedom
Jim (the author) is a fellow gloomier than I, and perhaps too (um) Freudian in some of his analyses (I don’t believe he’s Christian). But here he is right. Campus realityophobia and allied violence are driving people to the alt-right.
Today, if you support freedom of speech and the right to peaceably assemble, you are a nazi. So, what the hell, you had better ally and organize with actual unironic nazis. George Soros is a Jew, and he is providing your enemies with military grade pepper spray and restricted explosives, so if the Nazis say “the Jews” are doing this, why split hairs with them?
Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly was always a lie, sometimes, as in our past, a little white lie. Sometimes, as at present, a great big blatant arrogant lie. There is always a state religion, and you can never commit lese mageste against the state religion and its symbols…
The trouble is that our official unofficial state religion has open entry into our officially unofficial inquisition, the social justice warriors, with the result that it is intrusively developing a line on everything — not only race and sex but fatty foods and global warming, so that the necessary restrictions on freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of association have become alarmingly intrusive and aggressive.
Punchline: “Repression is ramping up not because we used to have freedom of speech and freedom to peaceably assemble before and now we do not, but because the official belief system is getting ever crazier, and thus requires ever more violence to be enforced.”
Repression is ramping up because too many people denied reality and said it could not happen here. Stop blaming the left—the right kept saying it couldn’t happen all the while it was. Denying reality catches up to anyone who does it.
(Those who stood up and tried are exempt from this comment. There were too few of said individuals and apathy won.)
I’m out of ideas. What are yours?
How about Abkürzungsdschungel ?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Abk%C3%BCrzungsdschungel#German
Calm down. Don’t be a defeatist. If you are incapable, and
if fighting is what you want, whoever you are, go out and find a real willing person to fight with and discover some true reality, if you’re hard enough. Calmness isn’t weakness.
Still waters run deep.
Here’s a dichotomy:
Either
1 Don Quixote…a la Nik Kershaw and the Tweaters;
Or
2 “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.”
Keats also says something about irritably reaching for fact and reason which the tempestuous should drink in deep. It refers to poetic composition but has been twisted by ‘relativists’ and their accusers.
He was the first and only person to use the term in describing the art of describing the unreachable, the unknown, where fear, mystery, doubt reside.
2 and Keats or similar, are the way to go, just a suggestion.
Years ago I read a book on the psychological origins of political correctness and the author pointed out that when you become PC you have to deny reality and live in fantasy land. The PC also claim to be oppressed and persecuted. If you don’t believe that just look at some of the feminist literature. People that don’t have a firm grasp of reality and believe they are being persecuted are commonly called paranoid schizophrenic. It’s no wonder they act crazy.
Ray,
Someone who believes they are persecuted has what some might call a persecution complex. *outside of actual persecution* A type of neurosis, an attitude. Someone like don Quixote, for example.
Paranoia is the state of believing you are right without question. it is a word so used in common speech that it has, like many, altered it’s meaning.
A Schizophrenic, paranoid or not, requires a diagnosis, one which is luckily rare in a given population.
Have you ever worked with any?
Feminists are in a class of their own and have themselves chosen their mindset and beliefs. Schizophrenics don’t have a choice, they have a disease.
Political correctness, like all other attitudes are a choice.
The only society worth living in is one in which people are free to say what they will but not without consequences, outside of the law. The law has no place in matters of civil freedom of speech. This is why the right and the left have become hysterical over PC.
If this means trampling on the deepest held beliefs and feelings of others. It does not, however mandate feeling trampling!
and it does not mean that good sense, sensitivity and honour, have less value than in a tyranny where people are not free to express their thoughts.
During the rise of Nazism, not all Germans were true believers, but there came a tipping point after sufficient power had been consolidated that to openly disagree would be to risk your life. The prevailing thought became “I must go along to get along”. We in the U.S. have not yet reached that tipping point (shown in part by the election of Trump) but I believe we are getting closer every day as more and more young people adopt that view. The best legacy we conservatives can leave our beloved country is to mentor young people in an effort to slow or reverse this trend.
“tipping point”. Where have we heard that before?
The left thinks thy’ve spotted nazis.
The right thinks the’ve spotted nazi style threats!
While Trump is in charge you’ve got no worries!
He has been the first in the line of the anti PC brigade and look what reaction he received from the virtuous religious right!
Trump breaks the ice and the rest sail long behind like swans, all innocent.
I don’t know any Trump songs. *trump’s a rude word in England.*
I prefer the nuke’s from space joke.
There is this, in lieu of a Trump song:
“I whistle down the wind”
“No cacher in the rye can help you from yourself…”
Guaranteed to irritate just about everybody. Non religious and the righter than right, those without humour and those who hate ‘happy’.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ace+of+base+flower&bext=msl&atb=v72-1&ia=videos&iax=1&iai=sdc_6YvJfFo
“There is always a state religion, and you can never commit lese mageste against the state religion and its symbols…”
This is a point made by Juan Donoso Cortés. He argues, correctly, that every state, even one claiming to be “neutral,” is in fact a confessional state. In the U.S., while there was still an abundance of desirable land, religious minorities could keep pushing west (mainly) and more or less be left alone. There was something of a tacit agreement held by governments at various levels accepting this. Now, however, the enforced Laicité of the State has become increasingly manifest and heavy-handed.
Perfectionist communities were still forming, on the East coast, well after the West began to open. Oneida lasted until the late 1870s, (and made our silverware until recently). One of the issues that plagued them was; At what age should children be initiated into sexual activity, and by whom?
I just noticed that there are 331 subscribers to this blog. 2 more and were halfway to doomsday !
I’m not sure where to tuck these words but…gotta’ say it someplace. Right now, in Venezuela, there is a maniac, wearing a Napoleon hat (Ok, a Simon Bolivar hat), who would rather plunge his country into a bloody civil war than acknowledge the error of his ideology. MAN UP DUDE!
They are young and stupid.
The only problem is that they don’t know that they’re “young and stupid.”
You propose a conundrum worthy of deep consideration. If human life is to have identifiers for an infinite number of desires, why not expand past simple sexual desires and say that all thoughts, personality traits, physical characteristics and all other potential identifiers be included. Yes, the number of these still reaches infinity, and as you mentioned, letter and number designations are problematic. We do have names, which could conceivably reach an infinite number of potential combinations, if one ignores commonly used patterns that allow names to be pronounced by the human tongue, however even this is insufficient as a name, no matter how long and convoluted will never quite cover all of the potentials. Consider that at any moment, your thoughts, desires and personality traits etc… are potentially changing or responding to various stimuli. What then does one do in this reality? Change your name every second of the day? No, the bureaucrats involved can’t possibly accommodate such requests, nor can my computer keyboard accommodate the backlog of name changes I have undergone just typing this comment. Perhaps we should just know that we are individuals and our identifying characteristics are unmeasurable. This would save the trouble of organizing your identity by various methods while satisfying the need to have some kind of identity. Also, I don’t have to get lumped in with all sorts of others who share common letters with me despite having little in the way of comparable traits.
I used to do drugs.
I care little if people want to make fools of themselves but it truly wrenches my thrifty soul to think that we, as taxpayers and parents, have to support this nonsense. Possibly some law firm that puts integrity first could aid in a legal action against this insanity where possible.