Slovakia celebrates a Constitution Day on September 1, for the Constitution passed by the Slovak National Council on September 1, 1992.
The Slovaks place their rights provision early in their document, like most American states, and not as amendments, as in the Constitution of the United States of America.
Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution.
It is hard not to miss the ideological left’s inconsistency regarding “diversity”: demanding diversity of race and gender, they enforce a monoculture that somehow cannot tolerate intellectual and political competition.
We see this in
That some areas of life are filled with one type of person, and others with a different kind, should shock no one. But the intolerance of this? It has recently become extra extreme on the left: De-platforming, physical attacks on free speech, censuring and firing employees who dare offer facts inconvenient for progressivism. When a senior Facebook engineer attempted to bring in tolerance and diversity, what should have been a non-story received national attention.*
It amounts to a new segregationism.
People are segregating more and more in their communities based on income and culture (see Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort) — despite many of these same self-segregators support for Martin Luther King’s civil rights agenda of de-segregation.
Another current trend is shunning. When it was discovered, the other day, that the In-N-Out burger chain had contributed $25,000 to the California Republican Party, the Twitterverse cooked up something special: “#BoycotInNOut — let Trump and his cronies support these creeps” . . . well, that gem is from the chair of the California Democratic Party.
Apparently, this Democratic Party official is demanding separate eating establishments for progressives and conservatives.
But hey, where would I eat?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Arguably, many of the stories we fret about should be non-stories — as in, “none of our business.” But when some people make others’ business theirs, the stories just will not stay local.
On August 31, 1870, educator Maria Montessori was born.
August 31 serves as Independence Day for Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, and Trinidad and Tobago.
Man is always something more than what he knows of himself. He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process…
I’m all for government transparency. But transparent politicians?
The office of New Mexico’s Secretary of State sent out a press release, yesterday, announcing that Secretary Toulouse Oliver “is formatting the 2018 general election ballot to once again include the option for ‘straight party’ voting.”
“The more options people have,” Oliver is quoted for explanation, “the easier it is for more eligible voters to participate — and participation is the key to our democratic process.”
This sounds all very nice and good. More options!
But hers was not a conscientious and noble adoption of a choice-promoting democratic notion. The whole point is to nudge voters to not consider a non-R/non-D alternative — perhaps especially in the state’s contest for the U.S. Senate.
In which former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson is making a not-longshot run.
As a Libertarian.
Though the Secretary of State’s office pretends to be for democracy, I have trouble buying that Ms. Oliver’s motives are non-partisan. Ditto Gary Johnson.
“Pushing voters toward straight ticket voting is a worn-out staple of major party incumbents,” says the candidate, “and flies in the face of the reality that the great majority of voters are independent-minded and don’t need or appreciate a ballot that provides a short-cut to partisanship.”
It’s a standard way to gain, as one Democratic State Senator put it, “partisan advantage in low-information elections.”*
Matt Welch at Reason quotes ballot access expert Richard Winger to show how old a gimmick it is. It’s been on its way out, actually (only nine states sport the “feature”), probably because . . . it’s just so obvious a ploy.
Transparent.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* The partisanship is also not appreciated by the Republican Party of New Mexico, which is suing the Secretary of State.
On August 30, 1918, Fanny Yefimovna Kaplan shot and seriously injured Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Though certainly justifiable on some primary level — evil killers with power probably deserve to be killed in turn — this assassination attempt, like most such, had disastrous consequences, prompting the mass arrests and executions known as the Red Terror.
August 30, 1999, saw East Timor’s referendum vote for independence from Indonesia succeed.
“Political correctness will die as it lived — kicking and screaming ad hominem abuse as a substitute for arguments.”
While statistics are generally unreliable, data about gun crimes often qualify as “anti-data.”
“This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, ‘nearly 240 schools . . . reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting,’” National Public Radio told us yesterday. Like previous stats we’ve seen cited on social media, that seems unbelievably high.
And yes, it is — “far higher than most other estimates,” reporter Anya Kamenetz noted. “NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened.”
Were they fibbing? Well, never underestimate the power of incompetence.
Even that’s harsh: remember that reporting requirements are a burden. And filing bureaucratically-designed forms with the Education Department may be no easier than filing tax returns with the IRS. One of the biggest errors in one school district report resulted from a simple data entry error.
That is not a sophisticated statistical problem, but a simple typo.
Not that there aren’t some difficulties of a not-so-easy-to-understand nature in the story. For one, the degree to which the report was off is said to lie within “the margin of error.”
So, how big was the error, exactly? What’s the number? Well, of the 240 supposed “shootings,” NPR claimed to be “able to confirm just 11 reported incidents.”
Yet the Education Department bureaucrats will only affix an erratum note to their ridiculous report.
Nor will it be withdrawn or replaced, as it should be.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven’t seen them since.