Author: Redactor

Tolstoy

Friedrich of Prussia said very truly: ‘Everyone must save himself in his own way.’ He also said: ‘Argue as much as you like, but obey.’ But when dying he confessed: ‘I have grown weary of ruling slaves.’ So-called great men are always terribly contradictory: that is forgiven them with all their other follies. Though contradictoriness is not folly: a fool is stubborn, but does not know how to contradict himself. Yes, Friedrich was a strange man: among the Germans he won the reputation of being the best king, yet he could not bear them; he disliked even Goethe and Wieland.

Leo Tolstoy, quoted in Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi, (1919; English, 1920), S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, translators.

Today

Gandhi and Yeltsin

On August 9, 1942, British forces arrested Mahatma Gandhi in Bombay, spurring the Quit India Movement into nationwide action.

In 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin fired his Prime Minister, Sergei Stepashin, and his entire cabinet.

Thought

Francis Hutcheson

The ultimate notion of right is that which tends to the universal good; and when one’s acting in a certain manner has this tendency, he has a right thus to act.
Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy (1755), Book II, Ch. III, No. 12.

Today

Born and Died

Francis Hutcheson, philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment and a great influence on David Hume and Adam Smith, was born in Ireland on August 8, 1694. He died on his birthday in 1746.

Followers of Mahatma Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement against the British rule on August 8, 1942.

On the same day in 1974, President Richard M. Nixon resigned.

Today

Purple Heart

On August 7, 1782, George Washington instituted the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle, an award later renamed “the Purple Heart.”

Illustration: “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” Emanuel Leutze, 1851, Oil on canvas (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), depicting an event in 1776, not 1782.

Thought

Karl Kraus

I have done nothing more than show that there is a distinction between an urn and a chamber pot and that it is this distinction above all that provides culture with elbow room. The others, those who fail to make this distinction, are divided into those who use the urn as chamber pot and those who use the chamber pot as urn.
Karl Kraus, as quoted in Thomas Szasz, Karl Kraus and the Soul Doctors: A Pioneer Critic and His Criticism of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis (Louisiana State University Press, 1976).

links

Townhall: The New Asian Exclusion Act

Post author By Redactor
Post date August 6, 2017
No Comments on Townhall: The New Asian Exclusion Act

Affirmative action isn’t as black-and-white as we were told.

Click on over to Townhall. Come back here for even more shades.

New York Times: Justice Dept. to Take On Affirmative Action in College Admissions
CNN: Justice Dept. pushes back on NYT’s ‘race-based discrimination’ report
CNN: Harvard faces discrimination probe while accepting mostly nonwhite class
Complaint: Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (Harvard Corporation); and the Honorable and Reverend the Board of Overseers
American Immigration Center: Asian American History Timeline
NPR: DOJ Looks Into Whether Harvard Discriminates Against Asian-Americans
Wikipedia: Grutter v. Bollinger
Washington Post: Affirmative action based on income
The Daily Beast: How Affirmative Action Became an Upper-Middle Class Benefit
TNR: Affirmative Action Fail: The Achievement Gap by Income Is Twice the Gap by Race
Kids Count Data Center: Children in single-parent families by race

IMAGE: A soap advertisement from the 1880s,
sub-titled ‘The Chinese Must Go’
Credit: Library of Congress

Today

Jamaican independence

On August 6, 1962, Jamaica became independent of Great Britain. In 1991, on this date, Tim Berners-Lee released files describing his idea for the World Wide Web, and put up the first website, running on a NeXT computer at CERN, in France.

Thought

William Gibson

Dystopia is not very evenly distributed.

William Gibson, in Abraham Riesman’s interview article, “William Gibson Has a Theory About Our Cultural Obsession With Dystopias” (Vulture.com, August 1, 2017)

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