Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one’s ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self.
Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good (1968).
There isn’t just one point; it takes time to learn. You don’t have to be intelligent, but I think you have to be open to possibilities and willing to explore. The only stupid people are those who are arrogant and closed off.
Edward de Bono, as interviewed by Angela Balakrishnan in “Edward de Bono: ‘Iraq? They just need to think it through,’” The Guardian (Monday, April 23, 2007).
On May 22, 1995, in U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Arkansas’s congressional term limits law, 5-4, overturning the congressional term limits then the law in 23 states: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.
Other May 22 events include
I am no longer sure this was ever correct, and am confident it doesn’t apply to American politics now.
First off, the enemy of conservatives may have been “liberals” 150 years ago. But not now. The proper word is “progressive,” not “liberal,” and to those who follow the to and fro of substantive policies, the most classically liberal people right now are conservatives.
And “conservatives” is not the right word, either, is it? Progressives hate hate hate the dominant strain in the Republican Party, the Trumpians. Well, Trump isn’t now, nor has he ever been, a “conservative,” though some of his actions during his term in office, were more conservative than any other Republican president of our time. What Trump and his followers now oppose is the “insider-ism” of big government, with Democrats constituting the dominant force of the administrative state and, yes, the Deep State. That is the nature of
Another problem with Krauthammer’s Law is that progressives have always looked upon conservatives and decentralist populists in the dread Republican Party as both evil and stupid.
But it’s worse: both sides, today, look upon the other as both stupid and evil.
The real question then, to anyone who ideologically distances himself from leaders on both sides, is to discern whether both sides are right about each other.
And, it follows, wrong
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.
C. S. Lewis, “Bulverism,” reprinted in God in the Dock (1970).
On May 21, 1851, slavery was abolished in Colombia, South America.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will no longer require applicants to make DEI statements.
MIT President Sally Kornbluth says the school can “build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they
Correct on both counts, but a bit blah as indictments go. And inadequate. Forget “inclusive.” This is merely a pledge to refrain from being arbitrarily exclusionary.
But the new policy is better than the status quo.
DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) may sound innocuous, at worst pointless. But DEI guidelines have functioned as a particularly odious form of ideological litmus test. The goal has been to force instructors to toe certain leftist (or collectivist) ideological lines as if the ideas imposed were as self-evidently true as declarations that the cloudless sky is cerrulian blue.
For example, if you dare disagree that race-conscious “antiracist” policies making skin color — and maybe also “gender” — more important than quality of work or some reliable leading indicators of productivity, your views may put you on the wrong side of the DEI divide.
So MIT’s dropping of mandatory DEI-fealty statements is a big step in the right direction. By as prestigious an institution of higher learning as any in
The bad news?
MIT has apparently not fired the “diversity deans” that it hired in 2021 — and hired not on the basis of excellence of qualifications: serious plagiarism complaints have been filed against two of
If MIT retains six “diversity deans” in place, able to run around causing trouble for those faculty who reject DEI edicts, it hasn’t purged itself of the poison quite yet.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Virtue is the fount whence honour springs.
Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. IV. iv.
French economist and co-winner of the first (1901) Nobel Prize for Peace, Frédéric Passy (pictured above), was born on May 20, 1822.
English economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill was born exactly 16 years earlier.
Rather early in pandemic there appeared a set of conspiracy theories to the effect that Great Britain’s National Health Service had used the coronavirus plague as an excuse to kill old people, thus pumping up the numbers of COVID deaths and fanning the flames of the pandemic panic while also thinning out the aging herd, relieving stress upon the medical system — which was said to be a paramount concern elsewhere, too.
As fuel for this theory were wild tales that the NHS had purchased vast quantities of Midazolam, a drug sometimes used in conjunction with other drugs at end-of-life situations.
What is the state of this accusation?
Well, Dr. John Campbell has been vlogging about Scotland’s COVID-19 inquiry, dealing with widespread malpractice regarding DNR (“Do Not Resuscitate”) orders in the country. Last week, Dr. Campbell provided an overview of where the Midazolam/COVID story is right now:
Note that Dr. Campbell is not taking seriously the extreme version of the Midazolam conspiracy theory, as cooked up early in the pandemic by David Icke. According to this accusation, there never was a new virus, and Midazolam was being used to kill thousands of patients to perpetrate a total fraud.
That theory seems a complete fantasy. But is the weaker version of the theory, where, for reasons not altogether clear, some COVID patients were given up on and “put out of their misery” — against the spirit and letter of the laws, as well as against the Hippocratic oath?
There does appear to be some evidence for that in Great Britain. We will see how this plays out. Though it may look like the fantasied projection of unhinged minds, the anecdotes are piling up, so perhaps we shouldn’t dismiss it at the start of inquiry.
Besides, we know that in several welfare states, Canada especially, euthanasia is all the rage — new subsidies and protocols by government to kill patients by “suicide,” designed (some say) to cut costs.