Most men’s conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress: Vol.II, Reason in Society (1905).
On December 11, 1792, King Louis XVI of France was put on trial for treason by the National Convention of the new, revolutionary, République française. His name had been de-sacralized to Citizen Louis Capet, and he was found guilty and then executed in January of the next year . . . by decapitation.
While it’s good that the school won’t hold that zero against her, she deserves a grade — an honest, objective grade — for her work.
Fulnecky did submit a paper, contrary to what is implied by the zero. She did indeed turn in an essay on the topic of “gender, peer relations and mental health” that her class was assigned.
Perhaps the word “gender” has given you the clue. You guessed it: she took the wrong view.
The Washington Post reports that her essay “rejected the concept of multiple genders and cited the Bible to support her view that traditional gender roles should not be considered stereotypes. ‘Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth,’ Fulnecky wrote.”
Turning Point USA, which collected 44,000,000 views for its post about the controversy, has also posted the essay itself.
Whether Samantha Fulnecky’s work precisely follows the requirements of the assignment I don’t know; these have not been posted as well. Though not deathless prose, the essay is intelligible and on the assigned topic, if perhaps annoying to those who, like the transgender professor who assigned the paper, disagree with its Biblical perspective and non-novel view of male and female.
In other words, it’s not nothing.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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It is so difficult to mix with artists! You must choose business men to talk to, because artists only talk of money.
Jean Sibelius, as quoted by Bengt de Törne in Sibelius: A Close-Up (1937), p. 94.
On December 10, 1884, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published. This novel, narrated in the first person by the title character, is a dark comedy of the antebellum South and slavery, and has been considered by more than one literary critic as the “Great American Novel.”
On this date in 1901, the first Nobel Peace Prizes were awarded — to economist Frédéric Passy, co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Union; and to Henry Dunant the founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Passy was an admirer of Richard Cobden and an active member in the French Liberal School of Political Economy that developed in the tradition of J. B. Say, Destutt de Tracy, and Frédéric Bastiat. His published works include Leçons d’économie politique (1860-61); La Démocratie et l’Instruction (1864); L’Histoire du Travail (1873); Malthus et sa Doctrine (1868); and La Solidarité du Travail et du Capital (1875).
Many newly unemployed are unhappy about having to job-hunt. Some complain about having to take jobs from profit-making businesses. Others lament sparse communication from prospective employers.
“When asked about barriers to finding employment, 85% of respondents cited lack of employer response as their primary challenge,” Aparna Rae’s not-very-shocking-at-all Forbes article elaborates. “The irony is stark: a sector built on human dignity subjects job seekers to dehumanizing ‘digital hiring mazes’ where qualified candidates are ghosted after final-round interviews. The disconnect between mission and practice erodes the sector’s moral authority.”
Wow. Dehumanizing to have to . . . look for work (or customers)? Worse because your last job was all about dignity — unlike all those grubby profit-sector jobs or, for that matter, jobs with nonprofits that rely only on voluntary private donations?
“I want to be seen and recognized as a human,” explains one representative job seeker. “The lack of communication and impersonal nature of the hiring process is demoralizing and makes job seekers feel devalued.”
Job hunting can be tough. It’d be nicer if qualified candidates who have been considered but lose out to other qualified candidates were always notified. Sure. But how does failure to do so represent a “disconnect” between mission and practice, and how does it “erode the [nonprofits’] moral authority”?
Job seekers might feel less demoralized if they didn’t take the impersonal aspects of the search so personally.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Le temps est un grand maître, dit-on; le malheur
est qu’il soit un maître inhumain qui tue ses élèves.
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
Hector Berlioz, letter written in November 1856, published in Pierre Citron (ed.) Correspondance générale (1989), vol. 5, p. 390; as quoted by Paul Davies in About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (1996), p. 214.
On December 9, 1958, the John Birch Society was founded in the United States. December 9 also marks the birthdays of
As Reclaim the Net reports, the European Union wants platforms to open themselves to what it calls “independent research.” In practice, this means that “academics and NGOs, often with pro-censorship political affiliations” get special access to the data, “exactly the kind of surveillance the [Digital Services Act] claims to prevent. . . . The EU is angry that X is not policing speech the way it wants.”
My advice to Elon Musk is to shut down X (formerly Twitter) throughout the EU. And refuse to pay the fine.
X’s departure from the EU wouldn’t need to be permanent. For the censors would then have not only X and its uncooperative CEO to contend with; suddenly, a pro-X lobby of millions of Twitterers would be putting pressure on the censors.
The chances of unilateral surrender by the EU? Pretty high. And that’s the only kind of surrender Musk should accept.
If he agrees to even a little EU repression in return for lifting of the fine, that could lead to a total loss for the freedom-of-speech side; the bureaucrats, spies, and busybodies would likely take that seemingly marginal concession and relentlessly work to enlarge it.
Accept only total victory. And be ready to again leave the EU the instant the EU-crats resume their attacks.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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If we understood the world, we would realize that there is a logic of harmony underlying its manifold apparent dissonances.
Jean Sibelius, as quoted in Henry Thomas & Dana Lee Thomas, Living Biographies of Great Composers (1946) p. 309.