On March 10, 1922, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), Indian activist and theorist of non-violent revolution, was arrested in India, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years in prison, only to be released nearly two years later for an appendicitis operation.
Don’t state the “wrong” opinion while studying at SUNY-Geneseo.
That is, if you want smoothly to sail through your academic career.
Owen Stevens violated the school’s “inclusivity” creed, according to which “a diverse campus community [is] marked by mutual respect for the unique talents and contributions of each individual.”
Would-be future teachers like Stevens, the university contends, must respect “all forms” of gender identity. But he has argued publicly that there are only two sexes or genders (male, female).
“A man is not a woman and a woman is not a man,” said Stevens in one un-inclusive Instagram video. “The biology is clear.”
So, faster than we have time to remember that “academic freedom” was once a hallowed standard of university conduct, he was suspended from the field teaching programs that are a requirement for all education students at the school. Stevens has refused to cooperate with the school’s plan to rehabilitate him.
The toleration and respect promoted by SUNY-Geneseo apparently does not include tolerating and respecting the right of others to express opinions about politics, society, and biology with which a university censor might disagree.
Of course, what constitutes “official” acceptable doctrine keeps changing. One can never know which once obviously untenable claims — about biology or anything else — will suddenly be upgraded to sacred dogma by persons with the power to penalize disagreement.
Regardless of one’s views of transgender contentions, though, Americans should judge a policy of forcing people to salute certain government- (or administrator-) approved conclusions intolerable.
It’s the school administrators responsible for suspending Stevens who should be suspended — or fired — for their conduct.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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March 9 marks the 1763 birthday of British pamphleteer and activist William Cobbett. Cobbett was known for his lifelong opposition to authority, and his later-in-life “radicalism,” which included his opposition to Britain’s protectionist Corn Laws as well as his support for Catholic Emancipation. Cobbett died in 1835.
In 1776 on this date, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith first published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which became the first widely accepted landmark work in the field of economics. It was not the first general treatise on the subject, however; that designation almost certainly belongs to banker Richard Cantillon’s Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général, cited by Smith in his more famous book. It is also worth noting that Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s systematic treatise, Le Commerce et le Gouvernement, also saw publication in 1776.
On March 9, 1862, the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia fought to a draw in the Battle of Hampton Roads, the first battle between two ironclad warships. The Virginia was built on the remains of the USS Merrimack, and the battle is often referred to as between “the Monitor and the Merrimack.”
Universally therefore, virtue is a certain co-adaptation of the irrational parts of the soul to the rational part. Virtue however, is produced through pleasure and pain receiving the boundary of that which is fit. For true virtue is nothing else than the habit of that which is fit. But the fit, or the decorous, is that which ought to be; and the unfit, or indecorous, is that which ought not to be. Of the indecorous however, there are two species, viz. excess and defect. And excess indeed, is more than is fit; but defect is less than is fit. But since the fit is that which ought to be, it is both a summit and a middle. It is a summit indeed, because it neither requires ablation, nor addition; but it is a middle, because it subsists between excess and defect.
Theages, Treatise on the Virtues, found in Iamblichus, Iamblichus’ ‘Life of Pythagoras,’ or ‘Pythagoric Life’ / Accompanied by Fragments of the Ethical Writings of certain Pythagoreans in the Doric dialect; and a collection of Pythagoric Sentences from Stobaeus and others, which are omitted by Gale in his ‘Opuscula Mythologica,’ and have not been noticed by any editor (Thomas Taylor, translator, 1818).
Is it safe yet for big media to tell the truth about China’s virus?
“Beijing’s efforts from the very start of the crisis to hide information, silence whistleblowers, put out false data and thwart any real outside investigation are too extensive to fully recount,” Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin wrote over the weekend, pointedly adding, “the Chinese government’s actions were both reckless and deliberate.”
Leading to many more deaths — the official tally being 2.6 million souls worldwide. So far.
Yes, the Chinese Communist Party leaders are actually “bad folks.”
Last year, though, the media treated candidate Trump’s attacks on China as just so much posturing and blame-shifting. The Post, for example complained of “too much political heat” regarding the pandemic — “some generated by China” and “some by Donald Trump in his attempt to distract attention from his catastrophic pandemic response as president.”
A month ago, a World Health Organization team traveled to China to finally look for the source of the contagion. “International experts investigating the origins of Covid-19,” the BBC reported at the time, “have all but dismissed a theory that the virus came from a laboratory in China.”
It turns out, as the Post explained, “the team lacked the training and forensic skills required to investigate this possibility” and “were under strong pressure from China to steer clear of the subject altogether.” The editorial urged the WHO to renew their investigation and “forcefully insist that China not stand in its way.”
“Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 shattered a fragile understanding between Washington and Beijing,” Rogin had informed readers at the outset of his essay, “and put the most important relationship of the 21st century in the hands of a novice.”
I call that a reprieve.
But the fact that our current prez is an old political pro?
Worrisome.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* There is “no going back to the stance that the Obama administration had taken toward China in 2016,” Rogin argued, “when . . . most uncomfortable issues were swept under the rug.”
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More on the Wuhan Lab angle: “Twelve Monkeys in Charge”
On March 8, 1775, “African Slavery In America,” often described as the first known essay advocating the abolition of slavery in America, was published anonymously in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser. Thomas Paine (pictured) is believed to be the essay’s author.
The first anti-slavery society was formed in Philadelphia weeks after publication, and Paine was a founding member.
Exactly 120 years earlier, a court in Northampton County of the Virginia Colony ruled that John Casor, then working as an indentured servant to Robert Palmer, must be returned to Anthony Johnson as Johnson’s “lawful” slave for life. Ironically, Johnson was one of the original indentured servants brought to Jamestown, had completed his indenture to become a “free Negro” and the first African landowner in the colony. The case marked the first person of African descent to be legally-recognized as a lifelong slave in England‘s North American colonies. The first official chattel slave in English-speaking North America was of African descent, and was owned by a man also of African descent.
Socialism is essentially inimical to family life, which it regards as a bourgeois institution — to use its own favorite anathema. Socialism would make motherhood a State business or profession, would pay women for this sexual function, and deprive fathers of all status or recognition. It would no longer be necessary for a woman to know who was the father of her child. Her children — up to a certain number — would be supported by the state, which would be supreme over their education.
Joseph Hiam Levy, The Outcome of Individualism (Third Edition, 1892), Chapter XII, “Economics and Ethics of Individualism.”
On March 7, 1644, Massachusetts established the first two-chamber legislature in the American colonies.
One hundred thirty years later, to the day, British forces closed the port of Boston to all commerce.
