In my experience, social-media-driven activists have been driven more to hate villains than to love and honor their victims. And the most hated villain is white supremacy.
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As Thomas Paine wrote, “To argue with someone who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”
Children get a wider perspective when they’re tugged out of the here and now for a little while each day. In an enchanted hour, we can read them stories of the real and imagined past.
Bun’s frankness about her own frailties lends her reporting the credibility and moral authority of honesty—the authenticity with which she writes closes the distance between journalist and reader, and her videos transport us into the world she covers.
Brodsky said that when confronted by boredom we should “exact full look at the worst.” He said “When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom.”
Quillette Podcast 10
Appiah is wrong to pretend that distinct civilizations were never a thing.
There’s nothing wrong with teaching Western Civilization or the Western classics alongside other cultural traditions. At the same time, the way Classics used to be taught is gone for good.
“Every human being worships something,” we’re told, whether it’s the movement of the planets, alien civilizations, a political cause, science, or even reason.
Salinger has been posthumously relegated to the limbo of #MeToo-tainted, “problematic” cultural figures, which probably accounts for the awkward half-silence around his centenary.
Progressives and corporations when aligned form a very powerful coalition, so when they combine to restrict speech or behavior they’re likely to be successful.
No one at Wilfrid Laurier University would give me a straight answer about anything. It was a climate of evasiveness and secrecy.
It would be decades before the people fully understood the fraudulence of 1959’s heady idealism, but it was corrupt from the start.