KARL D. writes:
I have been on Facebook for the last several years, something which is both a blessing and a curse. It has allowed me to re-connect with people from my past which is a good thing. But on the downside it has allowed me to re-connect with people from my past. I was never a liberal, but I was more of a centrist in my late teens and early 20s.
APPARENTLY, women have never excelled in the field of philosophy because of sexual harassment. See The New York Times's report, which includes this disturbing bit of news: In July, after the sociologist Kieran Healy published a study showing that women made up less than 4 percent of top citations in leading philosophy journals since 1992, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sent out an e-mail asking contributors to make sure that entries do not cite work by white men on a given topic while ignoring prior contributions by women and other underrepresented groups. Such “citation blindness,” scholars say, may be less a result of overt discrimination than of implicit bias, a phenomenon that has generated a rich literature in psychology, but that philosophers are only beginning to study. The dumbing down of philosophy is well underway.
FROM Fox News: Government workers in the city of Seattle have been advised that the terms "citizen" and "brown bag" are potentially offensive and may no longer be used in official documents and discussions. KOMO-TV reports that the city's Office of Civil Rights instructed city workers in a recent internal memo to avoid using the words because some may find them offensive. "Luckily, we've got options," Elliott Bronstein of the Office for Civil Rights wrote in the memo obtained by the station. "For 'citizens,' how about 'residents?'" In an interview with Seattle's KIRO Radio, Bronstein said the term "brown bag" has been used historically as a way to judge skin color. [cont.]
ARS ORANDI posted an excerpt today from St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori’s work Uniformity with God’s Will:
Let us now take up in a practical way the consideration of those matters in which we should unite ourselves to God’s will.
1. In external matters. In times of great heat, cold or rain; in times of famine, epidemics and similar occasions we should refrain from expressions like these: “What unbearable heat!” “What piercing cold!” “What a tragedy!” In these instances we should avoid expressions indicating opposition to God’s will. We should want things to be just as they are, because it is God who thus disposes them. (more…)
MARIO BERGNER analyzes in this video posted at Heteroseparatist.com the psychological forces that led him to feel sexual desire for men and turn to the homosexual life as a young man. He says the overwhelming cause was his weak attachment to his father.
THE negative consequences continue to unfold for Eagles wide receiver Riley Cooper, who did something so heinous he has been fined by the NFL, been widely condemned for an act of singular atrocity and has decided to leave the game for awhile. What did Cooper do? He used the N-word.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Cooper announced today that he is going to leave the team for now and enter counseling:
“The last few days have been incredibly difficult for me,” Cooper said. “My actions were inexcusable. The more I think about what I did, the more disgusted I get. I keep trying to figure out how I could have said something so repulsive, and what I can do to make things better.
The truth is there is nothing he can do. He is a permanent social outcast. He might as well find an island somewhere where he can live out his remaining days in seclusion. Cooper also said:
STEVE KOGAN writes:
The issue of “women’s rights” was almost a century old when Nietzsche cut it to the quick with a five word response: “Feminism: the uglification of Europe.” For years, I found nothing to match its bite until I recently came across the following reminiscence in The Dostoevsky Archive: Firsthand Accounts of the Novelist from Contemporaries’ Memoirs and Rare Periodicals (1997). The account is taken from the memoirs of a Prince Vladimir Meshchersky (St. Petersburg, 1898), a friend of Tchaikowsky’s and the grandson of Nikolai Karamzin, the 18th and early 19th-century historian, whose volumes on Russian history became classics in their time:
At the parties I gave, Dostoevsky showed himself to be a charming person. He told his stories, and he displayed his wit and humor, as well as his unusual and original way of thinking. As a new person entered the room, however, Dostoevsky became silent for a moment and looked like a snail retreating into its shell, or like a silent and evil-looking pagan idol. And this lasted until the newcomer produced a good impression on him…. If the stranger engaged Dostoevsky in conversation, one generally heard him make some rude remark, or saw a sour look on his face.
AT her lovely blog, Resting in Apricity, Casey Ann wrote earlier this summer of her trip to Paris. She was traveling as part of a study abroad program. Below is a snapshot she took in the Louvre. Her tour guide described a group of people protesting homosexual marriage as “the archaic people,” to which Casey Ann took exception.
Apricity, by the way, is the warmth of the sun in winter.
A New Zealand couple who refused to allow two lesbians to sleep in a double bed at their bed and breakfast, as previously discussed here, has formally apologized to the women as part of the settlement of a complaint against them before the New Zealand Human Rights Commission.
HERE is an interesting piece in the New York Times this morning about the rejection of a women’s rights bill in Afghanistan. The article by Azam Ahmed and Habib Zahori (typical bylines for an American newspaper) describes the Muslims who rejected the law, and see it as Western imperialism, simply as “conservatives.” From the piece:
Even in Kabul, one of the most liberal cities in Afghanistan, many young men and women express beliefs that fly in the face of the messages coming from American Embassy outreach efforts. Censorship, particularly when it comes to religious offenses, summons little ire. Many consider democracy a tool of the West. And the vast majority of Afghans still rely on tribal justice, viewing the courts as little more than venues of extortion.