+

"The running joke is that, while woke capital is outspoken on social justice issues at home, it's utterly cowardly towards China; Apple, for example, removed a Koran app in the People's Republic after an official request. Around the same time that the company released '60 new emojis with a focus on inclusion and diversity,' it refused to allow the Taiwanese flag emoji in Hong Kong." Ed West   "In 1906, he stated the doctrinal position from which he never departed: 'Dictatorship is nothing other than power which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestrained by absolutely any rules, and based directly on force.' The totalitarian Soviet state was built on Leninist principles and, although after the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 it was liberalized to a certain extent, it never became democratic. Described by Khrushchev as an all-people's state, all the components of the political system were elements of the same Leninist dictatorship exercised by one party, the CPSU. The last Soviet Constitution, promulgated in 1977, frequently mentions the full power of the people, but the delusion of democracy was easily punctured by a simple question: why were elections always unopposed?" Dmitri Volkogonov   "We must discipline ourselves to ask whether animals are altruistic without conveying any sense of approval, and we must ask if animals are nepotistic or spiteful without attaching any negative connotations to those terms. We must even be prepared to ask if it is 'good' for an animal to be nepotistic, because by 'good' we mean whether the nepotism increases its biological fitness. This use of language has nothing to do with whether it is good or bad for humans to be selfish, altruistic, nepotistic, or spiteful. We should decide for ourselves what is good and what is bad for humans; human ethics should not be based on what animals do or don't do." Raghavendra Gadagkar   "'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.' Those truths are anything but self-evident. They would have been unintelligible to Plato, to Aristotle, or to every hierarchical society the world has ever known. They are self-evident only to people, to Jews and Christians, who have internalized the Hebrew Bible. And that is what made G.K. Chesterton call America 'a nation with the soul of a church.'" Jonathan Sacks   "Although the magistrate's opinion in religion be sound, and the way that he appoints be truly evangelical, yet if I be not thoroughly persuaded thereof in my own mind, there will be no safety for me in following it. No way whatsoever that I shall walk in, against the dictates of my conscience, will ever bring me to the mansions of the blessed. I may grow rich by an art that I take not delight in; I may be cured of some disease by remedies that I have not faith in; but I cannot be saved by a religion that I distrust, and by a worship that I abhor." John Locke   "Psychological stresses can be produced in many ways. Dogs become disturbed when stimuli are unusually strong; when the interval between a stimulus and the customary response is unduly prolonged and the animal is left in a state of suspense; when the brain is confused by stimuli that run counter to what the dog has learned to expect; when stimuli make no sense within the victim's established frame of reference. Furthermore, it has been found that the deliberate induction of fear, rage or anxiety markedly heightens the dog's suggestibility. If these emotions are kept at a high pitch of intensity for a long enough time, the brain goes 'on strike.' When this happens, new behavior patterns may be installed with the greatest of ease." Aldous Huxley   "Democratic despotism, to Tocqueville's mind, is rarely violent. It would be more extensive and milder than other forms of despotism, and would degrade people without tormenting them. Nor did Tocqueville believe that the right to vote would mitigate this situation. 'It does,' he stated, 'little good to summon those very citizens who have been made so dependent upon the central power, to choose the representatives of that power from time to time. However important, this brief and occasional exercise of free will will not prevent them little by from gradually losing the faculty of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves so that they will slowly fall below the level of humanity.'" Samuel Gregg   "The more routine the perils from which we demand protection, the more frequently will those demands arise. If we confer despotic powers on government to deal with perils, which are an ordinary feature of human existence, we will end up doing it most or all of the time. It is because the perils against which we now demand protection from the state are so much more numerous than they were that they are likely to lead to a more fundamental and durable change in our attitudes to the state. This is a more serious problem for the future of democracy than war." Jonathan Sumption   "McDonald's hooks us by appealing to our bodies' craving for certain flavors; Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter hook us by delivering what psychologists call 'variable rewards.' Messages, photos, and 'likes' appear on no set schedule, so we check for them compulsively, never sure when we'll receive that dopamine-activating prize. (Delivering rewards at random has been proved to quickly and strongly reinforce behavior.) Checking that Facebook friend request will take only a few seconds, we reason, though research shows that when interrupted, people take an average of 25 minutes to return to their original task." Bianca Bosker   "AIDS has both sexes running scared. Research studies now project that one in five—listen to me, hard to believe—one in five heterosexuals could be dead of AIDS in the next three years. That's by 1990. One in five." Oprah Winfrey   "I have not lied before Congress. I have never lied. Certainly not before Congress. Case closed." Anthony Fauci   "Scientific breakthroughs don't care about calendars any more than the virus does. They certainly don't adhere to election cycles. And their timing, their approval, and their distribution should never, ever be distorted by political considerations." Joe Biden   "This is going to take a fight. This is going to be a moment for militancy, everyone, because you cannot have your government attempt to take away your right to control your body. It cannot happen in America. We have to fight it, every one of us." Bill de Blasio   "If we woke up tomorrow and decided to stop moderating content we would end up with a service very few people or advertisers would want to use. Ultimately we're running a business, and a business wants to grow the number of customers it serves. Enforcing policy is a business decision. Different businesses and services will have different policies, some more liberal than others, and we believe it is critical this variety continues to exist. Forcing every business to behave the same reduces innovation and individual choice, and diminishes free marketplace ideals. If instead we woke up tomorrow and decided to ask the government to tell us what content to take down or leave up, we may end up with a service that couldn't be used to question the government. This is a reality in many countries today, and is against the rights of an individual. This would also have the effect of putting enormous resource requirements on businesses and services, which will further entrench only those who are able to afford it. Smaller businesses would not be able to compete, and all activity would be centralized into very few businesses." Jack Dorsey   "Whereas The Federalist asserts that a diversity of interest will always underlie the extended republic, Wilson contended that history would overcome such particularism with an increasing unity of mind. So for him, the latent causes of faction are not sown in the nature of man, or if they are, historical progress will overcome this human nature. With the unity of national sentiment, political questions become less contentious and less important. We cease to concentrate on the question of what should be done, and more on the question of how we should do it. This is the principle behind Wilson's suggestion that the modern age is one of administration, where we seek to find the specific means to achieving the ends that we all agree we want. Government in such an age of unity is not a threat to the individual that has to be checked; rather, the state is an organ of the individuals in society—'beneficent and indispensable,' as Wilson described it. The distinction and tension between the individual and government, a primary feature of early liberalism to which the American founders at least partly subscribed, are made largely extinct by the progress of history. Instead, the state becomes one with the unified will of the people; it becomes the organic manifestation of their spirit." Ronald Pestritto   "What started as casual brutality—class enemies forced to wear ridiculous dunce caps or stand in stress positions—degenerated into outright sadism. On the outskirts of Beijing, where traffic-crammed ring roads now lead to walled compounds with luxury villas, neighbors tortured and killed one another in the 1960s, using the cruelest methods imaginable. People said to be the offspring of landlords were chopped up with farm implements and beheaded. Male infants were torn apart by the legs to prevent them from growing up to take revenge. In a famous massacre in Dao County, Hunan province, members of two rival factions—the Red Alliance and the Revolutionary Alliance—butchered one another. So many bloated corpses floated down the Xiaoshui River that bodies clogged the dam downstream, creating a red scum on the reservoir's surface. During a series of massacres in Guangxi province, at least 80,000 people were murdered; in one 1967 incident, the killers ate the livers and flesh of some of their victims." Barbara Demick   "Following the principle that 'diagnosis determines treatment,' the Walmart program seeks to create a psychological profile of whiteness that can then be treated through 'white anti-racist development.' Whites, according to the trainers, are inherently guilty of 'white privilege' and 'internalized racial superiority,' the belief that 'one's comfort, wealth, privilege and success has been earned by merits and hard work' rather than through the benefits of systemic racism. Walmart's program argues that this oppressive 'white supremacy culture' can be summarized in a list of qualities including 'individualism,' 'objectivity,' 'paternalism,' 'defensiveness,' 'power hoarding,' 'right to comfort,' and 'worship of the written word'—which all 'promote white supremacy thinking' and 'are damaging to both people of color and to white people.'" Chris Rufo   "In the 2022 draft revision of the California Department of Education's 'Mathematics Framework,' the chapter on 'Teaching for Equity and Engagement' includes this language: 'Empowering students with mathematics also includes removing the high stakes of errors and sending the message that learning is always unfinished and that it is safe to take mathematical risks. This mind-set creates the conditions for students to develop a sense of ownership over their mathematical thinking and their right to belong to the discipline of mathematics'—a truly artful way of saying that 'diverse' kids should not be saddled with the onerous task of having to get the actual answers." John McWhorter   "Intellectual debate and the concept of 'rigor' are often seen as the pinnacle—that is, the most ideal form—of intellectualism today in American higher education, a type of discourse that is prioritized and prized in a system that was created by and for white men. There are many other forms of intellectual discourse and knowledge building that don't center on conflict. 'Intellectual debate' is often cited as an ideal for finding truth, but in reality, it is a framework that gives equal weight to two ideas that often are not, in fact, equally worthy of platforming." Phoebe Cohen   "If the intelligentsia's view of life is foreign and hostile to theoretical and aesthetic themes, it rejects and banishes religious themes and values still more forcefully. Anyone who loves truth or beauty is suspected of indifference to the people's welfare and is condemned for ignoring vital needs for the sake of illusory interests and luxurious diversions; but anyone who loves God is considered an outright enemy of the people." Semyon Frank   "Masks hide from view the familiar faces, infectious smiles, and warm glances that bring light and color to everyday life. To dismiss this loss so cavalierly is to devalue human warmth and sociability in a remarkably callous way. In his detailed study of emotions, Charles Darwin observed that human beings' reliance on facial expressions is a key difference between us and animals. He wrote an entire book on the subject, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Communication, according to Darwin, was 'of paramount importance to the development of man.' Human communication is 'much aided by the expressive movements of the face and body,' and the face is 'the chief seat of expression.' Darwin adds that we immediately perceive the importance of facial expressions 'when we converse on an important subject with any person whose face is concealed.'" Jeffrey Anderson   "Imagine we live in a small band of five hunters, our spouses, and two children per couple—twenty people in total. The hunting is difficult, so we hunters only make kills on 5 percent of all days. Consequently, each nuclear family would go without meat for an entire month during one out of every five months, on average. However, if we share our kills, our band will almost never go a month without meat (less than 0.05 percent of months). Interestingly, now that we are sharing, the survival of you and your family will partly depend on me—on my health and survival. If I die, the chances that you and your family go a month without meat will increase by a factor of four. Even worse, my absence increases the chances that one of the other hunters or his spouse will die in the coming years—poor nutrition leads to sickness, etc. If another hunter dies, or leaves the band because his spouse dies, your chances of going a month without meat will increase by 22 times from the original situation, and now the chances of someone else falling ill or dying further escalates. From an evolutionary point of view, social norms like those that create food sharing mean that an individual's fitness—their ability to survive and reproduce—is intertwined with the fitness of everyone else in the band. This entangles even band members who don't directly contribute to each other's welfare: if your spouse nurses you back to health when you are ill, and you share your game with me and my kids, I need to worry about your spouse's welfare." Joseph Henrich   "An aspiring science or engineering major who attends a school where her entering academic credentials put her in the middle or toward the top of her class is more likely to succeed than otherwise identical students attending a more elite school where those same credentials place her toward the bottom of the class. Put differently, an aspiring science or engineering major would be smart to attend a school where her entering credentials compare favorably with those of her classmates." Gail Heriot   "The charge of 'white adjacency' now being leveled at Asian Americans has placed the community in a strange position. During a 2019 New York City Department of Education panel to combat racism, two presenters 'outlined a racial-advantage hierarchy, with African Americans at the bottom and whites at the top,' the New York Post reported. When a mother in attendance, whose adopted daughter is Asian, asked what status Asian Americans held, the presenters informed her they were near the top—close enough in 'proximity to white privilege' to 'benefit from white supremacy,' the mother was reportedly told." Ari Blaff   "Going out into white society for me is a little bit like a beekeeper going to get honey. I know what I'm doing: If I put on the right protection and blow enough smoke, most of the bees will leave me alone and the ones who don't won't really cause me that much pain. But I've got to put on the suit and the hat with the mesh and carry the smoke machine and be careful every time I want some goddamn honey." Elie Mystal   "In the case of Covid-19, we faced a disease that disproportionately affected the elderly, with a vaccine that was also remarkably safe and effective. Therefore, the scientifically appropriate protocol in this case was to prioritize their vaccinations, along with those of first responders. Such a protocol, however, would have disproportionately favored whites, as the elderly in this county are more likely than younger populations to be white. This did not sit well with many in the 'public health' profession, and as a result, the Centers for Disease Control openly considered changing the protocols to vaccinate essential workers first, since the elderly—those most vulnerable to the disease—are disproportionately white. The University of Pennsylvania's Harold Schmidt encapsulated this problematic perspective, telling the New York Times, 'Older populations are whiter. Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.'" Tevi Troy   "An abstract term is like a box with a false bottom; you may put in it what ideas you please, and take them out again without being observed." Alexis de Tocqueville   "None other than Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself described abortion as a way to control 'populations that we don't want to have too many of' in 2014. And in pitching abortifacients to Bill Clinton, Ron Weddington, a co-counsel for the pro-choice advocates in Roe v. Wade, said: 'You can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy, and poor segment of our country. It's what we all know is true, but we only whisper it.'" Nate Hochman   "It is so disagreeable to think ill of ourselves, that we often purposely turn away our view from those circumstances which might render that judgment unfavourable. He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct. Rather than see our own behaviour under so disagreeable an aspect, we too often, foolishly and weakly, endeavour to exasperate anew those unjust passions which had formerly misled us; we endeavour by artifice to awaken our old hatreds, and irritate afresh our almost forgotten resentments: we even exert ourselves for this miserable purpose, and thus persevere in injustice, merely because we once were unjust, and because we are ashamed and afraid to see that we were so." Adam Smith   "Let's recall that she set up a secret server to circumvent government transparency, likely to hide favor-trading related to her bogus foundation. She then repeatedly sent unsecured, classified, and top-secret documents through that illegal server, although she surely knew—or should have known, because, after all, she was the most qualified presidential candidate in history, according to Barack Obama—that it was both risky and illegal. According to the FBI, Clinton sent 110 emails containing clearly marked classified information, and 36 of those emails contained secret information. Eight of the email chains she sent contained 'top secret' information. 'We assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal e-mail account,' James Comey explained at the time." David Harsanyi   "The desirable effect upon one's mind of imaginative literature is not to strengthen one's memory or enlarge one's learning, or to inspire one to gather together a collection of passages from 'great authors'; it is to encourage one to learn the art of becoming a 'great author' oneself; not in the sense of composing a single line, but in the sense of sufficiently detaching oneself from the chaotic spectacle of reality so as to catch on the wing that fleeting loveliness of which no genius has the monopoly and which only the stirred depths of one's own deepest nature can prevail upon to pause in its eternal flight." John Cowper Powys