The Purity Paradox: How Tolerance and Intolerance Increase at the Same Time

The explanation below is interesting but I see it as an instance of "Give them an inch and they will take a mile".  Leftists have got a lot of traction and satisfaction out of arguing for more tolerance of various groups.  They have largely succeeded in getting tolerance for homosexuality, for instance. 

But now that good targets for tolerance advocacy have all been used up, they are searching further afield for things to be tolerant of.  They have found arguing for tolerance to be a good racket so are not willing to let it go.

So now even the tiniest infractions are seized on to argue that more tolerance is needed.

So people have indeed become superficially more tolerant but the Left  think the tolerance is still not enough.  It never will be to them

So the cries of intolerance are just Leftist propaganda with very little behind it


How can intolerance be increasing when Western democracies are demonstrably more tolerant of historically marginalised identities than at any point in their history? It is, according to Douglas Murray, “a curiosity of the age” that as racial and sexual tolerance “at the very least appears to be better than it ever was, it is presented as though it has never been worse.” This paradox occurs because, as we address and overcome problems of intolerance and discrimination, we also expand the concept of intolerance to stigmatise new attitudes and behaviours. This makes it appear as if we are either making no progress at all or, worse, that we are becoming more intolerant. The upshot is that social problems appear increasingly irresolvable.

It is, of course, counter-intuitive to think of tolerance and intolerance increasing at the same time. Nevertheless, the idea is supported by a Harvard University study of human judgement, led by Professor Daniel Gilbert. In a series of experiments, Gilbert and his team of researchers showed that “people often respond to the decrease in the prevalence of a stimulus by increasing the concept of it.” He termed this phenomenon “prevalence-induced concept change.” In the first experiment, participants were shown 1,000 dots that varied on a continuum from very purple to very blue and then asked to identify the blue dots. After 200 trials, the number of blue dots was decreased for one group of participants but increased for another. In both cases, participants assessed the number of blue dots to be the same—the group with decreasing blue dots expanded their concept of blue to include dots they had previously excluded. This change was not altered by forewarning participants, by sudden decreases in prevalence, or by reversal in the direction of prevalence.

The same effect was noticed when participants were shown 800 human faces on a continuum of threatening to non-threatening—when the prevalence of threatening faces was reduced in one group, participants expanded their concept of threat to include faces which they had previously defined as non-threatening. In a third study, participants were shown 240 proposals for scientific research that were rated on a continuum from very ethical to very unethical. When the prevalence of proposals defined as unethical were decreased for one group, the group expanded their concept of unethical to include proposals they had previously defined as ethical.

The implications of this research should give us pause for thought across a wide range of social and cultural issues, especially when it comes to assessing the prevalence over time of bias against marginalised groups. There is no doubt that discrimination against people on the basis of race, gender, or sexuality continues, the view that it is increasing is likely to be an effect of prevalence-induced concept change. The concept of what constitutes discrimination has expanded, and as marginalised communities have splintered into mutually antagonistic groups, overall hostility and inter-community tension has been exacerbated.

Tests for the detection of “unconscious bias,” such as the Harvard Implicit Association Test (IAT), have played a significant role in the emergence of this paradox, and the IAT’s methods have been widely adopted. For example, the UK Government established a programme of diversity training to unearth unconscious biases in participants. So, even as people become more tolerant of racial and gender differences they find themselves condemned for intolerance so deeply buried they were not even aware of it themselves. The theory of intersectionality, meanwhile, now widely embraced in Western universities, has generated an ever-expanding “matrix of oppression.” In search of a solution to the resulting tsunami of newly discovered prejudice, the number of oppressors—from white cis-gendered men to “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists”—proliferates, resulting in a feedback loop of exclusion, distrust, and resentment.

As concepts of discrimination and bias expand, the aggressive policing of behaviours increases in an attempt to rid society of all remaining prejudice. At the University of Sheffield in England, students were paid by the university to monitor the language of their fellow students for evidence of “microaggressions” that may unintentionally cause offence to a racial group. This inevitably leads to the needless demonisation of tolerant, liberal students as intolerant unconscious racists. And as the concept of intolerance increases in this way, tolerant behaviours and attitudes struggle to keep up. Like the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, we have to run faster just to stand still.

The outcome of all this is rampant no-platforming in universities and colleges, necessitated by the assumption that if people can’t be reformed then they must be silenced instead. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead described the University of Chicago as “the one place I have been that is most like ancient Athens.” He would doubtless have been disappointed to learn that protests derailed plans to invite Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, to participate in a debate on campus. Although the event did not take place, the professor who invited him remarked, “whether you like his views or not, he seems to have understood something about America that I’m curious to learn more about.”

Similar culture wars are escalating around gender. British author J.K. Rowling was showered with spiteful invective simply for being “deeply concerned about the consequences of the current trans activism.” The Indian feminist Vaishnavi Sundar had the screening of her film pulled because she objected to pre-op transwomen sharing shelters and bathrooms with female survivors of sexual violence. Her sins were compounded by her belief that biological sex is not a social construct. Compare this kind of behaviour to the philosophy of Ira Glasser, a liberal Jew and former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Glasser recently described the banning of speakers with racist views as “the most politically stupid thing I had ever heard.” As head of the ACLU, he had defended the right of neo-Nazis to march through a largely Jewish neighbourhood of Chicago on the grounds that “what happened in Germany didn’t happen because there was a good First Amendment there. It happened because there wasn’t.”

How can we encourage kind and decent people to become ever-more tolerant when they are vilified no matter what they say or do because the concept of intolerance keeps expanding to swallow their good intentions? Our desire for greater equality and inability to acknowledge progress are spinning us into a purity spiral—as new layers of intolerance are uncovered, coercive corrective measures increase in ferocity. Left unchallenged, this takes us to ever-more dangerous places. As Simon Schama explains in his magnificent study of the French Revolution, “the violence that made the Revolution possible in the first place created the brutal distinctions between Patriots and Enemies, Citizens and Aristocrats, within which there could be no human shades of grey.”

Allergy to ambiguity and nuance and to the complexity of human experience makes impossible demands of the individual. This in turn results in rising levels of frustration and recrimination because somebody has to pay the price for failure. “Il faut du sang pour cimenter la révolution” (“There must be blood to cement the revolution”) cried Mme Roland at the height of the French Revolution only to find herself arrested and guillotined a short time later. When justified campaigns for racial justice and gender rights adopt this same approach, they are fuelling the very forces they claim to oppose.

“My ultimate objection to political correctness,” English writer, actor, and comic Stephen Fry has observed, “is not that it combines so much of what I have spent a lifetime loathing and opposing: preachiness (with great respect), piety, self-righteousness, heresy-hunting, denunciation, shaming, assertion without evidence, accusation, inquisition, censoring… My real objection is that I don’t think political correctness works… (It) is always obsessed with how right it is, without thinking of how effective it might be.”

By relentlessly expanding the concept of intolerance, prevalence-induced concept change ensures none of us can ever be good enough—if we pass one test of tolerance, we are sure to fail the next. Meanwhile those who believe they do not have to change, wait—endlessly and in vain—for the world to change around them. The Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, understood clearly where this cycle takes us. Benjamin, who committed suicide as he fled Nazi persecution, wrote about the Angel of History whose “face is turned toward the past”:

Where we perceive a chain of events, [the angel] sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Benjamin’s logic is poetic and flawless in its illustration of a history of accumulated horror. As we disappear down the rabbit hole of identitarianism, hostile groups magnify existing divisions and manufacture new ones. But as we bask in the warm feeling of being good and right (and every identity group is always good and right), we should be wary of making ever-more exacting demands for tolerance which, by their very nature, can never be satisfied. The only way to “make whole what has been smashed” is to identify a common humanity that can obviate these divisions.

Prevalence-induced concept change seems to be a hardwired human trait, common to us all. Left unchecked, it will sow irresolvable division. If we are to attain a greater measure of social justice, we would do well to look at ourselves first and rescue our shared humanity from whatever sex, race, or culture we believe we belong to. Seeing the “Other” in myself, seeing in ourselves the things we dislike most in others, is a prerequisite to freeing the individual from the prison of the group. It means sacrificing moral purity in order to be effective in tackling intolerance.

SOURCE 








A Tale of Two Monuments

Virginia Governor Ralph Northam has ordered the removal of the monument to Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue in Richmond. The social and political significance of this is different from what many (perhaps most) Americans, educated in our politically correct government schools, think it will be. Let’s compare the meaning of the Lee monument to its most famous counterpart, the Lincoln Memorial.

The Lee monument means different things to different people, but history is history, and one thing the monument stands for is the act of defiance against the central state that occurred when the Southern states seceded from the union. Nineteenth-century Southerners were the only group in American history to ever seriously defy what they believed to be unconstitutional dictates of Washington, D.C. They took seriously the Jeffersonian dictum in the Declaration of Independence that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and whenever government fails, in their opinion, to promote their happiness, they have a duty to abolish that government and replace it with a new one. The U.S. government responded to Southern defiance by waging total war on the entire Southern population, which led to the death of one-fourth of the adult male population and some 50,000 civilians according to historian James McPherson.

Past generations of Southerners revered Robert E. Lee because he successfully defended Richmond for three years from the kind of looting and burning that occurred in Atlanta, Columbia, and many other Southern cities and towns. In his book, What They Fought For: 1861–1865, James McPherson concluded that the typical Confederate soldier believed he was fighting against an invading army that would loot and burn his town and threaten his family and friends; the typical Union Army solder thought he was fighting for “the flag” and “the Union.”

The Lincoln Memorial is a monument honoring the government’s waging of total war against its own citizens to prevent acts of defiance and to deter them in the future. As H. L. Mencken remarked in a critique of the Gettysburg Address, it was Southerners who were fighting for the consent of the governed; the North was fighting against it.

Lincoln did not invade the South to free the slaves. Both President Lincoln and the U.S. Congress informed the world in 1861 that the war had nothing to do with slavery. In his first inaugural address, Lincoln declared, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” In the same address, he also pledged his support for a constitutional amendment—the Corwin Amendment—that would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with slavery. It read: “No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said state.” It had already passed the Republican-controlled House and Senate and was ratified by Illinois, Ohio, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Kentucky.

The July 25, 1861, Crittenden–Johnson Resolution, also known as the “War Aims Resolution,” was issued by the House and Senate and declared that “this war is not waged on our part” for any “purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of the States,” by which they meant slavery. The official purpose of the war was to “save the union” by forcing the Southern states back into it at gunpoint and, most importantly to Lincoln, restoring their federal tax collections (mostly tariffs). In other words, its purpose was to destroy, not save, the voluntary union of the founders and replace it with a coerced union held together by violence.

The Lincoln Memorial celebrates this, above all else, as explained by a National Park Service publication entitled “Secret Symbol of the Lincoln Memorial” by Nathan King. The “true meaning” of the Memorial is represented by a “ubiquitous symbol” that is all over it. That symbol is the “fasces,” a “bundle of rods bound together by a leather thong.” The fasces (where the word “fascism” comes from) were used by Roman emperors as a “symbol of power and authority,” according to this U.S. government publication.

The rods of the fasces “suggest punishment by beating” and the axe “suggests beheading” of those who disobey the emperor’s orders. “Power, strength, authority [of government], and justice” are what the fasces mean. They represent “the power and authority of the state over the citizens.” Lest Americans be repulsed by such authoritarian and, well, fascist language, the article contends that the fasces were “Americanized” by placing an eagle above them all around the Lincoln Memorial.

So, according to the U.S. government, the “true meaning” of the Lincoln Memorial is essentially that the American people are no longer the masters but rather the servants of their own government. Government’s “just powers” are no longer dependent upon the consent of the governed, but on the opinions of the federal government itself, primarily through its own Supreme Court.

The one unequivocal good that came from Lincoln’s war was, of course, the ending of slavery in 1866 with the Thirteenth Amendment, although Lincoln’s role in passing the amendment has been exaggerated by historians according to Pulitzer Prize–winning Lincoln biographer David Donald. Lincoln’s biggest failure, however, was that the U.S. government did not end slavery the way all other governments of the world (including the northern states in the U.S.) did in the nineteenth century: peacefully. Only in America was there a war that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths associated with the ending of slavery. Following the British model, the North’s financial cost of the war alone would have been enough to purchase the freedom of all the slaves and end the evil institution once and for all, according to historian Jeffrey Hummel.

SOURCE 






What racists and anti-racists have in common

Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility is as committed to racial identity as any of Richard Spencer’s foul ramblings.

Today, racists and anti-racists have something in common. Consider Richard Spencer and Robin DiAngelo. Spencer is a racist arsehole. He is a white supremacist who believes that white people should found an ethnostate, to the exclusion of all ethnic minorities. He spouts disgusting, racist ideas which are built on the notion that white and black people are irredeemably different from one another.

Any right-thinking person would reject Spencer’s racist nonsense. But the starting point that Spencer adopts in arguing for his views is not entirely alien to much that passes for anti-racist politics today. The idea that skin colour is essential to your identity is also important in contemporary anti-racism.

For a clear example of this commonality, consider Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. DiAngelo’s celebrated book has recently returned to the top of the New York Times bestseller list amid the Black Lives Matter protests. The book is frequently recommended as a means of educating white people about racism. Yet its arguments are eerily reminiscent of those made by white nationalists like Spencer, particularly when it comes to its obsession with white identity.

For DiAngelo, being white means a lot. It provides advantages. It bolsters opportunities. It shapes your worldview. White people are the beneficiaries of a system that presumes ‘white’ to be the default and people of colour to be a ‘deviation from the norm’. We are products of relentless ‘racist socialisation’ which embeds a sense of racial superiority from our childhood onwards. ‘White supremacy’ is an ‘invisible system’ which maintains privileges for white people. This is why, to be an anti-racist, you have to acknowledge the advantage you received as a white person in a white-supremacist society.

‘White fragility’ refers to the tendency among whites to become defensive when talking about race. Whites are said to be so used to living in a society which elevates whiteness that they react badly when told they benefit from racism. For DiAngelo, anti-racism begins by understanding that our racial identities are essential parts of who we are.

DiAngelo acknowledges that racism has changed since the civil-rights movement. It is no longer morally acceptable among white society to be seen to engage in racism. This, at least, is borne out by statistics. Research collated by the University of Illinois finds that ‘one of the most substantial changes in white racial attitudes has been the movement from very substantial opposition to the principle of racial equality to one of almost universal support’. This change in attitude appears to affect almost every social issue. In 1942, just 32 per cent of whites agreed that whites and blacks should attend the same schools. In 1995, 96 per cent of whites agreed. In 1944, only 45 per cent of whites agreed that blacks should have ‘as good a chance as white people to get any kind of job’. By 1972, almost all whites agreed. Many of the questions that used to be asked in racial-attitude surveys are no longer asked at all because the responses are so overwhelmingly in favour of racial equality.

Does this mean white people have become less racist? Not for DiAngelo. She claims that the civil-rights movement merely forced racism to change its form. White people are now ‘colour-blind racists’. In fact, it is those people who believe they are not racist, those who may have black friends or loved ones and who believe themselves to be progressive, who are likely to ‘do the most daily damage to people of colour’, she argues.

Remarkably, DiAngelo explicitly denies that millennials are any less racist than preceding generations. In one of her boldest claims, she suggests that ‘racism’s adaptations over time are more sinister than concrete rules, like Jim Crow’. She seriously alleges that the ‘adaptations’ that racism takes today are more sinister than the system of laws that explicitly segregated blacks from whites.

Of course, there are huge issues with race in America. DiAngelo is on strongest ground when pointing to ongoing issues of economic segregation and how this impacts on what white America considers to be ‘normal’. But rather than interrogate the causes of these economic problems, she presents scant and misleading evidence of ‘white supremacy’ as the cause of racial division. She points out that ‘79 per cent of teachers in the US are white’. When you break the figures down (DiAngelo doesn’t), you find that in the 2011-2012 school year (the most recent year surveyed by the Department for Education) nine per cent of teachers were Hispanic, seven per cent were black and two per cent were Asian. In the period between 1987 and 2011, ethnic-minority teachers in the US increased overall from 13 per cent to 18 per cent, though the portion of black teachers decreased at the same time. It is hard to see how this is explicable by ‘white supremacy’ alone. In the words of left-wing political scientist Adolph Reed Jr, ‘disparity is an outcome not an explanation’. By pretending that ‘white supremacy’ can explain all the economic and political issues facing black Americans, DiAngelo ignores the wider political and economic context in which these disparities arise.

But DiAngelo is not attempting a serious consideration of the problems that affect black people in America. She is only attempting to make white people able to appear more virtuous. She is not attempting to persuade, but to indoctrinate white people into woke politics. In her final chapter, titled ‘Where do we go from here’, her advice to white people is to ‘show you can do the work’ to understand your own racism. Not to go out and change things. Not to think about the real social and political problems facing Americans. But rather to self-flagellate about one’s own prejudices. White Fragility is essentially a self-help manual which encourages white people to tolerate an unequal world rather than do anything about it.

This is why DiAngelo is particularly uncharitable to those who claim ‘not to see race’. She cites the passage in Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech to the March on Washington, in which King argued that people should be ‘judged by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin’. DiAngelo claims that white people ‘seized on’ this line of King’s speech in order to avoid having to think about race at all (when, in her view, we should be thinking about it all the time). This is why refusing to see race is apparently racist: it ignores the system of white supremacy that still delivers privilege to white people. Ignoring our inherent racism allows racism to be held in place.

But to suggest that whites ‘seized on’ King’s sentiment to avoid talking about race underplays the significance of what King was arguing. DiAngelo acknowledges that it was American elites who ‘invented race’ in order to disrupt social solidarity among working-class blacks and whites. Today, many of the problems which feature at the centre of the Black Lives Matter movement are shared across the American working class. King’s point, which was echoed throughout his later life, was that class solidarity had the power to transcend racial difference. It is not ‘denying the reality’ of race to suggest that poor black people may have more in common with poor white people than they do with middle-class black people. By fixating on ‘whiteness’ as the route of all the problems facing black Americans, DiAngelo discounts the possibility that solidarity in the face of common problems can be more powerful than racial identity.

This is why DiAngelo and Richard Spencer have something in common. Both share the view that white and black people struggle to transcend their narrow racial identity. Both believe that whites and blacks will struggle to find common ground because their experiences of the world are so fundamentally different. Both racists and anti-racists today doubt our capacity to leave racial identity behind. They want us in a never-ending, inward-looking cycle of self-abasement and victimhood.

This is not a model of anti-racism we should adopt. Real anti-racism should start with the idea that we can work through our common experiences to change the world around us. It should start with the idea that genuine solidarity allows us to create an identity that is bigger than the colour of anyone’s skin. It’s a simple idea, but it is downplayed or ignored by many purported anti-racists today.

SOURCE 






Western liberalism actually rests  on Christianity’s rock

The horrible death of George Floyd at the hands of a brutal policem­an in Minneapolis is producin­g very diverse reactions. One is a wholly good sense of human solidarity across racial lines. Such a response, that race is incidental to humanity, of no consequence in determining a person­’s worth, has no power to diminish human dignity, is a wonderfu­l response, and expresses traditional liberalism. This require­s the law to have no consideration for race, which means justice for every human being regard­less of race. Seeking that autho­r­ities live up to this is a necessary ambition.

But a good deal of reaction is heading down the destructive road of identity politics. Identity politics attacks the universalism which is the heart of liberalism.

Rejecting this universalism for an ideology which elevates race, gender, sexual orientation or some other features into the central ­organising principle in politics and culture is a disastrous wrong turn.

One reason we are in danger of taking this doleful path is the decline in Christianity as the animating inspiration of public culture.

It is worth understanding that the universalism of liberalism, indeed­ the whole of Western liberalism itself, is entirely a subset of Christian moral thought and develop­ment. One thing our culture rightly does is elevate and revere the experience and testimony of victims, especially powerless victims. This was not the way in the pre-Christian, ancient world. The humiliation and death by crucifixion of Jesus, both man and God, put a divine face on human suffering. It gave the suffering an unimagined dignity.

The Jewish scriptures of the Old Testament had already introduced a novel universalism. God created humanity in his own image. This elevated the status of humanity to a level it had never known. It was also a statement of the universality of humanity.

The Old Testament is assuredly the story of the Jewish people and the nation of Israel, but it is also the story of God’s relationship with all humanity, beginning with creation.

God does not create one race or another. He creates human­ity. Throughout the Old Testament, there are many ­statements of the universality of God and the universality of the human condition.

It is worth noting that African slaves in America took great inspir­ation from the experience of the Jewish people when they were enslaved in Egypt. The great black spiritual songs emerge in part from this inspiration.

The most radical statement of Christian universalism comes from Paul, in his letter to the Gal­atians: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, there is no longer male or female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

The Christian concept of the natural law over time became ­universal human rights. At every step of history, many Christians have dishonoured their teachings with their behaviour. But equally many Christians have lived out their beliefs.

My point though is the intellectual and political development of liberalism. Everything we like in modern liberalism is a direct expressio­n of Christian teaching and thinking. The idea of human­ity changed fundamentally after Jesus. Instead of being primarily considered as a member of a family­, or tribe or nation, each individua­l was seen to have been created individually in the likeness of God, to possess an immortal soul and to be in a personal relationship with the living and eternal God. This meant that individuals had rights and obligations: the rights of nations and tribes were of a much lesser order.

The most important book in understanding the basis of modern Western society is the work of ­Oxford scholar Larry Siedentop: Inventing the Individual, The Orig­ins of Western Liberalism. He writes: “The Christian conception of God provided the foundation for what became an unprecedented form of human society. Christian moral beliefs emerge as the ultimate source of the social revolution that has made the West what it is.”

Siedentop argues that by the later parts of the Middle Ages Christians had thought through and begun to try to implement all the foundations of modern liberalism. It was a long and conscientious process. Third-century Greek theologian Origen confirmed the free will of every human being to choose between good and evil. Another third-­century theologian, Tertullian, in Carthage, affirmed religious ­liberty. Christianity produced a pro-woman sexual revolution. Marriage became for the first time an institution of mutual love and mutual consent. Christians didn’t kill their female babies. Benedictine monasticism, when it came round in the sixth century, was radically egalitarian and democratically self-governing — the monks chose their abbot.

Some Christians owned slaves but there were always fierce Christian voices, including popes, denouncing­ slavery. A fourth-­century bishop, Gregory of Nyssa, denounced a man who had bought slaves. He thundered: “For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth the price of this human nature? God himself would not reduce the human race to slavery since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, recalle­d us to freedom.”

Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century developed a full understanding of the sovereignty of human conscience. The church, seeking independence from princes and the state generally, gradually divorced the concepts of sin and crime. The church could pronounce on sin, the state on crime. Internal church government, which had to be universal among church members, led governments of states to also became universal in their jurisdictions, rather than leaving power, often abso­lute, in the hands of local lords.

Liberalism was not invented in a minute and the Enlightenment thinkers often given credit for it were mostly Christians and used Christian moral categories and concepts. The question now is whether liberalism can survive the total severing of its connections with its Christian roots. I have the most serious doubts. Liberalism survives for a while because the first generation or two are imbued with Christian moral concepts and traditions. But eventually it goes crazy, as it is demonstrably doing now.

Without Christianity, there is nothing absolute for liberalism to anchor itself to, so its very practice of tolerance can easily morph into intolerant ideological demands. The various impulses of liberalism always need to be integrated in a genius of balance. But when there is no overarching transcendent belief, there is nothing to provide this balance. Each impulse runs to extreme, often absurd, excess, which is why so many notionally liberal commentators have endorsed viole­nce in the recent protests.

This crisis of liberalism is a crisis­ in the heart of our civilisation. It is a vacuum where there should be belief.

SOURCE 

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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