Posted on 12/20/2016 8:14:06 AM PST by Kaslin
A conservative professor decrying the corrosive effects of political correctness on the larger society wrote a recent Letter to the Editor in our local paper. In the letter, the professor compared young people to butter sticks who melt at the slightest rise in temperature. The professor’s brief letter suggested that parents are raising their kids to be hypersensitive and that the universities are making the situation worse, not better. I agree with everything the professor wrote but I believe the situation is much more ominous than that. So I am writing to supplement, rather than contradict, the professor’s astute observations.
Teaching students that they have a right to be unoffended does have an effect I refer to as “reverse Darwinism.” Teaching weak and chronically offended people that they can negate the ideas of other people simply by shouting “I’m offended” does tend to result in weak people suppressing the ideas of stronger people who are unafraid to speak. This results in a phenomenon I also refer to as the “survival of the least emotionally fit.” When the weak silence the strong, weak arguments tend to overtake stronger ones. But this also teaches a valuable lesson to some of the stronger participants in the marketplace of ideas.
Think about it for moment. If you were a strong and aggressive proponent of left wing ideas (and you believed that the ends justify the means) then how would you respond to seeing someone suppress the ideas of others by claiming to be offended? There is a pretty good chance that you would try to manipulate the process by pretending to be offended.
Take the modern social justice warrior/feminist as an example. She stars in The Vagina Monologues one day – talking about her sex organs in public in the most graphic terms imaginable. The next day she is charging someone with sexual harassment for telling a joke - or at Davidson College for simply asking her out on a date. (No, I’m not kidding. At Davidson College “comments or inquiries about dating” are actually defined as sexual harassment).
So which one is it? Is the modern social warrior supposed to be classified as an adult or as a child? The answer depends on who is talking. If she is talking, she is an adult with full First Amendment protection. If someone else is talking, she is a wilting lily in need of protection.
Thus considered, the result of political correctness is twofold: It produces a lot of nominal adults unable to function in the marketplace of ideas without special protection. But it also produces a lot of manipulative sociopaths that seriously threaten the future of our nation.
Do you think I am exaggerating? Well, just take a few minutes to Google the words “students demand” and see what comes up. Here is what you will find:
*George Washington University Students Demand Creation of Sanctuary Campus.
*Berkeley Protestors Demand Spaces of Color.
*Wisconsin Students Demand Ban on Conservative Group.
*Mississippi State Students Demand Removal of State Flag.
And so on.
It is hard to read the endless demands of these students without remembering what happened just over a year ago when all hell broke loose at Yale and Mizzou. At Yale, a student was caught on camera screaming at an administrator while simultaneously demanding “safety.” Students at Mizzou were captured on camera as they were goaded by a professor into using physical intimidation in order to remove members of the press from “safe spaces” located on public university property.
Now we are no longer shocked. This is the new normal. Gone are the days when college administrators tried to pull one over on college students by enforcing policies that violated their rights. Now the students are demanding these policies because they help facilitate a litany of other demands advanced in their endless crusade to control those that they cannot persuade.
Of course, most, though not all, of those demands involve the willful suppression of free speech protected by the First Amendment. But they will keep kicking and screaming until someone gives in to them. They will continue their tirades even if it means scrapping the First Amendment altogether. Force, rather than reasoned argument, is their new means of communication.
It is certainly true that our culture of faux outrage and victimhood is producing a lot of Butters. Unfortunately, it is also producing a lot of Cartmans.
If they are free to create euphemisms to mask their reality, we are free to invoke pejoratives to express our repugnance. Granted, the use of vulgar terms tends to shut down the discussion and is unnecessarily offensive, but it also shows we’re not afraid to offend. And the reality is that liberals will shut down the conversation regardless of the language used. We can’t allow them to dictate the lexicon.
Yes, but I think offending by using precise words is most effective. This is why I will sometimes call homosexual males “sodomists”. It gets to the core of what they actually are.
“The degree of “PC’ness” that we see today is really sad.”
The up-side to this is that “our” millennials, who’ve been raised correctly, will be ruling over these cupcakes.
“I prefer the term “Dumber than a Box of Barbara Boxers”.
You can’t get any dumber than that.”
Presumably you’ve never come across a Box of Sheila Jackson Lees. (But it’s close).
For example. Look at the hottest thing in your list, maybe the abortion issue. Why would people contemplate this? It’s easy to heap opprobrium on those involved, less easy to identify the perceived benefits, illusory as they may be in the long term. But it’s in understanding why and striving towards a correction of the situation, that a society will be moved to hate the abortion genie and will voluntarily wish it back into its bottle. And I’ll cheat a little here by stating an answer: it is a colossal loss of love all around that feeds the monster, and the baby becomes the “odd man out.” And it even extends past abortion. How many families have soul murders going on in them right now, hate filled houses that turn out hellions that plague society?
Anyhow, without a restoration of that love, even law is like trying to wrap Jello with rubber bands. Is it possible to go to an abortion-friendly regime? If yes, then people will go there in the final instance if the love problem is not addressed. And we know how hard it is to even start to try to put a lid on child abuse — in a weak moment, even some of the best of us might want to knock the kids down the stairs, even though never doing it.
If it goes no further, even that risks the retort “Yeah we are, and we like it. You just made up that talk about God... we never see you acting like you actually cared, except to use God as a hammer to hit those over the head you don’t like.”
except to use God as a hammer to hit those over the head you don’t like.”
I say to these people that if they reject Christ’s message, they can learn of their future in Ecclesiastes: They can eat and drink and enjoy the fruits of their labor, and then they die just like all other animals.
But Christ shows a better way, and the free gift is immortality with Him.
Then they get to choose.
I’m not beating them over the head with anything. I just offer them a choice: death or eternal life. That is the Christian message.
Perhaps a steady dose of this...
I don’t believe we are theologically forced to do this, though some Christian followings (e.g. 7th Day Adventist) do.
The route that I believe the Lord took me on, is one similar to the one that C. S. Lewis went on. Participation in either heaven or hell is ultimately voluntary, but going to heaven or hell is like a steel ball somehow being empowered to choose what side of a magnet it is going to stick to, but to one side or the other it must most certainly stick. Lack of commitment has been ruled out. Yes that means actions in hell would have a degree of voluntarism. We’ve met people who have so collapsed into grimness that they can only bite the hands that feed them, and rage at those hands. That might be a fair picture of hell. It’s utter misery, suffering forever from the consequence of sins, but the occupants would forever refuse any kind of deliverance, in a perfect twist of soul believing it better to hate God forever.
The Calvin/Arminius questions would be resolved (which is why I kiddingly call my position Calminian) by reference to point of view. Do we refer to our point of view, or at God’s? If we can accept that on some level we can choose something that affects our everlasting fate, and that on another level, God can infallibly view the choice and arrange for our everlasting fate (and where and when we appear in the history of the world), then we can live without bumping into constant phiosophical problems.
Chopping his prick off and feeding him estrogen doesn't make a man into a woman.
All it might take (both funny and grim, in a way, to think about it) is for some evil lefty to think about that and start agitating about it.
But again, it might not have occurred to any lefty, or if it has, it was met with a thull dud by the intended agitation targets. Their culture might not even connect the yellow of signs to their race.
My son had some real problems with his 5th grade teacher. He really didn’t like him and wasn’t treating him fair. I saw the evidence myself several times. I told my son to get used to it, there are Aholes in this world and not everyone is going to like you and maybe you need to change your attitude too.
I’m with you on C. S. Lewis’ perspective that people actually CHOOSE to die rather than receive immortality. Where we differ is that I believe the words death, destruction, perish, etc. are not euphemisms. I believe the lost die “a second death”, and a REAL death at the GWTJ. Only the saved receive immortality. The rest go to a final death, and cease to exist. They are no more.
I only came to this belief within the last six years. I used to believe that both sides received eternal life, but one side would not be happy with their condition. But I never actually studied it. Once I studied it, my mind was forever changed.
Don't tell anybody that "M&Ms" were invented for the military.
It may not surprise you to learn that many amazing discoveries and inventions are spawned from war, but did you know the hugely popular M&M candies beloved by kids and adults of all ages around the world are one such innovation?
Read "The Wartime Origins of the M&M"
http://www.history.com/news/hungry-history/the-wartime-origins-of-the-mm
All this candy talk!
I prefer people that are more like a good thick T bone. High heat just sears them and makes them better. Even overcooked they get tougher. They give people strength.
All I would say is that we don’t need a cessationist theory of death. There are scriptural testimonies to something that might be called a living death.
Hell is unhappy, and wants to be unhappy... that’s the kicker, I believe. We joke about the “snowflakes” on FR. That’s kind of an example. They don’t have to just perish. But they live a living torment as they try to pull others into their torment, and yet in a way love their torment too much to let God take it away.
Cessationist theology tends to follow unsaved Jewish theology. This is what they do to avoid facing up with what an everlasting hell would be. The saved will know that the damned still want to be in hell more than they would want to be anywhere else.
Hell and heaven, save reverence, are both participatory sports.
There are scriptural testimonies to something that might be called a living death.
An example would be the plain language regarding Jesus’ brothers. But if you believe Mary NEVER had sex, then it has to somehow be interpreted to mean something else. Hence the “relative, rather than brother” interpretation.
It started with Eden. In the day of their disobedience they would “die.”
Well just look at what that entailed. QED... I don’t need to make this long winded. Thanks for playing, though.
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