Captain Jean-Luc Picard: At the end, he gave me a choice – between a life of comfort… or more torture. All I had to do was to say that… I could see *five* lights, when in fact there were only four.
Counselor Deanna Troi: You didn’t say it.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: No. No. But I was going to. I would’ve told him anything. Anything at all. But more than that – I believed that I could see… five lights.
Star Trek The Next Generation, Chain of Command Part II (1992)
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels)
A college professor in Ohio is being forced to fight back against the university that is reprimanding him for refusing to refer to a student with a pronoun that differs from his gender at birth. That this is even an issue in college, let alone something that can get a university professor nearly fired, is not only outrageous but also absurd. College should be a place where students learn, sharpen their minds, and determine a vocation — not a place to engage in a debate over social justice issues and political correctness.
Last year, Nicolas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio, was teaching a transgender student. The student was male but identified as female and wanted to be addressed as “ma’am” instead of “sir.” Meriwether offered a very reasonable compromise: He suggested calling the student by his name rather than agree to address him by an inaccurate pronoun.
According to the Kansas City Star, the student threatened to have Meriwether fired if he refused and went on to alert school officials. University officials told the professor he had to use transgender pronouns and said he had created a “hostile environment” for the distressed student. While Meriwether has not yet been fired, he did sue officials from the university. Now the professor is seeking damages, claiming his First Amendment rights were violated.
Go here to read the rest. The main purpose of most of the Left these days is to force people to stop believing in reality.
PC has one main goal–to control us by silencing truth. Its best weapon is at the core of all sin–pride. The truth is, they present falsity with a diabolically crafted halo around it and we fear to be seen by others as against the halo, so we speak not about the falsity. if we ponder it, doing so, not remaining silent, is what got Christ crucified. Then again, He wasn’t restricted by pride.
Bingo. But you can take the “Communist” out of it, not because they didn’t do this, but because they were scarcely the first. This method of mind control is probably older than cities. How else is a king going to make the rest of his tribe believe that he is a demigod, the grandson of Horus or Marduk? Wherever you see compulsory flattery — to Elizabeth Tudor or to any mad Roman emperor, for example — you see this at least partially present.
Hi, I was wondering if you would recommend some history books before Christmas? We have Parrish’s American Civil War on our as This Hallowed Ground. Our son enjoys reading history books, so I was looking for more ideas. Thank you.
Stuart Card wrote that by encouraging “subjective emoting over objective thinking,” colleges render clients unsuited for the real world.
It’s always been about power, not about any sort of principle.
In 2016, the smartest woman ion the Planet (really!) let the mask drop when she called us “deplorable.” To be fair, Obama (“bitter clingers”) got away with it (had a big assist from the lying media [redundant] and Ace McCain) in 2008.
Almost anything by Bruce Catton on the Civil War would be good. Ditto for Andrew Roberts on English history and World War II. H.W. Crocker’s Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church is magnificent. Richard Brookhiser has done a series of enjoyable and informative books about the Founding Fathers. Victor Davis Hanson has written books on a wide range of historical topics and I have never been disappointed. Winston Groom, the author of Forrest Gump, has written numerous books on aspects of America’s military history, and his books, unsurprisingly, read like novels, as well as being historically accurate. Shelby Foote’s three volumes on the American Civil War, have never been surpassed as the best narrative history of the Civil War.
One thing that bothers me about Republican governors and Republican state legislators is that they’ve done flat nothing about cleaning the corruption out of public higher education.
@Ann — Try to find some local history. For example, I’m from the Florida Panhandle, and Dale Cox has some decent books about that part of the country. Having a familiar context for historical events can give you better insight into both the history and the place in which you live.
@ T Shaw.
Hillary Clinton “smart” is not a compliment. I know your quoting Stuart Card. It’s amazing that criminal behavior, omissions and deceit are qualifier’s for smart in the make believe world of PC.
Smart is a misnomer if it is describing Hillary Clinton.
Calling her the world’s greatest cheat…now that I can believe.
@Ann; Lee’s Lieutenants by Douglas Southall Freeman…has been abridged into a single volume by Stephen Sears. (Great for Virginians)
Thank you everyone for the book recommendations. I appreciate it.
Anything by Michael Grant for Ancient History. I think Norman Cantor’s Civilization of the Middle Ages is probably the best one volume history. For Ancient Military History, Adrian Goldsworthy.
Ann.
More ideas category.(?)
The Immortal Irishman by Timothy Egan.
Great story!
Inspirational and very difficult to put down. Your son might enjoy this. (?)
“Anything by Michael Grant for Ancient History. I think Norman Cantor’s Civilization of the Middle Ages is probably the best one volume history. For Ancient Military History, Adrian Goldsworthy.”
Agreed. The late Norman Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages is a wonderful, gossipy look at the great historians of the Middle Ages of the last century. I am on my third reading of that vastly amusing, and thought provoking, book.
I’m fond of it myself, but I know a number of professional medievalists who despise it, and him, precisely because of its gossipiness.
True story: Inventing the Middle Ages was the first book I acquired upon joining the History Book of the Month Club. (Ah, those were the days). And probably the 2nd or 3rd book I purchased with my own money.
I met Norman Cantor at the 1994 International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo and got him to sign my hardcover of Civilization of the Middle Ages. Naturally after that, I had to get a paperback copy for actual use.
“I’m fond of it myself, but I know a number of professional medievalists who despise it, and him, precisely because of its gossipiness.”
Too much truth telling and the revealing of the men behind the ivy covered curtain. Saint Thomas More said that Satan hates to be mocked. Doubtless true. Academics, and their acolytes in the groves of academia, share with Lucifer pride and a singular lack of a sense of humor, at least in my experience.
A good, and fair, review of Cantor’s tome:
http://dannyreviews.com/h/Inventing_Middle_Ages.html
Is his tome covered with Cantor dust?