The Question That Reveals the Heart of the Culture Wars by David French

The Question That Reveals the Heart of the Culture Wars

Our American differences are growing so very profound. Yes, we battle over tax rates and policing tactics. But we also battle over the deepest questions in life. We battle over reality itself, and we do so as enclaves on the cultural left increasingly brook no dissent. The cultural indoctrination begins early, and it’s intense. To fully understand, talk to conservative parents and kids in our most progressive public and private schools.
What is a man? It’s a question they dare not ask. If asked, there is an answer they dare not give. That’s how wide our divide has become.

If we can't define and make men, what will become of us?

Growth, Not Equality by Amity Shlaes

Growth, Not Equality

Free marketeers may sometimes win elections, but they are not winning U.S. history. In recent years, the consensus regarding the American past has slipped leftward, and then leftward again. No longer is American history a story of opportunity, or of military or domestic triumph. Ours has become, rather, a story of wrongs, racial and social. Today, any historical figure who failed at any time to support abolition, or, worse, took the Confederate side in the Civil War, must be expunged from history. Wrongs must be righted, and equality of result enforced.

I love Amity Shlaes. She is always original and interesting!

"This is Serious": Facebook Begins its Downward Spiral by Nick Bilton

"This is Serious": Facebook Begins its Downward Spiral

But the fallout from that success has also become increasingly obvious, especially since the 2016 election, which prompted a year of public relations battles over the company’s most fundamental problems. And now, as we enter 2018, Zuckerberg is finally owning up to it: Facebook is in real trouble.

Facebook seems to be realizing that it has real potential downsides... what does that mean? Who knows?

Trump to PC: “No More!” by Myron Magnet

Trump to PC: “No More!”
Two op-eds in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal and one on this website brilliantly call attention to aspects of the vast political and cultural change, still in its early stages, that is gathering force in this country as inexorably as the spring thaw breaks up a frozen river, first as a trickle and then a torrent. Donald Trump figures in all three stories.
I certainly don't like Trump's crudeness, I teach at a Classical school that values beauty after all, but he does say things that are actually true although no one wants to admit it.

The Claims Against Aziz Ansari Reveal the Defects of Modern Sexual Morality by David French

The Claims Against Aziz Ansari Reveal the Defects of Modern Sexual Morality

It was inevitable. The #MeToo movement was going to collide directly with all the ambiguity and pain of the college sexual-assault tribunals. We were going to read not about sexual assault but instead about a date gone wrong — where two parties had different perceptions, and all we could really know is that another young woman would feel used and traumatized, and a confused man would find his reputation in tatters because of a sexual encounter that never at any point (to him) had seemed inappropriate or wrong.

When we get away from a Biblical worldview on relations between the sexes, we get a mess!

Policing Sexual Desire by Heather MacDonald

Policing Sexual Desire

Actually, it is not the patriarchy that makes sexual decisions “utterly complex”; it is sex itself. Sex is the realm of the inarticulate and irrational, inherently fraught with “fear,” “shame,” and “guilt.” Sexual seduction is carried on through ambiguity and indirection; exposing that ambiguity to light, naming what may or may not be going on, is uncomfortable and risks denial and rejection. “Dangerously outdated gender norms” are not what make it difficult to say no to sexual advances; contemporary gender norms have confused these already fraught situations. Traditional mores set the default for premarital sex at “no,” at least for females. This default recognized the different sexual drives of males and females and the difficulties of bargaining with the male libido. The default “no” to premarital sex meant that a female did not have to negotiate the refusal with every opportuning male; it was simply assumed. 

Powerful case for traditional sexual mores that protected women AND men.

Studying Western Civilization in the South Bronx by Jillian Kay Melchior

Studying Western Civilization in the South Bronx

“First, you need to know the concept of what freedom means to be hungry for it,” Ms. Diaz says. She adds that these books “are for everyone. They were different people in different centuries, but at the end, they’re thinking about the same problems. And if we’re talking about this, it’s because we’re not where we need to be.”

I love that the value of Western Civilization's greatest works is being rediscovered!