Geðenc hwelc witu us ða becomon for ðisse worulde, ða ða we hit nohwæðer ne selfe ne lufodon ne eac oðrum monnum ne lefdon! Remember what punishments befell us in this world when we ourselves did not cherish learning nor transmit it to other men.
—Alfred the Great
Es ist so bequem, unmündig zu sein. Habe ich ein Buch, das für mich Verstand hat, einen Seelsorger, der für mich Gewissen hat, einen Arzt, der für mich die Diät beurtheilt u. s. w., so brauche ich mich ja nicht selbst zu bemühen. Ich habe nicht nöthig zu denken, wenn ich nur bezahlen kann. It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.
—Immanuel Kant
The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things.
—Richard Feynman
Dan Joppich has a post over at The American Thinker that may point to a means of bringing some sanity to the transgender bathroom issue. In the section of Title IX relating to bathroom and locker room facilities, the law requires that if such facilities are provided for one sex, then comparable facilities must be provided for the other.
The law refers to “the one sex” and “the other sex”. There are only two choices within the law as it was written in 1972. If it referred to “the other sexes” (plural), as the transgender proponents would like us to believe, the law would have certainly captured any interpretation of what constitutes a sex, but it doesn’t.
You can’t sprinkle magic fairy dust on the law and have a singular noun magically turn plural.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE—Two additional thoughts—
The last time I checked a biology textbook, there were only two sexes, and the science was settled.
If M. A. S. H. were being produced for TV today, would the Corporal Klinger character still work?
One of the problems about communication over the Left/Right political divide has been that the two sides have often been speaking two different political languages. Slate has a post up about the conservative victims of sexual assault who are responding to the transsexual bathroom controversy in the Left’s own terms, especially emphasizing their right to feel “safe.”
Those contradictions, however, are real. There’s no coherent ideology in which traumatized students have the right to be shielded from material that upsets them—be it Ovid, 9½ Weeks, or the sentiments of Laura Kipnis—but not from undressing in the presence of people with different genitalia. If we’ve decided that people have the right not to feel unsafe—as opposed to the right not to be unsafe—then what’s the standard for refusing that right to conservative sexual abuse victims? Is it simply that we don’t believe them when they describe the way their trauma manifests? Aren’t we supposed to believe victims no matter what?
Read the whole thing.
An additional thought—If the statistics coming out of the SJWs and feminists are correct, the number of survivors of sexual assault is far, far greater than the number of transgendered people.
The coming increase in California’s minimum wage to $15/hour will likely lead to the UC Berkeley laying off 500 low-paid workers. However, the university will be able to save the job an administrator for every five or six janitors or food service worker it fires.
Be less concerned about the number of books you read, and more about the good use you make of them.
—Charles Scriver
