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Then I came across everydayfeminism.com, a website that expressed a simplistic version of these new ideas and idioms in a highly accessible form.
“the ACLU has become in many respects a caricature of its former self.”
When Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, the state director of the local ACLU affiliate, tried to explain the organization’s long-standing principles at an event at William & Mary, students—holding signs that read, aclu, free speech for who? and the oppressed are not impressed—shouted her down before she had a chance to speak.
ACLU. It now seems “more important for ACLU staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand on principle,”
“All it takes is one particularly vocal, particularly difficult individual to raise concerns through social media and whether or not there’s any basis to it, often you can’t defend yourself publicly.”
“We used to want to make the world a better place,” he said. “Now we just make our organizations more miserable to work at.”
So can we predict when the pressure to conform becomes so crushing that anyone who dares to dissent is vilified and those who are left in the group feel an even stronger need to go along with the views of its loudest members? The answer appears to be yes.
Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren’t authentic; they’re just dead.
“Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thought and opinions has ceased to exist,” Frederick Douglass once said.
a society that gets into the habit of censoring unpopular viewpoints would be just as likely to suppress their own points of view.
Finally, free speech functions as a crucial safety valve that allows people to organize against all kinds of injustices; limiting free speech therefore makes it harder to achieve social progress.
On the other hand, it could well happen that the guilty party, in order to lighten his uncomfortable moral burden, will finally begin to rationalize his sins and affirm them as virtues. And by such a process, today’s ally can become tomorrow’s enemy.”
policymakers pretend that race doesn’t exist, they will neither be able to spot willful discrimination nor be able to recognize when a policy has an unfair and disproportionate impact on one demographic group.
Many people have a difficult start in life because they suffer from entrenched disadvantages. If you grow up in an impoverished neighborhood that has high crime and terrible schools, you deserve special assistance to ensure you have a fair shot at succeeding in life.
am at times impatient with the legal framing of moral debates in the United States.
Both scientists and medical professionals, for example, know that biological sex is a key determinant of important human attributes, from the prevalence of heart disease to the ability to become pregnant.
For centuries, America drew immigrants on the promise that even the lowliest dishwasher could become a millionaire. But if the American dream figured so prominently in the imagination of mankind, a big part of the reason is that the United States also afforded a good life to people who did not climb all the way to the top. Today, each of these promises is starting to sound hollow.
It is possible for members of marginalized groups to hold dangerous prejudices against members of groups that are comparatively “privileged.” A failure to recognize this makes it harder to understand the world or to combat certain kinds of hate crime.
The identity synthesis portrays itself as an ambitious ideology that seeks to make the world a better place. But its vision is ultimately neither realistic nor desirable. One of the core appeals of liberalism is that it aims higher.
The values of political equality, individual freedom, and collective self-determination make a huge contribution to fostering tolerance and prosperity, helping liberal democracies avoid the terrible suffering that has so often bedeviled humanity in the past.
But when they think about how and where they want to live, most people will, as surveys of the dream destinations for would-be immigrants reveal, choose countries like France and Germany, Canada and the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States: countries, that is, in which they could speak freely, enjoy great autonomy in how they lead their private lives, and contest the decisions of a government they consider out of touch.
“I want my two sons to understand that responsible citizenship in a diverse democracy is not principally about noticing what’s bad; it’s about constructing what’s good.”
Appearing on Pod Save America, a progressive podcast run by four of his former staffers, a few weeks before the 2022 midterms, Barack Obama warned that “sometimes people just want to not feel as if they are walking on eggshells. They want some acknowledgment that life is messy and that all of us, at any given moment, can say things the wrong way.”
social media and cable news, it can seem as though society were cleaved into two mutually antagonistic halves. Most Americans are either “woke” or “MAGA.”
Michel Foucault
To write a book is a lonely process.