Glenn Loury: It is Our Country, Not Their Country

Glenn Loury raises many "unspeakable truths" in his talk. His conclusion:

As a black American intellectual who loves his country, I can say without equivocation in the year 2021 that the Fourth of July-- like Shakespeare like Balzac, like Einstein--is ours. It belongs to me every bit as much as it does to you.

The question confronting we black Americans today then is not whether we are included within the body politic of the United States of America. What a ridiculous question! We most emphatically and obviously are. Today's question is not how to end our oppression. Rather, it is "What shall we do with our freedom?" What will we make of the enormous inheritance that is our birthright: citizenship in history's greatest republic?

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Two Paths Forward on Race

We've gotten to the point where we now have a category called "People of Color minus Asian." This is a true story.

I suspect (but don't know) that if Asian students stop studying so much and start getting worse grades, they might be allowed back into the category "People of Color."

I see two possible paths forward from this madness. A) We decide that there is one human race and that we are all shades of brown, or B) We keep dividing people up into smaller and smaller groups until we notice that we have 330 million Americans, each one of them being its own individual "race."

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Scientific American Publishes False Information, Recklessly Stoking the Culture Wars

Three alleged specialists in communications who wrote this article at Scientific American could not be bothered to look up the easily available text of a Wisconsin bill that they are falsely criticizing. This is deeply troubling. This is magazine that purports to celebrate science, yet this article, which has nothing to do with science, blatantly misrepresents the facts (the text of a Wisconsin) bill in order to score political points. Here's the false information:

A bill passed by the Wisconsin Assembly, for instance, bans any books, educational materials, or classroom discussions that include terms like “racial prejudice,” “patriarchy,” “structural inequality,” “intersectionality” or, ironically, “critical self-reflection.”

It only takes 5 minutes to read Wisconsin bill 411 and clearly and immediately know that none of the above claims are true.  Jesse Singal comments.

I'm not taking a position on the above Wisconsin bill. Rather, I'm criticizing well-educated people in high places who deceive others from their perches in order to feel better about themselves.

This is not the first time Scientific American has run off the rails on cultural issues. See here, here and here.

RIP Scientific American.  I used to read and admire you because you tried to get your facts right and you wrote about science.

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What if You CAN Take it With You?

What if, when you get to heaven, they tell you that everything costs money and that your earthly bank account has been converted into “heaven-dollars” as of the moment you died? What if you find out, however, that there is a cloud rental fee and a daily fee for the manna food bar and everything else heavenly costs money too?

What if you complain and those in charge tell you to go get a job? “There’s a lot of work that needs to be done up here. Go make yourself useful.”

You start belly-aching again, telling them how hard you worked while on Earth, blah blah blah.

They aren’t impressed. They tell you: “This is heaven, not paradise.”

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