Theodore Dalrymple on self-restraint:
Political correctness is the means by which we try to control others; decency is the means by which we try to control ourselves. There is no doubt which is the easier to undertake, and the more pleasurable and gratifying. There is a considerable element of sadism in political correctness.
Charles Moore on leftist anti-Semitism:
Both of them [Ken Livingstone and Naz Shah] must feel bewildered by the condemnation heaped upon them, because they inhabit a party whose leader has, over his 40 years in politics, spent hundreds and hundreds of hours sharing platforms with virtually every sort of Muslim anti-Semite and advocate of terrorism that one can imagine. They may have thought they had permission.
Robby Soave on when students can’t escape “social justice training”:
A student has no method of dissenting during an online training session on the necessity of complying with the university’s diversity dictates. Indeed, students might reasonably fear that agreeing with the ideology of the trainers is a precondition of coming to campus.
And KC Johnson on massively inflated campus rape statistics:
A recent Stanford survey… revealed that 1.9 percent of Stanford students said they had been sexually assaulted. This figure, which would translate to around 160 sexual assaults, given the university’s enrolment, would make the Stanford campus the violent crime capital of Palo Alto, which in the last five years has averaged around six rapes or attempted rapes annually. Nonetheless, it generated fury from Stanford campus activists, led by the anti-due process law professor, Michele Dauber — who seemed outraged that it didn’t return the preferred 1-in-5 figure.
If a survey suggests that the rate of serious sexual assault on the typical American campus is higher than the rate of rape, murder, armed robbery and assault combined in Detroit, the U.S. city with the highest murder rate, and higher than in war-torn areas of the Congo where rape is used as a weapon, and at a time when the rate of rape in general is in marked decline, then there’s probably something wrong with the methodology. And if someone’s definitions of rape and serious sexual assault include inept and unwanted flirtation, intoxicated consensual coupling and post-coital embarrassment, and refers to people who are pretty sure they hadn’t in fact been raped, then there may be something wrong with the person using that definition.
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