Monday afternoon round-up and Open Thread

Victorian posy of pansiesI’m soon heading to yet another appointment intended to keep my musculoskeletal system from disintegrating entirely.  I’m hoping to be functional again by September or October, but it sure seems a long ways away.  Anyway, before I go, these are for you (and let me know if you have anything interesting for the rest of us):

I didn’t know that Arthur Koestler, though a socialist, was a socialist along the lines of George Orwell, who was willing to be honest about the totalitarian instincts inherent in socialism.  Neo-Neocon has a fascinating excerpt from Koestler’s Cassandra-like lament about the Nazis — and the blind eye that the rest of the world turned to acts too horrible for them to acknowledge could be real.

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Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office has released the English transcript of his remarks on Yom Hashoah. It is worthwhile reading. Unlike the idiots and antisemites in America and Europe, Bibi remembers the past and refuses to go supine so as to create a Holocaust redux.

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Given a place in which to share their experiences in America’s Leftist-run academies of “higher education,” more than 350,000 conservative college and university students viewed or weighed in on the hashtag #MyLiberalCampus. These youngsters seem to be aware of the irony behind the word “liberal” in that hashtag, since their tales of woe include variations on startlingly illiberal behavior.

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We opponents of gay marriage (not of gays or civil unions, but of gay marriage) said that, once gay marriage cleared the gates, polygamy wouldn’t be far behind. This is not to say that gay marriage and polygamy are the same thing. It is to say, though, that once you erase marriage’s historic meaning in Western culture — one man and one woman — there are no further limits one can reasonably place upon it.

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Perhaps someone in academia is finally climbing atop the barricades and hollering “Stop.” Brett Sokolow, director of the Association of Title IX Administrators, has sent a mailing out to similarly situated Title IX administrators saying that they’re violating Title IX, which requires even-handedness in dealings involving the sexes on college campuses.  It turns out that, whenever two students engage in a drunken coupling, the school blames the man. Sokolow suggests that, if both students are equally blotto, neither is to blame. Sanctions should arise only if the complaining student was incoherently blotto and the accused can be proven to have had evil on his (or her) mind.

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Please enjoy the exquisite irony: Leftist Media Matters is opposing the unionization of its own employees.

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A friend of mine who feeds me a lot of the more interesting information you read in my posts tipped me off last week to the assault that the Leftist thought police are waging in the land of Science Fiction writing. I meant to write on the subject myself, but kept getting sidetracked. Now, I don’t need to, since Glenn Reynolds has addressed precisely that issue.

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This one is for the lawyers, or for the ones who have wisely decided not to become lawyers and, if possible, never to come within spitting distance of a lawsuit.

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The DiploMad writes about the known fact that, in America, being a Democrat, especially a highly placed Democrat, means never having to say you’re sorry or lose your job, no matter how abysmal your failures (or how many people have died on your watch).

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If you’re wondering why it’s a terrible idea to have the government manage anything beyond traditional government responsibilities (the military, waging war, providing basic infrastructure, etc.), this story about Medicare fraud may help you understand government’s extreme limitations.