Political Correctness

The enforced standards of political correctness continue to become more demanding. A woman lost her public-relations position because she tweeted, "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!" Maybe that is not the most charming statement one can make, but should you get in trouble for it? It's just a quick, casual aside, an attempt at pithy, barbed wit, a kind of saucy insouciance, the kind of thing Twitter was made for.

The PC police then scoured her other tweets, and they came up with this: "I had a sex dream about an autistic kid last night." That will arch your eyebrow, I suppose, but if you are her Twitter friend, wouldn't you just give an "LOL"? And then they found this noxious tweet: "I can't be fired for things I say while intoxicated right?".

Isn't Twitter and such social media made for this kind of light-hearted banter? However, I suppose it is one thing if you are living in the parents' basement, and another if you are a corporate executive. To achieve any meaningful position in the adult world is to give up having fun on social media such as blogs, Facebooks, and Twitters, or, I guess, on the Internet, period. When you are online, you are in society. But, man, talk about taking the fun out of the Internet!

{Source: News/LJ}

Edmund Burke

As Burke feared, the fever of the French revolution was spreading, and his own Whigs were contemplating big innovations for the British government. Burke counters with some conservative polemics.

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This British Constitution has not been struck out at an heat by a set of presumptuous men, like the Assembly of pettifoggers run mad in Paris … It is the result of the thoughts of many minds in many ages. It is no simple, no superficial thing, nor to be estimated by superficial understandings. An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is, however, sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces and put together, at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance and complexity, composed of far other wheels and springs and balances and counteracting and co-operating powers. Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption.

-- Edmund Burke

{Source: Jesse Norman, “Edmund Burke: The First Conservative”}

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Another Cold Snap

Another cold snap, with overnight temperatures expected to dip back into the thirties again. So soon, another one. This seems like a much harder winter this year. Relatively speaking. No sub-zero temperatures or even snow, but still more consistently cold. It is also pretty windy, giving the cold air a sharp bite, and the cats have readily come inside on their own.