That Sally Mason didn’t tell them to “grow up” should be firing offense.
In an interview published Feb. 18 in The Daily Iowan, President Sally Mason said she was dismayed by the reports of sexual assaults. She said “the goal would be to end that, to never have another sexual assault. That’s probably not a realistic goal just given human nature, and that’s unfortunate. …”
Criticism erupted over the phrase that includes “human nature.”
The Iowa City Press-Citizen says Mason apologized during a President’s Forum on Tuesday.
Mason said she’s been told by several people in the campus community that her remark was hurtful. She said she was “very, very sorry for any pain that my words might have caused.”
The conceit that humans are basically good is a modern, secularist belief that has allowed for some of the greatest evils of the 20th Century by “Utopianists” who have no compunctions about spilling blood of those who stand in the way of the “perfect society.”
Jews (and non-Jews) who believe that people are basically good are remarkably creative at finding explanations for human evil — poverty, capitalism, economic inequality, poor parenting, low self-esteem, colonialism, racism, to name a few. They offer every explanation but one — that those who commit evil have allowed their nature to rule them rather than ruling their human nature.
The consequences of this belief are awful. By focusing on all these outside forces to explain evil, we can never put a stop to it. Because if you don’t know the cause of a problem, you can’t solve it.
Life doesn’t hand you a Participation Trophy for merely showing up.
Greetings:
There was an Austrian-speaking Jew, by the name of Sigmund Freud, back in old Vienna of a century or so ago, who didn’t seem to believe much the “basically good” trope. I seem to recall his mentioning something called the “Id”.
“Narcissism, then, is a kind of addiction to self-esteem. So what would happen if you took an entire generation of young people and systematically and repeatedly masturbated their self-esteem mechanisms? Could it be true that the children raised in the school of Rogers, Branden, and Vasconcellos were growing up to be entitled, egomaniacal narcissists?”
Read the whole thing.
Life doesn’t hand you a Participation Trophy for merely showing up.
It does now.
“basically good” goes back to Rousseau.
And Freud’s definition of “basically good” was “free from sexual hang-ups.”
That may be an overgeneralization.
Haven’t they ever seen “Demolition Man”?
The thing about Utopia is that even if you could get most people on board with the program, some 10% of the population will have some degree of psychopathy. That is all you need to upset the party.
That 10% is just the percentage that gives Id Monster the keys on a routine basis. Everybody has an Id Monster.
I only let mine make suggestions, mostly for laughs.
Mostly.
I am not sure psychopaths have a set of keys, all the door are unlocked and the engine is running.
Hello,
Do you wonder how we got here?
You you wonder how you got here?
Was it circumstance or choice?
Come on now
I hear you’re feeling down
Well, let me ease your pain,
Why rise to your feet again?
Relax
I’ll need some information first
Just the basic facts
How long are you out of work?
There is no shame, I am dissolving
Like leaves and moss that rests on a lake bed
I was only drowing in my pride
The card swipes and I can’t feel what I’m spending
When I was a child I had this terror
I’d lay forgotten in some alley
Now I’ve got that feeling once again
I can’t explain, you would not understand
This is not how I am
I am quite sure, I am comfortably poor
O.K.
Just a little card Swipe
There’ll be no more downward plunge.
But you may feel a little sick.
Can you sell it?
I do believe some do that, sure
It can keep you going through a slump
Or you can trade it for some junk.
There is no shock .We’re all dissolving
A mumbling herd of angry, needy beasts.
We are only living from the hand
The foot shoves us and we just moves where it wants us
When I was a fool
I fought to keep my jobs
But they were still pulled from my grasp
Soon they were much harder to find
I wondered how I would survive the search
The world has changed
The dream is gone
And I am finally sure
I am comfortably poor.
“The thing about Utopia is that even if you could get most people on board with the program, some 10% of the population will have some degree of psychopathy. That is all you need to upset the party.”
Niven and Brin both deal with this in their ‘Known Space’ and ‘Uplift’ series.
In Niven they are exiled to space colonies, or recruited into into police, intelligence, and military, forbidden from breeding, and sent off to be euthanized for organ harvest if they cannot be controlled. Certain mental illnesses are even artificially induced if they help an agent with doing some distasteful task better.
In Brin they are marked, monitored, forbidden from breeding, watched and forced to stay on Earth without special permission to leave. This was imposed on mankind after their discovery by the civilization of the great Library because they were feared as a wolfling “wild” species that arose naturally instead of being uplifted from a proto sentient species by an older senior sentient species as clients.
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