Stephen

“One feature of sexual politics is the almost complete absence of critical scholarship that approaches it from any viewpoint other than enthusiastic advocacy. Ostensibly objective scholars are often active participants and promoters of the phenomenon they should be studying and understanding critically. Scholars who refrain from endorsing sexual liberation and insist on analyzing these subjects from a detached perspective find it almost impossible to publish their work and are quickly driven from the universities. “Some subjects are not only undebatable; they are unresearchable,” writes Phyllis Schlafly, “because they don’t want the public to know the facts that research might uncover.” 4 The fact is that the Western academic world today is not an “open society” of free inquiry and critical thinking. It is largely closed, inbred, and controlled by heresy-hunters who vet scholarship according to a litmus test of political doctrine and punish heterodoxy with ostracism.”
― Stephen Baskerville, The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power

“conversations each year with fellow participants confirmed my hunch: the powerful are experiencing increasingly greater limits on their power. The reactions to my probing always pointed in the same direction: power is becoming more feeble, transient, and constrained.”
― Moisés Naím, The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be

“Lent challenges us to consider the honest answers to these and other soul-searching questions. It invites us to jump off the hamster wheel of consumption and experience the pinch of abstaining from thoughtless indulgence.”
― Anonymous, Devotions for Lent

“News is news and spin is spin, and when you introduce the second to the first, what you have isn’t news anymore. Hey, presto, you’ve created opinion. Don’t get me wrong, opinion is powerful. Being able to be presented with differing opinions on the same issue is one of the glories of a free media, and it should make people stop and think. But a lot of people don’t want to. They don’t want to admit that whatever line being touted by their idol of the moment might not be unbiased and without ulterior motive. We’ve got people who claim Kellis-Amberlee was a plot by the Jews, the gays, the Middle East, even a branch of the Aryan Nation trying to achieve racial purity by killing the rest of us. Whoever orchestrated the creation and release of the virus masked their involvement with a conspiracy of Machiavellian proportions, and now they and their followers are sitting it out, peacefully immunized, waiting for the end of the world.”
― Mira Grant, Feed