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Category: Social Issues
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By Selwyn Duke “‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’” — Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass As humans, who cannot communicate telepathically, we as a rule will use our common language with its widely agreed-upon…
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By Selwyn Duke “Fish and guests start to stink in three days,” goes the old epigram — but not if French Olympic organizers bent on surrendering to summer heat have their way. That is, since they wouldn’t provide the athletes they’re hosting air conditioning, citing greentopian priorities, the competitors may stink after one night’s fitful…
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By Selwyn Duke As if cuing ominous music, we hear incessant warnings today about “Christian nationalism” and “fundamentalism.” We’re supposed to fear these forces and, in particular, their alleged inroads into education. In fact, as the Los Angeles Times writes this week, this phenomenon threatens to “destroy” our schools and transform us “from a democracy to a…
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By Selwyn Duke “Sugar and spice and everything nice; That’s what little girls are made of,” goes the old Romantic Period poem. Grown women are characterized differently, the work holds, and female leaders? Poem author Robert Southey didn’t say. But pundit Tucker Carlson just did. In fact, he stated while addressing the notion that “women…
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By Selwyn Duke Sweden long ago became the world’s first officially “feminist” government. Will it now be followed by what some might think is, outside the Islamic world, the unlikeliest of places: Mexico? This may be the case if its president-elect, ex-academic Claudia Sheinbaum, has her way. Focus on Feminism In fact, while Sheinbaum —…
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By Selwyn Duke “The white race is the cancer of human history,” wrote feminist author Susan Sontag in 1966. While Sontag has passed on, her idea has passed on to critical-mass stage; in fact, the notion that whites are history’s “oppressors” and everyone else is the “oppressed” is now left-wing dogma as much as “four…
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By Selwyn Duke It’s no surprise that black Americans used to be Republicans. The GOP is, after all, the party of Lincoln and slavery abolition. For more than half a century, however, blacks have given approximately 90 percent of their support to Democrats every election. What’s more, laments a black writer and speaker, “Democrats are guilt tripping…
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By Selwyn Duke Asian-descent Americans have long enjoyed notably higher incomes than their white countrymen do. It’s also true that men earn more money than women do. Now, question: Are both, neither, or just one of these wage gaps seen as a “problem” to be “remedied”? If you answered “just one” — and know which…
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By Selwyn Duke “New research makes it increasingly clear that companies with more diverse workforces perform better financially,” proclaimed McKinsey & Company in 2015. McKinsey’s study was taken seriously, too; in fact, it would be transformational. Citing McKinsey in 2016, the Harvard Business Review announced, definitively, “Striving to increase workplace diversity is not an empty…
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By Selwyn Duke “There’s no England now,” stated the Kinks in 1984, in a song that, in part, lamented the 20th-century loss of English identity. Today, in the 21st century, perhaps it could be said that there’s no Germany now.
selwynduke.com 