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...people of different races to different standards in the name of promoting racial tolerance and equality. But the logic here is flawed. The race, religion, and ethnicity of a person are all significant factors in determining the offensiveness of what he says or writes. Meaning is inherently dependent on context. The same words, used by different people in different circumstances, carry entirely different connotations...
Political correctness prohibits us from saying, “That’s so gay!” in a derogatory context, yet the incidence of illness-as-punchline remains an all too common occurrence in our otherwise hyper-P.C. environment. Straight people don’t say, “That’s so gay” because they understand why it might be hurtful; but knowledge about mental illness is often lacking and misinformed, and many underestimate (or fail to consider) the severity of mental illness and the grief that jokes at its expense may cause...
...critical policy decision, yet there was no NSC Principals meeting to debate the move. As for the 1 percent number Bremer cites, he didn't ask for that estimate until the date after he issued the order, and once he got it he ignored the two fold context: first that many of those Ba'athists were technocrats of exactly the sort Iraq would soon need if it were to again resume responsibility for its governance, and, second, that every Ba'athist "extirpated" from Iraq, to use Bremer's word, had brothers and sisters and aunts, uncles, and cousins with whom...
...soon began hearing stories about how Iraqis could not send their kids to school because all the teachers had been dismissed for being members of the Ba'ath Party. In the context of a country armed to the teeth, this was not a good thing. If the kids and teachers were not in school, they were on the streets. I went to see Condi Rice and complained that the indiscriminate nature of the de-Ba'athification order had swept away not just Saddam's thugs but also, for example, something like forty thousand schoolteachers, who had joined...
...critical missing element was an Iraqi government that could have helped us. We decided instead to have Americans administer Iraq. It may have worked in World War II, after the entire world fought against Nazi Germany for many years. But in the context of the Middle East, it was not going to work any more than the French occupation of Algeria. To Arabs it looked as though this was all about occupation as opposed to liberation. We were dismissive about the capacity of Iraqis to control their own future. We have struggled ever since...