More War on Christmas

 

I wrote this last year, and I decided to post it again.

Conservatives often complain this time of year about a war on Christmas by the leftists – generally attributing it to leftist disdain for Christianity. Many leftists do have a problem with the Christmas season. It has become a point of political correctness not to say Merry Christmas. There are scolding warnings in various media that references to Christmas should be avoided to avoid offending or “marginalizing” people who do not celebrate the holiday. Ads for retail companies talk only about holiday shopping and holiday gifts, not Christmas shopping and gifts, as though the corporate weasels running those companies expect to make their numbers and get their bonuses based on purchases of Kwanzaa gifts or New Year’s presents. The conservatives have a point, but I think their explanation misses something important.

There surely are leftists who are hostile to Christianity, and that likely explains some of the so-called war on Christmas, but not all or, to me, even most. Leftists usually say or do nothing about Easter, and Easter is a far more nearly completely religious holiday than Christmas. Christmas in our time is as much a secular holiday as a religious one, and many non-Christians enjoy Christmas and the Christmas season. Santa, Rudolph, Frosty, decorating trees, decking halls, giving presents, Christmas dinners, and a season to be jolly have little or nothing to do with Christianity. I think that for many leftists, the real difficulty is not with the Christmas but with the merry. A season of ordinary, unsupervised people enjoying themselves and their lives, vigorously displaying good will to the people they meet, giving and receiving presents, and generally feeling benevolent and happy, on their own without external direction goes against many of the left’s fundamental notions of how the world is and should be. It is no wonder many lefties do not care for it and feel uncomfortable with it or even threatened by it.

They might feel worse if they knew how little effect their feelings and opinions have had. Except among cowardly corporations which can be bullied into just about anything and the generally left leaning traditional media, their efforts seem to me to have been mainly a failure. In their private lives people behave as they like and enjoy Christmas. That’s good. They should keep it up.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year.

Learning from Phoniness

It is not news that most politicians and their media flacks are phonies. They produce evidence of that routinely day by day. People are so used to it that many expect nothing else and scarcely notice it anymore.  However sometimes  our civil masters and their friends display their phoniness in ways that tell people something interesting.   

A few years ago in  the Kelo case, the  Supreme Court ruled  that it was permissible for state and local governments to seize people’s property through eminent domain and hand it over to  private individuals or companies the governments favored.  Republicans like to claim they are defenders of individual rights and opponents of arbitrary government power.  The decision gave them an opportunity to show it by passing legislation banning the practice- either directly or indirectly by withholding money from governments that did it.  They  controlled the White House and both houses of congress, but  no bill was passed. (The president did issue an executive order, but it had little effect.)  One does not have to be a cynic to wonder if that was because some important donors to the Republican party were wealthy real estate developers who preferred having a government steal property for them to having to acquire it through voluntary exchange. Whether or not that was the reason, their  behavior told people something worth learning.

A while back Hillary Clinton let a large cat out of the bag when she  explained that she left Margaret Thatcher out of her supposedly apolitical compendium of gutsy women because she did not approve of her politics. It has been obvious to some people for a long time that Clinton’s style of feminism is less about women’s independence, accomplishment, or gutsiness than about leftist politics, and that to people like her the lives and accomplishments  and gutsiness of women who do not fit the political mold are to be ignored or disparaged. Still it was useful  though  a little unusual for her to proclaim her phoniness directly, out loud, and in public, but she is neither as clever nor as shifty as her husband.

  

A few days ago Trump appointed Richard Grenell to be acting director of national intelligence.  He is the first openly homosexual person to  have a cabinet level position in the United States. Activists and people in the traditional media have generally seen such firsts as beneficial and important whether by football players, police chiefs, elected officials, or whatever. One might have expected a similar reaction here, but it did not happen. The obvious reason it didn’t is that Grenell has the wrong politics, and that to them breaking down barriers does not matter if the politically wrong sort of people are doing it. That too is useful information.

Beto O'Rourke, Gun Enthusiast

It is unfair to Bobby Frank O’Rourke and his associates  Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Pete Buttigieg to charge them with being “anti-gun”. These people love guns. They need guns.  They depend on guns. The things they want to do to the country are accomplishable (if at all) only at gunpoint. They are not in the business of inspiring or persuading other Americans  to do what they want. They don’t expect people to go along with them voluntarily. They plan to use the government to  force us to do so, and government power comes - in the words of a famous advocate of strong,vigorous central government -  from the barrel of a gun.

What they object  to is guns, and thus the means for self-defense, in  the hands of private citizens. Helpless and defenseless people are likely to do as they are told. People with options and capacities for exercising them may decide not to obey orders.  Americans are stubborn enough about not  following the dictates and wishes  of their assorted  would be masters in the political and bureaucratic classes.  Knowing that they have the ability - as a last resort if things ever get bad enough to justify it -  to resist very effectively and having the would be masters know it as well only tends to make them more so.

Millions of Americans who own firearms are peaceful people who are no threat to their neighbors or public safety. The leftist politicians who want to disarm them know this. Yet they persist in trying to disarm them. There probably are various reasons for this. However the safe assumption for people to make is that anyone who wants to make you helpless may have something unpleasant in mind for you.  It is also the natural one.

Voting (and Aspiring) on the Green New Deal

For a good while leftists in this country have claimed that the climate change apocalypse is nigh, and that unless we humans mend our ways, horrific disasters and even extinction are imminent.  Recently a freshman Democrat member of the house presented a fairly detailed path to salvation and labeled it the Green New Deal.  Among other things it would require an end to air travel, abolishing gas and diesel fueled engines, exterminating dairy and beef cattle, the  forced remodeling of every house and other building in the country, ending the use of coal, oil, or natural gas to produce electricity, and taxing productive people to subsidize a livelihood for anyone unwilling to work.  The proposal has gained the support of many well-known Democrats including several of the party’s senators and candidates for president. 

This week the members of the United States senate had the opportunity to vote on the plan. Every Republican and four Democrats voted against it. No one voted for it. Forty three Democrats including all of the senators who had said they supported it, voted “present” to avoid going on record on the proposal.  For those who might still need it, this was a fine illustration of the fact that leftist politicians are not really serious about this stuff except as a means to increase their power and authority.  Not only would they not put their money where their mouths were. They would not even put their non-binding votes there.

There were various lame attempts to excuse the hypocrisy. The most common was to say that the things in the plan were aspirational goals, blueprints for things desirable in some future or abstract way but not something to work on now.  Of course that  is inconsistent with  all their apocalyptic talk. If one is facing catastrophe or even  annihilation if one does not take immediate action, one does not  merely aspire. One acts or at least tries to.

Still, without accepting it as an excuse, one should  take the statement of aspiration at face value  and consider what it means. Many  people have political aspirations. Many libertarians aspire  to a freer and safer country where the government respects more of people’s rights, expropriates less of their earnings and property, and avoids unnecessary foreign wars. Social conservatives often aspire to a return to the values and mores of an imagined better past. A person’s aspirations say something about him.  Aspiring to something like the Green New Deal says something important about the leftists and Democrats who do so. Anyone who aspires to that level of power over his fellow humans is a dangerous sociopath who should not be trusted with the authority typically given to a junior high hall monitor, much less anything more.  That is worth noticing and taking seriously.

Football Season

When I was a boy,  there was a saying that playing football builds character. I didn’t  believe it. I knew a number of the football players at my high school. Some were good guys, and some were jerks -  just as with the rest of us. I did not notice the quality of anyone’s character improving or worsening over the years from being on the team.  Nor have I seen much evidence for the idea in the following years.  Big time college football’s and the NFL’s present and recent collections of  thugs,  “domestic abusers”, prancing narcissists, bullies, belligerent near illiterates, and felons do not offer it strong support.

Neither does the behavior of some of the coaches who are said to be instilling all those upright character traits. Urban Meyer, coach of the prestigious and well beloved by the sports media Ohio State Buckeyes recently lied about a serious subject (accusations  of wife beating by one of his assistant coaches and what and when he knew about them)  to reporters and the public at an event where he was officially representing the university. He was caught in his lie and changed his story from a claim of complete ignorance of the matter to one of following the rules explicitly to one of maybe not doing all he should have but only because of his fondness for the accused man’s grandfather.  The university’s bosses suspended him for the time  up to the end of  the season’s first game and prohibited him from  being on the sidelines for two more games.  Most of the arguments I have read have been over whether this was too severe or not severe enough a punishment for failing to do more in 2015. While I have not followed the story thoroughly, I have not seen many people saying he should have to pay for his  lying. It may be that to many fans and people in the sports media, lying by coaches is to be expected and treated as no big deal.

College football often is a sleazy business.  Cheating and buying players in recruiting are said to be fairly common.  Coaches regularly sign up players lacking ability or preparation for college and bring hoodlums and criminals to their campuses while prattling about character and “student athletes”.  Trying to injure opponents in games gets some coaches’ tacit approval or even encouragement.  There is reason to be a little skeptical of the idea that all those three hundred pounders on college teams are the result only of weight lifting, clean living, and eating lots of Wheaties and to be curious about how prescription pain drugs are used on players.

One can know this and still like the game, but a person should take the game as it is and not fall for the character building stuff or participate in any silly idolatry of successful coaches.  

Diversity = Conformity?

The Alphabet Corporation should be ashamed.  An employee of Google posted an essay questioning some of the company’s policies on affirmative action and  its disdain for people with other than leftist political opinions and suggesting that men on average  might be better suited to doing technical work than women on average.  While such opinions may be controversial, they are not inflammatory, outrageous, or outside the bounds of rational discourse.  (There are valid reasons for believing hiring for ability and commitment to work is fairer and  more honest and leads to better results than hiring based on quotas for race, sex, or religion.  It probably is bad business for a company to  snub and offend millions of its customers and shareholders.  There are more men than women working in technical jobs, though that fact say nothing about any intrinsic difference in aptitude between the sexes.)

The most sensible thing for the  bosses at Google to have done about the essay would have been to ignore it.  An acceptable response would have been to issue a press release stating that Google’s managers disagree with the essay’s content in regard to both fact and opinion and will continue to follow their preferred policies. Instead the company first had its  diversity czarina issue a screed attacking the essay as evil and suggesting its writer might be in trouble with the law over it and then hunted the author down and fired him. 

 Apart from  the general absurdity and blatant hypocrisy of siccing  a diversity honcho onto someone  and firing him for the crime of holding and expressing  opinions  that bring diversity to various topics of corporate practices, the company’s actions have provided evidence to support some of the man’s arguments. There does seem to be an atmosphere of enforced conformity at the company.   Google really does seem not to tolerate employees  having  private opinions deviating from its generally leftist party line.  The existence of a hypocritical double standard does  seem fairly clear. (For example, an essay by a devout Muslim employee suggesting the company would be better off requiring female employees to be veiled and to work in sexually segregated offices very likely would not have caused its author any trouble or sent the diversity squad into action.)

I hope the poor guy finds a good job somewhere.  I also hope Alphabet catches holy hell for this in public opinion. It deserves to. An outfit which touts diversity while demanding total conformity is not only a far piece away from doing the right thing. It is a purveyor of Newspeak.  I say this as one of their frequent and generally happy customers. 

Admission to Colleges

This week at the White House a reporter asked the press secretary if people in the administration thought affirmative action policies at colleges discriminated against white students in a manner suggesting holding such an opinion would be at least a hideous breach of etiquette and probably something far worse.  (The question was probably inspired by  information leaked  to the New York Times about  Department of Justice hiring lawyers to look into the question of discrimination in admissions to colleges and by the reactions to it of  various Democratic politicians and their friends.  It turned out that the investigation apparently will deal with claims of discrimination against Asian students. The Times missed that, whether carelessly or perhaps on the premise that its audience would appreciate the evil of the thing more readily if the possible beneficiaries were white.)

The accepted  hypocrisies and taboos  of a society require that certain things not be publicly mentioned or considered even if they are not only  true but  obviously so.  Affirmative action in college admissions is a good example. Admission policies  which set lower standards   for black and Hispanic applicants than for white and Asian ones discriminate against the latter two. By excluding them from admission, these policies harm all white and Asian applicants  whose qualifications are below the white/Asian acceptance point(s)  but above the black/Hispanic one(s).   It is possible to argue honestly (though I think wrongly) that such discrimination is a good thing, but it is not possible to argue honestly that the discrimination does not exist.  If person A has higher overall qualifications for admission  than person B before  the race of either is considered  but is rejected while B is accepted once  the race of each is considered, then A has been discriminated against on the basis of race.

The dust up this week illustrates how well accepted the hypocrisy and taboo on this issue are. It also indicates more than a little fear among those who favor something they may not be able to defend. 

Kaepernick in the News

A few days ago Colin Kaepernick, a benched quarterback for a mediocre team in the NFL, made big news by denouncing the United States as oppressive to  minorities and by refusing to stand during the playing of the national anthem at the beginning of a football game.  Since then the news has been full of articles and commentaries defending or denouncing him. While I found nothing worth noticing about either Kaepernick or what he might say about  this or any other topic, I did find something  a little interesting in  some  of the reactions.  

The most amusing thing to me was the phony basis for the  praise he got for being brave, daring, and controversial. In  fact he took no risk at all with anyone who matters, because his actions fell within the boundaries of what is acceptable by the rules  of political correctness.  The officials of the NFL whose usual demands for total uniformity have had them in  tizzies over  such things as slightly deflated footballs,  someone wanting to wear  high  top football shoes to honor a deceased player, and stickers honoring dead cops,  said this  was just fine.  The officials of his team did the same. Many in the establishment media were effusive in supporting  him, and many others were at least appreciative of his “message”, if not his methods.   What he did seems no more brave or daring  than speaking out in favor of dolphins or puppies.  (Now if he had, for example, waved a little rebel battle flag while running onto the field and rhapsodized to reporters about the Lost Cause, that actually would have been bold, risky, and controversial, albeit bizarre.  It would also have gotten him fired, exiled from the league,  and left without support or sympathy  in the media.) It may even have saved him from being cut from the team for incompetence, since his bosses  may now be afraid to let him go.  

A Modest Proposal to Increase Correctness in Corporations

Corporations from Walmart to Amazon to Ebay have been rushing around removing the rebel battle flag and, one presumes, clothing and toys displaying it from their inventory. Apple has gone further and banned even Civil War games  depicting the flag incidentally as part of a historic scene.  These companies are free to do so, and I have no interest in owning a Confederate battle flag. I’m strictly a Union man. However despite these gestures in the way of correctness and approved thinking, there remains  a long way to go before achieving total purity. 

Imagine an organization still existing and still influential today which was the main political supporter of slavery, an organization whose members started the Civil War to defend slavery  and then, after losing the war, created and defended segregation and Jim Crow for almost a hundred years. Imagine that organization gave the country its only pro-Klan and segregationist president and had an admitted Klansman as one of its leaders as recently as a couple of decades or so ago.  One would have  to expect the same companies which have distanced themselves so righteously from a mere symbol (and a somewhat ambiguous one at that) would have to wash their hands of such a tainted group.

Well such a group does exist. It is called the Democratic Party, and its members did all those things. So in the name of consistency, shouldn’t  these companies and   Apple in particular need to cut all ties to the Democratic Party and remove any items or apps related to that party or showing its symbol in any way?  After all, there is no point in being halfway correct or sort of pure on something like this.

Race, Hypocrisy, and Basketball

There are various types of wrong opinions about race.  Racial prejudice consists of disliking, refusing to associate with, or disapproving of or liking, wanting to associate with, or approving of a person on the basis of his race or ethnic group. The error and the unfairness of this lie in judging a person on the basis of something irrelevant to his character, behavior, and capabilities and over which he had no choice. Racial bigotry is the practice of attributing bad or good (though usually bad) characteristics to members of a race or ethnic group indiscriminately  – such as claiming all Jews are mercenary and crooked or all  blacks are  brutal and stupid or all Englishmen are cultured and well educated. Racism is the doctrine that members of a particular race or ethnic group are necessarily and intrinsically inferior or superior to others on the basis of their membership in the race or group. 

It is not pedantic to make distinctions among the three, because the differences  matter.  Each of the second two is worse than the one(s) listed before it, being both more unreasonable and foolishly wrong and also liable to produce worse consequences. Racial prejudice alone, unless it is very pervasive within a society,  usually stops with bad, rude, and boorish individual social behavior.  Bigotry when widepread  in a society can lead to  large scale violence, systematic invidious discrimination,and  unjust laws, and even when uncommon often stimulates conflict and criminal activity. Besides all the wrongs associated the first two, racism can lead and has led to caste systems, race based  enslavement, and mass murder and even when  lacking many adherents and politically powerless inculcates brutal and inhumane attitudes and behavior. 

At present the apparently quite unpleasant owner of the Los Angeles Clippers of the NBA is being castigated for some rude things he said in private about black people. The man’s comments and opinions as reported fall into the category of boorish racial prejudice,  perhaps tinged with a touch of bigotry. A little while ago in the news,  famous rapper and associate of the president Jay Z publicly announced his affinity for people and opinions explicitly racist in the exact sense of the term.

It is useful to consider the two cases together. While assorted media and political queens of hearts are screaming for the team owner’s head or at least his property, there was scarcely a peep about the rapper’s saying something far worse by the standards espoused by those attacking the other man.  People operating fairly on the basis of thought out principles usually do not behave with that much inconsistency. Hypocrites, parroting ignoramuses, and phonies, on the other hand, do it all the time. These two cases present  another illustration that, while the Victorians may have had their hypocrisy and inconsistency on sex, our age’s treatment of race matches them and perhaps then some.  Future generations may  get the same sort of good laugh from it. 

Of the Nitwits, by the Nitwits, for the Nitwits

Last week in Connecticut a young psychopath committed a horrific sequence of murders at a school. Opportunistic politicians are rushing in to demand new laws and regulations and calling the event a political game changer. Yet to those who think about political questions in terms of principles, this event or any other single event is irrelevant to the issues of gun control. The reasons for a thoughtful person to be for gun rights or for gun control have not changed since last Friday. The right of the citizens to arm themselves for self defense has not changed. The fact that guns are dangerous weapons has not changed. The danger of widespread availability of firearms making it easier for criminals or psychopaths to get weapons has not changed.  The desire of much of the political class to rule a disarmed populace has not changed. The function of an armed citizenry as a bulwark against tyranny has not changed.

In a world of principled and scrupulous politicians and thoughtful citizens, nothing in the debate would have changed, because great political controversies  would not be driven by the emotions of the moment or affected by emotional reactions to single events.  That of course is not the world of reality. In the real world we have large numbers of voters who decide who should be president on the basis of photo ops after a  hurricane  and posturing, yahoo politicians who cater  to such people -  acting as though they never before considered the possibility that nuts could get guns and commit crimes.  In the real world we have disgusting politicians and their cheerleaders in the traditional media capitalizing on people’s grief and shock over a crime and ghoulishly dancing on the graves of the victims  to push their agendas while nerves are raw. (An observer could fairly ask the Michael Bloombergs of the world “have you no shame?”, and could follow up by asking them  whether their opinion of the intelligence of the public is really as low as their behavior makes it seem.) In the real world, we have logrolling and  tub thumping – as with creating the TSA after September 11^th and now with a president who seems to promise he can prevent any psychopaths from committing crimes in the future. In the real world we have Governor Le Petomane and the boys deciding they had better pretend to do something about the problems in Rock Ridge because their phony baloney jobs are at stake.

It is easy to be contemptuous of the politicians for all the sick shows they put on, but we should not stop with that. After all, politicians wouldn’t be doing this sort of thing if they didn’t think it would sell. 

Christmas Cheer and Holiday Phonies

I am again annoyed by all the retailers’ ads about “holiday shopping” and “holiday gifts” when everyone knows that it is Christmas shopping and Christmas gifts that  they are hoping people will do and buy. What bothers me is the utter hypocrisy and dishonesty of it all. I simply don’t like the cowardly phoniness. If the characters running the retailers are so cravenly afraid of giving offense to someone by mentioning the word “Christmas”,  they should put their money where their mouths are and not stock up for or run ads for Christmas shopping instead of trying  to make their numbers from the holiday of which they dare not speak the name.

The whole business is mainly absurd political correctness anyway. Christmas is  at least  as much a secular holiday as a religious one. Indeed the things people enjoy most about Christmas – the good cheer, the presents, the tree, the decorations, Santa Claus, Rudolph, Frosty, Christmas dinner, time off from work, and so on – are completely secular and enjoyed by millions of people who are not Christians. (I often wonder if the real reason so many of the politically correct among us dislike Christmas has nothing  to do with religion but rather is simply a manifestation  of a general,  puritanical disapproval of ordinary people having too much unstructured, unsupervised, spontaneous fun.)

It has been objected that, while all this may be true, there are still a few people who would be offended by mentioning Christmas, and sensitivity demands catering to their feelings. It is interesting to consider an example of  where a consistent application of this principle would lead. There is a national holiday in January to honor Martin Luther King. There are also those who do not approve of Martin Luther King, might be offended by mentioning the holiday in his honor, and might rather celebrate, say, Elvis’s January birthday instead.  If people were to  approach this situation with  the same sensitivity that is said to be necessary in the case of Christmas, they would need to avoid mentioning Martin Luther King Day and refer instead to the “January holiday” to avoid offending someone.  I doubt if that is something  the sensitivity police would favor, but it is where one arrives applying the standard they recommend. 

Hokum and Taboo

There is a small political stink going on in my town over a  couple of the pro-Obama  political signs that were defaced recently. It is not known whether the work was done by opponents or pro-Obama agents  provocateur, but the local Democrats are up in arms with one of their perennial candidates calling for an investigation by the hate crime police.  The reason for their and the local newspaper’s going into such a tizzy is of course that the vandalism took the form of writing the word “nigger” on the signs.

It is indicative of a strange  cultural phenomenon, where a word is held in such dread that it is rarely printed or spoken (except by black people, oddly enough), but rather referred  to fearfully and  surreptitiously as the “N-word”.  The term is after all  only a vulgarism, one of many offensive words in the language that polite people avoid using. Yet many people these days treat it as some sort of dread tribal taboo, almost in the manner of the superstitious savages in an old movie fearing  some  forbidden utterance will cause the gods to make the volcano erupt. It reaches a point where the silliness of it  all can make one wonder whether a lot of one’s fellow Americans are thinking  all that much more clearly than the savages with the volcanoes.

It is also interesting to consider trends of  fashion with respect to taboo words. A few decades ago, “fuck” was a word that may not be spoken, while the usage of “nigger”, though considered vulgar and low class,  was not taboo in the same sense. Now that is reversed. This may reflect the fact that while the sanctimony and  hypocrisy of the former time were often  centered on sex, the sanctimony and  hypocrisy of our time are  often focused on race. 

Praising Ted

It was interesting to hear about the tributes the Democrats paid Ted Kennedy at their recent convention. This was a man who was guilty of at least negligent  homicide (and possibly much worse) when he ran his car into the water at Chappaquiddick, left his female passenger to die, and did not report the event for several hours.  One might think that a bunch of people accusing their opponents of waging a war against women would have been at least a little concerned about that. This is also a man whose offers to the  Soviets in the 1980’s  to help them undermine this country’s strategies in the last years  of the Cold War were either treason or the next thing to it. Since many Democrats now like to claim that those in their party  were right there doing their part in winning the Cold War, one might think this might have been seen as at least awkward. Then there is the fact that he spent most of his life as a drunken, womanizing, rich kid living high on family money he did not earn.  One might think a few people in the party would have noticed that the man was a walking example of the stereotype of the vulgar, useless, wealthy parasite.

That none of this seems to have mattered at all, either to the Democrats or the people in the traditional media covering the convention, suggests once again that for them a person’s character and even his crimes are  irrelevant so long as he follows the correct political line.

Oddly Not News

Ted Cruz won the Republican primary runoff in Texas for a seat in the U.S. Senate last night. Since the only way the Republican nominee will  not win in November would be if Eric Holder canceled the election and declared martial law,  this means that Texas will have its first Hispanic senator. This fact is only incidental information to people who care more about a candidate’s political beliefs and principles (if any) than his ethnic background, but is the sort of thing  that is usually very big news with the race-obsessed traditional media. If Cruz had been a leftist and a Democrat, this would have been a major  bell ringing, leg tingling, news story from coast to coast and border to border. Since he is a conservative and a Republican, we get instead pretty much nothing. What does not get reported often reveals as much about bias and dishonesty  as what does. That is fairly obviously the case here.  Who knows, the traditional media may even label poor old Ted a “white Hispanic”,  a term never used for Democrats of any complexion but put into common usage by the New York Times  to make George Zimmerman an honorary cracker.

Diversity (University Style) Defined

As the Supreme Court is about to hear a case from the University of Texas on the permissibility of basing admissions to universities on race, we will hear a lot of talk about a supposed need for diversity. In the context of affirmative action at colleges and universities, the term “diversity” is used with a particular meaning. It does not  refer to the desirable goal of creating a community of active discourse and widely diverse opinions where students are exposed to a variety of viewpoints  and theories, but rather to something quite different. Diversity is to plain, direct, race-quota based patronage as creation science is to plain, old fashioned  creationism,  that is a fundamentally intellectually dishonest fallback and expedient developed for public consumption after the actual belief becomes untenable.