Rich but icy red for Valentine’s Day

 

Here are two more views, one broad and the other close, of fruited yaupon trees (Ilex vomitoria)
from the ice storm that we “welcomed” the month of February into Austin with.

 

  

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Below are some quotations from Andrew Doyle‘s 2022 book The New Puritans.
The guy has a way with words and comes out with some zingers.
(I’ve retained his British spelling and punctuation.)

 

…It has apparently never occurred to anyone involved that the best solution to feeling offended by a particular show is simply not to watch it.

The truest commitment to diversity, of course, involves a recognition of the primacy and sovereignty of the individual.

There are now flags for every conceivable sexual or gender identity. These are not necessarily representative of groups that have been historically persecuted, but rather a hotchpotch of neologisms that can be seemingly selected at will like so many fashion accessories. Flags have been designed for those who identify as pangender, aporagender, agender, bigender, trigender, genderqueer, genderfluid, demigender, demigirl, demiboy, neutrois, polyamorous, non-binary, asexual, omnisexual, poly-sexual, abrosexual, androsexual, gynosexual, skoliosexual, aromantic, gender questioning, gender non-conforming, and many more. Surely it would be far easier to create one giant flag for narcissists and be done with it.

Is this progress? Or it is simply that some of us remain sober while the world gets drunk? The proliferation of what we might call ‘neosexualities’ risks demeaning the struggles of sexual minorities in the past. The persecution of homosexuals over the centuries is well documented, but if there has been any equivalent campaigns against asexuals it has certainly escaped the attention of historians. It is difficult to conceive of a militant evangelist at his pulpit condemning anyone for having a low libido.

Those who oppose Critical Race Theory are so often charged with simply failing to understand it. As with any academic field, there are nuances and details that will escape a layman, but this does not debar him from objecting to some of the central premises. It would be akin to a clergyman claiming that atheists are unqualified to declare their disbelief in God until they have developed a sufficient level of expertise in Thomas Aquinas’s writings on the compatibility of faith and reason.

 

 © 2023 Steven Schwartzman