Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Do you find it difficult to start a conversation with someone you just met?


I do, even though I have been meeting new people on many different occasions for a long, long time.


Today I read an article about questions to ask that may be helpful to start a conversation.


I plan to try using some of these questions for starting conversations with new persons I meet.


The 55 Best Questions To Ask To Break The Ice And Really Get To Know Someone

Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Identity Politics

The term "identity politics" has been used social and political analyses since the 1970's.  Identity politics has been the "oppressed" in the United State to explain their felt oppression in terms of their own experience.
This identity politics has been, and continues to be, an element in our society that is tearing the "American Dream" apart and is destroying us as a nation.  It has became a leftist political weapon to try to gain power in all aspects of our lives.
Identity politics, as a mode of organizing, is closely connected to the idea that some social groups are oppressed, such as women, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, etc. Such as individuals belonging to those groups are, by virtue of their identity, more vulnerable to forms of oppression such as cultural imperialism, violence, exploitation of labour, marginalization, or powerlessness.
Excerpts from The Problem of Identity Politics and Its Solution,Matthew Continetti, Editor-in-Chief, Washington Free Beacon:

"This year another liberal academic, Columbia humanities professor Mark Lilla, writes 'was at first about large classes of people . . . seeking to redress major historical wrongs by mobilizing and then working through our political institutions to secure their rights. But by the 1980s, it had given way to a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow, and exclusionary self-definition that is now cultivated in our colleges and universities.'"