In America we have the right to protest, so when Kaepernick started his protest by refusing to honor the flag and the national anthem during NFL pre-game ceremonies a lot of people thought it was wrong, and a lot of people thought it was right. That’s America for you. And no matter what anybody thought, nobody disagreed about the fact that it was his right to protest like that – it is part of what it means to be American. It’s about free speech and our inalienable rights as American citizens.

If there was one theme that qualified the new politically correct definition of morality in higher education it was the idea that the new Affirmative Action professoriate wanted to do away with everything about civilization that white men had created. If a white man had made it or done it, then they wanted to get rid of it. They actually became extremely vocal about the premise of doing away with the white man’s civilization and replacing it.

When a tree dies, or when we run across decaying wood in a forest, our first reaction is to think we should remove it. However, the ecology of the forest is such that saproxylic organisms, including fungi and insects, depend on the dead wood that naturally generates the dynamics of the forest. The fact is, however, that there is a real obsession to eliminate it as soon as possible because it seems dirty and like it will attract pests. The biggest problem associated with dead wood is that dead wood plays a very important role in forest life.

Enter the concept of slight autism. We can define slight autism as a state of autistic perception that is noticeably but not diagnosably autistic. Here is how we can begin to explain it and understand it.

Psychology studies the individual, and sociology studies the group. Social psychology studies the relation between the individual and the group, and for me that’s where all the action is. I study perception and the subjective organization of meaning ...

In the mid-twentieth century, a social psychologist by the name of Harold Garfinkle (1965) wrote an article titled “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies.” This became one of those articles – one of those stand-out pieces that becomes a signpost for a way of looking at the world. Now largely subsumed under the rubric of Social Identity Theory in psychology, there is a sizeable literature of twentieth century social psychology that issued forth from peculiarly sociological camps.