NYTIMES.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 2000: "A balanced life, which is guided by faith and intellect, is built upon a value system which you can trust [will], Insha'llah, bring you happiness, spiritual happiness and worldly happiness ... it will give you happiness in many different ways."] ARTICLE: Who is happier: liberals or conservatives? Liberals obviously, right? Wrong, according to much data over decades. Take Pew Research. In 2006 they reported conservative Republicans were 68% more likely than liberal Democrats to say they were "very happy" about their lives. But why? Religion and family seem key. Conservatives make up 80% of religous Americans, liberals just 20%. And religious people are twice as likely to say they are very happy about their lives than secularists (43% to 23%). 52% of married, religious, politically conservative people (with kids) are very happy versus just 14% of single, secular, liberal people without kids. The very happiest Americans are either "extremely conservative" (48%) or "extremely liberal" (35%). The least happy are dead-center "moderates." The Occupy Wall Street protesters may have looked like a miserable mess. In truth none, it seems, are happier than the Tea Partiers, many of whom ...

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CONSERVATIVEWOMAN.CO.UK -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 1967: "What has been called the permissive society where anything goes, nothing matters, nothing is sacred or private any more, is not a promising foundation for a brave and upright new world." Hazar Imam, 1999: "It's clear that uncontrolled freedom becomes license.... It's probably the most challenging issue that I have to address today."] ARTICLE: It was of course in the 'Swinging Sixties' that the permissive society got under way. And then, with permissive floodgates opened, abandoning Biblical morality became cool and progressive and heralded as a liberal virtue. So began the process whereby on film, TV, stage and the printed page the old landmarks of propriety and decency were removed and the boundaries were constantly being pushed out. Where were the churches when the permissive society was running riot? The defence of Christian moral teaching was generally left to a few valiant individuals. The sexual revolution has continued up to the present day. One of its latest manifestations ...

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NATIONALPOST.COM -- While the federal government rightly hosted two consecutive summits on combating anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, attended by the Prime Minister, what I find inexplicable is there is no scheduled summit dealing with the current wave of destructive hostility directed at Christian worshippers. Especially since, that within a period of just two weeks, Canada had 48 acts of violance against Christian churches: from vandalism to total destruction by fire. We may not be in an age of faith and religion, but for many Canadians faith not an incidental pastime. It is core to their being. Indigenous leaders were angered by these attacks on their churces, some of which had served their communities for a long time. Two chruches had no Aboriginal associations. One was built by refugees who fled religious persecution. "Our church brought together a diverse congregation of Coptic, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Iraqi and Lebanese ...

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DAILYMAIL.CO.UK -- According to a YouGov poll, the British public hugely overestimates the size of minorities and, thereby, warping the view of society. While official figures show black Britons make up about 3% of the population, those surveyed estimated it was 20%. Conversely, when asked what proportion of adults were white, the median answer was 65% yet the true figure is 87%. Similarly, Britons believed about 15% of the population is Muslim, against the true figure of about 4%, and they estimated the Jewish community stood at 10% when it is 0.5%. MP Sir John Hayes said: "This distorted impression created by much of the broadcast and online media is so out of tune with the facts." The poll revealed that the public thinks 10% ...

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NATIONALPOST.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 2008: "People come together around competence, around ability, around knowledge. They don't like mediocrity." ~~ Hazar Imam, 2000: "Pakistan, fortunately, like many other developing countries, is moving to what we call a merit-based educational system."] ARTICLE: It is quite likely that the diversity, inclusion and equity (DIE) motivated eradication of objective testing will hinder students from mastering topics such as statistics which social sciences rely on. And so, when I meet someone hired on DIE grounds, should I be skeptical of their professional competence? Even the New York Times expressed its doubts about DIE in a 2021 headline: "Are Workplace Diversity Programs Doing More Harm than Good?" Commenting on the Western woke madness, Vladimir Putin said that although the advocates of so-called "social progress" believe they are introducing a new and better consciousness, Russia has been there already. The Bolsheviks, relying on Marx, led the destruction of age-old values, religion, and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too). And they were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs. "We are amazed ...

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ACADEMYOFIDEAS.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazrat Ali: "Use your intellect to understand something when you hear about it. The intellect that examines and not just the intellect that repeats what it hears, for surely there are many who repeat the knowledge that they hear, and there are few who examine it."] ARTICLE: Repetition is a well-known propaganda technique for solidifying falsehoods and perpetuating fear. By repeating specific phrases and warnings over and over, entire populations can be paralyzed with a fear psychosis. The Nazi Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, well aware of this, said: "It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition ... that a square is in fact a circle." Or, as George Orwell wrote: "Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." And, as Voltaire explained, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." To avoid this, one must give up being a common passive propaganda receiver and instead become an active truth seeker. Skepticism is ...

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