thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb We’ve commented before on the success of the abstinence-based anti-AIDS program in Uganda, noting that the readiness of health officials dealing with AIDS to ignore the success of the program confirms that they are willing to sacrifice thousands of lives for the sake of sexual liberation and similar causes. It appears that feminism… More ...
Good causes: support Senator Santorum, and sign a petition against the current attempt to write “gay rights” into international human rights law.
Feminism gives ground for very serious complaints. However, the social location of those whose voices get amplified by the media ensures that they mostly take the form of yuppie kvetching: there can’t be anything wrong with feminism that more and better feminism wouldn’t cure, so that things become what they should be for me. … More ...
Another snapshot of the self-destruction of thought: “Under this asinine rule we’d never have heard of Darwin.” The “asinine rule” is a quantitative measure of scholarly productivity UK bureaucrats use to allocate funds. Academics get high marks by treating “research” as an industrial product. That sort of research is normally worthless, but such questions fall … More ...
Turnabout is:
One way to express the contradiction at the heart of “gay marriage” is that it demands the right to a special status—marriage—in the name of abolishing special status. The real effect of such demands is to eliminate marriage in favor of equal treatment of living arrangements. The sentimentality about how nice married life is, and … More ...
The homosexual movement and its allies constantly use the phrase “sexual identity.” The phrase seems to be taken for granted, and is rarely explained and justified. It seems, though, to refer to the notion that our sexual habits and inclinations are fundamental to what we are, more so than religion or even sex in the … More ...
For anyone who’s interested, I just posted some comments on Rick Santorum/Andrew Sullivan at the other blog I participate in, here (page down for further discussion) and here. Also, a couple of essays I wrote recently appeared in print, “Emerson and Us” in Modern Age and “Understanding Conservatism and Tradition” in Telos.
More bulletins on the willed abolition of the American mind:
John Ray, an anti-leftist social scientist in Australia, has a couple of blogs for his academic papers (here and here—I don’t know why he has two). Many of the papers are concerned with debunking social science theories advanced in support of efforts to combat what is called “bigotry.” What he finds in … More ...