thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb A suggestion that there are limitations to manipulation: How anti-racism advertising can backfire. It seems that if someone doesn’t fully accept the official line that all groups are equally good in all respects, antiracist advertising can make him think about the issues and drop the official line altogether.
An odd feature of the piece … More ...
A common Leftist claim is that established moral principles serve the interests of the ruling classes. Oddly, the claim isn’t applied to moral principles of which the Left approves. In particular, it is not applied to a principle that in spite of its novelty seems to outrank all others today, the principle that “discrimination” is … More ...
A short listing of unevents for the unholiday, mostly not taking place in New York: Making Christmas Disappear.
They finally did it: New York legislature passes “gay rights” bill. The Republicans had been keeping the bill bottled up in committee, but brought it to the floor as a political pay-off to a homosexual organization that had endorsed the Republican governor for re-election. It passed the Assembly and Senate by solid-to-overwhelming margins.
There … More ...
Don’t worry, we’re all being looked after:
Mice and men share about 99 percent of each other’s genes. I wonder if that means there are no racial differences between the two?
More on the “human rights” front: U.S. isolated at population conference over its anti-abortion stand. The “anti-abortion stand” consists in attempts to clarify language in existing UN agreements that UN bureaucrats and human rights professionals have read to require support for abortion. It appears that the U.S. is saying it won’t provide support for … More ...
I don’t know enough about French intellectual life to comment, but this seemed worth passing on: French Intellectuals take off the gloves in slugfest over `new reactionaries’.
The social construction of reality, chapter whatever: American Psychiatric Association issues statement endorsing right of gay and lesbian couples to adopt. According to the APA, “research over the past 30 years has consistently demonstrated that children raised by gay or lesbian parents exhibit the same level of emotional, cognitive, social and sexual functioning as … More ...
Since I’m on the topic, here’s more sex news: unreported triumph fighting AIDS in Uganda because of superior sex education. HIV prevalence there was 15 percent in 1991 but 5 percent by 2001, a dramatic decline that is unique worldwide.
Oddly, the superior education was the kind Human Rights Watch doesn’t like because it violates … More ...