thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb This is puzzling: Nicholas Kristof has told us that those who question CEDAW must favor abuse of women in Pakistan because “frankly, the treaty has almost nothing to do with American women … it has everything to do with the half of the globe where to be female is to be persecuted until, often, death.” … More ...
Here’s an account of the effects of immigration on Britain and some reader responses. Can anything be more stupid than claims there are no real problems here, and that immigration opponents are simply anti-immigrant xenophobes who need to be re-educated to celebrate diversity?
A rare critical look at “human rights”: a review of The Rise and Rise of Human Rights, Kirsten Sellars, Sutton Publishing, 2002, which (it appears) treats human rights as an unprincipled attempt to rule the world in the name of principle. “[H]uman rights have not just been on the rise: they have also … More ...
The death of common sense is inevitable in a society in which “deeply rooted social stereotype” is a term of abuse, and it takes many forms. Here’s one: Playground squabbles, the total control of children’s play to ensure total safety. When you walk by New York playgrounds today it’s hard to miss how stupid … More ...
How a minor altercation becomes a hate crime: take a blue-collar neighborhood dispute that starts with insults and ends with shoving and punching but no-one hurt. Make one party an ex-con who had gone straight, the other a homosexual. Let them call each other “drug dealer” and “faggot.” Result: since homosexuals are a protected class, … More ...
Nemesis lives, pursuing the insolent and unjust with inflexible vengeance: Workers take Xerox to court for antiblack discrimination. Xerox, of course, is a notorious leader in corporate “affirmative action.” At the end of last year its US workforce was 5% Asian, 8% Hispanic, and 17% African-American, and 37% of its senior executives were … More ...
Andrea Dworkin helps clarify some issues. The Glasgow council has become the first local authority in the UK to state it would object to all licensing applications for lap-dancing clubs on the grounds that they demean and exploit women. Miss Dworkin responded with an opinion piece, which was published in a Glasgow paper. Since … More ...
Another example of the battle between pro-prostitution and antiprostitution feminists, this one in France. (You can tell it’s French when someone says something like “Prostitution is the paroxysm of a woman’s non-power over herself.”)
It really seems that the anti-prostitution forces need an expanded moral vocabulary, one that goes beyond concepts of power and … More ...
And to round out recent discussions of race, racism and antiracism, here’s a good reference for whiteness studies.
The UN’s on the job, accusing Canada of racism. There may be plenty of PC in Canada, but not enough. Some problem areas: immigrants don’t earn as much as natives, compensation has not yet been paid to survivors [?] with respect to a 19th century head tax on Chinese immigrants, and Ottawa still resists … More ...