thoughts in and out of season
Why do so many artists and intellectuals give support to really evil forms of political radicalism? Artists, writers defend Castro. How does one explain the shameless hypocrisy of someone like Garcia Marquez, who says he opposes the death penalty “in any place, for any reason, in any circumstances,” claims to have given secret aid … More ...
40 years after the Church threw open the windows, the better to reach out to Modern Man, a poll shows Catholicism is all but dead among young Romans and the Spaniards seem not far behind. The only encouraging point in the picture is the rather startling absence of happy talk in the first story.
Diane Ravitch has written a book complaining about the system of centralized purchasing and “anti-bias” vetting that now ensures that all school textbooks reflect a single bowdlerized multiculturalist point of view. (The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn.) The reviews by neocon Arnold Beichman and moderate liberal Merle Rubin are … More ...
Libertarians find themselves in a moral quandary: should they vote for the pro-market party or the pro-sodomy party? Duncan Frissell points out the obvious, that if interference in sexual matters and private life is the test of libertarian rectitude, then Democrats lose on that score too—witness comprehensive sex ed, initiatives to abolish the patriarchy … More ...
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 ...