Merry Ex-Christmas!
A short listing of unevents for the unholiday, mostly not taking place in New York: Making Christmas Disappear.
Inclusiveness
Speciesism refuted!
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?
Yet again, free to be you and me
Social construction, take two: in accordance with a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, Britain will now allow transsexuals to apply for substitute birth certificates showing their “new gender”. As the responsible parliamentary official explained,
… More ...“Our legislation will enable transsexual people confidently to take up those rights which have been denied
Santa up North
More prophets of a freer and more open tomorrow: Couple launches attack on ‘Christmas hell’. “Hell,” for these purposes, means Christmas as such, partly because it’s commercialized, but more fundamentally because it’s religious and thus exclusive. “Children are taught to worship this white, heterosexual man [Santa] who overeats. I mean, it’s wrong.”
Good point! … More ...
More growing pains for inclusiveness
It’s not just libraries that have a problem with the “atypical behavior” of skid row types: in Northampton, Massachusetts it’s the whole town.
Barbarians sack libraries
A reader sent in the following article by the dean of the library school at Indiana University. It was published in the November 15 Library Journal and gives a sense of how things work out today in public-service organizations. I rather liked the idea of seminars on how to deal with “atypical patron behavior” in … More ...
Racism confronted!
Quite a remarkable story that’s worth passing on: How I Was Smeared, by Harry Stein. The man gave a talk in which he told a story about his son and an English teacher who thought Huck Finn “a ‘racist’ book … the word ‘nigger’ appearing with appalling frequency.” Because of the presence of the … More ...
The fraud of pluralism
It should be obvious that in the modern world there’s no such thing as a pluralistic society. After all, life today is marked by pervasiveness, complexity and comprehensiveness of social cooperation, and those things require common habits, understandings and beliefs. Further, modern modes of production, exchange and regulation depend on standardization. The present day is … More ...
The life of the mind in Toronto
Another slice of life in higher education and in Canada: University of Toronto president under fire for remark. Read it—I have no idea where to begin.
Giscard demurs
One wonders when and how the EU fantasy will collapse. Even today, some seem dubious about the basic principle of managerial universalism, and if they’re French they sometimes say so: ‘Asiatic’ Turkey is threat to EU, warns Giscard. Among many interesting features of the article, note the response of the right-wing reporter (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard) … More ...