thoughts in and out of season
The pieces come progressively together: Amnesty International is buying stock to bring shareholders’ resolutions to pressure multinationals to adopt comprehensive policies on human rights that include explicit commitments to “support and uphold the principles and values contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”—whatever that means. Get a few big foundations and public … More ...
Worth noting: Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times comes out in favor of ethnic profiling. “Young Arab men are more likely to ram planes into nuclear power plants than are little old ladies, and as such they should be more vigorously searched.” It will be interesting to see where this goes.
The saga of multiculturalism in Europe continues: Michel Houellebecq charged with inciting racial hatred. The reporter’s a nitwit, but the facts seem reasonably clear: a leading French writer says Islam is “the most stupid of all religions,” so he has to answer in court to charges of “inciting racial hatred.” In a way, Houellebecq … More ...
Here’s a factually well-informed account of what the author calls “transnational progressivism” but I’d simply call contemporary liberalism: The Ideological War Within the West. The author underestimates the degree to which the bad guys have won already, and also the degree to which their bad theory is the natural consequence of his good theory, … More ...
Amnesty International discusses their mission in their current annual report:
… More ...Amnesty International urged that respect for human rights encompass not only the universality, but also the indivisibility of all rights, economic, social and cultural as well as civil and political. As globalization spreads, bringing greater wealth to some and destitution and despair to others,
It’s all one struggle: Violence Against Women Leads to Major Health Problems Globally. “Health” turns out to require doing something about “violence against women,” and that, we already know, will involve doing something about “pervasive patterns of gender inequality.” Since the world is so simple, there’s always the same answer to everything. If the … More ...
I’ll agree that who your parents were is part of who you are, and for that and other reasons every child has a right to both a mother and a father. But doesn’t that show that it’s wrong to do things—like use sperm donors—that intrinsically deny a child that right and force him to construct … More ...
For more examples of bias and irrationality of among scientific experts and the like, see healthfactsandfears.com, a project of the American Council on Science and Health. A bigger problem, of course, is the treatment of things like sex as questions for scientific experts which fundamentally are nothing of the kind.
From the New York Times: take the politics out of universal human rights by letting the legal experts look after it! So the solution to the Israel obsession and the administrative mess the piece describes is to apply treaties based on uniform legal norms and procedures. Sounds great! For example: in spite of … More ...
The ACLU never stops being educational. When they aren’t protecting students disciplined for coloring their hair blue or disrupting school events (the disruption had to do with protesting something), they’re fighting abstinence education and single-sex schools. Our liberties are in good hands!