Friday, April 08, 2005
What's going on in CYF? The number of staff misconduct cases have soared from 2 in 1998/99 to 46 in 2001/2002. Is it departmental culture, or workload stress?
Twenty-five years after it was launched, China's "One Child" population control policy is credited with cutting population growth to an all time low and contributing to two decades of spectacular economic development. But the costs associated with the policy are also apparent and are rising: a growing proportion of elderly with inadequate government or family support, a disproportionately high number of male births attributable to sex selective abortion, increased female infant and child mortality rates, and the collapse of a credible government birth-reporting system. (Comment: Also, what is the effect on children of having no brothers or sisters, and few cousins?)
Theodore Dalrymple says that in the long annals of judicial stupidity, there can rarely have been a more idiotic judgement than the recent British Court of Appeal decision which allows a Muslim girl to wear traditional dress at school. "It reads like the suicide note not of a country alone, but of an entire civilization." Dalrymple says that far from freeing Muslim women, the judgement will condemn Muslim women in Britain to a life of servitude, oppression and even death at the hands of their husbands, fathers and brothers.
Meanwhile, Kay Hymowitz asks why feminists are almost totally silent about the abuses Muslim women suffer. Her answer: Feminism has long been entwined with anti-Western, anti-nationalist and especially anti-American feeling. Radical feminists, especially those who congregate in the universities, view everyone in the Islamic world as victims of Western imperialism, exempt from all judgment. Criticism – even of, say, forcing a 13-year-old girl into marriage with her 40-year-old cousin, as is acceptable under strict Islamic law – smacks of "orientalism"; that is, the imposition of a Western value system on Eastern behaviour. In the eyes of the sisterhood, worse than stoning women for adultery or forbidding girls to go to school are the policies of white men such as George W. Bush.
Paul Rosenzweig of the Heritage Foundation, decries the trend towards more law. "Historically, criminal convictions required defendants be found guilty of both criminal intent (mens rea) and a criminal act (actus rea). Activist legislators such as Sen. Feldman aim to diminish -- or eliminate altogether -- the requirement of criminal intent and focus solely on the harmful act... When more and more ordinary (albeit unbecoming) actions are designated as crimes, more and more ordinary people can be classified as criminals. As a result, the stigma of being a “criminal” dissipates, in turn weakening the law’s ability to deter real crime. Overcriminalization is a slippery slope toward oppressive, centralized government power."
Newsweek's technology columnist Steven Levy has declared that the lack of "diversity" among the web's most popular blogs requires corrective action. (Levy's complaint comes on the heels of Susan Estrich's campaign against the Los Angeles Times for allegedly refusing to publish female op-ed writers.) "So here is the perfect medium for liberating all those qualified minority and female "voices" that are being silenced by the mainstream media's gatekeepers", says Heather MacDonald. "According to diversity theory, they should be far more heavily represented in the blogosphere's upper reaches than they are in traditional journalism. In fact, the opposite is the case. Why? Could it be that the premise of the "diversity" crusade is wrong — that there are not in fact hordes of unknown, competitively talented non-white-male journalists held back by prejudice?"
Political correctness has struck at Sesame Street. Cookie Monster is now advocating healthy eating habits. There's even a new song — "A Cookie Is a Sometimes Food."
Twenty-five years after it was launched, China's "One Child" population control policy is credited with cutting population growth to an all time low and contributing to two decades of spectacular economic development. But the costs associated with the policy are also apparent and are rising: a growing proportion of elderly with inadequate government or family support, a disproportionately high number of male births attributable to sex selective abortion, increased female infant and child mortality rates, and the collapse of a credible government birth-reporting system. (Comment: Also, what is the effect on children of having no brothers or sisters, and few cousins?)
Theodore Dalrymple says that in the long annals of judicial stupidity, there can rarely have been a more idiotic judgement than the recent British Court of Appeal decision which allows a Muslim girl to wear traditional dress at school. "It reads like the suicide note not of a country alone, but of an entire civilization." Dalrymple says that far from freeing Muslim women, the judgement will condemn Muslim women in Britain to a life of servitude, oppression and even death at the hands of their husbands, fathers and brothers.
Meanwhile, Kay Hymowitz asks why feminists are almost totally silent about the abuses Muslim women suffer. Her answer: Feminism has long been entwined with anti-Western, anti-nationalist and especially anti-American feeling. Radical feminists, especially those who congregate in the universities, view everyone in the Islamic world as victims of Western imperialism, exempt from all judgment. Criticism – even of, say, forcing a 13-year-old girl into marriage with her 40-year-old cousin, as is acceptable under strict Islamic law – smacks of "orientalism"; that is, the imposition of a Western value system on Eastern behaviour. In the eyes of the sisterhood, worse than stoning women for adultery or forbidding girls to go to school are the policies of white men such as George W. Bush.
Paul Rosenzweig of the Heritage Foundation, decries the trend towards more law. "Historically, criminal convictions required defendants be found guilty of both criminal intent (mens rea) and a criminal act (actus rea). Activist legislators such as Sen. Feldman aim to diminish -- or eliminate altogether -- the requirement of criminal intent and focus solely on the harmful act... When more and more ordinary (albeit unbecoming) actions are designated as crimes, more and more ordinary people can be classified as criminals. As a result, the stigma of being a “criminal” dissipates, in turn weakening the law’s ability to deter real crime. Overcriminalization is a slippery slope toward oppressive, centralized government power."
Newsweek's technology columnist Steven Levy has declared that the lack of "diversity" among the web's most popular blogs requires corrective action. (Levy's complaint comes on the heels of Susan Estrich's campaign against the Los Angeles Times for allegedly refusing to publish female op-ed writers.) "So here is the perfect medium for liberating all those qualified minority and female "voices" that are being silenced by the mainstream media's gatekeepers", says Heather MacDonald. "According to diversity theory, they should be far more heavily represented in the blogosphere's upper reaches than they are in traditional journalism. In fact, the opposite is the case. Why? Could it be that the premise of the "diversity" crusade is wrong — that there are not in fact hordes of unknown, competitively talented non-white-male journalists held back by prejudice?"
Political correctness has struck at Sesame Street. Cookie Monster is now advocating healthy eating habits. There's even a new song — "A Cookie Is a Sometimes Food."
