I had the pleasure recently of interviewing financier David Blumberg.
David and his partner Michal happen to be gay. They also happen to be Jewish. Michal happens to be French. They happen to live in San Francisco.
What is extraordinary is that based on everything else, they do not fit neatly into a stereotypical box. They are [...]
The Conservative Paper
The News Without The Left’s Bias
28
Sep
Chicago Tribune correspondent, Howard Witt, seems to have found the villain to blame in case Barack Obama loses in November: elderly prejudiced white people. However, such "prejudice" is not their fault, Witt "generously" allows, since they suffer from atrophied frontal brain lobes. Witt’s article claims that such people will be more likely to vote against Obama due to the prejudice induced by these diseased frontal lobes (emphasis mine):
The personality is familiar to us all: the sweet old aunt, the loving grandfather or the generous widow down the street, each of them unfailingly kind toward friends and family but given to flights of shocking prejudice when the conversation turns toward ethnic groups to which they don’t belong.
Often the response is a nervous laugh, a wan smile or a hasty effort to change the subject. We assume that old people are the products of less-enlightened times, they’re unlikely to change and their comments, however ugly, are largely innocuous.
Now, though, in the midst of the nation’s first presidential campaign between a black candidate and a white one, a convergence of new political and scientific research suggests that prejudice and stereotyping among elderly white Americans in particular may not be so innocuous after all.
Older white voters heavily favored Sen. Hillary Clinton over Sen. Barack Obama during the Democratic primary season, and national polls indicate that group now leans toward Sen. John McCain by 10 percentage points or more.
Pollsters and political scientists cannot pinpoint how much of that anti-Obama sentiment may be related to racial prejudice. But sociologists say their research indicates that implicit racial biases influence the voting decisions of many Americans of all ages—and that, for very basic physiological reasons related to the aging of their brains, many older citizens may be unable to suppress their prejudicial impulses, whether at the family dinner table or in the privacy of a voting booth.
In other words, Grandma’s biased outbursts may not be her fault. And Obama’s election strategists may want to schedule more campaign stops at nursing homes.
Perhaps Obama can give the elderly shots to vaccinate them to prevent them from voting against him… Now a "scientific" analysis on elderly frontal lobe prejudice:
Von Hippel, a professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, has found that as the brain’s frontal lobe begins to atrophy with age, elderly adults exhibit greater social inappropriateness and increased stereotyping and prejudice. And it happens despite their best intentions.
"At some level, I would say we should not hold older adults responsible for their racist attitudes," von Hippel said. "We call it ‘prejudice against your will,’ because we think it’s not something they can control."
Well, that sure puts Abe Simpson in a new perspective. However, if Obama does lose in November whether due to elderly frontal lobe prejudice or not, I think there will be a another very obvious illness for Howard Witt to look into: Democrat Rage Virus. And that sickness will last way more than 28 days.
28
Sep
Amid all the false media hubub about Sarah Palin being an alleged "book banner" comes much more serious news about the British publisher of "Jewel of Medina," a book about the child-bride of Islamic prophet Mohammed has been set afire:
Three men arrested in north London on suspicion of terrorism continue to be questioned by police. They are suspected of attempting to set fire to a publisher’s office in Lonsdale Square, Islington.
The publisher, Gibson House, is due to release a controversial novel about the Prophet Muhammad and his child bride, entitled "The Jewel of the Medina."
The three men were arrested by armed officers from the Metropolitan Police in a planned operation.
The men, aged 40, 22 and 30, were arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 and are being held at Paddington Green police station.
Two were arrested outside the property in Lonsdale Square, and the third following an armed vehicle stop near Angel Tube station on Upper Street at 0225 GMT on Saturday.
Will the U.S. media report this event? I’m not exactly holding my breath since the American press showed little interest earlier this year when Random House, originally scheduled to publish the book in the United States went back out of fear of violence.
At that time, not a single American television network reported on this sad moment for free speech.
The contrast between how Western elites are handling "Jewel" and "The Satanic Verses," an earlier work condemned by radical Muslims couldn’t be more stark Kenan Malik points out in the Times of London:
In 1989 even the Ayatollah’s death sentence could not stop the publication of the novel. Rushdie was forced into hiding for almost a decade, translators and publishers were killed, and bookshops bombed. Yet Penguin never wavered in its commitment to "The Satanic Verses."
Today all it takes for a publisher to run for cover is a letter from an outraged academic. In March, Random House sent galley proofs of The Jewel of Medina to various academics, hoping for endorsements. One of them, Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of Islamic history at the University of Texas, condemned the book as “offensive”. Random House immediately dropped it. No other big American publishing house would touch it. Martin Rynja, a fierce advocate of free speech, eventually picked it up in Britain.
What the differing responses to the two novels reveal is how Rushdie’s critics lost the battle but won the war. They never prevented the publication of his novel. But the argument at the heart of the anti-Rushdie case - that it is morally unacceptable to cause offence to other cultures - is now widely accepted. In the 20 years between the publication of "The Satanic Verses" and the withdrawal of "The Jewel of Medina," the fatwa has in effect become internalised.
“Self-censorship”, Shabir Akhtar, a British Muslim philosopher, suggested at the height of the Rushdie affair, “is a meaningful demand in a world of varied and passionately held convictions. What Rushdie publishes about Islam is not just his business. It is everyone’s - not least every Muslim’s - business.” Western liberals have come to agree.
That’s a great pity.