There is a huge gulf of toleration between respect and banning. In a free society, people should be allowed to do what they want wherever possible. The loss of liberty incurred by any alternative principle is too high a price to pay to stop people making dicks of themselves. But, if people are using their freedoms to make dicks of themselves, other people should be able to say so.
Things that I, on the whole, agree with:
David Mitchell, There's too much harping on about respect and banning. What about the huge gulf of toleration in the middle?:
There's altogether too much harping on respect and banning these days. If you can't respect something, you should ban it. If it's not banned, you should respect it. Bullshit. There is a huge gulf of toleration between respect and banning. In a free society, people should be allowed to do what they want wherever possible. The loss of liberty incurred by any alternative principle is too high a price to pay to stop people making dicks of themselves. But, if people are using their freedoms to make dicks of themselves, other people should be able to say so.
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It bears restating that it's not bigoted to disagree vociferously with people's choices, as long as you're even more vociferous in defending their right to make them.
Sloane Crosley, [I]t is almost impossible to have a single experience that you can pick from the lot and say here: this is what made me me. Quite.
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Dept of, okay, this may be mean, but sometimes I enjoy a good fullout snark:
Review of new bio of Agatha Christie:
After reading Duchess of Death, Richard Hack's biography of Agatha Christie, I can't help but wonder whether his name might also become a byword for a particular kind of book: an unauthorised, speculative muddle of fact and fantasy spiced with a pinch of salacious misrepresentation. A hack job, say. It might catch on.
This is a tremendously bad book. It manages to be both dull and unpleasant; to describe in exhaustive detail almost everything Agatha Christie ever did without coming close to revealing her as a person or a writer.
But alas and alack, I cannot find on the Observer website Barbara Ellen's codfishing of 'rom-bomb' movies about couples who 'exude the raging sexual chemistry of urinal cakes.... radiate the passion of two corpses accidently slung on the same mortuary slab.... spend the entire move looking as though their only urge is to disinfect each other'.
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This is shocking, but not really, unfortunately, surprising: Female circumcision will be inflicted on up to 2,000 British schoolgirls during the summer holidays – leaving brutal physical and emotional scars. What is perhaps a slight encouraging gleam, however, is the extent to which opposition to the practice appears to growing in the communities in which it is traditional, and and the development of resistance.
Dr Huang Hongyun cultivates the cells of aborted foetuses and injects them into the brains and spines of his patients. His method is controversial, but his results have led hundreds of westerners to his Beijing surgery.
Among them is Van Golden, a Christian, anti-abortion Texan who has sold his house so that he can travel to communist, atheist China and have Huang inject a million cells from the nasal area of a foetus into his spine. According to Golden's doctors, his spine was damaged beyond repair in a car crash last Christmas. The damage to his nervous system was so bad that he has been in a wheelchair and racked by spasms ever since. But Golden refused to give up, even if it meant having to compromise his values. "This is the only place that offered us any hope," he says. "Everyone else offered only to help make me sufficient in that chair. But the chair is not my destiny. It is not ordained."
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It cannot be easy for a man of his beliefs to be in China, where the government's one-child policy is partly responsible for millions of abortions each year. But instead of shunning the system, Golden believes his only hope is to embrace it. There is nowhere else he could get foetal cells. "I wish there was another way they could do it. There are 4,000 abortions a day in the US. Partial-birth ones are murder on a most terrible level. What they are doing here is a whole lot more humane.
"Four thousand a day. That's a waste. Something good should come out of something bad. The people who don't believe that aren't in a wheelchair."
"I don't agree with abortion, but it will happen anyway. In the US, we do abortions but don't use the cells. In China, they don't just take life and destroy it - they give something back. It's like lemonade out of lemons. You take something bad and you make it good." Such reasoning requires a moral somersault.
Julian Baggini is interesting on positive and negative freedom.
Hilary Rose on that 'gene for female infidelity' twin research and the whole 'it's all the genes' mindset and reporting on this kind of research.
The new director of the Brook Advisory Service (sexual health for young people [ETA: but Helen Brook was not a doctor, one of the numerous concerned laywomen who made the birth control movement in the UK what it was]) speaks out about the parlous state of sex education in Britain:
"We have a completely confused and inconsistent approach to sex in this country," she says. "The front page of a newspaper might have a couple of celebrities talking in quite graphic terms about their relationship and sex, yet a few pages further into the paper a 15-year old who is pregnant will be completely demonised. This sends out confusing signals."
Barlow believes the "mixed" and "misleading" media messages add to young people's confusion about sex, and that this fosters a climate in which adults and young children find it difficult to talk honestly and openly about sex. Media coverage of sex borders on "hysterical", Barlow suggests, illustrated recently by sensationalised tabloid reports about a schoolgirl, Melissa Smith, who had an abortion at 14 and became pregnant for the second time six months later.
And the corollary to this, report on the 'shocking ignorance' of the British public on the subject of AIDS: 'Survey shows 20% think victims have only themselves to blame'
And what I cannot resist describing as a boaring bit of news: wild boar roaming the usually peaceful fields of the Forest of Dean
and some boaring facts:
After being hunted to extinction more than 300 years ago wild boar are roaming and breeding in the British countryside again.
· There are thought to be other breeding populations: Kent and East Sussex, Dorset and Ross on Wye in Herefordshire.
· Most of the boar population is a result of escapees from defunct boar farms and abbatoirs.
· Contrary to the belief that wild boar are detrimental to woodland due to their rooting they are beneficial to woodland ecology - increasing floral diversity because rooting improves soil fertility and provides a seed bed in which annual plants can germinate.
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