Category

Brave New World

• 04.10.08
  Profiling the profilers
  Brave New World (0)

  So, the same people who oppose warrantless wiretaps want Big Brother to set up surveillance cameras to monitor airport screeners to make sure there is no profiling. With nearly 50,000 screeners nationwide, the civil rights and minority groups say "it is unrealistic to believe that a policy created in Washington is being implemented flawlessly on the ground." The groups also said, "Broad individual discretion allotted to screeners also allows them to bring individual biases to the screening process." "This places our communities and all Americans at risk because individual [screener] biases may distract from actual security threats at the airport," the groups said. But ...
  
  
• 03.24.08
  Savior siblings and walking supply
  Brave New World (0)

  A "walking supply" was what you might use to escape a Siberian Gulag, according to Anne Applebaum's book. Escapes were difficult because the camps were a long way from anywhere. So you and your buddy might talk a third person into doing an escape with you. You'd want to pick someone who was well fed, like the camp cook. He would be the "meat". If you ran out of food, you'd kill him and eat him. The nice thing about it was that you didn't even have to carry ...
  
  
• 02.01.08
  The Sacrament of Abortion
  Brave New World, Human rights (0)

  Since at least as far back as 1999 I've been referring to abortion as the Holy Sacrament of the Left. (I got this idea from watching the Senate Judiciary Committee, among other things.) For the Clintons, as for the rest of their party, keeping abortion legal supersedes all else: The Bill of Rights, our national security, all considerations of honor and truth, the safety of our children -- everything. Everything else is subordinated to the great and bloody sacrament of the left: killing fetuses. I even predicated that there would soon be ...
  
  
• 11.11.07
  Growing babies for spare parts
  Brave New World (0)

  What exactly was the point of going to all the trouble of winning World War II if Britain was just going to adopt the moral values of Nazi Germany, anyway? (And what's the purpose of having a debate if it's a foregone conclusion that it will become law?) News item: PARENTS of sick children in Britain will be allowed to use IVF to create "spare-part babies" under controversial laws published yesterday. The legislation will dramatically relax rules on IVF clinics creating "saviour siblings" who can help cure their older brothers and sisters of medical conditions such as leukemia. Experts said that one day ...
  
  
• 10.23.07
  Off the reservation
  Brave New World (0)

  Breitbart.com tells us that not everyone has yet succumbed to the mania for health and safety. There are still a few "live free or die" types that have not yet been made to submit. When Daniel Craig was unveiled as the new James Bond actor in October 2005, he was forced to wear a life jacket as he sped through London on a boat up the River Thames It was somewhat out of keeping for the daredevil fictional British spy, in a press call stunt widely acknowledged as having backfired. "It's not his fault. He's doing what he's told," McGregor groaned. "Today, health ...
  
  
• 10.18.07
  Nobel laureates
  Bash the Messenger, Brave New World (0)

  From the Guardian: The DNA pioneer James Watson today apologised "unreservedly" for his apparent claim that black people are less intelligent than whites. And this isn't the first time. Prof Watson has regularly courted controversy, reportedly saying that a woman should have the right to abort her child if tests were able to determine that it would be homosexual. He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, proposing that black people have higher libidos, and claimed beauty could be genetically manufactured. Sure, he's probably a bigot, but shouldn't we make allowances?   After all, he's a Nobel laureate,  and we know ...
  
  
• 09.28.07
  Banality of evil
  Brave New World (0)

  Here at Suicide of the West you can find photos of evildoers getting in a little R&R: What is most monstrous about these photographs is that they depict no monsters. No spaced-out, khat-chewing raiders ripping around in technical trucks. No rampaging, machete-wielding mobs caught up in the vortex of spontaneous violence. One is struck here by the sheer ordinariness of the happy people smiling back at the camera, people who at those very moments were willing, even enthusiastic accessories to the most horrific crime in human history. They were functionaries, bureaucrats, administering the machinery of genocide with professional detachment and absolute ...
  
  
• 09.21.07
  Slippery Slope Eudemon
  Brave New World, Schools, Social controls (0)

  The Daily Eudemon talks about the slippery slope: New hero: A 72-year-old man with a wine purchase refuses to produce proof that he’s 21 years old. I understand the policy: “If we don’t card everyone, we end up on a slippery slope. Do we not card the 40-year-old? The 30-year-old? Eventually, we’ll end up making judgment calls and offending people. We might even discriminate!” Well, deal with it in a rational manner. What the slippery slope chanters don’t realize is, everything is a slippery slope: Anything not reigned in with moderation can go too far. What the haters of discrimination don’t realize ...
  
  
• 09.14.07
  Telling doctors how to practice medicine
  Brave New World, Health care reform, Welfare-police state (0)

  There's nothing like the opportunity to do some death and dismemberment to bring out all sorts of libertarian-sounding talk from people who ordinarily would be quite the opposite.   We got a lot of this during the embryonic stem cell debates. Here's a different instance from Thursday's WSJ, in an article titled, "New limits debated for organ donation: Transplant group proposes barring donors who have certain health problems; balancing risk vs. need." These two paragraphs are a decent summary of the conflict: The debate reflects a tension between the need for organ donors and concerns that doctors may be lowering standards for living ...
  
  
• 08.02.07
  
  Brave New World (0)

  There is an interesting post about abortion and eugenics over at Postmodern Conservative . Here is some of it: Similarly, all the arguments about the sanctity of human life can remain accurate while still the fact remains that some genetic diseases are so awful that families ought to be able to prevent stricken children from coming into the world. Clearly the issue here is 'the line' to be drawn, the 'gray area' we blunder into. But we are already in that area. There is no way out of that area. The sanctity-of-life argument is tremendously powerful, but it is ...