Parents should be mindful of the advantage provided by bedtime reading. – Adam Swift
This week’s video was suggested by the musician friend I mentioned in my last diary column, Drake Sherman; the links above it came from Grace (“fascism” and “Whitney”), Scott Greenfield (“lock”), Jesse Walker (“Terry”), Radley Balko (“never” and “Karelia”), and RMV (“satire”).
- Fascism in action.
- Lock your doors, gates and windows.
- R.I.P. Nigel Terry and Grace Lee Whitney.
- Never call the cops for any reason whatsoever.
- It’s nice to hear there’s no actual crime in Karelia.
- “Harrison Bergeron” was a satire, not a blueprint.
From the Archives
- Wine, bacon, cops, language, censorship, pomposity, prudishness, drugs, population and a horror short.
- Another empty-headed actress attacks her less-privileged sisters with stupid lies & moronic myths.
- The newest excuse for police rape of sex workers is that Asian massage parlors are “sophisticated”.
- When they’re not infantilizing whores & demonizing our clients, they’re doing the exact opposite.
- Workers are not responsible for the moral failings (real or imaginary) of those who employ them.
- How the Golden Age of comics was destroyed by the repressive Comics Code Authority.
- How the government gets private corporations to do what it’s prohibited from doing.
- Prohibitionists pretend to be concerned for women, but they’re all about the men.
- Cops, correlation, shit, honesty, laws, politicians, pet rocks & much more.
- A “sex trafficking” cluck lectures us about the importance of word order.
- Sheriff considers himself the owner of every human being in his county.
- Wendy Lyon does her usual thorough job ripping apart a bogus study.
- A long, confused article on the latest attempt to destroy the internet.
- Busybodies love the police state until their doors are smashed down.
- Thousands of Indian whores lose their life savings to Ponzi schemes.
- Tulsa, Oklahoma’s sleazy war on whores reaches a new level of evil.
- An entity so large it harms by its very existence, is much too large.
- Sacrifices to the myth that sex can be purified, sanctified & tamed.
- Good-time girls and other non-professionals taking money for sex.
- Pennsylvania likes destroying the lives of kids who aren’t asexual.
- Lawheads are willing to shut down a city to stop consensual sex.
- How can a woman discourage her husband from hiring whores?
- White House claims 4% of American girls are “child sex slaves”.
- Amateur convicted of prostitution for answering a personal ad.
- Indian censors want to ban international telecommunication.
- A response to Rakhi “pop stars cause sex trafficking” Kumar.
- Fake whore pepper-sprays a teen and steals his piggy bank.
- The first signs of the massive anti-sex pogrom in Dongguan.
- Cop claims he was framed for drugs by his girlfriend’s pimp.
- An American medical student is auctioning off her virginity.
- Amazon declares some of its own products “inappropriate”.
- US prison officials silence prisoners’ protests with torture.
- As a pagan, do you believe in magic and psychic powers?
- The making of the DSM and the unmaking of psychiatry.
- On the fallibility of human memory as “testimony”.
- Note that the word “trafficking” is entirely absent.
- Newspaper mocks and demonizes murder victim.
- A powerful statement from Filipino sex workers.
- “Rescue” NGO enslaves 76 children in Uganda.
- Bad client falls to his death while fleeing cops.
- Can you imagine this in an American paper?
- Selling furniture causes “sex trafficking”!
- New York arrests men for being gay.
- A short biography of Lillie Langtry.
- The Streetwalkers’ Brigade.
- Debunking magic formulae.
- R.I.P. Ray Harryhausen.
- Rapist cop of the week.
- So much for “Sin City”.
- The Wiener exception.
- “HELP HELP HELP!“
- Porn Studies.
Today is Mother’s Day, and I know and am sorry that you are not a mother. As you have pointed out, being in a profession that requires you to care about other people would have made you (along with other sex workers you know) BETTER qualified for motherhood than other women who give in to selfishness. As it is, I think you are an inspiration and role model to a new generation of women (not just sex workers) willing to open their eyes and think about the world around them.
Keeping that in mind, I hope you have a wonderful Mother’s Day!
Anyone interested in the story might be advised to go to the Radio National website to find out what Swift actually says, rather than what Rupert Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph claims he says.
There’s at least two Murdoch agendas at work here. One is his support for large government subsidies for Australia’s elite private schools and the other is his long running campaign to cripple public media in Australia.
Yeah, what did he say? I heard Limbaugh going off about this yesterday (he’s great for long car drives since trying to process his ramblings keeps me awake) and kept thinking there has to be more to this. I also kept waiting for some explanation of how Swift would go about “abolishing the family” and “penalizing” parents who read to their children (I’m using Limbaugh’s words here).
This Swift fellow sounds like a (seemingly well-educated) pundit. So when was the last time he actually formulated implemented policy a la Jonathan Gruber? Or is there some politician in Britain who would put him in a position of power to implement his ideas? I doubt the Tories who just soundly won the election are going to pay him any mind.
You can click the link to find out.
The program is The Philosopher’s Zone and it’s not about punditry or policy formation.
I don’t know who Swift is, but being on that program suggests he’s a an academic of philosophy, not a think-tanker or social commentator. As is the case with so many academics he probably completely failed to anticipate what the mainstream media would do with his ideas (or rather, with the ideas they chose to attribute to him).
I just read your linked article and, lo and behold, there was indeed more to it.
You’re right about him being an academic, because I saw nothing in that article about how any of what he was questioning would actually be implemented, so that proves me wrong about him being a pundit.
Indeed, while he references the idea of ‘abolishing’ the family, it seems like they just as quickly dismiss that as unworkable and undesirable.
I also read the comment thread where it was 10-to-one knee-jerk criticism (“This is garbage!” “Is this April 1st?”) to considered defense. [sarc] Of course this guy must be some evil Marxist/Socialist/Totalitarian/Flying Spaghetti Monster. He couldn’t possibly think that perhaps MORE children should be read to, not less.[/sarc]
Sorry, forgot to add, thank you Cabrogal, for sharing the original article.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote Harrison Bergerson, but I assume “Swift” is in reference to famed Irish satirist (and author of Gulliver’s Travels) Jonathan Swift. Swift wrote “A Modest Proposal” where he suggested that Irish poverty be alleviated by eating poor Irish children. Obviously, Swift did not intend for that proposal to be taken seriously, nor did Vonnegut wish the proposals in his book, either. According to wikipedia, in Harrison Bergerson ammendments to the US Constitution are enacted which mandate the equality of all citizens by forbidding anybody to be richer, smarter, or more beautiful than anybody else.
My mistake. “Swift” is in reference to philosopher Adam Swift. I still maintain that arguing that having a loving family doing their best for the sake of their children is an “unfair advantage” sounds like a satire worthy of Jonathan Swift.
Not satire. He just pointed out a simple fact.
If you take the hypercompetitive nature of our current society as a given then from the perspective of those without loving families, having one is an unfair advantage. And someone who does have such a family – as well as a commitment to social justice – would see not having a loving family as an unfair disadvantage.
If you actually read the interview you’ll find that the main thrust of his argument is that having a loving family confers lots of competitive advantages. Far more than those conferred by, say, an elite private school education.
Hardly controversial, is it?
To understand “A Modest Proposal” you have to understand the time in which it was written. Catholics in Ireland then were not allowed to inherit, or to send their children to school, even overseas. Swift was making the point that you’ve already destroyed them in every other way, you might as well take the campaign to its absurd conclusion. I don’t know how many of the English knew enough about the situation to really understand it, but those laws stayed in place until their 1921 civil war.
Typical hair-splitting philosopher whose premises are all unstated and insane: there are good reasons for abolishing the family…but there is something to be said for the family…but children from better families shouldn’t have unequal opportunities…yet families shouldn’t be interfered with too much…except biological parents have no right to form a family…though we don’t propose eliminating parenthood, just redefining it.
It’s the same kind of disordered mind you see in the Unabomber or Elliot Rodger
I’d hardly call the difference between Plato’s arguments for abolishing the family and Aristotle’s arguments against it ‘hair splitting’.
It’s the job of philosophers to think beyond mainstream opinion and mores. That’s not the same as advocating for such thinking to form a basis for public policy. Though come to think of it, dialectical materialists (like Marx) do believe that the only valid philosophy is that which can improve society.
So are you a Marxist then Wilson?
BTW, not everyone would call examining an argument from more than one side ‘disordered thinking’. Some would call it ‘nuanced’.
Like a Theory of “Social Justice” could not be activist, or a belief in 100% “social mobility” would not be Marxist. This guy is not nuanced, he is sneaky
Indeed, as the article points out, state-run child rearing has been tried, both in ancient Sparta and the Soviet Union. For the Soviets it doesn’t seem to have accomplished much except to prevent a lot of people from learning real history; in Sparta it did get them an army strong enough to beat Athens, but at a huge human cost, of course. I don’t think it is out of line to label “fascist” anyone who wants to enact it again.
That makes me feel better about calling our government fascist then. As well as the various right-wing columnists and commentators who support the ongoing policy of taking Aboriginal kids away from their families.
Pretty ironic how the Daily Telegraph got all het up over an academic discussion about the pros and cons of a family upbringing while consistently providing a platform (and an income) to those who seek to deny it to Aboriginal kids.
Yes, what is the point of having opportunities if we all belong to the state anyway? Even if state-rearing was workable, there would still be states that take better care of their children and give them unfair advantages over other states.
A more important argument in favor of families is that it creates diversity. As in biology, I think diversity and adaptability are much more useful than uniformity for the survival of a population. When you have a group of people that were raised in completely different ways, you increase the odds that one of them will be able to solve a new problem. A ”pure” race is a weak race and a uniformly reared population is also a weak population.