wasp

kitos keistenybės apie laisvą žodį

Šių metų Bukerio premiją, vieną prestižiškiausių literatūros apdovanojimų pasaulyje, laimėjo britų rašytojas Alanas Hollinghurstas (Alanas Holigarstas) už romaną apie hedonistą gėjų "Grožio linija" ("The Line of Beauty"). Via OmniVartai.

A 14-year-old girl hockey player has won the right to share the same locker room with her male teammates. News Brunswick's Human Rights Commission has ruled that Brigette LeBlanc's rights were violated when she was forced to use a separate change room. Via CTV.

FRENCH comedians, worried that they might be out of a job, sided with freedom-of-speech advocates yesterday after Parliament passed a law that makes it an imprisonable offence to insult homosexuals and women. The Catholic church opposed the new French law and some critics on the Left said that the State was resorting to the methods of the Thought Police of George Orwell's 1984.
The centre-right Government of President Chirac ignored the advice, redrafting the Bill but leaving in place the maximum six months in prison and £15,000 fine for "defaming a person or a group of persons on account of their sex or their sexual orientation". Homosexual and feminist groups welcomed the law, which the Government drafted in an attempt to regain credit with gay and women's groups after it opposed homosexual marriage last spring. Via TimesOnline.

Police in Rotterdam removed this Wednesday a commandment from the Bible, 'Thou shalt not kill', from a wall in Rotterdam-North. A 52 year old man who tried to stop the police and the cleaners, was arrested. He was given a fine. Via PCwatch.

Sąmokslo teorija :)

The stuff we've been hearing about this morning – the radical feminism, the women's studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments – all these things are branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you're tempted to ask, "What is the theory?" The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. <...>

Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and that's the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of "polymorphous perversity," that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again in the early 30s. In Fromm's view, masculinity and femininity were not reflections of 'essential' sexual differences, as the Romantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part socially determined." Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct.
<...>

One of Marcuse's books was the key book. It virtually became the bible of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order (he downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A
Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist), repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes – the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of "polymorphous perversity," in which you can "do you own thing."

And by the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play. What a wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s! They're students, they're baby-boomers, and they've grown up never having to worry about anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesn't require them to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially, "Do your own thing," "If it feels good do it," and "You never have to go to work." By the way, Marcuse is also the man who creates the phrase, "Make love, not war."

Via Academia.