Advanced Search

Lowering the age of consent: Sexual rights are human rights

[three_col]

  • Lowering the age of consent: Sexual rights are human rights

    newpolitics

    Law professor John Spencer, of Cambridge University, has created a huge controversy in the UK by suggesting a reduction in the current age of sexual consent of 16. His proposals, broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Iconoclasts programme, with my support as a co-advocate, have been savaged by The Sun and the Daily Mail. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mrd9g

    Read more

  • Lowering the age of consent: Sexual rights are human rights

    newpolitics

    Law professor John Spencer, of Cambridge University, has created a huge controversy in the UK by suggesting a reduction in the current age of sexual consent of 16. His proposals, broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Iconoclasts programme, with my support as a co-advocate, have been savaged by The Sun and the Daily Mail. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mrd9g

    Read more

  • Free Kian Tajbakhsh. Rally Sept. 23 for democracy in Iran

    My colleague, Niloofar Mina, has been working on a campaign to free Kian Tajbakhsh, a scholar imprisoned in Iran. Kian is an American citizen of Iranian heritage, a secular intellectual, a sociologist and an independent scholar. He is not attached to any political organization or movement, inside and outside the country. Niloofar closely follows events…

    Read more

  • “The Last Truck”: Politics and Art

    The extent to which a film, book, essay, meeting, or web posting will evoke the emotional immediacy of some contemporary disaster or the analysis of why and how it happened is an aesthetic issue and a political one as well. My analysis of the film tilts toward the latter, and not merely a result of…

    Read more

  • The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant

    On the evening of September 7 (Labor Day) HBO broadcast "The Last Truck:Closing of a GM Plant [in Ohio]", a documentary by Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar. The film interviews workers about their years at the plant, and counts down to the last day and the last truck, I found it powerful, both emotionally and…

    Read more

  • On Labor Day in the US: Looking for Women

    On this (US) Labor Day, let’s consider the continuing, glaring hole in what’s written about labor, including by socialists, about women and gender. We really need to fix this because changes to work and social relations over the past twenty years caused by neoliberalism make women an ever more critical element of the work force.…

    Read more

  • Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29

    Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29 (2008), directed by Kevin Rafferty, a thrilling football movie showing Harvard’s astonishing come-from-behind “victory” – the title is the Harvard Crimson’s — in the last 42 seconds of the 1968 Yale-Harvard game. Rafferty is a brilliant documentarian, known for his earlier Atomic Café. In some ways, Harvard Beats Yale is continuous…

    Read more

  • Multiculturalism vs. human rights?

    newpolitics

    Multiculturalism vs. human rights? Defending multiculturalism but warning against its excesses Multiculturalism has many positive benefits. It defends the right to the different, which is a very important and precious human right, especially for those people whose difference has historically resulted in social marginalization and exclusion: including women, black, disabled and lesbian, gay, bisexual and…

    Read more

  • Debating Activism

    Underneath any specific conclusions we come to on any subject, is a more fundamental framework consisting of our premises. Because premises are usually implicit in contrast to explicit conclusions, and because they often are shared by much of our surrounding culture, we tend to take them for granted. We may argue or discuss some specific…

    Read more

  • Interested in "bad guys" – but not bad systems

    While researching a book on The Great Recession (or whatever we wind up calling this economic downturn) I noticed that I couldn’t find any unemployed bankers who had actually handled the “toxic assets” that supposedly caused the crisis. I started to look for them systematically and eventually discovered that they were still employed. Furthermore, their…

    Read more

  • Giving back – or rather, giving up

    GIVING BACK – OR RATHER, GIVING UPThe Council of NJ State College Locals, CNJSCL ( http://www.cnjscl.org/ )

    Read more

  • Question & Answer on the Iran Crisis

    , , ,

    Campaign for Peace and Democracy July 7, 2009 Right after the June 12 elections in Iran, the Campaign for Peace and Democracy issued a statement expressing our strong support for the masses of Iranians protesting electoral fraud and our horror at the ferocious response of the government.

    Read more

  • Obama's panacea for education: charter schools

    The NY Times reported on June 23 that Arne Duncan, Education Secretary, warned that inferior charter schools are ruining the reputation of the entire charter school project, endangering the administration’s initiative to make charter schools the focal point of school reform. Each charter school is essentially its own miniscule school district (a “local education authority,”…

    Read more

  • The Two Deaths of Max Shachtman

    The Two Deaths of Max Shachtman

    How we admired and respected Max! The “we” was small in number of course, for how many revolutionary socialists were there in the Thirties in this country? Only a handful of Trotskyists and not all of them had that special feeling for Max shared by “my crowd,” some barely teenagers, others in their late teens…

    Read more