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

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

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 in Iran through Persian language media sources, official and unofficial. She has learned that Kian is in a show trial with a group of defendants associated with Iran’s reformist movement.

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 my Victorian Marxist inclinations. Just recently, the University of California system has been visited by a round of disastrous cut backs and furloughs.

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 aesthetically. Immediately afterwards. I wrote to H-Labor, the labor historians discussion list: “Shown this evening … on HBO. Let's hope it stays around in one form or another. Powerful, poignant, sad beyond belief, brilliantly done.

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. Writing on “Women, care, and the public good: a dialogue,” Ann Ferguson and Nancy Folbre, (“Not for sale. In defense of public goods,” Westview Press, 2000), started a conversation about what’s happened to and with gender under neoliberalism.

How far the debate has come from 1954, when President Truman called for the creation of a national health insurance fund to be run by the federal government! For sixty years the Democrats have failed to deliver on this promise. Truman’s program —a single payer system- is essentially off the table. As a result we see enormous loss of life. On average, 20,000 people a year die in the United States due to lack of adequate coverage, including those who die due to caps on lifetime treatment for chronic and debilitating conditions.

The Campaign for Peace and Democracy’s “Q&A on Iran” has elicited an extremely critical response from Edward Herman and David Peterson, posted on MRzine. To summarize, Herman and Peterson accuse the Campaign of aiding and abetting (unwittingly, they allow) U.S. imperialism and its aggressive designs on Iran. They reject, for the most part, allegations of election fraud by the Ahmadinejad regime and dismiss the idea of solidarity with the Iranian pro-democracy movement. Their position appears to be that the U.S.

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 with the themes of the earlier film. Harvard’s largely working-class (and mostly anti-Vietnam War) team is up against the aristocracy and arrogance of Yale and its fans..

Both of us had been in Orgone (Reichean) therapy for most of the 1950s, and we still believe it was efficacious. Orgone therapy involves tearing down the muscular armor of the body’s defense mechanisms – neck armor, jaw armor, chest armor, eventually pelvic armor, sometimes with the therapist’s palpitations of the patient’s rigidity. It is an attempt to go beyond Freudian psychoanalysis in that it deals not only with a patient’s dreams and free association but also with the physical manifestations of repressed hatred.

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 transgender (LGBT) people.

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 government action, for instance, without even being aware that our agreement or disagreement is itself shaped by our underlying sense of human nature or what kind of society is possible or what difference we are able to make in the world.