Day: January 5, 2011

Innocence at home?

Cover of "The Adventures of Huckleberry F...
To be cleaned up

Huckleberry Finn is to be bowdlerized for various pragmatic reasons, no need to go into them here.

But de-niggerizing Huckleberry Finn doesn’t necessarily inoculate teachers from the danger of teaching that 19th century text in an offensive way. If anything, it might just give us all an inflated sense of protection from the most dishonorable aspects of our nation’s history.

Is this what we mean by post-racial? If so, it is a good example of the difference between repression and transcendence.

Thus John L. Jackson Jr. in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Legalize, legalize, legalize

Various prescription and street drugs may caus...
Samples

Former UK top drug official Bob Ainsworth to the House of Commons:

“We need to take effective measures to rob the dealers of their markets and the only way that we can do that is by supplying addicts through the medical profession, through prescription. We cannot afford to be shy about being prepared to do that.

“We spend billions of pounds without preventing the wide availability of drugs. It is time to replace our failed war on drugs with a strict system of legal regulation, to make the world a safer, healthier place, especially for our children. We must take the trade away from organised criminals and hand it to the control of doctors and pharmacists.”

Imagine that.  Organized criminals would lobby against it.

John McWhorter argues further, cogently, for the end of prohibition.

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