In the wake of recent high-profile suicides of young adults over sexual orientation, the media has been buzzing with words like “surge” and “buzz.” I was curious about whether such a phenomenon was really occurring. First off, it’s very important to keep in mind that, sadly, about 4000 young people (15-24) choose to end their…
Author: Clio
The gay agenda
I was just commenting to my wife that I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the media has suddenly noticed a “surge” in gay teen suicides about the same time that certain gay rights organizations are pressuring Congress to push the Safe Schools Improvement Act, which “would require schools receiving federal funds to implement bullying…
What is “bullying,” anyway?
I think we may be losing sight, in the wake of incidents such as the Tyler Clementi suicide, of what “bullying” really is. For instance, I’ve been seeing reality TV being blamed as a major cause of the perceived increase in bullying: Reality TV communicates that humiliation is an acceptable form of entertainment, says the…
“It gets better”: What does?
The national media’s attention is currently on the plight of young gay men who choose to commit suicide, and the social forces that encourage that decision. One of the recurrent themes in this media attention is that we need to communicate that “it gets better.” It’s easy to assume that there’s some moment, upon graduation…
Hey, Ocarina!
First you take some clay and mold it ’til it’s hollow, Then you make some air holes that your fingers ought to follow, Then you play a ditty or a paean to Apollo… Hey, ocarina! — ptkh 09.27.10
Hills and valleys
This weekend, I noticed that I hadn’t noticed something. For years, climbing hills was a source of great anxiety for me. When I approached a hill by foot, I would be nervous of twisting my ankle and not having the ability to go up. Even in a car, I was anxious that the engine would…
Life’s what you make it
… being some thoughts on today’s moment of enlightenment … Let us accept for the sake of this discussion the broader atheist premise that there is no god, no supernatural force, no afterlife, no transcendent soul, no extrinsic purpose to life whatsoever. We are, in this perspective, highly evolved ants going about our time on…
Hello Kitty Party (DS)
Since I’ve become a father, I’ve gone from fretting from the paucity of AO games to the paucity of EC games. Nintendo, the most family-friendly of the three major console producers, lists only six EC-rated games on its site, three for the DS and three for the Wii. That leaves us to look for E…
Brave New World vs Atlas Shrugged
Brave New World took me longer to re-read than I’d expected, given its length, and on reflection, the similarities between it and Atlas Shrugged are more tenuous than I’d remembered. I think this is in part because, as Huxley himself notes in the preface to my edition (a Bantam paperback), he spends no time whatsoever…
Just a skosh
Elsewhere today, somebody used the word skosh in a blog comment, although he spelled it scoce. It took me a second to recognize it, at which point it occurred to me that I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen the word in print (under any spelling). The word is fairly common in spoken English: “Move…