On The Fence, In The News
An article on the documentary film business in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a few comments from our very own Blaine Greenberg.
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
23 Jun 2006 @ 4:38pm
Spineless and Rude in Canada
Campus political correctness is not a phenomenon limited to the U.S. Witness this from Canada, as reported by the National Post:
Today, Ryerson University will award an honorary science doctorate to Margaret Somerville, one of Canada's most renowned and respected academics.
Whenever there is a major debate about medical or bio-ethics anywhere in the world, Somerville will almost certainly be summoned to explain the moral, legal, historical and cultural intricacies. Several networks around the globe call on her expertise. The United Nations, at the highest levels, consults her frequently. As founding director of McGill University's Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, Somerville may well be the world's foremost ethical authority.
But last week, Ryerson's awards committee -- which months ago enthusiastically asked whether she would accept an honorary degree -- did everything it could, short of rescinding it, to sully her honour.
You see, among her many, many stands on ethical issues -- abortion, cloning, reproductive choice, animal rights, euthanasia, palliative care and so on -- Somerville is opposed to same-sex marriage.
In an article entitled "Spineless and Rude," writer Lorne Gunter points out that the Dr. Somerville will still receive her award, but only because her opposition to gay marriage became known after the award was already announced:
For nearly a month, gay activists and their supporters have done all they can to get the Ryerson awards committee to uninvite Somerville.
They have, for example, circulated online petitions likening her to the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis for suggesting traditional marriage is better for children and society. Her detractors have also applied all manner of pressure -- including threats of disruption at the convocation at which Somerville will be invested -- to compel the school to relent.
One senses that Ryerson would have caved in fully if it thought it could get away with it. Last Wednesday, the awards committee decided to go ahead with the degree -- but only because "to rescind the award would raise basic issues of freedom of speech." Committee members, however, wanted it clearly known they no longer supported their original grant.
In a news release, they pointedly scoffed that "several things have become abundantly clear ... One is that the Committee was unaware of some positions for which she has advocated in the press and before Parliament -- positions that would have given Committee members serious pause before approving the award.
"There would have been no academic freedom concerns if we had initially decided not to award an honorary doctorate to Dr. Somerville," the committee added.
Let that be a notice to other Canadian academics: if you don't agree with the prevailing campus ideology, your career would be best served by keeping your mouth shut.
(Hat tip: David MacLean of Taxpayer's Federation.)
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
22 Jun 2006 @ 8:55am
Profiles in Academic Tolerance
At Johns Hopkins University, around 600 copies of The Carrollton Record, the school's conservative student paper, "went missing", reports the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Shortly thereafter, school administrators confiscated hundreds more copies of the conservative paper:
[The Carrollton Record's] May issue contained an article objecting to a recent campus appearance by pornographic film director Chi Chi LaRue. The cover photo pictured LaRue along with members of JHU's Diverse Sexuality and Gender Alliance (DSAGA) student group, which hosted the event. The pictured DSAGA members were apparently displeased to see their pictures on the newspaper's front page, and some have filed harassment charges against TCR staffers.
On May 14, approximately 600 copies of TCR that had been distributed to the library the previous day went missing. TCR editor Jered Ede attempted to report the theft, but told FIRE that a security officer and the Dean of Student Life both said that the missing papers did not constitute theft. Ede then learned that TCR would no longer be allowed to distribute in dorms and that administrators had confiscated 300 copies. Previously, TCR and numerous other publications--including the liberal Hopkins Donkey--had regularly been distributed in JHU dorms, some of which even have distribution racks expressly for this purpose.
TCR staffers contacted FIRE, which wrote in protest to JHU president William Brody on May 19. JHU counsel Frederick Savage defended JHU's actions by saying that student publications are subject to the posting policy, which demands that posters and fliers be approved by the Office of Residential Life before being posted in dorms. Savage wrote to FIRE, "Although it is not explicitly stated in the policy, by long standing practice the Office of Residential Life has applied the [posting] policy to student publications."
"This is a shocking and disturbing admission, if true," commented Lukianoff. "Not only would such a policy subject student newspapers to prior official review, but it appears to have been selectively enforced to silence unpopular opinions. By granting its officials the unfettered power to 'approve' newspapers, JHU is giving them the power to arbitrarily censor."
This sort of thing is all too common, unfortunately. We'll be covering more about campus newspaper thefts in our upcoming film, Indoctrinate U.
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
13 Jun 2006 @ 11:32pm
Great Moments in Socialized Medicine (Continued)
Some arthritis sufferers in Ireland face a seven-year wait:
Arthritis sufferers in the west of Ireland are waiting up to seven years to see a consultant.
Patients have been left facing the consequences of the condition due to the chronic shortage of rheumatology specialists nationwide.
Almost half a million men and women and more than 5,000 children in Ireland have arthritis, but the country still has the lowest rate of rheumatologists per head of population in the EU, with up to 60 patients per clinic.
Associated conditions, which increase the longer treatment is delayed, include deformity, disability, heart disease and cancer.
The average waiting time for an initial appointment with a rheumatologist is four years, with sufferers in the Galway region waiting seven years. Patients at Dublin's St James's Hospital, which covers the midlands, are waiting two years.
[...]
"These consequences are preventable if patients are treated early," said Dr Gaye Cunnane, consultant rheumatologist at St James's.
Yes, but they have "universal coverage" guaranteed by the government!
Posted by Stuart Browning
11 Jun 2006 @ 9:35am
Seattle Public School System Keeps Digging
In mid-April, I reported on a website operated by the Seattle public school system that defined racism in such a way that only whites can be considered racist.
According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, increasing attention to that website since then has caused the school system to address the issue:
An outpouring of criticism forced Seattle public schools on Thursday to pull a Web site that viewed planning for the future, emphasizing individualism and defining standard English as examples of cultural racism.
The message had appeared under an "equity and race relations" section of the district's Web site and was mentioned Thursday in an opinion piece by a Libertarian writer in the Seattle P-I. Criticism of the site has been building in the world of blogs for weeks.
In its place Thursday was a message that the site will be revised to "provide more context to reader around the work that Seattle public schools is doing to address institutional racism."
So, in other words, the school system pulled the website not because it defined racism as a white-only phenomenon or because it defined individualism as a form of racism, but because the website didn't describe what the school system was doing to fight those racist individualists and their institutions.
I don't think that statement resolves the situation; if anything, it proves that the critics of the school system are correct in believing that Seattle schools are pushing a political agenda.
The "explanation" offered by the Seattle public school system isn't satisfying Andrew Coulson of the CATO Institute, either. A recent critic of Seattle's educrats, Coulson commented on the new developments:
"It's a non-apology apology," said Coulson, an education history scholar and author of "Market Education: The Unknown History."
"My sense was that the definition was extremely offensive, but there was not much sympathy for those who were offended ...," he said. "The harm that can come from the Web site is the tarring of the ideal of individualism as racist, while the ideal of individualism is a central principle on which our nation was founded. Liberty is individual, not collective. So for our school district -- our official school organ of the state -- to tell children it's racist to believe in a principle on which our nation was founded -- is troubling."
Indeed.
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
8 Jun 2006 @ 4:09pm
Great Moments in Socialized Medicine (Continued)
Hospitals in Canada are funded by the government via annual "global budgets". They get their money up-front. Therefore, each new patient represents a cost - a drain on the budget. So, Canadian hospitals are incentivized to ration medical care by limiting the number of operating rooms and the hours in which they may be used. Private hospitals in the U.S. have exactly the opposite incentive: each new patient represents additional revenue so that hospitals are incentivized to provide more medical care for more people.
Unfortunately, the rationing of health care by Canadian hospitals can have fearful consequences. 18-month-old Olivia Vander Schelde needed urgent surgery to remove a brain tumor. Her neurosurgeon recommended that the operation take place within two weeks. However ...
Because Children's Hospital of Western Ontario and other London Health Sciences Centre hospitals do not staff operating rooms on long weekends, Olivia was going to have to wait for three or more weeks for surgery on a tumour discovered a week ago.
So her desperate mother did what media-savvy Canadians always do:
After Vander Schelde took her story to the media, the hospital arranged to find time for the operation Tuesday.
Unfortunately, they certainly "bumped" another patient by cancelling their surgery and making them wait longer instead of keeping the operating rooms open longer.
Posted by Stuart Browning
8 Jun 2006 @ 8:32am
The Agony of Socialized Medicine
The reality of medical rationing in Australia:
A MAN with a severely broken leg lay in a hospital bed for more than 10 days waiting for surgery.
The 60-year-old man endured four false alarms before finally being operated on yesterday at Dandenong Hospital.
James Abbott's family said he was in agony throughout the ordeal.
"It's an absolute crime," niece Deborah Bailey said.
[...]
Dandenong Hospital spokesman Kim Minett said it was "unfortunate" more urgent cases had come up, forcing Mr Abbott's operation to be cancelled.
Mr Minett said it was postponed for the first three days because blood thinners Mr Abbott was taking had to be out of his system.
"Obviously it's not ideal, but in this case it's just an unfortunate set of circumstances," he said.
Yet Ms Bailey said: "He was scheduled for surgery four times, which means fasting and no water.
"The poor man was going from extreme to extreme to extreme. It's not good for his wellbeing, his physical or emotional state."
She said the situation was made worse by the fact that Mr Abbott was still suffering from a broken hip and pelvis.
"He can't stand up or get out of bed," she said.
"I understand that he had to wait three days, but he should have had surgery on the fourth day."
Ms Bailey said she had asked doctors to move him to either Monash Medical Centre or the Alfred hospital, but was told waiting lists there were just as long.
"Something is very wrong," she said.
Posted by Stuart Browning
7 Jun 2006 @ 4:58am
Quote of The Day
"The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach. But America's skyscrapers were not built by public funds nor for a public purpose: they were built by the energy, initiative and wealth of private individuals for personal profit. And, instead of impoverishing the people, these skyscrapers, as they rose higher and higher, kept raising the people's standard of living ..."
- Ayn Rand, The Monument Builders, 1962
Posted by Stuart Browning
6 Jun 2006 @ 8:12am
Racial Separatism in L.A. Public Schools?
I generally support the idea of charter schools. They allow educational experimentation, which is usually beneficial in an otherwise bureaucracy-strangled public school system.
The downside to the leniency is that it has a way of devolving into complete lack of oversight. Nothing else would explain how Marcos Aguilar ended up running the taxpayer-funded La Academia Semillas del Pueblo charter school in Los Angeles.
Principal Aguilar, who also founded school, seems proud of his contributions in the field of education. But as far as I can tell, he's using his position to preach the cause of racial separatism:
We don't necessarily want to go to White schools. What we want to do is teach ourselves, teach our children the way we have of teaching. We don't want to drink from a White water fountain, we have our own wells and our natural reservoirs and our way of collecting rain in our aqueducts. We don't need a White water fountain. So the whole issue of segregation and the whole issue of the Civil Rights Movement is all within the box of White culture and White supremacy. We should not still be fighting for what they have. We are not interested in what they have because we have so much more and because the world is so much larger. And ultimately the White way, the American way, the neo liberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction. And so it isn't about an argument of joining neo liberalism, it's about us being able, as human beings, to surpass the barrier.
Self-sufficiency is admirable, but rejecting every institution that exists in your country just to prove self-sufficiency is childish. Some of our institutions have worked quite well over time: capitalism and democracy, free markets and classical liberal governments; the fact that the United States has consistently been one of the most prosperous patches of land on the planet is no accident. Students might benefit from learning such things. Understanding what leads to success might actually help kids later in life. It's too bad Principal Aguilar's students won't be learning anything like that at his school.
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
6 Jun 2006 @ 3:24am
The Priorities of Collectivized Health Care
Tanya
In the U.K., its amazing what procedures are classified as necessary health care under their socialized system. A man who received sex change surgery at taxpayer's expense in 2001 is now getting his tattoos removed courtesy of the National Health Service (NHS):
A FORMER sailor who became a woman after sex-swap surgery has secured NHS funding to have her tattoos removed.
Tanya Bainbridge, 57, from Middleton, says she needs the ... laser treatment because her tattoos are "unladylike" and she can't wear sleeveless dresses in the summer.
Middleton and Heywood Primary Care Trust has approved the funding and Tanya is waiting for a date for surgery at Charing Cross Hospital in London, where she underwent her ... sex-change operation on the NHS in 2001.
Meanwhile, cancer patients are deprived of expensive medicines:
Cancer sufferer, Claire McDonnel, 33, slammed Tanya Bainbridge, who will receive the ... procedure, while she has been refused the "wonder drug" Herceptin by her Primary Care Trust (PCT.)
And some patients are waiting up to four years for orthopedic surgery:
SOME patients are being forced to wait up to four years for hip replacements on the National Health Service despite a guarantee that delays should be no more than six months.
Many more wait to see specialists:
THOUSANDS of patients waited more than six months to see a specialist this year, despite Scottish Executive claims they have met their targets.
While others leave the country to get surgery:
NHS patients have the right to be treated abroad at public cost if they face "undue delay" getting surgery at home, the European court of justice ruled yesterday.
Posted by Stuart Browning
5 Jun 2006 @ 10:13am
Who is "We"?
Ezra Klein
Don't you just love it when a journalist who most likely doesn't have any money starts talking about how much money we should be giving to the "poor"?
Here's young collectivist Ezra Klein today at his eponymous web site:
It would be good if we gave all poor folks $10,000 of discretionary cash a year, and better if we forced them to have bank accounts to receive it.
And - notice his language about "forcing" people to do what he wants. Its the lingua franca of the left.
Posted by Stuart Browning
2 Jun 2006 @ 2:03pm
A "Right" to Health Care?
 An interesting story in the British press gives lie to the claim that people have an enforceable "right" to health care at other people's expense. As John Goodman has said:
What the right to care means almost everywhere is nothing more than the opportunity to get services free (or at very little cost) as the government decides to make those services available. But government is under no obligation to provide any particular service. And if it fails to provide a service, people are not entitled to go to court and sue the way that Americans, for example, can sue an employer, a health maintenance organization (HMO) or even Medicaid."
A 74-year-old gentleman in the U.K., Edward Atkinson, has been deprived of his "right" to health care by a government-owned hospital:
Mr. Atkinson has been removed from the hospital's wait list for an evaluation for hip surgery and has been banned from anything other than life-saving treatment ...
And what was his offense?
Atkinson was charged with "sending malicious communications" to the hospital.
[...]
The feisty Mr. Atkinson sent ... photos and a video of a child being aborted to hospital chief executive Ruth May who described them as "offensive, horrendous and absolutely disgusting."
Quite simply, the government-run health care system (the NHS) did not like what he had to say, so he was refused medical care.
Also: I can't resist pointing out that he was on a wait list for only evaluation for hip surgery. There's another long wait list for having the actual surgery.
Posted by Stuart Browning
2 Jun 2006 @ 9:16am
Quote of The Day
"The next time you encounter one of those 'public-spirited' dreamers who tells you rancorously that 'some very desirable goals cannot be be achieved without everybody's participation,' tell him that if he cannot obtain everybody's voluntary participation, his goals had jolly well better remain unachieved - and that men's lives are not his to dispose of."
- Ayn Rand, Collectivized Ethics, 1963
Posted by Stuart Browning
2 Jun 2006 @ 6:04am
John Stossel on the Canadian Health Care System
 From the Canadian press on John Stossel's latest book tour:
Stossel compared the structure of some of Canada's social programs to those of the former Soviet Union, and warned that socialism does not work.
"It takes a long time for socialist systems to break down," he said, noting that Canadians are already travelling to U.S. cities like Buffalo for medical treatment that they can't get in a timely way at home.
And he relates this telling example of liberal "tolerance":
"Somebody stopped me on the street in New York and said, 'Are you John Stossel? I hope you die soon,' "
[...]
"In Manhattan, to be a conservative is akin to being a child molester. But I'm not much of a conservative, I'm a libertarian. But liberals call me a conservative and hate me because I defend business."
Posted by Stuart Browning
1 Jun 2006 @ 9:12am
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