Monday, October 03, 2005

DANGEROUS PC IN ITALY

Earlier this month, Italy’s health minister condemned a Milan hospital for turning away a blood donor because he is gay, calling it “very serious and unacceptable,” according to news reports. But, unlike Italy, the United States Food & Drug Administration continues to impose a nationwide ban on blood donations from any men who have had sexual contact with another man since 1979.

The FDA began its ban in the early 1980s but reconsidered it in September 2000. It ultimately voted against softening the ban to allow gay and bisexual men who had not had sex with men for the last five years to donate. “Although a potential donor may practice safe sex, persons who have participated in high-risk behaviors are, as a group, still considered to be at increased risk of transmitting HIV,” the FDA Web site states, in its explanation for the ban.

An FDA spokesperson told the Blade, “The FDA definitely takes a conservative approach in working to ensure the safety of the blood supply. We’re very much aware that some of these policies eliminate some safe donors.” The U.S. is far from alone in its ban on accepting blood donations from gay men. Several developed countries have imposed a similar ban, including Canadian Blood Services, the Irish Blood Transfusion Service and England’s National Blood Service.

According to the Irish Blood Transfusion Web site acknowledges, “this policy causes considerable offense: it is clearly discriminatory against gay men. … The IBTS accepts that they are being discriminatory; we discriminate against several groups in the community insofar as we refuse to allow them to donate blood.”.....

However, in Italy, blood donors are screened based on risky behavior, such as having more than three sexual partners in the last year.

The American policies are outdated and do not reflect advances in testing, Givner and other critics have said. For instance, heterosexual women are internationally [i.e. in Africa only] one of the fastest growing groups of those infected with HIV. According to the CDC Web site, in 1992, women accounted for about 14 percent of adults and adolescents living with AIDS and by the end of 2003, they constituted 22 percent.....

Protests against the ban ebb and flow domestically and internationally. In 2000 when the FDA was reconsidering its ban several groups stepped forward to condemn the policy. Last spring, many college students protested and, in some cases, successfully kept the Red Cross off campus for its support of the ban. And, just last month, an Australian gay man filed a lawsuit against the Australian Red Cross for being turned away.

While many are insulted by the ban and consider it discriminatory, it is often viewed as a peripheral issue. Katz said that he has asked his gay male patients what they think of the ban. “They don’t find it to be the worst discrimination they’ve suffered,” he said.

More here



SISTERLY SOLIDARITY DEBUNKED AGAIN

One of the great feminist claims is how "supportive" of one-another women are and how that makes them superior to men. It's the usual Leftist inversion of the truth, however. Nobody is better at ripping a woman to shreds than another woman -- as the article below points out:

"Forget sisterly solidarity. Once she arrives in the office, it is every woman for herself. She backbites, plots and simmers resentment against her female colleagues - simply because she is jealous of their looks. The rantings of an embittered male boss? No, simply the views of working women themselves. More than 100 spoke frankly to American author Nan Mooney about what it's like working with other women. And it's not a pretty picture.

"With a man I would have confronted him directly, but women aren't worth the risk," said an estate agent called Elena who loathed her female colleague. The retribution can be brutal. Men are competitive, but you see it coming. Women can go from saccharine sweet to downright nasty in the time it takes you to turn around. Suddenly you're bleeding, and you never even saw the knife."

Miss Mooney, 35, who lives in New York, decided to write the book after her former boss "cocked her fist, and hit me square in the shoulder". She said: "Fantasies about the workplace as a happy bastion of sisterhood are useless. Even worse, they are a lie. "Our real-life scripts don't star Cinderellas or Evil Stepmothers. Instead, they feature real people with shaky self-confidence, thwarted ambitions, buried prejudices and sexual jealousies."

Miss Mooney's book, I Can't Believe She Did That: Why Women Betray Other Women at Work, is a collection of unflattering tales of sexual jealousy and empire building. It is published in Britain next month. Miss Mooney said whenever she brought up the subject of "women-haters in the workplace", most people had a lot to say. At a conference, her question on the subject was blanked by a panel of experts. But she was mobbed afterwards by women desperate to discuss it. ...

Many women told Miss Mooney they preferred working with men because they were more straightforward. Others complained about female colleagues who flirted incessantly or ignored every other woman in the room as soon as a man arrived. "They had this seductive power over men and they used it," one said".

More here



YET MORE ON TIBET AND THE DALAI LAMA

I know it is very bad of me to keep attacking idols

Perhaps in part because of his pacifism but mainly because he is not a Christian, the Left love the Dalai Lama. I have mentioned the matter previously and I have in particular noted this 1996 statement from him:

"Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability. Marxism is concerned with the distribution of wealth on an equal basis and the equitable utilization of the means of production. It is also concerned with the fate of the working classes-that is the majority---as well as with the fate of those who are underprivileged and in need, and Marxism cares about the victims of minority-imposed exploitation. For those reasons the system appeals to me, and it seems fair. . . I think of myself as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist".

So a more in-depth look at the history of both the Dalai Lama and Tibet generally may not go astray:

During the period of Tibet's relative autonomy in the early 20th century (ended by Mao's brutal invasion) there was a strange but now largely forgotten mutual admiration between the Nazis and the Tibetan "power elite" of the time, those who were the guardians and viceroys of the then young Dalai Lama. The Nazis had an ideological and mythological fascination with Tibet and Tibetan buddhist culture. One theory suggests that their adoption of the swastika, itself an ancient Buddhist symbol, may have been part of this strange package.

Some of the Nazi race theorists employed by Himmler imagined that the most powerful ruling clans in Tibet were descendants of the Aryans. (see here). At the same time, the Tibetan rulers were acutely aware of their dependence on Britain and British India as their (non-Chinese) gateway to the wider world. They may have been looking to Germany to decrease their resulting dependence on the British. This link discusses some of the strange aspects of this now largely forgotten chapter.

Of course the Dalai Lama and his followers are not Nazis, and his campaigns on behalf of the human rights and independence of his nation deserve our respect. However it is not hard to see that there COULD be something to the apparent "coincidence" between his veneration by 1930s-40s German National Socialists and the 1990s-2000s left-liberals. (See here for other historical similarities).

In both cases we have two distinct generations of Westerners obsessed with radically remaking the West into their idyllic imaginings of a pacified society, "free" of competition or conflict or base desires, ruled over by an enlightened elite. Both groups looked to an exotic foreign source of mystical authority, apparently more "authentic", but definitely easier for radicals to deal with, than the West's own homegrown traditions.

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