Marketing the Right

Three minor, not necessarily related, observations:

1) It strikes me as both hilarious and deeply weird that the best way to get the American elite class to comprehend the Tea Party is to cast it in terms of Eastern Religion.  (via Mr. Dreher)

2) I recently happened upon this "Tweet" the other day, and it struck me as hilarious:

Free idea: pitch Natural Family Planning to the self-regarding tech elite by rebranding it as the "algorithm method."
— Matt Frost (@mattfrost) April 17, 2014

3) Along similar lines, given current trends in academic historiography, perhaps we should petition the Holy See to rename the New Testament "The Jesus Christ Oral History Archive."

Ridiculous Moral Equivalence - Brandeis Edition

I am not a fan of Mrs. Ferguson, nor of (neo-)liberal critiques of Islam in general, but this example is just too stunning to pass up.


Like all university campuses go, I am sure Brandeis could do a lot more to safeguard its female student population - returning to a vigorous regimen of pastoral care would go a long way to ameliorating these scourges of modern student life. But .  .  . to equate what happens on the leafy campus of Brandeis with "female genital cutting, forced marriages, and honor killings" is beyond absurd. What we are talking about is violence, not just "gendered" violence, but violence, pure and simple, violence on a scale not seen on the congested avenues of Waltham, Mass.

Give Hirsi Ali an honorary degree, or don't - there are plenty of reasons not to (starting with the whole absurdity of the trade in honorary doctorates). But don't fall into the trap of ridiculous first world moral equivalence.