Whether pigs have wings « An Amrikan Chimaera at Jollybengali.net

Legislating National Identity

From Slate: http://slatest.slate.com/id/2244122/entry/8/

This concerns France’s recent attempts legislate its culture… banning the burqa, specifically. If this were done in the USA, I think I’d be against it. But in a country like France (or Italy or Turkey), which has a predominant character or cultural history, I’m okay with it. I’m definitely okay with Immigration [...]

Act right not just be right

NY Magazine recently asked a question regarding the Kanye West/Taylor Swift ‘controversy’:

Does his mission to acknowledge the greatness of contemporary musicians not amount to a worthy cause?

It’s a legitimate question to ask and in principle, I probably come down on Kanye’s side but he does a disservice to this mission by employing methods [...]

Why do Westerners lie to their children so?

Or, NO THE TOOTH FAIRY DOESN’T EXIST! GO GET A DAMN JOB IF YOU WANT MONEY!

A few years ago, I spent the Muslim holiday of Eid ul-Adha in Bangladesh in my dad’s boyhood home of Barahipur in the province of Feni. There I witnessed a cow being slaughtered in the old fashion. That is, [...]

The NOW answer

I think one of the more annoying aspects of human curiosity is the demand for the NOW answer. We want everything to be definitively explained NOW. And so we fill in the blanks for questions whose answers we aren’t prepared to answer yet.

Who created us? What came before the Big Bang? Why is Cleveland [...]

Fighting for Substance

A quarter-life crisis to be followed by a mid-life crisis to be followed by a late-life crisis to be followed by death

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk and the subsequent movie starring Ed Norton, Jr and Brad Pitt, I think, serves as one of the great stories about modern man’s dissatisfaction with his lot in [...]

No Joke, I Like Music

I tend to take music pretty seriously. I suppose that’s natural considering that my early music influences were grunge, metal and gangsta rap – Nirvana, Pearl Jam, REM, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns ‘n Roses, Snoop, Dre and Public Enemy, to name a few. Here was music that spoke to me, that either showed me [...]

The Darker the Flesh, the Deeper the Soul

I read a post over at Girl You So Well Spoken detailing an apparent casting call for a Ciroc commercial seeking “light-skinned african americans”. Now that it’s been discovered and publicized, Ciroc is taking to denying, denying, denying having made such a request for their commercials but the larger point still remains.

Unfortunately, it’s not [...]

Political Correctness and the Death of Civility

I am often struck by how Republicans, ie conservatives, are usually the ones who decry political correctness. I’ve said before that there is a line between crassness and the right to speak one’s mind. I do enjoy a little crass humor, myself, but not to the extent that I would condone prejudicial speech coming from [...]

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