UN indicators of sustainable development.

China as an example of how commerce is positive for gay life.

An Israeli Defence Force veteran has opened a business in a Muslim country.

Looking at the changes over time in Samuelson’s classic Economics textbook.

Post with lots of links on role of energy in Russian economy ( Read more... )

The first premise of Catholic natural law theory regarding sex, coming from Plato, is that the sole natural function of sex is reproduction. This is false. The genitals have three functions-excretion, reproduction and pleasure. Pleasure is a function in its own right, incorporating both connection and catharsis. Hence sex in nature has a range ( Read more... )

Louis Crompton is a pioneer of gay studies. He helped organise perhaps the first such course in 1970, which prompted a state legislator to propose a bill that would ban such courses except at the state medical school (the bill failed). But, as Crompton says, it was a reminder of sodomy as peccatum mutum, the silent sin (p.xi). (The persistence ( Read more... )

Adam Tooze’s book The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy is a superb example of how revealing and clarifying economic history can be ( Read more... )

Michael Burleigh’s The Third Reich: A New History is a wonderful single volume history of Nazi Germany ( Read more... )

Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within is a cri d’coeur from an American gay writer who found the sanctuary of tolerance he had thought he had found in the Netherlands and Norway to be not so ( Read more... )

What was a nice, Jewish, lesbian, feminist, academic sociologist doing in a “redneck” town like Timbertown Oregon? Finding out why a town with not much sign of a visible queer community was getting so exorcised over homosexuality. Arlene Stein-the aforementioned Jewish, lesbian, feminist, academic sociologist-later wrote up as The Stranger Next ( Read more... )

The Holocaust looms over C20th European history as the great evil act of that murderous century. It has made racism the great public sin of Western civilisation, even though revolutionary socialism has killed far more people. At least until recently, it also made what had been an abiding feature of Christendom-cum-Western civilisation (Jew hatred ( Read more... )

Genocide-the extermination of people by category-is a socialist idea whose only significant public advocates from the 1840s to the 1940s all called themselves socialists. It starts with Marx and Engels writing in the Neue Rheinsiche Zeitung in January 1849 (The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of ( Read more... )

Corey Taylor’s Naked: The Life and Pornography of Michael Lucas, a biography of a gay Russian Jew porn actor and director who has turned himself into New York celebrity ( Read more... )