Round-up

1. This is a very interesting article about a new book by Richard Thompson Ford - a black professor at Stanford Law School - called "The Race Card". The book is a serious analysis of the way modern conflicts involving race often have nothing to do with race at all, and the ease in this PC age of playing the race card to gain sympathy. For example, the article cites a recent case involving actor Danny Glover, who claims that a "racist" taxi driver sped by him instead of picking him up. But alternative explanations are offered which have nothing to do with racism: often, says Ford, taxi drivers are themselves black or of another race (other than white). Often, taxi drivers are hesitant to pick up black passengers for fear that they will be asked to drive to dangerous, seedy parts of town. On other occasions they are simply rushing to get the car back to the depot. The article, and possibly Ford's analysis, still seem a little bit apologetic to me, but many good points are made and this is a must-read piece.

2. Yesterday I wrote about the Lewis Hamilton "racism" scandal, and why there wasn't actually very much racism in it. But today it appears that there has been much REAL racism in the ongoing saga, with numerous people posting ignorant monkey comments on various websites. This is, of course, unacceptable, although I still believe that, due to free speech, people should be ALLOWED to equate Lewis Hamilton with a monkey if they so wish, so long as they don't physically hurt him or discriminate against him in the throes of their racism. You just gotta live with that, I'm afraid Lewis. Sometimes people don't like you (I'm not one of them, by the way).

3. But meanwhile, it seems that some people do indeed want to ban Spain from hosting a Grand Prix this year as a result of this incident. Gee, punishing a whole country because of the actions of a few of its people; that sounds rather...racist.