Balancing sensitivity with humor

References to political correctness became ubiquitous during the Republican primary race and has spread elsewhere. Recently some well-known comedians such as Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Bill Maher complained that they were avoiding college campuses on their tours because colleges had become too ‘politically correct’, and audiences were sometimes booing them for jokes that were considered offensive and thus preventing them from offering up edgy humor. But John K. Wilson writes that rather than the audiences being too thin-skinned, it is these very wealthy comedians who are hypersensitive, thinking that they have a right to not have to experience a negative reaction to their humor.
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Michael Ratner (1943-2016)

Anyone in the US who is concerned about human rights would likely be familiar with the name Michael Ratner who died of cancer on May 11. He was a lawyer who served as long-time president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and took an all manner of unpopular causes, such as fighting on behalf of Julian Assange and for the rights of Guantanamo detainees, where he won an important victory when the US Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 in 2008 that detainees had the right to the writ of habeas corpus. There have been many obituaries about his life and work and I will quote from just two.
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The never-ending soap opera that is now the Republican party

The next storyline is the will he/won’t he courtship between speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan, who is the one who is the chair of the party convention, and the presumptive nominee Donald Trump. Although Ryan has been playing coy and hard to get, we know how this will end of course. The person who wins the nomination gets to call the shots and so Paul Ryan will capitulate, the only question being when and how.
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Religious terrorists

During the interfaith panel that I was on recently, in my response to the question of whether there is a heaven, I said that the concept of heaven was not merely a harmless fantasy but harmful because it led people to do awful things in the belief that it would help them get into heaven. I mentioned Islamic terrorists who had committed recent atrocities and the Christian terrorist who gunned down the abortion providers in the belief that he would receive the grateful thanks of fetuses in heaven. I could have, if I had the time, listed Jewish, Buddhist, and Hindu terrorist acts as well.
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