The phenomenon of Political Correctness has finally reached its nadir of idiocy: now even microbes are being subjected to its hair-splitting (cilia-splitting?) criteria. From an article on the curious fact that all the lookalike "SARS week" magazine covers of the major newsmagazines used Caucasian models for a disease that originated in and has so far mostly affected an Asian country, is this quote:
Jim Kelly, the managing editor of Time, explained his thinking about cover girls as follows: "It was a very conscious decision on our part to pick a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman who looked like she got off the beach at Laguna. We wanted to go with a Western woman because we felt the disease was stigmatizing Asians unfairly."
At last, something about SARS that the hordes of PC can safely hate and fear: it's not just a disease that kills humans, it's a racist disease.
(Via alert reader Darth Monkeybone, who emailed me the article.)
Posted by Andrea Harris at May 10, 2003 09:46 AMSo did you hear the latest from the People's Republic of San Franky? The Fund for Animals wants the city inspectors to start cracking down on markets that sell live animals for food because of the SARS scare, claiming that the virus can jump from animals to humans.
Of course, no mention that there are apparently no infected animals here, no mention that the markets are all in Chinatown, no mention that the same group (and others) have been harassing those markets for years.
Posted by: Ken Summers at May 10, 2003 at 11:08 PM