… but did not have the time to…
I would like to have blogged about this thought provoking excerpt from Russell Banks’ The Darling on the difference between empathy and sympathy.
“What was ethically and even practically wrong with having empathy towards the other? For a long time, I answered, Nothing. Nothing at all. It’s good politics. I see a blind man about to cross a street and think, He can’t see the whizzing traffic, he needs me to see it for him, to take his arm and escort him over to …

In a recent posting at Aid Watch, William Easterly makes the very good point that we could help the poor more if we were to bypass dubious charitable scheme like Product Red. William Easterly points out that if you really want to support altruistic causes, you should do it directly rather than paying the business man and tipping the poor.

The question Easterly does not answer is why don’t we send our bucks or quids straight to the Global Fund instead of spending them at Starbucks?
Guilt, the one we feel knowing …

Rating 3.00 out of 5

Mates® is now manufacturing and merchandising a new type of condom, “thinner, softer and much more flexible”. The objective is to make wearing condom as if wearing nothing. Made with Sensoprene (aka polyisoprene), Mates® claims that using their Skyn™ condoms will make sex feel better.
The advert is rather interesting with its antithetic approach to condom promotion.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

Gone are the days of gloom and doom HIV prevention and condom promotion. Largely, AIDS does not kill anymore in the developed world unless you are one of the vulnerable people that would-be-clever ads hardly ever reach.
So what about a change in perspective, what about the fun side of sex and what about using it to promote condoms? We know that people enjoy sex but we also know that condoms are sometimes a barrier to the funny side of sex. Part of this comes from the association of sex, HIV …