If there's one thing execrable in the marketplace of ideas, it's "zombie debates" — discussions long dead, exhumed by Dr. Frankensteins posing as serious debaters.
Take the recent one about racial discrimination. When you consider the human-rights advances of the past 50 years, it's settled, long settled. Yet regurgitated is the same old guff: "We must separate people by physical appearance and treat them differently, because another solution is inconceivable"; "It's not discrimination — it's a matter of cultural misunderstandings, and anyone who objects is a cultural imperialist"; and "Discrimination maintains social order or follows human nature."
Bunkum. We've had 165 countries sign an agreement at the United Nations defining what racial discrimination is, and committing themselves to stop it. That includes our country.