Election of unelectables

If anything has become certain this election, it must be that, unless both presidential primaries end up being decided at the conventions and more likable and less divisive candidates are foisted to the surface, Americans are going to wind up electing an unpopular candidate, which seems counterintuitive to how democracy is supposed to work, but chalk that up to another of the head-scratching anomalies of 2016.

Clearly, Donald Trump is at the top of the unpopular list. In states where he has won, Trump has commanded up to 40 percent of the vote, and in at least one recent poll, 49 percent of the GOP electorate said they supported him, compared with 15 percent for Sen. Ted Cruz and 6 percent for Gov. John Kasich. But outside of Trump’s core audience, which includes mostly uneducated, angry or frustrated white people in rural America, Trump has long ago lost the plot with conservative-minded women, Hispanics and educated Republicans, which is why he not only could turn out to be a disastrous GOP nominee, but he may be virtually unelectable in a general contest.

The GOP inteligencia, we can only assume, includes all of the “establishment” Republicans in Washington and their supporters in districts across the nation who are beseeching the party to #StopTrump at all costs, which has become a viral hashtag on Twitter the last several weeks, along with #DumpTrump, #CrushTrump and of course, #AnyoneButTrump. Rather than let the democratic process work like it was intended, which occasionally means electing candidates who are neither qualified or worthy of the office — Trump happens to fit both bills — some leaders inside the GOP have been plotting and scheming in an attempt to “derail” the real estate mogul’s path to victory and offer up an independent candidate to face former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Sen. Bernie Sanders in the general election.

So, it’s no wonder, then, that 37 percent of Republicans surveyed said they would cast their ballots for a third party candidate rather than giving their votes to Trump. Meanwhile on a national scale, more than 60 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump, and 53 percent have a negative view of Clinton.

In short, although Trump and Clinton are the frontrunners in the next presidential election, a majority of Americans, amazingly, don’t like them. Trump’s problems are glaring enough — hostility to immigrants, xenophobia, bigotry and woeful foreign policy — but Clinton, at one time the darling of the left, has lost much of her luster amid a general mistrust and a perception that she lacks sincerity at all, much less sincerity on the level of Sanders.

Here is what Michael Barbaro had to say about this year’s unlikely primary election in a recent New York Times article:

Should they clinch the nomination, it would represent the first time in at least a quarter-century that majorities of Americans held negative views of both the Democratic and Republican candidates at the same time.

Cruz, who currently holds second place in the GOP primary with 424 delegates, is no better, and he may even be more disliked than Trump and Clinton. Numerous polls show Cruz hovering around 50 percent approval, and inside Washington, the perception seems to be that the only thing of substance he has done on The Hill thus far is to oversee — some might say “force” — the GOP-led government shutdown of 2013.

That leaves Sanders and Kasich, two candidates who happen to be the most liked, but consequently, the least likely to actually win the nomination in their respective parties. As unusual as the 2016 election cycle has been thus far, it’s almost a given that we are bound, in spite of ourselves, to elect a deeply unpopular candidate this year, and will then, as democracy goes, be forced to live with the consequences.

Below are favorability charts for the remaining candidates in the GOP and Democrat primaries (courtesy Huffington Post) with my brief notes:

Trump: Has the most momentum so far in the election and is the most disliked.

Cruz: Has few friends in Washington and widespread disapproval in the body politic:

Kasich: Objectively the most qualified candidate in the GOP field, with favorables outweighing negatives. Yet, still in a distant third.

Clinton: Has a strong base of supporters who would walk with her through fire and back, but everyone else is decidedly mistrustful and sees through the hollow politicking veneer. Will mostly likely win the nomination because — well — she’s Hillary Clinton, and apparently for the Democratic National Convention and her loyal supporters, that’s all that matters.

Sanders: Has almost as high a favorability rating as Clinton has unfavorable, but is and will likely continue to be in a distant second because — well — Hillary.

Party in exile: GOP’s identity crisis undermines nation

Like John Oliver, I have, for the most part, ignored Donald Trump on this site partly because he’s so ubiquitous, and I don’t want to be perceived as writing about him just to get a few click-throughs. The other reason is that a lot of my thoughts on politics are recorded in a column I write for the newspaper, so while I have plenty to say, much of it has already been said in newsprint. With that out of the way, what I am about to say has been stewing in the attic for quite some time, so pull up a chair …

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Back in November 2008, just after President Barack Obama was voted into office the first time, I wrote a blog post titled, “Republican Party on the wane,” and the main point was that the GOP had been in a process of slow decline for years leading up to that point in American history, and it culminated, or so I thought, in the nomination of Sarah Palin, who was one of, if not the, most clueless politician ever to be a few heartbeats away from the White House.

Here’s what I had to say at the time:

The general failing that has been accumulating over the years begins with the party’s seeming inability (or unwillingness) to move on, to modernize itself in our multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religion society.

… Many Republicans, at least those not yet attempting to analyze where the disc skipped, are still locked in a time, real or imagined, where America was more morally upright and more partitioned into separate ideologies, social classes and races. … This no longer represents America today. The inability to recognize this has led to the coinage “the stupid party.” I include this not to trivialize the matter or make jokes because it’s not funny in the least. …

Whether the title of the original post was understated or not — I tend to think it was about right for that particular time — the events of the last four years, and particularly of the last six months leading up to Tuesday night’s primary races, have clearly demonstrated, after scores of meaningless and symbolic repeals of Obamacare, the GOP-forced government shutdown of October 2013, the resignation of former Speaker of the House John Boehner, the emergence of Trump as a “serious” candidate, the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the party’s subsequent unconstitutional refusal to hold confirmation hearings to pick a replacement, that the current iteration of the GOP is now in its death throes as a party with scarcely any coherent, unified message.

As you might recall, Boehner, more or less a centrist, mainstream Republican, attempted to rein in the more fringe elements of his party and, as witnessed by his resignation, failed to do so and was apparently no longer interested in fighting the battle. Perhaps Palin was the more identifiable manifestation of the fringe contingent in the GOP, but it had been there all along, simmering somewhere under the halls of Congress, for the better part of three decades beginning with the advent of the Moral Majority back in the late 1970s when the party became inexplicably bound up with evangelicals and the religious right in a way that it had not been in previous generations. The tide clearly shifted with Ronald Reagan’s election of 1980.

According to Clyde Wilcox in “God’s Warriors: The Christian Right in Twentieth-Century America,” one-fifth of those who supported the Moral Majority cast their ballots for Reagan that year, although the same people voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976. Although the Moral Majority as an organized political organization went under in the late 1980s, only to be briefly reincarnated in 2004, its influence, its conflation of religion and patriotism, its strident opposition to things like a homosexuality and a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body, its support of public prayer in schools and its populist anti-intellectualism all, in my view, laid the groundwork for the Tea Party and for the kind of post-Tea Party GOP that we see today. Indeed, a detailed analysis on the long-term influence of the Moral Majority on the Republican Party would make for a fascinating study.

Now, Sen. Ted Cruz, once a darling of the Tea Party, was, at one time, heralded as the kind of politician who could give the movement a fresh, more diverse face and erase the image that the Tea Party was largely a club for angry, white Christians, is barely hanging on in this year’s GOP primary, as real estate mogul Donald Trump, despite being a liar and a firebrand with questionable business sense, carried seven states Tuesday en route to what looks to be a decisive overall victory, while Cruz won three states. Another “diversity candidate,” Sen. Marco Rubio, only managed to eek out a win in Minnesota this week.

Credit: Tea Party Express

Credit: Tea Party Express

The irony, of course, is that while Trump has been tapping into the worse angels of our nature in his open hostility to Mexican immigrants and Syrian refugees — nonetheless using illegal immigrant labor on his own construction projects, as reported here and here — the field of Republican candidates this year has never been more diverse.

But the GOP’s Johnny-come-lately strategy in modernizing itself to look more like the body politic, if not in reality, at least in the candidates it has offered this election cycle, has simply been drowned out by the meteoric rise of Trump, who has proven time and again that he will literally say anything and insult anyone to gin up votes.

Whereas politicians in previous elections have shown a modicum of restraint and decorum, Trump is openly combative, speaks in populist platitudes and caters to the lowest common denominator of right-wing anger, and GOP officials, flailing about as if caught in the undertow, simply have not been able to control him or the message, such that traditional Republican talking points and substantive discussion on things like low taxes, limited government and social conservativism can all be scrapped in favor of unbridled derision and infighting. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who in any other election cycle would have been a boilerplate mainstream conservative candidate, has himself been relegated to the hinterlands of the GOP. Graham has expressed his consternation with the current political landscape, calling Trump a “jackass” this past summer when he was still a candidate, and most recently, describing his own party as “batshit crazy.”

Graham, who hails from my home state, should be given credit for speaking out about the decline of the GOP, even now as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, formerly a harsh critic of Trump’s xenophobia, has now shamefully fallen in line, which is more than I can say for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan and the rest of the Republican Party leadership in Washington. Although Ryan and McConnell “denounced” Trump’s latest cringe-worthy episode, a refusal to decisively eschew the support of David Duke and the KKK, they have been mostly quiet and have only said they will get behind the eventual nominee.

Here is what Ryan had to say earlier this week regarding Trump’s comments on Duke:

This party does not prey on people’s prejudices.

Actually, it has and does — it’s just that now, the scab formerly covering up the ugly underbelly of the GOP has been ripped off for all to see.

In the past, the GOP played to people’s prejudices in less obvious ways, in support of policies that stunted economic and social progress in inner cities and among low-income residents, giving overwhelming preference to the interests of corporations, defense contractors across the globe and Wall Street. Today, and thanks to the GOP’s failure to neuter, first, the Tea Party, now Trump and put the party on a path toward modernization so its platform is more aligned and attuned to the 21st century, the face of the Republican Party, who commanded a dominating win Tuesday, has made his bones channeling the frustrations of the middle class, speaking to people’s anger about our supposedly inept government and appealing to the same old bigoted spirits of the past that never quite seem to fade away, all the while, alleging that he is going to restrict the First Amendment, expand the role of government to build a wall along the Mexican border — and somehow make that nation pay for it (“I’m not going to pay for that fucking wall!” retorted former Mexican President Vicente Fox.) — and get tough on sanctions with China and Russia, promises that Trump can’t possibly deliver.

And here is how McConnell addressed the party’s perceived bigotry problem:

Let me make it clear: Senate Republicans condemn David Duke, the KKK and racism. That is not the view of Republicans that have been elected to the United States Senate.

Screenshot 2016-03-02 at 7.56.54 PM

Credit: John Cole

That does, however, appear to be the view, veiled or otherwise, of a shocking number of Republican voters who have welcomed a candidate who is finally giving voice to their most closeted fears and prejudices. Unfortunately for the GOP — and most unfortunately for the country at large — the “batshit crazy” voting bloc is no longer a fledgling little demographic on the fringe. I hate to say it, but GOP leaders couldn’t do anything about Trump now even if they wanted to. They missed that chance, and attempting to stop Trump at the convention, against the will of the people, would be tantamount to authoritarianism.

I don’t believe Trump has much of a chance to win a general election, and if he gets the nomination, my hunch is that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will win decisively, as Sen. Bernie Sanders’ supporters fall on the sword and cast their default Democratic vote, while all but the most conservative Hispanics, blacks and women, left with scant few options at that point, will simply flock to the party that clearly has their best interests at heart.

Disturbing as recent events may be, this is democracy in action, like it or not. The double-edged sword of democracy is that while Trump and his supporters may in the midst of a heyday right now after Super Tuesday, we, as a nation, will inevitably get the kind of government we deserve, especially if he somehow gains enough traction to pose a serious challenge to Clinton. If we are irresponsible in choosing our candidates at the ballot box, as we have been, don’t stay informed about who these people are and view the sobering task of picking the next president as if it’s a fucking game show, we will reap more than a few ill-gotten fruits, as our collective stupidity continues to be laid bare before the world.

[Cover photo credit: SublimeBudd @ DeviantArt.com]

Sexism: Not what The Rock is cookin’

Full disclosure: I am a fan of the pro wrestling craft and have been since the 1980s, but I think I present a fairer and more comprehensive assessment of the WWE than the articles critiqued below. The idea for this post came from Don Tony, with the Don Tony and Kevin Castle Show. Go check them out here: http://wrestling-news.com.

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I know the good folks over at the Bleacher Report and Vocativ just need something to keep themselves busy, and in the fully-pajamaed, dweeb-in-the-basement-industry of Internet prognostication, any old fodder will do, but no serious writer who looks at the WWE today can conclude that the wrestling promotion, or wrestling in general, is any more or less sexist in its presentation and objectification of women than other products in the entertainment industry.

But as writers on the Internet are wont to do, Alex Goot, with Vocativ, and Ryan Dilbert, with the Bleacher Report, took great pains to shed all remnants of logic and type up critiques of what they deem is WWE’s glaring problem with sexism, particular in light of The Rock’s recent return to RAW on Jan. 25, as seen here:

The two articles actually read like mirror-pieces because they more or less cover the same ground on the Rock’s seemingly unscripted (I doubt it) conversation backstage with C.J. Perry, aka Lana, about their sexual proclivities, which partly took place in the presence of Perry’s real-life fiancé, Miroslav Barnyashev, aka Rusev.

During the segment, The Rock recalled how Lana met him in a hotel room at some point in the past, and the pair performed various positions in bed, one of which included the “one-legged Russian vacuum.”

According to Dilbert:

The Rock congratulated him on having a wife who was so flexible.

Lana offered no response. She mostly just stood there blushing. She wasn’t a player in this bit of minitheater; she was a prop.

At her height, Lana was both alluring and powerful. She was vicious, power-hungry, a blindly passionate patriot and real wrestling character. Over time, she’s been reduced to the subject of sex-centered storylines. She went from being the smiling, silent woman on Dolph Ziggler’s arm to the smiling, silent woman hanging around Rusev.

On Monday night, WWE pulled her back into the spotlight just to make a cheap joke about her promiscuity.

Dilbert and Goot miss, or purposefully exclude, some rather obvious, yet important details in this, and almost all, segments on WWE programming that anyone with an IQ over 50 would understand. First, these are all fictional characters talking to each other about fictional events. The Rock is not Dewayne Johnson the movie star; he is the “larger than life” character created by the WWE to entertain audience members and people watching at home. He is a little tamped down from the Attitude Era days, but he still says things that would be inappropriate in real life, as do many characters in all facets of the entertain industry.

Second, in order for The Rock, the character, to talk about Lana’s promiscuity, he must also talk about his own. If we want to pretend to tread the moral high ground in breaking down this segment, we might also ask what The Rock was doing getting drunk and messing around with someone else’s girlfriend. Yet, in the criticism against WWE, we are led to believe that only Lana could have been complicit in these fictional hotel acrobatics, as if Lana was the ultimate seducer, and The Rock was just along for the proverbial ride. Could we not call that assessment sexist as well?

Third, Lana was not suddenly downgraded from a “vicious, power-hungry, a blindly passionate patriot” to the coy, fawning female on RAW the other night just so The Rock could air their — again, fictional — exploits in front of millions of people. Lana has had “heat,” as they call it in the wrestling business, because she allegedly leaked news of her and Rusev’s real-life engagement on social media at a time when the couple were involved in a storyline dispute on TV. She also apparently had some kind of spat on social media with Paige, which also got her some heat. As a result, and this is the usual trend in WWE, she is being afforded less time on TV at the moment.

Fourth, are characters, who represent exaggerated version of real life figures, supposed to simply ignore the topic of human relationships and sex purely because WWE may run the risk of objectifying people? Drunken sex in hotels and promiscuous horseplay are still things people do, right? So, why does WWE run afoul for suggesting that an explicit and fictional encounter occurred between two consenting adults? Cheating on your boyfriend may be unethical, but it’s not illegal.

In any case, over-analyzing dialogue between fictional characters about fictional events in this way amounts to borderline insanity.

While WWE does have its fair share of boorish characters, both male and female, not all male characters in the company dredge up the sexual histories of female wrestlers, and not all female wrestlers are depicted as shallow, one-dimensional Barbies. Examples of the latter include A.J. Lee, who, until recently, was the longest running women’s champion in history, Lita, Jacqueline, Alundra Blayze, Charlotte, Sasha Banks, Natalya, etc.

I will say that when the opportunity presents itself, WWE does tend to go for the relationship storylines too often, in which female characters often get pigeonholed as side-kick figures, and people like John Cena and Ryback, who are supposed to be good guys, as Goot pointed out, sometimes make crude jokes about heel characters, as Lana was at one time. I would chalk these up less to sexism and more to laziness on the part of the writers.

Goot also took issue with Ric Flair kissing Becky Lynch during a match with Charlotte at the Royal Rumble in order to cause a distraction and help Charlotte regain the upper hand.

According to Goot:

Rather than adding anything of value to the contest, Flair’s actions took the audience out of it, forcing viewers to contemplate the strange display they just witnessed, rather than focusing on the action in the ring.

Flair’s kiss becomes even more maddening given how utterly unnecessary it was, with the finish of the match coming after some additional, far less lecherous interference. Bringing sexual harassment into the storyline added little, if anything, to Flair’s villainy.

What Goot failed to mention is that Flair’s character, which he has played on and off for 30 years, actually is an immoral and flamboyant ladies man, and the words, “kiss stealing” are part of his DNA as a character, as in the well-worn mantra that he is a “kiss stealing, wheeling dealing, limousine riding, jet flying, son of a gun.” Goot also failed to mention that Becky Lynch gave Flair a stiff slap in the face in return for his antics.

So, yes, Flair is a bad guy who would not and should not suddenly change to fit in with our modern sensibilities. Would a 2016 remake of “Scarface” show Tony Montana finally getting clean, going into rehab for his cocaine addiction and starting a new life in The Hamptons as a real estate agent? Would we, as consumers, even want to see a reformed Tony Montana? Of course not.

Low brow humor is easy pickings for overworked writers who are under immense pressure to produce five hours of television every week and 12-13 PPVs per year, but WWE is a publicly traded company now and has to answer to advertisers, so while the company clearly still has some outstanding issues related to gender, race and stereotypes, it is worlds removed from the WWE of the Attitude Era or the 1980s in the current PG era of political correctness.

If we want to have a conversation on sexism and the objectification of women in the entertainment industry, we could certainly find plenty to talk about, but we should have some perspective about judging wrestling against other television shows, movies and even music. Where is the outcry against television shows like Game of Thrones, which routinely depicts violence against women, misogyny and sexual abuse? Where is the outcry against shows like Real Housewives of (insert city) and The Bachelor? What about the sexism depicted in Mad Men, 2 Broke Girls and Modern Family? Hell, if we’re so concerned about objectification, why don’t we call for a boycott of Sports illustrated for producing a swimsuit edition?

I agree with Goot that WWE can and should do more to promote strong, confident women who should have more time on the mic and in the ring and be given more complex storylines, but the truth is that WWE does present strong-willed, ass-kicking females every week, 52 weeks out of the year. Perhaps strongest of all, despite her villainy on TV, is Stephanie McMahon, who is helping to run the company, all the while raising three daughters.

To suggest that WWE in the year 2016 is a hotbed of sexism, when one of its principle owners is a powerful female, all the while ignoring the rest of the entertainment industry, which features nearly ubiquitous examples of overt sexism and objectification that trump anything on WWE programming in recent memory, all the while ignoring the fact that WWE is, itself, a form of entertainment, is a dubious claim to make about a company that routinely trips over itself, almost to a fault, to toe the PG line and kowtow to the PC culture.

The anti-regressives: part 2

For those who are interested, here is first part of this series.

As other writers will likely attest, sometimes when sitting down to put pen to paper — or more accurately, keyboard to word processor — as I am wont to do in newspaper columns and as I have time on this blog, the entirety of what I might want to say on a particular subject is rarely fully formed before I take down the first sentence. Indeed, more times than not, while I usually have a general idea of where I’m headed on the page, epiphanies often occur in the process of writing, which is how the idea of the anti-regressives came about. This was either one of the more clever things that I have conjured up in 10-plus years of writing or it’s half-baked.

I’ll let others be the judge of that, but now that I have, I think, identified yet another subset of a subset of liberals who are at least as counterproductive and dangerous as regressive leftists like Glenn Greenwald, PZ Myers, Reza Aslan, Dean Obeidallah and all the rest, I only did so briefly in the previous post, tacking it on near the end of a fairly long post on Atheism is Unstoppable’s insidious YouTube critique of Lawrence Krauss’ recent essay, “Thinking Rationally About Terror.” It was also getting rather late as I was trying to finish the previous post, and I realized that I needed to fine tune a couple points and clear up a previously confusing title. And yes, I do realize that in identifying “anti-regressivism,” I run the risk of simply getting bogged down in labels and terminology.

In any case, I felt like I needed to take a few moments to more fully expand what I meant by the anti-regressives and how they came about in liberal circles.

That said, the first thing to point out is that I do not, in the least, blame people like Bill Maher, Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins for feeding the fire, for lack of a better phrase, of the kind of sentiment expressed in the cauldron of intolerance ginned up in YouTube videos, comment sections and on Twitter. I suggested that, perhaps, the impetus behind that kind of rhetoric sprung out of harsh criticisms of Islam as an ideology, whereby disenchanted or angry readers may go well beyond anything Dawkins or Harris have actually said on the subject and begin making crazy assertions like, “any city on earth … will have acts of Muslim terrorism in it,” as did the maker of the AiU video.

I don’t think Harris and Co. have fed the fire directly, and I know they certainly did not mean to do it indirectly either. Harris is currently collaborating with multiple current Muslims and former Muslims in a courageous and necessary attempt to reform the religion, or help believers reform it, from the inside out. Rather, I think that by pulling the gloves off and by being honest, forceful and unremitting in their critiques of Islam as an ideology, Harris and Co. have left the door open for certain individuals on the left to move the conversation far afield out into some kind of strange mixture of liberalism and outright bigotry and xenophobia. Harris, Dawkins, Maher and others aren’t Islamophobes simply because they criticize the religion of millions of Muslims. If that were the case, we must also dismiss them as Christophobes and Judeophobes, and that’s positively absurd.

We have overused the word, “Islamophobe,” to such an extent that it barely carries any meaning anymore, so let me bring that word back down to reality. There is true anti-Muslim bigotry out there, and it doesn’t just come from the right. If regressives like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan are apologists for Islam and are overtly tolerant of dangerous ideologies apparently just for the sake of political correctness, the anti-regressives, residing somewhere on the other side of the liberal dial, eschew political correctness altogether, and indeed, common decency, and take the opportunity to bury the better angels of their nature so that true intolerance can boil to the surface.

Take the following actual comments from people responding to AiU’s video, which was intended for fellow, self-proclaimed liberals:

KillerInstinct69 21 hours ago
I’m glad my state refused Syrian refugees. Conservatives are pretty much right when it comes to Islam in general…

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InvokerLongQua 2 weeks ago
What a fucking shame.
You guys should browse r/atheism to see more of this filths ilk.
If it ain’t Christianity, religion apparently has a place in this world. (ISLAM of course).

Am I in a fucking bizzaro world? I am seriously just going to vote Trump this year. If nobody has the balls to call out the Muslim threat, then Trump is the only candidate I will vote for.

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Adam Aston 3 weeks ago
perhaps he (Lawrence Krauss) should have taken a trip from Phoenix to Cologne Train station on New years Eve – I wonder what he’d think when he actually got to see some real life Muslims whilst 1000 of them were on thier robbing /molesting /raping spree of which they targeted only German women. (takes balls to rob a man you see). I used to highly respect Krauss but you can’t just criticise Islam and not it’s adherents. I would love to hear his opinions also if he came and lived where I do for a few months,lol . My Mrs can’t walk to the shop by herself at night for Pervy gangs of Muslim youth. …

The Dance Of Victory 3 weeks ago
(In response to the above comment) That sounds awful. Not sure where you live (assuming somewhere in the UK) but damn. I’d get the hell out of there. These Rapeugees all need rounding up and shot.

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Adam Aston 3 weeks ago
Have to say I was doubtful when I watched him (Krauss) speak to Noam Chomsky on some YT vid. I thought he was gonna drop to his knees as suck him off right there on the stage. uggh shrivelled old regressive cock – what a vision.

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MarketingDan 3 weeks ago
(testing new name – formerly 30 Day TYT Detox) Still his book A Universe From Nothing was brilliant – he should stick to what he’s good at. By throwing out his academic credentials like that on a subject he has no expertise in is very dishonest. He extends other scientist that respect – by admitting he has no expertise in other areas than his own. I Saw him in a conversion with Richard Dawkins a while back in Sydney – Great respect for the man, he’s achieved more than most ever will in his career at least. Sad day all the same.

This last one may not be questionable on the surface, but he seems to agree with most of AiU’s video, which most certainly is questionable.

A few more:

Callum Pearce (Britishgamer666) 3 weeks ago
+Ryan Floch Secular muslims? Oh, you mean the “HEY, LOOOK AT US! THE FEW MUSLIMS WHO SAY WE’RE MUSLIM AND ARE OKAY WITH OTHER RELIGIONS, BUT FUCK THE GAYS! ALSO, JEWS ARE BAD!” Those aren’t Muslims. Muslims have to follow the Quran to be Muslim. So that means killing non-believers, killing apostates, killing gays, converting, raping, forced marriage and children marriage. It’s happening in front of your eyes.+Proboscis the support for terrorism in the muslim world is around 10% according to any poll, so 100s millions will be correct, i don’t see how you being a fighter in the army gives you a better way to evaluate those numbers.
“they”, 100s of millions of muslims, are definitely “bad”, and not just because of the terrorism, that is a minor issue, what troubles me most is the support for sharia which exceeds 50% of muslims, that includes support for killing apostates, stoning adulterers etc…
if you are not against that then you are intellectually bankrupt.

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pwnsauce319 3 weeks ago
If you want to be very picky, you’ll get Islamic based violence on a significant scale in any city with Muslims. Not all of it is terrorism obviously. Some is honor killings, spousal abuse, and other manifestations of Islam. Of course you’ll have violence anywhere Buddhists or Christians or any people live, but that violence isn’t inspired by religion. Most violence committed by Muslims is inspired by Islam.

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Goshawk 3 weeks ago
+Lazarus You lost everyone with a semblance of intelligence when you said: “To be honest Chompsky (sic) has a point”. Saying we helped create ISIS is like saying we (UK,US and France) created Naziism. It’s pure, self hating, Chompskyist (sic) regressivism. Muslims have been on the warpath for decades. They’re doing their murderous stuff worldwide. They don’t need to be triggered by us. They’re at it in Africa(many countries), India, Lebanon, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines etc In fact, to find which states have Islamic terrorism just list the states that have substantial muslim populations. They’re at it everywhere. Go on – dig for the proof that we caused it all. It’s all our fault. Chomsky will have an explanation. You stupid, regressive twat.

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Nevermind the people who seem confused about what “regressivism” means in the first place, these are folks who, in many cases, are familiar with the work of both Chomsky and Krauss and who either agreed with AiU’s assessment about Muslims or made an effort to reiterate some of his more outlandlish points. And in some of the more extreme cases, they even agreed that Donald Trump had some good ideas about how to deal with refugees seeking asylum in the United States.

I certainly don’t have time to sift through hundreds more posts tonight, but I dare say one could find similar sentiments, if not worse, over at Reddit. Again, I am and have been as tough on Islam, and the other monotheistic religions, as anyone, but the comments above show that people who are watching videos intended for left-wing viewers seem to have crossed over into what I am calling anti-regressivism, that is, using legit criticisms of Islam as an ideology — and using the unfiltered frontier that is the Internet — as a liberal license to run down Muslims or Muslim-majority communities, which is obviously a problematic overreach, counterproductive and childish.

FBI finally gets around to taking action in Oregon

In what should have been a swift removal of gunmen who took it upon themselves to go outside the law to occupy, with a threat of violence, a federal refuge in Oregon, the FBI and local authorities now seem ready to begin take back the property after the arrest of eight people and the death of another stemming from a “standoff” that has lasted for more than three weeks.

I even hesitate to call it a “standoff” because that word implies that the police were actually near the occupied compound and actively working to diffuse the situation. What we have in this situation is the FBI simply playing a passive waiting game with a band of white, Christian, Republican outlaws — three points in their favor — and as I pointed out earlier this month, if these had been militant blacks or radicalized Muslims, law enforcement would have orchestrated a proverbial blitzkrieg on the compound in a matter of hours.

Here is a link to the FBI’s press conference if you haven’t seen the video, but Special Agent in Charge Greg Bretzing delivered the speech with about as much conviction and urgency as Ben Carson does with just about anything. According to Bretzing:

They had ample opportunity to leave the refuge peacefully. And as the FBI and our partners have clearly demonstrated, actions are not without consequences.

“Ample opportunity”? Why were they given any opportunity? I don’t use exclamation points much, but they were holding fucking federal territory at gun point!

In any case, after the arrests, the FBI is apparently going to let the rest of these guys, who were, in my view, complicit in an act of sedition against this country, to just wonder off back into obscurity, just so long as they come to a police checkpoint “where they will be ID’d,” as Bretzing said, with all the emotion of a subdued cow. 

I guess that’s what counts for justice so long as you come from the white-bred Oregon backwoods.

Charge the Oregon gunmen with sedition

This might completely blow the minds of so-called “Patriot” movement supporters, but by definition, seizing federal property and holding it with threat of force — in the case of the Oregon standoff with shotguns and rifles — a la a nonviolent (so far) John Brown at Harper’s Ferry-type situation is not in keeping with traditional American principles.

A sign tacked outside a Burns. Ore., home reflects growing community sentiment that outsider militia aren't welcome, in mid-December 2015. Self-styled patriots and militia say they are in the area to help ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond, convicted of arson for burning federal land. The sign refers to Ammon Bundy, whose father Cliven Bundy was at the center of an armed standoff in Nevada in 2014. (Les ZaitzThe Oregonian via AP)

A sign tacked outside a Burns. Ore., home reflects growing community sentiment that outsider militia aren’t welcome, in mid-December 2015. Self-styled patriots and militia say they are in the area to help ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond, convicted of arson for burning federal land. The sign refers to Ammon Bundy, whose father Cliven Bundy was at the center of an armed standoff in Nevada in 2014. (Les ZaitzThe Oregonian via AP)

We can all probably understand, or even sympathize, with the sentiment that the ranchers in Oregon pine for a day in which the federal government owned less land and homeowners and true pioneering types, folks who are used to living off the land, could tend to their own farms as they please without encroachment from the feds. But this is not 19th century, and we are all better for it. Whereas if the federal government had not created various wildlife refuges across the country, certain species of animals might have faced the threat of extinction, not to mention untold numbers of plants that are protected in these areas, not to mention thousands of acres of pristine land cannot be sullied by retail or residential developers and industrial users.

The specific list of demands from the ranchers is muddled, to say the least, but as best as Time can estimate, they want individual property owners to be able to take back control of refuge land, which was no doubt tended by families in the area generations before the protected area was established, and they want a lighter sentence for a pair of ranchers, a father and son, who were previously convicted of arson stemming from a fire that began on their property and then spread onto federal land.

As Sally Kohn, with The Daily Beast pointed out earlier today, the standoff in Oregon comes about a year after Clive Bundy, the crazed rancher who still owes money to the feds from past due grazing fees dating to the mid-1990s, somehow avoided charges in 2014 for refusing to comply with the law. According to CNN analyst Joey Jackson, Bundy could have at least been charged with resisting arrest or impeding federal officers, if not others. Yet, the only people charged were two Bundy supporters who picked counts unrelated to illegal grazing.

Kohn believes that, after Clive more or less got a win against the federal government, his son, Ammon, has now been emboldened in the latest Bundy fiasco at the Oregon refuge. While I understand arguments that, after disastrous outcomes in places like Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, law enforcement should treat the situation in Oregon carefully so as not to mobilize more support for these people and turn a peaceful incident (again, so far) into a shootout, it seems to me that the Bundy family has thumbed its nose at authority for way too long.

As many across social media have already said, if a group of gun-toting militant black people or AK-47-yielding Muslims had taken over a federal refuge, no shortage of blood would have already been shed. This goes without saying. That law enforcement does not even have a presence out there is almost unconscionable. To here news reporters talk about the incident, it’s as if law enforcement is just resigned to wait it out and try to come to some kind of settlement with individuals who are — I hate to belabor the point — holding a piece of federal land by force and who freely confess that they are ready to defend it if necessary.

Am I in the minority in seeing how serious of a crime this is? I’m not saying we should swoop in and violently take back to compound, but this passive approach in the face of overt defiance of the law is disturbing to say the least.

And unlike our “soft on terrorism” approach in Clive Bundy’s case, as Kohl put it, we should be ready to make an example of these folks, namely that right-wing nuts have every right to air their grievances and voice their anti-government rhetoric to whoever will listen, but a line must be drawn when the exercise of First Amendments rights crosses over into white-bred thuggery. As Peter J. Henning, law professor with Wayne State University said in this case, a charge of sedition would fit the bill.

Kennedy: ‘Everyone looked like a terrorist to me’

I long-since came to the conclusion that I simply can’t watch much Fox News because if I did, just because of the sheer volume of stupidity, I would spend my time writing about little else than Fox’s limitless potential for vomiting up heavy doses of sophistry, distortions and half-truths, served up drip-feed style to its loyal and dumb-downed viewed base.

Some media outlets latched on to the fact that Fox analyst Lt. Col. Ralph Peters and contributor Stacey Dash had some unflattering things to say about Obama — what a shock — as Peters called Obama a “total pussy,” and Dash said the president doesn’t “give a shit” about terrorism.

But I didn’t even think the latter barb from Dash was the most obnoxious part of the video below:

https://youtu.be/8MvFkc5Xdyk

I thought Kennedy’s — yes, that Kennedy — comments were actually the most repellent. She had this to say after contemplating Obama’s recent speech on the San Bernardino, Calif., shooting:

What I was watching for is I want to feel better. I want to feel better about my friends and neighbors, and this morning as I rode the subway to work, I was looking around — and you know, I feel kind of bad saying this — but everyone looked like a terrorist to me. And I don’t want to feel that way in my city and in my country, and I want the president — no matter what my party is — I want the president to make me feel better when something so horrific has just happened. I don’t think he gave it the proper context. I don’t he gave proper domestic strategy, and he certainly didn’t give me the peace of mind.

A privileged white female who gets to rant on television for a living just wants to “feel better” about herself and the people for whom she cares. Seriously? What about the families of the victims? What about peaceful believers of Islam whose lives get more difficult and complicated every time a fresh batch of terrorists cause chaos in the States or harm their fellow believers in Europe and the Middle East? What about the plight of closeted gays or nonbelievers living in the shadows in places like Saudi Arabia and Syria? What about oppressed women?

Even worse, Kennedy’s line, “everyone looked like a terrorist to me,” in true Fox fashion, needlessly stirs up anxiety among the network’s already panicky viewers, and Fox and its cronies then use that fear to prop up their shallow political message that stigmatizes nearly every outgroup except, of course, the privileged and affluent. Indeed, people like Donald Trump and Ben Carson are byproducts of this sinister strategy. You get what you pay for, but you also eventually wind up paying for what you get, and the American public is complicit in allowing this echo chamber of distortions and hysteria to fester and metastasize these last 20 years.

One has to wonder, then, what exactly could Obama have said to protect Kennedy’s precious feelings about the real or imagined threat of terrorism along her path to work on the subway? Since his name is Obama, after all, and since Fox analysts would find something for which to castigate him even if the government’s budget was perfectly balanced, health care and immigration were finally resolved, the world was a peaceful place and the sky rained down Skittles and unfiltered joy, I’m guessing the answer is nothing.

[Graphic credit: https://hipiseverything.wordpress.com]

Internet overlord of obscurantism

In his seemingly limitless propensity for thick-headedness and mischaracterizations, PZ Myers is at it again, skewing points that Richard Dawkins made about Islam recently on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” — or apparently just commenting on a Daily Beast article about the discussion between Dawkins and Maher, rather than, you know, taking an extra 3 minutes and watching the full video to get some context. Of course, doing so would not have played into the message that Myers is attempting to convey to his fawning followers, so he picks out the most provocative part of the interview and latches onto it, as he is wont to do, like a wolf going after a fresh kill.

Here is the clip from “Real Time”:

The interview begins with Maher pointing out that Dawkins actually came to the defense of Maryam Namazie, an ex-Muslim who was recently disinvited from speaking at Warwick University for her “controversial” (my quotes) views on Islam. Namazie, ironically enough, is a fellow writer with Myers at Free Thought Blogs and has been a particularly harsh critic of Islam. Dawkins and Salman Rushdie, another vocal, liberal critic of Islam, were able to get Namazie reinstated.

In his post, Myers, of course, doesn’t mention any of this, nor that Dawkins was standing up for free speech at college campuses. Instead, he launched into a confused analogy between Dawkins’ fondness for tolerance and Enlightenment principles in the West versus the evolutionary biologists’ critiques of Islam. Here is Myers, in characteristic shrillness, again, just cut and pasting from an article about the interview, rather than actually pulling from the conversation itself (interview quotes in italics):

Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher — a combination to bring out the worst in both — got together to damn everything Muslim.

Oh, that’s their culture, you have to respect it, Dawkins said mockingly.

That’s right! That’s what they say. It’s just insane, Maher said, swooning.

Liberal about everything else, but then this one exception, ‘It’s their culture.’ Well, to hell with their culture,Dawkins concluded, to a storm of applause and a passionate yelp of approval from Maher.

To hell with their culture? I despise all religions, and I can sneer at every hateful thing that emerges out of a culture, every culture — but to ignore the good to condemn the bad, to make sweeping dismissals of entire complex traditions…I am sorry, Professor Dawkins, but that is bigotry. To forgive the sins of one culture because of the things one likes about it, while damning another culture wholesale because you don’t like certain parts of it (even when those parts are unforgiveably evil) is something that perpetuates conflict.

Myers, and apparently the author at The Daily Beast, isn’t interested in accurately and honestly reflecting what was said in the interview, as the article doesn’t mention Dawkins’ support of Namazie either. If he were, Myers could not have possibly concluded, as he seems to do, that Dawkins somehow thinks that we:

need to erase the history of the Middle East, Asia, North Africa, and contributions all around the world. We should not ignore the Islamic gifts to literature, poetry, music, mathematics, and science; we must not forget that these are human beings who may feel the deepest love for their culture as a whole, even as they deplore aspects of it.

Dawkins and Maher were clearly referring to oppressive cultures within a minority of Muslim communities that suppress free thought, demonize gays and apostates and subjugate women and force them to wear burqas and full-body coverings as per fundamentalist interpretations of sharia law. They, of course, were not referring to the entire Muslim community or the majority of Muslims who respect free speech and the rights of women to wear what they please, including the right to cover their faces in respect to their religious traditions. Only someone who has been sitting on the sidelines intellectually could possibly conclude that Dawkins does not understand and respect the contributions to math, art and science that Muslims have made down through the generations.

Myers concludes his post with an obligatory nod to radical feminism, as if an old white guy, who happens to be one of the preeminent scientists and thinkers of our day, could possibly have any wise words to offer humanity:

Richard Dawkins is a smart guy, and we see these glimmerings of appreciation for the complexity of human life (how can he not, as a biologist?) in his writings — I hope he can see that he’s taking the wrong path. Even more importantly, I hope atheists everywhere can learn that he’s not the atheist leader we need…and that maybe we shouldn’t be looking for a man to tell us what to think at all.

Self-defeating as that last line is, all of that is actually not the most disturbing part of Myers’ post. The most disturbing part is the headline, “Atheists should not condemn any culture.” Seriously? So, we should not condemn cultures that practice animal sacrifice? What about cultures that eschew the rights of women and essentially give young girls zero say-so in who they can marry? What about cultures practicing female genital mutilation? Cultures that support and encourage honor killing? Cultures that support, with a full endorsement from their holy texts, the work of thugs who lop off the heads of journalists, shoot young girls for daring to educate themselves and hysterical jihadists who hurl themselves into buildings?

This, like the rest of Myers’ pathetic attempts at disparagement, is utter bullshit.

Sam Harris exposes Salon’s intellectual dishonesty

After attempted hack jobs against Sam Harris like this article and this one, it’s not like we needed more proof, but Salon’s dishonest brand of “journalism” and anti-intellectualism has now been laid bare, as Harris published the full version of his interview with Salon writer Sean Illing.

Harris, who called Salon “among the worst offenders of the new pseudo-journalism,” said he only agreed to do an interview with the website if the following two conditions were met:

1) I would get final approval of all the words attributed to me; 2) I could say whatever I wanted about Salon. These conditions were agreed to, and I spent several hours producing the following exchange by phone and email.

In an early version of the story and interview posted on its website, Salon made this claim in its introduction:

Harris’ remarks were edited merely for clarity and length. No substantive changes were made to the text beyond those considerations.

Yet, the current lead-in to the article says this:

This was mostly an email correspondence, not a traditional interview, so remarks were edited throughout.

The interview posted on Salon’s website omits a large block of text, in which Harris essentially implicates Salon as an active participant in the Regressive Left program of, not only running down Harris and other critics of Islam, but more importantly, ignoring or downplaying the very real dangers inherent in the religious motivations behind jihadism and literalist readings of the Quran and hadith.

I commented briefly on Salon’s handling of this interview on Twitter (here and here), but I thought I would repost the entire omitted part of Harris interview so that as many people as possible, within whatever limited reach I have, can be made aware of the pervasive levels of intellectual dishonesty in certain liberal circles.

Harris’ notes about the omission bookend the commentary:

[Note: Salon deleted the following section from the interview.]

As long as we’re talking about the regressive Left, it would be remiss of me not to point out how culpable Salon is for giving it a voice. The problem is not limited to the political correctness and masochism I’ve been speaking about—it’s also the practice of outright deception to defame Islam’s critics. To give you one example, I once wrote an article about Islamist violence in which I spoke in glowing terms about Malala Yousafzai. I literally said nothing but good things about her. I claimed that she is the best thing to come out of the Muslim world in a thousand years. I said she is extraordinarily brave and eloquent and doing what millions of Muslim men and women are too terrified to do, which is to stand up to forces of theocracy in her own society. I also said that though she hadn’t won the Nobel Prize that year, she absolutely deserved it—and deserved it far more than some of its recent recipients had. And in response to this encomium, Salon published a piece by the lunatic Murtaza Hussain entitled, “Sam Harris Slurs Malala,” which subjected my views to the same defamatory and dishonest treatment that I’ve come to expect from him. And this sort of thing has been done to me a dozen times on your website. And yet Salon purports to be a forum for the civil discussion of important ideas.

Most readers simply don’t understand how this game is played. If they read an article which states that Sam Harris is a racist, genocidal, xenophobic, pro-torture goon who supported the Iraq war—all of which has been alleged about me in Salon—well, then, it’s assumed that some journalists who work for the website under proper editorial control have actually looked into the matter and feel that they are on firm enough ground to legally say such things. There’s a real confusion about what journalism has become, and I can assure you that very few people realize that much of what appears on your website is produced bymalicious freaks who are just blogging in their underpants.

I’m not saying that everything that Salon publishes is on the same level, and I have nothing bad to say about what you’ve written, Sean. But there is an enormous difference between honest criticism and defamatory lies. If I say that Malala is a total hero who deserves a Nobel Prize, and Salon titles its article “Sam Harris Slurs Malala,” that’s tabloid-level dishonesty. It’s worse, in fact, because when one reads about what a nanny said about Brad and Angelina in a tabloid, one knows that such gossip stands a good chance of not being true. Salon purports to be representing consequential ideas fairly, and yet it does this sort of thing more often than any website I can think of. The latest piece on me was titled “Sam Harris’ dangerous new idiocy: Incoherent, Islamophobic and simply immoral.” I don’t think I’m being thin-skinned in detecting an uncharitable editorial position being taken there. Salon is telling the world that I’m a dangerous, immoral, Islamophobic idiot. And worse, the contents of these articles invariably misrepresent my actual views. This problem isn’t remedied by merely publishing this conversation.

[Of course, Salon didn’t actually publish that part of the conversation.]

Islam and the failure of western liberalism, redux, and the regressive left

Several developments have taken place in the four weeks or so since I echoed the arguments of Sam Harris and others that western liberalism, infected by a hyper-political correctness and intellectual dishonesty run amok, has essentially failed the very people that we should be the most concerned about at this point in our history — namely, skeptics, homosexuals and women who are under the heel of oppression in places like Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iraq, unable to speak, much less, live freely because of the influence of literalist strains of Islam in their culture.

Dave Rubin with Maajid Nawaz

Dave Rubin with Maajid Nawaz

Leaders of western, secular thought in America and Europe, from the ivory tower and so-called intellectuals, to the media, apparently afraid of who they might offend, seem to have no problem criticizing Christians for their views on social conservativism, many of which are inspired directly from passages in the Bible, but are quick to dismiss people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris as bigots when the conversation turns to Islam and its blot on modern society. For my money, Dawkins and Harris have remained true to the spirit and nature of New Atheism in refusing to don kid gloves in criticizing the faulty ideologies of Islam.

Oftentimes, this inability or unwillingness to admit what the problem actual is is more pronounced, in the case of Muslim apologists like Reza Aslan, Glenn Greenwald and Cenk Uygur, or it can take a more passive tone, as in this recent 1,000-plus word article from The New York Times. Here is what I said on Twitter about it a few days ago:

Apologists for the faith, and their passive let’s-skirt-around-the-problem-and-hope-terrorism-and-religiously-fueled-violence-just-goes-away-on-its-own liberal friends have been actively preventing us as a society from having the kind of open conversation we so desperately need on the true roots of jihadism and what causes otherwise intelligent people to become radicalized and willing to hurl themselves into buildings and lop off the heads of journalists in the first place.

Maajid Nawaz, Sam Harris’ co-author on the new book, “Islam and the Future of Tolerance,” coined the term “regressive left” to refer to these liberals who are on the wrong side of the dialogue on Islam and on the wrong side of history.

Fortunately, in part because of the important work of Harris and Nawaz, that conversation seems to be taking place, at least in some capacity here in America, although my hunch is that the large majority of mainstream liberals, for example, folks who think Ben Affleck actually won the debate in his now-infamous confrontation with Harris and Bill Maher, continue to live with politically correct blinders firmly in place.

For the rest of you who actually care about things like intellectual honesty and having a reasonable conversation on the necessity for reform inside Islam, in addition to Harris and Nawaz, I would suggest seeking out related content from the following: Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan, Gad Saad, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sarah Haider and Ali Rizvi.

Obviously, all of these people are not going to agree on every point, but that is the point: to allow an open discussion on the problematic ideologies of Islam without demeaning Muslims as people or castigating those who dare criticize the religion as bigots and Islamophobes, which is just a counterproductive shut-down tactic.

Next to climate change, this is, in my view, the most important conversation we should be having globally.

Following is a collection of recent interviews and vblogs on regressive leftism and Islam that demonstrate the kind of dialogue that needs to take place on a larger scale among liberals and reform-minded Muslims.

Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz on MSNBC’s “The Last Word:”

Richard Dawkins on “Real Time with Bill Maher:”

Gad Saad’s on Nawaz’s efforts to reform Islam:

Dave Rubin with Sam Harris:

Joe Rogan with Ali Rizvi (not as recent, but still an interesting interview with Rizvi, an ex-Muslim atheist):

Sam Harris loses his patience with the regressive left: