Democracy under assault

Few thinkers, past or present, could match the intellectual and rhetorical power Christopher Hitchens harnessed when he sat down to put pen to paper, excoriating what he saw were the misdeeds of leaders across the cultural and political spectrum, from Joseph Ratzinger, Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa to God himself.

“One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority,” he once said. “It’s indispensable.”

No one is above scrutiny, I believe he would say.

Sadly, we lost this imperishable writer in 2011, but one wonders what he would say today if he could witness the widespread regression taking place in politics and society, at a time when free speech is being threatened on college campuses across the nation, when journalists are demonized as “enemies of the people” and when the nation is being led by one of the most dishonest, borderline autocratic and nationalistic administrations in United States history.

The Washington Post’s motto reads, “Democracy dies in darkness.” While the battle for free speech on college campuses and elsewhere may not appear to be related to President Donald Trump’s administration, the two are actually working in tandem to dim the light of our democracy.

In recent years, dozens of speakers, including evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, libertarian Ben Shapiro, classical liberal and psychologist Jordan Peterson, conservative commentator Ann Coulter, feminist Christina Hoff Sommers and former CIA director John Brennan, of all people, have been either deplatformed or forced to end their talks early amid protests at public events in traditionally progressive centers.

To take one case, Dawkins was blacklisted by Berkeley progressive radio station, KPFA, for what the station described as “abusive speech” against Islam. Readers of Dawkins well know that while he is an unapologetic atheist, he, along with other members of the New Atheist movement, which includes Hitchens, have been careful to criticize the ideas of Islam, not the people who practice it.

Thus, officials at Berkeley and many other liberals toeing the social justice line have confused, and continue to confuse, this distinction, such that many rational liberals and progressives have been compelled to defend conservatives in the interest of free speech and the latter’s inalienable right to speak openly. College campuses and liberal towns are supposed to be bastions of free speech and expression. That is where students go to be intellectually challenged, not to be coddled.

“How have the mighty fallen,” Dawkins said in 2017. “Berkeley, the home of free speech. Now, the home of suppression of free speech.”

Trump’s ongoing attacks on the media — exempting, of course, his friend Sean Hannity and other supporters at Fox News — stick the dagger in even deeper.

To its credit, Fox News scolded Hannity for appearing on stage with Trump during an event in late 2018, but that was too little too late. With even a cursory look at the cable news channel, one must conclude that it stopped pretending to be “fair and balanced” long ago. For Trump’s part, dismissing stories as ”fake news” — fake, not because they aren’t true, but because the president just doesn’t like the reporting — and lambasting journalists who have an important job to do, maybe the most important job to do in this era of misinformation, undermines one of the pillars of our democracy.

For a sitting president to sneer at reporters and childishly complain that he is being treated unfairly, as he has done repeatedly since before the election, is beyond the pale, and even many of his fellow Republicans have found this behavior indefensible.

In August, the GOP-controlled Senate unanimously passed a symbolic resolution declaring that the media is not the “enemy of the people,” and Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., was among those on the right to challenge Trump’s charged rhetoric.

“We can’t go on like this,” Flake said. “We’ve got to reach across the aisle and find common ground. If we don’t, it’s just going to escalate further.”

Compound Trump’s hostility toward the media with overseeing one of the nation’s most secretive, intellectually dishonest administrations potentially one of the most corrupt if special counsel Robert Mueller’s work provides incontrovertible proof of collusion with Russia one could argue, as E.J. Dionne Jr. with The Post did in August, that we as a nation are “slouching toward autocracy.”

While we can laugh, and often do, at Trump’s Twitter meltdowns and the ridiculous speeches — he has the “best words” — what we have here is a prelude to disaster if the nation continues down the road of less transparency and the subversion of free speech and the press.

The First Amendment must be protected at all costs. In the year 2019, this should not be a controversial statement.

[Image credit: “Freedom” by DeviantArt user Bozack.]

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…

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

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.

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:

Islam and the failure of western liberalism

Following is text from a dialogue I had on Facebook on Islam and the various charges of anti-Muslim bigotry that have been hurled, unfairly in my view, against Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher, particularly after the infamous flare-up on “Real Time with Bill Maher” between Harris and Ben Affleck, and Dawkins’ series of Tweets on Ahmed Mohamed and his clock.

The discussion began when Steve Shives, who has been critical of Harris’s stance on profiling Muslims at airports, posted an article titled, “Atheists Have an Anti-Muslim Bigotry Problem,” by Trav Mamone at TheHumanist.com.

The article opened with this:

On Monday, September 14, Ahmed Mohamed, a fourteen-year-old student at MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, was arrested after school officials believed his homemade clock was a bomb.Although Irving Police Chief Larry Boyd knew it wasn’t a bomb, Mohamed was arrested anyway on charges of bringing a “hoax bomb” to school. As soon as the story broke nationwide, many people vocally expressed support for Mohamed with the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed, including many within the secular community—the Center for Inquiry, Sarah Morehead, and the American Humanist Association to name a few.

However, despite the overwhelming support for Mohamed, some prominent atheists instead chose to attack him. On September 18, Real Time host Bill Maher defended Mohamed’s arrest because “for the last thirty years, it’s been one culture that has been blowing shit up over and over again” [Correction: Bill Maher did say Ahmed Mohamed deserves an apology]. Also, Richard Dawkins suggested on Twitter that perhaps Mohamed “wanted to be arrested”(although, to be fair, Dawkins did condemn the police for arresting him). Indeed, Maher and Dawkins are two examples of prominent atheists whose criticisms of Islam only promote anti-Muslim bigotry. …

Here is the pertinent video referenced in the article, in which Maher, Mark Cuban and others discuss Ahmed’s case:

This is what I posted to Shives in reaction to the article’s basic thesis, that Harris, Dawkins and Maher are bigots:

Me:

Disappointing to see you take this stance since it’s not true.

To which, Edward Delaney responded:

It isn’t? You’ve never encountered anti-Muslim bigots in the atheist community?

Me:

It’s not true because the story Steve referenced is full of obfuscations. It specifically mentioned criticisms of Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins. Maher said Ahmed deserves an apology and “they were wrong,” referring to police and educational officials. Maher did not defend Ahmed’s arrest, as the story claims, so that was wrong. The story also cited Dawkins for claiming Ahmed wanted to be arrested, but the story even admits that Dawkins later condemned the police for the arrest.

On to the denigrating claim against Sam Harris. The man has collaborated with a Muslim reformer and has made the point ad nauseam now that he is only critical of the bad ideas behind Islam, not of the believers themselves.

If you all are prepared to reprimand Harris for speaking out on intolerance toward Islamic principles of jihad and matrydom, then I hope you all are also prepared to reprimand yourselves for intolerance against Christ worship, vicarious redemption and blood sacrifice because frankly, through the eyes of an atheist in which all messianic religions are equally noxious, I see no difference.

Delaney:

“Maher said Ahmed deserves an apology and “they were wrong,” referring to police and educational officials. Maher did not defend Ahmed’s arrest”, he said those things, but he also defended the arrest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=479&v=aGit-XltUB4
“cited Dawkins for claiming Ahmed wanted to be arrested, but the story even admits that Dawkins later condemned the police for the arrest. ”
And you do or don’t agree? Not sure how this makes it untrue, are you saying he didn’t say it in the first place or he didn’t condemn it?
As far as Harris goes, it’s not merely being intolerant towards jihad and martyrdom that anyone is prepared to reprimand him for. The guy said “We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.”
There’s no way that’s not a bigoted comment.

It sounds like the article is true and that you just don’t like what it’s saying for some reason.

Me:

I think the general tenor of the article was intellectually dishonest and misplaced. A reasonable person seeking to look at this issue without the PC blinders cannot watch the Maher video and conclude that Maher defended the arrest itself. He defended the fact that officials aired on the side of caution, given that the shooting took place half an hour away in Garland, and he said Ahmed deserved an apology. When Mark Cuban said “he should have not been arrested but he should have opened his mouth and had a conversation about it,” Maher said “right.” Police and school officials clearly overreacted and should have, if they were going to do anything, conducted an on-site investigation without taking the kid off in cuffs, but I don’t think what Maher said was a defense of the arrest. I was just pointing out that the article uses the rather strong word, “attack,” in criticizing what Maher and Dawkins have actually said on the subject. In what universe have Maher and Dawkins “attacked” Ahmed? To suggest such makes them sound like raving, hate-filled bigots who cannot tell the difference between criticizing bad ideas and tearing down individuals as people, and it’s absurd.

On Harris, the first thing to say is looking for individuals who might be terrorists at airports — in other words, those who fit a certain profile — is not “racial profiling,” as the article suggests. It’s just profiling in the general sense. Law enforcement look for suspicious people all the time who fit a certain profile. Followers of literalists readings of the Koran and hadith — potential Muslim jihadists, in other words — are obviously not of any one race and can be white, black or anywhere in between and can come from virtually any nation on earth. In any case, Harris’ point — I don’t actually think it’s tenable in practice — was more about excluding certain people from the “profile” of who we should be looking for and not wasting precious resources on people who are clearly not jihadists purely for fairness’ sake (80-year-olds in wheel chairs, for instance). To suggest anything else is an oversimplification of what he has said. If not “Muslims,” what other word would you have suggested he use to look for potential jihadists who take their marching orders directly from the Koran and the hadith? I think it’s safe to say radicalized Quakers and Jains aren’t going to cause any problems at airports. It’s this kind of dishonesty about what the actual problem is — those who adhere to literal interpretations of the Koran and hadith and who seek to unmake modernity in establishing a caliphate — that is going to get us nowhere.

That’s where the conversation has ended at the moment. I will update this file if Delaney or someone else offers a retort. I realized that once I criticized Shives, whom I agree with on more topics than not by the way, and came to the defense of Harris and Co., the discussion would take a predictable turn, with little attempts to actually understand Harris’ arguments, and so-called liberals — and with them a veritable cavalcade of dishonest sophists like Reza Aslan, Dean Obeidallah, Glenn Greenwald, Cenk Uygur and other Muslim apologists, claiming to be dedicated to free speech and enlightenment principles but who are quick to castigate someone as bigoted and Islamophobic for daring to hold Islam to higher standards than those on offer from the 15th century.

If the point hasn’t been made clearly enough made by now, political correctness and “soft” western liberal sensibilities, the kind that led to Affleck’s embarrassing display on Maher’s show, are doing a disservice to progressivism itself at the expense of the real victims in all this, namely women, gays, freethinkers and skeptics who have to live in the shadows in places like Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Syria precisely because of the literalist strain of Islam and its multigenerational grip on the region.

Islamism is the symptom, and religion is the poison.

Book review: ‘The Selfish Gene’

For readers who are new to books on biology, evolution and natural selection, I would recommend reading Dawkins’ other works, “The Blind Watchmaker” and “The Greatest Show on Earth” before tackling this one. In “The Selfish Gene,” which originally came out in 1976 one year before I was born, Dawkins seems to still be developing his writing style. As such, parts of the book tend to get a little weighted down by minutiae, and we only get glimmers of the eloquence that so characterizes his later works.

selfishgene

“The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins: 30th Anniversary Edition

That said, this is well worth the effort, as it presents the revelatory premise that we, along with every other living thing in the universe, are merely “survival machines” carrying genes that live on well past our individual lifetimes based on the “ruthless selfishness” of our genetic and evolutionary makeup. Some have criticized this view as depressingly cynical and bleak, but as Dawkins points out, “however much we may deplore something, it does not stop it being true.”

“The Selfish Gene,” of course, does not imply selfishness at the conscious level by human beings or any other plant or animal. The term is a figure of speech, and Dawkins’ main thesis has nothing to say about morality or how we ought to act, as Dawkins is mainly concerned with the selfishness of genes living inside “survival machines,” and in some cases, altruism and cooperation, at the genetic level.

Indeed, as a way to move forward as the only self-conscious creatures in the universe — that we know of — Dawkins posits that we can and should rise above our own basic selfish nature and proceed as a species in spite of it. As he says in the book:

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.

I very much look forward to reading “The Extended Phenotype,” which is the follow-up work to “The Selfish Gene.”

[rating: 4.0]

Skeptic group publicly shuns PZ Myers for ‘harmful and hateful rhetoric’

“That shepherd of Internet trolls.” — Sam Harris on PZ Myers

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I haven’t read PZ Myers for years because his scorched-earth brand of criticism, whereby he abuses the wide influence he has at Free Thought Blogs — particularly among an easily led college demographic — by dismissing everyone he disagrees with as cretins, goons and halfwits, belies the honest conversation we should be having in the freethought community about civil rights, social justice, secularism and the influence of religion in public life.

But one skeptic organization, Atheist Ireland, seems to have had enough in a rare, public rebuke of another high profile “spokesman” in the community, and Atheist Northern Ireland recently followed suit.

In a post titled, “Atheist Ireland publicly dissociates itself from the harmful and hateful rhetoric of PZ Myers,” the organization laid bare its evidence against Myers, and Michael Nugent, chairman of that organization, has kept a running log of what he calls Myers’ various “misrepresentations and smears.” Alex Gabriel, FTB blogger, provided a link to all the claims in the AI post about Myers, noting that he did so “for the sake of ethical conduct.” Gabriel prefaced his post with the statement, “Michael Nugent doesn’t much like PZ Myers,” but I think it’s safe to say the feeling is mutual. Presumably, if you like someone, you don’t call them a “demented fuckwit,” as Myers did in a comment on Nov. 18, 2014.

Here are AI’s ending thoughts:

These are only some examples of his harmful rhetoric. He also regularly accuses others of sexism without applying the same judgment to his own behaviour over the years, and he has accused a named person of committing a serious crime without employing the journalistic ethics expected in reporting on such an allegation.

It might be possible to interpret any one example of this behaviour charitably, if he was normally charitable himself and was misinformed or writing in anger, or if there was a particular context, or if he was willing to change his behaviour. However, the relentlessness of his abuse and hatred and smears across so many contexts, and his reluctance to even consider changing his behaviour, create the extra problem of the cumulative impact of his behaviour as a pattern.

Ironically, the sheer quantity of his harmful rhetoric can seem to minimise the harm of each example, as each example can hide behind a wall of other examples. It is easy for us to become desensitised to the harm caused by this gradual undermining of reasonable discourse. We can disagree robustly about ideas and behaviour, including using strong language that some may be uncomfortable with, but without unjustly attacking the people we disagree with.

Many within the atheist movement have been concerned about his behaviour for years. Some have responded by publicly ignoring it, either to avoid giving him the credibility of a response, or to avoid becoming his next target. Some have responded by attacking him back using similar rhetoric, thus adding to the problem and enabling him to deflect attention away from his own behaviour. Some, including Atheist Ireland, mistakenly believed that privately asking him to change his behaviour might eventually be productive.

So Atheist Ireland is now publicly dissociating ourselves from his hurtful and dehumanising, hateful and violent, unjust and defamatory rhetoric. We are asking all ethical organisations and individuals to consider how you can help to reverse the harmful impact of his behaviour. We look forward to continuing to work with others to promote an ethical secularism based on robust inquiry, empathy, compassion, fairness, justice and integrity.

Many in the community have long-since concluded, not only that Myers “does not speak for us” and that he is ill-fit to lead this community in any capacity, but that his approach is counterproductive to the goals set forth by AI and other skeptic organizations in the United States.

That he would rather be polarizing and launch hack campaigns against everyone from Richard Dawkins to Sam Harris and most recently, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, than help move secularism in a positive direction where we might actually be able to have civil conversations with dissenting voices without resorting to name-calling and arrogant, hyperbolic rhetoric, is a real shame. That the “leaders” over at the FTB network seem to be enabling and even appearing to be passively apathetic toward repeated concerns about behavior of this kind is doubly shameful.

Those ‘devil worshiping’ nonbelievers must be up to no good

I’ve only gotten through five minutes of CNN’s special tonight on atheism, and already the tone has taken a negative turn. Here is an exchange between Richard Dawkins and a journalist:

Interviewer: What is it about atheism that rocks so many people to the core?

Dawkins: It’s a very odd thing that the very word “atheism” has a sort terrible resonance to people.

Then seemingly answering her own question:

Interviewer: ‘Cause people (much like yourself, perhaps?) think devil worshiping, morally bankrupt.

Dawkins: I know. It’s possible that that word has become so deeply ingrained in sort of a horror reaction that we do need to find a better word.

Interviewer: And there are other words. “None.” “Humanist.” “Skeptic.” “Freethinker.” “Agnostic.” Millions of Americans.

I’m sure Dawkins gave a fuller reply that doesn’t make him sound like he’s tacitly agreeing with her suggestion, but the video cuts away to another segment at that point. What struck me, other than the paradox of a “devil worshiping” nonbeliever, was that the narrator lowered her voice on those last three words, turned to a gloomy inflection, and said “millions of Americans,” as if she was describing cancer patients or convicts on death row.

Hear for yourself:

I thought my DVR was recording the whole special, but there was apparently an error, so I didn’t get the chance to see the whole show, but I will provide my thoughts on the rest of it shortly.

In any case, CNN was set to air the first national TV ad from American Atheists before and after the show, according to Hemant Mehta, but even that was softened to try to prevent offending believers. In the original spot, the video was edited to remove a nun that could be seen singing with some nonbelievers, you know, in a show of harmony and human solidarity.

According to Mehta:

CNN said they couldn’t air the costumed nun because it mocked religion. I don’t really see how a still image like that constitutes mockery … but the final version had the nun cropped out.

Here are the two ads.

Original:

Edited:

Dawkins: Evolution ‘no comparison’ to Genesis

It really is an enormously exciting thought that we are cousins of all living creatures, that we have a history of 4 billion years of slow gradual, evolution — just think about 4 billions years — of slow gradual history. That’s not something that we can easily take on board, but the effort of doing so is well worth it. It’s such a beautiful thought that we are the heirs of 4 billion years — maybe 3.5 billion years of evolution — and that we are cousins of all living things. When you put that against the measly, piddling little ideas that are in Genesis, it’s just no comparison, and it’s a sad and diminishing deprivation of a child’s opportunities to be denied that knowledge.