Speaking of ethics…
It’s a clip of Fox News hacks telling people to refuse to get the vaccination – in other words telling people to keep spreading a killer virus and to get it themselves, in other words killing people. For money and fame and whatever other frivolous rewards they get from this activity, what they’re doing is making a pandemic worse than it would be without their propaganda. They’re knowingly causing disease and death.
We live in a strange world.
They’re doing this again! I guess because it worked out so well last time?
White House officials have helped craft an agreement under which purchases of Hunter Biden’s artwork — which could be listed at prices as high as $500,000 — will be kept confidential from even the artist himself, in an attempt to avoid ethical issues that could arise as a presidential family member tries to sell a product with a highly subjective value.
For fuck’s sake! Could it be any more blatant? Hunter Biden is not an artist any more than he was a legitimate qualified board member of Burisma. He exploited his daddy’s name to make the big bucks in that laughable “job” with Burisma and now he’s doing it all over again to sell his “art.” It’s corrupt when the disgusting Trumps do it and it’s corrupt when Hunter Biden does it. What is wrong with them?
Under an arrangement negotiated in recent months, a New York gallery owner is planning to set prices for the art and will withhold all records, including potential bidders and final buyers. The owner, Georges Bergès, has also agreed to reject any offer that he deems suspicious or that comes in over the asking price, according to people familiar with the agreement.
Oh shut up. Trying to manage the particulars is absurd: don’t do it at all.
What other beginning amateur “artist” gets to sell art for 500k a pop?
Biden’s art sale, expected to take place this fall, comes with potential challenges. Not only has Biden previously been accused of trading in on his father’s name, but his latest vocation is in a field where works do not have a tangible fixed value and where concerns have arisen about secretive buyers and undisclosed sums.
Plus the whole “his latest vocation” thing kind of reeks. He’s not 22, he’s 51. What conceivable reason is there to think his art is any good or worth anything at all? It looks like jumping up and down in front of an outraged world shouting “I’m doing it because I can nyah nyah nyah!”
Officials close to President Biden, who have helped craft the agreement along with Hunter Biden’s attorney, have attempted to do so in a way that allows the president’s son to pursue a new career while also adhering to the elder Biden’s pledge to reverse his predecessor’s ethical laxity, especially regarding family members.
Bullshit. Absolute flagrant bullshit. Hunter B isn’t “pursuing a new career” he is cashing in. What other 51-year-old gets to “pursue a new career” in art and sell the brand new works for inflated prices? Hunter might as well sell his underpants for 500k a pair.
But the arrangement is drawing detractors, including ethics experts as well as art critics who suggest that Hunter Biden’s art would never be priced so high if he had a different last name. Bergès has said that prices for the paintings would range from $75,000 to $500,000.
Ya think???
“The whole thing is a really bad idea,” said Richard Painter, who was chief ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007. “The initial reaction a lot of people are going to have is that he’s capitalizing on being the son of a president and wants people to give him a lot of money. I mean, those are awfully high prices.”
The initial reaction, and the interim reaction, and the final reaction. We’re going to have that reaction because that is what’s happening.
Hunter Biden, through his attorney Chris Clark, did not respond to an interview request for this article. When asked about the artwork — including terms of sale and potential ethics concerns — Clark referred questions to the White House.
To the White House. Which is supposed to have nothing to do with any of this, because Hunter Biden is simply selling his own art, nothing to do with Daddy at all. Fucking hell this is broken.
Andrew Bates, the deputy White House press secretary, suggested that the buyers’ confidentiality would ensure the process is ethical. “The president has established the highest ethical standards of any administration in American history, and his family’s commitment to rigorous processes like this is a prime example,” Bates said.
No. It is not.
But the officials who helped craft the agreement said that if buyers were publicly disclosed it would restrict interest, because the identities of most art purchasers are not automatically made public.
Oh it would “restrict interest” – so the officials are working for Hunter Biden. Interesting.
In Hunter Biden’s case, if a buyer’s identity does become public, White House officials probably would be warned against giving that person any preferential treatment, and could be discouraged from working with them at all, according to a person familiar with the arrangement.
And they think that’s good enough? Is this a joke?
Marc Straus, who for the past decade has owned a gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, said that among high-end art dealers, “nobody would ever start at these prices” for someone who has no professional training and has never sold art on the commercial market.
“There has to be a résumé that reasonably supports when you get that high,” Straus said. “To me, it’s pure ‘how good is it and what’s this artist’s potential, what’s the résumé?’ On that basis, it would be an entirely different price. But you give it a name like Hunter Biden, maybe they’ll get the price.”
He added, “My take was [the paintings] weren’t bad at all. But there’s a yawning gap between not bad and something fabulous.”
Others are not as kind.
Scott Indrisek, a former editor in chief of Modern Painters magazine and a former deputy editor at Artsy, said: “I would call it very much a hotel art aesthetic. It’s the most anonymous art I can imagine. It’s somewhere between a screen saver and if you just Googled ‘midcentury abstraction’ and mashed up whatever came up.”
Indrisek added, “If he wanted to be judged on his work alone, he’d show them under the name Hunter Wilson or something.”
What I’m saying. He might as well be selling the contents of his wastebasket.
Wayne Couzens has admitted murdering Sarah Everard. You’ll never guess what his secret hobbies were.
…underneath the veneer of respectability was a sexual deviant who, fuelled by extreme pornography, was driven to ever more depraved actions to slake his desires.
Extreme porn isn’t all that deviant though; it’s not rare enough to be deviant. It seems that a lot of men like watching women get beaten and tortured.
Despite being an armed officer tasked with protecting politicians, dignitaries and VIPs, Couzens admitted regularly cavorting with prostitutes and was also suspected of taking dangerous body-building steroids.
Cavorting? I doubt they spent the time skipping and jumping around.
…privately Couzens is suspected of having a dangerous addiction to extreme pornography.
“Extreme” doesn’t mean extra extra sexy, it means violent.
So anyway, a woman’s life is taken away because a man is addicted to violent porn. Whatevs.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of How Democracies Die tell us the biggest threat is not another insurrection but a steal.
The looming danger is not that the mob will return; it’s that mainstream Republicans will “legally” overturn an election.
They’re energetically at work on it now, like for instance all that voter suppression in Texas we were just reading about.
Last year, for the first time in U.S. history, a sitting president refused to accept defeat and attempted to overturn election results. Rather than oppose this attempted coup, leading Republicans either cooperated with it or enabled it by refusing to publicly acknowledge Trump’s defeat. In the run-up to January 6, most top GOP officials refused to denounce extremist groups that were spreading conspiracy theories, calling for armed insurrection and assassinations, and ultimately implicated in the Capitol assault. Few Republicans broke with Trump after his incitement of the insurrection, and those who did were censured by their state parties.
This is very very very bad. The Republicans are one of the two “respectable” parties, the majority parties, the as if official parties. They’re half of what they’re is – and they’re doing their best to become the only party.
From November 2020 to January 2021, then, a significant portion of the Republican Party refused to unambiguously accept electoral defeat, eschew violence, or break with extremist groups—the three principles that define prodemocracy parties. Because of that behavior, as well as its behavior over the past six months, we are convinced that the Republican Party leadership is willing to overturn an election. Moreover, we are concerned that it will be able to do so—legally.
You know…between global warming and the pandemic and far-right parties grabbing power in country after country, things are not going swimmingly for the human project right now. I kind of think we’ve messed up.
Democracy’s primary assailants today are not generals or armed revolutionaries, but rather politicians—Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—who eviscerate democracy’s substance behind a carefully crafted veneer of legality and constitutionality.
…Election officials can legally throw out large numbers of ballots on the basis of the most minor technicalities (e.g., the oval on the ballot is not entirely penciled in, or the mail-in ballot form contains a typo or spelling mistake). Large-scale ballot disqualification accords with the letter of the law, but it is inherently antidemocratic, for it denies suffrage to many voters. Crucially, if hardball criteria are applied unevenly, such that many ballots are disqualified in one party’s stronghold but not in other areas, they can turn an election.
Do we think they will if they can? In a heartbeat, and institutions will help them.
Competition’s effects are being undermined in the U.S. today by what political scientists call countermajoritarian institutions. We believe that the U.S. Constitution, in its current form, is enabling the radicalization of the Republican Party and exacerbating America’s democratic crisis. The Constitution’s key countermajoritarian features, such as the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate, have long been biased toward sparsely populated territories. But given that Democrats are increasingly the party of densely populated areas and Republicans dominate less populated areas, this long-standing rural bias now allows the Republican Party to win the presidency, control Congress, and pack the Supreme Court without winning electoral majorities.
They go on to say we should reform all that, which is true, but what are the odds. So that’s cheery.
Somebody seems to have Marxism confused with theocracy. They’re not quite the same thing.
The game’s afoot.
It’s not just the boardroom where such clashes are being played out. Mr S hears word that the editorial floors of the Guardian and its Sunday sister the Observer have become riven with tensions over the perennial problem of trans rights. WhatsApp groups are ablaze with talk that Observer commentator Sonia Sodha could become the next feminist hounded out of the group, following Suzanne Moore’s purging in November.
Sodha has incurred the displeasure of the Guardian’s vocal trans-rights faction for daring to suggest that women have a right to free speech and should not be threatened for having opinions. She now faces public attacks on Twitter from Guardian contributors, attacks that go unchallenged by executives at Guardian Media Group, which publishes both papers and has largely merged the two titles’ staff.
Well she’s a woman you see. It doesn’t do to challenge people who are attacking women. Women don’t matter plus they can be terfs.
Last month, the Observer published a leader about feminism and trans rights, in the wake of the Maya Forstater and Jess de Wahls cases. Forstater won an employment tribunal ruling that her ‘gender critical’ view that transwomen remain biologically male was legitimate and not hateful. The Observer argued that women who hold such views should be free to express them without harassment or abuse…
You might think an argument that women are entitled to speak would be uncontroversial, not least at the right-on Guardian. But the leader poked the wasps’ nest of trans rights advocates around the paper, who were left buzzing with fury.
Among them was Guardian columnist Owen Jones, who tweeted to denounce the Guardian’s sister-paper as ‘on the wrong side of history’ and criticising the leader for coming ‘during Pride month and on the weekend of Trans Pride’. The desperation of some executives to keep Jones, who is already making lucrative sums from his Patreon account, from walking out is thought to be a factor in the apparent absence of any public rebuke from his editors.
Imagine being desperate to hang on to Owen Jones.
The journalists are still chilled by the fate of Moore, who left the paper after being denounced by more than 300 staff members in a letter to Guardian management after writing a column also defending women’s right to raise concerns about trans rights policies.
Editor-in-Chief Editor Kath Viner failed to stand up for Moore during that row, and is said to live in fear of the paper’s woke readers and staffers. Some of her colleagues are wondering if she will again stand by while another feminist colleague faces attempts to bully her out of a job.
Any bets?
Originally a comment by Sastra on Gendered language at the abortion clinic.
James Randi used to do an experiment where college students who had previously given their birth dates were each presented with a paper written by a “master astrologer” describing what the stars said about them, specifically. After they finished their personalized readings, they were each asked to rank how accurate they were on a 10 point (?) scale. There were lots of 8s and 9s, and even some 10s. On the whole, they were all impressed, and gave the astrologer high marks, too. Then they were asked to pass the papers to the student in the next desk.
It was the same reading, of course, with the sentences mixed up so they’d appear to be different if anyone glanced over. What they thought surprisingly unique about them was also “unique” about everyone else.
Enbees strike me as little different than the students who ranked the Super Special Just About You astrology reading a 9 or 10. It’s just that they’re holding tight to that paper because it’s totally, totally THEM.
What next? Bus drives are Nazis if they don’t let you throw bottles at people on the bus? Servers in restaurants are Nazis if they don’t let you push over all the tables? Bouncers are Nazis if they eject you from the bar for throwing a punch? Dog walkers are Nazis if they don’t let you kick their dogs?
Fox News pushing boundaries again:
Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren on Thursday joined a growing number of right-wing pundits and politicians comparing covid-19 restrictions to Nazism.
To Nazism. Because of what? Are there concentration camps? Is there forced labor? Are there extermination camps? I’m not seeing the Nazism. I’m not seeing the Fascism and I’m sure as hell not seeing the Nazism.
Being told “No” is not the same as Nazism.
Lahren took issue with some flight attendants’ enforcement of federal mask mandates on airplanes during a segment on the show “Outnumbered.”
“There are so many good flight attendants out there, but there are some flight attendants out there that take their job as the mask police to extremes, becoming almost Nazis of the air,” Lahren, a host on the Fox Nation subscription service, said. “And it’s ridiculous.”
No that’s not what’s ridiculous.
Lahren’s remarks come as some conservative politicians have drawn fire for comparing the enforcement of coronavirus policies to Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust. On Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) called the people aiding President Biden’s push to encourage Americans to get vaccinated “medical brown shirts.”
Yes, because sound medical advice is exactly like street violence in aid of a future Nazi dictator.
Greene’s comments came weeks after she visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and apologized for previously comparing face-mask policies to the Nazi practice of labeling Jews with Star of David badges, The Washington Post’s Felicia Sonmez reported this week.
Actually the street violence seems to be coming from the other direction.
“If you talked with some flight attendants, they would certainly say this is the worst we’ve ever seen it,” Nelson said, less than a month after a passenger allegedly knocked out a flight attendant’s teeth. “It’s pervasive. There is constant conflict on board.”
Who are the brown shirts?
Time to grow up now, people.
The headline:
Why Emma Corrin is using a chest binder
Oh I bet I know the answer to that one – because, like many others, she’s found a new way to be special and attention-worthy.
Who is she? An actor. She played narcissistic PrinCess DiAna in The Crown. Typecasting, it seems. So a different woman, poshly named Charlie Gowans-Eglinton, instructs us on how meaningful all this is.
Your response to the above may be largely generational. In the middle of the millennial age bracket at 33, I didn’t know about non-binary pronouns at school or even at university…But it’s a very small adjustment for me, personally, to make, isn’t it? Just swapping one word for another. I don’t see the problem — any problem — with it. Do you?
Yes, of course. I see the problem of people making demands for special language to refer to Special Them. It’s not “just swapping one word for another,” it’s making the effort to contradict your own perceptions in order to avoid making a “mistake” that isn’t in fact a mistake. It’s also ratifying and flattering an exercise in narcissism and greed for attention.
It’s not even good for the people demanding it. This stupid nonsense isn’t going to flourish forever, especially not when more towns and cities burst into flames and burn to the ground in a matter of hours. We have serious shit to pay attention to, and some self-absorbed goon’s demand for reality-denying pronouns is not serious. It doesn’t matter. It’s trivial. It’s tiresome adolescent attention-seeking.
I’m a straight, white, cisgender woman and people’s assumptions of my sexuality, race and gender are always right. I have never been misgendered to my face, though people often assume from my name that I’m male when talking to me over email (they’re usually more respectful when they do so).
I find myself reflected everywhere: in books and songs, on TV, at the cinema. There are women who look and feel and identify as I do everywhere: broad reflections of me wherever I look for them. So I can’t imagine what it must be like when there are no yous visible in our culture, or how much it must mean to find out that this talented, award-winning actor is like you in some way.
Well lucky lucky you but not all women are as lucky or as smug as you are. There are some women and girls in the world who are oppressed as women and girls – kept out of school, ostracized when menstruating, married off at age 12, beaten, kidnapped, murdered. Women are not the dominant or privileged sex. Don’t wave some vanity-drunk actor in our faces as an emblem of pronoun oppression. Get a clue.
Another damn fool tries to erase the existence and needs of women, and thinks she’s progressive for doing it. I wish these people would hurry up and become adults.
I got pregnant four years ago, when I was 26, and had an abortion in my first trimester. At the time, I wasn’t in a position financially or emotionally to be a parent. I was unemployed, and I knew that choosing to have a child would make it very hard to get a job in the near future. I wasn’t in a living situation where I had room for a baby.
I didn’t feel ashamed about having an abortion. It was an easy decision for me. But as a non-binary transgender person, my abortion experience led to a lot of gender dysphoria. Every clinic had the word women’s in the name, all the pamphlets used gendered language and featured images of gender-conforming people…
Because it’s women who have babies, and thus it’s women who have particular needs, such as abortion and pregnancy care. The self-absorbed protagonist of this ridiculous piece wants to pretend she’s too Special to be a woman, and she ought to be put on the Naughty Stool for about 50 years.
It felt dehumanizing. I had to emotionally disconnect from the experience entirely because of how gendered it was.
Of course it’s fucking gendered you absolute halfwit – what else would it be? It would be a good educational experience for you to try to get a man pregnant; maybe after a decade or so you would catch on.
Non-binary people are valid!
In other words…there is no descriptor for non-binary, you just are it.
So…what does the word mean then?
And why are we supposed to care?
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Idolatry.
So, once again: Muslims are people, and as such they can be the targets of bigotry and racism. Islam itself is a set of abstract, philosophical ideas about theology, metaphysics, ethics etc. to which concepts like bigotry and racism don’t apply. It’s perfectly possible to be critical* of the ideas and practices of Islam (not to mention the political ideology of Islamism) for reasons that have nothing to do with what people look like, where they’re from, or who their ancestors were. It’s even possible to oppose Islamists and white racists at the same time.
Whatever’s legitimate about the term “Islamophobia” can be expressed better – because more precisely – by terms such as “anti-Muslim bigotry” or, even better, “racism against people of Middle-Eastern / North-African / South-Asian descent” (It’s not in fact “bigotry” to say that all Muslims are proponents of Islam, nor is it necessarily bigotry to see that as a problem in itself. Specifics matter). Failing to make such basic distinctions only devalues the concepts of bigotry and racism, and nobody should be more pissed off by this than anti-racists.
As I have said many times, the battle against Islamism is not a battle between whites and non-whites. What we have are some non-whites against other non-whites, with white, Western apologists on both sides. So the question that white, Western liberals and progressives need to be asking themselves is “Which non-whites do I support? Those who share my values (feminists, gay rights activists, secularists etc.), or a far-right movement that I would be the first to condemn if it were dominated by white people?” You cannot have it both ways.
Which is not to say that racists are not going to grab onto whatever legitimate criticisms they can find to bolster their cause. Of course they will! If you single out the ideas of certain ethnic groups for special criticism, that’s clearly racism, but it’s still ultimately targeted at people and not the ideas themselves. The obvious example being movement atheists who spend every free moment bullying women online and defending every sleazebag, sexual harasser, and rapist out there only to suddenly turn so concerned for the treatment of “Dear Muslima” as soon as the conversation turns to Islam. It still doesn’t mean that the treatment of women in Islamist societies is not a problem, though, let alone that we have to shut up about it. Everything that can be exploited, politicized and weaponized for ideological purposes will be, e.g.:
(a) There are legitimate criticisms to be made of specific ideas and practices associated with the religion of Islam (not to mention the political ideology of Islamism).
(b) The fact that (a) is cynically and opportunistically seized upon by hardcore racists and bigots to portray all Muslims (or even just people from majority “Muslim” countries, whether they are in fact practicing Muslims or not) as dangerous fanatics and extremists.
(c) The fact that (b) is seized upon by Islamists and their apologists on the far Left to portray any criticism of Islam (or even Islamism) as “Islamophobia”, racism, bigotry and hatespeech.
(d) The fact that (c) is seized upon by the far right to portray any talk of racism and bigotry as “witch-hunts”, “thought police” and “political correctness gone insane”.
(e) The fact that (d) is seized upon by the far left to portray any criticism of leftist cancel-culture, no-platforming etc. as a defense of bigotry.
(f) Etc…. etc…
If we have to self-sensor about everything that can be exploited for nefarious ends, we might as well have our lips stitched together right now.
* In full disclosure, I really am quite “phobic” of ideas such as these:
Ari Berman on voting rights in Texas:
Texas law makes it monumentally difficult to register voters…
And voting in Texas could soon get even harder. On Thursday, the GOP-controlled legislature is beginning a special legislative session that will revive a sweeping voter suppression bill that was blocked at the 11th hour in May when Texas House Democrats staged a dramatic walkout before a midnight deadline, denying Republicans the quorum needed to pass it. So Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session to pass new voting restrictions, along with far-right priorities like banning critical race theory
and preventing trans-gender athletes from competing in Texas sports.
He’s wrong on that last one, but anyway.
The voting bill, known as SB7, restricted every means of voting in Texas when it was introduced in the last session. It eliminated innovative voting methods such as drive-thru voting, curbside voting, and extended voting hours that helped increase turnout in large urban counties like Harris County in 2020. It banned mail ballot drop boxes and required voters with disabilities to show proof of their disability to qualify for a mail ballot. It cut Sunday voting hours, when Black churches hold “Souls to the Polls” voter mobilization drives. It made it a felony for election officials to give a mail ballot request form to a voter who has not requested one and subjected election workers to criminal penalties for 14 kinds of actions, such as obstructing access for partisan poll watchers and modifying state election procedures. And, to top it all off, it made it easier for candidates to petition judges to throw out election results.
It’s pure haves v. have-nots. Restrictions on voting impinge on have-nots more than on haves, and guess who mostly votes which way.
Texas limits mail-in voting to people over 65 and voters who are out of town during the election, in jail, or have a “sickness or physical condition” that prevents them from going to the polls. (It was one of only five states that did not expand mail-in voting during the pandemic in 2020.) Voting in person requires showing certain types of IDs—a list that seems designed for partisan skew. Under the state’s voter ID law, a handgun permit is an acceptable form of identification but a state-university issued ID is not.
So it’s not pure having and not having, it’s also pinko intellectual effete elitist college student and studly manly John Waynely gun-totin’ manman.
The state has closed 750 polling places since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, more than any other state, disproportionately in Black and brown communities.
John Roberts said they could.
Texas Democrats say they need congressional Democrats to pass federal legislation that would roll back voter suppression efforts. The For the People Act, blocked by a Republican filibuster on June 22, would enact nationwide automatic registration and a ban on partisan gerrymandering; the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which has not yet come up for a vote in Congress, would require states like Texas to once again get any voting changes approved by the federal government.
Hopes are not high.
The hotness was most likely because of hotness.
The searing heat that scorched western Canada and the US at the end of June was “virtually impossible” without climate change, say scientists.
In their study, the team of researchers says that the deadly heatwave was a one-in-a-1,000-year event. But we can expect extreme events such as this to become more common as the world heats up due to climate change.
If humans hadn’t influenced the climate to the extent that they have, the event would have been 150 times less likely. Scientists worry that global heating, largely as a result of burning fossil fuels, is now driving up temperatures faster than models predict.
That is worrying. If it gets too much faster everything will simply burn up.
Beating records by several numbers is virtually unprecedented, the BBC says. Seattle is one of the places that happened. 108 F. ONE OH EIGHT.
Since the start of the heatwave, people have linked the unusual and extreme nature of the event to climate change. Now, researchers say that the chances of it occurring without human-induced warming were virtually impossible.
…
Co-author Dr Friederike Otto, from the University of Oxford, explained what the researchers meant when they said the extreme heat was “virtually impossible” without climate change.
“Without the additional greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, in the statistics that we have available with our models, and also the statistical models based on observations, such an event just does not occur,” she explained. “Or if an event like this occurs, it occurs once in a million times, which is the statistical equivalent of never,” she told a news briefing.
So basically we’re sitting on a stove burner that is on.
But why is this political? Why is it right v left? Why is it Republicans v Democrats?
It’s not political, it’s technical. The two shouldn’t have anything to do with each other. Either the vaccine protects against the virus or it doesn’t. General vaccination either slows the pandemic or it doesn’t. The vaccine is either safe or not. Those are not political questions. Nobody wants to get the virus, so why is anyone making the issue political?
Is it just because “fuck you, that’s why”? Because it’s so urgent to be An Individual that people are willing to get a horrible disease to make their point?
Take-home question: Would Ayn Rand have gotten the vaccination?
Revisiting the quest for a new blasphemy law:
Just hours after Kim Leadbeater took her seat in Parliament, following a campaign dogged by questions about a Batley school teacher forced to go into hiding for showing children a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, [Labour MP Naz] Shah delivered an eyebrow-raising intervention likening such depictions to the vandalism of Winston Churchill’s statue.
This call from a frontbench spokesperson to treat cartoons of Mohammed as equivalent to actual public vandalism has caused something of a belated backlash, amid fears it would mean the restoration of blasphemy laws. Such restrictions were abolished in England, incidentally, by the last Labour government in 2008. Shah told the Commons:
As a Muslim, for me and millions of Muslims across this country and a quarter of the world’s population who are Muslim too, with each day and each breath there is not a single thing in the world that we commemorate and honour more than our beloved Prophet, Mohammed, peace be upon him.
If that’s true it’s tragic. It’s tragic in its narrowness as well as its delusion. All there is in the world to value, and religious zealots focus on just one guy who lived 14 centuries ago. It’s such a waste.
But when bigots and racists defame, slander or abuse our Prophet, peace be upon him, just like some people do the likes of Churchill, the emotional harm caused upon our hearts is unbearable, because for 2 billion Muslims, he is the leader we commemorate in our hearts and honour in our lives, and he forms the basis of our identity and our very existence.
Again: that’s a pathetic thing to admit. It’s a pathetic way to live.
Disgraced loser Donald Trump held a “press conference” today to tell an indifferent world that he’s suing Social Media for not letting him use its platforms to incite a civil war.
The funniest part is the photo, titled Let’s Pretend This Is Still the White House.
He’s at his New Jersey golf club.
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Playing a skeptical maverick.
As I have said many times, I cut all ties to Movement Skepticism™ specifically because of the misogyny issue, but now I don’t even think the movement did very well on the science front. For example skeptics tended to let climate change denialists (some of whom were even considered “thought leaders” of the movement) off the hook far too easily, and enter false balance territory whenever the issue came up, while congratulating themselves on how clever they were for not believing in homeopathy or Bigfoot.
The Movement also includes some of the most staggering examples of the Dunning Kruger Effect ever seen. Even the smartest, best educated, most knowledgeable person who ever lived, is only personally familiar with <<1% of all the scientific knowledge that’s available, and of that very tiny fraction <<1% is first-hand knowledge, And yet it’s quite common to hear skeptics talk as if they had personally done all the science (or even derived all of science, mathematics, epistemology, logic etc. from first principles without ever taking anything on trust) when all they’re really doing is repeating back half digested, half understood layman’s explanations from books, blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos etc. We see this whenever skeptics tell others (guilty as charged!) to just “follow the facts where they lead”, “let the evidence speak for itself” etc. which makes is sound like “following the facts where they lead” were a straightforward matter rather than something that requires vast amounts of experience and accumulated pre-knowledge in its own right. The truth of the matter is that the evidence never speaks for itself. As I have previously written, I could probably provide a decent layman’s explanation of the evidence for things like evolution or climate change based on books I have read, but I wouldn’t personally be able to derive any useful information about past climates from tree-rings or ice-cores.
I remember reading an article (I wish I could remember by whom) about skeptics debunking pseudoscience with bad science of their own. The author made the point that while self-identified “pro science” types may be more likely to reach a (somewhat) accurate conclusion than others, it doesn’t mean that their methods for arriving at those conclusions are that different from those of their opponents. It’s just that rooting for “Team Science” confirms their particular tribal identity. As much as movement skeptics like to think of themselves as Spock and elevated above all that touchy-feely “value” stuff, it seems to me that true critical thinking is at least as much about attitude as it is about skills. Without the proper self-questioning attitude acquiring the tools of critical thinking only gives you more excuses for rejecting any conclusion you happen to dislike for ideological, tribalistic or purely self-serving reasons.
Also, it now seems to me that skeptics have developed a few myths of their own. E.g. we’ve all heard how the system of (pre and post publication) peer review ensures that only those ideas that can withstand the most merciless criticism and attempts at falsification survive in the long run. My current understanding from reading about the replication crisis etc. is that the peer-review process often fails and in most cases no replication is ever even attempted. We have also heard how scientists like nothing more than having their pet theories disproved because it means there’s something new to learn, “it gives them something to do” etc. I think Max Planck was probably closer to the truth when he said that “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”.
Another commonly heard trope is the idea that freeze peach guarantees that the best supported ideas will rise to the top in the marketplace of ideas. The unstated – sometimes even stated – premise being that those who have science and logic on their side always enjoy a decisive advantage in the battle for public opinion. This never seemed right to me, even in my movement skeptic days. If critical thinking should have taught us anything at all, it’s that the strongest indicators of truth vs. falsehood – objectively speaking – rarely coincide with what seems most subjectively persuasive to laypeople. Playing by the rules of science is nothing if not limiting, while the purveyors of bullshit are free to say whatever will impress people. Without the necessary pre-knowledge and critical thinking skills all your average layperson can be expected to get out of the exchange is that one side comes across as far more assertive, aggressive and confident while the other side is forced to use conservative language (“seems to indicate” etc.), acknowledge uncertainty, and introduce caveats, conditions and qualifiers at every turn. No need to specify which side is the scientific one.
