“Harris’ moral landscape is cratered with artillery and pock-marked with bullets.”

I’m glad someone else is paying attention to Sam Harris, because I just can’t. Too many years of wrestling with creationists has given me some nasty allergies to bad reasoning and arrogant codswallop. But at least Marcus Ranum has the spine to tear into Harris’s terrible arguments defending Israel’s atrocities. It’s long, but worth reading.

Totally irrelevant

I’m sure this old newspaper clipping from 1934 has nothing to do with current events. Nothing at all.

FAILED TO GIVE NAZI SALUTE.

German Football Club Banned For 12 Months.’

BERLIN Sunday

The Karlsruhe Football Club has been prohibited from playing during 1934 because the team failed to give the Nazi salute when entering the field to play against a French club from Nancy at Metz in December.

The failure of the team to give the salute is alleged to be due to the Frenchmen threatening that they would not play and the Germans would receive no compensation if the salute was given because it was feared that the spectators would riot.

All sports clubs were forbidden to take part in French engagements until the incident had been settled.

We need better Democrats than these

Congress voted to roll back the various regulations that protected us from another wave of corruption and bank failures. What is most disappointing is that a group of Democrats voted with the Republicans on this bill for fat cats.

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO)
Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE)
Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE)
Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-IN)
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH)
Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND)
Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL)
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) (to think I voted for this guy)
Sen. Angus King (I-ME)
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV)
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO)
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL)
Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI)
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)
Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT)
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA)

This one was a no-brainer.

I am not looking forward to the next election, because this is what we have to look forward to: greedy, rotten bastards on the Republican side and a battery of spineless Democrats trying to look like they’re resisting, but not resisting too hard, since they want to keep that sweet, sweet cash flowing from the same sources fueling the Republicans.

We are so screwed. There will be more cash grabs and emergency bailouts of the banks in the future.

Tomi Lahren is all wet

She visited Minneapolis, went to a restaurant with her mother, and someone threw the contents of a glass of water at her. It’s the kinder, gentler version of Nazi-punching. And now I’m all confused.

Does Tomi Lahren deserve public scorn and opprobrium? Yes. She’s a horrible person profiting off the dissemination of hate and ignorance. I can’t get worked up about somebody dousing her with water…but at the same time, it would also be legit to arrest and fine the water flinger for assault (likewise, the guy who punched Richard Spencer did commit a crime). You take action, you take responsibility for the action.

But also, I recognize my own inconsistency. It’s one thing for someone to punch Richard Spencer, a male Nazi, but I’d be extremely uncomfortable if someone were to punch Tomi Lahren, his female equivalent. Part of it is the unfounded expectation that a man is supposed to be able to defend himself, while a woman is not. Part of it is the optics: it looks bad for anti-Nazis to be punching down on women (but that it’s even “punching down” to hit a woman is problematic). If you watch the video at the link, you’ll also hear someone shouting misogynistic slurs at Lahren — I don’t want that guy on my side, either.

In my perfect world, people who preach hate wouldn’t have a platform or an audience because no one would want to listen to them, and they’d wither away into irrelevance. In this far from perfect world, we have to struggle with appropriate responses to destructive ideas that rise to popularity in imperfect ways.

The new gun control plan is going in very strange directions

Crap. I’ve already got to add another one to the list of things other than guns to ban. So we’ve got:

  1. Doors.

  2. Trench coats.

  3. Creepy people.

  4. Saying “no” to boys.

That last one is prompted by this headline:

As Libby Ann points out,

We live in the era of #metoo. In an era of #metoo, such headlines should be unacceptable. She turned him down, she embarrassed him. Not he stalked her, he grew more aggressive in has advances until she defended herself the only way she could, by publicly calling him out.

One of Pagourtzis’ classmates who died in the attack, Shana Fisher, “had 4 months of problems from this boy,” her mother, Sadie Rodriguez, wrote in a private message to the Los Angeles Times on Facebook. “He kept making advances on her and she repeatedly told him no.”

Pagourtzis continued to get more aggressive, and she finally stood up to him and embarrassed him in class, Rodriguez said. “A week later he opens fire on everyone he didn’t like,” she wrote. “Shana being the first one.”

Every teenaged girl in the country is going to get the message the asshole shooter sent: I’m gonna get really mad if you turn me down, and shoot up the whole classroom…and the LA Times will shame you.

This is going to fit in really well with the new Incel Agenda and Forced Monogamy plan.

They’ll do anything to avoid regulating guns

The lieutenant governor of Texas wants to ban doors. Now Hugh Hewitt suggests banning trench coats.

To the teachers and administrators out there, the trench coat is kind of a giveaway. You might just say, “No more trench coats.” The creepy people, make a list, check it twice.

Oh, excuse me…we’re going to ban “creepy people”.

That last bit might have some merit. I find Hugh Hewitt extremely creepy.

Bari Weiss, official sycophant to Marie Antoinette

There are good reasons I’m incapable of watching Bill Maher any more — I’d have to rip the big screen off the wall and throw it through that expensive big picture window in our living room. This week, he had Bari Weiss on, because of course those two are made for each other.

“This week we opened the American embassy in Jerusalem which did cause a riot, as predicted, and of course people are blaming both sides,” said Maher.

During the embassy opening, a taunting event all but designed to inflame tensions, Israeli forces brutally massacred at least 58 Palestinians protesting along the Gaza border—including women and children. Many were killed by sniper fire hundreds of yards away. Weiss, however, saw no connection between the protests and the embassy launch.

“Bill, I love you, but the riots were not caused by the embassy move,” said Weiss. “They’re not linked. When Hamas attacked Israel in 2008, when Hamas attacked Israel in 2012, when it attacked Israel in 2014, the embassy was in Tel Aviv all of those times… They intentionally moved up the day so that it would coincide with the day of the embassy move so that we would all be disgusted and heartbroken when we saw this horrible split-screen of Ivanka Trump, looking like she was at a country club, next to poor, desperate people dying in Gaza.”

The first line set me back. How can you blame both sides when one side is being gunned down by snipers, and the other is armed, at best, with rocks? When one side is killing children?

But Bari Weiss managed to top it. How horrible that the Palestinian people planned their protest strategically? Why didn’t they schedule it for a day when it wouldn’t make Ivanka Trump look bad?

Talk about missing the whole point…it reminds me of the furious complaints when Black Lives Matter protests inconvenience people. How dare they march where people would notice! Couldn’t they just march down streets in the middle of nowhere that weren’t full of busy white people trying to get to a football game?

Just remember that Martin Luther King Jr. also protested strategically.

Let us remember not just King’s words, but also his actions. King was in his 20s when he helped coordinate the Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted more than a year and brought the city to its knees. Too often today, we hear that protests for justice and equality are being done “wrong.” They’re too intrusive; they’re too loud. But one wonders how the country can laud King, whose efforts shut down public transportation in an entire city, but chastise Colin Kaepernick (also in his 20s) for his peaceful protest of taking a knee at a football game.

It was King’s desire that we each examine our role in the fight for civil liberties, justice and equality. It is not enough to consider ourselves simply “allies” in the fight. Instead, we must put our heads down, listen more, and do the work of improving the lives of a marginalized community to which we don’t belong. Then, and only then, might someone in that community determine that we are worthy of the term.

“Accomplice,” not “ally,” should be the goal. An ally is one who acknowledges there is a problem. An accomplice is one who acknowledges there is a problem and then commits to stand in the gap for those less fortunate than themselves, without hope or expectation of reward. An ally is passive; an accomplice is active.

When you’re more concerned about exposing the superficiality of Princess Ivanka and Slumlord Jared then you are about people being shot in the street, you’re being an accomplice, all right — to the wrong side.