Nonbelievers are making their presence felt in politics

The atheist movement in the US, and skeptics generally, has advanced to the stage where for many it is no longer sufficient to simply be public about one’s disbelief in gods and the supernatural. The next stage is what one does in practical terms and it is encouraging that the skeptical community is now much more focused on becoming politically active on a wide range of causes. They are transitioning from making their presence known to making their presence felt.

While skeptics belong to all political persuasions, they tend to be much more on the left-liberal end of the spectrum, which is not surprising with the rise of the religious right and their reactionary political agenda.

When members of the small Pennsylvania chapter of Secular Democrats of America log on for their monthly meetings, they’re not there for a virtual happy hour.

“We don’t sit around at our meetings patting ourselves on the back for not believing in God together,” said David Brown, a founder from the Philadelphia suburb of Ardmore.

The group, mostly consisting of atheists and agnostics, mobilizes to knock on doors and make phone calls on behalf of Democratic candidates “who are pro-science, pro-democracy, whether or not they are actually self-identified secular people,” he said. “We are trying to keep church and state separate. That encompasses LGBTQIA+, COVID science, bodily autonomy and reproductive rights.”
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Can the swastika be reclaimed?

In Sri Lanka, one would occasionally come across the swastika symbol in various places. This had nothing to do with Nazis. The swastika predates the rise of the Nazis by millennia and is a religious symbol for many people around the world and even in the US. It only became a hate symbol with Hitler.

The equilateral cross with its legs bent at right angles is a millennia-old sacred symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism that represents peace and good fortune, and was also used widely by Indigenous people worldwide in a similar vein.
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The symbol itself dates back to prehistoric times. The word “swastika” has Sanskrit roots and means “the mark of well being.” It has been used in prayers of the Rig Veda, the oldest of Hindu scriptures. In Buddhism, the symbol is known as “manji” and signifies the Buddha’s footsteps. It is used to mark the location of Buddhist temples. In China it’s called Wàn, and denotes the universe or the manifestation and creativity of God. The swastika is carved into the Jains’ emblem representing the four types of birth an embodied soul might attain until it is eventually liberated from the cycle of birth and death. In the Zoroastrian faith, it represents the four elements – water, fire, air and earth.
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Trump’s white supremacist allies put his Republican enablers in a bind, again

The Republican party is in a dance with death with its leader Donald Trump, as he keeps going further and further in his ties with the worst elements of American politics, consisting of racists, misogynists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis. His dinner with Nick Fuentes and Kanye West/Ye has forced even the more servile members of the party criticize him.

House and Senate Republicans are speaking out against former President Donald Trump’s dinner last week with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, and white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.

“There is no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or white supremacy,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday. “And anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgment, are highly unlikely to ever be elected president of the United States.”
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The leaders’ reactions to the dinner came a day after former Vice President Mike Pence said that Trump should apologize for even sitting down with Fuentes.

“Trump was wrong to give a white nationalist, an antisemite and Holocaust denier a seat at the table,” Pence said in an interview with News Nation Now. “And I think he should apologize for it, and he should denounce those individuals and their hateful rhetoric without qualification.”

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Same-sex and inter-racial marriages get an extra layer of protection

The US Supreme Court has said that bans on same-sex marriage and inter-racial marriage are both unconstitutional. So why did the US Senate yesterday by a 61-36 vote pass the Respect for Marriage Act that protects what seemed to be already legal? It is because the overturning of the Roe v. Wade precedent that gave constitutional protection to abortions had created fears that the current US Supreme Court might overturn those other hard-won freedoms as well. Justice Clarence Thomas has openly voiced his disagreement with the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage.

All Democrats voted in favor of this bill, and it was supported by 12 Republicans. The House of Representatives will now have to pass a similar measure so that Joe Biden can sign it into law.

While the bill would not set a national requirement that all states must legalize same-sex marriage, it would require individual states to recognize another state’s legal marriage.

So, in the event the Supreme Court might overturn its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage, a state could still pass a law to ban same-sex marriage, but that state would be required to recognize a same-sex marriage from another state.

That is a good move. It is disappointing that 36 Republican senators voted against it.

A much-needed takedown of Musk, Zuckerberg, and SBF

Readers may recall Adam Conover as the genial host of the TV series Adam Ruins Everything where in each episode he debunks popular myths and misconceptions. In one episode on the myths about the Copernican revolution, he used my research into that topic to make his case.

In a new podcast, he channels Jonathan Pie to deliver a blistering attack on Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Bankman-Fried (the founder of the now bankrupt crypto exchange FTX). He discusses the failures of these so-called geniuses and says that they represent much that is wrong with our society, that we tend to uncritically accept the grandiose claims of people with ordinary abilities. He says that there are many people who are frauds like these three, privileged and incompetent, children of wealthy parents who attended Ivy league schools and claim to be able to change the world, when they are merely people who just got lucky at one point in their lives and then were able to fool enough people to buy their bullshit and get fawning coverage from the media and the moneyed classes.

A presidential ticket for the ages

The political commentariat in the US is agog with a report of Donald Trump hosting a dinner at Mar-a-Lago for notorious white supremacist, misogynist, and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes and notorious nutcase and anti-Semite Kanye West aka Ye. Trump was apparently highly taken with Fuentes who flattered him by apparently being familiar with Trump’s speeches. When Trump said that he disliked the teleprompters that his advisors wanted him to use at his rallies in order to sound more presidential, Fuentes said that he liked it when Trump ad-libbed. His flattery seemed to work when Trump turned to Ye and said, “I really like this guy. He gets me.”

Trump, of course, loves anybody who fawns over him, however unsavory they may be. This has become such a well-known fact about his personality that everyone seeking his favors does it once they gain access to him. Trump seems to not be aware, or perhaps care, if they are being sincere or cynically exploiting this weakness. Such a character flaw requires a person to be surrounded by gatekeepers who will block such people from getting close to him but in Trump’s case, they seem to be ineffective.
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FIFA + Qatar = A marriage made in hell

FIFA, the controlling body of international football, has long been known to be utterly corrupt. The nation of Qatar has an appalling record on human rights including ,the criminalizing of homosexuality, brutal treatment of its migrant labor force, and violations of free speech rights among others. So when in 2010 FIFA selected Qatar as the host nation for the 2022 tournament despite its manifest unsuitability (for starters, the temperatures can rise to very high levels in the summers), there were immediate suspicions that bribery had been involved, with the Qatari rulers seeking to get good publicity by hosting this major international sporting event.

This article goes into great depth on the sordid history of FIFA and Qatar.
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Sarah Palin loses again

One of the last races for the House of Representatives has been called, that for the single congressional seat in Alaska. Democrat Mary Peltola beat Sarah Palin by 55% to 45%, a larger margin than the 3% margin in the special election held in August. Alaskan elections have an open primary in which people of all parties compete and the top four then move on the general election which is decided by ranked-choice voting of the four candidates. Peltola came close to getting 49% of first preference votes and thus would still have won if the election were decided by a plurality. The details of how the preferential votes were cast can be seen here.
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Violent crime dropped rapidly after elections!

Not really. It is just that right wing media suddenly loses interest in the story once it is no longer useful to scare their voter base into thinking that Democrats are ‘soft on crime’. But you can expect coverage of violent crime to rise again just before the 2024 elections, irrespective of the actual data.

While mass shootings like the two that occurred this week naturally get a lot of attention, violent crime in general in every major category has been on a steep decline since the early 1990s.

Run-off election for the Georgia senate is still important

Once control of the US Senate had been decided in favor of Democrats with the win by Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada that gave them a 50-49 edge, interest in the Georgia run-off election between Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock and the batty Republican Herschel Walker dropped precipitously. If the Georgia race were still pivotal to control of the Senate, we would have had wall-to-wall coverage. Instead, now one has to seek out news about it.

But we should not think that this makes the race inconsequential. As this article explains, in practical terms there is a big difference between a 51-49 Democratic majority and a 50-50 tied body in which the vice-president breaks the tie in favor of the Democrats.

A 51-49 Senate would give Democrats an outright majority, meaning that [majority leader Chuck] Schumer wouldn’t have to negotiate a power-sharing agreement with Republican leader Mitch McConnell. The two parties had to do that two years ago and also in 2001, the last time the Senate was evenly split.

In early 2021, confirmations of new President Joe Biden’s nominees were stalled for several weeks while Schumer and McConnell worked out an agreement on how to split committees and move legislation on the Senate floor. Using the little leverage he had, McConnell threatened not to finalize a deal until Democrats promised that they wouldn’t try to kill the legislative filibuster that forces a 60-vote threshold.
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