Trump and the Republican id

Whatever one might think of the politics of Donald Trump, there is no question that he seems to have an unerring knack for gauging the visceral feelings of the small group of Republican supporters who play a disproportionately large role in the Republican primary process. He seems to know exactly what buttons to push so while the pundit class takes each outrageous statement of his as the sign that this time he really has gone too far and that people will now abandon him, in reality his popularity remains undiminished or even increases.
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Sam Harris goes totally bonkers

In a discussion Harris says:

“Given a choice between Noam Chomsky and Ben Carson, in terms of the totality of their understanding of what’s happening now in the world, I’d vote for Ben Carson every time,” Harris stated. “Ben Carson is a dangerously deluded religious imbecile, Ben Carson does not…the fact that he is a candidate for president is a scandal…but at the very least he can be counted on to sort of get this one right. He understands that jihadists are the enemy.”

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The over-representation of engineers in violent groups

When people think of violent Islamist groups, the image they have may be of disaffected young people who are the outcasts of society, poor and poorly educated. But a new book titled Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education based on research done by two academics Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog finds a surprisingly large number of engineers among the people labeled as Islamic radicals.
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Michael Moore’s new film Where to Invade Next

I had been wondering when Michael Moore would come up with another of his zany documentaries and whether he was working on one at all. I was glad to see that he was and that he did it in secret to enable him to employ his usual guerilla filmmaking tactics more effectively. It is going to be out soon. In this one, Moore ‘invades’ Europe to see how those countries differ from the US and to seize all their good ideas, rather than invade countries for their oil.
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Matt Taibbi tears into Thomas Friedman, again

Readers will have noted that I am an admirer of Matt Taibbi’s writings, quoting extensively from his articles because I see him as an accurate observer of the American political scene with a witty style. I also cannot stand New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and am baffled by the admiration he seems to generate with his vacuous pieties. I first came across Taibbi a long time ago when he was writing for a regional paper because of his hilarious and brutal takedown of Friedman’s inanities. Taibbi and Friedman seemed to be made for each other. (See here, here, and here.)
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Living in an age of hysteria

We are now well into full-blown anti-Muslim hysteria with every right-wing politician trying to outdo each other as to who can come up with the most outrageous suggestion. No suggestion is too bonkers if it has as its basis the idea that all Muslims and immigrants of color, however benign they may seem on the surface, are people who might well have a desire to slit your throat in the night.
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