While Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins are seen as leading lights of the New Atheist movement of which I consider myself a member, I have come to detest their views on a large number of political and social positions, seeing them as lackeys of the neo-imperialism that is driving the western assault on the rest of the world and responsible for immense amounts of suffering. There is an overweening smugness about their sense of their own, and their tribe’s, superiority over those dastardly Muslims that I find unseemly.
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There was a time when the US condemned China’s use of prison labor because it undercut the labor market and gave them an unfair advantage since the wages of prisoners were so low as to effectively constitute free labor. I was under the impression that in the US it was illegal to use prison labor for that same reason.
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The comments following my earlier post about Bill Cosby have been interesting. Some have argued that since he has not been convicted in a court of law of giving women drugs and then raping them, he should be given the presumption of innocence as is his right under our legal system.
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In the face of furious hyperbolic opposition from the Republican party who warned him that he was threatening to undermine the very foundations of democracy in the US, president Obama has gone ahead with his plan to use his executive powers to temporarily spare anywhere from three to five million undocumented immigrants from the threat of deportation for three years by offering them temporary legal status.
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On November 19 I tuned in to the radio news program The World and a story was already in progress. In it a voice with a British accent was describing his treatment at the hands of his captors. He described being tortured, stripped naked and beaten, threatened with execution, and heard the sound of a woman screaming in the next room and was told that it was his wife being tortured.
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Veteran investigative reporter John Pilger gives an update on the status of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, confined to the Ecuadoran embassy in London since 2012 that is guarded round the clock by police to ensure that he does not slip out of the country. Pilger says that even the British government that, like the US, hates Assange with a passion and would hand him over to the US in a minute to be tortured, is getting frustrated with Sweden’s intransigence and unwillingness to take any steps towards resolving this impasse.
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Samantha Power, the current US Ambassador to the UN, is one of those ‘liberal interventionists’, people who like to think of themselves as liberals but are always on the look out for ‘good’ wars to wage to show how tough they are, a disease that many Democrats suffer from. It does not seem to bother them that all the other military interventions have been disastrous, not least for the people at the receiving end of our military largesse.
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