Is there anything more boring than seeing the vacation photos of other people? What makes it worse is that the people who show you these photos are usually people you know well, making it hard to politely extricate yourself from the situation, as neighbor Bob realizes.
One of Trump’s most loyal groups of supporters are Christian evangelicals who, in their single-minded devotion to opposing abortion and LGBT equality, are willing to overlook the fact that Trump violates pretty much every tenet of what Christianity professes in return for him appointing conservative judges whom they think will rule in their favor them in the culture wars. But even here cracks are beginning to show as more of them are expressing support for Joe Biden.
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Ryan Grim and Akela Lacey wrote last week about some interesting Democratic primary races where progressive candidates were competing against establishment incumbents or establishment-supported candidates to replace retiring incumbents.
So how did they do? Pretty well, it turns out.
One big win was that Jamaal Bowman defeated Eliot Engel in the Bronx congressional district in New York City. Engel has been in Congress since 1989, was high in the party leadership, and the party establishment pulled out all the stops to try and help him retain his seat, seeing this as another major threat to its control, the way that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez upset another senior party leader Joe Crowley in 2018. But it was to no avail.
Incidentally, Engel is one of the most loyal members of the Israel lobby, a position increasingly unpopular in the Democratic party as its membership increasingly recognizes that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in unjust.
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This clip from John Oliver’s show was from back in 2017 but is still timely in the current context of removing statues and other monuments honoring confederate leaders and renaming military bases named after confederate generals.
Seth Meyers weighs in on Trump defending confederacy
You would think that given the recent focus on police brutality in the US that has led to massive demonstrations across the country and calls for even defunding the police, police departments would have emphasized to their officers that they need to dial back the use of force so that they do not invite even more media scrutiny. But it is a sign of how deeply embedded is the instinct to respond with overwhelming force to many situations that such acts have continued, sometimes using the very same chokehold that caused the death of George Floyd, even after its use was banned in that state.
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The investigate public TV program Frontline just released an episode with the above title that looked at how the company Insys Therapeutics deliberately set out to make people addicted to its formulation of the powerful pain killing drug based on fentanyl so that it could make huge profits. Because it is such a powerful addictive (100 times as strong as morphine), the drug is only meant to treat the excruciating pain experienced by certain types of cancer patients but the company, under the direction of its founder John Kapoor, pushed its sales team to bribe doctors to prescribe much more widely and in much larger doses than recommended, resulting in huge profits. Naturally, Wall Street investors did not look too closely at a company that was giving them huge returns on their investments.
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In my book The Great Paradox of Science: Why its conclusions can be relied upon even though they cannot be proven (that I hope all readers of this blog have bought!) I discuss in some detail the nature of scientific logic that enables us to arrive at very firm conclusions about so many things despite never having absolute certainty. This is particularly important in the case of assertions about the non-existence of any entity. Believers in things for which there is no positive evidence (such as gods and ghosts) point to this lack of proof to suggest that it is reasonable to believe in their existence.
My book argues that that argument is invalid and that in science we can quite confidently assert in the non-existence of some things (and have done so in the case of the aether and phlogiston for example) and that same logic can be extended to assert the non-existence of other things.
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Religious organizations that discriminate against the LGBT community have been stunned by the US supreme court’s ruling handed down last week that it is against the law for employers to fire LGT employees because of their sexual orientation or identity.
The ruling would have “seismic implications” for religious freedom and would potentially set off years of lawsuits for religious organizations, said Russell Moore, the president of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.
…“I am deeply concerned that the U.S. Supreme Court has effectively redefined the legal meaning of ‘sex’ in our nation’s civil rights law,” the president of the Catholic bishops’ conference, Archbishop José H. Gomez, said in a statement. “This is an injustice that will have implications in many areas of life.”
…But what conservative religious groups may see as a religious freedom issue, secular and progressive religious groups see as an excuse to discriminate.
While welcoming the ruling that said that firing someone because they are gay or lesbian or transgender violates the law, she says that there is much more that needs to be done to protect the transgender community. She highlights the particularly precarious and dangerous situation in our society of the black trans community who get the whammy of racism added to the homophobia and transphobia. And black transwomen have to deal with the added sexism as well.
What is appalling is that so many people try to act as if the non-trans community has to be protected from the trans community, when the reality is the other way around.
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Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ was always a stupid slogan. Trump and his supporters never specify when it was that America was great before, because to name any particular period in the past would be to say that the injustices that existed then, and there would be many, are preferable to what we have now.
But the Trump campaign has now come up with something even stupider. As I have mentioned, I am now on Trump’s email list and it has been a source of endless amusement to see their desperate gambits to get money from me.
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