Kareem Abdul Jabbar weighs in on the Shane Gillis/SNL issue

The basketball star who has become one of the sharpest social analysts has an excellent take on the firing of comedian Shane Gillis from Saturday Night Live soon after his hiring was announced, when it was revealed that Gillis’s past comedy routines indulged in sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia.

I will excerpt just two paragraphs to whet your appetite to read the whole thing.

It’s tempting to open this column by repeating Shane Gillis’ homophobic, anti-Asian and misogynistic slurs that got him fired from Saturday Night Live to show just how desperately unfunny, derivative and dripping with flop sweat they are. But their level of funniness is not the point. Comedians have the right to be unfunny sometimes, just as athletes have the right to lose games, and actors to be in bad films. But when a comedian makes hate-based comments, as Gillis did on his podcasts, we do have an obligation to take a closer look to see whether they are insightful provocateurs of culture and the human condition, or just another middle-schooler blowing milk out their nose for a quick laugh, not caring who they spatter with milky snot in the process.

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Where does the word ‘teetotaler’ come from?

I almost never drink alcohol and used to consider myself a teetotaler, though I never actually used the term because it seemed somewhat Victorian. But I had never thought about how the word originated and this article clued me in.

It dates back to the 1820s and 1830s when alcohol consumption in the United States dramatically increased. Back then, drinking was an all-or-nothing habit, explains Jon Grinspan, curator of political history at the National Museum of American History. The “tee” in “teetotaler” likely refers to temperance activists who were totally opposed to alcohol with “a capital T” (or “tee”). Similar to the way people used the label of capital-R Republicans or W-Whigs, being a T-Totaler was a distinct identity. It was only after Prohibition ended that drinking in moderation became more popular and the label fell out of fashion.

Since I am not totally opposed to alcohol and have on occasion consumed small amounts of wine and beer, it looks like technically I am not a teetotaler.

On social occasions when I ask for a non-alcoholic drink, my hosts often think I must have religious objections to alcohol, which I find amusing. My lack of interest in alcohol is mainly because I do not like the taste. Also, Sri Lanka used to have a lot of heavy drinkers and growing up I have seen too many people drink too much at parties and then say and do things they later regretted, or at least should have regretted. I vowed never to let that happen to me so have never drunk more than a token amount since. On the one occasion in my twenties where I drank a little more than usual at a party, I did not enjoy the sensation that I was slowly losing control of my words and actions and so stopped at once. Fortunately, my group of friends were also not heavy drinkers, so I did not face much peer pressure to do so.

The Libet free will experiment revisited

I have long been interested in the question of free will and back in 2010 even wrote a 16-part series (!) looking into what was known about it. Many people are Cartesian dualists where they view the brain and mind as distinct, the former being a physical organ while the latter is an immaterial entity, dubbed the ‘Ghost in the Machine’ by Gilbert Ryle, that controls the cognitive processes of the former, though how that actually happens has not been made clear.
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Trump suffering from memory loss would be worse than being a brazen liar

It is a given that Donald Trump lies brazenly. It is assumed that Trump’s lies are done deliberately to serve his immediate needs. But Robert Mackey provides a recent example that suggests that Trump may be showing alarming signs of memory loss.

AS HE THREATENED to bomb Iran at Saudi Arabia’s behest, President Donald Trump also intensified his battle with objective reality on Sunday, by railing against what he called “The Fake News” media for “saying that I am willing to meet with Iran, ‘No Conditions.’”

Since there is video of Trump saying exactly that in June, and at a news conference last year, there are only two possible explanations here: The president is either suffering an alarming memory loss or flat-out lying.

It is easy to put the blame for aberrant behavior on some sort of cognitive malfunction, as we can see with the NRA and its supporters who are quick to put the blame for mass shootings on mental health problems and shift the attention away from the easy availability of guns.

I have been reluctant to fully accept that Trump may be suffering from some form of cognitive degeneration and is not just a lying, manipulative, narcissist. But it may be time to face that that is a real possibility.

Sonic attack? Crickets? Insecticide? Update on the Havana mystery

There is a new twist to the long-running saga about the mysterious ailment that struck personnel working at the American and Canadian embassies in Havana, Cuba. Initially the US accused Cuba of using some kind of sonic weapon to attack their diplomats. But this seemed highly implausible, not least because there did not seem to be any evidence that such a weapon existed and it was not clear why the Cuban government, even if it had such a weapon, would do such a thing at a time when they were trying to improve relations with the US.
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The Christian right is driving more people into becoming nonreligious

Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Daniel Cox make the case that one of the reasons that the number of people identifying as nonreligious is increasing in the US is because the ugliness of the Christian right’s vision of what it is to be religious is driving liberals away. And as they lose their religion, they are drifting towards the Democratic party that is beginning to realize that this is an important demographic.

A few weeks ago, the Democratic National Committee formally acknowledged what has been evident for quite some time: Nonreligious voters are a critical part of the party’s base. In a one-page resolution passed at its annual summer meeting, the DNC called on Democratic politicians to recognize and celebrate the contributions of nonreligious Americans, who make up one-third of Democrats. In response, Robert Jeffress, a Dallas pastor with close ties to Trump, appeared on Fox News, saying the Democrats were finally admitting they are a “godless party.”
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When it comes to starting new wars, Trump’s bark is worse than his bite

Perhaps the only redeeming feature of Donald Trump is that unlike previous presidents he seems deeply reluctant to get the US involved in new wars. He also seems to want to end the US involvement in its existing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while at the same time being willing to continue and even expand specific military actions in those countries, as can be seen in the recent drone attack in Afghanistan that killed 30 farmers and laborers and injured 40 more who had been resting after work..
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Richard Stallman will not be the last clueless nerd to fall

The fall of computer scientist Richard Stallman, forced to resign his position at MIT because of his apologetics for rape and sexual abuse is now widely known. But Steven Levy says that the entire nerd culture that these people were steeped in that found their eccentricities amusing is also one that made them oblivious from seeing that their views on so many matters were utterly appalling.
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The whiners in the US and Saudi Arabia

The recent attack on the refineries in Saudi Arabia has, predictably, aroused outrage in the leadership of that country and its patron the US. The Houthi rebels in Yemen that are fighting against the Saudi-backed government have claimed responsibility for the drone attack but that does not fit with the preferred narrative of the Saudis and the US who want to paint Iran as the villain in that region in order to isolate it even further.

Donald Trump has astonishingly said that he is waiting for to hear from Saudi Arabia as to what the US should do, which makes the US military look like a mercenary force and one wonders who is the dominant partner in that alliance. But back in 2014 when Barack Obama was president, Trump was saying something quite different.


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