Black atheists and feminism

One strong stereotype about the African-American community is that they are one of the most religious ethnic groups. There is good reason for this. Slave owners, like colonial rulers, used Christianity as a means of control, deflecting the hopes of the oppressed people to a wonderful afterlife to distract them from their present state of exploitation. During the harsh period of slavery, many slaves placed their hope in some kind of miraculous salvation, either in this life or at least in the afterlife and there is no question that this enabled them to endure horrific conditions. So religion became both a means of imposing oppression and also of surviving it.
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Some extraordinary cricket

It’s been awhile since I wrote about cricket for the two or three blog readers who may care. But there has been some remarkable cricket in the last few days that deserves comment. (See here for my brief tutorial on this game.) In Test cricket (the long form that lasts five full days and in which each side has two innings), the team that bats first and scores over 400 runs is usually in the catbird seat, almost guaranteed to win or at least to not lose. But in two Test matches played concurrently on different continents, that conventional wisdom has been seriously challenged.
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Great moments in neologisms: phubbing

There is nothing like new technology to spawn neologisms. Some of them are pretty good but some are downright ugly. In the latter category I would place one that I have been coming across recently: phubbing. This is a contraction of ‘phone snubbing’ and is used to describe the phenomenon of when one is ignoring the person one is with in order to communicate with the phone. I assume that there are extensions ‘to phub’, ‘be phubbed’, etc.
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US meddling in other countries’ elections

As the rhetoric over the possibility of Russian interference in US elections heats up, Sam Kriss reminds us of all the times that the US did not merely meddle in the elections of other countries in order to put their own person in power but when those efforts failed, actually overthrew the democratically elected leaders in order to install their preferred candidates, causing decades of immense suffering to the people of those nations.
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Head over to Marcus’s place for two important posts

I am a little too busy today to blog much but I did have time to read Marcus’ Ranum’s two pieces here and here about the latest flashpoint concerning the capture of US intelligence gathering drone by China, that explains what might be going on. It is important to get this kind of perspective to counter the jingoistic coverage that dominates much of the mainstream media.

Trump’s choice for US ambassador to Israel is an extreme right wing zealot

Josh Marshall says that David Friedman is about as far right on the spectrum of Israeli politics as one can imagine, calling him the ‘worst of the worst’.

Friedman represents the extremes of the most vicious and destructive elements of rightist Zionism and the indeed the most radical elements of American Jewry.
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Amnesty is a dirty word only when applied to people

Critics of providing some kind of pathway to legal residence, however minimal, for the undocumented immigrants in the US are quick to scream ‘Amnesty!’ whenever any such proposal is made. But they do not utter a peep when wealthy companies seek amnesty for their offshore assets. Many US companies have shifted their operations to other countries thus enabling them to take advantage of cheap labor and avoid paying US taxes. They also use the tactic of ‘inversion’ where they will buy a small company in a low tax country and make that company their nominal parent company with headquarters in that country, even though nothing actually has changed except for the filing of some paperwork. This too enables them to avoid paying US taxes since they are now a ‘foreign’ company. The only catch for them is that in both cases, if the profits are brought back into the US, taxes will have to be paid.
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Are you beautiful enough?

It is such a drag for someone who is drop-dead gorgeous to be surrounded by ugly people. Well, if you are in that situation, there is hope for you. My eye was caught by this item about a dating site that caters only to beautiful people. The website is refreshingly frank about their mission, which is to enable members to “Meet REAL beautiful people who actually look in real life as they do online” and “Browse beautiful profiles of men and women without sifting through all the riff raff”. One can become a member only if the existing members think you meet the high standard of beauty
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Calling all grammar pedants!

Are you, like me, somewhat of a grammar pedant and struggling to find gifts to give certain friends and relatives of yours who consistently say things that annoy you? Mark Frauenfelder has found just the thing. If the recipients spot the typo on the mug, they get a pardon. That error, he tells me, is an example of something called Skitt’s Law that says that “any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself.”
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