January 22, 2015

OMG, there is actually a driver worse than my mother

and the person is in Calgary. This is hysterical.

January 21, 2015

I find it ironic that on the same day we have a thread lambasting Obama

for not delivering on a single payer promise he never made while running for President, we have yet another skewering the only potential candidate who actually sought to implement single payer.

The arrogance involved in thinking you can predict the future candidate for elections that have not yet happened is stupefying. I don't know who is going to run much less who is going to win, but I can tell you with absolutely certainty the last place I will look for insight into the candidates is here. You people have been carrying on the same inane fantasy presidential election games for years and watched the Senate go to the GOP in the process, with barely a notice save a celebration thread or two for the defeat of Mary Landrieu.

The idea that a president can transform a society is an absurdity. You all are fantasizing about Warren as you did about Obama, and know just as little about her as you did him. If by some miracle you get your wish and she is elected, in a couple of years time you'll be complaining about how she is a sell out because she didn't deliver what she never promised. A president is not Santa Claus and it isn't mommy or daddy. It is a limited constitutional position that has to work with congress, a congress some here helped turn GOP by telling everyone not voting was some act of political protest. Sure it is. It's a protest that benefits the GOP, the party that won.

I don't know how it is possible to have such little awareness of the country or political system one lives under. I don't know how one let alone a group of people can imagine the power to unmake the political elite (which is what fucking electoral politics is) and corporate capitalism lies in a presidential candidate. You live in a capitalist state, in a country built around capitalism, and have fantasies that a president is going to unmake the very nature of the state he or she serves? No wonder you all spend so much time complaining. You haven't even figured out what country you live in. Or perhaps you all don't really have an issue with capitalism at all. Perhaps the reason you never before figured out that the American political system serves capital is because many of you are privileged enough that until recently you were on the winning side of that class struggle, and what you're really pissed off about is not inherent inequality in the system but that your own position has slipped a bit to where you are a bit closer to being like the rest of us.

There have been changes under the current president, an end to don't ask don't tell, a rapid growth in marriage equality, equal pay for equal work, vigorous defense of the voting rights act, enforcement of Title IX on college campuses to help keep women somewhat safer from sexual assault; national health care, and an opening of diplomatic relations with Cuba. People here have called that crumbs. They don't care because it's not about them.

January 15, 2015

Why cannot we denounce specific acts and practices

and beliefs rather than indict an entire religion and it's people? I am more than willing to denounce practices like female circumcision, denying women education, the ability to move freely in public, etc.... That doesn't mean I need to indict all of Islam. How does that help Muslim women whose religion is important to them?

I despise war. Does that mean I need to hate America? Should Muslims who resent war hate all of America? Are all Americans imperialist assholes who deserve what we get? Is America and democracy itself imperialist concepts? It's the broad brushing that's the problem. Yes, America is imperialistic, but that is not all we are. Yes, part or much of Islam is misogynistic, but that is not all it is.

The stereotypes people are repeating in this thread have been carefully inculcated in us by our government and the media. People use religion as an excuse for bigotry against great swaths of the population. It enables us to round them up and detain them, torture them, and bomb them to kingdom come. But they are misogynistic terrorists who practice a barbaric religion, so that makes it okay. No, it doesn't. The indictment of Islam is the ideological arm of the military war against parts of the Middle East. I support neither the propaganda or the war.

January 14, 2015

Charlie Hebdo, Don't pretend your new issue does not disrespect Islam

Charlie Hebdo has the right to publish what it likes within the confines of French law. I don't dispute their right to free speech, and under no circumstances do I condone or excuse the murders. Pretending, however, that there is something respectful or conciliatory about this second edition is farcical.



Charlie Hebdo chose to be defiant. They also chose to disrespect Islam and French Muslims. Depictions of the Prophet Mohammad is seen as blasphemous under Islam. Edit: The question of depicting images of Mohammad is more complicated that I originally thought. Oberlinger links to some very interesting articles below, while this article shows that many Muslims were indeed bothered by the second cover. http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014989137






In the great traditions of Islamic art and architecture, the human figure is rarely depicted, while Allah and Mohammad never appear. Note, for example, the Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque in Isfahan, Iran in comparison to the Sistine Chapel.





It does not matter if the Prophet is crying or holding a machine gun. All images are seen as blasphemous. Certainly journalists operating in a country with a significant Muslim population know something so basic. In exercising their rights to free speech, Charlie Hebdo chose to disrespect Islam and French citizens of the Muslim faith. Their legal right to free speech even allows them to cloak that disrespect in the language of forgiveness, while my rights to free speech enable me to say I find their explanation disingenuous and willfully ethnocentric. Charlie Hebdo, you are full of shit.