Islam in America by Reiham Salam. American Muslims, especially those young, female, and US born, believe that Islamophobia is rampant. The evidence for this is not only missing, but backwards
Low-Conscientiousness Losers are Bad Senate Candidates by Josh Barro.
No, the failure to cover the tattoo indicates something different about Platner: Like John Fetterman, he is a fuckup.
The death of the Summer Job You learn to deal with unreasonable people and are treated as a low-status individual. But you also learn some small competencies and in a narrow venue, people depend on you to get it right.
Harari Vs Henrich For those of you who follow the overview of evolution. The prevailing 20th C view was that increased intelligence gave rise to language which gave rise to cooperation which produced culture. There is a developing consensus that this can't have been how it happened, and may even be reversed. Henrich says it's Culture to Cooperation to Language to Intelligence. We have discussed this here before, most recently a year ago
How Vermont Became Ground-Zero for the Anti-Israel Movement This infuriates me.
In fairness, I would be delighted if he turned out as well as Fetterman. That seems unlikely to eventuate, but Fetterman has proven to have some actually good qualities. Not saying he’s the best of all possible people to be a Senator, but given that our selection mechanisms reliably produce complete scoundrels even a few good qualities is a surprise.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Grim. This if Lamb were in the Senate right now, I don’t think he would have cast the deciding vote that made Markwayne Mullin Homeland Security Secretary. seems to be a far more likely cause of Barro's dislike of Fetterman than his parents paying his living expenses while he served in the part time position of mayor. I don't really see how the two men are comparable. Platner has literally held *no* elective office prior to launching into a campaign to be a US Senator. Fetterman didn't suddenly vault to the Senate from similar obscurity. He was mayor (a part time position) of Braddock PA for over a decade and received favorable press coverage for his efforts to revitalize the town. He had a similar mostly favorable coverage of his work as Lt Governor, specifically for his actions chairing the state pardon commission.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the tattoo controversy, I don't give a flying fig what Barro "believes". There's been extensive documentation provided, based on conversations Platner had with various persons, that he was fully aware of the Nazi associations with the Totenkopf symbol as well as its history.
As far as I can tell nobody has come up with anything remotely similar to the Kik and redditt activity that Platner engaged in with regard to John Fetterman.
This is a hit piece on Fetterman dressed up to look like complaints about the douchnozzle who is likely to lose the Democrats a Senate seat they might have won, and Barro is butt hurt about both of them.
DeleteI once lived in a US town where a proposed mosque campus outside of town was controversial. In the same town, just a few years before, a similarly sized "bible theme park" the same distance out of town in a different direction had also been controversial, and the reasoning the pressure groups were willing to admit in public were nearly identical.
ReplyDeleteSo I bristled when outsiders suggested that the opposition was 'islamophobic'.
Yet I also had many conversations locally where I found myself explaining that the first amendment applied to all religions, not just Christian ones, and that the same enumerated rights that kept the government from suppressing their own faith (or lack of it) and protected me when I was critical of Islam; ALSO protected muslims who wished to build a center to worship and offer islamic education.
I found that the islamophobia wasn't rampant, but it was certainly present and loud in certain sectors.