General Harris instructs liberals to surrender on the home front

Sam Harris does it again, opening his yap and exposing his biases.

Liberals have really failed on the topic of theocracy. They’ll criticize white theocracy, they’ll criticize Christians. They’ll still get agitated over the abortion clinic bombing that happened in 1984. But when you want to talk about the treatment of women and homosexuals and free thinkers and public intellectuals in the Muslim world, I would argue that liberals have failed us.

Hell yes, I’m still agitated over any abortion clinic bombing. Shouldn’t we all be? I’m also agitated over female genital mutilation and shooting girls who want an education in Pakistan. I can be frustrated by all the onslaughts against modernity everywhere; I don’t treat it as a failure of liberalism that American women are fighting for their rights at home as a priority; I’m sure that almost all of them feel a sense of solidarity with women around the world, but in most cases they are far more limited in what they can do about Somalia than they are about taking action in their own back yard.

Libby Anne really rips into him for that stupid remark.

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I read the Morris North Star, so you don’t have to

Last year, there was a rather ridiculous tempest in a tea cup in which our local conservative “alternative” student newspaper, the Morris North Star, published some sick racist crap, and I suggested that the campus ought to throw the paper out, and then they threatened to sue me. Nothing happened, except that the North Star stopped publishing for the rest of the semester — I think they probably ran out of money.

This year, I thought we might be rid of them. Their lawyers had gone silent, and no more crappy editions appeared. Unfortunately, our luck has run out, and new slimy stuff has appeared.

I thought I’d do them a favor. Since they’re so touchy about people taking their paper — they now say on the cover, First Copy: FREE. All subsequent copies are $5 — I thought I’d encourage you all to take zero copies. But if you’re really curious, I thought I’d be nice and summarize the content for you.

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A #gamergate poll

I don’t expect to win this one: it’s gotten the attention of github, the core of the dudebro universe, and it’s already gone far in the direction of delusion, with swarms of self-righteous gamer goons rushing to vote for their bias. The poll asks, What do you think is at the heart of GamerGate? (and like all badly designed polls, uses choices to split the vote). Here’s the status so far:

gamergatepoll

And this is right after the article tells you to go read a summary written by the GamerGate goons which starts like this:

We’ve got years of social justice ideologies, largely radical-feminist rhetoric, once thought safely contained within small blogging communities such as Tumblr, becoming more and more prevalent within games reporting.

How do you look yourself in the mirror in the morning if you are willing to so openly condemn “social justice”? Isn’t it also clear that what bothers these guys most is feminism?

Go vote. Despair that you’re outnumbered, but just remember: you’re atheists. You’ve always been outnumbered. You’ve also always been right.

Master of bad logic

I once read a book by Jason Lisle — it might have been his “Ultimate Proof of Creation”, or maybe “Logic and Faith”, I can’t really remember, it was such a tedious droning bore — and was unimpressed. If you claim to be using pure logic to determine the nature of the universe, and arrive at the conclusion that your idiosyncratic, culturally determined religious mythology is literally and perfectly true, it’s safe to say that you’re doing something wrong.

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A little bit of hope in a very typical story

Angel Mario Vega, a student at Minnesota State University Moorhead, tried a too-typical stunt: he got a couple of young women (one of them under age) disgustingly drunk, literally carried one of them to his dorm room, set up a camera, and filmed himself raping her. Oh, and of course he bragged to his buddies about it and invited them to come watch. Stupid and a rapist, that usual sweet combination.

But then something interesting happened.

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