Donald Trump’s weird obsession with Rosie O’Donnell

As we have seen, Donald Trump seems to place a great deal of importance on women’s looks. Matt Pearce writes that when he visited his properties, he would tell the managers to fire any woman on the staff that did not meet his standards and replace them with prettier women, and the managers had to scramble to find workarounds in order to save those women’s jobs.
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Jeremy Corbyn’s powerful speech at Labour conference

At the Labour Party conference held two days ago, newly–re-elected leader Jeremy Corbyn surprised observers by delivering a powerful speech that resulted in a standing ovation. It was a call for Labour to return to its socialist roots and reject the words of the doomsayers who think that neoliberalism is the way of the future and that Labour is heading to its doom. You can read the full text of his speech and here are some short excerpts.
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Singapore jails teenager for wounding religious feelings

Singapore is a weird country. It is technologically advanced, very modern society, boasting one of the highest standards of living and education and literacy in the world. And yet, when it comes to basic civil liberties, it is atrocious, criminalizing all manner of speech and behavior that would not raise an eyebrow in other countries that are similar to it. It has (or at least used to have) laws regulating the length of hair that men can have, massively punishing littering, and other things that it feels are not conducive of good order.
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The revenge trap

It is becoming increasingly clear that Donald Trump is smarting from his performance in the first debate. Initially, just after the debate, he seemed to think he had done pretty well, praising the moderator Lester Holt for doing a great job. This is not unusual for people like Trump who are so wrapped up in themselves that they do not realize how others see them until they are told, and even then dismissing any suggestion that they were less than excellent. But the fact that there was near unanimity that he was handed his hat by Hillary Clinton has sunk in and definitely got under his skin and he has started lashing out, calling the moderator biased, renewing his attacks on Alicia Machado, and even bizarrely suggesting that someone had tampered with his microphone.
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How to go from deism to your particular religion in eight easy steps

As I wrote in an earlier post on deism, theism and atheism, genuine deists are rarely to be found these days. Deism requires people to not affiliate themselves with any particular manifestation of religion. While sophisticated religious apologists these days will often use deistic arguments because they are the most intellectually defensible, these people are also usually affiliated with this or that particular religion and thus have to somehow make the transition from deism to theism.
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Donald Trump’s weight problem

I do not mean that Donald Trump himself is overweight but that he seems to have an almost visceral dislike of people who are over the conventional norms of weight. For example, he is like an adolescent in the way he rates women’s looks but he reserves his most vicious attacks for people like Rosie O’Donnell whom he has at various times referred to as “a woman out of control,” a “true loser,” a “total train wreck,” “disgusting,” a “slob,” “fat, ugly” “.
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