Excellent critique of Sam Harris

I came across this excellent and thoughtful critique of Sam Harris (and in passing the members of the so-called ‘intellectual dark web’ that he belongs to) by someone who identifies himself as T1J. The title of the video is Why I Stopped Idolizing Sam Harris and, as the author explains, “While I don’t hate Sam Harris like some other progressives, he has stopped being the intellectual hero that he once was in my eyes.” The video explains the reasons for that disenchantment. The video is 23 minutes long but is so well done that I did not notice the time passing.
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The cruelty and inhumanity of the US

It is absolutely disgusting that the children of undocumented immigrants are separated from their parents for weeks on end with no contact. I would like to think that one day we will look back on this shameful episode and as a nation feel deeply embarrassed and try to make amends. But given how people manage to avoid doing so for past shameful acts (genocide of Native Americans, slavery and Jim Crow, internment of Japanese-Americans, massacres in other countries, and many more), I am not hopeful. Americans are absolutely convinced that they are a fundamentally decent, even exemplary, nation and people who hold such views can never be persuaded that they are just as capable of cruelty as anyone else.
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Noam Chomsky on anarcho-syndicalism and libertarianism

The famous linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky describes his own political stance as that of anarcho-syndicalism and he is no fan of libertarianism. In an interview with Chomsky, Michael S. Wilson says that in the US, anarchists are largely seen as consisting of “disenfranchised punks throwing rocks at store windows, or masked men tossing ball-shaped bombs at fat industrialists”. Wilson asks Chomsky what he thinks the two positions represent and why he favors the former and dislikes the latter.
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The wild Californian primary system

Yesterday was primary election day in California. David Dayen and Ryan Grim analyze the results and argue that progressives had a good outcome, despite fears that the unusual system in that state might lead to a disaster.

With all precincts reporting, [Katie] Porter, a Sen. Elizabeth Warren protégé invested with the hopes of the progressive movement, ended with 19,453 votes. It was enough, putting her roughly 2,600 ahead of her main Democratic challenger David Min.
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Min, a former Sen. Chuck Schumer staffer, Center for American Progress fellow, and assistant professor at Porter’s school, UC Irvine, had the backing of the state party and the New Democrats, a Wall Street-friendly bloc that supplied 27 of the 33 House Democratic votes in favor of the recent bank deregulation bill. Porter was the only House candidate endorsed by Warren, her former teacher and co-author.

Min, meanwhile, was hesitant to embrace “Medicare for All” and ran a slashing race attacking Porter’s credentials. Porter ran on battling big banks, expanding Social Security, reversing the Trump tax cuts, and establishing “Medicare for All” — and she won.
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THE NEW DEMOCRATS suffered another defeat in a race that pitted the two camps of the party against each other in San Diego’s 50th District. Ammar Campa-Najjar, who ran as a progressive with the backing of Justice Democrats, PCCC, and DFA, beat Josh Butner, endorsed by the New Democrats and backed by the Wall Street-friendly Rep. Joe Crowley, the chair of the House Democratic Caucus, who is facing his own challenge from the left back home in the Bronx and Queens from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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Killing people to save them

During the Vietnam war, an American major said after the destruction of the Vietnamese village Ben Tre that “It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.” That macabre statement grimly captured the senselessness of war in general and the Vietnam conflict in particular, as the US laid waste to that country ostensibly to save it from Communism, but in reality for a complex of reasons that it was unwilling to explicitly acknowledge.

A similar statement can be applied to the way that the police in the US respond to calls that suggest that someone has suicidal thoughts. Police with guns drawn broke into the apartment of Chelsea Manning for what is called a “wellness check” after they received a call from someone that she had posted tweets that suggested suicidal thoughts. Fortunately for Manning, she was not at home (she was out of the country) or she might have been shot dead. Here is video footage from security cameras that show the police entering the apartment.

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The Colorado same-sex cake ruling

The US Supreme Court yesterday issued a 7-2 ruling that upheld the decision by a Colorado baker to not bake a cake for the wedding of a same-sex couple. While this is not a good thing, it could have been a lot worse. The ruling was very narrowly crafted to deal with very specific particulars of this case and so cannot be taken as a blanket license for private businesses to discriminate against the LGBTQ community. Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor were the dissenters. You can read the opinions here.
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