Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
I will be leaving today to spend a few days visiting my grandson (and also my daughter and son-in-law of course, but I have my priorities) so blogging may be somewhat sporadic. But playing with him will be a nice distraction from all the pre-election political nonsense.
I just watched the first two episodes of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj on Netflix and was blown away by them. Each show focuses largely on one issue, somewhat like John Oliver does, but whereas Oliver mixes hard news and analysis in the form of a news show with him as the anchor seated behind a desk, Minhaj uses a high-energy stand-up comedy format to mix hard news with analysis, with him moving around on a stage with large screens behind and below him and talking in a fast pace. He, like Oliver, provides lots of facts and background information that one does not often hear even on news shows but interspersed with plenty of comedic analyses. It really kept me glued to the show. The fact that I agreed with everything he said on both shows may had aided my enjoyment.
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(Via Matt Bors)
Not that we should be surprised since religious zealots exist in every country and in every religion. In New Zealand, they are upset by the fact that the new speaker of the parliament has dropped references to Jesus in the prayers that open each session of parliament.
Since taking over the role in November last year, Labour’s Trevor Mallard has dropped any reference to Jesus in the prayer which opens the start of every session.
Mallard said he wanted to make the prayer more inclusive for all parliamentarians and the tweak was a “compromise”.
A reference to “almighty god” remains, but it is not a specific reference to a Christian god.
On Tuesday around 1,000 people protested on the steps of parliament house in Wellington, arguing that New Zealand was a Christian nation and Mallard had no authority to axe Jesus’s name.
The protesters want Jesus’s name reinstated, and held signs reading “Dishonourable Judas Mallard”.
“He needs a good kick in his pants, and he needs to actually be removed because this is a Christian nation,” protester Rieki Teutscher told Radio NZ. “We don’t share his atheism.”
Election day in the US is Tuesday, November 6th and I for one cannot wait for it to arrive. Elections drag on for so long here that the period before the voting is really tiresome for many reasons. One is that news coverage of every major event starts by briefly discussing the actual event before pivoting quickly to what the event might mean for the elections. Will it help the Democrats? Republicans? Trump? All this is of course pure speculation. Poll numbers will often be thrown in to support this or that view but drawing a line from events to poll numbers is highly iffy.
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Seth Meyers comments on the conspiracy mongering that nowadays routinely follows acts of violence.
The Onion perfectly satirizes the disingenuous way that Donald Trump endorses the neo-Nazi tropes of his fans while pretending to deplore the violence that they espouse.
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The good news is that Ireland has voted to remove the crime of blasphemy from its constitution, with young people leading the way.
Until recently, Ireland was deeply conservative, dominated by the Catholic church, but the country has legalised gay marriage and abortion in popular votes, and is now led by an openly gay taoiseach.
Reflecting the speed of changes in Ireland, the strongest support for ending the ban came from younger voters, exit polls suggested. Four in five voters under 35 backed the change, according to the Irish Times, while over-65s only approved it by a narrow margin, with 52% in favour and 48% against.
The government had already laid out legislation to remove the offence of blasphemy from the constitution and all relevant laws, should the referendum be passed.
It has been over 150 years since anyone was prosecuted for blasphemy in Ireland, but the country had passed a blasphemy law in 2009.
As Josh Marshall points out, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers explicitly attacked the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) that helps refuges with resettlement in the US, saying on the white nationalist social media site Gab just before the slaughter, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
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Here is an interesting news item. It seems like Trump-whisperer Steve Bannon is not the sure-fire crowd puller that the Republican party thinks he is, as evidenced by what happened when they made him the featured keynote speaker at a fundraiser.
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