Ghost of Reagan Past posted:

I think AJA is editorially independent of Al Jazeera in Qatar. They're basically a different entity, just owned by the same folks.

Zanzibar Ham posted:

Did they locate that Good Guy with a Gun that shot at a person carjacking someone, hit the carjacking victim in the head, then picked up the shells of his gun and ran away?

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Now we're starting to see some brain drain going on; college grads that can't find decent jobs and can't pay their student loans are going "lol gently caress this poo poo" and buggering off to Europe. Can you blame them? Same with extremely Republican states. The educated and skilled are leaving for less lovely places.

Tarezax posted:

Yeah, you have a pretty skewed perspective

Motto posted:

So can gay stuff, can't it?

Davethulhu posted:

TGLT posted:

For a while there Al Jazeera had a real blindspot with Qatar if I remember correctly. Don't know if it still does. I know it's still owned by Qatar so I would imagine so. A flat "liberal/conservative" axis doesn't reeeaally capture much nuance about how an organization is biased.

Phone posted:

His ex-wife is now his personal assistant. He's dating some 20-nothing Instagram social presence bikini model.

i gotta admit, that's power move af tho

Pander posted:

I'd say PhD in a hard science field might be a start?

boner confessor posted:

imo no matter what credentials you have you're not a scientist by the strictest sense of the term unless you're doing research and publishing. this makes many educators like Tyson not necessarily science but the much rarer and arguably more useful Science Guys

smoke sumthin bitch posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBE0RKbRbl4 (video of obama telling african students the government wont let them have a car or AC while hes living a life of obscene over consumption and wealth )

Twelve by Pies posted:

Glenn Beck just said that grabbing a woman's breasts and forcing them into a kiss, and putting your erect dick on a woman's shoulder are not sexual assault.

Twelve by Pies posted:

But to Beck it's just a joke that has nothing to do with anything.

Josef bugman posted:

Sometimes I do think we tend to be quick to doubt others on their ideas when we never have the same level of scrutiny applied to our own.

BENGHAZI 2 posted:

Also there was the time Natalie referred to herself as the last of the old school transsexuals which is really weird until you remember that's some transmed bullshit and then it suddenly clicks with all the other poo poo she's said

Feinne posted:

The most unkind cut of course is that if you watch the credits Lana Wachowski contributes to her loving patreon so she almost certainly also watches the videos and had to surprise hear the rear end in a top hat who tried to get her killed.

Shbobdb posted:

A lot of it got kicked off because of the runner. She was either S African or Brazilian I forget which. Anyway she got barred and her accomplishments started because her ovaries are closer to "internal testes" and kick out a fuckton of testosterone. Shes not trans just a particular flavor of intersex.

PT6A posted:

It's fascinating how much Americans know about their presidents, even the ones who didn't really do anything noteworthy other than "die."

You'd never catch a Canadian or Brit knowing anything about our most useless has-been prime ministers, it would be unseemly and weird unless you're some kind of historian.

Republicans posted:

He's not wrong.

Harvey Mantaco posted:

Lol imagine being unlucky when it comes to towels.

There goes Ted, just absolutely towelcursed, what a life.

Twelve by Pies posted:

I'm excited to see a bunch of lovely right wing media get upset at Biden for doing something they praised Trump for doing.

Vahakyla posted:

It’s silly to perpetuate urban legends.

Star Man posted:

Is there a reason goons show sincere or sarcastic surprise over newspaper comic strips still being in print?

selec posted:

That there are worse criminals isn’t an excuse for the existence and support of lesser ones, unless you think Hunter is a “white hat failson” or something

VitalSigns posted:

Whether something should be used in criminal court is a different argument from whether the public has an interest in knowing about it.

I agree we should not make an exception on civil rights if someone did something really bad because that will be abused against the powerless. Again, OJ. The cops planted evidence and acquitting him may have been the right thing to do but he still did it and we should still know and it was still right to find him responsible in civil court.

If a powerful politician's family is committing crimes we should know even if we shouldn't use that evidence in court. If China released videos of Don Trump Jr committing a bunch of crimes wouldn't that be in the public interest. Should we be like "oh no no everyone ignore that, respect Don Jr's privacy"

OgNar posted:

As long as they can keep implying there are crimes, no crimes ever really need to exist.
Because their people really need very little to fly into a rage and no amount of truth can change that.

selec posted:

There was the video of him bullying a sex worker into saying he hadn’t abused her, which was less cool.

Twelve by Pies posted:

It really is incredible how literally every media outlet, even the supposed "liberal" ones like CNN (I know it has a new owner), the NYT and Washington Post are calling it a "spy balloon."

Twelve by Pies posted:

It doesn't matter what the analysis says because if it's just a weather balloon the military is not going to admit that, they'll make up some poo poo and say "See this proves it was a spy balloon!"

Because you definitely want your spy method to be completely and utterly useless if the breeze changes direction, that's just good espionage.

HootTheOwl posted:

To be clear: are you suggesting it /was/ a spy balloon?

Dirk the Average posted:

I would argue that it's very different than condemning Muslims for supposedly not speaking out about 9/11, or ISIS, or whatever. Muslims are not a significant power bloc in the US. On the other hand, Christians, in very large numbers, are pulling the levers of government to vote for regressive assholes. Right-wing politicians run on the idea of how Christian they are like it's some sort of purity competition. Christianity and pandering to Christians is thoroughly baked into our political system. Christians speaking out against that poo poo in large numbers can absolutely make a big difference, and if Christianity can divorce itself from right-wing politics, that would be a massive win for the country, and, frankly, for the religion.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

yeah i was born jewish and am stilll side-eying the jesus bath, believe me i get it

doesn't change the fact that "christian" means nothing without context unless you want to doff your fedora and own sky daddy

what has the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch, whose primary liturgical language is arabic, done to the US besides "exist while christian" and "get beat up because beard = terrorist"

or should everyone just self-crucify because southern evangelicals are bad?

Dopilsya posted:

Maybe I'm misunderstanding op's point, but I don't think that's a fair comparison. I think an analogy might be-- Mississippi does something really lovely and claims to do so in the name of America/the founding fathers/etc., but haranguing people in Vermont for failing to take the Mississippi government to task over it doesn't really make sense even though they're both part of the big club that is "Americans."

Civilized Fishbot posted:

I reject the idea that religion is a voluntary association any more than the country where you live, or the culture with which you affiliate, or who your family is, or what your name is, or the language/accent in which you speak, is a voluntary association.

Yes it is theoretically possible to change all of those things about yourself - sometimes it's even possible to change your race or gender assignment within society - but that doesn't mean we consider those things to actually be voluntary. The human reality is that there are enormous obstacles - psychological, social, and material - to abandoning the culture in which you were raised.

This idea that religion is just a voluntary club for people with a shared ideology/politics might be a good description of some strands of Protestant Christianity in the US but it fails to describe how religion actually functions for most people in most of the world, where it's inseparable from cultural and communal lif.

Civilized Fishbot posted:

You think it's easy for an American Jew to stop being Jewish or for an American Muslim to stop being Muslim or for an American Hindu to stop being Hindu? These identities are inseparable from broader cultural and communal affiliations, and deeply ingrained the person's own psychology from birth. It's not voluntary any more than our names or the languages we speak or where we live is voluntary. You can change any of these things, but it means overhauling your lifestyle or personal identity or both. It is scary and expensive and difficult.

I stand by what I said - "this idea that religion is just a voluntary club for people with a shared ideology/politics" is really just talking about much of American Protestant Christianity and maybe certain Protestantism-influenced Catholic communities.

Many of the posters in this conversation are saying things about American Protestant Christianity, things that look basically true to me, but then talking about "religion" as if the whole of religion is or ought to be American Protestant Christianity.

Civilized Fishbot posted:

Seems easier to say "individuals are morally responsible for the injustices that they have the power to stop, regardless of what they do or don't have in common with the perpetrators or victims." Is there a reason not to go with that?

Civilized Fishbot posted:

I think leaving is the moral act because this hypothetical of someone where it literally doesn't make any material difference whether they're in the klan or not is absurd. I don't agree with the idea that people can be morally obligated to do things that don't have consequences. Consequences are what give weight to our actions.

Leaving the Klan might reflect well on someone depending on their reason for doing it - assuming they're not leaving because they're mad they don't get to be the grand wizard or whatever, that they're leaving because they're disgusted by violent racism, that shows the person has a good heart, but if you're telling me that nothing changes as a result of the decision then to me that means the decision morally null.

Any other way of thinking about it, where actions have moral weight beyond their actual material consequences, feels, well, religious.

Civilized Fishbot posted:

To me it seems like all that stuff simplifies and essentializes messy cultural constructions, obscures the relationship between power and moral duty, and, in the case of ethnic/religious/cultural minorities, justifies dangerous bigotry. On the last page we were told Muslims should "stop bitching" about "guilt-by-association" for what the Saudi government does, and now we've reached a point where being a member of the wrong religion is implicitly analogized to being part of a violent terror cell.

Civilized Fishbot posted:

Uh, I'm not Catholic. I just grew up being told it's bad to blame Muslims for 9/11 and never grew out of it, I guess.

Civilized Fishbot posted:

You said you'd show me why it's bad to hold people responsible for the consequences of their own choices and nothing else, I still don't see it.

Civilized Fishbot posted:

I'm arguing with you because you said something wrong on the internet and I have that kind of weirdo syndrome where I can't let it stand, I figured that's what all of us are doing here.

Civilized Fishbot posted:

Which is why you think "being a Muslim" and "being in the literal KKK" are comparable.

Civilized Fishbot posted:

If you can't tell the difference between being a Muslim and being a terrorist, you shouldn't be lecturing others about excusing bigotry.

Civilized Fishbot posted:

I said Muslims and Jews should not be held accountable for the evil done in the name of their religion, because it's morally incorrect and because it puts them in danger, and you said, "well, imagine it was the KKK." I guess I have to admit I don't know why you think that's a useful analogy, but I disagree, it's not a useful analogy because "Muslim" and "Jewish" are benign cultural identities and the KKK is a violent terror cell.

I agree - if you're a member of a group that does harm, that's bad. Being Muslim or Jewish should not mean that you're held in suspicion as someone who's in a group that does harm. Because that suspicion is both morally unfair and literally deadly.

If it had stayed about Christianity it wouldn't matter to me, because anti-Christian violence doesn't happen in this country. But people in this thread started saying "yeah, no matter what religion you are, you should be ready to be held accountable for crimes committed in the name of that religion" which in the case of Muslims and Jews has gotten people killed.