Category: Current Events

From John Scalzi:

So, this week.

The last few days are a reminder that a large number of Americans are in fact shrieking, bigoted cowards, and that's a sad thing, indeed.

Seriously, I don't think the bedwetting about Muslims has been this bad in a very long time, which is saying something, and the panic on Syrian refugees is particularly ridiculous. Here's a nice, juicy quote from a just released essay on the subject:

Of the 859,629 refugees admitted from 2001 onwards, only three have been convicted of planning terrorist attacks on targets outside of the United States and none was successfully carried out.  That is one terrorism-planning conviction for a refugee for every 286,543 of them who have been admitted.  To put that in perspective, about 1 in every 22,541 Americans committed murder in 2014.  The terrorist threat from Syrian refugees in the United States is hyperbolically over-exaggerated and we have very little to fear from them because the refugee vetting system is so thorough…

The security threat posed by refugees in the United States is insignificant.  Halting America's processing of refugees due to a terrorist attack in another country that may have had one asylum-seeker as a co-plotter would be an extremely expensive overreaction to very minor threat.

What horrifyingly liberal commie soviet came up with this load of codswallop? The Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank co-founded by Charles Koch, i.e., the fellow who with his brother is currently trying to buy the entire right side of the political spectrum for his own personal ends. When the Cato Institute is telling you to maybe take down the pearl-clutching over the Syrian refugees a notch or two, it's an indication that you've lost all perspective.

It's been particularly embarrassing how the mostly-but-not-exclusively (and thankfully not all-encompassing) GOP/conservative politician freakout about the Syrian refugees points out that, why, hello, bigotry really is a thing, still. From small-town mayors declaring that FDR had it right when he put all those US citizens of Japanese descent into camps to presidential candidates alluding that might not actually be a bad idea to make special IDs exclusively for Muslims here in the US, to the House of Representatives passing a bill to piss on the Syrian refugees, it's been a banner week for bigotry here in the US, enough so that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum took the extraordinary step of issuing a statement of concern with reference to the Syrian refugees. And as many have noted, there is irony in the freakout about Syrian refugees coming into a season which celebrates a notable middle eastern family who famously were refugees at one point in their history, according to some tales.

But as this asshole politician said this week, "Mary and Jesus didn't have suicide bomb vests strapped on them, and these folks do." Well, no, they don't. Leaving aside that the perpetrators on the attacks in Paris all appeared to live in Europe to begin with, the actual process for placing refugees in new countries is so long and arduous and so selective, with just 1% of applicants being placed, that (as the Cato Institute astutely notes) there's a vanishingly small chance that someone with ill intent will make it through the process at all — and an even smaller chance that they would be assigned to the US when all the vetting is done. To worry about terrorists in the refugee pool is, flatly, stupid — no terrorist organization is going to pour resources into an avenue with such a small chance of success, especially when it's easier to apply for a friggin' visa and get on a plane (they can buy their guns when they get here, don't you know). The reasons why so many people are voiding their bowels about it are simple: Ignorance, racism, xenophobia and bigotry.

"But people are scared!" Okay, and? Being scared may be the excuse for abandoning all sense and reason in the moment one is actively under attack; it's not even close to a reasonable excuse for, thousands of miles away from an attack and with no immediate threat on the horizon, vilifying innocent co-religionists of the attackers and plotting to slam the door on refugees running from the very people who claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks. Taking the Paris attacks out on Syrian refugees is security theater — it doesn't make us safer, it'll just make the most ignorant among us feel safer. It's the TSA of solutions to the Daesh/ISIS problem.

This has been a bad week for the United States, folks. France was directly attacked by terrorists and its response was to promise to house 30,000 Syrian refugees; we weren't and one branch of our government fell over itself to put the brakes on accepting a third of that number. France is defying the very organization that attacked it while we, on the other hand, are doing exactly what that organization hoped we would do. We're being the cowardly bigots they hoped we would be, and as loudly as possible.

So congratulations, America. We've successfully wrested the title of "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" from France. Enjoy it.

Oh yes he did. What an fuckin' ASSHOLE.

From AMERICAblog:

In a lengthy interview with Yahoo News, Trump promised to deport Syrian refugees who are already in this country, doubled down on his promise to monitor mosques and, when pressed by Yahoo News as to what other drastic actions he would take, expressed an openness to warrantless and widespread surveillance on the general Muslim population:

"We're going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule," Trump said. "And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we're going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago."

Yahoo News asked Trump whether this level of tracking might require registering Muslims in a database or giving them a form of special identification that noted their religion. He wouldn't rule it out.

Trump didn't elaborate on whether the "form of special identification" could be, say, a yellow crescent that every Muslim would be required to sew into their clothing. But he may as well have. I'm a big proponent of reserving Hitler comparisons for the most extreme circumstances, but this is one of them. Donald Trump just pulled a policy proposal straight out of the Nuremberg Laws.

What's more, unless he's called on it, he's going to say something worse tomorrow. Since the attacks in Paris, Trump has been inching further and further toward advocating for open fascism. First he said we should "seriously consider" closing mosques associated with extreme clerics. When that claim didn't hurt him, he went a step further, saying we have "absolutely no choice" but to close them. He's going to keep going back to the anti-Muslim bigotry well until the Republican base signals for him to stop. And they've shown no intention of doing so.

Yesterday, we heard an elected official say that Japanese internment wasn't actually that bad of an idea. Now we have the frontrunner for the Republican nomination seriously considering a policy that was one of the defining characteristics of pre-war Nazi Germany. All over a contrived threat and an irrational bout of Islamophobia.

America needs to chill the hell out. This is going south fast.

Religious pluralism in U.S. foreign policy predates our own Constitution. Which, by the way, makes no reference to God.

There is no doubt that the Islamic State poses a threat to the Western world, including the U.S., its allies and global interests. Still, we needn't turn this campaign against terrorists into something that it isn't—a holy war. Doing doesn't just go against the First Amendment, but it also runs counter to everything our founders tried to establish.

Cruz, Bush, Kasich and others that would have American foreign policy end with "in Jesus name amen" are foolish and, as President Obama would correctly say, un-American.

Suffice it to say that they either don't understand America's history with regards to religious pluralism here and abroad, or they've chosen to ignore it." ~ Chris Walker at AMERICAblog

From Skeptic Ink:

In the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, many are asking how we should fight terrorism. I think this is an important question and I have a really good answer for it.

First, let us be clear here. While obviously not all Muslims are terrorists, the fact is that the terrorists that attacked Paris were Muslims and when we think about terrorism around the world today, most people are thinking about Muslim terrorists (i.e. terrorists claiming to be inspired my the religion of Islam). Republicans and hawkish Democrats want to wage war on the Arab world. The conventional wisdom is to use drone strikes, train foreign fighters, put boots on the ground, and create no-fly zones. Some have even promoted the idea of torturing Muslims for information (Dick Cheney, I'm looking at you).

I think all of those things are bad ideas. They are strategies that have proven not only ineffective, but counter-productive. Those courses of action have only created more extremists and have pushed moderates into joining the cause of extremism. These are the very strategies that created the Islamic State (ISIS) and have allowed them to recruit less extremists to their extremist cause.

What I am suggesting is to take the gloves off. I don't mean that we should let loose with military might, but instead to let loose with the might of logic and reason. We can't be afraid to spread the reality that Allah is imaginary and that Mohammad was not a prophet. Instead of dropping bombs, we should be dropping facts about reality. We should be out there pointing out the scientific and logical problems with the Muslim religion.

But we can't do that because if we point out the absurdity of the Muslim religion, we would also be pointing out the absurdity of the Christian and Jewish religions. I'm fine with that, but most of the people in our country are not. As a result, we are forced to wear kid gloves and not offend our own population. This prevents us from using our best weapon against terrorism.

The fact is that terrorists around the world would be far less likely to be terrorists if they were no longer religious. In fact, atheism is the cure not just for terrorism, but for a lot of social problems here in America too. There would be far less homophobia and bigotry in America if Christians stopped being Christian. Issues like Climate Change, women's rights, etc. are all propagated by religion. We could drastically reduce the opposition to these issues if we just got religious believers to stop believing in religion.

So here we have a cure not only for many of society's problems but also the current wave of terrorism around the globe. All we have to do is convince people that their deity of choice is imaginary and that their ancient superstitions don't match up with reality. Unfortunately, because of the superstitious beliefs of many in our own country, we are prevented from even trying.

From Towleroad (emphasis mine):

Voila, the "manifesto" of the Paris suicide bombers, in their own words.

Their obsession with sexual revenge, the revenge of the sexually rejected, is intense: They referred to the Bataclan nightclub as a place where where hundreds of "apostates" had gathered in a "profligate prostitution party"—that means a rock concert.

Bohemian Paris is on top of ISIS' target list because it is the country of "obscenity and perversity." Again, it's Paris' mythic reputation for the libertine, for free sexual exchange, for romance and unashamed ecstasy.

This "faith army," this death cult built on sexual repression masked as religious purity—has a detailed manual about how to run a sex-slave market of their war captives, including rules of inheritance. Essentially, you can't be a soldier in their army unless you buy into the faith that beautiful women everywhere are taunting and rejecting you, but you will teach them all a lesson by enslaving and raping them all day long—same with young boys. Everything "depraved" is holy when you're inflicting it upon a slave—makes perfect sense, right?

At some point your Grand Wizard arranges a marriage with an appointed virgin your parents picked out for her dowry. She is of no erotic interest; she is a nonperson except as your baby-receptacle and income source. Siring sons is her husbandry.

Meanwhile, you monitor all the women's menstrual cycles and the puberty of the young boys and girls in your slave pen so you can be sure to rape the right person on the most advantageous day, repeatedly shouting God's name when you come.

VOMIT. Vomit. Vomit.

Every fundamentalist religion today is running on the fumes of sexual psychosis. They are huffing and huffing and huffing until they annihilate everything including themselves.

No one is being jailed for practicing her religion. Someone's being jailed for using the government to force others to practice her religion." ~ Rachael Held Evans

With the emphasis on nut.