“The Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouths,” Mr. Putin said. “I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to respond to any challenges.”
Sundance Liked Her Documentary on Terrorism, Until Muslim Critics Didn’t
Film critics warned that conservatives might bridle at these human portraits.
But attacks would come from the left, not the right. Arab and Muslim filmmakers and their white supporters accused Ms. Smaker of Islamophobia and American propaganda. Some suggested her race was disqualifying, a white woman who presumed to tell the story of Arab men.
Sundance leaders reversed themselves and apologized.
Abigail Disney, had been the executive producer of Jihad Rehab. Now she disavowed it. "The film landed like a truckload of hate. I failed, failed and absolutely failed to understand just how exhausted by and disgusted with the perpetual representation of Muslim men and women as terrorists or former terrorists or potential terrorists the Muslim people are.”
Assia Boundaoui, a filmmaker, critiqued it for Documentary magazine.
“To see my language and the homelands of folks in my community used as backdrops for white savior tendencies is nauseating,” she wrote. “The talk is all empathy, but the energy is Indiana Jones.”
“An entirely white team behind a film about Yemeni and South Arabian men,” the filmmaker Violeta Ayala wrote in a tweet.
Ms. Smaker’s film had a Yemeni-American executive producer and a Saudi co-producer.
More than 230 filmmakers signed a letter denouncing the documentary. A majority had not seen it.
“When I, a practicing Muslim woman, say that this film is problematic,” wrote Jude Chehab, a Lebanese American documentarian, “my voice should be stronger than a white woman saying that it isn’t. Point blank.”
The argument over whether artists should share racial or ethnic identity and sympathy with their subjects is long running in literature and film — with many artists and writers, like the documentarians Ken Burns and Nanfu Wang, arguing it would be suffocating to tell the story of only their own culture.
Jihad Turk, former imam of Los Angeles’s largest mosque, was baffled.
“My first instinct,” he said, “was ‘Oh, not another film on jihad and Islam.’ Then I watched and it was introspective and intelligent. My hope is that there is a courageous outlet that is not intimidated by activists and their too narrow views.”
Mr. Trump had told advisers in the days before the march that he wanted to join his supporters in going to the Capitol, but White House officials said no, according to people briefed on the discussions. The president had also expressed interest beforehand in calling in the National Guard to hold off anti-Trump counterprotesters who might show up, the people said, only to turn around and resist calls for bringing those troops in after the rioting by his loyalists broke out.
The people in the crowd were angry, and “Chapo Trap House” wanted them to stay that way. The five hosts of the popular socialist podcast wanted everyone to know they had all been lied to. About everything.
The media they consumed was fake news aimed to distract them from the only war worth fighting: the class war. Politesse, civility, even pleasure — those were tools of the neoliberal oppressor. The right answer is rage.
“That joy,” the Chapo co-host Will Menaker said to the crowd gathered in Iowa City on the eve of the Iowa caucus. “That’s good but it’s not as good a motivator when you’re really going to war as spite.”
“Let the hate feed you,” the co-host Amber A’Lee Frost added as the audience roared.
And it does. Especially toward other Democrats.
Supporters of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. are “gelatinous 100-year-olds.”
Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg is “a bloodless asexual.”
“The gayest thing about him is he descends from an ethnic group that’s like a little toy dog,” Ms. A’Lee Frost said.
When Senator Elizabeth Warren’s name came up, the crowd made the sound of a snake hissing. She had accused Senator Bernie Sanders of saying that a woman could not beat President Trump, and so she is a snake.
“Yes, my sssssoldiers,” Mr. Menaker said.
Former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s run appalls them. “Beat him so badly that this midget gremlin won’t even have a shot even with a trillion dollars,” Mr. Menaker said.
“Kill him,” someone shouted from the audience. These were jokes, of course. Everyone was laughing.
As Mr. Sanders rises in the polls and claims strong showings in early states, a new set of media stars is on the rise, too. Leading the pack are the hosts of “Chapo Trap House,” the Pied Pipers of the candidate’s online movement.
In their rowdy, vulgar weekly podcast, they are stoking the fires of a political insurgency led by their 78-year-old idol. The man stands for the movement, the movement is the man.
“Our boy Bernie” they call him.
The fivesome of “Chapo Trap House" are not the only bards of the new American left — there is “Red Scare” and another whose name cannot be printed — but they have led the way for a movement that together generates millions of dollars a year. They are on their way to becoming the socialist’s answer to right-wing shock jock radio. Their primary targets, in evidence at that show in Iowa, are not the Republican Party or even Mr. Trump but rather centrist liberals, whom they see as the major obstacle to a workers’ revolution.
…
The main draw of the show is their banter, the hosts distilling the news of the week and checking in on their favorite and least favorite characters. But they have had major guests, including Mr. Sanders himself.
“These people on top are so powerful that the only way we bring them down, the only way we make the kinds of transformation this country absolutely requires is when millions of people are prepared to stand up and fight back,” Mr. Sanders said during his interview.
And the Sanders campaign maintains a close relationship with the podcast. His senior adviser, David Sirota, and his national press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, have also been on the podcast. At the Iowa show, a Sanders volunteer stood at the door with fliers and pins to hand out and an email list to gather names.
Their followers — on the night in Iowa City more than 700 strong — come to hear them rage for three hours against the student debt, the high rent, the dead-end creative class jobs, and the feeling of hopelessness fighting against a liberal political establishment that seems polite when they are angry.
They were promised a better life, a more dignified life, and they are done waiting for it.
…
An additional challenge is that as the free-floating anger they stoke finds community, it is escalating and souring into sometimes violent and ugly rhetoric — the kind of rhetoric that other Democratic contenders have fashioned into a major critique of Mr. Sanders.
On Monday, the Sanders campaign fired a campaign organizer, Ben Mora, after his private Twitter feed was revealed to include derogatory comments about 2020 candidates. The Chapo hosts publicly supported Mr. Mora, praising his organizing work and saying, “I hope the campaign doesn’t cave to these whiners and losers.”
For the hosts and their fans, those sort of tweets and the podcast language are all jokes. The audience understands the difference, they argue, and anyway the real problem with the Democrats is that they’re overly sensitive. A bunch of self-serious P.M.C.s (members of the professional-managerial class).
In today’s Republican Party, the path to power is to build up a lie in order to overturn democracy. At least that is what Senator Josh Hawley was telling us when he offered a clenched-fist salute to the pro-Trump mob before it ransacked the Capitol, and it is the same message he delivered on the floor of the Senate in the aftermath of the attack, when he doubled down on the lies about electoral fraud that incited the insurrection in the first place.
[…]
In multiple speeches, an interview and a widely shared article for Christianity Today, Mr. Hawley has explained that the blame for society’s ills traces all the way back to Pelagius — a British-born monk who lived 17 centuries ago. In a 2019 commencement address at The King’s College, a small conservative Christian college devoted to “a biblical worldview,” Mr. Hawley denounced Pelagius for teaching that human beings have the freedom to choose how they live their lives and that grace comes to those who do good things, as opposed to those who believe the right doctrines.
The most eloquent summary of the Pelagian vision, Mr. Hawley went on to say, can be found in the Supreme Court’s 1992 opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Mr. Hawley specifically cited Justice Anthony Kennedy’s words reprovingly: “At the heart of liberty,” Kennedy wrote, “is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The fifth century church fathers were right to condemn this terrifying variety of heresy, Mr. Hawley argued: “Replacing it and repairing the harm it has caused is one of the challenges of our day.”
[…]
In a 2017 speech to the American Renewal Project, he [Hawley] declared — paraphrasing the Dutch Reformed theologian and onetime prime minister Abraham Kuyper — “There is not one square inch of all creation over which Jesus Christ is not Lord.” Mr. Kuyper is perhaps best known for his claim that Christianity has sole legitimate authority over all aspects of human life.
A high school English teacher in Fort Worth was fired on Tuesday after asking President Trump to rid her school of undocumented immigrants in public Twitter posts that she thought were private messages to the president.
The board of the Fort Worth Independent School District voted unanimously to terminate the contract of the teacher, Georgia Clark, less than a week after she was suspended over her Twitter activity. Fourteen people at the board meeting spoke against Ms. Clark’s continued employment, with none in support, according to Fox 4 News.
According to a school district review obtained by The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Ms. Clark, who had taught in the district since 1998, admitted that the Twitter posts were hers. A lawyer for Ms. Clark, Brandon Brim, did not respond to a message seeking comment.
On May 17, in a series of tweets addressed to “Mr. President,” Ms. Clark said her school district was “loaded” with undocumented students from Mexico, that her high school had been “taken over by them,” and that drug dealers had not been punished. She blamed an assistant principal, whom she referred to as a “Hispanic assistant principal who protects certain students from criminal prosecution.”
“Anything you can do to remove the illegals from Fort Worth would be greatly appreciated,” she said, using a pejorative term for undocumented immigrants.
She then listed two private phone numbers and assured the president that she was using her real name. She later told an investigator that she had received several messages on those numbers calling her racist and that she had filed a police report.
On May 22, she followed up on Twitter in another post directed to Mr. Trump: “I really do need a contact here in Fort Worth who should be actively investigating and removing the illegals that are in public school system.”
if you want to win a trade war why educate the so called enemy? throw out all the chinese nationals now enrolled in american schools and you'll find out how fast discussions will lead to a trade pact.
It is a travesty that American universities are spending their resources educating the Chinese, America's foremost competitor. All transcripts coming out of China are suspect due to rampant cheating and bribery in their society at all levels. The US government should place a ban on Chinese nationals attending American universities.
Another Model Minority. Now, Chinese are at the US Supreme Court demanding, not asking for, a seat at Harvard. But not in a million years would Beijing University give up 1 seat for a nonChinese. The trade imbalance applies to every conceivable thing and person that could be traded, but only on terms hugely advantageous to China. If you think the trade war is something new, think again... you are 225 years late. Ask Ambassador George McCartney.
Another, Brenda Walker, a Sierra Club member, recently urged readers of the anti-immigrant Web site www.vdare.com to join the club and vote for the outside candidates.
In a column about Hmong immigrants on that site, she wrote, ''So will thousands of drug-addicted polygamists be welcomed into America in another escalation of multiculturalism against American values?'
WASHINGTON — President Trump reverted Tuesday to blaming both sides for the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Va., and at one point questioned whether the movement to pull down Confederate statues would lead to the desecration of memorials to George Washington.
Abandoning his precisely chosen and carefully delivered condemnations of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis from a day earlier, the president furiously stuck by his initial reaction to the unrest in Charlottesville. He drew the very moral equivalency for which a bipartisan chorus, and his own advisers, had already criticized him.
“I think there is blame on both sides,” the president said in a combative exchange with reporters at Trump Tower in Manhattan. “You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.”
Mr. Trump defended those gathered in a Charlottesville park to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. “I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups,” he said. “Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.”
He criticized “alt-left” groups that he claimed were “very, very violent” when they sought to confront the white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups that had gathered in Charlottesville.
“Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Mr. Trump said. “So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”
It was a remarkable rejection of the criticism he confronted after waiting two days before naming the right-wing groups in the bloodshed that ended with the death of a young woman after a car crashed into a crowd of protesters.
Mr. Trump accused people he called the alt-left of “swinging clubs” as they “came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right.” He said some of the right-wing members of the crowd in the Virginia park were “bad.” But he added that the other side came “charging in without a permit and they were very, very violent.”
Aides had urged him for days to take the high ground, persuading him on Monday to read a brief statement condemning the neo-Nazi groups from the Diplomatic Room in the White House. But over the past day, back in his private New York residence for the first time since becoming president, Mr. Trump was alone, without his wife and young son, and consuming hours of television, with many on cable news telling him he had not done enough.
On Monday night, he was tweeting his frustration, accusing the “fake media” of never being satisfied. But by Tuesday morning, the president was fuming again. At a scheduled event about the permitting process for infrastructure, Mr. Trump asked for questions — contrary to the wishes of his aides, including John F. Kelly, his new chief of staff, who stood to the side, looking grim.
Venting, his face red as he personally executed the defense of his own actions that no one else would, Mr. Trump all but erased any good will he had earned Monday when he named racist groups and called them “repugnant to everything we hold dear.”
Mr. Trump said his initial statement was shaped by a lack of information about the events in Charlottesville, even though television statements had been broadcasting images of the violence throughout the morning.
“There was no way of making a correct statement that early,” he said. “I had to see the facts, unlike a lot of reporters. I didn’t know David Duke was there. I wanted to see the facts.”
Within minutes, Mr. Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, praised Mr. Trump’s comments as a condemnation of “leftist terrorists.”
“Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville,” Mr. Duke said in a Twitter post.
But Mr. Trump also made it clear that even now — with the benefit of hindsight — he does not accept the overwhelming criticism that he should have reserved his condemnation for the white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups.
Mr. Trump called the driver of the car who the authorities said crashed into the crowd, James Alex Fields Jr., 20, “a disgrace to himself, his family and this country. You can call it terrorism. You can call it murder. You can call it whatever you want.”
Speaking bluntly about an ongoing investigation in a way that presidents rarely do, Mr. Trump said Mr. Fields, who is being held without bail on charges of murder and malicious wounding in the death of Heather Heyer, is “a murderer.”
“What he did was a horrible, horrible, inexcusable thing,” Mr. Trump said.
But he refused to explicitly say that the killing of the young woman was a case of domestic terrorism, saying only that “you get into legal semantics.”
The president also gave himself a pat on the back from Ms. Heyer’s mother, who thanked him in a statement for “words of comfort and for denouncing those who promote violence and hatred” after Monday’s remarks.
Mr. Trump said: “I thought it was terrific. Under the kind of stress that she is under and the heartache she is under, I thought putting out that statement to me was really something I won’t forget.”
He also unleashed his frustration at the news media on Tuesday, saying they were being “fake” because they did not acknowledge that his initial statement about the Charlottesville protest was “very nice.”
Again and again, Mr. Trump rejected any portrayal that nationalist protesters in the city were all neo-Nazis or white supremacists, and he said it was unfair to suggest that they were.
He said blame for the violence in the city — which also took the lives of two Virginia state troopers when their helicopter crashed — should also be on people from “the left” who came to oppose the nationalist protesters.
The president said it should be “up to a local town, community” to say whether the statue of Lee should remain in place.
Soon after Mr. Trump was done speaking, he wandered close to the velvet rope line that held a group of about 20 reporters and photographers, his mood noticeably brighter. A reporter asked if he planned to visit Charlottesville after the tragedy there. Mr. Trump replied by saying he has a house there, and provided an endorsement of the Trump Winery nearby.
Then he disappeared into Trump Bar, taking a shortcut to his residence next door.
*On the Pluto flyby*
I have a feeling this whole thing could be staged. You know, some have said that the moon landings were staged and no man was never actually thar. These could be photographs of balloons or something.
Africa for the Africans. Asia for the Asians. Arabia for the Arabs, Latin America for Hispanics but of course Europe and historically white countries for everyone.
Every nation has a right to preserve its ethnic and cultural identity except for European ones because as well know Western Culture is just an idea and has nothing to do with its historic people because white identity is just an invention though people being white is clearly a huge problem that we must overcome.
This is the cognitive dissonance we are dealing with.
All of you white liberals are astonishingly stupid and naive to think you will be safe in a future society dominated by non whites or that it would conform to your silly, utopian fantasy. These groups will simply Balkanize and vote their self interest based on ethnicity which is already the case with their disproportionate support for left wing parties.
Even more galling is that most of the boutique socialists commenting here are unaffected by these changes and so while they live in overwhelmingly white communities and send their children to private schools it's working class whites who deal with the consequences of their insanity in the form of displacement, crime, wage stagnation and inflation.
But reasonable people will simply not put up with this nonsense anymore. We have a right to exist, we have a right to preserve our identity. And this corrupt, Neo-Liberal world order will be relegated to the rubbish bin of history where it belongs.
If Mexico was predicting that in a few decades Mexicans would be less the 50% of the population of Mexico because of lower birth rates and the rise of Black and Asian immigration, would it really be surprising or worthy of ridicule if they expressed anger of fear over that and felt that somehow their demise was being orchestrated by the government? Would it really be because they must be racists who hate diversity? No, it's being normal.
In Austin, TX, Hispanic activists attack White businesses that have moved into traditionally Hispanic areas, but it is celebrated for attacking gentrification and preserving the ethnic character of the area. That of course if fine and noble and certainly not driven by any racist attitudes. Or I suppose when traditionally Black neighborhoods in the LA area became majority Hispanic and Blacks were driven from those neighborhoods they were supposed to celebrate that as one of the beauties of diversity?
Which race or ethnic group would cherish the idea of being replaced or becoming a minority in the country that wouldn't exist if not for them?
Gay Afghan Teenager Denied Asylum in Austria Because He Didn’t Fit Stereotype, Rights Group Says
BERLIN — A gay Afghan 18-year-old who was seeking asylum in Austria because he feared persecution in his country had his application denied because the authorities said he did not act like a stereotypical gay man, citing his walk, behavior and clothing, according to a Vienna-based organization that helps refugees.
In a case that illustrates the plight of many L.G.B.T. refugees coming to Europe, the organization, Queer Base, said the teenager, whom it did not identify, provided testimony at an asylum hearing this spring that he became aware of his sexuality when he was 12 and living in Afghanistan.
He migrated to Austria as a minor, according to the organization, which kept all other details of the teenager’s life and journey confidential at his request.
But after he applied for asylum, the document outlining the decision quoted an official as saying that the man’s claim that he was gay was not believable based on how he had acted while living in Austria.
“Neither your walk, nor your behavior nor your clothing give the slightest indication that you could be gay,” says the decision, which was more than 100 pages.
“They reported that you frequently got into fights with roommates,” it said. “You clearly have the potential to be aggressive, which would not be expected in a homosexual.”
lso said that the young man was not described as having many friends while in Austria. “Don’t homosexuals tend to be rather sociable?” it said.
Human Rights Watch said in its 2017 report on Afghanistan that the country’s law criminalizes consensual same-sex sexual conduct, and the report cited harassment, violence and detention of gay people by the police. The organization’s report this year noted that same-sex relations are punishable by five to 15 years in prison under a law that bans all sex between individuals not married to each other. Advocates for L.G.B.T. people operate largely underground out of fear of persecution, the organization said.
And while laws in places like Austria are much more gay-friendly, L.G.B.T. refugees often face challenges coming out, even if it would help their cases for seeking asylum, gay-rights experts say.
On the other hand, pretending to be gay or lesbian to increase one’s odds in the asylum process is relatively rare, those experts say. It’s more common for L.G.B.T. refugees to continue to hide their sexual identities and to lie about the reasons for seeking asylum, said Patrick Dörr, who runs Queer Refugees, a German state-sponsored program for L.G.B.T. refugees coming to Germany.
“Many of them have to overcome shame and stigma,” Marty Huber, a founder of Queer Base, said in an interview on Thursday.
The teenager was interviewed for his application in late April and the decision was handed down in early May. The decision gained international attention this week when a Vienna weekly newsmagazine, Falter, published details of his case.
Nina Horaczek, who wrote the initial article, published the key excerpts from the document that described the institution’s response to the teenager’s asylum request based on his sexual orientation.
The teenager continues to live in Austria as he appeals the decision. He has declined to be interviewed, Ms. Huber said.
Christoph Pölzl, a spokesman for the Austrian Interior Ministry, confirmed on Thursday that the decision was authentic. He said that the country’s Federal Immigration and Asylum agency had made decisions on about 120,000 asylum requests.
“In the asylum process, the asylum seeker must make his reason for flight credible,” he said. He declined to discuss the specific case of the Afghan teenager.
Migrants who flee their home countries for Europe face perilous and sometimes fatal journeys crossing by boat or over land, often at the hands of unscrupulous human traffickers.
The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said this month that more than 1,500 refugees and migrants had died trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in the first seven months of 2018, with 850 deaths in June and July alone.
About 60,000 people have crossed the Mediterranean so far this year, around half as many as during the same period last year, the refugee agency said. Spain has become the primary destination, with more than 23,500 people arriving by sea, compared with around 18,500 in Italy and 16,000 in Greece, the agency said.
Most of the migrants who have ended up in Austria have traveled by land through the Balkans.
Austria has recently tightened its asylum requirements. One such change gives the government control over where refugees are placed, which can mean that L.G.B.T. people find themselves in conservative states where it is harder to integrate.
In June, Navid Jafartash, a gay refugee from Iraq, said on Austrian television that he was asked during an asylum application interview to explain what the colors on the rainbow flag stood for. When Mr. Jafartash, who lived with an Austrian partner at the time, was unable to do so, his asylum application was initially denied, he said in the television interview.
Activists say that L.G.B.T. refugees are especially vulnerable because in many cases they do not want to discuss their sexuality at an official hearing. Translators often act as more of an impediment than the Austrian officials because they come from the same community as the asylum seeker.
“Many of them have to overcome shame and stigma,” said Ms. Huber, whose organization is helping more than 400 L.G.B.T. refugees in Austria.
The asylum seekers also run into trouble in the asylum centers, where they are forced to live among their peers after they have outed themselves to an immigration official.
Sometimes refugees are not aware that their sexuality could help their case for asylum, Mr. Dörr said.
As for the decision in the Afghan teenager’s case, “it’s scandalous misconduct,” he said. “It just makes you shake your head.”
The Redistribution of Sex
One lesson to be drawn from recent Western history might be this: Sometimes the extremists and radicals and weirdos see the world more clearly than the respectable and moderate and sane. All kinds of phenomena, starting as far back as the Iraq War and the crisis of the euro but accelerating in the age of populism, have made more sense in the light of analysis by reactionaries and radicals than as portrayed in the organs of establishment opinion.
This is part of why there’s been so much recent agitation over universities and op-ed pages and other forums for debate. There’s a general understanding that the ideological mainstream isn’t adequate to the moment, but nobody can decide whether that means we need purges or pluralism, a spirit of curiosity and conversation or a furious war against whichever side you think is evil.
For those more curious than martial, one useful path through this thicket is to look at areas where extremists and eccentrics from very different worlds are talking about the same subject. Such overlap is no guarantee of wisdom, but it’s often a sign that there’s something interesting going on.
Which brings me to the sex robots.
Well, actually, first it brings me to the case of Robin Hanson, a George Mason economist, libertarian and noted brilliant weirdo. Commenting on the recent terrorist violence in Toronto, in which a self-identified “incel” — that is, involuntary celibate — man sought retribution against women and society for denying him the fornication he felt that he deserved, Hanson offered this provocation: If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?
After all, he wrote, “one might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met.”
This argument was not well received by people closer to the mainstream than Professor Hanson, to put it mildly. A representative response from Slate’s Jordan Weissmann, “Is Robin Hanson the Creepiest Economist in America?”, cited the post along with some previous creepy forays to dismiss Hanson as a misogynist weirdo not that far removed from the franker misogyny of toxic online males.
But Hanson’s post made me immediately think of a recent essay in The London Review of Books by Amia Srinivasan, “Does Anyone Have the Right To Sex?” Srinivasan, an Oxford philosophy professor, covered similar ground (starting with an earlier “incel” killer) but expanded the argument well beyond the realm of male chauvinists to consider groups with whom The London Review’s left-leaning and feminist readers would have more natural sympathy — the overweight and disabled, minority groups treated as unattractive by the majority, trans women unable to find partners and other victims, in her narrative, of a society that still makes us prisoners of patriarchal and also racist-sexist-homophobic rules of sexual desire.
Srinivasan ultimately answered her title question in the negative: “There is no entitlement to sex, and everyone is entitled to want what they want.” But her negative answer was a qualified one. While “no one has a right to be desired,” at the same time “who is desired and who isn’t is a political question,” which left-wing and feminist politics might help society answer differently someday. This wouldn’t instantiate a formal right to sex, exactly, but if the new order worked as its revolutionary architects intended, sex would be more justly distributed than it is today.
A number of the critics I saw engaging with Srinivasan’s essay tended to respond the way a normal center-left writer like Weissmann engaged with Hanson’s thought experiment — by commenting on its weirdness or ideological extremity rather than engaging fully with its substance. But to me, reading Hanson and Srinivasan together offers a good case study in how intellectual eccentrics — like socialists and populists in politics — can surface issues and problems that lurk beneath the surface of more mainstream debates.
By this I mean that as offensive or utopian the redistribution of sex might sound, the idea is entirely responsive to the logic of late-modern sexual life, and its pursuit would be entirely characteristic of a recurring pattern in liberal societies.
First, because like other forms of neoliberal deregulation the sexual revolution created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in new ways and relegating others to new forms of loneliness and frustration.
Second, because in this new landscape, and amid other economic and technological transformations, the sexes seem to be struggling generally to relate to one another, with social and political chasms opening between them and not only marriage and family but also sexual activity itself in recent decline.
Third, because the culture’s dominant message about sex is still essentially Hefnerian, despite certain revisions attempted by feminists since the heyday of the Playboy philosophy — a message that frequency and variety in sexual experience is as close to a summum bonum as the human condition has to offer, that the greatest possible diversity in sexual desires and tastes and identities should be not only accepted but cultivated, and that virginity and celibacy are at best strange and at worst pitiable states. And this master narrative, inevitably, makes both the new inequalities and the decline of actual relationships that much more difficult to bear —
— which in turn encourages people, as ever under modernity, to place their hope for escape from the costs of one revolution in a further one yet to come, be it political, social or technological, which will supply if not the promised utopia at least some form of redress for the many people that progress has obviously left behind.
There is an alternative, conservative response, of course — namely, that our widespread isolation and unhappiness and sterility might be dealt with by reviving or adapting older ideas about the virtues of monogamy and chastity and permanence and the special respect owed to the celibate.
But this is not the natural response for a society like ours. Instead we tend to look for fixes that seem to build on previous revolutions, rather than reverse them.
In the case of sexual liberation and its discontents, that’s unlikely to mean the kind of thoroughgoingly utopian reimagining of sexual desire that writers like Srinivasan think we should aspire toward, or anything quite so formal as the pro-redistribution political lobby of Hanson’s thought experiment.
But I expect the logic of commerce and technology will be consciously harnessed, as already in pornography, to address the unhappiness of incels, be they angry and dangerous or simply depressed and despairing. The left’s increasing zeal to transform prostitution into legalized and regulated “sex work” will have this end implicitly in mind, the libertarian (and general male) fascination with virtual-reality porn and sex robots will increase as those technologies improve — and at a certain point, without anyone formally debating the idea of a right to sex, right-thinking people will simply come to agree that some such right exists, and that it makes sense to look to some combination of changed laws, new technologies and evolved mores to fulfill it.
Whether sex workers and sex robots can actually deliver real fulfillment is another matter. But that they will eventually be asked to do it, in service to a redistributive goal that for now still seems creepy or misogynist or radical, feels pretty much inevitable.
The Men Who Want to Live Forever
Would you like to live forever? Some billionaires, already invincible in every other way, have decided that they also deserve not to die. Today several biotech companies, fueled by Silicon Valley fortunes, are devoted to “life extension” — or as some put it, to solving “the problem of death.”
It’s a cause championed by the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, the TED Talk darling Aubrey de Gray, Google’s billion-dollar Calico longevity lab and investment by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. The National Academy of Medicine, an independent group, recently dedicated funding to “end aging forever.”
As the longevity entrepreneur Arram Sabeti told The New Yorker: “The proposition that we can live forever is obvious. It doesn’t violate the laws of physics, so we can achieve it.” Of all the slightly creepy aspects to this trend, the strangest is the least noticed: The people publicly championing life extension are mainly men.
Not all of them, of course. In 2009, Elizabeth Blackburn received the Nobel Prize for her work on telomeres, protein caps on chromosomes that may be a key to understanding aging. Cynthia Kenyon, the vice president for aging research at Calico, studied life extension long before it was cool; her former protégée, Laura Deming, now runs a venture capital fund for the cause. But these women are focused on curbing age-related pathology, a concept about as controversial as cancer research. They do not appear thirsty for the Fountain of Youth.
Professor Blackburn’s new book on telomeres couldn’t be clearer. “Does our research show that by maintaining your telomeres you will live into your hundreds?” it says. “No. Everyone’s cells become old and eventually we die.” Ms. Kenyon once described her research’s goal as “to just have a healthy life and then turn out the lights.” Even Ms. Deming, a 23-year-old prodigy who worked in Ms. Kenyon’s lab at age 12, points out that “aging is innately important to us.”
What an immense waste of resources, which will only widen the already huge inequality gap. I sure don't want rich, power-hungry, abusive men...
Few of these experts come close to matching the gaudy statements of the longevity investor and “biohacker” Dave Asprey, who has told journalists, “I decided that I was just not going to die.” Or those of Brian Hanley, a microbiologist who has tested an anti-aging gene therapy he developed on himself, who claimed: “There’s a bunch of things that will need to be done to achieve life spans into at least hundreds of years. But we’ll get there.” Or of the 74-year-old fashion mogul Peter Nygard, who during a promotional clip receives injections of his own stem cells to reverse his aging while declaring: “Ponce de León had the right idea. He was just too early. That was then. This is now.”
I came across Mr. Nygard’s ode to human endurance three years ago while beginning research on a novel about a woman who can’t die, and watching that video allowed me to experience something close to life extension. As Mr. Nygard compared himself to Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin while dancing with a bevy of models — or as a voice-over explained, “living a life most can only dream of” — nine minutes of YouTube expanded into a vapid eternity, where time melted into a vortex of solipsism.
At that time I was immersed in caring for my four young children, and this paean to everlasting youth seemed especially stupid. I recall thinking that if this was eternal life, death didn’t seem that bad.
But now, as powerful men have begun falling like dominoes under accusations of sexual assault, that video with its young women clustered around an elderly multimillionaire has haunted me anew. As I recall my discomfort with the proclamations of longevity-driven men who hope to achieve “escape velocity,” I think of the astonishing hubris of the Harvey Weinsteins of the world, those who saw young women’s bodies as theirs for the taking.
Much has been said about why we allowed such behavior to go unchecked. What has remained unsaid, because it is so obvious, is what would make someone so shameless in the first place: These people believed they were invincible. They saw their own bodies as entirely theirs and other people’s bodies as at their disposal; apparently nothing in their lives led them to believe otherwise.
Historically, this is a mistake that few women would make, because until very recently, the physical experience of being a woman entailed exactly the opposite — and not only because women have to hold their keys in self-defense while walking through parking lots at night. It’s only very recently that women have widely participated in public life, but it’s even more recently that men have been welcome, or even expected, to provide physical care for vulnerable people.
Only for a nanosecond of human history have men even slightly shared what was once exclusively a woman’s burden: the relentless daily labor of caring for another person’s body, the life-preserving work of cleaning feces and vomit, the constant cycle of cooking and feeding and blanketing and bathing, whether for the young, the ill or the old. For nearly as long as there have been humans, being a female human has meant a daily nonoptional immersion in the fragility of human life and the endless effort required to sustain it.
Obviously not everyone who provides care for others is a saint. But engaging in that daily devotion, or even living with its expectation, has enormous potential to change a person. It forces one to constantly imagine the world from someone else’s point of view: Is he hungry? Maybe she’s tired. Is his back hurting him? What is she trying to say?
The most obvious cure for today’s gender inequities is to put more women in power. But if we really hope to create an equal society, we will also need more men to care for the powerless — more women in the boardroom, but also more men at the nurses’ station and the changing table, immersed in daily physical empathy. If that sounds like an evolutionary impossibility, well, it doesn’t violate the laws of physics, so we can achieve it. It is surely worth at least as much investment as defeating death.
Perhaps it takes the promise of immortality to inspire the self-absorbed to invest in unsexy work like Alzheimer’s research. If so, we may all one day bless the inane death-defiance as a means to a worthy end.
But men who hope to live forever might pause on their eternal journey to consider the frightening void at invincibility’s core. Death is the ultimate vulnerability. It is the moment when all of us must confront exactly what so many women have known all too well: You are a body, only a body, and nothing more.
The Justice Department has started an investigation into a self-described self-help group in which women were branded with a symbol containing its leader’s initials, several people contacted as part of the inquiry said.
Those people said that agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation had recently contacted or questioned them about the group, which is called Nxivm. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because officials asked them not to discuss the inquiry, which appears to be at an early stage.
In a related move, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York is expected to soon recommend possible changes in how state regulators review complaints against doctors, a spokesman said. The decision follows the disclosure that health department officials declined to act on complaints about two doctors affiliated with Nxivm, including one who reportedly used a surgical device to brand women. Inquiries into those two doctors are now underway, a spokesman for the governor said.
John Marzulli, a spokesman for the office of the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, which is reportedly leading the inquiry, said he could neither confirm nor deny whether an investigation into Nxivm, which is based in Albany, was underway.
The developments follow an October article in The New York Times that disclosed how some women who joined a secret sorority within Nxivm were branded with a symbol that incorporated the initials of the group’s leader, Keith Raniere.
Women were also told that compromising information they had provided to join the sorority, such as naked photographs, would be publicly released if they disclosed its existence. The sorority revolved around “master-slave” relationships, former Nxivm members said, in which women faced punishments, including physical ones, for not following a master’s order.
Since the late 1990s, over 16,000 people have enrolled in courses offered by Nxivm (pronounced Nex-e-um), which the group says are designed to bring about greater self-fulfillment by eliminating psychological and emotional barriers.
Most participants take some workshops, like the group’s Executive Success Programs, and resume their lives. But other people have become drawn more deeply into Nxivm, giving up careers, friends and families to become devoted followers of Mr. Raniere. Critics and former members have described the group’s practices as cultlike.
Mr. Raniere, whose followers refer to him as “Vanguard,” urges women to follow near-starvation diets of 500 to 800 calories a day to achieve the body shape he finds appealing. Some women who have followed that diet have stopped menstruating and lost hair, according to former Nxivm members.
Quite the opposite. Trump has convinced long time progressives like me to abandon the world of Clinton, Obama and Hollywood for the people who really serve America. After contributing three times, I abandoned the fascist-like campaign of Sanders when I realized his speeches were not much more than rehashed failed socialism, and also after Hillary Clinton would not respond to the "Uranium One" article right here in the Times. I'm sure you regret ever printing that story.
I am far more at home in a tea party full of American flags and Bibles than an erstwhile assembly of undocumented immigrant protesters who believe they have more rights than the families of slain soldiers.
When I heard that Florida congressperson speak about John Kelly today, I was as stunned as I ever was at any Vietnam protest of any civil rights rally in the 60s. This woman is an embarrassment to the country, and wholly unrepresentative of the feelings of the vast majority of African Americans.
If you think that a confused millennial who shows up to protest something about Trump is any indication of change, try checking with the FORMER progressives of this land. There are many millions of us, and you will see us at the polls next year, many of whom will be first time registrants who are finally rid of ignoring the sick progressive decadence of America.
White Nationalism will save the West.
The idea of religious tolerance is alien to Islam. Islam sees peace on earth, but only when Islam has conquered the Earth and everyone lives under Sharia Law. The adoption of multiculturalism allows insidious ideas that all cultures are equal to spread in the West. This is not so. It is patently obvious that Western Eurocentric Civilisation is far superior to anything Asia, South America or Africa can produce.
Just visit the Arabian peninsula! All machinery, automobiles, sophisticated weapons, airplanes and construction know-how has been imported. They can't even make a washing machine there.
I see nothing wrong with a nation wanting to preserve its culture. I would hate to see London become another New York. We should be thankful for conservatives, including the white nationalists, as they keep the liberals from turning us into a country that would only allow free speech if they found it agreeable, try to push Christianity to the sidelines, and encourage behavior and lifestyles that were considered immoral for centuries.
You are not alone. Our local schools have gone from 10% Asian to 40% Asian in the last 5 years, with almost an even split between Indian and Chinese immigrant kids. The Chinese moms are often regarded as abrasive and rude. They do not seem to care at all about social norms or even basic manners. The attitude rubs off on their children. I even noticed my own children now chewing with their mouth open and talking with their mouth full because that's how all the kids in their school do it. Makes me very upset. These new arrivals have ruined the beautiful, polite Pacific Northwest that I grew up in.
The larger the immigrant group, the longer it takes to assimilate them. In such large numbers and such a sudden increase, they are now assimilating us. Obama is doing his best with the new visa rules to ensure the US turns into a Chinese colony even faster. In one generation they will turn the US into another China, and let's not forget why they left China in the first place, because there were too many Chinese!
PARIS — The man Marine Le Pen chose to lead her far-right party while she ran for the presidency has been forced to step down because he praised a Holocaust denier and expressed doubt that the Nazis used poison gas to murder Jews.
In a 2000 interview, the man she named as the National Front’s interim leader, Jean-François Jalkh, said Zyklon B, the gas used to kill millions of Jews during the Holocaust, would have been “impossible” to use in “mass exterminations.”
Ms. Le Pen called the outrage directed at Mr. Jalkh a “defamation” on Friday morning.
The negative news, however, was somewhat offset by day’s end, when Ms. Le Pen got an endorsement from a defeated right-wing presidential candidate, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, who won less than 5 percent of the vote nationwide.
“Marine Le Pen is not on the far right to me,” he said.
Ms. Le Pen is one of two candidates to advance to the second round of the presidential race, and announced on Monday that she would temporarily step down as National Front leader to focus on defeating the independent centrist Emmanuel Macron, considered to be the favorite in the election on May 7.
[...]
Ms. Le Pen herself prompted an outcry earlier in the presidential campaign when she said that France had not been responsible for the roundup of Parisian Jews during World War II in an event known as the Vel’ d’Hiv.
But her efforts to buff her party’s image were complicated this week by a furor over comments that Mr. Jalkh made in 2000. During an interview, a doctoral student, Magali Boumaza, had asked him about the gas chambers. Mr. Jalkh replied that he was not a “negationist” but that he had read the works of a “trustworthy revisionist”: Robert Faurisson, a former professor of history at the University of Lyon who has been convicted of inciting hatred and racial discrimination and who has often been cited by the more extreme far-right elements.
Mr. Jalkh, who once took part in a ceremony commemorating the death of Philippe Pétain, the leader of the Vichy government that collaborated with Nazi Germany, said in the interview that he had been “surprised” by the “rigor “ and “conscientiousness” of Mr. Faurisson’s research.
An investigation by The New York Times has found a total of five women who have received payouts from either Mr. O’Reilly or the company in exchange for agreeing to not pursue litigation or speak about their accusations against him. The agreements totaled about $13 million.
Two settlements came after the network’s former chairman, Roger Ailes, was dismissed last summer in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal, when the company said it did not tolerate behavior that “disrespects women or contributes to an uncomfortable work environment.”
The women who made allegations against Mr. O’Reilly either worked for him or appeared on his show. They have complained about a wide range of behavior, including verbal abuse, lewd comments, unwanted advances and phone calls in which it sounded as if Mr. O’Reilly was masturbating, according to documents and interviews.
The reporting suggests a pattern: As an influential figure in the newsroom, Mr. O’Reilly would create a bond with some women by offering advice and promising to help them professionally. He then would pursue sexual relationships with them, causing some to fear that if they rebuffed him, their careers would stall.
A former reporter for a news website was charged on Friday with making more than a half-dozen bomb threats against Jewish community centers, schools and a Jewish history museum, federal authorities said.
The man, Juan Thompson, 31, of St. Louis, made some of the threats using his own name and others implicating a former girlfriend as part of an effort to intimidate her, the authorities said in a federal complaint unsealed on Friday in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
In one threat, made on Feb. 1 against a Jewish school in Farmington Hills, Mich., the complaint says, Mr. Thompson claimed he had placed two bombs in the school and was “eager for Jewish newtown,” an apparent reference to the 2012 school massacre in Newtown, Conn., in which a gunman killed 20 students and six school employees.
The website The Intercept confirmed in a statement on Friday that Mr. Thompson worked for the publication for a little more than a year, until he was fired in January 2016 after it was discovered that he had fabricated sources and quotes in his articles.
The arrest came amid heightened tension involving more than 100 threats against Jewish groups that have been reported in dozens of states this year, resulting in a broad inquiry led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The threats, combined with vandalism at Jewish cemeteries, have prompted fears of an increase in anti-Semitism.
Mr. Thompson is not believed to be responsible for most of the threats against Jewish centers around the country, according to federal law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing.
Investigators are still trying to identify who is responsible for those threats, which the officials said were made using sophisticated technology to mask personal details, like identity and the origin of the internet-based calls.
The federal complaint, which was signed by Christopher Mills, an F.B.I. special agent, says Mr. Thompson’s threats were “part of a sustained campaign to harass and intimidate” the former girlfriend. The harassment began shortly after she ended their romantic relationship last July, the complaint says.
Mr. Thompson made at least eight threats against Jewish schools and community centers in New York, Dallas, Farmington Hills and San Diego, according to the complaint.
In a threat made on Feb. 22 to the Anti-Defamation League in New York, the complaint says, a caller, using an untraceable phone number and a tool that disguised the caller’s voice, said there was C-4, an explosive material, in the group’s New York office, and that it would be “detonated within one hour.” The office was immediately searched and no explosives were found.
The accusations against Mr. Thompson were announced on Friday by Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan; William F. Sweeney Jr., head of the F.B.I.’s New York office; and James P. O’Neill, the New York police commissioner.
“Threats of violence targeting people and places based on religion or race — whatever the motivation — are unacceptable, un-American and criminal,” Mr. Bharara said in a statement. “We are committed to pursuing and prosecuting those who foment fear and hate through such criminal threats.”
The F.B.I. said that its director, James B. Comey, and top bureau officials had held a meeting on Friday with Jewish community leaders to discuss the recent increase in threats to Jewish institutions around the country, and that the investigation into the threats was “a top priority.”
Mr. Thompson was arrested on Friday in St. Louis, where a federal magistrate judge ordered him held without bond pending a detention hearing on Wednesday. Mr. Bharara’s office will seek to have Mr. Thompson, who is charged with one count of cyberstalking, brought to Manhattan to face prosecution, an office spokeswoman said.
Lucille G. Liggett, a federal public defender who represented Mr. Thompson in court on Friday, declined to comment when reached later in the day.
Mr. Thompson worked at The Intercept from November 2014 to January 2016, when he was dismissed, according to a statement by Betsy Reed, the news organization’s editor in chief.
In the statement, Ms. Reed said the organization was “horrified to learn” of Mr. Thompson’s arrest in connection with the bomb threats and cyberstalking allegations. “These actions are heinous and should be fully investigated and prosecuted,” she said.
Mr. Thompson began making bomb threats in January after harassing his former girlfriend for several months, according to the complaint. She obtained a New York State order of protection against him last August; it was renewed in October and again in December.
As part of the harassment, Mr. Thompson, without using his actual name, had sent emails and faxes to the woman’s employer that made false allegations about her, including that she was anti-Semitic, according to the complaint. He also sent her an anonymous email, attaching nude photographs of her and threatening to release them publicly.
The bomb threat against a Jewish history museum in Manhattan, which the authorities did not identify, was made on Jan. 28, the complaint says.
The phone threat against the Anti-Defamation League on Feb. 22 was preceded a day earlier by an email to the organization that said that the former girlfriend was “behind the bomb threats against jews” and that she would be making more threats.
At a news conference on Friday in New York, Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said Mr. Thompson had been on the organization’s radar since he was fired for fabricating quotes in articles.
“While the motive is unclear, the impact is crystal clear,” Mr. Segal said of the bomb threats Mr. Thompson is accused of making. “While I cannot speak about what is in Thompson’s mind or certainly in his heart, threatening Jewish institutions is an anti-Semitic act.”
When Chris Doyle learned that his health insurance deductible would climb to $10,000 last year, he and his wife, both evangelical Christians, “spent a couple weeks just praying,” he said.
Then they opted out of insurance altogether, joining something called a health care sharing ministry, which requires members to help cover one another’s major medical costs as they come up.
While such nonprofit ministries have been around for decades, interest in them has grown since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, largely because the law exempts members from the requirement to have health insurance or pay a yearly fine.
Because they are not insurance companies, sharing ministries provide no guarantee that members’ medical debts will be paid; members are advised to trust that God will provide. The ministries say the payment system is helping Christians fulfill a biblical mandate to share one another’s burdens.
“Our only assets are the good will and continued participation of our members,” said James Lansberry, executive vice president of Samaritan, which is based in Peoria, Ill.
Some ministries operate differently, requiring members to pay monthly into accounts from which funds are disbursed to those with eligible medical bills. Pre-existing medical conditions are often not covered, nor are preventive care, mental health and injuries resulting from behavior the ministry considers immoral or reckless. Members who acquire a sexually transmitted disease from an extramarital affair are out of luck, for instance, as are those injured while driving drunk or during a melee.
Still, membership in sharing ministries has more than doubled over the last six years, to 535,000 from about 200,000, according to the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries.
...
Acknowledging that many families can qualify for subsidized insurance policies with free preventive care through the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Lansberry said that most new members were not “joining primarily on price; they are joining primarily on principle.”
I have been asked: How could I be comfortable with Trump's proposal to temporarily ban any new Muslim immigrants, while policy is reviewed? The Christian ideals of love and charity in no way mandate that the safety of U.S. citizens be compromised. God’s word gives to nations the right to self defense. The mainstreaming of Islam is undermining national security and may undermine the preservation of the U.S. Constitution and the Judeo-Christian foundation on which our freedoms have been based. As for Trump’s threat to kill the families of terrorists, I abhor the unnecessary harming of innocent lives. But I am convinced that the United States has the moral justification to use every means to fight terrorism.
JERUSALEM — One of the many things that divides Israelis and Palestinians is the letter P.
The consonant that prefaces prejudice and partisanship became an object of mirth on Thursday after Anat Berko, a conservative lawmaker from the governing Likud Party, said in Parliament that there could be no such place as Palestine because there is no P in Arabic.
The name “Palestine” is a borrowed term , Ms. Berko said, presumably referring to the ancient Greek “Palaistine” and the Syria-Palaestina of the Roman era.
“I want to return to history. What exactly is our place here regarding Jerusalem, regarding Palestine,” she said during a parliamentary debate late Wednesday called by the center-left Zionist Union on the two-state solution. “As we have said, there isn’t even a P in Arabic so this borrowed term is also worth scrutinizing,” she added.
As opposition lawmakers heckled Ms. Berko, she retorted, “There is no ‘Pa,’ ” sputtering, “Pa, pa, pa,” for emphasis.
“There’s ‘Fa,’ ” she conceded.
The Supreme Court’s decisions protecting gay rights were not rooted in the Constitution, and their logic could as easily apply to child molesters, Justice Antonin Scalia told a room filled with first-year law students at Georgetown University on Monday.
“What minorities deserve protection?” he asked. “What? It’s up to me to identify deserving minorities?”
He said those decisions should generally be made by the democratic process rather than by judges.
He also allowed that the First Amendment protects political and religious minorities but suggested that there was no principled way for courts to make further distinctions based on the text of the Constitution. “What about pederasts?” he asked. “What about child abusers?”
“This is a deserving minority,” he said sarcastically. “Nobody loves them.”
[New Saint Andrews College]’s philosophy is that cultural change begins with right worship and community rather than with political activism. College life revolves around Christ Church and Trinity Reformed Church — both members of the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a denomination based on “historic Protestant orthodoxy” that Wilson co-founded in 1998. The college handbook forbids students to embrace or promote “doctrinal errors” from the 4th through the 21st centuries, “such as Arianism, Socinianism, Pelagianism, Skepticism, Feminism.” If drawn to such ideas, they must “inform the administration immediately and honestly in a letter offering to withdraw from the College.” Cultural revolution cannot tolerate heretics.
QADIYA, Iraq — In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.
He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.
When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.
“I kept telling him it hurts — please stop,” said the girl, whose body is so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she escaped after 11 months of captivity.
The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in the group’s core tenets.
Without warning or explanation, the Indian government this weekend ordered Internet service providers to block access to 857 pornography websites that had been singled out by an anti-pornography activist.
The activist, Kamlesh Vaswani, a lawyer who failed to persuade the Supreme Court to block online pornography, gave thanks on Monday to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for taking a step that the Supreme Court would not. “Under Prime Minister Modi’s good governance and the good faith with which this government has been working,” Mr. Vaswani said in an interview, “they have been instrumental in blocking the 857 websites that I have been looking to get blocked.”
Mr. Vaswani, 43, a private lawyer from the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, said he decided to begin a legal crusade against online pornography in response to the brutal gang rape of a 23-year-old woman on a New Delhi bus in 2012. With help from a college engineering professor, Mr. Vaswani analyzed traffic data for pornography websites and came up with a list of the most popular sites. This list of 857 websites, he said, is what he asked the Supreme Court to block.
“Nothing can more efficiently destroy a person, fizzle their mind, evaporate their future, eliminate their potential or destroy society like pornography,” Mr. Vaswani wrote in his petition to the Supreme Court. “It is worse than Hitler, worse than AIDS, cancer or any other epidemic,” he added. “It is more catastrophic than nuclear holocaust, and it must be stopped.”
The gay marriage campaign in the US is a fraud. Gays claim they do not have the right to marry. That is false. There is no law against them living in whatever relationship they please. There are even many religious leaders who will perform marriage ceremonies for them.
What the gays really want is government recognition of their marriages. They want that so they can get lower income tax rates. They want to raid the Social Security Fund to get survivors benefits.
The US gay marriage campaign is really a campaign for money. It has nothing to do with human rights.
“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do."
“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
Christian School Faulted for Halting Abuse Study:
GREENVILLE, S.C. — For decades, students at Bob Jones University who sought counseling for sexual abuse were told not to report it because turning in an abuser from a fundamentalist Christian community would damage Jesus Christ. Administrators called victims liars and sinners.
All of this happened until recently inside the confines of this insular university, according to former students and staff members who said they had high hopes that the Bob Jones brand of counseling would be exposed and reformed after the university hired a Christian consulting group in 2012 to investigate its handling of sexual assaults, many of which occurred long before the students arrived at the university.
Last week, Bob Jones dealt a blow to those hopes, acknowledging that with the investigation more than a year old and nearing completion, the university had fired the consulting group, Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment, or Grace, without warning or explanation....
Bob Jones is no ordinary university. Unaffiliated with any denomination, it is a leading force in promoting a kind of fundamentalism so strict that the university’s founders assailed evangelists like Mr. Graham, Oral Roberts and Jerry Falwell as too accommodating to the larger world.
On the campus here, students are forbidden to listen to popular music or watch television or movies; the student handbook tells them to avoid clothing brands that “glorify the lustful spirit of our age in their advertising”; they face sharp limits on dating and even leaving campus; and they are told which churches in town — usually run by pastors tied to the university — they may attend. Faculty members and other employees are expected to adhere to the university’s literal interpretation of the Bible and are forbidden to drink alcohol.
If homosexuality is made state sanctioned behavior the consequence is a state-led war against the Gospel. It's true in every other country that has legalized gay marriage that the Gospel of Jesus Christ cannot be truthfully preached against homosexuality. This is what awaits the US if Christians do not stay strong against homosexuals and their perceived rights. I think we can agree many "privileges" should be afforded homosexuals...that are afforded to heterosexuals...that makes no sense to deny. But, to legitimate homosexuality via marriage will only lead to the persecution of Christ's body and church.
A 31-year-old woman was arrested on Saturday and charged with second-degree murder as a hate crime in connection with the death of a man who was pushed onto the tracks of an elevated subway station in Queens and crushed by an oncoming train.
The woman, Erika Menendez, selected her victim because she believed him to be a Muslim or a Hindu, Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney, said.
[...]
In a statement, Mr. Brown quoted Ms. Menendez, “in sum and substance,” as having told the police: “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.” Ms. Menendez conflated the Muslim and Hindu faiths in her comments to the police and in her target for attack, officials said.
I can only pray that the justices are not arrogant enough to override God's definition of marriage, the one that has been accepted by virtually every society in recorded history, to appease a minute minority. a minority that is NOT just seeking equal rights (which I have absolutely no problem with), but to identify themselves as the same as hetrosexual people. The two groups are not the same so why should their union be called the same? Just as monogamy is not polygamy, neither is the union (marriage) between a man and a woman the same as the union (civil?) between a man and a man or a woman and a woman.
"You may acquire male and female slaves from the pagan nations that are around you" -- and quoted I Timothy 6:1 as saying slaves should "regard their own masters as worthy of all honor."
"The incidence of abuse, rape, broken homes and murder are 100 times greater, today, in the housing projects than they ever were on the slave plantations in the Old South," he wrote. "The truth is that nowhere on the face of the earth, in all of time, were servants better treated or better loved than they were in the Old South by white, black, Hispanic and Indian slave owners."
"The issue is not race," he said. "It's Southern heritage. I'm on a one-man leadership crusade to get the truth out about what our Southern heritage is all about."
Turning the tables on an advocacy group that has long supported victims of pedophile priests, lawyers for the Roman Catholic Church and priests accused of sexual abuse in two Missouri cases have gone to court to compel the group to disclose more than two decades of e-mails that could include correspondence with victims, lawyers, whistle-blowers, witnesses, the police, prosecutors and journalists.
The group, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP, is neither a plaintiff nor a defendant in the litigation. But the group has been subpoenaed five times in recent months in Kansas City and St. Louis, and its national director, David Clohessy, was questioned by a battery of lawyers for more than six hours this year. A judge in Kansas City ruled that the network must comply because it “almost certainly” had information relevant to the case.
The network and its allies say the legal action is part of a campaign by the church to cripple an organization that has been the most visible defender of victims, and a relentless adversary, for more than two decades. “If there is one group that the higher-ups, the bishops, would like to see silenced,” said Marci A. Hamilton, a law professor at Yeshiva University and an advocate for victims of clergy sex crimes, “it definitely would be SNAP. And that’s what they’re going after. They’re trying to find a way to silence SNAP.”
Lawyers for the church and priests say they cannot comment because of a judge’s order. But William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, a church advocacy group in New York, said targeting the network was justified because “SNAP is a menace to the Catholic Church.”
Mr. Donohue said leading bishops he knew had resolved to fight back more aggressively against the group: “The bishops have come together collectively. I can’t give you the names, but there’s a growing consensus on the part of the bishops that they had better toughen up and go out and buy some good lawyers to get tough. We don’t need altar boys.”
He said bishops were also rethinking their approach of paying large settlements to groups of victims. “The church has been too quick to write a check, and I think they’ve realized it would be a lot less expensive in the long run if we fought them one by one,” Mr. Donohue said.