Catherine Leavy, hard core Trumpist, arrested after she called in a bomb threat to Boston Children’s hospital based on the lie that young children were having hysterectomies as part of sex reassignment and were being mutilated intentionally under the assumption that every child born is trans….all nonsense bullshit spouted by right wing talking heads like Carlson…forcing the rapid evacuation of critically ill children. Over a dozen distinct threats against this hospital based on idiotic stupidity your ilk are all too happy to believe without a second thought.

More terrorism, destruction, and death threats against children by the right….the same people who are trying to make it legal to marry 9 year old girls then have sex with them.

Edit: I’m going to guess that you support DeSantis trafficking illegals at insane costs, $12 million of taxpayer money to ship 50 deep into the US as a political stunt/advertisement….how many could have been caught and deported with $12 million? Proof it’s all politics, not about solving the problem at all. Also proof of the unChristian, uncaring, thoughtlessness of the right now, this was an evil ploy to use children as political pawns by attempting to dump them, at night, in residential areas with no social services in the hopes that, out of desperation, one would commit some crime….backfired big time, liberals stood up and took care of these people the right had lied to and abused.
Odd, I thought the right said it dislikes human trafficking, but clearly that’s a lie since you applaud it. Now both the Senator and Governor of Florida are caught red handed child trafficking. Lock them up? Wrong is wrong….child trafficking is wrong….come on friendo, call it wrong AND DENOUNCE THE PERPS, permanently, not for 3 days.

de·served
adjective-rightfully earned because of something done

Ad·vised
adjective-behaving as someone, especially the speaker, would recommend; sensible; wise

Because I claim violence is deserved does not mean I advise it. Many deserved actions are not advisable. I would say a child rapist deserves to have their genitals mutilated or removed, but I wouldn't suggest anyone do that to them for many reasons.
People rarely get what they deserve.

Carl's Jr, and Brawndo-the thirst mutilator. It's got electrolytes.

@gorillaman

The only thing I see failing completely is your absurd attempt at rationalizing your bigotry--more aptly labelled in this case by its proper name: Islamophobia. I don't for a second believe what I'm about to post will change your mind about Islam or Muslims in general but I do believe that this kind of bigotry needs to be called out when it rears its ugly head. And my, you went full ugly there, didn't you... comparing Muslims to rats and seriel killers? Classy.

Despite your protestations to the contrary, there are in fact Muslims who do not believe in God but for a variety of reasons (keeping peace with religious family members, maintaining a connection to their cultural heritage, networking, etc.) continue to attend services and identify as Muslims. This is true of many believers in all the major religions, including Christianity and Judaism.

You see, as much as you'd like Muslims to all be boogeymen coming to bring Sharia law down on the rest of world, anyone who has actually met and talked with a Muslim (and god-forbid actually visited one of the countries StukaFox listed) realizes that Muslims, like all people, are extremely diverse (again, despite your protestations to the contrary).

Indeed there are Sharia zealots. But there are also moderates and reformers and even liberal radicals. Mostly, though its just a lot of people trying to get on with their lives the best way they know how.

Now, I find most religious beliefs to be repugnant. However, I don't find the ideas expressed in the Koran to be much more repugnant than, say, the Bible. In fact, I'm less concerned about what is written in supposedly holy books and more concerned with how believers attempt to implement those ideas in reality. I do indeed find particular forms of this implementation, such as forcing women to wear a bhurka, disturbing (just as I find Christians' attacks on LGBT rights disturbing). It's important to note, though, that such practices are NOT universal. For example, in some Islamic countries like Malaysia it's enough to simply cover your hair with a colorful scarf.

On the other hand, other practices that you mentioned such as Female Genital Mutilation and virginity tests ARE NOT Islamic. FGM predates Islam and is still practiced in the locales where it originated (places such as Mali, for instance) that now happen to be Islamic majority areas. The Indonesian virginity tests as well do not stem from some universal commandment in Islam but from Indonesian culture which sees women as "the symbol of the nations moral guardians".

Again, I don't suppose any of this makes any difference to you. You want to see the world in black and white, us versus them, "rats" and "serial killers" versus you, the white knight who is just trying to save us all from our cultural relativistic blindness. And so the shades of grey I am describing to you will likely go overlooked. I would be happy to be proven wrong, but I suspect the reality is I'll receive some lengthy reply that can be distilled down to, "Islam bad, hur." Or perhaps, "All religions bad, but Islam worst, hur." To which I can only reply, that demonizing the practitioners of any particular religion is unlikely to bring about the reforms you seek.

Hodinkee... is a mutilation of the Czech word for wristwatch. Just so you know. No idea what the back story to that is.

I never wear watches but watchmakers and watchmaking are as awesome as steam trains.

He's in Pauline Hanson's party, and there are plenty of examples of her racism (mostly against indigenous people and Asians).

As for One Nation, they want to abolish the Racial Discrimination Act (the one that makes it illegal to discriminate based on race). They want surveillance cameras installed in all mosques.

They also have a number of utterly pointless policies designed to "target Islam" by outlawing things THAT ARE ALREADY FUCKING ILLEGAL, like female genital mutilation (male genital mutilation is just dandy though) and not allowing face coverings on driving licences.

That might not meet a strict definition of a "racist" policy, but it's pretty clear where they're coming from.

So this is just fucking great. I'll tell you, i recognise the kid in the picture and i remember what happened to Jamie Bulger. What a fucking wonderful way to sensationalise it and get a few quid from youtube views.

Just so you know, that young boy was led away from safety and led on a death march through populated areas, crying himself hoarse and scared - no, terrified and desperate and pleading - in a way that only a child can be. He was marched past some 30 odd people and everyone looked away because they thought they were brothers. To his poor little mind, he must have thought that all those strangers were in on it.

Once he had been walked miles away from where he was found to a secluded spot, he was tortured and mutilated, the details of which are harrowing even to simply READ about.

One can only imagine the relentless fear that this poor little kid went through and it brings tears to my eyes to contemplate it. This is something that affected me really strongly as a child, when it happened, and i can't believe that there are people who would use that to make money. Every single penny that they made off this video should be going to the families that suffered.

I hope whoever made money off this fucking video chokes on it and knows that what they've done regardless of their intent is to glorify and profit off some of the most desperate suffering that very few humans will ever experience. Profiting off the misery of a kidnapped, tortured, dead little baby.

By fucking god i hope there is a heaven and i hope Jamie Bulger is there and happy right now. I couldn't even bear to watch the majority of it. I look forward to the day that the bastards who did it are found and killed and i hope it's fucking slow. It makes you want to wipe the human race out and let nature start again. What a truly disgusting video to make and to present.

Why does it have to be Doomsday? Can't that be the NEXT movie?! Why merge these events? WHY GOD! *mutilates his body* I can't stop. the. cutting. You're LITERALLY killing me, guys.

And not to confuse lines made by vigilantes from other current movie trailers but Doomsday looks like "an avocado had sex with an older avocado." AKA a ballsack.

So wrist cutting and avocado ballsack. Oh look, it's badly CGI'd Wonder Woman. I have never been so inspired to look up porn of Wonder Woman being double teamed by Batman and Superman.

Why won't you take off your mask, Bruce?

I dunno, why won't you wear these glasses while I cum on your face, Clark?

You're supposed to cum on Diana's face, Bruce!

No way, boys, you're my bitches tonight. (Hint: The strap on of truth.)

Where is Dick Grayson in all of this? Locked in the gimp box.

This message has been paid for by Brawndo - The Thirst Mutilator!

@SDGundamX

We can criticise religion generally - for it's falsehood, for it's stultifying effect on the mind, for the shadow the faithful cast over an enlightened world.

We can criticise religions individually - for the divine exhortations to genocide in each of the abrahamic canons, for the promise of infinite torture by a benevolent god in both christianity and islam, for their arbitrary or bigoted taboos, and particularly of the newer creeds - islam, mormonism, scientology - for what we know to be the bad character of their founders.

And, as you say, we can criticise the behaviours of individual believers, communities or sects - catholicism on condoms and the spread of aids, genital mutilation in africa (which you're quite right to point out has cultural roots that pre-date islam, though it would be disingenuous to claim religion has no reinforcing or propagating effect on that practice).

I wholly disagree that this last is the only or most meaningful critique to offer of religion. There are fundamental tenets of these ideologies on which all their denominations, however fractured, can be said to agree.

Allow these people their diversity, their specificity and their subtle variation of interpretation and you're in danger of chasing a thousand little fish at once, in a thousand different directions, while the religious school as a whole shifts, shimmers, dazzles and slips away. I prefer to play the dolphin pack: surrounding, corralling, squeezing and finally devouring the enemy entire.

Attacking the religious text is a strawman in my opinion.

There's all sorts of outrageous (by modern standards) stuff in the Bible, Koran, Talmud, and other major religious texts. How could there not be? They were written hundreds to thousands of years ago at a time when reading and writing was limited to the wealthy or elite (i.e. priest classes). Much of that stuff is outright ignored or at the very least acknowledged by deemed less important by practitioners of those religions in modern societies.

All literature is open to interpretation and this includes religious texts. The fact that there are tens of thousands of denominations of Christianity with differing opinions about what it means to be Christian and how to behave as one gives testament to this. While there aren't as many named denominations in Islam, if you actually look at how it is practiced locally in say urban Malaysia (i.e. no Bhurka for women) compared with rural Afghanistan (i.e. full body covering required) you can see there's huge diversity there as well.

So if you want to judge the religion, then you actually have to take the time to make an informed opinion by looking at who does what and why they do it. And when you do that, you tend to find that there's this complex inter-relationship between religious teachings, economics, politics, ethnicity, history and so on which make it difficult to assign full blame to any one "thing" such as religion. The female genital mutilation example I used above makes this pretty clear.

Sticking solely with criticising the religious text puts a critic on very unsure footing, as at the end of the day all the critic is really doing is criticizing a specific interpretation of the text (i.e. their own understanding). That's why, as I said, it's something of a strawman argument since you're really arguing against an interpretation you yourself have created.

It is much better, in my opinion, to look at how specific groups are interpreting and enacting the text, and then criticizing their actions (or the effects of their actions) in the event that there is a negative effect. But in doing so I think it quickly becomes apparent that those actions are almost always enacted locally as opposed to globally. In other words, they are the actions of a specific group of people in a specific place at a specific time who have been influenced by all the factors (history, economics, etc.) I mentioned above.

And when you reach that conclusion you realize you're not criticizing Islam anymore, you're criticizing one groups' interpretation and enactment of Islam in specific context.

On the other hand, if you ask which type of criticism gets you more views on TV or more headlines in newspapers...

See, I agreed with everything you said up until that last statement (that I quoted below).

All organized religions brutally and mindlessly suppress individual freedom. But lately the target de jour seems to be Islam. People like Sam Harris got off track when they forgot that the real target is the dismantling of all organized religion and focused almost exclusively on denouncing Islam--usually with obnoxious overgeneralizations and a complete lack of understanding how diverse Islam actually is.

And that's the major problem with the whole argument Dawkins and Maher are proposing (i.e. that you can't criticize Islam anymore). You can't criticise Christianity or Judaism or any other major religion without hugely overgeneralizing, either. Instead you need to target specific denominations within specific communities and how they practice the religion.

For example, are you upset about how "Christianity" has helped spread AIDS or protected pedophiles? Well then really you're really looking to criticize the Catholic church and it's stance on contraception and handling illegal activities within the church, not Christianity as a whole.

Upset with how gay people are viewed? Again, you're probably not looking to criticize the Lutherans, Presbyterians, and many other Christian denominations who have reformed in recent times to be accepting of LGBT members and clergy. It's not a Christianity problem so much as it is a problem of how specific people in specific places for specific cultural reasons interpret the texts of their religion.

Basically, I don't think it is a problem if people want to criticize how Islam is practiced in a specific context (say, for example, the use of female genital mutilation in some subsets of Islam in Africa). But I do think it is a problem when the speaker is simply set on demonizing the religion as whole rather than making a rational argument, for example overgeneralizing female gential mutilation (which actually pre-dates Islam and was incorporated into it later after Islam's rise of influence in the region) as an example of why Islam is evil.

Certainly people have the legal right to make such an argument (in the U.S. at least). However, I'm guessing most universities don't want to come across as looking in support of such ill-structured arguments that are more akin to tabloid magazine hit pieces than an actual intellectual argument which is grounded in facts and reason.

All that said, I have no inside information about the real administrative reasons why certain speakers have been declined/uninvited at specific college campuses.

Not true, and that's why I posted the actual definition, rather than my personal feeling on what the word means. Then we can all start from the ACTUAL definition(s) rather than just making some up and arguing about it.

Your second paragraph/sentence makes no sense at all to me, and sounds like a disjointed red herring/straw man/bad attempt at creating a false argument you can shoot down....but it's so all over the place it's unfollowable.

You continue to confuse feminism with Feminism, and also continue to paint all Feminists in the worst possible light based on a few overboard examples rather than describing the normal, average Feminist.
For instance, many Feminists see pornography and prostitution as empowering and taking control of their own sexuality, and it was actually prudish anti-feminist men who tried to censor it in the courts.

In fact, there ARE many people in the civilized world who still think women don't deserve the same rights as men in many areas, and insist they are unable to perform tasks men can perform, must be coddled and subservient, and are lesser beings based purely on gender, despite all evidence to the contrary.

It's only because of this continuing misunderstanding on your part that you claim anyone said anything like "The implication, in any event, that this is somehow a novel position, for which we have feminist advocacy to thank... "...you are again confusing feminist with Feminist, and using the wrong one. We don't have Feminist advocacy to thank, we do however have feminist advocacy to thank for the advancements in women's rights...it's what the word means.


It doesn't sound at all like you 'appreciate the attempt at consensus building', or even understood my point, since you continue to conflate feminism with Feminism. I can't be certain, but it seems you are doing that intentionally in order to argue a moot point.



EDIT:sorry, I thought I quoted you @gorillaman, so I'll cut and paste....

gorillaman said:
Everyone has a different definition of feminism; that is to some extent the problem. Rather, this is the final bulwark to which its advocates retreat when their main arguments have been punctured and deflated.

"But surely," says the distorter of domestic violence and rape statistics - says the agitator who runs dissenting professors off campus - says the censor of allegedly harmful pornography - says the fascist who criminalises prostitution or BDSM - says the conspiracy theorist who sees systemic sexism in places it couldn't possibly exist, like science and silicon valley (and videogaming, and science fiction) - says the proponent of patriarchy theory in societies in which men are routinely sacrificed to war, to dangerous jobs, to extreme poverty; whose genitals are mutilated; whose children, houses and paychecks can be taken away essentially at the whim of their partners; for whom there is vanishingly little support in the event of domestic abuse or homelessness; who are assumed to be rapists and wife-beaters and paedophiles; and who are told, throughout all of this, that it is their privilege - "I'm just claiming that women have rights. How can you disagree with that?"

The implication, in any event, that this is somehow a novel position, for which we have feminist advocacy to thank and to which there is actually anyone in the civilised world who objects, is a laughable and insulting one.

Still, I'm sure we all appreciate the attempt at consensus building.

Everyone has a different definition of feminism; that is to some extent the problem. Rather, this is the final bulwark to which its advocates retreat when their main arguments have been punctured and deflated.

"But surely," says the distorter of domestic violence and rape statistics - says the agitator who runs dissenting professors off campus - says the censor of allegedly harmful pornography - says the fascist who criminalises prostitution or BDSM - says the conspiracy theorist who sees systemic sexism in places it couldn't possibly exist, like science and silicon valley (and videogaming, and science fiction) - says the proponent of patriarchy theory in societies in which men are routinely sacrificed to war, to dangerous jobs, to extreme poverty; whose genitals are mutilated; whose children, houses and paychecks can be taken away essentially at the whim of their partners; for whom there is vanishingly little support in the event of domestic abuse or homelessness; who are assumed to be rapists and wife-beaters and paedophiles; and who are told, throughout all of this, that it is their privilege - "I'm just claiming that women have rights. How can you disagree with that?"

The implication, in any event, that this is somehow a novel position, for which we have feminist advocacy to thank and to which there is actually anyone in the civilised world who objects, is a laughable and insulting one.

Still, I'm sure we all appreciate the attempt at consensus building.