Monthly Archives: August 2010

We the (White) Sheeple

Glenn Beck’s followers speak:

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Herderian Religious Cleansing, 1930s style, in Malaysia and the United States

Here’s an image of a book burning in Berlin, May 10, 1933: And here’s an image of a burned out synagogue after Krisallnacht (November, 1938): These two images are what anti-Enlightenment Herderian political action so readily devolves into. And now here … Continue reading

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Daniel Dennett v. David Chalmers on consciousness (with Terence McKenna putting in his two cents)

Daniel Dennett deflates consciousness here: __________ David Chalmers inflates it here: __________ And Terence McKenna takes some DMT to break the tie, struggling to share in words, to the uninitiated, the qualia that accompanies ingestion of the chemical.

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Jeffersonian Islam: Feisel Abdul Rauf, the Mosque Near Ground Zero, and the Book He Wrote Six Years Ago

Feisel Abdul Rauf is the imam (preacher) at the center of the ground zero mosque controversy, and so I thought it would be interesting to read the book that he wrote six years prior to the controversy: What’s Right with Islam: … Continue reading

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Tea Party Herderian Terrorism? Mosque Building Site Fire in Tennessee Ruled an Arson

This at CBS News last night: Federal officials are investigating a fire that started overnight at the site of a new Islamic center in a Nashville suburb. Ben Goodwin of the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Department confirmed to CBS Affiliate WTVF … Continue reading

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A Thoroughly Awesome Take on Civility in Public Discourse from Terry Teachout (and George Washington)

Not that I always live up to it, but I think that this is great: George Washington once drew up a list of rules of civility. Here is the first one: “1st Every Action done in Company, ought to be … Continue reading

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The Ground Zero Mosque: Jason Rosenhouse on Muslim American Collective Guilt for 9-11

At EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse weighs in on the proposed mosque at ground zero: The notion that somehow there is a radius around Ground Zero that is now a Muslim-free zone is obscene and bigoted. This isn’t even an issue of … Continue reading

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Drinking Coca-Cola in Weimar

Below is an Egyptian ad for Coca-Cola, and in watching it I can’t help but think of 1920s Weimar. Urban Muslims, living in Cairo, can welcome a bit of homoerotic humor. Like Berlin in the 1920s, city dwellers today tend to be … Continue reading

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The Last Exorcism: The Blair Witch Project Meets Marjoe and Nathaniel Hawthorne

At Salon, Andrew O’Hehir describes the genre that the Blair Witch Project launched: Your horror movie’s going to look like raw documentary footage, full of mistakes and retakes and hinky camera angles and jagged non-edits. In fact, why not make … Continue reading

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Muslim Americans and the Ground Zero Mosque: Countering Stereotypes

This recently at the American Prospect website: A 2007 Pew Study on Muslim Americans found “them to be largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the … Continue reading

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Go West, Young Species? Like Ulysses and Darwin, Launch Out?

Exploiting an open territory appears to be a larger driver of big evolutionary changes than getting into an already crowded market and competing for local territorial niches, suggests a new scientific study that, at first glance, might seem to contradict Charles Darwin’s … Continue reading

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Kepler Telescope Detects an Earth-Size Planet Orbiting a Star Like Our Own

The New York Times today: Scientists working with NASA’s Kepler satellite reported Thursday that they might have spotted a planet just 1.5 times the diameter of Earth around a Sun-like star. And, not to be outdone, the Europeans announced an … Continue reading

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The Ground Zero Mosque: Are We a Judeo-Christian Country or a Jeffersonian Country?

Muhammad Al-Zekri, a Muslim who is also a Bahraini anthropologist, gets it. He thinks that the ground zero mosque debate is good for America. This today in the New York Times: ‘What’s happening in America is very healthy,’ said Muhammad Al-Zekri, a … Continue reading

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Mosque NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) Spreading from Ground Zero to Other Parts of America

We all like for the lights to come on, but we don’t necessarily want to look out of our kitchen windows and see a nuclear power plant alongside what was once a pristine bay. Likewise, we all like the First … Continue reading

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Maureen Dowd on Some Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Anti-Muslim Crowds

In a recent New York Times column, Maureen Dowd tracks some of the Herderite stupidity swirling around the so-called ground zero mosque: The dispute over the Islamic center has tripped some deep national lunacy. The unbottled anger and suspicion concerning ground zero show … Continue reading

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Kepler Telescope Watch: Will the Discovery of an Earth-like Planet Be Announced By NASA Tommorrow?

Something seems to be brewing around a NASA announcement scheduled for tommorrow. Here’s Denise Chow at Space.com: NASA is expected to make an announcement Thursday on the progress of its Kepler spacecraft, which has been staring at one patch of … Continue reading

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9-11 Collective Guilt Watch: Muslim American NYC Cab Driver Stabbed for Being Muslim

This today at TPM: According to Detective Marc Nell, at 6:14 pm last night, the driver picked up Michael Enright, 21, of Brewster, NY, at the intersection of 24th Street and 2nd Avenue in Manhattan. The cab proceeded to drive … Continue reading

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Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin Have No Jeffersonian Clothes: Ron Paul Favors the Building of the Ground Zero Mosque and Castigates Its Opponents

The so-called ground zero mosque is generating a rift between Jeffersonian libertarian conservatives and those who identify with the Herderite Tea Partiers. The latest evidence of this split can be found in a statement released by the libertarian congressman, Ron Paul, who wrote … Continue reading

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Shadows on a Distant Wall: Nikodem Poplawski Says We Might Be Living in a Black Hole

In a new theory worthy of Alice in Wonderland, the Washington Post reports today that a cosmologist, Nikodem Poplawski, posits that each black hole may contain a universe inside of it, and we ourselves may be inside a black hole: We could be … Continue reading

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When Will the Word Become Flesh? The New Antisemitism, Ctd

Sigmund Freud, in the early 1930s, quipped that he was pleased to see that the German and Austrian antisemites appeared content to burn his books and not him. And, of course, within a few years, as things escalated, it wasn’t … Continue reading

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