Category Archives: Culture Wars/Current Controversies

The Left and Anti-Left Both Have Much Still to Learn Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Religion and Philosophy

Prominent atheist scholar Richard Carrier discusses the recent dust up in the atheist milieu between left and right over Sargon’s appearance at an atheist conference. What a mess. Carrier, whose own politics appear to be a kind of pragmatic center-leftism has also had some interesting debates with both left-wing anarchists and an-caps.

By Richard Carrier

My last article on the growing irrationality of the atheist left and right covered a lot. But some things it addressed only too briefly, and need a little more attention. Not least being, everyone ignoring its message.

Not long after I wrote that article, the atheist left and anti-left did the same stupid shit all over again, abusing and damning two popular and important atheist leaders for no valid reason whatever, ironically for doing exactly the opposite things. Seth Andrews voiced pretty much the same sanity I did, that attending the same conference with an anti-feminist is not endorsing or agreeing with their anti-feminism, and then (initially) agreed to speak at the Mythicist Milwaukee conference to lend another feminist, social-justice voice to balance any perceived imbalance there may have been, and to make sure the views of that side of the ideological divide get a clear hearing. For which he was vilified and condemned and unfriended by prominent atheist leftists. Aron Ra did what I also had already written was an entirely acceptable thing to do, and bowed out of the conference in protest of the few anti-feminists empaneled at it. For which he was vilified and condemned and unfriended by prominent atheist anti-leftists.

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Growing the Numbers of Pan-Anarchists: Reflections on Propaganda Techniques 2

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Strategy

About 20 years ago, I began to formulate ideas for the development of what I now call a “third wave” anarchist movement, with the “first wave” being the era of classical anarchism from the 19th and early 20th century, and the “second wave” being the forms of anarchism that have their roots in the New Left from the 1960s. The intention was that this “third wave” would embrace and honor the two previous waves, but would differ from earlier forms of anarchism in that it would lack the Marxist-influenced class determinism of much of the first wave, and it would also lack the emphasis on cultural politics found among the second wave. Instead, the third wave would be specifically oriented towards attacking the emerging global capitalist “Empire” critiqued by thinkers such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and its various component parts.

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Zizek and Chomsky against anti-fascist hysteria Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Uncategorized

Read the original Italian version of this post here.

It’s good to see there are still some serious thinkers on the Left.

By di Roberto Vivaldelli

Zizek e Chomsky scaricano l'antifascismo: "Un feticcio"

The paranoia of recent times imposed by liberal public opinion is marking the political debate, from the United States to the Old Continent, including Italy.

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SJW vs. Sargon: Showdown at Milwaukee Atheist Conference 2

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Religion and Philosophy

This Smith guy sounds like a weenie and a crybaby, although I’m not a huge fan of Sargon’s centrist “conservative libertarianism,” either.

By Andy Ngo

Areomagazine.Com

Sparks flew at the 2017 MythCon conference on Saturday when British YouTuber and cultural critic Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, exchanged verbal blows and jabs with his interviewer, Thomas Smith, an atheist and skeptic podcast host. The heated exchange on intersectional feminism, social justice activism and Black Lives Matter was marred by insults which frequently bled into Smith yelling at the audience. The tumultuous debate culminated in Smith storming off the stage after repeatedly accusing Sargon of holding misogynistic and racist views. Tensions continued to mount even after the conference, resulting in security removing angry attendees from the venue.

“Atheism plus” meets “atheism minus”

Held at the Pabst Theatre in downtown Milwaukee and organized by Mythicist Milwaukee, a secular and free inquiry group, the conference was surrounded in controversy weeks leading up to the event. Activists and feminists on social media took issue with the speaker lineup bringing to the forefront the growing chasm in the secular community between social justice humanism, sometimes branded as “atheism plus,” and a more libertarian or classical liberal skepticism. The event featured several atheist speakers of the latter-kind, including feminism critic Sargon and fellow video bloggers Gregory Fluhrer aka Armoured Skeptic and June Lapine aka Shoe0nHead.

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Shane Burley & Mark Bray on Fascism Today and Antifa 3

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Uncategorized • Tags: , ,

What’s most interesting about this presentation is that these guys admit that “fascism” is a very small, marginal, and unpopular tendency in mainstream society. And yet it’s somehow a grave threat to civilization. Being an “anti-fascist” in 21st century Western civilization is about as sensible as being a McCarthyite (although the mainstream center-left is trying to bring that back as well with the “Russia-gate” hysteria). These guys might as well be Civil War reenactors. If folks like this would put as much energy into fighting the state that we actually have with it’s worldwide massacres of brown people, and its domestic police-prosecutorial-prison state, they might actually have something. What a joke.

“Authors Mark Bray (Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook) and Shane Burley (Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It) will be discussing the rise of fascist politics in the U.S. and the movement’s that are fighting it. In ANTIFA: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, organizer and historian Mark Bray provides a compelling, meticulous history that details the early days of the movement — when it was formed almost simultaneously with fascism itself, to fight Hitler and Mussolini — up to the present day. The book also acts as a handbook to tactics and strategies, key organizations and the core philosophies of the movement, suggesting what role citizens can play today in combating the rise of the far right. Fascism Today looks at the changing world of the far right in Donald Trump’s America. Examining the modern fascist movement’s various strains, Shane Burley has written an accessible primer about what its adherents believe, how they organize, and what future they have in the United States. The ascension of Trump has introduced a whole new vocabulary into our political lexicon—white nationalism, race realism, Identitarianism, and a slew of others. Burley breaks it all down. From the tech-savvy trolls of the alt-right to esoteric Aryan mystics, from full-fledged Nazis to well-groomed neofascists like Richard Spencer, he shows how these racists and authoritarians have reinvented themselves in order to recruit new members and grow. Just as importantly, Fascism Today shows how they can be fought and beaten. It highlights groups that have successfully opposed these twisted forces and outlines the elements needed to build powerful mass movements to confront the institutionalization of fascist ideas, protect marginalized communities, and ultimately stop the fascist threat.” ‘Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It’ book by Shane Burley: https://www.amazon.com/Fascism-Today-… ‘Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook’ book by Mark Bray: https://www.amazon.com/Antifa-Anti-Fa…

How Russia-gate Rationalizes Censorship Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized

By Joe Lauria

Consortium News

At the end of October, I wrote an article for Consortiumnews about the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign paying for unvetted opposition research that became the basis for much of the disputed story about Russia allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election on the orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The piece showed that the Democrats’ two paid-for sources that have engendered belief in Russia-gate are at best shaky. First was former British spy Christopher Steele’s largely unverified dossier of second- and third-hand opposition research portraying Donald Trump as something of a Russian Manchurian candidate.

And the second was CrowdStrike, an anti-Putin private company, examining the DNC’s computer server to dubiously claim discovery of a Russian “hack.” In a similar examination of an alleged hack of a Ukrainian artillery app, CrowdStrike also blamed Russia but used faulty data for its report that it was later forced to rewrite. CrowdStrike was hired after the DNC refused to allow the FBI to look at the server.

My piece also described the dangerous consequences of partisan Democratic faith in Russia-gate: a sharp increase in geopolitical tensions between nuclear-armed Russia and the U.S., and a New McCarthyism that is spreading fear — especially in academia, journalism and civil rights organizations — about questioning the enforced orthodoxy of Russia’s alleged guilt.

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Cultural Marxism: One of Those Legitimising Ideologies that Come and Go Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Police State/Civil Liberties, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Uncategorized • Tags:

Totalitarian humanism is only the latest manifestation of a more traditional enemy. Ultimately, our enemy is not any one ideology but the state itself, as Albert Jay Nock pointed out.

By Sean Gabb

Last month, I wrote a defence of Charlie Elphicke, my Member of Parliament. He had been suspended from the Conservative Party while the Police investigated him for an alleged sexual assault. He has still not been arrested or charged. He has still not been told the nature of the complaint against him. It may be that he is about to be unmasked as a serial sex-murderer. More likely, the sinister clowns who direct law enforcement in this country have found nothing that even they regard as an assault worth prosecuting. But, if the former of these possibilities might embarrass me, the general reflections I made on his case stand by themselves. What I wish now to do is to elaborate on these reflections.

I begin by granting that ideologies are in themselves important. They are sets of propositions about the world that are true or false in much the same way as a scientific hypothesis is true or false. They are true or false regardless of what motives people may have for adopting them. This being granted, every person is born with a set of dispositions that draws him to accepting a particular ideology. Some of us are born with a dislike of pushing others around. This will not invariably make us into free market libertarians. But it will incline us to less intrusive formulations of whatever ideology is accepted. There are liberal Catholics and liberal Moslems. There have even been liberal Marxists. Others are born with a will to dominate. These will gather round the most fashionable intolerant ideology on offer.

Last month, I used the examples of Calvinism and Cultural Marxism. These were and are legitimising ideologies. Each has different formal propositions. Each has different enemies. Each has different effects on the character. But their essential function, so far as they can be made hegemonic, is to justify the gaining and use of power by an authoritarian élite – or by “The Puritans.”

If you want to see this case made at greater length, I refer you to my earlier essay. The case briefly stated, I turn to what may follow from it.

This is to suggest that direct argument with the Puritans is of limited value. Our own Puritans are Cultural Marxists for reasons other than the truth or falsehood of Cultural Marxism. Because its surface claims about treating people as individuals, and not being rude to them, are broadly in line with public opinion, it is an ideal legitimising ideology. If our Puritans had, after about 1970, taken up traditional Calvinism, or Orthodox Marxism-Leninism, or National Socialism, they would have got nowhere. The social liberalism of the previous two decades would have rolled straight over them. Instead, there was the combination, in Britain and America, of a large cohort of those inclined to Puritanism and an ideology, or set of ideologies, that could be shaped into a powerful legitimising ideology. It may be that the universe as a whole is locked into a rigid scheme of cause and effect. In this case, what happened was inevitable. But looking only at those parts of the universe we can understand and control, I think there was an element of contingency here. We are where we are because of a largely accidental discovery by the Puritans of a legitimising ideology that worked for them.

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Sexual Harassment 2

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Men and Women, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

Bill Lind argues that the solution to the recent brouhaha over sexual harassment is a return to Victorian mores. I would make the polar opposite argument,i.e. that present day hysteria over “sexual harassment” is in fact a kind of neo-Victorianism, along with other manifestations of PC, e.g. anti-smoking puritans, the food police, feminist crusades against sex workers, the language police, helicopter parenting, safe spaces, trigger warnings, sensitivity training, etc. All modern nations maintain laws against rape and sexual assault. These are violent crimes that are normally punished severely by the courts. Most functional businesses with competent leadership maintain rules against sexual harassment in the workplace, and terminate employees who violate the rules. Are there people who do all these things anyway, is spite of laws or rules? Yes, just as there are people who commit murder, armed robbery, and burglary even though they are assuming the risk of prison or execution, and there are employees who show up for work intoxicated even though they are risking termination. Nothing more needs to be said.

By William S. Lind

Traditional Right

No law is more deeply engraved in human nature than that which leads men to make advances towards women and women to flirt with men.  It was written there long before history began, before time began to be reckoned.  Why?  Because it is necessary for the perpetuation of the human race.

Today, cultural Marxism seeks to overturn this law, or at least half of it.  Women are to be allowed to do whatever they want, befitting their “victim” status in cultural Marxism’s hierarchy of saints and sinners.  But men–should one so much as look at a woman with a gleam in his eye, he is to be damned to eternal shame, cast out of public life, deprived of employment, and ordered to undergo psychological “re-education”, presumably so he can become a better person by turning gay.

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‘It falls woefully short’: Charlottesville residents criticize report on white supremacist rally Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties, Race and Ethnicity, Uncategorized
By Ellie Silverman
Washington Post

William Fears, a white supremacist and neo-Nazi from Houston who is holding the flag, clashes with a counterprotester at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017. (Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post)
 
Charlottesville residents criticized the review of the city’s handling of the white supremacist rally in August, saying that it focused on the technicalities of the response but failed to discuss underlying racism.

Residents and officials packed a council meeting Monday evening, where former U.S. attorney Timothy Heaphy presented the findings of the independent review, which sharply criticized the police department for lacking the proper training and preparation to respond to the violent rally. At the first meeting since the report was publicly released Friday, residents expressed their anger and frustration with city officials and police.

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What Happened in Charlottesville? Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties, Race and Ethnicity, Uncategorized • Tags:

A summary of the findings of the investigation conducted by a private law firm commissioned by the city of Charlottesville. Assuming this summary is accurate, the findings are fairly consistent with my own observations about Charlottesville.

By Gregory Hood

American Renaissance

Independent report makes an honest effort to find out.

The law firm of Hunton & Williams has just issued an independent, 207-page report on the Unite the Right protest that took place in Charlottesville last August. The city of Charlottesville commissioned and paid for the report, but it is no cover up. It is a slashing indictment of the way the city prepared for and handled the demonstrations. It is a thorough vindication of the perspective of the Unite the Right demonstrators.

The report makes clear that the Charlottesville Police Department (CPD) and its black chief, Al Thomas, had no intention of allowing the demonstration to take place. Astonishingly, the report leaves no doubt that Chief Thomas wanted the police to let enough violence go unchecked to justify an order to declare the event an “unlawful assembly” and shut it down. The report is also unflinching in its condemnation of police and city-administration bungling that virtually guaranteed continued violence even after the event was canceled.

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Immigration and the Lack of Clear Title 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Immigration, Uncategorized

An interesting thought experiment: I wonder how many rightists would be willing to give up immigration restriction laws in exchange for total freedom to engage in private discrimination, and how many leftists would give up antidiscrimination laws in exchange for totally open borders.

Anarcho-Dictator

Instead of a Blog

I think the immigration issue is more complicated than the Future of Freedom Foundation, Trumpistas or Hoppe would frame it. I don’t regard the UK (or US) government as having any legitimate authority, nor do I regard any increase in the activities of the police as desirable. While people should be allowed to exclude or discriminate against anyone they please that does not give them the right to exclude them from the property of other people or uninhabited land.

This latter point is especially salient to the USA – the vast majority of the USA is totally uninhabited wilderness. This can be settled by anyone, at any time, and no one else has the authority to prevent them. I have no problem with an Islamic Caliphate in Wyoming, as long as they’re not attacking other people. Certainly all ‘Federal’ lands are completely without owners, and ought to be open to settlement by all people, including the Chinese, ISIS and Mexicans.

Furthermore, I would argue that a lack of consensus and social cohesion is a good thing, on the large scale – it checks the loyalty to the central state and creates political divisions, sometimes irreconcilable. Anything that weakens the central government is, prima facie, a good thing.
While it cannot be denied that the US, UN and various European governments subsidize the importation and settlement of foreigners, this in itself does not legitimize the deportation or blockage of these people – anymore than collecting a welfare check is a legitimate reason to deport native-born Americans.

Put simply, the US government subsidizes and taxes every imaginable group, and being opposed to immigration on the principle of ‘citizen-taxpayers’ ignores the fact that no one really has a legitimate claim to ‘public land’ as it presently exists. The huge buckets of money that are sloshed around the USA by various tax-and-spend plans can not be meaningfully traced back to any person, nor can any person be shown to unambiguously be a ‘tax consumer’ as opposed to a ‘tax payer’.

Even if it could, there are clear conflicts within these groups – many people obviously DO want immigrants coming into the United States, and they often live in the same locality as people who do not want immigration. If there were actually uniform opposition to immigration by everyone in the city of Dallas then a general exclusion could be justified. But given that many firms in Dallas would love to have low-wage employees, and many liberals in Dallas would love to see more diversity, this is a purely hypothetical exercise.

The only way ‘immigration’ can be sorted out other than one group of ethnic chauvinists and class elites imposing themselves on another is for a thorough decentralization and privatization of all the regions concerned. But if this were to happen you could kiss ‘white America’ goodbye – while some regions would remain predominantly white and perhaps even racially segregated the vast majority of the empty countryside would quickly be filled up by enterprising frontier-folks who – by sheer demographic ratios – would mostly be Latin Americans and Asians.

Lindsay Shepherd LIVE: Free Speech Battle with Laurier University Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Education, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Uncategorized

I challenge any politically correct type among our readers to explain how this situation differs from the kind of inquisition one might expect to take place under a communist, fascist, or theocratic regime.

Lindsay Shepherd (Grad Student at Wilfrid Laurier University) joins Dave to discuss her free speech battle after coming under attack by University officials for presenting her class with a video of a Jordan Peterson lecture. *Subscribe to The Rubin Report: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_c… Hear Lindsay’s audio recording of her meeting with university officials in this video.

The 21st Century is Becoming the 19th Century: Repeating Tragedy as a Farce 2

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Science and Technology

“History repeats … first as tragedy, then as farce” … -Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon

By Keith Preston

The present era of globalization in the early 21st century is very similar to the era of industrialization in the early 19th century, in the sense of both the way that it is transforming the world, as well as the conflicts that it is generating.

The primary political conflict in the early to middle 19th century was the battle between the rising bourgeoisie and the Ancient Regime. The present day equivalent of that conflict is the emerging conflict between the “national bourgeoisie” (represented by, for example, the declining WASP elite in the United States), who are the contemporary equivalent of the throne and altar traditionalists of earlier times. This declining ruling class sector is pitted against the globalist techno-oligarchs, financiers, and information/managerial class professionals that comprise the New Elites (the present equivalent of the 19th century bourgeoisie). The populist-nationalist movements of the West who serve as the ground level constituency for the national bourgeoisie are comparable to the 19th century European peasants and petite bourgeoisie who supported the royalists against the rise of the classical bourgeoisie (and whose opposition to the global economy is somewhat comparable to the Luddites who opposed the advent of industrialization). For instance, to understand the presidency of Donald Trump, and the rise of the Trumpians, one needs only to read Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, which describes how “how the class struggle..created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.”

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte

Image result for louis napoleon bonaparte

Donald Trump

Image result for trump

The rise of the bourgeoisie in the 19th century, the subsequent institutionalization of the bourgeoisie as the new ruling class (replacing the monarchs, aristocrats, and clerics), the parallel growth of industrial capitalism, and the related class polarization, generated the rise of opposition to the bourgeoisie from the Left. This opposition took the form of the socialist, communist, anarchist, and labor movements of the 19th and early 20th century.

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The Puritan Hypothesis and Charlie Elphicke 3

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism

A great article from Sean Gabb. 

The debate over whether PC has its roots in Marxism or in Christian puritanism/pietism is an interesting one. Bill Lind is a staunch proponent of the former position, and Sean and Paul Gotffried take the latter position. I tend to think its both in the sense that Marxism itself is a kind of secularized Christian messianism/millenarianism (as Stirner and Nietzsche observed in the 19th century). Paul has pointed out that while the Frankfurt School originated in Germany, it was in American universities that it really took root because the Puritan and (later) Progressive Christian cultural foundations of American intellectual culture provided fertile ground for this kind of secular fundamentalism, which was the re-exported to Europe. I tend to regard the Cromwellians as pre-Marxist Marxists, or the Marxists as neo-Cromwellians. Having been a fundamentalist Calvinist when I was a kid,  as an adult I noticed PC was very similar to the climate of my upbringing. PC seems to me to be a hybrid of Calvinist moralism, pietism, zealotry and determinism with the Marxist emphasis on social conflict between the downtrodden suffering just and their supposed hegemonic oppressors.

My own anti-PC stance is merely a contemporary version of Bakunin’s anti-Marxist and anti-clericalism. If Bakunin were here today, he would be railing against the cultural Marxists just as fervently as he railed against the classical Marxists, and instead of writing a book title “God and the State,” he would have to write a book called “Social Justice and the State.”

 

The Puritan Hypothesis and  Charlie Elphicke
Sean Gabb
5th November 2017

Charlie Elphicke is the Conservative Member of Parliament for Dover and Deal. This makes him my Member of Parliament. On Friday the 3rd November 2017, he discovered – via the media, he says, not from any official notification – that he was suspended from the Conservative Party, and that the Police had been asked to investigate him. No reason for this was given. However, Mr Elphicke’s name was on a confidential list, compiled by Central Office, and immediately leaked on social media, of politicians said to be unable to keep their hands to themselves.

Nothing more has been said about him in the news. Speaking for myself, I know him hardly at all, but find it unlikely that he has committed anything that would once have been thought a criminal offence. It is conceivable – and I have no private information on this point – that he has cast the occasional lewd glance at a member of the opposite sex. He may even have issued an invitation to more intimate contact. But I do not find it conceivable that he has taken part in any sexual act without the consent, as reasonably understood, of the other party. Assaults of any kind require a lack of forethought I have never detected in Mr Elphicke. I do not hold him in high political regard. On the other hand, he is the best representative my constituency has had in the past twenty years, and I look forward to his continuation in this role at least until 2022.

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Subversive: Interviews with Radicals Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

There is an interview with me in this book. Available from Amazon.Com.

Subversive is a book of interviews with fifty-two of the most radical people in the world. From all walks of life, some are famous, while others are almost completely unknown.

These are people different to the rest of us. They want the world to change, and they are doing things to change it. Some are activists, some live in such a way that society has to take notice.

Subversive doesn’t adopt a sensationalist tone. It approaches its subjects with a curiosity about what they believe in and how they lead their lives.

Black Panthers, white nationalists, eco terrorists, unrepentant heroin users, The Cannibal Cop, meth makers, fetish pornographers, war protestors, 9-11 truthers, occultists, political agitators, sungazers, literary imposters, time travellers, flat earthers, anarcho-primitivists, murderers, and beyond.

“Motivated ignorance” is ruining our political discourse Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized

Listening to a political opponent is almost as bad as getting a tooth pulled

Frimer and his colleagues demonstrated this same effect with several different methodologies in their paper. In another test, they (essentially) asked participants to rate how interested they were in learning about alternative political viewpoints compared to activities like: “watching paint dry,” “sitting quietly,” “going for a walk on a sunny day,” and “having a tooth pulled.”

By Brian Resnick

Vox

Ikon Images / Getty Images

If you ever thought, “You couldn’t pay me to listen to Sean Hannity / Rachael Maddow / insert any television pundit you violently disagree with here” — you are not alone.

A study, recently published in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, essentially tested this very question.

Two hundred participants were presented with two options. They could either read and answer questions about an opinion they agreed with — the topic was same-sex marriage — or read the opposing viewpoint.

Here’s the catch: If the participants chose to read the opinion they agreed with, they were entered into a raffle pool to earn $7. If they selected to read opposing opinion, they had a chance to win $10.

You’d think everyone would want to win more money, right?

No.

A majority — 63 percent — of the participants chose to stick with what they already knew, forgoing the chance to win $10. Both people with pro same-sex marriage beliefs and those against it avoided the opinion hostile to their worldview at similar rates.

“They don’t know what’s going on the other side, and they don’t want to know,” Jeremy Frimer, the University of Winnipeg psychologist who led the study, says.

This is a key point that many people miss when discussing the “fake news” or “filter bubble” problem in our online media ecosystems. Avoiding facts inconvenient to our worldview isn’t just some passive, unconscious habit we engage in. We do it because we find these facts to be genuinely unpleasant. And as long as this experience remains unpleasant, and easy to avoid, we’re just going to drift further and further apart.

Listening to a political opponent is almost as bad as getting a tooth pulled

Frimer and his colleagues demonstrated this same effect with several different methodologies in their paper. In another test, they (essentially) asked participants to rate how interested they were in learning about alternative political viewpoints compared to activities like: “watching paint dry,” “sitting quietly,” “going for a walk on a sunny day,” and “having a tooth pulled.”

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Keith Preston: Trump has well-developed capacity for insulting people Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized • Tags: , ,

Press TV. Listen here.

US President Donald Trump’s use of the name “Pocahontas” during a White House ceremony honoring Native American World War II veterans highlights his inclination to insult and abuse people, according to an American analyst.

“Donald Trump has a very well-developed capacity for insulting people; it’s almost what he specializes in,” said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.

“Donald Trump is prone to making comments that are vey inflammatory from a racial and ethnic perspective,” Preston told Press TV on Tuesday.

“This reflects the wider divisions in our society,” he added. “We have a very polarized society.”

Trump made a remark on Monday some called racist at a White House event honoring Native American World War II veterans by referring to Senator Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas.”

“We have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago,” Trump said. “They call her Pocahontas. But you know what, I like you.”

Warren, a noted legal scholar who taught at Harvard Law School, denounced Trump for stopping to a “disgusting low” by attacking her with a derisive nickname.

“President Trump couldn’t even make it through a ceremony to honor these men without throwing in a racial slur,” Warren told CNN.

Trump started accusing Warren of lying about her heritage and called her “Pocahontas” at a campaign rally in June, 2016, according to the Washington Post, when Warren was campaigning for Trump’s Democratic rival Hilary Clinton.

Warren has been accused of using her Native American Heritage to get ahead in her political career, particularly in the 2012 Massachusetts race for senator, according to the Boston Globe.

Genealogists have found a document stating that she has a great-great-great-grandmother who is Native American, which would make her 1/32 Cherokee, but they say it would take more research to confirm that finding.

Keith Preston: US war on drugs led to opioid epidemic Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Health and Medicine, Law/Justice, Uncategorized • Tags:

Press TV. Listen here.

The US has been waging a war against drugs for half a century, viewing drug addiction as a criminal phenomenon instead of a health issue, therefore no headway has been made in curbing the US opioid crisis, an American analyst says.

The so-called ‘War on Drugs’ refers to a US government campaign launched during the administration of former President Richard Nixon, which included the prohibition of drugs and military intervention, with the stated aim being to reduce the illegal drug trade.

The United States leads the world in both recreational drug usage and incarceration rates. Many experts believe that the War on Drugs has been costly and ineffective largely because inadequate emphasis is placed on treatment of addiction.

The current opioid epidemic in the United States has multiple reasons, among them the excess prescription of pain killers, which in turn contribute to an increase in pharmaceutical financial gains, said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.

“People become addicted to pharmaceutical drugs when undergoing medical treatment, and then because of the addiction, they develop they can’t stop the habit, so when their medical treatment is over with, and they are cut off their drug supply then they start buying prescription drugs off the street that are sold on the illegal market and often they will switch to heroin because heroin is actually cheaper than prescription opiods,” Preston said in an interview with Press TV on Wednesday

“So we have now this wave of heroin addicts as well as people who are addicted to prescription opioids as well,” he added.

Preston said the Trump administration’s approach to the drug crisis is encouraging in the sense that it has not recommended the escalation of the war on drugs and instead has taken a non-criminal approach to the crisis recognizing the crisis is more of a health issue.

“There may be some signs of a turning of the tides there,” he said.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers said Monday that the true cost of the opioid epidemic in 2015 was $504 billion, more than six times the most recent estimate.

The council said a 2016 private study estimated that prescription opioid overdose, abuse and dependence cost $78.5 billion in the US in 2013.

Most of that expense was attributed to health care and criminal justice spending, along with lost productivity.

US President Donald Trump said Monday at a cabinet meeting in the White House that the “opioid epidemic that is ravaging so many American families and communities” would be among topics for discussion.

Last month, Trump declared the US drug crisis a “public health emergency.” He also announced an advertising campaign to combat the epidemic, but did not direct any new federal funding toward the effort.

Opioids are drugs formulated to replicate the pain reducing properties of opium. They include both legal painkillers like morphine, oxycodone, or hydrocodone prescribed by doctors for acute or chronic pain, as well as illegal drugs like heroin or illicitly made fentanyl.

The word “opioid” is derived from the word “opium.”

US government and healthcare officials have been struggling to stem the epidemic of overdoses, which killed more than 64,000 Americans last year alone, up from 52,000 the previous year. More than half were related to opioids.