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Party of Religious Liberty Botches Debate on Religion and the Constitution

…ernor George Pataki’s case, he botched the facts, too: he claimed that the New York Police Department had a “very active group, aggressively monitoring” Muslim communities, which “stopped and prevented dozens, and dozens of attacks in New York.” But the NYPD itself has admitted the program, since disbanded, produced no terrorism leads. “I’m a great believer in the First Amendment,” Pataki insisted, while advocating for spying on people based on th…

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Via Jokes, ChatGPT Chooses Which Religious Traditions and Figures Deserve Respect — And Therefore What Counts as ‘Religion’

…ah, or Muhammad. With regard to these latter examples, ChatGPT informs the user that it could hurt someone’s religious sensibilities by telling such a joke. But it does not say this with regard to Krishna. At first it seemed to me that there is an ontological difference between Krishna, Muhammad, and Jesus in that the latter two are—or are at least widely understood to be—historical individuals. So to test this hypothesis, I went to ChatGPT and I…

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Our Failure To Understand Ferguson: A Cognitive Explanation

…n teach us about Ferguson Watch filmmaker Dean Peterson’s short video of a New York City subway stairwell: When the video was posted three years ago, it prompted this jewel of an observation by Metafilter user James Bording: “On its own, when you see one person slip, you automatically assume that person slipped, was clumsy or not playing attention. But when you look at the aggregate, you realize that the failure isn’t on the individual at all, rat…

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New Poll Shows Most Americans Don’t Care about Romney’s Mormonism

…w wrote, “only Mitt Romney has broad potential appeal.”  Only Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul come close to Romney in name recognition, but more than 60% of voters say they would never vote for any of them. The Pew survey also shed new statistical light on a favorite subject of media and Republican handwringing: Romney’s Mormonism. A healthy majority of Americans (68%) say that it would not matter to them if a presidential candidate was M…

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Don’t Tread on our Gas Stoves: The Latest Right-Wing Cause May Be Silly But the Strategy is the Point

…tove from my cold dead hands.” Others, like influential right-wing Twitter-user “Catturd,” are willing to endanger themselves explicitly: “Dear Liberals…I turned on all my gas stove eyes today and let them burn for no reason—and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it but cry.” Ron DeSantis is willing to imply defending gas stoves with weapons by lifting a sign of a modified Gadsen “Don’t tread on me” flag featuring a gas stove rather than…

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Why We Should Ban Oppressive Speech Acts

…roducing white supremacist ideology by extolling it publicly; these aren’t new ideas! They undergird the history of Europe and the United States. So since the bell has been rung, and rung and rung, we can’t pretend to not have ever heard it.” This rebuttal, however, misses the difference between citationality—the ability to cite and discuss a given discourse without restating or reasserting its claims—and each new (oppressive) speech act. I’m not…

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Waterboarding in the Living Room

…sed, then, that in comments responding to the The Smoking Gun article, one user called “rahimali” wrote, “I’m ok with a little waterboarding now and again if it shuts the wife’s cakehole. Maybe waterboarding would cure PMS?”  Although the torture captured on film at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was presented as aberrant (the behavior of “a few bad apples”), released memos have shown again and again that torture and so-called enhanced interrogatio…

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Intolerance in Indonesia Extends to Religious Minorities; Lutheran Church in Norway OK’s Same-Sex Marriage, But Not in Finland; Catholic Church Warns Australian CEOs to Back Off Marriage Equality Support; Global LGBT Recap

…four revellers attempting to hold a banned “rainbow rally” to mark Bengali New Year in the Bangladeshi capital Thursday, amid heightened security threats from Islamists. Officers said they held four young men who joined revellers at the main new year parade at Dhaka University seeking to hold a rally in support of gay rights, which had been denied permission. Authorities had cancelled the rally, being organised by activist group Roopbaan — which s…

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Orlando Tragedy and the Tangled History of Jihad and Homosexuality

…struggling with his own sexuality as he frequented the nightclub and was a user of gay dating apps. To many this may muddy his motives, but only if one doesn’t understand the history of jihadism. Jihadism is a particular strain of political and social reform that emerges as an anti-colonial movement in the Muslim world. In response to the threat of European hegemony, jihadism resisted violently and through that violence sought to reform the Muslim…

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Gen X, Gadgets, and God

…would provide “Biblical guidance to your everyday ups and downs.” With it, users select from a scrolling list of “blessings” (friendship, new home) or “burdens” (anger, money), shake the phone, and get a Bible verse to guide reflection in the course of daily life. What is cool about apps like the Holy Roller is not, however, just what they contain and how that has been selected, but where they go and what comes back. That is, a user of the Holy Ro…

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