Religion Dispatches
…r her Israel trip, as it has done for other presidential hopefuls, instead booking it through a Christian tour agency. He thinks, perhaps, that Palin is miffed that he and other RJC board members have been critical of her, but that she’s unwise to rebuff them because they could be so helpful to her. But this is characteristically Palin behavior — with or without the criticism. She is, for example, the only GOP aspirant who has never spoken at the…
Read More…ent. Whereas the freethinker and the comic once shared a tour schedule and booking agent, now they are bifurcated by genre and accessibility. Both are degraded by the absence of the other, as the quest for quick hard laughter and serious statistical proof press Carlin and Jacoby to extremist corners of inflexible insight. Jacoby, a self-described “cultural conservationist,” might be right that the Bush presidency signals an all-time peak in Americ…
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…beat down of Duanna Johnson, an African American transwoman, in a Memphis booking room that was captured on a surveillance video. “I’d be stupid not to go packing now.” Williams lives in Oakland, just outside of San Francisco, and he’s going to check out the San Francisco chapter of Pink Pistols. As a national organization that encourages lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender to arm themselves to prevent hate crimes the Pink Pistols are also a s…
Read More…lier post on some of the spins Special Guest is promoting here. Today, the booking site is promoting Ted Shoebat, who says that being an atheist leads one to commit mass murder. “It’s actually very simple,” Shoebat was quoted in Special Guest’s promotion, “When God is not in your life, evil will seek to fill the void.” And who is Shoebat? As Sarah wrote in a post in August: …(He) is the son of “ex-terrorist” Walid Shoebat, an over-exposed figure i…
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…1. Gardella writes that “According to the largest flag manufacturer in the United States, Annin & Company, more flags were sold in the ten days following September 11 than in the whole year before. Orders became backed up until midsummer of 2002. Wal-Mart reported selling 118,000 flags in a single day.” The event even inspired new designs, from the well-known “Flag of Honor” and “Flag of Heroes” featuring the names of the dead to the lesser-known…
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…n. That said, there’s never any getting around the blunt reality of social class, and I believe Andersen deserves credit for showing how an ever-more-powerful overclass has shaped the political economy we all inhabit. If we’re lucky, we will move past the ever-more-sterile “debate” and get on with the business of uniting to overthrow an oppressive and highly racialized U.S. hypercapitalism. Because if we don’t—if we continue to spend energy in a p…
Read More…. That means you have to know where your flight is going. As it happens my flight will enter Saudi Arabia from a non-Muslim majority country, France, so will land in Jeddah, the transitional port. However, since my next stop is Makkah, and Jeddah is closer to it than any of the five miqat, then technically I have to make my intention and take on the ihram before I leave the U.S. (or in France, or mid-air). Everybody says it is great to clean up ag…
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…d creates a space that is very profound and spiritual for me.” France: Gay Flight Attendants Seek Opt Out From Flights to Iran Earlier this month, gay flights attendants for Air France sought the ability to opt out of working flights on a new route to Tehran; female flight attendants were previously given that option after some objected to the requirement that they wear a head scarf when deplaning in Iran. Malaysia: Top Cop Says LGBT People Cannot…
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…s, making Trumpism a revolt of the petty bourgeoisie not the white working class. Most of the real white working class, households earning less than $50,000, voted for Clinton. They voted for Biden this time around, too. As for Trump, he won voters making more than $100,000 a year, as he did last time. He is a populist, but it’s populism based largely on white supremacy, not economics. The pundit corps did not or would not see the difference. The…
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…teness”—a “psychological wage,” as W. E. B. Du Bois called it that working class whites earn by construing their interests in racial rather than class terms, by attributing their economic insecurity to black people rather than to white elites and to the system they made. This same misdirected resentment—misperceiving black people as responsible for a set of socio-economic circumstances that were created by white elites (politicians, bankers, and c…
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