Links - 7th November 2016

Superstar Marxist Professor Just Endorsed Trump for President - "Your favorite rock star Marxist professor and public intellectual Slavoj Žižek just endorsed Donald Trump for president in one of his signature rants. Speaking with UK’s Channel 4, Žižek was asked whom he would vote for in the U.S. presidential election. “Trump,” he quickly replied, adding that while the GOP nominee horrifies him, “Hillary is the true danger.” According to him, “[Hillary] built an impossible all-inclusive coalition. Look, the one point when I fully agreed with Trump was, you remember, when Bernie Sanders endorsed Hillary? He said it’s like somebody from Occupy Wall Street endorsing Lehman Brothers.” Zizek, a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, continued: “In every society there is a whole network of unwritten rules, how politics works, and how you build consensus. Trump disturbed this. And if Trump wins, both big parties, Republicans and Democrats, would have to return to basics, rethink themselves, and maybe some things can happen there.” Named in 2012 by Foreign Policy as one of the top 100 global thinkers, Zizek also dismisses the warnings that Trump will bring fascism to America. Instead he thinks it will be a “big awakening”"

Ugly, bloody scenes in San Jose as protesters attack Trump supporters outside rally - "Trump supporters were surrounded and, in several cases, attacked as they left the rally. In one incident captured on camera, a Trump supporter was struck hard over the side of the head as he was walking away from a group of protesters. The attack left him with blood streaming down his head and onto his shirt."
If Trump supporters are attacked and defend themselves, does this count as Trump supporters being violent?

Don’t look now, Venice tourists – the locals are sick of you - "members of the Comitato NO Grandi Navi, a group campaigning against the giant cruise ships that daily disgorge visitors into the fragile lagoon, took to dinghies to get in the way. Or at least to make a noise while some of the estimated 30,000 peak-season daily cruise visitors peered down at them from the upper decks. More than 60,000 people descend on Venice each day, with less than half staying the night. “At least the tourists in the hotels are easier to manage, and bring richness to the city,” says Marco Caberlotto, a member of Generation 90, a campaign group established this summer. “Most people just want to take a selfie in St Mark’s Square before they go back to their ships”... more than 500 members of Generation 90 staged a march. They held up shopping trolleys and push chairs and chanted in Venetian dialect: “Watch your legs, I’m coming through with a trolley”... “The problem is that these tourists think this is a kind of Disneyland,” Caberlotto says in a break from studying at a library on the Zaterre promenade, where many of the cruise ships dock. “They should remember that this is a living city.”"

Bali alcohol ban? Indonesian law would outlaw beer and wine - "A bill to ban the sale, distribution and consumption of drinks containing more than one per cent of alcohol was introduced by two Islamicist parties, the United Development Party and the Prosperous Justice Party, and is being deliberated by Indonesia’s House of Representatives. If passed, the law would be the first of its kind in Muslim-majority Indonesia. There may be some exceptions to the booze ban for travellers, customary activities and religious rituals. But the introduction of the bill has sparked uproar within Indonesia’s tourism and hospitality industries, which warn tourism would be crippled if the law was passed. “If the bill is passed, our business will be done,” Indonesian Hotel and Restaurant Association head Hariyadi Sukamdani told the Jakarta Post. “The tourists ... drink alcohol all the time. It will be very inconvenient for them if they can’t find alcohol.” Indonesia has already made moves to restrict the availability of alcohol... Representatives for Indonesia’s tourism and hospitality industries warn prohibition would merely cause sales in bootlegged booze to skyrocket, with potentially deadly consequences. Due in part to the increasing cost of importing liquor, Bali has seen a rise in the sale of home-brewed drinks laced with methanol, which have been linked to the deaths and serious illness of tourists, including Australians, on the party island."

Crowd turns its back on Hillary Clinton as photo captures the age of the selfie

Maajid Nawaz - Timeline - "1st world American non-Muslims at the Southern Poverty Law Center just listed me - a liberal reform Muslim - as an "anti-Muslim Extremist". I consider this as placing a target on my head. It is nothing but a hit list for jihadist terrorists."
Perhaps this will make the SPLC finally lose credibility
Comments: "And half the world asks why more Muslims don't denounce extremism."
"That organization has lost a lot of its credibility this year. They've identified a frog meme with fascism, now they are trying to denounce your work to reduce extremism as anti-Muslim. Your reputation with outlast theirs Maajid. I hope other people will understand how valuable Quilliam is in the fight against Jihadism."
"Surely the biggest anti-Muslim extremists are the ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorists who, as we're told time and again, commit the foulest of crimes against other Muslims. But no, a liberal, secular Muslim who's vision for the future of Islam is open, pluralistic and aligned with the principles of free expression and tolerance is the bad guy here. Utterly, utterly disgraceful."
"Ayaan Hirsi Ali too, sadly. They're beyond pathetic, especially when you consider how honest and pressing they are in their efforts to oppose the christian right. If only they rose above their lowered expectations and afforded other political-religious movements the same scrutiny."
"It's amazing how they have turned Anti Islamist in to Anti Muslim. What a dangerous and disingenuous conflation."

Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali named as “anti-Muslim extremists” by the Southern Poverty Law Center - "When I read stuff like the SPLC report, I sometimes agree with a person—I can’t recall their name—who criticized Regressive Leftists for thinking that “the only authentic Muslim has a Kalashnikov in one hand and a Qur’an in the other.” The SPLC, it seems, shares that view, and, when demonizing Nawaz’s tweeting out a Jesus and Mo cartoon (adding that God was greater than could be offended by it), the SPLC mistakes critics of Islam for bigots against Muslims. It’s the classic Islamophobia Conflation Syndrome. As Haider says, the SPLC has truly discredited itself with this one."

Professor Who Popularized Microaggressions Says Universities Have Gone Too Far
From original article: "conservative blogs ripped the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for guidance on its Employee Forum website that said (among other things) telling a woman, "I love your shoes," constituted a microaggression. (The university has said the guidance does not represent official policy.)"

I’m A Muslim Reformer. Why Am I Being Smeared as an ‘Anti-Muslim Extremist’? - "If there was anything we liberals should have learnt from McCarthyism, it is that compiling lists of our political foes is a malevolent, nefarious, and incredibly dangerous thing to do. And this terrible tactic, of simplifying and reducing our political opponents to a rogue’s gallery of “bad guys,” is not solely the domain of the right. As the political horseshoe theory attributed to Jean-Pierre Faye highlights, if we travel far-left enough, we find the very same sneering, nasty and reckless bullying tactics used by the far-right. Denunciations of traitors, heresy and blasphemy are the last resort of diminutive, insecure power-craving fascists of all stripes. Compiling lists is their modus operandi... In October 2014, the Center posted an “Extremist File” that included Presidential nominee Dr. Ben Carson. The SPLC had to later issue an apology... There is no “good way” to compile lists. Jihadist terrorists in Bangladesh also had a list. This appeared in 2013 and named 84 “atheist bloggers”, in other words secular free-thinkers. By the end of 2016 ten of them had been assassinated. Such a fascist tactic had been mirrored by a UK-based ‘anti-fascist’ group, Hope not Hate. In 2013 ‘Hope not Hate’ compiled a similar list that included the Danish author, journalist and Islam-critic Lars Hedegaard. He was later subjected to an assassination attempt, too. No. Nothing good ever comes from compiling lists. And so I say to the Southern Poverty Law Center: You were supposed to stand up for us, not intimidate us. Just imagine how ex-Muslim Islam-critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali must feel to be included in your list of "anti-Muslim" extremists. Her friend Theo Van Gogh was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam in 2004. And back then there was another list pinned to Theo’s corpse with a knife: it too named Ayaan Hirsi Ali."

Women are right to boycott Iran’s chess tournament - "Activists and political groups in the West hesitated to condemn the torture of political prisoners or the assassination of dissidents in diaspora, unsure of how to speak against those who were the enemy of their enemy. In its nearly 37-year rule, the Iranian regime’s greatest industry is the manufacturing of enemies — an expertise that has been widely exported. When the wealthy and educated elite fled in the wake of the 1979 revolution, the Ayatollah branded them “violators against God and morality.” When news of the 1979 women’s protest aired on television, the protestors were described as “prostitutes” who could not embrace the veil because they had no virtue. When droves of Bahais, a religious minority, were rounded up from their homes never to be heard from again, they were not missing neighbors but expendable “infidels.” When Kurdish regions were bombed and scores of Kurds executed, they were “separatists” receiving their due. Marxists and socialists, “sowers of corruption on earth,” were imprisoned and executed by the thousands in virtual silence. And when I and a handful of other women wrote the memoirs of our experiences in post-revolutionary Iran, several U.S.-based Iranian professors branded us “native informants.” We had found the freedom to speak and, as we began to exercise that freedom, we were hit with a tsunami of slander... Not surprisingly, many have called for a lifting of the boycott on Tehran’s chess tournament and have shunned women from the outside for meddling in the affairs of Iranian women... There has been no greater plague on human rights campaigns in Iran than “relativism” and its post-modern peddlers. The only thing relativist arguments achieve is to disband the hard-earned solidarity established despite border lines by the idealism of the 20th century. Now relativists are bullying female chess players and their supporters into withdrawing their boycott, accusing them of “cultural meddling.”"

Bono's 'Humbling' Realizations About Aid, Capitalism And Nerds - "The Irish singer and co-founder of ONE, a campaigning group that fights poverty and disease in Africa, said it had been “a humbling thing for me” to realize the importance of capitalism and entrepreneurialism in philanthropy, particularly as someone who “got into this as a righteous anger activist with all the cliches.” “Job creators and innovators are just the key, and aid is just a bridge”"

Calls grow to label attacks on Middle East Christians as genocide

Muhammad Was A Feminist - "After Khadija’s death, Muhammad married 12 wives. One was Aisha, the daughter of his closest friend and ally Abu Baker. The rest were nearly all widows, divorced women, or captives. He preached consistently that it was the responsibility of men to protect those women who had met with misfortune. This was one of the reasons polygamy was encouraged. Even with female infanticide, women in seventh century Arabia far outnumbered men because so many men were killed in the inter-tribal warfare of the day. Several of Muhammad’s wives were poor and destitute and he took them in, along with their children, into his household... Finally, there is nothing in the Quran about women wearing the veil, the Hejab. That was certainly the custom in Arabia at that time and Muhammad’s wives wore the Hejab to designate their special status as “Mothers of the Believers,” but the only thing the Quran says directly is that women should dress “modestly.” Muhammad said the same thing to men"
Islamophobic comments: "I wish this is true. But my reading of Koran tells me differently. Quran (4:34) - "Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them.""
"It's very interesting how you gloss over the fact that Aisha was 6 years old when Muhammad married her and 10 when he consummated the marriage. Nowhere is that minor little detail mentioned. Child marriage, particularly arranged marriages for girls, continues among Muhammad's people today, in no small part because of the example he set. A true feminist."
"This Islam apologism by liberals is one of the reasons why I'm sorely tempted to vote for the GOP downticket."

Why Women Need To Start Asking Men Out…Because Men Have No Balls - "Ladies, it's been said before, but I'll say it again: They just don't make ’em like they used to. There's no door-holding, no hand-holding and definitely no free drinks. There’s no taking off hats or courting through invitations. There are no smooth moves, no jackets to dinner. There are no flowers, no tables by candlelight. But, most importantly, there are no dates."
If a man had written something like this, it'd have been called male sexual entitlement
Comments: "In the society we have today, it's not socially acceptable or even politically correct to be masculine. You're somehow openly declaring that you're the better gender if you open up doors for a woman. Hyper feminism is telling us that genders have to be equal in the way they interact with each other. If that's the case, then maybe you should start asking men out. That'd be the "real equality" everyone is so desperate to enforce."
"you women pushed us away, you called us "pervy", "creepy" when we didn't have the requisite amount of cash/belongings etc. instead of saying "I'm not interested" to men who ask you out that you don't find attractive - you called us harassers and made utterly ridiculous claims that we were a part of "rape culture". you make crass jokes about men being in pain, laugh when one gets his dick cut off,band together when one needs bullying and almost orgasm when one has his children ripped from him. then there is the blaming shit you all seem to do... you say we're scared of you. yes, you're dam right we're scared of you. who wouldn't be scared of someone who can, with one false accusation (which seems to be happening more and more these days) ruin our entire lives. who wouldn't be scared of a pathological lying psychopath!!?"

Housework adds three years to your life (if you're a woman) - "men who do the gardening live 2.7 years longer, while working outside the home has little effect on women."
Patriarchy is so powerful it affects lifespan!

In Germany, Syrians find mosques too conservative - ""One time when I was there, a Salafist asked a young Arab man to leave because he was wearing shorts," he added. "At the Turkish mosque no one cares what you're wearing."... The imam who led the prayers said the community is not political or violent. Asked about the Syrians who felt uncomfortable at mosques like his, he said: "It's an honor to be called a Salafist. We are only interested in giving members of our community pure Islamic teachings." Even though Salam can't understand the sermons in Turkish, he said he has started going to a Turkish mosque instead... nearly half the Muslims it surveyed in Germany felt religious law to be more important than secular law... The intelligence agency has advised local authorities against housing asylum-seekers near Salafist or Wahhabi mosques... Since the start of the 20th century Germany has had a system of collecting taxes for worship, which are then paid out to religious groups like Catholics, Protestants and Jews. Muslims cannot benefit from this, because the four main organizations that represent Muslims in Germany can't agree to merge into one religious body, a requirement to receive taxes."
Islamophobia!