I was away for a couple of days, then it took me a couple of days to recover, then my site got migrated to another server, and now I can’t get into the Admin for my site, and my e-mails to the people who look after the server are being ignored, and I don’t know what to do, and I’m seriously unhappy and rather grumpy about it. Still, it meant you got spared a post about Michelle Bachmann.

I’ve no idea when I’ll be back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–DbgPXwLlM

Victimization seems to be contagious:

“it’s telling that the Discovery Institute, but no real scientific organization, whines continuously about being suppressed and censored. That’s also a hallmark of pseudoscientists like Deepak Chopra and Rupert Sheldrake. ” WEIT

I found Robinson likeable too, and felt he deserved some answers, as his concerns weren’t racist (if true) even if his solutions are. You need to hear the rest of the interview though. He wasn’t talking just about Luton, but made a much wider array of claims, including police corruption. I don’t remember him focussing on foreign nationals either, so your quote doesn’t seem to address the issue. I’m also not sure on what basis you can say his perspective in narrow, at least until you’ve heard the whole thing. Again, much relies on how much of what he says is true (and he’s had several run ins with the law, for instance, so could be lying about what happened), but if his arguments were put to me by him or someone else, I wouldn’t know how to counter them effectively.

Well I think we either champion open, honest debate, or we don’t. Doing so requires a standard that applies to all and it’s not good enough to me to say that it’s ok to shut down certain people, regardless of how, because they are perceived as strong, or have other avenues, or whatever. But like I said, I’m not keen to go through all the arguments again, so we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

Tommy Robinson. I had trouble with the Rubin interview video. It kept resetting and I only saw about ten minutes of the actual interview.

But let me confess, I rather liked Tommy Robinson. He grew up in Luton, a rough working class town that has been transformed by Muslim immigrants. I can understand his concern, although it should be noted that Muslims make up only about 25% of Luton’s population, and non-white’s about 40%. And it was clear that Tommy knows real Muslims and likes at least some of them, unlike armchair critics of Islam that have never met a Muslim.

Tommy is genuine and seems honest (unlike Rubin) but his perspective is limited. Muslims make up only about 5% of England’s population. Compare that with the US where blacks compose 13% of the population and Hispanics 17%. Luton may be Islamified, but certainly England is nowhere close. Yes, it is easy to find plenty of anecdotes of immigrants committing crimes, Trump has flourished by doing that in the US. Trump appeals to the Tommy Robinsons of the US, for whom personal experience and salacious anecdotes count for more than data. But Rubin certainly knows better. Let me quote Wikipedia:

“On 30 June 2013 there were 10,786 prisoners from 160 different countries in the jails of England and Wales.[80] Poland, Jamaica and the Irish Republic formed the highest percentage of foreign nationals in UK prisons.[80] In total, foreigners represented 13% of the prison population,[80] whereas foreign nationals are 13% of the total population in England and Wales.[81] During the 2000s, there was an 111% increase of foreign nationals in UK prisons.[36] According to one study, “there is little evidence to support the theory that the foreign national prison population continues to grow because foreign nationals are more likely to commit crime than are British citizens or more likely to commit crime of a serious nature”.[36]”

As in the interview Docatheist posted with an ex-Muslim girl, Rubin kept trying to get Tommy to say that he was being silenced by his enemies, when their was no evidence than that. Criticism, and even labeling are not censorship.

Most of the claims I see of “labelling” shutting down the conversation, or disinvitations denying free speech, or protests being censorship, are just playing the victim card. People like Dawkins, Harris, and Rubin have plenty of opportunity to express their opinions. It is an affront to those suffering from real censorship, like Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia, or many intellectuals in China, to claim that their free speech has been violated. Here is an ongoing example from Israel: (yes, I know it is alternet, and I’m not saying Israel is worse than a lot of other countries, but if this is not true, I’d like to see a rebuttal)

http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/degenerate-culture-inside-israeli-govts-persecution-jewish-left-and-one-its-most?akid=13957.1140325.5Snsx8&rd=1&src=newsletter1050358&t=13

Excellent article! We should turn our military bases in the middle east into camps for the refugees. Fat chance, with even Bernie saying we must “crush ISIS”. Yeah, like we did the Taliban.

Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda. The U.S. Military Bombs in the Twenty-First Century

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176100/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_%22the_finest_fighting_force_in_the_history_of_the_world%22/