Yep.

Yes, I think you’re right there, the ‘echo-chambre’ thing as it is popularly known now is probably the reason, with a teeny weeny bit of ‘virtue signalling’.

Jenny, I agree that allowing women to drive is about the least of things, nevertheless a positive.
Mr Mohammad bin Salman is a weird kettle of fish indeed.
He’s known for propagating the war against the (shiite) Houti’s in Yemen (with some definite smell of genocide), and has been known to be very harsh on peaceful protesters, using anti-terrorism laws.
On the other hand he was quite good at limiting the powers of the religious police. He advocated for “Green cards” for non-Saudis, and now the driving thing, and attacking the ‘wali’ system (“chaperones” for women ).
I think one of his driving motives is to get rid of the powers of the Wahhabist clergy in the KSA. I think he sees them as impeding modernisation, but I do not think he sees actual democracy as part of that modernisation.
I’m not steeped enough in Saudi politics to have a definitive opinion. I guess we’ll see more when is is the actual King.

Thank you. You’re very kind. 🙂

“It’s encouraging to see a professor of theology and religion who is herself an atheist. It makes sense, though. One can only be an expert on religion in general if one is not an adherent of one particular religion.”

As Hector Avalos is wont to point out the academic pursuit of religious studies, in his case he is talking about Biblical studies specifically, has been devastating to itself. It started out with believers using the tools of academia to investigate and corroborate Christian mythology as historically accurate but the result turned out to be just the opposite and now there are hardly any academic Biblical scholars still in the business.

Thanks Mark. I personally find the authoritarian left to be nothing more than a bunch of bullies. They want to control people just as much as those on the far right. The only reason most people don’t see the threat they present is that most of we classical liberals agree with a lot of what they say.

I’m always brought back to a quote from Bill Maher – “the problem with many left-wing liberals is that they’ve forgotten about liberalism”. He said it because he got criticized by the far-left for criticizing Islam.

Thanks. 🙂

True. It reminds me a bit of all Trumps followers having to explain what he really meant all the time.

I certainly don’t think the woman who did these tweets is in his league though. Most women who say this stuff, except for a few hard core ones, are basically fine. It’s just that they are being strongly influenced by others on this topic. They think they’re doing the right thing. They see that the hard core ones are getting a lot of attention so they think they must be doing it right. It’s one of the problems of the modern celebrity culture imo where people get famous for not doing much. I put a Big Think talk on this in a tweet recently. I think I’ll find it and post it so people can watch it. It’s controversially named – something like “How Americans Got So Stupid” or similar iirc. (I hope it’s something like that anyway or I’ve just made a huge Freudian slip. Good thing Freud has no credibility anymore!)

Very cool! Thank you. ????