Riot is defined as
Any use of force or violence, or any threat to use force or violence if accompained by immediate power of execution, by three or more persons acting together and without authority of law, is riot.
I’m fine with the law as applied to DC.
I would not be at all surprised if Gervais goes full deplorable. His comedy has always had a hateful snarky edge to it and rich white male comedians are highly susceptible to “cancel culture” hysteria.
Most comedians are fighting against the whole “cancel culture” thing out of self-interest. They toe the line between offensive and funny for a living and it only takes one person to start an online lynch mob that can cost one of them millions.
As for Ricky going deplorable, there aren’t a whole lot of anti-Brexit, Labour-voting vegetarian animal right advocates who are also far-right white supremacists.
Well as a counterexample there was hitchens who i’m fairly certain would fall into a lot of those camps, had some fairly deplorable views on some things, particularly islam.
Hitchins and Harris both became well-known in the aftermath of 9/11, when their anti-Islam, pro-torture stuff was more well-received than it would have been otherwise.
Hitchens’s view on torture changed after he elected to get waterboarded and wrote about the result.
Sam just kinda put his anti-Islam sentiment off to the side when it became repetitive.
Hope nobody starts racking up right wing pedestrian points to test out these laws.
Hypothetically, what is the best car for hitting right-wing pedestrians?
Sam Harris and Chris Hitchens look like intellectual heavyweights when they debate religious apologists and/or right wingers. When they are put in similar situations with people to their left, they’ve struggled. Examples: Hitchens debate vs George Galloway from I think ‘05 debating the Iraq war. Harris’ email exchange with Chomsky, in which Chomsky’s points were flying so far over Sam’s head, that Sam actually posted the exchange on his website thinking that it made him look good.
Harris does fairly well on his podcast when he’s interviewing people that work in the hard sciences. But there’s a reason(and not a good one) that Harris hosts Charles Murray(the Bell Curve guy) and titles the episode “Forbidden Knowledge”, and pals around with Ben Shapiro, and hosts Scott Adams, while saying that the reason he wouldn’t have Ta-Nehisi Coates on his podcast is that he doesn’t like his tone.
Yes, I say this every time Sam Harris comes up: Sam Harris is racist. Not the 14-words, n-bomb dropping kind, but he’s stuck in the space where he “has black friends” but still has a ton of bias against them.
A charitable way of looking at it is that he’s generally the kind of guy who’s so impressed with himself that he won’t seriously confront his own assumptions or wrestle with his own meta-cognition. That isn’t that uncommon–plenty of people are like that. What makes Harris extra annoying is that he thinks so much of himself and is so smug about it.
To add an example to your Chomsky one, he did a similar thing with Ezra Klein with their debates on Murray’s work and Harris having had Murray on his podcast. After it was all over, Harris was trumpeting what had happened as showing how wrong and bad Klein was, when the reality (as I saw it at least) was the exact opposite.
And yeah, he’s racist. So fuck that guy.
I had forgotten about his interaction with Ezra Klein. I had the same impression as you did.
Or a Spidey web. Or something. Anything.
This just feeds into false narratives about deficits and government spending.
I was so pissed when he had Charles Murray on. Back then, I was a regular listener. Didn’t always agree with him but the discussions were interesting. What pissed me off was that he never pushed back against outlandish claims Murray was making. It really seemed like Harris didn’t even bother reading The Bell Curve and brought Murray on because he got canceled by some liberal arts university.
Another thing that gets me is him never taking responsibility for his comments. He never says anything wrong. It’s always that everybody else misunderstands him and misconstrues his words for some nefarious reason and that if they truly understood everything they would realize that he is objectively correct. But no everybody who disagrees is just out to get him. Granted, this kind of behavior is kind of par for the course for a “public intellectual” (whatever the fuck that pretentious bullshit means) but it’s still incredibly annoying.
That’s not my take away from the meme. Perhaps we are interpreting it differently. What makes you feel that way?
I interpret as saying that if we didn’t spend so much on policing, we could spend it on the other stuff, that overspending on police prevents us from spending on things that will do more good.
But deficits don’t matter, or at least don’t matter anywhere near as much as austerity fetishists believe, and if policing accomplished good things, then we should be willing and able to spend money on that and all the other stuff.
I think that’s reasonable. I feel like most all people who see that meme would have this part of your interpretation in common: “if we didn’t spend so much on policing, we could spend it on the other stuff”. And I definitely agree on your point about deficits not mattering as much as austerity advocates say they do.
Speaking of austerity. Have you ever read or heard the economist Mark Blyth? He wrote a book called “Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea”. There are multiple talks he’s given on the topic on youtube. He’s an engaging public speaker, so may be worth a listen.
It’s a good watch. I wouldn’t say Hitchens “struggled” so much as Galloway scored points by mercilessly arguing ad hominem and misstating Hitchens’ position toward everything besides Iraq. He really did not need to make up positions Hitchens didn’t hold when the actual position held regarding the debate subject gave him at least an hours’ worth of ammunition.
