Rainbow

When the earth is ravaged and the animals are dying, a new tribe of people shall come unto the earth from many colors, classes, creeds, and who by their actions and deeds shall make the earth green again. They will be known as the warriors of the Rainbow -- Old Native American Prophecy

Nov/15 Trends

SCoMex legal weed

Ecocrash jan/17

Islamification

Chemsex

Microdosing

nootropics

Sanders v Trump

Bankrupt US political system implodes

Islam is unique

Because I consider Islam to be especially belligerent and inimical to the norms of civil discourse, my views are often described as “racist” by my critics. It is said that I am suffering a terrible case of “Islamophobia.” Worse, I am spreading this disease to others and using a veneer of philosophical atheism and scientific skepticism to justify the political oppression, torture, and murder of innocent Muslims around the world. I am a “neo-con goon,” a “war monger,” and a friend to “fascists.” In other words, I have blood on my hands.

It is hard to know where to start untangling these pernicious memes, but let’s begin with the charge of racism. My criticism of the logical and behavioral consequences of certain ideas (e.g. martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, honor, etc.) impugns white converts to Islam—like Adam Gadahn—every bit as much as it does Arabs like Ayman al-Zawahiri. If anything, I tend to be more critical of converts, whatever the color of their skin, because they were not brainwashed into the faith from birth. I am also in the habit of making invidious comparisons between Islam and other religions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Must I point out that most Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains are not white like me? One would hope there is no such need—but the work of several prominent writers suggests that the need is pressing.

Let’s take a trip to the real world. Consider: Anyone who wants to draw a cartoon, write a novel, or stage a Broadway play that denigrates Mormonism is free to do it. In the United States, this freedom is ostensibly guaranteed by the First Amendment—but that is not, in fact, what guarantees it. The freedom to poke fun at Mormonism is guaranteed by the fact that Mormons do not dispatch assassins to silence their critics or summon murderous hordes in response to satire. As I have pointed out before, whenThe Book of Mormon became the most celebrated musical of the year, the LDS Church protested by placing ads for the faith in Playbill. A wasted effort, perhaps: but this was a genuinely charming sign of good humor, given the alternatives. What are the alternatives? Can any reader of this page imagine the staging of a similar play about Islam in the United States, or anywhere else? No you cannot—unless you also imagine the creators of this play being hunted for the rest of their lives by religious maniacs. Yes, there are crazy people in every faith—and I often hear from them. But what is true of Mormonism is true of every other faith, with a single exception.  At this moment in history, there is only one religion that systematically stifles free expression with credible threats of violence. The truth is, we have already lost our First Amendment rights with respect to Islam—and because they brand any observation of this fact a symptom of Islamophobia, Muslim apologists like Greenwald are largely to blame.

At moments like this, we inevitably hear—from people who don’t know what it’s like to believe in paradise—that religion is just a way of channeling popular unrest. The true source of the problem can be found in the history of Western aggression in the region. It is our policies, rather than our freedoms, that they hate. I believe that the future of liberalism—and much else—depends on our overcoming this ruinous self-deception.  Religion only works as a pretext for political violence because many millions of people actually believe what they say they believe: that imaginary crimes like blasphemy and apostasy are killing offenses.

Finally, as I regularly emphasize when discussing Islam, no one is suffering under its doctrine more than Muslims themselves: Muslim jihadists primarily kill other Muslims. And the laws against apostasy, blasphemy, idolatry, and other forms of peaceful expression diminish the freedoms of Muslims far more than those of non-Muslims living in the West. Liberals like Greenwald, who are so eager to swing the flail of Islamophobia, display a sickening insensitivity to the plight of women, homosexuals, and freethinkers throughout the Muslim world. At this moment, millions of women and girls have been abandoned to illiteracy, compulsory marriage, and lives of slavery and abuse under the guise of “multiculturalism” and “religious sensitivity.” And the most liberal Muslim minds are forced into hiding. The best way to address this problem is by no means obvious. But lying about its cause, and defaming those who speak honestly in defense of a global civil society, seems a very unlikely path to a solution.

For further discussion of the “Islamophobia” canard, see my exchange with Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Lifting the Veil of “Islamophobia”

- Sam Harris

Adios, Social Justice Mofos: Political Correctness Has Peaked

If you’re Social Justice Warrior, you’re a liar. You actively spread absurd falsehoods about the nature of men, women, sex, and culture that can’t withstand even the slightest scrutiny. You change history and conceal facts to fit preferred narratives, even when it costs human lives. You claim the best of intentions yet achieve the worst of outcomes. And through it all, you hate the very nation and political system that have granted you the liberties you so grotesquely abuse.

If you’re a Social Justice Warrior, you’re intolerant. Because your lies can’t withstand scrutiny, you wall yourself off in comfortable enclaves and then ruthlessly suppress dissent within your chosen communities. From that secure ground, you then strike out, seeking to expand your territory by walling off the arts, the academy, pop culture, and even athletics, silencing because you can’t persuade and punishing those you can’t silence.

If you’re a Social Justice Warrior, however, you’re also ultimately impotent. While you’ve intimidated many institutions, you actually control few. Only in the most cloistered of communities, including in your academic strongholds, do you represent a majority. You gain power by causing trouble, by making it easier to comply with your demands than to defy your tantrums. And that works until it doesn’t — until your demands become so absurd thatyou become the joke, until you’ve been proven so toothless that defiance becomes a path to power and popularity.

If history is any guide, then mendacious and intolerant ideological movements tend to have relatively short cultural half-lives, especially when they don’t actually attain total control over law enforcement or the means of mass communication. The modern wave of political correctness is doomed. In fact, it has already peaked — it has nowhere to go but down.

While it’s always dangerous to predict when any particular cultural trend peaks, I’m pegging October 31, 2015, as peak PC. Whenuniversities actually post flow charts to keep your Halloweenparty from being offensive, humorlessness is redefined. When students are so fragile that the very thought of ethnic-themed Halloween costumes leads to much-mocked YouTube “guides,” then political correctness is losing its punch:

If you disagree — if you think that political correctness is gaining momentum — then consider a few facts. First, the top two candidates in the Republican race for president of the United States attained their front-runner status by willfully, gleefully defying political correctness at every turn. Ben Carson shot to the top of the polls when he did the unthinkable — told the truth about guns, about Islam, about resistance to mass shooters, and about abortion — without flinching. It’s old news by now that Donald Trump’s supporters love him for his anti-PC stands. (Though sadly, he’ll use feigned PC outragewhen it suits his purposes.)

In fact, virtually every great moment in the first three GOP presidential debates has occurred when candidates defied the cultural Left and spoke truth to power. Think of Carly Fiorina’s passionate argument against Planned Parenthood, or Ted Cruz blasting the media in primetime last Wednesday.

If there is one thing that’s predictable in this otherwise unpredictable GOP cycle, it’s that defying the PC police is the path to prominence. “Sensitivity” is the path to oblivion and ridicule.

Social Justice Warriors simply have no influence on large swaths of the American electorate.

Social Justice Warriors simply have no influence on large swaths of the American electorate. How many conservatives believe that Bruce Jenner is a woman? How many Evangelical denominations are reconsidering the traditional definition of marriage or the “fluidity” of gender? Evangelical congregations grow while liberal congregations shrink.

Even many of the Left’s “victories” are proving Pyrrhic. Yes, they’ve fined bakers and florists who refuse to participate in gay weddings, but rather than marginalizing and shaming these brave Americans, that persecution has encouraged millions to rally around their cause — and now the public, according to polls, is showing signs of respecting freedom of conscience. Then there are the scalps that the Left hasn’t taken — Chick-fil-A, Hobby Lobby,American Sniper, Duck Dynasty.

Increasingly, Social Justice Warriors seem to win only on the turf they already control. And so they’ve begun to turn to the behavior best calculated to end their cultural dominance, behavior that makes even their fellow liberals miserable. Liberal comedians won’t perform on college campuses, liberals disrupt liberal campaign events, liberals insult movies by liberal directors for failing to comply with impossible-to-meet liberal gender standards, and liberal professors now live in fear of their liberal students.

I’m no Pollyanna. I know the cultural climate is toxic toward Christianity, the social-justice Left is relentless, and Christians and conservatives in liberal enclaves tend to face real threats to their liberty and livelihoods. I also know that even if the PC wave is cresting, it has a long way to fall before it becomes culturally irrelevant. In fact, it’s likely to never lose all its power. There will be more casualties of the culture war yet.

But the PC Left is reaching its limit. Intolerance is ugly, self-righteousness is unappealing to everyone but the already-converted, and lies eventually lose to reality.

— David French is an attorney and a staff writer at National Review.

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,

      Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

      For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

      I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

      My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

      Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

      Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

      How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

      I am the captain of my soul.

Obfuscation

A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest

By Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum

Overview

With Obfuscation, Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum mean to start a revolution. They are calling us not to the barricades but to our computers, offering us ways to fight today’s pervasive digital surveillance—the collection of our data by governments, corporations, advertisers, and hackers. To the toolkit of privacy protecting techniques and projects, they propose adding obfuscation: the deliberate use of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection projects. Brunton and Nissenbaum provide tools and a rationale for evasion, noncompliance, refusal, even sabotage—especially for average users, those of us not in a position to opt out or exert control over data about ourselves. Obfuscation will teach users to push back, software developers to keep their user data safe, and policy makers to gather data without misusing it.

Brunton and Nissenbaum present a guide to the forms and formats that obfuscation has taken and explain how to craft its implementation to suit the goal and the adversary. They describe a series of historical and contemporary examples, including radar chaff deployed by World War II pilots, Twitter bots that hobbled the social media strategy of popular protest movements, and software that can camouflage users’ search queries and stymie online advertising. They go on to consider obfuscation in more general terms, discussing why obfuscation is necessary, whether it is justified, how it works, and how it can be integrated with other privacy practices and technologies.

Nant'an

While it took just two years for the Spanish to conquer the mighty Aztec and Inca civilizations, the Apaches successfully held off the Spanish for 200 years.

According to Tom Nevins the difference lay in the way the Apaches were organized as a society. The Apaches withstood the Spanish because they were decentralized.

In a decentralized organization, there’s no clear leader, no hierarchy, and no headquarters. If and when a leader does emerge, that person has little power over others. The best that person can do to influence people is to lead by example. Nevis calls this an open system, because everyone is entitled to make his or her own decisions.

This is not anarchy. There are rules and norms, but these aren’t enforced by any one person. Rather, the power is distributed among all the people and across geographic regions. There’s no Tenochchtitlan, and no Montezuma. Apache decisions were made all over the place by the people who were close to the action.

Apaches didn’t have chiefs. The had a Nant’an—a spiritual and cultural leader.

Geronimo held off the American forces for decades. Geronimo never commanded an army. He started fighting and everyone else joined in.

The traits of a decentralized society—flexibility, shared power, ambiguity—made the Apaches immune to the sort of attacks that destroyed the Aztecs and Incas.

The Aztecs and Incas were centralized, command-and-control societies organized. So were the Spanish. Nevins calls these societies “coercive” in contrast to the Apaches who were “open”.

When the Spanish encountered opposition from the Apaches they responded by eliminating the Nan’tans, just as they had disposed of Montezuma. In a coercive society, kill the leader and you control the followers.

But as soon as they killed one Nan’tan, a new one would emerge. The strategy failed because no one person was in charge. In fact, the more the Spanish attacked them the more open and decentralized and stronger they became.