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What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?

Phil Agre at UCLA is one heck of an intellectual. In this essay he takes on Conservatism and deconstructs it for us. Here is the opening graf: Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple: Q: What is conservatism? A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy. Q: What is wrong with conservatism? A: Conservatism is incompatible with…

Combating Anti-Muslim Bias | Teaching Tolerance

Combating Anti-Muslim Bias | Teaching Tolerance. When Basir Jamil was 8 years old in 2001, he hated the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center, smashed into the Pentagon and downed an airplane full of people in rural Pennsylvania.  So when he was called the same thing—a terrorist—a few years later in middle school, he was shocked.

PAMF

Stands for Punk A$$ Mo Fo. I think a better term than hoodlums in this case. Martijn always has such interesting posts. However, on the issue of counter-identity, isn’t that essentially OBL’s point? He hates women, so he’s a man. He hates the “West,” so he’s an Arab. He hates Christians and Jews, so he’s a “Muslim.” A little more seriously, hasn’t he simply adopted Islam as an oppositional identity? Isn’t he more aligned with Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam than with the Hanbali school? For OBL, it seems Islam is what others are not, and his association with Taliban,…