Duuuuuude... Decaf. Now.

What kind of paranoid person would give their real name to people at the counter?

For the record, my name isn't actually George P. Burdell.

It's easy to find an audience when you speak to people's fears and biases. It's the secret that all demagogues have relied on for centuries.

Well that's a sentence with enough ambiguities to cover just about anything.

What is anti-Semitism? Is it virulent hatred of the Jewish people (e.g. Holocaust denial or even praise)? Is it merely opposition to the settlement and occupation policies of the state of Israel and/or sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians? Is it some place in between? Almost invariably, you will find views *somewhere* on that spectrum in most Muslim communities, but whether or not they rise to anti-Semitism depends on how you define it. While I have not personally read her work, it seems that she's taken a stance that Israel is the "good guys" in what, IMHO, is a conflict with no such thing. (Which I find baffling given her father was assassinated by the IDF -- maybe I should read her if for no other reason that to find out how on Earth that happened.)

As for political sharia, it's worth noting that advocacy for sharia as a legal system does not inherently require violent struggle any more than communism did. It is also worth noting that many of the people who do advocate for sharia also advocate for achieving it violently. However, that's also true of people who wish to see this country run by Biblical law. (See, e.g. Dominion theology.)

And lastly, there's a geographic spread on this. It's true that advocacy for violent overthrow of government to establish an Islamic state that would seek the destruction of Israel is a prominent theme in the Middle East. But I seriously doubt it's pervasive in U.S. mosques to the point that your original post suggests.

So in short, your sentence is true in some or even many cases and yet misleading if you intend it to apply to all Muslims, including all of those living in the West. And Nonie Darwish goes far too far in claiming that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim.

Oh I will, and I have read many heart-rending testimonials. But one must consider the source and the fact that significant personal biases may have arisen from a given author's tragic backstory, and one must consider the possibility that the author has an agenda, whether public or selfish. I have a bit of skepticism towards an author that is reputed to have such a one-sided presentation of the other side, and I also have misgivings in the way that people can take even an unbiased account and interject their own biases into it upon reading it. Many of the "Christian" books I read as a child and teen were full of outright lies, urban legends, and telephone-game rumors masking as God-inspired truth. I have what I consider a healthy sense of skepticism when a book comes out and tries to paint the other side as inherently evil and distrustful. The world is far grayer than a lot of people like to believe.

Thank you for the links. My morning meeting is nearing its end, so I'll have to keep this shorter than this (especially the third link might merit). In order:

1) Yes, the shift did in fact start earlier than the 1960s. The Republican could not have capitalized on purely racial issues. Just as they could not purely rest on social issues like abortion in the 1980s or terrorism in the 2000s. The economic factor is important, but perhaps overstated when compared to the equal prosperity of white Northerners and the grow of wealth in the West, who have either stayed liberal or drifted libertarian. Perhaps most importantly for the question of whether or not Republicans shun racism, the author himself also acknowledges that the GOP did deliberately target racial politics. He just argues that economics was more important.

2) Whitewashing Nixon is an ongoing exercise. Nixon was an interesting and cunning politician. Desegregation happened under his watch, but it happened with him dragging his feet. He ordered Attorney General John Mitchell to pursue a "go-slow" policy. He didn't reverse himself on this until 1970, but by that time he had already gotten Chief Justice Burger on the Court, whose majority decision in Swann limited actions against segregation to those invidiously motivated (i.e. deliberately) to enforce racial division. Before that, he had proposed laws blocking bussing, and supported letting the state courts handle Voting Rights Act cases.

3) This one is the best of the lot. I have addressed many of the points it raises above and in the previous post, even in the words of the people who were planning Republican electoral strategy, but it does raise a few points that I think deserve a response. My main objection is his readiness to dismiss "coding" of messages with racist and non-racist appeal as a phantasm. The overt racism of the 1950s is largely dead (outside of some vocal outliers, as seen in 2008). There is too much of a stigma. However, more subtle bias and distrust is rife still. You see it often in policies that just "happen to" disadvantage minorities and that look down on poorer minorities as somehow deserving their lot in life. That all they need is "tough love," "law and order," and "weaning off the government dole," i.e. crappier and crappier treatment. Is it any wonder minorities believe Republicans are out to get them?

4) Absolutely fascinating. I didn't know much about Goldwater the man as much as Goldwater the candidate. I find it kind of sad that he got in bed with the devil there if those were his honest beliefs about segregation. (But it's indisputable that he did, what with letting Strom Thurmond stump for him.) Anyway, thank you for that article.

I addressed your core point directly: the idea that Republicans are all true egalitarians and that Democrats have unfairly tarnished them as racists when they were the racists is shown to be utter bunk when you review the last 50 years of politics. I have directly quoted Republican party election strategists on the issue of how they used racial identity politics to try to capture the (at the time) larger white vote by sacrificing the minority vote, and you claim I haven't addressed the point. How exactly aren't the words of Nixon's and Reagan's campaign strategist failing to address your core premise?

Yes, the founders of the KKK were Democrats. Yes, the abolitionist movement found its place in the Republican Party at the time of the Civil War. But so what? What bearing does that have on modern Republicans? I guarantee you every KKK sympathizer I grew up near was and still is a hardcore Republican.

It doesn't matter how noble the Party was in the 19th century if you're trying to claim that they still have the same nobility of purpose today, because that is an utter lie. The Republican Party of the 19th century was the socially liberal party. The Democratic Party of the 19th century was the socially conservative party. The political lines over issues were radically different back then. In fact, the modern economic leftist movement had its roots in socially right-wing, agrarians. (The Populists, William Bryan Jennings, etc.) Also, the parties tolerated far higher diversity of political positions (which would die during the 1960s-1990s period).

You cannot just simply read history up until the point you like and then just ignore the uncomfortable 50 or so years after that. Maybe, maybe you can argue that 21st century Republicans have eschewed the racism of the past, though I think it's pretty clear from the 2008 election and resulting uptick in white supremacist activity, the birther "movement" and talk of Obama as a "secret Muslim," and from rhetoric surrounding immigration that racial fearmongering is still continuing in the Atwater model.

But you cannot ignore the 1960s-1990s. That is the time of Nixon and Reagan and cynical pandering to Southern whites. That is the time of Strom Thurmond and of David Duke, in which racist Democrats found their party would no longer tolerate them, but that the Republicans would welcome them with open arms. And the policies continue to today with anti-immigrant rhetoric, cutting short early voting specifically to stop black church Sunday voting drives, cheering the defeat of the Voting Rights Act (and turning around and passing overtly discriminatory laws in Republican-controlled states like South Carolina), etc.

Glad to. That will be my next post, in response to his.

Oh pffsssh. Every decade or so, there's a book from some Christian convert about how secretly the group they were formerly a member of is actually two-faced. "Oh, they seem nice when you get to know them, but *actually* they are practicing hate / debauched sex / devil worship / etc. behind closed doors, which *you* will never be able to see, but you can totally trust *me* because I've been there. And I've usually got some sort of insider connection to make me totally credible."

It's inevitably complete bullshit. (See, e.g., Ergun Caner)

I remember as a kid hearing from the crazier members of my church that ouija boards can contact demons, that people who play D&D are members of satanic cults, that communists teach children not to believe in God by making them pray to God and then the government and giving them a cookie when they do the latter, that the Catholic Church is secretly a Babylonian cult, that modern mainstream Mormons practice blood atonement and have secret assassination squads, etc. etc.

It's amazing what utter nonsense people can be sold on about people different from them. This sort of "they seem nice, but behind closed doors...!" slander is the worst sort of lie, because it's completely unverifiable, and it justifies turning blinders to any signs that the accusation isn't right.

The sad thing is that I think you've actually convinced yourself of that. That the political parties are now as they have always been, and that the Republicans are still the "Party of Lincoln."

No, if you really look at the history, you see people like Strom Thurmond and his fellow Dixiecrats who left the Democratic Party to become Republicans in the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. You see Nixon and the Southern strategy. As Kevin Phillips, Nixon's political strategist said at the time:

The mid 20th century was a transition time in which the Democrats split over the issue of segregation v. equality. Thurmond's Dixiecrats feuded with the rising liberalism in the party, and the end result was that most Southern Democrats were replaced with equally racist Southern Republicans -- at least the ones that didn't just switch parties themselves. It would be the Republican party that would squeeze out its pro-equality members over the next few decades, not the Democrats. As LBJ is said to have told an aide upon signing the Civil Rights Act, ""We have lost the South for a generation." It was the Democrats who made the political sacrifice to do what's right on race. And it was the Republicans who made the cold, amoral decision to pander to racists to gain their votes.

Although it was then-Democrat George Wallace who first linked popularized the connection between racist policies and states rights, it was Republican Barry Goldwater who ran with the idea and became the first Republican candidate to win the South with Reconstruction. Nixon's subsequent campaign on "states rights" and "law and order," all under the guidance of Harry S. Dent, was well understood by Southerners to mean support for racially biased policies. As Lee Atwater said:

The only reason Republicans pretend to care today is because the political landscape has changed, and the failure of Mitt Romney to defeat Barack Obama because of half a century of burning their bridges with blacks and a quarter of a century of doing so with Hispanics, combined with shifting racial demographics as whites are on schedule to no longer be a majority means that appealing only to whites is political suicide.

This isn't principles or long held beliefs in true equality. This is nothing more but the same cold, amoral calculation that it's no longer Kevin Phillips' era, and if you want to know why it's falling on deaf ears, it's because minorities in this country have spend so long hearing "dependence" and "personal responsibility" and "47 percent" and knowing that what the speaker really means is, "Nigger, nigger."

How much power did feudal barons have and over how much territory or how many people?
Under some measures, "media baron" may be insulting the reach of such figures.

The paper on special relativity is fairly readable. The general relativity paper is practically illegible to the layman, requiring tensor mathematics that are usually not taught until the later stages of a physics degree.

He did, however, try to make it more generally accessible, at least to the determined student. This paper is pretty amazing:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Foundation_of_the_Generalised_Theory_of_Relativity

Lions do, and people can eat them just fine. And since when was this a component of your spurious claim of carnivore toxicity? Will you just admit that you were making an unsupported claim, will you provide some sort of citation backing up this "well-known fact," or are you just going to keep trying to shift the goalposts in an increasingly illogical and desperate attempt to avoid admitting that you were wrong.

Cats are obligate carnivores. Unlike dogs, they can't survive on a vegetarian diet -- at least not without severe processing of vegetable matter to get the nutrients they need and eliminate the components they can't digest. Vegan cat food exists, but it's by no means their natural diet. Nor is it representative of what cats raised for meat are fed, since it's the kind of thing only a Westerner would worry themselves with.

But, more importantly, don't you see that that torpedoes your own freaking argument!?

You) Cat meat, as a carnivore meat is well-known to be toxic.
Me) Carnivore meat isn't inherently toxic. He're a long list of carnivores people eat.
You) Well, I wasn't talking about fish.
Me) I wasn't exclusively either. Here's some more mammalian carnivores people eat -- and some mostly carnivorous omnivores too, including dogs.
You) Well, cats are kind of like dogs, that way.
Me) *Head explodes*

Whales and seals, which I mentioned, are mammals and not fish. Lion meat is also sold and eaten (though not without controversy over its conservation status). Polar bear meat is eaten by Arctic indigenous peoples as well, and it's only the liver that's toxic due to its extreme vitamin A content (seal and whale liver is a-okay).

Black bears are a bit more omnivorous but are also eaten by peoples around the world, including in Japan. Dogs are also eaten in various parts of the world, though their diets as food animals can vary wildly from the standard "mostly carnivore" model.

And to the specific subject at hand, domestic cat meat has been eaten widely across the world. I have found absolutely no references to it being toxic.

As a matter of federal law, the consumption of horse meat is legal. It's also legal to grow horses for meat consumption and to export them for slaughter (e.g. to Mexico & Canada) and then re-import the meat for consumption. It's also technically legal to slaughter them for consumption, but only if the USDA inspects the slaughtering facility for this purpose, and the USDA has not allocated any money to horse-butchering operations since a rider in budget bills explicitly banned them from doing so from 2007-2011. That pretty much killed the industry here, though some are looking to start it back.

Now, several states do ban horsemeat production and/or consumption, and much of that came about because of terrible abuses in the industry, such as the infamous Beltex plant in Texas, and concerns over the use of horse drugs not safe for human consumption commonly used in old race horses.

Personally, I'm allergic to horse hair and thus never developed an enchanted love for the beasts that so many others suffer from, which is probably why my opinion of horses and horsemeat tracks pretty well with The Oatmeal's.

That's Minamata disease. Sorry for the typo -- I got distracted in the middle of writing this.

Not really. Salmon, tuna, and swordfish are completely carnivorous and are eaten worldwide. Alligators and snakes are eaten in various parts of the US and are carnivorous. Indigenous Arctic peoples ate diets drawn primarily from seals (all carnivorous) and whales (many of which are carnivorous). Squids and octopi are carnivores.

Now, that said, carnivore meat does carry some risks, all in the form of bioaccumulation of toxic materials. (e.g. Mercury and other heavy metals, PCBs, etc.) But "highly toxic" is a bit over-dramatic. You can eat a serving of carnivorous fish once a week and be fine. You can also eat far more than that and survive, but you may run into health risks or, more importantly, pass on unsafe levels that will affect your child's development if you get pregnant. Adults only risk death if those kinds of fish are your primary protein source and/or you get them from an actively polluted area. (See, e.g. Minama disease.)

But the meat *itself* is fine, in absence of human-cause problems.

We don't eat carnivorous land animals. Some carnivorous fish, on the other hand, are so tasty that we're in the process of wiping them out.