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    Open Mikes: The Maiello-Orion Dialectic Strikes Again!

    By Orion on Fri, 10/10/2014 - 9:36pm |

    Here is my latest dialectic with Michael Gural Maiello. I thought this one was a bit interesting because, unlike the others, we were in disagreement over something - this time being the debate between Ben Affleck and Bill Maher and Sam Harris over Islam, which got pretty heated.

    Questions For Michael Gural-Maiello:

    Ben Affleck fought back hard against Bill Maher's sweeping generalizations of the world's 2 billion Muslims. I personally think Bill Maher is a bit ignorant about religion. Do you think he is enabling bigotry? Who was right? Who was wrong?

     
    I don't think that Maher is enabling bigotry at all.  I think he's pointing out that we give religious beliefs far more leeway, in our discourse, than we give any other kind of belief.  If you criticize somebody for believing what it says in the Koran, you're a bigot.  If you criticize somebody for believing in Hayekian economics, you're just having a disagreement.  Maher is saying that big L Liberals, people who believe in Western human rights values, cannot afford to look away from issues like, say, the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia out of some sort of false respect for the religious origin of those beliefs.  Sadly, there are people out there who think that if they can justify their beliefs and actions in religious terms then they are beyond criticism.  Maher says no.  Yes, he's singling out Muslims.  No, the 2 billion are not guilty of everything ISIS does or everything the Saudi government does.  But, you know, ISIS is Muslim.  The Saudi government is Muslim. It's unavoidable.
     
    Speaking of Ben Affleck. Affleck will be Batman in the next Superman vs. Batman movie. Wonder Woman will be played by the beautiful Gal Gadot and Superman will be played by Henry Cavill, who played him in Man of Steel. Are you excited?
     
    I'm a Marvel guy, so I'm more excited about Age of Ultron.  But, the Batman/Superman brawls from Frank Miller's two Dark Knight books were pretty awesome.  As for Gadot as Wonder Woman.  No, no, no!  It's sad because the perfect Wonder Woman is out there.  Her name is Beth Phoenix, the Glamazon.
     
     
    Did you watch the premier of Star Wars: Rebels?
     
    Yes!  I thought it was fun. But, the Empire is already starting to look like that incompetent organization that would build a Death Star that you can blow up with one shot.  I like the Mandalorian graffiti artist explosives expert, though and I do think they capture, in animation, a lot of the look of the original movie.
     
    We're discussed going back to Iraq. It looks like ISIS is clashing with the Kurds. Kurds have alot of advanced social institutions and serious socialist movements. Would creating a Kurdish state be a good end game for military intervention? What is the best possibility for a bad situation?
     
    I don't know.  So many places are so dead set against a Kurdish state that it seems like it would be just another cause for war.  On the other hand, Kurds have lived successfully in various autonomous zones, including in Iraq.  It certainly seems as if, from a U.S. perspective, that we'd be happier and be able to be less involved in the Middle East if there were a self sufficient Kurdish power in the region.
     
    Honestly, I think the best outcome would be for us to start ignoring the region entirely.
     
    Ebola madness! Is this serious or is it just yet another manufactured crisis?
     
    I wouldn't say manufactured.  It's a disease that captures the public imagination, though. Infectious disease is just such a great metaphor for the anxiety of globalization.  In the back of your mind, don't you just sometimes imagine that we're someday going to import some really horrible pandemic in a box of cheap Snuggies made in China?
     
    What projects do you have going on now?
     
    Years ago, I turned the Principia Discordia into a musical.  Now, I'm trying to turn the musical into a play.

    Questions For Michael Orion Powell-Deschamps:
    So, how do you square the circle between being religious but also supportive of the rights inherent in a secular humanist society?
     
    It took some really bizarre, strange and tragic things happening in my life to make me religious. Like most secular liberals, I am put off by the religious right - a faction of the religious world that exists in most of the world. I believe in evolution, I've been convinced that climate change is a real phenomenon and I am a socialist.
     
    My late girlfriend, Jennifer, had gotten in to Catholicism before she passed away. She wrote letters full of Bible quotes and had quite a few books on myth and ecology from Christian publishers. I was really curious about this world of Christianity, which was much more attractive than the evolution denying, gay hating and Rapture awaiting Christianity many of us in the US are familiar with. I explored it and found radical Christianity metastasized in many different political movements in the world which are quite humanist.
     
    I think that the future of a healed society, if we have one, lies in Latin America. If we follow your example and ignore the Middle East, we should pay attention to Latin America. The World Bank has praised Cuba for having one of the world's best education systems, Venezuela has been one of few countries in the world to open its arms to Gazan refugees and Jose Mujica, the president of Uraguay, has taken on Christlike humility - driving to work in a beat up Volkswagen and giving 90% of his income to charity. The Latin American model is critical because, unlike socialist countries in Europe, Latin America is not operating on the same sort of pre-existing capital.
     
    Liberation theology is a very, very popular thing in Latin America and its powerful partly because it marries democratic socialism, Christianity and folk traditions from Latin America. It is not as literal as right wing variants of Christianity - which teach their followers to wait for some sort of blockbuster film style rapture instead of simply just living Christian principles in their daily life, that do not realize that the Bible was divinely inspired literature but still literature.  Liberation theology has been around a pretty good while - Cornel West is an adherent - but Pope Francis, who is from Argentina, mind you - may be making it more popular than ever.
     
    There are all sorts of socialist ideas in the Bible that the Religious Right has omitted and that could genuinely lead to social justice. Take the "debt jubilee" for instance - the Bible insists that the indebted should periodically be forgiven. Applied to twenty first century politics, that would mean forgiveness of the outrageous student loans that students are coerced in to taking on. Alot of these ideas are being brought back - I follow Catholic News Service and their articles of late have sounded downright Marxist. I think that a lot of liberals who thought religion was gross may find themselves yelling "Hallelujah!" if the Pope keeps things in this direction.
     
    In these debates, I get in a weird position with atheists or secularists to defend everything Christianity has ever stood for or any religion has stood for, which is really bizarre. We're talking about religions that belong to billions of people, mean all sorts of different things and that were even wrought with divisions at their founding. I actually agree with how you interpreted Bill Maher's comments although, from having listened to him talk on other subjects, I'm not sure that's what he means. He made comments about Pope Francis being a secret atheist that were ridiculous - I think his perception of religion is very simple.
     
     I have not read the Koran in full and I am not an expert but from reading about the region's politics and history, it seems that the Muslim world has actually produced a good deal of progressive leaders - one was elected president in Afghanistan this month and another got the Nobel Peace Prize today. The Muslim world produced algebra and sometimes even stayed stable while Europe was a killing field. People like ISIS, the Taliban or the rulers of Saudi Arabia are powerful because we have given them resources when they were convenient - the equivalent of if a country like China or Russia gave funding to right wing militia groups to the point that they took over the government. Given how insane European history has been, it's unfair to let bad guys we helped create in the Muslim world define millions of people and acting like there is something uniquely oppressive about Muslim society when we have our own serious problems does lend to prejudice.

    Five months ago in Georgia a SWAT team looking for drugs burst into a home and injured a sleeping infant with a flash grenade.  The child has since had multiple surgeries.  A grand jury probed the SWAT teams actions, decided that mistakes were made but that there was no criminal intent.  Why is the system so bad at controlling out of control police and what can be done?

    This is so horrible. I don't know what is wrong with this country. Is it the Second Amendment, the military industrial complex or what? It feels a bit like our society is structurally falling apart and the military force we have built up for ourselves is coming in to try to manage it in the only way it is built to. A lot of countries in the Latin America (there I go again) had to deal with fascist dictatorships that operated a lot like this - they only push so far before there is a push back. The crumbling of a fascist state and then the truth and reconciliation that follows afterwards may be something we thought only happened in Chile or South Africa but that may be in the future for the USA. It's also worth noting that many around the world must see the sort of attacks on civilians that our authorities engage in and think the exact same thing about American style governance that Sam Harris or Bill Maher think about Islam - "they will kill you."
     
    Along those lines, what do you think about requiring cops to wear cameras?  I worry that the cameras are pointed the wrong way -- at citizens, not police officers.
     
    Police officers should be mandated to have their pictures taken and their chiefs should be elected a lot like mayor or City Council. Likewise, they should just no longer be given military gear. Simple as that. End the military industrial complex. If you have a hammer, you think everything is a nail.
     
    Oil prices are plummeting.  Isn't that weird given everything going on in the Middle East and Russia?  It's not like the world was more politically stable a year ago.  What do you think, global economic slowdown?
     
    I looked this up after reading your question and I found that most people were crediting this with fear and apprehension. Many people may simply just be scared to spend or invest and that's why shares are down. It'd be interesting if that applies just to oil or to another commodity as well.
     
    Should the NFL study the life and times of Chris Benoit to realize what traumatic head injuries can do to a man's behavior?
     
    Perhaps. Didn't they also credit that with "roid rage?" I know, given the SSRI threads I had on Dagblog and events in my personal life that most reading this are aware of, that that might be a predictable answer but the punches Mohammed Ali took are credited with his developing Parkinson's disease and Ali is seen as a respected citizen and loving father. Vince McMahon is known to have used and promoted steroid use and I highly doubt that such drugs had a positive effect on wrestlers' minds.

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