The crux of Laurie Penny’s many-pronged is about women and work. For her, Lean In and its “middle-class, aspirational” feminism isn’t enough, because “while a small number of extremely privileged women worry about the glass ceiling the cellar is filling up with water.” She thinks that “there are altogether too many boardrooms, and none of them are on fire.” While this view is extreme (I don’t recommend setting Goldman Sachs on fire unless you have some Piper Chapman-esque aspirations), it points out the selectiveness of a feminism that plays by the rules rather than breaking them — there’s only so much you can do. Calls for gender equality coupled with calls for comprehensive economic reform might do more for the multitudes of low-income, underrepresented women.
Last week, the Trump Plaza folded and the Trump Taj Mahal filed for bankruptcy, leaving some 1,000 employees without jobs.
Trump, meanwhile, was on twitter claiming he had “nothing to do with Atlantic City,” and praising himself for his “great timing” in getting out of the investment.
In America, people with lots of money can easily avoid the consequences of bad bets and big losses by cashing out at the first sign of trouble.
The laws protect them through limited liability and bankruptcy.
It's no secret that there's a very pro-war faction within the "new atheist" intelligentsia. Hitchens was famously pro-war in the early 2000s and Sam Harris recently wrote a blog post arguing that Islam is to blame.
A hatred of infidels is arguably the central message of the Koran. The reality of martyrdom and the sanctity of armed jihad are about as controversial under Islam as the resurrection of Jesus is under Christianity.
The U.S. government had determined al-Awlaki to be a moderate, and he even spoke at a lunch event at the Pentagon. By 2010, however, he had become increasingly disillusioned with U.S. foreign policy. In a “Call to Jihad” lecture he gave that year, al-Awlaki said:
“We are not against Americans for just being Americans. We are against evil, and America as a whole has turned into a nation of evil. What we see from America is the invasion of countries; we see Abu Grahib, Bagram, and Guantanamo Bay; we see cruise missiles and cluster bombs; and we have just seen in Yemen the death of 23 children and 17 women….I for one was born in the U.S. I lived in the U.S. for 21 years. America was my home. I was a preacher of Islam involved in nonviolent Islamic activism. However, with the American invasion of Iraq and continued aggression against U.S. aggression against Muslims, I could not reconcile between living in the U.S. and being a Muslim.”
Al-Awlaki’s radicalization is consistent with the historical pattern of political activists adopting a belief in terrorism when political action fails to bring about change.
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