Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Elvis Presley born; President Lyndon Johnson declares war on poverty; Ramzi Yousef sentenced to life in prison for first World Trade Center bombing. Physicist Stephen Hawking born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
All the pain and the poverty. Hypocrisy fuels my truth. Ain’t no stopping me.
In their 1999 paper, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, David Dunning and Justin Kruger put data to what has been known by philosophers since Socrates, who supposedly said something along the lines of “the only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.” Charles Darwin followed that up in 1871 with “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
Put simply, incompetent people think they know more than they really do, and they tend to be more boastful about it.
To test Darwin’s theory, the researchers quizzed people on several topics, such as grammar, logical reasoning and humor. After each test, they asked the participants how they thought they did. Specifically, participants were asked how many of the other quiz-takers they beat.
Dunning was shocked by the results, even though it confirmed his hypothesis. Time after time, no matter the subject, the people who did poorly on the tests ranked their competence much higher. On average, test takers who scored as low as the 10th percentile ranked themselves near the 70th percentile. Those least likely to know what they were talking about believed they knew as much as the experts.
…
There’s also “much more research activity” about the effect right now than immediately after it was published, Dunning said. Typically, interest in a research topic spikes in the five years following a groundbreaking study, then fades.
“Obviously it has to do with Trump and the various treatments that people have given him,” Dunning said, “So yeah, a lot of it is political. People trying to understand the other side. We have a massive rise in partisanship and it’s become more vicious and extreme, so people are reaching for explanations.”
He has “the best words” and cites his “high levels of intelligence” in rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change. Decades ago, he said he could end the Cold War: “It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” Trump told The Washington Post’s Lois Romano over dinner in 1984. “I think I know most of it anyway.”
“Donald Trump has been overestimating his knowledge for decades,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. “It’s not surprising that he would continue that pattern into the White House.”
Dunning-Kruger “offers an explanation for a kind of hubris,” said Steven Sloman, a cognitive psychologist at Brown University. “The fact is, that’s Trump in a nutshell. He’s a man with zero political skill who has no idea he has zero political skill. And it’s given him extreme confidence.”
…
Dunning says the effect is particularly dangerous when someone with influence or the means to do harm doesn’t have anyone who can speak honestly about their mistakes. He noted several plane crashes that could have been avoided if crew had spoken up to an overconfident pilot.
“You get into a situation where people can be too deferential to the people in charge,” Dunning explained. “You have to have people around you that are willing to tell you you’re making an error.”
What happens when the incompetent are unwilling to admit they have shortcomings? Are they so confident in their own perceived knowledge that they will reject the very idea of improvement? Not surprisingly (though no less concerning), Dunning’s follow-up research shows the poorest performers are also the least likely to accept criticism or show interest in self improvement.
So, Evil or Stupid? I vote for Evil. Not all Republicans are Stupid, many act transparently in their own personal self-interest in ways that are canny, effective, and persistent. The fact that they are wrong for the general population, morally abhorrent, and hypocritical is simply the tribute vice pays to virtue. If one considered their lack of empathy, disregard for the general welfare, and limited perception of time, indications of intellectual deficit then one might charitably assign them a category of lower than normal intelligence, say “Moron” or “Idiot”. Certainly when I label them that way it is with more compassion than I truly think they deserve.
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
I have no idea how well Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will perform as a member of Congress. But her election is already serving a valuable purpose. You see, the mere thought of having a young, articulate, telegenic nonwhite woman serve is driving many on the right mad — and in their madness they’re inadvertently revealing their true selves.
Some of the revelations are cultural: The hysteria over a video of AOC dancing in college says volumes, not about her, but about the hysterics. But in some ways the more important revelations are intellectual: The right’s denunciation of AOC’s “insane” policy ideas serves as a very good reminder of who is actually insane.
The controversy of the moment involves AOC’s advocacy of a tax rate of 70-80 percent on very high incomes, which is obviously crazy, right? I mean, who thinks that makes sense? Only ignorant people like … um, Peter Diamond, Nobel laureate in economics and arguably the world’s leading expert on public finance.
Shortly after the newly Democratic-controlled House was sworn in on Thursday, it held a vote on what rules it wants to play by. Among those rules was one known as “pay-go,” short for pay-as-you-go, requiring any legislation that would increase government spending to also include equal tax increases or budget cuts elsewhere to make up for it. Essentially, it indicates that Democrats put a high priority on keeping the deficit where it is, even as they try to increase government resources in desperately needed areas like infrastructure or health care.
It’s true that the rule can be waived at any time by a majority of lawmakers, or overridden if legislation is designated an “emergency,” allowing big-ticket items to come to the floor for a vote. There is also already a statutory version of pay-go on the books, making the House rule more symbolic than anything else. But therein is the problem.
So Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio wants to interrupt your Tuesday night Prime Time with an address that a growing number of people say should not be carried at all on the Broadcast Networks unless vetted and fact checked (the very foundation of it is a racist lie). I guess it’s a bridge too far even for him to get in the way of the Tide and the Tigers who would roll over him like a ratings juggernaught.
It won’t bother me at all because I’ll be watching Oak Island where last week we discovered what might be the 90 Foot Stone in the basement of a Halifax Book Bindery. Priorities folks.
As his policy deteriorates and crumbles by the minute I found these remarks by Bill Curry (I admit some ‘homeboy’ sentiment, I voted for him twice) instructive-
(T)he Clinton shutdown – which really should be remembered as the Gingrich shutdown and was perceived that way overwhelmingly at the time. Polls showed that by 20 and 30 point even margins, peopled blamed the Republicans squarely, as they should have. And it was, Gingrich thought at the outset, a really good idea for him to shut down the government. Notice the first parallel to our present moment, that Trump, like Gingrich, seems to feel that this is an idea that’s very much in his interest and for some of the same reason that it excites his base.
And the public … Clinton had been so far down when Clinton hired me after the 1994 election, I had lost a close race for governor in Connecticut, Clinton called and asked if he thought there was any chance that he could come back and win, and I said sure, not really having an opinion on the subject at the time. But Clinton was way down. Two things happened. He did very well with the Oklahoma City bombing and that bumped him up. People thought that he demonstrated empathy, some character in that. And then came the event that made his re-election, and that was the shutdown. And people decided that Clinton had acted as an adult, that he demonstrated maturity and reason.
(T)here’s a tendency sometimes to underestimate our base in terms of what we’re willing to talk about. And again, these trade, immigration issues, every Democratic president nominated in my adult lifetime has supported untrammeled free trade agreements. Most of our base is against it. The debate within our party has only begun in the last couple of years, and we’re still not at a point where we’re capable of engaging. So this international trade debate and the international immigration debate, there’s been too much silence.
The good news, I suppose, about this shutdown is it’s taking the two biggest leaders in our party, Schumer and Pelosi, and forcing them to engage and to begin to make arguments, like the one we talked about earlier, that begin to tell people the real story of border security and what it means. And so, I think Democrats – this is my constant message Democrats, is that policy precedes message. First you figure out what you believe and then how to tell people about it. We need to be better at making a brief. We need to be better at arguing the facts. The good news is the public opinion on almost all these great divides, on almost all these issues, is on our side already. We don’t have to create a market for it, we have to address it and we have to put a blueprint on the table that shows people we can fix those problems.
Ok, this is not funny in a conventional sense, more like the 2:30 First Act of The Abduction of Figaro, only less. Basically it’s 5 hours of D’Arcy Carden in character as Janet from The Good Place standing around in an empty white space reminiscent of the Nowhere Land found in the Vacuum Monster’s stomach (or nose, ick) in Yellow Submarine.
Now I could expound at length and in detail about the ‘bold artistic vision’ expressed by this particular piece of performance art and indeed whether ‘performance art’ is really art at all (Banksy, where are you when I need you? You should take Marshall McLuhan lessons).
Oh believe me, there’s a lot more where that came from like the symbolism of Janet’s Blue and whether that relates to the Blue Meanie invasion of the non-fictional world foreshadowed at the end of Yellow Submarine (the parallels are blindingly obvious folks).
Love, love, love.
Did you know I used to ghost write college papers? The best one was an exploration of whether a study of Shark cells, which unlike most reproduce indefinitely in a laboratory culture, would be valuable in understanding Cancer and Longevity. Some call that cheating but I didn’t cheat at all. My work was original, what other people did with it, like turning it in as their own, is not my responsibility.
Or is it?
More in keeping with the theme of the show (which is Moral Philosophy) I could talk at equal length about the futility of existence and whether consequences and accountability are a necessary predicate for ethical action (many Atheists would hold that ethical action has sufficient practical benefits in the long run and that appeals to external standards are arbitrary, detrimental, and unnecessary) in the face of ultimate impermanence.
You think it’ll last forever: people and cars and concrete. But it won’t. One day it’s all gone. Even the sky.
My planet’s gone. It’s dead. It burned, like the Earth. It’s just rocks and dust. Before its time.
What happened?
There was a war, and we lost.
A war with who? What about your people?
I’m a Time Lord. I’m the last of the Time Lords. They’re all gone. I’m the only survivor. I’m left traveling on my own, ‘cos there’s no one else.
There’s me.
You’ve seen how dangerous it is — do you want to go home?
I don’t know… I want… Oh, can you smell chips?
Yeah. Yeah!
I want chips.
Me too.
Right then, before you get me back in that box, chips it is. And you can pay.
No money.
What sort of date are you? Come on, then, tight wad, chips are on me… we’ve only got five billion years ’til the shops close!
I’ve also written monographs on the Varieties of Pipe, Cigar, and Cigarette Ash and Apiculture.
I hope I haven’t made you want to gouge out your eyes like Oedipus and cut off your ears like Van Gough. If the sheer experience is not enough the comments (found here) are quite amusing.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
First U.S. Presidential Election; Clinton goes on trial in Senate; Khmer Rouge overthrown; Emperor Hirohito dies.
Let’s just face it, Da Bears haven’t been good since the late 40s or so when future Wrestling Hall of Famer Bill Perry, the man with the thickest fingers in Throwball, was doing their choreography. That they, and not my Packers, are in they Playoffs is a gross injustice.
On the other hand I hate the Iggles with an abiding passion because they’re a crappy team that consistently beats my Giants (Da Bears by contrast regularly lose to my Packers, as they should).
The Iggles are the defending Champions and I suppose I should give them props for defeating the Patsies who I hate much, much more, but I’m kind of rooting for Da Bears in this one. The outcome sort of depends on how well Nick Foles weathered his beat down by the Native Americans last week, not for nothing Da Bears have the best defense in the league.
You see, it’s not about who you hate, I hate them all. It’s about who you hate the most. Coaches call Steroids “Muscle Fuel”, Hatred “Motivation”, and Traumatic Brain Injury is something you should just walk off- “How many fingers am I holding up boy?” “Uhh… 12?”. “Close enough. Can you stand?” “Uhh… yeah?” “Good. Now get out there and leave it all on the field.” It’s no wonder the players are inclined to shoot themselves and others, kill dogs, and beat their partners.
Oh, and if you kneel for the anthem and smoke dope you’re out. ‘Murika!
I told you yesterday that Baltimore got a better team, the Ravens. The good news is they’re likely to win today. The bad news is they’re going to face the Patsies if they do.
Not that it’s necessarily bad news, the Patsies have looked pretty vincible this year and there is no doubt Brady’s best days (not that he was ever as good as Rodgers really) are definitely behind him. It’s because of sentiments like that I rarely talk about Throwball in Stars Hollow which is rabid Patsies territory even though they dicked over Hartford to get a new Stadium in Foxboro (Billion dollar useless White Elephants again).
Thank goodness my Therapist is also a Packers fan.
But it’s hard to be offended by the Chargers, perennial also-rans. I don’t even blame them for ditching San Diego which, other than Tiajuana and a big ass military base, doesn’t actually have much going for it. Not that Los Angeles is a lot better, there are places I’d live in California but they’re all up North.
Both the Ravens and the Chargers have an annoying tendency to cough up the ball so this could be a fun game to watch. That’s really my problem with Throwball, it’s boring. Great to nap through though, if I’m having trouble sleeping it’ll zonk me out in about 10 Downs.
strong>Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
Joan of Arc is born; Samuel Morse demonstrates the telegraph to the public; Commercial airplane completes first round-the-world flight; Figure skater Nancy Kerrigan is attacked; Dizzy Gillespie and Rudolf Nureyev die.
George W. Bush can still be used as an avatar for the evils of the American empire because Bush’s presidency never really ended. The surveillance state, the lack of liberties like due process and the right to privacy, and constant direct warfare have all been part of our national reality since 9/11. The fundamentals of this Orwellian paradigm haven’t changed since then, and Obama and Trump have further established them by expanding America’s wars and by cracking down on whistleblowers.
As the U.S. gets ready to detain and prosecute Julian Assange, the consequences of staying complicit with this takeover’s earlier years are now ironically clear. When Bush authorized the CIA to carry out wildly unusual amounts of extraordinary rendition, the American people were told that this and the other new law enforcement measures would only be used to catch terrorists. Many people believed the government’s explanation, and those who didn’t believe were powerless to stop it and the other policies of the “War on Terror.”
The initial results were tolerable, at least for non-Muslims who didn’t challenge the empire. In 2003, CIA agents used extraordinary rendition to detain Muslim cleric Abu Omar from the streets of Milan, Italy and send him to be interrogated and tortured in Egypt without trial. Throughout early-to-mid 2002, the current CIA director Gina Haspel authorized the torture of multiple Muslim prisoners in a Thailand “black site,” with the prison’s tactics having included beating an innocent pregnant woman in the stomach, anally raping a man with meals he refused, and freezing a shackled prisoner until he died. The prisoners in Guantanamo have been detained without trial, and a U.N. report from last year says that torture is still taking place in the prison. These precedents have helped Bush and Obama establish an unaccountable and extrajudicial drone assassination program that continues to primarily kill Muslims who the CIA brands as “terrorists.”
But because Americans assumed that these “security” measures would only ever affect the un-patriots and the Muslims, the U.S. government will have the ability to capture Assange through extraordinary rendition after he’s driven out of the Ecuadorian embassy. Reports have indicated that the Justice Department’s prepared indictment against Assange focuses on the Manning-era WikiLeaks releases, which means that the U.S. plans to prosecute Assange only for engaging in the routine journalistic practice of publishing leaks.
If the U.S. succeeds in this prosecution, any journalist who publishes government leaks, including the ones from corporate outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, will also be eligible for prosecution from the Trump administration. In July of 2017 the New York Times’ own lawyer David McGraw explicitly warned against prosecuting Assange, having said that:
“I think the prosecution of him would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers…from everything I know, he’s sort of in a classic publisher’s position and I think the law would have a very hard time drawing a distinction between The New York Times and WikiLeaks.”
A VETERAN national security journalist with NBC News and MSNBC blasted the networks in a Monday email for becoming captive and subservient to the national security state, reflexively pro-war in the name of stopping President Donald Trump, and now the prime propaganda instrument of the War Machine’s promotion of militarism and imperialism. As a result of NBC/MSNBC’s all-consuming militarism, he said, “the national security establishment not only hasn’t missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength” and “is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism.”
The NBC/MSNBC reporter, William Arkin, is a longtime prominent war and military reporter, perhaps best known for his groundbreaking, three-part Washington Post series in 2010, co-reported with two-time Pulitzer winner Dana Priest, on how sprawling, unaccountable, and omnipotent the national security state has become in the post-9/11 era. When that three-part investigative series, titled “Top Secret America,” was published, I hailed it as one of the most important pieces of reporting of the war on terror, because while “we chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, this is the Real U.S. Government: functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.”
Arkin has worked with NBC and MSNBC over the years and continuously since 2016. But yesterday, he announced that he was leaving the network in a long, emphatic email denouncing the networks for their superficial and reactionary coverage of national security, for becoming fixated on trivial Trump outbursts of the day to chase profit and ratings, and — most incriminating of all — for becoming the central propaganda arm of the CIA, the Pentagon, and the FBI in the name of #Resistance, thus inculcating an entire new generation of liberals, paying attention to politics for the first time in the Trump era, to “lionize” those agencies and their policies of imperialism and militarism.
That MSNBC and NBC have become Security State Central has been obvious for quite some time. The network consists of little more than former CIA, NSA, and Pentagon officials as news “analysts”; ex-Bush-Cheney national security and communications officials as hosts and commentators; and the most extremists pro-war neocons constantly bashing Trump (and critics of Democrats generally) from the right, using the Cheney-Rove playbook on which they built their careers to accuse Democratic Party critics and enemies of being insufficiently patriotic, traitors for America’s official enemies, and abandoning America’s hegemonic role in the world.
MSNBC’s star national security reporter Ken Dilanian was widely mocked by media outlets for years for being an uncritical CIA stenographer before he became a beloved NBC/MSNBC reporter (where his mindless servitude to his CIA masters has produced some of the network’s most humiliating debacles). The cable network’s key anchor, Rachel Maddow, once wrote a book on the evils of endless wars without congressional authorization, but now routinely depicts anyone who wants to end those illegal wars as reckless weaklings and traitors.
Some of the most beloved and frequently featured MSNBC commentators are the most bloodthirsty pro-war militarists from the war on terror: David Frum, Jennifer Rubin, Ralph Peters, and Bill Kristol (who was just giddily and affectionately celebrated with a playful nickname bestowed on him: “Lil Bill”). In early 2018, NBC hired former CIA chief John Brennan to serve as a “senior national security and intelligence analyst,” where the rendition and torture advocate joined — as Politico’s Jack Shafer noted — a long litany of former security state officials at the network, including “Chuck Rosenberg, former acting DEA administrator, chief of staff for FBI Director James B. Comey, and counselor to former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III; Frank Figliuzzi, former chief of FBI counterintelligence; Juan Zarate, deputy national security adviser under Bush.”
As Shafer noted, filling your news and analyst slots with former security state officials as MSNBC and NBC have done is tantamount to becoming state TV, since “their first loyalty — and this is no slam — is to the agency from which they hail.” As he put it: “Imagine a TV network covering the auto industry through the eyes of dozens of paid former auto executives and you begin to appreciate the current peculiarities.”
All of this led Arkin to publish a remarkable denunciation of NBC and MSNBC in the form of an email he sent to various outlets, including The Intercept. Its key passages are scathing and unflinching in their depiction of those networks as pro-war propaganda outlets that exist to do little more than amplify and serve the security state agencies most devoted to opposing Trump, including their mindless opposition to Trump’s attempts (with whatever motives) to roll back some of the excesses of imperialism, aggression, and U.S. involvement in endless war, as well as to sacrifice all journalistic standards and skepticism about generals and the U.S war machine if doing so advances their monomaniacal mission of denouncing Trump. As Arkin wrote (emphasis added):
My expertise, though seeming to be all the more central to the challenges and dangers we face, also seems to be less valued at the moment. And I find myself completely out of synch with the network, being neither a day-to-day reporter nor interested in the Trump circus. …
To me there is also a larger problem: though they produce nothing that resembles actual safety and security, the national security leaders and generals we have are allowed to do their thing unmolested. Despite being at “war,” no great wartime leaders or visionaries are emerging. There is not a soul in Washington who can say that they have won or stopped any conflict. And though there might be the beloved perfumed princes in the form of the Petraeus’ and Wes Clarks’, or the so-called warrior monks like Mattis and McMaster, we’ve had more than a generation of national security leaders who sadly and fraudulently have done little of consequence. And yet we (and others) embrace them, even the highly partisan formers who masquerade as “analysts”. We do so ignoring the empirical truth of what they have wrought: There is not one county in the Middle East that is safer today than it was 18 years ago. Indeed the world becomes ever more polarized and dangerous. …
Windrem again convinced me to return to NBC to join the new investigative unit in the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign. I thought that the mission was to break through the machine of perpetual war acceptance and conventional wisdom to challenge Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness. It was also an interesting moment at NBC because everyone was looking over their shoulder at Vice and other upstarts creeping up on the mainstream. But then Trump got elected and Investigations got sucked into the tweeting vortex, increasingly lost in a directionless adrenaline rush, the national security and political version of leading the broadcast with every snow storm. And I would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself – busy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play.
I’d argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn’t missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism. I’d also argue, ever so gingerly, that NBC has become somewhat lost in its own verve, proxies of boring moderation and conventional wisdom, defender of the government against Trump, cheerleader for open and subtle threat mongering, in love with procedure and protocol over all else (including results). I accept that there’s a lot to report here, but I’m more worried about how much we are missing. Hence my desire to take a step back and think why so little changes with regard to America’s wars. …
In our day-to-day whirlwind and hostage status as prisoners of Donald Trump, I think – like everyone else does – that we miss so much. People who don’t understand the medium, or the pressures, loudly opine that it’s corporate control or even worse, that it’s partisan. Sometimes I quip in response to friends on the outside (and to government sources) that if they mean by the word partisan that it is New Yorkers and Washingtonians against the rest of the country then they are right.
For me I realized how out of step I was when I looked at Trump’s various bumbling intuitions: his desire to improve relations with Russia, to denuclearize North Korea, to get out of the Middle East, to question why we are fighting in Africa, even in his attacks on the intelligence community and the FBI. Of course he is an ignorant and incompetent impostor. And yet I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn’t get out Syria? We shouldn’t go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? Even on Russia, though we should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really yearn for the Cold War? And don’t even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?
That an entire generation of Democrats paying attention to politics for the first time is being instilled with formerly right-wing Cold Warrior values of jingoism, über-patriotism, reverence for security state agencies and prosecutors, a reckless use of the “traitor” accusation to smear one’s enemies, and a belief that neoconservatives embody moral rectitude and foreign policy expertise has long been obvious and deeply disturbing. These toxins will endure far beyond Trump, particularly given the now full-scale unity between the Democratic establishment and neocons.
I think the way it's supposed to work is the elected president, as Commander-in-Chief, makes decisions with Congress about whether troops will be deployed (which didn't happen in Syria), & then the President decides when they come home. We have civilian, not military, rule: https://t.co/5GJ2J5jjUE
Still, that a network insider has blown the whistle on how all this works, and how MSNBC and NBC have become ground zero for these political pathologies of militarism and servitude to security state agencies, while not surprising, is nonetheless momentous given how detailed and emphatic he is in his condemnations.
…
“Now would be a good time to reassess our relationship with Saudi Arabia. And I mean that as a Muslim and as an American,” says Minhaj in the episode titled “Saudi Arabia.”
He goes on to discuss the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in October and was revealed to have been slain on orders from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Khashoggi’s body has not been found.
The comedian then addresses the crown prince, referring to him as MBS, by critiquing the United States’ relationship with him and Saudi Arabia.
“MBS asked, ‘Why the outrage?’ and frankly, MBS’ confusion is completely understandable. He has been getting away with autocratic shit like [Khashoggi’s killing] for years with almost no blowback from the international community,” says Minhaj.
Minhaj then lists example after example of problems in Saudi Arabia, including the imprisonment of human rights activists and his critics and rising numbers of executions, and says that the only people who are fully aware of this are the people of Saudi Arabia, who call Mohammed “Abu Rasasa” ― which translates to “father of the bullet.”
…
According to the Financial Times, Netflix said the Saudi telecoms regulator cited Article 6 of the law as the reason for the complaint, which states that “production, preparation, transmission, or storage of material impinging on public order, religious values, public morals, and privacy, through the information network or computers” is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine not exceeding 3 million riyals (about $800,000).
The episode is still available on Netflix in the United States, and Saudi users can still find it on the show’s YouTube page.
Representatives for Minhaj did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Minhaj responded publicly to the debacle on Twitter on Wednesday. He said that the move by Netflix has only made the episode more popular.
“Clearly, the best way to stop people from watching something is to ban it, make it trend online, and then leave it up on YouTube,” he wrote, before adding:
“Let’s not forget that the world’s largest humanitarian crisis is happening in Yemen right now. Please donate. ”
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