Can we just ignore this guy?
Ben could have sent Brett a private request for a dick pic. No need for the rest of us to be in the loop.
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Was he very religious? Self loathing seems to come from being shamed and told something that is an integral part of you (gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) is wrong/disgusting/against god’s will at an early age.
Religion is fine, organized religion is generally shit.
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Reading the headline again I imagined a youtube video popping up in the sidebar: “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Brett Kavanaugh’s Penis.”
Anyway, his lil’ pee-pee is moot, when Kavanaugh denied that “Renate Alumnus” meant something other than slut-shaming he was lying under oath, and every teenager in the USA knew it. If someone wants to forgive sexual assault from decades ago, fair enough, but perjury is not something anyone should forgive in the highest court in the land.
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That’s a pretty broad generalization. Churches formed the backbone of the Civil Rights movement—Martin Luther King Jr.’s doctorate wasn’t in physiology. Likewise, organizations that purported to be science-driven were responsible for the American eugenics movement. It’s less about “who’s got religion” than “who’s looking for excuses to act like a dick.”
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I believe that he comes from a Modern Orthodox Jewish family and that he’s stuck with their fundie-with-convenient-exceptions approach. Early in his career he was mocked as “virgin Ben” because he often proclaimed to the public his steadfast choice not to have pre-marital sex due to his religious beliefs (which, fine) and his innate superiority over fellow young people and an immoral secular society for making that choice (which, not so fine).
Despite Ben being a Jewish fundie and Cardinal Douthat of the NYT being a Catholic fundie, their respective bodies of works both evince a deep horror of ladyparts. Fundamentalist religion: bringing different faiths together in shared dysfunction and general asshattery.
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Agreed…too broad a brush.
There are good and bad for sure. But many people use organized religion to gather power and be dicks.
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Yes, he always sounds like a bullshit machine-gun.
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So true. Besides monotheism, what do fundamentalist Christians, Orthodox Jews and extremist Muslims have in common? Misogyny!
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Aside from the real creepiness of his fascination with a description of the organ, it’s telling that he thinks it would be such a super memorable experience. It’s a class and gender thing. And probably age thing. The instance described and similar molestations happen, or at least happened in my youth, more often that someone from a more privileged or sheltered background might ever suspect. It was the era when Porkies and Revenge of the Nerds were considered family comedy. It was normalized, but it’s not something you really want to remember in great detail.*
*just in case, because, internet, want to be very clear that I’m not saying it is or was okay. Just that it happened.
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I used to think that and a few years ago it might even have been true, but some of his arguments have been so internally inconsistent that it is unreasonable to believe he truly holds them after a while. You can even see it in some of the video clips where he is quickly trying to spin a plausible enough story.
This is frustrating because it pretends that the problem is spread equally. It isn’t.
A lot of the time, yes. It is a rhetorical tactic that makes it hard to do a point by point rebuttal in a reasonable amount of time.
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Ben’s pretty much gone all the way over to sensationalism. I unsubbed from his podcast a while back as it is no longer a constructive place for finding fact-based conservative news and opinions. He’s inserted too much emotion and religion into his arguments for my taste.
I do respectfully disagree that being stuck in echo chambers isn’t an equal issue for both sides of the isle. I traverse many different discussion boards, news sources, etc., and it’s a bad problem for the right and the left. The right tends to suffer from severe gullibility and willful ignorance, while the left is a victim of its overwhelming assuredness that they are both morally and factually correct on every issue. Neither tend to take an honest look at what the other ‘side’ is saying.
Obviously that’s a broad generalization and there are exceptions abound, but that is my opinion and observation.
A quest to rival that of the Holy Grail.
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And the latest dodge from right-wingers I’ve seen is that Shapiro’s only joking, and it’s the leftists who are stupid and bad and probably the real rapists, too.
In other words, quite predictable.
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Oh, that old tactic again.
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I’ll preface this comment by saying that I’m not going to Google it as I really don’t want to see such a small and uninspiring thing. That being said: yes! you won!
I would agree for the most part, but would add that one of the most worrisome aspects of the deepening political intractability we are witnessing is that both ‘sides’ assume moral infallibility. Case in point the abortion debate. And that just seems impossible to surmount. And while the right absolutely appears to be not only more ignorant and gullible, they are now heading deep into the fever swamp of outright factual denialism and conspiracy theories, QAnon and the like, which I don’t think is nearly as much of a problem on the left. It appears we are in a desperate epistemological crisis, of which Trumpism is more a symptom than a cause.
“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” Marshall McLuhan
Natalie is a treasure.
Still, I can’t go all the way down that road with you.
It’s a good argument though.
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Is it circumcised? There’s a 50/50 chance you could guess that right
Looks like circumcision rates in the US 1965 were about 85%. Probably even higher for a white Catholic.
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