I don’t have anything against Islam in particular.

Just against religious fundies. Many of them made my life hell when I was growing up, and fundie parents made many of my friends’ lives worse every day for years.

I’ve lived in an Islamic country (unlike 99.99% of people who have an opinion one way or another) and saw in person how women were treated there in the name of religion.

It is worse, far worse, than most Americans can imagine. And that’s only what I saw in public.

But it’s not that I have anything against Islam in particular, to clarify once again. Just that Islam does actually in reality have more fundies, does oppress women more, and is more regressive, than other current religions.

I care about practice not doctrine, and in practice Islam oppresses hundreds of millions of people (mostly women) around the world every single day.

I see no reason to defend that, just as I don’t defend patriarchy anywhere else. Why make some stupid exception for Islam?

What’s so special about it?

I’ve seen numerous articles like this neoliberal scatological leaving at Slate proclaiming the impossibility of paying McDonald’s workers living wages – never mind that other countries do so quite well, thank you.

Part of that is just to shift the focus to an individual corporation, and thus to deflect attention from the systemic in an effort to forestall reforms, but even more of it is about that most people – including this clown at Slate – can’t actually even see the problem.

The system in other words is so natural to them that it is completely invisible. Of course it is impossible to pay more. Of course that would hurt McDonald’s competitiveness. Of course everything has to be exactly like it is.

In psychology this is called the status quo bias. It’s incredibly common in human reasoning.

But most of the writers I read are allegedly well-educated. Weismann is a graduate of Northwestern University, for instance.

And yet it seems that most of these so-called educated people cannot think their way out of a flipped-over refrigerator box.

Why is this? What are people learning at university that they are so ignorant of history, of other nations, or other possibilities, even of how to better educate themselves?

If that’s the best universities can do, I’m glad I am an autodidact.