“Brunei’s Royal Barbarity and Hypocrisy” is from the New York Times Editorial Board:
The oil-rich sultanate imposes harsh Shariah law on its subjects, while members of the royal family enjoy lives of conspicuous luxury.
Brunei’s cruel, inhuman and degrading penalties are not a relic of history, like the sodomy laws that stayed on the books of American states well into the 20th century, but the whim of Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, 72, who has ruled the Lilliputian nation since 1967 and ranks among the most ludicrously wealthy people on earth. He has long pushed his predominantly Muslim nation toward a conservative and restrictive form of Islam, and he first announced the new penalties — which, in addition to death by stoning for gay male sex, include amputation for theft and 40 lashes for lesbian sex — six years ago.
Besides the barbarity of the penalties, there is the danger that the law could nudge neighboring Islamic giants Malaysia and Indonesia toward tightening their own national or regional versions of Shariah laws targeting homosexuals.
The biographies of the authors do not suggest any expert knowledge of Islam or Shariah law. What qualifies these folks to tell Muslims in Brunei how to organize their lives in accordance with Islam? Is this “Amerisplaining”?
Also interesting… “The U.S. Immigration System May Have Reached a Breaking Point” (nytimes), from the same newspaper that said, three months ago, Donald Trump had manufactured a crisis. Now it seems that the “crisis” started five years ago:
The very nature of immigration to America changed after 2014, when families first began showing up in large numbers. The resulting crisis has overwhelmed a system unable to detain, care for and quickly decide the fate of tens of thousands of people who claim to be fleeing for their lives. … The country is now unable to provide either the necessary humanitarian relief for desperate migrants or even basic controls on the number and nature of who is entering the United States.
Trump is on the wrong track, as usual:
Mr. Trump has insisted on simply trying to stop people from getting into the country in the first place — a policy of deterrence that not only has failed but has made the problem worse.
Only a rookie would try to stop people from crossing the border into the U.S. by trying to stop them from crossing the border!
The immigration article is the most anti-immigration article I have seen in the NY Times. It does have anti-Trump remarks sprinkled throughout the article, but other than that it seems like a big endorsement of Trumpism.
I am confused. I thought the concept of the “nudge” was only supposed to direct people to do good things — like put money into their retirement plans, drink less soda, eat less salty snacks, and vote democrat. I didn’t think you could use this concept to “nudge” people into religiosity?
Thaler and Sunstein left that chapter out.
Donald Trump will never do anything the New York Times approves of, either proactively, retroactively or at the instant it happens, except tender his resignation and turn himself in.
Now that we know that there are two kinds of races: good (progressive) and bad (racist) ones, The New York Time has taught us yet another important lesson. There are two kinds of Islam: a good Islam (that teaches actively opposing Donald Trump) and a bad Islam (some people did something, perhaps in Brunei). I am still waiting for an editorial on how ISIS were really the AntiFa of Syria and Levant, brave and noble warriors who took upon Trump and his evil Russian overlord Putin.
The immigration article is plain wrong: those people simply gathered at the border to protest Trump’s cruel immigration policies, just like the NY mayor Bill De Blasio did recently (he did not cross to Mexico, AFAIK)