1. Comment #26101 by nine9s on March 16, 2007 at 10:40 pm

C'mon, Pantore, get it over with. Do your little AEI spiel.

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2. Comment #26104 by MelM on March 17, 2007 at 12:03 am

"Infidel" is 5 weeks on the NYT best seller list and is at #5. Good deal I say! Her intellectual journey out of Islam and out of religion is quite inspiring. A great read!

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3. Comment #26121 by Pantore on March 17, 2007 at 4:17 am

ROFL

Funny to see I have a fanboy/girl.

So christians aren't that evil according to the 'holy' Ayaan.

As requested by nine9s here you go:

Acording to AEI,Walmart is a blessing to the USA...LOL.

If you want to send fanmail write to:

Richelkind@msn.com

Looking forward to hear from you fans!
Have a good weekend

The american dream; you have to be asleep to believe it!

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4. Comment #26124 by heinitz on March 17, 2007 at 4:47 am

I'm getting a 403 error.

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5. Comment #26127 by howtoplayalone on March 17, 2007 at 5:12 am

"C'mon, Pantore, get it over with. Do your little AEI spiel."

Ha.

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6. Comment #26140 by mr gollo on March 17, 2007 at 7:17 am

I'm going to stick up for Pantore.

The AEI is a highly Authoritarian organisation, pro death penalty,
"Much of the disquiet of elite opinion with the death penalty seems to stem from a reluctance to differentiate between right and wrong. A just society, however, must protect its citizens and vindicate their sense of justice. Perhaps paradoxically, executing McVeigh is the best way to affirm Americans' deeply held belief that life is a gift from God and that those who coldbloodedly snuff it out should not continue to enjoy that gift."

Pro pre-emptive wars of agression,(advocated by their "Freedom Scholar") anti seperation of church and state, pro "New American Zionism", etc.

What do they think of Dawkins, Dennet and Harris?

"Alas, it is extremely difficult to engage on the same level with Harris, Dennett, and Dawkins. All of them think that religion is so great a menace that they do not have much disposition for dialogue. The battle flags they put into the wind are Voltaire's Ecrasez l'infame! Meanwhile, all three pretend that atheists "question everything" and "submit to relentless, almost tedious, self-criticism." Yet in these books there is not a shred of evidence that their authors have ever had any doubts whatever about the rightness of their own atheism." (Michael Novak)

"Naturally, the atheists focus their peevishness not on Muslim extremists (who advertise their hatred and violent intentions) but on the old-time Christian religion" (Samuel Schulman)

"The battle over evolution is not an example of how heroic scientists have withstood the relentless persecution of religious fanatics. Rather, from the very start it primarily has been an attack on religion by militant atheists who wrap themselves in the mantle of science." (Rodney Stark)

"...evolutionists have often explained new species as the result of the accumulation of tiny, favorable random mutations over an immense span of time. But this answer is inconsistent with the fossil record wherein creatures appear "full-blown and raring to go." (Rodney Stark)

"For apes to come out of the trees, and change in the direction of being able to write down Maxwell's equations, I don't think you can explain that by natural selection at all. It's just a miracle." (Freeman Dyson)

I could go on and on, but the fact is the AEI is an almost Orwellian, Anti-Muslim, Anti Secular/Atheist views, anti-intellectual, but Pro-Christian, Intelligent Design, conflict cheering, organisation.

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7. Comment #26144 by jonecc on March 17, 2007 at 7:48 am

The point with Ayaan, though, is that we on the left could have done better for her and people like her. We've consistently failed to grasp, and I still find myself constantly having to make this point, that by resisting fundamentalist Islam (by which I mean the belief that the Koran is the literal word of Allah) we are supporting not the neo-cons, who were quite happy to work with the fundamentalists in Afghanistan, Indonesia and other places when it suited them, but the people who have suffered directly through that literalist belief. If you actually read the Koran, it rapidly becomes very clear that people who follow this book are not our natural allies on any subject.

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8. Comment #26147 by Goodwithwood on March 17, 2007 at 8:13 am

Wow! That is one exoticly very sexy women.

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9. Comment #26160 by Loren Michael on March 17, 2007 at 9:52 am

Acording to AEI,Walmart is a blessing to the USA...LOL.

One good thing about Wal*Mart is that they actively destroy small towns, which, in the United States, are teeming with Republicans.

If Wal*Mart forces otherwise backward hicks to move to a city and get inundated with culture, they aren't all bad.

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10. Comment #26162 by BaronOchs on March 17, 2007 at 10:17 am

Comment #26140 by mr gollo

"For apes to come out of the trees, and change in the direction of being able to write down Maxwell's equations, I don't think you can explain that by natural selection at all. It's just a miracle." (Freeman Dyson)

Freeman Dyson is of course a respected physicist and mathematician. And according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson
a "non-dogmatic christian". evidently we can file him next to Fred "747 Junkyard" Hoyle and any other physicists who make outlandish statements about evolution.

But of course yes the AEI are a bunch of fruitcakes, so what did Ayaan Hirsi Ali have to do with them? I'll have to see some hard evidence before I accept she had any truck with their lunatic views. So maybe she was a sane voice in a thinktank of lunatics? answers anyone?

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11. Comment #26168 by Janus on March 17, 2007 at 11:36 am

My guess is that she wasn't offered that many jobs, and she took the best one available to her. *shrug*

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12. Comment #26169 by nine9s on March 17, 2007 at 11:59 am

Pantore said:

Acording to AEI,Walmart is a blessing to the USA...LOL.

"A McKinsey company study concluded that Wal-Mart accounted for 13 percent of the nation's productivity gains in the second half of the 1990s, which probably made Wal-Mart about as important as the Federal Reserve in holding down inflation. By lowering consumer prices, Wal-Mart costs about 50 retail jobs among competitors for every 100 jobs Wal-Mart creates. Wal-Mart and its effects save shoppers more than $200 billion a year, dwarfing such government programs as food stamps ($28.6 billion) and the earned-income tax credit ($34.6 billion)."


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/13/AR2006091301573.html

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13. Comment #26170 by nine9s on March 17, 2007 at 12:18 pm

AEI came to Ayaan, not the other way around. "But I also intended to meet with Christopher DeMuth, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington that was interested in offering me a job. ... When I had been approached for a think tank position in the United States, I thought that perhaps it could take my ideas to a larger platform and give me more time to develop them." Pages 339-340. Doesn't it say something good about AEI that they would hire a world-renowned atheist?

I've said this before, but the main thrust of AEI is economic and political issues, and Ayaan has said that she supports lower taxation and fewer benefits, since she's seen what happened when her fellow refugees were given enough money to live on -- they sat around on their asses and nursed imaginary grievances. So Ayaan and AEI have their basic politics in common, but there are of course differences. Would she really be more at home in a university full of politically correct socialists?

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14. Comment #26171 by Janus on March 17, 2007 at 12:35 pm

Thank you nine9s, I had read something like that, but I'd forgotten most of it.

Your last sentence is probably right on the money.

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15. Comment #26199 by mr gollo on March 17, 2007 at 4:12 pm

nine9s said:

Would she really be more at home in a university full of politically correct socialists?

Obviously not, but why join a neo-conservative thinktank either? They are not renowned for their fiscal responsability. I can see why they wanted her to join them, but not why she would want to. That's all I'm questioning.

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16. Comment #26204 by HughCaldwell on March 17, 2007 at 4:37 pm

What a wonderful woman! Almost too good to be true. It would be nice to know much more about her.

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17. Comment #26207 by He'sAVeryNaughtyBoy on March 17, 2007 at 4:53 pm

From what I've seen Colbert usualy struggles with rational types - they don't often have a lot of daft ideas that he can point out to people. He seems to prefer nutbags who he can give a bit of string to and watch as they tie themselves in knots.
This one with Hirsi Ali was very good though. I've finaly decided to get a copy of Infidel, it sounds like a good read.

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18. Comment #26277 by nine9s on March 18, 2007 at 9:28 am

I've finaly decided to get a copy of Infidel, it sounds like a good read.

Wikiquote has a bunch of quotes from Infidel, if anyone's interested: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali

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19. Comment #26353 by Riley on March 18, 2007 at 8:59 pm

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is not a monolithic organization. Ayaan will not be a lone voice of reason. But it's worth recognizing that the AEI leadership and at least a few of its scholars include outspoken anti-Darwinists (most notably Irving Kristol, Robert Bork, and Joe Manzari) who actively use the resources of the AEI to perpetuate the teach-the-controversy wedge strategy of "creation science" in American schools.

The AEI has been for decades and remains today a major contributor and a central organizing force suporting efforts to inject religion into American government policy.

I've compiled a list of information about the AEI for anyone who would like to learn more.



--

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20. Comment #188328 by militant_agnostic on June 3, 2008 at 11:11 pm

For me that link is down, it available on the Comedy Central website though.
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/?ml_video=83810

I also just watched her at AAI2007, I'm continually struck by her intelligence and dignity.

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21. Comment #188343 by huzonfurst on June 4, 2008 at 1:35 am

I recently finished reading Infidel and it is on the shelf right up there with Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens, patiently awaiting its autograph.

Ayaan is an incredible woman, even if she is working for AEI; let's hope she gets over that eventually.

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