Robert Reich has a tiny corner of the right idea, but "he didn't sufficiently tout the Administration's accomplishments"? WHAT accomplishments?

The only thing the Obama administration has genuinely accomplished in the last six years which is even mildly positive has been the Affordable Care Act, and that is only positive in the sense that forcing everyone to buy bad products from a corrupt industry is, in this case, marginally better than excluding some people from having the product at all. And the reason the ACA forces everyone to buy bad products from a corrupt industry? Because Obama kept anyone from mentioning Single Payer in public, and specifically forced anyone who was holding out for the Public Option to give up on that. If anything, we should blame Obama for not permitting the ACA to be a better bill; all the things he did to make the whole thing worse were officially to try and get Republicans to vote for the thing, and in the end none of them did — he wasted everyone's time by even trying. (And anyone paying any attention could tell you at the time that that was how it was going to turn out, because it was obvious as early as March of 2009 that the Republicans were not acting in good faith and weren't going to compromise.)

On other fronts? He has deported more people than any previous president. He has prosecuted more journalists under the controversial Sedition Act from a century ago than any previous president. He has kept up our drone bombing program — the one which we now admit doesn't work and actually creates terrorists instead of killing them. He started bombing Libya even though Congress voted against it, and was going to do the same thing with Syria (until Putin outmaneuvered him). He was okay with making Bush's tax cuts for the rich permanent, and loaded the budget process with people who favored austerity — the economic policy Europe had already been pursuing, and which has failed everywhere. He approved increased subsidies for fossil fuels. He tried desperately to renegotiate Bush's original timetable for pulling out of Iraq, and when the Iraqi government refused to give American troops indemnity from war crimes trials (that's what the deadline really was — and it tells you everything you need to know that we knew we would have to leave if they started tracking war crimes) beyond 2011, he suddenly turned around and pretended that 2011 — the deadline set by Bush — was somehow something he had been working for all along. He has been the one defending the NSA spying programs, and his legal team has been trying to keep the Justice Department from investigating — and also has prosecuted whistleblowers, and tried to keep citizens from being able to sue corporations for various and sundry violations of law. In nearly every way, he has been trying to push far-right-wing policy, and only the Republican unwillingness to let him accomplish anything has prevented him from doing more damage than Bush did in just about every way. (At one point, he VOLUNTEERED to decimate Social Security and Medicare. If the Republicans hadn't been mindlessly recalcitrant, we would have lost those programs.) Heck, even the ACA was basically used as an excuse to avoid doing anything about the financial meltdown — anyone who asked (as I did) when they were going to do something about that, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Gitmo, or anything else, was told that they couldn't possibly consider anything else while working on the ACA, which conveniently used up all the time the Democrats had a supermajority in the Senate. Then they spent the next two years carefully making sure to blame the Republican MINORITY for their own useless inability to do a thing. (And then they lost the House completely and had an even better excuse.)

The man is a sociopath and a warmonger. Yeah, the Republicans are racist creeps because they hate him for his skin color. But he has not been a good, or even a mediocre president; he is an awful person, and the other Democrats, who have permitted him to do all this without any significant criticism, are just as bad. The past six years have shown that Nader was right — Democrats really AREN'T any different from Republicans, except that they lie about feeling bad for doing bad things. (And now we're going to get Hillary Clinton — Barack Obama melted down and recast as a white woman — as the next Democratic presidential candidate, so that they can keep screwing us over if they win.) The national-level Democrats, frankly, are not worth voting for; they do whatever the Republicans want them to do, and are basically coasting on a reputation for leftism which ceased to have any grounding in reality thirty years ago. The state- and local-level Democrats are marginally better, but not by very much. It's time to admit that the party has outlived any vestige of utility to the average person and abandon it. Continuing to vote Democratic when in practice their policies are against you is every bit as stupid as voting for Republicans when THEIR policies are against you. We left-ish people need to get over our idiotic fear of voting for the Greens, because they're the only people who actually have any interest in doing anything at all about problems.

I know it's bad for non-doctors to diagnose mental disorders remotely, but as far as the details are available this really does sound EXACTLY like one of the cases recounted by the late neurologist Harold Klawans in his book Trials Of An Expert Witness. (Except that in the case he described, the woman was "stealing" clothing instead. I put that in quotation marks because, as described, she didn't do anything furtive, just went into stores, picked up the things she wanted, and walked right out.) (Oh, and if I recall correctly, she believed she was the queen of Chicago, and that she was about to give birth to a son — which would have indeed been miraculous because she was not in fact pregnant. Fortunately, after repeatedly trying to sue her doctors for literally nonexistent crimes — such as claiming that they had caused birth defects in her non-existent children — her family finally realized that she was mentally unstable and got her to start taking her medication again, and the claims all dissolved. Let's hope, if this woman is really crazy as well that she gets treatment.)

And, once again, you miss the point. Did any of the actual homeless people ask Ms. Kenneally to stop her project because she was making their lives worse? That's the point at issue from last time — it's not the faceless mass of critics in the public, it's the people who are being featured in the work. So far, you've refused to draw any distinction between the two. If the young girl who was abused had asked you to stop because it was making her life worse, would you have stopped?

What's so hard about "if you don't want to offend people, stop doing what you're doing if they tell you it's offensive"? Hemant would prefer being inoffensive to publishing that particular book; it's a matter of his priorities, not YOURS.

Hey, if you like, YOU can publish that book. Just look forward to everyone else distancing themselves from you afterwards because you come across as a jerk.

...yes, that's the skeptic way. We have an opinion; to hell with the facts or with reason!

1. If this is your stance, then it automatically invalidates the idea that the complaints Hemant received caused him to cancel the book, because he would have received complaints anyway, no matter what he did. (Unless you're arguing that Hemant is a fool, which I don't think you are.)

2. So, in other words, you think people who found the concept offensive would have been LESS offended if there had been a whole book's worth of similar drawings, rather than just a handful for demonstration purposes? I like your universe; let's move there.

3. Propaganda does not cease to be propaganda merely because you happen to agree with the cause in question. The book was not going to be a treatise of logical arguments, it was going to be a series of drawings intended to incite an emotional response. A rose by any other name...

4. My point is that the metaphor does not apply to most religious people to an extent which justifies the emotional reaction the examples were trying to achieve, which means that the book would be easily dismissed by anyone trying to do so.

5. We will also never know — at least, I sincerely hope — if atheists arming themselves and shooting everyone who steps out of a church on Sunday would have reached a generation of young Christian minds and help them turn towards a healthy relationship with reality. (Hey, coercion has worked in the past, sometimes — it COULD work.) If we have to degrade ourselves by adopting offensive rhetoric which appeals to emotions in an unfair, unrealistic way in order to convert Christians, then I'm not sure it's worth it.

6. You're still performing the same actions; you're simply not doing it in someone else's comment section. When Richard Dawkins produces yet another Tweet dismissing rape victims and then turns around and pretends he's surprised when people are angry, he's still a troll.

You aren't making sense here.

1. "People who will find offense in his work no matter what he produces"? Really? You have any evidence for the claim that they were nit-picking for the fun of it? Or are you just saying "people complained about an issue which is very specific to the project he proposed, but the issue isn't important to me so I'm going to pretend that they would have made something up no matter what"?

2. Had he self-funded, he STILL would have been open to criticism. He gave up nothing he actually wanted by crowd funding — the only two differences of self-funding would have been that of surprise (meaning that people would have taken MORE offense, because he went to the effort and expense of doing something offensive) and the need to fully commit to the project in advance (which would have been a handicap to him if the project had been a failure because of the offense). Also worth noting is that Hemant didn't stop the project because Kickstarter received complaints and refused to permit him to continue, he stopped it because he saw the complaints and realized that the actual results of his idea were not the results he intended. He wasn't forced to do anything, other than decide whether he really wanted to be offensive. Since he has issued an actual apology — not a "notpology" — it seems that he didn't.

3. The project was not "a work of art" except in the loosest sense. It was intended as a piece of propaganda and, to a limited extent, a commercial enterprise. The fact that it was significantly offensive would ruin its utility as the former and severely limit its success at the latter.

4. "The metaphor of an abusive relationship is a beautiful one". Abusive relationships tend to involve physical abuse as well as mental. (That's how the mental abuse tends to roll: "do what I want or I'll hit you again".) Sorry, but no matter what you may think about religion, it isn't physically harming MOST of the people who have faith. (I only wish it DID — it would die out very quickly.) This is akin to saying "I was on my feet for 8 hours today at work — it's like I'm a SLAVE"; it invites debunking which makes the speaker sound like an entitled whiner.

5. "Now we will never know." So what? There are plenty of things we will never know — this is not, in itself, a bad thing. We'll never know what would have happened if the Cuban Missile Crisis had exploded into thermonuclear war. We'll never know what it would be like if the sun went supernova. We'll never know how it feels to have red-hot knitting needles shoved up the nose and through the brain. None of this keeps me up at night. I am perfectly happy not to know what it would be like if the world were a worse place.

6. A tone troll is someone who attempts to derail or stop an opinion with which they disagree by complaining not about the opinion but about the way in which the opinion is expressed. You certainly SEEMED to be doing that, by characterizing the complaints as demands.

Basically, you're more or less tone-trolling, then.

Hemant stopped the kickstarter because he didn't want to cause distress to victims of abusive relationships. You are saying "Hemant should have specifically ignored the victims because some of them issued their complaints in the form of a demand". Hemant may not have an obligation to be kind to victims, but he ALSO has no obligation to cause them distress, and he certainly has no obligation to deliberately cause distress to make a point about communications. Doing so would be counterproductive, given his stated goal of enticing people away from religion by pointing out that atheism is kinder.

(In fact, come to think of it, if you're publishing a book which suggests that religion is cruel, then it's an AMAZINGLY bad idea to use a metaphor which by its very nature causes extra distress to a bunch of people who are on your own side who have already suffered. You might as well name the book "I don't understand irony".)

I don't think you can claim the two cases are really equivalent, though: in the case of photography, the people telling you not to take those pictures aren't actually in the pictures, themselves. In the case of the book, though, Hemant was repeatedly yelled at by people who actually HAD been in abusive relationships. Would you stop taking pictures of the homeless if the homeless themselves told you "look, your pictures are making us have a harder time dealing with our lives"?

Sam Harris? That would be the guy who supports profiling brown-skinned people at airports as a method of preventing terrorism? Even though it doesn't work, and Israel — which he has cited as a justification for doing this — doesn't do that, because according to them it doesn't work? THAT Sam Harris? Why are you even bothering to pay any attention to him on this issue? He's a fool.