On Letting It Go

It's just really hard to walk away. Sometimes it feels like you're lumping together your parents and your grandparents and everybody you've known and loved and respected your whole life - and you're calling them liars and fools.

John Pavlovitz on his troubles with American Christianity:

If religion it is to be worth holding on to, it should be the place where the marginalized feel the most visible, where the hurting receive the most tender care, where the outsiders find the safest refuge.

It should be the place where diversity is fiercely pursued and equality loudly championed; where all of humanity finds a permanent home and where justice runs the show.

That is not what this thing is. This is FoxNews and red cup protests and persecution complexes. It’s opulent, big box megachurches and coddled, untouchable celebrity pastors. It’s pop culture boycotts and manufactured outrage. It’s just wars and justified shootings. It’s all manner of bullying and intolerance in the name of Jesus.

Feeling estrangement from these things is a good thing.

I split with religion a long time ago, and only recently turned myself loose from the last bits of the Magical Thinking part of "Spirituality" (whatever the hell that word's supposed to mean), even tho' I still indulge myself in the use of the language and some of the ritual.

And I won't bore all of us struggling to come up with some wordy dissertation on "my journey".

• I was raised a Methodist
• I thought about it for 40 years
• Now I'm atheist

Back to the point - it's not so much that there's a lot wrong with Religion; the problem is all the fucked up things Religious People do because of it.

All together now - Duh.

Today's Silly Thing

You know you're going to try this pic.twitter.com/dHu58AeCek

— Theater of SciFi (@theaterofscifi) December 2, 2016

Today's Tweet

"I just wish that I had not voted."— Trump supporter despondent over Mnuchin, who's bank foreclosed on her home: https://t.co/WZASUp9D5Z pic.twitter.com/k720708Y6h

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December 2, 2016

So yeah - you got butt-raped with your pants on, and because you're just too fuckin' dumb to sort thru the obvious bullshit, you're forcing the rest of us to share in that little Personal Growth Opportunity. Thanks and fuck you so very much, you ignorant twat-waffle. I hope you enjoy a long and miserable period of well-deserved self-loathing, cuz you earned it, lady.

Almost forgot - generations yet unborn wanted me to pass this message to you:

(Ed Note: I guess I'm not quite ready for a lotta forgiveness and reconciliation just yet)

Slippery Little Buggers

"I believe"

That's about all it takes. The lady repeats the assertions she's heard her authority figures make, and she tries to back up those assertions by repeating the "supporting arguments" she's heard from those same figures, but as each bit of "evidence" is challenged and refuted, she eventually retreats all the way back to "I believe".

Once you have the Authoritarian Frame in place, all you have to do is make assertions and the true believers will fall in line.  It's not as simple as it seems of course, but if I have to boil it down to baseline premises, that's why the God-Knobbers make such good Republicans.

Today's Tweet

Poor Donald Trump hates pics of his double chin, so the Internet decided to help - https://t.co/a8SgrCs5u7 pic.twitter.com/dyWlhQepuX

— Dangerous Minds (@DangerMindsBlog) December 1, 2016

Today's Winner

hat tip = Facebook buddy Linda M-M

We Are All Willard Now

This was a simple exercise in Asserting Dominance. Because Donald Trump is a fucking dog that has to piss on the food so all the other dogs know who it belongs to.

I'll give Romney some props tho' - just for making even this feeble attempt at bringing something a bit more honorable to the shit show.

Know this tho', every one of these "establishmentarians" (who aren't out on the wingnut fringe) is auditioning for the part of Franz von Papen.

I sure as fuck hope this ends better than I think it's gonna end.

Today's Tweet

Conservatives say the problem is Christianity ain't taught in schools. The real problem is Christianity ain't taught in church.

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) April 18, 2015

On Nationalism

Doug Stanhope

hat tip = Facebookster Doug R

Survival

I guess my main question is - Why are we always talking about 'survival'?  Maybe it's just that we're used to framing everything in terms of some epic struggle or existential threat. Maybe we need to feel better about ourselves in comparison with The Greatest Generation, so we hype everything into a looming apocalypse. Maybe we're addicted to the drama. 

Or maybe we understand that our little experiment in self-government is actually and always being undermined by people who say they love this country and its honorable institutions while doing everything in their considerable power to countervail practically everything they say they love about them.

Kali Holloway at AlterNet

“We will survive Trump,” I keep hearing people say, often followed by a reference to how “we” survived Bush, or Reagan, or Nixon, or so many other historic calamities.

At worst, I’ve seen this sentiment expressed by people whose safety and well-being are all but guaranteed, mostly to dismiss or silence outpourings of fear, anger and grief from the vulnerable and justifiably petrified. At best, I’ve heard it from folks who stand to lose the most in the coming years — whose erasure, exclusion or expulsion were voted for by people eager to make this country exclusively theirs again — in an effort to turn resignation into reassurance, to transform a history of needless suffering into a warped kind of relief that what we’re facing is just more of the awful same.

--and--

That "we" excludes more than 650,000 Americans — overwhelmingly LGBTQ men and poor people of color — who ultimately didn’t survive Reagan’s indifference to the AIDS crisis, an epidemic the president didn’t dedicate a speech to until the American death toll hit 21,000. As many as 200,000 Iraqi and Afghan civilians and thousands of American soldiers didn’t survive Bush and Obama’s wars. The Obama administration's deportation of more than 2.4 million immigrants—a total that nearly rivals the previous two administrations combined—has left countless families broken and barely surviving. The misguided war on drugs launched by President Nixon and exponentially expanded by President Clinton has wasted $1 trillion, led to mass incarceration of black and brown citizens, devastated countless communities and families, and exacerbated police violence and abuse in communities that have long suffered state-sanctioned terror.