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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I'm more annoyed that apparently The Fundamentalist is assumed to be the majority.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.So now there are people thinking the USA will turn into a theocracy overnight.
Like, I get where they're coming from, but it's not like Trump or Pence can just wave a magic wand and say 'Collusion of Church and State' and make it happen. Nevermind that this new office isn't nearly as powerful as everyone's making it out to be.
Well, as the representative of the reasonable Christians, you guys should really step up your game.
Continue writing our story of peace.
Although the Christian left has always been an important part of the Progressive Coalition (Doctor King, SCLC, a lot of social justice reform movements, etc), it's much less visible, in part because generally we don't make it a central issue like the Christian Right has.
edited 3rd May '18 6:50:30 PM by megaeliz
Especially the ones feeding the hungry here in Kentucky in lieu of the government.
Well, in American politics, "consider impeachment" means, "ask if they have the votes then do it as well as make whatever deals necessary to get the votes."
What this sort of meeting in Kentucky means is that it's now negotiating price.
edited 3rd May '18 6:53:36 PM by CharlesPhipps
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.The problem is that progressive Christians don't take political positions as Christians. You tend to talk about politics as progressives and downplay how important your Christian values and virtues are to your progressive position.
The last time I can remember a really progressive Christian message stated, it came from the mouth of notorious goldbug John Kasich. And in Kasich's case while his heart might hypothetically be in the right place, his head is up his ass. And I'm not seeing a lot of progressives quoting his St. Peter argument for Medicaid expansion.
The other side is, of course, that abortion remains a really ugly wedge issue for those who want to unite social-justice progressives and Christians.
Part of it is that Christian Right has turned Religion into a Political issue, and tend to base policy exclusively on that doctrine.
A good example would be teaching Creationism in Schools. This is an almost exclusively "Christian Right" issue. There isn't really a lot of reasons for any other groups to argue for that, outside of that group.
On the other hand, the Christian Left has historically focused on wider issues, such as Social Justice and Poverty, which are much wider and more complex, and are much less doctrine based.
edited 3rd May '18 7:13:48 PM by megaeliz
Jimmy Carter was one of the last politicians to associate social justice with Christianity.
But Bill actually campaigned heavily on his Baptist roots in my area at least. He actually even visited Ashland on a train to give a speech about it to churches.
The Republican party under Nixon then Reagan morphed into the party of guns, God, and gold.
And they beat the drum of being for troops (while not being), for God (while being as Un-Christlike as possible), and keeping the gold.
edited 3rd May '18 7:10:17 PM by CharlesPhipps
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.![]()
Yeah, but I maintain that downplaying the religious message of helping the poor is a bad idea.
The original Progressive Movement was explicitly religious and outright theocratic (see: Prohibition). The Civil Rights Movement was built around churches (and the Nation of Islam) and led by ministers.
Kentucky's churches need to get that back. Maybe a Southern Fried Minister campaigning on a Democratic ticket might be able to undercut the Religious Right and make some magic happen.
x7 If we're talking about Progressive Christianity, I love John Pavlovitz.
Good People Don’t Defend A Bad Man
Sometimes they do the work for you.
Sometimes with their every vulgar, bitter word from their mouth, they testify to their personal malignancy and they make it easy to identify them.
Generally speaking, there are things that good people do and things good people don’t do.
Good people don’t refer to entire countries as “shitholes”—most notably countries that have given birth to our very humanity; ones that for hundreds of years have been colonized and poached and mined of their riches by powerful white men; countries whose people have been enslaved and sold and forced to come and build your country.
Good people by any measurement we might use—simply don’t say such things.
- Of course good people also don’t say they could grab women by the genitalia, either.
- They don’t defend racists and nazis and call them “fine people,” days after murdering a young girl and terrorizing an American city.
- They don’t brag about their penis size during debates, or suggest protestors at campaign rallies should be roughed up, or crack jokes about captured war heroes, or make fun of the physically disabled.
- Good people don’t tweet anti-Muslim rhetoric in the moments immediately following a bombing in order to bolster a position.
- They don’t leave American territories filled with brown skinned people without power for months upon months, after publicly ridiculing their public servants and questioning their people’s resolve.
- They don’t erase protections for the water and the air, for the elderly, the terminally ill, the LGBTQ.
- They don’t take away healthcare from the sick and the poor without an alternative.
- They don’t gouge the working poor and shelter the wealthy.
- They don’t abuse their unrivaled platform to Twitter-bait world leaders and to taunt private citizens.
- Good people don’t prey upon the vulnerable, they don’t leverage their power to bully dissenters, and they don’t campaign for sexual predators.
But this President is not a good human being, and there’s simply no way around this truth.
He is the ugliest personification of the Ugly American, which is why, as long as he is here and as long as he represents this nation, we will be a fractured mess and a global embarrassment. He will be the ever lowering bar of our legacy in the world.
And what is painfully obvious in these moments, isn’t simply that the person alleging to lead this country is a terrible human being—it is that anyone left still defending him, applauding him, justifying him, amening him, probably is too.
At this point, the only reason left to support this President, is that he reflects your hateful heart; he shares your contempt of people of color, your hostility toward outsiders, your ignorant bigotry, your feeling of supremacy.
A white President calling countries filled with people of color shitholes, is so far beyond the pale, so beneath decency, and so blatantly racist that it shouldn’t merit conversation. It should be universally condemned. Humanity should be in agreement in abhorring it.
And yet today (like so many other seemingly rock bottom days in the past twelve months) they will be out there: white people claiming to be good people and Christian people, who will make excuses for him or debate his motives or diminish the damage.
They will dig their heels in to explain away or to defend, what at the end of the day is simply a bad human being saying the things that bad human beings say because their hearts harbor very bad things.
No, good people don’t call countries filled with beautiful, creative, loving men and women shitholes or do most of the horrible things he does.
And good people don’t defend people who do.
You’re going to have to make a choice here.
edited 3rd May '18 7:26:53 PM by megaeliz
Honestly, that's the real mindfuck.
Abortion hasn't historically been a concern for religion in many places. It's another issue that has been made fundamental by the politicians trying to rally the base without changing anything (and like with homosexuality, created a backlash).
Though in this case, I can't blame the Religious Right alone as the Catholic Church also came down on it.
And if you think the Religious Right is slow to change....
edited 3rd May '18 7:27:48 PM by CharlesPhipps
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.![]()
Yep. Trump fits just about every bad stereotype of Americans.
Which ties in well with the studies indicating that bigotry was the main reason people voted for Trump.
edited 3rd May '18 7:31:58 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised
x6 Because drugs are 'evil things' that tempt men away from God. As someone above mentioned, Ministers and Pastors were some of the most important pushers of Prohibition, and while the current War on Drugs was mostly started by Business men and Politicians, I'm almost 100% positive most Preachers won't want to end the criminalization of Drugs.
Come to think of it, a prominent Religious Left might also cause problem for LGBT individuals (although obviously less then our current religious right), and they'd also probably keep pushing for abstinence only education...
Random Anecdote:
My father was (at one point) extremely rich.
He lost most of it generally trying to do the right thing after the collapse of our home city but he was rich, "got invited to fundraisers by George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush" rich as well as dictated the city as well as part of the state government's agenda on behalf of his company. He also held many positions on boards and fundraising groups for Kentucky development.
Notably, my father loathed Donald J. Trump and did his best to put the kibosh on a Trump golf course and resort in our area. I was too young to know the details but what he did tell me was the man was a crook who sold his name to any project which would pay for it and that most of them were scams designed to milk every dollar from investors before they left a ruin behind.
Notably, Lexington is one of the small patches of blue in Kentucky.
edited 3rd May '18 7:37:31 PM by CharlesPhipps
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.

St. Mary Parish is home to many processing plants for chemicals and natural gas, and keeping track of dangerous accidents at those plants is Arthur’s job. But he hadn’t heard of any chemical release that morning. In fact, he hadn’t even heard of Columbia Chemical. St. Mary Parish had a Columbian Chemicals plant, which made carbon black, a petroleum product used in rubber and plastics. But he’d heard nothing from them that morning, either. Soon, two other residents called and reported the same text message. Arthur was worried: Had one of his employees sent out an alert without telling him?
If Arthur had checked Twitter, he might have become much more worried. Hundreds of Twitter accounts were documenting a disaster right down the road. “A powerful explosion heard from miles away happened at a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana #Columbian Chemicals,” a man named Jon Merritt tweeted. The #Columbian Chemicals hashtag was full of eyewitness accounts of the horror in Centerville. @Ann Russela shared an image of flames engulfing the plant. @Ksarah 12 posted a video of surveillance footage from a local gas station, capturing the flash of the explosion. Others shared a video in which thick black smoke rose in the distance.
Dozens of journalists, media outlets and politicians, from Louisiana to New York City, found their Twitter accounts inundated with messages about the disaster. “Heather, I’m sure that the explosion at the #Columbian Chemicals is really dangerous. Louisiana is really screwed now,” a user named @Eric Tra PPP tweeted at the New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter Heather Nolan. Another posted a screenshot of CNN’s home page, showing that the story had already made national news. ISIS had claimed credit for the attack, according to one You Tube video; in it, a man showed his TV screen, tuned to an Arabic news channel, on which masked ISIS fighters delivered a speech next to looping footage of an explosion. A woman named Anna Mc Claren (@zpokodon9) tweeted at Karl Rove: “Karl, Is this really ISIS who is responsible for #Columbian Chemicals? Tell @Obama that we should bomb Iraq!” But anyone who took the trouble to check CNN.com would have found no news of a spectacular Sept. 11 attack by ISIS. It was all fake: the screenshot, the videos, the photographs.
In St. Mary Parish, Duval Arthur quickly made a few calls and found that none of his employees had sent the alert. He called Columbian Chemicals, which reported no problems at the plant. Roughly two hours after the first text message was sent, the company put out a news release, explaining that reports of an explosion were false. When I called Arthur a few months later, he dismissed the incident as a tasteless prank, timed to the anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “Personally I think it’s just a real sad, sick sense of humor,” he told me. “It was just someone who just liked scaring the daylights out of people.” Authorities, he said, had tried to trace the numbers that the text messages had come from, but with no luck. (The F.B.I. told me the investigation was still open.)
The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers. The You Tube video of the man watching TV had been tailor-made for the project. A Wikipedia page was even created for the Columbian Chemicals disaster, which cited the fake You Tube video. As the virtual assault unfolded, it was complemented by text messages to actual residents in St. Mary Parish. It must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off.
And the hoax was just one in a wave of similar attacks during the second half of last year. On Dec. 13, two months after a handful of Ebola cases in the United States touched off a minor media panic, many of the same Twitter accounts used to spread the Columbian Chemicals hoax began to post about an outbreak of Ebola in Atlanta. The campaign followed the same pattern of fake news reports and videos, this time under the hashtag #Ebola In Atlanta, which briefly trended in Atlanta. Again, the attention to detail was remarkable, suggesting a tremendous amount of effort. A You Tube video showed a team of hazmat-suited medical workers transporting a victim from the airport. Beyoncé’s recent single “7/11” played in the background, an apparent attempt to establish the video’s contemporaneity. A truck in the parking lot sported the logo of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
On the same day as the Ebola hoax, a totally different group of accounts began spreading a rumor that an unarmed black woman had been shot to death by police. They all used the hashtag #shockingmurderinatlanta. Here again, the hoax seemed designed to piggyback on real public anxiety; that summer and fall were marked by protests over the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. In this case, a blurry video purports to show the shooting, as an onlooker narrates. Watching it, I thought I recognized the voice — it sounded the same as the man watching TV in the Columbian Chemicals video, the one in which ISIS supposedly claims responsibility. The accent was unmistakable, if unplaceable, and in both videos he was making a very strained attempt to sound American. Somehow the result was vaguely Australian.
Who was behind all of this? When I stumbled on it last fall, I had an idea. I was already investigating a shadowy organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, that spreads false information on the Internet. It has gone by a few names, but I will refer to it by its best known: the Internet Research Agency. The agency had become known for employing hundreds of Russians to post pro-Kremlin propaganda online under fake identities, including on Twitter, in order to create the illusion of a massive army of supporters; it has often been called a “troll farm.” The more I investigated this group, the more links I discovered between it and the hoaxes. In April, I went to St. Petersburg to learn more about the agency and its brand of information warfare, which it has aggressively deployed against political opponents at home, Russia’s perceived enemies abroad and, more recently, me.
This one is interesting, since it went under the radar at the time, and seems to fit with an established pattern.
edited 3rd May '18 6:07:03 PM by megaeliz