GOP slouches into the crazy to be born as MAGA ~ GENERAL

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nycfan said:
Thanks for the link. It is interesting.

“… After Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Thiel implies, we might finally know the truth about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and whether the coronavirus was a bioweapon. Thiel notes that the internet also has questions about the death of the well-connected sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “Trump’s return to the White House augurs the apokálypsis”—that is, a revealing—“of the ancien regime’s secrets,” he adds. (Two pretentious expressions in one sentence? Monsieur, watch out for hubris.) Thiel wants large-scale declassifications and a truth-and-reconciliation commission, in the model of South Africa’s reckoning with apartheid. “The apokálypsis cannot resolve our fights over 1619,” Thiel writes, referring to the year the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, “but it can resolve our fights over Covid-19; it will not adjudicate the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who govern us today.”

Thiel portrays Trump’s resurgence as a defeat for the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex,” or DISC—his friend and employee Eric Weinstein’s term for legacy media outlets and nongovernmental organizations that supposedly prevent politically inconvenient truths from reaching the public. Thanks to the internet, information can no longer be suppressed.

… Thiel’s quest for closure about the pandemic is noteworthy. Something happened during that period to drive influential, apparently rational people toward beliefs that were once associated with crackpots. Others suddenly lost trust in institutions and expertise.

The podcaster Bryan Johnson—a successful tech entrepreneur who is now pursuing literal immortality—went from boasting about receiving the Moderna vaccine in 2021, because he had invested in one of the companies involved in its development, to complaining that “vaccines are a holy war” and that he regretted getting a COVID shot because not enough data supported its use. This is a man who pops enough pills that if you shook him, he’d rattle.

… Until recently, I had assumed that the anti-establishment sentiments promoted by Thiel and others were merely opportunistic, a way for elites to stoke a form of anti-elitism that somehow excluded themselves as targets of popular rage. … But reading his Financial Times column, I thought: My God, he actually believes this stuff. The entire tone is reminiscent of a stranger sitting down next to you on public transit and whispering that the FBI is following him. …”
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Think About It GIF by Big Potato Games
 
lawtig02 said:
Thiel and MAGA are right about this point -- "Thanks to the internet, information can no longer be suppressed."
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It couldn't really be suppressed in Medieval Europe either. Not at the local level. Peasants and serfs had all kinds of ideas, and had formed opinions based on all sorts of tales "they had heard."
 
Not sure where this goes, so putting it here.



"... Hostility toward the outgoing Democratic president is no surprise in Sulphur, Louisiana, a red town in a red state in a country that has handed the White House and Congress to Republicans. Yet the message felt like a poke in the eye at a time when Robertson was seeking funding through Biden’s signature climate law so her nonprofit organization could repair and retrofit hurricane-battered houses in the area — including her neighbor’s. Not even a fraying tarp, a tar patch or the piece of corrugated metal tacked on the roof could keep the rain from pouring inside.

Donald Trump has vowed to overturn the law that would provide the funding, the Inflation Reduction Act, which he has referred to as the “new green scam.”

If he follows through once he assumes office, Trump would be rolling back a law that has disproportionately benefited red areas like Sulphur that make up his base.

... in mid-December, an email from the Environmental Protection Agency explained it didn’t have enough time to make a decision on her application before the inauguration.

It will be up to the Trump EPA to determine whether Sulphur and some 2,000 other communities get the grants they applied for.

Now, Robertson said, all she can do is pray that Republicans will see that the investment is in everyone’s best interest, including their own. ..."
 


Is this a widespread interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan these days? Not how I learned it but admittedly I am not a religious person.
 
nycfan said:


Is this a widespread interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan these days? Not how I learned it but admittedly I am not a religious person.
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that's not how we interpret it in the episcopal church but that seems very much in line with the way that evangelicals / the religious right interpret it.
 
nycfan said:


Is this a widespread interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan these days? Not how I learned it but admittedly I am not a religious person.
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No, not at all. But as the guy says, MAGA has been jumping through all kinds of theological hoops to try to find some way to justify their support for an agenda that's utterly inconsistent with every single thing Jesus said and did. Many conservative churches are embracing a form of ultra-Calvinism, in which people are seen as SO BAD that they can't even be held responsible for the horrible things they do. So it doesn't matter if Trump locks kids in cages or uses tear gas to clear a public square so he can pose for a photo op with a Bible. It doesn't matter if Gaetz screws underage girls or if Boebert gives hand jobs to her boyfriend in a public theater. None of it matters because none of us are perfect anyway, so who's to judge? Without Jesus, we're all equally bad, which means Trump and his merry band of neo-Nazis are no worse than anyone else.

I think that's the sick, demented, antisocial thinking that's reflected in that post.
 
nycfan said:


Is this a widespread interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan these days? Not how I learned it but admittedly I am not a religious person.
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I don't know who Megan Besham is, but that's one of the worst interpretations I've ever seen of any Biblical text.

It seems pretty clear to me that her interpretation has a point, which is to remove compassion from the gospel of Jesus.

American Christianity is sick.
 
TarSpiel said:
I don't know who Megan Besham is, but that's one of the worst interpretations I've ever seen of any Biblical text.

It seems pretty clear to me that her interpretation has a point, which is to remove compassion from the gospel of Jesus.

American Christianity is sick.
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i just googled her - she has all of the bonafides that you would expect from someone spewing that garbage. formerly worked for the daily wire and looks to have written a couple of awful books propping up her version of "christianity" and the patriarchy/misogyny.
 
NYT bestseller, many positive reviews, accolades from influential dipwads like John MacArthur...she's not a nobody, that's for sure

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TarSpiel said:
NYT bestseller, many positive reviews, accolades from influential dipwads like John MacArthur...she's not a nobody, that's for sure

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Meanwhile, 84% of these same people voted for Trump in 2016.

Astonishing how rhetorically effective the victim mentality is.
 
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