Saturday, December 29, 2018

Wounded Knee, 128 Years Ago Today, 29 December 1890

Wounded Knee, 128 Years Ago today. If you want to #MAGA, is this when it was?

I weep that so much evil is committed in this world, & I don't feel it's getting better, but I weep most that I am certainly descended from many of its perpetrators.

One ancestral relative of mine was a noted "Indian killer" after the Revolutionary War.
War hero or Murderer? He was punished for at least 2 such murders, but only with a fine or something. So I can only assume that his relatives, including my ancestor, were of similar mind. Pride or Shame?

IDK. Maybe tRump is America's Karma. We non-natives ("settlers!") exist in large part because of the subjugation & murder of the First Peoples. But then, the Normans did so to the Saxons, who did so to the Britains, the Vikings were ruthless toward most of Europe, the Romans were toward almost everyone they met. Yes, most peoples have a past that involves THEIR ancestors being the winners somewhere along the line, the losers having been killed or absorbed.

But still we do it. We let children die in US CUSTODY. We sabotage people who are trying to NOT DIE by coming to the US.

We ignore our own teachings.

100 years before Wounded Knee George Washington thought we were better. But he also owned slaves, so...
Jesus seemed to have an opinion.
He was not, apparently, ready to approve of talking the talk while not walking the walk.
And there may be consequences.
Largely ignored by MAGAs...
(Credit: imgflip.com)
Celebrated, even...


 There're gonna be a lotta surprised people in Hell..

Saturday, February 3, 2018

American Evangelical Christians are Deluding Themselves, so Their Confirmation Bias is Total

     American Evangelical & Fundamentalist Christians, in terms they themselves would use, are being tricked by Satan. Like Screwtape, the Devil would use subterfuge and trickery to turn people towards their selfish desires. It is very difficult to convince someone to change their mind when they have a strong confirmation bias in place. But if you are able to convince them that something in opposition to that bias, but with a similar appearance to it, is true, then through that opening you might be able to change their mind  by leading them to think they are NOT changing their mind.

     Hitler knew that there were plenty of Germans who were antisemitic, but the societal norm was to let the Jews be, and take advantage of their skills. So the stereotype of the Jewish financier, lawyer, doctor, helped them to survive in spite of the antisemitism. Hitler didn't think that societal norms could be changed overnight, but he knew that if he could help people to convince themselves that "Jews were the problem" then he would have the public's support. Over time he found numerous ways to make Jews out as the evil he thought they were, so it was no big step at all for the German public to be complicit in support of "The Final Solution."

     Now we have, in 21st Century America, evangelicals supporting the most unChristian acts by people in government, or closely allied with it, that if they were able to reverse what they see and realize how they would react if the perpetrators were Democrat, they would not be fooled. But they aren't able, the blinders over their eyes put there by their "MAGA" hats seem immutable for now. Those MAGA blinders were put there by the desire to see change in D.C. and so, like the promises by populists before, the people are willing to believe that:

-Abortion will be banned. This is their overarching hope. There is no compromise, no alterations in Roe v. Wade, only reversal. There are no extenuating circumstances. This is the cause.
*If Planned Parenthood and all its services for women's health are to be sacrificed because of the small percentage of abortions, so be it.
Never considered is that abortion could be reduced greatly by a fully funded women's health system, one that makes one good choice more likely: to carry a child to term because it will likely be healthy, and there will be financial aid for as long as the mother needs it, ensuring that the child will not be raised in poverty. Or another good choice: to carry a child to term and put it up for adoption, because the mother will have all the health, spiritual, and financial aid she needs to get her through that time.

 - We are going to build a wall, and Mexico is going to pay for it
*This has the appearance of happening, but it's not. Mexico's President has stated very clearly that there is no way for them to be forced to pay for a wall, and a significant plurality, if not majority, of Americans would rather have our bridges made safer, or our health care made more stable.

 - Muslims are the personification of evil, though the evil be perpetrated by a relative few who have twisted Islam to their own purposes, they should all be held responsible, and kept out of this country, and even made to leave if here already.
*Yet domestic terror perpetrated by neo-right extremists is on the rise,
and 2017 had virtually no Muslim terrorism, but plenty from white males, largely White Nationalists.

 - the announcement early on that the American Dream is dead, and he's going to fix it.
                [“The American Dream is dead — but if I win, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before.”
                  — Trump, announcing his candidacy in June 2015.]
*The main thing that has happened from "MAGA" is to put it on hats.

https://gizmodo.com/president-trump-deletes-every-old-press-release-but-th-1795042808

American evangelicals have forgotten this:
Because they pray for this:
The fact that they ignore what they believe Jesus actually said, in order to support a man and his allies on the right because they choose to believe that version of their faith, escapes their notice.
Confirmation bias is total, for the American evangelical Christian.

Saturday, January 6, 2018

"Stable Genius" and the Inner Ring


"...my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart."- NEVER said by Albert Einstein, Steven Hawking, John Kennedy, Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Richard Dawkins, ...


Perhaps Mr. Trump has always felt to be "outside" the inner circle and always pined to be "in," as C.S. Lewis wrote about the urge to be in the “Inner Ring” that drives good people to do bad things:

"It would be polite and charitable, and in view of your age reasonable too, to suppose that none of you is yet a scoundrel. On the other hand, by the mere law of averages (I am saying nothing against free will) it is almost certain that at least two or three of you before you die will have become something very like scoundrels. There must be in this room the makings of at least that number of unscrupulous, treacherous, ruthless egotists. The choice is still before you: and I hope you will not take my hard words about your possible future characters as a token of disrespect to your present characters.
And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”
And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.

...[Yet] if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it."