GOP Insanity Containment: Beets, Gazpacho, and Lube

They haven’t read the book because they’re afraid the windmills will cause cancer.

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https://twitter.com/polltrackerusa/status/1412806016526344201?s=21

Seems fishy but whatever

Pence at 8% is the most unbelievable part of that poll.

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https://twitter.com/paul_bowers/status/1413296414080348160?s=21

I’m pretty sure CRT stole my bike. Pls donate.

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Any chance this is what Bezos is actually doing and we just can’t comprehend in real time due to an endless list of distractions?

How kind would history have been to Ford without the model t?

The evangelicals didn’t flip on Pence the same way the MAGA CHUDs did. He has 0% equity of course, but there’s a small faction of the Trump base that stand by him.

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images (12)

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https://twitter.com/jkass99/status/1413209136452411392

https://twitter.com/qclark12/status/1413319583511945220

https://twitter.com/Kno/status/1413216737084903428

https://twitter.com/SharksOnCouches/status/1413212405748875266

HOLY SHIT - the overton window just shot back to 1521.

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Onion. Onion? Please be Onion, please?

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LOL HARVARD LAW SCHOOL

I mean the other shit is bad too but do you all really not realize that is basically accepted US evangelical worldview? Sure some natives were slaughtered but WE BROUGHT JESUS AND THE GREATEST NATION IN THE HISTORY OF EARTH.

No seriously that’s what they all believe.

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This view is perfectly consistent with, even necessitated by, any strong form of Christianity. Vermeule (a known baddy) is smart enough to see that but not smart enough not to be strongly Christian.

That is why Christianity (and other religions) should be criticized at every opprotunity. Any supernatural belief that pretends to knowledge about the desires of some godhead (eg, to be worshipped as a condition for entering a perfect and eternal state) will have adherents who seek to manifest those desires in this world.

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To be fair, the predecessor to AN0M was phones made by a company called Phantom Secure, which were very much legit end-to-end encrypted phones, successfully used for years by criminals.

IDK if you’ve read the articles about this but Australian Federal Police made a huge number of arrests and stings based on this, it was a joint AFP-FBI operation but most of the action went down in Australia because civil protection against surveillance is a lot weaker here.

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I don’t know about that. Like I agree that the view that any amount of suffering is OK if it leads to salvation is necessary, but this doesn’t work as a justification for conquering pagan peoples, as this amounts to seeking worldly power, which is a no-no. You’re supposed to send missionaries to people.

Guy who does Revolutions podcast (which is quite normie).
https://twitter.com/mikeduncan/status/1413346679873576962?s=19

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I mean, for one, it’s not like history is devoid of atrocities carried out in service of the plain, perfectly knowable desires of some dude in charge who is an atheist. There are lots, and in fact many are at the top of the list of the most horrible. For two, any fair reading of Christianity by either adherents or critics would have to grant that, in no uncertain terms, the two most important things commanded are first, a relationship with God that is personal, and two, that you love your neighbor as yourself. Christians, and humans in general, are really bad about that second one, but that’s not a particular failing of Christianity or any religion. People will abuse any sort of justification they can to gain power over others, and religion is not unique in this. You might as well say we should reject representative democracy entirely because Donald Trump happened.

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There’s fairness in this, and i think the mass starvations and genocides for nonreligious reasons are important to acknowledge and to attempt to comprehend.

Truly secular justifications and arguments for various plans or actions have to be based on arguments about reality. These arguments can be terrible: the jews or hutus or Armenians or intellectuals are undermining society; collectivism will be easy and will bring more food; inherently inferior races must be civilized through work; or whatever.

These are all claims about reality that are subject to or can be tested against reality, at least to a degree. My problem with religion is that they stake a position where claims and acts cannot be tested vs reality because reality is an illusion or is secondary.

Or religious beliefs undergird political structures and make them unassailable. “The czar, God’s chosen leader, said do X, therefore X cannot be subjected to rational scrutiny.”

Now, in practical terms, most mainline religious claims are also subject to reality, becase humans are humans and act like such. But when you get true believers, like some Nazis, or smart guys like Vermule, they are willing to discount or ignore human reality in favor of the broader project.

It goes back to (Voltaire’s?) saying that “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”, which applies to both religious and secular ideas.

edit: in fact i somewhat believe that all people with the same information and thus the same conception of consequences will basically always favor the same actions/policy. But with religious ideals the goals or results they desire are not really “human”, so you can’t really have a rational argument about, eg, effective strategy to reach a result, because they want a different result.

It’s super weak. You think Hitler would give a solitary fuck about your data that show that Jews are, in fact, people? Or that Donald Trump would give one shit about undocumented Mexican immigrants not being rapists? Their supporters don’t give a shit either.

Again, incredibly weak. You think Hitler or Stalin or Mao or Castro or whoever respected any rational scrutiny of themselves? Donald Trump was obviously unreligious, too, but his infallibility is also orthodoxy even to the unreligious who would wish to use him as a springboard to power.

You corrected and improved your Voltaire quote while I was writing this, so I won’t comment on the previous version. But I do take issue with “absurdities,” at least to the extent of your implication that they include irrational axioms, being self-evidently bad. It would need to be true that irrational axioms are necessarily bad for any religion to be truly bad, no matter the teachings or practices of it. Underlying any system of values, religious or not, is an irrational acceptance of the axioms, and it is quite bold to say that one’s own are rational while someone else’s are not. I deeply value compassion and acceptance of one another, but I don’t think that it’s rational. Useful, maybe, maybe not also, but not rational. It seems even less rational in the era of Donald Trump, who shits all over compassion for considerable personal gain. His supporters even celebrate the fact that he is cruel, and they expect cruelty towards their enemies. What is true is that we are minuscule bags of meat sitting on a pebble hurdling through an immense emptiness of space, and our existence and the existence of anyone who would remember us is a tiny blink in the habitability or our little pebble. Under what rational, objective metric is Donald Trump wrong? Why can anyone call him bad without buying into an irrational system of values? Most of us buy into one. I even support it! I don’t think we want to live in a world where nihilism and self-interest are the only values, and a religion that says “love your neighbor” hardly seems like the worst thing, either in this world, or in a world where people reject everything irrational.

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The labels on that cartoon will be epic!

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Also they literally never read books. Books are full of Socialist Lies.