The Signs Of The Times (On Mehadism, Part One.)

The Pharisees also with the Sadducees came, and tempting desired of Jesus that he would shew them a sign from heaven. He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowering. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times? A wicked and adulterous generation seeks after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonah. And he left them, and departed. ~Matthew 16:1-4

I saw this last night.

Lin Wood, Trump's crazy election lawyer, claiming that COVID-19 is a "Partisan virus" and therefore some kind of conspiracy to kill Republicans.

No, dude, that's not it. COVID-19 is a virus, a strand of DNA that attaches itself to your cells, replicates and makes you sick. If you could somehow communicate with a virus, say telepathically...the only thing you would even get from it, is that it's simple, single-minded and operates only on the imperative to replicate itself. That's literally all the shit even does. Evolutionarily, it exists for no other purpose. A virus isn't a high-enough order organism to care about anything else. It is, pure and simple, a force of nature.

The virus doesn't give a shit about you, except for the fact that you're alive and can act as a vector to spread it. If you're a warm body, congratulations, you can be infected. Somehow, Republicans can't seem to get this. Nature was here long before you were born, and it will be there long after you're dead.

If it's a partisan conspiracy, shouldn't these fools be getting vaccinated, masking up, and protecting themselves?! 

Something something Gazpacho "Own The Libs!"

*Cough Cough*

This bullshit is becoming nonsensical, except that it seems like conservative elites, who are often vaccinated, seem to want to sacrifice their followers to the virus in the hope that our civilization will collapse under a big enough pile of bodies and they can rule the ruins as gods that have no followers.

Seems kind of contradictory if you ask me.

But self-centered people, who believe in Man-centered theologies, desperately want to make everything all about them, and to believe that they live in an ordered Universe that's small so stupid people can understand it, instead of an unimaginably vast, empty space containing these scattered whirlpools of light we call galaxies, each one careening marvelously amok, some of them with their own life, their own civilizations, and likely their own gods.

Much easier, it is, to believe that the Self and whatever one claims to believe in is the default setting of the Universe.

But that's complete and utter bullshit.

And once you believe that, anything becomes possible. Everything becomes possible, but nothing can be true.

Belief in truth means you have to be willing to understand that it's not all about you. Empirical reason and science is not going to shout back at you how great you are. It's going to tell you the true state of things.

We've all watched in horror as the Jihadist Taliban swept aside the Afghan National Army and took over Afghanistan last weekend, that is, except for a few of the conservatives who are cheering that shit on because they think that they might do the same here someday. Their previous horror at the ideas espoused by Islamic Jihadism seems forgotten in the passions of the moment.

What far too many people have failed to even notice, on the other hand, is the base Me-hadism that dominates much of America, in much the same way, and has an iron grip on the Conservative movement in particular. 

Frankly, I'd argue that this Mehadism is worse. 

Where a Taliban might shout "God is Great" and might do wrong things to try and prove it, the Taliban is still in theory answering to a power outside of themselves, and that may constrain their behavior. There are still truths they cling to, if only from a certain point of view. 

The conservative Mehadist desires to think, if only to themselves that "I am great" and they will do all type of debased shit to try and prove it to themselves but be predisposed to finding ways to always answer in the affirmative. The only way they determine "Truth" is by whether or not that dopamine rush hits their brain on time.

This bullshit has become not much more than endless ideological masturbation.

There is no sign from the heavens that proves how great and right they are...so they'll just invent one.

I saw this last night too. The Q-Anon nuts seem to be on this thing about the evacuation from Kabul not being a real thing. 

Like, what? Is everything somehow secretly OK over there and all this just 'made up?' If true, please let us know, so we can worry less about the people over there.

The question I have is "Why?"

Show me a cost/benefit analysis. Show me the logic of how you arrived at this conclusion. What's even the damn point, or reason for such an exercise?

As an Airman I was around plenty of big jets. I saw the original video. Yes, that is indeed a Globemaster.

You get shit like this when people who don't know what they're looking at but think they know everything start offering opinions and other people whose purpose in life is saying dumb shit on the internet agree with them. Nobody's thinking about the real people who are really involved here, the soldiers trying to protect the evacuation and keep order...or the Afghans and others who are trying to escape.

But of course, to the Q-Nuts not a bit of this is about those people. They care nothing for the real people living through this all too real hellish situation. The people of Afghanistan don't even exist, in the minds of these conspiracy theorists, who are overwhelmingly White and relatively comfortable and would never have to worry about hostile religious fanatics taking over their country. In point of fact, a lot of them are the hostile religious fanatics attempting to take over our country and having weird meltdowns while they livestream threatening to bomb the Capitol building from the cab of their truck or some shit, only to have a college student call the cops on them.

And again, they are desperate to believe they are the center of a small, ordered Universe, because they are afraid of everything that they do not understand, which is, well...everything.

All this shit basically boils down to a combination of narcissism and nihilism, bored comparatively well-off people (and mind you, even a poor American may be light-years better off in real terms than a person from Afghanistan) who simply feel that God or the Universe or the US Government or whatever hasn't given them enough.

They seek a sign to prove their imagined greatness, and they will not find one.

Therefore, in their own minds, they must try to tear down the Universe until they do.

I'm not sure how we're going to get ahead of this mess and start countering this garbage, but we'd best think of something.

Part Two.