On Fire, For Trump (American Revelation XVI, Six.)

Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive, and our bodies are working marvelously. Our eyes can still see the beautiful sky. Our ears can still hear the voices of our loved ones. ~Thich Nhat Hanh

....

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world. ~Gautama Buddha

...

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco

I'm tired of living in a world where the Christian church is literally turning into a church of Donald Trump.

I'm tired of Trump, period.

And then I saw this on Friday, some nut literally self-immolated outside of Trump's trial in NYC. The person was later identified as Max Azzarello, an apparently-far-left conspiracy theorist (and strangely enough, registered Democrat) from Florida.

Without really learning much about the person until I looked him up when I got home after work Sunday morning, just bits and pieces here and there because I was working, I spent the whole weekend wondering how somebody could set themselves on fire for Donald Trump.

I mean, what's even the damn point, right??

Dude ain't exactly Thich Quang Duc, I'm just sayin.'

And I saw it pile up over the weekend, there's an awful lot of weird shit going around, this is more than just one guy's fatal mental breakdown.

I saw this yesterday morning, some preacher got kicked out of a Christian "Men's conference" for criticizing the fact that the opening act was a male stripper and sword-swallower. Now, full disclosure, I went to a fair number of those things back in the day, and I've never even heard of anything like that being on the program.

Well then, I started researching what happened and it turned out that the preacher in question was Mark Driscoll, the disgraced former Pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, WA. I saw him speak once, when he was just at the start of his fame, and I was at the tail end of my involvement with the last church I went to. I didn't like him. I was not impressed. In this particular case he was right but his own arguments that I saw were peppered with a strange combination of harsh legalism that seemed almost right out of Paul's letters and Word Of Faith mumbo jumbo.

I got my answers, I shook my head, I very much felt like there were no good guys there.

And that seems to be by design.

Likewise, last week a bunch of Columbia University students got arrested and suspended from school for protesting the war between Israel and Hamas, and the University leadership responded by sending NYPD riot police to arrest them, and then kicked them out of school and threw their belongings in an alley all because Congressional Republicans were demanding they "Do Something."

Fuck all that.

While I don't much agree with the pro-Palestine protesters or their tactics, and I despise their frequent antisemitism, I also think the University's response sucked. This  apparently has generated real blowback within the campus, which is probably a good thing. 

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

I mean, when you do a thing and the worst people in the world start acting like they've won a great victory because they got you to do it, it's probably a good time to start rethinking your life.

And there's a segment of American "Liberalism" that'd rather let the Far-right burn freedom to ashes than lose their Cocktail Party friends. See Also; Stephen Breyer.

Again, fuck all that.

To "Conservatives" Antisemitism and Israel and Palestine and all this stuff, it's all nothing but wedge issues they can use to advance their own increasingly shitty agendas. They don't give a shit about Israelis or Palestinians, they just want to spank the monkey to the "idea" of kicking all the "Leftists" out of universities...as if there'd be enough people left to run the place or enough students left to justify their existence without said Leftists??

I mean, who else even wants to go to an Ivy League university in New York City??

(I sure didn't, and some people thought I might be that smart back in the day.)

If these fucking people (by which I mean both far-right Republicans and the squishy "Liberal" cowards who keep enabling them) could bow before the Hammer and Sickle and get their power fix by being Communist Zampolits and turning Universities into nothing more than ideological indoctrination centers, they'd fucking do it.

Because nothing else matters to them but getting to go to all the "right" parties and shit.

And yeah, I know, sometimes free people do shitty things with their freedom. Taking it away ain't the answer.

I mean, come on, Leftists and protests and shit are...whether I agree with them or not...things I associate with Ivy League schools, and I always have. I don't say that as it's meant to be a negative. It is what it is. I've always seen it as those people have their place in the world, and that's frankly another reason their administrations toadying up to far-right bullshitters like Chris Rufo lately makes my skin crawl.

Debate and education and learning are the damn point, otherwise, what are you doing in a school, at any level?? I know right-wingers see everything as ideology, but sooner or later somebody's got to learn something. You can't fly a jet...or maintain it...on nothing but Political Science. 

And by kowtowing to these shitheads, the Ivy League administrations have basically created a Campus Civil War that they're going to end up losing while Chris Rufo and Marjorie Taylor Greene slink out the back door, turned something that would have blown over in a few weeks into a national issue that's going to keep on going and create further confusion, division and drama and the only people who profit are people like Chris Rufo and Vladimir Putin whose entire intention is to burn American (if not global) civil society and higher education to the ground for their fascist beliefs.

Again, there's no good guys here, and that's how the Right wanted to set it up. I think that's why Putin put Hamas up to attacking Israel on 10/7 in the first damn place.

So it would cause this kind of mess, and fire up the American "Radical Chic" Far-left in a way that would be useful to the neo-Soviets of Putin's regime...and inspire the absolute worst from nearly everybody else, too.

And Putin did it so he could distract the US and the West from helping Ukraine, and so that he could go on persecuting Christians in both Russia and Ukraine. See, in Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church is an arm of the State, effectively controlled by the KGB (Face it, there's no sense in calling it the FSB anymore.) The Russians can't imagine religious belief anywhere else is any damn different, 'cause they're stupid intellectually incurious pricks who think everybody else longs to be a harness bull or a spy for Power because that's what they aspire to be and do.

I'm not kidding, go ahead, read the article.

Freedom doesn't even exist, as far as those motherfuckers are concerned.

Because they're Motherfuckers.

And what does it tell you, that American Evangelicals can't even see this shit and side with Putin??

We are absolutely looking right at who'd be the people joining the False World System of the Beast of Revelations and who'd be lining up 'round the block to take the Mark Of The Beast and of course it's the same goddamned people who violently denied they'd ever do any such thing for almost my whole life.

For no better reason than they automatically assumed the "Antichrist" and his beliefs would be some variant of Liberalism, and they reacted accordingly, per their shitty worldview. But when it turns out the one aspiring One World Potentate is far-right?? 

O Ho! That's different! Not only are they fine with it, but all he has to insinuate (not even say) is "Own The Libs" and suddenly the Mark Of The Beast isn't so bad. Hell, Elon Musk even has a prototype! (And he's apparently not the only one.)

These fucking people would gladly light the world on fire, for Trump or someone like him.

And the worst part is, they can't even see what they're doing. Ring the bell, the dog drools, it doesn't even matter if he gets food anymore.

The incentive structure of people is so massively out of whack it makes no sense to me.

As a human being that God endowed with a mind; It wouldn't even occur to me to light myself on fire for conspiracy theories and/or Donald Trump.

As a pragmatic, barely-a-liberal former conservative, it'd never cross my mind to call in the jackboots on protesting students who are, like it or not, simply exercising their Constitutional rights. 

It'd wouldn't be a thing I'd even think about doing; To try to sell America to Vladimir Putin for nothing more than cheap internet fame.

You can't reason with this shit. You can only fight against it. It's funny how Ukrainians understand that and so many privileged Americans don't.

And more to the point, being fought against is basically the only thing the motherfuckers understand.

But we're gonna have to, Somebody's gonna have to stand up. 

Otherwise the sole message of this time, were it up to the elites, is "Be Motherfuckers. It's profitable and it gets you so much glory that people will light their own ass on fire for you."

And they want to create a world in which there's no "Good Guys" simply to justify themselves and their evil deeds.

I don't want to live in that kind of world.

Do you??

If you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen.

Remember that, because it's going to be on the test.

Слава Україна!

There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die. Who knows? If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix — a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get. ~Hunter S. Thompson, Generation Of Swine.

...

"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride." ~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press