Shitty Man (On Bigotry, Libertarianism And Stupid Shit, One.)

 The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood. Thus all you that never passed under a great change of heart, by the mighty power of the Spirit of God upon your souls; all you that were never born again, and made new creatures, and raised from being dead in sin, to a state of new, and before altogether unexperienced light and life, are in the hands of an angry God. However you may have reformed your life in many things, and may have had religious affections, and may keep up a form of religion in your families and closets, and in the house of God, it is nothing but his mere pleasure that keeps you from being this moment swallowed up in everlasting destruction. However unconvinced you may now be of the truth of what you hear, by and by you will be fully convinced of it. Those that are gone from being in the like circumstances with you, see that it was so with them; for destruction came suddenly upon most of them; when they expected nothing of it, and while they were saying, Peace and safety: now they see, that those things on which they depended for peace and safety, were nothing but thin air and empty shadows.

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.

~Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God, Jonathan Edwards, 1741

I saw this the other day.

Also, before I go on, there's a point I'd like to stress here, my pull-quote, the infamous sermon "Sinners in the hands of an Angry God" was not directed at "Unbelievers" but at the Reverend's own congregation.

At Christians, likely the upper-crust of their time, as well (because historians tend not to write as much about regular people.)

Chris Rufo is allegedly a Christian...or at least, a Creationist.

Now I'm not a born-again anything anymore but I seem to recall that Jesus preached that those who are disabled, poor, sick and in various ways less fortunate than yourself should be helped, not hindered. I fail to see how cutting off deaf people from proper communication helps anybody.

Also for the record the Americans With Disabilities Act was signed into law by Republican President George H.W. Bush, thanks largely to the tireless advocacy of Republican Senator Bob Dole.

Now, mind you, I have Tinnitus...mostly thanks to a youth filled with loud truck engines, loud music, and shooting guns...including that I spent a few years in the Air Force, most of that time being spent around large, particularly loud aircraft like BUFF's (B-52 Stratofortresses) and KC-135 Stratotankers and in my specific AFSC (Security Specialist) doing a lot of light infantry stuff, which can get pretty loud. I'm also 51 years old, and my hearing ain't as sharp as it used to be...enough so that various people commented on it over the holidays. I use the shit out of Closed Captioning. I know a little ASL but not really enough to get by (See below.)

Lots of people in the veteran community have hearing issues, including some of my friends. I had a girlfriend for years whose adopted sister was both mentally disabled and severely hearing-impaired (although not completely deaf) and whose father had been disabled by a stroke and who was old and used hearing aids himself. Sign Language was used in that house, as was closed-captioning. 

But anybody can become disabled, or just get old. So yeah, fuck these motherfuckers. 

And don't be fooled, shitty little eugenicists like that basically just wanna kill people, and they see the disabled as a convenient target. 

No, they don't really care how people got that way. Having someone to abuse and discriminate against is more important than taking the time to note if somebody earned some right to compassion by service to their country or simply deserves it for being a human being. 

These fucking people's sole credo is "They Don't Like Other People" and that includes most of their own people. So, think about how they'd treat anybody they label as "Other" and stop giving these motherfuckers power. 

Yes, eventually they'll find a way to target you.

These fucking people don't give a shit about America, and it's obvious enough that even Steve Bannon (of all fucking people) called out Elon Musk the other day.

Also, I gather from social media that Pete Hegseth is exactly as much of a soup sandwich as pretty much everybody that was aware of, well, anything, predicted he would be. I'm sorry, but on top of having served in the Air Force, I also worked in food service for 25 years and I don't think anybody who's disgusting and inconsiderate enough to not wash their hands should even be allowed to go out in public. This motherfucker was an Army officer, you'd think he'd know how fast something like conjunctivitis or even the goddamned flu can spread around a barracks...let alone if somebody who's contagious is on an aircraft or a ship. 

More to the point, you're either a professional with standards or you're not. If you're not washing your hands...what else are you not doing?? How can you defend the goddamn country if you won't do basic health and welfare type of shit that's expected of any grunt completing their first full day of Basic Military Training?? What kind of Shitty Man refuses to clean himself??

And don't even get me started about lack of respect for things like the Geneva Convention. You want the world to cut us off and America to become a genuine failed state because we don't make our own toilet paper and other basic shit anymore (nor seem to want anybody around that's from somewhere else and still knows all that) yeah, go that way.

Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with people??

Oh, right.

Pretty much everybody (including not a few alleged "liberals") even after all this time is still trying to use all this Trump horseshit to fulfill petty agendas or make money.

They don't give a good goddamn if Trump's divisiveness and gang of morons divides and wrecks America (thus meaning a lot of that money is worthless, the petty agendas were for shit, and we're all worse off.)

It's all about attention and hedonism, relative status and wealth...right now.

These idiots don't give a damn if it all evaporates seven days from now because 30 years of endless infotainment bullshit and over a decade of Social Media has reduced everybody's brain to mush, and the latent Calvinism of America pretty much means as long as somebody else has even less of nothing than they do, they'll find a way to be happy with it.

Maybe we goddamned well need to have things get so we're all too busy surviving to worry about attention economies, relative status and stupid shit?? If things go the way I think they will and the combination of Trump's divisiveness and the fact that nothing he can do will be enough for some of these goddamn fanatics breaks America (and don't forget, the rest of the world gets a say in what goes on, too) it'll get pretty close to that level.

Unless a lot of people who haven't been willing to learn anything thus far start doing so, that alone will kill people. Our insistence that freedom is just taken for granted and luxury goods are freedom isn't going to work if these goons succeed in breaking America and we all have to start living like the rest of the world does.

Sociopathy doesn't work out very well (for you) when things go sideways and you need other people to fucking survive.

I say that as somebody who lives in Michigan, a place that'll be more like Latvia, in a Fall of the Soviet Union type scenario, and we'll network like we did during COVID-19, likely ending up the core of a Great Lakes Republic. Places like Texas on the other hand will basically be Uzbekistan for White People, with more dystopia and a non-zero chance of ending up with Elon Musk as their first president as a former-US republic, besides that. 

Think about that for a second.

Civilization, freedom, military service, society, the workplace, all these things have rules and require things from people and all that exists for the benefit of you and your team. If it restrains your baser impulses, well, that's the cost.

The right-wing insistence on unfettered individual rights...which ends up only being for the few, in any case...exists solely to beat down the rights of the majority and of society as a whole, with the aim of breaking civilization to benefit a very small number of bad actors.

Which, by the way, is the entire point of Libertarianism. It's not Liberty for you. It helps if, when you hear these idiots say the Rapture is coming...you mentally substitute the Bioshock version.

Because that's how they think they want to live and they think we're the ones who are gonna suffer?

And we're six days from being halfway there, again.

Either you believe in freedom or you don't.

And if we don't all have it, then none of us have it.

 Слава Україна!

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

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I believe in no God, no invisible man in the sky. But there is something more powerful than each of us, a combination of our efforts, a Great Chain of industry that unites us. But it is only when we struggle in our own interest that the chain pulls society in the right direction. The chain is too powerful and too mysterious for any government to guide. Any man who tells you different either has his hand in your pocket, or a pistol to your neck. ~Andrew Ryan, Bioshock