Men Of Sin (American Revelation XX, Nine.)

You take a drug, right? The chemicals, they rush through your body, rush through your brain. And the sensations, you want the sensations again and again and again, but let me tell you, you can also get addicted to grief, to guilt, to hate. Because when you feel dead inside, even bad sensations make you feel like you're alive! ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series Oz, S1.E5 "The Straight Life."

...

For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right.

Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time; for it is an evil time.

Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye have spoken.

Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph.

Therefore the Lord, the God of hosts, the Lord, saith thus; Wailing shall be in all streets; and they shall say in all the highways, Alas! alas! and they shall call the husbandman to mourning, and such as are skillful of lamentation to wailing.

And in all vineyards shall be wailing: for I will pass through thee, saith the Lord.

Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light.

As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him.

Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness, and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it? ~Amos 5:18-20

...

[Mon Mothma addresses the Senate chambers again]

Mon Mothma: Fellow Senators, friends, colleagues, allies, adversaries, I stand before you this morning with a heavy heart. I've spent my life in this chamber. I came here as a child, and as I look around me now, I realize I have almost no memories that predate my arrival, and few bonds of affection that cleave so tightly. Through these many years, I believe I have served my constituents honorably and upheld our code of conduct. This chamber is a cauldron of opinions, and we've certainly all had our patience and tempers tested in pursuit of our ideals. Disagree as we might, I am hopeful that those of you who know me will vouch for my credibility in the days to come.

I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil! When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest. This Chamber's hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza! What took place yesterday, what happened yesterday on Ghorman, was unprovoked genocide! Yes, genocide! And that truth has been exiled from this Chamber! And the monster screaming the loudest, the monster we helped create, the monster who will come for us all soon enough, is Emperor Palpatine!

~From the Star Wars series Andor, S2.E9 "Welcome To The Rebellion."

I saw this the other day.

Some idiot Evangelical rooting for "The Rapture" to happen because of the airstrikes on Iran.

They think (per the End Times Prophecy narrative) that war in the Middle East could lead to the End Times, or some bullshit like that, and they see (or have in the past, seen) Trump as some unbelieving Cyrus or Nebuchadnezzar who would nevertheless somehow "help" God bring about Something Something Gazpacho. The problem with that is, now, a hell of a lot of these morons transparently see Trump as Jesus.

As if God needing Man's help with any damn thing would not invalidate the entire concept of "God" as Christianity has traditionally preached and taught it.

As if spending Eternity with Donald Trump would not be its own form of punishment, wherever that supposedly happened??

These Fucking People literally think...and the point of their religion has become...this idea that they will be the lucky ones who get to go to Heaven without dying and then get to watch the rest of us burn and suffer torment here on Earth. The fucking sadistic cruelty is the point.

Here's the fuckin' thing, though; Jesus did not promise The Rapture.

The Rapture is a man-made doctrine, originally created by a British preacher, John Nelson Darby, and propagated after Darby's death by a former Confederate soldier turned lawyer turned preacher named Cyrus Ingersoll Scofield. We know when and where all this happened. It's doctrine, not magic.

And it is not real, not even Biblical in the same sense that Revelation itself is. The shit is fanfiction, except that it contains far more malice than most such things.

It's basic Escapism, and it's wrong. But if they're all so right, and so righteous, what do all these fucking Evangelical Christians feel such a need to escape from.

Honestly? 

After the last few days? 

I think that answer is "Each Other."

The motherfucking people these same sons of bitches damn near all voted for are basically outright saying right in the US Capitol that :"It's not the Mark Of The Beast when they do it." It's all bullshit and nonsense, these fucking people don't know what they want, don't know what they worship, and they really don't want to know, or even care, so long as they get to live hedonistic lifestyles and take out their anger and confusion at things like "Everyday life" and "Other People Exist" and inflict their cruelty on other people.

Last weekend, I had an ex-girlfriend (and former roommate and friend of over 20 years who I dearly love and always have) walk back into my life by the random grace of a Facebook post. Come to find out that the guy she got with after me abused both her and their daughter rather badly.

She's having a rough time right now, I'm trying to help, because it's the right thing to do.

I mentioned this to another longtime friend who worked with us, who then proceeded to get....well, from my side of it, anyway...more than a little weird about the situation. I find out the next day that dude (who I thought I and a whole bunch of people modeled better behavior for and taught better than this) found on Facebook and then went full creepy sexual harasser on my other friend. I expected better of him, for damned sure. She didn't see it coming either.

I'm unhappy about that, there will be another shoe that drops, here.

She's not a piece of meat, bro. She's a person.

But it's not just these two. I see stories like that everywhere.

Not just from individual people, there's accounts like Ask Aubry on social media that exposing or mocking this type of shit is what they do.

These kind of guys are a dime a dozen pretty much everywhere these days, and I don't know how so many dudes didn't get no home training but if I'd have ever talked like that to a woman as a young man  and my Mom found out about it, she'd have put me under the house while my Grandma kept a lookout.

And I'm sorry, but abusing, mistreating and objectifying women and girls is not what I was taught, it's not any kind of "Christian" values (and the sex pest mentioned above, while he's not either among other things because he's a gamer, he is very Christian-adjacent and very conservative-adjacent. I know his family, the list goes on. 

I wouldn't think any of those people would be or ever have been Okay with anything like that out of his mouth, but yet here we are. The lady he was being so shitty to told him to go pound sand for reasons that should be entirely obvious.

This ain't the way, my brothers, this ain't the way.

Women are people, too.

Other men who are different than yourself are people, also.

People who want to define themselves, whatever their nature, are people.

You don't get a say what somebody else is, my dudes.

You don't get to hit your wife...

Or talk to someone you once called friend worse than you'd talk to some freaking sex robot built by Elon Musk.

I can remember when a relatively common social response to that kind of crap was for somebody to about go full B.A. from The A-Team on somebody ass and be like "You talk to my (whatever) that way again, I'mma kill you, fool."

I remember when people used to post signs with guns on them that said "Pedophiles will be handled by Smith and Wesson."

You know, that stopped about the same time all the Q-Anon crazy bullshit started. On reflection, I no longer think that's a coincidence.

What the fuck are we even doing here??

And I think it's because it's easier for too many people to rail against some imaginary bogeyman built out of bigotries and conspiracy theories and partisanship than to clean up the filth in their own house.

I keep hearing about a "Male Loneliness Epidemic." These dudes ain't lonely, they're assholes.

And people have a right not to put up with that.

I've often said "Either you believe in freedom or you don't."

But if we don't believe in the humanity of other humans...if we don't believe in the Earth we're all walking around on...if your highest goal is to fuck off to some superior alleged spiritual plane...

And yet, at the end of the day all people care about really is control and power and satisfying their most base desires...or serving those of somebody like Donald Trump...

What the fuck is the basis of anything, much less freedom??

Without Truth, without the basic recognition that other people have the right to exist and be treated fairly, what's even the damn point??

What right do you, or I, have to exist and not be treated as some kind of device that exists only to please those who think they have more social power??

Without the belief that God or the Universe or whatever created all people equally and with certain God-endowed and given rights, what do any of us have??

Privilege ain't gonna cut it, bros, relative status will not save you. You cannot show me where anything says inalienable privilege because them two words don't even go together.

In a world where any random man can reduce any random woman to nothing more than an object to be used....don't doubt that eventually somebody will work around to thinking about you that same way.

One Antichrist, One Man of Sin, is bad enough, correct?? Isn't that what all these Christian End Times nuts think is gonna end the world??

What are we gonna do with a hundred million of the fuckers??

We'd best start dealing with this shit.

Слава Україна!

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.  The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.  And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan

Eight

 "I didn't want to do it,'' he hears himself saying. "I didn't want to leave them behind.''

The void laughs at him. There are miles of empty air beneath his dangling feet. "You had no choice.''

"Yes I did! I didn't have to come here.'' He pauses. "I didn't have to do anything,'' he says quietly, and inhales another lungful of death. "It was all automatic. Maybe it was inevitable.''

"-- Evitable,'' echoes the distant horizon. Something dark and angular skims across the stars, like an echo of extinct pterosaurs. Turbofans whirring within its belly, the F-117A hunts on: patrolling to keep at bay the ancient evil, unaware that the battle is already lost. "Your family could still be alive, you know.''

He looks up. "They could?'' Andrea? Jason? "Alive?''

The void laughs again, unfriendly: "There is life eternal within the eater of souls. Nobody is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace. They populate the simulation spaces of its mind, exploring all the possible alternative endings to their life. There is a fate worse than death, you know.'' 

~From A Colder War, a novella by Charles Stross.