~Leviticus 19:33-34, New International Version.
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When I kill a man, it's because he's standing in the way of my constitutional rights, what God has given me. The Sicilians understand that. The rest of these fucks will cut a man for a fucking cigarette, for a pair of sneakers, they are animals. ~Vern Schillinger, from the HBO series Oz, S1.E2 "Visits, Conjugal and Otherwise.
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Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on a race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength of the world. That is the American way. ~Ronald Reagan
...
Ka mate! ka mate! ka ora! ka ora!
Tēnei te tangata pūhuruhuru
Nāna nei i tiki mai whakawhiti te rā
Ā, upane! ka upane!
Ā, upane, ka upane, whiti te ra!
~Ka Mate, Maori Haka (main body)
'Tis Death, 'Tis Death, 'Tis Life, 'Tis Life
'Tis Death, 'Tis Death, 'Tis Life, 'Tis Life
This is the hairy man
Who caused the sun to shine again for me
Up the ladder, up the ladder!
Rise! The Sun shines.
~Ka Mate, from a previous post "War Dance."
Yesterday in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court upheld the 14th Amendment and Birthright Citizenship.The decision should have been 9-0.
Instead, Clarence Thomas wrote a 91-page dissent effectively arguing that once Black people were made citizens somebody should have pulled the ladder up behind him.
Sam Alito wrote a 30 page dissent laced with racist conspiracy theories. Alito is Italian, his people weren't considered "White" until well within my own lifetime. Seriously, White-on-White racism used to be a thing. My grandma owned a book of Polish jokes until the fucking day she died.
Crude as it may be, the Oz quote makes the point, and I used that shit for a reason. Look up the character, I fucking dare you. I'm a conservative, Democrat, yes...but I was taught and will always believe Rights are given by God, not Man.
Because if it was up to Man...especially these "men?" A few short weeks from now we'd be down to the last American...and that would be Trump. That kind of shit is what cults fucking do. I cannot even tell you how many times in dealing with people that've gotten fucked over in church communities, or as an Admin on that ex-Pentecostal forum, that in their previous situation the only person in the church they were sure was going to Heaven was the Pastor.
So much for "Saved by Grace" eh?
I've been an American my whole life. I swore an oath on the Bible to the Constitution when I was 19 years old and served my country, alongside people of all races, and many cultures. I swore no oath to "Whiteness" or to anyone's racism, and I say that as somebody who was a Republican at the time and who has said many things about other people and groups that would be deemed slurs or wrong in this day and age, MAGA or no MAGA. Am I sorry for that? Maybe, depends on the context. Sometimes shit's gotta be said, and what follows is such:
These people don't want God's grace or a world of laws and rights and people having recourse against the State or their fellow man. They don't want to be citizens, they want to trade freedom for slavery and call that "ideology." They want a pat on the head and privileges, like they're goddamned children. and to be guilt-tripped and manipulated and told what to do. They want to conceptually eliminate freedom so they know who they can be mean to and who's ass they have to kiss or who they have to backstab to get ahead Fuck that.
We've got to take the neighborhood back. We've got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It's right around the corner. It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go." I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't…". You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they're moving ahead on this? Well, they know they're not, they're just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you're just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out. ~Bill Cosby, the "Pound Cake" speech.
We need to take our country back from these motherfuckers.
I did not sweat through two deployments to Khobar and PSAB in Saudi Arabia to see a third of my country utterly prostrate itself before a more Orange, sans mustache version of Saddam Hussein. Fuck that shit!
Except it's actually worse.
I've seen people argue that nobody should be allowed to even visit America, least of all pregnant women. I've seen these freaks say that visitors (again, especially women) should be sterilized. There's a substantial part of "Republicans" out there that....well honestly, I don't even think North Korea is this fucking paranoid or xenophobic. Christ, the motherfucking Nazis didn't go that fucking far! This is the kind of shit that makes the whole rest of the world band together and put you down like a rabid dog, America.
And These Fucking People all say they believe in Jesus.
“The Good of the People was a laudable enough goal, but in denying a man’s soul, an enduring part of his being, Marxism stripped away the foundation of human dignity and individual value. It also cast aside the objective measure of justice and ethics which, he decided, was the principal legacy of religion to civilized life.”
― The Hunt for Red October
― The Hunt for Red October
Yeah, right.
These Ass-clown idiots think what color they were when they came out of their mama makes them gods.
Sorry, but I've been a Christian my whole life. Jesus wasn't White.
The Word says in Isaiah that He would not even be remarkable in appearance:
Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?
For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.
He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. ~Isaiah 53:1-5
And the locals, Egyptians, Israelites and Syrians, who had become Hellenized or Romanized were looked at by their neighbors about how like Black Republicans get looked at today, except things were a little more stabby.
As a carpenter, Jesus would have been a rough man, not unfamiliar with alcohol or physicality including physical violence as His driving the money-changers from the Temple suggests, both strong of arm and back, and very likely creative with His invective and prone to peppering his work with imprecations and spoken blessings and curses.
How's them Imperial Ambitions working out for Vladimir Putin? And if Russia is so great why, 35 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, does Moscow still look like a typical dirty Soviet city like Tom Clancy described Moscow or Tallinn in the Cardinal Of The Kremlin and The Hunt For Red October?
I've met people from the former Soviet states, including Russia. They all basically at one time or another said the same thing: Authoritarianism does not encourage one to pick up the garbage.
And yet even the average person from Moscow thinks they're a Boyar when dealing with people from rural parts of Russia.
Empire hands you a place in the world and then makes you fight your own neighbors to keep that shit. Seems like a hell of a way to live, eh?
I was taught all are equal in His sight. It wasn't even a question.
Salvation is a free gift, not a reward for submission. I was taught this, too, by conservatives.
In the same way, if you are born in America, our Constitution and culture and traditions all say you're an American. You don't have to do anything, or believe a certain way.
But if you accept and believe that, these assholes don't get to control you, and that's their real problem.
And again Power and control always come down to flesh-pots and meat-markets and a complicated ranking system for no greater purpose than who can do what to whom, usually in the most base and lustful ways possible.
We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev...Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! ~Ronald Reagan
Their real "god" is political power, "God" is little more than a golden idol they can fit in their pocket and play like a card to get their way or get out of having to argue.
Which is weird, given that so much of what we know of Jesus from the Word is Him, literally arguing with the religious leaders of His day...of which He was clearly not one, but he knew what they knew (and more, naturally) and had the same education and ascribed spiritual powers by society and thus a little political power, only lacking the same rank that they had achieved.
Because they didn't Believe, not in their hearts.
Because Power was their real "god."
It's the same way with These Fucking People.
That's why they worship Devils and Idols of Gold.
There's a reason these idiots hate Islam, or would try to arrest a Catholic nun for simply walking to Mass.
And it's not just the racism, they hate anybody whose belief in God extends much pass uttering "Goddamn" while getting stinking drunk...which is evidently a thing among even (perhaps especially) *Checks Notes* Hardcore Calvinists today.
I'm old enough to remember when even Anti-Communist Neo-Conservative War Hawks acted better than that. Hell, I started out as a conservative. I was a kid in the 1980's In the 1980's you couldn't go more than a day or two without hearing of the brave Mujhideen fighting the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan, facing down Soviet Mi-24 Hind Gunships and T-72 Tanks with nothing more than AK-47's, improvised explosives, our FIM-92 Stinger Missiles and their own guts, grit and determination:
“The moment stretched into eternity as both men brought their weapons to bear. He saw the man's eyes. It was a young face there, immediately below the emergency light, but the eyes . . . the rage there, the hatred, nearly stopped the Colonel's heart. But Bondarenko was a soldier before all things. The Afghan's first shot missed. His did not.
The Archer felt shock, but not pain in his chest as he fell. His brain sent a message to his hands to bring the weapon to the left, but they ignored the command and dropped it. He fell in stages, first to his knees, then on his back, and at last he was staring up at a ceiling. It was finally over. Then the man stood by his side. It was not a cruel face, the Archer thought. It was the enemy, and it was an infidel, but he was a man, too, wasn't he? There was curiosity there. He wants to know who I am, the Archer told him with his last breath.
"Allah Akbar!" God is great.
Yes, I suppose He is, Bondarenko told the corpse. He knew the phrase well enough. Is that why you came? He saw that the man had a radio. It started to make noise, and the Colonel bent down to grab it.
"Are you there?" the radio asked a moment later. The question was in Pashtu, but the answer was delivered in Russian. "It is all finished here,"
~Closing moments of the battle at the Soviet laser installation, from The Cardinal Of The Kremlin, by Tom Clancy.
As I wrote many years ago now; That war, or the nightly news reports of it anyway, right along with the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa this was something that marked and shaped my childhood and my view of the world, much as knowing Muslims as a young man shaped my views well into middle age. The Kuwaitis and the Saudis were our brothers in the Gulf War and in containing Saddam after this. Iraqis and Afghan Pashtuns alike have fought beside us in our own Global War on Terror...and American Muslims have shed blood in the service of this country, including friends of mine, guys who I served with who I sometimes had to live so close to we knew about everything there was to know about each other whether we wanted to or not.In mine and my partner's own struggles, a year ago one of the people helping keep her going was the Arab guy who owned the bodega across the street from her apartment building. I still consider it that I owe that guy, and I'd like to pay back that debt someday. Any man who does not understand this or claims not to is not a man.
I'll note, Hell I've extensively written about, that it's the right-wing Evangelical Christians who have strived to make her life harder and treat her like dirt.
That Muslim immigrant store-owner? He called her "Habibi" (which means "Baby") and paid for her groceries more than once.
We are better than this, America, or some of us are anyway. We are better than this racism and willful ignorance and we have to fight to make others be better than it too. We're better than this, and we damned well know it...or we should. We are a nation of immigrants, for fuck's sake!
We are better than this, America, or some of us are anyway. We are better than this racism and willful ignorance and we have to fight to make others be better than it too. We're better than this, and we damned well know it...or we should. We are a nation of immigrants, for fuck's sake!
And as you see these monsters gleefully discussing the heavy loads, so great that no one can bear them, that they would put on people to come here?
Imagine what they'd put on people in order to define them as "Christian" or "Republican" or any other damn thing.
At the end of the day, you either believe in freedom or you don't.
In the meantime, Don't tread on me with this bullshit.
Ronald Reagan said Blood is all one color.
Don't you dare forget that.
Because before this is over, we're going to find that out again.
Слава Україна!
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. ~George Orwell, 1984.
[Cassian plays Nemik's audio diary]
- Karis Nemik: There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they've already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try.
- ~From the Star Wars series Andor, S1.E12 "Rix Road."
