(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
What Dartagnan said. Me too. [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']
Date: 2023-03-09
This man is emblematic of the fascist threat
This posting is in support of, and expands, Dartagnan’s excellent posting of 3/8/23 titled “Finally: Conservatives prescribe calling out Trump supporters as moral failures and bad citizens.”
I second that emotion and raise it with the term “evil.”
Declaration #1:
There are only four questions whose answers settle the fallacy of god.
1. Who created god? Ans. Do not confuse who invented god with who created him. If life is so complex that there is no other explanation for its existence, except creation, then who created the ultimate in complexity? Hint, it wasn’t a god who had to have been here before he existed.
2. Where is he? Ans. Why the mystery? The burden of proof is on the believer because it is impossible to prove a negative, yet there has never been any scientific / theoretical proof of god’s existence.
3. Who says the Bible says? Ans. A handful of 4th Century scholars took tidbits of stuff from all other religious beliefs and cobbled them together in a Canon, the Holy Bible, and by fiat, declared that only they could declare who god is, what he’s all about, and only they can speak for him. And then claimed that an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent entity decided to hide away somewhere.
4. Between science and religion, which one is really seeking the truth? Ans. Certainly not religion, they claim to already have the truth, aren’t looking for it, and constantly use the sword to force their beliefs on others.
Ironically summing up all of that is the Gospel: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you.” Matthew 7:12 “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Luke 6:31 The secular version of that is, “Societies grow greater when old men plant trees they know they will never enjoy the shade of.” Good deeds are more important for happiness than any other human behavior.
Declaration #2:
There are only two types of personalities, you’re either an altruistic liberal or an evil conservative. As harsh as that seems it is impossible for the eleven synonyms to be anything but what they are. An altruistic, good, humane, left-wing, unbiased, liberal, Democratic pacifist who is an objective, logical, atheist cannot be a selfish, evil, inhumane, right-wing, racist, conservative, Republican neocon who is a subjective, illogical, theist. Oh, behavioral scientists call liberals “contextualists, and conservatives are “absolutists” – so add a twelfth synonym to a list that science has just lent credence to.
There has never been a war that was started by liberals. Apartheid was condemned by liberals, but justified by conservatives who cited some goofy Biblical reference. How many Southern slave owners were liberals? If your answer was close to, or actually zero, you’d be right. Show me which one of our mass murderers or assassins were liberals. The three items in the next paragraph sums it all up. When you think about the first sentence, in modern history the names of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Stalin, Idi Amin, Putin, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Orban and Trump proves the point. And, of course, because all other less powerful conservatives support those despots, accusing all conservatives of evil does withstand scrutiny.
1) Greed – the exploitation of the vulnerable – right wing extremism – their avarice is likely baked into their DNA (larger amygdala) and their selfishness is never satisfied – left unopposed their insidious maliciousness always metastasizes and grows to a point of tyranny before they have to be stopped. They do not care if we live or die, or how much we suffer in between.
2) Never, in human history, has anyone ever justified the need to end the compassion and charity of liberals because they had gone too far.
3) It is irreconcilable differences which must coexist, the immutable yin and yang of society, and because one side has to be the bad one, by definition, liberal compassion cannot be it.
Declaration #3:
My challenge is: name me another force more ubiquitous, more consequential and more life altering than the human behavior of politics and religion? Issues of such importance should not be taboo, they should be required topics of dispassionate discussion and debate. Our very survival depends on it. If evil can be marginalized to a point of irrelevance, isn’t that reason enough to lift this self-defeating taboo on discussing politics and religion? Now look at the first two declarations. The first one ends with recognizing that throughout human history the forces of good and evil are not of a supernatural origin or design, they are human nature. In other words, god does not work in mysterious ways and the devil did not make you do it. In fact, the human authored Golden Rule defeats evil. The second declaration ignores the polite and subtle niceties and goes directly to the heart of matters by calling out who is good and who is evil. But it does not set the blurred lines of when goodness ends and evil begins with any individual because the demarcation lines are impossible to delineate. Rather, we know if their character is good or evil by how often and/or how extreme their behavior is. It ends by inferring that communities set the standards for acceptable behavior, i.e., we enact laws for and against certain human behavior. Lastly, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. quoting Rev. Theodore Parker, the adage that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” may one day gainsay the alleged immutability of irreconcilable differences which must coexist.
Behavioral scientists, poets, song writers, philosophers, historians, etc., have been lamenting this behavior forever, but fail to identify who’s who. In the name of “free will” theologians still cling to hoping for peace on Earth, but their moral arbiter is still supernatural. Political scientists ignore the moral aspects of politics, while respected journalists vow to remain morally neutral even though they freely label the subject of their report as either liberal or conservative. Better understanding of human behavior is what can mitigate the contentiousness in religious and political discussions. (End of Declaration #3.)
Editorial: For decades conservatives successfully used expressions such as “bleeding heart liberals” as a pejorative to ridicule being too good. There has never been equivalent pejoratives from liberals to portray conservatives as too evil. e.g., after the kidnapping and intentional separation of migrant children from their parents was fully investigated it was revealed that cruelty was the whole point of that particular evil behavior to “own the libs.”
My understanding of the origin of “wearing the bloody shirt” came from someone killing someone, and then wearing their bloody shirt to portray himself as the victim. Conservatives, very effectively I might add, wear the bloody shirt to project their sins onto their victims.
Antifa literally means anti-fascism. Conservatives portrayed antifa as an organization and claimed they were responsible for riots and violence in Charlottesville SC and Portland OR (Fox News admitted to lying about the Portland myth). As witnessed in Charlottesville, fascists marched with Tiki Torches and (a la Hitler’s Brown Shirts) chanted “The Jews will not replace us.” The fascists killed a woman and gravely injured others. Loser proclaimed antifa was an organization that he was going to put on the list of domestic terrorist organizations (he never did because they’re not an organization), while he said nothing about the likes of The Proud Boys and The Oath Keepers, both domestic terrorist militias found guilty of insurrection in the J6 riots.
“Woke” means to be aware of threats and avoid them so you don’t wind up like Emmett Till and all the way-too-many black people who were shot in the back while fleeing law enforcement officers. Now conservatives use it to universally portray it as some kind of evil that they can’t define, but invoke it in order to vilify liberals. (According to Ron DeSantis, Florida is where “Wokeness comes to die.”)
The Black Lives Matter movement’s altruism has been corrupted to intimate that black people are seeking racial superiority. Conservatives began this corruption of words by proclaiming that All Lives Matter. Like, Duh.
Critical Race Theory is a graduate course in law schools which is way above the ability of elementary and high school children to grasp, and has never been a course below college level curriculum - - - lily white elementary schoolchildren are supposedly being brainwashed by CRT to the point of being ashamed of being white. Ask any white child if they feel that way and I’ll show you a kid who never heard of CRT in the classroom, but whose parents are racists.
The list is endless, but conservatives never condemn their leader’s atrocities and the so-called “unbiased” media is too idealistic to call them out. In fact, conservatives freely admit that their satisfaction comes from “owning the libs.” To them it matters not how deviant their behavior becomes in order to accomplish their goal. In all of the above, right-wing extremists have worn the bloody shirt to very effectively foment evil. There has never been equivalent pejoratives from liberals to portray conservatives as too evil.
The three enemies of freedom - ignorance, fanaticism and tyranny - are rampant in today’s America. We are divided into two polarized tribes as dangerous as it was pre Civil War. More dangerous today because Organized Money – factions - are plotting to destroy democracy, not just secede from the Union. The devil, by any other name is still evil.
On Organized Money and my Camelot Case Histories: It’s counterproductive for the plutocrats to allow a sociopathic narcissist like Loser to remain in power after they gave him the election. They made a mistake, a miscalculation. My guess is that they thought, because Loser was rich like them, he’d be more compliant. They could not have seen how charismatic he would be, or how quickly a cult would form around him. But more importantly, they could not have foreseen how quickly and successfully the fascists would be able to wrest control away from them. Loser may run for office again if he’s not convicted, but the plutocrats will never let him win again and they will then marginalize the fascists in order to retain the facade of a democracy they’ve had since our founding. That’s our future. Ah, but for one brief shining moment, Teddy tried valiantly, but it took FDR to give us Camelot. Then – Reagan and - Poof!
Tribalism is human nature and all tribal members, liberal or conservative, defend their tribe to the death, or they are forced out. Behavioral scientists have found that conservatives are more likely to go to war than liberals are. They have found that liberals tend to be pacifists and slow to rally strong defenses. Paraphrasing Mark Twain, never the aggressor, always the defender. Behavioral scientists have found that conservative tribes are as crazy as cults and if cult members leave, then the deserters become the enemy. The distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys are increasingly blurred – on purpose – by very skilled political conservative propagandists while liberal propagandists try in vain to expose the evil. But if I accuse Loser’s cult of being the bad guys, everyone accuses me of violating a tacit rule of not talking about politics.
It is time to name names and speak out.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/9/2157143/-What-Dartagnan-said-Me-too
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
