There was a brief panic a few years ago over the AP Stylebook as a Tool of Oppression, I wonder if it belongs here? Possibly outdated. But campus protests definitely deserve an entry.
Thanks, Eric. I live in Philly now but I was born outside Philly, was raised in the north Jersey suburbs and lived most of my adult life in central Jersey.
You live in Philly? No kidding. Hey you know, we should consider meeting up for lunch one day. Bro date and all. New friends. You seem to me an intelligent guy to talk to.
Yes, you are correct: all of those leaders of social change were people of faith. But it’s a false corollary. Their abilities to enact social for the benefits of a greater good did not come from god. It came from the good natures of those individuals themselves. To ascribe the actions of good people to a divine entity actually makes human beings themselves incapable of good deed without a fake being in the sky.
And not all communists are atheists. And not are socialists are atheists either.
And more people have been slaughtered in the name one Christ and Mohammed than atheism.
I can tell that you grew up in a family of god believers. One of the ways I know is based upon the numbers. If you grew up with family members who believed in god, you are 92% likely to adopt those same beliefs.
This is true across all denominations of hokum. And no one can point to one single reason why faith is so good for all us, that the costs of its deceptions, manipulations and bloodshed make it worth its costs.
Eric, you're essentially making my larger argument, which is to separate the good and evil in people from their religious beliefs. You're also making inappropriate and dogmatic assertions about who you think I am while knowing very little about me so let me 'splain. I grew up in an Irish Catholic family but we weren't at all churchy and I left the Church the nanosecond after I was confirmed, so like my hero Frank Zappa I consider myself an "escaped Catholic." I can be every bit as anti-clerical as you without also being a dogmatic atheist, which you surely are. Some of the most fiercely anti-religious people were raised in the faith and are anti-religious precisely because they reject their upbringing. So 92% me no 92%'s ;)
Karl Marx was a dialectical materialist who famously called religion "the opiate of the people." It was very hard for Communist regimes to completely repress religion in the developing world but all Communist regimes are _doctrinally_ atheist. And I really wouldn't split hairs over atrocities, which are absolute and cannot be compared. Pol Pot didn't need "God" to unleash auto-genocide on his people. The Nazis slapped something they called "Positive Christianity" (with Jesus as the original oppressed Aryan) on their regime, but it was entirely cynical, needing to placate the churches. Some of the most important resisters to Nazism were men of faith, particularly Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The SS elite fancied themselves Norse pagans. Stalin certainly didn't need "God" to starve Ukrainians and commit atrocities which rivaled the Nazis.
As a nonbeliever, I have a sociological understanding of religion, where shades of doctrine are less important than the way people behave to each other. But shades of doctrine can also be important. It is highly significant we have Pope Francis now, the most socially liberal Pope the Church has had in centuries, and not the arch-conservative ideologist Pope Benedict. There is absolutely nothing socially threatening in the Deism of Thomas Jefferson and the Unitarian Universalists, neither of which even believe in the afterlife. My understanding of religion is very close to the atheist Sigmund Freud's, as a projection of the conscience onto the community.
None of this is to remotely argue that religion is somehow essential for the morality of a community or that atheists are somehow more immoral than believers, something which I categorically reject as a moral intuitionist. My objection to dogmatic or "hard" atheism is philosophical, based on the science epistemology of Sir Karl Popper. What we can concretely know is what we can demonstrate. And we cannot demonstrate why we are here as opposed to not here. Ergo, we'll never know if we were created by an extra-creational force.
The only negative I have about Rick Wilson's project is that he does it (exquisitely and enjoyably well) as entertainment -- albeit entertainment at a rhetorical and intellectual level on a par with a Mencken or Hitchens. The problem is that the fireworks and hyperbolic spectacle is not going to breach what he so accurately described as an impermeable membrane sealing off now half or more of the population, not only from reality, but from the ability to even grasp that there is a difference between public policy and the circus of stupidities and idiocies.
I'm afraid we may come to the Rick Wilsons (and the Bulwarks, and the Dispatches, and all the other little bands of beleaguered partisans trying to forestall the final defeat and extirpation of the American republican experiment) for the comfort of the entertainment. Which ultimately may amount to pulling in a delusional but comforting rabbit hole around ourselves. Unfortunately I have no idea how to stop the nightmare brewing outside... and it may well be ineluctable. But I don't think we're reaching whatever audience might yet not have been captured by the Shelob MAGA-mind monster. And that remnant, if indeed it even remains, since it is presumably still open to reasoned appeal, must see the hyperbolic entertainment on both sides as disqualification for attention.
But I did sign up because, frankly, I'm at least as angry and sick at heart as Mr. Wilson, and I want some emotional release from the agony of how intensely horrible all this is. And if our doom is to perish in any event -- whether out in the open or in our rabbit holes -- at least underground is a chosen locale. And what is the point of saving a few subscription dollars? After they come for us we won't have any use for the money anyway.
I love that you not only point out the theory, but also the facts. Also, could someone point me to similar stories on the left? There have to be some here too… and I would like to see them, and try to change my mind.
You should absolutely write this as a book; it's genius, perfectly describing the contagious disease that has afflicted the late Republican party. However, like other communicable illnesses it's not just confined to MAGA. Today I saw a picture of RFK, very Junior, and his equally unqualified, if fabulously wealthy VP, yucking it up with two sterling characters, Roger Stone and Comrade Michael Flynn, who is so far gone he might as well pack it in and move to the Motherland, Russia or any other totalitarian state of his choosing. I'm surprised that the kept man of the international crime syndicate, Bannon wasn't there, but maybe he was off on some kleptocrat's yacht. Of course, both Stone and Flynn have dual interests in this candidacy: the spreading of disinformation through what they imagine is a revered member of a family who spurns him, and taking votes away so that their sandwich board candidate, crazypants can open the door to the vault again.
All of this to say, yes, the MAGA party and its treasonous back up liars and rat**ckers are poisonous, paranoid and sadistic, but they have created a contagious frame of mind that can travel and alight just about anywhere. It's really imperative to rid the nation of this plague of thuggery in defense of stupid.
thank you Lonnie for this link to "Mass Psychosis"
While 20 minutes is a long watch in our short-attention-span world, every single sentence rang true.
In explaining how mass psychosis (like Trumpism, or Nazism, or Communism) takes hold of so many minds, this video 1) scared the shit out of me, because it is happening in America today, right in front of our eyes, but it also 2) offered some means of overcoming it.
Rick Wilson & the Lincoln Project personify those measures of combatting this mass MAGA delusional psychosis, but my main takeaway from this video is that the Lincoln Project has to be AMPLIFIED to a huge degree, to a point where LP posts and comments are as prevalent as Trump's latest outrageous lie.
I'm going to post this video (with a short introduction) on my own site (Neo-Fascism: A Warning) because, as a wise man once said, "the hour is getting late."
Thanks again, Lonnie. Knowledge is power, and I certainly learned a lot from your contribution.
Sure. I hear what you are saying. And you are correct to point out that science does not yet conclusively know what preceded the Big Bang. The most likely answer is that nothing preceded the Big Bang but this has not been proven yet. As far as bad people are concerned, science does not define that. Evil is a human construct. A vain, foolish assumption that right and wrong are universal values ascribed to to human worth. I see no such evidence of evil. Only a lack of cooperation where one group is ceaselessly trying to out compete the other. Agnosticism, sure. I understand where it comes from. Variations the try to balance religious minimalism with atheism is, I Think, just a way to come to grips with atheism slowly and in a less painful path of ultimate acceptance.
The reason I have such a problem with religion, and its minimalist variants, it because it disincentivizes cooperation amongst our species to solve major problems like climate change. Intelligent minimalists such as yourself, grant a nod to the religious extremists because you have the intelligence and humility to admit that you don’t have all the answers.
But the religious whose feelings you protect while noble in your humanity do not, deep down inside feel the same about you. They see you as an enemy because to them you are possessed by an invisible demonic force that does not exist.
MAGA are afraid of their fictitious god. They fear that if they do not eradicate you, then they will spend the rest of eternity burning in a realm they does not exist.
So to appease their fears, the justify murder and demonization of agnostics and atheists alike.
Eric, again with respect, no. We don't know what happened before the Big Bang because _it is impossible to know_ what happened before the Big Bang. Any theory about it is not testable and thus scientifically vacuous. The human mind excels at analysis and synthesis; we can take things apart and put them together like nobody's business. It's less naturally inclined to holistic thinking. So there are some realms of knowledge that our human brains will simply never have access to. I think understanding the nature of consciousness is another one.
Now you called me a "minimalist" and I object to that. I'm a theological non-cognitivist, an ignostic. Tell me what you mean by "God" and I'll tell you whether I believe in it or whether it even makes sense. That means I'm a sliding-scale agnostic. I feel more doubtful about a belief system the more concrete it is, making me for all practical purposes an atheist when it comes to monotheistic religions. As we go up levels of abstraction, I am less certain. I haven't the tiniest clue how we came to be and suspect we'll never know. I respect the Anthropic Principle; it's a strong intuition even if it doesn't prove anything. So I can't be and never will be a hard atheist. I will never have a smug certainty that some kind of extra-creational force can't exist.
I really object to being characterized as an atheist who just doesn't know it yet; that's what Communists used to say about Socialists regarding Communism. I am very confident in my beliefs and I think science supports them more strongly than it supports hard atheism.
What I object to most, though, is lumping all believers into one bucket, as if liberal Episcopalians and Unitarian Universalists are tantamount to Pentecostals and Southern Baptists and as if all religious believers have the heart and soul of the Taliban. You _are_ aware that not all religious sects / denominations make a huge deal about the afterlife, right? There are strains of religious belief that don't wish me dead and aren't socially toxic at all.
What you object to is a religious tendency. I object just as strenuously to that tendency but I also don't conflate all religious belief with it.
I think all religions that teach in belief structures that cannot be proven are a form of child abuse. Christianity, Islam, Judaism are ways in which savvy individuals know full well that the easiest way to control someone is to get them while they are young. And then—brainwash them.
I do cast religious faith of all denominations into the same sausage grinder. The variants we have are just ways to make the more extreme versions of religion seem less pernicious.
The religious among us are by far the most violent among us.
And there is no such thing as hard atheism, sir. There is only atheism. And so you say that you believe that there will always be entire realms of knowledge off limits to man? Well, I disagree. If we manage not to destroy ourselves or this planet then, over time, we will have access to all realms of existence and at the end of it, science will show there is no go. Because that’s what it shows now.
And religion is the only socially acceptable form of child abuse that is not only still allowed. It is worshiped and monetized.
Flavors of atheism exist including what I informally called "hard" atheism; if you don't believe me, fire up the 'pedia. But you're beyond even hard atheism, which is the dogmatic assertion that God cannot exist (which is untestable and thus unscientific), you're an antitheist with a conspiracist view of religion.
Need I remind you that the Abolition movement was led by northern preachers, that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a reverend, that the civil rights movement was led by Southern black churches, that Mohandas Gandhi was a devout Hindu? And I hate to use this argument because it's beloved by wingnuts, but that all Communist regimes, which were uniformly abysmal to their citizens, were doctrinally atheist?
Science has disproved various aspects of religious doctrine but it has not "disproved" the existence of God because, once again, you cannot formulate that question in a way that it can be tested. You're certainly entitled to believe that some time in the future if we don't blow ourselves up we'll have access to all realms of knowledge. But all it is is a belief, on the same epistemic level as religious belief.
Dogmatic atheists are only the flipside of dogmatic religious believers.
I think you nailed Eric to the atheist cross, right here, with your last sentence. I am aligned with Bob in this conversation. Eric doesn't know whether god exists and Eric never will. The Pope doesn't know whether god exists and never will. However, with what little I know of either man, I suspect the Pope is a little more flexible about the confines of his faith than Eric is of his own.
Don't get me wrong, Scott; I'm pretty fiercely anti-clerical and the last thing from a religious apologist. I share 100% of Eric's concerns about the not-so-crypto-theocrats who want to seize power this November.
The Catholic Church apologized to Galileo's descendents a century ago and has backed away from its anti-science legacy; it explicitly says now that a lot (most) of the biblical stories are metaphorical and Catholic doctrine doesn't contradict science, including evolution.
On the abortion question, it is scientifically unarguable that an individual human life begins at the moment of conception when two strands of DNA combine into a unique strand. But the question isn't when life begins, it's when personhood begins, and that's a social construction that has had different meanings across time and cultures.
So if a forced birther tells you that life begins at conception you can go yeah, but that's not the point ;)
I have to laugh about how much energy we spend defining our neutral position, as people who don't want to be aligned with anyone of a particular faith. "I emphatically disagree with you! But that doens't mean that I agree with this other guy either!"
My only ask of people who enter into these conversations is, don't be a dick to people who have a different belief system than your own. I also ask that you DO be a dick to those people actively taking steps to limit your freedom to hold different beliefs. Target the right people.
With that said, I agree with both of you that IF you care about our democratic institutions remaining steadfast, the organized evangelical religious right are the enemy. They are well organized and well-funded, with an acutely machiavellian mindset.
It's nice to see Rick sounding like a party line Democrat. I'd love to know what he thought about the ACA when Obama was president, just sayin'. I love to josh my main man Rick Wilson ;)
Our first instance of transphobia as a political weapon happened in our very first contested election at the birth of political parties in 1800. Thomas Jefferson's campaign called John Adams a hermaphrodite, true story, I guess cuz he was short, pudgy and though an acclaimed defense attorney, not very comfortable on the hustings. Maybe Abigail's assertiveness on behalf of the ladies was seen as emasculating, although I don't know if that was known beyond private letters. This pained Jefferson greatly because he and Adams were lifelong close friends. But hey, Jefferson won the election. This was pushed by a broadsheet hawker, that era's idea of a political reporter. We think the press is biased and siloed now, but it was nothing like it was when all printed material was on behalf of a particular political party and everyone had chosen sides. "Objective journalism" is a postwar phenomenon.
Turns out our Framers loathed and feared political parties for a good reason.
My first memory of character assassination in the guise of political campaigning happened to poor Barry Goldwater. Now Goldwater was a crystal pure ideologue, a Western libertarian conservative so far right he made Ronald Reagan look like a sentimental New Dealer at heart. He wasn't personally bigoted but he argued against the Civil Rights Act on First Amendment (freedom of assembly) grounds and made some intemperate remarks that got out publicly. The Democrats ran with this and enlisted psychiatrists to paint him as a literal psycho, leading to the Goldwater Rule. Why the Democrats felt the need to do this when Barry got absolutely squashed in '64 I have no idea. Decades later he became an important Republican voice against the religious right. And he was not a nut.
Of course we Democrats have been tweaking amygdalae over entitlements forever. Any time a Republican so much as mouths the words "entitlement reform" and we cut an ad accusing them of wanting to roll Grandma's wheelchair off a cliff, LOL. I mean, there's an easy way to fix the Medicare and Social Security trust funds. Raise the contribution of the highest earners, well duh ;)
And Rick, my brother, how was paraplegic veteran Max Cleland in bed with Osama bin Laden because he wanted to let TSA workers organize a union? That was one of your most effective ads and is a total non-sequitur, impossible to defend on policy grounds. Pure amygdala masturbation ;). Of course, anybody who worked for Dubya in the '00 primary campaign has amygdala jizz on their hands after those windshield flyers in SC accusing John McCain of having an "illegitimate black baby."
Fear is a powerful force and for good or ill (mostly ill) has been in our politics forever, long before social media and the siloing of legacy media. And our Job One right now is to stroke amygdalae to a frenzy over the dystopian nightmare Trump 2.0 threatens our country with. Whether what we're saying is based on _truth_ or not is kind of beside the point because nothing about the future is true until it happens. So we just have to be better amygdala strokers than the other guys. Onward.
Good article and a more serious tone by Rick Wilson. He just missed one perceived Demon in all of this—atheism.
Beneath it all, beneath the claptrap yawpings about Antifa, the Left, the “invasion” at the southern border, Obamacare, AOC, Aunt Nancy, and Liberal Media Bias, is one basic fear that underscores it all—the Death of their fake god.
What MAGA fears more than anything else is a healthy, independent mind. And Elon Musk, for all his douchey cool-bro tech-lord edge case genius Schtick is just another example of a wealth nepo-baby who also cannot take criticism from others who just might be more intelligent.
A healthy mind rejects god and unquestionable Uber-genius because it understands that both stand as midgets against the towering literary cannon of The Origin of Species.
And now that any religious god from scripture has been shredded by the march of science, the MAGA base is forced to confront two basic truths. 1) There is no god. 2) Their parents, priests, and neighbors all lied to them. And now as they look back on their lives spent under the oppression of a lie and the fear of a flaming realm of fire and pain that never existed, the are furious at the people who had the courage and intellectual fortitude to break away from the knuckle dragging religious herd.
Beneath it all, this is what the Fox News, pro-life, Trumpian MAGA movement is all about. Using force to install a false god who allows these cowards to pretend to have a real one.
And if allowed back into power, it is they who will use violence to avoid facing their hangups about death.
Eric, with respect, as an agnostic I have to object to this. I have no positive belief in an anthropomorphic god but I have no idea why we're here as opposed to not here. I have no idea what happened before the Big Bang. Science can't answer these questions, either, because they can't be tested. Being agnostic, for me, is a nod to epistemic humility.
So it sets me on edge when I see atheism pushed into antitheism. Religion is just a justification system and there are many possible (including dogmatic positivism). I think it's simplistic to ascribe most of the darkness in the human heart to religion. I think bad people can use religion as an excuse and a cover, but the problem is more the bad people than the excuse.
From what I can tell, to believe anything as the absolute truth that can't be proven is evil. Everything we think and do is right or wrong, moral or immoral, Godly or satanic,positive or negative, you get the drift... No one is perfect and no one is totally imperfect the matter of degrees. The irrational mind is lost in reality.
Well except that there's no objective foundation for morality and yet we have to believe in a shared moral code in order for society to function at all. So people as a matter of course in believe things that can't be grounded in absolutes. And thank goodness we do, else our world would be an anarchy.
From this entry forward, any ad targeting the Christian Right needs to mention that Trump had the chutzpah to "correct" to the Bible. No word yet on 2 Corinthians. [I don't know. Did they walk into a bar?]
Big Don’s inauguration will be the largest watched event in history.He’s a great man.
There was a brief panic a few years ago over the AP Stylebook as a Tool of Oppression, I wonder if it belongs here? Possibly outdated. But campus protests definitely deserve an entry.
The B chapter is coming, but I consider the entire thing a work in progress!
Great post Rick. I look forward to the next installment.
I've read Project 2025. I used to refer to it as "scary". Now I refer to it as terrifying.
I've stated a series of posts comprised of excerpts taken from each of its 30 chapters.
You can find it at POLYTRICKS.
I'm not getting older, I'm getting closer.
just a stupid joke. not to be taken out of context.
I’ll pre order 3 copies. lmk when the Stuart mug becomes available.
You know Bob, you’re an interesting guy. I live in New Jersey. Let me ask you, where do you live in the world?
Thanks, Eric. I live in Philly now but I was born outside Philly, was raised in the north Jersey suburbs and lived most of my adult life in central Jersey.
You live in Philly? No kidding. Hey you know, we should consider meeting up for lunch one day. Bro date and all. New friends. You seem to me an intelligent guy to talk to.
Think about it!
Yes, you are correct: all of those leaders of social change were people of faith. But it’s a false corollary. Their abilities to enact social for the benefits of a greater good did not come from god. It came from the good natures of those individuals themselves. To ascribe the actions of good people to a divine entity actually makes human beings themselves incapable of good deed without a fake being in the sky.
And not all communists are atheists. And not are socialists are atheists either.
And more people have been slaughtered in the name one Christ and Mohammed than atheism.
I can tell that you grew up in a family of god believers. One of the ways I know is based upon the numbers. If you grew up with family members who believed in god, you are 92% likely to adopt those same beliefs.
This is true across all denominations of hokum. And no one can point to one single reason why faith is so good for all us, that the costs of its deceptions, manipulations and bloodshed make it worth its costs.
Eric, you're essentially making my larger argument, which is to separate the good and evil in people from their religious beliefs. You're also making inappropriate and dogmatic assertions about who you think I am while knowing very little about me so let me 'splain. I grew up in an Irish Catholic family but we weren't at all churchy and I left the Church the nanosecond after I was confirmed, so like my hero Frank Zappa I consider myself an "escaped Catholic." I can be every bit as anti-clerical as you without also being a dogmatic atheist, which you surely are. Some of the most fiercely anti-religious people were raised in the faith and are anti-religious precisely because they reject their upbringing. So 92% me no 92%'s ;)
Karl Marx was a dialectical materialist who famously called religion "the opiate of the people." It was very hard for Communist regimes to completely repress religion in the developing world but all Communist regimes are _doctrinally_ atheist. And I really wouldn't split hairs over atrocities, which are absolute and cannot be compared. Pol Pot didn't need "God" to unleash auto-genocide on his people. The Nazis slapped something they called "Positive Christianity" (with Jesus as the original oppressed Aryan) on their regime, but it was entirely cynical, needing to placate the churches. Some of the most important resisters to Nazism were men of faith, particularly Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The SS elite fancied themselves Norse pagans. Stalin certainly didn't need "God" to starve Ukrainians and commit atrocities which rivaled the Nazis.
As a nonbeliever, I have a sociological understanding of religion, where shades of doctrine are less important than the way people behave to each other. But shades of doctrine can also be important. It is highly significant we have Pope Francis now, the most socially liberal Pope the Church has had in centuries, and not the arch-conservative ideologist Pope Benedict. There is absolutely nothing socially threatening in the Deism of Thomas Jefferson and the Unitarian Universalists, neither of which even believe in the afterlife. My understanding of religion is very close to the atheist Sigmund Freud's, as a projection of the conscience onto the community.
None of this is to remotely argue that religion is somehow essential for the morality of a community or that atheists are somehow more immoral than believers, something which I categorically reject as a moral intuitionist. My objection to dogmatic or "hard" atheism is philosophical, based on the science epistemology of Sir Karl Popper. What we can concretely know is what we can demonstrate. And we cannot demonstrate why we are here as opposed to not here. Ergo, we'll never know if we were created by an extra-creational force.
Another one for the As if there’s room. Alternative Facts.
The only negative I have about Rick Wilson's project is that he does it (exquisitely and enjoyably well) as entertainment -- albeit entertainment at a rhetorical and intellectual level on a par with a Mencken or Hitchens. The problem is that the fireworks and hyperbolic spectacle is not going to breach what he so accurately described as an impermeable membrane sealing off now half or more of the population, not only from reality, but from the ability to even grasp that there is a difference between public policy and the circus of stupidities and idiocies.
I'm afraid we may come to the Rick Wilsons (and the Bulwarks, and the Dispatches, and all the other little bands of beleaguered partisans trying to forestall the final defeat and extirpation of the American republican experiment) for the comfort of the entertainment. Which ultimately may amount to pulling in a delusional but comforting rabbit hole around ourselves. Unfortunately I have no idea how to stop the nightmare brewing outside... and it may well be ineluctable. But I don't think we're reaching whatever audience might yet not have been captured by the Shelob MAGA-mind monster. And that remnant, if indeed it even remains, since it is presumably still open to reasoned appeal, must see the hyperbolic entertainment on both sides as disqualification for attention.
But I did sign up because, frankly, I'm at least as angry and sick at heart as Mr. Wilson, and I want some emotional release from the agony of how intensely horrible all this is. And if our doom is to perish in any event -- whether out in the open or in our rabbit holes -- at least underground is a chosen locale. And what is the point of saving a few subscription dollars? After they come for us we won't have any use for the money anyway.
Wish I could like this twice.
I love that you not only point out the theory, but also the facts. Also, could someone point me to similar stories on the left? There have to be some here too… and I would like to see them, and try to change my mind.
You should absolutely write this as a book; it's genius, perfectly describing the contagious disease that has afflicted the late Republican party. However, like other communicable illnesses it's not just confined to MAGA. Today I saw a picture of RFK, very Junior, and his equally unqualified, if fabulously wealthy VP, yucking it up with two sterling characters, Roger Stone and Comrade Michael Flynn, who is so far gone he might as well pack it in and move to the Motherland, Russia or any other totalitarian state of his choosing. I'm surprised that the kept man of the international crime syndicate, Bannon wasn't there, but maybe he was off on some kleptocrat's yacht. Of course, both Stone and Flynn have dual interests in this candidacy: the spreading of disinformation through what they imagine is a revered member of a family who spurns him, and taking votes away so that their sandwich board candidate, crazypants can open the door to the vault again.
All of this to say, yes, the MAGA party and its treasonous back up liars and rat**ckers are poisonous, paranoid and sadistic, but they have created a contagious frame of mind that can travel and alight just about anywhere. It's really imperative to rid the nation of this plague of thuggery in defense of stupid.
"GOP MASS PSYCHOSIS - How an Entire Population Becomes MENTALLY ILL" and How to Prevent It
❤️ Discredit totalitarian propaganda everywhere
🤣 Mock GOP worship of dictators
❤️ Promote moral organizations
❤️ Actions by everyone creates freedom
https://youtu.be/09maaUaRT4M
thank you Lonnie for this link to "Mass Psychosis"
While 20 minutes is a long watch in our short-attention-span world, every single sentence rang true.
In explaining how mass psychosis (like Trumpism, or Nazism, or Communism) takes hold of so many minds, this video 1) scared the shit out of me, because it is happening in America today, right in front of our eyes, but it also 2) offered some means of overcoming it.
Rick Wilson & the Lincoln Project personify those measures of combatting this mass MAGA delusional psychosis, but my main takeaway from this video is that the Lincoln Project has to be AMPLIFIED to a huge degree, to a point where LP posts and comments are as prevalent as Trump's latest outrageous lie.
I'm going to post this video (with a short introduction) on my own site (Neo-Fascism: A Warning) because, as a wise man once said, "the hour is getting late."
Thanks again, Lonnie. Knowledge is power, and I certainly learned a lot from your contribution.
Sure. I hear what you are saying. And you are correct to point out that science does not yet conclusively know what preceded the Big Bang. The most likely answer is that nothing preceded the Big Bang but this has not been proven yet. As far as bad people are concerned, science does not define that. Evil is a human construct. A vain, foolish assumption that right and wrong are universal values ascribed to to human worth. I see no such evidence of evil. Only a lack of cooperation where one group is ceaselessly trying to out compete the other. Agnosticism, sure. I understand where it comes from. Variations the try to balance religious minimalism with atheism is, I Think, just a way to come to grips with atheism slowly and in a less painful path of ultimate acceptance.
The reason I have such a problem with religion, and its minimalist variants, it because it disincentivizes cooperation amongst our species to solve major problems like climate change. Intelligent minimalists such as yourself, grant a nod to the religious extremists because you have the intelligence and humility to admit that you don’t have all the answers.
But the religious whose feelings you protect while noble in your humanity do not, deep down inside feel the same about you. They see you as an enemy because to them you are possessed by an invisible demonic force that does not exist.
MAGA are afraid of their fictitious god. They fear that if they do not eradicate you, then they will spend the rest of eternity burning in a realm they does not exist.
So to appease their fears, the justify murder and demonization of agnostics and atheists alike.
Eric, again with respect, no. We don't know what happened before the Big Bang because _it is impossible to know_ what happened before the Big Bang. Any theory about it is not testable and thus scientifically vacuous. The human mind excels at analysis and synthesis; we can take things apart and put them together like nobody's business. It's less naturally inclined to holistic thinking. So there are some realms of knowledge that our human brains will simply never have access to. I think understanding the nature of consciousness is another one.
Now you called me a "minimalist" and I object to that. I'm a theological non-cognitivist, an ignostic. Tell me what you mean by "God" and I'll tell you whether I believe in it or whether it even makes sense. That means I'm a sliding-scale agnostic. I feel more doubtful about a belief system the more concrete it is, making me for all practical purposes an atheist when it comes to monotheistic religions. As we go up levels of abstraction, I am less certain. I haven't the tiniest clue how we came to be and suspect we'll never know. I respect the Anthropic Principle; it's a strong intuition even if it doesn't prove anything. So I can't be and never will be a hard atheist. I will never have a smug certainty that some kind of extra-creational force can't exist.
I really object to being characterized as an atheist who just doesn't know it yet; that's what Communists used to say about Socialists regarding Communism. I am very confident in my beliefs and I think science supports them more strongly than it supports hard atheism.
What I object to most, though, is lumping all believers into one bucket, as if liberal Episcopalians and Unitarian Universalists are tantamount to Pentecostals and Southern Baptists and as if all religious believers have the heart and soul of the Taliban. You _are_ aware that not all religious sects / denominations make a huge deal about the afterlife, right? There are strains of religious belief that don't wish me dead and aren't socially toxic at all.
What you object to is a religious tendency. I object just as strenuously to that tendency but I also don't conflate all religious belief with it.
I think all religions that teach in belief structures that cannot be proven are a form of child abuse. Christianity, Islam, Judaism are ways in which savvy individuals know full well that the easiest way to control someone is to get them while they are young. And then—brainwash them.
I do cast religious faith of all denominations into the same sausage grinder. The variants we have are just ways to make the more extreme versions of religion seem less pernicious.
The religious among us are by far the most violent among us.
And there is no such thing as hard atheism, sir. There is only atheism. And so you say that you believe that there will always be entire realms of knowledge off limits to man? Well, I disagree. If we manage not to destroy ourselves or this planet then, over time, we will have access to all realms of existence and at the end of it, science will show there is no go. Because that’s what it shows now.
And religion is the only socially acceptable form of child abuse that is not only still allowed. It is worshiped and monetized.
Flavors of atheism exist including what I informally called "hard" atheism; if you don't believe me, fire up the 'pedia. But you're beyond even hard atheism, which is the dogmatic assertion that God cannot exist (which is untestable and thus unscientific), you're an antitheist with a conspiracist view of religion.
Need I remind you that the Abolition movement was led by northern preachers, that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a reverend, that the civil rights movement was led by Southern black churches, that Mohandas Gandhi was a devout Hindu? And I hate to use this argument because it's beloved by wingnuts, but that all Communist regimes, which were uniformly abysmal to their citizens, were doctrinally atheist?
Science has disproved various aspects of religious doctrine but it has not "disproved" the existence of God because, once again, you cannot formulate that question in a way that it can be tested. You're certainly entitled to believe that some time in the future if we don't blow ourselves up we'll have access to all realms of knowledge. But all it is is a belief, on the same epistemic level as religious belief.
Dogmatic atheists are only the flipside of dogmatic religious believers.
I think you nailed Eric to the atheist cross, right here, with your last sentence. I am aligned with Bob in this conversation. Eric doesn't know whether god exists and Eric never will. The Pope doesn't know whether god exists and never will. However, with what little I know of either man, I suspect the Pope is a little more flexible about the confines of his faith than Eric is of his own.
Don't get me wrong, Scott; I'm pretty fiercely anti-clerical and the last thing from a religious apologist. I share 100% of Eric's concerns about the not-so-crypto-theocrats who want to seize power this November.
The Catholic Church apologized to Galileo's descendents a century ago and has backed away from its anti-science legacy; it explicitly says now that a lot (most) of the biblical stories are metaphorical and Catholic doctrine doesn't contradict science, including evolution.
On the abortion question, it is scientifically unarguable that an individual human life begins at the moment of conception when two strands of DNA combine into a unique strand. But the question isn't when life begins, it's when personhood begins, and that's a social construction that has had different meanings across time and cultures.
So if a forced birther tells you that life begins at conception you can go yeah, but that's not the point ;)
I have to laugh about how much energy we spend defining our neutral position, as people who don't want to be aligned with anyone of a particular faith. "I emphatically disagree with you! But that doens't mean that I agree with this other guy either!"
My only ask of people who enter into these conversations is, don't be a dick to people who have a different belief system than your own. I also ask that you DO be a dick to those people actively taking steps to limit your freedom to hold different beliefs. Target the right people.
With that said, I agree with both of you that IF you care about our democratic institutions remaining steadfast, the organized evangelical religious right are the enemy. They are well organized and well-funded, with an acutely machiavellian mindset.
It's nice to see Rick sounding like a party line Democrat. I'd love to know what he thought about the ACA when Obama was president, just sayin'. I love to josh my main man Rick Wilson ;)
Our first instance of transphobia as a political weapon happened in our very first contested election at the birth of political parties in 1800. Thomas Jefferson's campaign called John Adams a hermaphrodite, true story, I guess cuz he was short, pudgy and though an acclaimed defense attorney, not very comfortable on the hustings. Maybe Abigail's assertiveness on behalf of the ladies was seen as emasculating, although I don't know if that was known beyond private letters. This pained Jefferson greatly because he and Adams were lifelong close friends. But hey, Jefferson won the election. This was pushed by a broadsheet hawker, that era's idea of a political reporter. We think the press is biased and siloed now, but it was nothing like it was when all printed material was on behalf of a particular political party and everyone had chosen sides. "Objective journalism" is a postwar phenomenon.
Turns out our Framers loathed and feared political parties for a good reason.
My first memory of character assassination in the guise of political campaigning happened to poor Barry Goldwater. Now Goldwater was a crystal pure ideologue, a Western libertarian conservative so far right he made Ronald Reagan look like a sentimental New Dealer at heart. He wasn't personally bigoted but he argued against the Civil Rights Act on First Amendment (freedom of assembly) grounds and made some intemperate remarks that got out publicly. The Democrats ran with this and enlisted psychiatrists to paint him as a literal psycho, leading to the Goldwater Rule. Why the Democrats felt the need to do this when Barry got absolutely squashed in '64 I have no idea. Decades later he became an important Republican voice against the religious right. And he was not a nut.
Of course we Democrats have been tweaking amygdalae over entitlements forever. Any time a Republican so much as mouths the words "entitlement reform" and we cut an ad accusing them of wanting to roll Grandma's wheelchair off a cliff, LOL. I mean, there's an easy way to fix the Medicare and Social Security trust funds. Raise the contribution of the highest earners, well duh ;)
And Rick, my brother, how was paraplegic veteran Max Cleland in bed with Osama bin Laden because he wanted to let TSA workers organize a union? That was one of your most effective ads and is a total non-sequitur, impossible to defend on policy grounds. Pure amygdala masturbation ;). Of course, anybody who worked for Dubya in the '00 primary campaign has amygdala jizz on their hands after those windshield flyers in SC accusing John McCain of having an "illegitimate black baby."
Fear is a powerful force and for good or ill (mostly ill) has been in our politics forever, long before social media and the siloing of legacy media. And our Job One right now is to stroke amygdalae to a frenzy over the dystopian nightmare Trump 2.0 threatens our country with. Whether what we're saying is based on _truth_ or not is kind of beside the point because nothing about the future is true until it happens. So we just have to be better amygdala strokers than the other guys. Onward.
Good article and a more serious tone by Rick Wilson. He just missed one perceived Demon in all of this—atheism.
Beneath it all, beneath the claptrap yawpings about Antifa, the Left, the “invasion” at the southern border, Obamacare, AOC, Aunt Nancy, and Liberal Media Bias, is one basic fear that underscores it all—the Death of their fake god.
What MAGA fears more than anything else is a healthy, independent mind. And Elon Musk, for all his douchey cool-bro tech-lord edge case genius Schtick is just another example of a wealth nepo-baby who also cannot take criticism from others who just might be more intelligent.
A healthy mind rejects god and unquestionable Uber-genius because it understands that both stand as midgets against the towering literary cannon of The Origin of Species.
And now that any religious god from scripture has been shredded by the march of science, the MAGA base is forced to confront two basic truths. 1) There is no god. 2) Their parents, priests, and neighbors all lied to them. And now as they look back on their lives spent under the oppression of a lie and the fear of a flaming realm of fire and pain that never existed, the are furious at the people who had the courage and intellectual fortitude to break away from the knuckle dragging religious herd.
Beneath it all, this is what the Fox News, pro-life, Trumpian MAGA movement is all about. Using force to install a false god who allows these cowards to pretend to have a real one.
And if allowed back into power, it is they who will use violence to avoid facing their hangups about death.
Vote Blue No Matter Who.
It’s Trump or Democracy. You cannot have both.
Eric, with respect, as an agnostic I have to object to this. I have no positive belief in an anthropomorphic god but I have no idea why we're here as opposed to not here. I have no idea what happened before the Big Bang. Science can't answer these questions, either, because they can't be tested. Being agnostic, for me, is a nod to epistemic humility.
So it sets me on edge when I see atheism pushed into antitheism. Religion is just a justification system and there are many possible (including dogmatic positivism). I think it's simplistic to ascribe most of the darkness in the human heart to religion. I think bad people can use religion as an excuse and a cover, but the problem is more the bad people than the excuse.
From what I can tell, to believe anything as the absolute truth that can't be proven is evil. Everything we think and do is right or wrong, moral or immoral, Godly or satanic,positive or negative, you get the drift... No one is perfect and no one is totally imperfect the matter of degrees. The irrational mind is lost in reality.
Well except that there's no objective foundation for morality and yet we have to believe in a shared moral code in order for society to function at all. So people as a matter of course in believe things that can't be grounded in absolutes. And thank goodness we do, else our world would be an anarchy.
From this entry forward, any ad targeting the Christian Right needs to mention that Trump had the chutzpah to "correct" to the Bible. No word yet on 2 Corinthians. [I don't know. Did they walk into a bar?]