Category Archives: Perversion and Propaganda

Trump Derangement Syndrome

I saw this posted on Facebook today. It was posted by a “friend.” In my view, this is the predictable, cumulative effect of the daily “two minutes of hate” being orchestrated by our mainstream media. Very scary. Very sad.

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If you are voting trump in November, please unfriend me. It is so unconscionable to me that I’m burning up every day at this point it feels equivalent to being a “friend” of a murderer who is brainwashed and beyond hope of any argument or event or obvious sign changing their mind. The conclusion is foregone because the conclusion is the premise. 

Your vote directly endangers the lives and wellbeing of the people I care about most. It’s not a “political question” anymore; it’s a life and death and basic goodness question. So just hit the unfriend button. I don’t want to talk about it because I believe you are beyond logic and brainwashed by the idiotic twisted plastic sadistic empty headed empty hearted white supremacist misogyny-filled hosts I see on conservative media. I don’t want trolls, I don’t want arguments. I just don’t want to see your posts, and I don’t want you to see mine. 

BECAUSE I’m more furious at conservatives than ever before, than any wrongheaded irrational superior self-righteous crazy inhumane bigotry I’ve seen before. there is no excuse anymore and if you can’t see how evil this man and his administration are, and how much damage they are doing to democracy and to ordinary people like me, I just don’t want to see you on my feed or in my life. Because it means you do not support my wellbeing or the wellbeing of my friends and communities and you do not have basic discernment to recognize that this narcissistic evil idiot is a threat to us all. 

BECAUSE the department of justice, the conservative stacked Supreme Court, now wants to sue state governors for opening when it makes sense for their state’s public health versus when trump says so because he cares more about the DOW and his re-election prospects and encouraging his crazy base than human life? 

AND Every single day I see messages in JP Facebook groups about people losing parents or other loved ones to this disease. It kills me. It scares me. Every day I read about health care workers (like my sister, my close friend’s father, medical professionals I know well who help me get monthly infusions, or medical professionals in my community) who worry about getting adequate PPE and who will not with this administration, or if they do it will be thanks to their governor, who will be vilified for taking any independent action to supply their need (like that poor guy Hogan). 

BECAUSE Trump Is halting all immigration demonstratively including the refugee program, which were already stopped anyway because travel is stopped, but also because he halted the refugee program before this, to rile up his base when travel was already stopped? 

AND I have friends and former students (whether ex pats living abroad, or friends from Iran, or Pakistan, or Western or Eastern Europe) who will directly suffer from travel and immigration bans. 

BECAUSE he is stopping funding to the World Health Organization (and therefore to developing countries that have 11 ventilators total) during a pandemic? 

AND I oriented a refugee (who had been detained by ICE) into his homestay this year and now know that the country he is from, Burkina Faso, is one of many African countries with extremely limited water and health care infrastructure that will suffer in unimaginable ways because of the president’s funding cuts to The World Health Organization, one of the most important actors in global health emergencies. 

BECAUSE he is letting human being stay packed into prisons, homeless shelters, and ICE detention centers.

AND I have friends who have experienced ICE detention, and a penpal new friend in a prison with cases who may get sick, and they are at the bottom of the list of who gets a ventilator. 

BECAUSE this man is endangering media freedom by labeling questions “nasty” or not taking them, labeling new outlets that don’t “yes” him as fake, firing people who don’t agree with him, and in every possible way endangering freedom of press, freedom of speech, academic freedom, freedom of thought, and freedom of critique. 

BECAUSE his Supreme Court is so partisan they would rather support voter suppression by not allowing mail-in voting during a pandemic, because they probably want to justify delaying the election, and further destroying our democracy. 

BECAUSE this administration both tacitly endorses anti-asian sentiment and hate crime and doesn’t do enough to stop it, and since the virus there has been a huge spike in hate crimes and I give this administration some responsibility for that. 

BECAUSE all this shit terrifies and infuriates me. 

BECAUSE close responsible talented friends of mine living month to month are not going to make it through this without reliable government support and instead this administration is giving supposed “small business loans” mostly to the pretty large businesses they are fans of and very vey few people are actually getting these loans, and most of the bail out bill went to corporate giants who would have been relatively fine compared to human beings living month to month. And even if things “start up” again this just means and excuse to not support people financially during the pandemic which essentially means anyone who cannot put themselves or others in their lives at lethal risk will not get either a paycheck or in some cases a backlogged unemployment check or an inaccessible small business loan or another one-time stimulus check… nevermind the students, undocumented people, and other ineligible Americans who need payments or rent and mortgage bans to survive now… “opening” is an excuse for the government to financially do a criminally minimal job of supporting people in an economic situation worse than the Great Depression. This suffering included children. Children of immigrant parents, black children, white middle class children, poor kids, scared kids… and everyone who falls between the cracks the policies forget or knowingly abandon, like those who aren’t eligible for unemployment, or who can’t move right now but can’t pay their rent because unemployment is so much less than they were making before, or who aren’t eligible for disability but still can’t put themselves at risk. 

BECAUSE this administration is destroying environmental protections, and cares more about the oil industry than the fate of life on this planet, and is willing to ignore the facts and allow climate change to progress and the periods of severe climate disasters, flooding of coastal cities, inequality, and diseases will get much much worse unless we take radical climate actions… and that endangers every life on this planet, including the unborn babies you claim to think are more important than the lives and agency and wellbeing of every single living adult. Supporting the oil industry also means supporting the oil industrial and military industrial complexes, which in a very not abstract way, means terror and death for people who are real people with real lives you can’t imagine or choose to ignore. Sanctions do this too; they punish people more than they punish governments. 

BECAUSE this evil demented gertrude stein and evil milktoast / oily snotbag (trump and pence) are misogynistic homophobic transphobic pieces of shit and that structurally and psychologically endangers me and 80% of my closest friends. even if a gay man can run for president and get disgustingly harassed not by trump but only by the ever-disgusting Rush Limbaugh to whom our president gave a medal of freedom, I know this administration especially pence would actively block national adoption rights and other protections for nontraditional families or any other number of policies, which means this country will continue to be built of benefit structures that benefit straight cis people. 

Don’t talk to me about politeness and decency… look at the billboard in your own eye before the speck in ours. is trump ever “decent”? we start dying inside when we lose our capacity for just outrage, to blend an MLK quote with a Rabbi Heshel line. Nancy ripping up a speech is a symbolic act of just outrage because the speech was full of outright lies and propaganda. I wish she had burned it. You know what is NOT a symbolic act of nonviolent resistance? Violent and/or idiotic protesters without masks on spreading disease and the disease of misinformation while conservative commentators perpetuate a comparison to Rosa Parks…. completely re-appropriating and dishonoring her legacy (are you fucking kidding me?) …. and Hilary’s emails? I mean… seriously? does that questionable fumble equate even remotely the open secret, now openly admitted of trump’s scandal which included actually blackmailing a nation and withholding military aid for his own interests? admit the problems with these facts and then talk to me about correctness, politeness, decency, or transparency. Look at trump’s actions… are they humane or based in empathy? Ending the REFUGEE program? trying to limit the FOOD STAMP program? don’t excuse my language when I say: what the Actual fuck. 

his defense’s only recourse to defense was in the argument that ABUSE OF POWER IS NOT AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION. you seriously want that precedent on the books? 

BECAUSE he is allowing his son in law’s company and other friends in big Pharma to build in legal ways to profit off of this disaster instead of guaranteeing accessible treatments and care to all. Because he won’t even let people with NO medical insurance buy it LATE. He wants them to be suddenly hit with 100K in medical bills and no insurance and no way to pay? 

There are about a million more things I could say here and I am furious. And I am watching our country fall apart because of “flu klux clan” protesters and churches suing states and the feds suing the states and the states having no choice but to sue the feds… honestly, I just wish the red states would go make their own country. just go away. no war, just leave. 

I wish the same of trump and his base. 

Dear trump base if I even know any of you (I can’t even think of any friends of mine I’m aware of so this is just in case): I believe you are brainwashed by conservative media and beyond hope of basic rational or basic compassionate argumentation reaching you. 

That has been my experience of trying to have conversations with those who support trump. It looks like total complete beyond hope brain washing to me of previously kind good people. 

So I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to argue. It does no good. The premise is the conclusion and reason and logic and human care went out the window a long time ago on your “side.” 

Trump’s supporters support him no matter what he does, no questions asked, no matter how his message changes, no matter who or what he hurts, or how much death his actions make him directly responsible for. 

Nevermind him being a narcissistic child and sociopathic misogynist asshole with an obvious personality disorder who actually expects governors to Thank and praise him profusely for (not) delivering on extremely basic needs during this crisis then bullies them for getting supplies however they can (because Hogan was to be his republican challenger; so it’s always about his political or financial interests). 

There is no logic that works. He acts like he is not subject to logic, law, or basic empathy. Out of one side of his mouth he pretends to be listening to experts and giving states leniency since every state’s situation is different, out of the other side of his mouth he eggs on protesters and incites those who feel violently toward reasonable people just doing their jobs who are now getting daily death threats because he is doing the opposite of protecting them. 

If you can not see that this man is the most obviously obviously obviously evil awful inhumane anti-empathetic scum bag that has ever walked the face of the earth, please just hit that unfriend button. I have a close friend who stopped talking to a parent because of this… since I do not have parents that support this man, this is my version of that. I would absolutely cut out the closest of family. In the same way I would cut out the closest of family if nazis brainwashed them and took control of their bodies and minds. It is disgusting and intolerable to me to see posts that do not recognize the evil in the powers that be right now and recognizing and standing up to it means protecting me and my friends and my communities, and human beings everywhere, so if you’re going to be in my life, know I need that basic level of human decency and recognition from you.

“Science”

This is a comment I made yesterday in a private Facebook group: “On an unrelated note, I also see a faux but convenient ‘religion versus science’ narrative developing, with the highly ‘reasonable’ (junk) science ‘experts’ on t.v. being pitted against the red state religious ‘rubes’ clamoring for their magic shows and spiritual ‘opiate.’ I mean from the beginning I thought the media’s strange obsession with the distribution of the Body and Blood of Christ in Catholic Churches was a big ol’red flag.”

This article over at LRC today does a nice job of explaining the problematic “science” that surrounds the coronavirus hype:

Science and Coronavirus Confirmations

One of the primary characteristics of the modern age is the ingredient of “science,” its methodologies, and its rhetoric, within the general disposition of society. We use words and phrases like evidence-based, objective facts, and data-driven as a means of authority in making our claims. In this way, the rhetoric of science has entered the spirit (or the mind—Geist, as in Zeitgeist) of the age in a way that is unique in world history. We have emphasized the primacy of scientific analysis, or rather, the conclusions of the scientific community, over and above lines of a priori thinking. That is, it is a distinctive feature of our epoch that things like religion and philosophy are either less important or not important at all, but regardless are relegated to their appropriate spheres.

YES! Exactly!

So grateful to The Remnant for publishing this excellent article on the Coronavirus “crisis.” These are the questions we should be asking. Thank you to Christopher Ferrara for writing it. What he has to say at the end is, in my opinion, SPOT ON:

Finally, to the readers of this newspaper I address this plea: How long will good Catholics allow themselves to be herded like sheep in whatever direction lying demagogues tell them to move?  When will we learn to presume that the truth will almost invariably be precisely the opposite of what these liars tell us?  In the midst of this panic, we are indeed facing a test of our courage. Not courage in facing down a virus, but rather courage to declare a resounding nay to the propaganda of the Ministry of Truth in a post-Christian world that is fast becoming a complete realization of Orwell’s Oceania.

https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/4809-here-we-go-again-the-virus-of-mass-destruction

https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/4809-here-we-go-again-the-virus-of-mass-destruction

Prayers for the Warrior Caste

In my parish and many others, during the Prayers of the Faithful I often hear: “For the military, first responders, and police, and all who keep us safe, we pray to the Lord.” I personally believe the first and second parts are in many ways mutually exclusive, that (leaving out paramedics and fire fighters) US foreign policy and militarized policing do not “keep us safe”, but in many ways make us less safe. If we are praying for specific occupations, why not for engineers, factory workers, pilots, garbage collectors, teachers, data entry clerks, government bureaucrats, corporate middle managers, billionaire tech executives, mail carriers, sewer workers, waiters, cooks, movie stars, cowboys? Or is the US Catholic Church part of the problem with promoting violence?

Knights of Christ or of Clinton/Bush/Obama/Trump

I recently received my newest edition of “Columbia” magazine by the Knights of Columbus. An article was about a Knight who received the Congressional Medal of Honor. Unfortunately, besides a little about the prayer life of the man who received the medal, the Knights did not delve deeper on the morality and justness of the war in Afghanistan, especially after Osama bin Laden was killed (of course, in Pakistan and not Afghanistan), which is when the events occurred for this sailor to receive the award. Instead, we just got platitudes about defending freedom and doing your duty. Are my brother Knights of the Prince of Peace or Knights of the Military–Industrial Complex? Christ told us it would be hard to follow Him; it is too easy to go along to get along in general society, which celebrates militarism and war.