The bar to being an anti-christ is pretty damn low. There’s also no limit to how many exist all one needs is to deny the divinity of Christ. It’s just that easy!
There some conflation with the “Man of Sin/Lawlessness” though who is supposed to be a “fierce King” who appears at the end of times and “will exalt and magnify himself above every god and will say unheard-of things against the God of gods. He will be successful until the time of wrath is completed."
I am less shocked and more resigned. Been tracking the progress of the Republican party over a decade now and watching them throw out euphemism after euphemism as they just aren’t needed anymore. What the reaction of shock got us back then was “alarmist” since the Conservative playbook was so layered up in dogwhistles the average person thought it was tinfoil hat fodder.
The base was being groomed to accept this as an outcome and so they were slow boiled. It was that way for the Nazis too. Each terrible move wasn’t quick it was the next horrible logical conclusion of their worldview of removing the “useless” aspects of humanity. They started first in government services and then with eugenics in mental health care while dismantling queer infrastructure in cities under the same eugenics line citing them as non-reproductive genetic dead ends. Then it turned to homelessness. Then as their policies created more “useless” classes of people in the form of minorities who could not legally work because of the laws they passed they turned to liquidation of those groups. Each step was followed by a pause to make the rhetoric more callus to build off the basic premise that as an able-bodied, regularly employed, sane, cishet, white, Christian / atheist that your resources were personally being stolen from you to feed the “undeserving”.
How far back can you remember Republicans on their soap box about people being undeserving of assistance or support? About people being a waste of resources or campaigning to make those people easier to stigmatize? It shouldn’t be surprising after over a decade that they’ve been dropping the mask.
They did a study and money can buy happiness but it caps out after the point it allows you chances to travel and take stress free time off. Being poor literally shortens people’s lives through misery.
So what we have is a man whom money will make as happy as he will ever get and remains miserable plunging people into a deficit of security through his actions. He’s infectiously miserable and someone needs to quarantine him.
These jabs are only vaguely in your direction. I have been aiming past you to people who are not shut down. You have decided to stay sidelined which I have said at multiple points, is fine. You do you. But what you keep doing is to try, quite transparently, to discredit the seriousness with which I am taking the situation by signaling to the people around me that inaction is noble. That what I am doing is shameful… That is my only problem with how you comport yourself because otherwise even those who are useless are fairly neutral.
But you aren’t useless, you are taking this personally. You are throwing up your hands and crowing victim which is another silencing tactic well worn in circles that aim to keep the conversation going so the solve never comes. That isn’t useless behavior , it is undermining tactics. This isn’t about you. Get over yourself.
At this point this convo is so buried that the point has essentially passed so I will not continue. Goodbye.
Get used to there being a front line because as this gets worse these mediums of communication are going to get more action driven. You think it’s overkill now but the more you get used to hearing other people calling for ACTUAL action the more you will see what it actually looks like and will know what you could be participating in. This is likely lost on you because at this point you are simply reacting to being checked.
Yesterday the US failed diplomatically at a fundemental level with allies who are key to policing the international waters and air between the USA and Russia. Don’t be fooled. It is not just a trade war, it is a softening of US defenses as well. Priorities will be changing and depending they could change faster than you expect. If this follows the patterns of other historical conflicts we will all only learn how critical our time was at this stage in hindsight.
No APATHY is calling a call for further action moreso than the feather touch of resistance “being an edgelord” it’s an attempt to shame someone into less vocal rhetoric so that people take what is happening less seriously. It’s an attempt to shame people out of mobilizing.
You want to stay out of the frontline? Fine. Move to the rear and stay out of the way of the people who are showing up People who are taking classes in collective action or medic training, showing up to protests and getting arrested or helping their neighbours with minor acts of institutional sabotage. You don’t get to shame on people taking this more seriously than you are.
We are so far beyond caring about toothless boycotts.
Well quite frankly nobody asked for this but we have it and we’re not the first fucking generation to have to put aome skin on the line to make the place we live habitable after everything goes to shit. If you think all you can do is wait to cash your ballot or wave a sign then I am speaking to you. It’s time to organize better and move because it is only going to get worse from here.
You are free to ignore this. You are free to go quietly. However keep your destructive apathy to yourself. More of us have to look apathy and personal disenfranchisement from the system in the eye and see it as the weight that stops any of this from ever getting better.
Your government design and allocation of power made it so one person could do this. Trump is simply the first to flaunt the social contract this brazenly. There was no lock on the door, only a verbal agreement not to go through it.
Once this is done, once Trump is deposed the fight will not be over. Measures must be enacted to make the systems safe so that another Trump can’t do this ever again. The system is just as liable for this happening as the man himself. We need to stop thinking in terms of singular bad actors and recognize faults in system design because otherwise it is just a waiting game for the next bad actor to do just as bad or worse.
It is your government. This is your head of state and the head of the US government weilding power that once belonged to Congress but ceeded to the executive branch about a hundred years ago. This man represents you.
I understand it is uncomfortable. That you wish it wasn’t so I get it… But Do not diminish this fact because these are the stakes. He is your, I repeat Your, Government. Do not wash your hands of him acting as he does because in your silence and denial he still acts on your behalf and you need so much more than silence and denial.
The anti-trans community does have a branch devoted to hating on trans men. It just looks different and has different targets. Trans hate in this direction is often quite patriarchal. It looks at trans men as a loss of a valued resource in the form of a reproductive object. It paints them as lost and confused little girls who were led astray by peers and the confusion of existing under patriarchal oppression into taking the easy way and becoming traitors to their category. Trans hate towards Trans men has largely the same hallmarks of homophobia and the social oppression that women will regret any non-natural change to their bodies or that they will regret not having babies. Trans men are framed as “a mistake”.
The second half of transmisandry is erasure focused on refusing to acknowledge some of the biological realities of Trans men. For example that for some trans men it is still possible to become pregnant or have periods. This second half props up the first half as it erases the fact that the social category of men do get pregnant and when they do resources are often riddled with stigma, services do not support them as frequently and they are treated as less valid a parent.
This is actually in part an issue of a misunderstanding of the dynamics of one of the situation law enforcement and people forced into dangerous circumstances face. Ever played that game where you have your hands out and a person puts their hands under yours and you have to withdraw your hands before you get slapped? It’s the same principle. Reaction is slower than action. When someone states they have a weapon and they reach for it you could be dead in about a second, maybe two if they pull it and instead fire at you. This means your “safe” reaction space is about a second to a half second long.
If you duck out of the way you get a person with a weapon who can choose to turn it on bystanders or retaliate by getting you into another situation where you have even less reaction space. While it is realized that cops, particularly US ones tend to escalate situations more quickly in part that is because in the US there’s a higher chance someone is packing heat and in part because of a culture of standing one’s ground. When we are talking about ACAB events a lot of the time those deaths occur in circumstances where the cops either should not have been there at all, escalated far too quickly or the death happened when the person was restrained and no longer an active threat. In Canada for instance improper use of force applies to everyone. If you had to be violent as a citizen, including as a cop then you are vulnerable to legal reprocussions unless your use of force was judged appropriate to mitigate damage to life. Not property, only life. If you exhaust every other de-escalating option only then you are cleared to use violence but the initiation of this reaction window is the point of no return. People who experience this window basically operate strictly on instinct and often are traumatized to some degree after the fact.
In this instance the officer’s life was at risk the moment the gun was indicated to be in the vehicle and the person in question stated they would use it. Could the entire traffic stop have been a series of inappropriate escalations on behalf of the officer, yes. Is there zero justification for an officer shooting this guy? No. We don’t know the first part, you would have to pick apart the senario starting from when he stopped the car. But if you end up in a situation where you have a gun trained on you and you escalate the situation further by saying you are reaching for a gun then basically this is effectively how you suicide.
Nope, this tracks. Travelling while trans even before the Trump presidency means hastle. Gender markers on passports often mean very little aside from potentially outing passing trans people to asshole agents when they don’t match what you look like.
Normally it looks like variations of this : You go through the body scanner and a guard makes a determination based on basically vibes and pushes one of two buttons, a pink or a blue. If you have boobs and the blue button is pressed or a dick and the pink button is pressed you get flagged as having something “unexpected” on you and then are subjected to a body search during which they might just stick you in a holding place for as long as they feel like while they figure out who to send to perform a rather humiliating discussion about your medical history while your privates are checked over by strangers.
Or, someone just looks at you, looks at your passport flags the sex marker or your photo as a “suspicious error” and pulls you out of line. It’s remarkable how poorly the whole bureaucracy suddenly operates when you don’t immediately fit someone’s exact expectations of what a trans person looks like. Most of the time this just wastes a lot of time as you wait around for someone to have a long ass conversation and they run the papers to check them.
These delays can mean missing a flight but the person who missed the flight could be in a place to sue if they don’t offer a solution hence… Standby flights. So this is more or less just going back to being the old sucky forms of travel discrimination versus an even worse form. The bar is in hell and folk are gunna feel about it based on what the bar was before it was lowered. Whether that’s “oh thank god” or “fucking hell life is shit” is a glass half full/empty reaction. Both are valid.
Women actually did participate in maths quite a bit throughout history. While it’s generally true that formal schooling was more limited and opportunities were rarer than for men in the same fields a keen mind was often seen as a thing best not wasted. The work generally disappears in footnotes of businesses and whatnot where wives were sort of unpaid appendages of their husbands endeavours where they participated wholly in many aspects of the work and were often in a bookkeeping role. Maths was not limited to the nobility and gentry though the mathematical rockstars all came out of the class. Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia was born in the 1640’s and became a lecturer of Mathematics in Padua and was the first woman to be awarded a doctorate degree from a University.
The rates of literacy and numeracy are always more than you would think in these periods. The common folk needed those skills but for different stuff so they taught them in informal ways to each other and didn’t tend to use them for flashy things like writing stories or coming up with new stuff because paper was an expense saved for important stuff you needed to record. Most of it was for legal and organizational purposes. A lot of samples don’t tend to survive unless they were either for posterity or kept for sentimental reasons but we know that slates saw a lot of use day to day for regular business. Women were a resource of skilled labour that households could not afford to leave unoccupied and the idea of them in aggregate as limited to being brainless drudges isn’t accurate.
I mean they are allowed to whine. As an Enby it’s quite useful to know where the people whom you needn’t bother getting to know particularly well are. That high pitched sound their brains make as they grind out another low effort opinion is annoying, granted.
Considering the US has the more millitary bases on foreign soil than the rest of the world combined…
Actually let me recontextualize this so you realize how much America has a gun to the rest of the world’s collective heads. The number of foreign bases, exempting potential secret off the record ones, held by the totality of nations Other than the US is less than 100. The US has over 750 bases on foreign soil in over 80 countries.
How did you think America had gotten away with it’s warcrimes scott free until now? Until America itself calls the shot the rest of us are basically on tiptoe.
Considering the US has the more millitary bases on foreign soil than the rest of the world combined…
Actually let me recontextualize this so you realize how much America has a gun to the rest of the world’s collective heads. The number of foreign bases, exempting potential secret off the record ones, held by the totality of nations Other than the US is less than 100. The US has over 750 bases on foreign soil in over 80 countries.
How did you think America had gotten away with it’s warcrimes scott free until now? Until America itself calls the shot the rest of us are basically on tiptoe.
Considering the US has the more millitary bases on foreign soil than the rest of the world combined…
Actually let me recontextualize this so you realize how much America has a gun to the rest of the world’s collective heads. The number of foreign bases, exempting potential secret off the record ones, held by the totality of nations Other than the US is less than 100. The US has over 750 bases on foreign soil in over 80 countries.
How did you think America had gotten away with it’s warcrimes scott free until now? Until America itself calls the shot the rest of us are basically on tiptoe.
I think you are looking too narrowly at explicit mention of specific things and missing the forest for the trees a bit. It’s smaller and in places but look at his appeal to widows and the unmarried in Corinthians
“To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.”
Marriage and sexuallity is a failure state for Paul. A lack of control over one’s Holy Temple of a body. He outlines the only circumstances one can have sex that isn’t a complete affront to God because he veiws the desire and need for it at all as weakness that is a tough sell a lot of his followers. It’s not so much a guidebook to pleasure, it’s creation of a roped off private circumstances to indulge a shameful human desire.
If you’re interested I recommend going back and reading his letters again but from the imagined perspective that Paul is a sex repulsed asexual who holds his own perspective on sex as the most sacred option. There’s some interesting queer discussion on the matter out there.
There are some aspects of Paul which tick the conservative box in that he comes across as a sex negative asexual who uses part of his soapbox to preach his own distain by insisting that pleasure in sex is bad and linking the idea of anything but purely reproductive sex with a spiritual uncleanliness and immorality. It fuels a lot of bad shit from purity doctrine to anti-same sex relationship rhetoric.
Not that sexual control over women and reproduction particularly hasn’t been a worldwide phenomenon but instilling pleasure and sex directly to sin really linked in to all the conservative bullshit that Paul’s hijacked letters contained so I feel like there’s a bit of a “depends on your definition of conservative” thing.
Totally cool making WA a Province but leave providence out of it. Canadian politics are aggressively secular and we would prefer any divinities keep their noses out of our maple-y business.