So true. Trump Republicans remind me of the "two-minute hate" in Orwell's "1984", except that their hatred, while just as performative, lasts far longer. H.L.Mencken described Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy". I think this description suits the MAGA leaders and their disciples too.
I hereby award this commentary of the Week! Justin, 🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯
This is ultimately what s behind these miserable hateful sub-humans. Their christian religion is loaded with violence and fear mongering & it is ingrained in them early on. They can’t be happy if others succeed. It has to be THEM. Because they have been taught, and the media has repeated that they are victims. There are always others to blame. There is no reason whatsoever to repeat the idiocy that “they felt ignored & left out!” I scream at the screen every time someone writes it, including Bernie. Trump et al has given hateful speech after hateful threatening violent speech. He’s a felon-a rapist-a psychopath who can’t speak a full sentence. But they’re still behind him!
These are fascists and hateful people to the core. They must be crushed not pampered. Will we ever learn!?
And you know what? They want us to be as miserable as them and it’s starting to work. Just look at how enraged I have become over the manager of my senior mobile home park flying the flag upside down at his residence. It’s very close to the entrance of our park so it’s the first thing you see when you enter now. I have become a hate filled person about NAZIsm and Fascism because of MAGA’s fascistic ways! I once had one of these idiots. Ask me why do these people meaning gays need extra rights? The questions these fools ask are revealing to us what their thought processes must be like. That stupid man of age 50 or so thought that gays were getting more rights than white people. And that’s what they are pissed off about. No one should have as many rights as straight white cis gendered males. It doesn’t make any sense to me even while I’m voicing it here right now.
No, I’m in Lakeport California. It’s northwest of Sacramento by about three hours I think in between I five and highway 101. But I am from Cocoa Beach Florida, and I will never go back to that state ever again. I ran away from home in 1969 and found California, and forever grateful even though it’s costing me every arm and every leg I have to be able to manage my monthly bills at times.
I had moved up to Oregon in 2014, because of the economic situation I was facing at the age of 60 back then. And I left the southern Oregon coast because Maga took over. And now where I moved to I’m smacked out in the middle of an entire mega enclave. I expect the other 10 flag waivers in this park to invert their flags any day now because the manager fascist I call him sent out a Robo call last night that said by now many of you have seen our upside down flag, exercising our First Amendment rights and we ask that you please respect this decision of our to leave the flag upside down in front of our house. I have been calling the headquarters office that owns the park, this guy is just the local manager. He doesn’t do anything but collect rent. And I’ve been leaving them messages that I repost here on my Facebook to call this out. it’s the only action I can take. His wife threatened me yesterday by phone. And that’s on recordings at the police department.
I called this the county on the city to find out certain things that I might have been unclear about. And I realized that My honking my horn out front of their house is completely legal. It was in the middle of the day. I only did it for about 30 seconds a couple of different times an hour and a half apart. That is not a nuisance. And she called and threatened me by continually asking me first are you the one that honked your horn were you honking your horn she kept asking it over and over cause I kept repeating. Why do you have an upside down flag out front of your home and then I would just repeat that you have an upside down over over a flag outside of your home, etc. Finally I said you have an upside down flag outside of your home and yeah I’m exercising my first amendment right a free speech in protest against it. And she goes. Yeah that’s all I needed to hear so that I can file a community complaint against you.
Sounds in a sense enough, but anytime anyone makes any kind of threat by phone by text by email or in person, that person is being aggressive in their approach, and it is not allowed. No threats of any kind. Not even an inconsequential thing like saying I’m gonna file a report against you it’s a threat and it could escalate and that’s why I called the police and I have blocked her number to protect her from herself. And I have blocked the manager from being able to reach me by phone to.
Perfect example is Greg Abbott of Texas. God tried to tech him humility by dropping a tree branch on him as he was out jogging (as the Jesus thumpers might put it), and instead of heeding the Word of the Almighty, Governor Greg makes his life work a vengeance on the world -- drowning pregnant women in razor wire is not heaven-bound behavior -- for his own confinement to a eheelchair.
Misery loves company. I’ve always understood what it meant, but mostly in terms of “hey I’ve been there too”. Now it just means “please be fucking miserable because I hate the fact you’re not, m, k, thanks”.
Dead on, Justin. The psychological effects of constantly being told that you and people like you are being oppressed and held down, regardless of its veracity, along with the ridiculous assertions that even one sinner amongst us can bring god's wrath on all of us, help form the hyper-judgmental, self-righteous mindset that has escaped from the confines of deeply fundamentalist, inerrancy touting, snake-handling, gibberish speaking, apocalyptic, young earth creationists who inhabited the hollers and trailer churches across the bible belt and mountain regions and catapaulted that syndrome into mainstream X-ianity. (Inappropriate to call it "christ"ianity, since any connection to the morality, empathy, and teachings of JC have long ceased to exist.)
Your observations remind me of the old joke: a frenchman, englishman, and russian encountered a genie, who gave each of them a wish. The frenchman stated that he was blessed to enjoy gourmet meals and wished that everyone be gifted with a lifetime supply of good food. The englishman said that he has a comfortable home in a picturesque rural village, so he wished that everyone be able to enjoy good accomodations in their lives. The russian said, "My neighbor has a goat and I do not. Kill my neighbor's goat." [Something of a perverted Kantian principle: If my beliefs prevent me from enjoying life, no one should enjoy life. They want to generalize their narrow, ascetic mindset.]
As I approached retirement and looked around my social environment, I also noted the "universal pain phenomenon" mandated by fundamental religions of all kinds and its corollary, "if you are happy and enjoying your life, you must be sinning." As I have mentioned in a number of comments in various ss columns, the personal tragedy of joy-sucking, self-righteous (masochistic) mindsets - especially in retirees who for most of their pre-MAGA lives simply lived their lives locally and did not waste energy and emotional well-being lamenting the inescapable fact that many, if not most people in a country 360 million strong will not and do not share each of your particular religious or moral beliefs. Indeed, most Xians do not even agree with each other about the tenents of the "faith" to which they all nominally ascribe. It is all so needless and a waste of time, energy, and opportunity. The only ones profiting are the people leading the congregations, extorting donations through threats of damnation, the creation of cult-like communities, and creating "theological" abominations such as the prosperity gospel to justify the leaders' love of money. JC is turning in his grave.
This is the absolute truth! I’ve seen this dynamic just in our small SE Texas town.
We have a large Hispanic population because of our location, and that had never ever been a problem.
Back in 2005-2010, I worked at a facility that employed mostly immigrants, and I became friends with a lot of them. I noticed that they always ate their lunch that came from home, and I never saw any of them when we ate out at local restaurants to dinner.
I asked about this one time because I was just curious if they felt unwelcome or what, and everyone told me it was mostly just because they couldn’t afford to eat out and they were saving up to buy homes and other things.
But after all those years of working hard, paying taxes, saving money…I guess they began to feel like a real part of the community, and had become financially stable enough to enjoy dinner out or what-have-you. I realized when we went to our local Mexican food places (of which we have five in our 11k population town) I would see those same friends and other Hispanic families out enjoying dinner too. I thought it was kinda great.
In fact I only noticed it because it had been something we’d talked about so many years before. I thought, maybe we, as a society, were really moving beyond all the old hate and ignorance.
It starts in the church: American Christianity is fragile, built on a house of cards. Bc the earth is older than 6,000 years, and those pesky scientists have the receipts. Because Christofascists are told Those Gays are living in sin and must be punished. Ergo, if we see happy gays it threatens everything their Hate Church has told them. If God loves the Christofascists, then everyone else must suffer. Otherwise ppl may start to actually question it all…
Nailed it! They want to grind us down to the point of exhaustion, but we cannot let that happen. Democracy is like a good relationship one wishes to maintain, and it takes work! We need to show up everyday to keep this idea that we all hold dear.
This one, and “if we give the LGBTQ community the right to marry, the next thing you know, someone will want the right to marry a goat”. Always wondered where that one came from too! Both insane nonsense.
Indeed. It’s all part of the “The Gay Agenda is for them to get ‘special rights’.” lie.
Ask anyone who says that, or anything similar to it, exactly what those “special rights” are and they won't be able to come up with anything that isn’t a right they themselves already have. Clearly their concern ISN’T that gay people will get something extra, but rather that they will have all the rights and the privileges that heterosexual people already enjoy.
But if you look at that phrase literally, maybe the "special right" is that those gays get to practice their homosexuality and the haters don't...so maybe they're just jealous because, as we circle back to the start of the argument, those gays get to be happy and, by God, I don't wanna piss off God.
In middle America, sex is taboo but violence is prized. Any kind of sexuality is taboo which makes it almost impossible to resist and then you get the pleasure of good Catholic/Protestant guilt. Hence, the misery.
Not just middle America. The country in general has always been much more pearl-clutchy about sex than violence.
Show a man’s head getting chopped off complete with spurting blood and your movie gets rated R (or even just PG-13 if you agree to limit the spurt to two seconds). Show the same man’s penis at all and your movie is X.
I wonder if you are aware of Robert Altemeyer's work on right wing authoritarians? His website: https://theauthoritarians.org/
I recommend the free book. This has helped me understand hateful, hostile, selfish right wingers. I'm afraid RWAs are a genetic type of human being. As you say Justin, they have always been among us. With good leadership and education, they can be managed. But, we've had way too much bad leadership and a huge rightwing lie machine and anger industry. RWAs are very gullible, easily manipulated by their preferred leaders. They like a very strong, mean "daddy" who sets the rules and punishes anyone who doesn't behave.
Conservatives love saying “I don’t care what people think about me,” when in fact they rarely think about anything else. What they mean is they won’t change anything about themselves to be more liked. But they still demand you like them, at least as far as they can perceive. That’s where the force comes in.
So true. Trump Republicans remind me of the "two-minute hate" in Orwell's "1984", except that their hatred, while just as performative, lasts far longer. H.L.Mencken described Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy". I think this description suits the MAGA leaders and their disciples too.
"David?"
"Yes, Ethel?"
"I can't sleep."
"Why's that, honey?"
"Just the idea that someone...somewhere...might be smoking a joint, harming no one, having a really good time...it keeps me up!"
"There, there, dear. I'll author a bill to make it illegal in the morning."
"Oh would you, honey? That would be swell!"
I hereby award this commentary of the Week! Justin, 🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯
This is ultimately what s behind these miserable hateful sub-humans. Their christian religion is loaded with violence and fear mongering & it is ingrained in them early on. They can’t be happy if others succeed. It has to be THEM. Because they have been taught, and the media has repeated that they are victims. There are always others to blame. There is no reason whatsoever to repeat the idiocy that “they felt ignored & left out!” I scream at the screen every time someone writes it, including Bernie. Trump et al has given hateful speech after hateful threatening violent speech. He’s a felon-a rapist-a psychopath who can’t speak a full sentence. But they’re still behind him!
These are fascists and hateful people to the core. They must be crushed not pampered. Will we ever learn!?
And you know what? They want us to be as miserable as them and it’s starting to work. Just look at how enraged I have become over the manager of my senior mobile home park flying the flag upside down at his residence. It’s very close to the entrance of our park so it’s the first thing you see when you enter now. I have become a hate filled person about NAZIsm and Fascism because of MAGA’s fascistic ways! I once had one of these idiots. Ask me why do these people meaning gays need extra rights? The questions these fools ask are revealing to us what their thought processes must be like. That stupid man of age 50 or so thought that gays were getting more rights than white people. And that’s what they are pissed off about. No one should have as many rights as straight white cis gendered males. It doesn’t make any sense to me even while I’m voicing it here right now.
Corinne, are you in Florida?! i have one near our entrance too.
No, I’m in Lakeport California. It’s northwest of Sacramento by about three hours I think in between I five and highway 101. But I am from Cocoa Beach Florida, and I will never go back to that state ever again. I ran away from home in 1969 and found California, and forever grateful even though it’s costing me every arm and every leg I have to be able to manage my monthly bills at times.
i know where that is, i was born in California and would love to come back.
I had moved up to Oregon in 2014, because of the economic situation I was facing at the age of 60 back then. And I left the southern Oregon coast because Maga took over. And now where I moved to I’m smacked out in the middle of an entire mega enclave. I expect the other 10 flag waivers in this park to invert their flags any day now because the manager fascist I call him sent out a Robo call last night that said by now many of you have seen our upside down flag, exercising our First Amendment rights and we ask that you please respect this decision of our to leave the flag upside down in front of our house. I have been calling the headquarters office that owns the park, this guy is just the local manager. He doesn’t do anything but collect rent. And I’ve been leaving them messages that I repost here on my Facebook to call this out. it’s the only action I can take. His wife threatened me yesterday by phone. And that’s on recordings at the police department.
oh my, that sounds so scary. glad it is on police record now. stay safe!
I called this the county on the city to find out certain things that I might have been unclear about. And I realized that My honking my horn out front of their house is completely legal. It was in the middle of the day. I only did it for about 30 seconds a couple of different times an hour and a half apart. That is not a nuisance. And she called and threatened me by continually asking me first are you the one that honked your horn were you honking your horn she kept asking it over and over cause I kept repeating. Why do you have an upside down flag out front of your home and then I would just repeat that you have an upside down over over a flag outside of your home, etc. Finally I said you have an upside down flag outside of your home and yeah I’m exercising my first amendment right a free speech in protest against it. And she goes. Yeah that’s all I needed to hear so that I can file a community complaint against you.
Sounds in a sense enough, but anytime anyone makes any kind of threat by phone by text by email or in person, that person is being aggressive in their approach, and it is not allowed. No threats of any kind. Not even an inconsequential thing like saying I’m gonna file a report against you it’s a threat and it could escalate and that’s why I called the police and I have blocked her number to protect her from herself. And I have blocked the manager from being able to reach me by phone to.
It's in the Bible. Straight white men, our overlords forever.
That’s why I’m an atheist anymore. I’ve studied that Bible.
Perfect example is Greg Abbott of Texas. God tried to tech him humility by dropping a tree branch on him as he was out jogging (as the Jesus thumpers might put it), and instead of heeding the Word of the Almighty, Governor Greg makes his life work a vengeance on the world -- drowning pregnant women in razor wire is not heaven-bound behavior -- for his own confinement to a eheelchair.
Is it October already? I'm hoping there's a typo in how many days there are until the election or else I seriously overslept
Whoops! Fixed. :)
I had the same thought. 😉😊
Misery loves company. I’ve always understood what it meant, but mostly in terms of “hey I’ve been there too”. Now it just means “please be fucking miserable because I hate the fact you’re not, m, k, thanks”.
Dead on, Justin. The psychological effects of constantly being told that you and people like you are being oppressed and held down, regardless of its veracity, along with the ridiculous assertions that even one sinner amongst us can bring god's wrath on all of us, help form the hyper-judgmental, self-righteous mindset that has escaped from the confines of deeply fundamentalist, inerrancy touting, snake-handling, gibberish speaking, apocalyptic, young earth creationists who inhabited the hollers and trailer churches across the bible belt and mountain regions and catapaulted that syndrome into mainstream X-ianity. (Inappropriate to call it "christ"ianity, since any connection to the morality, empathy, and teachings of JC have long ceased to exist.)
Your observations remind me of the old joke: a frenchman, englishman, and russian encountered a genie, who gave each of them a wish. The frenchman stated that he was blessed to enjoy gourmet meals and wished that everyone be gifted with a lifetime supply of good food. The englishman said that he has a comfortable home in a picturesque rural village, so he wished that everyone be able to enjoy good accomodations in their lives. The russian said, "My neighbor has a goat and I do not. Kill my neighbor's goat." [Something of a perverted Kantian principle: If my beliefs prevent me from enjoying life, no one should enjoy life. They want to generalize their narrow, ascetic mindset.]
As I approached retirement and looked around my social environment, I also noted the "universal pain phenomenon" mandated by fundamental religions of all kinds and its corollary, "if you are happy and enjoying your life, you must be sinning." As I have mentioned in a number of comments in various ss columns, the personal tragedy of joy-sucking, self-righteous (masochistic) mindsets - especially in retirees who for most of their pre-MAGA lives simply lived their lives locally and did not waste energy and emotional well-being lamenting the inescapable fact that many, if not most people in a country 360 million strong will not and do not share each of your particular religious or moral beliefs. Indeed, most Xians do not even agree with each other about the tenents of the "faith" to which they all nominally ascribe. It is all so needless and a waste of time, energy, and opportunity. The only ones profiting are the people leading the congregations, extorting donations through threats of damnation, the creation of cult-like communities, and creating "theological" abominations such as the prosperity gospel to justify the leaders' love of money. JC is turning in his grave.
This is the absolute truth! I’ve seen this dynamic just in our small SE Texas town.
We have a large Hispanic population because of our location, and that had never ever been a problem.
Back in 2005-2010, I worked at a facility that employed mostly immigrants, and I became friends with a lot of them. I noticed that they always ate their lunch that came from home, and I never saw any of them when we ate out at local restaurants to dinner.
I asked about this one time because I was just curious if they felt unwelcome or what, and everyone told me it was mostly just because they couldn’t afford to eat out and they were saving up to buy homes and other things.
But after all those years of working hard, paying taxes, saving money…I guess they began to feel like a real part of the community, and had become financially stable enough to enjoy dinner out or what-have-you. I realized when we went to our local Mexican food places (of which we have five in our 11k population town) I would see those same friends and other Hispanic families out enjoying dinner too. I thought it was kinda great.
In fact I only noticed it because it had been something we’d talked about so many years before. I thought, maybe we, as a society, were really moving beyond all the old hate and ignorance.
And then came 2015…
I’m just so disgusted with the whole lot of them.
It starts in the church: American Christianity is fragile, built on a house of cards. Bc the earth is older than 6,000 years, and those pesky scientists have the receipts. Because Christofascists are told Those Gays are living in sin and must be punished. Ergo, if we see happy gays it threatens everything their Hate Church has told them. If God loves the Christofascists, then everyone else must suffer. Otherwise ppl may start to actually question it all…
This is correct. I was raised in that. They even demonize Carl Sagan.
Nailed it! They want to grind us down to the point of exhaustion, but we cannot let that happen. Democracy is like a good relationship one wishes to maintain, and it takes work! We need to show up everyday to keep this idea that we all hold dear.
“It’s important to understand that this is the enemy we face. They can’t be reasoned with …. They can’t be bargained with”
🤖
“It destroys the sanctity of marriage!”
Nobody has ever been able to explain that one to me. Not what the “sanctity of marriage” is and absolutely not how it gets destroyed.
I’m open minded. Anyone want to give it a go?
This one, and “if we give the LGBTQ community the right to marry, the next thing you know, someone will want the right to marry a goat”. Always wondered where that one came from too! Both insane nonsense.
Indeed. It’s all part of the “The Gay Agenda is for them to get ‘special rights’.” lie.
Ask anyone who says that, or anything similar to it, exactly what those “special rights” are and they won't be able to come up with anything that isn’t a right they themselves already have. Clearly their concern ISN’T that gay people will get something extra, but rather that they will have all the rights and the privileges that heterosexual people already enjoy.
That those who were oppressed become equals.
But if you look at that phrase literally, maybe the "special right" is that those gays get to practice their homosexuality and the haters don't...so maybe they're just jealous because, as we circle back to the start of the argument, those gays get to be happy and, by God, I don't wanna piss off God.
There do seem to be a lot of homosexual and self-hating behavior by those who oppose equality of LGBTetc. people.
The “I’m ashamed of my sexuality so you don’t get to be comfortable with yours!” hate akin to what Justin pointed out in his article.
In middle America, sex is taboo but violence is prized. Any kind of sexuality is taboo which makes it almost impossible to resist and then you get the pleasure of good Catholic/Protestant guilt. Hence, the misery.
Not just middle America. The country in general has always been much more pearl-clutchy about sex than violence.
Show a man’s head getting chopped off complete with spurting blood and your movie gets rated R (or even just PG-13 if you agree to limit the spurt to two seconds). Show the same man’s penis at all and your movie is X.
I wonder if you are aware of Robert Altemeyer's work on right wing authoritarians? His website: https://theauthoritarians.org/
I recommend the free book. This has helped me understand hateful, hostile, selfish right wingers. I'm afraid RWAs are a genetic type of human being. As you say Justin, they have always been among us. With good leadership and education, they can be managed. But, we've had way too much bad leadership and a huge rightwing lie machine and anger industry. RWAs are very gullible, easily manipulated by their preferred leaders. They like a very strong, mean "daddy" who sets the rules and punishes anyone who doesn't behave.
Conservatives love saying “I don’t care what people think about me,” when in fact they rarely think about anything else. What they mean is they won’t change anything about themselves to be more liked. But they still demand you like them, at least as far as they can perceive. That’s where the force comes in.
Yup, crisis imagineers. Crisis addicts.