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The GQP: Trumpist Death Cult


Hugo Stiglitz

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15 minutes ago, brown water said:

All these analogies are wrong because the issue isn’t solely the risk you’re willing to take - it’s balancing that risk with the collective interest of the community.  For many of us that’s an easy choice yet you and your ilk default back to solely selfish reasons. I’ll try a different comparison. 
 

Not reclining the airplane seat during take off and landing isn’t for your safety. It’s for the safety of the passenger behind you. You seem like a guy that would complain about not being able to recline. You actually seem like a guy would prefer to because it makes you a bit safer at someone else’s expense. 

I get that, I really do. But what I'm saying to you is that in theory and on paper, it is very easy to say. If you or your loved one were to have a vaccine injury-- whether that be a blood clot or a lifelong autoimmune disease-- the collective interest of the community suddenly is not as important as the acute, personal outcome in your own life. Maybe to some, but not to others at least-- and that "selfishness" is not immoral or unethical, or at least is debatably so unlike people who want to legislate morality for others.

As I mentioned in the first post-- there are no 100% safe and sure things. The law of large numbers says someone, somewhere will get screwed. Whether it be from a vaccine injury or from getting Covid-19. I assume there is an acceptable number by way of a % for people being hurt by the vaccinations that can be kept under to put a vaccination (or any medication) on the market, hence the crazy side-effect warnings for most meds.

I think today being scared of the Covid-19 vaccination is being a chicken little, to @Sawbonz point on the data we now have **checks notes** two years later, but I also think (and said) that in the immediate time after the vaccine was rushed to market, there is sane and reasonable reason to take a wait and see approach. Especially as the pharma companies were given legal immunity, so there was no remedy for any damages. That's it.

Edited by HamsterHookah
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On 2/2/2023 at 12:28 PM, HamsterHookah said:

I get that, I really do. But what I'm saying to you is that in theory and on paper, it is very easy to say. If you or your loved one were to have a vaccine injury-- whether that be a blood clot or a lifelong autoimmune disease-- the collective interest of the community suddenly is not as important as the acute, personal outcome in your own life. Maybe to some, but not to others at least-- and that "selfishness" is not immoral or unethical, or at least is debatably so unlike people who want to legislate morality for others.

As I mentioned in the first post-- there are no 100% safe and sure things. The law of large numbers says someone, somewhere will get screwed. Whether it be from a vaccine injury or from getting Covid-19. I assume there is an acceptable number by way of a % for people being hurt by the vaccinations that can be kept under to put a vaccination (or any medication) on the market, hence the crazy side-effect warnings for most meds.

I think today being scared of the Covid-19 vaccination is being a chicken little, to @Sawbonz point on the data we now have **checks notes** two years later, but I also think (and said) that in the immediate time after the vaccine was rushed to market, there is sane and reasonable reason to take a wait and see approach. Especially as the pharma companies were given legal immunity, so there was no remedy for any damages. That's it.

Wait and see for what exactly? This mentality and the fact that “vaccine injuries” miraculously occur with conservatives at significantly higher levels than dems and libtards is laughable.

The reality is that you and the rest of your ilk don’t want any level of government telling you what to do even though you are perfectly fine having the same government officials tell women what they ought to do with their bodies.

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On 2/1/2023 at 7:05 AM, Biff Tannen said:

Why do people keep posting what these morons are doing on like newsmax and “real Americas voice”, whatever that is?  They don’t need to be amplified. 

At the risk of sounding like an old man yelling at clouds, which I am, you are absolutely right.

Don't repeat stupid shit by morons.  It's a pretty easy rule to follow.

 

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45 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Let's put our big brains together and figure out the potential risk from covid vaccines as compared to the covid virus:

 

Dead Americans from covid:  1.1M

Dead Americans from covid vaccine:  Bueller?  Bueller?  Anybody have that number?

Well there's that football player.  Never mind that he's since been seen in public.  That's a deep fake and the whole team is in on it.

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47 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Let's put our big brains together and figure out the potential risk from covid vaccines as compared to the covid virus:

 

Dead Americans from covid:  1.1M

Dead Americans from covid vaccine:  Bueller?  Bueller?  Anybody have that number?

Nine Times, Mrs. Bueller.  Nine Times.........

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51 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Let's put our big brains together and figure out the potential risk from covid vaccines as compared to the covid virus:

 

Dead Americans from covid:  1.1M

Dead Americans from covid vaccine:  Bueller?  Bueller?  Anybody have that number?

3 minutes ago, YGIFS said:

Nine Times, Mrs. Bueller.  Nine Times.........

Correct. Here’s the CDC report.
 

Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem. More than 668 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered in the United States from December 14, 2020, through January 26, 2023. During this time, VAERS received 18,977 preliminary reports of death (0.0028%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine. CDC and FDA clinicians review reports of death to VAERS including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records. Continued monitoring has identified nine deaths causally associated with J&J/Janssen COVID-19 vaccination. CDC and FDA continue to review reports of death following COVID-19 vaccination and update information as it becomes available.

 

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html

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Imagine being groomed by your parents to one day shoot them both dead in accordance with their wishes.  At least they never took her to a drag show.  

I'll give them this much---they could have taken others out with them but at least had the decency to do this in the privacy of their own home like good, consenting adults.  

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https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/republicans-ar-15-lapel-pin-clyde-santos-20230205.html

 

Quote

The backward walk of devolution that is the modern Republican Party, and the near-death experience of American governing, can be best told through the story of two adjacent Long Island congressional districts that, over the course of one generation, sent two radically different kinds of human beings to Capitol Hill.

In 1993, a stunning act of violence turned an everyday citizen into a political activist who tried to change the world for the better — by getting elected to Congress. Carolyn McCarthy was shocked when her husband was murdered and her son wounded when a rage-addled madman boarded a Long Island Rail Road commuter train and began firing a Ruger 9mm pistol, killing six and wounding 19. A nurse by training, she ran for Congress in New York’s 4th Congressional District as a Democrat three years later and won an upset victory, largely on her promise to Long Islanders that she would be “the fiercest gun-control advocate.”

 

 

Quote

McCarthy’s storyline had an almost Frank Capra-esque feel, albeit tinged with sadness. But her tenure overlapped with the rise of a far-right Republican Party that fetishized firearms ownership and thus ensured there would be no Jimmy Stewart-style satisfying ending to her crusade for justice for the gun attack on her family. In fact, McCarthy was a House member in 2004 when her colleagues allowed a ban on assault weapons to expire, triggering a rise in mass shootings like the one that shattered that LIRR commuter car.

She retired in 2014, eight years before voters next door in New York’s 3rd Congressional District, covering Long Island’s North Shore and parts of Queens, elected a GOP grifter and con man who called himself George Santos. While McCarthy had gone to Washington to get something done on guns, the cash-strapped Santos reportedly confided to friends hewanted to cash in on the lucrative congressional pension and free health care.

 

 

Spoiler

In winning election on a completely made-up resume, Santos is the final downward spiral for a Republican Party that has become 100% about the performance and 0% about the policy. So when his new GOP colleague from Georgia handed Santos a lapel pin in the shape of an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, the New Yorker did what any outrageous showman would do. He pinned it on.

The sight in recent days of Santos and several of his Republican colleagues parading through the hallowed halls of the U.S. Capitol with a mini-celebration of a killing machine that serves no civilian purpose beyond mowing down large numbers of innocent people in the shortest possible time is perhaps the most hideous assault on human decency I’ve seen in more than 40 years of covering U.S. politics.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? The lapel pins — like those Christmas cards of their adorable blond kids armed to the teeth with high-powered weaponry or the right’s new love affair with the toxic fumes of gas stoves— are meant to “trigger the libs” and sustain a career arc that generates prime-time hits on Fox News and fund-raising emails without ever having to get anything done. Yes, you could argue this column, then, is a perfect example of what these cons want. But what a choice: playing along, or remaining silent while America sheds the skin of humanity.

It’s one thing to embrace the more extreme interpretations of what the Second Amendment means around the rights of individual citizens to buy or own a gun, for purposes like hunting or self-defense. It’s something else entirely to worship the AR-15 and similar assault rifles, which were invented in the 1950s for the military and weren’t meant for civilians until the lucrative gun manufacturers who also finance the National Rifle Association saw a gold mine in marketingthem to men obsessed with their masculinity in an era of social change.

And so these AR-15 lapel pins appeared on the chests of Santos and his fellow newcomer Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida — even in the same week that back in Luna’s home state four gunmen in a sedan opened fire on a crowd of people in Lakeland, wounding 11. Even as the notorious list of deaths from mass shootings involving AR-15-style weapons — in now-infamous locales like Uvalde, Las Vegas, Orlando, Sutherland Springs, Parkland and Newtown — grows longer and longer.

Imagine members strutting around the corridors of Congress in late 2001 with a Boeing 747 lapel pin, or wearing a spiky replica of the coronavirus when New York City’s morgues were overflowing in the spring of 2020. Explain to me how worshiping an AR-15 — when the blood stains are still being scrubbed off a dance studio in Monterey Park, Club Q in Colorado Springs, or a bus in Charlottesville — is any different, really?

Yet while it’s about “owning the libs,” the GOP’s performance art is also about much more than that. It’s instructive to look at who has been handing out the AR-15 lapel pins: Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia. In the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department, Clyde was born on Nov. 22, 1963 — the exact day that someone with a rifle gunned down President John F. Kennedy — and he has built his political career around the cult of firearms.

A Navy combat vet who before this week was best known for his declaration that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection was like “a normal tourist visit,” Clyde was first elected in 2020 largely on his high profile in the north Georgia exurbs as the owner of the Clyde Armory gun store. He grew that operation from his garage into a $25 million business, marketing AR-15-style guns in the heart of Trump country. That’s because in the Donald Trump/George Santos GOP, grievance is highly profitable — and often a grift.

But Clyde’s career is also a tribute to the ways that today’s GOP has inherited the flag that Southern segregationists like Georgia’s Lester Maddox waved in the 1960s. The Georgia freshman was one of only three House members to vote against the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act and 14 who opposed the creation of the Juneteenth holiday. In doling out his AR-15 pins, Clyde reminds us that the NRA’s radical interpretation of the Second Amendment arose only after Black civil rights gains in the 1960s, and that for its true believers gun ownership is a surrogate for their core value, which is white supremacy.

For much of America’s history, white supremacy — enforced by everything from the bias baked into our laws and codes to the terror of lynching — has dominated. When the swings of social change and a more enlightened government advanced the rights of Blacks, women, the LGBTQ community and others, Republicans competed as the anti-government party backed by the new terror of their unbridled gun cult, but even that increasingly is a losing hand in a more diverse and better educated America. If the white supremacy-soaked far right can no longer rule our nation, today’s Republicans are all too happy to blow it all up, in a world of mass shootings, insurrections, and unchecked pandemics. Their nihilism — wittingly or not — has turned them into a death cult.

At the start of 2023, Clyde, Santos and Luna are the avatars of what some have called “the Seinfeld Congress” with the House back under Republican control — a show about “nothing.” The next two years are indeed likely to see little more than a surge of Fox News-friendly stunts around protecting gas stoves or banning drag shows, but the GOP’s lack of interest in policy is worse than inertia. Americans are dying from do-nothing government.

It’s not only the hundreds who’ve been needlessly killed since 2004 in the surge of mass shootings by AR-15-style weapons and large-capacity magazines that Congress had banned in the 1990s only to let that successful law expire. And it’s not just the rejection of 99% of the world’s top climate scientists by a political party screaming “drill, baby, drill!” in the face of growing wildfires and 1000-year floods that are destroying homes and lives.

Today, the leading candidates for the 2024 Republican nomination for president — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and our ex-president Donald Trump — seem locked in a bidding war for who can most dissuade the public from using the COVID-19 vaccines that both men once touted before vaccine denial was swept into the jet stream of conservative nihilism. DeSantis has even launched a criminal probe of the vaccine’s production — pretending that research hasn’t shown that the shots have been highly effective in preventing hospitalization and death. As the pandemic nears its third anniversary, some 400 to 500 Americans are still dying every day — many, needlessly.

And things could get worse. In recent days, health experts are increasingly alarmed about newer H5N1 strains of the so-called bird flu that seem to spread more easily among mammals, which is highly worrisome because human infections with the bird flu have been much more deadly than COVID-19. In other words, a major outbreak of bird flu would require exactly the type of communal response — both in terms of government spending and action, and public cooperation — that today’s nihilistic Republican Party is built to prevent.

So when the next pandemic strikes, our first line of defense will be the Andrew Clydes and George Santoses waving the silly millimeters of their do-nothing death cult’s AR-15 lapel pins against the lethal threat they can’t see and don’t understand. God save the United States of America.

 

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Christian nationalism as a worldview is not new but the terms is. Indeed, a third of respondents said they had not heard of the term. For that reason, it’s impossible to say whether the ranks of Christian nationalists have grown over time.

In their book “Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States,” sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Sam Perry found that about 20% of Americans strongly embrace Christian nationalist ideas. The PRRI survey is more in line with a 2021 Pew Research survey that found that 10% of Americans are what Pew identified as hard-core “faith and flag” conservatives.

Whatever the precise number, the survey confirms that by a ratio of 2-to-1, Americans reject a Christian nationalist worldview.

The vast majority of Americans (70%) do not think the government should declare America a Christian nation. And nearly 60% do not think its laws should be based on Christian values.

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48 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

Christian nationalism as a worldview is not new but the terms is. Indeed, a third of respondents said they had not heard of the term. For that reason, it’s impossible to say whether the ranks of Christian nationalists have grown over time.

In their book “Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States,” sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Sam Perry found that about 20% of Americans strongly embrace Christian nationalist ideas. The PRRI survey is more in line with a 2021 Pew Research survey that found that 10% of Americans are what Pew identified as hard-core “faith and flag” conservatives.

Whatever the precise number, the survey confirms that by a ratio of 2-to-1, Americans reject a Christian nationalist worldview.

The vast majority of Americans (70%) do not think the government should declare America a Christian nation. And nearly 60% do not think its laws should be based on Christian values.

This is horrifying 

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1 hour ago, cactusflinthead said:

Christian nationalism as a worldview is not new but the terms is. Indeed, a third of respondents said they had not heard of the term. For that reason, it’s impossible to say whether the ranks of Christian nationalists have grown over time.

In their book “Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States,” sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Sam Perry found that about 20% of Americans strongly embrace Christian nationalist ideas. The PRRI survey is more in line with a 2021 Pew Research survey that found that 10% of Americans are what Pew identified as hard-core “faith and flag” conservatives.

Whatever the precise number, the survey confirms that by a ratio of 2-to-1, Americans reject a Christian nationalist worldview.

The vast majority of Americans (70%) do not think the government should declare America a Christian nation. And nearly 60% do not think its laws should be based on Christian values.

Clickbait

 

A new PRRI survey finds that 10% of Americans are avowed Christian nationalists and an additional 19% are sympathetic to its ideals. Among both groups combined, nearly two-thirds are white evangelicals.

 

be better

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2 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

Clickbait

 

A new PRRI survey finds that 10% of Americans are avowed Christian nationalists and an additional 19% are sympathetic to its ideals. Among both groups combined, nearly two-thirds are white evangelicals.

 

be better

I wouldn't call it clickbaity. I made it a point to include the quote that under any measure the Nays have a 2-1 advantage on the question. It's a 6600 sample size. I'm ok with the methodology. 10% hardcore? Yeah I buy that. Another 19% sympathizers? Give or take. That's the gray area. I'm feeling pretty good about 10%  as being sold out for a CHRISTIAN NATION. How many are willing to go to Jan 6 levels? Well there weren't that many, but they do seem to attend a lot of school board meetings.

I'll stand by it. You're gonna have to point out the problems with the findings not the headline to get a click. This is a known tool to get you to click. You know this. Worked didn't it? You clicked on Br. Reese's clickbait didn't ya?

We can argue numbers and that's fair, but this thread is full of citizens fucking convinced that we are a Christian nation and their laws should be based on their interpretation of it. 2-1? 3-1? 100-1? Does it really matter? Some fucking shithead gets a hating on and one man can do a bunch of damage. See Atlanta for bombs. See numerous shootings. See countless racist religiously motivated beatings post 9/11.

How many? How hardcore? I guarantee they are running questions by new participants as we argue about it.

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13 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

I wouldn't call it clickbaity. I made it a point to include the quote that under any measure the Nays have a 2-1 advantage on the question. It's a 6600 sample size. I'm ok with the methodology. 10% hardcore? Yeah I buy that. Another 19% sympathizers? Give or take. That's the gray area. I'm feeling pretty good about 10%  as being sold out for a CHRISTIAN NATION. How many are willing to go to Jan 6 levels? Well there weren't that many, but they do seem to attend a lot of school board meetings.

I'll stand by it. You're gonna have to point out the problems with the findings not the headline to get a click. This is a known tool to get you to click. You know this. Worked didn't it? You clicked on Br. Reese's clickbait didn't ya?

We can argue numbers and that's fair, but this thread is full of citizens fucking convinced that we are a Christian nation and their laws should be based on their interpretation of it. 2-1? 3-1? 100-1? Does it really matter? Some fucking shithead gets a hating on and one man can do a bunch of damage. See Atlanta for bombs. See numerous shootings. See countless racist religiously motivated beatings post 9/11.

How many? How hardcore? I guarantee they are running questions by new participants as we argue about it.

10% is not 30%. It’s not difficult. I don’t like misinformation and fearmongering regardless of which side is doing it. Words have meanings. We should be mindful of that

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1 hour ago, cactusflinthead said:

We can argue numbers and that's fair, but this thread is full of citizens fucking convinced that we are a Christian nation and their laws should be based on their interpretation of it.

I look at our entertainment, I look at our leadership (political, business, sports, etc.), and quite a few other things, and it's pretty clear we are not a "Christian nation" in the sense that these people believe we are - hell, those nuts supported Trump, a guy who has had three wives and cheated on them, sometimes being caught openly doing so, and a guy who has no problem swearing and breaking the Third Commandment, along with quite a few other of the Commandments.  That speaks volumes about what they really feel like - it's not about being a Christian to them, it's about trying to make things happen the way they want them to happen, dressed up in Christian imagery.

And I've got some of those folks in my family (go Arkansas and Oklahoma and East Texas), and I clashed with them a few times, even a few times pointing out that him losing was what they get for supporting a serial adulterer who refused to ask forgiveness for his sins.  That always pissed them off because refusing to ask forgiveness/admitting you are a sinner is a big deal with some of those folks, but I digress.

Church membership/attendance has been declining.  I think we may look back at COVID being one of the final nails in the coffin for a lot of churches - a whole lot of younger people, people with kids, found themselves freed up on Sunday mornings, and I know plenty who were churchgoers pre-COVID, who discovered they had better things to do with their time on Sundays.  A decade ago, 75% or so of Americans identified as Christians, while it's now down to the mid-60s.  Sure, plenty of churches will now hang on, but my wife changed churches, and we did the church-shopping thing for a few months, and the churches that we saw that were healthy/vibrant were pretty-damned accommodating of a lot of different folks at all ages, but in particularly chasing a younger crowd.  It seemed like the ones drying up were the more fundamentalist types catering to an older or more radical crowd.  Those people can't keep the larger churches out of the red, at least not for too long.

That's not to say they aren't going to cause damage, particularly at the local level, simply because too many Americans are apathetic about school boards, etc.  They know they are on a timer of sorts though- their numbers are shrinking (not enough having big-ass families), and when things like the Roe v Wade ruling happen, that energizes people against them, as we saw last November.  But that also means that they may just focus their energy on things like the school districts.  They are acting like the place is on fire and they are going to empty the cash register on the way out.

 

 

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