#incongruity | #WhatTheyVotedFor
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... it like your saying Hitler was part of a unstoppable cycle, gee would it not be nice to know what causes those ups and downs and stop it? Or is your goal to just sit back and claim you saw it all coming while doing nothing to prevent it?
You should probably put in some effort and #StartMakingSense.
To wit, it only seems like ... er ... ah ... that, I guess, whatever it's supposed to mean—you're not really trying, are you?—because you say so. Other than that, let's go with random flying monkey pulled out of someone else's fantastic ass that doesn't exist.
No shit! But this is NEW, this is different, but to you it is all the same, and that inability to see the diffidence makes this argument impassible at this point.
Yeah, we're aware of the conservative need to declare arbitrary starts to history. It coincides with the conservative need to think everything is new and unprecedented, to the point that they start to sound like Douglas Adams' old joke about sheep and the sunrise.
And poe's law does not apply to striping white men of the vote?
To borrow from Lisa Simpson: What does that even mean, anyway? Seriously, you're not really trying, are you?
What does education have to do with this.
Sometimes it helps with making
logical and
rational decisions. Like, you know, trying to find the benefit in, and deciding whether or not to participate in anti-Semitism.
I buy into what I have seen with my own eyes, if they have seen the same thing, does that somehow make it all not real? If they say 2+2=4 is it now untrue or part of some republican propaganda?
It is uncertain how many people around here remember ideas like VHF and UHF, rabbit ears, a dial, or getting four stations between two and thirteen, but also picking up channel twenty-eight, or whatever, that was always Christian programming. Or, say,
Divorce Court straight into
Success 'n' Life. And, okay, so there was this band, called Panic, and I'll have to look up the song because it's never the one I think, but they crammed a sample of the S'n'L preacher, Bob Tilton, onto their album at one point; the guy is an echo of childhood for a bunch of us. And then there were the Crouches, who succeeded the Bakkers at Praise The Lord. I recall the late Jan Crouch once explaining to the audience that God gave makeup to the Christian women so they could be the prettiest. And, you know, for years, I laughed at that with my only other witness, my mother. And then one day I went and heard it again, from a completely different direction. And it's hard to decide where to start with what's wrong with all that.
But, you know, I've seen with my own eyes: Yes, there are some women who call themselves Christian who do, in fact, need makeup in order to reduce the aesthetic discomfort their appearances inspire among certain others who need women to wear makeup in order to be properly pretty.
And, you know, it's something you can see in the world, and you're welcome to buy into it and see the same thing, but in the end it is only true or not as a matter of belief. And this? Complete bullshit. Do you know how we accommodate people like the Crouches, how to not make them uncomfortable? Be like them. Imitate them. Use the same words. Dress the same. Judge others as ye see the Crouches judging.
Which is all fine, right? Until the part where merely existing without doing so makes them uncomfortable. So tell me, if they believe God made Christian women so ugly as to need makeup in order to be properly beautiful, is it untrue or part of some Christian propaganda?
The question of two plus two equaling four is pretty straightforward. The trick is in whether what one describes actually equals what it is. In the Crouches' world, that God created makeup for Christian women to be the prettiest is as straightforward as two plus two. Within the boundaries of faith, it seemed rather quite inappropriate to wonder why God made Christian women so damn ugly in the first place. Or why "pretty" mattered in the eyes of God.
And while it's true most I knew were hardly so obsessed about women's appearances, I'm also of the generation that saw
Redbook endure a terrible controversy by offending its advertisers when they selected a Harvard professor as woman of the year; she didn't wear makeup, so advertisers threatened to pull from the magazine.
Women and makeup; two plus two. (What does that even mean, anyway?)
Fun bit of trivia: There were a lot of noise nuisance ordinances in the eighties, as part of the Christian fight against youth and freedom. Okay, that's one way of putting it. But the thing was the laws were only enforced against heavy metal and rap. When it came to violating the ordinance under the guise of chasing black people away from McDonald's or country music for the same reason at a car dealership, people didn't understand what kind of jerk would try to apply the noise ordinance. And what finally did those particular noise ordinances in was Harley Davidson. Yeah, you can still ban the use of compression brakes in your city, but a bunch of noise ordinances passed to stop young people from playing heavy metal or rap in public, never really did work.
But the argument behind censorship has found many innovative uses in contemporary conservatism. The idea was an adaptation of the
end of the nose argument about rights. As it stands, one's right to swing their fist ends at the tip of another's nose. Empowered Christianity attempted a reasonably popular argument:
Your right to free speech ends where I am offended. And we've pretty much been on that one ever since. Music, movies, television, books, birth control, health insurance,
feeding children, religions other than Christianity, &c. The list goes on. It's the heart of the conservative social policy argument by which the Christian can only be equal under law by having superior rights and protection under law.
Truth told, if you can convince a billion Chinese, or anyone else, as such, that the healthiest way to avoid air pollution is to cover your head with a plastic bag, y'all will still be wrong.
If they have seen the same thing? Welcome to the brotherhood, dude. It's the same appeal to solidarity men relied on back in the eighties, when those uppity women were stealing their jobs and pretending the temerity to tell a man she had a choice in whether or not she was going to have sex with him.
Saying two plus two equals four is actually supposed to mean something beyond whatever emotional twinge you might feel in saying it.
Your politicking lacks any actual appeal to rational discourse. See, in the end, the only way to not offend the
women need makeup argument is to neither contest nor defy it. Two plus two, man. All it takes is for women to shut the fuck up and wear makeup ... in certain ways ... that, you know, men find attractive ... or that preachers' wives approve of. You know, not spooned on like a harlot, but troweled on like Tammy Faye or Jan.
And this is what you can't account for. And there is no Spock dualism for mystery. That is, we understand why you're unwilling to try; it is because you are unable to succeed. Part of me wants to say something like, "Don't feel badly, but ...". The problem, of course, is that such prefaces ring hollow when what comes next is to remind of your inherent human limitations. But the truth is you are unable to succeed because it is an impossible task. That there is a hypothetical state by which humanity can meet such bizarre standards does not mean they are rational.
In truth, Jan Crouch is part of a consistent American Christian tradition of pantomiming faithlessness.
In the fourth century, Arius and Athanasius threw down about the nature of Christ, and with spectacularly stupid and enduring results. The problem, of course, was human pride: The divinity of Jesus would undermine the redemption on the Cross; the humanity of Jesus was repugnant for presuming God frail. That is, yes, the dispute really was between practical reality according to the story before them, to the one, and wanting to be able to say their God was better than anyone else's, to the other. And they concretized this conflict in a particular Creed still recited in many churches, today, and then continued on their merry way, including prosecuting people for denying the full humanity of Jesus. See, the way they settled the problem, functionally, was that Jesus Christ was one hundred percent human, and also one hundred percent divine.
It's like another Douglas Adams joke, the one about how the Babel fish destroyed God. If the point is faith, these are the people who decide they can best demonstrate their faith by doggedly attempting to prove everything, and, furthermore, having engaged that seemingly paradoxical struggle, encounter the problem of being able to prove anything, and thus invent bizarre surrogates in lieu of solutions.
Judge not, except when ye do. Render unto Caesar, except when ye don't want to. Something about adultery, something about divorce. Eventually we get to Kim Davis.
Faithless.
I've been trying out the word "Christianist", lately. It seems to work; I'm unwilling to call them "Christian". Two plus two. Corn is not Steve.
And they can be wrong, just like anyone else, including you.
