We often hear people say how little difference there is between the two main political parties in the U.S. And it’s true that they’re both driven by money’s corruptive influence; lawmakers reward their campaign donors with legislation that benefits them financially.
Yet if we’re able to look beyond that sad fact, there are very few similarities between the Republicans and the Democrats, as illustrated by the meme here.
I used to say that there are two types of Trump supporters: the amoral rich and the hateful morons. I use the word amoral because most of these people are not actually vicious; they simply couldn’t care less about anybody but themselves and their families.
That was before all this ruckus went down about Fox News. What can we say about Tucker Carlson, for instance? Here’s a man who “hates Trump passionately,” but, in exchange for fabulous amounts of money, goes on camera every night and tells millions of viewers that the former president is a man of honor and great love for his country, who’s being unjustly harassed by the radical left who have weaponized the DoJ.
In summary, Carlson receives his salary on the basis of his huge capacity to make America a more violent, lawless, weaker, and stupid place to live. That’s immoral, to put it kindly.
This is what happens in a culture of intelligence and compassion.
The Dutch don’t live lives that are driven by religious fanaticism, censorship, lousy education, political fund-raising and finger-pointing, or misogyny.
The result? Sanity.
My wife was just talking about this earlier today. “How is it possible,” she asked me, “that our world’s wealthiest people have so little interest in reversing world hunger or climate change? What would they rather do with hundreds of billions of dollars? Wouldn’t they like to be remembered as great human beings?”
Good question, but the answer is no. For most of them, their love of money, and their lack of interest in the welfare in the rest of humankind, is what drove them to their station in life in the first place, not to mention that most of that wealth, in more cases than not, was inherited from ancestors who had even less concern for others than they had themselves.
If you’ve ever delivered pizzas, as I did in my youth, you probably learned what I did: hope you don’t get a drop-off in a rich neighborhood expecting to get a tip, because it’s unlikely to happen. Hope for a customer living in a trailer park who’s going to give you $10 that they clearly can’t afford, only because they know–and care–about the real-world lives of working-class Americans.
What was it, precisely, that brought us from where we were as few as ten years ago to where we are now? The universality of the Internet? The advent of Trump?
How did we come to a point where a plumber or a bus driver has come to think he knows more than climate scientists do about global warming, or epidemiologists know about COVID-19?
Whatever its cause, we have lost something extremely valuable in the process.
Yes, this is all completely true.
But let’s keep everything in perspective here. Fox “News” is an extremely powerful institution. Its business model is turning the truth completely upside-down as required to keep its audience engaged, and, given that it has no integrity, it has no compunction about doing precisely that.
Fox continues, at the astonishment of us all, to do anything it wants, regardless of how heinous, to keep tens of millions of hateful morons dialed in. Though it’s possible that it may eventually be corralled via some blend of civil and criminal legal proceedings, right now it controls the minds, votes, and wallets of the most pitifully miserable of Americans.
If there is more violence (as suggested at left) as a direct result of its blatantly dishonest “reporting,” that’s just too f***ing bad for America and its teetering democracy, if it means more profits for Fox.
Is there anything we can do about that? Not sure. Maybe we’ll find out some day.
Finding God may not always make someone a better person, but is it correct to say that it never does?
Yes, many of our world’s most evil people were/are church-goers, and from there, it could be argued that their belief in God did nothing to help them become kinder and more humane.
Further, one could say that these terrible people’s religion only solidified their confidence that their desire to …. (fill in the blank) torture suspected heretics, enslave the blacks, commit genocide against the Jews, invade a neighboring nation, etc., was ordained by their Creator. As they say, “Nobody counts the bodies when God is on your side.”
It’s a hard question to answer. Even most atheists know many fine human beings who walk around all day believing that God has a plan for them.
Personally, I’m taken by the rhetoric of folks like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens, who summarize their positions as follows: religion is to the human mind what a virus is to a computer.
This is a nice thought, but it’s erroneous.
Nature, whatever we mean by that word, is inanimate. It’s the summation of the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. It doesn’t ask or want anything.
If humankind succeeds in degrading the life-supporting qualities of this planet, the only loser will be ourselves.
Senior energy analyst Glenn Doty takes this one step further: he resents the entire concept of “Mother Nature.” He says the idea that there is a benign, animated force, especially a maternal one with a caring and nurturing personality that is actively working to bring us back from the precipice of global destruction provides justification for our gross selfishness and stupidity.
Below is an internal memo from chief of the U.S. Capitol Police to the officers themselves.
There is no limit past which Fox “News” won’t sink in tarnishing the reputation of brave public servants so as to continue its torrent of lies to its audience.
Liz Cheney is bold, brave, honest …. and a complete anomaly in the Republican party.
When all this is over, she’ll be remembered as a national hero.
And btw, this will end. This country and its people cannot continue to maintain a fiction of this magnitude forever.
