It’s also convenient that churches tend to be de facto segregated by race. We’re not racist, we just setup institutions that happen to work in racist ways.

It’s also convenient that churches tend to be de facto segregated by race. We’re not racist, we just setup institutions that happen to work in racist ways.

You’ve been experiencing a cult of an idea. The Republican party has transformed into a cult of personality with no clear successor.

There are cults of personality that have successfully transformed into a cult of ideas. Mormons and Scientology are examples. However, in each case, the person at the center fostered a clear successor, and that successor was able to make it last in the long run by centering around ideas. Scientology still has that successor around (David Miscavige), but there isn’t really a specific person in charge of the LDS. Not in the same way. Their leadership is now interchangeable, but replacing their ideas is a harder sell.

Trump has no successor, and isn’t interested in fostering one. It’s not JD Vance; nobody respects him, including Trump. It’s not Musk; he made the mistake of trying to be more popular than the boss, and he’s not a natural-born citizen, anyway. It’s not Peter Thiel; he prefers to be the power behind the throne. It’s not any of Trump’s adult children; they’re nothing but spoiled rich kids. It’s not any of the people in his cabinet; they’re all plebes using booze and cocaine to get through the day. It’s not Tucker or Matt Walsh or any of the other right-wing commentators; they’d just eat each other trying to get on top.

Oh, no, they’ll devolve into infighting. There won’t be enough shared ideals and actions to sustain Republicans as a political force. There will be fringe groups that linger on for a while. After almost three centuries, there are still two people left claiming the Shaker tradition; that’s a group that forbids sexual relations even for procreation, so you can see how they’d have trouble gaining new members. But they’re not a religious group that anyone really cares about, either. That’s how MAGA will go eventually.

See also, Knitting Cat Lady, who is a former member of the Children of God cult, then the US Army, and then got a masters in organizational psychology around cults.

Fracture to irreverence where the component pieces eat each other. There is no future for the party after Trump except as various fringe groups claiming to be the “true” party.

Channels aren’t doing that because they want to. YouTube has a lot of rules, some of which are written down. They do it because YouTube has flagged them in the past for demonetization on the issue, and they can’t afford to do that too many times. It can also impact your ability to do livestreams.

It’s on top of a pile of issues that’s making YouTube content creation non-viable for everyone.

That would probably happen as part of a narcissistic collapse. In the most extreme cases, it may trigger suicidal reactions.

That would have some significant medical ethics issues. She nearly died. Do no harm, and that’s regardless of the patient’s political ideology.

Don’t take it too seriously.

Iran might be a fucked up theocracy, but they can generally be counted on to behave like a rational actor. More so than Trump can.

Well, then keep shooting, homophobes.

The claim that the Psalms are just poetry is going to be heartbreaking to anyone that cites them as prophecies about Jesus

That’s completely fine. The early Christians went to great lengths to try to say “this bit here was prophecy, and here’s how our guy fulfilled it”. But nobody was viewing those passages as prophecies before then. It was all marketing for a weird little offshoot of Judaism on the fringes of the Roman empire which happened to take off centuries later.

Even that being true, it’s readily apparent that Christians always choose which scriptures to highlight. The fundamentalist ones will say you must take the whole bible or nothing, but that’s not how they behave. Not at all.

Let’s assume the homophobic translation of Romans 1 is the correct one. Is any given Christian talking about that, or are they talking about being kind to the poor, pointing out the hypocrisy of religious leaders, or that the literal, obvious interpretation of “rich men can’t get through the eye of a needle” is the correct one? There’s so many scriptures they could be highlighting, and it’s conspicuous that they choose to make a homophobic one really, really important to them.

MAGA Christians tend to get very angry if you point this out. The usual responses are along the lines of “you only know a few cherry picked scriptures as talking points” or “you atheists would burn alive if you actually read the bible”.

There’s a defensible argument that Paul invented Christianity. Jesus (whoever he was historically) does not appear to have intended to produce a separate religion from Judaism. Paul did that.

It’s not a complete slam dunk, but even if you don’t buy it, it’s still very apparent that Paul was the central figure in shaping what Christianity would become.

Strictly speaking, I don’t think there’s a single scripture that specifically calls out sexual abuse of children. There’s general prohibitions against sex outside of marriage and such, but nothing that applies directly to pedophilia.

You get there by not being a monster. Literal, direct interpretations of the Bible won’t do it.

Like Paul Ryan and Rick Santorum?

The more conservative American Catholics have a theology that’s close to the right-wing, protestant-derived groups around them. Ask Paul or Rick about how their views on evolution jive with the Vatican’s official position, and they’ll start to squirm.

They may have been a foundation to build on, but they largely failed in their goals. There was a sudden surge in cities proposing budgets that defunded the police. Once the sausage making process was done, those budgets largely reflected the status quo.

The best you can say about its direct practical effect is that Chauvin was convicted. I do think we’re seeing more cases of abusive cops actually being prosecuted for misconduct, or at a minimum, losing their job.

It’s still taking some effort to even get that, though. I just ran across a case in my YouTube feed, where a civil rights lawyer with a channel brought attention to a case. This had happened months ago, but all the sudden, the prosecutor dropped the charges and the cop was fired. If it weren’t for it blowing up on YouTube, that probably wouldn’t have happened. There’s almost certainly thousands of stories like it in process right now that aren’t getting that attention.

Oh, and we got Juneteenth added as a day off. I guess that’s nice. Except some companies have already dropped it from their holiday list (mine did).

Or Franco or Pinochet or Marcos or Saddam. Hell, put Tito on that list. Or any number of countries that had been subjugated by colonial empires, like India or the Philippines.

There are so many ways that oppressive governments work and ways that protest movements can work effectively against them. Germany 1933 has parallels to today, but it’s by no means an exact match, or even a very good match.

Can people learn about dictators that aren’t Adolf Hitler? Please?

Is this based on a careful study of violent and non-violent protest movements under regiemes in many countries? Or did you pull it out of your ass?