FA+
Shop
Some thoughts on American politics.
13 years ago
I know very few people read this, but I have some things on my mind and I need to say them somewhere that someone other than me might read them.
Once again, the Republican Party, or more like its puppeteers in the Christian Right or the Religious Right or whatever they are calling themselves nowadays, have tried to drag America back to the "Good Ol' Days" of rich white men running everything and nobody else ever getting a say-so in any matter of any import. The new item that they want to impose is an amendment to the new "Obamacare" health care program to allow employers to decide whether or not women who work for them can receive insurance coverage for birth control. You read that right, just in case you have been totally ignoring the news lately, the employers have the right to impose their own religious ideologies on their employees, but only the female ones. Isn't this covered in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? As in, "An employer can't use an employee's race, color, religion, sex or national origin to determine his or her pay, fringe benefits, retirement plans or disability leave." This can't be law, it's federally already illegal. It's also illegal to impose your religious strictures on people who work for you based on the very same law, stated thusly: "An employer can't make hiring decisions based on an applicant's color, race, religion, sex or national origin. An employer can't discriminate based on these factors when recruiting job candidates, advertising for a job or testing applicants," and, "An employer can't decide whether or not to promote a worker, or fire one, based on the employee's color, race, religion, sex or national origin. He or she can't use this information when classifying or assigning workers."
This is bullshit and these fuckers know it. There isn't a war on religion in this country, there's a war on personal freedom to determine your own religion and fate. If you want to believe in a god or a supreme being or an alien overlord or even a plate of anti-gravity, hyperintelligent pasta, that's your right. What is not your right, as covered in the First Amendment to the U.S. constitution, is to legally require me to belong to your religion in order to be employed. This is not even to mention that the decision is being given to men to make for women. If men can decide whether or not women are allowed to use birth control, women should be equally allowed to vote on whether or not the men voting get neutered. This isn't about morals or some antiquated idea that ignoring sex will make it go away. This is about religious bigots making decisions for people who don't share their views in an effort to "bring everyone into the fold."
Speaking on behalf of free thinkers everywhere, we don't want your religious ideals. We don't want you making decisions on how to live based on a several millenia old rulebook that has been poorly translated to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean. We don't want money to be the deciding factor in what rights a person has and, more than that, we simply don't want you. If we wanted to live in a zombie-like cult state, we would have worked to establish one. Freedom of speech doesn't mean you have a right to be heard. Freedom of religion means that you don't have a right to impose your religion on someone else, any more than they have the same right to do it to you, and freedom, ultimately, means the ability and power to make your own decisions, own mistakes and own way in the world.
If you Religious Right assholes and your backward friends in the GOP want to live in a country with a state religion, might I suggest Iran. I hear they were quite progressive before the radical Muslim takeover in the 1970s and see how that turned out. See you guys in about fifty years when we show up to kick your ass for trying to wipe out Spaghettopia, the ancestral lands of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Once again, the Republican Party, or more like its puppeteers in the Christian Right or the Religious Right or whatever they are calling themselves nowadays, have tried to drag America back to the "Good Ol' Days" of rich white men running everything and nobody else ever getting a say-so in any matter of any import. The new item that they want to impose is an amendment to the new "Obamacare" health care program to allow employers to decide whether or not women who work for them can receive insurance coverage for birth control. You read that right, just in case you have been totally ignoring the news lately, the employers have the right to impose their own religious ideologies on their employees, but only the female ones. Isn't this covered in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? As in, "An employer can't use an employee's race, color, religion, sex or national origin to determine his or her pay, fringe benefits, retirement plans or disability leave." This can't be law, it's federally already illegal. It's also illegal to impose your religious strictures on people who work for you based on the very same law, stated thusly: "An employer can't make hiring decisions based on an applicant's color, race, religion, sex or national origin. An employer can't discriminate based on these factors when recruiting job candidates, advertising for a job or testing applicants," and, "An employer can't decide whether or not to promote a worker, or fire one, based on the employee's color, race, religion, sex or national origin. He or she can't use this information when classifying or assigning workers."
This is bullshit and these fuckers know it. There isn't a war on religion in this country, there's a war on personal freedom to determine your own religion and fate. If you want to believe in a god or a supreme being or an alien overlord or even a plate of anti-gravity, hyperintelligent pasta, that's your right. What is not your right, as covered in the First Amendment to the U.S. constitution, is to legally require me to belong to your religion in order to be employed. This is not even to mention that the decision is being given to men to make for women. If men can decide whether or not women are allowed to use birth control, women should be equally allowed to vote on whether or not the men voting get neutered. This isn't about morals or some antiquated idea that ignoring sex will make it go away. This is about religious bigots making decisions for people who don't share their views in an effort to "bring everyone into the fold."
Speaking on behalf of free thinkers everywhere, we don't want your religious ideals. We don't want you making decisions on how to live based on a several millenia old rulebook that has been poorly translated to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean. We don't want money to be the deciding factor in what rights a person has and, more than that, we simply don't want you. If we wanted to live in a zombie-like cult state, we would have worked to establish one. Freedom of speech doesn't mean you have a right to be heard. Freedom of religion means that you don't have a right to impose your religion on someone else, any more than they have the same right to do it to you, and freedom, ultimately, means the ability and power to make your own decisions, own mistakes and own way in the world.
If you Religious Right assholes and your backward friends in the GOP want to live in a country with a state religion, might I suggest Iran. I hear they were quite progressive before the radical Muslim takeover in the 1970s and see how that turned out. See you guys in about fifty years when we show up to kick your ass for trying to wipe out Spaghettopia, the ancestral lands of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
but the religious right can suck my left testicle, seriously
I'd like to hear what you think about the democrat party, just for balance of course.
I have both conservative and liberal leanings and I think that the Democratic Party is highly flawed. The reason I agree with them over the Republicans, at this point is because the democratic party is stratified into a gradient between, "Give everybody everything for free," to, "We really need to work hard to solve our own problems so the government doesn't have to ever get involved in our lives for any reason." The GOP, on the other hand, has turned the steering wheel, for most of the party, (no generalization can ever be completely true) over to a bunch of radical religious people who base their opinions on the world on conjecture, denial and flat out delusion. I like the Republicans from before 1964, when the religious zealots started getting involved. I think a small government and a stable economy are really good things. I think that violent criminals should have very harsh punishments and should be treated like defective machine parts that are undermining the society machine's purpose. I could give a fuck about gun control one way or another. I liked firing my rifle when I was in the army, but I don't harbor the delusion that my house would be any more or less safe with a firearm in it than it is without. Death comes for everyone. Whether or not you can wave a gun in its face, it's still gonna get you when the time comes.
I don't think the republican ideas are wrong. In fact, I see libertarians as the last hope for a disintegrating GOP. I count the current incarnation of the GOP as an enemy of free thought, because anybody who wants to impose their religious anything on someone else who has no ability to say no, might as well call himself the Ayatollah. The only difference is the traditional costuming.
The way I see it, the Democratic party lacks the backbone to be ruthless enough to finally say, "Hey, GOP, kick those fucking radical religious nuts out and start doing your job to oppose our bad ideas and not just all of them." This makes the Democrats weak, in my eyes. It also makes them the only current alternative to a hostile theocracy. They can't eliminate the threat of theocracy, but a vote for a democrat is a vote against my kids being forced to study the bible in their public education, maybe the ability to make decisions as to whether or not they are going to have healthy sex lives and decide on having kids instead of just crossing their fingers and hoping. I don't hate republicans. I don't hate christians. I do hate narrow minded hate mongers who place the supposed validity of millenia old texts over the rights that made this country worth our ancestors sacrifices to get here.
dam strait
I think a small government and a stable economy are really good things. I think that violent criminals should have very harsh punishments and should be treated like defective machine parts that are undermining the society machine's purpose.
could not agree with you more
I see libertarians as the last hope for a disintegrating GOP
I see libertarians as the last best hope for this country, not just the GOP.
the Democratic party lacks the backbone to be ruthless enough to finally say, "Hey, GOP, kick those fucking radical religious nuts out and start doing your job to oppose our bad ideas and not just all of them."
actually, all I have ever really heard from them OTHER than "hey, let us be in charge because we are NOT the republicans!" is how the religious people are too stupid to be allowed to vote... which is one area I do NOT disagree with them on...
I do hate narrow minded hate mongers
I see those people on BOTH sides of the isle, and not just the religious ones.
Global Warming and socialism are as much religions as christianity is
I prefer to look at things from the lowest common denominator, so I see everything within the frame work of three topics
Religion
Politics
and Sex
pretty much any topic can be boiled down to one of those three things.
and I am a FIRM believer in that all three of those topics should be in harmony with each other.
I grew up VERY conservative, for the first 16 years of my life my mother did everything she could to turn me into a preacher. her error was in allowing me to READ.
while I am still VERY conservative, I have moderated my thoughts to a more libertarian view point. this was NOT easy, and has taken most of the last 20 years of my life.
I'll quote the wiccan redde as the simplest formation of my view on life "And Ye Harm None, Do As Thou Wilt"
or quote Thomas Jefferson "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
that is how I handle most things...
I'm not judgmental, I'm just HIGHLY opinionated
I haven't seen much democrat hate mongering. Finger pointing certainly, but it's hard to hear the really annoying kid when the old guy next to you is screaming about how everybody but him is going to hell while he picks your pocket to pay the thugs behind you to tie you up and send you to fight a holy war in a country you are not invested in, all in the name of freedom.
As long as the GOP are still in bed with fundamentalist televangelists, I can only see them as ignorant, redneck bullies. They lose all credibilty when they try to legislate morality.
Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich And Rick Perry can eat a hypocrisy flavored dick.
PLEASE tell me where socialism Actually worked? I know of FAR too many places where it's failed (USSR, Cuba, China, Vietnam, North Korea, just to name a few)
Socialism works very well in Canada,where I lived for about a decade, and is at its optimum world performance in Denmark, where I lived for a year, where everybody gets to go to college if they so choose, go to the doctor whenever they feel the need and live in happy, relatively crime free neighborhoods. Taxes are a little higher, but when you weigh that against never having to wonder if your kid is going to college (or if you are) or if you're going to lose your life, livelihood and bankrupt your family if you get a serious enough illness, it seems worth it. Denmark has a higher standard of living than most industrialized nations, has a lower rate of poverty than same, has lower rates of violent and most other forms of crime and has some of the best education systems in the world. I didn't much enjoy living there but that's because I didn't speak the language and I don't deal well outside my linguistic comfort zone. The people were beautiful, healthy and happy while I lived there and they started to employ socialism as of the 19th century. Canada, in a lot of ways, is like living in the US. They vote the same, they have their own version of republicans and democrats (Conservative and Liberal parties) The difference is: if you need medical attention, you go to the feckin' doctor and you don't have to worry about breaking the bank, mortgaging your house, losing your job. The taxes there aren't even really higher for income tax, property tax or sales tax.
Please don't buy the hype. The US is a socialist government. It's just bad at it. They tax us and put all of our money into the military, or paying non-functional congresspeople to take bribes from lobbyists instead of giving it back to us in the form of services and protections.
but I'm not going to start a flamewar in your journal over my opinions.
too many people here do NOT want to make it work, they just wanna siphon off 'their fair share' and not EARN anything
i.e. carreer welfare recipients, OWS crowd, most youth these days
Christianity, when properly practiced is a form of communism, i.e. For The Community, but you have to have a hyarchy of who to provide for
You first, then your family, then neighborhood, local community, state/province, nation planet/human race
if you try to make it go in any other fashion, the system breaks.
the problem, in my NOT so humble opinion, is no one wants to do it in that order only to a safe comfortable margin (no one in the u.s. that is)
IF socialism is voluntary, I can see it might work out pretty good. the problem with most places, if not all, is that it is FORCED, against your will, and that makes people resent it no matter HOW good it is to them.
when everybody pulls together and works for a common goal, yeah. but dead weights and lazy people kill it.
I've been homeless broke and unemployed SOOOOO many times in my life it's not funny (it was NEVER funny, trust me) and I've tried to get a hand UP just to get me back on my feet...
and every single time I've been turned down. government agencies, churches, charity groups, family, friends... no one would help when I was homeless, broke, unemployed, starving out in the woods in the middle of febuary in a foot of snow.
Yes, I am bitter, I cannot deny that.
So why the hell should I support some lazy fuck when no one would help ME?
(all my rational arguments get boiled down to that eventually)
Occupy Wall Street doesn't want hand outs. They want corporations to stop setting national policy through corruption and glad-handing. Some welfare recipients are gaming the system, certainly. Others are people in the position you were once in and just need someplace to land so they can rebound. Most youth are currently stuck in a system where they can't afford a decent education which is demanded by most workplaces for even the consideration of employment, when the things you actually need to know for the job are taught to you on the job and the education you have amounts to nothing more than an expensive ticket into the over minimum wage workforce.
The US is already socialist. We have police and fire protection paid for by our taxes, as well as public schools, hospital subsidies, road and bridge building and maintenance, orphanages, homeless shelters, a military, farm subsidies, social security, medicare, medicaid, the FDA, the FCC... the list goes on. In a truly capitalist country, none of those things would exist, because there would be only enough taxes to pay for the salaries of the politicians, if even that. The only difference between the US and a functioning socialist country like Denmark, is that here, your money goes to all these nebulous, government regulated, social projects that most people don't benefit from or don't notice. It always feels like the government is taking from you and giving to someone else. In Denmark (only as an example) everyone knows where their money is going. The average work week is 30 hours. People cooperate because it's obvious that it's in their best interest and people who defraud the system are taken out of it.
I'm absolutely certain if the government started a project here that was put to the public like this, "Pay us an extra $350 a year and in ten years any one person you want to send to school will have free tuition," everyone would jump right on that wagon. If you went instead and said, "We want to take your money. It's going to put someone through college," nobody would go along even though they're just different angles on the same plan. The relationship in Denmark is causal. The people chose socialism because the government showed them a plan that works. They work toward the common good because they see the good in cooperating. It's like buying into a 401K plan only with certainty that no market crash is going to kill your medical coverage or your educational prospects.
I think I can point out that the reason you are bitter about becoming unemployed and homeless in a system that wouldn't help you is because the system was built in such a way that it didn't have to help you and anyone who saw you struggling, under the current economic system of the US, was just as likely to say, "Why don't you get a job and stop asking for handouts?" That doesn't happen under socialism, or it happens far less. You go somewhere, say, "I need help" and they find you a place to stay until you get your shit straightened out, help you find a job and then help you move out into your own place.
In a good society, everyone's fate rests on the fate of others. The reason you should help when no one would help you is because if you don't, who's going to? If everyone says, "No," then eventually society falls apart. This is why third world countries are still third world everybody is so busy looking out for themselves that there is no society and society shares a root word with socialism.
and every time I have ever been forced to depend on others, I've gotten royally screwed for it.
I've been homeless a few times in my life. I happened to turn up lucky, I guess. I also never turned to churches, religious types of any kind or people who had a vested interest in keeping me homeless or unemployed. You have a right to be bitter, but if you make your political decisions out of that bitterness, you become the people that let you down. They don't have the right to take away your ability to choose whether or not to help.
again I Always got burned for it.
I describe myself as a disenfranchised Idealist, also know as a Cynic. I know full well Just How Great This World Could Be IF we all just got along...
I'm also a Realist, and I know that will NEVER happen. the human race is far to fragmented to allow it's self to work together for more than a temporary project, then self destruct in it's usual fashion of bickering, in-fighting, backstabbing, and daytime soap operas
"All that's necessary for evil to triumph is good men doing nothing." - Edmund Burke
I am a cynic, too, but if the battle is lost, I prefer to lose knowing that it wasm't because I surredered without a fight. I will make whatever difference I can until I can't anymore. My efforts may come to nothing either way, but being that I have no gods, my supreme authority is me, and I can't allow myself to lose by forfeit.
I'm mostly conservative, and being attacked BECAUSE I'm conservative and being called hundreds is not true bullshit on a daily basis wears me out after a while. how can I make a difference when no one will listen to me because of a label?
there's more, but I have been poked, prodded, stabbed, and medicated today, I'm a bit too tired at the moment
I'm financially a freemarket capitalist
Socially libertarian/liberal (legalize pot, gay marriage)
Pro Capital Punishment, Pro Abortion, pro suicide, anti-illegal immigration but pro LEGAL immigration.
pro states rights over federal, anti-obamacare
to me 'gun control' means using both hands and the safety.
I used to think of myself as a Social Darwinist, Some People Must Fail, and we have to allow them to fail. If they can pull them selves up by their boot straps (as I have Many Many MANY times) then all the better, else wise...
the government calls the shots, not you.
I already pay my own medical expenses, why should I have to shell out three times as much to cover people that cannot be bothered to get insurance, or those that do not need it, or those that can afford to pay cash for anything they might need?
here's two examples: when I was 20, I did not have medical insurance. I did not need it, I was health, young, and immortal (or is it immoral, I forget)
second: Rush Limbaugh doesn't have insurance. he doesn't need it. if he needs to go to the hospital he pays cash, and gets a 20% discount because they don't have to do all that F-ing paperwork.
Also, Rush Limbaugh is firmly in bed with both big business and the religious right. Of course he's against socialized medicine, his friends lose moral control and revenue if the country handles it instead of private industries.
Theres 3 wings to the republican party. Libertarians which only controls like 20% at best. The nut bar religious right which controls 25%.And the let the super rich control everything and pay no taxes which controls the other half. At their worst combination they declare "fuck science,fuck education, fuck the poor, fuck minorities ,fuck children (who often are the big % of the poor and CANT get a job..well unless they change labor laws like Newt and some others who want to maybe go back to 1890s children work force ), fuck anything that is energy other then big oil and coal" and "let us make a huge government that helps no one after birth but makes sure every sperm that touches an egg (even if its rape of an 8 year old by her dad ) must be born (then its on its fucking own ) , that comes just short of stoning the gay , spies on its citizens (though thats a bit of a bipartisan issues since 9-11 but still more repub then dem ) and maintains lots of foreign wars since were fighting an idea (Muslims..er we mean terrorism) then any specific group like a country`s army .
I dont consider myself "liberal" and would like to consider both parties. But the repubs are going more and more bat shit insane year after year.This curent republican party worships Reagan but forgets he gave "amnesty" to illegals,let taxes raise, left countries after attacks like Lebanon,etc,etc. Eisenhower,Nixon, Ford,even Dole would be considered untrusty Republicans In Name Only liberals in todays Republican party. The John Birchers took over somehow .
The democrats have their weasel politicans, their hypocrites and such.But really they are nowadays what liberal republicans used to be .I laugh at people who call Obama some "socialist,liberal,communist,nazi,secret muslim" hes pretty right down the middle politically much to our country`s non benefit really.
The neoconservatives are in league with the evangels, but have a separate agenda. They believe in letting the mob do whatever it pleases -- burn gays at the stake and take children away from atheists? Fine with the Kochs and Cheneys. All they believe in is the Almighty Dollar, and as long as the peasants stay away from Wall Street they can pretend they run the country all the want. I don't think the neocons have any interest in any history at all, revisionist or otherwise.
King Josiah of Judah "found" a missing book from the Torah. We call it Deuteronomy, and somehow all sorts of vitally important laws that God wanted the Jews to observe had been forgotten about for centuries until Josiah discovered them. The new laws included the forcible suppression of native worship -- the age-old shrines built by Abraham were destroyed and everyone forced to to come to Jerusalem to make sacrifice. (I call it the Mecca Scam.) People were forbidden to worship whatever local gods had been their custom in the past. An official state history was written about the Hebrew people, incorporating dimly recalled events and magical folklore -- many of the events never happened at all, happened to some other people, or happened in a different century. But so long as they could be altered to make a story about the glories of the Kingdom of Judah and how God loved its line of kings and promised the kingdom great things, it made it into the final cut of the Old Testament. Really, the Israelites didn't exist as a people separate from other Canaanites until very late in Bronze Age history. They probably only developed a national consciousness of themselves as different from their neighbors about 800 or 900 BC. Everything before that is like looking at a hologram. You see a three dimensional picture of something, but there's no reality there.
You may find it worthwhile to read "The Bible Unearthed" by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, published by Simon & Shuster's Touchstone imprint, 2002. It's not a crank book. Many of the central theses can be found in Asimov's Guide to the Bible, which is about as uncontroversial as it gets...
One amusing detail from the book. A director of excavation of one site in the Holy Land had the worst name imaginable. He was "P.L.O. Guy."
When missionaries hit me up, and they seem to do it frequently, (I must look hellbound) I frequenty tell them that I am not in the market for a middle eastern death cult to join. This usually confuses which further proves that they rarely stop and smell the crap they're selling.
I am mystified thay we are half a century into the age of reason an these cult obsessed morons are still trying to win, through promoting ignorance and easy answers.
I wake up every morning with the same sense of disorientation and puzzlement. Then I have some coffee and things begin to fit in place. But it's still a mystery why we still have to fight to keep rank superstition out of classrooms, hospitals, labs and the Oval Office. Worse, "they" seem to be winning.
Mind you, things don't look quite so bad, the further from the US you get. American style religiosity is unique to America... and parts of Canada, unfortunately. Elsewhere, religion is a sort of quasi-state institution (such as Catholicism in France or Italy, or the Anglican Church in England) and everyone ignores it completely. Only in America does the President open a meeting with other heads of state by starting a prayer. (As George Bush was in the habit of doing, much to everyone's bafflement.) Only in America would a president with no strong convictions about religion be required to thank god for America every two or three minutes in a speech. Only in America do you have schoolboards run by Creationists, liberally funded conservative PACs trying to change the constitution to include Christianity, or an armed forces largely manned by nth. generation military families drawn from the reactionary, evangelical south. Only from America came Mormons...