BEWARE OF SATAN!

 Satan is real. Dolly Pardon has said so:

Dolly Parton Warns ‘Satan is Real’ in New NBC Christmas Special

 | Dec 7, 2022

“My brothers and my sisters,” Parton begins. “I’m here to tell you that Satan is real. He is real and walking around amongst us trying to destroy everything that’s good and beautiful. He wants to break our hearts and minds, destroy our dreams and plans. He wants to tear us up into little pieces, break us down and send us straight to hell.”

Parton then adds, “My God can do anything. My God can heal the sick, mend broken hearts and take our souls to heaven.”

https://dailycitizen.focusonthefamily.com/dolly-parton-warns-satan-is-real-in-new-nbc-christmas-special/

Apparently the dailycitizen agrees with her:

So, what should the discerning Christian think about Parton’s new Christmas special?

On the one hand, it’s certainly a good thing for a major celebrity to remind the world of the reality of Satan and hell.

From the very first chapters of the book of Genesis, Scripture teaches about the reality of Satan and his schemes to deceive and destroy the world. In addition, Jesus Christ frequently taught about the Devil and hell.

Fear is Satan’s primary tool for sterilizing you

Without faith, it’s impossible to please God, and without faith is where probably most Christians are at this moment.  Satan knows if he can rob you of your faith, you can’t share your faith — because you can’t share what you don’t have. In fact, fear is Satan’s primary tool for sterilizing you, to keep you from reproducing more Christians. He knows having faith and sharing your faith are two sides of the same coin.

https://www.christianpost.com/voices/fear-is-satans-primary-tool-for-sterilizing-you.html

Not convinced yet?

The truth is that talking about Satan isn’t going to win you a lot of popularity points. If most people think about Satan they envision him as a red devil with horns and a pitchfork. It is much more acceptable to talk about God and his plan and his love. And of course we should talk of Christ and preach of Christ and prophesy of Christ. But knowledge of Satan is absolutely crucial if we are going to survive his increasingly bold assault and discern his increasingly devious strategies. 

Why is it worth our efforts to study the origin, character, and tactics of the adversary? I believe there are at least eight reasons.

The eight reasons listed here:

https://latterdaysaintmag.com/why-learn-more-about-satan/

AND PLEASE, when wondering why I posted this thread, Don't say the Devil made me do it!

Continuing commentary about Clarence Thomas: Normalization of blatant corruption continues

The NYT published an interesting opinion by Adam Cohen,  a former member of the NYT editorial board. Cohen writes:

54 Years Ago, a Supreme Court Justice Was Forced to Quit 

for Behavior Arguably Less Egregious Than Thomas’s

There are two distressing aspects to the scandal of Justice Clarence Thomas’s years of accepting luxurious vacations and private jet trips from a billionaire, as revealed last week in a damning investigation by ProPublica.

The first is that these gifts came from a man who seems to have strong feelings about issues that come before the Supreme Court. The second is the lack of bipartisan outrage at malfeasance that corrodes the standing of the nation’s highest court.

.... it is worth recalling that the last time such serious allegations were made against a sitting justice, Congress did respond firmly and in bipartisan fashion. Justice Abe Fortas’s departure from the court in 1969 is both a blueprint for how lawmakers could respond today and a benchmark of how far we have fallen.

Justice Thomas’s conduct has been far more egregious in scale than Fortas’s. ProPublica reported that a single nine-day “island hopping” trip by Justice Thomas and his wife, which included a 162-foot superyacht, could have cost him over $500,000 if he had chartered the private jet he flew on and the yacht himself.

The defenses being made on Justice Thomas’s behalf hardly pass the laugh test. It was just, as Justice Thomas put it, “personal hospitality” among close friends? That would be a nice meal at a friend’s home, not an invitation to travel the world like royalty on a plutocrat’s dime. And about that friendship: ProPublica reports that Justice Thomas’s rich benefactor, the real estate developer Harlan Crow, befriended him after he became a justice. It is hard to believe that if Justice Thomas started voting like Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the friendship or the free island hopping would continue.

Democrats in Congress are also pushing for a code of ethics for the justices who, unlike lower court federal judges, are not covered by one.

Republicans, however, have been deafeningly silent. Fox News has filled the void by locating an “expert” to declare that the story about Justice Thomas is “politics, plain and simple.” Influential Republicans in Congress are reported to be working behind the scenes to block the push for a code of ethics.

News bits: Irate professor calls DeSantis a fascist; Electrons are very round ⭕; Radicalizing Democrats

Newsweek reports:

The director of New College of Florida's applied data science program has offered his resignation in a letter that accused Governor Ron DeSantis of being a "fascist" over his conservative overhaul of the school.

Aaron Hillegass has worked at New College—a public liberal arts institution in Sarasota, Florida—since November 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile. His role has been to recruit students and professors, help students find jobs after leaving school, and teach machine learning. On April 8, he offered his resignation, decrying alleged attempts to transform the school into the "Hillsdale of the South."  

DeSantis and other Republican politicians have for months been pointing to Hillsdale College, a private conservative Christian institution in Michigan, as a model for what they want education nationwide to look like. 

In his letter, Hillegass protested DeSantis' alleged moves to transform New College into a new Hillsdale, stating that the Michigan school is "bad for America" because it "cultivates prejudice" towards minorities, the LGBTQ+ community, and non-Christians.

"When a governor guts the leadership of a state school in an effort to make a facsimile of Hillsdale, that is fascism. Not the shocking Kristallnacht-style fascism, but the banal fascism that always precedes it," the academic wrote.

This is just some more evidence of the deep animosity that Christian nationalist elites have toward secular education and education about inconvenient subject matter. This is not just public schools at risk. This theocratic attitude includes post high school education institutions. Specifically, they want to entirely get rid of both and replace them with (i) Christian fundamentalism and myths, and (ii) Whitewashed false history.

The MSM, Newsweek here, keeps referring to this kind of politics as conservative. The MSM still does not get it. This kind of politics is not conservative. It is radical right for the politically correct, or fascism or Christofascism for the more blunt.

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Boring physics - electrons are very, very round: Quanta Magazine writes:

Imagine an electron as a spherical cloud of negative charge. If that ball were ever so slightly less round, it could help explain fundamental gaps in our understanding of physics, including why the universe contains something rather than nothing.**

Given the stakes, a small community of physicists has been doggedly hunting for any asymmetry in the shape of the electron for the past few decades. The experiments are now so sensitive that if an electron were the size of Earth, they could detect a bump on the North Pole the height of a single sugar molecule.

The latest results are in: The electron is rounder than that.

The updated measurement disappoints anyone hoping for signs of new physics. But it still helps theorists to constrain their models for what unknown particles and forces may be missing from the current picture.

Jeez, the height of a sugar molecule on a ball the size of Earth? That seems to be pretty darned sensitive. 

** Current theory posits that we should not exist because the big bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and anti-matter. When matter and anti-matter collide, they mutually annihilate and release a lot of energy, and particles like neutrinos and various flavors of quarks. Obviously since we're made of matter and doing human stuff, there's still some things we don't understand about the universe. 

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Radicalization of the Democratic Party: Radicalization of the left in response to the radicalization of the right is an ongoing process according to some observers. A 2019 article in The Atlantic pointed to the rise of Bernie Sanders, a socialist who calls himself a democratic socialist. That was cited as evidence of a movement in the Democratic Party toward the far left. Socialism really is far left, so that could be called radicalization. Despite Bernie's popularity, the Democratic Party is still mostly controlled by neoliberal capitalists. Socialism is not going to happen with that crowd in charge.

A WaPo opinion cites the effects that radicalized Republican politics in red states is having on young Democrats who are active in politics. The WaPo opinion comments:

The reactionary turn underway in many red states is beginning to shape a new generation of young Democratic officials, many of whom will one day be the party’s leaders.

In these red states, young Democrats are entering local politics and developing public presences in response to the far-right culture-warring unleashed by GOP majorities. New restrictions on abortion and the growing right-wing backlash to LGBTQ rights are radicalizing a wave of Democratic public servants who mostly hail from the Gen Z and millennial generations.

“We’re seeing this across the country,” said Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run For Something, which recruits progressive candidates for state and local office. “It’s no coincidence that some of the loudest voices pushing back are young leaders in red states, often from urban environments, often people of color, often LGBTQ themselves.”

Last week, after the GOP-controlled state legislature in Tennessee expelled two young Black lawmakers for protesting gun violence, and after a Texas judge invalidated federal approval of abortion medication, Run For Something’s candidate recruitment spiked. Litman says more than half the new candidates are from red states.

What binds these lawmakers and candidates together is an acute sense that the character of the country is on the line and it could determine their own futures. “For them, every part of this conversation is personal,” Litman says.

As one would expect, this is an issue that radical right propaganda plays on and spins into a narrative of a hellscape run by communists, socialists, strange, dangerous people like people of color, atheists or LGBTQ people. Republican elites and leadership now routinely refer to the left as the radical left. That is standard American fascist rhetoric.  

Despite a movement to the left of some of the Democratic Party, Pew Research data from 2022 indicates that congress has generally become more conservative over the last 50 years. So at least at the level of congress and red state legislatures, the drift to the left in those places apparently has not made much of a difference yet.

News bits: About the mifepristone ban; Etc.

Last Friday, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas, a radical right Christofascist, issued a decision withdrawing the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. That case was immediately attacked by another federal judge who said states had to keep the drug on the market. That issue will wind up in the Supreme Court. 

There was one other thing in the Kacsmaryk decision I was overlooked. Slate comments, the Kacsmaryk decision "goes even further than expected, raising the possibility that he will impose “fetal personhood,” which holds that every state must ban abortion because it murders a human."

Unbelievable as it is, Slate was right. Page 29-30 of the Kacsmaryk decision includes this paragraph:

Parenthetically, said “individual justice and irreparable injury analysis also arguably applies to the unborn humans extinguished by mifepristone especially in the post-Dobbs era. See Dobbs, 142 S. Ct. at 2261 (Nothing in the Constitution or in our Nation's legal traditions authorizes the Court to adopt [the] theory of life "that States are required to regard a fetus as lacking even the most basic human right -- to live -- at least until an arbitrary point in a pregnancy has passed.) (internal marks omitted) Brief of Amici Curiae Scholars of Jurisprudence John M. Finnis and Robert P. George in Support of Petitioners, Dobbs, 142 S. Ct. 2228 (2022)(arguing unborn humans are constitutional persons entitled to equal protection).

Getting the US Supreme Court to declare that an embryo or a fetus is a person endowed with full constitutional rights is a core Christian nationalist goal. That is what the radical theocrats want to impose as nationwide law. This is Christian Sharia law.

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The Guardian reports that one of the two Tennessee legislators has been reappointed my Nashville's metro council. The other is expected be reappointed on Wednesday. One wonders if the Republicans will expel them again.

And for what it's worth, Biden has informally announced he is running for re-election in 2024.

A criticism of my rhetoric and a response

Moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre

This popped up recently. Maybe me explaining myself helps put the situation in better context. This is about me calling America's authoritarian radical right fascist or Christofascist, partly in response to recent political events. 

Comment: I understand the frustration you feel about the state of politics in America, but you are doing the same thing as the people you are criticizing, narrowly defining millions of Americans because you disagree with their politics.

My response: You've hit a nerve here and I want to air this out.

I've though long and hard about this. Thought about it over the last 6 years at least. I understand your argument. Until the last few days, that reasoning kept me in check most of that time, despite my misgivings about holding back. But the radical tyrant side has gone too far. I am not doing the same thing as the people I criticize. One has to compare tactics, rhetoric and intent. My side, if that's what it is, is not the same as the other.

In my opinion, and under current circumstances and facts, that reasoning poses a false equivalence. I am warning about an undeniable rise in (i) a virulent, bigoted Christian theocracy (Christian nationalism), and (ii) a virulent, cruel brass knuckles capitalist plutocracy, both of which are solidly against, or reject, democracy, civil liberties, compromise and inconvenient fact, true truth and sound reasoning.

In my opinion, me calling out the radical right on the basis of facts, true truths and sound reasoning is not the factual or moral equivalent of America's authoritarian radical right slandering the hell out of everyone and everything that stands in opposition to the monstrous corrupt tyranny the radicals are openly trying to establish at the expense of our democracy and civil liberties.

On the other side, we have a torrent of lies, crackpottery and slanders-based vitriol aimed at the forces of pro-democracy and pro-truth. I've compiled a list of some of the lies and filth the pro-tryanny/theocracy forces routinely accuse the pro-democracy forces of being or doing:

1. teaching CRT and indoctrination of public school and university students with false, rewritten history such as land being stolen or taken by force from American Indians, and (ii) alleged but false effects of systemic racism on minorities
2. gender fluidity indoctrination of public school students, especially young children in grade and middle school, but also in high school
3. ruthless reliance on divisive, identity politics that divides, polarizes and disinforms society and damages democracy
4. blaming the right for ruthless divisive, identity politics that divides, polarizes and disinforms society and damages democracy
5. being too subjective and easy about public school grades, especially for non-White students
6. unfair and/or unconstitutional affirmative action in college admissions, with admissions based on self-described representations instead of actual, demonstrated merit
7. etc.
.
.
12. ridiculous, unfounded alarmism about climate change and its causes based mostly on flawed or fabricated data, unreliable science and corrupt, lying scientists
.
.
22. support for Antifa and violent protest in support of socialism or communism


That is how the pro-tyranny-theocracy forces see the pro-democracy forces. How much truth do you think is in it? I don't see much truth in most of it myself despite having looked real hard for the fact and logic basis for those alleged bad traits and actions. But most of the radical right sees it as rock solid, undeniable, unspun fact and truth.

.... narrowly defining millions of Americans because you disagree with their politics.

I very much want to respond to that. I define or describe groups of people as I see them based on facts, true truths and sound reasoning, including differences between rhetoric, actions and factual circumstance-based intent. I define sound reasoning as reasonably defensible thinking in accord with facts, true truths, logic and personal biases, morals, interests, social situation and etc. For me, empirical facts are facts, not lies. Flawed partisan motivated reasoning is not sound reasoning, it is mostly (~90%) dark free speech (deceptive, divisive and/or emotionally manipulative propaganda).

1. So, here is what I wrote in the 1st paragraph of this blog post:

Most Republican Party elites (~95% ?) are full blown American-style fascist tyrants (Christian nationalist zealots and/or brutal brass knuckles capitalists). Most of the Republican rank and file (~85% ?) are either (i) full blown American-style fascist tyrant supporters, or (ii) horribly duped and manipulated into a false belief that they are innocent, terribly persecuted pro-democracy patriots valiantly defending democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties, mom, the flag, apple pie, inconvenient truth, etc.

What I did there was define by qualifying two different groups of radical right American authoritarians and how they differed or are the same. I specified how many people were excluded from being in those groups. I never once used the word all to describe GOP elites or rank and file because there will be some exceptions among members of all significant political groups.

Exactly what is wrong with those definitions? What makes them too narrow? What, if any, facts contradict my descriptions of those groups? My intent was to describe groups accurately, not too broadly or too narrowly. I am open to reasonable criticism, especially fact-based criticism. What did I get wrong here?

2. What are the politics I disagree with? That's in my comments above. For clarity, I strongly oppose:
1. theocratic and secular tyranny, e.g., corrupt capitalist plutocracy, Christian nationalist theocracy
2. intolerance, bigotry and racism, which is plentiful and openly supported by Christian nationalist dogma and the laws that Christian nationalist legislators and judges are trying to impose on America right now
3. politics unreasonably and indefensibly based on too many lies and slanders, too much deceit, irrational emotional manipulation and flawed partisan motivated reasoning, e.g., crackpottery
4. politics grounded in too much bad faith and ill will

I support:
1. religious freedom outside of government
2. separation of church and state
3. solidly evidence and reason-based politics (no, that does not mean I oppose personal morals, biases, etc.)
4. pluralist and tolerant democracy with reasonable compromise
5. civil liberties
6. politics mostly grounded in good will and good faith

Q: Is it unreasonable, unwarranted and/or counterproductive for me to call those who support radical right elites and policies fascist, American fascist, Christofascist or the like, or all of is this just too much navel gazing?

About the polarization of America

The WaPo reports about an in-depth analysis of factors that have driven American polarization to the unhappy, dysfunctional place we are at today. The core finding is quite interesting:

New report outlines the deep political polarization’s slow and steady march

Urban-rural division has grown dramatically over the past 25 years, according to data from the Cook Political Report

David Wasserman, senior editor of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, highlights the Kentucky district in a new deep dive into all 435 House districts to explain the geographical roots of political polarization and how hollowed-out the political middle has become.

Although legislative gerrymandering plays a key role in letting representatives choose their constituents, the nation’s “urban/rural polarization” has been a much bigger factor over the past 25 years, Wasserman wrote.

“The electorate has simply become much more homogenous than it used to be,” he wrote in the newly released analysis.

It’s part of a nationwide realignment highlighted by the new rankings of the “Cook Partisan Voting Index,” which operatives in both parties have examined for years to help determine which districts are truly up for grabs every two years.

Districts like Rogers’s in Appalachia now have more in common with a rural district nearly 900 miles away in eastern Oklahoma — in terms of income and education levels, home property values and the number of people living in poverty — than Kentucky’s 6th District directly to the north and west.  

In 1999, 164 seats fell into that Cook PVI margin to qualify as swing seats. Now, just 82 fit that statistical data point.

There’s a real-world impact, on policy issues, that happens through all of this political sorting. As fewer members of the House need to worry about the general election, more and more grow concerned about losing primaries to ideological challengers from their left or right flanks.

Data like that leads one to wonder if anything at all could reverse America's continuing slide into extremism. The forces fostering polarization are powerful and not going to go away. Nearly all House seats are safe, so incumbents move farther toward the safety of their activist base to avoid being outflanked by someone more extreme. 

One experiment that at least some red and some blue states could try is imposing a mandatory requirement to vote. There voting means at least returning a ballot. It does not mean voting for anything or anyone you don't want to vote for. Would that affect deep polarization in gerrymandered districts where one side or the other is safe? Since red states are hell-bent on neutering elections, there's no chance of the experiment being tried in any of those states. And, Dems who control blue states may not be interested in such an experiment either.