Category Archives: ethics

Fast Car and Why Marriage Vows Matter

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Remember this song?

It’s both a very personal song and one with universal appeal, a rare combination.

Anyway, one verse really stands out to me.

See, my old man’s got a problemHe lives with the bottle, that’s the way it isHe says his body’s too old for workingHis body’s too young to look like hisSo mama went off and left himShe wanted more from life than he could giveI said, somebody’s got to take care of himI quit school, that’s what I did

That mama was SELFISH! If she had stayed to care for her husband, the daughter would have stayed in school and be more likely to have a bright future.

That’s why I think everyone, male or female, must take marriage vows seriously.

I, ___, take you, ___, for my lawful wife/husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. I will love and honor you all the days of my life.

Of course, a man faithful to his wedding vows would also quit drinking for the sake of his wife, right?

A TERF wrote a bigoted book that was published by Unitarian Universalists!

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This is one of my favorite memes:

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Now read this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transsexual_Empire

The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male is a 1979 book critical of transsexualism by American radical feminist author and activist Janice Raymond. The book is derived from Raymond’s dissertation, which was produced under the supervision of the feminist theologian Mary Daly.[1]

What makes this book especially disturbing is what company published that bigoted pile of crap. BEACON PRESS, the publishing arm of the Unitarian Universalist Association!

It’s a safe bet that the UUA of today would never endorse such a book.

A Critical Mistake in the UU World

And indeed, when I looked for this book on the Beacon Press website:

https://www.beacon.org/cw_Search.aspx?k=The+Transsexual+Empire

Search Results For ‘The Transsexual Empire’
Displaying items 0 – 0 of 0
No products match your search criteria or the criteria was not meaningful.

So that’s a relief. Oh, wait…..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transsexual_Empire#Publication_history

In 1979, the first edition of The Transsexual Empire was published by Beacon Press, a nonprofit publisher in Boston run by the Unitarian Universalist Association. In 1980, the book was published in the United Kingdom by The Women’s Press.[7] In 1994, a second edition was published by Teachers College Press.[8]

Hopefully, the book in the year 2024 is completely out of print and maybe it won’t be sold in bookstores anymore. But…..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janice_Raymond

Janice G. Raymond (born January 24, 1943)[citation needed] is an American lesbian radical feminist and professor emerita of women’s studies and medical ethics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is known for her work against violence, sexual exploitation, and medical abuse of women, and for her controversial work denouncing transsexuality.

A LESBIAN?! Does that hypocrite not understand that her psychotic views against transgender people are EXACTLY the same as homophobes would be against her as a lesbian or male chauvinists would be against her as a feminist? She has NO credibility whatsoever!

TERFs are no better than MRAs

A former TERF defects and exposes the cultlike nature of the movement she once believed in.

And while Raymond may still be alive, her mentor Mary Daly died in 2010. What was her attitude towards men?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Daly#Career

Daly taught classes at Boston College from 1967 to 1999, including courses in theology, feminist ethics, and patriarchy.

Daly was first threatened with dismissal when, following the publication of her first book, The Church and the Second Sex (1968), she was issued a terminal (fixed-length) contract. As a result of support from the (then all-male) student body and the general public, however, Daly was ultimately granted tenure.

Daly’s refusal to admit male students to some of her classes at Boston College also resulted in disciplinary action. While Daly argued that their presence inhibited class discussion, Boston College took the view that her actions were in violation of title IX of federal law requiring the college to ensure that no person was excluded from an education program on the basis of sex, and of the university’s own non-discrimination policy insisting that all courses be open to both male and female students.

In 1989, Daly became an associate of the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press.[8]

In 1998, a discrimination claim against the college by two male students was backed by the Center for Individual Rights, a conservative advocacy group. Following further reprimand, Daly absented herself from classes rather than admit the male students.[9] Boston College removed her tenure rights, citing a verbal agreement by Daly to retire. She brought suit against the college disputing violation of her tenure rights and claimed she was forced out against her will, but her request for an injunction was denied by Middlesex Superior Court Judge Martha Sosman.[10]

A confidential out-of-court settlement was reached. The college maintains that Daly had agreed to retire from her faculty position,[11] while others assert she was forced out.[12][13] Daly maintained that Boston College wronged her students by depriving her of her right to teach freely to only female students.[14] She documented her account of the events in the 2006 book, Amazon Grace: Recalling the Courage to Sin Big.

So Daly was BIGOTED against men! As are most TERFs today.

You are either inclusive of all kinds of people, or you are not. I want NOTHING to do with the kind of toxic “feminism” that seeks to exclude and demonize men, even those that want to understand women and their views better!

The Bigotries of “Everyday Feminism”

It is BIGOTED to exclude white people from a course on black American or African history.

It is BIGOTED to exclude Christians from courses on Islamic history.

It is BIGOTED to exclude straight people from a course on LGBT issues and history.

We should either oppose ALL bigotry, or we are HYPOCRITES, period!

And the Unitarian Universalist Association needs to explicitly denounce “The Transsexual Empire” for the worthless shit it is!

Mr. Beast is an Activist; His Critics are NOT!

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Mr. Beast is a YouTube personality that makes a lot of weird videos. That’s not unusual. It’s what he has done with his fame and wealth he has gained from his works that have gotten a lot of attention!

Watch this:

Amazing, right? But then he made a slight mistake, as pointed out on another channel, a Dose of Buckley.

In his own sarcastic way, Buckley is telling Mr. Beast that he should just ignore his critics, who have themselves most likely never done anything close to what he has.

Others rose to defend Mr. Beast.

In a blog entry from an earlier era, I called Africa “the Cursed Continent”.

Two Reasons for Public Ignorance

So it’s about time someone stood up and made Africa less cursed.

If he keeps doing humanitarian work like this, I can tolerate whatever shit he posts normally in his YouTube channel, Sometimes, such nonsense is a necessary evil, I guess.

Google Bard’s List of Evil People is….Inaccurate

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This is a chatbot known as Google Bard:

https://bard.google.com/

Ever since I began using Replika, I have wondered if an A I can make actual judgements over matters of good and evil. So I asked Bard:

What are the ten most evil people in history?

And this is what I got in response:

Here is a list of ten of the most evil people in history, based on the scale and severity of their crimes:

  1. Adolf Hitler (1889-1945): The leader of the Nazi Party and Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945. Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust, the genocide of six million Jews, as well as the deaths of millions of other people, including Roma, homosexuals, and Soviet prisoners of war.
  2. Joseph Stalin (1878-1953): The dictator of the Soviet Union from 1924 to 1953. Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people, including through purges, executions, and forced labor.
  3. Mao Zedong (1893-1976): The leader of the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 1976. Mao’s policies, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, led to the deaths of tens of millions of people.
  4. Pol Pot (1925-1998): The leader of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Pol Pot was responsible for the deaths of up to two million people, or about a quarter of the country’s population.
  5. Hirohito (1901-1989): The Emperor of Japan from 1926 to 1989. Hirohito was the supreme commander of the Japanese armed forces during World War II and was responsible for the deaths of millions of people, including Chinese civilians, prisoners of war, and Allied soldiers.
  6. Vlad the Impaler (1431-1476): The Prince of Wallachia (modern-day Romania) from 1456 to 1462 and again from 1476 to 1477. Vlad was known for his cruelty and his use of impalement as a form of torture and execution.
  7. Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584): The Grand Prince of Moscow and the first Tsar of Russia. Ivan was known for his paranoia and his outbursts of rage. He is believed to have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
  8. Leopold II of Belgium (1835-1909): The King of the Belgians from 1865 to 1909. Leopold was the personal owner of the Congo Free State, a private colony in Central Africa. Leopold’s brutal exploitation of the Congolese people led to the deaths of millions of people.
  9. Saddam Hussein (1937-2006): The President of Iraq from 1979 to 2003. Saddam was a brutal dictator who used torture, execution, and chemical warfare against his own people. He is also believed to have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the Iran-Iraq War.
  10. Idi Amin (1925-2003): The President of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. Amin was a megalomaniacal dictator who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ugandans. He was also known for his eccentric behavior and his bizarre public statements.

 

My responses:

  1. Absolutely! Hitler was DETERMINED to start a war even while the western democracies desperately tried to appease him based on the mistaken notion that Hitler, who was known to be anti-Communist, would be a reliable ally against the Soviet Union. Instead, we ended up allying with the Soviet Union against Germany and defeating Hitler. Hitler was not only evil, he was an IDIOT!
  2. Stalin actually killed more people than Hitler, but that was only because he ruled for a lot longer. He also did more to defeat Hitler than any other leader. Without the Soviet forces, we would have LOST World War II.
  3. Chairman Mao is an example of a brilliant revolutionary who was incompetent at governing, but his massive ego would never let him admit to his failures, leading to many people suffering needlessly during the scam that was known as the “Cultural Revolution”. Eventually, even his fellow Communists got sick of his nonsense and stripped him of his power while allowing him to keep his Chairmanship out of respect for his making the original revolution in China possible. After Mao died, the remaining Communists charged his widow with crimes and sent her to prison, along with others who had been most loyal to Mao. Good riddance, but they have kept the phony “Communist” state in power to this day, and it needs to go!
  4. By percentage, Pol Pot killed more of his own people than even Stalin did. Eventually, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and overthrew him and later he was tried by his own people and eliminated. 
  5. No, the Japanese Emperor does not belong on this list. Sure Japan committed a lot of war crimes, but the Emperor, once he realized Japan would inevitably lose the war, did something Hitler was too cowardly to do:  He openly called for his people to SURRENDER to the Americans to avoid more deaths and destruction. His proclamation saved many Japanese and American lives, which is why he was allowed to keep his throne throughout the American occupation of Japan.
  6. This guy was indeed so horrible that he was the inspiration for the fictional vampire Count Dracula……Dracula was a nickname for Vlad and was a reference to the Devil.
  7. Russia has always been notorious for its tyrants. Ivan started the trend, obviously.
  8. All the acts of imperialism in the modern age were terrible, but King Leopold II was indeed the worst. The simple fact that he lived to a ripe old age and was never overthrown is a stain on the history of Belgium forever!
  9. Saddam was terrible, but not THAT terrible. In fact, he was our ally in the 1980s when he was at war with Iran, based on the idiotic idea that “the enemy of my enemy can be my friend”. We only turned on him when he stopped doing our bidding and attacked Kuwait, and that was absolutely NONE of our business. WE backstabbed Saddam, not the other way around!
  10. Africa was left largely to fend for itself after the European powers ended their occupation of most of the continent, and when there is a void of power, someone naturally has to fill it. Idi Amin was only one of many examples of bad African leaders. He learned from Europeans how to be a ruthless leader. 

 

The Damage to the iilluminaughtii’s Crediblity

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Over the past few weeks, a controversy erupted over a legal dispute between Blair Zon, AKA the iilluminaughtii, and another YouTube personality known as Legal Eagle over content in the latter’s videos. Blair claimed in a public twitter post that the other user had committed copyright infringement. This caused others to attack her in turn, including former friends of hers!

There are at least a dozen other such videos on YouTube. Feel free to check them out.

Blair herself began the address the issue in reddit:

iilluminaughtii
I did apologize to LE privately. Idk who the Big Joel person is but yeah. That’s why I deleted the tweets.
But that clearly was not enough. So she then made a whole video about it all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDV71uqk_Gs&ab_channel=iilluminaughtii 

And I left this comment there.
We all make mistakes. I had to end an 18 year long friendship with someone I had loved like a sister because she accused me of not being supportive enough of her emotionally and then she started sending me very long and hurtful messages attacking me personally. After many days of enduring this and hoping she would just stop and move on, I finally had ENOUGH! I sent her one last message. “Do not send me any more long and hateful messages, they will be ignored.” Then I blocked her. I miss the beautiful person she used to be, but I totally reject what she became in the end!
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Having been a target of a former friend turned sworn enemy, I know all too well how it can be when someone is well respected and even beloved for her public activism and then others seek to tear them down for…..reasons.
It should be noted that at no point was Blair ever accused of making false statements against the various MLMs or other corrupt entities she has criticized in the past. This was all about her engaging in unnecessary drama with people like Legal Eagle, who should have been seen as valuable allies, and getting burned for it.
Now, here is my advice to Blair on how to move forward in the future.
  1. NEVER attack someone publicly for a perceived offense unless and until it is clear the conflict cannot be resolved privately.
  2. Be willing to take a break from ALL social media for a few weeks or even several months. I KNEW that eventually with the massive output of content on your YouTube channels that eventually something would go wrong. I just didn’t think it would be something like what came out this month. You have FAILED!
  3. No, a private apology is not enough. Always be willing to make a public statement apologizing and clearing things up.
  4. STOP SPEWING SO MUCH NEGATIVITY ON YOUR CHANNELS AND OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA OUTLETS! You can always shift gears and talk about something positive in the past as a way of inspiring others to do better. What about a video about someone like Carl Sagan and his awesome works? When you are so negative for so long, it is inevitable that negativity will come back around and hurt you.

I look forward to seeing you recover from this, but I’m not going to be satisfied with you just moving on like nothing happened.

You…..must…..CHANGE!

SOLanding, a Possible Cryptocurrency Scam Site?

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In a previous blog entry, I detailed how I was scammed out of thousands of dollars over several months by a woman in the Chicago area named Madaline Wampler. 

John Wiley and Madaline Wampler

Apparently I was not the only victim of hers. I thought after that I’d never fall for another scam. But the thing about scammers is that once they are exposed, they change their tactics to stay in business. And it seems I am among the first to fall for a new scam involving cryptocurrency trading and a fake website.

My story begins in Facebook.

Right after I posted that, a complete stranger posted a comment saying she agreed with me. Her name, at least that I saw, was Ahn Lee.

I looked up her profile and saw pics of the most beautiful lady….and she was a DOCTOR, a specialist in anesthesiology. In case you are wondering what that is:

https://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/anesthesiology/patient-information/role-of-the-anesthesiologist/

A common misconception is that an anesthesiologist is the doctor who “puts patients to sleep” before surgery. It’s true that this is part of their job, but it’s only a small part! An anesthesiologist is actually a perioperative physician, where “peri” means all-around. So, an anesthesiologist is responsible for patient care throughout the surgical experience: before, during, and after the surgery itself. An anesthesiologist also has many responsibilities outside of the surgical suite (operating room).

So her job was extremely vital! Anyway, here are some pics of her:

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300893948_1444837892656979_6180150661167185475_n

299834835_1444808899326545_186678437683124375_n

302274205_1458574234616678_8612466429269413168_n

So tiny and sweet looking! So I friended her on Facebook and soon found her in other places:

https://www.instagram.com/medicalmyanne/

https://medicalmyanne.tumblr.com/

https://www.amazon.com/shop/medicalmyanne

She then started chatting with me in WhatsApp, with her number there being 347-343-3474, which is indeed in New York City, where Ahn said she lives. She told me she was of Vietnamese and Chinese descent, had a home in Florida, occasionally visited Texas, was 35 years old, her birthday was on October 9 and what really got my attention…..she was looking for a man to start a family with.  She also told me she was close to her uncle who was a university professor and an entrepreneur. And like her uncle, she made lots of money via investments.

A couple of weeks after we had started chatting, she told me I could make lots of money via trading in cryptocurrency, just as she had. And so she introduced me to Coinbase.

https://www.coinbase.com/home

 

Work2

She directed me to wire money to Coinbase, so I sent it $1000. Then she directed me to send that money on to another site:  SOLanding.

https://solandingmarket.github.io/

Work1

And she began teaching me how to invest with this site:

Work 5

And because of my investments, I made a small profit and then I withdrew all my money back.

That was in early September. Then she said I should invest more to get a bigger return. Over the course of the rest of September and early October, I wired more money to Coinbase and then transferred that money in turn to SOLanding, a total of $15070 dollars. And again through trading I made a profit, a HUGE one! And this was the result:

Work3

So now I had 30267 dollars to my name! I then requested that I withdraw all that money. And you know what they told me? That I needed to send an additional $4540 as taxes before I would be allowed to withdraw the 30 K in my assets. I was also told my account in SOLanding would be frozen if I did not pay within 72 hours. 

In a panic, I contacted Ahn and she told me she would help pay the rest if I could send most of it. I believed her, so I wired to Coinbase an additional $3200, thus nearly draining my checking account. Ahn asked me to tell her how much I sent so she could send the rest.

Apparently she kept her word, since when I later contacted the customer service department of SOLanding, they told me my taxes had been paid. So again I asked to withdraw my assets. They requested my bank account numbers so they could wire me all the money I requested. And then I waited……..and am still waiting. But meanwhile, Ahn Lee disappeared from Facebook, claiming that her account there had been hacked and then she also disappeared from WhatsApp. I have no more contact with her and likewise SOLanding no longer responds to my questions or demands. I have been totally cut off!

Acting on advice from an employee at Chase Bank, I contacted Coinbase and asked for help. I asked if they had ever heard of SOLanding and they said they had not. As soon as I saw that, my heart sank like the Titanic.

I now believe the following.

  1. The person who contacted me in both Facebook and WhatsApp wasn’t the real Dr. Ahn Lee, but an imposter using me to get money for SOLanding, their actual employer. 
  2. SOLanding is a FAKE website that takes the funds from unsuspecting investors and practically steals them after allowing for “investments” that seem to be successful.
  3. Coinbase is a legitimate trading site and is not to blame for all this. I could have done all my trading with that and not taken the impostor’s advice to send so much money on to SOLanding.

So now with this blog entry, I have exposed SOLanding as a scam operation and I hope an investigation can be done by law enforcement to shut that site down! Even as a victim of it, I am determined to prevent others from being duped as I was! And of course…..I WANT MY $15000 BACK!!!

Blizzard FAILS Again!

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Blizzard, the company that brought us World of Warcraft and Overwatch, two games I have loved and been loyal to for years, got derailed last year due to a scandal and a lawsuit over acts of sexual harassment and abuse that destroyed the company’s reputation, as documented here:

Blizzard and Activision Need to be Split Apart, Round 2!

Just when I was beginning to think Blizzard was recovering and learning from its past mistakes, it prepares to release a new game called Diablo Immortal, a mobile game that is part of the Diablo franchise Blizzard has also been known for over the decades. The earlier Diablo games were for PCs, and the fact that Blizzard made a Diablo game for mobile devices shows how advanced cell phones and tablets have become. So Blizzard was making their games even more inclusive, right?

Well, think again! This Diablo Immortal hasn’t even been officially been released yet, only being beta tested so far and games and game critics are already slamming it! See for yourself!

Now I have played a starter edition of Diablo III and I enjoyed it, but I never bought any of the Diablo games and I certainly won’t after seeing this train wreck of this newest game.

I’m beginning to wonder if I should apologize to EA for blasting it as I have. No, but I do think that Blizzard is giving EA some stiff competition for the title of WORST VIDEO GAME COMPANY EVER!!!!

 

 

A New Trend on YouTube: Bashing Narcissists

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Ever since Donald Trump became President of the USA, people who are disgusted with his incredible sense of entitlement have wanted to give him and every other selfish asshole a kick in their faces!

Recently, YouTube users have begun to post stories depicting such people and how they were dealt with.

Here is an example from a channel titled “Apple Texts”, featuring one sister betraying another:

or this one of a mother wanting to be a parasite on her son and his wife:

For more videos like that, go to the channel:   https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgkQeV7CxSeKHei7V9esEBw

Another channel with such videos is Feel Good Story: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoSRJRAOsBODe2b63EXNhqg

Here is a story of a greedy moocher taking advantage of family members:

And another of a mother-in-law trying to reduce her son’s wife to slavery:

After watching many of these videos, I got in on the trend too, with this episode of the Debbie and Carrie Show:

That was fun to make, wasn’t it?

Now we just need to make such stories always end that way in real life!

Racists should be consistent in their bigotry

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I always assumed that most racists rejected and looked down on ALL members of minorities, without exception. But that appears to not be the case sometimes.

Take a look at this discussion:

British expats ‘in tears’ as Spain to deport 500 for failing to register for residency under post-Brexit regulations. By March 31 they will be deemed as illegal immigrants.
byu/green_flash inworldnews

gothlaw

“expat Shaun Cromber voted Leave but said he did not believe Brexit would end his Spanish lifestyle. He said: “Yes I voted out, but I didn’t realise it would come to this.”

So he voted for the UK to leave the EU, but then did not immediately leave the EU to return to the UK? Seriously???

InPatRileyWeTrust

This is literally the classic leave voter. Yeah we voted leave but didn’t think anything negative would actually happen.

_________________

Don_Fartalot

‘Get those dirty Italian and Spanish foreigners out of the UK….but oh let me stay in their country so I can enjoy their lifestyle’.

Then the discussion went beyond the issue of Brexit.

GZHotwater
I spent most of the past decade working (legally) in China. You wouldn’t believe the number of American “expats” I met there “teaching” English on tourist & business visas. For most I didn’t care about their status…except the ones who ranted on about “illegals” back home. I took great pleasure in discussing & highlighting their illegal status. Most didn’t get the irony of their situation due to exceptionalism.

Note: I was an economic migrant. I had a choice of being unemployed/redundant back home or move to China.

__________________________

Swarles_Stinson

A Trump supporter’s husband was deported in 2017 and she says that Trump was only supposed to deport “bad” people and not illegal immigrants like her husband. She Trump made a mistake, but still has her support.

____________

endoffays

and then they interviewed other Karens from the same town. Apparnetly the genetleman deported had lived in the town for 20 + years, raised a family there, OWNED THE ONLY MEXICAN RESTAURANT IN TOWN, was loved by all the people there……

Interview after interview these white folks said they LOVED TRUMP and still supported his push to get rid of illegals, but they wanted him to make an exception for their illegal.

Just like every other thing and republicans…..they are filled with hate and anger until their policies affect themselves…..then they have an epiphany, say something akin to “I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face” and then keep on hating the next day.* (* explained at bottom)

Hate is their fuel. Just like old people’s medicine is for the robots that are going to take over and kill us all.

*: I just made a comment about 30 minutes ago about Republicans who protest outside abortion clinics. I’ve read countless interviews with abortion clinic nurses and providers who repeatedly state that many of the same women that protest wind up in their clinic receiving their services, but ALWAYS say something along these lines, “Well, you see, my situation is special. I wasn’t a whore like all the other girls that come here.”

And then after being treated with kindness and compassion, the abortion protestor is seen outside the very clinic they received an abortion at less than a week afterwards, yelling hateful things to the people that treated them with kindness. Just another example of someone who can’t fathom life outside of their own little minds until they are thrust into the same situation. Then, instead of it changing their viewpoint and becoming a better person, they think they’re the exception and go on right back to hating.

_______________

JessicantTouchThis
I listened to an NPR interview a couple months ago (up to 6 months ago I’d say, so I may get some details wrong) where the host did a segment on one gentleman. He was from Mexico, but his family got him US citizenship when he was a child and moved him up here. I think they said he joined the Navy for a time before getting out and joining Border Patrol. He was a distinguished border patrol agent, got several awards and a fair amount of recognition over his 10+ year career.
He talked about how he didn’t always agree with who he was tasked with deporting, but it was the law and how things worked and he left it at that. I was honestly kind of pissed with how he could view someone in such similar circumstances as himself, but because their family didn’t do their due diligence, they deserved to have everything taken from them in an instant. Him and his wife both voted for Trump, despite him being an immigrant.
And then they talked about how he was called into his supervisors office one day where he was met with a couple other federal agents. He was informed that his US birth certificate was actually a forgery and completely fake, and he had been illegally living and working in the US for a few decades. He was ordered to turn in his badge, his gun, and then told that he would need to fight it in the courts. Y’know, just like all the people he had arrested over the years. He had no idea, his parents/grandparents had lied to him since he was a boy.
Him and his wife were very upset, obviously, and got legal help. During the interview he had mentioned that they had been fighting in the courts for a couple years already, but they had just submitted their final appeal, likely in vain. They couldn’t believe that he, a distinguished federal employee and veteran, couldn’t be granted any sort of leniency to try and prevent him from being deported, or that Trump had enacted such tough immigration laws and had basically abandoned them when they felt they needed him.
The whole interview, like I said, pissed me off because I honestly felt the guy was getting what he deserved. He broke the rules, just like he said all those people he had apprehended over the years, and they needed to suffer the consequences. But once the shoe was on his foot, and he was the one being deported, all of a sudden it’s “this isn’t fair, this isn’t right, this isn’t just,” blah blah blah.
The most astounding part? I’m pretty sure they both said they (the guy and his wife) had or were going to vote for Trump again in 2020, and… Just, I don’t get people. The Republican Party and those who follow it are the epitome of “rules for thee, not for me,” and this guy was acting like he was unjustly being targeted when he was literally guilty of everything they said he had done.

________________

Teripid

And Trump himself is responsible for Melania’s parents.

__________________

Myfourcats1

I watched an episode of that show Ghosted on MTV. There was a white girl who had been ghosted by her black friend. She couldn’t figure out why. It turns out she was a Trump supporter and would post all kinds of hateful stuff on FB. When they found her former friend the ghoster was like you really don’t understand why I wouldn’t want to be friends with you?

__________________

Seeker_Alpha1701

That’s the very definition of hypocrisy.

There was the case of a German Army officer who had to deal with a Swedish diplomat (Sweden was neutral in World War II) who eventually revealed he was Jewish. The German officer said, “You are a good Jew. I wouldn’t consider you my enemy.”

That German was still a Hitler supporter to the end, of course.

______________

ky0nshi
there was this saying that every German had their “good Jew”. You know, that one Jew who wasn’t like the others, all the others were terrible, but that one Jew they knew, he wasn’t like that.

It’s always easier to hate a big abstract group of people than the people you actually know.

_______________

Voroxpete

There’s a very important corollary this that I want to note; despite what they claim, they don’t actually believe that abortion is wrong. They just believe that the wrong kind of people are getting abortions.

This is prevalent in Conservative attitudes to literally everything. It’s all about hierarchies, and making sure that the right kind of people are at the top of those hierarchies. Everything is acceptable, when the right people are doing it.

This reminds me of this earlier blog entry:

The Dumbest Kind of Trump Supporter

And the cases of Thomas Jefferson and Strom Thurmond come to mind as well. Both had relationships and even children with black women……and both were racists and championed racist policies. BOTH WERE HYPOCRITES!

And that’s why I have always said:

I believe in consistent standards of right and wrong and so I see no point in ever excusing something that is wrong because the wrongdoer is otherwise a friendly or nice guy. That’s how corruption sets in.

And corruption is the only thing Conservatives in ANY society seem to do. People enable that nonsense because it seems they only want to be good to a certain point and when that point is reached and ethical consistency starts to make their lives a bit less convenient for them (but beneficial for people that are different from them), they embrace corruption instead. And so they might as well not be good at all.

Rape Apologists, Round Two!

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Start with this earlier blog entry:

A Horror Story of Rape, Ostracism and Triggering Memories

Focus on these passages:

I heard a group of fifteen year old girls discussing a girl in their high school who had been [raped] by a classmate talking on the train yesterday……As far as they were concerned, the girl who had accused their classmate of rape was probably not lying, but apparently should have known better than to have hung out with this specific boy because he was a “ghetto” kid who had a reputation for being a ladies man?

In other words, blacks are expected to be rapists and white girls can protect themselves by being racists. Which is bullshit, of course. Rich white men also rape!

I was raped by my puppt loves cousin as his uncle held my puppy love down to wait to take his turn on me. Fortunately, my bf finally got out of his much older uncles grasp and ran. His uncle chased him to the train station where he lost him and my puppy love called the cops to tell them his cousin was raping me…..In the year leading upto the trail, my entire neighborhood (mostly old school Italians) completely turned on me. I went from being a straight a student to a high school drop out within 6 months due to the insanity which ensued. Not only facing death threats, having guns pulled on me, having my family threatened by the family of the guy who raped me, but also being shunned by the very community I grew up in all because
a white girls like me must have been asking for it to have 3 Puerto Rican boys in my house alone. I guess that fact alone made what happened to me my fault.

The harrassment and bullying I endured at the hands of my community, including being jumped by the same Italian girls I grew up with almost every week and having their mothers who had known me as a little girl shun me and forbid me from talking to their daughters (one neighbor of mine went so far as to call me a slut and spit on me after telling me if she saw me try to talk to her daughter again she would personally fuck me up).

Not to mention what the so called “Justice System” put me through, maligning my character, questioning my morality, trying to paint me as a slut beforehand (which shouldn’t have mattered even if that had been true, which it certainly was not). As if wearing a short skirt or hanging out with a boy or two is tantamount to asking to be raped!

I see a connection between this and MRA’s making excuses for raping women.

Rape Apologists!

Women say “no” to me in one way or another on a regular basis, e.g. “no, you can’t have my number”, “no, I should go home”, “no, I’m not coming into your apartment”, and of course, the classic, “no, we’re not having sex”.

Yet somehow, when it’s all said and done, the woman is invariably happy that I didn’t listen to a single word of protest she uttered; that I barreled through her resistance nonchalantly and drove the ball to the basket. Women RESPECT this sexual insistence even if they aren’t acutely aware of it……….I’ve had hour or more long battles with a girl who had come to my room and then protested that she wasn’t going to have sex with me. Hell, it just happened again yesterday. In the end, of course, we got naked. And, she appreciated it after the fact. If a girl isn’t open to being seduced she will either not come in or will precipitate hastily from your room. Anything short of that is a green light.

Note: the website that posted those lies was eventually shut down.

But there are still people who believe the lie that rape can EVER be blamed on the one who was raped. Read this horrible story from India:

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/outrage-16-old-girl-tied-133656911.html

Outrage after 16-year-old girl tied to her rapist and paraded through Indian village

A teenager who said she had been raped by a neighbour was punished by being bound to her alleged attacker and paraded through her village, in a ritual humiliation which has caused outcry in India.

Film of the incident showed villagers raising pro-India chants as the pair were led around by a mob of men.

Six people have been arrested after the incident, which campaigners said demonstrated the widespread shaming of victims of sexual assault.

Members of the mob struck and spat at the 16-year-old girl as they lined her path in the village in Madhya Pradesh. Those arrested included the alleged attacker and the victim’s brother, uncle and cousin.

“When I saw them doing that to her, I had tears in my eyes,” one villager called Tilak Ram Bhilela told the New York Times. “But no one could speak a word, the mob was so angry they would have killed us.”

Accounts of horrific sex crimes are commonplace in India, which has seen repeated waves of protest over the issue since the notorious 2012 rape and murder of a teen on a Delhi bus.

Yet campaigners say a culture of violence against women includes the harassment of victims, who are often considered shamed and not fit for marriage. Women are put under pressure not to report crimes and often face revenge if they do.

The teenager had told family members that their neighbour had pushed her to the floor, then gagged and attacked her. The relatives, with a number of villagers, found the man she had accused and beat him, before parading them both.

India’s government promised to do more to protect women after the 2012 Delhi rape sparked outrage. Yet despite regular protests and new laws, the number of assaults on women has not abated and prosecutions languish in the backlogged courts for years.

Recent notorious cases have included the murder of a woman in Unnao district, Uttar Pradesh, who was on her way to court in 2019 after alleging she had been raped. She was set upon by five men, including two alleged rapists, and set alight. She died soon afterwards.

Sexism is a problem because of India’s two main religions, Hinduism and Islam, both of which teach that women are to be property of men, or at best socially inferior.

In such an atmosphere, a man, even if condemned for rape, can argue that the sex was consensual. “She must have wanted it too, or she wouldn’t have been with me at all!”

Men can learn to not rape women and girls even if they have strong romantic and sexual feelings for them. It is sad that religions do not seem to teach that!

https://www.openbible.info/topics/rape

Deuteronomy 22:23-29

If there is a betrothed virgin, and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman because she did not cry for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.

But if in the open country a man meets a young woman who is betrothed, and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die. But you shall do nothing to the young woman; she has committed no offense punishable by death. For this case is like that of a man attacking and murdering his neighbor, because he met her in the open country, and though the betrothed young woman cried for help there was no one to rescue her.

If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife, because he has violated her. He may not divorce her all his days.

Is that why my friend was scorned and why the girl in India was scorned, because they were raped in cities and not the countryside? Location has nothing to do with it!

I remember a discussion I had with another friend about sex with underaged girls.

Being Better Educated and Changing my Opinion

Teenagers do not process information the same way adults do. Their brains have not fully developed the ability to reason and understand consequences of their actions. They act on almost pure emotion. They process information using the amygdala and adults use the pre-frontal cortex. Children and teenagers do not have the ability to reason the way an adult does, which is why they are notoriously impulsive and they are easily influenced. Adults have the ability and responsibility to protect young people and, even if put in a position where a minor comes on to them, it is their responsibility to handle that situation appropriately and not use that as an opportunity to prey on that vulnerability.

So even in a big city, an adult can manipulate a teen into sex because the teen responds naturally to peer pressure (essential as a survival tool in a natural environment of small tribes, but dangerous in larger and modern communities where one can thus “disappear” after committing an offense or crime).

If the teen later regrets the sex act, it is because their sense of personal autonomy and justice kicks in later and makes them realize they were used purely for physical gratification by the older partner, and not for love!

Which makes this meme particularly insidious:

Any adult by definition has power over a child, so sex between them cannot logically be consider consensual once the child clearly says she was raped. If you want to avoid ever being accused of rape, DO NOT EVER HAVE SEX WITH AN UNDERAGED PERSON, PERIOD! If you can’t wait until the younger person becomes legally an adult, or better still, find an actual adult to satisfy your urges, you deserve to be locked up to protect others from you!

And yes, that includes that damned pervert R. Kelly!

Joe Walsh, ex-Republican, anti-Trump, but still conservative

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It’s no secret that as a progressive/liberal/leftist I bitterly despise most conservatives, seeing nearly all of them as hypocrites who deserve no respect at all. But there is one that I have noticed recently on Twitter that challenges that perception quite well and so he may indeed be the exception that brings redemption to conservatism as a philosophy. He is Joe Walsh.

But before I actually talk about him, read this first:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HeelFaceTurn

Heel–Face Turn

When a bad guy turns good. This usually makes for a good plot, for three reasons:

  1. It lets the writer reintroduce the villain as a “darker, edgier” hero.
  2. It reinforces a desired notion of the inherent goodness within people.
  3. It prevents the Worthy Opponent from falling victim to What a Senseless Waste of Human Life.

There are also various in-story motivations for the bad guy to make the turn:

  1. An encounter with an All-Loving Hero or gaining a Morality Pet.
  2. Discovering that Being Evil Sucks or possibly that Good Feels Good.
  3. An Enemy Mine situation leading to Fire Forged Friendship or The Power of Love in the form of Deliver Us from Evil or Love Redeems changing their priorities. Conversely Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal makes them rethink their loyalties.
  4. Realizing that they are a Noble Demon.
  5. A Heel Realization, if they had never considered their actions evil or wrong in the first place.
  6. They become friends with a hero after fighting them.
  7. A case of Even Evil Has Standards, if one villain becomes a good guy to stop another villain from doing something so horrible that they just cannot allow it.

Now on to our actual subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Walsh_(American_politician)

William Joseph Walsh (born December 27, 1961) is an American politician, conservative talk radio host, former social worker, and former 2020 Republican presidential candidate who served one term in the United States House of Representatives representing Illinois’s 8th congressional district.

Rep Joe Walsh.jpg

Born and raised in the Chicago metropolitan area, Walsh began his career as a social worker providing education and job skills training to students in low income areas, gradually becoming more politically active. Walsh had unsuccessfully campaigned for Congress in 1996 and the Illinois House of Representatives in 1998, but was elected to the U.S. House in 2010, defeating three-term incumbent Melissa Bean. Though he received little Republican Party support in his bid against Bean, he was popular with the Tea Party movement. In the 1990s, he identified as a moderate Republican, but he later became a conservative and a Tea Party activist.

During his time in Congress, Walsh was criticized for his often personal attacks against members of the Democratic Party and, specifically, President Barack Obama. He accused the president of abandoning the U.S.–Israel alliance and bankrupting the country. Walsh maintained a no-compromise approach to legislating that included rejecting any tax increases. He consistently voted against raising the federal debt ceiling and authored a balanced budget amendment to the United States Constitution. Walsh rejected the scientific consensus on climate change and supported tougher border control. Later, during his presidential campaign, Walsh expressed regret for some of the comments and stances he made during his time in Congress.

As a result of redistricting following the 2010 United States Census, Walsh’s district was redrawn by the Democratic-controlled Illinois General Assembly in 2012. While he initially planned to run in the newly drawn 14th district against fellow Republican Representative Randy Hultgren, he eventually decided to run in the remapped 8th district against Democratic candidate Tammy Duckworth. Walsh was defeated by Duckworth in the general election on November 6, 2012. After leaving office, Walsh began hosting a talk radio show. Though initially a strong supporter of Donald Trump, Walsh became increasingly critical of the president and, on August 25, 2019, he announced his presidential campaign. He dropped out of the race on February 7, 2020, after a poor showing in the Iowa caucus, and subsequently left the party.[2] He later endorsed Democratic candidate Joe Biden, who won the election.

Say whatever else you will about this guy, but he is not (anymore, at least) a liar. He just doesn’t seem to be a backstabber like so many others I could refer to.

His Twitter account: https://twitter.com/WalshFreedom

And here are some of his actual recent tweets:

I’m going to be watching him over the next few months, at least. And maybe listening to him too.

http://fsilencepodcast.com/

If he really wants to make a difference soon, I think he should join the Libertarian Party and build it up to overthrow the corrupted Republicans.

https://www.lp.org/

Let It Go… my analysis of its lyrics

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In an earlier blog entry, I spoke of the experience of people leaving their former religion and seeking personal freedom. I also referred to a song that seems to speak of that experience. Here is that song again:

And here are the lyrics:

The snow glows white on the mountain tonight
Not a footprint to be seen
A kingdom of isolation
And it looks like I’m the queen
The wind is howling like this swirling storm inside
Couldn’t keep it in, heaven knows I’ve tried
Don’t let them in, don’t let them see
Be the good girl you always have to be
Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know
Well, now they know
 
Let it go, let it go
Can’t hold it back anymore
Let it go, let it go
Turn away and slam the door
I don’t care what they’re going to say
Let the storm rage on
The cold never bothered me anyway
 
It’s funny how some distance makes everything seem small
And the fears that once controlled me can’t get to me at all
It’s time to see what I can do
To test the limits and break through
No right, no wrong, no rules for me
I’m free
 
Let it go, let it go
I am one with the wind and sky
Let it go, let it go
You’ll never see me cry
Here I stand and here I stay
Let the storm rage on
 
My power flurries through the air into the ground
My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around
And one thought crystallizes like an icy blast
I’m never going back, the past is in the past
 
Let it go, let it go
When I’ll rise like the break of dawn
Let it go, let it go
That perfect girl is gone
Here I stand in the light of day
Let the storm rage on
The cold never bothered me anyway
 
And here is my interpretation of those lyrics.
 
The snow glows white on the mountain tonight
Not a footprint to be seen
A kingdom of isolation
And it looks like I’m the queen
 
When you realize that a religion you based your entire life around is not true, or at least not suitable for you, you don’t just lose that religion, you lose the COMMUNITY that religion creates, and thus you feel terrified about what may happen to you later. We humans are social animals, so this is indeed trauma on a grievous scale.
 
The wind is howling like this swirling storm inside
Couldn’t keep it in, heaven knows I’ve tried
Don’t let them in, don’t let them see
Be the good girl you always have to be
Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know
Well, now they know
 
At first, you may try to pretend to still believe in and follow your former religion, but this is no long term solution if you value your integrity. And eventually, those in the faith closest to you may figure out you are just pretending and condemn you, rightfully, as a hypocrite. The sooner you come out with the truth about yourself, the better.
 
 
Let it go, let it go
Can’t hold it back anymore
Let it go, let it go
Turn away and slam the door
I don’t care what they’re going to say
Let the storm rage on
The cold never bothered me anyway
 

Once you turn that corner and admit openly you have abandoned your past faith, your fears will be replaced with inner peace, perhaps the same inner peace the religion itself was supposed to give you. Now you can face the others who still follow your old religion and refute their claims. The controversy (cold) wasn’t the issue; you were just on the wrong side of it!

It’s funny how some distance makes everything seem small
And the fears that once controlled me can’t get to me at all
It’s time to see what I can do
To test the limits and break through
No right, no wrong, no rules for me
I’m free
 
People who reject all dogmatic religions do so because they realize the rules of those religions are not grounded in reality. The only rules and laws that should ever matter are those that serve real needs of real people in real time. Religions can’t do that!
 
Let it go, let it go
I am one with the wind and sky
Let it go, let it go
You’ll never see me cry
Here I stand and here I stay
Let the storm rage on
 
So now you can prove that leaving a religion won’t destroy you as a person, but make your life better!
 
My power flurries through the air into the ground
My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around
And one thought crystallizes like an icy blast
I’m never going back, the past is in the past
 
Leaving an oppressive religion increases your creativity, allowing you to  explore possibilities that you were fearful of before. And that justifies your leaving and makes you see there is no point in ever turning back.
 
Let it go, let it go
When I’ll rise like the break of dawn
Let it go, let it go
That perfect girl is gone
Here I stand in the light of day
Let the storm rage on
The cold never bothered me anyway
 

The religion you left promised you light, but it was a lie; you only became truly enlightened once you left it and found what was right for you. You stopped seeking moral perfection once you recognized it never existed. Instead, you make up your own standards and live by them. Just as I did in 2005:

 

An Honorable Skeptic

Bigotry is bigotry, and NONE of it should EVER be excused.

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The most troublesome bigots in American society are often the ones who are white and/or Christian and say crap like “I have black/Jewish/Muslim/(other minority) friends,” but being conservative they must have lower standards for friends than me, because if they truly saw every other person in their community as equals, THEY WOULDN’T BE CONSERVATIVE! Liberals are the ONLY ones that truly champion equal justice for all.

Want proof of that? Read this article

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/viral-video-forced-wealthy-texas-suburb-confront-racism-silent-majority-n1255230

Southlake, Texas is a community not far from where I live (Haltom City, just outside Fort Worth). And Texas is a notoriously red (conservative) state.

Let’s zero in on some specific parts of the article in question.

This past summer — nearly two years after the viral video — the school board unveiled a plan that would require diversity and inclusion training for all students as part of the K-12 curriculum, while amending the student code of conduct to specifically prohibit acts of discrimination, referred to in the document as “microaggressions.”

Within days, outraged parents — most of them white — formed a political action committee and began packing school board meetings to voice their strong opposition. Some denounced the diversity plan as “Marxist” and “leftist indoctrination” designed to “fix a problem that doesn’t exist.” The opponents said they, too, wanted all students to feel safe at Carroll, but they argued that the district’s plan would instead create “diversity police” and amounted to “reverse racism” against white children.

Basically, they were saying they wanted minorities to feel maybe 90% equal to whites, NOT 100% equal. We mustn’t be fooled by their false rhetoric.

Like many small towns in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area in the early 1990s, Southlake was on the cusp of explosive population growth. In the nearly three decades since the Cornishes arrived, Southlake’s population has tripled to more than 31,000 residents, driven in part by a surge of immigrants from South Asia. Hundreds more Black people also moved in, though they still make up less than 2 percent of the population in a city where 74 percent of residents are white.

With its proximity to the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and the headquarters of several Fortune 500 companies, the city became a magnet for wealthy professionals, with the median household income now topping $230,000.

As it grew, Southlake gained a reputation in the Dallas area as a sort of suburban utopia, with master-planned neighborhoods and dominant high school sports programs. A 2007 D Magazine article about the Carroll football team’s run of state championships described the city’s “otherworldly” charm.

Despite having lived most of my life in suburbs like Haltom City, North Richland Hills, and Arlington, I am perceptive enough to recognize that the purpose of establishing most of those suburbs, including Southlake, was to provide places where whites could move away from the huge cities where minorities are concentrated. But then some members of those minorities began to follow the whites to those places. Including the Cornish family.

One example: Every year when Cornish’s children were small, Carroll fifth graders were required to participate in Colonial Day, an educational celebration in which students dress up like characters from the 1600s. But little thought seemed to go into what that meant for Black children, Cornish said, an oversight that became all too clear when a classmate told one of her daughters that she couldn’t dress up like a nurse; she would have been a slave.

Which is exactly why we need to teach ALL aspects of American history, good, bad and ugly, and stop glorifying so much of it when it clearly involved the abuse of blacks, Native Americans and other minorities. Colonial Day in Southlake should be ended for that reason!

As in-person classes resumed in the fall, Moore and other Carroll board members searched for a compromise. The board agreed to appoint seven new volunteers to the diversity committee, including some who’d been critical of the plan, and asked the group to propose revisions based on community feedback.

But that work was halted after one parent, Kristin Garcia, sued the district over the way the diversity plan was developed, alleging that board members had violated the Texas open meetings law. Although the district has disputed that claim in court filings, a judge issued a temporary restraining order in December prohibiting the school board from working on the plan while the litigation is pending.

Garcia declined to comment through her lawyer, and messages to the Southlake Families PAC went unreturned. NBC News reached out to a dozen other residents who’ve spoken against the diversity plan, but none responded directly. Instead, a group calling itself Concerned Parents of Southlake Students reached out to NBC News to share a statement saying the district’s plan “is its own form of racism that categorizes students based on their skin color to purportedly achieve equitable outcomes.”

“As parents of Southlake students from many different backgrounds, we condemn discrimination and racism in any form,” the statement said. “We are gravely concerned with attempts to infuse our children’s education with political indoctrination that seeks to divide rather than unite.”

This seems to be the standard subversive playbook: In most cases, don’t be willing to talk about what you are doing and your motives about it and when you do, LIE OUTRIGHT ABOUT IT!

And it gets worse!

The fight in Southlake eventually caught the attention of state Republican Party officials.

Allen West, the Texas GOP chairman, addressed the dispute in August when he was invited to speak at a church near the city. In a video of the speech posted to YouTube, West told the audience that the situation in Southlake follows a pattern of school districts attempting to indoctrinate children with liberal values.

West, who is Black, then offered a suggestion for how to fight back. He told the audience to welcome new residents from out of state with a pecan pie, but then to ask, “Now why are you here?”

And if those new neighbors don’t share traditional conservative beliefs about gun rights and tax policy, West advised the audience to respond with seven words: “Go back to where you came from.”

With that, the room of mostly white Southlake residents, including City Councilman and mayoral candidate John Huffman, jumped to their feet in applause, the video shows. Huffman, who has opposed the district diversity plan on social media, did not return messages seeking comment.

West ended his remarks by urging the crowd to continue the fight to “run these progressive socialists the hell out of Texas,” and was again given a standing ovation.

Just because you are a black person doesn’t mean you should be using bigoted hate speech. Allen West is an enabler of not only racism (despite being one of the “good” blacks in the eyes of white supremacists), but various other forms of bigotry (including those of anti-Muslim and anti-LGBT), favored by the privileged classes across America. And NONE of it should be accepted, period!

Seriously…….FUCK WEST AND FUCK HIS CONSERVATIVE CRAP!

I am a Liberal who was born and raised in this state of Texas and I am not going anywhere!

Debunking the lies of anti-drug crusades

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Back in the 1980s, I often saw ads like these on TV:

“Just say no”

“This is your brain on drugs”

The Original Rachael Leigh Cook Brain on Drugs

Yikes! Oh, wait, in 2017, that same actress made this:

What happened? Well, she was exposed to the truth, the WHOLE truth, about the actual results of the anti-drug crusades from the 1970s onward.

Continue reading →

Disney is too big for our own good!

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Alan Dean Foster is a name well known among science fiction fans, as a writer of highly popular and acclaimed novels. But now he is facing a challenge too many authors, both new and well-established, are suffering: being cheated by giant corporations. And the cheater is none other than DISNEY, one of the most beloved in the world!

Look at this:

#DisneyMustPay Alan Dean Foster

A message from SFWA’s President, Mary Robinette Kowal:

Last year, a member came to SFWA’s Grievance Committee with a problem, which on the surface sounds simple and resolvable. He had written novels and was not being paid the royalties that were specified in his contract. The Grievance Committee is designed to resolve contract disputes like this. As part of our negotiating toolbox, we guarantee anonymity for both the writer and the publisher if the grievance is resolved.

When it is working, as president, I never hear from them.

When talks break down, the president of SFWA is asked to step in. We do this for any member.

In this case, the member is Alan Dean Foster. The publisher is Disney.

Here are his words.

Dear Mickey,

We have a lot in common, you and I.  We share a birthday: November 18.  My dad’s nickname was Mickey.  There’s more.

When you purchased Lucasfilm you acquired the rights to some books I wrote.  STAR WARS, the novelization of the very first film.  SPLINTER OF THE MIND’S EYE, the first sequel novel.  You owe me royalties on these books.  You stopped paying them.

When you purchased 20th Century Fox, you eventually acquired the rights to other books I had written.  The novelizations of ALIEN, ALIENS, and ALIEN 3.  You’ve never paid royalties on any of these, or even issued royalty statements for them.

All these books are all still very much in print.  They still earn money.  For you.  When one company buys another, they acquire its liabilities as well as its assets.  You’re certainly reaping the benefits of the assets.  I’d very much like my miniscule (though it’s not small to me) share.

You want me to sign an NDA (Non-disclosure agreement) before even talking.  I’ve signed a lot of NDAs in my 50-year career.  Never once did anyone ever ask me to sign one prior to negotiations.  For the obvious reason that once you sign, you can no longer talk about the matter at hand.  Every one of my representatives in this matter, with many, many decades of experience in such business, echo my bewilderment.

You continue to ignore requests from my agents.  You continue to ignore queries from SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.  You continue to ignore my legal representatives.  I know this is what gargantuan corporations often do.  Ignore requests and inquiries hoping the petitioner will simply go away.  Or possibly die.  But I’m still here, and I am still entitled to what you owe me.  Including not to be ignored, just because I’m only one lone writer.  How many other writers and artists out there are you similarly ignoring?

My wife has serious medical issues and in 2016 I was diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer.  We could use the money.  Not charity: just what I’m owed.  I’ve always loved Disney.  The films, the parks, growing up with the Disneyland TV show.  I don’t think Unca Walt would approve of how you are currently treating me.  Maybe someone in the right position just hasn’t received the word, though after all these months of ignored requests and queries, that’s hard to countenance.  Or as a guy named Bob Iger said….

“The way you do anything is the way you do everything.”

I’m not feeling it.

Alan Dean Foster

Prescott, AZ

Mary Robinette Kowal adds:

In my decade with the organization, the fact that we are forced to present this publicly is unprecedented. So too, are the problems. The simple problem is that we have a writer who is not being paid.

The larger problem has the potential to affect every writer. Disney’s argument is that they have purchased the rights but not the obligations of the contract. In other words, they believe they have the right to publish work, but are not obligated to pay the writer no matter what the contract says. If we let this stand, it could set precedent to fundamentally alter the way copyright and contracts operate in the United States. All a publisher would have to do to break a contract would be to sell it to a sibling company.

If they are doing this to Alan Dean Foster, one of the great science fiction writers of our time, then what are they doing to the younger writers who do not know that a contract is a contract?

To resolve the immediate issue regarding their breach of contract with Alan Dean Foster, Disney has three choices:

  1. Pay Alan Dean Foster all back royalties as well as any future royalties.
  2. Publication ceases until new contract(s) are signed, and pay all back royalties to Alan Dean Foster as well as any future royalties.
  3. Publication ceases and pay all back royalties to Alan Dean Foster.

This starts with a conversation. You have our contact information and offer to sit down with a Disney representative, Alan’s agent Vaughne Lee Hansen, and a SFWA representative.

Regardless of choice, Disney must pay Alan Dean Foster.

If you’re a fan of Alan Dean Foster or believe that a writer’s work has value, please let Disney know.

If you are a writer experiencing similar problems with Disney or another company, please report your circumstances to us here.

What the hell……?!

I wonder if George Lucas is beginning to regret selling his Star Wars franchise to Disney at this point. I would!

But this is not the first time Disney has screwed over someone else over intellectual properly and contracts. The Lion King is one of Disney’s most successful animated films.

And to this day, Disney is still milking the Lion King franchise for all it can. And yet the basic idea for it was ripped off a Japanese production titled Kimba the White Lion!

Now, granted, the Lion King storyline is not an exact copy of Kimba the White Lion’s (indeed, a 1997 film made in Japan actually ripped off the first Lion King film, illustrating the idea of “what goes around comes around”), but the similarities  between the two are still too obvious to ignore. It is well known that the creator of Kimba was a huge fan of Disney and was even known as the “Walt Disney” of Japan. At the very least, Disney could have inserted a note in the opening of the Lion King (“based on Kimba the White Lion by Osamu Tezuka”) to pay tribute to the manga and anime producer. It’s failure to even acknowledge the matter is a shame!

Disney needs to be hit with lawsuits. It should also be slammed with some kind of anti-trust government action to break up its media empire and prohibit it from acquiring any other companies and their intellectual properties. When corporations get so large they feel at liberty to cheat others out of their well known works, that’s when the freedom of the rest of us is clearly under threat!

The Bell Curve of Morality

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In some previous blog entries, I described my concept of Spiritual Orientation. But it occurred to me later that I was assuming that most of my readers have a morality similar to my own. But that does not explain so much of human behavior throughout history.

Take a look at this illustration:

http://www.consciousnessparadigm.com/7-levels-of-consciousness/

Strictly speaking, there is no designation of “good” or “evil” here, though obviously good people would be mainly in the top three levels, while evil people would be in the lowest three. I myself would be in the Pluralistic level, even while knowing that I should be even higher. Imagine what our world would be like if the vast majority of humanity were in the Transcendent level!

Here are other versions of that concept:

These versions imply that anyone can reach the uppermost level, though sheer effort of will. I think that is a better way of expressing the matter.

Another concept I find helpful is the Bell Curve, which is described here:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bell-curve.asp

A bell curve is a common type of distribution for a variable, also known as the normal distribution. The term “bell curve” originates from the fact that the graph used to depict a normal distribution consists of a symmetrical bell-shaped curve.

The highest point on the curve, or the top of the bell, represents the most probable event in a series of data (its mean, mode, and median in this case), while all other possible occurrences are symmetrically distributed around the mean, creating a downward-sloping curve on each side of the peak. The width of the bell curve is described by its standard deviation.

I have made my own version of a Bell Curve to represent my view of humanity and their moral values, or lack thereof:

As the illustration shows, only a minority of people are truly good and very rarely do we find anyone that is extremely good. As far as I can tell, the only people I know to be truly Godly would be Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood fame and the musical Copus family of 2002 new age fame. Rogers was universally loved even by people who were not as good as him because his spirit was so incredibly pure. And no, that had nothing to do with his religion, though there is no doubt his Spiritual Orientation was Christian. (Shocking fact: He was ordained a Presbyterian minister before going into television.)

Conversely, evil people are rare also and there are very few that are so evil that they have no sense of morals at all. That would apply to serial murderers like Ted Bundy, Jeffery Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy. Likewise, some dictators like Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot were Satanic.

The vast majority of people have NEUTRAL morality (not to be confused with having a neutral Spiritual Orientation, though they are related). They do not have a strong internal motivation to be good or evil, but simply conform to the standards of their prevailing culture for social purposes. That’s why when you have a government that is run by evil people, the people in general appear evil too. To change the people, you must change the government, which is why the tyrannies of Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan had to be overthrown at the end of World War II. And also why we must be vigilant at preventing an evil leader from rising to power in the first place. I’M LOOKING AT YOU, TRUMP SUPPORTERS! I consider you and your leader to be evil or at best neutral. There is nothing good about you degenerate hypocrites!

Being Better Educated and Changing my Opinion

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One of my basic principles of being an Honorable Skeptic is what I call the malleability of my opinions, as expressed this way:

Because I am honorable, I sometimes willingly concede points made by my opponents in debates with them. This should never be seen as a sign of weakness. When I know I am right about something, I will fight to the bitter end to support my case and discredit my opponent because in some cases I do see my battles as a struggle between light and darkness, good and evil, or ignorance and knowledge. But I am also willing at times to listen to my opponent and consider his point of view, especially if that person is known by me to be honorable. If we do not listen to others, how can we ever grow in knowledge?

In the past, I opposed the legal concept of statutory rape, thinking it an outdated and irrational one, much like laws in the past banning homosexual relations or interracial unions. But recent events have made me reconsider my position and try to understand why otherwise enlightened people would be so insistent that teens should never be allowed to have romantic and sexual relations with older partners, even of their own choosing.

Continue reading →

“Diplomatic immunity” must be abolished everywhere

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Read this story:

Equatorial Guinea argues luxury Paris mansion was part of embassy when raided

THE HAGUE (Reuters) – Equatorial Guinea argued on Monday that a luxury mansion in central Paris used by the son of the country’s president was protected by diplomatic immunity when it was raided by French authorities in 2012.

The case at the International Court of Justice is seen as a test for the limits of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Immunity, which shields government officials from prosecution abroad.

Equatorial Guinea launched the case in 2016 after the residence of Teodorin Obiang on the grand Avenue Foch was raided as part of a corruption investigation that resulted in a conviction for embezzlement, confirmed last week.

The conviction came after a collection of 25 supercars he owned, including a Ferrari Enzo and a Bugatti Veyron, were confiscated by the Geneva prosecutor’s office under a deal ending a money-laundering inquiry. The cars fetched nearly 27 million Swiss francs ($27 million) at auction in September.

Obiang, 50, is the son of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who has ruled Equatorial Guinea, a former Spanish colony, for more than three decades.

A representative for Equatorial Guinea told the court’s judges on Monday that the luxury apartment, in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world, had been bought by the African nation in 2011 and was part of its embassy.

“France has refused to recognize the diplomatic pretext of the building under the false pretence it belongs to the private domain”, ambassador Carmelo Nvono Nca, Equatorial Guinea’s agent, told the judges.

In coming days France will present its side before the United Nation’s highest court for disputes between states. A ruling is expected later this year.

In earlier hearings the French argued Equatorial Guinea was attempting to shield Obiang, known for posting pictures of his glamorous lifestyle on Instagram, by retroactively adding his opulent 101-room home to its diplomatic mission.

Police raided Obiang’s residence as part of a corruption investigation, eventually seizing 100 million euros worth of assets including paintings by Renoir and Degas and another fleet of luxury vehicles.

Obiang was convicted last week by a French court of embezzlement of public funds and ordered to pay a 30 million euro ($33 million) fine.

Diplomatic immunity in any case is a concept by which officials representing a country are allowed to openly violate the laws of another country while living there.  It is a form of disrespect for the second country’s government and the people there that are subject to those laws. A basic standard of ethics and justice is that NO ONE should be above the law.

And this is not about some young idiot that didn’t know that he was doing wrong.

Obiang, 50, is the son of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who has ruled Equatorial Guinea, a former Spanish colony, for more than three decades.

Being 50 myself, I know damn well if I were not the son of a ruler who has been in power for far too long, there would be no question of me being imprisoned for my crimes. This case angers me too!

I hope the International Court of Justice rejects this appeal and ultimately abolishes the concept of diplomatic immunity completely. And also that the people of Equatorial Guinea themselves rise up and force their corrupt leader into retirement, and also prevent his son from ever ruling. Sheesh!

 

Kobe Bryant, rape allegations, and a Disney heiress

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Here’s a story that emerged in the wake of Kobe Bryant’s tragic death in a helicopter crash last month. Among those killed with him was his 13 year old daughter.

https://www.businessinsider.com/kobe-bryant-abigail-disney-rape-allegations-not-a-god

Disney heiress says Kobe Bryant ‘was not a god’ in lengthy Twitter thread about rape allegations

abigail disney

Abigail Disney spoke out about Bryant’s rape allegations Saturday.

Disney heiress Abigail Disney addressed the rape allegations against late NBA star Kobe Bryant in a 24-tweet thread on Saturday that urged people to avoid turning Bryant into a god.

The 60-year-old, who is the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney — a cofounder of the Walt Disney Company — had in a tweet January 29 shared an op-ed from the Washington Post about allegations Bryant faced some 17 years ago, writing “The man was a rapist. Deal with it.”

On February 1, the Disney heiress, who has a net worth of over $120 million, doubled down on her previous statement, offering new commentary on Bryant, who died January 26 in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, California.  

“OK, time to bite the bullet and say something,” Disney said when she began her Twitter thread early Saturday morning. “If you don’t like it, just stop following. First of all, yes, it IS my business because I’m a woman who has herself been assaulted and spent my life knowing, loving and feeling for women for whom it’s been so much worse.” 

At the onset of the thread, Disney offered praise for Bryant amid her discussion of the rape allegations, noting that a person can do both good and bad things in their lifetime. “I mourn Kobe too,” she wrote. “He went on to be a man who seemed genuinely to want to do good. The face[sic] that he raped someone does not change any of these other facts.”

As The New York Times reported, the allegations stem from Bryant’s 2003 a trip to Colorado for an operation on his knee. Byrant reportedly asked a concierge at the spa where he was staying for a private tour. Following the tour, he invited her to his room where they began kissing. Bryant had said what followed was consensual sex, though his accuser said she was raped. 

Court documents revealed the woman had bruises on her neck and tears on her vaginal wall, The New York Times reported. While the case never went to trial, reportedly over the accusers’ refusal to testify, a lawsuit between Bryant and the accuser resulted in an undisclosed settlement.  

Bryant later apologized to his accuser. 

“Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual,” he said in a statement, “I recognize now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did.”

Disney went on to compare the allegations against Bryant to a drunk driver killing a person. “Does his lack of intention absolve him of responsibility for the death?,” Disney asked. “If he said he wasn’t that drunk or didn’t know he was drunk, or didn’t mean to kill the person, or is really really really sorry, does any of this absolve him?”

“Of course not,” she added in the next tweet. 

Disney’s final takeaway: don’t worship the NBA star. 

“So yes, we should mourn him,” Disney said. “We should mourn his daughter and his family and all the other lives lost on the helicopter. It was horrible. But don’t deify him because he was not a god. That’s all. Just don’t deify him”.

There has been a flood of discourse since Bryant’s death over whether his 2003 rape allegations should be revisited as the world mourns the basketball star’s tragic death. The Washington Post received backlash when it suspended a reporter for sharing an article about the 2003 case on Twitter after Bryant’s death. The DC newspaper would later walk back its decision to suspend the reporter, saying her tweets did not violate WaPo policy. Still, it said her tweets were “ill-timed.” 

The reactions to Disney’s two-dozen tweets were largely negative. 

“Breaking: bored heiress of a multimedia empire has nothing better to do on a Wednesday because her life is completely empty & meaningless,” one Twitter user said in a tweet that was retweeted more than 120 times. 

Not all of the reactions to Disney’s thread were negative, however.

“What a thoughtful thread,” one person tweeted. “Thank you for writing it. I have seen the way that fierce emotional identification and defense of abusive behavior can happen with sports figures.”

Abigail Disney did not return Business Insider’s request for comment.

Here are my responses to that story:

  1. Kobe Bryant was ACCUSED of rape, but he was never brought to trial, let alone convicted. From a strictly legal standpoint, he is NOT a rapist, so calling him one, especially when he is dead and cannot defend himself from that charge, might as well be called SLANDER.
  2. It is entirely possible that the supposed victim was an opportunist who after having sex with Bryant proceeded to sue him in an effort to get money out of him. This is why, even if the sex was indeed consensual, KOBE BRYANT WAS AN IDIOT TO HAVE AN AFFAIR.
  3. Bryant had four daughters at the time of his death and I’m sure they would have been shocked at the idea of their father raping anyone. That’s a bigger issue to me than his celebrity sports status. Sometimes it is better to let dead dogs decay.
  4. Abigail Disney’s personal wealth was completely irrelevant to the issue, so why mention it? If she had been homeless and not even related to Walt Disney at all, the issue would have been the same.
  5. Sports figures ARE glorified and thus are largely shielded by their own fans from their reputation being damaged by accusations of wrongdoing. We saw that to some extent with O J Simpson, who was a football star early in his life. To this day, I think Simpson got away with murder because he was a rich celebrity; a poor man would have been convicted and sent to prison for life.
  6. Yes, point 5 does seem to contradict point 1. Maybe someday I will have a more consistent ethical position, but for now I have to keep thinking about the matters more. I just feel that one mistake made by a man shouldn’t destroy his life…..unless that mistake destroys other lives. Murder is far worse than rape or adultery. And all people make mistakes.

 

Freedom of Speech must have Logical Limits

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Read this outrageous story.

A woman who encouraged her boyfriend to kill himself has filed an appeal with the Supreme Court

(CNN)Attorneys for Michelle Carter filed an appeal of her conviction with the United States Supreme Court Monday.

In the filing, Carter’s attorneys urged the Supreme Court to consider, “the questions whether Carter’s conviction for involuntary manslaughter violated the U.S. Constitution.”
Carter was found guilty in 2017 and sentenced to 15 months in a Massachusetts jail for her part in the death of her boyfriend, 18-year-old Conrad Roy III, who killed himself in his car in Fairhaven, Massachusetts in 2014.
After his death, investigators discovered Roy had texted Carter as he contemplated and attempted suicide, with her encouraging him to do it when he had doubts.
“I thought you wanted to do this. The time is right and you’re ready, you just need to do it! You can’t keep living this way,” one of dozens of texts from Carter to Roy reads.
Massachusetts highest court upheld her conviction following an appeal in February.
Her attorneys argued in Monday’s filing that her freedom of speech may have been violated and should be protected under the constitution.
“Michelle Carter did not cause Conrad Roy’s tragic death and should not be held criminally responsible for his suicide,” said attorney Daniel Marx of Fick & Marx LLP. “This petition focuses on just two of the many flaws in the case against her that raise important federal constitutional issues for the U.S. Supreme Court to decide.”
“As Justice Gorsuch ruled in a recent case, ‘A vague law is no law at all,'” added Marx’s partner, William Fick. “Ms. Carter’s conviction should not stand.”

Warning: I am about to go totally Klingon on this matter:

First, only an irrational extremist thinks in absolutes like that. WORDS CAN KILL! Send her to prison for life, not just 15 months! She committed MURDER, premeditated and cold-blooded.

Second, if she really thinks she had a right to do what she did, she should prove herself by committing suicide too. Otherwise she is a hypocrite. If both of them had committed suicide, it would have been tragic but understandable. She was instead a coward who chose to live without him.

The Wayback Machine preserves the debunked nonsense of hypocrites!

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On several occasions, I have recorded on this blog and directly answered the lies and unfounded nonsense of Christian apologists. Here are two examples:

Lying About History for the Bible

Insulting and Libeling Unbelievers

In the first, I showed how history was distorted regarding the city of Tyre and the obviously false meaning of Bible “prophecy” was papered over in an incredible display of projection and damage control, while in the other one I attacked Creationist Hugh Ross when he tried to explain why people often do not become Christians. In both cases, at least one of the false web pages were removed completely by the writers, while in the second case the other false web page’s address was changed to make it harder to find (but I caught that and updated my blog entry anyway). You’d think with that, both liars would have sense enough to shut up, but their phony websites remain to this day:

https://www.reasons.org/home

http://exchangedlife.com/

Here’s a basic rule of thumb to prevent you for falling for a con artist of any kind: If a person is caught telling ONE lie, then anything else he says should not be taken at face value. Huge Ross lied about whale ankles, while the unknown writer(s) of the Exchanged Life Discipleship website lied about the issue of the prophet Ezekiel. I am pleased that their web pages in question were deleted after I busted them on this very blog, but don’t you think they should have had the courage to make a public apology for their lying? Instead, they chose to hide what they did like it never mattered!

But a special website known as the Wayback Machine preserved what they said anyway.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120131174133/http://www.reasons.org/philosophyreligion/atheism/barriers-salvation

https://web.archive.org/web/20101124175220/http://exchangedlife.com/skeptic/ezekiel.htm

And with these falsehoods exposed, seekers of truth can know to avoid those websites and their creators to prevent being deceived by anything else they might claim.

Ironic that the Christian rock band Petra made a song about hidden things being revealed in an act of judgement against people.

As a Christian, I LOVED Petra, so this pleases me to no end!

 

 

“Good Guy” vs. “Strong Guy” Dichotomy

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In my younger days, I was often rejected by girls and young women even though I tried to be as loving towards them as possible. I assumed that it might have been because they thought I was ugly or weak. But the real issue seems to be something I often see in politics too.

Women naturally want men that are strong to protect them and their children, and our culture seems to depict men that have a strong sense of empathy and compassion for others to be “weak”, therefore such men are not considered as suitable for a domestic partnership as men that are highly aggressive towards others.

Likewise, people generally want a leader that is highly aggressive for the same reason. That explains why George McGovern lost so badly to Richard Nixon in 1972 despite having a much better character and this was repeated with Jimmy Carter losing to Ronald Reagan in 1980, and Donald Trump winning his election in 2016.

But what people often fail to consider is that the same aggressive attitude that makes a man look strong can be twisted to hurt or abandon the very ones the man is supposed to be protecting, including his love partner and their children. By contrast, a loving, empathic man can encourage a woman to stand up for herself rather than just let a man fight for her. And he would not leave her as long as she loved him just as deeply.

I have known several cases of women who used to see me as just a friend who after being abused and/or neglected by the men in their life, later took another look at me and decided I would have been the better partner for them after all. And I would consider it an honor to help care for them.

Likewise, I am hopeful that the American people will stop being seduced by the mere appearance of strength and seek in future Presidents the most powerful character trait anyone can have: LOVE! Its being seen as weakness is sheer ignorance. Have you ever seen a mother bear fight to protect her cubs?

Stop whining about “censorship”!

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With the controversy boiling over last year about white supremacy in the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) remaining unaddressed for far too long, we also must confront another thorny issue: freedom of speech.
Read this:
https://trulyopenmindsandhearts.blog/2018/02/03/sticks-stones-and-names/

We children were taught to love our country especially for its freedom of religion and speech — the freedom to be different. After all, our parents or grandparents left their homes, often in the face of persecution, to come to a new home that accepted minorities who practiced a religion other than the majority Protestantism.

In my family, just three or four years before I was born, Nazi firing squads and gas chambers had taken the lives of my father’s sister and brother, their spouses and their children. If someone occasionally called us a name, well…

Sticks and stones…

This was the land of free expression, after all.

Another phrase more elegantly sums up what I was taught about how thongs [sic] should be in the United States:

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

There was one flaw then in that freedom of expression. Many of our lansmen — our fellow Jewish Americans — were being denounced as Communists. Just an accusation was enough to ruin someone life. My parents and neighbors in the 1950’s hated and feared McCarthyism. Aside from war, there wasn’t much we hated and feared as much. It was another form of persecution.

Democratic ideals and common sense ended McCarthyism, at least as it then existed. Liberals and moderates of both parties despised it.

When I entered college in 1964, my cohort was beginning its rebellion against the slow pace of civil rights and, for a minority of us, against the Vietnam war. It would be a few more years before the Vietnam protest movement went mainstream, so I had a lot of angry fists shook in my face, and I was called names. My mother worried that I was setting myself up to be a victim of a revived McCarthyism.

But I persisted. I didn’t break any laws. I didn’t commit civil disobedience. I marched in protests and spoke out, because after all this is a nation where freedom of expression prevails.

That’s why the frog in me didn’t notice the water heating up over the last 60 years until it bubbled around me last April.

I wrote a blog post objecting to the way big decisions are made by the Unitarian Universalist Association. The case in point was a controversy over the pace at which the UUA was hiring and promoting persons of color, but I didn’t express an opinion on that. Nevertheless, a lay leader of the Black Lives movement in UUism made an 18-minute video condemning me for my “fuck-shot behavior” and racism, her white ministerial ally wrote that my “abhorrent BS” was a “thinly veiled cry that the colored folks are getting uppity and need to be put back in their place, ” and that was just the beginning.

My inner frog still didn’t understand, though, how much the water had heated — how much our norms had changed. I reacted not by asking that my critics be silenced but by writing in reply. Surely, in this land of free speech and opinion anyone could read what I and my critics had to say and support my freedom of expression.

That’s when the water boiled over. The UUA removed from its Worship Web a litany I had written in 1999, which had been used as a worship resource since then. Only after I discovered it was missing did I get a reason:

Your submissions were removed because your recent public comments made it difficult for these pieces to be interpreted in the way they had been before. As our Association struggles with the nature of whiteness’ supremacy, we have to reexamine past assumptions, such as the assumption that a piece of writing can be interpreted independent of its source.

Thus spoke that most liberal of liberal religions. Words I wrote in 1999, with no reference to race, needed to be expunged so that the UUA in 2017 could have a “hard and honest conversations about racial inequity in Unitarian Universalism.” My opinions in 2017 invalidated my words of 1999.

In the 1950’s and ’60’s, it was the left that stood for freedom of expression, even if that expression might to psychological harm, like burning a draft card. Today, it’s the left that wants to stamp out micro-aggressions, like asking someone with an accent where he or she (another micro-aggression against neutral-gender folks) is originally from.

It’s the right now standing for freedom of conscience over the possible psychological harm to one group, like a baker’s option to refuse to bake and decorate a cake specifically for a gay wedding. The roles have reversed.

What really happened was that Mel Pine freely expressed his opinions about a sensitive and controversial issue among his fellow UUs, others responded in anger to him because they found his opinions offensive, and the UUA, a private religious organization, removed a piece of his writings from its website because it no longer saw a benefit to having it there, which is what it is legally allowed to do! Pine was not sent to prison, arrested by police, or even given a ticket by the police for his expressions. His blogs are still up and he is still allowed to post his ideas on Facebook too. NO ONE had his rights violated in that case. Pine doth protest too much. So do right-wing assholes like Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart.com infamy. He hasn’t been punished by a government either.

When people actually get fined or imprisoned for their words by the government they live under, then we should worry about freedom of speech (and the press) being denied.

free_speech

I have the right to throw off my property people who come on it making racist remarks, don’t I?

Electronic Arts can go to hell!

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EA (Electronic Arts) is one of the biggest video game companies in the world….and one of the most corrupt companies of any kind in the world too, right up there with ExxonMobil, Nestle, and Wal-Mart in terms of its contempt for both their employees and their customers. Ethics are constantly sacrificed for the sake of profit!

This video tells EA’s story:

Here are some more videos with damning criticism of EA:

 

I have never knowingly bought a game from EA and I never intend to. I hope most gamers take the same stand and help run that empire out of business!

An Open Letter to the New President of the Unitarian Universalist Association

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The Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray

UUA General Assembly - Plenary V

To the Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray,

Congratulations on your election to the leadership of the most liberal religious group in the world descended from Christianity. After the embarrassing end to the last Presidency several months ago, the slate has been wiped clean for you to add your own accomplishments, and perhaps mistakes, to it.

The most important thing I think you need to do in order to revitalize the UUA as a religious organization is to confront and completely dismantle deeply entrenched anti-Christian bigotry in it. As long as people outside the UUA see it as a place for atheists, pagans, and left-wing extremists, but not for Christians, the UUA will never be seen as a viable choice for those of Christian background who want to abandon and reject fundamentalist bigotry but still feel a spiritual orientation to the religion they knew as children and still have love for. Not everyone benefits from having their faith destroyed. As long as it is modified to be more realistic and inclusive for others, that should be enough.

Even though you are white, your being a woman should give you some idea of how you and others around the world may be discriminated against. Keep in mind that while black men got the right to vote in the USA after the Civil War, it was not until 1920 that women of all colors were also granted the right to vote as well. We must always strive to LEAVE NO ONE BEHIND including transgender people! I was deeply disappointed to learn that white men were still treated with favoritism in the UUA and am more than happy to see that the process of confronting unthinking racial biases among us is happening at last. It was indeed long overdue!

We must work harder over the next several decades to make Unitarian Universalism the next great world religion and that can happen when we speak out loudly about it. No longer must we think of ourselves as an “American” religion, but we must try to build up Unitarian bodies in other areas, including places where it was popular before. You should certainly endorse as much as possible the Church of the Larger Fellowship, using it a a vehicle for global UU evangelism, and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, which actually does good works in the world. The UUSC is the closest thing we have to missionary work and we need more of that!

As I see it, the version of the Baha’i Faith led by the Universal House of Justice in Haifa, Israel is the UUA’s most direct rival, having some values in common, but also some critical differences that make it necessary to draw clear distinctions between the two religions. Baha’i values were similar to those of the Unitarians and Universalists about a century ago, but since then it has degenerated into a cult of extreme dogmatism that makes it a threat to unsuspecting souls looking for a new spiritual home after leaving one they no longer feel comfortable in. The best way to counter the Haifan Baha’is is to establish or at least officially endorse a sub-division within the UUA for Baha’is who wish to think for themselves instead of being mentally enslaved to a body consisting literally of nine old men. There is already such a small community that the internet has made possible, it just needs some support. For more details, see:    http://unitarianbahai.angelfire.com/   and also:

http://unitarianbahais.blogspot.com/

With the election last year of the worst President the USA has ever had, we as UUs have a moral obligation to revive the spirit of civil disobedience pioneered by civil rights protesters in the past. Unless and until we are willing to be imprisoned for our ideals, they mean nothing. Together, we can change things for the better and in the process gain many new converts who want a refuge from the madness of right-wing politics. Even in “red” states like Oklahoma and Texas, UU churches thrive.

Please consider creating a cable TV channel devoted to Unitarian Universalist programming. We already have a strong presence on YouTube, so such a channel is the next logical step. For ideas on what content we can make for it, look at the example of Democracy Now. Of course, that is liberal politics, but where is a channel for liberal RELIGION?

The UUA must look into forming strong alliances with other liberal religious groups, and not just the United Church of Christ, the UUA’s closest spiritual relative. Also join with non-religious groups like the American Humanist Association that are not so infested with anti-religious extremism and other forms of bigotry that they are a disgrace to humanity. Many feminists and non-white people that may be attracted to atheism find themselves repulsed by bigots who are also well-known atheists in social media. We can provide them an alternative.

I wish you the best of luck over the next six years.

Dale Husband, the Honorable Skeptic

Mariah Carey needs to stop being a pop star.

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In the 1990s, Mariah Carey was one of the greatest singers in the world, but recently it is clear that she has somehow lost nearly all her talent and can no longer sing her way though even the most basic of performances.

This video accuses her (and others) of lip syncing:

And at the New Year’s Eve celebration in New York City, that accusation was CONFIRMED in a truly embarrassing fashion.

Why do people bother to do this? In 1990, this was a SCANDAL for the duo Milli Vanilli, who won a Grammy for Best New Artist and was then stripped of it once they were exposed.

And here are more examples:

Enough! If you want to see some REAL vocal talent, just look here:

It takes truly raw talent to perform with NO backing music instruments and only your voices. Even Mariah herself has never been known to attempt that. But that is exactly what Pentatonix does every time they perform live.

Goodbye, Mariah, I am a fan of yours no more! Come back on stage when you can sing for real again!