“There you stand, the good man doing nothing. And while evil triumphs, and your rigid pacifism crumbles to blood stained dust, the only victory afforded to you is that you stuck true to your guns.”
Yep you go it right it's supposed to imply "whoever they are".
The quote goes something like this,
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.'
At which point someone of course asks "Whose my neighbor?" and then the parable of the Good Samaritan comes out which is basically about a Samaritan rescuing a beaten near dead Jew and nursing him back to health, this after several other Jewish leaders passed him by and left him for dead. At the time of the story Jews and Samaritans basically hated each other - so the conclusion of the story is supposed to be that the Samaritan is the one that acted like a good neighbor, and we should be the same and treat all people as our neighbor regardless of our differences.
So yeah....
Oh for fucks sake!
Of course it's an Obama-era thing.
That puts this it in a slightly different light, which is not any better.
It's not some irrational hatred of minorities this time; just Obama. I bet you anything, that if it was Bush instead of Obama, Trump would not be interested in reversing this. Because he is that ridiculously petty. It's the one thing connecting every single reversal from Trump. Did Obama do it? Reverse it.
There's a wonderful line in the Simpsons, where Ned Flanders, while praying, says he was following the Bible -- "even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff".
The Bible is a complex work, written by multiple people over the span of centuries, meaning some of the authors never met each other.
There's a part where Jesus tells the Disciples to get swords (Luke 22:36-38)
There's multiple parts where servants of God flat-out kill people. Remember the part where Moses friggin' drowns the entire Egyptian army? (Exodus 14:28) These are people who are just chasing a guy who stole all their slaves -- and the Bible has some things to say about slavery, too (Paul's letter to the Colossians 3: 22).
And yes, if you look hard enough -- past the part about not eating pork, not eating mixed fibers, not wearing gold, no tattoos, that kind of thing -- you find the bit about Sodom and Gomorrah, yes, Sodom as in "sodomy". Oh, and it's Old Testament -- Leviticus 20:13 to be precise -- and yet,you rarely hear about the Jewish faith taking such pains to exclude or punish homosexuality as you hear from New Testament followers. Well, claimed New Testament followers.
And anyone who claims to be a follower of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ by hating and condemning homosexuals not only misses the grander point -- the point you made yourself, the one Colbert has pointed out too, that Jesus never once mentioned homosexuality but says Love Thy Neighbor over and over -- but had to intentionally go verse-hunting to find an excuse to do so. This is a lot like saying "If I fire my gun randomly into this crowd of people, it will just so happen to only hit the wicked and miss the innocent". It's whatever the holy version of cherry picking is. And this is from a book that can't even be consistent about haircuts. Haircuts. Ain't that topical?
It's nearly impossible, if not completely impossible, to adhere to every single word of a book written by multiple authors over hundreds of years consistently, regardless of the subject matter. If you try, you might find yourself following a thief, and adulterer, and idolator, who can't get "render unto Caesar" right, let alone everything about peace, love, forgiveness, and going to church every once in a while.
It's like they wanted to use the Bible as directions, but were holding it upside-down.
Folly and fakery have always been with us... but it has never before been as dangerous as it is now, never in history have we been able to afford it less. - Isaac Asimov
Every damn thing you do in this life, you pay for. - Edith Piaf
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. - Orwell
No amount of belief makes something a fact. - James Randi
@Benggaul would have posted this eventually.
New York is making the U.S.' coronavirus trends look better than they are
I'll save you the reading, a graph is worth a thousand numbers.
- - - Updated - - -
So let's talk about North Korea.
"It's fucked?"
Well, yeah, but that's a pre-existing condition. Let's talk about something more recent, Trump's Nobel Prize.
And North Korea never gave us that Christmas gift they promised.North Korea officially declared an end Friday to its diplomatic dalliance with the U.S. But experts say it’s been clear for some time that President Donald Trump’s bold but risky effort to sweet talk Kim Jong into relinquishing his nuclear weapons never really went anywhere.
Two high-profile meetings with North Korea’s leader bought Trump a hiatus from bellicose rhetoric and nuclear tests, but Kim never stopped building nuclear warheads and the missiles to deliver them, U.S. intelligence officials and private analysts say.
Now, on the second anniversary of that first Trump-Kim summit in Singapore, North Korea is renouncing the diplomacy while promising to expand its weapons program, even as experts say it is ever closer to perfecting a long-range missile capable of reaching and destroying an American city.
Trump therefore joins a long list of presidents who tried and failed to cut a deal to get rid of North Korean nuclear weapons — but the first one who met face to face with the leader of the outlaw regime, lending it a measure of legitimacy. Trump at one point mused that he and Kim “fell in love,” and he showered praise on a dictator who is said by human rights groups to keep tens of thousands of political prisoners in vast gulags.
Trump made a series of other concessions, including the unilateral cancellation of joint U.S. and South Korean missile exercises. He got very little in return.
“In terms of the so-called goals of the summit, we made no progress in any of those things,” said Victor Cha, a former White House adviser to President George W. Bush and now senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an NBC News contributor. “And this was arguably the one piece of diplomacy into which Trump put all of his personal capital.”
Trump famously proclaimed on Twitter that Americans can “sleep well at night” knowing that North Korea was prepared to give up its nuclear weapons and that “there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea."
“None of that was true,” said Bruce Klingner, a former CIA analyst and North Korea watcher at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. “And what we’ve seen since then from leaked intelligence assessments and commercial satellite imagery is that they’ve expanded and improved production facilities for fissile material, missile production, mobile re-entry vehicles and launch vehicles. And they’ve probably built eight or more additional nuclear weapons.”
Because of how NBC News does their site, there's more information here and here. The anniversary thing really makes the point clear.
"Oh, who said anniversaries were that important?"
Oh, Trump did. By putting his rally on "Juneteenth". So, NK trolls Trump in public once again.
Unrelated, but interesting:
Kentucky to remove statue of Confederate leader Jefferson Davis from Capitol
Team Trump was caught claiming donations to BLM were funneled to Democratic campaigns. He deleted the tweet, but the internet never forgets.
The US death rate for COVID-19 is 100 times greater than the listed rate of China. Obviously, China's probably lying and there are news of a new outbreak in a market, but on their face that's pretty bad news for the US. Per capita, [url=https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality]the US is fourth behind France, Italy, and the UK.
And more and more polls have Biden with a slim lead in battleground states like Texas. The Party of Trump is understandably concerned. Not only is a path to EC victory without Texas basically impossible, but they're likely to lose some TX House seats as well.
That was...strange...to watch. I wouldn't read too much into it though. Looks like "old man with old man health problems" sort of stuff. Which wouldn't really be that big a deal if this wasn't the narcissistic dumbass who paid some doctor to reassure the American public that he was the leading example of Alpha Male Health and Virility.
Don't forget apparently its evil to be homosexual, but going into a cave with your young daughters and getting them both pregnant made Lot a superstar in the bible.
Living in an isolated area after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot's two daughters conspired to inebriate and seduce their father due to the lack of available partners. Because of intoxication, Lot "perceived not" when his firstborn, and the following night his younger daughter, lay with him.
Buh Byeeeeeeeeeeee !!
"Law and Order", lots of places have had that, Russia, North Korea, Saddam's Iraq.
Laws can be made to enforce order of cruelty and brutality.
Equality and Justice, that is how you have peace and a society that benefits all.
One of the big problems with the debate around historical statues is IMO the romantic idea of good vs bad people seem to have.
Back in the days of the slave trade there were essentially three types of people, the slaves, the people actively engaging in slavery, and the people who wanted to be actively engaging in slavery but couldn't afford it. If people want to get rid of X statue because he was into slavery that's cool but they should also be in favour of removing practically every statue erected before the year 2000 as approximately 100% of them represent a slaver or a racist or a homophobe or a misogynist or a transphobe. Hell they should be campaigning to pull down mount Rushmore while they're at it. And while they're at that they may wanna burn any pictures/paintings they have of their great grandparents or any older ancestors because they would have been just as bigoted.
I wonder how up for destroying confederate statues people would be if each one required the destruction of a civil war era union statue? After all that war was essentially a economic war between a bunch of northern racists and a bunch of southern racists fighting over farms vs plantations. Lincoln didn't throw the slavery card in until he realised he was going to lose the war and any chance of re-election unless he did something drastic.
That is some terrible photoshop, like they didn't even try. That arm though.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/13/media...est/index.html"A FoxNews.com home page photo collage which originally accompanied this story included multiple scenes from Seattle's 'Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone' and of wreckage following recent riots," the note read. "The collage did not clearly delineate between these images, and has since been replaced. In addition, a recent slideshow depicting scenes from Seattle mistakenly included a picture from St. Paul. Fox News regrets these errors."
and
"We have replaced our photo illustration with the clearly delineated images of a gunman and a shattered storefront, both of which were taken this week in Seattle's autonomous zone," a Fox News spokesperson told the newspaper.
Are...are you suggesting owning slaves is going to come back into fashion? Because I personally am of the idea that slave owning will never be American ever again.
Also, please don't use Slippery Slope arguments. It makes it seem like you're not posting in good faith.
Speaking of spineless cowards who picked the wrong side and don't want to be remembered as losers who defended evil even though they are losers who defended evil, Mike Pence is now on the record as to why he wasn't also at the church, holding a Bible upside-down.
"Also," he didn't add but I'm pretending he did, "we were taking a tour of the bunker during the daytime. And Trump would be happy to present his taxes, but he's being audited. Since 2000. Out of an abundance of caution."I was at the White House. And I was actually encouraged to stay at the White House out of an abundance of caution. It was obviously a volatile environment at moments, and so I was encouraged to remain.
But I would have been happy to walk shoulder to shoulder across Lafayette Park with President Trump
I see the SS was taking an abundance of caution to protect Pence, but not Trump. Hmm. Wonder if all that unpaid overtime and underfunding is showing its head.