Monday, November 27, 2006

Apparently the peace sign is a symbol of OMG SATAN!!!!!

 


Wow, talk about stupidity! A peace sign is actually considered a symbol of Satan! Just when you think the Age of the Litterbox cannot produce anymore shit, this gem comes along. Last time I checked Satan was the prince of darkness, the father of lies, you get the gist. Last time, I checked, Jesus was the prince of Peace and supposedly it’s his birthday coming up. So why all the fuss?



Some residents who have complained have children serving in Iraq, said Bob Kearns, president of the Loma Linda Homeowners Association in Pagosa Springs.



These are probably the same people who say our soldiers fight for your freedom to say stupid things, NOW SHUT UP! (without realizing the irony of course.


There are some things so absurd that you have to see the part in the article to believe... 



He said some residents have also believed it was a symbol of Satan. Three or four residents complained, he said.




Apparently the confusion is that they believe that this is actually a symbol of Nero, who persecuted Christians and blamed them for the Great Fire of Rome in 64 A.D. according to Tacitus. Apparently, they believe that Nero used it as a symbol to represent what he hoped would be his victory over Christianity, as they claim. Well I hate to burst their bubble, but the peace sign is not a vast left-wing conspiracy to co-opt the teachings of Jesus and use them for the Satanic purposes of purging Christianity from the face of the Earth. The only sites that are claiming that this is the Cross of Nero are fundamentalist Christian sites in hysteria over the peace movement and it's connection to Satan. 


Basically there is a more benign explanation to the peace sign...



 It was developed by the British "Committee for Nuclear Disarmament" (CND), apparently about 1958. It is comprised of the two semaphore flag positions for "N" and "D," standing for "nuclear disarmament."



Here are the flag positions for N and D...Put together with a circle around it, and you get the peace sign.  


Apparently peace is so unpatriotic that if Jesus were alive today, he would be investigated by the NSA and the Pentagon, after all they do a helluva job investigating non-violent anti-war protesters who might, I repeat might grow violent some day. (Meanwhile, potential right-wing homegrown terrorists are ignored by this administration even when they acquired shit like cyanide. But that's how it is in our Age of the Litterbox where peace is war and 2+2 = 5). After all, didn't Jesus throw out the moneychangers in the temple, overturning their tables and driving them out with a whip? Such violent behavior! OMG!


The church is getting ready to celebrate Advent, which is preparation for the birth of yes, you guessed it, the Prince of Peace. Yet some people in the homeowner’s association in Denver are spitting on the principles of Jesus and is now equating Jesus with Satan. I wonder what Dobson and Falwell would have to say about this…Oh I forgot, they’re too busy fucking over their buddy Ted Haggard and ditching him after it turned out that Pastor Ted was gay (not that there’s anything wrong with being gay, but the hypocrisy, of course!).



Perhaps we should nominate those members of the Loma Linda Homeowners Association who believe that the wreath in the form of a peace sign is so offensive for the Nobel War Prize. Oh, there’s no such thing? Well then, we can always nominate it for the Nobel Peace Prize, after all, if Bush can get nominated by a Norwegian right-wingnut hack, then I’m sure the homeowners association can too. Who knows? Maybe Bush might stump for them to actually win the whole thing…



There are those like Dennis Kucinich who propose a Department of Peace that will do everything in its power to make sure that war is reduced to the dustbin of history, forgotten as the leaves scattered about in the wind. Then there are people like Chuck Sweeny who believe that this is a loony idea. There are those like Roy Blunt who believe that this is an idea to be mocked, that if the United States advocates peace, then we have become OMG a sissy nation...


How about we give peace a chance instead of attributing it falsely to Satan? 


Wednesday, November 08, 2006

The Great Cat has woken up from her nightmare and the Senate AND The House are OURS!

3:24 PST

STATUS CANDIDATE VOTE VOTE %
KEY RACE
DemocraticTester
173,259 49%
RepublicanBurns
(Incumbent)
171,207 48%
LibertarianJones
9,061 3%

90% of the precincts reporting

Senate is 49-49, with 2 undecided. Jim Webb leads in Virginia but that will most likely go to a recount. This is the important race...Tester's lead keeps on shrinking and I am loathe to go to bed but I have work tomorrow at 9:20 am.

The best news is that we took down Pombo!

Saturday, November 04, 2006

Fear, it worked back in 1861 and it's working again...

We Americans need to get over this mentality that suggests that the other (in this case gays and lesbians, illegal immigrants, and African-Americans) is going to come into your homes and rape and kill you. We must seem like a cowardly people, so afraid of the big, bad terrorist that we are willing to compromise our civil liberties in order to receive protection (non-existent from the GOP, but that’s for another blog post). We are so afraid of so-called illegal immigrants crossing our borders, invading our towns, terrorists coming over to blow up our petting zoos in Indiana, and even worse, TEH GAYS brainwashing our children and forcing them into homosexual orgies and Bacchanalias. It is my intention in this blog to hopefully argue that the same irrational appeals to fear are being perpetrated on the American voter today and that the GOP does not really believe in those appeals but are finding them useful in trying to keep power.

Corker had been trailing in the polls to Ford until that FUCKING NRCC ad aired, you know the one with the seductive scantily-clad woman winking at Harold Ford. Ever since, he has been rising in the polls and now enjoys a slim lead over Ford. If Corker pulls out a victory, we can thank this damn ad that plays to a common theme that has been found throughout Southern history, the fear of the other, in its case, the black person, whether slave or free, a fear that has led to 3029 lynchings of African-Americans in the former Confederate states, an astounding 87.9% of the total in just 11 states, will rightfully be blamed for snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.

Rewind back to 1861. The DEEP South is burning with the fire of secession. Lincoln has been elected and the states in the Deep South secede because they cannot accept his election because they fear he will do everything in his power to abolish slavery even though he has publicly declared that he would not touch slavery in places it was already established. The secessionists are the hardcore, no-compromise hardliners who would not accept anything less than the Republican Party totally abandoning their platform of restricting the spread of slavery. They are pretty confident that citizens of their states would stand by their votes to secede.

The Deep South knows that they would not stand a chance without those states for If they could get the Upper and Middle South, states like Virginia and Tennessee to secede, they would go a long way to evening out their seemingly insurmountable odds. James McPherson notes that the Lower South only had 5% of the industrial capacity of the North and only 20% of the population (McPherson, Ordeal of Fire, 150). Commissioners were sent to these states to fire up the population, arguing that Lincoln’s victory would mean racial equality and worse to their standpoint, interracial mixing or miscegenation.

Charles B. Dew, a Southern-born historian argues persuasively that it was racism and the appeal to fear that got the Upper South fired up from lukewarm support to actual secession. He argues that the direst specter that any Southerner could imagine was the slaves rising up and engaging in interracial sex with their daughters! Dew argues that this was the most dire threat of all as the chastity of their daughters was what the plantation owners cherished the most (Dew 79). Contrast that to the denial of neo-Confederate groups who deny that slavery had anything to do with what they call the “War of Northern Aggression.” Contrast that to the neo-Confederates who deny that racism is a problem today and that it IS a problem.

I’ll let the primary documents and Dew speak for themselves…for they can say it better than I can.

But in the South, where in many places, the African race largely predominates, and as a consequence the two races would be continually processing together, amalgamation or the extermination of the one or the other would be inevitable. Can Southern men submit to such degradation and ruin? God forbid that they should.

But it is said that there are many constitutional conservative men at the North who sympathize with and battle for us.

- Letter of Stephen F. Hale, commissioner from Alabama to Governor Magoffin of Kentucky, 12/27/1860

They have demanded, and now demand, equality in the honors and emoluments of office, equality in the social circle, equality in the rights of matrimony. The cry has been, and now is, “that slavery must cease, or American liberty must perish,” that “the success of Black Republicanism is the triumph of anti-slavery,” “a revolution in the tendencies of the government that must be carried out.”

- Address of William L. Harris, commissioner from Mississippi, to the Georgia General Assembly, Dec. 17, 1860.


Leroy Pope Walker, Alabama’s commissioner to Tennessee and subsequently the first Confederate secretary of war, predicted that in the absence of secession all would be lost – first, “our property,” and “then our liberties,” and finally the South’s greatest treasure, “the sacred purity of our daughters.”

- Dew, Apostles of Disunion, pg. 79

Same strategy except less graphic and less mention of rape, but the same topic of “miscegenation” is there. The GOP knows that showing Ford and bringing up the fear of blacks raping whites is overtly racist and would be too obvious for our society today, which is reluctant to acknowledge our racist past but is just in denial today, believing that racism is a thing of the past and limited to only the KKK and other Neo-Nazi groups. However, they can imply that Ford, a black man is secretly lusting after white women and they know that some of their hardcore racist hick base will fall for that again unfortunately. I find it sad that perhaps the ad is working as Corker has opened up a slight lead in the polls and signs show it to be leaning Republican as of today. Of course this is not to excuse Ford, I thought his pandering to his base was despicable with respect to the NEW Jersey decision, but I wasn’t surprised. Do you not see the “nightmare” that the GOP is trying to conjure up? A black man in the Senate from the South, and even worse a black man who claims that he loves girls (his own words, not mine)? OMG, what next? More interracial marriage and sex? There are those who still disapprove of interracial marriage and this ad is just more pandering to that select group.

I’m arguing that the GOP is using the same strategy here as right-wingnuts did in 1861. Does the GOP actually believe their inane arguments just as implausible as the brutal orgy of rape the secession commissioners conjured up in the Deep South in the lead-up to war? Does the GOP actually believe that the Democratic Party would actually ban the Bible in favor of allowing gay marriage? Probably not. The GOP knows the Democratic Party would do no such thing, because that would be political suicide, but the same appeal to the emotions, our basest emotions is there. People care about religion in the United States and what better way to demonize the other party by saying that the Dems will mock and outlaw Christianity? Did the secession commissioners believe that the slaves would force themselves on their masters’ daughters? Probably not, even though they conjured up images of another Santo Domingo (slaves rose up in revolt in 1793).

Same arguments apply here to gay marriage. Legalize gay marriages and TEH GAYS will be emboldened! They are trying to brainwash our children by sending subliminable (haha) maessages to our children attending our schools. Their message of tolerance is just a Trojan Horse in which lies the true, dire, sinister message that children SHOULD accept homosexuality and even become homosexuals themselves. So let us compare the message…Not seceding will mean amalgamation and miscegenation and interracial rape…fast forward 145 years and now it’s homosexuals want to convert our children into becoming homosexuals! Isn’t there a common theme here? Why did Ford feel the need to pander when it came to the New Jersey decision which did not go FAR ENOUGH in securing gay rights? Simple, it is the irrational fears that the GOP exploits to win votes from people who if they don’t know any better, don’t care that they are irrational fears. Ford can’t be seen as the candidate who would allow the gays to come into your homes to rape you and brainwash your children into joining their daily orgies they must hold in the moonlight! :sarcasm:

Compare the quotes of the secession commissioners to the quotes the Religious Right and the extreme right leaders of our generation say against our GLBT brothers and sisters…

"This is ultimately about the protection of America's youth from such groups as NAMBLA and militant homosexuals who seek to lower the age of consensual sexual intercourse between homosexual men and young boys to the age of fourteen" - Charles Socarides, on the board of NARTH and the other top 'ex-gay' psychiatrist, from NARTH's Web site, http://www.narth.com/docs/1995papers/socarides.html

Gays want access to children
"Gaining access to children has been a long-term goal of the homosexual movement." - "Homosexual Activists Work to Normalize Sex With Boys," Family Research Council publication, July 1999,
http://www.frc.org/misc/bl057.pdf

Cannot this argument be compared to the OMG Slaves want access to our daughters and race mixing will ensue if we don’t secede from the Union? Is this argument not appealing to the same unfounded fears that stir up such fear and loathing?

Gays want to give churchgoers AIDS
"[Homosexuals]want to come into churches and disrupt church services and throw blood all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the face of ministers." Pat Robertson, 700 Club, 1/18/95 - People for the American Way Web site, http://www.pfaw.org/issues/right/rtvw.antigay.shtml

Compare this quote to John Smith Preston’s speech claiming that Lincoln’s election was a “decree” of “annihilation” for the whites of the South. He claimed that South Carolina had a GOD-given right to strike back at such “mad rage of fantaticism” (Dew 70).

I find it truly sad that the GOP has to use race-baiting especially in the South to “win.” It just shows that they truly have no ideas and that they are the party with no ideas other than tired, battle-tested, battle-failed ideas such as “STAY THE COURSE,” tax cuts for the rich that fail to prop up a sluggish economy, BAN GAY MARRIAGE (gets old), and deregulation of everything. I find it sad that Corker has to express faux outrage over the ad and Mehlman suddenly claims he is impotent and cannot do anything against an ad “independently produced,” INDEPENDENT of the NRCC that paid for them. I find it sad that the party which started off with some rather progressive ideas such as the progressive income tax they passed during the war has degraded into a shadow of its former self.

Except, things are different now. This blatant play to racism and the faux outrage make it seem that the Southern Strategy is evolving into even more of a giant shell game. Show the racist ads but condemn them at the same time and blame them on some independent contractor. It’s always someone else’s fault with the Republicans because the Party of Personal Responsibility is always taking the awesome responsibility of shifting responsibility away from itself. We’re not racist, the ad was an independent expenditure! We had no control over it even though we paid for it. Besides, it’s all fun and games! It’s all satire. This is the new Republican line when it comes to this racist ad and deceptive mailers in Nevada done a while back. That’s exactly what the Clark County GOP said too when it mailed those mailers which were supposedly from Harry Reid’s Searchlight PAC but had actually endorsed Republican candidates. The GOP claims to have disowned these ads but they ran their course, doing their damage and we’re paying for it. This is the new face of the Southern Strategy where nowadays, it’s not enough to just benefit from these actions and keep silent, but to show their bona fides in pretending to condemn these actions. Too bad that in Tennessee, it just might work. Then you have people using the “OMG they’re using the racism card!” If you’re too blinded and stupid not to know our history to see the implicit racism in this ad then there is no hope for you. This is how Marilyn Musgrave can claim that gay marriage is not just the most important issue in this election, but in all of America. This is how the GOP can continue to use fear to scare us into voting Republican, lest the gays, blacks, “illegal” brown people, terrorists, Iraqis break into our homes and slit our throats or rape us.

FEAR, it’s the only weapon that the GOP has left, it’s just too bad that some people are just so fucking scared that they will believe anything fearmongerers have to say.

Dew, Charles. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001)

McPherson, James M. Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001)


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