Christian responses to US Politics

Discussion in 'The Commons' started by Tiffy, Mar 26, 2020.

  1. Botolph

    Botolph Well-Known Member

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    Frankly I regard this as simply implausible opportunistic marketing. There is no evidence, meaningful or otherwise, that suggests that a greener economy is less susceptible to the rampage of this deadly virus. I personally don;t discount the value to addressing climate change, but I think think that the cause is either helped or advanced by leveraging the fears and feeling people might have in the wake of this pandemic.
     
  2. Tiffy

    Tiffy Well-Known Member

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    I think perhaps that the severe reduction in fossil fuel spaffing into the atmospere caused by the reduction in air travel and unnecessary road, rail, and sea journeys is evidence that it is possible for world economies to reduce their carbon emissions. The improvement in environmental conditions are already apparent. Greener economies could evolve out of this covid crisis if there is not a mad rush back to a "SNAFU'', business as normal, form of recovery. Investment will be crucial to get economies going again and increased green investment would obviously be better than dirty carbon consumption subsidisation, which has been characterisic of many past national economies worldwide. Particularly USA, Australia and the biggest, China.
    .
     
  3. Rexlion

    Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    Lest there be a misunderstanding, allow me to explain. It has nothing to do with the susceptibility of a greener economy to the virus. Instead, the virus is being amped up, over-emphasized, blown out of proportion in order to reduce carbon emissions. If enough airlines and manufacturers go out of business, the hope is that they will never come back, and their carbon emissions will be gone for good. If enough livestock farmers go under, the methane emissions of livestock are being reduced, and with meat in scarcer supply people can be re-conditioned to eat veggie burgers and whatnot in lieu of meat. If people can be talked into willingly accepting a Covid vaccine that also contains biometric tracking for the alleged purpose of "contact tracing," movement of humans can be tracked and controlled worldwide, and carbon-consumptive travel can be further limited. Add in a e-pay system layered on top of the bio-ID (ostensibly to make fraudulent transfers and tax evasion nearly impossible), and very soon no one will be able to buy or sell unless they meet global standards of carbon neutrality... standards set by whom, and policed by whom?

    The quote of Klaus Schwab, founder of the WEF, shows that the 'elites' view Covid as an opportunity to re-make the world in their own, green image. If you study the website of the World Economic Forum, you'll find that it contains a deeply layered, highly detailed road map for achieving global control via manipulation of public perceptions and utilization of 'crises' (real or concocted) to solidify all governments under a unified oligarchy. 'Climate control' and pandemic response are portions of this multi-layered game plan. And it's all there on their website for those who care to dig; I posted about it much earlier in this thread.

    Bill Gates is a top supporter and participant in WEF. Both WEF and Gates have their fingers in WHO. Gates is currently sponsoring experiments on South African people in which they receive vaccines coupled with bio-ID and payment (buy-sell) tracking, all 3 in one neat package.

    Prophecy is being fulfilled in our lifetime. (Rev. 13:17)
     
  4. AnglicanAgnostic

    AnglicanAgnostic Well-Known Member

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    12/8/2020
    Just an update the number of cases has jumped to about 80 and would appear to be being contained with isolation measures, testing, and people tracing. All cases bar one are linked using G-nome sequencing. The one other case is a one off and doesn't appear to have spread to anyone else. The individual who is a covid isolation cleaner appears to have got it off an isolating woman from America even though they weren't in the same room at the same time. The latest theory is they used the same lift , even though the cleaner used the lift and cleaned her room several days after she left the isolation hotel.

    On the day we had 9 new cases and the USA 42000 Trump said

    "The places that they were using to hold up, they're having a big surge. And I don't want that, I don't want that. But they were holding up names of countries, and now they're saying, 'Whoops!' " Trump said.

    "In fact, even New Zealand, do you see what's going on in New Zealand? They beat it, they beat it, it was like front page, 'They beat it,' because they wanted to show me something," Trump said. "The problem is, big surge in New Zealand. So you know, it's terrible."

    Silly old me thought our government was doing things to halt Covid I didn't realise it was to show Donald something!
     
  5. Tiffy

    Tiffy Well-Known Member

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    Is that English that Trump is trying to speak? :laugh:
     
  6. AnglicanAgnostic

    AnglicanAgnostic Well-Known Member

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    Um yes it's like real good English He's big on English, no one speaks it greater than he does. C,mon Tiffy haven't you the sense to clearly understand him? Maybe he is way to cleaver for you to understand.:whistle:
     
  7. Rexlion

    Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    It took me a while to understand this! Finally I figured out that you meant, 'way too clever.'
    People who live in glass houses.... :rolleyes:
     
  8. Tiffy

    Tiffy Well-Known Member

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    No I think he really meant "way too cleaver". or perhaps Trump would say it as, "weigh two cleaver". Would be as coherent as anything else Trump says. I wonder if English is his first language? If so he hasn't broken it in yet and is still talking in pidgin English.
     
  9. Rexlion

    Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    It's the New York City dialect... :cool:
     
  10. Lowly Layman

    Lowly Layman Well-Known Member

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    Hi all, I just read an article on Judge Napolitano's theory of how Nancy Pelosi could become "acting President" if the Electoral College fails to elect a president by January 20. While I find that scenario EXTREMELY unlikely (since it rests on the presidential succession clauses of the Constitution rather than the election clauses, a point not fully clarified in the article) it did drive me to review the Constitution for what happens should the presidential election be thrown into the house. And the results were surprising...at least to me, lol.

    Article II, section 1, of the US Constitution provides in relevant part:

    "The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote; A quorum for this Purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary to a Choice." (Emphasis added)

    Now, common knowledge would dictatee that should the election went to the House, then Biden, the Democratic candidate would easily win, since the Democrats enjoy a comfortable majority in the House. But looking at the party mix by state, the Republicans are majority representatives in exactly the number of states needed (26) to win the election. So for Biden to win, at least one Republican controlled state would have to vote against its party.

    2020, am I right?
     
    Last edited: Sep 3, 2020
  11. Lowly Layman

    Lowly Layman Well-Known Member

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    ...there's also a possibility that they could choose a compromise candidate from 1 of the third party candidates should one of them get at least 1 electoral vote.
     
  12. Tiffy

    Tiffy Well-Known Member

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  13. Rexlion

    Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    https://www.theepochtimes.com/trump...morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb

    I will quote from this article:

    Trump to Sign Executive Order to Protect Babies That Survive Abortion
    By Zachary Stieber
    September 23, 2020 Updated: September 23, 2020

    President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he plans to sign an executive order aimed at mandating medical care is provided to babies that survive abortion.

    “We believe in the joy of family, the blessing of freedom, and the dignity of work. And the eternal truth that every child, born and unborn, is made in the holy image of God,” Trump said in a pre-recorded announcement shown at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast.

    “I will always protect the vital role of religion and prayer in American society, and I will always defend the sacred right to life,” he added.

    “Today, I am announcing that I will be signing the Born-Alive Executive Order to ensure that all precious babies born alive—no matter their circumstances—receive the medical care that they deserve! This is our sacrosanct moral duty.”

    The text of the executive order wasn’t immediately available.

    The Susan B. Anthony List, a nonprofit that seeks to reduce abortion in the United States, praised Trump after the announcement.

    “What a contrast with Joe Biden who picked as his running mate Kamala Harris who voted NO on the #BornAlive act which would ensure equal medical care for all infants born alive,” the group said in a statement on Twitter.

    The Biden campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.

    Congressional Republicans have tried repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, to pass the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which would require medical workers who are present at the birth of a child who survives abortion to provide the same level of medical care they give to children born normally.

    The act would also require medical workers to report violations to law enforcement authorities and penalize the killing of a born-alive child through fines or up to five years in prison.

    Mothers of the children would be immune from prosecution or civil action.

    Trump also said at the breakfast his administration was increasing federal funding for the neonatal research to ensure that every child “has the very best to thrive and to grow.”

    And Trump told attendees that America is a strong nation because of Catholics and all people of faith.

    Trump earlier this month said he would work to fully defund Planned Parenthood and other groups that supply abortions if he wins a second term....​
     
  14. Rexlion

    Rexlion Well-Known Member

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  15. Rexlion

    Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    It's come to my attention that the above article is not available without login. So....

    A Münster of Our Own Making: Religiosity in Portland
    Joseph Bottum

    September 25, 2020 Updated: September 25, 2020
    Print
    Commentary

    A violent gang of radical Anabaptists—now that’s a phrase one doesn’t get to use often, but there it is: In 1534, a violent gang of radical Anabaptists seized control of Münster, the city in northwestern Germany, and announced to all the world the coming of the New Jerusalem. It was there in Westphalia, they said, that they would create heaven on earth, founding the true community of saints.

    You can probably predict the path the tale takes. This kind of story follows a familiar narrative logic, and it always ends in murder. The great temptation of radicalism is the attempt to “immanentize the eschaton” (a phrase of Eric Voegelin’s, much used by conservatives back in the 1970s and 1980s).

    This is the belief that perfected human society is within sight and needs just one little further push. It’s the idea that what religions promise for the end time can be brought about in the meantime, with only a little effort—a little revolution and revaluation of values. A little spilt blood.

    You can find that general pattern in the Killing Fields (where the Khmer Rouge executed over a million Cambodians in the 1970s, in the firm belief they were bringing about a peaceable utopia). Or the Cultural Revolution (where, at the instigation of Mao Zedong, radicalized “Red Guards” killed as many as 20 million Chinese in the late 1960s, in the name of restoring true communism).

    What’s fascinating about the Münster Rebellion, however, is that it doesn’t follow merely the general history of grand social revolutions that begin in claimed idealism and end in actual slaughter. It also follows a particular pattern familiar to Americans watching the news these days.

    Find the riots in the big cities a little hard to understand? They’re reenacting a 16th-century morality play. Portland is our mini-Münster. The members of Antifa and Black Lives Matter are our ersatz Anabaptists.

    New Jerusalem
    So, around 1532, a Dutch agitator named Jan Matthys came to Münster and began working tirelessly to rile up the city. His party soon found a local Lutheran pastor named Bernhard Rothmann to promote their cause and a local wool merchant named Bernhard Knipperdolling to finance it. Anabaptists poured into the city from Holland and Germany, with mobs shaming and bullying random citizens into being rebaptized in the new dispensation.

    Winning the magistracy elections in 1534, the Anabaptists installed Knipperdolling as mayor and deposed the representatives of the prince-bishop who ruled Münster for the Holy Roman Empire.

    Wild bouts of looting and iconoclasm followed, with the (mostly Lutheran) churches stripped of their art and valuables. Rebaptism into Anabaptism was made mandatory, and property was forcibly seized—with a declaration that, henceforth, all property would be held in common. The New Jerusalem, the world was told, had arrived.

    The Westphalian prince-bishop and the Holy Roman Empire did not share the euphoria, however, and they soon besieged the city. Not to worry, said Matthys, who announced that he was the new Gideon who would conquer for God—on Easter Sunday, no less. He and his indomitable band of twelve followers sallied out to smite the hundreds of professional troops surrounding Münster. They proved not quite up to the task.

    After the deceased Matthys’s head and genitals were nailed to the city gates, a 25-year-old Dutchman named John of Leiden took charge, on the basis of his claim to be receiving visions from God. Proclaiming himself the new David, and Münster the new Zion, John began to dress in royal robes and took several wives.

    Of course, to have multiple marriages, he needed to enact a law allowing polygamy. When legalized polygamy failed to bring about the perfected kingdom, John—in a classic example of the escalating logic of radical social transformation—passed another law, making polygamy mandatory.

    Even that, however, failed to end the starvation of Münster’s citizens or shame the Holy Roman Empire into surrender. The city was retaken by the prince-bishop on June 24, 1535. John of Leiden and Bernhard Knipperdolling were executed, with their bodies displayed in cages that still hang from a Münster church steeple.

    Using the Radicals
    Portions of this story have echoes in other rebellions. Looking at the Russian Revolution, Gary Saul Morson has written of the ways in which the liberal party in Russia actually helped the radical Bolsheviks who despised them.

    Picturing the radicals as merely a useful club with which to terrorize the opponents of reform, the liberals supposed that the Bolsheviks could be reined in once the conservatives were defeated. And so the liberal Kadet party maneuvered to have Bolsheviks released from jail and armed for street protests.

    Not surprisingly, the Kadet politicians proved less smart than they imagined themselves. The Bolsheviks used the opportunity to seize power—and promptly executed the liberal politicians who had facilitated their rise.

    The obvious parallel to the Münster Rebellion comes in the early days, when key Lutheran figures aided Jan Matthys and the radical Anabaptists, taking them as tools to use against Catholic opponents.

    And the parallel to the violence in America cities today comes with the Democratic party figures who pay the bail of radical protesters, the facilitating of violence by liberal mayors, and the notion that agitation makes Antifa and Black Lives Matter useful weapons for defeating Republicans—all in the mad belief (so like the insanity of the Münster Lutherans and the Russian liberals) that the radicals can be dealt with easily once the hated opponent has been eliminated.

    Anxious Revolutionaries
    But the Münster Rebellion and the current American agitation share elements not exactly present in the Russian Revolution—for Westphalia and America were profoundly Protestant territory, with their agitations shaped by that fact. In my 2015 book “An Anxious Age,” I argued that current generations of radically-tinged Americans are “post-Protestants,” the children of the people who once filled the dying Mainline churches.

    Certainly they manifest some of the worst of the old social norms: a conviction of their own moral rectitude and a feeling of superiority to the unenlightened. They have, as well, the same spiritual anxieties, made all the more desperate by their lack of actual religion. They seek constant assurance that they hold the right attitudes and take the right positions.

    They are, in essence, the heirs of the Social Gospel movement, with all the old religion stripped out: the Church of Christ without Christ.

    You can find my application of these ideas to contemporary events in a Weekly Standard essay called “The Spiritual Shape of Political Ideas” and in “Wokeness: Old Religion in a New Bottle,” a recent interview in Spiked. In them I think about “white guilt” as the idea of Original Sin with God removed, cancel-culture as Christian shunning with the church removed, and even radical environmentalism as the Christian Apocalypse with the Second Coming erased.

    But, more particularly, think about the unendingness of the riots going on right now in Portland, the mad politics of the autonomous zones in Seattle, the bullying of restaurant goers, the confrontations with passers-by, and the rest.

    The key is discerning the unfocused and unadmitted religiosity in it all. Antifa and Black Lives Matter are filled with spiritually anxious people, desperate to make their lives meaningful. The agitators traveling from protest to protest are Jan Matthys, come to Westphalia to see if that is where the Anabaptist revolution would finally take hold. The mad escalation is religious rebellion against the sinful world, following out its inescapable logic.

    We are watching a Münster of our own making: a vague and dangerous hunger for the world to be changed, with an anarchist utopia imagined to lie just a little push ahead—needing just a little apocalyptic revolution and social reversal. Needing just a little blood.

    Joseph Bottum, Ph.D., is director of the Classics Institute at Dakota State University. His most recent book is “The Decline of the Novel.”
     
  16. Tiffy

    Tiffy Well-Known Member

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    I was told there had been a 'TV Debate'. I think American Dictionaries must have changed the definition though, having listened to some choice snippets.

    Not a debate!

    More of an incomprehensibly incoherent abusive rant between two old men, with another old man trying to make some sense of what was going on, but failing miserably. What do we now know about their individual policies from what was blurted out by them all?

    Sweet FA!

    Can anyone in the USA remember what 'TV Debate' actually implies?

    In the days of J F Kennedy everybody knew it meant listening to an articulate and sensible President rationally discussing Domestic and Foreign Policy, not just slagging off the opposition like a slum gang ghetto leader.

    Whole thing made me feel really glad I'm not an American.
    .
     
  17. Botolph

    Botolph Well-Known Member

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    I watched the debate and concluded that the highlights must be on the other channel.

    Then I found this old poster from another era. Although he was not elected, one of his themes was - Prosperity at Home and Prestige Abroad.

    I have often felt in Australian Elections (we have to vote) that it would be good if we had a box which said none of the above. I imagine same Americans feel that way at the moment. Far to much of political discourse across the western world has descended to crass anathematization and vilification, which is neither helpful not enlightening.

    PeterCooper1876ElectionPoster.jpg
     
  18. Rexlion

    Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    I agree, more like mud wrestling than a debate.
     
  19. Rexlion

    Rexlion Well-Known Member

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  20. Botolph

    Botolph Well-Known Member

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    Where I am we allow 40,000 to go to the football and 20 to go to church.
     
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