Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees,
you hypocrites!
You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces.
You yourselves do not enter,
nor will you let those enter who are trying to.
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees,
you hypocrites!
You give a tenth of your goods.
But you have neglected the more
important matters of the law:
justice,
mercy and
faithfulness.
You should have practiced the latter,
without neglecting the former.
You blind guides!
You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.
Hypocrites!
You worry and fret
about words and phrases and
count the costs to your own fattened wallet
but ignore the cries of the children,
the perils of the poor and marginalized.
Although you were once immigrants yourselves
welcomed in grace
you now turn away immigrants
seeking safety and welcome
Blind guides!
Ungrateful ones!
For this was the sin of your sister Sodom
(don't listen to charlatans who tell you otherwise...):
She and her daughters were arrogant,
overfed and unconcerned;
they did not help the poor and needy.
Don't be like Sodom!
Woe to those who fail
to side with the poor and needy!
Woe to those who refuse
to welcome the refugee!
Judgment will draw nigh!
There will be a swift witness
against those who swear falsely,
against those who oppress the laborers in their wages,
against who cheat at charities meant to aid
the widow and the orphan,
against those who thrust aside the sojourner seeking refuge.
There will be hell to pay!
Now listen, you rich people,
weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you.
Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes.
Your gold and silver are corroded.
You have hoarded wealth in the last days.
Look! The wages
you failed to pay the workers
who mowed your fields are crying out against you.
The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty.
You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence.
You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter.
Snakes!
Do what is just and right;
rescue the oppressed from the power of the oppressor.
Don’t exploit or mistreat the refugee,
the orphan,
or the widow.
Don’t spill the blood of the innocent in this place.
Do not place the innocent in prison.
Instead,
Tear down those walls!
Free the captive
provide healthcare to the sick
preach actual good news to the poor!
(And not any sort of cheap counterfeit
"stay quiet and accept the punishments coming to you
at the hands of rich oppressors and slave traders!"
sort of "good news")
Preach the real good news to the actual poor.
For what you do for the least of these
for the poor
the strangers
the outcasts
the refugees
those in the oppressed classes...
What you do for them,
you do for and with and alongside God
you do for and with and alongside
your own children and
you do for and with and alongside
your own self.
It's simple
do unto others,
what you'd have them do unto you
and here's a hint:
IF you were escaping hunger and rape and murder
YOU would want to be welcomed in as a refugee.
Do that, for others.
and love
and love
and love.
~The Bible, God, Jesus...
along with just reasonable, compassionate people everywhere
regardless of their faith tradition
or belief system
you hypocrites!
You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces.
You yourselves do not enter,
nor will you let those enter who are trying to.
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees,
you hypocrites!
You give a tenth of your goods.
But you have neglected the more
important matters of the law:
justice,
mercy and
faithfulness.
You should have practiced the latter,
without neglecting the former.
You blind guides!
You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.
Hypocrites!
You worry and fret
about words and phrases and
count the costs to your own fattened wallet
but ignore the cries of the children,
the perils of the poor and marginalized.
Although you were once immigrants yourselves
welcomed in grace
you now turn away immigrants
seeking safety and welcome
Blind guides!
Ungrateful ones!
For this was the sin of your sister Sodom
(don't listen to charlatans who tell you otherwise...):
She and her daughters were arrogant,
overfed and unconcerned;
they did not help the poor and needy.
Don't be like Sodom!
Woe to those who fail
to side with the poor and needy!
Woe to those who refuse
to welcome the refugee!
Judgment will draw nigh!
There will be a swift witness
against those who swear falsely,
against those who oppress the laborers in their wages,
against who cheat at charities meant to aid
the widow and the orphan,
against those who thrust aside the sojourner seeking refuge.
There will be hell to pay!
Now listen, you rich people,
weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you.
Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes.
Your gold and silver are corroded.
You have hoarded wealth in the last days.
Look! The wages
you failed to pay the workers
who mowed your fields are crying out against you.
The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty.
You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence.
You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter.
Snakes!
Do what is just and right;
rescue the oppressed from the power of the oppressor.
Don’t exploit or mistreat the refugee,
the orphan,
or the widow.
Don’t spill the blood of the innocent in this place.
Do not place the innocent in prison.
Instead,
Tear down those walls!
Free the captive
provide healthcare to the sick
preach actual good news to the poor!
(And not any sort of cheap counterfeit
"stay quiet and accept the punishments coming to you
at the hands of rich oppressors and slave traders!"
sort of "good news")
Preach the real good news to the actual poor.
For what you do for the least of these
for the poor
the strangers
the outcasts
the refugees
those in the oppressed classes...
What you do for them,
you do for and with and alongside God
you do for and with and alongside
your own children and
you do for and with and alongside
your own self.
It's simple
do unto others,
what you'd have them do unto you
and here's a hint:
IF you were escaping hunger and rape and murder
YOU would want to be welcomed in as a refugee.
Do that, for others.
and love
and love
and love.
~The Bible, God, Jesus...
along with just reasonable, compassionate people everywhere
regardless of their faith tradition
or belief system
50 comments:
Just to be clear (because some people do not appear to understand), there are a few of my words added into all this mix. Primarily what's in parentheses is where I expanded on what is being said.
However, what I have expanded on is just more of the same of what is actually said. At any rate, just to be clear, not every single line of what is found in my post above is literally from the Bible. Just 99% of it. And the other one percent, again, just repeating more of what the Bible said, but in my own words.
It's interesting, that, rather than shouting Alleluia and thanking God for the consistent message of justice for the oppressed found in the Bible, that some have opted to nitpick about words that echo what is found in the Bible.
Some might call that straining at gnats but swallowing camels.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose: racism, bigotry, white supremacy, American Christianity's bargain with Satan.
"Davenport’s 1919 “The Trait Book” listed 3,500 human genetic attributes, each assigned a numerical value; these included “forwardness,” “forehead, low,” “fondness of children,” “frivolousness.” Osborn opined that “education and environment do not fundamentally alter racial values.” To gather “facts” about who could become desirable Americans, nativist leaders sought public opinion, but their respondents were limited to men listed in “Who’s Who,” Harvard Medical School graduates, prominent white Southerners and labor union officials such as Samuel Gompers (an ardent restrictionist). This extremely non-random sample reflected the kind of people whose opinions these scientists respected. Leaving nothing to chance, their survey used a multiple-choice questionnaire; respondents were asked to rank several groups in order of desirability: “native born; persons from northern Europe; skilled persons; families with some money, intending to settle in the country; British; Scandinavians; Germans.”
Henry Goddard’s famed Kallikak study of “defectives” persuaded more than 30 states to impose forced sterilization on the “feeble-minded.” He also tested arrivals at Ellis Island and “found” that 83 percent of the Jews, 80 percent of Hungarians, 79 percent of Italians were either “morons” or “imbeciles.”
The temperature of nativist bigotry reached new heights in the World War I era, through the efforts of Madison Grant, also a proud descendant of Puritans. His 1916 book, “The Passing of the Great Race,” promoted the myth that the “master race” was facing extinction — this view, incidentally, was recently borrowed by the white nationalists in Charlottesville, Va., who were chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” Eugenic claims became increasingly absurd: Dante and Leonardo were Nordics, Marco Polo and Galileo were really Germans, Jesus was not a Jew.
Nativism’s denouement was the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. Previous immigration restrictions targeted particular groups — notably people from Asia — but this comprehensive law aimed not just to limit immigration but to preserve white Protestant dominance in America. It assigned a quota to each nation, ranging from 51,000 for Germany to 2,000 for Russia to 1,100 for the entire African continent. The northern Ku Klux Klan drummed up support for the law, claiming that America was ordained by God to be a white Protestant nation. Okrent slights the Klan’s influence, understandably, because his book is a history of elite nativist spokesmen rather than a social history. But recognizing the Klan’s campaign can serve as a reminder that bigotry has no life of its own; it needs deliberate promotion. The 1920s K.K.K. gained astonishing strength — four to six million members — and operated a sophisticated lobbying and get-out-the-vote machine, putting into office 11 governors, 45 congressmen and hundreds of state, county and municipal officials. The Klan-identified congressman Albert Johnson, chairman of the House immigration committee, shepherded the anti-immigration bill into enactment. The law remained in effect until 1965, with some dreadful consequences. To name just one: It justified the refusal to accept refugees from Nazism, including 20,000 Jewish children.
Equally chilling is Okrent’s documentation of American influence on Nazi “race hygiene.” As early as 1932 Walter Schultze of the Nazi euthanasia program called on German geneticists to “heed the example” of the United States. The Nazi Handbook for Law and Legislation cited American immigration law as a model for Germany. Osborn complained that negative press about the Nazis resulted from Jewish influence. Perhaps paradoxically, it was the Nazi genocide that stigmatized eugenics forever.
The more things change, the more they stay the same: from even earlier in our history about Irish immigrants: "All Europe is coming across the ocean, all that part at least that cannot make a living at home, and what should we do with them they increase our taxes, eat our bread, and encumber our streets and not one in 20 is competent to keep himself."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/books/review/guarded-gate-daniel-okrent.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
Objective moral standard: straight white male supremacy is brutal by design and nature.
Stop applying morals selectively, Craig. Call for the cessation of caging children and pressing the oppressed.
It took 230 years and a diverse and morally clear Democratic Party: a President has been declared racist. Better late than never.
Good god, Craig is a fuckingly shallow, duplicitous operator.
Given that Omar and her siblings all came to live in the U.S. under identical circumstances as refugees, and that Omar herself became a naturalized U.S. citizen while still a minor, how did one of her siblings end up with such a radically different immigration status that she would have needed to marry him in order to facilitate his U.S. residency application?
Also, if Ahmed Elmi were truly Omar’s brother, why would he have needed to take the drastic step of marrying her in order to secure a path to U.S. citizenship? U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) policies qualify immigrants as eligible to apply for permanent residency status (and later become naturalized citizens) if they are the “spouse of a U.S. citizen” or the “brother or sister of a U.S. citizen.”
Craig has most recently given us his prediction and secret hope for the election outcome. He makes two premises.
1) that no significant percentage of Trump's support care that he's a brutalizing race baiter. Perhaps true, though clearly a damning summation of half of white American voters.
2) that is likely that the two large portions of the Democratic vote - moderates who want to compromise via slow social progress and progressives who want to ratify strong moral change - will divide over principle.
and one tone:
3) With ironic, snarky, snide tone, he shows that he relishes such an outcome.
It is obviously an anti-Christian faith to want it so: the victory of a race baiting, misogynist, bigot who is so acidic on normal governmental health.
And then the game Craig plays with himself of suggesting that there is a way out of defeat (bury principles for the sake of a win) is anti-Christian again, in a different form.
He thus presents himself as having two very anti-Christian thoughts at the same time.
Such is the fix that brutalizing white men who think they are upstanding citizens are in: a secret thrill to see victims suffer more but cannot be conscious of it enough to enjoy himself because of a benumbed conscience.
"If you think he's a racist, that's up to you. I don't!" -- Lindsey Graham, this week.
"He's a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot." -- Lindsey Graham, 2015.
Craig did it, too.
History will not look kindly on these feckless Trump enablers.
Oops, Craig has been outflanked by mature behavior.
“Rep. Ilhan Omar will participate in a new bipartisan black-Jewish congressional caucus. On Thursday, the Minnesota Democrat’s spokesman, Jeremy Slevin, confirmed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that she is planning to join the group. On Monday, three black and two Jewish members of the U.S. House of Representatives from both parties launched the caucus.
The caucus, launched after a meeting convened by the American Jewish Committee in January, will work to bring blacks and Jews together to back hate crimes legislation and combat white supremacist ideology and actions.“
They’re coming here illegally!
They need our help.
We should help Americans first!
Well, then, let’s help Americans.
No! That’s socialism!
[RE Craig's latest where he pretends he knows scripture and how we can ignore caging Christians.]
You are aware, Craig, that the people being caged are Christians, right?
As if you know the least of what scripture tells us. Re Israel as a nation, from the heart of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah:
You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the LORD your God.
So show your love for the alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.
There shall be one standard for you; it shall be for the stranger as well as the native, for I am the LORD your God.
When you reap the harvest of your land, moreover, you shall not reap to the very corners of your field nor gather the gleaning of your harvest; you are to leave them for the needy and the alien. I am the LORD your God.’
You are aware that the people being caged are Christians, right?
As if you know the least of what scripture tells us. From the New Testament:
"For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God — not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life. So then, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called “the uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision”—a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands — remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God."
Don't bother posting. I'll send it around how you have a pretend knowledge of your faith.
So, Craig, your claim that are no "biblical arguments" "for making government policy based on" "offering support and help for immigrants and refugees" is wrong about the Bible and stupid.
And your idea that Jesus could have called on the Roman government - a brutalizing foreign occupier - for help but chose not to... is worse than stupid... and the opposite of Christian belief in the the gospel proclamation of Jesus Christ.
[Craig's hits on the vulnerable, the terrorized, the poor... they just keep coming.]
You really suck at scripture, Craig. Don't bother posting: I'll pass around how you suck at scripture. I guess the children dying and being traumatized for life aren't the "right" representation of Christ for you. Color of skin? You do know that Jesus wasn't white don't you? Don't you?
When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’ Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
You're not wrong. He makes bad arguments not grounded in decency, reason or the Bible. Alas, this is modern conservatism.
Re Stan's latest:
By your shallow proof texting, Stan, you give the impression that you are not aware that Revelation is a book of letters to... churches. And that Hebrews, particularly the section you quote from, is directed to confirmed Christians to not give up they mission of peace, good will, and love despite what life brings them:
"Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed. Pursue peace with everyone, and the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and through it many become defiled. See to it that no one becomes like Esau, an immoral and godless person, who sold his birthright for a single meal. You know that later, when he wanted to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, even though he sought the blessing with tears."
Pusure peace, Stan. Let not root of bitterness spring up. See tot that even you do not sell your birthright for some privilege, some better position than others that you expect life to give you.
But, here you are, casting judgment, resentment at the every forward moving desire of peaceful people not to dump bitterness on the marginalized, the outcast, the poor. Here you are, and Craig and Marshall and your band of renegade haters, hating: drawing lines, acting the Esau fool, in order to try to rule society.
How can anyone read the gospels and not know that Jesus would do exactly what you cannot: embrace and love the outcast, the marginalized, those seeking equal rights. And the poor, who need our help.
What kind of Christian are you? A Judaizer. Like Craig. Like Marshal. Like your other white boys club.
“A pro-Trump Republican candidate for Congress who is aiming to unseat Ilhan Omar in Minnesota has been charged with a felony after allegedly stealing from stores.
Danielle Stella was arrested twice this year in Minneapolis suburbs over allegations that she shoplifted items worth more than $2,300 from a Target and goods valued at $40 from a grocery store. She said she denied the allegations.
Stella, a 31-year-old special education teacher, was reported this week to be a supporter of the baseless “QAnon” conspiracy theory about Donald Trump battling a global cabal of elite liberal paedophiles.
This week Stella also described Minneapolis as “the crime capital of our country”. She has in the past complained that local police were “overworked and overburdened” and said that, if elected, she would work to reduce crime.”
Well, Johns Hopkins University is in Mr Cummings' district.
But so are Jared Kushner's real estate poverty traps.
"The tenants in a slew of properties owned by Jared Kushner might agree with Donald Trump’s assessment that the majority-black congressional district is a “rat and rodent-infested mess.” As Pro Publica had reported, Kushner faced charges that he bought up a slew of run-down apartment units across Baltimore County and implemented a series of shady practices that targeted the people living there. The story noted that a private investigator who was looking into Kushner’s property management company, a man who was actually a supporter of Donald Trump, concluded that “they’re nothing but slumlords.”
Craig is as racist as Trump and as in the bag for brutalizing people of color as Trump is.
""Mitch McConnell has an easy-to-read list of triumphs. He played a top role making the state Republican party a powerhouse. He returned Kentucky to the forefront as a hemp producer, and helped poor students at a state community college.
Yet Kentucky continues to lag behind the national average in health care and median income. Its teachers spent much of the spring decrying low education funding and changes to their pensions. Poverty remains a persistent challenge in Kentucky, with the rates in some Eastern Kentucky counties among the highest in the country.
"You're talking about persistent problems that we've had for decades," McConnell said of the state's troubles."
"It takes remarkable fortitude to remain an optimist about Baltimore today. I have lived in the city for 11 of the past 18 years, and for the last few I have struggled to describe its unraveling to friends and colleagues elsewhere. If you live in, say, New York or Boston, you are familiar with a certain story of urban America. Several decades ago, disorder and dysfunction were common across American cities. Then came the great urban rebirth: a wave of reinvestment coupled with a plunge in crime rates that has left many major cities to enjoy a sort of post-fear existence.
Until 2015, Baltimore seemed to be enjoying its own, more modest version of this upswing. Though it is often lumped in with Rust Belt economic casualties like Cleveland, St. Louis and Detroit, Baltimore in fact fared better than these postindustrial peers. Because of the Johns Hopkins biomedical empire, the city’s busy port and its proximity to Washington, metro Baltimore enjoyed higher levels of wealth and income — including among its black population — than many former manufacturing hubs.
The city still had its ills — its blight, suburban flight, segregation, drugs, racial inequality, concentrated poverty. But as recently as 2014, Baltimore’s population, which is 63 percent African-American, was increasing, up slightly to 623,000 after decades of decline. Office buildings downtown were being converted to apartments, and a new business-and-residential district was rising east of the Inner Harbor. The city was even attracting those ultimate imprimaturs of urban revival, a couple of food halls.
The subsequent regression has been swift and demoralizing. Redevelopment continues in some parts of town, but nearly four years after Freddie Gray’s death, the surge in crime has once again become the context of daily life in the city, as it was in the early 1990s. I have grown accustomed to scanning the briefs column in The Baltimore Sun in the morning for news of the latest homicides; to taking note of the location of the latest killings as I drive around town for my baseball coaching and volunteering obligations. In 2017, the church I attend started naming the victims of the violence at Sunday services and hanging a purple ribbon for each on a long cord outside. By year’s end, the ribbons crowded for space, like shirts on a tenement clothesline....
... The violence and disorder have fed broader setbacks. Gov. Larry Hogan canceled a $2.9 billion rail transit line for West Baltimore, defending the disinvestment in the troubled neighborhood partly by noting that the state had spent $14 million responding to the riots. Target closed its store in West Baltimore, a blow to a part of town short of retail options. The civic compact has so frayed that one acquaintance admitted to me recently that he had stopped waiting at red lights when driving late at night. Why should he, he argued, when he saw young men on dirt bikes flying through intersections while police officers sat in cruisers doing nothing?
Explaining all this to people outside Baltimore is difficult, not only because the experience is alien to those even in cities just up or down the Interstate from us (though a handful of cities elsewhere, like Chicago and St. Louis, have experienced their own waves of recent violence, albeit less dramatically than Baltimore). It’s also because the national political discourse lacks a vocabulary for the city’s ills. On right-wing talk radio, one of the few sectors of the media to take much interest in Baltimore’s crime surge, there are old tropes of urban mayhem — Trump’s “American carnage.” Typically lacking from these schadenfreude-laced discussions is any sense of the historical forces and societal abandonment that the city has for decades struggled to overcome.
On the left, in contrast, Baltimore’s recent woes have been largely overlooked, partly because they present a challenge to those who start from the assumption that policing is inherently suspect. The national progressive story of Baltimore during this era of criminal-justice reform has been the story of the police excesses that led to Gray’s death and the uprising, not the surge of violence that has overtaken the city ever since. As a result, Baltimore has been left mostly on its own to contend with what has been happening, which has amounted to nothing less than a failure of order and governance the likes of which few American cities have seen in years."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/magazine/baltimore-tragedy-crime.html
Where's your McConnell quote coming from? What is the context of that? Who said it?
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article212946289.html
“When President Trump characterized immigrants as “animals,” some people waved it away, claiming he was only referring to gang members. But his use of “infest” in connection to human beings is impossible to ignore. The president’s tweet that immigrants will “infest our Country” includes an alarming verb choice for anyone with knowledge of history.
Characterizing people as vermin has historically been a precursor to murder and genocide. The Nazis built on centuries-old hatred of Jews as carriers of disease in a film titled “Der Ewige Jude,” or “The Eternal Jew.” As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum notes on its website, in a section helpfully titled “Defining the Enemy:” “One of the film’s most notorious sequences compares Jews to rats that carry contagion, flood the continent, and devour precious resources.”
Jewish Daily Forward
Craig is enjoying the thrill of rhetorical brutality and reveling in Trump’s lies re Baltimore. (But please know he doesn’t support Trump.) So, he’ll ignore the role of this nice white Jewish landlord.
“Jared Kushner's troubled Baltimore housing complexes could be the 'disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess' Trump tweeted about”
President Donald Trump took aim at living conditions in Baltimore twice in two days, even though his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, has a stake in some of the area's most troubled housing complexes.... Kushner, however, has continued ownership of several Baltimore-area housing complexes that have been so embroiled in housing violations and mismanagement that Kushner has been called a "slumlord." A 2017 investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times called "The Beleaguered Tenants of Kushnerville" detailed how a subsidiary of the real-estate firm Kushner Companies functioned and the poor living conditions that plagued residents in complexes bought under Kushner's oversight.
The investigation reported decrepit conditions including leaking ceilings, maggots in living-room carpet, and raw human sewage coming from a kitchen sink. The report also includes mention of multiple retaliatory lawsuits against tenants who tried to move out. Residents said in lawsuits they noticed near-constant but largely unexplained fees that would end up aiding their eviction if they weren't paid. The cases are ongoing, as Kushner Companies switched the suit to state court after a federal judge ordered the company to reveal the identity of mysterious company investors.
Whether Trump is aware of the complexes where it seems "no human being would want to live" or not, the housing troubles tied to Kushner haven't gone unnoticed by the city. Baltimore County officials took notice of Kushner's powerful status while announcing in 2017 that he was to be fined for more than 200 code violations in apartments owned by Kushner Companies.
"We expect all landlords to comply with the code requirements that protect the health and safety of their tenants," county officials said in a statement at the time, "even if the landlord's father-in-law is president of the United States."
God but Craig and Marshall and Stan are morally shallow. In 2 ways.
1. In Baltimore, gangs are killing each other. So no one white cares. In Guatemala, gangs are killing innocent sons, daughters, whole families. And they still don’t care.
2. They ask why we should help refugees when so many Americans need help. But when Americans suggest helping each other they call it socialism.
They are fucked in the head. As is every fundamentalist.
I'd just soon that you leave the personal names out of it. This is a problem of modern conservatism, writ large, unfortunately. Yes, our conservative friends are part of that problem, but just point out the problem, please, without specifying names. I don't think it helps.
It is a symptom of bad times for modern rightwing religiosity... the sexism, oppression and racism they'll tacitly support all in the name of supporting some sick idealization of "the good old days" when evil was even more rampant (the evils of sexism and sexual oppression, of oppression of the LGBTQ community, the oppression of black and other "racial minorities...") and they think that evil was good.
Alas.
May that tribe have its collective eyes opened or just die out (I fear it will be the latter).
It's not slander if it's apt.
This is Craig, writing openly in public:
“In 2017, Baltimore had a homicide rate of 57.8 per 100,000. Guatemala, in that same year, had a homicide rate of 26.1 per 100,000. I’m guessing that either Baltimore residents should be applying to Guatemala for asylum, or we shouldn’t send anyone claiming asylum to Baltimore.”
It accurately reflects the racist, morally shallow and corrupt open, public writing by Marshall and Stan.
The problem seems to be with modern Trump-defending conservatives (like Craig and Marshal, et al) is that they appear to deny some basic realities in favor of false claims and fake news. You can ask them direct, reasonable, clear questions in a variety of ways and they just don't answer them (while thinking they DO answer them) or they answer them with non-reality-based answers.
I don't know what to do with that level of delusion, but I don't need to provide a forum for that. Which is why Craig and Marshall can't comment here now. It's not that I'm not allowing them to comment here, it's that they need to answer some questions that demonstrate they understand reality.
They can't/won't/don't, so they can't comment here.
I expect conversations here to be fact-based, not delusional or non-factual.
I love how Craig gets the exact opposite of the text of Micah.
Micah has God literally imploring the rich and powerful to draw from their divinely endowed inner capacities which image the likeness of God in order to help the poor and suffering and stop practicing endless, worthless worship.
But Craig believes exactly the opposite: people are worthless and a focus on God alone is the sole necessity. Sure, Craig says it's still a nice thing to volunteer an hour or so. But change actual conditions for suffering people? Not a priority.
Micah's lament is all about people like Craig.
"Many conservatives have a loose relationship with facts. The right-wing denial of what most people think of as accepted reality starts with political issues: As recently as 2016, 45 percent of Republicans still believed that the Affordable Care Act included “death panels” (it doesn’t). A 2015 poll found that 54 percent of GOP primary voters believed then-President Obama to be a Muslim (…he isn’t).
Then there are the false beliefs about generally accepted science. Only 25 percent of self-proclaimed Trump voters agree that climate change is caused by human activities. Only 43 percent of Republicans overall believe that humans have evolved over time.
And then it gets really crazy. Almost 1 in 6 Trump voters, while simultaneously viewing photographs of the crowds at the 2016 inauguration of Donald Trump and at the 2012 inauguration of Barack Obama , insisted that the former were larger. Sixty-six percent of self-described “very conservative” Americans seriously believe that “Muslims are covertly implementing Sharia law in American courts.” Forty-six percent of Trump voters polled just after the 2016 election either thought that Hillary Clinton was connected to a child sex trafficking ring run out of the basement of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., or weren’t sure if it was true.
If “truth” is judged on the basis of Enlightenment ideas of reason and more or less objective “evidence,” many of the substantive positions common on the right seem to border on delusional. The left is certainly not immune to credulity (most commonly about the safety of vaccines, GMO foods, and fracking), but the right seems to specialize in it. “Misinformation is currently predominantly a pathology of the right,” concluded a team of scholars from the Harvard Kennedy School and Northeastern University at a February 2017 conference.
But, the gullibility of many on the right seems to have deeper roots even than this. That may be because at the most basic level, conservatives and liberals seem to hold different beliefs about what constitutes “truth.” Finding facts and pursuing evidence and trusting science is part of liberal ideology itself. For many conservatives, faith and intuition and trust in revealed truth appear as equally valid sources of truth.
To understand how these differences manifest and what we might do about them, it helps to understand how all humans reason and rationalize: In other words, let’s take a detour into psychology. Freud distinguished between “errors” on the one hand, “illusions” and “delusions” on the other. Errors, he argued, simply reflect lack of knowledge or poor logic; Aristotle’s belief that vermin form out of dung was an error. But illusions and delusions are based on conscious or unconscious wishes; Columbus’s belief that he had found a new route to the Indies was a delusion based on his wish that he had done so.
Although Freud is out of favor with many contemporary psychologists, modern cognitive psychology suggests that he was on the right track. The tenacity of many of the right’s beliefs in the face of evidence, rational arguments, and common sense suggest that these beliefs are not merely alternate interpretations of facts but are instead illusions rooted in unconscious wishes.
This is a very human thing to do. As popular writers such as Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein, and Richard Thaler have pointed out, we often use shortcuts when we reason, shortcuts that enable us to make decisions quickly and with little expenditure of mental energy. But they also often lead us astray—we underestimate the risks of events that unfold slowly and whose consequences are felt only over the long term (think global warming) and overestimate the likelihood of events that unfold rapidly and have immediate consequences (think terrorist attacks).
Our reasoning is also influenced (motivated, psychologists would say) by our emotions and instincts. This manifests in all kinds of ways: We need to maintain a positive self-image, to stave off anxiety and guilt, and to preserve social relationships. We also seek to maintain consistency in our beliefs, meaning that when people simultaneously hold two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values, one or the other must go. And so we pay more attention and give more credence to information and assertions that confirm what we already believe: Liberals enthusiastically recount even the most tenuous circumstantial evidence of Trump campaign collusion with the Russians, and dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporters happily believe that the crowd really was bigger at his candidate’s inauguration.
It’s not just that Trump is “their” president, so they want to defend him. Conservatives’ greater acceptance of hierarchy and trust in authority may lead to greater faith that what the president says must be true, even when the “facts” would seem to indicate otherwise. The New York Times cataloged no less than 117 clearly false statements proclaimed publicly by Trump in the first six months of his presidency, with no evident loss in his supporters’ faith in him. In the same way, greater faith in the legitimacy of the decisions of corporate CEOs may strengthen the tendency to deny evidence that there are any potential benefits from regulation of industry.
Similarly, greater valuation of stability, greater sensitivity to the possibility of danger, and greater difficulty tolerating difference and change lead to greater anxiety about social change and so support greater credulity with respect to lurid tales of the dangers posed by immigrants. And higher levels of repression and greater adherence to tradition and traditional sources of moral judgment increase the credibility of claims that gay marriage is a threat to the “traditional” family.
Conservatives are also less introspective, less attentive to their inner feelings, and less likely to override their “gut” reactions and engage in further reflection to find a correct answer. As a result, they may be more likely to rely on error-prone cognitive shortcuts, less aware of their own unconscious biases, and less likely to respond to factual corrections to previously held beliefs.
The differences in how conservatives and liberals process information are augmented by an asymmetry in group psychological processes. Yes, we all seek to keep our social environment stable and predictable. Beliefs that might threaten relationships with family, neighbors, and friends (e.g., for a fundamentalist evangelical to believe that humans are the result of Darwinian evolution or for a coal miner to believe that climate change is real and human-made) must be ignored or denied, at peril of disrupting the relationships. But among all Americans, the intensity of social networks has declined in recent years. Church attendance and union membership, participation in community organizations, and direct political involvement have flagged. Conservatives come disproportionately from rural areas and small towns, where social networks remain smaller, but denser and more homogeneous than in the big cities that liberals dominate. As a result, the opinions of family, friends, and community may be more potent in conservative hotbeds than in the more anonymous big cities where Democrats dominate.
The lack of shared reality between left and right in America today has contributed greatly to our current political polarization. Despite occasional left forays into reality denial, conservatives are far more likely to accept misinformation and outright lies. Deliberate campaigns of misinformation and conservative preferences for information that fits in with their pre-existing ideology provide only a partial explanation. Faulty reasoning and judgment, rooted in the interactions between modes of reasoning and judgment shared by all with the specific personality patterns found disproportionately among conservatives may also play a central role.
Every poll - every poll - shows Trump is more disapproved than approved.
Dan belongs to a bigger group.
____
We’ll keep Baltimore. You can hold on to Wichita.
“The American Human Development Index (AHDI) allows for a state-by-state assessment of critical factors like income, education, and health. When we calculated the average AHDI for the red states — those won by Donald Trump — it was much lower than the average AHDI for blue states. In fact, by way of international comparisons, the blue states won by Hillary Clinton have a human development index similar to the Netherlands, while the red states have an AHDI that resembles Russia’s....
... a recent study by David C. Parsley and Helen Popper... investigated the differences between red and blue... [they] vary so much in their economic trajectories that they may as well be two distinct countries within the United States.
First, blue states have enjoyed higher economic growth rates on average than red states since the Great Recession. Since the mid-2000s, the business cycle of blue states has increasingly diverged from that of their red counterparts. The average disparity in GDP growth between red states and blue states has hovered around 3.5% since the recession ended. For comparison, a previous study of 20 developed nations found an average GDP convergence among them of only 1.75%.
Differences in GDP growth also lead to differences in household income and household consumption — i.e., in living standards. Luckily, there are several transfer mechanisms that mitigate these gaps in GDP growth so that consumption shortfalls in red states amount to only about one-fifth of the growth deficits.
The second most critical tool to smooth consumption in red states is fiscal transfers. Blue states, on the whole, contribute more tax revenue to federal coffers than they receive in return. So in aggregate, the federal government transfers wealth from the blue states to the red states.
Blue staters, on the other hand, ease the consumption gap by saving more and purchasing durable goods. Of course, poorer households often cannot save and thus must rely on fiscal transfers, so this red state-blue state gap might just be the result of wealth disparities between the two cohorts.
Whatever the cause, the study demonstrates that the current polarization in US politics is misguided and counterproductive. Economically speaking, the red states benefit from the blue states through government redistribution and transfers of capital from blue state savers to red state investments via capital markets. Blue states benefit from red states, on the other hand, which fuel their higher growth and higher income with attractive investment opportunities as well as cheaper labor and lower prices.”
from the CFA Institute: Practical analysis for investment professionals
“CFA Institute stands for creating an environment where investors' interests come first, markets function at their best, and economies grow.”
Jesus, Craig! You don’t the first thing about faith. No one has ever proved God’s existence. Nor can we! What do you think the word, faith, means?! Oh my god!!
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.”
Since the Enlightenment, philosophers of Christian faith have offered interpretive arguments arguments for God’s existence asked on the faculty of reason alone, but even they don’t propose that such a thing is incontrovertible proof beyond doubt. Leibniz, Spinoza, et al, are all christian philosophers you despise anyway: the forerunners of text critical Christians who understand the ancient character of scripture cannot be squeezed into modern desire for infallibility.
God but you are uneducated and ignorant when it comes to your deepest commitments. And that’s precisely where your brutality enters.
Don’t bother posting. I have to send this around to Marshal and Stan to show how corrupt your theology and theirs is.
It is fact, Craig, that the only reason Christian philosophers and Christian theologians and Christian scientists have over the last 300 to 400 years tried to do strict rational proofs of God’s existence is BECAUSE they accepted the modern findings that scripture is untrustworthy: it contains ancient bad science and obvious ancient lack of applying strict reason to texts.
You are trying to keep one foot in each of two diametrically opposed biblical views. Because you’re uneducated in both.
Rules of Modernity:
1. Nothing can be ultimately proved.
2. Scientific observation and reasoning with data is the only acceptable method of pursuit out the best possible explanation.
3. Every best possible explanation will be superseded either largely or in very nuanced ways.
4. Many times we have the best possible explanation so preponderantly accurate in predicting outcomes and so thoroughly reasoned that there is no rational opposition that they serve as proofs for now.
5. In all things, rely on what has a weighable balance of good effect for life.
Rules of Fundamentalism:
1. The Bible is infallible and we can admit no problems for our current position. [So, what if our parents thought blacks were sinful just because they were black; we now know that queers are sinful just because they are queers.]
2. This must meant the Bible gets no science and no history wrong because liberals keep saying accurate, enlightenment based- rationally argued science and history are modern discoveries which show the Bible's modern faults.
3. God is Sovereign. And reveals himself beyond the shadow of a doubt. Particularly in the Bible.
4. Man is depraved. Unless he worships in the right way: by the book.
5, So, the Bible shows the way to scientific and historical proof for all time. Faith is certainty in this. It's visible. It's proven.
I love how Craig infers there can be a 51% proof of something.
Craig says, “Your obsessive desire for control is anti Christian and disturbing. Your refusal to do what you demand of others just means you’re a coward.“
Rabid hypocrisy isn’t Christian either, but Craig excels at it.
Craig would prefer I not be here. His conscience suffers too much.
Everything you say about Dan is what you’re guilty of. There’s is a reason that the act of projection is something modern psychology discovered. And, thereby, fundamentalists are ignorant of.
To Craig’s latest, because he should be ashamed:
Pleading for readily available contraceptives is the moral response. Blocking such legislation is yours.
Pleading for stricter gun control is the moral response. Blocking such legislation is yours.
You are a fucked in the head disgrace as a Christian.
“EMERGENCY: a man, another 20-something white nationalist, just walked right into a Wal-Mart in El-Paso and shot and killed 22 people, eighteen adults and four children Toxic, fragile white masculinity is the greatest threat to American National security. Apprehended alive.”
Reminder: The NRA is responsible for more American deaths than Al Queda and ISIS combined.
Craig: “If we want to add up the toll of ended innocent human lives, abortion far outstrips guns. With abortion, the ending of innocent human life is protected, encouraged, and cheered.”
I don’t equate 500,000 American women with Patrick Crusius, who hunted down brown people. Craig does, though. And he finds the women worse than Mr Crusius.
Craig is sick in the head.
Dan, Craig’s latest manipulative ploy is a strategy of erasure. As we demonstrate his, and Marshal’s, vapid and brutalizing patterns of thinking and judgment, their sole strategy can only consist of erasure. Unless and until they drastically change and elevate their spiritual reasoning.
Not speaking up, despite the bare fact that they will not change their thrill to white supremacy, would amount to them changing us.
In fact, Craig’s desire to erase overwhelming reason, shares the same kinship with Trump’s “Go back to your country” said to US Congressional representatives and the Charlottesville Alt-right chant of “Jews will not replace us”: racism. Craig is fascist lite.
And what a hypocritical fool he is to defame you when he allows Marshal to call you a fascist at his blog.
I rejoice to read that on Stan’s latest post, Craig thinks a killer’s manifesto based on Trump’s talking points about an invasion of brown people is Satanic and nihilistic. Such is the President we have as picked by Republicans
We should note that everywhere.
What Craig needs to hear:
You are so fucked in the head. You think everyone has a right to assault weaponry but healthcare for the wounded is a privilege. And no woman has a right over her own health and body.
And here you are hiding behind a meaningless story. How many micro-aggressions are you ignoring in addition to covering up your brutality?
“Police have charged a Montana man with assault after witnesses say he threw a 13-year-old boy to the ground because he was "disrespecting the national anthem." Curt James Brockway, 39, was arrested Saturday at the Mineral County Fair and charged with assault on a minor, according to Sheriff Mike Boone. Brockway slammed the child on the ground because he did not remove his hat during the national anthem, witnesses told KPAX.”
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