It isn’t the same. For one, the Supreme Court ruled only this year the the president has nearly king-like powers and immunity – which was only made possible because of the far-right justices he appointed (put forward by the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation, who are also behind Project 2025), and he’ll get to appoint two more, bringing the balance from 5-4 to 7-2. That will give him literally unchecked power, which he didn’t have last time.

Have you read Project 2025? If not, you should. They learned a lot from the limitations they faced in 2016, and have worked this whole time to make sure they will have free reign this time.

It isn’t about trump. He’s just the frontman for a larger fascist movement, who now have the House, Congress, Supreme Court, and have infiltrated the legislature at the state level. They will enact Project 2025 and all they need from trump are rubber stamps between rounds of golf.

The whole reason they chose him was because he’s practically illiterate and insanely easy to manipulate. He doesn’t need to do anything except put his signature on whatever shit they put in front of him. And they have a comprehensive plan to dismantle democracy this time.

Considering evolutionary time scales, this trait may have been a response to something large and dangerous that’s extinct now.

I’m not saying he wasn’t progressive for his time in the context of those stories, but progressive for his time still meant the utter suppression of women within the culture.

Women weren’t allowed to have opinions, conduct trade, or own property, because they were property themselves. eta: and Jesus didn’t explicitly say women should have those rights.

If you believe the bible is the infallible word of god, it shouldn’t be controversial that women are like livestock.

Now, you can rationalise progressive values by saying if Jesus was alive today, he wouldn’t have gone along with all that, but that’s just not what the bible actually says.

Yeah, contradictions are baked in, which is part of why it’s endured this long. But for the misogyny and sexism specifically, there aren’t really any contradictions.

Jesus never said woman are equal or slavery is wrong. You could maybe argue he didn’t condone the genocide of his father by saying lepers deserved compassion or whatever (though that’s also a stretch), but there’s plenty of misogyny and racism in the new testament as well, so he absolutely did not counter any of that.

Anyone trying to argue Jesus (an apocalyptic preacher who was a product of his time) wasn’t misogynistic doesn’t actually know scripture or history. The preacher in the article is absolutely following the gospel, even if that’s an uncomfortable truth.

They do cherry-pick, that’s true. But my point is you don’t have to cherry-pick to wind up at awful levels of misogyny and racism. If you take it at face value, misogyny and racism is the message you should take from it.

They can hand-wave some of it away with the whole ‘Jesus fulfilled the covenant’ nonsense (which is 109% cherry-picking), but throughout the whole thing, both old and new testaments, women are property and some races are meant to be slaves.

This is what fundamentalists – who famously don’t cherry-pick, but believe the literal word – believe. It’s atrocious, but their interpretation is literally correct.

Well, yeah. The bible was written in a place and time where women were property, like livestock, and if you actually believe those teachings (without doing mental gymnastics), that’s what you should believe.

The 10th commandment makes this pretty clear:

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.

Women are included in the list of property you shall not covet, on the same level with your neighbour’s servants and livestock.

Modern christians try to whitewash the religion, but if you take it as it was written, women are akin to livestock.

My ex took my last name, because he had siblings with children and my family name would have died with me. It was a gift to my father that his* grandson would carry the family name forwards. And no, that wasn’t a red flag – we were married for 30 years.

I can easily imagine that, too. I saw an early concept render that went around a decade ago or so when I worked in a design office, and we half- joked they’d accidentally released a low-poly model by mistake. Or it was some sort of weird joke we didn’t get.

It’s so ridiculous and broken, it has Musk’s fingerprints all over it (and good luck; fingerprints are near-permanent on that ludicrous metal finish they chose.)

Yeah, that’s what bugs me about this. Dogs deserve for us to treat them better than this. They’ve certainly earned better than this from us.

Paying bills is for poor people. Rich people don’t need to do that. How would they stay rich?

A lot.

Why is anyone listening to her, though? According to her followers, her vagina should be shooting out babies like an AK when it’s not making sandwiches.

Uh, more like a saddening percentage of the country wants Israel to succeed for their rapture fantasies, and an another significant portion is unaware that’s their goal. They don’t care about Israel, really, only that their doomsday prophesies are fulfilled, so Jesus can come back. A few million brown people dying is just the price to be paid for paradise.

Upper management deserves everything it gets. Middle management is often underpaid and expected to do all the jobs of their own plus their superiors.

Some *organisational tasks will always be needed. Middle management does that plus fielding some amount of customer service, plus a lot of what upper management takes credit for.

The system is fucked, but we shouldn’t let the people doing barely anything to earn their yachts turn us against those grinding their own bones to glue the grind-house together.

(No, I’m not a middle-manager.)

One place to start is this article from the Stanford Encyclopaedia on Philosophy: Conservatism.

It’s a lengthy read, but enlightening.

One highlight from the summary:

Most commentators regard conservatism as a modern political philosophy, even though it exhibits the standpoint of paternalism or authority, rather than freedom. As John Gray writes, while liberalism is the dominant political theory of the modern age, conservatism, despite appealing to tradition, is also a response to the challenges of modernity. The roots of all three standpoints “may be traced back to the crises of seventeenth-century England, but [they] crystallised into definite traditions of thought and practice only [after] the French Revolution” (Gray 1995: 78)

I recommend reading the sources linked in that article, as well.

eta: It’s worth noting that societies worldwide often see a resurgence in conservatism in response to social change, crises, and civil rights movements, which are without fail a fear response to threats to the social hierarchy. We can see this in real time.

Nanu nanu.

This has been studied, and the ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaires’ idea is actually wrong.

The real reason is because some people (especially conservatives, because it’s a core part of conservative ideology) believe that in order for society to work, a hierarchy must be maintained wherein the ‘deserving’ are at the top, and everyone else is in their rightful place. Any threat to the natural hierarchy will undo the societal order and bring chaos and carnage.

This is why Obama becoming president was such an affront – because his presence outside his ‘rightful place’ was an existential threat to the natural order.

This belief has its roots way back when feudalism began to fail and the moneyed classes needed to find a new way to retain their power – both capitalism and conservatism were born at that time, with ideologies shifting from birthright to ‘earned’ status, which enshrined the haves and have-nots into literally sacred structures of meritocracy and social darwinism, and colonialists specifically fostered strict adherence to the social order. It became ingrained culturally that adhering to your station, whatever it is, is crucial for society to function. That there’s honour in being a cog in the machine, and that not accepting your lot in life is a danger to everyone. (eta: this is mostly subconscious, but you can see it if you ask ‘why’ enough times of someone who idolises Musk, for example. You’ll eventually whittle them down to these themes.)

That’s a nutshell view of a complicated topic, but these people don’t believe they’ll strike gold one day. They believe people who are rich deserve to be treated as kings, for the same reason monarchist peasants did.

Ooooh. Welcome blast from the past. That sound…

Say what you will, this is an efficient and elegant way to store your adapters. I’m envious.