• Nationalize insulin. Then sell it at cost or just make it a public good like parks, libraries, and sidewalks. Remove it from the profit-seeking and rent-seeking unfree markets now controlling it. This would be perfectly legal, cheaper for everyone, and just.
• I am shocked — shocked! — that good Christian people are telling lies about Planned Parenthood.
The rationalization for this bearing of false witness against thy neighbors goes like this:
- Falsely accuse those neighbors of being Satanic baby-killers who kill babies for Satan.
- Argue that even though this is a lie, what’s worse? A little white lie? Or killing babies for Satan?
- Race around this mental circle again, faster.
- And faster.
This movie is based on the lie of the Big Money Abortion Industry being a cash-cow for evil feminists. That lie is spread by the same people pushing various TRAP laws that effectively shut down abortion providers because they are low-margin and non-profit agencies. You cannot simultaneously argue — or simultaneously believe, in good faith — that Planned Parenthood is secretly richer than Putin thanks to its lucrative abortionplex industry while also celebrating capricious new regulations designed to force financially struggling, donor-dependent clinics to close.
The dishonesty of that is gross, obvious, and disqualifying. It’s also very obviously a sin.
• “What Time Is the Global Pedophile Roundup Again? QAnon Keeps Missing Deadlines.” Kelly Weill writes about when prophecy fails for adherents of the latest quiet-parts-loud iteration of the perennial Satanic baby-killers folklore. (Hint: Prophecy never fails, even when it does.)
The only difference between QAnon videos on YouTube and the “Christian”-branded Pure Flix film above is that the latter has slightly better production values.
• Speaking of failed prophets, here’s Part 2 of David Swartz’s reflections on “Christabel Pankhurst: Suffragette and End-Times Seer.” Pankhurst spent the last 40 years of her life confidently proclaiming that there couldn’t possibly be another 40 years left before the Rapture. She died more than 40 years ago.
• “Xenophobia and racism plays out on policies related to women’s bodies.” We recently discussed the Orbán regime’s propaganda charm offensive and the way white Christian nationalists were gobbling it up. Katelyn Burns provides some additional reporting: “Trump Officials Attend Hungarian Conference to Promote Women Having More Babies.”
For added context on why this cozying up to nationalist authoritarians is so disturbing, see Sarah Posner’s latest: “Right Makes Might.”
At the time [2015], Rohrabacher’s support for Orbán placed him outside the political mainstream in the United States. Obama White House officials weren’t the only public figures calling out Orbán’s strongman rule; Republicans were as well. In 2014, Arizona Senator John McCain called Orbán “a neofascist dictator getting in bed with Vladimir Putin” and accused him of “practicing the same kinds of anti-democratic practices” as the Russian president. And in the years immediately following Hungary’s admission into NATO in 1999, the George W. Bush administration also confronted Orbán when he departed from basic commitments to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law — criticism that Orbán believed cost him his bid for reelection in 2002, and that fueled his animosity toward the United States.
• A chaplain is not the same thing as an evangelist. Signing on to be a chaplain so that you have a captive audience for proselytizing isn’t any more clever or righteous than any other form of fraud. It’s just lying — lying to the very people you were supposed to be serving and comforting. That’s not a great witness.
• I just heard this on the muzak at the local Wawa. I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled …
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