Why "Conservative" "Christians" Are All Going To Hell (If There Is A Hell... Which I Don't Believe)
"The Number One Cause Of Atheism Is Christians," Catholic Theologian, Karl Rahner, SJ
"The Story Of Jonah And The Whale"
Retold For The Righteous By Anne Herbert
Christianity: A Compendium Of "What Went Wrong" And Current Worship Of The Wrongness
https://newsfrombarbaria.
The Big Lie And Conservative Christianity's Unshakeable Belief That The Bible Is Inerrantly True
"Conservative" "Christianity" Is Neither: It's A Shameless Ruse Perped By Religious Maniacs
Reprise: "God Enjoys The 10 Plagues Way Too Much"
(Supplemented By "America's Best Christian," Betty Bowers)
Dear Ed,
Thanks for the review of COVID's "early days."
By way of reply, I want to focus the role of conservative Catholic (and accused wife beater) Steve Bannon. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/26/steve-bannon-domestic-violence-trump-campaign-ceo
Although Bannon is a fairly secretive fellow, he was clear that his intent as Trump's "chief strategist" was to deconstruct government which was a thinly veiled cover for destroying government.
The logic was this...
Liberalism had clearly gotten the upper hand, and conservatism's rearguard measures to minimize the damage with each new wave of liberal advancement was destined, ultimately, to catastrophic failure.
But if government were deconstructed (i.e., destroyed) there'd be a real chance to rebuild an entirely new conservative regime from the ashes.
Deconstruction/destruction was Bannon's goal from the beginning, and he didn't hide it.
"The Brink," New Steve Bannon Documentary
Feb 24, 2017 — White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon rarely appears in public and rarely speaks to the press, much less on live television. So his ...
Feb 25, 2017 — Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said that President ...
Feb 23, 2017 — Stephen Bannon, President Trump's reclusive chief strategist and the intellectual force behind his nationalist agenda, said Thursday that the ...
Mar 16, 2017 — Presidential adviser Stephen Bannon has made a bold vow: "Deconstruction of the administrative state." For Bannon to use a term invented by ...
A crucial background element to all this is that functional government depends on collegiality, tolerance of "the other," widespread virtue (without obsessing over "perfectionism," compromise, and a plethora of "gentlemen's agreements." Without this underlying cultural matrix, government becomes dysfunctional, and as it has played out in the "United" States, we are immersed in political paralysis. (Puncturing the balloon of filibuster -- a process that does not appear in the Constitution -- could put an end to political paralysis and the deconstronstruction/destruction the filibuster enables. https://newsfrombarbaria.
But because liberals tend to be significantly -- if not categorically -- more compassionate, generous, kind and understanding than self-terrorized conservatives (who pretend that terror originates with "The Other," be it Antifa, BLM or MS13), we liberals find it hard to conceive -- or even believe -- that contemporary conservatives (in the main) are as self-seekingly vile as they have become.
Notably, there is not one contemporary conservative in ten thousand who has even seen a member of MS13 or Antifa, much less had their lives impacted by these people.
Voltaire's famous dictum, "Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer" is meaningfully re-stated as: "If the devil did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." https://www.whitman.edu/
And then there is Dostoyevsky's marvelous observation: “I think the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.” "The Brothers Karamazov"
As January 6th brought into clear focus, contemporary "conservatism" has redefined sedition as patriotism, and the whole QAnonsensical, right-wing Noise Machine is at ease with redefining ANY inconvenient truth as Deep State deception or conspiratorial illusion.
Don't like it? Deny it.
What a crock!
And so the mofos "make it up" as they go along, representing their whole-cloth fabrications as "God's Truth."
Finally, because most of these destructive people are white, "conservative" "Christians" who -- like the gnostics of the early centuries A.D. -- consider themselves inner circle cognoscenti in possession of Absolute Truth, they also see themselves as God's ordained agents, paladins who have no responsibility to "Caesar," Jesus be damned.
The American Right-Wing's Ersatz Theology: Ancient Gnostic Heresy Is A Key To Understanding QAnon (An Illuminating Interview From NPR's "On The Media")
Instead, these neo-gnostics believe - absolutely - in their own highly-personalized, meticulously "photoshopped" visions of God, essentially an Old Testamental "thunder sky god" who authorizes them to work His Will in any way the True Believers conceive God's Will.
In the end, contemporary conservatives live in a "confirmation bias bubble" that distills to an all-enveloping tautology, a construct so dazzling in its superficial splendor and self-enclosed "completeness" that they bamboozle themselves into the neo-fascism of theocratic Totalitarianism.
"Conservative" "Christians" Only Believe In God And Themselves & The Two Are Interchangeable
Un abrazo
Alan
On Sat, Mar 20, 2021 at 11:41 PM E.M., M.D. wrote:
Remember the front end to this COVID disaster:Top White House official in charge of pandemic response exits abruptly
Rear Adm. R. Timothy Ziemer was the Trump administration's senior director for global health security and biodefense at the National Security Council. He left that post Tuesday as part of a reorganization under national security adviser John Bolton. (Khin Maung Win/AP)ByMay 10, 2018 at 1:32 p.m. PDTThe top White House official responsible for leading the U.S. response in the event of a deadly pandemic has left the administration, and the global health security team he oversaw has been disbanded under a reorganization by national security adviser John Bolton.
The abrupt departure of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the National Security Council means no senior administration official is now focused solely on global health security. Ziemer’s departure, along with the breakup of his team, comes at a time when many experts say the country is already underprepared for the increasing risks of a pandemic or bioterrorism attack.
Ziemer’s last day was Tuesday, the same day a new Ebola outbreak was declared in Congo. He is not being replaced.
Sent from my iPhoneOn Mar 20, 2021, at 7:23 PM, Alan Archibald <alanarchibaldo@gmail.com> wrote:Thank you, Ed.This is great!On Sat, Mar 20, 2021 at 9:36 PM E.M., M,D. wrote:
Compa,
This is by FAR the best presentation I’ve found, but after an exasperating hour trying to copy&paste for will have to give up. Here’s the best I could manage, but I think worthy trying to access directly (free)Subject: Re: COVID-19 Disparities ExplainedOn Mar 20, 2021, at 6:24 PM, Ed Myer <remyer20002000@yahoo.com> wrote:One of the keys to human well-being is the ability of societies to confront urgent societal challenges. Societal crises demand pro-sociality: the abilityof societies to work harmoniously and rationally towards common objectives. In the case of COVID-19, the most dramatic global peacetime crisis since the Great Depression, pro-sociality is required at all scales of interactions. Individuals must abide by pro-social behaviors, such as physical distancing and wearing face masks. Governments must attend to human needs ofthe most vulnerable citizens. And nations must cooperate with each other in order to bring the global pandemic to a halt.COVID-19 has exposed many acts of heroism, notably among front-line workers and healthcare workers who have battled the disease at great peril to their own safety, often without the benefit of even rudimentary personal protective equipment (PPE). Yet COVID-19 has also exposed the short- comings and outright failures of pro-sociality in many countries, including many of the richest countries, for which lack of material resources is not an issue. This paper explores the differences in pro-sociality between the countries of the Asia-Pacific region, where the pandemic was effectively contained to low levels of community transmission, and the countries of the North Atlantic region, where community transmission and excess mortality have been extremely high throughout the course of the pandemic.Perhaps the most notable variation across world regions of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the far lower mortality rate (deaths per million) inthe Asia-Pacific region (northeast Asia, southeast Asia, and Oceania) compared with the North- Atlantic region (the US, Canada, the UK, andthe European Union).1 Both regions are hometo temperate-zone, urbanized, and developed economies and are broadly comparable in economic structure. Yet, the death rates were vastly lower in the Asia-Pacific than the North Atlantic in every quarter of 2020 and in January 2021, the most recent month at the time of completing this paper (Table 4.1). In January 2021, for example, the countries of the North Atlantic region had an unweighted average of 7.6 deaths per day per million population, while in theAsia-Pacific region, the unweighted average was a mere 0.18 deaths per day per million population, 42X lower than the North Atlantic.The Asia-Pacific success in suppressing the pandemic has been consistent since last spring. On April 8, 2020, I wrote the following:2East Asian countries are outperforming the United States and Europe in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the fact that the outbreak began in China, to which the rest of East Asia is very closely bound by trade and travel. The US and Europe should be learning as rapidly as possible about the East Asian approaches, which could still save vast numbers of lives in the West and the rest of the world.The main sources of the successes of East Asia, and more broadly the Asia-Pacific, were also discernible at an early stage. The Asia-Pacific countries, in contrast with the North Atlantic, were actively engaged in a wide range of intensive Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs), including tight border controls; quarantining of arriving passengers; high rates of face-mask use; physical distancing; and public health surveillance systems engaged in widespread testing, contact tracing, and quarantining (or home isolation) of infected individuals. I also document such differences across the two regions in a companion paper.3The successes of the NPIs in the Asia-Pacific region reflected both the leadership of govern- ments and the strong support of the public for the government’s bold leadership. The Asia -Pacific successes were both top-down, with governments setting strong control policies, and bottom-up, with the general public supporting governments and complying with government -directed public health measures.One key factor in the success of the Asia-Pacific was the preparedness of the region for newly emerging zoonotic diseases, a point also emphasized by Helliwell et al. in this report.The Asia-Pacific region was on the front line of the battle against SARS in 2003 and also was mobilized in the H1N1 (2009) and MERS (2012) crises. Southeast Asia is battle-hardened against dengue fever. The practical import of the earlier epidemics is a regional preparedness strategy, “Asia-Pacific Strategy for Emerging Diseases and Public Health Emergencies” (now in its third version, APSED III), coordinated by the Western Pacific Regional Office (WPRO) of the World Health Organization.Yet something more than preparedness is at work. Cultural and educational differences are also apparently playing key roles. The countries of the North Atlantic region have now had a year to learn from the Asia-Pacific countries, but by and large, they have not done so. The North Atlantic countries have failed to implement comprehensive NPIs during the entirety of 2020 and early 2021. Even after the first wave of infections was brought down in the summer of 2020 following lockdowns during the spring, the North Atlantic countries failed to introduce rigorous control systems akin to those of the Asia-Pacific. This article explores the puzzle as to why the North Atlantic failure persisted throughout 2020 and now into 2021.Structural features in COVID-19 mortality ratesBefore delving into the policy and behavioral differences between the two regions, we should note that cross-country differences in COVID-19 mortality rates depend not only on policy and behavioral factors but also on structural factors in societies that shape the COVID-19 epidemiology. There are at least five key structural factors:• Age of the population: The age-specific mortality rate from COVID-19 is far higher among individuals aged 65+, so population- wide mortality is higher in countries with a higher proportion of elderly people.• Comorbidities of the population: COVID-19 mortality is associated with a number of comorbidities, including cardiovascular disease, obesity, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, andothers, so countries with higher rates of these comorbidities would have higher mortality rates.• Health-system coverage: COVID-19 mortality is reduced by access to Intensive Care Units (ICUs) and the interventions they provide (respirators, therapeutics). Disparities in health-system infrastructure affect mortality rates.• Contact patterns: The transmission of the COVID-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) dependson structural factors such as time spent indoors (where transmission is more likely) versus outdoors, and thus on temperature, seasonality, employment patterns, urbani- zation, and the like.• International travel: The frequency of new infections arriving from abroad dependson the magnitude of international arrivals. More connected regions are more vulnerable to new introductions of the virus from abroad.Such structural factors help to explain the low-to-moderate mortality rates observed in Africa and South Asia. In Africa and South Asia, death rates are far lower than in the North Atlantic despite less healthcare coverage (e.g., fewer hospital beds per capita). However, in Africa and South Asia, populations are younger; comorbidities are less prevalent; more time is spent outdoors because of higher temperatures, more farm work, and lower rates of urbanization; and there are fewer international tourist arrivals than in the North Atlantic.Yet, such structural factors do not explain the differences in mortality rates between the Asia-Pacific and the North Atlantic regions. Both regions share broad structural commonalities in climate, population age structure, healthcare access, prevalence of comorbidities, and the flows of international tourist arrivals. In a cross-countryCross-country differences in COVID-19 mortality rates depend not only on policy and behavioral factors but also on structural factors in societies.World Happiness Report 2021regression of total deaths per million as of January 2021, the Asia-Pacific region has far lower mortality rates after controlling such structural factors (see supplementary information).Higher public support for NPIs in the Asia-PacificWe have useful comparative information on public attitudes towards NPIs from YouGov, the UK survey company. YouGov surveys cover 18 countries across the two regions, including nine in the Asia-Pacific and nine in the North Atlantic. According to almost all behavioral indicators, the public in the Asia-Pacific countries has regarded the pandemic with greater concern and with larger behavioral responses than in the North Atlantic region. Part of this improved public response is no doubt due to the clarity of policies in the Asia-Pacific based on the region’s readiness for emerging diseases. When public officialssent contradictory messages, such as violatinggovernment curfew policies, public confidence in government policies was seriously eroded.4 Another part seems to be both cultural and cognitive, reflecting the public’s own higher readiness to adopt pro-social health-seeking behaviors based on social norms and better scientific understanding of the pandemic.Consider, for example, the proportion of the population wearing face masks in public places, shown in Figure 4.1 for the period March 2020 to January 2021. The public in the Asia-Pacific countries, in red, adopted face mask-wearing earlier and then at consistently higher rates of use compared with Europe and North America.This higher face mask use in the Asia-Pacific is consistent with the public’s fears of catching the infection (Figure 4.2). A far higher proportionof the public in the Asia-Pacific region is “very”or “somewhat” scared of contracting COVID-19, compared with the North Atlantic region. Remarkably, these differences in fears have persisted throughout the pandemic, even though, in fact, the North Atlantic region has incurred far higher rates of infection and mortality.The publics of the Asia-Pacific have also endorsed tough public policy measures by the government. According to the YouGov survey data, the publics in the Asia-Pacific has consistently supported two core pillars of NPIs: quarantining all inbound airline passengers (Figure 4.3) and quarantining (or locking down) locations in regions hit by infection (Figure 4.4). Such strong measures are key to suppressing transmission, and public support is vital for implementation, but these measures do not garner majority backing in many countries in the North Atlantic region.Another indicator of public support or opposition to NPIs is the frequency and intensity of public protests against COVID-19 lockdowns. The Al Jazeera news agency monitors large-scale protests against COVID-19 control measures (defined as those that lead to arrests), resulting in the global map of protests in January 2021 shown in Figure 4.5.5The map records 11 major protests in the North Atlantic region but just one in the Asia-Pacific region in Wellington, New Zealand.YouGov COVID-19 tracker: fear of catching% of people in each market who say they are "very" or "somewhat" scared that they will contract COVID-19 (coronavirus).From Feb 21, 2020 To Feb 22, 2021Another key determinant of NPI success in the Asia-Pacific is the public’s adherence to government protocols. While we do not have authoritative data on public compliance with NPIs, we do have an interesting data point from a YouGov survey covering the period December 7-20, 2020. Inthis survey, individuals were asked whether they and others in their country were following the government’s COVID-19 rules. In general, the survey respondents gave themselves quite high grades for compliance (between 77% and 94%) but reported much lower compliance ratesby “most people” in their local neighborhood (Figure 4.6).Interestingly, the five locations in the Asia-Pacific region (Australia, China, Hong Kong SAR, Indonesia, and Singapore) score an average of 67.4% for “most people” following COVID-19 rules, whilethe nine locations in the North Atlantic region (Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain,Sweden, United Kingdom and United States) score an average of 55.4%. Only Indonesia scores low in the Asia-Pacific region, at 43%, whereas none of the North Atlantic countries reaches a score of 70% of “most people” following the COVID-19 rules.Culture and the failure of the North Atlantic region to learn from the Asia-PacificThe North Atlantic region was perhaps too inexperienced with emerging pandemic diseases to react promptly and decisively to the COVID-19 pandemic when it first emerged in late 2019/early 2020. This was true even after the WHO declared COVID-19 a “public health emergency of interna- tional concern” on January 30, 2020. By the time the dramatic scale of the pandemic was widely understood in mid-March 2020, the transmission of the virus was far too high for the understaffed and limited systems for testing, tracing, and quarantining.Therefore, most countries in the world adopted stringent lockdowns in the spring of 2020, which brought the incidence of new infections to relatively low levels by June (around ten new confirmed cases per million per day in the UK and European Union on average in June). Yet even then, with incidence drastically lower, the North Atlantic region did not dramatically scale up its testing, tracing, and quarantining activities. By last summer, precautionary behavior had dissipated, and Europeans and Americans vacationed, setting the stage for a second and even larger wave of the pandemic in the fall.Amazingly, the mainstream media also failedto draw any lessons from the glaring gap in performance between the Asia-Pacific and the North Atlantic. The leading business daily in the United States is the Wall Street Journal. TheJournal’s editorial board completely disregarded the evidence from the Asia-Pacific throughout 2020. In the course of dozens of editorials,the Wall Street Journal editorial board utterly overlooked the lower mortality rates in the Asia-Pacific and consistently failed to inquire how those low rates could be achieved in the US.The real puzzle is why there was so little learning during 2020. The lockdowns should have been followed by a massive scale-up of NPIs in order to keep incidence low. Why did this did not happen?Part of the problem, no doubt, was the incompetence of some of key leaders, including former President of the United States Donald Trump. Trump incorrectly believed that the only choice facing the US was whether or not to close the economy. His biggest mistake (which probably cost him the election in November 2020) was to overlook the NPI option. The US Government’s top infectious disease scientist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, recently put the situation this way: “My influenceWorld Happiness Report 2021with [Trump] diminished when he decided to essentially act like there was no outbreak and focus on re-election and opening the economy. That’s when he said, ‘It’s going to go away, it’s magical, don’t worry about it.’”6The failure obviously goes well beyond Trump. It was common to the European Union as well. The blunders ran both from the top-down and the bottom-up, in a kind of folie a deux between politicians and the public. In many North Atlantic countries, there were public protests against even the most basic public health measures, such as wearing face masks, with agitators rejectingmask mandates in the name of “liberty.” Nobody explained to these would-be libertarians that the first dictum of classic libertarianism is that the right to liberty does not include the right to harm others. John Stuart Mill famously put it this way: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harmto others.” A government requirement to wear face masks would surely have passed Mill’s strict scrutiny.The researchers Iveta Silova, Hikaru Komatsu, and Jeremy Rappleye have recently and cogently argued that that excessive individualism of the Western nations made these countries resistant to the kinds of pro-social policies needed to end human-induced climate change7 and COVID-198.In their statistical analysis, the authors feature a cross-country measure of individualism originating from the work of Hofstede et al.9 The measure ranges from 0 (complete collectivism) to 100 (complete individualism). It includes scores for nine countries in the Asia-Pacific region and 18 in the North Atlantic region. The mean score for the Asia-Pacific countries is 38.3, compared with64.9 for the North Atlantic. The difference is statistically significant at the 0.01 level. All of the Asia-Pacific countries score below 50 (that is, are more collectivist) except for Australia (90) and New Zealand (79). In contrast, all of the North Atlantic countries score above 50 (that is, are more individualist) except for Greece (35) and Portugal (27).The higher individualism of the North Atlantic is correlated with lower public support for NPIs, such as face masks. The proportion of the face mask use (according to the YouGov survey data) is a negative function of Individualism for June 2020 (Figure 4.7a) and January 2021 (Figure 4.7b).World Happiness Report 2021
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