My God. Jonathan Coulton is going to be doing the MST3K theme song for the new RiffTraxx episodes? My dreams are coming true!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rifftrax/rifftrax-makes-mst3k/posts/4614097

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Aa91jAYx4/

#RandPaul shows once again, that he's a true conservative:

https://apnews.com/article/ice-congress-trump-minneapolis-alex-pretti-hearing-ada1986f0c4639e96a6f7bf06f2856c3

While #Trump is celebrating his jobs numbers with a single data point from the last month, let's take a look at all of them en masse, shall we?

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who... so far... still have to tell the truth. You can get all the data from their website here, where you can download the Excel sheet that I just downloaded from them:

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/ces0000000001?output_view=net_1mth

But I've attached an image that makes things a little bit easier to see. The numbers are all in the thousands. Hmm.....

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

- Thomas Edison, Asshole

"breaking important tradition" hmm... like maybe... the "peaceful transition of power" that our Democratic Republic is based on? #Trump

Not my words but had to share:

“It always begins with a story we tell ourselves.

A story where “they” are not worthy of being treated with human dignity, where whole lives are flattened into headlines, where mothers and fathers become statistics, where children become shadows at the edge of a slogan.

We call them criminals.
We call them invaders.
We call them “the worst of the worst,”
as if they are all evil.

Dehumanization is never loud at first.
It arrives dressed as concern.
As “law and order.”
As reason.
As protection.
As common sense.
It asks us only to believe the worst about someone else, and promises it will benefit us and won’t cost us anything.

But it always does.

Because the moment we accept a lie about another person’s humanity, we loosen our grip on our own.

We begin to tolerate cages we would never enter, violence we would never excuse, and cruelty we would never survive.

We learn to look away.
And looking away reshapes us.

Once a group of people becomes a threat instead of a neighbor, anything can be done to them.

Their families can be torn apart.
Their bodies can be abused.
Their suffering can be explained away as necessary, unfortunate, but deserved.

History teaches this lesson again and again,
not in whispers, but in mass camps turned into museums, mass graves with monuments, and apologies written too late.

And still we say, this time is different.

It never is.

What dehumanization does most effectively
is not just harm its targets, it hollows out the soul of those who participate.
It trains us to distrust compassion.
To sneer at mercy.
To call empathy weakness.
To mistake dominance for strength.

It teaches us to survive by shrinking our moral imagination until only people like us can fit inside it.

And then we commit the greatest blasphemy of all: we drag God into justify it all.

We quote scripture to justify cruelty.
We baptize policies that break bodies and spirits.
We invoke Jesus while ignoring everything he said, everything he touched, everyone he loved.

The God who knit every human being together,
brown, black, documented, undocumented,
made in the image of divine dignity, is turned into a mascot for fear.

A weapon for exclusion.
A stamp of approval on violence.

We sanctify evil and call it righteousness.

This dehumanized mentality looks at the immigrant, the refugee, the outsider
and sees a problem to be solved.

It looks at someone like Jesus,
beaten by the state, criminalized by religious leaders, executed under the banner of law and order, and says, “He should have just obeyed the law.”

Jesus is always found among the dehumanized.
Not because he failed to rise above them, but because he refused to abandon them.
He is with the caged.
The scapegoated.
The lied-about.
The bodies treated as disposable.

So when we Christians participate in this dehumanization, when we strip others of their humanity, we also strip Jesus of his humanity,
denying that he would suffer where others suffer.

And then we strip him of his divinity,
by reshaping God into our own fearful image.

When we erase the humanity of others,
we erase our own reflection in the mirror of God.

A society cannot survive this forever.
A church cannot survive this at all.

Because the gospel does not begin with borders,
but with God and humanity.

It does not begin with exclusion, but incarnation.

God does not save us from a distance.
God becomes one of us.

And any faith that requires us to believe the worst about our neighbors
is not forming saints,
it is forming tyrants,
it is training us to forget who we are.

When we dehumanize others,
we don’t just harm them.

We become something less than human ourselves.

We must regain the story of our shared humanity.”

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1B8drUpgu9/

"No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another."

- Charles Dickens, in "Our Mutual Friend"

@ReggieHere oh I get what you're saying on a theoretical/ideal world scenario. I spent 3 of my 5 years in college studying #philosophy (going for a dual major, end up cutting the philosophy major because it made way less money than computer science), I know all about it.

But when it gets to the real world with real people, it falls apart fairly quickly.

Or are you suggesting that Xi Jinping is NOT running a totalitarian state? If so, I'd like to learn about the other parties that have a legitimate chance of vying for power in that country.

There seems to be an undercurrent in human history of a large portion of our population DESIRING to be controlled, just like Loki described in the first #Avengers movie. Certainly there are people like that brave old man in that movie that spoke up against him that will fight such things. I like to think that America's founding fathers were similar people to that old man. That's how we got America to begin with.

But, as we've seen in America in the past decade, there actually IS that undercurrent of, for the lack of a better word, "simps" that simply want to kowtow to a "benevolent dictator". Unfortunately, their choice of dictator is anything BUT benevolent.

Which is why we should be fighting this consolidation of control even HARDER. Our systems should BE decentralized, bottom-up, as you describe.

But, as we've seen, aside from small "communes", communism itself doesn't scale well. When the theory meets with real humans, it inevitably ends up a totalitarian state. We've seen it time and again.

Unless, that is, you can point me to a current communist state that is NOT totalitarian?

@captainrob troll harder please! I don't even feel slightly agitated yet! =D Come on, you can do better than that I'm sure!

@captainrob Yes, and I believe that's Mr. #Trump

@ReggieHere I'm NOT saying that America IS communist, I'm saying that the "wolf in sheep's clothing" Donald #Trump (who has always been a New York liberal from birth and has only been pretending in the past two decades to be a "conservative"), wants to MAKE it a communist, totalitarian state, where he is the king and control/decide everything directly himself wherever possible.

This is how democracy dies - centralized control of EVERYTHING, even the election process. Our democracy flourished BECAUSE we have 50 different systems for voting, not in spite of it.

Trump wants to run #Communist #America just like they run Communist #China, with ONE PARTY controlling and deciding everything.

This MUST be stopped. He EXPLICITLY called out the Republicans to make this happen. Well, guess what, my Republican brethren, nationalizing elections would essentially undo the Republic.

Then you could no longer call yourselves Republicans.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-urges-republicans-nationalize-voting

Taco taco man - I want to see, a taco man!

Feds won’t help blue cities amid riots unless asked: Trump | Fox News
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-vows-not-help-blue-cities-riots-instructs-ice-border-patrol-protect-federal-property