“Now I see why you’ve joined this religion. It’s the same reason I campaigned for Dukakis.” – Andy Richter Controls the Universe
“Yeah,” I thought, “Why not make EVERYONE mad?”
Religion has been a central concept for humanity as far back as we can see in the historical record which starts somewhere before Zeus fought Buddha in Summer Slam -4023 B.C. I think, as a species, we’re hardwired for worship and loving bacon, which comes into conflict for some people. I could get into the likely reasons that religion is hardwired into us, but I’ll save that for another post when I want to irritate people. What’s not up for debate is that most people express this religious brain-programming as actual religious activity, me included.
Sometimes, however, religion is replaced by “civic” religion, which was more common in the World War II generation. I was at a club a few years back and watched a 95+ year old veteran sit during the opening prayer when everyone else was standing. After the prayer, the opening ceremony moved to the national anthem. The veteran struggled to his feet and stood with hand over his heart. To me it was obvious – his religion wasn’t only Christianity (he is a Christian) – his religion is also America.
But a lot of Leftists don’t express their religious views at all – they’re atheists. Instead of expressing religious belief as religion, they adopt secular tenants as items of belief. You can’t convince them that their position is wrong with facts or logic. The only thing that can change the views of a Leftist is conversion away from the Left.
For the record, I’m not anti-atheist. I have several friends who are atheist, and I’m totally okay with that. I’ve met Libertarian atheists or atheists on the Right, and they (in general) are much more relaxed than the Leftists. We’ve had great philosophical conversations, and I don’t think less of them because they’re atheist. They don’t think less of me because I’m not. It works for us because neither of us are programmed to hate each other based on beliefs. We can even discuss religion without getting even slightly angry.
And all of his pamphlets are blank.
That’s not the case when discussing Leftist dogma with a Leftist. Perhaps the most sacred canon in liberalism is abortion. When the communist Republicans took over the government in Spain before the Spanish Civil War, just about the first thing they did was to legalize abortion. As a second step, they took over the churches. During the war, leftists murdered about 7,000 priests, monks, and nuns. It seems like every leftist takeover of a country ends up in a death-spiral against a growing number of “enemies of the revolution” that must be dealt with, especially people with a competing religion.
Lenin cat does not like competition.
Leftist dogma hates competition from priests, but they really, really like abortion. It seems that a large number of the “sins” of leftism are based in self-hatred, and the self-genocide of abortion fits nicely. I have started quite a few arguments on Twitter® on abortion, not because I think I’ll change anyone’s mind. Nope. I do it because it’s like throwing bait into piranha-infested waters – fun to watch unless you stick your hand in after the feeding frenzy has started. An example of how triggering abortion is: one Leftist politician recently attempted to (I kid you not) dox some kids who were doing the most awful thing possible outside of an abortion clinic: praying.
Leftists feel guilty, and not kind of guilt that’s potentially healthy: guilt over actions that they were responsible for that changes their future behavior for the better. No. They feel guilty over things other people do. Which people? Doesn’t matter, as long as it’s not them. They feel guilty for the actions of their ancestors. They feel guilty for the actions of their parents. They feel guilty for the actions of the Swiss. Just as long as they, personally, don’t have to take the guilt.
So, as Christianity has sin where you have to take accountability for your actions and repent, Leftism has sin where the evil must pay. Sadly, the only icon for Leftists seems to be themselves – if you’ve seen some of the selfies on Twitter®, you know what I mean. Obama® was a pretty good icon for a time, but he’s no Joe Biden.
I have a suggestion for a liberal symbol: Thanos®.
I asked The Boy to put together a mashup of George Soros and Thanos®. He did a pretty good job. I guess we could call this guy George Thoros?
Thanos© is the super-villain from the latest Marvel© comic book movies. In the previous movie, 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War™, Thanos© assembled the blingy-ist glove in history, containing multiple stones that allowed him to change reality just by snapping his fingers. What did Thanos® wish for?
His wish was that the entire population of the Universe would be cut immediately by 50%. In the movie, in rather dramatic fashion, those who were eliminated just turned to dust. Poof. Gone.
Why? This seems like an odd wish. My wish would involve many more cheeseburgers. Actually, cheeseburgers (or the lack thereof) were the basis of his wish. As a wee super-villain, Thanos© had been hungry due to overpopulation, so he decided that the best way for no one to go hungry again was to kill half of everyone. Rather than use his magic glove to give everyone free cheeseburgers for life, Thanos™ decided that more killin’ was in order, and I guess that it makes sense from a dramatic standpoint. A Spiderman® that got fat and had heart issues from all the free cheeseburgers is just pathetic. A dead Spiderman™ who evaporates into ash is good drama.
The most ironic part of the wish? It only took Earth from 1960 to 1999 to double in population from 3 billion humans to 6 billion people. Thanos© ends up killing billions of people having forgotten the fundamental principle: people can make lots more people, and we won’t forget the recipe because we practice it so much.
Interestingly (to me, at the time) Thanos® didn’t pick who lived or died. It was entirely random. So, Thanos® put together a perfect Leftist Program:
- Created immediate suffering.
- “Solved” a problem in the worst possible way – lots of instant pain for no real long term benefit.
- Made sure that he was totally equalitarian – don’t start with prisons or jails. Just make it random.
I even read a column from a Leftist who thought that maybe Thanos© was onto the right idea. “Imagine how easily we could control Global Warming™ if only we got rid of half the people on the planet.” And abortion? Thanos© has to be a big proponent.
So, the Leftists can have their religion, it comes with its own god, death, who we can represent with Thanos©. Heck, the Left even has its own devil, Trump. Though if I were casting him in a superhero role? Yeah. Trumppool©.
The Boy put this together, too. He seemed pretty pleased.
Most civnat tame “conservatives” don’t get this, they are not in a struggle over ideas, they are facing a violent religious jihad. Abortion is their holiest sacrament, a blood sacrifice of innocents like every other death cult in human history. They have their sacred stories (Watergate, Russian collusion, the gender wage gap) and their own saints and martyrs (Matthew Shephard, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown). They have priests (media, entertainers). They have jihadi that put the Fremen to shame (antifa). They even have their own creation myth where people of color lived in a utopian garden of Eden until white people came along to steal all of their knowledge and their vibranium. There are plenty of smart, sincere conservatives (not the grifters like Bill Kristol) that just don’t understand this.
You don’t defeat a violent death cult by owning them on the issue of tax rates, you rip them out by the roots and burn them on a pyre.
Great observations – their entire life is a jihad. Thankfully, the ones they attack first are heretics.
“Leftists feel guilty, and not kind of guilt that’s potentially healthy: guilt over actions that they were responsible for that changes their future behavior for the better. No. They feel guilty over things other people do. Which people? Doesn’t matter, as long as it’s not them. They feel guilty for the actions of their ancestors. They feel guilty for the actions of their parents. They feel guilty for the actions of the Swiss. Just as long as they, personally, don’t have to take the guilt.”
This is something about the Left that I cannot figure out. We know that they feel guilty, they rave about white colonialism and events 200, 300, 4-500 years ago… but WHY? Why do they feel guilty for something they weren’t even remotely involved in? Maybe it’s some form of Original Sin? They have hidden masochistic tendencies? For a group of people that want to make the government responsible for and take care of everything, they sure are quick to heap the responsibility and guilt of events they were never part of; “I don’t want to work or be responsible, but I will claim all the guilt for smallpox blankets and slavery, though I never owned slaves myself.” Huh?! Why, why would you do that? What mental leaps and bounds made you think that was a good idea?
It really is that sin, but they don’t have the strength to take that sin upon themselves. So, there’s sin. But you’re the sinner.
It’s easier to feel guilt when it’s not *your* guilt.
Leftists feel guilty about other people’s behavior, but never their own, because it fulfills their need to be their own Messiahs.
When you start out at square one making yourself god, everything else follows naturally.
They worship MEsus.
Hey, I should copyright that and sell bumperstickers.
Whatever.
Public domain. And I’m not rich.
Easy come, easy go.
“A Spiderman® that got fat and had heart issues from all the free cheeseburgers is just pathetic. A dead Spiderman™ who evaporates into ash is good drama..”
Right.
But lousy thermodynamics.
1. Energy (hence matter, which is the “m” in E=mc²) can neither be created nor destroyed.
So other than violating one of the prime directives of the physical universe, Thanos was great.
The fact that he also sounded like a sophomoric dorm-room bull session with a D-student Antifa member after too many bong hits was just icing on the cake.
Besides being the fop of the decade, his main purpose was to get rid of a bunch of talented actors with too much say in their own salaries for the next round of movies.
People forget the key word in “entertainment business” is business, to their peril.
(This includes the nominal business people running it, but then again, Hollywood is the only industry on earth where producer is an entry-level job for twenty-somethings. Babies with hammers and live hand grenades. QED.)
Ask Martin Sheen about how fast he shut up about his left wing politics when NBC showed him the upcoming “President Bartlett takes one in the head” episode of The West Wing, when advertisers were getting testy about his mouthiness.
I think we’ve seen Peak Comic. Deadpool was the harbinger of that – when a genre starts mocking itself, the end is nigh. But you know as well as I know that Hollywood will forgo hundreds of millions of dollars to serve that one got bigger than a dollar – Virtue. Cue the recent Star Wars debacle, where any competent fanboi could have made billions more.
I’ll bet you a c-note we’ve seen peak Disney, too.
I’m two exits away, and I’ve worked at the studio too.
You have absolutely seen peak Disney, and peak Disneyland.
The Eisner miracle was him figuring out (because the board and predecessors couldn’t) how to leverage entertainment media advances into b-b-Billions instead of millions. That ship has sailed.
BlueRay and HDTV are evolutionary, not revolutionary.
Disney has killed Star Wars, they’re killing Marvel, Pixar is a graveyard tomb, the parks are stagnating to peak annoyance (Galaxy’s Edge will explode at first, and then flop spectacularly, and their plan to time-out visitors is tailor-made to piss off legions, endlessly), ABC is the bottom of the barrel in every respect, and ESPN is almost as bad as PMSNBC.
Think about that:
Disney – Disney, mind you – has finally invented a way to make Americans hate to watch sports!
Inconceivable!
Abut the only outrage they haven’t committed is to put the witches on the cast of TheSpew into the broadcast booth to cover the Superbowl.
Wait for it…
Sweet Suffering Shiva, they re-made Mary Poppins, Oscar-winning pinnacle of Walt’s success on earth, which is on the order of the most horrendous artistic and financial decisions ever to go into the Dictionary of Debacles.
The only stuff worth a tinker’s dam in their whole sorry empire now, ginormous as it is, is the stuff they haven’t yet fornicated sideways, but rather, left pristine and untouched from its origin.
Everything they “fix” turns to crap, instantly.
They have confused “produce” with “create”.
The former is mere excretion; the latter requires talent, love, dedication, craft, and a sprinkle of genius.
The cupboard of those vital attributes is bare over at Mauschwitz these days, and it’s a parade just waiting for some mouthy kid to point out the emperor’s nakedness.
Walt is dead.
What’s inherited the Kingdom isn’t worth a patch on his underpants.
Compared to the environmentalists, Thanos was nothing. A piker (whatever that means).
Earth First wants only about 100 Million humans on the planet, killing off 98.4%. Ted Turner was the easy guy, thinking 250-300 Million people could live, so wanting to kill off 95% of humanity.
I’ve read comments around the web where leftists have said things similar to your quote.
That was the plot of a Tom Clancy novel in 1998 (Rainbow Six). a group of super woke scientists planned on wiping out the Earth’s human population with a bio-weapon so they could start over with a new, more enlightened humanity. Apparently the “environmentalists” didn’t figure out who the bad guys were in that novel.
you can say i am somewhat “out” of it, that i finally saw “Endgame” but at least i can now join THAT conversation…and thanks to Aesop for the previously discussed reviews that (for me) enhanced my viewing experience. I suppose i SHOULD put comments on HIS blog, but those postings are SO “old” now, probably nobody but Aesop would ever see them? For example, his review of “the force awakens” realistically lowered my expectations SO MUCH that i could enjoy that movie when i finally got the chance to watch it…
and to turn my attention back to THIS blog, perhaps Thanos was a bit of a piker to only go for 50% population reduction BUT i think that is a much easier number for the *average* viewer to wrap their mind around…
on one hand, i agree that abortion is murder, yet on the other hand, i would argue that it could also be a prophylactic gene pool cleansing…for the 18,19 or 20 year old floozy who isn’t interested in having kids (and who knows how much drugs and alcohol she doesn’t want to miss out on for the next 9 months) what kind of end product is THAT going to produce??? and if she wasn’t interested in having kids in the first place, i shudder to imagine how the next 18 years will be for that kid! I’m not even going to bother mentioning the sperm donor!
Depending what part of the map you want to look at, Dystopia is at “terminal velocity” in some places, approaching in other places, and placing “tax burdens” everywhere else. Thanos might never visit us in reality, but sooner or later the correction will begin…
Yeah, that’s a note – removing people from the gene pool who want to have abortions isn’t bad – but Alisa Milano is wanting to have a sex strike over abortions! It cures the abortion problem, since the people who support it aren’t having babies.
Oh. That requires self-control.
Nevermind.
Maybe this varies with where in America you are. Where I am, “sometimes” isn’t the right word; it’s more like “nearly always.” Back when I used to actually write a blog, I did a post about this. Given the company I usually keep, I talk with mostly hemi-semi-demi-quasi-rightists (“Republicans,” in a word), and they are big into civic religion. Lefties tend to be the same, I think, except that the “civic” part refers to a very different political order.
So, sure, I’m on board with leftism being a religion. It is. Rightism is also a religion. Both have death-centered “sacraments.” The difference is pretty much limited to who kills whom.
Great post, James!!!
Yes, nearly always is correct, but the Right version gives you July 4th and desires for mandatory standing at the pledge (I could write a post about that!), whereas the Left version gives you . . . my Monday post.
(And, yes, the Right can go bad, too.)