Ted Rall for May 05, 2010

And the day after we leave; their own “leaders” will string ‘em up by the thousands - rape ‘em, kill ‘em, force ‘em off their land, send ‘em to Pakistan, etc. But, go ahead, Libs - do your “thing.”

The number one killer of Muslims , is other Muslims .

No, I think the number two killer of Muslims is lack of eating pork.

It seems that all wars are basically popularity contests.

“The number one killer of Muslims , is other Muslims .”

That does not make it okay.

Bin Laden may have been dead for a long time. But he’s a very good boogie man to justify “the war on terror”, aka petroleum wars.

The dead often exert a greater influence on events than the living. They have even been known to acquire glowing halos and mythologies more potent than anything they were capable of in life.

TheObamaScowl- congratulations! You’ve just exemplified Ted’s point! Thank you for helping.

we have occupation troops?? Another distortion by the left because they can’t win with the truth.

Behold the wonder of broad, unsubstantiated generalizations!

“Threaten to raise taxes to pay for the wars and the USA will start to leave before the sun sets.”

Truth.

Agree Jade. A mandatory balanced budget would produce many better decisions and policy.

Reinstating a universal draft, especially including girls this time, would probably work a lot faster.

“Reinstating a universal draft, especially including girls this time, would probably work a lot faster.”

I’ll probably be considered a traitor to the “cause” or something but I always find it entertaining when women are so vocal about being considered “equal” to men and yet there’s been no push to make women have to register for selective service like men have to.

Right on, Jade! I’m certainly no fan of the draft, or of anything military or even paramilitary, but in this as in all other areas, let’s have real, full gender equality – which entails responsibilities as well as rights.

In the right wing’s never ending game of shifting rationalizations, now we ARE the policeman of the world and we are trashing Afghanistan (and have trashed Iraq) to protect them. It’s kind of reminiscent of, “We had to destroy the village to save it.”

The number one killer of Muslims, maybe other Muslims. I would bet the number one killer of Christians are Christians, of Americans are Americans and so on.

Forgive them, Lord, for they check not what they have written before they hit the post button.

When the American populace have been bludgeoned daily, and over the course of more than a decade, with propaganda that poses as objective mainstream media, we’ve all become anesthetized to the moral depravity of our foreign policy.

So long as nothing bad happens to us, we just don’t give a bleeep anymore.

What do libs do? They receive the largest donation from BP in 2008, $71K, for their campaign, thus ushering in the Democratic standards of ‘change’ and ‘hope’, and then feign indignation at the company for the being the root cause of the worst ecological disaster in decades.

The last panel instantly reminded me of a typical thrilling episode of WhiteWash Week in Review Starring Gwen Awful~

“The number one killer of Muslims , is other Muslims .”

Wowz! Then by that reasoning, “The number one killer of Americans, is other Americans.”

Right on, Jade! I’m certainly no fan of the draft, or of anything military or even paramilitary, but in this as in all other areas, let’s have real, full gender equality – which entails responsibilities as well as rights.

Works for Israel. Mandatory service for both men and women.

one hundred years of war and hatred

Well said Sirrom, I will work on that.

Content + form = clarity.

All the three “major” religions have gotten quite good at killing their “own”- they all worship the “God of Abraham”–can’t get much more psychotic than that.

Glad you put major in quotes, dtroutma, since Judaism has far fewer adherents than Hinduism or Buddhism, or the traditional Chinese religions, and even fewer than Sikhism. Its importance is mainly in its historical significance, as a progenitor of Christianity and Islam. The actual number of believers is less than one quarter of one percent of the world’s population.

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_religious_groups and http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html)

In the United States, there are approximately the same number of adherents to Judaism as to Mormonism. There are, of course, a large number of ethnic Jews who are nonreligious, like myself.

That’s a by-product of making this a war between good and evil. Nobody’s surprised to see the evil side butcher everything in sight, that’s what they’re all about! The good side, though, has the responsability of being the good side.

According to Sigmund Freud (disclaimer: his view is widely rejected, but makes sense to me), the “God of Abraham” was a minor volcano-god of the Sinai Peninsula who became conflated by “Moses” with the sun-god of Akhenaten, cementing the concept of monotheism as the basis for the new religion of Judaism.

Later, Robert Graves pointed out that the patriarchalism of the Jewish people, in combination with that of the Olympian Greeks, was responsible for the lopsided development of Western civilization, in ways that stifled the more “natural” pantheistic or goddess-worshipping impulses of other contemporaneous societies, giving rise to the insane “scientific” attempts to belittle or overcome nature that have caused so much grief in the modern world, and which are ultimately unsustainable.

The two offshoot religions, Christianity and Islam, have clearly carried this male-dominated ethos to extremes that are obvious to any objective observer. No wonder that the more patient Asian cultures, with their conception of the unity of all things, both natural and spiritual, male and female, are slowly gaining a dominant position in the planetary consciousness.

As always, the poet’s succinctness trumps the scholar’s pedantry.

sirrom, I think the paragraph about the fusion of Mosaic and Olympian patriachalism should more properly begin “Graves maintained” or “Graves argued”, rather than “Graves pointed out.” It’s an interesting (and plausible) conjecture, but it’s still a conjecture and not a historical fact. At this point (if it ever was or ever will be), it’s impossible to reconstruct or parse out how we got to this pass, let alone how things might have developed otherwise.

The “Our God is better than your God” tribal declaration has fueled such insanity for so long.

Humankind’s similarities far outweigh humankind’s differences.

I wonder–will our world survive religion?

fritzoid – Point taken, but what is historical fact? Who writes the accepted history, which we can’t possibly verify without recourse to a time machine? For example, Shakespeare’s take on Richard III was based on the commentaries penned by Richard’s political enemies. The objective facts viewed through the prism of time are reduced to an ever narrower light beam of “truth,” if there ever were such a concrete thing. Because I agree with Graves the more I ruminate on the subject, I’ll defend my use of the unabashedly forceful verb. The institutionalized degradation of the female in most human societies, not just in the West, leads only to a perverted, woefully incomplete realization of human potential in general. Sex roles are a biological fact in all species, but in no other have they been magnified and twisted into as blatant a power hierarchy as humans have contrived.

zekedog – the world will survive, in some form or other (bearing in mind that the universe itself is finite in a temporal sense); our world may not. In any case, the only thing that actually can be said to exist is the present. The time-worn paradox of determinism versus free will loses validity in the fierce, absolute imperative of now. Every sentient, conscious being who sheds the bonds and shackles of conventional religion, and attains a more honest realization of his or her symbiotic relationship with the universal, is a direct expression in the here and now of whatever spirit of survival is actually possible and practicable.

Re the cartoon: I wonder whether dropping balloons of pig blood from the drones would outrage the Taliban more than the bombs….

sirrom, I’m just trying to make a distinction between concrete events (names, dates, personal or institutional actions), which may either be factually correct or incorrect, and chains of causality, which can never be proven or disproven. That what Graves proposed is an interesting theory, I’ll grant. I’m neither disagreeing with it nor agreeing with it. But it’s not a “statement of fact” that can be “pointed out.”

That patriarchal societies and (perhaps even moreso) theologies can lead (or have led) to the institutionalized oppression of women and devaluation of female values is a theory to which I cannot place myself in opposition, but I’m not going to say “This is what happened.” There’s no concrete evidence. To go further and say “the combination of Greek and Mosaic theologies/philosophies is responsible for the West’s drive to subjugate , exploit, and despoil the natural world” is, it seems to me, to go far beyond anything about which it could ever be said “This is so.” There are too many possible variables to consider, the causal thread is to thin to support that much weight. Frankly, I personally think the weather had a lot to do with it, for one thing; the Greeks and the Hebrews both had relatively mild climates to deal with, and bringing “the blessings of civilization” to the Northern Europeans sped things along the path to destruction pretty rapidly. There were some particularly ungentle goddesses up there, like the Morrigan. Not every Mother-cult is nurturing (see also Kali).

Again, though, my main objection (probably too strong a word; more like a quibble) is not with Graves’ argument per se, but with treating it as established fact.

I didn’t try to read all the posts here - and jordaner021, I have complained about your incessant cross posting of this website.

America, while I love her and fought for her, is bent on imperialism. Read Max Boot’s “The Savage Wars Of Peace: Small Wars And The Rise Of American Power,” for a fairly cogent demonstration of our ever-expanding mindset.

It’s about oil, people. Want change? End our love affair with oil and STOP the era of entitlement. ‘Nuff said.

[Just flagged Jordaner again…]

fritzoid, you’re eminently reasonable and probably right. Part of my rationale for posting these things is to stir up a little controversy, as I suspect MojoScowl (how did he manage to change his name, anyway?) has been doing. I’m not really as doctrinaire about this matter (or anything else) as it might appear – I do get a bit carried away with the rhetoric. But as a hypothesis, postulated to generate further discussion and some unorthodox ways of considering the history and cultural evolution of our species, I think it deserves a place on the agenda. That you in particular, and several others, should find it intriguing and worthy of consideration at all, is very gratifying and validates my decision to give this particular forum so much of my attention. The dialectic itself is more significant than any conclusions that might arise from it.

sirrom – have you read Graves’ “Watch the Northwind Rise” (also published as “Seven Days in New Crete”, I believe). It’s a novelistic treatment of some of his ideas. There’s also “King Jesus”, but I find it less entertaining. I have struggled to get through “The White Goddess”, but somehow I always give out.

Graves is neat, and influential, but pretty unreliable. If you look at his commentaries in “The Greek Myths”, they often boggle the mind.

kingster – Yes, Boot’s book is fascinating. It opens up a huge area of history that is often ignored. I think he wrote it as a justification for these small wars of the past – and more to the point, the small wars of the future – but it can be read in other ways. In any case, it’s a treasure of information on a lesser known topic.

Back to pedestrian politics. I just wanted to point out that while many Democrats are liberal, the Democratic party is not. thekingster’s comment is right on.

lonecat – I recently read Watch the Northwind Rise for the second time, and then I finally got through King Jesus, and now I’m in the middle of Hercules, My Shipmate. All in preparation for taking another crack at The White Goddess, which is where the ideas above come from (I’ve read almost all of it, but never from end to end). His translation of Suetonius is like reading I, Claudius in the original. I am continually amazed at how much ancient literature the man was versed in, and the geographical details in King Jesus and Hercules, My Shipmate seem to indicate a total familiarity with the terrain, down to the most minuscule details. I can’t read Graves without keeping my dictionary close at hand, since he uses so many obscure names of trees, types of incense, and the like.

So Jordan has been deleted again. And I would really like to know how MojoScowl changed his screen name. When I wanted to do that, I had to call someone in Kansas City, who told me to call back and speak to someone who was only there on Thursdays. Does ObamaFilter have some special secret knowledge? I’d hate to think so.

sirrom, changing your displayed name is pretty easy. In “Edit Profile”, put what you want to appear in the “First Name/Last Name” fields (first name alone works; dunno about last name alone). That overrides what you’ve got set as your profiled “handle”. If you leave that field blank, it goes back to your default.

sirrom – the most amazing aspect of “I, Claudius” is that it’s on the one hand quite accurate in detail and on the other hand quite eccentric in interpretation. When Graves wrote, the received opinion was that Claudius little better than a fool, but Graves makes him look quite intelligent and interesting. (I should add that there has been some reassessment of Claudius since Graves’ time, and his reputation has improved.)

The two primary sources for that period are Suetonius and Tacitus, both of whom I have read (Suetonius in Graves’s translation, Tacitus in the original Latin when I was in college), and Graves himself obviously knows them inside out – plus the host of lesser-known sources that he has scoured for additional details. While I find it rather incredible to believe that Livia was as evil a conniver as she appears in Graves’s version, both Suetonius and Tacitus pull no punches when it comes to the other bad apples of the period, like Tiberius, Caligula, Agrippina, and Nero, and Graves’s embellishments and conjectures seem entirely plausible. When compared to the goings-on in Hitler’s bunker or the Nixon White House, there is a strong feeling of déjà vu for anyone who has studied the last days of the Roman Republic and the lives of the early emperors. That’s an excellent reason why the study of “ancient” history can be of immense value to those who wish to make better sense of more recent events.

dioztirf (fritzoid) – Thanks. I thought it was asking for actual personal info.

No worries, morris.

While we’re on the subject, I was struck while rewatching “I, CLAVDIVS” on DVD a few months back (I’ve read the books, but years ago; I’ve also read Suetonius, but not Tacitus) that, as bad as the men ARE in the story, the women are often as bad or even worse (and it’s not just Livia).

I’m just wondering how that view (and I know it may not be Graves’ own view, as opposed to his representation of Suetonius’ views) fits in with his goddess theories. With Augustus as our model, a paternal Deity-in-Chief can be relatively benign, while his feminine counterbalance/consort can be truly destructive indeed. I suppose you could say “this is the sort of thing that happens when the goddess is subjugated to the god”, but it seems to me that, if Livia COULD have ruled Rome in her own name rather than through the men around her, it wouldn’t have been much of an improvement.

Bear in mind that the Goddess is a Triple Goddess, who represents nature in all her aspects. Her three persons are the maiden, the mother (later, under male domination, the wife/mother), and the hag. She is by no means always benign – in fact, she demands the half-yearly sacrifice of her consort, the Sacred King, and his dark twin. The Goddess’s wild women would get drunk on wine and tear the young king to shreds, and feast on his flesh. Those of us who have lived with women are well aware of the crueler side of their nature. Like the moon that governs them, their personalities go through cyclical changes. Men, on the other hand, are perceived to be constant. There is an ’80s rock song that expresses this mythology surprisingly clearly: “Sex (I’m A…)” by Berlin, where the man repeats “I’m a man,” while the woman sings “I’m a goddess, Well I’m a virgin, I’m a blue movie, I’m a bi*ch, I’m a geisha, I’m a little girl” and a whole lot of other things. Most men would agree that this fickleness is what makes women so fascinating, and it is also what causes patriarchal societies to distrust having them in positions of power.

[“bitch” got turned into “bleeep” by the software…apparently it’s okay inside quote marks, though]

First and last post for this whackjob. Is anyone aware in this thread that the reason most civilians are killed is because the cowards use them as shields ? Our soldiers try mightily to not not kill civilians, even at risk to their own lives. But this is a war you morons. We are fighting cowards who hide behind children. What else would I expect from this brainless lib? I regret even stopping here in this cesspool.

Most of my exposure to the Triune Goddess has been through Neil Gaiman and “The Sandman”, but I know it didn’t originate with him.

However, it still begs the question “How would anything have been different (i.e. “better”) with either a matriarchal theology or a balanced male/female theology?”

I have my own (half-developed) thoughts on the matter, which I’m hesitant to share (they’re more open to accusations of androcentrism than outright misogyny; I’d inform you privately, if there were a way). But I’ve come to mistrust anything that smacks of “Woman good, Man bad” as much as “Man good, Woman bad.”

Maybe (probably) I’m misunderstanding your (Graves’) argument, but to the extent that it reads “Let’s blame everything on the patriarchy”, there’s an unsavory aroma reaching my nostrils.

I’d rather say, “Let’s blame everything on religion,” but science has given us some real doozies, too, like atomic weapons and oil slicks. I’m not a self-hating man, by any means. And as long as there are actual women in power like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, and troglodytes like Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and Lynne Cheney, I have no illusions that they would be any better than their male counterparts. Earlier in this thread I argued for full and absolute gender equality – that’s where I stand personally.

Don’t go straytski! We need more intelligent and rational debaters to stand against these paranoid pot-smoking pagan politburo pukes that post here!

Paleolithic pablum putridly pretending prescience.

^^ I don’t smoke pot.

^Did you know Astarte’s third teat is emblematic of the Female ascendancy over the less evolved male - i.e “three teats is better than two”; and is analagous to the phallic member of the male procreation trinity…i.e. two testes and one penis. The waving of the third teat is emphasized in the post-scatalogical etruscan renaissance imagery of the stone friezes of tuscany and roughly equates to the heightened ecstasy of the male orgasm. Early Pro-Phallics gradually exchanged their rigid ceremonial garb for the massive third teat embodied in the , “Celestial goddesses most milky Mother of all Sacred Pleasures” mock breastuary made of polished olived wood.

“Wastertit” , which translates ( roughly for the sake of probity) to the “Waving of the Teat” is a festival still observed in secret by a remote group of Armenian separatists. It is based on the Early Vagists practice of “Astarte Atoning” which consisted of beating pious monks of the Astarte cult with the aforementioned “breastuary” The wooden device was used to flail the nude penitent acolyte by the High Priestess or Acting High-Priestess. The wounds were cherished as visible “signs of the Goddesses Favor.” But the male acolyte was immediately murdered afterward so the honor was short-lived. Later the practice was adapted to the newly inculcated Isis Cult imported from the Ptolemaic Provinces, and lived on as a smaller soft ball sized breast worn as an adornment on the Priestess necklace. Again, pious believers were admonished to revere the Goddess by applying suction to the artificial-teat. The “kiss of Isis” often led to other scandalous behaviours too numerous and of a graphic nature to record at this moment.

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

Bad poopsie Scowl,

Meds…

Not with a whimper…with a shout!”

*”For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first.” (NIV Bible, 1Thessalonians 4:16)

And that will be the beginning of the End ;^)

Or play the game existence to the end Of the beginning Of the beginning Of the beginning Of the beginning Of the beginning Of the beginning

It purports unity not fragmentation…

The Kabbalists imagine the world, our world as a destroyed image of the Divine (Why else would there be such a bent among humans for “perfection” and an urge to “right” what has never been wrong?)…

I include the above simply as an example of human thinking…You are worried about fragmentation and being controlled Rikoshay - when I can almost be certain you are currently under so much control by your environment and human desires from within that you might as well consider yourself a puppet to inanimate forces, let alone the potential plaything of some kind of nefarious power-grabbing Cult or madmen (In fact that sounds rather fanatical - like a conspiracy theorist?).

To simply “Be” is to deny whatever makes you “human” in the first place. Accept it and move on. God made everything GOOD and everything had its proper place before MAN allowed SIN and Darkness to rule in his (mankind’s) rightful place. (Furthermore, God in the form of His ONLY Begotten SON Jesus, has demonstrated his Rightful authority by defeating the Powers of Darkness and Redeeming mankind from Destruction, to His own purpose).

Lennon, like a lot of Pop philosophers (I’m not denigrating his intellect; just his choice of loyalty in the general), assumes to take control of his Environment with thecontemporary thought-memes of his time, rejecting the traditional and embracing the un-proven and propositional as fact…very foolhardy and un-warranted. Meanwhile impressionable people pick up on the cynicism and use it to belittle and impugn concepts out-of-hand they know nothing about …out of sheer Pride. And you know where I think Pride will take you…

So tell me why I should pattern my life after an example of a weak cynical man (again, I’m not separating Lennon out for special criticisms - Just the Pop-culture Worldly Meme he represents, I actually rather liked the guy) who was known for sampling illicit pharmaceuticals for satisfaction and inspiration (BTW, what does this say about being in control?); rather than the PROVEN Son of God who died for my Sins so I would not perish as I DESERVE to?

poopsie,

So perish already…

Bad poopsie Scowl,

“the PROVEN Son of God who …”

If he’s the “the PROVEN Son of God” where’s his birth certificate, ya know the long form?

^You are assuming I grew up identifying with anything…I assure you it wasn’t because of any active impulse of my own if I had. As it happens I was indeed raised in a God-fearing home even though we as a family had severed our relationship with organized religion early on. Subsequently, I bought into a de facto Theistic evolution mindset…Why do I say this? Because you make many un-scientific assumptions in your assessment of my apparent religiosity. RikyShay, you and other posters here have demonstrated a close-minded approach to belief in Christianity which I guess is fine for you; but in no way comes close to the manner with which I have come to believe in Christ nor the manner in which I apply my faith as I go about living my life. Besides that, your pseudo-Supernaturalism has even less to do with the Naturalistic Model than does my version of Christianity; which , by the way, served as the building block with which all the “new science” has been built on. SuperGriz, Jesus’ birth certificate started on Genesis 1:1 and continues through The Revelation of Jesus Christ 22:21 - I doubt there is a better attested to Birth and Life in all Creation.

Of all the countless identities that Puppy cowers behind, this self-chosen ID is the most descriptive of her:

“Errr..Ahhhh…Ummmm…”

Indeed!

What a good little christian.

Well, since you asked…Yes.