Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

Books are my comfort food!

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Late Night Open Thread: Good Xtian Men

Late Night Open Thread: Good Xtian Men

by | 93 Comments

This post is in: , ,

You’d think Sullivan would’ve learned better, by now…

Reader Interactions

93Comments

  1. 1.

    Corner Stone

    You’d think Sullivan would’ve learned better, by now…

    I’m taking this as sarcastic in the extreme. Because, why would anyone with working cells think that POS would be anything other than his usual POS?

  2. 2.

    Howard Beale IV

    He also got filleted (surprising well, actually) by ol’ frail Freddie earlier on Sully’s Islamic rant.

  3. 3.

    mclaren

    Christianity, unlike Islam, has long since renounced violence.

    Those Xian fundamentalists gunning down abortion doctors like dogs?

    Just an optical illusion.

  4. 4.

    jacy

    @Corner Stone:

    Sometime several months ago, I broke the habit of ever looking at Sully’s website for any reason whatsoever. I forget exactly what the straw was that broke the camel’s back, but considering Sully, it could have been almost anything. I’ve never looked back.

  6. 6.

    Violet

    You’d think Sullivan would’ve learned better, by now…

    Why? What has he ever done that would lead one to think he’d learn better? Now if the subject was how those nice Christian people were anti-gay and how that meant their interpretation of Christianity was All Wrong, well then he’d have a different opinion.

  7. 7.

    max

    You’d think Sullivan would’ve learned better, by now…

    Sully sorta figured out that Iraq II was a bad idea, so he’s gone all the way to some other weird extreme. I don’t think he’ll ever figure out the problem with listening to Hitchens, or the problem with going overboard all the time.

    max
    [‘He’s still doing better than the WaPo editorial staff, so there’s that.’]

  9. 9.

    TheMightyTrowel

    I actually love how irrelevant Sully has gotten since he set up his own place behind a paywall ensuring that almost everyone who ever read him would already by a devout Sully reader. He’s dropped into a nice, nearly hermetically sealed bubble and I almost never have to encounter his cow pats of shitty ideas anymore.

  11. 11.

    Patternmaker

    “Sully” is a fucking idiot and has been for the last, oh, seven years. Which is to say the whole time I’ve been aware of him.

  14. 14.

    Tokyokie

    I seem to recall that during the Clinton administration, we bombed the crap out of Orthodox Serbs who had been oh so gently ethnically cleansing Muslims in Kosovo, as they had done in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and as they previously had done to Roman Catholic Croats and Slovenes. Or maybe Sully doesn’t consider Orthodox Christians Christian.

  15. 15.

    Jordan Rules

    @TheMightyTrowel: Ain’t that the truth. His profile seems to have diminished or maybe I’m better at ignoring him. I wonder how people predicted his move and new model would work for him.

    I do expect him to start throwing more tantrums in a pathetic grab for some shitty buzz.

  16. 16.

    Violet

    @Tokyokie: Sully’s a devoted Catholic. Everyone else isn’t a Real Christian to him. I remember one time skimming his blog on a Sunday and seeing some post where he waxed lyrical about how amazing Mass is in Latin. So yeah, One True Church and all that crap.

  20. 20.

    TheMightyTrowel

    @Major Major Major Major: Having been raised catholic, I always find it ironic that catholics, who practice symbolic cannibalism at least once a week, can call anyone else’s religion a “death cult” with straight faces.

  22. 22.

    Tenar Darell

    @Violet: Heh! You ever notice how anything he is arguing, when it’s about Christianity or Conservatism it gets a massive goalpost readjustment mid-argument?

    He won’t be able to help himself, he’ll probably respond to those tweets. I predict there’ll be a post in a couple of days with a “my friend TNC” reply.

  25. 25.

    Anne Laurie

    @Major Major Major Major: I’ve always been grateful to the nuns for twelve years of parochial education. Apart from an early skepticism about received authority, it inoculated me against the faddish cults so many of my fellow college freshman wasted their energies on — like Objectivism and Marxism. As I always told them, once you’ve survived smallpox, you’re immune to cowpox!

  27. 27.

    Violet

    @Tenar Darell: Definitely. Andrew Sullivan moves goalposts around all the time if it’s something important to him. Gay rights and pot smoking? A zillion ways to justify those. Abortion rights for women? That’s a sin!

    He may tweet about this or he might be on yet another extended vacation. Has he moved away from that dreadful New York City where he couldn’t leave his wifi open because people–gasp!–used it without permission? The nerve!

  28. 28.

    cckids

    @Anne Laurie:

    Apart from an early skepticism about received authority, it inoculated me against the faddish cults so many of my fellow college freshman wasted their energies on — like Objectivism and Marxism. As I always told them, once you’ve survived smallpox, you’re immune to cowpox!

    No sh*t! As a fellow Catholic school survivor, it continues to amaze me that so many people go through that up-close-and-personal experience with the church & continue as Catholics. Your “pox” analogy is so, so good.

  29. 29.

    Tenar Darell

    @Violet: I must have missed that among the NY Sh*tty posts. Sounds like he was lucky he wasn’t hacked leaving an open wifi network like that.

    He moved back to DC. Yes, I still read his blog. Rationalized reason for that? It’s the only way I’d ever regularly read any conservatives. Irrational reason? It gives my blood pressure a workout. Lately, I’ve been skipping posts, maybe I’m curing myself?

  30. 30.

    Tommy

    @efgoldman: I think there is a term for that, “First World Problem” :).

    A few weeks ago I picked up an external battery charger on Woot for like $50 bucks. Will charge 8 cell phones, 4 tablets, and 2 laptops from zero power to capacity (or so they say). Power was out here for more than a few hours not long after I got it and I felt I got my $50 bucks back in that one usage, since both my phone and tablet were both about to die. I at least got to read and surf the web by candle light.

  31. 31.

    Splitting Image

    @Anne Laurie:

    I’ve always been grateful to the nuns for twelve years of parochial education. Apart from an early skepticism about received authority, it inoculated me against the faddish cults so many of my fellow college freshman wasted their energies on — like Objectivism and Marxism. As I always told them, once you’ve survived smallpox, you’re immune to cowpox!

    I’ve never thought of it that way, but this is probably true for me as well.

  32. 32.

    Major Major Major Major

    Sully(‘s interns) does a good job aggregating opinions from “across the spectrum” (from moderate all the way to theocratic, with the occasional link to Jacobin). I recommend reading him with an RSS reader so you don’t have to feel complicit in his paywall BS.

  36. 36.

    piratedan

    fuck Andrew Sullivan and his oh so earnest concern trolling. He can stimulate the economy by buying a new fainting couch.

  37. 37.

    Calouste

    You’d think that Sully, being of Irish heritage, had some awareness of religion-related violence rather more recently than the 30-Year war, but as usual with conservatives, awareness and him are not in the same zip code.

  38. 38.

    kindness

    Sully’s over the top hysteria has been in overdrive since Burning Man. WTF drugs did he do there?

  41. 41.

    Suzanne

    @Anne Laurie: Between 3rd and 12th grades, I lived in Mesa, AZ, which is the second-largest LDS community in the world. So I know fucktons of Mormons, and I consider quite a few of them friends. It is staggering, even to me, to see how many of them have left the church. Some just drifted away because beer is delicious, but some have these horrible stories that are really upsetting. I am glad that my indoctrination was limited to Presbyterian Sunday School once a week, and my family didn’t really care about my immortal soul too much. I told my mom in high school that I had refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance since junior high, and that I joined the ACLU. I got shrugs and “whatever”.

  42. 42.

    Villago Delenda Est

    The Fundie fuckheads can trace their warped “faith” back to the “Christians” who used their “good book” to justify slavery over a century and a half ago.

    Fuck them alll.

  44. 44.

    kindness

    @Howard Beale IV: Yea there was apparently a whole campsite of some notable conservative. Imagine going all the way to Burning Man and being assigned the site next to theirs. Don’t eat the brown acid, I’m tellin’ ya.

  47. 47.

    Howard Beale IV

    @Villago Delenda Est: Liberterianism.

    Here’s a great six-part series that refers to a 2001 book from one of the guiding lights of Liberterian thought, Herman Hans’s Hoppe’s “Democracy: The God that failed”.

    If you think Sully is a pretentions twit, he’s a piker compared to Hoppe.

  48. 48.

    suzanne

    @Violet: I’m not counting the friends and classmates I lost to drug ODs and suicides—all Mormon. Many of them don’t do well.

  49. 49.

    Tommy

    This is how sad my life is. Just got out of the shower, with my new Tardis shower curtain. Now about to binge watch 4-5 Doctor Who episodes I just bought to see what is happening with the “new” Doctor.

  52. 52.

    Violet

    @suzanne: Doesn’t Utah have the highest pr0n usage of any state in the country, or something like that? That kind of strict religious indoctrination will create a lot of psychological problems. Especially when your entire family and community are in the religion, if you decide to leave it–or you do or are something (drink, gay) that means you can’t be in it–it’s pretty tough. You don’t just lose the religion, you lose your entire support system. No wonder people end up having problems.

  53. 53.

    Xenos

    @Calouste:

    You’d think that Sully, being of Irish heritage, had some awareness of religion-related violence rather more recently than the 30-Year war, but as usual with conservatives, awareness and him are not in the same zip code.

    He is a second-generation Irish immigrant to southern England, and he grows up as an avid Tory. Forget the religious aspects of that, just think a bit of four hundred years of brute colonial power… the kid identifies as a Tory? Wanker does not even begin to describe it, a clinical personality disorder, a monstrous moral perversion must have been going on there.

  56. 56.

    Anne Laurie

    @Suzanne: You know, I think a lot of it is that people who leave their “faith communities” now have other places to go. Even when I left my very Catholic parish in 1973, my classmates were kinda, “Well, yeah, but you’re going Away” (I was one of 5 in a graduating class of 76 planning to go to college outside of NYC, and one of the other 4 was entering a convent.) From what I understand, it’s even more pronounced in heavily Mormon communities. “Leaving the faith” also meant being shunned by your neighbors, your classmates, even your family members, not to mention knowing that a considerable portion of the business community wouldn’t hire you, or would pay you less than your “godly” co-workers. And if you weren’t married, your choice of potential dates would be reduced to the few fellow “gentiles” stubborn or unfortunate enough to be stuck among the self-proclaimed Latter-Day Saints.

    Just in the last generation, “the internet” has given us (here in the ‘developed’ world, at least) access to a Global Village where we can find like-minded individuals 24/7. Someone who isn’t happy in the particular community where their parents brought them up can find like-minded friends, dates, rental spaces or job opportunities from the privacy of their room.

    It’s still never easy to change one’s life, of course, but even compared to what it entailed when the Spousal Unit and I decided to move from the Midwest to the Boston area not thirty years ago, the mechanics have gotten infinitely more do-able. Just the ubiquity of cell phones (so we weren’t tied to waiting for calls on a land line) and email (so we could could contact rental agents & expect a written reply in hours instead of days) would’ve made such a difference…

  59. 59.

    Xenos

    @Major Major Major Major: Maybe you need to Widener your stance and succor of Oakshott would be coming your way.

    (Don’t mean to creep toward homophobic attempts at humor, but you got to work with available materiel.)

  60. 60.

    Amir Khalid

    @Tommy:
    Well, four stars out of five seems a generous rating to me. The poncho saved two lives, yes; but it did develop a big tear that could have been lethal in other circumstances. I would have given it a lower star rating, commensurate with the “would not recommend”.

  63. 63.

    wetcasements

    I’m honestly surprised The Dish is still a going concern. There are enough suckers willing to pay 20 dollars a year when they can subscribe to Metafilter for five bucks for the same aggregated content, without Sullivan’s constant stream of Tory bitching and moaning.

  65. 65.

    Amir Khalid

    @wetcasements:
    Maybe Sully does more than just solicit subscribers by himself. For instance, he could have scored deals with publications to pay him up front for Dish subscriptions to hand out to their own subscribers. He’d have had enough residual pull to get such deals when he set up the Dish, given his not unimpressive résumé and still-valid membership in the Very Serious People club.

  67. 67.

    Svensker

    @Tenar Darell:

    I read Sully for the same reason — gives me a small peak into Right Wing World without having to jump head first into the cess pit. Hadn’t read him for a while, but hopped over the other out of boredom only to find Islamophobia booga booga full swing. Fuck Sully. He’s an overfull colostomy bag.

  68. 68.

    BruceFromOhio

    @Howard Beale IV: Also, too, some entertainment to be found in the comments to that.

    Imagine if the Kardashians or Big Brother, or what hell, why not Survivor, went for a season in the NASCAR pits. Think of the ratings bonanza!

  69. 69.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Xenos: Sullivan finally realized that no matter how much he tried back in Albion, he could never advance to the upper class, so he migrated across the pond. Why could he never advance? Not because he’s Catholic, or he’s gay…but because he’s Irish.

  73. 73.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Chris: That certainly helps on this side of the pond….but over there….well, sorry, paddy, you can’t hang out with us Oxbridge types at our clubs because you’re supposed to be planting potatoes, or something else more suitable for your kind. We’ll let you serve in the Royal Navy, though….

  74. 74.

    RAM

    There’s no discernible difference in worldview between radical fundamentalist Christians and Muslims.

  75. 75.

    Cermet

    I blame marriage equality for Sully’s current state of believing he is middle of the road left wing learning while all the time maintaining most his extreme right wing beliefs. He’s the same old bigot that hates all liberal ideas while maintaining a fake left learning spin while still tightly wrapped up in his deeply held christian beliefs of self-hate and ass licking love and servitude for/to the 0.001%.

  76. 76.

    Cermet

    @Violet: Did you notice that every single family, as shown in his ads, that Romney helped was Mormon? That is, besides all the “corporation’s” he helped (which count as people in his twisted mentality.)

  79. 79.

    Amir Khalid

    @Cermet:
    Really? I remember that We Take Care of Our Own was Obama’s campaign song. But trust Romney to take the phrase to heart in its narrowest sense.

  81. 81.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @RAM: The key thing is “fundamentalist”, and it applies to the wildly orthodox Jews and Hindus as well. It’s the extreme ends of any of the major religions where you find the crazies, and the Abrahamic ones are not alone in having those types among them.

  82. 82.

    Gex

    @Tommy: Hey Mayberry, your knowledge of Buddhism might have been shaped by American celebrities and not any real understanding of it as it acts in this world. I’ve read articles on nurses showing lack of sympathy for suffering children because they must have done something to earn it in a previous life. Americans always pick Buddhism as their “harmless” religion. It says more about Americans than it does Buddhism.

    It has the same issues as other religions which, face it, are people problems acted out with a little extra oomph because it’s religion.

  84. 84.

    Rafer Janders

    @TheMightyTrowel:

    Having been raised catholic, I always find it ironic that catholics, who practice symbolic cannibalism at least once a week, can call anyone else’s religion a “death cult” with straight faces.

    Symbolic cannibalism? Um, actual cannibalism. Catholic doctrine is that the priest transforms the bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ. If you don’t think you’re eating actual flesh and drinking actual blood, then you’re not in accordance with Church teaching.

  85. 85.

    kindness

    I read Sully. I’m always surprised that he voices some reasonable positions and then backs extremists who fight against those positions. Why I’m still surprised at this point in time I can’t easily explain. I guess I want to see sanity from the other side. I want them to get that those people they’re supporting will only really help those already in the uber echelons.
    An example of the same delusional reasoning, the Denver Post Editorial Board just came out for Mr. Fetal Personhood (Gardner) over Udall because ‘Democrats have not been effective pushing anything through in a dysfunctional Congress and if Republicans take the Senate they will become reasonable and we will have a functional government again.
    Where’s the Prestone bar?

  86. 86.

    Another Holocene Human

    If Sullivan was maybe talking about the construction of European identity in the early modern period and the forces that maybe caused that construction of identity to shift, but he’s not, he’s a political pundit, also the transformation was gradual, in other words you still have this discourse in the Enlightenment that privileges a conflation of Christian and European identity, which is then challenged by a call to integrate European Jews into civic and social life (which does happen during the Napoleonic era and following).

    Sullivan is lazy as fuck. The end.

  87. 87.

    Another Holocene Human

    And you can still find motherfuckers on the SCOTUS right this very minute who conflate “ceremonial Deism Christianity” with Western culture, civic culture, identity, everything actually.

    Deism my ass, like Deists are planting fucking crosses everywhere. Deists deny the divinity of Christ but it’s funny how they make a convenient excuse for White-and-we-don’t-mean-J00000s supremacists in power.

  88. 88.

    Another Holocene Human

    Sully’s a devoted Catholic. Everyone else isn’t a Real Christian to him. I remember one time skimming his blog on a Sunday and seeing some post where he waxed lyrical about how amazing Mass is in Latin. So yeah, One True Church and all that crap.

    The Orthodox Patriarchy is pretty awful and nothing to crow about but it was pretty eye-opening for this ex-Cat’lick to read about the Great Schism and find out how much the Western Church had just gone off the deep end, organizationally and doctrinally, and that they more or less instigated the Schism. And part of the split seems to have been political, as Rome felt abandoned and Constantinople’s envoys did nothing to protect them from German bandits who eventually wrecked the place good and proper. And then for fucks sake, then ended up in charge and the Medieval Era began. Ugh. That it wasn’t a complete and utter shitshow out there just speaks to the triumph of the human spirit, I mean you have a political system based on salic inheritance oh and whatever you can grab with a bunch of armed bandits, SO BASICALLY SOMALIA. When they say “armed warlords” on the TV just think “knights in shining armor”. Same thing. By the way, Richard the Lionhearted among other things was dodging rape charges on the continent. What a hero.

    Hm, Gregory converting all the barbarians up North and then his descendants deciding to go indy and boot the franchise fees to the parent organization kind of reminds me of union turf wars. Maybe, just maybe, if this kind of shit is still going on in 2014 (hint: it so is … one of our sister locals has had ongoing leadership issues and the independent union next door attempted to raid them, this is after they accused us of a raid a decade ago … sigh), it’s time to reform US labor law, maybe make it a bit more like Germany, guarantee employees’ right to elect their own union leaders, ensure a place at the table, ensure that union will be there and maybe set industry wide wage rates and whatever other reform might take the appeal out of this organize-raid cycle which is a load of fucking bullshit.

    Wow, that was some stream of consciousness … meh.

  89. 89.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Rafer Janders: Surveys show most lay Catholics believe in consubstantiation, thus invalidating centuries of religious wars.

    I mean, not really, but it shows how misleading it is to talk about doctrine as the casus belli when neither side actually understands this distinction or cares. Truthfully I think it had a hell a lot more about operating theology, appearances (hence the Counter-Reformation, a big PR move in large part to make the Church look less decadent) and of course leadership. That whole thing with James II trying to take over the Scottish church just illustrates the extent that leadership–who’s in charge and how it’s structured–is a really big deal. Rome knew it was political, and that’s why they have sculptures of their Cat’lick champeens in Northern Europe in St. Peter’s including Queen Cristina which — LOLOLOLOL. But in school I remember being taught that Catholics and Lutherans warred over a doctrinal point that survey after survey has shown that adherents of both sects don’t even understand (and that didn’t really exist before the Protestant revolution). And that’s pretty dumb.

    But maybe they didn’t want to talk about power structures. Too subversive.

  91. 91.

    Matt

    @kindness: There’s a tiny Hunter S Thompson on my shoulder suggesting fog machines filled with LSD dissolved in DMSO would sort out that whole “camp next door” problem…

  93. 93.

    kindness

    @Matt: Yea but who would waste hard to find acid on them? It’s not like you can go out and get the stuff outside a Grateful Dead concert any longer.

Comments are closed.