I took a break from the news, specifically the Ukraine War, because it is all so depressing and demoralizing and why are people so fucking awful all the time and you know the drill.
It occurred to me, what a luxury. The people of Ukraine sure wish they could take a break from the war, too. And so it is with most everything. If I want to take a break from basically anything, I can. All of the issues the Republicans and the world are pushing on people don’t impact me personally. Abortion, police brutality, the drug wars, racism, homophobia and on and on and on.
It’s gross, really. Even grosser when you realize that the people unaffected by the abuse the rest of the world have to deal with are the ones most behind inflicting that abuse- straight white men.
zhena gogolia
You have captured what goes through my head on a 15-minute repeating cycle these days.
UncleEbeneezer
The ability to step away is the most obvious example of privilege and we should always keep that in mind.
Sebastian
Frontpage is crashing for me on iOS 15.3.1 Safari
Bruce K in ATH-GR
I get that. It’s more than a luxury, though; I think it’s a genuine privilege, to be able to wall out the awfulness to try to sort yourself out.
Had a similar epiphany early in my days in Greece, when I passed by an anti-foreigner protest from screaming Golden Dawn fascists.
I realized: people only know I’m not from here because of my accent. All I had to do was keep my mouth shut, and nobody would realize I was a foreigner. Then it hit me that there are many foreigners in Greece who don’t have that luxury. And then it hit me even harder: this is sort of what they mean by “invisible privilege.”
JaneE
Of course. If they could empathize with people not like themselves they might not abuse. Probably most of them are nominally Christians and they probably know “love thy neighbor as thyself”. Unfortunately the abusers missed the whole point of the parable of the Good Samaritan.
mrmoshpotato
@JaneE:
And a whole lot more of the New Testament too.
GoBlueInOak
@JaneE: You assume they can even read.
Roger Moore
This is completely natural. They are able to deal out abuse precisely because it doesn’t affect them. If it did affect them, they would never do it. This is precisely why Rawls’s theory of justice- in which people should figure out the form of society before they know what place they will occupy in it- is so attractive.
Hildebrand
Yep – I feel this deeply. I’m a pastor at a Black congregation in Detroit. These past four years have taught me the million and one ways my white privilege manifests itself.
opiejeanne
@JaneE: the question used to arise periodically in Adult Sunday School at my church: who is my neighbor? Is it only the guy next door, or is it everyone in the world?
The fact that we had to address it so often tells you something about the understanding of the New Testament, even among dedicated church-goers.
These were Methodists, but they’re certainly not alone in needing this discussion, this clarification.
Roger Moore
@JaneE:
Most of these people come from the school that believes some words in the Bible are in red to indicate they’re optional.
bluegirlfromwyo
@GoBlueInOak: In my experience, more conservative Christian denominations don’t encourage reading the Bible so much. They’d much rather parishioners swallow the pastor/priest’s interpretation whole.
Alison Rose ???
@Roger Moore: These are also the folks who love to quote Leviticus to justify their homophobia, and I’m like, 1) Stop using my people’s book to defend your hatred, and 2) Do you keep kosher? No? Then shut the entire hell up.
brendancalling
I was reading a certain baby-blue blogger’s incoherent posts about Ukraine last night—reading that site is always a bad idea for me—and all I could think was “nice privilege you have there to boil this down to a dick-measuring contest.”
People are dying, and all some people can do is drone on endlessly about some academic abstractions, as if THAT is the real problem and not the bombs that are dropping on people.
Kropacetic
@Alison Rose ???: I’m no religious scholar, but everything I know about Leviticus reads as a pre-germ-theory hygiene manual.
Spanky
OH NOES! What will Jen do without her
caviar vodkatchotchkes?zzyzx
@Alison Rose ???: if you go there, they’re all “Well Paul had a dream and therefore now we don’t have to keep kosher.”
It seems like all of the worst aspects of Christianity all come from Paul, and I’ll never understand why his words are considered that important. But I’m Jewish so what do I know?
Ohio Mom
I also wake up every day and think how lucky I am to live in a peaceful part of the world (at least a peaceful part for an old white woman). Makes me think of all the prayers for peace and how that, and having enough to eat, are the bottom lines of life on this planet.
This is the first war that appears on my phone constantly. That may be a reflection of the sites I have bookmarked. Even most of my decorating sites have made mention of Ukraine.
Old School
@brendancalling:
I think you misread that post.
Assuming you are referring to Atrios, he was saying that other people aren’t concerned about Ukrainian lives and are making it a dick measuring contest.
Anyway
@Spanky:
Putin, Lavarov – the whole govt apparatus there hate Hillary. She should wear it as a badge of honor. She called them out from early on in her State Dept tenure and they hated her (and all Dems ) for it.
AJ
Agreed.
Plus hard core depression.
At least I have some ability to work these days. And some work. Grateful for those blessings.
RandomMonster
@Sebastian: Seeing the same crash on my iPhone.
Ruviana
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: Irish and Polish undocumented workers are told to do that here.
Jonas
@Sebastian: same here. Also on Amazon Silk reader.
Baud
The ability to walk away is the greatest privilege of them all.
Soprano2
@JaneE: They truly don’t think of “those people” as their neighbors. That’s how they justify it.
Heidi Mom
Oh yeah. After the 2016 election a coworker who’d voted for TFG tried to console my brother by saying “Oh don’t worry, you’ll be fine!” He was surprised (“shocked” might be going too far) at how blatant was her assumption that when you vote, of course it’s all about you.
different-church-lady
@Sebastian: pretty much the same here, also relentless reloads on Firefox.
It would appear Twitter is no longer content with breaking old operating systems snd is now hellbent on breaking every device no matter how new.
Baud
@Heidi Mom:
That’s how a lot of people think. As if it’s something your purchasing for yourself. It’s sad and frustrating.
lowtechcyclist
Maybe so, but this particular dream was from Peter. (Acts 10, for those keeping score at home.)
The funny thing is, the fundies interpret it as God saying all foods are clean, even though Peter himself says later in that same chapter that the dream was about people – that Gentiles weren’t unclean. The food was a frickin’ allegory, and Peter says so himself.
dnfree
@zzyzx: You are exactly right. Some Christians get mad when I point out that Paul and Jesus disagree directly on some points. The biggest is that Jesus says we’ll be judged on our actions (how we treated “the least of these”) and Paul says, nah, faith is sufficient for salvation. There are acrobatics to reconcile the differences, like saying that naturally faith inspires you to do good, but it IS a contradiction. Jesus was a visionary prophet, and Paul built much of the church as we know it.
I’ve spent some time reading Robert Alter’s translation of the Old Testament to get more understanding of what it actually means without the Christian bias. Very interesting.
Alison Rose ???
@zzyzx: Yeah, Paul sounds like a real peach, doesn’t he?
Alison Rose ???
@Kropacetic: Right?? Especially the food stuff. They’re like “Hmmm people keep getting sick from eating pork and shrimp, guess God doesn’t want us to!”
artem1s
@opiejeanne:
my faux xtian family members always identify with the Good Samaritan in the parable. I think Jesus meant we should identify with the man who was attacked. That the Samaritan (an outcast in his society) was willing to overlook the fact that the victim would probably pass by him on the road if the situation was reversed. He was capable of empathy and being a good neighbor. White privilege allows us to assume we will always be the hero in the story and in control of our fate, not the afflicted or powerless. If we can’t imagine being the victim, we can’t imagine whether we would or wouldn’t be a ‘good’ neighbor in any given situation. that’s why the modern conserva-christian has to reinterpret this parable so they never have to imagine what it would be like to have their ‘godly’ saved neighbors pass them by as if they were unclean and unworthy.
Matt McIrvin
@bluegirlfromwyo: My experience is, they’re big on the Bible but they see it not as coherent narratives, but as a disconnected collection of verses to use for divination or rhetorical ammo. And they’ve got some utterly bizarre fan-canon present nowhere in the text but assembled out of these collections of pieces cherry-picked out of several different books and mashed together.
Baud
Paul was nothing without John.
We’re talking about the Beatles, right?
brendancalling
@Old School: I’ve been reading him long enough to understand what he’s saying. I didn’t misread it. He took the time to write a second post clarifiying the first one.
I’ve said this before, but I know people in Ukraine—old people—who had to flee their home. The pithy, oh-so-ironically-detached tone he takes about how “Anglosphere politicians… see belligerence as an end in itself, and will prioritize punitive measures” blah blah blah doesn’t impress me.
One of the reasons I read THIS blog is because I actually learn things from people that actually know things. And the folks here that don’t know things have heart and clearly feel for the victims of Putin’s aggression.
zzyzx
@lowtechcyclist: oops, thanks.
Google fucked me over and I forgot to keep looking.
And yeah, it was also said as being an allegory.
lowtechcyclist
@Soprano2:
They justify it by acting as if the parable doesn’t exist, or is just an attaboy to the Samaritan for being nice to someone, or something that doesn’t involve actually reading the damn parable.
Because the question that sets Jesus off into the story is, “But who is my neighbor?” And after telling the tale, Jesus flips the question around and asks, “Who was neighbor to this man?” (The man lying in the ditch, that is.) There’s really no way to limit that.
Brachiator
My sister and I were talking about the Ukraine war the other day, and I thought I knew the answer to a question, but want to check.
Apart from the 9/11 attack, in the 20th and 21st century, has a city on the US mainland ever been shelled or bombed by a hostile country?
And obviously I mean with damage to streets and buildings, and casualties, not just the dropping of a bomb that does not explode.
Bex
@zzyzx: Simon Peter had that dream or revelation or whatever you want to call it. Paul was writing letters and trying to organize diverse groups of people into a developing belief system he was working out. He had no idea he was writing scripture.
Baud
@Brachiator:
By a foreign power? None I can think of.
Mike E
@Baud: Pope John Paul George Ringo would truly be a uniter.
lowtechcyclist
@Mike E: Nah, people would argue that he should have had the names in a different order.
VOR
The Netflix version of Marvel’s “Daredevil” has this wonderful sequence with the villain Kingpin. He’s in police custody and tells the story of the Good Samaritan, one of Jesus parables. Kingpin says he always saw himself as the Good Samaritan who aids the injured traveler. But he has realized that he really is the hostile force who attacks the traveler for being where he does not belong. It’s important to understand your true place in the world.
Ohio Mom
@AJ: I hope your hard core depression is being treated by a qualified medical doctor. If not, please get to it. That’s all another commentator here can do for you, no matter how alarming we find your comment.
On a completely different note, I see Hillary has responded to the Russian sanctions: “I want to thank the Russian Academy for this lifetime achievement award.” Heh.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Brachiator: Not as far as I can recall, although the OG Nazis got close when they sent a bunch of submarines to the East Coast in 1942. They torpedoed some ships only a few miles off shore, in full view (I think one of the more famous losses was the tanker Gulfamerica).
Baud
@Ohio Mom:
Oh that’s awesome (the second paragraph).
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
This is so true. For the last few days, “Thank God for antidepressants!” has been in my thoughts.
I have so much going on right now, and I haven’t followed the news all that much since last fall, when everything in my own life began getting overwhelming. And I’m well aware that there are people who have my problems and a bunch of shit in the news to deal with that doesn’t affect me at all.
It is maddening. I wish life were fairer. I got dealt the best hand I could have gotten at birth. And I think that’s why we’re here, to try to make the world fairer. I just wish I could do more right now, but I can’t.
Raoul Paste
@RandomMonster:
Also seeing the crash on my iPhone. If I immediately leap to comments it does not crash
WaterGirl
@Spanky: Russia needs to be kicked out of interpol so it can’t put red notices on people they don’t like.
I also think Putin/Russia should be told that if the woman BB player they have in custody is not released immediately, unharmed, that they don’t get to participate in the Olympics any more.
delk
I subscribe to a YouTube channel called Never Too Small. From their website:
Last week they featured this Kyiv Apartment
Not sure if it still exists. Every time I see the destruction of the city I see this apartment. Sad.
Calouste
@Baud: No. But Peter and Paul would have been nothing without Mary.
Baud
Haha. Hilary also retweeted Mitt Romney
raven
@Alison Rose ???: I’ve been trying to catch you but we are in different orbits. I apologize for the flip comment that you should “enlist” and I hope I never said you should shut the fuck up but, if I did, I apologize for that as well. I struggle with sending people to war but that’s a me problem. sorry
Calouste
@Brachiator: Depends on whether you consider right-wing terrorism a continuation of the CSA or not.
JoyceH
This post made me realize why the rage against ‘cancel culture’ is suddenly a thing. For years and years, the rotten people have been able to pick and choose their engagements – when and where and for what duration they want to perform their rottenness. Their victims never had the luxury that they had.
Say you’re an anti-abortion activist. You go and do your shift outside the clinic, harassing staff and patients, and then you can go home and cook out, attend the kid’s soccer game, whatever, your shift is over. Never mind that you and your cronies make lives sheer hell for the people you oppose, you’re off shift. NOW, the tables can be turned. Someone can get a video of your red-faced rant and post it online. They can identify you and your hateful behavior. “This is Susie Miller who lives on Maple Street in Easytown. She works at the Harrison Coffee Shop. Is this the behavior Harrison Coffee Shop wants to be associated with? If they continue to employ Susie Miller, maybe we shouldn’t patronize Harrison Coffee Shop.” And OH, the screams of outrage! Cancel Culture!
Baud
@JoyceH:
Good point.
dmsilev
@Brachiator: I think there were some stray bombs that landed in Honolulu during the Pearl Harbor attack. The Japanese also tried some some small scale indiscriminate bombing during the war by putting bombs on balloons and letting them drift in the jet stream across the Pacific, and release on timers. Most or all of them landed in unpopulated areas and I’m not sure if anyone was actually hurt or killed by them.
Gin & Tonic
And now one of NPR’s lead stories is about that propagandist Ovsiannikova and not the fact that Russians have taken a hospital hostage in Mariupol. An entire hospital. So mission accomplished.
The absolutely incandescent hatred Ukrainians now have for Russians is impossible to describe. If Ukraine survives, it will take generations for the Russians to wash the blood off their hands.
brendancalling
@JaneE: A lot of them—Southern Baptists in particular—ignore whole books of the Bible. They insist that it is grace alone that gets them into heaven, and look to the parable of the prodigal son as their guide. You see, the prodigal son came back after all his evil deeds, and his father forgave him (to the chagrin of the son that didn’t leave). The idea is that simply and sincerely returning to God’s fold is enough.
This, of course, completely ignores Matthew 25:31-46, the parable of the goats and the sheep, where Jesus explicitly says “it ain’t grace that gets you in.” It also ignores the Book of James, “As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.”
So they act like that under the misapprehension that God is going to look favorably upon their behavior. If what JC said is true, if James is accurate, God—assuming such a being exists—will not look favorably upon them.
James E Powell
@Baud:
One of my favorite headlines from National Lampoon’s “News of the World” was John Paul elected pope, George Ringo miffed.
geg6
@zzyzx:
Hell, I grew up Catholic and they love them some Paul. I have absolutely no idea why. It was never explained why Paul seemed to be the biggest authority on what Jesus and/or the Father wanted. And why what Paul said is somehow more relevant that any quotes by Jesus or the Father in the New or Old Testament.
Brachiator
@VOR:
Sounds like an interesting variation of Samuel L Jackson’s diner speech in Pulp Fiction.
opiejeanne
@lowtechcyclist: The same people who continually needed to hear this in the Adult SS class, two or three families left and joined the Assembly of God because they didn’t feel “saved” because the UMC didn’t give them enough rules they had to follow or tell them exactly what to believe. All but one returned after getting a good, hard look at that church.
That particular congregation of A of G held regular book burnings.
opiejeanne
@dmsilev: There was that thing that happened in Los Angeles, when it was thought that there was an attack in progress. The Battle of Los Angeles, 1942. Also, the Bombardment of Ellwood, CA.
Soprano2
@Alison Rose ???: In “Collapse” Jared Diamond talks about how people in Greenland starved to death in the midst of plenty because they didn’t eat fish. Hard to believe, but true. He theorizes that someone of high importance must have died after eating fish early on in the settling of Greenland, so it became taboo to eat it. Food stuff can sometimes have no logical explanation.
thisismyonlinenym
@Brachiator: Imperial Japanese balloon bombs. Some made it as far east as Detroit.
opiejeanne
@Soprano2: That’s said about the famine in Ireland, too, that they just could have eaten fish, but the truth is that the Irish peasants couldn’t legally fish in the rivers (they did anyway but it stopped during the famine). The English Lords who owned the land with rivers. Also, not everyone lived near the coast, or owned a boat and tackle.
SiubhanDuinne
@zhena gogolia:
Exactly. I was bitching about a fire alarm in the middle of the night, but it is nothing when you think of being awakened because a god damned bomb reduced your apartment building to rubble, while you were in it. I was grumpy earlier today because I had to sit in my car through three full traffic light cycles while waiting to make a left turn. But I don’t have to walk hundreds of miles to a border crossing to try to find refuge in a foreign land among strangers. The privilege is real.
Soprano2
@opiejeanne: But in the case of Greenland there wasn’t anything like that; it was newly settled by people from Denmark. They ate fish in Denmark all the time. He said they must have decided for some reason that the fish in Greenland were different, and were bad for you. No one knows for sure, because there was no written record of it.
thisismyonlinenym
Re: balloon bombs…
IIRC some Japanese atmospheric scientists had some evidence of a high altitude high velocity steam of air moving east to west across the Pacific. It was the first indication the jet stream existed.
The balloons were made of mulberry paper, pasted together by thousands of Japanese schoolchildren. Each balloon carried an anti-personnel bomb and several incendiaries set to drop after a certain number of days had passed.
The intention was to set huge forest fires in the pacific northwest and to create mass panic. Neither idea was far fetched given the right conditions.
I read somewhere the Imperial Japanese launched tens of thousands of these, and at least several thousand were estimated to have reached mainland US.
I learned this living in Oregon not too far from where the schoolteacher and her students were killed. There’s a memorial to them there. Or was there when I lived in Oregon 30 years ago.
edit: of course wiki has it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
Ruckus
@Sebastian:
I’ve been having problems with Safari 15.3 as well.
It loads like a drunk on a 4 day bender. On day 4.
Same everything except if I use Brave or Firefox, the site loads fine.
Dan B
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: Being gay and straight looking is similar. But the difference is there are many countries where I could be locked up or executed. And there are people here in the US who would wish the same. So I remain focused on the war because I’ve been under threat for years.
thisismyonlinenym
@Brachiator: Also, the Imperial Japanese I-class subs carried aircraft. They were to be launched against San Diego and the Panama Canal.
The missions never happened but I think there was some speculation after the war that one of the planes may have dropped a small and ineffectual bomb on the west coast. Can’t find the story now so who knows.
Citizen Alan
@brendancalling:
As I have been saying for 30 years, there are 2 types of christians in this country. There are people who have accepted Jesus Christ into their hearts and allowed him to make a change in them so that they become better people. And then there are the others, the ones who just got dunked in a bathtub when they were little kids at their parents insistence. And having been dunked in the magic bathtub, they were then told they were better than everyone else and that they could be as hateful and evil as they want and still get into heaven.
I have always believed that these 2 types of christians existed side-by-side. But until 2016, I was never cynical enough to imagine that the bathtub Christians outnumbered the decent ones 4 to 1.
Origuy
@Soprano2: The flesh of Greenland Sharks is toxic unless you go to great lengths to prepare it. In Iceland, they bury it for several months; that’s called hákari. Iceland went through several periods of bad famine. I don’t know if they were preparing hákari when the Greenland Norse were still around.
There’s a lot of evidence that Jared Diamond got it wrong about Greenland in Collapse. He probably got Easter Island wrong, too. Still an interesting read, and Guns, Germs, and Steel holds up well, I think.
Citizen Alan
@geg6: What I have always heard was that Catholicism was the victory of Peter over Paul, that protestantism was the victory of Paul over Peter, and that evangelicalism was the victory of Paul over Jesus.
Miss Bianca
@Heidi Mom:
I had a boss at the time of the 2016 election say the same thing to me. And I just couldn’t seem to get it across to him that the didn’t know it was going to be fine for me, and he damn sure couldn’t tell me that it would be fine for others.
This guy is a really good guy – civic minded, old-school Chamber of Commerce Republican. But he couldn’t see Donald Trump as the existential threat to our democracy that he was – and remains.
Ladyracterinok
@Hildebrand:
In 1964 I was in grad school in California.
That was a summer we called in California Mississippi summer , when white students from the north trained and then went down to Mississippi to help blacks there try to register to vote.(quite and from the north because it was assumed, mostly correctly, that they would be less likely to suffer retribution retribution. That assumption of course did not work for the two flight students who with the black student was murdered in Philadelphia Mississippi.)
A local California minister who had been with some of the students for a while that summer came to talk to us at our student church group.
I’ll never forget the point he made: he said he finally had to leave because he couldn’t take it anymore. And he realized that the black people trying to register to vote and living in Mississippi were there. They couldn’t escape; that was their life
Kristine
@RandomMonster: @Sebastian:
Another iPhone/Safari user. BJ kept crashing this morning. It crashed on Chrome, too.
That said, the site crashes on my iPhone about half the time. I tend to blame the phone. It’s a 7, which lacks the processing oomph of the newer models.
Ladyracterinok
@Hildebrand:
In 1964 I was in grad school in California.
That was the summer we called in California Mississippi summer , when white students from the north trained and then went down to Mississippi to help blacks there try to register to vote.(white and from the north because it was assumed, mostly correctly, that they would be less likely to suffer retribution . That assumption of course did not work for the two whitet students who with the black student was murdered in Philadelphia Mississippi.)
A local California minister who had been with some of the students for a while that summer came to talk to us at our student church group.
I’ll never forget the point he made: he said he finally had to leave because he couldn’t take it anymore. And he realized that the black people trying to register to vote and living in Mississippi were there. They couldn’t escape; that was their life
@Hildebrand:
satby
@opiejeanne: Ireland exported food to Britain throughout the famine. The peasants relied on the potatoes for most of their food, when that crop failed other food was available but far too expensive and mostly exported to the British overlords home country. The peasants starved, the landed gentry didn’t.
I never heard the “let them eat fish” version, but of course you’re correct; the penalties for poaching were often death. I did grow up hearing “mackerel snapper” as a slur for Irish though.
Kristine
@satby:
Huh–I always thought it was a slur for Catholics because of the fish on Friday thing.
Geminid
@satby: Some of that grain that was shipped to England while Irish people starved was used to feed English horses.
Wapiti
@JaneE: Maybe Jesus told the story wrong. Maybe he should have had the Samaritan beaten by bandits, and cared for by the good neighbor. If the Samaritans were seen as lesser in ancient Israel… well, lessers are supposed to take care of their betters. That’s why they’re maids and laborers.
Wapiti
@thisismyonlinenym: The Japanese dropped incendiary bombs in the PNW from a submarine’s float plane.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/rogue-siskiyou/null/recarea/?recid=69514&actid=50