"Joy and pleasure are as real as pain and sorrow and one must learn what they have to teach. . . ." -- Sean Russell, from Gatherer of Clouds

"If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right." -- Helyn D. Goldenberg

"I love you and I'm not afraid." -- Evanescence, "My Last Breath"

“If I hear ‘not allowed’ much oftener,” said Sam, “I’m going to get angry.” -- J.R.R. Tolkien, from Lord of the Rings

Monday, September 16, 2019

Today in Disgusting People

But we knew he was a disgusting piece of work:

Acting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Ken Cuccinelli on Sunday defended the Trump administration’s decision not to grant temporary protected status to Bahamians displaced by Hurricane Dorian, saying the government there is “capable of taking care of their own.”

“The Bahamas is a perfectly legitimate country capable of taking care of their own,” Cuccinelli said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” adding that U.S. immigration agencies “rushed in resources” and noting that power has already been restored in the northernmost islands.

The Associated Press reported Sunday that the official death toll from the storm stands at 50, and some 1,300 people are missing.

Even though he's nominally Catholic, Cuccinelli sounds like an evangelical "Christian". I'm sure that the fact that the population of the Bahamas is 80% black and only 12% white has nothing to do with it.

And according to commenter BobSF_94117 at Joe.My.God., they don't expect to have power restored to Abaco for weeks.

This seems like an appropriate place to refer to this article:

I understand why it’s hard for normal people to believe that white evangelical Christians are sadists. Normal people have never been, as I was a long time ago, on the inside of that shadowy religious world. But the sooner they understand this, the sooner normal people will see that white evangelical Christian support for Donald Trump isn’t rooted in hypocrisy, contradiction or merely straying from the straight and narrow. The reason they support a fascist president is simple: They’re sadists.

The word “sadist” is off-putting. I get that. But if you’re thinking of sex, you’re thinking in the wrong way. If you’re thinking of “pleasure,” as in sexual pleasure, you’re thinking the wrong way. The pleasure white evangelical Christians derive from the suffering of human beings deemed less human than they are is not about sex. It’s about the pain, humiliation or even violence out-groups deserve by dint of being out-groups. Gay men, for instance, deserve their punishment because they are gay. Punishment for being gay is “divine justice.” From such “justice” comes pleasure—which is sadism.

The whole article is worth reading, but I'm not sure that the analysis is spot-on: it's more complex than that. There is, in fact, a large element of hypocrisy in the attitudes of too many "Christians" toward the suffering of others, and, notwithstanding the fact that right-wing luminaries such as Tony Perkins and Franklin Graham, and Cuccinelli himself, spend a lot of time and effort inflicting pain on other people, that's in direct contravention of the tenets of the faith they claim to follow. (I'm sure you've noticed that however much they drop Jesus' name at the slightest opportunity, they're solidly grounded in Leviticus.) And I think that one of the main reasons so many white evangelicals support Trump is that they're proto-fascists themselves: they want everything cut and dried, they need to follow an authority figure, and Trump's saying the things they believe but haven't dared to say themselves. While the author concentrates on the right's focus on gay rights, the idea does have broader application, as indicated by the article above.

With thanks to commenter greenmanTN at Joe.My.God. for the link.

And now that Brett "I Like Beer" Kavanaugh is in the news again, a runner-up (aside from Kavanaugh himself):



How clueless is the Times? "Harmless fun"? Seriously? What kind of person thinks that sort of thing is "harmless fun"? I mean, aside from Brett Kavanaugh and whoever wrote that tweet at the Times.

With thanks to commenter Halou at Joe.My.God.


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