Yeah, they were perfectly happy to ride the tiger when it was hurting people they hated and giving them power over ignorant bigots.

The Card Says Moops is a great video that illustrates this principle.

Should have said or done something when you were in office, fucko.

Exactly. One glance at the list of countries by incarceration rates will confirm that the US has been a police state for a while now; it’s just who is being targeted that is changing.

I don’t listen to the show very much, but I was tempted out of masochistic curiosity.

Dude is like a boomer Joe Rogan— he buys into the dumbest bullshit because he thinks being a contrarian is a cheat code for the truth.

Bill Maher is a textbook reactionary centrist: he’d sell out any minority for the sake of his own influence and pocketbook.

From the constant digs on trans people to the time he was ready to scab (until it became clear that it would diminish his influence), he’d step on every person he views as beneath him to get powerful people to think he’s smart.

And he’s not half as smart as he thinks he is— he ends up platforming the absolute worst people and letting them run rhetorical circles around him.

So you’re saying this would be the funniest time for him to have a heart attack?

This exactly.

They don’t see imposing a state of fundamentalist Christian supremacy as tyranny, because their ideology is one of Christian Nationalism (which in the US is inherently white nationalism).

They see the erosion of their relevance as the tyranny they’re supposed to stand up to despite it mostly being driven by cultural changes instead of government mandates. This means that the militias are meant to commit violence against civilians; they know the cops will side with them in a scrum. They’re more afraid of a lesbian with blue hair than a rogue sherrif depriving them of rights.

What kind of music are you into and what do you play?

IMSLP has a ton of stuff.

What is your budget?

On The Art of Dice by the Roman emperor Claudius would be both trivial and fascinating, I’m sure.

Nice! I’m playing mostly enhanced vanilla, I’ll dig into OpenMW at some point though. I had no idea there was a decent multiplayer mod!

Still going on UFO50. There’s still a couple games I haven’t even tried yet.

Also, doing a modded playthrough of Morrowind, which is a TES game that I missed when it came out due to having an underspec PC. Its magic creation system is ridiculous and a lot of fun to play with. I wish they’d put something like that in TES6, but I’m not gonna hold my breath (without making a spell for it, anyway).

The Steam controller is amazing for Elden Ring and similar games. It makes the camera so much easier to deal with.

Oh yeah, Amarillo is a big city for the NI-coC. Abilene, too.

The us-or-them situation is exactly what they’re aiming for: isolated people are easier to control. But yeah, I’m not sure if it’s an intentional strategy or just what happened to work out for their purposes.

Wow, I’m so glad this dipshit who’s never had to work a day in his life could give this paternal wisdom to the plebs who might need this medication to retain employment and not die destitute in the streets.

Who knew they just needed to be sent to a farm upstate so they could run free forever and ever?

Well, I grew up in what is known as the non-institutional church of Christ. There are different branches of the coC, ranging from the relatively liberal to the downright draconian.

What made this particular branch of the coC “non-institutional” is that they are independent of each other congregation, so the leadership of each group is separate from every other.

The way it actually shakes out is that every congregation gets super deep into the weeds about arcane interpretations of an ancient text about which they are unqualified to explain while making overconfident proclamations of certainty. Other congregations disagree with a fairly minor point in this reading, and they will become effectively dead to each other. Ultimately, the different churches (they would hate me calling them that) would form a loose confederation across the region with various groups they could live in uneasy peace with.

Within the congregation itself was a religion that taught that the world is a wicked place from which we should set ourselves apart. Evolution was a lie spread by the devil to make us doubt God’s power. Women were not allowed to speak or wear pants during the church service. We did not use instruments to make music during the service, as that was not mentioned in the Bible. Any disagreement with doctrine could get one removed from good standing, and we left two churches (forced out, really) based on the Elders’ strict views on baptism and musical instruments: my father would not agree that immersion was strictly necessary to save one’s soul, or that it was sinful to exceed the Bible’s authority and use instruments.

It is a bit of a weird duck as a cult, but they’re extremely controlling, patriarchal, and reactionary. They’re in most towns, but people usually think they’re an offshoot of the Baptists (of which certain types also dip into cult status in my opinion). I’d place them between the Baptists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses on a fundamentalist belief scale. I think the BITE model is a useful one (but not perfect) for defining cults:

• Behavioral control
• Information control
• Thought control
• Emotional control

The coC did all of these things: they wanted members to live apart from society where only those in the church were acceptable social peers, to limit exposure with “subversive” ideas and science, to make people so afraid of going to hell that you’ll blindly accept the teachings. You were expected to attend every service: Sunday morning & night and Wednesday night.

In short, they wanted to control people’s lives by love-bombing newcomers and then suffocating them until they fit into their assigned tiny little box.

And yes, we were in the end times. Even though nobody knows when Jesus will return. Wink.

I feel equal parts pity and exasperation that they’re ignoring critical crises like global climate change to focus on superstitious nonsense.

I grew up in a cult, so my whole life.

Because they’re certain that the people getting punished are heretics to their reactionary ideology.

They see it as inferior people getting what they deserve, and since it’s privatized they imagine they’ll pay less for the privilege.