GOP Senator David Perdue leads prayer for Obama's death

You need to explain to the goyim that we never name after the living. Something about the angel of death getting confused when he comes for the elder customer. We just never trust anyone to just get it right, no, we gotta have rules.

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As I recall, Offred did reminisce about some of the build-up, such as when she could no longer pull money out of the ATM and had to get a male relative to do it for her. There was a sense of the frog in a pot of water on the stove…little things that kept getting slightly bigger until all of a sudden women were trapped.

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Now that you mention it, I do recall such a flashback scenario (it’s been a long time since I last read the novel.)

Good catch.

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I think we dodged that bullet, at least until next time.

Sorry, which one was that?

And regardless of whichever bullet you mean, there always seems to be a ‘next time’, unfortunately.

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Handmaid’s tale is way more Cruz than Trump. I’m not saying that president Trump couldn’t usher in a dystopia, but I don’t think it would be a theocracy.

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Trump’s is more of a Mad Max kind of dystopia I think. Or possibly Neuromancer.

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Different shades of fresh hell; I prefer to pass on both, if at all possible.

:slight_smile:

Agreed.

Again, hard pass.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the Cyberpunk genre was easily viewed as technologically prescient, but few people noticed how it was also politically prescient.

John Brunner is more relevant today than he ever was. We might luck out with Shockwave Rider, but at the moment we’re headed for The Sheep Look Up.

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https://www.guerrillamail.com/
There are others. Disposable email address, lasts for half an hour.
What information you give him is then up to you.

On the whole I dislike anonymous messages but they do have their valid uses. In a civilised society, of course, his remarks would lose votes; from Christians because of his abuse of Christianity and from well-bred people because his remarks were in poor taste. But we’re now in a media-induced frenzy of politics as a gladiatorial sport.

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“Non-Jews” would have been much more polite. (Yes, I know what the word means, but it is regarded as derogatory and is unnecessary; more to the point, someone who didn’t know about Jewish naming conventions wouldn’t necessarily understand what “goyim” meant, or who “we” were.)
[edit - OED has
NOUN (plural goyim /ˈɡɔɪɪm/ or goys)
informal, derogatory
A Jewish name for a non-Jew.
vide resp. infra]

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No doubt churchy-Joe types have written many books on the hermeneutics of prayer, but there’s more to it than just asking God for stuff. If you pray for rain, yes, God is the only person who could action that. But if it’s like, “Dear Jebus, please let everyone in this church do the right thing and vote Republican, Amen”, then regardless of their beliefs (or whether God is listening), it’s the people doing the praying who determine whether that prayer comes true.

In the latter case, you’re addressing yourself (or your followers) more than God. I don’t suppose fundamentalists would ever analyse their motives like this, but they’re obviously aware of the distinction on some level, because I don’t believe they would bark out orders like that if they thought they were speaking to God.

How is the Hebrew word for “nation” derogatory? It has no innate derogatory meaning, unlike, for example, shiksa or sheygetz (which are extremely disparaging words for non-Jewish women and men, respectively). Certainly it can be used in derogatory ways, but I would argue that that’s no different than any other minority’s exasperation and exhaustion when dealing with a majority.

Or, TL;DR: the only difference between a shout of “Gah! MEN!” from an irked woman and a shout of “Gah! Goyim!” from an irked Jew is the specific language being used.

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I would use my usual “Christ , what an asshole” but it sure seems like Christ isn’t listening.

English needs a word for people who claim to be Christian but act against Christian principles. I propose “Perdudian” (made up) or perhaps “Perduame” (a contraction for “lost soul” in French.)

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The whole concept of asking God to bless oneself, and curse ones enemies has always struck me as a logical contradiction. “Dear God, you made me, and you made him, and I petition you to destroy what you’ve made in his case, and upgrade what you’ve made in my case, because I know what you’d want and he doesn’t.”

The whole concept isn’t even self consistent on its own terms, never mind the the whole thing about there being one single creater who makes everything happen.

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I’ve seen some argument from conservative Christians that the only proper English translation for the Bible is the King James version because that was written in “original” English (what we have now is some debased version of the language, apparently). Basically they don’t want to admit that anything, even languages, evolve, so they’ve decided that “English” only came about when Norman French was introduced to whatever they think was spoken in England before that, thereby - “poof” - creating “English” (never mind that this happened long before King James and is quite different from the language at that time). They want a text that’s modern enough to be readable but archaic enough that they can pretend they’re reading the original text, and there’s been enough linguistic drift that they can interpret things as they like (also, it’s the version they grew up on, and have invested all their time in cherrypicking).

I think of American conservative Christians as “Old Testament Christians” - although they’ve really rejected Christianity for their selective text version of the Old Testament, which better supports their worldview and prejudices. They love all the smiting, judgement, “eye for an eye,” God giving permission to wage war, rape and murder, racism (though they have to stretch things a bit), homophobia, subjugation of women, etc. of those older texts, but are deeply uncomfortable with the pacifism, communalism, lack of judgement, and well, love of the newer texts (to the point where those ideas get labeled “unChristian,” ironically).

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I’m going to say this is a silly scandal, as that Bible verse has been used politically for most of US’s history. The worst thing you can say is he re-used a joke that was old when this nation was born.

30 minutes of Google Books research gives me: http://plover.net/~agarvin/days-be-few/

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I notice that you have not, in fact, answered my point; just sought to deflect it by arguing that the word “goyim” isn’t derogatory. If so, why use a Hebrew word as the only Hebrew word in an English sentence? There is a polite Romance word, “gentile”, which is available.
I know this can be a tricky area. I am, for instance (and despite a complete lack of interest in the game) a Tottenham Hotspur supporter by accident of place of birth and upbringing; the nickname given by other clubs to its supporters is well known, and Tottenham supporters appropriated it to themselves - only to be told recently that they could no longer use it under public order laws. We will have to differ; I consider your post tendentious, you and at least one other person disagree. However, I do at least have the OED on my side.

Yeah, free will rather screws with both the idea of intercessory prayer and a divine plan. Which are also contradictory of each other - surely intercessory prayer is just asking for an “opt out” of the divine plan (which is the best of all possible outcomes, even if you can’t see it yet). But if there really were a divine plan that encompasses all of creation, all intercessory prayer should be met with either two responses: “No” or “Sure, I was going to do that anyways.” But people want to feel like they have control over the uncontrollable things that happen, and feel comforted when those uncontrollable things turn out to be bad. Which leaves us with the belief system of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who believes that God remote controls murderers into mass-murdering to make a point to feminists and civil rights activists.

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Careful. Soon “men” will be un-PC and we’ll have to use “male person”, till that goes south too. What next, “Testicular-American”?

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