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CharlesXII, blogging a chapter-by-chapter readthrough of Christian Nation
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:13 PM Author: drab double fault Mentioned possibly doing this a few weeks ago and there was a little interest, so I thought I may as well. It's a 180 hilarious book to read.
There are 21 chapters and I'll try to get through at least a chapter a day. It's a pretty typical-length novel of about 300 pages.
To reach new entries quickly, you can search using the [CXN-0] tag, with the number representing the entry.
We'll start off with the basics before diving into the story:
-Christian Nation is a dystopia novel published in 2013, written by Frederic C. Rich, a partner at Sullivan and Cromwell. His biography on the book's website is lulzy:
http://www.readchristiannation.com/author/
FWIW, Rich grew up Catholic and now identifies as very not Catholic.
-The book is about an America where Sarah Palin becomes president after the 2008 election and within a decade America is a totalitarian evangelical dictatorship. The tagline is "It Could Happen Here..." though this is hard to read on the book's badly-designed cover (http://www.amazon.com/Christian-Nation-Frederic-C-Rich/dp/0393240118)
-Some of the blurbs on the back:
"Rich's Christian Nation is more than a 'what if'- as the 'theocratic program' unfolds, our usual 'So what?' regarding fundamentalism of any variety becomes the real danger. Pay attention. What's at stake is the heart and soul of American democracy." -James Kowalski, dean of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. Naturally, that's an Episcopal Church.
"This riveting novel should join Sinclar Lewis's It Can't Happen Here as an American classic... a chain letter for liberty." -Nadine Strosser, former ACLU president
"Mr. Rich's narrative brings the issues of religion and politics in American into relational and personal view. His is a compelling and timely parable for our time." -Rev. Robert Allan Hill, professor of New Testament theology at Boston University
-My book is signed by Chuck Klosterman, because I went to a book signing he was doing on a whim and didn't have one of his books handy (and wasn't gonna buy his new one). He appreciated the gesture.
We'll get started on the next post. |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:59 PM Author: bonkers bronze space ""This riveting novel should join Sinclar Lewis's It Can't Happen Here as an American classic... a chain letter for liberty." -Nadine Strosser, former ACLU president" i believe she meant a chain email, not chain letter FW: FW: FW: FW: RE: FW: RE: RE: FW: FORWARD ON IF YOU BELIEVE IN LIBERTY |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 8:16 AM Author: drab double fault (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28059809) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:07 AM Author: 180 filthy point This guy is so fucking full of himself. Which would probably be OK, if he wasn't a complete ignoramus, as you make clear in this thread. Look at this blurb he wrote about himself. Politics AND Philosophy AND Law--OH WHAT A POLYMATH!
"Frederic C. Rich is a polymath, who studied politics and policy at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and pursued graduate work in moral philosophy as a Keasbey Scholar at King’s College, Cambridge. Although practicing as an international lawyer for the past 30 years, his works over that time include the music and libretto for the world’s first environmental oratorio, a classroom chart of American history (published by the Daily Telegraph in the UK), and articles on subjects as diverse as the Olympic Games and garden history." |
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Date: November 14th, 2016 1:01 AM Author: racy twinkling uncleanness forum finally started this thread. a billion 180s to you (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#31903385) |
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Date: November 14th, 2016 7:39 PM Author: drab double fault 180 thank you (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#31909067) |
Date: June 6th, 2015 11:15 PM Author: infuriating salmon home french chef (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058263) |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:24 PM Author: drab double fault [CXN-1]
The book begins with an Author's Note:
"This novel is a work of speculative fiction. The speculation is about one possible course of American history had the McCain/Palin campaign won the 2008...All statements and actions of actual public figures and organizations following election night 2008 are the product of the author's imagination; the appearance of such statements and actions in a work of fiction does not constitute an assertion that such person or entity would speak or act in that way in those circumstances."
This is pretty funny, because this note is blatant ass-covering to get around the fact that Rich totally thinks this is how Christians would act given the opportunity.
It also gives the standard "original characters aren't based on anybody" line, and then he quotes Evelyn Waugh: "I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they." This mostly amuses me because Waugh was a pretty serious churchmo.
-The introductory quote is a gem, taken from Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization:
"Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness."
Of course, Durant was a little more nuanced (he saw himself as a "reluctant" atheist), as Rich has shorn off the second half of the quote:
"Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and—after some hesitation—the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization." |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:40 PM Author: infuriating salmon home french chef Lol at the dishonesty with that quote. TY for your PUBLIC SERVICE (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058431) |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:42 PM Author: bonkers bronze space hypo: an associate presents him with a one sentence blurb from a case to make a point. he then learns that the point is eviscerated by the next few sentences in the case, but the associate did not provide them. what happens to the associate (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058441) |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:50 PM Author: infuriating salmon home french chef (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058497) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 2:35 AM Author: emerald dilemma regret (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28059366) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 9:46 PM Author: pale impressive degenerate (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28072496) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 11:26 PM Author: aphrodisiac coiffed scourge upon the earth patrolman (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28082239) |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:27 PM Author: Odious orange masturbator already a great thread (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058349) |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:39 PM Author: infuriating salmon home french chef (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058424) |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:45 PM Author: Curious saffron center (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058465) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 2:36 AM Author: emerald dilemma regret (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28059367) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 8:20 AM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28059817) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 9:20 PM Author: Territorial Jap (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28072265) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 11:27 PM Author: aphrodisiac coiffed scourge upon the earth patrolman (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28082243) |
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Date: November 9th, 2021 8:32 AM Author: violent sneaky criminal site (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#43410497) |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:36 PM Author: Clear windowlicker hell how can you read tha tshit? it's like being forced to wade through screed after screed on salon.com (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058410) |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:42 PM Author: Know-it-all Arousing Ticket Booth I am an atheist reptile, and this book is great because it presents an alternative reality where conservaheroes actually defeat the shitlibs (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058438) |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:43 PM Author: Rough-skinned nibblets (Kim Philby) (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058445) |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:43 PM Author: bonkers bronze space would u say it's comparable to reading a book written from the nazis' POV about the allied forces winning wwii (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058456) |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:45 PM Author: Know-it-all Arousing Ticket Booth its comparable in the sense that Hitler clearly did not understand how Americans and British people actually think and operate, and likewise the author of this book clearly does not understand how conservatives actually think and operate (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058468) |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:46 PM Author: bonkers bronze space damn where's that study posted a couple of years ago that shows that reptiles understand libs far better than libs understand reptiles (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058477) |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:52 PM Author: Lavender sick stage dysfunction http://www.businessinsider.com.au/whos-better-at-pretending-to-be-the-other-side-conservatives-or-liberals-2012-5 (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058505) |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:56 PM Author: bonkers bronze space bingo, ty (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058541) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:49 AM Author: Swashbuckling Slap-happy Travel Guidebook Trust Fund not sure if this was it, but it sounds close and cites haidt:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0050092 |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:49 PM Author: infuriating salmon home french chef (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058495) |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:53 PM Author: Rough-skinned nibblets which is why it's so easy to spot lib fraud "bias incidents" (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058512) |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:56 PM Author: Odious orange masturbator And then the cashier said, "You're a demon! You're buying this pornographic magazine because you worship the devil!" (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058540) |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:58 PM Author: Lavender sick stage dysfunction It's insane. I've been a multicult liberal my entire life and I'm basically an XO reptile because modern liberals are solipsistic retards who are ironically incapable of understanding any other culture in the world besides their own. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058559) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:00 AM Author: bonkers bronze space hey. HEY. *stamps foot* they don't have to tolerate intolerance. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058567) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:00 AM Author: infuriating salmon home french chef (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058571) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:01 AM Author: Odious orange masturbator (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058589) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:00 AM Author: infuriating salmon home french chef Same here brother. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058568) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:01 AM Author: Odious orange masturbator you should check out http://notalwaysright.com/ , it has a metric assload of shit_that_didnt_happen.txt with fundie cashiers, waitresses, customers, etc (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058585) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:01 AM Author: frozen spruce spot son of senegal tbf, it sounds like you're probably an xo reptile because you let XO cloud your perceptions of reality (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058587) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:22 AM Author: Disturbing carnelian rehab hunting ground (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28084369) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:44 AM Author: Clear windowlicker hell (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058854) |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:41 PM Author: bonkers bronze space 180 have been looking forward to this (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058433) |
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Date: June 6th, 2015 11:43 PM Author: Rough-skinned nibblets Cannae wait for the pwnage of this thread (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058450) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:05 AM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 1: What They Said They Would Do [CXN-2]
CHAPTER 1: What They Said They Would Do
-As we've already seen, Rich likes quoting other people, so it's no surprise the first chapter starts with him quoting two other authors. First, Czech writer Milan Kundera: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Ominous!
The second quote really shows how weighty he thinks this all is. It's from Hannah Arendt:
"Would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones."
This isn't a terrible pick for a quote, because a theme that Rich is going to RELENTLESSLY hammer home is the idea that "we were warned" all this could take place, in the sense that there are some extreme Christians out there who say pretty nutso stuff. Therefore, their attempt to establish a totalitarian dictatorship shouldn't be a shocker.
-And with that, we're FINALLY into Rich's own fictive writing. The narrator quickly establishes that this is a first-person story being written about events many years in the past. It's being typed on an IBM Selectric II typewriter, "disconnected and without memory, immune from the insatiable probings of the Purity Web, and thus the ultimate contraband." Yeah, the Christians have banned typewriters.
-Rich quickly has the narrator (who isn't named yet) dump some backstory for us:
"I was a lawyer and then a fighter for the secular side in the Holy War that ended in 2020 following the siege of Manhattan. Like so many others, I earned my release from three years of rehabilitation on Governors Island by accepting Jesus Christ as my savior. For the past five years I have lived as a free citizen of the Christian Nation. This is the only truth I have allowed myself... I am no longer chained in my cell, but for five years I have been bound even more firmly by the fifty commandments of The Blessing and the suffocating surveillance of the Purity Web. The cloak of collective righteousness lies heavy on the land."
Hoo boy. Got all that? If you're confused, our narrator is happy to suggest it's your fault, because he is a LEGAL SCHOLAR:
"Before, I was a lawyer. I was good with words. I was organized. I was not, frankly, much interested in my feelings, although I was pretty good at telling a story."
-The narrator is being helped by some bro named Adam who got him the typewriter and supplies him with illegal contraband research materials. The point of these banned materials? "They did what they said they would do." He quotes some pamphlet titled "Christian Political Action" from 2006 which declares that once America has a Christian majority, we will ban "satanic churches," get rid of porno, and take away gay rights. "Pluralism will be seen as immoral and evil."
As it happens, this is a real quote from Gary Potter, a Catholic writer who I can safely say I had never heard of before writing this review.
-The narrator expresses regrets that he didn't act back when he was a first-year biglaw associate in 2005.
"Did I know anything about Brownback, Palin, Bachmann, DeMint, Santorum, Coburn, or Perry?"
-The narrator, despite talking about his own Catholic upbringing in New Jersey, has a very funny line showing he quite possibly hasn't met anybody who doesn't live in the New York metro area:
"I knew vaguely that out there somewhere in America, in an America that was to me a dimly understood foreign land, there existed people - lots of people - who called themselves "born again" or "evangelical.""
-He gives a brief definition of two key movements that will drive the story, Dominionism and Reconstructionism. Dominionisim holds that Christians must work to establish Christian rule here on Earth prior to Christ's return. Reconstructionism is basically an extremist fundamentalist philosophy pushed by Rousas Rushdoony calling for a theocracy operating in accordance with literal biblical law (stoning gays and all).
Rich makes an ominous reference to how these ideas had "influenced" the Wasilla Assembly of God church in Wasilla, Alaska.
-The narrator finally gives us his name after 5 pages: Greg. Good to meet you Greg.
-He laments not listening to his friend, Sanjay, who saw all this coming. We're going to be seeing a loooooot of that guy.
-As Greg types, he is enraptured by the musical hum of the typewriter, noting that all secular music has been BANNED since the time he was interned at Governor's Island. This apparently includes the music of Bach, who mostly wrote church music.
-Greg has PTSD flashbacks to the war:
"I suddenly remember the face of the redheaded kid I killed with a grenade. He ran at my position in Battery Park, alone, screaming, his face twisted in hate. I couldn't hear him, but his mouth suggested, 'Die faggot.' They called everyone left in Manhattan 'faggot.' He exploded in a fine red mist."
I am pretty sure frag grenades do not literally make you disintegrate, but I could be wrong.
-Greg laments that the world similarly didn't listen to Mein Kampf.
He also references Bin Laden giving warnings of his ideology before 9/11, and says we were "surprised when he did what he said he would do."
Okay, I'm calling bullshit on that. Nobody was surprised that Al Qaeda was willing to launch a big terrorist attack. We were just shocked they were able to pull it off. That's totally different. We weren't deliberately letting known Al Qaeda bros fly on planes just because.
...And that's Chapter 1. One more chapter to go, and then we start the juicy historical narrative. |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:11 AM Author: Curious saffron center 180 (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058660) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:13 AM Author: bonkers bronze space "They called everyone left in Manhattan 'faggot.'" holy shit xo takes over america YNY we're off to a GREAT start
"'He exploded in a fine red mist.' I am pretty sure frag grenades do not literally make you disintegrate, but I could be wrong." it's because he lifted that imagery from any one of a thousand bad war-themed works of fiction/science fiction written by people who don't really know what grenades do |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:22 AM Author: infuriating salmon home french chef (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058735) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 9:28 AM Author: dark box office digit ratio oh what an insight into lawyers, from a lawyer himself! (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28059888) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:03 AM Author: 180 filthy point Shit like this and the misquoting in the intro make this dude seem like a complete mental midget:
"As Greg types, he is enraptured by the musical hum of the typewriter, noting that all secular music has been BANNED since the time he was interned at Governor's Island. This apparently includes the music of Bach, who mostly wrote church music. " |
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Date: June 28th, 2015 9:01 AM Author: Gaped gaping halford fucking amazing already (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28215589) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:06 AM Author: insecure navy coffee pot what a surprise, a thread of reptiles being whiny faggots. Waaah! The lib biglawyer is caricaturing us!!!111 (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058636) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:08 AM Author: drab double fault Bro sorry to burst your bubble but this is more of a comedy thread than anything. This book becomes incredibly funny to read by the 60% mark or so. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058651) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:11 AM Author: infuriating salmon home french chef (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058664) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:11 AM Author: bonkers bronze space everyone itt is loling at the book but ty for providing further confirmation of the study posted upthread (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058666) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:15 AM Author: Curious saffron center (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058696) |
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Date: June 27th, 2021 10:41 PM Author: lemon motley goyim (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#42696472) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:32 AM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 2: Indian Lake [CXN-3]
Second chapter is pretty short, so I think I'll do it as well on the first day/
CHAPTER 2: Indian Lake
-The quote this time is from Proust: "An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself."
I suppose the quote is kind of relevant, since Greg is still trying to dredge up his memories, but I also suspect Rich is just trying to signal that he's read Proust.
-Greg is apparently near Indian Lake (presumably the one in New York, up in the Adirondacks).
-More backstory! This is the first time Greg has left New York City in ten years, apparently. For the past five years he has worked in the "Christian Nation Archives in New York," formerly NYU's Bobst Library. The old libraries are closed, "of course," but they didn't destroy all the books.
-Greg's job is as an "indexer," going through all the books and reviewing their contents to determine if they can be preserved or must be destroyed. He also retrieves books requested by officials and scholars whose research has been approved by the Church of God in America, abbreviated as COGA. COGA apparently controls all academic and cultural enterprises.
-Greg works for COGA in part because as a graduate of Governor's Island he is under suspicion. He might not REALLY be a Christian believer. Fortunately Greg has those stoopid Christians fooled.
-Greg was able to escape from the city after Adam began working in the same department six months prior. Adam is a black guy, and before the war he was lay professor of theology at the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea (Yep, it's Episcopal). Adam convinces Greg that his story MUST be told, because he was friends with the more-important Sanjay.
-Greg takes him on a trip to an inn in upstate New York. There, they hand over their "Devices" to the innkeeper, who is in on the plot. Apparently, Greg was required to carry his Device at all times, and despite that requirement they didn't do anything to make it irremovable. You know, like we do with modern criminals all the time.
-Adam is apparently with a movement called Free Minds, though he can't so much as say its name because the Purity Web is an all-seeing eye that is analyzing ALL forms of communication, apparently including talking.
-Greg thinks back again to nine years ago, when he was taken as a POW following the assault on Manhattan. He and about six thousand other "secular fighters" were taken to Governor's Island. He apparently had a "pencil-thin" hole in his skull taken out by a whizzing bullet but this was a minor injury. He remembers passing by "seventeen acres" of bodies. I was going to call bullshit on that, but Battery Park is apparently 25 acres, so I guess it really is possible if they just filled every open space in the park with a body.
-"When I closed my eyes, I daydreamed that I was an African deep in the hold of a slave ship. Shackled. The sound of waves slapping against the hull. Silent stinking African bodies my companion and only comfort."
-Greg has survivor guilt, as he correctly deduces he had no business surviving the war:
"I, a corporate lawyer with no aptitude for violence, stood up and shot at a company of charging US Marines."
The next chapter will finally take us back to the beginning. Specifically, the 90s. |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:46 AM Author: bonkers bronze space he could be burned at the sjw stake for that slave ship bit if they got wind of it (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058865) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:47 AM Author: infuriating salmon home french chef (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058868) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:47 AM Author: drab double fault I mostly just love that he finds stinking African bodies in cramped quarters to be comforting. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058871) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:52 AM Author: bonkers bronze space seems very intellectual of him (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058900) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 12:51 AM Author: Odious orange masturbator lol at all the projection in this book. this is already funny but can't wait for the rest, ty for your service (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28058896) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 1:40 AM Author: infuriating salmon home french chef (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28059118) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 9:13 AM Author: Rough-skinned nibblets (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28059861) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 9:26 AM Author: dark box office digit ratio so this is basically the shitlib response to the "Left Behind" series. awesome. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28059883) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 9:30 AM Author: Rough-skinned nibblets uh Left Behind wasn't anti-shitlib, really. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28059893) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 9:35 AM Author: drab double fault It's worth noting that all the heroes in Left Behind are non-believers who weren't raptured.
Though yeah it's still utterly terrible. |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 9:35 AM Author: Rough-skinned nibblets WTF, Left Behind is 180 (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28059906) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 11:34 AM Author: bonkers bronze space had the exact same thought (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28060347) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 10:20 AM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 3: Sanjay [CXN-4]
CHAPTER 3: Sanjay
-I forgot to mention that each chapter has a date with it. The first two chapters were in 2029; now we're back in 1998.
-Our quotes for this chapter are both from Confucius:
"Sincerity becomes apparent. From being apparent, it becomes manifest. From being manifest, it becomes brilliant. Brilliant, it affects others. Affecting others, they are changed by it. Changed by it, they are transformed. It is only he who is possessed of the most complete sincerity that can exist under heaven, who can transform."
"It is characteristic of the most entire sincerity to be able to foreknow."
-Both of the above quotes are used in relation to Sanjay, the narrator's best friend and one of the central characters in this story. I won't spoil everything, but one of the funnier broad parts of this book is that while the whole point is to shit on religion, Sanjay himself is something of a Christ figure. Yeah.
-"For the first time in a long while, I allow mself to think about my best friend, and the finest person I ever knew, Sanjay Sharma."
-Greg met Sanjay one his first day of college in 1998, when they were freshman roommates at Princeton...what do you know, Frederic Rich went to Princeton too! What a coincidence!
-Greg reflects on how his parents were a tad raaaacist:
"I could tell that my parents had doutbs. Not that they were prone to racial prejudice, but aristocratic Indians were simply outside the scope of their experience. Sanjay's mother wore a beautiful purple sari. His father's English tweeds seemed not very practical for hauling in boxes from the Land Rover parked outside. We quickly learned that this task was delegated to a darker-skinned Indian man introduced only as 'our helper.'"
-Greg hits it off with Sanjay because he has the same favorite brands of Jeans, polos, and sneakers.
-Greg mentions that this Sanjay was the same one who 14 years later "I worked with, fought with, and then did not die with."
-Sanjay was raised in America and has no accent, but some remnant of his origins remains:
"He retained a ghostly trace of the Indian head wobble and a more pronounced shadow of the typical Indian mannerism in which the head is slightly cocked to one side when considering a question."
-Greg also may have an erotic attraction to Sanjay:
"He had an unusual gaze that was completely attentive. His eyes were a deep warm amniotic brown. and these soft liquid eyes stared out at you as if you were the focus of his world...his attention was tender, neither judgmental nor threatening. I don't know anyone who ever met him who was not affected by the way he looked at them... It didn't hurt, of course that unless someone was the type who could never see beauty in a person of another race, people usually thought that Sanjay was one of the most handsome men they had ever seen. Over the years a great deal of airtime was devoted by the media to the subject of Sanjay's extraordinary face... His skin was the color of warm polished cinnamon except below the perfectly defined edge of his beard, where a fine pixilated [sic] black shadow was visible even though he was always clean shaven... His hair was a black so luminous that all other colors were visibly collected up in each strand."
Jesus, just suck his dick already.
-Sanjay's parents urged him to be American, so naturally, Greg notes, he started yoga at ten, and by 13 had "mastered the full Ashtanga series of yoga poses." I know nothing about yoga so I don't know if that's just descriptive or suppose to be REALLY IMPRESSIVE or something.
-It's pretty strange that Sanjay is so tender and perfect, because he also is very aspie. Greg recounts a babe at Princeton asking Sanjay out for drinks. His reply:
"I hope you will forgive me, Patricia, but your conversation, although entertaining, I generally do not find intellectually stimulating. It may be selfish of me, but tonight I am looking to be intellectually stimulated, not simply entertained."
Greg explains that you can't tell people that sort of thing and Sanjay is all like "But it is absolutely true." Later he learns that minor falsehoods are useful for "social lubrication," but he was overall a "natural truth teller."
-This truth-telling ability made him "spectacular" on TV and as genius as the head of (it's actually called this) Theocracy Watch.
-But Sanjay's beautiful perfect has a dark side, you see, because it makes Christians think he is the Antichrist. No, really!:
"For our fundamentalist opponents, this perfect face was evidence of dark forces at work. This was because the Antichrist, according to prophecy, would take the form of a handsome young man. Sanjay was the popular champion standing against the establishment of the Godly Kingdom. The fact that he was also Indian (which they always referred to as 'pagan'), and gay, certainly seemed to them to complete the satanic profile."
-Apparently Sarah Palin herself is responsible for starting the idea that Sanjay's beauty = Antichrist. Yeah.
-Sanjay tells Greg he's gay the first day they met. Greg confesses he's a little worried at first this may impair his social life:
"To my shame, I felt compelled to have a very public fling with a cute girl in the next entryway to ensure there would be no roome for speculation about my own sexual preference."
-Greg wonders why Sanjay chose him for his "most intense and long-lasting friendship," when he was so charismatic and well-liked he could have chosen anybody:
"No one - neither the occasional boyfriend of his nor my girlfriend Emilie, with whom I lived for six painful years - changed that. Ultimately, that is. Emilie came close."
And with that, EMILIE enters the stage! We'll be seeing a lot more of her. I'm almost certain that Emilie is a stand-in for some ex of Rich's, because he is going to pile some absolutely gratuitous hatred on this woman for the entire first half of the book. Don't feel bad, though, as she's an i-banker supershrew.
I'll break here and do the next part in a follow-up post. |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 10:27 AM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse Lol'ing, the author is shameless. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28060069) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 10:36 AM Author: Hairraiser Pozpig Black Woman I'm trying to understand what is going on. A gay lawyer wrote a book about not being gay, but having gay impulses and fighting a violent war against Christians who have slaughtered non believers leaving MFH as the sole hold out of the sane? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28060101) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 10:37 AM Author: Rough-skinned nibblets close enough (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28060105) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 11:32 AM Author: Aggressive marvelous death wish range jfc (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28060338) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:15 AM Author: 180 filthy point LOL, Princeton should take legal action. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28084350) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:20 AM Author: 180 filthy point lolling so hard at his "friendship" with gay indian TBF Sanjay (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28084363) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:21 AM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie wtf, bros helping bros isnt gay at all (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28084368) |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 11:58 PM Author: Gaped gaping halford "The Indian head wobble" would be a decent moniker (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28227729) |
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Date: November 5th, 2021 12:23 AM Author: lemon motley goyim Extremely racist in 2021. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#43389914) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 10:50 AM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 3 PART 2 [CXN-5]
Chapter 3, continued:
-Greg reflects that he has one power Sanjay didn't: a sort of "extreme situational awareness" that borders on clairvoyance, which sometimes bubbles up. His explanation of how he first realized this is hilarious. You see, he was preparing for his first middle school football game, when the coach called them all together before hand for a prayer which he recited in a "flat Midwestern accent." The prayer:
"Lord as we prepare to join the field of battle, we ask you for strength, we ask you to lead us to victory. Victory in your name, and in the name of you son, Je-sus. Help us to vanquish our foe, to defeat our enemy, to ...., you know, to defeat evil. Take the field with us, Je-sus. Well, you know. Screw the other bastards. Amen." [An aside: I never never heard a prayer like this in my life. Also, Midwesterners do not pronounce Jesus that way]
"And you know what happened then, San? Suddenly in my minds' eye I was lookign down at the locker room from somewhere up in the air, looking down on twenty scrawny teenagers, dressed ridiculously, on their knees, invoking the personal intervention of the deity - the deity responsible for the spinning galaxies and the quantum flux - to take their side in a pissant football game. I had absolute situational clarity. I didn't have the vocabulary at the time to articulate it, but I completely and profoundly understood what I was seeing. I felt = so strongly that I had trouble keeping my composure - the absurdity, futility, humanity, and pathos of the moment. I... Let's just say I didn't play very well that day."
-"And by the way, although I thought I saw things clearly at the time, it was only much later that I finally understood that about half of those teenagers had earnestly adjusted their cosmology to accept that God was quite literally on their side."
-Sanjay teaches Greg yoga and explains the philosophy of it. Yoga isn't a religion, you see, but it also isn't purely physical. Rather, it is an external "cleansing" practice that in turn lay the groundwork for mental practices, such as self-awareness and virtue. Greg asks some dumb questions, and Sanjay laughs, but no worries: "Sanjay laughed in a way that never gave you the sense that he was laughing AT you." Well, that is a relief.
-Yoga's final end result is apparently achieving Samadhi, which is basically nirvana. Sanjay says he never expects to reach it, and Greg asks why. This sets up an amusing THEOLOGICAL SMACKDOWN:
"Yoga, G, is not about striving. For me, desiring Samadhi would be wrong - as wrong as being good only because you desire the eternal reward of heaven or merely wish to avoid the punishment of hell." Ohhhh snap.
-Greg wishes he were as awesome as Sanjay, with his deep yoga meditations and inner beauty: "As a young man, I harbored a secret fear that I was a superficial person whose shallowness was well disguised by a glib cleverness. But I don't think that now." Well good for you Greg.
-"I don't want to write about college. Princeton itself was a kind of nirvana, but like all temporal and physical varieties of paradise, it passed quickly."
-After Princeton, he decides to go to law school, and gives a great justification:
"My choice to go to law school did show a latent self-awareness. I couldn't have articulated it at the time, but I was right to intuit that I would be a good lawyer. I am a linear organized thinker, comfortable with abstraction and with a knack for insight. Good with words, and disciplined when I need to be. Of course, law school was also a safe choice. So safe as to be almost a non-choice. So like me at the time. Maintaining options, taking few risks."
-Sanjay the Perfect isn't like that, though. Even though he could get into Harvard Medical School, he tells his father that he is NOT ambitious and thinks ambition is wrong. His father apparently dislikes the yoga stuff.
-Despite not being ambitious, Sanjay goes and becomes spectacularly wealthy. By the time Greg graduates law school ("with seven years of loans from tertiary and graduate education"), Sanjay is estimated to be worth $100 million.
-So, what made Sanjay so rich, so fast? Well, he founded a social networking website! It's called You And I, and it's special because...well, it's not totally clear.
"All relationships," Sanjay says, "are bilateral. A social network of multiple individuals - a virtual community - is necessarily superficial. The other sites have it all wrong. The measure of success is not how many online friends or contacts you have, but the quality of the relationship you have with each individual. You And I is about deepening the online contact between two people. It is not a dating site. These are not romantic relationships. It is not necessarily even about friendship. It is about deep engagement with another mind and another character. And, most importantly, it does not make the mistake of all the other sites that base their networks on shared experience or shared interest. Zuckerberg has it all wrong, feeding the Facebook friending fetish with people who went to the same schools, grew up in the same town, or work at the same company .Relationships based on affinity are essentially narcissistic - it is like looking in a mirror."
A few things: 1. When is this taking place? If Sanjay started school in 1998, he was the class of 2002. By 2005, he's worth $100 million, so his site is already well off the ground. Facebook was only created in February 2004 and took over a year to really take off. This reference to Zuck seems like a big anachronism.
2. Sanjay's description, as far as I can tell, suggests that it's a social network that basically matches you with randos. That sounds like a pretty crappy social network that would not be successful.
-Oh, but is it ever. How does it take off? Well, it gets a cult following among thousands of Manhattan yogis.
"It was, they claimed, the only 'authentic' online experience, bucking the very essential wired society by providing depth not breadth, an dsubstance instead of spectacle [How? This is not really explained]. In an early interview, making an analogy to the slow food movement, Sanjay called his site the 'slow web.' By 2004, it had reached a million members."
-Despite all this success, Sanjay does no advertising and the site has no revenues. It is supported entirely by donations. Despite this, he gets offered $80 million to sell it. He refuses, for the time being. |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 10:53 AM Author: Rough-skinned nibblets holy fuck this is dumb
also, link to your new moniker's source? |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 10:59 AM Author: drab double fault I can't remember the thread. The author of some work of inane shitlibbery was either getting or already had a masters in "resisting genocide" at USC. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28060206) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 11:05 AM Author: Odious orange masturbator Pretty weird to associate Manhattan, a port city and financial center, with gift economies and radical selflessness. Does he also claim that rural white Bibletowns are libertarian (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28060227) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 11:07 AM Author: drab double fault Oh we will be going on a fun journey to rural white Bibleland soon enough, dear swordmo. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28060242) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 11:05 AM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie lol cult following among MFH SHREWS and GAYS (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28060235) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 11:45 AM Author: bonkers bronze space when xo says things like OH THE CULTURE, if any of you ever finds yourself wondering what that's all about, just imagine this guy sitting at a brunch with miniscule portions of food smugly waxing poetic about the super authentic yoga class he went to as three listeners greedily devour the verbal scraps of his oh-so-unique and worldly experience. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28060394) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:29 AM Author: 180 filthy point there's a whole city beyond MFH and Williamsburg (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28084400) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 4:36 PM Author: Provocative high-end mediation lol so each user voluntarily donates an average of $100 each and he's such a humanitarian he has no problem taking it? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28062182) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 2:49 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse Just lol at how badly the author wants you to think he's smart, between being described as a "polymath" on his author bio page and the comically pretentious quotes punctuating shitty fiction writing. It's also a good reminder that the self appointed intellectual elite have an incredibly narrow world view and inability to understand others. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28061608) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 3:11 PM Author: Frum cracking elastic band (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28061708) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 3:12 PM Author: infuriating salmon home french chef Polymath is one of those words where anyone who describes themselves as one almost certainly isn't. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28061713) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 3:17 AM Author: emerald dilemma regret (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28083764) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 5:26 PM Author: bonkers bronze space (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28062519) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:31 AM Author: 180 filthy point bro, he studied politics AND philosophy AND law! if that isn't polymathy, i don't know what is! (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28084406) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 3:12 PM Author: Frum cracking elastic band LITERALLY the most entertaining book report I've ever read. LOL at how quickly it became clear this guy was gay from his Sanjay description. OH WHAT A SCHOLARLY SWEET from a totally not self-important author. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28061714) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 8:20 PM Author: infuriating salmon home french chef (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28071660) |
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Date: July 4th, 2015 1:07 AM Author: Dull Tripping Heaven (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28255294) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 3:59 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 4: Tomorrow Belongs To Me [CXN-6]
CHAPTER 4: Tomorrow Belongs To Me
-We're jumping forward to 2005 now, and we open with no less than FOUR different quotes, all on a similar theme:
"I don't see how you can be President... without a relationship with the Lord." -George w. Bush, 2005
"The second coming of Christ is everything that I'm living for. And I hope the Rapture comes tomorrow." -Tom DeLay, 2007
"America has no King but Jesus." -John Ashcroft, 2004
"The Republican Party of Texas affirms that the United States of America is a Christian Nation." -Republican Party of Texas platform, 2004
-Greg has left law school and is now a biglawyer. Can you feel the excitement?:
"Several months after starting work at a law firm, I handled the closing of an initial public offering for a company that previously had been taken private by a private equity firm, entered Chapter 11 when it could not service the debt it incurred to fund its own acquisition, was again bought and re-leveraged by a different set of private equity firms, and was then being re-sold to the public. Nothing about that seemed to me to be unusual or untoward...What I thought was that facilitating the free flow of capital to where it was needed was a necessary and an even noble calling. After all, the removal of regulatory impediments to the free flow of capital had led to three consecutive economic booms, freed billions in emerging markets from poverty... and created the glamorous world city, of unprecedented energy and cultural vigor, that I enjoyed. So when I, with unbecoming self-importance, cleared the deal to close - harvesting $7 billion in cash from the public markets for the private equity firms that were our clients - I felt very good about my day."
That's an actual paragraph there.
-While working on this closing, Greg meets Emilie Craig, a woman from the small-town Midwest who is a graduate of Tuck Business School who was starting as a VP at Credit Suisse. Greg can't help but express his loathing:
"When I close my eyes, I cannot see her twenty-five-year-old face, but I do hear her twenty-five-year-old voice before it acquired the strain and exasperated edginess that later caused me such pain."
Given that he can never write about Emilie without hating on her, it's hard to see why Greg liked her in the first place. Apparently it's because their status as the most junior members of their respective deal teams caused an "easy camaraderie." Also, he makes fun of how her name is spelled (a Francophile father is to blame, apparently).
-"Emilie looked great in a suit. At work, she was comfortable with the role of being a strong professional woman, but, like the suit, it was something she put on."
-Greg protests greatly about his vigorous heterosexuality:
"I cannot honestly say [Emilie] had a great gift for friendship. But initially this did not matter, since we were lovers before we were friends. We had sex after our first date. Emilie was a free and uncomplicated lover. For both of us, sex became a critical part of coping with the stress of our new lives... after a few months I convinced myself that I had fallen in love."
-He says Emilie didn't go to biz school because she loved money, but because she was "good with numbers." But then something changes. "She proved to be a chameleon, efficiently absorbing and reflecting the tastes, prejudices, and values of the people whose world she had entered. I did so more slowly and less completely. And therein lay the root of our problem."
-Emilie gets annoyed at how frequently Greg talks to and spends time with Sanjay, and doesn't understand their friendship. For some reason despite being a shallow shrew she doesn't seem to be enraptured by the fact that he's worth over $100 million on top of being superhumanly attractive and charistmatic. Go figure.
-"What does he give you that I can't? I want to be your soul mate." Sorry Emilie, we know there's only one soulmate for Greg the Heterosexual.
-Greg reflects that 2005 was a good year.
"The Wall Street I entered was not the Wall Street that became so reviled following the 2008 financial crisis, with its lethal brew of myopic focus on short-term profits and faith in financial alchemy."
Dude, you were 3 years away from the crash. It ABSOLUTELY was the Wall Street of the crisis. You didn't start in the fucking 60's.
-You guys will probably like this quote on Sullivan and Cromwell (he works at a fictional firm he abbreviates RCD&S, but who are we kidding?):
"At my firm, I found a truly diverse group of men and women...who had risen to the top of their law school classes through extraordinary academic performance and were attracted to the firm by its culture of quality and integrity. And it really was a meritocracy. No one who started in my class of lawyers at the firm had obtained their positions through family or connections."
"In addition to the salary, we got first-class training and great work....and - when entertained by RCD&S partners at their penthouse apartments and perfect country houses - received a glimpse of the life that we too might have."
-Can biglaw partners actually afford NYC penthouses? Aren't those like $20 million? I suppose the elite rainmakers could afford it.
-"The quid pro quo for our provisional access to this rarefied world was total dedication to the firm. The first rules was that the clients were to be treated like gods. Their phone calls and e-mails were to be answered promptly. Their requests and deadlines, no matter how unreasonable were to be met - and met with perfection."
"The sources of stress were manifold. I was often exhausted from lack of sleep. Worse was the uncertainty. You made plans but never knew when a last-minute assignment or crisis would keep you at the office. Your friends quickly became used to empty seats and unused tickets. And for overachievers accustomed to excelling at everything, having memos and drafts come back from senior associates and partners covered with corrections and comments was deeply disturbing."
-I extracted all this from just five pages of the chapter. This could be a long project. |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 4:22 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse oh what a polymath changing the world one private equity deal at a time! (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28062090) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 5:30 PM Author: bonkers bronze space just when i thought he might have run out of different flavors of self-importance to grind into his readers' eyeballs he finds another gear and goes full elevator pitch on me (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28062556) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 5:49 PM Author: drab double fault Just you wait bro. We aren't even 10% into this epic tome. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28062659) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 5:52 PM Author: bonkers bronze space have a feeling this is going to end up being my favorite thread since the one about comments on the volokh conspiracy article re: free speech and the oklahoma SAEs (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28062679) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 9:17 PM Author: Khaki parlour (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28063966) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 7:41 PM Author: Odious orange masturbator I literally never imagined that one day someone would unironically write, and I would read, an actual mashup of Handmaid's Tale and biglaw testimonials aimed at summers. Remix culture is exploring strange new places ITT (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28071412) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 8:17 PM Author: infuriating salmon home french chef (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28071632) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 9:43 PM Author: Frum cracking elastic band holy fuck LOLOLOL (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28072466) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 9:56 PM Author: pale impressive degenerate lol (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28072570) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 10:37 PM Author: bonkers bronze space (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28072876) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:43 AM Author: 180 filthy point (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28084459) |
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Date: July 4th, 2015 1:11 AM Author: Dull Tripping Heaven (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28255307) |
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Date: June 27th, 2021 11:02 PM Author: lemon motley goyim (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#42696589) |
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Date: June 27th, 2021 11:06 PM Author: Comical Fear-inspiring Indirect Expression School Cafeteria (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#42696615) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 4:19 PM Author: Lime tanning salon background story tyft OP (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28062077) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 5:19 PM Author: Khaki parlour (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28062487) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 4:58 PM Author: Stirring indian lodge 180 Ty bro (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28062360) |
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Date: June 7th, 2015 5:03 PM Author: crystalline lodge (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28062389) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 8:15 PM Author: drab double fault Will have the next excerpt up in a bit. Good Lord is it a doozy. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28071622) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 9:16 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 4 PART TWO [CXN-7]
CHAPTER 4 PART TWO -In 2005 Greg, Sanjay, and Emilie all travel out to the wedding of a friend in central Pennsylvania. This is one of my favorite parts of the book and I can’t do it justice without simply quoting it at length. The following is presented unabridged: . “I rented a car, and Sanjay, Emilie, and I drove together to the wedding. These excursions out of the city often gave us a sense of dislocation, a sense that the suburban and rural America of our youths – not so many years before – was changing beyond recognition. “’There it is again,’ said Sanjay. “We had been driving through a sprawling landscape of shopping malls and housing developments, grotesquely ugly beads strung randomly along a strand of four traffic-choked lanes. The cars – windows up cocooning their passengers in air-conditioning on a lovely spring day – mysteriously shuttled among malls even though most seemed to contain exactly the same blend of national chain stores and fast-food outlets [How does he know they’re going mall-to-mall, anyway?]. The rare undeveloped pockets between commercial strips and sprawling housing developments hosted overscale billboards carefully angled toward the slow-moving traffic. Sanjay had noticed a particular billboard advertisement, repeated over and over, that featured a recognizable image of Jesus, looking rather more stern than I was used to, looming over the dome of the capitol building in Washington with the strident message ‘The time is now’ floating above on a banner supported by two angels. It seemed there had always been religious billboards, most of a fairly anodyne variety, announcing, for example, that 'Jesus Saves.' But this seemed different. “’Tomorrow belongs to me,’ I said. “’What?’ asked Emilie. “’The song. That’s what the billboards remind me of. In Cabaret, when the young Nazi starts singing. You know, ‘Fatherland, Fatherland give us a sign…’ I can’t remember the rest. But it ends with ‘Tomorrow belongs to me.' It always gives me the creeps. I mean serious creeps. Not sure why.'" "'You are a sentimental twit.' Emilie had started to pick up all sorts of anglicisms from the British bankers at Credit Suisse, a habit that had started, even then, to annoy me [LOL at how he just constantly heaps hatred on her]. "The wedding was in a suburban 'mega-church' [Suburb of where? Central Pennsylvania has no large cities] - a large gray metal building seating thousands and surrounded by acres of blacktop parking that entombed the fertile soils below that had been farmed for centuries. I had never seen anything like it. It was near the intersection of two state highways, far from any village or town center. Other than a grossly overscaled cross mounted on the roof, the architecture was not at all ecclesiastical. It could have been a factory. The complex included a vast sanctuary with a platform at the front that was more stage than altar, with elaborate theatrical lighting. In another bit of stagecraft, a large crucifix [Don't evangelicals NOT like crucifixes because they emphasize Jesus' death over his resurrection? It's Catholics who like them], which looked to me as though it was made from fiberglass, was suspended by invisible wires, giving the appearance that it hovered over the back of the stage. A rock band was positioned on one side, and a large choir in shiny purple robes was on the other. Enormous video screens were arrayed, stadium-like, around all sides of the room. During the service, a talented producer chose images for the large screens. He projected close-ups of the preacher but frequently interrupted that feed in favor of ecstatic faces from the audience and angelic choir girls who then appeared in flashing superscale all around the room. This clearly was religion as entertainment. It made me remember that so much of the historical success of Christianity was owing to its ability to embrace and incorporate popular culture form all parts of the world and all eras. The pagans are wedded to celebrating the winter solstice? No problem, we'll shift the birthday of Christ to accommodate. [Actually, the leading modern theory for Christmas being on 25 December is that it was pegged to 9 months after the Anunciation, which was believed to fall on 25 March for a variety of religious and cultural reasons]. "I reflect how different this was from the Catholic Church of my childhood, holding fast to the old hymns and refusing to make any expedient accommodation to contemporary sensibilities [an ironic statement, as Greg's childhood would coincide with the years right after Vatican II when everything was in upheaval and they WEREN'T sticking to old hymns]. What we saw that day, in contrast, was religion finely and completely attuned to every nuance and preference of contemporary American popular culture - attuned, that is, in terms of experience and presentation. Content, as we found out, was another thing altogether."
-I think I'll stop there. This passage really needs to stand apart, for it is incredible. |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 9:31 PM Author: canary cocky base (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28072357) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 9:41 PM Author: Odious orange masturbator ps Sanjay was Albert Einstein (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28072448) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 9:48 PM Author: Frum cracking elastic band wow you really get the sense that this self-important biglaw faggot just loathes suburban america, probably because he grew up there and was beaten up constantly (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28072514) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 10:41 PM Author: bonkers bronze space highly credited (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28072906) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 9:50 PM Author: Khaki parlour You really have a special talent for annotating this. I knew you would be great, but you are living up to every high expectation. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28072531) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 10:02 PM Author: infuriating salmon home french chef (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28072603) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 10:40 PM Author: bonkers bronze space (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28072896) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 8:32 AM Author: drab double fault Ty man (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28075024) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 10:01 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 4 PART THREE [CXN-8]
CHAPTER 4 PART THREE
Now that we're past that legendary excerpt, the story can continue.
-Sanjay gets in a fight with the bride's sister, because he mentions how his website is popular with yogis and she asks "aren't yoga people, you know, atheists?"
"I mean, yoga is a religion, an atheistic religion [hur hur, stoopid Christians], so that means that yogis don't believe in God. In our church, we believe that yoga is one of the ways that Satan recruits souls."
-Sanjay is legitimately CONFUSED and BAFFLED by this exchange, and goes off researching once they return home
-The chick also says their church doesn't believe in evolution, after Emilie jumps in and asks if they think it's an "illusion."
"We're a Bible-believing church. The Bible is pretty clear about creation. But even if you don't believe the Bible, there are so many problems with evolution that many eminent scientists don't believe it, you know. Surely you understand that much." [Okay, admittedly this part rings pretty true]
-Chick talks about the big FIELD TRIP to Kentucky's Creation Museum. This is an anachronism, as it is 2005 and that museum did not open until 2007.
-Along the way back, Sanjay reads some STUNNING FACTS off his phone [were there smartphones with good internet in 2005? I guess he's a supermillionaire so maybe I shouldn't complain...wait, didn't they rent a car? Sanjay is worth $100 million but doesn't own one?]
"Amazing. Did you know that 84 percent of Americans believe that Jesus is the son of God, 80 percent believe in the Day of Judgment and in miracles, 50 percent believe in angels, and 40 percent believe in the literal truth of the Bible? Fifty-five percent say God created humans in their present form, and only 13 percent believe in evolution without divine guidance."
-Emilie isn't buying it:
"'Impossible,' said Emilie. 'I don't know anybody who believes in angels or who doesn't accept evolution. Who are these people?'" [Didn't Greg say Emilie was from a small town in the Midwest? How does she not know anything about conservative Christians? The rural Midwest is one of the most sincerely religious regions on Earth]
-Sanjay: "The latest Gallup poll says that 25 percent of American describe themselves as evangelicals and 40 percent self-describe as born-again Christians - I had no idea." Seriously?
-Emilie acts like a dismissive snot and asks why we should care about retards and their cosmology. She references Miss South Carolina not knowing that Hungary is a country. The actual Miss South Carolina fail happened in 2007, so this looks like another anachronism. Maybe there's another example I don't know about though.
-Sanjay sets her straight, or tries too:
"Those people are not what I thought fundamentalists were like. We were not in the Deep South or a stereotypical 'red state.' We were in Pennsylvania. And the family. Well, they did not appear to be unreasonable people. But the sister at dinner..."
"'Wasn't that a scream?' Emilie interrupted [that bitch]. 'When she started explaining to you why yoga was satanic... oh my God, it was classic, classic. Sanjay, ear, it's not often that I've seen you at a total loss for words. And she's an accountant. What an idiot. Unbelievable. My head hurts.'"
-Sanjay has a lot of time because running his $100 million company that has no revenue stream besides donations is apparently not a full-time job [Greg actually says it isn't], so he immerses himself in researching radical Christianity. Sanjay's burgeoning obsession starts to make Greg distance himself a bit, a trend Emilie discourages as though she wants him to stop being friends with the guy worth over $100 million.
-Greg ominously states that in 2005, the president, Speaker, and many leading federal officials were born again. Even worse, "forty-two out of a hundred U.S. senators were entirely supportive of the Christian right agenda, holding ratings of 100 percent from the Christian Coalition."
Okay, I need to say something here, because it's going to pop up again and again as we progress through the book. Rich really plays fast and loose with how he's classifying the enemy. Sometimes it's all Christian conservatives, and sometimes it's specifically the born-again evangelical movement. That's super-misleading. A huge proportion of the Christian right ISN'T evangelical, especially among lawmakers:
http://www.pewforum.org/2015/01/05/faith-on-the-hill/
Right there, you can see that in 2005 a whopping FIVE GOP senators were Mormons, who aren't evangelical. Another 11 were Catholics, and only 38 were Protestant, not all of which are evangelicals. Rich is going to blur the lines between evangelicals and non-evangelicals a lot in this book.
-Rich cites other ways radical fundamentalists are infiltrating the US government. He singles out Tom Coburn for favoring the death penalty for abortionists and Jim DeMint for wanting to ban gays and pregnant unmarried women from teaching in schools. He also cites the restrictions on stem cell research [such bans are common in less-religious Europe] and strong US support of Israel.
"We had already been given a preview of what was to follow." |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 10:17 PM Author: Khaki parlour So you are telling me the reason I got dingfagged from biglaw isn't because I am dumb? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28072697) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 10:17 PM Author: infuriating salmon home french chef (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28072701) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 10:49 PM Author: bonkers bronze space (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28072971) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 10:29 PM Author: Bright histrionic therapy What level of cite checking are you doing that you picked up on the Evolution Museum thing? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28081620) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 10:37 PM Author: drab double fault I remembered from my first readthrough that Rich is prone to anachronisms, and I knew the Kentucky museum couldn't be any older than 2004 or so, so I just decided to check when it opened and found it pretty fast. Usually I only do quick searches when he's quoting stuff or citing some specific fact, because as we have seen he has a tendency to be misleading on things. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28081719) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:55 AM Author: 180 filthy point Oh what a linear organized thinker he is! (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28084517) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 11:03 PM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie lol someone on tumblr is presenting commentary from this thread as being from their friends
http://inherentlygloomy.tumblr.com/post/121069124489/from-a-friends-thoughts-on-christian-nation#121069124489 |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 11:45 PM Author: drab double fault They also link to the pieces of evidence that the whole airline Islamophobia thing was faked, and link to the story about New York's "racist" tests that got a bunch of attention here. I wonder what their moniker is.
How'd you find it anyway, assuming you aren't sneakily pushing your own tumblr? |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 11:47 PM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie googled 'frederic rich' and found a link to a tumblr aggregator on the second page (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28073488) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 12:15 AM Author: drab double fault This reminds me that I still have no goddamn clue how tumblr "works," despite seeing it all over. How does one browse tumblr or find stuff that you aren't looking for beforehand? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28073767) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 2:12 AM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie im not even sure what the point of tumblr is to tell you the truth (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28074442) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 4:31 PM Author: House-broken property I messaged him with a throwaway tumblr account and told him to fuck off with his stealing from xo. His tumblr blog is now gone. LJL (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28078515) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 8:47 PM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie LJL
IDENTIFY YOURSELF, I KNOW YOURE READING THIS |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 9:28 PM Author: Clear windowlicker hell Crrrr (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28080943) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 11:30 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 4 PART FOUR [CXN-9]
CHAPTER 4 PART FOUR
Man, what a chapter.
-Greg mentions that in the future, while working for Governor Bloomberg (foreshadowing!), he researches past revolutions and finds that most succeed not because of mass support but because of a disciplined cadre of die-hards to carry the day and sweep everybody along with them. This is important, he says, because the hardcore cadre of the Christian right was already in place by 2005.
"The small band of fanatics, headed by James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and Doug Coe, among others, inspired by Rousas J. Rushdoony and funded by Howard Ahmanson, Jr., had succeeded in bringing their brand of fundamentalist Christianity from the fringes of American life to the very heart of political power. A theology that had been intolerable to mainstream Christianity before had achieved legitimacy... [after 25 years,] evangelicals, through carefully incremental political work at the precinct, county, and state level, had seized control of the Republican Party. It was a movement that was at once cultural and political, and it was the largest such movement in the country by far. All that by 2005."
Man, Christians seems awesomely organized in this book.
-Greg laments about how SNEAKY they've been with this whole stunt:
"The rest of America still associated the word "Christian" with benign mainstream Protestant denominations and Roman Catholicism, which had no theocratic tendencies and for whom the dominionist, reconstructionist, and similar theologies were heretical and abhorrent."
Okaaaaaay, then. Weren't you just complaining about all the Republicans being creatures of the radical Christian right? Because a lot of those guys are Catholic or mainline. Also, what do you mean about the rest of America being oblivious. A QUARTER of the country is evangelical! That's a mass movement, and they're all across the country. While they may dominate the South you can find plenty of evangelicals in Orange County, or Colorado Springs, or Boise, or Fargo. Really, the only place they're outright rare is in New England and other relatively elite enclaves. They aren't the outliers, Greg. You are.
-Interestingly, Greg for once manages to articulate a criticism that sounds like the sort of thing I'd write about the Christian right of the early 2000s:
"What had migrated north was a redefined Christianity in which the singular voice of Christ called the faithful not to modesty, charity, meekness, love, and social justice but to a theological imperative for the accumulation of wealth and political power in order to establish Christian dominion over the country."
Of course, I would point out that this isn't exactly NEW. Even among Protestants, the gospel of wealth (in the sense that the faithful will be rewarded with material blessings on Earth) and the drive for Christian theocracy dates to the early Calvinists.
-In one sentence, Rich uses "Bemused" to mean "mildly amused" rather than "confused."
-Greg emphasizes that evangelical belief in essence creates a mindset of total credulity that demands the Bible be accepted as literal truth, without question. This has various sundry effects:
"What so few people saw at the time was that this mind-set of credulity was a form of brainwashing that completely undermined the role of rational argument that lies at the heart of democracy. This, more than anything else, laid the groundwork for the totalitarianism that followed."
-All great movements need enemies, and Greg says by 2005 evangelicals had picked theirs: Secularism ("which, they argued, was really a competing religion") and "the homosexual agenda." Anti-Semitism, he says, was rendered off-limits by the Holocaust, while Communism was no longer relevant enough. Gay hate, though, was ripe for exploitation:
"Christian broadcasting was filled with ridiculous canards: Nazism was really a gay movement, gays were born with a missionary zeal to convert others to the 'gay lifestyle'; a whole range of diseases, not just AIDS, was spread by homosexuals; all male homosexuals were pedophiles. Preachers preached that the rise of homosexuals was the surest sign of the coming end times; they were the Antichrist's army, predicted with startling clarity by the Bible."
-Gay hate, he says, is pretty much the great unifying cause of Christianity:
"This core message was echoed every Sunday, week after week, at thousands of churches around the country." Maybe evangelicals are different, but I know tons of Christians who fought hard against gay marriage and the like, and I'm still pretty sure that gay issues were only occasionally brought up in services themselves. It's not really an obsession. It comes up a lot OUTSIDE of church because it's a political battlefield. They talk about it because the other side talks about it too.
-Ah, but having enemies alone isn't enough, Greg says. The movement also draws strength from "the meme of the 'persecuted church.'" Every aspect of liberal democracy and tolerance is turned around into an attack on Christianity, making all true Christians into victims.
"Permitting gays to marry becomes an attack on marriage in which married people are somehow victimized... Abortion is seen as an attack on life itself." Apparently the second half of this statement was supposed to come across as just an obvious absurdity.
-Greg does bring up the amusing fact that Pat Robertson claims Christians are treated like Jews in Nazi Germany. But in this book, that claim has dark implications:
"After all, what do such victims do? What are they ENTITLED to do? What would we EXPECT them to do? There is no moral or legal code under which a minority so terribly victimized would not be entitled to rise up and vanquich their persecutors and claim the mantle of history - and the mantle of righteousness - in doing so."
And so finally ends Chapter 4. I suspect most of the chapters are going to require multiple parts from here on out, because holy shit I can't get through a page without having to quote something hilarious. |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 12:45 AM Author: bonkers bronze space "What so few people saw at the time was that this mind-set of credulity was a form of brainwashing that completely undermined the role of rational argument that lies at the heart of democracy" lemme stop u right there hoss |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 1:06 AM Author: Frum cracking elastic band you're very good at this, ty (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28074124) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 2:22 AM Author: Khaki parlour We don't deserve him. This should have 4000 poasts by now. It is scholarship of the highest order. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28074482) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 2:28 AM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28074510) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 2:39 AM Author: Frum cracking elastic band (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28074578) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 4:53 AM Author: crystalline lodge If you replace "Christians" with "Jews", suddenly the novel becomes awesome. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28074829) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 3:38 PM Author: Lime tanning salon background story "Permitting gays to marry becomes an attack on marriage in which married people are somehow victimized... Abortion is seen as an attack on life itself." Apparently the second half of this statement was supposed to come across as just an obvious absurdity.
180 laughed so hard at this |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 10:45 PM Author: Bright histrionic therapy Is he supposed to be researching revolutions for the NY state governor? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28081793) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 10:47 PM Author: drab double fault Well, that's the implication. All shall become clear in time. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28081821) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 11:32 PM Author: drab double fault JFC, the title of Chapter 5 is literally "Striving." 100% not flame. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28073330) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 11:46 PM Author: splenetic self-centered liquid oxygen how the fuck can this nigga claim to be a polymath when his accomplishments are all in LETTERS and none in SCIENCES (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28073478) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 11:49 PM Author: drab double fault Bro he is an expert on environmental politics, which is extremely SCIENTIFIC in nature. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28073509) |
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Date: June 8th, 2015 11:52 PM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie he's an autodidact polymath, like da vinci (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28073543) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 12:42 PM Author: drab double fault Bump 4 daycrew. 5th chapter may be delayed a day, sadly. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28076462) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 1:44 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location Would be unbelievably unwieldly for me to 180 and blank bump all these posts, so just posting here to say this has to be the most fascinating and mindblowing threads in XO history. Truly legitimately incredible work being done ITT (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28077108) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 1:50 PM Author: canary cocky base once completed this should be mass-emailed to the author as a scholarly and serious criticism of his shitwriting. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28077167) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 1:52 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28077188) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 2:15 PM Author: Khaki parlour He looks a lot like Leiter. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28077430) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 1:50 PM Author: mentally impaired people who are hurt titcr (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28077169) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 2:08 PM Author: Frum cracking elastic band (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28077350) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 2:43 PM Author: drab double fault Organization update: To make it easier to find entries in the sea of other comments, I've added a [CXN-1] tag at the start of each one, with the # reflecting what number entry it is. So, the second post is [CXN-2], then [CXN-3], and so forth. It should make it easier to look through this once this spirals out to be like 500 posts long. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28077646) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 7:43 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 5: Striving [CXN-10]
Chapter 5: Striving
Did a double-take when I saw the title of this chapter.
-We're up to 2007 now, so we're getting close to the point of divergence. Our two quotes for the chapter:
"Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies... Christianity is completely and radically anti-democratic; it is committed to spiritual aristocracy." -Rousas Rushdoony
"It is the quality of patriotism to be jealous and watchful, to observe all secret machinations, and to see publick dangers at a distance. The true lover of his country is ready to communicate his fears, to sound the alarm, whenever he perceives the approach of mischief." -Samuel Johnson
-The question opens with Sanjay inquiring with Greg about a book Sanjay has read, A Christian Manifesto by Francis Schaeffer. The book is popular, he says, having sold 250k in its first year and still "selling briskly" 25 years later. Sanjay notes:
"It advocates the end of a pluralistic secular democracy and advocates violence to restore biblical morality. I understand that the crime of treason includes advocating the overthrow of the Constitution of the United States [it doesn't]. So tell me, when evangelicals say that God's law, as set forth in the Bible, should trump all civil law including the Constitution, is that not treason? Should that not be illegal?...What is more, at a time when the author of this book was advocating violent resistance to the US government and constitutional law, two presidents invited him to the White House. You are a lawyer, Greg. What am I missing?"
Besides the stupid rhetoric on treason, this whole section is extremely dishonest. Rich is wording this paragraph to suggest that Schaeffer was calling for violent revolution right now to impose theocracy. In fact, Schaeffer was urging Christians, and in particular evangelicals, to become politically active, as they largely were not at the time (Schaeffer was particularly important in making abortion a major issue for evangelicals, who barely opposed it at all in the 70s). As part of his argument, Schaeffer said that civil disobedience was acceptable, as well as the extreme end of force in self-defense, citing the example of resistance to Nazi Germany. He wasn't calling for a violent revolution, but rather rejecting the idea of total obedience to government. He also explicitly rejected theocracy, and actually was shit on by more extremist Protestants for that very reason. Here's a quote:
"We must make definite that we are in no way talking about any kind of theocracy. Let me say that with great emphasis. Witherspoon, Jefferson, the American Founders had no idea of a theocracy. That is made plain by the First Amendment, and we must continually emphasize the fact that we are not talking about some kind, or any kind, of a theocracy."
-Greg says you can't prosecute somebody for treason for writing a book. Sanjay replies, "We did when those books advocated communism." [We didn't]
-After this exchange, Greg abruptly asks Sanjay if he thinks he'll be able to make partner:
"I do not know."
"Come on, you're supposed to say that I can do whatever I put my mind to."
"Sorry, but that would not be true. You know I have great confidence in your abilities. But I do not know what it takes to make partner; therefore, I cannot appraise whether you have what it takes."
"OK. Well, that's the problem. I don't know either."
-Sanjay counters that maybe Wall Street's culture of celebrating self-interest is bad for Greg's long-term health.
"There is a tendency towards grasping and shallowness that is endemic. There is striving always and, I fear, much disappointment. Such a place could change a person."
[Greg counters:] "San, I'm sorry. And no disrespect, but that's yoga talking. The world is not an ashram. The economy and political system - hell, the society - is built on self-interest. Evolutionary biologists teach us that even altruism may be a form of self-interest. You know that...Give me a little credit, San. I think I can swim with the sharks without turning into one of them."
-So, San goes off connecting the dots about the Christian Nation, while Greg is immersed in biglaw: "If I stayed at the firm, it would be a marathon, requiring five more years of long hours, high stress, and low odds of ultimate success."
-Emilie, of course, has no doubts about Greg's path, and in 2007 he moves into her UES apartment ("I asked her to move into mine, but she declined").
-Emilie actually feels a little bad that Greg isn't able to see Sanjay because he's so busy, so she invites Sanjay to go to THE OPERA with Greg and her, as the guests of her boss at Credit Suisse.
-Greg remarks on Sanjay's stunning entrance into this white-tie event:
"There was a noticeable lull in conversation when Sanjay turned the corner from the coat check and stood in the front of the room. And it was not simply the relatively [sic] rarity of a brown face. Even I was stunned. Sanjay in white tie presented a striking image. The black and white played off his brown face and ebony hair. The long line of the tailcoat emphasized his height and lean body. He could have been an Indian prince entering the court in Edwardian England."
-Emily is clearly thrilled, and Greg gets annoyed thinking that she's just trying to score bonus points from her boss for bringing such a hot guy to their fancy event. |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 7:55 PM Author: Aggressive marvelous death wish range what in the fucking world (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28080021) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 8:01 PM Author: bonkers bronze space clinical, devastating, hilarious loling at the shoehorning of what seems to be an autobiographical account of his own progression through biglaw |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 8:02 PM Author: Khaki parlour So Sanjay is basically TT? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28080074) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 8:45 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse "I understand that the crime of treason includes advocating the overthrow of the Constitution of the United States [it doesn't]."
lol half the crits in the '80s wanted to overthrow the constitution, and rich is unintentionally calling them traitors |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 8:49 PM Author: sapphire massive sex offender locale This book needs to be pulled from the shelves after this brutal gaping (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28080525) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 12:38 AM Author: Lime tanning salon background story 9876987687598769875 (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28083032) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 7:56 PM Author: Appetizing stage community account big fan of your work (and ur scholarship extraordinaire) (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28080026) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 8:46 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 5 PART TWO [CXN-11]
Chapter 5, Part Two
-The party at the opera continues as Sanjay charms the elite bankerbro. The opera that night is Thais by Massenet, about a monk who convinces a courtesan to renounce her sinful life and enter a convent only to find his physical love of her has surpassed his love of God, causing him to renounce his vows. They debate the meaning of the opera over dinner and what Massenet's intent was, with Sanjay dominating:
"I would imagine that we are intended to conclude that neither is the right path to follow. Instead, both paths illustrate the same fallacy, the fallacy that religious devotion can lead to real redemption or salvation. The monk learns from hard experience that he cannot be complete as a human if his only relationship is with an imaginary being, and that striving for eternal life is a futile quest. The courtesan spends her life striving for pleasure, but when she finally realizes that she is in need of redemption from an immoral life, she makes the same mistake as the monk in seeking it in an equally futile marriage with God. Massenet is telling us that we humans make the same mistakes over and over - the mistake of striving and endlessly seeking unobtainable extremes."
-The banker is in awe of this analysis, saying he's seen the opera half a dozen times and simply never thought it was that kind of carefully-disguised anti-religious polemic:
"Faith and religious enthusiasm leading where they always do, to tragedy. Heh. Heh. [Doobs?!?] I wonder if any of the French clerics got it. You had to be careful back then, you know." [You didn't]
-Sanjay quips that you have to be careful about offending churchmos today as well, but the family reassures him that they're nonthreatening Anglicans:
"Oh, don't worry. We're Episcopalians; we're not offended. We don't believe; we go for the music, and so our kids have someplace nice to get married."
LOL Episcopalians. -Sanjay points out that while good liberals don't get offended, evangelicals do, and that 40 percent of Americans think blasphemy should be a crime. I can't find the poll he's citing on this one so I can't determine if this is worth making fun of.
"'No,' said the wife. 'You don't mean America; you must mean Afghanistan or Pakistan or some such place. It's the Islamics who go on and on about blasphemy.'"
"'You are right - but actually it is all fundamentalists - Islamic, Christian, and even Hindu - who are not only offended by blasphemy but believe that it should be a crime. A capital crime, by the way.'"
-Emilie saves this awkward conversation by redirecting it back to the opera music. Thankfully Sanjay also is an expert on musical composition. Y'know, cuz he's perfect.
-This evening is successful and so Sanjay starts regularly visiting. One day, he comes over on Sunday morning. Greg laments to the reader that Emilie was wearing a pair of his boxers without asking along with one of his shirts, which he needed for an important meeting later that week in Dubai ("Also, I resented that it cost me eight dollars every time I had to send it to the laundry").
-Greg ALSO expresses displeasure when Emilie reacts to a stoning in Pakistan by exclaiming "fucking unbelievable:"
"Emilie had not only picked up anglicism from the bankers with whom she worked but also a casual vulgarity that had not been part of her vocabulary when we met."
You know, for a guy trying to shit all over those radical conservative Christians, Greg seems to be a bit of a prude.
-Greg notes that after 9/11 there was a surge in coverage of Islamic punishments, like stoning adulterers, amputating hands, lashing people, etc. But guess who isn't on board?:
"What was largely unnoticed at the time was that American evangelical leaders were not among those condemning these barbaric practices. And what went largely unreported at the time was the newly public enthusiasm of the Christian reconstructionists for the literal application of Old Testament penalties."
-To back up this massive enthusiasm for bringing back stoning, Greg quotes Gary North, an oddball fundamentalist libertarian who works at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and is so famous that none of his books have a Wikipedia article about them. North loving stoning people because it turns executions into a community project that is also delightfully cheap.
Fun fact: I have corresponded with Gary North via email before.
-Sanjay mentions that actually tons of Christians want to bring back stoning, and also mentions most statewide offices in Oklahoma are held by evangelicals [DUN DUN], as well as 85 percent of the legislature. Sanjay paints a picture of this Hell on Earth:
"You would not believe how bad things have gotten there. It's this ugly mix of anti-immigrant sentiment, over-the-top patriotism, and Christian fundamentalism. Did you know that in a poll, 60 percent of Oklahomans said they did not believe Christians and Muslims worship the same God? Even on the subject of their own religion they display astonishing ignorance... This is possible because almost a fifth of the children are homeschooled and exposed only to Christian fundamentalist doctrine. They've never been to a public school and never been exposed to any non-fundamentalist views. And it is not just Oklahoma; Idaho and some other western states are not far behind."
This homeschooling stat is not true. Even big homeschooling fans estimate that the highest figure for any state is likely only 3-4 percent: http://www.responsiblehomeschooling.org/homeschooling-101/homeschooling-numbers/ Perhaps Sanjay is equating homeschooling with private schooling, though 20 percent would still be an enormous figure in that case (the national rate is 10 percent). Also, while perhaps most identified with them, homeschooling is not an exclusively evangelical phenomenon, as tons of Catholics and even left-wing nonreligious hippies homeschool.
-Greg humblebrags about his elite biglaw lifestyle:
"I reflected on all this the next day in one of the places I did my best thinking, the first-class cabins of the really good international airlines, such as Emirates. En route to Dubai, I was settled into my own small cabin, with a sliding electric door cutting off the distractions of my fellow passengers, sipping Arabic coffee and - through four windows - enjoying the view of the clouds below and the dark edge of the atmosphere above. During my first two years at RCD&S, much of the actual work was ministerial - routine research, drafting documents based on precedents with little need for variation, and the review of large stacks of contracts and corporate documents known as due diligence. But instead of complaining that the work was not sufficiently challenging, I forced myself to think about the reasons the transactions were structure the way they were, and I tried to figure out whether I could conceive a more efficient or less risky alternative. This critical and creative habit of mind stood me in good stead, and I quickly was given more advanced work than was customary of for associates at my level. Powerful partners with interesting work, including a senior partner in line to be the firm's chairman, increasingly sought me out to be assigned to their transactions...My determination to stick it out and become a partner was firming.
"Six hours later, after a good sleep on a flat bed covered with a starched linen comforter, I was eating a breakfast of freshly scrambled eggs, crisp bacon, and fresh figs. The flight map on the large plasma screen at the opposite end of my small cabin indicated that we were directly over Baghdad. Here I was, cosseted with every indulgence, and 39,000 feet below me were other Americans my age fighting a needless war and dying by the thousands, mostly by being blown up by a faceless enemy. I wondered why I was here and not there." ...
"[Over time,] I felt an increasing sense of estrangement from those not living a similar life. They didn't 'get it, ' we would say. The handmaiden of justifiable pride is an ugly undercurrent of arrogance from which I was not exempt. many of my colleagues came to see the rest of humanity as idiots, ordinary people bumbling through life in a fog of imprecision with no real knowledge of the world, easily duped, analytically handicapped, and generally clueless. I suppose you could say that I had 'drunk the Kool-Aid,' but at least I remained aware that I had done it. During the rare times Emilie and I were not working, we tended to socialize with other bankers and lawyers who lived in the same world. They shared our experience and understood our lives. It was easier."
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Date: June 9th, 2015 8:57 PM Author: sapphire massive sex offender locale Petition to stone Rich (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28080606) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 8:57 PM Author: Odious orange masturbator fun fact: the novel "thais" was written in the late 19th c by prominent atheist and nobel prize-winner anatole france, who somehow managed to escape the pyre and scaffold (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28080609) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 9:01 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse literally lol'ing at the Episcopalians quote and the biglaw humblebragging, this is all fucking incredible (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28080651) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 9:11 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location Also lol'd at Episcopalians. JFC protestants!!!!! (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28080746) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 9:14 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse "yeah...non-evangelical protestantism is basically all fraudlies" (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28080773) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 9:03 PM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie SCHOLARSHIP (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28080669) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 9:10 PM Author: Frum cracking elastic band "Six hours later, after a good sleep on a flat bed covered with a starched linen comforter, I was eating a breakfast of freshly scrambled eggs, crisp bacon, and fresh figs."
*Edinburgh's ears perk up* |
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Date: June 11th, 2015 2:48 AM Author: emerald dilemma regret mr jinx exits the opera house, FURIOUSLY denouncing massenet for false advertising, why? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28092048) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 10:01 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 5 PART THREE [CXN-12]
-After that odd little vignette, we get back to Greg's life. One weekend Emilie decides to invite Sanjay over for dinner because she wants him to meet George, a new super-cute associate at her bank who is very very gay:
"'You're trying to set up Sanjay?' I asked. 'Why not? He may be filled with yogic equanimity, but he's still got to fuck.' 'Jesus, Emilie. I wish you wouldn't be so crude.' 'Yeah, so what, you think he doesn't want to fuck cute guys? He doesn't want a relationship? I guess you think as long as he's got you as his best friend, he doesn't need another man? Is that it?' [Well, at least somebody in this book has figured things out]
-Greg wonders if this is "good Emilie" trying to help a friend or "bad Emilie" trying to drive him and Sanjay apart. At the time Greg suspects it's unnecessary, because he's just getting goddamn tired of Sanjay always bringing up fundie Christians in every conversation.
-Emilie makes the night awkward by constantly steering conversations to GAY topics, while Greg awkwardly pushes around his "forty-dollar-per-pound white asparagus that Emilie had ordered from the most expensive market on the East Side." What a foodie!
-Sanjay just keeps babbling on about fundies though. This time, his obsession is The Institutes of Biblical Law, a very tedious thousand-page book by Rushdoony whose core thesis is that Old Testament law should still be enforced today. Greg notes that later, when working for Governor Bloomberg, he would become an expert on the book, as he would read it "time and time again to search out clues about the strategy and behavior of our theocratic foes."
-Sanjay notes with a sinister edge that Rushdoony has had his work funded by Howard Ahmanson Jr., heir to the Home Savings bank fortune. Sanjay says that Ahmanson's money allowed Rushdoony to take his views and move them towards the mainstream, glossing over the fact that Ahmanson has actually had to distance himself from Rushdoony precisely because of those totally insane view. He also notes that Rushdoony's organization, the Chalcedon Foundation, is still "going strong" under Gary North, in alliance with Dobson and Tony Perkins and other evangelical leaders. Meanwhile, in the real world, the Chalcedon foundation has 10 employees and less than a million dollars in revenue per year, giving it an economic clout similar to about 0.8 XO pumos.
-Sanjay goes on a long speech that, for once, I won't type up, but the key idea is that Rushdoony's interpretation of Calvinism requires total submission to God's law as a precondition for the Second Coming. It's also totally antithetical to democracy and requires a theocracy. He says this view is super-influential on the Christian right, if not the dominant ideology.
-Emilie rags on Sanjay for his obsession and points out that Rushdoony rhymes with loony.
-Sanjay says that Rushdoony is to blame for the rise of homeschooling:
"It is hard to get a precise number, but some scholars estimate that 10 percent of American children are either homeschooled or taught in fundamentalist Christian private schools [at most it's 3-4 percent homeschooled, with 10 percent in ALL private schools, most of which are Catholic and not evangelical]. As a percentage of all children, this is significantly higher than the proportion of Pakistani children attending fundamentalist madrassahs. That translates into roughly two million children in homeschool [...does Sanjay think America only has 20 million schoolkids?], almost all from evangelical families. And it was largely Rushdoony's idea... Children are taught that faith and acceptance of the revealed wisdom of God are the highest values and the only legitimate and reliable ways to konw the world. With children thus trained, it is an easy step to get them to accept as true the things that are manifestly false, such as that the earth is only a few thousand years old, that Iraq was behind 9/11, or that Senator Obama is foreign born. As one writer said, they are 'redefining faith as deliberate blindness to big lies.' [Searching this quote in Google brings up this book as the first and only exact result, so I guess this is a fictional outside quote]
-Emilie, who again is supposed to be an elite college graduate raised in the rural Midwest, is SHOCKED to learn homeschooling exists:
"'Greg, that can't be legal can it? I mean, you cannot pull your kids from school and fill their heads with bloody nonsense. Why doesn't someone do something?' "[Sanjay answered,] 'No, it is perfectly legal, and the Christian right defends homeschooling most energetically. The Home School Legal Defense Association litigates anything that could limit the right of parents to cut their children off from mainstream society and fill their minds with superstition and hate [Well, that's one way to put it I guess]. I believe it is child abuse, I really do. In America last year more than a billion dollars was spent on homeschooling texts. These texts are increasingly political [unlike public school stuff], emphasizing a Christianized American history, with little basis in fact, to emphasize the divine destiny of America.'"
-It's not just that one in ten kids are supposedly being raised on this stuff and absolutely believe it, but they're being trained for even more than that, Sanjay says:
"'The evangelicals call these cadres of homeschooled children Generation Joshua after the military commander of Moses. You know, the one that marched seven times around the walls of Jericho? That's what they call them, GenJ for short. A generation of little soldiers. There is a homeschooling video titled Putting on the Whole Armor of God, which asks, 'Boys, are you ready for warfare?' - and they mean warfare against secularism and warfare to obtain control of all civil institutions. And when they are teenagers, these kids are made to join GenJ clubs that focus on political action. They are organized by congressional district, and they do things like getting their older brothers and sisters to register to vote [shouldn't these siblings already have done this, having been brainwashed in the same club?]."
You can read more about GenJ here and see for yourself whether they are a vast military conspiracy to seize control of the US: http://www.generationjoshua.org/dnn/Home/tabid/1/Default.aspx
-At this point in this incredibly long conversation, George [the gay dood from the bank, if you recall] interrupts to say that he was a White House intern, and that in his year 7 percent of all White House interns were from Patrick Henry college, founded by home school advocate Michael Farris. He'll be popping up a lot.
-George describes the pernicious presence of evangelicals in Washington, when they represent a scant quarter of the American population:
"It wasn't just the White House. Evangelicals are everywhere in Washington. There are prayer cells in the Senate and almost every federal department [cells?]. My year there was a bit of a scandal because senior civilian and military leaders at the Pentagon appeared in a video for the group Christian Embassy talking about the platform that their jobs provided for doing evangelical work. Many federally paid congressional junkets are really evangelistic missions...Not only are public displays of religion ubiquitous in the military and civilian services, but federal money is flowing directly to evangelical causes in large amounts. When I was at the White House, we bragged to the base that we dedicated a billion dollars for abstinence education alone, with the result that a third of US public schools have so-called sex education that teaches only abstinence. And this is solely for reasons of religious doctrine."
Rich is pulling a common stunt here, where THOSE views are illegal because they are allegedly based ONLY on religious doctrine and have absolutely no other reasoning to them, while HIS views are simply correct, I guess, because they're...not?
-Sanjay notes that Ted Haggard had a weekly conference call with George W. Bush, something nobody else got except maybe Cheney. This is not really true, as the conference call was actually one between several evangelical leaders and the White House in general. Bush often did not personally take part.
-Even though we're supposed to be annoyed by how Emilie constantly keeps trying to set up Sanjay and George, they DO end up fucking afterwards. They're together for about a year. -Even though he doesn't seem to have done anything all that bad, and mostly just dumped more plot related to the evangelical menace, George reflects that "I realize now I never really liked George, but I cannot put my finger on why [it's probably because he's based on a real person you don't like, Rich]."
"I do wonder now, writing these words and thinking about the man for the first time in many years, where he is today. I never say him in New York during the siege. He was not at Governors Island. Had he married and kept his position as a banker? It was possible. Or fled to Canada or Sweden after 2016? He certainly would have had the money to get a visa. Or perhaps I'm not giving him enough credit. Perhaps he fought with us and died, or languishes even today in one of the gay reorientation camps scattered in remote locations around the country."
-Finally, in the summer of 2008, after McCain picks Palin as his VP nominee, Sanjay becomes so agitated that he has Greg draw up the documents to create his new non-profit, Theocracy Watch. That's the name of a real organization, which has an unimpressive website: http://www.theocracywatch.org/
Greg argues that theocracy is an "egghead" word people won't understand, or will even think is a good thing because it sounds like "democracy." Sanjay overrules him, however, saying that his only concern is theocracy, not people simply exercising their religious beliefs in general. This despite the fact that he wanted to ban homeschooling a while back.
-To focus on his new non-profit, Sanjay sells his social media site You and I, which has and no revenue base besides donations and a business model based on directly frustrating what most people want from social media, to a tech fund for $400 million. This is well-timed, as he makes the sale 3 weeks before Lehman Brothers collapses. Sanjay puts ALL the cash in treasury bills. Greg reflects on the irony that Sarah Palin allowed him to be rich, because without her nomination he wouldn't have cashed out in time to avoid the crash. |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 10:07 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location Hmm. Is it possible that the narrator/author is using Emily as a foil in order to "rationalize" himself as a moderate, middle of the road guy? She seems to represent a kind of ghostly self-awareness of what the left is: kind of a vapid shiteating urbanite who is mostly hedonistic. She is the contrast to the narrator's own thoughtful, rational, well-centered and virtuous SANJAY (and to a lesser extent, the narrator's own self!).
That's all very false-flagy though, because it's obvious that this narrator IS the kind of shiteating urbanite who is mostly hedonistic. |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 10:22 PM Author: drab double fault It's possible, I suppose, but the amount of gratuitous hatred heaped on her (Why does she swear so much? Why is she so ignorant about stuff?) makes me feel she HAS to be based on some ex of Rich's. If she isn't, he's certainly done a good job making Greg seem incredibly unsympathetic and lame. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28081522) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 10:24 PM Author: Odious orange masturbator Hypo: Greg and Emilie are both modeled on aspects of Rowan (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28081544) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 10:24 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location Cannot wait to hear moar! (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28081550) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 10:27 PM Author: drab double fault Oh will you ever. There is one point about halfway through the book where I'm literally going to have to transcribe 4 pages of text. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28081590) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 10:28 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location pins and needles, brother. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28081595) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 10:28 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse yussssss (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28081606) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 10:10 PM Author: drab double fault I forgot to mention this in the main post, but the line bringing up the "Whole Armor of God" video is also really silly. He's referencing this line from Ephesians:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians+6%3A11-18&version=KJV
It's clear, both from the "whole armor" term and the subsequent verses, that the phrase means were need to be armed for warfare against sin and temptation rather than against physical foes. It's a basic and very popular metaphor that's common in Christianity. But Rich is taking the analogy extremely literally and suggests that when evangelicals talk about spiritual warfare they are really girding up for REAL warfare. |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 10:24 PM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie we don't deserve you, every post in here is a gem (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28081551) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 11:18 PM Author: bonkers bronze space and people laugh at rural texans for being crazy because they think military exercises in their backyards may have a sinister purpose meanwhile... if you were watching me id be waving my hands helplessly at this man and the book that someone somehow allowed him to publish |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 10:06 PM Author: dark box office digit ratio in fairness to Rich, you ARE supposed to write about what you know... (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28081313) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 10:23 PM Author: infuriating salmon home french chef (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28081541) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 11:20 PM Author: crystalline lodge Not really. Most people live boring lives that no one wants to read about. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28082178) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 10:51 PM Author: Aggressive marvelous death wish range never forget: to this day mr. rich works in the fucking ENERGY field for fucking sullivan & cromwell
his job is to suck corrupt fascist and theocratic cock while he sits in his first class emirates cabin penning these fantasies about throwing grenades at palin's us marines.
mental illness does not really come close to describing this asshole |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 12:58 AM Author: Lime tanning salon background story (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28083199) |
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Date: June 11th, 2015 3:11 AM Author: emerald dilemma regret (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28092108) |
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Date: June 9th, 2015 11:07 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: INTERLUDE: The Website [CXN-13]
Before getting to the next chapter tomorrow, it's probably worth observing how funny the website for this book is:
http://www.readchristiannation.com/
Be sure to watch the incredibly cheesy promotional video based on the first chapter. Some thoughts on it:
-Greg is supposed to be almost fifty in 2029 (he started Princeton in 1998), but the guy playing him is a lot younger and more handsome-looking. He's also notably more handsome than author Frederic Rich -The narration is awesomely monotone at the start -The dramatic speech about defending Manhattan to the bitter end is...something else, man. I suppose it's way funnier to me because I know what's coming.
It also has other funny stuff like a lot of additional reviews that came out after the cover blurbs:
“Brilliant 1984-style dystopian novel of a Christian theocracy under President Palin and her successor . . . read Fred Rich’s Christian Nation and learn fear.” —-Richard Dawkins, November 2014 [Somebody was updating this over a year after the book came out]
“Frederic C. Rich’s book, Christian Nation: A Novel is a thought-provoking futuristic look at what the evangelicals and their Republican Party enablers might envision for America’s future.” —-D. Leslie Schreiber of Bacon’s Rebellion
“[W]ell written and persuasive . . . It does achieve its intended purpose by demonstrating how a theocratic government could arise in this country. It has an imaginative plot of a seriously conspiratorial nature. For those who might enjoy a work that entwines political, legal and religious themes, “Christian Nation” is a worthwhile read.” —-Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“[A] wonderful book . . . wonderfully cinematic, I’d love to see it as a TV series. I highly recommend it.” —-Erroll Louis, “NY1″
“Though McCain did not win the 2008 election, in recent years controversial actions like drone strikes, invasions of privacy and unlawful detainment have been condoned in part due to greater worries over terrorism. So it’s not for us to say, “It can’t happen here.” This disturbing book argues that much of it already has. —-Book Page
“Required reading . . .” —-New York Post |
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Date: June 13th, 2015 2:49 AM Author: emerald dilemma regret lol richard dawkins (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28108278) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 3:25 AM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie this guy donated to bush in 2003, giuliani in 2007 and romney in 2011, LJL
RICH, FREDERIC C MR. GARRISON NY 10524 SULLIVAN & CROMWELL BUSH, GEORGE W VIA BUSH-CHENEY '04 (PRIMARY) INC 11/24/2003 2000.00 24962760693 RICH, FREDERIC C MR. NEW YORK NY 10004 SULLIVAN & CROMWELL LLP/ATTORNEY CAPITO, SHELLEY MOORE MS. VIA SHELLEY MOORE CAPITO FOR CONGRESS 09/21/2011 1000.00 11952631161 RICH, FREDERIC C. MR. GARRISON NY 10524 SULLIVAN & CROMWELL GIULIANI, RUDOLPH W VIA RUDY GIULIANI PRESIDENTIAL COMMITTEE INC 03/13/2007 2100.00 28931502387 RICH, FREDERIC C. MR. NEW YORK NY 10004 SULLIVAN & CROMWELL L.L.P. ROMNEY / PAUL D. RYAN, MITT VIA ROMNEY FOR PRESIDENT, INC. 11/01/2011 2500.00 13942689428 RICH, FREDERICK DUNDALK MD 21222 MCLEAN CONTRACTING COMPANY ROMNEY / PAUL D. RYAN, MITT VIA ROMNEY FOR PRESIDENT, INC. 10/04/2012 500.00 14941668342 RICH, FREDERICK WAKEFIELD MA 01880 WYETH BIO PHARMACUTICAL MASSACHUSETTS DEMOCRATIC STATE COMMITTEE - FED FUND 04/23/2007 400.00 28990413603 RICH, FREDERICK C GARRISON NY 10524 SULLIVAN & CROMWELL LAZIO, RICK A VIA LAZIO 2000 INC 08/17/2000 1000.00 20020271236
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Date: June 10th, 2015 8:18 AM Author: Odious orange masturbator 180 find (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28084207) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 10:06 AM Author: bonkers bronze space LOL (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28084579) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 4:29 PM Author: Khaki parlour Wtf is his IRL schtick?
MAF corporatist who wants to take the GOP back from religious people? |
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Date: June 11th, 2015 3:29 AM Author: Swashbuckling Slap-happy Travel Guidebook Trust Fund looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28092131) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 8:23 AM Author: wonderful orchid brunch roast beef Send to Daily Caller asap (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28084213) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 8:28 AM Author: drab double fault I don't think I'm gonna be able to sell a 60-page review of a two-year-old book to anybody, regardless of how fun it is to write. Maybe it could go on some blog, but I don't have one myself. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28084223) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 8:36 AM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie it was on a blog but we scared tumblr bro off (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28084244) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 8:37 AM Author: wonderful orchid brunch roast beef There are literally 1000 sites that would publish this. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28084250) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 8:42 AM Author: drab double fault Perhaps, but how about I at least finish this first, though, so I don't have the write-up tainted by writing for another audience? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28084268) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:38 AM Author: Unholy dingle berry location Brother how many more chapters? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28084443) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:46 AM Author: drab double fault I've completed 5 of 21 chapters and 62/338 pages. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28084470) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:47 AM Author: Unholy dingle berry location Wow! Dang we have a ways to go. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28084478) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 11:29 AM Author: drab double fault It may speed up a bit because some chapters have less dialogue and simply describe silly events, which I can summarize rather than transcribing. Then again I didn't realize how much I'd be transcribing when I started this project, so I could be full of shit. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28085220) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 8:34 AM Author: brilliant thirsty senate karate This book strikes me as a pretty easy target. Maybe for a follow-up you could pick on Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," which is considered "literature" by many (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28084238) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 8:32 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 6: Sarah [CXN-14]
CHAPTER 6: Sarah
-Our quotes for this chapter take up a whole goddamn page:
"It is not the forces of darkness but of shallowness that everywhere threaten the true, and the good, and the beautiful, and that ironically announce themselves as deep and profound. It is an exuberant and fearless shallowness that everywhere is the modern danger, the modern threat, and that everywhere nonetheless calls to us as savior." -Ken Wilber, from Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
"She absolutely believes these are what the evangelicals call the Last Days. She absolutely believes... that the earth is six thousand years old and that dinosaurs and man once lived together. And she absolutely believes that Jesus will return to earth during the course of her life. These believes are at the core of everything she says and does. She is locked into that worldview. If you don't appreciate how totally she is governed by these beliefs, you'll never understand Sarah Palin. Sarah feels chosen. She feels called... She knows herself to be on a mission from God... [I]f you're on a mission from God to destroy evil, there are going to be all kinds of expendables along the way. Collateral damage." -Rev. Howard Bess, quoted in Joe McGinniss' The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin
"I want to be invisible. I do guerilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag." -Ralph Reed, 1991
-I was sort of expecting the second quotation to be from a fictional book, but it's actually a real one from 2011. Also, given that this chapter revolves around PALIN HATE, and Palin is a worthy target, you'd think this might end up being a slightly more reasonable chapter. If you think that, you are mistaken.
-So, we're finally at the clear point of divergence in this book. "Half the nation was disappointed," Greg writes, "when the dream of an Obama presidency died." So, Obama still ran, but the McCain/Palin ticket won. Given that Obama won a big victory in real life thanks to the wars, the economy, and Bush's brutal unpopularity, you'd think Rich would describe some notable event that allowed McCain to not only win, but win by a solid two percent popular vote margin (more than Bush beat Kerry by!). But no, he doesn't. McCain just wins. Somehow.
-Greg voted for Obama, but says at the time he was content with the outcome, because McCain was a good bro: experienced, independent, and with good intentions. He says he even hoped McCain's bipartisan credentials would bring a lull in the bitter partisan warfare of the Clinton/Bush years.
"But none of us could have anticipated the bizarre way in which the McCain administration began and ended, or the disastrous start to Sarah Palin's presidency."
-Greg notes that most of the good Republicans HE knows - "the moderate types found in New York" - thought McCain was either being extremely careless or had sold out to the right wing in nominating Palin (my personal opinion is that he made a long-shot gamble on limited information which simply didn't pan out). Basically, she's the worst nominee to anything ever:
"Never before had someone as ignorant naive, uncultured [OH! THE CULTURE!], and unprepared been elevated, for the most cynical reasons, to be a candidate for high national office. Never before had the voters seemed so mesmerized by the personal narrative of such a person, so driven by emotional appeal, and so accepting of a candidate with only the most superficial grasp of policy."
But, in the end, Greg says most Republicans were willing to give her a pass in the name of lower taxes.
-Greg says that even on election night it's clear McCain and Palin aren't on good terms. She doesn't speak at the victory party and the very next day "McCain-Palin" turns into the coming "McCain" administration with Palin never even mentioned in statements or press releases. She is invisible until inauguration, then briefly appears before once against retiring from public view. She holds no notable responsibilities.
I get what Greg is going for here, but doesn't this seem a little bit excessive? Even if Palin is crappy on srs policy, you could also put her on some task that appeals to the base and is based more on principles rather than policy nuts and bolts. Have her meet with faith leaders and handle faith-based initiatives or something. Still, it's Rich's book and I can't hate on this too much. We'll find better grounds soon enough.
-McCain lets his anonymous Treasury secretary handle the financial crisis (the details aren't specified), while he focuses on foreign policy. His big early initiative is to promote a series of "major cooperative initiatives" to improve relations with Russia (the details aren't specified). Soon, he's planning his first overseas trip, to Russia in March 2009. Notably, Palin doesn't come to see off Air Force One.
-McCain is giving a speech to the State Duma, but only gets three seconds in before he pauses, grabs the back of his head, and collapses. He's rushed to the Kremlin hospital and pronounced dead from a cerebral aneurysm. Palin is now POTUS.
-Greg hears the news, and immediately calls Sanjay for his reaction:
"It was my worst fear. And now that it has happened, it somehow feels like it was inevitable."
-Palin is immediately rushed from the Naval Observatory to the Situation Room. Greg says that a cleaning lady later revealed that at the time of McCain's aneurysm, Palin was busy watching reruns of the show Bridezillas. One hour after the president's death, Palin comes out and reads some prepared remarks announcing that the military is at DEFCON 4 as a precaution.
-The first big controversy of the Palin presidency arrives within a day: Confusion over the location of McCain's body. Everybody expected that McCain would immediately be loaded onto Air Force One and returned to the US. Instead, Russia pulls a POWER MOVE and says that Russian law required an autopsy and inquest before releasing the body. As a result, his body is seized by the Federal Security Service, which Greg notes is the KGB's successor. This is srs business:
"Few people in the United States slept much that night. The Russians held the president of the United States, dead or alive, and refused to release him."
Obviously, Palin is being tested by Putin and Medvedev. A deputy press secretary announced that Palin is in contact with the Russians
-Instead of a statement from the White House, the next bit of news arrives via a near-instantaneous leak from the website Wikileaks, which releases a transcript of Palin's call with Medvedev (it's leaked by a McCain aide who hates Palin):
"'Mr. President, this is Sarah Palin.' 'Madam President, please accept my sincere condolences on the loss of your president. A terrible tragedy. And to happen here in Moscow, we are inconsolable.' 'Yeah, well, it was God's will, ya know. So. I mean, um. I want to talk about the, you know, body.' 'Yes, Madam President.' 'Well, what's this about not... about keeping it, uh,, him. The American people want him. I mean, they want him to come home.' 'Ah. I'm afraid it's the law, Madam President. Due to the circumstances of his death, an autopsy is required and then an inquest must be convened to determine the cause of death. I'm sure it will be quite routine; I understand that President McCain was not in the best of health. When it's complete the body will of course be turned over.' 'But... I mean. Dim... Dim... Dim-i-triss [really?] ... I'm asking you. Can't you give a waiver or something? The man deserves a Christian burial.' 'But of course, and he shall have one, I'm sure.' 'But, now... When I was governor of Alaska, ya know?' 'Yes. Alaska...' 'Yeah. Well, when I was governor the law thing was not always crystal clear. Ya know, not carved in stone... not like the Ten Commandments. Some of my people said the law was one thing, and some said another thing, so, ya know, it wasn't really always clear... So, well I kinda got to decide.' 'Uh-huh.' A pause. 'So, I mean, can't you decide? Look here, I know that God really wants him back in Washington. He does. It's what God wants.' Another pause. 'I have decided. We will obey the law of the Russian Federation, do an autopsy and inquest as quickly as possible, and then return the body to your government.' 'But, so... [pause] so, there's nothing really you... really can do?' 'No, I'm afraid not. I was sure you would understand. [pause] Well, again Madam President, my deep condolences. I do look forward to working with you. I'm sure this unfortunate tragedy will not affect the good working relationship between our two great countries.' 'Oh no. I want a good... I mean... We should...' 'Good-bye, Madam President.'
-This transcript is so bad that immediately pundits not just on the left but also the right are demanding her immediate resignation for being incredibly out of her depth. How does she survive? We'll see in the next post! |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 8:39 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location hmm interesting (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28089706) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 8:43 PM Author: bearded theatre LOL (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28089743) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 8:50 PM Author: Frum cracking elastic band God nothing annoys me more than his dick-sucking characterization of Sanjay. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28089820) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 8:51 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28089833) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:13 PM Author: rusted brethren i thought the protagonist is pissed at sanjay at this point for being a fundie-obsessed lunatic at this point? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28090003) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:15 PM Author: drab double fault Not pissed, but growing apart or w/e. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28090033) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:13 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28090004) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:29 PM Author: bonkers bronze space (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28090183) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:49 PM Author: 180 filthy point this faggot believes god is imaginary, but he expects us to believe that a "handsome" indian that literally turns heads with his natural beauty is a plausible character. lol (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28090351) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:08 PM Author: Khaki parlour I am on the edge of my seat. This is actually a good idea for a book. Too bad it wasn't done by someone competent. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28089951) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:23 PM Author: Frum cracking elastic band What's interesting is a similar book about the rise of the totalitarian left was already done & done much better. It was called 1984. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28090120) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:25 PM Author: Khaki parlour I like that this has IRL characters we know and love. I would read a well written dystopia about any of are politicians going off the rails. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28090150) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:30 PM Author: pale impressive degenerate the DOJ would consider it a threat and subpoena the publisher for your personal information (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28090192) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:39 PM Author: Frum cracking elastic band Yeah I kinda agree. It'd be awesome if like Rachel Maddow & Ta-Nehisi Coates became Pres & VP and just started lynching straight white people and Christians, forced intermarriages, mandatory reparations even from poor whites, etc. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28090255) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 10:12 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse tbf wait 10 years (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28090542) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 10:46 PM Author: drab double fault Yeah this is basically a U.S. politics fanfic. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28090851) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 9:30 PM Author: pale impressive degenerate (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28090189) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 10:25 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 6 PART TWO [CXN-15] CHAPTER 6 PART TWO -So, Palin is off to a bad start. She isn�t helped a week later when Putin is at a cocktail party and is quoted joking that �If God wants the body back in Washington so much, why can�t He just take him? I guess that means that Russian law is stronger than the firm intention of the omnipotent being with whom this woman claims to be on such good terms.� Everybody is LAUGHING at America, and Palin logs the lowest approval ratings in history. -But then�HE arrives. Who? A man named Steve Jordan, that�s who. Henceforth, XO Steve Jordan. Just a few days after the body fiasco breaks, XO Steve Jordan arrives at the White House in an unmarked black town car and enters the West Wing. Since then, Greg reflects, he has never really left -Who is this Steve Jordan? Greg digresses for a few pages to give his short biography (unlike most major players in this book, Jordan is totally fictional). Apparently, Jordan was filled with the Holy Spirit relaxing in his dorm room at Alabama State and had been a born-again Christian ever since. He led abortion protests in the 80s and then worked for the Family Research Council in its early years. He�s a �political genius,� but mostly prefers the shadows to the spotlight. That changes in 2006, though when he runs for governor of Alabama. He fails after the IRS prosecutes him for not paying income taxes. However, he proves to be a wily target, and he never confesses wrongdoing. Instead, he simply retreats (I guess he just�didn�t go to prison or anything?) and forms a partnership with Ralph Reed, the founder of the Christian Coalition. -Together with Reed, Jordan founds the Faith and Freedom Coalition (FFC), a new �network� that Greg says is intended to harness the energy of the Tea Party movement for Christian conservative purposes. Now, this development is confusing on several fronts. The Faith and Freedom Coalition is a real organization, founded by Reed in June 2009 when the Tea Party thing was just taking off, though it isn�t really a Tea Party group itself (it was more a reaction to the organization of the Obama campaign). But Jordan is already in the White House by April 2009, so clearly this group is being founded earlier in the book�s timeline. But in that case�how the fuck is it reacting to the Tea Party movement? That shit only started thanks to the stimulus package and bailouts in the early Obama days. Hell, if Obama isn�t the president, how does the Tea Party even EXIST? Rich never explains how this comes to pass. -Anyway, whether its new origin story makes sense or not any more, Greg has the novel�s FFC work in the exact same way as the real life one. He identifies four major approaches: Inclusiveness (�It�s got to be more brown, more black, more female, and younger,� says both real-life and book Reed), stealth, focusing on state and local elections, and embracing the power of the Internet. Hilariously, Rich directly quotes the real-life Reed even where it no longer makes sense: ��The Internet�s first wave was e-mail,� Reed explained, �and the next wave was social networking, which Obama perfected. There�s going to be a third wave, which we�re still developing.� Okay, Rich, how the heck is your version of Reed saying this? Besides the fact that in this universe Obama frigging LOST the 2008 election by two percent, Reed can�t be saying this any earlier than 2008 (because FFC has been active a while before Jordan joins Palin), so why would he be touting Obama as the perfect master of anything? IRL Reed was reacting to Obama campaign�s excellent 2008 organization that helped him win. Here, he has no reason to react to anything Obama did. This is just so goddamn lazy.
-Anyway, because Jordan is a god-tier strategist, he sees a grand opportunity when Palin is being humiliated in her first days. He gets himself added to her staff and moves into an office two doors down from the Oval one. However, in a sneaky move, he takes no official title and isn�t hired by the U.S. government, instead simply remaining FFC�s political director and taking a salary from them (would this sort of set-up be legal?). This allows him to avoid regular record-keeping and disclosure laws. -While XO Jordan is on the upswing, Sanjay is struggling a bit. Theocracy Watch isn�t getting much traffic despite its slick design, and few people care enough to donate. The group, Greg notes, has only one paid staffer besides Sanjay and works out of a small loft-style office adjacent to the old WTC site, which he says gives it highly discounted rent (does it?). -Rich fucks up his timeline a bit, saying that Theocracy Watch has been running for �over a year� in April-May 2009, even though it was only started in August 2008, when Palin got nominated. -Theocracy Watch gets its BIG BREAK, however, when a memo from Jordan is leaked and TW has the scoop. What�s the memo? Why, naturally, it�s a short email laying out his strategy for having homosexuality criminalized within 8 years!: �Re: Fighting Homosexual Agenda In First Term �Recommend going slow in first term. Priority now should be to lay groundwork for acquiescence by mainstream culture to re-criminalization in second term. How? Religious arguments ineffective beyond Family [I assume he means the D.C. Christian fellowship], and non-Family simply does not see tolerance of homosexual lifestyle as attack on family/marriage. Key problem is diminishing revulsion at homosexual behavior � traditionally most powerful motivator in prejudice against gays. We must refocus on gay sex and thus restore visceral disgust. Best strategy is to conflate all homosexual behavior with extreme sexual practices, especially sexual abuse of young boys. �Goals: (i) everyone has vivid picture of what this depravity involves and (ii) all parents of young boys become viscerally fearful of all male homosexuals. �Tactics: Personify victims. Ensure that physical acts against young boys are graphically depicted in major films and TV. �Action items: (i) Provide stealth support to pedophilia promotion groups to allow them to raise their profile, prompting spontaneous backlash even from mainstream culture. (ii) Fund mainstream films, one with explicit pedophilia, one gay S&M. J2 and J3 have agreed to fund. (iii) FFC to place abuse victims into mainstream talk radio and TV to tell their stories, coach to ensure graphic detail and maximum impact. �This strategy full cleared with and supported by leadership. SJ.� Maybe I�m wrong and Steve Jordan isn�t fictional; he�s just a pseudonym for a real guy who typically goes by Halford. -So! Looks like XO Steve Jordan is toast, huh? NOT SO FAST. The administration argues that Jordan is an unpaid consultant who absolutely doesn�t speak for the POTUS or anybody else, and it says there is no evidence the president or any other admin member read it. Plus, they argue, evangelicals have always been totally transparent about how they view gays, so what�s the scandal? And so, the memo sticks around for a couple news cycles, and then�it just fades away, never mentioned against by the major media. Greg wonders whether they went through with the plan even after the memo was released. He doesn�t recall any pedophilia or gay S&M films, but hey, he was pretty busy with biglaw so maybe he simply didn�t notice them. �And besides, Emilie didn�t like films and instead ensured that the few evening I could get away were spent at whatever restaurant was, that week, at the top of Manhattan�s mercurial dining scene.� -Greg doesn�t have much time back in 2009 to worry about the Palin plot to destroy homosexuals though, because out of nowhere an even bigger shock arrives: �I was in the elegant conference room of one of London�s best law firms when my secretary transferred a call form a state trooper in New Jersey. My parents, together with my sister, had been in an accident on the New Jersey Turnpike. A tractor-trailer had blown a tire and veered across the highway into the opposite lane. Our trusty green Volvo had been obliterated, and, along with it, in an instant, my entire family. These things, as you know, happen to other people, unless they don�t. I endured a full-length Catholic funeral mass at our family church in Madison, New Jersey.� -Good thing you-know-who is there for Greg: �Only� as all three caskets were simultaneously lowered into the ground did my grief finally erupt� I collapsed to my knees sobbing convulsively. Emilie looked terrified. Sanjay knelt beside me and held me tightly, and did not let go.�
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Date: June 10th, 2015 10:59 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location in my head when I read "Sanjay" i see PN's mugshot (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28090935) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 11:13 PM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28091033) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 11:17 PM Author: Alcoholic Gay Wizard 9287427398423894729347892374237489 (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28091057) |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 11:56 PM Author: Khaki parlour Damn Steve Jordan! (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28091311) |
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Date: June 11th, 2015 2:56 AM Author: Frum cracking elastic band 1 fucking 80. cannot believe that all this xo talk of greedy little fuckPIGS rooting around for TiNA is part of a xtian fundy plot (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28092077) |
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Date: June 11th, 2015 4:19 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse lol apparently the worst part of Greg's whole family dying was the fact that he had to "endure a full-length Catholic mass." (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28095167) |
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Date: June 11th, 2015 4:20 PM Author: drab double fault Personally, what I love is that he has to throw in some details about the elite London law firm he was visiting while his parents were being obliterated. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28095175) |
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Date: June 11th, 2015 4:23 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse Please tell me that XO Steve Jordan starts bringing attention to depraved gay craigslist ads. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28095187) |
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Date: June 11th, 2015 4:27 PM Author: rusted brethren lol, XO SANJAY vs tls emilie (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28095205) |
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Date: June 11th, 2015 4:29 PM Author: drab double fault "Like, oh my God, CRYING at his family's funeral? I can't even. How CREEPY." (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28095221) |
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Date: June 11th, 2015 4:39 PM Author: bonkers bronze space XO Jordan running PERFECTLY HEALTHY, PERFECTLY NORMAL schtick 917383610173719261 |
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Date: June 10th, 2015 11:19 PM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie i dont want this book to end! (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28091065) |
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Date: June 11th, 2015 11:06 AM Author: drab double fault Hey, we're only a quarter through! (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28093054) |
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Date: June 11th, 2015 4:31 PM Author: Frum cracking elastic band you're a real boart asset brother -- i look forward to these entries like i look forward to new GOT episodes (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28095229) |
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Date: June 11th, 2015 5:24 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28095634) |
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Date: June 11th, 2015 5:27 PM Author: Stirring indian lodge (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28095650) |
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Date: June 11th, 2015 5:02 PM Author: Olive State Holy shit just read through the whole thing. Can't wait for the next entry. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28095485) |
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Date: June 11th, 2015 8:25 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 7: Passionate Intensity [CXN-16]
Chapter 7: Passionate Intensity
-This chapter sounds like a porno name, but it's actually just from its opening quote, which is finally a short one:
"The best lack all convictions, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity." -William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"
-So, XO Steve Jordan is in place and working in the shadows, but Palin is still really vulnerable, and needs help. Her poll numbers are the lowest ever. But after a month alone, somebody comes to her aid: Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, "well known for his support of the intelligent design movement and his determination to abolish the Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, and Housing and Urban Development [Oh, god, oh!], as well as his anti-gay agenda and desire to ban abortion unless necessary to save the life of the mother."
Greg clucks his tongue that Brownback looks to Scripture for inspiration on issues.
Also, given that Rich has been trying to focus on the evangelical menace, it's interesting that he picked Brownback as Palin's savior here. Brownback is a convert from evangelicalism to Catholicism.
-So Brownback blitzes the Sunday shows, declaring that God doesn't need smart leaders, just ones willing to submit to His will. Palin is clearly willing to do that, and so Americans should support her. This argument wins over the country's 70 million evangelicals, who "decided to... accept that intelligence, knowledge, and competence didn't matter; and focus instead on the fact that finally they had a president who, like themselves, spoke to God and obeyed his instructions."
After Brownback, Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry endorse Palin as well, setting off a cascade. Palin is painted as a Joan of Arc-like figure, who can succeed by virtue of her unshakeable faith even if she knows little. Palin's poll numbers recover and she picks Brownback to be her new VP. He is narrowly confirmed.
-XO Steve Jordan crafts Palin's strategy. Palin ain't too bright, so naturally the only workable persona for her is the "common man." Basically, he has her be simple gal who just condemns virtually any government program other than defense as "socialistic" (that's the word he has her use). Palin will starve the federal government with a zero tolerance policy towards higher taxes or higher deficits. She torpedoes anything resembling a fiscal stimulus:
"These twin strategies suited her perfectly. She could speak freely, and her errors, ignorance, strident anti-intellectualism, and naivete would simply reinforce her 'common man' image. And she needed to master only a single idea and single policy, and repeat it in answer to every question."
-Rich has David Brooks, "a thoughtful conservative commentator," write a column that he actually wrote in real life (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/opinion/14brooks.html) where he declares "If all government action is automatically dismissed as quasi socialist, then there is no need to think. A pall of dogmatism will settle over the right." That's exactly XO Steve Jordan's intent though, Greg says.
-Under Palin's leadership, the economy totally implodes. The bank bailouts that started under Bush stand, but there's no stimulus and Chrysler and GM go bankrupt. Unemployment hits 15 percent and the Dow stagnates at 5000.
-But XO Steve Jordan has a plan, and in June 2009 he pulls off a shocking coup: Fox News announced that it's merging wtih the Faith and Freedom Coalition to form Fox Faith and Freedom News. All pretense of neutrality is dropped and the network becomes the explicit cheerleader of the national evangelical movement. Academics and journalists are horrified but the public doesn't care. Dems in Congress try to launch an investigation but get shut down by the Republican majority (I guess they won the House back in 2008, somehow. Man, Dems in this book are useless). The FCC takes no action (what action WOULD they take? This is dumb but I don't think it'd be illegal). Some libs even say this is good because Fox has finally been exposed for its true self.
This entire development happens in a single paragraph and it's never explained how in the fuck it happened. Why would Murdoch shackle himself to a single American religious movement? What the Hell happens to the rest of News Corp? Do they fire and replace most of their staff?
-In a parallel development that makes even less sense, all six major Christian TV networks (he doesn't name them) and almost all of the 2,000 Christian radio stations come under the control of dominionist Christians (the ones who want evangelical theocracy). How did this happen? Dunno. Just does. |
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Date: June 11th, 2015 9:14 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse I want more Sanjay/Emilie. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28097260) |
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Date: June 11th, 2015 9:29 PM Author: drab double fault I can only provide what the book offers. Cherish what it does give us, friend. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28097406) |
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Date: June 12th, 2015 12:29 AM Author: Stirring indian lodge Yeah that chapter unfortunately sucked (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28099225) |
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Date: June 12th, 2015 3:03 PM Author: drab double fault Don't worry man, it's only half-over and the second half is a top 5 moment in the book IMO. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28103556) |
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Date: June 12th, 2015 3:10 PM Author: Frum cracking elastic band (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28103604) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 7:01 PM Author: Bright histrionic therapy If the President dies, the VP can't appoint their replacement, right? It's the Speaker of the House. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28143685) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 7:38 PM Author: drab double fault Nah, 25th Amendment allows for appointed replacements with Senate confirmation. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28143906) |
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Date: June 12th, 2015 9:53 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 7 PART TWO [CXN-17]
Chapter 7 Part 2
-Having suddenly and for no reason obtained a huge propaganda outfit, Sarah Palin holds a Rose Garden meeting attended by "religious leaders of all denominations" (actually all evangelicals, except two conservative Catholics, a Jew for Jesus, and an Imam who supports deporting all Muslims) at which she announces her legislative agenda. The first order of business: A joint resolution of Congress declaring America to be �A Christian Nation, which devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ.� It would be non-binding and thus not have anything for the SCOTUS to review. Palin argues that it�s no different from adding In God We Trust to the currency or putting Under God in the Pledge. Of course, Palin is stupid, so she goes off-message a bit the next day when a reporter asks her to explain the intent in more detail: ��Ya know, kind of like Israel, a Jewish state, but also of course with the right of people at home to also practice those minority religions too.� When asked whether this mean that people could practice �those minority religions� in public as well as �at home,� she declined to answer. When reminded that the �God� in the pledge and on the currency was the God of Abraham common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, she professed doubt that this was indeed so, and � showing some confusion over Trinitarian theology � stated that �it was always understood, in an American context, that God meant Jesus, you know, and also his Father, too, of course, together.� When asked later why � if this was a Christian Nation � there was no mention of God or Christianity in the Constitution, she looked surprised and started to answer, �That can�t be�� [Brownback bails her out by talking about how the �divinely inspired Constitution� didn�t need to mention God because Christianity was so omnipresent then that it would be like mentioning breathing air�] -Palin�s second desired piece of legislation is the Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act, which has actually been introduced by Congress before. This law will allow church to endorse candidates and engage in political activity without losing their tax-exempt status. -The third law Palin proposes is the Academic Freedom Bill of Rights, which allows students to sue their universities if they believe they are subject to �liberal bias.� The new version of Fox (henceforth called F3) really likes this law, and describes it as �necessary to fight leftist totalitarianism by dictator professors.� -In a single week, Boehner and McConnell (this is the first time they�re mentioned as still being the Republican leaders) ram all three pieces of legislation through Congress, apparently picking up Democratic support along the way, somehow. Following their passage, we get one of the most incredible scenes in the book. Once again, I�ll just have to type it up at length: �The next morning Sanjay called me at work and asked if I had access to a television and insisted that I tune in immediately to see what was happening. In a reaction unanticipated by both the right and the left, small groups started to gather throughout the country in shopping malls, mega-church parking lots, and the occasional town square and celebrate their new Christian Nation by burning books. [Yep, this is Rich�s idea of how Christians SPONTANEOUSLY act] ��Isn�t it joyous?� one typical pastor was quoted as saying. �All that filth, all that pornography, so-called gay literature, abortion manuals, irreligious filth forced on our children, evolution nonsense, so-called science, the Koran � all the work of the devil and all purified in God�s great light and heat. I knew this day would come,� he said, breaking down in tears, �but I just wasn�t sure I would live to see the day. And now, by the grace of Jesus, my nation, my America, has been redeemed. Praise God. Praise God.� �The bonfires were ringed with families and typically included hundreds of children. A festival atmosphere prevailed. New families arrives with lawn chairs and coolers of beer. But for the fuel source and the absence of cheerleaders, the scenes could have been college pre-game bonfires. �Soon the media, including Fox Faith and Freedom News, had switched to nonstop coverage of the phenomenon. Book burnings continued in all fifty states, with over two thousand specific locations indicated by little flames on the CNN national map. In Colorado Springs, the crown in the parking lot of New Life Church was estimated at twelve thousand. SUVs drove up and off-loaded new piles of books to keep the fires going. Reporters asked irreverently whether the celebrants had been stockpiling gay pornography in their houses and, if not, where they had gotten the books. The answers were evasive, although it soon became clear that teenagers were checking books out of public libraries to provide fuel for the bonfires, after which almost all public libraries closed by midday and locked their doors. It also became clear that, having little use for books of any sort [This Is What Fred Rich Actually Believes], families were just emptying out the dusty bookcases at home, where the volumes, many inherited from their parents, hadn�t left the shelves for years. Reporters spotted Reader�s Digest Condensed Books, 1950s encyclopedias, American Heritage dictionaries, lots of Danielle Steel and Harry Potter books, and many other works that hardly seemed to fit the stated criteria for destruction (although, when asked, a number of pastors explained that the Harry Potter series, which promoted the false religion of witchcraft, had to go). [I�ll skip a paragraph that�s just a lady arguing this is happening because about 40 percent of Americans never read books past college] �By midday, the media other than Fox were asking why the president, the political leadership of both parties, and the governors were not calling for these crowds to disperse. Only a few governor spoke out against the fires. To their great credit, the Catholic archbishops of New York, Boston, and San Francisco held news conferences at which they called book burning �abhorrent,� reminding reporters of the sad history of their own church and the great evils that had sprung from this sort of intolerance [side note: Did he just pick those cities� bishops because he figures they�re liberal? Does he know anything about how Catholic dioceses work?]. Fox Faith and Freedom News was jubilant � pressing the theme that the rights of majority Christians had been denied for so long that this sort of jubilant release was perfectly understandable and appropriate. The theme for the F3 news coverage was a clip, played over and over, of Dr. Martin Luther King speaking the words �Free at last, free at last, Thank God Almighty I�m free at last.� �Late in the day, crowds at malls across the country swept into Borders [remember them?], Barnes and Noble, and small locally owned bookshops [sic�you know, one interesting trend throughout this book is that Rich is very spotty about hyphenating his two-word adjectives. That hardly seems lawyerly] and started pulling almost everything off the shelves to feed the fires. Police appeared one the scene, and the usual mix of hotheads and provocateurs on both sides created dozens of violent incidents, with mobs surrounding police and demanding the release of �celebrants� accused of looting [yeah man white people are famous for mass resistance to the police]. In Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Texas, �Minutemen� and other �Christian Militia� appeared on the scene to protect the �celebrants� from the police. Police and officials seemed uncertain how to deal with these armed groups, referred to by F3 as Second Amendment Militias, which were �simply exercising their rights to guard the people from tyranny.� �No one was killed in the few episodes of violence, and by nightfall the families had packed up and gone home. A few days later, the malls and parking lots were back to normal, the media had dropped the story [�really?], and most people settled into the comfortable illusion that this ugly spasm was an aberration, a letting off of steam, a reaction equally attributable to popular discontent over jobs and the economy as to religious fervor.� -Ooof, that took a while to write up, but I think it was worth it. Considering what�s to come this isn�t the most extreme thing that will happen in the books, but it may be the most utterly inexplicable. How the fuck does Rich think this is how conservative Christians act, especially spontaneously? Even most conservative Christians would object to only a few books, and even THEN they�d tend to regard burning them as weird, and on top of THAT it�s totally surreal for Rich to think they would break into Barnes and Noble to steal books and then attack police who try to halt the looting. Speaking of stopping the police, how the fuck did all these �Minutemen� groups mobilize so quickly to protect these rioters? Good fucking God.
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Date: June 12th, 2015 11:19 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse I love how the books are loaded up in SUVs (no sedans), but my favorite bit is that Rich seems to think that college football pregame tailgates have a lot of bonfires. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28107254) |
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Date: June 13th, 2015 2:38 AM Author: Odious orange masturbator Pickup trucks with Calvin pissing decals would have been too obvious, plus he's never seen one. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28108249) |
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Date: June 13th, 2015 1:16 AM Author: drab double fault Maybe the night crew will appreciate more. Honestly this is a top 3 passage IMO. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28107975) |
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Date: June 13th, 2015 2:57 AM Author: bonkers bronze space "By midday, the media other than Fox were asking why the president, the political leadership of both parties, and the governors were not calling for these crowds to disperse" ljfl ARE current president won't so much as suggest that crowds burning down our own cities should disperse, accordingly this one might have the dubious yet nonetheless impressive distinction of being the biggest stretch yet |
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Date: June 12th, 2015 10:26 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 7 PART THREE [CXN-18]
Chapter 7 Part Three
-So despite this massive orgy of book-burning, Sanjay remains pretty much alone in sounding the alarm about the Christian Nation while Greg, Emilie, and everybody else keep putt-putting along. Emilie even thinks the Christian Nation law is a good idea, in her own bitchy way:
"'It's actually smart of her. Throw the crazies a few bones where it doesn't matter. I mean, presidents have been saying 'God Bless America' for years at the end of every speech. Even the Clintons went to the prayer breakfasts and made necessary obeisance to the Jesus freaks. You think Bill believed a word of it?' [I've heard Hillary probably does believe, actually, though not in a very dogmatic way. Also, I've noticed an odd tendency among libs to be downright happy at the idea that their politicians just lie through their teeth on religion. If they lie on that...why do you trust them on the rest?] -The two other pieces of legislation, on church free speech and suing lib professors, prove more ominous than the Christian Nation resolution. The first is tied up in the courts for a while (but one it arrives, it will open up $100 billion a year in church $ for political stuff), but the latter immediately starts influencing how colleges operate, because F3 apparently funds students to sue their professors. Colleges start "balancing the liberal faculty with conservatives who would not otherwise have been advanced on merit." While rich schools can resist, within a few years the landscape at smaller ones has changed totally. Liberal professors start missing out on tenure, and Christian social networking sites organize boycotts of profs they deem to have "liberal bis," which pushes profs to retire or transfer to schools in lib areas. Colleges in red states get filled with graduates of Patrick Henry, Regent, Liberty, and other "Christ-centered" schools (does Rich not realize that way, way more evangelicals go to places like Alabama than fucking Regent?)
-Finally, more personal drama shit! Greg notes that Emilie is more interested in Sanjay now that he's flipped a company for $400 million (Why? Did the fucking investment banker not understand that he was rich even if he didn't sell the company?)
-So, Emilie has Sanjay over and we get more personal dialogue action. Sanjay complains that recently, F3 has been used to engineer a rhetorical shift on the right placing a greater emphasis on the "rhetoric of violence." In the past, he said, the Christian right worried about both sex AND violence in media, but now he says it's only sex stuff:
"When was the last time you heard a mega-church preacher criticize a film or television show or video game solely on the grounds of being too violent? Sex - yes, they still go on about that. But violence, not so much."
-This isn't an accident, Sanjay says, but is a deliberate effort, somehow being coordinated among thousands of evangelical leaders, to prepare people for civil war:
"'If you want people to take up arms and fight, you need two things. You need the people to have arms, which is what our forty-year fight over the Second Amendment and gun control has been all about. But second, you need to make the use of these guns acceptable. People have to lose their fear and abhorrence of violence. It has taken more than a generation, but they have almost succeeded."
-Sanjay says they're able to pull it off not by talking about attacking the enemy, but by phrasing things so that the left is at war with Christians. Christians are portrayed as "under siege" and needing to battle back. But, Emilie isn't really feeling it. Because she's dumb:
"'San, darling, all religiou crap is violent as hell. They're always smiting one another over something or other, especially in the Old Testament. Why do you think they call it 'fire and brickstone?' "'Brimstone,' I said. Emilie shot me a look; she hated it when I corrected her [that bitch!]. "'What is brimstone anyway?' asked Emilie. "'I have no idea,' I answered. Emilie went to the kitchen to open another $130 bottle of Chardonnay [what a foodie!]. -Maybe Emilie is dismissive, but Sanjay may be right. Apparently, Fox has started a new "War Room" show which is literally about military strategy, with Glenn Beck interviewing right-wing general on civil war-style scenarios. The scenario they describe is one where the federal authorities try to arrest militia members, and there is a MASS UPRISING in response.
-Greg makes a very common analogy Sanjay has somehow never heard of:
"'San, you know the expression 'to a hammer, everything looks like a nail?' "'No, I have never heard that expression. A very interesting aphorism. Most apt.'
-The serious conversation is cut off, though, because Emilie [that dumb bitch] comes back and babbles on with stories about her new boss and how he's a jerk. She then starts probing about Sanjay's gay love life, but Greg intervenes by bringing up his work review:
"'Not to be immodest, [but] they said I was doing fantastic work and was in teh very top part of my class. That's a pretty strong signal for RCD&S, especially after fourth year." [You know, he always abbreviates it that way...but I feel like nobody ever abbreviates real firms that way. They just use the first name or two in some fashion]
"Emilie got up fromt he table and, oblivious to Sanjay's presence - or, perhaps, because of it - straddled me on the chair, took my head in her hands, and delivered an intense and passionate kiss, which I reciprocated. Sanjay slipped out without our saying good-night." |
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Date: June 12th, 2015 10:34 PM Author: Odious orange masturbator I get the feeling that, while writing this, Rich only stopped masturbating to change hands. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28106796) |
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Date: June 12th, 2015 11:24 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28107298) |
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Date: June 13th, 2015 3:03 AM Author: bonkers bronze space (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28108320) |
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Date: June 13th, 2015 11:24 AM Author: drab double fault (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28109261) |
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Date: June 15th, 2015 2:39 PM Author: Frum cracking elastic band UGH emilie is SUCH a bitch how could anybody be attracted to women i mean emilie (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28125237) |
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Date: June 15th, 2015 2:41 PM Author: Khaki parlour "'San, you know the expression 'to a hammer, everything looks like a nail?'
"'No, I have never heard that expression. A very interesting aphorism. Most apt.' |
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Date: June 15th, 2015 3:00 PM Author: Odious orange masturbator "San, ever hear that 'a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?'"
"My dear Greg, what a charming apopthegm. Concise, yet incisive. Perhaps I shall share it as my 'You and I' status." *wobbles head* |
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Date: June 16th, 2015 2:54 AM Author: mentally impaired people who are hurt (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28130491) |
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Date: June 16th, 2015 9:43 AM Author: drab double fault 190 moniker (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28131235) |
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Date: June 30th, 2015 9:14 PM Author: Vermilion casino (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28233575) |
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Date: June 14th, 2015 9:59 PM Author: Rough-skinned nibblets (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28119985) |
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Date: June 14th, 2015 10:13 PM Author: canary cocky base (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28120145) |
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Date: June 15th, 2015 2:24 PM Author: Stirring indian lodge (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28125127) |
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Date: June 15th, 2015 2:29 PM Author: drab double fault Sorry about missing the last couple of days. I'll get back on it tonight. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28125162) |
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Date: June 15th, 2015 2:42 PM Author: Khaki parlour 190 (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28125268) |
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Date: June 15th, 2015 3:24 PM Author: Lime tanning salon background story (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28125590) |
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Date: June 15th, 2015 3:26 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse yussssss (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28125605) |
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Date: June 15th, 2015 11:16 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 7 PART FOUR [CXN-19]
Chapter 7 Part 4
-Sorry about the delay. Was occupied over the weekend.
-So anyway, despite Greg's advice to worry less, Sanjay continued to be obsessed with "the notion that the long-standing battle over gun control and the theocratic program of the Christian right were deeply synergistic." Sanjay believes the right's leaders know they can only win final victory through force of arms, and are preparing actively for that day while the left sits around doing nothing.
-So, in order to do more research on this phenomenon, Sanjay decides to go and spend a week visiting Tulsa, Oklahoma to research the milita movement.
-But, before Sanjay goes, we get this amusing insight into how well Rich understands the modern Internet:
"A few days before [Sanjay] left, I called his office, and the receptionist who answered the phone asked if I had a moment.
"'Greg, he probably wouldn't want me to tell you this. But, well, he listens to you. We had a comment on the website that, well - it was a death threat against Sanjay. It's probably nothing you know, but... Well, I wanted you to know." "I was not worried. Given his subject, it was inevitable that abuse and threats of all sorts would ricochet around the web. But I did insist that he report the threat to the authorities and take two staffers with him to Oklahoma."
-Sanjay returns from Oklahoma and sounds like he's visited Helmand province:
"He found that the Christian media there was filled with talk of apocalyptic violence. Informal militia and military groups were springing up everywhere, including branches of the Christian Identity movement, where believed that religious war was inevitable. The ranks of these nascent militias were filled with what one brave [SOBRAVE] investigative journalist called 'thugs, felons, and low-lifes.' His expose showed that the shadowy organizers of these militias recruited ex-cons on the day of their release, gang members, and the chronically unemployed who had become homeless [yeah, we all know how much Republicans love gang members]."
-Sanjay expresses worry about how groups routinely cite Romans 13:1: "For there is no power but of God; the powers that be are ordained by God." This, he says, means they believe in following orders as long as those giving the orders "wear the cloak of an earthly government ordained by God." Actually, for most Christians, this verse has been used for the opposite purpose, to explain that Christians still owe obedience to a non-Christian government, provided it is not actively evil (and sometimes even then; the scholarship on Christian rebellion throughout history is pretty interesting).
-Sanjay warns about the scaaaary homeschoolers:
"'At these rallies in Oklahoma, I met homeschooled evangelical kids who referred to themselves as Generation Joshua. They told me their purpose in life is to retake the land for Jesus.'"
-Greg find it dubious to worry about these people, but then Sanjay drops a LAW BOMB on our lawyer hero:
"Do you know about the Militia Act - a law originating in 1792 that is still on the books in modified form? It provides federal sanction not only for the state national guards but also for something that is called an 'unorganized militia.' That concept has been hotly debated in far right circles for decades, but most believe it means that the states are free to recognize and permit private armies in their own states.'
-So apparently, Oklahoma is going to create a Christian militia, and everybody is just going to follow along:
"But the Oklahoma legislature proposes to recognize what it calls a Christian Militia. Imagine, G, all the red states. The most committed fundamentalists organized into armed militias. With ranks, regimental headquarters, advanced weapons, Saturday drills - all sanctioned by the state but not subject to state or federal government control. Most people would ahve thought it impossible in America. After all, only a few years ago private militias, like the white supremacy groups and neo-Nazis, were hunted down by the FBI and prosecuted. Now they are being sanctioned by the states themselves."
-Greg regrets not listening to Sanjay's bulletproof logic:
"During the siege, we spent many evenings debating whether our collective blindness to the militarization of the Christian right was in fact an understandable error of perspective or some lethal combination of historical myopia and wishful thinking. Does the explanation matter? I'm starting to think it might."
-Greg expects Sanjay to rail against militias when he comes back, but instead he throws a curveball by writing and publishing an opinion piece for the New York Times on virtue. It's apparently some totes awesome essay about the long-term fruits of traditional virtues such as good humor and politeness, and how these are built atop a foundation of honesty and tolerance, which are in turn built atop the greatest virtues of mercy, compassion, and love.
-In a profound example of the literary sin of telling rather than showing (this awesome essay isn't in the book), Greg describes how Sanjay then turns this rhetoric to attack his enemies:
"He then asked... how those who advocated a 'more moral society' could engage in behavior that was, by this standard, anything but Christian. He picked quotes from Palin and Jordan to show that their own morality was arrogant, full of pride, and fundamentally intolerant. If these were their words, Sanjay argued, their behavior was inevitably going to be rude, devious, and intemperate, as it was..."
-Apparently Sanjay's essay is so good it can change history. Or at least give Greg a boner while humiliating fat plodding law beavers:
"I and many others were profoundly moved by this essay... It revealed that Sanjay was a profound thinker and a good man. Although I had known him at that point for twelve years, I discovered in him a depth I had not seen before. Sanjay was growing and becoming a better man, I remember thinking. But was I? He had written an essay designed to move hearts and change history. I was spending my time, and my own powers, writing indentures and loan agreements."
-A year after Palin's program passes, her Christian nation doesn't weigh very heavy, but what DOES weigh heavily is the recession. The Dow is STILL stuck at about 5k, middle-class savings are wiped out, unemployment is 18 percent. The auto industry has collapsed (Greg apparently being unaware that there is tons of auto manufacturing in America not done by GM or Chrysler), causing a devastating ripple "that the advocates of a bailout had predicted." Homelessness spikes back to 80s levels.
-The stoopid Republicans, though, don't get it:
"Despite a public letter to the US congress from every living Nobel Prize-winning economist calling for fiscal stimulus, no new appropriation could pass the House, and federal spending actually decreased, exacerbating the economic decline in exactly the way predicted by the Keynesians [can Rich talk about anything in this book without trying to settle some political score?]. Moreover, unemployment benefits were allowed to expire. All the President said, repeatedly, was 'Washington is the problem, not the solution.' -Given how shitty everything is, in the midterms the Democrats take back the House.
"Emilie [that bitch] smugly reminded Sanjay that for our entire history, American politics flirted with the extreme but always reverted to the centrist mean and now had done so again... Sanjay was once again ignored by the media, and I immersed myself in my work."
-You know, I never thought of this the first time around, but given how horrible this recession is it seems really odd that Rich never makes any mention of how absolutely gruesome the results must have been in biglaw and bigbanking, especially considering that he and Emilie are right in the sweet spot for getting wiped out by ITE. I get the feeling that Rich isn't very good at adapting the blatant self-insert of his own life to match the circumstances his world-building has created. |
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Date: June 15th, 2015 11:29 PM Author: rusted brethren Ur forgetting that Greg is on dat breakfast tip breh (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28129194) |
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Date: June 16th, 2015 12:03 AM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 8: CURRENTS [CXN-20]
Chapter 8: Currents
-This chapter will cover 2011-12, and we really start getting into alternate history at this point. It's gonna be a fun ride. Here's our quotes for the chapter:
"When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe... The culture of illusion thrives by robbing us of the intellectual and linguistic tools to separate illusion from truth. It reduces us to the level and dependency of children.' -Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion
"It was characteristic of [authoritarian movements] that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention." -Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
-We take a short break from the narrative so that Greg can talk about his condition in 2029. Yesterday, he says, there was a visitor whom Adam talked with, but they don't explain who she is. Greg asks why, and Adam responds:
"Our being here is forbidden. This house is forbidden. The typewriter is forbidden. What you are doing is forbidden. And you ask 'why the secrecy?'"
-Greg gets snippy and asks for more details. Is Adam a member of the illegal "Free Minds" organization? How did he get in the archives and find Greg? Adam explains that the group is very loose, and he doesn't know what position he holds in Free Minds. He was simply told to get close to Greg, because Greg is Very Important.
-Greg reflects back to 2009 and his involvement in an Important Legal Matter:
"It was almost a year before the midterm election in 2010 that I started work at the firm on the most important matter of my career. By 2009 some farsighted engineers in the world's largest mining company had started to worry about the near monopoly the Chinese government had obtained in an esoteric class of minerals called rare earths. These metals - with names like cerium, neodymium, scandium, and yttrium - are not used in bulk quantities, as are copper or bauxite, but are absolutely essential to a whole range of applications, including aviation, computer monitors, and medical imaging. Previously, rare earths were produced from mines located in North America and southern Africa, but every one of those mines had been shut as the result of low-cost competition from China. Customers didn't mind, though, as the Chinese supplies were reliable and cheap [zzzzzzz....].
"But once the CHinese consolidated their near-monopoly position, they limited supply and achieved a gradual increase in prices to a level exceeding that at the outset of Chinese competition. Some vague talk of export quotas had been heard from Beijing. The US and EU government sounded the alarm, and Harco, a global conglomerate based in the United Kingdom, saw an opportunity. It quietly bought up the mining licenses for the world's largest non-Chinese rare-earth deposits, located deep in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Development of these deposits to compete with the Chinese would require negotiating a long-term agreement with the government of PNG, assembling a join venture, and raising most of the US $8 billion project cost [Uh, Greg, aren't you supposed to be writing a top-secret history of the rise of the Christian Nation? Remember that?]. "When Harco came to RCD&S with the assignment, the general counsel specifically requested that I should be the lead attorney. It was a remarkable opportunity for a young lawyer. "I spent the next two years in a peripatetic international existence, traveling many times to Port Moresby, the sometimes [always] violent and dangerous capital of PNG, to negotiate with the government. Ona particularly bad day I remember the freshwater supply to the city having been cut off by rebels. The hotel staff responded by bringing two buckets per day of salt water to my room - 'one for flushing, one for washing,' the bellman cheerfully explained. Negotiations with the relevant ministry were held in a Quonset hut dating from the Second World War. I also traveled frequently to Tokyo, Frankfurt, and London. One day I would be patiently explaining the joint venture arrangements to the senior executives of a Japanese trading company in Tokyo, and the next would find me in Frankfurt explaining the same provisions to German businessmen in a wholly different way. I found I was able to communicate to different audiences with remarkable success."
And that all mattered for...some reason. You know, this actually is worse than pointless. Greg is writing some powerful work of rebellion and he is filling it up with this POINTLESS SHIT. If you're writing a secret history that people will be executed for carrying, you want to make it short and TO THE POINT. Nobody is going to be inspired to join the resistance by Greg's loser biglaw life and his homoerotic crushes. JFC, man.
-Greg reflects even more on how this new LEGAL LIFE made him feel:
"I remember vividly my immense productivity and the exclusive claim made by the job on my life. I felt again the almost guilty satisfaction of really understanding when those around me were confused, and the rewards of listening well, bringing solutions to the table, and bridging interests and cultures [Man this guy can lay it on thick. He's GOT to be in a SullCrom video somewhere]. I recalled the gratitude of the clients. I had been truly happy in my work... I'm surprised by the magnitude of what I lost."
This, my friends, is a man who truly loves the law.
-So, anyway, Greg's rare earth deal starts a new phase in his relationship with that bitch Emilie, because we all know how much the dissidents of the Christian Nation are gonna care about her. Emilie was the perfect biglaw GF, never complaining about Greg being away all the time or missing weddings or working long hours:
"When I called her from a car in Tokyo to say I would not be back for the wedding of one of her oldest friends, the other RCD&S lawyer in the car cringed. When I reported her curt reply - 'I understand, no problem' - he said simply: 'She's a keeper.'
-So what DOES make Emilie mad? Anything that can upset her shrewish nature. Beware, XO bros, this excerpt may hurt:
"Nothing annoyed her more than my periodic doubts about whether I wished to spend my life as a corporate lawyer. She mocked anything I said that had about it even a whiff of diluted ambition. In that sense, the rare-earths deal should have been good not only for my career but also for my relationship with Emilie. This is because after a few months of working on rare earths, I was so interested and fulfilled by the work that most of my career-related doubts evaporated. I allowed myself to be defined by the job, and I acquired the confidence and ambition of a fast-rising star.
-Greg loudly protests his heterosexuality again:
"For her, it should have been an aphrodisiac. Perhaps it was. As our time together became scarcer, our physical relationship became more intense. We were still cathartic lovers. I remember one night in bed, after sex, I told her about my most recent trip to Japan, particularly how fascinated I was by the contrast between the refinement of Japanese culture and the misogyny and potential for cruelty that seemed equally embedded. I told her about the Zen rock garden at Ryoan-ji. "'Did Mitsubishi commit to a billion?' she asked. "'What?' "'Isn't that why you went? Did you get them to sign up for a billion?' "'Yes, but-' "'Good. Keep your eye on the ball, Greg. No one is interested in the Japanese. They're has-beens. The money is in China now.'
-Greg FINALLY realizes that maybe, just maybe, Emilie isn't so great. "I was stung by her complete indfference to the things that fascinated me." |
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Date: June 16th, 2015 2:50 AM Author: Odious orange masturbator i'm feeling cheated that we haven't actually gotten to see greg's evaluations. i bet he was ahead of his class year every single time.
in fact, he certainly could have been a SCOTUS clerk, but was too smart to go for it. it was just too impractical and too much foregone income -- a sucker bet, really. |
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Date: June 16th, 2015 3:49 AM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie i love the random biglaw shit which are obviously thinly veiled anecdotes from his time as a lawyer (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28130567) |
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Date: June 16th, 2015 10:53 AM Author: Lime tanning salon background story so good, tyft (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28131622) |
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Date: June 16th, 2015 11:41 AM Author: Khaki parlour JFC this guy is insufferable. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28131882) |
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Date: June 16th, 2015 12:33 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse Oh shit this is unbelievable.
"Negotiations with the relevant ministry were held in a Quonset hut dating from the Second World War. I also traveled frequently to Tokyo, Frankfurt, and London. One day I would be patiently explaining the joint venture arrangements to the senior executives of a Japanese trading company in Tokyo, and the next would find me in Frankfurt explaining the same provisions to German businessmen in a wholly different way. I found I was able to communicate to different audiences with remarkable success."
JFCCCCC |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 9:04 AM Author: bonkers bronze space this is the story of this man's life but he does not seem to be aware that nobody wants to hear it (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28139440) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 4:23 PM Author: Sickened incel http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB846631589729952000
Just before Fred Rich, a partner at the New York law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, showed up at a motel in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, local guerrillas blew up the town's water main, leaving Mr. Rich's hotel without running water. Every morning for a week, a hotel clerk brought Mr. Rich two buckets of sea water. "One for flushing, one for washing," he explains. |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 4:46 PM Author: bonkers bronze space 180 find, see my post directly above this is the biglaw partner equivalent of a shrew doing a TBT facebook post of a brunch pic she took in spain 3 years earlier with the caption "my crazy life..." |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 5:05 PM Author: drab double fault Holy shit, 190 find. I entertained the possibility this was just loosely based on his own career, but nope, it's pretty much identical. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28142900) |
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Date: June 18th, 2015 3:32 PM Author: Khaki parlour lmao (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28150322) |
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Date: June 16th, 2015 2:58 AM Author: Plum plaza (fred rich) (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28130497) |
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Date: June 16th, 2015 3:49 AM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie (S&C associate) (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28130570) |
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Date: June 16th, 2015 3:54 AM Author: Plum plaza (lawyer) (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28130587) |
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Date: June 16th, 2015 3:56 AM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie (Sanjay) (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28130592) |
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Date: June 16th, 2015 4:05 AM Author: Plum plaza (a little gay) (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28130614) |
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Date: June 16th, 2015 4:08 AM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie (guy who didnt hear me say no homo) (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28130620) |
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Date: June 16th, 2015 4:09 AM Author: Plum plaza (fred rich) (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28130621) |
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Date: June 16th, 2015 10:54 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 8 PART TWO [CXN-21] Chapter 8 Part Two -While Greg is all sad about Emilie being a bitch, Sanjay’s anti-theocracy push is in the doldrums because the Dems have the House again (but not the Senate, somehow) and so no more legislation from XO Steve Jordan is forthcoming. But Sanjay warns that evangelicals are nothing if not patient: “The Internet revealed continued plotting and intrigue by dominionist groups. Millions of children each year were still being withdrawn from public schools so their minds could be locked in the cage of fundamentalist dogma.” -The recession has become the Second Depression. Dems push through some fiscal stimulus and Palin declines to veto. -Stressed out and demoralized, Greg stops by Sanjay’s apartment, where he speculates that his relationship with Emilie just might not survive. Sanjay has his own doubts, wondering if he is “just another gay man afraid of a heterosexual world,” or a “mind deluded by an illusion of prophetic powers.” Then, uh, this happens: “I got up and went to the kitchen and came out with two cold beers. Sanjay had a weakness for an artisanal lager from Brooklyn. “’San, tonight we are going to give birth to something completely new. I call it ‘brewga.’ It’s going to be big. Bigger than You and I, and a lot more fun. A nice big gulp of Brooklyn lager [it doesn’t have an actual name?] between every pose. This is the way I want to learn yoga. Will you teach me?’ We hadn’t done yoga together since we were in college. “Without comment, he took the beer and started teaching. Three hours and four beers each later, we had run through all the poses of the Ashtanga primary series, stupidly chanting ‘Brew-ga, brew-ga’ at the end of every post. Sanjay told me he had never before laughed out loud while doing yoga. At the end, we sat cross-legged on his brown carpet facing each other, knees almost touching. I remember the smell of his sweat, slightly sweet, mixed with my own, more acrid, and the stale odor of the beer we had spilled on the carpet. Empathy aligned our inhales and exhales. His breath wafted across the small distance between us and was drawn inside me [Yeah, only his breath is inside Greg.]. His tender gaze gently held my eyes. We sat like that for a long time.” -For organization sake, I’ll end this post here because the next part is a big tonal shift.
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Date: June 16th, 2015 11:03 PM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie laughing out loud in my office, hope the tonal shift is this becomes an explicit gay sex novel (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28137479) |
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Date: June 16th, 2015 11:22 PM Author: drab double fault (Biglaw associate laughing in office at 11:03 PM) (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28137703) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 10:21 AM Author: bonkers bronze space (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28139783) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 1:10 AM Author: rusted brethren wtf
was it nude brewga at least? |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 8:35 AM Author: Odious orange masturbator Hahahaha ~dead~ (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28139380) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 9:07 AM Author: bonkers bronze space lol oooooh my god (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28139445) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 10:29 AM Author: canary cocky base does the tonal shift involve anal sex? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28139820) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 1:37 PM Author: Frum cracking elastic band "our knees touched as we burped lager into each other's face"
OH THE ROMANCE |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 7:54 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location lol (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28144025) |
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Date: June 18th, 2015 5:24 PM Author: Khaki parlour I bet they are clothed brewgaers. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28151217) |
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Date: June 16th, 2015 11:18 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 8 PART THREE [CXN-22] Chapter 8 Part Three -One month after the super STR8 brewga with Sanjay, everything changes. On July 22, 2012 the country is rocked by a 9/11-level terrorist attack. Terrorist teams at 13 different airports (JFK, LaGuardia, Newark, Boston, Reagan, Atlanta, Miami, Houston, O’Hare, Denver, LAX, San Fran, and Seattle) strike on a day where weather conditions across the entire country are extremely clear. Greg notes that in good conditions, passenger planes can make their final landing approach in very rapid succession, with another plan touching down every 45 to 60 seconds. At each airport, small terrorist teams deploy a few miles out from the runway and blast a bunch of planes out of the sky with MANPADS as they take off or land. At a few locations, the teams use “fancier laser-guided assemblies” that he notes cost about $250k each (a little spendy for a terror group, but w/e). The chaos of attacking so many planes at each airport causes a total collapse of air traffic control, causing damaged planes to end up smashing into the wreckage of previously crashed planes as they try to make an emergency landing. On the ground, massive fires burn in neighborhoods hit by destroyed planes. Thirty-nine planes total are shot down (despite this, Greg says that ‘scores’ were attacked). Over 6,000 people die in the planes and five hundred are killed on the ground. The 81 terrorists involved all commit suicide to avoid capture. All are Muslim men in the country legally. I’m not sure how to feel about this terror attack as a major event of the novel. On the one hand, terrorists DO have these weapons and attacks like this have occurred overseas. On the other, this plan involves nearly 100 people and in some cases weaponry large enough to require mounting on a truck. This seems like a remarkably difficult operation to plan and execute without the FBI noticing, even if the attack itself is totally doable. On the other hand, we had warning signs for 9/11 as well, and Greg himself notes that this is a huge embarrassing intelligence failure, so I can be charitable this time. Also, I suppose it's possible that the attack may have been conspiratorially engineered by XO Steve Jordan given his earlier email about funding pedo groups, but Greg doesn't raise that possibility. -Greg takes a nice little shot at the TSA-ification of America: “Instead of figuring out how to defend airliners against missiles, the government had spent the decade having ordinary Americans and frequent travelers like myself [Oh! The Travel!] remove their belts and shoes and pack their toiletries into little plastic bags. -As you may imagine, the effect of all this on America is pretty profound. “The mood in the country, initially one of shock, grief, and solidarity, turned ugly.”
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Date: June 17th, 2015 12:32 AM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 9: It Can't Happen Here [CXN-23] Chapter 9: It Can’t Happen Here -With that shocking twist, the narrative reaches 2012. Our quotes for this chapter really amp up the Nazi comparisons: “Repeatedly I heard anti-Nazis say, ‘If only 1,000 of us in the late twenties had combined in heroic resistance, we could have stopped Hitler.” –Dr. James Luther Adams, German dissident and later Harvard divinity professor “Hanna Arendt dated her awakening to February 27, 1933, the day the Reichstag burned down [It didn’t burn down; it just got gutted, but hey, it’s just a quote]. From the moment Adolf Hitler began using the fire as a pretext to suspend civil liberties and crush dissent, Arendt said, ‘I felt responsible.’” –Samantha Power, writing the introduction to the 2004 edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism -In retrospect, Greg realizes that only the 7/22 attacks (as they are called) could have saved Palin. Otherwise, the Democrats would have routed her. His own life would be different as well: “I would be installed in my corner office downtown, practicing law. I would probably have children with Emilie [shudder].” -But, 7/22 does happen, and Palin decisively seizes her chance, despite being functionally retarded in this book. On July 24, she declares martial law nationwide. She delivers an address not from the Oval Office or Congress, but from the Situation Room flanked by the Joint Chiefs (the only civilians present are Brownback and XO Steve Jordan). She gives a forceful speech saying enemies had exploited our weaknesses such as political correctness (like letting Muslims immigrate and giving terrorists trials). No more, she says. Palin swears to “find and deport or punish every last one of them,” but it looks like she’s only describing Muslims with extreme tendencies, not all Muslims. In any case, she says this crackdown requires martial law, and she says the Joint Chiefs agree. Critically, though, Palin says that she promises to focus EXCLUSIVELY on the renewed anti-terror crusade. She pledges not to campaign in the 2012 election and says if the American people want her to be reelected they can go ahead and do so. Meanwhile, she will focus on smashing the Muzzies. This speech is massively popular. Palin not only gets Congress to approve a suspension of habeas corpus, but also to repeal the Posse Comitatus Act, allowing the US military to take part in investigating and prosecuting terror cases within the United States. The bill also contains a provision allowing the president to take control of the National Guard without the consent of state governors (is that permission needed now? I’m pretty sure Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas guard without Faubus’ approval). In another move they will later regret, Congress puts no limits on the President’s authority with these new powers, and includes NO sunset provision in the law. For Pete’s sake, even the Patriot Act had a sunset, but so it goes. -To keep people enthusiastic, F3 suspends its regular programming and starts running specials on prior uses of martial law in an attempt to convince people that it’s totally fine: “F3 cited, in some cases incorrectly, the Chicago Fire, Hawaii after Pearl Harbor, coal riots in West Virginia, and even hurricane Katrina as prior uses of martial law. They argued that martial law was routine and necessary in times of national crisis.” Of course, this is all LIEZ, but F3 needs to run interference so Republicans can abruptly forget their preoccupation with states’ rights and go along with a massive usurpation of power by the federal government. Greg grimly notes that two years ago F3 was hyping up the ability of Christian militias to rise up against a much less “tyrannical” federal government. -Emilie points out that this is all political gamesmanship; if Obama had pulled this after 7/22 the right would scream bloody murder about martial law. Greg can’t accept things so easily: “My mind expected and sought principle and coherence. I was not programmed to deal well with pure expediency. And I found it difficult to accept that people could be so easily manipulated into supporting positions that contradicted both their self-proclaimed values and their own interests. But Karl Rove, Steve Jordan, and the other brilliant political strategists of the Republican far right had made their reputations and fortunes doing just that.” -Sanjay predicts that the Christain Right has now crossed its Rubicon. Having given the federal government such massive power, they cannot afford to every give that power over to the other side. Whether they’re ready or not, they will need to make their big push for a theocracy within a few years. -Sanjay calls out Sanjay for just being too reasonable: “’And Greg,’ Sanjay continued, ‘as to the cognitive dissonance, with respect, this is an example of how ‘thinking like a lawyer’ can get you into terrible trouble. People are endowed with reason, but it rarely rules their minds. They have access to logic, but they use it sparingly. One of the most remarkable things about the human brain is its ability to embrace contradictions.” -Emilie is scornful, because she’s a bitch: “’No one knows or cares about ‘cognitive dissonance.’ Just say what you mean. Most Americans will believe almost anything – golden tablets from God buried under a hill in upstate New York alien souls bouncing around the universe and inhabiting our bodies, getting to fuck seventy-two virgins as a welcome present when you arrive in heaven – it’s all the same crap. If you are raised to believe it, or are dumb enough and desperate enough, you’ll believe anything.’” -Sanjay acts annoyed for once and tells Emilie that she will certainly NOT be writing his speeches. He thought he was talking to smarts, but since he was apparently wrong, he cites an example: “’Remember Terri Schiavo? I think history will record the Terri Schiavo affair as one of the seminal events of our modern history [okay…], a singular watershed for the evangelical movement and for conservatives. The reconstructionists, previously somewhat at the margins, were propelled to the center of a fight that galvanized the entire Christian right. And what was at the heart of it? You had a question – whether to let the doctors remove life support from a brain-dead woman as authorized by her husband and opposed by her parents [Schiavo was not brain-dead; brain death requires damage so severe that even involuntary body functions like breathing and heartbeat have ceased]. This is and has always been a question solely for the states [wait, NOW the libs suddenly care about states’ rights?]. There is absolutely nothing in the Constitution that makes any part of this a federal question… So, was their response consistent with their own fundamental political belief – that is, to defer to the state and keep the federal government out of it? No. When federal courts properly declined to intervene, George Bush flew back from Texas, Tom DeLay recalled Congress, and the Congress of the United States attempted, by federal law, to prevent the doctors of a brain-dead woman [she was not brain-dead] in Florida from removing her feeding tube because, in the particular belief system of a single sect of a single religion, this is seen as euthanasia and contrary to the law of the Old Testament [I am pretty sure New Testament Christians and Catholics and Mormons see euthanasia as bad too].’ -Sanjay says this shows that there are higher values than conservatives’ concern with individual liberty: “’You could be forgiven for thinking that this is an absolute barrier to a conservative embrace of theocracy. But it is not. These values, what some conservatives call ‘process conservatives,’ will always be throw under the bus if they conflict with ‘substantive values,’ such as the right to life. Mike Huckabee, the governor of Arkansas, was at least frank about it. He just shrugged and said, ‘There’s a larger issue in play, and that is the whole issue of the definition of life.’ So there you have it. Personal freedom, states’ rights, and limited government – all pushed aside in a moment when there is a ‘larger issue.’ That Huckabee quote feels really forced in. It’s not particularly strong on its own and he doesn’t explain the context at all even though he’s talking to the constantly clueless Emilie. -Sanjay especially hates on Jeb Bush: “Jeb Bush actually dispatched armed state agents to forcibly remove Terri Schiavo from the hospice in violation of court orders, but those state agents were stopped by the local police who upheld the law. Jeb Bush should have been impeached and jailed for that stunt [hoo boy]. But instead he became one of the heroes [LOL evangelicals hate Bush now]. I was really surprised to learn that a large plurality of Americans would have approved the use of violence to ‘save’ Terri Schiavo [he always writes out the whole name].’ -Sarah Palin keeps her promise and doesn’t do any campaigning, focusing totally on the terrorist threat. The Republican convention says nothing about the Christian Nation or the economy; it’s all 7/22 all the time. But hey, forget about THAT stuff, we need a Biglaw update!: “Despite 7/22, I managed to close the rare-earths project in August. We mobilized $8 billion of capital for one of the poorest countries on earth, prevented the Chinese from obtaining a monopoly position in a strategic commodity, created billions in value for our clients’ shareholders, and earned a fee in excess of $10 million for RCD&S. The timing could not have been better. The firm’s elections for partnership were held in early November. The odds start out pretty long, with over a hundred lawyers starting in a class and typically fewer than ten of them becoming partner eight years later. Moreover, the process and criteria were opaque to the associates, and the results seemed to us to be unpredictable. It was, one of the partners reminded me cryptically, ‘ an election’ where the dynamics of decision making [sic; Rich is still pretty bad about properly hyphenating] were prone to sudden shifts in view.” -Greg knows he is deserving but fears <><><>NOBREAKFAST<><><>. Emilie is supportive: “’For God’s sake, grow a pair, Greg. If you want to be a winner, you have to believe you’re a winner. A whiff of doubt and they’ll crucify you.’ “It continued to alarm and annoy me that, each year, Emilie’s language became increasingly vulgar. She knew how to ‘behave’ when we were with older people in social situations, but she brought home with her the casually foul language of the trading desk. I wonder now why I didn’t tell her more often how much it bothered me.” Man, Greg is a bit of a prude.
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Date: June 17th, 2015 8:21 AM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse I wonder if Emilie knows that she's Greg's beard... (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28139354) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 11:24 PM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie when's the last time s&c made 10 partners in a year, should be more like fewer than 5. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28145898) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 1:03 AM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 9 PART TWO [CXN-24] Chapter 9 Part Two -Sanjay’s Theocracy Watch is on the upswing again, driven by the implementation of martial law. He’s convinced that as soon as Palin is reelected she’ll start deploying it for means other than fighting terror, to achieve the REAL agenda for her, Brownback, and XO Steve Jordan. In October, he gives a speech at the New School in NYC titled “How To Take Over The USA,” a rather blunt assessment of the theocrats’ strategery to take seize control of America while “casting aside the constitutional mandate for separation of church and state.” -What, you wanted me to quote what is probably going to be a hilarious attempt at epic rhetoric by Rich? Tough luck. You see the speech is SO AWESOME that it doesn’t exist anymore!: “I have looked long and hard in Adam’s files to find a copy of the speech. It’s not there. Before the Holy War, scholars were already labeling it as ‘historic.’ I remember an opinion piece in the Times during the siege that called it one of the most prescient works of political and cultural analysis in American history. For the five hundred of us packed in the Tishman Auditorium at the New School that night, it was a riveting experience. Sanjay was a compelling speaker. After only a few minutes, the audience intuited that he was an utterly sincere man, and scrupulously honest. He did not play with their emotions. He did not dumb down his speech, nor did he indulge in unnecessary jargon or convoluted analysis. He laid out the facts, thoroughly and methodically. “Sanjay started by reminding his audience about the path followed by most revolutionary movements, starting from the fringes and proceeding to the legitimate mainstream and then insinuating themselves into the very power structures they seek to overthrow… But the Christian fundamentalists, according to Sanjay, had four other, more unusual strategies, each of which, he argued, had the potential to be successful. These included moving the Christian religion itself from its moderate Protestant roots to the fundamentalist beliefs in biblical literalism and godly authority, the reinvention of American history to establish the origin myth of America as a Christian Nation, the inculcation in all Christians of a strong sense of victimization and threat, and preparing the ground for the inevitable necessity to use violent means to achieve the final transition to the theocratic utopia. I remember that he closed by reminding his audience of Hanna Arendt’s conclusion regarding the driving motive behind all totalitarian revolutions: ‘unwavering faith in an ideological fictitious world, rather than lust for power.’ “His audience was shocked but at the same time motivated. For the first time I saw the sort of visceral fear and determination to act that would alter come to unify New York and power its resistance.” Oh, what a prophet! -Afterwards, Sanjay tells Greg he wants him to quit Biglaw and work at Theocracy Watch as Sanjay’s co-president. Greg feels like he has been PUNCHED IN THE GUT, because he’s killed himself for eight years to make partner only for Sanjay to ask him to abandon it all. Keep in mind that Sanjay is worth $400 million and could almost certainly offer Greg a salary equal or better than what he’d pull as a new partner. I guess that thought just didn’t occur to him. -Greg says that Sanjay is a “fucking saint” and basically perfect, but that in the end he thinks he’s wrong. “It can’t happen here,” he says, oblivious that that’s a book by Sinclair Lewis. So, Sanjay gives him a copy he has lying around and demands he read it. -It turns out that in undergrad Greg was a history shithead, so Sanjay urges him to use his “skills as a historian” to see how it totally CAN happen here. -On November 6, Sarah Palin is reelected with 56 percent of the vote (better than Eisenhower over Adlai!). The result is so decisive Palin doesn’t even need that law allowing churches to engage in politics, which Greg notes survived the SCOTUS review on a 5-4 vote. Nevertheless, the churches were heavily involved, with mega-churches conducting massive GOTV efforts. Steve Jordan has perfectly fused the Tea Party (which, again, exists despite the lack of the 2009 Obama stimulus package that created them IRL) and Christian right. In fact, the merger is so strong that the media starts calling them (drumroll, please)… the TEAVANGELICAL movement! Eeyup. -The Republicans also retake the House and retain the Senate, with many of the new members riding a new anti-immigrant wave as well. -A week later, Greg gets breakfast, or in this case dinner. It is all he could dream of: “Sanjay used to say that attaining a thing ardently sought usually results in disappointment. In this case he was wrong. It was even better than I had imagined. My only dilemma that afternoon was about two friends who were up for partner and did not make it. I debated whether to go see them to offer condolences or whether my presence might cause them pain by letting them see my happiness. I decided to wait a day or so. At 5 p.m. I was dragged off to Harry’s Bar with a group of younger partners and the other associates for a celebratory drink. Emilie came downtown to join us. That night in the black car driving home to our apartment, in a throwback to the first year of our relationship, she snuggled up, kissed me warmly, and said, ‘You’re a rock star and I really do love you.’ I told her that it was her victory as well and I couldn’t have done it without her. I meant it.’
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Date: June 17th, 2015 10:20 AM Author: bonkers bronze space "teavangelical" this man is a visionary |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 10:22 AM Author: drab double fault I'm a little surprised "revengelicals" has never become a term on the left. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28139786) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 10:46 AM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse whoa crazy what a coincidence that his firm is located downtown, just like S&C (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28139897) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 1:36 PM Author: Frum cracking elastic band jfc nothing is more blood-boiling than the use of "rockstar" in biglaw parlance and of course greg throws it out here casually. i hate everything about him. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28141140) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 11:28 PM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie tbf, it was that retarded whore Emilie who used the term, so Rich may agree with you (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28145938) |
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Date: June 18th, 2015 3:29 PM Author: crystalline lodge "These included moving the Christian religion itself from its moderate Protestant roots to the fundamentalist beliefs in biblical literalism and godly authority,"
yeah the puritans were soooooooooo moderate! |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 1:07 AM Author: Stirring indian lodge I search this thread every night before bed. Don't have any witty comments. Just a thank for you (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28138665) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 1:10 AM Author: drab double fault Doesn't need to be witty man. I like seeing comments and 180s regarding stuff you find particularly funny or interesting. Besides reaffirming that people are appreciating this and motivating me to keep working on it, it also helps me see what stuff is worth giving attention to while writing this up. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28138678) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 9:10 AM Author: Odious orange masturbator Proud to say I've been in on this hall of fame thread since the beginning. Not enough 180s exist. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28139450) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 11:28 PM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28145941) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 7:35 AM Author: drab double fault (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28139315) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 7:56 AM Author: chest-beating gas station yarmulke Excellent work (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28139327) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 11:33 AM Author: canary cocky base this has been my favorite read since you started. 180 work. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28140222) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 4:22 PM Author: Sickened incel how does this book have 4 stars on Amazon? WTF? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28142563) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 4:29 PM Author: Aggressive marvelous death wish range libs are mentally ill are you new here...? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28142619) |
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Date: June 17th, 2015 8:04 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28144095) |
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Date: June 18th, 2015 12:05 AM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 10: The End Of Law [CXN-25]
Chapter Ten: The End Of Law
-Believe it or not, we’re less than 40% through the book still. The chapter quote this time is short, and relevant in a rather forced way:
“In time of war the law falls silent.” –Cicero, 52 BC
-Greg is a partner now, and gets installed in a corner office “about the size of the tenement in which my Irish grandfather had raised his five children.” But wait! One final test remains:
“Later that day one of the senior partners invited me to his office to sign the partnership agreement; he handed it to me folded open to the signature page. Thinking this could perhaps be one last test of my diligence, I demurred, suggesting that it was unprofessional for a lawyer to sign a contract that he had not read. The older man laughed and noted that for 126 years every new partner had signed the agreement without reading it first, but if I wished to be the first to decline to do so, that was my prerogative. I signed.”
Since I know you’re all wondering, SullCrom was founded in 1879, making it 134 years old in 2013. I wonder if there’s a way to find out whether their first new partner was added in 1887.
-Greg finds out what partners make. He won’t actually say what it is, but it’s a ton. He can’t tell anybody, including Emilie because he hasn’t married her yet.
-A few weeks later Palin is inaugurated for her second term as one of the most powerful presidents in history. Despite only being one election removed from a brutal 2010 midterm, she somehow has a filibuster-proof contingent of 68 Republican senators, suggesting that in 2012 Republicans managed to unseat virtually every Democrat elected in 2006. Martial law is still in effect.
-Palin’s second inaugural is a new level of strange:
“The former newsreader who mounted the podium that day could only rarely craft a coherent sentence of her own, but she was very good at reading words written by others:
“’Six months ago, our nation endured the worst attack in its proud history, far worse than Pearl Harbor, far worse than 9/11. Almost seven thousand godfearing innocents were slaughtered right here in the homeland. Seven thousand Americans going about their daily activities – working, eating, praying – obliterated in an instant by radical Islamic foreigners, most of whom had been welcomed to this country and invited to share our freedoms. Like so many of you, I have prayed long and hard about this tragedy. How did our Lord, who loves America and its people – who established this Christian Nation to do His will on Earth – how did He allow this terrible thing to happen?... I think, my fellow Americans, we all, deep in our hearts, know the answer. The Bible tells us of so many instances where God’s people have strayed from His path, where the people have lived godless lives, and where His retribution is swift and just. God’s justice is an eternal truth. Do we think because the pages of the calendar have turned, because we live in a twenty-first century age of technological wonders, that somehow these eternal and universal truths do not apply?’”
-The upshot? SOME Americans have rejected God and so he is making us PAY. Who are these Americans? Palin tells us:
‘”Our federal courts prevented us from doing God’s will. They decided that the commandments of God could not even be displayed in public. They decided that our citizens could not pray in schools and other public places. They decided that practicing evil was a right, nothing more than an ‘alternative lifestyle.’”
-Plain pledges to halt the terrorist threat not only be killing the baddies, but by “returning this nation to a godly path” to assuage God’s wrath. At this point…
“The usual decorum associated with an inaugural ceremony was cast aside as scores of congressmen leapt to their feet, hooting and hollering as if their team had just scored a touchdown [he likes football analogies for these people, doesn’t he]. The vast crowd on the mall erupted and refused to quiet down for a full five minutes. Palin assumed what the press called her Joan of Arc face, a carefully practiced [sic; he’s flubbing his hyphenated adjectives again] blend of stoic determination mixed with the smug satisfaction of a woman remembering moments of intimacy with the divine. The television focused on the more liberal members of the Supreme Court squirming uneasily in their seats as the ovation refused to abate.”
-All of this leads up to Palin’s big legislative proposal to save America: The Constitution Restoration Act, originally written by “one of our most brilliant jurists, Roy Moore.”
-This reference is great because Roy Moore back in the news for trying to defy gay marriage stuff in Alabama. But a decade ago, he was the guy who was removed from office for refusing to take down the Ten Commandments monument outside his courthouse.
-Palin describes this law:
“’This legislation will restore God to His rightful places as the sole and sovereign source of law, liberty, and government in America. Any federal judge who acts contrary to this truth will be impeached. And no one will again surrender the sovereignty of America – no international organization, no UN, no bizarre group of atheist dictators – will again dictate to the people of America what they can or cannot do. We answer to God and to the Constitution and not to the UN.’”
-The law would also allow Congress to block the Supreme Court from “reviewing laws that liberal judges just don’t like.” The bill will also give individual states the power to allow prayer in schools, officially recognize Christianity, ban abortion, or block gay marriage, all without the judiciary stopping them.
-This summary is followed by *ten minutes* of applause.
-Sanjay gives a second summary if you didn’t get it the first time: The bill makes denying God as the supreme source of “law liberty, and government” an impeachable offense, and denies federal courts jurisdiction on issues involving the separation of church and state. Interestingly, even Sanjay admits this law is to certain extent constitutional; Article 3 DOES give Congress the power to limit the SCOTUS’ appellate jurisdiction. By extension Congress can also limit the jurisdiction of all other federal courts since they’re just a creation of Congress anyway.
-Greg counters that the SCOTUS enjoys ORIGINAL jurisdication over “all matters arising under the Constitution.” I am not a lawyer but I am pretty sure this is untrue. The Constitution only gives the SCOTUS original jurisdiction over cases affecting ambassadors and other public ministers, as well as cases where a state is a party (which has thus far been interpreted as referring to cases where it’s a dispute between the feds and a state).
-Sanjay says this bill shouldn’t be a surprise as it was a part of the 2004 Republican platform. I can find no evidence this is actually the case, however.
-Palin’s second legislative proposal is the Defense of Freedom Act, which is modeled on the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. It gives the president absolute power to imprison or deport a foreigner who is suspected of terrorism or other subversive activities:
“If someone publishes scandalous or malicious lies designed to hurt our nation and help our terrorist enemies, or advocates treason or insurrection against our sacred Constitution, it’s a crime. Common sense. And nothing that hasn’t been done before. I repeat, nothing that hasn’t been done before. My fellow Americans – you are going to hear a lot of talk from the liberal elites about civil liberties. You will hear lies and taunts about dictatorship. Well, just remember this. What we are doing is no more than our Founding Fathers did, than Abraham Lincoln did, than Woodrow Wilson did [conservatives hate Wilson now…actually, a lot hate Lincoln too].”
-Greg decides to stop quoting Palin, and reflects about whether “the version now carried on the Purity Web is the same [as Adam’s version].” He doubts it, as very few historical documents go unedited in the new Christian Nation. “History has been scrubbed clean of the awkward, the untidy, and the un-Christian.” Apparently, “The Constitution Restoration Act is now taught as a seminal moment in the development of the Christian Nation,” but the Defense of Freedom Act has probably been covered up, a “nasty bit of history unnecessary to an understanding of the Christian Nation movement.”
-Despite being extreme, Palin’s supermajorities mean her proposals are enacted within a few weeks of inauguration. Because the opposition is utterly powerless to stop it, they sort of lose heart, Greg says, and focus on accommodation rather than resistance. “No one wanted to hear, and certainly did not want to believe, that these two pieces of legislation put the country on the road to some kind of authoritarianism. The price of civic illiteracy was now being paid in full.”
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Date: June 18th, 2015 12:32 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 10 PART TWO [CXN-26]
CHAPTER 10 PART TWO
-Palin’s two new theocracy bills are the tipping point for Greg, looking back. He sees how BRILLIANT the Teavangelical strategy was, using each setback to undermine critics like Sanjay who claimed theocracy was inevitable. Like a lobster in the pot, nobody notices what’s happening until the water is so hot it kills you.
-Greg can’t focus on his important legal work, because he can see what’s happening:
“I could see the ‘setup’. These laws did not establish a state religion, nor did they constitute a full frontal [sic] attack on tolerance. But they sought to disable the laws and courts that would be our front line of defense against future attempts to do just that. Whether this effort would succeed was up to the Supreme Court.”
-And what of the Supreme Court? They’ve been in the background, mentioned only in passing as approving Palin’s bill about giving churches political speech 5-4. Thus far, there have been no mentions of Palin getting any nominees, so the line-up is presumably identical to what it was when Bush left office (Scalia, Kennedy, Alito, Roberts, Thomas, Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, Souter).
-Well…it WAS identical. Because out of nowhere, XO Steve Jordan has 91-year-old John Paul Stevens murdered:
“Stevens…had steadfastly refused to consider resignation during the first Palin administration, knowing that his vote would almost certainly be replaced with that of a radical conservative appointed by Sarah Palin and confirmed by the still-Republican Senate. He remained in good health, swimming in the ocean daily during the summers. But it was unrealistic to think Stevens could hang on for another four years, and following the election most Supreme Court watcher expected that he would bow to the inevitable and tender his resignation. But the old man, horrified by the legislation so hastily passed by Congress and knowing that the constitutional challenges that followed would soon wend their way to the Supreme Court, issued a terse two-sentence press release stating that he had no intention to resign…”
“One month later Stevens was killed in a car crash on the way to work, his limousine broadsided by a Hummer [LOL really?] only blocks from his town house near Capitol Hill. The security camera at that intersection was out of order [DUN DUN!] and thus did not record the driver, who fled the scene of the accident and was never found. The Hummer had been stolen from the driveway of an army colonel seconded to the State Department. Although the investigation was not completed, the official view was clear: a stolen car, a thief fleeing the scene, and bad luck for Justice Stevens.”
-Palin surprises everybody by replacing Stevens with “a nominee who was reliably conservative but not as radical as anyone, including her own supporters, had expected.” That nominee? Ted Cruz. Given this book came out in summer 2013, this was probably written before Ted Cruz was nationally famous and perhaps even before his Senate campaign drew attention. It shows because Rich has pretty solid praise for Cruz:
“Cruz was the son of Cuban immigrants, a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, former attorney general of Texas, clerk for Justice Rehnquist, and prominent Supreme Court litigator with a major firm. His pro-gun, pro-prayer, anti-separation, and anti-abortion credentials were impeccable, but the left could not claim he was unqualified.”
-Souter wants to retire, but decides not to because of the Teavangelical menace.
-Even with a clear bloc of five conservatives plus Kennedy, the SCOTUS only gives Palin mixed results. They strike down the parts of the Defense of Freedom Act that criminalize anti-government speech, but uphold Palin’s deportation powers. Critically, they uphold the parts of the Constitution Restoration Act that roll back substantive due process protections, thus allowing individual states to curtail constitutional rights as well as “those derived from… fundamental concepts of personal liberty (such as the right to privacy).” How extreme is this:
“I did not know a single lawyer at RCD&S or elsewhere, no matter how conservative their politics, who agreed with this part of the decision. The deans of the top twenty law schools signed a public letter protesting both the result and reasoning of the decision. It was now the law of the land that any federal judge could be impeached for attempting to exercise jurisdiction on any matter ‘concerning [any governmental] entity’s, officer’s, or agent’s acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.’ The long history of the federal courts as the enforcers of separation of church and state was at an end.”
-And with that, the floodgates open. Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Alabama declare themselves officially Christian states. Scores of laws are enacted across the South and West, such as bills banning Islamic law, banning spousal benefits for gays, removing evolution from public schools unless taught alongside creationism and intelligent design, criminalizing sodomy and adultery, making school prayer mandatory, “banning from use in schools any book by a gay author or with a gay character,” and even more. All are rammed through by evangelical-controlled legislatures using the Constitution Restoration Act for cover. Take that, libs.
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Date: June 18th, 2015 3:35 PM Author: Jade pistol (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28150342) |
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Date: June 18th, 2015 8:19 PM Author: Odious orange masturbator "a full frontal attack on tolerance"
if it's palin, i'll allow it |
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Date: June 18th, 2015 9:40 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse Why does he unintentionally paint Justice Stevens as a limousine liberal? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28153322) |
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Date: June 18th, 2015 11:24 PM Author: drab double fault Libs are famously oblivious on this shit, man. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28154428) |
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Date: June 19th, 2015 2:42 PM Author: Stirring indian lodge Love the gas guzzling hummer taking Stevens out (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28158388) |
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Date: June 18th, 2015 10:02 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 10 PART THREE [CXN-27]
CHAPTER 10 PART THREE
-You probably noticed the last post didn’t mention abortion. That’s because by far the BIGGEST offensive is occurring on that issue, so Greg singles it out. Even though he notes abortion isn’t a separation of church and state issue (try telling actual libs that), and Roe v. Wade remains in force, lots of states use the new Constitution Restoration Act as cover to pass loads of new restrictions. In an intriguing strategic quirk, each of the 400+ laws is designed to be a little different, with the intent that at least some of them would be able to survive court scrutiny.
The new abortion restrictions passed in various states include: Abolishing ALL family planning services (so that abortion/contraception aren’t singled out), mandatory ultrasounds, banning (again) all taxpayer funding of abortion, banning private insurance from covering abortion, and in a few cases banning either giving or receiving an abortion. All are challenged, but the sheer variety leaves the ACLU “overwhelmed.” With Stevens replaced by Cruz, Roe looks doomed.
-The seeds of civil war are appearing:
“Within a year of the inauguration, we had in effect become two countries, with the legal norms of one antithetical to the other. A few pessimists said this was the beginning of the end of the United States and predicted the gradual erosion of the country into a loose confederation of convenience between the two blocks – a view that was dismissed as extreme even by the avowedly liberal press.”
-But the Teavangelicals don’t think they’ve achieved enough after the first year, so at the end of 2013, Fox Faith and Freedom News (remember them?) announces that they are launching a national movement to ensure the Constitution Restoration Act is “fully enforced,” “with nightly exhortations for citizens to report to F3 any public official who appeared to be resisting the mandate to put God back at the center of our national life:”
“Within weeks, any red state federal, state, or municipal judge without a Ten Commandments plaque in his or her courtroom was at risk of becoming the target of noisy public protest and attempted impeachment. No small-town mayor dared resist a call for a Christmas crèche outside of town hall, and no school principal dared discipline a teacher who insisted on starting each day with his or her children on their knees in prayer to Jesus Christ.”
-In Oklahoma, Kansas, and Alabama state attorneys general actually prosecute science teachers for defying requirements to give equal time to intelligent design and creationism. Sanjay goes on TV to point out these teachers are also gay.
-To back up its offensive, F3 runs a propaganda campaign, with historians appearing to declare that this form of radical state sovereignty reflects America’s constitutional design. Only the influence of “socialism” in the 20th century made the country lose its way. This argument surprisingly WORKS, even with some libs:
“Blue state people of ordinary intelligence were not inclined to accept the really big lie – that the growth of a secular and tolerant society constituted the tyrannical suppression of Christianity. But they WERE inclined to accept that those folks out in Oklahoma could live how they wished, including teaching their children whatever crazy nonsense they wanted. After all – this strain of thinking went – no one has to live in Oklahoma, and if they don’t like it they can leave. Not my problem.”
This paragraph is a really good example of what has been a small problem for the whole book but which is going to become a bigger one: Rich tends to treat states as monoliths. Almost EVERYBODY in Oklahoma is some radical evangelical, while “blue state people” are basically all irreligious or libertarian or whatever. Of course, in actuality America is a country of politics on the margins, so there are tons of red staters living in blue states and vice versa. But Rich never really describes a world like that. It’s going to become a glaring problem when the civil war comes.
-Greg derisively notes that Emilie thinks like those naïve blue-staters, because that allows her to carry on with her shrew masterplan:
“Her plans required the financial services-led economic boom to continue without interruption from the stupidity of politics and politicians. She would make managing director at Credit Suisse, leave with one of her clients to found a private equity firm, then make more money than could be spent in a lifetime on her first deal. Only then would she marry me (or perhaps someone even more suitable) and have children. The rest of her life would be spent decorating fabulous houses and raising perfect children.”
-All these ambitions mean Emilie is VERY worried about how distracted Rich is getting by all this theocracy nonsense:
“Emilie knew that, despite my burst of enthusiasm upon becoming a partner, I had become dangerously distracted by the public drama that was playing out every day. After all, my making partner was not the limit of her ambition. Only a few weeks after I became a partner, she said in the jesting voice she used only when she regarded the topic as very serious [LOL so random!], that she hoped I had now turned my sights on becoming head of my practice group and then, eventually, chairman. She knew this required a single-minded focus on my work that permitted no distractions, and Emilie feared that I was being distracted. Being married to a B-list partner, even of the city’s best firm, would have been difficult for her. A cheating spouse would have been better than a professionally mediocre one. Thus her fear of my increasing interest in current events. But she didn’t fear – and couldn’t imagine – what I was soon to do.”
-As you may have guessed from this chapter’s title, what Greg is about to do is live the XO dream and QUIT LAW out of the blue. What motivates it? More Teavangelical mania:
“I saw a CNN e-mail news alert and read that the federal Department of Education and the National Science Foundation had jointly released for comment rules setting new conditions for participation by colleges and universities in federal grants and funding... The first of the new conditions was that the university must not maintain any rule or practice that prevented university libraries from acquiring books dealing with creationism or intelligent design as legitimate theories. The second condition was that the supported institution must not maintain any rule or practice preventing the display of Christina symbols in public places on campus. Such a rule prohibiting Islamic, Hindu, or Wiccan symbols, the commentary explained, would be acceptable but not required. The final condition was that the supported university would be required to adopt a policy forbidding the further acquisition into any university library of any book ‘celebrating or promoting’ a ‘homosexual lifestyle.’”
-This is Greg’s breaking point. The SCHOLARSHIP must be protected: “Our elite universities were the stewards of our true national history, our temples of reason and the keepers of our collective memory. They, more than the Supreme Court, are the ultimate guardians of the enlightenment.”
“Just like that day long ago before y first middle school football game, I seemed to rise above the noise and complexities of the moment and look down on the field of play. I saw neither ambiguity nor uncertainty but a society tumbling toward the most conventional type of religious authoritarianism… I saw that Sanjay was right.”
-The very next day Greg walks into the office of his mentor at the firm, and tells him he’s quitting to join Theocracy Watch:
“’I have made a choice. Not because I don’t owe everything to you and the firm. Not because I’m unhappy in my work. Not because I don’t think I’m a damn fine lawyer [damn fine!]. I have chosen something… well, something more important.”
-The partner objects that Greg is throwing his career away for something that doesn’t matter with a group that has no power. He tells the lie that thousands of biglaw drones have told themselves to justify selling out:
“People like you, people like us, Greg, if we want to save the world, we do it from the inside.”
-Greg compares this to WW2, when apparently the partners actually went and fought. He namedrops Roger Leman as a partner who was killed helping to evac the British at Dunkirk. Still, the partner is scornful:
“’If I thought there was any possibility that fascism was around the corner or that a real religious authoritarianism could take root in this country, then of course I’d be with you. But it can’t happen here.’”
“I wondered if he’d read Sinclair Lewis, but I decided not to go there.”
-“And that, after eight and a half years of striving and sacrifice, was that.”
Sorry, XO, but the BIGLAW portion of this tale is done. Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.
Fear not. The most heroic parts of the book are yet to come.
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Date: June 18th, 2015 10:11 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse "In Oklahoma, Kansas, and Alabama state attorneys general actually prosecute science teachers for defying requirements to give equal time to intelligent design and creationism. Sanjay goes on TV to point out these teachers are also gay."
lolwut? |
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Date: June 19th, 2015 11:42 AM Author: Odious orange masturbator if humans have a common ancestor with chimps, we're all fags. what's not to get (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28157117) |
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Date: June 18th, 2015 10:44 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 11: Not So Bad [CXN-28]
CHAPTER 11: Not So Bad
-Our quotes for this chapter:
“For true blissed-out and vacant servitude… you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught at all.” –Christopher Hitchens, “Why Americans Are Not Taught History”
“I hope I live to see the day, when, as in the early days of our country, we don’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again, and Christians will be running them.” –Jerry Falwell
-So now Greg works for Theocracy Watch. He trades in his suit for jeans and Wall Street for Chambers Street
-Sadly for all of us, the end of biglaw also means the end of Emilie. The agony of a shrew is a glorious sight:
“The night after my meeting with John, Emilie was there when I arrived home. I looked her in the eye and told her that I had resigned from the firm and was going to help Sanjay at TW. For a moment she held her breath. Then, slowly, she started gulping air with sharp hiccup-like inhalations. Her arms reached across her chest, and she embraced herself. I remember watching the bare skin on her upper arms turning white from the strength of her grip. Within moments, her staccato exhales evolved into loud sobs. She sat on the couch, rocking back and forth. I stood perfectly still. Her crying continued wordlessly for what seemed to me a long time. When it abated, she raised her head and showed a face contorted with a mixture of humiliation and rage.
“’Out. Get… out. Now.’ I didn’t answer. ‘Now,’ she screamed.’
“I turned and left and have not seen her since.”
-At Theocracy Watch, Greg assesses Sanjay’s operation. Despite his great wealth, Sanjay doesn’t spend much on the organization, as he doesn’t want its successes to appear “bought.” Greg convinces him to change his approach. They hire a guy named Walter Evans over from the Wall Street Journal (I was shocked to discover that he is apparently fictional), as he is apparently disgusted with how it has become another F3 mouthpiece under Murdoch (so I guess ALL NewsCorp entities went on the evangelical wave… you know, for some reason). They also higher a gay techie to reboot their online presence (which was supposedly state-of-the-art earlier in the book).
A week after landing Evans, Greg also discovers Sharon Heller, another person I was surprised to discover is fictional. Heller was formerly a professional fundraiser for charities, most recently the Topeka Symphony. That went belly-up after the Kansas legislature cuts off all state funding for cultural institutions, bans NPR (yeah), and passes a new law that eliminates the charitable giving tax deduction if it goes to groups that “promote abortion, homosexuality, secularism, or other evil.” All this caused a collapse of the cultural scene in Topeka – “once a bastion of enlightenment against the retrograde politics of Kansas” – and made her an exile along with “thousands” of other artists, musicians, writers, and liberal academics. I like the implication that all these people are essentially wards of the state.
Anyway, Heller is a fundraiser, so she significantly boosts the amount of money being given to Theocracy Watch. Lastly, Greg hires a director of security, because shortly after he arrives somebody fires a bullet [DUN DUN] through their office window, which he suspects is no accident. Literally DOZENS of threats are made against Sanjay on the internet, and while he is so pure that he doesn’t care for his own security he is finally convinced to protect himself more for the sake of his disciple- er, employees.
-Walter Evans scores a BIG COUP by getting Sanjay an interview slot on…The Daily Show!
“’Stewart. Jon Stewart. The Daily Show. Where our target demo gets their news and laughs. Average of one and a half million of them every day. He’s in love with Sanjay. Bloody hopeless love [that describes another character in this book…]. Thinks he’s a prophet. Wants to help. I mean really. Not take cheap shots. Really help.”
I like the subtle acknowledgement that Jon Stewart is also a political operator and not just a “straight shooter” or whatever.
Of course, the appearance is a big hit, mostly because Sanjay is just SO BEAUTIFUL:
“It was brilliant. The extroverted wisecracking Stewart had met his match and didn’t mind one bit. Like everyone else, he could not avoid Sanjay’s penetrating gaze. And many of Stewart’s fans listened to what Sanjay had to say simply because they were captivated by the way he looked. After our first appearance on the show, our daily website hits went from about twenty thousand to eight hundred thousand.”
-So Sanjay has finally made it big. And that means it’s finally time for him to become a known enemy for Sarah Palin. She’s taking questions during an event at New Life Church in Colorado Springs [Given that Palin is presented as functionally retarded, I’m not sure why her handlers are letting her do a freeform Q&A, friendly audience or not] when she launches her attack by calling him the literal Antichrist:
“’Some people are more determined than ever to stop [the Christian Nation stuff]. I mean, if you want to stop God, which is everything good, then doesn’t that have to mean also that you’re, well, the opposite of good, which is evil? I’m no genius, but it seems right to me. I mean, also, have you heard this new guy, this foreign guy who is organizing a movement against our Lord? Theology Watch, I think it’s called. Well, have you seen him?’ [she turns to a pastor next to her] ‘What does the Bible say about the Antichrist, Reverend? That you shall know him as a young man with a handsome face and the tongue of a serpent. Something like that? And from what I hear, a… you know… well, a grievous sinner. Well, have you SEEN him? The Bible warns us that just when the Kingdom is closest, an Antichrist will come to try to reclaim America for the devil. As usual, if it’s in the Holy Book, it happens. But really, my friends. Also, really, this is really, you know, a cause for joy. Because it means we are close. Really close. Thank God. Thank you, Jesus.”
-Palin’s remarks are covered by every media outlet except F3 and it starts a sensation. Reporters harass Palin back in Washington about whether she knows the difference between theology and theocracy and whether she thinks Sanjay is cute.
-But Sanjay is upset, because this movement wasn’t supposed to be about him, and how it is. His picture lands on all the magazines. “The Face of Evil?” is his caption on Time. Naturally, all the Christian blogs and websites go along with Palin in lockstep, arguing that Sanjay really is the Antichrist, knocking Prince William and Obama out as the top contenders (srsly). Greg notes that even Sanjay’s obvious goodness and gentleness are used against him, as a “well-known early church sermon” testifies that the Antichrist will appear very holy (said sermon is not terribly famous and is mostly known because evangelicals cite as evidence of early belief in the Rapture).
-Journalists from Christian media outlets literally start harassing Sanjay in an effort to link him to biblical prophecy. They ask him questions like whether he’s support a seven-year treaty guaranteeing peace with Israel, rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem, the implementation of a socialist “New World Order,” or creating a single world religion (all this is familiar to Left Behind readers, apparently). They even ask if he’s been to Babylon, to which he cheekily replies that he has been to the Long Island suburb, but not the Mesopotamian ruins (oh, what wit!).
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Date: June 19th, 2015 1:18 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse lol what's his deal with Emilie? is there some shrew that broke Rich's heart or something? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28157741) |
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Date: June 24th, 2015 9:27 PM Author: Lime tanning salon background story probably met on OKC and did two dates IRL (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28194300) |
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Date: June 28th, 2015 3:15 AM Author: mentally impaired people who are hurt “’Some people are more determined than ever to stop [the Christian Nation stuff]. I mean, if you want to stop God, which is everything good, then doesn’t that have to mean also that you’re, well, the opposite of good, which is evil? I’m no genius, but it seems right to me. I mean, also, have you heard this new guy, this foreign guy who is organizing a movement against our Lord? Theology Watch, I think it’s called. Well, have you seen him?’ [she turns to a pastor next to her] ‘What does the Bible say about the Antichrist, Reverend? That you shall know him as a young man with a handsome face and the tongue of a serpent. Something like that? And from what I hear, a… you know… well, a grievous sinner. Well, have you SEEN him? The Bible warns us that just when the Kingdom is closest, an Antichrist will come to try to reclaim America for the devil. As usual, if it’s in the Holy Book, it happens. But really, my friends. Also, really, this is really, you know, a cause for joy. Because it means we are close. Really close. Thank God. Thank you, Jesus.”
SO folksy! |
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Date: June 19th, 2015 11:36 AM Author: drab double fault Interestingly, the Faith And Freedom Coalition conference is happening right now. Consider reading news coverage and reflecting that, according to Rich, this group is just a minor historical quirk away from spearheading a totalitarian theocracy. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28157047) |
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Date: June 19th, 2015 12:01 PM Author: well-lubricated abode Truly alarming. All of this could literally happen today. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28157259) |
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Date: June 28th, 2015 3:16 AM Author: mentally impaired people who are hurt ty (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28215331) |
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Date: June 20th, 2015 1:27 PM Author: drab double fault (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28164857) |
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Date: June 21st, 2015 10:32 PM Author: Odious orange masturbator Don't let this peter out. No way I'm buying this just to find out how Sanjay dies (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28174262) |
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Date: June 21st, 2015 10:34 PM Author: drab double fault Don't worry, I have no plans to stop. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28174274) |
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Date: June 21st, 2015 10:36 PM Author: Bright histrionic therapy In Greg's arms. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28174280) |
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Date: June 21st, 2015 10:37 PM Author: drab double fault Hey, NO SPOILERS man. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28174287) |
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Date: June 21st, 2015 10:51 PM Author: Stirring indian lodge (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28174372) |
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Date: June 21st, 2015 11:18 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 11 PART TWO [CXN-29]
Chapter 11 Part Two
-Now that people are obsessed with handsome Sanjay, F3 launches a smear campaign against him. An “expose” series makes a bunch of spurious accusations against him, such as that TW is funded by radical Islamists, that new staff members undergo “bizarre homosexual induction rituals,” that Greg was fired by his firm for embezzlement, and that Sanjay is a follower of an obscure yoga cult that conducts rituals involving aborted fetuses. It’s absurd, but “most of the enormous F3 audience…simply accepted it all as true.”
-Meanwhile, the lib press makes the mistake of simply mocking Palin’s stupidity instead of taking her Antichrist comments at face value. This hurts them in the long run.
-After the first few months of Palin’s presidency, legislation slows down, lulling the public into a belief that the new Christian Nation reality is “not so bad.” But while legislators are resting, the executive branch is moving. In early 2014 Palin names Michael Farris secretary of education. Farris founded Patrick Henry College, a four-year fundamentalist Christian college. More notably, Farris also founded the sinister Home School Legal Defense Association, which promotes homeschooling and defends its legality. Greg notes that he “promoted a curriculum of Christ-centered homeschooling texts to ensure that the children emerged into adulthood with a wholly fundamentalist Christian worldview and prepared, as Generation Joshua, to assume their places in the battle to retake America for Jesus.”
-Greg describes Patrick Henry College as a virtual dystopia, with students required to sign a statement of faith, and all classes are required to adhere to the Bible as literally true (it teaches creation science). Farris is also raked over the coals for saying that “tolerance cannot coexist with liberty.” To Farris, liberty is simply (according to Greg) “the liberty of the Christian to exist in a Christian Nation free of competing faiths or tolerance of practices at odds with his fundamentalist theology.”
This is a rather unfair way of summarizing Farris’s beliefs. In his original rhetoric, Farris puts “tolerance” in quotes, because he’s attacking the particular tolerance of the left which seeks to abolish certain viewpoints it does not like as intolerant. The abstract of a piece he wrote declares that “true tolerance and diversity require a constitutional commitment to liberty for all, not a “constitutional norm” of silencing the “intolerant.” But Rich instead just quotes him as dishonestly as possible.
-Even though Farris’s appointment would have been “unthinkable” at any other period of U.S. history, he’s confirmed in the Palin administration, and he rapidly starts influencing the government on more than just education policy. During his confirmation hearings, Chuch Schumer of New York launches an aggressive attack. He reads a part of Patrick Henry’s statement of belief which holds that Satan and Hell both exist, and Hell is where those who die outside Christ are banished for all eternity:
“The senator asked, ‘So, Mr. Farris, in your capacity as a future secretary of education, does this mean that every child in America should be taught to believe that every Hindu or Muslum in India, every Buddhist or Confucian or atheist in China, every Jew, every Roman Catholic, every person everywhere in the world who has had the bad luck to be born to parents who are not born-again evangelical or Pentecostal Christians, that every one of those other people, when he or she dies, faces conscious torment for eternity?’” -Farris responds rather straightforwardly:
“’Yes, Senator. That is what the Bible says, but only if they die outside of Christ, without having accepted Christ as their redeemer, which of course is their choice. With respect, sir, you may think it strange, but who are you to question the wisdom of God? I don’t second-guess my creator.”
Apparently no Republicans care about this statement even though tons of them are Catholics or Mormons or otherwise non-evangelicals. Also apparently no evangelicals care even though a lot of them are rather ecumenical and don’t say everybody else goes to Hell. Farris is confirmed with apparently unanimous Republican support.
-The fictional Walt guy from the WSJ thinks of having Sanjay attack the National Prayer Breakfast, which thousands of DC politicos attend every year. While the breakfast is going on inside the DC Hilton, Sanjay holds a press conference on the street outside declaring that the relatively inoffensive breakfast is actually super-evil:
“’Since 1953…good Americans have been deceived by the people inside this building. Yes, that is right. DECEIVED. They have been deceived because this breakfast is sponsored by, and is one of the rare public manifestations of, a long-standing secret political movement that calls itself The Family. This organization, led by the man – Doug Coe – whom our national leaders are inside applauding as I speak, has only a single purpose: to recruit politically powerful people to the cause of dominionist theology – that is, rule by God’s law, or theocracy. There can be no confusion; The Family exists to acquire power. Doug Coe has said, in a perversion of everything I know about Jesus Christ, that Jesus ‘prefers power to piety.’”
-Sanjay lays it on pretty thick about the Family and its structure:
“’They deliberately emulate the structures and practices of the old Communist Party, organizing themselves as a system of ‘cells’ without traditional hierarchies and with few if any members having sight of the whole organization. Did you know, my friends, that these cells, sometimes simply referred to as ‘prayer groups’ [dun dun!] have existed for years within the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the Pentagon – in virtually every department of our federal government?” Did you know that The Family tries to impose its fundamentalist policies on impoverished foreign countries, like Uganda, where they prevented our country from supporting programs promoting condom use, causing a doubling of AIDS infections, which was followed by The Family’s urging that the country adopt the death penalty for homosexuality? It is true.
Hooooooo, boy. Where to begin. First of all, Sanjay oddly never calls the Family by its actual name, which is The Fellowship. Second, the criticism that the group is focused too much on power is an old one…and heavily comes from the Christian right! Actual fundamentalist Christian orgs are really suspicious of the Family because they buddy up with those who hold pretty liberal beliefs (Al Gore has praised the Family, for example) and aren’t very doctrinally strict; they often don’t even urge lawmakers to attend church. Plenty of Democrats and moderates are bros with The Family, which is hardly a sign of hardcore dominionism.
For a lib, the line about The Family “imposing” its policies on impoverished countries is a little colonialist, assuming Africa never creates policies of its own. The idea of executing gays in Uganda came from UGANDAN lawmakers. They were associated with the Ugandan branch of The Family (it has a global reach) but to claim the group invented it is not really true.
The line about Uganda, condoms, and AIDS is a familiar lib canard, and is predictably very flawed. Uganda actually crushed AIDS in the 90s with a policy that emphasized abstinence and reducing sex partners over using condoms; infections have risen a bit since then, but they went from about 5 percent to 6 percent, not a doubling as Rich asserts. The exact cause if this uptick is debated.
-But still, Sanjay starts a firestorm by telling the media to ask the people leaving the Prayer Breakfast whether they “believe that biblical law and not the Constitution should be the ultimate rule in this nation…Please ask them when they come out of this building whether they are members of a prayer group that meets in government offices. Please ask them why they hold these meetings in secret.”
Even though this stupid and plenty of IRL politicians have acknowledged the Family’s role in their lives, this is a big success. While a few politicians proudly say “they had never hidden their conviction that God’s law was supreme,” others deny having every heard of The Family, and they stumble over questions about whether they are willing to “tolerate” non-evangelicals. Michele Bachmann makes a cameo defending her rejection of enemy faiths “in an act of breathtaking double-speak”:
“Michel Bachmann, whose husband had called gays ‘barbarians’ and ran a Christian counseling clinic that advised youngsters to ‘pray away the gay,’ answered, ‘Of course I’m not for intolerance, because it is against freedom and un-American. But let me be perfectly clear, I am against, and the Lord tells us we must make a stand against, evil in all its forms. That I cannot tolerate and will not tolerate.’”
-F3 is NOT PLEASED by this development, so they launch a new smear campaign against the “coastal media elite.” Greg prints a typical editorial extract that Adam has in his file which reads like a conservative parodying liberal parodies of conservatives:
“These Ivy League egghead intellectual so-called journalists are nothing but frustrated radical liberal professors mounting a rearguard action against the American people. They American people have spoken, but they do not hear. Instead, they take the public for idiots, repeating and spreading every lie and slander anyone can think up to embarrass President Palin, Steve Jordan, and religious people everywhere. They hate God – you can hear it in their voices. They hate ordinary Americans – they hate how we live, how we look, how we eat, how we raise our children, and they hate our religion [remember: Rich thinks this sounds laughably untrue]. It is completely outrageous, and unacceptable, that these people – so out of touch, and with such an extreme agenda – command most of the airwaves and talk time and newspapers in this great country. We call on President Palin and the Congress to do something about it. The use of the airwaves and bandwidth in America is a public trust, and they have breached this trust. Do something, Madam President. We just cannot take it anymore.”
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Date: June 22nd, 2015 12:24 AM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 11 PART THREE [CXN-30]
Chapter 11 Part Three
-It’s hard for Madame President to “do something,” whatever that means, because the SCOTUS is still in place and the Constitution still functioning, as Greg says. Overt media censorship isn’t in the cards, so instead XO Steve Jordan finds another way. He has the IRS create a new regulation that bars media companies from deducting the business expenses of producing newspapers or new programs that show “extreme liberal bias.” The regulation would force all gross revenues to be taxed as profit and basically make for-profit news shows unfeasible (or so Greg says; I have no idea if this regulation makes any sense).
However, this regulation is actually a fuck-up by XOJordan, because it arouses major backlash from the business community and a federal court kills it after a few months.
-XO Jordan tries another attack, and retaliates against PBS’s NewsHour program for devoting an entire hour-long show to Jeff Shartlet, the journalist who wrote “a brilliant but underappreciated expose of The Family.” (this review is a good takedown of Shartlet’s hackery: http://www.amazon.com/The-Family-Secret-Fundamentalism-American/product-reviews/0060560053/ref=cm_cr_dp_qt_hist_one?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addOneStar&showViewpoints=0 )
XO Jordan has PBS cut off all funding for NewsHour, but all of the funding is replaced by private donors. PBS follows up by simply canceling the show, but the entire show crew is picked up by CNN and they continue as before, now with increased viewership.
-His media assault having failed, XO Steve Jordan takes a different tack: Direct contact. He calls up Theocracy Watch and asks to meet Sanjay in D.C. Greg gets to tag along for the meeting, which is held at F3 headquarters rather than the White House (Fox News HQ is in New York, but I guess they could have moved it). Jordan welcomes the two, acts super-chill, and even makes Sanjay tea. The conversation is…well, it doesn’t strike me as how powerful people talk IRL, but I am not powerful so maybe I am wrong :
“’The core message of your religion is love. So why do you hate me?’ “’I don’t. I hate your sin. You, Mr. Sharma, might still experience God’s love. All you need to do is to accept what He has offered, which is Jesus Christ as savior. Your sin can be redeemed.’ “’You believe that God created me?’ “’Of course.’ “’Then how can it be a sin to be who I am? He made my skin brown. He made me homosexual.’ “’You are mistaken. You have free will and your creator has told you clearly that homosexuality is a serious sin. It is no more a defense to say that God made you a homosexual than it would be for a murderer to say that murder is not a sin because God made him a murderer.’ “’You say my creator has told me. With respect, my creator has not spoken to me. The Bible was written and assembled by men. I understand completely that, following prayer and meditation, an individual person may have insights that take the form of answers. But when you take these individual answers and give them a privilege and authoritative position, this is very dangerous. Claiming the authority of God can justify any ambition and absolve you of personal responsibility for any act. What about your murderer? What if he simply asserted that it was God’s will?’ “Jordan ignored the question. ‘May I ask you something?’ “’Go ahead.’ “’Do you believe that the essence of the human condition is ignorance? That the give of reason properly tells us that most of what is important is not understood or understandable?’ “’Man is a deeply spiritual animal,’ Sanjay replied, ‘aware of the great mysteries and questing always for answers.’ “’And doesn’t this imply the moral imperative of humility? Humility, Mr. Sharma, is what allows us to submit to authority. And that is what you and every man must do, and in it you will find great joy. That is what God is: authority. God said sodomy is a sin. You don’t ask why; it is because He said so. God made the speed of light 186,000 miles per second. You don’t ask why, do you? It just is.’
They go back and forth like this for a while, with Sanjay trying to claim that XO Jordan is basically just claiming to speak for God when what God wants is unknown, if he even exists. XO Jordan lays down the gauntlet:
“’You should understand, Mr. Sharma, that one of the reasons I believe you are a dangerous person is that you promote sin and disobedience and actually make possible sins by others, like abortion. It is one thing to engage in individual sinful behavior; it is another thing to lead a movement that opposes God. As Christians, we have a duty to deal with that very harshly.’
-Sanjay dares XO Jordan to produce a single piece of evidence God exists, and says he wants to defend the right people to believe in whatever deity they want. Jordan again ignores his challenge and counterattacks:
“’You have, Mr. Sharma, fundamentally misunderstood what religion is. The essence of every religion is the exclusivity of its truth claim. Either Mohammed is God’s prophet or he is not. Either Jesus is the life and the way to eternal salvation or he is not. More than one religion cannot be true. Ecumenicalism is an impossible dream; the beliefs of the major religions are simply not consistent. Torture them into some sort of mush where one can live alongside the other, and they lose all their coherence.’
-This back and forth goes on for two bloody hours, with Jordan ending the meeting by thanking Sanjay for helping to understand him better. The exchange confirms to Greg that “religious zealotry was ultimately tautological.” Sanjay is so affected by this encounter that he is abnormally quiet for several weeks, and doesn’t want to talk about it.
The whole scene was pretty boring but I thought it was important to transcribe what is, I believe, Jordan’s only direct interaction with the cast.
-For the final few years of Palin’s presidency, the Christian Nation offensive goes quiet. No new legislation comes forth and they focus on the economy (it’s not said what happens in the 2014 midterms, which seems odd). However, what is notable is that XO Steve Jordan emerges from the shadows and is increasingly recognized as Palin’s de facto co-president. He’s always with her when she appears and he usually steals the show. This actually helps him a lot because the public is worn out with Palin’s obvious stupidity and appreciates having an articulate smart guy running the show behind the scenes. Because of his dominant role, XO Jordan emerges as Palin’s clear successor. He goes unchallenged in the Republican primaries, allowing him to avoid any party feuding that could damage him.
-Because XO Jordan faces no opposition in the primaries, he is able to avoid having to shore up his right wing, and can focus on appearing moderate and making appeals to the center. God rhetoric goes into hibernation. America is lured into false security, convinced the Christian Nation nonsense has reached its end and things will go back to “normal” now.
-The GOP convention is in Tampa for 2016. I guess because he…didn’t want to think of a different one from what they used in 2012?
-XO Jordan finally rips off his moderate mask at the convention, giving a super Jesus-heavy speech. He actually gives a pretty bad-ass speech, way better than the dumb lectures Sanjay gives:
“’While I talk about saving, yes literally saving, this country by returning it to its moral foundation, my critics talk about civil rights. But I ask you – the law, the so-called rights of man, even our beloved Constitution – what are they compared to the word of the eternal and almighty God? They are nothing. Bubbles in the river of time, real only for a moment, then forgotten. Brief illusions born of man’s imagination, without real power or substance. I promise you – I promise you as my most solemn duty as a man, my most solemn duty as a Christian – I promise you that as a candidate and as president I am going to talk to this country about something real. Something important. Indeed, the only real and important thing there is – the word of God our Father, the message of His son and our redeemer, our Lord Jesus Christ, and the truth of His revelation.”
The applause to this lasts fifteen minutes. “Old ladies clasped their hands in prayer. Young men wept. A sea of attractive blonde women raise their arms in ecstatic prayer, eyes closed, shouting.”
This seems really stupid from an electoral point of view. People pay the most attention to presidential campaigns as an election comes closer. If XO Jordan is going to dramatically reveal that he’s a hardcore theocrat in August, there was no point to him acting moderate beforehand. It would have been better for him to start acting moderate late, or just never rip the mask off while counting on evangelicals to know what he was all about.
-Sanjay goes around to all the networks sounding the theocracy trumpet. In these appearances he starts off by defining what a theocracy is, using Iran and the Taliban as examples. Interestingly, both appear to be in the past tense, so I guess Palin went and whacked the Islamic Republic, or else a revolution brought about a new order. In general, this account has totally ignored what’s going on overseas besides the one terror attack and the Russia incident. Is this super-evangelical movement limited to America or is it having success overseas? Has America’s super-severe recession fucked the rest of the world’s economy? Has China overtaken us in power? It’s all pretty unclear so far.
-Sanjay gives a long, boring explanation about how democracy and constitutional democracy are NOT the same thing.
-Greg laments that XO Jordan’s dramatic statement of support for God’s law above all should have allowed theocracy to be the main electoral issue. Greg says that he, Sanjay, and millions of others finally realized that THIS election was the key one, the choice between “the republic our founders had given us and an authoritarian Christian state where our core liberties would be defined in theocratic terms.” But the Dems aren’t up to the challenge. They’re demoralized from sixteen years out of power and how they repeatedly got pwned by a retard like Palin.
The Democratic primary is a tough battle for the soul of the party. The progressives of the party want to field a strong alternative to Jordan’s vision, with a strong commitment to repealing all of Palin’s legislation, ending martial law, and advancing gay rights. Their champion is Sam Newbridge, a (fictional) 35-year-old tech executive and married gay man who gives lots of money to Theocracy Watch. Newbridge goes against Hillary Clinton, who in this timeline remained a senator throughout Palin’s tenure. Clinton enjoys sympathy because Bill died in 2015, and she’s now an elder stateswoman. Her backers argue that nominating Newbridge would play into XO Jordan’s hands by allowing the election to be an apocalyptic struggle. Clinton wins the nomination.
-The deciding factor of the election is the law Palin passed allowing churches to enter politics. Church are the number one source of political advertising, “partisan endorsements from evangelical pulpits virtually guaranteed the votes of those congregations,” and their GOTV efforts are formidable. Among evangelicals, voter turnout tops 85 percent.
-Somehow, Democrats manage to fuck up and lose in 2016, even though America is apparently STILL in a recession, now in its 8th year. According to Greg, Republicans actually spin this to their advantage, because Clinton’s stale pragmatism had no appeal to hard-pressed Americans. XO Steve Jordan had vision, dammit, and called America to “renewed national greatness, to honor, to community.”
-XO Steve Jordan CRUSHES Hillary, with the election called by 8 PM eastern time. In a development that makes very little sense to me, he has a close majority in the House but sixty-nine Republican senators, enough to defeat all filibusters and even pass constitutional amendments.
-And with that, we’re halfway through the book.
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Date: June 22nd, 2015 11:06 AM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse This is pretty compelling stuff but I wish there were more biglaw discussions... (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28176417) |
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Date: June 22nd, 2015 11:08 AM Author: drab double fault The next chapter is probably the last stand of biglaw-related stuff.
The next couple chapters are a bit less exciting (mostly just political events) but the narrative itself will pick up and become pretty hilarious soon enough. |
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Date: June 22nd, 2015 4:18 PM Author: Odious orange masturbator does greg ever explain what billing code you use for pulverizing generation joshua shock troops into a fine red mist? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28178603) |
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Date: June 23rd, 2015 6:24 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location "Their champion is Sam Newbridge, a (fictional) 35-year-old tech executive and married gay man who gives lots of money to Theocracy Watch"
Cannot believe how delusional this guy is. holy fuck. |
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Date: November 9th, 2021 2:39 AM Author: lemon motley goyim (Pre-Buttigieg era post) (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#43410053) |
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Date: June 23rd, 2015 8:33 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 12: New Freedom [CXN-31]
Chapter 12: New Freedom
-XO Steve Jordan is POTUS now. Rich really ramps up the Nazi allusions with his quotes:
“The national government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.” –Adolf Hitler, Speech on Feb. 1, 1933
“Today, not only in peasant homes but also in the city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcism… What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet; fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the… course of normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism.” –Leon Trotsky, “What Is National Socialism?” June 1933
-XO Jordan gets right to the point. The opening line of this inaugural address is, “I submit America to Christ.” The culture war has ebbed and flowed for 20+ years, but now with victory in sight the Christians decide to sprint for the finish rather than continue their marathon strategy, Greg says (man, Christians seem really strategically disciplined).
-Jordan claims the mantle of “our great devout, Bible-believing 28th president, Woodrow Wilson.” Kinda funny because IRL the right is starting to really hate Wilson. Sanjay points out that he shouldn’t claim Wilson’s mantle because Wilson “would have found the evangelicals’ biblical literalism to be abhorrent,” and because Wilson’s program was supposedly to increase economic and political liberty. I kind of wonder if Rich knows anything about Wilson’s presidency.
-XO Jordan calls his program the New Freedom, which is a direct reference to Wilson’s program. It has 7 key planks:
1. All policies will be built on obedience to GOD. 2. The sovereignty of the United States will be protected so that it has total freedom to pursue its destiny. 3. The government will officially recognize the authority and laws of Jesus Christ and the Bible, and remove judges who object. 4. The government will slash regulations so that businesses can enjoy the blessing of “biblical capitalism.” 5. The government will defend marriage. 6. The government will work towards eradicating abortion, homosexuality, adultery, and other “abhorrent” practices. 7. The government will ensure every child the freedom to “enjoy the blessing of a Christian nation.”
-But Jordan is a smooth operator, according to Greg. Rather than just immediately propose legislation, he appoints a committee that is charged with developing a legislative program within 90 days. Because that will make it easier to pass his stuff, or something. The members of the committee named by Greg include: Michael Farris (the chair), Tom Coburn, Jim Demint, Rick Santorum, Sam Brownback, Rick Perry, John Ashcroft, Gary North, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Rick Warren, Doug Coe (who is literally 88 fucking years old), Ralph Reed, Gary Bauer, and some other evangelical leaders and “scholars” from Christian colleges.
Considering what this commission is about to do, it’s worth noting that Rick Santorum and Brownback are Catholics.
-Sanjay says XO Steve Jordan’s agenda is impossible, because the Supreme Court is still around and even the conservatives are “serious men and women” who won’t countenance a total theocratic takeover.
-“Sanjay was wrong.” Why? Well, for starters, Ruther Bader Ginsburg literally dies of a broken heart.
“At eighty-four, she had overcome the death of her husband, colon cancer, and a previous bout of pancreatic cancer and was the court’s most ardent defender of civil liberty…Friends said she had become deeply depressed by the Jordan victory in November and seemingly lost the will to live.”
-Whom does XO Jordan appoint to replace her? None other than our old pal Roy Moore from Alabama, the guy who pulled the Ten Commandments stunt. Hundreds of law professors and judges from both parties take out full-page ads in major newspapers to object to his nomination. Roberts and Kennedy actually break protocol and lead to a reporter their view that his nomination, if confirmed, would “destroy the Court.”
However, Teavangelicals are enthusiastic, and they coordinate with F3 to aggressively promote him. On the day the Senate Judiciary Committee starts its hearings, literally 750,000 of them gather on the mall chanting slogans like “Take Back The Court” and “Get Out of Our Way” (srsly). Then Greg writes this hilarious paragraph:
“When the Senate confirmed Moore, every Democrat and six brave Republicans opposed it. Four of those Republicans failed to achieve their party’s nomination at the end of their terms. The two others were dead by the start of President Jordan’s second term.” Dun dun.
-John Roberts pleads illness to avoid swearing in Moore and instead Thomas does the job, with no other justices in attendance. XO Jordan is pissed, so the next day he hosts a second swearing-in at the White House where he does the deed himself. He notably adds a big wooden cross to the row of American flags used as the event’s backdrop.
-More things go XO Jordan’s way. Just a week after Moore’s confirmation, a case challenging Roe v. Wade reaches the Court. In June, the decision is released, with Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Cruz, and Moore totally reversing Roe and holding there is no constitutional right to abortion. XO Jordan releases a brief statement lauding the end of “our national nightmare.”
-This decision is the impetus for the arrival of a new major character in our book…none other than former mayor and current Governor Michael Bloomberg!:
“The governor announced that the Supreme Court’s decision was wrong and ‘unacceptable,’ although he refused then to be baited into stating what he meant. Instead, he reported that New York National Guard troops had been dispatched to provide physical security at every family planning and abortion clinic in the state and he had signed an executive order that day making women from any other state eligible to receive such services in New York. He said that abortion doctors and family planning professionals fleeing other states would be welcomed in New York. He also announced that his charitable foundation had set aside $300 million to provide funding to any woman in the country who could not afford to travel to New York for family planning, counseling, or abortion services.”
Yep, the resistance to the Christian Nation is inspired by and revolves around abortion.
-F3 is, of course, ecstatic, and Greg here takes a moment to note that F3 is totally controlled by the President. The channel is used as an agent provocateur, encouraging people in the streets to show their “intolerance” for baby killers and for law enforcement to take action against providers. Thanks to this incitement, every state that doesn’t have National Guard protect clinics sees them hit by a wave of arson attacks. Abortion providers abandon much of middle America.
-The abortion decision also leads to Greg himself becoming more important, because now the public needs a GREAT LEGAL SCHOLAR to light the way:
“Legal matters were [different from what Sanjay handled.] What was needed there was credibility and authority. I would be promoted as an establishment figure, a lawyer with unimpeachable credentials as a former partner of one of the country’s most prestigious law firms. I would serve as an expert, outside of politics, interpreting for the people the technical implications of the New Freedom legislative program and the actions of the Supreme Court.”
“Surprisingly, it was easy. When I stood in front of the cameras, I just pretended I was briefing a client. One thing a corporate lawyer learns to do well is to take complex legal issues and translate them for a corporate executive – the decision maker – in a way that he or she can understand.”
-Amusingly, Greg’s first legal foray, about Roe v. Wade, totally butchers the actual law:
“[The press] had failed to focus on the implications of the manner in which Roe was overturned. The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe was built on decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence that established a constitutional ‘right to privacy’ [it was built on less than one decade of such jurisprudence, save a couple 20s cases on education]. This ‘right’ is not listed in the Bill of Rights. The word ‘privacy’ does not appear in the Constitution. Instead, the court developed the concept of a ‘right to privacy’ to capture the overarching constitutional presumption in favor of personal liberty that needed to be taken into account when judging whether laws infringing those liberties were constitutional.” The right to choose to have an abortion before the fetus is viable was not the only ‘right’ implied in the Constitution based on the right to privacy. The others included the right to engage in whatever private sexual acts you choose in the privacy of your residence, the right to read or view pornography, the right to choose to terminate medical treatment, the right to marry the person you choose, the right to procreate or withhold from procreation, and the right to rears your children as you see fit, including to select the schools they attend [wait, hasn’t Rich spent half this book bitching about how homeschoolers rear their children?]. The Supreme Court had held for many years [about eight] prior to Roe that this right to privacy is there: there because the Ninth Amendment makes clear that the list of rights in the Bill of Rights is not exclusive [the notion that the Ninth creates new rights rather than clarifying that the U.S. government has only enumerated powers is EXTREMELY debatable], there because the Bill of Rights itself should be read expansively [except when it involves guns or homeschooling, I guess], and there because the substantive due process rights established by the Fourteenth Amendment extend to protect our personal ‘liberty.’
“Take away this right to privacy, I pointed out, and the constitutional door was once again open for federal and state governments to legislate in the sphere of sex, family, and personal behavior. Our liberties were in grave danger. No serious scholar disagreed with me [not one?].”
Actually, lots of scholars have disputed the existence of substantive due process. For starters, lots of SCOTUS justices have, not just Thomas and Scalia but also guys like Hugo Black and Byron White. John Hart Ely is one of the most cited legal scholars ever and he was a fierce critic. It is grossly inaccurate for Rich to represent his view as the objective truth. Also, Rich never seems to realize that one could easily acknowledge that a right to privacy exists and still allow abortion bans, by simply holding that fetuses can have rights as well and therefore abortion isn't a pure privacy issue.
But hey, libs gonna lib.
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Date: June 23rd, 2015 8:50 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse literally LOLing at Rich. "No serious scholar disagreed with me." Um actually most honest constitutional scholar libs view Roe as an embarrassment and see Casey as a halfway-decent cleanup attempt. but tracing the history of abortion jurisprudence would have taken a lot more work than just making this about "overturning roe v. wade" and his halfassed attempt at defending it. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28187757) |
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Date: June 24th, 2015 1:29 AM Author: Stirring indian lodge (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28189424) |
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Date: June 24th, 2015 9:35 PM Author: Odious orange masturbator (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28194365) |
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Date: July 2nd, 2015 10:39 AM Author: vibrant grizzly crackhouse apparently SullCrom partners don't realize that reversing Roe wouldn't make abortion automatically illegal nationwide. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28244561) |
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Date: July 2nd, 2015 10:47 AM Author: drab double fault Yeah, forgot to mention that. A few states have "trigger laws" explicitly saying they will return to their pre-Roe state should it ever be overturned, but the majority of the country doesn't. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28244606) |
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Date: November 13th, 2016 11:52 PM Author: drab double fault The bit about Ginsburg dying of a broken heart is pretty funny given current circumstances. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#31903007) |
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Date: November 10th, 2019 4:15 PM Author: Narrow-minded vigorous voyeur corner SMASH that reply button if you're reading about JUSTICE xo Roy Moore (the chivalrous southern gentleman) in 2019. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#39097884) |
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Date: June 23rd, 2015 9:01 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 12 PART TWO [CXN-32]
CHAPTER 12 Part Two
-Thanks to Greg's incredible LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP, Theocracy Watch rises to a higher plane:
"I do not recollect this in an immodest way, but form that moment one, TW - and not the Democratic Party, the ACLU, or any other political organization - became the primary voice of opposition. And we got their attention. F3 and the president were not amused when I published a paper demonstrating that the right to homeschooling and the right to send your child to a religious, and not public, school were were both based on the right to privacy, and that the Supreme Court's decision opened the way for states to legislate away these parental prerogatives [there was no SCOTUS precedent protecting homeschooling in the first place]. We had a lively debate at TW about whether we should urge the remaining blue states to do just that.
-On July 4 the Farris commission releases its proposed legislation, ominously known as the fifty Blessings, or simply The Blessing. This part is all worth quoting at length. First, the president's address:
"'My fellow Americans, for over five months a group of our most experienced and distinguished legislators, this country's finest legal scholars, our leading historians, experts on the Constitution, our best theologians and the most trusted Christian leaders in the land have worked day and night to understand to what great purpose this nation is called and how to restore this nation to grace and greatness. Not since the Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia to boldly dedicate their lives to establishing a nation under God have wiser or better men pondered the future course of our republic.'
"And yes, he was being accurate. Not a single woman served on the Farris Commission.
"'They prayed together and they prayed separately; they prayed day and night for the Lord to guide them and were overwhelmed and humbled at the wisdom with which God filled them. I am told that when the Commission members assembled in the morning, one would tell the group that he had prayed all night on the question before them and been given the answer by our Lord - and the others around the table would fall to their knees in wonder and thanks, as each had received exactly the same answer to his own prayers. The Lord was truly with them.
"'So what was revealed to these men by the Lord? I assembled the Commission to formulate a legislative program to implement the New Freedom program announced at my inauguration. Proving one again that God does always know best, they have come back to me with something different: not a series of regular laws but a covenant. My fellow Americans, by the grace of God, what I have the honor to give to you today is the final covenant with our Lord, a covenant to put this nation on the path of virtue, grace, and obedience, and to secure for all Americans the gift of eternal salvation through Jesus.
"'Most Americans know their Bible well, but I remind you that the first covenant was made by Abraham, and then later God sent his son, Jesus and made a new covenant with mankind - a covenant that if we believe in Him and accept Jesus as our savior, then in the eyes of God the death of Jesus will atone for our sins.
"'And now, a new and final covenant - the last befor ethe second coming of Jesus - is offered to us by God to restore America to its true purpose and former greatness [this notion is ludicrously heretical for Catholic and Protestant Christians]. This new covenant is a magnificent blessing, the greatest blessing bestowed by God on any nation or people. It seals for us God's favor and protection; if we accept it it will once again make this land God's shining city on a hill, a holly and sacred place that He will henceforth protect from all evil. This is why our new American covenant with the Lord is called The Blessing.
"'The Blessing is an offer from God. I submit it today, on the nation's birthday - which will also henceforth be the date of our nation's rebirth in Christ - to the Congress and to the American people. God offers us this new covenant, and you, through your chosen representatives, must decide whether to accept it. Later today the full text of The Blessing will be emailed to every American with an email address [WTF?]. I ask you to read it, to study it, to pray about it. I ask every congregation in America to devote this Sunday to prayer and discussion. Then, please communicate with your representatives and senators. In two weeks' time, Congress will take a simple yes or no vote. If they accept The Blessing on behalf of the American people, I will sign it immediately, and it will become a binding covenant between this nation and God, with the status of a law that prevails over all other laws of the land. Over time, our laws and regulations and procedures will be conformed to it. I trust this momentous decision to our great democracy and to our God-given Constitution. I know these great institutions will not fail us. God bless you, and God bless America."
-Greg says that today the Blessing is known to every American by heart, so he feels no need to include it. But then Adam intervenes, pointing out that Greg's book could be of macrohistorical importance:
"We dream that your book will be read not only by those alive today - many of whom know very little about how they came to live as they do now - but also those who live in a future America where the Christian Nation is a distant nightmare. Assume nothing. Tell the whole story."
-And so, Greg writes out The Blessing. It is an amazing read and will have its own dedicated post. |
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Date: June 23rd, 2015 9:37 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: THE BLESSING [CXN-33]
-We're at the climactic point of the book, in which Rich presents his idea of a four-page evangelical governing document. It follows below, unabridged, with 50 specific rules organized under 10 broader principles called Covenants:
THE BLESSING I. There is no power but God, and the powers that are ordained by God. 1. As the fate of the nation depends entirely on unbending obedience to the will of God, it shall be treasonous to deny the existence of God, to question the Word of God, or to advocate disobedience to the will of God.
II. The Lord created America that His will may reign on Earth. 2. The sovereignty of the United States of America is absolute. Accordingly, the United States shall not join or support any international organization. 3. The United Nations is hereby expelled from the territory of the United States. Its operation shall be relocated within one year. 4. Any treaty that abrogates the absolute sovereignty of the United States is hereby repudiated and declared null and void. 5. No US citizen shall be extradited to face criminal or civil proceedings in another country. III. This nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of our Lord Jesus Christ. 6. The most important task of man is to accept, embrace, and obey God's law. 7. God's law, as set forth in the Bible, shall be the supreme law of the land, prevailing over any imperfect human law. 8. The American Constitution is a divine gift and shall be strictly construed. The Constitution shall be interpreted in accordance with the higher law of the Bible. 9. The purpose of the federal and state court systems shall be to do God's will and to faithfully interpret and enforce the law of the land in accordance with the Word of God. 10. No judge shall interpret the law or render any judgment that is contrary to the will of God as evidenced by the Bible. 11. Only persons who have accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as their savior shall serve as federal judges. 12. The Constitution wisely limits the role of government, and such limitations shall be deemed to prohibit involvement by the federal government in education and social welfare, which shall remain the exclusive domain of the people, their churches, and, if permitted by state constitutions and state laws, the states. 13. No state or local government may enact any law prohibiting so-called "hate crimes," which can too easily be used to persecute or abuse those faithful to the Word and laws of God. IV. The Lord gave America the biblical capitalist system for our material comfort; He reigns over our economy and demands obedience to His will in return for our prosperity. 14. Only one economic system, the free enterprise system, is consistent with God's will and God's law. 15. No economic system other than the free enterprise system shall be taught or practiced in the United States. 16. The advocacy of socialism in any form is treasonous. 17. Poverty is due to disobedience of God's will. 18. In a Christian Nation, where obedience to God is the measure of equity, "labor unions" [why is this in quotes?] are unnecessary and illegal. V. The Lord gave us marriage for our pleasure and procreation. 19. Marriage shall be the sole form of civil union or partnership recognized for any purpose within the United States. 20. Marriage means marriage between one man and one woman. 21. No other form of "marriage" consummated in or recognized by any other jurisdiction shall be recognized or valid for any purpose whatsoever within the United States. 22. Adulterous behavior by either husband or wife is a crime. 23. Homosexual behavior of any kind is a crime 24. Sexual relations outside of marriage are a crime. 25. Sexual perversion, even between husband and wife, is a crime (provided that a wife may pleasure her husband in any way her husband desires and to which she consents) 26. No person shall participate in the creation, distribution, or use of pornography, all of which shall be crimes. 27. Abstinence from all sex (including masturbation) outside of marriage shall be the only form of sex education permitted. 28. No foreign national who is homosexual shall be eligible for immigration to, or resident alien status in, the United States. VI. The Lord created the male, who shall reign in headship over the family. 29. Upon marriage, a wife shall be obligated to obey her husband. 30. A child shall obey his or her father. 31. The primary responsibility of a husband and father shall be to align the family with the will and Word of Jesus Christ. VII. The family is the basis of American life and the fundamental unit of American society. 32. The discipline of children is in the sole discretion of parents. No unit of government shall outlaw or regulate the discipline of children, or prosecute any parent or teacher for the disciplining of a child. 33. It shall be unlawful for a child to strike a parent. 34. Incorrigible juvenile delinquency shall be a crime. VIII. Only the Lord may determine when life shall begin and end. 35. For all purposes of the law, life begins at conception. 36. Abortion, meaning any act that terminates life following conception, shall be illegal.. 37 Killing an unborn child through abortion shall be a capital offense. 38. A woman who permits her child to be aborted shall be guilty of a felony. 39. Euthanasia, meaning any act that terminates life prior to its natural end, shall be illegal. IX. The Lord loves our children, and gave His Word and His will as the basis for educating our children. 40. Children shall be instructed that God's Word is the only reliable path to the truth. 41. Reason unguided by God's Word is an illusion, often perverted by Satan to divert us from obedience to God's will. It shall be a crime to teach that philosophical investigation or so-called 'scientific method' are the sole or primary paths to knowledge. 42. Ther shal be no tolerance of lies, falsehoods, and illusions. The primary task of all teachers is to protect children from falsehood. 43. A principal task of public education shall be to teach obedience to God's will. 44. A principal task of public education shall be to teach sexual purity. 45. No atheist, homosexual, or single woman shall be permitted to teach or play any role in a public or private school, at any level [didn't you already make atheism illegal?]. For this purpose, (i) any person over the age of thirty who has never been married shall be presumed to be a homosexual [this would include several of the people who helped write The Blessing, including Santorum], and (ii) any person not registered with and certified in good standing by a recognized church shall be presumed to be an atheist. 46. Each classroom in America, public or private, shall, at the commencement of each school day, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and join in a prayer of thanks to God for America. The prayer may, but is not required to, mention our Lord Jesus Christ (but shall not mention any other purported deity, prophet, saint, or other figure from a specific religious tradition other than Christianity). X. Although a Christian Nation and its Christian citizens have a duty to open the eyes of all citizens to the Word and light of Christ, the right of non-Christian citizens to believe and practice, in the private sphere of their families and places of worship, religions other than Christianity shall be protected. 47. Religions other than Christianity are permitted. Witchcraft, Wicca, astrology, the worship of Satan, any violent sect of Islam, and other cults are not recognized as religions. 48. All places of worship and other property, real and personal, present and future, of superstitions and cults that are not recognized as religions shall be forfeit to the state in which they are located. 49. Non-Christian religions shall be entitled to maintain places of worship but shall not be permitted to make public displays of the symbols of their religions in any places other than the premises of such places of worship. 50. The promotion of non-Christian religion through advertisement or missionary or proselytizing activity shall be prohibited within the territory of the United States of America.
-And there you have it. That's The Blessing. I'm tired from typing all that so I'll offer some thoughts on it later.
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Date: June 23rd, 2015 9:39 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location ALLAHU ACKBAR!!!! (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28188014) |
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Date: June 23rd, 2015 9:46 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse "any person over the age of thirty who has never been married shall be presumed to be a homosexual"
LOLL |
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Date: June 23rd, 2015 9:47 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28188058) |
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Date: June 23rd, 2015 10:40 PM Author: drab double fault Probably my favorite part as well. That or the really weird part about how sexual perversion is illegal except that wives can pleasure husbands in any way he wants. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28188531) |
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Date: June 24th, 2015 9:39 PM Author: Odious orange masturbator No means yes, yes means anal!
-Martin Luther |
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Date: November 9th, 2021 8:16 AM Author: lemon motley goyim By “really weird part” you mean best part right?? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#43410468) |
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Date: June 25th, 2015 4:56 PM Author: bearded theatre this is incredible (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28199578) |
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Date: July 2nd, 2015 1:23 AM Author: Frum cracking elastic band Been gone for a while and this is the first thread I needed to catch up on. Typing all this up - we don't deserve you tyty. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28243055) |
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Date: June 24th, 2015 11:23 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 12 PART FOUR [CXN-34]
Chapter 12 Part Four
-Man, The Blessing really is something, isn't it? Before going on, a few thoughts are in order:
1. The Blessing's contents are at several points explicitly evangelical in nature, such as the requirement that judges have accepted a personal savior in Jesus Christ. Despite this, Catholics supposedly play a major role in creating it. This makes no sense and he never gives any indication these people were "overruled" or betrayed or anything. He seems to just assume Santorum and Brownback are evangelicals.
2. For a bunch of hardcore Christians, it seems odd the Blessing doesn't define what books make up the Bible. Catholics, Protestants, and the Orthodox have different book rosters. If we're assuming a Protestant makeup, this seems to be another instance of him just forgetting he made Catholics help out with this.
3.The rhetoric on poverty being the result of sin is a very Calvinist attitude not at all in line with the attitudes of Catholicism or more Protestant branches. Tons of hardcore Christians find the gospel of wealth pretty repellent, so it seems odd that they could specifically ram through something like that even in this theocratic reality.
4. Similarly, the ban on prayers to saints seems deliberately anti-Catholic (and anti-Orthodox, I guess), and it makes no sense for Catholics to endorse it. Is Rich just forgetting that millions of conservative Catholics exist and would be an essential part of this theocratic coalition?
There's a lot more that's silly about it but those strike me as really odd even within the logic the book forces us to adopt.
-Moving onward, the evangelical promotion of The Blessing is hilarious:
"The next two weeks were among the most extraordinary in American history. Many of the 70 million or so Americans who called themselves evangelical or born again stopped work, school, and every aspect of their daily routine and devoted each waking hour to persuading their friends, neighbors, and congressional representatives to accept the ten 'covenants' and the individual Blessings associated with each of them. The owners of many professional sports teams [are there that many super-DUPER Christian franchise owners? Only the Hunts spring to mind] cancelled games and instead hosted huge choreographed rallies at their stadiums [planned in under two weeks?]. Stadium rallies had been part of the fundamentalist subculture for decades, but in these circumstances the echoes of Nuremberg were hard to ignore. I remember watching on television, with a combination of awe and horror, an event at Reliant Stadium in Houston. The rally unfolded in the manner of an Olympics opening ceremony. At the beginning, all lights were extinguished to create complete darkness representing the 'dark age of sin and disobedience' from which we were about to emerge. Then a single white spotlight followed a young boy who walked alone onto the enormous field clutching a copy of The Blessing. When he reached the center he knelt and raised his face to heaven. The silence was broken by his voice saying only 'Thank you, Lord.' At that moment, the whole stadium was brilliantly illuminated, revealing the combined choirs of fifty Texas churches (one for each Blessing) arrayed across the field in the form of a giant cross. The massed choirs began singing a gospel version of 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' complemented by fifty trumpeters. From all around the stadium, long gold banners unfurled, one by one, revealing fifty crosses, each a hundred feet high. The production continued in this fashion for an hour and left the seventy thousand faithful in attendance exhilarated and exhausted.'
Damn, that rally sounds pretty awesome.
-Meanwhile, for everybody else, the revelation of The Blessing starts off a panic, as they finally realize just what is about to happen. Greg shames them for reacting abruptly when they've had dozens of warning signs for the past 16 years.
"To hear their shock and outrage, you would have thought that for the last twenty years the proponents of the Christian Nation had not said exactly what they would do and now were simply doing it."
-Despite the panic, the opposition campaign is poorly directed and hopeless, with a lot of it amounting to blame and confusion over how things came this far. Frantic business leaders promise Theocracy Watch unlimited funding, but it's just too late. XO Steve Jordan has the votes he needs to pass it. Greg focuses everybody on what their real focus needs to be, stopping it in the courts.
-Still, a valiant effort is made beforehand, as literally all non-evangelical religious leaders oppose The Blessing. The unnamed archbishop of New York (presumably Tim Dolan; he's described as a 'jovial Irishman') convenes all Catholic bishops as well as the leaders of Mormonism, Reform and Orthodox rabbis, some imams, and some leaders in every mainline Protestant denomination to express their opposition. The massive gathering is intended to show that the debate is not simply a battle between the godly and the godless. F3 simply responds by saying The Blessing clearly guaranteed their religious freedom, and apparently millions of Americans take this at face value.
Again, this all irritates me. The Republican Party isn't JUST evangelicals. The conservative Catholics are the ones who are going to be MOST protective of their denomination. Over a quarter of Republican Congressman are Catholic today, several are Mormon, plenty are non-evangelical Protestants. It makes absolutely NO sense that these people are easily brushed aside in the Christian nation push. It's as if Rich simply has NO CLUE what he's talking about.
-The Mormons see where things are headed and are worried they'll be labeled an illegal cult, so they rapidly move their assets to Canada, "an error that eventually made their worst fear a self-fulfilling prophecy."
-The UN Security council meets in an emergency session and passes a resolution warning America that The Blessing would breach the UN's Declaration of Human Rights. NATO flips out. China and Russia calmly say this is an "internal matter" for the US.
-The stock market falls 40 percent in just a few days, a shock so severe the SEC simply suspends trading until after the vote can be held. Colleges are rocked by violence between liberal and conservative students, leading to canceled classes (although...it's July. How many students are around?)
-"So many evangelicals had poured into Washington on church buses from around the country that non-evangelical constituents could not break through the crowds to lobby their legislators on Capitol Hill."
LOL, unprepared libs are done here.
-Desperate for some success, TW goes to the old standby of libs promoting a cause: A big concert. The Real Freedom concert in Central Park assembles almost every mainstream popular entertainer in the country for a big bash broadcast and streamed live on "every media outlet other than F3." Three generations of rock, rap, pop, and blues jam out for hours and then urge their fans to stand up for their rights:
"Many wept and cried and begged America to come to its senses. Millions were moved by the event. But virtually none of Jordan's political base watched the concert, for at the same time all the leading country and Christian music stars had assembled on the mall in Washingon for a competing Thanks for The Blessing concert."
-Greg randomly mentions around this point that Christine Quinn is mayor of New York. This actually came out before she nearly won the mayoral election in 2013, so I wonder if he was just a fan. It's worth noting that she's a lesbian.
-Greg watches the Congressional vote at Bloomberg's swanky pad in New York. Ultimately, only five House Republicans and two Senators vote against the blessing, which allows it to easily pass. |
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Date: June 25th, 2015 1:38 PM Author: drab double fault Come on you people this shit is hilarious. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28198180) |
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Date: June 25th, 2015 2:58 PM Author: Bateful temple 180 work, brother. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28198739) |
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Date: June 25th, 2015 4:53 PM Author: Lime tanning salon background story (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28199558) |
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Date: June 25th, 2015 4:57 PM Author: drab double fault I'm hoping the next few chapters will provide some much needed escapism for XO conservaheroes depressed about the ongoing lib carnival. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28199586) |
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Date: June 25th, 2015 4:57 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28199594) |
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Date: June 25th, 2015 4:59 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location Still here, still reading daily, even if not poasting (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28199604) |
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Date: June 25th, 2015 11:32 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 12 PART FIVE [CXN-35]
Chapter 12 Part Five
-The Blessing has passed, with strong majorities in both houses. Within a few hours, thousands of pre-prepared legal challenges flood the nation�s court system at every level and with almost every kind of plaintiff possible (judges, unions, non-evangelical Christians, etc.). This of course, is all Greg�s doing:
�I persuaded the most prominent lawyers and firms in the country to appear as counsel of record, including every living former head of the American Bar Association and the deans and senior faculty of every major law school.� Such prestige!
-There�s a sudden calm after the Blessing is passed, as stays are granted almost immediately and XO Jordan takes no action. So, during this time, Sanjay starts studying XO Jordan�s cabinet appointments to figure out his strategery. Apparently, he has relied heavily on celebrity appointments. His Secretary of Health and Human Services is pastor Rick Warren, but that�s just a notable instance; according to Greg, �Five cabinet secretaries had appeared on reality television shows� the Jordan cabinet marked the triumph of personality over character.�
-Sanjay also makes a disturbing discovery while investigating the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, which he says was �strangely inactive� during Palin�s presidency. XO Jordan picks evangelical historian David Barton to lead it, but what is more disturbing is who is being hired for all the low-level posts: Dozens of MIT computer scientists, Chinese software engineers, and web consultants who had previously worked for the governments of Saudi Arabia and Iran. This Is only revealed, apparently, because XO Jordan had fired Palin�s appointees to the office and some leaked what was going on. You know, even though government employment is public and people would notice if the Faith-Based Initiatives were suddenly filled with classified info.
It turns out all these hires are experts on Internet censorship. One had developed the website eFatwa.com, another invented the algorithms used in China�s Great Firewall, yet another helped Saudi Arabia integrate the thousands of security cameras across the kingdom into a system that automatically detects illegal behaviors like kissing in public. This whole project has the ominous codename Purity Web, and is personally overseen by the president. Nobody knows its exact purpose, but the leaks force XO Jordan to explain himself:
�This will be a wholly modern presidency. I just cannot understand the fuss. What do they think � that religious people are stuck in the Middle Ages? God commands us to use all the tools at our disposal, and I have always been completely transparent about that. In 2008, when Ralph Reed and I were growing the Faith and Freedom Coalition, we were absolutely clear that we were not going to cede web-based organizing, web-based fundraising, and techno-savvy political action to the liberals. You may remember that all of our original Faith and Freedom chapters were virtual� we are figuring out how to use technology to perfect our democracy, to ensure more perfect freedom, and to advance our country toward its destiny as Christ�s Kingdom on Earth.�
Apparently, this explanation works, because terrorist attacks plus reality television have made Americans less worried about living under surveillance. Nobody mounts much resistance to the Purity Web, until it�s too late. In hindsight, Greg reflects, �Jordan�s long-promised Internet third wave now seems so obvious and so inevitable that I find it difficult to understand how we failed to figure it out in 2016.� Honestly I struggle too because it seems pretty obvious to me as well.
-After a six-week lull, XO Jordan launches his next offensive by announcing a series of �implementing regulations� for The Blessing. The first is called �On Sexual Deviancy,� apparently because the Jordan administration didn�t want to call it �On The Homosexual Problem� because it would echo the �Jewish Problem� too much. The regulation is implemented by executive order without any review, and its content is simple: All homosexuals must register with the federal government within 90 days and be tested for AIDS, �a long-overdue public health measure for the good of those who choose the homosexual lifestyle.�
-XO Jordan says they have no plans to create a federal penalty for homosexuality, because while it must be a crime it�s up to states to punish it. However, the Farris Commission that created The Blessing releases an advisory paper by biblical scholars stating that, to comply with the second covenant of The Blessing, states should implement the DEATH PENALTY for sodomy.
-Besides forcing gays to register, the regulation also bans all gay partner benefits, bans gay adoptions, and voids those already carried out (though in an odd twist they�re harsher on gay men than women; women living together can keep kids above the age of five if they�re under supervision of a panel. No idea why that wrinkle is there).
-In response to all this, gays start fleeing to Canada or Europe, feeling even lib havens like San Fran are not safe. Greg remarks that �many [heartland] states were amazed to discover the number of gay households in their midst, and shocked that home prices fell sharply as large numbers of residences, sometimes up to 10 percent of the housing units in an area, flooded onto the market.� Even closeted gays leave, due to the presumption older singles are gay combined with a rumor that the administration has developed a literal �gay test.�
-Eight state governors, following the lead of Bloomberg in NY, openly defy the Deviancy Regulation and pledge to ignore it. Even the Chamber of Commerce joins in, saying that it is illegal for companies to suddenly revoke the vested benefits of employees (these got revoked for gays too).
-In response to all this, an 18-year-old gay Buddhist monk from Myanmar immolates himself in front of the White House. But the burning is only covered on non-F3 news. �The millions of Americans for whom F3-controlled media outlets were their sole or primary source of news never knew that it happened.�
-Greg, our extremely str8 hero, remembers this heroic monk:
�I remembered his beautiful name, Banya Vamsa. I remembered his story. He was a quiet and earnest young man, persecuted by the military regime in Myanmar for his politics, his religion, and his sexual orientation. His whole short life had revolved around a seemingly impossible dream, the dream of America, a place of sanctuary and freedom. And then, thanks to a small community of Buddhist nuns outside Atlanta, the impossible dream became real. I cried today thinking of his anguish when the America of his dreams betrayed him.�
It�s worth noting that Burma is devoutly Buddhist so him being persecuted for his religion is a bit unlikely. Also, while Theravada Buddhism isn't as hard on gay stuff as, say, Islam, I'm pretty sure their monks are still supposed to be celibate, so I don't know how his sexual orientation is even coming into the picture.
-Greg�s description of their strategy is a good insight into how he does not get how non-Blue America operates:
�One of our strategies during this year was to let the American people see themselves through the eyes of those outside the Untied States. Americans always have had enormous pride in their country and tend to become anxious and unhappy when the country is criticized or derided by others. During the two terms of Sarah Palin, the position of America in the eyes of the world had deteriorated steadily� The leaders of our allies and foes alike were coldly proper when meeting the US president on international occasions, but she had been completely frozen out of those parts of meetings like the G8 and the G20, where the leaders hammered out economic and political deals.�
I dunno, I just find it funny that Rich thinks middle America gives a shit what Sweden thinks about America in the way his crowd does.
-America may have been viewed oddly under Palin, but under XO Jordan things reach a new level. Europe�s cultural affinity with the U.S. largely evaporates over religious differences, and America�s fundamentalism is lumped in with that of the Muslims in Europe. Americans don�t seem to care about their growing isolation from their allies, though (did Greg ever reflect that a ton of Americans SUPPORT isolationism, perhaps justifiably?)
-As the court battle rages on, Greg and Sanjay go back to Oklahoma again, where Sanjay first went 8 years ago. What�s happened to the Sooner State in that time? Well, let�s look:
�For years the militias in Oklahoma had failed to persuade the state legislature to formally recognize them as an �unorganized militia� under the Second Amendment. But in March of that year, the Oklahoma legislature finally acted. The state sanctioned something now called simply the Christian Militia (a change from 8 years before, when they were called Liberty Boys or Freedom Fighters). When asked what was the mission of the newly recognized �unorganized� militia, the sponsor of the Oklahoma bill replied, �to eradicate evil.�� [very XO]
�Dozens of red states quickly followed suit, and by summer hundreds of thousands of men (there were no women) were spending every weekend marching, drilling, training, displaying their weapons, and preparing to defend the Christian Nation and The Blessing from gays, abortion doctors, communists, Muslims, liberals, immigrants, and elites.
�Rallying in Oklahoma City with a ragtag collection of secularists, humanists, lawyers, and other opponents of The Blessing, we asked the media to focus on the fact that �liberty� and �freedom� had been dropped from the names of these militias and all these armed men were now simply �Christians,� sworn not to protect our liberty or even the Constitution but now sworn officially to �defend the Christian Nation and the covenants of The Blessing,� and, unofficially, to �eradicate evil.�� Could not everyone see the sort of hypocrisy foreshadowed by the Schiavo affair [that again?], with the proper scope ad role of government depending entirely on who controlled it and on the ends for which it was being deployed?�
-In a daring step, at the OKC rally the TW team says that the only way to stop this madness is to STAND UP to XO Jordan and defend constitutional democracy by using the same �vigor� one would use to stop a physical assault. In other words, they�re finally admitting violence may be necessary.
-As soon as they get back to New York, the federal government ARRESTS all the rally organizers in Oklahoma, citing their martial law powers. This is a first for the government, although Greg notes that lots of Muslims had been arrested under Palin and shipped to Gitmo-style facilities in Wyoming and Alabama. A dozen state governors denounce these arrests, along with �every remaining independent member of Congress,� but it�s no use. XO Jordan ignores them.
-Greg laments to Sanjay that things seem doomed. Sanjay tries to cheer him up:
�Just remember, G, there are battles and there are wars. And even nations that win wars do not stay on top forever. Nothing is irreversible,�
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Date: June 26th, 2015 12:15 AM Author: Buck-toothed Newt Immigrant First.
Historic thread. |
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Date: June 26th, 2015 1:26 AM Author: Swashbuckling Slap-happy Travel Guidebook Trust Fund THIS was an NYT bestseller?
ljl @ clown world america. |
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Date: June 26th, 2015 1:12 AM Author: Stirring indian lodge It's just the hardcore fans left. Bro need u to finish all chapters. U are appreciated (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28202381) |
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Date: June 26th, 2015 4:35 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: Chapter 13: Secession [CXN-36]
Chapter 13: Secession
-Awww, yeah, now we’re rolling. If you’re one of the five people still reading at this point, you’re in for a treat, because events really ramp up here and become even more utterly hilarious. Our quote for this chapter:
“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of asociety. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” –Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
-The quote from Moynihan is timely, because the chapter opens with Greg and Sanjay heading to the Moynihan Federal Courthouse in downtown NYC. He thinks about how DIVERSE the city is while watching an IRL version of XO:
“Female bankers in expensive shoes climbed the steps from the subway with young Indian software engineers and Jamaican secretaries. We watched an angry Russian limo driver scream profanities at a Sikh cabby while the Russian’s passenger sat in the backseat reading the Times, unperturbed. Normal.”
-Greg is at the courthouse, of course, because the first ruling is about to be made on The Blessing. The district court judge is Denny Chin, who IRL was appointed to the Second Circuit by Obama but in this reality has languished at the district level for his entire career.
-The case concerns the first blessing: “As the fate of the nation depends entirely on unbending obedience to the will of God, it shall be treasonous to deny the existence of God, to question the Word of God, or to advocate disobedience to the will of God.” Greg notes that this provision violates “the separation clause, the Bill of Rights [that’s redundant], the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments [that’s redundant again], and a raft of other constitutional protections.”
-Greg also notes that the STUPID evangelicals wrote their law in a dumb way: defining the will of God is pretty hard, and the same goes for defining “advocating disobedience” to said will. Amusingly, the government’s defense notes that because the Blessing doesn’t say what “God” is intended by the law, it doesn’t violate the establishment clause.
-Who is in charge of bringing down this legislation? None other than Greg’s old biglaw buddies, who are basically described as Deal Team Six:
“There were no smarter, more thorough, or more strategic litigators in the country. I suspected they would come up with a brief that wove together dozens of grounds for objection, virtually ensuring that even if the court rejected some of our arguments, a dozen more would survive, and survive appellate review. I was right. The case they developed was brilliantly tactics – relying not only on the best arguments from a legal perspective but the principals and lines of authority that were most deeply embedded in constitutional jurisprudence, with the result that an appellate judge or a hostile Supreme Court tempted to reject the principle or overturn the line of authority would be forced to undermine dozens of other Supreme Court decision vital or convenient to the fundamentalist Christian cause.”
Oh, what SCHOLARS!
-Outside the courthouse are tons of press and a huge group of protesters bussed in from a Pennsylvania mega-church (why are they always megachurches? Most Christians do not attend mega-churches). Their signs include “crudely painted messages” such as “Judges who reject Christ will Burn in Hell Forever” [yes, that’s the capitalization], “Christians will not be victims anymore,” and “The people have spoken, get out of the way.” When Sanjay walks by, the pastor screams “Antichrist!” at him and people join in with chants of “Satan!” Then Sanjay just STYLES on the pastor by approaching and shaking his hand:
“’Pastor,’ Sanjay said, ‘countless Americans have died to defend your right and my right to believe what we wish to believe, to worship in the manner we desire, and to practice our religions freely, Will you join me in a prayer of thanks?’ The pastor was speechless. ‘Thank you, Pastor,’ Sanjay continued after the briefest pause. ‘Let us pray.’ Like a deer caught in headlights, the pastor had no choice but to bow his head. His previously rowdy congregation became silent. ‘Let us remember the dark days when our forefathers in the Old World were forced to conform to the religion and beliefs of their monarch. Let us remember the thirst for freedom that drove them across the ocean. Let us remember and give thanks for the brave men and women who have defended our republic and its freedoms against every assault. Let us give thanks that our father sand mothers in the last century were prepared to give all they had to defeat fascism and communism, systems that tried to tell us what to believe and what to think and to control every aspect of our behavior and lives. We give thanks for having been delivered from these great evils. And may we meet today and go forward from this place in the spirit of Jesus, whose radical commandments to love our enemies, to love the sinner, and to turn the other cheek have shown us the only path to peace and justice in this world. Amen.’”
Sanjay’s move SHOCKS THE NATION:
“His gesture to the Pennsylvania pastor captured the daily news cycle and initially threw F3 into a rare state of confusion. F3 first cycled through a series of explanations: the prayer was a cynical exploitation of people’s faith that was typical of the Antichrist; the prayer was a staged even where the purported pastor and congregation were really fronts for TW; the prayer and reference to Jesus were evidence of the Holy Spirit having descended for a brief moment, overcoming the power of Satan and illuminating Sanjay’s mind with the power of Christ.”
Eventually, though, F3 finds it best to just drop the matter and pretend it never happened. Eyes on the prize, chaps.
-Meanwhile, the non-F3 networks feel the need to explain what “fascism” and ‘communism” were and why Sanjay was implying their similarity to the Christian Nation project. Greg cites a CNN poll finding that only 8 percent of Americans can even vaguely define fascism, whileonly 30 percent can adequately define communism. He mentions an interview of a “straight-A” student in Iowa who thinks America fought the Jews in WW2. Sadly this is all pretty believable. My sister was a straight-A student and is a total historical retard.
-Greg gives us more Sanjay gushing over that prayer:
“This confrontation with the Pennsylvania pastor was typical of Sanjay at the height of his power. Had it been conceived and planned in advance, it would have been a brilliant strategic move, well designed to advance our cause. But it wasn’t. It was even stronger by virtue of being completely spontaneous and authentic. Viewers could tell, when Sanjay paused before turning, that he was acting on instint. They knew that his desire to reach out and connect was genuine. They saw that Sanjay truly believed that he had more in common with the pastor than differences. And, importantly, they accepted that his admiration for Jesus and his message was real. This was the Sanjay whome the country saw in action almost daily during that year. He was disarming, charming, authentic, earnest, modest, and compelling. And – unlike any politician and most other charismatic public figure – his motivation was completely free of ambition or greed. Charisma when turned to the good is a powerful thing. And yes, had he really been the Antichrist, he would have been a superb one.”
-A side note: Greg talks about how Sanjay’s prayer took over the news cycle for an entire day. But this event happened when they’re arriving to hear the judge’s ruling on The Blessing. Cool or not, wouldn’t the media regard the ruling as WAY more important than Sanjay’s stunt? This seems like gushing that doesn’t work with the book’s plot.
-Anyway, Greg goes in to the courthouse and meets his old RCD&S bros. Thankfully, it’s not awkward, mostly because Greg is just so, so awesome:
“I have to say that all awkwardness with my former firm had disappeared. I had become the alumnus of whom they were most proud, and my association with the firm and its resulting leading role in pro bono support of the anti-Blessing movement now made it the firm of choice for law students anxious to have the chance to do something to avert the disaster.”
-Denny Chin comes out and reads his ruling from the bench. Unsurprisingly, it’s a total victory for Theocracy Watch and a devastating condemnation of The Blessing from start to finish, describing it as “anathema not only to the Constitution and the law but to Western civilization itself [Libs confused at suggestion Western civilization is a good thing].”
-Chin’s ruling serves as a catalyst for the media, which finally decides to stop adhering to any BS about respecting “both sides” in this political battle:
“The independent media conveyed the sense of historic urgency that TW had promoted since the election. From that day on, the media and coastal public treated Sanjay as a prophet whose lone voice had suddenly been vindicated and validated and to whose predictions they now accorded a presumption of truth. It was a privileged but dangerous position.”
-So, how does XO Steve Jordan save the situation? We shall see soon enough.
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Date: June 26th, 2015 8:03 PM Author: Lime tanning salon background story Lol @ "coastal public" (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28207759) |
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Date: June 28th, 2015 10:17 AM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse Tbf I'm starting to think Sanjay is the antichrist... (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28215692) |
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Date: June 28th, 2015 11:27 AM Author: rusted brethren why do i have a feeling emelie is gonna pop up again? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28215923) |
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Date: June 27th, 2015 11:42 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 13 PART TWO [CXN-37]
CHAPTER 13 Part Two
-Greg notes that no historian has ever analyzed what happened in the Jordan White House after Chin�s ruling. He doesn�t know what the debate was like, whether moderate Republicans urged him to pull back, and whether anybody refused to go along with what Jordan chose to do. What Greg DOES know is that the two weeks after Chin�s ruling with the only good weeks of 2017, perhaps the last �good� weeks of his life.
-In the following two weeks, two more federal judges in California and Illinois release equally strong decisions obliterating other parts of The Blessing. Pundits declare The Blessing dead on arrival, and move on to predicting that a non-evangelical majority will take back Congress� wait, is Congress actually majority-evangelical? How did that happen? I�m not even sure the GOP has an evangelical majority. Did they kick the Catholics and Mormons out? If they did, how do they win elections?
-But then�XO Jordan strikes:
�Two weeks to the day following Judge Chin�s ruling, with no media present but F3, the chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary tabled resolutions of impeachment against the three federal judges whose decisions against The Blessing already had been released. The minority members of the committee and staff scrambled for their phones to alert the media and their leadership [LOLing at the idea the regular media were just ignoring a Congressional committee]. The majority counsel outlined the case in about ten minutes. Despite numerous motions and protests, the chairman called for a vote. The minority rose from their seats and walked out of the room as the chairman called the roll and obtained the required majority to report the articles of impeachment to the full House. Later that afternoon, with the minority having exhausted its parliamentary options, the articles were approved by the full House and 'managers' of the impeachments were appointed to present the case to the Senate.�
�Jim Lehrer opened his NewsHour that night with the report that the United States had experienced the first stages of a �constitutional coup d�etat.� The Senate majority leader referred the article to a special Impeachment Trial Committee and allowed the three judges exactly one week to prepare for their trial. Since the matters in contention were of a legal and not factual nature, each trial was short, and all three proceedings had been decided by the following week. The committee recommended conviction to the full Senate. Exactly four weeks after Sanjay and I sat in the Moynihan Courthouse and listened to Judge Chin�s decision he was convicted by the required two-thirds vote in the full Senate, whereupon he immediately and automatically forfeited his office. Impeachment convictions by the Senate are not justiciable matters, and thus no review by the Supreme Court was possible. It was done and could not be undone.�
[Ding!]
�Not only was it done, but the Speaker of the House [Is this still Boehner? He�s Catholic; shouldn�t he be a little upset about all this?] and the majority leader of the Senate appeared together and made clear that any other district or appellate judge similarly overturning The Blessing or its implementing law or regulations on purportedly constitutional grounds would suffer the same fate. The impeachable offense of which Chin and the others had been convicted was acting beyond the scope of their authority and thus having treasonously attempted to usurp power committed by the Constitution to the people and their representatives in Congress. Therefore, the congressional leaders explained, any judge doing the same would be impeached and convicted in expedited proceedings as the basic legal issue� had already been decided by Congress. They had no interest, they said, in continuing the impeachments, and noted that in other cases impeachment had been an effective deterrent to similar errors by an overactive judiciary.�
-Hilariously, Greg simply did not see this coming, and he�s mortified that he hadn�t done anything to try preempting this strategy. He points out that conservatives have proposed impeaching judges more than once before, such as after the 1996 Romer v. Evans decision on gay rights.
The Christian right doesn�t object to XO Jordan�s move, but instead digs in and defends it as necessary for removing judicial impediments to their agenda. Christian law schools devote themselves to exhaustive studies of the history of impeachment, citing 17th-century precedents to declare usurpation of authority �treasonous.� They also selectively cite the Federalist Papers to make the case that �disregard of the public interest� and �seizing the role of policy-maker� are high crimes and misdemeanors. The arguments all work because the public, Greg says, is ignorant of the Constitution and constitutional jurisprudence, so they can�t critically assess constitutional claims.
-There is immense gloom in New York and euphoria in red state America, as TW�s legal offensive collapses. Judges either toe the line or try defiance, only to be removed and replaced by a reliable Christian conservative. Earlier, Greg had proposed a weekly conference call between the gubernatorial staffs of ten anti-Blessing states: Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, Maryland, Illinois, Connecticut, California, Maine, Washington, and Minnesota. Following the impeachments, the governors themselves start participating as well.
-Greg becomes better-acquainted with Michael Bloomberg, whom Rich probably adores in real life:
�The state�s voters turned [to Bloomberg] in 2016, instinctively understanding that a man of proven competence was required to navigate what clearly were going to be myriad challenges for New York under a Jordan presidency. They were prescient. In addition to competence, experience, and a first-class team around him, the governor had two things that no other state governor did. First was money. The governor�s personal fortune had increased during his return to the private sector [even though the economy is horrible in this universe?], and despite hyperactive philanthropy his foundation had billions of dollars from which to provide funding to public initiatives that would otherwise have strained the state�s chronically overextended budget. The second was his own media base. It wasn�t the broad or ubiquitous behemoth that F3 had become, but Bloomberg LLP was a major global media company with savvy professional journalists and a team of sophisticated web technicians and engineers.�
-Around Thanksgiving, Bloomberg calls Greg and asks for a meeting. Greg asks if he should bring Sanjay, but no, it�s GREG he wants. Greg shows up, is shown in by Bloomberg�s butler (who rocks a Brooklyn accent), and is told the governor wants a skilled lawyer who is also a die-hard foe of the theocratic movement. He offers to pay Greg whatever he wants, and Greg accept immediately, becoming Bloomberg�s personal legal retainer.
�We talked long into the night, and I was impressed at the deep consideration he had given to the various possible outcomes of the current struggle. He was a man who was thinking ahead. He was also a man who was highly motivated.�
��Greg, these fuckers are monsters� Nazis,� the governor said at one point during the evening. �You gotta understand this is not about religion or rights or law, this is about people. Yesterday I sent the jet to Topeka. You know why? My cousin Maude has a son who lives there. He�s a music teacher, gay, been with his partner for ten years, and they had a little girl together. He�s the nicest young man in the world, and they adore the little girl. Maude�s son is the biological father. A week ago some official from the Kansas Department for Children and Families came to the house with the local sheriff and took the child away. The sheriff and some militia thug said that if they complained or came after the girl, they�d both disappear. It�s the fucking same thing, Greg. Just like what the Jews went through in Germany. Maude was hysterical. So yesterday I sent the jet with five of my bodyguards. They got the boys safely on board first and then went to the DCF and took the little girl at gunpoint� That�s right, just walked in, drew their weapons, and said they were taking the child. I never thought I�d see the day in America. But I�ll tell you, it�s the single best thing I ever did with my money. They�re all back in Fort Washington now with Maude.�
-Greg goes in the next day and tells Sanjay he�s jumping ship, but Sanjay agrees it�s the right choice, indeed the only one:
�New York and Bloomberg will naturally assume a leadership position among the states in opposition. You can make an enormous difference. You can leverage your skills there in a way that you just cannot do here.�
-Still, Greg is a little annoyed Sanjay doesn�t try to beg him to stay, and tells him as much. Sanjay replies with� well:
��Ah, of course I should have said that I WANT you to stay. I need you, G. I hope you know that I will always need you.� [Greg apologizes for having a fragile ego, and Sanjay continues:] ��Can I till you something stupid? Something completely irrational? Sometimes I remember my dreams. I had a dream about us. It was simple. You and I were fireworks, two shells launched at the same time. At first the shell that was me arced higher and burned brighter. Then our trajectories crossed. Yours ascended even higher, and it became clear to me that it would travel much much further. I think, G, that this may be the point where our trajectories cross.�
-Greg says Sanjay is crazy and there�s no way he can outshine him. Good for him, but the upshot here is that Rich thinks that HE is the guy outshining Sanjay.
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Date: June 28th, 2015 8:26 AM Author: Odious orange masturbator i wonder why rich is so intent on saying "fuck you" to pennsylvania in particular. closest state to MFH that he thinks of as mostly hicks? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28215544) |
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Date: June 28th, 2015 8:53 AM Author: Stirring indian lodge Lol at that nebbish geek Bloomberg ever using guns or force to accomplish anything.
Can't wait for Sanjay to get got. I assume he will be crucified. Needs a lot of heavy handed Christ imagery |
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Date: June 28th, 2015 11:56 AM Author: Rough-skinned nibblets Literally fall asleep reading this thread every night (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28216097) |
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Date: June 30th, 2015 12:11 AM Author: Lime tanning salon background story (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28227849) |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 12:31 AM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 13 PART THREE [CXN-38]
Chapter 13 Part 3
-Greg’s first assignment for Bloomberg is to outline every possible legal theory that could justify New York and the other states defying The Blessing. Bloomberg tells Greg that regardless of “legality” he’ll never let The Blessing be enforced in New York as long as he’s alive. However, he wants to have the best “legal face” possible for his stand. Ironically, Greg notes, most of his work was done by conservatives in years past when they sought justifications for defying liberal federal edicts. Greg explains for the reader not only the idea of state nullification but also that of interposition, in which states “interpose” a claimed right in order to halt the enforcement of certain federal actions. Then, he gives a long explanation of how these two ideas are totally illegitimate, just to settle that score:
-Greg is tempted to cite nullification and interposition despite their invalidity, but he’s just too damn honorable to do so:
“I was still a lawyer, and I could not advise the governor to act on the basis of a theory that was so clearly invalid. I recoiled at descending to their level. However worthy our ends, they could not justify the means.”
-A few days later, Bloomberg assembles 22 state governors on Liberty Island for a press conference, where they all announced that each of their states had passed and subsequently signed legislation suspending the enforcement of The Blessing in their states [How do they ‘announce’ this? States can’t pass entire bills without anybody noticing the process. It won’t surprise anybody]. Bloomberg gives a big long speech citing the legal excuses Greg provided him:
“’For decades, President Jordan, Justice Moore, most of the members of the Farris Commission, and all the scholars associated with the Christian colleges and law schools [Greg can get away with vague wording like that, but how can a governor at a press conference? ‘The Christian colleges and law schools?’ WTF does that mean?] proclaimed that each state had the fundamental right to nullify federal legislation that it deemed unconstitutional or improper. They were wrong. They were wrong because it was settled law from the earliest days of the republic, it was settled law after the Civil War, and it was settled law again after the civil rights movement that only the federal courts have the power to determine whether federal legislation is unconstitutional. So instead of following the unlawful path charted by our opponents, we did what the Constitution required. We turned to the federal courts to decide the matter. And, as has been the case so many times before, our federal judges stood firm in favor of the fundamental rights and freedoms of our Constitution, which do and must prevail, no matter how popular, convenient, or compelling the case for overriding them in the name of a purportedly greater good.
“’But then,’ he continued. ‘for the first time in our national life, the other two branches of our federal government refused to recognize and accept the judgment of their third and co-equal branch, the judiciary. Congress turned to its constitutional power of impeachment to remove those judges, even though it was clear to everyone that the judges’ conduct did not constitute ‘treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors’ as required by the Constitution. For that particular misdeed by Congress, our Constitution provides no remedy.
“’So,’ the governor asked, ‘where does that leave our states and the majority of the American people whom we represent? It is one of the oldest maxims in law that each right must have a remedy. The principle is so ancient and so fundamental that every law student still learns a bit of legal Latin: Ubi jus ibi remedium – where there is a right, there is a remedy. It is the cornerstone of what lawyers call equity – the doing of the just or fair thing even if strict application of the law does not produce a just or fair result. So when the constitution provides a preferred remedy that is unavailable, then we have the right to an alternative remedy. In this case the preferred remedy has been rendered unavailable by the improper impeachments and threatened impeachments by Congress. So in these circumstances, and these circumstances only, we turn to an alternative remedy, in this case the doctrine called interposition.
You get the idea, Bloomberg drones on with the legal logic for another couple pages. The key idea is that Bloomberg’s coalition of 22 governors declare that the courts are simply totally wrong on the Blessing, and they’re going to defer to the long list of decisions made in decades past. And so, they declare The Blessing illegal and say it will be criminal to try enforcing it. Bloomberg also promises to provide sanctuary to anybody fleeing the dark lands of Kansas, Texas, or any other state that implements The Blessing.
-Bloomberg’s defiant group is labeled the “Secular Bloc,” which is immediately abbreviated to “Sec Bloc.” Most people in these states feel relief, believing Jordan will be content to live and let live, allowing two separate legal orders to prevail. These people are retarded.
Greg never lists the 22 Sec Bloc members, but you can put together most of the membership based on stuff that’s written elsewhere. The 21 known members are: Washington, Oregon, California, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Iowa, Wisconsin, New Mexico, New York, Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, Vermont, Maryland, Rhode Island, Illinois, Delaware, New Jersey, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Michigan. I have no clue what state the 22nd is supposed to be. Probably Nevada or Colorado.
-For one week, the Sec Bloc is fine; the White House simply says it is “studying” the situation. Then, XO Jordan calls a press conference that opens with a statement that casually dismissed the “interposition” argument as being totally without merit. He announced that the attorney general (who is unnamed) is convening a grand jury to consider prosecution of various state officials for seditious violation of the Defense of Freedom Act. That was the law passed after 7/22 that contained a provision basically criminalizing criticism of the government. That provision had been struck down but had apparently recently been revived by the post-Roy Moore Supreme Court (how that happened is unexplained; the Court doesn’t just change is precedents as soon as a new guy comes on).
-Bloomberg and Greg are caught totally off-guard, but Sanjay saw this all coming:
“Jordan’s casualness, Governor, was not an affectation. Your interposition response was fully anticipated by the feds. Their only uncertainty was how many states would go along. The days allotted to the purported review of interposition by Justice was a fiction; my sources tell me [is Sanjay Varys or something?] that the response to interposition had been ready to go before you began the speech at the Statue of Liberty. Their main strategy now is most likely to be a show of force designed to intimidate Sec bloc states from pursuing secession. They will find a few Sec Bloc states with loyal FBI bureaus and where the National Guard will accept a call to federal duty. They will then proceed in these states with high-profile arrests and prosecutions of governors, Democratic leaders in the legislature, newspaper publisher, and others.”
-You know, if Sanjay predicted this was all coming, wouldn't it have been nice for him to TELL Bloomberg this a little earlier? I mean, they are gambling with their lives here.
-Sanjay predicts that New York is safe for now; XO Jordan will start with states where by arresting the governor, lt. governor, and perhaps a legislative branch head, he can make the governor a Republican. He’ll start with those. Sanjay also predicts the trials will be under martial law, not civil courts.
-Sanjay further predicts that some state governments could see a coup d’etat by Christian militas active in the state, which will start insurrections that will provide XO Jordan a pretext to federalize the National Guard there and take over. Basically, Sanjay warns, while 22 states currently oppose the Blessing, the number able to secede will probably shrink from there.
-To protect New York, Greg goes and makes sure all the police and National Guard figures will remain loyal to Bloomberg rather than Jordan. Most say yes, as he notes that many are Catholics and Jews who are personally fearful (once again, we have Rich positioning Republicans as anti-Catholic, when Jordan could never win the presidency or advance his legislative agenda without significant Catholic backing. This makes no sense).
-From Greg’s first day with Bloomberg, he has been working on secession legislation in secret. Again, his work is easy; he simply draws on earlier right-wing secession movements in Texas, Alaska, etc. Once again, he drones on for a while about how secession is clearly illegal, citing the 1869 Texas v. White case. Because it’s so totally illegal, Greg relies more on political philosophy justifying revolution than any kind of constitutional claim.
-Greg runs the numbers of secession: Seceding states could have up to 43 percent of U.S. GDP and pay 47 percent of federal taxes:
“Put simply, without the more liberal coastal states and other large economies like Illinois, the federal government would not be viable.”
Oh boy, Greg has fallen to the level of Benzo-style arguments. No, the federal government could be perfectly viable without those states, because while it would lose their taxes, it would also lose their expenses. If they aren’t paying SS and Medicare and so forth to those states, that almost totally offsets the lost tax revenue. They may not come out ahead, but they aren’t immediately having to borrow over half the budget. This is stupid.
-Sanjay, of course, ends up being totally correct, as December 2017 brings a crackdown from XO Jordan:
“Following arrests on sedition charges of state leaders in New Hampshire, Iowa, Wisconsin, and New Mexico, new conservative Republican governors took office. National Guard troops and Christian militia shut down the smaller state capitals, including Olympia, Washington; Salem, Oregon; and Lansing, Michigan, preventing the legislatures there from convening [LOLing pretty hard at the fact the Sec Bloc is so unprepared they haven’t even planned for extraordinary legislative sessions elsewhere].”
-In the end, fourteen states manage to pass secession legislation: California, Maryland, Hawaii, Delaware, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Illinois New Jersey, New York, and all of New England save New Hampshire.
-Greg, being the special person he is, gets to write the secession declaration. He is very humble about it:
“My fingers hovered over the keyboard for many minutes. I started out the window up Third Avenuge toward 42nd Street, unable to start. It was 10 p.m., and yet the traffic was as dense as that in most American cities at rush hour. Suddenly I saw myself from above, sitting at the desk, and realized that this person was about to draft a document that would rank among the most important in American history. But sitting at the desk wasn’t a Jefferson or a Lincoln, a Webster or a Clay – it was me. It must be a mistake, I thought. Sitting there was a lawyer, a technician, andan advisor to others; a person who saw both sides of every argument rather than embracing one side with passion. Surely this was not the person to write the words that would tear apart a great nation that had endured for nearly a quarter millennium.”
-Greg gets over himself after having Sanjay over for some more Brooklyn lagers (no brewga is mentioned) and writes his epic declaration of independence:
“Fourteen states have today suspended their participation in our federal Union. We do so with heavy hearts but with a strong conviction that we have acted in the best interests of our great nation and its people. Even the greatest country can lose its way. A strident minority has seized the instruments of federal power intent on implementing a theocratic society completely at odds with our Constitution, our values, and our traditions. This is not merely a debate about politics or policy. The freedoms and lives of millions of Americans are at grave risk. Neither the fourteen states stepping out of the Union today, nor the thirty-six remaining states, can prosper or endure on their own. We have taken with us nearly half of the federal government’s revenues and over 40 percent of our national economy. Know this and take courage from it – deprived of these resources, President Jordan and all those who serve him cannot govern. They cannot succeed and they cannot implement their theocratic vision. Take courage and stand against them because they CAN be defeated. Our nation must and will again be whole. When the voters return to power people committed to the restoration of constitutional government, we will rejoin the Union. When the so-called Blessing is withdrawn, we will return. When martial law is lifted and our fundamental freedoms are restored, we will return. We WILL return. My fellow governors, our brave legislators and millions of our citizens join with me in making this promise: We will dedicate our lives, and make any sacrifice required, so that America will be whole, free, and great again.”
-I rate this declaration a 5/10 at best. Despite being a “joint statement,” it’s written from Bloomberg’s point of view rather than from the collective’s. Collective declaration of independence are more prestigious. Also, it doesn’t really talk about all the horrible rights they’ve lost that justify secession, which is normally a must. The talk of economic percentages is really awkward and feels out of place, besides being stupid for the reasons mentioned above.
More broadly, the talk about wanting to restore America makes secession itself a poor strategy, IMO. Secession is a form of permanent separation and will alienate those committed to keeping America united. If they simply want Jordan out of the way, Bloomberg and co. should have done something like declare a Coalition to Protect the Constitution or somesuch and said they were simply fighting to halt the outrageous tyranny of the Jordan government. Secession implies that Jordan’s political order is legitimate but abhorrent, while a revolutionary action simply rejects his entire order as corrupt and illegal.
I have some broader criticisms of the utterly TTT way this rebellion is being waged, but I’ll save them for the next chapter.
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Date: June 29th, 2015 4:16 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location wtf is happening in other countries? Isn't, like, the UN and everyone else sort of concerned about the world's foremost nuclear power going batshit crazy? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28224484) |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 4:20 PM Author: drab double fault Yeah, the overseas component is really lacking throughout the book, though I'm not super-critical of that. Engulfed in civil war or not, the U.S.'s enormous military resources mean it's pretty dangerous for other powers to get involved.
He'll give a general rundown of what's going on abroad towards the end. It's really LOLworthy so I'll be breaking it down in detail. |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 4:21 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location Cannot fucking wait. This thread has replaced GOT for my daily entertainment. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28224535) |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 6:43 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse The Bloomberg speech is hilarious, I'm sure the lengthy discussion of esoteric legal doctrines really blew people away. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28225447) |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 6:54 PM Author: drab double fault I'm sure in Rich's head he's contrasting the brilliant reason and intellectualism of Bloomberg/Greg with the absurd lunacy of Jordan, but apparently he's never taken read anything on the need for emotional appeal to be a great speaker. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28225510) |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 3:57 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 14: Holy War [CXN-39]
Chapter 14: Holy War
-We’re into the heady year of 2018,and it’s time for the Second American Civil War. Here’s our quotes:
“If your brother, the son of your father or of your mother, or your son or daughter, or the spouse whom you embrace, or your most intimate friend, tries to secretly seduce you, saying ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’ unknown to you, whether near you or far away, anywhere throughout the world, you must not consent, you must not listen to him; you must show him no pity, you must not spare him or conceal his guilt. No, you must kill him, your hand must strike the first blow in putting him to death and the lands of the rest of the people following.” –Deuteronomy 13:7-11
“’Yes, march against Babylon, the land of rebels, a land that I will judge! Pursue, kill, and completely destroy them, as I have commanded you,’ says the Lord. ‘Let the battle cry be heard in the land, a shout of great destruction.” –Jeremiah 50:21-22
“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” –Napoleon
-The Holy War, as it is called, is declared on Christmas day, with an epic speech by XO Steve Jordan:
“Today is Christmas Day, a day which America, as a Christian Nation, has solemnly celebrated for all of its national life. So to each of you and your families, I wish you a happy and joyous Christmas, filled with the light and grace of Christ. 2018 years ago last night, an angel told a simple shepherd the greatest news that has ever been communicated to a human being – that our loving Father had sent us a redeemer, our Lord Jesus Christ. Today, I share with you similarly joyous news. America, God’s shining city on a hill, the consummation of all He desired and planned for His children, has itself nearly completed its own redemption as a Christian Nation. The Lord never said it would be easy. For nearly 250 years He has tested us with the challenge of establishing human dominion over a vast wilderness, and most recently the challenge of casting off a thoroughly corrupt and disobedient culture that brought down upon us the grave weight of God’s displeasure. Our Lord Jesus Christ, who was crucified for us at Calvary, taught us to shoulder the burdens of the Lord joyfully, and so I tell you today the good news that we are now prepared to shoulder – with joy and determination – the last burden set for us on the path of God’s plan for man. I hereby declare that the United States of America is at war – a Holy War for the Union – with the states that have purported to secede from our great and God-given nation. Our Union is a holy and indissoluble one, like holy matrimony, and only the hand of Satan would dare attempt to rip it asunder. So with reverence, I pray that God will accept this national sacrifice on the day of Christ’s birth. I know that you join me in committing our nation to this course. By the Lord’s birthday next year, our national redemption will be complete, our nation will be whole and finally truly free, and all Americans will live in peace until the joyous time when we ascent to eternal life by the grace of Jesus. Thank God for the Blessing of His Word and His law, God bless each of you, and God bless America.”
Fuck yeah, XO Jordan is a way better speaker than that loser Bloomberg. Pretty funny that the best speech Rich manages to write in this book is by his “villain.”
-Greg describes how odd it feels during the winter, to “hit the gym and go through my familiar routine; to ride the subway where I often sat near the same large Jamaican woman reading Guideposts who always gave me a friendly smile that made me feel good about my morning; to queue up at the same coffee cart where Abdul didn’t need to be told my order; to pass through the metal detector sternly operated by the largest state trooper I had ever seen; and to enter the governor’s midtown office and sit down in front of a computer like millions of other New Yorkers, all doing what we always had done as if nothing had changed.”
So wait, WTF? You guys just SECEDED and basically launched an insurrection against the U.S. government, and everybody is just going about their lives normally, doing shit like drinking coffee? Nice fucking try. You guys should be rationing the fuck out of everything and girding up for war. I guess this is what a civil war is like when one side is a bunch of Pajama Boys.
-This inactivity is all galling because Greg ADMITS that New York is totally unprepared:
“What I knew, but most others did not, was that New York was woefully unprepared for any type of physical confrontation with the federal forces, which most of the Sec Bloc population now referred to simply as “the Holies.” Had Jordan chosen to launch an assault in January or February of that year, promptly following the declaration of Holy War, I believe that the result would have been swift and certain. But civil war was one contingency for which the US military had not planned [I find this extremely unlikely].
-Still, Greg says there’s a reason for Jordan’s delay, a mixture of uncertainty and potential moral weakness:
“Full-blown civil war is a tricky business. A regular army knows what its resources are. But at first the Pentagon could not predict which Guard units, reservists, and other troops would respond to federal direction and which would choose to defy orders and defend their home states. Planners could not know which hardware located within the Sec Bloc would remain available to commanders and what equipment would be commandeered or sequestered by forces loyal to the Secs… It was far from clear that even the most disciplined naval aviator would follow orders in the customary way when the bomb he has been told to drop is destined for Beacon Hill or Harvard Yard, or the strafing run is to disperse a crowd from Times Square. In conventional wars, troops manage to dehumanize the enemy, a psychological defense mechanism that is vital to having good young people engage in horrific violence against a political enemy. But this is more difficult in a civil war… It is more difficult when the place being attacked is where you went on your eighth-grade trip, you honeymoon, or your last vacation. America then was a mobile society. You grew up in Iowa, went to college in Florida, had your first job in Atlanta, and married a woman form Colorado. All this explains why regimes fighting long-standing wars against their own people rely mostly on special forces distinguished by their fanatical commitment to the cause, such as the Republican Guards in Iraq or the Revolutionary Guards in Iran. As far as we knew, Jordan didn’t yet have a reliable force of holy warriors who would follow orders to kill their fellow Americans and obliterate the coastal cities of their own country. This, we speculated, was one of the reasons why the Holy War, once declared, did not actually commence.”
-Despite this tremendous opportunity to act while Jordan lacks the sure resources to fight, the Sec Bloc is passive and basically does jack shit. XO Jordan, meanwhile, moves quickly to muster military strength by forming his own badass army of loyal followers:
“Evangelicals had been deeply embedded within all branches o fthe military for many years. They had dominated the chaplaincy since the beginning of the Iraq War, and for at least two decades born-again commanders had preferentially promoted fellow evangelicals within the ranks. The only remaining task was to create special units and squads in all the relevant commands that had been purged of any but the most fervent and fundamentalist evangelical troops and thoroughly screened for family ties to the Sec Bloc. This process took about four months. The resulting units were cohesive, with each soldier sharing a worldview that included deeply rooted disdain for the godless coastal elites, whom they [accurately] believed had for decades scorned, ridiculed, and victimized true Christians. For them, this was now about payback [fuck yeah!]. These special units were called Joshua Brigades.”
-Meanwhile, in the Sec Bloc, most people figure Jordan’s inaction is simply because actual civil war is the final line theocrats simply will not cross, and they feel confident their secession will be allowed to occur. Jordan undermines the Sec Bloc with lies they are stupid enough to believe:
“On the weekly conference call of the Sec Bloc state governors [Weekly? You’re at war, these should be DAILY], the governor of Delaware said she had received assurances from those close to Jordan that actual war, violent war – tanks-in the-street kind of war – just would not happen. Sanjay was always patient and methodical in his replies:”
-Sanjay explains that XO Jordan would have been in a very strong position had he simply accepted Interposition, because he could have consolidated his hold on the federal government, sustained martial law, and been ready to contest the 2018 and 2020 elections. Thus, Sanjay says, the Sec leadership need to ask WHY he rejected this opportunity and chose war.
Sanjay’s argument makes no sense, though. There’s ample evidence that a huge portion of the country is really upset with The Blessing once they’ve seen Jordan’s true colors, so in there are actual fair elections (admittedly, maybe he could rig them) the Republicans could be tossed from power. Him striking for absolute power while he has his super-Senate and apparent legitimacy was crucial. He needs to win fast. Sanjay is a dum-dum, and the Sec Bloc deliberately starting a violent throwdown instead of, say, trying an economic tactic like a general strike, was incredibly stupid of them.
-Anyway, Sanjay explains XO Jordan’s iron will for victory and how it will crush the sissies running Sec Bloc:
“’[Jordan] is entirely sane, quite brilliant, and extremely strategic. But you msut understand that when these people say they believe, they believe. People who do not have religious beliefs too often fall into the trap of failing to accept the professed beliefs of others at face value. Don’t think of faith as belief; think of faith as a type of knowledge. They know that God exists, they know that the Bible is the revealed word of God, they know that their highest calling in life is to obey God’s will, and they know that if they do not, they will suffer unbearable torment for all eternity. How does this compared with the things that motivate you, Governor?’”
[Greg cuts in for a comment, and Sanjay continues:]
“’On the other side of this roadblock stands the most important thing in the universe ever to happen – the most important thing that CAN ever happen, which is the second coming of Christ. They know that America must be a godly kingdom in order for that to occur. And they know that we are now in the end times and that the rapture and Armageddon are near. So no, they are not bluffing about war. For two decades they have been educating their children and preparing their parents to use violence. Gen Josh, Joshua’s Army, Warrior Christ, making Christians the victims and secularism the aggressor, inuring popular culture to violence – these are the things they have done to prepare. Violence is what is now required. So, I am sorry, violence is what we will see.”
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Date: June 29th, 2015 4:19 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location "So wait, WTF? You guys just SECEDED and basically launched an insurrection against the U.S. government, and everybody is just going about their lives normally, doing shit like drinking coffee? Nice fucking try. You guys should be rationing the fuck out of everything and girding up for war. I guess this is what a civil war is like when one side is a bunch of Pajama Boys."
180 |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 5:05 PM Author: Aggressive marvelous death wish range still really loling about the final battle or we being in manhattan.
just fucking lol.
alpha conservaheroes would just cut off supplies. theres literally no way it would come down to fucking BIGLAWYERS THROWING GRENADES AT MARINES on wall street. |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 5:09 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location lol for sure.
Blow the bridges, set up blockade on the rivers, and just wait a WEEK for those fuckers to starve. |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 4:46 PM Author: Swashbuckling Slap-happy Travel Guidebook Trust Fund the logistics of the "siege of manhattan" are going to be lolworthy to read about... (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28224759) |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 5:06 PM Author: Aggressive marvelous death wish range posted above without seeing this.
it really makes no fucking sense. |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 6:55 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse LOL @ the weekly conference call among secession governors.
"Hi who just joined?"
"Uh hey, lieutenant governor from Vermont. I've got to fill in to day because the boss got hurt skiing."
"Oh ok. Anyone hear from Oregon or Illinois?"
"They were on email chains earlier today so I'm sure they'll be along."
"Ok we can wait a few more minutes."
"Guys I've got a 3:30 and we've got a lot of items in the agenda to get through, could we just get started and circle back on any items they need to discuss?"
"Yeah, ah...ok, item 1.a. High speed rail line across contiguous Sec Bloc states. Can whoever put that on the agenda get the discussion going on this one?" |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 7:05 PM Author: drab double fault "$5 billion for small arms and some old French fighter jets? No way we're managing both that and our pension payments." (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28225554) |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 8:31 PM Author: Odious orange masturbator "Oregon here. Sorry bros, had to chill with some dank weed before taking this. Harsh realm, bros."
"Illinois is on. Sorry, Rahm stole the copper wire when he left and we needed to nig- uh, to jury-rig a temporary solution."
"Glad everyone's here. Thank." |
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Date: June 30th, 2015 5:57 PM Author: Aggressive marvelous death wish range afro-american engineering is the preferred nomenclature (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28232512) |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 8:54 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28226202) |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 10:53 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 14 PART TWO [CXN-40]
Chapter 14 Part Two
-Bloomberg now comes in and admits they’re totally fukkkkked, militarily:
“We never pretended we could win a war. Secession was an economic strategy. Cut off their money; show them that the United States is not a viable country without half the GDP, without Wall Street and the banking system, without Hollywood [this is SUCH a lib thing to mention], without the ports of Long Beach and New York. We cut the heart out of the country, and if that doesn’t bring them to the table, then God help us.”
Bro, if your plan was simply an economic ultimatum, your best bet would have been a general strike, not secession. Also, even if you know you can’t fight, why the fuck weren’t you at least preparing like you could? God, these people are idiots.
-San finally states the obvious: Gee, maybe they should be getting ready for war.
“[Secession] was the right thing to do. The only thing to do. And it might work. But it might not. And if it does not, you need to decide whether or not to fight. If you decide to fight, then now is the time to prepare.”
No, San, the time to prepare was MONTHS ago. I don’t normally love quoting Sun Tzu like some 16-year-old on a Total War discussion forum, but he has a highly relevant quote for this (paraphrased): “The defeated go to war and then seek to win, while the victorious win and then go to war.”
-Greg adds to the massive circle of fail in this conference call by noting that they have no idea who will fight for the Sec Bloc:
“I know they [XO Jordan’s people] will fight. The question is will OUR people really fight? The Guard perhaps, some of the troops loyal to the Sec states, maybe law enforcement. But ordinary people taking to the streets for a full-blown civil war? Fighting professional soldiers? I don’t know. We don’t have guns [LOL libs]. It would be suicide for a bunch of ordinary New Yorkers to stand up in front of charging marines. Isn’t it over if they can get the regular military to come in?”
-TLS Bloomberg says this incredibly important question is irrelevant:
“Let’s not worry about that now. Everything we do, every single little thing, should raise the stakes, raise the cost of a real war. If it puts them off for a month, a week, even a day, we should do it. If they send in the US Air Force and Marines as if this were Grenada, well, we know how that story ends. Nothing I can do about that. But I can do lots of things so history says we tried our best to ensure that that day never comes.”
Bloomberg’s epitaph: Hey, he tried.
-And so, throughout the winter and early spring of 2018, a “phony war” prevails across the Sec Bloc, with Christian militias conducting harassment campaigns in rural California, upstate New York, and western Pennsylvania. Apparently, this “harassment” consists of attacking universities, public schools, and TV stations that are “disrespectful” of The Blessing. Two liberal judges are whacked near Harrisburg, and the president of Cornell University in farthest Ithaca is kidnapped and only released after he agrees to shut down the school’s college radio stations, known for their aggressive mockery of The Blessing. In Albany, arsonists torch the homes of the Democratic legislative leadership, though nobody dies because these people have wisely relocated to Brooklyn (the way Rich portrays everywhere that isn’t NYC as some dark outland is really something).
-Finally, in late April, the violence comes home in a big way, when violence comes to the heart of New York:
“On a Saturday afternoon in late April, Mayor Quinn and her wife attended a wedding in Queens. The groom was the most senior officer in the New York City Fire Department who was openly gay and one of the department’s most decorated heroes. The Daily News coverage of the wedding included a photomontage of all the children and others he had carried out of burning buildings under the headline ‘Mazel tov!’ After a decade with his partner, they were getting married. Any mayor would have attended this wedding, but it had special meaning for Quinn, who was also gay. Only moments after the ceremony was completed, five gunmen in commando fatigues appeared from behind the altar […sneaky?]. A brief staccato burst from military-issue automatic rifles followed, and the commandoes disappeared as suddenly as they had arrived. A security camera captured two black SUVs in the real parking lot, but these were never traced [Black SUVs just…escaped from the middle of NYC? And Mayor Quinn had no security, when she’s a hated leader during a CIVIL WAR?] Inside, the wedding party and a dozens guests in the front rows, including the mayor and her wife, were killed instantly. A score of others were injured. NYPD security officers never had the chance to draw their weapons. ‘Terror’ is a word cheapened by two decades of abuse. Although a wedding is a joyous occasion and a funeral a sad one, both are moments where we feel fragile and exposed. The undercurrent of a wedding is that happiness is transitory, and this fact is affirmed by a funeral. So the Taliban knew what it was doing in targeting weddings and funerals [I think they did this because lots of people show up to them, Rich]. This was a day when New Yorkers felt real terror.”
-The chaos of the following year means NYC can’t elect a new mayor, so Bloomberg basically ends up doing both jobs. Because he’s heroic like that I guess.
-Greg breaks down the incredibly lame efforts of the Sec Bloc to win this economic war of wills:
“During this period, our principal strategy was to do everything possible to starve the federal government of resources and prevent it from functioning in the normal way. The day the secession laws were passed, each Sec Bloc state required its corporate and individual taxpayers to pay all federal taxes to a special escrow account in New York [An ESCROW account? You guys SECEDED. This money should be going to your alternative federal government to buy weapons and shit. Holy fuck. Also, given that 90+% of American money is electronic, couldn’t the federal government basically freeze this effort pretty easily? I’m not a banking MFE but I suspect the Sec Bloc would need to start issuing its own currency]. The fourteen Sec Bloc states that seceded – though only 28 percent in number of the states – provided the federal government with nearly 50 percent of its tax revenue [I really ought to check and see if this is even true], and a day after secession the US Treasury was cut off from that portion of its normal cash flow. Moreover, US Treasury borrowing operatiosn were dependent on New York City: Manhattan-based primary dealers bought the bulk of the treasury bonds, notes, and bills at auction; those trades cleared through New York; and New York financial institutions handled custody, payment, and numerous other functions necessary to sustain the deficit funding to which the federal government was addicted [didn’t Palin slash the deficit by basically vetoing all spending? Also, is it that hard to simply MOVE where treasury purchases take place at?]. The entire board and staff of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York ‘defected’ to the Sec Bloc and cooperated with the financial strategy being run out of the governor’s office, effectively disabling the usual operations of the Washington-based Fed.”
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Date: June 29th, 2015 11:17 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location Lol. Fuck this is incredible. This is literally a lib's wet dream. HEROIC GAY FIREMAN GUNNED DOWN BY JACKBOOTED THUGS DURING HIS GAY WEDDING, SURROUNDED BY CHILDREN HE HAD SAVED FROM FIRE. jfc (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28227373) |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 11:51 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse The real question is whether that FIREFIGHTER clogged up the staircase escape routes on 9/11... (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28227656) |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 11:54 PM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie Can't wait for the movie.
Kal Penn as Sanjay
Matt Damon as Greg
Scarlett Johannson as that bitch Emilie
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Date: June 30th, 2015 12:26 AM Author: crystalline lodge Can't believe how the author doesn't see the absolute idiocy of the sec block's strategy. Without context, I'd assume it was satire.
Are libs really this deluded re: the efficacy of economic sanctions/coercion? |
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Date: November 11th, 2019 12:43 AM Author: Narrow-minded vigorous voyeur corner Was already guessing it was a GAY wedding before I got to the next line. But a gay firefighter wedding. Wow. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#39100057) |
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Date: June 30th, 2015 1:42 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 14 PART THREE [CXN-41]
Chapter 14 Part Three
-Greg finally points out what I’ve mentioned before, that the economic strategy is useless when most expenses are simply based on entitlements:
“Although the revenue sources of the government had been decimated, the federal budget was in some sense self-correcting. Forty-three percent of federal expenses were for entitlements, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The administration immediately cut off all payments and transfers to the Sec Bloc states, at once eliminating almost 25 percent of their customary expenses. They suspended servicing of interest owing on treasury securities to persons resident in the United States, but, afraid of the Chinese, they kept paying interest to foreigners. This move cut another 3 percent of expenditures. But this still left a severe gap in funds available to run the federal government and plan a civil war. Federal employees were paid only sporadically, and entitlement payments to citizens left in the Christian Nation Bloc were often late or reduced. The disruption to the nation’s financial, trading, and transportation systems had again thrown the economy back into recession, and as a result the tax revenues of the federal government further eroded over the balance of the year [isn’t Greg a Keynesian? Going to war footing should STIMULATE the economy, no?]
-Rich can’t really fathom actual material deprivation, so the economy just sort of muddles on, thanks mostly to China apparently:
“China continued to fund – at shockingly high rates – both the federal government and American corporations. Although the disruption was as severe as any since the Civil War, businesses on both sides of the Holy War divide showed enormous adaptability the resilience. Somehow goods moved around, energy sources remained reliable, consumers consumed, employment stabilized, and the impact on ordinary families was far less than we had predicted.”
-XO Steve Jordan handles the economic situation masterfully to achieve his political agenda and nuke the federal government:
“The president called a press conference to say that the temporary loss of tax revenue from the Sec Bloc states was part of God’s plan and a great blessing, as it would at long last precipitate a reshaping of the federal government to a sustainable size. He tabled legislation, passed by Congress within a week, that eliminated hundreds of federal departments, agencies, boards, and commissions ranging from enormous organizations, such as the Department of Education [not enormous; only has about 5k employees], Department of Energy, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Environmental Protection Agency, to perennial right-wing targets such as the National endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, National Institutes for Health, and the National Science Foundation. The savings, he announced, would nearly close the federal budget gap, and it would free American business to grow and prosper. The hundreds of thousands of DC-based federal workers thus cut off from their jobs mostly fled north, further taxing the social services in New York and other big cities [LOL’d IRL when I read that part]. In an instant, Jordan had achieved the right-wing dream of disassembling much of the post-New Deal federal governmental apparatus.”
-With the federal bureaucracy smashed, Congress steps up to the plate and basically unleashes a White Terror on the parts of America it controls:
“Having unleashed the spirit of total revolution, the controlling ‘Teavangelical’ bloc in Congress promptly seized the social agenda from the administration and – free of any meaningful parliamentary, judicial, or other restraint – proceeded to pass almost every bill introduced by any individual member, however ill conceived [sic; goddammit, why does Rich hate hyphenated words so much? MS Word is literally flagging that as a misspelling]. These included an anti-blasphemy statue, under which ‘taking the name of the Lord in vain’ became a federal felony. The text was modeled on a United Nations resolution promoted for years by the fundamentalist Muslim countries, but the scope of its protection was limited to ‘the true God and His son Jesus Christ,’ and it provided expressly that no speech about ‘Allah, Mohammed, Buddha, Satan, Hindu deities, yoga, false secular values, or any other purported deity’ would be considered blasphemous. The United States thus joined Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and a few others as countries whose gods were so think skinned [there he goes again] that they demanded retribution for disrespectful speech.”
I think it’s worth pausing here to mention that several European countries more or less ban blasphemy. Also, in the realm of real life, conservatives have been bashing the Obama administration for cooperating with Muslim countries to advance a modified version of that UN blasphemy resolution mentioned above.
Anyway, back to the social revolution:
“Soon thereafter, the statute of limitations for abortion crimes was abolished, and prosecutions began for abortions committed prior to the time that all abortion became illegal, in clear violation of the Constitution’s protection against ex post facto laws. This result was justified based on the long-standing [wait, NOW he hyphenates stuff?] rule that there is not statue of limitations for murder and the argument that abortion always was murder, regardless of the failure of corrupt and satanic federal judges to recognize that fact. Long-retired abortion doctors who had failed to flee to the Sec Bloc were executed in Kansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Texas within two months of President Jordan signing this law [I guess this outs me as totally extreme, but this sounds 180 to me].”
-Another bill, introduced by Senator Inhofe from Oklahoma, abolishes all state and local hate-crime laws, even though those were already banned by The Blessing:
“Tony Perkins’s Family Research Council had been clear for years: Defining hate crimes to include crimes against gays would lead, inexorably, to the criminalization of Christ. On this theory, it was still murder, they conceded, if a lesbian woman was murdered, but if she was murdered because of her sexuality, it was unacceptable for that crime to be treated any differently from any other murder, for to do so could restrict religious speech, like the common slogans at evangelical rallies, ‘Kill the Faggots,’ ‘God Hates Faggots,’ and ‘Gays Must Die’ [I don’t think I really need to add anything here].”
-Another law passed is the Jewish Homeland Act, which gives American Jews five years to either accept Christ as the Messiah or else relocate to Israel. Jordan vetoes a similar bill that calls for a Shia Islamic Caliphate that all American Muslims would have to relocate to. At first I thought this was a subtle jab at conservatives not realizing most Muslims are Sunnis, but I think the actual failure here is on Rich’s part, for a reason that will be clear by the end of the book.
-Last of all is an outright assault on education that is a true joy to read about:
“The Christian far right had for decades studied and admired an Islamic movement in Nigeria called Boko Haram [Admired!]. Literally translated, the phrase meant ‘education is prohibited,’ but the principle as implemented in parts of Nigeria prohibited all but strictly Islamic learning. The evangelical version adopted for American purposes prohibited any curriculum or teaching that could reasonably be expected to ‘undermine respect and reverence for the Bible as the Word of God.’ Its proponents argued that affirmative Christian education was not required but that intolerance for Christian teachings and values was inconsistent with and unacceptable in a Christian Nation.”
-After this, XO Jordan takes care of business by, not flame, taking out the Dartmouth protesters:
“Late in the month, the Congress of the United States passed legislation invalidating the charters of each of the hated Ivy League universities on the purported grounds of sedition, treason, and a long catalog of illegal anti-Christian activities. The statute provided that their property was forfeit to the federal government. Of the eight Ivy League universities, only Dartmouth was located in a state that had failed to secede and was thus then controlled by federal forces. The nation was transfixed when regular army troops secured the campus, arrested senior members of the Dartmouth administration, and installed a new president, who immediately demanded the resignation of every member of the faculty. A committee, he announced, would screen the tendered resignations and accept those from professors whose work was seditious, socialist, blasphemous, or promoted the homosexual lifestyle or other types of sexual deviancy. When students clashed violently with army troops controlling the campus, most parents withdrew their children, and the new administration suspended classes and announced that operations would recommence the following September.”
-Not bad for what’s essentially two weeks of work (XO Jordan started gutting the fed bureaucracy in mid-March, and all of this has happened by the end of the month).
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Date: June 30th, 2015 7:58 PM Author: Odious orange masturbator for some reason, biglaw jargon doesn't like hyphenated adjectives. e.g., you'll see "pull aheads" in auto leases, "slow hand pills" in m&a jargon, etc. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28233093) |
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Date: June 30th, 2015 8:05 PM Author: Odious orange masturbator protesters pictured here: http://i.imgur.com/Cq3xjlz.png (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28233124) |
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Date: June 30th, 2015 8:06 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28233129) |
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Date: June 30th, 2015 8:20 PM Author: drab double fault 190 (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28233222) |
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Date: June 30th, 2015 10:38 PM Author: Swashbuckling Slap-happy Travel Guidebook Trust Fund when you see it... (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28234237) |
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Date: July 1st, 2015 12:16 AM Author: Stirring indian lodge Cr (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28235162) |
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Date: June 30th, 2015 5:40 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 14 PART FOUR [CXN-42]
Chapter 14 Part Four
-Finally, in fucking LATE MARCH, four months after their states seceded, people in the Sec Bloc realize it might just be time to get ready for war. But it’s far too late:
“Even those who didn’t have the vocabulary to describe it now understood that what they faced under the Christian Nation was not simply the loss of religious freedom but a comprehensive authoritarianism that would affect every element of their lives. Ordinary people became angry, scared, and determined to resist. Across the big cities and suburbs of the Sec states, community boards, block associations, condos, schools, non-evangelical churches, unions – almost every element of civil society – started to organize itself for armed resistance. And then, almost immediately, the Holy War began in earnest.”
-On Friday, March 30, XO Steve Jordan unleashes his Joshua Brigades, with their first mission being to secure the federal capital area. They amass overnight outside Dover and Annapolis, and in a single morning seize and seal off the state capitols, executive offices, and all the local newspaper and broadcast media outlets. By noon, the governors, lt. governors, and rebellious legislators of the two states have been captured. The operation is so perfectly planned, and the Sec Bloc so hilarious unprepared, that there is only one casualty, a state trooper who is shot trying to keep the Maryland governor from being dragged out of her home. Tanks roll through the streets of Baltimore and Wilmington, schools are closed, there’s a total media blackout (including a loss of Internet), with the exception of F3 being streamed everywhere.
-Because the operation was so well-planned, XO Jordan gets a propaganda coup, because he can claim he’s not fighting a civil war but simply engaging in a law enforcement operation. Secession is illegal, and the Joshua Brigades simply executed arrest warrants. The attorney general says the 12 remaining states are welcome to come back, and any further bloodshed is on their hands.
-Everybody in Bloomberg’s office is depressed and basically stuck watching events unfold on television because they have no real intelligence network I guess. Bloomberg busts out his favorite Highland whisky and wonders whether Maryland’s governor has already been executed, while Sanjay suggests that California will be attacked next because it’s “someplace that matters,” unlike Maryland or Delaware.
-Finally, the heroic GREG intervenes, and tells them they need to DO SOMETHING. And just what is that something? Well…it’s pretty much Occupy Wall Street:
“’Call the Sec governors tonight, right away. Tell them each to get on all local media tonight, right now, to declare a public holiday tomorrow, and ask every single citizen – every family with their children – to turn out on the street and stay there all day. The whole Sec population should rise up to tell Jordan that they will not allow what happened in Delaware and Maryland to happen in their states. That they will fight. Today Jordan showed the country he would fight. Now, immediately, we must tell him that we’ll fight back. Each governor should explain to their people that no army will come to their aid – that they will need to defend their homes and families and freedom by themselves. Each governor must say that he or she will fight in the streets with the people. Stand in front of their tanks. This is the Churchill moment, Governor… right now.’
-Sanjay comes in and quotes Churchill off his iPad:
“’[I]f the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our island home, to rise out the storm of the war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. This is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government.’
The governor was visibly moved. Our island home was Manhattan. We would fight, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. That would be our resolve.”
-The next day, March 31, 2018, is one of the greatest moments in American history. Well, according to Greg anyway:
“Saturday, March 31, 2018, is one of the great days in American history, yet you will find no mention of it in any text or account of the Holy Wars available in America today. It was a day when no one could have wished for more form the American people. It was a day that finally proved that our national reserves of courage, independence, and common sense were intact. It was the day that Sanjay had been working and waiting for ever since our fateful visit to a mega-church in Pennsylvania thirteen years before. By noon on Saturday, over 100 million Americans in every Sec state left their houses and gravitated to those places that were the traditional hearts of their communities. In New England, it was the town squares. In Boston, millions crowded the Common and Public Garden, packed the entire length of the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, and spilled into the field and bleachers at Fenway. In New York, 1.5 million came into Central Park, with millions more assembled in parks and squares in every borough and neighborhood. In San Francisco. People streamed south across the Golden Gate Bridge on foot, filling the Presidio and all of Golden Gate Park. Chicago’s entire Lake Shore was covered with crowds estimated to grow to 2 million by midday. In the suburbs, people by instinct left their cars at home and walked down highways and gathered in whatever green and open spaces had survived sprawling development [MFH-dweller Greg shows his odd hatred of suburbia again]. Although none of the gatherings turned violent, the tone was one of anger and defiance.
“In the afternoon, something most remarkable happened. The crowds thinned, divided into groups, and went to work. They parked cars and buses to make a defensive cordon around stat elegislatures and other buildings. Contractors moved concrete barriers from highway work sites to block tank access to main streets. Ground-level entrances to local television and radio stations were boarded up. All around the Sec states, people prepared for the coming Joshua Brigade attacks as they would for a hurricane. The spirit of unity and cooperation was unprecedented. Yes, people were shocked at what was happening, and driven by anger, defiance, and patriotism. But there was also an overwhelmingly pragmatic determination not just to express their anger but to DO something. Over and over, when interviewed, ordinary people shrugged off the question of whether their preparations really could be expected to stop or deter the US military. That didn’t matter. Over and over, they simply said they had no choice but to do something, to do their best.
“In that one day, Sec America had been transformed, No one speculated that Jordan would stop with Maryland and Delaware. There was no more talk of ‘phony war.’ People accepted that, one way or another, their lives would be completely changed. And they were prepared to fight Mayors announced that tanks could be met with bulldozers [LOL, a bulldozer would lose to a Humvee, never mind an Abrams]. Weekend pilots promised kamikaze-style raids on local air force bases if the planes there took to the air against the Sec forces or local populations [why haven’t these air bases been seized?]. The National Guards, almost uniformly loyal to the Sec state governors, set up their own tanks and defensive positions around government buildings and media centers. Barriers and checkpoints were built on the main roads into major cities. And weapons stockpiles were widely distributed to prevent capture by invading Holies and to allow a sustained guerilla-style campaign even if the state governments fell. America woke up that day from a decades-long slumber and found to its surprise that it still possessed the courage, can-do pragmatism, inventiveness, idealism, and teamwork that had made the nation the envy of the world.”
-So, in order words, the Sec Bloc finally does the basic, BASIC shit that should have been happened in November even before they officially seceded (for historical reference, the South was actively prepping for civil war as soon as John Brown’s raid happened). So what good does all this do? Absolutely nothing! The following military phase of the Holy War is dealt with by Greg in only two pages as XO Jordan utterly curb-stomps the pathetic Sec Bloc resistance. I’ve quoted huge swaths of this chapter, and I’m not gonna stop now, because this is the best chapter of the book IMO:
“The official history of what else happened during the balance of that summer and autumn, is, unfortunately, mostly true. Sanjay was correct: Jordan tackled one of the big states next. California hosted thirty-seven military bases, and the majority of active-duty personnel on those bases were conservative Christians from the old red states. He calculated that they would follow orders, and he was correct. Although Democrats had a substantial lead over Republicans in voter registration statewide, the inland areas of the north, the Central Valley, and Southern California outside Los Angeles were all heavily conservative and woul d not require a substantial dedication of resources to secure.
“The ‘liberation’ of California, as it is now called, took only a week and signaled a tougher approach by the administration. It started when the state Capitol building and main state office buildings in Sacramento were obliterated in nighttime bombing runs, which not only effectively disabled the opposition administration but terrified the half million people of the city, who largely remained inside as Army units secured the city and captured the governor and nearly all opposition members of the legislature. The large California National Guard was already split, with some units remaining loyal to the governor and others accepting the call to federal service. With the governor and state-level command structure removed, even loyal commanders had difficulty coordinating their actions, and the California Guard failed to mount an effective defense anyplace in the state.
“What followed the next day in San Francisco shocked the nation. Marines landed at San Francisco International Airport and quickly established a perimeter across the peninsula from the airport to Pacifica. The Golden Gate and Bay Bridges were closed. As a result there was no way on or off the peninsula. That night, at 2 a.m., a single air force plane dropped a dozen MK-77 incendiary bombs on the Castro. In the resulting conflagration, the historic neighborhood burned to the ground within an hour [I am not sure that 12 firebombs could do that in only an hour]. Given the time of night, we estimated that about twelve thousand people, mostly gay men, died in their beds. More people were murdered that night in San Francisco than were killed in the attacks of 9/11 and 7/22 combined.”
-This attack is praised by F3 and evangelical leaders, “freed from even the minimum degree of restraint that had previously governed their remarks about homosexuals,” as “divine justice,” “cleansing fire,” and “sanitation.” A bunch of foreign countries recall their ambassadors, and a select host of lib countries Rich likes (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark) offer refugee status to any gay or transgender Americans who move there. As one of TW’s last acts, Sanjay estimates that about 4 percent of the U.S. population flees the country via Canada before XO Jordan successfully closes off the border.
-After California, the ass-whupping continues. Hawaii, Minnesota, and Illinois fall next, followed by a hiatus as the government digests its conquests before taking on the Northeast. Federal air power proves decisive, repeatedly obliterating thousands of Sec militiamen (and militiawomen, in contrast to the all-male Joshuas) who try to take on tanks and APC’s with bulldozers, trucks, and buses. In California, as much as 40 percent of the population in San Fran and LA take part in guerilla attacks, and sympathetic countries pledge them weapons, but the power of the U.S. Navy is such that almost no weapons actually reach these insurgents. Tens of thousands are killed, and within a few months attacks die off as ammunition runs out.
-In mid-autumn, the assault on the Northeast begins with a federal landing in Massachusetts, which proceeds to secure Vermont and Maine before turning south to take Connecticut and Rhode Island. Then, a land force slams up through Philadelphia up to the Raritan River.
“Most people thought the Holy War was nearly over.” But no, we have another chapter to go.
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Date: June 30th, 2015 5:45 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28232446) |
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Date: June 30th, 2015 11:58 PM Author: Buck-toothed Newt Immigrant !!!!! (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28234988) |
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Date: July 1st, 2015 12:36 AM Author: Stirring indian lodge Love the shitlib destruction (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28235339) |
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Date: July 1st, 2015 12:52 AM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse Just when you thought the Castro couldn't be more flaming... (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28235505) |
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Date: November 11th, 2019 12:41 AM Author: Narrow-minded vigorous voyeur corner Great how the author views Bloomberg / the Bloomberg Foundation as a totally legitimate governmental force. You would think a lib would express SOME unease about literal SECESSION and armed rebellion under the direction of a real-life GC billionaire and his non-state legal entity. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#39100054) |
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Date: June 30th, 2015 10:13 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 15: Siege [CXN-43]
Chapter 15: Siege
-It’s time for the final battle (though not the end; there are actually 7 chapters of fun left). Our quote is suitably Biblical:
“When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it. And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee. And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it.” –Deuteronomy 20
-Greg says they knew from the beginning the final battle would be on MFH, but he was still surprised 18 months before when Bloomberg yanked him aside with a strange question:
“Greg, you studied history. What do you know about the Siege of Leningrad during World War II?”
-Despite being arrogant through this whole book about his knowledge, Greg actually doesn’t know a lot, besides that there was terrible suffering, but also great heroism. He mentions the story of the Pavlovsk Experimental Station, a seed vault that was protected by 12 scientists who starved to death while protecting its edible seeds. Sieges, he says, are all about food.
-So, in addition to all his other work, Greg also conducts a bunch of research on the history and conduct of sieges, because I guess Bloomberg doesn’t have anybody else who can do that despite leading a national resistance movement.
I should note that Leningrad is not really comparable to a siege of Manhattan. Aside from a short few months, Leningrad was never actually cut off from the rest of the Soviet Union. It was dangerous work bringing in supplies but it absolutely could be done. The resistance was also a military affair; the vast majority of surviving civilians were evacuated by the end of the first brutal winter.
-Greg starts with the Bible and sees that sieges are a very biblical thing the Holies will likely be unable to resist.
-He also says an assault on Manhattan would be particularly difficult:
“The high-rise nature of the island and the extraordinary density of building would make conventional attack strategies difficult [only if they have effective defenses, which they don’t]. And then there was the symbolic and political aspect. Would even the most ardent fundamentalist believe that the American people would tolerate the US government ITSELF reducing the new World Trade Center building or other New York landmarks to rubble? [Um…yes? Is that way worse than the other shit they’ve done?] We also hoped that the feds would realize that the United States was simply too dependent on New York – financially, economically, and culturally – to destroy it [the Big Applesauce of this is incredibly delusional]. And so, even without the biblical mandate, a siege seemed to use to be the preferred military strategy: surround Manhattan, blockade all goods and travel on and off the island, and wait. Starve the decadent city folks into submission. And if submission never comes, then a conventional amphibious assault, to subdue the city without destroying it, would be far easier against a weakened population. The Bible, in this case, really did have all the answers.”
-Throughout the Holy War, Bloomberg sells out the rest of the country by prepping for a final stand on MFH. They decide the other four boroughs will be abandoned, and stockpile food and medicine within the city.
-So, you think, won’t MFH be incredibly unsustainable without outside support? Lucky for you, that’s apparently not the case: Water supply is guaranteed by three massive tunnels which can’t be detonated without “rendering New York uninhabitable for decades,” and apparently the electric grid is SO COMPLEX that only five engineers know how to shut down the MFH grid without depowering the entire greater NYC area in the process (why XO Jordan wouldn’t simply do that is unclear). All five of these engineers are brought to MFH with their families and all the files mapping out the grid and how to run it are deleted.
-In a top-secret operation, the Bloomberg Foundation in just five months successfully lays three super-conducting cables in unused conduits below the Hudson and East Rivers. These cables will automatically route power to the city even if other feeder cables are disconnected. Somehow these can be totally hidden. So don’t worry, guys, besieged MFH will still have water and electricity!
-Not only that, but it’s going to have FOOD:
“Ina biblical siege, if the wells could not be poisoned or fouled, the principal purpose of troops surrounding the besieged city was to deny its supplies of food, and starve the citizens into submission… At my recommendation, the governor hired the charismatic doyenne of urban agriculture, Annie Novak, who ten years before had pioneered large-scale, for-profit vegetable farming for the rooftops of Brooklyn. Her job was to develop plans to quickly convert every available patch of land in Manhattan – and every rooftop that could take the weight – to the production of vegetables and other food should a siege be commenced. Under her guidance, hundreds of thousands of yards of green-roof soil began to be stockpiled at every sanitation garage in Manhattan… Annie also established extensive collections of vegetable seeds and seedlings at every public library branch in Manhattan and organized a small army of community organizers and urban farmers who would be ready – at the governor’s signal – to fan out across the island and teach the population of the world’s most densely populated place to become self-sufficient in food. As far as we could tell, the federal authorities never learned of these efforts.”
Let’s run the numbers here: The most densely-populated large country on Earth, Bangladesh, is barely self-sufficient in food despite lying on the Ganges delta, the most productive farmland on Earth. It has a population density of 2,600 per square mile. Manhattan’s population density is over 71,000 per square mile, over 25 times as much (and, despite Novak’s efforts, the land is mostly paved over). The idea of it being self-sufficient in food is totally fucking ludicrous.
-Besides food, Manhattan also needs other essentials. Medicine is needed too:
“Close observers at the time noted that the governor’s jet logged multiple trips to London, Stockholm, Oslo, and Helsinki [why doesn’t the Air Force intercept this easily-detected jet?]. The goodwill of northern Europe, and the governor’s money, resulted in substantial commitments from foreign governments and companies to step up and provide New York, if necessary, with the essential goods that it normally procured domestically. But how to bring supplies into a blockaded Manhattan remained a vexing question, right up to that week in November 2018 when we watched with alarm the advance of the federal forces, represented by F3 by little lines of gold crusader crosses marching across the electronic map [I love that touch].”
-Finally, with the enemy at the gates, normal life in NYC breaks down. The tourists and business travelers “left town,” commuters go home, trains and airlines suspend service [Yeah, now. Not at the start of the war]. Those who stay in NYC are there for the duration. The outer boroughs are helpless, as only MFH has the defenses needed to fight back.
-Just before Thanksgiving, the feds conquer New Jersey and read the Hudson. They capture Liberty Island and drape it in the “Christian flag” [did he ever say what that was? I don’t recall]. There’s a brave fight by three obsolete tanks at Kennedy Airport, but other than that Long Island falls easily as well. All forces are pulled onto MFH, though for now the bridges aren’t blown, because they’re “easy to defend.”
-Early the next morning, an Air Force bomber bombs the Greenpoint neighborhood in Brooklyn to take out guerillas. This single plane somehow obliterates thirty square blocks with not a single building remaining intact:
“For the sixteen thousand households living in the neighborhood of old brick and wooden structures, there was no escape. No one knows how many died that night, but it cannot have been less than half of the neighborhood’s population of about forty thousand Poles, South Asians, North Africans, artists, rooftop farmers, foodies, and other young people who had been attracted in the years before to one of New York’s most affordable and dynamic communities.”
I really wonder if Rich used to live in Greenpoint.
-Bloomberg has a nervous breakdown over the death and destruction:
“Not in New York. I really didn’t think they would do it. Not here. It’s my fault. We should not have let the people think they could fight and win this battle…That’s it. No more. We’re going to surrender. I’m going to call Jordan.”
-But who should save the day other than…Greg!
“Please, sir. They will not come after Manhattan tomorrow. I’m sure of it. It will be a siege. Go ahead and make a statement for the outer boroughs. If you want, tell the militias there to give up. Tell them the price is too high, that they cannot win. Tell them the price for continuing the fight is their neighbors dying in their sleep as they did in Greenpoint. But not Manhattan. We must try to hold Manhattan.”
-Then, Greg plays his trump card: THINK OF THE GAYS.
“’Mike’ – I almost never called the governor by his first name – ‘think of the gays. To give up now is a death sentence for them. And we have to think of the millions in the rest of the country who don’t go along with this madness. As long as secular rule continues somewhere in the country, even if it’s just Manhattan Island, they all will have at least some hope. They need us to hang on, sir. If we lose, all those people out there will give up. The siege will give us time Anything can happen. The world may come to our rescue. Jordan could die or lose the next election.’”
-Bloomberg accepts Greg’s sage wisdom and orders the other boroughs to stand down. He then delivers this “epic” address:
“Mr. Jordan – for I am too much of a patriot to call you president – Mr. Jordan, hear this clearly. We draw the line at Manhattan [you really should have drawn it earlier, bro]. Yes, you have the power to destroy us. But think a moment. This island is the capital of the world and a microcosm of the whole world. Our people are the best and brightest who have come from all corners of the earth drawn by the promise of America. Our diversity, and the energy and creativity it drives, are a model for what the world can be. Our dozens of great museums and private collections hold the most important art, sculpture, and artifacts of all human civilization. Here on this island live some of the world’s most accomplished musicians, dancers, actors, and artists. Here are the headquarters of dozens of the world’s largest private enterprises, providing jobs for tens of millions of Americans and people around the world. Here lies the heart of the world’s financial system. You cannot take Manhattan without destroying all these things. If you do, your name will be recorded by history alongside the likes of Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and Adolf Hitler – you will be regarded by history as a genocidal maniac and vandal of civilization. So I tell you this. Not one federal soldier will set foot on this island. The 1.7 million New Yorkers who live here will fight you in every neighborhood, every street, every building, every alley [why the FUCK didn’t you guys do this a year ago before the whole country was overrun?]. This is a promise and a fact. What do we have to lose? We who have come from all over the world for the promise of American freedom and the American dream – we have nothing to lose, because losing that dream is to us like death. Our brothers and sisters whom you want to slaughter for their God-given sexuality [there with the gays again] – they have nothing to lose because they fight for their lives. So think well, Mr. Jordan, what you do next. And I ask the governments of the world to do everything they can to help us, and I ask the people of the world for their prayers."
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Date: June 30th, 2015 10:32 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location "We also hoped that the feds would realize that the United States was simply too dependent on New York – financially, economically, and culturally – to destroy it"
OH THE CULTURE! |
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Date: June 30th, 2015 10:36 PM Author: Unholy dingle berry location oh my god this makes me want to fucking nuke that shithole nyc and every sorry delusional retard who lives there jfc (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28234224) |
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Date: June 30th, 2015 10:56 PM Author: Swashbuckling Slap-happy Travel Guidebook Trust Fund (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28234376) |
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Date: July 1st, 2015 2:55 AM Author: crystalline lodge (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28236246) |
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Date: July 1st, 2015 12:39 AM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse THINK OF THE GAYS (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28235373) |
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Date: July 1st, 2015 12:40 AM Author: Swashbuckling Slap-happy Travel Guidebook Trust Fund lol, he actually went with the "urban agriculture" line of thought.
holy shit, this guy made millions publishing this drivel and the last time i received payment for anything i wrote was from a fratbro. |
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Date: July 1st, 2015 12:43 AM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse At some point I think he realized he was writing lib porn and just decided to force in as much as he could. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28235425) |
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Date: July 1st, 2015 12:45 AM Author: Aggressive marvelous death wish range lol at self-sufficient MFH.
jfc |
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Date: July 1st, 2015 2:55 AM Author: crystalline lodge That last speech is just too absurd. The author has to know he's writing total shit. I can't believe some superduper biglaw partner can be this stupid. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28236243) |
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Date: July 1st, 2015 12:46 AM Author: Stirring indian lodge XO Jordan's first move is to bomb all brunch spots to break the will of the shrews. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28235455) |
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Date: July 1st, 2015 11:28 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 15 PART TWO [CXN-44]
Chapter 15 Part Two
-Following Bloomberg’s speech, XO Jordan hits back with a way better one on Thanksgiving:
“My fellow Americans. Almost one year ago I promised you that by Christmas this year our nation would again be whole and free. It is thus appropriate that on this Thanksgiving Day, the day when the whole nation thanks God, its patron and protector, for all His many Blessings, I can ask you to join me in thanking the Lord and His son Jesus Christ, who have once again shown their divine favor by granting us victory in the Holy War we waged in their name. All fifty states are once again together in this sacred Union. All the state capitals are free. Senators and representatives from all the states once again work together in Congress for the people. By any measure, the battle should not have been so easy [no kidding]. With God’s grace and favor, with his miraculous intervention on more than one occasion, our brave Joshua Brigades – consisting of our finest federal men and women in uniform – retook the rebellious states with a minimum of bloodshed. We thank each of those men and women for their service. And even today, in their finest hour, our troops proceeded to the very shore of Manhattan Island, awaiting only my order to take the last bit of American soil under the control of the rebels.
“My fellow Americans, like you, when I face a tough decision, I turn to the only advisor a man needs, to our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the good book he gave us. And lo and behold, my Bible opened right to Deuteronomy 20, and this is what I read: [he reads the same quote the chapter opens with]
“My fellow Americans, I am no longer surprised, but always grateful, when the Bible has a direct answer for every question. And so tonight, on this day of Thanksgiving to the Lord, I do what I have done my entire life and career, and seek humbly to follow the will of God. Fro the last year, I have said over and over to Governor Bloomberg and each resident of Manhattan, peace be unto you. I have come at the behest of the Lord to fight you, but I have offered you peace as the Lord instructed. If you had responded in peace, and offered us peace, then you would have been returned to the bosom of your country in the peace of the Lord. It’s not too late. But you have not made peace with us. You have made war. So the Bible is clear. We shall besiege your island. Effective immediately, I announced to the people of America and the nations of the world that the island of Manhattan is quarantined. Its waters have been blockaded by our navy. Every connection between the island and the outside world is under the control of US forces. No one may enter and no one may leave. No food or other goods shall be allowed in or out. Manhattan is surrounded, just like Jericho was when under siege by Joshua and the armies of God. The prophets, thanks be to God, were right, and it all ends now with a siege against the godless and disobedient. I don’t know whether it will take seven days, like Jericho, or seven months, but I tell you this. Just as the indestructible walls of Jericho tumbled to the ground, everything yields eventually to the power of God’s intervention and God’s favor. Good night, and my God bless America.”
Fuck yeah.
-Bloomberg gives a slightly better speech the next day, noting that “New Yorkers are the toughest people in the world” and reading the next verses of Deuteronomy, where the Lord decrees that after a successful siege the men are to be smitten by the edge of the sword while women and children are taken captive. Manhattan must fight to the bitter end, he says.
-For now, Manhattan has only two missions: Survive, and prepare for the inevitable attack. Greg talks about his research, which focuses on 20th century urban combat:
“Most intriguing to me was the Battle of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War because of its many parallels to our situation [I can think of a big one: The Spanish Republicans were super-incompetent]. The Spanish Republicans entrenched in Madrid saw it as a battle for civilization [it was; Franco saved the country from Stalinism] and promised that Madrid would be the ‘graveyard of fascism.’ On the other side, Franco’s troops were heavily supplemented with criminals and thugs from all corners of the continent [that’s…uh, one way of describing them]. With rich irony, the key battles played out around the faculty buildings at Madrid’s University City. The improbable battle cry of the fascists: ‘Down with Intelligence’ [I looked this up, and as I expected, the battle cry was ‘Down with the Intelligentsia,’ which means something very different]. This wasn’t the Christian Nation slogan, but it might have been had they been more honest. After his victory, Franco controlled Spain for nearly the next forty years. Franco called himself Caudillo de Espana, por la gracia de Dios, claiming the mantle of divine authority ot justify over a hundred thousand summary executions of intelligentsia, atheists, and republicans, by the grace of God [XO Franco]. This is what we could be facing, and the end result could very well be the same.”
-The urban agriculture campaign begins with great fervor once the siege begins, as the lawn of every park is plowed up and covered with hoop houses to shelter winter vegetables. Tens of thousands of people are trained for the campaign. The city’s food stockpiles are enough to last through the winter, after which winter vegetables like radishes and cabbage are apparently able to take over. Chickens are also raised in large numbers.
“When late March arrived, every inch of ground – the median of Park Avenue, the bases of street trees, the edges of every playground and dog run – all were topped with supplemental soil and densely planted by brigades of local farmers. Each community board was responsible for coordinating the planting and harvesting in its area, and these famously fractious civic institutions became models of cooperation in allocating public land, assigning farmers, and ensuring an equitable distribution of the resulting produce.”
Reminder: This is all completely fucking absurd. They’re trying to feed about 70,000 people per square mile. That’s less than 400 square feet per person, without accounting for the huge swaths of land that are paved over and unfarmable. This is IMPOSSIBLE.
-But Greg is all impressed and says as much to Sanjay while they are, uh, on a walk down Broadway toward Bowling Green. Sanjay spews some faux-philosophical gobblygook:
“’Yes,’ said Sanjay, ‘and of course there is a certain temporal echo, or historical symmetry, that is pleasing.’ Sanjay had learned to speak plainly and simply when addressing the public and the media in his role as spokesman for TW. But with me, he reverted to the more complex locutions that were natural to him. ‘New Amsterdam was a fort, walled off to the north against the sometimes hostile native peoples. Is it not ironic that this part of the city was originally designed for siege? For self-sufficiency? I cannot remember exactly, but I think that long before it was a place of recreation, Bowling Green was the site of the public well and a food market. And now, after three hundred years, it again serves the same purpose. You know, G, anything that suggests that time is not completely linear has a lot of deep resonance with us Indians.”
“’San, are you saying you believe in reincarnation?’
“Sanjay smiled, ‘I am glad you are not a reporter.’
“’Well?’
“’No is the simple answer. But there is a great deal of wisdom in the idea. You know how physicists now think that space consists of ten or eleven tightly rolled up spatial dimensions? It would not surprise me to find that time is also not completely linear. I’ve always thought of time as a bit loopy, in the sense of patterns repeating themselves, the future influencing the past, and other connections between events that defy linear time.’
“’So when we are dead we are dead?’ I asked.
“’Are you not content with the wonderful gift of a single life? Yes, our bodies and our minds are dead, but our actions and words bounce around time for eternity. That is something. That is enough for me.’
-They walk onto Wall Street and see some young women sowing seeds by hand, which seems really wasteful an inefficient given the circumstances. Sanjay gives some more history:
“’All citizens of New Amsterdam grew food. Although it is true that the rise of cities required advances in agriculture and transportation, the idea of city as consumer and countryside as producer was a false dichotomy [Uh, bro, in New Amsterdam everybody grew food because it was a VILLAGE, not a real city. Once a city gets big you ain’t growing anything beyond a small vegetable garden]. I wonder whether what we have accomplished here will be noticed and studied. Whether it will change the way other cities feed their people. I wonder, G, if that will be part of our legacy.”
-Greg flashes back to earlier, in December, when he and Bloomberg are introduced by Sanjay toa fellow named Steve Duncan. Dr. Duncan, who is described as a “rather disheveled unshaven man with long blond hair and wearing high-top sneakers, dirty cargo pants, and a black T-shirt,” is a professor of urban history at Columbia. What’s his role in the plot? Ohhhhhhhhh man:
“’Sir, we have a problem. Yes. Yes. I suppose you know that. I mean not just the siege, but the problem of how to smuggle things into Manhattan. I assume there are people who would send us medicines, parts, food, other things, if they could.’
“’Absolutely.’
“’Yes, well, I know a great deal that the Holies do not. This is a city of tunnels, Governor. We’ve been digging them, using them, abandoning them, losing them, and forgetting about them for a few hundred years. But I’ve been poking around in them – sometimes illegally, I have to say – for all my life. It’s not just urban legend. We live on top of a maze. Beautiful double-barreled brick sewer tunnels; abandoned subway lines; pedestrian tunnels between buildings...and off to the side of many of them, forgotten access and service tunnels. But you know who didn’t forget about these? The Underground Railroad before the Civil War. Confederate sympathizers during the Civil War. Bootleggers during Prohibition. Smugglers and drug runners. And the mole people. Yes, sir, they’re real. Not an urban legend. And I’m the only one they trust.”
Yep, that’s right, Rich has brought the MOLE PEOPLE into the story to help save New York. I should note that there is hardly a shred of real evidence to support the notion that there is a large, orderly society of mole people in NYC’s tunnels as opposed to some transient homeless. But here they’re like the fucking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or something:
“They not only know underground New York better than anyone else, they’re pros at evasion. The police have been after them for years. From spending most of their time underground, they’ve developed a sixth sense. They can tell when someone else enters a tunnel blocks away…I know dozens of them. They’ve been my guides and mentors in my work on underground New York. And they’re on board for this project.”
-What’s the project? Using the handful of tunnels the feds know nothing about, Bloomberg can send couriers off Manhattan to pick up shipments of medicine and spare parts. This plan somehow totally works:
“Steve Duncan turned out to be a brilliant organizer and natural guerilla. The mole people were fearless and effective. Together, they quickly grew a dusk-to-dawn operation, creating a continuous flow of products and materials onto the blockaded island. We established in City Hall an office code-named Amazon, which prioritized orders from Manhattan hospitals and public services, routed those orders to active Sec supporters on the outside, and through Steve Duncan, coordinated our clandestine system for delivery into Manhattan. A few couriers were shot for breaking curfew, but others promptly took their places.”
-Without this network of magical mole people, Greg says, Manhattan would not have survived the winter. But alas, Duncan’s heroic efforts have been ERASED FROM HISTORY:
“I checked once at the archives to see if there was any record of Steve Duncan on the Purity Web. It was a foolish thing to do, as each search is recorded, analyzed, and added to my profile. Duncan had, as I suspected, been removed from history. There was no record of his birth, his dissertation, his tenure at Columbia, his books, or his role during the siege. I don’t know whether he is alive or dead. I realize now that once those of us who were there during the siege are dead, no future historian will know he existed or what he did for New York. Steve Duncan was one of the great heroes of the siege of New York, and I hope some copy of this memoir survives, if for no other reason than to carry that message to a future historian.”
-Come springtime, Manhattan is not just surviving but thriving. They can FEAST upon sweet greens and spinach, hospitals are running, kids go to school, and even the subways are apparently operational. There’s even a “dramatic increase in leisure time,” so libraries, museums, and gyms are full all the time. Crime is almost nonexistent. But this glorious period will not last.
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Date: July 1st, 2015 11:41 PM Author: Stirring indian lodge *feeds entire 6 floor building for a year with 3 tomatoes planted out front (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28242461) |
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Date: July 2nd, 2015 12:19 AM Author: Buck-toothed Newt Immigrant ENTIRELY off the rails. MOLE PEOPLE to the rescue, with the help of the only topsider they trust, a tenured ivy league professor. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28242716) |
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Date: July 2nd, 2015 10:49 AM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse literally one of the best twists of the book (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28244617) |
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Date: July 2nd, 2015 12:20 AM Author: Buck-toothed Newt Immigrant Moar! (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28242718) |
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Date: July 2nd, 2015 12:27 AM Author: drab double fault I am typing up the BATTLE OF MANHATTAN at this very moment. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28242752) |
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Date: July 2nd, 2015 12:35 AM Author: Buck-toothed Newt Immigrant You, sir, are a mensch. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28242797) |
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Date: July 2nd, 2015 12:29 AM Author: Swashbuckling Slap-happy Travel Guidebook Trust Fund no fucking way.
do the Holies break up this logistical network by enlisting the CHUDs, promising them a future in God's Kingdom?
do the SecBloc fighters get their protein from sewer alligators? |
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Date: July 2nd, 2015 1:10 AM Author: drab double fault Subject: THE BATTLE OF MANHATTAN [CXN-45]
Chapter 15 Part Three: The Battle of Manhattan
-At long last, it's time for the Battle of Manhattan. Greg says that June arrives with a sense of foreboding. They know the Holies have a love of Biblical symbolism, and the seventh month of the siege corresponds well with the seven days of Jericho.
-At this point, Greg has spent over a year strategizing over how to defend Manhattan against an amphibious attack, because I guess Bloomberg has ZERO current or former military experts who could consider that question. Nope, I guess his ex-biglaw adviser who is also busy as a legal strategist and speechwriter is the best choice:
"The strategy I proposed was counterintuitive. Battery Park, with its long gently curving low seawall, the expansive waters of the harbor beyond, ad the open lawns of the park on the land side, was by far the best spot for an amphibious assault. It thus might have been logical to erect all the physical barriers we could to block a landing at that spot. But in my view, what we needed was a virtual guarantee that the Battery would be irresistible as the place of attack for the simple reason that our shortage of trained troops and very limited supply of weapons made it impossible to defend all the potential landing spots along the thirty-two mile perimeter of Manhattan Island. If we were not confident of where the attack would come, we could not mount a resistance even remotely likely to repulse it. When I convinced the governor of my logic in early December, we decided to use the last of our precious fuel stores to position all city buses, trucks, and private vehicles then in Manhattan to create physical barriers to landing at all the potential landing spots around the island OTHER THAN Battery Park. We posted highly visible gun and Guard units at a number of these other places so it was not totally obvious that we were indifferent to their defense. And we added all remaining stores of razor wire to the edge of the Battery so it did not appear too obviously inviting.
-As June arrives, all forces go on high alert. Their strength? Not very imposing:
"Our Sec fighting force comprised roughly twenty thousand men and women of all ages [that's a pretty shitty muster for an island of 1.7 million, barely 1% of the population], most of whom entirely lacked military experience. They were led by officers consisting of the few National Guard commanders left in the city when the siege commenced, about a hundred veterans, and a handful of senior brass from the NYPD. The squads were assembled in a totally ad hoc way. One, for example, consisted exclusively of sanitation workers led by a union officer who had been a master sergeant in Vietnam. Another squad was staffed primarily with Chinese American male nurses from New York Downtown Hospital [Um, yeah]. The lack of weaponry was our major problem. During our siege preparations - and frankly in the smuggling operations over the winter - we had concentrated on food, medicines, and other essentials, affording low priority to weapons and ammunition [well THAT was retarded]. This was a choice we regretted when faced with the prospect of trying to repulse an actual military invasion."
-To Greg's surprise, no attack comes in June, or even July. The city's morale starts to fray a bit, as the joy of surviving winter gives way to anxiety as people increasingly realize they could be butchered once the siege ends. Troops remain mobilized, but their training is increasingly desultory. God-DAMN these people suck. You can't even die enthusiastically like a proper lost cause?
-Finally, in August, the attack comes:
"My patrol partner on the night of Tuesday, August 19 [Aug. 19, 2019 is a Monday], was Matthew McManus, a happily married thirty-something [this guy is SCREWED] who before the siege had been a personal trainer ministering to a diverse roster of private clients who had in common only stress, money, and Matthew. Matthew relieved the tedium of many a night standing watch in the Battery with entertaining accounts of confidences shared by his clients, such as the Citigroup mergers banker and mother of two [lean in!] who revealed that she moonlighted as a dominatrix specializing in latex, which she assured Matthew was the fetish of the moment among thirty-somethings working in private equity."
That...was an oddly-detailed anecdote. Also, I guess Greg now ALSO works shifts as a regular infantry grunt? I get that everybody is contributing here and all, but isn't pretty silly when he also has an important job as Bloomberg's top adviser? Hell, he apparently came up with their military strategy! Shouldn't he be helping coordinate overall defense, not sitting in a foxhole?
-Anyway, the battle comes. For your edification, it is here in full:
"'Greg, wake up,' Matthew said at about four in the morning.
"'What?'
"'It's starting,' he said. 'Fuck.'
"Our company was arrayed in forward positions behind the twenty-foot-high concrete and marble slabs of the Battery Park East Coast World War II memorial, two rows of four each, lined up like gigantic dominos and engraved with the names of the dead. Our mission was to cover the central part of the Battery seawall with thick fire and grenades to prevent the first wave of commandoes [he spells it that way] from blasting down the railing, cutting through the razor wire, and opening the way for amphibious landing craft. Our positions were well shielded from forward fire and located only yards from the water's edge.
"There was no hint of dawn over Brooklyn, but we could just make out a smudge of dark gray arcing across the water. Through the night-vision binoculars, the smudge was revealed to consist of scores of landing craft, side by side, each with their ramp bows aimed at the seawall. At least six identical rows of the small ships appeared behind the vanguard and wrapped ominously around the west side of Governors Island.
"Moments later, through the channel between Governors Island and Brooklyn, where for years I had watched with fascination the Queen Mary 2 turn and dock, two navy destroyers emerged at high speed, their big guns ominously lowered for the close-range target. An almost grotesquely fat robin, doubtless having feasted on the unusual abundance of worms aerating our urban food gardens, landed heavily on the oakleaf hydrangea bush just a few feet to my right and set about greeting the dawn. The next moment the big guns opened fire and four shells exploded on the lawn behind us. We heard screams. Moments later, two helicopters swept in from the west and attempted to take the air just in front of the tall buildings along Battery Place, and from that position to strafe our defensive positions from the rear. The antiaircraft batteries arrayed along the tops of those buildings opened fire, and one helicopter plunged dramatically to the street, careening off the reflective glass facade of an office building.
"The cacophony and chaos were almost instantaneous. In one moment, the robin's song occupied the deep silence of early morning. In the next, I was surrounded by percussive violence so extreme that I lost my balance and bearings. The combination of the destroyer fire, antiaircraft guns, crashing helicopter, and strafing from the remaining helicopter was overwhelming. We had not trained with live fire.
"One of the Guard officers in charge of our position ran up the center of the memorial shouting 'Twelve o'clock. Twelve o'clock. Give 'em all you've got.'
"Straight ahead, on axis with the center of the memorial and the Statue of Liberty in the distance, two almost comically small boats - they might even have been Zodiacs - pulled next to the seawall. With astonishing courage and calmness, a group of commandoes, with only the cover provided by machine guns mounted on the bow of the small craft, placed explosive charges at the bases of about ten posts supporting the railing atop the seawall. Then they retreated only a few yards, blew the charges, and returned to cut the top rail with a saw and pull a large section of rail into the harbor. A second team of commandoes emerged with long-handled wire cutters and started to cut through the tangle of razor wire along the water's edge. Finally one of our forward teams threw two grenades, and one of the boats and her crew were obliterated [quite the grenades!]. A moment later I saw a disembodied hand, still gripping wire cutters, floating on a fragment of wood. I felt the bile rise in my throat and swallowed hard. The second crew was momentarily disoriented, and our machine gunners peeked around the corner of the massive walls and killed the second crew. At the same time, the Sec antiaircraft team on the top of One Battery Place scored a direct hit on the second helicopter, which had been only moments away from being in position to strafe us from the rear [shouldn't it have been REALLY easy to just bomb these guns beforehand?]. There was only a brief pause in the action when the navy ships against started their barrage of the park from the water.
"Two new Zodiacs took up the position, and a second wave of commandoes attacked the razor wire with urgency. Their gunners, having observed the fate of the first screws from only yards behind them, pinned our forward gunners behind the memorial pylons with unrelenting fire. I was close enough to see the arm patch that identified the Joshua Brigades, the stylized city wall and battlement image now of course well known to all and a favorite motif for teenagers to wear on the back pocket of their jeans. Within less than a couple of minutes - which seemed to me, and must have seemed to them, an eternity - the second team of commandoes had opened a hole in the razor wire that was at least forty feet wide. Two of the amphibious ships, with their broad ramps up and presenting a formidable shield, advanced on the opening. When they were only sixty yards offshore, the Sec fighters nearer the water again managed to take out the two Zodiac machine gunners with grenades. For the moment, we were free to blanket the opening with fire, which we did the moment the first boat lowered its ramp. It struck me as completely suicidal for the marines in these ships to attempt to come ashore.
"But come ashore they did. Low and weaving, maintaining the shelter of the partially raised ramp for as long as possible, the first wave of marines leapt onto the lower promenade of the park with a blaze of offensive fire. At least half of them were hit by our fire and dropped to the ground. But more marines kept coming. There was no hesitation. I admired the bravery of these men, but I needed to remind myself that they were the enemy, here to kill me if I did not kill them first. In the next wave, one marine who moved laterally to the west and was not hit swung around our right flank. Matthew, who was standing on the outside shooting around the west edge of our slab, took the first bullet. Matthew dropped to his knees and turned to face me. The top right side of his head was gone, as was his right eye and his face down to his mid-cheek. His left eye was active and very much alive. He stared at me hard, eye to eyes, in a look of confusion that hardened almost instantly to desperate imploring. I remember speaking the words, 'What, Matt, what do you want?' Before my question was complete, the light in the remaining eye faded and he fell facedown. I looked beyond him to the west and saw a young man, red hair visible below his helmet. He had thick freckles on a pale face, which twisted with anger and hate. He charged in from the right, firing, but at an angle from which I was protected by the wall. He was screaming. I heard 'Die faggot.' I realized that even before Matthew had hit the ground, I had taken a grenade from my belt and pulled the pin. I had no idea how long before. I swung my arm in a lazy underhanded loop, and the grenade landed right at his feet. He paused, and then disappeared in a fine red mist.
"I turned to my left and peeked around the east side of the wall. A unit of marines leapt over the end of the ramp, landed on the inside of the Battery seawall, and charged up the center of the memorial plaza. Without thought, I stepped to the outside of the wall, knelt, and fired into the group of running soldiers. I remember counting out loud the ones who dropped. The last thing I remember was softly saying to myself the word 'three.' |
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Date: July 2nd, 2015 10:16 AM Author: drab double fault (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28244439) |
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Date: July 2nd, 2015 11:17 AM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse Honestly I'm more surprised by the incompetence of the marines and Joshua Brigade troops than the Sec fighters. Any halfway competent commander could have completely taken out any resistance at the landing spot before sending in troops. Didn't all of the best generals side with XO Jordan? I get that Rich's understanding of military strategy is comically limited and his inspiration for that scene was probably Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, but why the hell wasn't Battery Park shelled to pieces for hours before the landing troops came in? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28244755) |
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Date: July 2nd, 2015 1:15 PM Author: Odious orange masturbator two possibilities:
1) XO steve jordan cynically decided that this was a guaranteed win and a sanguinary battle would be a better element in the republic of gilead's founding myth than a complete curbstomping. basically he sacrificed a bunch of 19-yo flyover mooks for long-term asabiyyah
2) rich doesn't know which end of a gun the bullets come out of |
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Date: July 2nd, 2015 1:45 PM Author: crystalline lodge That would damage the city's cultural monuments. Even when you're a genocidal dictator, you just don't do that. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28245797) |
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Date: July 2nd, 2015 4:11 PM Author: Aggressive marvelous death wish range "I admired the bravery of these men, but I needed to remind myself that they were the enemy, here to kill me if I did not kill them first."
clearly a man who has been in combat. one has to "remind" himself that the enemy shooting at him is trying to kill him. takes a lot of intellectual discipline to stop yourself from merely mirin their courage.
and once again lol at grenades making men "disappear" into a fine mist. |
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Date: July 3rd, 2015 12:25 AM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie GREG KILLED DOOBS (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28249372) |
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Date: July 2nd, 2015 10:28 AM Author: canary cocky base This has been my nightly read lately. TY. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28244492) |
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Date: July 2nd, 2015 3:27 PM Author: Lime tanning salon background story (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28246469) |
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Date: July 2nd, 2015 11:59 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: HOLY WAR WRAP-UP [CXN-46]
Holy War Wrap-up
-I want to take a moment here to critique the disastrous effort by libs to stop XO Steve Jordan, because seriously, these guys totally fucked everything up:
1. Greg describes life in the seceding states as trying to proceed as normally as possible until the war comes. That�s STUPID. If you guys are trying to bring down the Jordan government so you can keep the country together, you should be trying to FUCK EVERYTHING UP, even if they start off using only non-violent means. If you aren�t willing to go all-out, you shouldn�t have seceded at all and should have tried remaining in the political process while using passive resistance measures, like a general strike. 2. More broadly, they seem to be trying to take a legalist approach to everything. Even though over 20 states are opposed to Jordan, only 14 manage to secede because the rest suffer coups that stop their state governments from meeting in the state capitol? WTF. You retards should have been flying the governor and a quorum of legislators to the safest areas you could find and passing secession legislation in secret, if you insisted upon it. Then you could temporarily suspend regular state governance in order to create a �Sec Bloc Congress� of sorts in charge of conducting the war effort (this may by necessity be less of a Congress and more of a war committee) 3. The Sec Bloc knows months in advance that it�s ready to at least consider secession and violent resistance. Also, they probably enjoy the backing of a majority of the country�s wealthiest people, not to mention many sympathizers abroad. So why in the FUCK did they apparently do nothing to buy up arms and munitions from overseas beforehand? Sure, heavy weapons may be a hard go, but even guns and explosives would allow them to wage a long-term guerilla action that could sap the willpower of the Jordan faction. Instead, Manhattan has almost no weapons for the final siege and the California guerilla war is lost for the incredibly lame reason of running out of ammo. 4. The Sec Bloc appears to do very little to communicate with or support possible sympathizers in red states. There are literally tens of millions of people living in places like Houston, Miami, and Salt Lake City who should be secular or non-evangelical and sympathetic to the Sec Bloc, so why aren�t they creating a national resistance movement that can do coordinated stuff like blow up power plants, shoot Guardsmen, hide in the Rockies, etc. The Holies apparently rely a ton on their militias, so why the Hell can�t the Sec Bloc train their own? There�s a lot of jokes to be made here about how libs don�t own guns. 5. Greg puts a lot of focus on their rhetoric and speeches, like that would do much to help them win. But of course, the speeches aren�t covered on F3 so they�re just screwed. In reality, major speeches are largely irrelevant and what they SHOULD have done is used what is almost certainly a technological edge to spread their propaganda over the Internet, which everybody uses. Fill social media with anti-Jordan rhetoric, hack F3 to show what you want, etc. Or do stuff like print and distribute flyers in the streets of red state cities. Don�t just release speeches to be dramatic. You need to win the rhetoric of the trenches. 6. Making a last stand in Manhattan is utterly retarded, because the city can�t sustain itself, is easily attacked, and is almost impossible to escape once the attack comes. They�d have been far better off giving up on a last stand and dispersing across the country to carry out low-level violence all over. 7. Bloomberg actually encourages fighters to give up once they�ve �lost.� Bro, you were ALWAYS going to lose, so if that�s your mentality you shouldn�t have fought at all. You need to embrace the suicidal aspect of defeat. Encourage desperate attacks and even suicide bombings in order to sap the overall strength of the government. FORCE the government to have to kill 150 million of you to survive. Such a war may even invite foreign fighters to come in, similar to what�s happened in Syria. 8. Overall leadership of the Sec Bloc is shitty. Bloomberg is kinda just first among equals because he�s rich. Given that they seceded, though, they really should have had a formal leader who could have full authority in all states. Preferably a leader who doesn�t get a lot of his news from F3, the way Bloomberg did on multiple occasions.
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Date: March 13th, 2019 3:21 PM Author: erotic hissy fit authoritarian man bad (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#37925313) |
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Date: July 3rd, 2015 12:07 AM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 16: Camp Purity [CXN-47]
Chapter 16: Camp Purity
-Our quote is a little confusing:
“It is not by one way alone that we can arrive at so sublime a mystery.” –Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, 384
-Symmachus was a pagan during the late Roman Empire, and this line is from a longer appeal for religious toleration. I'm not sure why he used a short version when the full quote isn't terribly long and makes a lot more sense: "We gaze up at the same stars; the sky covers us all, the same universe encompasses us all. What does it matter by which wisdom each of us arrives at the truth? It is not possible that only one road leads to so sublime a mystery."
- Greg somehow survived the Battery Park bloodbath, though he did receive a head wound, and is now a prisoner at a freshly-built camp on Governor’s Island. Despite being dated 2020, I assume this chapter starts with him still in 2019. I think. The dates get a little wacky late in the book:
“Months before the amphibious assault on the Battery, the feds had planned meticulously for the end of the siege. The centerpiece of their plan was the conversion of Governors Island, the 172-acre former military base in the heart of New York harbor, into a ‘re-education camp’ for male Sec fighters. The femaleSec fighters were taken to a converted summer camp on Staten Island.”
-Prisoners are dressed in orange jumpsuits and ushered into a large auditorium on the first day. They are not allowed to talk to one another. A clergyman approaches a lectern which is adorned with a sword and crucifix (again, pretty sure evangelicals aren’t so hot for those) overlaying a gold shield. The pastor opens with a prayer to God, asking that the men in the room, who had sinned “most abominably,” will yet be able to win redemption. A few Amens rise from the prisoners.
-An army colonel comes up and lays out the situation:
“The special military tribunal convened by order of the president to deal with domestic enemy combatants in the Holy War for the Union has reached a judgment in your case. Although Executive Order No. 424 gives the military tribunal exclusive jurisdiction, the president asked that our finding be reviewed by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which also sits as a special court to advise the federal judiciary on questions of biblical law. The commission has instructed us to come before you to read its decision.
“In the matter of The People of the United States of America v. Enemy Combatants in the State of New York, this tribunal finds said enemy combatants guilty of sedition, treason, armed insurrection, and conversion of federal property. You are hereby sentenced to death.’ He paused to let this sink in. I heard only a few gasps and quiet groans in the large room. ‘However, the sentence of death is hereby suspended for three years, or until such earlier time as you indicate by your words or deeds that you have closed your heart to the saving grace of Jesus Christ. Each of you is ordered confined to the federal Faith and Freedom Rehabilitation Facility, Governors Island, until such time as you are born again in Christ’s love and you have demonstrated for six months thereafter the sincerity and total conviction with which you have accepted Jesus as your savior, following which time you shall be released and your death sentence commuted. My God bless you and forgive you of your sins.”
-The colonel leaves and is replaced by a late-thirties civilian with a boyish face and “unnecessarily tight T-shirt” and crucifix tattoo. “He moved with an awkward self-consciousness. His expression tended toward a sneer. This is a person, I imagined darkly, who likes watching others suffer.”
-This fellow has the uninspiring name of Joe Jones, and he is the superintendent of Camp Purity at the Faith and Freedom Rehabilitation Center. He repeats in even harsher terms the reality that prisoners will live under:
“If you cease to work in good faith on your rehabilitation in Christ’s love, you will be executed. If you falsely claim to have accepted Jesus Christ as your savior, a heinous sin and crime, you will be executed. If you are not born again within three years, you will be executed. Are you getting the picture?”
-At this point Jones glances over at a massive crucifix mounted to the side wall, with a Jesus figure at least 15 feet tall that apparently is out of a Mortal Kombat game:
“This was not the lanky Jesus mile of countless medieval and Renaissance depictions. This was Jesus the warrior, with the musculature of a marine and a fierce gaze that spoke of defiance to this torturers, not submission and suffering. The crucifixion was grotesque, with splayed skin and bone fragments hanging from the nail wounds in his ankles, and tendons and blood vessels spilling from a large tear in his right wrist. The dirty cloth that was supposed to maintain the modesty of the crucified Christ instead suggested his virility [he’s saying Christ has a boner?]. As a sculptural object, the crucifix was literal, empty, and entirely without art. I could not imagine how it could inspire devotion.”
-Anyway, after that odd interlude, Jones continues, and says that those who are contrite and truly convert will not be executed, but will instead be released to be useful citizens of the new Christian Nation.
-“As a lawyer,” Greg admires the way they have designed their sentence, simultaneously suspending the sentence while also essentially reserving the right to execute them at any time if they wish.
-Jones continues on to the MOST IMPORTANT TOPIC:
“’Now that you understand your sentence, and the gracious mercy of Christ that has been extended to you by your fellow citizens, I will turn to the next topic. This is masturbation.’
“I thought at first I had not heard right and looked to the person to my right for affirmation. He arched an eyebrow.
“’Yes, that’s right, masturbation.’
Yep, after a ten-month siege and a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands, the Holies have the top Sec fighters in their grasp and their #1 concern is exalting Nofap. “In my confusion, I remembered a comment Sanjay had made – that all authoritarian regimes, were they not so tragic, tended toward the farcical.”
-Jones lays it out like a champion XO poaster:
“’Look within yourselves. Somewhere deep down you knew this day would come. From the first day you pleasured yourself you knew it was wrong. Ugly. Unclean. A perversion of the purpose of sex. An abomination in the sight of God. A terrible violation of His temple, your body. Impurity – the corruption of your bodies – is what opened your souls to Satan. Impurity literally cracked open the door to evil, and evil flowed through that crack and filled up the work with corruption, like water flowing through the crack in a dam. So you see, impurity is what lies at the root of every social and political evil. And, what’s worse, you and your culture were blind to impurity; instead, you tolerated, even celebrated, the corruption. And this tolerance of impurity is what caused God to punish us on 9/11 and then again on 7/22…’
“’The place to start on the road to your second births is simple. You will cease to masturbate. This is the first and most important rule of Camp Purity. This is so much more than a rule. This is a covenant you will make with yourselves, with one another and with God. Knowing how to make and keep covenants is the first step to knowing God. When you get to your rooms, you will find a contract on each bunk. It’s a binding agreements among the six of you in the room. Your five roommates are your brothers. They are your new family. Their role is the same as your brothers in your first life – to love and support you, to keep you strong and pure. You will agree to do this for one another and for God…If one of you fails, all fail.’
‘You will be monitored at all times. If you attempt to masturbate, you and all your brothers will be punished…punished severely. If you observe someone else attempting to masturbate and you do not report it, you and all your brothers will be punished, severely. This is the nature of your covenant with one another – a sin by one is a sin by all.’
“’And in case you continue to think we are idiots, I will tell you that you are being watched at all times [he literally just said this three sentences ago]. Privacy is a liberal conceit and an illusion [this again?]. Do you seriously think you can hide anything from God? Privacy is an invitation to corruption. Privacy is the refuge of the pervert and the criminal. There is no privacy at Camp Purity.’
-Jones ends on a suddenly upbeat note that somehow submission under threat of punishment is NOT their goal, but rather genuine conversions. They are all then dismissed.
-Greg goes on a tangent about how they should have expected this twist:
“Most religious texts encompassed sexual taboos, and the evangelical movement had been preoccupied with sex since its inception. From the 1990s on, the movement was almost defined by its insistence on abstinence with the Abstinence Clearinghouse, the Southern Baptists’ celibacy program called True Love Waits, and a blizzard of other initiatives aimed at youth of high school and college age. ‘Purity balls’ and ‘abstinence teas’ entered the lexicon of red state students. An evangelical speakers’ bureau of beautiful male and female ‘power virgins’ spread the word on college campuses across the South and West. What most people didn’t realize at the time was that ‘abstinence’ included not only abstaining from sexual intercourse but also abstaining from masturbation. I became aware of that only by accident when, sometime around 2011, I was walking through Atlanta airport with a colleague and noticed black plastic arm bracelets on a significant number of young men. I had assumed the bands represented a disease. But the younger lawyer with whom I was traveling set me straight.
“’They’re masturbands,’ he said.
“’What?’
“’Masturbands, as in masturbation.’
“’Like what – as if it’s a disease?’
“’Not exactly. It started about six years ago. You wear it as long as you’ve stayed pure. If you’re weak and you beat off, then you have to take it off. And everyone knows and won’t shake your hand.’
“’But…why?’ He had no answer.”
-Over the next few months, Greg learns ALL ABOUT the theology behind the wanking prohibition, with one course consisting of videotaped lectures from none other than Christine O’Donnell, who in THIS timeline became a senator from Delaware in 2012 and apparently became an anti-masturbation crusader. Predictably, like Palin, she is a literal retard even in her preprepared lectures:
“It is not enough to be abstinent with other people, you have to be abstinent alone… The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery, so you can’t masturbate without lust. The reason that you don’t tell [people] [the bracketed ‘people’ is in the original text, oddly] that masturbation is the answer to AIDS and all these other problems that come with sex outside of marriage is because, again, it is not addressing the issue…”
-I thought this O'Donnell quote seemed a bit odd, so I looked it up. It's actually a quote from when O'Donnell appeared on MTV's "Sex in the 90s" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzHcqcXo_NA) as a 20-something campaigning for sexual purity in young people. This wasn't a "lecture" from her, but rather an interview, which explains why it's more disordered.
Also, in the quote above, Rich makes everything after the first sentence appear to be a cohesive paragraph, which makes O'Donnell look super-retarded by jumping from the Bible to AIDS without any apparent rhyme or reason. But in the actual interview, there's a clear gap between those two parts.
TLS Rich: Literally doing sabotage work on a failed Senate candidate in his novel about a biglawyer fighting theocracy.
-As another instructor eloquently puts it, “Sex is a threesome, between man, wife, and God. Without God in the picture, it’s just fucking, like animals.”
-And so, the defeated Sec Bloc forces start their new lives not with torture and imprisonment, but rather with Nofap. That’s okay, though: “Most of us were wounded, exhausted, devastated at our failure to defend the last outpost of tolerant democracy in the country, and still apprehensive that our lives could be taken at any moment. Moreover, we were living in a setting that did not offer much in the way of either sexual stimulation or privacy. Let’s just say that few of us found obeying the first commandment of Camp Purity to be much of a sacrifice.”
The long digression on masturbation and how absurd it is to think it’s bad makes me kind of wonder how often Rich jacks it IRL.
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Date: July 3rd, 2015 10:43 AM Author: drab double fault Updated this to expand on the Christine O'Donnell part. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28251087) |
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Date: July 4th, 2015 11:08 AM Author: Lime tanning salon background story (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28256286) |
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Date: July 3rd, 2015 10:49 AM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie easily the most scholarly thread since 'im starting to lean brownstone over mcbeef' (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28251106) |
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Date: July 3rd, 2015 7:43 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 17: Assembly [CXN-48]
Chapter 17: Assembly
-We're winding down now. Only 50 more pages to go. Here's our quote:
"...Christocentrism is inevitably a religion of suffering, of agony and death. The emblem of Christ nailed to the Cross that is set up everywhere is a vision of horror...The story of Jesus is full of crying, weepign and sudden dramas...[In contrast] serenity, when it wears a human face - seems to me, in fact, to be the fundamental value of Eastern religion and philosophy." -Michel Tournier, Gemini
-Greg expands a little bit on the nature of how the ex-Sec fighters go about conversion. It's basically a four-step program dubbed the Four Graces. The first step is for them to see they are vile sinners, disgusting to the sight of God. The second step is to understand that God loved them nonetheless. The third step is to accept that God sent Jesus to redeem them, and the fourth is to finally accept Jesus as the savior and be born again. Prisoners get colored nametags representing what Grace phase they are in. Those considered "born again" get a gold star badge.
-Obviously, the Sec fighters are mostly atheists and cynics, so they struggle to take things seriously. They even nickname the program SLURS (sin, love, redemption, second birth...dunno where the U comes from). Greg says the typical SLURS class has the "intellectual content of a late-night infomercial," because despite their conversion being an apparent priority I guess the Christians are too stoooopid to have any good instructors:
"Our instructors spoke in a language that bore little relation to the English we used in Manhattan. Their sentences were peppered with the cliches of game shows and reality television and leavened with the cadences of the southern preacher. The inventor of SLURS must have been an earnest student of a twelve-step addiction program, or, more precisely, a dumbed-down Jenny Craig-like version of the twelve-step idea... Unlike Alcoholics Anonymous or Weight Watchers, however, the SLURS program came with the significant additional motivational tool of execution as the penalty for failure or inadequate effort. This tensions between the farcical absurdity of our training in purity and religion and the realities of prison life, with its incipient threat of violence, created a bizarre and unsettling atmosphere at the camp."
-The actual day to day life is sort of like a depressing summer camp. Every day, they meet in a big mess hall for breakfast and a prayer, followed by morning Bible study. Around noon there's physical labor and chores, with inmates unchained and able to move freely. More SLURS and Bible study in the afternoon. Following dinner, inmates have to sit quietly for two hours and read the Bible verses that were the subject of the day's classes. Greg reflects that were it not for a single choice, to join Sanjay, he could still be working in his old Biglaw office, which he can see from the island (what do you know, SullCrom's NYC office is on Broad Street and easily visible from Governor's Island!)
-Every morning, between breakfast and Bible study, there's an assembly in an outside courtyard, which is attended not only by the prisoners but also by all the guards, workers, and administrators, including Joe Jones, who Greg lets us know is nicknamed Super JJ. The higher-ups such as Super JJ, rather than wearing military attire or suits, typically wear business casual, with khakis, loafers, and button-down shirts (though Super JJ himself typically prefers his tight T-shirts). The prisoners have standard orange jumpsuits.
-The assembly has a predictable pattern. A chaplain says a prayer, there are announcements, and then Super JJ supplies them "news," which Greg suspects is "a carefully programmed series of lies dripped out to convince us of the finality of their victory and the hopelessness of the secular cause." As it turns out, Greg says, Super JJ wasn't lying, and news such as the immediate surrender of Manhattan after the fall of Battery Park and the end of violent resistance across America is all true.
-After two months on the island, assembly finally has its first shake-up, as the chaplain announces that about 20 inmates have advanced to level two of SLURS. After a few more months, several hundred prisoners have reached step one, dozens are at step two, and a few are even at step 3 (Given how closely related all four steps are, it's not clear why it's so hard or time-consuming to go from step to step).
-Over time, Greg and co. learn that Super JJ wasn't kidding when he warned that inmates are being watched. There are cameras in every shower and toilet stall, and every table in mess hall is miked up. With so much surveillance, it's impossible for prisoners to frankly discuss their situation.
-Greg, being the upstanding chap he is, simply can't understand how people are advancing through the program:
"Yes, I knew about the Stockholm syndrome, and the natural tendency to want to please those who control your life. But the 3,500 men in that courtyard were New York's most committed secularists. All had chosen to risk their lives to resist the Christian Nation. They were mostly committed atheists, with many observant Jews and the occasional Muslim [what about the Catholics who were showing up earlier?]. My fellow prisoners were cynical journalists, tough-minded lawyers, foul-mouthed cab drivers, and liberal professors - hardly the ideal candidates for conversion, much less full-on second birth... It seemed improbable to me that capitulation would start to occur so quickly... Was it an escape strategy? Had they learned how to fool our captors? Were they plants intended to inspire the real prisoners? Or had the mental strain of the war and imprisonment unbalanced their minds sufficiently that they were in fact open to religious conversion?"
-Greg decides to ask a guy...to the extent he can:
"'So you made step two,' I said with complete neutrality to a stranger following assembly. We were outdoors, where we all hoped the risk of being overheard or recorded was lower.
"'Yes,' he answered.
"'I'm interested. How did it happen?'
"'Think about it. Aren't we all sinners?' he said, walking away and revealing nothing. I did not dare to pursue him.
-The mentality on the island changes after their first FLOGGING. After a normal assembly, Super JJ ascends the podium and reads a verse from Deuteronomy declaring how wicked men are to be beaten if they deserve it. he then calls forward "Prisoner Number 4587" and his roommates. It turns out that Prisoner 4587 is a CHAD and was caught having sex with an assistant cook behind the kitchen. The assistant cook gets shipped off the island to be "dealt with" by civil authorities, but each of the prisoners is sentenced to 24 lashes with a bullwhip. Since the max is 40, Super JJ describes this as merciful. The sinner himself goes last, so he can see the consequences of his sin.
-The whipping is super gory and Greg gets oddly into it, describing it for like two pages. Here's an excerpt:
"Only months before, I had killed men and seen men killed. I saw horrible suffering. But that suffering was incidental to a violent battle.The point of that violence was to kill the enemy, not to inflict pain. It was far different from deliberate physical torture. I had never seen anything like this. I had never seen one man look into the suffering eyes of another and calmly count out further torment. I had never seen a torturer steel himself to the sounds of desperation and carry on. At eighteen strokes the victim's back was a single blue and purple bruise decorated with a crazy crisscross of red lines oozing blood. The soft touch of a single finger would have been unendurable on such a back, and yet he would receive six more lashes. It did not seem survivable."
-But survive the first prisoner does, barely. It's so gruesome Greg expects Super JJ to commute the other whippings, but he doesn't, and all get whipped in turn. He then tries to motivate the prisoners:
"Remember this. What you saw this morning is nothing compared with the suffering of our Lord. Nothing. Each flogging should remind you of the terrible suffering that Jesus endured for you. He suffered to redeem your sins. And with his stripes, we are healed. Think on this. You are dismissed."
-After this flogging the atmosphere becomes a lot more depressing. The summer-camp vibe evaporates, guards become more aggressive and prisoners more sullen. "It was as if the genie of latent violence had been released."
-Rather than being suppressed, resistance actually proliferates. The second flogging comes just three days later, and soon they're a regular feature of assembly. Notably, the standard punishment becomes 12 lashes rather than 24, since that proved to be too much and the initial victims are still hospitalized.
-Still, many inmates advance. After a year, about two dozen have the gold badges of the certifiably "born again" and are in their six-month trial of authenticity.
-Greg has no such luck though. Christianity is just to STUPID:
"After the first year I had read the Bible front to back three times. We were permitted no other reading material, so I devoted all my intellectual energy and analytic skill to that single anthology. I regretted not knowing Greek, as some prisoners were allowed to read the gospels in their original language. I was a diligent student and an active participant in Bible study, but I needed to be exceedingly careful not to stray too far into the mode of literary criticism, thus indirectly challenging the only approved manner of engaging with the text, which was as revelation received directly from the omnipotent being. We were permitted to debate what God meant and how to apply the lessons and the mandates of the Bible to everyday life. We were not permitted to note the inconsistencies among the gospels and the wonderfully different voices of the human authors, or to acknowledge the existence of the non-canonical gospels [IRL Christians acknowledge them all the time and LOL at them]."
-Greg is stuck at step 1, having managed a "sophistic confession of sin" premised on all people being sinful. Be he sees no honest path to step two, because he refuses to believe God exists. Despite his lack of progress and impending execution, Greg feels pretty good overall. His set of roommates never gets whipped, and he feels good from the regular food, sleep, and exercise. The lack of uncertainty about things is also very liberating. Really, he could do this forever! |
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Date: July 3rd, 2015 7:45 PM Author: Rough-skinned nibblets GLORY TO GOD (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28253606) |
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Date: July 3rd, 2015 8:39 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 18: October 22, 2022 [CXN-49]
Chapter 18: October 9, 2022
-Okay, before doing anything else, I want to note that Rich has managed to fuck up his timeline and somehow skip ahead a year. Let’s recount how time has passed:
2016: XO Steve Jordan is elected
2017: The Blessing is passed, and the Sec Bloc states secede around Christmas. Jordan promises holy war.
2018: The Sec Bloc is gradually overrun. At Christmas, Jordan gives a new address, promising to besiege Manhattan.
2019: Manhattan is besieged. In mid-August, it is assaulted and conquered. Rich is immediately brought to Governor’s Island and told he has three years to convert or die.
2022: October 9, 2022 would mean Rich has been on Governor’s Island for OVER three years, and he should be getting executed. Instead, it’s clear from the writing that Greg has only been on the island for TWO years. Rich fucked up, and you can actually see how it happened: Each chapter has a year or span of years below it marking the passage of time. Chapter 14 (Holy War) was appropriately dated to 2018, but inexplicably the next chapter (Siege) was dated 2019-2020, when the chapter actually spans 2018-2019. Then the following chapter (Camp Purity) is dated 2020, when it actually still takes place entirely in 2019. Whoops!
-Anyway, after that embarrassing digression, let’s look at our quote:
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it form religious conviction.” –Blaise Pascal
-October 9 starts like any other day, with Greg and pals rising, showing, dressing, and shaving. Facial hair is NOT ALLOWED, he says.
-But Greg soon realizes today is a DIFFERENT sort of day when he sees two men with video cameras trailing behind Super JJ. Their assembly has never been televised before.
-Greg’s day becomes a spectacular one when he sees none other than SANJAY standing in an orange jumpsuit near the platform where addresses are delivered. He hasn’t seen Sanjay since the night before the Battery Park attack:
“[At the time,] I was busy listening to the instructions of our sergeant, a retired marine from the Bronx. I had understood that Sanjay was with the rest of the civilian leadership at City Hall, so I was surprised to see him walk into the park carrying a small machine gun. Sanjay had not accepted military training. I left my unit and walked over to him…”
“’You know how to use that thing?’ I asked.
“He looked exhausted but managed a weak smile. ‘I am learning quickly.’ We stared at each other in silence.
“’I have come to fight with you,’ he said simply, and then turned to follow a turbaned Sikh to a position about thirty yards to my south.”
-Greg had simply assumed Sanjay died that night, but nope, here he is. Greg’s eyes meet Sanjay’s and he smiles, but “his eyes told me [this] was not a good idea. But no one seemed to notice.”
-After the regular assembly, the gold star Born-Agains are led up onto the platform. Their numbers have rapidly grown over the course of the second summer, though none have yet been released. They’re arranged in a semicircle around the whipping post.
-Greg takes a while to put the dots together, but you probably didn’t: Yep, it’s time for Sanjay to die! I’ll type this up in detail:
“With a nod by JJ to the guards, Sanjay was brought forward to the post. One of the guards roughly pulled up his orange jumpsuit and two others tied his wrists in front of him. He was shoved with his back against the post, so he faced the semicircle of born agains, and his arms were pulled up and stretched tightly above his head. This in turn stretched his torso, revealing each rib. His feet were spread and pulled back, each tied slightly behind the post. This position left his smooth brown body grotesquely exposed. I had never seen anyone look so completely naked or so vulnerable. Sanjay’s breath remained deep and steady. I, in contrast, could not breathe, and I dreaded the whipping that I assumed would follow.
“Super JJ looked carefully at Sanjay and nodded his satisfaction to the detail of guards, who then stepped away.
“’A reading from the book of Leviticus: ‘And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him.’ A reading from the book of Deuteronomy: ‘If there be found among you… that… hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them… Then shalt though… stone them with stones, till they die… If they brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, though, nor thy fathers… thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die.’ Thanks be to God.
“As JJ had been reading, four puzzled-looking men from the maintenance crew had entered the courtyard with wheelbarrows and dumped small loads of stones, each ranging in size between a golf ball and a baseball, at the feet of the gold stars.
“’You, my brothers born again in Christ. This man you see before you has been Christ’s greatest enemy in this world. He is an agent of Satan. He is an atheist, a pagan, and a sodomite. He not only turned his heart from God, but he harnessed Satan’s power of illusion to turn millions of others from Christ. He reeks with the blood of infants, the dark stain of sin most vile. And God calls out for vengeance, for justice. So for you, our first class of sinners born again in Christs’ love – for you we have reserved the unique privilege of showing your devotion to Jesus by doing this just thing. The Bible calls us to justice, and to you we extend the special privilege of doing God’s will. If you falter, we know that Christ’s light does not truly burn in your heart and that you have deceived us. And you know the consequence. Brothers in Christ, pick up the stones and do as the Bible tells you. You may proceed.
“There was no sound in the courtyard. I remember hearing the sound of a ferry engine and the faint echo of a taxi blowing its horn in Red Hook. My eyes were locked with Sanjay’s, paralyzed, I was terrified. His eyes were calm. Resigned. Not a person in the semicircle moved. To a man, their eyes were cast down, staring at the stones. Eyes trying to make invisible the bodies to which they were attached.
“Super JJ walked down to the stairs and into the space between the gold stars and Sanjay. He scanned the faces and walked up to a man who must have reminded him of himself. A balding man who was large and muscular, with receding hair and a buzz cut. Perhaps ex-military. He raised his eyes. JJ stood in front of him.
“’You will pick up a stone and start,’ JJ said.
“’I will not,’ the man replied. In an instant, JJ drew his sidearm and shot the man in the middle of his forehead [damn!]. He dropped in place.
“The Super stepped back and again scanned the circle. He walked up to a younger man, probably a student when Manhattan fell, with curly red hair and acne scars. His face was pale and he was too scared to look up. ‘You will start,’ said JJ. The redhead looked up at Sanjay and started to stammer, ‘I…I…No, I…’ The back of his skull and half his brain exploded backward from the shot to his head, splattering a guard behind him.
“Again, JJ stepped back and scanned the circle. As he approached the next man, the man dove into the stone pile, picked up a small stone, and hurled it at Sanjay. I heard the crack of a rib and stared at the purple bruise on the side of Sanjay’s chest.
“’Everyone. Now,’ said JJ.
“The stones started to thud against Sanjay’s body in a regular rhythm. Some men threw them frantically, some methodically, and many laconically […while speaking few words?]. A few wept.
“It seemed to me that I had breathed only a single breath since JJ stepped off the stage. I had not moved. I can remember observation but no conscious thought. But the instant I understood what was happening, I darted from my place in assembly, around the side of the gold-star circle and through the hail of stones, to Sanjay. I wrapped myself around the exposed side of his body and grasped my hands together behind the post, intending never to let go.
“My body now shielded his from the stone throwers. Some of the prisoners stopped throwing, but others continued. A few stones hit my back and the back of my legs, but I felt no pain. Sanjay was conscious. I felt his breath on my neck, and for a few moments I heard only the sound of his breathing, now labored.
“’San,’ I said. ‘I’m here.’
“The guards rushed forward and the stoning stopped. The first two to arrive grabbed my shoulders and tried to pull me away. I held my left wrist with my right hand. I had never felt stronger. A third guard arrived and wrapped his forearm around my neck and gave a stiff kick to the back of my knees. I did not let go. “Sanjay turned his head and whispered in my ear, ‘G, you must remember.’
“Two more guards arrived, and with four arms pulling each of mine, they succeeded in breaking my grip. They yanked me away and dragged me back to the edge of the circle. I was held down by the guards.
“All stoning had stopped, and each gold start was staring at me in shock.
“’No,’ I begged them. ‘Don’t do it. You know it’s wrong.’
“JJ raised his gun. I remember wondering what it would feel like. Instead, he pointed it in the general direction of the forty born-again prisoners.
“’You will now show me how much you love Jesus. Again.’
“A dozen prisoners instantly resumed the stoning, and within moments all had joined in. Sanjay’s body now twitched and jerked form the force of the blows. The stones from the throwers at the ends of the arc landed on his sides, and most of his ribs soon had fractures that penetrated the skin. When a large stone fractured a kneecap, he cried out in pain for the first time. Blood streamed from a wound in his throat. Agonizing minutes later I saw a prisoner heft one of the larger stones and, with the deliberation and strength of a professional pitcher, land a blow on Sanjay’s left temple. Sanjay instantly lost consciousness. It was, I choose to believe, an act of mercy. The stoning continued for another few minutes. Although the site was unbearable, I was determined not to avert my eyes. I did not blink. All I could do for Sanjay was to witness.
“Then JJ held up his hand silently, and within moments the throwing stopped. With a nod he summoned the doctor, whose starched white coat was already stained with a misty spattering of Sanjay’s blood. The doctor’s step faltered when he approached the pillar. His outstretched fingers had trouble finding the carotid artery beneath Sanjay’s purple and bloated neck. He pulled a small flashlight form his pocket and raised on of Sanjay’s eyelids. The other eyelid was missing. He turned and nodded to the Super and mouthed, silently, the word ‘dead.’
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Date: July 3rd, 2015 8:57 PM Author: rusted brethren RIP sanjay (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28253983) |
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Date: July 3rd, 2015 9:11 PM Author: Odious orange masturbator Please tell me that Rich works in a little something about how JJ must believe he is without sin. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28254022) |
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Date: July 3rd, 2015 10:15 PM Author: drab double fault I don't think he does, but then again I had totally forgotten about the hilarious Nofap lecture until this reread, so who knows what I could find! (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28254413) |
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Date: July 4th, 2015 12:14 AM Author: Odious orange masturbator I assume JJ is a closeted gay and he represents the personality-warping effects of denying your God-given sexuality (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28255081) |
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Date: July 4th, 2015 11:51 AM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 19: Born Again [CXN-50]
Chapter 19: Born Again
-It’s a sprint to the finish now, with three chapters and about thirty pages to go. I’ll probably wrap this up today or tomorrow. Still a good deal of hilarity left. Our quote:
“Very truly I tell you, no one can see the Kingdom of God without being born again.” –John 3:3
-Greg apparently goes unconscious after Sanjay dies, and he doesn’t know for how long. When he awakes, he’s locked in a small, completely dark punishment cell. Greg knows a little bit about this place, which is located in GI’s Castle Williams, because one of his roommates unwisely flirted with a cook in the mess hall and got them all sent there for two days. Greg learned that solitary confinement is a very unfun experience that can induce psychosis in just a few days.
-This time is even less fun than before:
“My arms worked strangely, and for some time – minutes or hours, I don’t really know – I thought perhaps I was injured or paralyzed. But eventually the picture emerged. I was lying on my side, secured in a canvas straightjacket, arms across the chest – loose enough so that I could move my arms slightly in all directions but not so loose that I could pull my arms out. The first time I tried to stand, I discovered that the back of the straightjacket was attached to a metal ring in the floor by a chain too short to permit me to stand upright. I could stand with legs straight and torso bent over, or kneel or squat on the floor with torso upright and straight. The chain was just short enough to prevent me from walking or crawling to the latrine hole. It was so typical of GI. Superficially the veneer of twenty-first century civilization was preserved. Would any of this shock the conscience of the American public? I was not beaten; there was no sexual humiliation, no grotesque tortures. After all, before the Christian Nation hundreds of American prisoners and mental patients were kept in solitary confinement and secured in straightjackets for their own protection.
“I occupied myself the first few days become accustomed to the routine: the way in which food and water would be delivered without allowing any light into the room; the way to piss and shit [what happened to Greg’s prudish dislike of profanity?] as far as possible from the place where I could lie down; the way to stand and squat given the short chain; how to keep my arms from seizing up and keep the blood flowing; how to scratch using the wall.”
-Over time, though, Greg starts having a mental breakdown, and he experiences vivid hallucinations. When he isn’t hallucinating, he is gripped by a fear that his entire life will be spent in this cell; he starts to believe that he’s already been isolated for 2 years and could be there for another 40.
-And so, Greg resolves to die via hunger strike, in order to at least die in an autonomous way. He is amazed at how hunger recedes after a few days and his body steadily shrinks, and imagines that he’s really pwning that asshole Super JJ. But, alas, they can’t let him die that way. So, one night he goes to sleep in his cell only to abruptly awake in an infirmary bed. He’s on an intravenous drip and over a few days (where he refuses to speak to people) his muscles and strength gradually return. -Hilariously, Greg gets utterly pwned when a nurse shatters his illusion of how badass he was:
“’How do you feel, Sweetheart?’ the nurse asked every morning.
“The only question I ever asked her, after about a week, was the date. When she told me, I became angry. ‘Please, why are you lying?’
“She looked genuinely startled. ‘What? Lying? Why would I lie about the date?’
“’It cannot be,’ I said. ‘I was at the castle for over two years.’
“She held my hand. ‘Greg, you were at the castle for five weeks. You didn’t eat for the last two weeks. You’ve been here for ten days.’
-This pwning of Greg snaps him out of the long-term stupor he’s been in and makes him deeply depressed. He starts to dream of SANJAY every night:
“During the entire time at the castle, I had not thought once about Sanjay. Now I dreamed every night about the stoning. I most dreams I managed to hang on and endure the stoning, usually waking at the moment I lost consciousness in the dream. Sometimes I told him jokes. Sometimes he comforted me. Sometimes I swore vengeance.”
-Somehow, Greg’s five-week solitary stay and two-week hunger strike manage to keep him hospitalized for FIVE MONTHS, because he comes out of the cell in November and finally has a big breakthrough in April:
“One morning in April, with no apparent precipitating factor, I had an idea that quickly became and idee fixe: hell. My God, I though, they were right. There is a hell. I know because I am in it. And it is something completely supernatural, something surely not of this world. My lawyer’s mind ran with the idea. Never-ending torment, my new reality, was something impossible for any man to cause. I didn’t choose it or make it, nor did they. It was, simply, something outside nature and outside human nature. Therefore, there must be a God or at least something like a God. If there was, and if this God had created this hell for me, then this God could end it. End it. The seemingly impossible notion that there could be an end to my suffering floated there miraculously. The impossible suddenly seemed possible.”
-Greg summons a camp chaplain and confesses, apparently sincerely:
“Reverend,’ I said, weeping. ‘it happened This morning. I finally understood. My God, it’s true. There is a God. There is a heaven and a hell. I can see it now. So clearly. Why? Why couldn’t I see it before?”
“’What do you mean, son? What do you see?’
“’I see that I am, am… nothing. I am worthless. A speck of dust. I mean nothing apart from Him – apart from creation, apart from the creator, apart from God. And I don’t know what, what I have done or been or said, but He has punished me. And I AM in hell. A hell only He could conjure. A hell so terrible, so hopeless that I cannot bear it. And there, right in front of me – right inside me, was my redemption. He sent me this hell. He can take it away. That’s what I have figured out. That’s what I now know. I pray to God with all my heart to take away my suffering.’
-This goes on for a bit, with the chaplain asking Greg whether he OPENS HIS HEART TO JESUS and Greg saying that yes, he does. They pray together. But the chaplain says there needs to be more:
“’Son, you repeat that prayer. You keep that feeling. You open your heart to Jesus and, if you truly repent your sins, and if your heart is truly open to the lord, he will come in and you will experience the most wonderful thing a man can experience, the taking of your life by Jesus, the certainty of eternal salvation, and your rebirth in Christ. Keep praying son. I will come see you tomorrow.”
-But alas, it’s not that easy. Greg wants nothing more than for his “desperate hollowness” to be filled, and he cries out for Jesus to enter his heart, but the it doesn’t happen and his Hell does not recede.
-The pastor tries to cheer him up, saying that it simply means some part of his repentance is imperfect and that some pride remains within him. At first, Greg is sad, but then his magical intuition [remember that middle school football game so many chapters ago?] kicks in and he realizes this is all fraudlies:
“Sometime on the third sleepless night, a startling calm took hold of my troubled mind. For the first time since the stoning, my conscious self felt familiar. And then I seemed to float to the ceiling, look down at my pale body strapped to the hospital bed, and see everything clearly. In a single insightful flash, I understood it all: In the depths of depression and despair, I had opened my heart. I was as ready for redemption as any man could be. I had never wanted anything more completely or more genuinely. But no one was home. No redemption came because there was no redeemer. I had, like a child, longed for a miracle to put an end to my troubles, but the miracle hadn’t come, and I was, again, on my own. And that was fine. It was how I was born and how I would die. It was the human condition and it was OK.”
-And with that realization, Greg decides it’s time to blow this joint:
“By morning I had a plan. During the hour before the nurse arrived to take my blood pressure, I did ujjayi breathing exercises – long, slow, slightly constrained inhales and exhales taught to me by Sanjay to lower my blood pressure and lock in the calmness in my mind. I carefully remembered and organized everything I kenw about the born-again experience, developed my script, and rehears it over and over in my head. When the pastor arrived, I was both the physical and mental picture of equanimity. “’My son, what’s happened?’ “’Just as you said, reverend. Last night, just when I thought I could go no lower, I was filled with a strange peace. I felt – well, free – for the first time in my life. Where only a moment before there was a most terrible emptiness there was a fullness, a…’ At this point I teared up and choked [quite the actor!], and for the first time I smiled faintly, ‘…a joy. And he was here. Just as surely as you are there. Jesus was in my heart. I didn’t have to ask or beg or grasp or try. The moment I was fully open, there he was. And he was pure light, and perfection, and love and grace and…I just cannot describe….’
-Naturally, Greg’s MASTERFUL acting completely fools everybody:
“During the balance of my time at GI, I never indicated to a single one of my fellow prisoners, by so much as a wink or grin or raised eyebrow, that I harbored the least bit of skepticism or discontent with the Christian Nation program. I led Bible study and was a model prisoner. I was released two months before the three-year deadline [you know, the one that had already arrived a year before], my death sentence commuted.
“Until the last hour, when my fingers tapped out the truth for any reader of these words to discover, I have lived this lie to perfection My actions and words became automatic. I taught myself to believe that I was saved, to ease the burden of dissembling. For five years I have lived the lie, not half-heartedly, not incompletely, but so thoroughly as to call into question what really happened that night. All the evidence in the world points to the fact that I was born again that Easter Sunday 2023, six months to the day after Sanjay Sharma’s death [He actually got a date right this time, Easter 2023 really is April 9]. Only I, and now you, know it to be untrue.”
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Date: July 4th, 2015 12:30 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 20: Christian Nation [CXN-51]
Chapter 20: Christian Nation
-This the last major chapter, and it's a doozy. Time for a last hurrah! Our two quotes are from two of Rich’s favorite crappy dystopia novels:
“’Ordinary,’ said Aunt Lydia, ‘Is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.’” –Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
“Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn ‘reasonable’ and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to stop and speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. Btu the blessed final quarter keep you alive.” –Doremus Jessup, in It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis
-As Greg leaves Governor’s Island, a counselor shows him his sleep new i20 Device, complete with Apple logo:
“The top of the thing looked a bit like the iPhone that had been taken from me three years previously, upon arriving at GI. But it was thin and much smaller, like an overscaled wristwatch. And I wa surprised to see when he took it out of the box that it was somewhat flexible.
“’Is it a phone or a little iPad or what?’ I asked.
“’I still find it funny that you guys don’t know. Everyone in the country has one now. And I mean everyone. It’s a Device; it does everything. All you need.’
-The Device comes with a little wrist-strap that has an embossed gold cross on it:
“’For born again. So you know. You know who you can… count on,’ he said somewhat cryptically… ‘You can take it off, but you need to keep it with you at all times. Do you understand? It’s important. Serious stuff if they find you without it.’
-As Greg leaves the ferry and enters Manhattan he looks up at his old office, where his law firm is apparently still operating with the same partners and everything, along with a new batch of associates who most likely have never heard of him. Greg hasn’t been able to brag about how much he knows for a while, so he drops this gem in:
“I saw a few fleeting silhouettes against the glass and remembered a favorite scene form the opera version of Great Gatsby [Oh! The opera!] where Nick Carraway sits and watches from outside a party under a tent, seeing on the white sides of the tent the shadows of partygoers dancing. I briefly wondered if I always had been an outsider, like Nick, and then realized that it no longer mattered. I had made my decision and had never once regretted it.”
-In an odd way, much is unchanged. The Staten Island ferry is still orange, New Yorkers still wear black, the Nike swoosh is all over. Tourists leave the subway confused over how to reach the Statue of Liberty.
-Greg goes to Battery Park and finds that every single trace of the siege has been removed. The defenses are all gone, the vegetable gardens are dug up, and the World War 2 monument the battle took place around has been fixed to remove all battle damage. Greg feels the wall of names, managing to find a slight indentation where a bullet hole was filled in. A guy walks over and asks if he’s okay, and he lies, saying one of the names on the monument is his great-grandfather. The implication seems to be that the other guy is also a veteran of the battle faking his born-again credentials, though it’s unclear.
-Greg moves into a halfway house in the West Village, where he lives with five housemates. Three of these housemates are also graduates of Governors Island. Two are employed by COGA, the Church of God in America, which is an umbrella org for every evangelical denomination in the country. Greg explains that COGA is nominally separate from the federal government, but supervises all cultural, academic, and religious affairs nationwide. COGA doesn’t pay its employees much, but it does provide free housing:
“The house, on the charming small Commerce Street, dated from the mid-nineteenth century. It was all wood construction and had settled alarmingly so that no floor was level or wall perpendicular. With its odd angels and low ceilings, it seemed almost whimsical. In back of the house, an old garden, now gone to seed and dominated by weeds and tall grasses, surrounded a small patio with a wrought-iron table and scattered chairs. The pleasure I would have taken in such a place was dulled by the realization that I was doubtless in a house confiscated by the feds from a gay person or family.”
-A housemate gives Greg the lowdown on the new Christian Nation. Their conversation is hilariously Stalinist in style:
“’So how much do you know?’ he asked.
“’Know? About what?’ I answered warily.
“’About how things are. The Purity Web, for example.’
“’No, What’s that? It sounds good, of course. I prayed a great deal on the island that I would find the country cleansed of all the filth we had before.’
“’Amen. Then you’ll be pleased. President Jordan’s great insight was that the nation couldn’t possibly be redeemed if all the depravity were simply pushed underground – mean, from the real to the virtual world. Remember, before what the Internet was? Mostly porn. If that had been allowed to continue, well, how could we expect God’s grace and favor as a nation?’
“I judged that it was a rhetorical question, and simply nodded.
“’Just after the siege began, Congress passed the Purity Web Act, although I understand it was in the works for quite some time before then.’ That much I remembered.
“’Of course porn sites were made illegal, and all immoral content from overseas was stopped at our borders. That was the easy part – I mean, the Chinese and Saudis and others had been doing it for years. But President Jordan’s real inspiration was not to stop at eliminating temptation – he realized that since we lived our lives on the web, the web could be an active partner in eradicating evil.’
“’How so?’ I asked, glancing at the Device on my left wrist.
“’Yes, the Device is a part of it. Well, the big breakthrough was integration – integration of every webcam, every e-mail and text, every web search, every website visited, every post you make on a social network, everything you watch on TV or listen to on the radio, every video you watch online, every credit card charge, every ATM withdrawal, every cell phone call, every trip in your car or other device with GPS, every digital picture taken – all of it is now integrated and analyzed to discourage and discover evil. It’s truly amazing. Jordan reminds everyone that it was divinely inspired – it came to him in a direct revelation from God. Hate the sin.’
“’Amen to that. Most of the things were already linked to the web one way or another. But what exactly does integration mean? That’s a lot of data.’
“’Every street camera, every security camera in the country, and everyone’ Device is linked to the Purity Web. Every bit of GPS data, every keystroke or click on any electronic device is recorded and analyzed by supercomputers. But more than that, they now can recognize a face, they can read handwriting, they can understand speech, they can read lips.’
“I thought I saw him lift his chin slightly up and to the left, toward the back of the house behind us.
“’The big machines look for patterns in the data, changes in your routines, your movements. They look at what you buy, what you say, what you write in your emails, what you choose to read, what you search for online. They look for patterns in virtually everything you do. Computers, you know, can predict human behavior better form this data than any person can, and of course only the big machines can handle that volume of information. That part’s not new – it was proven technology back in the first decade of the century. What’s new are all the data sources, especially the cameras, which are everywhere – their integration on the web and, of course, the big machines themselves. And It wouldn’t have been possible without some pretty amazing programming. I heard a rumor that the key algorithms were developed by a Chinese scientist for the Chinese government, but then he was born again and came here and gave it all to the Christian Nation, thank God.’
“’Thank God.’ [Greg says this with a little less enthusiasm, probing to see if perhaps his housemate is also faking, even though admitting that could get them both killed]
“’Yes. So you see, for our countrymen who are not saved, they have a helping hand to avoid sin and evil. Not really an issue for us, you know. But still, it’s helpful to understand, especially for people like us, from the island. Just remember, they’ll know if you don’t go to work, they’ll know if you are sick, they’ll know everything you buy and do and everything you read and write – every word. If your face is pointed toward a camera, they know everything you say. Now the big machines, they’re not looking at every person all the time – unless, of course, they identify you as being at particular risk for temptation or evil conduct. When the big machines see something they don’t’ like, you ‘go pink.’ That’s what it’s called. It means there’s an issue. If that happens, then the machines’ analysis is referred to a real person, a deacon, who surveys the data and decides on the next steps. Not a good idea to go pink, my friend. Just so you know. Can be a real hassle. But of course, it’s a blessing as well, since the deacons can usually intervene before the sin is actually committed.’
“’Thanks for the tip. I doubt, though, that I’ll be doing anything that could be considered remotely… well, pink.”
“’Of course. And,’ he said, turning toward the house with a smile that I knew to be artificial and suspected that the big machines did not, ‘the dream of eradicating evil has been nearly realized. Thank God.’
“’Thank God.’
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Date: July 5th, 2015 11:10 AM Author: Buck-toothed Newt Immigrant Thank. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28260467) |
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Date: July 5th, 2015 11:55 AM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse Really need to understand more about how his old firm is still in operation. Didn't everyone in MFH have to go through purification or was it just the identifiable Sec Def rebels? If just the latter, does everyone in biglaw now profess to be a born-again Christian?
Also what happened to Emilie? I was really expecting her to make an appearance as JJ's or XO Richard Jordan's wife or something (because of course she's unprincipled and wants to be with someone powerful). |
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Date: July 4th, 2015 1:48 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 20 PART TWO [CXN-52]
Chapter 20 Part Two
-Greg settles into his new life of nonstop digital surveillance. Every day the USA Today and WSJ get delivered each day via their Devices to a set of tablet computers in the house. Greg realizes that he can’t even read these in peace, because the “big machines” will log what articles he reads and for how long. Still, the papers inform him that a GREAT DEAL has changed across the world in the past three years.
-Jordan does as he promised and terminates ALL overseas alliances of the United States, and all U.S. troops stationed overseas come home. I don’t really know if that’s the implication of the “absolute sovereignty” thing evangelicals push, but I guess it is in this universe. This has the effect you might expect:
“China immediately invited Japan and all of Southeast Asia, including Australia, to join the Greater China Cooperation Area. It was an offer none of those countries was in a position to refuse. In a month, without a shot being fired, China had established a sphere of economic and military domination covering the entirety of the western Pacific. It was nothing less than a new empire, a reprise of the colonial model pioneered by the British, under which all petroleum and minerals in Australia, Indonesia, and elsewhere in the region were reserved to feed China’s insatiable demand for energy and resources. In return the ‘cooperating’ countries purchase the products of China’s burgeoning manufacturing sector. The Chinese occupied the former US military bases in Japan, the Philippines, and Korea. The Christian Nation seemed to me to be on good terms with China, notwithstanding the fact that every newspaper I read used the adjective ‘godless’ before the word ‘Chinese.’ I couldn’t figure out this passive acceptance of the Chinese empire, and I wondered what had happened to the evangelistic imperative. But having created a Godly Kingdom in America, the federal government seemed content to allow great swaths of humanity to wallow in atheism and error.’
-This sort of development is unlikely at best. China is an actual rising power, and if America abruptly pulled out of all its military commitments it would leave a lot of countries with their pants down. On the other hand, China’s navy is still shitty, so the idea that every country had to suddenly give in to a COLONIAL relationship or risk annihilation is pretty dicey. South Korea, Taiwan, and several other countries actually have reasonably capable militaries. The combined economies of East and SE Asia are still bigger than China’s, and countries like Japan or Australia could probably develop a nuclear program very quickly in a pinch.
While I could see China gradually drawing the area around it, a sudden colony grab is unlikely to me, and I think it’s far more likely these countries would join together for mutual defense. Hell, if they can get India to join in, they not only massively outproduce China, they also handily outnumber them.
-The developments in the rest of the world make even less sense, though:
“The Middle East had been messier, as Jordan had reiterated America’s support for ‘biblical Israel,’ as the country’s sole international commitment. But having made clear that the Jews must continue to be in control of Jerusalem, Jordan made no effort to protect the Saud family from the Shia revolution that swept the Middle East. The Islamic fundamentalists, with tacit approval form Washington, soon realized their dream of a Shia Islamic Caliphate extending from Pakistan through Iran, Egypt, the entire Gulf, and North Africa. In an attempt to unwind globalization and shock the world economy bakck to a pre-modern condition, the ayatollahs in charge shut in and abandoned all the oil and gas wells in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and the old United Arab Emirates. Within three months, 60 percent of the world’s oil production disappeared. Planners in the United States had long assumed that any government in control of the oil fields of the Middle East might threaten to withhold oil form the market – and even do so for a time to achieve some specific objective – but would eventually act in its own economic interest and resume production. This proved incorrect. The Shia Islamic Caliphate decided that the disruption to the Western world and the potential obliteration of modernism in general were far more appealing than the money and power they could have had by continuing to produce and sell petroleum products to the West. As a result, the economics in the developed world other than China and Russia staggered. As a quid pro quo for American acquiescence to the restoration of an Islamic Caliphate, Israel was left alone, and it too realized its destiny as a religious state, with a dramatic revision to its liberal constitution in order to establish the primacy of the Torah and effectively guarantee political domination by the ultra-orthodox Jewish sects.”
-Okay, what the FUCK, Rich? Almost NOTHING in this paragraph makes ANY goddamn sense.
1. Sunni Islam is BY FAR the dominant branch of Islam. Shiites are only the majority in Iran, Iraq, and Azerbaijan, and they’re only a sizeable minority in a few more (like Lebanon, Pakistan, and Yemen). Saudi Arabia has only a few million, and North Africa has essentially ZERO. The idea of Shiites managing to conquer this entire region, and in just a few years, no less, is completely ludicrous and impossible. Furthermore, the idea without the US no country would do anything to stop this is extremely unlikely. If anything, the lack of ability to count on the U.S. would INCREASE the pressure on countries like France and the UK to watch out for themselves and make sure the Middle East doesn’t get overrun. 2. The most hyper-extreme branches of Islam are mostly in the Sunni tradition. Al-Qaida is Sunni. ISIS is Sunni. Boko Haram is Sunni. Iran may have a theocracy, but it’s actually a relatively modern country and its per-capita income is comparable to Brazil and Mexico. It has an actual scientific sector. It’s not nearly as medieval as the sort of shit Sunni extremists push. 3. Radical Muslims may push a pretty old-fashioned morality, but they usually aren’t LITERALLY seeking to time travel back to the middle ages. The idea that they’d cut off oil production to “shock the world economy back to a pre-modern condition” makes no fucking sense whatsoever. 4. Why the fuck did this Shia revolution go on with the U.S.’s “tacit approval?” I could maybe buy our super-neutrality, but there is absolutely no reason for evangelicals to suddenly turn around and support radical Islam in some weird “watch the world burn” way. 5. It’s also ludicrous to claim that this would wreck almost every major economy EXCEPT China. China does have significant oil production of its, own, but it actually recently passed the U.S. as the world’s biggest oil importer, and it relies heavily on the Middle East to supply its needs, while the U.S relies on Canada and Mexico. I’d have found all this a lot more plausible if China had INVADED the Middle East to guarantee an oil supply, but instead Rich just takes the stupidest route possible. 6. Furthermore, even if China could deal with the shock, the idea that they’d hum along just fine as everybody else implodes makes no sense. China isn’t an autarky and its growth has been driven by a huge quantity of exports as well as massive foreign investment. If the entire world economy has been tanked by an energy crisis, they’d get hurt really badly as well. Their vast colonial empire isn’t very useful if all of them have horrible economies. 7. Israel going theocratic doesn’t make any sense. Back during the Holy War, Congress passed a law forcing Jews to either accept Christ or else leave for Israel. I’m guessing that a lot of Jews seized the chance to escape a fucked-up up America, so I highly doubt it was only ultra-religious types who left. The substantial majority of them will not be Orthodox; most may even be effectively non-religious. If anything, they could move Israel to the LEFT politically. The idea their arrival turns the whole country ultra-orthodox is lunacy.
-As you may predict, things are stupid in Europe too:
“NATO was gone. The European Community had survived, but it seemed to subsist in a state of Finlandized subservience to Russia, which, through its supply of natural gas and control of the gas pipelines, dominated the western part of the continent both economically and politically. Only the UK and the Scandinavian countries seemed to endure in a state of true political and economic independence. Very little was said of them in the American press.”
-I’m not ARE Reptile, but this is probably the most “plausible” development, given the other retarded shit that has happened. If, in fact, 60 percent of oil output abruptly vanished, and the US bailed out, Russia really would have Europe by the balls, though the notion of them being in vassalage is pretty extreme, especially since they have an independent nuclear deterrent. In actuality, I think you’d just see several European countries re-arm, while political opposition to nuclear power evaporates in an instant. I have no idea what the justification is for non-Norway Scandinavia being able to stand up to Russia better than Germany or France, other than the massive boner Rich and other libs have for Sweden.
-And what of America? We have our own energy crisis to deal with:
“In Manhattan, fewer cars on the streets appear to be the only symptom of the shock suffered by the country having lost access to half the crude oil it had consumed before [Actually, most U.S. crude is domestically produced now thanks to fracking and other things libs hate, and our imports are from the Americas]. But the newspapers suggest many other changes in the country at large. Shale gas wells linked by a dense web of natural gas pipelines dominate the landscape in a great swath of the country extending from upstate New York down to Texas. Every new car runs on natural gas [I guess an energy crisis killed all interest in the electric car?], and a type of coal-based slurry has replaced fuel oil as the power source for America’s home furnaces. Mountain after West Virginia mountain has disappeared to give up its coal, and a hazy smog once again has settled over many cities and suburbs of the country. Politicians appear at each new coal-fired and nuclear plant opening, promising that god will provide, and within a decade, things will return to ‘normal.’
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Date: July 4th, 2015 10:07 PM Author: Dull Tripping Heaven (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28259047) |
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Date: July 5th, 2015 11:51 AM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse I like how Rich is able to get in another subtle nod to how everything in the world comes down to natural resource law (in case it wasn't clear to the reader what an important guy he is IRL). (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28260631) |
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Date: July 5th, 2015 3:29 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 20 PART THREE [CXN-53]
Chapter 20 Part Three
-Greg's new job in Manhattan doesn't start for a week, so he spends his time walking around Manhattan taking in the changes. Unable to digest everything he sees, he starts having...weird dreams:
"After one of my long walks, I dreamt that a neutron bomb had dispatched all the real New Yorkers and that Stepford Wife-like facsimiles had been installed in their place by the big machines."
-What does Manhattan under the Christian Nation look like? Unsurprisingly, it resembles the suburbia Rich clearly hates so much:
"For a Christian Nation where we were all supposed to be attentive to our souls, the New York I found during these walks was strangely soulless. The absence of gays was palpable [funny, because throughout the book Rich has worked hard to send the message that gays are no different from everybody else]. The West Village, once so animated and irreverent, now had a suburban ambiance. Fast-food outlets and national chain stores, once rare in Manhattan [Uh, if you say so], were ubiquitous. I observed an elevated sense of fashion compared to what we saw on television in the rest of the country, but it was subdued. Nothing outrageous. Nothing revealing. Nothing, really, very interesting.
"And then, I slowly realized, there was the lack of foreigners. New York, a beacon of cosmopolitanism since the seventeenth century, was the one place in the country where walking down any street at any time, you could always hear a language other than English being spoken. Before the war, the population was polyglot, and residents walked the streets with millions of visitors from around the world. But I now found during my walks that the world had stopped coming to New York. While I was on Governors Island, illegal immigrants in the city had joined those from around the country in being detained and repatriated. New Yorkers who had been educated in our schools, who greeted us every day as our doormen and taxi drivers and whose children were born here, were torn from their families and sent back to countries that were for many of them only distant memories. Eventually even those members of their families who were in the United States legally joined their loved ones in exile. New immigration stopped, and hundreds of thousands of Americans from the Rust Belt and the South migrated to New York to fill the shoes of the missing immigrants."
-Greg starts what he realizes is only the third job he's ever held in his life: His law firm, Theocracy Watch, and now in the Christian Nation Archives [It's actually called that]. I guess he's totally forgotten about the two years he spent working for Governor Bloomberg. His supervisor is "a corpulent middle-aged woman with a helmet of carefully composed hair...and an accent that suggested the southern reaches of the Midwest." Like all people Greg dislikes, she is a 'tard:
"'I am Mrs. Scott, but I hope you will call me Lurlene. No need to stand on formality here - like my Dale used to say, God rest his soul. After all, we are all... Well, yes. So now. I know you were at the, um, the facility.... I just want you to know it makes no difference. You know, we are now all together despite, you know-"
"'Don't worry about it,' I interrupted. 'I understand. I'm here now and anxious to get to work.'
"'Oh good. And so important, you know. Our work. Really, I mean, you know how much trouble all that, well, trash caused. So much trouble. So it's up to us to sort it all out. What's left, that is.'
-Greg's workplace is in NYU's former library. His job:
"'That will will be your desk,' said Lurlene. 'But first you must learn the alphabet.' She saw my look of confusion. 'Oh dear, of course, silly me. My husband - now with the Lord - always said, 'Lordy, Lurlene, folks don't understand a thing you say. For heaven's sake, slow down.' Have you lost someone, Greg?'
"'Yes, but as you say, they are with the Lord.'
"'Still. So, well, yes. Here, alphabet means the letters - you know, A-C means approved Christian literature. The prefix D means books to destroy, so D-D, for example, means books to destroy that have to do with some kind of deviancy. But there are more than twenty-six letter combinations actually, and they're a bit tough to learn. So for a day or so you'll work with Mr. Thornton...' She then lowered her voice, whispering conspiratorially, 'who is a bit, let's say, stiff. You'll see.'"
-What's so stiff about Mr. Thornton? Well. Before the Christian Nation, he was chief librarian at Patrick Henry College, the evangelical outpost founded by the homeschooling buy. He was chosen personally by XO Steve Jordan to head the Christian Nation Archives. Their objective: Collect all the physical books in the country and mark them for either preservation in approved Christian Nation Archives, or else destroy them:
"No physical books, of course, were required any longer by the general public, who had access to the entirety of the COGA-approved canon through their Devices."
"'As saved Christians, [said Thornton], you all understand just how urgently God requires us to rid His kingdom of all traces of smut, filth, and evil. Our redemption as a nation is conditional - conditional on our following through and eradicating evil th way God wants. Think of it this way, Gentlemen: Every ungodly book was a paving stone in that wicked road of human-centered, egotistical arrogance that led this nation off the path of righteousness. As long as such books still exist, they have the potential to exercise their evil influence on the fragile and flawed minds of man. God calls us to their eradication. So, job one, so to speak, is to ensure that not a single such book remains. Do you understand? You might think, what does it matter if a couple old books remain on a shelf somewhere? But sin is like a virus. It worms its way out of the pockets where you try to keep it hidden and then it waits, silently, for the chance to strike. Understand?'
"The three of us nodded silently. I was surprised by the depth of the anger directed at the humble book. This was a rhetoric I had not heard before Governors. Mr. Thornton continued:
"'So the D codes are by far the most important. Any code starting with a D means the book requires destruction. This is your prime objective. Take your time. Obviously any book that contains the text of a false religion or is sympathetic to a false religion or asserts or even explains heretical teachings at odds with the truths of The Blessing – these are D-F. We have chosen letters you can remember – so think ‘F for false.’ Ridding the nation of false teaching or confusing untruth is one of our highest priorities. Understand? Then you must also consider whether the book promotes so-called humanism, any basis for morality that is not based on God’s word or asserts the primacy of reason over faith. These are all D-H; here H is for humanism. Or perhaps the book promotes the theory of evolution or argues the existence of geological or biological evidence that contradicts the Bible; this is all D-S – anything that assumes that pure science can exist separately from revelation and other types of godly knowledge. Then we have D-D – you can probably guess, with D for deviancy. These we call ‘double D’s.’ Few of these escaped form the purges of three years ago, but you will be shocked how many are still floating around, and in places you would not expect. So everything written by a known or suspected homosexual that promotes, excuses, or justifies the homosexual lifestyle or includes homosexual characters is D-D. Similar to that is D-A, for adultery, which of course includes anything involving divorce, sex before marriage, or other sexual sins.’ “Mr. Thornton looked both disgusted and exhilarated by this litany of enemy texts. He wanted us to understand the immense burden and responsibility that was his.
“’Can you imagine, all those years, all those novels where characters casually dissolved marriages made by God, had affairs, committed adultery. Books where people flaunted homosexual lifestyles. They disrespected God, trashed Christians. What were children to think other than that it was all OK?’ -Thornton has his new employees practice on a stack of books. Greg’s LAWYER POWERS make him, apparently, the most brilliant book-sorter of all time: “When he visited my table late on the second day to check my work, [Thornton] looked skeptical. When it turned out that I was the only worker to index each of my test books exactly right, he stared at me with interest, and then spoke in a low voice, with his back to the two small cameras on the far wall of the room. “’I know who you are, you know. From before. They thought I should know. But they told me they were certain that your call to Christ was strong and deep. But I plan to watch you. More closely than the others. No one else has ever gotten a perfect score [Oh what a SCHOLAR Greg is!]. Not the most devout and dedicated deacon. Only you saw the insidious undercurrents hidden beneath the seemingly acceptable texts. That really takes… If He can open a heart like yours…’ He stared at me again with a searching intensity. ‘Well, praise God is all I can say.’ -On Greg’s second day of work, Lurlene casually mentions that while she hates filth, she’s sad her grandchildren will never hold a physical book. It turns out that ALL new books are exclusively digital, and printing is banned. Another indexer dismisses this as NBD, physical books were nearly dead even before the Holy War: “And yet I was chilled by the obvious. Nothing now could be written or read in private. All digital text could be centrally edited, censored, or deleted. The written word no longer could be hidden behind walls or tucked away in the attic. With all new words in the maw of the Purity Web, no wonder they were obsessed with eradicating the old words on paper that conflicted with their version of history and truth.” -Greg reflects on the deep hidden hatred Christians have for the idea of books: “Sanjay and I had understood the anger directed at intellectuals..[but] we had not grasped the anger at the book itself. The book was the ultimate symbol of the great divide between faith, which depends on a single authoritative book, and reason, which challenges the very idea of revealed wisdom and celebrates books for their subversion of authority. And here I was. It was bad enough that I fraudulently pretended to their belief to save my life, but now I did their work, spending my days eradicating the only seeds from which a counterrevolution could emerge. I was slowly, a book at a time, eradicating both memory and hope.” -Greg’s work send him back into a lethargic depression. His life becomes boring, with few events of note: “One of my housemates became engaged, and we had a dull party. He was almost thirty, approaching the time when any ‘yet-to-be-married Christians,’ known colloquially as YCs, needed to make the transition to ‘married Christians,’ or MCs. No man or woman risked turning thirty as a YC. At the party I watched him with his twenty-nine-year-old fiancée. I saw no signs of affection.” Wait, Greg is like 45 years old. Why isn’t he presumed to be homosexual? Did he get grandfathered in because he was single past 30? This law really doesn’t seem very coherent. -After about two years in his new job, Greg has a moment of excitement when he finds a book by the biologist E.O. Wilson. Titled ‘The Creation,’ he assumes it survived because “those to whom the author’s name meant nothing would have mistaken it as a creationist screed and reshelved it with reverence.” Wilson, he says, was one of Sanjay’s heroes. He reads the book’s opening, which takes the form of Wilson writing a letter to a fictional Southern Baptist preacher, suggesting there is common ground between them: “History’s verdict: A decent man betrayed and a magnificent gesture rebuffed.” Wilson is still alive IRL, so I wonder if the implication is that XO Jordan had him executed Greg is so moved that he makes his first-ever erroneous classification, labeling it “A-C: Approved Christian.’ -Greg’s deception goes unnoticed after a month, so he realizes that deliberate misclassifications could be his small way of fighting back: “Once shelved in the permanent archives, my imposter books almost certainly would not be discovered. There, in the custody of the might COGA itself, would reside the seeds for the American culture that would subvert and succeed it. Tucked among novels of banal edification, expositions of intelligent design, and theology dense with its own self-referential illogic – I could plant these subversive germs.” -Another two years pass, and Adam comes into Greg’s life as another indexer. As described at the very start of the book, he becomes Greg’s friend and recruits him to go camping in upstate New York. With that, the chapter ends. Only one more to go, and it’s a short one.
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Date: July 5th, 2015 9:48 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse A few things:
(1) Why does Greg never marry? B/c he only loves himself and, though he can't admit it, Sanjay?
(2) Why wasn't Greg executed, setting aside his failure to marry? He led a rebellion and the Christian Nation types seem big on retribution. The purification process seems more apt for sinners generally, not traitors.
(3) His form of "revenge" -- classifying books that no one will ever read -- is the most beta and lawyerlike I can possibly imagine. |
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Date: July 5th, 2015 9:54 PM Author: drab double fault 1. Yeah, it's really weird to me that Greg never even addresses how the mandatory marriage rule applies to him. And as far as I can tell, he doesn't even date anybody after Emilie dumps him. Almost like there's another, HIDDEN love in his life.
2. Also not really clear. He describes himself as being super-important, and he literally WROTE their secession legislation. He's not some random. Yet he just gets shipped to Sec Bloc camp while Sanjay presumably got some big-deal trial that ended with execution.
3. Yeah, LJL at lawyers. |
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Date: July 5th, 2015 4:02 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: CHAPTER 21: Ripples [CXN-54] Chapter 21: Ripples -It’s been a long road, but we’re finally done. This was a fun project, and I thank those who have read this far. Our final set of quotes: “And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” –Thomas Jefferson, 1823 “But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only ‘message’ which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes an historical event, is the supreme capacity of man.” –Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; onl love can do that.” –Martin Luther King Jr. -With the book finally done, Adam lays out the stakes: “’You know, this will probably get you killed. Or at least get you put back in prison for life Maybe worse. You’re still a young man. You have a choice.’ “’You didn’t give me that choice when you asked me to come up here. You didn’t give me that choice when I started to write. Why not?’ “’It would have been a lot to ask,’ he said. “I didn’t disagree… Yesterday I finally learned what they are asking of me. Sitting at the small breakfast table, Adam raised the subject. “’The book is almost done. We should talk about what comes next.’ “’Enlighten me,’ I said a bit acidly. “’Free Minds works on the cell system. A cell is four people. Every cell has an originator, called the ‘point,’ and the others are members. Everyone is in two cells. You are recruited by the point of your first cell, and that becomes your base cell. You get it? The point is the only link between cells. And all any one person knows is the members of two cells – the original base cell of which he is a member, and the new one that he has formed as point.’ “’So how many cells are there?’ “’No one knows. At least I have no idea. I don’t know who formed the original cell. It’s like a chain letter – you are tapped and you tap three more people. Over time, it should produce huge numbers. It’s about the power of exponential numbers.’ “’But you don’t know. There could be only two cells in the whole country.’ -Greg points out further that even if there are thousands of cells, they’re so fragmented that they can’t do much. But then Adam tells him that his memoir is SO SPECIAL that things are different: “’You. The memoir. This is… different,’ Adam said, pausing. I waited. Am now nothing if not patient. “’Well, all I really know is that the plan came from somewhere above or outside my point’s base cell. Far above, I think. My point received a specific message for me. A message from someone who knew about you but also knew about me. Knew about this place. My point was told that I was to get to you and told you I was to do it. I was instructed to apply for the job at the archives. When I was hired, I knew that other FMs must be at work. I was told exactly what to do. I was told what to ask you to do. That’s all I know.’ “’So what now?’ “’The system in reverse. We have access to old copiers that are not networked. I will make six copies of the book, one for each other member of the cell where I am the point and also one for everyone in the cell where I am a member. Up and down. Each one of them will do the same. Many, many people, Greg, will read it. Exponential numbers.’ “He did not seem to want to say the obvious. ‘But of course…’ I waited. ‘Well, eventually a copy will come into their hands. They will know what you have done. They will come and get you.’ “’And what about you and Sarah?’, I asked. ‘What about the movement itself? This place? The book reveals it all. Should I take that out?’ “’No. FM will do its best to take care of us, but both of us, and Sarah, will be fugitives for as long as the Christian Nation endures. This place will be sacrificed. There are lots more like it, and we want them to know that. We want them to know that FM is real. We want them to know what we can do. We want them to know we’re organized. We want them to fear us, and we want them to crack down harder. Each time they do, they take one step forward toward their own destruction.’ -Greg isn’t feeling it: “’I don’t see it,’ I said. ‘Not this time. They control everything. There’s never been technology like the Purity Web. That changes everything. I’m not sure a little bit of cognitive dissonance will bring it all down.’ I saw his right hand grip the table edge.’ Adam tries to argue that the Holies’ contradictions are so numerous and severe that their eternal continuance is not fathomable, but Greg thinks that if they can come to power, there’s no reason they can’t stay in power: “”Greg, I know it’s hard to believe when they seem to hold all the cards. But believe me, they will self-destruct. Each time we show our hand, they crack down harder. The harder they crack down, the more people are turned to the opposition. Each turn of the screw is a step closer to the end. It’s just a question of whether it takes years or decades. And that matters a lot. So for FM, it’s all about accelerating the process.” -Greg hands in the book and testifies to Adam that it is all true, to the best of his knowledge. Adam asks him whether he hates the Holies, and rather than answer Greg asks whether Adam does: “’Yes, I do. Very much. More than anything. I would give my life to destroy them. You must too, Greg. You have to hate them. Not hating them is too passive… it’s a kind of death. But… it’s not entirely clear, form the book I mean, that you do. Do you?’ “’I don’t know,’ I answered carefully. ‘I really don’t know.’ “But I do know. I do not hate them. How could I, when hate is what destroyed my life and my world? Actually, I could hate them. I’m not Sanjay. But I don’t. And perhaps Adam is right, perhaps I SHOULD hate them. But I don’t. Socrates, I think, said that deep desire is at the root of all hate. And I desire nothing. It’s true. Nothing. So perhaps that’s why I don’t hate them. I can hear Sanjay saying, as he often did, that only by setting aside desire can we find freedom. I used to think that his non-attachment was hollowness. A cop-out. But now I’m starting to understand. I wish he were here to talk to.” -Greg goes for an artsy ending that makes absolutely no sense considering he’s supposedly already handed over the text to Adam: “’How was your camping trip?’ the innkeeper asked. “’Very nice,’ said Adam. ‘Terrific weather. Lots of deer. No bears, though.’ “’I’m glad,’ the innkeeper said, handing us our Devices from the drawer under the counter. “He gave us a ride down the train station in the small village of Garrison. The train back to New York City runs at water level along the east bank of the Hudson River. “’Did you know,’ asked Adam, ‘That the Indians called it The River That Flows Both Ways? The Hudson is tidal. Twice a day, it reverses direction and flows upstream. Twice a day, a chance to recover lost ground.’ “I looked out the window, and as the train lumbered south I watched the water flow slowly north around a large stone near the bank. It left a well-ordered wake, as if it were the stone, and not the water, that was moving. Adam continued his explanation. “’When the tide comes in, the fresh water slowing downstream is no match for the ocean. An invisible tide of salt water comes up from a trench deep below the surface, strong and dense enough to reverse the flow of the river above. Did you know that?’ “’No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know that. But I do now.’”
-And that’s a wrap! Rich ends with a brief Afterword: “Critics of this book may suggest that it overstates the influence of the dominionist and reconstructionist theologies within the evangelical movement as a whole, and thus exaggerates the probability of theocracy should the Christian right obtain the political power it has long sought. Were this novel intended as a prediction about the most likely outcome of the ‘culture wars,’ that criticism might be deserved. But this novel is not such a prediction; instead, it is intended as a warning that such an outcome is possible. And because this possible outcome would be so catastrophic were it to occur, the resulting risk demands our vigilant attention. By illustrating what our homegrown fundamentalists mean when they say America should be a ‘Christian Nation,’ I hope this book will cause its readers to think twice about politicians who justify their public policy agenda on the basis of the Bible or who sprinkle their political speech with references to the desires of God. Support for the constitutional design of a secular state, with no religious belief receiving preference over any other, should be common ground for all Americans, conservative and liberal, religious and secular.
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Date: July 5th, 2015 4:11 PM Author: Dull Tripping Heaven Sewanee Writers Conference can also be conservative friendly (at least one rightwing literary editor teaches there)
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Date: July 5th, 2015 4:17 PM Author: drab double fault I didn't even know the garbage board still existed, let alone what it supposedly says about my job (if it's some deleted quotemo rambling, just ignore it), but in any case I think people may overrate this. I really enjoyed writing this, but I'm really just riffing on a shitty two-year-old book. It's hard the sort of thing that cries out for wider publication. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28262392) |
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Date: July 5th, 2015 4:21 PM Author: Dull Tripping Heaven Here's the garbage board... http://autoadmit.com/main.php?forum_id=5
Maybe this project doesn't deserve wider publication--and I think you could find a decent venue, if you wanted to--but clearly you care about writing and literature and calling out hypocrisy |
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Date: July 5th, 2015 4:02 PM Author: drab double fault Subject: DISCUSSION QUESTIONS My copy of the book is a review copy, and it actually came with this set of discussion questions, in case the book was used for a reading group. Man, W.W. Norton really thought a lot of this tome:
1. How do Greg, Emilie, and Sanjay each react as the country takes small incremental steps toward theocracy? Why are their reactions different? If you were under the same circumstances, do you think you would react more like Greg, Emilie, or Sanjay? 2. Has your view of John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential candidate changed as a result of reading this book? If McCain/Palin had won and McCain had then died, what do you think would have happened to the country under a Palin presidency? 3. In the Christian Nation, authoritarian control is possible largely because web-linked cameras are everywhere and all reading, writing, and other communication are digital—making privacy or uncensored expression virtually impossible. The technology for this exists now. Does this worry you? Do you think it is a real threat? 4.Greg seems obsessed by the similarities between what happened in Germany in the 1930s and in America in the period leading up to the Holy War—mainly economic depression and a shock to national confidence. Do you find the similarities credible? Has something about the world changed since the twentieth century that now makes a populist embrace of fascist-type totalitarianism impossible? Or could it happen again? 5. What do you make of the relationship between Greg and Sanjay? 6. The author says that the public events occurring before election night 2008 are all historically accurate—such as legislation introduced in Congress seeking to end separation of church and state and allowing churches to use tax-exempt contributions for political activity, the channeling of billions of federal dollars to evangelical organizations, foreign policy decisions being influenced by evangelical beliefs regarding the “end times,” a federal ban on vital stem cell research for religious reasons, and U.S. troops being subjected to proselytization by evangelical chaplains. How many of these things were you aware of? If you didn’t know about these events, why do you think that is? 7. Do you believe that Greg’s memory of what happened is reliable? What parts of his story do you think might be suspect? 8. The long-standing agenda of the Christian right is finally realized with the adoption of “The Blessing.” When you read the text of “The Blessing," how much of it do you agree with or disagree with? What about your friends or family who are conservative Christians—how many of these things do they think should be laws binding on all of us, whatever our religion? Have you ever discussed it with them? 9. Greg writes the memoir in a cabin overlooking a lake. He seems attracted by both water and stone, seeing ripples and reflections in the water. How does this setting affect him, and how does it affect your experience of the story? 10. At the end, Greg is looking out at the Hudson River, and Adam tells him that the Hudson is tidal, a river that flows both ways. Adam says that twice a day a hidden tide comes from the ocean and causes the river to flow upstream. What do you think he means? When Greg says he now understands, what do you think he means? 11. What do you think will happen next? Does the Free Minds movement have a chance? Does Greg have what it takes to be a leader? |
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Date: July 5th, 2015 4:16 PM Author: Dull Tripping Heaven 1. I would be like Sanjay and lead an armed but limp-wristed rebellion and die as a martyr (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28262377) |
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Date: July 6th, 2015 12:55 PM Author: Lime tanning salon background story tyft thread OP (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28267659) |
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Date: July 6th, 2015 1:07 PM Author: Stirring indian lodge Someone needs to email Greg this link. Invite him to join the discussion. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28267736) |
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Date: July 7th, 2015 1:05 AM Author: Buck-toothed Newt Immigrant Thanks man. I looked forward to reading this every night. It's been great. What's the next book? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28273376) |
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Date: September 20th, 2015 5:32 PM Author: drab double fault (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28799447) |
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Date: September 25th, 2015 4:03 PM Author: Useless Bearded Bawdyhouse (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#28836714) |
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Date: December 4th, 2015 12:20 PM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#29308064) |
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Date: December 4th, 2015 12:23 PM Author: Stirring indian lodge I think the next book to analyze is that one that was self published about the guy who wants revenge I think about Trayvon. was discussed on this bort (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#29308087) |
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Date: December 10th, 2015 12:49 AM Author: drab double fault This one?
http://www.amazon.com/No-Justice-Peace-Trayvons-Revenge/dp/1495946193
Could be worth a look. That or I can do a blast from the past and find The Great American Parade. |
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Date: February 2nd, 2016 8:59 PM Author: Stirring indian lodge Yeah this one (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#29740147) |
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Date: December 23rd, 2015 11:04 AM Author: flatulent mood lay (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#29439248) |
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Date: December 24th, 2015 4:47 PM Author: drab double fault Thinking of doing a follow-up where I analyze Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, the epic fanfic by that spreglord who runs LessWrong. Would that interest people? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#29447793) |
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Date: January 1st, 2016 7:58 PM Author: Odious orange masturbator I'd pay money to read that (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#29501123) |
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Date: January 2nd, 2016 12:42 AM Author: drab double fault 180, I think I'll start in a week or two (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#29502899) |
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Date: January 6th, 2016 4:32 AM Author: drab double fault Oh fuck, I just realized I never posted the incredibly cringeworthy, striverish video Fred Rich made for Sullivan and Cromwell:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at_AxC1ZwgI |
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Date: February 2nd, 2016 8:58 PM Author: Stirring indian lodge (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#29740143) |
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Date: June 21st, 2016 10:35 AM Author: Henna trailer park antidepressant drug (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#30753936) |
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Date: July 7th, 2016 1:01 AM Author: drab double fault "Rich, who wrote the novel Christian Nation, which imagined Sarah Palin in the presidency, is currently working on more fiction."
http://highlandscurrent.com/2016/06/24/red-blue-getting-green/ |
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Date: July 7th, 2016 1:02 AM Author: emerald dilemma regret YES (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#30869154) |
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Date: July 30th, 2016 5:39 PM Author: Henna trailer park antidepressant drug (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#31069571) |
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Date: November 8th, 2016 10:42 PM Author: domesticated blathering alpha (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#31843864) |
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Date: December 27th, 2016 2:26 PM Author: rambunctious love of her life (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#32241320) |
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Date: January 30th, 2017 12:38 AM Author: drab double fault Bump for upcoming civil war.
"They called everybody left in Manhattan 'faggot.'" |
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Date: March 25th, 2017 9:40 PM Author: Copper cruel-hearted library boistinker (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#32917124) |
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Date: May 11th, 2017 7:54 PM Author: impertinent mad cow disease coldplay fan Wild thread (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#33285117) |
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Date: July 6th, 2017 10:50 PM Author: Stirring indian lodge (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#33719491) |
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Date: July 6th, 2017 11:09 PM Author: big fluffy athletic conference half-breed (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#33719610) |
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Date: August 15th, 2017 8:24 PM Author: drab double fault Bump for Roy Moore on his way to the U.S. Senate. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#33997386) |
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Date: February 16th, 2018 9:32 PM Author: 180 filthy point ? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#35421505) |
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Date: July 16th, 2020 10:23 AM Author: Narrow-minded vigorous voyeur corner That was the law passed after 7/22 that contained a provision basically criminalizing criticism of the government. That provision had been struck down but had apparently recently been revived by the post-Roy Moore Supreme Court (how that happened is unexplained; the Court doesn�t just change is precedents as soon as a new guy comes on).
-Bloomberg and Greg are caught totally off-guard, but Sanjay saw this all coming: |
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Date: September 21st, 2017 12:05 PM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#34259245) |
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Date: February 16th, 2018 9:32 PM Author: 180 filthy point (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#35421499) |
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Date: March 13th, 2019 1:28 PM Author: drab double fault (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#37924622) |
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Date: March 19th, 2019 9:25 PM Author: glittery abnormal chad chillingly timely blankbump (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#37957821) |
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Date: April 29th, 2019 9:56 PM Author: Peach Jewess Selfie (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#38162613) |
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Date: July 26th, 2019 8:11 PM Author: drab double fault He has a blog now!
https://fredericrich.com/blog |
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Date: August 9th, 2019 7:51 PM Author: Electric Dog Poop (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#38663547) |
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Date: August 9th, 2019 7:52 PM Author: drab double fault (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#38663552) |
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Date: November 10th, 2019 11:27 AM Author: lilac university toaster (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#39096922) |
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Date: November 10th, 2019 11:55 AM Author: Narrow-minded vigorous voyeur corner (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#39097010) |
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Date: December 20th, 2019 1:27 AM Author: Narrow-minded vigorous voyeur corner (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#39295981) |
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Date: February 24th, 2020 6:53 PM Author: drab double fault Christian Nation makes The Federalist!
"n 2013, Frederic C. Rich wrote a dystopian novel called Christian Nation, about a terrifying future where “Sarah Palin becomes president, [and] the reader, along with the nation, stumbles down a terrifyingly credible path toward theocracy … one of America’s foremost lawyers lays out in chilling detail what such a future might look like: constitutional protections dismantled; all aspects of life dominated by an authoritarian law called ‘The Blessing.’”
It’s tempting to recommend reading Christian Nation because it’s often entertaining, albeit unintentionally so – it’s kind of a literary version of The Room where it’s amusing in proportion to how utterly sincere it is. However, the book is often disturbing, such as this description of the narrator’s role in the combat that ensues when Christian Dominionists lay siege to Manhattan.
“I suddenly remember the face of the redheaded kid I killed with a grenade. He ran at my position in Battery Park, alone, screaming, his face twisted in hate,” recalls the book’s narrator. “I couldn’t hear him, but his mouth suggested, ‘Die faggot.’ They called everyone left in Manhattan ‘faggot.’ He exploded in a fine red mist.” The first chapter of the book then ends with this ominous warning about America’s impending totalitarian Christian theocracy: “They said what they would do, and we did not listen. Then they did what they said they would do.”
I thought of Rich’s book because on Sunday, Politico published an article by Joshua Geltzer, a Georgetown University law professor and former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council. In the article, Geltzer quite seriously argues that “widespread closure of polling locations and expanding imposition of voter identification laws [and] escalating purges of voter rolls” means that certain states should be stripped of representation in Congress. Read Geltzer’s argument for yourself, there’s some interesting history there, but to sum it up: something something 14th Amendment something something." |
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Date: April 22nd, 2020 3:47 PM Author: Stirring indian lodge (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#40070927) |
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Date: June 12th, 2020 1:49 AM Author: Dead beady-eyed puppy (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#40402168) |
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Date: June 12th, 2020 1:53 AM Author: drab double fault On his blog, Rich writes about a possible "nightmare scenario" for Trump's reelection:
Assuming that election night returns show Trump losing, he angrily rejects this result, asserts (with no basis) massive fraud, claiming the margin of difference is due to millions of illegal immigrants and a democrat conspiracy revolving around absentee and mail-in ballots. He refuses to concede and launches a blizzard of litigation. With no wiser heads in the White House to stop him, in the next 24 hours, his tweets awaken every flavor of far right paranoia: if the democrats are permitted to steal the election they will take your guns, ban your religion, end your freedom, and preside over a chaotic collapse of law and order.
It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Trump’s base takes to the streets, invades state houses, and threatens judges. They are met by massive protests in opposition. The streets erupt in violent chaos. Trump militarizes the response, telling the country that only he can preserve law and order.
Although many judges quickly resolve their cases, scores of red state judges require recounts, extend voting, and order other remedies that delay the ability of state officials to certify the results. On December 14, when electors meet in each state, scores of litigations remain unresolved and some elector meetings are enjoined from proceeding. In some swing states won by Biden, such as Michigan, a hyper-partisan GOP legislature simply “finds” that fraud has occurred, throws out the results from contested urban and minority precincts, and votes to certify the electors pledged to Trump. On January 6, when the elector results are due in the Senate, enough state certifications are absent or contested to deny Biden 270 electoral votes. The constitution gives Congress the power to count electoral votes and determine the result. Outraged, the Democrat-controlled House determines that Biden has won. The Senate, still controlled by the GOP, either determines that Trump is the winner or votes to delay deciding.
The President’s term expires at noon on January 20 and, pursuant to the Presidential Succession Act, if the office becomes vacant and a new president has not been inaugurated, the Speaker of the House becomes acting president.
As of January 19, the Supreme Court has issued a series of contradictory and inconclusive 5-4 rulings. Other cases have yet to reach the Supreme Court. Having allowed the violence to peak to levels that have terrified ordinary citizens, Trump has declared martial law, pledging to restore law and order. The move has widespread support.
That night, the President addresses the nation, this time “revealing” a vast conspiracy by the “deep state,” aided by the Chinese and other hostile governments, to subvert the constitution and deny him the office to which he was elected. Attorney General Barr, standing at his side, is “gravely concerned” and has launched a full investigation. Trump says he has taken an oath to defend the constitution and this is what he will do. He notes that if all the still-contested state elector certifications break his way, he will have won the electoral vote. Let the process work, he argues. Moreover, it is a time of national crisis, and he will not abandon the nation to chaos and violence. All eight members of the Joint Chiefs were ordered to stand behind him when giving this address. Two agreed and stood at his side. The other six refused and were fired.
The next day, in a ceremony on the steps of the Capitol, Nancy Pelosi, as Speaker of the House, is sworn in by Justice Ginsburg as acting president pursuant to the 1947 Presidential Succession Act. Trump tweets from the White House that this is an act of treason and orders the Attorney General to arrest both women.
Outlandish? Unthinkable? My argument is not that this grim scenario will happen, only that it is a real risk. |
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Date: June 12th, 2020 1:55 AM Author: Dead beady-eyed puppy What a fucking delusional loser (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#40402185) |
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Date: July 11th, 2020 12:41 AM Author: Narrow-minded vigorous voyeur corner (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#40584552) |
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Date: July 15th, 2020 1:05 AM Author: startled stead (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#40610680) |
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Date: November 14th, 2020 9:56 PM Author: domesticated blathering alpha (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#41367864) |
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Date: June 7th, 2021 11:21 AM Author: razzle hairy legs (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#42586803) |
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Date: June 10th, 2021 11:02 PM Author: Contagious clown knife (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#42608169) |
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Date: June 27th, 2021 10:52 PM Author: trip station toilet seat Looks like Fred Rich dropped a new book last September. Bizarre that the summary mentions Jurassic Park, since this seems to be a ripoff of Crichtons less popular “Next” but maybe a hit new pumo could review it for us.
As Escape from Extinction opens, the last Neanderthal dies in a cave on the Iberian Peninsula. 30,000 years later, the naturalist Muir O'Brien, hunting deep in the Oregon wilderness, spots a fern believed to be extinct since the end of the last ice age. His discovery leads to a life-changing encounter with the visionary and narcissistic Leo Bonelli, founder of the world's most successful biotech company. Despite misgivings, Muir and his daughter, Lilith, are drawn into Leo's world. When the truth about Leo's strange son, Ned, is revealed by a politically ambitious preacher, the world must grapple with the mystery of Neanderthal extinction and the true basis for human hegemony over the planet. Ned and Lilith, and all who love them, confront a tsunami of ignorance, fear, hatred, and violence.
Escape from Extinction is not science fiction. Scientists wielding new tools for editing DNA now have the power to change the blueprint for humanity, hack evolution, and even create entirely new forms of life. In Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, the intersection of avarice and scientific hubris gave us man-eating velociraptors. Here, the "monster" is an empathetic and charming teenager, who many nevertheless believe presents the same threat to humanity as Crichton's dinosaurs.
Escape from Extinction features Rich's distinctive mix of graceful writing, deep intelligence, and narratives that engage his readers, both emotionally and intellectually, with topical issues.
https://www.amazon.com/Escape-Extinction-Eco-Genetic-Novel-Frederic-ebook/dp/B08BYXL573/ |
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Date: December 12th, 2022 5:53 AM Author: Honey-headed theater (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#45619797) |
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Date: March 23rd, 2024 1:56 PM Author: pearly dashing faggotry (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#47519568) |
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Date: March 23rd, 2024 2:00 PM Author: Comical Fear-inspiring Indirect Expression School Cafeteria (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2901174&forum_id=2#47519580) |