The Republican Golden Rule was, "He who has the gold makes the rules." But Deplorables believe desperately in the Fool's Gold Rule: "Do unto others before they do unto you." Because of course that's what we must want to do to them.
Those who have this in their blood and bones regard their overwhelming fear and hatred of us as their great superpower, the basis of their ancient claims of vast privilege.
Everything for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
The modern Conservative is engaged in one of mankind's oldest philosophical pursuits—that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
John Kenneth Galbraith
They are certain that what they have done to everybody else is what their vengeful victims plan to do to them.
The really vicious nasties say that
- Blacks are the real racists. They want to enslave all Whites.
- Black men want all White women. Under Reparations, they will get them.
- Feminists just hate men.
- Immigrants are job stealing rapists and drug dealers.
- Scientists want to destroy all religion and morality.
- All Muslims support terrorism.
- The Gay Agenda is the greatest threat to America.
- The Deep State is the greatest threat to America.
They cannot believe that the Bible means any of what it says about the poor and powerless, or that any of us actually mean
- If thine enemy be hungry, feed him
- Love thy neighbor
- Unalienable rights
- Equal protection of the laws
- Liberty and Justice for all
Leviticus 19:33-34
When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.
Good News Thursday: The Best of Everything
Misterjaw without his pal Pally
It's true. We Democrats all want the best of everything for everybody, whether they don't like it, or not. (HT Misterjaw) It's not our fault that a raging but shrinking minority refuses our offer for fear that Those People will get some.
You see, that would mean admitting that the rest of us are better Christians than they are—even us Jews, atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Daoists, and followers of Santeria, Voudun, Obeah, and other Africa-based religions.
And so they feed each other tales of reverse discrimination, of Reparations entailing white slavery and expropriation, and delivering their women over to Black men, together with forcing "Gay Marriage" on them. They claim that refugees from Latin American and Middle Eastern disaster zones want to bring all that horror into the US rather than leave it behind and become patriotic, law-abiding Americans.
Examples
Wikipedia: List of Conspiracy Theories
A radically incomplete list, of course. It doesn't even mention our conspiracy to do everybody good.
Who believes in conspiracies? New research offers a theory
New research by Josh Hart, associate professor of psychology, suggests that people with certain personality traits and cognitive styles are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. The research was recently published in the Journal of Individual Differences.
"These people tend to be more suspicious, untrusting, eccentric, needing to feel special, with a tendency to regard the world as an inherently dangerous place," Hart said. "They are also more likely to detect meaningful patterns where they might not exist. People who are reluctant to believe in conspiracy theories tend to have the opposite qualities."
Needing to feel special. Entitled, even. Yeah, that'll do it.
Battling the 'homosexual agenda,' the hard-line religious right has made a series of incendiary claims. But they're just not true.
By this kind of logic, Trump's trade war is necessarily a success, because he did unto them first. Whatever might happen to Trump and Trumpists in the elections or the courts or his Senate impeachment trial, he did unto us first and hardest. He hates all the people that White Supremacists take as their enemies, and he hits them back first. The people whose greatest fear is losing privilege can't love him enough.
It's just like the South blaming Mr. Lincoln's War, the War of Northern Aggression, on that crafty tyrant Lincoln tricking them into shooting back at Fort Sumter first.
No, wait.
Well, I'm not claiming that any of this makes any kind of sense. Quite the contrary.
The mineral pyrite (/ˈpaɪraɪt/)[5], or iron pyrite, also known as fool's gold, is an iron sulfide with the chemical formula FeS2 (iron(II) disulfide). Pyrite is considered the most common of the sulfide minerals.
Pyrite's metallic luster and pale brass-yellow hue give it a superficial resemblance to gold, hence the well-known nickname of fool's gold.
Pyrite is usually found associated with other sulfides or oxides in quartz veins, sedimentary rock, and metamorphic rock, as well as in coal beds and as a replacement mineral in fossils, but has also been identified in the sclerites of scaly-foot gastropods.
Sclerites are hardened body parts, such as shells.
Chrysomallon squamiferum, common name the Scaly-foot Gastropod or Scaly-foot Snail, also known as Sea Pangolin[3], is a species of deep-sea hydrothermal-vent snail, a marine gastropod mollusc in the family Peltospiridae.[2] This vent-endemic gastropod is known only from deep-sea hydrothermal vents in the Indian Ocean, where it has been found at depths of about 2,400–2,800 m (1.5–1.7 mi). Chrysomallon squamiferum differs greatly from other deep-sea gastropods, even the closely related neomphalines.[4] In 2019, it was declared Endangered on the IUCN Red List[5], the first species to be listed as such due to risks from deep-sea mining of its vent habitat that also produce high-quality metal ores[6].
The shell is of a unique construction, with three layers; the outer layer consists of iron sulfides, the middle layer is equivalent to the organic periostracum found in other gastropods, and the innermost layer is made of aragonite. The foot is also unusual, being armored at the sides with iron-mineralised sclerites.
I will leave you to consider how this information can be applied to what have sometimes been called copper-bottomed Republicans.
In Conclusion
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.
Breathes there the man, by Sir Walter Scott
What a great word, pelf.
money, especially when gained in a dishonest or dishonorable way.
OED
See also pilfer. Or as Thorstein Veblen put it in The Theory of the Leisure Class, those great leisure-class virtues, force and fraud rather than honest toil.