Are Right-Wingers Basically Just Lonely Old Guys?

A Facebook friend expressed the opinion that many of Trump's fanatical supporters are lonely old white men with no friends, no support group. I think he may be on to something, and I think it may apply to more than just Trump's hard-core base.

I just spoke to my brother today. Yesterday I'd left him a voicemail saying it was about time for "our monthly time to disagree about... everything." My brother is not part of Trump's hard-core base; he belongs to the part of Trump's support that hates him, but still supports him because they hate Democrats much more (that group probably also include many Republican Senators and Congresspeople). My brother's a libertarian loonie who believes in worldwide conspiracies of Evil being run by Hillary, Soros, Israel and The Media.

So I screamed at him for a half hour or so on the phone, telling him repeatedly that he has his head up his ass and doesn't know shit about politics, history or culture, then he said he had to go and I told him I loved him and to take care, and sorry about the yelling.

And most likely, in November we'll do it again.

Actually we don't disagree about absolutely everything. He's a scientist and doesn't deny that humans cause global warming and need to stop it. I repeatedly make a point of acknowledging that he is well-informed about science, technology, engineering and math, highly educated in those areas. He agrees with me that Trump is both an idiot and a career criminal. We both hate Elon Musk, although probably not for identical reasons.

Anyway, if my friend is on to something here, if there's a basic link between right-wing lunacy and loneliness, maybe we all should be calling our crazy right-wing relatives more often, and hugging them more and reminding them more often that we love them even though their heads are completely up their asses.

Maybe even scream at them a little bit less, although I'm not totally sure about that part. That would be asking a lot.

An Unexpected Gain

It happens often that we try strenuously to do one thing, and fail, but without realizing it we have begun to succeed at something else.
There is no evidence that Constantine the Greatever so much as thought of altering a word of the Bible --but of course there are powerful minds among us who will never be slowed down by such puny considerations as evidence. They have arrived at such conclusions as that the Bible as we know it is a product of the council of Nicea in AD 325 -- yes, sometimes they get the date of Nicea right -- and that its present form was decided there by Constantine, or by Constantine and Pope Sylvester,nevermind that Sylvester wasn't at Nicea, there you go with your "facts" and evidence again, they have arrived at such conclusions, and, mighty minds that they are, if I disagree with them they leap with startling speed to further conclusions such as that I am a Christian, perhaps because they assume that anyone who disagrees with them about anything is a Christian, perhaps because they have heard some of the things I assert said by Catholics and they assume that everything every Catholic says is a lie, who can say? who can keep up with such minds?
I have tried and failed to bring evidence into my discussions with these folks, failed miserably to interest them in such things as the primary sources for Niceaand manuscripts of Bible passages copies before and after Niceaand the total lack of evidence for their theories contained in such documents but again, evidence schmevidence.
Okay, so it really looks like I can't talk to some people about the development of the text of the Bible, but without realizing it I had already begun to investigate the development of some paranoid conspiracy theories involving Constantine and the Catholic Church. Yes, it is a bit of an anachronism to speak of a Catholic Church existing distinct from an Orthodox Church as early as Constantine, and yes, it is more than somewhat ridiculous to assume that, if such a distinction had existed, Constantine would have favored the Church in far-off Rome to the one based in the new capital he had founded and named after himself. The absurdities are many and delicious here. Does the theory of Constantine and Sylvester as Biblical authors and/or editors have anything to do with the Donation of Constantine?Perhaps vast numbers of Catholics and now anti-Catholics are still busily drawing conclusions based on not knowing that the Donation is a forgery. Or maybe it's just these anti-Catholic paranoid moronic conspiracy theorists.
How many people think Charlemagne was the guy from the Song of Roland,of superhuman size and strength with extremely long flowing white hair and beard? How many think he was French? How many think the Franks were French right from the beginning, since before Merovich? How many think Charlemagne and King Arthur were pals and that King Philip murdered the Templars for the Grail and that Jesus was an ancestor of the Merovingians who of course were all as French as could be and that Leonardo was a Templar and that that was why he was buds with the King of France and that the entire Bible, Old and New Testament, was originally written in French by Constantine and Pope Sylvester, two Frenchman, alors! and only later translated into Hebrew and Greek?
Maybe these people have horrible paranoid fears of Frenchmen and see them everywhere. Maybe they saw me exercising my very limited skills in French once and that's why they think I've only been pretending for years to be an outspoken atheist, all the better to ensnare them with my horrible French Catholic treachery.
I've actually gained a little bit of sympathy for these kooks. It's fun leaping pell-mell from one conclusion to the next, even if I do have a little bit of evidence on my side.

Let's All Try Not to Get Blowed Up Real Good

Recently I started reading in the Religion section of the Huffington Post, and participating in the debates in the readers' comments area of the same. Just today I read this post entitled "Nuclear Theolgy," By H.E. Dr. Mustafa Cerić, The Grand Mufti of Bosnia and Herzegovina; Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, General Secretary National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA; and Dr. William F. Vendley, Secretary General of Religions for Peace. Their essay champions UN enforcement of the Nuclear Test Ban treaty, alrightythen, and bases this position in a very traditionalistic reading of the Judaeo-Christo-Islamic tradition, hey wait a minute!

As I have already mentioned in the comments section at HuffPo: the essay by the three eminent Doctors refers over and over to God's authority, supposedly offended by nuclear arms, environmental disaster, human poverty and the like; an appeal to God is hardly necessary to get people to oppose nuclear proliferation, this opposition having already been pretty much guaranteed years ago by scientists led by Carl Sagan; nuclear weapons, pollution, global warming and religion are all man-made, and while controlling the first three are essential to maintaining human life, and keeping the last alive is essential to maintaining the way of life of the authors and their colleagues, for the survival and well-being of the rest of us it's not a high priority, to put it mildly.

A little while later I was thinking about the movie Armageddon,and specifically about the montages of various scenes of humanity in that movie, which in their production style, with lots of very high-definition slow-motion shots of pastoral scenes, and their voice-overs, often the voice of a fictional US President, remind me very much of the sort of commercials one sees on Sunday on American network television, commercials where you don't know until the end, when a company logo finally appears onscreen, and the voice-over sonorously intones the company's name and a completely vague feel-good slogan like "protecting tomorrow" or "experts providing solutions," what exactly is being advertised.

Except that even then you don't know what the company does. The commercial didn't give you a clue, it just lulled you into a warm, fuzzy mood, and then perhaps later you learn from another source that, YAAAGHAH!! the company makes nerve gas or is a hedge fund. It might not be completely farfetched to suppose that those Sunday commercials, the ones that look like they cost a lot to make, with closeups of children's freckled faces followed by shots of idyllic meadows followed by shots of well-dressed business people nodding sagely in slow-motion in boardrooms with rain-spattered glass walls overlooking cityscapes at sunset, Ah say Ah say it might not be so farfetched to conclude that those commercials are above all camouflage. Put the commercials in front of millions of viewers of political-discussion shows and golf, get those viewers to associate the company's name with vague pleasant sleepy thoughts and not with quasi-legal hostile takeovers and huge defense contracts.

And then, perhaps strangely, I began to connect the HuffPo essay about nuclear proliferation being an affront to God with the expensive say-nothing commercials. Both are the products of movers and shakers. It's not so odd to think that a director of AIG or TRW or ADM might rub elbows outside the UN with a PhD or DD or three representing God's authority, while inside the NPT was discussed.

Perhaps the Doctors' essays are meant to do the same as the slick commercials -- and slick movies like Armageddon too, sure -- to distract. In this essay which champions non-proliferation -- who does not favor non-proliferation? You know who does not: people who make fatass bucks from proliferation, is who -- Ah say in this entire essay I did not notice one mention of the idea of the elimination of nukes.

It's very hard to know what is really going on in this world. It's hard to know who's sincere, who might be sincere but still be supported by the shadiest, least sincere and most scary sorts of people, because their happy horseshit and dogged superstition keep us busy.