@Khabib Khanate What do you think Marjorie Taylor Green reflects on the social-political posture of the Republican Party? You're, of course, quite a bit more socially conservative than I am, so I'm interested to hear your thoughts.
When it broke last year or whenever it was that she had had a bunch of extramarital affairs and had been running around on her husband, it annoyed me. Politicians cheating on their spouses isn't anything new, from Trump to Ted Cruz to Bill Clinton to that Cal Cunningham moron whose indiscretions just cost the Democrats a Senate majority. Even Ilhan Omar, one of my favorite current legislators, committed adultery in some fashion or another. So I wasn't sure why it irked me. I came to the conclusion that it was because Green doesn't, as far as I can tell, even present a façade of moral conservatism to fill in her aggressive representation of
religious conservatism. She's openly the sort of personality that would be not at all ashamed to run around on a spouse, and that bold immorality is woven into her political identity and platform, which brands itself as fundamentally and aggressively
Christian. Everyone kind of guessed that the moral conservative angle was always just an arrowhead on reactionary politics (and that Christianity was just an ethnic vehicle), but a lot of us kind of hoped that was overly cynical and that salt-of-the-earth types would choose moral righteousness if it was divorced from higher-priority political considerations. I think that's pretty clearly not the case now, as MTG won election over a primary opponent who
did challenge her from a more traditionally moral conservative position. But MTG destroyed the field. Because it really is just about
power.
Basically, bottom line is that I'm now absolutely sure that American religious conservatives have no moral backbone. But I wonder whether that imputes across the world. Are religiously conservative rural Iranians purely using religious conservatism as a political and ethnic bludgeon?
Wow thanks! I admit the top level has gotten smaller over time. Sometimes you, Jack, Zankou, Deorum, and even essie lately make points that I assume make sense but I can't get to the core of myself.
Often because I just don't have the familiarity with or contextual understanding of the subject being discussed that I could.
Tbh, I assume you are smarter than all of those posters. Certainly me. Except maybe Zankou. But he's had posts that fall into that "over my head" category in the past. And I used to assume that meant that I was just too dumb or unfamiliar with the topic to understand, or that I wasn't trying hard enough. But the past few years have
really put a dent in my deference to perceived competence. I now lean toward thinking that it signals they're partly bullshitting, they don't understand their own message, or they aren't great at communicating.
For me, my area of expertise is so narrow that, if you aren't understanding something that I am saying outside of legal topics, I'm probably in one of the three groups above.