This shouldn’t be surprising. There are only so many ways to productively arrange organic compounds, and convergent evolution is well-known.
Given similar environmental pressure, immeasurable responses will be tried, and the most effective ones will self-select.
Sorry to keep clarifying, but I want to make sure people understand the depth of this threat.
The only reason you could credibly claim Stone isn’t a dominionist is because it didn’t quite exist when he was criming for Nixon.
He was intimately involved with the founders of dominionism, and worked very closely with all those same people during its rise over the past few decades, and now works so closely with its adherents, they could all be a Cronenberg monster.
e: nevermind, I get your point. He’s a mercenary, and I agree, but his position as a mercenary specifically for dominionists makes him especially dangerous, IMO.
No, I mean the opposite.
Stone may not have been stanning for dominionism under Nixon (it was only a twinkle in their eye at that point), but Stone walks, talks, and quacks like a dominionist.
Is he an opportunist or a believer? I can’t claim to know, but he says dominionist things, does dominionist things, and surrounds himself almost exclusively by dominionists, so he’s a de facto dominionist.
e: I really should learn to spell, and also use words
Yes, thank you! There are a few others, and these aren’t disparate groups. They all work together.
e: The membership Venn diagram is often a circle.
That’s fair. It’s hard to know what a snake actually thinks. He’s been sliming for their cause since Nixon*, though, so this may be a distinction without a difference.
e: my autocorrect hates me.
FWIW, he did the same thing with those trapped Thai kids in the cave. Then claimed sour grapes and called the real rescuer a paedophile. This is his MO.
But they’re so cute!.🥺
No, see, that’s how they GET YOU!
One place to start is this article from the Stanford Encyclopaedia on Philosophy: Conservatism.
It’s a lengthy read, but enlightening.
One highlight from the summary:
Most commentators regard conservatism as a modern political philosophy, even though it exhibits the standpoint of paternalism or authority, rather than freedom. As John Gray writes, while liberalism is the dominant political theory of the modern age, conservatism, despite appealing to tradition, is also a response to the challenges of modernity. The roots of all three standpoints “may be traced back to the crises of seventeenth-century England, but [they] crystallised into definite traditions of thought and practice only [after] the French Revolution” (Gray 1995: 78)
I recommend reading the sources linked in that article, as well.
eta: It’s worth noting that societies worldwide often see a resurgence in conservatism in response to social change, crises, and civil rights movements, which are without fail a fear response to threats to the social hierarchy. We can see this in real time.
Tramp stamps are usually cringe, but this is just awesome.
The King of Unforced Errors strikes again.
e: oh shit, it got me. Didn’t see the community, and this is so trump. Ha. I ate the onion.
Nanu nanu.
Every single word of this is horribly disappointing. Even words like ‘the’ and ‘an’ are ashamed to be associated with this story. Jesus wept.
Here’s another recent article (2022) that goes into more detail: Who are the Dominionists backing conservative candidates?.
And another: Dominionism Rising: A Theocratic Movement Hiding in Plain Sight
Other notable dominionists:
Ron DeSantis
Ted Cruz
Kari Lake
Amy Coney-Barrett
Brett Kavanaugh
Mike Johnson
Mike Pence
Roger Stone
Tucker Carlson
Bill Barr
Pretty much everyone in Trump’s orbit.
There are hundreds more. This should scare the shit out of all of us.
Here’s the Wikipedia article on Christian Dominionism.
This is not fringe. It’s mainstream.
e: names
She’s close. Trump isn’t the disease, though, he’s a symptom. The disease is Christian nationalism, and it’s been festering far longer than Trump has been on the national scene.
The disease lies in the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and a few other groups hell-bent on turning the US into a theocracy. They’ve been working on this for a very long time, and have been testing the fences for decades, like velociraptors, only making their move now they’ve found all the weaknesses they need to succeed.
It worries me how focussed people are on the threat trump poses, because even if he dropped dead today, it would only be a temporary inconvenience to these dominionists who have infiltrated nearly every facet of the US government. They will not stop if trump disappears, or if Harris is elected.
Please, watch The Family documentary. You’ll be amazed and likely sick at how deeply they’ve embedded themselves.
It definitely did. I remember it vividly (I was alive back then). And I’m talking about the premium services, specifically (e: which was the point of my comparison: the premium paid services back then advertised no-ad service, then included ads, just like the premium streaming services are doing today).
Here’s an article from the NYT in 1981 on the topic:
WILL CABLE TV BE INVADED BY COMMERCIALS?
e: a quote:
Indeed, even pay television, once assumed to be secure from commercial interests, is attracting some attention as a potential vehicle for advertising. Admittedly, such leading pay cable services as Home Box Office and Showtime, whose programming consists primarily of theatrically released films, staunchly maintain that they will never accept advertising.
This has been studied, and the ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaires’ idea is actually wrong.
The real reason is because some people (especially conservatives, because it’s a core part of conservative ideology) believe that in order for society to work, a hierarchy must be maintained wherein the ‘deserving’ are at the top, and everyone else is in their rightful place. Any threat to the natural hierarchy will undo the societal order and bring chaos and carnage.
This is why Obama becoming president was such an affront – because his presence outside his ‘rightful place’ was an existential threat to the natural order.
This belief has its roots way back when feudalism began to fail and the moneyed classes needed to find a new way to retain their power – both capitalism and conservatism were born at that time, with ideologies shifting from birthright to ‘earned’ status, which enshrined the haves and have-nots into literally sacred structures of meritocracy and social darwinism, and colonialists specifically fostered strict adherence to the social order. It became ingrained culturally that adhering to your station, whatever it is, is crucial for society to function. That there’s honour in being a cog in the machine, and that not accepting your lot in life is a danger to everyone. (eta: this is mostly subconscious, but you can see it if you ask ‘why’ enough times of someone who idolises Musk, for example. You’ll eventually whittle them down to these themes.)
That’s a nutshell view of a complicated topic, but these people don’t believe they’ll strike gold one day. They believe people who are rich deserve to be treated as kings, for the same reason monarchist peasants did.
Classy, as always.
Where’s Musk’s donation? Oh, right, empathy is for wokies.
A: they’re betting most people will accept it, and they’re right. The same thing happened in the early 80s when cable television advertised themselves as the pay-for-ad-free service, then started sneaking ads in. People complained, sure, but we all saw the outcome. They got away with it.
B: Greed, capitalism, and fuck you.
Upper management deserves everything it gets. Middle management is often underpaid and expected to do all the jobs of their own plus their superiors.
Some *organisational tasks will always be needed. Middle management does that plus fielding some amount of customer service, plus a lot of what upper management takes credit for.
The system is fucked, but we shouldn’t let the people doing barely anything to earn their yachts turn us against those grinding their own bones to glue the grind-house together.
(No, I’m not a middle-manager.)