Haiku in the wild

That’s exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.

Yup. Same here. There’s not a printer in our house I haven’t fixed. But I do not reliably get good results with tearing out hardwired components and I don’t want to brick a new tv, so I figured I’d ask.

Yeah, it hit me hard when I first saw it. That’s how I still remembered it well enough to go back and find it. It was a gut punch.

That’s why I posted the definition. We’re not a community dedicated to religion, here in c/atheism, which is to say we may not be the same “make it up as you go along” types you seem more used to. There is an actual, formal meaning to the terms I linked, and you don’t get to exclude Christian nationalists from Christian nationalism.

When you have to rearrange formal, well-understood definitions of social constructs in order to come back at someone saying something you don’t like, it’s probably time for you to recognize you have no real argument, and are just trolling.

No one else is invested in defending it.

In a community dedicated to the discussion of atheism, no less.

You’re fooling yourself by refusing to see what you’d rather not see.

Christian nationalism is flourishing in Europe as much as it is in the US and the UK right now: look at that long list of European countries on the Wikipedia sidebar.

It’s a core part of the end-times fascism springing up all around us as an answer to the current world crises by trying to evade them altogether for some religious fantasy world.

Let’s just have a quick look at the definition of Christian nationalism, shall we? Because I guarantee you that all of these adherents of Christian nationalism not only consider themselves Christians, they consider themselves to be the BEST Christians:

Christian nationalism is an ideology that espouses a form of religious nationalism that focuses on promoting the Christian views of its followers in order to achieve prominence or dominance in political, cultural, and social life.

In countries with a state church, Christian nationalists seek to preserve the status of a Christian state.

Christian nationalism has been observed to overlap with antisemitism, racism and ethnonationalism.

And I can tell you they are none too friendly when it comes to LGBT and trans, either. Even the European ones.

YOU brought up hate, not me. It’s YOUR hate, and YOUR hate fantasy. Own it.

And lol you do not know your own church history at all. You were just certain I didn’t.

Hate preachers are found everywhere religion is, on every continent, and the American Colonial “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” hate preachers were just that era’s flavor.

For a brief history on that specific crowd, they came straight from Britain’s hate-filled Puritans, who came straight from Knox’s hate-filled iconoclastic crew in Scotland, and have moved forward though countless hate-filled Protestant church splits (because when they weren’t hating everyone else they were hating each other) right up to this present-day hate-filled American whateverthefuck it is now.

Go ahead, look it up. Jonathan Edwards, Congregationalists, Puritans, John Knox, the Protestant Reformation.

I genuinely dare you.

When you do, you will see for yourself that your own example of Christian hate goes both forward and backward in hate just as far as you’d like to take it, and across every continent and era. Go ahead, I studied Christian church history, both east and west, all the way from the Desert Fathers to Zwingli, from Chrysostom to Billy Graham. I pulled that second para off the top of my head. I KNOW the history. That’s why I’m not Christian anymore, and why you still are. So pull the other one.

As for the rest of your comment, you are free to define your deified hate fantasy however you like. It’s no longer my personal concern.

OP, how did you isolate and identify the chip from the rest of it: did you have a service manual, or just relevant experience that told you where to look? Also, was it hardwired, or was it something you could just detach?

I am definitely storing this away for future use, hence the questions. Right now I’ve got very old totally non-networked, non-exploitable sets, but I’m sure that will change some day. Hook a brother up so I know what to look for when I have to buy something new.

Ex-Christian here. Your points are mostly well taken; I just think you wildly misjudge how Christianity is seen from outside, and how these days its spokepersons are by default the worst-behaved among you because the “good” ones never get the mic, or don’t take it.

Atheists, including myself, come from the entire spectrum of religious experience, all the way from no religion whatsoever to that little church down in the backwoods of the South whose members eat, drink, and sleep religion, absolutely certain that they alone, and no one else, are going to be part of that 144,000 because not only did they not really read it, they don’t math.

There is no such denominator as “atheists being atheists” anywhere. I was deeply into it for thirty-five years and am even more deeply grateful every day I wake up that I am out of that mental jail. Someone else might have endured ongoing manipulation, cruelty, ostracization, or even outright abuse from religious groups. Someone else might be none of the above and just think we’re all a disparate group of loons that were either born wise (always atheist) or somehow came to our senses.

There is NO one size fits all. There is NO one kind of atheist. There is NO “atheists being atheists” sitting around talking about a hole in the universe where they see nothing and you see your god. THERE IS NO ATHEIST BRANDING.

This thread is quite mild compared to some I’ve seen. You seem to have the totality of atheism confused with what sounds like one person’s individual kneejerk reaction to their own bad case of Christianity. And you’ve dared to define for a group of atheists what atheism is. Selah.

This is excellent. Thank you. And – holy shit they are insane.

it sounds so weird and lowkey racist that so many people are focusing so much on the epstein files

I’m gonna just stop you right there, ml guy, and tell you bluntly that you lost me for good in the first sentence.

Don’t try to get it back. You and I will never find common ground on this.

Walk away. I know I am.

I’m sure they tried, and there has been a slow but steady drip of confirming information all along, like the headline today, confirming what many already know but just haven’t been able to prove yet.

But given as the order verifiably came from within the soldier’s command structure, and it took a couple of years just for the audio of it to leak, I am certain all those responsible are doing everything they can to obfuscate and deny.

TL;DR: It’ll come out, just like the Epstein shit here in the US, but it’s being similarly fought and blocked and misdirected and covered up every step of the way.

There is an interview with an IDF soldier who was on duty at the wall on the morning of October 7, who testified to the Knesset about how they got the order an hour before the attack to NOT go out for any reason until 9:00 am. So when the sirens went off around six they couldn’t go check it out like they normally do.

See the embedded X video; the whole thing is fire, and includes a recording of the order his unit was given to stay where they were, but at the 5:30 mark, right at the end when he’s saying why he wants answers about the order he was given, he says,

I’m telling you, for every little thing, we would jump to the fence, for every little thing.

He was doing that, gladly. They all were. And that’s exactly how you deal with false alarms: you treat every single one as the real thing. Until Bibi sends down orders that you don’t, anyway.

A handful of the Israeli soldiers who were on duty protecting the wall have been saying for over a year that they got conflicting orders that morning, how they were told to stand down, and of course it all then unfolded as it did.

Some of the soldiers were haunted by this and spoke out; I saw an interview involving one of those soldiers (in Hebrew, subbed in English) and it was undeniably real, just going by this guy struggling to get through talking about it. If I can find a link for it I’ll post it.

But no, this wasn’t just any regular morning. They do get regular breach warnings on the wall, but they have a protocol for that, which is one of the things these soldiers explained in the interview. They get a barrier notification or some other indication of breach, they notify their immediate superior, and that person kicks it up the chain while they go out to take a physical look at it. In this particular case, these soldiers were directly ordered not to go out before any notification was received. In his own words, he was serving in the Gaza area, and did not hesitate to respond to ANY sign that there was a breach. “For every little thing we’d jump the fence, every little thing.”

But that morning they got the order not to do so. About an hour after this order was passed down is when the killing started. This is why he is haunted. He genuinely feels like they could have stopped it, or at least slowed it down, and were prevented from doing so. He also personally lost a leg that day, and many of his friends.

EDITED TO ADD: I looked in my history and found the article. It’s not just an interview but has footage of the soldier testifying before the Knesset, Israel’s congress. The video is on X embedded in the article, and it includes the audio recording of the orders his unit were given that morning to stand down an hour BEFORE any breach notifications were received.

No “btw” about it. Massie DID support Trump. Massie also DID legitimately and tangibly act to support the victims of Jeffrey Epstein not just once, but throughout his term – and Trump DID fuck him up the ass for it, openly working to primary his seat out from under him.

You got a lot of laughy faces for something that isn’t funny, given that many innocent people have died because of this administration. At least Massie’s using his learned lesson to do something good. What are you doing?

As for me, the enemy of my enemy tends to be my friend. It’s not that hard to hold conflicting views about one person for most of us. I’m not shocked so much by your response as by your position; your inability to handle nuance and/or people that are not easily divisible into black and white/good or evil figures is not uncommon, just far more readily found among the locked-step Republicans you decry.

But this thing where you run around a thread screeching at anyone who doesn’t wholly reject one bad guy doing good things doesn’t get you fans. It gets you blocked. But I’m guessing you with your fourteen day old account already know that quite well.

That’s honestly so shocking I wonder what alterior motive he has.

Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna led the bipartisan effort to get EFTA I passed in 2025; in retaliation, Trump did everything in his power to get Massie primaried this year and succeeded, so now Massie is a lame duck with an even bigger grudge against Trump. Massie can do whatever he wants now, without fear of losing his already lost seat, until January when his replacement gets sworn in . . . IF Congress is allowed to come to work by Mike Johnson. Cue the long vacation.

Massie is also, depending on who you believe, also responsible for Mitch’s long unexplained absence: there are those who maintain the reason for absolute silence on McConnell’s absence is because had the Senate vacancy been confirmed, Massie – also from Kentucky, and also newly available because he’d recently lost his primary – would have grabbed it in a special election. (As McConnell declined to run for re-election, his seat will be filled in November’s regular election anyway.)

I’m not a fan of Republicans or Republican policies, but this is a rare one who is refusing to march in lockstep on the subject of Epstein. I don’t doubt he has a shitty record on unions and/or work reforms, all Rs do. But he’s one of only four Republicans with a spine who crossed the aisle to get EFTA I passed. This long Congressional break Massie is highlighting above, posted by OP, is a specific and direct result of Mike Johnson doing whatever he can to stop EFTA II from coming to a vote, not just run-of-the-mill Republican rich boy posturing.

He always does this bizarre renaming shit for a reason. It’s never random.

And while I’m open to hearing other reasons New Mexico in particular has raised his ire, I’m pretty sure this has to do with the Epstein files, and the New Mexico lawsuit taking place that alleges Todd Blanche’s DoJ is stonewalling NM’s attorney general from getting unredacted records that will allow New Mexico to thoroughly investigate Epstein’s ranch there, where Epstein’s acts against minors are known to have occurred.

New Mexico isn’t backing down. At the same time, Thomas Massie is forcing a discharge petition on passing EFTA II, which specifically gives states and state attorneys general legal right to access the completely unredacted records. The walls on his sexual crimes against children are closing in.

So he thinks this name change will shame them into submission, because it’s what would shame him. Dumb ass. Didn’t work for me; I just think he’s a freak that liked to rape and possibly kill children with his good buddy Epstein.

The reason Massie is calling this out is because he is getting the necessary signatures for a discharge petition (a process that allows a bill to get to the floor for a vote despite a Speaker’s blockade) going for the Epstein Files Transparency Act II, but Mike “I Protect Presidential Pedos” Johnson can’t actually let it come to the floor for a full vote because votes are public.

So Mike Johnson is keeping Congress out until the day after the midterms because he can’t let his delicate snowflakes go on record as either voting for EFTA II (which will make Trump very angry) or voting against it (which will make sentient beings with active consciences very angry).

It’s that simple. Yeah, Massie’s a Republican. But he’s literally trying to do the right thing here, and it’s working so well that Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, is choosing to fucking shut down Congress than let a vote on EFTA II come to the floor.

Yes. This shutdown of Congress really is all about protecting a pedo. This is not hyperbole. It is actually happening.