sacrifice

320 <div>
</div><div>see interlock isms, magical thinking, Zinn</div><div>
</div><div>sparked by</div><div>
</div><div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div style="font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>=</b></font></div><div style="font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>an 320</b></font></div><div style="font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div style="font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">aha: is there an end-times sacrificial aspect to this? see mega 3; the <b>mkt/GNP prosperity = good = God?!</b></font></div><div style="font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div style="font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>
</div><div><b>The ‘false choice’ between saving lives and saving the economy is a ‘profoundly stupid’ response to this pandemic: cultural historian</b></div><div>
</div><div>Written by Alex Henderson March 26, 2020</div><div>
</div><div><b>During a rant earlier this week, far-right talk radio host Glenn Beck argued that in order to save the economy, older Americans should return to work and abandon social distancing — even if they’re putting themselves at risk of dying from the coronavirus pandemic. It was an idiotic assertion even by Beck’s abysmal standards, but Beck is hardly alone in claiming that the United States must choose between social distancing and saving its economy. And journalist Siva Vaidhyanathan, in a March 26 op-ed for The Guardian, slams those on the far right who have been claiming that the U.S. must choose between physical health and economic health.</b></div><div>
</div><div>“Republican officials, conservative economists, unqualified pundits and even the 73-year-old president of the United States have suggested that the short-term economic pain we have just begun inflicting on ourselves to slow the spread of coronavirus might cost too much, just to save the lives of a few million of our most vulnerable neighbors,” notes Vaidhyanathan, who teaches media studies at the University of Virginia in addition to writing for The Guardian.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Jason Campbell</div><div>@JasonSCampbell</div><div>Glenn Beck says older Americans should return to work: “Even if we all get sick, I would rather die than kill the country”https://www.mediamatters.org/glenn-beck/glenn-beck-says-older-americans-should-return-work-even-if-we-all-get-sick-i-would …</div><div>
</div><div>Embedded video</div><div>
</div><div><b>Vaidhyanathan goes on to say those who are arguing that the U.S. must reduce or eliminate social distancing in order to save the economy are offering a “false choice” that is both dangerous and “profoundly stupid.” According to Vaidhyanathan, the short-term economic pain caused by social distancing will hurt the U.S. economy a lot less than the economic pain that will result if the death toll from COVID-19 is higher than it has to be.</b></div><div>
</div><div>“To set up a false choice between driving the economy into the ground while saving millions of lives or reviving the economy while sacrificing millions of lives ignores a core fact: the global economic depression unleashed by the deaths of millions in the United States, millions in Europe, millions in Asia, millions in India, millions in Mexico and millions in Brazil would be beyond our experience or imagination,” Vaidhyanathan writes. “No one would trade with anyone for years. Trade would grind to a halt because of mourning, fear of infection, society-wide trauma and social unrest.”</div><div>
</div><div><b>Moreover, Vaidhyanathan emphasizes, painting coronavirus as a disease that attacks older people exclusively ignores the fact that young people can die from it as well.</b></div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>“Positing this problem as a tradeoff between the economic interests of the young and the lifespan of the old is a terrible error</b>,” Vaidhyanathan explains. “As the U.S. Centers for Disease Control explains, those vulnerable to serious or fatal cases of the infection include not just the elderly, but anyone who is obese, diabetic, has high blood pressure, is HIV-positive, has undergone cancer treatment, suffers from asthma or smokes. Those factors are more common among poorer Americans as well as older Americans, and poor Americans occupy all age ranges.”</div><div>
</div><div>Vaidhyanathan concludes his op-ed by stressing that people of all ages have a stake in reducing the spread of COVID-19.</div><div>
</div><div>“This is not a matter of young v. old or even rich v. poor — although that would be more accurate and a more classic story of political conflict in America,” Vaidhyanathan writes. “Even those with none of the most dangerous conditions, who are as young as 12, could succumb to this powerful virus. It’s all of us v. all of us. Or, if we choose, all of us for all of us.”</div><div>
</div></div><div style="font-size: medium;"><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> free mkt FUNDAMENTALISM:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div style="font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/its-time-to-reject-the-gods-of-commerce-america-is-a-society-not-an-economy/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/its-time-to-reject-the-gods-of-commerce-america-is-a-society-not-an-economy/</font></a></div><div style="font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">david m</font></div><div style="font-size: small;"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The “economy” does not exist. Human beings do.</b> What nearly everyone understands, except Republican officials and economists on television, is that there is no singular, shared experience within one large-scale economic system. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Leilani Jordan, a 27-year-old woman with a developmental disability, who worked as a grocery clerk at a satellite store of Giant Food — a chain throughout three states — <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8217469/Grocery-clerk-died-COVID-19-continued-going-work-20-64-final-paycheck.html" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">died from the coronavirus infection she contracted</a> when earning her final paycheck. That check was for $20.64. She worked without a facial mask, and lived in an entirely different universe than Nick Bertram, Giant’s CEO, who collects a salary in the high six figures.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The majority of Americans have less than $500 in savings. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">They simply do not experience the same “economy” as <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/14/politics/trey-hollingsworth-coronavirus/index.html" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Rep. Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana</a>, a Republican who described Americans dying as a result of “opening the economy” as the “lesser of two evils.” Hollingsworth is the 12th-richest member of Congress, with a net worth of $50.1 million, most of it coming from his father — the “silent partner” in Hollingsworth’s investment firm.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Americans as disparate as Trey Hollingsworth and Leilani Jordan, whose death the congressman would presumably regard as collateral damage, might not share an economy in any substantive sense, but they do share a society.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The ideological disease that cripples the United States is the belief that society does not exist beyond its commercial activity. President Calvin Coolidge famously remarked that “the business of America is business,” while Joel Millman, a former<b> reporter for the Wall Street Journal, once wrote, “America is not a nation … America is a market.”</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Millman was making a neutral, analytical observation, but a similar thesis has guided America’s long succession of disastrous policy decisions that</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> <b>treat the “economy” — meaning profits for corporations and their owners or shareholders — as sacred.</b> </span>An entire set of religious assumptions follow, most significantly that people like Jordan are martyrs for the God of profit. <b>Their deaths are acceptable losses in the name of God and country, which mutate together into the bloodless idol of commerce.</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Human sacrifices at the altar of the idol have become almost commonplace.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pollution-poverty-people-color-asthma-inner-city/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Millions of children of color in the inner cities develop asthma</a> and suffer from other respiratory problems because they breathe heavily polluted air; 26,000 Americans die every year <a href="https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/newsletter-article/health-care-advocates-say-thousands-die-due-lack-insurance" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">because they lack health insurance</a>; public health experts have concluded that poverty — and the lack of robust social services — <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/poverty-kills-better-poli_b_908795" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">causes tens of thousands of deaths a year</a>.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The fatalities caused by environmental injustice, denial of health care and outright deprivation never provoke widespread scrutiny because, unlike the daily stock market report or reports of marginal GDP growth rates, they are largely out of sight and out of mind.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the United States to confront its market-based theology.</span> Americans now must consider whether their country is anything more than an engine of commerce, and whether human life has value separate from a financial calculus. For the first time in most of our lifetimes, the question of priorities is direct and implicates almost everyone....</font></p></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Moloch!</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/restart-the-economy-is-a-prayer-to-a-conservative-god-who-demands-human-sacrifice/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/restart-the-economy-is-a-prayer-to-a-conservative-god-who-demands-human-sacrifice/</font></a></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">‘Restart the Economy’ is a prayer to a conservative God who demands human sacrifice</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">GDANSK, POLAND - APRIL 10, 2009: Anonymous actors play Mystery of the Passion of Jesus Christ. April 10, 2009. Gdansk, Poland.]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Stephen Young / Religion Dispatches March 25, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to classic interpretations of the Jewish and Christian Bibles, a Canaanite deity named Moloch demanded the sacrifice of children. There is a long history of writing about this bloodthirsty god spanning the ancient world to John Milton’s Paradise Lost to Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” to modern social commentators. One recurring point is that the depravity of Moloch was reflected in his insatiable lust for innocent flesh. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>How could anyone worship such a monster? </b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Readers have drawn further connections: human sacrifice marks not only Moloch as evil, but also the population who offers their children to him. This is the biblical justification given for why Israelites should exterminate Canaanites, the worship of their gods, and their customs from the Promised Land. </b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But although the prevalent understanding of Moloch as a rapacious child-consuming god falls short in the minds of many scholars,* some deep truth remains. We should absolutely judge a deity by the offerings and piety it demands! Furthermore, what people are willing to sacrifice for their god should likewise be a commentary on their deepest values. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Let us call this an ethics of religious responsibility: we are responsible for the deities we follow. </b>Many people tacitly accept this point when they opine that folks who follow other gods, or at least not their God, deserve to burn in hell. So, if one’s deity demands things like human sacrifice, genocide, or partiality to rapists and autocrats, then this should give some pause. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a society founded partly on the concept of religious liberty people can, in theory, choose to worship such deities. But in a society also founded on the concept of free speech, shouldn’t people who follow these gods at least have to answer uncomfortable questions about their sociopathic deities? Why should it be bad manners to question people who worship such gods instead of bad manners to promote those gods in the first place?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You can see where this is going. At the moment an influential contingent of conservative leaders and commentators are advocating that we put a stop to measures meant to suppress the spread of COVID-19. Most of these measures fall under the category of social distancing, which has deeply impacted  corporations by restricting us from our usual purchasing and employment movements. Combined with broader uncertainties brought by the pandemic, the Stock Market has likewise been tanking. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The developing cry to end social distancing predictably centers on reversing these obstacles. “Restart the economy” is becoming a refrain. President Trump has already tweeted in this direction: “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.” </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 23, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>His top economic advisor, Larry Kudlow, has spelled-out things further: “The economic cost to individuals is just too great … we’re going to have to make some difficult trade-offs.”</b> And one conservative talk radio host went still further, declaring that “If given the choice between dying and plunging the country I love into a Great Depression, I’d happily die.” Better for a whole lot more people to suffer and die than for the free market to be stifled any further. It’s the economy, stupid!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Given the prevalence of religious voices among support for Trump, perhaps we could think about our situation with the ethics of religious responsibly as outlined above. A simple translation of “restart the economy” suggests itself: the economy or the free market is God. It rules over and defines reality. And this God demands human sacrifice to rescue us from Coronavirus.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Those who know our history will not be surprised. The God of the Economy has long subsisted on human sacrifice in ways that reveal his character. When the Cotton Gin was invented, enslavers needed to increase cotton picking output to feed the machines in order to realize their profits. As Edward Baptist has vividly documented, they didn’t hire more workers or even invest in the large scale acquisition of additional slaves. Instead they intensified their system of slavery into an even more brutal form that exponentially multiplied suffering as a technology to increase production. The God of the Economy got his fill of human flesh.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">If the blood of human sacrifice was the seed of the free market, its god remains hungry as ever today. As historians such as Kim Phillips-Fein, Kevin Kruse, and Lawrence Glickman have shown, <b>wealthy followers of this god have been successfully proclaiming their gospel as the exclusive path to freedom for generations. </b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Their message now seems obvious and their god feels like the only option. These disciples are sick of losing wealth to social distancing, even if it saves lives. They want their economy of the pre-Coronavirus status quo back. It’s the economy that made them rich. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The surprise is not that this god’s followers are eager to offer human sacrifices, but that anyone is still shocked they would offer the rest of us to him or try to sell us on this approach by warning against the “the false god of ‘saving lives.’” </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We should, at the least, stop tiptoeing around this god’s followers as though it’s bad manners to identify him as evil or un-civil to make them own that he is the real Moloch. And if their economy is Moloch, why don’t we demand that our leaders serve a new god, or replace them with leaders who aren’t Moloch’s disciples? Surely there are gods to whom we can turn now whose values are health and human flourishing as opposed to bloodthirsty greed. It doesn’t take a biblical scholar to figure it out.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> As biblical scholars such as Francesca Stavrakopoulou and Heath Dewrell have argued, there was no Moloch deity in ancient Canaan. The biblical passages traditionally thought to name him instead refer to a kind of sacrificial offering (mlk). Biblical writers delegitimized this offering—and the idea that their God had commanded it!—by rendering it foreign and evil. Ancient interpreters transformed the mlk offering into a depraved foreign deity, Moloch or Molech. And readers have been off to the races ever since.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">links</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> realize their profits. </span><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=dSrXCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA111&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">As Edward Baptist has vividly documented</a><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, they didn’t hire more workers or even invest in the large scale acquisition of additional slaves. Instead they intensified their system of slavery into an even more brutal form that exponentially multiplied suffering as a technology to increase production. The God of the Economy got his fill of human flesh.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">If the blood of human sacrifice was the seed of the free market, its god remains hungry as ever today. As historians such as </span><a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Invisible_Hands_The_Businessmen_s_Crusad.html?id=g0tCwOhyl7MC" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Kim Phillips-Fein</a><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, </span><a href="https://www.npr.org/2015/03/30/396365659/how-one-nation-didnt-become-under-god-until-the-50s-religious-revival" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Kevin Kruse</a><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, and </span><a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Free_Enterprise.html?id=L6mxwgEACAAJ" target="_blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Lawrence Glickman</a><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> have shown, wealthy followers of this god have been successfully proclaiming their gospel as the exclusive path to freedom for generation</span></font></p></div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===</font></p></div>