#christian nationalism is not Christian

[socialjusticeinamerica]

[lazarusemma]

It doesn't matter if American Christians in power are "doing it wrong" or if actually, Jesus said things that contradict their proclaimed values. What matters is that religious groups should not be in a position to legislate their religious beliefs such that it applies to people not beholden to that religion.

In other words, the argument that "Jesus would hate White Christian Nationalism because the Bible shows he was a radical etc etc" doesn't matter because you are meeting them on their terms. If the Bible did say that Jesus hated abortion/poor people/socialism, it still would not be acceptable for Christians to legislate on that basis.

And yet cultural Christianity has brought us to a point where we'd rather pin the problem on a new subset of Christianity whose issue is that they're misinterpreting original doctrine. Y'all have been saying, “Well, they're not Real Christians” for centuries. This is not a problem of a new sect's formation. This is an issue of separation of church & state. In political/legal contexts, it should not matter what the Bible says or doesn't say, or how anyone interprets it, because the Bible has no place in a courtroom. It's literally that simple.

Edited to add: This "The Bible actually says" tactic can have its use in deprogramming individuals who may genuinely benefit from some recognition of their own cognitive dissonance. However, using this strategy as a "gotcha" against the phenomenon as a whole has negligible practical value.

[aestum]

(by Christian Garcia)

[just-a-pole-sir]

[callese]

Story - (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧YAY ✧ﾟ･: *ヽ(◕ヮ◕ヽ)

[odinsblog]

This is what taking Alabama’s asinine ruling on embryos to its natural conclusion looks like

[batboyblog]

Amongst some of the proposals for a second Trump Admin:

- end surrogacy

- end no fault divorce

- invoke the insurrection act to stop protests

- end sex education in schools

- stop policies that “subsidize single motherhood”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Uncle Sam paid to develop a cancer drug and now one guy will get to charge whatever he wants for it

Today (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Tomorrow (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

The argument for pharma patents: making new medicines is expensive, and medicines are how we save ourselves from cancer and other diseases. Therefore, we will award government-backed monopolies – patents – to pharma companies so they will have an incentive to invest their shareholders' capital in research.

There's plenty wrong with this argument. For one thing, pharma companies use their monopoly winnings to sell drugs, not invent drugs. For every dollar pharma spends on research, it spends three dollars on marketing:

https://www.bu.edu/sph/files/2015/05/Pharmaceutical-Marketing-and-Research-Spending-APHA-21-Oct-01.pdf

And that "R&D" isn't what you're thinking of, either. Most R&D spending goes to "evergreening" – coming up with minor variations on existing drugs in a bid to extend those patents for years or decades:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3680578/

Evergreening got a lot of attention recently when John Green rained down righteous fire upon Johnson & Johnson for their sneaky tricks to prevent poor people from accessing affordable TB meds, prompting this excellent explainer from the Arm and A Leg Podcast:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/john-green-part-1/

Another thing those monopoly profits are useful for: "pay for delay," where pharma companies bribe generic manufacturers not to make cheap versions of drugs whose patents have expired. Sure, it's illegal, but that doesn't stop 'em:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforcement/pay-delay

But it's their money, right? If they want to spend it on bribes or evergreening or marketing, at least some of that money is going into drugs that'll keep you and the people you love from enduring unimaginable pain or dying slowly and hard. Surely that warrants a patent.

Let's say it does. But what about when a pharma company gets a patent on a life-saving drug that the public paid to develop, test and refine? Publicly funded work is presumptively in the public domain, from NASA R&D to the photos that park rangers shoot of our national parks. The public pays to produce this work, so it should belong to the public, right?

That was the deal – until Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. Under Bayh-Dole, government-funded inventions are given away – to for-profit corporations, who get to charge us whatever they want to access the things we paid to make. The basis for this is a racist hoax called "The Tragedy Of the Commons," written by the eugenicist white supremacist Garrett Hardin and published by Science in 1968:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin invented an imaginary history in which "commons" – things owned and shared by a community – are inevitably overrun by selfish assholes, a fact that prompts nice people to also overrun these commons, so as to get some value out of them before they are gobbled up by people who read Garrett Hardin essays.

Hardin asserted this as a historical fact, but he cited no instances in which it happened. But when the Nobel-winning Elinor Ostrom actually went and looked at how commons are managed, she found that they are robust and stable over long time periods, and are a supremely efficient way of managing resources:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

The reason Hardin invented an imaginary history of tragic commons was to justify enclosure: moving things that the public owned and used freely into private ownership. Or, to put it more bluntly, Hardin invented a pseudoscientific justification for giving away parks, roads and schools to rich people and letting them charge us to use them.

To arrive at this fantasy, Hardin deployed one of the most important analytical tools of modern economics: introspection. As Ely Devons put it: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Hardin's hoax swept from the fringes to the center and became received wisdom – so much so that by 1980, Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole were able to pass a law that gave away publicly funded medicine to private firms, because otherwise these inventions would be "overgrazed" by greedy people, denying the public access to livesaving drugs.

On September 21, the NIH quietly published an announcement of one of these pharmaceutical transfers, buried in a list of 31 patent assignments in the Federal Register:

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2023-20487.pdf

The transfer in question is a patent for using T-cell receptors (TCRs) to treat solid tumors from HPV, one of the only patents for treating solid tumors with TCRs. The beneficiary of this transfer is Scarlet TCR, a Delaware company with no website or SEC filings and ownership shrouded in mystery:

https://www.bizapedia.com/de/scarlet-tcr-inc.html

One person who pays attention to this sort of thing is James Love, co-founder of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that has worked for decades for access to medicines. Love sleuthed out at least one person behind Scarlet TCR: Christian Hinrichs, a researcher at Rutgers who used to work at the NIH's National Cancer Institute:

https://www.nih.gov/research-training/lasker-clinical-research-scholars/tenured-former-scholars

Love presumes Hinrichs is the owner of Scarlet TCR, but neither the NIH nor Scarlet TCR nor Hinrichs will confirm it. Hinrichs was one of the publicly-funded researchers who worked on the new TCR therapy, for which he received a salary.

This new drug was paid for out of the public purse. The basic R&D – salaries for Hinrichs and his collaborators, as well as funding for their facilities – came out of NIH grants. So did the funding for the initial Phase I trial, and the ongoing large Phase II trial.

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, the proposed patent transfer will make Hinrichs a very wealthy man (Love calls it "generational wealth"):

https://prospect.org/health/2023-10-18-nih-how-to-become-billionaire-program/

This wealth will come by charging us – the public – to access a drug that we paid to produce. The public took all the risks to develop this drug, and Hinrichs stands to become a billionaire by reaping the rewards – rewards that will come by extracting fortunes from terrified people who don't want to die from tumors that are eating them alive.

The transfer of this patent is indefensible. The government isn't even waiting until the Phase II trials are complete to hand over our commonly owned science.

But there's still time. The NIH is about to get a new director, Monica Bertagnolli – Hinrichs's former boss – who will need to go before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for confirmation. Love is hoping that the confirmation hearing will present an opportunity to question Bertagnolli about the transfer – specifically, why the drug isn't being nonexclusively licensed to lots of drug companies who will have to compete to sell the cheapest possible version.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/19/solid-tumors/#t-cell-receptors

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[lionofchaeronea]

Angel, Tadeusz Popiel (1863-1913)

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Under His wings,” one lobbyist wrote in an email. “The Devil never sleeps,” another person sent in an email chain about the distinction between gender and sex. “I pray for the 2nd coming more and more.”

These missives are part of a trove of leaked emails between South Dakota GOP Rep. Fred Deutsch, anti-trans lobbyists, and other state lawmakers about anti-trans policies that are filled with language so deeply religious that, at times, the communications read like scripts from The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s the language, one expert told VICE News, of Christian nationalists who believe they’re engaging in a holy war.

The emails, which are available online for journalists and others to read and were first reported on by Mother Jones, include revelations about some of the ways that anti-trans lobbyists—and elected Republicans like Deutsch and Idaho Rep. Julianne Young—collaborate and strategize to write and endorse policies that directly target trans people on a national scale.

The repeated notes about “blessings” and “prayers,” as well as sign-offs like “God bless you” and “Under His wings,” proliferate throughout the emails, which frequently reference explicit religious motivations for targeting trans people.

[...]

“It is the language of Christian nationalism,” Thomas Lecaque, an associate professor of history at Grand View University focusing on apocalyptic religion and political violence. “It is the language of people who very much believe they are doing God’s will, and it is the language of people who very much believe that they are engaged in a holy war.”

[llyfrenfys]

See, I personally find this quest to find pagan/pre-Christian elements in Welsh/Irish literature quite unnerving - I don't know about anyone else.

There's something to be said about genuinely discovering pre-Christian elements in a narrative or story and that being where evidence and study has led you. But I see some people on this fruitless quest to find pagan elements in very Christian texts and sometimes it feels like if no pagan elements can be found, people start making stuff up out of whole cloth - and that can be very dangerous for already not-well known texts in minoritised languages!

There's already so much misinformation out there about Irish/Welsh texts and literature in general - so it hurts to see people carelessly adding to the misinformation either out of ignorance or lack of respect for the source material.

I promise you the source material being Christian doesn't ruin it - you can in fact, enjoy these myths without making them into something they're not!

[just-a-pole-sir]

[whatbigotspost]

Oh hey here’s a resource that says what we all already know: Christian nationalism is a rising threat in the US. It also covers how the 10% of Americans who are Christian Nationalists are pretty damn comfortable with fascist leadership.

I give this to you not because YOU need this proof, dear follower. But because your centrist cousin Beth or coworker Greg take NPR more seriously as a source than tumblr discourse…

So it’s here to source as needed, as you help them PAY ATTENTION TO THIS SHIT. Because we all really need to PAY ATTENTION TO THIS SHIT.

You’re PAYING ATTENTION TO THIS SHIT, right?

[odinsblog]

No Action, No Peace

Republican lawmakers in Tennessee have been accused of overt racism after expelling two Black Democrats from the state legislature in an act of unprecedented retaliation, for their role in a peaceful protest calling for gun control in the aftermath of a massacre at a school in Nashville.

The Republican-controlled legislature voted on Thursday to spare a white Democratic lawmaker who participated in the same protest.

Justin Jones, representative for Nashville, and Justin Pearson, who represented Memphis, gave rousing speeches in the chamber before the majority-white legislature voted to oust them, leaving tens of thousands of mostly Black and brown Tennessee residents without representation.

Justin Jones, 27, said he had “no regrets” and would “continue to speak up for Tennesseans who are demanding change”, in an interview with CNN on Friday,

“What happened yesterday was an attack on our democracy and overt racism. The nation got to see clearly what’s going on in Tennessee, that we don’t have democracy especially when it comes to Black and brown communities. This is what we have been challenging all session, a very toxic, racist work environment.”

Jones said Republican lawmakers were trying to take Tennessee backwards, and pointed to the state’s history of white supremacy, the birthplace of the ultra-violent Ku Klux Klan.

After the vote to expel them, Jones and Pearson, the two youngest Tennessee lawmakers and former community organisers, were greeted with rapturous chants and songs of resistance by a huge crowd outside the state capitol building. During the vote, the visitors’ gallery exploded in angry shouts of “Shame!” and “Fascists!”

Pearson, 27, told reporters that in carrying out the protest, the three had broken “a house rule, because we’re fighting for kids who are dying from gun violence and people in our communities who want to see an end to the proliferation of weaponry in our communities”.

He later tweeted: “We will not stop. We will not give up. We will continue working to build a nation that includes, not excludes, or unjustly expels. People power will always prevail!”

Gloria Johnson, the white Democrat spared expulsion by a one-vote margin, was asked by reporters about the split vote as she left the chamber on Thursday.

“I’ll answer your question; it might have to do with the color of our skin,” said Johnson, a retired teacher.

(continue reading)

[shinobicyrus]

This week, Supreme Court Justice Samuel "goes on expensive fishing trips with republican megadonors" Alito decided to use an official Supreme Court order to once again rail against same-sex marriage and the entire concept of safeguarding queer rights.

It was all in response to a case the Supreme Court declined to hear involving the dismissal of 3 potential jurors who claimed that they had been unfairly passed over (yes they're complaining about not being selected for jury duty) due to their religious beliefs. The case involved a woman who was suing her employer for sexual discrimination and retaliation after she started dating the ex-girlfriend of a male coworker. The 3 potential jurors that had not been selected had stated a belief to the court that homosexuality is a sin.

Rather than commenting on the obvious bias three potential jurors had against a party in the case, Alito instead spent five pages ranting about the sheer injustice that had been done to them. The case, he said, fully exemplified the "danger" that he'd predicted back in 2015, when the Supreme Court had legalized same sex marriage nationwide (in a slim 5-4 vote, I will remind):

"Namely, that Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homo-sexual conduct will be labeled as bigots and treated as such by the government."

Again this was a case in which a court ultimately decided that maybe people who believed that homosexuals were sinful shouldn't sit on a case in which one of the parties was one such "sinner." That sounds pretty fair to me; they didn't call them bigots, or evil, or throw them in jail. The court just decided that maybe they weren't a good fit for that particular case. For that particular plaintiff.

But no, a Supreme Court Justice, someone who is supposed to be a scholar of law, turned it in his mind into a government assault against "people of good will."

Never forget how narrow that marriage equality decision had been. Never forget Alito and Thomas are still salty about it 9 years later and have stated in public multiple times they want to revisit this decision. Just like Roe, just like Miranda Rights, just like the Voting Rights Act - they will gut civil rights and established precedent on the altar of their Originalism and make us beholden to the tenets of their personal Gods.

And they're doing it in public too, so they can signal to everyone who thinks like them to keep trying, you have friends here. You have a sure chance of victory.

At the very least, the lesbian with mad game won her case.