More than a policy error

People have really gotten on my nerves lately with their self righteous shaming and blaming and quoting the Elie Wiesel silence quote after thirty years of squelching evangelicals but I am horrified about the Mexican children being separated from their parents and probably siblings with a strong likelihood of never being reunited and I do think that Trump should be impeached and along with others jailed for child abuse.

A soccer goal post

   This is a short post about something I am not really mad about but thought I would share a suspicion.  It has to do with soccer and something that I think would make the game more fun and interesting. My theory is that regulation soccer fields should be smaller. I think that the usual soccer scores are a little bit too low and people have to run too far but no one wants to say it because it would be like admitting that they were too tired or not great athletes.  That is just a theory that I have, and everyone can watch the world cup games and say that I do not know anything, but I actually did play indoor soccer one time and it was really fun, and it was fun because it was a smaller space and more time was spent aiming the ball instead of trying to transport the ball and it went all over the place constantly so everyone was always actually playing soccer and not doing long distance running in disguise.

    This also reminds me to share an idea for a game that me and some friends made up in middle school.  The game is called Ten-vol-soc.  You play it on the tennis court and you use volleyball rules but kick the ball across the net and try not to let it hit the ground.  It really is fun and I think people could become really good at it and eventually use the Wimbleton courts for world championships.

Desperate Times

    It may not be necessary to write this post since I have already mentioned this topic enough for other people to crack the code and solve the obvious problem, but I did decide to go ahead and say a little more about the rent gouging problems in this country.  A lot of people want to talk about gentrification and say that the "real" real estate problem is the bad white people taking over all the neighborhoods.  But I think it would be more honest and more productive to place the blame where it really belongs, which is on the apartment and real estate people who are gouging everyone.  I think that the faster that people realize that the rent gouging doesn't really help white people either and hurts pretty much everyone in not just individual neighborhoods but the whole country, then the faster we can prevent the behaviors that are actually wrong and our whole society can recover.

    And I want to add my main idea, which some people will think is horribly ignorant communism.  But I think that really, I am right when I say we need to question our whole system of letting people in power charge everyone rent that eventually exceeds the value of the property.  I think that there is a strong case that it is exploitation by nature and should not be allowed.  I will even say the most drastic idea for a solution that I have, which is that a lot of the apartments people pay rent for might need to all of a sudden be condos with their accumulated rent totals counting as mortgage and the ownership being transferred to the tenants.  People would kill over this and they think it is the foundation of American capitalism that I am attacking, but I think they might unexpectedly be wrong about that.  I think that justice is the true foundation of a profitable economy, and the damage that greedy people have done to our country does deserve a punitive act that could include property seizure.  And who better to hand the property to than the people who actually have paid for it.

"When lives are shattered, brains should be splattered."

I was recently at a conference where a speaker mentioned that Christian writers needed to have a response to the "Me Too movement."  I think he was an editor, so it actually is appropriate for him to be talking about it in a writing context.  And it probably is good and faithful for Christians to be on the lookout for some "gospel need" in any discussions that become kind of macro and national.  But I also felt strongly that the actual issues of most of the "me too" articles and essays from abuse survivors should not be minimized into just some kind of arbitrary current events topic that Christianity can be mechanically plugged into, and even a hint of viewing it that way is exactly the reason people wouldn't want to hear that editor's message, and is also part of why the abuse in question has taken over our country.  The Christian response to millions of people saying they have been sexually abused should include an immediate effort to kill the rapists.  That is the situation. We have a nation of pigs and rapists and we should be standing up to all of it in every context.  And when things are criminal, then there should be a use of force to stop the abuse.

The Stench of Liberal Hypocrisy

            It is normal and good for people to not want to be Nazis and to not want to be the bad people in the old civil rights photos.  But when fearfully avoiding "the wrong side of history" is the only moral compass someone has, and they want to prove their goodness by acting out another holocaust using real people as props, then I think they have to be suspected of contributing to the problems themselves. 

            People in the media still seem to be operating under a "trust us, we're the good guys," delusion as they report on all the flailing and failing republican efforts to "secure the border." But I am not convinced of the supposed media goodness.  I have thought since even before Trump got elected that the promotion that propelled him to power was directly and deliberately from the New York Times and a few other news sources who wanted to seem like heroes.  That is not to say that they genuinely like him. I do think they think he is a bad leader, but I think they also have always wanted him to represent the republicans and not just the republicans but really the Christians in this country, because it serves their interests of trying to squelch us and even destroy us.  I don't think it could have been more obvious during the elections, and if anyone thinks I am wrong, I would be interested in seeing even one example of any news story about any of the other Republican primary candidates.  The fact is that it was the media's strategy to make Trump the candidate because they thought everyone would vote for Hillary instead.  But a lot of people really don't want to pay for 40 million abortions, so they reluctantly voted for Trump.  And instead of admitting that their plan went wrong, The New York TImes immediately started diverting everyone's attention to the possibility of some kind of Russian interference in the election, when really, everyone remembers what happened.  The debates were horrible and Clinton got taken down by an abortion question.  And then the Republican candidate that the media chose for everyone actually won.  And what is left to do than for all the liars to try to prove themselves innocent by doing everything they can to insure that their only historical references: the Civil Rights movement and the Holocaust, actually play out with them starring as the heroes who denounce Trump.  And another interesting thing about this is that even with literally thousands of headlines selling the liberal narrative, everyone, including the liberals, knows that what I am saying is true.  And they also know that we do have immigration problems that need to be solved.  But why solve anything when we can spend all our free time playing nerdy little history games with all the people we can control because of their poverty that is largely due to our same old problems not getting solved, because it is such valuable material to use for the liberal's reputations in all their little photos that they wish were more iconic than their own dishonesty which is now an indisputable part of history.

Contracts aren't everything.

      People in our society make a big deal out of agreements, especially when it comes to wages.  A lot of people believe that if you agree to work for a certain wage, it automatically means it is fair.  But contracts aren't all there is to justice.  Justice also means that people get paid what they deserve in the first place, and that they keep what they deserve to keep.  Work value, effort, competition, and especially profits might all be factors, and an agreement doesn't mean that no one is being scammed.

       It is actually very dangerous for too many legal decisions and societal transactions to be based only on contracts and agreements.  People can be tricked, exploited, and leveraged into any kind of abuse with agreements when there are no other protections.  And even though everyone has gotten used to being expected to "read the fine print" and letting signatures be the last word on any matter, I think that more and more people will soon realize the limitations of legal paperwork without the foundation of true justice behind it.

      All the long and overwhelming "terms and conditions" that people have to sign before using any technology are one example of the risks that come with forcing people to agree to things. We all know that most people not only don't but probably can't read all the terms and conditions for almost every service that grants us access to most public participation and trade, and we all know that the personal information that is supposedly now the property of people who got us to click certain boxes gives complete strangers an absurd and dangerous amount of power over all kinds of people, including vulnerable populations like children. At some point, the agreements will have to be over-rided by more important factors and logic.

      Here is a more specific example: I signed up to pay my rent from an automated system because the property management company kept pretending not to get my checks.  When I signed up, I had to agree to their terms, and one of the terms said that they were not responsible for lost money even if the reason was negligence on their part.  I literally had to agree that negligence would be okay in order to pay my rent.  It is absurd, and if negligence happens, do you think it will hold up in court?  I don't think it will, and I think they don't think so, either, otherwise they would have done it.  But some things they will go ahead and try to get away with, and in this corrupt society, there is agreement after agreement that people try to get people to sign in order to have all the power.

      But it isn't automatically justice to honor all contracts, and if we put too much stock in it, the rampant abuse could suddenly mean that contracts have no power, which is also dangerous.  Systems and laws simply can't save a bad society.  They can only protect the good that is already there.  That is one of the moral laws that governs reality, whether people agree to it or not.