em1913

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Posts by em1913

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  18

  J.W.Sisters are not recognized as part of the 144000 Anointed class by the Governing Body of Jehovah`s Witnesses and never have been.

  by smiddy3 in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  rev.14: 1-6 describes the 144000 as males who do not defile themselves with women and are classed as virgins.?.

  how does the governing body of j.w.`s explain that a man having a sexual relationship with a woman defiles a man?.

  isn`t this or shouldn`t this be an affront to women who are jehovah`s witnesses ?

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  em1913

  Well, looking at most JW men, I have to say that they probably won't have much trouble with the "virgin" thing.
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  85

  “Monkey this up”...

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  that expression is a no-no now.

  it is racist and hateful.

  some people just need to get the monkey off their backs..

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  em1913

  See, there's where we disagree. You're looking at capitalism in, basically, a theological bubble.. I'm looking at in in terms of practical application. Our perspectives are so utterly opposed that there's really no grounds for a discussion, because I don't accept your basic premise and you don't accept mine. For me to argue on your grounds, I would have to accept your basic premise that capitalism is a "system of free voluntary exchange." Well, it's that because your theology, or your cosmogony or whatever, chooses to define it that way, and I don't agree with that definition. I'll give you my definition and then you'll disagree with that, and the rest of it will just go around in circles.

  I have a pretty good friend who's a Libertarian of your style, and we've discussed these very points many times, And I know *exactly* what you'll say and the points you'll make, and I know exactly the points I'll make in return, and I could cut and paste the entire conversation here, and it would make absolutely no difference for either one of us, so why bother?

  I think you should research the Black Codes a bit further. They were inextricably tied to the economic system of the post-bellum South, and were entirely driven by the holders of Southern capital in their practice of capitalism.
  
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  18

  J.W.Sisters are not recognized as part of the 144000 Anointed class by the Governing Body of Jehovah`s Witnesses and never have been.

  by smiddy3 in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  rev.14: 1-6 describes the 144000 as males who do not defile themselves with women and are classed as virgins.?.

  how does the governing body of j.w.`s explain that a man having a sexual relationship with a woman defiles a man?.

  isn`t this or shouldn`t this be an affront to women who are jehovah`s witnesses ?

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  em1913

  I wouldn't want to spend eternity next to 143,999 self-aggrandizing jackasses like them in the first place. So there.
  
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  85

  “Monkey this up”...

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  that expression is a no-no now.

  it is racist and hateful.

  some people just need to get the monkey off their backs..

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  2. 
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  em1913

  "“A Negro labor force would tend to keep the Chinese steady, as the Chinese have kept the Irishmen quiet.”

  Yep, divide and control. This is actually a really good example of the point I was making, so thanks for noting it. Moving ahead a bit historically, but on the same general theme, I'd call your attention to Stetson Kennedy's book "Southern Exposure," published in 1946, which offered a detailed and thoroughly documented expose of how major Northern industrialists were in full collusion with Southern racists to ensure a continued source of cheap manufacturing labor to fuel their operations. A book well worth seeking out for anyone interested in these issues/
  

  Getting back to the railroads,I think you might want to look more deeply into the treatment of "coolie labor" by the railroads, because it isn't quite as simple as "paid labor.". It wasn't a particularly happy situation for those workers, to say the least, and their importation en masse by the railroads for the specific purpose of cheap labor was used as yet another tool for driving down wages overall in that particular sector. White rail workers saw the Chinese not as fellow laborers, but as a specific threat. This attitude continued long after the Transcontinental Railroad itself was completed, and led to incidents of racial violence between white and Chinese workers into the following decades, most notably the Rock Springs Massacre of 1885 in Wyoming, involving miners employed by the Union Pacific Railroad -- which in turn detonated a wave of anti-Chinese racism that swept rapidly across much of the Western United States.
  

  Among those jumping on this particular bandwagon was the then-thriving Populist movement itself -- which adopted a rather militantly racist, anti-Chinese platform in response, which had the effect of pushing the entire movement sharply in the direction of reactionary nativism, and after a disastrous alliance with William Jennings Bryan's failed presidential campaign, to the movement's eventual adoption in the early years of the twentieth century of an overall white-supremacist orientation.

  The remnants of that movement, especially in the Midwest, made a significant contribution to the rise of the Second Era Klan, a movement which swept the entire United States in the early twenties and even controlled the state of Indiana, before collapsing under the weight of a debilitating sex scandal in the late twenties. Its fragments in the 1930s drifted into other movements, notably those of Father Coughlin and Gerald L. K. Smith. After much fragmentation and straining thru the filters of Birchism and Cartoism, this identical strain of nativist populism -- its racism now encoded rather than worn on the sleeve -- resurfaced in the Buchanan movement in the 1990s, which eventually hijacked the straggling remains of Ross Perot's nativist but not especially racist Reform Party, and laid the groundwork for the populist movement that began in the late 2000s and continues to the present day.
  

  History's fascinating, it really is -- and as Mr, Faulkner so aptly put it, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."
  
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  85

  “Monkey this up”...

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  that expression is a no-no now.

  it is racist and hateful.

  some people just need to get the monkey off their backs..

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
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  em1913

  Capitalism uses racism, and profits from it. That's a simple historical fact. The great New England fortunes of early America were largely built on the slave trade -- and those of us here are only just beginning to come to terms with that. But it's unimpeachable historical fact. The great fortunes of the pre-Civil War south -- need we even discuss those? The vast railroad fortunes of the 19th Century -- whose physical labor, exactly, built those railroads? It goes on and on, but I think the point is made.
  

  The "black codes" imposed in the South in the late 19th Century were largely imposed to ensure a continuous source of cheap labor for, not just the plantation system, but also for manufacturing. The continued repression of African-American wages served as a useful tool for keeping working-class white wages down as well. And it wasn't just the South that profited from this -- the use of lower-paid black labor during the years of the Great Migration was used as a constant threat over white workers, thus preventing them from coming to any understanding of working-class solidarity across racial lines. The CIO worked mightily during the 1930s to overcome this, to only limited success, because the problem was so widespread. It wasn't until the Fair Employment Practices Act of 1941 outlawed race differentials in wages for defense contractors that any real progress was made toward dealing with this issue, and that law was bitterly opposed by the National Association of Manufacturers and similar capitalist-interest groups, and enforcement was always spotty. This, too, is unimpeachable historical fact. And I won't even start on our current administration, run by a billionaire who was seeded in his "self made" business career by a slumlord father who ran racially-restricted buildings, and who himself had an extremely dubious racial record in conducting his own real estate enterprises.
  

  As for the rest of it, I believe that economics, as I said, is far more a "faith" than a "science." And when discussing matters of faith there's really no point in two people who are clearly of different fundamental philosophies running around in circles with each other. I can cite Marx and you'll cite Bohm-Bawerk and I'll cite Hilferding and you'll cite Hayek, and I'll say tomata and you'll say tohmato, and eventually we'll just call the whole thing off. I'm not in this for the ego-boost, so I'll save us both the trouble. If there's one thing I learned on the doorstep it's that you can't make a Witness out of a Mormon. OMG MORPHS LAW!
  
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  85

  “Monkey this up”...

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  that expression is a no-no now.

  it is racist and hateful.

  some people just need to get the monkey off their backs..

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  2. 
  3. 
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  em1913

  I'm not familiar with Morph's Law, but having looked it up, I stand by my comments. Economics, especially the Austrian variety, despite the best efforts of its adherents to paint it as a science based on Pure Fact and Reason, is as much a matter of Faith As The Assured Expectation Of Things Hoped For, The Evident Demonstration Of Realities Not Beheld as any form of religious belief. I know a lot of Libertarians, Anarcho-Capitalists, and god-forbid Randites with sticky copies of "Atlas Shrugged" under their mattresses who are just as desperately culty in their beliefs as any hard-boiled Witness. And I'll put an awful lot of the Trump people I've met in the same camp. Not all, certainly, but a distressing number of them, especially old white people who live in the whitest state in the union and are nonetheless convinced that OMG MEXICANS ARE HERE TO STEAL OUR JOBS AND WRECK OUR PROUD CULCHA when they see the brown-skinned carnies working the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair. What Richard Hofstadter wrote about "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" in 1964 is even more true today. (Not that I'm citing him as scripture, you understand, but I do suggest you look it up and read it -- well worth anyone's time.)
  

  Now, you can turn it around and say MARXIST! POT, KETTLE, ETC., but the difference is I don't look to Marx as the last word in my beliefs. I believe he was correct in his analysis of class structure, but I don't hang by his every written word as sacred writ. Why would I? As human beings we're all just making this up as we go along, and anyone who claims otherwise, who claims to have the Real Truth, is just as deluded as the cheesiest elder on the platform. So, sure, go ahead, Morph away. But look in the mirror while doing it.
  
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  85

  “Monkey this up”...

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  that expression is a no-no now.

  it is racist and hateful.

  some people just need to get the monkey off their backs..

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
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  em1913

  In other words, "sorry, I have my religion."

  I don't agree that the good Austrians proved anything, except to those already inclined to accept those beliefs. But that's your religion, and those are your Scriptures, just as some people choose to believe that Jesus Christ is physically present in a cookie, or that a bunch of men in Patterson were chosen to lead God's People thru Armageddon, or that a hacky novelist from the 1940s with a rape fetish could develop a world-changing philosophy, and you can believe it if you want. And if it makes it easier for you to sleep thru the night putting the groups I mentioned on the "left,"then go right ahead and do that. It puts you completely at odds with all historical understanding of the Populist movment in the United States since the 1930s, but hey, the world is full of new ideas, and now that I think of it, I love the idea of somebody like Robert Welch actually being a leftist. Serves the old candy-coated blowhard right. Or left, as the case may be. I bet he and Ike had a good time at the cell meetings.
  

  I really do suggest, though, that you visit the nice folks at Gab and run your ideas by them. I think you'll find them a lively bunch.
  

  As far as board software is concerned, I think I've figured out what happened -- I have the habit of spacing between paragraphs for legibility, and I think the software, coupled with my particularly ancient browser, might have a problem with that -- it was inserting spaces where none existed, and cutting out any part of the post below that space. If that's what happened, I'm perfectly happy to withdraw my censorship comment. I'm a moderator myself on a board, and I know that certain software has the ability to be set to "discourage" specific people from posting by throwing various roadblocks in their path, but I'm satisified, through your own colorful language, that this isn't the case here.
  
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  23

  Stroup's "The Jehovah's Witnesses."

  by em1913 in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  a book that doesn't get a lot of talk these days is herbert h. stroup's 1945 study "the jehovah's witnesses.

  " which is too bad, because in the field of jw studies it pretty much stands on its own as a serious, scholarly look at the rutherford era of the movement -- one written with no theological or doctrinal axes to grind, but rather with the impartial eye of a professional sociologist.. stroup received no cooperation whatever from brooklyn in writing this book, but he spent a great deal of time among rank-and-file witnesses of the late 1930s and early 1940s, attending their meetings, joining them in field service, and eating at their homes, and what emerges is a picture of an overwhelmingly working-class movement which overlapped in its hopes and ultimate goals the ambitions of other radical social movements of the 1930s.

  the witnesses were not marching in labor parades or participating in sit-down strikes or engaging in other forms of street-level radicalism, but stroup finds that, in their individual views on the social and economic structures of the time, they were largely in harmony with those who were, even in spite of their religion's supposed disavowal of politics, and he sees them as much as a political movement in that sense as a religious one.

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  em1913

  There was no room on earth big enough to contain those two.

  Coughlin was in pretty close contact with actual Nazi agents thru most of the late 1930s, which influenced much of his broadcast content -- a lot of what he had to say, especially about the Poor Suffering Sudeten Germans and that Christian Gentleman Gen. Franco, came direct from Goebbels by way of these contacts.The Judge had his own skeletons in the closet viz. Hitler, but there doesn't, at least, seem to be any evidence that he was pen-pals with Goebbels.
  
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  64

  The Longest Goodbye Of John McCain

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  can you believe it?

  this funeral arrangement goes on and on and on.

  if the people loved him so much he would have been elected president.

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  em1913

  "The indisputable facts show that a class of men who indulge in hunting wild beasts merely for the thrill and selfish pleasure derived therefrom are also the men who indulge and delight in military training and the prosecution of wars, and also that they are to a large degree religionists, given over to formalism and the praise and adulation of men...."

  -- w38, p 359 para. 27
  

  Well, I guess two out of three ain't bad.
  
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  50

  Financially Are You Doing Better Than a Year Ago?

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  this isn’t a usa question.

  is your financial situation better or worse or pretty much the same?.

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  em1913

  Worse. Crushing medical debt got worse when I required eye surgery this summer that my -- heh -- insurance declined to cover. Plus my pay has actually gone down over the past two years from where it peaked in 2016.

  Oop - just saw that this "isn't" a USA question. Never mind. You can see the eye surgery did a lot of good.