Exodus 1: 8-14 22 The Way Out Of The Rule Of Gangsters - Got too hot too early today so this is an early post

I was uncharitable to those who have bought into the "Microsoft is evil, Apple is good" PR that is the basis of the cult of the Mac industry.   I think they are largely the victims of the kind of anxious desire to be seen as virtuous, or good or, really, it gets down to being of more economic value and so if you present marketing in terms of good vs. evil as Apple certainly did, of being the heroine who will smash Big Brother when they were manufacturing their shiny, flashy, way overpriced products with quasi-slave labor under the giant figure of Mao or whichever successor gangster king was lording over China at the time.

Um, hum, I see.

One of my dear relatives, a sister-in-law, bought into that PR BS, a brilliant and good person who worked very hard in her professional life to make life better, the first in her family to go to university and get a PhD, who, I know, suffered the kind of anxiety I mention above, who wanted to do the right thing and, faced with the alternatives of the computer industry, unfortunately bought that false gospel.

Not that the PC industry is any more virtuous, it isn't.  This isn't a matter where virtue comes into it, it's a matter of profit making business.  There are no more virtuous choices I know of.   I'm not even sure my recent experiments with Linux and the charitable Raspberry Pi foundation could be justified, entirely, in making that claim for it.   Just as Google's motto "Don't be evil" hides the fact of things, so does any claim of virtue by any giant corporation does.  The vileness of the big players in the modern economy are, virtually all of them, totally amoral.  The "ethics" of business aren't to "don't be evil" they are to maximize profits for the owners.  That's the reason that Youtube will not really suppress neo-Nazi content as its algorithms steer people towards them* - if they really do that I will revise but I'm not expecting to need to - and they're only one such "artificially intelligence" driven machine of commerce.

Marxism, the great false hope of so many, turns out to be, in reality, just a similar thing with other PR claims.   After all, look where Macs and other computers and their components are made by quasi-slave labor.  Look at the results of Marxism in every country which has adopted that as its explanation for how they've been governed.  Look at how Russia couldn't manage to achieve democracy but quickly went from the corroded remnants of Marxism to overt gangster governance.  Other than some Youtubes made by Marxists pining for the good old bad old days under the Communist Party, no one else even in Putin led Russia wants to go back, why bother, they've got the latest in a series of gangster thug dictators in a string that didn't stop with the last official Czar but has continued in an unbroken line of them.

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Today's Catholic liturgy begins the readings from the central core of the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the Book of Exodus which starts like this (in my quick and rough dynamic translation):

A new king, who knew nothing of Jesus, came to power in the U.S.
He said to his subjects, "Look how numerous and powerful
the people of the children of Central America are growing, more so than we ourselves!

Come, let us deal shrewdly with them to stop their immigration;
otherwise, in time of election they too may join the Democrats
to fight against us, and so take the country from us."

(Here the translation is more difficult because it involves U.S. colonial policy, the history of setting up gangsters to rule over them to force their labor growing bananas and other things and manufacturing instead of building granary cities, though those here unofficially certainly did that.  Migrant laborers picking our food is a more direct equivalent) 

The Republicans, then, dreaded the children of Central America
and reduced them to cruel treatment,
making life bitter for them with cruel treatment —the whole cruel fate of slaves.

Trump then commanded all his subjects,
"Take the children of the Central Americans, rip them from their mother's arms, from their fathers, from their tias and put them in concentration camps and if they die in disease and misery and squalor, meh!."

Exodus 1: 8-14 22 TCV

Listening to that passage from the very start of Exodus, early this morning,  awakened by the commentary and methods of Walter Brueggemann which makes the ancient texts ever new, ever illuminating, ever provocative,  I understood that the story wasn't just about things that happened thousands of years back, it's happening today, here, now and we are the Egyptians and Trump is Pharaoh - the gangster king of what, for now, is still the most powerful country in the world (or at least what the original authors knew of the world) and that is what the secularists junk in their so-called "enlightenment".   Trump's tweets about immigration, his campaign speeches to his racist base are exactly a translation of the claim of Pharaoh against the Children of Israel, the indifference of him and his base to the photo of a father and daughter drowned, to children tortured, sexually molested and left to die in Federal concentration camps is exactly equivalent to Pharaohs' order to drown the male babies of the Jews, in fact, it's crueler because it doesn't spare half of them as Pharaoh's order did.

Other translation are certainly possible, using other scenarios in which gangster governments oppress The People and dupe The People and divide and conquer The People and the conventional way of thinking doesn't free The People but only when they turn to God does that free them.  I have lost my faith this past twenty years watching the American left repeat the same stupid mistakes over and over and over again and I've come to realize it does that because it is based in a secularist materialist program that is not only ineffective, it is corrosive of the very thing that is necessary to get out of that rut.  Here is a way to get out of it.

*  Even with the best of good will (which they have yet to demonstrate) any algorithm based system that they might come up with will quickly be overcome by the intent of the neo-Nazis, fascists, Putinists, Xi-ist, etc. gang who hire the best and brightest to ratfuck everything.  It's an irony of the scientistic modern enlightenment which jettisons any idea of absolute morality that the "best and brightest" are often the ones who cast the most shadow over the world, doing their worst for money in support of gangster governance.   What's even more ironic is that it's the "freedom" of speech, of press, etc. who have played us right into their hands and still do, the best and brightest of them as can be seen on Rachel or Lawrence or on so many a lefty Youtube channel.   I'm trying to figure out the connections between RT and those lefty Youtube channels, especially those revolving around The Young Turks.  I'm beginning to think that just as we demand the tax records of Trump, we should demand they be entirely transparent as to their finances, personal as well as business, as if there's a difference when it's a Youtube channel.  That goes for the "Justice Democrats" who are tied in with them.