It’s fair to say that not all theocratic systems are fascist, but they’re also not mutually exclusive. A particular theocratic system can also be fascist in nature.

Some common points:

• Appeal to tradition
• Rejection of modernism
• Anti-intellectualism
• Absolute factual authority of leaders
• Obsession with outgroups as enemies, such as sinners and atheists and believers of other faiths
• Special jargon to control the masses
• Subordination of people to a greater cause
• Jingoist militarism (ironic for a lot of “peaceful” religions)

It wasn’t just “don’t bow to a king” but also “taxes are a legitimate method of funding the public welfare,” which directly contradicts the right wing libertarian ethos. It was also saying that more permanent safety was an achievable goal without having to give up freedom. He wasn’t saying that freedom (to regulate and tax as a representative body) and safety were always mutually exclusive. So to use such an example to say that people need the freedom to endanger multiple lives even though the safety provided by the regulation isn’t just temporary is an absurd misappropriation. Dying in a car accident because a selfish asshole decides not to wear a seatbelt or removes the seatbelts from his vehicle isn’t very free.

It’s not an interpretation. You’re ignoring the verifiable context of the quote and the speaker. You’re actively choosing to misrepresent it for your propaganda. This undermines your narrative and marks you as transparently untrustworthy. If you don’t care about that, then nothing you say has value.

The irony is that you don’t need to be dishonest to undermine your propaganda. You’ve already been doing that with your honest enthusiasm for deregulation as if everyone thinks seatbelt laws are oppressive government overreach.

Except it’s not a subjective topic like which flavor of ice cream is better. We can actually see whether the speaker of the quote would agree with your positions. You’re not agreeing to disagree. You’re saying you don’t care about verifiable facts because you’re not interested in intellectual honesty. You’re saying you don’t care what he actually thought and just want to use him to push your propaganda.

And that doesn’t contradict the fact that the quote was used to support the right of the legislature to tax the wealthy and property owners for the greater good of all citizens, including their long term (not short term) safety. The point still stands. The quote is not in defense of right wing libertarian philosophy and is being used out of context.

If you’re just going to transparently use unrelated quotes for your propaganda, you might as well just make up the quotes.

I love it when libertarians quote this out of context, not realizing that it often contradicts their positions.

The quote is backing the right of the state legislature to levy taxes on wealthy assholes who want the benefit of property ownership and political power but who don’t want to contribute to the welfare of society.

https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century

Maybe use image editing software instead?

So a bad parent tells the story of how his child was innocently engaging his creativity with a tool his father provided and then the father taught the child in a potentially traumatizing way that there’s wrongthink possible when some wealthy people have decided they need to collect rent from everyone for engaging with culture. And dad blames the tool rather than the IP laws he supports that actually created the problem he now punished his child for unwittingly encountering with natural human behaviors such as curiosity and imagination.

And dad writes about it like he wants a cookie from the other IP profiteers since he was willing to throw his son under the bus to make a bad and misdirected point.

Good bedtime story. And the dragon slept happily on his hoard of IP forever knowing that the guards would stop even their own children from trying to “steal” it. The end.

I stopped biting my fingernails in high school when I viewed one under a microscope in science class. Washing your hands likely won’t get rid of all the gross stuff on your nail that you won’t want in your mouth, especially your gums, which are especially susceptible to bacteria and infection. You might need to gross yourself out with the reality of that to get yourself to stop using a fingernail.

If you can’t stop the desire to “floss” that much, maybe at least carry disposable floss around with you and use that instead.

There might be a different, less dangerous sensation you can find instead. Chewing gum?

This might not be a philosophical issue for you. You seem to be having an emotional response to your dilemma, which means the solution may not be to find belief, but to find hope or solace or even just a temporary distraction (and distractions can be productive). If the cognitive process doesn’t yield desirable results, maybe look at the issue from a different angle. If you can imagine this state of disbelief mixed with desire for belief never going away, what circumstances might make the dilemma less distressing? If it might be around for a while, you can always come back to it later when you’ve had new experiences that may change your perspective.

Something I experienced when I was younger was my certainty about what was wrong with the world and I felt righteous in raging against it as if being angry at it was a worthy excuse not to have to put effort into improving things. The older I got, the more I saw that it was “yes, and…” in that I wasn’t wrong, but there was a bigger picture I just couldn’t see at the time. I was hyper focused in pointing out what was wrong as if I was the only one who could see it, but then I realized I could be doing something about it, even if the world was never going to be a sane or just place or my efforts weren’t going to be highly impactful.

But your stated wish for believing in a benevolent deity is functionally like optimistic nihilism. Existence appears to lack inherent meaning from a creator deity, so you get to decide what is meaningful to you.

It’s not really “nihilism” because it specifically finds something worth valuing in life. And being a nihilist isn’t functionally incompatible with being a practicing Christian either, so they’re not really mutually exclusive.

The thing is, you can believe in a deity without having to accept a specific deity. Being an anti-theistic atheist or a Christian aren’t the only two possible scenarios. You don’t have to be an atheist in the sense that you actively don’t believe in a god. You can be agnostic and accept that you don’t know for certain and you may just not have enough information to draw a conclusion either way.

If you’re comfortable with believing something primarily based on your desire for it to be true, then you’re free to believe anything you want. You don’t have to pick a specific cosmology. Believe in ghosts and faeries and the hidden folk and kobolds and dragons or whatever. Believing in Christianity because some non-Christians are obnoxious just doesn’t make a lot of logical sense.

What I’m saying is it seems like you’re concerned too much with outspoken atheists and you’re letting your experience with them cloud your perspective. You shouldn’t believe or want to believe anything other than because you have reason to consider it believable. There are cringy atheists and cringy theists. That’s just people. It’ll be true of any association.

Believing something just because you want it to be true, or worse, believing something out of spite just because you don’t like some people, is not an authentic approach to matters of belief.

You can block a subreddit. You can ignore people you don’t like. Don’t let them define you. They don’t represent the concept of atheism. They are just prominent voices on the topic in one particular place. There are significantly more you never hear from because regular people don’t make it their identity and they don’t look to talk about it all the time.

I wouldn’t worry about the label. Your association will be different than others, so it might be taken several different ways by many different people. Labels become shorthand but also a bag full of various and sometimes contradictory concepts, so they’re primarily useful when they’re very simple and facilitate communication and meaning rather than make it harder to understand and more confusing. This is true of every label you think might apply to you. The label isn’t what’s important. It’s important to understand what you think, feel, and believe. It’s just as easy to say, “I don’t believe a god exists,” as it is to say, “I’m an atheist.” There are a lot of people for whom labels become a sense of identity, but that often seems to involve adopting things that don’t apply to them simply based on the association. Be yourself, determine for yourself who you are and what you think. Don’t try to shoehorn yourself into someone else’s confused bag of meanings and associations.

If I am cast aside by MAGA Inc and replaced by Neocons, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Military Industrial War Complex, foreign leaders, and the elite donor class that can’t even relate to real Americans,

Wait til she realizes MAGA was always a grift by elites to get votes and support and they never cared for the “Real Americans™.”

The worst part is that he didn’t actually learn his lesson. He voted for Trump because of bullshit promises and now he’s just going to go back to voting for right wing libertarians who won’t win and thus he’ll be throwing his votes away instead of preventing future Trumps.

“I got my nose bitten off by a leopard, so next time I’ll coat my face in ketchup and hope no one eats my face.”

Other people, moral people

An hour ago you edited it, but now you’re telling someone to read it again when the content has changed? That’s a disingenuous tactic.

You are subjective in your perception of reality and therefore what you perceive as reality isn’t necessarily going to coincide with the perception of reality of other people so pretending that your perception is the one true set of relevant perceived truths is just your bias. So when you say you want people to make arguments based in reality, you’re only referring to your own perception, not the greater picture.

But even this argument is irrelevant. Your defensiveness to every comment in this thread indicates that you’re not open to criticism, you’re possibly looking for an argument rather than other perspectives, and you’re likely disinclined to change your perspective based on feedback because you’re not asking questions, only arguing with responses.

Some particular things being “true” is not some absolute and limited set of facts that encompasses all relevant information about any given topic. You can know a lot about the truth of a particular issue but be completely unaware of a greater context that makes that knowledge moot or even detrimental to focus on in neglect of the greater picture. Your desire for people to believe true things is actually silly because observed patterns would indicate that they likely won’t. But even more, they’ll believe their own “true things,” the truths or “truths” that they choose to focus on and value. Shouting like Willy Loman’s wife will never get the attention you want. And it’s entirely possible that your focus is dictated by your own bias because you don’t want to accept valid criticism of something you value.