Lloyd Lofthouse

WOKE is at War with CLUELESS

What does it mean to be WOKE?

“The meaning of WOKE is aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice). Definition of WOKE

So, to be WOKE means being a lifelong learner, an avid reader, a fact checker, a problem solver and a critical thinker, since that is what it takes to be actively attentive to important societal facts and issues.

What does Clueless mean?

“having no knowledge, understanding or ability.” Definition of CLUELESS

Therefore, those so-called liberals, as they are labeled by the extreme right, cannot be WOKE and CLUELESS at the same time.

Still, the authoritarian-fascist wackos on the far right are proud of being unwoke, meaning they are, by official definitions from reliable ditinoaries, CLUELESS, making them perfect followers, known as ditto heads, for authoritarians like Traitor Trump and Republican governors DeSantis, Abbott and Sanders.

Lloyd Lofthouse

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23 responses to “WOKE is at War with CLUELESS”

  1. Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt Avatar
    Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt

    I feel sorry for those who live in such tiny universes that a guru at the top can manipulate them because they will never seek to question his words (usually a him). What are they so afraid of? They can’t stick to a single thing – they’re afraid of everything, the modern world, science, progress, education, choices, their own rights.

    And they are finding their children less willing to stay and live that way – has to hurt, but good for the kids to try, to question, to find out for themselves.

    Reply
    1. Lloyd Lofthouse Avatar
      Lloyd Lofthouse

      It isn’t just the United States where many younger people are moving away from rural areas to urban ones. Many rural areas in China, India, Japan, and other countries are seeing the same thing happening.

      Reply
      1. Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt Avatar
        Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt

        But those people don’t vote in MY country – they are part of the world economic force, of course and affect me that way.

        Moving to the city isn’t a panacea – working conditions can be horrendous, and safety networks laughable – but life in a village can be horribly constricting.

        I read recently – can’t find it – how the children of American Evangelical Protestants are just leaving their parents’ beliefs behind, and going out into ‘the world’ to find out for themselves.

      2. Lloyd Lofthouse Avatar
        Lloyd Lofthouse

        I’ve read the same thing about the children of Fundamentalist Evangelicals (I do not think they are real Christians so I leave that word off when I mention them). Most of those rural Evangelicals are almost as old as I am and will die out eventually, their numbers shrinking until they are no longer a political block, the MAGA RINO force that the rest of us have to live with until then.

        I hope I outlive most of them and witness their decline into the history books until they are no more — memoires, shadows only. The vampire rats that roared, then squeeked, and finally couldn’t be heard anymore even if our ears are within a meter of their mouths.

        In time, the majority of sane people will learn to ignore the survivors as their numbers dwindle until only a few of the scattered from that lunatic fringe are left, basking in their glory days, denting couches in dusty houses, watching taped versions of FOX fake News from their DVD library.

      3. Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt Avatar
        Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt

        I hope so – but it isn’t happening soon enough. They could still be a factor in the 2024 election, and DeSantis seems to be creating his own mass of followers – there are a lot of latinos voting Republican (which I totally don’t get – who is worse for them than a party which doesn’t support better wages, better schools, the environment?). They are voting AGAINST their own interests and their children’s interests.

        Same thing is happening in Mexico – the masses voting for AMLO. There, though, the middle class is too small, the rich are too rich, and it doesn’t take much of a bribe to get the appearance of helping the poor – without doing anything for them. The PRI left everything in a mess, the PAN wasn’t strong enough to take up the mantle, and AMLO’s bunch used all that against the people’s interests. I hope it will change (Mexico is still home in many ways, and all my family of origin on my mother’s side is there), but all the power of the presidency is being used to perpetuate a wannabe dictator. Education is the great leveler – and it is severely compromised.

      4. Lloyd Lofthouse Avatar
        Lloyd Lofthouse

        The majority of the young vote has been going to Democrats. In 2024 that vote will increase again be several million as it does every year. Since the majority of the Republican voters are older, uneducated, rural white males, they are losing votes as they die off. That tells me that each year, there will be more new, younger voters voting for Democrats but fewer voters supporting Republicans. The GOP is running out of time and thanks to Traitor Trump, the Republican Party has become a frightening fascist threat to future freedom of choice, what the U.S. Constitution is supposed to protect.

        Everything Dangerously Deranged Despot DeSantis and a few other Authoritarian GOP governors (Abbott, Sanders, et al) are doing to attract votes from the MAGA base will motivate younger voters to sign up and vote against them. Those younger voters do not want to grow up in a fascist world that doesn’t care about global warming.

        https://www.npr.org/2022/11/10/1135810302/turnout-among-young-voters-was-the-second-highest-for-a-midterm-in-past-30-years

      5. Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt Avatar
        Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt

        Sure hope you’re right. Lots voted last time – but will they do it again? And get involved – and run for school districts and local government. It’s a constant battle – not a onetime tsunami.

        My assistant is going from college to a Masters in Education program at Notre Dame! She wants to teach. Two years of teaching 4th graders in California (where she wants to teach) are included in the program. Hope there are a lot more like her. Has her head on straight.

      6. Lloyd Lofthouse Avatar
        Lloyd Lofthouse

        One of the younger members of my Saturday Critique group that meets every two weeks is in her second year as a public teacher in California (a district in the Bay Area). She’s feeling the stress and vents when we meet. The challenge to teach in this environment where the extreme right is waging an all out war to get rid of public education and replace it with publicly funded, private sector charter and voucher schools that the public will have no control over is overwhelming and driving a lot of younger people away from public education.

      7. Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt Avatar
        Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt

        Interesting; my assistant, a college senior at UC Davis, is about to get a Master’s in Education through a program which will end up with her having taught elementary school kids two years in a Bay Area private school. She seems primed – lovely young woman.

        BTW, I like how you leave off Christian from the Evangelicals. As a practicing LIBERAL Catholic, I find them inexplicable. As I find the far right adherents of my faith. Gilead, indeed. So joyless. So comfortless.

      8. Lloyd Lofthouse Avatar
        Lloyd Lofthouse

        The Bible does a good job,

        for those that read the Bible instead of relying on someone telling them what the Bible means from a bully pulpit,

        warning us about false prophets.

        Still, too many fundamentalist evangelicals are not real Christians, when they are focused on hate, the 2nd Amendment and AR-15s, racism, and supporting Traitor Trump’s Big LIE.

      9. Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt Avatar
        Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt

        Wasn’t it said of the early Christians: See how much they love? We need to be there.

      10. Lloyd Lofthouse Avatar
        Lloyd Lofthouse

        Before the Christian religion became the official religion of the Eastern Roman Empire in the 4th century, before the first council of Nicosia in AD May 325, Christianity followed Christ’s teachings more closely. Once the Church became the official religion of the EAstern Roman Empire, it also become political and went down hill from there. Due to those religious politics, the Christian Cathar sect was slaughtered because they wouldn’t follow the official party line of the Catholic Church,

        Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolute, and once the Catholic Church had real power, the corruption started.

        The Christian Gnostics. that also did not buy into the Catholic Party line, were hunted and killed by Catholics.

        “St. Irenaeus was one of the Church’s first systematic theologians (authoritarian politicians in the Church), Irenaeus is considered one of the most influential early Christian thinkers. On June 28, we celebrate his Memorial, recognizing his critical contributions in combatting the Gnostic heresy.”

        “Jesus is identified by some Gnostics as an embodiment of the supreme being who became incarnate to bring gnōsis to the earth, while others adamantly denied that the supreme being came in the flesh, claiming Jesus to be merely a human who attained enlightenment through gnosis and taught his disciples to do the same.” For that, Gnostics were hunted down and killed.

        “The Cathars are among the great burn victims of history. They preached an austere form of Christianity originating in the East and were opposed to a dogmatic, coercive Catholicism. They were exterminated by burning at the stake on huge pyres. … The French city of Béziers, a Cathar stronghold, was burned down and 20,000 residents killed after a papal legate, the Abbot of Cîteaux, declared, “Slaughter them all!”

      11. Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt Avatar
        Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt

        Yup. As soon as you start to hate, people start dying.

      12. Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt Avatar
        Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt

        The Bible isn’t a modern novel. People who read it – IN ENGLISH – are assuming they understand every word, and don’t even think of the biases of the translators. But they are SO sure of themselves and their own interpretations.

        The benefit of the doubt and of assuming good intentions – and not trying to find reasons to covet your neighbor’s X – lose so easily.

      13. Lloyd Lofthouse Avatar
        Lloyd Lofthouse

        The Old Testament was written in an older vision of Hebrew known as Biblical Hebrew from oral stories that went back thousands of years. The authors of that first version of the Old Testament live din a cultural that though figuratively an not literally like most if not all modern Americans.

        The New Testament was written in Greek about a century after Jesus Christ was crucified.

        The original version of Biblical Hebrew was confusing so a more modern Hebrew added more punctuation to clear up confusion, but who decided to add what where?

        “Jerusalem fell after a 30-month siege, following which the Babylonians systematically destroyed the city and the First Temple. The Kingdom of Judah was dissolved and many of its inhabitants were exiled to Babylon. During the late 7th century BCE, Judah became a vassal kingdom of Babylon. Archaeological research has shown that the Babylonians systematically destroyed the city with fire and that the city wall was pulled down.”

        Then a”round 2,300 years ago,the Greek-Egyptian emperor Ptolemy ordered the Jewish sages to render the Torah into Greek on two separate occasions. The first time, he had five scholars carry out the translation together. The second time, he assembled 72 scholars, isolated them in separate rooms, and had them prepare their own simultaneous Greek translations. On the 8th of Tevet, all 72 scholars produced identical versions having made the same 13 changes, where they judged that the literal rendition would result in a significant distortion to the intended meaning.”

        And that all happened before the English translation resulting in the King James version of the both the Old and New Testaments with significant revisions through translations.

        “The first Bible in English, 1535 – The first complete Bible in English was published abroad, most likely in Antwerp, in 1535. Myles Coverdale (1488-1569), an Augustinian friar from Yorkshire educated at Cambridge, ‘faithfully and truly translated [it] out of Douche [German] and Latin into English’”.

        Even claiming that Jesus called God his father proving that he was the son of God, when he was on the cross, is misleading.

        “In some Old Testament passages, God is directly called the father of Israel and in others his qualities are compared to human paternal qualities in relation to Israel.”

        I brought this up with a former friend of mine I’d known since grade school, who converted late in his life (around 60) to evangelic fundamentalism that translates literally what the King James Bible says. His answer, “God guided their hands when they wrote the Bible in English so that is how God wants us to understand what He means.”

        This fact also did not budge his thinking: “The system of punctuation now used by writers of English has been complete since the 17th century.” When that happened the English version of the Bible went through revisions again by adding the system of punctuation we now use, and those writers added commas to cemented some passages to mean what they wanted them to literally mean.

      14. Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt Avatar
        Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt

        If someone is that obstinate, you give up on their ability to think rationally. Yes, GUIDED. Not DICTATED in colloquial English of its time. Some people NEED security and someone to tell them who they are and what they need more than they need to breathe. We pray for them, leave judgment to God (hey – WE may be wrong), and try not to let them damage the world and other people more than absolutely necessary.

      15. Lloyd Lofthouse Avatar
        Lloyd Lofthouse

        When I hear someone say that the Bible they read or carry around without reading for meaning, is correct, because God guided the hands of whoever wrote that version, one of hundreds just in English, I think of this:

        (Deuteronomy 30:19)

        “I am now giving you the choice between life and death, between God’s blessing and God’s curse, and I call heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Choose life.” God created and gave to mankind the gift of free will — the gift of choice.

      16. Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt Avatar
        Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt

        Sometimes I wish He hadn’t. Only sometimes.

      17. Lloyd Lofthouse Avatar
        Lloyd Lofthouse

        Well, if He hadn’t, our species might have had to deal with another Biblical flood. Still, He doesn’t have to do that because some of us are doing it for Him. Maybe what humans caused will be a smaller flood affecting only a portion of life on the planet. Maybe civilization will survive in some form. An improvement hopefully.

      18. Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt Avatar
        Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt

        I have kids; I’m not about to throw them under the bus. They have agency. They are voting in larger and larger numbers. They are fair-minded. We’ll see – up until a few years ago, I might have said things were sort of stable. Then 45, pandemic, and Russia stealing Crimea and when nobody said anything invading Ukraine.

      19. Lloyd Lofthouse Avatar
        Lloyd Lofthouse

        If prayers worked, I’d strongly suggest praying that Putin and his administration, Trump, DeSantis, Abbott, Sanders, every member of the Freedom Caucus, and a slew of extremist billiaonres all turn themselves into compost and do something useful for the planet.

      20. Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt Avatar
        Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt

        They’re not going to do it – and their system is to hand out stress, not take it on.

        That said, one would cheer.

        But the compost would be too toxic.

      21. Lloyd Lofthouse Avatar
        Lloyd Lofthouse

        True, I wouldn’t use that compost if they were giving it away free. For the safety of all mankind, that compost should be loaded on a rocket and shot into th sun.

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