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Why is it called a "coning tower?" (In Australian bogan vernacular, that would imply it being a place where you might go to smoke a few bongs, which would make sense at surface depth as you could just crack the top and vent the place out)
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Jun 15, 2024 03:19
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| # ¿ Sep 8, 2024 21:34 |
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ThisIsJohnWayne posted:And if you have trouble motivating your leaders, simply point out how much money the fines can make and that they will get to keep it. Then you can make more money writing history books about the 30 year wars This is assuming that your leaders aren't flag waving member's of said Church. With the general collapse of organised labour, fraternities such as trade associations and grassroots political movements outside of the fringe, church groups are now the single best opportunity to organise within a political movement. Once motivated, aspirational movers and shakers worked out they could use church groups to stack local branches of conservative-leaning political parties, they effectively had control over who won preselection/primary races. I bet you could count the number of GOP candidates and sitting members who don't belong to a megachurch or are extremely active in a conservative baptist/catholic parish group on one hand. It's arguably worse here in Aus - to vote in a preselection (our version of a Primary race), you have to be a paid-up financial member of the party in question, not just a "registered voter" for that party. This additional barrier for entry makes the impact of Branch Stacking more pronounced. It got so bad in my state that as of about 5 years ago, in order to get pre-selected as a candidate in the centre-right "Liberal" party, you effectively HAD to have the local evangelical church behind you. Before bad optics during COVID had them effectively wiped out at federal and state levels, something like 90-95% of party room members from my state belonged to a prosperity-gospel preaching evangelical church, as well as the Prime Minister (Sydney is well on the way to having the same issue). We had a huge Royal Commission (kinda like a Grand Jury I guess) into systemic sexual abuse in religious institutions about a decade back - our Prime Minister at the time was a former Catholic seminary alumni, who was close personal friends with Cardinal George Pell - the Vatican's man in Australia who was both accused and convicted of child sexual abuse, and identified as being pivotal to covering up systemic abuse within the Church. The PM openly supported Pell and spoke out against the judicial processes in play. Separating Church and State is a solid idea - but they're onto it, and doing their very best to stack the halls of government and defend their income streams. Edit: Not to mention the fact that Evangelical churches are rich as gently caress, and are likely big campaign donors.
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Jun 26, 2024 02:41
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