MAGA Christianity hits Las Vegas

[bilby]

That guy was killed by the Russians, and they did it by meme bombardment.

Most of his "points" are direct regurgitation of widespread Kremlin propaganda.

 

[Elixir]

So, white men are the scariest of all!

They certainly scare me most of all. And I'm one of them.

It must be terrifying to see yourself in the mirror everyday. How do you cope?

I try to avoid it. Not that I am so scary, but at 75, even a person in good shape is a little terrifying to look at.

 

[southernhybrid]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/04/us/matthew-livelsberger-las-vegas-cybertruck.html

This link is behind a paywall because I'm trying to save a few articles for later, but when are you all going to understand that the man with the truck in Vegas was a victim of combat!

Alicia Arritt spent years as an Army nurse working with combat veterans with brain injuries. And when she started a relationship with Matthew Livelsberger in 2018, long before he shot himself and blew up a Cybertruck in Las Vegas this week, she recognized many of the symptoms in her new boyfriend that she had seen in her patients.

A master sergeant in the Army’s 10th Special Forces Group, he was forgetting words, losing his train of thought midsentence and struggling with insomnia. He had headaches and depressive moods that sometimes kept him shut away for days. In a text exchange after they started dating, he mentioned having been deployed three times in three years. She asked if he had been hurt. “Just some concussions,” he responded.

“I think he wanted to get help, but he thought if he said anything, he wouldn’t be able to do his job anymore,” she said in an interview on Friday from her home in Colorado Springs. They dated for two years, and then remained friends.

By the time they met, Sergeant Livelsberger had been in the Army more than a decade and had been deployed into combat a number of times. He had spent years jumping from airplanes and being exposed to weapons blasts in training. He had back injuries from hard parachute landings and had lost some of his hearing from being around explosions and gunfire.

To Ms. Arritt, Sergeant Livelsberger had symptoms of a traumatic brain injury, but he didn’t have a diagnosis from the Army. Over the years, she said, his symptoms seemed to grow worse.

Repeated blows to the head and blast exposure may cause damage that can accumulate almost unnoticed over time, said Dr. Michael Jaffee, a retired Air Force colonel and a neurologist who was director of the military’s Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center and now runs a similar center at the University of Florida. Neurologists now measure risk of developing a brain injury, including the progressive disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., not in terms of number of concussions sustained, but in terms of time involved in high-risk activities.

“The more years of exposure, the higher the risk,” Dr. Jaffee said. One of the high-risk activities officially listed by the National Institutes of Health, he noted, is “military service.”

A small number, including the Army reservist Robert R. Card II,who killed 18 people and himself in Maine in 2023, turn violent. An autopsy found that Mr. Card’s brain had extensive damage consistent with blast exposure. An Army investigation found no link between Mr. Card’s mental health problems and the years he spent working as a grenade instructor, repeatedly exposed to explosions on the practice range.

“We can never say that having repeated head injuries will make someone do something violent,” said Dr. Daniel Daneshvar, the chief of the Division of Brain Injury Rehabilitation at Massachusetts General Hospital. “But we can say that repeated head injury increases your probability of making very bad decisions.”

I only copied enough to give you the idea, but imo, based on what I know about PTSD, as well as the other evidence, I don't see his actions as connected to politics. Yes. He voted for Trump, but he could have been a far left brain damaged victim of combat and had done something similar. It's our fucking wars and the ineffective treatment that many veterans receive that are the real problems.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

That guy was killed by the Russians, and they did it by meme bombardment.

Most of his "points" are direct regurgitation of widespread Kremlin propaganda.

That's an interesting point. I think a huge amount of MAGA points are correlated to Russian propaganda as well.

 

[Elixir]

That guy was killed by the Russians, and they did it by meme bombardment.

Most of his "points" are direct regurgitation of widespread Kremlin propaganda.

That's an interesting point. I think a huge amount of MAGA points are correlated to Russian propaganda as well.

Yup. No secret. Tell a sucker they’re parroting Putin and they’ll tell you “he’s right”.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

That guy was killed by the Russians, and they did it by meme bombardment.

Most of his "points" are direct regurgitation of widespread Kremlin propaganda.

That's an interesting point. I think a huge amount of MAGA points are correlated to Russian propaganda as well.

Yup. No secret. Tell a sucker they’re parroting Putin and they’ll tell you “he’s right”.

You're making it sound like conservatives directly interviewed Putin and then just started agreeing with him when that never happ--...

Oh wait, never mind.

Okay, you win, but I am not sure if absolutely everything he said was pro-Russia. I mean, he said he was for giving up on Ukraine but did also say some day we'll have to go to war with Russia. Also, as a traditional Christian family values MAGA guy, are all Livelsberger's family values the same thing as Putin's family values? On the other hand, I just read this which seems pretty compelling.

When Vladimir Putin declared 2024 the “Year of the Family,” it was an extension of previous campaigns portraying Russia as the last bastion of Christianity against a West where nefarious elites are apparently pushing “dozens of genders or gay pride parades.”

His concept of the family unit contains little sentiment. “The main purpose of the family is to have children, about procreation, and thus, the perpetuation of our people and our centuries-old history,” he said on January 23.

But Putin, whose personal life is a notoriously tangled web of affairs, is also using “the family” to build sympathy for his regime in the West and to shore up support at home while, in reality, his policies leave Russian families bereaved, unprotected and destitute.

That sounds a lot like Trump, too.

 

[unapologetic]

"the coroner’s office found that Livelsberger “had sustained a gunshot wound to the head prior to the detonation of the vehicle.”
“the level of sophistication is not what we would expect from an individual with this type of military experience.”
On CSI this would suggest he was killed somewhere else and the 'suicide' was staged.

When asked, most people would automatically spout the religion they were born into. For most people religion is not a belief but an identity.

 

[ZiprHead]

"the coroner’s office found that Livelsberger “had sustained a gunshot wound to the head prior to the detonation of the vehicle.”
“the level of sophistication is not what we would expect from an individual with this type of military experience.”
On CSI this would suggest he was killed somewhere else and the 'suicide' was staged.

When asked, most people would automatically spout the religion they were born into. For most people religion is not a belief but an identity.

A Dead Man switch is easy to create.

 

[unapologetic]

Is it religious bigotry to despise all religions equally?

I despise all religions. I do not shy away from the label 'religious bigot'. (maybe not equally. Is-lame is the worst)

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

So, in the end, odd coincidences can happen. Which is good, national security wise. The driver in New Orleans acted alone, the driver in Las Vegas was suicidal and maybe suffering from CTE and/or PTSD. What possibly could have been a more broad plot was simply a convergence of two people suffering from different things, acting irrationally.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

This isn't evidence of anything--not guilt by association, but I had to share this picture from his father's facebook profile.

View attachment 49019

Despite saying no guilt by asscoiation you just had to show that picture.

I showed the picture because it shows how far out there the MAGA cult can be.

Implying guilt by association.

I did not imply guilt by association. In fact, I explicitly said it wasn't guilt by association. You chose to illogically and counter-factually infer it because it is what you want to believe. You are in a state of denial.

That said, being someone's parent is far more than a mere association since parents bring up their children, at least generally. Whether or not that holds to adulthood is different since sometimes adults choose not to follow what they've been taught as children. In the case of Livelsberger, there are many indications he followed in his father's footsteps: for example, his father was a Viet Nam vet Christian who later launched a career related to his military experience, correction officer, patrolman, etc etc. The son also kept continuity with his initial stint in the military, eventually joining the National Guard. Matthew was called a "patriot" by his uncle even after his suicide and people injured in the blast and had he gone astray into some other faith such as Islam or even become atheist, his uncle wouldn't have used that word or would have qualified it by saying he was "lost."

Or at least it is most probable that that is what we'd have heard. It certainly isn't proof like hearing from Livelsberger himself talking about "family values" and "morals" in the context of being a MAGA cultist.

The father has a picture of Trump with a lion, flag, helicopter, but no Christian imagery or symbolism I notice => son is like that.

If we suppose that there is no religious symbolism, it doesn't mean the father is not religious. However, the lion could very well be religious symbolism because a big-ass male lion is often symbolic of the Christian god. This can be found scripturally and in literary works (i.e. Aslan from Narnia).

It is ambiguous, neither means what you want it to, nor implies what you don't want it to, but you've made a choice of interpretation for your reasons.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

So, white men are the scariest of all!

There are a lot of things that ought to be violent crimes that aren't, like say denying someone their healthcare to make a hefty profit, and while such violent non-crimes aren't exclusive to white people, it may scare some people who begin to see patterns.

The only scary white person I've seen recently is your avatar. What's up with that? Is that one of those creepy kids from Village of the Damned?

Village of the Damned? Isn't that what they call The Dawg Pound up in Cleveland.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

This isn't evidence of anything--not guilt by association, but I had to share this picture from his father's facebook profile.

View attachment 49019

Despite saying no guilt by asscoiation you just had to show that picture. Implying guilt by association.
The father has a picture of Trump with a lion, flag, helicopter, but no Christian imagery or symbolism I notice => son is like that.

WHAT?! Unless you are you getting a Jack Hanna or Disney vibe from that, it is very obviously religious imagery.

 

[bilby]

This isn't evidence of anything--not guilt by association, but I had to share this picture from his father's facebook profile.

View attachment 49019

Despite saying no guilt by asscoiation you just had to show that picture. Implying guilt by association.
The father has a picture of Trump with a lion, flag, helicopter, but no Christian imagery or symbolism I notice => son is like that.

WHAT?! Unless you are you getting a Jack Hanna or Disney vibe from that, it is very obviously religious imagery.

I am guessing that @Tigers! has conveniently forgotten C S Lewis.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

The only scary white person I've seen recently is your avatar.

I wouldn't be scared of guys like Livelsberger if I were you either. You believe a lot of the same stuff, so you wouldn't get purged.

 

[unapologetic]

Don;
I don't want to get in the middle of whatever this is...
But I too was curious about your avatar.

My avatar is of my master.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Don;
I don't want to get in the middle of whatever this is...
But I too was curious about your avatar.

My avatar is of my master.

I changed my avatar upon seeing post#2 of this thread.

Back to the topic at hand, I was referencing a previous post in this thread that included one of Livelsberger's emails where he had called on the military to purge all Dems from military, government, etc by any means necessary.

 

[Derec]

I in no way equated several people with minor injuries and a suicide with quite a few people dead. That doesn't mean there isn't a point, though, in comparing what is similar and different.

They are different in almost every point, including the motivation being religion. It was for the Islamic terrorist attack in New Orleans, it wasn't for the public suicide in Las Vegas. So why the thread title?

 

[Patooka]

I in no way equated several people with minor injuries and a suicide with quite a few people dead. That doesn't mean there isn't a point, though, in comparing what is similar and different.

They are different in almost every point,

They were both US veterans who trained at Fort Bragg and used trucks as weapons against soft targets. But don't let that stop you from riding that hobby horse of yours.

Although to be fair, I'm a bit surprised you haven't whatabout yet involving a black man committing a terrorist attack last century. So yay?

 

[Derec]

You were not "attacked" at all; And you are being corrected for fallaciously linking Islam to the attack, not for correctly (but pointlessly) linking the attack to Islam.

I wasn't "corrected", since I wasn't wrong. Islam has a problem with terrorism. It's not like this guy is a one-off.

I explained that to you in detail.

No matter the level of detail in your apologetics for Islam, you are still wrong.
And note that the Las Vegas case had zilch to do with Christianity, so why don't you go explaining stuff to Don2?

An attack by a Muslim is not a sound basis for fear that Muslims are likely to attack us. Any more than this attack by a Christian is a sound basis for fear that Christians are likely to attack us.

The difference is
a) when the religion of the attacker is the reason for the attack.
b) when adherents of Islam commit such attacks at rates disproportionate to their numbers

You cannot resonably draw conclusions about an entire large population based on the aberrant act of one member (or if a small number of members) of that population. To do so is bigotry.

I am not drawing conclusions about the entire population. But there is certainly a problem with Islam in general. That is not bigotry, it's just not being blind or sticking the head in the sand.

A specific terrorist's motive may be his interpretation of Islam. That does not imply that identifying any other person as a Muslim is useful in determining the probability that he will commit an act of terrorism. It kinda feels like it ought to, if you don't think it through; But it doesn't.

If we were to calculate conditional probabilities, you are really denying that P(terrorist|Muslim) is not greater than P(terrorist|¬Muslim)?

Your belief that it does is mathematically and demonstrably wrong, and is bigotry.

Show your work.

You need to either stop believing it, or accept that you are a bigot who believes erroneous slurs about blameless people due to pig-headed refusal to see an obvious mistake whan it is spelled out to you in detail.

It's the opposite. You suffer pig-headed refusal to recognize the threat to western societies stemming from political Islam.
Not only when it comes to terrorism, but also the more insidious threat of the demographic takeover due to mass migration and hypernatalism. Look at Muslims who invaded Germany already demanding imposition of an Islamic Caliphate in Germany.