infamousbrad

[infamousbrad]

"Long, dull, and full of Nazis."

After putting it off for a couple of weeks, I finally got around to watching Bob Fosse's 1973 movie Cabaret last night. I didn't get out of it what I was hoping for.

(No spoilers but, aside from why I was watching it, I found it very frustrating just as a movie. There's a much better movie trying to claw its way out from under Bob Fosse's direction. There are people who poured their bodies and souls into trying to save this movie, and Liza Minnelli wasn't even the first one that comes to mind. The camera work is amazing and nobody prepared me for just how good Michael York is in this.)

Our current moment reminds me of a thing that's happened at least five times in my life that I remember off-hand when, as an amateur historian and hard-core journalism addict, I've seen disasters coming. All of those times I was able to persuade some people that the disaster was coming, and most of them I was able to use that to get at least a few people to relative safety. But ...

Imagine seeing someone's car stuck, bottomed out on a railroad track, seeing the train coming, screaming at them to get out of the car and start running in a diagonal direction towards the train, to escape the about-to-be flying debris. Now imagine them saying that they're confident that the train is going to stop on time, and they're not willing to give up on their car just yet.

I have variations on this nightmare two out of every three nights, on average. It's not always a train, but the common element is innocent people dying, or at least losing everything and having their lives ruined, because I couldn't get the right people to listen to me, because I wasn't persuasive enough.

The Satanic Panic felt just like this when it was just ramping up. AIDS felt just like this, in spades, in the couple of years between when the CDC announced that they'd noticed it and when the mass die-offs began. The runup to the Iraq War felt a lot like this. The nearly a year between the first spike in subprime mortgage default rates and the worst of the '08 financial crisis felt very, very much like this, and so did covid-19 in the four months between when it first made the news and when the mass die-offs reached the US.

All times that I saw it coming, couldn't stop it, barely managed to get a few of my most vulnerable friends to relative safety. But all times when the months between when I knew for a fact that a disaster was going to happen and when it started happening were excruciating. Cassandra's curse. The Sword of Damocles without even a throne to show for it.

I got around to watching Cabaret despite its (arguably justifiable) reputation among my friends-group as a terrible movie. (As an old friend of mine used to say, "Life is a cabaret old chum: long, dull, and full of Nazis.") I decided to finally see it myself because I wanted help processing and moving past this feeling of knowing that we're in for it now, long past preventing it. Of knowing that some people should be running, not waiting around, but they're not. Of knowing that most of us, but not all, are going to outlast this, survive to grieve the ones who don't. Help starting again to live a life with some sanity-preserving happiness between now and when it passes, so that at least some of us who survive in body also survive in soul, having made some good memories to lighten the deadening rage.

I didn't get that out of watching Cabaret. Shame. I could really use it. 'Cause I'm way too old to be going through this for a sixth time, I don't feel like I've still got it in me.

[infamousbrad]

I tap the mic. “Most people don’t want to crawl down your chimney and steal your dog.”

the crowd murmurs uncertainly.

“If someone wants to steal your dog,” I continue, “there are easier ways to do that. They don’t have to crawl into a chimney.”

Murmuring intensifies. People stand in their seats and begin to boo.

“People disguising themselves as chimney sweepers and stealing dogs is not a rational fear,” I shout. “Literally anyone could steal your dog. Why make sweeping chimneys illegal?”

“I have a list of chimney sweeps who stole dogs from parks!” Someone yells, throwing a shoe.

“You seriously think no chimney sweepers could possibly ever steal from a home?” Another cries.

“Only a dog thief would even want to crawl into a chimney to begin with!” Says a third.

A single tear rolls down my cheek. They are all so fucking stupid

This is a metaphor

[infamousbrad]

"I do not believe it is born in you! I do not believe it!"

"It's not born in you. It happens after you're born. ...

"You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear, / You’ve got to be taught from year to year, / It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear— / You’ve got to be carefully taught!

"You’ve got to be taught to be afraid / Of people whose eyes are oddly made, / And people whose skin is a different shade— / You’ve got to be carefully taught.

"You’ve got to be taught! before it’s too late! / Before you are six! or seven! or eight, / To hate all the people your relatives hate— / You’ve got to be carefully taught! / You’ve got to be carefully taught!"

"You've Got To Be Carefully Taught" - SOUTH PACIFIC (1958)

The children are our future if only the haters don't get to them first. If only we can keep them from being emotionally hardened, emotionally calloused.

watching children successfully and compassionately self-mediate conflict and wondering if it's possible to pinpoint where exactly it all goes wrong for us

[infamousbrad]

Consider this another preview for the essay I'm currently half-working on.

companies make billions from you thinking you're ugly btw. only ugly thing is their bottom line. log out of tiktok right now.

[infamousbrad]

Y'know who else had an American auto industry CEO helping prop him up?

So maybe people are doing now what they wish their predecessors had done to Henry Ford after he published The International Jew and the English-language translation of The Protocols of Zion, what should have happened to Henry Ford when he was building weapons for Hitler.

People resisting the new America First movement are going to lengths their predecessors didn't go to when they were resisting the original treasonous, racist, fascist America First movement? Good. Because maybe the people resisting Henry Ford and his allies could have stopped World War II sooner, even averted the worst of the Holocaust, if they'd gone at Ford, and the rest of the Hitler-payrolled traitors, the way today's anti-fascist activists are going at Musk and the rest of the Putin-payrolled traitors today.

There were Americans taking right-wing racist authoritarianism seriously in the 1930s. They helped stop Hitler's agents from dragging America into the war on the Nazi side, and we should be proud of them. But the most important thing we need to learn from their work is that we need to go harder. No America First leader should sleep a single quiet night.

[infamousbrad]

Other people making the point I'm going to get around to in (if I stay on schedule) my #pornotopia post after next. "I didn't consent to see that"? I don't consent to seeing lifted pickup trucks or advertisements; learn to cope.

[infamousbrad]

ive seen some discussion of this in the notes already, but i'd like to second the people saying that they don't fit into either full pornotopia or pornotopia lite.

i'm asexual. a world where every adult "should" want sex with most other adults, and is assumed to want sex with most adults as a baseline, isn't gonna work for me. but pornotopia lite, as it's described in your post, is already too anti-sex to me. nearly everything past the first sentence feels objectionable. "people should be picky about partners; sex or porn addiction is a real thing worth worrying about; forming a family should be your priority; sex is private and talking about it in public should be frowned upon" these are all things i heavily disagree with. i'd find pornotopia-lite way too restrictive.

i guess similar what you said about how even though you're not a woman, you feel unsafe in places where women don't feel safe to be topless. i don't want sex, but i don't feel safe in a place where people wanting sex aren't allowed to be open and casual about it.

I'm going to address that. Soon. Or at least Soon™ (as such things go) and in pieces, because this next point ardently resists being condensed and generalized.

I'm still on my bullshit. Block the #pornotopia tag if you want to keep reading my other stuff but are done with this topic. And, importantly, before I go on ...

This post comes with a Content Warning for discussions of weight loss and disordered eating, below the cut. If you're struggling and at risk of relapse if you think about that too hard, skip this post.

I have to start this one by being personally vulnerable in a way that I'm afraid is going to hurt me, but if this goes to 10,000, fine, I can at least hope it does somebody some good.

Okay? Let's go, let me expand on something I tried to condense and ended up over-condensing in my "Searching for Pornotopia" kick-off post.

The "Unfuckable" are Easy Prey for Villains

It's early 1978. I'm 17 years old, and months away from graduating from the Union of Christian Schools (and John Birch Society covert front group) high school that my parents forced me into to escape murderous bullying for my mental health in the local public schools.

The senior class is having an unsupervised "open study hall" in one of the larger classrooms, some few of us working on homework, most of us just socializing. I'm as happy as a pig in congress because I'm hanging out with both of my ongoing (if fruitless) crushes. Let's borrow some names from cryptography, call the taller, skinnier, bespectacled, earnest girl Alice and call the shorter, cheerier, heavier, sexier one Carol. And of course I'm Brad (sorry Bob), the compassionate famine-thin autistic liberal nerd. I've been friends with both since at least sophomore year.

Alice and Carol get to talking about their respective most-recent dating disasters, and they turn to me and ask for my my most recent dating disaster. Mortified but brave, I admit to them that I've never been on a date in my life. Do I want to date Alice asks, hell yes. Nobody's ever said yes. (Left unsaid: including both of you, not that you apparently remember.) So Carol turns to Alice and says, "[Alice], you've known him forever, why haven't you gone out on a date with him?"

And Alice's laugh is sudden and brief, shocked and horrified. She's a good person, she knows that her surprise has made her do something unforgivably wrong, so she chokes it back fast. But then she makes it worse, right to my face. "I can't imagine dating Brad. (pause) I can't imagine anyone ever dating Brad."

I wrote this in the first-person because it is 2025, I'm 64 years old, and I am still there. That mental, emotional , and social injury has never even scabbed over, let alone healed. It has haunted me my whole life.

And it didn't occur to me at the time, but it may not be a coincidence that within about a year, I read Atlas Shrugged for the first time.

I've lived a long life, and not all of it awful or alone. I've been ferociously political since I was 13, and a journalism addict since I was four. So feel the impact of those facts when I say that I cannot think of any more effective way to permanently cripple a human being than to tell them that nobody will ever feel an ounce of attraction for them, that they will never feel an affectionate touch. And we have whole industries dedicated to doing just that. What diet-culture capitalism and Alt-Right violent radicalization have in common is that they prey on the unloved.

A Perfect Cinderella Story

It's an intense competition to ask me "Brad, what's the most radicalizing thing you've ever read?" but with this on my mind, the slam dunk has to be chapter 5, called "A Specimen American Myth," in Philip Wylie's 1942 (and thus public-domain!) mental-health jeremiad Generation of Vipers.

He points out in the older, continental, mythical stories of the Little Cinder Girl, the prince is a cipher, barely a character, just a reward, a McGuffin in modern terms. The Fairy Godmother intervenes because he's in danger of marrying one of two lazy, slovenly, greedy (but lovely, not ugly!) girls, but also, more importantly, because Ella of the Cinders is everything the Faerie realm admires: generous to a fault, considerate to a fault, and tidy to a fault. Cinder Ella's introduction to, and ultimate marriage to Prince Charming is a reward for her virtue.

Not, unlike in the children's book versions that began to circulate in the Anglosphere in the early 20th century, a reward for her beauty. And it is those versions that make the stepsisters Ugly. Wylie argued that one of the reasons that the whole world was going insane was that:

Boys are taught that the only things women care about are wealth and power, and that they should judge their own success by the youth and beauty of the women who want to fuck them. And, the obvious converse:

Girls are taught that the only things that men care about are youth and beauty, and that they should judge their own sexiness by how wealthy and powerful the men who want to fuck them are.

And, he argued, this drives all of us insane because most moms are disgusted with themselves for having to settle for the husbands they got, and most dads are disgusted with themselves for being married to someone who got old and fat. And dads (and other men) teach young boys that that's why they have to be ever more successful providers so they don't end up with an ugly woman like their mom, and moms (and other women) teach little girls that they have to stay young and thin, and at least dress to look like they have big boobs, or else they'll end up with a loser like their dad.

The Return of Fascism and the Black Pill

This is the straight line that leads to pickup artistry, to Game, to incelry, to the black pill. This why two consecutive generations of right-wing violence hucksters have flogged the same story: liberals and feminists have stolen the good jobs that were supposed to fund your success, they left you behind, you won't have a home of your own or any other success to be proud of until you're 40 or more, by which time all the young, pretty girls will be married, out of your reach, and you'll be lucky if you have the option to be grudgingly accepted by women who are total losers, irreparably damaged themselves by that point. No young, beautiful woman will ever express any attraction to you. You will never feel an affectionate touch.

So vote for Trump, they said. Burn it all down.

The Horror of Diet-Culture Capitalism

A strong candidate for the most radicalizing documentary I've ever seen was Catharine Gilday's 1990 movie, The Famine Within. She interviewed many girls and women of all ages about their experience of a then-recent research finding. I'm quoting from long-ago memory here, so I may have a detail or two off by a little bit, but it was something like this:

The average woman goes on her first calorie-restriction diet at the age of 11. Nearly always because of an unkind remark from an older female relative. She will go on another diet every 8 years. Each of these diets will fail within 18 months and result in a net gain of at least 10 pounds.

Let me also send you to nutritionists Matt Priven and Jen Baum's hour-long podcast episode about the history of diet drugs. If I may summarize their summary, we've had multiple generations of diet drugs, starting with "thyroid extract" in 1888 up to GLP-1 inhibitors of today. They all have the same ultimate mechanism of action: they make anorexia nervosa less painful. Not less deadly, just less painful. And just like every other form of extreme calorie restriction, none of them could be taken for very long and, just like every form of extreme calorie restriction, they on average result in an overall net gain, not loss, of weight, they make the women who take them fatter.

So after 137 years of failure, why do diets and diet drugs still sell, especially to women? Because successful men, the ones women want, are looking for youthful appearance, big boobs, and narrow waists. And there will never be a shortage of scientists and companies, deep in the throes of confirmation bias, willing to take their money, "cashing in on body issues, selling skin and bones and big boobs" (as Jax put it in her hit song "I Know Victoria's Secret").

Because this time just might be different, maybe for you. Because otherwise, no successful man will ever express any attraction for you. You will never know affectionate touch.

Stop eating, they say. Take the drugs.

And it's spreading to men, too, thanks to cultural pressures and intense marketing of anorexia in a bottle, Wegovy and Mounjaro, and equally intense marketing of orthorexia nervosa, aka "clean eating." If I may risk being vulnerable again?

It's gotten to me. I started going to extreme lengths to starve myself rather than eat "unclean" foods, after years of nagging since my primary-care physician got herself certified as a dietitian. By the time I got her to stop, she'd infected me with orthorexia nervosa, and getting her to stop (which took years, and intense courage) hasn't done me a lick of good. In her horror, as my health markers have declined, she's tried to refer me to an eating disorder clinic, but there are none that are affordable, accessible, and who treat men. I'm having to tough it out myself.

But you know what makes it harder? I lost almost 60 pounds in four months, and for the first time in decades, more people were happy to see me, and for the first time in decades, my female friends started telling me that I finally looked attractive. They're still doing it. They're still telling me that, as a relative failure on the wealth and power scale, that if I don't keep making myself dangerously ill, I'll never hear anyone call me attractive, never again feel an affectionate touch. They don't mean to. But they're not immune to the culture we live in.

What Does That Have to Do with #Pornotopia?

I do not believe we can defeat the return of fascism or the health ravages of diet-culture capitalism without providing all people with an attainable, achievable path to feeling attractive, to feeling loved. I think we must find a way to build a not merely sex-positive but actively sexual culture, no matter who it makes uncomfortable, because the alternative is horror for us all. I think those made uncomfortable by the idea of living in a pornotopia will not find its absence any more comforting. I don't think it's enough by itself, but I do think it's essential.

Why do I think that, and how could we get there? Man, give me a brief break. Those are good questions, but writing this and then condensing it down even this far has drained me. Let this go out there and (as if) get read while I build back the strength to continue.

Previously: "Searching for Pornotopia" (poll still open!) and ...

"Topless Women are an Indicator Species."

And this piece: "The 'Unfuckable' are Easy Prey for Villains." Next, tentatively:

"Looking for Reasons to Say Yes?" Can and should everybody feel attractive? and hopefully finally, but probably not ..

"Nobody Wants to See That" We can't fix any of this while preserving shame culture.

[infamousbrad]

Topless Women are an Indicator Species

Happy Mardi Gras, for those of you who celebrate.

I still have a poll running for a few more days (that has so far gotten a disappointingly low number of votes) asking, in a lot of words, just how much sexuality and sexual display you would want to see in a "pornotopia," in a world where few or no reasons to turn down sex that you want still applied: if you had no fear of disease, unwanted pregnancy, violence, damaged relationships, or slut-shaming. (Please go vote and reblog while there's still time?)

And then today I got forwarded a link to this article:

That article reminded me of something I've observed in multiple subcultures, unchanging over the course of decades: the number of women in a space who are nude, topless, or at least very scantily clad is directly proportional to how seriously that environment takes protecting women from sexual violence or coercion.

In an environment where a woman who's running around naked or partly naked will be blamed for any assault she suffers and then slut-shamed, none of them do. In an environment where she can be confident that she won't, lots of them are, in fact, quite eager to show off.

And after decades of occasionally finding myself pleased to be in that situation, I realized that having an exhibitionist fetish isn't the only reason I only really feel comfortable in those spaces. (Although I won't deny it is a reason.) The even bigger reason is that, even though I'm as masculine-presenting as it's possible to be, if women don't feel safe from bullying, neither do I.

The kind of guys who defend rape culture are the same kind of guys most likely to bully everyone they can get away with, including crazy people like me. If the women who want to run around "rugs out, jugs out!" (thank you for that image, Harley Quinn!) aren't flocking to a space because it's safe for them, it's probably not safe for anybody else either, is it?

That's what I meant when I say that the less sexual shame there is in a society, the less sexual shyness, the less sexual fear, the healthier I think that society is, that the road to utopia leads through sexual liberation. That's why I, personally, am searching for pornotopia.

[infamousbrad]

There's one in Helluva Boss s2e12 (the client in "Sinsmas").

And yeah, Viv has said that she wants to avoid arguments over which real-world religions are right or wrong, isn't out to make enemies in that way. And yeah, pilot Katie Killjoy's homophobia got dropped when series Katie Killjoy got recast and rewritten as a transwoman, so we lost that opportunity.

I'm pretty sure that Viv intended the series to be unambiguous that homophobes, transphobes, and haters in general go to hell, not heaven when they die and I don't know if she faced studio interference, network interference, or if she just self-censored, but pretty much the whole fanbase of these shows want her to come down on the theologically correct side: "God is love, and all who dwell in love dwell in God, and God in them." (1st John 4:16) I think she's got everything to gain and nothing to lose by making it at least as explicit in Hazbin Hotel, too.

The one thing I desperately need to see in the Hellaverse (literally either show idk) is sinners who were evangelical christians in life and are confused as to how they ended up in Hell. Please, Viv, I need it for my soul.

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This week-long arc Peanuts arc ran when the measles vaccination was first developed and widely administered in 1967.  GoComics republished it as part of their rerun strips late last year, but it could obviously stand to go around again.

Big slow claps to everyone who made a 50-year-old PSA relevant, good job everyone we’re doing GREAT

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Searching for Pornotopia

(Audio accompaniment for this too-long post: LaTour, "People Are Still Having Sex," 1991.)

More and more news stories and essays (and mass media, and fanfics) keep reminding me of something I read about decades ago, in a used-book sale find called The Other Victorians by Steven Marcus. It's a fascinating book that came about by accident, when the Kinsey Institute inherited, unsolicited, one of the largest ever collections of 19th century European pornography, and hired a grad student to catalog it.

And that grad student had the whimsical realization that these various authors, all over the continent, had converged on a shared-world alternate history that resembled their own world in almost every respect: same countries, same political systems, same kinds of people in the same jobs, but with one important difference: none of the reasons to turn down sex existed.

A maiden both modest and mild Sought to keep herself undefiled By thinking of Jesus, Contagious diseases, And the bother of having a child.

In the fictional alternate-history Victorian-era world of Pornotopia:

Sexually transmitted infections do not exist, or are trivially curable. Nobody shows any worry about contracting or spreading them.

Unintended pregnancy does not exist. In fact, in most of these stories, it seems impossible to get pregnant by anyone other than your spouse, or at least not without both spouses' permission.

Sexual coercion does not exist because, on some level, everybody is horny for everybody most or all of the time, and are just waiting for the other person to mention it and point out an opportunity.

Emotional consequences do not exist; people treat it as the proverbial "equivalent of a formal introduction."

Social consequences exist, but are mild. If you get caught having sex, people might mock you for your taste, or tease you for getting caught. But it's gentle teasing, because all grownups understand that sooner or later it happens to everybody, that if it hasn't happened to them yet, it will.

Now, obviously this is back-formation from the premise "how do we write around the fact that, in the real world, these two characters wouldn't dare have sex." On a practical level these mostly-anonymous authors weren't so much sci-fi alternate-history world-building as making an excuse to smash their imagined characters together. (What, you thought AO3 invented this?)

Why am I bringing this up now?

At the top of the list of reasons why I'm thinking about this again, other than the entirely predictable freakout about recreational and "deviant" sex that you see whenever right-wing authoritarianism is on the rise (see Wilhelm Reich's autobiographical work about the rise of fascism in Germany), is the fact that in Vivienne Medrano's YouTube series "Helluva Boss," her fictionalized version of Asmodeus, the Embodiment of the Deadly Sin of Lust, is shown as having structured the society of his ring of Hell's native species, the succubuses (no longer a gendered noun in this story), as a Pornotopia. And I wonder how many people would want to live there?

Medrano's fictionalized Realm of Lust is governed by a being of near godlike power who is fanatical about enforcing enthusiastic all-party adult sober consent! But he's equally fanatical in promoting the idea that people owe it to their society to be as sexually enticing as possible, to be as sexually available as time and energy and minimal privacy permit, to be as kinky as all partners involved want, and to be entirely non-judgmental about each others' sex lives. Don't be ashamed of lusting after each other, and certainly don't be ashamed if people can tell that you've had sex. It's a great thing, Asmodeus says, and he seems to think that it's an essential pillar of any healthy, happy, prosperous society.

So here's my poll question. (And yes, in fact, I do know that being on tumblr is going to skew my sample.) If all of those conditions existed, how much casual, purely carnal sex would you want to exist in your world? Is Pornotopia a utopia for you, or a dystopia?

Full-on Pornotopia: Most adults should be horny for most adults, should play with each other sexually as often as time and energy and attention and minimal privacy permit, and there should be no lasting social consequences for sex no matter who you're accidentally caught having sex with.

Pornotopia Lite: Healthy people are entitled to desire as much or as little sex as is comfortable for them, should be picky about who they let themselves be attracted to, should be wary of addictive or compulsive behavior that would get in the way of them forming families and holding down jobs, and please keep sexuality out of the public eye at all costs, nobody should have to see that.

Anti-Pornotopia: Sex should be something that's special and sacred between two married people, reserved for intense pair-bonding, and nobody should ever find out that those two people have actually had sex any more often than would explain their number of children, if only to protect children and other people who shouldn't be exposed to sexuality. (Am I straw-manning, here?)

That's Because They're in Hell: Sex is disgusting and a waste of time that could be better spent doing literally anything else, so it should come with harsh consequences so that, as much as possible, people stop doing it.

Feel free to rant in the reblogs. (As if I could stop you, amirite?)

[infamousbrad]

SUBMIT. STAY ASLEEP.

[infamousbrad]

every update I see for the Murderbot show makes me think of this meme, so I decided to make it real.

[infamousbrad]

This has been bugging me since the very first casting announcements.

I do not remember more than one character, so far in the whole series, who was described as recognizably white, and she was a minor villain introduced several novels on from All Systems Red. This show is more thoroughly white-washed than the live-action Avatar the First Airbender disaster.

And Martha Wells says that she's happy with what she's seen, but I'm going into this asking myself the question: what else did this production team hate about the books? How much else of what I love about this series did they discard?

Gonna find out one way or another in a few weeks, obviously, but I am not exactly approaching this adaptation with an open heart. On the contrary, I have The Fear.

(Also, it should go without saying that a famously asexual character who is also assertively agender, who uses it/its pronouns exclusively, absolutely should, once the helmet comes off, be made up and played as non-binary, should not be made to look masculine. As it would say, "If I were masculine that would make me a sexbot and I'm not a sexbot." So, yeah, I repeat, what else did the producers and writers hate? Are we gonna get a white cisgender masculine sexbot that just calls "himself" Murderbot? I ain't kidding when I say I have The Fear, I don't want this property adapted if it's going to be butchered beyond recognition.)

murderbot should have been played by a trans person of colour. I'm not taking criticism on this take at this time

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okay listen it's very simple. Galinda Upland is a closeted lesbian experiencing comphet who imprinted on Fiyero because he's like a Kinsey 4 demisexual and thus sexually unthreatening. (Fiyero does not know this about himself) (Fiyero has imprinted on Glinda because his self-professed coping mechanism for dealing with his sexuality is that he will keep all of his personal earth-shattering revelations locked in a box that he never looks at and then someday he will die) (also because he's experiencing comphet and she's a lesbian and thus sexually unthreatening) (Fiyero would die twice before realizing that he's not straight except that about seven months into camping in the Fairy Himalayas or whatever the fuck his wife makes a bluntly casual reference to it and his poor nonexistent brain bursts into very existent flames which is concerning to all involved).

Elphaba is just a normal bisexual who thought she had better taste. Unfortunately the [gestures] unusual and exceeding peculiarity has also left her with a wildly insecure self-concept and associated paranoia about any perceived advances crossed with predatory-attraction complex unmatched by anyone who is not the average Earth trans woman.

They would be God's perfect polycule if God wasn't a snake-oil salesman from 1930s Kansas.

Anyway that's why Wicked is good.

[infamousbrad]

Elon Musk is the bank robber firing the guards.

Unelected parasite.

There will never be one bit of evidence given regarding 'waste' or 'fraud'. The corruption is Elon. The accusations are confessions.

This whole sham works because MAGA are unserious hyper-partisans addicted to racial animus and homophobia.

[infamousbrad]

I don’t know why that affected me so strongly, but I’m watching a youtube video on disasters on Lake Huron, and the first one involves a coal freighter that was lost in the White Hurricane of 1913 called the SS Argus. Everyone on the ship was lost. But it’s mentioned that the captain’s body washed up later, and was found without a life jacket. So they thought, based partly on testimony of another ship that thought they saw them go down, that it just happened too fast for him to have time to get his jacket. But then another body was found, that of the second cook, and she was found wearing the life jacket marked ‘captain’. And that’s …

It didn’t work. It didn’t save her. But it’s so very possible that he spent his last moments alive trying to save someone else, one of his crew, and they probably both knew that it wouldn’t work, that there wasn’t a lot of hope in a blizzard on the lakes in November, but he tried … he tried anyway. Even if it did nothing but maybe make her body easier for her family to find.

You know that Mr Rogers thing of ‘look for the helpers’? How many times has someone, facing the end, done something tiny and fragile and maybe hopeless just to try and help someone else? Whether it works or not. How many people went to their graves at least trying?

That has to say something about us. As a people. As monstrous as we sometimes (perhaps often) are, so many times we were also …

Whoever saves one life, saves the whole world.

And sometimes you can’t save one life, sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes there’s no getting out of this for anyone, but … try anyway. Because it matters anyway.

And maybe no one will ever know. But maybe also some day more than a century down the line, maybe some idiot will be crying into her coffee because of what you died trying.