infamousbrad

[infamousbrad]

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.

[infamousbrad]

What's going to happen when Missouri eliminates half of its tax revenue?

We get poorer.

It's just that simple. Any kind of an even minimally functioning economy depends on taxpayer funded services for things that the private sector can't or won't fund. Once those services are curtailed or go away altogether, so does the private sector economy that depends on them.

Once the roads go to shit, any job that depends on roads goes away.

Once the justice system goes to shit, any job that depends on safety goes away.

Once the schools go to shit, any job that needs even minimally educated workers goes away.

Once public health goes to shit, any job that depends on people being healthy enough to work goes away.

Once all semblance of affordable housing goes away, once affordable transportation goes away, any job that needs low-wage workers goes away.

This isn't even vaguely theory or ideology, this is historical fact. No county, no state, no country, has ever gotten wealthy by providing fewer government services, nobody has ever tax-cut their way to prosperity. I went to a John-Birch-Society-funded private high school, I know that the anarcho-capitalist right thinks that anything that deserves to be done can and will be done better by the private sector, but it's been tried over and over again since the term "laissez fair" was coined and they don't have a single success to point to.

But apparently we're going to try it again, and slide down into chaos and poverty again, and why? Because "my ideology says it does work." Because "nobody else has ever tried hard enough for long enough." (Yeah, there's a reason for that.) Because "we have alternative facts." Because "this time will be different."

Because there is no historical force more implacable than a bad idea whose time has come around again. Because we have record-high income inequality and nobody has ever designed a form of government that can keep money from being converted into power. Because for every problem there is a solution that is easy, obvious, and wrong.

[infamousbrad]

Solve the public restroom problem now.

I ranted the other day, in a reblog of someone else's lovely rant about businesses who won't provide publicly-facing restrooms, that this is a crisis, it's getting worse for hard-to-solve reasons, and once fecal spore spread diseases return to widespread community spread, we're all going to spend a lot of time sick and a lot of us are going to die. Cholera, the reason we mandated public restrooms in the first place, is no joke.

There is a solution, at least two cities have proven it, it's even cheaper and more effective than mandating that all places open to the public provide them, and the pilot projects turned out to be even cheaper and even more beneficial than the most optimistic forecasts.

One thing you can do about it is forward this link to the city/county council member that represents where you live, and/or to your state legislator(s), and if you live in a place that has public transit, to whoever answers emails at your transit agency. And I wish you would, while there's still time.

[infamousbrad]

Captain America 2 is my favorite movie in the whole messy MCU and it is entirely because of this scene and the next few scenes, because we keep cutting to ordinary SHIELD employees who just found out that any minute now HYDRA is in all probability about to conquer the world, and they will win by killing millions of innocent people, and that nothing the loyal SHIELD employees can do has the slightest chance of stopping that.

And what those dozens of ordinary people do is die trying, unhesitatingly and unafraid and unashamed.

None of those deaths make the slightest amount of difference.

Most of them, unlike the one in this gifset, don't even slow HYDRA down by a second. But here's why it mattered to them: it had to be tried. There was nothing to gain by living, if HYDRA won. And even if you did comply, step aside, and somehow "live to fight another day," you would spend the rest of your lifetime, however long or short, not knowing if it would have mattered. That guilt would follow you into eternity.

I've thought long and hard, for most of a lifetime, about courage and this is what I believe true courage is. True courage is doing what you know is right, saying what needs to be said, even if there's no hope of reward, even if there's no hope of surviving it, even if there's no hope of success, just because you know it has to be tried.

And this movie gets that.

[infamousbrad]

As MAGA persecutes the equally fanatical right-wing white Catholic leadership for not being loyal enough to Trump, could it split the coalition that the Moral Majority crafted, drive them out of politics or back to the Democrats? Could Republicans ever win an election without white Catholic votes?

[infamousbrad]

Untitled Ghost Game?

vampire hunter? no i said vampire HAUNTER. this jerk sucked all my blood out so now i spend my afterlife knocking over shelves and scaring off potential victims and just making the castle generally pretty cold

[infamousbrad]

In case you thought it was just this one guy preaching that empathy is a sin:

The same news source had a long piece, a couple of days ago, quoting top Baptist theologians on this controversy, here's the steel-man version of it:

If people are suffering, it's because they're doing something wrong, probably something sinful or else God would protect them.

Empathy tricks you into thinking that the problem is that they're suffering, when the real problem is that they're sinning.

True sympathy says, "stop sinning so you don't have to suffer." And, "If I lifted your suffering, what would motivate you to stop sinning? You're supposed to suffer until you stop sinning."

Never mind how many ways in which this contradicts the plain language of the Bible, you don't even have to go into that to sigh and say, "It's the 'Just World' hypothesis all over again." Rich and powerful people and their acolytes love the "Just World" hypothesis because if it were true, their wealth and popularity and power would be proof that they did nothing wrong.

I warned you.

About 15 years ago, I had a minor moment of Internet fame when I wrote a lengthy essay series on LiveJournal called "Christians in the Hand of an Angry God." In it, I argued that right-wing evangelical "Christianity" was literally Satanic by scriptural standards, was literally the cult of anti-Christ that Jesus prophesied in Matthew 25:31-46, that they were literally worshiping a made-up guy with the same name to justify cruelty, just like Jesus predicted they would the week before the crucifixion.

And at least half of the people who read it and praised it called it excellent satire. They saw my point, thought I was onto something, but couldn't take seriously that I literally meant what I literally said.

"Do not commit the sin of empathy."

Jesus' prophesy that these people were coming was not especially miraculous, in hindsight. No philosophy or theological movement becomes a large organized church, let alone a majority faith of a nation, without needing rich people's money, and/or government funding, to pay for it all.

And rich people in general, and right-wing governments in general, get to be the way they are by believing that the poor and the down-trodden can never be shown anything but cruelty, should never be rewarded, or else they'll lose all motivation to obey, to work hard, to be good. (By contrast, they believe that the same thing would happen to rich, powerful, popular people if they were ever punished in any way, if they were ever anything but rewarded.)

And rich people and governments are not going to subsidize your church foundation funds, your church repair funds, et cetera if you tell them that they're evil. But someone definitely will come along and offer to take that money. The people who take that money and conform won't even all be lying psychopaths; if you truly believe that your organization matters, is doing irreplaceable good in the world, you'll sacrifice any principle of your faith to keep the bills paid, you'll look away from or excuse any sin. It's that or see it all shrink and crumble into irrelevance.

I've come to the conclusion that it may not actually be possible to be a good person while practicing the majority faith of the land you live in. Or, if it is possible, well, like the man said, "straight is the gate and narrow is the way, and few there be that find it."

The Episcopal Church has its own legacy of sin, they've long overlooked a laundry list of crimes to pay their own bills, so don't rush to congratulate a mainline bishop for preaching mainline Christianity or take too much pleasure from Trump and his fascist followers being surprised that that happened. But do remember this:

From the mid-1970s to the present, right-wing billionaires have poured a LOT of money into church expansion and maintenance conditional on them distorting the Bible's teachings to make it appear that Jesus was pro-fascist. "To deceive, if it were possible, the very elect." So when honest theologians tell you that this is literally anti-Christ, literally checks every box in the Bible's description of the future cult of anti-Christ, you need to hear us.

The modern book and movie image of "the Antichrist" was a well-funded propaganda campaign to distract you from the plain language of the scriptures. The biblical anti-Christ is not some socialist liberal peacenik. The biblical anti-Christ is everyone who tells you that Jesus wants you to be cruel to "the least of these, my brethren" so that they'll straighten up and fly right.

[infamousbrad]

Do u think killing babies is wrong? Yes or no

Yes. Killing babies is wrong.

Nothing in embryology or any other science says that a fetus is a baby. Nor does the Christian bible (which says the soul enters the body with the first breath), nor the scriptures of any other major world religion, not that that should matter.

I, for example, was almost 15 years old before the Southern Baptist church stopped denouncing abortion opposition, calling the "pro-life" position un-biblical "papistry" before then. And they didn't change their mind through biblical exegesis, they changed their mind in exchange for huge bribes from crazy right-wing billionaires.

Now let me turn it around on you, asshole: do you think killing women (by denying them essential healthcare) is wrong? Yes or no.

[infamousbrad]

This is your second-to-last warning.

Back when fanatical anti-abortion judges were getting appointed in Trump's first term, people on Facebook asked me how scared should they be? And I drew the comparison to the role that the Fugitive Slave Act played in the run-up to the US Civil War, to lay out three levels of alert, because repealing Roe would be your third-to-last warning.

If Roe v Wade was repealed, I said, have a discussion with your loved ones and dependents where you try to get them to imagine having to flee, and come back to it, if not every night, often enough to keep the possibility in mind.

When the first attempt is made to extradite a doctor or pharmacist or other volunteer from a free state to an anti-abortion state, for a crime not illegal in that state, I said start active preparations in case you're going to need to flee. (More on that in a bit.)

When that extradition request fails, and it will fail, you should expect a Republican Congress like this one to pass "Fugitive Slave Act 2.0," requiring free-state local law officials to assist out-of-state law officials and/or bounty hunters in bringing "abortionists" to justice, just like they did last time, and expect this Supreme Court to uphold it. When that happens, get yourself and your loved ones to safety in a free state or, honestly, abroad if you can. Because ...

The last time these very same states tried this, they found that private citizens and local law enforcement in the free states went to extreme lengths to buy time for escaped slaves to escape, delaying out-of-state bounty hunters in every way, the Supreme Court be damned.

If you're still here when that bridge is crossed, you volunteered to live through a civil war. Because the anti-abortion states are going to find out that it is physically impossible to enforce their will on free states while remaining in the United States.

The outcome will be the same, because the conditions haven't changed. The army will take their side? Nearly the whole army took their side last time, too. Didn't help once the food and bullets ran low, which will happen again this time. Last time it ended with their cities shelled and burned to the ground, their economy in a shambles that it still hasn't recovered from, and there's no plausible story that ends the next civil war, if they're determined to have another one, on any other terms.

Yesterday ...

... a Louisiana grand jury issued an order to extradite a New York pharmacist for remotely prescribing mifepristone to a patient in Louisiana. Not only was that legal, but New York state has a shield law, requiring local law enforcement to defend the pharmacist or anyone else so indicted. And it's just what I predicted, because that's what they did last time.

With this Congress, expect a "Fugitive Abortionist Act." They'll have to suspend the filibuster in the Senate to pass it, so there's some hope yet. But by the time it passes, if it does, you will need:

Up-to-date travel papers. A passport is best, but for Gods' sake at least have up-to-date REAL IDs for yourself and your dependents. And ...

Cash. Preferably stashed off-premises, maybe diversified, and at least some of it out of the country or in a local credit union in the free state you're going to if that's your choice.

A transportation plan. Where are you going and how are you going to get there? And, finally, and most importantly ...

An agreement. Promise each other, in advance, that once physical resistance to extraditions ordered under the Fugitive Abortionists Act (or whatever they end up calling it) makes the news? Screw inertia, screw work, screw the fact that you might not have a plan for a place to live when you get there, screw all the reasons to stay, you need to promise each other that, if that day comes, you are going to implement your escape plan, and not wait another day.

Because, to expand on what I said above, if you wait until armies are on the march and checkpoints go up because borders are closing, you will have waited too long, and wherever you are on that day, that's where you're going to be when US cities start looking like Aleppo, like Mariupol, like Gaza.

[infamousbrad]

What denomination is your essay about the real antichrist? I'm in a red state and everyone is just... really really mean. I would love to actually find some people who think like that essay. Thanks!

I'm an exvangelical, now pagan.

These days I stand by my claim that it's hard as hell to be a decent person, to get actually decent religious advice, if you're a member of the majority faith in your country because wealthy sinners have amazing control over what gets preached in those circumstances.

Even if I had a higher opinion of the Christian bible than I do, I'd probably identify as a non-specific theist on forms and want nothing to do with any Christian denomination in America, personally. I think about it sometimes, but, no.

But if you are looking for a far-less Satanic denomination of Christianity, my expert opinion is that you should seriously check out whichever of the following denominations has a church physically closest to you: the Friends (Quakers), the Mennonites, or the American Baptists. The Episcopalians are sometimes okay, it varies widely from church to church from actually saintly all the way to Prosperity Gospel lite.

RedLetterChristians.org is also a pretty good source of material.

On the other hand, you should avoid any megachurch, regardless of denomination, because I can safely guarantee they agreed to horrifying moral compromises to build that fancy building; the bigger and newer the building, the more likely what they're preaching is a straight-up pyramid scheme grift.

And you will hear nothing but teachings that are anti-Christ in almost any Southern Baptist or Independent Baptist or Primitive Baptist church, basically any Pentecostal church (especially the Assemblies of God), any non-Communities-of-Christ Mormon church, or any American white-majority Catholic church. The "Christ" they preach in those churches more closely resembles Moloch, their "Holy Spirit" a thinly disguised Mammon.

And once again, don't confuse what I write about this for satire; I mean the Moloch comparison extremely precisely. They entirely literally teach that if God isn't blessing our nation, we must not have tortured enough people to death lately, and need to torment more victims. As Alan Ginsberg said roughly 80 years ago, the true god of America is Moloch.

[infamousbrad]

You know what, let's do this.

I know there's a decent percentage of Fandom Old Guard who are over here these days, but it can't be all of us. I want to know how useful a comparison it would be.

Like to numbers, reblog to sample size.

[infamousbrad]

I just listened to the Sounds Like a Cult podcast’s special episode on Neil Gaiman. I hadn’t done very deep a dive into the Gaiman allegations, but I was waiting for someone to satisfy my curiosity on one question: where the hell was Amanda Palmer in all of this? This podcast tells the story in just enough detail that I smacked my forehead, figuratively, for not guessing sooner. Because Neil and Amanda turn out to be actively stereotypical in the polyamory community:

They were unicorn hunters. Straight-up cliché unicorn hunters. Straight man with bisexual wife seeks hot younger woman who will fuck both partners, raise the married couple’s children and do all the household chores. Salary not provided; room and board contingent on the married couple’s satisfaction.

Couples like this show up at almost every polymeet. They’re as familiar as the sunset. And, generally, as welcome as a turd in a punchbowl. Because most cities with an actually active poly community have seen enough straight husband, bisexual wife couples looking for disposable vulnerable younger girls that when girls who match the target demographic show up, they get subtly warned. Unicorn hunters are a plague on the culture of consensual non-monogamy.

Gaiman and Palmer didn’t hunt in the poly community, so far as anyone has revealed. But they hunted at sci-fi, fantasy, and horror conventions, and I’d be startled if there weren’t polyfolk in all of those places. Ah, but these are rich, and famously beloved unicorn hunters, celebrity unicorn hunters. So, well, shit.

Now I have even less difficulty believing the victims, because I’ve long since lost count of how many couples I’ve met who have emotionally, financially, and, often, physically abused their secondaries. So I can easily imagine how many abuse victims any one of those couples would have left behind if, in addition to being predatory, the husband was wealthy and had been trained from birth in cult recruitment by high-ranking Scientologists.

[infamousbrad]

Let me try to be unambiguous and clear about this:

Almost every city and almost every county in the United States has a law on the books, since around 1940, requiring every place that admits the public, government owned OR private sector, to have a public restroom stocked with soap and clean water. Where those laws are no longer on the books, they were repealed within living memory; even where they haven't been repealed, they are no longer enforced.

Why were those laws written in the first place? Cholera.

Cholera is one of those rare viruses that forms spores that can survive more or less indefinitely on any surface, and reactivate once any other human touches that surface and then touches their mouth or nose. We didn't have a cure for it and we still don't. We have palliative care: we put you in an emergency room and try to pump fluids into you faster than you're losing them, and if that's not enough, you die.

Once it was proved that if there is anybody in your city who has cholera and can't wash their hands after they shit, once a clean restroom is a privilege you have to earn? Once it was proved that this meant that sooner or later everybody was going to catch it?

Tough-minded (and nearly-all Democratic or centrist Republican) public health officials refused to take no for an answer, because cholera was a common and expensive cause of death. Mandating free public restrooms was as important of a public health intervention, and as successfully life-saving, as the polio vaccine.

But it's hard as hell to get human beings to stay worried about something that hasn't happened in the last three years, and nigh-impossible to get them to take seriously something that hasn't happened in the last twenty. And keeping public restrooms open to the whole public is expensive and unpleasant, and business owners resent paying for it, feel like it's a tax.

Cholera is coming back to the United States. We're not ready for it. So we better get really ready to have the public-restroom conversation again. This, not the existence of transwomen or the existence of homeless people, is the real bathroom panic we need to be having.

Love local coffee shops. your “refugees are welcome here” sign goes really well with the one that says “bathrooms are for paying customers only”

[infamousbrad]

Actually, (Biden HHS secretary) Xavier Beccera, going toe-to-toe with social media WAS your job. And you were bad at it.

“I can’t go toe to toe with social media,” Becerra said in a wide-ranging interview Wednesday, arguing that even a Cabinet secretary can be hemmed in. As examples, Becerra cited the lawsuits the Biden administration faced after urging social media companies to take down posts the White House considered disinformation. And he noted that officials can’t formally disclose many details about negotiations to lower prescription drug prices. “I don’t get to write whatever I want,” he said. The health secretary never mentioned Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but the longtime anti-vaccine activist’s shadow hung over Becerra’s answers. President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run HHS has relentlessly criticized the agencies he soon may lead, amplified false claims about vaccines and offered alternatives to what he called government misinformation. Now, Kennedy, who has said he is not anti-vaccine, could occupy the office where Becerra was giving his exit interview.

Okay, I hear what he's saying, but here's something I've been saying since the first days of the last plague:

Effective public science education is a core part of the job of public health.

As soon as it became obvious that nobody in public health was doing public communication at all well, I started asking around. There's a first-rate college of Public Health just up the road from me; how many semesters of communication do they require to graduate with a masters degree in public health?

One. At the college sophomore level.

Yikes.

Y'know, my ex-wife was a technical writer, entered the field just as they were switching from hiring male engineers to female english majors, specifically because they found out that it was easier to teach engineering to english graduates than it was to teach engineers how to write coherently.

Public health administrators and staff don't need to be first-rate epidemiologists. They need to know enough about epidemiologists to understand what they're being told by the people in the actual contagious-disease labs and by the statisticians. What they do need to be is first-rate communicators. And they're just not. All the first-rate (and even more of the second-rate) communicators are on the anti-public-health side. May god have mercy on our souls, though mercy merit we none, because as a society we gotta fix this.

[infamousbrad]

I warned you.

About 15 years ago, I had a minor moment of Internet fame when I wrote a lengthy essay series on LiveJournal called "Christians in the Hand of an Angry God." In it, I argued that right-wing evangelical "Christianity" was literally Satanic by scriptural standards, was literally the cult of anti-Christ that Jesus prophesied in Matthew 25:31-46, that they were literally worshiping a made-up guy with the same name to justify cruelty, just like Jesus predicted they would the week before the crucifixion.

And at least half of the people who read it and praised it called it excellent satire. They saw my point, thought I was onto something, but couldn't take seriously that I literally meant what I literally said.

"Do not commit the sin of empathy."

Jesus' prophesy that these people were coming was not especially miraculous, in hindsight. No philosophy or theological movement becomes a large organized church, let alone a majority faith of a nation, without needing rich people's money, and/or government funding, to pay for it all.

And rich people in general, and right-wing governments in general, get to be the way they are by believing that the poor and the down-trodden can never be shown anything but cruelty, should never be rewarded, or else they'll lose all motivation to obey, to work hard, to be good. (By contrast, they believe that the same thing would happen to rich, powerful, popular people if they were ever punished in any way, if they were ever anything but rewarded.)

And rich people and governments are not going to subsidize your church foundation funds, your church repair funds, et cetera if you tell them that they're evil. But someone definitely will come along and offer to take that money. The people who take that money and conform won't even all be lying psychopaths; if you truly believe that your organization matters, is doing irreplaceable good in the world, you'll sacrifice any principle of your faith to keep the bills paid, you'll look away from or excuse any sin. It's that or see it all shrink and crumble into irrelevance.

I've come to the conclusion that it may not actually be possible to be a good person while practicing the majority faith of the land you live in. Or, if it is possible, well, like the man said, "straight is the gate and narrow is the way, and few there be that find it."

The Episcopal Church has its own legacy of sin, they've long overlooked a laundry list of crimes to pay their own bills, so don't rush to congratulate a mainline bishop for preaching mainline Christianity or take too much pleasure from Trump and his fascist followers being surprised that that happened. But do remember this:

From the mid-1970s to the present, right-wing billionaires have poured a LOT of money into church expansion and maintenance conditional on them distorting the Bible's teachings to make it appear that Jesus was pro-fascist. "To deceive, if it were possible, the very elect." So when honest theologians tell you that this is literally anti-Christ, literally checks every box in the Bible's description of the future cult of anti-Christ, you need to hear us.

The modern book and movie image of "the Antichrist" was a well-funded propaganda campaign to distract you from the plain language of the scriptures. The biblical anti-Christ is not some socialist liberal peacenik. The biblical anti-Christ is everyone who tells you that Jesus wants you to be cruel to "the least of these, my brethren" so that they'll straighten up and fly right.