scarletspider-lily

[scarletspider-lily]

I really hate how criticisms of religion by ex-members are dismissed as, oh, you had a bad experience with religion. Therefore you're traumatized/embittered to it, so your criticisms don't "count." But criticism from outside the religion doesn't "count," either, because oh, you just don't understand, you haven't lived it, you don't have the right perspective. But criticism from active members doesn't "count" either, because they're just heretics who aren't believing or practicing it right.

It's just a way to avoid taking accountability for the harm they're causing. But it bothers me, especially, ESPECIALLY when the concerns of ex-members are dismissed. Because these are the people you failed! These are the people who fell through the cracks! These are the people who wanted to belong, who know the community inside and out, who encountered the abuse or hypocrisy or whatever flaws there are in your community first hand. If you really cared about accountability and making your community safe for everyone, they should be the first people you'd be lining up to talk to!

[scarletspider-lily]

meme by me

[scarletspider-lily]

it’s so funny when christians say ex christians never truly believed and were always faking like i was six years old being told if i didn’t believe i’d burn in hell for eternity surely i was trying my best

[scarletspider-lily]

I think it should be clear to everyone at this point (especially those of us in the US) that the point of all these awful executive orders is not to actually get legal permission to enact them. theyre just giving orders to his followers. the goal is to tell his base what theyre supposed to believe. its to tell people that it is now normal, even encouraged, to be bigoted and cruel. and these people who call themselves christians treat every word out of this dumb fascist's mouth more like scripture than they ever did the bible. genuinely what the fuck is going on

[scarletspider-lily]

god forbid you be traumatized by your religion and have the gall to talk about it. because—okay, it’s not like people treat other kinds of trauma much better, but at least if you’re talking about your trauma from, like, poverty or abuse or something, you’re a little less likely to butt up against the sorts of topics that people stake their whole identities on.

whereas if you have the fucking gall to talk about your religious trauma, even if you’re very polite and restrained about it, even if you’re a good victim and just try to talk very straightforwardly about what happened to you without going out of your way to try to assign blame or anything—people will crawl out of the woodwork like fucking weevils champing at the bit to tell you how wrong you are. normal people, people who (nominally) believe in believing victims, people who would not act this way under other circumstances. no, it’s not like that. no, you must have misunderstood. you’re stupid, bitter, a liar, naive—how dare you try to insult to their truth, their faith, their way of life, their god.

you can say simply and honestly, the church hurt me. this is how. and you will simply get swarms of people going UM ACTUALLY THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN AND IF IT DID IT WAS YOUR FAULT. YOU JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND THE THEOLOGY. YOU’RE DISTORTING AN ENTIRE RELIGION BASED ON ONE BAD EXPERIENCE. YOU’RE A BIGOT, ACTUALLY. like if posting about your experience with child abuse got you a wave of people going UM MY PARENTS DIDN’T DO THAT SO YOU MUST BE LYING. ALSO IT’S MISOGYNY TO ACCUSE YOUR MOM OF ABUSE. no compassion. no validation for the victim’s experiences. no examination of what enabled the abuse, or what currents of it carry on into your community. no space to breathe.

[scarletspider-lily]

Just in case any of you are confused, TikTok being banned and coming back not even 24 hours later with a giant "we thank President Trump" message is NOT a win. It's a huge red flag and a sign that this was a thousand percent planned.

[scarletspider-lily]

i find it funny that conservatives try to paint me calling for the death and destruction of multi-billionaire CEOs as some radical "woke liberal" standpoint. as if that even has anything to do with politics, especially in this era of surface level circus politics. the same way they try to politicize the hurricanes or the wildfires destroying parts of america, as if climate change is somehow a red vs. blue issue. it's no secret i'm from a deeply conservative family in the sticks of florida and i still grew up hearing "i fought the law and the law won". the healthcare system has fucked each and every member of my family in a different way at one point or another, as is the case with pretty much every family in this scorched earth nation. remember when country music, the genre currently associated the heaviest with the most conservative faction of america, used to be staunchly anti-government and about sticking it to the man? remember when the coal miners, grandfathers to the "trump-er hillbillies" of appalachia that everyone loves to write off as ignorant, fought tooth and nail for unionization because the companies that were built off their labor didn't give a shit if they lived or died? since when has "upholding traditional values" gone hand in hand with... defending lawmakers and oil tycoons. my family and i complain about the same issues at the dinner table. the men in charge better hope they can keep their digital smokescreens running as long as they can because the moment the rednecks and the hippies lay down their swords long enough to realize they have the same enemy, all hell is gonna break loose.

[scarletspider-lily]

for the last fucking time, tiktok getting banned is BAD. this is a huge free speech concern. it's rooted in sinophobia. and it will set a really bad precedent that allows the government to ban any platform that doesn't let them control the media narrative

[scarletspider-lily]

Adding into the discussion of the incarcerated young people fighting fires in California:

I can think of no place worse than prison for emotionally stunting or regressing a person or for dismantling their ability to make good decisions.

You take an adult or child who maybe has exhibited some antisocial behaviors, right? So you remove them from whatever community and support network they have, put enormous financial and logistical barriers between them and any communication with that community. Incarcerate them hours from home in a place not accessible by train or plane with narrow visiting hours that conflict with people's work schedules, and maybe you're fighting to prevent in person visits at all, maybe you got a kickback from a company selling expensive video call visits so people can't even hug their kids when they drive 6 hours on a Wednesday to see them. Get a kickback from a phone service provider that's going to charge extortionate prices for every minute a person spends talking to their loved ones, and if the state passes a law saying you can't do that anymore, pivot and go after the mail. Subvert USPS. Get a kickback from a company that'll give prisoners shitty scans of letters or refuse to deliver it because it was flagged for drug contamination by a machine with a 70% false positive rate, force them instead to send texts at extortionate rates through their proprietary app.

Put them in an environment with a bunch of other people with social issues and force them to compete for resources. Give them no mental healthcare. If they are victimized by other prisoners, punish the victims with solitary confinement. Transfer people around so they can't form meaningful long-term friendships. Tell them that once they get out, it will be illegal for them to talk to any of the people they meet here.

Hire guards who have no qualifications other than a willingness to be a modern day slave overseer or the ignorance to not realize that's what it is, give them complete control over every aspect of other people's lives and tell them those people want to kill them and that any object can be covered in drugs so dangerous that touching them can kill. Allow the guards to traffic drugs into the prison with impunity. Have the guards discourage racial mixing because racial conflict in the prison means the prisoners won't join up against the staff.

You do all of this and you ask if a 20-year-old, who's been in the system since 14, is emotionally mature or psychologically healthy enough to choose to risk their life in exchange for slightly better living arrangements.

You take someone who has probably made some bad decisions, right? And you put them in a place where every detail of every day is decided for them: what they eat, when they eat, when they sleep, where they sleep, what clothes they wear, who they talk to, where they work. Or maybe you give them big decisions that have no right answer. Maybe at the start of the day, you open the cells and they have 10 minutes to decide if they want to be stuck in their cell all day - no shower, no recreation, no library - or go outside and be stuck in genpop all day - no napping, no alone time, no escape if someone is hassling you. You let them decide if they're going to eat breakfast at 3am (because there's too many meal shifts) or sleep in and spend their precious commissary funds on toaster strudel (they have no toaster) or sleep in and not eat even though you're barely giving them 1000 calories a day. You let them start to make decisions about how to spend their day, then you put them on lockdown, take all those decisions away.

You do all this and then you ask if anyone who's spent time in this environment has the decision-making skills to choose to risk their life in exchange for slightly better living arrangements.

All of the incarcerated firefighters in California are 18 or older, and all of them volunteered, but there is no world in which they were adequately prepared to make that decision.

[scarletspider-lily]

every now and again, i try to put my grievances with christianity into a well-articulated speech but it ends up snowballing and becoming a beast of an argument. does anyone else feel this way?

[scarletspider-lily]

on the topic of christianity, I don't understand why someone would WANT god to be real. I understand the comfort that would bring, but that would mean hell is real too. Why would you want an option for people to go to hell? How does the idea of innocent people suffering for an eternity not bring you to your knees in sadness? You're telling me that not only that a person could go to hell no matter how good they were because they didn't "know god", but you, as a "loving" christian, are telling me that they SHOULD?? How selfish is it to want god to be real, knowing that it means that many people on this earth will be condemned to an eternity of suffering??

What loving god would even allow any of his children to go to hell? If you saw your child (or any child really) was about to walk into a busy road, you would rush to pull them back. Sure that would be violating their free will to walk into the road, but is that not better than death? You wouldn't scream for them to stop at the sidelines, you would (hopefully) run to stop them. And yet all god does (if he's real) is sit on the sidelines and let us all burn. fuck that.

[scarletspider-lily]

[scarletspider-lily]

Probably the thing I think highlighted most in the UnitedHealthcare assassination is how everyone is considered expendable by these companies - even their ceos.

The rest of the board reportedly stepped through the active crime scene to get to a meeting and replaced him the day after.

These oligarchs are crying "this unique man had a family, why don't you care?" When they treat him as easily replaceable themselves.

It's just about them.

Each individual wants people to care about just them. But these CEOs and their constituents, their boards of trustees, these millionaires and billionaires, they don't care about each other. Just their money.

No one cares, not even the people claiming to be "on his side."

A man was killed, yes. Even though he gained his wealth by hurting people, he should have had a chance to make it right. (Even though he wouldn't)

Are these other billionaires going to have a realization that they could help people and get goodwill, to prevent this from happening to them? No. For them it's all about "how dare these peasants" and "it could have been me, and that would have been a tragedy! I'm irreplaceable! People would get sad if I died!"

Should they have a chance to do better, and not get replaced by another dime-a-dozen oligarch via bullet?

...I'd have to say yes.

But whether or not they get that chance- and use it wisely- is up to them.

[scarletspider-lily]

something interesting is happening

[scarletspider-lily]

[scarletspider-lily]

'People are panicking about AI tools the same way they did when the calculator was invented, stop worrying' cannot stress enough the calculator did not forcibly pervade every aspect of our lives, has such a low error rate it's a statistical anomaly when it does happen, isn't built on mass plagiarism, and does not obliterate the fucking environment when you use it. Be so fucking serious right now

[scarletspider-lily]

in real life you will probably not respond to harassment in a sexy, clever, scripted way where you come out with the upper hand and everyone claps. you will freeze up and your moment will pass, or your voice will shake when you tell them to stop and you’ll realize two minutes later that you’re gross and sweaty and sticky from the adrenaline. maybe you’ll be on the ball and answer in a way you actually think is pretty smart and get ignored, or they’ll get more aggressive when you mouth off to them. you almost never will walk away feeling victorious. you walk away feeling uncomfortable and relieved that it’s over. you’ll think about it later and imagine that maybe you could have said something else. maybe you’ll feel ashamed that you weren’t quicker-witted, weren’t able to cut them down to size, weren’t able to avoid that lingering sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, as though there’s some kind of magical words you could have said that would have left you feeling less powerless. there really aren’t.