#but they should have their wives on the podcast.....

[littlekingbergara]

A couple tidbits I remember from today's patron stream

-the boys did their meet and greets at Vegas in a hallway because the venue gave them a hotel room to do it in with like a big jacuzzi tub and they felt that would be too uncomfortable lmao

-they were talking about bachelor parties and shane said he told his brother he didn't wanna make any decisions so it ended up being Scott and ryan who did all that which is so sweet to me to imagine Scott and ryan working together to make shanes bachelor party trip go well 🥺

-somebody said they should have their wives on the podcast and shane joked 'we're not the try guys we're not making our wives sit down and talk to each other' lmao

-ryan has some regrets about how he rated things on the episode shane was a guest on fya but "shanes very convincing" and basically him and shane ended up ganging up on Byron (color me shocked!!! Lmao)

-stevens gonna be gone in December along with a lot of the crew for a Secret Project 👀👀👀

-carter did interviews with the guys for another making watcher ep

pls imagine meeting the ghoul boys in a fancy ass vegas hotel room with a jacuzzi 😭 hallway was definitely the better + funnier option there.

ryan and scott working together to plan shane's bachelor party trip is sooo sweet 🥺 the two people who know him best!!! and it looked like they had a lot of very shane-themed fun so they did a great jobb that's so Cute.

WE'RE NOT THE TRY GUYS DHSGSSG

absolutely nooo surprise that shane and ryan ganged up on byron on his own show... i'm not sure that poor man knew what he was getting into. he's obviously experienced them together but never in That context. i cant wait for that ep lmao.

[weebsinstash]

Really like the idea of a yandere Vox who is so ride or die for his overconsumerist capitalist Musk-esque lifestyle UNTIL he sees it negatively affecting his darling and does a complete 180

like take that poly red string soulmate Vox x Reader x Alastor concept and, you've got Alastor KINDA warming up to technology and willing to watch TV and do other things with you but he's still not a fan of you being on your phone constantly and some of the video games and movies you consume. He's on the couch reading a paper and (affectionately) rolling his eyes as you and Vox take turns headshotting each other in a video game and hollering "hell yeah, suck my fucking dick!!"

Meanwhile Vox is just 200% chronically online and loving it until one day he asks you why you wear baggy clothes all the time and you're ever so casually replying "because my body is fucking icky, duh" and Vox has absolutely no idea what you're talking about until you break down on a tangent about it

I was watching a clip the other day where someone was pointing out that Marilyn Monroe was considered the 50s icon of beauty and there are plenty of photos with her with thick thighs or a visible belly pooch and, imagine Vox sitting there, the disbelieving 'are you joking?' smile falling off of his face as you just, go OFF, "why would I wear anything other than sweatpants? I have fucking CELLULITE VOX, I'll NEVER have leggings legs no matter how thin I am, and look at my hip dips, they're so fucking GROSS, and my butt isn't shaped right, I have banana rolls, and, do I have siren eyes or doe eyes?! Am I bunny cute or am I frog cute?! And look at how bad my facial balancing is! Ugh, where's my gua sha?! I'm so tired of being UGLY!!"

Later that week Alastor is looking up from his paper to see Vox just, slowly entering the room, sloooooowly shutting the door behind him, looking to his old friend, "so hey! Funny idea, stop me if you've heard this one before but, I was thinking we could uh, maybe take their phone away annnnnnnnnnd... not give it back?" and here's Alastor, "oh, funny story! So earlier today they asked me if I 'wouldn't like them anymore' if they got COSMETIC SURGERY, yeah, ON THEIR FACE BELIEVE IT OR NOT, so, naturally, I'm already one step ahead of you :)" as he just casually gestures to the smashed wifi router in the garbage can in the corner of the room

You just get home from work one day and Vox has his CRT head back on and you're told 'if you want to look something up online, you can use the desktop in the computer room, and only 3 hours of screen time' and it all but blasts you 15 years into the past 💀 no more nights where you're gaming for 5+ hours straight and ruining your sleep. No more skipping meals because you're hyperfocused and binge-watching an anime while also playing an idle game on your phone. No more Alastor and Vox finding out you're just smoking bowls for hours literally nonstop because you need some sort of extra stimulation while you doomscroll and watch 3 hour long roast reviews for shows you've never watched

Alastor catches you swiping through an app and you get a divisive video thrown in your face from some alpha dude bro podcast, "yeah, a real man knows how to protect his lady! She should be at home cooking and keeping the house clean, not running around like a tramp and doing dumb chick stuff! All women need to focus on is marriage and being good wives, you know, a TRADITIONAL relationship!" and Alastor is just, swiping that shit out of your hand, "he DOES have a bit of a point, repulsive as he is! I suppose I'll have to start looking at potential dwellings that can fit you, me, and, I SUPPOSE Vox too 🙄" and little do you know he's already got a cute little home in the 'burbs set up already. He's just... you know! Waiting for the right moment to let you and the annoying TV bastard know that you'll be moving! Maybe he'll just... wait until the day of! Nothing beats a fun surprise, right? ^^ he doesn't want either of you... trying to run away or anything after all haha!

[yermes]

PAC: why you should invest in yourself 🍷

I don’t know how some of these fundies get off. The fact that they can be stay at home wives in a “safe” way is due to feminism. We should all be investing in our skill sets, knowledge, personal freedoms, and self happiness. Because at the end of the day when it all goes to shit no one can take away your self love, your wisdom, your knowledge, your beauty inside and out. The crime it is to assume someones worth by an arbitrary title or connection. The fact that you live in the tender nature of the divine is worthy enough

Heres a reminder

Disclaimer: please take what I say with a grain of salt and not as the gospel. I just want to share some ideas of practicing and giving advice using the medium as often as I can with school, work, and my own personal studies and practice. But I am working on sharing my notes soon so that will be exciting! Liking and sharing does a lot 🥰

Socials: Podcast | Follow me!

Pick a meme

1 2 3

The cards

Chariot 🦤

Mars associated with Mercury, Mars with Sun, Cancer, Binah to Geburah, water

You are a bitch with some real big and really glorified goals (not always a bad thing) to achieve these goals you must stay connected to the root of these goals and not to let your ego transcend the actual and original purpose. Keep your head and yourself stable in the pursuit of excellence.

Knight of disks ⭐️

21° Leo to 20° Virgo, Earth of Assiah, Chokmah

You are a strong enduring mother fucker. TAKE CARE OF YOUR VESSLE! Eat food that makes you happy, do small material things for yourself. Get a treat, get a tattoo get many! You have a lot of worldly and material goals. You need to take care of yourself and invest in yourself so you are able to invest in greater pursuits

The Empress 🪼

Venus in Taurus, Chokmah and Binah, Earth

You love. LIKE A LOT! It’s important to acknowledge that amazing and multidimensional skill and you can use that skill to leverage other skills. But while you do give a mom vibe. You are no ones mommy. Don’t give so much you neglect yourself and your pursuit. You Have an abundance of creative energy, please foster and take care of it.

Extras:

Story/vent:

My new hoodie came in! New ear drip come tmrw

[z-and-the-space-child]

my head is all currently midnight burger podcast so here's everything i like about this wonderful piece of media:

it's pretty fun and very funny!! i smile like an idiot on public transport and on my way to class at least once a day listening to this.

the characters are so. idk how to describe them but theyre so full of life and you can tell that they are loved greatly by the creator(s)

the WRITING. i could seriously pluck a quote from damn near every episode to carry me through the day. i don't need affirmations i need gloria to talk me through my problems.

i was doing a lil analysis of the themes in this show and i came up with "the best thing you can ever do is the best thing you can do right now" and it is FUEL, babey.

The el triste monologue. also just gloria being a POC and being proud of herself and her culture. there's a lot of cultural mish-mash in podcasts, so this is very refreshing.

It's very, very sweet and heartfelt. kind of like wolf 359 if they communicated more instead of dodging their issues until they came to a peak (love them for it.)

the PHYSICS of it all. i'm a physics/astrophysics major because i think space and looking at the stars is my lifeblood so i won't shut up about it. i don't want ava and leif (certainly ava) to shut up about it ever. HOW much reasearch did they have to do to get this kinda grasp on it. im in awe, i'm LEARNING actual things from them. i could go on. the gravity waves, the stellar nuclear fusion, the time dilation of it all. and all without using over-flowery language!!! i can actually follow a good chunk of the time. are we sure ava didn't take one of those science communication seminars. maybe 5 phds does it. when she and leif talk i vibrate like an electron in a lazer. wonderful.

star sequencing??? stellar nucleosequencing??? right up my alley. thats my kinda stuff. the romanticization of space, i've seen. the romanticization of physics, however, is not something i haven't seen in such a beautiful modern fashion. (Ie, not oppenheimer or even richard feyman)

and it's not too science-y to the point that they think they can't have fun. yes they discuss the implications of gravity waves and wax poetic about space and pulsars. (it beats for you, berts) but they have FUN! they meet their parents because they can. they get a plant drunk. there's an atmosphere(?????) around the diner that allows them to fly around and mind-numbing speeds and look at the curvature of spacetime and also sit on the roof. (I imagine the entire place is the temperature of a summer night.) they have a whole wild west planet. leif builds things inexplicably. how? where does he get the materials??? shhhhh don't question it just let him have the gravity wave detector. nobody actually knows what engineers do, not even engineers. let him be. also time crystals??????

ALSO ava being a woman in stem and being so blunt yet covert about it. she's been dealing with it for so long. why are all (recognized) physicists a)white b) men c) both. it's such a sucky thing to work into because of the outward appearance. ava is a proud mad scientist which i aspire to so much. i am keeping her in my little arsenal of people to think about when i don't want to study. (picture the do it for her meme but it's pics of ava) I don't think i aptly put how much i love her. i'm not all the way finished yet but i've heard she was forced to marry someone? i think it would be a thing for sure if she cheated on him. so many physicists cheated on their spouses (wives ): ) and i think ava should also do it. as a treat. if that's what she'd like.

when people have done bad, bad things but show/are capable of redemption upon reflecting on their past/current shortcomings is just something that gets me so much directly in the heart. the hiddenness of people. the tragedy. we contain MULTITUDES and this show demonstrates that so well. how they support each other! they are everchanging and that's good for them. Leif the engineer the ex criminal the diner cook.

leif exploding a man in cold blood. if i could draw i'd draw that. maybe i will anyways.

food as a form of affection/way to bond. grief. doing your best. making amends. using the time you have. death is inevitable but that's okay.

And if time and tide roil you too harshly, or diurnal courses leave you with no safe havens, just remember we’re out there, somewhere, lookin’ for ya’

they open at six

[supreme-leader-stoat]

Since this wasnt the point of the post, I'm actually going to mildly correct the thinking here. A lot of American protestant pastors get to "anything short of cheating means divorce isn't allowed" but that actually isn't what Jesus says. He says "unless it be unlawful" and he is talking about in exodus/leviticus where the Laws are talking about what other gentiles must follow while they live in the land of Israel. Mainly, that you can't marry someone related to you [sister, step mother] or the same sex as you [ei modern so-called gay marriage].

It is likely with this teaching in mind that the disciples/Apostles decided in Acts/the council of Jerusalem that gentile converts need only follow the gentile-pertinent laws found in the Scriptures, and not the whole of the Mosaic law. Because, essentially, that's what Jesus said the Jews should be following.

It is very recent in history that its been interpreted that adultery is viable for divorce and re-marriage, because while adultery is unlawful, it doesn't make the actual *marriage* unlawful. Because otherwise, the interpretation has to be "the person who was cheated on gets to get remarried, but the person who did the cheating is still married to their original spouse" which doesn't make a ton of sense.

While it is a Catholic source, I think the Shameless Popery podcast did a video about this topic and it's definitely worth the listen!!

I'll definitely have to do some more digging into the subject when I have some free energy for it. What you're saying doesn't match up with the way that I've always been taught the passage, but I'm open to hearing out other perspectives.

You're right that I technically paraphrased a bit. The full text of the verses (just for the benefit of anyone reading this without context), in the ESV translation I usually use, is

31 “It has been said, ‘Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.’ 32 But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

—Matthew 5:31-32

The way I've always learned it is that the law given in Deuteronomy was addressing a culture where women were being cut loose by their husbands for petty reasons, and so they were being given legal protections in the form of a required certificate of divorce which would allow them to remarry and thereby regain the social and legal protections that came with marriage. The Sermon on the Mount then builds on that going "this is still a sacred institution, by continuing to divorce your wives (even if it's all formal and legal) over petty reasons, you're still missing the point and proliferating sexual immorality." And so the only time you should even consider divorce is when the marriage has already been broken by sexual immorality.

There's also the whole debate over how to approach the text in a time and place where either party in a marriage can initiate a divorce and how cases of spousal abuse and violence fit into things, but at that point we're getting into possible eisegetic readings.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 1, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 02, 2024

Trump’s comments to right-wing media figure Tucker Carlson last night at an event in Glendale, Arizona, about former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), coming as they have after the extraordinary racism and sexism of Trump’s Sunday event at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, have have highlighted the centrality of the campaign's attack on women. 

“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump told Carlson, “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”  

Today, Trump surrogates have tried to say that he was referring to Cheney’s positions on American warfare, but it seems pretty clear he is fantasizing about seeing her in front of a firing squad. Journalist Magdi Jacobs noted the parallels between this statement and his 2020 command to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” the precursor to the Proud Boys’ attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. In both statements, Trump avoided explicitly calling for violence, but absolutely set the stage for it. 

This morning, Cheney responded to Trump’s threat “This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”

While Trump began to attack Cheney openly when she accepted the role of vice-chair of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, where her presence clearly made Republicans—like Cassidy Hutchinson, aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows—willing to share what they knew, Trump’s recent bloody fantasies appear to have broader meaning.

Cheney has emerged as the key figure to urge Republican women to vote against Trump, and it is becoming increasingly clear that Trump’s reelection is in trouble in part because white women are abandoning him. The early hints that this is happening, like the huge gender gap showing up in early voting, have sparked a right-wing frenzy of attempts to restore the power of white men over the women in their lives. Right-wing men are insisting that wives should vote as their husbands do, or that women should lose the ability to vote altogether. 

Trump’s suggestion that Cheney should face a firing squad seems to be a general expression of the anger of white men accustomed to dictating the terms of public life when faced with the reality that they can no longer count on being able to cow the people around them.

Trump’s attack on Cheney has galvanized his unpopularity with women, while the larger meaning of the MAGAs’ attacks on women got additional illustration with the news broken today by Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana of ProPublica that a pregnant 18-year-old in Texas suffering from sepsis was turned away from emergency rooms twice before doctors at a third visit required two ultrasounds to make sure her fetus no longer had a heartbeat before they would move her into intensive care. She died within hours.  

Today’s news continued to be bad for Trump. Last week, on the Joe Rogan podcast, Trump talked about the CHIPS and Science Act that authorized about $280 billion to encourage domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the U.S. While the law has brought significant private investment into the construction of new manufacturing plants and has created manufacturing jobs, Trump complained to Rogan, “That chip deal is so bad.” 

After listening to that conversation, journalist Luke Radel asked House speaker Mike Johnson in a report aired today whether, with Trump opposed to the bill and with Republicans having voted against it, the Republicans will try to repeal the law if they get majorities in Congress. Johnson responded “I expect we probably will, but we haven’t developed that part of the agenda yet.”

Republicans are determined to cut government spending to make way for more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. But the CHIPS and Science Act has brought important supply chains home and has created more than 115,000 new high-paying jobs in the U.S. 

And it has brought significant investment to battleground states: $19.5 billion to Arizona, $75 million to Georgia, $325 million to Michigan, $750 million to North Carolina, and $93 million to Pennsylvania. Johnson quickly realized that acknowledging the Republicans’ hopes of repealing it was a bad mistake days before an election and, claiming he had not heard the question accurately, said he had no intent to undermine the CHIPS and Science Act. 

At a closed-door meeting earlier this week, Johnson said repealing the Affordable Care Act is a Republican priority. He tried to walk this comment back, as well, but Pennsylvania Republican senatorial candidate Dave McCormick kept the issue in front of voters when he was caught on a hot mic saying he wants to reform the ACA and that he opposes the provision in the ACA that allows children to stay on their parent’s health insurance until they’re 26.

Trump’s mental state continues to deteriorate, taking with it the former president’s inhibitions. After going on a rant about the people he blamed for troubles with his microphone at a sparsely attended rally in Warren, Michigan, the Republican nominee for president of the United States of America simulated oral sex on stage.

An official with the Harris campaign told reporters today that they “fully expect” Trump will replay the game plan of 2020 and claim victory on election night, before all the votes are fully counted. In an interview on Wednesday, Harris noted that they were ready if Trump prematurely declared victory: “We are sadly ready if he does and, if we know that he is actually manipulating the press and attempting to manipulate the consensus of the American people...we are prepared to respond,” she said. 

Washington State governor Jay Inslee has activated the state’s National Guard so it will be “fully prepared to respond to any…civil unrest” before or after the election. 

The Department of Justice today announced it would monitor the polls in 86 jurisdictions in 27 states to make sure they comply with federal voting rights laws. Although the federal government has monitored certain polls since 1965, officials in the states of Florida, Missouri, and Texas promptly announced they would not permit Department of Justice officials inside polling stations.

Meanwhile, Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris made two stops in Wisconsin today before packing the Wisconsin State Fair Exposition Center in West Allis near Milwaukee. 

In Madison, Harris told a reporter: “What I am enjoying about this moment most is that in spite of how my opponent spends full time trying to divide the American people, what I am seeing is people coming together under one roof who seemingly have nothing in common and know they have everything in common, and I think that is in the best interest of the strength of our nation.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[misfitwashere]

November 1, 2024 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

NOV 2

Trump’s comments to right-wing media figure Tucker Carlson last night at an event in Glendale, Arizona, about former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), coming as they have after the extraordinary racism and sexism of Trump’s Sunday event at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, have have highlighted the centrality of the campaign's attack on women. 

“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump told Carlson, “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”  

Today, Trump surrogates have tried to say that he was referring to Cheney’s positions on American warfare, but it seems pretty clear he is fantasizing about seeing her in front of a firing squad. Journalist Magdi Jacobs noted the parallels between this statement and his 2020 command to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” the precursor to the Proud Boys’ attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. In both statements, Trump avoided explicitly calling for violence, but absolutely set the stage for it. 

This morning, Cheney responded to Trump’s threat “This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”

While Trump began to attack Cheney openly when she accepted the role of vice-chair of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, where her presence clearly made Republicans—like Cassidy Hutchinson, aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows—willing to share what they knew, Trump’s recent bloody fantasies appear to have broader meaning.

Cheney has emerged as the key figure to urge Republican women to vote against Trump, and it is becoming increasingly clear that Trump’s reelection is in trouble in part because white women are abandoning him. The early hints that this is happening, like the huge gender gap showing up in early voting, have sparked a right-wing frenzy of attempts to restore the power of white men over the women in their lives. Right-wing men are insisting that wives should vote as their husbands do, or that women should lose the ability to vote altogether. 

Trump’s suggestion that Cheney should face a firing squad seems to be a general expression of the anger of white men accustomed to dictating the terms of public life when faced with the reality that they can no longer count on being able to cow the people around them.

Trump’s attack on Cheney has galvanized his unpopularity with women, while the larger meaning of the MAGAs’ attacks on women got additional illustration with the news broken today by Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana of ProPublica that a pregnant 18-year-old in Texas suffering from sepsis was turned away from emergency rooms twice before doctors at a third visit required two ultrasounds to make sure her fetus no longer had a heartbeat before they would move her into intensive care. She died within hours.  

Today’s news continued to be bad for Trump. Last week, on the Joe Rogan podcast, Trump talked about the CHIPS and Science Act that authorized about $280 billion to encourage domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the U.S. While the law has brought significant private investment into the construction of new manufacturing plants and has created manufacturing jobs, Trump complained to Rogan, “That chip deal is so bad.” 

After listening to that conversation, journalist Luke Radel asked House speaker Mike Johnson in a report aired today whether, with Trump opposed to the bill and with Republicans having voted against it, the Republicans will try to repeal the law if they get majorities in Congress. Johnson responded “I expect we probably will, but we haven’t developed that part of the agenda yet.”

Republicans are determined to cut government spending to make way for more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. But the CHIPS and Science Act has brought important supply chains home and has created more than 115,000 new high-paying jobs in the U.S. 

And it has brought significant investment to battleground states: $19.5 billion to Arizona, $75 million to Georgia, $325 million to Michigan, $750 million to North Carolina, and $93 million to Pennsylvania. Johnson quickly realized that acknowledging the Republicans’ hopes of repealing it was a bad mistake days before an election and, claiming he had not heard the question accurately, said he had no intent to undermine the CHIPS and Science Act. 

At a closed-door meeting earlier this week, Johnson said repealing the Affordable Care Act is a Republican priority. He tried to walk this comment back, as well, but Pennsylvania Republican senatorial candidate Dave McCormick kept the issue in front of voters when he was caught on a hot mic saying he wants to reform the ACA and that he opposes the provision in the ACA that allows children to stay on their parent’s health insurance until they’re 26.

Trump’s mental state continues to deteriorate, taking with it the former president’s inhibitions. After going on a rant about the people he blamed for troubles with his microphone at a sparsely attended rally in Warren, Michigan, the Republican nominee for president of the United States of America simulated oral sex on stage.

An official with the Harris campaign told reporters today that they “fully expect” Trump will replay the game plan of 2020 and claim victory on election night, before all the votes are fully counted. In an interview on Wednesday, Harris noted that they were ready if Trump prematurely declared victory: “We are sadly ready if he does and, if we know that he is actually manipulating the press and attempting to manipulate the consensus of the American people...we are prepared to respond,” she said. 

Washington State governor Jay Inslee has activated the state’s National Guard so it will be “fully prepared to respond to any…civil unrest” before or after the election. 

The Department of Justice today announced it would monitor the polls in 86 jurisdictions in 27 states to make sure they comply with federal voting rights laws. Although the federal government has monitored certain polls since 1965, officials in the states of Florida, Missouri, and Texas promptly announced they would not permit Department of Justice officials inside polling stations.

Meanwhile, Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris made two stops in Wisconsin today before packing the Wisconsin State Fair Exposition Center in West Allis near Milwaukee. 

In Madison, Harris told a reporter: “What I am enjoying about this moment most is that in spite of how my opponent spends full time trying to divide the American people, what I am seeing is people coming together under one roof who seemingly have nothing in common and know they have everything in common, and I think that is in the best interest of the strength of our nation.”

—

[stephenjaymorrisblog]

Republicans Are Soft on Fascism

(I try to put my head in the sand, but I suffocate.)

Stephen Jay Morris

9/7/2023

©Scientific Morality.

Billionaire Elon Musk blames Jews for the failure of his social Media venture, “X” (formerly “Twitter). It has something to do with the ADL. I saw recent videos of neo-Nazis on a Florida bridge, waving their swastika flags left to right in view of the oncoming traffic. Hitler fan and podcaster, Nick Fuentes, tells the world he hates poor people. Anti-Semitism has come full circle, again, to being blatantly expressed in public. There used to be repercussions for talking shit about the Jews. I am watching this cadre of Jew haters unfold in front of my very eyes.  Lots of American Jews once thought that if they converted to Christianity and married a Gentile, they would be immune to being put in concentration camps or thrown into ovens. I can still hear my father pounding his fist on the dining room table, in a rage, yelling that the Jews are a religion not a race. “Why is he yelling at his family and not to real Jew haters?” I thought. That is a story for another time.

 But alas, you can’t convince a Nazi that Jews are white. They think and feel that Jews are a mogul race of mud people and should be destroyed. Once they find out that you are Jewish—bye, bye!

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published a book, “It Can’t Happen Here.” It warned about the possibility of Fascism in America. I read that book in 1969. I told my parents and they thought I was crazy. America is the strongest country in the world, they said; it would never happen here!

It is now happening here. What about the owners of massive wealth and the military industrial complex? Do they care? First, the so-called deep state couldn’t give a damn about Jews at risk for death! Second, Nazis are pro-capitalism so long as White men control it. I’ve asked this question a million times: have you ever seen a Right winger protest a Nazi? Neither have I. Conservatives are soft on fascism. They get embarrassed by Nazis because they say the quiet rhetoric out loud. They say things like, “the East elites (Rich Jews) want to run our country” or “the globalists (Rich Jews) want to run the world!” They say, “the Jews will not replace us!” to which the conservative agrees, but thinks the Nazis are giving the game away.

But when it comes to Communism? Holy fuck burgers! Bomb them! Kill them all and let God sort them out! They know that Communists would take away their property and businesses and give it all to the poor. If you ask me, I’d rather live in Stalin’s Russia than in the 1950’s America, anti-communist hysteria. Fuck anti-Communism!!! Conservatives outlawed free speech in America in the 50’s. If you slightly inferred liberal tendencies in your speech, the FBI would tap your phone and follow you to work! You think I am exaggerating? Go through some time machine and find out. During the 50’s, if you were in America and, simultaneously, in the then Soviet Union, you wouldn’t know the difference! In Russia, The KGB would follow you around and, in the USA, the FBI would follow you around.

As an anarchist, I am not surprised. As a Jew, I am highly concerned. Oh, and your gentile spouse will not be spared. During the Nazi’s regime, many Aryans were put into camps for marrying non-Aryan husbands or wives. The price for race-mixing is death.

I sure miss the Jewish Defense League, even though they were Right wing, Zionist revisionists. They were pro-active. Whenever there were Nazi rallies, they were there with baseball bats. I am not pro-violence, but I am not pro-surrender, either. I’ll tell you one thing. I will not walk into a gas chamber peacefully. Never again, motherfuckers!

[a-queer-seminarian]

Hey Avery, I love this blog and the binary-breakers blog. They’ve both been a great help to me as I reconstruct my faith. But I’m struggling with something: my fiancé and I are scheduled to light an advent candle during the Sunday morning service at his church. Initially I was really looking forward to it, but by chance I was curious about how old Mary was when she bore Jesus, and when I looked it up I learned she could have been anywhere from 13-16. Moreover, some traditions put Joseph as being much, much older. It’s just hard not to think in a very . . . sinister direction when considering that context, especially as far as God’s role in this is concerned. What did you learn about this topic in seminary, if anything? Is there any hope that my “problematic” interpretation is unnecessary/invalid?

Hi there! I think it's lovely y'all are going to light an advent candle tomorrow, and I hope it's a meaningful experience! I also totally get your dismay about Mary's age at Jesus's birth.

To start with the facts: yes, Mary was almost certainly a teenager when betrothed to Joseph. The Bible doesn't give any confirmation of her age, but in both ancient Jewish culture and Roman culture, girls were usually married off not too many years after they started menstruating.

When it comes to Joseph's age, I do have some slightly relieving news — he's unlikely to have been the old man he's often depicted as in medieval art. (I actually had a fascinating conversation on this topic with queer Catholic art historian Amy Neville on my podcast that you can read or listen to here!) He almost certainly would have been older than Mary, but it's uncertain how much older.

In ancient Jewish culture, the "ideal" marriage was actually one between a man and a woman who were both in their teens, with an expectation that a man marry by age 20. Being able to support a wife & kids was a key indicator of manhood, so men were expected to get married as young as they could. But in practice, it was more common for men to marry in their late 20s / by age 30, which does mean that their wives would often be a good ten or fifteen years younger than they were.

The Bible doesn't tell us what age Joseph was when he and Mary were betrothed, but it's unlikely he was older than 30, just as it's unlikely she was older than 18.

So maybe that's not quite as discomfiting as the image of a much older Joseph, but by our modern standards, it's still pedophilia. So what do we make of that? And what did God think of that??

__

I believe it is an act of faith to be troubled by elements of scripture that should be troubling, rather than shrugging them off as being "God's will" just because they're in the Bible. I highly recommend Rachel Held Evans' book Inspired on this topic, which has a whole chapter on grappling with difficult biblical texts (you can read a long passage from it here).

While exploring our emotions and giving them holy space, it is also important to accept that biblical cultures are two thousand or more years old — the ancient world had completely different understandings of morality from us. That doesn't mean we shrug off displays of sexism or xenophobia in scripture — bigotry is bigotry, whether an ancient iteration or what we have today — but learning about biblical cultures enriches our understanding of why certain things, like slavery or women having little say in whom they marry, are present in the Bible (and often completely taken for granted by its human authors). It can help us distinguish between what is truly God-ordained, versus what the humans writing down their experience of God presume is God-ordained.

I appreciate how womanist theologian Wil Gafney explores the complexity of appreciating the Bible as an ancient human text while looking for Divine truth "between the lines":

“There is liberation in the gospel even though it is sometimes obscured by the structures of power that benefit from holding people captive. There is also a story in and between the lines of and behind the text we hold so dear that points to a liberation that not even the authors and editors of scripture were able to see clearly or, see their way to record.

Jesus was a rabbi, he would have never wanted us to cling to the letters and syntax of these texts as though they were his very body and blood but rather, his spirit and the Spirit of God, blow through them, ruffling and disturbing them and permitting us to read new truths in and out of them and, not lose sight of the ancient stories that are also part of our shared heritage."

___

When it comes to Mary's young age when betrothed to Joseph and approached by Gabriel to request her "yes" to carrying God's child, your question of God's "role" in that is a vital one to ask.

In Mary's world, a woman without a kyrios, a man to be her protector, was in a very precarious position. Mary has to be betrothed to someone in her teens. We don't know whether God "approves" of this cultural practice, but we can see how God works within this custom to ensure Mary's security throughout her life:

when Joseph plans to divorce her after she becomes pregnant with Jesus, God sends an angel to persuade him to stick by her;

when Jesus is dying on the cross, he ensures that his beloved will protect Mary after he's gone.

Throughout scripture, God largely seems to operate within a people's cultural expectations (with key exceptions, like how God insists Their people treat foreigners the same as members of the group, or when God warns against giving the people a king just because that's what all the other nations have). That's what I see here. Mary must have a husband to be secure in her culture, and I imagine God ensuring that that husband will be one who will treat her well.

__

Then there's the question of God espousing Mary — of the Holy Spirit "overshadowing" her so that she conceives Jesus. What exactly is this "overshadowing" act? Why is God getting a teen girl pregnant?

Again, Rev. Wil Gafney provides words that wrestle out the good news with this complexity. When reading Luke 1, she urges us to sit with our distress at the image of a powerful "male" figure (Gabriel) approaching a teen girl to tell her what's going to happen to her body:

"Sit with me in this moment, this uncomfortable moment, before rushing to find proof of her consent, or argue that contemporary notions of consent do not apply to ancient texts, or God knew she’d say yes so it was prophetic, or contend that (human) gender does not apply to divine beings, Gabriel or God, and the Holy Spirit is feminine anyway. Hold those thoughts and just sit in the moment with this young woman."

Our distress is holy; it shows our connection to a fellow human being, our thirst for justice. Honor what you feel, don't discard your emotions, even while you join them to sociohistorical understanding.

I highly recommend you read Gafney's whole article, but here's a little more from it that balances ancient culture with modern ethics:

"Yet in a world which did not necessarily recognize her sole ownership of her body and did not understand our notions of consent and rape, this very young woman had the dignity, courage, and temerity to question a messenger of the Living God about what would happen to her body before giving her consent. That is important. That gets lost when we rush to her capitulation. Before Mary said, “yes,” she said, “wait a minute, explain this to me.” ... Did the Ever-Blessed Virgin Mary say, “me too?” Perhaps not. A close reading shows her presumably powerless in every way but sufficiently empowered to talk back to the emissary of God, determine for herself, and grant what consent she could no matter the power of the One asking. And yet in that moment after being told by someone else what would happen to her body, she became not just the Mother of God, but the holy sister to those of us who do say, “Me too.” "

Because Mary was a teen girl, an impoverished Palestinian Jew living under empire, she can extend solidarity to people across all time who experience similar oppression, whose bodily autonomy is equally precarious. Just as her son, God in human flesh, extends solidarity to all who have ever been arrested or executed under an unjust state through his crucifixion. Divine power is expressed in and through those whom the world denigrates and discards — that's why God chose Mary, and why Mary in turn chose God.

Sorry this got so long and has a lot of complex stuff to wrestle with. I honor your courage to ask the hard questions, and I hope you are able to take time throughout Advent to keep pondering! There are no easy answers, but wrestling can yield a blessing.

[losercade]

Listening to Sherlock & Co! Thoughts so far!

EP. 14:

- I haven't done one of these in a while,,,

- the cardboard box!!!!

- yeaaa!! He is my favorite! Hi John!

- "waffle waffle waffle. Blah blah blah"

- DEATH ●_●?

- " sto🔇🔇🔇"

- I'm also lacking in the socialization department (I talked to 5 people today)

- "that's them leaving"

- "no its not Watson, don't be stupid-- ah yes they are."

- 🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻 my name 🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻 is doctor John Watson 🎻🎻🎻🎻 <- the sickest intro

- rapport: a close and harmonious  relationship in which the people or groups concerned understand each other's feelings or ideas and communicate well

^ is that what he said?

- mind reader

- 🤨🤨🤨🤨

- accompany him that would be so fun pls

- nightmare:(

- WHAT ??????

- I sleep on my stomach (no one asked)

- he's just like me fr

- plsss Archie, John and sherlock in the country plsss

- "I don't know I haven't opened it"

- "it's my birthday 🫤" "WHAT??"

- thought he was gonna say it's a cardboard box in a cardboard box-- nope! Just human remains!

- DONT DISS THE CARTOON MERMAIDS, SHERLOCK!

- very shouty

- stop talking about that

- "what makes her the little mermaid 🤨" <- I've never thought about that before, actually.. good question

- "stop playing with the ears.. put them down.."

- "I'm all ears 👂😀👂"

- "good cop bad cop sorta vibe?"

- "Alright love time to start talking 😎"

- "not a single bean?"

- "she can't hear you she's sobbing 😒"

- "🤓☝️ maybe I can get you a cup of tea?"

- "hi Susan, your sisters dead and had her ears cut off"

- "MARY?? 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭"

- "HAD two sisters.. I should have said.." <- no I don't think so

- "☝️that's enough ENOUGH"

- "I'm gonna get emails about this" 😭

- "she's also gained the one she thought she lost"

- "let me just check i'm recording before I go speak to her.." <- ALWAYS ON THAT PODCAST GRIND 💪💪💪💪💪💪💪

- pissed? In the lounge?

- not the carpet 😨😨

- king you don't gotta explain it to her

- "the police are stupid 🤷‍♂️"

- "smelling 😐 sniffing 🤨"

- diesel 👉👉

- woah ☹️

- "husband's do kill their wives 🤷‍♂️"

- CAPTAIN !!! CAPTAIN SHERLOCK!!

- water

- "we found their ears"

- YEAHHH SHERLOCK & COOOOO 🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻

[maconthepen]

the silence.

2014.

“He’s a provider. He’s calm,” the woman says. I would not call her a friend. She is a drinking buddy, an acquaintance, a person who occasionally says certain things just to shock me. This isn’t one of those things. This is advice. “If you two break up, it will be because you wanted it. You’ll be the person blowing everything up.”

2013.

“I love you,” I say. I am crying because I’m tipsy and in love, and I cannot possibly hold it in anymore. It is the moment they told me about in the story books. The ‘you’ll just know’ moment. Part of me knows it’s too early — three weeks! It’s no time at all. Still, I just know. He gives me a hug and does not say it back.

2014.

On our three-month anniversary, he turns to me, bright-eyed and sweaty, after we have sex. I tell him, again — I have never stopped telling him — that I love him. He whispers it back onto my lips. I am so happy that I don’t realise it sounds like all the advice columns I read growing up in the sealed sections of a teen magazine: don’t say it too fast, don’t wait too long. Three months is perfect, give or take.

2017.

I cannot remember his entire response to the question, “When did you know it was me?” but I do remember he used the phrase, “You seemed like a good option.” Later, I am listening to a snippet of some stitched misogynistic podcast on TikTok. “What is she bringing to the table?” ask the men. “Why should I consider her an option?”

2018.

At his family’s dinner table, I spend all of dinner listening to the sounds that aren’t a dreadful silence: a knife scraping against a plate, the mastication of a dry chicken breast, the pouring of wine into my glass, which I am downing too quickly. I thank his mother for the meal. After her, “Oh, you’re welcome. It’s nothing,” we are the only two people to have spoken until the plates are empty.

2023.

When our new dining table arrives in our new flat, I get through thirty seconds of dinner before I ask, “Mind if I pop some music on?” The sound of eating is unbearable to me.

2022.

We are flipping through some unofficial, blurry wedding photos on his cousin’s phone when an unflattering one of me comes up. It is taken from below and behind my chair, and I am laughing at something so hard that my head is thrown back, but I am slouched in a way I wouldn’t be if I knew a camera was on me. Before he can stop it, my husband makes a short sound, an urgh of disgust. I can feel his guilt smothering me afterwards when he takes me to bed.

2023.

I am fat. I take some time off work due to stress. He nods at my coffee cup one morning and says, “Now you’ve got the time, you’re not considering giving up any bad habits?”

I know it is not the coffee he’s talking about.

We have sex later with the lights off, and when I ask if there’s anything he wants to try in bed, the answer is an awkward silence.

I fill in the gaps myself. It’s far worse than any kink he might have thrown at me.

Yesterday.

“I think I want to book driving lessons soon,” I mention over a beer. “But I'll need to get a stable job again first.”

“Don’t worry about that,” he says. “I’ll put it on the card. If you want them, you should go for it.”

It’s a lovely thing for him to say, and so I utter a thank you. Unbeknownst to him, I am thinking about good men who provide and wives who are provided for.

Today.

“You’ll be the person who blows everything up,” I remember, washing the dishes in a rage. I am enraged at myself for not doing them earlier, at him for not doing them at all. I am furious at the silence that has blanketed my life. I cannot believe I am so conscious of myself talking these days.

I sound so loud in this house, but I want to be louder.

I want to be an explosion.

[lastweeksshirttonight]

All right, gonna attempt to put the writing cap back on for this blog. And what better way to do so than to do a recap of everyone's favorite (episode) five car pileup of a game show?

It's Strike Force Wives time y'all

:thunderclap:

We are going to speak EXTENSIVELY about what a trainwreck Fallon is in this episode, but let's also take time to acknowledge that Stephen opens this episode by mispronouncing 'podcast' in two separate ways (podcant and codpast). While saying they're getting the podcasting thing down. This episode was cursed from jump street.

Giving Fallon credit where it's due, introducing John as "a frequent guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" is objectively hilarious. Reminds me of the time Stephen introduced him on the Late Show as "you know him from The Love Guru", which is still the funniest introduction I have ever heard for anyone.

The introduction goes off the rails at 1:30. AND WE'RE OFF

Kimmel: "My first radio job in Seattle was called the Him and Me Show". [...] Fallon: "Which one were you?" Kimmel: "I don't know. To this day I don't know." I could listen to Kimmel talk about his radio show days for hours, honestly, just for wild bits of ephemera like this.

As we all know, the theme of this episode is Strike Force Wives. Now Fallon is clearly trying to do something akin to The Newlywed Game, where you ask a couple one question and you see if their answers match. Here is a scene from Parks and Rec showcasing the general idea (except as Tom's ludicrously named Know Ya Boo):

Fallon somehow manages to completely fuck up this very simple concept. I'll be honest, I STILL don't know how he screwed this up so badly. He just needed to ask both people the same questions and give them clearly defined subjects!

Moments right before disaster: "[Kate, John's wife] wanted more details than I had available to her, and I said 'Jimmy's gonna text you and it will all become clear.' ...He started texting her and early on, it was in no way clear."

Related, I love that Stephen and Kimmel's wives were totally up for it, Seth's did not want to do this, and John's wanted more details. Lines up pretty well with my sense of them (from the guys' descriptions and talk about them + Evie being a literal gem during the COVID shows).

Seth's kid shrieking in reaction to Seth going to try and quiet them was absolutely perfectly timed.

This will sound very silly, but I genuinely love hearing about how people met their partners. (Maybe because my story is a bit boring? Mr. Lee and I met on a dating app and managed to go the distance despite only having 3 dates before COVID shutdowns.) You can tell so much about a relationship from those kinds of stories. In that vein, Kimmel joking about how he met his wife Molly at work and spinning it, as a joke, into a sexual harrassment lawsuit waiting to happen before being a little more honest and vulnerable was very cute.

Seth and Alexi's meet cute at Chris Kattan's wedding sounds like a sitcom plot waiting to happen.

John and Kate met at "the opposite of a meet cute", the 2008 Republican National Convention. Regular followers of my blog/Buglers may remember this as the point in time where John lost his goddamn mind and did an episode of the Bugle fully naked and kept inexplicably bringing that up in-between bemoaning how catastrophically depressing his surroundings were. (Episode 44, if you're curious. Have you gone through The Bugle Archive? Maybe you should. Be sure to download and not stream!)

Kimmel: "[Your wife] could have been Sarah Palin." John, clearly holding back 15+ years of accumulated hatred and in the most purposefully even tone ever: "It could have been."

Stephen's story about meeting his wife involved him literally fleeing an old girlfriend by going to South Carolina, seeing a Phillip Glass performance that he wouldn't recommend, and seeing Evie across the room at that performance and immediately knowing she was the one he was going to marry. Which, as Seth and John point out, was probably really reassuring to that old girlfriend.

I'm pretty sure this is the first time we get loud clapping when Fallon mentions "Fever Pitch". I actually kinda like "Fever Pitch", but my grading scale for baseball movies is extremely biased and flawed. Let's be real, baseball fans, is "Major League" actually overall good? Because it's like half a funny movie and half a movie about a random baseball player stalking his ex-girlfriend.

Addendum: Queen Latifah should have been in "Fever Pitch".

Addendum to the addendum: This has been playing on a loop in my head for like a week so also Rob McElhenney should have been in Fever Pitch.

Update to Chris Kattan's wedding: Seth and Alexi were pretty convinced that Chris' marriage was not going to last very long, making their meeting even more sitcom-like. Seth thinks that Chris and his ex-wife themselves didn't really believe that wedding was going to take either.

Kimmel wants to see all the fights that come out of this game. He says this before the real chaos even begins in the episode.

Lessons about England - dimples were part of the class system in the 1970s. Totally true. Definitely a well-documented phenomenon.

As someone with chronic stomach illness, I deeply relate to Kate realizing John was the one when she was stuck on the toilet trying to determine if there was blood in her stool. That precipice where you are, as John so eloquently put it, "shitting yourself to death" in the same general area as your partner is when you find out if love is real, trust me.

With that, I also don't disagree with Seth that Kate bringing that up was probably because Fallon didn't explain this game correctly at all.

The first time I heard the little horn noise transitions in the podcast, I was so fucking happy and got really in my feelings about John and the Bugle. That apparently has not worn off at all in the gap between the last episode of the show and me re-listening to this one.

Kimmel is the one to finally break the game, as he asks the very difficult question "is it when she fell in love with me or when I fell in love with her?" Fallon's response is to acknowledge that's where it gets confusing, and then everything implodes with everyone. (John yelling "There's no 'I think', it's your fucking question!", incidentally, made me fall in love with John all over again. But was that the question? Maybe every question is, in a way, the question. The questions are truly the friends we made along the way.)

"Climb inside his head. It's a happier place."

Evie going to visit Stephen in Chicago and calling her sister about his monogrammed towels is the most Jane Austen thing anyone relates in this podcast series. She saw the magnificent grounds towels of Pemberly, Illinois!

Fallon's story about a driver dropping him off on the set of Fever Pitch (CLAPCLAPCLAP) and noticing his wife's smile and pop leads directly into John saying that Fallon described his wife like a horse. Why are you constantly thinking about horses John

Kimmel's "a horse with a Jansport" joke gets lost in the chaos, which is sad because it's the funniest part of Fallon's whole story of falling in love with his wife.

"My second question was 'what do you think bothers your wife the most about you?'" You can almost hear Kimmel's eyes bug out a bit before he follows up with "While we're pondering that..."

Kimmel has been thinking about Kate's story for a bit clearly, and is befuddled by the idea that a veteran combat medic would ask John to check her stool. I mean, he has a point.

Seth and Alexi seem like a parody of a chaotic couple sometimes. I cannot imagine caring about filling a humidifier. It seems to greatly occupy Seth's mind.

Molly and Alexi somehow ended up with different questions for the same round. Molly and Kimmel are on the same page about Kimmel's messiness at least?

Stephen pulling out his Colbert Report hat to tell Fallon "that's not what you said, but I'll accept it" made me cry laughing the first time I heard it.

Stephen: "I wanna say that she said that I'm selectively anal." Consummate frat bro Kimmel: ���

The moment where everyone starts going 'oh' after Stephen explains his fastidiousness is a nice, rare moment of everyone clowning on someone who isn't Fallon this episode.

Fallon thinks his wife is most irritated by his overthinking tendencies. Literally everyone else on this podcast is pretty sure that she's annoyed by his "inability to ask a coherent question". And a collection of badly worded questions asking basic concepts from all the guys.

Nancy then responded with what DOESN'T bother her, which...

I need to put a block break here because I've written too much about this podcast, lol. Happy Spooky Season!

ONWARDS!

I forgot this episode also had the adventures of Fallon eating the weirdest food possible in bed, like pizza and ramen. (Seth squeaks "soup?!" in a high-pitched quiet voice in the background.) Stephen, when asked if he eats food in bed, says he'll occasionally have a lozenge, which I am pretty sure does not qualify as food.

John: "What irritates me most about [Kate] - I hope she doesn't mind me saying this, she shits blood sometimes." Y'all I love two men and this is one of them

The Ryan Reynolds commercials are hit or miss, but the phrase "ivory underground bunker" is one I've gotten a lot of mileage out of to describe certain members of the US Congress.

Fallon forgot that there was a third option to his question about pet names. You could not script better escalation of absurdity.

The half-hit lightning strike is such a good noise. It sounds like a rustling sheet (something Seth notes pretty accurately).

Stephen's utterly convoluted explanation of how he thinks his imaginary version of his wife's pet name for him is Steve is, as Seth points out, a pretty solid way to answer a Jimmy Fallon question.

Seth and John both seem bewildered at the idea of calling someone "love duck", which, fair.

Esteban Colberto definitely is a deep cut. It's such a deep cut that it seems like Colbert completely fucking forgot about it.

Everything about Anastasio Somosa on this podcast kills me. Kimmel devoted almost 5 hours to making an AI message of Somosa telling Stephen he's proud of him as his son, which also kills me. If Kimmel and John ever joined their trolling forces, I think they could probably do some absolutely insane damage.

Molly's pet name answer: "Trump called him a low-rated loser, does that count?"

Alexi getting the pet name question so wrong that she just named her actual pet makes Stephen laugh harder than I have EVER heard him laugh. Ever.

Ranking everyone's family traditions from most to least weird: Meyers family's secret language > Kimmel's birthday cake for Jesus on Christmas (honestly a great idea) > Colbert men singing songs from the movie Zulu > Fallon banging pots and pans outside on NYE > Colbert family sharing the same story over and over again like they've never heard it > Kimmel making 20+ fishes > Alexi's father's karaoke nights > Oliver Uno championship (also a Lee family tradition, weirdly enough) > John and Kate having Italian food on Thanksgiving (this feels super LA, I know a lot of people who do this or get sushi)

Weird to hear Stephen briefly transform into my dad while discussing Zulu.

To round us off, a collection of quotes John has about Fallon's incredible inability to run this game: "Your staff all need their wages doubled." "Just because you inflect up at the end of a sentence doesn't make it a question." "They've had to insert an internal logic to what you're asking, and you're complaining that THEY'RE confused!" (upon the question being changed in the same round) "YOU CAN'T DO THAT!" "When you ask her how's her day, what do you say? 'How do you think... days went? For your sister's sister?'" "You're being fed through Google Translate, that's how you sound." "Jimmy. How do you think this went?"

[maxlarens]

hehe can you recommend your favorite books and poetry💜

YES I CAN! giving people book/movie/music recommendations scratches a very specific itch in my brain. i love when people think i have good taste😭 love u forever for this anon!!!!! under the cut because i go ON AND ONNNN AND ON.

anyway. PREFACE. i love poetry, but i tend to collect it through pinterest instead of reading poetry collections. which i feel like is probably the better way of reading poetry. that being said i do have a few fave poems:

a poetry collection i have read is crush by richard siken! it's fairly easy to digest if you're new to poetry. but it's very evocative and deeply emotional for me. i love the poems snow and dirty rain, dirty valentine and litany in which certain things are crossed out.

jessica gives me a chill pill by angie sijun lou is one of my favourite poems ever. my favourite quote comes from it, 'I ask Jessica what drowning feels like and she says not everything feels like something else'.

this is a book? this a translation? this is kind of a play? i think it's fair to also call it poetry. antigonick by anne carson. it's a little difficult to parse but it's so worth it. my favourite line is 'a husband or a child can be replaced but who can grow me a new brother'.

this last one is not technically a poem. it's a game transcript which u should play. but it reads very much as a long poem/short story. it counts to me. anatomy by kitty horrorshow. if you're into haunted houses/body horror you'll like this. i love it very much, i think about it all the time. this is one of my many favorite lines from it: 'When a house is both hungry and awake, every room becomes a mouth.'

okay so that's poetry done. here are my favourite books:

annihilation by jeff vandermeer. if you've seen the movie (with natalie portman) and have no idea about the book i urge u to ignore the movie and read the book. it's science fiction/horror adjacent. i find the main character incredibly compelling and i love the writing style and the way vandermeer talks about nature. it's just a stunning book and has def influenced my writing even if it's not terribly obvious.

you feel it just below the ribs by jeffery cranor and janina matthewson. this is also science fiction. it's written in the world of a podcast i listen to, within the wires. i approached it with context on the world so i'm not sure how it would come across to someone with less context. regardless i think it's fantastically written. i'm not sure how to describe it other than to say i really connected with it emotionally.

the raven cycle series by maggie stiefvater. this is a young adult paranormal fantasy series. in my opinion it's not a typical YA series. rather than focusing overly on romance or love triangles it instead focuses deeply on incredibly well-rounded and multi-faceted characters, the power of friendship😭 and coming of age. romance is there but it's treated with such reverence. it's such a special series and stiefvater is a wonderful writer.

our wives under the sea by julia armfield is an exploration of grief and loss wrapped up in an abstract horror book. i can't describe how it made me feel but i think everyone should read it.

i wont get into these but also: my year of rest and relaxation by ottessa moshfegh, the hunger games series, the girls by emma cline and the grace year by kim liggett (<-i love the first 3/4s of this book. i hate the last 1/4. its worth it for the 3/4s imo).

[jechristine]

Love languages’ days are numbered god willing

Some excerpts:

Chapman has never claimed that the love languages are based on any kind of scientifically rigorous process. They have always been an impressionistic tool that comes from the observations he made during his time as a pastor, counseling couples at his Baptist church in North Carolina in the ’80s and ’90s. That’s a specific political and cultural context, and it informs the way the theory of the love languages developed.

In the 1992 edition of The 5 Love Languages, Chapman is explicit about the demographics of the couples he worked with. They are white, heterosexual, conservative Christian couples. The book is structured under the assumption that the wife will stay at home and care for the house and children while the husband goes to work to provide for her. It is a thoroughly heterosexual, monogamous book that chooses not to acknowledge the existence of queer people, to say nothing of poly or trans people.

As the debunking podcast If Books Could Kill laid out in April 2023, most of the couple fights Chapman uses as examples tend to involve wives nagging their husbands to take care of chores. In one case, Chapman explains to a henpecked husband that while he thinks the best way to express love is through sex (physical touch), his wife only experiences love if he helps her with vacuuming (acts of service). If the husband would just help out with vacuuming once in a while, Chapman goes on, the wife will feel just as loved as the husband does when they have sex. The idea that the wife might be interested in sex but can’t focus on it while never-ending housework piles up all around her is not one Chapman engages with.

The most infamous of these examples comes with the case study of Ann, who goes to Chapman for guidance in dealing with her husband’s cruelty. “Is it possible to love someone you hate?” she asks Chapman. In response, he gives her Bible passages about loving one’s enemies and tells her that her husband’s love language is probably physical touch. In order to save the marriage, he advises her, she should stop all complaints about her husband and start initiating sex at least twice a week.

Ann tells Chapman that sex with her husband is difficult for her because she feels so estranged from her husband. When they’re intimate, she says, she feels “used rather than loved.” Lots of women feel this way, Chapman tells her. Her Christian faith will help her through it. Ann does as Chapman tells her to, and the marriage is saved.

…

Still, the research suggests that adhering rigidly to the love language model won’t serve you well over time, in large part because it doesn’t match how human relationships work. We love in many ways, not just one.

“It is very likely that in one situation, someone might need a certain type of love or support,” says Park. “Perhaps after losing out on a promotion, you just need your partner to listen and provide you with words of affirmation. Maybe on an anniversary dinner, affection makes you feel special. Or during a particularly stressful time at work, having a partner take on extra household tasks is the best way to support you.”

[hippeasantwitch]

So, I started this podcast where I discuss the weird, cringey stories, that kids who grew up in evangelical (especially fundamentalist leaning independent evangelical churches) want to share to laugh about the absolutely ridiculous nature of the activities and ideas we were force fed as minor children/into adulthood. The idea was for folks who have been out of the nonsense for a few years to process and laugh about this niche, strange world we all found ourselves in. It’s one that is difficult to describe and is often emotionally exhausting because you have to explain so many levels of evangelical lore and ideology to make one silly story make sense.

I have many friends married to folks who did not grow up this way, or, the more difficult path (imo) married someone who grew up in church (generally mainline Protestant) who brings their church assumptions to the table or has enough of an idea of church in general to sometimes struggle to grasp church in the evangelical context. Kids who grew up evangelical were taught to believe other Christian groups were heretics to save. My former church had ministries to convert Catholics to evangelicalism. With this context, it can be difficult to explain church and why “other” Christians weren’t seen as the same team as the chosen Evangelical few.

With that being said, it genuinely horrifies me every day what people send me, what they are remembering and have kept hidden. I’ve had husbands, wives, and partners text me saying they always knew it was bad but they never quite understood. I’ve had episodes mention something off hand that snaps a horrifying memory back for me, friends, listeners, it’s……a lot.

What started as a “let’s joke about the guy at Christian camp who said God told me we should date” to a genuinely sickening spiral into an ideology so corrupt at its roots it has shaped and traumatized generations. It’s exposed to me how much the most insidiously oppressive parts of western culture are idolized and enforced by pastors every day.

My biggest takeaway from all of this: the exceptional role of capitalism in pushing evangelicalism. Each and every time I’ve researched a subject or dove in a little deeper on a story that is sent to me, I’m blindsided by how much capitalism enables evangelicalism as it is. Let me explain.

Evangelicals use “the others” as a scapegoat for Capitalist based problems. I read a mommy blog about how fortune cookies are bringing the occult to your restaurants. Except fortune cookies are a symptom of capitalism, an American invention to sell something to Asian restaurants. I had a friend discuss her chronic illness in regards to a music festival where evangelizing the attendees was a focus. They chastised her for having a flare up and prayed for her to get better for God. The “problem” was the sinful illness. BUT, without an obsessive growth mindset, a salesman technique to force tired and vulnerable free labor to manipulate tired and vulnerable concert goers is the most capitalism pilled thing I can think of. Dozens of horrifying coverups, and for what? To save the church’s finances. A friend who found a literal crime scene with video evidence, forced to throw that evidence away as a child. For what? To save the finances of the missionary program. To protect a couple in power. The optics only mattered, not safety, Justice, or love. The masses give millions to evangelical churches to get essentially no give back while the CEO style pastor sits pretty. Evangelicalism is about numbers, profit, and keeping your worker bees in line. You’ll never be enough for evangelicalism (and they tell you that outright at late night youth events and over the top sermons) and so you HAVE to keep working (for free!) for a church that works on extreme loyalty. You’re entire life and afterlife depend on doing more than is necessary and to ask for compensation is sinful. You work your entire life around this one thing and that thing comes with a weekly monetary cost. You can never work your way up, you’re either a chosen one or not. There’s little creativity or diversity, folks are isolated, and no one can make true friendships because they’re secretly afraid that the other members will tell the pastor how they’ve messed up and be punished. I’ve never been more alone in a group than when I was at an evangelical church.

This is a long post, but yeah, it’s been….a ride.

[asherlockstudy]

ok context this comes from someone who's not up to date on the fandoms thoughts on the matter and haven't interacted with others in it since 2015 so this is probably old thoughts by now but I wasn't active when it was discussed and therefore wanted to hear the consensus on it sooo I'm not entirely convinced about rhink for sure, mostly because rhett seems so repressed I'd be surprised they've been at it, but I'm 100% sure that link is bi just by the way he talked about lgbtq+ during the first decon podcast and how he believes outside religion he can live and love more freely and how uncomfortable and almost rejecting of it he is (and of course all the shame and judgement talk) sorry for the paragraph but I'm normally happy to indulge long posts so eh

Hello. The consensus generally does not reflect my personal thoughts on the matter. If you haven't interacted with the fandom since 2015, you should know that the fandom went through a transformative period and most of the old Rhink shippers left it around early 2021, I think. So, the momentum of the post-deconstruction period faded with their departure.

Most new fans are not shippers or ship it strictly as fanon and shiver at the idea that there could be some truth to rhink. My opinions might as well be the most extreme currently in the fandom here on tumblr (even though of course I really believe in what I say because this is what I honestly see and not what I demand to be true).

The consensus is "sometimes" "somewhat" open to the idea that they might be bi in theory but strictly if this does not lead to any uncomfortable consequences regarding the nature of their relationship with each other or with their wives. There are a few people who, I feel, truly believe something is really happening but always phrase it through humour and disclaimers like "It's just a joke, I don't really believe this", even when their post has picked up on things that have nothing funny about them, so I can just tell they are hesitant to let themselves explore this possibility seriously. I have received hate or just really negative mail because of what I believe and I sort of feel marginalized in the fandom. Not sure whether this is truly the case or I have simply made for myself that bad of a dash. In any case I am sorry to say that the fandom is just a shadow of its old self. I am telling you all this to paint the picture of the fandom nowadays: old shippers have left, new ones are not all that into Rhink, except for a few and except for VERY FEW who believe it's real and of whom I am honestly - dare I say by a long shot - the most vocal and the "edgiest" (I don't see it this way though).

A few more people started seriously considering the possibility after the latest GME last August, in which Link almost came out but Rhett stopped him. This was just too obvious and people - even more casual viewers - finally started talking. But since then it's been almost a year and so this has started getting forgotten as well. In any case, the consensus is more open to the possibility of Link being bi / gay / non-straight than about Rhett.

In my opinion, things are lukewarm so far compared to last year because Rhett and Link have been consistently more daring in their scripted content than in their regular shows. This is why the talks have died down again, because we had nothing scripted so far this year, the show is coming in August. But even last year, the vast majority of fans did not assume anything based on their scripted content which they consumed at face value ("oh a chicken crosses the road how silly Rhett and Link are haha"). That's all I have noticed.