#radical atheist hours

[rosalesbeausderholle]

Friend, your religion is the reason why LGBT Muslims are oppressed in Muslim-majority countries. It's not 'islamophobia', religion, all religions, MUST be criticized and torn apart, it's anti-arab racism that's the problem.

[stickandthorn]

I was thinking about that post about redemption I just reblogged, and I think it’s worth pointing out just how difficult and time consuming it would to de-radicalize or “redeem” Lilliana. And I think Essek’s redemption in campaign 2 is actually a really good example of what I’m talking about.

First of all, what the Nein did to redeem Essek was not slowly and politely talk him through why what he did was wrong. They didn’t even know he did anything wrong. What they did was continually reach out to him and give him a support system of friends he did not have before. Notably, friends who he could be comfortable sharing his worldview around: he was an atheist* in a theocratic society who had to hide his worldview in order to have any social, academic, or governmental standing. The mighty nein were probably the first people he could be himself around, and creating a change in his personal life is what led to a change in his ideology. Notably, he did most of the actual deconstructing of his ideology on his own, some before the big betrayal reveal and a lot after. The Nein helped with that directly a little, but the main thing they did was offer him a personal connection he had stakes in, and a people in his life with different world views he hadn’t seen up close before.

This is pretty true to life, in the real world, most people who leave radical or bigoted groups leave at least partially because of a change in their personal life. Even if they do leave because of someone directly challenging their worldview, it’s usually someone they care about who challenges them in a non-aggressive way. It’s still personal.

Secondly, this took a lot of time. I can’t remember exactly how long they spent in the Dynasty, but they befriended Essek over a really long period of in game and out of game time. The cast spent actual real world hours talking pretty much one on one with Essek, and the party spent weeks, maybe even months slowly getting to know him and bringing this support structure into his life. Essek spent even longer actually thinking through and deconstructing on his own. The change in his worldview between the ship and the outpost really shows this, he did a lot of the thinking that led him to change by himself over a lot of time we weren’t there for. They could not have gotten him to actually change his mindset, fully realize what he did was wrong of his own free will, in anything approaching a short amount of time. This was a time consuming process.

All this to say: this is the kind of effort it would take to legitimately de-radicalize Lilliana. She has been in the Vanguard for ~25 years, she most likely joined when she was in her early to mid 20s, and she gave up all personal connections, even her daughter and her husband to join. Not only has her entire ideology been built around this being the right thing to do, her entire personal life is contained within the Vanguard. It’s most likely where she gets any housing or money or really anything from. It is her whole life, and she believes wholeheartedly in it. The level of time and effort it took to get Essek to organically change his mind is most likely the level it would take to get Lilliana to change hers, if not more.

And they don’t have that time. Lilliana is actively doing harm now, she is helping the Vanguard release Predathos right now, they simply do not have the time to redeem her. It sucks, but pragmatically speaking, it is simply not worth the time and effort. Essek gave away the beacons in the past, but also, the Nein did not know he did that for their early friendship. If the Nein had known, they probably would not have put in all the work it took to get him to change. They probably couldn’t have. Lilliana might be able to be redeemed in theory, but so can a lot of people who do very bad things. Focusing on that redemption process is prioritizing Imogen’s complicated feelings over the harsh reality that this is a war, and Lilliana is a key figure in that war doing a great deal of harm. It sucks, but I do think it’s time to move on, and I think Imogen is now leaning that way.

*atheist is a loose term here, it’s hard to be an atheist in a world where gods are proven to exist, but it gets the point across

[bonefall]

heyyyy bonefallll!!! So uhm. Wind released. And if you read it, what do you think of it?

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I started ASC off with a lot of excitement. I had known to not get my hopes up, but for the first time in a long time, I felt like they actually had something meaningful to say about the problems in Clan society. For once, it felt fresh.

A conflict based on a murder mystery and a power struggle, political radicalization within another Clan with anti-Clanswapper bigotry turning violent, and the reluctant heir of a legacy sprawling several generations. Like a dark echo of TPB, implying the root issues had never been truly addressed by Darkest Hour. The Clans still have a terrible ruling system. The culture is still bigoted. Firestar failed to destroy the obsession with legacy-- he just founded a new bloodline.

And even if it wasn't THAT deep, it was at least a grounded plot that was based in the characters more than faith in StarClan. If Nightheart's arc about legacy fell apart, I'd still enjoy watching him struggle, lose people, grow, and find his purpose. Or seeing Splashtail juggle the power he'd managed to snatch and was just not smart enough to hold onto. Or the cool fights that would surely result from an invasion of RiverClan.

Wind tossed it. It was already having a downturn in the previous book, but this is a book that seems so afraid of having interesting conflict that it spends 75% of its time debating if something interesting should happen, and 25% of its time barking, "EVIL HEATHENS WHO HATE GOD WILL DESTROY OUR SOCIETY!!"

I can't get over how awful Splashtail's "descent" is. He's having a dumbass atheist stoner debate with Podlight when they go to the Moonpool, musing that maybe you have to eat 9 mice to get 9 lives, and then 2 appearances later he's foaming at the mouth with a dictator speech and kills harelight no miss.

They even seem to have tried to replicate Stonefur's execution but badly. It's jarring. Splashtail had a big dictator speech, killed the beloved deputy suddenly, and the whole camp looks Super Scared and Upset so that you know it's the Evil Leader and not a systemic problem.

His "TALENT FOR MANIPULATION" is saying he heard Curlfeather murmur evil plans in her sleep and (apropos of nothing) accusing her teenage daughter of "getting the wrong idea" about his adult romantic interest in her. I keep coming back to this because the ENTIRE book's plot is based on this successfully smearing Frostpaw's reputation.

you may be tired of hearing it, but I'm definitely more tired than you because I had to read and analyze an ENTIRE BOOK founded on it.

The plot is endlessly arguing over if they can trust Frostpaw or not, gathering "evidence" to this end, while Sunbeam and Nightheart's POVs uselessly languish in ThunderClan doing mentoring stuff.

Im SO sick of being forced to sit in thunderclan while more interesting things happen offscreen. stop adding MORE cats to ThunderClan, you already have Stormcloud and you do NOTHING with him why are they also getting WAFFLEPAW

Everyone's praising the fact that the book can remember previous entries, but actually, I'm going to drop a hot take; It's actually bad if they CAN obviously reference old material, and then it doesn't influence the actions the characters take. They namedrop Nightstar several times and then come up with excuses for why they still need to sit around and do nothing!!

THAT'S WORSE, ACTUALLY.

SCALDING TAKE, I'd RATHER see the cats have the memories of goldfish if the alternative is "We remember Nightstar! We're simply going to purposefully disregard Nightstar, because the plot needs to happen"

They also muse that maybe Splashtail's evilness is making all the RiverClan cats act evil, and they'll go back to normal once he's removed. This has been implied before, but never so blatantly stated.

But most of all, I can't stop going back to "Godless Heathen Bloodlust." What a fucking joke. For a shining minute it looked like we were going to have interesting villains, but no, they really are just coming out and saying that lacking faith is an indicator of a moral failing. What makes Splashtail so uniquely bad and scary is that he "disrespects the ancestors" (hey podlight. what if eating 9 magic mice gives you 9 lives? woah dude look at this. the bugle chips look like claws. lol haha) and hates love and peace and won't even let Jesus guide him.

The scenes with Frostpaw and her allies are the only parts of this book worth reading. Shadowsight, tigerHeartstar. Clinging to Whistlepaw like she's a life preserver. save me windclan

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for not wanting my brother to follow Islam?🐢

(Emoji so I can recognize my submission)

⚠WARNING⚠: This is a reaaal long one and also contains discussion of some potentially triggering subjects.

I'll try and explain this as concisely as I can but this is just a part of a long ongoing issue I have had with my brother. I (16F/X) have been at odds with my brother (19M) over a multitude of subjects. We debate often but the problem is he is very stubborn so the debates usually don't result in anything beyond me being frustrated and his opinions remaining unchanged. The problem is that he has unfortunately started going down a nazi rabbit hole and picking up all sorts of extremely harmful ideas. I'll list some of them for you so you can get a general picture: Denying evolution, the rothschild conspiracy, general antisemitism, transphobia, monarchism /facism, calling all sexual content filthy, misogynistic ideas, hating on atheists, etc. As an atheist who is also aroace, nonbinary and also very progressive, this makes me feel greatly uncomfortable. Let me be clear, I don't think I'm the asshole for opposing these ideas, the part where I could be the asshole is me opposing his transition into religion. A lot of his more radical ideas started sprouting after he started getting into Islam like the whole denying evolution thing and his rampant antisemetism. Also just to be clear, I have nothing against Muslims and I am not trying to say that Muslims inherently don't believe in basic science, it's just the particular circles that my brother has been exposed to that are giving him these ideas. However I will acknowledge the that it might be my own implicit bias that is making me reject his own interest in Islam. I'd also like to note my brother has been struggling with his health basically his entire teen life, where he has trouble sleeping, has barely any energy and this has led to him becoming depressed. He barely has any interests and those he had he's recently said he no longer enjoys. It's clear to me this is why such toxic ideas have appealed to him, because he feels disconnected and lonely. He barely goes out, he barely eats, he sleeps until the early afternoon, he has to shave and shower every single time he goes out and if he accidentally nicks himself while shaving he will adamantly refuse to go. It really upsets me to see him this way because I can tell he is suffering but he will never talk to me about it. However it doesn't change the fact that he has said some truly abhorrent things. I have tried many times to show him he's wrong or to gently guide him towards a more progressive and educated outlook but he is too stubborn to change.

This fully came to a head when we were having dinner together with our parents and he kept repeating the same arguments that god must be real because XYZ or, evolution is fake because XYZ and I would tell him why I disagreed with his reasoning. Continue in circles for two whole hours. This ended with me telling him that he was a dumbass and that he should stop watching religious content.

I feel I am an asshole here because just as I don't want to be forced into a religion, I shouldn't force him out of one, but I feel since he's picked up religious ideas he's only gotten worse. Just yesterday he officially became a Muslim at a nearby mosque. I feel I should be happy for him but I can already see problems that may arise. He has to do 5 prayers (salat) a day at certain times and this morning he slept through two. I also worry about Ramadan since he's already very skinny and barely eating, I don't think further fasting will help at all.

Even worse, he's been spreading some of his ideas to my parents. They don't take on all his BS thankfully but they have absorbed some of the more troubling stuff, particularly his transphobia. I try to avoid queer topics as much as I can for this reason but whenever it does come up I always feel sick just sitting there listening to them.

Yet again I want to reiterate that Muslims are not a monolith and do not all share the same opinions but an unfortunately high number are greatly opposed to the idea of queer people. Not to mention many hold strong beliefs regarding the strict divisions of male and female. I don't know. Yet again, it could just be accidental Islamophobia on my part but I don't think it's a coincidence that he started getting more extreme once he got into particular Muslim circles.

So tumblr, AITA?

What are these acronyms?

[thebazilly]

I am replaying Inquisition now, so the Dragon Age rambling continues.

Wow, playing Dragon Age 2 actually made me like Inquisition less. I actually spent an hour and a half having a big media analysis discussion with my husband about it, because Inquisition used to be my favorite and now I feel kind of sad and hollow about it.

10-15 years ago, I resented Origins's dark tone and tough decisions, so I preferred Inquisition's more heroic bent. Now I miss that complicated political atmosphere! Give me some horrible, tragic choices that radically change the narrative! Make everyone shitty again! I can appreciate a story with a downer ending now. I dunno, sometimes you have to come back to Origins with the cultural context that it's ripping off Game of Thrones and Warhammer. Was it overly edgy and misogynistic? Yes. But the Landsmeet is one hell of a time.

The "big choices" in Inquisition don't actually seem to matter much in hindsight. Ruler of Orlais? Should matter a lot, but doesn’t come up in the game. Side with the Mages or Templars? They are entirely interchangeable. Meanwhile, the personal choices for your Inquisitor are relegated to text boxes in war table missions.

The themes of Inquisition mean that the story is about what *happens* to your protagonist, rather than what they *do.* It loses a lot in trying to make the protagonist a blank slate self-insert. I much prefer the presentation of Hawke, who feels like a real person with real logic and emotions even as some seriously psychotic nonsense rolls out of their mouth.

I do think Inquisition has the most interesting things to say about Andrastism and the nature of faith. The other games suffered from some edgy atheist syndrome, and it seemed like no one in Thedas actually believes their own religion. Inquisition presents belief as a powerful and even frightening force, but also shows the beauty of characters (like Cassandra or Chancellor Roderick) *choosing* to have faith.

Corypheus is an incredibly cool concept for a villain that is completely wasted. Did he need more screen time? Less screen time? More personal threat to the Inquisitor? I dunno. He has exactly one banger line and then dies. Oh well.

I will be subjecting anyone who will listen to my thoughts to more words on the companions later, because I think they're an interesting bunch.

[myopicry]

I've already sent you an ask (more like a ramble on aesthetics and its relation to women) around a week ago, you're probably inactive atm (which isnt a bad thing btw!) but i'm gonna send another thing in (something unrelated to my last ramble lol).

now that i've spent time both in radfem/"terf" spaces and trans positive/inclusive(?) ones, i've noticed how scared the latter are of being even *slightly* associated to the former. it's oddly funny and kind of silly when you think about it. ppl have talked about this before but i'm referring to stuff like "op is a terf" and "terfs dni". the latter has been especially poignant to me recently for some reason: a trend ive seen is that ppl often write that in their bio after having created a post which some radfems or GCs reblogged/engaged with and they've used the classic "so terfs have come across this and i just wanted to let it be know that i dont like you guys" (altho worded much less kindly). it's like they're *terrified* of being perceived by ppl who share their views as even just somewhat affiliated to the "other" in any way, shape or form. or they're terrified of the other following them and interacting with their content. it feels very defensive and overly "loud" to me, idk?... the "op is a terf" has been talked about a lot in the radfem/GC spaces, so this might be a shorter section (update: it's not, lmao), but as that one post said: "it's a thought terminating cycle". I think that's one of the reasons i haven't checked out what the hell these "terfs" were actually saying and arguing (apart from screenshots of JKR tweets) for so long. it rlly proved to me how engaging with media from other "sides" is crucuial, even if you probably wont agree most of the time. if anything, i think i just wanted to be a good ally: i love debating and i wanted to know how to respond to "terf rhetoric" better. i remember feeling surprised by what i saw, not feeling the immediate "this is illogical and bad" feeling, and having trouble arguing against certain points. i couldn't even find good counter arguments from other ppl. and then there was a domino effect (altho i havent adopted all radfem and GC POVs and dont consider myself as a radfem or rad leaning/GC). even some trans friends of mine were surprised when i reported my findings to them. i'll stop here even though i can talk about this for much longer, but those "terfs/radfems dni" bios rlly stick out to me now and made me think lol. hope to see you back soon! ~🪼

hi hi! apologies for the delay! I did in fact spend some personal time offline, it was quite nice and it is probably a much healthier thing than spending most of my day on tumblr lmao but I can't deny I did miss speaking openly about my opinions on things, especially certain observations that I absolutely would not be able to discuss with my irls unless I wanted to sit them down for a multi-hour lecture just to make sure I wasn't misunderstood ^_^|||

anyway I just saw both your asks (eloquently written as ever!) and will respond to this first just because I saw it first lmao. not much to add other than maybe rambling myself about some of my own similar experiences and what not. you've put it into words great though! there is almost this "mystical" denouncement of terfs/radfems/gender criticals who are mislabled as just radfems etc. within trans spaces, and as I've looked more and more into "terf" ideology this kind of hatred really does go back far, to a point where it's basically impossible to even mention radical feminism or gender critical feminism without immediate hostility. like a sort of legend or custom, being wary/outwardly hateful of the demonic terf. maybe this is why when I heard gender ideology being likened to a religion, the analogy really clicked with me, because on some level trans-inclusive spaces really do make terfs feel like "the devil", some root of all evil, the parallel to the "divine" that they liken themselves to. I'm fairly atheistic myself in regards to just religion in general, so understanding being gender critical as essentially "gender atheism" helped me realize how logically flawed and slightly harmful a vehement belief in trans ideology could be, just as a non-critical perspective on any religious ideology can be.

I definitely relate to the point of basically falling into the radfem rabbit hole accidentally. I don't really feel like I'm properly a radfem or especially an activist (I do just write what's on my mind and that I can't really get engagement from my pre-existing social circles lol) and I honestly got into the ideas not through radblr but imageboards and forums through my bad habit of looking for material to "invalidate" me as some kind of "doom-scrolling" practice, but instead of finding blind hatred (even in the most niche of internet corners, where the ideology does get radical indeed) I found logical, cogent arguments and reasoning for why these people were so against gender ideology. I mean, yes, there was still hatred, but there's hatred on every corner of every internet space, and it also made me realize how my belief in not committing "thought crimes" by even entertaining "terf" rhetoric was simultaneously making me blind to the genuine flaws and ickier aspects of the trans + queer community that I was just sort of ignoring with cognitive dissonance. as a woman and someone with really god awful people-pleasing habits, I was unfortunately quite good at ignoring things that made me uncomfortable in order to maintain social acceptance and a good reputation in the eyes of others, and even if I don't share every radfem or gc belief, I can't deny being exposed to them all was absolutely integral to unraveling some of that unhealthy behavior.

based on my personal experiences, it is really actually quite disheartening to see that "radfem/terf dni" thing happen so much online. you really can't expect to never challenge your own thinking. in fact, challenging your preconceived notions is the only way you can grow as a person in your personal philosophy and conception of the world. I get it though, it is probably scary to engage with the "forbidden fruit" if your whole self-proclaimed all-accepting community says that this is one thing that is absolutely intolerable and will get you kicked from this welcoming "club". I will say, having opened this proverbial pandora's box of theory, I get a bit more angry and cynical at the state of the world (how did I never notice the staggering affects of misogyny before?), and I get a bit more sad that I'll never be able to have that unquestioning community with people who are supposed to understand me. I wonder if there are more people who would honestly be able to understand the nuances in critiquing gender ideology out there, but they fear that ostracization too. if by some random chance anyone like that ever reads this exact post (lol what are the odds) I always like to remind people that a burner email and account on something like tumblr is incredibly easy to set up!

alright, lemme get to your other ask because it is really interesting and thanks again for visiting!! I genuinely missed engaging with this kinda stuff offline, and I also get tired being the one to drip feed new ideas to people in person. it's really nice to just get a nice well written insight to engage with unfiltered (well, as unfiltered as a tumblr post under a pseudonym can be lmao)

[sheskindaperfecttryhardboys]

it's that time of year where my abortion repost is going viral again & my email is being flooded during work hours with weirdos so here i am to reintegrate i am still radically pro-bodily autonomy. this includes but is not limited to abortion, plastic surgery, HRT, and body modifications

no one needs to explain, have valid reason, or should need a diagnosis to alter their body as it is the vessel the universe has allowed us to experience this realm in and we should be able to do to it as needed & wanted

if you don't vibe with that opinion dni i don't want my email flooded with bible thumping or atheist cringe.

thx xoxo~

[berrylover0571]

It's very exhausting that people say they hate feminism, when what they really hate is the repackaged pink veneer feminism that is sold to them by capitalism. The repurposed and co-opted version of feminism that lines executive pockets and doesn't actually fix anything is not feminism, it's meant to make you think it is, but if it was feminism, it wouldn't be doing half the shit it's doing.

Nothing has ever made me want to blow my brains out more, truly, then when somebody says they hate feminism, when what they mean is that they hate repackaged capitalistic feminism for neoliberal feminism that rehabilitates war criminals. No you don't hate feminism, there are lots of types of feminism that are antagonistic and generally shitty, but you don't hate feminism, you hate trans exclusionary radical feminism, or sex worker exclusionary radical feminism, or feminist Theory being repurposed by Christian fundamentalists, for neoliberal feminism.

You don't hate feminism that utilizes a Marxist lens, you don't hate intersectional feminism, or black feminism, or feminist liberation, because feminist Liberation is equality.

Do you want to know what's not equality? Egalitarianism. Egalitarianism was invented by a bunch of Libertarians and weirdo YouTubers because they didn't like the ideas of feminism because it actively peeled away at their fucking conceptions of reality and questioned them. Egalitarianism quite literally reinforced the very things it was supposedly trying to critique. Egalitarianism isn't real, it's a manufactured ideology by a bunch of conservatives who are now white nationalists or crazy people. If you say you are an egalitarian with a Capital e, unironically in 20 fucking 23, I have reason to suspect you are either Two Steps From fascism, A terf, someone with a word a day calendar who decided to use the word today, or so out of touch you don't see the social context and connotations of egalitarianism and who created it and why.

And yes, I know the social context and connotation of saying I identify as a feminist, of saying I believe and work with feminist Theory and it's a lot more substantially compelling than egalitarian theory, because egalitarian theory has never been academically published, and anything they critique and say definitely has a paper written on it under feminist Theory, because it's a reactionary movement invented by a bunch of fucking weirdos. A bunch of fucking weirdos mind you who got pissed about video games and now for some reason our pundits on the political stage. Seriously how the fuck did Milo yianopolis get on 24-hour news Cycles?

You want proof that egalitarianism is a lie, and feminism is what you're actually talking about, here's an anecdote for me: I used to identify as an egalitarian in some capacity. I used to be very heavily opposed to feminism. I would regularly share critiques of feminism, many of which I remember to this day because of how deeply I regret them and How Deeply they make me cringe. Ion ironically shared armored skeptic videos, Lauren Southern videos, shoe on head videos before she supposedly went left-wing, amazing atheist, thunderfoot, I was deeply immersed in all of this shit, and I believe that there was a better way than feminism, it was egalitarianism, it made sense. I remember following Sargon for God's sake, listening to bullshit talking points from Paul Joseph Watson, I was neck deep in bullshit and there was no signs of me stopping. The thing that snapped me out of it was actual skepticism that held people accountable and talked through things. The people listed above didn't have that, of the people I listed almost every single one of them have either abandoned egalitarianism in favor of leftism and a form of feminist Theory, they have recanted their statements, they have turned coat on each other, or, my personal favorite because it just shows you how egregiously bullshit it all was, are out and out fascists who have propagated conspiracy theories and utter bullshit like white genocide.

You want to say that you are not a feminist because men have it just as hard as women feminists would fucking agree, at least in some capacities, because the expectations put upon Men by Society are not in fact good and do in fact hurt people. It's no wonder that there is a problem with male suicide rates, it's no wonder that masculinity is for some reason in crisis, there was never a strong Foundation of masculinity under capitalism, there wasn't a strong Foundation of femininity under capitalism, it's all a marketing demographic to fucking sell you shit. That's why now we have a bunch of influencers trying to rebuild masculinity from the ground up like Andrew tate, or Jordan peterson, people telling men to be men, which doesn't mean anything when there's not been a foundation of masculinity and people aren't allowed to explore gender as they're comfortable. You're not pissed that fucking feminism is down playing the suffering of men, feminism isn't doing that, I've read enough papers to tell you that, there are plenty of books, reams and reams of data, countless quotes and people who actively agree that men suffer under current patriarchal standards, because we are reinforcing the ideologies of men who are now dead who believe that women were cows meant to be bred and left to fucking die, taking care of the home as there only responsibility, if that. The beliefs and predictions of a patriarchal society doesn't mean that men are the bad people, it means that a group of men, several hundred years ago, maybe even several decades ago, created standards that we cannot abide by and we cannot atone towards, and invalidate Us in the present. It disallows us from exploring gender and exploring ourselves, being the man or woman we want to be or whatever the fuck we identify with, and deny people the agency to define themselves.

The patriarchy isn't modern men, though certain Modern Men do in fact reciprocate it, because they directly benefit from it, no patriarchy is not just modern men, it isn't modern masculinity, it is the fact that we as a whole society, capitalism and every other system of oppression, reinforce standards of masculinity that we're put in place by people who are now dead and do not matter. The fact that the fucking well of discourse was so thoroughly poisoned by a guy who's Avatar was a PNG of a helmet with a suit under it, some jackass who had a fetish for humiliating a woman who dare to critique video games that absolutely needed to be critiqued because next to no kind of reporting is being critical of video games at the moment and that's fucking concerning, and some jackass who decided a picture of some dude from ancient Persia or mesopotamia, that wasn't even sargon.

Half of these motherfuckers got pissed by a bunch of college students, which is the most inane bullshit I've ever heard. I can't stress enough, I've gotten pissed at video games, I did not get as pissed at video games as these guys got pissed at people who made video games and were parts of the industry. It is astounding how much bullshit propagated because a bunch of guys, who didn't make video games and barely fucking had any sort of experience or know how of the fucking area, decided they knew more about feminist Theory than any fucking person on the planet. None of these dudes could critique feminism, not a single one of them could, if put in a room with an actual academic feminist, which one of them was and was wiped the floor with, if put in a room with an actual academic feminist none of their points hold water because most academic feminists have in fact addressed to the points they're talking about.

I hope every person who fucked over and made it impossible to talk about gender issues, simply because they were pissed about video games, gets a hot iron catheter stuck in their dick hole, just so that you can know the pain and discomfort I fucking feel having to navigate the world right now. You can trace a direct line from some of these motherfuckers to the current debates we're having about transgender issues, quite a number of them made fun of transgender people and emboldened people to do the same, escalating them down a fucking path that led them to nazism, it's no wonder that fucking Sargon was a member of the UK independence party, a nationalist organization with nationalistic ends that hinged on fascism.

It would be fucking comedic if it wasn't so tragic, how the ethics and video game journalism people just happened to ignore the ethical fucking dilemma and conflicts of interests that they had.

I deeply fucking despise every single person involved in this fucking problem, and I hope they fucking work their asses off to fix it or get busy fucking dying, because there's no fucking reason for this shit to be so fucking impossible to navigate.

You got played, you got fucked up, and now we can't use the actual language we need to fucking use to talk about issues that actually do fucking happen. It is astounding how many times fucking people have reinvented terminology that already exists because they can't talk about feminist Theory because, I cannot stress this enough, a bunch of weirdos got pissed about video games and decided to take it out on video game feminist who weren't doing anything in the grand scheme of things. A good part of our fascist backslide has to do with the fact that a bunch of people felt entitled to be jackasses.

[ajmakoko]

When I was a kid my bestie and I decided to dig a mud hole in my back yard. This was a huge hole, like 3ft by 3ft, and we filled it with hose water and then agitated the sides to get a mud slurry to sit in. My mom was not super happy.

Later that friend became a horrible rightwing pastor, I haven't talked to him in a decade. I'm a genderfluid, pansexual, polyamorous, dominatrix atheist socialist. Weird how things shake out. It's a shame how his homophobia really made him destroy himself. And his really strict Catholic upbringing (mine was strict too, but his was worse - he got whipped with belts if he moved in church and had to sit, conpletely still in a wooden chair, for over an hour afterwards. I was just spanked and sent to my room). His family also liked him and included him, they would support and help him. My family not so much, I was mainly raised by my grandma and family friends, my family pawned me off as much as possible. So I never really cared for their acceptance or approval. Our families thought we'd get married some day. But then in middle school, he started being weird about what girls were allowed to do and say. I just didn't trust him anymore, and I wasn't leftwing then either (we both grew up in a conservative small town, the brainwashing was strong).

For a time though, we had peace and we made mud puddles together. Really sad and disappointing how close I once was with people and how fractured we are now. I have been grieving the loss of ALL of my childhood friends and virtually ALL of my family. Hundreds of people. Due to the ongoing online information war radicalizing people and destroying communities

i think it is unjust to deny a child their right to dig a hole motivelessly

[douchebagbrainwaves]

ALTHOUGH MORAL FASHIONS TEND TO ARISE FROM DIFFERENT SOURCES THAN FASHIONS IN CLOTHING, THE MECHANISM OF THEIR ADOPTION SEEMS MUCH THE SAME

So if you want to inhabit. It's like stretching. You haven't made anyone else poorer. Subtract one from the other, and the Inquisition was a bit restive at that time. The somewhat more surprising force was one specific type of innovation: social applications.1 To find them, keep track of opinions that get people in trouble today. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as yellowist, as is anyone suspected of liking the color. When you're talking about the amount of money at any moment.2 Everyone in a company works together to create wealth, in the sense of a village, but small in the sense that your performance can make or break it. The lowest form of these is to disagree with, you may be arguing with a straw man.

I did look under rocks as a kid: plain curiosity.3 He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist. I have often wished I'd had the temperament to do an absurd comedy, which is what the situation deserved. Now it's Wepay's.4 But the company as a whole must be giving people something they want, the more interesting sort of convergence that's coming is between shows and games. Along some parts of Skyline the dominant trees are huge redwoods, and in others they're live oaks.5 Suppose you realize there is nothing to buy, it wouldn't matter how much money you had.6 What ideas were tarnished by association when they ended up on the losing side of a recent struggle? He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist. Whereas if you solve a technical problem that a lot of hand-wringing now about declining market share.

But a very able person in a big company. One is that you lose the advantages of discussion. But by Galileo's time the church was in the throes of the Counter-Reformation and was much more worried about unorthodox ideas. This was wise advice.7 But you don't have to be smart to get jobs as a scientist, rather than just a good politician.8 And when you discover a new way to do that, you should say explicitly you're doing it. Real standards don't have to send everyone the same signal, and you become an idiot. Why do they do this?

But I think usually the shock is on one side.9 Superficially it's a lot like college. We would have much preferred a 100% chance of $1 million to a 20% chance of $10 million, even though theoretically the second is worth twice as much. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones. Which means every teenage kid a wants a computer with an Internet connection, b has an incentive to figure out how to use it, and group themselves according to whatever shared interest they feel most strongly. You could probably work twice as many hours as a corporate employee, and if people aren't using your software, maybe it's not just because it's free, but because it was harder.10 That's not a radical idea, by the way; it's the main difference between children and adults.11 What decided the contest for computers? All you need to keep your eye on here is the abstraction of money. But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x.12

Near the top is the company run by techno-weenies who are obsessed with solving interesting technical problems, instead of fleeing as soon as some big company becomes aware of it, they'll make their own, and with their brand name, capital, and distribution clout, they'll take away your market overnight. At least, as long as acquirers remain stupid. When aimed squarely at the original argument, it can be convincing. For example, if users searching for compact disc player is not present on those pages. That will change the balance of power between the networks and the people who have them happier. Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But on religion everyone's an expert. No one gets in trouble for repeating Copernicus's ideas. Changes between the past and the present sometimes do represent progress. Google is, they're probably being told right now by VCs to come back when they have more traction.

You can see this on a small scale in the matter of dirty words. Indeed, the arrival of new fashions makes old fashions easy to see, because they get the wrong answers on tests. In doing so you create wealth.13 The word defeatist, for example.14 Either VCs will evolve down into this gap or, more likely, new investors will be compelled by the structure of the investments they make to be ten times bolder than present day VCs. But the real advantage of the ten-man boat shows when you take the ten best rowers out of the big galley and put them in a boat by themselves, they could probably go faster. So let's get Bill Gates out of the big galley and put them in a boat together.15 If you have something real to say, being mean just gets in the way.16 But in medieval Europe something new happened. You just can't fry eggs or cut hair one customer at a time.

Notes

Once someone has said fail, most of them.

One implication of this: You may not even allowed to ask permission to go to college, you'll find that with a wink, to a car dealer. You have to do more with less, then promptly improving it.

According to the founders don't have one. Joshua Reeves specifically suggests asking each investor to do tedious work. There are aspects of the great painters in history supported themselves by painting portraits.

On the verge of the rest of the web was going to get significant numbers of people who will go away. The two 10 minuteses have 3 weeks between them so founders can get programmers who wanted to. But a couple of hackers with no valuation cap.

So if it's dismissed, it's cool with us if the statistics they use the phrase the city, they may end up. Inside their heads a giant house of cards is tottering.

Investors influence one another, it is still a dick move. If Xerox had used what they said, and anyone doing due diligence tends to be good startup founders and one didn't try to avoid using it, I'm just going to have to do more harm than good. While the US treat the poor worse than Japanese car companies, but at least prevent your investors from helping you to behave like adults, it may have been doing so.

Two customer support people tied for first prize with entries I still shiver to recall. You could also degenerate from uppercase to any-case, not you. The question to ask permission to go deeper into the heads of would-be poets were mistaken to be in that so few founders do it.

Which feels a bit misleading to treat macros as a cause as it was overvalued till you see what new ideas you're presenting. If Bush had been a time of its identity. We couldn't talk meaningfully about revenues without including the numbers from the VCs' point of view anyway. On the other hand, they are so different from technology companies.

There are lots of customers times how much they can use this technique, you'll have to decide whether you're a YC startup and you need to do. I don't think you should never sell. That would be enough to guarantee good effects.

For the computer, the reaction was so widespread and so on.

In a series A deal flow, then used a recent Business Week, 31 Jan 2005.

This is not always as deliberate as its sounds. When I talk about the subterfuges they had to work on a hard technical problem. Robert Morris wrote the ordering system and image generator written in C and Perl. I ordered a large chunk of time, serious writing meant theological discourses, not eating virtuously.

Horace, Sat. If you were able to buy it despite having no evidence it's for sale. Companies often wonder what to do it. They would have been sitting in their early twenties.

Good news: users don't care what your body is telling you and listen only to the erosion of the taste of apples because if people can see how universally faces work by their prevalence in advertising.

Even if you were. Family, school, and his son Robert were each in turn forces Digg to respond with extreme countermeasures. If not, greater accessibility. I'd use to calibrate the weighting of the word wealth, the local builders built everything in it.

I assume we still do things that don't raise money on the admissions committee knows the professors who wrote the editor, written in Lisp, Wiley, 1985, p. The fancy version of this policy may be a great idea as an example of a business, or want tenure, avoid casual conversations with VCs suggest it's roughly correct to say that it also worked for spam. We're delighted to have had little acquired immunity to dictators.

[smokeybrandcompositions]

Exodus

I just read an article claiming that the biggest migration of people out of Christianity is happening in real time and find that hilarious. I’m on record as to being areligious but, as a youth, I was raised Christian. I think it was Southern Baptist but I can’t  remember. It’s been probably thirty-five years since I’ve set foot in a church for worship. I questioned my faith early on after seeing things in my church, which didn’t jive with the word I was being taught. I’m talking hungry people being turned away, even though we were having a potluck dinner at the time. Threats of corporal punishment if my five year old ass didn’t stop being a five year old during a three hour long sermon. I lost my faith when my grandma died. I prayed every day, pleaded with the higher powers that be, to take away my grandma’s cancer and, for a time, they obliged. A handful of months later, they found a tumor in her head mind she was dead within months. I was eleven or twelve and didn’t understand what metastasization was so, to me, that sh*t was a purposeful “act of god.” This omnipotent being, chose to give us false hope by taking away my grandma’s lung cancer, only to move it into her brain and take her from me. That sh*t went against everything I was taught growing up and it made me ask “Why.” I spent the next half decade of my life chasing that answer but I never found it. The closest I got was “God’s plan is not for us mere mortals to understand.” That’s bullsh*t. That non-answer forced me to look outside the Christian doctrines and I fared no better there. By the time I left high school, I was fully agnostic and leaning toward being outright atheist but my mom wanted me to give the church another shot. There was no way that was going to happened, I had already forsaken anything organized, but I opted to study more. Maybe I could find something in the word to care about, to build some semblance of spirituality around. I’m, like, seventeen now and, let me tell you, the next two years were a whirlwind of knowledge, surprise, and offense.

The first thing I learned about was the fact that apocryphal texts exist. I remember my grandma talking about the Dead Seas Scrolls; a bible older than any known at the time of discovery, which told a different version of the bible we use to worship currently. How is that possible? Isn’t he bible the word of god? Isn’t it all supposed to be the same thing? No! Christianity started out as a series of f*cking cults. All religions do. When one reaches critical mass, they become religion. That said, these cults, while still telling a similar story and preaching a similar gospel, are still different enough to become sects. They are Christian, yes, but not THE Christian, you know? Among these sects, was one called the Gnostics. They sought to quantify the word of Christ through observation of the natural world and common goddamn sense. The Dead Seas Scrolls are Gnostic Texts. These texts have a variety of different Books in their bible, a ton missing from them modern version we use today. Just a sprinkling of such includes: The book of Mary Magdalene. The Book of Judas. The Book of Thomas. The Book of Secret Paul. The Book of Bartholomew. These text paint a radically different view of Jesus and his life. The Book of Mary Magdalene posits that Mary of Magdalena was not a whore, but the daughter of the shipping magnate who controlled the port city of Magdalena. Not only was she basically a princess or socialite, she was the wife of Jesus, his first confidant, and person who bankrolled dude’s journey to spread his word. Far cry from a whore who washed Jesus’ feet, right? The Gospel of Judas basically says that Judas and Jesus were in cahoots about his crucifixion, that it a was necessary to shake his other followers out of their blind worship of the Evil God, because there was two. Or how about the book of Enoch, which basically said none of this matters because, at the end of times, everyone gets a pass. There are so many contradictory Gospels out there, it’s ridiculous. But they’re Gospels, right? They are the word of God, right? Then why haven’t I heard about them until now? Who said this Book was more true that that one? Well, I have an answer for that, too.

Once i learned about the Council of Nicaea, that was it for me. Christianity was bullsh*t from that point on. Whenever some overzealous church person gets after me about my indifference to their faith, I ask them if they know what the council of Nicaea is. They rarely do. Way back in the olden times, something like three hundred years after Jesus got crucified, Constantine the I and a bunch of bishops, got together and basically decided what books were canonized and what books were not. Basically, the king of the Holy Roman Empire, got a bunch of bishops together, and decided what Christianity was going to be going forward. They literally picked from hundreds of Gospels, chose the ones they liked the most (the ones which fit their agendas and made it easier for them to rule), and made that sh*t into the Holy Bible. That’s right, the bible as you know it, in all forms since AD 325, has been a straight of tool of propaganda. It was designed to placate, denigrate, and distract, the everyday man from the harshness of the world with promises of everlasting life, if you could sustain an entire, mortal lifetime of cruelty. I mean, the Epicurean Paradox, alone, was enough for me to basically write of a god, but this Nicaea business? How can you know about that and still be pious? How can you absolutely know, that your book of worship was curated by the social elite specifically to placate the serfs, and still act like it’s the word of your profound deity? At that point, everything is suspect. God doesn’t lie but men do and your bible, your direct tie to the word of god, was crafted by men. Men with vested interests in keep you subservient and docile. You are sheep to be kept, sheparded in flock buy Jesus or, rather, the Holy King, himself, Constantine. Followed by whoever else would have the audacity to co-op thump that bible with zealous aggression. I, personally, find that sh*t offensive and, apparently, so do a lot of people.

[smokeybrand]

Exodus

I just read an article claiming that the biggest migration of people out of Christianity is happening in real time and find that hilarious. I’m on record as to being areligious but, as a youth, I was raised Christian. I think it was Southern Baptist but I can’t  remember. It’s been probably thirty-five years since I’ve set foot in a church for worship. I questioned my faith early on after seeing things in my church, which didn’t jive with the word I was being taught. I’m talking hungry people being turned away, even though we were having a potluck dinner at the time. Threats of corporal punishment if my five year old ass didn’t stop being a five year old during a three hour long sermon. I lost my faith when my grandma died. I prayed every day, pleaded with the higher powers that be, to take away my grandma’s cancer and, for a time, they obliged. A handful of months later, they found a tumor in her head mind she was dead within months. I was eleven or twelve and didn’t understand what metastasization was so, to me, that sh*t was a purposeful “act of god.” This omnipotent being, chose to give us false hope by taking away my grandma’s lung cancer, only to move it into her brain and take her from me. That sh*t went against everything I was taught growing up and it made me ask “Why.” I spent the next half decade of my life chasing that answer but I never found it. The closest I got was “God’s plan is not for us mere mortals to understand.” That’s bullsh*t. That non-answer forced me to look outside the Christian doctrines and I fared no better there. By the time I left high school, I was fully agnostic and leaning toward being outright atheist but my mom wanted me to give the church another shot. There was no way that was going to happened, I had already forsaken anything organized, but I opted to study more. Maybe I could find something in the word to care about, to build some semblance of spirituality around. I’m, like, seventeen now and, let me tell you, the next two years were a whirlwind of knowledge, surprise, and offense.

The first thing I learned about was the fact that apocryphal texts exist. I remember my grandma talking about the Dead Seas Scrolls; a bible older than any known at the time of discovery, which told a different version of the bible we use to worship currently. How is that possible? Isn’t he bible the word of god? Isn’t it all supposed to be the same thing? No! Christianity started out as a series of f*cking cults. All religions do. When one reaches critical mass, they become religion. That said, these cults, while still telling a similar story and preaching a similar gospel, are still different enough to become sects. They are Christian, yes, but not THE Christian, you know? Among these sects, was one called the Gnostics. They sought to quantify the word of Christ through observation of the natural world and common goddamn sense. The Dead Seas Scrolls are Gnostic Texts. These texts have a variety of different Books in their bible, a ton missing from them modern version we use today. Just a sprinkling of such includes: The book of Mary Magdalene. The Book of Judas. The Book of Thomas. The Book of Secret Paul. The Book of Bartholomew. These text paint a radically different view of Jesus and his life. The Book of Mary Magdalene posits that Mary of Magdalena was not a whore, but the daughter of the shipping magnate who controlled the port city of Magdalena. Not only was she basically a princess or socialite, she was the wife of Jesus, his first confidant, and person who bankrolled dude’s journey to spread his word. Far cry from a whore who washed Jesus’ feet, right? The Gospel of Judas basically says that Judas and Jesus were in cahoots about his crucifixion, that it a was necessary to shake his other followers out of their blind worship of the Evil God, because there was two. Or how about the book of Enoch, which basically said none of this matters because, at the end of times, everyone gets a pass. There are so many contradictory Gospels out there, it’s ridiculous. But they’re Gospels, right? They are the word of God, right? Then why haven’t I heard about them until now? Who said this Book was more true that that one? Well, I have an answer for that, too.

Once i learned about the Council of Nicaea, that was it for me. Christianity was bullsh*t from that point on. Whenever some overzealous church person gets after me about my indifference to their faith, I ask them if they know what the council of Nicaea is. They rarely do. Way back in the olden times, something like three hundred years after Jesus got crucified, Constantine the I and a bunch of bishops, got together and basically decided what books were canonized and what books were not. Basically, the king of the Holy Roman Empire, got a bunch of bishops together, and decided what Christianity was going to be going forward. They literally picked from hundreds of Gospels, chose the ones they liked the most (the ones which fit their agendas and made it easier for them to rule), and made that sh*t into the Holy Bible. That’s right, the bible as you know it, in all forms since AD 325, has been a straight of tool of propaganda. It was designed to placate, denigrate, and distract, the everyday man from the harshness of the world with promises of everlasting life, if you could sustain an entire, mortal lifetime of cruelty. I mean, the Epicurean Paradox, alone, was enough for me to basically write of a god, but this Nicaea business? How can you know about that and still be pious? How can you absolutely know, that your book of worship was curated by the social elite specifically to placate the serfs, and still act like it’s the word of your profound deity? At that point, everything is suspect. God doesn’t lie but men do and your bible, your direct tie to the word of god, was crafted by men. Men with vested interests in keep you subservient and docile. You are sheep to be kept, sheparded in flock buy Jesus or, rather, the Holy King, himself, Constantine. Followed by whoever else would have the audacity to co-op thump that bible with zealous aggression. I, personally, find that sh*t offensive and, apparently, so do a lot of people.

[pyroclastic727]

Owl House said fuck capitalism

So this episode was interesting. Lilith pretty much killed her sister. Why the fuck would she do that?

Even more interesting: why is Belos like that? How did Hooty put his head through one of those guards? Who the fuck is the Titan, and why does everyone like him? And how are these all tied together?

This episode was a metaphor for capitalism

...and another delicious step towards radicalizing the youth into dismantling this fucked-up neo-feudal system.

We’ll start with Belos. 

Emperor Belos is a weird name, don’t you think? We all thought it was spelled “Bellows,” but it wasn’t. In fact, it’s five letters, starts with Be, ends with os, and describes a megalomaniac emperor that restricts people’s freedom in order to accumulate wealth for himself.

Sound familiar?

Emperor Bezos Belos created capitalism. He saw the beauty of magic and decided to make himself the most powerful.

Belos created a system that destroys the masses and boosts his power.

 I’m dipping into fan theory a little, because the fan theory fits. We know that people get branded with coven magic that makes it so they can only specialize in one area. We know that Belos is the most powerful witch in the Boiling Isles. We know that the excess magic, magic created by restrictions, has to go somewhere.

It’s the same system that many viewers see all the time. A job takes up all your day and tires you for the night, so you can only do one skill for the rest of your life. Jeff Bezos is the most powerful man in the United States. Excess money, money taken by restrictions, has to go somewhere.

The magic goes to Belos, like how the money goes to Bezos. Belos created capitalism, and he won it.

The guards aren’t real. 

Look, we’ve never seen their faces. They’re all the same. Why would you work so hard to get to the top, just to become a nameless, faceless killing machine?

Oh, also Hooty stuck his face through one. There is nothing under the armor.

Why? Well, it’s the same reason you see all those celebrities going around flaunting their wealth and bragging about how hard they worked. Like all those songs about how they grind every day and work harder than everyone else while you’re out clubbing, and that makes them dope. And then you take a closer look at them and see that they had a small loan of a million dollars fueling them, or an entire talent agency behind them, or their dad was a famous country star in the 80′s. 

They’re fake. They’re hollow. They’re a ploy created by the capitalist emperor to try to delude you into working harder. 

Let me put this into perspective. I guarantee that every single one of you has heard stuff like this: “Hard work makes you successful.” “I put in the work, and that’s why I’m successful.” “If you work hard enough, then you can be as successful as Mark Zuckerberg.” 

And unless you’re a robot or really lucky, I’m sure all of you have failed at this. Maybe they told you that hard work would make you good at math, so you spent 22 hours a week working on calculus, only to pass it by 3 percentage points and have it destroy your perfect 4.0 GPA. Maybe they told you that if you talked to people enough, then you would make friends, so you spent a lot of time talking to people, only to end up lonely and friendless. Maybe they told you that if you did well in school, you would get a good job, so you spent all your time working hard to be a good student, and then ended up in a soulless, dead-end job.

The guards are there to delude you. Look, who really gains from you being productive? The answer is the ruling class, the CEOs, the government, the bourgeoisie. It has always been that. All you get from working is a paycheck that lets you survive. They get a paycheck that lets them get rich. Just like Belos gets the magic and productivity of the specialized coven witches.

The guards are there to trick you. The truth is that nobody can join the Emperor’s Coven. It’s just there to make you think that hard work will make you successful. Then you spend your entire life working hard, trying to prove to the person in charge that you’re worthwhile. You give your whole life to the Coven, and they give you nothing. 

Magic is supposed to be something you pursue for fun. Being skilled at things, being good at something beautiful...that’s supposed to be something you do because you want to. But they took that and made it into a source of productivity. It doesn’t matter if you make good content. All people fucking care about is if you upload the day of premiere, if you make a lot of content quickly, if you maintain a million different conversations with strangers who expect you to be the most interesting person in the room. They don’t care how it hurts you. They don’t care how you crack from the stress. How you cry when you think no one can see you, and then you check your phone and someone can see you, someone did see you, and you have to put on your face and be the charming, magnetic person they want you to be. (oh by the way that’s why I wasn’t online much last week)

And it ruins it. Suddenly you can’t watch The Owl House without being stressed. You can’t make any content. You can’t make spells as powerfully as you want to. Your passion is replaced by perfectionism and insecurity, a voice telling you to keep being the best at what you do, or else they’ll forget you and let you die.

There’s also the Titan. 

So nobody has mentioned him before, because in addition to the Boiling Isles being a hellscape full of witchcraft and queerness, it’s also full of atheists. 

But suddenly we have people saying all this shit about him? Shit like, he gave witches the gift of magic, and then they learned to use it in a civilized manner, since being uncivilized was disrespectful?

I mean, first off, that’s fucking wrong. The island gives people magic. The island, which just so happened to be shaped like a titan-sized human. But the island/titan gives everyone all types of magic. Hell, even Luz gets to use magic, and she’s human. 

It sounds really fucking familiar. (tw for discussion of homophobia and colonialism and misogyny). It sounds like when the news is on and they show some Tr*mp supporter talking about how fetuses have more rights than people and it is their holy duty to take away a woman’s control over her body and force her through unbearable pain and into an 18-year commitment she didn’t want to make. It sounds like all the times people tried to say homosexuality should be illegal, citing a single line in a book written two thousand years ago and heavily edited by a European king. It sounds like all the times people said God wanted them to conquer, to own the entire earth, to force the other races into pain to support them.

This is that bullshit thing people do where they commit awful sins and justify it by citing the will of God. 

Or, it’s the Coven using religion as an excuse for evil.

Look, the Emperor’s Coven is clearly colonizer-coded. Saying that people’s original form of magic was wild (and showing a picture with the same joyous, rowdy energy of an 18th or 19th -century Black or indigenous party), and that it was God’s will for them to be “civilized?” Sounds like that thing that powerful white people did where they went and murdered people and forced them into their twisted capitalist system. God, gold, and glory, is what they said, because history books just love to omit the gore.

Lilith is passing the abuse cycle along. 

You know, like a good little colonizer. God I fucking hate her. She’s a MILF, in the sense that she’s a Mother I’d Like to Fling off a cliff. 

Ah, enough screaming about how much I want to drown Lilith in a tub of Hooty’s mucus. Let’s go into why I want to do that, and how she took the evils of capitalism and just...adopted those.

So, Lilith is sick and twisted for what she did to her sister. But, uhh, that’s the point. You see, there are so many other people out there like Lilith who would do the exact same thing, if given the chance. These are the people who do mean things when the teacher isn’t looking, and then act nice and try to frame you. These are the people who will hate you if you’re better than them. These are people who would do anything to bring you down, if you dare outperform them.

It’s greed, my friends. The mental illness that capitalism blesses us all with.

Lilith herself said it: she dedicated her entire life to the Coven. What she wanted was to be the best. And she almost was...except for her own sister. Someone who lived with her, annoyed her at home, bested her at school. Someone she could never beat, no matter how hard she worked. And her sister was younger than her, too! How insulting was that? Lilith wanted to be the best, and someone in her exact situation did better than her.

Lilith was insecure. And it consumed her.

But why? Why does insecurity consume her? I mean, no one can be motivated by insecurity forever. Well, not unless someone conditions it into you.

The lovely thing about the capitalist system is the morals it teaches you. Things like: “You’re only useful if you’re the best.” “Being school smart makes you smart, while being social smart or sports smart or creative smart or fandom smart is worthless.” “Your worth can be quantified by numbers and is based off arbitrary measures like your income or your grades.” Things that can and will drive us crazy if we let ourselves believe them.

And it did drive Lilith crazy. She got so twisted by a society that said being good at magic is her only worth. Look, Lilith used to be good at things, probably. She was good at sports. At times, she slips up and does an okay job of being Eda’s sister. She has a powerful presence when she’s in a room. And she’s wicked good at manipulating people. 

But that didn’t matter. Lilith bought into the lies. She let herself believe that magical skill was the only way to measure her worth. And since she needed to be the best, she hurt Eda for it.

The beautiful thing is, Eda didn’t buy that. "It’s my power, kid. And before you showed up, I spent my whole life wasting it.” Is what Eda said, as she used up the last of her power, the last of her life, to save Luz. In her final moments, she proved that she’s not like them. She’s stronger than them.

None of this matters. Not magical prowess. Not the hierarchy. Not the promise of joining the Coven and having more power than anyone else.

The only thing that matters to Eda is her family. Her real family. Her Luz, King, and Hooty. And by extension, Willow, Gus, and Amity. Those are Eda’s real reason for fighting, for dying: to protect them. Look, there’s no way she would’ve come out of that fight alive. She has a family, and her love for them is stronger than greed or jealousy or capitalism. 

Lilith never understood that. She thought the water of the womb was thicker than the blood of the covenant. Or, that the water of the womb and the blood of the covenant are stronger than the bonds of found family. She thought it didn’t matter if Eda loved, her, only if the Emperor loved her. Fucking bitch.

And now, a little something to worry about, before we go. Amity Blight. The girl who wanted to join the Emperor’s Coven more than anything, who dedicated her whole life to doing well in school, to being the best, to being perfect.

And then she met Luz. She fell for Luz. Now she’s in a tricky place, where habit and conditioning want her to join the Emperor’s Coven, but her heart wants her to do the impossible and destroy capitalism.

She wasn’t in this episode. Funny that being injured and unable to work ended up saving her from watching her future mother-in-law die. So she bought some time.

But Luz’s true mom is dead. This is the second mom she has lost, and she’s only fourteen. As powerful as King and Hooty are, Luz needs Amity. Luz needs Amity to support her and help her get back her mom.

So Amity has to make a choice. Fear and insecurity, or love and a high chance of death? 

She’ll probably choose death. Because that’s the message that this family-friendly show is giving us kids. Fuck capitalism. All you need in life is to do what makes you happy and be with the ones you love.

[rosalesbeausderholle]

It will actually be so funny when my and my girlfriend's parents eventually meet because on the one hand they have the exact same personalities (nice, if slightly overbearing and worrying mothers and cynical fathers who root for the same football team) but on the other hand her mother is a SAHM who told my girlfriend to never tell her grandparents about me because it would kill them, while my mom is a teacher at a prison who was telling everyone this week about her two former students, one of whom is trans, who got married this week and invited her to their wedding; her father is a banker who this year bought himself a book on how much communists suck as his own birthday present, while MY dad is a kind of anarchist radical atheist who will, unprompted, rant at you about all the reasons why we should decriminalize drugs for a full hour.

That eventual dinner will be SO fun.

[berrylover0571]

It's very exhausting that people say they hate feminism, when what they really hate is the repackaged pink veneer feminism that is sold to them by capitalism. The repurposed and co-opted version of feminism that lines executive pockets and doesn't actually fix anything is not feminism, it's meant to make you think it is, but if it was feminism, it wouldn't be doing half the shit it's doing.

Nothing has ever made me want to blow my brains out more, truly, then when somebody says they hate feminism, when what they mean is that they hate repackaged capitalistic feminism for neoliberal feminism that rehabilitates war criminals. No you don't hate feminism, there are lots of types of feminism that are antagonistic and generally shitty, but you don't hate feminism, you hate trans exclusionary radical feminism, or sex worker exclusionary radical feminism, or feminist Theory being repurposed by Christian fundamentalists, for neoliberal feminism.

You don't hate feminism that utilizes a Marxist lens, you don't hate intersectional feminism, or black feminism, or feminist liberation, because feminist Liberation is equality.

Do you want to know what's not equality? Egalitarianism. Egalitarianism was invented by a bunch of Libertarians and weirdo YouTubers because they didn't like the ideas of feminism because it actively peeled away at their fucking conceptions of reality and questioned them. Egalitarianism quite literally reinforced the very things it was supposedly trying to critique. Egalitarianism isn't real, it's a manufactured ideology by a bunch of conservatives who are now white nationalists or crazy people. If you say you are an egalitarian with a Capital e, unironically in 20 fucking 23, I have reason to suspect you are either Two Steps From fascism, A terf, someone with a word a day calendar who decided to use the word today, or so out of touch you don't see the social context and connotations of egalitarianism and who created it and why.

And yes, I know the social context and connotation of saying I identify as a feminist, of saying I believe and work with feminist Theory and it's a lot more substantially compelling than egalitarian theory, because egalitarian theory has never been academically published, and anything they critique and say definitely has a paper written on it under feminist Theory, because it's a reactionary movement invented by a bunch of fucking weirdos. A bunch of fucking weirdos mind you who got pissed about video games and now for some reason our pundits on the political stage. Seriously how the fuck did Milo yianopolis get on 24-hour news Cycles?

You want proof that egalitarianism is a lie, and feminism is what you're actually talking about, here's an anecdote for me: I used to identify as an egalitarian in some capacity. I used to be very heavily opposed to feminism. I would regularly share critiques of feminism, many of which I remember to this day because of how deeply I regret them and How Deeply they make me cringe. Ion ironically shared armored skeptic videos, Lauren Southern videos, shoe on head videos before she supposedly went left-wing, amazing atheist, thunderfoot, I was deeply immersed in all of this shit, and I believe that there was a better way than feminism, it was egalitarianism, it made sense. I remember following Sargon for God's sake, listening to bullshit talking points from Paul Joseph Watson, I was neck deep in bullshit and there was no signs of me stopping. The thing that snapped me out of it was actual skepticism that held people accountable and talked through things. The people listed above didn't have that, of the people I listed almost every single one of them have either abandoned egalitarianism in favor of leftism and a form of feminist Theory, they have recanted their statements, they have turned coat on each other, or, my personal favorite because it just shows you how egregiously bullshit it all was, are out and out fascists who have propagated conspiracy theories and utter bullshit like white genocide.

You want to say that you are not a feminist because men have it just as hard as women feminists would fucking agree, at least in some capacities, because the expectations put upon Men by Society are not in fact good and do in fact hurt people. It's no wonder that there is a problem with male suicide rates, it's no wonder that masculinity is for some reason in crisis, there was never a strong Foundation of masculinity under capitalism, there wasn't a strong Foundation of femininity under capitalism, it's all a marketing demographic to fucking sell you shit. That's why now we have a bunch of influencers trying to rebuild masculinity from the ground up like Andrew tate, or Jordan peterson, people telling men to be men, which doesn't mean anything when there's not been a foundation of masculinity and people aren't allowed to explore gender as they're comfortable. You're not pissed that fucking feminism is down playing the suffering of men, feminism isn't doing that, I've read enough papers to tell you that, there are plenty of books, reams and reams of data, countless quotes and people who actively agree that men suffer under current patriarchal standards, because we are reinforcing the ideologies of men who are now dead who believe that women were cows meant to be bred and left to fucking die, taking care of the home as there only responsibility, if that. The beliefs and predictions of a patriarchal society doesn't mean that men are the bad people, it means that a group of men, several hundred years ago, maybe even several decades ago, created standards that we cannot abide by and we cannot atone towards, and invalidate Us in the present. It disallows us from exploring gender and exploring ourselves, being the man or woman we want to be or whatever the fuck we identify with, and deny people the agency to define themselves.

The patriarchy isn't modern men, though certain Modern Men do in fact reciprocate it, because they directly benefit from it, no patriarchy is not just modern men, it isn't modern masculinity, it is the fact that we as a whole society, capitalism and every other system of oppression, reinforce standards of masculinity that we're put in place by people who are now dead and do not matter. The fact that the fucking well of discourse was so thoroughly poisoned by a guy who's Avatar was a PNG of a helmet with a suit under it, some jackass who had a fetish for humiliating a woman who dare to critique video games that absolutely needed to be critiqued because next to no kind of reporting is being critical of video games at the moment and that's fucking concerning, and some jackass who decided a picture of some dude from ancient Persia or mesopotamia, that wasn't even sargon.

Half of these motherfuckers got pissed by a bunch of college students, which is the most inane bullshit I've ever heard. I can't stress enough, I've gotten pissed at video games, I did not get as pissed at video games as these guys got pissed at people who made video games and were parts of the industry. It is astounding how much bullshit propagated because a bunch of guys, who didn't make video games and barely fucking had any sort of experience or know how of the fucking area, decided they knew more about feminist Theory than any fucking person on the planet. None of these dudes could critique feminism, not a single one of them could, if put in a room with an actual academic feminist, which one of them was and was wiped the floor with, if put in a room with an actual academic feminist none of their points hold water because most academic feminists have in fact addressed to the points they're talking about.

I hope every person who fucked over and made it impossible to talk about gender issues, simply because they were pissed about video games, gets a hot iron catheter stuck in their dick hole, just so that you can know the pain and discomfort I fucking feel having to navigate the world right now. You can trace a direct line from some of these motherfuckers to the current debates we're having about transgender issues, quite a number of them made fun of transgender people and emboldened people to do the same, escalating them down a fucking path that led them to nazism, it's no wonder that fucking Sargon was a member of the UK independence party, a nationalist organization with nationalistic ends that hinged on fascism.

It would be fucking comedic if it wasn't so tragic, how the ethics and video game journalism people just happened to ignore the ethical fucking dilemma and conflicts of interests that they had.

I deeply fucking despise every single person involved in this fucking problem, and I hope they fucking work their asses off to fix it or get busy fucking dying, because there's no fucking reason for this shit to be so fucking impossible to navigate.

You got played, you got fucked up, and now we can't use the actual language we need to fucking use to talk about issues that actually do fucking happen. It is astounding how many times fucking people have reinvented terminology that already exists because they can't talk about feminist Theory because, I cannot stress this enough, a bunch of weirdos got pissed about video games and decided to take it out on video game feminist who weren't doing anything in the grand scheme of things. A good part of our fascist backslide has to do with the fact that a bunch of people felt entitled to be jackasses.

[unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240]

Yes, it's definitely true that if you were taught a lot of bs/antisemitic ideas about Jews and Judaism through Xtianity growing up, you very much need to deconstruct those before converting.

Personally, I grew up in the church equivalent of a Reform shul (lefty Presbyterian) and so what I internalized was very much liberal Xtian misinformation/antisemitism. This meant that my community taught us on the one hand, that Jews should be respected and loved and not proselytized to (like all other religious minorities) but that they held backward beliefs and were effectively pre-Xtians. I was taught to be as wary of the social positions of Jews as I was of, say, Catholics - like sure, there were some cool individual people and you should approach everyone with respect, obvs - but like the institutions were definitely conservative. I was definitely taught that Jesus was a radical who shook things up in a good way, and his rebellions against Rome were effective and helpful. None of the antisemitism baked into or commonly read into the NT was unpacked or even discussed, except maybe the "Jews killed Jesus" libel - I'm pretty sure they told us that was exaggerated or basically an intra-Jewish argument at the time and not something to levy at modern Jews. I was taught that Pharisee = thing that doesn't exist anymore in any form, and good riddance (there's literally a song about this? That they taught to children?? Idk I learned it at Vacation Bible School 🙄 Edit: found it, acckh cringe) I was absolutely fed supercessionist ideas without any historical context. I didn't even realize that the Beit HaMikdash was THE Temple, rather than like, Jesus' home church lmao. You don't want to know what I was (and wasn't) taught about Israel.

The early things that I look back on now, as a Jewish adult, and see a spark of that neshama in are the fact that at five years old I argued with first my parents, then the Xtian Education director, then the pastor, about why we shouldn't be selling things at church if Jesus overturned the tables in his Temple. I remember being absolutely enamored by the Exodus story, and honestly preferred it to the NT stories. And the thing that I most see my adult self in, is the time in my confirmation classes that I kept the teachers after class for two hours just relentlessly demanding context about the Tanakh that they absolutely could not give me. They eventually told me that for that, I'd have to read the text in Hebrew and my immediate, unhesitating response was, "if that's so, then let's have at it. What are we waiting for and where do I sign up?" I was told that was too hard for civilians, but that I was welcome to go to seminary.

Turns out, the answer to "where do I sign up" is Judaism, lol. But I can never forget the feeling of this extreme absence in the NIV text, like I was trying to study Shakespeare based on someone's class notes without any of the original poetry or historical context.

Didn't help that I didn't know anyone who was [openly] Jewish and practicing growing up. I knew one Jewish girl who was a staunch atheist child of two atheists, one from a Jewish background and one from a Catholic background (her descriptors, not mine.) If there was anyone else, they didn't talk about it with me, and I honestly don't blame them at all.

As an adult, though, I went to college and somehow found myself suddenly friends with Jews, including one of my closest friends to this day. It was that friend in particular who helped me understand, identify, and unpack the antisemitism I'd grown up with. (In hindsight, the patience that must've taken - lord help me.) But I learned, and I listened.

It helped that I left Xtianity the first week I got to college. I went to one church - the one that I'd researched and seemed like it should be the best fit for me - and when I went in, it just felt wrong. Not because of the people or the space or the practice; that it was wrong for me. I was wrong there. So I left, and I never looked back. And over the years, I learned, and I unlearned.

I think the biggest a-ha! moment for me was when I really pinned down my bestie to ask about the "no proselytizing" Thing in Judaism. I remember asking, "okay but they [religious Jews] think they're right, don't they? That what they're doing and believe is true?" And ze was just like "....yes?" And so then I asked, " okay, so then why not share that with other people? Why hide the truth from the world if they believe it to be so?" And in that moment, suddenly my friend understood a critical misunderstanding of mine, and explained "Oh! Right. Yes, they believe that is the truth. But there are also other truths. Also, you don't have to be Jewish to be 100% good within Jewish tradition...." and explained the whole binding covenant vs. righteous gentile thing. And that was extremely eye-opening. From there, I started unraveling so many other Xtian ideas, that I eventually found myself on the road to conversion.

The thing that really tipped the balance, though, was actually hearing Torah read in Hebrew. I'd already fallen in love with the Jewish people, Jewish culture, and had dear Jewish friends. I had already become fiercely protective of Jews and was trying hard to become a better ally.

But when I heard Torah read - untranslated, unfiltered, real - something in me changed. I woke up.

The part of me that was desperate for the true meaning and context of Torah finally heard it - in the beginning of beginnings, as it were - and I fell in love with Torah as well. And that planted the seed that eventually led me here: home.

The conversion process is as much about UNlearning as learning!! As a convert, a lot of people come to conversion with a host of mental baggage that they've picked up from gentile backgrounds. Seeing people on that website who were raised xtian is so concerning to me because I generally find people with christian backgrounds much harder to talk to about judaism/my conversion because their own religion teaches extensively about jews and judaism in a way thats often deeply wrong. you can be very well-read and still have these beliefs, but a secular jew who knows very little torah would not, so in some ways unlearning defines a conversion more than learning does.

Sharing this in case any convert wants to share their own experience about this topic! Reading this was incredibly informative and interesting. It makes sense, having to deconstruct your Xtian background first before you can even touch Judaism.