Don’t Be a Coward

It’s hard to judge what a reasonable level of fear is in reaction to shitty events, and there are plenty of extremely shitty events going on in the world right now.  (Thanks, fascists!  Please eat shit and die at your earliest convenience.)  That said, there are a loooot of people on the internet right now stoking panic.  Like Putin makes a lazy threat about hacking our shit and tweets and subreddits explode, telling you to run for the hills immediately lest you fall victim to supply chain banditos.

Harden the fuck up, you ridiculous cowards.  You make it harder for people to judge what that reasonable level of fear is, by ratcheting every little thing up to “cannibal holocaust.”  You spread anxiety and dread and turn stomachs and ruin people’s days.  The way you talk, I imagine you trembling like little chihuahuas with urine running down your thighs as you clack out your terrified tweets.  Yeah, especially those of you with guns.

Do you live in America?  Are you not a member of an oppressed minority at the moment?  (No, xtians don’t count.)  You’re going to be fine.  Some bad stuff will happen.  Wildfires burning up your cabins, rising tides taking out your timeshares.  But compared to people in Ukraine, or Russia, or anywhere near the Equator?  Your life is going to be a cakewalk – at least until you’re old and infirm enough to be considered disposable by republicans.  Drink in the freedom, manbabies.  Calm the fuck down.

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“You Are Loved”

I saw “You are loved” on a church sign.  Not the first time I’ve seen this sentiment but it’s the first time I can remember this occurring to me.  What’s being proposed here is that the all powerful super creator of humanity and the universe has particular care for each of us, as individuals.  Anything good that happens to us comes from that care, anything bad doesn’t matter because he’ll make up for it when you’re dead.

What I realized is that this lets all xtians off the hook from genuinely caring about anyone.  If young jeezy is taking care of everybody, we don’t have to do that at all.  He exhorted people to care for the poor and the ill, but clearly that is just a hobbyist pursuit – not a genuine responsibility – because god’s love is enough.

That would be a good logical excuse for why xtians hate social services, but I suspect there’s no reasoning behind it.  Rather they just don’t want to pay for the care of others and assume their religion endorses any given thing they feel as part of their conservative identity, without any need for actual knowledge of the words in the holy books.  Much like “geeks” assume they’re intelligent because it’s part of the geek social identity rather than any useful metric (assuming such are even possible).

That’s all.

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Last Climate Doompost

I have a bad time thinking about climate change, clearly.  Maybe that’s something I have in common with the blitherers who oppose action on it?  Aside from love of pounds and pence, who knows what goes on in their unthinkable heads?  Anyway, I intend to stop posting about it for the foreseeable.  I expressed my main thoughts about it on this blog and in the FtB podcast on the subject, that should be enough.

But I want to leave one last prediction for the way this is going to play out, have this on record.  There is going to be a holocaust heat wave at some point somewhere in the tropics.  It could happen as soon as this summer, or maybe ten or more years from now, but it most assuredly will happen.  There will be a heat wave so severe that literally millions of people will die within days.  There will be mass graves, mountains of bodies in this incident.

I say this with confidence because where I live we, just last year, had a heat wave that smoked all previous records by more than ten degrees.  A few small towns were disintegrated by wildfires so fast people barely had time to escape – certainly no time to pack.  Hundreds of people died.  This is the Pacific Northwest of North America, as moderate of a climate as exists anywhere in the world.  What happens when a similar heatwave hits Delhi?  Hyderabad?  Jakarta?  Jerusalem?

That’s my prediction.  There was a major volcanic eruption this year and sometimes that cools the global temperature for a while, so we may have some reprieve on this.  That’s time to prepare, to prevent deaths, but will it happen?  It sure as fuck isn’t happening in Louisiana or Florida.  Now that you’ve heard the prediction, hear my request, my call to action.  Because this will not be prevented, due to greed and politics, it is a request for what you should do once those mass graves show up in your news feed.

If you are in the company of anyone who spouts off denialist or petrol-defending rhetoric after that happens, I want you to do them violence.  At very least slap them hard, knock them upside the head.  Preferably knock out one of their teeth, and I wouldn’t be disappointed to hear if you stabbed them in the gut.  Spit on them.  Curse them.  Let them know what they’ve done and that this particular holocaust is the end of the line for tolerance of their worldview.

If there is one thing that will tilt majority opinion on the globe in favor of radical action, it’s another holocaust.  It’s gotta be.  I know it won’t convince everyone but it has to be enough to convince a majority of those in power.  Right?  Right?  Maybe one more thing to say.  FUCK YOU, JOE BIDEN.  You fucking ignorant rich trash.  You murderous greedlord.  You fucking waste of space.  I hope your death is painful.  I hope you hate every second of it.

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No Win

Content Warning: Despairing Rhetoric re: Politics, COVID, Environmentalism.

Fighting antivax beliefs, and indeed reactionary thought as a whole, feels like dealing with an insurgency.  There is just no good solution at this point.  (Government crackdown on facebook’s fascist bullshit algorithms in 2015 might have helped, but there’s no political will to make that happen even now.)  You’ll never win the hearts and minds of people deluded into feeling like brave defenders of an invaded homeland, any effort to force compliance will just lead to more terrorist reprisal.  We’ve already had a taste of that, in destruction of medicine, in obstruction of vax sites, and in many cases of physical assault all across the country.

Given all that, how does one adjust to this new world of biological gods and ideological monsters?  Knowing what endemic COVID looks like will be a good start for that discussion.  Funny to think if I live to my seventies or nineties I could be killed slowly and painfully, asphyxiated and brain damaged by a disease that could have been strangled in its infancy two years ago.  By funny, I mean all rethuglican fucks please eat shit and die ASAP, it’s the least you can do for us.

No, no, Satan.  Calm down.  These are human beings, this is humanity.  The same humanity that supports Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin and Jair Bolsonaro, that has LGBT Jamaicans assaulted every day, living in vacant lots and scrounging garbage to eat, that packs megachurch pews to fund murderous hate around the globe, that scapegoats anybody and everybody to pursue short-term political and financial gain while ensuring the extinction of your species.  You have no choice but to live with these people, or to die.  They are here to stay, for as long as humanity continues to exist.

I don’t know.  We can just keep having these conversations, every day until we die.  Very tiring.

 

 

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If You Hail Satan, Come Correct

Woof.  I wanted to like The Satanic Temple and Lucien Greaves, but I randomly came across the real scoop on what low-down fash-friendly piles of shit they really are.  Representing myself as satanic, I feel the need to address this, and while I’m at it, help fix some of the harm they are doing in the world.

To start with, I need to make clear that I do not believe every member of TST is fascist or a scumbag.  Some just haven’t gotten the facts yet, and some who have feel too invested to acknowledge the truth.  To those of you who are good people, I hope you work things out.

But I also hope you can realize you don’t need TST and can represent Satan in your own ways.  There is absolutely nothing stopping you from walking away from TST en masse and starting your own Satanism.  Maybe it starts small, a facebook group or a twitter account, but it can turn into something just as big and certainly better.

 

Eugenics and Nazi Friendliness

I was ill-informed and had little idea that modern satanists were so cozy with antisemitism and nazism until I fell down this unfortunate rabbit hole.  What in the name of Hell is the point of rejecting Christ only to wallow in the shit ideals of his worst fanboys?

Lucien Greaves has made some half-assed apologies for antisemitic comments made on a radio show in 2003 as that came to light recently, and in the narrow context of that clip one could think of his comments as being more antitheist than antisemitic – he was saying jewish religious belief is his problem and jewish blood is not, in disagreement with the hosts of the radio show he was on.

But broaden that context just a little bit more, and things look much worse.  Why did he not rebuke the whole proceedings when his pals on the show went full sieg heil?  Why didn’t he bail?  Because he knew they were nazis going in, and he was OK with that.

The show itself was the “Might Is Right 24-Hour Radio Special” in honor of a new printing of racist / antisemitic book “Might is Right” – and Greaves (as “Doug Mesner”) was invited because he illustrated the book.  Whatever terms or qualifiers he’s used for it (he had a site called “dysgenics” as late as 2018), Greaves has wholeheartedly endorsed eugenics on many occasions.  As recently as the founding of The Satanic Temple ten years after his appearance on that show, he was willingly associating with and involving the sieg heiling host of that very broadcast.

(Quick aside – the event hosts may or may not have identified as nazis and they didn’t actually say “sieg heil” but I don’t give an earthly shit about distinguishing between flavors of antisemite and the finer points of their ideologies.  Another guest on the show was prominent KKK figure Tom Metzger – in a segment of the show Greaves (Doug Misicko in the transcript) happily participated in.  Y’all are nazis; eat shit and die at your soonest convenience, thanks.)

(Aside Deux – because this is an atheist blog network and the “thought leaders” of modern atheism seem to think some nice guy version of eugenics, as a concept, can be salvaged for good, I should emphasize that ain’t true.  I’m not up to linkspamming support of that point, but feeling tempted to give nazi ideas an inch of your mental bandwidth should give you great pause.)

Anyone who would oppose the hypocrisies and injustices of cultural christianity has to decide for theirself what they will propose in the wake of christianity’s defeat.  Because you’re not going to defeat xtianity at large, of course (only they can do that to themselves lol), but you are going to win some hearts and minds away from the pews and pulpits.  What are you giving them in exchange for what they’ve given up?

For some opposing xtianity is enough, like dictionary atheists who are iconoclasts without a care.  LaVey was in the pitiful thrall of Ayn Rand and his satanic bible owes its soul to her “objectivism.”  His Church of Satan and the satanic movement generally from that point on carried those values of cruelty and greed forward.  This was the movement from which Greaves emerged, only differing in that he was more fully atheistic than his predecessors.  Or maybe just more ableist.  From what I’ve seen, ableism was always his biggest hobbyhorse.

OK, greed as a value does seem to oppose the charity spoken of by Jesus, so satanic, right?  Wrong.  If we were just going to oppose xtianity as described in the bible, maybe.  But I don’t give a fuck about that.  I want to oppose xtianity as it is practiced in my culture, and all the harm it does – most of which is fueled by greed.  If you’re not doing that – fighting for the ability of people to enjoy life, fighting oppression – what’s the fucking point?

In their stances on gay rights and reproductive rights and religious freedom, The Satanic Temple has lured in thousands of progressive people – taken their time and money.  But was this truly deserved?  The organization is rotten at its core for the same reason the gnu atheist movement was: the founders centered ableism, the ability to feel superior to the “stupid” xtians, which is just about the quickest path to eugenics and nazism.

To this day, there are high ups within TST that have a history of consorting with nazi clowns like Mike Cernovich and Milo Yiannapolis.  TST have gone on record as being anti-antifa, and you know what you get when those antis zero out.

 

Reproductive Rights People Hate Them

Just because anti-abortion scumbags have had a great deal of success lately does not mean that the defenders of reproductive health have been failing at their jobs, only that fascists have been achieving horrific victories across the board.  But The Satanic Temple has opted to use that messaging to suck up activist dollars – to claim “We must accept the fact that traditional efforts to protect reproductive rights have failed.”

And what are they doing with the pro-abortion activist dollars?  They’re acting like $cientology in the way they veer between saying they’re a religion and denying that depending on what’s most advantageous in a given financial or legal situation, and not being at all transparent about where the money goes.

 

SLAPP Suit

All these issues and more led some Satanists in my part of the country to rebel, to make public critique of the organization.  The law protects criticism of religious organizations, but they’re still suing for business harm – a business when it suits them, a religion when it doesn’t.  The apostates are just regular people facing tens of thousands of dollars in legal expenses they can’t afford.  It’s a SLAPP suit working as intended, and you can see why I might find that something worth fighting against.

Support the Queer Satanic Apostasy.  Help defend them against the SLAPP suit.

 

Full Disclosure:

TST and FtB have both employed the same lawyer in free speech cases, a man who is a strong partisan on that issue, but easy to find very negative articles about.  That lawyer is specifically named as one of the reasons for dissenters leaving TST.  Due to our prior relationship with him, I will not be addressing that one specific issue here and prefer it not be discussed in this space, except to say I understand and very much sympathize with those concerns.

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Blatantly Rigged Trial Ends as Expected

I guess all nazis have to do to get away with murder is have their teen sons pull the triggers.  Given the public statements of the judge in murder boy’s case, I want nobody to act surprised by this outcome.  Outraged is cool, yeah, do that.  But surprise?  That would just be silly.

There’s a foul stench of danger hanging over this country, that the barely concealed racist fascism of the turn of our century will go overt, will remove the last pretenses of democracy from our processes and usher in a new era of far greater horrors.  I can understand people feeling hopeless – and especially turning up their noses at our supposed liberal political party – but we can’t stop until this is over.

I mention these things because stuff like the result of this court case is empowering to the fash, which will make them more motivated to turn up in numbers next election, depending on what happens in the meantime.  And what’s been happening lately is a 24-7 doubt parade from corporate media on the ability of the democrats generally and Biden particularly to govern.  The “people say” style of reportage is in full gear, where any nasty fucked up lie from billionaire-funded nazi-ass think tanks turns into a headline.

Protestors will be returning to the streets.  Some are probably there already.  And now murderers have been forearmed with precedent for how to get away with straight-up executing them in broad daylight.  But people will fight on anyway, and I fucking love them for it.  Long live the fighters!  Black Lives Matter.  Black Power Now!

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Skeptisuck – Harriet Hall Time

HJ doesn’t do comments at his blog, but his recent article about Harriet Hall – concluded with a simply told bit of news that makes the more well-loved end of the skeptisphere a lot less lovable – cries out for comment.  If you wanna rip on Harriet Hall, or her pals Steven Novella and David Gorski, or whatever, I invite you to make the comments on this post into your mosh pit.

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A Fistful of Justice

Justice is a human construct.  The Universe does not have an inherent sense of right and wrong.  Karma is nonsense, heaven and hell moreso.  But sometimes we luck out, and things happen that look to us like nature making things right.

Five conservative radio hosts – all people who spread deadly misinformation about covid – have died of covid.  Of them, as you may have heard, Phil Valentine died in the most brutal, drawn out, and excruciating way of the lot.  His fellow radio recipients of coincidental justice were Tod Tucker, Marc Bernier, Dick Farrel, and Jimmy DeYoung.

In other good news, disgraced fascist demagogue Baby Milo got covid and poisoned himself with ivermectin.

For a LOT of additional examples of people dying for conservative identity politics, check out the reddit COVIDAteMyFace.  How do you feel about the ethics of this kind of reportage?  I feel like these stories need to be spread as much as possible, for the sake of the dicks that are dying.  If all they care about is owning the libs, maybe they’ll get smart and mask/vax up – if they see that doing otherwise is fielding the opposite result.

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Hot Tip to Unionize Video Games Now

Get a load of this shit: Activision-Blizzard Hires Amazon Union-Busting Firm.  As Boots Riley from the Coup said, “If we’re ever gonna do it let’s do it now.”  That is to say, when a government agency in a state with anti-worker wildcat strike laws decides to bring charges against a company for fucking massive systemic sexual harassment, and as employees start to organize, and that is their response?  Workers of the world unite!

The game industry is massive in profits thanks to selling gambling to children, but small in workforce, which makes it extremely vulnerable to labor revolt.  It hasn’t happened yet only because douchebros attach sucking corporate ass product to their sense of manhood and identity, and have stacked the industry with like-minded people.

But the video game industry, like all creative industries, is so vicious and life-draining that even scumbag misogynist right wingers last an average of two years there before flaming out and going back to work at Electronics Boutique.  The sausage is made out of art students and young programmers, and management thinks nothing of it because there’s always a new graduating class to brainrape (or sometimes just physically rape).

So here’s how you do it.  Organize their asses before they leave the schools.  You can’t do this at one school or you’ll just get the grads there shadowbanned.  You need to hit them all at the same time.  There are not that many schools producing video game creators.  Find them, do not involve the faculty in any way, and infiltrate their shit.  Full court propaganda press.

You get enough traction and make these vampire businesses face a united group of graduates saying NO.  I don’t have the time to do a two year unpaid internship, or take starvation wages.  NO.  It is not acceptable to make drinking to excess normal during business hours.  NO.  Seriously, your entire fucking culture must die, now, so that the silly people who love video games enough to want to make them can stop being chewed up and shit out.  Having a dream should not make you into so much bloody meat for billionaire pit bulls.

Video game workers of the world unite.  You have nothing to lose but your mass exploitation.

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