Penny Arcade & Love Lost

Many of you have never heard of Penny Arcade. As far as webcomics go, it was the original success story, the ur-two-guys-on-a-couch video game afición strip-styled deal. The popularity of the comic helped the writer and the artist build a significant business, running gaming conventions, charities, and so on.

They’re still doing their thing, but outside of “gaming” (the bro subculture, not video game playing as a whole field), who has heard of them? They’ve hit the wall.

Two factors limit their success – the existence of gamergate and the “dickwolf” controversy.

Gamergate poisoned all things gamer, actually succeeding at their primary goal. Gamergate’s social terrorism was so vast it gained international media attention and told the world that gaming is an off-limits hostile place, ruled by miscreants that are best left alone. Congrats! You kept out the normies!

I’m not going to explain the dickwolf controversy and subsequent flare-up involving transphobia (because of course it did), even though they’re less well-known than gamergate. Long story short – they aligned themselves culturally with gamergate, with regressive gaming, by having mean-spirited blow-ups at mild criticism.

The dickwolf controversy aligned them with gamergate, no matter what they’ve said on the subject since, and gamergate relegated the culture of gaming to the sewer of human civilization.

I was thinking about that, about love lost. I used to follow the comic for a chuckle and dropped it like a rock back then. How many trans women and progressive-inclined people in general felt they weren’t safe engaging with the comic, with its fans, with the conventions they sponsored? How much love did they lose forever by being reactionary dickwolves?

And here we are – online atheism. The background is different, but the end result is the same. We were founded on islamophobia, so we were rotten at the core. A lot of us may have been socially progressive on a few issues, enough to feel good about ourselves, even then.

But collectively we were reactionary. When an opportunity for a movement-wide misogynist freakout came, it showed that we were stacked to the rafters with villains.

Many of us left the movement and culture altogether, I have no doubt. And of those who remained, the scum outweigh the rest of us by an order of magnitude. Maybe not in actual population (though I bet they do), but certainly in terms of will, of money, of resources, of cultural impact in the form of web presence, on social media and youtube.

Atheism aligned itself with evil and lost love. Where could we be without “elevatorgate”? Without the years of feeding the right wing islamophobia war machine?

It’s gone and it’s never coming back. I had a slow moment and considered opening up Penny Arcade’s website to see if I could have a chuckle. But no, I really profoundly don’t want to. They betrayed the vulnerable people in their audience – a fucking lot of us – and I’m not about forgiveness.

And no one is obligated to forgive us either. Organized atheism is a sewer. We can do things, we can be together, we can fight the good fight as much as possible. But what more could we be right now? How much love was lost?

Feels like all of it.

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Hot Take from Sean McElwee

I don’t know who he is, but this tweet was hella righteous:


Sean McElwee on Twitter:

“every republican who wins an election meaningfully increases the chance that you or someone you love will die. from guns, from war, from pollution, from childbirth, from lack of health insurance, from a militarized police state. the republican party is a party of death.”

Seems like McElwee is a kind of journalist I can’t handle on the daily. He often speaks in mantras and laments that “no one cares” about this or that important progressive issue. It’s guilt tripping and I feel bad enough just living through this political climate without someone hammering my frayed nerves.

But other than that, word to my brother. Fight on, dude. This was a perfect encapsulation of where we’re at, what’s going wrong with the world. A lot of centrists and moderates just seem to have no earthly idea why things are going so badly.

Politics is just about opinions, maaan, and you should be nicer to your Aunt Sally! No, politics has direct impact on lives, and every position the GOP holds most dear is deadly as fuck.

Anyhow, Fuck any and all conservatives everywhere forever. Long live the fighters.
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Cobra Kai ARGGGGGH

I haven’t given a shit about the Karate Kid franchise since I was six, and I still don’t. That said, Cobra Kai looks fucking amazeballs. The martial arts genre is elementally appealing to our bad selves. The main character has a problem, gets their ass beat, and has to overcome through rigorous training montages and lots of cool-looking fights.

This show has all that stuff, and the original movie gives it a depth of a backstory you can feel in an unexpectedly cool way. Plus the setting is real. Aside from the bougie Californiana aspects, it’s the world as I know it – strip malls and TV installation and shitty convenience stores. It looks and feels EXACTLY like the real American martial arts story I’ve wanted to see for years.

Now for the Argh factor. Right from the first episode, we get the ableism and appeals to conservative horseshit. They’re pretty softball examples of that, but any at all is more than I should have to deal with in my life, in my entertainment. As my new category says, fuck any and all conservatives everywhere forever.

The ableism takes the form of a cliche so crusty it’s like baklava – a dude throwing away someone’s asthma inhaler, calling the condition made up. They immediately have a guy say, “that’s nonsense, that’s a real health problem,” but it’s just a half-assed lampshade because we never see the kid need the inhaler after that.

The big question – what do the show’s producers believe? Would I want those people to have my money? I can do the free trial of Youtube Red, but then I’m giving google my credit card information and gotta be johnny-on-the-spot canceling or get dinged. Hassle.

I don’t know. I watched the free episodes, except as noted I’m liking what I’m seeing, but should I bite? I’m genuinely looking for opinions and input on this one. Crudlords, if you’re seeing this, tell me if you liked it, so I can skip it. I’ll skim my trash filter for a few days to see if you’re there. The rest of whoever, comment below.

EDIT:
I can skip the show! In the comments on a review elsewhere, there was this gem. Thanks, “jbrisby”! You are everything wrong with the human species and your kind will be our extinction, but you helped me avoid wasting an assload of time on cultural sewage.

jbrisby:
“Finally, an unapologetically sympathetic portrayal of a conservative point of view. This is the show Roseanne promised, but never delivered. This is going to be a huge smash, because as we saw with Trump, there’s a massive untapped audience who is sick to death of our pansy-ass modern culture, that cloaks itself in tolerance but is in fact tremendously repressive and saps us of our real strength. This show, like Trump, works because people are fundamentally fed up. And the best part is, I haven’t seen a single liberal reviewer who gets it. It really slips in under their radar! They love it…but they don’t know why!”

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Trump Ups his “Kill the Poor” Game

Via The Root, cheeto hitler signed a fucking executive order mandating that people on welfare must work or lose benefits. This kind of policy has been demonstrated to kill people dead in the UK.

Maybe he figured out that the demographic that has lost the most economically under him was the very group that voted for him – upper middle class, mostly white people – and he wanted to extend the damage to poor people who would have prevented his election if we weren’t hedged out of voting so hard. Or maybe he just wanted to make good on a life’s dream and see us in the ground.

I’m fortunate to not be one of the people who will be killed by this specific turn of policy, but nonetheless,

Eat shit and die, Mr. President, and all your bloodsucking racist greedlord friends. That’s not a threat, it’s a request. Ya better think about it baby.

EDIT TO ADD – Significant oversight in this article: I should have mentioned this will affect the disabled, primarily. They’ll be the first to go, as it always is with nazis. Smash American Fascism Now.

–

Conservativism = Cowardice and Greed

Literally every conservative belief stems from either cowardice or greed.  They like to say similar things about progressives, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.  Spelled out simply:

Conservative Position – Cowardice or Greed?

  • Anti-abortion – Cowardice
  • Anti-tax – Greed
  • Anti-regulation – Greed
  • Anti-social services – Greed
  • Pro-gun – Cowardice
  • Cop Worship – Cowardice
  • Anti-immigration – Cowardice
  • Theocracy – Cowardice

Afraid to look upon death, or even human life with the slightest ounce of honesty, conservatives project themselves onto the aborted and shiver in terror and disgust.  They imagine that life as a person of perfect potential, surrounded by and dependent on evil sinful woman parts for survival.  So scary.

And they are so trapped in that imagination that they can’t do the right moral math.  Human lives often FUCKING SUCKKKKKKK.  Any woman considering abortion is clearly not in the ideal circumstance to be making a happy successful human being.  Far from it, especially in a place as conservative as the United States.  An unborn human has no concept of life, of potential, of the future, of where it’s going and what it might mean to lose that.

Any human that is born is guaranteed to experience pain and frustration at some point in their life.  Plenty of people wish they had been aborted.  I don’t feel that sad about shit but I know damn well it wouldn’t matter if I hadn’t come to be, and I would have been spared a ton of pain and humiliation and anger and sorrow.

Again, I’m a Neurotypical McGee, happy to be alive and watch my TV.  But I’ve got the moral clarity of seeing things as they are, and caring about people enough to want them to have what they actually need.  I’m not trembling in fear of sin, in fear of death, in fear of a sadistic super ghost that I have to love.  Grow the fuck up, conservatives.

Anti-taxes, anti-regulation, anti-social services:  These are mostly about greed, about being too short-sighted and willfully ignorant and cruel to take responsibility for the world around you.  But there’s an element of cowardice as well – the idea some evil poor people might benefit from your wealth.  Piss on that.

Gun fondling and cop worship are the most blatant displays of cowardice, though there’s an element of fascist death fetishism in there for good measure.  I admit, the symbols of death have a toxically delicious appeal.  I’ll bang my head to that beat, watch movies about bad guys getting blasted left and right.

But the reality of guns?  The physical presence of them?  The idea of what they can do to a living creature?  Creepy as fuck.  Get that goddamn shit away from me.  What sort of wet dream lets you think you can control that?  Why do you think YOU should have the power to say who lives and who dies, or that your state-appointed executioners should be able to do the same?  Who are you so fucking afraid of?  Don’t answer, it’s obvious as hell.

I’d allow for heavily regulated single shot hunting rifles.  Hunting in the first world is a hobby for twisted minds, but it could help regulate unbalanced animal populations and feed some people.  But even then, why not use a fucking spear?  Cowardice, that’s why.

Being against immigration is the purest cowardice, but more than some of these categories it makes me wonder if I should have added cruelty to the list.  The racism to imagine another group of humans is inferior to your group, to imagine they have nefarious motives against you, to think they deserve to fucking die rather than inconvenience you with their presence?  Cruel.  But mostly crybaby cowardly.

Theocracy likewise, the notion this is a “christian nation” and needs to be legally mandated as such.  The fear your one true religion will lose ground if it isn’t enforced by the apparatus of state?  That your cherished illusions will feel more ephemeral, might dissipate and leave you with nothing but a grimly real view of the grave?  Why are you so afraid of facing competition, dominionists?  Ya cowards.

At last, let’s look at how a conservative might play this game, and answer the charges:

Progressive Position – Cowardice or Greed

  • Pro-abortion – Cowardice Compassion
  • Pro-tax – Greed Responsibility
  • Pro-regulation – Greed Responsibility

Honestly, not much point in elaborating the progressive positions.  Even conservatives recognize a lot of them as being motivated by compassion, but then they turn around to demonize caring about people – call it weak or foolish, especially in misogynist terms.

I do think they’d make the case that being in favor of abortion is because evil should-be mommies are too afraid to die (or ruin lives) to bring a lump of cells to term.  For shame!  But they’ve tried all sorts of smears that don’t make sense.

And they are always trying to say that taxation for the purposes of paying for social services is the greed of a lazy underclass of subhumans out to take yer hard-earned dollars, you (venal immigrant exploiting criminal) contractors and red-blooded manz. There’s a lot of bipartisan fawning over the middle class but I say fuck ’em. That’s where a lot of white fascism lies.

Anyhow, cowardice and greed – modern conservative beliefs are completely encapsulated in that simple phrase, in that shitty little binary.  I should make it explicitly clear I’m including “fiscal conservatives” with more socially progressive beliefs.  Fuck yes, I’m including them.  Just because you wanna smoke weed with your gay friend and your black friend doesn’t mean you aren’t a goddamn piece of shit.

Fuck any and all conservatives everywhere forever.

–

Hello Darkness My Old Friend

Though Pepe’s meme is usually in the hands of hate criminals, in hateless incarnations, I can dig.  Here we see the sad Pepe in a very brief animation…

Two things:

I had this foolish schedule with only an eight hour gap between two eight hour shifts, and rather than monkey with buses to get ten minutes of sleep at home, thought I’d be clever and sleep in the break room.  I barely slept and ended up super sweaty and vile.  I felt so gross it killed me.  Plus just working that shift wrecked me even worse than the job usually does.

I’m in this state that is hardly a relief from the quasi-depression I’d gotten into from long underemployment.  I put myself through pain and stress all day for a reward that seems inadequate and a million years away.  My first paycheck is in about four days, it feels further away.  Feels like I’m hurting myself for nothing but self-loathing, a punishment for inadequately providing for my loved ones for years.  I do my customer service game face as much as possible, but it’s a thin mask on a zombied out pile of agonized cellz.  Seems to fool about 65% of people.

Thing two, being around humans means sexism, racism, misogyny, fatphobia, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia.  If you’re clued into that shit, you know why anyone would want a safe place from it all.  It is shot through so many of our conversations and ways of relating to each other.  Like, in any work environment, you’re going to have one or more guys whose interactions with women are all creepy as hell.  Maybe for whatever reason the ladies are sorta OK with it or front as such, but it doesn’t make it less grody to see a fiftyish dude smiling on young ladies over everyone else.

Then there’s like a third of all lady conversations that seem to come back to weight, with a lot of self-loathing and popular delusions and eating disorder talk.  Then there’s the really disgusting fuckers – the ones with minds so full of hate they need to be shitting on someone to feel right.  Some are macho men, some are ladied-out ladies, but they’re usually awash in cisheteronormativity, have to treat the existence of non-cishet people as a joke in and of itself, act like LGBTQIA people are repulsive, when it’s the brains on these creeps that are the most disgusting thing in the room.

And all this stuff is low-key and banal and common enough that I’ll look like the unreasonable terrible nogoodnik for reporting it.  What could that evil liberal PC police fucker’s problem be?  Does he just hate America?  Hate fun?  I dunno.  Maybe.  Our society as it now exists is fucking unacceptable.  Change it please.  We shouldn’t spend so much of our time hurting each other, regardless of whether or not we recognize that’s what we’re doing.

Oh, also, I saw a gaggle of young skinny white dudes with one wearing a trump hat backwards.  And I didn’t even stop to crush them into bone meal.  I’m really being spectacularly well behaved lately.  The man should throw me a fuckin’ bone already.

 

Pitfalls of RP: Garbage Humans

Holy shit, dogg. Why would this even need to be a post? Isn’t it a given that no one would waste their time RPing with sexists, racists, homophobes, transphobes, and so on? Fuck those guys. Don’t play with them. As others have said, tabletop gaming has a white male terrorism problem, and it’s every tabletop gamer’s responsibility to make sure that shit does not go unchecked.
[Read more…]

The Bigots Behind the Curtain

I wrote this in frustration on my social justice tumblr, in regards to the spate of transphobic “bathroom laws”:

has no one reported on why these transphobic laws are all coming at the same time?  it’s obvious there’s an organized effort behind it, either in the inner circle of the repugnican party, or in some kind of think tank that all the dominionist theocrats are taking their marching orders from.  this is important information, this is an obvious question to ask.  i can’t be the only person thinking of this.

BAM!  Thank you CBS!  (And thanks to commenter kestrel over at New Frontier.)  It’s “Liberty Counsel,” who are listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.   So if you feel overwhelmed by the outpouring of transphobic hatred coming from over a dozen states at the same time, if it feels like the all this hate and horror is growing naturally out of who we are as a culture, remember:

This was specifically planned, organized, and executed by one group of motherfuckers.  It couldn’t have happened without the transphobia of our culture, but it isn’t a spontaneous natural occurrence.  It’s an active campaign by the cisheterofascist lawyer equivalent of the KKK.  Spread the word.  This, by the way, is the head bastard of the team.  You can find a picture of his horrible ass comforting tearful bigot Kim Davis on the CBS article.

fucking mathew staver

      Mathew Staver is a shit-eating bigot.

EDIT to add, Affinity had the news up before I did. Check that thread out for discussion on the topic.

Satan Says: Islamophobia is Real

this is reposted & slightly edited from a previous iteration of this blog
Trigger Warnings – child sexual abuse, racism, islamophobia, anti-semitism, ableism

Deep Rifts 2.0 is about the division between regressive and progressive sides of the atheist and skeptic communities. Before this rift, one notion popular in atheist communities was that we were the free thinkers who arrived at our beliefs by reason and observation, while our opponents – the theists – believed what they were told like mindless obedient dogmabots. It’s a nice idea for atheists – in a society that despises us, we get to feel superior to the mainstream in some respect. Since the rift though, some of us have used this against our atheist opposites. What sense does that make? Where is this dogma codified? Who is walking in lockstep, refusing to question our dear leaders? This casts a lot of doubt on the original premise as used against theists, which is a loss for all of us. (Edit: I now know it’s ableist to think oneself superior on the metric of intelligence, so at this point I’m not feeling that loss so much.)

I’m not going to mirror my atheist opposites’ mistakes and claim they are a monolith, even though their beliefs line up better with the unjust status quo of the USA. I’m just going to keep poking holes in this ridiculous meme. The progressive side of the divide is not a monolith. We have our disagreements, and these are not small ones. Some of us continue to work with or promote people like Richard Dawkins (less so now than when this originally posted), some have joined in the masses ridiculing his ignorance and his strange grudge against Rebecca Watson. Some of us want to find common cause with theists to promote the secularism that can protect us all, some want to keep eviscerating the foundations of faith at the expense of potential allies. Some of us don’t have a decided stance on one more of these essential issues, and some people who generally come down on the progressive side are professional fence riders. All of this can be found within one blog network – Freethoughtblogs – if you look long enough. On the common cause vs. evisceration issue, you can find discord even within the A+ forums (now dead), and I am personally riding that fence at the moment.

One of these important areas of dispute – and the topic of this post – is the legitimacy of the term “islamophobia.” [Read more…]

‘Net H8rs R a Bunch of Arch Hall Jr. Characters

This is a reblog from previous versions of G-A-S

Arch Hall Jr. as The Sadist

There’s this old Arch Hall Jr. movie called “The Sadist,” which doesn’t feature a sympathetic portrayal of one who engages in a risky kink ethically. Rather, it’s about a criminal in floods who enjoys psychologically tormenting his victims.

Arch Hall Jr. as The Sadist

The character has a catch phrase which I think befits the underlying psychology of the internet’s sundry hate mobs perfectly: “You think you’re better than me?” Then he’ll stalk menacingly at you, looking like he’s carrying a massive deuce in his drawers. No offense to AHj, this character was supposed to be creepy and job well done.

There’s clearly a sense of aggrievement on their part. They feel upset at being scorned. Our side is motivated by compassion for the victims of abuse and the desire to make the world a better place. The less self-aware on their side might feel like they’re into these goals as well, but find that overwhelmed by the outrage that someone might be looking down on them. You especially see this in the response to things like Schrodinger’s Rapist. No matter how kindly or carefully parsed, any idea that could be perceived – correctly or not – as a criticism of them (or the kind of person they imagine themselves to be) raises this knee-jerk response. You think you’re better than meee?

So then they start doing the poopy pants walk while waving guns around (metaphorically and literally) and make things so much worse. To borrow a much more sensible catch phrase, guys, don’t do that. Seriously, even if you fundamentally disagree with social justice advocates on every issue, just agree to disagree and strut. If you honestly believe your position to be the right one, you have a million motherfuckers to agree with you and coddle your shared privilege. You wouldn’t feel the need to freak out about the fact someone else has a different belief unless – on some level – you think they might be right, and that their rightness would make you feel bad.

You don’t have to feel bad about yourself to accept the truths SJWs be spittin’ – at least, not much. Because no one has to be perfect, we can all learn from our mistakes, all try to be better people. And honestly trying is good enough. Doing something racist/sexist/transphobic/etc doesn’t make you a bigot, outside of that moment. Being unrepentant, being so chickenshit of the possibility of your own imperfection that you double down and make it worse – even make it a part of your raison d’être – this is deciding to wallow in bigotry.

Come off yourself, calm down, drop the fucking keyboard, take a day off. Even if your beliefs don’t change, at least recusing yourself from participating in a hate movement is a step in the right direction. Be cool. Get steppin’.