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#like that's a whole thing in American evangelicalism

eowyntheavenger · 3 months

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Palestine and the US election

I’m done with Twitter soundbite takes that voting blue = supporting genocide. I see a lot of people making an argument that goes like this: "Biden has sent arms to Israel, helping its government commit genocide against Palestine. Therefore, voting for him in the 2024 US election, if he is the Democratic nominee, is supporting genocide, and NOT voting for him helps Palestine." There's a lot wrong with this view, so let's break it down.

It's true that Biden has sent a lot of arms to Israel and bypassed Congress multiple times to do it, and it's indefensible. I'm ashamed that any US politician would help Israel wage its brutal, genocidal war against the Palestinian people. As one of Israel's closest partners, the US could actually be using its leverage right now to put pressure on Israel’s government—I’m thinking about how apartheid in South Africa fell, in part, because of international pressure. That's what should be happening, but instead the US government is literally just helping Israel kill Palestinians.

I wish there were a strong pro-Palestine candidate in the upcoming election. The best bet in that regard would probably be Bernie Sanders, since he's prominent enough, well-liked enough, and has good ideas, not just on this issue but on many things (and yeah, he's way too old, but so are the current frontrunners). But he's already ruled out another run. Unless an amazing candidate materializes and wins the Democratic nomination (please vote in the primaries where you live), it will probably be Biden running against Trump. It’s not guaranteed, but it’s likely.

Here's what people need to understand: the election will not be "genocide Joe" vs. "pro-Palestine candidate." It will most likely be a choice between these two candidates:

On the one hand, Biden, who has armed Israel, but can be pressured to change his policies because he can be pushed left; who is not a wannabe dictator; who will not destroy what's left of the country's democratic norms; who will not encourage coups, political assassinations, or jail his political opponents; who will not utterly stifle dissent.

Or on the other hand, Trump, who is beholden to a fanatical evangelical base that backs Israel no matter what, that actually wants more conflict because they are part of a death cult. Trump, who is not susceptible in any way to pressure from the left, but is susceptible to pressure from the right and the far right. Trump, who has been clear all along about his desire to be a dictator; who will destroy what's left of democratic norms; who has already encouraged a coup to overthrow a democratic election, encouraged the assassination of his own vice president, and is openly planning to jail his political opponents if he returns to the White House.

(This isn't even touching on Trump's positions on trans rights, gay rights, women's rights, the environment, policing, immigration, or his racism against every group he could be racist against, or his liability for sexual assault, or a whole bunch of other issues).

There's a very convincing argument that Netanyahu actually wants Biden to lose the US election and Trump to win. That's because Netanyahu knows that Biden has in the past responded to pressure from his own party and the public. If there are a lot of people criticizing his policies, it gives him pause. Trump doesn't operate like that. If millions of Americans criticize his policies as inhumane he just lashes out at them. In short, Biden views criticism from the left as a liability that he has to act on. Trump views criticism from the left as an incentive to be even worse.

Biden is not the candidate I want. But you need to understand that if Trump wins the election, he won't just arm Israel like Biden is doing now: he will do that and more. Not only will he help Israel escalate its war, your very freedom of speech to support Palestine will be under attack. Trump might even decide that financial support for Palestinians or charities that help Palestine = financially supporting terrorism, and use that as a pretext to arrest and jail people. You think he and his far right goons wouldn't go that far? If Trump wins this election, you shouldn't be surprised if this kind of thing happens, and much worse.

Do you want the US to accept Palestinian refugees? Because it won't accept them under a Trump presidency. A key Republican talking point in this election is "the US shouldn't take Palestinian refugees because they're probably all terrorists." This isn't just a Trump thing, it's something other Republicans are saying, but obviously you can imagine where Trump would fall on this issue given his infamous Muslim ban and conflating refugees with terrorists. These are just a few examples of how Trump would actually be even worse for Palestine than Biden—which is saying something.

In this upcoming election there is no neutral option. There is no morally pure option. There just isn't, I'm sorry. Refusing to vote will not help Palestine. Refusing to vote will only help Trump win, and will give every single person in the United States who is fighting for a better world a significantly harder battle to fight.

It goes without saying that there are things everyone should do to help Palestine besides voting in an election. But I'm writing this post that is about voting because I'm genuinely worried by how many so-called leftists want to give up their right to vote—a right that older generations had to fight tooth and nail for—because they think it won't achieve anything. If voting didn't achieve anything, Republicans wouldn't be trying so hard to suppress your vote.

I'll conclude by saying that nuance is not this site's specialty, but please try to understand what I'm actually saying here before attacking me in the notes. Finally, people being antisemitic or islamophobic on this post will be blocked. People denying that Israel is committing genocide against Palestine will be blocked. Trump supporters, tankies, and people who say that Biden and Trump are the same will be blocked. So will people who say "voting is pointless" or "but Biden did this bad thing—" Biden fucking sucks, I know that very well, so if you're going to try to make that argument to me then stop right now and read the post again.

#US politics #my post

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captainjonnitkessler · 5 months

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It's kind of fucked up that every time an evangelical goes off about how those godless commies/queers/liberals are trying to destroy America and the church, tumblr embraces it whole-heartedly - Yeah, we're gonna attack and dethrone god! Yeah, we're satanic rebels intent on overthrowing the angelic hierarchy! Yeah, we're godless commies/queers/liberals and we're gonna destroy the entire fabric of American society!

And then as soon as anyone actually tries to criticize organized religion and the role it plays in the oppression of basically everyone it's suddenly a bunch of handwringing about how "ugh, you're just an edgy atheist, you only think that way because you're only familiar with Christianity (which is the Bad religion), any criticism of religion whatsoever is actually an attack on me and my community and so it's actually really harmful for you to say things like that."

And it's especially hypocritical coming from a website that complains so much about how any social justice movement eventually gets watered down and turned into a cheeky aesthetic, undermining its ability to effect actual change. Sorry that I actually believe in working to dismantle religious hegemony and wasn't just saying it as a quirky "fuck you" to a mega-pastor on twitter.

#saw a person the other day complaining that people using phrases like 'attack and dethrone god!'#are basically saying exactly the same thing as antitheists. and i can't stop thinking about it because they're RIGHT #it's just that they were offended by it and i think it's based as hell #atheism #skepticism umbrella

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jessicalprice · 7 months

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So I've spent a lot of time untangling Christian exegesis of parables and talking about how the way Christians interpret parables almost always ends up being antisemitic.

But aside from how it makes them think about Jews and Judaism and Jewishness, I also want to talk a bit about how it makes them sympathize more with abusers than with victims.

The easy-to-point-to culprit here is the trilogy of parables that culminates in what most Christians know as the Prodigal Son story.

The common interpretation of these parables is that God does (and therefore Christians should) value a repentant sinner over someone who's never sinned.

The problem here isn't the stories themselves--they're pretty enigmatic as far as their actual meanings--but Luke's gloss:

"Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance."

(Mark says, "So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost," which is very different.

So on its face, in 2023, that's a blatantly dangerous, abuser-supporting belief. What is it like to be a child sexually abused by your youth pastor and to hear that the fact that he hurt you is part of what makes him somehow spiritually "better" than you?

And we can see it play out in the way Kevin M. Young, a popular progressive pastor on Twitter (who describes himself as "post-evangelical" and was the senior pastor at a Quaker congregation) responded to being told one of his tweets was antisemitic, and then jumped in to support a woman who responded by identifying herself as a fan of John Chrysostom (the literal author of "Against the Jews" and the most antisemitic of the Church Fathers, which is saying something).

I'm not going to transcribe the whole thing, because it's not all that important for what I have to say about this, but I am going to call out a few lines:

"The American Christian approach to t'shuvah sees the victim's spirit, character, and speech as equally important to the offenders. I.e. in Christendom, the victim can exceed the sin of the offender simply by their reaction (if it be in sin or acted in a way that is not Spirit led)."

So, to be clear, if someone assaults you, and you don't meekly forgive them in a "Spirit led" way, you're somehow worse than they are.

The uniquely Christian brain rot here is in seeing every sin as an opportunity for forgiveness. After all, if being a repentant sinner gives you a higher spiritual status--if there's more "rejoicing in Heaven" over you--than that of your victim, then you have to sin to get there. It treats other people as props in your salvation journey, not as fellow humans whose suffering matters. (Combine that with the Christian idea that suffering is somehow virtuous in and of itself, and you've got a very toxic recipe. Not only, by abusing others, are you guaranteeing your own value as a repentant sinner, but you're giving your victim the opportunity to ennoble themselves through suffering.)

Of course, a key word here is repentant. Put a pin in that.

These sort of exchanges on Twitter--a Christian being outright genocidal toward Jews, and a supposedly progressive Christian figure jumping in to defend the Christian, with seemingly no ability to comprehend that the Jews in the conversation are human beings who may have their own trauma around violently antisemitic language, with boundless empathy for the Christian abuser and none for the Jewish targets of their abuse--happen frequently and just as frequently leave Jwitter baffled in addition to angry.

Why all this empathy for the abuser and none for the victims?

I think a lot of this comes out of progressive Christian exegesis of parables, which is frequently looking for the radical "twist" to the story.

E.g. in the story of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, the assumption is that the audience of the time would have empathized with the Pharisee, and thus the twist is to make them empathize with the tax collector. In the story of the Good Samaritan, the assumption is that they would have seen the Samaritan as a threat, and the twist is to make him the hero.

The thinking goes that the audience would have had empathy for certain groups and none for others, so the stories push them to feel that empathy for the latter, and that this was needed to balance the scales, to make sure everyone was receiving love and empathy and care.

Except that this, in modernity, has the effect of simply reversing the roles, not balancing them. The groups that are assumed to be in good social standing get no empathy, even become the implicit villains, and the groups (supposedly, since this is now a Christian-dominant society) traditionally looked down on get all of it.

That might still be a balancing act if the "looked down on" groups were actually marginalized. But in the Christian imagination, that role is filled by sinners in need of Christian grace, not necessarily demographically marginalized groups.

The idea seems to be that the victims are getting sympathy from elsewhere, so it's the Christian's job to make sure the abuser/sinner gets sympathy too.

But I'll point again to that pesky word "repentant."

Ultimately, when it comes to treatment of Jews and Muslims and anyone else who points out that a Christian has in some way harmed them, Christian sympathy goes immediately to the offender before the offender has even expressed any repentance.

The repentant sinner is so much more valuable, at this point, than their victims that they must be preemptively forgiven, that they are more valuable purely because they now have the potential to repent.

And this seems to be lurking under not just how "progressive" pastors act on Twitter, but in a lot of our cultural narratives around, say, college rapists and their futures, around white people who are publicly called out for racist acts, etc.

#jumblr #tshuvah #christian forgiveness culture

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bitterkarella · 3 months

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Midnight Pals: Harry Potter TV

JK Rowling: hello children Poe: oh joanne Poe: you're back Rowling: yesss i have a new harry potter TV sssseriesss that you are all obligated to watch by order of the king Poe: Lovecraft: King: Koontz: Barker: Barker: yeah how's that work? Poe: clive

Rowling: harry potter isss back! Rowling: he'sss the boy who lived! and he will NEVER die Rowling: thanksss to my wealth and influence, i can cram whimsssy down your throatsss forever!! Rowling: now take this online quiz to find out your hogwarts house!! Rowling: take it, i say!!

Rowling: as executive producer, i can finally tell the ssstory of harry potter how i imagined it!! Rowling: i know i've already told the ssstory through the booksss and the moviesss Rowling: but you know, third time is the charm

Rowling: ok sssso picture thisss Rowling: hogwartsss is taken over by transss deatheaterss King: by what? Rowling: oh yeah the deatheaterss are transs now Barker: hell yeah queer villainy Rowling: NO! It's BAD!

Rowling: they're forcing their woke agenda on Hogwartsss Rowling: instead of learning potionss, the sstudents are forced to learn pronounsss!! Rowling: insstead of defensse against the dark artsss, the sstudents are forced to learn Rowling: Rowling: uh Rowling: PRONOUNSS!!

Rowling: now hogwartss musst destroy the woke menace Poe: this sounds a lot more like american evangelical terfism than the genteel plausibly deniable british terfism we're used to from you Rowling: newssflassh, edgar! the ssingularity hass happened! itss all the ssame now!

Rowling: only the hero harry potter can ssave the day! Rowling: by doing the bravessst thing a boy wizard can do Rowling: he'ss going to deadname a murdered teenager

Rowling: harry potter isss back!! Harry potter is eternal!!! Barker: hey whatever happened to that whole cormorant shrike thing you had going Rowling: shut up Barker: aw what's the matter? didn't people like your farty detective? Rowling: SHUT UP

Rowling: the important thing isss Rowling: i'm sstill extremely rich Rowling: and therefore, by british law, correct

#the midnight society #midnight pals #midnight society #stephen king #clive barker #edgar allan poe #dean koontz #hp lovecraft #jk rowling

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chelledoggo · 1 month

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okay can i just GO OFF about how angry the Trump-endorsed "God Bless the USA" Bible makes me?

like first of all, one of the most privileged and un-Christlike human beings on the planet using their face to promote a Bible is just... EWWW. and during Holy Week, no less. and ever so conveniently when he has to pay legal bills.

second, by adding political documents to the Bible, they are essentially trying to lump them in with scripture, which is literal blasphemy.

"You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God with which I am charging you." - Deuteronomy 4:2 (NRSVUE)

third, this whole thing just screams "American exceptionalism." God sent Their son to earth because "God so loved the WORLD," not because "God so loved the USA." by trying to turn patriotism into something that must be one and the same with faith, you are making an idol out of America, and i'm pretty sure God had a whole-ass commandment about not making idols.

look, it shouldn't matter if you're a hardcore conservative evangelical, or a queer-affirming progressive left-wing Christian like me. or even if you're not Christian at all. this should absolutely disgust you.

#religion cw #politics cw #donald trump #progressive christianity #queer christian #christianity

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vvatchword · 1 year

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In Defense of BioShock Infinite

Although I had preordered BioShock Infinite with all its bells and whistles, I did not actually play it until January 2023. And lordy, I had me another Experience with a capital E. How the hell a bunch of urban Yanks could capture my experience as a queer democratic-socialist atheist struggling with her roots as a rural evangelical-cum-fascist is kinda magical, honestly. As to the game itself, it didn’t hurt how good it looked—the kickass skyhook gun battles—that novel setting—the complex characters—that delicious historical setting—that bloodthirsty critique of America—and to top it all off, they had pulled yet another Cassandra. Hell, speaking of which—not only was the game fun, it was fucking smart. It was intelligent, memorable, and meaningful in a way I hadn’t experienced in video games for years.

Now, back in 2013, when I had realized that I would be spoiled for Infinite, I left the BioShock fandom. After completing the game, I headed to Tumblr to re-engage, wagging my whole body like an excitable golden retriever, only to discover that BioShock Infinite was remarkably absent, and when mentioned, brutally derided.

“I hate BioShock Infinite and all my friends do, too,” someone said in the tags under a post.

I was utterly befuddled and deeply sad. I wanted to talk about BioShock Infinite! I wanted to dig into it, uncover unexpected ideas, learn new things, talk shit, make new friends—the full fandom experience. And instead I kept stumbling into hateful diatribes and super-charged disgust.

Obviously, I first looked at myself and my own judgment. Had I missed some obvious problem or misread some theme or dialogue? This wouldn’t be the first time I’d snapped down on a hook. But the more I thought about it, the angrier I got.

There are two parts of BioShock Infinite that are unquestionably terrible: the fridging of Daisy Fitzroy and the false equivalence of violence between haves and have-nots (lol what are the have-nots supposed to do, ask nicely?). Additionally, one could look at the use of real Native American tragedies as tasteless. Personally, I do not—in the same way that I don’t find it tasteless that real war victims were used as inspiration for Splicer deformities. This is what really happened; this is commentary on events that really happened to real people.

At this point, I’m sure I don’t have to explain why two of these themes are Unequivocally Bad.

Anyway, I thought that perhaps these were the reasons BSI had been condemned to Super Hell.

I was wrong.

How Criitcsim Werk

This wasn’t the fandom I’d made friends in over 2010. Hell, this wasn’t the fandom of 2013. This was a fandom made up of Babies. They were making their first coltish stumblings into media criticism and with it, dredging up the same brain-dead bullshit from Tumblr circa 2008.

Suddenly I was brought face to face with people who seemed to think that if a character couldn’t be likable or good that the story itself couldn’t be likable or good; that one bad element means the story is unsalvageable (lol u pussies); the implication that one is bad for liking it; the destructive juvenile insistence that media accurately measures its fans’ moral qualities en masse like an astrological sign. This goes far beyond simple like or dislike and plunges head-first into Puritanism: praying loudly on street-corners instead of quietly in a dark corner where God might hear you.

At one point I had a kid go off about how they wouldn’t take time to understand Booker DeWitt’s perspective because he had (fictionally) taken part in a genocide. (That same person said the Native American element had been employed for shock value, a thought that sometimes keeps me up at night, because it is legitimately one of the dumbest criticisms the game has ever received.) At another point I saw someone acting personally offended that (fictional person) Dr. Suchong’s (fictional) data was being stolen (in a fiction) by a (fictional) racist who would (fictionally) take credit for (fictional person) Suchong’s (fictional) inventions “while calling him slurs”. Sure, a better question would have been, “Why would the creative team opt to do this” rather than assume intentional racism from a Jewish creative director with an in-office multi-ethnic team in the year of our lord 2013, but why not handwave the choice with prurient moral dismay so your audience won’t beat you to death with bats?

It was as though fans were treating these completely fictional characters as real people whose personal gods had opted to torment them, and that their tormentors merited the kind of censure that psychopaths should receive. As I hope all of you understand, this is fucking madness.

More than once I saw people posting about hating the studio or the creative director in ways that seemed intense, unreasoning, and excessive—notably an “I Hate [Irrational Games creative director] Ken Levine” stamp (rofl the more things change amirite). People get so performatively moralistic about it that I started wondering if I missed something big along the way. Was there some secret Voxophone I missed swearing fealty to baby Hitler or some shit?

Double Standards

At the same time, I was utterly confused. BioShocks 1 and 2 both featured some absolutely ghastly bullshit based on real-life horrors and a thick mix of complicated human beings—many of them victims who have become monsters. The fact they are grounded in historical tragedies is a huge part of their appeal. Hell, I don’t think those games would have had half their meaning without World Wars I and II and the threat of a third.

A gay man who feels so cursed by his orientation that he is incapable of intimacy and systematically destroys his ex-lovers—including the man he loves the most. A Korean who survived Japanese occupation and a Jewish Holocaust survivor repeat the violence and traumas exacted upon them and their people, subjecting a new generation to agonies unthinkable. Chasing the shadows of Bolsheviks, a Russian citizen becomes the brutal tyrant that he loathed. A rich lawyer with an easygoing drawl designs a concentration camp and systematically harvests hundreds, if not thousands of political prisoners, selling them out to medical testing for a quick buck.

But a Native man who destroys his own people and class to ensure his own survival and social acceptability is too far? This character is where people drew the line, so much so that the entire game is disavowed? Hell, if you’re just talking about Booker (rather than Comstock), he doesn’t have anywhere near the largest bodycount. If we were to judge on the metric of human misery alone, Booker wouldn’t even hit the top ten.

Keep in mind that the most-discussed BioShock game on Tumblr is BioShock 2, and that one of the biggest fandom favorites is Augustus Sinclair—the easy-talkin’ Georgia lawyer who sells your character into horrors past all human comprehension, as he sold hundreds before and after you. Sinclair is a motherfucker so vile that BioShock 2 gives you no choice but to murder him. But Sinclair is also pleasant; good-looking to some; spends the whole game making sweet love to your ear; is one of the only true positive experiences you experience in a horror story. Unlike DeWitt, a man who is brutal and awful from step one, Sinclair is smooth and sweet. Unlike DeWitt, Sinclair’s victims are faceless, completely fictional, and carry no political or social baggage.

People fuckin’ ship this guy with Subject Delta, his explicit victim. He’s usually described as a squishy cinnamon roll. In most fanfiction, he often gets to escape to the surface and fuck Delta while helping raise Eleanor as Dad 2. It is rare that I find fanfiction that acknowledges his monsterhood in all its glory. In fact, I can only think of two.

Literacy Comes in Levels

My problem with the over-the-top hatred of BioShock Infinite is along the same lines as my confusion at Twilight and Harry Potter hate: there is so much worse out there (how much do the haters actually engage with media if they think this is that bad—yes, even considering the shitty creators themselves!), the hatred far outweighs the sin committed (in BioShock’s case, the truly bad bits are not central enough to derail the larger narrative), people don’t seem to hate it so much as they want to be seen hating it, fans want to enforce an unspoken rule hating it (bitches this is poison. Stop this), and there’s something about the hate that stinks of poor reading comprehension.

A great metric for general literacy is the newspaper. In journalism, you’re writing for the lowest-common denominator, which for years here in the USA has been about a fifth-grade reading level (about 10-11 years old, for my non-American readers). The AP posted an article a couple years back about how the general reading comprehension of Americans needs to be dropped to a third-grade one (8-9 years), and baby, I’m here to say it’s true.

Most of the problem is that the American education system is shitty as fuck. The rest of it is from an extremely American disdain of intellectualism and the arts. People are not taught how to interpret art or literature—a difficult and subtle skill which involves accepting such truths as “multiple contradictory readings can exist and yet be simultaneously correct”, “the author can be a complete tool and still be right about things”, “the author can be a great person and still write horrifyingly incorrect bullshit”, and “worthwhile works can be ridiculously long and it really is your fault for not having an attention span”.

Media criticism must be learned through trial, error, asking questions, confidently swaggering into a public space to announce your brilliant insight only to have your ass handed to you (usually by your older self ten years later), being willing to admit you swaggered confidently into a public space to state bullshit and then amending your bullshit only to produce more bullshit, and otherwise making a complete and utter cock of yourself. We are taught to fear and flee pain and failure, despite the fact this is how we learn and improve. Because we judge our value by whether or not we are “smart,” we are afraid of displaying that we don’t know something or might be mistaken–better not to try at all than to reveal ourselves to be fools. And yet the best way to learn is to crash up against someone else and be proven wrong!

American parents are terrified of hurting their children to the point that they spare them cognitive dissonance of any kind, disavowing difficult art—without any appreciation for the fact that art is how we provide safe spaces to explore key human experiences, better preparing us to face those difficult subjects when there are real-world consequences (sex, gender and social expression, grief, violence, predation, illness, interacting with people of different ideologies, whatever new issue is pissing off some smooth-brained old motherfucker somewhere).

If parents and teachers aren’t teaching us how to interpret art, we’re probably never going to develop the skill at all, or crash unsubtly into it in a piecemeal fashion (hello it me). Another unfortunate side effect is that these readers tend to be blitheringly superficial: they are literally intellectually incapable of reading deeper than the uppermost layer of a text. The curtains are always blue.

And let’s not forget the role moral performatism plays in media criticism, which although faaar from new, has reached hilarious levels in the age of social media. What’s important isn’t understanding something, it’s finding something to symbolically burn at the stake so everyone knows God loves us: please keep loving me, please don’t hurt me, please don’t throw me on the fire—for performatism is not for outsiders. We long for human connection so fucking much that it’s more important to destroy what might point out our fallibilities than it is to let ourselves stand in the furnace and burn out the dross.

What do you think the point of BioShock Infinite was?

Emotional Machines

Let’s face it. Human beings give a lot more credence to how something makes them feel than they do its complex invisible reality. We are not logical creatures; we are emotional ones. Our logic is too new a biological mechanism to override something as powerfully stupid as our primal lizard brains.

Knowing this, let’s take BioShock’s most popular characters. The first two are Subject Delta and Jack Wynand, the protagonists of BioShocks 2 and 1, respectively; and why not? They’re the characters we play. In the first two BioShocks, whether or not you kill Little Sisters determines the ending you receive. In other words, Delta and Jack can only be as “wicked” as the players are.

How do people want to see themselves? As good. What do people want to see around themselves? Good. (What is “good”? Uh, well,,,,,,) What do they want? Simple moral questions with simple moral answers. And in the first two BioShocks, what is moral is obvious: don’t kill little girls. It’s actually kind of insulting once you say it out loud.

In-fandom, Jack and Subject Delta are almost never painted as murderers or monsters, but as victims and heroes; I saw someone musing about putting Subject Delta on a “gentle giants” poll and I nearly choked on my own tongue. I only saw that musing because someone put Subject Delta and Jack in a “Best Fathers” poll. Nobody in-fandom really considers the “evil” or “complicated” endings as canon choices, despite those versions being fully understandable alternate readings, with a story that doesn’t make sense without them. (I don’t believe Burial at Sea is necessarily canon; in fact, I would bet good money that it is a huge middle finger lol, mostly because a number of brain-dead motherfuckers won’t take unhappiness for an answer.)

Most fandom art and writing is gentle, sweet, good: the symbolic healing of the damaged, the salvation of innocents, the turning of new leaves. These things are not just saccharine sweet—they tend to be unrealistically sweet. Now, far be it from me to demand these works cease. There’s a reason they exist. People write them because they need hope and happiness; I have enjoyed them greatly myself and intend to enjoy them in the future. But if y’all get to have your dessert, I demand the right to have my dinner.

The Colours Out of Earth

Let there be media where the opposite can also be true: where everything is unbelievably complicated and unforgivably fucked-up. Let there be characters who slide slurs into their speech without thinking. Let there be characters who destroy themselves in a thousand different ways, not all of them obvious, some of them horrifying. Let there be well-meaning people struggling with all their mights to do what is right only to destroy everyone around them and then completely miss the fact it’s all their faults. Let there be wickedness painted as goodness, superficial appearances accepted over essential and inherent values, denial of change and transformation, failure to accept that what is old must die and what is new must live, human stupidity and short-sightedness and cruelty in all their flavors. Let’s smash it all together and see how it plays out.

Oh, badly? No shit! But “badly” isn’t the point. How does it play out?

Let there be a world of gradients—a place I can float from color to color, hue to hue, value to value, while attempting to figure out where, why, how, and by whom they transform—to taste concepts in a hundred different ways, test their textures by a hundred different mediums, insert them into a hundred different contexts. I need to understand why I feel the way I do; I need to understand morality in all its hideous, fragmentary glory. For I have been sold to a ideology of blacks and whites, and let me tell you: it prepares you for nothing, and it will always destroy what is most precious about human life.

I can no longer believe in a world where what is lost always returns, because that world does not exist. I have a reflexive need to come to terms with Finality: what I have lost, what I have destroyed, what will never return, what will never be better. I have a reflexive need to understand Transformation: what I am now, what is as of the present, what has risen shambling from the ashes, what turns to gaze upon me in the darkness. I need to understand what is wretched about me as much as I need to heal myself. How can I heal if I can’t understand how I have hurt and been hurt?

I need to shine a light in the dark. Not to remodel it, not to destroy it—because I also can’t believe in a world where the wicked is destroyed forever—but to behold it, to learn from it, to view my own impact upon it, to accept how it has become a part of me, to learn how to do my best (because that’s all one can do). I must learn to love people more than causes, I must learn to love people rather than the act of winning, I must learn to love people rather than battle. I need to stand in that endless black with the lamp off and my eyes closed, letting the agony roll over me, burning with a fire that throws no light, rolling back and forth from an intense self-loathing to a fury at a society that destroys what is most valuable because it didn’t make them feel the way they wanted.

The Unforgivable

I believe that there are only two differences between Booker DeWitt and his equally cursed cohorts.

In the Hall of Whores: The Unmarked Slate

First, unlike the previous two games, where you enter the world as a tabula rasa and might roleplay as what you perceive as a good person, you are explicitly put into the shoes of a monster, and nothing you do can save you.

With other shitty BioShock characters, you are passively watching other people, and you are able to hold yourself apart. Sure, everyone else is crazy as fuck from using biological Kryptonite, but you’re too smart to end up a crazy fucking asshole like them! Sure, you are now technically a mass murderer, but those fuckers deserved it, damn it!

“Look at this crazy bastard!” you say, rolling your eyes at the Steinmans and Cohens and Ryans and Fontaines. “It sure is a great thing I’m not a crazy bastard!”

You are able to escape acknowledging that you, too, in certain circumstances, might be the crazy bastard. You are being challenged to stand in the body of a person who has committed unforgivable sins. Imagine if you yourself committed those sins. Imagine what sins you have already committed. Imagine what brutalities you cannot take back. Imagine what horrors you have wreaked just by breathing.

“Ahhhh!” said players, probably. “What do you mean I’m not allowed to be good?”

Because that’s what the game was designed to do. Because “good” is a fucking cop-out and if it’s how you live with yourself wait until you find out you’ve been doing horrifying bullshit all your life without question. You can be evil by association through no fault of your own.

Original Sin

Second, the plight of Native Americans is a sin that non-Natives will always carry, and the socially conscious are aware of this even if they don’t know how to put it into words. The state of affairs being what it is, it is unlikely that First Peoples will ever be treated humanely, much less have their land returned. They must struggle for scraps of what is rightfully theirs while we lounge on their corpses. We cannot help but benefit from their destruction; we are made unwitting partners with our forebears; we steal the fruits of their lands and make mockeries of their faiths and identities. We have destroyed part of what made this world fascinating and unique and most of it can never be returned. Even if everything were to be made right tomorrow, their genocide is a sin that we will carry until we die, because the only reason we could be here at all is because they were killed.

The obvious solution stands before us, but the powers that be are so much greater than we that we are effectively powerless, and achieving anything less than total restoration smacks of anticlimax.

This is unbearable.

How can one think of oneself as a good person if one sees the good that must be done, but cannot achieve it? If one’s actions are meaningless? Goodness without action is pretension.

We are all Booker DeWitt. We have all set fire to the tipi. We swept the ashes away, we ignored the sizes of the bones, we built a CVS on their graves, and then we made statues and holidays commemorating Native Americans like the world’s cheapest “Thinking of You” card. We have de-fanged them, transformed them into cardboard cutouts, and set them up as cute little side characters in our sweeping American dream.

Booker is not a man. Booker is America and Americans—and America and Americans are monstrous: one part hypocrisy, two parts incessant violence, three parts constant peacocking, and four parts dumb as a stump.

The Monsters We Make

Outside of the message about “choice,” an enormous part of BioShock’s thematic ensemble is the creation of monsters. How are monsters created? Who or what is responsible for creating them? What do the monsters think made them the ways they are? Can a monster be saved? How? Is it enough to acknowledge you did wrong and want to be a better person?

Maybe most people are aware on some instinctive level of what facing one’s own monsterhood means. No one wants it. It’s not fun. It hurts. It’s embarrassing. It’s destructive. It’s admitting you don’t have it all together and might never, ever—that despite your best actions, you can have it horribly wrong at any point. In an age where we demand moral perfection, it demands vulnerability: you must admit that sometimes you’re the racist, the transphobe, the sexist, the nationalist, the classist, the homophobe, the violent, the wrong, the dumbfuck.

Human beings are not built to be moral; human beings are built to survive. We so rapidly learn how to deal with our contexts at such young ages that we don’t have the time or capabilities to question why those contexts are the ways they are or why it is demanded we perform the ways we do.

In a very real way, BioShock Infinite demands vulnerability of us. It demands you look in the mirror and see what is monstrous in you—how you have been created—manufactured—a tool, a machine, a trained animal. It asks you to recognize that you can be a monster simply by association. And if we can’t look into the mirror and truly acknowledge that monsterhood, we run very real risks of becoming or enabling those monsters in one way or another.

Worst of all: perhaps monsterhood isn’t optional. Perhaps the monster was inside of us from the very beginning. It’s not a matter of if you become a monster, but when, under what circumstances, by whose hand. What is more, believing the “right” moral stances will not save you. Monsterhood can afflict anyone, in any ideology, any political stance, in any social movement, in any faith. The only element that can save you is to truly love other people, and even then, you can fail, for there can be states where there is no winner and ways to misread how best to treat another person.

Environment and Society: Context Will Not Be Denied

BioShock 1’s original ending is Jack-as-monster, regardless of how many children he saves, regardless of your feelings as player. He passes through the gauntlet of Rapture, but he has supped of its poison. And he wasn’t poisoned when he entered Rapture the second time—he was poisoned the minute he was conceived. He was born of it. He had no hope of ever escaping it—he never could have—he’d never had a choice to begin with.

No matter what choices you make in BioShock Infinite, Elizabeth will always kill you. Why? Because she has seen every world—every context—every limitation—every boon. And there is no way to stop what has been; there is no way to undo what has been done. The minute you have committed to a decision, you have split the universe; there is no telling what kind of person it will make you. In fact, there’s no telling which of your decisions will matter at all. Only Elizabeth can see because she is the unlimited future: your offspring stands before you, judge and jury, and you will have no choice but to accept her verdict, for despite your name, you are incapable of controlling how you are interpreted.

Elizabeth sits across from you in the boat and stares without blinking. She sees a million million similar Bookers. Some are a little bit taller, some a little bit shorter, some a little heavier or lighter. Some more-resemble one grandparent or another. They have different colored ties. This one blinks when rain hits him in the eyeball. That one took a brutal beating back on the airship and one eye is swollen shut. That one can’t stop shaking; this one is unable to speak at all; one hasn’t yet lost hope, although even he doesn’t realize it.

They all lowered the torch to the tipi.

The baptism determined Comstock; what determined Booker?

Why Booker Is

In BioShock 1, characters are often stand-ins for larger concepts. Thus Ryan stands in as Ayn Rand’s Objectivist Ubermensch; Bill McDonagh as Andrew Ryan’s conscience; Diane McClintock as the citizenry of Rapture; Captain Sullivan as law and order; Frank Fontaine as the truest expression of Objectivism in its distilled form.

Who is Booker? Most importantly: why is he?

Booker is a fictional character with a brutal background based on historical events, alternative and true. Booker might be Lakota; Booker might have undergone forced Anglicization; Booker might have been ripped from his parents; Booker is a product of violence, perhaps literally. Booker is American exceptionalism distilled. Booker is the past in constant judgment of itself, unable to live with itself and unable to die. Booker destroys what is best in him and around him in exchange for belonging. Booker has sold the future to absolve his sins. Booker has sold his daughter because he is a fictional character in a work of fiction who needs to be propelled.

Booker is a shell, a sluice, an environment. Booker is the broken shape you are meant to fill, horrified. His internal shape should torture you as it has tortured him: the messy slaggy soul of a shitty tin soldier.

Does Booker take the baptism and become Comstock? If so, it might be his second one. His last name literally means “the white.” His first name can mean “author.” It is most likely his second name: an attempt to rewrite himself. And when he was unable to rewrite himself the first time, when the cognitive dissonance boiled at the edges of his skull, he found there was only one way to cleanse himself the second: to remake the world entirely. To force transformation on everyone else. To take vengeance on a world that could never love him, never want him—to create a world that has no choice but to love him. If he can’t change the world’s mind, he’ll change the world.

Note what he opts to do: to take the fight to the environment–to the unyielding universe.

Context Is Everything

It is no mistake that BioShock Infinite occurs in 1912: the sinking of the Titanic is often credited with ending an unfettered optimism, a period when the Western world believed technology had brought the human race into a golden age. With World War I—which would follow a mere two years later—came modern warfare and all the horrors thereof, not the least of which was the realization that humans had created a kind of war that could destroy the entire world. World War I also seeded the rise of the United States: much of the wealth of warring Europe—itself fat on the blood of subjugated peoples and stolen lands—would rattle into America’s coffers.

It is also no mistake that BioShock 1 directly follows World War II. With WWII came a heightened terror—that this war is not the last war, that there will never be an end to war, that war will go on expanding and expanding until it has consumed us all. World War III would not be denied: prettily packaged in the ideals of its children, it simply followed the utopians down to their underwater tombs. According to BioShock 1’s original ending, World War III is not a matter of if—it’s a matter of when.

But even more important than the history in the BioShock games are their settings. Mute leviathans, Rapture and Columbia determine all of your behaviors: from where you can exist in space to all of your desires and goals to how you choose to present yourself to how you opt to behave. Isolated in extremism—whether that extremism is the crushing depths of the ocean or the unbearable lightness of the air—most of their power is that they simply cannot be escaped. You can’t outrun them. They are everywhere. They are everything.

Like Lovecraft before it, BioShock acknowledges the greatest horror of all: you cannot escape your context. Your context does not only involve your immediate surroundings. It is also historical; contains zeitgeists from various cultures and subcultures; is filled with pressures both personal and impersonal, human and nonhuman. Many of these forces can hurt you. Many more can destroy you. What you do to survive depends very much on where, when, and with whom you must live.

Human beings are not built to be moral.

The Death of the Future

In the film Operation, Burma!, a soldier asks Errol Flynn: “Who were you before the war?”

“An architect,” says Flynn.

Who were you? Because that “you” doesn’t matter now. That “you” is irrelevant. So you’re an architect. What the war does to you; what these deaths mean to you; your past, your education, your loves and desires and forward motivation, the you that could have been outside war, the you that slogs alone into the brutal future—all completely irrelevant. Your forebears don’t care so long as you can bleed.

Children are the manufactured tools of their creators—helpless before the enormous strength of their elders and the zeitgeists that enclose them, poisoned by their parents’ insecurities and flaws, utilized like weapons regardless of the cost—often with great love.

Consider something more than the traumatized culture: consider the society filled with traumatized children; consider the traumatized society. Consider channeling children through that trauma over and over and over again, if you can. Poisoned—poisoned—poisoned—all of us poisoned. Poisoned by those who loved us most. Poisoned by the people we trusted. Poisoned by the people who meant to make a better world.

I believe it is notable that creative director Ken Levine is Jewish; I have read from multiple accounts that the European Jewish diaspora was uniquely traumatized from the Holocaust and passed that trauma down upon their own families. I sometimes wonder if he saw that firsthand.

The fathers eat sour grapes; their children’s teeth are set on edge.

Choice: Player Expectations and Entitlement

For players who experienced BioShocks 1 and 2 with their multiple endings (Good, Bad, and “ok bye then I guess” respectively), it must have been jarring to suddenly reckon with being a monster. How often I see players grousing that nothing they do will change their wicked pasts! These players completely miss that the only meaningful choice had already been made, that it had nothing to do with the player at all, and even if they had been there, DeWitt was still unforgivable. The only way to go on was to bow out and allow the future to redefine herself.

Nobody was ready for that shit.

Like it or not, BioShock 1 had set a precedent. Not everyone’s going to read up on creator intentions. If any keyword came blaring through the noise, it would have been “choice.” Most players only recognize choice by the ability to make it, not the absence of it, and most of them weren’t equipped to recognize that its lack was the point. The meaningless choices were commentary, and they were as much about the player as they were about DeWitt himself. Not every choice will be meaningful, will it? And there will be choices you make that will be momentous, but they will seem very small when you make them.

Because most players had experienced what they thought was a basic moralistic tale in the first two games, and would see Infinite not as reflection upon America’s destructive personality, its obsession with a meaningless Good/Bad duocracy, and the infinite, cyclical nature of violence, they saw Booker’s death as corrupted artsy claptrap.

“I did the good schuut,” they say. “I want the good schuut end. Where happy end??? Where treat :(”

Bitch the future is here.

Time to die.

It’s Not Me, It’s You

Generally I despise essays that end with, “But the real fault lay with the clueless motherfuckers who played the game!” Often, if enough people complain, there’s something to it; the message has been obscured somehow. Details or explanations weren’t clear or intuitive enough, some mechanism isn’t working somewhere, some character needs to talk more or less, some setting needs to be transformed. O artist: stop whining and get cracking. If everywhere you go smells like shit, it’s time to look under your shoe.

But sometimes it’s true that a piece of media is on a level folks aren’t equipped for. Think of every literature and art class you’ve ever had, if you’ve been fortunate enough to have one. There’s always someone scoffing in a back row, like here are all these jokers making more of something than they should. Similarly, some of you have been arguing with me this entire time, saying: “I just wanted a video game. I just wanted to shoot something and feel better and instead I get this bullshit ending that makes no sense.”

First of all, smart bullshit (and even fucked-up attempts at smart bullshit! Hi BioShock 2) gets to exist on this Earth along with Gmod and Roblox or Schuut Big Tits 84 (there are 84 tits and you must shoot them all. They explode into smaller tits) or whatever-the-fuck-else you think is a worthwhile gaming experience. Second of all, miserable bullshit also gets to exist, and what did you fucking expect if you played through either BioShocks 1 or 2? When you hear a football player quavering out in the darkness for his mom to pick him up, how’d that make you feel? What did you think was going to happen to Jack after pounding back the entire Plasmid library, the cancer cocktail that explicitly destroys the fuck out of its users? Third of all, if you missed the smart bullshit going on in BioShock 1 and didn’t think BioShock Infinite might be larger in scope in more ways than one, that’s on you. Fourthly, if you were simply satisfied with saving like, 15 kids from a violently-perishing city of thousands and call it good, I mean… is that really where your thoughts end? Are you really that fucking small?

It’s Not You, It’s Me

You ever meet those motherfuckers who talk shit about Shakespeare or modern art? And you’re just left there staring with dead eyes at this poseur who mistakes playing devil’s advocate for intelligence, cheek resting on your fist, thinking about the fanfic you’re writing, wondering who it’s for, remembering that all your smut-writing friends get ten times the viewers, and considering throwing yourself in front of a bus.

Yeah, there’s a personal element to this: the fact that BioShock Infinite is the kind of art I like and long for and want to make myself, the fact that the game was successful and yet the studio was closed, the way its DLC was so rushed that the story plopped out like half-baked mystery meat—realizing that the same forced rush was at 2K’s behest for BioShock 2, as well, and wondering how good art can ever be made in this unforgiving capitalist hellscape. The game was weirdly niche and I’m not 100% sure I’ll ever experience anything quite like it again. And with the whiners in this fandom, the loud ones controlling the narrative, some fresh brain-dead exec in some brain-dead publisher might be like: “We must keep it safer and simpler for these fuckin babby adult!”

Nah bitch nah. Naaaah. Cry some more while I enjoy me my fucking dinner. I’ll eat it while making loud smacking noises and keeping unbroken eye contact. Come here. Let’s look at each other. It’ll be like Lady and the Tramp but we want to punch each other. What truer form of love can there be here in the modern world?

I keep having to remind myself that this response isn’t new. I keep having to remind myself of my place. I keep having to remind myself why I write, why I read, why I like to experience art to begin with. It’s not for the reasons other people do it. Oh, I want the same emotional release as everyone else, I want the same rollicking plots, I adore the same tropes. I seek out everything and anything for a good time; I’ll read Moby Dick today and a smutty 5,000-word abortion with the world’s most suspect grammar tomorrow. I don’t give a shit if it’s low- or high-brow; there are all kinds of ways to have fun and there are all kinds of ways to engage with art, and lord knows I’ve done my share of smooth-brain criticism. The problem is that I’ve always wandered off by myself, sunk into an all-consuming reverie, on tracks that no one else ever seems to be on, and then looked up to talk excitedly about something only to realize I’m alone. And whose fault is that?

By the same token, maybe I haven’t talked enough. Maybe I spend too much time with my mouth shut. Maybe I haven’t stood up enough for things that are worth our time, worth talking up, worth setting on pedestals.

I tell you, BioShock Infinite will stand the test of time. It’s too good for this. It’s too good for you, warts and all. Some of you will grow to understand that; some of you won’t; many of you will shrug and go on with your lives (and this is fine; it is only a video game). But I’ve truly not seen anything like it. I can’t believe a mainstream video game was allowed to be so fucking brutal about the American juggernaut, and what’s more, that it sold like hotcakes. Plus, I can’t think of any works in recent memory that have struck me so close to my own heart. No creative work has made me start beating a monster’s face into a washbasin for ten hours only to lift her by the scalp and see my own eyes looking back.

Look into those eyes. See your own stupid impulses pouring out. Your own stupid excuses, your violences, your sins—your claws, your teeth, your costumes, your hilarious attempts at interpretive dance. The beast doth protest too much.

O, monster—behold thyself—and tremble.

#bioshock #bioshock 2 #bioshock infinite #bioshock infinite burial at sea #booker dewitt #subject delta #jack wynand #augustus sinclair #essays #video games #spoilers #vvatchword #vvbsreceipts

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gotta-get-back-to-hatchetfield · 1 year

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Here's what you missed on Hatchetfield...

Okay so Nerdy Prudes Must Die is happening in a month's time and I'm aware that lots of people who enjoyed guy who didn't like musicals and black friday might not have had time to watch nightmare time. While Nick has said this musical will be fully stand alone and no knowledge of nightmare time is required, nonetheless some of you might be curious about what we've learned that might come up

Presenting a tldr lore drop for nightmare time:

1) Wiggly has brothers (aka the Lords in Black)

You remember Wiggly from black friday? That ugly green little fucker? Well turns out he has brothers. They call themselves the Lords in black because they're pretentious little fucks and they all have different 'powers'.

Itemised list

Pokey (pokotho) - mind control type stuff, likes to make hiveminds

Wiggly (Wiggog Y'wrath) - idk you saw black friday whatever the fuck goes on there

Blinky (blinklotep) - massive eye, likes watching things

Tinky (T'noy karaxis) - fucks with time

Nibbly (nibblenephem) - massive mouth, eats shit

You've actually met Pokey before - remember the blue shit from guy who didn't like musicals? That's the same blue shit leaking out of the cracks in pokey's face in the picture above.

They also have a sister called Webby that I believe Hannah references in Black Friday. We don't know much about her but thus far she seems like a good guy

2) Grace Chasity is a nerdy prude

Remember the girl Bill is trying to set Alice up in guy who didn't like musicals because 'at least she's nice to him in church'?

Well turns out Alice was right. Grace Chasity is a nerdy prude. And also coincidentally one of the main characters of Nerdy Prudes Must Die (to be played by Angela Giarratana).

We meet her in nightmare time 2 (episode 2 part 2) which takes place at a religious camp designed to educate people about the perils of pre marital sex.

Grace Chasity is, well she's many things, but she is very much the stereotype of an American evangelical Christian. She even showers with a swimming costume on so as not to tempt herself into sin.

Despite all this, however, she is a devious motherfucker who will absolutely fuck you up

3) You remember Ted from guy who didn't like musicals...

Well not only are he and the homeless guy the same person (time travel, its a whole thing, blame the yellow guy from the Lords in black photo)

But also we learn that his surname is Spankoffski (because of course it is) and he has a 'nerdy little brother' called Pete Spankoffski who will be one of the leads in nerdy prudes. In nightmare time he's played by Nick Lang but in nerdy prudes he'll be played by Joey Richter

We meet Pete in nightmare time 2 (episode 2 part 2) but we've actually met him before in guy who didn't like musicals. You remember hot chocolate boy? The one who had very low blood sugar?

Yup you guessed it that is one Peter Spankoffski

(If you've been super out of the loop and are wondering why he was recast and for that matter where the heck is Robert anyway just trust that that is a whole thing im not going to get into and it's for the best he's gone)

4) Meet the Lauters

Two more characters who have been announced for NPMD who we met in nightmare time 2 are Stephanie Lauter (Mariah Rose Faith) and her father Solomon Lauter (Corey Dorris)

Steph is actually pretty nice and chill on the inside but definitely has a reputation for being a bit of a party animal/wild child.

This isn't helped by her father who is the mayor of hatchetfield and from what little we see of him will always put his career before his daughter.

Steph and Pete hook up in nightmare time so look out for a possible romance between these two

5) What the fuck is a Holloduke?

You may have seen the word 'holloduke' batted a lot around this fandom lately which refers to the ship of two characters that we've been introduced to through nightmare time.

While it's unclear if either of them will appear in nerdy prudes, given that both Kim and Curt are in the cast and they go a long way out of their way in nightmare time to show Kim's character getting a job at Hatchetfield High in set up for *something* a lot of people think there's a good chance she at least will be appearing.

The Hollo of these characters is called Miss Holloway although at the end of nightmare time she ends up ret conning herself and is forced to assume a new identity as Miss Holiday so if we meet her in nerdy prudes that will likely be her name. She is a witch who has a deep love for all things 80s. We don't know a huge amount about her but that might be because she's cursed(?) so that anything she reveals about her backstory will be instantly wiped from the mind of the listener.

Curts character is an ordinary social worker called Duke who among other things works with Hannah and Lex when they're having troubles with their mum. He's in love with Miss Holloway/Holiday, and it's reciprocated, but due to the curse(?) et al things keep not quite working out for them.

They're both absolutely wonderful people who deserve the world and are absolute OTP fodder

6) The Gift

We don't know a huge amount about this yet but we do know that some people in Hatchetfield, notably including Hannah from black friday have something called 'the gift' which gives them some loose powers

Most people grow out of the gift as they go through puberty, for instance Lex also used to have it, but they may be able to use it in some scenarios (such as manifesting a firearm from the black and white as Lex does in Black Friday)

People with the gift were historically persecuted in Hatchetfield by a group of people called 'the hatchet men' who may or may not have turned them into trees(?)

7) The Black Book

There is a book of spells called the black book which Miss Holloway/Holiday uses to do her magic

#starkid #hatchetfield #guy who didnt like musicals #tgwdlm #nerdy prudes must die #npmd #black friday #nightmare time

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racefortheironthrone · 1 year

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Why People Are Wrong About the Puritans of the English Civil War and New England

Oh well, if you all insist, I suppose I can write something.

(oh good, my subtle scheme is working...)

Introduction:

So the Puritans of the English Civil War is something I studied in graduate school and found endlessly fascinating in its rich cultural complexity, but it's also a subject that is popularly wildly misunderstood because it's caught in the jaws of a pair of distorted propagandistic images.

On the one hand, because the Puritans settled colonial New England, since the late 19th century they've been wrapped up with this nationalist narrative of American exceptionalism (that provides a handy excuse for schoolteachers to avoid talking about colonial Virginia and the centrality of slavery to the origins of the United States). If you went to public school in the United States, you're familiar with the old story: the United States was founded by a people fleeing religious persecution and seeking their freedom, who founded a society based on social contracts and the idea that in the New World they were building a city on a hill blah blah America is an exceptional and perfect country that's meant to be an example to the world, and in more conservative areas the whole idea that America was founded as an explicitly Christian country and society. Then on the other hand, you have (and this is the kind of thing that you see a lot of on Tumblr) what I call the Matt Damon-in-Good-Will-Hunting, "I just read Zinn's People's History of the United States in U.S History 101 and I'm home for my first Thanksgiving since I left for colleg and I'm going to share My Opinions with Uncle Burt" approach. In this version, everything in the above nationalist narrative is revealed as a hideous lie: the Puritans are the source of everything wrong with American society, a bunch of evangelical fanatics who came to New England because they wanted to build a theocracy where they could oppress all other religions and they're the reason that abortion-banning, homophobic and transphobic evangelical Christians are running the country, they were all dour killjoys who were all hopelessly sexually repressed freaks who hated women, and the Salem Witch Trials were a thing, right?

And if anyone spares a thought to examine the role that Puritans played in the English Civil War, it basically short-hands to Oliver Cromwell is history's greatest monster, and didn't they ban Christmas?

Here's the thing, though: as I hope I've gotten across in my posts about Jan Hus, John Knox, and John Calvin, the era of the Reformation and the Wars of Religion that convulsed the Early Modern period were a time of very big personalities who were complicated and not very easy for modern audiences to understand, because of the somewhat oblique way that Early Modern people interpreted and really believed in the cultural politics of religious symbolism. So what I want to do with this post is to bust a few myths and tease out some of the complications behind the actual history of the Puritans.

Did the Puritans Experience Religious Persecution?

Yes, but that wasn't the reason they came to New England, or at the very least the two periods were divided by some decades. To start at the beginning, Puritans were pretty much just straightforward Calvinists who wanted the Church of England to be a Calvinist Church. This was a fairly mainstream position within the Anglican Church, but the "hotter sort of Protestant" who started to organize into active groups during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I were particularly sensitive to religious symbolism they (like the Hussites) felt smacked of Catholicism and especially the idea of a hierarchy where clergy were a better class of person than the laity.

So for example, Puritans really first start to emerge during the Vestments Controversy in the reign of Edward VI where Bishop Hooper got very mad that Anglican priests were wearing the cope and surplice, which he thought were Catholic ritual garments that sought to enhance priestly status and that went against the simplicity of the early Christian Church. Likewise, during the run-up to the English Civil War, the Puritans were extremely sensitive to the installation of altar rails which separated the congregation from the altar - they considered this to be once again a veneration of the clergy, but also a symbolic affirmation of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.

At the same time, they were not the only religious faction within the Anglican Church - and this is where the religious persecution thing kicks in, although it should be noted that this was a fairly brief but very emotionally intense period. Archbishop William Laud was a leading High Church Episcopalian who led a faction in the Church that would become known as Laudians, and he was just as intense about his religious views as the Puritans were about his. A favorite of Charles I and a first advocate of absolutist monarchy, Laud was appointed Archbishop of Canturbury in 1630 and acted quickly to impose religious uniformity of Laudian beliefs and practices - ultimately culminating in the disastrous decision to try imposing Episcopalianism on Scotland that set off the Bishop's Wars. The Puritans were a special target of Laud's wrath: in addition to ordering the clergy to do various things offensive to Puritans that he used as a shibboleth to root out clergy with Puritan sympathies and fire them from their positions in the Church, he established official religious censors who went after Puritan writers like William Prynne for seditious libel and tortured them for their criticisms of his actions, cropping their ears and branding them with the letters SL on their faces. Bringing together the powers of Church and State, Laud used the Court of Star Chamber (a royal criminal court with no system of due process) to go after anyone who he viewed as having Puritan sympathies, imposing sentences of judicial torture along the way.

It was here that the Puritans began to make their first connections to the growing democratic movement in England that was forming in opposition to Charles I, when John Liliburne the founder of the Levellers was targeted by Laud for importing religious texts that criticized Laudianism - Laud had him repeatedly flogged for challenging the constitutionality of the Star Chamber court, and "freeborn John" became a martyr-hero to the Puritans.

When the Long Parliament met in 1640, Puritans were elected in huge numbers, motivated as they were by a combination of resistance to the absolutist monarchism of Charles I and the religious policies of Archbishop Laud - who Parliament was able to impeach and imprison in the Tower of the London in 1641. This relatively brief period of official persecution that powerfully shaped the Puritan mindset was nevertheless disconnected from the phenomena of migration to New England - which had started a decade before Laud became Archbishop of Canterbury and continued decades after his impeachment.

The Puritans Just Wanted to Oppress Everyone Else's Religion:

This is the very short-hand Howard Zinn-esque critique we often see of the Puritan project in the discourse, and while there is a grain of truth to it - in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Congregational Church was the official state religion, no other church could be established without permission from the Congregational Church, all residents were required to pay taxes to support the Congregational Church, and only Puritans could vote. Moreover, there were several infamous incidents where the Puritan establishment put Anne Hutchinson on trial and banished her, expelled Roger Williams, and hanged Quakers.

Here's the thing, though: during the Early Modern period, every single side of every single religious conflict wanted to establish religious uniformity and oppress the heretics: the Catholics did it to the Protestants where they could mobilize the power of the Holy Roman Emperor against the Protestant Princes, the Protestants did it right back to the Catholics when Gustavus Adolphus' armies rolled through town, the Lutherans and the Catholics did it to the Calvinists, and everybody did it to the Anabaptists.

That New England was founded as a Calvinist colony is pretty unremarkable, in the final analysis. (By the by, both Hutchinson and Williams were devout if schismatic Puritans who were firmly of the belief that the Anglican Church was a false church.) What's more interesting is how quickly the whole religious project broke down and evolved into something completely different.

Essentially, New England became a bunch of little religious communes that were all tax-funded, which is even more the case because the Congregationalist Church was a "gathered church" where the full members of the Church (who were the only people allowed to vote on matters involving the church, and were the only ones who were allowed to be given baptism and Communion, which had all kinds of knock-on effects on important social practices like marriages and burials) and were made up of people who had experienced a conversion where they can gained an assurance of salvation that they were definitely of the Elect. You became a full member by publicly sharing your story of conversion (which had a certain cultural schema of steps that were supposed to be followed) and having the other full members accept it as genuine.

This is a system that works really well to bind together a bunch of people living in a commune in the wilderness into a tight-knit community, but it broke down almost immediately in the next generation, leading to a crisis called the Half-Way Covenant.

The problem was that the second generation of Puritans - all men and women who had been baptized and raised in the Congrgeationalist Church - weren't becoming converted. Either they never had the religious awakening that their parents had had, or their narratives weren't accepted as genuine by the first generation of commune members. This meant that they couldn't hold church office or vote, and more crucially it meant that they couldn't receive the sacrament or have their own children baptized.

This seemed to suggest that, within a generation, the Congregationalist Church would essentially define itself into non-existence and between the 1640s and 1650s leading ministers recommended that each congregation (which was supposed to decide on policy questions on a local basis, remember) adopt a policy whereby the children of baptized but unconverted members could be baptized as long as they did a ceremony where they affirmed the church covenant. This proved hugely controversial and ministers and laypeople alike started publishing pamphlets, and voting in opposing directions, and un-electing ministers who decided in the wrong direction, and ultimately it kind of broke the authority of the Congregationalist Church and led to its eventual dis-establishment.

The Puritans are the Reason America is So Evangelical:

This is another area where there's a grain of truth, but ultimately the real history is way more complicated.

Almost immediately from the founding of the colony, the Puritans begin to undergo mutation from their European counterparts - to begin with, while English Puritans were Calvinists and thus believed in a Presbyterian form of church government (indeed, a faction of Puritans during the English Civil War would attempt to impose a Presbyterian Church on England.), New England Puritans almost immediately adopted a congregationalist system where each town's faithful would sign a local religious constitution, elect their own ministers, and decide on local governance issues at town meetings.

This seemed to suggest that, within a generation, the Congregationalist Church would essentially define itself into non-existence and between the 1640s and 1650s leading ministers recommended that each congregation (which was supposed to decide on policy questions on a local basis, remember) adopt a policy whereby the children of baptized but unconverted members could be baptized as long as they did a ceremony where they affirmed the church covenant. This proved hugely controversial and ministers and laypeople alike started publishing pamphlets, and voting in opposing directions, and un-electing ministers who decided in the wrong direction, and accusing one another of being witches. (More on that in a bit.)

And then the Great Awakening - which to be fair, was a major evangelical effort by the Puritan Congregationalist Church, so it's not like there's no link between evangelical - which was supposed to promote Congregational piety ended up dividing the Church and pretty soon the Congregationalist Church is dis-established and it's safe to be a Quaker or even a Catholic on the streets of Boston.

But here's the thing - if we look at which denominations in the United States can draw a direct line from themselves to the Congregationalist Church of the Puritans, it's the modern Congregationalists who are entirely mainstream Protestants whose churches are pretty solidly liberal in their politics, the United Church of Christ which is extremely cultural liberal, and it's the Unitarian Universalists who are practically issued DSA memberships. (I say this with love as a fellow comrade.)

By contrast, modern evangelical Christianity (although there's a complicated distinction between evangelical and fundamentalist that I don't have time to get into) in the United States is made up of an entirely different set of denominations - here, we're talking Baptists, Pentacostalists, Methodists, non-denominational churches, and sometimes Presbyterians.

The Puritans Were Dour Killjoys Who Hated Sex:

This one owes a lot to Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter.

The reality is actually the opposite - for their time, the Puritans were a bunch of weird hippies. At a time when most major religious institutions tended to emphasize the sinful nature of sex and Catholicism in particular tended to emphasize the moral superiority of virginity, the Puritans stressed that sexual pleasure was a gift from God, that married couples had an obligation to not just have children but to get each other off, and both men and women could be taken to court and fined for failing to fulfill their maritial obligations.

The Puritans also didn't have much of a problem with pre-marital sex. As long as there was an absolute agreement that you were going to get married if and when someone ended up pregnant, Puritan elders were perfectly happy to let young people be young people. Indeed, despite the objection of Jonathan Edwards and others there was an (oddly similar to modern Scandinavian customs) old New England custom of "bundling," whereby a young couple would be put into bed together by their parents with a sack or bundle tied between them as a putative modesty shield, but where everyone involved knew that the young couple would remove the bundle as soon as the lights were turned out.

One of my favorite little social circumlocutions is that there was a custom of pretending that a child clearly born out of wedlock was actually just born prematurely to a bride who was clearly nine months along, leading to a rash of surprisingly large and healthy premature births being recorded in the diary of Puritan midwife Martha Ballard. Historians have even applied statistical modeling to show that about 30-40% of births in colonial America were pre-mature.

But what about non-sexual dourness? Well, here we have to understand that, while they were concerned about public morality, the Puritans were simultaneously very strict when it came to matters of religion and otherwise normal people who liked having fun. So if you go down the long list of things that Puritans banned that has landed them with a reputation as a bunch of killjoys, they usually hide some sort of religious motivation.

So for example, let's take the Puritan iconoclastic tendency to smash stained glass windows, whitewash church walls, and smash church organs during the English Civil War - all of these things have to do with a rejection of Catholicism, and in the case of church organs a belief that the only kind of music that should be allowed in church is the congregation singing psalms as an expression of social equality. At the same time, Puritans enjoyed art in a secular context and often had portraits of themselves made and paintings hung on their walls, and they owned musical instruments in their homes.

What about the wearing nothing but black clothing? See, in our time wearing nothing but black is considered rather staid (or Goth), but in the Early Modern period the dyes that were needed to produce pure black cloth were incredibly expensive - so wearing all black was a sign of status and wealth, hence why the Hapsburgs started emphasizing wearing all-black in the same period. However, your ordinary Puritan couldn't afford an all-black attire and would have worn quite colorful (but much cheaper) browns and blues and greens.

What about booze and gambling and sports and the theater and other sinful pursuits? Well, the Puritans were mostly ok with booze - every New England village had its tavern - but they did regulate how much they could serve, again because they were worried that drunkenness would lead to blasphemy. Likewise, the Puritans were mostly ok with gambling, and they didn't mind people playing sports - except that they went absolutely beserk about drinking, gambling, and sports if they happened on the Sabbath because the Puritans really cared about the Sabbath and Charles I had a habit of poking them about that issue. They were against the theater because of its association with prostitution and cross-dressing, though, I can't deny that. On the other hand, the Puritans were also morally opposed to bloodsports like bear-baiting, cock-fighting, and bare-knuckle boxing because of the violence it did to God's creatures, which I guess makes them some of the first animal rights activsts?

They Banned Christmas:

Again, this comes down to a religious thing, not a hatred of presents and trees - keep in mind that the whole presents-and-trees paradigm of Christmas didn't really exist until the 19th century and Dickens' Christmas Carol, so what we're really talking about here is a conflict over religious holidays - so what people were complaining about was not going to church an extra day in the year. I don't get it, personally.

See, the thing is that Puritans were known for being extremely close Bible readers, and one of the things that you discover almost immediately if you even cursorily read the New Testament is that Christ was clearly not born on December 25th. Which meant that the whole December 25th thing was a false religious holiday, which is why they banned it.

The Puritans Were Democrats:

One thing that I don't think Puritans get enough credit for is that, at a time when pretty much the whole of European society was some form of monarchist, the Puritans were some of the few people out there who really committed themselves to democratic principles.

As I've already said, this process starts when John Liliburne, an activist and pamphleteer who promoted the concept of universal human rights (what he called "freeborn rights"), took up the anti-Laudian cause and it continued through the mobilization of large numbers of Puritans to campaign for election to the Long Parliament.

There, not only did the Puritans vote to revenge themselves on their old enemy William Laud, but they also took part in a gradual process of Parliamentary radicalization, starting with the impeachment of Strafford as the architect of arbitrary rule, the passage of the Triennal Acts, the re-statement that non-Parliamentary taxation was illegal, the Grand Remonstrance, and the Militia Ordinance.

Then over the course of the war, Puritans served with distinction in the Parliamentary army, especially and disproportionately in the New Model Army where they beat the living hell out of the aristocratic armies of Charles I, while defying both the expectations and active interference of the House of Lords.

At this point, I should mention that during this period the Puritans divided into two main factions - Presbyterians, who developed a close political and religious alliance with the Scottish Covenanters who had secured the Presbyterian Church in Scotland during the Bishops' Wars and who were quite interested in extending an established Presbyterian Church; and Independents, who advocated local congregationalism (sound familiar) and opposed the concept of established churches.

Finally, we have the coming together of the Independents of the New Model Army and the Leveller movement - during the war, John Liliburne had served with bravery and distinction at Edgehill and Marston Moore, and personally capturing Tickhill Castle without firing a shot. His fellow Leveller Thomas Rainsborough proved a decisive cavalry commander at Naseby, Leicester, the Western Campaign, and Langport, a gifted siege commander at Bridgwater, Bristol, Berkeley Castle, Oxford, and Worcester. Thus, when it came time to hold the Putney Debates, the Independent/Leveller bloc had both credibility within the New Model Army and the only political program out there. Their proposal:

redistricting of Parliament on the basis of equal population; i.e one man, one vote.

the election of a Parliament every two years.

freedom of conscience.

equality under the law.

In the context of the 17th century, this was dangerously radical stuff and it prompted Cromwell and Fairfax into paroxyms of fear that the propertied were in danger of being swamped by democratic enthusiasm - leading to the imprisonment of Lilburne and the other Leveller leaders and ultimately the violent suppression of the Leveller rank-and-file.

As for Cromwell, well - even the Quakers produced Richard Nixon.

#history #puritans #calvinism #english civil war #oliver cromwell #the stupid meme about christmas #new england #protestantism

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thatdogmagic · 5 months

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Disclaimer: I am a gentile, raised Evangelical. I know the Evangelical side of this very intimately, from direct experience or from listening to other ppl who fled the religion. None of what I'm about to say is questionable or weird to them. I also do not in any way support the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people and never will.

With that out of the way: the kind of violent antisemitism we're seeing expressed on various social media sites -- not just from Elon, but from 'well meaning' leftists - is what Christian Zionists are hoping for as part of their Rapture fanfiction. It's why they're pushing so hard to wed Zionism to Judiasm in US Congress (which in itself is an act of pretty violent antisemitism), when in reality, the majority of ppl who support Zionism are Christians.

Part of the Apocalypse is quite literally the world turning against Israel and the antichrist eradicating Jews. They see an opportunity here to usher it along, and always have. And yes it really is that cynical and straightforward. So good job if you fell for it: you're doing the fundies' work for them.

Israeli government =/= Jewish people as a whole Exactly like Hamas =/= Palestinians as a whole.

And even leaving aside the highly questionable practice of equating an entire diaspora of people to a single region or government: how many Americans reading this have quickly had to state 'he's not my President' about Trump when they're traveling overseas? And were quick to tell their international friends that they never supported Bush during the 9/11 era?

...Yeah, exactly.

Don't make assumptions about the Israeli people, much less Jewish folks who have never once even seen the place themselves. Wrt to my own demos: Americans, and the American left, of all people, ought to fucking know better. Shame on you.

Also PS there is no such thing as a 'Christian Jew.' Because anyone who says that is just a Christian. Period.

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brainrockets · 9 months

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Some of the Suvi critics out there are... something. I mean, I get it if you don't enjoy media because of unpleasantness. I very definitely avoided Succession because it squicked me deeply.

So if Suvi squicks ya out. Like sure fine. But some of the interpretations of Suvi being irredeemable or 'not showing signs' that she might be 'redeemable' are just weird? To me?

I mean. I also was raised in one of the cristofascist American evangelical death cults and had to deprogram and unlearn a lot in my 20s and have done a lot of work to be in a healthy space now so... maybe I just have sympathy for being 20 and just suddenly seeing cracks appear in the way you understand yourself and the world around you?

One thing people seem real perturbed by is Suvi's behavior towards Ame (and Ame's seeming lack of correction of that behavior).

And I think there are a few things at play here.

1. Suvi was raised in a highly ordered hierarchy as a soldier from early childhood.

2. Ame is a witch of the heart and has been handling all manner of village nonsense and nonsense people for years.

3. Suvi has not had ANY sort of psychological safety or release since maybe the Cottage. She is more afraid of Steel than Orima.

4. Ame is worried about Suvi. Worried about the way she killed without trouble. The way she's not allowed herself to express feelings for the most part other than anger.

5. When you have a lot of feelings and no safe way to let them out. They still come out. Usually inappropriately. Often paradoxically they get vented on people you feel safe with. Not to say that's acceptable or good but it is pretty normal?

6. Paradoxically, while Ame is safe to be mad at, perhaps subconsciously, Suvi also views Ame as a threat. And she's not wrong. Ame is a huge threat to her. Ame threatens to upend everything that Suvi believes about herself, about magic, about her world. She also plays by different rules and has actively exposed Suvi to risk by divulging things Suvi wanted to keep private. (Not with malice but definitely flagrantly flouting basic rules because she doesn't know they exist.) She also is a threat to the defenses Suvi has built around herself in the wake of her parents' deaths. The way that she has used the notion of the Citadel's correctness as a shield against the pain of loss.

7. I think Ame has dealt with wounded animals and wounded people fairly regularly in her role as apprentice. I think that Ame knows that wounded creatures snap at someone even if they are trying to help. Snapping back at her isn't maybe the move right now. And she has expressed dissent, she's not leaving her nonsense totally alone. She's just carefully cutting away little pieces of net and tutting at her raging and getting a little closer each time. And when Suvi finally lets herself cry instead of rage, Ame reacts with the same patient care she'd use with an injured animal.

8. Also, i do think people are missing Suvi's actions behind her words. Particularly vis a vis redeemable qualities. She does talk mad shit and she says some truly terrible things. But her actions are in conflict with her words. She abandoned her training and her responsibility to help Ame break her curse. He outfitted her friends from the armory and rented out a whole floor of an inn just to be kind. She's kept silent on Honored Friends the entire time she's been at the Citadel. Steel told her to stay and wait but she ran after Ame anyways. She was making a lot of threats but now that Eursulon has promised to free the Great Spirit her only issue with helping do it is that Steel might kill her first. She is ready to throw down for her friends with extreme prejudice.

She's at a crossroads. I find it very hopeful. But like again, I relate pretty heavily to being young and afraid and angry as the world opens up before you and everything you thought you knew is wrong and harming people. Knowing there's a chasm and on one side is your family and your community and on the other side is the unknown and your friends.

#long post #wbn pod #suvi #worlds beyond number #aabria iyengar

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qqueenofhades · 2 years

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I'm seeing a lot of leftists complain about Biden not being able to do anything and how Republican presidents were able to write executive orders for seemingly whatever they wanted, and I got confused. So i wanted to ask: why does it seem like Republicans can pass whatever they want whenever they want but Democrats can't?

Welp. This is, yet again, another Online Leftist "argument" that isn't correct, doesn't give an accurate view of the situation, and doesn't propose any helpful alternatives. I know that the Republicans can often feel like an overwhelming and unstoppable evil machine, but the truth is that despite the chaos and damage of Trump's four years to American democratic society and sociopolitical norms, he didn't actually pass much legislation -- even with a compliant Republican-controlled Congress from 2016-18. The Republicans didn't even succeed in legislatively repealing the ACA, despite trying zillions of times to do it, and mostly just passed tax cuts for rich people and other bad economic policy, since they could do it with budget reconciliation (the same process that Democrats used to pass the American Rescue Plan with only 50 votes in the Senate and no Republican support). Because budget/financial legislation isn't subject to the filibuster, the Republicans could pass it with the same simple-majority vote. But they didn't really succeed in doing much else.

Next, Trump's most onerous and infamous executive orders -- withdrawing from WHO and the Paris Agreement, the "Muslim Ban," etc etc -- were all in the list of things that Biden reversed on his first day in office. This is why, as myself and others have said, policy based solely on executive orders is never a long-lasting or ideal way to do something, since it's subject to instant repeal if an administration with different ideological priorities happens to succeed you. Besides, this whole "Biden should just executive order everything!!!" demand basically means that he should just... be Trump and try to exercise the presidency like a king? Online Leftists have no patience for or interest in the American democratic legislative process any more than the fascist wingnuts, and while I get the desire for a quick solution, that's still not going to be a magical panacea that fixes everything. It's not an excuse or an escape from having to put in the work.

Right now, Democratic control of Congress is slender and very contingent on whether Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema feel like supporting something in the Senate, and as long as they won't budge on reforming the filibuster, that means Democrats are likewise limited in what they can do from a legislative perspective. It's unfortunate that people deliberately don't understand that there's a huge difference between 60 Democratic senators and 50 Democratic senators, but there is, and since the Obama-era 59/60 Democratic Senate included seats in red states that a Democrat will never win again in the post-Trump era, it's always going to be a matter of very thin margins and major wrangling. None of this is to say that the Democrats shouldn't be doing more; obviously, they should, and I was sharply critical of Biden's initial response to the Roe overturn. Everything I have seen since has confirmed my opinion that the administration wasn't prepared, might not have thought it would really happen even after the draft leaked, and were wary of taking too "drastic" steps or openly trying to overrule the Supreme Court. This results from, as I have said before, Biden's over-reliance on his outdated belief that American democratic institutions will function more or less properly, even if they're currently staffed and controlled by terrible anti-democrat fascist evangelical nutcases. And that is... just not true, unfortunately.

That said, Biden has picked up the pace in recent days: he issued an executive order to maintain abortion access insofar as possible, the Department of Health and Human Services issued guidance that any federally funded hospital must provide a life-saving abortion regardless of state laws, Democrats in the Senate are trying to pass legislation preserving the right to travel out of state for care, and there is talk of Biden declaring a federal public health emergency, which would likewise preserve access at least in the life-threatening cases. None of this happened in the first weeks after the overturn, and I'm glad to see it happening now, even if there are still more steps to be taken. But as I have explained many, many times, an executive order does not magically work everything out and fix it immediately. It directs the relevant federal departments to come up with and implement a solution, and that still takes time and effort. And as I said, it is the least durable and most easily overturned form of policymaking, and should not be the option of first resort for any number of reasons.

The current leftist demand just seems to be "issue an executive order that instantly fixes everything and makes SCOTUS irrelevant so we don't have to feel any guilt about not voting for Clinton and laughing off everyone who warned us that this was going to happen." And that, likewise, is totally unrealistic. Biden can take concrete steps with his executive authority to ameliorate the situation to some degree; he has done some already, and hopefully will be pushed into more. But there is no way to simply remove SCOTUS as a major political piece, or make its decisions irrelevant, or wave our hand and pretend it doesn't exist. There are still obviously far more barriers to abortion care and access than there were while Roe was the law of the land, and that was the direct and intended result of them overturning it. That is not going to disappear.

Anyway. The claim that "Republicans can always do whatever they want and Democrats can't because they just don't try" is not true. As noted, the Republicans didn't actually do that much during Trump's time in office, and all their major victories now are coming as a result of the Republican-hijacked SCOTUS handing down decisions that are not easy to reverse, challenge, or otherwise get around. This is exactly why the Republicans played the long game with the direct goal being to capture the judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, and why Democrats need to expand or significantly reform it if any of us plan on having any civil rights again in our lifetimes. But to do that, we need to get an actual working majority in the Senate, hold the House, and then keep the pressure up for the promised filibuster reform and subsequent legislation to actually get done. I know that pointing out that things take time and have concrete steps that need to be accomplished in a certain order isn't as satisfying or pithy as "just do it all now and stop making excuses!!!", but it is, alas, still the case.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts

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trekwiz · 4 months

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It strikes me that there are 2 different (modern) Israels, and in the US and Europe, we're only really taught about one of them.

You might know this one: in 1947, the UN adopted a partition plan to create Israel. This was intended as reparations for the holocaust--but mysteriously, would not be comprised of land from the perpetrators, the Axis powers. Wikipedia has a good primer:

Here's the important thing to know: that Israel doesn't exist. The plan was never implemented. It would have required that Palestinians give up the majority of their land to create a new country, despite having an overwhelming majority of the population in the territory. Mass theft and expulsion was not reasonable. Palestinians boycotted the talks. Ultimately this country never came into existence; a massive terrorist attack left it moot.

There's a second Israel that has its origins in the 1840's. British Evangelical Christians came up with the idea that Jewish people should be shipped off to Palestine to bring about the second coming. Yes, it's as antisemitic as it sounds. You can read a primer on Wikipedia here:

In 1914, the British promised to liberate Palestine and return it to Palestinian rule in return for military support against the Ottomans. They didn't uphold their end of the deal (no surprise), and opted to manufacture a conflict: in 1917, they promised to create a Jewish homeland, and encouraged Zionist immigration specifically, to strengthen their "peacekeeping" claim to the territory. (Differentiation: Zionists are those who specifically support a Jewish ethnostate on Palestinian territory; one does not have to be Jewish to be a Zionist, and not all Jews are Zionist.)

In 1936, the Palestinians fought back against the British, who still hadn't kept their promise to free Palestine. Unlike the American revolution, Palestinians lost. If you're starting to think this sounds a lot like how Britain treated India, you're not far off.

In 1938, Britain decided to take steps to honor its promise to free Palestine. This spurred escalations from multiple Zionist terrorist organizations: comprised of foreigners who believed they had a greater right to the land than the locals, Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi coordinated against the British and Palestinians.

Haganah formed earlier, in the 1920s, and originally worked with the British to prevent Palestinian liberation. They were eventually armed by Poland.

Irgun was an internationally recognized (including by the US) terrorist organization. They're known for a particularly heinous bombing:

They worked with Haganah to plan it, and you may recognize a specific tactic they used: a phone call to "warn" their victims in advance.

They formed because they believed armed force should be used to prevent Palestinian freedom, and allow Zionists to secure a future country. Their whole cause for existence was to suppress Arabs and make them compliant.

They explicitly believed that terrorism was a necessary tactic to steal Palestinian land for their own benefit.

Lehi is an offshoot of Irgun that described itself as a terrorist organization. It's important to understand that this organization also explicitly wanted to ally itself with Axis powers, specifically Nazi Germany and Italy. Their goal was to create a totalitarian Jewish ethnostate that would operate by the same values that Nazis held.

This all came to a head in 1948. Britain basically said, "fuck it, we created this mess, but we're not going to fix it." They pulled out of Palestine, without making good on their promise to free it.

The Zionist terrorist organizations banded together for one large terrorist attack after the British left: they massacred Palestinians in multiple hundreds of villages and forced them out of the territory--including the use of bio-terrorism to ensure they wouldn't return:

In the aftermath, these terrorist organizations decided to cosplay as a country, now going by the name Israel. Under this new name, these organizations worked together to destroy evidence of their 1948 terrorist attacks.

It's worth mentioning as well, that Israel continues to honor its component terrorist organizations; it still has a military service ribbon named for Lehi--the organization that literally wanted to pal around with Hitler.

Despite the merger and name change, these terrorist organizations have never ceased their violent attacks against the Palestinian people. They regularly escalate the ongoing ethnic cleansing any time they can create an excuse. They were slaughtering Palestinians on a regular basis, even before Israel's October 7 escalation.

Palestine remains oppressed by a terrorist entity that US and European governments are funding and arming.

The only reason you haven't heard about this Israel is because the US government has a vested interest in propaganda that portrays them as a legitimate country: they serve as a military presence for us in the mid-east.

You already know why our government lied about WMDs as a pretext for war against Iraq and Afghanistan; it shouldn't be a surprise that our government has the same motivation for maintaining ties with a terrorist organization operating in the same region, seemingly tied to our interests.

Americans and Europeans: you should be questioning this propaganda and advocating for the Palestinian victims of genocide: your tax dollars are funding terrorism. When you decide "it's too complicated, I don't know enough to have an opinion" or "both sides engage in violence so I'll just equivocate", then you're helping to normalize these atrocities. You're making it easier to spread propaganda in favor of arming and funding Israeli terrorism.

You should speak up in favor of a one state solution, led by Palestinians. The history of these Zionist terrorist organizations makes it clear that this is the only way for there to be justice. The leaders of the Zionist entity should be brought to trial, and Israel permanently disbanded.

#Israel

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dawningfairytale · 7 months

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hi here's my thinkpiece on the religiosity of grace chasity (also op is a christian no clowning in the notes) :)

so she's pretty clearly a critique on christianity, specifically american evangelical christianity. that's because that one's got a lot of purity culture fuckery. she lives in a no-moan household. she wears swimmers to the bathtub. i say evangelicalism not catholicism because of the exchange with detective shapiro.

and her purity is what she finds most valuable about herself. and, i would argue that that and swearing are the most christian* things she adheres to. when she finds herself accidentally masturbating (good on her for finding her spot immediately tbh), she wants to do anything to get rid of it. she thinks kissing and carrying books is sinful (there is nothing in the Bible about this). but she's fine when she commits manslaughter (which the Bible doesn't like super vibe with). and that is the biggest problem with american evangelicalism. that sexual immorality** and doing secular things (swearing, non-christian music) are the worst sins you could ever commit. she loves power, and i've found that evangelicals in my country (australia) have a similarly hell-focused theology to grace (her disregarding catholicism, "she's bisexual and dead where else would she be").

so let's talk about the climax (pun intended) of the musical, which simultaneously shows grace in the best light of the whole show and how the church didn’t help her in her faith. let’s start with the positive: grace giving up what means the most to her so neither of her friends have to die. it’s the most wwjd moment she has in the whole show, sacrificing herself for, if you’ll excuse the ocean-ism, the Betterment of Humanity. however, she gives up her chastity. not her faith, or her relationship with God, or church attendance, or her love for humanity. that last one isn’t really in line with grace’s character, and that’s exactly my point. all these things should be valued over her virginity. but they aren’t, because the us evangelical church is really obsessed with (their definition of) sexual morality. i say this as someone who is allosexual (not het but) and intends to wait until marriage to have sex because of my christian faith.

the finale is also telling. she revels in her power, because i think you’ve seen church leaders who manipulate and hurt. there continues to be an emphasis on her prudence.

now, not to hijack my religious analysis post with my religious agenda but, i feel bad for her. i’m not going to say everything about us evangelicalism is wrong, i like nuance, and for the same reason i’m not even going to say that about their sexual ethics. i do disagree with some interpretations (mainly the queer stuff), but i do believe any christian has the right to interpret the Bible to the best of their abilities and act accordingly. i’ll never say “you’re going to hell for your interpretation of the Bible” (with one major and irrelevant exception). i am fine with christians following the sexual ethics they feel are right/called to.

the issue is, grace, in her environment, hasn’t had the opportunity to do that work for herself. she hasn’t been able to flourish in her faith in any regard because she’s been encouraged (considering what i’ve gleaned, birth) to focus on virginity and not even think sexually about someone else. that hatred is fine but sex will send you straight to hell. and like. the Bible says sexual sin is a big bad (i personally interpret that to be things like rape, incest, and paedophilia), but it also says the greatest commands are to love God and love your neighbour. those can be difficult when you’ve been taught to look elsewhere from your faith community

basically i want to give grace a deconstruction arc so she can be a happy healthy murdering christian :)

#npmd #npmd spoilers #nerdy prudes must die #grace chasity

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spurgie-cousin · 7 months

Text

if you've watched TV in the last 3 years you've probably seen ads for a non-profit organization called "He Gets Us". their ads, their website, all of their media claims they are not affiliated with any church or left/right political agenda, they're just out to promote the unconditional love of Jesus, appeal to the younger gens, yadda yadda yadda whatever.

But if you have any experience with American evangelical organizations like I do, you know they're notorious for this kind of baiting with unconditional love and acceptance only to push their agenda once they got their hooks in you so while I've always been suspish, I never cared enough to look into it until today and LOOK who is the biggest donor to this supposedly non-political organization:

HOBBY LOBBY???

you mean "we are the most shoplifter friendly store in America bc we think barcodes are the work of the devil" hobby lobby??? You mean the loudly anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ organization Hobby Lobby??? When I tell you I yelled......

And it would be just par for the evangelical course if this group's WHOLE THING wasn't supposed unconditional love and comminity, but they're being funded by one of the most politically hateful organizations in this country i just..........

It's ALWAYS political, being evangelical Christian is INHERENTLY political, and it's so fucking ironic bc Jesus Christ was supposed to be opposite and HE'S THE BASIS for their ENTIRE religion like...... just imagine fucking up such a simple concept, unconditional love for all people, so bad.

Also fuck hobby lobby SO goddamn much.

#sorry to go all Jill R with the caps but i am so mad lol #i was ranting to my husband and the look on his face was pure fear #he gets us #religion #evangelicism

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