infamousbrad

[infamousbrad]

I can count on the thumbs of both hands all of the phlebotomists who have shown themselves able to draw blood from me without leaving me in pain for days.

The average phlebotomist needs 5-7 sticks to draw from my elbow. (The record so far is 13. I made him stop and fetch a fresh phlebotomist instead of letting him try the fourteenth time.)

Most phlebotomists can draw from the back of my left hand in 2-3 sticks. (The record so far is 5.)

But either one leaves the arm, or at least the hand, unusable for at least a day.

I don't know what was special about the only two who were able to draw from my elbow in one stick, but until the schools replicate more of them, I'm not a blood donor.

(I did notice a couple of details, though. Neither one had their eyes open, they worked entirely by touch, and both of them probed with their fingers for a long time before the stick.)

Why don't you donate blood?

- I can't for medical reasons (eg, illness, disability, etc)

- I can't for lifestyle reasons (eg, piercings, frequent travel, tattoos, etc)

- I can't for stupid reasons (eg, gay sex, mad cow risks, etc)

- I can't for logistical reasons (eg, can't get to a donation centre)

- I can't for phobia reasons (eg needles, hospitals, etc)

- I can't for religious reasons

- I can't for some other reason

- I can't for multiple of these reasons

- there's nothing physically stopping me, I just never thought to do it (do it!!)

- there's nothing physically stopping me, I just don't want to (why not? It's a great way to help others)

- I actually do donate blood

[infamousbrad]

How very depressing that Neil Gaiman had trended not even a tiny bit for demonstrating what a fucking horrific person he is.

As a reminder, he's suing Caroline Wallner, one of his accusers, for breaking her NDA. Not for libel. He's saying she shouldn't have told anyone about it, not that she lied.

He doesn't need the money. He's risking the Streisand effect. He is punishing Caroline, he's trying to intimidate other victims who have signed NDAs to scare them into continued silence.

He is no friend to women, to the LGBTQIA+ community, to anyone quite frankly unless he thinks they are of value to him.

Share the story. Put it on Facebook and bluesky and whatever else you're on. Make it clear what a horrifying person he is. Tell your friends. He's paying Edendale a fortune to try and cover this up. Make this hard for him. Make it cost him money.

[infamousbrad]

Honestly, no.

Because honestly, it's hard as hell to find even two people in the same area who agree on what part of Hellenism they want to reconstruct, let alone what it would look like in the modern era.

Because we have two to three thousand years of "organized religion" that people take for granted and assume that converting that to Hellenism is just a matter of swapping the proper nouns.

Because the primary source material that survives is mostly shit, for that matter. Very little got written down and much of that by anti-Hellenic philosophers and much of what did get written down, about actual religious practice, was thrown away or actively burned during and right after Emperor Constantine's campaign of Christianization.

I'm honestly seriously disillusioned about this.

The two best sources we have, in my opinion, aren't by reconstructionists or revivalists, they're by historians who aren't even trying to ask "how would it be if it were still here?" but "how was it, back then?" Read Walter Burkert's Greek Religion and Jon Mikalson's Athenian Popular Religion first. Observe that people in the Hellenic period weren't interacting with "religion" at all, and certainly not in the way that we do. Then decide for yourself what, if any of that, is applicable to the world we live in. And if you can find a dozen other people in your town who agree with you, try that.

hello :) not sure if you'll ever see this or respond in time but why not I'm having some issues finding reputable sources on modern Hellenism and reconstructionist Greco-Roman religions for my university work! Not nessecarily academic sources but stuff that someone might normally come across to get an understanding of it.

Thanks :)

Accurate sources on Modern reconstructionist Hellenism? That's a tricky one. If you have access to a university database, I'd start with Antoine Faivre's work on the new age and the reconstructionist movements for background. But if you're looking for current stuff youre probably gonna end up interviewing people.

[infamousbrad]

In the ”Everything happens twice: once as tragedy, once as farce” dep’t…

[infamousbrad]

What do you say to the person who's "just asking" if maybe you should bring a gun to a left-leaning protest?

"No thank you, officer."

(Doubly so if he offers to hook you up with someone who'll arm you for cheap. Triply so if he offers to be your ride.)

In various online forum threads, on multiple platforms, I'm seeing people with suspiciously new social media profiles "just asking" if "we" should engage in "2nd amendment activities" at this Saturday's protest marches, or any future anti-Trump protests.

Agitprop.

And, look, on the off chance anybody thinks they might be giving good advice, anybody thinks it's time to play hero, fire the guns, sound the revolution?

I've been reading and studying histories of revolutions since the Nixon administration, and if there's anything I'm sure of it's this: until you know that the army is on your side or at least that it will remain in barracks, it is not time to call the revolution. Nobody has ever won a revolution where the army sided with the regime.

On the other hand, sufficiently large peaceful protests stand a very, very good chance of convincing Republicans (other than the die-hard MAGA) that if they continue placating Trump, they'll lose way more of their seats than they can afford in the '26 mid-terms. It's what convinced Republicans in the House and Senate they would need to vote for Nixon's impeachment, and it's still our best chance now. At our current rate of attendance growth, we'll be there before Memorial Day. Like the Man in Black sang ...

"Don't take your guns to town, son. Leave your guns at home, son. Don't take your guns to town."

[infamousbrad]

Some interesting stuff about Joe Rigney, the guy who coined the term "the sin of empathy:

Rigney has been the leading evangelizer against what he calls the “sin of empathy” since 2019, when he first aired his views on a video series hosted by the far-right Christian nationalist pastor Douglas Wilson. ... Rigney’s book The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits was released in February by Canon Press, a publishing house founded by Wilson and best known for releasing – and then withdrawing over allegations of plagiarism – Wilson’s co-authored apologia for the antebellum south that characterized slavery as “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence”. Rigney’s argument is that empathy can be sinful if it is “untethered” to biblical truth on issues such as homosexuality and gender. ... Women are more empathetic than men, which is why God does not allow them to be ordained, Rigney argues. 

[infamousbrad]

Apparently Black Lives Don't Matter to Progressives Any More, Either

There's a thing that most non-St. Louisans (and quite a few St. Louisans) missed about the Ferguson Uprising: every middle aged or elderly black politician or pastor in the greater St. Louis area, except for one, sided with the police. Here, Black Lives Matter was a movement of young black democratic socialists who had trained in activism by the remnants of the Bernie Sanders campaign.

And I'm told that in the wake of the Ferguson uprising, that mixed-race democratic socialist alliance saw an opportunity, a common cause they could use to reach out to the embittered middle aged and elderly white feminist remnants of the H. Clinton campaign. Leaders from those factions agreed to meet and hammered out the rules of engagement for a new, enlarged progressive caucus.

Because the feminists have a long, long history of being betrayed by the Democratic Party, they insisted that rule one be that in any competition within the party for a position, if the last two candidates were an equally qualified man and a woman, the whole coalition would endorse the woman. And because black voters have a long history of being betrayed by white progressives, they also all agreed that if it came down to two equally qualified women, one white and one black, the whole caucus would endorse the black woman.

That's how the progressives built a St. Louis alliance that swept the old right-wing Democrats from the majority of the levers of power in the city and the surrounding suburbs, electing, among others, a black woman mayor and a black woman treasurer in the city.

Both of whom just lost, by wide margins, to liberal white women with no significantly better qualifications.

And I know that there was more going on than race, but not enough more to explain the huge margins without concluding that the black/female/progressive alliance is dead. Progressivism is now a whites-only movement in St. Louis again, so kiss any future wins bye-bye.

Because after this betrayal, it's safe to say that the elderly black conservative Democrats from the same 5-6 families who've run the north side since 1964 will take over the north side again, will go back to allying with upper-middle-class white conservative Democrats and once again take over the city. I know Cara Spencer's a reliable progressive, but she'll be the last progressive winner in this town for a generation.

I could be wrong. But I'm pretty certain.

[infamousbrad]

ive said it before and i'll say it again but carrying a weapon does not make you safer, it gives the person assaulting you a free weapon. i know we live in a time where fear is profitable and the cute pink stun guns make feminism sexy but they do not work like you think they do.

there is an extremely slim chance you will be able to deploy the pepper spray/taser/gun in a way that does not harm you at all. pepper spray blows back, guns miss, tasers slip. there is a much much larger chance things go poorly and you end up getting hurt worse than originally intended because now your assailant is pissed and more heavily armed.

im not talking out my ass here, i'm a case manager at a homeless shelter for addicts. we have a lot of violent behavior. none of our staff carry any sort of weapons. we are trained to de-escalate or remove ourselves from the situation. i have worked there over two years without being harmed despite intervening in many fights and having weapons pulled on me.

there is safety in numbers. there is safety in well lit streets and staying on your phone and knowing when to scream and run. there is no safety in "personal defense items".

[infamousbrad]

[infamousbrad]

To be fair, the rest of the South says the same thing about Atlanta. (Garreau 1991)

wait i'm curious

[infamousbrad]

if the usamerican civil war was happening now instead of the 1800s you would see posts on here like "im literally disabled and i need a slave to function"

[infamousbrad]

"Long, dull, and full of Nazis."

After putting it off for a couple of weeks, I finally got around to watching Bob Fosse's 1973 movie Cabaret last night. I didn't get out of it what I was hoping for.

(No spoilers but, aside from why I was watching it, I found it very frustrating just as a movie. There's a much better movie trying to claw its way out from under Bob Fosse's direction. There are people who poured their bodies and souls into trying to save this movie, and Liza Minnelli wasn't even the first one that comes to mind. The camera work is amazing and nobody prepared me for just how good Michael York is in this.)

Our current moment reminds me of a thing that's happened at least five times in my life that I remember off-hand when, as an amateur historian and hard-core journalism addict, I've seen disasters coming. All of those times I was able to persuade some people that the disaster was coming, and most of them I was able to use that to get at least a few people to relative safety. But ...

Imagine seeing someone's car stuck, bottomed out on a railroad track, seeing the train coming, screaming at them to get out of the car and start running in a diagonal direction towards the train, to escape the about-to-be flying debris. Now imagine them saying that they're confident that the train is going to stop on time, and they're not willing to give up on their car just yet.

I have variations on this nightmare two out of every three nights, on average. It's not always a train, but the common element is innocent people dying, or at least losing everything and having their lives ruined, because I couldn't get the right people to listen to me, because I wasn't persuasive enough.

The Satanic Panic felt just like this when it was just ramping up. AIDS felt just like this, in spades, in the couple of years between when the CDC announced that they'd noticed it and when the mass die-offs began. The runup to the Iraq War felt a lot like this. The nearly a year between the first spike in subprime mortgage default rates and the worst of the '08 financial crisis felt very, very much like this, and so did covid-19 in the four months between when it first made the news and when the mass die-offs reached the US.

All times that I saw it coming, couldn't stop it, barely managed to get a few of my most vulnerable friends to relative safety. But all times when the months between when I knew for a fact that a disaster was going to happen and when it started happening were excruciating. Cassandra's curse. The Sword of Damocles without even a throne to show for it.

I got around to watching Cabaret despite its (arguably justifiable) reputation among my friends-group as a terrible movie. (As an old friend of mine used to say, "Life is a cabaret old chum: long, dull, and full of Nazis.") I decided to finally see it myself because I wanted help processing and moving past this feeling of knowing that we're in for it now, long past preventing it. Of knowing that some people should be running, not waiting around, but they're not. Of knowing that most of us, but not all, are going to outlast this, survive to grieve the ones who don't. Help starting again to live a life with some sanity-preserving happiness between now and when it passes, so that at least some of us who survive in body also survive in soul, having made some good memories to lighten the deadening rage.

I didn't get that out of watching Cabaret. Shame. I could really use it. 'Cause I'm way too old to be going through this for a sixth time, I don't feel like I've still got it in me.

[infamousbrad]

I tap the mic. “Most people don’t want to crawl down your chimney and steal your dog.”

the crowd murmurs uncertainly.

“If someone wants to steal your dog,” I continue, “there are easier ways to do that. They don’t have to crawl into a chimney.”

Murmuring intensifies. People stand in their seats and begin to boo.

“People disguising themselves as chimney sweepers and stealing dogs is not a rational fear,” I shout. “Literally anyone could steal your dog. Why make sweeping chimneys illegal?”

“I have a list of chimney sweeps who stole dogs from parks!” Someone yells, throwing a shoe.

“You seriously think no chimney sweepers could possibly ever steal from a home?” Another cries.

“Only a dog thief would even want to crawl into a chimney to begin with!” Says a third.

A single tear rolls down my cheek. They are all so fucking stupid

This is a metaphor

[infamousbrad]

"I do not believe it is born in you! I do not believe it!"

"It's not born in you. It happens after you're born. ...

"You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear, / You’ve got to be taught from year to year, / It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear— / You’ve got to be carefully taught!

"You’ve got to be taught to be afraid / Of people whose eyes are oddly made, / And people whose skin is a different shade— / You’ve got to be carefully taught.

"You’ve got to be taught! before it’s too late! / Before you are six! or seven! or eight, / To hate all the people your relatives hate— / You’ve got to be carefully taught! / You’ve got to be carefully taught!"

"You've Got To Be Carefully Taught" - SOUTH PACIFIC (1958)

The children are our future if only the haters don't get to them first. If only we can keep them from being emotionally hardened, emotionally calloused.

watching children successfully and compassionately self-mediate conflict and wondering if it's possible to pinpoint where exactly it all goes wrong for us

[infamousbrad]

Consider this another preview for the essay I'm currently half-working on.

companies make billions from you thinking you're ugly btw. only ugly thing is their bottom line. log out of tiktok right now.

[infamousbrad]

Y'know who else had an American auto industry CEO helping prop him up?

So maybe people are doing now what they wish their predecessors had done to Henry Ford after he published The International Jew and the English-language translation of The Protocols of Zion, what should have happened to Henry Ford when he was building weapons for Hitler.

People resisting the new America First movement are going to lengths their predecessors didn't go to when they were resisting the original treasonous, racist, fascist America First movement? Good. Because maybe the people resisting Henry Ford and his allies could have stopped World War II sooner, even averted the worst of the Holocaust, if they'd gone at Ford, and the rest of the Hitler-payrolled traitors, the way today's anti-fascist activists are going at Musk and the rest of the Putin-payrolled traitors today.

There were Americans taking right-wing racist authoritarianism seriously in the 1930s. They helped stop Hitler's agents from dragging America into the war on the Nazi side, and we should be proud of them. But the most important thing we need to learn from their work is that we need to go harder. No America First leader should sleep a single quiet night.

[infamousbrad]

Other people making the point I'm going to get around to in (if I stay on schedule) my #pornotopia post after next. "I didn't consent to see that"? I don't consent to seeing lifted pickup trucks or advertisements; learn to cope.