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robbyrobinson · 5 years

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Favorite Monsters and Cryptids

1) Black-Eyed Children: What these beings are no one knows. Some cite them as being demons or vampires who require permission to be allowed in. Some say they're alien-human hybrids or tulpas (thought beings). Even interdimensional entities or the ghosts of deceased children. They are described as either wearing old-timey clothing or dark-colored hoodies. They have extremely pale, oftentimes peachy skin tones and speak in a monotonous, adult-like fashion. They approach their target's home or car to knock or their door or window saying that they needed to get in because of bizarre reasons. If they are further denied entry, they become increasingly enraged and reveal their dark, turquoise eyes. In some cases, the witness almost considers opening the door...at least until they catch a glimpse of their eyes.

2) Mothman: A large, red-eyed creature that was described as stalking Point Pleasant from 1966-1967 in West Virginia. Typical descriptions depict the Mothman as bat-like in appearance that had a deafening screech. On December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge collapsed killing 46 civilians. Strangely enough, Mothman seemingly disappeared after the tragedy, many believing that the Mothman was a harbinger of the bad omen.

3) Reptilians: Crazy conspiracy theory aside, Reptilians are shapeshifting extraterrestrials said to hail from the Alpha Draconis star system. David Icke, in particular, believes that they infiltrated the Earth to take over each of the world's governing bodies. Some also say that they terrorize humanity because they feed on negative emotions and what better way than to stoke the flames of anger and fearmongering than with propaganda?

4) Shadow People: Ever thing you catch something moving from the corner of your eye? Shadow People are believed to be different things ranging from guardian angels; demons; interdimensional beings, etc. The Hatman is often considered to be the leader of the Shadow People and is considered as being the most dangerous out of his wicked kind, but many say that he is an entirely different being.

5) Kuchisake-Onna: A Japanese urban legend, it is said that Kuchisake was once a beautiful woman married to a samurai. When the samurai felt that she was being unfaithful, he cut her mouth and killed her. Since then, she had become a vengeful spirit wearing a trench coat with a surgical mask. Carrying a pair of scissors, if she approaches a victim, she would ask them if they thought she was pretty. If they say no, she kills them. If yes, she would remove her mask to reveal her Glasgow grin and asks the question again. If the victim said yes again, she would make their mouth like hers.

6) Teke Teke: Another ghost from Japanese folklore, Teke Teke was a woman or schoolgirl who was bisected by a train. One take of the legends have her ask her victims if they knew where her legs were. If they said no, she would rip their legs off. Another variation has Teke Teke go after the listener if they heard the story.

7) Eight Foot Tall: A demon disguising itself as an 8-ft tall woman wearing a sundress and straw hat. She targets children and is recognizable by her demonic droning.

8) Machine Elves: They are extradimensional entities often described as being sighted by those taking DMT. They claim to be the architects of different planes of existence but have unstable forms that continually contort. Everything happens at a fast pace in their world with all of them having high-pitched voices.

9) Greys: The stock character many think of when the possibility of extraterrestrial life is speculated. They are buglike in depiction with almond-shaped black eyes. Some say they were created by the reptilians as a slave race that deflected. They are commonly associated with alien abductions.

10) Butterfly People of Joplin: In 2011, a devastating tornado hit Joplin, Missouri that killed several people. But from the disaster, many children claimed that they experienced winged beings that saved them by holding back falling debris with their wings. One boy was found miles away in a field claiming that the Butterfly People wrapped him in it to smoothen his fall.

11) Chupacabra: Later takes of the cryptid posit the creature as being more canine in its features. They are accredited to draining the blood from livestock such as goats.

12) Jersey Devil: its origin story is really unique. The story goes that when a mother of 12 kids was due to have a 13th, she in annoyance, prayed for that child to be a devil. The baby is born and appears to be relatively normal. But then it, of course, transforms into a horrible abomination, escaping into the woods.

13) Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman: Bigfoot or the Sasquatch is an ape-like, humanoid creature believed to have been sighted in several parts of North America. Some believe that the Sasquatch is either an ancient ape species that had escaped extinction, or some even assume that Bigfoot is the missing link that researchers have been searching for. The Abominable Snowman is similar to Sasquatch in some fashion, the exception being that the creature was sighted in the mountains of the Himalayas. There have been some samples of hair believed to have been those of a Yeti's that were analyzed to be the fur of an extinct species of bear from the time of the ice age.

14) Mongolian Death Worm: In the Gobi Desert, there is believed to be a large species of worm that is said to have lethal venom that could kill anyone who even slightly touched the creature. It can even generate electricity. The worm was also known to hunt camels, and would then lay its eggs in the intestines.

15) The Loch Ness Monster: Probably one of the most famous examples of a cryptid in cryptozoology. Believed to be an ancient creature such as a plesiosaur, the Loch Ness Monster, or Nessie, is believed to inhabit Loch Ness. Described as having a long neck, flippers, and endless humps, accounts of the creature date far back to the time of Saint Columbia. Interest in the creature continued until in the 1930s, an alleged photograph of the monster dubbed the Surgeon's Photograph goes down in history as one of the best cases for the existence of Nessie. Even though the photograph was a hoax, many others had given their accounts of the Loch Ness Monster through the use of sonar and photography.

16) Black Stick Men are what happens when you take drawings of simple stick figures and give them sentience. They are believed to be two-dimensional in appearance, and can even generate electrical discharges. Unlike with other paranormal entities, Black Stick Men are not connected to supernatural events. So, they just appear randomly for no real rhyme nor reason. They are believed to feed on negative emotions and their presence incites aggression and uneasiness.

17) Wendigo: In Native American myth, a Wendigo is born when a hapless human commits the act of cannibalism in desperation. As punishment, they are transformed into a monster with an insatiable hunger that would never be quenched. They don't have a corporal form, but they are often represented as antlered-humanoids.

18) Ningen: These are giant, aquatic humanoid entities that are commonly sighted in the waters of the Arctic. Some species are alleged to grow to great lengths.

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girlfriendsofthegalaxy · 4 years

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tuesday again 1/12/21

sometimes, one must retreat into a big pile of fictional settings. i didn’t do that this week but it’s the thought that counts

don’t want to keep up with the rest of my bullshit/want to be alerted specifically for tuesdayposts? follow @tuesday-again , where i will reblog each week’s post Once to archive it.

also i forgot to drop the 2021 tuesday again no problem playlist last week so here it is now if you want to follow along throughout the year

listening exoflash, by fever the ghost feat lealani. this is some dreamy-surreal alt electronica? alt electropop? i have significant hearing loss (TM) and so i think i am missing out on some of the melodies in the base bc i have lost that frequency range. like i can feel my headphones pulse but i can’t hear anything

do i know what the song is about? not a fuckin clue. do i like the mouthfeel of the lyrics? yes! rhyming intonation/incantation off each other charms me, bc i am a simple woman with simple tastes. there’s a very deliberate, enunciated delivery that i enjoy, again bc of the hearing loss. i do think some of the lyrics on genius are wrong (i hear “crown your enemies” in the first line instead of “prawn your enemies” for example) but i can’t really. back that up with anything

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reading y2k is back babey- this popular mechanics article is a good quick read of why a common fix back in ye olde 1999 is failing again. everything is a teetering pile of precariously balanced quick fixes relying on legacy code. i myself worked in COBOL more times than i want to think about in my undergrad career, often alongside the octogenarian profs who had written it. pop mech’s oral history of y2k is also extremely good.

the thing i came here to talk about is this autostraddle article on making a go-bag. it is more of a personal essay than a list of practical tips, but it does not fearmonger. this is the point of mutual aid: it is important it is to make sure the people and community around you are more resilient. mutual aid is not just running a cool decentralized thrift store so you can declutter, although that can be very helpful in many communities. if you are all better prepared for various flavors of disasters, your neighborhood or community or circle will come out of it better.

i’ve lived in hurricane zones almost my entire life, and i’ve had a go bag my entire life. i can see mine right now from my bed, i think they’re important things to have, and i would be happy to answer questions privately via ask or dm. the infographic above from the city of seattle is pretty decent- yours will probably be region-specific. new year, new check on all your safety measures. make sure your smoke alarm batteries and carbon monoxide batteries and go-bag are all topped up. test your fire extinguisher while you’re at it.

watching i was going to watch the first few eps of the new arsene lupin show on netflix and write a charming little thing about my personal history with detective stories, and then i had a less than ideal weekend. so i am making less work for myself and linking a food crime. i hate layered pasta dishes with a burning passion but i want to taste this. just to see. their faces at the end are SO good. thank u ms el-waylly

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playing one of the most exciting arcs of early january is my dear acquaintance @believerindaydreams becoming a fallout blog. now that i am relegated to an underpowered laptop while i wrangle getting my desktop fixed, i am back in new vegas bc it’s a ten-year-old game, it runs on fuckin anything. i had a truly bizarre configuration of mods on this thing we’ll see how well it plays with (checks notes) ignoring whatever the fuck i was doing in the main storyline and fucking around in Big MT.

making ending big things makes me anxious. and i am really nowhere near finishing this! i still have a lot of time left with it! at least an hour weaving in all the thread ends i didn’t bother with the first time around, some unknown dozens of hours backstitching various details and outlining the blue frame, and then the whole washing/pressing/framing rigamarole that (counting drying time) will take up a full day. i started this last summer, put it aside for weeks at a time, and it’s been with me in a very real way through a lot of bullshit.

part of the bad adhd brain is having difficulty forming and maintaining new routines- when i no longer have this to fall back on as part of my crafting routine i uhhhhh don’t really know what i’ll do. i don’t really have another Big Project lined up.

unlike knitting, where i find the act soothing and i knit as more of a process thing as opposed to an end-product thing, embroidery is very much a “i want the end product very badly” thing. and i can only have so much cross stitch displayed in my home. besides the smaller glitch version of this sampler, which is literally almost done and needs perhaps another hour of finishing before it gets washed/pressed/framed, i don’t have anything really on the docket. i want my own version of the “wretched hive” star wars sampler i made my sister, and i have a small pillow in the fun chromatic aberration font planned, but both of those have fewer complicated color changes and shifts and should stitch up fairly quickly.

i dunno. might go back to traditional embroidery for a bit- there’s an old project where i need to rip out a bunch of satin stitch and redo it in long-and-short BUT i also need to buy a whole bunch of new thread for that. might sew some more patches on my jacket for if i ever go outside again. i’m trying to get through the backlog of half-finished projects with shit i already have rather than ordering a bunch of shiny new things bc uhhh money.

#tuesday again #tuesday again no problem

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partytilfajr · 4 years

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Slms. I've seen some of the more fearmongering, conservative Ulema in my community put out posts saying that vaccines are haraam because they contain animal-derived ingredients (that are not necessarily halal). How do I respond to them from an Islamic pov? I know that preserving life is incredibly important in Islam and instinctively know that the vaccine ingredients won't matter because of that but what's the best argument to use? (PS: I'm not an anti-vaxxer)

Wa alykum as-salaam,

Well, Dar Al-Ifta Al-Missriyyah writes the following about vaccines:

“...vaccinations, which fall under preventive medicine, are encouraged by Islam.”

Now, about whether medicine is made out of something that is ritually impure or forbidden, the general Islamic rule is pretty basic.

Let’s say you have two different medicines, let’s say one has a ritually impure substance (Medicine A) and another does not have it (Medicine B); if Medicine A is 91% effective and Medicine B 90% effective, the Muslim should use Medicine A. If Medicine A and Medicine B are both 90% effective, then Medicine B should be used.

So, let’s go through some proof of this, yes? Again, I’ll be referring to Dar Al-Ifta Al-Missriyyah, who write that according to the Hanafis and the Shafi’is that it is “ permissible to take medicine made from ritually impure substances under the supervision of experts whenever pure ones are unavailable.”

Ibn Abidin citing various Hanafi scholars wrote: "It is permissible for an ill person to drink urine, blood or consume the meat of an unslaughtered dead animal for medication if a Muslim medical expert informs him that [the impure substance] is a cure and if a permissible substitute is unavailable. There are two opinions if the physician informs the patient that such a cure will hasten recovery."

Al-Khatib Ash-Shirbni wrote of the Shafi’i opinion: "It is permissible to take anti venom and the like mixed with alcohol which has become completely indistinguishable (such that no color, taste, or odor remains) if a cure made from pure substances is unavailable. Examples include medication with ritually impure substances such as snake meat and urine which are permissible even if for the purpose of hastening recovery. [This permissibility] rests upon the prescription of an upright Muslim physician or the patient's own knowledge of the [healing properties] of the impure substance."

Al-Haitimi wrote: "It is permissible to use alcohol (which has become completely indistinguishable) with medicine for medication similar to the permissibility of using ritually impure substances in their original form if the patient himself knows or is informed by an upright Muslim physician of the [healing] benefits of that particular substance and if a pure substitute is unavailable."

Dar Al-Ifta also write that this necessity can be extended to things as extreme as eating insects, where the Malikis are the one school which permits this. In this instance they cite Ibn al-Hajib, Ibn Rushd, and Abu al-Barakat Ahmed al-Dardir, who support the opinion that particularly when it comes for medical reasons that this is permissible. The rationale is because of "Istihala."

Istihala is when you transform a substance's properties which results in the removal of its impure nature. Once this transformation is complete, the substance no longer is designated as impure.

Dar Al-Ifta write: "Through this process, these substances become pure and permissible for human consumption provided they are not harmful to health. This is the opinion of the majority of scholars."

Medical necessity is the ultimate rule when it comes to Islamic rulings.

I hope this helps, insha Allah, but ultimately, medical realities are the most important issue here--and even if there are things that are ritually impure, if they are necessary for medical use and there is no substitute, then it becomes permissible for a Muslim to use this medicine, without controversy.

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fenlock · 4 years

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Not part of the ask game, but as someone interested in each-uisge what would you recommend to expect from them compared to other water horses?

I mean, my first recommendation when it comes to each uisge is don’t, but that’s not what you’re here for is it?

So, let’s start with some good old-fashioned folklore. Each uisge are widely regarded in Scottish folklore to be not only one of the most vicious waterhorses, but one of the most vicious and dangerous fae. Let that sink in. Of the hundreds of different fae species, each uisge are one of the most dangerous. There’s a legend about one that would take on the form of a human with a horses’ head, sneak into the local village, and devour anyone it could get to, including people in houses who forgot to lock their doors or slept too close to a window. It took the entire population of the village, armed with heavy iron chains and hooks, to stop it. There’s another story of one that was shot multiple times to no effect until the man loaded a silver coin into his gun, after which the each uisge retreated to the loch.

Folklore out of the way, let’s get into my experiences with them. Now, there are only two that I work with in any capacity, though I have met a couple more, and they are(thankfully) much rarer than kelpies, at least where I live. Bas, as I said in the previous ask, spent over an hour attempting to kill me when we first met, and that was just him gauging whether I was worth his time. He was interested in me, wanted to work with me, and still spent that much time and effort attempting to eat me. He occasionally leaves physical dead animals on my deck(and I know they’re from him because they’re always bloody, often wet, and my roommate’s dog, who goes ballistic if any wildlife is in the yard, doesn’t bark and alert us that something is outside) just to prove he can, and in the ten years since I’ve been working with him drowning deaths in the area have noticeably increased. He also keeps other spiritual beings away from my home by straight up eating them. No warnings, no second chances, if they’re on my property without my express permission then they’re dead men(or women, or other) walking, and he likes to harass beings that do have permission just to remind them that they live only because he allows it. He is, quite literally, the worst.

Vy, the other each uisge I work with, isn’t quite so overly aggressive, but he’s equally as dangerous. While he does hunt normally when he’s hungry, he takes on extraordinarily pretty shapes and will spend weeks, or even months, courting people he finds interesting before killing them. It’s a game to him to make his chosen person fall in love with him, just so he can watch the shock and betrayal on their face when he drags them under. He’s also more demanding when it comes to offerings than Bas. Bas is content with meat and blood every month(albeit ridiculous amounts). Vy wants ‘fancy’ gifts along with the meat, like wine and roses, and he’s picky about the quality too. It’s not unusual for me to have to spend over $100 a month on offerings for the two of them(and thank god I’ve got two jobs and low rent costs). I first met him because he was hunting a friend of mine, and my constantly appeasing him is the only thing stopping him from going back to her.

Basically, each uisge are aggressive, demanding, and far more cunning than anyone gives them credit for, and they will eat you given half a chance. I adore them, I do, but I’m also very very wary of them, and I will not approach an unfamiliar one unless I absolutely have to. Now I can’t tell you what to do, your choices are your own, but I highly recommend reconsidering whether or not you want to get involved with one. If you do get involved in working with one, just know that it could very well be a life-long commitment, it’s going to take a lot of work and potentially money, and ultimately there’s a very low chance you’ll be able to ward one off if things go badly. Even if it seems to retreat, they’re fae. They’re effectively immortal and they’ve got time to wait you out. I’m not trying to fearmonger or anything here, just trying to impress the seriousness of what I’m saying. Each uisge are dangerous, and they aren’t something to approach lightly. Just be prepared for that. There are plenty of other water horses that are less dangerous(though never safe), like hippocampi, or backahasten, or even kelpies. Hell, a phouka might be a better alternative, as they are shapeshifters who have been known to take on the form of a black horse and take humans on wild rides, but without causing real harm beyond a bit of bruising from when they buck you off(this is regional though, some are more dangerous than others. Like with all fae, do your research.)

Sorry for the essay, I got a bit carried away haha. I hope this is helpful, or at least informative!

#asks #each uisge #Bas #Vy

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dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram · 4 years

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Sorry for another tedious anon but do you honestly think Harry thinks so deeply about things he's not particularly affected by? You seem to project a lot of your own interpretations on the motives behind Harry's actions, maybe to give yourself reasons to continue enjoying his actions. Have you ever processed your own feelings about Harry? I know you've said you don't love him but I feel like you don't want to look too closely on a lot of things because you don't want to put yourself off. Which I guess is a fair strategy for personal reasons but it's unfair to your readers who more often than not form their opinions because of your point of view or at least take your POV in consideration. You said Harry posted a video about Biden's kindness because positivity is a better motivator. In no universe do I think Harry thought that deeply about his tweet (which I doubt came from him in the first place) he has a very shallow understanding of how things work in real life judging from his lifestyle and his incoherence when talking about things that matter (arena interview). A lot of celebs are talking about biden as if he's a savior who will defeat the monster trump despite the horrible stuff that Obama administration did to other countries. It's the same as putting a black screen or singing imagine. Also you said he chose to show joy in Golden MV when he looked very emotionlessly excited. I couldn't associate any emotion to his expressions even though it looked like he tried to convey something. Same as falling and SOTT. But you seem to think he considered spreading joy to people through his music video. Do you think he sat down and talked about people suffering because of Covid and said "I wanna make a video of myself doing mundane things because it will bring joy to people"? Wouldn't an easier explanation would be from a business point of view? Something this whole era has been a great testament to?

Oh anon - why are you so worked up that someone has a different view of a celebrity to you? Why are you treating that as something that has to be examined? Perhaps most strangely - why have you had to greatly overstate what I said in order to suggest that anything but negative views of Harry are illegitimate.

I didn’t say that Harry posted a video that presented Biden as kindness because you need to give people something to vote for (I would never say ‘positvity is a better motivator). I said that I can see that the video connected with Harry and that I think Harry’s message is better than fearmongering messages.

It’s absolutely fine that we disagree about the effectiveness of Golden. But the idea that it’s somehow a shock that there’s a business point of view to a music video is bizzarre. There’s no contradiction between a music video having an artistic intent also being part of a marketing plan. That is the essenece of what all music videos are. I’m sorry if you’re shocked that pop music is a business, but that really isn’t a recent development.

Even more bizzarre is your imaginary conversations about COVID that you think I think Harry is having. Artistic intent isn’t some kind of charity. I’m not suggesting that he made a joyful video as a solution to suffering. I think he made a joyous song so he tried to make a joyous video (and whether he succeeded is a different matter).

Finally, I’d like to return to the strangest of your claims. The idea that I somehow owe an examination of my feelings about Harry to my readers, who might be unduly influenced by something (me enjoying a music video? My hatred of kindness? I don’t even know what). Nothing that you said has any basis in reality, but even if it did what’s the worst that could happen, I could be influencing people to like a celebrity slightly more than they do otherwise. Chill the fuck out.

#As always it is totally bizzarre #to be accused of skating over things Harry does that bother me #I don't think that's a particularly sustainable belief #Anonymous

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antoine-roquentin · 5 years

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Author Richard Beck, in We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s, locates the roots of the McMartin conspiracy theory in the social progress of the previous decade—particularly in the gains won by women. “In the ’80s you had a strong, vicious anti-feminist backlash that helped conspiracies take hold,” Beck tells me. “In the ’70s, middle- and upper-middle-class women had started to enter the full-time workforce instead of being homemakers.” This was the dawn of what the economist Claudia Goldin has termed “the quiet revolution.” Thanks in part to expanding reproductive freedom, career horizons had widened sufficiently by the end of the 1970s for women to become, in Goldin’s words, “active participants who bargain somewhat effectively in the household and the labor market.” They were now forming their identities outside the context of the family and household.

The patriarchal family was under siege, as conservatives saw it, and day-care centers had become the physical representation of the social forces bedeviling them. “You had this Reagan-driven conservative resurgence,” Beck says, “and day care was seen as at least suspicious, if not an actively maligned force of feminism.”

Day care held a prominent place in right-wing demonology. As far back as the 1960s, conservatives were warning darkly that child care “was a communist plot to destroy the traditional family,” as sociologist Jill Quadagno writes in The Color of Welfare. In 1971, President Richard Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would’ve established a national day-care system. In his veto message, Nixon used the Red-baiting language urged upon him by his special assistant, Pat Buchanan, saying the program would’ve committed “the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child-rearing against the family-centered approach.” In a decade of rising divorce rates, at least conspiracism and reactionary social conservatism could enjoy a happy marriage. By the time Judy Johnson came forward in 1983 with allegations that a teacher at the McMartin preschool had molested her child, the country had been primed to assume the worst by more than a decade of child-care fearmongering.

Certainly it wasn’t just the movement of women into the workplace that created the conditions for a reactionary panic. There were other cultural forces at work. The anti-rape campaign of the 1970s, historian Philip Jenkins writes in Moral Panic, had “formulated the concepts and vocabulary that would become integral to child-protection ideology,” in particular a “refusal to disbelieve” victims. The repressed-memory movement of that era had created a therapeutic consensus surrounding kids’ claims of molestation: “Be willing to believe the unbelievable,” as the self-help book The Courage to Heal put it. “Believe the survivor…No one fantasizes abuse.” And the anti-cult movement of the late 1970s had raised the specter of satanic cabals engaging in human sacrifice and other sinister behavior.

Beck likens conspiracy theories to parables. The ones that stick are those that most effectively validate a group’s anxieties, with blame assigned to outsiders. In a 2017 paper on Pizzagate and pedophile conspiracies, psychology professor Jim Kline, now at Northern Marianas College, argues that conspiracy theories “are born during times of turmoil and uncertainty.” In an interview, Kline goes further: “Social turmoil can overwhelm critical thinking. It makes us get beyond what is logically possible. We go into this state of hysteria and we let that overwhelm ourselves.”

The McMartin accusations were a vivid demonstration of the rot in the American social structure, as perceived by conservatives. Perhaps inevitably, the claims metastasized. Now it was hundreds of children who had been assaulted and subjected to satanic rituals, and now, instead of just one McMartin teacher, there was an entire sex ring involved. One boy told of adults in masks and black robes dancing and moaning; of live rabbits chopped to bits by candlelight. “California’s Nightmare Nursery,” People magazine called it. But soon the case began to fall apart. The stories of abuse turned out to have been coaxed out of children by way of dubious and leading questioning. Judy Johnson, who made the initial accusations that her son had been molested, was found to be a paranoid schizophrenic. In 1986, a district attorney dropped charges—at one point there had been 208 counts in all—against all but two of the original defendants. A pair of trials ended in 1990 with the juries deadlocking on some charges and acquitting on the others. After seven years and $15 million in prosecution costs, the remaining charges were dropped.

However flimsy its premises, the case whipped up a national panic. In 1985, a teacher’s aide in Massachusetts was wrongly convicted of molesting 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old boys and girls; the prosecutor had told the jury that a gay man working in a day care was like a “chocoholic in a candy store.” Around that time, employees at Bronx day-care centers were arrested for allegedly sexually abusing children. Five men were sentenced before all ultimately saw their convictions overturned.

Liberals certainly participated in the hysteria—Gloria Steinem donated money to the McMartin investigation—but by and large it was a reactionary phenomenon. What drove the panic, Beck says, wasn’t just the sense that children were being harmed. “It’s that families were being harmed.”

In 2016, three decades after the McMartin trial, WikiLeaks, in cahoots with Russian hackers, published the private emails of top Hillary Clinton adviser John Podesta. In one, Podesta is invited to a fundraiser at Comet Ping Pong. Amateur internet sleuths blew it up into a conspiracy theory about a child-sex ring. The pedophiles communicated in code: “hotdog” meant “young boy”; “cheese” meant “little girl”; “sauce” meant “orgy.” The theory was easily debunked. Eventually it was abandoned by the high-profile internet figures who’d initially given it oxygen, but not before Pizzagate, as it was immediately dubbed, had spilled over into reality. In December 2016, a 28-year-old man named Edgar Maddison Welch, having driven from North Carolina to Washington, DC, fired an assault rifle inside Comet in a bid to rescue the children he thought were locked away there. No one was hurt. Welch was sentenced to four years in prison.

The QAnon conspiracy picked up where Pizzagate left off, alleging that the liberal elite’s pedophile ring extends way beyond one restaurant and that it is only a matter of time before Trump arrests Podesta, Clinton, and other Democratic power brokers for their crimes. All of this was fueled by an anonymous internet poster dubbed Q, who claims to be a government insider.

With Pizzagate and QAnon, the molesters have changed from day-care workers to the liberal elite, and the politics behind the theories now are more explicitly spelled out. But the general context is more or less the same: conservative retrenchment after a period of progressive social gains. If women’s entry into the workplace in the latter half of the 20th century triggered deep anxieties about the decay of traditional gender roles and the family unit, in the 21st century it was same-sex marriage, growing acceptance of transgender rights, and the seeming cultural hegemony of a social justice agenda. “Q found that fear,” says Travis View, a conspiracy theory researcher and a host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

“While Q directly never touches on trans rights or those sorts of things, there is a great deal of anxiety on those sorts of issues,” he says, referring to the QAnon community at large. “They’re concerned generally on the sort of acceptance of trans people and the oversexualization of children.” On the matter of transgender rights, the conspiracists are aligned with “normal” conservative politics; from the state legislatures to the White House, Republicans have made considerable hay out of attacking and overturning various protections that had been extended to trans people.

Conspiracy theories of all kinds draw their energy from social anxieties. Occasionally there is some real basis for the theories. In her book, Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power, Anna Merlan details the belief among black New Orleanians after Hurricane Katrina that the city’s levees hadn’t failed on their own—they had been bombed intentionally to destroy the poor parts of New Orleans. The theory was “rooted in a real event—a 1927 decision to dynamite levees outside of New Orleans, the logic there being that they were going to flood low-lying areas and save the city itself,” Merlan said in an interview with Mother Jones’ Becca Andrews. “[I]t created a lingering sense of suspicion that maybe the government would do this again.”

View points out that the concern about elites preying on children isn’t baseless, either. “The core of elements of the systematic elite child abuse theories—they aren’t crazy,” he says. “There are instances of wealthy powerful abusing children and other people covering it up. Jeffrey Epstein, the Catholic Church. People have the sense that elites can commit horrifying crimes and get away with them.” The Epstein arrest earlier this month has done much to ratify the QAnon worldview. “This is just the beginning,” declared QAnoner Liz Crokin, a former gossip journalist. “The Storm is officially here.”

And thus does the legitimate concern about elite predation and impunity get woven into a demeaning and dangerous social crusade. The “Storm” cited by Crokin—also known as “The Great Awakening”—is part of the vivid eschatology that QAnon adherents share with traditional conservative culture warriors, one in which judgment is at last be rendered against liberals, and the nuclear family is restored to its proper place. “One thing they often talk about after ‘The Storm’ is that they imagine that the economy will be restored so that a single income can support a family again,” View says. “They imagine traditional gender roles and norms will be upheld and how children are raised will return to what [it] used to be.”

The differences between the pedophile conspiracies of the 1980s and those of today are telling in their own way. There’s the matter of scale. The pedophile witch hunt of the ’80s managed to mobilize entire institutions, with much of the media uncritically amplifying its falsehoods and police taking action based on shoddy nonevidence. Lives were ruined around the country. But except for some reckless far-right pundits and websites, the media hasn’t taken the claims of Pizzagate and QAnon seriously. Earnest conversations about the conspiracies are limited to online image boards and social media.

There’s also the nature of the targets. Where the pedophile conspiracies of the 1980s attacked the institutional emblems of feminist progress, the pedophile conspiracies of the 2010s attack the cultural emblems of creeping cosmopolitanism. The ritual abuse of the 1980s supposedly happened in the suburbs in state or state-licensed institutions such as schools and child-care facilities. Today the abuse happens in businesses in cosmopolitan cities. Comet Ping Pong, in the Chevy Chase neighborhood of DC, is known as a welcoming space that regularly showcases progressive DIY artists and musicians—“a tangible emblem,” in the words of University of New Haven sociology professor Jeffrey S. Debies-Carl, “of inclusivity, tolerance, and other progressive values that are threatening to the conspiracy-prone alt-Right.”

British historian Norman Cohn, in his book Europe’s Inner Demons, finds elements of pedophile conspiracies throughout history. In the 1st century B.C., members of the Catiline conspiracy, an aristocratic plot to overthrow the Roman Republic, supposedly swore an oath over the entrails of a boy and then ate them. And in the witch hunts of the 15th–17th centuries, tens of thousands of people were tortured and killed over allegations that they’d performed ritual child murder, among other heinous acts.

The conspiracy theories documented by Cohn are fundamentally political. The rituals they describe are the means “by which a group of conspirators affirms its solidarity,” he writes, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing “an existing ruler or regime and to seize power.” The mass witch hunts that followed are political too, based on the “demonological obsessions of the intelligentsia.” The history of American political reaction is full of sex demons. Jim Crow was buttressed by myths about black male virility. Likewise, North Carolina’s infamous bathroom bill was sold in part on the fear that predatory men could say they’re transgender to gain access to women’s bathrooms. Opponents of abortion rights continue to conjure gory fantasies of promiscuous women committing “infanticide,” an incitement that Trump turned into an applause line in an April rally.

In this way, pedophile conspiracies act as a sort of propaganda of the counterrevolution, a fun-house reflection of the real threats to the social order. This is what connects QAnon and Pizzagate to McMartin to the witch hunts of the Middle Ages to the dawn of major religions. The demons may take different forms, but the conspiracy is basically the same: Our house is under attack.

“Decay of morals grows from day to day,” goes one despairing account. A secret cabal is wreaking havoc across the land, the man complains to his friend. Its members “recognize one another by secret signs and marks,” and “everywhere they introduce a kind of religion of lust” that subverts “ordinary fornication.” There is a rumor that they worship the “private parts of their director and high priest.” Maybe the rumor is false, “but such suspicions naturally attach to their secret and nocturnal rites.”

In this dialogue, written by Marcus Minucius Felix in the 2nd century, the Roman pagan Caecilius Natalis speaks of Christians the way Pizzagaters described John Podesta and his fellow liberal elite. Natalis is particularly incensed by the cult’s initiation ritual. The details are as “revolting as they are notorious”: New members are initiated into the cult, he reports, by stabbing and killing an infant who has been coated in dough.

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imuybemovoko · 4 years

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So I just read an article that talked about brainwashing techniques employed in POW camps in North Korea. (It’s linked here.)

I’m inclined to take this article with a slight grain of salt, but there’s something very eerily familiar about the ten steps it lists for brainwashing. It reminds me quite a damn bit of the way your more fundamentalist churches will tell you to share the gospel. I’m going to take a quick run through them and show what I mean. For reasons I’ll explain as “about half shitty site design and about half trauma” I’m having a hell of a time finding specific examples of what I’m talking about here because it involves navigating confusingly executed ministry websites crammed with the exact shit that spent a childhood and five more recent years breaking me. For that reason I’ll make a shitty gospel tract in paint.net with a slide or two to illustrate each point. I’ll probably be annoyingly close to the real thing. Trigger warning here. If this is going to bring something up that you’re not ready to deal with, please do not read any further.

With that in mind, what would our shitty gospel tract be without some kind of eye-catching title? I’ll take more of a Jack Chick kind of approach to formatting here; Ray Comfort has also been known to make terrible comics following a vaguely similar pattern and typically with far less diverse plots. (Hate-reading Chick tracts is honestly oddly fun sometimes because of the variety and the absolute over-the-top fearmongering about entirely innocent aspects of life and culture.) I’m shooting for a bit of parody energy, so for a title let’s go with:

God’s Blast Furnace Because that seems like the exact kind of cursed energy we should be going for here. I’ll go for a 2x1 aspect ratio here because that also seems pretty typical.

Chick tracts like... usually include people terrified by either God or the flames of hell. I chose the latter. The idea is as much fear factor as you can shove into one tiny page. If you think I’m exaggerating, prepare to be disappointed. Ray Comfort and a lot of campus ministry resources take a less... “in your face” approach to the hellfire bit, but they’ll make damn sure to mention it and how much it’s going to suck to be burned forever. But this is a parody, so if it’s somehow possible to be more over the top than Chick, that’s the goal here.

1. Assault on identity. In most evangelism guides I remember, one of the first things you’re supposed to mention is that God created the earth and humans and wants us to worship him. Finding specific examples would be a bit of a mindfuck for me because this shit is honestly kinda triggering, but they have a strong tendency towards heavily focusing this in the beginning of their approach. A simple scroll through Chick.com’s tract inventory or, if you can find it, this kind of resource on other sites will show that this assault on identity is extremely important in their approach. Since our parody tract is going to include all of these steps (this is a common but far from universal approach; Ray Comfort tends to include them all but Chick will hyperfocus one or two in every piece of literature), let’s make the first page. The idea here is that they’re saying “you are not who you think you are”. If someone tries to tell you that you’re created by a god rather than a product of evolution, this is their true message. They’ll even mask-off this one, saying “these people think they’re accidental descendants of apes, they’re denying that they were created by God”. So for our parody, let’s do exactly that. I’ll introduce two characters, one Christian and one dreaded “other”, and I won’t bother giving them names; in the real industry, approaches vary. Chick typically gives names, Comfort typically doesn’t. They also tend to grossly caricature unbelievers, so I’ll do that too. I’m going for the “tiny graphic novel” approach here, so I’ll make a panel.

Notice how 1. the unbelievers are presented as strawmen, 2. the Christian is presented as totally normal and even wholesome, 3. he presents this like it’s a self-evident truth, and 4. the response by he unbelievers is angry denial. This is very common and based on prevailing perspectives about unbelievers. You’ll notice an approach quite like this in movies like God’s Not Dead as well, where they make a caricature of Christians that’s way tamer than they present in real life (the kid in God’s Not Dead is super vanilla and a lot of Christians are at best passive-aggressive about it) and a caricature of unbelievers, particularly atheists (they have the most problem with atheists for some reason) that’s straight up aggressive and hostile. In Chick’s tracts, sometimes they wear shirts not that different from the shittily-drawn ones I put on these two unbelievers. I also tried to give the one a mohawk, though the perspective probably isn’t that good.

Some literature you’ll find in the wild takes a much more detailed approach to this, attacking established scientific facts such as evolution, but others simply present the creation narrative or something akin to it as self-evident and move on. I’ll take the second approach here to save space. Thus, having our unbelievers respond with “how dare you” fits even better because there’s a strong tendency for Christians to think they’re challenging the entire worldview of unbelievers (again, particularly atheists) by even presenting this “fact”. This sets us up perfectly for point 2.

2. Guilt. In the evangelical view, and in these evangelism resources online, a combination of guilt and fear is very important. Point 2 of the ten in the article is summed up as “you are bad” in the paragraph detailing it; in these forms of Christianity, and very strongly in evangelism techniques, this should be summed up more like “not only are you bad, but the consequences for that are going to be unending and extreme when you die”. This is the strength of the hell narrative in a sentence. On someone who believes it or can be led to believe it, the impact is profoundly damaging. In every “properly-done” evangelism, it is included. Jack Chick goes fucking mental with this narrative and it features in most of his work with vivid pictures of fearful people being yeeted into the flames after pleading for their lives. Ray Comfort also hammers this point fairly hard, framing it as a natural consequence of a life not lived for Jesus and using a metaphor likening death to a long fall and his message to a parachute. In our tract let’s take a mixed approach. Our Christian will yoink Comfort’s parachute metaphor and, much later, we’ll show one of our unbelievers being Chicked. More on that later.

I’ve started to establish a dichotomy of a type that Chick often uses here where he shows one person getting saved and one getting yeeted into hellfire. “lol sex is epic” is going to dig his heels in like the scary atheist and “there is no god” is going to have his world absolutely rocked by this news. Also, a common caricature is that unbelievers haven’t heard the hellfire bit before. "there is no god” gets this treatment while “lol sex is epic” digs in and gets mad. (It seems to me that the reader is likely meant to find this fitting because he’s the one with the mohawk.) Chick might draw shadowy demons around “lol sex is epic” here, but he doesn’t in every case. Also, note that I’ve brought our title, “God’s blast furnace”, into it here. “there is no god” is walking right into step 3 here.

3. Self-betrayal. The trick here is to get you to agree that you’re bad. You don’t necessarily have to agree to the hellfire thing; Comfort doesn’t hit that very hard during this phase of a conversation. His approach, which I’ll more or less emulate here, is to get the person to admit that they’ve lied about anything at all, stolen anything at all, or had any lustful thought at all (and, with the latter, referencing Matthew 5:28). Most humans have done at least two of these things at least once (some don’t steal and some are asexual, and there’s most likely overlap, but I feel confident in saying literally everyone lies at least about minor things from time to time), so once he has the confession, Comfort will catastrophise it with a line like “ok so that makes you a lying thieving adulterer in heart” and then pressure the person into answering whether a “just God” will call them innocent or guilty based on this standard. Many people say “guilty” here, as desired. (He paints the ones who say “innocent” or question the standard as dishonest when he makes videos of this.) With guilt thus established, he then asks whether this means a person goes to heaven or to hell. Again, in a typical conversation, the other person answers that this means hell. Ray has triumphed in this moment, because whether he says it or not, the connection is made in the person’s mind that as one guilty of these “sins”, they are bad and deserving of hellfire. So, for our tract, let’s have “there is no god” ask some questions and learn just how “dire” this is from our Christian, a la Ray Comfort.

“there is no god” betrays himself; “lol sex is epic” stays mad.

In evangelism, at least in Ray Comfort’s approach, step 3 most often comes in tandem with a lite version of the compulsion to confession, step 6. I’ve condensed this process a bit to fit it into a single panel. “there is no god” now proceeds into step 4.

4. Breaking point. “there is no god” is now in the trap. This has him questioning everything about himself, his life, and the world. I’ll change his facial expression for the next few panels to illustrate the change. In real life, it takes a lot of repetition, scare tactics and/or other abuse, application during childhood or a moment of great weakness, or a combination of more than one of these to get this done. Since these tracts are a caricature of reality, this is always shown as a fast process. The fast process is also seen as normative because of the belief that God is self-evident, but I am aware of almost no Christians who had this kind of shift because of a single conversation. To my knowledge, this is a months- to years-long process even in most cases of childhood indoctrination. In any case, the victim reaches a point where their view of the world has begun to shatter around them. Or, as the article puts it, asking “who am I, where am I, what am I supposed to do?” We’ll have “there is no god” ask this latter question and add an interjection from “lol sex is epic” to add weight to this.

“lol sex is epic” gets mad again and says something that many Evangelicals caricature as a common saying of unbelievers, particularly atheists, and progressive Christians (who they have mad beef with for a variety of reasons. Like, I genuinely think they hate progressive Christians more than atheists sometimes). This shows that, in the evangelist’s eyes, “lol sex is epic” has missed the point. Meanwhile, “there is no god” has arrived right at that breaking point, questioning his moral character and asking desperately if there’s a solution to this problem. Our Christian is right there to provide an answer.

5. Leniency. Our Christian is going to give “there is no god” the out he’s looking for, declaring that God has given him a solution in the form of Jesus Christ. To show the remaining steps I’ll separate a few things out more than tracts often do. Let’s have a bit more rage from “lol sex is epic” and, for now, have him leave the scene because his use as a character is over until the “and then they both died” bit.

“lol sex is epic” is now gone. Meanwhile, our evangelist has a captive audience for the other steps of this process.

At this point I’m going to list a couple of steps for each panel because I’m not completely sure how to parse it out the way I’ve been doing thus far. In my perception of this, I tend to view these more easily as far fewer steps. I’ll probably draw this as two or three panels, followed by one where “there is no god” is happy about the decision he’s made. (And wearing a new shirt.)

6. Compulsion to Confession. Part of the process of salvation is a confession. The fledgling Christian must admit to their status as a sinner and their need of a savior, often in prayer but sometimes also in person to an evangelist or spiritual mentor. This is framed as a relief, a part of casting one’s burdens onto Christ or, as the article puts it, “ the target is faced with the contrast between the guilt and pain of identity assault and the sudden relief of leniency. The target may feel a desire to reciprocate the kindness offered to him, and at this point, the agent may present the possibility of confession as a means to relieving guilt and pain.” The person has been carrying a “lifetime of sin” and a “guilty conscience” and is now letting it all go for the first time. The Catholic church goes absolutely nuts with this, institutionalizing regular confessions. “there is no god” will be presented with a call to confess to Christ.

7-8. Channeling of guilt; releasing of guilt. The groundwork for this was already laid in the beginning; I forgot to include that part in this tract, but many evangelists will touch on their beliefs about the beginning of the world and the fall of Adam. Thus, they establish the concept of an in-born nature towards sin in all humans. They can give this concept to their target in the form of framing sin as an inherited curse that they can’t avoid having, but isn’t their fault (their actions are but the curse isn’t) and thus can be considered the source of all their “evil” motivations and actions. In this process, a lifestyle of sin is what they channel their guilt into, saying, “I feel bad because I’ve been living this way and not believing in Jesus!” Then, they can use this curse of sin to say, “it’s not me, it’s my bad nature.” Thus, this sense of guilt is channeled and released. This is repentance described in a paragraph.

9. Progress and harmony. At this point, the target is encouraged to choose Jesus and the abuse and negativity will stop. They must now make an active and conscious choice towards belief. The fears of hell will be abated. (At least for now).

10. Final confession and rebirth. Evangelicals go full mask off with this, touting a “born again experience” as proof of someone who is truly Christian. Often, the previous several steps are confessed in what’s called the “sinner’s prayer”. I’ll paste it below for a full explanation before I draw the panels for this. At the end, the person invites Jesus into their lives and grants him lordship over their life, then thanks God for this occurrence. This is the end of this process, though the church behaves in ways that reinforce every step of this. You know, for maintenance. The sinner’s prayer, in one of its several, similar forms: “Dear Lord, I’m a sinner. Please forgive me. Come into my life and cleans me of my unbelief. I believe in you and in salvation through the blood of Jesus. I turn from sin and trust in Jesus alone as my Savior. In Jesus name I pray, Amen.”

Here we see the Christian offering the solution and the broad outline of the sinner’s prayer. Also, “there is no god” is greatly relieved. I’ll make one panel of him doing the sinner’s prayer, then we’ll touch on the “after they both die” thing. Our Christian character is also disposable and this, in this case, is his final appearance.

Here he is getting saved. (His shirt changes alongside this.) And, of course, he ends this with a desire to go tell literally everyone about this. That’s normative in evangelical circles too.

After this, we’re back to more fearmongering, this time involving a dichotomy meant to imply hope, as I yoink a page right out of Chick’s playbook for a couple more panels.

Here we see a (shittily-executed) great white throne with our Christianized “there is no god” and our angry unbeliever standing before it. The circumstances of their deaths are outlined (fuck you Jack Chick that’s a creepy vibe) and their condition now is clearly explained. Notice how “lol sex is epic” is still angry. But not for long...

The mask drops:

They never portray Jesus putting it exactly like this but this is the kind of energy, at least it’s how it comes across to me when I read these after deconverting. Tracts tend to give a more detailed reaction to the “but I was good” and “give me a chance” things if their damned victims say these things. They assert that deeds aren’t enough and no one is good. Convenient for brainwashing, there’s also an artificial sense of urgency in that this life is listed as your only chance to accept this message and avoid having your flesh boil away before your eyes over and over again for all of time.

Chick is a big fan of showing the damned being dragged or frogmarched to the pit by angels.

And here, mohawk man gets the big yeet.

After this, particularly if they take the Chick approach and include the hell yeet scene and/or the thing at the throne of judgement, they’ll tend to have some questions like this:

Again, parody. They’re not this goddamn on the nose with it.

I could translate this entire thing in one image:

So this has been a painful little look at what goes into a gospel tract/the brainwashing inherent to the gospel message as understood by fundies/evangelicals.

I hate that I used to think this way and unironically tell people this kind of shit. It’s manipulative and stupid, and also deeply cringey. If you’ve read this far, I’m sorry/congratulations.

Oh, and one final thought: People who don’t generally do this with tracts use verbal, often shorter, versions of the exact same process. CRU reduces it to five points in their resources (and this is a common approach): something like 1. God made the world, 2. we screwed things up and deserve the big yeet, 3. but Jesus makes a way to fix this shit, 4. He died on a cross and rose from the dead so we could be saved, 5. so believe in him and live forever in a realm that doesn’t have to be filled with fire all the fucking time. They’ll tell you to do something involving counting on your hand while explaining this shit. It’s goddamned cursed, and you’ll notice it goes through the exact process I mentioned above. It literally intends to break you down and mold a new person out of the shards and ashes this produces.

Evangelists are assholes.

#ex christian #religious trauma #fuck jack chick #fuck ray comfort

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bi-dazai · 4 years

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i think id also like to say that every so often i go and read some of the t*rf stuff, I genuinely try to come at it from an angle of trying to get it, but I find that it just ends up being a very shallow form of feminism in general, and that it hyperfocuses on men and damselises women in a way that is extremely weird and overly fear mongering. men are big scary monsters and women must be protected at all costs - how is that uplifting to women? the rhetoric of it all makes you scared and reactionary and unempathetic. This is obviously all more complicated than I can fit in a Tumblr post so don't argue with me or debate, this is post is not inviting that. in the long run though it creates an anxiety-ridden, delusional state in your head that ends with you not being to interact with any man at all, which is extremely unhelpful in any revolutionary praxis situation.

I also find that a lot of their analyses on trans stuff make sense only at first glance. when you look at data and reality and lived experience you find that the roots of many of their talking points and conversations are almost ALWAYS just...false, made-up, exaggerated, or out of context. furthermore the framework is highly liberal and right wing, focusing on fear and essentially replacement theory but woke. it fails at proposing any kind of change, and often appeals to fascist authority structures at long form. they propose strict laws on sex work - something that we have all of human history to show will simply make things vastly more dangerous for sex workers, who t*rfs are supposedly trying to uplift. they appeal to the authority of cops to protect and defend them and state the truth. they like laws and their analysis of women is deeply flawed and honestly extremely shallow because without the key factor of analysing women as a class, and understanding further that western gender is a construct, there is limit on how accurately and meaningfully you can analyse misogyny and gender in society. feminist theory works best along trans and gay theory and most importantly along anticapitalist and antifascist theory. t*rf often hyperfocuses on fear mongering and rarely offers class analysis, and when it does it's honestly ways rather basic. it fails to offer a solution for what women should do should their proposals of how society functions is real. t*rfs version of solutions, of proposed praxis, is to appeal to authority, to impose fascistic laws on sex workers and trans people, to appeal to capitalistic white patriarchy. that's...not what im looking for from a feminist framework.

there is a reason why it is hard to find anarchist t*rfs (not that they don't exist tho), because there is no authority to appeal to. In all my attempts to understand the workings of this version of feminism (and we have to acknowledge it as a form of feminism, we are not going to no true scotsman this), I've always found that the feminism that t*rfs offer falls extremely flat. Its not uplifting at all when all you ever talk about is how awful all men are (and not even in the exaggerated jokey way i enjoy). its frustrating and honestly stupid if your feminism does not assess women in a wider framework of capitalism, white supremacy, and imperialism. it is awful if for all you claim to criticise capitalism and authority and patriarchy and so on, at the end of the day what you consider praxis is a conservative lawmaker passing a law that will push sex workers (who are mostly women!!) further into poverty, if your praxis is letting the patriarchal government make invasive and fascistic laws, if the news you celebrate is always at the hands of christian right wing lobbyists.

the feminism that reaches the most accurate and important conclusions and framework for analysis is the feminism that can work alongside the revolution. ive found that for all the times ive tried to empathise and hear it all out, for all the hours I've spent reading recommended resources and so on and seeing the community, ive been driven away by t*rfs shallowness, the obsession with fearmongering, and the aversion of actual meaningful clever praxis and discussion.

#dnt rb #long post

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rdclsuperfoods · 4 years

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Scroll through Twitter or take a look at trending articles, and it’s clear that people’s feelings about food and body image are all over the place right now. The age-old “there goes my summer body” joke is reaching new heights. #Quarantine15 has been trending on and off for weeks. The headlines about healthy cooking and at-home exercise range from helpful to questionable to downright punishing.

I get it—we’re all looking for things to bond over right now, and body insecurities are, unfortunately, fairly universal. Anxieties are running high, and eating is a common response to stress. It’s natural to be a little concerned about how things might change if you can’t stick to routines. But frankly, all this fearmongering around food and quarantine weight gain is unhelpful bullshit, and it’s not something you need to buy into.

That’s not to say you’re bad for being worried about these things. We live in a fat-phobic culture that pushes all kinds of food and exercise rules on us, whether we realize it or not. But instead of beating yourself up about (very understandable) changes in your routine, consider using this time to establish a better relationship with food and your body by loosening the reins.

Comfort Food Is Your Friend

If you’ve been gravitating toward certain comfort foods and eating more than usual, that’s normal. “A lot of us use familiar coping mechanisms, such as eating, to help deal with anxiety,” says Whitney Catalano, a registered dietitian who specializes in intuitive eating. “These times are unprecedented, so we turn to what feels safe.” Eating familiar food can bring some normalcy to a time that is decidedly not normal.

We use food as a source of comfort for several reasons. First, there’s plenty of evidence that highly palatable foods temporarily activate pleasure centers in our brains. Second, food is accessible. Therapy and expensive self-care habits are financially out of reach for many, and some inexpensive coping mechanisms—certain forms of exercise, time with friends and family, normal daily routines—may be off the table for now.

Catalano’s advice? “Let it be comforting. Let it be joyful. Let it be satisfying and nourishing.” As this quarantine progresses, you’ll develop new routines and other strategies for managing anxiety, she says, and you’ll probably start relying on food less.

Diets Usually Backfire

When you’re feeling insecure or anxious, dieting might seem like a great way to regain some control. “It gives you a purpose,” Catalano says. “It gives you a plan that is supposedly going to change your whole life.”

The problem? Diets don’t produce lasting results. A 2013 review in the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass looked at existing weight-loss studies and found that virtually all dieters abandoned their diets and regained lost weight within five years. Likewise, an April 2020 meta-analysis published in The BMJ looked at 121 clinical trials studying different diets and found that while most produced weight loss and improved heart health at the six-month mark, none led to significant weight loss or health benefits at the 12-month mark.

Instead of changing your life for the better, restriction typically leads to overeating. “The more you obsess about what you’re eating or how much you’re eating, the more [you’re going to want to eat],” Catalano says. If you have a complicated history with dieting or food, you may feel especially out of control right now—boredom and stress could be the immediate trigger for overeating, but long-term restrictive patterns are the root cause.

Remind yourself that food isn’t the reason you’re feeling so uneasy right now. “The food is not the problem,” Catalano says. “The anxiety and the emotions are the problem; the food and the eating are the symptoms.”

Eat Intuitively

It might feel scary to give yourself permission to eat whatever you want, but it’s the right choice. “Eating enough is the best way to support ourselves during a time like this,” says Heather Caplan, registered dietitian and host of the podcast RD Real Talk. “Stressing about whether your meals are healthy enough or macros are balanced or calories are in check may feel safe, but it’s not actually improving your health.” And don’t fall prey to any headline or company trying to sell you an immunity-boosting food or diet—no single food has the power to do that.

Move Along

You’re probably moving less right now, which can be challenging if regular exercise is important to you. There’s nothing like being bombarded with existential dread and having nowhere to channel that energy. But you can still use physical activity as a way to deal with overwhelming emotions. “Try to incorporate movement into your day, instead of just structured exercise,” says Caplan, who works with athletes and is a runner herself. “We can absolutely use movement like walking, running, yoga, dancing, or even a virtual fitness class to help cope with stress and anxiety. Let it be a coping mechanism without also being a way to try and manipulate your body.”

“You don’t have to be following a training plan or hitting a certain mileage every week to stay healthy,” Caplan says. In fact, a few weeks or months off from intense exercise can be a good thing, especially for people who are used to rigorous workout regimens. “It will give your body time to relax and transition into a rest and recovery phase,” says Meg Furstoss, a certified strength and conditioning specialist and founder of New Jersey–based Precision Sports Performance. “You may start to detrain a bit within two to three weeks, but we have this wonderful thing called muscle memory. Once you get back to your regular routine, you’ll be pleasantly surprised how quickly your prior fitness level comes back, especially if you were very fit to begin with.”

If you’re feeling really uncomfortable about scaling back, now is a great time to examine your relationship to exercise. Caplan recommends getting curious about why you want to move: “Is the desire to walk or run triggered by a bad body image moment? Is it to ‘burn calories’? Is it because you’re worried about weight gain?” Those are signs that you’re using exercise as a way to control your body, which can be stressful and unhealthy.

Put It into Perspective

At this point, you might be thinking: “OK, fine, but won’t all of this make me gain weight?” That’s a fair question, and the answer is: maybe. But try to remember that all of this is temporary—once you get back to a more typical routine, your body will likely also return to whatever a typical weight is for you. Although there’s a lot we don’t yet understand about weight “set points,” research indicates that your body will fight significant loss or gain in order to maintain a certain weight, and small fluctuations are normal, Catalano explains.

“Gaining weight during this period, I want to be super clear, is not a problem,” Catalano says. “If the worst thing that happens to you from this is that you gain a few pounds, then consider yourself lucky. Everyone’s routines, everyone’s habits, everyone’s quality of life is drastically changing right now.”

And if you do gain more weight than you’re comfortable with, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be less healthy. “Weight changes may be an indication of disease, but weight alone isn’t a reliable measure of health,” Caplan says. A 2019 review in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that 35 percent of obese subjects in several previous studies were metabolically healthy. And a 2016 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at a total of 100,000 adults in Denmark over a period of 40 years and found that those in the overweight category had the lowest mortality rate (that is, risk of death). In other words, the relationship between weight and health is complicated and not perfectly understood.

Just Do Your Best

The bottom line here is that you shouldn’t stress about what you’re eating or how much you’re exercising right now. We’re in uncharted waters with the COVID-19 pandemic and current quarantine guidelines, and it’s fine to turn to food as a source of comfort. While your exercise routine might change, you can still use movement as a way to decompress and establish some sense of normalcy. Remember that what’s happening is temporary, and trust that your body can handle it.

via Outside Magazine: Nutrition

#IFTTT #Outside Magazine: Nutrition

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shirlleycoyle · 5 years

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After 1,434 Days of Testing, My Review of the iPhone 6S Plus

When the iPhone 6S Plus was released in September 2015, The Verge said it was "the best iPhone ever made, and it is right now the best phone on the market." Techradar said that with the iPhone 6S Plus, "Apple has reinvigorated its phablet," which was a word tech blogs used at the time. "Do you want or need a new iPhone? Great, buy this one," Wired said.

Motherboard did not review the iPhone 6S Plus when it was released, but I did buy one in March of 2016 and, pathetically and without exaggeration, have not stopped using it for more than a few hours at a time since. Now, after 1,434 days of rigorous real-world testing, I'm finally ready to give my impressions of the iPhone 6S Plus.

The short version is that it's a good phone, and in a better world it could be the last phone you'd ever own, but the world is not as good as we want.

According to an email receipt, I bought my iPhone 6S Plus on March 11, 6:17 p.m. at Apple's SoHo store in Manhattan. I got it along with a black leather case ($50) and a Lightning cable ($30). The phone itself was $850, meaning the final price after taxes was $1,009.27, which is less painful to write today than it was to pay in 2015.

The best thing I could say about the iPhone 6S Plus is that the price almost makes sense given how long it's lasted. I've used it for several hours a day, every day, for years, mostly to text, read articles on the internet, watch videos, and use various messaging apps. Less often, I've used it to play games, take pictures, and record interviews.

Since I got it, I probably dropped the phone from sitting, standing, or table height once a day on average. Most of those falls were with some kind of case on, but I abandoned all cases in 2018 after an argument that ended with me foregoing the case in order to make a point I no longer remember. In April of 2019, I dropped the iPhone 6S Plus on the concrete floor at VICE's office, without the case, and shattered the screen terribly. At that point, the phone's battery also couldn't hold a charge for more than a few hours, so I replaced the screen and battery at an independent repair shop for $185.09.

That's exactly what Apple didn't want me to do. As Motherboard has reported for years, Apple has gone to great lengths to make it difficult for me to repair my phone. It lobbies against laws that would make it easier for repair shops to access parts, sues repair shops, and fearmongers about the mostly non existing risks of repair. The company does everything it can to push users to buy new phones, or take their phones in for repair at Apple stores, but I persevered.

Given the disposable nature of modern electronics, it's remarkable that a complicated piece of technology like my iPhone 6S Plus lasted this long. I've dropped it hundreds of times and downloaded iOS updates designed for phones four or more generations ahead of mine. I don't want to be gross, but it's fair to say that every form of waste that my body produces has at least made contact with my iPhone 6S Plus at some point, which I do try to clean regularly with an antibacterial or alcohol spray and a microfiber rag. (I'm sorry, but if you've owned a phone for a significant period of time, research shows that's probably true about your phone as well.)

I have, on several occasions, used the phone in the shower. Sometimes I hold my phone out in front of my dog and ask him to eat it, but he refuses because he's a good boy. I often joke about shoving the phone up my ass, but have not, because I am a coward.

That's not to say it's not worse for wear: There's a visible dent in the upper right, back corner of the phone. Ever since the repair shop replaced my screen, the touchscreen has been a little screwy, leading to more butt-dialing and butt-texting. Sometimes I'll take the phone out of my pocket after walking the dog and find that it'll be locked because it's been entering the wrong security pin in my pocket dozens of times. When I drop it now, sometimes the screen pops out of the frame a bit, and I push it back in.

My iPhone 6S Plus, shot with an iPhone XR. note the dent in the upper right corner. Image: Emanuel Maiberg

One time I walked into the office in the morning and the phone speaker just started playing an episode of Pod Save America, which is embarrassing enough, but I live in fear of the day that the same will happen with an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience. Depending on what Rogan is talking about, it could be the end of my career.

Other than those problems and the 2019 repair and battery replacement, the phone more or less serves my needs just as reliably as the day I bought it. I don't personally know anyone today who uses a phone as old as mine. My wife, who got an iPhone 6S Plus the same day I got mine, has upgraded her phone twice since. Even Motherboard's editor-in-chief Jason Koebler, who is a leading reporter on the right-to-repair movement, has upgraded his phone twice in the time that I've had my iPhone 6S Plus: First to an iPhone 7 Plus, and then to an iPhone 11 Pro, which he revealed to me one morning by saying, "Hey, want to see something horrible?"

Koebler, who at the time of writing was in the tropics, did not respond to a request for comment.

I don't know why I have stuck to the same phone for four years while my colleagues, friends, and family have not. I don't think I'm cheap. In fact, I'm known to (and often ridiculed for) spending too much money on technology. I have an expensive PC, which over years I've upgraded with ridiculous accoutrements like a 144hz monitor and a split mechanical keyboard. I don't mind spending money on things, I just hate getting scammed. As far as I can tell, the idea that I need to get a new phone every year or two just because Apple makes new phones or because my carrier offers an "upgrade" which is really just a way to trap me into a multi-year contract, is a scam.

When I see someone with a new and objectively more powerful phone, I'm not jealous. I don't want to unlock the phone with my face. I don't wish it had a bigger screen. I don't long for more and better cameras.

If anything, people with more recent versions of the iPhone are jealous of my 6S Plus—its tactile home button, its headphone jack, and the thousands of dollars in savings that its long life implies.

Mostly, the phone does what I need it to do—read and write over the internet—and tragically far more than I need, like sending me push notifications from news apps I forgot to disable or delivering my location to shady data aggregators.

The iPhone 6S Plus is my first, and so far my only, Big Phone. These, at first, were an object of ridicule. Steve Jobs himself said that "no one's going to buy" a big phone before Apple made them, which makes their current ubiquity all the more embarrassing, a tacit admission that we are powerless to let these screens literally take up more space in our lives.

The smartphone is a window into the world. The bigger the window, the more of the world you see, and the world is often bad. This is the screen that quivers and glows in the middle of the night with ominous texts. It's the screen I leaned up on my nightstand and watched as I fell asleep to a live video of Trump's 2016 election victory speech. It's the phone that rings when my parents need to tell me that someone has cancer or has died. For some reason I only have bad memories of the phone, though I know that it has delivered good news as well. It does not spark joy.

Limiting my time with the iPhone 6S Plus has been my biggest issue with it. Apple tried to address this with the Screen Time feature, which I assume is designed to humiliate me by showing me exactly how much time I spend looking at the phone's screen and which cruel app held my attention there.

I have mostly not had Twitter installed on the phone since that night in November 2016. For about a year, I would often watch YouTube videos on my phone before going to bed. One night in December of 2019, I was up until 3 a.m. watching TikToks in bed, and woke up with a sore shoulder from holding the phone up at a weird angle. Since "I pulled my shoulder watching TikToks in bed" is the dumbest true statement I've had to make in quite some time, I have since been good about not bringing the iPhone 6S Plus to bed. I leave it on my desk and read instead. I can't overstate what a positive effect this has had on my life.

The iPhone 6S Plus and I are now in a kind of equilibrium. I don't love it, but not because it is bad or old technology, but because it's a type of technology I wish I didn't need to have. Getting a new and improved phone might be a thrill for a bit, but I imagine I would soon settle into the same relationship, and that's not a thrill that's worth the price of a new iPhone, or the unnecessary waste created by a phone that still works but is suddenly garbage.

I'm sure that one day soon my iPhone 6S Plus will break beyond repair, Apple will release an iOS version that won't work on it, or a security issue will force me to get a newer device. Until then, I'm sticking with it. It can do more than I ever needed any smartphone to do. If you have one and it ain't broke, don't fix it. And if it's broke, fix it until you can't anymore.

After 1,434 Days of Testing, My Review of the iPhone 6S Plus syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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newsnigeria · 5 years

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Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà

New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/deconstructing-islamophobia/

Deconstructing Islamophobia

[this article was written for the Unz Review]

Introduction: a short survey of the cuckoo’s nest

My initial idea was to begin with a definition of “Islamophobia” but after looking around for various definitions, I decided to use my own, very primitive definition. I will define Islamophobia as the belief that Islam (the religion) and/or Muslims (the adherents to this religion) represent some kind of more or less coherent whole which is a threat to the West. These are two distinct arguments rolled up into one: the first part claims that Islam (the religion) represents some kind of threat to the West while the second part claims that the people who embrace Islam (Muslims) also represent some kind of threat to the West. Furthermore, this argument makes two crucial assumptions:

there is such thing out there as a (conceptually sufficient) unitary Islam

there are such people with (conceptually sufficient) common characteristics due to their adherence to Islam

Next, let’s summarize the “evidence” typically presented in support of this thesis:

The god of Islam is not the same god as the God of Christianity

The Muslim world was created by the sword

The Prophet of Islam, Muhammad, was an evil person

Islam is incompatible with western democracy and represents a threat to what are referred to as “values” in the modern day West

Muslims have treated Christians horribly in many different historical instances

Muslims often turn to terrorism and commit atrocities

Islam is socially regressive and seeks to impose medieval values on a modern world

There are more such as these, but these, I believe, are the main ones.

What is crucial here is to point out that this evidence relies both on theological arguments (#1 #4 #7), and historical arguments (#2 #3 #5 #6).

Finally, there is a most interesting phenomenon which, for the time being, we shall note, but only discuss later: the legacy corporate Ziomedia on one hand denounces Islamophobia as a form of “racism” but yet, at the same time, the very same circles which denounce Islamophobia are also the ones which oppose all manifestations of real traditional Islam. This strongly suggests that the study of this apparent paradox can, if carefully analyzed, yield some most interesting results, but more about that later.

Of course, all of the above is sort of a “bird’s eye” view of Islamophobia in the West. Once we go down to the average Joe Sixpack level, all of the above is fused into one “forceful” slogan as this one:

This kind of crude fearmongering is targeted at the folks who don’t realize that the USA is not “America” and who, therefore, probably don’t have the foggiest notion of what Sharia law is or how it is adjudicated by Islamic courts.

[I have lived in the USA for a total of 22 years and have observed something very interesting: there is a unique mix of ignorance and fear which, in the USA, is perceived as “patriotic”. A good example of this kind of “patriotism through ignorance” is in the famous song “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning” by Alan Jackson which includes the following words: “I watch CNN but I’m not sure I can tell you the difference in Iraq and Iran, but I know Jesus and I talk to God“. Truth be told, the same song also asked in reference to 9/11 “Did you burst out with pride for the red, white and blue?“. Why exactly the massacre of 9/11 should elicit patriotic pride is explained as follows “And the heroes who died just doin’ what they do?“. Thus when the “United American Committee” declares that Sharia law is a threat to “America” the folks raised in this culture of fear and patriotism immediately “get it”. David Rovics hilariously described this mindset in his song “Evening News” where he says: “Evil men are plotting, to blow up Washington, DC, ’cause they don’t like freedom and democracy, they’re fans of the Dark Ages, they are all around, they’re marching from the desert sands, and coming to your town“. I have had the fortune of visiting all the continents of our planet (except Oceania) and I can vouch that this blend of fear+patriotic fervor is something uniquely, well, not “American” but “USAnian”.]

Having quickly surveyed the Islamophobic mental scenery, we can now turn to a logical analysis of the so-called arguments of the Islamophobes.

Deconstructing the phobia’s assumptions: a unitary Islam

Let’s take the arguments one by one beginning with the argument of a unitary Islam.

Most of us are at least vaguely aware that there are different Islamic movements/schools/traditions in different countries. We have heard of Shias and Sunni, some have also heard about Alawites or Sufism. Some will even go so far as remembering that Muslim countries can be at war with each other, and that some Muslims (the Takfiris) only dream about killing as many other Muslims (who, obviously, don’t share the exact same beliefs) and that, in fact, movements like al-Qaeda, ISIS, etc have murdered other Muslims in huge numbers. So the empirical evidence strongly suggest that this notion of a Muslim or Islamic unity is factually simply wrong.

Furthermore, we need to ask the obvious question: what *is* Islam?

Now, contrary to the hallucinations of some especially dull individuals, I am not a Muslim. So what follows is my own, possibly mistaken, understanding of what “core Islam” is. It is the acceptance of the following formula “There is no god but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God” or “lā ʾilāha ʾillā llāh muḥammadun rasūlu llā“. Note that “Allah” is not a name, it is the word “God” and “rasul” can be translated as “prophet”. There are also the so-called Five Pillars of Islam:

The Shahada or profession of faith “There is no god but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God“

The Salat or a specific set of daily prayers

The Zakat or alms giving

The Sawm or fasting

The Hadjj or pilgrimage to Mecca

That’s it! A person who fully embraces these five pillars is considered a Muslim. Or at least, so it would appear. The reality is, of course, much more complex. For the time being, I will just note that in this “core Islam” there is absolutely nothing, nothing at all, which could serve as evidence for any of the Islamophobic theories. Yes, yes, I know, I can already hear the Islamophobes’ objections: you are ignoring all the bad stuff in the Quran, you are ignoring all the bad stuff about spreading Islam by the sword, you are ignoring all the bad things Muhammad did in his life, you are ignoring the many local traditions and all the normative examples of the tradition (Sunnah and it’s Hadiths). Yeah, except you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say:

Islam is inherently evil/dangerous AND

use local/idiosyncratic beliefs and actions to prove your point!

If Islam by itself is dangerous, then it has to be dangerous everywhere it shows up, irrespective of the region, people, time in history or anything else.

If we say that sometimes Islam is dangerous and sometimes it is not, then what we need to look into is not the core elements of the Islamic faith, but instead we need to identify those circumstances in which Islam was not a threat to anybody and those circumstances when Islam was a threat to others.

Furthermore, if your argument is really based on the thesis that Islam is evil always and everywhere, then to prove it wrong all I need to do is find one, just ONE, example where Muslims and non-Muslims have lived in peace together for some period of time.

[Sidebar: while I was working on my Master’s Degree in Strategic Studies I had the fortune of having the possibility to take a couple of courses outside my field of specialization and I decided to take the most “exotic” course I could find in SAIS‘ curriculum and I chose a course on Sharia law. This was an excellent decision which I never regretted. Not only was the course fascinating, I had the chance of writing a term paper on the topic “The comparative status of Orthodox Christians in history under Muslim and Latin rule“. My first, and extremely predictable, finding was that treatment of Orthodox Christians by Muslim rulers ranged from absolutely horrible and even genocidal to very peaceful and kind. Considering the long time period considered (14 centuries) and the immense geographical realm covered (our entire planet from Morocco to Indonesia and from Russia to South Africa), this is hardly surprising. The core beliefs of Islam might be simple, but humans are immensely complicated beings who always end up either adding a local tradition or, at least, defending one specific interpretation of Islam. My second finding was much more shocking: on average the status of Orthodox Christians under the Papacy was much worse than under Muslim rule. Again, I am not comparing the status of Orthodox Serbs under Ottoman rule with the status of Orthodox Christians in modern Italy. These are extreme examples. But I do claim that there is sort of a conceptual linear regression which strongly suggests to us that there is a predictive (linear) model which can be used to make predictions and that the most obvious lesson of history is that the absolute worst thing which can happen to Orthodox Christians is to fall under their so-called “Christian brothers” of the West. A few exceptions here and there do not significantly affect this model. I encourage everybody to take the time to really study the different types of Muslim rulers in history, if only to appreciate how much diversity you will find].

Deconstructing the phobia’s assumptions: the “Muslim god” vs the “Christian God”

This is just about the silliest anti-Muslim argument I have ever heard and it come from folks inhabiting the far left side of a Bell Curve. It goes something like this:

We, Christians, have our true God as God, whereas the Muslims have Allah, which is not the God of the Christians. Thus, we worship different gods.

Of course, the existence of various gods or one, single, God does not depend on who believes in Him or who worships Him. If we can agree on the notion that God is He Who created all of Creation, and if we agree that both Christians (all denominations) and Muslims (all schools) believe that they are worshiping that God then, since there is only one real/existing God, we do worship the same God simply because there are not “other” gods.

I wonder what those who say that “Muslims worship another god” think when they read the following words of Saint Paul to the Athenian pagans: “For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, To The Unknown God. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you” (Acts 17:23). What Saint Paul told them is that they ignorantly worship a god whom, in spite of that ignorant worship, Saint Paul declared to them. I submit that “ignorant worship” is not an insult, but a diagnosis of heterodoxy, and that such an “ignorant worship” can nonetheless be sincere.

The issue is not WHOM we worship, but HOW we worship (in terms of both praxis and doxa).

And yes, here the differences between Christians and Muslims are huge indeed.

In my 2013 article “Russia and Islam, part eight: working together, a basic “how-to”” I discussed the immense importance of these differences and how we ought to deal with them. I wrote:

The highest most sacred dogmatic formulation of Christianity is the so-called “Credo” or “Symbol of Faith” (full text here; more info here). Literally every letter down to the smallest ‘i‘ of this text is, from the Christian point of view, the most sacred and perfect dogmatic formulation, backed by the full authority of the two Ecumenical Councils which proclaimed it and all the subsequent Councils which upheld it. In simple terms – the Symbol of Faith is absolutely non-negotiable, non-re-definable, non-re-interpretable, you cannot take anything away from it, and you cannot add anything to it. You can either accept it as is, in toto, or reject it.

The fact is that Muslims would have many problems with this text, but one part in particular is absolutely unacceptable to any Muslim:

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Only-begotten, Begotten of the Father before all ages, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, Begotten, not made; of one essence with the Father, by whom all things were made

This part clearly and unambiguously affirms that Jesus-Christ was not only the Son of God but actually God Himself. This is expressed by the English formulation “of one essence with the Father” (ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί in Greek with the key term homousios meaning “consubstantial”). This is *THE* core belief of Christianity: that Jesus was the the anthropos, the God-Man or God incarnate. This belief is categorically unacceptable to Islam which says that Christ was a prophet and by essence a ‘normal’ human being.

For Islam, the very definition of what it is to be a Muslim is found in the so-called “Shahada” or testimony/witness. This is the famous statement by which a Muslim attests and proclaims that “There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God”. One can often also hear this phrased as “There is no god but Allah, Muhammad is His prophet”.

Now without even going into the issue of whether Christians can agree or not that “Allah” is the appropriate name for God (some do, some don’t – this is really irrelevant here), it’s the second part which is crucial here: Christianity does not recognize Muhammad as a prophet at all. In fact, technically speaking, Christianity would most likely classify Muhammad as a heretic (if only because of his rejection of the “Symbol of Faith”). Saint John of Damascus even called him a ‘false prophet’. Simply put: there is no way a Christian can accept the “Shahada” without giving up his Christianity just as there is no way for a Muslim to accept the “Symbol of Faith” without giving up his Islam.

So why bother?

Would it not make much more sense to accept that there are fundamental and irreconcilable differences between Christianity and Islam and simply give up all that useless quest for points of theological agreement? Who cares if we agree on the secondary if we categorically disagree on the primary? I am all in favor of Christians studying Islam and for Muslims studying Christianity (in fact, I urge them both to do so!), and I think that it is important that the faithful of these religions talk to each other and explain their points of view as long as this is not presented as some kind of quest for a common theological stance. Differences should be studied and explained, not obfuscated, minimized or overlooked.

Bottom line is this: it is PRECISELY because Islam and Christianity are completely incompatible theologically (and even mutually exclusive!) that there is no natural enmity between these two religions unless, of course, some Christian or Muslim decides that he has to use force to promote this religion. And let’s be honest, taken as a whole Christianity’s record on forced conversions and assorted atrocities is at least as bad as Islam’s, or even worse. Of course, if we remove the Papacy from the overall Christian record, things looks better. If then we also remove the kind of imperialism Reformed countries engaged in, it looks even better. But even Orthodox rulers have, on occasion, resorted to forceful conversions and mass murder of others.

And here, just as in Islam, we notice that Christians also did not always spread their faith by love and compassion, especially once Christian rulers came to power in powerful empires or nations.

Deconstructing the phobia’s assumptions: Islam was spread by the sword

In reality the “Islam spread by the sword” is a total canard, at least when we hear it from folks who defend “democracy” but who stubbornly refuse to concede that 1) most democracies came to power by means of violent revolutions and that 2) just a look at a newspaper today (at least a non-western newspaper) will tell you that democracy is STILL spread by the sword. As for the USA as country, it was built on by far the biggest bloodbath in history. If anything, Sharia law and Islam could teach a great deal to the country which:

spends more on aggression than the rest of the world combined

has the highest percentage of people incarcerated (and most of these for non-violent crimes)

whose entire economy is based on the military-industrial complex

and who is engaged in more simultaneous wars of choice than any other country in history

So “Sharia Law Threatens America” is a lie. And this is the truth:

Was Islam really spread by the sword?

Maybe. But anybody making that claim better make darn sure that his/her religion, country or ideology has a much better record. If not, then this is pure hypocrisy!

Finally, I will also note that Christ said “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence” (John 18:36). In contrast, the Prophet of Islam established the first Islamic state in Medina. So when we compare Muhammad’s actions to Christ, a better comparison should be with the various Christian rulers (including Byzantine ones) and we will soon find out that the Christian Roman Empire also used the sword on many occasions.

Deconstructing the phobia’s assumptions: the Prophet of Islam was a bad man

You must have all sorts of stories about how the Prophet Muhammad did things we would disapprove of. I won’t list them here simply because the list of grievances is a little different in each case. I actually researched some of these accusations (about marrying young girls, or sentencing people to death for example) and in each case, there is a very solid Muslim defense of these incidents which is almost always ignored and which provides a crucial context to, at least, the better understanding of the incident discussed.

Since I am not a historian or a biographer of the Prophet Muhammad I don’t have any personal opinion on these accusations other than stating the obvious: I am not a Muslim and I don’t have to decide whether Muhammad was a sinful man or a infallible person (that is a purely theological argument). I will simply say that this ad hominem is only relevant to the degree that some Muslims would consider each action of their prophet as normative and not historical. Furthermore, even if they would consider each action of their prophet as normative, we need to recall here that we are dealing with a prophet, not a God-Man, and that therefore the comparison ought not to be made with Christ, whom Christians believe to be 100% sinless, but with a Christian prophet, say Moses, whom no real Christian will ever declare sinless or infallible. As for the Quran, let’s not compare it to just the New Testament but to all the books of the Bible taken together, including those who were eventually re-interpreted by the new religion of (some) Jews after the fall of Jerusalem: rabbinical/Phariseic Talmudism which found plenty of passages in its (deliberately falsified) “Masoretic” text of the Old Testament “Tanakh” (please see here if you don’t know what falsification I am referring to).

Finally, NO religious text worth anything is self-explanatory or “explains itself” by means of comparing passages. This is also why all major religions have a large corpus of texts which explain, interpret, expand upon and otherwise give the (deceptively simple looking) text its real, profound, meaning. Furthermore, most major religions also have a rich oral tradition which also sheds light on written religious documents. Whatever may be the case, simply declaring that “Islam is a threat” because we don’t approve of the actions of the founder of Islam is simply silly. The next accusation is much more material:

Deconstructing the phobia’s assumptions:Islam is incompatible with democracy

That is by far the most interesting argument and one which many Muslims would agree with! Of course, it all depends on what you mean by “democracy”. Let me immediately concede that if by “democracy” you mean this:

Then, indeed, Islam is incompatible with modern western democracy. But so is (real) Christianity!

So the so-called “West” has to decide what its core values are. If Conchita Wurst is an embodiment of “democracy” then Islam and Christianity are both equally incompatible with it. Orthodox Christianity, for sure, has not caved in to the homo-lobby in the same way most western Christian denominations have.

But if by “democracy” we don’t mean “gay pride” parades but rather true pluralism, true people-power, and the real sovereignty of the people, then what I call “core Islam” is not threat to democracy at all. None. However, there is also no doubt about two truisms:

Some Muslim states are profoundly reactionary and freedom crushing

Traditional Islam is incompatible with many modern “western values”

Still, it is also very easy to counter these truism with the following replies

Some Muslim states are pluralistic, progressive and defend the oppressed (Muslim or not)

Traditional Christianity is incompatible with modern “western values”

Again, Iran is, in my opinion, the perfect illustration of a pluralistic (truly diverse!), progressive and freedom defending Muslim state. I simply don’t have the time and place to go into a detailed discussion of the polity of Iran (I might have to do that in a future article), and for the time being I will point you to the hyper-pro-Zionist Wikipedia article (which nobody will suspect of being pro-Muslim or pro-Iranian) about the “Politics of Iran” which will show you two things: Iran is an “Islamic Republic” meaning that it is a republic, yes, but one which has Islam as its supreme law. There is absolutely nothing inherently less democratic about a Islamic republic which has a religion as its supreme law than a atheistic/secular republic which has a constitution as its supreme law. In fact, some countries don’t even have a constitution (the UK and Israel come to mind). As for the Iranian polity, it has a very interesting system of checks and balances which a lot of countries would do well to emulate (Russia for starters).

As for modern “western values”, they are completely incompatible with Christianity (the real, original, unadulterated thing) even if they are very compatible with modern western (pseudo-) Christian denominations.

So, now the question becomes: is there something profoundly incompatible between the real, traditional, Islam and the real, traditional, Christianity? I am not talking about purely theological differences here, but social and political consequences which flow from theological differences. Two immediately come to my mind (but there are more, of course):

The death penalty, especially for apostasy

Specific customs (dress code, ban on alcohol, separation of genders in various settings, etc.)

The first one, this is really a non-issue because while traditional, Patristic, Christianity has a general, shall we say, “inclination” against the death penalty, this has not always been the case in all Orthodox countries. So while we can say that by and large Orthodox Christians are typically not supporters of the death penalty, this is not a theological imperative or any kind of dogma. In fact, modern Russia has implemented a moratorium on the death penalty (to join the Council of Europe – hardly a moral or ethical reason) but most of the Russian population favor its re-introduction. Note that Muslims in Russia are apparently living their lives in freedom and overall happiness and when they voice grievances (often legitimate ones), they don’t have “reintroduce the death penalty” as a top priority demand.

The simple truth is that each country has to decide for itself whether it was the use the death penalty or not. Once a majority of voters have made that decision, members of each religion will have to accept that decision as a fact of law which can be criticized, but not one which can be overturned by any minority.

As for religious tribunals, they can be easily converted by the local legislature into a “mediation firm” which can settle conflicts, but only if both sides agree to recognize it’s authority. So if two Muslims want their dispute to be settled by an Islamic Court, the latter can simply act as a mediator as long as its decision does not violate any local or national laws. Hardly something non-Muslims (who could always refuse to recognize the Islamic Court) need to consider a “threat” to their rights or lifestyles.

An “Islamic Matrioshka”?!

As for the social customs, here it is really a no-brainer: apply Islamic rules to those who chose to be Muslims and let the other people live their lives as they chose to. You know, “live and let live”. Besides, in terms of dress code and gender differentiation, traditional Islam and traditional Christianity are very close.

Check out this typical Russian doll, and look at what she is wearing: this was the traditional Russian dress for women for centuries and this is still what Orthodox women (at least those who still follow ancient Christian customs) wear in Church.

Furthermore, if you go into a Latin parish in southern Europe or Latin America, you will often find women covering their heads, not only in church, but also during the day. The simple truth is that these clothes are not only modest and beautiful, they are also very comfortable and practical.

The thing which Islamophobes always miss is that they take examples of laws and rules passed by some Muslim states and assume that this is how all Muslim states will always act. But this is simply false. Let’s take the example of Hezbollah (that name means “party of God”, by the way) in Lebanon which has clearly stated on many occasions that it has no intention of transforming Lebanon into a Shia-only state. Not only did Hezbollah say that many times, but they acted on it and they always have had a policy of collaboration with truly patriotic Christians (of any denomination). Even in today’s resistance (moqawama) there are Christians who are not members of Hezbollah as a party (and why would they when this is clearly and officially a Muslim party and not a Christian one?!), but they are part of the military resistance.

[Sidebar: by the way, the first female suicide bomber in Lebanon was not a Muslim. She was a 18 year old from an Orthodox family who joined Syrian Social Nationalist Party and blew herself up in her car on an Israeli checkpoint (inside Lebanon, thus a legitimate target under international law!), killing two Israeli invaders and injuring another twelve. Her name was Sana’a Mehaidli]

A Hezbollah fighter respectfully picks up an image of the Mother of God from the ruins of a church destroyed by US-backed Takfiris

Recent events in Syria were also very telling: when the AngloZionist Empire unleashed its aggression against Syria and the “good terrorists” of al-Qaeda/al-Nusra/ISIS/etc. embarked in a wholesale program of massacres and atrocities, everybody ran for their lives, including all the non-Takfiri Muslims. Then, when the plans of the Axis of Kindness (USA, KSA, Israel) were foiled by the combined actions of Russia, Iran, Syria and Hezbollah, something interesting happened: the Latin Christians left, whereas the Orthodox Christians stayed (source). Keep in mind that Syria is *not* an Islamic state, yet the prospects of a Muslim majority was frightening enough for the Latins to flee even though the Orthodox felt comfortable staying. What do these Orthodox Christians know?

Could it be that elite traditionalist Shia soldiers represent no threat to Orthodox Christians?

Deconstructing the phobia’s assumptions: Islam generates terrorism

In fact, there is some truth to that too. But I would re-phrase it as: the AngloZionists in their hatred for anything Russian, including Soviet Russian, identified a rather small and previously obscure branch of Islam in Saudi Arabia which they decided to unleash against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. From the first day, these Takfiris were federated by the USA and financed by the House of Saud. The latter, in its fear of being overthrown by the Takfiris, decided to appease them by internationally supporting their terrorism (that is all Takfiris have to offer, their leaders are not respected scholars, to put it mildly). Since that time, the Takfiris have been the “boots on the ground” used by the West against all its enemies: Serbia, Russia first, but then also secular (Syria) or anti-Takfiri Muslim states (Iran).

So it is not “Islam” which generates terrorism: it is western (AngloZionist) imperialism.

The US and Israel are, by a wide margin, the biggest sponsors of terrorism (just as the West was always by far the biggest source of imperialism in history) and while they want to blame “Islam” for most terrorist attacks, the truth is that behind every such “Muslim” attack we find a western “deep state” agents acting, from the GIA in Algeria, to al-Qaeda in Iraq to al-Nusra in Syria to, most crucially, 9/11 in New York. These were all events created and executed by semi-literate Takfiri patsies who were run by agents of the western deep states.

As far as I know, all modern terrorist groups are, in reality, “operated by remote control” by state actors who alone can provide the training, know-how, finances, logistical support, etc needed by the terrorists.

And here is an interesting fact: the two countries which have done the most to crush Takfiri terrorism are Russia and Iran. But the collective West is still categorically refusing to work with these countries to crush the terrorism these western states claim to be fighting.

So, do you really believe that the West is fighting terrorism?

If yes, I got a few bridges to sell all over the planet.

Conclusion: cui bono? the so-called “liberals”

There are many more demonstratively false assumptions which are made by the AngloZionist propaganda machine. I have only listed a few. Now we can look to the apparent paradox in which we see the western “liberals” both denouncing Islamophobia and, at the same time, repeating all the worst cliches about Islam. In this category, Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton are the most egregious examples of this hypocrisy because while pretending to be friends of Muslims, they got more Muslims killed than anybody else. For western liberals, Islam is a perfect pretext to, on one hand, cater to minorities (ethnic or religious) while pretending to be extremely tolerant of others. Western liberals use Islam in the West, as a way to force the locals to give up their traditions and values. You could say that western liberals “love” Islam just like they “love” LGBTQIAPK+ “pride” parades: simply and only as a tool to crush the (still resisting) majority of the people in the West who have not been terminally brainwashed by the AngloZionist legacy corporate propaganda machine.

Conclusion: cui bono? the so-called “conservatives”

Western conservatism is dead. It died killed by two main causes: the abject failure of National-Socialism (which was an Anglo plan to defeat the USSR) and by its total lack of steadfastness of the western conservatives who abandoned pretty much any and all principles they were supposed to stand for. Before the 1990s, the conservative movements of the West were close to fizzling out into nothingness, but then the Neocons (for their own, separate, reasons) began pushing the “Islamic threat” canard and most conservatives jumped on it in the hope of using it to regain some relevance. Some of these conservatives even jumped on the “Christian revival in Russia” theory (which is not quite a canard, but which is also nothing like what the Alt-Righters imagine it to be) to try to revive their own, long dead, version of “Christianity”. These are desperate attempts to find a source of power and relevance outside a conservative movement which is basically dead. Sadly, what took the place of the real conservative movement in the West is the abomination known as “National Zionism” (which I discussed here) and whose ideological cornerstone is a rabid, hysterical, Islamophobia.

Conclusion: cui bono? the US deep state

That one is easy and obvious: the US deep state needs the “Islamic threat” canard for two reasons: to unleash against its enemies and to terrify the people of the USA so that they accept the wholesale destruction of previously sacred civil rights. This is so obvious that there is nothing to add here. I will only add that I am convinced that the US deep state is also supporting both the Alt-Right phenomenon and the various “stings” against so-called “domestic terrorists” (only only Muslims, by the way). What the Neocons and their deep-state need above all is chaos and crises which they used to shape the US political landscape.

Finally, the real conclusion: rate the source! always rate the source…

Whom did we identify as the prime sources of Islamophobia? The liberals who want to seize power on behalf of a coalition of minorities, conservatives who have long ditched truly conservative values and deep state agents who want to terrify US Americans and kill the enemies of the AngloZionist Empire.

I submit to you that these folks are most definitely not your friends. In fact, they are your real enemy and, unlike various terrorists abroad who are thousands of miles away from the USA, these real enemies are not only here, they are already in power and rule over you! And they are using Islam just like a matador uses a red cape: to distract you from the real threat: National Zionism. This is true in the US as it is true in the EU.

Most westerners are now conditioned to react with fear and horror when they hear “Allahu Akbar”. This is very predictable since most of what is shown in the western media is Takfiris screaming “Allahu Akbar” before cutting the throats of their victims (or rejoicing at the suffering/death of “infidels”).

Yet in the Donbass, the local Orthodox Christians knew that wherever that slogan (which simply means “God is greater” or “God is the greatest”) was heard the Ukronazis are on the run. And now we see Russia sending mostly Muslim units to Syria to protect not only Muslims, but everybody who needs protection.

Having a sizable Muslim minority in Russia, far from being any kind of threat, as turned to be a huge advantage for Russia in her competition against the AngloZionist Empire.

Chechens in Novorussia

There are, by the way, also Chechens fighting on the other side in this conflict: the very same Takfiris who were crushed and expelled from Chechnia by the joint efforts of the Chechen people and the Russian armed forces. So, again, we have Muslims on both sides, the Takfiris now happily united with the Nazis and the traditionalist Muslims of Kadyrov protecting the people of Novorussia.

That is one, amongst many more, nuances which the Islamophobic propaganda always carefully chooses to ignore.

Should you?

The Saker

#Religion

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asleepingwindow · 7 years

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Ace Discourse Masterpost (Rebloggable Cut Version)

Here is a master list of arguments in the ace discourse over the years against the notion that cishet ace/aro people are members of the LGBT community, because they are cis and straight. Furthermore why calling asexuality an oppression (while not denying the existence of prejudice against asexual people and the need for their own community) leads to very homophobic and transphobic understanding of what it means to be LGBT. I have been involved in “the discourse” for over five years, making arguments of my own and promoting others on this blog. But now it is time for me to move on and leave this masterpost as the culmination of this blog’s purpose.

Some of these posts are mine but for the most part this is the product of a lot of other people’s work: their words, their thoughts, their experiences and their research all compiled into one place to help people understand the ace discourse and to track its record of ahistory and blatant homophobia and transphobia. I have made sure to use links on my blog so they don’t get lost in any name changes or deletion, but I do not take any credit for their posts and content. So thank you to everyone who contributed to the discourse, and ultimately this post. I hope this will be great resource for discoursers young and old and help people form their own arguments and to help young LGBT people from falling into the trap of denying their sexuality because of the homophobic and transphobic rhetoric of the Ace Community.

So without further ado, The Ace Discourse Masterpost:

Why Asexuality is Not Oppressed

A comparison of asexuality to racism and why it does not meet the definition of systemic oppression

A Debunking of the study often cited as proof of Asexual Oppression and Acephobia

Another response to the oft cited study.

And denying oppression is not proof it exists

Oppression is systematic, not individual

Asexuality does not need to be oppressed to still be valid

Gatekeeping

The LGBT community was created to combat transphobia and homophobia

Gatekeeping doesn’t mean what you think it does

“The LGBT Community is meant to be inclusive!!”

Safe Spaces are meant to be exclusive

And thus excluding cishet aces protects LGBT people

On Oppression Olympics

If not LGBT, where do asexual people belong?

On the assumption that some LGBT people live happy homophobia free lives and should be called “not queer enough” too.

The emergence of REG, “ Reactionary Exclusionist Gatekeepers”

REG is just another version of using “it’s the same as ___” to gain legitimacy

The Queer Identity

The history of “queer” as a slur and why its not an umbrella term

Insisting “queer” is an umbrella term for abnormal/deviant people is classic homophobia

Queer is also often used to intentionally erase an individuals distinct identity and relation to oppression

Queer can never fully be reclaimed

On queer theory and the true history of the term

A is for Asexual

How AVEN started the A for Asexual, fully aware that it was also being used for allies. (Arguing the origin of A as Ally is pointless now, this post explains it all from the horse’s mouth)

Why trying to use MOGAI instead does not work.

Ableism and The DSM

A thorough argument on why hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) in the DSM is not proof of oppression against asexuals, and is in fact a homophobic and ableist claim.

More on HSDD and the absurdity of claiming it targets asexual people

More on the history of the slur homosexuality and how it was used to medically torture gay people.

Autistic people are often assumed to be asexual (And are not meant to be ace representation)

A Complete Guide to How the Ace Community has lied about the Pathologization of Asexuality and Fearmongered Young Aces into thinking Anti-Ace Conversion Therapy is a Thing

Split Attraction Model (Asexuality is not Straight!)

Why the split attraction model is bad and people hate it.

It makes gross assumptions about non-asexual people who do not use the model, and conflates sexual attraction with sexual orientation

Sectioning personal thoughts on sex and using mogai labels are ultimately useless

The -sexual prefix has always meant gender not sex

Attraction cannot be so evenly split into Romantic or Sexual

“You must be cisgender, heteroromantic, and heterosexual to be Straight!”

Also “Homoromantic” is a terrible word

The History of the word Straight

Allosexual & Allosexual Privilege

Why Allosexual is a terrible term

The word makes sweeping assumptions about someone’s private sexual feelings for vast number of people. (tl;dr version)

The person who coined the term now opposes it’s use.

There is no such thing as sexual privilege.

SGA people have a relationship to sex based on our oppression that straight asexual people cannot understand or experience

The failure of liberal analysis of power structures

Refuting the idea that LGBT people don’t face homophobia or transphobia even in more liberal places.

A cringe-worthy comic that assumes “allosexual” people easily know their sexual orientation because sex

Can you all just stop with this shit, really?

Monosexism, allosexuality’s evil cousin, has many of the same issues.

TL;DR Another brief argument against Allosexual

Corrective Rape

The term “corrective rape” has been appropriated from a very specific homophobic hate crime in South Africa to mean any kind of rape that punishes the victim.

The UN updated it’s terminology guidelines to refer to it as homophobic rape to “note the deep-seated homophobia that motivates the hate crime”

Often used as a gotcha argument than concern for rape victims.

Supporting Rape Culture and Pedophilia

Discourse about ace people having sex is often thinly veiled rape culture

Claiming rape is worse for asexual people again, and again, and again, and again, and again

Is the discourse becoming too “inclusive” of pedophiles?

The troubling trend of protecting pedophiles and calling out victims

On Sex In General

How capitalism affects our perceptions of sexual culture

Asexuality is about sex in a way being Gay/Bi is not (And how it relates to explaining sex and sexuality to children)

Aces need to talk about sex too!

Erasure and Visibility

Visibility directly contributes to the violence LGBT people face

Visibility is not always positive and is often stereotyped and not good for LGBT people

Accepted versus Respected

“At least you have representation!”

A History of Ahistory

Arguments that the Spinster Movement was about asexuality cherry picks history

Another post about the Spinster Movement

Assuming Boston Marriages were about asexuality

Asexuality is based on western/eurocentric ideas of sexuality

New terminology lacks historical context of “homosexual”

And is often appropriating language from LGBT people

Even recent history gets rewritten

The Ace Community really needs to just stop.

Pushing LGBT People Back into the Closet

Homophobia wants gay people to be asexual

Ace discourse has promoted sexually regressive and classic homophobic ideas about sex that has prevented LGB people from fully admitting to themselves their same-gender attraction. (Proof)

Ace discourse against same-gender PDA in LGBT safe spaces is classic homophobia

As well as dangerous to our sexual safety!

PDA is not applied to straight and gay people equally

AIDS/HIV and Serophobia in the Ace Community

“We’re Here, We’re Queer” - was created in response to the AIDS Crisis (Source)

Joking about the crisis to complain about gatekeeping

Resenting AIDS activism so much as to imply no young gay man today could possibly be affected by the AIDS crisis

Assuming no one alive during the crisis is speaking now about seraphobia (The AIDS Crisis is Not Over!)

Imagining sexually transmitted plagues that won’t affect asexuals

“Ok but that was like 40 years ago and homosexuality is now widely accepted”

Homophobia in the Ace Community

Will comment on topics of violent homophobia with “at least they know you exist” so they can kill us

Ace tumblr or conservative republican?

Claiming people who hate aces are “Sexually Deviant”

Masterpost of some really terrible homophobic shit

“Gay people are obsessed with sex!” Edition of Ace Homophobia

This entire tag of fucked up shit ace people have said

Please feel free to reblog and add any arguments I may have missed.

(Uncut Version)

#ace discourse #asexuality #ace discourse masterpost #read more version

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