#there should be some kind of secular version

[ad-caelestia]

Common Misconceptions about Witchcraft

You have to be a Wiccan to be a witch

I literally thought this until I was 23 years old and started practicing magic again. It’s hard not to believe when nearly every book, guide, and tutorial you come across is geared towards Wicca. Wicca is a religion in which its followers may practice witchcraft. Witchcraft is a practice that may or may not involve religion.

Witches don’t cast curses and if you do, you’re a terrible person

No, stop. The idea that cursing is “bad” stems from the Wiccan “threefold law,” you know, the whole “whatever you do will come back at you three times as much” thing. Not everyone is Wiccan, not everyone follows that belief.

Witchcraft is a religious practice

Witchcraft itself has no religious basis. You can be pretty much whatever religion you want and still practice magic. You can practice witchcraft with no religious preference whatsoever. You can choose to work with deities, or keep your craft entirely secular. Up to you.

Witchcraft is the work of the devil and if you practice witchcraft you’re going to hell

A Christian concept and scare tactic. Not everyone is Christian or even believe in the Christian devil or Christian version of hell.

You have to dress the part

I practice magic in sweat pants and a t-shirt. I find that I work best when I am dressed comfortably, not in some flowy black dress and pointy hat. You don’t have to dress a certain way to be a witch or cast spells. Some witches or magicians have ceremonial clothing that is worn during various rituals but for your every day spell, it’s really not a requirement.

You can call yourself a witch without actually practicing witchcraft

No, I’m not referring to those with chronic or mental illness who practice magic in a minimalistic manner. I’m referring to those who call themselves a witch for the aesthetic and don’t actually practice magic. You don’t have to constantly do spells or even involve magic in your life on a daily basis but you do have to practice magic at some point in order to call yourself a witch.

Witchcraft is inherently dangerous

Practicing witchcraft itself is said by some to invite spirits and entities into your life that are sensitive to the energy we give off, but that may not be true for everyone. Learn how to protect yourself from these kinds of things and you’ll be golden.

You can cherry pick from closed cultures and use those practices in your craft

You don’t have a “gypsy soul,” pizza isn’t your “spirit animal,” having a bundle of white sage doesn’t automatically mean it’s a “smudge stick,” and you should probably throw away that shirt that says “namaste in bed.” A lot of terms we see folks using these days are being appropriated, at best. In terms of witchcraft, well yes, some cultures and religions are open or partially open but please don't disrespect those that aren’t just to sound trendy.

You have to choose one path of witchcraft and stick to it

You can incorporate many types of magic into your craft and it’s really not a problem. Some witches get overwhelmed trying to choose a “type” but it's not required, at all. 

You have to be a woman/straight/cis, whatever, to be a witch

Heck nope. Anyone can practice witchcraft and please don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

You have to be born into a family of witches to be a “true witch”

Witchcraft is a learned practice, not something embedded in our DNA. Even if everyone else in your family is a witch, you can choose not to follow that path. The same goes for those who don’t have any witches in their family history.

© 𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟺 𝙰𝙳-𝙲𝙰𝙴𝙻𝙴𝚂𝚃𝙸𝙰

[penguicorns-are-cool]

Did you have color war or anything like it at your school/camp. as in everyone dresses up in a different color and competes in a bunch of competitions for points and whoever gets the most at the end of the day wins.

I've had some version of color war at almost every Jewish school or camp I've been to. It comes from Macabi Games in Israel and a bunch of Jewish camps and schools were like, we should have something like that. I've seen it called color war, bikkurim, and macabi games.

I realized it was probably a Jewish thing when I realized that field day wasn't just color-war and tends to be more team-building than color war. I read a fanfic yesterday set in a secular camp that had color-war so now I'm wondering if it really is a Jewish thing that just kind of spread a bit or if it isn't a Jewish thing so here's a poll

please reblog for more spread and leave your answer or experiences in the tags if you want

[tuurverheydepoetryandprose]

The influence of Twitter on online culture made me angry, the influence of TikTok on online culture kinda scares me. The amount of misinformation, censorship, media illiteracy, secular puritanism, revisionism, moral dogmatism… it just horrifies me.

Twitter made online culture into a sphere of perpetually pointless discourse, filled to the brim with pedantry, cynicism, performative outrage, gleeful abuse, bad faith arguments etc. It’s a world where everyone is an intellectual, an activist and a critic, no matter how incurious, inaccurate and demonstrably absurd their arguments.

TikTok is creating a world where everyone feels themselves to be historians, educators, politicians, community leaders, moral guides, experts etc. Like that woman who says the Roman Empire didn’t exist said: “some people just know more than you.” (Or something similar)

‘Just know’ is critical here: lots of TikTok influencers just confidently presume to know things without doing any real research, fact-checking and due diligence. They just act as if they are experts and will say whatever without citing anything. More than anything, they act as if their words and intuitions hold universal moral weight.

This is inevitably leading us to a path where the worst impulses of people who love attention and love to feel right no matter the cost are steering discourse standards for young people.

The result is this kind of secular dogmatism, puritanism and moral absolutism. What is problematic is immoral, what is uncomfortable is abusive, all authoritative information is untrue… People propagating all kinds of misinformation and historical revisionism, people spreading the attitude that all “problematic” media should be wiped from existence, that any expression that doesn’t meet their criteria doesn’t have a right to exist publicly, that morality is not concerned with actual interpersonal behaviour but with personal taste, preference and media consumption instead… At the centre of it is the bane of much online media “analysis”, the attitude that ‘I am the universal I. My taste corresponds with the bounds of what should exist and what shouldn’t. If I can’t relate to it, it’s irrelevant, if I dislike it, it must be morally reprehensible and should be erased.’

This will lead to more alienation, fragmentation and polarisation, but that’s not all. A lot of these misguided attitudes come clad in the language of progressive values and radical politics, but deliberately or not, they are smoothing the path for reactionary gain. People forget that reactionary ideas and attitudes don’t always have to come with explicitly right-wing conservative, neoliberal signifiers, they can just as easily be clad in the language of socialism or revolutionary values as well (just look at the Sovjet-Union or modern day China).

I do sincerely hope that the online left does something to counter this because this trend will make it incredibly easy for the right-wing to enflame the culture war and turn offline people against social progressivism and/or for red-brown goons and reactionary “socialists” to infiltrate the online left and increasingly make it more conservative and more culturally restrictive.

This finger-wagging, prudish and proudly ignorant version of progressivism will not protect anyone from anything. It will just open up online communities to more harassment, thought-policing, gatekeeping, public shaming and open the door for many cynical and unscrupulous people to gain prominence and violently enforce cultural conformity.

[beardedmrbean]

I know you didn’t see it, but as someone pointed out with Killmonger. The people who often said “fuck Christopher Columbus and white people!” don’t hate imperialism itself. They hate that their ancestors was on the losing side of the wars centuries ago

As I mentioned before they glamorized the Dahomey kingdom of all things, I saw a person online with a PHD said the Ottomans were good to lived under.

A Hindu mutual of mine said that the left constantly glamorized the Mughals because they are brown. People are even defending the Aztecs now.

Like I saw people say that the left only “protected” the Jews because of the Holocaust. Because when you dive into Hitler and the Nazis the mindsets you notice a lot of similarities

“The Jews/White people are the root of all evil and must be wiped out!”

And I think Jews are getting a wake up call with the I/P conflict as now the left antisemitism is in full force

I mean I saw these as the left said in more privileged than career politicians such as Hillary Clinton because I have a dick. But the second they learn in black, I’m more oppressed than a trailer park kid that was pimp out by their parents

And the decolonization thing, hmm strange that never passed to Arab ethnostates

Oh good, you're still here. I'm happy about that _____________

Aztecs, yikes people raised hell here in CA about some of the lessons that involved learning various Aztec prayers, not sure how far if actually got but I hope it didn't get implemented.

Was a whole thing about connecting the Latino students to part of their heritage and CA history as well dumb for one because the Aztecs never made it up this far and for two, the reason Cortez managed to take them out with 300 Spaniards was because of the 30,000 natives that joined in because they were tired of being used for human sacrifices among other things.

Interesting to see the return of moral relativism

It's their culture and it should be respected even if that means this 73 year old dude that died's 19 year old wife will be placed on his funeral pyre with him and burned alive so they can be together in the afterlife (first time I hears a self proclaimed atheist say something along those lines my head spun, was weird. Still is gotta respect their beliefs provided they are using a western religion because reasons)

Colonization thing, I was originally looking for a map of arab migration into North Africa but this kind of thing kept coming up

Finally ran into one that was just Arab migration and it's the same map, which makes sense, Egypt is still full of Egyptians though which is kinda wild, Iran is split between Persians and Arabs, Persians being the indigenous people in that area.

Like I saw people say that the left only “protected” the Jews because of the Holocaust.

This is one of those things I've put a lot of time and thought into.

Short version of my conclusion is that if they were still a stateless people they would likely be one of the darlings of leftist circles.

At least until they started getting to successful, preformative wokeness would be the modern term I guess.

You're not supposed to actually do well because if you do then we can't use you as a prop to show how awful other people are.

Be why Asians got kicked out of the POC club.

And I think Jews are getting a wake up call with the I/P conflict as now the left antisemitism is in full force

Stephen Fry coming out and saying, you know what, I'm Jewish is a good bit for that, seems to be some of the secular Jewish community, even the one's that don't do anything Jewish at all, well didn't since it would seem a bunch of them are having their eyes opened more than they ever thought they would.

So ya that's a thing too.

Circling back to Egypt, wonder what the hotep contingent thinks about the Arabization of North Africa, they're lunatics regardless but I bet there's some funny stuff going on in the we-wuz circles about that. __________

And again, I'm glad to hear from you especially after your previous ask. Keep pushing through world needs self aware people in it.

[a-very-fond-farewell]

hello!!! i hope i'm not too late to ask about your original fiction wips!!! would love to hear more about them if you're comfortable with sharing 6: their titles are so suave!

ah! you do know how to prod where it hurts most xD (affectionate)! thank you for asking dear, you’re not too late at all! and also thank you for all the kind comments/tags/etc. that you sprinkled throughout my notifications today :D they really made my Saturday more bearable and I hope you are doing well yourself!

(more under the cut)

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so. it’s not my first rodeo. I have written original fiction in the past but I was always unsatisfied with it and these 2 bad bois are no exception even if they are in their planning/draft phase.

mária of the moon (the ‘seas’ of the moon) is too personal for me to delineate in detail, bc it should be set in a city where I used to live in for a while so I can’t be too specific about that. but it’s basically the story of an unnamed and lonely narrator who steals someone else’s identity in order to be welcomed inside someone else’s home, where their weird little found family comes in. it’s inspired by a curious incident my mother told me about once or twice and, even if it will not be based on it specifically, it got me thinking for a long while.

the title is a play on words with the name Maria, but in the ‘maria’ of the title the accent is placed on the first syllable rather than the second one, as if to imply that sometimes a shift in perspective is needed in order to move on with the plot. it’s also a reference to a literary trope in my country’s history that traces back to the renaissance, where it’s believed that lost things happen to land on the moon somehow. since the majority of the lunar seas are gathered on the visible side of the moon, it may be appropriate to wonder if someone named Maria has gone missing and if they have, have they landed on the moon? or maybe their name has?

it’s a story about gender identity and grief, about lies and new families too. but also, somehow, about lobsters. and sculptures. angels and taxidermy. hallucinations and burnout. there’s magical realism and insanity. it’s a lot. I’ve mapped the plot in its entirety but I feel like I’m never alone and this kind of work requires a lot of self-isolation, I think, something I can’t afford right now and possibly wouldn’t handle too well if I really think about it. also, idk in which language I should write it: my native language or English. which is a problem bc I’m tempted to write both versions myself, but that requires even more time and I simply don’t have that right now.

Secular Games is far more difficult to approach. it’s something I came up with a couple of years ago while studying for an Ancient Roman History exam, in order to remember some dates, but now it’s mapped out and sometimes I still think about it xD

it’s set in 17BC and it’s the story of a legitimate (fictional) child of emperor Augustus with his first wife Claudia. in reality, the marriage has probably never been consummated and Claudia was very young at the time of their union. but in this scenario the marriage did result in an offspring even if Claudia was sent back to her family in the end, so that Augustus (then known as Octavian) could marry someone else. there are other circumstances surrounding Claudia’s family that explain the situation a bit better, but in the context of this project her child would grow not knowing of their true lieneage until something very dramatic happens to them and they swear revenge towards the man who caused so much suffering to them and their young mother by sending her back home long ago.

the main plot would then proceed to be framed by the Secular Games, a religious celebration that (through 3 days of sacrifices and games) allowed the entire population of Rome to celebrate the coming of a new era every 110 years or so. one of such celebrations was held in 17BC. our protagonist would find themselves traveling to Rome in order to get their revenge, but in order to do so they have to disguise themselves and join a group of misfits to reach their destination. each person has their agenda and reason to be there at that particular time, all coming from different social levels and whatnot, and even if the main focus of their adventure will see its climax in those fated 3 days.. I want their bond to be established in their journey to the capital somehow.

problem for this project being: I need a ton of research. like. a TON. it would not be 100% historically accurate, but I still want to do a somewhat decent job. language is also an issue here, bc i don’t think writing in English is the right way to approach this ambitious project. the main issue is.. this is a very immersive work. I need to eat and breath nothing but ancient Roman history for, possibly, 2 years for this to come to light. which is not ideal. maybe I’ll come back to it, maybe I’ll drop it, but for now I call dibs on this xD

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thank you so much for your ask :D I hope you have a lovely weekend! see u soon :)

[please do not reblog or share]

[bizarre-blorbo-bracket]

Round 3 Poll 4: Rev. Green from Cluedo vs Davis (Juror 8) from Twelve Angry Men

Propaganda:

Rev. Green:

1) Literally just a random board game character 😪 2) Ok so basically here’s the deal. One day, about a year and a half or two years ago, I saw some random thing related to Clue online. I (dual U.S. American and Russian citizen, because I was born in America to an immigrant parent, I PROMISE this is important) was confused because among the cast of characters was “Mr. Green”. Now, I hadn’t played Clue in a very long time. It wasn’t my favorite game as a kid, my only memories of it were wanting to play as Ms. Peacock and then my brother taking her and making me pick someone else, but I was pretty confident the character was Reverend Green. What happened? Was he excommunicated?? I kind of figured the name was just changed to reflect a more secular culture and that I had unknowingly played an old copy of the game as a kid.

But it fascinated me. So I spent months on and off researching the topic. (poorly, might I add, it wasn’t a complicated issue. But still.) I found out about many changes from version to version. Clue Junior, Clue VCR Mystery, Clue Master Detectives, all of it. And the whole time, Green was there to greet me in each new version. It was the first thing I always checked. Was he Mister or Reverend? I found out in one version he was a defrocked priest turned businessman, and in another a scam artist who pretended to be a member of the clergy to pull of a scheme. Closer. I ran polls, I went to irl Clue events, and eventually I found what I was looking for the whole time. Green was a Reverend in the 1944 patent of the game, and the subsequent 1949 U.K. release of Cluedo. But, because of fear that U.S. Citizens would take issue with a member of the church being suspected of murder, Parker Brothers changed the name to Mister Green for the U.S. release.

That all could have taken me five minutes of googling, but honestly the chase made the result so much more worth it. And yet, there was something more there in the back of my mind. This all was well and good, but why was I so sure of the U.K. version of the name? My father’s family is Irish so we have a pretty healthy hatred of all things British, there’s no way my dad would’ve had us play that version of the game. Right? But thanks to a response from a poll I ran, I found out that the German version also went with Reverend. Because Green is an Anglican, I kind of assumed that the U.S. change might have been carried over into other international releases. But no! That made me realize that Mister Green is an outlier and that almost all languages of the game use Reverend. So then last night the pieces finally clicked together. I asked my mom to confirm a hunch I had, not expecting her to at all remember something this trivial. Like I said, I didn’t play it much as a kid. Maybe we didn’t even own a copy, and I had just played it at a library or a hurricane shelter or a relative’s house or something. But she remembered. We did, in fact, own the game. Not just any version, but a RUSSIAN COPY. I unknowingly grew up with Cluedo! So I had every reason to believe it was Reverend Green and be confused when I heard otherwise.

Tl;dr, minor version difference between Russian and American copies of a board game gave me a hyperfixation and a blorbo.

Davis (Juror 8) (these are all from the single submitter)

a quick lil list babes, and I apologise for all of this in advance:

He's from the fucking film 12 angry men. like, aside from letterbox bootlickers and middle school hass students NO ONE has watched this film let alone care about it, it was made in 1957, is shot almost exclusively in one room and the entire film is just middle aged white men yelling at each other over whether some not white poor kid should be sent to the electric chair. what the fuck.

Henry Fonda, the actor, was 52 years old at the time of filming

Henry Fonda is the father of Jane Fonda, the woman who would revolutionise the 80's with her home workouts and her blindingly neon leg warmers.

His name wasn't revealed until the very end of the film and even then it's just "Davis."

I could honestly give him a lil smooch

He's absolutely not girlypop but he's the ally-iest ally who's ever allied

He's categorised as a "Benevolent Leader" on the Heroes Wiki

instead of the overwhelming urge for me to coddle him like most all other blorbos, i would appreciate it switched

I have a photo of him inside my saxophone case and sometimes i forget he's in there, then he creeps into my saxophone bell and when I play it he shoots out like a ballistic missile

Dude, on ao3 there's more fanfiction about the real life 80's British punk band The Clash than the entire film of 12 angry men, let alone Davis (80 fics come up under the clash, while 10 come up for 12 angry men)

I have a counter, and I've watched 12 Angry men a total of 145 times. The figure is up on my wall in tallies. whenever the number goes up, I like to watch it in 5's so then I can put another full group of tallies on my wall.

I have incredibly detailed stories about how Davis would boogie down to ringo starr's solo career, and they're written within the margins of a book called Tobruk written by Peter Fitzsimons. The only reason I reread that book is to wonder at my elaborate works of fiction

My HASS teacher was the one to introduce me to 12 Angry Men as he played it for the entire class. He gave us a set of questions to complete on the film and a few Law based questions as a little treat, and he expected it to be handed in the next day. What he didn't expect was an 11 page monster of a response that included social commentary, 4 paragraphs dissecting the character of Davis alone, deeply discussed comparisons between the landscapes of politics and law in the 50's to the present, and basically an entire point-for-point summarisation of the film, completed with obscure quotes from Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon and Presley (Elvis). He presented the printed masterpiece in front of the entire class to shame me.

After class he explained how his favourite Juror would either be 6 or 5, because 6 seems like a big dumb teddybear and he just liked 5. I explained how I liked Davis because he didn't want to send a kid to die, then he told me how Davis would make a good cowboy (at this point in time I was unaware of Henry Fonda's role in Once Upon A Time in The West) and I proceeded to go home and write a 3 part orchestral composition that I could pretend would play as the soundtrack to Juror 8: A Cowboy's Tale or something like that

I had started to make an animation meme starring Davis but only gave up when photoshop literally deleted itself from my laptop

I didn't even hear that Juror 8's name was Davis when I first watched it in class, somehow I only heard it on my 6th rewatch but when I did I literally got so excited I literally got winded and cried a little bit, I had to take a panadol because I got so lightheaded

I have learned the musical motif that plays throughout the film on saxophone, clarinet, recorder, guitar, bass, ukulele, piano and trumpet

I have visions of him

One of Davis' 3 children HAS to be gay and nothing can convince me otherwise

honest to god I'd be a home wrecker if it came to him

I quote not only Davis but the film a lot, and sometimes in the dead silence of all my friends I go on about how the old man couldn't have possibly made it to the door in such a short amount of time to see the kid running down the stairs (because the old man has a limp, and Davis proved it my limping around the room, which I have to say was incredibly attractive of him)

He's literally an architect

I once had a dream where Davis was in my bass guitar case when I opened it, and i literally just picked him up and started picking him like a bass guitar until I tried to play a full chord and he bit the hand that was meant to be on the fretboard. I dropped him and he fell on his ass, and when I said "what the hell dude what was that for" he said bass chords are lowkey ugly to listen to, and since then i don't like playing bass chords because now they're lowkey ugly to listen to. before this ordeal, i enjoyed them, but alas

i once got my romantic partner to write me a davis x reader fanfiction as a birthday present

my parents believe that Davis is my first celebrity crush, and while they're actually wrong it's still actually so embarrassing they believe that because OH MY GOD it's literally JUROR 8 FROM 12 ANGRY MEN

I've attempted slam poetry about him

I've eaten a paper printed full a4 size photo of his hand

I would also not mind him to be literally my father, but given the rest of the things I've just said about him that's really weird and I recognise that

[misalpav]

the kerala story is copied caliphate netflix series and you dont understand. you support bjp?

did you miss the part where i said that TKS is a MOVIE. and artists and writers take creative liberties??? i couldn't give a flying fuck which netflix series it's similar to bc in the end I see it as a movie and in the larger scheme, media, and every 10 yr old child I know knows not to believe everything they see on a big screen, but apparently you didn't get the memo. the isis fucking exists in India and with it they bring salafi jihadist culture and conversion because that's literally who they are and that's the bottom line. if you're in support of covering up their terrorism then please just stop reading and get the fuck off my blog. again why the fuck are people making such a big deal out of it oh my god. movies such as PK have shown offensive versions of Hindu gods, and in Canada, they made some play about the goddess Kali smoking and shit. I saw absolutely none of you say anything then so why the fuck do you "secular" people care now.

if you denied terrorism in India from middle easterners you'd be an idiot. ranging from pilgrim taxes, iconoclasm, and to forced conversions in Mathura and Kashmir among other places, the native Hindu-Indian population has seen everything over the years. I don't deny that islamophobia is real, but oh my god, the existence of islamophobia and hinduphobia is not mutually exclusive, this is so fucking basic. I can agree that islamophobia exists in many parts of the world and even in India, but this movie has nothing to do with that. again, it's a movie about ISIS and i will see it as such. If you see it as a movie about Islam, then maybe you're the one under the flawed assumption that all Muslims fall under the bracket of ISIS, which says more about you than me in any case.

if we get into politics then, no, i have no strong affiliation with any indian political party and, as someone who can't vote, i have no good reason to go out of my way to pick a side when i like neither anyways. i'm the kind of person that reads everything and figures out what makes sense. from that point of view i can say, IF kerala is a secular state, then they should have no problem with this movie, something backed by the Kerala High Court ruling as well. i also mentioned earlier that this is an issue of ISIS vs anti-ISIS, not hindu v muslim. that being said, if you were a secularist I'd continue to question why you care so much about the government handling religion in media when your entire argument should be separating state and religion entirely. movies and entertainment isn't a branch of the government so you're not allowed to give a fuck what they do as they try and gain viewers.

your bullshit "secularism" only goes to the extent that the agendas of islam and apparently also isis are supported in the public sphere and it fucking shows. secular countries around the world make movies with religion in the center and nobody gives a shit but you guys don't get those memos do you. movies such as priest and the 1972 movie adaptation of the canterbury tales exist show christianity in a skewed negative angle and were screened all over the west. but nope, just ignore that and blame some right wing party for a writer making a story because it inconveniences you and your little anti-hindu agenda.

in terms of this other ask,

again with the word fanaticism. either you're accepting you're a blatant hinduphobe in which case get the fuck off my blog, I said very specifically that bigots are not welcome, or you just didn't read my last post properly in which case read that and then get the fuck off my blog. God, this whole post is so redundant and such a waste of my time. saying ISIS and the BJP are the same is such a flawed undertaking. I also can't think of a single example of a BJP member specifically targetting "muslims whose loved ones were lured into ISIS" and even a quick google and jstor search renders nothing.

The ISIS hijacked 4 Boeing 747s worth billions of dollars total and sent their members on a suicide mission halfway across the globe killing around 3000 people. They've run similar attacks all over the globe in areas including europe, africa, asia, or in other words anywhere they can fucking get to and their hate doesn't even stop at religion, and extends instead to anyone who rejects sharia law. the bjp has run nothing to the scale of the mass-murder and terrorism of isis and i can't decide if your desperation to prove me wrong with the most exaggerated arguments of the century are funny or if your ignorance is just sad. if conserving islam in the middle east with islamic republics and dictatorships is deemed ok, then maintaining hindu culture in a democracy where such members are elected is also ok.

[frostyreturns]

Frosty Ruins "Here Comes Peter Cottontail 1971"

Just like with Christmas and with anything Christian there is going to be a culture of trying to shift focus away from Christ and onto some goofy nonsense that has nothing to do with it. For the celebration of Christs death and resurrection we have…the easter bunny, painted eggs and chocolate. And now this year we also have the government tranny holiday trying to steal focus.

Now with Santa and all that I understand it and am ok with it more because it still ties in with the theme. Jesus was brought gifts so we bring each other gifts…santa is based on a saint who brought the poor/orphaned presents and the whole idea of giving is consistent with Christian values…it makes more sense. With Easter it's just a whole bunch of totally unrelated nonsense. Rabbits have nothing to do with Christ or the celebration, painting and hunting for eggs also have nothing to do with anything, even the name Easter has nothing to do with Christ. However It's a bunch of nonsense that if people choose to do it as part of their celebration of course there's nothing wrong with that. I've said before I'm totally ok with coopting other celebrations and integrating with other things…Easter is more of a celebration of spring, and even spring can be reflected in the resurrection story. So I personally get nothing from the easter decor and the non-Christian easter traditions but I don't begrudge anyone who does. Even as a kid I wasn't really into the aesthetics of easter…I liked that we got chocolate but that was it.

What I do like however is a good Rankin Bass holiday special, so in this instance I was willing to give it a chance. Though the rudderless nature of the story has the characters all seeming ridiculous. I'm not sure why the host is a leprechaun man, or why there's a caterpillar that's also a frenchman, or why one of the charactes is a hat…like just a hat. I mean is it possible to be more removed from the meaning of the holiday than jewish people writing a song for a french wormguy to sing to a rabbit about painting american flag eggs for july 1st? Almost sounds intentionally far removed doesn't it? The only thing that would make it more obvious of a subversion attempt was if it had witches in it or something…oh wait it does.

The premise for the secular easter story is so thin this story has to contrive a time travel scenario and then borrow and interpose the facets of easter into all the other mainstream holidays. The irony that the villain at one point tells Santa (who yes is also in this) to stick to his own holiday is palpable. I wasn't a fan of the throwing all the holidays in a blender thing and never have.

The plot is too goofy and not even in a magical cartoon kind of way…it's almost like a reflection of politics, they are trying to decide who the new easter bunny should be. One of which is a child hating ass hole who hates easter and wants to ruin it and ruin their home and way of life. So of course they have to follow their constituion and let this guy have a chance even though absolutely nobody thinks they would be a good easter bunny and they cheat to win. Actually it's a perfect metaphor for politics.

But one of the funny parts of the story is that part of the villains scheme to ruin easter is to declare rabbits and chicks will no longer be the symbols of the holiday and instead they would have to make it "spiders and octopuses"…and I'm just here like…ok, that's not any less arbitrary than rabbits and chicks why not?

I do love the stop motion animation style and some of the visual gags are excellent. I'm totally indifferent to the music though. It's not bad, I don't have anything negative to say about it but I also don't particularly like it, so I guess I'll just say it's not for me. I know some of the music was very memorable for kids who grew up with this movie...but mostly it's just the last titular song they remember.

One of the things that most bothers me about this version of the easter bunny is the way they depict the easter bunny as openly approaching children and offering them eggs in person. It kind of ruins the idea of the easter bunny hiding chocolates and stuff, it didn't even get easter egg hunting right…like that's the one solitary interesting thing about the secular easter and they fucked that up. There's no magic or mystery for kids. They just have to… go oh this is a make believe story because on easter I've never seen an acual bunny handing out eggs directly to me so it must be made up. And the way he goes about trying to give them out for other holidays by just making shit up is also annoying and makes the main character less sympathetic.

It was also really weird how they stuffed in a romance thread into the last 10 minutes of the movie with a character they just introduced us to. Overall I'm comfortable saying this was a bad movie with a few small redeeming qualities.

C-

0 Jesuses/10

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Rio Veradonir

As most of us understand it, social justice is a good thing. Definitions vary, but the common thread is a belief that society should actively work to expand access to social goods for all people, regardless of race, sex, or other immutable characteristics. Like all decent people, I support that noble goal. So it worries me that a vocal minority of extremists with dangerous ideas and toxic tactics have abused the concept in recent years, throwing it into disrepute. A cadre of activists today push a radical ideology in the name of “social justice,” one with none of its liberal principles. Because its proponents intentionally manipulate language to evade criticism, I will use the terms Liberal Social Justice (LSJ) and Critical Social Justice (CSJ) to distinguish between the original version and the new one.

Growing up in a Cult

My elementary and high school education took place at a private religious school, Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) to be exact. The SDA Church is a fundamentalist, Protestant Christian denomination that began in the United States in the mid-19th century — an era during which many separatist cult-like movements sprang forth out of American Christianity, the most famous being Mormonism. The SDA Church was born out of the Millerite movement whose early believers predicted, based upon an esoteric reading of the Bible, that the world would end on October 22nd, 1844. When that day passed, offshoots of the movement formed based upon one or another justification for the miscalculation. To this day, SDA Church doctrine states that we are living in “The End Times.” I was instructed by teachers who had no qualms informing students that Armageddon would probably come “during our lifetime.” Despite that certainty, some of those elders have since passed away without the pleasure of experiencing the end of the world.

Apart from being a bit kooky, that kind of eccentricity seems harmless enough. But beliefs invariably influence other beliefs. I was taught Young-Earth creationism — in Science class no less — and that anyone who tried to persuade us otherwise, even with credible evidence, was a tool of Satan sent to damn our souls. My early schooling was about two years ahead of public school in some subjects — but 200+ years behind in science.

Some of the indoctrination inevitably took root. I was a skeptical but otherwise upstanding SDA kid. I had no objections when my friends casually stated that they would never marry outside the Church. We were discouraged from even associating with non-Adventist kids. I remember taking an odd pride in that, like outsiders were beneath me. This went on well into my teens. Then something changed.

Escaping the Cult

My sexuality was pivotal to my relationship with the SDA church. I was aware from early adolescence that I was attracted to both boys and girls. At first, I thought little of it, but over time it began to cause cognitive dissonance. The Bible, as we were taught it, stated explicitly that homosexuality (and by extension bisexuality) is a sin. Did this mean I was supposed to resist temptation and just marry a nice SDA girl when I grew up? Perhaps. We were also supposed to follow other strict rules, such as not engaging in “secular activities” on Saturday. The truly devout would never eat pork or shellfish. Many were even vegetarian. In that context, everything seemed equally arbitrary — as illustrated by the common answer adults gave to pesky questions: “Because God says so.” By sixteen, I had outgrown it. I’d had enough of the hypocrisy and the dismissal of my skepticism. So, I tested out of high school early and started college.

Most of my SDA friends went to private Adventist universities where their indoctrination continued unabated, but I dove headlong into the belly of the beast: public community college, then a public state university. I flourished in that new environment. Whereas my skepticism and curiosity had been frowned upon by religious instructors, outside it was welcomed — even encouraged. For the first time, I felt free to fully explore the world of ideas, unconstrained by dogma. I quickly realized I’d been led astray not only in science, but in history, and even the arts, where only the most Christian-friendly material was covered. My intellectual experience had been filtered through the lens of a single subculture. It was a pedagogy built upon circular reasoning with the goal of reinforcing faith in SDA doctrine.

To compensate, I spent the next ten years immersing myself in a broad education — changing majors four times. In contrast to my prior schooling, these public institutions were founded on Enlightenment values — where critical thinking, logic, and evidence ruled — not blind faith. It’s not that tradition was disrespected; I was exposed to philosophical and religious traditions from all over the world. It was a breath of fresh air — life-giving. I appreciated my newfound intellectual freedom all the more because I knew firsthand what it was like to be arbitrarily constrained. My experience had fine-tuned my dogma-radar, and when secular education institutions began falling to a different but equally stultifying set of dogmas, red flags went off.

Warning Signs

It was in an advanced literature course in the late 2000s that I was first exposed to a school of thought called Critical Theory, which we used as an approach to literary criticism. I remember the professor saying, “The author’s intent doesn’t matter,” which meant that it was considered acceptable to attribute meanings to a work even if the author had explicitly stated that they never intended such. That rubbed me the wrong way. It begged the question “By what standard can we judge which interpretations are correct, or is it just anything goes?”

As the semester wore on, however, I gained a new insight: that language is an imperfect tool for communication, because “signifiers” (such as words) can only be defined by other signifiers. There is no way to directly access the “signifieds,” which are different for each speaker and listener because they are informed by our different experiences. In other words, it is never possible to ascertain exactly what the speaker means, only an interpretation of it, because we all have different associations with each word or phrase. That collectively adds up to substantially different readings of a given work.

I was mesmerized. It made sense. Applied to art, it resulted in more dynamic and interesting criticism. Besides, this was just one perspective out of many I studied at a school that had earned my trust by exposing me to a variety of differing perspectives. Little did I know, Critical Theory would escape its confines and expand well beyond literary criticism.

Queer Liberation

Southern Oregon University, the last school I attended, has repeatedly been recognized as one of the most LGBT-friendly colleges in the US. Still, I remember anxiously walking into the campus’s Queer Resource Center (QRC). Anybody who saw me might assume I was gay. What if people looked at me funny? I wasn’t ashamed of my bisexuality, but the fear of being judged by my new peers brought back latent insecurities from my childhood. The girl at the help desk was kind — and cute! After some flirtatious pleasantries, I asked her, “How do I meet other LGBT people around here? I’d really like to find a circle of bi folks.” She invited me to a dance put on by the QRC. I went, and I had a great time. Everybody was friendly and supportive. Nobody had anything to hide. It was another world, a freer one, compared to the insular and judgmental atmosphere of my youth.

After school, I got engaged and moved to Los Angeles with my fiancé, now my wife, so she could pursue her master’s at the USC School of Cinematic Arts in — notably — Critical Studies. We got involved with a wonderful social club for bi people called amBi. I’d finally found that bi circle! It was healing to be surrounded by tolerant, open-minded people — yet another liberating chapter in my life. Before long, we made a name for ourselves as event organizers, and then as volunteers at Pride parades and festivals. In time, I was invited to work for a nonprofit called The American Institute of Bisexuality. I readily accepted.

The organization, also called The Bi Foundation, shares the liberal Enlightenment values that helped me escape the indoctrination of my youth. But as it turns out, they are something of an outlier. The vast majority of LGBT orgs now take a different, illiberal, counter-Enlightenment approach. I would soon discover that the world of contemporary queer activism could not be more different from the liberal arts education I received in the 2000s or from the carefree bi social club I had since come to love. Instead, it was much more like the repressive environment in which I had grown up back in the 90s. It came to remind me of a fundamentalist cult, with a lot of the same qualities.

Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire

The first bi-related conference I attended was BECAUSE (Bisexual Empowerment Conference: A Uniting, Supportive Experience), in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. It began as a way for bi activists to network with one another. Upon checking in, I was asked to put on a name tag with my pronouns. I didn’t think much of it. I was asked to fill out a survey with questions about my personal history, including my preferred label to describe my “bi+ and gender identities.” That felt a little strange. Regardless, the conference was a positive networking experience with engaging speakers. There were early warning signs, though. The discussion groups were rife with virtue signaling. It reminded me of the religious one-upmanship of my SDA days, and the pride in perceived victimhood.

In 2016 I attended an LGBT event in DC hosted by the Obama administration as an invited bi activist. I didn’t know what to expect. I was hoping for something productive. What I witnessed was anything but. There was virtually no discussion of policy ideas that might make a real material difference in the lives of bi people. It was nothing but grandstanding. Panelists were competing in the Oppression Olympics, obnoxiously vying to portray themselves as both the most virtuous and beleaguered. Every speech began with a recitation of the speaker’s intersecting oppressed identities. The more intersectionality points, the more street cred. Poor chaps who had the misfortune of being born white, male, and/or heterosexual (and who weren’t trans) were admonished to “Check their privilege,” which meant that their opinions were worthless. The quality of one’s ideas didn’t matter, not that anything concrete was being discussed anyway. Instead, the political strategy amounted to nothing but endless shouting about how American society was irredeemably awful and needed to be torn down. It felt like the White House invited us so we would feel listened to, even though it served no other practical purpose. Of course Obama was not in attendance — I’m sure he had more important things to do — but I wondered what he would make of the weird, illiberal theater I’d witnessed. I thought back on his speech, delivered after attacks on his association with the radical Reverend Jeremiah Wright:

“… We’ve heard my former pastor ... use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; … they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America...”

No, President Obama would not have approved. He is a liberal, like me, who shares Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of inclusion as a pathway to integration and treating people the same, regardless of any immutable trait. I got into LGBT activism in service of that dream. Isn’t the whole point to bring about a future where everybody is treated as an individual, rather than stereotyped on the basis of superficial qualities? Shouldn’t we be working to break down barriers, instead of fomenting perpetual divisions for tribal warfare? Why were these activists, among the most privileged people in society, so full of disdain for the Enlightenment values that rest at the foundation of all that is good about this country and for the liberal values that made LGBT rights possible? Didn’t they understand that replacing one form of bigotry with another was not real progress? I reassured myself that this was probably just an eccentric group. It was just one day, after all. Surely most LGBT activists shared my liberal values. They had to, right?

I returned to DC to attend training sessions with a leading expert on social media strategy. A friend and colleague, who happened to be a cis white male, committed the cardinal sin: stating an opinion contrary to the Critical “Social Justice” (CSJ) dogma. When asked explicitly to give feedback, he expressed sympathy and understanding for the ideas presented, but dared convey concern that some of the more extreme language being used might alienate allies. He was brutally pilloried by several fellow students in the class, who claimed that his words had triggered them and amounted to “actual violence”, and demanded that he rescind his statement or be expelled. I was flabbergasted, and my friend was fighting back tears, which only elicited more yelling and taunting. We’d made real sacrifices to be there. It felt wrong.

Over the following years, we attended many more progressive conferences, including Netroots Nation (attended every year by Democratic lawmakers). They all had the same toxic culture — and it got worse by the year, especially after Trump took office. Eventually, almost every discussion group, presentation, or speech seemed narrowly focused on this emerging, illiberal ideology. With it, came more obnoxious behavior. Attendees who spoke up in defense of traditional liberal values were protested, shouted down, and disinvited. I witnessed outright racism against white people, sexism against men, and cisheterophobia — all coming from the movement that was supposed to be standing for equality and human rights. Even SSSS (the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality) eventually succumbed to the dogma. They were pressured into releasing embarrassing statements denying biological sex, reinforcing the irrational worldview of CSJ and undermining their scientific mission. There had to be an explanation. I needed to understand the motivations behind this trend.

The Cult of “Social Justice”

I looked to my better half for support. With her MA in Critical Studies, which was somehow related to this convoluted landscape, I knew my wife Talia could help me decode this riddle. She explained that Critical Theory, the obscure academic philosophy I encountered in a literature course, had expanded to become the dominant political principle and epistemology of modern progressive politics.

Madness! How did a single perspective of limited practical application come to capture half of Western political thought — and so quickly?! It wasn’t just the US Democratic Party — it had spread to the global left. I needed to research it further. I compiled a reading list of figures influential in cultural-left thought, including Hegel, Marx, The Frankfurt School, various postmodernists, and their contemporary successors. The common thread was a mode of thought much less grounded in rationality than the analytical, pro-Enlightenment thinkers I preferred. It was like going back to religious school all over again!

Religion, like social justice, is hard to define. Superficially plausible descriptions such as “A belief in god(s)” fall short, because not all religions have such beliefs. Scholars tend to prefer broader, less parochial definitions like “A particular system of faith and worship” or “A pursuit or interest to which someone ascribes supreme importance.” Contemporary thinkers have argued in all seriousness that some apparently secular ideologies can be regarded as religions. In “Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World”, theologian Tara Isabella Burton argues that the “social justice” phenomenon has all the key components of a religion: it provides believers with an all-encompassing worldview, meaning and purpose, clearly defined communal boundaries, and powerful self-actualizing rituals. Linguist John McWhorter’s “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America” maintains that a blind faith in systemic oppression (despite evidence of unprecedented progress) is a kind of fallen creation myth. Cisgender, heterosexual, white, and/or male people are “born in sin” and can never purge themselves of it — they can only endlessly atone by saying the right words and performing the right self-flagellations. Biologist Richard Dawkins, a notorious critic of religion, has come under fire for making similar invidious comparisons in his attempts to defend his own scientific field from related gender essentialism and science denial. Political Theory Professor Joshua Mitchell has argued that the boundaries between politics and religion are breaking down, and that CSJ has strong structural parallels with Christianity. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, in his book “Woke Inc.”, wrote that CSJ beliefs arguably “Meet the legal definition of a religion” and thus employers would be well-advised not to force these views upon their employees. Among others, CSJ shares with religions the qualities of blind faith, circular epistemology, self-referential exegeses, cynical apologetics, sacred testimony, indoctrination, authoritarianism, holier-than-thou attitudes, hostility to science and rationality, and the persecution and excommunication of heretics.

In Christian school, “faith” was the convenient get-out-of-jail-free-card for authorities who had no real answer to valid questions. Every dogma is reducible to an article of faith, which means that it requires no evidence to back it up. If there was evidence, then there’d be no need for faith. What matters is that we prove our loyalty to God and the Church by choosing to believe despite the dearth of evidence. The less evidence, the more faith is required, and the more noble and virtuous it is to believe. This creates a self-reinforcing, perpetual motion machine of irrationality. It would be harmless enough if people were content to keep those beliefs to themselves, but a great many religious people see it as their calling to force those beliefs onto others through indoctrination and even legislation. The Cult of CSJ is no exception. If someone asks heretic but otherwise perfectly reasonable questions calling for evidence-based answers, they are told that logic and science are tools of the oppressor. It is a symptom of our privilege (sin) that we have these doubts. In other words, we are supposed to take the central tenets of CSJ on faith.

Of course, that doesn’t mean proponents never attempt to offer logical reasons or evidence for their ideas. They often do, but it comes in the form of pseudo-evidence that is reducible to faith. In Adventist school, appeals to science and reason were selectively made only when the apparent facts aligned with the dogma. Any argument or evidence that did not was conveniently ignored or explained away as the devil trying to deceive us. But that isn’t how rationality and science work; you don’t get to pick and choose when their standards apply. Without consistent and universally applied principles, appeals to logic and science are insincere. Does this argument or data point seem superficially compatible with my cherished belief? If yes, then it is true. If no, then it is false. It’s just confirmation bias. Years of working in CSJ-dominated spaces have made it quite clear that this kind of dishonesty is baked into the ideology.

The same circular standard applies to sacred texts: At Christian school, it was the Bible, among other SDA writings. In CSJ circles, it’s the approved canon of scholarship. Religious schools teach a process called exegesis, whereby the sacred text is interpreted. You start with the assumption that the text is the infallible word of God (or one of his prophets), and you proceed from there. If something about the text seems inaccurate or incoherent, you must be misreading the text. After all, you’re a fallible human being — so who are you to judge God’s word? Any apparent failings of the text are thus explained away as user (reader) error. This is exactly how believers in CSJ defend their own core canon. If critics point to logical errors, claims contrary to evidence, or self-contradictions, CSJ defenders are quick to accuse you of “misunderstanding” the material. There’s nothing wrong with Theory — only you’re too dense to comprehend its wisdom. It’s the same tactic.

In religious traditions, apologetics is a discipline where practitioners known as apologists devote their lives to making excuses for the irrationality and immorality of their chosen faith. Is your church engaging in the systematic cover-up of child rape? No problem — put out a ten-thousand-word essay explaining why Catholic tradition is blameless nevertheless. CSJ apologists include academics with pro-CSJ dissertations that lay out the philosophical basis for the practice, and journalists or public intellectuals who apply them in defense of the faith. The underlying principle is blind devotion to the dogma. It’s easy to excuse bad behavior done in its name (or deny that it happens at all), because CSJ is The Truth. If you’ve felt gaslit by people telling you that your concerns are totally misplaced, that cancel culture isn’t real (or it’s a good thing), or that rioting, looting, and arson in the name of CSJ is justified, you’ve been in the company of a religious apologist.

Another form of “proof” used by the religious is sacred testimony. In my Christian school, much fanfare accompanied the testimonies of the “born again.” The testifier would recount negative life experiences such as drug addiction, criminality, or sexual deviance, and how coming to faith in the salvation of Jesus Christ our Lord saved them from a miserable, meaningless existence. Of course stories such as my own, where escaping the church was the liberating experience, were not allowed to be discussed. CSJ’s “lived experience” is the same thing as sacred testimony. We are told we must respect the lived experiences of oppressed groups, and that only oppressed bodies are qualified to discuss issues related to their oppression — which as it turns out, conveniently encompasses all issues. If the “lived experience” in question is compatible with CSJ dogma, it must be believed, and any skepticism is pure bigotry. But if the lived experience does not reinforce CSJ dogma, into the trash they go (even if the speaker is a member of the oppressed group). My experience as a bi person, triggered by the cult-like behavior that brings back childhood traumas doesn’t count for anything at all — because it makes CSJ look bad. Similarly, the lived experiences of black critics of CSJ, like John McWhorter, are also rejected. There are no real principles here.

Just as with religion, people are not born believing dogmatic ideologies. They are indoctrinated into these beliefs. In my childhood, that was accomplished by a curated revisionist history and science curriculum. The CSJ cult uses taxpayer-funded public schools. Every subject must be reworked to ensure students are only permitted to see the issue through a CSJ lens. Ideologues always prefer indoctrination to genuine education that teaches students how to think instead of what to think, because critical thinking, rationality, skepticism, debate, and free speech are the tools that dismantle nonsense. By contrast, dogmatic belief systems shut down criticism by punishing the critics and silencing free speech. Liberalism, with its preference for open and universal inquiry, is seen as dangerous because it steers people away from the virtuous path. According to “social justice” pedagogy, not only are there ‘stupid questions,' there are evil ones. The very act of questioning CSJ is “literal violence” that must be shut down — by punishing the student (or teacher) who does so.

This ideology is consuming every academic subject. It began in the humanities, but it is now infecting even the hard sciences and mathematics. Universal, objective standards for success in these fields are derided as oppressive. Science and mathematics are now “One way of knowing,” no better than any other, and perhaps even inferior — since they are the preferred tools of Western culture. Those who disagree with its tenets are pressured, intimidated, silenced, or exiled as heretics. Professors like former Portland State University professor Peter Boghossian and even administrators like former Harvard President Lawrence Summers are run out of academia; employees like former Google engineer James Damore and even executives like former Roivant CEO Vivek Ramaswamy are forced out of corporations, and in the nonprofit world I’ve seen the same play out over and over again — especially in progressive spaces like LGBT activism.

Give Me that Old-Time Religion

Religion satisfies a deep need for many people, and it is not my place to take it away from anyone. But religion has boundaries. The world’s first liberal democracy was founded by Enlightenment thinkers who understood that the best way to respect religious freedom was to separate church from state. The establishment clause of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution was devised to serve that purpose, as eloquently explained by Thomas Jefferson in his Letter to the Danbury Baptists:

“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”

That wall must apply to all religions, theistic or otherwise. Believers of Critical Social Justice have every right to hold their beliefs. But the freedom of religion also means freedom from religion. Just as they must be free to believe as they wish, we must be free from having their beliefs forced down our throats. Taxpayer-funded schools should not teach the tenets of CSJ, and their ideas should not be applied to the pedagogy or curriculum of public schools. Corporations and nonprofits should have no more right to discriminate against employees based on CSJ beliefs than upon traditional (religious) ones. A liberal society should tolerate differences of opinion and allow ideas to compete fairly in the marketplace of ideas. CSJ cannot be granted special status, because that road leads to totalitarianism. The debate over CSJ isn’t likely to be settled any time soon, but we should be able to come to a consensus about its place in the public sphere. We need only choose between the liberty afforded by secularism or the tyranny imposed by theocracy. I know which I prefer. As a bi man who was liberated from religiously-induced self-loathing by exposure to a more secular environment, I can attest that liberalism and Enlightenment ideals are the path forward for our movement. Tethering ourselves to illiberal ideologies like CSJ is not.

“Social Justice” is Not Just

At the outset, I explained that I distinguish between two conceptions of Social Justice: the liberal one (LSJ) and a newly ascendant illiberal one (CSJ). Liberal Social Justice is the vision that has given us the progress we’ve made on civil rights; it is one based on the liberal principle of equal treatment for all individuals regardless of their membership in any identity group. It’s what was championed by the original feminists, LGBT activists, and anti-racist leaders. By contrast, Critical Social Justice, in the name of Neo-Marxist “equity” (equal outcomes), advocates for intentional systemic discrimination against historically “oppressive” groups. This is because you cannot have that kind of “equity” without violating the liberal principle of equality. The most informed and honest of its adherents will admit this if pressed.

A collectivist conception of “justice” breeds tribal warfare and tyranny. CSJ proponents are correct that there is a history of oppression against marginalized groups. But that oppression wasn’t in the name of liberalism; it was in the name of different illiberal ideologies: pre-liberal feudalism, mercantilist slavery, theocratic homophobia, and fascism. For a group that claims to value nuanced critiques of issues, CSJ proponents seem to miss a key fact about the West: we are not and never have been perfectly liberal. Progress has happened gradually, always slowed and sometimes reversed by various illiberal alternatives that have animated segments of our society all along. And, yes, the early liberal and Enlightenment thinkers were not perfect exemplars of their ideals. Nobody ever is. But this is to be expected. Utopia isn’t possible, which is why we channel inevitable human conflicts in productive directions through institutions like capitalism and democracy. Beware the cult that sells you a utopia, because any dictatorial action can be justified by such a false vision.

It wasn’t Critical Social Justice that liberated me as a bi person. It was Liberal Social Justice. For any individual to be liberated, they need a conception of justice that values individual liberty. CSJ proponents aren’t going to liberate anyone. They are merely justifying a new kind of prejudice by appealing to an old one. This is why they must deny that we’ve made progress on civil rights in the West. If they were to admit it, they’d lose their excuse for that power grab. Liberals should not be taken in by this con. CSJ isn’t the new frontier of civil rights. It’s just one of liberalism’s old enemies resurfacing and rebranded with a trendy 21st-century pseudo-woke veneer — one of many illiberal ideologies vying for the power to tear society down and seize control for itself. Given liberalism’s proven track record of progress on civil rights, we’d be unwise to ally, even temporarily, with a movement that opposes those ideals. We need an awakening, but a liberal one — which celebrates real progress and views collective action as voluntary arrangements between individuals. We need a new Enlightenment, not just another deluded cult. It’s time liberals wake up to the fact that Critical Social Justice is an oxymoron, a mockery, and a Trojan horse. CSJ might just as well stand for “The Cult of ‘Social Justice.’”

[thisaintascenereviews]

Seth MacFarlane & Liz Gillies - We Wish You The Merriest

Note: This review was meant to go up before Christmas, but I kind of forgot about it, and I still want to post it, so oh well.

I’m going to be frank for a second — I’ve only truly gotten into Christmas music within the last couple of years. I just never got into it growing up, whether it was the same handful of songs that are popular, and that get replayed each year, or how most Christmas music sounds the same, or has the same message. It gets tired, and even after getting into some Christmas music, I still feel that way. I’ve been real picky with the Christmas music I’ve been listening to, and I’ve found that I really enjoy the jazzier side of Christmas. Albums from Ol’ Blue Eyes himself, Frank Sinatra, as well as Dean “The King Of Cool” Martin, and Ella Fitzgerald are all ones that I’ve come to really get into, but one artist that I’ve talked about before is Seth MacFarlane, and his jazz career. Known as the creator and the main voucf actor (he hasn’t written for the show since 2010, give or take), of a little show called Family Guy, as well as American Dad, and the Ted movies (and the upcoming show), along with lesser known projects, he also has a music career. Inspired by mainly Frank Sinatra, he has released a bunch of albums in this retro jazz and big band style, covering a lot of standards from that era.

He just put out an album last year called Blue Skies, and it was one of my top albums of 2022. I had it at number three, but in retrospect, I should have put it at number one. I absolutely loved that album; it was so fun, upbeat, energetic, and catchy. MacFarlane really nails that style, and he sort of did it again with his newest album, We Wish You The Merriest. This time, though, he doesn’t do it alone — he teams up with Victorious actress, Liz Gillies. He did put out an EP with her a few years ago, during the pandemic, entitled Songs From Home, and it, too, is really fun. Their chemistry is great, Gillies can sing insanely well, and I never realized that until now. They had a couple of Christmas songs on that EP, but they’re different versions than what we got, which I like, because they could have slapped those on and called it a day, but they sound different and better.

I hate to say this, although I really don’t, but I love this album so much, it’s one of my favorites of the year, because it combines a few things — jazz, Seth MacFarlane, and Christmas music. The Christmas aspect could be a novelty for some people, and in a sense, it is, but here’s the thing that elevates this album — the song selection. I recently listened to an interview that both Seth and Liz did on the Zach Sang show, and they talked about how they wanted to put every Christmas song that doesn’t mention “Christ” on the album, and all of these songs are timeless and secular songs that anyone can enjoy. There are a lot of very well known song, such as “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,” “Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty The Snowman,” and “Winter Wonderland,” but a few lesser known songs are here, including the title track, “Christmastime All Over The World,” and “That Holiday Feeling.”

Another thing I love here is that Seth MacFarlane dropped a Christmas album back in 2014, entitled Holiday For Swing, and it’s another solid record, but the cool thing is that no songs from that album show up here — except for one. That song is, understandably, “The Christmas Song,” and instead of a solo cut, it’s a duet, which makes it stand out. That album features a few other duets, as well as some more classic Christmas tunes (and some obscure ones), but this one is a bit different, as I think it has more energy. Holiday For Swing has a lot of energy, too, but We Wish You The Merriest is such a blast to listen to. I always have a smile on my face when listening to this record. It always breezes by, too.

I could go into a bit more about how both Gillies and MacFarlane sound, and how their chemistry is great, too, or how the arrangements are done well, but these are mostly songs that people know well. You’ve heard these songs before from various artists of various genres, but maybe not always in a duet form. This album, whether it’s the overall sound, the album art, or their voices (and their playful banter they have on a few tracks) reminds me a lot of albums from the 1950s and 1960s, but in a really good way. Honestly, this is the Christmas album I’ve been playing more than anythjng else, and it’ll surely be on the rotation every year from now on.

[sadieshavingsex]

something I miss from fundamentalism

is that profound certainty that someone could tell me the exact "good" and "right" thing to do in any situation.

I find myself seeking out this kind of reassurance with therapists now. I want them to give me a diagnosis or personality quiz to help me figure out who I am, what I'm like, and how to live my life. I want them to tell me what I want. Because for so long I was told what to want and what to hate and what is right and what is wrong. And I went for gold in every aspect of that. I believed it so wholeheartedly. I constantly contorted myself into smaller and smaller versions of me, trying to cut out all kinds of "secular" and "sinful" experiences from my life because it was the "right" thing to do. What's the lyric? "I became such a strange shape from trying to fit in"?

Now, having left the church, I sometimes feel like I’ve almost totally lost any of my own capacity to judge for myself what is good or bad or important or not, especially when it comes to relationships and sex.

It's a funny thing. I can't really even ask for advice, because what I want to know isn't something that anybody can tell me. My most recent therapist had to repeat this fact to me quite often. Still, I long for someone to just give it to me straight - to tell me that I'm okay and I don't need to worry, or to warn me that things are wrong so that I can fix them.

I'm quite close with my grandmother, and she recently noticed that my current relationship is more serious than any I've had in quite a while. She was very candid with me and told me if I need help with finding protection, want to talk to someone about sex, etc. she's there. The most recent time I saw her, I was in a bad headspace about the relationship. Thoughts were just going round and round in my head about whether or not the relationship itself and the things myself and my partner are experiencing within this space are "right" or "allowed."

Walking with my grandmother, I wanted to ask her, or tell her something. But I knew before I opened my mouth that the whole thing would die right as I said it, because she wouldn't be able to tell me, "Yes, Sadie, you love this man. Keep having sex with him." or "No, Sadie, this is a bad situation. Stop having sex now."

At least, she wouldn't be able to tell me anything that would convince me of anything, anything I would believe, because she doesn't know every detail, so she can't know the right answer for sure. I wonder if I have my own little form of scrupulosity OCD. I have to find out what is happening and I have to label it good or bad and I have to ensure that everything is as it actually appears. I have to be told that I am doing the right thing, and I have to be certain. But I never will be. I never will be. No amount of anyone telling me something will make me certain, because whoever is giving the advice doesn't know every last detail like god should. But if he can't be the authority anymore, who can be? Nobody!

I wonder what the overlap is between relationship anxiety/ocd and ex/fundies or people in similar situations. All I want sometimes is for some larger, seemingly more valid outside force to evaluate my life and tell me that I’m in the “right” relationship or doing sex the “right” way. It’s difficult not to have that. Being repressed was honestly easier because it felt like it got to the point where I was so utterly sexless that there was no urge powerful enough to ever make me even consider changing my mind or my personal state of affairs.

Now, I’m out here experiencing the world instead of stoically hiding from it, and I have to face the fact that I have no clue what I’m doing and neither does anybody else. Nobody can give me the definitive truth or rules of the world. Nobody can confirm for me that I'm a good person. Nobody can make me believe that something I do or don't do is morally okay. Nobody can know with certainty that I am on the right path - I can only try to convince myself of that idea, or come to terms with the fact that I can never know for certain.

It sometimes makes me just want to retreat back into my shell until someone hands me a definitive handbook on what is good and bad and right and wrong in sex and relationships. One might say a Bible. ha.

[biblioflyer]

Picard s3e2 Reactions

Dear Picard writers, I know you’re traumatized by the backlashes to seasons one and two but you still can subvert expectations, you don’t always have to commit to the old tropes.

Where they went boldly

I’m going to start off with the good before I whine, because this was a very good episode. Spoilers ahead:

More character development for Raffi! We meet the ex-partner and get some insight into who she was before. A picture is starting to come together that she was always a bit troubled, prone to paranoia and obsessive behavior, but it got significantly worse after Mars. I was disappointed that the implication in the first episode that she had made amends with her son was not entirely accurate. The brutality of “The Choice” to either chase the mystery or have her partner advocate for her to their son was harsh but it also threw into stark relief just how hard the last decade and change was for them.

OG Trekkers will still probably be kind of salty about this. This is supposed to be a utopia! Why are there “crazy people?!” Shouldn’t there be a robust mental healthcare system and social attitudes that make seeking help a no brainer? 

What Star Trek Picard tells us about the Federation and its relationship with mental health is a topic I intend to explore more deeply as part of my “Did Picard Turn the Federation Into a Dystopia?” series (I should think of a pithier title.) 

The short version is that I think the examples we have of troubled characters has a valuable narrative purpose, recall that Star Trek is a very “meta” franchise - it is NOT a documentary of the future but rather a collection of secular fables that tell the audience about the present using the future as a storytelling device. It can also be aspirational and instructive, but again where it is these things, it is trying to lay out a divergent path we can take in order to arrive at a better future.

Raffi and other characters like her such as Barclay also tell us about the values of the Federation itself: it is incredibly respectful of individual autonomy, so much so that you can live alone in the desert, getting high and chasing rabbit holes and nobody will bother you as long as you don’t bother anyone else. 

My belief is that help is available but nobody is going to show up and drag you off to care. Whether this is for the greater good or not is a debate well worth having, especially in an era of mass shootings but also the criminalization of not conforming to median assumptions about gender.

Some may also argue that Raffi’s status as mentally ill or neurodivergent demands that she be afforded more or unlimited compassion and patience. I would tend to agree with the element of mental health discourse that a wide latitude ought to be afforded to accommodate people with personality types and conditions that make it more difficult to conform to normative society, however there are reasonable limits and people who feel victimized by someone’s behavior cannot responsibly be good advocates and caregivers for that person.

I consider it a tribute to MIchelle Hurd’s performance and the writing of the character that Raffi infuriates me yet my heart also bleeds for her at the same time. These reactions are not paradoxical to me, they are an impressive depiction of what it’s like to care deeply about someone who is incredibly difficult to be a friend or partner to.

The Captain Shaw(shank) Redemption

The Call to Adventure has been trying to reach you about your starship’s extended warranty.

Shaw’s continuing attempts to resist the Call to Adventure is in an immediate sense, very annoying, yet at the same time if one pulls back emotionally and sets aside his demeanor, his arguments are very much rooted in the tradition of “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.” 

Shaw represents the conundrum that societies have always had to struggle with. From his perspective, he is directly responsible for 500 lives aboard his ship. Putting them at risk for the sake of four people who have made choices that have taken them outside the protections and jurisdictions of the Federation, even outright repudiated those authorities, is heroic but profoundly irresponsible. 

Let's not kid ourselves, before it’s all over people on the Titan will probably die because of Shaw’s decision to rescue Picard, Riker, and the Crushers from their problems. Of course it will probably turn out that the Crushers were involved in yet another convoluted mystery that could seal the fate of the entire Federation, if not the galaxy, but Shaw can’t know that yet.

Yet the heroism underpinning rescue operations is also in some sense, what makes a civilization civilized. Societies without some baseline belief in the deservedness of individuals to live, even if they don’t always make the best choices, is what makes a decent society possible, not mere conformity to a set of rules and norms. 

In some sense I think Shaw represents a callback to Season One and its baggage. One might speculate that he represents some aspect of the Federation that is struggling with shaking off its self satisfied introversion and the sense that the outside universe is full of chaos and terror rather than wonder. 

Should Shaw be “converted” to the Picard/Riker school, we might interpret this as a sign the Federation is well and truly restored as an entity that is not merely a construct of rules and norms, but is an emergent phenomenon of principles and attitudes.

Assorted Other Cool Stuff

Yippee Qa’pla-yay PetaQs!

Worf! As someone who spent much of the early seasons of TNG being pigeonholed as constantly angry and paranoid, he makes a good handler for Raffi because he’s got baggage that he’s had to overcome that slots into Raffi’s baggage well. A person torn between the high minded ethos of the Federation but prone to seeing darkness, a person who has not just lost love but buried two lovers, mayhaps we will finally get to see Worf doing the parts of the security job that involve unraveling mysteries instead of solving problems with a Bat’leth.

The bounty hunter is fun. Based on the design of the ship and the character’s scarring, I still assume she’s Son’a. It's actually a pretty good update to the look of the species because it actually seems a bit weird in retrospect that with all of the technology available to them, they’d look quite that morbid in spite of their vanity. Insurrection is such an underappreciated film despite it being far more like a typical TNG episode than any of the other TNG era films, so if there is even a tiny amount of worldbuilding in Picard that acknowledges Insurrection, that would be nice.

Unwanted Compliance with Genre Tropes

Okay here comes the whining.

Crush(er) my expectations, please.

“You’ll remember this day as the day you almost caught Captain Jack Picard!”

I suspect with an entire rest of the season to come, Jack Crusher’s origins may wind up being more complicated. Yet if they are going to go with the secret love child angle, I have every expectation that it's going to be well performed, everyone involved is doing a phenomenal job. This story, if played straight, is not to my liking from a world building perspective, but I’m open to it growing on me.

My problem is twofold.

First off, it's so unlike Beverly to have withheld a pregnancy from Picard. Unlike Kirk and Carol Marcus, there’s no radically divergent worldview or differences in priority. They’re both Starfleet, both exploration service officers, and they have a deep history. When they were lovers, they were old friends who had had a fling long in the past and were cautiously exploring whether or not being together still made sense. The way TNG portrayed this was incredibly thoughtful and mature, especially for the 90s. 

It's not that the secret love child can’t work, it’s just that it better be darn good in order to not feel like it's stepping all over a lot of very good and very well resolved character arcs. This is, incidentally, what makes me think that there’s probably more to it. Jack is naturally somehow embedded into the storyline to come. My current estimate is that there’s a 40% chance he’s a Synth of some sort. 85% chance he was not conceived the old fashioned way.

My second problem has to do with Picard’s arc specifically. Picard throughout TNG was not chasing a nuclear family or children. These were the furthest from his mind. Generations planted the seed that Picard might be questioning this in light of the deaths of Rene and his family. In general though, Picard has always been portrayed as less concerned with biological family and more with found family. This would likely have led to him becoming a mentor to the children of his crew, but that pathway closed off after Mars and his self imposed isolation.

Jack represents another bite at that particular apple, but it just doesn’t quite feel right to me. As someone seriously considering whether or not biological family is something that’s going to happen for him, I understand the sentiment of wanting that experience yet I also in some ways am envious of people who don’t feel the itch and can just be entirely content with deep commitments to friends and other sources of fulfillment. Being that Picard was just that sort of person, there’s something about springing the secret love child trope onto the character and having him be someone who is “not a person who leaves a legacy” that feels like a retcon of sorts. Even the “not leaving a legacy” bit is kind of contradictory because Picard is proud of his family lineage and its reputation, even if he himself was content to have no direct heirs.

Prove me wrong Picard writers. That’s not a taunt, that’s a polite request.

Raffi off the wagon. 

I really don’t want to go through this with this character if that’s where they’re going with this.

Narratively, I recognize Raffi’s struggle is everyone’s struggle to stay sober and to keep their mental health in check. Yet I sincerely hope that the classic relapse trope doesn’t play itself out because I think the character deserves to be portrayed as in control and competent after two seasons of stories about mastering various demons. 

I have never been part of the Raffi hatedom but I also recognize that there are legitimate complaints about the plausibility of this character ever having been a capable member of Starfleet and the general unlikability of the character. Which again, if you have ever struggled with caring for someone who makes it incredibly difficult to be there for them then I think we see the same thing in Raffi and the lack of nuance in the Raffi hatedom is also depressingly emblematic of the way that a particular sort of person turns every face into a mirror for their own self loathing. Herd’s performance and the Picard writers are victims of their own prowess.

It's not as if I think that a composed, effective Raffi who doesn’t drive everyone around her crazy would silence the critics; but the part of me who is still caring for people who couldn’t care for themselves wants to see the character thrive.

[allthemusic]

Week ending: 21st November

Is 21t November the earliest we've seen Christmas music, so far? I think it might be - and you thought that the ever-earlier Christmas radio creep was a modern phenomenon! I have to say, there's something very odd about listening to Christmas tunes in August. And it doesn't exactly get less odd with our second song.

Mary's Boy Child - Harry Belafonte (peaked at Number 1)

This is a funny one, because this is quite a well-known Christmas song, but listening to it, I've realised that I mostly know the Boney M version. It's not that I didn't know that this was the original, and it's not like I've never heard this version, but I can absolutely see why this version gets less airplay - because it turns out, stripped of the distractions of a driving beat and some disco sensibilities, you're actually left with something that's kind of weird.

I think part of it's the delivery. Because this song is so soft and gentle. Harry's voice is usually quite mellow, but he goes above and beyond here - fittingly, for a song about Jesus, he just sings with a sort of reverent wonder, never going all out or showboating. And the music itself fits with this, with its smooth strings and minimal guitar part that's honestly kind of reminiscent of Silent Night. The whole thing feels a bit Silent Night, actually, and I do wonder if it was a conscious decision.

Even if it wasn't, there's something decidedly carol-like about the song. If it hadn't come out in 1956 by a popular recording artist, I think we would call this a carol. But by dint of being modern, and by dint of there being a disco version, this gets counted in the category of "Christmas song" rather than "Christmas carol". Which is really odd, because at least in my mind, Christmas songs are secular things, all about the traditions and feelings around Christmas. But here comes one that turns up and proclaims that Long time ago in Bethlehem / So the Holy Bible say / Mary's boy child, Jesus Christ / Was born on Christmas day. You don't get much more Biblical than that!

Heck, in the chorus we even get into matters of salvation, and about how man will live forever more / because of Christmas day, which just feels wild to have in a popular Christmas song. Like, that's not even the comfortably familiar school-play territory of the nativity story, that's full-on gospel. Personally, I love that it's there, but it strikes me as decidedly odd that this has been embraced as a standard "Christmas playlist" addition. (Incidentally, the Boney M version, which is even more popular, adds a bridge that goes even further in this direction, so go figure...)

Anyway, all this is odd, and that's before we get to the calypso stylings. It's not odd that calypso carols exist - people are Christian in the Caribbean, it makes sense that they might right Caribbean-sounding carols - but it does feel wild to me that such a carol is making it to number one in the UK charts, particularly given the strong patois elements you get here. Because have maybe been little bits of Jamaican-inflected English in Harry's other hits this year, but this song really goes in on the patois. It's striking even today, so I can only imagine what people thought in 1957, upon hearing lines about how them find no place to borne she child. Clearly it didn't put anybody off buying the song, but I'll bet it turned heads.

I should be clear that I really do like the song. But yeah, the more I listen to this one, the weirder it feels, occupying a decidedly uneasy place in the Christmas playlist canon. Good, but odd.

I Love You Baby - Paul Anka (3)

And fresh off one oddity, time for another. This one, though, doesn't feel like it ought to be odd. The title, "I Love You Baby", is bland almost to the point of parody, and Paul Anka's one of those early pop artists who does standard-issue pop tracks. He generally does them quite competently - the other songs of his that I've heard, I have quite liked - but I wasn't expecting anything too crazy, here, going in.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I clicked play and got a straight-up traditional jazz track that I feel like could have been a hit back in 1927. I think a lot of this is in the instruments, honestly - from the get go, the track's heavy on the clarinet, alto sax and trombone, and you've got that thing going on periodically where the different instruments go off on little independent side-quests and tangents, completely divorced from whatever Paul's doing. It's a fun, carefree sort of sound, and I like it a lot.

The lyrics, when they come in, are equally carefree and cute, all about being in love. Some lines could easily feel bland - like the one about how I need you honey, I'll never ever let you go - or could just come off as too twee to take seriously - like the line about how I see little bluebirds making love while I pass - except Paul's careful to balance the sappier, lovey-dovey lines with more specific, concrete details that serve to ground the track a bit more. Mostly these are just different things he sees while walking around town, from the sea-shore grass he's walking through at the start of the track, to the tree that him and his love used to carve their names into, to the nostalgic music drifting from the candy store. Everything around Paul reminds him of his love, it's a cute concept.

I think it also helps that Paul sings with a confidence and a gloss that's tangible. He sings like a man in love, full convinced of his own invincibility, and it's really quite charming. He comes off as earnest, but never smarmy, lighthearted, but not silly, secure in his love, but not cocky about it. And then you get a few fun little moments towards the end where he just makes these noises, a little rrrrrrrrah at the start of a line, or a chuckle at the end of one, a little whoah! It's all very charming and cute, and really keeps the energy up. I'm a fan.

I'm also a fan of the bells that periodically turn up. They're not overused, and they're solidly unexpected when they do turn up. They almost but don't quite give the song a Christmassy feel, and at one point they introduce a key change, which, you know, awesome. All key changes should be heralded with bells.

Throughout my first listen-through, I was also struck by the feeling that this song felt familiar, and I've realised since that it's also giving me some major Randy Newman vibes. Like, this is giving Toy Story or Monsters Inc, for sure. I like both of those films, so this is absolutely not a problem for me. Just interesting.

Well, those songs were delightfully weird. Good job, 21st November. Both of them unexpected, both of them songs that I liked more and more, the more I listened to them. The Paul Anka song, in particular, feels worth a listen, just because it's a fun, happy tune with a lot going on, all of it very competently handled. Highly recommended.

Favourite song of the bunch: I Love You, Baby

[anaxerneas]

...the orthodox version of the critical model is based on a very distinctive philosophical view that can, in large part, be ascribed to the influence of Hegel and Marx. It involves a conception of history as moving (in dialectical not linear fashion) towards the realisation of human ideals. This does not need to be seen as an inevitable historical trend: there is room for delays and perhaps even for derailments. However, what is crucial is the idea that what is involved in Marxist politics is not simply the pursuit of some ideal that is to be imposed on reality (as in the case of utopian thinking), but rather of an ideal that is built into history. Associated with this is a conception of truth in which normative and factual elements have been fused, and where the pursuit of truth requires not just discovering what corresponds in past and present reality to the true (that is, to the ideal), but also changing future reality in order to bring it more completely into line with that truth (Prokopczyk 1980). This point of view has considerable appeal. It combines both radical and realistic emphases, thereby providing the optimism required to motivate research and political action that are committed to actually bringing about radical social change. And it has particular appeal to intellectuals because it portrays the process of history as analogous to an idealised form of intellectual debate, and as involving the ultimate realisation of ideas in pure form, in contrast to the messy and intellectually unsatisfying compromises of all hitherto existing politics. Despite its coherence, comprehensiveness and appeal, however, the teleological model of history is far from convincing. What reasons are there to believe that the history of the world represents a progressive development towards perfection, even potentially? What sense can we give to the idea that some single set of beliefs and values represents humanity's true self-consciousness? How could these conclusions ever be established? As Lowith (1949) has shown, this is a secular version of influential Jewish and Christian theologies, and they demand a kind of faith that is hard to reconcile with modern philosophical assumptions. Furthermore, the idea that how things ought to be can be divined by discovering the tendencies present in the current organisation of society suffers from a variety of defects: one cannot legitimately derive 'ought' from 'is'; it is difficult to see why we should believe that there is only one coherent set of tendencies within a society at any one time; and the strategy places an enormous methodological burden on the factual analysis of society, one that it cannot sustain if we accept post-positivist ideas about the nature of scientific inquiry.

As I noted earlier, many critical theorists have abandoned the orthodox model, along with its teleological version of history; and with good reason. Yet it seems to me that once this is done, the rationale for critical theory becomes difficult to sustain. Marx provides a coherent, if rather implausible, explanation for why his scientific socialism is true, why the realisation of socialist ideals in pure form is possible despite what seems to be implied by political "reality'. And he shows how this can come about (in principle at least), and the role of the working class as an emancipatory force in bringing it about. But once the teleological model has been abandoned, there is no longer any guaranteed potential for change of the kind to which critical theorists are committed, and therefore it is no longer clear why one set of ideals should be regarded as 'true human consciousness', rather than another.

Indeed, we may even be plunged into value relativism. Nor is it clear why we should believe that these ideals are realisable, especially when they seem to lack political feasibility. As a result, we are forced to ask why it should be assumed that one particular political struggle should have priority over others, and why it is in the interests of groups engaged in different struggles to support one another (apart from for merely tactical considerations).

Martyn Hammersley, “Critical Theory as a Model for Ethnography”, from What’s Wrong With Ethnography?

I really like the concise synopses of philosophical ideas from this chapter! I remember finding the word 'dialectic' particularly mystifying, with how it means "rational argument" in the context of Socrates but encompasses historical and natural processes in Hegel et al.

The list of objections that follows definitely isn't adequate, though the book as a whole isn't primarily a work of philosophy and I'm not sure if it would be completely fair to criticize Hammersley for not dwelling any further on e.g. those "modern philosophical assumptions" or the problem of how 'is' and 'ought' are related.

[planetofsnarfs]

audio version available above

You’ve heard the story. Thursday’s congressional session turned nasty when Marjorie Taylor Greene (R/Georgia) accused Jasmine Crockett (D/Texas) of not being able to properly read due to “fake eyelashes,” and the United States descended another step into a New Normal where stupidity is wisdom, childishness is courage, and cruelty is Christianity.

Greene is a zealot theocrat who apparently “learned” American history from pseudohistorian David Barton’s Post-it notes. She has proudly proclaimed, “We need to be the party of nationalism and I’m a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists.”Pluralistic democracy ain’t her thing.

She’s also the dullest of Crayons. In the past, Greene gaffes have included warnings about the “Gazpacho police,” a secret Bill Gates scheme to grow fake meat in a “peach tree dish,” and of course, those Jewish space lasers purposefully burning California forests so the Evil Libs can ram climate change policy down America’s throat. (Another gem from MTG. She once reasoned that ice age people didn’t pay taxes for environmental policy and did just fine.)

Yeah. She’s as sharp as soup. And she’s part of the larger cult of MAGA mindlessness that worships the convicted sexual predator and salivating Day One Dictator who once inquired about nuking hurricanes and has made millions selling merch of his own mugshot.

But beyond the stupidity, what frustrates me most is the celebrated cruelty. MTG’s eyelashes jab was ad-hom bullying that should have prompted the entire House Oversight Committee to oust her and issue a formal apology. Alas, New Normal allows Greene to hair-pull a professional lawmaker with only a limited rebuke, some click-baity media attention, and a collective national shrug: “Eh…America’s wheels came off long ago. I guess we’ll watch the crash.”

I also don’t condone Crockett’s childish return volley. Many of my fellow lefties cheered “bleach blonde, bad built, butch body” as warranted retaliation, a defensive return swing. Yet where they see rightly turned tables, I see a surrender of necessary high ground when critical times require an adult in the room. The “they made us do it” rationalizations ring false, as they reduce our representatives down to petty reactionaries instead of tone-setting agents of high-ground restoration.

Millions of U.S. Christians are cheering Marjorie Taylor Greene, or at the very least, they consider her outbursts a kind of fearless kick at the Devil. They’ve skipped past the best teaching of Jesus (humility, charity, forgiveness, love) to embrace Old Testament justice. The biblical Yahweh was proudly jealous, territorial, vengeful, even lethal. He took what he wanted, subjugated the Other, and shredded the opposition. God’s holy-war violence was largely punative, and MAGA America seems far too ready to exact similar retribution. “They dare to defy; we must make them pay.”

And who is “They?” American Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Mormons, JWs, spirituals, seculars, atheists, even Catholics and progressive Christians. Cruelty culture is defined by its enemies. Hence, theirs is a micronation of borders and walls, indigenous and foreigners, patriots and traitors. The planet is a temporary resource to be scraped and raped. American roads are most free when clogged with exhaust fumes and Trump flags. Dominance demands they razor-wire the rivers, crush the non-capitalists, and even shoot the dog.

It’s true that the Christ of scripture wasn’t always a good guy (check Dr. David Madison’s work on “bad Jesus”), but it’s astounding to see so many Christians ignore the New Testament love verses to instead praise the more savage savior Donald Trump. 

I Timothy 6 says not to love money? Trump loves money. 1 Cor 5 commands not to associate with an immoral brother or sister in the faith? Trump is immoral. Philippians 2 teaches humility? Trump is an egomaniac. Romans 12 says not to take revenge? Trump smirks that he “loves getting even with people.” Matthew 5 tells Christians to turn the other cheek? Trump tells his crowd to “knock the crap” out of a protester.

And his minions cheer. Stupidity is wisdom, childishness is courage, and cruelty is Christianity.

I don’t know where this road takes us, but like you, I feel the gravity of the descent. The hateful and spiteful no longer hide in the shadows, and even those who might think Marjorie Taylor Green is an idiot might still empower her for the one characteristic they most admire: her inhumanity.

[tropylium]

some thoughts diverted from tags pontification: I may tend towards consequentialism whenever moral philosophy comes up, but one of the starting points I will insist on is really not inherently tied to it at all (even if there's clearly reasons why they tend to correlate): that ethics does not happen in a vacuum but is a form of (human) thought, and is hence necessarily individuated. We cannot rationally derive an ought from an is, but it is still us who derive oughts from somewhere… That something seems to be all the instinctive, emotional, pre-rational functions of our minds, & given sufficiently much empiricism + materialism, this means happening as some complicated response of our brains to the rest of the world (perhaps we could start reaching towards moral non-relativism or even realism from this); but already even before that, this means the roots of morality start off in our individual minds, not as any kind of collective free-floating entities. Moral opinions are prior to general moral positions.

and particularly secular versions of deontology keep appearing to me as non-individualist enough to be just theism / divide command theory, or maybe more generally "authority command theory", with serial numbers filed off. All sorts of historical "god says that you should X" turn into "you should X (just abstractly, don't ask according to whom)" … and there might be lots of tools provided to, uh, end users about what kind of actions or thoughts "you should X" really demands, but typically nothing about how to tell if, or for who, "you should X" even holds in the first place. Seemingly coming from a meta-imperative that sufficient agreement among moral philosophers should be treated as moral authority?

Universalist ethics would have problems to it even if assuming theism I think, but it really does not work at all if given even mild agnosticism + granting that people exist as independent moral agents. No way to skip from some finite cases like "Aki and Boris think that Canna should X" to generalized "Canna should X" or "people should X"… It might be interesting to see "fully individuated negotional deontology" that does not do this, but would it end up having that much in common with the current thing? Maybe, maybe not.

still: not a unique issue of deontology either (as much as just seemingly correlating with it for historical reasons); the same problem is very findable also in e.g. forms of utilitarianism or virtue ethics: "we assert this measure of utility / these virtues to be how your actions will be judged"; again pardon who are "you" to assert it?