HJ doesn’t do comments at his blog, but his recent article about Harriet Hall – concluded with a simply told bit of news that makes the more well-loved end of the skeptisphere a lot less lovable – cries out for comment. If you wanna rip on Harriet Hall, or her pals Steven Novella and David Gorski, or whatever, I invite you to make the comments on this post into your mosh pit.
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Once upon a time, some SJW types decided we should avoid using stupid and crazy and their synonyms in our discourse, because of splash damage to those with cognitive and mental disabilities. This idea prevailed only in a few narrow places, never on FtB. Gradually, it has faded altogether. It doesn’t help that in the last few years the worst elements of society have been pushing ignorance and irrationality to virtually unprecedented depths. The tumblr types I follow have actively rebuked this voluntary policing of our own language. So should I enforce this in my own language and in my comments section?
Yeah, I’m going to keep doing it. I’m going to respond to the arguments in my last post’s comment section here, paraphrasing for simplicity. Might be that nobody said exactly any one of these – they are amalgamations and distillations. I’m trying to boil this down to reduce redundancy, without leaving any one argument completely unaddressed. Indeed, some of my commenters did less arguing than merely posing questions, and I don’t want the way I’ve set this up to make them think I think this is what they were saying… Whatever. Here I go:
Anybody remember the Ableism Challenge? I’ve made it a matter of principle to never use crazy, stupid, and their synonyms on all my blog posts, the entire time I’ve been doing this. I’ve also made it a comment policy. The most recent violations of said policy are currently unaddressed, because I’m wondering what I should do at this point.
There was a minute when the prevailing feeling in the progressive internet parts was that we need to take ableism seriously in our language. In culture at large we are quick to refer to anything we disagree with as stupid or insane. People with psychological and cognitive disabilities exist and unquestionably do suffer from ableism. Implicit in calling a conservative antivaxxer a “covidiot” is the idea that having such disabilities makes one a fair target of mockery.
FtB has never, on the whole, taken this type of ableism at all seriously, or had any staying power with efforts to reduce it. How many of us are even trying? I feel like I’m not 100% alone in this, but I’m not even sure who the others are. This makes sense – the atheist and skeptic movements are founded on the hobby of making ourselves feel clever by mocking those who are not.
And I get it. This isn’t a callout post for Mano, PZ, or 95% of the commentariat across the whole network. We live in a world on the fast track to extinction and the cultists of a cheap and obvious con artist are spreading doubt about germ theory. I wanna call Q shit stupid and crazy the same as you. Who am I to tie your hands, to tell you not to call a spade a spade?
Furthermore, the SJWsphere seems to have moved on. I never see people addressing ableist language anymore, and have seen a few prominent progressives actively rebuke these restraints. The people who initially advocated for taking stupid and crazy off the table? They’ve been quiet about this for years. Some aren’t even blogging anymore.
I will continue to avoid stupid, crazy, and their synonyms in my posts. It costs me nothing and I like to think this commitment offers some people a way to feel like they have some safe content on the internet, somewhere. But how important is it? Where’s the SJW pulse at, right now? Should I hold my commenters to the same standard as myself?
When I say I want SJW opinions, I mean it. If you’re just commenting to grouse from a centrist or liberal or crass point of view, fuck off. The people whose opinions informed my original stance were the sensitive, the thoughtful, and those who are seriously committed to making the world a better place. Social engineers. Idealists. Real social justice warriors.
I’m going to delete any comments that don’t meet that standard, even if I don’t ban anyone over it. The comments on this post, assuming I get any, are for comrades only.
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Justice is a human construct. The Universe does not have an inherent sense of right and wrong. Karma is nonsense, heaven and hell moreso. But sometimes we luck out, and things happen that look to us like nature making things right.
Five conservative radio hosts – all people who spread deadly misinformation about covid – have died of covid. Of them, as you may have heard, Phil Valentine died in the most brutal, drawn out, and excruciating way of the lot. His fellow radio recipients of coincidental justice were Tod Tucker, Marc Bernier, Dick Farrel, and Jimmy DeYoung.
In other good news, disgraced fascist demagogue Baby Milo got covid and poisoned himself with ivermectin.
For a LOT of additional examples of people dying for conservative identity politics, check out the reddit COVIDAteMyFace. How do you feel about the ethics of this kind of reportage? I feel like these stories need to be spread as much as possible, for the sake of the dicks that are dying. If all they care about is owning the libs, maybe they’ll get smart and mask/vax up – if they see that doing otherwise is fielding the opposite result.
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I’m put in mind of something but don’t want it to seem like I’m one-upping a comrade in the sidebar.
I finished the first draft of my novel Rent is Theft. That sumbitch took 7 years to get through, and unfortunately the second draft will surely be a year or more in coming. One issue I had throughout was feeling like I didn’t have a distinctive voice / personality for my MC Courtney, but through a quirk of foolery late in my process, I found a fun gimmick to use. She started telling stories to her gf, and I thought to myself, Satan, you can make storytelling her thing.
I’ll have to do a lot of work to make it happen earlier in the book, in the parts I’ve written over the last several years. In the meantime, if you want a sample of her storytelling styles, here is an excerpt I amused myself with posting on tumblr. The uncensored version is funny, the censored one is kind of hilarious. The background of the scene is that the characters are living illegally in a building that is getting a heat treatment, and for lack of planning ended up having to suffer through the heat. To get by, Courtney starts to tell stories. This is about someone they know named Graeme, though they call him Grime.
Get a load of this shit: Activision-Blizzard Hires Amazon Union-Busting Firm. As Boots Riley from the Coup said, “If we’re ever gonna do it let’s do it now.” That is to say, when a government agency in a state with anti-worker wildcat strike laws decides to bring charges against a company for fucking massive systemic sexual harassment, and as employees start to organize, and that is their response? Workers of the world unite!
The game industry is massive in profits thanks to selling gambling to children, but small in workforce, which makes it extremely vulnerable to labor revolt. It hasn’t happened yet only because douchebros attach sucking corporate ass product to their sense of manhood and identity, and have stacked the industry with like-minded people.
But the video game industry, like all creative industries, is so vicious and life-draining that even scumbag misogynist right wingers last an average of two years there before flaming out and going back to work at Electronics Boutique. The sausage is made out of art students and young programmers, and management thinks nothing of it because there’s always a new graduating class to brainrape (or sometimes just physically rape).
So here’s how you do it. Organize their asses before they leave the schools. You can’t do this at one school or you’ll just get the grads there shadowbanned. You need to hit them all at the same time. There are not that many schools producing video game creators. Find them, do not involve the faculty in any way, and infiltrate their shit. Full court propaganda press.
You get enough traction and make these vampire businesses face a united group of graduates saying NO. I don’t have the time to do a two year unpaid internship, or take starvation wages. NO. It is not acceptable to make drinking to excess normal during business hours. NO. Seriously, your entire fucking culture must die, now, so that the silly people who love video games enough to want to make them can stop being chewed up and shit out. Having a dream should not make you into so much bloody meat for billionaire pit bulls.
Video game workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your mass exploitation.
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Genesis 3:14: And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.
Injustice that calls itself justice, hatred that calls itself love, is foundational to the abrahamic faiths. The serpent in the garden was a cartoon villain with no motivation but the joy of evil itself, taking the text at face value, but any cursory examination of the events of the stories as written exonerates all villains save god himself. Of course he made the serpent to love evil, made men and women to be curious, and so on.
And as abrahamic faiths are foundational to western civilization, the injustice is baked into who we are and how we do. Poor people deserve to suffer because whatever people have or lack in life is according to his will, is “just” by divine fiat. We must have done something wrong to deserve this.
I am put in mind of all this because today my ramen noodles smelled and tasted like cigarette ash. Having smelled that, why did I proceed to eat them (with a lot of butter and salt added)? I didn’t want the ramen to go to waste and I’d already added the packet by the time I smelled it. I thought about why I’m eating cigarette ramen.
Maybe somebody rich is adulterating ramen with literal garbage just for spite. Or maybe some poor filipino working in a ramen factory, knowing he’s gonna die in economic hell and unable to do anything else, tipped an ash tray into the flavor packets, knowing it would find decadent western mouths, and fuck those guys. I won’t blame the worker, as shit a thing as that is to do. I blame the global system built on exploitation, making us poor folks as cruel as what the rich have given us.
And capitalism, as much as it runs contrary to the hippy shit young jeezy preached, is a perfect piece with the justice that runs through most of the bible. I’m a serpent, I’m gonna eat my dust all the days of my life. Or maybe I’ll rise to the middle class, where I can eat chaff instead, and rain dust upon my lessers with a sense of righteousness. All is as it should be on god’s earth.
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EDIT to add: I’m living on my belly as well – more crippled this week than I’ve ever been in my life from throwing my back out. Had to miss 3 days of work. I turn 45 in a few days, so I probably got another 45 years of this worsening to look forward to. It’s OK tho, I’m cool.
Past a certain point in the USA, holdout businesses and agencies are going to need to end their quarantines, even in places with low vaccination rates, where it will result in contagion and death. A certain amount of americans have chosen ignorance and the risk of death – to themselves and others – that it carries. We’re stuck together in this country. Most of us do not have the means to emigrate, would not be allowed into many other countries due to our national antivax rep, nor allowed to stay due to local xenophobic policies that mirror our own.
We’re stuck together and that means we’re really over a barrel. There are some things we cannot force on other people, any more than the US could force itself on Vietnam or Afghanistan. If fashy freaks don’t want to participate in a public health project even to save the lives of them and their own, we cannot make them. We cannot try to protect them from themselves forever. It’s just not feasible.
At some point, we must embrace the horrible status quo. Sufficient numbers of people want their grandparents, parents, husband and wives, themselves offered up as a plague sacrifice to their orange god, and they can make it happen. Just like they can make getting a simple ID practically impossible in the pursuit of vote suppression, they can make vax carding illegal, or make enforcement unfeasible. We cannot control them, cannot control this, and some crucial public services cannot remain limited like they are now.
It’s time to reopen the government offices (yes, many are still closed right now, even in texas), wear masks all day long if we have to, get used to this reality. Trump-style virtue-signalling won’t die until the last trumpist dies, probably around the time coral goes extinct and the US midwest is the new Sahara desert. Many of us will be alive to see that. Looking forward to the death of qanon-type shit, not looking forward to the time that will drive in those coffin nails.
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I guess you could say he’s finally gone into the Great Known Unknown.
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