Unimaginable Nationalism

Any kind of nationalism is kinda fucked up and weird to me.  Born and raised on stolen land, soaked in blood and slavery, the whole nine yards.  I don’t belong here but I don’t belong anywhere else either.  Citizen of the world?  Except you can’t be.  Every inch of every place that hasn’t had the natives fully eliminated is staked out, by people who would die for the dirt, kill for the dirt.  Give me this dirtpile or give me death.  But better to give you death, other people who I have decided should not be here.  Nationalism, like colonialism, is the seed of genocide.  Some flavors of it are so mild and banal that you could miss it, but it’s always there, waiting to blossom.

It’s especially wild to me that some people want to kill or die for land in the Middle East.  There are much nicer or more interesting deserts and plains and beaches, and most of them don’t have nearly as many genocidal terrorists or fascists, don’t have as many centuries of decapitations and flayings and immolation and destruction.  If any place in the world is hell, it’s the holy land.  If I was Jewish, I’d be glad to be nowhere near it.

Might feel some type of way about it, since the history of the shituation is very different from that of my ancestral island.  What would it be like, to have lost your homeland for over a thousand years, to never be allowed to feel at home anywhere in that entire time?  To at last be given a promise of a return there, of a homeland – a promise literally predicated on nationalism and colonialism both – and to see that come to exactly what anybody with an ounce of wisdom could have seen a hundred years away?  Poison gift.  I’d keep Brooklyn, thanks.

Seriously.  People who feel magical about that piece of dirt.  What even?  I can’t imagine a worse place in the world.  Here I can walk down main street and feel the ghosts of natives choked in disease, driven from their homes, murdered in the wilds.  Not great.  There, I’d be walking the same streets where so many people were slaughtered in so many ways it’s fucking near unimaginable.  I’m willing to bet there is not a person in the entire region who is without genocide in their hearts.  How could you live through that history and not want to see everyone on the other side of the conflict disappeared?  With cruel violence?  At least on some level.  I know there are peace activists in Israel and bless their hearts.  But how often are they tempted to just give up, and join in finishing the job on their opposites?

The overwhelming hate of it all.  For dirt.  If I was born there, I’d have left and never looked back.  The USA is bad enough, but at least I’m not living on a land mine, living in torture alley between people who want nothing more than to see each other reduced to shreds, to blood and then dust.  Ain’t no god and ain’t no land and ain’t no ideal worth living in hatred.

This is the only thing we have, when fascists rule the day.  The freedom to have moments of peace in our hearts.  Because above all they love hate, and we have the ability to love life.  They can’t be happy unless horrible shit is happening to someone, somewhere.  We are capable of living for good things, and they aren’t.  We win even when we lose, given that.  What if we didn’t have the option tho?  What if we were born into an endless war, gestated in amniotic fluid poisoned with cruelty, with lust for annihilation?

I advocate a no-state solution.  Everybody lives as refugees in other countries for another thousand years, and moves back when they’ve learned to play niceys.  I used to be more flip about the idea all the holy cities should get nuked (rome, jerusalem, mecca – ideally with everybody moving out first), and I’m not that grody nowadays.  But should anybody be living there?  No.  What’s the half-life on genocide?  How long before that land is no longer glowing with hatred?

My guess is that for the remainder of humanity’s time on this world, there will be nothing in Israel or Palestine worth preserving, except for people – who would be much better preserved by leaving that hellhole behind.  The touristy beaches, the shopping malls, the ultramodern gleaming skyscrapers, the perfectly irrigated fields – yeah, even the nice parts.  They are not nice, because of what they cost.  Leave them.

With my nazi-ass country in your corner, Israel, things are about to get even worse.  So much worse than you’ve ever imagined.  To those of you who love genocide, you may find that getting what you wished for is the worst possible outcome for your people, for humanity.  And your day in the sun won’t last.  Your whole country will be destroyed.  And then rebuilt again, I’m sure, with or without you, and whoever lives there?  Probably gonna be genocidal zealots as well, of some flavor.  It’s in the dirt.

Fuck dirt.

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PrAIse Jeezes

For reasons, I wanted to create an image of jeezis that looked like an old Klasky-Csupo cartoon, like Rugrats, Ahh Real Monsters, or Wild Thornberrys.  Trying this in midj came back with very undignified results, quite amusing to me.  You should be scared, jeezis.  I hate you and I’m coming for your ass.

Anyway, I actually wanted a result with smaller eyes, like the Thornberrys, but I did like the vibes on those ones, so I used one as an image prompt, while using words to tease out smaller eyeballs.  I said “little tiny eyes” and –no large eyes, bulgy eyes, big eyes.  However, when using a bug-eyed image prompt and telling it to not make bug-eyes, I broke the AI’s mind.  Results:

Eldritch, son.  Once again, I was heartily amused, tho I gave up on making smol eyes, for now.

Next, unrelated, I was trying to get some ideas for motifs, rendering style, and composition, in a heraldic design.  Composition isn’t my strong suit as a visual artist.  This was a really strong result, and shows what I was looking for: not an image I could use as my final design, but something that can inform aspects of it.

The next one had a more rough-hewn texture and chiaroscuro that was appealing in other ways.  I have a wealth of inspirations to choose from, with a few pushes of a button.  I likes AI art tools.

I also like randomly recombining unrelated AI works, just to see what comes out, so putting previous jeezies together with heraldry, I got…

Again, love the indignity.  Nice texture too.  This next one brings back the chickenshitness of the klasky-csupo messiae.

But this is my favorite, reflecting my feelings on the big mans.  Catch one in the dome, motherfucker.  Catch you on the flipside.

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I Gets Religion

You gotta get yourself religion
And try to serve the lord
While the blood’s
Still warm
In your veins…

I dunno who wrote that but it played in the background of a deleted scene in Lord of Illusions.  Love that shit.  But yes, to the point…

I want the protection of religious faith, in a country that gives lip service to allowing non-christians religious liberties, but will never ever do the same for atheists.  But it has to be real, or I’ll fold under inquisition.  I need something I can believe in, and per some legal definitions, that needs to be a higher power.

Now more than ever I do believe in a higher power.  I believe that Chaos reigns supreme over both the meek and the mighty, that no human truly controls their own life or destiny.  The most powerful motherfucker in the world cannot keep shit from coming out his asshole on live TV.  The rich can never act with beneficence or generosity.  The bourgeoisie can do nothing but slide into fascism over and over and over again.

We’re all controlled by something which is why even the conspiracies that are actually true are a bad joke.  CIA you don’t own shit at the end of the day except your own bloody hands and wasted lives.

Entropy, of which Death is just one aspect, as best expressed by Ian Malcolm in Yurassis Next, “The kind of control you’re attempting simply is… it’s not possible.”  But not just dinosaurs, not nature more broadly, like in his little speech.  It’s everything.  The only consolations I’ve ever known are dark consolations, and it’s more of the same – the fuckos that rule the world are still subject to everything that they fear, everything that they want, everything that they’re afraid of losing.  They can ruin a lot, but they can’t control everybody all the time any more than the US could beat Vietnam.

This isn’t Discordianism, except insofar as those hippy fucks would claim everything is everything and nothing, and this would naturally be enfolded by that.  A lot of key differences, most notably that I don’t entertain headaches and I don’t love my higher power.  I just feel its explanatory power in all aspects of life, and it lets me throw up my hands sometimes when I need to.

I wouldn’t say I have holy, sacred, or unholy books or people to elevate, but there are some cultural icons that resonate with these feelings.

Ian Malcolm.  Not Mr. Goldblum, not even Mr. Crichton.  He is greater than the sum of his parts.  He showed me a truth I initially scoffed at, disregarded as inane.  Of course you can keep dinosaurs in a zoo, if you do it right.  And then it all came to pass, and now I know.

The Two Maxes.  We are living in the cyberpunk dystopia as symbolized by Max Headroom, and living in anticipation of the post-apocalypse as symbolized by Mad Max.

Hellstar Remina.  The only ethos worth having when everything is bad, it’s the ethos that allows you to keep doing good.  I don’t find that in abasement and martyrdom.  I find it in two characters from Hellstar Remina.  Remina herself, not strong enough to do much more than suffer what the world does to her, and the grace with which she does so.  And the astronaut dropout Whatsisface, who is strong enough to help her, when all it can afford them is a short reprieve from the evils of the world, leading up to certain death.  He is Antifa.

The Adversary.  My girl Satan is weak right now, tho people who do not recognize her true form may suppose the opposite.  Satan is the one who opposes sanctimonious authority, and she has been thrust like Sisyphus to the bottom of the mountain.  It will be a while before she has the sauce to start pushing that boulder up again, but when she does, she’s on my list too.

… that’s all my thoughts for the moment.

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Sometimes I’m an Antichrist

This is a post that sat not-quite-finished in my drafts since before October, dusted off because I am done with my “hope” series.  That’s not to say I’m going doom, just that my big push is over.  I will try to include a silver or at least grey lining in all future posts on dire topics.  If you missed any of my hope articles and want to check them out, I had at least one a day between 11/6 and 11/16.  Oh 2024, what a time…

Anyway, the same old shit, back to one post most days:

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The massive fuckboyism of organized atheism has put me off the brand completely.  You won’t catch me saying “atheist and proud,” because how can I be?  Don’t come up in my comments begging for a list of the dozens of famous atheists that have turned out to be shitbirds.  The movement itself was a contributing factor to the rise of reactionary fascism, and while FtB types should feel good about how we conducted ourselves since Deep Rifts 2.0, most of us were part of the problem for a decade leading up to it.*

But I do hate jeezis an awful lot.  If hate could power telekinesis, I’d have accidentally caused a few million in property destruction over the years.  I see a bus go by with the name of some vile religious fake charity, youth group, church, or whatever?  One devil claw in the side, scraping through the words as it passes by.  Billboards in flames.  Church facades in rubble.

I’ve long thought the origin of American fiction’s love for underdogs has to do with our national narrative of rebellious colonies, but realized today it’s apiece with the way jeezis fans here will imagine themselves oppressed, and that can be traced all the way back to the origin of xtianity** itself.  Why in fuck did the Romans adopt the religion of some Hebrews – people they’d colonized and oppressed?

It’s because of that dramatic story in Exodus, and the reiteration of the same theme in jeezy’s story – wanting to play the brave victim.  It captured imaginations.  More importantly, it somehow gave license to people with all the power in the world to feel like they were oppressed courageous fighters for that one special truth.

Religion in general promotes and protects itself with truth claims no matter where it’s found, but these narratives of oppression have a unique appeal which has given the abrahamic faiths potent recruiting power – especially xtianity.  Jewish and Muslim people aren’t mine to talk about, but xtians are.  They spread jeezix germs nowadays with tears for the magic suffering boy (and voter suppression and using collection plate money to fund the legalized murder of gay people abroad).

Look at what you did, sinners.  You made the magic boy cry.  And when you accept him into your hearts, you can feel the empowerment of that suffering.  His performative victimhood is yours!  For just $9.99 a month (which we will use to prop up conservatives that help us launder more money and eviscerate the social programs on which so many of you depend).

Jesus is my enemy.  Progressive and liberal xtians aren’t necessarily my enemies, but if they see me talking like this and take it that way?  Fine.  Your boy is shit.  He’s an excuse to feel oppressed in a culture where your fellows in faith have control of nearly everything, to feel justified in persecuting anybody who can’t or won’t fall in line with your fables.

If xtianity was truly a good thing, it wouldn’t still hold a concept of hell, wouldn’t separate the saved from the damned.  It would just give to everyone, and take nothing in return.***  It can’t pretend to.  If jesus the superghost exists, and christianity is his will, then he can be held to account for so many crimes, enormous and small.  Not a day goes by that somebody isn’t victimized in his name.  This entire nation is about to get reamed by his holeyness.

He’s in my head because I’m culturally xtian.  Even if I’ve never believed, I absorbed the lessons of misogyny and homophobia and islamophobia from the culture he controls, and they made me do bad things, made me harm myself, made me harm others – or at least annoy them.

Progressives can quote all the parts of the bible where magic boy is not being hot trash, but conservatives have the veto of cultural dominance.  Your version of jeezis has never held sway over the masses.  The one in control demands human sacrifice and is already drinking that tithe of blood and souls from those who died waiting for an abortion.

I’d crucify him again just for that.

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*It’s funny that slymer bitch “nunyabiznis” is Xitting that we should feel bad for making him a fascist.  Fucko, the only thing we should feel bad about is that we were rubbing elbows with you up until the soup went down.  The movement was always ableism and islamophobia with a progressive gloss.  In our own separate ways, we’ve both figured that out, and are now living our truths.  It’s not our fault if your truth makes it hard for you to look in a mirror.

**I get that x can stand for jesus, hence xmas and xianity.  I just think xtianity sounds better, but honestly I’m up on the air for what I should call this dogshit what I’ve been stewing in.  I don’t want to call it by the name it wants for itself.

***It’s a low bar to clear but I’m holier than that, giving help to people regardless of political persuasion, nine to five – for less money than I’d need to pay my mortgage by myself!  I’m one accident away from disaster, as most of us are, but I’m still putting myself out – even to utter fucking bastards – for this pittance.  Back of the line, jesus.  I’m numba one!  Seriously, fuck you!

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Does this post need a silver lining?  Maybe.  Most of us are not women whose lives depend on an abortion in the Midwest or south, not gay people in Uganda, so most of us will be fine – just sad, is all.  Whoever you are or however much risk you personally endure, take care of each other and take care of yourselves, comrades.  I love you!

If I turn in a sicko, will I get a reward?

Ah, it’s a good day to be alive and bearing the Mark of the Beast.  I can do commerce and have the rights of a citizen of the One World Government, unlike those freaky christians.  Man, who’d wanna be like them?  I heard sometimes they disappear leaving behind a pile of empty clothes.  Serves ’em right.  Wait, I was talkin’ about how it’s a good day.

Back to that.  So I’m out here mindin’ my biz when some christians were down on the street corner talkin’ about how much they love their savior.  Wotta laff, but also, it made me angry for no reason at all, and I was wondering.  If I turn in a sicko, will I get a reward?  Like, maybe from one of those New Age Healers appointed by the United Nations to indoctrinate the youth into righteous atheistical thinking.  They probably got loot under those cone hats with the nucular symbol on ’em.

Or they can gimme credits to use at the megastore, stock up on spiced lamb of god.  Deeee-lish.  I sure hope I can get a reward.  If I turn in a sicko.

Yeah I’m lookin at u, jeezy people.  Step on up.
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An Atheistical Thunk for Thee

Every atheist thought has been thought, which makes the freethoughtblogs just a place to hear the same thing you’ve heard before, at least, when we’re not talking about all the other kinds of stuff we talk about.  But sometimes one pops into your head and you’re like, when was the last time I heard this?  It’s striking me novel in the moment, even if it’s so rusty it’s dust, therefore, I set it before you, like a child’s bean-bedecked popsicle stick, and beam with pride.

If god made me, he made me incapable of believing in god, and whose fault is that?

Incidentally, I was reminded recently that during the recruitment surge when I was brought on FtB therre were slymers and kin creeping in the comments.  Haven’t seen a hater in a dog’s age.  Anybody know if they still haunt some other blogs?

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250 Words on the Topic of Loki as God

Somebody suggested I could meditate for a moment on what it would be like if Loki were behind the mask of the christian god.  What an obscure concept to be into, Norse mythology of all things.  It’s not like there’s some global media conglomerate spamming culture with a contemporary representation played by a conventionally attractive rich white guy.  How does one even get into these things?

At the core of the request is the concept of dystheism, and I’m grateful to whatever wikipedia editor linked that in the “related articles” section of Loki’s page.  What if the abrahamic god was a malevolent prank?  That might explain why god is nowhere to be seen – Loki was captured by his fellow æsir and squirreled away until doomsday, when his bastard children will bust him out of jail and destroy the world.  We’ll see Loki again when the soup goes down, possibly rocking stigmata and a crown of thorns.

Sometimes Loki’s pranks were for his own ends, sometimes he was badgered into using his powers for the pantheon, like the time he was impregnated (mpreg) by a male horse.  On one level, Loki playing Yah;_;eh demotes our lord of creation, but on another level, it empowers him, because he’ll win in the end, right?  And just like in Revelations, we’ll all lose at the same time.  If xtianity and the Great Middle East Hatepit are the creation of a prankster god, congrats to him, but it doesn’t change much for us.

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People Are All Crazy! Then What?

Had a conversation today that put me in mind of this post I wrote.  Like in that one, this one has to contain ableist language, but hopefully not be seen as an endorsement of such, or an invitation to do that in my comment section.  In fact, read that post first, because I don’t wanna repeat the same junk.  Long story short, what if the things we rate as cognitive deficits and malfunctions are vastly vastly more commonplace than we assume?  What if, as an emotionally stable person without any major risk of delusions, you were in a minority?  Can we sane few right the world gone mad?  Can we steer this ship of fools unto the safe harbor of sanity?

Nope.  There are no cures for most of what can ail a mind, just a life of care and carefulness.  Assuming we are even fortunate enough to know how bonkers we are.  A lot of people who are walking around assuming they are fairly normal or similar to others, not susceptible to delusions, are one weird day away from joining a cult and giving their lives over to it.  One moment away from being told “the truth” on a facebook post and forever thinking something that would make a gullible child look twice.

Atrocity Guide on yewchoob has a video about a cult that includes interviews with an ex-member who got out and is doing well.  Nice.  But what happened?  At a seminar the cult leader gave, he saw a golden light radiating from the man.  The deeper he got into it, the more impossible things he bore witness to.  And yet, on the other side, he realized those were all hallucinations, provoked through the power of suggestion.  Hearing this sensible guy say these things, you have to wonder, could it happen to me?

If it’s never happened to you before, well, probably not.  I think some people just have wild imaginations, or are more prone to influence.  But who knows?  Also, as you age, who is to say how your faculties might change?  As an atheistical type, formerly of the fiery brand, I used to imagine we could eliminate magical thinking from the world by getting everybody hip to philosophical materialism.  The holes in the logic of religion are trivially easy to point out, to talk under the table.

But nobody is impervious to bullshit, and it’s so pervasive in the world that it deforms the perception of reality on an everyday basis for vast swathes of humanity.  They’ll never buy reality because the fantasy everybody around them was taught every day forever just feels more correct, in their hearts.  Words to the contrary, they just sound like silly noises.  Maybe they don’t have the exact words to argue against you in the moment, but they’re sure somebody smarter in the faith, some preacher would be able to get you to see the light.  Because they have the same point of view as I do, at the end of the day.  Their truth is so obviously self-evident, it doesn’t need a rationale.  You don’t see me doing atheist apologetics much.  We all know what’s what, right?

The misguided person I spoke with today, she felt mighty foolish and didn’t know what to do with herself.  Not her fault.  I got the same conclusion here as I did before, but feel it more today than the last time I wrote it.  We need laws against lying.  The ACLU will say no, reaching across the aisle to join hands with political propagandists and corporate salesfuckos, but nay.

We can’t prevent all types of exploitation forever, we can’t protect people from themselves perfectly, but if human life and well-being has any value at all, we, as a society must find a way to reduce the harm caused by dishonest persuasion, better than we do now.  It’s like how we have laws against murder, knowing full well it will still happen at some point, no matter what we do.  But the laws give us a mechanism of enforcement, a disincentive.  Right now, in the USA, you’re literally praised for being the biggest con artist.  It’s fucked up and I hate it.

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still atheist

if there is a god that is good, it would not condemn people for the crime of disbelieving the unbelievable.  if there is a god that condemns people for disbelieving the unbelievable, that is an evil god, and the very bravest way you can live your life is in utter defiance of such a being.  amirite ladies?  old idea, i know, but worth stating out loud from time to time.

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No Regrets in The Struggle

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE FtBlogger atop all the main page categories of FtB articles.  Gimme the prize!

Anyway, I just flew in from Social Justice and boy are my arms tired.  I mean airplane food, amirite?  Wocka wocka.

Some of my articles in this series have been quasi-thoughtful, but I’m running out of power.  What can I do?  Social justice, social justice, what can I say about that?

You know, there’s an idea you would sometimes see come up in comments in the early days of the Deep Rifts 2.0, when many of us were becoming “woke” for the first time.  It was a sense of gratitude that women were bringing to light the way they’d been mistreated, that it was opening up all these other conversations, and that this would give us a chance to become better people.  To truly realize the equality we’d always just assumed was part of the movement, in contradistinction to the naked sexism of christian fundies.  I just want to bring that gratitude back for a moment.

I love that we broke up the atheist movement.  The crudlords and fogies are still out there, somewhere, embarrassing themselves in Elon’s Thunderdome.  But they forever have to sit there in full awareness that they have been rebuked.  That a sizeable chunk of their former bedfellows just said “Fuck Y’all” and never looked back.  Everybody said their piece, then went their separate ways.

Can they even understand what we feel?  I don’ t think they can.  Dawkins can only conceive of this as us being led astray, bewitched by the sorcery of women in glasses and colorful hair.  He doesn’t know how good it is to look at society as it really is, the same way he’d look at the physical world as it really is, and know what you’re going to do with that, do with your time here.  We’re gonna be good, as good as we can be.  We’ll make mistakes but we’ll learn, because yeah, we woke up to the importance of social justice.

I’m still proud to be an SJW.  Power on, comrades.
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