Ya Talk Too Much

When I was a kid in the ’80s, the children in the halls and on school buses would chant song lyrics, especially raps.  Janet Jackson, Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, and Run DMC all had their time, sometimes with alternative lyrics, like the “batman smells” versions.  This song was especially popular.

The place I heard it the most was in the mouths of other babes four decades ago, and I’m only seeing the video for the first time now.  I love the use of white people in this video.  It’s like these guys are the sensible cool mans in a world of weird posers and art freaks.  They gots my number.

In more ways than one.  In the latest FtB Poddish Sortacast, I spoke way too much.  I had proposed the topic so it was kinda my time to rampage, but still, rude.  Nonetheless, I thought I did a great job elucidating my perception of the world and the shituation we’re in.  This is not a good video to watch if you’re one of the people my doomerism policy is designed to protect, so don’t watch it if you’re one of them.  Anybody else, have at it.

Am I foolin myself, or did I come off like a big ol’ smartypants?  I lost the bead a few times, but when I was on, I was on.

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Lemme At Im

I wanna kill Jesus.

You know, I’d love to be a nicer person to all the good people of the world who happen to also be christian, but it’s mighty hard.  Mighty hard.  Shitbird preachers like to unfairly characterize atheists as all hating god &/or jesus, but I’m sure it isn’t true for most of you.  It is true of me.  Very true.

There is, on balance, more justification in the words of jesus for progressive ideas than for conservative ones.  Twisting that shit into prosperity gospel and gaybashing is twisting.  But I don’t care about the feelings of some ancient dead guy.  I care about the monster he created, and if I am to take his continued supernatural existence as true – as christians want me to do – then if I were to meet this superghost?

Fuck that motherfucker.  It’s on.

I’m that Dexter-flavored hypocrite who wants to kill the killers.  Atrocities make me mad, make me feel like doing something atrocious, and there are now millennia of horrors that happened on resurrected jeezy’s watch.  Culturally christian people who wanted to believe they could point to something older and better within their ancestors invented wicca, which – in culturally christian fashion – positions one’s people as the real victims in all of this.

Well, your people are the real victims in all of this, wiccans, but witches aren’t your people any more than they are mine.  Your people have been christian for a very long time, like their oppressors.  Christians oppress christians more than the Romans ever had a chance to.  These are the atrocities of which I spoke.  Of those that were tortured and killed for witchcraft, how many had any cultural context for being anything other than christian (or atheist, which can come into existence without being taught)?  Europe was utterly dominated by christianity during all of the witch hunting times.  Their victims were christian.  (oh yeah just remembered the muslims and jewish people, lol.  anyway…)

That’s not mentioning the much more frequent form of historical oppression they engaged in – sectarian warfare.  Genocidal violence, mass slaughter, women and children hung from the walls, cities burned – all for believing in jesus wrong.  I look at that shit and cannot feel schadenfreude about jerks I disagree with killing each other.  I see the torture and murder, and it infuriates me.

Somebody’s gotta pay, and if I try to pin down which sect shot first, that’s playing their game.  No.  I can do them one better.  These sects wouldn’t exist if jesus wasn’t a real supernatural guy that rose on the third day yadda yadda, right, Kenneth?  Only the magic version of jesus could have inspired these millennia of obscene cruelty.  And therefore, magic jesus must die by my hands.

Gimme the spear, centurion.  It’s time to stick this pig again.  For old time’s sake.  Just a jesus murdering party, me and my besties.  Who’s in?

Guys?  C’mon, it’ll be fun.  Guys?

 

 

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A Moment of Bothsiderism

The gnu-flavored atheist movement was founded in part by people who favored military adventurism against muslim-majority countries, chiefly Christopher Hitchens.  That movement quickly morphed into a broad liberalism which appealed to less bloodthirsty people like you and I.  That was revealed to be paper thin cover for a reactionary mindset during Elevatorgate, which is why FtB is so much smaller than SciBlogs had been before the schism.

Elevatorgate’s queen was Abby ERV, who basically abandoned pro-vax activism in favor of a 24-7 misogyny campaign.  Together with Gamergate and the MRA and incel movements, these were the foundational kernel of the neo-nazism that has taken over the USA.  If you meet a rethuglican bro under fifty, he probably spent some time in one or more of these online communities, or their descendants.

If we take that piece of shit ERV as being an icon of atheo-skepticism who contributed to fascism, what of her opposite number in the anti-vax movement, Jenny McCarthy?  Anti-vaxxing (and medical woo in general) used to be strongly associated with liberals, with left of center people.  When conservatives embraced anti-vaxxing, those people swung hard.  I’ve had the misfortune of talking to some of them.  Maybe they have a left belief or two among the gallery of monsters in their skulls, but they are ardent supporters of shitler, and many are Qanon as well.  Both pro- and anti-vaxxing contributed to fascism.

So here’s my moment of bothsiderism.  Who contributed more to our present political ruination, gnu atheists or antivaxxers?  Abby ERV or Jenny McCarthy?  Even tho the actor was much more famous, I honestly do not know the answer to this question.  Both movements had some amount of access to the halls of power via lobbyists or cultural prestige.

In composing this post, I found myself reflecting on the strange political moments and movements that added up to Nazi USA.  That broad tent is wild as hell.  It’s so much easier to take the world apart than to make it better.  The locust swarms flow into and out of each other, devouring hope and love.

I do not fault anyone for feeling doomed and destroyed, but I still have hope for all of you, that you keep it together, that you enjoy the things you can, and you don’t feel too overwhelmed by the overwhelming circumstances.  We’ve got each other and we’re still alive, baby.

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Selection Selection

You can still join the RP by comment, open for two more players.  Catch up from the beginning here, just look at the most recent post, or whatever.

we know natural selection and sexual selection.  it’s pretty clear complex species have a kind of sociological selection, even if it isn’t the darwinism some would imagine.  what other kinds of selection could be happening?  all that’s needed for selection is a variable thing and another variable thing that filters the variety of the first.  what if there’s a kind of selection we haven’t identified yet that drives the cycle of mass extinctions?  people point to certain astronomical and geographical cycles but i’m thinking something more abstract.  i once wondered why diseases hurt and kill, when they could proliferate more if they did not do those things.  maybe what selects for them to cause harm is something we haven’t thought of yet (tho there were other explanations from commenters which seem more likely).

might be that sociological selection is understudied.  i could be using the wrong term and i don’t know the literature, don’t even know for sure that sociology is the field in which study would happen.  the way unregulated capitalism guts itself and ruins the world is actively selected for in some way.  superficially you can look at specific actions like the repeal of glass-steagall, but it’s part of a larger phenomenon which is out of control and strangling democracy.  i guess that one would be studied by radical economists, even tho it shouldn’t be radical because it’s blue-sky obvious from outside the schools that spawn alan greenspan clones.

i dimly recall some scientists believing that sexual selection was just one aspect of fitness selection and didn’t deserve equal footing.  people fond of the fascist version of natural selection would apply it very broadly, but i’m sure there are non-nazi justifications for doing so.  then again, that could just be humans trying to cram the natural world into neat little boxes for ease of understanding, when complexity and chaos are the true way of things.  If sexual selection is just natural selection junior, then natural selection (as fitness to the environment changing rates of mutant gene expression in populations) could itself be a concept nested within a larger framework, and in company with myriad categories of related phenomena.

i’m gonna start with the types of fitness i’ve discussed so far and list any others i can imagine off the top of my head.  feel free to add more in comments, or whatever you please.

type of selection — variable A — variable B / the filter
natural selection — mutation — environmental fitness
sexual selection — costly displays — weird fetishes
sociological selection — cultural behavior — success of the culture
invisible hand shit — supply — demand (lol fake)
political corruption — personal ethics — lobbyist money
sexy water droplet on laura dern’s wrist — goin different directions — chaos

i never did get at what i was feeling, something bigger… but that’s all i got for now.  waking up for work in six hours…

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Zoroastrian Optimism

I was looking up monsters and some chain led to motifs from Middle Eastern art, which led to an article on Zoroastrianism, which led me to get confused about their concept for the soul.  I remember once reading some outdated conventional wisdom about the origin of religion, wherein the concept of the soul emerged from the observation that the living breathe and the dead do not – that a soul must be an immaterial thing that is in your body and subsequently leaves.  Simple enough, but a lot of supernatural ideas from older religions leave me scratchin templez.  More complicated.

If I got this right, the main part of your zoroastrian soul exists outside of the material world.  It sends a piece avatar-style when you are born, animating you, and that part returns to the source four days after you die, bringing with it the wisdom of your time spent on Earth.  As you spend various lives on Earth, you’re making your main soul more wise and powerful.  Juiced-in soul points.  Power ups.  I presume when you hit your limit break, you can do a special finishing move.

The concept of the soul that most amurrican christians believe is less ornate.  Your soul is born when you’re born, it goes to heaven or hell when you die.  I think most of the denominations preach something more like you stay in the dark until judgment day when the helling and heavening will actually happen, but that doesn’t stick in the heads of the laity.

Still, these are the conceptions I’m most familiar with, and you gotta admit, they’re more streamlined than that zoroastrian stuff.  Why the extra steps, zoroastrians?  I have to admit tho, I find their take appealing.  While you are alive, you are fighting against evil.  When you die, your main soul gets the XP, making you more powerful against evil.  We’re all getting better at fighting evil all the time.

Whenever the zoroastrian end of days comes around, we’ll all be 99th level paladins, kickin’ ass on the angra-mainyu-something-whatever.  That’s optimistic.  That’s some “moral arc of the universe bends toward justice” kind of shit.  I can’t believe it, but it’s nice.

This is the part when people raised under the cruel repression of the zoroastrian bible belt come into my comments and explain how it isn’t nice.  As you will…

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Purple Pill Poppers

Red pill, blue pill.  Why so biney, Morpheoose?

I’ve gotten self-righteous about it from time to time, as have most of the people on this network – bloggers and commenters included – but fundamentally I am an atheist because it feels real to me, based on my predilections in combination with my experience of life, and not because I was moved to this position by Reason and Enlightenment.  In the Matrix metaphor, to me, atheism is the blue pill – the world that has been “pulled over my eyes.”  Comforting, tho often a cold comfort.

What then would be the red pill?  Anything that was capable of overthrowing that idea of reality, replacing it with something new.  In The Matrix that would be the Truth.  In my ill-conceived thesis, I’ll just treat the red pill as an alternative view of the world, different from what you’ve previously known and not necessarily true.  With that being the idea, red pills are rare things indeed.

We have a sense of what’s real built on the stuff of our lives.  For some people that’s jesus and paranoia, for others, well, there’s a lot of ways people can be, regardless of how polls aim to simplify it all.  But across the board, we are not easily convinced of anything that falls outside our biases.  Some of those biases are good and fine, even factually correct like atheism, but that doesn’t keep them from being biases.  The bias is the thing you are predisposed to believe.  What can overcome this?

Believers in society as a great discourse between rational minds, they’d say debate and discussion can overcome incorrect beliefs.  The truth will inherently emerge from a true socratic dialogue.  Does it though?  Seems to me we almost never change what we believe to something directly opposite.  Those who went from cookie-baking grandma to goose-stepping Q-creep were building on whatever their baseline was.  The flaw was there, waiting to be nurtured.

The gradual creep of US fascism over the last hundred years, while it involved intentional propaganda by malevolent masterminds, those masterminds themselves were thralls of propaganda they’d been fed, as much subject to manipulation as anyone they sought to manipulate.  We’re all just following a course of social entropy.

Within that, there are ways to bend people, to ourselves get bent.  Like that fascist grandma, take a pre-existing belief or point of view and elaborate on it, build it into something new.  Not a red pill because it’s not a total jailbreak of the original firmware, call it a purple pill.

In The Matrix, Joey tha Rat had the same choice about what to believe that Neo was given, chose red, then changed his mind.  Wouldn’t that be nice?  Change your beliefs on a dime, to whatever felt the best in a given moment?  Not to say I want to change my own beliefs, just using a lil’ reflection on my relationship to those beliefs as a way to understand some people whose thoughts are nigh unimaginable.  Do your own research, as they say.

What I’m interested in, like anybody else living in a society that isn’t living up to their ideals, is how to alter the beliefs of those who seem dead set on ruining everything.  They got purplepilled into that point of view, and maybe we can purplepill them into a point of view that is less ruinous somehow.  It’s not like looking for a “weak spot” to exploit.  Those that indoctrinated them into fascism did not seek to dominate, they fertilized the soil and watered it.  It’s a process of nurturing, I think.

What is left in a fascist that is good enough to build on, to encourage them to become something less bad?  I don’t know, but it could be worth thinking about.

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Postmodernism Eating Itself

Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance: If a society tolerates all types of speech and political expression it will be challenged and subverted by those who wish to suppress freedom and tolerance.  In order to defend the tolerance of a society, one must be intolerant of intolerance.  If I’m reading the article right, he said that while outlawing intolerant speech would be undesirable, rational discourse should be used to help maintain the popular dominance of tolerant principles – that intolerance defends itself by suppressing rational discussion.  But that at the end of the day, a tolerant society must reserve the right to say a dangerous enough expression of intolerance is illegal and can be suppressed.  I expect the way that was written into post-WWII German law would sit well with him, whether the actual application of those laws would or not.

I’m not here to discuss the plus and minus or the exact nature of how to best adjudicate the tolerance v intolerance in an ideal society.  Taking the paradox only on its face but not going all the way to the conclusion he offers.  And having done that, I want to look at a phenomenon affecting modern politics that can serve as an example of the paradox in action.

The current flavor of fascism is a direct result of the very postmodernism that it postures against.  There are other factors and influences, especially the “therapy culture” that emerged in the boomer generation, but in the course of my life, this is the one I’ve seen time and again.  The tolerance that was used to justify this intolerance was grounded in postmodern values.

Postmodernism has many aspects, but I’m going to use the broadest version here.  Modernism was the idea there are right ways to do things, truths that can be discovered and known.  Postmodernism was about uncertainty, vagueness, and especially the idea there are multiple “ways of knowing” – functionally, that opinions can be as valid a view of reality as facts.  The cry of the postmodern fascist, when they have lost the bully pulpit and know they’ve lost the argument as well, is a Lebowksian, “That’s just, like, your opinion, maaan.”

The Sokal hoax was, on its face, convincing enough.  Given that Sokal himself is part of that raft of neo-nazis and enablers in Epstein Pal Krauss’s new book, I suspect there are valid arguments that his stunt was bullshit from go.  It was meant to illustrate that postmodernism bad, reality is in facts and concrete things.  And yet the Krauss cohort is a clown car of people who habitually and fiercely ignore good strong science that refutes their biases, and that use flimsy and handwavey science to support what they want to believe.  “Facts don’t care about your feelings” cries lil Benny Shaps on monday, “Your intolerance hurts my feelings” on tuesday.

Faux News popularized opinion-as-reality.  It’s possible to cherry pick reportage of factual things to support ideological positions, but it’s so much easier to spew propaganda when you realize “somebody said a thing” can be “news.”  Then it’s Editorial Page: the Ostensible News Network.  You can’t say anything anybody says is wrong, because that’s just, like, their opinion, man.  I’m using my freedom of speech! You hates freedom?

I’ve heard this play out so so so many times at the street level.  In my high school classrooms in 1993, in the arguments of randos on buses, in arguments with people I know.  Person expresses factually wrong idea, is shown to be wrong, and says it’s an opinion, or even cites the first amendment.  Maybe I’m wrong, but it feels to me like a natural extension of the idea that all opinions about truth have some validity – an essential postmodern idea, embraced by the masses without ever acknowledging the source.

There were variations on this that predated my youth, but based on the attitudes of teachers and adults and opinion-havers of the world as I observed back then, it seems to me that it was an idea whose promotion began with 1960s mysticism, developed into therapy culture in the 1970s, and stayed with us in that form ever since.  Liberal schoolteachers were big fans of the idea, trying to encourage kids to debate because that’ll make us smorter.  I got smortified off having to hear what skinhead Ron thinks about the just society.

The funny thing is, I don’t even think the idea is wholly lacking in validity, nor is postmodernism itself as a larger package deal.  We’re all so powerfully influenced by our cultural environment and personal situations that assumptions about the nature of any given phenomenon can seem like Objective Truth when they are no such thing.  And yet, those feelings and perceptions have a power that creates a sort of reality, a sort of truth, which is in some ways the only truth we can truly apprehend.  Agnostic shit.

But the postmodern justification of and promotion of fascism shows the weakness of this liberal idea, employing it to ultimately work against itself.  Fascist propaganda was just opinions which are all valid, until fascists won control of the media, the government, the church, big business, etc etc.  At that point, all opinions are no longer valid.  Fascist propaganda is “fact” – and fascist control of science publication and journalism means there is no official source you can point to that isn’t soon to express only the facts that the Aeternal Reich wants you to see.

It’s sad how George Orwell, Karl Popper, and any number of other intellectuals going back to the dawn of the written language can call these things out, illuminate them so clearly and simply a child could understand them, and yet collectively we fall for the trick unto the end of (our) time.  Fascists working against education is certainly part of that, but there is a flaw in the human animal that is doing no small amount of the work for them.

We’re not as smart as we like to think we are.  When you see the fancy talking heads spouting big words in defense of callow bigotry, using lofty language to make it seem like black is white, bad is good, up is down…  You’re seeing smart people outsmarting themselves.  The flaws in their thinking are obvious as all hell to you and I, but they are fucking impervious to truth.

Reality is what we make it and we are what that reality makes us.  The vast majority of this country’s media is painting the picture of reality the Kochs and the Murdochs and Muskerbergs want people to see.  It’s everything around them.  They are swimming in hate speech and propaganda nonstop, all day all night, cradle to the grave.  It used to just be radio, TV, and newspapers.  Now it’s algorithms in social media sorting people into camps that can be marketed to more effectively, fueling division and strife, and even genocide if it makes the page views go up, makes money for the shareholders.

As much as they’re my hated enemies, I don’t blame US conservatives for having shit ideas about basically everything.  It’s the world as they know it.  A perversion of liberal principles, unashamedly hypocritical.  Contradictions don’t mean a thing, because this stuff thrives on goldfish memories.  The human animal is not as smart as we’ve wanted it to be – as every flavor of modernism supposed we would one day be able to achieve.

But being unintelligent does not mean you deserve to be misled.  Blaming fools for being fooled is letting the foolers off the hook, and in this situation, those foolers are just the worst motherfuckers in human history.  Hook their fucking asses.  I don’t know that we can ever really beat this type of shit, but I do know we have to keep trying in any way we’re able for as long as we can.

If the world goes nasty, you owe it to yourself and the people you care about to make your own piece of that world as nice as possible.  Just sucks knowing what you’re up against in that fight.  But power on my people.  I love you.

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It’s a Kind of Magic

I find myself lusting for magic again.  I may have mentioned before that my soul is forfeit because I made an ill-considered deal with the devil while walking home from a shift at Pizza Hut in the ’90s:  Show me magic is real and you can have my soul.  Why make such a foolish deal?  Because the world can seem so very dull and pointless.

I can’t tell you why it feels to me like magic would make it interesting and worthwhile.  There’s evidence a lot of people out there feel this way, especially those who are able to fool themselves into believing, at least in fits and starts.  Probably cultural damage of some kind.  It doesn’t really make sense.

Some people have very magical thoughts, like they’re the center of reality, important and big in some way.  It isn’t always a good feeling; you see this a lot with paranoia-flavored mental illnesses.  Tough to feel OK with life when everybody is out to get you.

I didn’t really want to write about that.  I’m just trying to put a finger on this feeling again.  The place it’s most relevant to me is in the creation of art.  I can’t make myself believe in some cult bullshit or mainstream religion either.  I can’t eke a transcendant spiritual feeling out of the things that I do believe, in my heart of hearts.  All that stuff just overwhelms in a bad way.  But fiction, that’s another thing altogether.

This feeling connects to other thoughts I’ve had in the past, as expressed through blog posts on The Doors, on levitation, on action, on Faust.  Is it wrong to want the weirding way?  To be a scanner, or if I’m ready to go, to get scanned?  I want my will to move the world, just a little bit.  Push.

I am reminded now of the Floaters-themed personal ads on my levitation post, and how they should be updated to reflect my current name.  Here I go…

Cancer, and my name is Bébé
And I like a lover who gots somethin’ extra in their jayjays
Whether that’s a big belly or a dingly dang dongus
There’s no way you and I can go wrongus
when you
Take my hand, come with me baby, to Love Land.
Let me show you it’s queer and/or gay
Sharin’ your love with Bébé
I want you to Float On… Float with me baby…

Way off topic.  The important thing is that y’all tell me how you do it.  Projecting your will like Charles Gray in The Devil Rides Out.  Stop holding out.  Slip me the runes.  I can handle it.  It’s time.

JUST GIVE ME THE PRIZE!

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It’s a Gas

What did ’60s people mean by “it’s a gas”?  Something like “it blows my mind, it’s trippy, it’s exciting,” I think.  Wasn’t there.  Were they thinking of inhalants, huffing gas fumes?  Or laughing gas, at the dentist’s office?  Probably the latter.  Wait, no, maybe it was just about the fuel to make a hot rod go – mostly about the excitement.

Whatever the answer, life is a gas, and it blows my mind, and it’s trippy, and exciting.  Too much of the last one, unfortunately, but one can abide.  I think of the laughing gas.  I laugh under stress sometimes, like when I was a six year old shepherd in a school play and lost it completely, or when I annoyed my husband by weirding out at the hospital.

I remember when my homeboy was trying to go on a road trip, with me and my brother, and his car gave up the ghost at freeway speed.  We were slumping to a stop while a chu-chunk sound played to the tune of “when johnny comes marching home again.”  I started laughing.  I remember when we did manage to actually undertake that road trip, and a map put us on something one would barely consider a road, with giant chunks missing and boulders in the way, in the rain in the middle of the night.  The gas tank had a “remaining miles” display which was ticking down from two to one to zero super slowly as we struggled up a gradual incline that never seemed to end.  Inappropriate jokes, stifled laughs.

We finally crested that hill as dawn broke and the remaining miles jumped up to ten, gravity helping us out.  I hope we all crest this hill together, and in the meantime, I hope my coping mechanisms don’t get too annoying.

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New Sura Just Dropped

Should I call them suras?  My emerging personal religion has disparate influences, which could be read as holy texts, and as they are not currently part of a consolidated canon, they could be considered supplemental writing in the sense that islam’s suras.  I dunno.  I wouldn’t say apocrypha because that term denotes status as non-canon, which isn’t possible if there isn’t a canon.  Or wait, maybe there’s nothing but apocrypha.  A belief system of pure apocrypha.  I dunno.

I want people to regard these beliefs as earnest, and as religion.  Y’all jesus fucklers who use “atheism is a religion” as a gotcha, it still doesn’t make sense for atheism, but you can use it for whatever this thing is I’m putting together over here.  Especially if the schedule F party boss comes ’round the factory floor to inquisite about my unusual practices and appearance.

Before I introduce the new principle, let us contemplate these other mysteries of Chaos:

Ian Malcolm.  This level of control we attempt, it is not possible.

The Two Maxes.  Max Headroom shows us the blipvert of our current cyberpunk dystopia, Mad Max shows us the sorrow of the coming post apocalypse.

Hellstar Remina.  This text shows the way of being good when the whole world goes bad.

The Adversary.  Satan speaks truth to sanctimonious power – the truth that in the end there is no real power that a human can possess.

To these I add:

Restoring Biological Truth.  January 22 2025, the second most powerful man in the world decreed that all prior science on gender and sex was invalid, and the government of what is, for now, the most powerful nation in the world set about erasing from science all mention of sexual variation or ambiguity in the natural world or in human beings.

When I was an atheist I clung to the idea that science was the truest arbiter of reality, and so I must concede that whatever is allowed to exist of science in this new world must be the only truth of reality.  Mans and womans are the only thing, nothing else exists, and gender is the delusion of insane sex criminals like myself.

However.  If my belief that gender and biological sex are both spectra is not scientifically valid, then it must come from somewhere other than science.  It must come from Revelation!  From a higher power!  That is the power that I believe, ardently and piously in, the power of Chaos to rend asunder clean boundaries, and make a mess of everything.

It is my religious duty to embody the power of Chaos, in specifically dressing counter to my state-mandated sex.  For if I do not carry the truth of Chaos upon my visage, I am disrespecting the highest power in the cosmos.  I do not love my god; I fear it, and live in this way to avoid its wrath.

Respect my religion.  Allow me to wear the garments of my faith.  Or concede that you do not actually care about freedom for any religion except a narrow range of christian denominations, and just fuck right off the planet in a spaceX deathtube at your earliest convenience.

Thank you.

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