Organized Atheism Also at Fault

I’m pretty quick to point out that terves very much share blame for the recent losses on women’s rights.  Transphobia was one of the levers that helped buoy fascists and autocrats in elections across the globe recently.  But this isn’t a terf blog network, it’s an atheist one.  That’s our beat.  So to that end, let me just reiterate this point I’ve made before.

Organized atheism should always have been a force for progressivism, against the barbarity of religious belief.  But nope.  The idea of listening to even the mildest of feminist critique caused all our talking heads to leap headlong into bed with fascists, to promote the movements that ultimately led to Trump’s election and the current slate in the supreme court.  DickDawk can whine all he wants that he’s liberal, that we should believe that counts for fuckin’ anything, while he engages in piteous dickriding transphobia and platforms the hero of incel mass shooters everywhere.

There is a straight line from elevatorgate to gamergate to altright white supremacy to cheeto hitler to the end of Roe v Wade.  Terfs did their part, but we were in the game of ruining civilization as we know it when those bitches were barely getting started.  We had a lot of friends along the way in building this theocracy, but we should never lose sight of our part in subverting our own ostensible ends.  Like terfs – they should never be allowed to forget they helped set feminism back eighty years, and we should never be allowed to forget we set atheism back as well.

My own part was small.  I let a subtle brew of ableism and islamophobia drive me to participate in boosting new atheism, participating in the comments and the discourse, not doing enough to change the rotten core of the movement or start a better one.  I’ll own that.  I wonder if the narcissistic thunk leaders of our defunct movement will ever process the same, ever feel that as they fade from the earth.  I doubt it.

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Department of Bad Ideas – Mass Shootings

Content Warnings: Murder, Ableism, Suicide, Abuse, etc.  This is me being a shitty edgelord for a minute.

Nobody likes mass shootings, even rethuglicans.  A few people carry out the practical end of Fucker Carlston’s stochastic terrorism and gun control looks reasonable – the NRA doesn’t want that, even if they don’t give a shit about a mountain of dead children.  Nobody who knows one of these killers is surprised by them doing the deed.  Sometimes they’ve even been ratted out to the authorities, who were too slow to act on the information.  This suggests to me a solution.

If you’re very pro-gun and you know somebody who is going to kill lots of people, murder them before they can do it.  They are usually troubled enough you could make it look like a suicide easy, and who is going to believe this as a motive for murder?  You’ll know in your heart that you saved lives – you were the fabled good guy with a gun, putting one in the back of your friend’s dome like George did Lenny.  And you’ll know you helped prevent bad press for your beloved assault rifles.

Literally everybody wins.  The children live, the guns keep their good name, you get the joy of committing a murder which is something I know you all desire so richly, and your troubled friend is released from all earthly suffering – their boiling rage allowed to cool and subside into the earth along with their physical corpus.

There are of course multiple reasons this is a bad idea.  Conservatives are spectacularly bad judges of where the violence and abuse in society are coming from.  Youth Pastor Handsy?  Solid dog.  Coach Concussion?  Made you into a real man.  Officer Beatdown?  The thin blue line.  Autistic Steve with the tics?  Who let him be a janitor?  Somebody should part him out for organ donations.  Making this ask to the kind of people in a position to carry it out is both advocating murder, and asking them to be as ableist as possible about who they choose to kill.

I just felt clever in a terrible way for two seconds and had to share my faulty math.  I hope you enjoyed it as dark humor and forgive me if you did not.  Thanks.

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Great Idea re: Muskworld Twitter

When tumblr was bought by one ridiculous corporation for a huge sum of money and immediately resold for peanuts, the remaining users there cheered in amusement.  Look how much money we cost these corporations by just being useless freaks!  That contributed in part, I think, to this idea: Everybody delete their twitter on the same day and tank the stock.

There are reasonable reasons for people to not participate, but for a lot of you I know twitter is nothing but an unhealthy tax on your minds and you could use an excuse or motive to excise it from your life.  Why not make it a form of direct action and kick Apartheid Jr right in his spaceballs?  Delete your Twitter at the appointed hour.  Huzzah!

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Some Lies Should Be Jailing Offenses

The laws of the USA are profoundly generous to liars and con artists.  I don’t know from legal history, but some court said there could be “common sense” limitations on freedom of speech, like “no shouting fire in a crowded theater.”  I could google that easily enough but whatever.  I bring this up because the problem is not alerting people to fire, it’s unnecessarily causing a stampede when there is no fire.  The problem is the lie.

What do you charge that liar with?  Reckless endangerment?  Malicious mischief?  Anyone who has ever lied about covid for political or financial gain should have spent time in handcuffs.  Of course, a creepy enough liar can believe almost any lie they tell, at which point, is it a lie?  That would be a common defense if we ever arrested people for that shit.  “What?  I really believe the vaccine helps them control you with the 5g.  Prove I don’t believe it.”  I don’t know how to deal with the actual prosecution of such cases.

But there are no such cases in the first place, no consequences for telling world-ruining lies, literally strangling a million people to painful miserable death with your flaming bullshit.  Those lies lead to lies lead to lies, a circular firing squad of fascist dreamers creating a world of illusion.  And now we have honest, earnest true believers in these lies.  People who believe in antivaxxing like they believe in jeezis.

In my day job I hear their stories.  One woman had a health problem blood clottish and blamed the vaccine.  One man’s wife took the shot and died from a stroke, perfect health before that he says.  She took the shot and he didn’t.  His faith affirmed, he will one day have a chance to lay in a hospital for a month with his body ravaged in unimaginable ways, his lung’s function replaced with machinery while they run out the clock, if that hospital doesn’t have to triage his ass straight to hell.

Because this lie was sold with conservative cultural identity, most of the victims are fascists, and I can’t feel too bad for them.  Lest we forget,

But it isn’t only fascists that buy these lies.  Mainstream anybodies can be swept up in memes and swindles, and they are – great swathes of them.  I don’t know the numbers but I do know a lot of people in this fairly urban part of a blue state are complete rubes about this shit.  People I know, people I’ve known.  They’re at a risk of death and at a risk of killing people they care about, not to mention all the people they don’t know or care about.

This could have been stopped by aggressive laws against demonstrably dangerous lies.  But politicians on both sides of the aisle, plus the corporate world (and all the incestuous crossover between the two) benefit from dangerous lies just often enough that they don’t want to take that tool off the table.  Freedom of speech is freedom to lie.  Any policies we currently have against that are defanged or shot full of loopholes that are barreled through by fuckers in monster truck convoys from sea to shining sea.

I’d just love to see people like the pink-faced sack of shit in that picture purse their lips and wonder – will this be the one that sends me to the penitentiary?  Please.

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Hey Conservatives

Lately you’ve been trying to kill people a little harder than usual – kill people who get abortions, drive trans people to suicide, killing the old and the infirm with covid, torturing refugees and stealing and raping their children, legalize killing protestors – as long as it isn’t your own nazi buddies…  Anyway, I’m just thinking, anyone who is so horny on killing should absolutely be horny on being killed.  If you push this stuff but don’t want to be murdered, you’re being hypocrites.  I don’t even need this to be an even split.  Let’s say for every five oppressed people you kill, I wanna see one of your figureheads take their face apart on national television with their weapon of choice.  Get on it, motherfuckers, or I don’t know, stop being such homicidal fascists for TEN FUCKING MINUTES PLEASE.

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Don’t Be a Coward

It’s hard to judge what a reasonable level of fear is in reaction to shitty events, and there are plenty of extremely shitty events going on in the world right now.  (Thanks, fascists!  Please eat shit and die at your earliest convenience.)  That said, there are a loooot of people on the internet right now stoking panic.  Like Putin makes a lazy threat about hacking our shit and tweets and subreddits explode, telling you to run for the hills immediately lest you fall victim to supply chain banditos.

Harden the fuck up, you ridiculous cowards.  You make it harder for people to judge what that reasonable level of fear is, by ratcheting every little thing up to “cannibal holocaust.”  You spread anxiety and dread and turn stomachs and ruin people’s days.  The way you talk, I imagine you trembling like little chihuahuas with urine running down your thighs as you clack out your terrified tweets.  Yeah, especially those of you with guns.

Do you live in America?  Are you not a member of an oppressed minority at the moment?  (No, xtians don’t count.)  You’re going to be fine.  Some bad stuff will happen.  Wildfires burning up your cabins, rising tides taking out your timeshares.  But compared to people in Ukraine, or Russia, or anywhere near the Equator?  Your life is going to be a cakewalk – at least until you’re old and infirm enough to be considered disposable by republicans.  Drink in the freedom, manbabies.  Calm the fuck down.

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“You Are Loved”

I saw “You are loved” on a church sign.  Not the first time I’ve seen this sentiment but it’s the first time I can remember this occurring to me.  What’s being proposed here is that the all powerful super creator of humanity and the universe has particular care for each of us, as individuals.  Anything good that happens to us comes from that care, anything bad doesn’t matter because he’ll make up for it when you’re dead.

What I realized is that this lets all xtians off the hook from genuinely caring about anyone.  If young jeezy is taking care of everybody, we don’t have to do that at all.  He exhorted people to care for the poor and the ill, but clearly that is just a hobbyist pursuit – not a genuine responsibility – because god’s love is enough.

That would be a good logical excuse for why xtians hate social services, but I suspect there’s no reasoning behind it.  Rather they just don’t want to pay for the care of others and assume their religion endorses any given thing they feel as part of their conservative identity, without any need for actual knowledge of the words in the holy books.  Much like “geeks” assume they’re intelligent because it’s part of the geek social identity rather than any useful metric (assuming such are even possible).

That’s all.

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Last Climate Doompost

I have a bad time thinking about climate change, clearly.  Maybe that’s something I have in common with the blitherers who oppose action on it?  Aside from love of pounds and pence, who knows what goes on in their unthinkable heads?  Anyway, I intend to stop posting about it for the foreseeable.  I expressed my main thoughts about it on this blog and in the FtB podcast on the subject, that should be enough.

But I want to leave one last prediction for the way this is going to play out, have this on record.  There is going to be a holocaust heat wave at some point somewhere in the tropics.  It could happen as soon as this summer, or maybe ten or more years from now, but it most assuredly will happen.  There will be a heat wave so severe that literally millions of people will die within days.  There will be mass graves, mountains of bodies in this incident.

I say this with confidence because where I live we, just last year, had a heat wave that smoked all previous records by more than ten degrees.  A few small towns were disintegrated by wildfires so fast people barely had time to escape – certainly no time to pack.  Hundreds of people died.  This is the Pacific Northwest of North America, as moderate of a climate as exists anywhere in the world.  What happens when a similar heatwave hits Delhi?  Hyderabad?  Jakarta?  Jerusalem?

That’s my prediction.  There was a major volcanic eruption this year and sometimes that cools the global temperature for a while, so we may have some reprieve on this.  That’s time to prepare, to prevent deaths, but will it happen?  It sure as fuck isn’t happening in Louisiana or Florida.  Now that you’ve heard the prediction, hear my request, my call to action.  Because this will not be prevented, due to greed and politics, it is a request for what you should do once those mass graves show up in your news feed.

If you are in the company of anyone who spouts off denialist or petrol-defending rhetoric after that happens, I want you to do them violence.  At very least slap them hard, knock them upside the head.  Preferably knock out one of their teeth, and I wouldn’t be disappointed to hear if you stabbed them in the gut.  Spit on them.  Curse them.  Let them know what they’ve done and that this particular holocaust is the end of the line for tolerance of their worldview.

If there is one thing that will tilt majority opinion on the globe in favor of radical action, it’s another holocaust.  It’s gotta be.  I know it won’t convince everyone but it has to be enough to convince a majority of those in power.  Right?  Right?  Maybe one more thing to say.  FUCK YOU, JOE BIDEN.  You fucking ignorant rich trash.  You murderous greedlord.  You fucking waste of space.  I hope your death is painful.  I hope you hate every second of it.

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No Win

Content Warning: Despairing Rhetoric re: Politics, COVID, Environmentalism.

Fighting antivax beliefs, and indeed reactionary thought as a whole, feels like dealing with an insurgency.  There is just no good solution at this point.  (Government crackdown on facebook’s fascist bullshit algorithms in 2015 might have helped, but there’s no political will to make that happen even now.)  You’ll never win the hearts and minds of people deluded into feeling like brave defenders of an invaded homeland, any effort to force compliance will just lead to more terrorist reprisal.  We’ve already had a taste of that, in destruction of medicine, in obstruction of vax sites, and in many cases of physical assault all across the country.

Given all that, how does one adjust to this new world of biological gods and ideological monsters?  Knowing what endemic COVID looks like will be a good start for that discussion.  Funny to think if I live to my seventies or nineties I could be killed slowly and painfully, asphyxiated and brain damaged by a disease that could have been strangled in its infancy two years ago.  By funny, I mean all rethuglican fucks please eat shit and die ASAP, it’s the least you can do for us.

No, no, Satan.  Calm down.  These are human beings, this is humanity.  The same humanity that supports Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin and Jair Bolsonaro, that has LGBT Jamaicans assaulted every day, living in vacant lots and scrounging garbage to eat, that packs megachurch pews to fund murderous hate around the globe, that scapegoats anybody and everybody to pursue short-term political and financial gain while ensuring the extinction of your species.  You have no choice but to live with these people, or to die.  They are here to stay, for as long as humanity continues to exist.

I don’t know.  We can just keep having these conversations, every day until we die.  Very tiring.

 

 

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