Hot Take from Sean McElwee

I don’t know who he is, but this tweet was hella righteous:

Sean McElwee on Twitter:

“every republican who wins an election meaningfully increases the chance that you or someone you love will die. from guns, from war, from pollution, from childbirth, from lack of health insurance, from a militarized police state. the republican party is a party of death.”

Seems like McElwee is a kind of journalist I can’t handle on the daily. He often speaks in mantras and laments that “no one cares” about this or that important progressive issue. It’s guilt tripping and I feel bad enough just living through this political climate without someone hammering my frayed nerves.

But other than that, word to my brother. Fight on, dude. This was a perfect encapsulation of where we’re at, what’s going wrong with the world. A lot of centrists and moderates just seem to have no earthly idea why things are going so badly.

Politics is just about opinions, maaan, and you should be nicer to your Aunt Sally! No, politics has direct impact on lives, and every position the GOP holds most dear is deadly as fuck.

Anyhow, Fuck any and all conservatives everywhere forever. Long live the fighters.
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Cobra Kai ARGGGGGH

I haven’t given a shit about the Karate Kid franchise since I was six, and I still don’t. That said, Cobra Kai looks fucking amazeballs. The martial arts genre is elementally appealing to our bad selves. The main character has a problem, gets their ass beat, and has to overcome through rigorous training montages and lots of cool-looking fights.

This show has all that stuff, and the original movie gives it a depth of a backstory you can feel in an unexpectedly cool way. Plus the setting is real. Aside from the bougie Californiana aspects, it’s the world as I know it – strip malls and TV installation and shitty convenience stores. It looks and feels EXACTLY like the real American martial arts story I’ve wanted to see for years.

Now for the Argh factor. Right from the first episode, we get the ableism and appeals to conservative horseshit. They’re pretty softball examples of that, but any at all is more than I should have to deal with in my life, in my entertainment. As my new category says, fuck any and all conservatives everywhere forever.

The ableism takes the form of a cliche so crusty it’s like baklava – a dude throwing away someone’s asthma inhaler, calling the condition made up. They immediately have a guy say, “that’s nonsense, that’s a real health problem,” but it’s just a half-assed lampshade because we never see the kid need the inhaler after that.

The big question – what do the show’s producers believe? Would I want those people to have my money? I can do the free trial of Youtube Red, but then I’m giving google my credit card information and gotta be johnny-on-the-spot canceling or get dinged. Hassle.

I don’t know. I watched the free episodes, except as noted I’m liking what I’m seeing, but should I bite? I’m genuinely looking for opinions and input on this one. Crudlords, if you’re seeing this, tell me if you liked it, so I can skip it. I’ll skim my trash filter for a few days to see if you’re there. The rest of whoever, comment below.

EDIT:
I can skip the show! In the comments on a review elsewhere, there was this gem. Thanks, “jbrisby”! You are everything wrong with the human species and your kind will be our extinction, but you helped me avoid wasting an assload of time on cultural sewage.

jbrisby:
“Finally, an unapologetically sympathetic portrayal of a conservative point of view. This is the show Roseanne promised, but never delivered. This is going to be a huge smash, because as we saw with Trump, there’s a massive untapped audience who is sick to death of our pansy-ass modern culture, that cloaks itself in tolerance but is in fact tremendously repressive and saps us of our real strength. This show, like Trump, works because people are fundamentally fed up. And the best part is, I haven’t seen a single liberal reviewer who gets it. It really slips in under their radar! They love it…but they don’t know why!”

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Conservativism = Cowardice and Greed

Literally every conservative belief stems from either cowardice or greed. They like to say similar things about progressives, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Spelled out simply:

Conservative Position – Cowardice or Greed?

Anti-abortion – Cowardice
Anti-tax – Greed
Anti-regulation – Greed
Anti-social services – Greed
Pro-gun – Cowardice
Cop Worship – Cowardice
Anti-immigration – Cowardice
Theocracy – Cowardice

Afraid to look upon death, or even human life with the slightest ounce of honesty, conservatives project themselves onto the aborted and shiver in terror and disgust. They imagine that life as a person of perfect potential, surrounded by and dependent on evil sinful woman parts for survival. So scary.

And they are so trapped in that imagination that they can’t do the right moral math. Human lives often FUCKING SUCKKKKKKK. Any woman considering abortion is clearly not in the ideal circumstance to be making a happy successful human being. Far from it, especially in a place as conservative as the United States. An unborn human has no concept of life, of potential, of the future, of where it’s going and what it might mean to lose that.

Any human that is born is guaranteed to experience pain and frustration at some point in their life. Plenty of people wish they had been aborted. I don’t feel that sad about shit but I know damn well it wouldn’t matter if I hadn’t come to be, and I would have been spared a ton of pain and humiliation and anger and sorrow.

Again, I’m a Neurotypical McGee, happy to be alive and watch my TV. But I’ve got the moral clarity of seeing things as they are, and caring about people enough to want them to have what they actually need. I’m not trembling in fear of sin, in fear of death, in fear of a sadistic super ghost that I have to love. Grow the fuck up, conservatives.

Anti-taxes, anti-regulation, anti-social services: These are mostly about greed, about being too short-sighted and willfully ignorant and cruel to take responsibility for the world around you. But there’s an element of cowardice as well – the idea some evil poor people might benefit from your wealth. Piss on that.

Gun fondling and cop worship are the most blatant displays of cowardice, though there’s an element of fascist death fetishism in there for good measure. I admit, the symbols of death have a toxically delicious appeal. I’ll bang my head to that beat, watch movies about bad guys getting blasted left and right.

But the reality of guns? The physical presence of them? The idea of what they can do to a living creature? Creepy as fuck. Get that goddamn shit away from me. What sort of wet dream lets you think you can control that? Why do you think YOU should have the power to say who lives and who dies, or that your state-appointed executioners should be able to do the same? Who are you so fucking afraid of? Don’t answer, it’s obvious as hell.

I’d allow for heavily regulated single shot hunting rifles. Hunting in the first world is a hobby for twisted minds, but it could help regulate unbalanced animal populations and feed some people. But even then, why not use a fucking spear? Cowardice, that’s why.

Being against immigration is the purest cowardice, but more than some of these categories it makes me wonder if I should have added cruelty to the list. The racism to imagine another group of humans is inferior to your group, to imagine they have nefarious motives against you, to think they deserve to fucking die rather than inconvenience you with their presence? Cruel. But mostly crybaby cowardly.

Theocracy likewise, the notion this is a “christian nation” and needs to be legally mandated as such. The fear your one true religion will lose ground if it isn’t enforced by the apparatus of state? That your cherished illusions will feel more ephemeral, might dissipate and leave you with nothing but a grimly real view of the grave? Why are you so afraid of facing competition, dominionists? Ya cowards.

At last, let’s look at how a conservative might play this game, and answer the charges:

Progressive Position – Cowardice or Greed

Pro-abortion – ~~Cowardice~~ Compassion
Pro-tax – ~~Greed~~ Responsibility
Pro-regulation – ~~Greed~~ Responsibility

Honestly, not much point in elaborating the progressive positions. Even conservatives recognize a lot of them as being motivated by compassion, but then they turn around to demonize caring about people – call it weak or foolish, especially in misogynist terms.

I do think they’d make the case that being in favor of abortion is because evil should-be mommies are too afraid to die (or ruin lives) to bring a lump of cells to term. For shame! But they’ve tried all sorts of smears that don’t make sense.

And they are always trying to say that taxation for the purposes of paying for social services is the greed of a lazy underclass of subhumans out to take yer hard-earned dollars, you (venal immigrant exploiting criminal) contractors and red-blooded manz. There’s a lot of bipartisan fawning over the middle class but I say fuck ’em. That’s where a lot of white fascism lies.

Anyhow, cowardice and greed – modern conservative beliefs are completely encapsulated in that simple phrase, in that shitty little binary. I should make it explicitly clear I’m including “fiscal conservatives” with more socially progressive beliefs. Fuck yes, I’m including them. Just because you wanna smoke weed with your gay friend and your black friend doesn’t mean you aren’t a goddamn piece of shit.

Fuck any and all conservatives everywhere forever.

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Pitfalls of RP: Garbage Humans

Holy shit, dogg. Why would this even need to be a post? Isn’t it a given that no one would waste their time RPing with sexists, racists, homophobes, transphobes, and so on? Fuck those guys. Don’t play with them. As others have said, tabletop gaming has a white male terrorism problem, and it’s every tabletop gamer’s responsibility to make sure that shit does not go unchecked.
[Read more…]

Satan Says: Islamophobia is Real

this is reposted & slightly edited from a previous iteration of this blog
Trigger Warnings – child sexual abuse, racism, islamophobia, anti-semitism, ableism

Deep Rifts 2.0 is about the division between regressive and progressive sides of the atheist and skeptic communities. Before this rift, one notion popular in atheist communities was that we were the free thinkers who arrived at our beliefs by reason and observation, while our opponents – the theists – believed what they were told like mindless obedient dogmabots. It’s a nice idea for atheists – in a society that despises us, we get to feel superior to the mainstream in some respect. Since the rift though, some of us have used this against our atheist opposites. What sense does that make? Where is this dogma codified? Who is walking in lockstep, refusing to question our dear leaders? This casts a lot of doubt on the original premise as used against theists, which is a loss for all of us. (Edit: I now know it’s ableist to think oneself superior on the metric of intelligence, so at this point I’m not feeling that loss so much.)

I’m not going to mirror my atheist opposites’ mistakes and claim they are a monolith, even though their beliefs line up better with the unjust status quo of the USA. I’m just going to keep poking holes in this ridiculous meme. The progressive side of the divide is not a monolith. We have our disagreements, and these are not small ones. Some of us continue to work with or promote people like Richard Dawkins (less so now than when this originally posted), some have joined in the masses ridiculing his ignorance and his strange grudge against Rebecca Watson. Some of us want to find common cause with theists to promote the secularism that can protect us all, some want to keep eviscerating the foundations of faith at the expense of potential allies. Some of us don’t have a decided stance on one more of these essential issues, and some people who generally come down on the progressive side are professional fence riders. All of this can be found within one blog network – Freethoughtblogs – if you look long enough. On the common cause vs. evisceration issue, you can find discord even within the A+ forums (now dead), and I am personally riding that fence at the moment.

One of these important areas of dispute – and the topic of this post – is the legitimacy of the term “islamophobia.” [Read more…]

‘Net H8rs R a Bunch of Arch Hall Jr. Characters

This is a reblog from previous versions of G-A-S

Arch Hall Jr. as The Sadist

There’s this old Arch Hall Jr. movie called “The Sadist,” which doesn’t feature a sympathetic portrayal of one who engages in a risky kink ethically. Rather, it’s about a criminal in floods who enjoys psychologically tormenting his victims.

Arch Hall Jr. as The Sadist

The character has a catch phrase which I think befits the underlying psychology of the internet’s sundry hate mobs perfectly: “You think you’re better than me?” Then he’ll stalk menacingly at you, looking like he’s carrying a massive deuce in his drawers. No offense to AHj, this character was supposed to be creepy and job well done.

There’s clearly a sense of aggrievement on their part. They feel upset at being scorned. Our side is motivated by compassion for the victims of abuse and the desire to make the world a better place. The less self-aware on their side might feel like they’re into these goals as well, but find that overwhelmed by the outrage that someone might be looking down on them. You especially see this in the response to things like Schrodinger’s Rapist. No matter how kindly or carefully parsed, any idea that could be perceived – correctly or not – as a criticism of them (or the kind of person they imagine themselves to be) raises this knee-jerk response. You think you’re better than meee?

So then they start doing the poopy pants walk while waving guns around (metaphorically and literally) and make things so much worse. To borrow a much more sensible catch phrase, guys, don’t do that. Seriously, even if you fundamentally disagree with social justice advocates on every issue, just agree to disagree and strut. If you honestly believe your position to be the right one, you have a million motherfuckers to agree with you and coddle your shared privilege. You wouldn’t feel the need to freak out about the fact someone else has a different belief unless – on some level – you think they might be right, and that their rightness would make you feel bad.

You don’t have to feel bad about yourself to accept the truths SJWs be spittin’ – at least, not much. Because no one has to be perfect, we can all learn from our mistakes, all try to be better people. And honestly trying is good enough. Doing something racist/sexist/transphobic/etc doesn’t make you a bigot, outside of that moment. Being unrepentant, being so chickenshit of the possibility of your own imperfection that you double down and make it worse – even make it a part of your raison d’être – this is deciding to wallow in bigotry.

Come off yourself, calm down, drop the fucking keyboard, take a day off. Even if your beliefs don’t change, at least recusing yourself from participating in a hate movement is a step in the right direction. Be cool. Get steppin’.