FreethunksBlogdotWho?

In pursuit of my conquest of the categories of FtB articles, I must think a thought about FREETHOUGHT.  Sometimes our network shows a bit of disunity in the continuing mission to be progressive and secular charismatic preachers.  But there can be reasonable disagreements within that remit, and no one lately has come out the side hatch with regressivisms or god belief, so we’re cool on that level.

It’s just a little funny to see somebody who is like, God?  Nuh.  Ghosts, well…  That’s alright tho, as I said.  It’s interesting to me that we all have different reasons for our unbelief.  At least one of us has stated unequivocally they arrived at it through a kind of Cartesian meditation, another that it was the injustice of christian dogmas alone that pushed them away.

My own feeling du jour is that some people are constitutionally incapable of believing in the immaterial, some people being me.  I didn’t have a choice, and still don’t.  Whenever I’ve had a feeling that touches on the transcendent, I recognized that there was nothing genuinely supernatural to it.  No, not strictly accurate.  I never stopped noticing the real.

The activism was a choice.  I speak out in defense of philosophical materialism because people like me, who have never seen a ghost and never will, shouldn’t have to feel like grim outliers in the no-fun police.  We’re fun, I swear!  So fun.  I like to think   I’m fun.
–

Pepsi and Mania

Don’t drink mildly caffeinated beverages close to midnight when you’ve been having random nights of insomnia.  A recurring theme of these episodes is feeling the need to explain myself, in some way, to some hypothetical audience I’ll likely never face.  Last night it was the annoyance of seeing yet another leftesque person decide to take a “bold” stand against AI art, locking arms with exactly everyone in the entire universe except apparently my boyfriend and one subreddit.  And so I was contemplating making that my first ever yewchoob video, which I’ll likely never do.  But I kept contemplating, getting no sleep whatsoever.  It’s ten minutes to eight and my work alarm goes off at 8:20.

So I’ve decided to make eight posts, so I can have the top article in every category on FtB’s front page.  Here I am, born to be kings, I’m the princes of the universe.  This post has already mentioned art, and so it will be the top post for “Arts and Culture.”  I rule.
–

Antisemitism and Phishing

They say the misspellings and shoddy construction of phishing emails are specifically to weed out potential bites from people clever enough to do fraudsters some damage.  It seems every conspiracy except for the real ones trace back to antisemitic beliefs – flat earth, qanon, hollow earth, pizzagate, 9-11 truth, antivax, gender crit, foreign infiltration, whatever.  “They” are always, at the end of the day, “the jews.”  It makes me think, in this moment, what if antisemitism serves a similar function?  If you can believe “the jews” are up to no good on that level, you can believe any wack thing.

There are definitely holes in that.  The spelling errors are there from go, in your spam trap.  Sometimes the antisemitism is buried kinda deep; it can’t be the gateway drug.  Just a random thunk on a random day.

–

What to Say, What to Say

I have a few sticks in my craw lately and don’t know which of them I should post about, or if posting about them would just rile me up worse.

One, Apartheid Beneficiary Musk letting famous transphobic inquisitors look at your DMs.  That put me in mind of the way cisheterofash always accuse LGBT+ people of being pedophiles, and the way actual pedophiles get nothing like this level of persecution from them.  Actual pedophiles are incredibly commonplace.  We all know them, they’re in every community.  They would not be hard to hound in this way, to be exposed and have their privacy invaded, to be threatened from all corners.  And yet, where is that?  Oh yeah, it’s somehow different for right wingers when it’s their dad, their brother, their pastor, their football coach.  Somehow he’s the one who can be saved if you just let him off the hook this one time with a promise to be different and never do that thing again.

Two, given how my boyfriend’s life has been enriched by using AI art, the prevalence of irrational and uninformed luddism in that discourse is especially depressing and infuriating.  On this site, at least, people pride themselves on being skeptical thinkers.  I thought I might leverage that to spread the word about how unfounded the AI hater’s main points are.  But focusing on that at the moment?  I dunno.

What do you like to see me write about?  What’s your preferred GAS content?

–

Get Me on a Cross

Seems like everyone I know in my personal life is more mentally ill than I am, to the point one is checking into a happy hotel semi-voluntary style for it.  When I feel like the “lone sane person in a world gone mad” it’s more a feeling of sadness for all the suffering around me.  So I was thinking, y’know, human sacrifice.  If I’m the sanest person in the world, they should be able to crucify me and have my blood wash away the emotional disorders of man.  Where the centurions at, I’m feelin’ generous.

–

Random Thunks

Happy Halloween ladies, and I mean that in the same way that Clancy Brown’s character in Highlander meant it, when he said it to those nuns.  It’s gonna be a busy one and I’ll probably turn in the last of my Spooktobers tomorrow, though they are in the works.  Tomorrow also the first day of NaNoWriMo, and I’m gonna be hella busy that day too.  In the meantime, allow me to share with you an example of my random thunks, from when I was on the john yesterday.

My cat came to meow for pets.  I called him “little duder” though he is little neuter.  As cat names spin out, I called him “Little Duderonomy,” a reference to “Old Deuteronomy” from Cats, which I’m only familiar with from videos mocking the film.  That got me thinking about Judi Dench playing Old Deut in the scary movie, and about the old testament book of Deuteronomy.

I don’t know from the bible, really.  I feel like Deuteronomy was a close neighbor of Leviticus, in the whole “this is still a religion of abject patriarchy and genocidal xenophobia” part of the works.  In that context, where “priestess” is a dirty word that will get you filleted like a salmon, Judi Dench as a cleric for cat religion becomes a bit amusing.

And that got me thinking about the differences between judaism and xtianity in how they approach their holy writ.  In studying demonology, I strayed into some rabbinical texts, and was struck by how much more scholarly they were than the xtian ones.  But that very density of thought, the layers and layers of analysis and (motivated) reasoning, was all in the service of adding mystique to harmful bullshit.  Bullshit that was, at its core, as simple as a total ass-pull.

As much as Agrippa would look like a basic bitch next to some of those rabbis, his system of categorizing and breaking down everything in the world into labels and spirits and numbers, it was just more appealing to me.  And that makes sense, because it was at least an indirect influence on Linnaeus, and subsequently all that ongoing work of piecing together the tree of life – the real tree of life, not the kabbalah – which is something I love to reflect on.

And that got me thinking about my own work in demonology, how I went searching for something like a canon of demons, found out it was a bullshitting free-for-all, and then hatched a foolish dream of bringing it altogether in a modern synthesis that irons out the contradictions.  If I did that, I would be putting reason and thought and structure onto a cartoonish mass of nonsense, which would make me better than those rabbis only in that I’m not also enforcing violent patriarchy.  I mean, that’s not nothing, but I wonder that I should be reiterating the errors of judaism and xtianity in my precious spare time.

That’s it, enjoy!

–

Music Questions and Groovy Ghouls

I hope this video plays on other sites and in most countries. If you can, take in this visual and auditory information, then consult with me when you have finished your assignment.

OK, to be honest, I have nothing profound to say about this. I pick up this and that, trivial info, from random curiosities and wikipedia, but the answers are often lacking. You can never really know what it was like to be there. So I’m still left with a few questions.

The lead singer of the Mary Jane Girls was a protégé & / or collaborator with Rick James, and I think the only actual MJ Girl on the recorded track. The other girls were stand-ins for tours, promotion, image. I expect on tour they’d just lip synch at most concerts, so they didn’t even need singing skills. Probably they were dancers first. But did they sing? I know sometimes singers would try to do the whole package as performers, sometimes with tragic results (I’m thinking of a breathless sweaty Paula Abdul performance on MTV Music Awards from long ago). How singin’ were the non-recorded Mary Jane Girls?

The lead MJG was a singer first and a dancer / performer second, right? I think it’s funny to imagine she just danced how she felt and the dancing girls had to try to coordinate to that. Try to keep up girls. Probably not, but who knows?

Other random thought, why is the white girl in a skeleton costume? I do think the combination of light eyes, blonde hair, and heavy makeup evokes the doll-look possession in the first Evil Dead movie, so she’s kinda ghoulish. I know cocaine was huge in this scene, which creates a strong association between the color white and death, but surely that’s my own projection. It’s just weird that one of them had a ghoul outfit and the rest didn’t. The song does have a spoopy vibe, anyway.

Still from Evil Dead (1979)

I rather like eighties funk, though I’m no expert on it. I feel like it lost something in the transition from the seventies, like feeling and soul, and then replaced that with this cold alien drug vibe that has a different and perverse kind of appeal. What do you think?

–

Are You Bored Again?

FtB hasn’t been very hoppin’ lately, so you may be seeking something to read.  Last time I noted this, I came up with a list of good articles I’d written that received little attention at the time I posted them.  You could revisit that, if you didn’t avail yourself the first time.  Something else that could be fun to read: My short-lived RP by Comment.  Cartomancer was the last man standing in that exercise in collaborative writing*, and he brought it to a very meta and amusing conclusion.  Thanks, Cartomancer.

When I was a young man*, Pepsi ran a slogan “Be young, Have fun, Drink Pepsi.”  You Could win a prize by collecting cans that were printed in the bottom with each word of the creepy demand.  But the print inside the can was only 2-3 letters, which worked out to BE YNG HAV FUN DRK PEP.  As you survive another season of fire, invoke this ancient spell to summon Pepsiman to protect you.

BE YNG HAV FUN DRK PEP.  Now gimme the prize.

–

*some would say “egg” but it felt appropriate enough at that time so i let this kind of thing stand.

Poached

My spam filter was getting a bunch of bot comments advertising poaching adventures for evil whiteys.  An evil whitey who was involved in helping arrange that kind of shit was found executed gangland style in South Africa.  I’d like to think that was the work of somebody who cares about nature, but realistically it was a fellow gangster that will likely continue in the same line of business.  However, I am no longer seeing those particular comments in my spam trap.  Almost certainly a coincidence, but again, I’d like to think…

–

What the Cock is this Real ID Shit

Apparently 17 years ago the US gubmint passed a law that’s starting to take effect now-ish, requiring a extra-special super ID.  When I first heard people talking about this, I assumed it was a voter disenfranchisement scheme implemented by various states, but I recently found out it’s federal.  There’s a copy of the law here and I can’t understand every part of it, but I hear it’s going to be required for interstate air travel.  I don’t cotton to it, no sir.

Can anybody in the know explain anything I should know about this bullshit?

ETA:  One interesting requirement I noticed is that you’re not allowed to have a legal driver’s license in more than one state at a time.  You literally have to get one state DL cancelled to get another.  Ridiculous.

 

—