And another thing.

Caine’s comment on my last post brought to mind something I wrote on a friend’s Facebook post yesterday:

Sadly, I used to have much more empathy and compassion for conservatives than I do now. When their political orientation comes down to “I got mine, f*ck you and f*ck them” – and yes, it really is that simple, narcissistic, infantile and un-nuanced – I no longer find myself able to give a single, solitary f*ck about them. I can *understand* them, and to a certain limited extent have basic empathy for them as I would any human being. But I can no longer honestly say that I don’t wish for them that they reap exactly what they have sown. And then some. I am not proud of this, BTW. But “be the better person” no longer cuts it for me as a survival mechanism (if it ever really did). Not when conservatives are *by nature* opposed to equality in principle, and indifferent (at best) to unnecessary suffering, except for their own.

And in case you were wondering, that also goes for the conservatives in the Democratic Party Squirrel People.

OWN THAT S#!+.

Somebody commented on my cross-post about the election at my other blog. Well, “commented” isn’t quite the right word—more like “Demsplained.” I’ve been seeing a lot of this, and I am not having it. I’ll spare you the whole self-righteous rant, but I do want to address the overall gist by responding to a few brief excerpts.

Stop blaming Bernie supporters.

Not if they stayed home on election day, no. They absolutely share the blame. (I voted for Sanders in the primary.)

Stop blaming white people.

The ones who overwhelmingly voted for Trump? The ones who stayed home or cast third-party votes in swing states? No.

Stop blaming Black people or Latinos.

Only a Trump-magnitude asshole would ever do that.

Stop blaming people who voted their conscience.

Jeezus Christ. EVERYONE voted their conscience, and even people who stayed home did so because of conscience. Their consciences suck. I can and will hold accountable every single one of them if they had any part in this outcome. Lard knows they’re highly unlikely to ever do it themselves. Especially not with people like you ranting about how blameless they all are.

You’re looking for me to suck it up and sing kumbaya with people who by their own action or inaction threw women, LGBTQs, immigrants, Muslims, Native Americans, the disabled, blacks and Latinxs, the poor, the environment, 20 million people who will lose health insurance etc. under the fucking bus because “They want us fighting among ourselves,” “They want us divided,” and “That’s how they always win.” No. That is an abuser’s tactic, and that shit does not fly with me. Not any more.

I am not the one who did the fucking “dividing” here; YOU are refusing to hold accountable those who are actually responsible. They, and you, need to OWN THAT SHIT.

__________

If you’re getting a sense of deja vu like I am, I think its because the parallels to Big Tent Atheism™ are only too obvious.

So sorry, world.

flagdown

We the People suck. The deadly contagion of right-wing conservatism in the US will no longer be restrained, however tenuously and imperfectly. It has been unleashed to destroy the earth like flesh-eating bacteria. It will start, as it always does, with more death and harm to the bodies of the most marginalized among us, and eventually work its way to harming the very people who enable it—which is to say, harming almost everyone.

[Read more…]

Waiting for our wits to grow sharper? Could be a looong time.

The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
–Eden Phillpotts, unattributed internet sources (via Freedom From Religion Foundation).

Looks like the universe is going to have to wait one hell of a long time.

The Cognitive Bias Codex, 2016 is a collaboration between Buster Benson, who recategorized Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases, and John Manoogian III, who transformed Benson’s work into this stunning image:

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Squirrel attacks in Florida senior center, 911 call: “people are bleeding.”

People, I just don’t know what it will take to get through to the world’s citizens about the extinction-level threat posed by the Sciuridae menace. You would think it would be enough that they’re relentlessly attacking our critical infrastructure, infecting us with the fucking plague and stealing our beer. Now, as part of their escalating terror campaign, they’re jumping on, biting and scratching hapless senior citizens. [Read more…]

And it’s not even my birthday!

[CONTENT NOTE: misogyny including slurs, racism, violence against logic, incoherence, banality, Nazis, sex toys.]

I had almost forgotten about this, what with all my squirrel monitoring duties and sofa painting and suchlike. But buried in my inbox was a gift from the WordPress gods in the form of two consecutive auto-moderated comments, written in response to a post I wrote back in July about the harms of benevolent sexism, and purporting to offer “an opposing viewpoint.”

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Christ as colonic?

[CONTENT NOTE: discussion of fecal elimination and common problem associated therewith.]

As readers here may recall, I take tremendous pride in my half-assed, poorly executed, semi-regular attempts to extract $82 billion worth of amusement every year from the Religion-Industrial-Complex on behalf of atheist U.S. taxpayers. I perform this service 100% free of charge; it is my noble, selfless, one-woman protest of the appalling injustice that is $82 billion in yearly taxpayer subsidies to the R-I-C. Okay, it’s probably not much of a sacrifice on my part, because I happen to thoroughly enjoy mocking a particular church sign in the small town in Northern Maryland where my mother lives. Hey, someone has to do it.

And today’s sign is a doozy. [Read more…]

ALL UR BONEZ ARE BELONG TO US.

It’s bad enough of course that the Catholic Church as an institution has precisely zero respect for the bodily autonomy of living people. Like all authoritarian panty-sniffers, the hierarchy strives to control every aspect of human existence in keeping with its morbid and moribund dictates whenever and wherever it can get away with it. Now, in accordance with its bizarre and stunted worldview, the Vatican has helpfully narrowed its mandates for what Catholics can and cannot do with their bodily remains even after they’re fucking dead.

[Read more…]