Just like I do! But instead of mocking the wacky beliefs of his correspondents, Dreher likes to praise them and agree with them. I guess he gets better letter-writers than I do.

But no! This guy is nuts. He senses omens of cultural armageddon in the Academy Awards. He is apparently very concerned that the Best Picture award went to a movie that was all about…bestiality. It’s not just cats and dogs living together, it’s human women copulating with fish! That’s all that movie was about!

Full confession: I very much liked The Shape of Water, although I would actually have favored Get Out winning the big award. It’s a nice, gentle story of love triumphing against adversity in a fantastic context. I guess that makes me a sexual prevert and degenerate now.

They haven’t seen the movie, but these two are aghast at what they think is the plot.

He’s talking about The Shape Of Water, a movie in which the female protagonist falls in love with a humanoid amphibian, and has sex with it (“cod coitus,” according to Sonny Bunch). The reader continues:

Even more astounding is that no one seemed to care: the critics, the media and now the Academy all applauded at director Guillermo Del Toro’s “boldness”. The Best Screenplay and Best Foreign Film winners — respectively about a pederastic love story and a trans woman fighting prejudice — look almost tame in comparison, though they’re symptomatic too.

But the movie is so much more! The villain, the excellent Michael Shannon, is a deeply conservative, materialist man who is also a kneejerk Christian — see? Dreher’s ilk have a prominent role in the movie. One of the protagonists is a gay man. The heroine is a disabled poor woman with a mysterious past, who also seems to have gills. The “humanoid amphibian” has supernatural powers, and is actually a kind of god, worshipped in his native land.

There’s so much they could have hated if only they’d seen the movie.

But gosh, they must suffer greatly at the movies if the idea of a trans woman fighting prejudice repulses them. They see everything as an attack.

I agree with the things you say most of the time, but something I think you miss is how the turmoil we’re witnessing is basically a transfer of power from “regular” people to the freaks. Everything previously deemed inferior, abnormal, marginal, obscene is now not only normalized but embraced, even glorified. In his book The Antichrist, Nietzsche denounced Christianity as a perversion of all good and healthy values. He called for a total revolution in values, to overturn Christian morality and replace it with its opposite. That’s what we’re seeing now, at a very deep level.

This wouldn’t matter that much if our new lords weren’t so full of rancor and determined to get their revenge on those who humiliated them, hence the attacks on the various “privileges” that systematically target the representatives of the old order: patriarchy, masculinity, heterosexuality, “whiteness” and — yes — Christianity. As a member of a minority group, this shouldn’t worry me so much, as many aspects of said “old order” were not worth preserving or friendly to me. But I’m telling you, what is coming threatens to be much worse because it’s revenge, not justice.

The Shape of Water is not a revenge story. It’s a love story about people finding happiness outside of conventionality. If you want to see a movie about rancor and revenge and people who attack those who are different, the remake of Death Wish is playing right now. I’m sure torture-porn is more in keeping with Christian values.

Dreher ends with an apocalyptic warning:

Listen to me, conservative Christian readers:

• there are no politicians on earth capable of turning this tide of decadence; the power of culture is far too strong;
• you cannot expect your children to be salt and light to a culture that gives its highest honor to a movie celebrating bestiality as an act of liberation, and a “love letter to love”;
• soon, people who believe the things you do will be regarded as perverted and dangerous to the common good; are you ready for that?

You had better be ready for that. The handwriting is on the wall, and the cracks are widening in the foundations.

Again, if we’re going to prognosticate on the future of our nation based on movies, The Shape of Water gives me far more hope than Death Wish. I’d rather see a love letter to love than a celebration of bloody violent murder.

It used to be that I’d only get ranty, incoherent, ill-informed email from devout Christians. I guess we’ve won and converted them all to ranty, incoherent, ill-informed atheists now. Victory!

You are a stalker

Why do u continue to stalk Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and shermer and other NA.[Define “stalk”. You seem to think it synonymous with “criticize”. Does that mean you’re stalking me?] You vermin. You are obsessed. Just leave these people alone. [meme?] You have target. You really think you are smarter then a PhD in neuroscience.[All bow down before the Ph.D. in Neuroscience] Sam Harris is like really really smart [who else is like really, really smart?], you couldn’t get a PhD in that field.[I don’t know why I find that amusing]

You side with irrational blue hair women [More accurately, I don’t use hair color as a criterion for deciding who I side with]. Hysterically pathetic “girls” not women [I knew there’d be misogyny in here — there always is]. Sam is more of a man than you’ll ever be. [Oh. Degrees of manhood — so he’s agreeing that gender is not binary?] That’s logic [I missed the logic bit there]. Where suppose to trust a buzzfeed journalist. A retart could get a degree in journalism.[A journalist would know to spell and use proper grammar] Only the top 1 percent get into neuroscience. [Source? Top 1% of what?] You wonder why majority of people choose Harris over your inquisition [Source?]. A Harvard graduate vs were did you get your degree from a community college. [University of Oregon, Institute of Neuroscience, 1985] Hahahah. Lawrence a mit grad. You really think an mit grad is a rapist? [Impossible. No rapes ever occur at MIT. Also, I don’t think anyone has accused Krauss of rape. Why do you bring it up?] We will win this war.[With your logic?] Notice how na movement is a hundred times bigger than your movement.[What is “my” movement? I wish I knew. Also…Source?] I wonder why?[Because you just made up a number?] Hmmmmmm. #loser [I am crushed. You are #winning!]

Mike Adams, the “health ranger”, the con artist behind Natural News, has been kicked off YouTube. Apparently it’s because he has long been promoting hateful conspiracy theories, but I’m surprised it hasn’t been because of his life-threatening quackery, or his twisted racism. He’s a red-skinned American Indian, you know.

So he’s gone. Now Alex Jones is feeling existential dread. YouTube is threatening to throttle his channel for all the nonsensical conspiracy theories he peddles, and advertisers are finally stampeding away.

Can we hope that the NRA is next?

I know all the freeze-peachers will be shrieking about this abridgment of the freedom of conservatives, but it’s really not a conservative/liberal thing. It’s about lies. There should be disincentives to fraud and lying and fomenting hate, and that goes for the entire range of the political spectrum. Dangerous health advice ought to be punished rather than rewarded, and that’s the purview of not just the Right, but also the Left. Racist garbage ought to be flagged and not be a recipe for shoveling money via clicks. Let the NRA make their blood-soaked propaganda, but don’t let them use YouTube to monetize it.

The Internet had such promise, but now it’s used as a convenient sewer pipe to drench us with lies. A crackdown on dishonesty would be a nice corrective.

I just ran across this video, and I was outraged. It’s totally fake. It is so wrong.

She has hidden herself in the pantry to stuff herself with snack foods. I could empathize with her plight, but I was just saying to myself, “Where’s the vodka? The whisky? The tequila? This is a bullshit response.”

But maybe that’s what the video for a Truth Bomb Dad would look like. No tiaras. We replace them with alcohol.

If you need a laugh next week, and you live near Bellingham, there’s an opportunity:

By the time Wed., March 7 rolls around, you’ll have gone a few days without mirthful medicine, so make plans to attend the inaugural “Menace on the Mic” Standup Comedy Night night starting at 9pm at Menace Brewing, 2529 Meridian St. The 21-and-older event will feature a few of the aforementioned comedians and others, including Charlie Myers, Matt Benoit, Timmy Riney, James Miller, and Ryan Cuddihy. If you need a beer or three to help with your healing, drink up. More info: http://www.menace-industries.com

That fellow with his name correctly spelled in there is my nephew, who has apparently decided that a career in academia, for instance, is too full of frustration, heartbreak, and struggle, and is taking the easy path of trying to make it in standup comedy. At least it’s a job with beer.

Dick’s announced that they will no longer sell AR-15s, and all I’m seeing is cheers and huzzahs for the company.

My first thought was, “Why was a sporting goods company selling assault rifles in the first place?” There’s something just plain wrong with that.

But now I learn that they’ve pulled this stunt before. In the wake of the Sandy Hook murders, they announced then that they would stop selling these specific murder-tools (cheers, huzzahs), and then a year later they quietly resumed peddling instruments of death (silence, cluelessness). This is a stunt. A ploy. An advertising gimmick. And oh, but they are receiving lots of free advertising right now.

Fuck ’em.