The first time I took acid my friend and I were trying to make a ranked list of different divination methods and number one on the list was âyou already know the informationâ
Let us consider genies for a moment. At least in the context of the popular conception of genies. There is a vessel and within resides a spirit that can grant your wishes if you release it. Typically by rubbing/cleaning/using the vessel.
Iâve arranged these examples in order of release (there are other genie comics but Iâm keeping it short here and focusing on the ones that portray this sort of interaction):
Heathcliff interfaces with a vessel and a thematically appropriate spirit appears. Garbage Ape for the trash can, Yellow Mouse for squeez cheez, cow for milk bottle, sunflower seed pouch for Sunflower Spirit.
What I find fascinating here is that genie vessels are manufactured objects. Glass, plastic, aluminum, all represented here with Heathcliff. Even the story of Aladdin has one in a brass oil lamp.
Now look at today: a tomato is not manufactured, right? But read that text. This is a Jersey tomato. This is something that humans have very specifically bred selectively to have the properties it does. In a way, the Jersey Tomato is manufactured.
From a philosophical viewpoint, the act of successive generation and design refinement does imbue a kind of mysticism to these everyday objects we encounter. Do you personally know or have experience with the manufacture of glass or do you simply accept that it is made somewhere and you trust that it will work for your purpose? You buy the glass bottle at the store and assume that you will receive potable milk from it. And you usually do! But many of us are so disconnected from the supply chain that it might as well be provided by a magic spirit right in the bottle.
Does Heathcliff know the process for sunflower seeds being grown, harvested, seasoned, and put into the plastic baggie and emerging only once he rips the bag open to release the sunflower spirit? All of these marvelous inventions are provided to this cat as if by benevolent spirits. All of the human endeavor over years and years of study and research development of supply lines and even the ancient human research of discovering which seeds were edible, all of it condensed into a single entity that magically manifests sunflower seeds into the bag when Heathcliff performs the correct interaction with the Vessel.
He rubs the trash can and asks for trash. Within the can, that is what he finds.
He rubs the easy cheese and asks for cheddar. Within the can, that is what he finds.
He asks for milk. Within the bottle, that is what he finds.
He asks for sunflower seeds. Within the bag, that is what he finds.
He asks for a slice of Jersey tomato. Within the tomato, that is what he finds.
Iâd also like to highlight how all of these comics take place in the locations where youâd expect these spirits to dwell. The dairy farm, back alley, baseball field, mouse hole, backyard barbecue. It further ingrains the messaging of the supply line. Heathcliff is right at the terminus of each one. These are the convergence points of the human endeavor up to these moments and product deliveries.
Go learn about the beginning-to-end process of something you enjoy today. It will probably take a while and be difficult! Much harder than simply grabbing the end product and wishing that it will contain what the label says.
Text in artwork: â"Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion and liberation of the human body from the coercion of property; Liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. It stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals.â Emma Goldmanâ
âDo not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.â â Exodus 22:21
âWhen a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.â â Leviticus 19:33-34
âHe defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.â â Deuteronomy 10:18-19
âFor I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in.â â Matthew 25:35
âDo not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.â â Hebrews 13:2
âWhoever shuts their ears to the cry of the poor will also cry out and not be answered.â â Proverbs 21:13
âShare with the Lordâs people who are in need. Practice hospitality.â â Romans 12:13
âDo not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other.â â Zechariah 7:10
âWoe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spicesâmint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the lawâjustice, mercy and faithfulness.â â Matthew 23:23
âAccept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.â â Romans 15:7
.... But you just use the Bible as an excuse to be bigots and commit genocide, because you're not seriously faithful, you're just political pawns and useful idiots.
People always want to fucking talk about a general strike when they can't even stop giving JKR money or stop eating at Chik-fil-A. Between that and the complete gutting of safety nets, it definitely feels like some serious magical thinking.
I do not think that the people who talk about a general strike are the same people who give JKR money and eat at Chik-fil-A. I think you are confusing two almost entirely non-overlapping groups. It makes sense to include as many people as possible in a general strike, but it doesn't make sense to just assume right-wingers are the target audience!
i think it would do a lot of people good to remember that Mormons are white supremacists, no nuance, no debate, no arguing how they've gotten "more diverse", their whole belief system is fundamentally rooted in white supremacist ideals
Iâm gonna be blunt: you bring little worth to a friendship if youâre apathetic toward the good in your friendsâ lives. If you shrug when they come to you with little things that theyâre happy about, they will eventually stop coming to you with anything and youâll wonder why that relationship feels stale. Practice genuine excitement with the people in your life. If you see a friend try to downplay how excited they are about something just be like âyoooo! This is a cool thing! Youâre a lovely person and you deserve lovely things! I love you!âÂ
I think itâs easy to be someone people complain to, but itâs just as if not more important to be someone they know theyâre allowed to be excited and proud and happy around.
Doug Wilson preaches iron discipline and male dominance. One of his disciples runs the Pentagon.
Kiera Butler at Mother Jones:
On a brilliantly sunny day in early May, I found myself in Moscow, Idaho, eating brunch with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegsethâs spiritual leader, Doug Wilson.
We dove into the quiche, studded with bits of bacon and onion, prepared by his wife, Nancy, as we sat in the sun-drenched breakfast nook of their compound, high on a hill above rolling farmland. The Âemerald-green wheat fields below looked like a golf course for giants.
Wilson, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, is the 73-year-old senior pastor and founder of Christ Church, a congregation of approximately 3,000 in Moscow. But his influence extends far beyond this small town. Wilson has spoken at high-Âprofile conservative events, including the 2024 National Conservatism conference, where then-Sen. JD Vance was also a headliner. He appeared on a political strategy panel with Russell Vought, President Donald Trumpâs Office of Management and Budget director and a key architect of the Heritage Foundationâs Project 2025 conservative blueprint. Heâs also the co-creator of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a global network of 160 congregationsâincluding the one Hegseth attends in Washington, DC. A few months before my visit to Idaho, Hegseth had invited Wilson to the Pentagon to deliver a sermon to troops and officials on the importance of faith in times of war.
A core tenet of Wilsonâs beliefs is that a patriarchal society, what he calls âbiblical masculinity,â is both a religious mandate and âcultural gluten,â as he wrote in his 2023 book, Mere Christendom. âWithout it, the cookie just crumbles to pieces in your hand, and is tasteless on top of that.â In a previous book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, he wrote: âThe sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.â For that reason, he went on, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is âan erotic necessity.â As Wilson put it in an interview with CNN last year: âWomen are the kind of people that people come out of.â
He also has called feminists âa large army of singularly unattractive and bitchy womenâ and said women serving in the military are âloathsomeâ to Godâan observation that may inform Hegsethâs hostility to women in senior military leadership. In all matters, he believes, wives should defer to their husbands, the âcovenant headsâ of the family. Women shouldnât assume church leadership roles, or speak in church, and heads of households, overwhelmingly male, should vote on behalf of their entire families.
For the last two years, as Iâve covered the rise of Christian nationalism, Wilson and I have developed a mildly adversarial email rapport. I ask questions; he answers, sometimes working in a little dig, like calling Mother Jones a âcommie publication.â
As Hegseth was bragging about his âkinetic strikesâ on narco-terrorist vessels and then launching the attack on Iran, I began to realize that the secretaryâs determination to eradicate âwokeâ from the US military tracks consistently with Wilsonâs teaching of a warrior-like Christian faith. So I decided it was time Wilson and I met in person. I invited myself to Moscow, and he graciously accepted. Over the course of my five-day trip, I had unprecedented access to the world he has carefully built, which serves as a model for what he imagines a Christian United States might someday look like.
I would meet happy and prosperous families in Wilsonâs realm, but also witness aspects of his faithâs exacting standards and obsession with discipline that align closely with Hegsethâs enthusiastic embrace of US military aggression and shed light on what it means for biblical masculinity to become the so-called Department of Warâs defining ethic.
[...]
They married in 1975; by then, Wilson was involved in a new Moscow church. Deeply influenced by the hippie-adjacent Jesus People Movement, he strummed a guitar during services and taught Sunday school. Two years later, he became the pastor of a congregation that would eventually become Christ Church. Over the next decade, though, Wilson grew wary of the wishy-washy elements of evangelicalismâsome of his congregants had even begun questioning whether God could be omniscient. He was drawn instead to the more absolutist theology of Calvinism, which emphasizes an all-knowing God who has already preordained who goes to Heaven. His own brother ended up leaving Christ Church over their theological differences and started his own congregation. But for Nancy, the conversion to Calvinism was âwonderful.â She recalled, âI thought, âItâs not all gray and muddled anymore.ââ
The Wilsons officially became âreformedââanother word for Calvinistâin 1988, and in the following years, Dougâs influence grew. Logos School became a robust Kâ12 institution, one of the nationâs first classical Christian schools. He started Canon Press, which published his popular homeschool curricula, in 1988 and in the â90s launched the nationwide Association of Classical Christian Schools and helped found New Saint Andrews College. A series of new churches planted outside Moscow grew into an entire neo-Calvinist denomination, now known as the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.
During the pandemic, Wilson and other church leaders flouted public health restrictions, organizing maskless outdoor psalm sings. These protests garnered media attention, which helped grow their flock as remote work allowed people to relocate to Moscow. Doug estimates that the church has doubled in size since the pandemic.
At the Wilsonsâ compound, it wasnât hard to see the appeal of the Kirker life. Nancy showed me a display she had made of her 18 grandchildrenâs Logos graduation announcements and brought me up to speed on Judah, who had just graduated from New Saint Andrews and planned to work in DC. Belphoebe, sharing a name with a huntress character in Edmund Spenserâs classic poem âThe Faerie Queene,â was now a mother of two. All the grandchildren remained devout and were raising their own kidsâDoug and Nancyâs great-grandchildrenâin the faith.
[...]
The idea of empathy as a sin is having a moment. Conservative Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey published a book, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, elaborating on the same theme. JD Vance hinted at the notion of misplaced empathy in 2025 when he talked about the Christian idea of ordo amoris, Latin for rightly ordered love. âI think itâs a very Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world,â he said in a Fox News interview. âA lot of the far left has completely inverted that.â (Pope Francis disagreed with Vanceâs interpretation, describing the concept instead as âlove that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.â) In an appearance last year on Joe Roganâs podcast, Elon Musk famously said, âThe fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.â
Hegseth, too, has waged war against empathy, Wilson told me. âThe woke military, the DEI militaryâall of that was possible because people had accepted as an ethical responsibility to be empathetic, to step into other peopleâs shoes without judgment,â he said. âHegseth has emphasized the job of the military is lethality, developing a warrior ethos, not to feel sorry for the guy who wishes that he could wear a dress.â
Ostensibly, Wilson was referring to one phrase in Hegsethâs proclamation at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, last year, âNo more dudes in dressesâŚweâre done with that shit!ââa statement that has a distinctly Wilsonian ring to it. Since becoming defense secretary in January 2025, de-Âwokifying the military has been the focus of Hegsethâs tenure. He has ended affirmative action and trans-inclusive policies, dissolved the Pentagon committee that supported female troops, and blocked female and Black military leaders from being promoted. But it is in Hegsethâs unapologetic assertions of hypermasculinity that Wilsonâs influence is most apparent. In his Quantico speech, he reaffirmed his commitment to the military being âtough as shitâ so it could âcompletely destroyâ adversaries.
Wonder where Pete Hegseth is getting his idea of denying promotions to women from? Doug Wilson and his hyper-Calvinist and Christian Patriarchy-tinged worldview.
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