Bit Parts

54 year old white male cishet ("he/his"). Aware of my privilege and trying to be responsible with it. Fully aware of how that makes me "the enemy" in many eyes.

[infamousbrad]

And not just during Pride.

I make this point about modesty culture in general, not just during Pride, so ...

"I didn't consent to see that!" I don't consent to seeing billboards or lifted pickup trucks. I don't get a veto over people existing in public and neither do you.

[infamousbrad]

I think people forget why we banned this.

Stomach-churning recent news out of Lebanon:

Israel escalates attacks on medics in Lebanon with deadly ‘quadruple tap’

Lebanese health ministry says killing of 91 healthcare workers shows ‘total disregard’ for international law

... and yes, I hope that somebody, somewhere who was justifying Israel over this can no longer handwave the evidence, admits this happened, and, as the old comedy sketch goes, finally asks themselves "are we the baddies?" But y'know what? There's something about this that underscores something else that's important to me that's just as true about the US, Russia, and other countries, here in the 21st century:

I think a lot of world leaders, and their supporters, have forgotten why the Geneva Conventions exist. Why the Nuremberg Principles exist. Why the UN Charter exists. It's not just moral revulsion, however useful that sometimes is: it's just pragmatic facts.

The reason why deliberate attacks on non-combatants in general, and medical personnel treating civilians (or, even, former combatants rendered unable to continue fighting) is defined, by a whole host of international treaties, as one of the worst crimes, as something nobody can be allowed to get away with, is that (a) it's easy, (b) it advantages neither side, and (c) no matter who wins, it makes the victory, as well, as the loss, worse, and makes things worse for a long time.

Is blowing up the other side's ambulance drivers, first aid workers, hospital crews bad for the other side's war effort? Obviously. But there's also nothing you can do to stop them from doing it to you. If you're winning by so much that you can prevent them from doing it back to you, you don't need to do this. If you're losing, and it's always the losing side that does this first, then doing this isn't going to change the outcome, once they start doing it to you. It's just going to make things worse for everyone.

Let's let pass the issue of whether or not Jews need a guaranteed Jewish-run state and whether or not it has to be in this particular blood-soaked war-haunted strip of land. Even if you believe that? That they're repeatedly and remorselessly targeting rescuers shows you that Israelis themselves know that they're losing. Just as every side that has resorted to banned tactics of war when they were losing knew. But those tactics never, ever saved the losing side.

That's why it was so easy to get treaties where everybody agreed in advance not to resort to these tactics. Not only were the outcomes stomach-churningly revolting, they didn't even work.

So when I say that everybody involved in giving these orders, from Netanyahu all the way down to the missile and bomber crews who carried out these orders, needs to be tried and sentenced as all those treaties require, the rest of the Israelis also need to start figuring out how to negotiate some kind of surrender that they can survive.

Because breaking those treaties are their enemies' best recruiting tactic. And their enemies may not even have to sweep those treaties aside, and treat Israel the way it treats its residents and its neighbors, but if they do, the Israeli people are not ready for the horror they unleashed coming home. Nobody could be.

Maybe they can negotiate a peaceful surrender, like white South Africans did. If not, then horrors or no horrors (and probably with horrors) they're facing the absolute certainty of genocidal ethnic cleansing of Jews from "the holy land." There is no path to victory, once you're losing so badly you have to resort to bombing the ambulance crews that tried to rescue the ambulance crews that tried to rescue your victims. There's no coming back from that. Not for long.

[gurubuckaroo]

Honestly, the best outcome I could see from this current situation would be for Iran to take all that enriched uranium they have and (threaten to?) crop-dust the entirety of Israel with it. Specifically Jerusalem. Israel will of course react by nuking Tehran and turning both parties into pariahs. If two reasonable peoples (and I'm using that term with extreme grace) can't agree to share the same "holy" lands, then neither of them should have it. A very Judgement of Solomon type of solution, perhaps, but it would at least put the problem to bed for a few hundred years.

I'm not suggesting this be done. I'm saying it's the only way that's going to stop the turf war, and put the fear of worse-than-clean-death into the heads of both sides.

[infamousbrad]

I think Eric Swalwell THINKS he did nothing wrong. Let's talk about that. A lot.

So about 30 years ago, I was working at one of the most famous fintech companies in the world when we had a particularly horrific sexual assault scandal in management. Rather than let the company just pay the victims off, the judge overseeing the settlement demanded that the company bring in a court-approved HR consultant and put every single employee through an anti-sexual-abuse training seminar.

So I ended up in a conference room with a dozen-ish sullen coworkers I don't know and this HR consultant, and she opens the actual seminar with a question:

When is it appropriate to sexually proposition a subordinate?

And as usual, nobody wants to go first. So I wait a long time, by my standards, and stick up a hand and get called on, and gave the answer my dad raised me with:

Never. Don't look for meat where you make your bread. Don't fish off of the company pier. If your written job duties don't include sex with co-workers, don't have sex with your co-workers.

You would have thought I'd endorsed human sacrifice. Everybody on both sides, the consultant and my co-workers, stared screaming at me all at once, and then in relays, and it was made clear that nothing else was going to be discussed, the Maoist self-correction circle was going to continue, until I admitted I was wrong. Nobody who knows me will pretend to be surprised that I stuck by my guns and wore them down. I lost that argument, but I didn't surrender.

And I was told, by both sides, that that was unrealistic. That busy working professionals only go two places, work and home, that they're either working or sleeping. So where else are they supposed to meet prospective partners? (Church? Neighborhood associations? Referrals from friends or family? Hobbies, for Christ's sake? "Unrealistic. Nobody does that.")

But remember, I was staking out a broader principle, the actual question that was asked wasn't "co-worker," it was "subordinate."

So when the consultant grudgingly went on and gave the "right" answer, the court-ordered and approved answer was, "as many times as you want until or unless they explicitly tell you to stop." I asked for and got clarification on that, and no, she didn't mean until they say "no," because what if they change their mind? It's not sexual harassment, abuse, or assault until they in as many words explicitly say "stop asking me that." They have to use those words.

So I asked, "And how do you know if they want you to keep asking, or that they mean it when they say 'yes,' if you're in a position to fire them if they say no? How can you tell the difference between a coerced versus an un-coerced silent consent?" And that bitch actually said to me with a straight and stern face, "That is the risk we all take."

Fuck that noise.

I've learned even more in the last thirty years that just makes it more obvious to me that as a species, we are far overdue to have some hard conversations about what is okay and what is not okay.

For one thing, experimental psychology has shown that if you give one person any even trivial amount of authority over another, they are statistically more likely to mistake minimal politeness for flirtation. Both genders are vulnerable to this, no matter how they were brought up, which makes assuming "they're really into me" not an even vaguely safe assumption.

But when you combine it with the other well-known fact that all of us in general, but also women more than men, are taught to fawn over superiors? In a species were any even trivial obsequiousness is commonly mistaken for sexual interest?

There's a phrase for the result of that combination, and I don't care how much the worst people in the world hate it: that's rape culture. If you propositioned someone who wouldn't necessarily feel safe saying no or feel safe leaving, whether they said yes or no or just kept their mouth shut, even if it was because they did want it you don't know that.

You may well have been the rapist, the assaulter, the abuser, whether you know it or not. And if you value your own self-respect, let alone the safety of others, that's a stupid risk to take.

Don't look for meat where you make your bread. Don't fish off of the company pier. If your written job duties don't include sex with co-workers, don't have sex with your co-workers. And if you're afraid those rules mean celibacy, get a life.

Let me play you out on a song, Emeline's "What it means to be a girl."

... Be polite, spend the night / Call it self-defense. / Got the time of his life at my own expense. / But even if he were my man / He'd never truly understand / What it means to be a girl ...

[orteil42]

I must not explain the joke. Explaining the joke is the joke-killer. I will face my followers who did not get the joke. I will permit them to pass over me and through me

[orteil42]

you are making this so difficult

[saywhat-politics]

[shotofchinaco]

Soldier Details Chilling Messaging From Higher-Ups About ‘God’s Plan’ In Iran: ‘It Shocked Many Of Us’

One commander had a “big grin” on his face while saying Donald Trump “has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran," a servic

[infamousbrad]

Okay, I was going to keep my darkest thoughts bottled most of the way up, shared only with a handful of close friends. But this is bothering me.

Ever since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, a hair over 30 years ago, my angriest, darkest fantasy is that a war in the Middle East would spin so out of control that Israel started lobbing nukes, that Pakistan would respond with their nukes, and the whole "holy land" would be so thoroughly irradiated and gassed as to render it completely uninhabitable for decades, so that we could finally stop fighting over it.

Since the Crusades, that tiny little profoundly unimportant land has been fought over with every advance in the history of warfare by people whose attitude is that God will punish them if they let anybody but their own militant ethno-religious sect live there. They think that if they can't have it, then nobody can have it and on that one last narrow point, I've long since passed the point where I agree with them: nobody should have it. Kill them all, and ruin the land more thoroughly than Rome destroyed Carthage during the Punic Wars.

The words "holy land" are history's most concise yet deadly cognito-hazard. I've long since come to terms with the idea that, contrary to my early impression, what religion people profess doesn't correlate all that well with their personal morality, for better or for worse. But believing that there is such a place as the "holy land" tends to create remorseless killers. Infectious remorseless killers.

Would it be unfair to the civilians? I'm not sure, dammit. You look at the polling data out of every one of those religious and ethnic nationalist regimes, and it gets painfully clear that basically everybody there who actually wants peace has fled. So as a friend of mine summed it up when I was ranting to him the other day, "Wouldn't it be great if all of the worst people who ever lived agreed to get together in one place and kill each other off?"

As I've been complaining for a while, fascism, the movement that spontaneously re-emerges whenever ethno-religious nationalism adopts militant strong-man authoritarianism, is having a moment right now. It's stronger than it's ever been. Strong-man authoritarian ethno-religious nationalist parties control my country, the USA (for hopefully not much longer, the polls do give some cause for optimism) but also Russia, Poland, Hungary, China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. And almost all of those countries are at Holy War, quite often with each other.

(We're all losing our minds over the Middle East, and properly so, but do enough of you even realize how close India and Pakistan are to nuclear war with each other over Afghanistan?)

And we see where that horrible meme-plex leads: war of all against all. We have to, if it can be done at all, defeat this horrible idea and then do an even better job of teaching the generations that come after us just how badly this idea even works, let alone how morally repulsive it is. But while it's on the rise, I'm getting angrier and angrier and the worst part of me is howling, "Good. Let them all burn."

[infamousbrad]

The Far Lesser of Two Evils

I'm going to preface and follow this with an even more important announcement: any time we Americans are spending, this year, on arguing about 2028 is, potentially, an absolutely unaffordable distraction from the far more urgent question of how are we going to make our votes count this year, when there is a civilizationally important election already going on that we cannot afford to take as lightly as the average mid-term. That being said ...

I'm seeing an intense argument among my fellow progressives and liberals about what are we going to do, starting January '27, about the Gavin Newsom Problem. Because as much as the reactionary centrists want us to nominate someone even worse in '28, like Josh Shapiro, they want a commitment from us now that even if he or, almost as bad, Gavin Newsom rises to the top of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, progressives will still show up to vote for him. Because, if not, they're just going to write us all off as ignorable, unlikely to vote at all.

So let me say what I've already had to say a couple of times on Bluesky:

I am going to vote straight-ticket Democrat in both the '26 and '28 elections, no matter how dogshit the candidates are, because stopping the rise of ethno-nationalist authoritarianism is the most urgent issue we face, and not just here in the United States, and there is nothing I'm not willing to sacrifice to stop the MAGA movement from doing any more harm.

But I need you to understand something.

I am close friends with two separate couples my own age who have trans daughters and am still distant friends with another couple with a trans son.

If I vote for Gavin Newsom in November of '28, I'm going to have to look those parents in the eye and tell them that sacrificing their children's safety, maybe even their lives, was a price I was willing to pay to stop the far-right-wing extremists. That's going to be, to put it mildly, hard.

Look.

During FDR's first term, southern Democrats threatened to cross the aisle and vote to uphold the Republican filibuster of the whole New Deal if he didn't compromise and make the WPA jobs program whites-only in any state whose governor wanted that. It was go along with that, or not end the Great Depression at all.

During his second term, he faced the same open revolt again, a legislature that said they'd cross over and side with the literal Nazis against their own government if he objected to Japanese-American internment.

In neither case was there any chance they were bluffing.

Are we proud of him for the decisions he made both times? God I hope not. Do we wish he'd stood his ground, do we wish that Hitler had won World War II? Also no.

If we don't pick a better candidate in '28 (Walz/Pritzker '28: Good Cop/Bad Cop!), this is where we're going to be. Hundreds of thousands of gender non-conformists are going to be severely oppressed for decades longer, and thousands of them are going to die, to stop the nationalists, and not all of them volunteers. If that's what it costs, it will be worth it, and may God have mercy on our souls though mercy merit we none. But if we can't do better than that, history will judge us for our betrayal and history will be right.

Now, I'm deadly serious:

Spend more time planning how you're going to cast your vote this November (or earlier if you can), have a multi-layered plan with multiple go/no-go points and plenty of fallback plans, because before January '27 even rolls around we have to win at least one house of Congress in ten months, and MAGA will bend or break any law they have to in order to stop us. (After all, as they proved with regard to January 6th 2020, if they win, it won't have been illegal.) If you live in a blue district, you should assume that you're going to see voter suppression efforts like you've never seen before.

Any time you spend, between now and November, arguing about the '28 Democratic presidential primary is go to turn out to have been time that you should have been spending on voting this year yourself, getting out all of the anti-MAGA votes you can, and persuading low-information independents and conservatives that they can't support MAGA any more and should at least sit this one out if they aren't willing to cross over this one time.

But for the love of all holy Gods, if between now and then someone tries to drag you into an anti-trans liberal argument, don't threaten to sit the 2028 election out if you lose in the 2028 Democratic primary but dear holy God demand better. And then change the subject, because time between now and this November is getting short.

[gurubuckaroo]

I agree with every word here. Brad, I don't know if you're including us in your count; we're not terribly close but I do count you as a friend. Heck, you may not even know that our AMAB firstborn is 4+ years into her transition.

I've used her as an example when talking to (sigh) family who vote republican, because they are stuck in the echo chamber and although both of them are smart enough, educated enough, and worldly enough to know better, they keep falling for the malinformation that spews so often and so widely from this administration and the people supporting it. These are people who are the last people that share most of my DNA, and I point out to them that these people want my daughter dead. But it doesn't make a difference. I will vote for whatever person on the ballot that opposes "MAGA" and has a realistic chance of winning. Sitting it out because we don't have a perfect candidate is how we got here in the first place.

Hopefully my daughter will have finished her current plan to make her permanent residence in Canada by then. She is engaged to a Canadian, and their family adores her - but her fiancé isn't in a position to sponsor her at the moment, and our daughter doesn't have experience in one of the fields that they're seeking for immigrants.

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[charlesoberonn]

Concept: Depressing dystopian factory where everything is gray and samey and the workers are called by their employee numbers by an ominous deep voice.

But it's a really great place to work with high salaries, excellent benefits, and a flexible working schedule with plenty of paid leave. They just like the dystopian aesthetic.

[charlesoberonn]

PA system: Worker 72094. Leave your working station and report to the Supervisor immediately.

Supervisor: Worker 72094. You failed to meet your quota for 3 weeks in a row now.

Worker 72094: I can explain!

Supervisor: You're clearly burned out. I heard you moved recently. Take a mandatory two weeks paid vacation to readjust and report to me then.

Worker 72094: I... thank you?

[charlesoberonn]

Shadowy Board Member: Worker 11335. Do you know why you were summoned?

Worker 11335: Is it because I badmouthed the company during lunch?

Shadowy Board Member: That is correct. We are very displeased, Worker 11335...

Shadowy Board Member: ...with ourselves, that is. We hold ourselves to high standards of excellence which we clearly failed to meet. We were hoping you could advise us on necessary improvements. You will receive appropriate compensation, of course.

[charlesoberonn]

Job Interviewer: *wearing a featureless mask and speaking through a voice changer* Welcome to Hopeless Inc., Worker 100100.

Worker 100100: What's with the mask?

Job Interviewer: I'm shy 🤭

[charlesoberonn]

Of course. All Hopeless Inc. employees are due-paying members of Mindless Drones United.

It's a very responsive union that cares about its members on an individual level. They just love the dystopian hivemind aesthetic.

[mandywondering]

All members of Mindless Drones United are issued a membership badge, but it is Forbidden to wear them on DystopiCorp property. This is not to suppress the union, but because the adorable bee mascot beloved by the Drones would ruin the vibe.

[one-time-i-dreamt]

Gomez and Morticia Addams got divorced. I woke up mortified and with a sense of inexplicable dread.

[one-time-i-dreamt]

[penrosesun]

[weaselle]

you literally don’t need any other plot and i would watch the movie

[random-chaos-thoughts]

Every 'normal' adult is fussing around Pugsley and Wednesday because "poor children that must be so hard for you to see mom and dad break up like this"

But the kid are absolutely unfazed, arguing that "it's alright they will be together again soon". The normie are so sad for the "children clinging to vain hopes" until Morticia and Gomez get married again two weeks after the divorce.

In the meantime Mama and Uncle Fester fight about which one of them will go to whose custody.

They pretend to argue in court and at meeting with lawyers over the splitting of the properties but that's mostly Gomez insisting to leave more and more thing to his wife in an angry voice.

At home they decided not to talk to each other so Lurch has to (begrudgingly) transmit messages from one to the other, even when they are sat on either side of the table.

That works (more or less) then Morticia says one word in french and Gomez run to cover her with kisses until Morticia remind him that they are spliting (that's the only moment he seems to regret the whole thing)

[yeomanstuff]

This. All of this.

[6qubed]

Wednesday offers to help with split custody of Pugsley. her suggestion involved a big table saw

[swimmingblue]

They fight over who gets to hire the expensive big-firm lawyer and who gets to hire the up-and-coming rookie divorce lawyer. It's a whole Thing.

[ladyartemisia28]

The up and coming lawyer is Thing?

[aethersea]

Thing wins the case

[amultitudeofyellowrodents]

it's actually started because Thing just passed the bar exam and no one will hire Thing

[infamousbrad]

[mudwerks]

SUBMIT. STAY ASLEEP.

[honourablejester]

I don’t know why that affected me so strongly, but I’m watching a youtube video on disasters on Lake Huron, and the first one involves a coal freighter that was lost in the White Hurricane of 1913 called the SS Argus. Everyone on the ship was lost. But it’s mentioned that the captain’s body washed up later, and was found without a life jacket. So they thought, based partly on testimony of another ship that thought they saw them go down, that it just happened too fast for him to have time to get his jacket. But then another body was found, that of the second cook, and she was found wearing the life jacket marked ‘captain’. And that’s …

It didn’t work. It didn’t save her. But it’s so very possible that he spent his last moments alive trying to save someone else, one of his crew, and they probably both knew that it wouldn’t work, that there wasn’t a lot of hope in a blizzard on the lakes in November, but he tried … he tried anyway. Even if it did nothing but maybe make her body easier for her family to find.

You know that Mr Rogers thing of ‘look for the helpers’? How many times has someone, facing the end, done something tiny and fragile and maybe hopeless just to try and help someone else? Whether it works or not. How many people went to their graves at least trying?

That has to say something about us. As a people. As monstrous as we sometimes (perhaps often) are, so many times we were also …

Whoever saves one life, saves the whole world.

And sometimes you can’t save one life, sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes there’s no getting out of this for anyone, but … try anyway. Because it matters anyway.

And maybe no one will ever know. But maybe also some day more than a century down the line, maybe some idiot will be crying into her coffee because of what you died trying.

[infamousbrad]

This is your second-to-last warning.

Back when fanatical anti-abortion judges were getting appointed in Trump's first term, people on Facebook asked me how scared should they be? And I drew the comparison to the role that the Fugitive Slave Act played in the run-up to the US Civil War, to lay out three levels of alert, because repealing Roe would be your third-to-last warning.

If Roe v Wade was repealed, I said, have a discussion with your loved ones and dependents where you try to get them to imagine having to flee, and come back to it, if not every night, often enough to keep the possibility in mind.

When the first attempt is made to extradite a doctor or pharmacist or other volunteer from a free state to an anti-abortion state, for a crime not illegal in that state, I said start active preparations in case you're going to need to flee. (More on that in a bit.)

When that extradition request fails, and it will fail, you should expect a Republican Congress like this one to pass "Fugitive Slave Act 2.0," requiring free-state local law officials to assist out-of-state law officials and/or bounty hunters in bringing "abortionists" to justice, just like they did last time, and expect this Supreme Court to uphold it. When that happens, get yourself and your loved ones to safety in a free state or, honestly, abroad if you can. Because ...

The last time these very same states tried this, they found that private citizens and local law enforcement in the free states went to extreme lengths to buy time for escaped slaves to escape, delaying out-of-state bounty hunters in every way, the Supreme Court be damned.

If you're still here when that bridge is crossed, you volunteered to live through a civil war. Because the anti-abortion states are going to find out that it is physically impossible to enforce their will on free states while remaining in the United States.

The outcome will be the same, because the conditions haven't changed. The army will take their side? Nearly the whole army took their side last time, too. Didn't help once the food and bullets ran low, which will happen again this time. Last time it ended with their cities shelled and burned to the ground, their economy in a shambles that it still hasn't recovered from, and there's no plausible story that ends the next civil war, if they're determined to have another one, on any other terms.

Yesterday ...

Arrest warrant issued for New York doctor indicted in Louisiana for prescribing abortion pill

An arrest warrant has been issued for a New York doctor indicted by a Louisiana grand jury for allegedly prescribing an abortion pill online

... a Louisiana grand jury issued an order to extradite a New York pharmacist for remotely prescribing mifepristone to a patient in Louisiana. Not only was that legal, but New York state has a shield law, requiring local law enforcement to defend the pharmacist or anyone else so indicted. And it's just what I predicted, because that's what they did last time.

With this Congress, expect a "Fugitive Abortionist Act." They'll have to suspend the filibuster in the Senate to pass it, so there's some hope yet. But by the time it passes, if it does, you will need:

Up-to-date travel papers. A passport is best, but for Gods' sake at least have up-to-date REAL IDs for yourself and your dependents. And ...

Cash. Preferably stashed off-premises, maybe diversified, and at least some of it out of the country or in a local credit union in the free state you're going to if that's your choice.

A transportation plan. Where are you going and how are you going to get there? And, finally, and most importantly ...

An agreement. Promise each other, in advance, that once physical resistance to extraditions ordered under the Fugitive Abortionists Act (or whatever they end up calling it) makes the news? Screw inertia, screw work, screw the fact that you might not have a plan for a place to live when you get there, screw all the reasons to stay, you need to promise each other that, if that day comes, you are going to implement your escape plan, and not wait another day.

Because, to expand on what I said above, if you wait until armies are on the march and checkpoints go up because borders are closing, you will have waited too long, and wherever you are on that day, that's where you're going to be when US cities start looking like Aleppo, like Mariupol, like Gaza.

[infamousbrad]

I warned you.

About 15 years ago, I had a minor moment of Internet fame when I wrote a lengthy essay series on LiveJournal called "Christians in the Hand of an Angry God." In it, I argued that right-wing evangelical "Christianity" was literally Satanic by scriptural standards, was literally the cult of anti-Christ that Jesus prophesied in Matthew 25:31-46, that they were literally worshiping a made-up guy with the same name to justify cruelty, just like Jesus predicted they would the week before the crucifixion.

And at least half of the people who read it and praised it called it excellent satire. They saw my point, thought I was onto something, but couldn't take seriously that I literally meant what I literally said.

"Do not commit the sin of empathy."

Jesus' prophesy that these people were coming was not especially miraculous, in hindsight. No philosophy or theological movement becomes a large organized church, let alone a majority faith of a nation, without needing rich people's money, and/or government funding, to pay for it all.

And rich people in general, and right-wing governments in general, get to be the way they are by believing that the poor and the down-trodden can never be shown anything but cruelty, should never be rewarded, or else they'll lose all motivation to obey, to work hard, to be good. (By contrast, they believe that the same thing would happen to rich, powerful, popular people if they were ever punished in any way, if they were ever anything but rewarded.)

And rich people and governments are not going to subsidize your church foundation funds, your church repair funds, et cetera if you tell them that they're evil. But someone definitely will come along and offer to take that money. The people who take that money and conform won't even all be lying psychopaths; if you truly believe that your organization matters, is doing irreplaceable good in the world, you'll sacrifice any principle of your faith to keep the bills paid, you'll look away from or excuse any sin. It's that or see it all shrink and crumble into irrelevance.

I've come to the conclusion that it may not actually be possible to be a good person while practicing the majority faith of the land you live in. Or, if it is possible, well, like the man said, "straight is the gate and narrow is the way, and few there be that find it."

The Episcopal Church has its own legacy of sin, they've long overlooked a laundry list of crimes to pay their own bills, so don't rush to congratulate a mainline bishop for preaching mainline Christianity or take too much pleasure from Trump and his fascist followers being surprised that that happened. But do remember this:

From the mid-1970s to the present, right-wing billionaires have poured a LOT of money into church expansion and maintenance conditional on them distorting the Bible's teachings to make it appear that Jesus was pro-fascist. "To deceive, if it were possible, the very elect." So when honest theologians tell you that this is literally anti-Christ, literally checks every box in the Bible's description of the future cult of anti-Christ, you need to hear us.

The modern book and movie image of "the Antichrist" was a well-funded propaganda campaign to distract you from the plain language of the scriptures. The biblical anti-Christ is not some socialist liberal peacenik. The biblical anti-Christ is everyone who tells you that Jesus wants you to be cruel to "the least of these, my brethren" so that they'll straighten up and fly right.

[raccooncomic]

209. Sleepy

[fennecandco]

Trauma didn't make me nice, I consciously made me nice because I don't want anyone else to suffer like I did. Trauma didn't make me strong, I made me strong. Don't you dare ever tell me my trauma made me anything but scared, broken, and confused. Don't give credit to the abusers for me being a good person. They didn't make me good, I made myself good.

[vigilantsycamore]

Just in general, if someone's a neopagan, cool. Good for them. If someone's specifically the kind of neopagan that's very insistent that their unsupported assumptions about historical paganism are 100% true, you should try to quickly and subtly ascertain their opinions on Jews, trans people, and the idea of POC joining their movement

[gurubuckaroo]

I cannot support this view enough. My adventures with the local neopagan community started way back in the 1980's, amid the Satanic Panic, and yeah - let's just say I don't hang out with most of the people I met there anymore. Some of them are lifelong friends, but a disappointing number of the "highly respected" leadership types were utter trash people. With the movement of the Overton Window over the last 10 years or so, I can't imagine it's gotten any better.