the truth shall set you free

surpassing seas since 1984. when the scales fall from your eyes | and your soul is put to the test | what will your answer be?

[silver-and-ivory]

realizing that much of what was shown to me throughout childhood as "positive examples of masculine role models" or what have you was actually just men who were benevolently sexist

[silver-and-ivory]

the idea previous poster came up with isn't clever, it's literally the same thing -- lying to people about what they're purchasing and whether it's safe -- portrayed in the pictures above! and sure, in some sense it involves people being hoist upon their own petards, but only in a really malicious way where you deliberately set them up to fail.

[headspace-hotel]

So I wanted to know what kind of crystal could go in a wizard staff, right? so I googled “big crystal,” as one does, and got an Etsy ad for This

And as you all know I Am currently taking a geology class, so I am probably more emotionally invested in minerals than usual. But that is...very obviously not a natural crystal.

So I did some looking around on Etsy.

Now, these shops all seem to advertise to the “witchy”/“spiritual healing” type of person. And there are a lot of them. Crystals are a Big Thing on Etsy. And ALMOST ALL of them are obviously artificially cut into the same sort of prism with a triangular pyramid top, regardless of the actual sort of crystal it is supposed to be.

Even like, fucking, obsidian. Obsidian is volcanic glass, it doesn’t form crystals at all, it is not a crystal

I’m not throwing any shade at people who are into crystals for like witchy reasons, but it really seems like if crystals are spiritually important to you, you should know what a crystal is...right...?

[headspace-hotel]

So there I am. Caught in the helpless anger and distaste of looking at geologically inaccurate Etsy crystals.

And as I scroll, I start to see items in...interesting shapes:

“Oh,” I think to myself. “Oh no.”

But it is too late. I have heard the siren’s song, singing to me of knowledge that will destroy me, but that I cannot help but seek.

These...elongated objects are almost always ambiguously described as “massage wands,” “crystal healing wands,” and other such innocuous things. The egg-shaped objects are, um, “yoni eggs.”

...Right. Okay.

Maintain the youthfulness of my sacred organ.

IT’S A SEX TOY. SAY IT. BITCH, IT’S A SEX TOY, IT’S OKAY, SERIOUSLY, THERE’S NO SHAME IN IT, SAY IT WITH PRIDE, SAY IT WITH YOUR CHEST,

OKAY.

Okay. I’m good. I’m fine.

Actually, you know what, never mind. There is shame in this and I want it to be never acknowledged again.

Additionally, I am not fine.

Why the fuck are there so many of these—

At this point I stop and start googling.

Now, Selenite is the crystalline form of gypsum. It is also known as satin spar. Selenite is brittle and breaks easily, and has a Mohs hardness scale of 2.

For those unfamiliar with the Mohs hardness scale, a mineral with a hardness of 2 is soft enough that it can be easily scratched with a fingernail. It also is dissolved by moisture.

NO. DON’T PUT THAT IN YOUR BODY???? DON’T PUT THE GYPSUM, WHICH HAS A MOHS HARDNESS SCALE OF 2, IS BRITTLE AND BREAKS EASILY, AND IS WATER SOLUBLE, INSIDE YOUR LITERAL ACTUAL VAGINA??????????

I try to reassure myself with the fact that these things are probably not actually selenite, because making a dildo out of such a soft mineral in the first place would be very difficult. Having seen fluorite before, I feel pretty certain that the fluorite yoni eggs are probably actually just glass.

I google fluorite.

Okay.

Further exploring online shows me that fluorite is soluble in various strong acids.

Some guys on a forum in 2004 have strong contradictory opinions on this.

(I google the pH of the vagina.)

I don’t understand how pH works. I give up on the solubility question and google the toxicity of fluorite:

I now know at least one orifice fluorite does not go inside.

Science.

[headspace-hotel]

No, dear followers, my journey did not end here.

I have opened Pandora’s box, except Pandora’s box is filled with minerals God did not intend to be anywhere near the vagina carved into the shape of dildos. Etsy is advertising me sex toys I wish I could forget.

And vaginal steam herbs.

It seems that there is potentially a correlation between wanting to steam your vagina and wanting to put rocks in it. I know, groundbreaking discovery.

Okay, so we’re talking therapy substitute therapy substitute.

(I begin to think about how desperately we need universal health care. Maybe I just need someone, something, to blame.)

At this point, I realize that I haven’t done any googling on whether dildos made of rocks are a good idea at all. So, very tentatively, as if typing it more slowly will make it any less observed by the FBI, I google whether quartz should be used...internally.

First result that pops up:

That’s, uh. That’s reassuring.

I decide I’m incapable of unpacking this particular suitcase.

There are, of course, a small handful of articles debating the safety of rose quartz sex toys. But I’m getting the feeling that this is not a normal question to have in the first place. I close the tab with little relief.

Etsy is still enthusiastically recommending me things that hurt me psychologically.

...pleasure chalk?

How can I describe the fear that this image struck in me, reader?

Pleasure Chalk? What could that be?

Is knowing worse, or is not knowing? I scarcely have a choice:

I check in with my emotions.

Is this relief? Am I relieved that they are eating the dirt instead of fucking it? One review complains about the taste. I don’t know what they expected.

I try in vain to struggle against the tide, to return to the relatively normal side of Etsy. I begin to resent, no, hate, these deceptively aesthetically pleasing hippie shops eagerly spreading medical misinformation and things as yet unknown.

This, unlike the other “crystals” I have shown, appears to show naturally grown crystals. They are, of course, quartz crystals, and $45 comes off as extremely overpriced. I have a quartz crystal I got for a dollar at an Eastern Kentucky rock festival, about the size and quality of the ones in the photo.

Quartz is the most common mineral in the Earth’s crust. But at least this is regular levels of annoying.

Then I see this:

Well, I see the photo and the price, and I think, that looks like a regular quartz crystal. There’s no way a regular quartz crystal is $1,347.

I read the description:

I am crying. I don’t want to google any of this. I am beyond googling. I no longer desire knowledge.

THATS A QUARTZ CRYSTAL. MOTHERFUCKER THAT’S QUARTZ. SIO2, MOST COMMON MINERAL IN THE EARTH’S CRUST. ITS FUCKING QUARTZ IM—

I click on a malachite.

The malachite promises to protect me from emails. And at this, darkest hour, I want to be protected.

I have been broken. I have been lured to my demise.

Big Brother: loved.

Geology lab I’m supposed to be doing: incomplete.

God: unmerciful.

[theevenprime]

I have an idea. I'm going to need a dildo mold, an industrial quantity of Authentic Himalayan Salt, and a deep and abiding malice for the sort of person who buys these things.

(You guys remember that "these cheap, shitty rings are ablative apotropaics, and will snap once they've absorbed too much negative vibe from your surroundings" fad? It'll be like that, only with raw sexual energy, and definitely not just because they're made of salt.)

[silver-and-ivory]

Have you considered that lying to people in the hopes that they have a medical emergency on account of your product, regardless of how gullible or obnoxious they may be, is morally wrong?

[silver-and-ivory]

you know those posts like “jeff bezos has a net worth of [insert arbitrarily large amount of money here that includes shares he owns in amazon which are only worth that amount because he controls the company or something like that]! we should redistribute it because it’s not fair that one guy has that much money!” are kind of right even though there is no specific alteration that I could envision making to his wealth and any specific case of misdoing by the company could be rules lawyered to be “technically” ok, because I have a sense that bezos’s endeavor is, when considered as a whole, exploitative in some fashion; and furthermore that I expect he will use the influence descendant from his wealth to make the world worse rather than better.

but I still feel like it’s kind of dumb to harp on stuff like “did you know that barron trump has a whole floor to himself in a giant mansion?!” like yeah but who cares? other people having stuff is not the problem; other people exploiting other other people and having undue influence that they will use for further (often negligent) harm to others is the problem. and I guess that it reflects poorly on the characters of adults who purchase entire floors in giant mansions for their children that they’d do that instead of something more altruistic.

my grandfather’s mistress collects a bunch of clothes. in the room I stayed in she had this massive bookshelf from the floor to the ceiling of shoes, like the shelf behind Galinda in that scene from Wicked, but somehow with more shoes. and then the wall had a bunch of clothes too. it was kind of disturbing.

and I guess that if you reflect on the element where every single one of those items was made via various distributed exploitative processes likely to involve some kind of slave labor at some point along the line it was pretty viscerally horrifying.

(and it was tacky, but that’s not, like, a moral thing.)

and, the problem of moral character doesn’t appear at a specific number of shoes, it’s not like the 33rd shoe is any worse than the 32nd, nor even the 103rd any worse than the 32nd. (every shoe can be assumed for our purposes to on average be about the same re: how much suffering it inflicts.) the problem is that she clearly wasn’t even trying.

[silver-and-ivory]

Reading virtually the same people having the same old mutual aid versus government services debate, where supposedly the government is preferable for such things because it’s a faceless bureaucracy where you don’t have to be well-liked to get aid.

But it is not the case that the only two options are “the government, also known as a protection racket, steals money from people and then unreliably metes it out to some people who sign up after they spend like a year filling out forms and testifying in court about how they really do deserve it” and “you live on a commune with your highly traumatized queer friends all of whom are in their 20s and who will ostracize you if you accidentally say ‘nonwhites’ instead of ‘people of color‘”.

The hope here being placed with the government is that, if local communities or whatever are bad and reject you because you have zero social skills or because the communities are filled with terrible people, then you always have something to fall back on. But in this hypothetical the government decided to give people welfare for a reason -- which implies that there are a lot of people who think it is good for the weak to be taken care of regardless of their social skills (or maybe the government is a rentier state? but I feel like that’s out of scope). Then the correct solution ought to be for those people to voluntarily set up some way to facelessly distribute money to people who need it, not for them to set up a protection racket.

An interlocutor might reply that that means that the weak are dependent on the whims of the people running this fund, and indeed on the existence of people who want to run this fund. And I think that there is just absolutely no getting around the fact that, in any scenario, some critical mass of people has to be on board with the “let’s give money to the weak even if they’re personally unpleasant” plan for it to happen. This problem is not solved by stipulating that the government will do it -- that abstracts over the actual hard problem where you need to convince voters or plutocrats or whatever, and it abstracts over how low-level government agents, overworked at best and actively malicious at worst, will be the ones actually implementing any solution that routes through the government.

Another issue could be that it’s disproportionately people who are not very rich in the first place who are in favor of giving money to the weak. But in large part money is currently concentrated with people who have stolen it through exploitation, so this could be solved by directly -- not laundered through the law -- stealing this money back.

Other issues I imagined (like “how do you prevent people from signing up with a thousand accounts without some unique identifier?”) are implementation details that any such project would face.

I think the critical issue here is that -- though we live in a world where the vast majority of wealth is not rightfully owned by the people who legally claim it -- by default, it is actually wrong to steal people’s money. And stealing money comprises the entire foundation of government.

[afloweroutofstone]

Most gruesome thing I learned in religion class is that crucifixion doesn’t kill you via blood loss from the nails, dehydration, or exposure. Once all of the strength from your limbs gives out, you can only support all of your body’s weight on your chest, resulting in your body basically suffocating itself

[silver-and-ivory]

giving money to someone else because with near certainty and moral obligation on their side that they’ll give you something in return would be a trade; giving money to someone else because you hope it will make their life better would be charity; and giving money to someone else because you hope to get a return to your person on it would be investment.

(this should work with other forms of value, too.)

[memecucker]

Got some bad opinions? Here’s how to sound like the voice of the working class

It's interesting that middle-aged business owners with nice cars are working class, but their young, educated employees aren't

“If you simply must address the disparity between older and younger voters, you should carefully conflate “young people” with “students”, because all students are middle-class and therefore out of touch. This move works best when combined with sneering at “kids these days”, with their funny hairstyles and identity politics. A 17-year-old earning £4.20 per hour doing admin work is a middle-class cosmopolitan because she dyed her hair green and has liberal ideas, while her Audi-driving boss is working-class because he made his money selling plumbing supplies and gets irrationally angry.

There is a catch to this, which is that the White Working Class needs to be infantilised as a whole. The important rhetorical move is to position working-class instincts as correct but to maintain their status as intellectually inferior. Their naïve, uncomplicated straight-talking is there to show that the Social Justice Emperor is naked, something ignored by the liberal lefties in their postmodern universities. But there is still a requirement for people such as yourself to act as the conduit for their wisdom and, you know, actually run things.”

[silver-and-ivory]

However, there is a caveat. While the White Working Class are definitely not racist, if ivory tower latte liberals call them racist then they will turn into actual Nazis and vote for the most racist people imaginable. This is similar to what happened when American “shock jock” Rush Limbaugh popularized the term “feminazi” in 1992, thus chasing every woman in America into the arms of the far right. Therefore, even if the White Working Class are racist, which they aren’t, they are only racist because cosmopolitan city folk annoyed them into being racist, even though they aren’t racist and anyone who says that they are is an out of touch elitist.

[tarhalindur]

The important rhetorical move is to position working-class instincts as correct but to maintain their status as intellectually inferior. Their naïve, uncomplicated straight-talking is there to show that the Social Justice Emperor is naked, something ignored by the liberal lefties in their postmodern universities. But there is still a requirement for people such as yourself to act as the conduit for their wisdom and, you know, actually run things.

This is the part where I once again link to the old-but-good Archdruid Report “American Narratives: The Rescue Game” essay, right?  (And then get darkly amused by JMG morphing into an absolutely perfect example of the kind of “voice of the working class” writer the original article is talking about.)

Anyways, here it is: http://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/american-narratives-rescue-game.html

[the-grey-tribe]

who wore it better? @slatestarscratchpad

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans

[seat-safety-switch]

What is it about parking that turns otherwise civilized and reasonable human beings into monsters? Psychologists would tell you that it’s about the strain of having to own and maintain a private space in public, that the interaction between this chunk of Earth that temporarily belongs to you and the random assholes who wish to also occupy it is bound to cause problems. All I know is that the guy who parks over the line at the hardware store is a dick, and deserves any number of violent ends.

When I used to own a nice car, I never liked the kind of person I’d become whenever anyone got close to it. Surely, they were a clown car full of jerks who would ding my door, take out my wing mirror, or crack my tail light while drunkenly swerving in and out of a too-tight spot with their God-damned Hummer. The fact that this never happened didn’t keep me from being worried about it. I started parking further away, but then I’d come out to an apoplectic rage when someone had decided, against all reason, to park immediately beside me, as if we were now parking lot buddies united against the menace of all mankind.

My first experience parking a shitty car, now that was a revelation. Now I no longer feared door dings, crooked parkers, or an errant shopping cart. In fact, I would spot bad parkers and then pull up real close to them, forcing them to ding my doors. The karmic damage that would be levered upon them from that evil act was well in excess of any resale value that was lost on my dripping land barges. And I’d watch and laugh from the window of the store as I watched them do it. Sometimes people with nicer cars were too scared to park next to my heap, and so I’d come out from being parked out front to see a row of empty spots, vacated in fear. Masochistic? Maybe a little, but I genuinely thought I was setting right an ancient wrong.

There is a better strategy, however, than just having one crap car. If you aggressively dominate a parking lot with a whole squadron of crap, normal folks will be too afraid to enter said lot. That’s why Bad Cars Monthly is no longer paying for our monthly underground parking lot; we’re just shoving stuff in the lot of the bar next door. Even the tow truck is too chickenshit to get too close.

[silver-and-ivory]

imagine selling benjy’s pasture, that quentin may go to college. sad!

[silver-and-ivory]

a few years ago people would make posts like “I don’t know who needs to hear this right now, but [generic words of affirmation and encouragement for the people who need to hear this right now]” and now people are making posts like “I don’t know who needs to hear this right now, but [the people who need to hear this right now are doing something completely awful and they should stop]”.

the putative “need” to hear a thing has changed from a vaguely sympathetic posture where someone thinks you might have a need for reassurance or solidarity to a need in the sense where, say, a serial killer might “need” to hear that they should stop serial killing. but just as telling a serial killer to stop serial killing falls on deaf ears, it’s fairly clear that these posts are in fact for the audience, and not really for the person “who needs to hear this”, anymore. but at the same time, the framing of the post strongly encourages the reader to place themself in the position of, perhaps, being the person who needs to hear this.

so my theory is that these posts actually intend to make you feel like you fucked up for no particular reason.

[transgenderer]

so like, among the big 5 religions, in lay discussions the abrahamic religions tends to get lumped together, and like, obviously that makes sense, they share common ancestry, so like, abrahamic religions + (hinduism and buddhism) is one natural classification, but personally i feel like (christianity, islam, buddhism) + (hinduism, judaism) is a more interesting classification, because (to me) the Special Thing about the first three, among the myriad religions on earth,  is their successful spread/conquest of cultures where they did not originate, and the Special Thing about the latter two is their successful resistance to being displaced or absorbed by the former three

[discoursedrome]

yeah to me the most interesting thing about the judaism/christianity split is how it embodies the two “types” of established religion – judaism is the original type where religion is tightly coupled with the culture and political dynamics of a particular nation, and is basically like a load-bearing component of that specific society, and christianity is the more “modern” type of religion as universalist and proselytic

it’s interesting because the judaic style of religion is more traditional and it makes the religion into a sort of organ of the society, and the christian style is analogous to a cancer in that it developed a self-interest which can come at the expense of the host society’s interests as a nation, which is not necessarily pathological in the way that “cancer” implies but is at least threatening from the standpoint of “national interest”, hence the constant struggle to domesticate it into a particularist form like the church of england

[transgenderer]

this is also pretty loaded, but maybe a more apt metaphor is a virus? like, if you can consider a culture has an organism defined by a set of memes, then something like judaism is a meme functioning as it “should”, assisting in the propagation of the culture, and something like christianity replicates itself and spreads to new hosts, without optimizing for the distribution of its host culture

its interesting to try to fit the role of what scott calls “universal culture” (good article, bad name for this phenomenon). in a way, some useful set of memes “displace” traditional aspects of a culture, while also making that culture far more successful, resulting in whats left of that culture being propagated worldwide (like, theres nothing objectively optimal about english, but its still popular worldwide, because england got a major boost from “universal culture” (and other factors, ofc)). maybe its just not that generalizable a metaphor but it FEELS like it should work

[transgenderer]

discoursedrome said: 

yeah “viral” is a bit less loaded, but I think it’s significant that these universalist religions develop /from/ modifications to load-bearing societal pillars, so it’s like they’re organs that develop self-determination

trying to figure out a way to work mitochondria into this metaphor but nothing yet

in my mind i was thinking of viruses under the theory that viruses came about from little mutated bits of DNA/RNA, and also sort of thinking about transposons at the same time. im like, mixing my metaphors on a meta-level (a metaPHOR level? much to consider). anyway i guess mitochondria would be…another culture, that gets coopted into a larger culture, and provides a useful service to that larger culture, but maintains its own identity and is also carried along by that large culture when it spreads. i think theres basically no non-offensive specific example but i do think that many subcultures/ethnicities could sort of fit that mold

[fatpinocchio]

“Surely leopards will start eating my face any moment now. We need only wait.”, says lifelong voter for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.

[ratliker1917]

there’s literally only three political causes JK rowling has picked up and furiously advocated for ever since becoming a billionaire celebrity: opposing the independence of Scotland, opposing any change in Britain’s economic system so that austerity won’t be killing disabled people en-masse and working class people won’t be dying in apartment complex fires, and virulently opposing trans rights while implying heavily that autistic people are literally too mentally inferior to have any agency and thus should be barred from seeking out gender transition. British nationalist, dedicated transphobe and social darwinist, this is who JK Rowling is when we let her actions speak for themselves.

[silver-and-ivory]

someone asked me about evidence for this, and then I realized I don’t know anything about UK politics. ratliker said Rowling supported the Blairites, which is apparently a conservative wing of the Labour party, or something like that. I’d rather not spend any more time thinking about the question “JK Rowling: Bad, or Very Bad?”, so I’m just reblogging to indicate that I’m currently completely agnostic on whether OP is right.

[ratliker1917]

i think social media spectacle brain leads to people playing down the transphobia of jk rowling because it reduces her to just somebody who is transphobic on twitter (large amounts of people are this unfortunately) and a fantasy author whose books are full of reactionary garbage and prejudice (the fantasy genre is full of authors like this, unfortunately) while ignoring the fact that she’s a billionaire celebrity using her enormous amounts of social and financial capital to actively campaign for restrictions on the human rights of trans people in a country that’s currently undergoing a massive anti-trans moral panic and which has recently seen serious rollbacks in the right of trans people to transition. she’s more than just a problematic fantasy author who is a bigoted asshole, she’s actually putting her money where her mouth is to ensure that her bigotries become actual public policy.

[silver-and-ivory]

hm, maybe my previous opinion re: whether libraries paying JK Rowling to host Harry Potter events was good or bad, was wrong, if she uses her wealth to do material harm.

[ratliker1917]

there’s literally only three political causes JK rowling has picked up and furiously advocated for ever since becoming a billionaire celebrity: opposing the independence of Scotland, opposing any change in Britain’s economic system so that austerity won’t be killing disabled people en-masse and working class people won’t be dying in apartment complex fires, and virulently opposing trans rights while implying heavily that autistic people are literally too mentally inferior to have any agency and thus should be barred from seeking out gender transition. British nationalist, dedicated transphobe and social darwinist, this is who JK Rowling is when we let her actions speak for themselves.

[deirdreskye]

One of my favorite troop/copaganda tropes is where the military industrial complex produces these futuristic technological marvels. Like in the Nolan Batman movies where he gets the batmobile and all his gadgets from a defense contractor's top secret labs. Of course, everyone knows that if Raytheon tried to make the Batmobile it would catch on fire and kill every single one of its drivers and they would sell it to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for 75 billion dollars each. The IRL example here is how everyone thinks Israel's iron dome is this science fiction miracle tech when in reality it actually doesn't work and is just a big boondoggle money pit scam

[deirdreskye]

If you've ever seen this thing in a movie you should know that it does exist IRL and it crashes and kills its entire crew all the time. BTW, if you can't afford food and need money to survive the government won't give it to you because Uncle Sam needs that money to buy these for 4363 bajillion dollars a piece.

[silver-and-ivory]

https://pando.com/2015/09/24/war-nerd-why-f-35-albanian-mushroom/