The Book of Job Chapter 10
Now, I don't want to be too self-referential in these posts. This is the Book of Job after all and it is one of the most misunderstood books in the world literature canon, so adding my own personal anecdotes makes things feel amateurish. The college professor who always marked me down for my papers on Horace's Odes because I always included personal stuff haunts me to this day. Especially when I agree with him to a certain extent. Or more accurately I agreed with him wholeheartedly when I tried to listen to a Sarah Vowell book about the pilgrims and learned absolutely nothing about the pilgrims but learned a great deal about Sarah Vowell, way more than i ever wanted to know about Sarah Vowell.
But the line from this second part of Job's response to his friend that is now a response to G-d that goes "Does it benefit you to defraud , to despise the toil of your hands, while smiling on the counsel of the wicked?" (verse 3) that gets to me this week because I was again in the crosshairs of the Facebook AI. Apparently Facebook has fired most of its standards people (including the one friend that I had who worked at Facebook) so my week long ban stuck.
And the weeklong ban was for a meme that gets shared all over Facebook, especially on the Ides of March - the one that goes "Whoever made September, October and November the 9th, 10th and 11th month should be stabbed." Because it promotes violence. Against Julius Fucking Caesar. And again, I'd be ok with that if this was a fucking sensible rule but it's not. How do I know it's not? Because I repeatedly make complaints against Nazis, conspiracy theorists, racists and transphobes on Facebook and then get the gaslighting "this isn't against Facebook standards"
Yes, G-d is arbitrary and shitty and lets the wicked prosper and the virtuous suffer. I expect better from Facebook standards. If other media companies can cancel Andrew Taint while G-d takes his only sweet time with that tumor, you'd think that Facebook would deal with the shitbags. But yeah, Facebook was complicit in the Myanmar genocide.
So what's the rest of this chapter. It's still pretty dark but it's also one of the ultimate "fuck you G-d" chapters where Job talks about being created and risen up just so he can get smashed. And he's actually asking why G-d would make this a thing. Job knows that he's innocent (and as a reader, we know that Job is innocent. Thank you, Satan). Yet, does Job's innocence help him? No.
And then we end with another "if only I was never born" verse. I just wonder if we would hear this verse a lot more if the anti-forced birth movement was full of religious fanatics and the forced birth assholes did not selectively quote the Bible.
