Excessive Religiosity Of A Mennonite

[victusinveritas]

[e-n-d-a-s-h]

Liz Toohey-Wiese, 2024.

"A sign installed in the largest wildfire burn I’ve ever seen, along the BC/YK border. Borrowing the aesthetics of BC Recreation Site signs, once again pointing to the overlaps of outdoor recreation, resource extraction, and the consequences of the climate crisis. Most recreation sites in BC exist along previously built logging and mining roads.

“Forced into a great and difficult transformation” was a line I heard in a lecture on Buddhist philosophy I was listening to on my drive up north. But it became another mantra I thought about while living in a place that’s been utterly transformed by resource extraction over the past century, and as I thought about the burnt landscapes I drove through."

More here.

[youcouldmakeareligionoutofthat]

“Let people enjoy things” no. If u have ever read or watched a hockey romance then “we breed lions” is now required reading no exceptions.

[youcouldmakeareligionoutofthat]

one of the funniest hockey conversations i ever had was with an american who knew I wasn't much of a hockey fan; he found out where I was from and said oh I know that place because, I don't know if you know this, but there's a hockey team there.... as if there is an conscious human being in a 300km radius of said town who doesn't know about that team. I loved it. I wish knowing things about hockey was optional and I don't even hate hockey

[youcouldmakeareligionoutofthat]

as a girl from (relatively) small town western canada who went to high school with these assholes, I appreciated the healing power of watching heated rivalry and living in a rich fantasy world where hockey players are not all entitled rapey misogynists. but then they had shane reading a book and it forcibly removed me from that world damn it.

[youcouldmakeareligionoutofthat]

Like a lot of things are being enshittified but today I’m pissed off by how every app responds to you taking a screenshot by popping up their “share post” screen. I have literally never wanted to share it via the app. I’m taking a screenshot so it’s a static image in my photos. I’m aware you have an embedded share function and I’ve chosen not to use it. Usually it’s just for my own purposes anyway. Screw off and die

[youcouldmakeareligionoutofthat]

I though advertising was purely an evil scourge upon society but then someone had a seizure at work and the PSA ad from when I was a kid played like a movie through my mind and I did all the things from that commercial. So maybe all pop up ads on website should be government funded first aid instructional videos.

[kaijuno]

Who that man

[hollow-head]

blorbo from my petroglyphs

[technofeudalism]

betting on nuclear annihilation and mutually assured destruction like it’s an NFL playoff game. this country is so totally and completely beyond the pale. you could not create a more sick and depraved society in your wildest imagination. we’ve shot across the Rubicon and are storming towards Rome with a level of malignant temerity can only be described as straight up suicidal. death cult nation.

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

Gilded Age Protestant moralists were right about gambling.

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

#I really don’t know how this moral arc can be righted#but I suppose there’s no use but to keep trying to steer the ship back

(from @bug-gribble)

[afloweroutofstone]

what i’ve failed to understand since i was a kid is why these ghouls want war with iran so badly. is it resources? do they have money in defense contracting? is it just that iran is too strong an opponent to us hegemony? why specifically do they want to see iran destroyed?

There is not one singular motivation behind the drive to send the US to war with Iran. There are multiple motivations which often overlap, but which are held in different orders of prioritization by different advocates of war. Most of these motivations are irrational and/or immoral, while others are legitimate complaints that could be addressed through diplomacy far more easily than they could through militarism.

Here's ten common motivations and arguments for a US war with Iran which you might encounter:

Independence from the US: The Iranian government is among the world's least-willing governments to obey US demands and subjugate themselves to the US-led order. For certain US primacists, this independence means that their very existence poses an existential threat to US dominance (similar to North Korea, Cuba, etc.) To a particular type of US militarist, it is necessary for the Iranian government to fall in order for the US to remain the unquestioned leader of the world.

Real Fear of their Nukes: There is a substantial contingent who really does believe that Iran is close to developing a nuclear weapon and that they could well use it if they were to develop it. Logically, the best way to address this concern would be through a diplomatic deal similar to the 2015 JCPOA, which Iran complied with! But the intensity of anti-Iranian sentiment among US hawks tends to convince them that direct military confrontation is somehow a better option, thus explaining why Trump decided to break this deal.

Desire for Revenge: Many older foreign policy hawks in the US have never forgiven Iran for 1) the 1979 US Embassy hostage crisis, and 2) the 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Lebanon, which was orchestrated by a terror organization with ties to the Iranian government. In their minds, both of these incidents were embarrassments to the US' military prestige which we have never properly gotten revenge for. (These people tend to ignore the massive wrongdoings which the US has carried out against Iran during this same time period, like the US destruction of Iran Air Flight 655). There are people in and around the Pentagon who have wanted to bomb Iran over a grudge for more than 40 years now.

Iran's Regional Proxies: Over the last several decades, Iran has engaged in an aggressive campaign to expand their influence throughout the region by supporting proxy paramilitary forces in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, etc. Many of these proxies have undeniably engaged in acts of terrorism. This strategy is both opportunistic (taking advantage of the power vacuum caused by the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein) and defensive (countering the regional influence campaigns of Saudi Arabia and Turkey). This is probably the most legitimate cause of US anger towards the Iranian government, but it is a grievance which will only be worsened by backing Iran into a corner militarily.

Israel (and Saudi Arabia) Hates Them: Iran is unfriendly with two of the US' closest partners in the region: Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Israeli government, in particular, has long been laser-focused on the overthrow of the Iranian government, and they are fully committed to dragging the US into such a regime change operation. For the most fervent defenders of Israel in the US, overthrowing the Iranian government is near the top of their wishlist.

They Got Oil: Oil is a factor which is often overstated in these discussions, but it definitely is one of the factors. Iran currently produces 5% of the world's oil and has the potential to produce far more were the current sanction regime against it to be removed. They also have the ability to shut down the Straight of Hormuz, an important chokepoint through which 25% of the world's oil flows. Regime change in Iran would significantly increase the leverage that the US and its allies hold over global oil markets and further weaken the strength of OPEC.

And Other Commodities Too!: Though the separation between the US and Iranian economies hurts the US economy as a whole, there are certain sectors of US industry that benefit enormously from having Iran so heavily sanctioned. Some of the big names in the US pistachio industry have lobbied heavily to keep US-Iranian relations unfriendly, because the elimination of US sanctions on Iran would allow the massive Iranian pistachio industry to compete with the US industry. As long as these two governments hate each other, a few politically-connected US businessmen make way more money.

Diaspora Pressure Campaigns: Most Iranian-Americans hold the following two opinions at the same time: 1) they hate the current Iranian government and want to see it replaced, but 2) they strongly oppose US efforts at regime change in Iran. However, there is a vocal minority of Iranian-Americans that do support regime change efforts, and they tend to cluster into two well-organized groups that wage pressure campaigns against the Iranian government. The first are the monarchists, who want to see the son of the former US-backed Iranian dictator restored to power. The others are those who are loyal to the MEK, a cult and former terrorist organization which has been extremely effective at building relationships with US politicians. Both of these groups work full-time to push the US towards overthrowing the Iranian government so that they can step in and take over; it's fairly easy to find both of these groups in online social media threads about US-Iranian relations.

Who Cares, We Want War: As I have written about many times before, the US military-industrial complex encourages the US government to engage in militarist behavior in order to boost their profits. Iran is one of their favorite boogeymen to justify increased levels of US military spending, second only to China. These companies fund think tanks and other policy initiatives to argue that Iran is an immediate threat to us, and then they fund political candidates who want to spend more money preparing for this "threat."

They're Crazy! You Can't Trust Them!: We are led to believe that the Iranian government cannot be negotiated with because they are irrational, they're anti-Western religious zealots incapable of reasoned decision-making. This is a convenient excuse for war, but it's entirely incompatible with the restraint that the Iranian government shows in responding to Israeli attacks, their continued willingness to sit down for diplomatic talks with their aggressors, the way that they helped the US government deal with al Qaeda and the Taliban after 9/11, and a million other indications that the Iranian government is just as rational as any other government in its geopolitical decision-marking.

Add all of that together, and you get a deranged political ecosystem obsessed with inflating the scale of foreign threats, finding excuses for maintaining the trajectory of our militarist status quo, increasing regional tensions, and rejecting obvious opportunities for diplomacy and a peaceful resolution of our differences.

[youcouldmakeareligionoutofthat]

Finally watched the terror season one and I can see why everyone on tumblr was obsessed

[youcouldmakeareligionoutofthat]

But it was a mistake to watch it in [city redacted] during [season redacted] bc every day when I bike to work in the cold and the ice and the snow and the dark I think about how I’m probably being hunted by tuunbaq

[youcouldmakeareligionoutofthat]

Finally watched the terror season one and I can see why everyone on tumblr was obsessed

[bedlund]

i think brady tkachuk belongs in prison. (remembers i dont believe in incarceration as a solution for anything) we should restructure society so that brady tkachuk cannot exist within it

[youcouldmakeareligionoutofthat]

The new visibility of gambling in the form of sports betting and gaming apps has really solidified for me that the Mennonites were 100% right about gambling being totally evil

[gatheringbones]

[“TUCK: Well, I was about to ask that actually, I was gonna ask how growing up around Mennonite and formerly Mennonite people informed the ways that you first had concepts of gender and gender roles and stuff?

CASEY: Oh, shit, what a great question! Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, so like, on my mother's side, specifically, my mother's side is more rural, more conservative, and a little more old school—my father's family belonged to a Mennonite denomination that was kind of a little more assimilated, a little more, kind of had more things in common with, like, U.S.-style evangelicism. And they were more urban. So I'm specifically talking about my mother's side of things here. They’re EMC, used to be the Kleine Gemeinde. Maybe like three people will know what that means, but that's for you! My mom's family was EMC, my dad's family was Mennonite Bretheren. There you go. Anyway, that was a branch of religion that practiced, you know, it was like very specific about traditional gender roles where things were very gender segregated. You know, my mom, for example, grew up where like, there were men who sat on one side of the church and women who sat on the other side. Like that kind of thing. I think it stopped when she was like, maybe a teenager or in her early 20s. It was before I was born, but it was like just before I was born.

But also, Mennonites practice unconditional pacifism, and there is this extremely… um, an underpinning of the religion is non-violence. And I mean, like, there's plenty of violence that happens in Mennonite communities, but there is still sort of a different attitude towards it, and a lot of the religion is centered around this idea of peace, in every kind of sense of the term, which obviously intersects a lot with questions of gender. So I would say that when I was growing up, I mean, like, Mennoniteism influenced a lot about like, gave me sort of this weird role models of peaceful masculinity. Like, that that was possible. Like, there's also plenty of role models that were not peaceful masculinity, but like they were there and they existed. Traditional Mennoniteism kind of like doesn't really fit in terms of like, our modern political parlance in all sorts of ways, because it comes with things like pacifism, because it has—some parts of it have this really like socialist ethoses. Like, there's this group of people called Hutterites that are an offshoot of Mennonites that literally believe that private property is a sin. Like it's an actual literal hell-worthy sin to have private property. You know, they're also an extraordinarily like, deathly homophobic society. And you can find lots of stuff from their expats that will talk to you about that. And also, it's like, I mean, I've been on Hutterite colonies, and they're like, literal, functional communes that are like, kind of amazing and beautiful. And also, the last time I was on one was when I was nine years old, because for obvious reasons.”]

Casey Plett Gender Reveal

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

[is-the-post-reliable]

requested by anonymous:

RATING: RELIABLE

The above is from this article from The Guardian.  The images are from MYA Network. The caption on their website reads:

Source: ‘When a sperm and egg get together, the body creates tissue in order to support the developing pregnancy.  Here are photos of that tissue from 5-9 week pregnancies.  This is called the gestational sac, and it’s like the “house” for the pregnancy. Inside this sac there are cells that have the potential to become a fetus but there is no visible embryo at this stage. We rinsed off the blood and menstrual lining (decidua) for these photographs.’

The published images sparked a lot of debate, leading to the story being picked up by other news outlets. For example:

Source: ‘Last week, the Guardian published images of pregnancy tissue after abortions in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. The small size and appearance of the tissue were shocking to many. We have all absorbed, knowingly and unknowingly, the pervasive anti-abortion narrative that a pregnancy resembles a tiny baby starting in the earliest weeks. Though an early embryo can be seen under the magnification of ultrasound, it can take months for it to be perceptible to the naked eye.’

Source: ‘People have responded in disbelief, citing the (magnified) images they’ve seen on ultrasounds. […] ”Think of the illustrations on pregnancy and medical websites. The Mayo Clinic, one of the preeminent medical organizations in the country, shows week-by-week illustrations of embryonic and fetal development without any context of scale, like the rulers in the MYA photos.’

As stated in the article, whilst people talk about a ‘heartbeat’ at 6 weeks, there is no heart developed at this stage - only a group of cells that will become part of the heart.

Source: ‘But what exactly do we mean when we talk about a “fetal heartbeat” at six weeks of pregnancy? Although some people might picture a heart-shaped organ beating inside a fetus, this is not the case. Rather, at six weeks of pregnancy, an ultrasound can detect “a little flutter in the area that will become the future heart of the baby,” said Dr. Saima Aftab, medical director of the Fetal Care Center at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami. This flutter happens because the group of cells that will become the future “pacemaker” of the heart gain the capacity to fire electrical signals, she said.’

It should also be noted that the images show an embryo, not a fetus, until the 9th week.

Source: ‘In human pregnancies, a baby-to-be isn’t considered a fetus until the 9th week after conception, or week 11 after your last menstrual period (LMP).’

The co-founders of the MYA Network responded in a New York Times article.

Source: ‘Many people, even those who support abortion rights, did not believe the photos were accurate. Some insisted we had deliberately removed the embryos before taking the photos. The images weren’t consistent with those often seen in embryological textbooks, magnified on ultrasounds or used in anti-abortion propaganda; these enlarged images are not what you see with the naked eye after an abortion. A Stanford gynecologic pathologist has validated our photos, but many people could not believe the pictures were presented unaltered.

[loveridden1999]