[prisonhannibal]

if I was hannibal when he was in prison I would've been even more annoying I would've been like "remember when you came over for dinner and I said this? Pretty clever now that you have context, wasn't it? I thought so."

[mysharona1987]

[callese]

[dutchovensnuggie]

[pisces-gf]

[foulserpent]

one of the most fascinating/nightmarish components of american evangelism is prosperity gospel. im not even sure theres any other facet of mainstream christianity that is SO transparently evil and fundamentally opposed to like, human life and kindness?

like if youre unfamiliar the idea is essentially that god rewards the faithful with literal economic wealth, and it exists mostly to tell poor people that the reason theyre poor is bc theyre not faithful enough, and that they can prove their faith to god by giving whatever money they have to a rich televangelist grifter who owns 5 planes and a megayacht.

[yarnold]

the two core ideas here are 1. god rewards the faithful 2. give money to church neither of which feel like new ideas? it just feels like mandate of heaven/tithing but like, more transactional

[foulserpent]

its not, and if you actually look into what prosperity gospel/prosperity theology is, youll understand the difference. its a very specifically modern capitalist phenomena

its kind of hard to find good thorough run-downs of it from secular sources though (since a lot of the discussion is from other christian groups) so aside from like reading the wikipedia article id recommend this npr show. its a long listen but its a good rundown of the history of prosperity theology and evangelism in america in general

[pure]

everyone forgot that mlk jr. said he hated white moderates

[pure]

he said white moderates were a greater stumbling block to freedom than the kkk. mlk jr said that.

[swtrgy-deactivated20250202]

yo can someone please tell me if this is accurate? Because that’s fucked up

[regularlesbian]

yes and he was right

[projectburnt]

read the thing for yourself https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/Letter_Birmingham_Jail.pdf

Most relevant paragraph 

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

[rev-krissy]

He wasn’t wrong. It is, sadly, still true today.

[blessedarethebinarybreakers]

“…who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” We talk about this in seminary all the time: peace that is won by one side holding its foot on the other side’s throat is not peace. When we pray for peace, we must pray for peace with justice, never at the cost of justice, made by silencing the oppressed.

Fellow white people, don’t just reblog or share mlk jr.’s more palatable “hate cannot drive out hate” type quotes and ignore the fact that he also said challenging things like this. We must hold ourselves accountable. We must not be lukewarm. And there is never a “more convenient season” to act to secure rights for all people – the time is now.

[sourcedumal]

He also had a speech to the APA that openly called out white people for caring more about “riots” and damaged property than the fact that Black people were suffering under institutional violence.

He called out white people regularly for their lack of empathy for Black lives and their continuance to spout respectability at Black people than hold the white policymakers accountable for their racism.

[0dabiah]

Boost tf outta this for MLK day.

  We’re done talking about “ I Have a Dream”.

[disgooseting]

time for white people to wake the fuck up

[areasontobreathe]

This

[quantumized-insanity]

Yeah, that stands true for every political issue I’ve seen. Those who are indifferent or feign indifference do more to slow political and social progress than any outright hate group.

[ms-demeanor]

The US army has increased its signing bonus to a max of fifty thousand dollars.

This is your reminder that no matter how good a $50k signing bonus from the army seems, it is not worth it.

First of all, the US army is bad. I know that sounds simplistic and obvious, but that's hard to remember when you're just looking to get out of a tough situation. But the army is bad. They're bad and they do bad things and you will do bad things for them. The US Armed Forces kill innocent people who want nothing to do with the wars we bring to their doorsteps.

If you think that having a Democrat in the White House means you won't be called upon to kill civilians, you're wrong.

You may tell yourself that we're not at war, that you'll never actually fire on another human, that you aren't going to be a drone pilot. But you don't know that. None of that shit is your choice when you're in the military. A war could start tomorrow. You could be sent out to kill people even if we aren't at war - we do it all the time - and you don't get to choose what you're going to do. Choosing to join the military is giving up the choice to not kill someone. As soon as you participate in that system, your options are to charge ahead or to be discharged.

If that's not a good enough reason for you, then remember that the military doesn't care about you. The army doesn't give a shit if you leave with PTSD so long as they still get their budget. The Navy doesn't give a shit what damage it does to your body. The Marines don't care about who you are and what they're taking out of you when they fill you up with a myth of brotherhood and a mountain of discipline.

Joining the military is going to be traumatic at some level. When you're done with your term you'll think that you're going to get support - medical treatment or a pension or money for school - and it's going to be like pulling teeth to get any of that, and it's going to be hard to get back into the swing of what life is like without the military making your choices for you. It'll be hard to find a job, it'll be hard to find support. It'll be hard to get along with people who don't have the same experience that you do because you took yourself outside of the normal experience of life in your country. You will resent the people you come home to and it will be because of a situation that you created, and nobody is going to be around to help you resolve that tension, which is going to make reenlisting look pretty attractive.

And if that's not enough reason for you, if you're trying to get out of a bad situation and this looks like the only way and the recruiter is telling you that you're gonna get fifty grand that you can put into savings and have it build interest while you're enlisted and you're going to get out and be rich and all your troubles will be behind you - that's bullshit too.

Almost nobody gets the high end of the bonus. It's not paid out immediately, and what most people DO get in the first six months is gone by the end of the first year because you signed up for that money for a REASON, so of course you spend the $8k you got instead of the $50k you signed up for, and of course you don't save it.

If you live in a city where the minimum wage is $15 an hour then a minimum wage job will pay more than your starting salary in the army, and getting a higher salary will depend on you staying in and working your way up the ladder, each increase convincing you to stay longer, to reach for the next rung. If you don't live in a city with a minimum wage that high, a bus ticket and a bunch of roommates are a hell of a lower cost than the possibility of being asked to kill people.

Almost all the vets I know are cops, are fucked up, are dead, or are some combination of those three things. You're not going to come out of the army rich, you may not come out of the army at all, and if you do make it out you're not going to be the same person on the other end. You will have learned some things about yourself and about discipline, and about how the world works, but those things aren't going to help you be a happier, healthier, better person.

Don't sign up. The bonus is a lie and the national pride is a lie and the job skills and fraternity and discipline is a lie.

Don't join the army.

[homunculus-argument]

One absolutely hilarious part of human existence is the repeated incidents of spicy bananas. People who have lived their entire lives up to this point just assuming that a specific fruit or vegetable is supposed to taste bitter, tangy, or spicy, having no fucking idea that all this time, they've been allergic to this plant. Because how would they have known? You learn what things taste like by tasting them, nobody's going to tell you that bananas are supposed to be one of the mildest flavours out there. And people already eat so many things that taste hot, bitter, tangy and tart! Because they like how that kind of thing tastes like!

You can just happily much on a plant, thinking "ah, this angry plant tastes sharp because it hates me. Much like all the other sharp angry plants that people eat because they like the sharp", and it wouldn't cross their mind to think that the plant just hates you, specifically.

[msfcatlover]

This is sitting on the shelf of human experiences riiiight next to people who don’t realize they’re colorblind.

[deadmomjokes]

My best friend’s husband didn’t realize he was colorblind until after they were married in their mid-twenties and she watched him run a stop sign that was in front of a big bush. He’d lived his entire life not knowing. So when they did some tests and realized “hey, you’re super colorblind,” he got to thinking, it’s X-linked, right? Which means it had to have come from Mom’s side of the family, so he started digging and asked his mom’s dad, and Grampa was like “Well that would explain a lot, I suppose. I kind of thought your grandma was just pulling my leg about the tomatoes.”

Because Grandma had apparently banned him early on from picking the tomatoes in the garden because he was constantly coming in with unripe ones, and he thought she was just being super nitpicky about it. This was a lifelong family joke, that Grandpa couldn’t tell a ripe tomato to save his life, and nobody ever stopped to wonder if maybe he and the grandson who routinely colored the grass red on his drawings might have something going on with their ability to see red and green as distinct colors.

[yardsards]

i thought aloe vera gel was SUPPOSED TO burn your skin. like how rubbing alcohol burns when applied to a cut. figured that everyone else was just better at gritting their teeth and bearing the full body aloe sting than i was. i just didn't feel like the stinging was worth the mild healing properties aloe had.

yeah... turns out it's NOT supposed to burn and i was just allergic to aloe

[life-on-the-spectrum]

STORY TIME!!!!!!!

My husband comes from a “weird” family. Like, the whole county knows. “He’s a total weirdo. AAAH THAT’S HIS LAST NAME THAT EXPLAINS IT OKAY NO PROBLEM GO FLY FREE DUDE WE LOVE YOU!!” The family’s just a bunch of freaks, like the Addams Family meets the Beverly Hillbillies. I ADORE them.

It was celebrated because they’re so valuable to the local community. This one sells meticulously grown veggies at the farmer’s market, then hisses at you for suggesting they wear soemthing that isn’t tie-dyed. That kid was in kindergarten before she said her first word, and that’s cool because her older sister translated for her NO THANK YOU TEACHER WE DO NOT NEED A DOCTOR THAT IS NORMAL FOR THIS FAMILY GO AWAY. She’s got two quiet kids of her own now and WE STILL DO NOT NEED A DOCTOR GO AWAY. That uncle knows everything there is to know about every car engine ever, and he never wears shoes with laces because he literally never worked out how to tie them (He’s 60). He’s also the top mechanic in his town and makes serious dough that put his super-smart daughter through college, and now she’s an ace veterinarian who pterodactyl screams at acrylic sweaters and keeps everyone’s pets alive. I shit you not, the family matriarch gets excited for tax season every year and begs everyone to bring her their taxes so she can MATH at them. It’s her freaking hobby.

Whatever. They’re in OUR family. It’s totally normal for us. The family’s just full of freaks, that’s all. We encourage our people to go with their strengths and use their skills to make our little corner of the world a nicer place to live in, then teach them how to manage the difficult parts of the world because we all had to learn to do it ourselves. “Because this family’s full of people just as freaky as you. You’re one of us.”

No, most of them don’t go to college. It’s rural Illinois, of course they don’t. Lots of them end up in specialized trades, like electricians or farmers, and they always kick ass at it. They tend towards jobs that require a lot of focus, and attention to detal, and very specific, in-depth knowledge that is almost useless outside of whatever field they’re in. We’re mostly spread between two or three small towns in Illinois, and I do not think these three towns would function without my husband’s family fixing and growing everything they do.

One of our cousins’ kids got diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder a few years ago. His now-ex-wife insisted that something was wrong and that our cousin was a jerk for not caring enough to notice. The family reacted with “He’s fine, it’s normal, we all did that when we were his age... wait... shit... what do you mean it’s genetic?”

It turns out that like 70% of my husband’s side of the family is autistic as fuck. We’re talking about grandmothers. Uncles. Cousins. People are in their 70s just now figuring out why they are how they are. 

They’re just so famously weird in our community that they attract the other weird people as partners, and then they have weird little kids, and no one really looks twice. A bunch of the people (including me) who married in were informally adopted first. “Oh, your parents punished you for this behavior? We all do that here. Come to the barbecue!” Two years later, I had their last name and was helping watch their adorable little handflappy babies.

We’ve got an entire gene pool over here of autistic people thriving so well that no one noticed we were all autistic.

Also, that cousin got RID of his wife when she started talking about how “tragic” their son’s autism is. Their son is a perfectly normal child in our family and will be raised as such. We joke now that when something needs fixed, “Oh, just call Uncle So-and-So, he’ll autism at it.”’

I fucking love this family so much.

[prokopetz]

Something just occurred to me.

You know how back in the pre-Internet days, it was nearly impossible to watch a TV series in its entirety because the local affiliate stations would deliberately air the episodes all out of order, then do some sort of statistical sorcery to figure out which particular episodes gave the advertisers the best return for their dollar and just run those ten or twelve specific episodes in an endless semi-randomised rotation, and that was why every time you channel-surfed across a particular show it always seemed to be the same damn episode?

Twitter’s algorithm is literally the social media equivalent of that.

[mrmeriwether]

In middle/high school I put all the music I had on an off-brand mp3 player and would just set it to Shuffle All. I quickly realized the player’s shuffle fuction wasn’t purely random–it was weighted towards my favorite songs (aka the songs with the most plays).

Only I had never chosen those songs. They were just the random few to pop up the first time I shuffled everything, and they started playing more and more frequently as this horribly short-sighted algorithm fed itself bad data, until I was so annoyed at those few songs that I stopped listening entirely.

Anyway a few years later Facebook did the exact same thing with my friends list, siphoning me off from seeing most of my feed because OBVIOUSLY I interacted with them the most, therefore they must be my besties. But really they were just the only people showing up for me to interact with in the first place, until I was down to just a few people I never really talked to from high school, a college prof, and my racist uncle I kept calling out.

And shortly after that, YouTube followed suit, replacing “Subscriptions” with “Recommended” as the default category, and trying to find “things I liked” when it was really just whatever three channels I’d watched last, whatever unrelated viral vid it wanted to push that week, and weird perennials like Whose Line clips or lockpick reviews or YTPs that seem to hibernate for months at a time then return like locusts.

All this to say: the big mysterious algorithms that now run all the major platforms on the internet are never acting in your best interests. They’re just that junky mp3 player’s Shuffle All with a fresh coat of paint, and, to be clear, this is by design. They are VERY good at what they do, which is funneling users into nice predictable pockets of content that advertisers can exploit.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Last week.

Just last week I was using VLC, and I realized the same few songs kept playing over and over again. I ended up downloading an extension to manually shuffle the playlist.

I know Twitter lets you switch to chrono order. Facebook hides it in the sidebar, as “Most Recent”.

[gobletblind-shibboleth]

realize this

[third-order-simulacra]

holy shit im so glad to see that thread screencap again thank you

[oldshowbiz]

Be wary of any politician or polemic who uses the term “Cultural Marxism” to deride liberals, college students, professors, or artists. 

The phrase originated in Nazi Germany as “Cultural Bolshevism” and was used to deride the same people. 

[thedailypositivityblog]

Redditors crashed the website with donations over $25k and 0 wishes left. via /r/MadeMeSmile

Click here and follow to get more daily positivity on your dash!

[no-mere-mortals]

In response to this event, some redditors created r/charityraid, with the goal of concentrating the power of thousands of users into a single charity at a time to hopefully break a few more sites.

[thefitzandthegeralds]

As of 9/21/21, the site has updated with more wishes. The incredible spike in donations is amazing, but if you want to and are able to keep the momentum going, there are over 300 waiting to be filled at https://www.onesimplewish.org!

[oneheadtoanother]

[glamourweaver]

The white suburbs were born of white flight from communities of color. The fantasy of defending the “homestead” from the “marauding savages” is an integral part of the frontier mythology of America.

[dilfosaur]

i realized this was also lost in the fall of the CH website so

since it’s That Time of Year again, i’m just gonna bring back my Every Christmas TV Rom-Com comic

[hugwort]

“The Patient” | Handmade paper, monotype, and found object installation | 2021 

In the context of medicine, what does it mean to be born “different? How is the helpless body of the deformed, defective, or debilitated patient regarded by the doctor? Is it tragedy from the beginning? Is it the justification for a benevolent surgeon’s science experiments? Contending with questions about my own medical history, the piece asks: what’s does it look like  when your body isn’t your own? How does it feel?

The viewer was encouraged to enter the room and handle the folder of documents, which contains copies of medical records pertaining to a series of consultations, physical exams, and surgical procedures that I underwent from ages 4 to 6. On the cover and occasionally nestled between the pages of documents are a series of monotypes exploring the thoughts and feelings that arose from the consequences of these events. 

[cognitohazardous]

from the recreational benadryl subreddit (r/DPH)

[cognitohazardous]

[ahordeofmandrills]

A reddit for healthy happy people

[pulling-aggro]

reddit for people who want to see horrors beyond their comprehension and then die and honestly? i cant blame them

[mediamattersforamerica]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that many young people are concerned about having kids because climate change will make the planet increasingly uninhabitable.

Fox News hosts are now claiming she wants to “get rid of children.”

[urban-hieroglyphs]

Fuck fox news bro. Rich people playing dumb to influence poor people to be dumb

[spiroandthelacktones]

There’s hardly been such a blatant and clear example of how biased media outlets twist things… this should be in a damn text book on propaganda

[cockyroaches]

Her: kids are scared about the future and wonder if they could have a family with how terrible the world is

Rich ppl: sounds like communist China :^/

[betterbemeta]

I want to point out that “maybe these aren’t stable conditions to raise children in” sends rich people, nationalist/fascist people, religious fundamentalist people into the same kind of panic and demonstrates the most basic level they are allied on: baby farming.

Rich people farm babies because they need to ensure that their own children will live in the same type of deeply unequal society as they did and thus can inherit their wealth and be assured that there are enough workers to ensure that it maintains the same value. Even if they do not create ideal conditions for raising children, they demand you replace yourself with a new person to toil away for them, and to need their resources and have to buy shit to survive, anyway.

Nationalists/Fascists farm babies because they believe that controlling the family sphere is the best way to control information and to produce armies and police that enforce their legitimacy. If they are isolationists, they want to stop all migratory populations which means they are extremely vulnerable to the population aging faster than it can reproduce. In the racist context they also believe in both out-populating what they see as inferior races, but they also on the quiet don’t want their enemies to stop having kids either because that means they won’t be able to exploit future generations for free labor, or have an “other” accessible to scare their kids over.

Religious fundamentalists farm babies because they believe that population under a religion determines its strength and sphere of influence and they would rather have a noncompetitive time of it by breeding more followers rather than trying to appeal to converts, whom they distrust. You can see this in certain organized fertility movements like Quiverfull, etc. Many fundamentalists fear that as religion becomes more voluntary and personal, rather than an obligation under threat of violence, the power and influence of religion will shrink.

All three of these interests oppose accessible and free health care, family planning and reproductive rights. All of these interests have significant reasons for opposing the right to a safe, accessible, and nonjudgmental abortion, as well as the right to safe, accessible, and nonjudgmental prenatal care and post-natal child support, and in the USA, universal parental leave. 

It may seem counter-intuitive that people who farm babies might want to make it hard to be a new parent but consider that setting a precedent for public assistance in one direction also sets it in the other. Instead, they prefer forms of influence like fox news up there that mostly do not have to take responsibility for the welfare of the people, but instead can just sway public opinion to vote against their own health and safety, or sway the public to uncritically accept actions pushed by far-right lobbyists.

Any interest that promotes hierarchy promotes it from the cradle to the grave.

[hayatims-deactivated20240111]

so, with the miss universe contestants having arrived in occupied palestine, they are being taught how to make traditional palestinians foods, dressed in traditional palestinian thobes, and taught traditional palestinian dances

as this celebration of appropriated culture was taking place in the west bank, this was gaza:

over two million people are trapped under a constant air, sea, and land blockade, inside one of the world’s largest cages

while miss universe contestants celebrate stolen culture, the genocide is ongoing. while they danced and sang and feasted and posted under the tourist hashtag of #visit_israel, the israeli government held a ribbon cutting ceremony for the continued oppression and ethnic cleansing of the very people who’s culture is advertised and consumed as a tourist attraction

[arabian-batboy]

There are 8 stages when it comes to the denial of settler-colonialism and when it comes to the Zionist occupation of Palestine, it seems we’re at the last stage

The vast majority of these European settlers (AKA Israelis) weren’t even here a 100 years ago, yet somehow Palestinian clothes/food/traditions that have around for centuries and millenniums somehow became these colonizers to claim? Meanwhile Israeli has demolished an actual Bedouin village with actual Bedouin people for the 192nd time in a row at the same exact time these so called contestants are having this cute Bedouin-themed picnic with their colonizer hosts.

Anyways, all of these "beauty" queen that’s participating in the Miss Universe competition in occupied Palestine (aka Israel) is ugly as a pig, every single one of those complicit hoes.

[dumb-of-ass-pure-of-heart]

Hey I’m once again seeing discourse about PewDiePie (probably because he has been welcomed back into the larger community of youtube personalities playing Among Us like Corpse Husband, JackSepticEye and Cr1tikal) and I just want to remind people of his ugly racist history that he has never properly put behind him and in fact continues to perpetuate.

His fanbase has always been racist. He was one of the first big YouTubers and he has always made racially charged jokes and has said the n-word in videos - notably, targeting somebody else with it. I watched his content when I was a young child, I experienced these things first hand. There were racist jokes, rape jokes, and generally sexual jokes targeted for his younger demographic. He has always been known as problematic, as problematic was used back in 2012.

A preamble to his first exposé: in November 2016 he showed up to a taping of his own series produced by Maker Studios (Disney) wearing a shirt with a swastika on it. Somebody told him to change. He denies this ever happened, but acknowledged that the shirt exists. There are photos of him and a friend wearing it.

The thing he got caught for was when he paid two men $5 to write and hold up a sign with the words “Death To All Jews”. His apology was half-assed. He apologized for the way that it came across and did not acknowledge the reasons that it was wrong. Febuary 2017: he descends into utter alt-right reactionism, harassing the WSJ journalist and sending his fans after the publication to the point where the Journal offered to put the journalist in a safehouse.

September 2017, he called somebody he n-word on stream, just weeks after Charlottesville occurred - where his imagery, jokes, and memes were used as motivation. He went on to say he had no idea that Nazis actually existed, that the Nazi jokes he was making weren’t funny anymore, and that he would not be making them anymore.

In March 2019, a white supremacist livestreamed himself saying “Subscribe to PewDiePie” before committing mass-shootings in two Christchurch mosques, killing dozens and injuring more. He responded with a single tweet, that he felt sickened that his name left the man’s mouth, and that his heart went out to the people affected. Later, he called for an end to the Subscribe to PewDiePie meme and promised $50,000 to the Anti-Defamation League. He then retracted his decision, saying that he did not want to donate to something that he was not passionate about.

Felix Kjellberg has never made a single attempt to rid his fanbase of actual literal Nazis and white supremacist scum because he built his platform around them. He alone has radicalized probably half of the white nationalist/supremacist/Nazi men in America ages 18-25.

I will never forgive him.

This is taken from the Guardian article from above:

You could say that today’s digital economy has spawned a new “bro-nality of evil”. Racist memes serve as in-jokes that help solidify bonds between alienated white men online. The style of these memes, their overblown exaggerated nature, means we often don’t take them seriously. Dismiss them as jokes. But this is how antisemitism creeps into our lives. Not with a bang but with a punchline.

Happy Chanukkah, everyone.

[dumb-of-ass-pure-of-heart]

this is getting a little traction so I just wanted to point out that I’m saying this I’m not black, I am a native Jewish person with a degree in how race, gender, and class move through modern media. Nazis in America target black and Jewish people in particular and it would be an incomplete conversation if I didn’t include his racism.