Religious folk like to claim that lack of God begets a lack of morals, and to a certain extent they’re right. Only, it’s not secularism that causes the problems but rather instilling people with notions of magical punishments for their actions, hammering into them the import of doing good not for the sake of being a good person, of not doing harm to others because they understand harm, but for the sake of saving themselves from some fantastic damnation. And once that veil is pulled away, what’s the point? Once religion, once God is exposed as a fraud, then suddenly the impetus to do good out of fear is eliminated as well. And when you confuse morality with a system of religion, this can be really dangerous.

It’s similar to the way we approach other things, too: Like how we build up these mythical tales of marijuana use killing you on your first use, and destroying your life, and being so addictive and horrible that you’ll be ruined within months if you ever even think about smoking a joint. And then people actually end up smoking pot at some point in their lives and realizing it’s not even close to as bad as depicted, and in fact quite pleasant with seemingly few side effects with responsible use. And then it dawns on them that other drugs were depicted this way, too, so maybe it’s safe to give, say, heroin a go. Or crack. Hell, why not some crystal meth?

And that’s what the gateway is: Not some intrinsic property of the drugs themselves, but rather the way we condition ourselves as a species to think about things. We aren’t honest with ourselves because we don’t seem to be able to trust ourselves to be adults. (And it’s cyclical, of course: Treat someone like a child and they’ll become one.) We end up inventing all these little tricks to try to convince ourselves that intensely exaggerated and often outright invented repercussions will result from actions we’re afraid (sometimes with good reason — see: heroin) or uncomfortable to take. And in doing so, in lying to ourselves, we never fully grasp what the actual situations are, what the actual dangers are. All we do is prop up a bunch of facades of boogeymen and train ourselves to believe that if we do something “wrong”, they’re going to come alive at night and eat us.

And some people can only be tricked for so long.

When you find out that Santa Claus isn’t real, for how long do you continue kissing ass with your parents? The whole thing was just a device to get you to behave for an entire year for a single annual reward. There was always the threat of no presents at Christmas, because Santa doesn’t bring gifts to bad girls and boys. Only lumps of coal. And then you’re told it’s bullshit, and not only is the incentive to be artificially pleasant and complacent under almost any circumstance[1] throughout the year removed, but you’re also disillusioned with the system as a whole.

So what happens when you suspect that God isn’t real? The same God you’ve been kept in a state of perpetual childhood to believe in, to suspend your disbelief, to exhibit cognitive dissonance to such an extent as no rational adult in an enlightened, mature society would be capable? The same God who’ll burn you for an eternity — a fucking eternity — for something so much as lying to your parents? God doesn’t give heaven to bad girls and boys. Only lumps of coal. Lit. Up your asshole. Forever. What happens when you begin to suspect that maybe this whole system might not be real?

Some people can only stay children for so long.

[1] And this is what makes the whole Catholic kid-rape scandal particularly insidious is that these children are led to be complacent to appease God — who they’re told is represented by these men — and so they’re afraid to do anything out of fear that they’ll make God angry. Fucking disgusting.

Jabberwock

It’s good to see that the Pope is undeterred by all these “petty rumors” about how he facilitated the systematic sexual abuse of thousands of children. Because that’s what all of this is, right? Petty rumors. It doesn’t matter what documented, incontrovertible evidence says. That kind of shit is for suckers.

So, if raping and covering up the rape of children, in some cases repeatedly, is just a “petty rumor”, then what else can we get away with? I mean, if that’s a petty rumor, then surely shoplifting is nothing more than childish hearsay. Armed robbery? Maybe vindictive gossip. At best. And punching an old former-Hitler-Youth assbag in the balls until he can’t even fantasize about ever sitting down comfortably again without feeling like he’s going to vomit so hard from the lasting pain that his scrotum inverts would be, what, juvenile chatter?

Meanwhile, Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League and regrettably not just a long-since-washed stain in his mother’s panties, claims it would have been “heartless” for the Catholic church to do anything about the pedophilia among its priests. Surely, by logical extension, more heartless than raping children and then exacerbating the emotional and psychological scarring by making them completely helpless to do anything about what happened to them.

My dad — who doesn’t quite yet know I’m an atheist, for reasons I won’t get into here, though I think he suspects — recently told me (before the recent spate of evidence against the Pope and the church in general came forth) “you know, a little church never hurt anyone.” I don’t quite understand cognitive dissonance. I mean, the Inquisition alone — think of how many people were tortured to death by representatives of the Catholic church.

Yet somehow millions still think of this man, this organization, of representations of some kind of loving and benevolent God. Cognitive dissonance is an amazing thing. I can’t imagine knowing all of this and still failing to draw the connection that either this religion does not represent an actually loving God, or that the God of this religion really, really loves child rape.

Jabberwock

I find myself here having to apologize once more for infrequent updates. You know I love you guys, but everything’s been so busy and crazy and I think I’ve gotten into another of those lulls where I feel like my rage meter has sort of become all overwhelmed and stopped working properly. I still get really fucking angry about a number of things, but before I can think to write about them it just kind of bursts and sputters out and I can’t bring myself to give a shit about them. There are only so many times you can read about, for instance (among many), people for whatever reason earnestly defending insurance companies before your brain just kind of shits itself and says “fuck it, just play some video games or something for a while, I can’t do this right now”.

This has happened before, and passed, and I feel like this time it will as well, but while it persists my updates here are going to be relatively infrequent, and I’m sorry.

In the meantime, I’ve started a new webcomic that captures at least a portion of that anger. It’s incredibly lazy, and is all basically transcripts of conversations I have (mostly — and all to this point, at least — with my friend Tom who you may have seen in Rocket Man) throughout the day that I basically just copy/paste into the database to be spat out as a sort of pseudo-comic. It takes about three minutes of my time outside of the conversation itself, which would be happening anyway.

You can find it by visiting Human Mammal Dot Com or basically clicking on that link right there. There’s so much content that it’s going to be updated daily simply because if I didn’t I’d get this tremendous backlog of material that would necessitate me eventually putting up like eight posts a day or something just to keep up.

I want to keep providing you guys steady content, but it’s hard when I have to sit there and write out some long essay on top of everything else. So while I muscle through this terrible lull amidst my general existential angst and depressive issues, you can check that out. It’s still in beta and I know there are a bunch of bugs, and I’ll be adding more functionality soon, but it’s there and it wants you to look at it so please do.

MORE TO COME!

-The Mgt.

Jabberwock

This was originally written in response to a Facebook post made by someone with whom I went to high school:

“God will never tempt you, Satan does. Will you choose to sin when you are tempted? Or will you turn away? God always offers a way out.”

And her subsequent response to my initial reply (which I’ll refrain from posting for the sake of brevity and because the rest of my response renders it redundant):

“I believe that there are demons (Satan) working against believers in Christ everyday. Satan knows when and where we are weak and will take every opportunity to attack. God has set eternity in hearts of man, and I believe that there IS more than this life. Revelations is VERY differnt than that of the rest of the bible..however it does reveal some about what is yet to come. Eternity of punishment=death=sin. Eternity in Heave=life=obediance…..

“Which is Which? Thats a battle believers in Christ struggle with everyday…Is this God speaking to me? or is it my flesh? (Sata) the deeper the relationship with Christ, the clearer it becomes..”

I liked my own argument so much that I wanted to share it with all of you. (Also, she appears to have deleted the entire thread instead of replying. Thanks, Sally. Guess that means I win the argument.)

I’ve modified it slightly for flow/conciseness/etc. Anyway:

The problem lies with authentication: How do you identify the tricks when you see them? If God is giving you some kind of signal, how can you be sure it’s not a forgery? That is, if Satan is truly cunning, it should be possible for him to fake God’s signature sometimes.

Everything gets so oversimplified that God and Satan are reduced from omnipotent or nigh-omnipotent super-beings to these caricatures that can barely pull off cunningness at the level of which humans are capable. It’s all cartoonish and blatant, like the depictions of Satan as a rascally pitchfork-wielding red guy, always causing childish and puerile mischief. But if he’s really such a threat as to necessitate this big, long battle over human souls — something some would argue is one of the most important things we could concern ourselves with — he HAS to be capable of tricking us into doing or believing just about ANYthing.

For instance, maybe Satan wrote the Bible, and every time someone worships the God depicted therein — a God who would commit genocide against humanity when it disgusted him, or who created two people with no sense of right and wrong and expected them to understand the significance of obeying rules and then punished not only them but every one of their descendants forever when they didn’t use the facilities that they didn’t actually even POSSESS until AFTER they’d eaten the apple — every time you align yourself with this petty, irrational, arbitrarily cruel entity, you’re worshiping the REAL Satan — the one who was so devious, so deceitful that he masterfully wove together this elaborate and effective framework of religion and faith, manufacturing and demonizing bogeyman opposition, so that people would eagerly throw themselves with the best of intentions and hopes right into his trap.

And sure, you can say “well I know the difference, I have the clarity that God has given me to recognize the truth”, but that’s exactly my point: How can you be sure? How can you know that that feeling you have, that understanding you feel you possess, is the genuine article and not just a forgery intended to keep you obedient to the REAL Satan?

Maybe the real trick is to get you to think that something is a trick when it’s not. Or that something else isn’t a trick when it is. And whatever clarity you might think you’ve attained is also just deception.

Jabberwock

The thing possessed poor Maria. It drove her to do strange things. But Jesus’ power delivered her so the thing couldn’t hurt her anymore.

I want to read this as a euphemism, and considering how religious and superstitious folk have treated everything from mental disorders to menstruation over the course of human history, I probably wouldn’t be too far off the mark: “The thing” possessed poor Maria, and made her do strange things! (Psst — “the thing” is her menses! Oogabooga!)

Anyway, here’s another terrible Tract for you, hand-crafted by Jack Chick with all the talent, love and beauty of a cat throwing up half a dead mouse onto your bed. Enjoy!

(more…)

Jabberwock

So, who here has interesting or entertaining stories about dealing with religious kooks of one variety or another? Did your parents join a cult? Have you gotten into a heated and serious argument with a fundamentalist only to find out to your embarrassment that they were actually schizophrenic? Were you ever forced to go to one of those “Gay Cure” camps? Did your religious friends put a bucket of holy water above the door and keep a priest or pastor handy so that they could baptize you when you walked in? Ever find a Chick Tract rolled up inside a condom? Any Catholics out there ever need the Heimlich because you choked on the communion wafer?

Well, I want to hear about it.

The best, most amusing (and most believable — and trust me, I’ll probably be able to smell bullshit when I read it) stories will be featured as posts (with all due credit, of course, plus a link to your website if you have one or a sketch of your favorite pony or whatever you want to accompany it). And, as with FMyLife and other such sites, don’t be offended if your story doesn’t make the cut.

For right now, e-mail them to me using the “Contact” page over on the left (or if you have an account on the site, log in and submit them as posts) — I’ll try to have some kind of form up by the end of the week.

Tell your friends. Seriously this time. I know some of you actually are, and I really appreciate it, but you other guys… it takes thirty seconds. Only slightly more time than it takes to *cough ahem* click an ad on the side of the page and then close the browser window *choke cough ahem*.

Speaking of telling your friends, only TWO MORE DAYS to the END OF MAY 5TH, the HOG CALL DEADLINE. I’m still 249,879 Twitter followers away from my goal! Let’s get on this shit!

Jabberwock

Until this evening, I’d somehow been completely oblivious to the fact that there’s a transfer between the 7 and the E/V/G/F/etc lines at Roosevelt Avenue. This led me this morning to take the 7 to 23rd and do the annoying above-ground transfer to a Queens-bound E, and then hop onto the R at Roosevelt Avenue. Not only did this add probably ten or fifteen minutes to my total commute, but it also placed me in the presence of a man who was very eager to inform everyone on the train car via loud shouting that Jesus was forgiving enough to fix his life and give him a very nice Honda even though he’d condemned himself to hell by jerking off to the Spice Channel too often.

So that the other passengers on the train wouldn’t have to hear two people ranting, I decided not to argue with him over it, but I really wanted to ask him:

What does God get out of condemning people to hell?

Of late, I’ve been thinking a lot of Doctor Manhattan from Watchmen, mostly for the obvious reason that the movie just came out, but in part because I’ve been experiencing what I think is probably best described as a depersonalization disorder that occasionally leaves me feeling completely indifferent toward all life including my own. Not in a weird, depressing, troubling way or anything, and not all the time, but it’s provided me an interesting perspective on things.

Tonight, though, I realized something: Alan Moore isn’t exactly the best writer in human history by any stretch, yet Doctor Manhattan is a substantially better-written, more believable omnipotent character than the God of nearly all religious texts, especially the most widespread ones.

Christians especially love to dodge the complicated questions like “why are some babies born with no faces?” and “why do children get force-fed drugs and then raped by people they thought loved them?” with their explanation-de-deus-ex-machina “God works in mysterious ways” — we’re not SUPPOSED to know the way God’s mind works because he’s just such a COMPLICATED BEING with such an INCREDIBLE CAPACITY for KNOWING, and it’s IMPOSSIBLE for our LITTLE PEA MINDS to even BEGIN to fathom ONE IOTA of his OMNISCIENCE. Yet throughout the Bible, God is characterized as basically a human with the power to shape the universe — a being with human needs and desires and likes and dislikes. Were God truly omnipotent and omniscient, his mind would likely in no way come close to resembling that of a human.

Sure, some of it can be attributed to the imperfection of human language (as employed in the Bible) as a medium for losslessly conveying information, but it goes well beyond that. All the things God wants are just projections of things humans tend to want — love, respect, adoration, justice, punishment for those who get away with the nasty things they do to others, etc. He’s just a vessel for wish fulfillment. “They never caught the guy who licked my grandmother to death, but it’d sure be great if someone eventually got ‘im!” This is especially evident in the cultural stigmas depicted and the punishments that result. “Thar wussa WHOLE CITY fulla them FILTHY FAGGITS and’n GAWD dropped a buncha METEORS on it!” or “People were mean to each other, so God drown everyone but the nice, respectful folk!”

What would God get out of that? In fact, what would an omnipotent, omniscient being get out of even paying any attention to us at all? Regardless of free will, an all-knowing being wouldn’t likely be surprised by anything. (Well, unless their precognition was affected by tachyons, but presumably God would be immune.) One could argue that God might get a kind of “pleasure” out of it, but this assumes that God would have a need to somehow attain pleasure. Every reason we could possibly come up with for God to do any of the things he’s apparently supposed to do, to feel or need any of the things he’s depicted as feeling or needing, all rely on God basically having a human mind and body. When you look beyond the conditioning of our biology and our parents and our society, nearly everything we attach significance to is in itself meaningless.

With nearly everything we do, we do it because we’re programmed to in one way or another, and it’s ultimately insignificant on a long enough timeline, or compared to the complete scope of all movement in the universe. It’s important from our perspective, but to an outside observer — especially an omnipotent/-scient/-present one who wouldn’t be subject to the same drives and needs and effects of upbringing as we humans — our behaviors wouldn’t have the same importance. Even I can see this, and as much as I sometimes wish otherwise, I’m just a dumb, meaty human with my emotional reactions sometimes temporarily partially factored out of my observations.

Of course, there’s the whole “we were created in God’s image” argument, but even if you were able to ignore basically all of science, and then ignore the fact that humans can be radically different from their opinions to their behaviors to their feelings to their needs, it would only ultimately serve to contradict the argument that God’s mind is beyond ours.

So which is it? Is God’s mind unfathomable, and his actions therefore attributable to his unfathomableness, or is he jealous and needy and loving and desiring of unbalanced revenge for wrongdoers?

Jabberwock

CNN asked viewers, when I was in the airport the other day, how they would solve the Israel/Gaza crisis, with an e-mail address where you could send your response. The anchor said, in a completely unironic tone, “Hey, wouldn’t it be something if one of our viewers out there had the answer?” as though an e-mail response to a cable news network is going to somehow solve thousands of years of conflict in the region.

Wait, has it been thousands of years? I forget, with all this specious “BUT WHAT IF MEXICO WAS LAUNCHING MISSILES AT CALIFORNIA?!?” shittery, as though Israel did absolutely nothing — nothing, and it’s appalling that you would even imply it as a possibility — to warrant any kind of attack. I guess all our politicians and most of our conservatives here in America seem to think that all the conflict in that region began with Hamas launching those missiles.

It’s getting to the point where, as soon as I hear about U.S. politicians supporting something, my immediate response is to oppose it, just because they’re wrong nearly all the fucking time.

It’s weird how it’s gotten to be that any response — of whatever intensity — is always justified, as long as someone did something bad to us. Like that asshole Bloomberg:

Well, let me just phrase it for you something that’ll bring it home. If you’re in your apartment, and some emotionally disturbed person is banging on your door, screaming, ‘I am going to come through this door and kill you,’ do you want us to respond with one police officer, which is proportional, or with all the resources at our command? Just think about it in that context. There is no so such thing as a proportional response to terrorism. This is not something we are playing by the Marquis of Queensbury rules. People’s lives are at risk.

LET’S KILL HUNDREDS OF ARABS BECAUSE DOZENS OF ISRAELIS WERE KILLED! IT’S TOTALLY JUSTIFIED! THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A PROPORTIONAL RESPONSE! NUKE THEM FROM ORBIT! IT’S TOTALLY JUSTIFIED!

I’m not saying by any means that Hamas is the best thing since sliced freedom, but everyone’s been treating this as such a one-fucking-sided issue, as though Israel is always already innocent of any wrongdoing in any situation, and that’s just ridiculous and wrong. Wrong. I don’t hate America (or, by extension, usually, for conservatives, Israel), I hate bullshit. This is a major reason the terrorists hate us: Because we unquestioningly support anything Israel does, and we treat any conflict there like it’s entirely one-sided.

[Aside: It's ironic, by the way: Religious fundamentalists tend to be so quick to claim that certain people "hate America", while at the same time talking about (but not actually living by) the idea of "hate the sin, love the sinner". Do they just not understand that you can hate what America does sometimes without hating America itself? Maybe it's because that expression tends to actually mean nothing to them, and they hate gays as much as homosexuality.]

In response to the CNN question, I have an idea for how we could possibly ameliorate the problem: Build a time machine, go back to World War II, and convince the U.S. government to allow Jewish refugees from Europe and the U.S.S.R. to settle here, so that Israel wouldn’t undergo such a massive population boom that effectively turned the Arabs living in the area into a minority underclass of prisoners.

Or, how about this: Everyone can stop giving a shit about this religious feud gone way too long into overtime, stop bombing each other, stop subjugating and oppressing each other, recognize that we’re all human beings, for fuck’s fucking sake already, and deal with all of this like an intelligent civilization.

Jabberwock

…because obviously it’s not overpopulation and the subsequent mass consumption of resources that’s going to endanger humanity, but about ten percent of the population not reproducing, many of them wishing to adopt unwanted children. Yeah. THAT’s the problem.

Somebody get this guy a freakin’ Nobel already!

Jabberwock

One thing I find amusing in the weeks since the election is the backpedaling of conservative pundits on the definition of a mandate.

If you’ll remember in 2004, when Bush “won” with a whopping 50.7% of the popular vote, you couldn’t turn on a television or radio without hearing the word “mandate” about a hundred billion dozen times per hour, as though the outcome was some sort of epic landslide. Robert Novak crawled out from his coffin in the cellar of a Transylvanian castle long enough to hiss out the following in response to a question on whether Bush’s “win” was really a mandate:

Of course it is. It’s a 3.5 million vote margin. But the people who are saying that it isn’t a mandate are the same people who were predicting that John Kerry would win. … So the people who say there’s not a mandate want the president, now that he’s won, to say, Oh, we’re going to accept the liberalism that the — that the voters rejected. But Mark, this is a conservative country, and it showed it on last Tuesday.

Peggy Noonan warbled out the following on the same topic:

George W. Bush is the first president to win more than 50% of the popular vote since 1988… The president received more than 59 million votes, breaking Ronald Reagan’s old record of 54.5 million…It will be hard for the mainstream media to continue, in the face of these facts, the mantra that we are a deeply and completely divided country. But they’ll try!

And, of course, all you have to do is toss this idea into the echo chamber of conservative commentators, and the message gets spread far and wide as incontrovertible fact: Move over, everyone — the country has spoken, and our Fearless Decider now has a free pass to oppress gays, privatize everything, create even larger gaps between haves and have-nots, and basically do whatever in fuck we damn well please.

Well, jump ahead four years, and what do these same pundits (and likely the myriad others who drink the Kool-Aid they make) think about Obama’s victory with 53% of the vote?

Here’s Robert Novak, just before grumpily slamming his coffin shut:

The first Democratic Electoral College landslide in decades did not result in a tight race for control of Congress.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt won his second term for president in 1936, the defeated Republican candidate, Gov. Alf Landon of Kansas, won only two states, Maine and Vermont, and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress by wide margins.

But Obama’s win was nothing like that. He may have opened the door to enactment of the long-deferred liberal agenda, but he neither received a broad mandate from the public nor the needed large congressional majorities.

[Emphasis mine.]

What did Peggy “our country is united under the banner of conservatism” Noonan have to say about this?

This is already a dramatic time — two wars, economic collapse — and people are rattled. “Moderation in all things.” It should be noted here that the split in the popular vote was 53% to 46%. That is a solid seven-point win for the new president elect, but it also means more than 56 million voters went for John McCain in a year when all the stars were aligned against the Republicans…Mr. Obama has a significant portion of the nation to win over. He acknowledged this in his sterling victory speech, when he spoke of “those whose support I have yet to earn.” He does have yet to earn it.

So 50.7% > 53%, apparently. I mean, that’s grade school math, right there, and they fuck it up so bad it’s pathetic.

Now, it’s true that over 46% of the country voted for John McCain — over 50 million Americans. That’s a lot of people, and an election victory doesn’t mean you get to just ignore that many people just because your side was victorious. Real democracy means considering the wishes of the minority as well. But, see, here’s the difference: Conservative policies tend to be extremely oppressive, or at least facilitating of oppression. Bush had to ignore the wishes and demands of liberals, because implementation of conservative policies is on the whole fundamentally incompatible with freedom.

For instance, it’s impossible to dictate who an adult can and can’t love while also giving that same adult the ability to decide for themselves who they do and do not love. It’s impossible to give religious freedom while denying the right to perform marriage rights to churches and individuals who believe they can’t deny any two consenting adults the ability to marry each other regardless of genitals. It’s impossible to force teachers to propagate the message that science has nothing to do with the scientific method while also allowing them to teach their students what science actually is. It’s impossible to outlaw abortion while still giving a woman the right to her own body. It’s impossible to ban pornography and contraception while at the same time giving individuals the right to sexual freedom.

Conversely, Obama can for the most part ignore conservatives’ wishes and demands, because conservatives in the end are still free to do as they themselves please (save for oppressing other people, which is a right they should unquestionably and forever be denied). Their churches don’t have to marry gays and they themselves don’t have to have gay relationships just because gay marriage is legalized. They can still send their children to “Sunday School” without worrying that some third party has the right to come into their Bible study classrooms and countermand everything they teach. They have the right not to get abortions or use contraception, and not to look at pornography.

Ultimately, it’s difficult to claim a real electoral mandate in the case of either a 50.7% or a 53% win. Obviously, Obama won by a larger percentage, substantially more electoral votes (which is really meaningful, given that the Electoral College is skewed in favor of more conservative states) and over 7 million more people, but anything in the range of just over 50% isn’t really a mandate. The real mandate comes from the fact that liberal policies give the individual the right to be individual — that they don’t oppress anyone in the same way conservative policies almost always do. The real mandate comes from the fact that oppression is wrong.

Jabberwock

For the first time in a long, long while, I’m feeling proud to be an American. I know Obama isn’t going to fix every problem in the world, and that having a rather immense majority in Congress, while nice, isn’t necessarily going to bring about all the necessary reforms and things that we so desperately need, but it’s finally — at long last — a step in the right direction, an indication that there is still hope for us and that we are capable of learning from our experiences. So thank you, America, for not completely fucking things up.

In Michigan, a medical marijuana initiative passed by a landslide, surprisingly, and restrictions on stem cell research were loosened.

There is, however, some bad news out in California, where cruel, bigoted morons managed to triumph over morality and decency and Civil Rights and human kindness by passing Proposition 8. I’m feeling such a profound hatred for so many people right now in an Ahab-style “chest/cannon heart-fire” way that if my wrath could somehow manifest itself, millions of humanity’s most bigoted members would suddenly find themselves immortal with instant regenerative capabilities, roasting ceaselessly and inescapably on the surface of the sun. It really is a shame that we have so little protection against the use of democracy as a tool of oppression.

If these people, these immoral cretins, are going to piss-parade around the ever-increasingly-laughable idea of the “sanctity of marriage”, then I’m going to have to demand that they outlaw divorce, and, further, that people (with much overlap with those who voted “yes”, here, I’m sure) stop dressing up their hideous little inbred monstrosities of pets in tuxedos and dresses and giggling in embarrassing, anthropomorphizing glee about how Pongo and Perdita are getting “married”.

Shame on you, California. Words cannot possibly express the profundity of my disappointment in so, so many of you. To every one of you who voted “yes” on Proposition 8: May every misfortune and tragedy that has the opportunity to befall you succeed in doing so, so that you may yourselves sample the misery you’ve inflicted (and will likely continue to inflict) on so many of your fellow human beings — people who have done you no wrong, yet you persist in your baseless sadism and cruelty.

Let the outcome of Proposition 8 serve as a reminder that we cannot ease up after this one victory, however major — as meaningful and amazing this election may have been, it’s only one battle in what will assuredly be a long, difficult struggle to drag the ignorant kicking and screaming (and perhaps kicking them and screaming at them) into enlightenment.

Jabberwock

Funny, campy, over-the-top. This Halloween tract by Jack Chick starts with a vampire story, but ends with a straight gospel message.

Storot:Yeah, “campy”…concentration campy.

nepphi: I don’t know, I think less ‘intense, soulless horror’ and more ‘awkward teenage years’ when I read this one, so maybe…bible campy?

Storot: I was just looking for a pun on the sheer awfulness of the tract. Or Jack’s Jewy arch-villains.

J: You know, isn’t Jack kind of disobeying his own moral guidelines, here, by telling a vampire story? If other forms of fantasy are all evil and will lead people to demonic possession, does it really matter if they tack a gospel message onto the end of it? By this logic, if D&D guidebooks included some random passage from Mark at the end of it, would Jack retract Dark Dungeons?

Storot: When reading the following tract, enhance your experience with an audio track. We at Consolidated Incorporated (our slogan “If you need it, talk to someone else. We can’t help you”) recommend “Fingernails on a Chalkboard”, “Cats In Heat”, or “Rosanne Barr’s Rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’”. Anything to distract you from the pain before you.

(more…)

Jabberwock

Q: Why should children be taught about the “bad touch” before they learn how to read?

A: Because there are children getting molested before they learn how to read.

It’s not like this is a tough logic puzzler or anything. Here’s another one:

Q: Why does McCain/Palin have such a ridiculous stance on this?

A: Because for the Republican party, it’s more important to be a total reactionary to information about the human body because it’s politically advantageous even if it means you’re advocating preventing victims from being able to recognize the crimes committed against them than it is to actually stop molestation from happening.

Anyway,

Jabberwock

(Cross-posted from It Is *Dancing*)

A heartbeat away from the Presidency if McCain should win is a woman who is mostly a shameless thief; her instincts are a bandit’s and her loyalties are a mobster’s.

She deliberately destroyed the world’s largest sockeye fishery for no better purpose than the profit margins of some Goddamn mining consortium; she likes to pretend that she’s a loyal Christian but she’s got that same evangelical fixation on her own petty, ridiculous issues – treating a pipeline like an object of saintly veneration, conscripting children (who Jesus of course admires more than anything, so long as they’re white) to pray with her (TV cameras rolling – Heaven forbid we not be noticed in our piety, good Philistines we are) for a fucking pipeline.

I like to say pat things about the terrible mick fuckers who squint on their million-dollar TV programs to convince the audience they’re extra special pious, but they at least have a concept of piety divorced even conceptually from their own bottom line. Palin literally believes God is smiling on her petty graft.

In the course of doing so, of course, she scammed money from the government. The gesture means more than the amount – $600 would seem pathetic to someone like her – after all, she doesn’t share the daily difficulties of the working class, and for her $600 is not a month’s rent but pocket change to be spent on a flight and a lunch; she’s stolen much larger amounts, but they all follow the same basic logic.

She has a basically fascist concept of society – it doesn’t seem at all out of place for her to requisition money to pray for a pipeline in public, nor to spend $400,000 campaigning against common sense or campaign actively against her own government on the basis of its incoherence with her private worldview. She’s been doing it since she was a small-time operative; before she became a fearless Duce for Alaska, she played the same role in Wasilla, waging a D’Annunzian war against a local librarian whose insufficient zeal for censoring moral turpitude revealed too little support for the mayor – in her own words.

Her speeches since she became nationally prominent have all been great fulminations against civil society – grand proclamations of the uselessness of community organizing, the inefficacy of private society and the transcendent beauty of the state. Small wonder she has an Objectivist fan-club devoted to scouring every black mark on her character from the public record – no human being has been as shameless about their political bankruptcy since Rand sang and danced for fascist Italy. She has no concept of power unless it be divorced from the power of life and death; no concept of good unless it be enslaved to the crusade against evil; and nothing but contempt for any people decadent enough to refuse any power to their rightful Leaders.

This is not just another rant about the inexplicable rise of the Basileus of Wasilla, however hilariously it lays bare a truth about the American right too terrible to explain directly. Her fascism – and here the word is so literal I actually feel ashamed for using it on people who simply exhibited surreal enthusiasm for power rather than openly worshiping it – is not so much a governing principle as a malignant worldview, a festering, evil rotting of the soul. Like any other aspiring autocrat, she has no power over the demoniac pull of her ink-black spiritual abyss – she simply feels its compelling claw, understands beyond understanding that eternal urge to triumph through faith.

No: the one thing Palin can understand, the one emotion she can be counted on to exhibit, is contempt for things outside of her domain. Like the nearly erotic terror the idea of art and culture divorced from tradition aroused in the Nazis and their sympathizers, anything that she cannot clump into her own stilted, corrupt experience – the Pinochetian cosmos of greed, grasping Nietzchian wills and impossibly complicit victims – is an impossible beast, something to be set alight and trampled underfoot. Anything that is not part of the rat-race must become fuel for that which is.

This is the common theme we see in what she does where there is no clearly understandable profit motive. We can exercise the benefit of the doubt and suppose that her militant contempt for ANWR might just be the hand of big oil up her ass, and we could similarly paint her willingness to rip her own state’s future as a tourist haven to shreds as the impossible desperation of a miner’s whore in an incipient ghost-town.

But we cannot by these means explain the wolves.

Like that filthy monster Reagan – dead before the public ever knew his name and shambling about even now these four years after his moldering body at last followed his conscience and memory in giving up the ghost – she hates the world in a way functioning human beings find impossible to understand. Reagan insisted that the redwoods and other precious parts of our nation’s most populous, diverse, and essentially American state were interchangeable logging stock; even that had some surreal, warped basis in economic impulse. But Palin goes beyond this.

She offers men who think of themselves as hunters, responsible men of the world, a hundred and fifty dollars each to destroy wolves. She has been warned by people who understand ecology, even those – like the Republicans for Environmental Protection mentioned by Dolan – who share her culture’s insistence that the place of nature is under the dominion of man. Unlike any other hunters in the first world, the methods she favors – methods that shameless thief’s thief spent $400,000 of the state’s money to encourage at the polls – are mechanically efficient. We are not dealing with boar-stickers or deer-slayers; these women and men are intimate with the idea of death and share a kind of spiritual concern for the animals they destroy. They are often not the most ecologically-minded of people, but they are united by a vague idea of sport.

Palin, aiming to correct their ludicrous inefficiency, suggested they machine-gun the wolves from a thousand feet. To her, not only is the idea of the wolf repellant but so is the idea of the wolf meeting a human end. She can understand humans preying on big game – even if she does not understand, as ecologists now do and as sport hunters always have, that their fellow predators play a vital role in weeding out the weak and sick and keeping the big game strong – but the idea of something hunting out of hunger is alien to her, and so is the idea of competition with mercy. Wolves must be destroyed; the strong must destroy the weak even when forbearance serves them just as well.

Here, thus, we can record the only principle Palin has ever exhibited in any of her forty-four years: that God put us on Earth to strafe the wolves. I am no Christian, but I’m not sure what Christ would say about this.

Alec

CNN: “Speaking of the troops in Iraq, Palin says they were sent on ‘task that is from God’.”

Yeah, this is totally someone I want in the copilot’s seat for the nation. Definitely. Sometimes I think the only thing keeping us from stitching ornate crosses on the uniforms of our soldiers is that it would be counterproductive to camouflaging efforts.

Anyway, two decades of Pentecostalism under her belt, huh? Maybe the reason they won’t let her give press conferences or participate in debates is that she has a habit of dropping to the floor and speaking in tongues.

In other news, I’ve started working on an online-only television show. I’m aiming for ten episodes, roughly eight or ten minutes apiece for the first (and possibly only) season. I’ll try to squeeze out a Chick Dissection at some point soon, though. Promise.

Jabberwock