Dis-Civil Obedience Pt. 2

     "There are no facts, only interpretations."
           -F. Nietzsche 
 
      "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
          -John F. Kennedy

Thanks in no small part to the manipulation of popular perception by the American media, most Americans exist in a happy delusion that unpleasant things like riots, police states, systemic corruption and armed revolution only happen in distant, hard-to-pronounce countries full of strange brown people.

I'll give an example of manipulated perception. An associate of mine, who we'll call Paul, is an average American. Paul is in his mid-30's, has two children, works as an assistant manager at a convenience store, loves classic rock, doesn't really follow politics, is a 'default Christian,' and rents a two-bedroom apartment that he can barely afford.

Paul has a tumor growing against a cracked disc in his spine, which has given him a form of sciatica that causes severe back pain, numbness in extremities and generally makes his everyday existence way way way more of a pain in the dick than it should or needs to be. He has shitty health insurance from his job, but even with that he can't afford the out-of-pocket costs necessary to treat his condition with a relatively simple operation. What Paul can afford is enough muscle relaxers and pain killers to continue functioning as a wage slave.

Paul does not support socialized healthcare (even though he supports medicare/medicaid.) Paul thinks Obama wants to euthanize your grandparents. Paul thinks America has the best health care system in the world. Facts and figures and evidence do not sway Paul. Paul has been indoctrinated by the media, through it's use of attractive, self-perpetuating misinformation.

Anyway, enough about Paul. Fuck Paul, this article is supposed to be about ignored or glossed-over unpleasantries in white peoples' countries.

Austeria 

There was a royal wedding recently in the United Kingdom between Prince William and Kate Middleton. The estimated cost of the wedding was somewhere between 30 and 110 million dollars with estimates of the ongoing damage to the economy ranging from 2 billion to 50 billion dollars.



While William and Kate were planning their ridiculously fancy hitching, the people that actually govern the United Kingdom were pushing through austerity measures, including drastic cuts to welfare support and public sector jobs.

(As an aside, I think it's weird that I almost don't want to type the word 'welfare.' Because of popular perception 'welfare' is now seen as a dirty word, conjuring images of crack-addled burglars gaming the system and unemployed single mothers driving luxury cars. This imagery is so pervasive and effective that I didn't wish to invoke it. In reality, 'welfare' simply refers to the part of the government system that concerns itself with providing a basic level of well-being and support to it's citizens, that they may fare well in their endeavors. The perception that huge numbers of the lower class are unwilling to pull their weight is largely a myth, as a moment's reflection by any member of the lower or working class would reveal. A moment's reflection, unfortunately, seems beyond the majority of us. Of course, there will always be a small minority of those that will attempt to manipulate any given system in their favor. Just look at the banking industry.)

Meanwhile, with the Will and Kate fiasco capturing the hearts and cameras of the world, anti-austerity protests and displays of civil disobedience were happening in the streets of London.

They were largely ignored.

And it worked. Mostly. Lots of young people chanted and waved signs and had marches and got knocked around by the police and no one really noticed. I remember having conversations where the disgusting level of opulence and privilege on display at the wedding would be brought up, and I would mention the disconnect between the imagery of the figureheads of state eating $40,000 cakes and wearing $400,000 dresses, and the working class outside eating terrible British food and wearing $20 hoodies trying to keep their jobs or child benefits. The crazy-ass thing about these conversations: I was the only one that even knew the austerity measures, let alone the protests, were even a thing. And I'm an asshole.

Cut to two months later.


Warning: Contains awesome.

If you can't, or don't feel like, watching that, it features two of my favorite things: Hooliganism and self-empowerment.

#occupywallstreet

should have been the top trending topic on Twitter on several different occasions over the past 12 days. Twitter, however, has an unwritten policy of censoring offensive and controversial topics to prevent them from trending. I can understand this. No one wants to log into a website and see a page of posts with #whenIfuckmydog or #Howtofistmycousin. But who decides what is controversial or offensive? JP Morgan? Tia Tequila? No one seems to know. It's also worth noting that emails containing information on the protest were marked as spam by Yahoo!, who later claimed it was an accident. It's not incriminating, just suspicious. Especially with the echoes of the cry that "the Egyptian revolution was made possible through social media!" still echoing in people's minds.

Whatever. Occupy Wall Street should be on the front page of every newspaper and website in the country. It isn't. Or hasn't been. New Jersey Governor and animate 'before picture' Chris Christie is. Why? Because he announced that he will not be running for President. That is not news. It doesn't even smell like news. I don't run for President every single goddamn day, and you know what? It doesn't warrant mention. Maybe as a blurb in the back of NJ newspapers, not the front page of the Washington Post and the New York Times.

I stumbled across Occupy Wall Street on accident after it had been going on for four days. It wasn't until after a week in that someone that could justifiably be called a member of the mainstream media, Keith Olbermann, ran a serious piece on it, mostly focusing on the media blackout. And it wasn't until videos of police using excessive force a couple of days later that anyone else took serious interest.

Occupy Wall Street, for anyone that doesn't know, is a leaderless, nonviolent protest on (well, near,) Wall Street. It was loosely organized by Adbusters and Anonymous (inasmuch as a group of random hacker vigilantes with a meme and love of lulz can be called organized,) that focused on, in a nutshell, American revolution.

They claimed to have one demand, although they hadn't agreed upon it yet. They still haven't. The closest thing to a common theme is one that states "We are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%."

To my religious friends: Exodus 32 seems pretty clear about this kind of shit.

The movement has received endorsement and support from such various celebrities, activists and intellectuals as Cornell West, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Roseanne, Immortal Technique, Lupe Fiasco, Chris Hedges, Susan Sarandon and Tom Morello.

The protest, intensely nonviolent at this point, has been using open forums and general assembly to build itself as it goes. This is interesting, because it means the movement is organic (insert vegan hippie joke here,) changing as it progresses, as opposed to the average Tea Party protest, or the Madison sit-in, or the Verizon strikes, which were organized with specific objectives, intentions and goals beforehand.

The attendance, as far as bodies on the ground, has been wildly debated from 'a couple dozen' up to 'several thousand,' with a predictable swell on weekends.

There have been between several and lots of videos showing police using excessive force on the protestors (such as macing women trapped behind a net and roughing up cooperative, unresisting protestors and bystanders,) as well as underhanded arrests like the resurrection of a 150 year old mask law and asking protesters to step off the sidewalk, then arresting them for obstructing traffic.

These are, of course, debatable facts for the callous and inhumane among us, but this fact remains: there are a lot of police there. If this is a small and insignificant demonstration by a bunch of bored, entitled kids (it's not,) why is there such a large number of police officers surrounding a public gathering of unarmed civilians exercising their constitutional rights?

Still, it is, at this point, a relatively small movement. That can be changed though. I think that that kind of change, while possible, is not very likely. The #occupy meme is spreading, with reported demonstrations being set up in Houston, Austin, Portland, Detroit, Washington D.C., Los Angeles and, well, anywhere big enough to theoretically support it. I hope that people get plugged in to this, and I hope it spreads. I hope that people realize that they personally have a responsibility in this country, that when this country no longer serves their interests it's not some distant politician's responsibility to reform or abolish it, it's the American citizen's.

I just worry that the divisiveness, apathy, indoctrination and indifference are too thoroughly entrenched in the American psyche to be shifted. Anyway, hopefully someone finds this informative and takes an interest in, well, their own best interest for once and tries to educate themselves. If not, have fun voting for the same crooked thieving mouthpieces everyone else at your church is voting for and please don't act surprised when the riots happen.

Dis-Civil Obedience (part one)

     "We do not remain slaves because masters exist, masters exist because we elect to remain slaves."
           -Paranoid Internet Yahoo

     "Arm the Homeless"
          -Paranoid Real Life Yahoo

(Author's note: There are a lot of links embedded in this article. They'll take you to more questionable information. I'm not getting paid for them.)

I'm a big fan of conspiracy theories. I'd like to be up front about that. I'm also a big fan of truth. What I'm not a big fan of is idiots that don't realize they're idiots.

It shouldn't have to be pointed out that not all 'theories' are equal. Saying that evolution and gravity are only theories, and then saying creationism and lizard people from beyond the stars replacing world leaders are theories too does not make them equal. But that's how dumb, crazy people justify believing in dumb, crazy ideas.

I desperately, desperately wish adults would self-educate. Unfortunately the vast majority of fully-developed humans I know are openly opposed to new information. Try to explain the Federal Reserve to them and it's like their brains shut down in fear. I don't know why that is.

I also wish I was half as smart as I claim to be. If I was, I'm sure I could find a way to shove truth into the heads of people that seem destined to happily base their entire lives on misinformation. Maybe start a Jersey Shore knockoff where every few minutes the Bar Hag and the Date Rapist erupt into a screaming match over the Bush Administration's culpability as war criminals.

Maybe a light-hearted web-comic?

It seems like people would rather believe an attractive lie than an ugly truth. You have to click on those last two links or the joke doesn't work. I'll wait.

Anyway, facts are boring and celebrity naked people rarely seem to want to attach giant boobs to boring old facts and figures. Leave that to boring old ugly boring people like Noam Chomsky and Richard Dawkins. Here's some I'll attach my marginal attractiveness to:

The Free Press

It seems like every time I turn on the TV someone's covering a revolution in the Middle East. And that's all well and good, but I've noticed an odd trend. The only revolutionary activity being covered here at home involves violent, ignorant hillbillies unwittingly representing the interests of private multinationals.

Like this charming fellow.

And again, there's nothing inherently wrong with this. The problem I have is that this minority of anti-healthcare, anti-choice, anti-government fringe lunatics receive such a disparate amount of media attention. Generally, supporters of this movement fall into two categories.

The first; The rich, power mad imperialists: the ones switching back and forth from company executives to government lobbyists and Representatives, the ones that benefited from the current economic meltdown, the ones pouring money into the campaigns of politicians that will later represent their interests in the State, the shadow CEOs, perfectly happy to perpetuate the current trend of low taxes, mass ignorance, poverty, disunity and deregulation. The ones that need the masses to believe in nonsensical ideas like 'too big to fail,' or 'death panels,' or 'small government,' that need the illusion that the system is fair, that hard work is the touchstone of success, that the voice of the little man is important. Their greatest strength lies in self-perpetuating falsehoods: That the unemployed are lazy, that the poor deserve to be poor, that they are being repressed, not by their oppressors, but by their fellow proletariat.

The second, of course, is the type of lower-class, herd-mentality, low functioning, country music and NASCAR loving apes that can be easily tricked into believing they have more in common with the smooth-talking, white multimillionaire that owns the company that enslaves him than with his dark-skinned (or Muslim or gay or female or whatever,) analogue. This type of capital B Believer seems custom made to be manipulated. Truth, to this type of person, is almost infinitely malleable. By harnessing this infantile and almost impossible level of naivete and lack of critical thinking with an almost endless capacity for misguided anger they have created the perfect army: the kind that doesn't require payment.

Truth isn't facts or dates or figures. Not to Sgt. NASCAR up there. Truth is a shared hallucination, a passionate conviction of faith, an agreed upon delusion. Truth is a catchy slogan. Death-Panels. Intelligent Design. The Bible is truth, and the Bible can be spun to support any argument. Incest is A-Okay because Lot did it. See? The dollar is truth, and the value of the dollar is based not on gold or resources, but on the whim of a private institution, (you shoulda listened when your weird friend tried to explain about the Fed). The perception that some people are genuinely evil is truth, and conveniently enough the 'evil people' are the ones that most share their common interests. The only mentality that breeds true evil is the one that is encouraged to see evil in others.

What this has caused is a perception shift in the American public, where the "Right," (Christian/Republican/conservative/etc.) is now seen as this fringe group of ultra-conservative capitalists, and the "Left" is now seen as anyone that embraces proven social programs that benefit the majority, such as socialized healthcare, well-funded public education or the social safety net for the unemployed, mentally ill, elderly, handicapped or those unlucky enough to slip through the cracks. As a consequence, what we now call "Centerist" or moderate views would have, 30 years ago, been seen as "Conservative."

The media, a capitalist institution, has fallen victim to the same amoral buyouts and mutual back-scratchings that took down our political and financial institutions. When the protesters don't represent the same lunatic ideologies as the Tea Party or Christian Dominionists the media coverage dries up. When it doesn't dry up it takes on the tone of condescending scorn, name-calling, derision, conspiracy-mongering (the kind based in wild assertions and linking unrelated coincidences, not the kind based on research and fact-checking,) and other blatant editorializing passed off as 'fact' by an irresponsible press to a public kept in ignorance of the truth.

The Madison, Wisconsin protests over Scott Walker's Union busting garnered a fair bit of attention. The weird thing is that the further up the media ladder one climbs the less 'fair and balanced' the coverage becomes. While online blogs and progressive activist sites treat it with the same gravitas as their conservative counter parts treat, I don't know, assault rifle porn and Planned Parenthood clinic burnings, major news sites were more likely to shift the focus away from the facts and towards editorializing. All of a sudden the buzzword wasn't 'union busting,' it was 'right-to-work.' The "Democratic Walkout" became an 'irresponsible stunt.' Suddenly it wasn't "gigantic ass protest over threatened union bargaining rights,' it was 'Democrats abandon ship while Walker makes tough choices.' It was marginalized and deflated and spun in a dozen different directions. Then the bill was passed. Then media coverage vanished.

Wait, what about the recall elections? What about the lawsuits filed against the State? What about Walker's relationship with the Koch brothers? What about pundits like Beitbart and Palin making against-character statements supporting Big-Government making decisions negatively impacting the working class? What about the smaller protests this caused across the nation?

Here's what happened: They were ignored. Old news. It was close enough to election season to resume the overly simplified black-or-white ideological charade that is American politics. People have the right to petition their elected representatives for redress of grievances, and inconvenient troublemakers that don't fit with the current narrative have the right to be ignored, mocked, demonized, bought out, criminalized, and ignored again.

Next Time: The Austerity of Hope and #Occupywallstreet

Subjective Fact

I was looking at the stats for this thing and I noticed that my bullshit Nier review is way ahead on page-hits. Like way way ahead. Like screw the hilarious-ass posts on the state of modern RPGs. Never mind the informative piece about video game lawsuits. No one cares about the struggles of an atheist in a religious community. Underrated video games no one really played: that's where it's at. Also: I'm huge in Russia for some reason. Hi Russia!

Anyway, video game reviews are mostly bullshit. Sure, some parts are objective, such as 'are the controls responsive,' or 'how long are the load times,' or 'is it a bug-ridden, unplayable mess using paying customers as beta testers.' But most of it is subjective, such as the graphics, the soundtrack, or the combat engine.

For example; the Castlevania games, especially the ones for the NES, have the best soundtracks. I just stated that as a fact. It's not a fact. It's an opinion. But I behave as if it's a fact, and if anyone challenges my stance on it I'll start screaming about music theory and composition and spending 16 years playing music and my questionable credentials as a musical and regular genius and dammit, boy, I was listening to video game music before you were even a mistake in your father's eye!

My credentials.

All that doesn't make me right though. Just opinionated and loud. Most video game reviews fall into this category. Sure, they'll usually break them up into categories like "Graphics," "Sound," "Replayability," and so on, but that doesn't do much beyond give the appearance of some kind of set criteria for comparison.

Games with strong online multiplayer (first-person shooters,) tend to score high in the 'replayability' department. But what if someone doesn't have a reliable broadband connection? Or, like me, they feel like a creepy old man by being forced to play games with strange teenage boys? They're saddled with the repetitive, 8 hour long single player campaign. And quite often the multiplayer is just that + strangers. My neighbors play Halo: Reach like 80% of the time. I don't mean "of the time they play video games," I mean "of the time they have electricity." I hate that game. I've watched them play the same three goddamn levels with the same one character and his fucking two dozen identical, palette-swapped twins for hours on end. It looks, subjectively, like the boringest shit someone could do with a turned-on television.

Okay, none of that had anything to do with the games I wanted to talk about. I just wanted to point out that video game reviews are only an accurate judge of a game's merit for the person doing the review.

Chrono Trigger

Here's something I don't understand. Popular opinion states that JRPGs are a dying breed. People don't want turn based combat, fixed character development, plucky teenagers or anime bullshit in their video games. Yet the 2008 re-release of this criminally overrated game not only has a 92 on Metacritic, it also won 2008's DS Game of the Year. Nostalgia is a motherfucker.

I have no idea why this game is still so popular. Sure, it's a good game. It's not a great game. Turn-based combat, silent protagonists, plucky teenagers and sprawling plot-lines were hardly a new thing in 1995. Square wasn't doing anything new or different. It had several different overworld maps, yeah, but they all looked like shit. There weren't any random encounters, but by the end of the SNES's life cycle there was no real reason there should have been. All that really meant was instead of waiting for an invisible timer to go off you looked for an enemy to bump into.

One of the things I, personally, liked about the game (back when I last played it in 2002, after buying it off of a friend,) was the plethora of decent (for the time,) side quests. Mostly they involved pretty standard things like fighting optional bosses for overpowered gear, multiple endings and a new game+ option.

Like I said, it's a good game. But it was also one of, like, a billion equally good games that came out that generation on that platform. Earthbound was also good, and had enough tongue-in-cheek self-awareness to still be fun today. Secret of Mana/Evermore used many of the same conventions, but also had live-action combat (as well as confusing ass radial menus.) Robotrek, Lufia, Breath of Fire, Super Mario RPG, Arcana, Illusion of Gaia, E.V.O., Shadowrun. Why single out Chrono Trigger? Especially now; with fan translations and emulators we have access to gems we missed the first time around, like Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean, Terranigma, several Dragon Warrior games, and Bahamut Lagoon.

It feels like (subjective, remember?) people are remembering the spirit of the time more than the actual experience of playing Chrono Trigger. Seriously, modern reviews of Chrono Trigger are just moon-eyed love letters to a bright and innocent past. It's as if CT is winning the 'Most Generically Agreeable Game For 16-bit Consoles" award. Which is sweet, I guess, but kind of unfair to the dozens of other equally deserving games.

Koudelka

was a survival horror RPG released in the States in 2000. Don't worry if you haven't heard of it. I had almost convinced myself playing it had just been something I had made up while drunk then forgot I had made up. It wasn't until I recently worked through my backlog of current-gen RPGs and started raiding the past's dumpsters that I even remembered it wasn't a hallucination.

I'm going from memory and the Wikipedia page here, but I remember loving the shit out of this game. The combat was turn-based on a grid and had a pretty unique (for the time,) feature of breakable equipment. This wasn't a new thing, I personally first remember it cropping up in Final Fantasy Legend from 1989, but it was the first time I remember a RPG using it to heighten tension. And again, Survival Horror/RPG crossovers (with the exception of Parasite Eve,) weren't like a common thing at the time.

It also had decent voice acting at a time when most games either didn't use voice overs (Final Fantasy,) or shouldn't have used them (Resident Evil.) Graphically it was, well, PS1 Milk-Carton People, but it worked from an aesthetic standpoint. What I mean by that is that the game had a consistent visual style, which is about the best anyone can say about early faux-3D games from our perspective here in The World Of Tomorrow.

Koudelka, like many games and women I develop unhealthy obsessions with, received polarized reviews, with most reviews falling between 2 and 9. See? Reviews don't mean anything. I mean, if a game received a score of 2 out of 10, that would imply that the game was physically unplayable, like it would crash at the third boss or turn your Playstation into a spider dispenser or something. While a review of 10/10 would mean "This game is perfect and there is nothing anyone could ever do or suggest that would improve or detract from it. It also cures herpes." Whatever. Most of the praise was aimed at the dark atmosphere, combat system and audio, with most of the complaints being leveled at the dark atmosphere, combat system and audio.

It's a unique game, is how I would best sum it up. If you're reading this then you're obviously deep enough in the backwaters of video game history to expect more from a game than another Wolfenstein/Doom knockoff or another heap of bullshit+zombies+gimmick shovelware. I also realize that I'm writing this about 9 years too late for most people to actually play the damn thing, so instead please download Parasite Eve from PSN and pretend that it's somewhat different and set 100 years in the past and you'll get a pretty good idea of what you missed.

Vitriolics Anonymous

"Nothing worse than a monster who thinks he's right with God." - Capt. Reynolds

I'm an atheist. Not sure if anyone's picked up on that yet. It's taken me quite a while to get comfortable with being comfortable about it. Living in a small, mostly Christian, functionally illiterate and rabidly Republican-conservative-dominionist Texas town is not the most desirable environment to be radically, or even marginally, unusual. In Texas, by the way, it is illegal for an atheist to hold public office (article 1. Sec. 4.)

Before anyone tags me as an intellectual snob or close-minded elitist I would first like to point out that I spent three solid years doing my level best to believe in any kind of supernatural supreme being. I just cannot buy into it. I see absolutely no evidence of any kind of loving and/or personal Higher Power at work in the lives of mankind. Having one day of rain after a record drought doesn't qualify as an answered prayer to me. Sorry. I think it would have happened even if you hadn't been praying for it since March. Fuck, why did it take your god seven months to make it rain anyway? Was he punishing us for something? Did we stop doing it? Or start or whatever? See? That's so, so, so much less likely than a high pressure front crossed the gulf stream or whatever. I'm not good at meteorology. You think it's a miracle, and I don't even see it as a coincidence. It's just rain! Why are you praising Jesus? That's fucking crazy!

I tried is what I'm saying here. I tried to believe in god way harder than any capital B Believer I know tried to not believe in him. And I'm not going to go into why or how I came to this conclusion. You all have the same internet and libraries I do.

The reactions I've received since I first began opening up about this have fallen into four broad categories. The first, and by far the most preferable, has been the clumsy but endearing acceptance and attempted identification I use when a male friend opens up about being gay. "Okay Adam, so I feel about Eve and Mary the way you feel about Steve and Joseph, boobs notwithstanding?" Only Eve and Mary are replaced with God and Church while Steve and Joseph are replaced with cell division and astrophysics. It's cute and clumsy but it works.

 The second kind of reaction is the purple elephant one. Entire relationships suddenly have this big awkward silence in the middle of them that we aren't going to talk about. We're not even going to talk about how we're not talking about it. If one of us, God forbid, says something even vaguely religious we'll just clam up and start staring at the ceiling and... Holy shit! I said 'God forbid!' Change the subject!

I understand this. Belief is a huge deal. Even among loved ones it's very easy to get defensive, to feel like something one cherishes is being threatened. People kill, riot and go to war over these things. We're a xenophobic species. Suddenly I'm a member of a different tribe, even if only in this one area. I appreciate that most people are at least willing to make an effort to be inclusive. I only wish they would go a little further with it and see that things like belief in certain religions or god or politics or whatever aren't binary, yes/no, good/evil systems. Saying someone is a Republican doesn't automatically mean they are also a white, Christian capitalist any more than a Democrat is automatically a liberal, chronically dissenting socialist. I am a liberal, a socialist and also a chronic dissenter, for example, but if John Huntsman or Buddy Roemer win the primary (unlikely,) I would probably vote for them over Obama because, from where I'm standing, they're the least bad options available as the others are either irredeemably corrupt, insane, incompetent or all three.

Anders Breivick and Martin Luther King Jr. are/were both Christian. This doesn't mean Breivick is a 'bad Christian' and Dr. King was a 'good Christian.' They're just people. Breivick is, conventionally speaking, a 'bad' person, while King was a 'good' person. I believe either of them would have behaved comparably regardless of personal religious beliefs if, for example, King had been a Muslim or Breivick had been a Buddhist.

Anyway, people feel strongly about their beliefs. Try disagreeing with a Birther or a 9/11 conspiracy theorist for ten minutes and you'll see what I mean. So it often seems easier to ignore this kind of ideological conflict than to get into a debate that could degenerate into a fistfight and a grudge.

The third kind of reaction really bothers me on a deeper level because it's the kind of closeted-bigot, nudge-nudge wink-wink response I grew up around. The kind of mentality that leads people to say things like "Obama did really well in life considering." The implied end of that statement being "his racial handicap," although they would be horrified if someone actually said that. It's a weird breed of arrogant doublethink that seems to occur a lot in Christianity. At least in the Christians I meet.

These people use the Shame and Guilt approach. "Jesus loves you and wants what's best for you and don't you just feel horrible for not believing in him?" No, bitch, I don't. I have zero give-a-shit for what some Jewish holy man that may have existed 2,000 years ago thinks of me. Especially since I've read your Bible more than you have, know what Jesus really taught better than you and know enough history to trace where that went wrong starting with Paul and proceeding through the Holy Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, Puritanism and the current rot of American Dominionism. I don't care how well-dressed, well-spoken or well-off you are because of your invisible father figure. I don't even care if you're objectively a 'good' person. You've aligned yourself with a nonsensical belief system that promotes ignorance, unquestioning obedience and the ostracism and demonization of anyone critical of the herd. That shit doesn't impress me. And even if it did, in my mind it's no different than wishing on a star or writing letters to Santa Claus.

This may work when you're indoctrinating your children, taking emotional advantage of the bereaved or brainwashing simpletons, but to me you look like a predator. Worse, it's a predatory tactic that turns people into more predators.

Don't approach me like I'm some idiot child throwing a tantrum, and don't try to put words in my mouth. I didn't mean "I'm agnostic," I didn't mean "I believe in God, just not the Bible," I didn't mean "I'm angry at God, and that's why I'm doing this." I meant "I've examined the evidence with an open mind, I've heard many different arguments for and against and have decided that I don't believe in god, gods, goddesses, demi-gods, ghosts, draculas, mummies, demons or any other supernatural explanations for natural phenomena." And please, please, for fuck's sake please don't Testify at me. Do you know how many times I've heard the "I was a hopeless, violent drug addict until Jay-zus saved me and washed my sins away!" story? I'll give you a hint: Lots. And you know what? Of those lots, lots minus a couple relapse and either die or go to prison. All that shows me is that either A) religious belief hinders recovery in drug addicts by attempting to bypass the work necessary to bring about the desired internal personality change required to keep from returning to active addiction or B) your god is a capricious asshat with terrible PR.

Look, I know I'm a self-righteous blowhard. I know I have shitty, hateful opinions about, like, everything. And I know how that alienates people, and that I would probably have a richer, more fulfilling life if I didn't loudly proclaim things like "95% of the music on the radio is shit, and that's being generous," or "most parents are shitty parents because reproduction isn't regulated." But, and this is important: I can admit when I'm wrong, on the very rare occasions when I am. Religious people don't. Or can't. Or won't. "I'm always right," is built into religion. If you succeed you get to be a saint, if you fail you get to be a martyr. Either way you get to feel superior to the non-religious or to members of different religions without having to do anything to justify the feeling of superiority.

As bad as the Holier Than Thou Brigade is, they're nothing compared to the, thankfully, smallest group of reactionaries: Unreasonable Lunatic Fundamentalists.

These people are the reason for separation of church and state. They're the reason we had the Dark Ages, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Fox News and the Salem Witch Trials. They're the reason Galileo was imprisoned for heresy and Darwin is held, at least in some circles, at the same level as Hitler and Castro.

Here, try to watch this dumbass:

Since you probably didn't finish that whatever-that-was, I'll sum up: the most punchable kid in the world thinks evolution (EVILution!) isn't real because the spork is the missing link for horses+Jesus. I think. I'm not even certain it isn't just Poe's Law in action, but it's not any more insane than any other fundamentalist bullshit out there. 

Point is, he doesn't know anything about evolution. Natural selection is not blind chance. Since he thinks it is, then he's basing his 'thesis' on something he heard from the preacher that molests him in the broom closet.

Science deniers shouldn't be allowed to have the benefits of science. Such as computers. They do shit like this with them. If you buy a computer designed by (probably,) evolutionists and make a video using a webcam and video editing software (probably,) designed by evolutionists to put on the internet to hopefully convince anyone bored enough to watch it that the book of Genesis is a factual, step by step account of the origin of the universe then you're not just a failure, but, I don't know, some kind of demi-human super-failure prototype designed by the government to wreck emergent civilizations as some kind of almost-sentient anchor baby dropped off to destroy any progress they've made like some kind of creepy, bipedal Dark Age.

And, like all creationists, he cherry picks his own sacred storybook and ignores anything that disagrees with his own theory. Like how, in Genesis, God creates plants before the sun. Wouldn't they instantly die? Or how, in Genesis, Cain, after murdering his brother, went to the land of Nod, where there were also people, that presumably weren't created by God. Or how, in Genesis, the Sons of God took human women for their brides, meaning Jesus isn't an only child (he does claim that the 'sons of God' in the story are really demons and fallen angels, but again, why would a loving and magnanimous deity allow that?) Or how, in Genesis, God destroys almost all life on Earth, which would mean God is fallible, since God created it in the first place. Was God displeased with his own work? Then he makes mistakes. Did he not know what man would do with free will? Then he's not all-knowing. Why did God destroy the animals for Man's wrongdoing? Because he's a vengeful asshole that overreacts to everything or because he was invented by vengeful assholes that overreacted to everything? Or, in Genesis, when Noah gathers two of every species of animal life onto a boat. There are over 2 million known species on the planet, and scientists think the total number could be between 5 and 10 million total. So, four million different animals on one boat being cared for by one family for six months? Evolution isn't a thing, so it had to be every species that's around today plus every species that has gone extinct since. And how did Noah get the penguins back to Antarctica and the lions back to Africa and the bears back to America and the lemurs back to Madagascar and the kangaroos back to Australia? Don't even get me started on dinosaurs or early mammals like the sabretooth tiger or mastodon.

I could of course go on, but I'm not here to point out that a 3,000 year old book is made almost entirely out of plot holes. I'm here to point out that there are people like Boy Wonder up there that think the God of that book wants them to kill people like me for questioning it. And they wouldn't even feel bad about it, because it's what God wants. I feel bad when I run over a cat that's already been ran over. I cry during Humane Society commercials. I volunteer at a homeless shelter. And they claim that I'm going to be on fire for eternity because I don't believe their crackers and cheap wine are really the body of someone that died 2,000 years ago? I know how fermentation works so I'm going to Hell?

I know this may be painful,  but imagine that weird kid up there again. Now, imagine he's a 250 pound meth-addled construction worker. Or a police officer. Or a judge. Or a governor. Or, well, anyone, really. He's not insane, if he didn't talk he wouldn't appear abnormal enough to shun. He'll probably grow up and be one of those things. And I have no doubt in my mind that he would be totally okay with me dieing a slow, painful death and then being thrown into a lake of fire for eternity. In his mind that's what I deserve. That's why I don't talk about it to most people, because some people may not be content to just tell me about Hell.

Fuck, I'm not trying to turn anyone's kids into whatever it is people like that think atheists are trying to do to other people's children. Believe me, I'm far more polite and respectful of others religious beliefs than they tend to be about mine in my day to day life. I'm only venting here because I have almost no one to talk to about this in the real world.

Slacker Shack

I'm not very good at repairing things. I also don't have enough money to pay other people to do it. I also also am not charismatic enough in real life to trick people into doing it for free. So this happens.

I made it on Paint. Again because I have no money, skill or resources.