Zinnia

@Zinnia

Socrates & commentators #crackpot #wingnut

I’ll give these types that Trump was probably not a fascist, but qualify that with he was perfectly willing to allow fascists to have their way if it meant more power for him or if they would feed his ego hard enough. And that the US has never had government which operates on fascism as a principle, though we’ve had a few agencies and our share of congresspeople who could reasonably count as such.

That’s as far as it goes, though. And for those who think fascist governments haven’t existed in the 21st century, or even just “in the West for decades” I have two words for you: Golden Dawn.

Chief Turey #crackpot #moonbat #racist

A lot of this whole “critical race theory” discourse is basically white people (and the rare highly-privileged minority) telling other white people that racial minorities don’t like it when white people tell them how to feel, so please butt out and let them experience the joy of racism and oppression like they would be doing if you weren’t forcing uppity ideas on them.

This is frequently coming from the same people who claim that socialism takes away the right of the poor to choose to be crushed under the wheels of unfettered capitalism, and/or that allowing people to reclaim their former culture is a type of colonization.

Horrifying Houseguest #quack

I’m guessing that this is based on the fact that sometimes cancer cell clusters get trapped in microcysts before they get to the point where they can really start spreading. It won’t kill most of them on its own, but as long as the cyst lasts, they won’t do any real harm to the body either. If the cyst breaks, that can be bad. This is one of the many defenses the body has against cancer.

This is the kind of hypothesis you get when you think that all illnesses are caused by toxins. Or “chemicals”.

Kate Harris #moonbat #sexist #transphobia

“Hey trans people! You don’t need to be trans! You can just be a GNC (Gender Non-Conforming) member of your AGAB (Assigned Gender At Birth)! Isn’t that so much easier!” This attitude conflates gender presentation with gender identity. I see it from more moderate TERFs and moderately trasphobic members of the LGBTQ+ community who think they’re being all benevolent and understanding… but subscribe to a worldview where gender identity doesn’t meaningfully exist and just gets in the way (politically) of achieving true equality.

And then there’s “de-transitioners exist and are valid, so therefore trans people aren’t real, and if you accept trans people are real then you’re invalidating the de-transitioners!” The first part of that is fine so long as you don’t consider them to be representative of those who choose to transition (as they’re only a few percent of the total); but what follows is a grotesque non-sequitur which barely even pretends to make sense. It’s just a string of assertions which need to be true for de-transitioners to meaningfully be used as a clobber argument against trans people badly disguised as an actual clobber argument.

You don’t often see the former “reasonable” (not actually reasonable) attitude mixed in with the severe fucked-upness of the latter, yet here we are.

Liberty Hangout #dunning-kruger #fundie #wingnut

Oh, they’d definitely be small-government economically, at least until they started assigning moral values to certain economic activities. Banking, tax collecting, and entertainment were long considered unsuitable jobs for Christians (at least in some parts of Europe) and those jobs were handed off to oppressed minorities. Who were then double-oppressed for having those jobs, even if it sometimes paid well enough to partially compensate for that. …And then called “greedy” for taking “immoral” jobs “just for the money” as if there was a whole lot in the way of choices. This is where the “greedy Jew” stereotype comes from, incidentally.

Socially, though? Big government. Real big.

Robert Slovak #quack

Or, ya know, you could just add a bit of sea salt to your food? Sure, it’s processed a little bit, but at least you won’t have to worry about it being full of live microorganisms. Just saying.

IrishTheFrenchie #conspiracy #transphobia

It’s odd. I’ve been seeing a creeping theoretical acceptance of GNC People (Gender Non-Conforming; the term is most often applied to cis people whose gender presentation tends towards what society says the opposite gender should be like) but only as a means of denying the existence of trans and nonbinary people. I say “theoretical” because I suspect most of them wouldn’t actually treat GNC people all that much better than they would have before.

Vox Day #fundie #crackpot

I thiiink he’s trying to portray atheists as some kind of elitist or religious supremacist. Probably ironic, given that he’s pretty elitist himself.

Gymcelled #pratt #psycho #racist #sexist

I don’t know about this case in particular, but I bet the media isn’t calling it “rape” because some jurisdictions still use older laws where she can’t actually commit rape due to lacking a penis. Also, I’m not aware of any jurisdiction where “pedophilia” is the name for the actual crime, instead it’s “statutory rape/assault” or something similar.

Q #crackpot #dunning-kruger #racist

You’ve heard of Bushido, the samurai code? Well, what they didn’t tell you is that it actually codified pederasty and established a legal and moral framework by which samurai could have sex with little boys.

I’m assuming that this is a reference to shudou (earlier term) / nanshoku (later term), which was basically the tolerance of older mentor / younger student relationships among male samurai (same-sex relationships were otherwise forbidden among members of that caste during most eras) with the younger sometimes being underage by modern standards, but definitely not prepubescent children. A bit icky by today’s sensibilities, but not really different than, say, ancient Greece. Regardless, this was not actually part of any version of Bushido, but something separate, and hasn’t been part of Japanese culture after the disappearance of the caste system.

Medeea Greere #crackpot #conspiracy #fundie #magick

If CERN somehow accidentally created a micro singularity of some sort (and we’re pretty sure by now that they can’t) what would happen is that it would fall through the earth, emerge on the opposite side, fall through again, oscillate repeatedly for a long time before finally settling in the center, and then do… basically nothing. Below a certain threshold, it will just evaporate over thousands or millions of years without absorbing anything. (And then explode and maybe cause a few minor earthquakes.) Otherwise, it will most likely take millions of years to even notice anything is wrong.

Also, if magnetic attraction was all it took to send meteors flying our way, then earth already has an insanely powerful magnetic field… and the Sun is much, much stronger. Why haven’t those meteors already crashed into the Sun, I’ll never know. /s

BladingEagle #racist #sexist #transphobia #wingnut

I think they’re trying to go for a combination of “liberals say they can’t agree on anything, but they’re actually just a bunch of conformists” and “most other people are basically NPCs because they behave consistently” but it kind of gets lost if you aren’t aware of those assumptions.

Artyom_of_Moscow #transphobia

Language changes. Some of those changes are due to trans people being allowed to freely talk about themselves.

“A transgender” was never correct, though. And I admit that “personal pronouns” is a new one for me.

Taron #crackpot #conspiracy #ufo #fundie #magick

Set’s role and reputation in Egyptian mythology changed over time, but he was generally not wholly evil. The closest thing to a true “god of evil” was Apophis, not Set.

Roosh V #fundie #dunning-kruger

requires so much faith

Only if you lack the requisite knowledge. To be fair, some people don’t seem to find it an easy concept to grasp. Also to be fair, some of those people have been specifically taught how to not grasp it.

it would be a simpler matter to believe in the Bible

I find that “simple” and “complex” to be relative, especially when it comes to abstract concepts. Saying “I will flap my arms and fly to the moon” uses simple concepts, but trying to explain how it doesn’t work beyond the level of “nope, you can’t” can easily get pretty complex. This is because “simple” ideas are usually emergent phenomena of highly complex underlying realities.

Gary Curtis #transphobia #fundie #wingnut

Transgenderism is a dangerous and destructive ideology.

There’s no real-world ideology named “transgenderism”, though there are various *hypothetical* ideologies, most of which are based around the idea that trans people have the exact same beliefs, experiences, and ignorances as whichever group invented it but choose to be evil (or occasionally, to “not get over their mental illness”) instead.

This is hardly unique, of course. Ideologies which exist in opposition to nonexistent ideologies which are often assigned to real world groups say more about the originating people than the real or fictional people they oppose.

Brett Stevens #sexist #wingnut

Are you going to argue that assault and battery is just unpaid boxing? Or that murder is unpaid military service?

Jacob Harrison #psycho #fundie

Jacob: [Says something incredibly stupid]
Me: [Punches Jacob in the face, turning it into a bloody mess]
Also Me: Wow, your face is messed up! You are a sinner for being in public with that face!
Random bystander: [Slits Jacob’s throat]
Jacob: [Dies, burns in hell for no reason other than saying the stupid thing]
Also Jacob: [Fantasizes about me and the bystander joining him in hell]
Both of us: [Commit many more sins, repent on deathbed, go to heaven]
God: This is my mercy!

Moral of the story: Mr. Harrison is a douche.

Riothamus & Avadavat #crackpot #moonbat #sexist #transphobia

A lot of transmen were abused as children/teens for being trans. Thankfully less common now.

A lot of transwomen attempted to hide from themselves by adopting hypermasculine (and usually toxic) behaviors. This is both a cause of harm to other women and also a form of self-harm. Also, it was often a reaction to being abused as children/teens for being trans. Also thankfully less common now.

(I don’t know if it is/was common for transmen to engage in toxic hyperfemininity, only that if it is, it’s less culturally/socially visible.)

This is starting from the assumption that trans people aren’t really trans, taking the superficial details common to older trans folks (because only older ones have a long personal history to draw from) out of context, then coming up with motivations based on those superficial details to explain how trans people don’t real. In other words, the ususal TERFish nonsense.

deathnicel #racist #sexist

So much speculation about the internal mental state of one particular person, by someone who is clearly terrible at it.

Shana Schutte #fundie #kinkshaming

Based on what I’ve heard anecdotally (I’ve never been married) abstaining from sex before marriage is good for preventing jealousy and/or stress caused by neuroticim towards sex and/or relationships if one or both partners have them, and does little to nothing if neither does. However, it’s also a crapshoot in regards to sexual compatibility; if you’re not compatible enough, then this will cause a lot of stress and/or a strong temptation to cheat.

A more productive idea would be to rid oneself of such neuroticism before seriously dating (easier said than done). Or better yet, change cultural attitudes so people are much less likely to end up that way to begin with (some progress has been made on this). But neither of those are compatible with “traditional values” so of course they’re not going to suggest them.

Edward Martel #wingnut #racist

I could see that happening in a world where most people are strawman liberals of some stripe. That would suggest that, in such a reality, conservatives have always been a powerful minority, not the silent majority they often claim to be.

JohnEngelman #pratt #psycho #racist

The side effects of oppression justifies continued oppression, part too many to count.

Alexandra Bruce #conspiracy #ableist #wingnut #quack

There’s this weird thing going on in conservative-leaning moderate spaces right now where they’re trying to diagnose far-left people with some kind of mental illness, in order to “help” them. Why can’t they just be happy with the way things are? All that protesting is a sign of something wrong, and that something wrong is probably that they need psychological help to feel more secure, or something along those lines. And of course it was inevitable that this would get turned into a conspiracy theory.

Kaitlin Bennett #wingnut

There’s this idea in certain conservative spaces that most liberal cities are some kind of dystopian crimescape, and liberal politics and/or culture are to blame. Because if it’s not true, then their worldview has a serious need of being rebuilt almost from the ground up. That’s one of the hardest things you can do, so nope, must be crimescape. It “helps” that the kind of people who would believe that aren’t generally the sort to travel, and that Fox News hints at such occasionally.

MankoW #ufo #crackpot #dunning-kruger

II is actually just a product of modern society, not physics. Some people do better as daylarks or night owls, but have jobs which are out of sync with that, so they feel like they should be going to bed earlier or later. And there are others who do better with 25 or 26 hour days. It’s meant to make sure that everyone’s sleep periods aren’t in sync and somebody’s always awake, so that lions can’t just creep in and steal your babies while everyone’s asleep. Keeping to regular clock schedules may be necessary for modern society, but also is subtly disruptive for some people.

For the rest of it, what do you think a “natural” lifeform to this world would even be made of? Rubber and titanium?

slipkid223 #racist #dunning-kruger

Just a few days later, there was an incident in the same state (Minnesota) which was similar, except the guy was older, and white. Also just before fleeing he hit one of the cops in the face with a hammer. They took him in without tasing or shooting him.

I wonder which is the most significant difference?

Vicious Deplorable dollop #racist #wingnut

The Star Chamber, when it was active, was widely seen as a serious violation of the Magna Carta, and a blot upon human rights in general. Secret trials, secret evidence, guilty until proven innocent, often used for political or religious vendettas, all that kind of crap. The fact that you want to bring a modern-day version of it to the US is telling.

Arkansas Republicans #fundie

Say what you will about the current makeup of the US Supreme Court, but most of them at least pay lip service to precedent and rule of law. (I’m saying “most” because Boof either doesn’t or is very bad at it, and I still have questions about ACB.) Something this blatant is extremely unlikely to pass. It may, however, result in the conservative two-thirds of the court suggesting a “valid” (by their standards) path towards eroding religious freedom in the name of upholding it. And then there’s a good chance that it will just get ignored or badly misinterpreted, because the conservatives pushing hardest at these kinds of things are just that dense. But there’s still a long-term danger here.

Ryushin Malone #crackpot #ufo #conspiracy #racist

If they’re that desperate, the aliens can just buy synthetic adrenochrome, which is both chemically identical and more pure than biologically-derived sources. Sure, it’ll cost them around $1500 per Kilogram at current prices, but if you can afford to travel across the galaxy, that price is trivial. Also, think of how many children it would take to harvest even that much!

Sandra Archibald #crackpot #fundie #wingnut #quack

I tried to look it up to see if “Newtown, CT” is also a reference to some event from the Satanic Panic. I vaguely recall some major trial involving that happening in Connecticut. I ended up with tons of conspiracy theory pages about how Newtown is basically Satan Central and the city council members are puppets of the Church of Satanism. Child abductions and human sacrifice rituals everywhere and all that. Most of them don’t focus on the Sandy Hook shooting, but that’s a part of the larger Satanism thing, apparently. These articles go back to at least 2012, so it’s not new.

Catherine Austin Fitts #conspiracy #wingnut #dunning-kruger

An inhuman culture is one where we’re a natural resource to be exploited like an oil deposit or a herd of livestock.

By this standard, cultures with monarchies, chattel slavery, and/or caste systems count as “transhumanist”. However, she(?) doesn’t appear to be thinking along these lines, or at least doesn’t particularly fear that - to quote, “I can’t stop the Government from killing my body but I have the power to stay within the umbrella of my inalienable rights.” Reading the full article didn’t help much, as my knowledge of techno-woo terminology is too limited to make sense of it.

I suspect what she’s afraid of is an AIocracy, where artificial intelligences rule instead of humans. And also afraid that this would result in humans getting brainjacked for computational resources and/or transformed into cyborg slaves. Or possibly just some vague technophobia where she has no idea what might happen but it’s probably very bad on a spiritual level.

Jerry Derecha/Adrenogate #crackpot #conspiracy #transphobia #fundie

@Spacewyrm #83004
what difference does it make for the Evil Satanic Conspiracy's whole "undermining Christian values" plan

I suspect it’s something like “Whoops, you were tricked into idolizing something inherently satanic! Doesn’t matter if you didn’t know, you’re still burning in hell forever! Doesn’t matter if you couldn’t have known, God is really really strict about that sort of thing, that’s why we have to save you!”

Huge Johnson #psycho

Given how often extreme racists refer to people with different skin tones as “apes”, I can’t help but wonder if there’s some sort of weird racist thing going on here.

“Bible a Book of Truth” #crackpot #fundie

Peter B. Meyer #conspiracy #ufo #fundie #magick #crackpot

So Spock shouldn’t even logically exist at all, even IF you take the “Ancient Humanoids seeding the galaxy with similar life” explanation into account.

I may be remembering wrong, but I think Star Trek: Enterprise tried to explain that the very small number of human-vulcan hybrids which existed were created not by natural breeding, but by extensive genetic engineering. Assuming that were possible, the result would be incompatible with both humans and vulcans without further genetic tinkering and would be essentially a completely new race. However, that wouldn’t explain of some of the mixed-species characters from the various Next-Generation era shows.

Though K’Ehleyr (human-klingon) having a fling with Worf, then showing up a year and a half later with a five-year-old boy and the implied explanation of “oops, we forgot the condoms” seems suspicious. Perhaps she was trying to dump one of her nephews that someone else had dumped on her and Worf is just an idiot. ;-p

Various TERFs #sexist #transphobia

I’m getting irritated by the way the term “gaslighting/gaslit” is increasingly being used by bigots. If I were in the mood to be generous, I’d say that this could be considered true in a very broad sense of the term: the silent tolerance of bigoted views are no longer being tolerated as much (and for that matter, are being revealed to them as having been uncomfortable tolerance all along, and not silent agreement), their “truths” are constantly being challenged by society as a whole, parts of the foundation of everything they believe in are being dismissed as wrong and crazy. The experience of that would feel much the same as actual abuse.

Buuut, most of the time I’m not feeling that generous. Preventing them from suffering as a result of their own delusions and wrongheaded ideas means that they have free reign to genuinely gaslight others out of ignorance (usually with quite a lot of misguided hatred and superiority complex mixed in), and provides plausible deniability for malicious actors looking for easy victims. It’s not worth slowing progress towards a fair and just society to a crawl by going out of the way to spare their feelings, even if a few get genuinely traumatized as a result.

kopfinhand #moonbat #transphobia

@ArkBien #82160

I suspect that it varies somewhat, but generally true, even if they’d refuse to admit to it. I do have some (admittedly limited) real-life exposure to one particular group of TERFs who are all menstruation / fertility / moon goddess types but also have connections to white supremacist groups. My impression (possibly inaccurate, again due to limited exposure) is that infertile cis women, non-white women, and most female-identified intersex people are acknowledged as women due to shared anatomical similarities and patriarchal trauma (or something along those lines), but due to lacking the “true female experience” don’t really consider them as having much to contribute to the cause of feminism.

Likewise, the people who they don’t really consider having much to contribute to feminism generally aren’t interested in contributing to their concept of feminism anyway.

Laura Wood #dunning-kruger #conspiracy

Science (or medicine, for that matter) is not some unchallengeable orthodoxy. It’s just that most challenges aren’t new, aren’t even new takes on old ideas, don’t work any better than they did decades or centuries ago, and are put forward by people who are quite clearly missing a key bit of understanding or are disregarding it for ideological reasons. It’s just not worth repeatedly entertaining known failures in order to give the appearance of “non-orthodoxy” to bad-faith actors and dunning-kruger exemplars - progress would be slowed to a crawl, and even more ignorance would be gumming up the works of what we do have than is already the case.

“Facts don’t care” is kind of a problematic phrase in the way it’s generally used, but this is a case where it’s reasonable to say “facts don’t care about your pet theory.”

Various Incels #sexist

Meanwhile, despite all the “evidence”, most people go about their lives in a reality far removed from the so-called “blackpill”.

kopfinhand #moonbat #transphobia

I want to say “have they ever met a trans person”… except a lot of bigots with utterly ridiculous beliefs have met the people they hate on, they just ignore all evidence in contrary to their strawperson image or consider the one/few they have met to be exceptions.

Fritz Berggren #fundie #racist #conspiracy #homophobia

I’m not sure I even want to know what they mean by “grooming children for sexual slaughter”. I’m pretty sure it’s not actually that bad, comparatively speaking, it’s just probably going to involve demented pretzel logic involving souls and Hell or somesuch which I am not in the mood for right now.

OverwroughtDoeling #conspiracy #crackpot

There do exist some good conservative actors. See Clint Eastwood, for instance. They’re just in the minority. Conservative writers and directors, on the other hand, are nearly always quite terrible. The main reason why Hollywood isn’t some liberal paradise is because producers and studio heads are more likely conservative than not, and they have a pretty big say in what gets made and how.

I’m sure that if you segregated Hollywood by broad sociopolitical ideology, then the conservative minority side of it would produce films which hardcore conservatives would love, but would fail to achieve broad appeal. And a lot of them would be rather offensive to the general public, but they wouldn’t be able to understand why.

Total Imbecile #sexist

These days, girls study hard, boys think studying is for losers, generally speaking. Plenty of exceptions obviously, which is why only “generally speaking”.

…This is a real problem right now, and penalizing girls for learning doesn’t help boys learn any better.

Ben Garrison #conspiracy #quack

Sci-fi tech is magic! And also already exists. Also the government is extra super-sinister now that Trump isn’t in charge anymore, because something something Tom Hanks eats souls and possibly also kicks puppies.

Total Imbecile & Caesercel #psycho #sexist

That is… some logic. “If they won’t have sex with you for a better grade, then give them a worse grade instead!”

This is on top of the general “they’re probably stupid, so if they somehow prove they’re not actually stupid, punish them for being stupid regardless, as it’s a valuable life lesson” WTFery that’s going on here.

Ben Garrison #transphobia

If all the hullabaloo were really about genital surgery for minors without the permission of parents, and nothing else: a law against that wouldn’t do much anyway, as this is illegal in most places already. This is not an actual issue, and even very few trans people are calling for it.

This is just a cover for the real “concerns”; which is if trans people were to transition as children, and make use of puberty blockers as teenagers (which some people seem not to be aware of, or understand how they work if they are aware, and come up with incorrect and wrongheaded ideas how transitioning works for teens these days), and complete the last steps as adults if desired and needed, then they’ll be indistinguishable from cis people of their gender. This will not do. If transphobes can’t bash trans people who look like men wearing dresses, then who can they bash? What if a man puts on a dress to look like a man wearing a dress in order to impersonate a transwoman who doesn’t look like a man wearing a dress (and who are generally actually wearing pants anyway) and enters a women’s restroom? Ohhh mmyyyy gaawwd. ;-p

Bernard Gaynor #sexist

Mike Stone #wingnut #conspiracy #dunning-kruger #quack

"He's not wearing a mask. Why am I wearing one?"

Nobody has to ask. They *know*.

Lauren Boebert, US Representative for CO District 3 #fundie #wingnut

For all those who complain about US politics being overly partisan and divisive, not like the “good ol’ days” (ignoring that things weren’t quite that rosy in reality), you can put a good chunk of the blame for that on Rush. Sadly there are many others fighting to pick up his torch, but at least none of them so far appear to have his charisma.