Pretentious Jackal

I've grown so bored and tired of all the "well technically, the Bible says to be nice to women and treat all as alike to God" or "Y'know the Talmud says there are six genders" or "Y'know Jesus said eunuchs are valid and blessed". So tired of looking through Jewish or Christian commentaries struggling to find those scraps from Jewish Rabbis or Christian clergy, scholars and apologists who had a good idea after reading the Bible. The true word of God should not require so much effort to not see it as invoking hate and violence. Make it make some sense at every level of understanding and interpretation. Surely a god could do that. When can we finally just replace the Bible with a new foundation that doesn't need so many levels of shaky interpretation to finally see it as saying something good?

I'm getting so sick of feeling responsible to try to find all the small pieces of good in the book used to censor me, repress me, violate my bodily autonomy, give me the fear of eternal punishment, etc. The Bible has done nothing to earn my respect. The only minutiae of respect goes to individuals who bullshitted themselves a way for the Bible to align with true morality.

Why would potential benefits of AI in healthcare even matter if the government is cutting science funding, shutting down mRNA research, destroying USAID, slashing medicaid.

Claim: That's just gender roles/ sexism/ toxic masculinity. So misandry doesn't exist.

Response: Misandry is a part of sexism. Gender roles and toxic masculinity are built on ideas of what men should be and shouldn't be. The ideas of what they shouldn't be are the misandry part. Toxic masculinity's ideas of stoic attitude are built on the premise that men's feelings don't matter. Purity culture tells men There specific aspects of sexism, gender roles and toxic masculinity that put down men, which deserve a word to describe it. It's a unique dimension of sexism that can't be ignored. Even if certain statement about men are perpetuated by other toxic men who try to frame it as the natural order and not really something you should feel ashamed about, I can't help but feel shamed and dehumanized. It carries the seeds of self-hatred for men. It's hateful to me, and it's on account of me being a man. "Misandry" is a useful word for this.

Claim: Men have the power and misogyny is rampant, so misandry doesn't exist.

Response: Sexist attitudes can be misandrist at the same time as being in service of misogyny and patriarchy. When religious fundies scare me about how inherently sinful and lustful I am, it doesn't stop being misandry just because that narrative is also used for misogynistic purposes by telling girls/women that they need to control how they dress to protect men from temptation. I may not know how it feels to be a girl being told that, but I don't need to win some oppression olympics to know it emotionally hurt me too and drove me into self-hatred.

This whole thing reminds me of that "Racism is prejudice plus power" bullshit. To which I got the same response.

People can take turns holding power.

There are multiple kinds of power that can act in parallel from opposing sides. Emotional power, Financial power, Social power, Legal power, etc.

Power depends on context. (For example, someone has the social power in one group of people but not in others. Or they have the emotional power in one type of conversation but not others because people have their emotional vulnerabilities and trauma in different places.)

You can be an asshole without having institutional power behind your back. Don't be a grassroots asshole.

Also the military draft and infant circumcision are institutional systems of violence against men. Schedule-use male birth control is kept from men because doctors don't take men's mental health or personal concern for their wife's health seriously in judging the comparison between drug benefits and side effects. I've heard stuff about family court bias but I can't really say if it's proportional. I've personally seen more instances of family courts siding with terrible fathers in order to avoid looking prejudiced toward men. So I don't know about that. I don't know if we're good enough at measuring what's going on there.

Claim: Misandry is just a trauma response from dealing with other men in the past.

Response: If I call someone misandrist, it's because they make sweeping generalizations of all men. When people making sweeping generalizations, they should be called out on it no matter the reason. There are ways to voice frustration toward patriarchy, toward things that men are more likely to be allowed to do, that doesn't throw all men under the bus. Use some "I feel" statements. Or say "In the past when I was in X situation, this happened." Or learn the statistics and use words like "statistically" or "disproportionately" appropriately. And misandry is not just from individual women. It's from other men. It's from religion. It's from the government. It's in the way many people talk regardless of past experience.

Claim: X is just homophobia, anti-neurodiversity or racism. It's not misandry.

Response: You got to understand intersectionality. Misandry and other prejudices combine, compound and inform each other in unique ways.

I can't talk about religious homophobia toward myself without also talking about the way men in general are shamed for their sexuality. I'm bi and I can say that I was made to feel shame for both attractions, even if the shame was to different degrees and had some differences. If I were lesbian, I don't think I'd have the same fear of castration and feeling of deserving castration put into me.

I can't talk about neurodiversity prejudice without talking about being framed as just a nasty, rude, loser, trouble-making boy who needs to unlearn boyish ways.

Sex is short for sexual intercourse. Sexual intercourse as a word is analogous to the state of being in water. I'm sorry there's not a special word for good, consensual, thriving, relatively safe sex, that would be analogous to swimming. And my other problem with the analogy is that it makes it sound like it's a problem with the person drowning, for not being able to swim, instead of a problem with the waters flooding without warning and pulling them down.

And another thing. I don't understand us saying that children can't be raped because rape implies the ability to otherwise consent. Well if the tsunami comes and babies are swept away, they suddenly aren't drowning because they never had the ability to swim in the first place. Replacing every instance of "child rape" with "sexual assault of a minor" makes it sound so much softer. It lessens the immediate mental image from forceful sex to something like strangers in trenchcoats flashing people indiscriminately in public. Makes it sound like just an inconvenience or a funny story. We're afraid to admit we live in a cruel culture and country where children are raped by those in power, who then get away with it.

Obligatory George Carlin Clip.

Don't say: Mormons aren't Christians. (Mormons still follow the New Testament and view the Book of Mormon as supplementing it, being another Testament of Jesus Christ. The Book of Mormon Jesus scenes repeat a lot from the Sermon on the Mount. It's true that Mormons don't believe the Bible as it survives is inerrant but so do a lot of other Christians.)

Instead say: Mormons often fail to follow the teachings of Jesus, just like a lot of Christians do. They'll focus on hate instead of love. They'll ignore what Jesus said about caring for the poor and vulnerable.

Don't say: Jesus and Lucifer being brothers is blasphemous. (This doesn't matter. Everyone is spiritual siblings in Mormon Doctrine. Common origin says nothing about morality.)

Instead say: Mormonism fails to solve the Problem of Evil. They bring up how Lucifer's temptation is necessary for God's plan but can't justify why Lucifer is punished for it, or why Lucifer is complicate in going along with it. Mormons say that Jesus's plan is agency and unsure return to God's presence, as opposed to Lucifer's plan of no agency and guaranteed return to God's presence. But the Mormon church often doesn't respect your agency and can exhibit the controlling behaviors you were taught to associate with Satan. And it's weird to call it Jesus's plan if it was the plan of all the Gods before ours. Were the separate plans even a real choice?

I've decided that if I'm going to constantly worry about and put up with seeing people venting their trauma in ways that make men into a monolith, they should worry about hearing my trauma too.

I'm sick of hearing women and pick-me men who only talk about purity cultures in terms of its harmful effects on women while putting men down for not being effected by it or for supposedly benefiting from it. Or if they do talk about the harmful effects on men, it's ultimately a segway into talking about how hurt men, hurt women. Like our pain is just instrumental to womens' pain and doesn't matter enough on its own. It's so condescending. Or they just throw gay men a bone for feeling shame for sexual attraction to men, as if men aren't also made to feel shame for sexual attraction to women, or shame for just being a sexual being in general, throwing bi and straight men under the bus and missing key components of shame that affect gay, bi and straight men alike.

More scary internet talk. Can't let people talk about the problems in the church online without shame and pressure of a congregation judging you.

The church talks a lot about philosophies of men. But the church has no alternative philosophy. Their works are self-contradictory and based on circular reasoning without a foundation. The church's doctrine and philosophy is a tangled mess.

But at the same time if you look into church history, you'll find prophets saying weird stuff, and they will be excused as being a product of their time. Then you hear about less literal interpretations of translation, like with the whole Book of Abraham and Horse stuff. So prophets are able to make mistakes, and their mind and experiences inform how they're able to get revelation. So everything that comes through prophets is filtered through philosophies of men. Scripture itself is understood as revelation mingled with philosophies of men. Because men must be told things in words they understand, or they need to be asking the right questions to obtain revelation in the first place, or they mistake cultural practices from the time as doctrine.

It's great to emphasize diversity and loving people and having the church be a mosaic of patterns. But they're going to be vague and self-contradicting about what Jesus wants. It is notoriously hard to find out what's really doctrine in the Mormon church. And there's the back-and-forth praising and defending of policies, and saying that things were just policies so it doesn't matter that the church had a terrible policy in the past. When there's no clear present instruction, members go to past teachings, policies, and culture as precedent. There is no reliable way to tell the church's Right-wing White Western American culture apart from their teachings.

I've seen general authorities in the past 30 years both say it's against doctrine, and in-line with doctrine to use LGBT labels.

More glorification of abandoning bad cultural practices while being vague about what practices those are.

I don't like stories of whole kingdoms or families being converted. Just sounds like people are following the government or parents, and not everyone is deciding for themselves. They remind me of that disgusting story in the Bible with the king forcing all his people to be circumcised.

Airports sure are scary and uncomfortable, especially now.

Japanese work ethic fetishization.

More objectification and infantilization of church members, turning us into property and children. He's comparing the church to airport employees and normalizing the church's mass surveillance and control over our lives. I think this goes back into the church trying to regulate everyone's thoughts and redirect every opposition to the bishop's office or stake president, so other everyday members don't have to hear difficult topics.