#dan mcclellan

My favorite books:

The Culting of America - Daniella Mestynanek Young 🇺🇸🌈

Chromophobia - David Bachelor 🎨🚫

the Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux 🥀⚰️

Uncultured - Daniella Mestynanek Young ⛪⛓️‍💥

All FREE except for Daniella Mestynanek Young's books, which I bought and encourage you to buy.

Other things to check out:

White Woman Whisperer ✍🏻🫱🏻‍🫲🏿

(Helps white women- and anyone who wants help- deconstruct white supremacy. Helped me start journaling, please listen.)

Knitting Cult Lady 🧶📘

(Channel run by Daniella Mestynanek Young: Scholar of Cults, Extreme Groups, and Extremely bad leadership - wity, informative, made my life make sense. Awesome books, mission, and merch. Donate and join the discord server!)

"Who's Afraid of Modern Art" 🌈👮🏻

(Video essay by Jacob Geller on Fascism, art, color, and censorship. Changed my life)

Dan McClellan 📜🔍

(Biblical academia channel - misinformation/misconception corrections, debunking apologetics and conspiracy theories. Great for ex-christians and ex-mormons.)

Miniminuteman 🏺🧭

(Archeology channel run by Milo Rossi and team - conspiracy theory debunking, witty commentary, exploration, really-fucking-cool merch)

Internet Archive 📚💐

(books, movies, TV shows, music, 3d print files, scans, wayback machine, ect, all for free. Please donate to them)

Twenty One Pilots "The Story" 🏞️🌻

(A haunting story told via music videos - Unique, intriguing worldbuilding, esoteric and emotional storyline)

My Chemical Romance "Danger Days" 🏜️🔫

I gave https://podbay.fm/p/data-over-dogma/e/1760951520 a listen, which is purportedly on what the bible actually says about adultery, and I found it rather disappointing. Dan McClellan is a politically-progressive academic, which is pretty obvious from how he comports himself on his youtube channel, even though he generally shies from direct commentary on contemporary political issues. His choice of words, the topics and interlocutors he addresses, how he frames his responses, are all full of contemporary American left-progressive shibboleths.

And with respect to this episode in particular I think it lead Dan and his cohost (also named Dan) to get away from doing meaningful discussion about the original text of the bible, to a noticeably lesser degree than in some other episodes. Dan basically spent a decent chunk of the episode emphasizing that most of the old testament law as it pertains to adultery was really about dealing with women's virginity as a property right of either their fathers or husbands, and that men were not obligated to refrain from having sex with slave women, concubines, prostitutes, etc.; and that most of the new testament law as it pertains to adultery has to do with people who spiritually prize celibacy, influenced by Platonic Greek philosophical ideas about it, making practical compromises to permit some licit marital sex.

This is fine in and of itself. This is the sexual morality of the ancient isrealites and many similar cultures as I understand it; and the new testament was mostly about Jesus's preaching itself and the thoughts of people who thought they were living in the end times awaiting a quick return of Jesus. This is good information to teach.

But instead of exploring more about, say, what people in the old testament or in similar ancient cultures might have thought about more complicated questions of sexual morality, Dan spent most of the episode getting mad at people he labels Christian nationalists for using the bible to advocate for traditional (in the Anglo-American world) ideas of sexual morality, and against modern feminist ones.

The problem with getting mad about traditional Anglo-American anti-feminist trad sexual morality, is that contemporary left-progressive feminist sexual morality is itself a moral system, whose ethical precepts can legitimately be challenged just as it attacked the ethical precepts of traditional sexual morality. Dan spent a significant portion of the video getting mad at marital rape not being formally illegal until a few decades ago in the United States.

"Alright, forget the bible" I thought to myself as I listened, "You yourself are married. You have a wife and daughters yourself and you live in the same contemporary united states that I do. What would you personally do if your wife refused to have sex with you again? Or slept with another person? Or if your minor daughters exercised their bodily autonomy to make decisions about having sex in ways you think are long-term harmful and dangerous for them? Forget the actual text of the bible and forget the popular misconceptions of what's in the bible, and forget what the people you call Christian nationalists say - the modern right is a lot more atheist than it used to be anyway - what do you think constitutes correct sexual morality as it pertains to your own life and family, and why do you think it? How far away from the text or popular conception of the bible is it actually? Aren't you a Mormon? What does that actually mean to you in terms of ethical sexual behavior?"

I also thought that it was a missed opportunity to go into further depth about ancient israelite sexual mores. There was only one mention of a Hebrew word in the podcast, which I thought was noticeably low, the Hebrew original of thou shalt not commit adultery, which was apparently just a two-word phrase with a conjugated verb. Dan explained that simply said "don't commit adultery", and then went on at length about how adultery didn't imply that King David did anything wrong with Bathsheba except violate Uriah's property rights in his wife's chastity. But, like, how do we know that actually? I'm not even saying that's necessarily incorrect, but could you spend a bit more time talking about how we know what the scope of the word in Hebrew translated as commit adultery is? Maybe how we know that, or what other words the ancient israelites had to talk about sexual morality and what their presence or absence from the text of the old testament implies?

Yo!

I've been doing well, thanks for asking!

My medicaid reset after the new year, which means it's covering my therapy again after a 2 month lapse. Americaaaaaaaa

Here's what I've been consuming with my time:

GAMES:

First game I bought for my PS5 Pro. It's been very playable with only one hand, though getting the platinum is going to be out of reach until I can use both hands again. I've loved it, especially the combat, though the mandatory minigames during the main story were irksome. Yes, the original had mandatory minigames too but this game goes too far with their density, especially during Costa Del Sol, which I felt was the game's nadir.

Progress: Post game has been more enjoyable than the main game. Open world suits the combat engine. I've completed every region's data for Chadley. This includes the moogle wrangling. One-handed. Very irritating but I'm proud I could accomplish that.

A sale enticed me, plus I haven't played X in over 20 years. I may not even play X-2, it was the game that broke my unwavering faith in Square(soft) and ultimately led me to try out other JRPG publishers, eventually Atlus with Nocturne (it and X-2 were released in the US within a year of each other).

Progress: Just beat Seymour at Mt. Gagazet. I forgot that this game has some real teeth during certain bossfights. I suppose I'll be setting myself up to once again completely remake Sphere grids and min-max characters like I did circa 2002. I thought I would be annoyed by the game's pacing and the inability to skip cutscenes but the story is still good and I don't think I would have wanted to skip them anyway. I had forgotten so much, especially about Dream Zanarkand.

I haven't been enjoying this one as much as I'd hoped. Part of it I think is being spoiled by the FF Pixel Remasters' boost options to eliminate grinding. DQ3, on the other hand quickly became relentless, so, in lieu of grinding I didn't want to do, I lowered the difficulty to the "Dracky Quest" Easy mode. And it's been strange, since its major conceit is that it won't allow you to die. Any mortal blow still leaves a character with 1 HP; this includes the monster arena, which is the kinda cheese I do enjoy since you get great reward for winning those. Now, I would have preferred some kind of attack/HP rebalancing instead of perma-endure so I felt my equipment/party choices still mattered for something.

Progress: Reached Zoma's castle so I'll probably beat it tomorrow. I've still been having lots of fun rounding up monsters and exploring, so it hasn't been a total wash. For being a Famicom game originally, the scope is pretty staggering. Still, I'm an FF guy at heart.

SHOWS:

An absolute delight from start to finish and probably the best Star Wars production of the Disney era after Andor. I'm legit sad it's over with no Season 2 in sight.

Castlevania: Nocturne season 2

After feeling a bit whelmed by the first season, other than the surprising inclusion of Juste, I felt this one was an overall improvement and an interesting adaptation of series elements without being bogged down by them. Plus it embraces Castlevania's SMT-like side. Fingers crossed for more with this same creative team; they seem to have planted some seeds for a potential future Soma story within this season.

YouTube