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@throwsahammer
Assassination is, historically at least, one of those things that tends not to be terribly effective as a political tool unless there's a sympathetic political apparatus already in place to capitalize on the moment, at which point it arguably stops being an assassination and starts being a coup.
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I didn't experience DARE as a kid. My older brother did, but by the time I hit the correct age, the school board had gotten into some sort of kerfuffle with DARE and axed the program. The replacement program that had been hastily rolled out was called NOVA, and it was created entirely by the city police department. From what I can gather, DARE seems like it was limited to ineffectual anti-drug stuff. NOVA was far more comprehensive in its whinging. Mostly, it consisted of a uniformed officer coming in once a week to lecture us for an hour or so about whatever moral panics were fashionable at the time.
Obviously, there was the classic "drugs will melt your brain and turn you into an evil criminal" lecture, but the NOVA officer would also explain how violent video games would brainwash you into becoming a thrill-killing spree sniper, how listening to popular music would hypnotize you into doing drugs and being a violent sex offender, and how the only thing preventing the total collapse of society was the police. I remember at least one tearful tirade about how the release of Halo 2 was a sign of the apocalypse.
Our particular officer also loved telling irrelevant stories about times when he threw his weight around as a cop and how cool it was to be able to beat up bad people and arrest them.
Antisemitism is an existential threat to all humanity, but I understand that it's somewhat gauche to talk about how easily it is able to be repurposed and redirected when it's actively making life miserable for Jews right now without any repurposing whatsoever. I think the reason why I want to talk about it through this lens anyway is because, depressingly, rising antisemitism being demonstrably awful for a specific minority group is evidently not doing much to spur anyone else into action, so maybe recognizing it as a matter of self-preservation will.
Now I'm not exactly a fan of "original sin" style arguments generally, and I'm doubly dubious when they're brought up in a historical context. There's no singular original flavor of discrimination and bigotry from which all others are descended. That said, antisemitism has a very long history, and Jews have existed as a highly visible minority population throughout Eurasia and the Mediterranean for long enough that a rather unique level of xenophobia has accumulated around them. This foundation of hatred has been repeatedly leveraged throughout history to mobilize people against their Jewish neighbors in service of various political projects. Everywhere Jews have been dispersed to has (to one degree or another) seen unscrupulous and power-hungry individuals draw from this deep well of historical hate to build petty fiefdoms on the backs and bodies of Jewish suffering.
Again, just to reiterate, the main thing that sucks about antisemitism is that it kills and oppresses Jews. That's a terrible, terrible thing. It should, ideally, be enough to get people to go out and do something when the Jews in their communities express fear or open up about experiencing antisemitism. It clearly isn't, so that brings us to the second worst thing antisemitism does: it acts as a strategic reserve of highly adaptable bigotry.
Charlottesville shocked a lot of people. Not everyone, mind you. There were plenty of folks who were plenty familiar with the hateful underbelly of America, but for a lot of the rest, it seemed like a whole mess of neo-nazis had apparently materialized out of thin air, and, despite the fact that basically everyone interviewed in conjunction with the event expressed overt and extreme anti-black and anti-LGBT bigotry, the chant the event would become known for was "jews will not replace us". Why is that?
I frequently say that antisemitism is the bedrock of conspiracy belief. The nebulous "they" in "they don't want you to know the truth" is always, always steeped in antisemitic trappings and imagery. Jew hatred in all its historical monstrosity acts as a blueprint for constructing new hate movements, and Antisemitic bigotry is capable of fueling a truly staggering array of unrelated bigotries. If you want to instantly paint a target on a particular group, all you need to do is gesture in the vague direction of "the Jews," and suddenly, there's an entire shadowy conspiracy that must be opposed at all costs.
A significant part of why there is such a strong opposition to trans rights in the US and why anti-trans rhetoric so frequently invokes fears of deception and the victimization of children is because it's been built on a skeleton of antisemitism. Antivax, opposition to public education, white supremacy, Qanon, and basically every other hate movement in recent memory have used existing antisemitism and the conspiracy beliefs built on it as a springboard to quickly build political coalitions.
Remember, the only way to stop a bad guy with a dehumanization is a good guy with a dehumanization.
Let's Watch Libertarian Propaganda for Children for Some Reason
Hey everybody, look, it’s the Tuttle Twins!
Yeah, there they are. Zooping around on their time machine.
The Tuttle Twins is a streaming show from Angel Studios, the independent studio behind Sound of Freedom and various Christian and Christian-Adjacent movies. They’ve got some movie about Jesus out right now.
No, you can’t- The Buddy Christ thing isn’t- You don’t-
Ah, Angel Studios. Where to begin? Wikipedia says 2014 was the public launch of VidAngel, which was these (mormon) guys' initial business venture. Basically, you could buy a DVD copy of a movie or TV show that had a series of customizable censorship filters (profanity, nudity, violence, etc.) applied to it for $20, and then you could either keep it or sell it back within 24 hours for $19. Naturally, they got sued into bankruptcy in 2016 by a coalition of major studios (they claimed fair use, because since you had to enable at least one filter on any of "their" content, it counted as transformative.) They mostly operated as a local alternative to Netflix in Utah during this initial run. Their public perception among fellow Mormons was mostly positive, as most saw them as performing an invaluable service by enabling faithful latter-day saints to watch popular media without needing to hear any cussing. A few saw them as con-artists who were running a massive piracy operation and tempting otherwise righteous church members into engaging with worldly media by offering "clean" versions that were still haunted by the conspicuous absence of the removed elements.
During and after the lawsuit, VidAngel started diversifying their offerings. Dry Bar, their live standup show, offered a profanity and innuendo-free alternative to popular comedians. They offered their filter technology as a standalone subscription service that could be applied to other streaming platforms (though, hilariously, not the ones belonging to the studios suing them), and they split Angel Studios into its own label so that they wouldn't lose any of their original content (basically just the Dry Bar stuff at this point) to the looming bankruptcy. They then started building a library of predominantly faith-based films and local vanity projects and eventually branched out into true original content. And now we're roughly caught up to the present.
So, first of all, why does Tuttle Twins exist? Well, the simple answer is that Bluey fucking exploded into a multi-billion dollar intellectual property, and now everyone and their dog (heh) is trying to make the next one. The more complicated answer is that it's because Tuttle Twins already existed. The Tuttle Twins book series is written by a local (also mormon) guy from Lehi, and every book is an attempt to introduce kids to foundational and contemporary libertarian and conservative texts. A child-friendly version of 12 Rules for Life is there, alongside Leviathan and Atlas Shrugged. I haven't read them, but I'm really hoping that Karl Marx gets to be their time-traveling nemesis, and they have to go back in time to prevent him from unionizing the ancient Egyptians so that the pyramids still get built or something.
Anyway, a preexisting book series for anxious parents who want to combat "woke indoctrination" or whatever is perfect for adapting into an animated series. Utah also has a surprisingly robust animation industry
Damn it, I hit post on accident before I could finish. Ah well. Continued, I guess:
Utah's past animation projects have involved a number of former Disney animators, and even big names like Don Bluth have ties to the local scene (fun fact: one of the theater professors at UVU has a Land Before Time character named after him). The combination of BYU having a surprisingly prestigious animation program and the state's weak labor laws means that it's historically been relatively cheap (for the US at least) to produce animation projects.
One side effect of the current culture war stuff is that children's media is being examined (or at the very least "examined") really closely, and one of the right-wing takeaways has been that maybe all of the 'be nice and share' messaging you see in Sesame Street inevitably leads to communism later in life, and therefore children's media should be focusing on promoting values that aren't as easily "co-opted" by the left.
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Is it a ‘religion a good and vital part of the Human Condition but on gods the actions people take with theism as a cause can be heedlessly horrifying’ kinda deal for the antitheism
Ehhhh I take issue with the idea that religion is somehow inherent to the human experience. Plenty of folks are born atheist and die atheist after a lovely and fulfilling life.
Like, I don't think religion is good or bad, it's just one of the many possible gears in human culture. Sure it's often used to justify oppressive power structures, but so is like, the printing press. Painting religion as a unique evil seems just as reductive as painting it as a unique good.
It's the Belief that troubles me. At a certain point it just feels like lying to people. At a certain point you just have to accept that no, the earth is not 6000 years old. But that doesn't mean you gotta stop going to church yk? Hanging out with your neighbors to sing old songs can be fun. Nothing wrong with that.
I feel like there are ways in which spirituality is generally given a pass on a societal level that makes it uniquely dangerous in a number of ways, but whether that is due to its innate characteristics or its interactions with external factors is up for debate. I don't think that mocking and insulting people for holding non-evidentiary beliefs is necessarily productive or anything, but I do think that establishing a universal baseline for socially acceptable blasphemy is vitally important for any number of reasons.
If you're going to argue that Trump is purely the result of economic factors, you need to explain why similar or worse levels of poverty, starvation, etc didn't lead to Trump before, or why better economic conditions and investments in manufacturing etc 2021-24 resulted in Trump again.
You can, of course, insist that 24 was the nadir of poverty and that people were worse off than ever, or you can look at actual data and realize that's wrong
Before you bring in a handful of anecdotes about people being poor, consider: did poverty suddenly appear from nowhere in 2015? Were there, in fact, poor people before then?
If so, what is the difference between then and now?
Maybe, just maybe, the whole reason propaganda matters at all is that people act on more than just the pure level of material goods they can access. Maybe there's something going on with what they believe, and why they believe it.
There's this little rhetorical two-step I've seen where anything that demonstrably influences someone's decision-making is automatically awarded "material conditions" status. Someone acting according to an erroneous understanding of the world in a way that directly, demonstrably worsens their material conditions is merely an unwitting pawn being used to consciously advance someone else's material interests, even when they are adamant that their reasoning comes from a place of sincere belief.
It's not that I'm nostalgic for the days when conspiracy belief was "harmless" or anything; anyone who has actually examined the space without rose-colored glasses could tell you that it has pretty much always been drowning in bigotry, reactionary politics, and aggrieved entitlement. I do, however, think that conspiracy beliefs have become noticeably more politically unified in recent years and that the active danger they present to those outside of the internal predatory cult and grifter ecosystem is significantly higher than it has ever been within living memory.
there's only so much smarmy gesturing at the ingroup-outgroup dynamics of the outgroup you can take before you notice that this itself is also ingroup signalling about an outgroup.
and you'll note that this is ingroup signalling about the outgroup signalling about their outgroup signalling about their outgroup
*gesturing* outgroupers are always saying shit like this
The fact that after the United States the countries with most mormons are Mexico, Brazil, Philippines, Peru and Chile makes me want to scream. Kill all missionaries now.
Yeah, there are more mormons in Latin America in sheer numbers, but Oceania has bigger percentage per population. Tonga, Kiribati, both Samoas, Marshall Islands and Tahiti all have a big percentage of mormon population. Kill all missionaries now.
The mormons we have in Mexico are mostly not from missionaries, they are other branches of mormonism who fled the US for different reasons. The first wave came here because they rejected Brigham Young as the successor of Joseph Smith, and the second wave came later because they refused to abandon polygamy
That said I'm just saying this from memory and could be wrong, maybe there were more migrations, or they happened for different reasons, I'm not gonna look it up
Of the various mormon settlements in Northern Mexico, none trace back to the initial Brighamite/Rigdonite schism, and all originate during the Deseret period as part of the Settlement missions that colonized the Wasatch corridor and southwest. Several of these communities were established following Young's death as a way to avoid the federal crackdown on polygamy and continue the practice of celestial marriage in secret under the direction of church leadership, similar to the BC settlements and Hilldale. Following the practice's official discontinuation, las colonias underwent the sort of gradual split between fundamentalist factions and those who followed the mainstream church that other traditionalist areas also experienced.
The mormon population of Latin America is almost entirely recent converts and their children (grandchildren, in some cases). The church's presence in the region is primarily the result of the mid-century expansion of the church's missionary program. The rate of flow for converts into the church at present is a matter of speculation, but the mormon subculture within Mexico is overwhelmingly recent, its older historical roots notwithstanding, and is spread more or less proportionally throughout the region's population centers.
I have significantly less direct experience and expertise regarding Oceanian mormon subcultures and their history, but I should mention that Polynesian mormonism, while still part of the mainstream LDS church, would be most productively thought of as its own faith tradition at this point, despite the overlap. Polynesia's relationship with Mormonism is extremely complex, and is also extremely compelling if you find things like syncretism and folk religion interesting.
And now the caveats. Statistics are always going to be a bit dicey when it comes to Mormonism, but international stats generally rely on self-reporting, so they tend to be a lot more trustworthy. That said, the difference between "self-IDs as mormon" and "actively participates and tithes" is significant, and I'd say that roughly half of all mormons on record fall into the latter category. Chile's mormon population, in specific, is, as of about a decade and a half ago, operating at a roughly 20% activity rate. I'm not positive what the impact of accounting for this would be, but I strongly suspect that it wouldn't actually change much in terms of mormon population rankings, because at this point half or more of official mormon missionary work originates within those same countries. Even if the US were to completely cut off diplomatic relations and travel with those countries, mormon subcultures would likely maintain their presence and continue to spread. The only real example I can think of of a mormon subculture undergoing a near-total demographic collapse was in Albania, largely in response to a nationalist revival of Albanian Christianity. One could also look at Utah's current demographic shift, where mormons (active and inactive) now constitute only 60% of the total population, driven primarily by increased urbanization, immigration, and widespread disaffection among generational mormons.
I don't think that "kill all missionaries now" is being seriously proposed as a course of action here,
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Maybe it's just my yankhood speaking, but I genuinely can't stand royalty. Monarchy is, to me, one of the worst ideas we've ever come up with as a species. I genuinely try to see and understand other people's perspectives, even when doing so is deeply uncomfortable, because I believe that it's necessary for any real communication to occur. But I have never been able to empathize with or even understand the monarchist on any meaningful level.
Even the deeply flattering mythologies that kings have commissioned and passed down to us show how dysfunctional the whole concept is. Why on earth would anyone with a presumably functional brain ever endorse such a system? I would particularly like to ask anyone who supports it why their response should matter to me in the slightest, seeing as they are actively arguing that their own perspective should be disregarded.
The lesson from today is 'always live your life in such a way that if a close confidant needs someone in full golden age pirate garb within 30 minutes you are available to answer the call'
God dammnit, but I'm annoyed enough to finalize my mormon racism masterpost. Someone please hold me accountable if it's not up within the next couple of days.
It's consistently weird to me that people credit Joseph Smith for things that are entirely Brigham Young's fault. Pedantry, I know, but you should know enough about cults by now to pin at least something on the second generation.
Anyway, anyone who blames Joseph Smith for anything happening in Utah is an idiot.
It's consistently weird to me that people credit Joseph Smith for things that are entirely Brigham Young's fault. Pedantry, I know, but you should know enough about cults by now to pin at least something on the second generation.
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the next pdf struggles to be born
