And even worse, he's a good friend. And black. Free photo from Pexels Weeeeeeeelllll...not sure I'm happy about that, even as I agree with your political assessment. Not crazy about you owning a gun being suicidal and all. Even as I recognize you might NEED it living in AmeriKKKa... Charley and I met over Twitter, at the beginning of lockdown. I live in Toronto, he lives in a major U.S. city I'll call BigMetro. Our friendship spanned phone calls, Zoom, and Whatsapp. We dissected the pandemic, toxic Trump culture, and America's racism and crime problems. I'd left the U.S. fifteen years previously; he, an African who'd immigrated in the '80s, now wanted to live anywhere but. "Is there any place that doesn't hate black men?" he asked. "Uh, Africa?" No, he claimed Africans hated each other. "You don't have to move back to the mother country. Pick a different one. Africa has lots of countries." He was a little racist, but not the kind you'd expect in a black man. He blanket-disliked Africans along with African-Americans. He found the latter backward, anti-intellectual, and claimed they'd made fun of him because he was a nerd--educated, well-spoken, with an interest in geek culture like comics and superhero movies. His African-American assessment wasn't off-mark. I'm not black, but I lived in the US for over forty years, including the South. I've observed some racially self-destructive attitudes. Charley was especially un-fond of black women. One night he confessed he'd twice had dreams in which he strapped on C4 explosives, prepared to go out and end it all, taking others with him. We came with an expiry date That conversation happened either on a phone or Zoom call. It's not in our lengthy, thousands of WhatsApp texts. I saved the year-long exchange, in case the BigMetro police might one day need it. The C4 dreams bothered me not because I was concerned he would perform a suicide bombing - how easy was it to procure or make C4? - but he'd also expressed some sympathy and empathy with mass shooters, saying he understood why they snapped. I could tell from the beginning our friendship came with an expiry date. We struggled with mutual unemployment, both of us depressed, stressed, and anxious, Charley even more so as a black man living in Trump's America. He suicidally ideated, so I counseled against buying a gun, knowing two-thirds of American gun deaths every year are male suicides. Almost all are white males, but black male suicides were increasing as America deteriorated under pandemic lockdown, a recession, Trump, George Floyd and anti-masking protests, and skyrocketing crime rates, especially in BigMetro. The person most at risk from an armed Charley was Charley. He didn't want to pack heat on the street, just keep it locked in his house in case of a break-in - not only thieves but, perhaps, racists coming for a successful black man living in his own home in a middle-class neighborhood. He didn't know his neighbors. Charley found it difficult connecting with others, and while he'd likely encountered discrimination from his fellow humans, I pushed back on blanket statements, particularly about blacks and black women, and I hadn't been the first. His personal narratives slowly unraveled, like an uncut loose thread. Our friendship ended over a failed roommate arrangement with a young black woman. (What could possibly go wrong???) When I questioned his vague dispute with her and got too close to the problem - his misogynoir - he ended the friendship with a long rant on everything wrong with me on WhatsApp, followed by blocking me. What became clear was his history of quitting early - jobs, two short-lived marriages, a roommate arrangement and at least one friendship. I suspected there were several others given his inability to stay connected long with anyone. He could never articulate whatever the problem was. After receiving enough vague answers, I fully recognized where it lay. Few of us can meet a threat to our self-image. Many of us choose to let the offending party go rather than face the challenge. I mentally bade Charley good-bye and, as we say in Paganism, 'Go in perfect love and perfect trust'. We'd passed our sell-by date. Revenge of the nerd Those C4 dreams bothered me, along with incel language that crept into his speech during the roommate fiasco, and the occasional mass shooter empathy. Sometimes he'd said he thought he might snap like that. As far as I knew, he didn't own a gun, but I wondered what might happen if he did. What nagged me was I was 95%, maybe 96% certain he wouldn't turn into a mass shooter, but not 100%. I knew him as a good guy with a big heart, a great brain and a deep desire to connect with others. But angry aggrieved men with guns rarely end well. How would I feel, I wondered, if he acted? What if he pulled a black man's George Sodini and walked into a public place and started shooting innocent representatives of his grievances? What if I might have stopped it if I'd told someone? He'd sometimes sound like the abusive males profiled in the book Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men. Male therapist Lundy Bancroft writes of men in abusive partnerships and explores the intense entitlement these men feel. While I didn't think Charley was an abusive guy, (not that I knew his ex-wives' sides of their stories), he'd begun to express certain sentiments I recognized from the book. Lots of self-aggrandizing talk about how wonderful he is, with so much love to give and women just don't want it. He spoke with entitled jealousy of his three-week-long roommate, suspecting her of being a side hustle sex worker, using incel slang like THOT (That Ho Over There). He thought she was getting way more sex than he was, but denied spending time in incel forums. He created what looked distinctly like a performative video of how terrified he claimed to be after an unspecified threat she allegedly made (he 'couldn't remember' the exact words, or any of them, when I pushed). The incel language increased, and I wondered if he'd perhaps pulled something on her. Nothing like a sexually frustrated male to impel shooting at strangers. Would he or wouldn't he? In the months after our split (the spring of 2021) I mentally debated whether I should do anything. Should I warn someone, but who would I call? The police? He was a black man in one of the most dangerous cities in post-Trump's America. What if the police went in there with guns blazing and killed him just on a tip that he might be dangerous? I didn't even know if he had a gun. But what if he did and went Sodini? Who would he kill? How could I know he wouldn't go to some black 'hood and start shooting? Or shoot a group of black women? What if I could have prevented those deaths by telling someone? How could I look at the victims' photos on a news site and not feel horrified guilt? Google offered nothing on dealing with the early nuances of a potential mass shooter. I didn't know who to talk to, who would listen. I considered maybe talking to someone at BigMetro's Black Lives Matter chapter but I didn't think they'd take me seriously - a white woman calling from Canada wondering whether to tell the police about an otherwise really great black guy who might snap and kill black people. What do you do when the potential shooter isn't a young white male, but a black man? Would the police even care if his gravest threat was to black people? My choice was to potentially save lives, or maybe get my ex-friend killed. I didn't want that on my conscience either. Especially as he has a child he was helping to raise. I tried following him online. He had a blog he didn't update much, and he'd blocked me on Twitter, his most active account. Later, it got banned. If he's got a new account, I don't know what it is. I kept an occasional eye on his YouTube channel. He posted nothing radical, or much at all, and when he did it was usually about his long-distance child. I kept thinking about him though, although I didn't call the police. I just couldn't. This is where the Divided States of America has gotten us. I want to protect innocent lives, but I can't trust the police not to overreact to a potential black male threat and kill a man who may have only been popping off. I still consider him my friend even if he doesn't return the sentiment. We were there for each other during a very dark time in our lives, and for that I will always hold a very large soft spot in my heart for him. What I have since learned The Internet still offers almost no discussion of the early stages of someone who hasn't yet taken his first step down the mass shooter path. Charley ticks several profile personal history boxes, like past trauma, mental health struggles, and suicidality. But that describes a sizeable chunk of Americans . A less common sign is empathy for previous rage killers. Charley, like most of us, has personal trauma, but no violence in his history as far as I know. He spoke well of his parents, and never of school bullying. He did think his brain might have been damaged or altered by a near-death illness when he was a child (supported by some medical evidence). While he never expressly said he would hurt others, I regarded the C4 dreams and shooter empathy as warning signs. What he doesn't share with mass shooters is youth: He's comin' 'round the mountain to 50. Another thing: He's a laudable maverick, in therapy at the time of our split. It's unusual for a man to seek therapy , and even more so for black men. Recently he posted an interview he did with a podcaster. I didn't listen to it all as it was nearly an hour of the same-old-same-old, but he mentioned a plan to move to another country, one I think is a good choice. It's something for him to work toward. It won't solve his human connection problems until he recognizes his own role, but his mental health struggles should be partially alleviated with not having to worry about white racism or becoming a crime victim. I don't worry about him going Sodini as much now. When I wrote a recent article on mass shooters I learned when to call the police, and when not. You call when something seems imminent, or might shortly, and not just a few warning signs . Lower-level resources can be drawn upon - family, friends, clergy, and community groups (like ones focusing on violence prevention). I Googled his brother based on details he'd told me, who lived elsewhere in the U.S. That might be my first stop if I had to tell someone. I won't know if Charley spirals again since we're no longer friends, but I've Googled a few community/mental health organizations in BigMetro to whom I will reach out if I discover he might be at risk again. They'll be in a better position to know whether to intervene, and how. I've considered reaching back out to Charley in friendship but his interview proves he hasn't changed his self-pitying and I don't have the patience or energy anymore. As mental health spirals downward in the Ignited States and mass shootings become almost not-news, I wonder how we can better help the Charleys of the world - with the knowledge that they can include any American. Mine was a particularly tough decision to wrestle with. I would have called the police last year if Charley was white. When to seek intervention, and from whom, strikes me as a new discussion we should add to the public debate on reducing rage murders, whether they're in the workplace, schools, or public venues. What do you do before they start making plans and buying guns? How can we politely intervene to alleviate their distress? Discuss. Debate. Explain. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Why not? Photo by Andreas Lawen, Fotandi on Wikimedia Commons Why do ex-wife Dita Von Teese and ex-fiancee Rose McGowan maintain they were never abused by shock rocker Marilyn Manson, unlike how actress Evan Rachel Wood and several other women have alleged? I wondered about the unusual pair while I researched and wrote an earlier article this year, She Is Willing To Do Whatever It Takes To Be With Me , examining Manson's accusers' typical lack of self-reflection or self-awareness one customarily finds with abuse victims as to how they let this guy happen to them. The title comes from Manson's quote in a 2015 Guardian interview to describe the devotion of his then-girlfriend, which summed up the mental headspace of all of them, I thought. When Wood labeled Manson as the previously unnamed celebrity who'd physically, emotionally and sexually abused her for years, Von Teese and McGowan publicly supported the accusers' stories, but noted that Manson had never treated them that way. "Please know that the details made public do not match my personal experience during our 7 years together as a couple," Von Teese wrote in her 'sole statement' on the matter. "Had they, I would not have married him in December 2005. I left 12 months later due to infidelity and drug abuse. "Abuse of any kind has no place in any relationship. I urge those of you who have incurred abuse to take steps to heal and the strength to fully realize yourself." McGowan also denied having been mistreated by Manson. "When he was with me, he was not like that,” she said. “But that has no bearing on whether he was like that with others, before or after." McGowan has been more publicly commentative than has Von Teese, who stuck to her 'sole statement'. Several other accusers reinforce Wood, along with celebrities like Trent Reznor with his own ugly stories about the kid from smalltown Ohio. Two women stand alone, claiming no abuse. Or are they lying too, as all his other accusers were until they finally told the ugly truth? Make him fear the frying pan "There is just no way that I would allow that to happen to me." - Marguerite Whitley, O.J. Simpson's first wife I've looked for the answer in the months after my original article. Not all women who've been with abusers were themselves abused. I want to help women better understand their complicity in withstanding abusive relationships. Unless a woman is forced into a relationship by trafficking, or a restrictive religion or culture, she makes choices every step of the way, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes informed , like Evan Rachel Wood, along the downwardly-spiraling abuse staircase. What's more interesting than why some were abused by a given man is why some weren't. Why not? I haven't found much information anywhere on why a man abuses some women but not others. O.J. Simpson's first wife, Marguerite Whitley, springs to mind. They were married for twelve years, from 1967 to 1979 and she claims he never hit her, not once. "If he did he would have got a frying pan upside the head," she told Barbara Walters in a 1995 20/20 interview . Whitley asserts the marriage broke up over O.J.'s celebrity. She was a private person and as O.J. once stated, "...we can't walk down the street without causing a commotion." Simpson's celebrity clearly wasn't a problem for teenage Nicole Brown, who met him just as his first marriage was ending. Her life achievement goal in high school was to 'marry a wealthy man', and she seem as obsessed throughout the rest of her life with him as he was with her. Indulging a man's excessive control needs, feeding his narcissism and tolerating his abuse are the lengths at which Brown, and other women, will go to 'do whatever it takes to be with him'. Others may set boundaries for the man, either stated or simply expressed in how much nonsense she'll tolerate when he acts up. I have a theory about that... I suspect not all abusive men are 'classic' abusers. They're not born to be bad, evil from the moment they started walking. I suspect everyone, women included, have the potential to be abusive, but only with the right (wrong?) circumstances aligned. I have one ex-boyfriend who stalked the ex-girlfriend who came after me, which was hard for me to wrap my head around when she told me years later. "X? X did that?" I kept saying, slack-jawed. I found my own inner abuser twenty years ago when I underwent what I think of as my Angry Bitch years after a bad breakup and much romantic disappointment to follow. I never hit anyone but I was emotionally abusive. Angry, hostile, and drinking too much didn't improve my communication skills. I think we all possess The Monster. It resides within, along with our better 'Buddha nature'. Marguerite Whitley sounds like she tolerated no crap from O.J. Maybe he wasn't allowed to hit her, and he knew it. Maybe he could imagine a frying pan aimed at his head without her ever stating it. Maybe he was not yet a full-blown narcissist. Maybe he wasn't famous enough, or powerful enough, to set the new rule: You'll accept the beatings, or I'll find someone who will. Will you do whatever it takes to be with me? But, I suspect, mostly he knew on some level he couldn't get away with that shit, the way we all know what we can and can't get away with with our partner. Maybe s/he won't tolerate dishonesty, infidelity or insults. Maybe you can bring up stuff from their past, but not that one thing . If we want to keep the peace, if we want to keep our partner, we know what we must do, and not do. Manson ex-wife Dita Von Teese on Wikimedia Commons: She won't take your shit. Rose McGowan. CC0 2.0 image by Philip Ng on Wikimedia Commons. She won't take your shit either. If there's one thing that became glaringly clear about Nicole Brown Simpson, it's that she was willing to tolerate his abuse. I'm not sure why as she didn't emerge from an abusive household and childhood, but not recognizing bad, abusive men is a common weak spot for many women. Their abuse susceptibility is increased if they're not strong enough to live independent lives of their own. What We Can Learn From Nicole Brown Simpson's Bad Choices What Abuse Victims Can Learn From Prison Groupies Now I wonder about Dita Von Teese and Rose McGowan. Did they also not tolerate abuse from Manson? Did it never come up because of the boundaries they set, even unconsciously, if he'd never tried to control them, because he knew they wouldn't put up with his shit? Where are your boundaries? I have always maintained that abuse contains a certain level of choice, and Manson's Guardian quote effectively sums it up. How much is a woman willing to do to be with him? I've tried to understand where Nicole Brown got the idea it was okay to tolerate O.J.'s abuse and I still don't. Maybe it was simply a lack of discussion during her girlhood. I grew up trained by my mother never to put up with crap from boys and later men, years before I was old enough for either. She drilled it into my head that I should never tolerate abuse, and never let a man control me. My Mother Taught Me Never To Tolerate Abuse This Is What Zero Tolerance For Abuse Looks Like The #1 Red Flag Of The Abusive Man I'm nearly sixty, and I've spent my entire life not being abused by partners. I've never been hit by one. Never been called a filthy name or put down by one. Maybe an early boyfriend, when I was 19. I think there was one time I lightly slapped him for something disrespectful he said, and by light slap I mean little more than a gentle tap on the cheek. That said, today I concede I was wrong to do that. Striking , however without injury, is always wrong, especially with heightened emotional response, unless you're physically defending yourself. I set boundaries with him, as I did all my boyfriends and partners. I think they did too. It's all part of being in a healthy relationship. It's possible to live an abuse-free life if you make the choice to do so. Some men have abusive personalities, entrenched in rock-solid male entitlement and privilege. Many people may develop it later, due to life circumstances, a substance abuse problem, or, I wonder, finding those who are willing to take their crap. We all take our private crap out on others at one time or another. We all have deep-seated psychological problems that may stem from serious trauma or, as psychologist Mark Epstein notes in his book The Trauma of Everyday Life , from traumas that engrave themselves on our brains even as infants that we can never consciously remember, but they're there, impacting our views and values and reactions and filling us sometimes with unnamed fear we don't understand. Even people from happy, tightly-knit families have these unconscious dysfunctions. It's what makes us human. Our brains, according to theoretical physicist Michio Kaku , are THE most complex systems in the universe, and the more complex a system is, the more ways it can malfunction. None of us are immune. But what we can do, if we want to avoid abusive relationships, is to educate ourselves on the warning signs of an abusive partner, but also self-examine and ask ourselves an all-important question: Do I Have A Thing For Abusers? A far more important question young women need to ask themselves as they embark on a romantic life is What am I willing to do to be with him? It's a particularly critical question if one's goal is to marry wealth, or to be with a powerful celebrity. Rich men often expect to control their women, who are expected to take his crap. It's hard enough to snag a rich or even just well-off man if you're not as gorgeous as Nicole Brown, and the pool shrinks considerably if you throw in And he can't be controlling and abusive. The day of the O.J. verdict, I went home and wandered around my apartment asking aloud, "Was he worth it, Nicole? Was he rich enough, handsome enough, famous enough, cool enough for you? Was he worth all the beatings, Nicole? Was he worth it?" She did whatever it took to be with him. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

When you're too extreme to think critically, the center looks like a bunch of existential terrorists Photo by hamletnc on Free Images Something happened to Kendra in the last twenty years. The woman who once was, in true progressive form, willing to accept another’s deeply held belief contradicting her own, recently defriended me on Facebook because she claimed I 'misgendered' people and was 'transphobic' and a 'TERF'. That was the extent of her argument. I'd take a half hour or more to explain my positions and she'd return a few seconds to toss off a few irrelevant insults. The article that launched a thousand TERF accusations: We Accept Trangenderism, Are We Ready for Transracialism? "What happened to you?" I asked. "You were a lot more tolerant twenty-two years ago when we disagreed on the War in Afghanistan." In the days after 9/11, she wanted me to sign a petition protesting the as-yet unlaunched war on the Taliban. I explained this was our Pearl Harbor, we were attacked, and the Taliban knew what to expect as President Clinton had warned them if they didn’t turn Bin Laden over to us, and if he pulls any shit on our soil, your asses are burnt falafel, capische, paisans? They didn’t hand him over, and in retrospect maybe Clinton shouldn’t have spoken Italian to a bunch of semi-literate goat herders. But I’m paraphrasing. Rather a lot. Kendra politely acknowledged our differences, and we were back on the same page a year and a half later with the Iraq War. Now, she's turned fundamentalist. Not Christian, 'woke'. In an already-divided world rent violently asunder by an orange-haired dementia-addled manchild, the left and right have both embraced extreme ideology, pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, rigid adherence to holy dogma, and persecution of ‘heretics’ who dare to dissent. Their only difference is one god. The ‘woke’ even have their own Judgment Day thing: The fuzzy future ‘day of reckoning’ their adversaries have coming for them. The hell with established evidence. Fundamentalists believe what they want, regardless of how demonstrably ludicrous. Faith trumps facts with religious nuts, every single time. Opposing extremism has squeezed those of us who see logical fallacies and inexcusable hypocrisy on both sides closer to the center, where we reside easier with others from t’other side of center. We all eschew both the whiny overprivileged identity politics of the red-capped Trumpers and the label-obsessed narcissist Social Justice Warriors, two extremes united by one common agreement: That those of us in the Murky Middle, where the other side isn’t always wrong, and our side isn’t always right, are The Devil! Graphic from FreePNGimg The Murky Middle is where the world isn’t as simplistically cut and dried, black and white, Democrat and Republican, male and female, or, most importantly, good and evil. It fully embraces and flaunts the dreaded N-word: Nuance. The Murky Middle is where we come to say…. The Forbidden Things The opinions that piss off everybody . The ideas that used to sound rational, reasonable or just plain commonsense before the world got — crazy. “My only problem is not all cases are the same. The comedian Aziz Ansari was being mentioned in the same sentence as Harvey Weinstein and that’s ridiculous.” ― Christina Hoff Sommers, feminist bête noire “It is time for those who love liberal democracy to join hands with Islam’s reformists. Here is a clue to who’s who: Moderate Muslims denounce violence committed in the name of Islam but insist that religion has nothing to do with it; reformist Muslims, by contrast, not only deplore Islamist violence but admit that our religion is used to incite it.”  — Irshad Manji, gay feminist author and perpetual bug up Islam’s ass “One does not need to be brown to discuss racism, one does not need to be Muslim to discuss Islam. Ideas have no color, or country. Good ideas are truly universal. Any attempt to police ideas, to quarantine thought based on race or religion, and to pre-define what is and what isn’t a legitimate conversation, must be resisted by all.” - Maajid Nawaz, British activist and media talking head “Racial differences are largely adaptations to climate. Skin pigment was a sunscreen for the tropics, eyelid folds were goggles for the tundra. The parts of the body that face the elements are also the parts that face the eyes of other people, which fools them into thinking that racial differences run deeper than they really do.”  — Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist, science writer Two-for-the-price-of-one offense with The Pinkster: The extreme right is offended that color is only skin-deep, and the extreme left denies race even exists. This is *embarrassing* It sounds intellectually virtuous and fashionable to challenge the sacred dogmas and rock-solid ideological beliefs of both extremists. We Murky Middlers can cheer each other and pump a fist or two. We’re so smart! We know, after all, the world is a lot more complicated than the infantile tantrums over stupid crap pitched by the let’s-see-who-we-can-get-fired-this-week Twitterati would admit. Then other voices pipe up from the darkness, saying things we agree with, and the Murky Middle squirming begins. “Things have happened, having to do with many things including political correctness, where people are so worried about being politically correct that they are unable to function.” “Cities like Richmond and Baltimore and Philadelphia have black mayors, have black city councils, have black police commissioners. How can it be systemically racist if these men and women today are actually in control of the city?” “I have fought on the front lines to prevent illegal immigration.” The Murky Middle turns to smile in camaraderie with those who dare to voice our own unpopular opinion and find ourselves looking into the eyes of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and racist Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, the trio who gave us those last three quotes. Then there’s Fox News's troublesome Tucker Carlson, for whom I briefly gave grudging respect a few years ago when he stood up to the left's social media hit squads . They tried to boycott him into the unemployment line over offensive sexist comments he’d made more than ten years ago on a shock jock’s radio show. His comments about women were loathsome but he was perhaps the first individual with the power and clout to successfully challenge far left social media sociopaths. And I’m pretty sure he was punking women anyway. I think? Someone has to challenge the suspiciously unemployed and mentally deranged Outrage Machine on Twitter, which has nothing better to do than dig up the ancient dirt in all our backyards. And anyway, who has to go back ten years to find Carlson’s misogynist views? Just switch on Fox. Thing is, it works in reverse too. Several months after the left failed to cancel Carlson, the undercover far right and their easily-gaslit lefty allies found they can’t cancel J.K. Rowling either. The trans movement demonized a perfectly reasonable beloved children’s author whose only arguable transphobia stems from the online abuse she’s taken from misogynist trans-activists. She’s called them out for what they are: Abusive assholes just like her ex-husband. The Murky Middle’s first challenger began with a racist overaged frat boy who defends Nazis. But damn, he had the balls to stand up to anonymous and powerful online bullies. He told Twitter to go fuck itself, refused to resign and, holy shit, Fox News was perhaps the first corporation with the balls so far to refuse to fire a ‘canceled’ employee. This is our embarrassing condundrum: In the Murky Middle, we don’t always like the company we keep. We recognize that even repugnant assholes from either end of the spectrum sometimes make a good point. The Murky Middle’s intelligent and messy denizens properly represent real life: The deeply flawed human beings we all are who say, do, and act in abhorrent ways sometimes, or oftentimes. We don’t expect the unattainable moral purity the fundamentalists demand, yet are unable to deliver themselves. Murky Middlers know Trumpers are on the wrong side of history, but so too are those who promote exaggerated, racist and distorted ‘critical theory’ ideologies for children and adults in the name of ‘wokeness’ and ‘accountability’ that never seems to include themselves. When you’re part of the Murky Middle everyone who’s a football field from the center thinks you’re on the opposing team. The Republicans think you’re a Democrat and vice versa; the conservatives and liberals each think you belong to the other group; feminists think you hate women and the MRAs and incels are afraid you don’t. Related: Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web Murky Middlers condemn the right’s, especially the ‘Christian’ right’s, excuses for any and all sins - as long as they’re committed by their own. Family values? No touching genitals you’re not married to? Hold your nose and vote for three-baby-mamas Trump! Anti-pedo? Vote Roy Moore, he loves Jesus! Pro-life? Don’t wear a mask, because liberals do! We also condemn the left who started the anti-vaxx crusade years ago with a titty-flashing Playboy model, her past-his-prime funnyman boyfriend, and her perhaps-not-as-autistic-as-advertised son. We further condemn those who mock, persecute and attack people on its own side for sins they consider far worse than anything Republicans excuse: Jokes, ‘cultural appropriation (but only for white people), ‘misgendering’ (except for women’s athletics), slavery obsession fatigue, kids’ Halloween costumes, or writing about any indigenous person or character while white. Lefty radicals join with their enemies on the one objective they agree on: Destroy all liberals! Turning others from the dark side Some brave Murky Middlers march into the metastasized hate fringes and their festering beliefs. Black dude Daryl Davis, my Murky Middle Dalai Lama, befriends members of the Ku Klux Klan. He collects their robes when they leave. He’s got dozens. Some Murky Middlers come from the Belly of the Beast itself and decide simmering in spiritual poison is no way to live. Nothing makes you sympathetic to people’s beliefs you now reject than having been one of them yourself. Some of us may be more imperfect than others, but all of us are more imperfect than we believe ourselves to be. Stage Five hate cancer is too late. It’s what happened in Christchurch. Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. El Paso. Pulse. Charlottesville. Overland Park Jewish Community Center. The Wisconsin Sikh Temple. The Pittsburgh Tree of Life Temple. The Buffalo supermarket. People like Daryl Davis and Christian Piccolini strive to cure those who want to be cured, and to prevent Stage 1’s tentative tendrils from taking root in naive young minds. The Murky Middle Challenge I choose to confront the hard left because it’s too easy for them to brush off critiques from The Other Side. They’re more likely to listen to one of their own, although, like my ex-friend, they can be quick to shut down any challenge to their beliefs (exactly like their ‘enemies’ on t’other side). Have you talked to a center-right or center-left person, whichever isn’t on your political side, recently? Intelligent, rational conservatives and liberals do exist, and they’re our fellow allies against extremism. We don’t agree on everything, but we don’t need to. Read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, and then talk to someone from t’other side. Who may read the National Review rather than Huffington Post, or who may enjoy avocado toast. Hey, you don’t have to eat it too. Before we help others, though, we need to help ourselves. It’s hard when we’re as easily triggered or emotionally hijacked as they are. I struggle with it daily. How do we deal with our own anger issues? How many of us turn it inward or lash out blindly at the world, like Trumpistan and the Twitterati? How many of us engage in unhealthy coping behaviors - like our adversaries - while living with perptual anxiety and a chronic, background, low-grade depression whose origin we can’t identify? We, too, make others around us miserable and angry. We have more in common with our opponents than we know. At some point, if we grow tired enough of our own emotional cesspool, we wade toward the ladder to pull ourselves out. But others don’t, perhaps unaware they don’t have to feel this way. That they have a choice. Spewing at rallies or on social media is the lazy person’s public debate. Painting a childish black-and-white world where the wolves are always evil and the humble tradesmen always good is easier than acknowledging many of us share the wolves’ desire for flesh. As for the humble, heroic woodcutter and miller, when they’re not saving their beautiful daughters from evil witches, they’re attending anti-immigration pitchfork mobs and plotting to commit genocide against a neighboring kingdom. The Murky Middle conceals you if you do the easy thing and shut up. When you speak up or refuse to take sides you get slapped down by both. Is that any way to live? Do we want to cede the power to the screaming, vexatious mobs who compete to see who can bring down public debate, civil behavior and political discourse the fastest? We in the Murky Middle are The Enemy To All. We must embrace it. We are the ones who dare to think, see and hear other sides. And recognize the nuance. Because we’re not The Side of Good, and they’re not The Side of Evil. How do we know? Because finding a simple point of agreement is a start. Even with Klansmen and Nazis. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Your story may be true but your opinions, selective omission and creative mindreading need a fact check When she's telling you something with a lot of spin. Photo by Personal Creations on Flickr CC0 2.0 Women love to 'tell their truths', most recently under the #MeToo label, and almost always involving bad, abusive men. Gaslighters. BDPs. Manipulators. Psychopaths. And of course everyone's fave pop-psychology label, narcissists. I’ve absorbed the stories over the decades, including men with dysfunctional partners and exes, like one who thought he could ‘fix’ her, the way Johnny Depp thought he could Amber Heard, two people engaged in mutual physical dysfunction. Others have spoken of living with women with serious psychological issues. My ex’s son was abused by his first wife and her now-husband. She used to hit my ex, too. Many publicly ‘tell their truths’, sharing stories of rape, sexual abuse, and childhood neglect. Fewer men do. Is it because men are less inclined to speak publicly about their problems? Or because #MeToo can be hostile to men, forgetting how women can also abuse? I read to understand power dynamics and identify how people (especially women) can protect themselves better from dysfunctional, abusive relationships. Sometimes I like, or comment, or piss people off, or I get liked a lot when I say something that resonates. Often I say nothing at all, I lurk to learn. Some complain they’re ‘attacked’ for ‘telling their truth’, asserting ‘they won’t shut me up.’ Women are often singled out for speaking out, most often by men. But not everything women say is true, even as they’re not lying. A room with a wrong view Mixed into many of these unvarnished truths are half-truths, fallacies, selective omission and interpretive mind-reading. It’s one thing to state the facts, and another to pile on what Buddhism calls Wrong View, the opposite of Right View on the Eightfold Path. CC0 3.0 image by Krisse on Wikimedia Commons Right View is 'clear seeing', understanding reality unfiltered through one's values, beliefs, experiences, goals, dreams, practices, family, culture, religion, etc. We all delude ourselves, thinking we know our reality better than we do. You can only tell your truth to the best of your current ability . Some confuse their truth with their interpretation of why the other person inflicted psychological damage, prompting these armchair psychologists to blithely apply popular diagnostic labels. The blinding lack of self-awareness and critical self-analysis explains why the world appears to be full of narcissists, almost all of them women's ex-partners. What’s *your* pop-psychology label? As one reads tales about abuse, bad dates and sexual harassment, one wonders what the 'truth-teller' was like. What is 'the narcissist's' side of the story? What, you can't trust a narcissist to tell the truth? How can you be sure the narcissist isn't the narrator? Or someone suffering from some other pop-psychology label. Occasionally writers are honest about their own toxic contributions. They’re frank about past shameful actions like being abusive themselves or cheating on a partner. I salute those writers for having the labia (or the balls) to bare their imperfect souls. Women seem especially prone to adding their own judgments and interpretations, making one wonder whether the Evil Ex owns the label . Did a medical professional diagnose them or did the writer? Women are particularly unforgiving, especially if they’re steeped in ‘patriarchy’ victimhood-centered thinking. They'll happily analyze and diagnose the accused but almost never turn the spotlight on themselves. What did they contribute to the bad relationship? No one is ever 100% innocent. There's a typology of victimhood, with varying levels of personal responsibility. There’s a bit of an angel/devil complex, too. Vagina = angel, Penis = devil. Fark off, I’m in bitch mode Women have achieved equality with men in one realm: Inventing reasons for why they're not responsible for their toxic reactions and behavior. A time-honored female self-excuse for controllable bad behavior is one’s period, later called PMS, for which there's still uncertain evidence. When you’re older you can blame it on menopause. When I was young, a friend blamed her irritable, snappish mood on her period, leading some to conclude she must be ‘on the rag’ thirty days out of the month. Easier to blame her hormones than acknowledge her legendary low self-esteem and ongoing jealousy of everyone. Now women explain their bad behavior as the result of mental illness--anxiety, depression, or the universal favorite, stress--all of which are almost never so debilitating that sufferers lose control over their behavior. Opposed to, say, a schizophrenic or psychotic or someone who's genuinely delusional, ergo less accountable for their actions. Some will wave off their own dysfunction contributions by claiming to have Borderline Personality Disorder, PTSD or Alcohol Use Disorder (the fancy new term for ‘alcoholism’), which begs the question: What must life have been like living with her? The ex might be a piece of work, but she may be no walk in the park either. Like, you know, Amber Heard. Interpretive judgments aren't facts, they're opinions. Where does one end and the other start? Does the truth-teller even know? Many women love to cite thousands of years of 'patriarchy' to explain bad male behavior. If he hit or raped her, was it because of his ‘male entitlement/ privilege/narcissism’ or because he was raised in a violent, abusive household of his own? What if he’s been raped too, making him a brother in her dysfunction? What if violence is the only way he knows how to deal with his anger, if he doesn't realize he's trapped in a 'man box' ? What if he’s as ignorant as she as to what constitutes a healthy, functional relationship? She might not understand the real reasons behind his behavior, but has increased her own suffering by layering her experience with her own skewed interpretations, i.e., ‘wrong views’. Critical gender theory takes a female-victimization view and almost always faults men, masculinity and 'patriarchy', but asking what’s at the root of his dysfunction carries uncomfortable implications for women. If we accept some women are socialized to be victimized, it’s a given that some men are socialized to be abusers. If some women simply know no other way, we must acknowledge the same for some abusive men. The point is not to excuse abusers, but to rehumanize them. The responsibility of truth-telling Some women complain about pushback when their views or interpretations are challenged. Others are genuinely victimized by misogynist, angry men hiding behind cowardly anonymous accounts with their own caricatured wrong views about how women are all gold diggers, whores, manipulative puppet-masters, rape liars or whatever other pop-psychology labels they parrot from the Red Pill crowd. Then again, 'feminists' hiding behind anonymous accounts attacking men are misandrist trolls, no different from their misogynist brothers. Public domain photo from Pickpik ‘I’m anonymous because I need to tell my truth without gang rape, death threats or doxing attacks,’ is justifiable, but it holds one to a higher standard of truth-telling. Anonymity grants the freedom to express opinions and tell truths that might subject us to unjustified abuse. But it also grants the potential to lie, or simply be less judicious with the facts. Interpretive mind-reading I particularly dislike the practice of impugning motives, beliefs and values to individuals one has never met or groups toward which one is prejudiced. I understand the frustration of decent men who get attacked for their ‘privilege’, ‘entitlement’, or ‘toxicity’ by strangers. As a white person I’m tired of Critical Race Theorists impugning motives to what we think and feel and how we’re subconsciously racist even if we don’t know it. What the hell would they know about the white experience? I imagine men must get tired of being caricatured as potential rapists and perpetual misogynists and don't even know where this Patriarchy they're accused of being in collusion with even holds their secret Davos summit. I work to identify and question my own endless wrong views, perceptions and toxic beliefs. I have multiple daily lapses where I catch myself in toxic thoughts caricaturing individuals and groups I don’t like. It’s especially important to challenge one’s wrong views in these divided times where Manichaean politicians and social media turn full-fledged people into cardboard characters. Like in children’s cartoons, you can tell the good guys from the bad guys by the evil mustache. I challenge you to separate your truths from your potential wrong views. And enough already with the silly pop-psychology labels, ya little narcissist! Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Tired of people's stupid questions? I'm tired of everyone else's stupid questions too, but I still answer them. No, this is not what I do on the sabbats. Image by Jean Louis Mazieres on Flickr "It's not my job to educate white people!" Man, it's tough to be a 'woke' black antiracist today. If a twelve-generation legacy of slavery, 100ish years of Jim Crow and Herschel Walker aren't enough of a cross to bear, you still have to keep answering Stupid White People Questions: "Why do you get mad when I say I’m colorblind?" “Do you really get followed around in stores?” “Don’t you know there’s black privilege too?” Nobody knows the troubles you’ve seen. “Is there really any such thing as ‘microaggressions?” “If education is so important, why do black kids accuse others who do well in school of ‘acting white’?” “But what about Ibram Kendi’s racism?” A little personal Googling would avoid the annoyance you feel at having to answer the same seriously dumb questions. Then there are the ones that push internal buttons because—well, erm, maybe they have a point? Some ‘dumb questions’ persist because antiracists would rather not answer them. They fall into two buckets: Truly Stupid White People Questions, and Uncomfortable White People Questions. Or male questions. Or religious questions. Or gender/sex questions. I understand both sides, the frustration of being asked the same questions about something over and over, especially when you want to scream, or maybe you actually do, “WHY DON’T YOU DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH? WHY IS IT MY JOB TO EDUCATE YOU?” For me, substitute ‘Paganism’ for ‘race’. Monotheistic folk, we Pagans are really, really tired of your dumb questions too. It’s not our job, either, to update or educate you on how modern Paganism has changed since the practices of Baal. FYI: No, we don’t sacrifice children anymore. I don’t care what QAnon told you. “Google, ignorati? Ever heard of it?” I don’t say that. I answer the questions, however truly stupid, and say, “Google Paganism and Wicca, it’s fascinating stuff. We’re sooo not like the pagans of yore. We’re all about human equality, spiritual power for women, protecting the Earth, the great circle of life and the web of human interconnectedness. Hey, it’s the 21st century, amirite?” Friendly chuckle! Pxfuel If you don’t want to ‘educate’ others, you’re right, it’s not your job, but ask yourself this question, regardless of whose dumb questions you get ad nauseum : “Would I like to be part of the solution, or the problem?” I can offer two reasons, as an exasperated Pagan, why you might consider the former. You’re changing the world one mind at a time Not everyone who asks questions is evil, stupid, or making fun of you. Often, there’s genuine inquiry behind it. I’ve chosen to be the solution. When you get angry and tell people off, you’re the problem. The first two questions I usually got when people found out I’m Pagan were THE most annoying, the ones that made me want to rip heads off. But I didn’t. “Do you worship Satan?” “Do you do naked rituals?” I politely tell them no, Pagans don’t worship Satan, and I add a little historical perspective: Satan is a Christian deity, not a Pagan one. He was invented by the early Church, and debuted in the New Testament. “Christians will argue Satan isn’t a deity,” I respond, “but I argue he is, especially among the fundamentalists, who ascribe almost the same power to Satan as they do to God.” It gives them food for thought. As to the always-salacious question about nudity in rituals… “Some do, I don’t. Geez, we live in Canada, and before that, I lived in Connecticut. Do you know how COLD it gets in both places? Ha ha ha! Then there are the summer bugs. Who wants to get bit there by skeeters?” Can I blame them for thinking we all get nekkid and shag each other in the circle? Whenever the mass media drags us out of the shadows (at Halloween) they often focus on the nekkid rituals some groups do that others don’t. Anything that appeals to the penis gets top billing. Not to mention all those Hollywood movies featuring gorgeous naked or nearly-naked witchyboos. Sometimes I’ve added—honestly— “Look, do you know what REAL witches look like? Geez, we don’t want to see ourselves naked, much less each other!" People are interested in alternative religions whether they’re spiritual seekers or curiosity whores. I can get mad and put them off, make them walk away and think Pagans are real bitches, or I can feed their curiosity and perhaps incline them to do their own research. Those who contend daily with racism, sexism, gender identity and other issues might consider how many minds they might change, or plant the seeds, when they answer ‘dumb’ questions. When you offload education efforts to Google, they could go down all the wrong rabbit holes If I told my ‘dumb questioners’ to just Google Wicca and Paganism, they might pull up fundamentalist propaganda along with legitimate websites and videos. Google is working to ensure their algorithms provide more reliable sources in their search results than in the past. Today, the first page or two of Paganism/Wicca search results look mostly respectable. A few years ago, before political pressure to reduce higher ranking of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, and downright fake news-driven results driven solely by popularity, Google’s coveted first page offered a mixed bag of reliability and factualism. I hoped that, after talking about Paganism in a positive manner with a thumbnail sketch of what we commonly believe, that people would discount fundamentalist nonsense. Now you have to dig deeper into Google to find the crap. When I Googled, Are Wiccans Satanists? I found only one Christian-written article critical of Wicca by the conservative Focus on the Family. It provides a less hysterical Christian critique than I used to get years ago, and I’m not much nicked it’s on the first page. It’s targeted at parents whose teen girls may be showing interest in Wicca and brings up a good point about how it may appeal as a ‘mix ‘n’ match’ religion for a generation that eschews absolutes. Young unformed minds might not be ready for something like Wicca, not without responsible adult guidance. I disagree with some of the article’s contentions, and reject its argument that Wicca is wrong because the Bible is against witchcraft, but I can’t call it propaganda. Encouraging Google use offers you the opportunity to educate on the basics of responsible research. Social and political divisions encourage us to remain within our insular ‘bubbles’ of belief and only consult sources that substantiate our already-formed opinions rather than challenge us to consider others. You can’t trust mass media as much anymore. Researching growing sexual predation in the trans movement is Exhibit A in attempting to untangle fact from narrative, or outright fiction, from two warring sides with their own diametrically opposed agendas. Not only the right has a reliability and credibility problem. When I Google about transwomen raping or sexually assaulting others, it takes a little effort to locate the truth, starting with ‘truthiness’. The right-wing media is far more willing to report issues of men in dresses intimidating women with their genitalia, but twisted to their own narrative and sometimes outright false. Worse, the journey often starts with far-right sources. The Blaze? Intercept? Breitbart? The UK’s Daily Mail? I’ve run a lot of sources through Media Bias Fact Check over the years and these sources are all huge factualism fails, but that’s where you often start for the first clue about the trans movement’s uncomfortable problem. Left-biased sites mostly ignore these stories, so I’ll take the alleged offender’s name from the right-biased media, Google it, perhaps with quotes around his name along with ‘trans’ and maybe other key words, to see if there’s mention in more reliable sources. Which you can find, if it’s a real story, with braver websites willing to risk social media condemnation for ‘transphobia’, like The Guardian or the UK’s Unherd. Still, you can’t always trust these sources either. A fair chunk of them still bounce up and down in the MBFC ratings. I’ve seen Fox News ranked as high as Mostly Factual although they otherwise remain fairly stable at Mixed. The Guardian was ranked higher a few months ago, today it’s Mixed. CNN is the same, stabilizing at Mostly Factual far more than Fox News, but not enough to make them a reliably reliable source. Overall, the farther one travels down the bias spectrum, the lower the factualism rating, but even sources on both ends can get something just enough right to hint whether there’s a real story or grain of truth. MBFC offers brief summaries of fact checks the source may have failed or notes they have so far not failed a fact check. How many people, really, know how to properly research and pay attention to information sources, particularly who’s funding them? If MBFC doesn’t list their source, I encourage them to Google it, perhaps with quotes, and add ‘is it reliable’, or ‘who’s funding X’. I also encourage them to click the About link on the website to see who’s behind it and possibly funding it, which might influence its point of view. We all think we’re better at critical thinking than we are. But some are really lousy at it and won’t know The Intercept from the Associated Press (The AP is one of the least biased, most factual sources). We should try to guide people away from the Internet’s uglier rabbit holes. Now let’s ask you, the non-educator, an important question. Are some of those ‘dumb questions’ those you’d rather not think too much about? Some ‘dumb questions’ get asked repeatedly because they deserve answers they’re not getting. I intentionally ask ‘dumb questions’ of certain feminists still stuck in the ‘80s when women had less financial, economic and political power than we’ve got today. I ask because there’s real inquiry behind them and I’ll keep asking them until feminists stop hissing and spitting like angry kittens and answer them. Like, “Why does she let him treat her like that?” I don’t assume an abused woman will be automatically hunted down and murdered like some feminists think. I know abusive relationships usually happen gradually, with equivalent compliance from the victim. Not all abusers are physically violent, and not all violent ones are Stephen-King-character-over-the-top-psycho violent. Every decision a woman makes to stay with that guy is consensual (unless she’s trafficked), and sometimes she doesn’t understand she has a choice. But not all. Many domestic violence victims are educated, competent women, many go into it warned , making excuses along the way until they’re wondering how they got to the point where they could star in their own Lifetime Channel movie. I’ll keep asking my ‘dumb question’ until victimhood-identifying feminists acknowledge how much female choice and power plays a role in abusive relationships. After which, I hope, we can better educate girls and women on how to avoid toxic partners entirely. Other questions that make feminists squirm are, “How many rapists get off scot free when victims refuse to report and take them to trial? And, doesn’t that give the men permission to rape again, since they got away with it before, making the earlier victims partially complicit in future rapes?” I understand all the reasons why women wouldn’t want to put themselves through the ordeal of a rape trial, but they forget for whom it’s also quite an ordeal: The accused . Putting more rapists on trial will give them plenty to squirm about for several months, most importantly contemplating this uncomfortable thought: How pretty am I? Shit, maybe I shouldn’t have worked on my glutes so much at the gym! He might be acquitted, but he’ll be forever changed. His world will never be as safe, either. Feminists hate these ‘dumb’ questions. I keep asking them because they’re not. They’re questions that put others on the defensive because this ain’t The Battered Wife or The Burning Bed forty years ago. It’s today, and not all women can claim ignorance or lack of financial and personal power. There are logical, moral, and ethical problems with deniers’ stated positions. Every social justice activist will encounter squirmy questions. Truly dumb questions require patience, so you can educate others and not create animosity. I can’t believe we Pagans are still defending ourselves against Satanism but instead of getting mad, I put the responsibility for belief in Satan squarely in the lap of the early Christian church, where it belongs. Not-so-dumb questions demand answers. Antiracists tired of answering questions about ‘acting white’ or the still-high rate of fatherless black American families need to come up with better answers than “Educate yourself!” which sounds like they should start with themselves. People who claim transwomen are the real victims (and some are) need to answer for the blatant misogyny, entitlement, and traditional male aggression many trans activists - invariably transwomen - exhibit. If feminists want to end rape and sexual assault, they’ve got to think about why they aren’t willing to take difficult but realistic steps to end it. Related: The Woman Who Abetted Sex Trafficking Men who are tired of being blamed for everything wrong with the world must debate why they’re responsible for the lion’s share of violence against others. Some dumb questions are really dumb, but let’s answer them anyway. It’s not our job to educate others? If you choose social justice you signed up to be an educator. You quickly learn who to educate and who just wants to fight. I choose to be part of the solution, rather than the problem. Which do you choose? He's educating himself. PxFuel Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

The left and right share much in common, including compassion only for the 'right' people "F'n snowflake." "F'n MAGA." Photo by form PxHere "Where's your compassion?" she screamed at me in a comment on another blogging platform. "Where's your brain?" I asked. We argued whether transwomen's rights were more important than actual women's rights. She hewed to the 'woke' narrative, I spoke for the Reality Community. I've pondered compassion a lot in the year since that argument (I got kicked off the famously far-left platform shortly after and wonder if she had something to do with it) and today I'd ask a different question. "Where's YOUR compassion? For women, Ms. So-Called Feminist?" Her heart was in the right place--after all, most of us can agree people have the right to live how they want without hassle or violence--but not her brain. She accepted uncritically the 'woke' metanarrative that how you identify is what you are, when clearly that's not true. Or no one would question Donald Trump's identity as the rightful, lawful President of the United States. Since women have been an underclass for forever and men only when they chose to don dresses and wigs and post endless narcissistic Instagram photos, my compassion for them is more limited than it is for, say, female prisoners - emphasis on the word connoting powerlessness - who don't want people imprisoned for sexual offenses sharing a jail cell with them. But still. Ms. So-Called Feminist had a tangential point. I'm low-TERF; just as one's right to swing your fist stops at my face, your right to parade your dick around stops at the same place. But I knew who I was heartless and uncompassionate about. Trumpers. MAGAs. White nationalists. Misogynist men. Did I just trigger you? How much do we have in common with 'those people'? I'll be honest; I can't stand fundamentalist Christians. I grew up in the United States and remember the modern day movement's birth. It started not with famously fundamentalist Ronald Reagan but during conservative Christian Jimmy Carter's reign, in 1976 with a mysterious slogan. Bible-thumping had left the revival tent and was about to be discovered with an annoying believer near all of us. The ignorati asked, "Found what?" which was their invitation to tell us about Jesus. I grew up in a nice mainstream, progressive Lutheran church and family, and we didn't like those 'Bible thumpers' much. I argued with them in college, left Christianity and later wrote many articles criticizing them in a local alternative newspaper which today I would regard as a bit extreme (my articles, not the newspaper). I still can't stand 'fundies', considering them Trump-loving fake Christians along with their fellow MAGAs, white nationalists, and toxic masculine males and fangirls. But I've begun to ask myself, "Why are they the way they are?" I excuse my lack of compassion, reasoning they chose who they are, their values, their toxic ideologies. They may have been born into a certain religion or culture, but they can escape it if they choose, along with their politics, values, and assumptions. But were they truly as free to leave as I thought? After all, everyone has a story, and negative beliefs imply it's never a pretty one. Sometimes life is like a difficult video game you can't shut down and walk away from when you get frustrated. Maybe you've tried to find a way out and you can't; you wander around forever trying doors that are locked because you haven't found the mystery device or life decision to liberate you. Learned helplessness teaches you God wants you here, this is your lot in life, you're not good enough and there's nothing much you can do but shoot meth and let Tucker Carlson or QAnon assure you it's everyone's fault but yours. Fundamentalist ministers encourage you to vote for the masters who prefer you in your place and persuade you to stay there, and God will reward you in death. We don't know the other side's stories, and we make ill-informed judgements about them. Why does that woman hate men so much? Because she's one of those hateful, misandrist feminists! But why? Why did she go down that path and not another? There may well be a tale, or several, of trauma and abuse involving males. Or maybe she was raised to hate men by her angry, resentful mother. Maybe men abused the hate into her. A cousin or uncle who molested her. Maybe she doesn't know another way, because she believes her own mental bullshit. Why does that asshole insist on living in a trailer park? Doesn't he know he should lay off the heroin and get his goddamn GED? Others have worked their way out of poverty; look at J.D. Vance! That MAGA isn't J.D. Vance and didn't grow up the same way he did and maybe he just gave up trying for various reasons, good or bad. It's easy to feel compassion for those we can relate to, with whom we've shared their struggles; less so for the ones with whom we have little in common. I don't understand why fundamentalist Christians hew to a clearly unscientific, historically flawed history to explain why humanity sucks - is it 'sin', or our complex, flawed brains? - but I try to understand why they choose that path. Maybe they prefer simplistic answers, or they prefer the deeper ties with a community of like-minded individuals. Maybe they're afraid of the responsibility a more worldly view entails. Maybe they see how screwed-up the rest of us are and think, "Not for me. I only need Jesus." It's an 'insular bubble', but so too are our own, wrapped up in our own little religions - 'woke', liberal/conservative politics, fan culture, 'furries', #MeToo. Traditional liberal thought is rooted in compassion for others and accommodating and debating other points of view. It's what drove blindly privileged white people to support the early civil rights movement, and heterosexuals to embrace gay rights. To ask the questions, "Why should a black skin matter when applying for a job?" and "What skin is it off my nose who they love?" The left's conceit is that we're more compassionate than Those Other People. Liberals, like conservatives, are imperfect humans too, less inclined to show compassion for those they don't think of as 'downtrodden' or in today's parlance, 'marginalized'. The left has fallen into the rigid trap the right fell into long ago. Give me that old-time Woke religion The seventies marked the fundamentalizing of the Religious right, and the late eighties the 'fundamentalizing' of liberalism. Today's highly illiberal extreme left is a 'woke' religion indistinguishable from fundamentalist Christianity save for its only difference - one God. Like their Christian brethren, they're more unforgiving of Those Others. When TV evangelist Jim Bakker fell from grace after a sexual affair with a woman in the '80s, Christians forgave him. When Jimmy Swaggart publicly confessed with tears and shaking voice to hiring prostitutes to perform weird sexual stuff, Christians forgave him. And then again when he did it again. They forgave Christian politicians for diddling other men - repeatedly - "Hate the sin, not the sinner" - and today have so abandoned Christian moral standards they voted for Donald Trump, arguably the biggest sinner the Republican party has ever rallied behind. Their 'pro-life' claims now lie in shambles with their support for Herschel Walker, a man of Trump-level stupidity with multiple baby mamas, who's paid for at least two abortions. Christian fundamentalists demonstrate what Buddhists call 'idiot compassion' for the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Idiot compassion is what Ms. So-Called Feminist exhibited when she asked where my compassion was for transwomen. I asked where her brain was because she should see transwomen aren't the same as born women mostly from the vehement misogyny coming from many. Putting on a dress and wig and calling yourself Mary Anne doesn't negate traditional predatory male sexual behavior. The 'woke', like Christian fundies, will forgive anyone who shares their own insular bubble. One wonders how the compassion game will politically unfold after a mass shooter targeted an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado last week by a male-born suspect identifying as 'non-binary'. Guess what? He hails from a right-wing, conservative Mormon family. Oh, the cognitive dissonance for both sides! Will the left condemn 'one of their own', if the accused turns out to be another right-wing extremist? Will the right excuse him for 'mental illness' as they always do with their own mass shooters, or will they fold in embarrassment that a crazy gender identity nut came from a conservative Christian family? The fundamentalism police Another commonality both extremes share is turning on each other for insufficient devotion to The Cause. Wokeists, like Christian fundamentalists, police each other like the Gestapo. The holy rollers keep an eagle eye out for sin, especially anything sexual, while wokeists patrol social media, looking for anyone who's not woke enough. If they find someone they don't like, and can't find a good reason, they'll dig back practically to the point of their target's birth to find something untoward that person said or did. Because, you know, the Holy Wokers themselves are sinless. Putting aside our own biases Ms. So-Called Feminist's question is worthy of all our consideration. I don't worry about my acceptance of transwomen. My TERFiness extends no farther than keeping men out of women's-only spaces until they can handle the responsibility, which I believe won't be for at least a few generations. Maybe a century or more. You don't erase thousands of years of patriarchal entitlement and objectification in just a few. I focus my attention on my far more visceral response for MAGAs and Bible Trumpers. I've read books about the chronically poor to gain some insight into why they're so uneducated, why they don't understand white privilege, and why they're so inclined to bigotry. I can never understand their lives as I grew up middle class. But I can try to understand what it must be like to go into debt over a rundown home, barely-functioning car or a health problem, and living a daily, endless struggle over paying the rent, the mortgage, their child's medication, and how they're going to keep their family eating. They don't have time to do anything but struggle - stress, anxiety and depression their constant companions from dawn to dusk. I can't understand the wokeists either, who, despite their fancy college educations, come across as hateful, dogmatic, and as ignorant as those for whom they have zero compassion. Fundamentalist Christians get one thing right: We can hate the sin but not the sinner, or bigot. Christians may imperfectly apply that themselves (which is why there's a runoff between the highly flawed Herschel Walker and a Democratic Christian minister in Georgia), so there's something the left has in common with 'Bible-thumpers': They strive, and often fail, to be more like Jesus and on the left, we strive, and fail, to be better people too. But not always. If we can see the error of our ways we can change, and many have. Obama got elected partly because Republicans fed up with George Bush's party extremism voted for him (like my father, who told me Obama was the first and only Democrat he voted for before his death). Some have left both the 'woke' because they're fed up with the lies, the hypocrisy, the misogyny, the racism, the anti-science, and the anti-intellectualism. They see identity politics are as hateful, dogmatic and loathsome whether the bigot flies a Confederate or trans-activist flag. CC0 2.0 image by thaths on Flickr CC0 4.0 image by Ted Eytan They look at the history of enforced left-wing politics (Communism), recount the human catastrophes that resulted in China, the Soviet Union and North Korea, and realize that living under Kim Jong-un is no better than living under Hitler. Compassion is good, and sorely lacking. Idiot compassion, unfortunately, is a pandemic. We'd do well, when we accuse the uncompassionate, to start with ourselves. So I ask: Who do YOU despise? Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

If Jesus or Santa are too lenient, you can still punish the year’s sins with stupid costumes and a big-ass church Christmas pageant Every kid in church playing every star in the Milky Way. Photo by Ralph on Flickr Christmas is fraught with peril when you’re a Christian kid. If you’re not in one of those Santa-averse denominations you’ve got a lot to preoccupy you this time of year. Like how you’re going to be good for a whole damn month when you’ve had zero practice for the previous eleven. (Let’s just hope Santa missed last summer's allegations re the infamous Poconos Swimming Pool Incident.) Fortunately, Santa has beaucoup kids to keep track of and no sophisticated system to deal with it, like some super-network of clustered servers with AI-driven bleeding-edge advanced analytics fueled by an Apache Hadoop behavioral data-crunching ecosystem to extract who really is naughty and nice. If he did, he could save money only giving killer gifts to the exceptionally nice kids instead of all the ones who were ‘good enough’, as far as he knows, because he lacked the proper evidence to pin several suspicious incidents on them. Then again, maybe the robots really *are* coming for everyone’s jobs. The Hudson’s Bay Centre window on Bay Street in Toronto a few years ago. More than anything else, the most perilous peril you must survive to see how good you really are — the journey that truly tests your mettle as a kid deserving of the Toy Du Saison this year — is the dreaded Church Christmas Pageant. One of my starkest Christmas memories was being dolled up, my hair combed to perfection, and getting schlepped to church by my parents for that most holy rite all Christian children are required to endure: Saccharine-sweet parent-sanctioned-and-approved Christmas pageant performance humiliation. It was kind of a requirement at our Orlando church, I guess, to be part of the Christmas Pageant. I don’t know why, maybe to impress upon our young impressionable minds a lesson of the similar trials and tribulations Christian kids have been forced to endure through the centuries before we became holy crusaders, sadistic inquisitors and imperialist oppressors. You were doomed to this fate because parents love any opportunity to watch their hapless, helpless offspring dress up in silly pseudo-adult costumes and look ridiculous the way our parents were forced to do when they were kids. Probably in damp, chilly Roman catacombs. Today, with video recorders and this thing called The Internet, the Angel Gabriel with swords sticking out of his shoulders and the Virgin Mary in shorts ensure that Christmas pageant kids will live forever in infamy, globally. When I was one of the ‘little kids’, under ten or so, we got the same damn stupid thing to do every year: We’d be forced, under penalty of eternal damnation, to put on these dorky-looking white Puritan collars manufactured by sadistic church ladies, and even dorkier-looking large red ribbons which made everyone look like toddlers. Naturally, everyone thought we were hopelessly adorable which meant we’d probably be forced to wear them someday when we joined the senior choir. After forcing us to put on this outlandish gear, we stood in a row in front of the church, each of us holding a large construction-paper letter, so that we spelled out “Merry Christmas,” and then held up our letter in turn, the big dorky-looking collars and ribbons half-obscuring our cherubic little red faces, as we recited a line we’d been required to memorize. My mother took this solemn obligation so seriously — I was one of the ‘R’s — which was, “R is for Ringing of bells loud and clear!” that for three weeks beforehand she asked me to repeat it on an average of, oh, about every 10.2 nanoseconds, to the point where I could never forget this @#$% line even if I tried, and I still wake up in the middle of the night screaming, “R is for Ringing of bells loud and clear!” That’s (the future) Mary, Mother of Jesus standing next to me. The kid with the S was the minister’s son, who I guess used his influence to get out of wearing the goofy white collar, at least. That year my brother joined us at the tender age of two and a half as we were short one kid to hold the final ‘S’. Except he was too young to memorize the process of how to use the toilet, much less anything as complicated as an actual line of dialogue. Another kid said his line, but I liked to tease Brett years later that they wouldn’t let him say it because he had the intelligence of a tree frog. My mother told me to stop teasing my brother, that it wasn’t very Christian and that I lacked Christmas spirit. Like I cared. I was one of those older sisters who believed I’d been granted the privilege, nay, the God-given divine right, to pick on, abuse, and otherwise torture my younger sibling. Undoubtedly he will break down in front of a grand jury one day, confess to a five-state killing spree, and scream from the primeval depths of his baby-brother soul, “I couldn’t help it, she was always PICKING on me, she told about how we used to play Barbie dolls and dress up in Mom’s clothing before I could even talk, in front of all of my high school friends!” Finally I got promoted from the dreaded Big Bow Brigade to Chief Narrator for this Southern-town yuletide extravaganza, but it still irked the heck out of me because by this time, budding thespian that I was, I longed for the starring role, Mary, Mother of Jesus. But that part always went to my lucky friend Tina, which I always thought was because her adorable, angelic, blue-eyed Germanic face lent itself perfectly to the part of the Virgin Mother. Every year she brought all her Teutonic glory to the Eastern Mary’s part. She ALWAYS got to kneel in front of the church with that really cute boy I liked, What’s-His-Name, and stare down beatifically at the infant Jesus, played with much dramatic impact by a naked plastic Di-Dee doll wrapped in a spit-up stained baby blanket. My mother explained that my part was much better, because although Tina was a very nice little girl, she had all the reading skills of a weiner schnitzel, which is why all she could handle was to look beatific while I got a speaking role. But she still got to wear the Mary costume and sit in the spotlight with a cute guy who hated being Joseph because it looked like he was married to a GIRL, and the guys might think he LIKED Tina, who had GIRL COOTIES and would probably poison our budding little misogynist for life and tar him forever as Unclean. Meanwhile, I sat behind the podium with two other narrators waiting to read Luke 2:8–14, six lousy Bible verses to showcase the sum total of my aspiring acting talents, and there were never any scouts from Hollywood in the pews looking for the next Jody Foster Child Star of the 1970s. On the other hand, at least I didn’t have to wear that atrocious collar-and-bow monstrosity anymore! It’s no wonder, years later, I became a Pagan. Mom’s lucky I didn’t become a Satanist. We grew up. Tina eventually learned to read, then got married which ruined her for any future Mother of Jesus roles, and I graduated from my career as a narrator to a much less Christian incarnation as a Pagan belly dancer and computer sales dork. My baby brother, though, surpassed us all by learning how to speak coherent sentences. And how to use the potty. Used with permission by my brother. Brylcreemed hair courtesy of my mother, without permission, who made him sit still for it. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Few recognized the evil of slavery for 400 years. Today's social justice warriors ignore our current greatest human rights moral failure. Photo from Rawpixel Slavery abolitionists weren't popular in pre-Civil War days. When there were cotton and other crops to be picked and money to be made, you couldn't find a more efficient business model than slave labor. The canny plantation owner calculated exactly the minimum cost for keeping his property alive and healthy (enough) and his biggest challenge was preventing slave rebellions or underhanded schemes like harming or hurting his family. Slavery ended when enough white, especially Christian, mavericks questioned the prevailing status quo and came to see slaves as less inferior than advertised (but still inferior), yet still not born to serve others in appalling conditions, but as human beings with the right to live their own lives as free (theoretically) as others. Needless to say, this didn't go down well with plantation owners who complained about 'lazy n***ers who didn't want to work' and wondered why they'd have to make less money when these n-words should have been grateful for being 'civilized' with Christianity and their basic needs taken care of (barely). The prevailing Christian narrative was that God intended Africans to be slaves and for centuries, no one thought to question the status quo because everyone dehumanized Africans and only an idiot would question the prevailing wisdumb. What never factored into the cost/benefits analysis was whether slaves might work harder and be less inclined to murder white people if they were no longer subject to hideous abuses and were paid fair wages. It's easy to judge previous generations and wonder, What the hell were they thinking? How did they not see the evil in what they were doing? Not like me It's extremely difficult to justify brutal, heinous practices if the targets are 'like me'. One must remove their humanity and see them as 'less than' to excuse otherwise intolerable atrocities. Once others become one's inferiors, one can justify their horrible treatment, or, if they're a modern-day social justice warrior, simply ignore it. It's more socially acceptable to champion black rights after George Floyd or child sex trafficking after Jeffrey Epstein, and damn our ancestors for slave culture because we're so much better than that now. But are we? What about the people we torture and abuse today, every day, and justify it by telling ourselves They're just animals. They've proven they're filthy animals. No, they're lower than animals. Animals don't do the horrible things they've done. They deserve their fate. They asked for it! [Trigger warning: Unpleasant self-violence and descriptions ahead] We deny their torture because the very worst aren't daily subjected to whippings, lynchings, 'the hogshead' (an older medieval torture adapted for recalcitrant slaves) or cooking them over a fire. What will be our own everlasting shame for future generations? Our equivalent, complicit 'slavery shame' 150 years from now? Soul death, soul murder Henry Hodges cut off his own penis in October of this year. The Tennessee death row inmate had been subjected to solitary confinement for thirty years and according to fellow inmate Jon Hall, “He’s suffered the most adverse unecessary (sic) & wanton neglect, deprivals, & mistreatment I’ve seen on death row. It’s a miracle he’s not committed suicide.” Hall complained about Hodges's treatment in the lawsuit he filed for himself for his own endless six years of solitary confinement. What had Hodges done to merit thirty years alone in a cell, with no windows, nothing to read, see, listen to, or do, allowed out only an hour a day for air and exercise, to stew in his own pre-existing mental illnesses, exacerbated by one of the cruelest punishments imaginable? He was no angel, for sure. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1992 for murdering a telephone repairman, and has been in solitary the entire time. Why? It's not clear. Solitary is where they put the worst of the worst, like Canada's serial killer Paul Bernardo, who raped, tortured and murdered two teenagers with the help of his wife in the 1990s. Prison officials put inmates into solitary on mere whims, or as 'punishment' for various infractions of the rules. Sometimes they're isolated to keep them safe from other prisoners, or vice versa. It can last for days or decades, with few willing to champion their right to be treated like human beings. Amnesty International, among many others including psychologists, call out solitary confinement as 'designed to dehumanize', not to mention torture. Where there is dehumanization, there is justification for any atrocity. Very few know what truly goes on inside prisons. When we think of 'torture' our thoughts drift to physical punishment like the hideous chambers of medieval Europe, where, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker notes, professional torturers raised the craftsmanship of inflicted human suffering to a high art form, led by subject matter experts who understood human anatomy and the science of maximum prolonged inflicted agony. Like the horrible things the most sadistic serial killers do to their victims before finally killing them (like Bernardo and now ex-wife Karla Homolka, the details of which have never been released to the public - nor the videotapes they made of the torture, sexual abuse, and murders). Like the vicious punishments, tortures, and endless cruelties inflicted on slaves in the antebellum South. But there's one torture literally worse, literally more painful than physical torture. Prison psychologist James Gilligan, author of multiple books on violence, violent men and how the prison system increases their suffering by hundreds of times, says 'soul death' is the very, very worst torture there is. It's what Henry Hodges suffered after thirty years of solitary confinement, along with thousands of others incarcerated. Gilligan worked with countless prisoners in his career, with a special focus on 'the worst of the worst': Those who had committed far worse crimes, and perhaps more extensive, than Henry Hodges. Men who had committed horrifying acts of mutilation, torture, sexual sadism. Serial killers. Serial rapists. Psychopaths. The crux, the core of what drove them, all these suffering men was "...the family of painful feelings called shame and humiliation, which, when they become overwhelming because a person has no basis for self-respect, can be intolerable, and so devastating as to bring about the collapse of self-esteem and thus the death of the self." He describes men whose souls have been literally murdered, something we can never understand because our own painful feelings can't teach us what it feels like to be "...so deeply shamed as to undergo the death of the self." When one is overwhelmed by shame and humiliation, he experiences "the destruction of self-esteem, the self collapses and the soul dies." When people can't protect or defend themselves against the unloving acts and violence committed on their bodies, including non-violent assault, "something gets killed" within them, their souls are murdered. When prisoners inflict deliberate physical injury on themselves like Hodges, Gilligan states they're as vicious to themselves as they were to their victims. Gilligan says, "...it is worse to feel 'nothing' than it is to feel 'something', even pain, which they don't feel while they self-mutilate, reassuring themselves that they'll feel pain later when they heal, which proves they're not a 'robot'. So great is their psychic pain that they long for death, but many expressed to Gilligan their desire to do it "in a blaze of glory" after killing as many people as they can. When that's impossible, suicide is a common option. A 2020 report on suicide and solitary confinement in New York state prisons found that "The rate of suicides from 2015 to 2019 is over five times higher in solitary confinement than in the rest of the prison system, and is likely much higher because of a lack of data on suicides in 'keeplock' and other forms of solitary." It would be hard to read the list of crimes any had committed and feel much remorse for them. But that's only if you don't know their backstories. And they all have them, extremely ugly ones, in which, from the moment of birth, they were subjected to horrifying abuse, neglect, bullying, shaming and sexual assault. Their sole 'crime' being born into the wrong families and circumstances. Gilligan, in his classic treatise Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic , says the ultra-violent criminals he's worked with over the decades feel dead inside, describing themselves as 'robots', 'vampires' or 'zombies'. And that's before their incarceration. The U.S. prison system, considered the most brutal in the industrialized world, magnifies it a thousand times. If you're still having a hard time mustering sympathy for 'the worst of the worst', and believe whatever's happening behind concrete walls can't possibly be worse than burning a slave alive as an example to others, consider this: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics 5-7 year data collection report on adult correctional facilities, it found there were more than 75,000 people in solitary confinement and that both black men and black women were 'over-represented in solitary confinement even more than in the prison population in general'. (A 2019 New York Times article argues, Slavery gave America a fear of black people and a taste for violent punishment. Both still define our criminal-justice system." ) Out of sight, out of mind. No one to witness the hideous infliction of pain on other 'inferior' human beings the way people once enjoyed public executions, whippings, and slave punishments. We don't know what physical torture happens behind feet-thick prison walls since the system famously doesn't allow journalists and other documenters in, although a few, like the one Amnesty International visited, did. While we might be inclined to think, 'I can't give a rat's patoot about what they do to a filthy serial pedophile in prison, and if solitary is the worst they can do to him, have at it!', we'd better think about how this might one day hit closer to home. Who's next? The nihilistic despair and hopelessness we witness in the U.S. prison system has begun to take root outside prison walls, boosted by a two-year on-and-off lockdown that sundered ties to family, friends and work colleagues. We think we had it bad when we resorted to Zoom to see anyone outside our immediate biological bubble, when one prisoner in solitary visited by Amnesty International hadn't been visited by another human being in twenty-two years. We're social animals and need human connection, even the filthiest of criminals. Even psychopaths. Reams of digital verbiage have been published over the pandemic detailing the further social breakdown already in place for decades. Suicide is up, along with substance abuse, domestic violence, and mass murder. It's a bit like the famously violent 1960s, but with better technology in place for mass slaughter and smash 'n' grabs and home invasions if you don't have the temperament for freeform violence. The next person who may know someone in prison, or might land in prison, is anyone who thinks That would never happen to me. Don't be so sure. None of us know what will drive us over the brink to madness, and I've had my own flirtation with it, about twenty years ago, when I felt so frustrated, powerless and shamed that I called a friend one night and said, "Help me, I'm about to consciously turn my life over to evil." My intention was literal. Long story, and the ugliest part is I wasn't even being abused, I suffered more from entitlement than anything else. But I never forgot that night and it's why I've become interested in why people become evil. Not the 'monsters', the serial killers, Josef Mengele or Communist dictators (Stalin/Lenin/Putin/Mao/Jong-il & -un). The rank and file. The common man. The 'good little Germans', and the people who enjoyed a helluva lynching on a Saturday night and went to church the next day listing a bunch of silly-ass sins during confession. This is all of us today, pointing to the prison system. We are not unlike the crowd in the photograph. The complicit. The collaborators. The prison system is the shame we do not know, and don't care to examine, just as white Southerners turned a blind Christian eye from the horrors and evils of slavery. It's hard to acknowledge evil when everyone also looks away, and especially when everyone outside benefits. Sure, we've got to get violent criminals off the streets, and some can never be rehabilitated and released. But they may not be beyond redemption, either, and those who are unaware of or ignore Gilligan's body of work on the root causes of violence, and especially American violence, will be on the wrong side of history once our nation civilizes itself enough to realize the current prison system is as much a moral stain on our historical legacy as slavery is to antebellum America (including the North). Gilligan speaks of stumbling upon the discovery that some of these horrific human beings were capable of helping their fellow inmates by raising their literacy. They taught others how to read and write so they could navigate records and legal content. Others learned how to cook and made meals for other prisoners. They developed a purpose in life, and self-esteem, and contributed some good to the world. Finally. Let's remember, it wasn't their fault entirely either. Childhood abuse has been consistently, definitively fingered as a primary root cause of violence in adults and no one alive today can claim they don't know that. We choose to ignore it. We don't report it. We are complicit. We collaborate in creating the future monsters of America. Each of us may be the future monster of America. I doubt Twitter will be around in a hundred years, not because I think Elon will destroy it before Christmas but because it will be a 21st-century buggy whip. I also don't know whether we'll choose civilization or descend into chaos, madness, and failed-state status by then. But I do believe this: One day we will arise again as a people, look back on a past no one alive by then remembers, and damn the twentieth and twenty-first century America for its clear and horrific shame. The U.S. prison system, in a more civilized America, will have undergone reform and prisoners rehabilitated, reintegrated into the outside world when viable, and finding reasons to live rather than self-mutilate if they're not. We will have stopped torturing them the way we once tortured witches, heretics, and slaves. We will civilize ourselves. Photo from Pexels Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

If you could step through a portal back to 1st-century Bethlehem on Christmas Eve... Image by Gerd Altmann on Pixabay, altered by author "Imagine there's a portal going back to first-century Bethlehem on Christmas Eve. What gift will you bring the Baby Jesus?" Suspend your disbelief for a moment if you don't believe Jesus ever existed. It's the question I posed for my friend's weekly Virtual Cocktail Hour, held every Friday at 7pm since the beginning of pandemic lockdown. After we moved beyond historical criticism ("There's NO evidence to prove Jesus ever existed!" Archer reminded us in that stern manner of your third grade teacher who was quite quite quite tired of reminding you that silly story about George Washington and the cherry tree never happened ) we began talking about what we might bring and what the ramifications might be. We had a week to think about it. The night we answered the question Archer, our hostess, felt compelled to remind us in case we'd forgotten what she'd said the previous week, "...the gospels are not a good record of Jesus's life AND how they portray someone who wasn't all sweetness and light." This ignited some discussion on whether the Gospels portrayed him accurately at all, since not a single scrap of any Gospel was an original, none of the writers knew Jesus and everything was written after Jesus's death. The history of Bible translation is one of countless errors, relentlessly piled one on top of the other over the centuries by monk after overtired monk, everyone working from copies of copies of copies. Maybe the originals are lying around in a cave somewhere, a la the Dead Sea Scrolls, waiting to be discovered by some shepherd boy looking for his lost goat. Skeptical Archer's gift to Baby Jesus was lots of writing materials so Jesus could explain his goals in his own words. She'd give him lots and lots of paper and a whole whack of ballpoint pens. No trusting to a bunch of later religious fanatics to get Jesus's words right. Let him tell us in his own words, and preferably lots of them. Especially those lost years between twelve and thirty! While Archer is the inveterate skeptic, I'm the pain in the ass critic who finds the flaw in every plan. How long would ballpoint pen text last in the desert, I asked, even if it was preserved in jars in a cave? Also, who can translate it all from the original Aramaic? Janie wanted to give Jesus a camera so we'd know what he looked like, prompting her partner Cameron to joke that he could borrow it and take it around Bethlehem getting girls to do nude selfies and telling them, "Don't worry, only Jesus will ever see it!" Public domain photo from kevinwgarrett on Flickr If the camera was an iPhone, would some brainiac, like maybe Plotinus or Hypatia of Alexandria, find it later and accidentally engineer something malevolent like someone did with the Terminator's damaged arm to one day turn into the malevolent Skynet? I wondered as well how long an iPhone would last in the desert. Would the iOS's NANO RAM chips preserve the photos of Jesus or would they degrade over the millennia? Especially if the lost goat peed on it. Buzzfeed publishes the first-ever photo of Jesus. Chaos ensues. Let's just hope Jesus remembers to delete all the photos of those hot Gallilean chicks before he throws it away or they're sure to wind up on the slut-shaming Internet 2,000 years later. Heck, no one ever even thought their embarrassing photos from the 1980s would one day come back to haunt them worldwide. But there they are. I myself considered Jesus's safety. His unspeakable end wasn't necessary, as far as I was concerned, and if I could save him from one of the worst tortures ever, I would. To be perfectly frank, I think Jesus was a good man and a wise teacher in many ways, but he needed to watch his mouth. Let me tell you, when they 'cancelled' people back in first-century Palestine for shit that pissed them off, they didn't mess around. I said I would bring some teachings from the Buddha on 'right speech' and mindful words, which would have been historically doable for Jesus as Buddha lived a few centuries prior. But if others are going to bear an iPhone and Bic pens, now that I think about it, Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends & Influence People would be a much better choice for dealing with those Pharisees. Sometimes, Jesus, it's not what you say, it's how you say it. And hopefully he'll be able to speak more diplomatically, if I can find someone who can translate the book before Christmas. But if I was trying to help Jesus save his own tuchis , Archer's husband Dan schemed to give Jesus something to do besides wandering around as an impoverished teacher shooting off his mouth. If nothing else, Jesus would love him forever as the guy who gave him probably his best gift ever. Dan planned to give him a full set of carpentry tools. "Great gift, Daniel of Toronto! My heart is filled with great joy!" "Glad you like it, Jesus. Whatcha gonna build first?" I think I'll invent 'the bathtub''!" CC0 2.0 image by James Shepard on Flickr (Even as a child I wondered why the Three Kings didn't bring the Saviour practical gifts, like toys!) C'mon, this is totally a better gift than frankincense. "Go long down the marketplace, Peter! I'm throwing for the touchdown!" Cameron clearly had porn on his mind that evening as he wanted to give Jesus a Playboy and a camel, since every growing boy needs inspiration and wheels! I'm quite certain that magazine would have gotten Jesus into a lot of trouble when his mother found it, and she would have. Mothers have a sixth sense about these things. If there's a porno mag anywhere within eight furlongs of the kid she will hunt it down, roll it up and whack him upside the head with it. It's hard enough to hide stuff from your mom in 2022, where exactly would Jesus put it? He couldn't stuff it under the mattress, he probably slept on the ground. There was no basement to stash it somewhere, and his father would have found it when he was down there building cabinets or something. Jesus might have gotten a helluva whuppin' for that. He might have been so upset he jumped on his camel and went riding off to visit Mary Magdalene, who was known to 'comfort' unhappy boys from time to time. To be found in a cave in 1947, slightly damaged with a yellow stain. Image by Mark Mathosian on Flickr Other suggestions were a nice casserole to support Mary (but make it vegetarian as meat and cheese must not be mixed in accordance with Jewish law) and maybe a nice box of Pampers. Although Mary will really miss them when they're gone and she's washing out cloth diapers again in the River Jordan. So what would you bring the Baby Jesus? And why? Tell me in the comments section! Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Seriously, police partners are as big a risk for women as are biker gang hubbies CC0 4.0 original image by Ted Eytan A Newark, New Jersey police officer was found guilty in early October of murdering his estranged wife in 2019 along with the attempted murder of her boyfriend. He leaves two now-motherless children and a shameful father in jail. John Formisano didn't deny shooting them but claims he 'blacked out' from a 'mental defect' that made him incapable of wanting to shoot the wife he was divorcing. But it didn't stop him. There was something faintly OJ-ish about the crime, like he borrowed the idea of returning forgotten glasses to his wife a la Ron Goldman, late at night. Prosecutors alleged it was a pretext to get her to come downstairs. He parked on a different street and loitered outside her bedroom window before entering the house. It was hard for Formisano to argue it wasn't premeditated as he fired at both parties a total of fifteen times. Blue silence Look, I get it: There's something deeply attractive about a big, strong man in a blue uniform. A few years ago I stood on the sidewalk against a building watching the Toronto Pride Parade. Standing next to me was a burly helmeted cop in sunglasses doing his policeman thing in a large crowd: Looking powerfully badass in case anyone's thinking of pulling some shit. It's a pretty effective established practice for a parade begun in 1981. Our Pride Parade has never suffered a single death, although there are the usual pre-parade threats. The cop next to me was sexy, no doubt about it. I let myself imagine what it must feel like to be protected by someone that strong, if I was his domestic partner. Then I wondered if he beat the crap out of his wife with impunity. Big strong masculine he-men are a giant red flag. Especially those in violent professions. Cops have a 40% higher domestic violence rate than other professions. They often blame stress for their violent actions, but it ain't stress. The domestic violence rate is considerably lower for other high-stress professions like doctors and paramedics. It's, rather, a desire to control others, a critical skill for cops, which attracts the sort of man who already believes he possesses the right to control others--primarily women. While we debate whether men with domestic violence histories should be allowed to buy and own guns, maybe now's a good time to address another class of Men Who Are Too Violent To Have Guns: A fair number of policemen. Not all cops, of course. Only the ones with a domestic violence record. Which is rather a lot of them. This naturally begs the question: Why are these guys allowed to be cops? Black Lives Matter has been asking the question for years, since police have a long and documented history of using violence against black people, often without provocation. Training surely has something to do with it, but plenty are already violent, and it may not be immediately obvious during the job application process. He might be an abuser but without a record; and once he's a cop, any domestic violence complaints will be utterly ignored at best. If you think the justice system is unresponsive and unsympathetic to women abused by their partners, just look at what doesn't happen when the abuser wears a blue uniform. Or harasses a fellow female officer , which is fairly common in big-city police departments. A cop will sooner lose his job smoking dope than he will beating the snot out of his wife or raping a fellow police officer. In California blue abusers plead down to violent misdemeanors which allow them to keep their guns. In a seventeen-year period in Chicago, 5,280 domestic violence complaints were filed against Chicago police --that's 310 per year!--and resulted in 'no real discipline at all'. Police in Australia don't give a crap if any of their own are terrorizing their wives; and Canada, along with other countries, may be arguably 'in the Stone Age' when it comes to confronting the police domestic violence problem--in Montreal and Halifax, less than one percent of blue abusers may face a criminal charge, versus 6% in the U.S. Women who report domestic violence by one of those entrusted with keeping the populace safe from harm encounter the infamous 'blue wall of silence' whereby the police protect their abusers with the loyalty of the Vatican to its own abusers. A Canadian journalist came to explore the problem of blue abusers when a friend working with domestic violence survivors told her the majority of her clients came from women married to policemen, and biker gang members . Let's be 100% clear on this: Falling in love with a cop greatly increases one's risk of becoming a victim of horrendous domestic violence, and it's unofficially perfectly acceptable to the rest of the police force. Good cop/bad cop We, as women, need to think about and challenge more the appeal of the 'bad boy', i.e., the violent male. In popular media, he's portrayed, if the producer hopes to attract a female audience, as a violent, protective, 'traditional' male but who never whacks around his wife, girlfriend, or burgeoning love interest. Contrast this with movies that regularly portrayed abuse of women as normal, especially in a romantic setting, decades ago. Brigitte Bardot got smacked around a lot by hot guys back in the '60s. Movie partner abuse by bad boys became less common later, perpetuating the mythology, tailored for women's fantasies: He's violent with everyone except her. I recently re-watched Sylvester Stallone's Marion Cobretti ride off into the sunrise with Brigid Nielsen clinging to him on his motorcycle as the end credits roll in the 1986 movie Cobra and I wonder, what happens after that? He's the most violent cop on the force, famous for 'catching bad guys' as his partner tells Nielsen's character, a beautiful supermodel pursued by a vaguely evil cult after having witnessed one of their murders. After Cobra commits ridiculous amounts of city property damage with his car (a vintage 1950 Ford Mercury, at that), his lady fair watches him take the law into his own hands by catching the bad guy, impossibly hanging him on a hook through his back and then pulleying him into a furnace. The next morning Bridgey rides off with her new boyfriend and, what, they live happily ever after? He never hits her or threatens her or shoots her entire family? She never wonders what he might do if he ever became displeased with her? Like if he began to suspect she was screwing other men, however wrongly? Where I differ from other women is wishing I could meet a guy like Cobra, even if I could get past the horrifying and 100% illegal bad guy execution. I know Cobra is a fantasy . Men similar to that character, cops or not, rarely confine their violence to 'bad guys'. They take it out on their families. They especially take it out on women, who can't fight back. If I saw a guy like Stallone in a bar I'd watch and lust from afar--and keep it that way. I wouldn't want to talk to him. Just looking at someone like that in real life makes me want to run for the ladies' room if he turns his gaze toward me. Reform, not defund After the 2020 George Floyd protests swept America, the harsh spotlight on the cops revealed a widespread tolerance of violence against blacks. Even if the number of white cops killing unarmed black men turned out to be far less than realized, the stats showed they did target blacks for higher levels of non-fatal violence. It's not just a requirement, it's a job perk! Ridiculous calls to 'defund the police' come from those quarters privileged enough not to have to deal with crime on a daily basis, and roundly rejected by those who do, i.e., poor, primarily black communities. Cooler heads call for reforming the police. The debate needs to include a frank discussion of the tolerance of domestic violence in the blue line. Reform won't happen quickly, and not quickly enough for those wives and children tethered to abusive husbands and fathers against whom there will be near-zero recourse to protect against his abuse, or his desire to kill any of them. Police brutality discussions center almost exclusively around violence against people of color, which is only a percentage of police violence. For every famously violent encounter between black men and white cops that ends badly for the former, there is a near-equivalent story of a white man who fared as poorly. It's not a game of Who Is The Most Abused, but tallying how much we all need to deal with one of the most violent professions, whose threat extends far beyond people who may be committing criminal acts, or people arrested, abused, and murdered for existing while black. Not just black men. Or black women. Cop violence affects everyone. The best way to persuade people to join your social cause is to show them What's in it for me? As selfish as that sounds, it's universally human. We're more likely to fight injustice if it is for, or includes, our own group. You won't get black people to jump on board by talking about how unarmed white men are killed more often by cops than black men, and they are, but by defining What's in it for me? Which is why I want women to be aware of cops' high domestic violence rate, before they fall for Mr. Big Strong & Manly. It's on us as women to take responsibility for making good partner choices. Not all cops are abusers but how does one tell until after you're married to him or have moved in with him? Hollywood sells us the fantasies we want to believe in, which is why Disney princesses and Harry Potter are so popular with children, locked in seemingly dull middle-class families dreaming of finding out they're actually special little princesses or wizards. After little girls grow up, we're sold the fantasy of desperately sexy hypermasculine men, but we're not told the full truth - that as violent as he is, he often doesn't hold back for the weaker sex. It's incumbent on us to stop believing the lie, and to warn others. As we debate how to reduce the unnecessary use of force in police work, for everybody aggressed against by police who may or may not be doing their job, we women need to analyze the hypermasculine fantasy when we confront the hypermasculine reality. Because in the real world, the beautiful supermodel might find herself on the business end of a lethal weapon when her ex- or soon-to-be-ex-husband Cobra shows up seeking vengeance for her audacity in leaving him because she's not sure she'll survive another beating. Not that her ex-husband needs to be a cop for that. But it sure increases the odds. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

But the trans movement sure has become a gynophobic, homophobic word salad. It's time to reclaim our words and meanings. Public domain photo by petcor80 on Flickr The wheels are beginning to fall off the transgender bus. Maybe it's because of new management at Twitter, now run by a 'free speech absolutist' except when he's not. He doesn't seem much interested in refereeing trans battles even though he's got a trans kid. And he's probably too preoccupied at the moment crying into his MyPillow about his lost $200B . Gender identity critics are getting bolder, and women are directly challenging angry men who watch too many Kardashian and makeup how-to videos who arrogantly continue to tell women who is and isn't a woman, and to lecture lesbians to get over their vaginal 'genital fetish' and suck some (lady)dick already. It's finally turning into a long-awaited 'Emperor's New Clothes' awareness except people are pointing and saying, "The Empress has a dick." In case you haven't gotten the latest news from TransWorld, gender dysphoria is no longer a prerequisite to being 'trans'. Tweet saying you don't have to be gender dysphoric to be trans, you can just be gender congruent. What's 'gender incongruence', you ask? I didn't know either. It means pretty much the same thing as 'gender dysphoria', except it doesn't have 'dysphoria' in the label, so if you're feeling, you know, more 'incongruent' than 'dysphoric' you can still be trans and drive your family crazy with 'another goddamn label' when you come over for dinner. The increased language fuzziness points to continuing efforts to groom those of us who aren't 'trans' into accepting broader and broader (ar ar) definitions of 'female' and 'male' (but mostly female) as well as what's considered 'gay' and lesbian', leading to a joint complaint from natal women and gay people of both genders that the trans set is trying to 'erase' us all and tell us who we 'should' sleep with. Them. Men. As always, it's mostly 'trans women' with their original equipment complaining. Interestingly, the gender identity set has 'identified' 68+ labels for various gender identities and expressions, which may now require a handbook to keep up at your next LGBTQ2+2=5XYZPDQ Pride Parade and TERF punching riot. Gender-benders are a distributed processing random label generator. If you need a new label, they'll pull one out somewhere. Image by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels. The push to 'deconstruct' language has been a function of the social justice Left for years and is rooted in post-modern French philosophers like Jacques Derrida who introduced language 'deconstruction' in 1967. He declared a veritable war on words and rejected the notion that words contained commonly-understood meanings and that they should mean what they do. According to Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity (2020), Derrida believed "...words refer only to other words and to the ways in which they differ from one another, thus forming chains of 'signifiers', which can go off in all directions with no anchor," and that meaning is 'relational and deferred, and can never be reached and exists only in relation to the discourse in which it is embedded." Perfectly clear now, right? Okay, let's summarize this academic jargonbabble: It's clear the self-appointed 'masters' are the brand new management, same as the old: Men who decide. 1950s vintage ad for swishing household cleaner up one's hoochy-koo. Apparently, men in pre-feminist America were obsessed with the 'cleanliness' of women's genitals and couldn't abide any odors, on penalty of getting divorced or something. CC0 2.0 image by Erica Firment on Flickr Trans oral sex with an orange 'Lesbian' transwomen have been encouraging, pushing and pressuring vadge-loving lesbians to 'get over' their 'genital fetishism' and 'accept' that 'some lesbians have penises'. Lesbians, I Know That 'Cotton Ceiling' Guy Who Called You Transphobic It's funny how 'lesbian transwomen' never seem nearly as interested in expanding their own boundaries and moving beyond their own 'genital fetishism'. If they're really women, shouldn't they want to partake of one of the most womanly experiences available to them, the he-man penis? I mean, wouldn't you bet there's no better blowjob available than one offered by a transwoman who will know exactly what feels good for a penis, since she's got one herself? Let's not forget her all-important mangina. Men have been penetrating women for millions of years and no self-respecting genital-de-fetishizing evangelist would deny himself this supremely female experience. They're not just dick-tating to women, both straight and lesbian, they're lecturing gay men that 'some men have pussies' and that they too should get over their 'genital fetishism' and learn how to go down on--um, an orange. YouTube's Mr. Menno is a self-described 'Satarist [sic], Songwriter, Performer, Woo Woo Buster' who takes strong exception to the advice of two porn actors, one of whom is a somewhat passable transman, that gay men should learn how to 'eat pussy'. The transman, with a masculine voice, no breasts, and a sort of pretty masculine face, demonstrates for gay men how to apply the appropriate tongue action to an orange, which will be quite useful if a gay man ever dates a citrus basket, but trust me, that's not even close to being what a woman's vagina looks like. Her male (non-trans) actor buddy looks like he's probably getting a mighty banana watching her. Not so Mr. Menno, who looks like he wants to hurl. I guess he just doesn't like oranges! Mr. Menno calls out the homophobia, offensive language and old-fashioned 'gay conversion' mindfuckery of the video. "Words like 'cis' and 'trans' are woo-woo words used to pull the wool over our eyes so that in our minds we start disconnecting men and women from actually being male or female. To cut through that, simply replace 'cis' with the word 'actual' and when you see the words 'trans guy' or 'trans man', simply replace it with 'girl or boy with identity issues'. Just like a so-called 'transwoman' is a guy or a man with identity issues." Dusting off the oldies It's time we reclaim our language, and the real meanings of real words associated with real types of people, from those who need to sort out their confusion with each other and leave those of us happy to be male or female, gay or straight or bisexual, out of it. Assigning labels is no longer just for the gender-mindfuckers anymore. I'm resurrecting the old labels we used before gender nuts (ar ar, pun intended) archly informed us said labels are 'transphobic' and 'offensive' because they delineated exactly how close to being a woman one actually was. All I'm asking is for everyone to acknowledge the different types of 'women' which used to be recognized back when the left still had two brain cells to rub together. Let's start with the most common woman found on our Big Blue Marble. ADULT HUMAN FEMALE - This defines someone who was born female, and ergo will die female, regardless of how she identifies. If you have a vagina you are vulnerable to pregnancy and you will have to guard against messy underpants once a month for about forty years. But if you have your breasts surgically removed you'll no longer be at risk for breast cancer. TRANSSEXUAL - Anyone who's dead serious about becoming whatever they're currently not goes 100% transitional and their penis is now a vagina or vice versa. In the olden days of twenty years ago, most transsexuals were gay men and straight men who were autogynephilic - they derived sexual pleasure from imagining themselves as, dressing as, acting as, or in the most extreme cases being a woman. Ain't nothing wrong with that and it might make the debate over whether transwomen belong in female-only spaces a little less heated. Not saying it'll go away, but a transsexual woman be less of a physical threat to Adult Human Females without her penis. TRANSVESTITE - This traditionally means a man who likes to dress as a woman but doesn't go so far as to fully transition. They identify as men and often but not always prefer sex with women, and they like to dress up as women. 'Walkin' Round In Women's Underwear' I suspect a lot of so-called 'transgender' women are actually plain, simple transvestites, or 'cross-dressers' as they were called growing up. Cross-dressing bad movie producer Ed Wood was a transvestite. CC0 3.0 image from Uncyclopedia LESBIAN - This is a Human Female who falls in love with and prefers sex with other Human Females. It's pretty simple. There's no such thing as a 'lesbian with a penis'. A human male in women's clothing who likes sex with human females is not a 'lesbian', he's a 'heterosexual male' (like Ed Wood). Human Lesbians' male counterparts are 'gay men' or 'homosexuals'. They're only attracted to other Human Males which absolutely requires a penis. That's pretty much it. Women aren't as complicated as you think, unless you're swiping through OKCupid or Tinder. Then, well, sorry buddy or lady, you're on your own. Even I don't understand women and I am one. A real one. Lifelong committed natal human female. There is a very small fraction of people who are 'intersex', born with both male and female sex characteristics and who are arguably the true 'gender dysphorics' among us. They often need help figuring out how they identify and in less educated times, which wasn't that long ago, they were arbitrarily assigned a sex by the medical profession at birth and surgically altered to be either male or female after consultation with the parents. It was believed that the infant was too young to know the difference and would be fine however they were raised. But later many of these newborn transition patients felt 'trapped in the wrong body' and deeply miserable until it could be rectified, even if just by living and dressing as their 'right' sex with or without medical intervention and surgery. Unfortunately, many unhappy souls committed suicide, and many doctors today discourage or are reluctant to transition intersex babies anymore. Parents are encouraged to wait and see what the child prefers, and then raise him or her that way. Which makes for a pretty good argument that sex isn't just nurture, but also includes nature, at birth. The trans movement, like much of the left, clings to the 'blank slate' theory of the newborn infant brain, which has fallen out of favor with medical science. The trans movement, which for all its faults contains some really interesting ideas about gender identity fluidity, has unfortunately gone off the rails and is trying to legitimize and 'normalize' new definitions of 'male' and 'female' which simply don't work for the majority of dimorphic human beings. The fact is, most of us are happy with the bodies we were born with, whether that body lights up for the opposite sex or their own. Transactivists haven't persuaded most of us, and mandating gender fluidity won't, either. Blame it on evolution and Mother Nature, that transphobic bitch. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Will we allow awful people to take whatever they like and ruin it? Or is it too soon? Public domain photo (Update: I've left this up because I wrote it several months before 10/7 and the hideous global outbreak of antisemitism. I still stand by what I say as the swastika's history is mostly holy. I'm not going to cater to right - and left-wing antisemites) Some Asians think it's time to reclaim their holy symbol, the swastika. Or, more to the point, the 'svastika', which is the Sanskrit spelling of the word, since the ancient language has no 'w'. It dates back several thousand years, a universal sacred symbol that appears to have developed in disparate parts of the world . Hindus, Buddhists and Jains lay claim to it. Swastikas were found in the 4,000-year-old city of Troy unearthed by archaeologist Hermann Schliemann in the 19th century. North American Indigenous tribes and bands displayed them, as did the Teutonic Knights, a Catholic German medieval military order. A mosaic swastika was discovered in a Byzantine Church excavated in Israel. Its many meanings include a solar symbol, good luck, good fortune, and in ancient Sanskrit it meant “It is!” “Life is good!” “There is value!” “There is meaning!” The earliest examples of a sort of vaguely swastika shape come from a 12,000-year-old bracelet carved from mammoth bone, found in a Ukrainian cave. Another Ukrainian find dated to 15,000 years ago is a bird figure with very elongated, stylized swastikas that I myself can't see, and which might arguably be nothing more than an artistic interpretation of feathers, with no assigned special or sacred meaning. We can never know what artifacts from preliterate epochs truly meant, or didn't, and archaeologists are mad for assigning religious meaning to all of them, as though our cave ancestors were as obsessed with religion as their descendants are with the Netflix craze du saison . Those who would reclaim the symbol for their ancient cultures might well reclaim the original spelling of svastika , to differentiate it from what some asshole ninety years ago culturally misappropriated it for. Spot the swastika! When I visited Toronto before I moved here, I stayed with my fellow Pagan friend Diana. We visited the Royal Ontario Museum and found ourselves playing a game of Spot The Swastika! It began with a large Buddha statue near the entrance. "Hey, look!" I pointed out. "The Buddha's got a swastika on his chest!" Diana had visited the ROM many times over the years and she'd never noticed it before. We began playing Spot The Swastika. We found them in Asian, Greek, and Roman exhibits, snickering like mischievous children pointing out naughty bits in a National Geographic. They were on pottery and weapons. They were on statues and bowls. 8th century BC Greek pottery. Original image by Zde on Wikimedia Commons, CC0 4.0 When I moved to Toronto I landed in nearby Mississauga, home to many Indian immigrants. I began to see 'live' swastikas, rather than those collecting dust in a museum. I found them on silver Buddhist bowls in Toronto's Chinatown. I saw swastika necklaces and jewelry on Indians and Asians working in the mall, and I'm pretty sure they weren't white supremacists. Last year a friend and I found an Indian-looking shirt covered with swastikas at a thrift store. It looked like it was probably used for some celebratory event. Too soon? Probably fifteen years ago I floated the idea to my fellow Pagans that maybe the swastika should be rehabilitated, since it doesn't deserve its ugly reputation, and Hitler had engaged in pagan religion abuse. The suggestion was met with acknowledgement that the swastika didn't deserve its reputation but no one wanted to hurt Jews, especially Jewish Pagans. Pagans lean toward supporting minority, marginalized religions, but no one wanted any part of this, even though everyone knew Hitler's regime was an opportunistic toxic salad of Christianity, Norse Paganism and appropriated occult beliefs. Whatever worked! He created a personality cult to serve himself and his ugly obsession with Jews. He misappropriated the swastika, along with several other Norse pagan symbols, which annoys the crap out of many modern Norse Pagans. Hitler's thousand-year Reich disintegrated in twelve years when Germany was forced to surrender to the Allies in 1945. As the unthinkable evidence of the Final Solution unfolded in the years after the war, the swastika became cemented as the ultimate symbol of evil. It didn't deserve it. Poor Pepe Pepe the Frog is a more modern, if less universal example of how the right misappropriated a non-political creation for evil. Pepe was a harmless cartoon frog begun in a 2005 comic by cartoonist Matt Furie. Pepe turned into a meme with mood variations and 'You will never...' Public domain Ten years later, the alt-right appropriated the symbol to Furie's intense dismay, as Pepe was never intended to be a political character, and certainly not the poster cartoon for hate. Furie has sued organizations for misusing it in this manner, but it persists. Once it's on the Internet, it's forever. It's not fair to Pepe, and it's certainly not fair to his creator. The most obvious critics of the swastika reclamation project are Jews, especially those who remember or are descended from Holocaust survivors who they argue will be re-traumatized by seeing the swastika again. The camps were liberated in 1945 so there can't be many survivors left. But still. It was less than a century ago. In the grand scheme of history, Hitler's swastika regime is a blip of a very, very bad reputation hit on an otherwise entirely noble timeline. Most Pagans I know wouldn't adopt the swastika if it became acceptable even though there's precedence in ancient Celtic and Druidic history, from which many modern Pagans draw inspiration, re-enacting the practices and resurrecting the symbols of their ancestors. I've never seen one utilize it. Speaking as one who could adopt it myself, since my own Pagan practice is based on Greek and Roman paganism and mythology, I wouldn't, mostly because I have no emotional attachment to the symbol. Nazi association aside, I have neutral feelings about it. But several traditions have a pretty airtight historical argument for utilizing the swastika again freely, regardless of Hitler. Ancient rock carving of Sindh, Pakistan, Believed to be Neolithic or prehistoric. Original image by Aziz Kandrani on Wikimedia Commons, CC0 4.0 As for the Jewish people struggling with a too-recent memory of genocidal hell, now is a good time to simply open a discussion as to when it should be released from its more recent association, and let others reclaim their honorable symbol. Because the Nazis never had any right to it, and no group has the right to dictate how others may practice their religion. It would be one thing if the Nazis invented the symbol; it's quite another that many others did thousands of years before Hitler's birth. Nazi claims to the symbol require as much mental gymnastics as the once-fashionable Christian justification for enslaving Africans. Slavery-sympathetic theologians hundreds of years ago couldn't find a damn thing in the Bible to support what they wanted, which was God's blessing for enslaving darker-skinned people, so they created a ludicrous link out of a randomly-chosen story about the sin of Ham, seeing his father naked and telling his two brothers, resulting in a 'curse'. What this has to do with black people is a mystery, but it's just as stupid as the Nazi justification for appropriating the swastika. German nationalist scholars, smash 'n' grabbing anything that seemed to or could be made to support a German nationalist myth , chose the Sanskrit word 'arya', meaning 'pure' or 'noble', and turned an adjective into Aryans, a new race identity, and it wasn't long before it then turned into a 'master race' of Europeans, with guess who at the summit. German nationalists cadged the swastika from Herman Schliemann's Trojan swastika-fest, with Schliemann too dead to protest. Whose sacred symbol is next? What bothers me about allowing the swastika's Nazi association to persist is it sends a subtle message giving hate and evil purveyors carte blanche to take what they like from the rest of us, like shoplifters in a supermarket. The 'okay' symbol we all know has been modified slightly and added to the Anti-Defamation League's ever-expanding database of 'hate' symbols. Supposedly, it's now a 'white power' gesture when flashed upside down, since the 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand mass shooter flashed it during a court appearance. Its origin as a 'white power' gesture is actually a hoax started by the trolling website 4chan, and was adopted by some white supremacists. The haters have won when your friend mouths to you across a noisy, crowded room, "How are you?" and you respond with a gesture others think means, "Thank God I'm white! Power to the pale! Down with Israelites!" Anything can be appropriated now. Like the way the Christian cross is misused by the KKK. What if the alt-right or other hate groups appropriate the trans flag, the peace symbol, or the Black Lives Matter raised fist? What if the Jewish Star of David was turned into a hate symbol? Oh wait, it already was, by Twitter , at least under the Old Regime. Know your swastika Ten years ago, 120 tattoo parlors around the world sponsored a one-day ' Learn To Love The Swastika ' event. Artists offered free swastika tattoos but made people sign a waiver stating they weren't getting it as a neo-Nazi symbol, relying, one supposes, on the neo-Nazis' honesty to not lie on the waiver. I wondered if it wouldn't have been better to stipulate the tattoo must include the words "Love" or "Peace For All" or "Good fortune to all." Or maybe with a flower in the center. What neo-Nazi wants to go around with a girly-looking swastika? Perhaps the swastika could be reclaimed, slowly, over a few generations, with a few 'best practices'. Like, cocked at a 45-degree angle, on a white circle, with a red background, is right out. Traditional Hindu swastikas fit neatly into a square, with the arms pointing to the right, clockwise (or as modern Pagans would say, 'Deosil'). Buddhist swastikas face the other way ('Widdershins' in Wiccaspeak) . Original work by MennasDosbin on Wikipedia. Creative Commons CC0 4.0. For some reason, the upper right one sort of reminds me of both Colin Kaepernick and Tim Tebow taking a knee at a football game. Avoiding the characteristic 'Nazi' angle would be a good practice. Perhaps a swastika on a neutral background, along with some words you would never find on a Nazi flag. Like भवतः सौभाग्यम्, which is Sanskrit for 'Good fortune to you!' Or better yet, in English, so no one thinks it's secret Sanskrit for 'Springtime for Hitler and Germany'. Associating the swastika with positive imagery and original sentiments might help in reducing its Nazi-induced poison, and make it clear this isn't a bad swastika, it's a good svastika. Yes, Dorothy, there is a difference. With input from members of cultures and religions where svastikas belong, and of course Jewish voices, perhaps there could be svastikas incorporated with peace signs, doves, olive branches, hands clasped in peace, or hearts. These are suggestions for discussion, because the Pagan in me never wants to tell anyone else how to practice or present their religion. But, it wasn't my people who were subjected to hellish torture and genocide under the swastika either. I'm not the one living with the legacy of the Nazi symbol. But, neither do I hail from a culture for whom the svastika has had a long and honorable tradition, which was hideously misappropriated without permission. These are a few thoughts. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!