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aoyama-division · 1 year

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In a restaurant located in Aoyama, a man and a woman, besides the chef and musicians, were the only people present, as the man was on one knee with a beautiful diamond ring in his hand as the woman was staring at him, shocked. Who were the people in question, you ask? They were none other than Tomi Chōten, and Miho Kobayashi.

"...Miho Kobayashi," Tomi stated, "Would you do me the honor of being my lawfully-wedded wife?"

Many hours ago...

— Shinagawa, Kobayashi Residence —

"Pardon me, ma'am," Goro spoke walking into the living room where his master and mistress, Miho Kobayashi, was located, reading a novel on her sofa. "My apologies for bothering you, but it appears that you have a guest at the front door. I stated you weren't accepting visitors at this time, but the visitor stated they were from Master Chōten."

Hearing the name of her friend and fellow business partner made the scowl on Miho's face disappear slightly. She knew Tomi wouldn't bother her unless it was for an important reason. Sighing, she placed a bookmark on her current page, got up from her seat, and walked to the front door. Opening it, her eyes grew slightly as a familiar-looking older gentleman wearing a black suit, along with many other similarly-dressed men, stood at the door. Spotting the matriarch of the house, they all bowed in respect.

"Good day, Lady Kobayashi," The older man spoke, raising his head. "I am Akiharu Hino, head butler for the Chōten family. Master Tomi Chōten has ordered that my servants and I make sure you have the best day you could possibly have. He has thus ordered us to escort you as he has a full day of enjoyment and relaxation planned for you."

Hino then held his hand out towards the black limousine that suddenly appeared out of nowhere. On the back, the vehicle was adorned with the Chōten family's logo, signifying who it belonged to.

"Shall we, ma'am?

As Miho looked at the limousine, a smile appeared on her face before she looked at the old butler.

"Give me five minutes." She ordered, before walking back into the house. After five minutes, she prepared to leave before looking at her butler, Goro.

"I'm heading out now, Goro." She informed her butler. "Please keep an eye on the house while I'm gone."

"Of course, milady." Goro bowed, respectfully. "I assume that also means Lady Sumire, as well?"

Giving the butler a meaningful look, she exited the house and looked as the army of butlers stood ready and waiting for her. Nodding, she followed Hino to the limousine, the other butlers following behind.

— Aoyama, Spa Resort —

To say that Miho Kobayashi was feeling bliss would be an understatement would be an understatement. She sighed as she was face down on a massage table while a massage therapist was firmly, yet gently massaging her back. She wasn't aware of how stressed she had been lately until the therapist started pressing down on her, releasing all the tension in her body.

Hino had stated that their first stop was a spa resort, which, safe to say, Miho was thoroughly enjoying. She had always meant to visit one of these places but never found the time to. What made it even better is that she was the only person there, meaning she had the entire spa to herself, which she was not complaining about. She didn't know how Tomi had arranged this, but she was grateful.

Soon afterward, she was seated in a lounge chair with face cream and cucumbers on her eyes. Beneath her, a massage therapist massaged both her feet, as they had done her back earlier. On the sides of her, a manicurist was working on her nails, either filing them or painting them, making them. Usually, she wouldn't bother having her nails done, but she was impressed with their work.

The last part of the resort allowed Miho to soak in a spa filled with mineral water. She sighed as the water heated up, providing a soothing, relaxing time. She had been told numerous times by Goto the benefits of mineral-rich baths but had never tried them before now. She wished she had; taking one of these every day would have helped in dealing with her wayward niece. Shaking her head, the CEO refused to think of that now, preferring to let her mind, body, and soul relax.

"I must definitely remember to thank Tomi for this." She thought as she continued relaxing.

— Aoyama, Shopping Center —

After several hours of relaxation, Hino and his butlers then drove Miho to their shopping center, which, she was loathed to admit, made Shinagawa's look bare in comparison. She was then instructed to buy whatever she pleased as Tomi would pay for it all; there was no limit, as he stated this day was for her.

The Matriarch did not need to be told twice, as she busied herself visiting store after store. Much of what she bought consisted mainly of clothes and jewelry, though she did buy some practical things as well; mainly, a thank you card for Goro for all that he had done for her. She truly valued her butler. She was one of the few people in her life that she could say she trusted, and the only one whom she would say she could call a family.

Although she had Ritsuko and Sumire, neither of them could hold a candle to Goro. As much as she valued her friendship with Ritsuko, even Miho had to admit that there were times she couldn't stand the immoral and unethical Chuohku scientist. And Sumire... the less said about how much she tolerated (and she used the word in the loosest sense) her anarchic niece, the better.

— Aoyama, Restaurant —

After she had finished shopping and had bought herself a beautiful dress, she was driven to her final destination: the Chōten mansion, where the man himself, Tomi Chōten, waited. Wearing an attractive emerald-colored tuxedo, he bowed graciously to the lady waiting.

"A pleasure as always, Lady Kobayashi," Tomi stated, as he gently kiss her outward hand. "I hope this day was filled with bliss for you."

He gently took her hand as he led her to his Rolls Royce, which was waiting for the two of them.

"And it is not over yet, milady."

From then on, Tomi took the CEO to a variety of places: a theater show, a casino, and finally a rooftop restaurant. Miho was not surprised in the least to say that the restaurant was empty, save for them and a couple of chefs and some musicians who were playing classical music.

As the two finished eating, Tomi called for two glasses of wine, both already filled. Clinking their glasses together, the two downed their drinks, but Miho stopped as felt something in her glass. Looking at it, her eyes couldn't believe that it was a ring. Looking up at Tomi, she noticed he wasn't there, but was now beneath her on one knee...

Now...

"Miho Kobayashi, you are truly a woman that I would love to spend this life and the next with. I am truly fortunate to know you. And it is for that reason I have to ask you this..."

Reaching into his coat pocket, Tomi pulled out a jewel box and opened it, which contained perhaps the largest and most expensive diamond ring in the world.

"...Miho Kobayashi, would you please do me the honor of being my lawfully-wedded wife?"

#hypmic #hypnosis mic #hypnosis microphone #hypmic oc #hypnosis mic oc #tomi chōten #miho kobayashi #happy birthday miho 2023 #arb birthday special #the hegemony #alternative rap battle #tomixmiho

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birdemic · 2 months

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we have to stop letting the usa have such control/influence over international politics

#edit: i know its not just the us that has veto power and i know how the un and international politics work #i know un veto isnt the be all end all of american hegemony #this was just a reaction to hearing that the us vetoed a ceasefire for the 3rd time thats it

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stil-lindigo · 3 months

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In Gaza, journalists are passing out from exhaustion and famine. Despite the ICJ ruling, the US and Australia are intentionally defunding UNWRA based on baseless claims by Israel that members of the aid group are Hamas-sympathizers. Netanyahu, of course, has ignored the ICJ ruling. Israel has banned insulin pens from arriving in Gaza, a particularly cruel and inhumane crime to add to their laundry list of offences. Nothing has changed, and things are getting worse.

It is not that hard to not buy things. To not watch things. Perhaps it is inconvenient, and makes you go out of your way, and costs a little more to buy alternatives. But if you were to attend a funeral a day for every child that has died in Gaza so far, it would take you over 27 years. When the worst that will happen to you is that you don't watch a TV show featuring a zionist, you don't buy a specific brand that donates to and supports zionism, how could that possibly compare to the plight of Palestinians who must amputate limbs without anesthesia?

Once again, this is the BDS list of brands to boycott.

Here is a comprehensive post about more actions you can take in support of Palestine.

Here is a list of verifiable orgs that provide aid on the ground.

credible organisations that are doing work on the ground in Palestine:

Care for Gaza:non-profit charity that distributes money, food and other resources directly to families in Gaza.They maintain a regular presence on Twitter and Instagram. You can donate to them via Paypal here.

PCRF / Palestine Children's Relief Fund: non-profit organisation that distributes essential food and resources to families in Gaza. Most recently, they delivered 30 tons of vital medicine, and 82,000 pounds of flour.

Medical Aid For Palestinians: deploys medical teams to treat Palestinians suffering under Israel's malicious bombardments.

Donate e-sims to Palestine: massive post with tutorials and relevant links, with discount codes included in the post and in the replies.

Direct Aid: humanitarian fund distributing supplies such as blankets and winter jackets directly to Palestinian families.

help people leave palestine (donate what you can)

Help a Family Evacuate Gaza (GoGetFunding)

Save Sanaa and her Family (Gofundme)

Save Amjad Saher and his family (Gofundme)

Help a family of 13 escape Gaza (Gofundme)

Help a Palestinian children's book illustrator save her family of 12 (Gofundme)

Today, tomorrow and until Israel faces justice for their crimes, learn how to prioritise Palestine over your own comfort.

#the defunding of the unwra as israel further escalates their unimaginable cruelty produces an indescribable rage #these western leaders deserve to be fucking stoned #nothing comes in the way of western hegemony and their commitment to upholding unforgivable cruelty for profit #palestine #free palestine #free gaza #free west bank #fuck israel

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sayruq · 3 months

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beguines · 2 months

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As a significant "feminised" category of mental illness, however, HPD [histrionic personality disorder] was superseded in the DSM-III by the introduction of the controversial BPD, a label which has been increasingly applied to women, with around 75 per cent of all cases estimated to be female. Seen as a milder form of schizophrenia and lying on the "borderline" between neuroses and psychoses, the concept has been used in psychiatry since 1938. Like other personality disorders, BPD has a notoriously low reliability level even by the generally poor standards of the DSM, and even within the profession is considered by many as yet another "wastebasket" category (though as Bourne ruefully remarks, the ambiguity of such personality disorders makes them particularly useful in policing deviance in the new century). One member of the DSM-III task force stated at the time of constructing BPD that "in my opinion, the borderline syndrome stands for everything that is wrong with psychiatry [and] the category should be eliminated". The chair of the task force, Robert Spitzer, admitted with the publication of DSM-III that BPD was only included in the manual due to pressures from psychoanalytically oriented clinicians who found it useful in their practices. Such practices have been documented by Luhrmann who describes psychiatrists' typical view of the BPD patient as "an angry, difficult woman—almost always a woman—given to intense, unstable relationships and a tendency to make suicide attempts as a call for help.' Bearing significant similarities to the feelings of nineteenth century psychiatrists towards hysterics, Luhrmann's study reveals psychiatrists' revulsion of those they label with a personality disorder: they are "patients you don't like, don't trust, don't want . . . One of the reasons you dislike them is an expungable sense that they are morally at fault because they choose to be different." Becker reinforces this general view of the BPD label when she states that "[t]here is no other diagnosis currently in use that has the intense pejorative connotations that have been attached to the borderline personality disorder diagnosis." A bitter irony for those labelled with BPD is that many are known to have experienced sexual abuse in childhood, something they share in common with many of those Freud labelled as hysterical a century earlier; a psychiatric pattern of depoliticising sexual abuse by ignoring the (usually) male perpetrator, and instead pathologising the survival mechanisms of the victim as abnormal.

By the mid-1980s, the hysteria diagnosis had disappeared from the clinical setting while BPD had become the most commonly diagnosed personality disorder. BPD is now the most important label which psychiatric hegemony invokes to serve capital and patriarchy through monitoring and controlling the modern woman, reinforcing expected gender roles within the more fluid, neoliberal environment. Nevertheless, as Jimenez (emphasis added) reminds us, the historical continuity from hysteria to BPD is clear: "Both diagnoses delimit appropriate behavior for women, and many of the criteria are stereotypically feminine. What distinguishes borderline personality disorder from hysteria is the inclusion of anger and other aggressive characteristics, such as shoplifting, reckless driving, and substance abuse. If the hysteric was a damaged woman, the borderline woman is a dangerous one."

Bruce M.Z. Cohen, Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness

#bruce m.z. cohen #psychiatric hegemony #psychiatry

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date-a-jew-suggestions · 1 year

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Happy first day of the war on Christmas everyone

Yearly reminder to gentiles that

1. Jews do not recognize Jesus as anything but a human man who probably existed in some capacity at some point

2. We do not celebrate his birthday. He is just some guy to us.

3. It is not a personal attack on you if we don’t celebrate your favorite holiday.

4. Chanukah is not the most important Jewish holiday, its just the only one you know by name because it happens roughly around Christmas time.

5. You can say or do whatever you want, we just think you’re annoying. At the end of the day, you’re still gonna get school or work off on Christmas and Easter while I have to chose between my religion and my schoolwork every year on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.

6. You are not the victim. However, unfortunately you are usually the main character.

#jumblr #judaism #christian hegemony #christmas #the war on christmas

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magnetothemagnificent · 5 months

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As we enter the Christian holiday season, just your friendly reminder that "non-Christian character discovers the magic of Christmas" is not a trope you should be writing for a holiday themed fic. Cut that shit out.

#fandom negative #christian hegemony #christian universalism #holiday season #christmas #fic prompt #fic writing

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socraticcryptid · 1 year

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Pick 'It's complicated' if you have spent significant parts of your life both in the US and outside of the US, for example if you grew up there but then moved.

I'm not American, and sometimes it really seems that this website is dominated by the US. I've seen a couple of polls asking which continent/region you're from, and there's one going around at the moment about whether you're white or non-white, but I haven't seen one just asking about the US, and I'm curious!

Also I'd appreciate it if you reblog for greater sample size (but no pressure!)

#polls #america #usa #poll #the american cultural hegemony

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ipodlinux · 1 year

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its 2056. you wake up and your clothes jack you off. you go to take a shower (jacks you off) and insert a nutrition tablet in your mouth. it tastes like every dorito flavor at once. you go to your desk, it jacks you off. you lend your brain to main computation core of the Hegemony of Man, while it jacks you off. After 4 hours real time (it feels like you were being jacked off for a year) you go and plug in some entertainment. your brain is hooked up to the computer core, and it jacks you off. you get a notification in your field of vision. its a comm from your best friend, letting you know they are being jacked off. you hit like. its time for exercise, so walk towards the longevity pod where it exercises your body and jacks you off. your heart is full.

#hegemony of man is stolen from hyperion #cyberpunk #future #love #self love #205*

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tikkunolamresistance · 3 months

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Zionism has taught Jews that we are ontologically different from the rest of humanity and collective community. Instilled within us that our only claim to safety, the only true way we can be undoubtedly safe, was through the existence of a quasi-Religious, ethno-nationalist state strictly dictated by the Zionist project. That the self-determination of Jews can only, exclusively, be achieved through the establishment of this colony of forced-assimilation. The equation of Zionism equals Judaism, no matter the disastrous consequences of which, has raised millions of Jewish people around the world.

And trust, it has not only been by the hands of Jewish Zionism. For Christian Zionism plays a major, glaring role in this indoctrination. With there being more Christian Zionists than there are Jews in the world (with much of the Republican and Democratic parties being Christian Zionists) the ideology of The Rapture, second coming of Jesus, with establishment of Jerusalem as the World’s new Capital following; Jews and Palestinians are just canon-fodder; pawns to summon Jesus. We implore that you do further reading on this matter and it’s instrumental role in Zionist ideology.

And one can only wonder, one can only assume, that has this not since opened an irrefutable Pandora’s Box of a new kind of capitalist nationalism onto the global Jewish community? To appoint a group as above another is a complexity of supremacy that we’ve seen through history. If we look at Imperialist history, we see what ideology has forced its way through epochs to excuse brutal expansionist policy.

What’s worst, and what’s most enraging, is that Shoah has been weaponised not only from the Holocaust industry— the billions made from displaying Jewish generational trauma and the cinematic brutalisation of our people— to ensure the West can constantly remind us that their role in the war was for Jewish liberation, and certainly not due to fearing Nazi imperial domination as a threat to Western imperial interests… but to merit the Israeli States’ “right to self determination” and “self-defence” against inevitable Native Palestinian uprising.

Zionism is a right-wing, ethnonationalist idology that has been used to control and influence Jewish communities for decades, to justify imperialist expansion. It’s an insult, a disgrace, to Jewish history, identity and peoplehood.

Anti-Zionism is the radical rejection and desire to dismantle the very systems that harm not only us, Jews, but our brothers and sisters in this fight against capitalist regime. We seek unity, liberation, equity, justice. We seek love where there has been unprecedented hatred. We seek grace where there has been insolence. Anti-Zionism is integral in the fight for true global liberation.

There is pain upon the Holy Land, Palestine, and we must admit that we can do something about it.

#free palestine #palestine #anti capitalism #anti imperialism #jumblr #judaism #israel #jewish thought #jewish #antizionism #jewish antizionists #antizionists unite #christian hegemony #christian zionism

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aoyama-division · 1 year

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Obey Us (The Hegemony Ver.)

Bring the Beat!

[Tomi:]

I'm High Class, now hurry and kneel down before me

That's life, the rich always stand above the poor

If you listen and obey, I may grant you leniency

But disappoint me, and I'll erase you so easily

The world is mine, right in the palm of my hand

I smile as you peons fulfill my every demand

You drop down on your knees at the clarity I bring

But what else can you expect from the one who is born to be king?

[Miho:]

You fools dare to invade the queen's space?

You are all just trophies hidden behind my showcase

Your future lies with us, so there's nothing to discuss

Obey your rulers, and bend the knee at once!

[The Hegemony:]

Do as we say!

Obey us, you’ve got no choice

But to get down on your knees! Ei ei ya!

Throw away your pride, you’ve got no choice

Now get down on your knees! Ei ei!

Get down, get down, get down (As you wish)

Get down, get down, get down (Yes, sir)

Get down, get down, get down (As you wish)

Get down, get down, get down (Yes, sir)

[Miho:]

Enough with the half-hearted, let's get started

How amusing to think that all of you are regarded

A nice word is said and you feel so rewarded

Unaware that with a flick of the wrist, you're discarded

Outside the castle walls, the bitter stare at us with envy

Curse and hate us, but in the end, you all just look silly

The pinnacle of hierarchy, the best of the best

Think a few words will hurt us? Surely you jest! (Ha!)

[Tomi:]

You fools try to oppose us? What complete idiocy!

Face down on the ground, that is your destiny!

We remain at the top, steadily increasing our cash

You think to reach where we are? Know your place, trash!

[The Hegemony:]

Do as we say!

Obey us, you’ve got no choice

But to get down on your knees! Ei ei ya!

Throw away your pride, you’ve got no choice

Now get down on your knees! Ei ei!

Get down, get down, get down (As you wish)

Get down, get down, get down (Yes, sir)

Get down, get down, get down (As you wish)

Get down, get down, get down (Yes, sir)

[Tomi:]

Listen up, feel honored to be in my presence!

[Miho:]

To do anything but revere me is just nonsense!

[Tomi:]

You foolish lot have a long way to go until you reach the head

[Miho:]

A waste of time; truly, nothing more needs to be said!

The world, simply put, is our palace

Where only the rich and powerful have status

[Tomi:]

You peons aren't worthy to be our enemy

So bow down and submit to us, The Hegemony

[The Hegemony:]

Do as we say!

Obey us, you’ve got no choice

But to get down on your knees! Ei ei ya!

Throw away your pride, you’ve got no choice

Now get down on your knees! Ei ei!

Get down, get down, get down (As you wish)

Get down, get down, get down (Yes, sir)

Get down, get down, get down (As you wish)

Get down, get down, get down (Yes, sir)

#hypmic #hypnosis mic #hypnosis microphone #hypmic oc #hypnosis mic oc #tomi chōten #miho kobayashi #the hegemony #obey us #do as I say #amprule #paradox live #happy birthday miho 2023

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jessicalprice · 1 year

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culture isn’t modular

I did a thread (actually several) on Twitter a few years ago about Christianity’s attempts to paint itself as modular, and I’ve been seeing them referenced here in the cultural christianity Discourse, and a few people have DMed me asking me to post it here, so here’s a rehash of several of those threads:

A big part of why Christian atheists have trouble seeing how culturally Christian they still are is that Christianity advertises itself as being modular, which is not how belief systems have worked for most of human history.

A selling point of Christianity has always been the idea that it's plug-and-play: you don't have to stop being Irish or Korean or Nigerian to be Christian, you don't have to learn a new language, you keep your culture.

And you’re just also Christian.

(You can see, then, why so many Christian atheists struggle with the idea that they’re still Christian--to them, Christianity is this modular belief in God and Jesus and a few other tenets, and everything else is... everything else. Which is, not to get ahead of myself, very compatible with some tacit white supremacy: the “everything else” is goes unexamined for its cultural specificity. It’s just Normal. Default. Neutral.)

Evangelicals in particular love to contrast this to Islam, to the idea that you have to learn Arabic and adopt elements of Arab culture to be Muslim, which helps fuel the image of Islam as a Foreign Ideology that's taking over the West.

The rest of us don’t have that particular jack

Meanwhile, Christians position Christianity as a modular component of your life. Keep your culture, your traditions, your language and just swap out your Other Religion Module for a Christianity Module.

The end game is, in theory, a rainbow of diverse people and cultures that are all one big happy family in Christ. We're going to come back to how Christianity isn't actually modular, but for the moment, let's talk about it as if it had succeeded in that design goal.

Even if Christianity were successfully modular, if it were something that you could just plug in to the Belief System Receptor in a culture and leave the rest of it undisturbed, the problem is most cultures don't have a modular Belief System Receptor. Spirituality has, for the entirety of human history, not been something that's modular. It's deeply interwoven with the rest of culture and society. You can't just pull it out and plug something else in and have the culture remain stable.

(And to be clear, even using the term “spirituality” here is a sop to Christianity. What cultures have are worldviews that deal with humanity’s place in the universe/reality; people’s relationships to other people; the idea of individual, societal, or human purpose; how the culture defines membership; etc. These may or may not deal with the supernatural or “spiritual.”)

And so OF COURSE attempting to pull out a culture's indigenous belief system and replace it with Christianity has almost always had destructive effects on that culture.

Not only is Christianity not representative of "religion" full stop, it's actually arguably *anomalous* in its attempt to be modular (and thus universal to all cultures) rather than inextricable from culture.

Now, of course, it hasn't actually succeeded in that--the US is a thoroughly Christian culture--but it does lead to the idea that one can somehow parse out which pieces of culture are "religious" versus which are "secular". That framing is antithetical to most cultures. E.g. you can't separate the development of a lot of cultural practices around what people eat and how they get it from elements of their worldview that Christians would probably label "religious." But that entire *framing* of religious vs. secular is a Christian one.

Is Passover a religious holiday or a secular one? The answer isn't one or the other, or neither, or both. It's that the framing of this question is wrong.

And Christianity isn’t a plugin, however much it wants to be

Moreover, Christianity isn't actually culture-neutral or modular.

It's easy for this to get obscured by seeing Christianity as a tool of particular cultures' colonialism (e.g. the British using Christianity to spread British culture) or of whiteness in general, and not seeing how Christianity itself is colonial. This helps protect the idea that “true” Christianity is good and innocent, and if priests or missionaries are converting people at swordpoint or claiming land for European powers or destroying indigenous cultures, that must be a misuse of Christianity, a “fake” or “corrupted” Christianity.

Never mind that for every other culture, that culture is what its members do. Christianity, uniquely, must be judged on what it says its ideals are, not what it actually is.

Mistaking the engine for the exhaust

But it’s not just an otherwise innocent tool of colonialism: it’s a driver of it.

At the end of the day, it’s really hard to construct a version of the Great Commission that isn’t inherently colonial. The end-goal of a world in which everyone is Christian is a world without non-Christian cultures. (As is the end goal of a world in which everyone is atheist by Christian definitions.)

Yet we focus on the way Christianity came with British or Spanish culture when they colonized a place--the churches are here because the Spaniards who conquered this area were Catholic--and miss how Christianity actually has its own cultural tropes that it brings with it. It's more subtle, of course, when Christianity didn't come in explicitly as the result of military conquest.

Or put another way, those cultures didn't just shape the Christianity they brought to places they colonized--they were shaped by it. How much of the commonality between European cultures is because of Christianity?

It’s not all a competition

A lot of Christians (cultural and practicing), if you push them, will eventually paint you a picture of a very Hobbesian world in which all religions, red in tooth and claw, are trying to take over the world. It's the "natural order" to attempt to eliminate all cultures but your own.

If you point out to them that belief and worldview are deeply personal, and proselytizing is objectifying, because you're basically telling the person you're proselytizing to that who they are is wrong, you often get some version of "that's how everyone is, though."

Like we all go through life seeing other humans as incomplete and fundamentally flawed and the only way to "fix" them is to get them to believe what we believe. And, like, that is not how everyone relates to others?

But it's definitely how both practicing Christians and Christian antitheists relate to others. If, for Christians, your lack of Jesus is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed, for New Atheists, your “religion” (that is, your non-Christian culture) is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed. Neither Christians nor New Atheists are able to relate to anyone else as fine as they are. It's all a Hobbesian zero-sum game. It's all a game of conversion with only win and loss conditions. You are, essentially, only an NPC worth points.

The idea of being any other way is not only wrong, but impossible to them. If you claim to exist in any other way, you are either deluded or lying.

So, we get Christian atheists claiming that if you identify as Jewish, you can’t really be an atheist. Or sometimes they’ll make an exception for someone who’s “only ethnically Jewish.” If the only way you relate to your Jewishness is as ancestry, then you can be an atheist. Otherwise, you’re lying.

Or, if you’re not lying, you’re deluded. You just don’t understand that there’s no need for you to keep any dietary practices or continue to engage in any form of ritual or celebrate any of those “religious” Jewish holidays, and by golly, this here “ex”-Christian atheist is here to separate out for you which parts of your culture are “religious” and which ones are “secular.”

Religious/secular is a Christian distinction

A lot of atheists from Christian backgrounds (whether or not they were raised explicitly Christian) have trouble seeing how Christian they are because they've accepted the Christian idea that “religion” is modular. (If we define “religion” the way Christians (whether practicing or cultural) define it, Christianity might be the only religion that actually exists. Maybe Islam?)

When people from non-Christian cultures talk about the hegemonically Christian and white supremacist nature of a lot of atheism, it reflects how outside of Christianity, spirituality/worldview isn't something you can just pull out of a culture.

Christian atheists tend to see the cultural practices of non-Christians as "religious" and think that they should give them up (talk to Jewish atheists who keep kosher about Christian atheist reactions to that). But because Christianity positions itself as modular, people from Christian backgrounds tend not to see how Christian the culture they imagine as "neutral" or "normal" actually is. In their minds, you just pull out the Christianity module and are left with a neutral, secular society.

So, if people from non-Christian backgrounds would just give up their superstitions, they'd look the same as Christian atheists.

Your secularism is specifically post-Christian

Of course, that culture with the Christianity module pulled out ISN'T neutral. So the idea that that's what "secular society" should look like ends up following the same pattern as Christian colonialism throughout history: the promise that you can keep your culture and just plug in a different belief system (or, purportedly, a lack of a belief system), which has always, always been a lie. The secular, "enlightened" life that most Christian atheists envision is one that's still built on white, western Christianity, and the idea that people should conform to it is still attempting to homogenize society to a white Christian ideal.

For people from cultures that don't see spirituality as modular, this is pretty obvious. It's obvious to a lot of people from non-white Christian cultures that have syncretized Christianity in a way that doesn't truck with the modularity illusion.

I also think, even though they're not conceptualizing it in these terms, that it's actually obvious to a lot of evangelicals. (The difference being that white evangelical Christianity enthusiastically embraces white supremacy, so they see the destruction of non-Christian culture as good.) But I think it's invisible to a lot of mainline non-evangelical Christians, and it's definitely invisible to a lot of people who leave Christianity.

And that inability to see culture outside a Christian framing means that American secularism is still shaped like Christianity. It's basically the same text with a few sentences deleted and some terms replaced.

Which, again, is by design. The idea that you can deconvert to (Christian) atheism and not have to change much besides your opinions about God is the mirror of how easy it’s supposed to be to convert to Christianity.

Human societies don’t follow evolutionary biology

The Victorian Christian framing underlying current Western ideas of enlightened secularism, that religious practice (and human culture in general) is subject to the same sort of unilateral, simple evolution toward a superior state to which they, at the time, largely reduced biological evolution, is deeply white supremacist.

It posits religious evolution as a constantly self-refining process from "primitive" animism and polytheism to monotheism to white European/American Christianity. For Christians, that's the height of human culture. For ex-Christians, the next step is Christian-derived secularism.

Maybe you’ve seen this comic?

The thing is, animism isn’t more “primitive” than polytheism, and polytheism isn’t more “primitive” than monotheism. Older doesn’t mean less advanced/sophisticated/complex. Hinduism isn’t more “primitive” than Judaism just because it’s polytheistic and Judaism is monotheistic.

Human cultures continue to change and adapt. (Arguably, older religions are more sophisticated than newer ones because they’ve had a lot more time to refine their practices and ideologies instead of having to define them.) Also, not all cultures are part of the same family tree. Christianity and Islam may be derived from Judaism, but Judaism and Hinduism have no real relationship to one another.

But in this worldview, Christianity is "normal" religion, which is still more primitive than enlightened secularism, but more advanced than all those other primitive, superstitious, irrational beliefs.

Just like Christians, when Christian atheists do try to make room for cultures that aren't white and European-derived, the tacit demand is "okay, but you have to separate out the parts of your culture that the Christian sacred-secular divide would deem 'religious.'"

Either way, people from non-Christian cultures, if they’re to be equals, are supposed to get with the program and assimilate.

You’re not qualified to be a universal arbiter of what culture is good

Christian atheists usually want everyone to unplug that Religion module!

So, for example, you have ex-Christian atheists who are down with pluralism trying to get ex-Christian atheists who aren't to leave Jews alone by pointing out that you can be atheist and Jewish.

But some of us aren’t atheist. (I’m agnostic by Christian standards.) And the idea that Jews shouldn’t be targets for harassment because they can be atheists and therefore possibly have some common sense is still demanding that people from other cultures conform to one culture’s standard of what being “rational” is.

Which, like, is kind of galling when y’all don’t even understand what “belief in G-d” means to Jews, and people from a culture that took until the 1800s to figure out that washing their hands was good are setting themselves up as the Universal Arbiters of Rationality.

(BTW, most of this also holds true for non-white Christianity, too. I guarantee you most white Christian atheists don’t have a good sense of what role church plays in the lives of Black communities, so maybe shut up about it.)

In any case, reducing Christianity--a massive, ambient phenomenon inextricable from Western culture--to the specific manifestation of Christian practice that you grew up with is, frankly, absurd.

And you can’t be any help in deconstructing hegemony when you refuse to perceive it and understand that it isn’t something you can take off like a garment, and you probably won’t ever recognize and uproot all the ways in which it affects you, especially when you are continuing to live within it.

What hegemony doesn’t want you to know

One of the ways hegemony sustains and perpetuates itself is by reinforcing the idea not so much that other ways of being and knowing are evil (although that’s usually a stage in an ideology becoming hegemonic), but that they’re impossible. That they don’t actually exist.

See, again, the idea that anyone claiming to live differently is either lying or deluded.

There are few clearer examples of how pervasive Christian hegemony is than Christian atheists being certain every religion works like Christianity. Hegemonic Christianity wants you to think that all cultures work like Christianity because it wants their belief systems to be modular so you can just ...swap them. And it wants to pretend that culture/worldview is a free market where it can just outcompete other cultures.

But that’s... not how anything works.

And the truth of the matter is that white nationalist Christians shoot at synagogues and Sikh temples and mosques because those other ways of being can’t be allowed to exist.

They don’t shoot at atheist conventions because there’s room in hegemonic Christianity for Christian atheists precisely because Christian atheists are still culturally Christian. Their atheism is Christian-shaped.

They may not like you. They’re definitely going to try to convert you. They may not want you to be able to hold public office or teach their kids.

But the only challenge you’re providing is that of The Existence of Disbelief. And that’s fine. That makes you a really safe Other to have around. You can See The Light and not have to change much.

What you’re not doing is providing an example of a whole other way of being and knowing that (often) predates Christianity and is completely separate from it and has managed to survive it and continue to live and thrive (there’s a reason Christians like to speak of Jews and Judaism in the past tense, and it’s similar to the reason white people like to speak of indigenous peoples of the Americas in the past tense).

That’s not a criticism--it’s fine to just... be post-Christian. There’s not actually anything wrong with being culturally Christian. The problems come in when you start denying that it’s a thing, or insisting that you, unique among humankind, are above Having A Culture.

But it does mean that you don’t pose the same sort of threat to Christianity that other cultures do, and hence, less violence.

#cultural christianity #christian hegemony #christian atheists

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sayruq · 3 months

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After the US bombed the Yemenis for the fifth time, the Yemenis responded by attacking an American ship in the Gulf of Aden

Earlier Joe Biden admitted the missile strikes are doing nothing to the Houthis. For example:

As a result of such antics, insurers won't cover US, UK ships heading to the Red Sea and it's become clear that the US navy is more vulnerable than expected

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beguines · 2 months

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Yet problems in the legitimacy of psychiatry's vocation have remained, and reached crisis point at the cusp of deinstitutionalisation in the 1970s. At the time, a number of significant studies demonstrated the profession's inherent tendency to label people as "mentally ill," to stigmatise everyday aspects of a person’s behaviour as signs of pathology, and to make judgements on a person's mental health status based on subjective judgements rather than objective criteria.

The study that had the most direct impact on the psychiatric profession—as well as public consciousness—at this time was David Rosenhan's (1973) classic research On Being Sane in Insane Places which found that psychiatrists could not distinguish between "real" and "pseudo" patients presenting at psychiatric hospitals in the United States. All of Rosenhan's "pseudo" patients (college students/researchers involved in the experiment) were admitted and given a psychotic label, and all the subsequent behaviour of the researchers—including their note-taking—was labelled by staff as further symptoms of their disorder. This research was a culmination of earlier studies on labelling and mental illness which had begun in the 1960s with Irving Goffman (1961) and Thomas Scheff (1966). Goffman's ethnographic study of psychiatric incarceration demonstrated many of the features which Rosenhan's study would later succinctly outline, including the arbitrary nature of psychiatric assessment, the labelling of patient behaviour as further evidence of "mental illness," and the processes of institutional conformity by which the inmates learned to accept such labels if they wanted to have any chance of being released from the institution at a later date. Scheff's work on diagnostic decision making in psychiatry formulated a general labelling theory for the sociology of mental health. Again, his research found that psychiatrists made arbitrary and subjective decisions on those designated as "mentally ill," sometimes retaining people in institutions even when there was no evidence to support such a decision. Psychiatrists, he argued, relied on a common sense set of beliefs and practices rather than observable, scientific evidence. Scheff concluded that the labelling of a person with a "mental illness" was contingent on the violation of social norms by low-status rule-breakers who are judged by higher status agents of social control (in this case, the psychiatric profession). Thus, according to these studies, the nature of "mental illness" is not a fixed object of medical study but rather a form of "social deviance"—a moral marker of societal infraction by the powerful inflicted on the powerless. This situation is summated in Becker's general theory of social deviance which stated that "deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an 'offender.' The deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied; deviant behavior is behavior that people so label".

Bruce M.Z. Cohen, Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness

#bruce m.z. cohen #psychiatric hegemony #psychiatry

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is-the-thing-actually-jewish · 6 months

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are Hanukkah sweaters a Jewish thing? i've seen them before but 90% of the time, they're people trying to make christmas displays more "inclusive." so are they legit Jewish or no?

Rating: Capitalism.

Hanukkah sweaters are a prime example of what I previously characterized as "capitalism's tendency to tepidly repackage any Christmas symbols in literally or metaphorically blue-and-silver wrapping paper to appeal to a Jewish market." As the "ugly sweater" phenomenon has grown more popular, retailers saw an excellent opportunity to widen their market by having "Hanukkah" versions.

That said, there's a wide range of Hanukkah sweaters out there, some of which are more problematic than others. Ones that are literally just recolored Christmas designs with a couple Jewish-y things tacked on, like this "Shalom Gnome" design or this "Oy to the World" design are more problematic than enthusiastically tacky designed-from-the-beginning-to-be-Jewish ones. The former says "Hanukkah! It's Christmas for Jews! Jews! They're just Christians without Santa or Jesus!" while the latter says, "Oh, you're going to walk around with an eyesore sweater full of tinsel and actual little jingle bells as though anyone could possibly forget that it's Christmas season in this country? I see you, I see you, and I'm just going to casually wear this sweater with a menorah and candles that actually light up because Judaism rocks, that's why."

Then there's a whole genre of Hanukkah sweaters with, let's say, more adult content, and people's mileage may greatly vary on how they feel about them. Personally, I find the ones riffing off more secular aspects of the holiday to be largely harmless, such as this "You Spin Me Right Round, Baby" design with dreidels. On the other hand, while some may find it amusingly subversive, I find ones making fun of the religious part of the holiday (i.e., the actual hanukkiah/menorah) to be in poor taste at best. There are a plethora of "let's get lit" Hanukkah sweaters like this one that genuinely annoy me. (For one thing, Hanukkah isn't even a drinking holiday! If you want a drinking holiday, we actually have those but Hanukkah isn't it!) Ones like this that make it into a creepy pick-up line actively disgust me. And this "gelt digger" one is genuinely antisemetic, given the stereotypes about Jews and money.

I would be remiss not to mention what I personally think is the best of the Hanukkah sweater subgenres: animal puns. My fiance owns this Meowzel Tov sweater with a truly garish design. What does "mazel tov" have to do with Hanukkah, you may ask? Absolutely nothing, but hey, cats! Can't be upset about Jewish cats! Similarly, llamas? Not Jewish at all! But Happy Llamakka? Okay, cute pun, cute graphic, I'm reluctantly charmed. Your Menorasaurus would not be kosher for actual use as the candles are all different heights, but you know what, that actually makes me smile.

So, basically: If you get joy out of being loudly Jewish during a season where everything is yelling about Christianity all the time, go ahead and wear your ridiculous ugly sweater to the company party. Just take a close look at the design to make sure it's not actually full of Christmas trees, not pretending something extremely Christmas is Jewish because it's a pun now, doesn't use Charedi men as a cartoon stand-in for anyone Jewish, and doesn't makes being Jewish primarily about not being Christian.

In sum: RIP my browser history, I'm going to be getting such terrible ads for the next several weeks. Click the links at your own risk.

~Mod Leora

#rating: capitalism #hanukkah #hanukkah sweaters #christian hegemony #jumblr #animal puns

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