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if I was hannibal when he was in prison I would've been even more annoying I would've been like "remember when you came over for dinner and I said this? Pretty clever now that you have context, wasn't it? I thought so."

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one of the most fascinating/nightmarish components of american evangelism is prosperity gospel. im not even sure theres any other facet of mainstream christianity that is SO transparently evil and fundamentally opposed to like, human life and kindness?

like if youre unfamiliar the idea is essentially that god rewards the faithful with literal economic wealth, and it exists mostly to tell poor people that the reason theyre poor is bc theyre not faithful enough, and that they can prove their faith to god by giving whatever money they have to a rich televangelist grifter who owns 5 planes and a megayacht.

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everyone forgot that mlk jr. said he hated white moderates

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The US army has increased its signing bonus to a max of fifty thousand dollars.

This is your reminder that no matter how good a $50k signing bonus from the army seems, it is not worth it.

First of all, the US army is bad. I know that sounds simplistic and obvious, but that's hard to remember when you're just looking to get out of a tough situation. But the army is bad. They're bad and they do bad things and you will do bad things for them. The US Armed Forces kill innocent people who want nothing to do with the wars we bring to their doorsteps.

If you think that having a Democrat in the White House means you won't be called upon to kill civilians, you're wrong.

You may tell yourself that we're not at war, that you'll never actually fire on another human, that you aren't going to be a drone pilot. But you don't know that. None of that shit is your choice when you're in the military. A war could start tomorrow. You could be sent out to kill people even if we aren't at war - we do it all the time - and you don't get to choose what you're going to do. Choosing to join the military is giving up the choice to not kill someone. As soon as you participate in that system, your options are to charge ahead or to be discharged.

If that's not a good enough reason for you, then remember that the military doesn't care about you. The army doesn't give a shit if you leave with PTSD so long as they still get their budget. The Navy doesn't give a shit what damage it does to your body. The Marines don't care about who you are and what they're taking out of you when they fill you up with a myth of brotherhood and a mountain of discipline.

Joining the military is going to be traumatic at some level. When you're done with your term you'll think that you're going to get support - medical treatment or a pension or money for school - and it's going to be like pulling teeth to get any of that, and it's going to be hard to get back into the swing of what life is like without the military making your choices for you. It'll be hard to find a job, it'll be hard to find support. It'll be hard to get along with people who don't have the same experience that you do because you took yourself outside of the normal experience of life in your country. You will resent the people you come home to and it will be because of a situation that you created, and nobody is going to be around to help you resolve that tension, which is going to make reenlisting look pretty attractive.

And if that's not enough reason for you, if you're trying to get out of a bad situation and this looks like the only way and the recruiter is telling you that you're gonna get fifty grand that you can put into savings and have it build interest while you're enlisted and you're going to get out and be rich and all your troubles will be behind you - that's bullshit too.

Almost nobody gets the high end of the bonus. It's not paid out immediately, and what most people DO get in the first six months is gone by the end of the first year because you signed up for that money for a REASON, so of course you spend the $8k you got instead of the $50k you signed up for, and of course you don't save it.

If you live in a city where the minimum wage is $15 an hour then a minimum wage job will pay more than your starting salary in the army, and getting a higher salary will depend on you staying in and working your way up the ladder, each increase convincing you to stay longer, to reach for the next rung. If you don't live in a city with a minimum wage that high, a bus ticket and a bunch of roommates are a hell of a lower cost than the possibility of being asked to kill people.

Almost all the vets I know are cops, are fucked up, are dead, or are some combination of those three things. You're not going to come out of the army rich, you may not come out of the army at all, and if you do make it out you're not going to be the same person on the other end. You will have learned some things about yourself and about discipline, and about how the world works, but those things aren't going to help you be a happier, healthier, better person.

Don't sign up. The bonus is a lie and the national pride is a lie and the job skills and fraternity and discipline is a lie.

Don't join the army.

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One absolutely hilarious part of human existence is the repeated incidents of spicy bananas. People who have lived their entire lives up to this point just assuming that a specific fruit or vegetable is supposed to taste bitter, tangy, or spicy, having no fucking idea that all this time, they've been allergic to this plant. Because how would they have known? You learn what things taste like by tasting them, nobody's going to tell you that bananas are supposed to be one of the mildest flavours out there. And people already eat so many things that taste hot, bitter, tangy and tart! Because they like how that kind of thing tastes like!

You can just happily much on a plant, thinking "ah, this angry plant tastes sharp because it hates me. Much like all the other sharp angry plants that people eat because they like the sharp", and it wouldn't cross their mind to think that the plant just hates you, specifically.

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Something just occurred to me.

You know how back in the pre-Internet days, it was nearly impossible to watch a TV series in its entirety because the local affiliate stations would deliberately air the episodes all out of order, then do some sort of statistical sorcery to figure out which particular episodes gave the advertisers the best return for their dollar and just run those ten or twelve specific episodes in an endless semi-randomised rotation, and that was why every time you channel-surfed across a particular show it always seemed to be the same damn episode?

Twitter’s algorithm is literally the social media equivalent of that.

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Be wary of any politician or polemic who uses the term “Cultural Marxism” to deride liberals, college students, professors, or artists. 

The phrase originated in Nazi Germany as “Cultural Bolshevism” and was used to deride the same people. 

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Redditors crashed the website with donations over $25k and 0 wishes left. via /r/MadeMeSmile

Click here and follow to get more daily positivity on your dash!

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i realized this was also lost in the fall of the CH website so

since it’s That Time of Year again, i’m just gonna bring back my Every Christmas TV Rom-Com comic

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“The Patient” | Handmade paper, monotype, and found object installation | 2021 

In the context of medicine, what does it mean to be born “different? How is the helpless body of the deformed, defective, or debilitated patient regarded by the doctor? Is it tragedy from the beginning? Is it the justification for a benevolent surgeon’s science experiments? Contending with questions about my own medical history, the piece asks: what’s does it look like  when your body isn’t your own? How does it feel?

The viewer was encouraged to enter the room and handle the folder of documents, which contains copies of medical records pertaining to a series of consultations, physical exams, and surgical procedures that I underwent from ages 4 to 6. On the cover and occasionally nestled between the pages of documents are a series of monotypes exploring the thoughts and feelings that arose from the consequences of these events. 

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from the recreational benadryl subreddit (r/DPH)

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that many young people are concerned about having kids because climate change will make the planet increasingly uninhabitable.

Fox News hosts are now claiming she wants to “get rid of children.”

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so, with the miss universe contestants having arrived in occupied palestine, they are being taught how to make traditional palestinians foods, dressed in traditional palestinian thobes, and taught traditional palestinian dances

as this celebration of appropriated culture was taking place in the west bank, this was gaza:

over two million people are trapped under a constant air, sea, and land blockade, inside one of the world’s largest cages

while miss universe contestants celebrate stolen culture, the genocide is ongoing. while they danced and sang and feasted and posted under the tourist hashtag of #visit_israel, the israeli government held a ribbon cutting ceremony for the continued oppression and ethnic cleansing of the very people who’s culture is advertised and consumed as a tourist attraction

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Hey I’m once again seeing discourse about PewDiePie (probably because he has been welcomed back into the larger community of youtube personalities playing Among Us like Corpse Husband, JackSepticEye and Cr1tikal) and I just want to remind people of his ugly racist history that he has never properly put behind him and in fact continues to perpetuate.

His fanbase has always been racist. He was one of the first big YouTubers and he has always made racially charged jokes and has said the n-word in videos - notably, targeting somebody else with it. I watched his content when I was a young child, I experienced these things first hand. There were racist jokes, rape jokes, and generally sexual jokes targeted for his younger demographic. He has always been known as problematic, as problematic was used back in 2012.

A preamble to his first exposé: in November 2016 he showed up to a taping of his own series produced by Maker Studios (Disney) wearing a shirt with a swastika on it. Somebody told him to change. He denies this ever happened, but acknowledged that the shirt exists. There are photos of him and a friend wearing it.

The thing he got caught for was when he paid two men $5 to write and hold up a sign with the words “Death To All Jews”. His apology was half-assed. He apologized for the way that it came across and did not acknowledge the reasons that it was wrong. Febuary 2017: he descends into utter alt-right reactionism, harassing the WSJ journalist and sending his fans after the publication to the point where the Journal offered to put the journalist in a safehouse.

September 2017, he called somebody he n-word on stream, just weeks after Charlottesville occurred - where his imagery, jokes, and memes were used as motivation. He went on to say he had no idea that Nazis actually existed, that the Nazi jokes he was making weren’t funny anymore, and that he would not be making them anymore.

In March 2019, a white supremacist livestreamed himself saying “Subscribe to PewDiePie” before committing mass-shootings in two Christchurch mosques, killing dozens and injuring more. He responded with a single tweet, that he felt sickened that his name left the man’s mouth, and that his heart went out to the people affected. Later, he called for an end to the Subscribe to PewDiePie meme and promised $50,000 to the Anti-Defamation League. He then retracted his decision, saying that he did not want to donate to something that he was not passionate about.

Felix Kjellberg has never made a single attempt to rid his fanbase of actual literal Nazis and white supremacist scum because he built his platform around them. He alone has radicalized probably half of the white nationalist/supremacist/Nazi men in America ages 18-25.

I will never forgive him.

This is taken from the Guardian article from above:

You could say that today’s digital economy has spawned a new “bro-nality of evil”. Racist memes serve as in-jokes that help solidify bonds between alienated white men online. The style of these memes, their overblown exaggerated nature, means we often don’t take them seriously. Dismiss them as jokes. But this is how antisemitism creeps into our lives. Not with a bang but with a punchline.

Happy Chanukkah, everyone.