One Finds More Crime In Societies That Operate More Off Of Shame.

One finds more crime in societies that operate more off of shame.

This dovetails with the data showing that regions with higher expressions of christianity, have more domestic violence, child abuse, grooming, SA, and other kinds of harm.

I've often noted that the worldview inherent to christianity -- in which humans are seen as naturally evil and given to the questionable concept of "sin" from the moment of birth -- can help excuse even one's bad treatment of innocent people.

After all, ALL humans are bad…right? So, oppressor or victim....in the end, who cares? 🤷🏾‍♀️

This worldview makes christian morality inherently corrupt.

Not to mention that the god character already displays all the classic behaviors and desires of an abuser: 'Love me or die', and 'Obey me or die', are not actually expressions of love or caring at all -- much less are they markers of a healthy relationship dynamic of any kind!

Yet, this "divine" example of actually toxic behavior, unfortunately, further entrenches those biblically-modeled abusive behaviors as 'acceptable' -- even as 'holy' -- in the worshippers' understanding.

And any disagreement -- much less outright protest -- is further maligned… because that worldview will go on to insist that we are all of us potentially demon-riddled and deserving of hell, unless we eagerly bow and scrape before the tyrannical god character.

The bad treatment and victim-blaming of marginalized, disabled, sick, poor, or homeless people, is also very much excused within this worldview... because, when your religion makes the entirely-too-pat assertion that good people are sure to be protected, rewarded, privileged, and empowered by god; while bad people are abandoned, disempowered, and punished; what else will religious people believe; but that to be good is to be rich, "normal", and "strong", and that all those who are being harmed by the hierarchies and oppressions around them therefore deserve what they get?

This is a sadly double-edged blade.

I remember how it felt.

The sheer self-loathing, self-dismissal, and anxiety ingrained into religious people, who are constantly told that they are worthless and evil unless they follow the whims and nonsensical, arbitrary rules of the capricious and authoritarian god character, can be immense.

It encourages just as much self-abuse and self-neglect as it encourages the neglect and abuse of others.

Reminder:

The number on the weight scale is not a reliable indicator of one's health.

Your metabolic numbers (blood sugar, blood pressure, etc.) and body function/ability are.

Even More Important, Bonus Reminder!!!:

PEOPLE WITH MEDICAL ISSUES AND ILLNESSES ARE ALLOWED TO EXIST, ALLOWED TO BE CARED FOR, AND ALLOWED TO HAVE LIVES.

A "CONCERN" FOR "HEALTH" IS NOT AN EXCUSE FOR YOU TO BE A EUGENICIST PIECE OF SHIT.

The owning class ultimately want there to be not ONE inch of earth that is not monetized, paved over, or existing in their personal gardens.

Meanwhile, people have to shift around like a card game, chasing employment and affordable housing: never getting to know and to work with and to be nurtured by the lands in which they live.

We are Earth's children.

The theft of humanity's connection to her is just one more insult that comes part and parcel with the deep injuries of capitalism.

Internalized Fascism

Seriously.

If you want to know the shape of the fascist cage that media has constructed inside our minds, our parents' minds, and our grandparents' minds over the years?

Read that awful "Screenwriter's Guide for Americans" slop that Ayn Rand wrote.

And then, if you're a creator?

Go forth, and do your damnedest to make works that depict and stand for the OPPOSITE.

Reminder: Cis women can have boyish builds, or muscles, or tall, angular body frames and features (or all three) of their own.

Cis men can have curves or petite builds or soft features (or all three).

People aren't fucking barbie and ken dolls.

They're not cookie cutter. They're not clones.

They come in all kinds of different proportions and shapes and types and sizes! 🎉✨

I actually wound up liking "The Woman King" as a movie way, WAY better than 300.

It is beautiful cinematically, it touches on some things and addresses some things that are good…

But please don't get it twisted, because that was NOT a historical movie. ^^;;; We know that.

The sunrises were beautiful, but I do not perceive it as a society that I wish to return to.

Because it does envision a world in which most of the hierarchies that plague us now, are still in place.

If you pay attention to the beginning, they're pretty adamant about showing this.

A lot of what is depicted seems like an attempt to say, "Look! This society in Africa was just as good as white people's, because, see: we had money, and patriarchy, and rich people, and kings, and war, too! That's what makes a civilization!"

For me, that whole attempt misses the plot on what it means to be a human.

There's a fundamental thing that I think that we miss when folks say, "Well, but look: white people are right, because they have all the money and all the power. They're "winning"!"

…Sure, that's winning….

If you enjoy being hated by your kids and having to down twelve Zoloft and two bottles of wine and step on the necks of fifty different people before breakfast, just to be able to stand being yourself for five fucking minutes… :/

Let's not pretend that these "winning" rich people and monarchs and oligarchs have healthy relationships with themselves, much less their families, much less anyone else.

The image of happiness that they project is often just that: a very carefully (and desperately) maintained IMAGE.

Even more basic than that: It's winning if you're a virus.

If you are an unselfaware gorilla, who lives in a troupe rather than a society, and your only idea of a "good" life is about domination and control. About who can you manipulate, who can you threaten, who can you hit over the head with a stick and gain power, for the sole purpose of just having power.

That is an ape troupe's idea of winning.

The kind of "winning" where scientists start to study you to try and figure out what's wrong with you.

We are apes, and descended from apes -- but we're not in an ape troupe...or really, we're not supposed to be.

We are HUMANS.

Humans are a KIND of ape, but we became different for a reason.

The fossil record shows a point, hundreds of thousands of years back in history, where the strongest apes -- the ones who were using violence and strength and threats to control and lord it over the other members of their community -- started dropping like flies.

Because one of the weaker apes had invented the blow gun.

And one of the other weaker apes knew how to make poison.

And all the other weaker apes agreed, "yeah, you know what, this guy is a fucking asshole, he needs to go!"

This happened multiple times across the populations of our ape ancestors, at roughly the same time frame in human evolution.

…And afterwards?

After our ancestors ended these strongest apes?

That's when our ape ancestors began to evolve at an EXPONENTIAL rate.

That's when we started to live by collaboration, consent, community, and trying to continually make conditions better for each other; instead of constantly trying to hoard and compete and get over on one another…that's when we started to have each other's backs on the regular.

After our ape ancestors sent their tyrants into the dirt; THAT'S when you start to see extremely complex language and tool-making and art and architecture EXPLODE across human culture: opening up all kinds of different options for life and for living.

All the things that make us FULLY human -- not just apes -- all these things resulted from us looking at nature's 'Might Makes Right', 'Red in Tooth and Claw', types of "winning", and saying to each other, "I'M SO SICK OF THIS SHIT!"

Nature is beautiful, yes. It birthed us. We need to cohabit with it sustainably and respectfully in order to live.

Yet, becoming human was an ancestral act of REVOLUTION.

It is relatively only very, very recently in the span of human existence when folk whose only loyalty is to capitalism and the made-up concept of whiteness, have swept across the world and RE-reframed the concept of "winning" according to fucking ape-brained bullshit that humanity had gotten rid of LONG ago.

They're doing it in ways that hurt not just everyone else, but themselves, too.

They are literally murdering the global ecosystem to do it.

And it disturbs me how many people have accepted that return to an absolute trash concept of "winning", instead of seeing it for what it is: NOT "the way humans just are"; but a regression, back into semi-conscious and ultimately suicidal ape-troupe mentality.