Notices by Trivial Einstein (intransitivelie@beige.party)

I win arguments on the internet all the time. The trick is to block your opponent and claim victory. The first person to do that wins!

Once again I must regretfully inform you that you may say you want a revolution but most people don't and I don't really believe you do either. Anyone who does is either woefully unprepared or selling something. Sorry if that harshes your leftist buzz or whatever. I'm a bad comrade.

I am babysitting/running sound today for a large, disorganized group of people whose first language is Chinese. I don't speak Chinese at all. The only Chinese I know is "Hello" and "Thank you" and I'm fairly sure I can't pronounce them correctly. This is an adventure.

@JessTheUnstill
Any time I read someone talking about leaving the country, I can practically guarantee that within the first paragraph or so they'll mention how it's so expensive. People like me can't afford to take a two-day vacation to someplace I can drive to. Moving within the US is out of my price range. And that's ignoring everything but money.

But yes, absolutely, let's tell marginalized trans people to move to another country. Where they will be even poorer, with no support systems in place, and probably in just as much danger from the usual things that endanger trans people. That makes total sense. /s

As an addendum and excuse to share anecdotes, when I was in Catholic school I wasn't the only non-Catholic there. We had some mainline Christians of various Protestant denominations, because as I said the public schools are terrible in my area. I believe at one point we even had a non-Christian of some sort several years below me, but I wouldn't be prepared to swear to it.

What always made me confused was that many of the non-Catholic Christians would behave Catholic when called upon to do so. They'd take Communion. A lot of them. And they belonged to denominations which do not believe in transubstantiation. They'd say the prayers to the saints that their religion didn't believe in either. But whatever, Christians gonna Christian.

What I also found weird, and I mentioned it at length above, was my friends who were super rebellious, anti-establishment, the whole bit, until they got into church at which point they became model Catholics, knelt at all the right times, took Communion, the whole bit. It always seemed two-faced to me, but that's honestly how most Catholics do it. It's just rote for them at this point. They're on autopilot. It's a little disturbing.

Now, I was raised by two people who were nominally Quakers. Our attendance at Meeting dropped off after awhile because the nearest Meeting House was an hour away (it's fun being a member of a fringe religion) but as far as I know my parents still consider themselves Quakers, and that's really all that's necessary as far as the sect of The Religious Society of Friends to which they loosely belong requires for membership. There's no magic words to say or bread to eat.

The Quakers are split into two sections: the evangelical Quakers and the weirdos. I have just made a lot of Quakers mad by simplifying it to that division because if you get two Quakers in a room together there will be members of three different versions of the religion present, but the broad truth is that I grew up as a weird Quaker. My parents thought it would be a good idea for me to learn things about Christianity in the same way that it would be to learn things about Greek and Norse mythology. They're in common cultural parlance.

So I knew a fair amount about Christianity while being about as non-Christian as you can be while still technically belonging to a Christian denomination. Maybe if I had been raised Unitarian instead it might have been even more, but whatever, I like the Unitarians and based on what I know about their denomination I can't say it's that different from weirdo Quakerism. The point being that, by the time I got to high school, I was not really a Christian at all but knew a fair amount about the religion, including Catholicism.

I used to put this combination to great effect by flummoxing religion teachers. I'd make a real pain in the ass of myself. If I hadn't been forced to take classes in a religion I kind of feel is evil, I wouldn't be proud of this, but as I don't care for Catholicism and most of my religion teachers were engaged in indoctrination, I feel very little guilt. The worst were the seminarians, which if you're unfamiliar is Catholic for "priest-in-training." They'd show up full of the fire of the Lord, ready to teach a class full of obedient Catholic angels, and they'd get me instead.

I won't bore you with boasts about how my high school hijinks drove my religion teachers to distraction. At a certain point, my parents told me that as long as I passed religion class, they didn't care how I did it. I managed to do that.

But my hatred of Catholicism (which at that time was largely down to it being forced on me) was well-known by all. I might have been the first non-Christian who wasn't one of the other major religions that any of these kids had ever met. I remember one of them, with whom I was perfectly cordial if not friendly, asking me why I worshipped Satan.

This is what you're dealing with when you deal with Christians in this country. They've been taught that everyone who isn't a Christian must worship Satan. Sure, maybe things were liberal enough that Jews and Muslims don't count in that calculus as much, but they probably secretly believe it about Jews and Muslims too. A person who isn't a member of a religion they've ever heard of before? Yeah, they're a Satanist.

And the thing is, he wasn't being nasty. He genuinely thought I worshipped Satan and was cool with that, he just wanted to know why. He probably would have asked an actual Satan worshiper the same question.

I attempted to explain to him that no, I didn't worship Satan, and I think I just confused him, but maybe it made it into his head enough that he got the gist of it. I'd love to believe so. The other problem about all this was that I was so anti-Catholicism at that time that I probably would have pretended to be a Satan worshiper if it riled up my religion teacher.

Catholic school when you're not Catholic or at least Catholic-lite is a trip. And I managed to make it through without being molested or anything. I still hated that school though. So when I learned last year that it was closing (because the diocese apparently owes so much in settlements over sexual abuse that it can't afford to fund the school anymore, to which I say yikes) I was thrilled. I won't lie. Didn't feel anything but happy. No nostalgia there at all.

But several of my friends from high school, with whom I still have slight contact, were lamenting the closure as if it were a death in the family. And I just wanted to say, "You fucking dipshits, when we were in that hellhole you would have lined up to get to light the fuse that would blow it to kingdom come." Again, two-faced. I really don't get it.

Catholicism, I'm afraid, is a bit like a hereditary genetic disorder which is somehow also contagious. By that I mean that there are so many people who are Catholic because they were born Catholic, and their point of view on the religion tends to be radically different from the point of view of a recent convert whose family history and upbringing don't predispose them to Catholicism.

This is probably true of other religions too; Judaism comes to mind most strongly, but that's just because I do have a small amount of experience with Judaism. But I don't have enough to speak on the subject more than to suggest that there seem to be similarities. Catholicism, on the other hand, I have gotten a ringside seat for while being not one, so I can perhaps provide perspective that someone on the inside, even a lapsed Catholic, could not. I suffered through Catholic school because in my area the public schools are worse than awful and the Catholics provide most of the other options.

Catholicism, and here I'm going to be nasty about it, is unpleasant. It's abusive, and I don't mean the ways in which Catholic priests and others are literally abusive. Catholicism privileges the convert because they typically take everything very seriously, whereas the folks who were born into it, they've typically figured out the score, so they suffer from it more. It's not a choice, for them. But at the same time, it makes up such a large part of their upbringing and family history that they can't really escape it.

What's worse is that, unlike those on the outside, born Catholics have been hurt so much that they think anything that isn't suffering is great. This applies to both their personal relationship with the Church but also to doctrine in general. Any time the Pope announces that maybe homosexuals shouldn't be executed on the spot but rather taken to a farm where they can be fattened up and then humanely slaughtered and processed into gruel for child laborers, every Catholic I know is like, "Liberal papacy ftw!!!"

And this applies to Catholics who aren't exactly observant anymore. They got older, they fell away a little. Maybe they stopped going to mass every Sunday. Maybe they got away from their family and realized that there's more to life than the Eucharist, so they stopped going to Confession quite as regularly. Whatever. They still think of themselves as Catholic, they raise the kids Catholic, and they do a half-assed job of obeying Mother Church.

Sometimes they're the worst, because most of the bad stuff doesn't really affect them anymore, so they see their childhood and family through rose colored lenses. They think Catholicism is fantastic. There's nothing wrong with it. And they make their kids into smaller versions of themselves. They perpetuate the family trauma another generation. And they're often the ones who are the most conservative about other people, because why wouldn't they be? Catholicism is fantastic.

This is not an anti-religious screed. If you want one of those, post a picture of Jesus and wait. One of the millions of fedi atheists will be along shortly. This is just commentary on Catholicism, which even I, who really doesn't like it, find strangely fascinating. My spouse is culturally Catholic and they sometimes make me a little frustrated with how they can be totally opposed to everything the Church stands for but still so connected to it. I don't understand how so many Catholics in the US can say, in the same breath, that the Pope is the spiritual arbiter of all things and that birth control is fine. I just want to scream, "You know there are other religions, right? You know that you can belong to a church which actually teaches things you actually believe in, as opposed to remaining a member of a church with which you seem to fundamentally disagree on many, many major issues?"

But I don't. I come here and toot through it. You're welcome.

Like, I don't know how to explain to people that rule by fiat is bad no matter who does it because eventually someone who isn't an enlightened philosopher king will gain the levers of power. I think I might just carry around a copy of Plato's Republic which I can pull pages from and eat while swearing under my breath.

Seriously though, fuck Plato. I blame him for this bullshit.

I'm pleased to see that "disabled" and assorted related words made it onto the list of words the government will no longer allow. I'm sure the abled will skip right over them like they do with disabled people and issues concerning them, but maybe not.

If someone forced me at gunpoint to open a restaurant, I would open the world's first restaurant where everything is made of water but we don't serve water as a beverage. So yes, I would open a restaurant where I could throw ice at customers. I think this is pretty obvious.

I don't want vengeance on fascists for what they've done, are doing, and will do.

No, I lied. But I can recognize that a desire for vengeance isn't helpful.

I want to stamp fascism out like the garbage fire that it is because only then can we achieve lasting peace.

But...

But I will secretly enjoy the vengeance, if it's offered to me. I will secretly enjoy every time a fascist fails, crashes and burns, shits themselves in public, cowers and snivels in fear, looses everything, suffers, and/or dies alone. I will take joy in justice and fascists getting what they deserve, even though I should be better than that.

I won't tell anyone to stop hounding fascism back to its hole because it's already beaten. Beat it some more. Beat it until it ceases to exist in memory. Beat it until fascism is a word with a strict definition that only historians use. Beat it first, then wonder whether you went too far.

I will take my vengeance hot or cold. I will dig two graves and fill both of them with fascism. I will let the poison work on me because there are some things worth hating. If the lord wanted vengeance to be his, he should have gotten here earlier. The victims of fascism can have little a vengeance, as a treat.

It's not yet time to talk of vengeance, and maybe it never will be. But I still want it. I am not a good person.

I flatter myself to think that I would try pretty much any food once, if offered it. There a few things I can't stomach the thought of, but most things, I'll take a flier on. I'm one of those annoying people who will go into foreign restaurants and order without understanding a word of the menu. I'm rarely disappointed.

All that said, I think, if I could do it ethically, I would try human flesh. I don't find anything inherently morally wrong about consuming human. It's the way you obtain the meat that's the moral problem. But if it were legal and someone put in their will that, should they be killed in a manner which would allow it, I could try a taste of their body after they were dead, yeah, I'd try it.

I'm not sure how I feel about eating people who never agreed to it before they died, as in the case of being stranded in the Andes with a plane full of corpses after a crash and being forced to cannibalism to survive. I'd probably do it, but I'm not sure I'd feel completely moral about it. If I didn't cause their death in order to eat them but they didn't consent to being eaten, it's a bit of a gray area maybe.

Of course, if I eat meat of any kind, it was pretty much without consent, as animals aren't capable of informed consent by most metrics, and was almost certainly from an animal which was killed simply so I could eat it. And that's leaving aside the ethical problems of environmental devastation and animal cruelty. Even the most careful and ethical consumer of meat is still killing an animal without its consent in order to eat it. Various indigenous cultures throughout the world have dealt with this fact in various ways, but we inhabitants of "modernity" shove that under the rug and distance ourselves from the act of killing as much as possible.

For the purposes of full disclosure, I'm not a vegan. I should be. We all should be. But I'm not. I violate my own moral compass and eat food derived from the mistreatment of animals. I'm not proud of this.

Humans are just animals. Sure, in the complex moral calculus of life, I will acknowledge that I value human life more than that of other animals, whether that's blinkered of me or not. I am something of a human chauvinist, I guess. I'm not particularly proud of this either.

But it still doesn't explain why I have moral qualms about eating human meat, even if it comes from a human who was killed for reasons other than being eaten and in whose death I am blameless. I don't know. It's hypocrisy, I guess.

All this to say, I'd try long pork under a certain set of circumstances and I don't think I'd be bothered by the act itself, even if I were bothered by the method of procurement. They claim human tastes like chicken. I'd be curious to find out, if nothing else.

If you're a developer who's asked to put in a backdoor to your encryption, you have the opportunity to do a very funny thing by putting one in that doesn't work properly. If they wanted it done well, they should have done it themselves. Make it so that all messages decrypt to a copypasta, or that the key is wrong so they all decrypt to nonsense. Make it so that trying to decrypt a message encrypts it further. Tell them the encryption is ROT26. Make it only work sometimes. Encryption is a black box. Use that.

Let terminally ill people have the drugs. And by extension, stop treating old people like children. Most of them know the score. Let old people do stuff. Life is for the living.

Maybe the news cycle was boring as fuck during the Biden administration for you, but it sure wasn't for a lot of people. #subtoot

No, seriously, I'm kind of done with any take on the Palestinian genocide that isn't, "The Palestinian genocide is horrible and should be stopped by whatever means necessary, not massaged to score cheap political points." Fuck sake.

Huh, seems like I've seen a lot of people who were opposed to genocide when it was Biden doing it and are still opposed to genocide when it's Trump doing it. Maybe you're just not looking very hard for some reason? #subtoot

I wasn't allowed to watch Sesame Street as a kid because my parents felt that the only thing Sesame Street teaches you is how to watch television. Based on what little of it I've seen, I can't say that I entirely disagree. It's much less educational than I think a lot of people think it is. However, it's probably harmless enough in a society where TV is inescapable. It's not inappropriate for children, it does teach some basic things and some basic lessons about tolerance and being good to other people. It could be much worse.

I had a professor in college who hated Mr. Rogers, another show I wasn't allowed to watch because my parents didn't think I should watch TV at all, really. I don't get why you'd hate Mr. Rogers though. My professor thought that he had taught the youth of America that they were special, like that's a bad thing. Old people who dislike the idea that younger people might possibly have identities are a fucking trip, man.

Other than that, I don't really have much to say about children's educational television at the moment. I'm not sure why I have even that much to say.

What you all don't understand is that by writing really long toots, I'm actually fucking myself over because when they break containment and generate lots of notifications, I have to scroll through them a million times. Plus, if I threaded a bunch of smaller toots, you'd have to click through them, and wonder whether it was proper to boost and fav them all, whereas with one long toot you can turn on that setting which hides long toots and only have to boost and fav once. I do this for you, because that's just the sort of selfless bastard I am. You're welcome.

He doesn't care that he's lying. He doesn't care. Going along with his lies is a loyalty test. I know I'm not the first, second, or ninety-fifth person to tell you this, so why do you keep behaving like exposing his lies is going to make any damn difference? #subtoot