— The Most Pernicious Anticipatory Obedience Hides in Plain Sight

Remember, all of Trump's selected cabinet picks haven't been confirmed yet, and need a 2/3rds majority to get around a Filibuster, and with some of those picks (Matt Gaetz, for example), even other Republicans don't like him. So, contact your Congressional Representatives and Senators and let them know you consider these picks unacceptable. Give specifics, in terms of Cabinet members or their positions. Make Trump have to fight for each and every one of his toadies and lickspittles, or force him to throw them to the wolves.

And if this kills the Filibuster, then make them kill the Filibuster.

While the Onion buying InfoWars is indeed extremely funny, very few of the posts I've seen commenting on the sale have mentioned that the families of the Sandy Hook victims apparently agreed to voluntarily reduce their lawsuit payout as part of a deal to ensure that the Onion would acquire InfoWars wholesale, rather than having the company broken up and auctioned off piecemeal, as the latter course could potentially have allowed some of those pieces to end up back in the hands of Alex Jones' cronies.

Like, yes, it is in fact very funny that InfoWars is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Clickhole, but the real props go out to the Sandy Hook families who saw the opportunity and willingly gave up the additional millions of dollars that could have been realised by stripping InfoWars for parts in order to make that happen.

This is an important message.

I will never NOT reblog this.

Check in with your Jewish friends.

See how they're doing re: the recent antisemitic violence in Amsterdam, which happened on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, and which I consider to be a pogrom.

Also, here's a FAQ about said violence. Please know this is not me flailing at strawmen. I have had to go through every one of these arguments with one of my best friends today, and I am tired.

This wasn't a pogrom. No one died.

Okay. No one died, that is correct. By some definitions this is technically not a pogrom. Could you please not argue about the technicalities of mass violence against my people? Do you think it will make Jewish people feel better if it's just an act of mass violence?

This violence wasn't antisemitic, it was a response to shitty football fans.

BBC reporting disproves this. Per the BBC, the attackers:

Not the shitty football fan. Not even the Israeli. The Jew. There could not be a more textbook "they were attacked for being Jewish". Also there is video of someone being attacked yelling 'I'm not Jewish!' which I am not linking here, but you can Google it if you really must.

But Israeli fans chanted racist things and destroyed Palestinian flags.

Yeah. Some of them did, and that is not OK, and people are right to be outraged about what they did. At least one person was right to fear for their life. That said:

I promise you I really have actually had to address this last one.

This is nothing like Kristallnacht. Kristallnacht was totally unprovoked.

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People always find a pretext for why the Jews are to blame. Always. ALWAYS. Kristallnacht is no exception. A 17-year-old Jewish boy killed a Nazi official, and the Nazis used that as a pretext for Kristallnacht. They were like, gawrsh, we didn't plan this (they did), it arose spontaneously because the Jews murdered that official.

As for why people are bringing up Kristallnacht (which I had not in this instance, but I have seen people do): this violence occurred literally on its anniversary. Please be kind to people who are mentally making comparisons.

Please also consider why people want you to give a shit about this before you jump in and argue, or before you decide this isn't as important as Gaza and choose not to reblog. Please consider we have millennia of experience of people doing violence against us that frequently starts just like this, with something plausibly justifiable to test the waters, while people either stand by and do nothing or agree that it's justified. Please consider we are scared. Please be kind.

November, or, as anyone who follows artists of a certain stripe knows it, Anatomical Fanfiction Month.

I do not follow artists of a certain stripe. What happens in November?

In brief, the month of November is observed in some online communities as "No Nut November", in which participants challenge themselves to abstain from sexual activity of all kinds, including masturbation, for the full duration of the month.

The event is usually treated as a meme on the surface, but in practice, many of its actual participants are adherents of the pseudo-science of semen retention, which – they claim – brings about various beneficial transformations to the body and mind; as you may already have guessed, there's a great deal of overlap between semen retention true believers and the online alt-right.

While active participation in No Nut November is largely restricted to Reddit incels and other alt-right weirdos, the idea of No Nut November has been taken up by many artists whose work focuses on what might politely be described as "speculative biology". Though most of them have very little interest in the political dimension of No Nut November, the notion of protracted semen retention bringing about bodily transformations – typically paired with some degree of orgasm denial kink – appeals to them for what I trust are obvious reasons.

The upshot is that in certain circles, the month of November sees an outpouring of fanart playing with the idea of semen retention leading to bodily transformation (not always beneficially). The subject matter ranges from the anatomically implausible to the thermodynamically impossible, and hits every point in between.

This is so weird man, back when I was in high school the homies were always like "It's a challenge to see how long we can last without sex or jacking off" and it was kinda entirely there just to laugh at whoever failed first and give yourself something to pat yourself on the back for, just something to compete about. We even included girls and we all double-challenged with No Shave November (which the girls were always happier with bc they could skirt the societal expectation to shave all the time for a whole month and say "It's a thing my friends and I are challenging each other to do")!

It was just some dumb shit we did for kicks and to compete over fuck all back then, at what point did someone take that shit SO SERIOUSLY they had to go do pseudo-science around it?

It's the other way 'round, oddly enough. The semen retention truther movement is considerably older and larger than No Nut November, and eventually they just sort of moved in and took over in many online spaces. I'm given to understand that NoFap (both the Reddit community and the website) is a big part of how that happened, though I haven't looked deeply into the details. It's not terribly recent, in any case – criticisms that participation in No Nut November had been co-opted by the alt-right were circulating at least as early as 2018.

So, clearly, we need to respond with... Nonstop Nut November!

Item: free trunk (not haunted)

To be fair, the sign didn't say anything about the trunk being a mimic.

Not that anybody asked, but I think it's important to understand how shame and guilt actually work before you try to use it for good.

It's a necessary emotion. There are reasons we have it. It makes everything so. much. worse. when you use it wrong.

Shame and guilt are DE-motivators. They are meant to stop behavior, not promote it. You cannot, ever, in any meaningful way, guilt someone into doing good. You can only shame them into not doing bad.

Let's say you're a parent and your kid is having issues.

Swearing in class? Shame could work. You want them to stop it. Keep it in proportion*, and it might help. *(KEEP IT IN PROPORTION!!!)

Not doing their homework? NO! STOP! NO NOT DO THAT! EVER! EVER! EVER! You want them to start to do their homework. Shaming them will have to opposite effect! You have demotivated them! They will double down on NOT doing it. Not because they are being oppositional, but because that's what shame does!

You can't guilt people into building better habits, being more successful, or getting more involved. That requires encouragement. You need to motivate for that stuff!

If you want it in a simple phrase:

You can shame someone out of being a bad person, but you can't shame them into being a good person.

Fun fact, that was literally what inspired me to make this post!

So, if we need to encourage people to vote in the US, particularly states with restrictions on Vote-By-Mail, we need to institute the tradition of Democracy Sausage.

Christ on a Stick, those Temperance purists were even against cough syrups?

Also: "Mexicanized dishes and Pepper sauce?"

These are the kinds of mother fuckers who come to the barbecue and bring the blandest fucking potato salad you ever ate in your life. Like its just Mayo, potatoes, and maybe a pinch of salt for "flavor" and that's it.

Me on my way

“What time is the flight?”

“It’s a red eye.”