"we are all just stars that have people names"

google search How to become so nonbinary it kills people

We need to put the “I’m in prison for killing a cop.” energy back in country music. We need to put the “I really hate the establishment so much. Abolish prison. Beat up your boss.” energy back in country music. We need to put the “I feel so bad for disappointing my mommy.” energy back in country.

The “I killed my husband/boyfriend/best friend’s husband and I regret nothing” energy

Controversially, the “I shot my girlfriend and now her ghost has come back to seek revenge.” energy too.

The “Holy shit, Hank Williams Sr.’s ghost is driving this fucking car. What the fuck.”

The “I’m fighting Satan with my fancy fiddling.” energy.

“We’re forming a union because our boss is a thieving plutocrat and we’d rather die than let the scabs win” energy

"My mother wore her miniskirt to a PTA meeting and DRAGGED the biggest names in town for slutshaming her" energy.

tags by j-erin: #I don't listen to country music #but I might if more was like this

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okay then it is rec list time! (you will notice that few if any of these have a year of publication that begins with a 2, because fucking Toby Keith and Alan Jackson and their fucking 9/11 songs changed the entire genre.)

Johnny Cash, "Man In Black"

Reba McEntire, "The Night That The Lights Went Out In Georgia"

Carrie Underwood, "Two Black Cadillacs"

Alabama, "Five O'Clock 500"

Charlie Daniels, "The Devil Went Down to Georgia"

"Sixteen Tons", originally by Merle Travis; this cover is by Southern Raised; see also covers by Tennessee Ernie Ford, Johnny Cash, Geoff Castellucci, and LeAnn Rimes and the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles

Dolly Parton, "9 To 5"

Trisha Yearwood, "XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl)"

Martina McBride, "Independence Day"

Shania Twain, "Man! I Feel Like A Woman"

More recs!

My favorite of the “I killed my husband/boyfriend/best friend’s husband and I regret nothing” energy songs (also known as revenge country) is Goodbye Earl by the Dixie Chicks:

And “My mother wore her miniskirt to a PTA meeting and DRAGGED the biggest names in town for slutshaming her” is a reference to Jeannie C. Riley’s smash hit Harper Valley P.T.A.:

placeholder reblog to dig into recs from some of the more modern country artists I do actually like beyond the Chicks from the last twenty years: Corb Lund and Brandi Carlile and Kacey Musgraves and, most blessed of all, Delta Rae. Slaid Cleaves. Tim O'Brien, fuck, I gotta get a link to Mick Ryan's Lament in here, though that came out in 2001; he's old as dirt but right in the thick of things. Arguably, ZZ Ward. Lee Ann Womack, she's one who survived the purges of the early oughts but "Orphan Train" would be perfectly at home here anyway.

There's a resurgence in all these things in country already, if you know where to look! A lot of it is avoiding the Toby Keith and godawful 9/11 energy by virtue of approaching the genre from country's roots in folk and bluegrass, which are usually the genres I follow a little more closely than country qua country. Leftist country as a tradition has retreated into bluegrass and folk in particular over the last couple years and is now coming back and stepping into the more rock and pop-ish corners of the genre. Pop country has certainly had a conservativism (and soullessness) problem for some time, but there's plenty of good music that's been simmering in the background the whole time. You just won't find it on the radio, mostly.

Fuck, this is making me want to make a playlist for one of my students, who loves country but has glumly resigned herself to the notion that absolutely no one around her is going to share her tastes. And sure, good ol boys don't have a lot of appeal for me--but I bet you she might see the appeal of some of these artists, too.

ETA: Fuck, MIRANDA LAMBERT, how could I forget her and "Mama's Broken Heart"

Lil Nas X, "Old Town Road", "Rodeo", and cover of "Jolene"

...so about that elephant in the room...

just wanted to make a general donations post for native americans 

and here’s a map of what indigenous land you are living on if you want to donate specific towards those people and tribes 💗

niamuck land trust & shinnecock land acquisition and stewardship fund

help support returning land, including burial grounds, to the shinnecock nation

garashir text posts part two

It’s 2022 and this James Acaster bit continues to be relevant

Garfield without garfield comics are an absolute treasure trove for mentally ill moods just LOOK

People trying to "replace" John Mulaney with a different (white cishet male) celebrity are really fucking missing the point aren't they

No matter what "unproblematic fav" you pick it's not about whether they truly are morally impure, it's about the fact that you're putting actual strangers on a pedestal and then feeling personally offended or worse guilty when it turns out they were average human beings all along

The fact that you keep replacing your object of worship doesn't make the worship itself any better for you

The nuns who took care of the building are thrilled that skaters saved the church. They even let the skaters push them around on the skateboards.

I looked it up to verify and found not only that one but also

it's weird when i step outside of my firmly anti-diet social circle and hear a person talking about doing some pretty severe calorie restriction as if that's totally normal. like how the fuck do i even begin explaining to someone i barely know that eating only 1300 calories a day is extremely bad for you and that basically everything they think they know about nutrition is false.

the average thin person is so afraid of becoming fat that they'll do things which are extremely bad for them on every level with zero upsides (calorie restriction is even likely to cause future weight gain!) and this is completely normalized in mainstream culture. anti-fat discrimination is so deeply ingrained in the systems of our society and it's so fucked.

My hot take is that it's cartoonishly evil how one of the core pillars of christianity is that their goal is to convert the entire world & they explicitly state this very frequently & everybody's just like yeah that's normal

Fantasy story where The Empire is very polite about their intentions when they're not actively literally mass-murdering people if they refuse to join them so nobody questions it

The book gets criticized for being unrealistic while the united states of america exists

Isn’t that every religions goal? Correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t every religion think to some extent that everyone should be a part of their religion?

No. Most religions don’t. It’s just that the ones people are most likely to be familiar with, namely xtianity and Islam, are “universal” religions, meaning they proselytise. It makes sense that these would become the biggest and most well-known religions, because of this very thing -- religion was used as an excuse/justification for imperialism -- and so people often assume that’s just what religion is, but it’s not true for really most of the religions of the world.

Historically, polytheistic cultures, upon encountering other polytheistic cultures, would just assume that those gods are those people’s local gods and so on. It wasn’t a threat to them. But even among monotheistic religions, it’s really mostly just xtianity and Islam. Judaism does not care about making non-Jews Jewish; there are some basic moral principles Judaism expects non-Jews to adhere to, like not murdering, but in orthodox Judaism it is still customary to turn away potential converts three times before even considering them. The Druze religion is even more tightly closed. In order to be considered Druze, both of your parents must be Druze, and conversion and proselytism have been expressly forbidden for almost a thousand years. I’m not sure what the Bahá’í view on proselytism is, but they generally believe that the other world religions have the same core truths.

Many, probably most by number, world religions are ethnoreligions, not universal religions. That means that religion and culture are tied together. Judaism and the Druze religion are examples of ethnoreligions. That is why a person can be, say, an atheist Jew. Most indigenous/folk religions don’t care about what other groups believe and have no interest in making other people outside their culture conform to their beliefs. By number of religions, the idea that you hold an absolute truth that you must make other people believe (and the idea that you must do this because if you don’t they will not be “saved” and will suffer punishment) is very uncommon. It’s just that this belief has enabled a small handful of religions to dominate through colonialism and war and so those are the ones people think of when they think about “what religion is.”

I encourage you to read about indigenous/folk religions to understand this more. Here is a list of ethnic religions, to see the sheer number (and this is not necessarily complete, because there is some argument about terms like folk religion vs ethnoreligion vs indigenous religion and so on). I appreciate the politeness of the question, because there are a LOT of ex-evangelical atheists (or people who grew up in what we call “cultural xtianity”: you may not be religious yourself, but you grew up in a society that was heavily xtian, had xtian holidays as the mainstream, and absorbed xtian values/philosophies as part of cultural norms, and because this all seems normal to you, you have a blind spot, because it’s hard to see our own culture from inside, especially when it’s the majority) who are very keen to disparage all religions as being identical to the brand of fundamentalist xtianity they are familiar with, and it’s a racist and harmful position that they are VERY reluctant to give up. Because a lot of these religions are ethnoreligions and inseparable from culture, wanting to eradicate all religious practice/belief is the same as cultural genocide. It’s important to understand that A. you have this blind spot, and B. that most religions are not like xtianity, and religion is not synonymous with right-wing politics, homophobia, sexism, violence, controlling rules etc.

It’s kind of like how the British Empire was a profit-driven enterprise that was presented to the people back in the UK as them spreading “civilisation”, but entering the 20th century wider reporting made it increasingly harder to justify due to events such as the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, where a British officer killed literally hundreds of people because he couldn’t be bothered to disperse a crowd of protesters twice.

Kind of hard to create a hero-based narrative when you have people like Colonel Reginald Dyer at the formal inquest of the above incident openly admitting that if he had trucks with machine guns he would have killed even MORE people given the opportunity.

You guys weren’t kidding that 2008 spn livejournal post was literally where mansplaining came from

You can see history being made here

@tactical-support-thembo

ah yes, the three genders: the broken, the beaten, and the damned

you can do all those to an egg

How do you damn an egg

there it is.

The fact that Dante created the most popular image of the afterlife with absolutely no theological basis for it will still be the funniest thing to me

Church: Heaven is eternal connection with God, while Hell is total separation from Him. Anything else is only speculation.

Dante: Actually Hell has layers like an onion, and the devil is big and mean and also frozen. People are fighting and there’s a mountain to get to Heaven and a nice place for babies. Also I know this because I went there with my friend :)

Dante: I had a dream where I astral projected into hell with the famous poet Virgil who I am totally Best Bros with. I wrote a poem about it if you wanna read it idk

Several Popes: Thank you king I am commissioning fan art of you

I hope this has been pointed out already, but I think it’s important for you to know that Doug from Our Flag Means Death is played by Tim Heidecker

who some of you might know better as…the Free Real Estate guy

but anyway, that’s not why I’m making this post.

this is why I’m making this post:

Doug, looking at the empty place in the family that Stede left behind:

you’re welcome

@simon--spooks jsdjhdisjfhsjdj

What if when we were born we were each assigned a Wikipedia page like a social security number would that be fucked up or what

do you mean a wikipedia page about us? or do you mean some baby is arbitrarily given the rights and responsibilities to update the paramecium article?

ok I did mean a Wikipedia page about us. But keep talking I like where you’re headed

What's your government-assigned Wikipedia page? (No rerolls. I am in charge of "1929 in Wales" now. Not a great year, some bad floods in November.)

I used to have a housemate who LOVED meat and ate it every day, but if you ever brought up the fact that it came from an animal he would be disgusted and yell at you for grossing him out. We served venison one evening and he gushed over how delicious it was until someone mentioned that it came from a deer, at which point he abandoned the meal and wouldn’t speak to us for several days.

It wasn’t a religious thing, he just desperately wanted to believe that meat was conjured from the ether and had no connection to the world, and if you threatened that illusion it would enrage him. He refused to eat free range eggs from the neighbors because they had too much reality clinging to them.

I’m not vegan, or even really vegetarian, but that pissed me off so much. If you’re going to eat animal products I feel like there’s an ethical obligation for gratitude and acknowledgement to the creature or thing you consume, even in just an abstract sense. I guess I found this guy so repulsive because it was clearly something he found profoundly shameful and wrong and yet made no effort to stop or change his relationship to meat in any way… the cowardice of that disturbed me.

But, then again, am I coming at this from a place of unconsciously assigning spiritual meaning to suffering? Why do I feel as though he owes empathy to something that cannot materially benefit from it? Do I believe that emotional pain is the ritual debt he owes for the consumption of his animal cousin, if he can offer nothing else? Do I object to my own instincts here? I don’t know.

I guess the reason this bothered me so much is not that I have strong opinions on the morality of eating meat, but that I am disturbed by the practice of engaging in something you believe to be morally unconscionable through willful self-deception—and expecting others to cater to that.

This was not a man forced by the necessity of finance or health or convenience to eat meat—he was very wealthy, and remains the only person I know who has regularly dined on actual literal caviar. I have other, unrelated reasons to despise him but this is just something I am reminded of often.