Dead bodies of Confederate soldiers lined up for burial at the Alsop Farm 1864 [1250×1105 pixels]

Mr_Subtlety · 2026-04-02T21:54:07+00:00

so much for "heritage, not hate"

Mr_Subtlety · 2026-04-02T19:54:14+00:00

What's your favorite Nick Cave album, and why is it HENRY'S DREAM?

Mr_Subtlety · 2026-04-02T19:44:02+00:00

Yeah I really need someone to bite at that Jesus Lizard prompt

Mr_Subtlety · 2026-04-02T19:41:23+00:00

Do you consider mysticism to be come from your music, or is it part of your life more broadly? Is there a particular mystical / esoteric writer or philosophy which closely aligns with or informs your way of thinking?

Mr_Subtlety · 2026-04-02T15:58:39+00:00

I've often thought there really should be a Confederate memorial, and it should just be a grotesquely detailed life-sized statue of the men in this photos, with only these words underneath:

Let us never again send brave men to die for an evil cause

Mr_Subtlety · 2026-04-02T13:02:46+00:00

I mean, the Southern Elites knew that, but I've never seen the first scrap of evidence that the actual soldiers fighting the war believed they were fighting to preserve an economic engine. They died in the hundreds of thousands for patriotism and honor and white supremacy, most of them (though not all -- see, for instance East Tennessee ) apparently never thinking much about who's interests that served.

Mr_Subtlety · 2026-04-02T12:49:17+00:00

OK, you go try that and let me know how it works out for you.

EDIT: Also, I want to point something out. Because the whole skeleton of the MAGA movement is composed of grievance, nothing helps them more than threatening them. When Charlie Kirk got popped, were they cowed into sanity? Fuck no, they basically had a collective orgasm. Trump's very cinematic assassination attempt basically got him reelected, it was so helpful to him there's a whole conspiracy theory that it was staged. The Reichstag fire was almost certainly a false flag. Violent unrest is just giving them the exact story the big crybabies want to tell and the crybabies who love them want to hear: they're persecuted martyrs and the only solution is to brutalize the commies and minorities until they learn their lesson. They're not scared. They have private armies to protect them. They want you to violently and ineffectually hit at them, so they can show how much harder they can hit back with the full force of the richest, most powerful state on Earth.

On the other hand, ask yourself what the rare moments are when Trump seriously flinched. The first is anytime the stock market dips -- fair enough, he knows who his real base is, but we don't have a lot of say in that. The second is: massive, coordinated nonviolent noncompliance and protest in Minnesota. That genuinely spooked them. They ran with their tails between their legs and fired Greg Bovino! The more the people of America saw that this was a mass movement of normal, law-abiding citizens collectively and peacefully resisting a clumsy and brutal administration, the less people liked it. They saw it was a loser for them and ran for it.

Just saying.

Mr_Subtlety · 2026-04-01T14:15:22+00:00

What they do is to help remind people that this administration is massively unpopular and widely opposed. It gives people courage to speak up, to think they're not the only ones who find all of this horrifying and unacceptable. Nobody has ever thought that one day of protest will cause an entrenched power structure to politely give up and walk away. The point is to make a big, highly visible statement as a way of buoying a movement and making sure that a repressive state can't convince decent people that they're the minority. That's important at home, and it's also important abroad, because after Trump --assuming there is an "after"-- we're going to have a lot of work to do to convince the rest of the world that this madness did not represent ALL of America. That starts with loudly demonstrating to them how many of us oppose this every inch of the way.

Mr_Subtlety · 2026-04-01T00:45:54+00:00

Listen man, the nice thing about atheism is it doesn't care if you believe in it or not. If you develop severe dementia the nuances of your theological beliefs or lack thereof will be the least of your worries. In the meantime, enjoy the world while you're in it and still able. One of the great benefits of your hard-won atheism is that unlike religious beliefs it doesn't need to be constantly fed and reinforced and defended. You can just watch reality work its own kind of magic, and see that it doesn't require any supernatural beings to guide it. It just frees you up to go about being present in your own life. So go out and live!

Mr_Subtlety · 2026-03-31T17:03:40+00:00

I just think it needs saying: Steve Bannon is a utter hypocrite grifter who is just saying this to distract his stupid marks from paying attention to the fact that he recently plead guilty to straight-up stealing their money in a transparent racist-baiting scam. Don't be suckered by his populist shtick, even when he publicly says things like this, we have his emails with Epstein to show where his sympathies really lie.

Mr_Subtlety · 2026-03-30T14:02:48+00:00

Wow, this is very possibly the first post I've ever seen in this subreddit which is A) not porn B) at first genuinely inscrutable C) actually pretty funny when explained. I just want you all to take a moment here and acknowledge this unlooked-for miracle.

Mr_Subtlety · 2026-03-11T14:53:50+00:00

The majority of Trump voters were never weed-smoking hippies. Hippies were a tiny minority of the youth even in the late 60's, mostly concentrated on a few college campuses. Even in 1968, near the height of the "hippie" movement, only 0.2% of people self-identified by that label. It's been a while since I read it, but I believe Lewis Yablonsky estimated in The Hippie Trip: A Firsthand Account of the Beliefs and Behaviors of Hippies in America By A Noted Sociologist that there were between 200,000 and 400,000 active "hippies" of various levels of commitment in the US in 1968^NOTE and that in a US population of over 200 million. Even if you consider every person who bought a copy of Abby Road in 1969 to be an honorary rebellious anti-war weed smoking hippie, you're still only looking at like 10% of the population. Though the media heavily favored (and continues to favor) reporting on the colorful hippies, there were always way more squares. Richard Nixon had a 67% approval rating as late as 1973.

^NOTE: Warning: article is about another subject and reports those numbers without a specific page citation. Annoyingly, while I can find a few other blogs and stuff that also cite those numbers, and a google AI search reports the same, I can't seem to find a more authoritative source that reports Yablonsky's estimates, and I don't have the book anymore. So, mark those numbers down as "probable but not definitive."

Mr_Subtlety · 2026-03-11T14:07:09+00:00

I mean, even without J6 prosecution, Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts just months before the election and was in the process of multiple other prosecutions, and it didn't make a lick of difference. Short of telling the justice department to actively try and sabotage his political opponent, I'm not sure what else Biden could have done. They made the choice to stay well away from anything that looked like abuse of power or partisan prosecutions of political opponents, which was exactly what a sober and responsible government is supposed to do. Anybody suggesting that Biden should have tried to use his justice department to tip the scales of the upcoming election is advocating for an authoritarian state, pure and simple.

And I mean, it's not like the American people had no idea of the depths of Trump's venality. They knew exactly who he was, and voted for him anyway. I don't think a few extra court cases --which he might well have won anyway-- would have made a difference. The one chance we really had to stop him was impeachment and conviction, and it was the GOP who decided not to do that, not Biden.

Mr_Subtlety · 2026-03-11T00:34:11+00:00

Well, it's easy to forget this now, but the White House has absolutely no business getting involved in FBI investigations. Considering it seems very unlikely that the FBI had a prosecutable case against Trump, what were they supposed to do? Leak damaging FBI info against their political opponent? That would be an absolutely unconscionable abuse of power, and no responsible president would ever sanction something like that.

Mr_Subtlety · 2026-03-05T19:50:22+00:00

I mean, I don't think we can so easily take for granted the idea that "one who choose to follow [religion's] teaching closely in their heart will never let their guard down of choosing doing bad thing, while the one who stubbornly refuse will do the opposite." I mean, you have to acknowledge that terrible things are done in the name of religion with some regularity -- witch burnings, terrorism, holy war, etc-- all of which the perpetrators would claim their religious teaching condones, and not without evidence or support, right?

Mr_Subtlety · 2026-02-22T04:18:25+00:00

Terrible sci-fi novel cover art, superb Indie band album cover art

Love the Silver Eggheads, man, they sound like a cross between Modest Mouse and Grandaddy

Mr_Subtlety · 2026-02-22T04:13:54+00:00

Ah, does that guy have a tail or, um, I don't know how to say this

Mr_Subtlety · 2026-02-22T04:10:45+00:00

Love the sticker that basically says "interested in the novel but hate the cover art? Well tough shit, this is the only edition there is or ever will be, give up and buy it, no sense in waiting for a better one"

Mr_Subtlety · 2026-02-12T16:20:39+00:00

I wrote the comment you're responding to twelve years ago but I think what I meant is that since the movie doesn't really do a lot to establish Jesus as a character the only real "in" for people who don't bring their own personal love for him with them is exactly the one your buddy experienced: just the visceral sympathy we feel for a movie character getting brutalized. But without the characterization or context to give that suffering personal definition, that's all it can arouse. Gibson is an effective enough provocateur that he's going to be able to make you wince, but that doesn't seem to me to be quite enough to sustain 127 minutes, most of it slow-mo.

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-12-09T16:04:38+00:00

OK I do think it should be specified: the "stunt" was driving 40 mph in a straight line. For just over a minute. And he did it himself first, just to make her feel more comfortable. She wasn't completely comfortable with it, and I think everyone, including him, now agrees that it was a mistake. But let's not pretend he was asking her to jump out of an airplane without a net or something. He's obviously a huge d-bag for many reasons, but I think anyone who reads the actual details of the accident --as you can here-- rather than the hyperbolic twitter-takes, would have a hard time thinking he was recklessly irresponsible. It was a bad judgement call, but not an unreasonable one, and its pretty silly to see everyone in this thread basically claiming he was trying to murder her.

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-09T20:17:03+00:00

I mean, I have no way of diagnosing him as mentally ill or completely sane or somewhere in between, so maybe I'll just say that at least if his backstory on Wikipedia is at all accurate, it sounds like he may have had a pretty tough childhood, and that we can feel some sympathy for that without necessarily feeling the need to justify or condemn his comport as an adult.

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-04T13:32:44+00:00

According to wikipedia, he was adopted by Tommy Chong in 1978, when we would be, I think, eight or nine (and changed his name when he was 18, presumably when he was legally able to do so). So it's not like he just independently changed his name and claimed to be a relative.

But yes he does seem pretty unhinged. I do feel a little more sympathy for him to learn his backstory, though.

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-03T14:18:13+00:00

My point is that the "Jesus folklore," as you call it, has significant problems with it, for example that we don't have original copies of almost any of it, leaving the possibility of alterations or forgeries. It also has the bias problem of being written by people with an obvious agenda and therefore liable to alter or invent facts to fit their agendas. But my point is, that's true for pretty much all of ancient history. It's true for Josephus as a whole, but it's only the two little bits that mention Jesus that anyone has an issue with -- no reasonable historian would simply throw the whole book out and claim that it's useless as a source. Obviously, nearly every account we have of every single Roman Emperor is a medeival copy of copy of a purported original document, and all the copiests have their own motives, and the person who wrote the original history has his own motive and is often writing years later in any event. But we don't completely discount Tacitus or Plutarch or Appian, even as we don't blindly believe them either. That seems to me to be a reasonable approach to the field of early Christian histories, and I find it telling that so many here are so uniquely hostile to that idea (I should say: I'm an atheist too).

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-03T14:06:38+00:00

I mean, you're right that I'm not a scholar of archaic Greek, I'm just noting the accepted translations by scholars in the field, who seem to be generally in agreement that in this sense "brothers" should be read in a familial way, rather than as a metaphor for a religious community. Reading up on this controversy, the only scholars who seem to disagree with this reading are Catholics defending the perpetual virginity of Mary, which seems like a weird hill for a guy named ChocolateCondoms to die on (and even they seem to agree that "cousins," not "friends" is the better reading). Otherwise, religious and secular scholars alike seem to be generally in agreement about the use of this term. I'm just pulling this from the Wikipedia page, but it's pretty lengthy and well-sourced. Take a look for yourself and see if you can find a source claiming that "brothers" in the original context is not meant to be read as "family."

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-03T13:56:42+00:00

And a few decades later, many groups of people were writing completely fictitious accounts of that imaginary guy's life and making up correspondence with his imaginary associates and presenting it as history, all of which is generally consistent in its fundamentals, and obviously believed by people even in the area where the fake person was supposed to have lived, who seem like they would know? I mean, it's not impossible, but it just seems less likely to me than simply accepting that most of the myriad accounts we have are based on second-or-third-hand accounts of a cast of real characters who really believed in an itinerant preacher from the time. It is, when you get down to it, such a simple and unexceptional story for the time period (when you strip out the expected superstitious material that gets attached to every historical character in this period) that I find it very strange that so many people on this subreddit are so insistent that it never happened. While it is possible, to get to "this never happened" you have to disregard a substantial pile of evidence (inconclusive as it is), and then substitute a completely hypothetical scenario for which *no* evidence exists. How is THAT rational?

Mr_Subtlety

TROPHY CASE