Dragoness Eclectic's Journal

On Inspirational Comfort Reads...

2026-01-26T02:02:13Z

I have noticed an interesting thing among all sorts of internet folk: in this harrowing time, when it seems like the world is re-enacting the run-up to WWII with the U.S.A. cosplaying Nazi Germany...

All sorts of people have turned for comfort and inspiration to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. He wrote of a world in dire straits, and in a world in dire straits, in which evil seemed about to triumph everywhere, but reminded us that the Shadow cannot last forever, and there are good and beautiful things forever beyond its reach. He reminded us that even the least of people make a difference by doing the right thing; and that hope matters. "Despair is for those who see the end beyond all doubt; we do not."

People also write beautiful fanfiction about hot elves. We all need some hope and escape.

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I thought we'd have more time

2025-11-25T02:51:27Z

I thought we'd have more time together. He wasn't supposed to get dementia this young, and he isn't supposed to be dying in hospice now. He'll never get to read the books I'd planned to write, and he wanted to so much. We'll never get to play another TTRPG campaign together, and I had some ideas for one I really wanted to do with him. I'll never get to see Yosemite with him. We were supposed to have another 20 years together, at least. His father is still alive at age 92, and he should have lived at least that long. I won't get to retire and move north with him, and go on hikes in the woods with him.

I've been slowly mourning the possibilities being cut off one by one as the dementia advanced, but there was always a slim hope that it was a form of dementia that could be fixed or controlled with medication. Now there is no hope; he is dying. There are no more possibilities with him, and I grieve.

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Long fics are LOOOONG. (And need editing)

2025-06-11T23:25:41Z

So far, every single fanfic longer than about 400K words has been in desperate need of editing. No, I am not including series whose cumulative word count is greater than that, because the smaller individual stories are usually fine. I am referring to single fics that weigh in at 500K or more.

If you are writing purely for self-indulgence, and don't care if no one else reads your fics or likes them, fine, this doesn't affect you. However, if you are writing for an audience that you hope will enjoy your fic, please look over your massive epic carefully. In my experience as a reader, the middles of such fics are often rambling, with the plot wandering in repetitive circles, or the main character having redundant character-development arcs, or otherwise slow and boring.

Less is more. Prune some of those plot branches; tighten up your character-development arcs. You don't need to show every minute of the main characters recovery from trauma, or falling in love, or having important epiphanies. You don't need to have the main ship characters having the same argument over and over--let them settle it the first or second time! Hit the highlights and key epiphanies of character-development arcs--don't grind them into the dirt with repetition. Move the plot along. Let stuff happen; keep the reader interested. Have an end point in mind, and stick the landing.

I have yet to see a single long story that couldn't have been told in 350K or so words, at most. If there are multiple major, long plot arcs, you might actually have multiple stories in a trench-coat, and should recast it as a series of stories. Otherwise, your story probably needs some editing and pruning; it's gotten leggy and tangled.

Just don't bore your reader, because that's more likely to lose them once they've started reading than missing content warnings or the wrong ship.

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Justice League: Totality

2025-05-02T00:52:23Z

I recently borrowed the "Justice League: Totality" graphic compilation and read it, along with "Dark Knight: Metal". One, Scott Snyder loves his non-linear story-telling (and I wish he'd be a bit more linear); two, Lex Luthor has been handed the functional equivalent of the One Ring by an unknown evil power.

In Totality, I'm pretty sure Luthor is an Unreliable Narrator--I mean, he's a lying, scheming S.O.B., why should he be telling the truth now? Especially when he's assuring all and sundry that he's really, truly telling the truth! Pull the other one, Lex; it's got bells on.

Either he's lying about his trip to the far, far future and his epiphany there, or he's having some really good delusions. He said himself that he'd pushed himself to his physical and mental limits, travelling up and down the timestream. He was presumably exhausted--and then he so conveniently falls into a distant millon year future where the locals are not just recognizably human, but wearing costumes based on 21st century supers? And they have a giant image of Lex Luthor, and know his personal history as the guy who discovered "the Truth" about humanity? Right. Sure. That's just the kind of delusion a narcissistic sociopath like Lex Luthor would have--one where he's been proven right about everything by all of humanity in the end. He then wakes up back in his lab, which definitely makes me think he dreamed or hallucinated that whole sequence.

He finds the doorknob that's the key to the rest of the story arc. It apparently has the power to kill Vandal Savage, and with it in hand, Lex is strangely persuasive to people who would otherwise try to kill him for sport. He's convinced by the doorknob of Doom (literally, it has the Old Martian emblem for Doom/Fate on it) that not only is all humanity really like himself, deep down, but that the entire universe is designed to be evil, cruel, and selfish. That's a helluva projection there, Lex!

The people who get caught up in Luthor's Legion of Doom are the same kind of people--narcissistic, sociopathic, evil, and they inevitably agree that their internal vision of humanity is the natural bent of the universe. Of course they do.

I am reminded of Sauron, who cannot imagine that someone would willing destroy the One Ring rather than use the power it grants. The Legion of Doom are unable to imagine a universe in which people are not all selfish assholes like themselves, starting with and especially including Lex Luthor. To Luthor, there is no other possibility--and, like the One Ring, the One Doorknob seems to feed Luthor's delusions about the universe and inflate his own sense of power. The Rings of Power that Sauron handed out purported to grant visions of things both Seen and Unseen, but ultimately what the user saw were the delusions and phantoms of Sauron's devising. I think that's what the One Doorknob is doing to Lex and his Legion: feeding them delusions and ideas based on someone's evil and selfish ethos. Who is that someone--Barbatos, Darkseid, Luthor himself? Don't know, haven't read beyond that.

However, I think the writer of this saga very cleverly used the One Doorknob as the functional equivalent of the One Ring, or of the Witch-King of Angmar's Ring, and showed what it did to powerful, evil leaders. It seduces them with megalomanic visions and delusions of the "Truth" of reality, and made them very persuasive rulers of men.

Is my interpretation correct? I don't know, but it's interesting.

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Lessons Learned from Columbo and Perry Mason

2025-05-01T23:25:52Z

I've learned some important life lessons watching Columbo and Perry Mason and "Murder, She Wrote".

Don't be the biggest asshole in your family or social group. You'll get murdered.
If you find a dead body, call the police and your lawyer immediately. Do not call your brother/cousin/uncle whose first notion is to hide the evidence and dispose of the body. It makes you look really guilty, and it's probably a felony.
If you find a dead body with the murder weapon laying next to it, don't pick up the weapon! If you do, someone will inevitably barge into the scene and witness you standing over the dead body with the murder weapon in hand.
Don't make death threats, even casually. If you do, someone will inevitably overhear you and tell the cops about it after the person you threatened turns up dead.
Don't blackmail the murderer about their crime. They've already killed someone once; no reason not to make you number two. (Seriously, every time someone in either Columbo or Perry Mason blackmails the murderer, they get murdered. Every Single Time.)
If you're the murderer and you've constructed what you believe is the perfect alibi/frame-up, don't double-down on the frame when Columbo starts questioning your alibi/frame. Just pretend you have no clue why things don't add up--the world is weird that way, isn't it, Lieutenant? Also see next entry.
If Columbo (or J.B. Fletcher) keeps turning up to ask questions about "one more thing", get a very good criminal defense lawyer on retainer, and follow his advice (which will be "Shut the fuck up!"). I recommend Perry Mason. You'll need them.
If J.B. Fletcher or Columbo show up to confront you about the murder, don't add to your felonies by threatening violence. Fletcher and Columbo ALWAYS bring backup of the armed and official variety. Perry Mason does his confrontations in the courtroom, so you have no hope in violence there.
Don't bother faking your alibi by time-shifting the tapes or staging fake phone calls to dead people. Columbo has seen that too many times.
Don't bother threatening Columbo with your friends in high places. They're not going to pull his badge on your say-so, because he has a far higher clearance rate on "homicides committed by rich, influential assholes" than you do.

One more thing I've observed watching these shows: Columbo is an idealized police detective. He's courteous, patient, and gets warrants for searches. Likewise, on "Perry Mason", Lt Tragg is another idealized detective: he won't plant evidence, he gets warrants, he doesn't rough suspects up, and he got very angry with one of his sergeants who tried to get rough with the lawyer. Hamilton Burger, the DA, is also an ideal: he's a zealous prosecutor, but not overzealous: he wants justice, not convictions. When he realizes that Perry Mason is right and someone else is the murderer, he drops the case; he doesn't double down. He has openly said that he cares about justice more than scoring convictions, and that convicting an innocent would be unjust. He does sometimes take a lot of convincing that he's wrong, though--he brings charges based on evidence and/or witcnesses, after all.

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Happy New Year

2025-01-01T04:24:32Z

Happy New Year to all!

In spite of portents and prophecies, may you all have a good year anyway!

If you've heard too much negativity and doomsaying, I give you Iron Maiden's Die With Your Boots On.

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Hurricane Helene

2024-09-27T01:01:32Z

I hope any of my mutuals in Florida are well back from the shoreline and hunkered down or evacuated somewhere safer. This looks like another Katrina, only in Florida--which is to say, an Andrew or an Ivan.

God help us it isn't a Camille.

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To Kill a Mockingbird

2024-09-07T02:45:18Z

I read To Kill A Mockingbird over Labor Day holidays for the first time.

It was not the story I thought it was from all the Atticus Finch quotes around the internet. I expected an uplifting courtroom drama; I got a bittersweet coming-of-age story about a young girl growing up in Depression-era small-town Alabama. The bitter: good guys didn't win; the innocent man died instead of going free, and the town is full of racist assholes for whom Justice is another "Whites Only" thing. The sweet: the protagonist learned not to judge people based on gossip, and that not everyone was a racist asshole.

Alas, at my age, "coming-of-age" stories have all the appeal of a soggy dog biscuit. I outgrew them long ago. The stark portrayal of the racism and the unwritten codes of how the races were permitted to interact was interesting--as were the exceptions: the rich landowner who lived with his black wife and mixed-race children and didn't give a damn what people thought of him. Even he pretended to be a drunkard to provide an excuse for his relationship, to protect his family.

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Edwardian Socialism

2024-08-05T02:14:58Z

I recently finished reading Barbara W. Tuchmann's The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War 1890 - 1914. Like all of her other books I have read, such as The Guns of August and A Distant Mirror, it was a very educational look at history I didn't know very well if at all.

One major takeaway about that period of history was that Anarchists and Marxists were about as useful as teats on a boar hog (to use an old expression).

Anarchists were (and presumably still are) fatally allergic to organized activism or politics, because organization and hierarchy are against anarchist principles. Unfortunately for them, that means they have no political power whatsoever. Their strategy, such as it was, was stochastic terrorism ("Propaganda of the Word") and plain old terrorism ("Propaganda of the Deed"). By murdering bosses, leaders, rulers and other oppressors, they thought that they could somehow spark the masses of working people to spontaneously revolt and overthrow all the oppressors and usher in a golden age of harmonious anarchy. Which is to say, Anarchists were either as dumb as posts, or had never actually met other human beings before.

Syndicalists were another development of Anarchism, except instead of throwing bombs and shooting rulers, they believed that General Strikes would magically bring about the overthrow of capitalism and usher in a new golden age. They seem to have overlooked that most union men consider strikes a tool to achieve a specific goal, not another way to have a revolution.

Orthodox Marxists believed in Marx's prediction that Late-stage Capitalism (a term the internet gets from Marxism, I believe) would lead to ever-increasing poverty for the working class, ever-increasing wealth for the ultra-rich, and the destruction of the middle-class, and this miserable state would lead in turn to the the collapse of Capitalism and the seizure of the means of production by the working class, ushering in a golden age of socialism (communism). Orthodox Marxists wanted nothing to do with improving conditions in the here-and-now for the working class, because that would delay the final collapse of Capitalism. Also, they were organized, but shunned getting involved in politics, because that would require joining with the bourgeoisie and playing by Capitalism's rules.

Both Anarchists and Orthodox Marxists struck me as being like evangelicals awaiting the End Times, and doing nothing to improve things for those suffering here and now, because "Jesus will take us all up into heaven by and by." In their case, the "inevitable working class revolution" was their future Rapture event.

Revisionism, a branch of Socialism that popped up in the Edwardian period, suggested that Capitalism didn't look like it was going to collapse any time soon, so maybe we ought to work with the existing government and get involved in politics and try to improve things for the working class. They were regarded as a bunch of heretics who would destroy the fabric of socialism by the Marxists, but I believe they're probably the origin of modern social-democracies in Europe today.

Also, Trade Unions had little use for Marxists, because Marxists didn't care to work for social safety nets and the 8-hour day and all those benefits that lift the working class out of desperate poverty. Unions weren't interested in overthrowing society, they just wanted to make things better for their members. They were actually useful and they and the socialists willing to work with them on their goals actually got things done.

(cross-posted to Tumblr)

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The Nightwatch Series

2024-05-19T02:32:56Z

I've been re-reading the Nightwatch Discworld sub-series, by Terry Pratchett. Contrary to what some might think, it's not 'copaganda'. Terry Pratchett portrays his cops (the Day Watch and the Night Watch) as very real characters, and most of them are either lazy and corrupt, lazy drunkards, lazy petty thieves, petty thugs, or petty authoritarians--up until Carrot joined the Night Watch and cleaned it up. (See the story Guards! Guards! for that.) Even Sam Vimes, the character we follow through all the Night Watch novels, who understands what a cops job should be, thinks nothing of using trickery and intimidation to get suspects to talk. The time-travel novel in the series, Night Watch, has a lot of Sam Vimes the Elder laying down what lines a cop should not cross and what a cop's job is. (Thesis: It's "Keep the Peace". Cops are supposed to de-escalate fights. For a cop, whole point of arresting criminals and putting them in front of a judge should be to keep victimized people from taking the law into their own hands, and to stop people from doing things to other people that make them want to do that. That's the whole point of having laws in the first place--"every man for himself" is a bloodbath.)

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"Going Postal" by Terry Pratchett

2024-04-13T03:12:09Z

"Going Postal" by Terry Pratchett is a fantasy novel about Ankh-Morpork's moribund postal service and the semaphore company competing against it. It's also a prescient view of what happened to Boeing Corporation. Just change the names from Boeing to Grand Trunk, and Dave Calhoun to Reacher Gilt, it's the same story.

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Terry Pratchett's "Moving PIctures"

2024-04-02T13:24:58Z

Thesis for discussion: Moving Pictures is Terry Pratchett's Discworld retelling of H.P. Lovecraft's prose-poem Nyarlathotep.

Crossposted to Tumblr.

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We visited NOMA...

2023-11-02T01:35:57Z

..for the first time in several years. Out in front of the museum, there is a fountain full of gorgeous water lilies.

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Goodbye to the best girl...

2023-08-06T02:22:08Z

We said goodbye to Elsa today, after six good years with her. Cancer sucks.

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I now have a Mastodon account.

2023-07-26T01:28:40Z

"dragonesseclectic@mastodon.social"

I have no idea if I'll ever post anything, though.

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A rant I did not post at /r/HPfanfiction

2023-06-22T22:50:11Z

Seriously. Any discussion of HP characters that involves Snape gets people piling on saying he's irredeemable, he's evil, no one would like him, any sympathetic depictions of him are OOC, and so on. People can write Bellatrix Lestrange adopting Hermione Granger, and that's fine. People write Voldemort mentoring Harry, and that's fine. But writing Severitus or other fics where Snape has reason to rethink his stupid grudge is somehow just wrong and OOC. Did you read the same books I did? I saw a tragic character that danced on the knife edge of overcoming his old grudge and feeling sympathy for Harry Potter--but ultimately made the tragic choice to hang onto his grudge. He could easily have gone the other way, and a fanfic AU where he did is quite plausible.

This is all very weird to me, because I come from fandoms where the biggest villains are also the most popular ships and characters to write interesting stories about. Villains who make Voldemort look like That Guy at the office who steals from the fridge--villains who commit mass genocide, and who have never repented of their deeds or goals. (Though they may have stopped committing genocide.) People who think Drarry is disgusting because you think Draco (a teenager under duress) is an irredeemable villain who should be in a human-rights-violating prison for life... have you heard of the Hannibal fandom?

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Wellerman Sea Shanty

2023-06-11T23:06:19Z

After rewatching the Wellerman Sea Shanty remix to show my spouse the wonderful thing made by Covid-locked TikTokkers, I finally realized that "Wellerman" resonates because, in a way, it's about COVID lockdown.

"Soon may the Wellerman come, bringing sugar and tea and rum" = soon may my DoorDash/UberEats/contactless grocery pickups be ready.

"When the tonguing is done, we'll take our leave and go." = "When COVID is done, we'll take our leave and go (out)".

I feel silly not realizing this until years later.

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About jury duty when the defendent is "obviously guilty"...

2023-05-30T01:58:14Z

Tumblr, 9-9-2022:

Here's what you do if asked to serve on a jury for an "obviously guilty" dickhead. You wait until you hear the actual evidence and are in the jury room to voice your opinion on the person's guilt or innocence. The news media doesn't have all the evidence--maybe the prosecution picked this guy because they looked like an easy win, and let the cops drop comments about all kinds of evidence they have against him. What, you don't think cops and the DA would collude to taint the jury pool? Please don't get on a jury, then.

If you're on a jury, listen to the testimony, view the evidence, listen to the arguments. Engage all your critical thinking skills; do not let your emotional hot-buttons get pressed. If either side seems to be appealing to emotion rather than providing evidence supporting their case, they likely have a weak case, and want to get you reacting rather than thinking too much about it.

The prosecution MUST prove that the defendent (a) committed the crime, (b) of which he was accused. Laws have specified conditions to meet for something to be a crime; if you're not certain what they are, you are allowed to ask. Did the prosecutor establish that the defendent met those conditions? It doesn't count if the defendent committed some other crime other than what he was charged with. (This is why Ammon Bundy got off for the Malheurer Wildlife Refuge invasion--the prosecutor charged him with Conspiracy, instead of the easy-to-prove trespassing, littering, carrying firearms on federal property, and damaging federal property, and then didn't prove the conspiracy charge.)

I am not a lawyer, but I have served on a jury in a criminal trial.

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Indigenous Americans never were Noble Savages and that Trope needs to die.

2023-05-16T03:45:49Z

2013-08-17:

There are people who just don't want Rousseau's "noble savage" to die, even though it is an archetype that never existed in any age of the world, as far as we can tell.

I read Charles Mann's "1491" recently, and found myself comparing the war between Tikal and Calakmul to the Peloponnesian War. That was when I realized my own conceptions of indigenous Americans as "noble savages" was finally dead.

Closer to home is Old Stone Fort in Tennessee. The local park guides would have you believe that that 'fort' is a misnomer and it was just some kind of "ritual site", because "they didn't have any enemies that we knew of". My spouse and I looked at the site built on bluffs at the confluence of two small rivers, the archaeological evidence of palisade walls on the landward approach, and the dog-leg entrance to the site, and, both being military science enthusiasts, said, "Nope. This was a fort. They had enemies, or Old Stone Fort would not have been so obviously a defensive work. Might want to look around for those enemies."

Sadly, being just visiting tourists and not renowned archaeologists, we only got polite smiles at our "mistaken" notions.

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N'Longa and Soloman Kane

2023-05-16T03:20:28Z

2012-06-21:

Ana, your essay makes me think of an example where POC helping out the White Hero was done right... and why is Robert E. Howard always turning out to be my go-to author for such examples?

In the Soloman Kane story "Red Shadows", Kane first meets N'Longa, a elderly African shaman who has been taken prisoner by a usurping evil chieftain who has also captured Kane. N'Longa get Kane to promise to help him since the two of them have the same enemies, and then frees both of them. Kane helps as promised, and after that, the two become friends. No "life debt" crap, just "the enemy of my enemy may be my ally," and later, "this guy is actually honorable, unlike most of the white slavers and outlaws I see, so maybe worth staying friends with". In later stories, N'Longa is a friend of Kane's, whom Kane sometimes turns to when he has a supernatural problem in Africa--though not always, because Kane is very ambivalent about N'Longa's "black magic", even if the guy is a friend--and N'Longa in his turn sometimes manipulates Kane into being N'Longa's catspaw in cleaning up certain supernatural messes. ("Hills of the Dead" comes to mind.)

Yes, N'Longa is literally a Magical Negro; however, he's not there to help the White Hero accomplish his White Hero goals. As written, N'Longa acts as if the White Hero is there to help N'Longa accomplish his aims.

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Frederick Douglass

2023-05-16T03:08:24Z

More gems from Disqus

2012-04-05:

I can attest that Mr. Douglass is sadly neglected in American schools, except as a footnote to the slavery issue. I read his biography and several of his speeches as an adult, downloaded off Project Gutenberg, and they are absolutely searing. I finally understood why so many people find the display of the Confederate Battle Flag, or incorporation of parts of it in state flags, so offensive. Waving that flag in front of a black person must be like waving the flag of Nazi Germany in front of the descendant of a concentration camp survivor. It's beyond bad taste, to put it mildly.

I personally think his "Life and Times" and the very thinly fictional "Uncle Tom's Cabin" should be required reading in school. (A number of the incidents in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" are either taken from Douglass's biography, or that sort of thing was horrifyingly wide-spread and notorious). People need to understand not only how bad slavery was for the slaves, but how pervasive and corrupting it was to every race and class and station of life. It's still corrupting our public discourse.

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My Theory: a possible historical basis for Exodus

2023-05-05T20:23:20Z

2018-10-23:

The problem I have is that the "Exodus didn't happen because ancient Israelites came out of the Canaanite hills" argument seems to require the ancient Israelites to have appeared ex nihilo in those hills, with no previous existence. That really doesn't work. Highlands are nomad shepherd country, and the nomad shepherds of the ANE wandered all over the place, from the dry hinterlands of Sumer all the way to the dry hinterlands of Egypt. Maybe the hills of Israel is where they finally settled down and took up mixed herding and farming and viniculture.

Why does everyone ignore the documented Hyksos invasion and explusion when saying "there's no evidence, none whatsoever, that the Hebrews were ever in Egypt, lalalalala I can't see that part in Josephus where he explicitly identifies the Hyksos with the tribes in Exodus, lalalalala"

Even the Bible says that Abraham's people were originally nomads out of Ur (The Sumerian one? The Mitanni one? who knows, still one of the great river cities). From what we know of Mesopotamian cultures, there's a very long tradition of desert nomads (bedu) ranching sheep in the hinterlands, trading with the cities, and sometimes banding together and sacking weak cities. Or conquering them in really bad times. I see Abraham's people as one of those bedu tribes, and wouldn't be surprised if their culture was Canaanite-adjacent.

Bedu tribes drifting into Egypt during times of drought and famine is also documented in ancient Egyptian history. They were considered a nuisance on a good day, when the kingdom was strong, and a dangerous threat in bad times, when the kingdom(s) were weak. So this known circulation of peoples gets the precursors of the Hebrews, the tribes of Abraham, into Egypt. They settle for generations in the Delta, become powerful, mix culturally and religiously (the Hyksos brought quite a bit of Canaanite culture with them), until a Pharoah of the Theban Upper Kingdom decides to re-unite the Two Lands under himself. The "Shepherd-Kings" of the Lower Kingdom, the Hyksos, don't agree with this plan, but eventually lose out. War captives are enslaved as usual. The Theban nobility have no interest in sharing power with the Hyksos...

However they end up back in Canaan, by this point the people of Abraham have a mix of Canaanite and Egyptian culture, which is something we see in the Exodus and Deuteronomy accounts. The Ark is in the style of an Egyptian portable shrine, and the original tent shrine is laid out in the fashion of an Egyptian temple, not a Canaanite one. Settling in the hills of Canaan, they acquired (or re-acquired) their neighbor's culture; the great temple of Solomon is of Canaanite style, not Egyptian.

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This is Cultural Calvinism, btw

2023-05-05T02:51:12Z

Note: going through my old Disqus account and reposting some of the more interesting comments I made to Slactivist back in the day.

2019-11-09:

I have quite a few thoughts on this topic, because I realized that so much of pop culture about vigilantes and rogue "good-guy" cops like Dirty Harry are based on some Very Bad Ideas: to wit, (1) that people can be divided up into Good People and Bad People, and that (2) "A leopard never changes his spots", i.e., Good people never "go bad" and Bad People can never truly be good, and (3) You can infallibly tell Good People from Bad People because reasons (the reasons vary, but traditionally, being an unrepentant criminal is considered a signifier of Badness. Or being a minority criminal). The logical implications of these exceedingly bad ideas leads to "if we just eliminate all the Bad People, then no one will ever do Bad Things again and the world will be Safe", and that "Only Good People should have rights, so ignore the rights of Bad People, they're just 'technicalities' that keep us from punishing the Bad People".

These are Very Bad Ideas because they're flat-out wrong, and lead to very bad conclusions. (1) People are complex and volatile; they are neither good nor bad, for the most part, but just human, with needs, fears, ignorance and literal brain damage driving a lot of apparent criminal behavior. (Then there's the condition of living under an oppressive system, wherein just surviving from day to day may be a crime in the eyes of the oppressors, but in no way is actually bad or evil). (2) People grow and change; people grow out of youthful folly, and people fall into mature debauchery or just do something stupid out of desperation or lose touch with their compassion and let fear drive them instead. (3) Given that there are no such animals as "Good People" and "Bad People", you certainly can't tell them apart.

Why doesn't Batman just kill the Joker? Because he's really tempted to do just that, and he knows it would set him on the road to becoming an even bigger monster than the Joker.

Why doesn't Superman fix every disaster, rescue everyone, stop every crime and put every corrupt politician and criminal away/remove them? He's capable of it. Because Clark Kent is wise enough to know that humanity neither needs nor wants a vengeful god looking over everyone's shoulder, and, as much as they might want it, it's not good for humans to have everything solved for them. And it would probably turn him into a monster like TurboJesus in Left Behind.

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On Abortion

2023-05-05T02:36:38Z

2019-11-12:

Abortions have steadily dropped over the years as affordable contraceptives have become more available. Guess where the rate of abortions goes back up? In places where contraception is restricted, unaffordable, or outright illegal.

Abortions for medical reasons will continue to be necessary, and the anti-choice position of "let the mother die rather than have a medically-necessary abortion" is one of the truly evil results of the Church's war on women's choice. Any church that takes that position and/or forces hospitals they own to follow such a policy is guilty of murder and firmly in the hands of Satan, not God.

Stop trying to tie women's hands to choose when they want children, and abortions will decline, because women who don't want children for whatever reason will use contraception, and women who want children won't. Women who don't get pregnant in the first place don't have abortions.

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My Religion

2023-05-05T02:31:57Z

2019-11-18:

I'm proud to call myself a "cafeteria Christian": I test all things, and keep what is good, instead of swallowing theological poison without question.

2019-11-15:

Y'know, it occurs to me that the whole doctrine of "Original Sin means all babies and children and adults everywhere are condemned unless they are baptized as Christians" is just another form of self-righteous elitism: "I'm a saved Christian, and Those People are damned heathens". Worse yet, that doctrine means it is pointless to help people in this world who are Not Saved, because they are going to eternal torment anyway, so what's the point?

The doctrine of Original Sin as taught by most Protestant sects is incompatible with God's Love, therefore, I reject it.

The interpretation of Original Sin that means "we're all born less than perfect, and have to work at being good people" is actually useful and anti-elitist.

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