In 1937, it was 40 hours a week per household. Now it’s 80 hours a week per household. The amount of work done by the average person has doubled for the same or less pay.

The greatest work of art ever created was made by writers who think subtext is for cowards. It’s called Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. It’s about a cyborg ninja who turns fascists into human confetti. It tackles fundamental themes of human agency from the point of view of nature, nurture, culture, and identity. It deconstructs and then reconstructs the concept of free will while criticizing the military industrial complex and entire entirety of conservative ideology. The final boss of the game is a United States senator who wants to “make America great again” and you rip out his fucking heart after spending an hour debating political philosophy with him.

Radical, illogical levels of misogyny are not an altered state of consciousness. Evil is mundane.

If you’re the kind of person who thinks feminism is annoying, then you deserve to be annoyed. It wouldn’t upset you if you were cooler.

The good part is that it offers an analysis of where actual power within a monarchy comes from, and how American agents destroy regimes.

Blade will become an MCU movie when its canon is referenced in another canon MCU property. Until then, it isn’t. And even if Blade becomes an MCU movie due to a crossover, it won’t have been the first to fit into the canon.

Black Panther was seemingly made for the sake of being the MCU’s first black-lead movie. And it’s great. Drag can’t think of any other movies made for the sake of being woke, so we’ll just have to rely on this sample size of 1 which says woke movies are awesome.

The problem is that modlogs form a permanent record on Lemmy. Drag didn’t encourage suicide. The c/trans people don’t believe drag encouraged suicide. That issue was cleared up. But there’s still a permanent note saying drag encouraged suicide. It’s a lie. They could take back the lie by unbanning drag, and they could even ban drag again with the true reason. But the true reason is a secret, so they’re choosing to keep lying. It’s messed up.

I never earned respect from them while they were alive

You shouldn’t have had to. They should have loved and respected you unconditionally.

You’ve got it all backwards. Adults are the ones who think they know everything. Don’t mistake confidence for arrogance. If you raise a kid right, then they’ll confidently do dumb shit, knowing they’ll learn from it and you’ll keep them safe. That’s healthy development. But you look at the adults who never take risks, never consider different ideas, refuse to learn tech or politics because they think they won’t get it. That’s low self esteem, but it’s also a form of arrogance. The arrogant belief that you are already the best you can possibly be. That you have no growing left to do. Even if you think you’re the dumbest person alive, thinking you’re the smartest version of yourself is arrogance.

Because people like Catoblepas keep saying they’re good mods.

Another really interesting mythological figure is Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, from Journey To The West. He’s kind of on the border between mythology and fiction. Like Superman. Sun Wukong is a leader and he is a tyrant, but he’s a very unusual case of both.

The monkeys of Flower Fruit Mountain decided to make Sun Wukong their kong because he was the bravest monkey. They all collectively decided on a challenge that whoever did it would be king, and Sun Wukong did it. Being the Monkey King is a ceremonial title for the most part. Sun Wukong does try to teach the monkeys warfare a few times, and it never goes well, because the monkeys are inherently chaotic and therefore bad at following orders. They’re not actually a society in the way that humans are, they’re just pretending to be a kingdom for fun.

When Sun Wukong gets bored of being the Monkey King, he decides to go to heaven and demand a fancy royal title from the Jade Emperor. This does not go well, and Monkey ends up beating up all the gods until the Buddha finally puts him in his place. Monkey is explicitly doing violence on people with the goal of dominating them into granting him a royal title. But the thing is, Monkey is shallow and he only cares about getting a fancy name. He doesn’t want any responsibility and the only power he wants is to be immortal and good at martial arts. (This is where most of Goku’s personality comes from).

Sun Wukong is tyrannical and he is technically a leader, but calling him an authoritarian tyrant is completely misleading. He’s chaotic neutral. He only really wants to be the Monkey King so he can call himself the Monkey King. He doesn’t want to oppress anybody. He’s very different to characters like Zeus or Odin. He has a lot more in common with Loki or Dionysus, though with a focus on physical power as opposed to trickery or magic.

Drag disagrees. Zero mod and admin accountability was what made Reddit awful. Getting your account banned for being slightly left wing and having a robot deny your appeals sucked. Communities like r/fatpeoplehate and r/the_donald and r/politicalcompassmemes that took years for admins to address were the worst parts of reddit.

Drag has had a negative experience with the moderation on that community.

So drag got banned due to a moderator misunderstanding a comment drag made on an entirely different community. Drag contacted the mods and cleared up the misunderstanding, and drag is no longer accused of encouraging suicide. However, there are now secret accusations against drag that the moderators won’t share and that aren’t in the modlog. Banning people for secret reasons and refusing to allow appeals is messed up.

we run into the issue of the world being sacrificed to intangible ideas, which is bad

Oh, you don’t need religion for that. Most of the world already worships The Economy and would rather destroy all life on earth than hurt The Economy.

This is certainly what I’m thinking of when someones wants me to accept even the existence of a god: that they defy the limits of the world and thus deserve attention

Why though? There are so many counterexamples to both of those. Most western religions don’t say that gods defy the limits of the world in any way. Thor doesn’t defy the limits of the world when he summons lightning with Mjolnir, for example. In fact, Thor has to wear special bracers that protect him from the hammer’s power. Prometheus still has to follow the commands of his king even though he’s a god, and when he doesn’t, he gets chained up and eaten by vultures. Even Jesus needs to sacrifice himself on the cross in order to satisfy the Old Laws and get everyone into heaven. None of these gods exist outside the world, they’re all bound to its rules. It’s just that when you have a magic hammer, the rules are a little more permissive. Just like the rules for humans have been more permissive ever since humans figured out antibiotics and aircraft. The gods, in nearly all religions, are just powerful people or creatures. And often they’re not even powerful. Shinto has 8 million Kami. And while Kami aren’t exactly what most people think of when they say “god”, we’re talking about divine beings in general, right? Some Kami are just… the spirit of this one river here. The worst thing they can possibly do to you is give you turbulence when you cross the river in your boat. Or maybe make too much silt deposit in the soil on the banks of the river and spoil the farmland over a few generations. If your family has been farming that riverbank for generations, you should definitely cultivate a good relationship with the river god. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter. That Kami has no more power than Village Idiot Tetsu who accidentally dropped a bag of salt on your land while he was taking a shortcut back from the market. You should also be polite to Tetsu, because he’s your neighbour and it’s the right thing to do. Tetsu is just a guy and the river kami is also just a guy, who happens to be nonhuman.

Drag forgot what drag’s point was.

It sounds like you’re not an antitheist. You’re just an antheist - someone who thinks divinity and worship relationships are not inherently self justifying, and must instead justify themselves through good work. An antitheist opposes gods for being gods and wants them all disbelieved in. An antheist is suspicious of gods, but can be convinced to accept them if they’re good people.

Drag recognises that the Patriarchy is a destructive and oppressive force built upon male supremacy, but drag doesn’t oppose the existence of men because of it. Drag has met plenty of good men. So drag takes the time to learn whether a man is sexist before judging him. Drag supports men who engage in healthy and positive masculinity. Drag supports good male role models like Bob Ross, Carl Sagan, and Tim Walz.

Supporting good examples is just as important as opposing bad examples. Because you can’t generally change whether someone is a man, or whether they’re religious. But you can change how they engage with masculinity or worship.

Drag has a theory about why antitheists attack all gods, despite not having any logical arguments against gods like yours. Drag thinks it’s because they’re Christians. Cultural Christians. No belief in Jesus, but they still celebrate Christmas and Easter and think abortion and divorce are wrong and all the other Christian beliefs. Christians don’t believe in any god but Deus, and white antitheists agree. They believe in Deus enough to make counterarguments, but they don’t even dignify your god with that much respect. They’re doing a Christianity.

Yeah, and there’s the Asgard, and Oma Desala. Stargate doesn’t unilaterally dismiss the concept of good gods at all. Teal’c might have some baggage about respecting any kind of god, but the rest of the team only cares about the “no masters” part.

Any metaphysical claim can be used to create a “power over” relationship

But not every metaphysical claim is. There are plenty of metaphysical beings even in European mythology who aren’t tyrants or even leaders of anyone. Jormungandr is terribly powerful, but he doesn’t rule the world, he just eats it. He doesn’t oppress anyone until Ragnarok. And it’s not just because he’s an animal. The Dryads aren’t out here building empires, they just want to be left alone with their trees. Cú Chulainn is a supernaturally good warrior with the Hulk’s superpowers, but he doesn’t oppress anyone. In fact, when he kills Chulainn’s dog, he offers to be the man’s hound until he finds a new one. That’s humility and respect for other people.

The gods were created by people. And people create gods that match what they see in life. Life is good and life is bad. Gods are good and gods are bad. Gods will be worse in a more oppressive culture, and gods will be better in a less hierarchical culture. There’s no doubt that the culture of the people who enslaved the world is worse than the culture of their victims. It’s not “noble savage” thinking to say that. It’s not that people who don’t have kings are better than “normal” people. People who don’t have kings ARE normal people. Living in a feudalistic or capitalist society is weird and bad. Anarcho-communism is the way humans naturally live.

And besides, the Mayans gave the Europeans a run for their money in the “sucking and having authoritarian gods” department.

Drag is worried about “no gods, no masters”. It fucking slaps, it sounds great. There’s a lot of emotion in it that’s perfectly communicated.

But… Gods being oppressors is a very European view. Do you think Navajo are oppressed by Coyote? Do you think Yindjibarndi view the Rainbow Serpent as a tyrant? What about Maui, is he exacting tithes from the Maori like the Vatican do? Is Anansi hurting the Akan?

Odin and Zeus were pieces of shit, but the idea of gods as tyrants is a view almost exclusive to the areas of the world that had humans as tyrants; the old world. And not even all of it even, the Buddha never ruled over anyone.

Drag worries that “no gods no masters” is pushing an overwhelmingly white stereotype of religion and harming members of religions that don’t have oppressive gods.