The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Lighter Side Of The Border Crisis

Posted on | July 13, 2014 | 13 Comments

by Smitty

Category: humor

What ‘Precocious’ Means

Posted on | July 13, 2014 | 55 Comments

The blogospheric badminton continues with Sophia the Teenage Feminist who, having made a point of bringing up her theoretical “bisexuality,” now objects to this topic being discussed critically.

Or sarcastically, for that matter.

In case you’re arriving late, a recap: While conducting a Google search Saturday as part of my ongoing series about feminism, I encountered a blog called “Please Excuse My Vagina: My life as a teenage feminist.”

OK, congratulations, you got my attention. Under the topic of “heteronormativity” (!!) I found she referenced an occasion when she and her friends were “messing around” with a Ouija board, which became the theme of my post, An Omen of the ‘Mystifying Oracle’?

To this she responded here and also here, and then I responded this morning with “The Precocious Feminist Replies.” This afternoon, while I was watching the World Cup final (damn those Germans), Sophia the Teenage Feminist responded yet again and, among other things, wonders if calling her “precocious” was intended as an insult.

No, it was a mere description of someone who is intellectually advanced at an early age — a prodigy, the Mozart of feminism, as it were.

How many kids are slinging around the word “heteronormativity” in high school? Precocious. Her prose style was impressive enough that some of the commenters here suspected her blog to be elaborate hoax, i.e., an adult pretending to be a teenager. Precocious.

She is “upper-middle class,” she takes dance lessons, and her creepy ex-boyfriend “goes to a gifted goddamn school“ — from which I deduced that Sophia the Teenage Feminist also attends this school for the gifted, which explains her own intellectual precocity.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Having established the plausible veracity of her biography, so that we can presume she actually is a high-school student, we now proceed to Sophia’s latest volley in the badminton match:

At the age of eighteen or nineteen I hope to be studying Sociology at Columbia [University], far away from my asshole dad and my ambitionless ex. I hope to be dating a nice guy. I hope to be having the time of my life.

(Green Day allusion? Never mind. The reference to Columbia generally fits her “upper-middle class”/”gifted” profile.)

I am in fact bi on a theoretical basis. . . . But if you can say my sexuality is only theoretical, then aren’t all the good little Christian boys and girls only theoretically straight? This is heteronormativity in action, folks.

(Very clever. When you view the world through an ideological prism, no fact can disprove or discredit your ideology. A word like “heteronormativity” sets up a tautology, so that argument becomes impossible. It’s like trying to argue with a Marxist who insists that your criticism is a product of “false consciousness.”)

And you know what, maybe I’m being unnecessarily rude here . . .  and you know what? I don’t care at this point. I tried to be civil, but you can’t even call me by name or validate me as a person because of my age.

(Have I been less than civil? I didn’t call you by name because — hello? — “Sophia Hudson” is a pseudonym, as you say yourself. Is it my job to “validate [you] as a person”? What does that even mean? Never mind. Here is her response to one of my points . . .)

Oh good lord. I don’t even know how to respond to this because it is stupid on a deeper level than anything I’ve experienced. . . .
I could go on and on for years about why this is so end-all ridiculous but in the interest of not beating a dead horse, I’m just going to keep my mouth shut for now.

Well, what was this incredibly stupid point of mine? It was this:

Given the direction our culture is heading, one can imagine a scenario in which anyone who rejects a homosexual advance — “No, thanks, I’m straight” — is accused of being a homophobe, so that society is effectively divided into two groups: Gays and Haters.

Sophia the Teenage Feminist seems to think this is right-wing paranoia, but what was the argument of the “Free Kate” crusade? That enforcement of Florida’s age-of-consent law was “homophobic” when it was applied to a lesbian having sex with a 14-year-old girl. How far a leap is it from such an argument to the claim that rejecting a homosexual advance is evidence of homophobia?

And wasn’t this the whole point of Sophia’s Ouija-board story?

When the “Mystifying Oracle” indicated Sophia’s same-sex interest — gosh, I wonder how that happened? — her girlfriends were shocked and this, Sophia tells us, proved “they’re homophobes who are terrified of girls being in love with them.” What would have been the appropriately non-homophobic reaction, Sophia?

Excuse my cynicism. I used to be precocious, too.

“I’m just going to keep my mouth shut for now.”

 

Category: Feminism

Rule 5 Sunday: On The Beach

Posted on | July 13, 2014 | 11 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Holy guacamole, I’m actually getting this done on a Sunday for once. As usual, exercise discretion when clicking the links; if you don’t know why that is, maybe you’d be better off reading some other post.

Rotten to the Core leads off this week with Jennifer Lawrence, followed by Fishersville Mike with Taylor Swift, Goodstuff with Helena Bonham Carter, and Ninety Miles from Tyranny with Morning Mistress Cameltoe, Hot Pick of the Late Night, and Girls With Guns. Blackmailers Don’t Shoot offers a Rule 5 Linkfest with Yaya Han, and First Street Journal contributes a very timely salute to the women of the IDF.

EBL’s herd this week includes vintage cat calls, Frieda Pinto, reporting on water parks, Jeri Ellsworth, Brazil’s agony of defeat, Global Warming and the threat to gingers, Esquire’s mockworthy salute to “older women”, more World Cup Rule 5  from Germany and of course, Argentina.

Postaldog returns after a long absence with Maria Sharapova, the Spring Breakers girls, Eva Green and more Eva Green, Paris Hilton, and Cameron Diaz.

A View from the Beach chips in with Christy Turlington, Tip Well at Shooters Cafe, Stay Classy, Virginia!, Renowned Climate Scientist Predicts End of Curvaceous Women. “Toxicity”, Climate Change to Lessen Ginger Menace, Zombie Obamacare Schadenfreude, Ban the Pill – Save the Fish!, and Hoop de Doo!.

At Soylent Refuge, it’s your Sunday morning spoon licker, an Evening Awesome with blue eyes, Monday Motivationer Rockin’, The Queen of Linky Love, Happy Hour Hawtness Formal, Tuesday Titillation, Overnighty Masque, Humpday Hawtness – Sweet Hitchhiker, Because Irish Can’t Put Her In His Own Header, Falconsword Fursday Ferocity, Evening Awesome, Corset Campfire, T-GIF Friday Shimmy, Cocktail Hour, Weekender Adrienne, and Bath Night Bliss.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Draya Michele, his vintage babe is Lillian Gish, and Sex in Advertising is all about the lingerie. At Dustbury, it’s Faye Emerson and Carole Lombard.

The DaleyGator’s DaleyBabes this week were Shoko Takasaki, Reima Tachibana, Patricia Mizen, Julia Kelly, April Bowlby, Andrea Parker, Kozue Nitta, more Reima Tachibana, Miho Imanmura, Kelly Jensen, Samara Redway, Rei Toda, Miyako Akane, and Random Beauty.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox for next week’s Rule 5 roundup is midnight Saturday, July 19.

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Category: Rule 5

How to Get Raped at College

Posted on | July 13, 2014 | 106 Comments

A long article in the New York Times describes the fate of “Anna,” who was a freshman last fall at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (tuition $46,852 a year). This elite liberal arts college in Geneva, N.Y., has an enrollment of 2,300 students and, apparently, a campus culture that turns a blind eye to illegal underage alcohol consumption. So when a girl shows up as an 18-year-old freshman . . .

She had entered what is commonly known as the Red Zone, a period of vulnerability for sexual assaults, beginning when freshmen first walk onto campus until Thanksgiving break.
“Students arrive and you have a new environment, new social circle and the fear that goes with new expectations,” said Robert S. Flowers, vice president for student affairs. That can lead to experimentation, including excessive drinking and attendant problems.
For that reason, the school held what students call rape seminars, the first in a program that, Mr. Flowers said, has made Hobart and William Smith a leader in preventing sexual violence.

Do these “rape seminars” warn freshmen girls against drinking rum and partying with football players at the Kappa Sig house? Two weeks after school started, that’s what Anna was doing:

Anna and a senior football player she had just met were grinding to the music, rubbing their bodies together. . . .
Anna said she had begun the evening drinking shots of rum mixed into Gatorade.

By the time police Sgt. Anthony Pluretti showed up at 2:10 a.m., Anna had reportedly had sexual intercourse — evidently including anal intercourse — twice with the football  player, and had also performed oral sex on another player. Rather than this incident being investigated and prosecuted as a crime, however, it was handled as a school disciplinary matter by the college, and Anna was shocked by what she perceived as the unfairness of the proceedings:

The panel’s initial questioning was based mostly on the investigative work of campus officers who aggressively sought out witnesses, followed leads and conducted interviews. According to the federal Education Department, a sexual-assault investigation typically takes around 60 calendar days. Hobart and William Smith did it in a little more than a week.
The hearing followed almost immediately. . . .
Anna was questioned first. “It was one of the hardest things I have ever gone through,” she said later, adding, “I felt like I was talking to someone who knew nothing of any sort of social interaction; what happens at parties; what happens in sex.”
She had to relive that evening through questions that jumped around in time, interrupted her answers and misrepresented witness statements. . . .
Two of the three panel members did not examine the medical records showing blunt force trauma — it was the chairwoman’s prerogative not to share them. Instead, the panel asked what Anna had drunk, who she may have kissed and how she had danced. It was, Anna said, as if admitting you were grinding — a common way of dancing — “means you therefore consent to sex or should be raped.”

You can read the whole thing. One wonders how the world could be arranged so that 18-year-old girls can get drunk at parties and “grind” with football players without the players inferring from this behavior that the girls are interested in having sex.

One also wonders why colleges are treated like bubbles where normal rules do not apply. In the normal world, sexual assault is a felony, and is investigated and prosecuted as such. On college campuses, it seems, sexual assault is treated about as seriously as laws against providing alcohol to teenagers, i.e., not seriously at all: “Oopsie! You got drunk. Oopsie! Is that a football player’s penis in your butt?”

See, there is an unspoken agreement involved: If parents are paying $46,852 a year to send their daughter to college, the college isn’t going to kick the girl out (and forfeit $46,582) just because her idea of fun is chugging rum at the Kappa Sig house. If it weren’t for drunk freshman girls “grinding” on the dance floor, why would the guys at Kappa Sig — all of whom represent $46,852 in annual revenue to the college administration — bother throwing parties? And if the football players can’t take turns banging the drunk girl they picked up at the Kappa Sig house, what’s the point of playing football?

These are the implicit assumptions of 21st-century elite college life: Underage drinking and sexual promiscuity, for $46,852 a year.

If you don’t like that deal, go to community college. Full-time tuition at Fingers Lake Community College is only $4,022 a year, and it’s less than 14 miles from the campus of Hobart and William Smith Colleges. But you don’t get the social prestige of the elite liberal arts college experience by attending community college, and prestige is what these parents are paying $46,852 a year for, isn’t it?

Having your teenage daughter raped by football players at Hobart and William Smith Colleges is a luxury most people can’t afford.

UPDATE: Professor Donald Douglas at American Power:

I certainly don’t know what to believe, which brings me back to the notion of personal responsibility. Anna got herself into trouble. So many of these “rape” stories I read about are just like this. It always comes down to he said, she said, and alcohol is involved . . .

Alcohol is always involved in these stories, see? But colleges aren’t willing to discipline kids for underage drinking. If you want to stop “rape culture,” do something to stop “drunk culture.”

 

Category: Crime, Education, Feminism, Sex

Good-Bye, Miami Beach? The Problem With Climate-Change Hysteria

Posted on | July 13, 2014 | 47 Comments

From a Guardian feature about Miami:

“There has been a rise of about 10 inches in sea levels since the 19th century — brought about by humanity’s heating of the planet through its industrial practices — and that is now bringing chaos to Miami Beach by regularly flooding places like Alton Road,” says Harold Wanless, a geology professor at the University of Miami. “And it is going to get worse. By the end of this century we could easily have a rise of six feet, possibly 10 feet. Nothing much will survive that. Most of the land here is less than 10 feet above sea level.”

The obvious first question: Is this true?

Stipulate that Professor Wanless is correct about the 10-inch rise in sea levels in the past 200 years. This would be a measurable phenonmenon, and it would be hard for a scientist just to make up something like that. But must we accept Professor Wanless’s cause-and-effect assertion, that the rise in sea levels has been “brought about by humanity’s heating of the planet through its industrial practices”? Even if we accept that assertion, does the data really justify Professor Wanless’s claim that the trend will — or rather “could” — bring about “a rise of six feet, possibly 10 feet” within the next century?

When you start chaining together “if/then” hypotheticals to arrive at a doomsday scenario of the future, you have ceased to engage in science and are merely fear-mongering. Having seen all kinds of doomsday scenarios like this turn out to be nothing but irresponsible speculation, I am skeptical about the latest scare, and don’t think people are being serious about the whole “climate change” hysteria.

Second obvious question: Aren’t carbon-emitting “industrial practices” necessary to make Miami suitable for human habitation?

Try to imagine living year-round in Miami without air-conditioning. But how do you have air-conditioning with electricity, and how do you generate electricity without carbon emissions? There are five nuclear power plants in Florida, but most of the state’s electricity is generated by coal-burning or natural gas-burning plants.

How many more nuclear/solar/wind plants would Florida need to reduce the “carbon footprint” of their electricity needs by 10 percent or 20 percent? What would be the cost of this, and who would pay those costs? Isn’t it possible that switching from cheap coal-powered electricity to more expensive forms would involve a cost so large as to cripple Florida’s economy? And should we do this for the sake of a theoretical threat of global warming catastrophe?

Questions like this could be multiplied infinitely. Miami’s economy is largely dependent on tourism. These tourists mainly arrive by airplanes and automobiles. We can imagine (and there may already exist) technology that would reduce or eliminate the use of carbon fuels in transportation, but that technology will cost money, and if non-carbon fuels were economically feasible — if they were cheaper than “green” technology — there would be no need for government mandates or subsidies to promote them. (Keep in mind that electric cars don’t do anything to reduce carbon emissions, so long as electricity is generated by carbon-burning plants.)

As long as tourism is crucial to Miami’s economy, the “industrial practices” involved in cheap transportation will be necessary to the city’s existence. So trying to “save” Miami from rising sea levels by reducing carbon emissions doesn’t make much sense if, in the process of reducing carbon emissions, you wreck the basis of the city’s economy: No air conditioning, no jet planes, no Miami.

The Apostles of Climate Change do not generally follow the logic of their ideology to the secondary and tertiary consequences. They cast aspersions on critics — Marco Rubio is denounced as an “idiot” for his skepticism — as being unscientific, as if economics were not a science, and as if the anti-industrial/anti-capitalist biases of the global warming crowd were not apparent.

 

Category: Global Warming

The Precocious Feminist Replies

Posted on | July 13, 2014 | 66 Comments

The Ouija-board girl has written a lengthy response including this:

I’m totally with you on the idea that radical feminism is a f–king disease which needs to be eradicated. It’s what gives feminism a bad name and is quite frankly bulls–t. Glad we could find something that we really agree on. However, I’m not a radfem. I don’t think penile-vaginal intercourse is rape. I don’t think men are inherently evil, and I don’t think women are inherently good.

Oh. Then she’s not really a feminist. Yet. On the other hand . . .

For the record, the Ouija board incident which is referenced here wasn’t anything of a demonic nature. The lights didn’t flicker and I didn’t feel a cold force come over me. Wanna know what did happen? The Ouija board said I would f–k a girl, and my friends got uncomfortable. That’s all. . . .
Okay, let’s get something straight right now.

(No pun intended, I’m sure.)

I don’t know what surprise you thought I was referring to (the surprise of the fact the board worked, maybe?) but I was referring to the surprise that I’m bi. So, yeah, my friends were in fact really surprised, because they’re homophobes who are terrified of girls being in love with them. Just wanted to clear that up for ya.

It was clear to me all along. However, I didn’t mention in my blog what the Ouija board said about her, because pursuing that tangent might have required another 500 words I wasn’t in a mood to write. So I merely alluded to it indirectly, remarking that “it is admittedly weird to discover a high school kid writing about ‘heteronormativity.’” Yet she seems to wish to discuss it further. Very well, then . . .

Let’s see: She’s not old enough to get a drivers license, but is already (a) questioning heteronormativity, (b) professing her own bisexuality, and (c) condemning her friends as homophobes.

If she keeps traveling that trajectory, where will she be at 18 or 19? Considering her expressions of disgust with her ex-boyfriend and her resentment of her father, doesn’t it seem possible that her disdain for males might become more generalized in the future?

But wait — this is crazy!

Her self-declared “bisexuality” is purely speculative, a matter of imagination. Her situation illuminates the problem with how young people are now being indoctrinated to think about sex. All this chatter about sexual orientation and gender identity emerging from academia and promulgated in pop culture is profoundly confusing to many young people. A teenage girl whose “sexuality” so far has been limited to some clumsy kissing and fondling with her ex-boyfriend nevertheless identifies as “bisexual” on what we might call a theoretical basis. This identification then qualifies her to denounce her girlfriends as homophobes because they “are terrified of girls being in love with them.”

In that context, isn’t “homophobe” just a synonym for heterosexual?

Given the direction our culture is heading, one can imagine a scenario in which anyone who rejects a homosexual advance — “No, thanks, I’m straight” — is accused of being a homophobe, so that society is effectively divided into two groups: Gays and Haters.

Nor is this a problem we need only imagine in the distant future. We can see how this attitude is already beginning to take hold among teenagers. The precociously “bisexual” feminist at Please Excuse My Vagina may indeed be an omen of the liberal future.

UPDATE: She continues to volley: “Please, don’t put my identity into quotation marks.” The reason I put “bisexual” in quotation marks is because, by her own account, she has not actually acted on her same-sex attractions. Her self-declared “identity” therefore exists in the imaginative realm of Tommy Flanagan’s wife, Morgan Fairchild.

Furthermore, the “B” of bisexuality in the LGBT acronym has always struck me as dubious. One does not encounter militant bisexuals demanding their equal rights to . . . Well, whatever it is they may choose to be or do on any particular occasion.

Indecisive ambiguity doesn’t lend itself very easily to political sloganeering: “We’re here! We’re queer! Or maybe not, this week!”

 

Category: Feminism

FMJRA 2.0: The Mission

Posted on | July 12, 2014 | 8 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


Have A Koch And A. . .Hint Of Queasiness

The Dorchester Doofus

Gender Theory: Beyond Parody

Good-Bye, Employer Mandate?

The Silence Is Settled!

Feminist Attacked by Feminists After Telling the Truth About Birth Control

In Which @PatKasprik Teaches Us That Rape ‘Satire’ Is Acceptable on Twitter

FMJRA 2.0: Hey, Baby, It’s The 4th Of July

LIVE AT FIVE: 07.07.14

‘Internalized Misogyny’

Presidential Imperialism

LIVE AT FIVESIX: 07.08.14

Rule 5 Tuesday – Belated Independence Day Weekend Edition

They’re Not Going Back

The MSNBC Agenda

The Devil in Oklahoma: Satanic Ritual Promoted by Registered Sex Offender

Crazy: #RadFem Announces ‘Major Shift or Breakthrough in My Feminism’

LIVE AT FIVE: 07.09.14

Exhausting the Blitzkrieg Metaphors

Fire Can’t Melt Steel, and ‘The View’ Can’t Possibly Become More Ludicrous

Obama Fails Again: Are We Surprised?

What Is Radical Feminism? ‘Make Deviance the Core of Our Identity’

LIVE AT FIVE: 07.10.14

Atheist Progressive Makes Rape Threat About Conservative’s Teen Daughter

What Were They Thinking?

LIVE AT FIVE: 07.11.14

Buy It Now: ‘The Last Falangist’ Review; Wombat Shows the Hard Face

Rape Without Context

Stupid Vicious Criminal Scum

Top linkers this week:

  1. Batshit Crazy News (29)
  2. Regular Right Guy (13)
  3. That Mr. G Guy (8)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!


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Category: FMJRA Award

An Omen of the ‘Mystifying Oracle’?

Posted on | July 12, 2014 | 142 Comments

“One time I was with Cara, Chloe, Anne, and Ellie,
and we were messing around with a Ouija board.”

The blogger at “Please Excuse My Vagina: My life as a teenage feminist” will probably notice the trackback, and to her this should be a warning — as it should be to anyone tempted to try “messing around” with the occult. WARNING: EVIL IS REAL.

Maybe you’re not religious. Maybe you think the Bible is just a lot of superstitious nonsense. Nevertheless, evil is real, and even if you think you’re just “messing around” with it, you are in danger.

Those weird coincidences you keep noticing? They’re not coincidences.

Life has a meaning and purpose. We are not random collections of atoms. Human beings have spirits — souls — and our lives are part of something larger than ourselves. Most people do not notice the evidence of this larger meaning and purpose. They lack a spiritual awareness and do not contemplate the relationship between their own mundane existence and the eternal truth of the cosmos. And so they do not notice that seemingly random events aren’t actually random.

So you were “messing around with a Ouija board” — random.

And your first boyfriend was a manipulative jerk — random.

Then you were riding home from your dance recital and, for no apparent reason, your dad got angry and started shouting at you.

Is all this random? Just a coincidence?

“I’m a self-righteous bitch. I don’t have any religion. . . .
I was raised in a liberal household, being taught
that everyone’s opinion is equal and valid, and
also being taught to value my own opinions.”

OK, I guess, except that if “everyone’s opinion is equal and valid,” you can’t really have any core foundational beliefs, which might be a problem when you start to fear that you’re going insane:

I started out the day so tired I was physically unable to move. My mom had to come in and tell me to get out of bed about five times.
I cried twice in about twenty minutes . . .
When people ask me to do things I find myself saying no more and more often. My friends are getting pissed off at me for being so apathetic. . . .
Thinking of all the things I might do wrong and all the people I might lose. And that was when I realized.
It’s happening again.
In sixth grade, I was depressed or anxious or some combination of both. I was never officially diagnosed, so maybe it was nothing and I was just being crazy. . . .
I imagine funerals. Eulogies I would give. Eulogies people would give me. I imagine people who aren’t even my friends dragging blades over their skin or killing themselves because of careless bitchy little comments I’ve made. I imagine the people I love pushed too far by something I said and sent careening over the edge. Vivid images of me or my family dying in a huge car crash flash behind my eyelids.
It’s happening again and I don’t know how to stop it. . . .
I’ve also somehow developed an intense pathological fear of bugs. . . . I constantly feel things crawling on my skin or fluttering near me but when I look there is, without fail, no creature in sight.

The good news: If you think you’re going crazy, you’re probably not. As long as you have enough self-awareness to recognize these ideas and behaviors as abnormal, you’re not insane . . . yet.

The bad news: If it doesn’t get better, that means it’s getting worse, because the persistence of the symptoms is itself symptomatic.

Anybody can have crazy feelings or spells of depression once in a while. If these things persist, however, the word “chronic” applies, and your morbid obsessions — your irrational death-related ideations — are not encouraging in that regard.

So, let’s get back to the reality of evil and that Ouija board incident. Lots of kids try “messing around” with the occult in this manner, without thinking that they thereby make themselves vulnerable to evil. It’s like the concept of marijuana as a “gateway drug”; you start “messing around” with weed, next thing you try LSD or Ecstasy, then prescription pain-killers or meth, and one day a dopehead friend tells you she’s tried heroin and you think, “Hmmm.”

Same deal with “messing around” with the occult. Sure, a Ouija board is a silly child’s game. But will it stop there? Maybe next you’ll be “messing around” with astrology or tarot cards. You’ll find a friend who shares these interests, and that friend will start telling you about paganism and Wicca and if you keep going in that direction, who knows where you’ll end up? People who say they “don’t have any religion” are often the most vulnerable to the occult, without evidently recognizing that such beliefs are also a religion.

Does it seem to you, however, that there could be a connection between your “messing around” with the occult and your recent emotional disturbances? Because I don’t believe in coincidences, and because evil is real, it strikes me that you may be under the influence of evil — and I mean Evil with a capital “E” — without realizing it.

Well, I ain’t superstitious.
Black cat just crossed my trail . . .
Don’t sweep me with no broom.
I might get put in jail.
— “I Ain’t Superstitious,” Willie Dixon (1961)

Rather than being superstitious, let’s exclude the possibility that the “Mystifying Oracle” of the Ouija board summoned forth the spirits to provide the answer to your inquiry. There were five girls involved in that game — yourself, Cara, Chloe, Anne, and Ellie — and let us suppose that at least one of them deliberately manipulated the result.

Who suggested this game and why? What was their motive? Evil has human agents, after all, and if the Powers of Darkness wished to influence you, wouldn’t your “friends” be an obvious means of exercising such an influence? You see that, even if you don’t attribute any magical power to the Ouija board, it can still be an instrument of evil through which your “friends” act to cause you harm.

“Ellie told me later that they were surprised . . .
that I seemed so casual about it.”

Were they really surprised?

“Especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon. . . . He is a liar. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful. So don’t listen to him. Remember that — do not listen.”
— The Exorcist (1973)

If you’ve never read the book The Exorcist, you might want to do that, because it is actually quite a profound meditation on the nature of evil, and our vulnerability to evil. What we call “mental illness” was understood by the ancients as demonic possession, and I’m not sure that modern science is more accurate than the ancient understanding. Psychiatrists keep telling us it’s all neurochemistry — serotonin and synapses, blah, blah, blah — but is insanity always organic? Do crazy people just have bad brains? Isn’t our belief in the omnipotence of science a sort of religion?

Is it not possible that there are things beyond human explanation? Are we who believe in cosmic truth just stupid and ignorant? And what about your own search for answers?

I’ve been feeling this weird sense of powerlessness lately, like I have no control over anything in my life. . . .
Recently, I’ve been having a lot of mini-existential crises, mostly of the if-we-suffer-so-much-why-do-we-exist variety. I mostly just question myself in circles and end up exhausted by the end of it. . . .
I’m a control freak with no control over anything. . . .
I used to think I had some semblance of control over some of the things that happened to me in my tiny, insignificant life. But apparently that’s not true. Things happen to and around me and I have no control or power over them and that scares me, it really does.
Sometimes when I feel like this I find myself wanting to turn to a higher power, but there’s no higher power that I have the strength to believe in. I find it impossible to believe in a supreme being that allows terrible things to happen to people on a daily basis, that allows human beings to destroy themselves all the time, without so much as a whispered word of assistance.
Sometimes I’ll pray. I don’t know who or what I’m praying to, or if my prayers are heard.

WARNING: Evil is real. If you “don’t know who or what [you’re] praying to,” don’t you think Satan may be listening? Yes, “terrible things happen to people on a daily basis,” but why do think that is? Don’t you think that Evil and Death are partners? And if you surrender to the influence of Evil, what do you think happens next?

Hadn’t you better see if Good and Life are within reach?

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”
— John 1: 1-5 (KJV)

Darkness still does not comprehend the light.

By the way, Miss Teenage Feminist, isn’t it kind of weird that I found your blog this morning? I’ve been researching radical feminism — a mental illness in its own right — and it is admittedly weird to discover a high school kid writing about “heteronormativity.”

Probably just another random coincidence, eh?

 

Category: Feminism, Religion
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