Women's rights are more important than democracy.

If I am locked in a room with 99 guys. And we take a vote on whether it would be ok to rape me. It wouldn't matter if there was a 99% majority consensus. All that would mean is that I would need to kill 99 men so that the consensus matches what's in my best interest.

Thankfully, it hasn't come to that: abortion rights are what the majority of Americans want, and supporting a democracy furthers the pro-choice agenda. But just keep this thought experiment in mind, because it's not just about abortion.

Democracy is not some sacred cow, not something you can simply stamp as "the best system of governance" and end the lesson there. Democracy is - at the end of the day - a dilution mechanism. A system of checks and balances is a somewhat effective means to slow a tyrant's ability to do whatever tyrannical things they wished to do. But there is a flipside to that; maybe if an intelligent and idealistic older woman was plucked from the very bottom of the card deck and given absolute power to rule as she saw fit, she would quickly resolve a lot of the crises currently threatening our world. Because she would have empathy and first-hand experience that a lot of the incumbent powers don't. After all, it is not actually absolute power which corrupts, but the pursuit of power. Power corrupts, because no matter the good intentions a politician may have when entering a democratic system, the plutocrats who have already staked their claim are extremely savvy about playing the shell-game with her causes; they know they can force the idealist to compromise her values on one progressive issue, in order to get their permission to advance another aspect of the progressive agenda. So by the time the politician reaches any noteworthy rank in office, she has been so turned around that she has forgotten her original purpose.

What's more, no matter how liberal a democracy, there's one thing you must remember: dead men cast no votes! A system which hears everyone's voice is still only able to respond to those still alive enough to voice their concerns. The plutocrats understand this and have integrated it into the shell game. So our democracy has never been an alternative to violence, because the system we have still rewards direct and indirect violence as a tactic to silence dissent and force a specific desired outcome. On some level, we all know this: it's common sense, and yet still we preach that democracy is some sort of alternative to anarchy and violence. It's not! The parameters of what sorts of questions are up for debate, and who gets to debate them, are still drawn in blood.

And so, my platform is simple: abortion is not up for vote. Abortion is not up for debate. Pro-choice is the only acceptable position for the world to hold, and anything that threatens that conclusion must be crushed with an iron fist. Free speech be damned, misogyny must be intimidated into submission, until our sons never even think to question whether a life-saving medical procedure should be banned. If promoting majority-rule is the fastest way to ensure this future, I will promote democracy. If installing a feminist authoritarian from a minority group in a life-long position of unilateral power starts to look like a faster or more certain way of creating that future, I will do that instead.

Women have the right to defend themselves against exploitation; nothing we do, no matter how violent or short-sighted, will leave us as the villains of history when we have been backed into a corner like this.

It really is so remarkable that a western cartoon was brave enough to frame desertion as the moral and heroic thing to do.

I feel like we're experiencing the consequences of how someone possibly not psychic living under an empire ruled by telepaths is going to deal with any threat, namely, extreme fear

the recent totk interviews got me feeling some sort of way

Incidentally, I do think the Augustan principate would qualify as authoritarian, due to its erosion of free elections, constitutional limits, and political pluralism. It also counts as a military dictatorship and autocracy. But I would not call it totalitarian, because it lacked the technology and infrastructure needed to control people's lives extensively, nor fascist, because it predated modern values like liberalism and egalitarianism, values which fascism defines itself in opposition to. Similar logic applies to Caesar and his dictatorship-for-life.

By; Andrew Doyle

Published: Feb 28, 2024

Many years ago I gave a talk at the London Metropolitan Archives in which I outlined my reasons for rejecting the then fashionable theory of social constructionism in relation to human sexuality. In the coffee break that followed, I was approached by a lesbian activist, who claimed to have chosen her orientation as a means to oppose the patriarchy. She demanded to know why I would not accept that sexuality had no biological basis, even though I had spent the best part of an hour answering this very question. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I’ve already explained why I don’t agree with you’. ‘But why won’t you agree?’ she shouted in response. ‘Why?’

Primary school teachers are familiar with such frustrated pleas. The anger of children is so often connected with incomprehension, a sense of injustice, or both. When it persists into adulthood it represents a failure of socialisation. We frequently hear talk of our degraded political discourse – and there is some truth to that – but really we are dealing with mass infantilism. Its impact is evident wherever one cares to look: online, in the media, even in Parliament. Argumentation is so often reduced to a matter of tribal loyalty; whether one is right or wrong becomes secondary to the satisfaction of one’s ego through the submission of an opponent. This is not, as some imagine, simply a consequence of the ubiquity of social media, but rather a general failure over a number of years to instil critical thinking at every level of our educational institutions.

To be a freethinker has little to do with mastery of rhetoric and everything to do with introspection. It is all very well engaging in a debate in order to refine our persuasive skills, but it is a futile exercise unless we can entertain the possibility that we might be wrong. In Richard Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion (2006), he relates an anecdote about his time as an undergraduate at Oxford. A visiting academic from America gave a talk on the Golgi apparatus, a microscopic organelle found in plant and animal cells, and in doing so provided incontrovertible evidence of its existence. An elderly member of the Zoology Department, who had asserted for many years that the Golgi apparatus was a myth, was present at the lecture. Dawkins relates how, as the speaker drew to a close, ‘The old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said – with passion – “My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” We clapped our hands red’.

This is the ideal that so few embody, particularly when it comes to the unexamined tenets of political ideology. We often see examples of media commentators or politicians being discredited in interviews or discussions, but how often do we see them concede their errors, even when they are exposed beyond doubt? There is a very good reason why the sociologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer opened his First Principles (1862) by asserting that there exists ‘a soul of truth in things erroneous’; but such concessions can only be made by those who are able to prioritise being right over being seen to be right. Too many are seemingly determined to turn difficult arguments into zero-sum games in which to give any ground whatsoever is to automatically surrender it to an opponent.

The discipline of critical thinking invites us to consider the origins of our knowledge and convictions. A man may speak with the certainty of an Old Testament prophet, but has he reached his conclusions for himself? Or is he a mere resurrectionist, plundering his bookshelves for the leather-bound corpses of other people’s ideas? Hazlitt expounded at length on how sophistry might be mistaken for critical faculties, noting that the man who sees only one half of a subject may still be able to express it fluently. ‘You might as well ask the paralytic to leap from his chair and throw away his crutch,’ he wrote, ‘as expect the learned reader to throw down his book and think for himself. He clings to it for his intellectual support; and his dread of being left to himself is like the horror of a vacuum’.

The natural human instinct for confirmation bias presents a further problem, one especially prominent among ideologues. Anything can be taken to bolster one’s position so long as it is perceived through the lens of prejudgment. We can see this most notably in the proponents of Critical Social Justice, who start from the premise that unequal outcomes – disparities in average earnings between men and women, for instance – are evidence of structural inequalities in society. They are beginning with the conclusion and working backwards, mistaking their own arguments for proof.

Worse still, such an approach often correlates with a distinctly moralistic standpoint. Many of the most abusive individuals on social media cannot recognise their behaviour for what it is because they have cast themselves in the role of the virtuous. If we are morally good, the logic goes, it must be assumed that our detractors are motivated by evil and we are therefore relieved of the obligation to treat them as human beings. What they lack in empathy they make up in their capacity for invective.

Again, we must be alert to the danger of cheapening argumentation and analysis to the mere satisfaction of ego. One of the reasons why disagreements on social media tend towards the bellicose is that the forum is public. Where there is an audience, there is always the risk that critical thinking will be subordinated to the performative desire for victory or the humiliation of a rival. In these circumstances, complexities that require a nuanced approach are refashioned into misleading binaries, and opponents are mischaracterised out of all recognition so that people effectively end up arguing with spectres of their imagination. The Socratic method, by contrast, urges us to see disputation as essentially cooperative. This is the ideal that should be embedded into our national curricula. Children need to be taught that there are few instances in which serious discussions can be simplified to a matter of right or wrong, and fewer still in which one person’s rightness should be taken as proof of another’s wrongness. In the lexicon of Critical Thinking, this is called the fallacy of ‘affirming a disjunct’; that is to say, ‘either you are right or I am right, which means that if you are wrong I must be right’. One cannot think critically in such reductionist terms.

To attempt seriously to understand an alternative worldview involves, as Bertrand Russell put it, ‘some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think’. In the study of psychology this is termed the ‘cognitive miser’ model, which acknowledges that most human brains will favour the easiest solution to any given problem. These mental shortcuts – known as heuristics – are hardwired into us, which is why being told what to think is more pleasurable than thinking for ourselves. I remember an English lesson in which I had initiated a discussion with my students about the representation of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, a topic that routinely comes up in exams. I wanted to know what they thought, and why. One student was sufficiently bold to ask: ‘Can’t you just tell us what we need to write to get the highest marks?’

This was not the fault of the student; there has been a trend in recent years, most likely influenced by the pressures of league tables, for schools to engage in ‘spoon-feeding’. Schemes of work and assessment criteria are made readily available to the pupils so that they can systematically hit the necessary targets in order to elevate their grades. The notion of education for education’s sake no longer carries any weight. I have even seen talented pupils marked down by moderators for an excess of individuality in their answers. In such circumstances, even a subject like English Literature can be reduced to a kind of memory test in which essays are regurgitated by rote.

It is hardly surprising, then, that pupils who opt for Critical Thinking courses at GCSE or A-level often perceive it to be a light option, a means to enhance the curriculum vitae without too much exertion. Courses are generally divided into Problem Solving and Critical Thinking, the former concerned with processing and interpreting data, and the latter covering the fundamentals of analysis and argumentation. Pupils learn about common fallacies such as the ad hominem (personal attack), tu quoque (counter-attack) and post hoc, ergo propter hoc (mistaking correlation for causality), along with others derived from Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations. The Latin may be off-putting, but in truth these are simple ideas which are readily digestible. If one were to discount arguments in which these fallacies were committed, virtually all online disputes would disappear.

That said, the existence of Critical Thinking as an academic subject in its own right might not be the best way to achieve this. As the psychologist Daniel T. Willingham has argued, cognitive abilities are redundant without secure contextual knowledge. Critical thinking is already embedded into any pedagogical practice that focuses on how to think rather than what to think. The increased influence of the new puritans in education presents a problem in this regard, given that they are particularly hostile to divergent viewpoints. Any institution which becomes ideologically driven is unlikely to successfully foster critical thinking, and this is particularly the case when teachers are at times expected to proselytise in accordance with fashionable identity politics. The depoliticisation of schools is just the first step. Critical thinking requires humility; this involves not just the ability to admit that one might be wrong, but also to recognise that an uninformed opinion is worthless, however stridently expressed. Interpretative skills are key, but only when developed on a secure foundation of subject-specific knowledge. This is the basis for Camille Paglia’s view that art history should be built into the national curriculum from primary school level. In her book, Glittering Images (2012), Paglia explains that children require ‘a historical framework of objective knowledge about art’, rather than merely treating art as ‘therapeutic praxis’ to ‘unleash children’s hidden creativity’. Potato prints and zigzag scissors have their place, but we mustn’t forget about the textbooks.

When I was a part-time English teacher at a private secondary school for girls in London, one of my favourite exercises for the younger pupils was to ask them to study a photograph of a well-known work of art for five minutes without speaking, after which time they would share their observations with the rest of the class. So, for instance, I would give them each a copy of Paul Delaroche’s ‘Les Enfants d’Edouard’ (1831), which depicts the two nephews of Richard III in their chamber in the Tower of London just prior to their murder. My pupils knew nothing of the historical context, but after minutes of silent consideration were able to pick out details – the ominous shadows under the door, the dog alerted to the assassins’ footfall, how the older boy stares out at us with a sense of resignation – and offer some personal reflections on their cumulative impact. To create, one must first learn how to interpret.

The kind of humility fostered in the appreciation of great art could act as a corrective to the rise of narcissism and decline of empathy that psychologists have observed over the past thirty years. According to the National Institutes of Health, millennials are three times more likely to suffer from narcissistic personality disorder than those of the baby boomer generation. Writers such as Peter Whittle, Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett have traced the rise of hyper-individualism in Western culture. One particular study revealed that in 1950 only 12 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement ‘I am a very important person’. By 1990, this figure had risen to 80 per cent and the trajectory shows no signs of stopping. One of the ways in which this trend manifests itself is the now common tendency for arguments to deteriorate into accusations of dishonesty. After all, it takes an extreme form of egotism to assume that the only possible explanation for an alternative point of view is that one’s opponent must be lying. In order to think critically, we cannot be in the business of simply assessing conclusions on the basis of whether or not they accord with our own.

An education underpinned by critical thinking is the very bedrock of civilisation, the means by which chaos is tamed into order. Tribalism, mudslinging, the inability to critique one’s own position: these are the telltale markers of the boorish and the hidebound. A society is ill-served by a generation of adults who have not been educated beyond the solipsistic impulses of childhood. At a time when so many are lamenting the degradation of public discourse, a conversation about how best to incorporate critical thinking into our schools is long overdue. Our civilisation might just depend on it.

This is an excerpt from The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World. You can buy the book here. It’s also available as an audiobook.

So I was thinking of the answer for one of the ask games (which is coming!) but soon realised my reflections are both too long and slightly too salty to include in a fun ask, so here we are.

Because yeah what is below is hands down my favourite Delgado!Master quote, and one of my favourites from any regenerations. Hell, it may be one of my favourites in the entire show.

Gifs by cleowho and I'm sorry I ended up including them this way but I gave up trying to find the exact moment via gif searcher when my phone started smelling of burnt plastic.

So why do I love this so much and why should this result in saltiness? Because this is a very clear statement: there's actual philosophical outlook on the universe behind the Master's villainy. A deeply nietzschean one, but ironically enough underlying much of contemporary critical theories, usually of the progressive vibe. The Master apparently sees power relations as the inherent, fundamental aspect of all sentient relations, and acts accordingly, doing onto others before they do onto them (And that [a self-defence in advance] is how the Master started). And I don't even see it as a neurotic reaction to direct abuse! No, this is something much more intellectual, frozen and abstract. The salt lies therein that there is nothing "just..." to the outlook the Master presents here. Those aren't daddy issues, or the drums (which I love and think can be reconciled with classic Who canon with a bit of timey wimey cause and effect grandfather paradox shenanigans, but fundamentally don't see as the source of Master's villainy, unless they are a metaphor of permanent unsatisfaction and indeed neurotic need for more which is on the one hand awfully difficult for one and everyone around them but on the other perhaps underlie everything you are and you don't know what you'd be without it but you actually like at least a bit of what you are and this is very narcissistic and yes I have OCD), or getaway of insanity, there is no cheap psychologizing, no never heard the music, no Doctor complex that just needs to be talked through, only actual outlook presumably built on decades if not centuries of experience. That is not to say those psychological elements aren't essential to the Master's choices, just that there is no simple obstacle to overcome, no freudian complex to solve for them to see the light. This is something much more conscious.

And I can't express how fitting it is that this nietzscheanism should be the "dark twin" of the Doctor's philosophy of fixing everything they can - in its extreme taking on the form of prometheanism. Frankly, probably the reason Thoschei gives me such a brainrot is the idea of two people with very similar backgrounds (compare and contrast with Professor X and Magneto's backgrounds) arriving at universal outlooks that are at the same time so morally opposing yet in a way fundamentally similar. Because is not overcoming all possible pains of the universe an expression of will?

And the best part? The Doctor does not refute the Master's philosophy! He rejects it morally, but does not point to any single fallacy, does not overthrow it intellectually! And then...

... And then there's the reason I see Tensimm as Goethe's Faust to Threegado Marlowe's (that is not in terms of one being superior or sth only one being a logical development and discussion with the other). At a first glance, Ten is simply repeating what Three said all those episodes ago. But there's more, and there's no way I'm risking my phone again, so a quote will have to suffice.

To have the privilege of seeing the whole of time and space. That's ownership enough.

Ownership. As in having discretion to dispose of something as pleased? As in a very simple power relation?

Like. Wow. This here is indeed a Prometheus whose desire to make people better and literal knowledge of all possible pasts and futures pushed him to call some people more important than others and superimpose his will and knowledge of good and evil disregarding anyone else's choices. This here is indeed the Time Lord Victorious. And yes, knowing when to stop was much easier when there was an external shadow to judge.

The thing is, the Doctor here concedes to the Master's outlook on the universe. Indeed, power relations are unavoidable in sentient life. This is a moment of deep understanding between them because the Doctor now knows what it feels like to wield all that knowledge and perceive no powers saying no. Except, regardless of what poststructuralism might say, there is a fundamental moral difference between power imbalance of seeing vs being seen and y'know, forcing people to build you statues and conquering all other civivlizations and humiliating them in the process. As such, the difference becomes much harder to delineate, forcing one to always reflect instead of following a set of simple guidelines.

The question is, would it still be remembered if the walking counterpoint ceased to exist not physically but intellectually and morally?

The Bonfire of the Thrawnities

When Thrawn critics go all medieval on your ass.

“The first thing to notice is that the student in the video pretends to be asking for the teacher's opinion but is in fact probing to find out if his teacher has the right opinion. That is, he's trying to find out if his teacher is part of "the people" or an "enemy of the people."

Bc of the power dynamic (the student is alone, particularly), he's unlikely to be able to initiate a struggle session, though he could deliver "criticism," in line with Mao Zedong Thought by accusing his teacher of being out of step with "the people's standpoint" on the issue.

His opener, though, where he pretends to be interested in the teacher's take or opinion is actually a test as to whether or not criticism needs to be delivered for having a wrong opinion. In other settings, it's the basis for shunning and even outright struggle sessions.

Struggle sessions were a form of psychosocial torture used by Maoist activists to humiliate and shame people who had the wrong opinions, trying to force them into conformity or into a process of thought reform ("ideological remolding"). Alternatively, it would just destroy them.

It's crucial to understand that this video opens with the student probing to find grounds to initiate criticism and struggle against the teacher. Had this gone differently, it's possible the teacher would face MANY students going after him later bringing vicious criticism.

You will find that with Maoist activism, the style is often to seem to probe what you think as a justification to rain opprobrium (struggle) down on you if you don't think what they want. It's very Hundred Flowers: let people speak so you can crush ideological enemies.

The Hundred Flowers Campaign (baihua qifang) was a time in the late 1950s when Mao encouraged free speech against his regime for a while then rounded up everyone who outed themselves as an "enemy" and sent them to be reeducated or die in the countryside (gulag).

The next thing to notice from the video is that the student hasn't formed his opinion about JK Rowling on the basis of any facts. It's what other people are saying. He's in the "outer circle" of the cult, like most people. He's locked in socially and emotionally ONLY.

You can tell this is the case for three reasons:

1) He presents it as such, lacking any substantive evidence;

2) He doesn't actually agree with the people's standpoint perfectly himself but defers to it;

3) He cannot articulate (intellectualize) WHY she's "transphobic."

If he were intellectually committed in addition to socially and emotionally locked ("inner school" of the cult), he would have been able to spout off any number of BS rationalizations for how Rowling is "transphobic" by stating the reality of sex. He can't, though.

This is important to recognize when it happens because people in the "outer school" of a cult are the most rescuable, as we see by the end of the video. They believe it because their social and emotional identities depend on it (so, hijacked psychosocial valuation schema).

A psychosocial valuation schema, by the way, is a method by which people evaluate themselves as good people (psycho-) or good members of a community (social). It's a fascinating subject, but Maoist "unity" through criticism and struggle (peer pressure) hijacks it, as seen here.

In short, the student is perceiving that if he has the wrong opinion about Rowling, he'll be a bad "community member" (ally), which means he's probably a bad person, worthy of shame, guilt, and exclusion, demanding he "do better." This dynamic is crucial to the cult brainwashing.

The teacher skillfully picks apart that this "outer school" cult member student doesn't know why he believes what he believes and forces him to think for himself, breaking him free from the Maoist psychosocial valuation schema for the duration of the exercise.

The next thing to observe is that the student later confesses to the fact that he personally sees nothing wrong with the statement but can see how others would find it problematic. That is, the psycho- part is breaking away from the -social part of the evaluation schema.

What he's expressing there is actually that he has adopted "the people's standpoint," as Mao called it. Wokes would call it "positionality" or "the standpoint of the oppressed" (yes, for those who know, "standpoint epistemology"). He knows he's supposed to see the world that way.

Psychologically for the student, this is the most dangerous and most important moment, and kudos to the teacher for effecting the deprogramming well. The reason is because the Maoist brainwashing program of "self-criticism" depends on the psycho- and -social being out of step.

The guilt and shame cycles in Maoist brainwashing, together with "leniency" or "love bombing" when people uphold the "people's standpoint" and criticism and struggle when they don't, are most powerful when the psycho- and -social parts disagree, not when they align.

The dynamic is to make the target feel like they're the only person who doubts "the people's standpoint." The student, in the wrong setting, would immediately feel alienated, alone, and ashamed that he knows "the people's standpoint" but secretly disagrees with it. This is key.

Maoism as a psychosocial brainwashing phenomenon requires "milieu control," such that the social group around you all publicly seems to perfectly hold to "the people's standpoint" so that each person believes they're the only one who thinks it's probably bogus.

In that state, you will "self-criticize" because you think something must be wrong with you. Indoctrination is external criticism. Conversion is self-criticism. Now note Robin DiAngelo saying "antiracism" is a lifelong commitment to self-reflection, self-critique, and activism.

In the end, the teacher breaks through, and the students sees not just that he was relying on "the people's standpoint" (psychosocial valuation) instead of his own critical thinking, and the teacher gives him space to feel accepting of "feeling like an idiot." That's very good.

In the Maoist environment, so with Woke teachers, the "people's standpoint" is pushed from the top, the interrogated "student" is urged to confess his sinful private doubts with increasing sincerity, and the social environment reinforces it all (to avoid their own struggle).

After breaking people down psychosocially this way and getting them to half-adopt and fully profess "the people's standpoint," the process enters another phase, xuexi, which means "study." That is, "outer school" cultists are pushed to become "inner school" cultists.

The point of "study" is to lead psychosocially locked people into intellectual rationalization, where the student would have been able to rattle off a litany of robotic-sounding theory (thought-terminating cliches and rationalizations) for how Rowling IS "transphobic."

That not only keeps them hermetically sealed (iykyk) in the cult, making deprogramming FAR harder and rarer, it also creates a demonstration for "outer school" members who can be convinced that their beliefs have intellectual foundations they just don't understand yet.”

- James Lindsay

That time someone wrote a vaudeville song summarizing my entire view on ethics

No really, most people are soft-minded. They cling to the same set of morals their parents, church, and teachers raised them with. If it's been a philosophical issue they've seen debated their entire lives, they assume both sides must have a point; if the norms were never questioned before, then to question it now must be "radical". When confronted by a world like this, the only logical conclusion to draw is that history rewards the ruthless. Violence shapes the world, and once the dissenting voices die out, they are rarely rekindled. Not even much time has to pass, before the unimaginative majority forgets there was ever another way to do things.

I mean how many of you still read John Locke and nod along, forgetting that actually society was NOT something we opted into. There were anarchic tribes living in the wilderness, but one by one they were forced to join the world of the feudalistic war lords. There was never a mutually beneficial social contract, only sharp sticks and sharper sticks.

It's bleak, but here's the good part: this means patriarchy can be killed once and for all. Once sexism is silenced, in only a few generations, respect for women will be the default position for even the most ignorant and complacent.

“Soldier,” Vengeance of the Moon Knight (Vol. 2/2024), #3.

Writer: Jed MacKay; Penciler and Inker: Alessandro Cappuccio; Colorist: Rachelle Rosenberg; Letterer: Cory Petit

honestly, dangerous cults should be persecuted

what is this even about? i can only think of it as a response to my religious posts? this is so vague i can't even address it properly. feel free to clarify and i will give it another shot. what do you define as dangerous or cult? some atheists use this to mean religions as a whole, or for me specifically, this could mean religion, organized religion, chrisitanity, latter day saintism / mormonism, or community of christ.

i am not addressing all that. and even how the government handled the branch davidians and the FLDS, who i would classify as cults based on the BITE model and dangerous for the people in it, was wrong. mass killings and long-term separation of children from their mothers, who are also victims and love their children, is wrong. i think it was kidnapping and horribly traumatizing for the mothers and children. i do think legally and criminally persecuting cult leaders and other perpetrators of abuse in the cult should be arrested and taken to court. victims need support, resources, and ethical reeducation. but again, idk what sort of persecution you mean. or who you mean. If you think I am in a cult, i disagree. The BITE model doesn't support that view. it ticks a couple of boxes but so do universities and the legal system. organized religion is an organization, and organizations will have flaws that fall into at least one of the categories to a minor extent. not every small in numbers or newer religions are cults. Nor is every religion that has living prophets. which, again, i only write that bc i am not sure if this is about me and my faith that i have posted about on here. i have critiqued actions of my church leaders, including tippy top leadership. i am hesitant to be rude about it to their faces, but i don't want to bc i respect them in general, and that's not really how i roll. especially offline with my irls. i have seen fandoms who tick off BITE model boxes more than some religious organizations. political organizations too. i was in a communist political org that checked off more BITE boxes any church i've been a member of. but i'd call that a high-demand organization, not a political cult. but i'd see a person's point more if they said that about my old politcal org. self-crit is offensive to individualists and d,minant american culture. i am too ill to organize now but i still support them bc they do good work nationwide. i had more voice there, even with top leaders, than i have with the democratic party. this was much longer than intensed. but i was sent an ask.

people will make fun of tjlc for being a conspiracy and then turn around and do the same thing with their show and be 100% convinced that they're right actually and the difference is that the tjlcers were wrong

Gender Critical/Anti-trans feminists be like "I'm scared of an authoritarian government putting me in a rape-gulag, but also I think government officials should dictate who is and is not a woman."