It’s amazing to me just how good the Mormon church has been at hiding just how bad they really are from public view. Even the shit that gets spread around is the relatively harmless bullshit. They had a crazy prophet with magic glasses. They believe in god-mandated polygyny. They think everyone who is good enough will get their very own planet after the world ends. They wear magic underpants. Mormon men are all paladins.
Here’s one of the ones you hear less often:
See, like many other Christian sects, the Mormons really do believe that the existence of Christ obviates the existence of Judaism. Judaism was just a placeholder until the “real” church could be established by Jesus.
And the Mormons in particular believe, dead ass, that the entire inheritance of Israel has been given to them, because the Jews failed to recognize the Messiah when he was on Earth. They really do. They have this whole system where people are given a “divine revelation” about which of the Tribes of Israel they’re a member of (don’t worry, they decided that most people belong to the two tribes that are willing to “adopt” people. Only the most specialest boys and girls are members of the original ten).
Let’s sum up so far. The Mormons believe that they are the people of Israel, chosen and protected by God. If Jews want to get back in on that party, they can always repent and convert to Mormonism, the one true church to which God gave all the rights and blessings that were originally bestowed on Abraham’s house.
But it doesn’t stop there!
The Mormons also believe, in all seriousness, that all Indigenous peoples of the Americas are descended from a small group of Jewish people who left just before the fall of Jerusalem (~600 bc iirc). Their entire weird-ass extra bible is a chronicle of those people’s history in [unspecific part of America]. At the very beginning of the book, two brothers in the original family turn away from god, so they and all their descendants are cursed with dark skin, so that the good Nephites (who remain “white and delightsome”) will always be able to tell themselves apart from the wicked Lamanites.
So, you’ve got supposedly Jewish people running around the Americas. And the “good” ones are white, and the “bad” ones are brown. Then, ofc, Jesus comes to visit them (I guess supposedly that’s part of what he was doing during his dirt nap? Or possibly after he left again, it’s not clear), and they all convert to Christianity, which they think is clearly the natural evolution of Judaism. Well, at the end of the book, all of them become wicked, in a kind of weird pseudo-apocalyptic series of events. They are all cursed with dark skin, until such time as they repent for their ancestors sins and return to the gospel.
But of course, Mormons being the good and kind people they are, they want everyone to receive the blessings of God and be brought into the houses of Israel etc etc. And it isn’t the fault of those poor little Indigenous children that their distant ancestors turned away from God and became wicked.
So what’s the natural answer? Well, Mormons are real big on missionary work, as we all know. But apparently that wasn’t enough in this case.
Because the Mormon church has been one of the big players in abducting as many Indigenous children as possible, in order to indoctrinate them into being good Mormons, so that they can turn white again and be blessed. My mother remembers hearing talks about this in the 70s and 80s. The church literally had a “Lamanite Adoption Program,” where families in the church were encouraged to get as many Indigenous children as possible away from their families and not let them be reunited until they were fully assimilated and ready to go back and proselytize about how wonderful the church is.
The church leadership literally talked about how wonderful it was to see these children becoming whiter. Actually whiter. Like, saying that when they finally saw them with their families again, it was beautiful how much paler they were.
I’m pretty sure this program has been officially ended, but it doesn’t take a genius to speculate about who might be behind the curtains on the movement in the western US to gut the ICWA….
So yeah. Next time someone tries to tell you that the Mormons are just harmless weirdos, please remember that they’re an antisemitic cult that advocates for the forced assimilation of Indigenous children to help them escape the cursed brown skin of their ancestors.
The only thing funnier than the FOB We Didn’t Start the Fire cover is libs handwringing over the “Shinzo Abe blown away” line as “tasteless” since a) it’s literally just an update of the lyric “JFK blown away” and b) Shinzo Abe getting murked by a Fallout 4 contraption shotgun was one of the funniest and coolest things to happen in the last ten years and he 100% deserved it
Fun fact she actually likely did this SO she could copyright claim videos and get them taken down, as well as make people make so much fun of her for a ukelele apology, they forget to entirely hold her accountable.
by far the most interesting part of the latest You’re Wrong About on homosexuality in the animal kingdom is the account of how science missed it for so long. the guest, lulu miller (of radiolab fame) basically divides the reasons into three categories: ignorance, self-suppression, and what you might call “official” suppression.
essentially, since the days of thomas aquinas when it had been simply declared that homosexuality was inherently against nature, you had a lot of observers of the natural world, even once the enlightenment got underway, who simply didn’t know what they were looking at. many animal species are very sexually dimorphic and thus easy to sex; but many more are not, and if your background assumption (because the background assumption of society in general) is that homosexuality does not occur in nature, if you see two animals of unidentified sex mating, you will assume one is male and one is female. or you might simply assume what you are seeing is an aberration, with no real systemic significance, and not pointing to any kind of underlying phenomenon, and simply fail to note it down–or talk to any other naturalists about it.
and this blends into self-suppression, which includes all researchers who might have noticed homosexuality among animals in the wild, but didn’t write about it. this includes researchers who might not have thought it was significant, or who might have thought nobody was interested in it–miller offers the example of a guy who died relatively recently who spent his life studying mountain rams, who omitted mentioning from his quite detailed survey of their behavior that about one in twelve males mate exclusively with other males, because it seemed to him (at the time of writing) an aberrant and unpleasant fact about an otherwise majestic creature.
“official” suppression we might apply to any time a researcher noticed and wanted to write about the phenomenon, but who simply couldn’t get their data published, including researchers who might have pressed the scientific community at large to recognize this phenomenon, only to be greeted with hostility and suspicion–i.e., what kind of pervert is so obsessed with this topic?
and out of a combination of all these factors you get centuries of a bias being confirmed, because anybody who might care to ask, “well, homosexuality clearly occurs in humans, have we observed it in other animals?” would have been confronted with a vast lacuna in the scientific literature, not because it did not occur, but because multiple intersecting cultural biases prevented anybody from actually talking about it. and it makes it hard to have a conversation about natural phenomena from an empirical and rational perspective when a bias that irrational runs that deep! and i cannot help but wonder what other biases we have in our culture, that might be producing similarly irrational lacunae in our apprehension of the world.
the shitstains at youtube memoryhole’d propane genesis evangelion but I had already downloaded it because I know youtube is full of absolute cunts so here it is
Only 13 percent of video games are readily playable and accessible. No other form of media is as endangered as video games. There is no legal path to preserve or archive video games. You can go to libraries and archives for books years out of print. You can rent a movie or download a pdf. There is no legal equivalent for video games. Games companies do not double as archival organisations and they never will. They have never been about preserving. They are about selling. Which is not inherently evil compared to anyone else but they along with the law are directly preventing archivers and preservationists from doing their job and allowing this entire medium to be experienced in the future.
Think of some of the most influential video games of all time. How many of them can you play right now. Without piracy. How many of these could your not very technology literate friend play. How do you think this is affecting not only the wider industry now but also people in the future. And for completely arbitrary meaningless reasons.
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