when the words "Kiritsugu was right" come spontaneously to me that's, uh, yeah! ~Chara

Christianity, as I've said before, is both a wild and playful thing, turning up in folk beliefs and syncretic religions and who knows how many lively and tremendous works of fiction, and it's also a dying authoritarian juggernaut. This die was cast a long time ago, unfortunately. Christianity began questionably, with St. Paul's dubious interpretation of the Incarnation (which I am assuming, for the sake of argument, actually happened—I'm Catholic you know! kinda) and his determination to make the new cult both radically distinct from Judaism and more palatable to professionals like himself. From the start, Christianity was cursed with the disease that's presently almost about to kill the patient: Christianity wanted desperately to be NORMAL. The lurch to embrace Roman tyranny a few centuries later sealed the deal. You can't get much more failed, as a transformative moral and social force, than merging with the Roman Empire.

Now look at Christianity, especially in the United States, which has been preening itself as the New Jerusalem for a while, while hypocritically claiming to honor the old. This terrifying trope of "Western civilization" lives on, like an even more poisonous and maddening version of the older-fashioned myth of descent from ancient Troy. The Romans most famously tried that one out but Great Britain did as well and I'm pretty sure there's other instances of European national founding myths which somehow go back to Troy or at least to Æneas. "The West" is still hagridden by ancient Greece, as hagridden as Rome was. "We conquered you, and yet you are better than us, whyyy" seems like an eternal mystery for many Europeans and persons of European descent.

Hence there's no shortage of prideful Americans claiming to be the prophets and priests of a deathless Christian faith, and at the same time they don't seem to know what they believe any more. They shout about Jesus and the Lord in one sentence, accuse trans people of killing God in the next sentence. How did this happen? It's pretty simple: NORMAL smothered Christianity. St. Paul's objections to adhering to Jewish practices seems almost like laziness. It was an impediment to facile conversion. "You mean I have to worry about what I eat now?" and so forth. St. Paul, like any cynical salesperson, was selling canned Jesus, simplified salvation, a simple formula for businesspersons to adopt into their lives while going on doing what they're doing, just as St. Paul himself did.

It's always been a MASSIVE issue with St. Paul. If he really believed in Jesus then where was his humility? He had none. He wasn't repentant and reflective and thoughtful about his previous mistakes, the things he supposedly repented of. Instead he did what every toxic Christian today still does, in mimicry of St. Paul: they say, "Whoops, my bad, I won't sin again I promise!" and then get straight to pretending that their conversion now entitles them to special social status. St. Paul was the first obvious Christian hypocrite, a fake Apostle, and now Paul's shittiness is baked into Christianity.

Everything since then feels like a creeping paralysis or wasting disease slowly spreading through Christianity, killing belief, killing the mystery that Christianity was supposed to embody, reducing it to a dead litany that corporate executives intone from time to time while they're scamming money. Christianity may still be a religion (though I'm not sure how I'd even define it, because so much of Christianity now exists as independent offshoots and syncretisms) but public Christianity surely isn't. It's a political label, a badge of membership in an evil society. Any politician or boss who conspicuously wears a cross or makes a point of saying "I have Christian values" might as well be saying they're in S.P.E.C.T.R.E. or something.

Well, now what

~Chara of Pnictogen

the ultra-right-wing movement which has currently seized hold of U.S. politics and discourse and has been driving it relentlessly rightward since 1980 and the illegitimate Presidency of Ronald Reagan has a paradoxical character that's made it very difficult to talk about in a concise fashion. That's partly through deliberate strategems: right-wing figures make themselves deliberately as blurry as possible, constantly changing their political labels and finding new "theories" and "philosophies" behind which to disguise their own beliefs, which are apt to be in constant ferment and unsettled. The pose is always that these people are still undecided somehow, still available for persuasion, and the difficulty with liberal and leftist ideas (so they say) is that they're never persuasive.

but in a genuine sense the entire movement is rudderless, bereft of unifying ideas and therefore reliant for cohesion on mutual hatreds rather than positive beliefs. every person in the coalition thinks of themselves as a lonely truth-teller, the one person who has been granted true political vision, and therefore they don't work well in groups. the Internet has been a godsend to their sort of politics, because it furnishes a medium that's both very broad and available almost anywhere in the country with the right equipment, but also isolating and tailored to the needs of people who want all their socializing to happen at a long distance. each of these persons, when quizzed, can truthfully claim to be part of no organized movement. "Gosh, me?? A 'fascit' or whatever it was you called me? I'm just an independent truth-teller, politically homeless, a rebel against conventions, etc."

there's an element of self-protection in that, of course. claiming to be independent and "heterodox" isn't just self-flattery, it's also safer than belonging to groups and causes. every right-wing influencer of note has probably used the "I'm just an entertainer uwu" excuse at least once. again, the Internet is of immense value here, because it allows for right-wing celebrities to ditch their own fandoms at a moment's notice, claiming that they've merely attracted a rowdy crowd and they're not responsible for them. but also, it's partly genuine. each person in the movement, whether they're relatively big and famous like (say) Charles Murray or just an insignificant admirer with a Twitter account, feels like they ought to be in charge and that their fellow reactionaries, while good and sound fellows on the issues that matter, are in fact hopelessly wrong and heretical about something.

each of them is a potential leader. but each of them is also a FAILED leader—that's important. people sink to this level because they've had their illusions crushed so now they need bigger illusions, grander ones, in order to keep their egos from collapsing. Charles Murray probably still feels, really and truly, like they've been robbed of a Nobel Prize by carping hypocritical liberals. Elon Musk knows deep down inside that all his "success" is fake, almost entirely the work of others, and thus he must pretend he's the restorer of a racially purified Roman Empire or whatever. they have both the grandest possible aspirations and a fearful ignorance of all the skills and abilities that would enable them to carry their aspirations through.

they must, therefore, always look to someone greater. the only way they can feel like leaders themselves is if they've got a bigger leader behind them. even a coward can fight if they think they've got a threat in front of them and a massive wall behind them, preventing them from running away and therefore leaving them no choice but self-defence.

and thus we get a mechanism for self-organization. smaller failed leaders cluster around bigger failed leaders, who are themselves always seeking someone to back them up. the degree to which these persons can obtain some backup—sponsorship for example, the way that murky creditors sponsor Elon Musk and Harlan Crow sponsors Charles Murray—determines how well they can function as temporary or provision leaders, stable enough to gain a crowd of adherents, and of course a large enough crowd of adherents is itself a source of stability. large groups of people, even rowdy mobs with little cohesion, have a tendency to stick together by a sort of human Van der Waals force, a general tendency for human beings to attract each other's company.

and that, I think, is roughly how you get the sort of paradoxical accidental conspiracies that prevail in the right wing. conventional U.S. political journalism hasn't really caught up with the fact that these people and groups are working towards common goals even if they're only loosely organized. money and a rather small collection of mutual concerns keeps them all going in the same direction. is it "conspiracy" in any way that a U.S. prosecutor or judge would reckon conspiracies? honestly...I don't know. I feel like the law is lagging well behind political reality.

~Chara of Pnictogen

I mean...let's be honest here. eggbug's been seen around some pretty shady characters ~Chara

so I think I know why this only roused mild interest: I didn't really think it through at the time, simple as that. my intent was unclear and it's still unclear. what was I even trying to say? I admit that I've never felt entirely at home on Cohost, partly because of seeing that other people (especially Black and other marginalized users) were having a rough time, but more because I've never felt at home anywhere on line. I've gotten used to feeling detached, like I'm condemned to wander so I'd better get used to it. but I don't feel like it's fair to pin that sense of detached skepticism on eggbug.

I will say this about eggbug, though, in general. I think there's an inherent danger in any cutesy twee mascot for a commercial enterprise. Cohost was a business after all—for now, it's the only way to do anything sizeable in the United States, at least so far as I'm aware, without getting in trouble with the law—which means that eggbug has the nature of a corporate mascot, albeit a benign and charming one. But where's the line? When does "cute mascot" become "fake happy mask over a sinister scheme"? The Mickey Mouse line, if you like, or the Kyubey line. Curiously I think Toby Fox in Deltarune might be deliberately teasing this line with Ralsei, who seems both beloved and slightly evil, like he really might pull a gun on you at any moment.

~Chara of Pnictogen