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Arthur Chu Profile picture
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21 Jan, 6 tweets, 2 min read
"Mainstream" evangelicalism is always teetering on the edge of falling into some kind of cult movement -- local or global, big or small -- at any given moment

People outside have no fucking idea how common this actually is and people inside are disturbingly numb to it
Still remember listening to music with friends in high school who were like "Ah yeah I used to have a whole Metallica collection on vinyl before we burned it all in that bonfire three years ago"

Like that's just... a thing that happens, like bad weather
Sometimes you get in a car accident, sometimes an electrical fire breaks out in your house, sometimes a traveling preacher comes through and gets everyone all hyped up about how they need to purge all secular culture from their lives to get right with God

You get used to it
Even "normal" evangelicals talk about periodic "revivals" as a positive thing, wax lyrical about a "New Great Awakening" bringing spirituality and religious passion back to America

Even though every single one of these that happens has some element that's utterly fucking batshit
Still remember talking to my mom about this bullshit swallowing up my former church in California back in 2008

The usual fare -- glossolalia, faith healing, resurrection, massive fundraising spike, rampant sexual abuse

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeland_…
What really bugged me about this particular one is just how obvious and tawdry this was

Todd Bentley wasn't even, like, good at selling the grift

He was like this sleazy con artist out of Central Casting

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More from @arthur_affect

Arthur Chu Profile picture
20 Jan
A Poem

Sometimes you have to jump out of the plane
It's the opposite of what they train you to do

Everything is designed to keep you in the plane

You're strapped in tight, the door is locked and barred, and every move toward jumping out trips a dozen shrieking alarms
And the wind is wild and howling and rabid, clutching and groping at you like an animal

And the ground spins dizzy below you, and the empty sky yawns hungry around you, and there's no one here to tell you you're doing the right thing

But you still have to jump from the plane
Read 25 tweets
Arthur Chu Profile picture
18 Jan
Dad under investigation from the FBI for insurrection threatens his own children with a gun to try to keep them from turning him in

Gets turned in
Okay so the whole "children informing on parents" stuff has become a right-wing outrage meme, and I gotta say

If you intend to call on bonds of loyalty and love to keep yourself out of trouble, you also need to not threaten lethal violence

You don't get to use both approaches
Like, I think you *shouldn't* threaten to kill your kids in general, because that's, you know, bad karma

But while some abusive dads may have completely normalized this kind of relationship with their kids, *springing* the death threats on them in a panic is just bad tactics
Read 7 tweets
Arthur Chu Profile picture
18 Jan
"Meaning" and "community" are extremely loaded terms, especially because a ton of the essence of fash ideology is bashing other people's definition of meaning and community as fake/degenerate/pathetic/childish/effeminate/gross/weird/stupid
The red-light districts of Weimar Berlin WERE a nexus of meaning and community, and the Nazis tore it all up and burned it all down because it was the WRONG KIND of meaning and community
Of course the world sucks and people are unhappy

What I am deeply suspicious of is arguments that everyone is less happy than they would've been in the Good Old Days, and gosh if we want people to be happy we should import some of those Good Old Days values into modern times
Read 5 tweets
Arthur Chu Profile picture
16 Jan
Yeah I want to be clear I do not think this in and of itself was a valid justification for picking Biden in the primary

But hoooooly shit how stirred up would these people be if it were Harris actually becoming President -- or Warren, or Sanders
That old joke about the old Jewish guy reading Nazi newspapers because "In these papers we're always winning" resonates with me a lot these days

I get my hope from blackpilled Pepes whining about how "Joe Biden's presidency will irreversibly put us on the path to socialism"
"Sleepy Joe is just a figurehead! He's a puppet for that foreign agent KaMAla, who only pretended to be a law-and-order DA until she could get the chance to put her Marxist professor father's ideas into action!"

Yeah, that's it baby, you know just what to say, keep going
Read 4 tweets
Arthur Chu Profile picture
14 Jan
I had a thread once about how if you listen to the lyrics of the song "Day-O" they're a horribly depressing description of a truly horrible job

Which means that associating it with tourists on vacation at a resort is kind of wildly perverse
(The song is from the POV of dock workers loading the bananas for shipping, hence the subtitle "The Banana Boat Song"

So it's not technically a "sea shanty" but it's shanty-adjacent)
Seriously, one of the verses of the song is about how when you're exhausted at the end of your shift and tipsy because you've had a little nip to take the edge off is the perfect time for a tarantula to ambush you
Read 5 tweets
Arthur Chu Profile picture
14 Jan
I'm sitting here weighing the idea that you could get rid of a lot of what's toxic about the word "working-class" (as well as misleading, hypocritical, inconsistent, etc.) in ordinary discourse by just committing to saying "poor" instead
Yes I know that in Marxist theory etc. it has a specific meaning

I'm saying that meaning has been so messed up by the way people use it and bicker over it that outside of an academic context, "poor" works much better
It's just really grating hearing about "the working class" to refer to people who own giant ranch houses and huge pickup trucks and a whole arsenal and so forth, and who turn out to own businesses and have employees

Over and over and over again
Read 7 tweets

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