Jessica Price

I’ll post another recommendation to read this book.

It weaves the Satanic Panic, the rise of Televangelists, magical thinking, political Christianity, and ritualized child abuse by evangelicals into a coherent narrative that explains much of the last few decades.

Yikes, that’s exactly the binary thinking I’m criticizing here, and I talk a lot about how the AI obsession is a lack of distress tolerance for the messy business of dealing with other humans, and resentment that they are autonomous beings, but you can sub in “fictional characters” for AI.

But also, sometimes people who do awful things make art about confronting one’s own demons that’s worth learning from. Just because they lost their battle doesn’t mean you have to.

Did this art by someone who turned out to be some sort of supremacist make you feel superior? Did it make you feel justified in dismissing others as inferior?

That’s worth interrogating.

But that’s also retreating to safety you might not need. It’s worth asking what you loved, either because it forces you to deal with human complexity, or because you might learn something about yourself.

And I think it’s actually worth engaging more, and more deeply, with art that moved you, after you find out the artist did something awful.

It’s worth understanding *why* you loved it. It’s easy to treat it as radioactive, to flatten it and flatten the artist.

You don’t have to hate art that moves you because the artist did something awful.

I think you have a responsibility not to provide them with further profits, while they live, but buying more art is not the same as being moved by art, gaining value from it.

And the flipside of seeing little surges of monstrosity in ourselves and other “normal” people means seeing normality and insight and yes, the capacity to make worthy things, in “monsters.”

It’s necessary for understanding why America is where it is at this particular moment. It’s necessary for authentic relationships with other people and not just script-following. It’s necessary to see people and not projections.

Seeing this small impulse to hurt as akin to this greater one to torture. Not because most of us would actually kidnap and torture anyone, but because it is worth understanding, starting with self-examination, why any human would ever want to harm another human.

People think you’re soft when you insist on seeing humans and not monsters, but it’s not softness. It’s realism, and seeing humanity in “monsters” often requires seeing monstrosity in humans. It means seeing human behavior on a spectrum.

I’ve listened to so many true crime podcasts and I fall off all of them because the hosts inevitably want the world to be monsters, heroes, and victims, and can’t conceive of suffering, or mental incapacity, on the part of “monsters” and want to see punishment.

Because they know him and they love him and it isn’t the obvious violence they imagine and they know he is capable of love because he loves them.

He is not a monster, and thus can’t do monstrous things.

A lot of guys who want to be good guys have women in their lives who have been harmed by rape and it hurts them to see and so they say things like “I would beat anyone I found out was a rapist bloody.” And then they can’t see the way their brother coerces their sister-in-law.

Complete healing as opposed to scarring is understanding that both can be true simultaneously. Most survivors don’t get there, because the steadiest place from which to undo abuser gaslighting is “they were a monster and they didn’t love me.”

Our brains love binaries, as humans, so it feels like it has to be one or the other—they were a monster, or we loved each other. Either the abuse is excusable or the love was false.

You know, in your bones, this complexity if you have loved and been loved by someone who abused you.

It seems like there is no way forward except to either be gaslit by them (they loved me, so they cannot actually have abused me) or by yourself (the abuse was real, therefore the love was not).

The world isn’t divided into sinners and saints, and our brains seem to have as much trouble actually processing that as they do with very large numbers.

We say people are complex but we can’t actually deal with their complexity up close.

This is the same impulse that leads a lot of men to say they hate rapists and would kill any rapist they encountered, while being friends with rapists, or true crime podcast hosts to talk about murderers as monsters. (Brief thread)

I've been thinking about this impulse, when a beloved artist is revealed to be a crummy person, to go back and explain away the beloved art. 🧵

"actually his stuff was very Derivative and not Original" like, you don't have to do this. it is good for us all to sit with the cognitive dissonance that a very bad person can make very good art. it is good for us to work through the moral ramifications of that.

Dr Jordan B Peterson @jordanbpeterson Go to hell you woke Virtue-signaling race-baiting Anti-science postmodern neo-Marxist Clickbait disseminating Bastards Pop Base @PopBase • 12h Today is Elmo's birthday. He turns 3½ years old every year.

It's Elmo's birthday

man if i got beaten up by a bunch of random emo teens in Buda, Texas I think I'd never leave my house again

You should be ashamed of yourself if you’re still defending Noam Chomsky in 2026. Discard him in the regrettable dustbin of history where he belongs.

The best thing that came out of the last round of "self-immolation is righteous" discourse was finding out that one poster's husband was a Nazi

Re: last RT

PLS read Bree's thread about living with endo(metriosis) & medical science ignoring it.

My maternal grandmother, both her daughters, & all of their daughters had/have endo.

Mine was only confirmed bc my sister knew the surgeon & asked her to look when I had an emergency C-section.

So the issue here is the same as it is for many conservatives: He doesn’t consider anything he does to be “political” because he believes that all reasonable people already agree with him.

X is hiring a creative writing specialist at $40 an hour to make Grok better at writing and a true LOL at the qualifications

“Being right should be more important than being presentable” sounds to me like “I refuse to entertain the idea that my priorities are not the only ones that matter, & it bothers me greatly that other people also have priorities, inner lives, social embeddings, alternate intelligences, & free will.”

No. It means “being ‘right’ is highly contextual and if you don’t understand that ‘right’ usually has, at minimum, 6 channels and you’re rarely ‘right’ in all of them, people are less likely to care if you’re ‘right’ in one of them, and thinking that channel is the only one that matters = asshole.”