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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 13th, 2023

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  • I found out my mom had spent three decades of my life lying about who my biological father was.

    She has always spun some romantic bullshit story about a specific guy. Like I’m talking there was a whole ass story of her life leading up to my conception that she liked to tell me. A pretty fucked up story - she was a teenager, this guy was in his early twenties. But still, a mostly normal and consensual story barring the statuary aspect, not at all shocking where we live. He knocks her up, chickens out immediately, dumps her, etc. There was even a cathartic story about her being a then abandoned pregnant Sonic carhop, discovering the guy as a customer and throwing fries at his face. She describes my eyes and hair as his.

    I reach out to the guy as a teenager with help from family, who keep track of this guy throughout the years in case I’d want to ever make connection. I reach out, he denies that he’s my father. Well, sucks, but nothing too unexpected.

    As a lark, I get genetics testing kit one year. It’s on Amazon prime (back when that was a good deal and back before I realized how problematic that giving my DNA to a random company.)

    I take the test. A woman reaches out. My aunt. And she’s not the sister of my “father.”

    My biological father was a different adult man (mid twenties) who raped a teenager he met at a party. Even told me to my face that he hadn’t been interested in her, but more in her older sister.

    When I confronted her with this. It was a non reaction. It was “oh.” She’s told so many lies throughout her life, but this was finally the one she couldn’t bullshit her way out of. She lied to me for thirty years, and unlike any other lie she’s told, there‘s no “oh you’re just remembering it differently” or “I didn’t really mean that.”

    The most difficult thing is that maybe it was traumatic for her. Maybe it was violent. I’ve met him twice, and neither experience was really pleasant. He has a history. Maybe she did block it out, repress it in that Freudian way and did convince herself that some guy she had a crush on and her had some secret little tryst. Realizing maybe the hell of my childhood had an explanation - that she was trying to punish me, that she hated me as a symbol of rape. Can I forgive her for that?

    It’s just such a complicated and difficult thing to wrap my head around. Nothing about her as a person has ever made any sense.










  • If you are a veteran, I hope that if you believe in heaven that you realize that you’re going to hell… Because breaking the Commandments includes not murdering for any reason whatsoever including for your country.

    The Bible is pretty explicit that killing in warfare doesn’t count. The prohibition is specifically of murder. I’d ask if you were a Jehovah’s Witness, who do interpret the verse this way, but 99% of Christians and Jews would understand that commandment as only discussing killing out of warfare. You comment later that you are “playing to the Christian Reader” - this is something that absolutely would not work. (And why? Lemmy is like 90% atheist?)

    Also - you get that the vast majority of people who join the military never kill anyone right? Not every soldier goes to the front lines, hell, the majority don’t.

    Many people who join are young people who believe that they are actually protecting their country. Because, that’s what the military would ideally do. Yeah, in reality the US is a hegemon that does a lot of fucked up shit, but stupid 18 year olds don’t usually understand that. Someone whose body got fucked up because they believed that they were “protecting their country” because the media and their entire social world told them that should probably not be left in the cold.

    And yeah, student loans are fucked too. Making this a “people who went to college” versus “people who went to the military” thing is the absolute dead opposite of class consciousness, and counterproductive as shit. I’m surprised you aren’t an .ml troll.

    Edit:

    Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what should we do?” He said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages. — Luke 3:14










  • Islamic socialism is a huge thing. Why do you think the US backed the Shah in Iran? Who was the Shah imprisoning?

    The Koran absolutely forbids charging interest (which is why there is an entire alternate Islamic banking system) and one of the five pillars of Islam is zakat - giving money to the needy. Shariah explicitly demands forms of land redistribution and mandates zakat.

    If you read Qutb (literally wrote a book called Social Justice in Islam), you realize that there’s actually a substantial group of people who are very heavily inspired by Marx and Lenin, and also believe that apostates should be killed.