Thought Criminal, My Favorite Liberal Blogger

Read Thought Criminal's blog.

I'm a self-described moderate. I even leaned conservative for a while. So why do I enjoy reading a blog by someone who's so far left he considers Obama a moderate sellout? Lots of reasons.

I found him after I saw a link to an Alternet article bashing Christians. I wanted to see if anyone else thought Alternet and the like had an anti-Christian bias, and I found his blog. He totally agrees. I realized pretty fast that 1) he's very, very far left and 2) he would accept someone like me into the liberal fold. He says that the secularization of the left is the worst thing that could happen to the left. As he wrote on this post:

I have absolutely no idea who most of the people who read my blog are, I do know that several hundred people read it every week if not every day. If your accusation is correct and they're all creationists, I can't say that I consider it to be a problem. If they want to read what is said here, maybe they'll learn that they don't have as much to fear from real liberals as they're led to by the atheist pseudo-liberals. ... If any evangelical or fundamentalist or creationist reads me saying that seriously considers it, I'm not unhappy to have written it. They have the same right to my consideration as anyone else who does me the honor of reading what I write.

I may have severed ties with evangelicalism since then, but I still believe similar to evangelicalism, I was an evangelical at the time he wrote that, and it means a lot to me. Most of the left won't give me the time of day. He explicitly said that he'll allow people who are far more fundamentalist than me to listen to him. Even creationists, the ultimate left-wing bogeymen.

The guy's a brilliant thinker, not afraid to think way outside the box. Also, he trashes the bad parts of the left as much as he trashes the right. Keep in mind this is someone who calls all Republicans fascists. He makes cultural conservatives like me feel more at home with liberal ideas. He's far from a cultural conservative himself, but he doesn't like a lot of the cultural liberal rallying points. He represents a left wing that wants to include everyone instead of one based on mocking rural Southern Christians like me. It's the left of Martin Luther King Jr., not the left of Seth MacFarlane. He often uses the phrases "pseudo-religious right" for the modern right and "pseudo-left" for the modern Seth MacFarlane-type left. I'd love to meet him someday and talk about life, politics, music, Christianity, whatever.

He also has an army of trolls. I won't mention their names, but one of them is like the platonic opposite of me. A "rock music critic" who hates Christians, rural people, and progressive rock. I'll bet he hates cats and pineapple salsa too. The sad thing is there's way more of him on the left than there are people like Thought Criminal. How I wish it was the other way around. Thought Criminal's pretty angry, so a lot of his posts are responses to hate mail. I kind of wish he'd ban the trolls, but on the other hand some of his best posts started as hate mail.

I'll openly admit that his blog has pushed me further to the left. He got me more comfortable with the idea of voting for Hillary this year, when I was very uncomfortable with it at first. You should read him too. Here's an intriguing place to start, a series of posts critical of famous skeptic James Randi. (Who I'd never heard of before his blog, but I don't run in the same circles either.) Or try this post, Alternet Belongs On The Southern Poverty Law Center's Hate Group Watch List, which compares some Alternet writers to the American Family Association. I don't know if he'd like much of what's on my blog, but I like a lot of what's on his blog, even when I don't agree with it. If Thought Criminal says something, I listen and I consider the idea.

I'm back after four years

So I let this blog lapse after a while. I may disable comments or I may not. I don't know. In the past four years I've gotten exactly one comment, so I probably will. For years I thought this blog was too angry and negative and I got ashamed of it. Then the election from hell hit and I got angrier and angrier. I decided I needed to blog again, then I remembered I had this old angry blog lying around, so I'm gonna revive it!

Some big changes:

• I got more conservative in the pre-Trump sense. In 2015 I was ready to vote Republican. Then the Antichrist (Donald Trump) hit and destroyed everything good on the right. Now I'm politically homeless. I would move further to the left again, but I despise the left almost as much as I despise the alt-right shitheads.
• I have a girlfriend now. So I'm going to post about some things I hid from everyone before. I didn't want to turn off single women by talking about some things. I'll ask her about the posts first to make sure she's fine with them.
• I let myself say "fuck" on here now because some things, like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, are hard to describe without the word "fuck".
• I quit identifying as "evangelical Christian" after the election because evangelicalism is apostate. I still believe the same. I still believe that Jesus saved me from my sins, that the Bible is inspired by God, and that Protestants are generally right. I just think evangelicalism has lost its mind completely. I still want to be the best Christian I can. I suck at it horribly of course. I have a bad temper and I hate it. Plus a lot of people would doubt my salvation because I say "fuck" and "shit" and other bad words. (Fact: I never used a swear word until I was 19.)
• I also lost any respect for the "reason logic fact science evolution fuck" militant atheist crowd. People like Bill Maher, PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins, etc. I can't even read Neil DeGrasse Tyson any more without responding "reason logic fact science evolution fuck" because THAT'S ALL THEY SAY. I wish the militant atheists supported Trump and the evangelicals were against him. Atheists face prejudice, so I want to make it clear that most atheists are fine with me, even if most of them supported Bernie Sanders (the substitute God for secular America). It's the minority of annoying ones I'll go after.
• I quit caring if I offend people or not.
• I said nice things about the Occupy movement? Seriously?!?! Those people are the Tea Party of the left. Those people got us Bernie fucking Sanders, the second worst major candidate in recent memory.

Expect me to bitch about just about everything wrong with modern American culture. Don't expect too many answers here. I don't know if there are any, and if there are, nobody's listening anyway.

Comments!

I enabled comments on new posts now. I have to enable them on the old posts by hand. There's still some I don't want comments on, but I decided there's no point in not having comments when half of my posts start discussions with my friends anyway. I am a sellout.

Positive stuff?

I want to write more positive stuff. It's hard! Being negative is easy. Being positive is hard. It's easy to bash people and hard to offer solutions. I'm good at bashing people but I never have the answers.

I used to be more positive than I am now. Then I hit my twenties. Most people are jerks in their twenties. Teenagers believe the world can get better. Twentysomethings believe everything sucks and we're screwed. I know teenagers who are so positive about the world. I fear for them. They'll get out in the real world.

Here's an example: A college student decides he wants to make a difference in the world. He's a political liberal with plenty of money. He's part of a "mainline" Christian denomination, the Presbylutherans or something. He's a straight white guy but he's aware of his privilege. He wants to change the world! He wants to end poverty around the world. And the Democrats will do it! If it wasn't for those Republicans the world would be a better place. He won't consider the Republican view on anything. Despite his middle class background, he identifies with the "working class" and their struggles. He graduates from college having never met more than a few working class people. Then...

The economy sucks so he gets a low-paying part-time job. That's all he can afford. He still lives with his parents. His co-workers, most of whom are "working class", look down on him for being from a well-off family. They think he's a snob, which he may be. He's mad at them for voting Republican, shopping at Wal-Mart, driving gas guzzlers, etc. like Stuff White People Like wrote about. They hate him for being holier-than-thou and not enough of a Real Man. Eventually he realizes he doesn't know jack about the world and stops caring. He gives up all political views and barely holds on to his religion. It's easy to have convictions when they're not tested.

That example was not me, but I based it loosely on my experiences. The people at my jobs have always been nice to me regardless of social class. I grew up with very little money. I was a liberal in college but I grew up super-conservative.

I need to be less prejudiced against the working class. There are lots of awesome working-class people. But working-class culture is anti-intellectual. Something your average college Marxist will never admit, because Working Class = Good and Middle Class = Bad. I grew up "working class". Poor people aren't stupid or inferior but the culture tries to keep them that way.

See? I want to be positive, but when I try, I can't! The world's a horrible place and I'm convinced it won't get better. I'm also convinced it won't get any worse.

FIRST POST

Welcome to my new blog, Will of the Majority. The name's ironic: I'm in all the majority groups but I never have majority opinions. This blog doesn't reflect the will of anyone but me. Plus nobody's gonna grab the name for a hate blog.

About me:
1. I'm a Protestant Christian.
2. I'm moderate in politics. I hate the right wing and the left wing equally. I respect libertarians more but I disagree with them a lot.
3. I'm a straight white guy so I don't deal with prejudice much.
4. I live in Mississippi. This alters how I see things.
5. I care about people who are different from me, unlike most of humanity.

Some ground rules:
1. No comments. I don't have the patience to deal with them. I won't change your mind and you won't change mine so there's no point.
2. I post about whatever I want to. I won't post about my personal life.
3. Most of my posts on serious topics are halfway between serious and silly.
4. There will be occasional swearing. If you don't like it, don't read it. I'll avoid anything too bad but anything else is fair game.

Why don't I use my real name? I don't want to. I don't want my real name attached to the blog. A lot of my friends know about the blog already so that's not an issue.

EDIT: I enabled comments. I'm a sellout.