Salt City Sinner

posted on 4/26/2015 by the Salt City Sinner Content Warning: Post contains references to rape Believe it or not, your beloved Sinner generally prefers to give people the benefit of the doubt regarding their motives. This has become more difficult of late, given that the most recent strategy that dominant groups have been deploying is to drape themselves in the cloak of imagined victimhood, magically transforming Christians (who make up 80% of the population in the United States) into a persecuted minority , or white people (who have a virtual monopoly on political, economic, and cultural power) into beleaguered souls who need or deserve a “ white history month ” or “ National Association for the Advancement of White People .” As laughable as these examples are, this type of persecutor-in-persecuted-clothing shtick is becoming a force to be reckoned with in American politics. If this strategy and social media had both been around in the 1960s, your average Alabama diner owner wo...

posted on 4/23/2015 by the Salt City Sinner I suppose that you can look at the history of Sugar House Community Garden (or “Lettuce Bee Community Garden” – but I'll get to that in a moment) as a three-part story, structured in a manner familiar to anyone who has studied your average ancient empire; birth and rise, followed by a period of flourishing, followed by decline and/or death. Unlike your average ancient empire, SHCG left little behind in its aftermath. Instead of a gargantuan toppled statue in the desert ironically inviting travelers to “look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair,” our garden left behind the same pathetic fenced-in patch of nothing that we briefly brought to glorious life. Before Wasatch Community Gardens After Wasatch Community Gardens This was not our design or our preference, mind you, but the design and preference of Wasatch Community Gardens . Wasatch Community Gardens is a not-for-profit organization based in Salt Lake City tha...

posted on 4/19/2015 by the Salt City Sinner  The drunk pack of sports fans at the football game do it when they don “war paint” and headdresses and cheer for the crude, stereotypical “Indian” that is their team's mascot. That insufferable white college freshman does it when he shows up for class inexplicably clad in a dashiki. It's called cultural appropriation, and it's one of the favored pastimes of dominant groups in this, the poisoned fever dream of late-stage capitalism. Wikipedia has a pretty good working definition of the phenomenon, which it describes as “the adoption of elements of one culture by members of a different cultural group, especially if the adoption is without the consent of the originating culture, and when the appropriating group has historically oppressed members of the originating culture. ” This brings us to the modern Evangelical yen for Judaism, and the related (in a limited sense) topic of Messianic Judaism. Now, this post is specif...

posted on 4/15/15 by the Salt City Sinner Due to the total lack of media coverage, you probably haven't heard that, over the weekend, former Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton formally announced that she is running for the presidency. To celebrate this completely shocking and unforeseen development, I'd like to take the opportunity to address two points regarding Hillary Clinton: first, the question of Clinton and sexism (in the media and elsewhere), and second, the phenomenon of “Clinton nostalgia.” Never think for one second that sexism isn't a factor in opposition to Hillary Clinton's campaign. The Christian Right has been especially egregious in this department. The examples are so numerous they deserve their own post at this point, but as a representative sample enjoy this, via the Huffington Post : A female CEO in Texas has come under fire this week for saying a woman “shouldn’t be president” because of “different hormones” and “biblical sou...

posted on 4/9/2015 by the Salt City Sinner Joseph Farah, the Grand Wizard of Christian white nationalist web tabloid WND, is many things. A braggart , a hypocritical and paranoid conspiracy theorist, a self-proclaimed prophet , a “former left-wing radical,” take your pick. Like many on the left and the right, he also fails what a friend of mine calls “the ideological Turing test,” which said friend describes as a measure of the ability of a person to accurately describe the arguments and stances of someone they strongly disagree with on their opponent's terms. There's something about Farah I haven't figured out. He turns a tidy profit at WND through a publishing imprint, a magazine, DVDs (mostly Christian end-times gobbledegook), advertising at WND.com (mostly survivalist supplies and assorted weirdness), a truly impressive email list, which he regularly rents to the Republican Party for outreach purposes, and now even an end-times oriented 'Holy Land Cruise....

posted on 4/7/2015 by the Salt City Sinner The first time that I saw the future site of Sugar House Community Garden, I'll freely admit that I failed to see the potential. I had headed to Fairmont Park in Sugar House with my mom's little dog Charley to pay a visit to the ducks (Charley loves waterfowl). There, rotting in the spring sunlight right next to the park, was a large, fenced-in sheet of concrete, formerly tennis courts but now little more than a blighted, crumbing weed preserve. For a while in 2011, I took Charley to Fairmont a few times a week, and so it came to pass that I was ambling past the abandoned courts on the morning that something extraordinary took root.  I recognized at once the skeletal outlines of raised garden beds in the making. I walked Charley over to the festivities and offered to pitch in, which officially began my involvement with Sugar House Community Garden. UtahStories.com has a little background on the genesis of the ...

posted on 4/3/2015 by the Salt City Sinner On this Good Friday, as some celebrate through self-flagellation and others prepare for a Holy Saturday vigil or navigate the stations of the cross , lo, we have rolled away the stone that sealed the tomb where good, moral people everywhere hoped this bloggue would remain trapped forever. Wouldn't you know it, a miracle! The tomb is empty, and the glorious resurrection of Salt City Sinner has occurred! (Ignore the carefully dug and concealed trap door, spider hole, and escape tunnel – they have nothing to do with this Easter Miracle) As Salt Lake slouches inexorably toward the magical Saturday evening when the Easter Jesus creeps through the homes and yards of good Christian boys and girls to lay chocolate eggs that bring them delight and laughter, we bring you a sneak preview of what you can expect in the coming weeks from your favorite half-funny hellbound heathens. Coming Soon They Paved Paradise OR How I Learned ...