Salt City Sinner

posted on 1/23/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Crow! Nobody likes to eat it. For one thing, corvids are highly intelligent and social animals, and for another they taste awful (or so I’ve heard). That said, I’m a fellow who prides myself on my ability to admit when I’m wrong, and thus I present an instance (one of many, but we’ll tackle them one at a time) when I’ve been wrong. Mostly. The year was 2015 ! The newfangled “jazz music” craze was ripping up the airwaves, and women were wearing short skirts and voting! In actuality, 2015 only feels like 100 years ago, due to the horrific time distortion field we’ve been living in recently. Here’s what I had to say then about Senator Mark Madsen’s attempts to decriminalize the devil’s lettuce for medical use:   I will not argue for a single second that [2015’s failed legalization effort] isn't progress – it is. And Senator Mark Madsen's bill regarding medical marijuana only failed by a single vote.  …All of that as...

posted on 1/11/2019 by the Salt City Sinner “So…why Satan?” he asked me. It was a reasonable question – albeit a personal one. I am,after all, a Satanist . I’m not an evangelist, however, and people in the United States are socially conditioned to think of religion as an inherently expansionist, conquering influence. For example: even though Christians are instructed to “enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray” (Matthew 6:6) those rascals are obsessed with the spotlight – grabbing it, keeping it, brightening it. It’s why Evangelical Christians erect giant stonemonuments to their god on public land, why they   want to make your mind up for you on any number of subjects, because look at them (please, won’t you?), how good they are, don’t they know best? Even when I was a Christian, I was a Catholic. While Catholicism is certainly a public-facing faith that has no problem whatsoever exerting political pressure on the saved and unsaved...

posted on 1/2/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Hey gang! How was your New Years? Did you have fun getting arrested and beaten and maybe tased until you whizzed yourself and then locked in a box for a few days? What’s that you say? You dodged Utah’s shiny new .05 DUI law by calling a Lyft after having two drinks rather than chancing it? Well will you have a look at that, I guess the system works ! I did no drinking whatsoever on the dreaded night in question and went to bed at (if I remember correctly) 8 PM, because I am a wild man and a party animal. To me, annual New Year celebrations have all of the bad baggage of a birthday – the march of time, a grim reminder of mortality – with none of the fun. Maybe it’s my temperament, maybe it’s the time of year, I don’t know, but for me it’s just a bummer of a holiday. That said, the year ahead ought to prove interesting, and so I present to you my five predictions for 2019. Stand back as my listicles descend! April 1, 2019: ...

Illustration by Miguel Ángel posted on 12/16/2018 by the Salt City Sinner The Religious Education Series is has proved to be an interesting and welcome addition to life in Salt Lake City. Since 2017, Executive Director Megan Kennedy has presented a series of free public lectures on topics including religion, anthropology, and archaeology. On Saturday, RES (in conjunction with the Godless Rebelution Podcast , which sounds like a lot of fun based on the name) presented the seventh lecture in the series, “Delusions of the Gods: The Colonial Racism of Ancie1nt Aliens, Mormon Anthropology, & Other Pseudohistory.” Recordings of all of the RES lectures can be found here for free, which is mighty generous of them. Now, I was not in need of a debunking on this subject. I absolutely did not subscribe to the “ancient aliens” theory going in, and have long considered it to be both nonsense and not a particularly rich vein of nonsense at that (although I have a lingerin...

posted on 12/14/2018 by the Salt City Sinner I first wrote about Jerome “Dr. Dimples” Corsi almost a decade ago, in 2009. When he popped up in connection to the Mueller investigation it was, like so much of conservative politics these days, a little like watching a band I’d seen when they were small-time favorites finally make it big. There’s a feeling of pride, but also covetousness: “Hey, this weird conspiracy-minded corner of the right wing used to be my thing – now Rachel Maddow is smirking and chuckling about it on the MSNBCs!” Yes, it seems that Dr. Jerome may have finally flown too close to the sun. It’s one thing to lie to the readers of WND or the radio-signal-receiving dental fillings in the mouths of InfoWars fans, but lying to the FBI, it turns out, may – sometimes, maybe – actually have consequences in the real world! Dr. Dimples is primarily known for being the father of the Birther conspiracy theory, but he’s a lot crazier than just that distinction wo...

posted on 12/6/2018 by the Salt City Sinner A consistent theme present in many events from about 2008 until now can be summed up as “things as they have always been, but stripped of pretense and nicety.” Whether you’re talking about the racial politics of the GOP or Jerome Corsi admitting (on camera!) that a lie isn’t really a lie when an evangelical tells it to a heretic*, these are things that we’ve all known were true all along yet more-or-less mutually agreed to bury beneath a blanket of bullshit, nonsense, and euphemism. Ever so has it been, yea verily, in Zion. Anyone who hails from the land of Life Elevated knows that the LDS Church wields more cultural, political, and economic power than any other entity ever has (or probably will). Given our state’s history, the Church’s grip on Utah is understandable (if unconstitutional and colonialist) and has been the subject of much ink and many pixels from irritated, impotent nonbelievers such as myself. Having lived in...

posted on 11/29/2018 by the Salt City Sinner (You can find part one here ) Why does Robert Lifton’s Thought Reform matter? It was written in 1959, based on interviews conducted between 1954 and 1959, and first released in 1961. Is it still relevant? It is, for better and/or worse. “Better” because what Lifton documented – and what the Chinese Communist Party developed through experimentation with Stalin-era Soviet tactics – is a form of applied political psychology that to an extent works , and can be used for good or ill (like any other tool). Now, as Lifton himself has been very careful to point out, there are enormous caveats to what thought reform can achieve and on whom it is effective (for example, thought reform is a mixed bag at converting religious believers). Caveats or no caveats, its effectiveness means that some forms of thought reform-adjacent manipulation are more widely used in 2018 than you might think. Thought Reform Is Still Going O...