one of my father’s hindu colleagues was surprised that my family didn’t make everyone say a christian prayer before we sat down to eat dinner. we were like “….this is your house.” and she laughed and said that her christian friends “make” her pray all the time. like what the fuck. how fucking rude can you be to make the host pray to your god. you are in their fucking house.
I say this as a former Christian
Christians will deadass claim to be oppressed but feel comfortable and safe enough to:
Force non-Christians to pray to the Christian God in their own fucking homes
Go door-to-door to proselytize
Call people to proselytize
Take classes to proselytize (my mythology teacher actually dealt with this, and now has to include a warning on the first day of class)
Cross the fucking ocean to proselytize
Openly tell people they think they are going to Hell
Insist that their beliefs should influence the law
Get all pissy if someone says this isn’t a Christian nation, but a beautifully mixed one.
Have radio stations built around their religion
Have movies based on their religion
And fucking everything else
In short, Christian Supremacy needs to be addressed and religious imperialism stopped.
I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.
The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.
So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”
1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.
Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.
Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! Hewrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.
It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.
dude had guts, someone needs to update his Wikipedia page
man i wish coronavirus wasn’t happening and i could have a nice time at my favorite restaurants (sees a bunch of maga boomers having astroturfed public meltdowns about not being able to go to five guys burgers and fries) nevermind i dont care about eating out anymore
Thank you. It’s okay to mourn and miss those experiences privately. But when you go public with it and start demanding them, like a spoiled child throwing a tantrum, that’s when it’s a problem.
I miss getting my hair cut, i look like count olaf. But Im not freaking out and demanding hair dressers risk their lives so I can upkeep my pixie cut. Because im not an asshole.
remember when boomers kept saying we were too sensitive to survive an apocalypse and now that there is a literal apocalypse theyre throwing tantrums about not being able to get a burger
My favourite math fact is that 0.9999999.. is equal to 1. Exactly. Not approximately. Not as a rounded number. 0.9999 (recurring) is exactly 1.
Question. How the fuck does that work?
I tried explaining it here:
Here’s another perspective on why .999… repeating is exactly equal to 1.
For any two distinct real numbers, we can always find a rational number strictly between them, i.e. that rational number must be able to be expressed as a terminating decimal or a repeating decimal. To be clear, that rational number is strictly between the two values; it is not allowed to be equal to either.
Suppose k is a rational number strictly between 1 and 0.9999…. If this is possible, then, I can write k exactly as either a decimal with finite digits, or I can write k as a repeating decimal. The problem is, there are no decimals with finite digits between 1 and 0.999… , and there is no way to write a repeating decimal that is greater than 0.999… and still less than 1. Either way, a k strictly between 1 and 0.999… does not exist. The only way this can be true is if those two numbers are not actually distinct. That is to say, 1 = 0.999…..
i truly appreciate how math seems like it’s this infallible always-true only-one-answer thing, when in reality math is just like: