• The Onion just published a brilliant joke about the absentee Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, but I’m not sure the folks there realize how brilliant that joke is.
It’s one of their cut-line-only one-panel gags, a photo of Johnson with the text: Mike Johnson: “My Christian Faith Is More About Not Jacking Off Than Feeding The Poor.”
The joke lands because Johnson’s peculiar public piety has centered on his flamboyant prudery — particularly his obsessive measures to avoid the temptations of internet porn. And at the very same time this extravagantly Very Christian man has happily complied with the dismantling of most humanitarian foreign aid and the denial of SNAP benefits to more than 40 million poor families here in America.
Judged by his words and his actions, and by the outcome of his words and his actions, Mike Johnson’s Christian faith really is much, much more about “not jacking off” than about feeding the poor.
The Onion writers clearly understand this about Johnson, and correctly see it as evidence of what a weird little man he is and how twisted and strange his religious obsession with “Jesus is watching and Jesus wants, above all else, to make sure I never touch my bad parts” is.
But I’m not sure those writers fully appreciate that they’ve written an accurate summary not just of this one weird individual, but of the overwhelming character of white evangelical discipleship and white evangelical devotion, practice, hermeneutics, orthodoxy, orthopraxy, spirituality, piety, ethics, and soteriology.
All of that — all of it — can be accurately summarized as “More About Not Jacking Off Than Feeding The Poor.”
And I don’t even mean in some generalized vague sense that this form of Christian faith tends to prioritize personal purity or personal holiness above “social justice” or that it suffers from retaining some Neo-Platonic notions of the evils of the material world or anything like that.
I mean that it is very specifically and very particularly about “Not Jacking Off.” I mean that its first and greatest commandment is this: Do not masturbate. And the second is like unto it: Do not do anything that might make you more likely to masturbate.
The writers at The Onion realize they’ve written a good short gag that roasts Speaker Mike Johnson. They don’t realize they’ve also written a 9-word summary for everything I learned in four years of evangelical youth group.
• Here’s a 12-year-old post from the Frantz Fanon Blog interviewing the author and academic Mahmood Mamdani. This interview is bouncing around social media now partly because Mamdani’s son, Zohran Mamdani, was just elected mayor of New York City in a giddy landslide, but mainly because of this truly amazing description of how he was first introduced to the work of Karl Marx as a college student in 1962.
After his involvement in a SNCC protest, two FBI agents came to his dorm room to interview him:
MM: Two or three weeks later, I was in my room. There was a knock at the door. Two gentlemen in trench coats and hats said, “FBI.” I thought, “Wow, just like on television.” They sat down. They were there to find out why I had gone … They wanted to know who had influenced me. After one hour of probing, the guy said, “Do you like Marx?”
I said, “I haven’t met him.”
Guy said, “No, no, he’s dead.”
“Wow, what happened?”
“No, no, he died long ago.”
I thought the guy Marx had just died. So then, “Why are you asking me if he died long ago?”
“No, he wrote a lot. He wrote that poor people should not be poor.”
I said, “Sounds amazing.”
I’m giving you a sense of how naïve I was. After they left, I went to the library to look for Marx. So that was my introduction to Karl Marx.
BS: The FBI.
MM: The FBI. Then, of course, I took a class on Marx. …
• John Scalzi test-runs Elon Musk’s conservative A.I. encyclopedia and finds that partisan auto-fill is maybe not the most reliable source of information:
Now, here’s the thing: I am me, and thus, am the definitive expert on me, and I am here to tell you that if you were to rely on the Grokipedia article about me for reference, you would get several things wrong, some things trivial and some others rather less so. If Grokipedia is getting things about me wrong, what else is it getting wrong in other articles, where I do not have the same level of domain knowledge? I can’t trust it to be accurate about me, so how can I trust it to be accurate about any other thing? The answer is, I can’t. Again, it’s put together by an LLM, and LLMs, by their nature, get things wrong.
• “In this life, things are much harder than the afterworld …” Brook Wilensky-Lanford has some context and comments on our aging, ailing president’s increasing obsession with “getting to heaven.”
• The title for this post comes from the one Chumbawamba song that everybody knows. But instead of that, let’s enjoy a Chumawamba song that everyone should know, because they really have been coming out of the woodwork lately.
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