the bastards' last stand

@DrawingEggen I have been re-reading 1984 and it has admittedly taken longer than needed. It was an assigned text in high school to which I never felt the need to return. It's better reading than I remembered. I think that I sometimes forget that our cannon is made up of literature that's not just thematically important, but also masterfully written. That Orwell knew what he was doing. The reason it's taking so long is that I find it so chilling that I need to periodically stop. It generates more dread than actual horror stories might. It's not entirely clear if I missed this in the first reading because of my own relative youth and naiveté or the shrinking distance between this moment in time and the society in the book. The erosion of the wall between our reality and the fictional reality of 1984 begins with the way that language is constructed to maintain ideological commitment and social control. The totalitarian state,  Oceania, created and recreates the language o...

A reed warbler raising a common cuckoo chick it hatched from an egg surreptitiously placed in its nest by the cuckoo's parent “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”―  George Orwell Parasite to Virus Brood parasites are species that manipulate other organisms to raise their young for them. Among the best known of brood parasites is the cuckoo.  A number of cuckoo species have specialized to lay their eggs among hosts whose eggs theirs mimic closely enough to provide protective camouflage. The eggs hatch sooner than host eggs, the chicks grow faster, and they often eject the eggs or hatchlings of the host from the nest. The cuckoo chicks begin to mimic the cries of the host young to encourage the fostering birds to keep up with their growth to the detriment of their own young. Following one of the first documented cases of computer espionage in the mid 80s, the concept of brood parasitism was applied to mal...

Great Britain has been called TERF Island by Trans Rights Activists (TRAs) for a number of years now. TERF means Trans Exclusionary Reactionary Feminist. It's used to refer to women who recognize that sex in humans is binary and immutable. They are accused of excluding males from being women, when it's reality that excludes males from being women. The word 'woman' means nothing if it's applied to both people born female and male. That's the nature of words. Few words continue to have meaning while simultaneously holding a concept and its opposite. British feminists were among the first to recognize the conflict between the rights of women and the desire of males to be considered women expressed as a right. As someone only waking to the madness behind gender ideology in the last few years it's due to the constancy of British women and a growing number of men fighting gender ideology. Reading the incredibly 'bigoted' open letter from "Queen TERF...

I began a Dictionary for the Modern Age. It was an attempt to record the absurdity of social justice discourse and its remove from material reality. It started as an amusement but I grew quickly unable to inure myself to how dumb, to be frank, the discourse is. If the point of language is to trade in reality and meaning, the point of social justice discourse is the exact opposite. It exists to obscure reality and remove meaning to substitute the desires of elites for the needs of vulnerable people. It has no defined concepts or fixed definitions. This is especially apparent with what is called trans rights activism.  It's entirely discursive, but you're not allowed to ask questions about it. It starts by premising that there is some right lost to people upon declaring themselves the opposite sex that must be reattained. False premises are always the basis of this ideology spread through logic defying assertions of faith like, transwomen are women. There is no right lost, the go...

I have been conducting ongoing conversations with people I've known for years on Facebook. To a person they insist that my positions are anti-trans or somehow harmful despite my insistence that I'm talking about an ideology and the connected attempts to make reality irrelevant. I'm going to excerpt the long email sent to me in order to respond to the misconceptions that frequently come up. I'm assuming without asking if I can share, because he offered to make the discourse public on Facebook. Frankly, I'm beyond frustrated and becoming angry with all of the people implying that I'm being bigoted, arrogant, and intellectually dishonest over something they've accepted without thought.  The irony is that they mean that I am being a heretic. They don't understand that their assertions are no different from religious declarations. I'm a heathen for not accepting gender (the soul) as an important thing. It doesn't matter that not one of them can define...

I've been thinking more about how meaningless Critical Race Theory is in the sense that proponents can't say what it entails. Instead they note that critics are being unfair with what they include to attack it. My writing plans have taken a somewhat unplanned detour. I had an experience which grows more disturbing with distance. I posted an image on Facebook from USA Today's Twitter account using intersex people to promote the idea that there are three sexes . I said the following: I wonder how much money needs to be invested in a campaign to change biological fact. There are two sexes because there are two reproductive strategies in humans-- impregnate or be impregnated. "Intersex" isn't a third sex it's an umbrella term for over 40 congenital conditions in males and females. It's incredibly dehumanizing to tell people they are not really men or women because of a medical condition. It's not clear how denying biological fact benefits society just ...

If transwomen are women, at what point does a person born male who identifies as a woman become a woman? What are the steps? Is it with surgery? Is it after a specific time on hormones? Is it just when he feels like it? What would a person born male and a person born female have in common that they can both be called women? If a person born male can be a woman, what does "woman" mean? Asking these questions is often portrayed as erasing trans people (meaningless) or transphobic. How do trans people benefit by redefining "woman" to include men? How are they hurt if we refuse? If someone is "hurt" by a reality they dislike or cannot accept how does it benefit society to pretend that our reality is different? It's a discourse for controlling discourse, and by extension for utilizing power to control our shared reality.  What makes this especially perverse is that people with clear psychological delusions are having their delusions affirmed. By delusion I ...