Less clothing doesn’t mean less oppression

We Westerners easily identify the clothes of other cultures as oppressive. And certainly, when dress-codes are enshrined in law and the non-compliance is punished with more than mere social ostracism, this is indeed true. But in many circumstances, this is not the case, and yet we identify this “other” clothing as oppressive, even going so far as to ban it, without seeing the irony of saying “Poor subjugated women, we’d better tell them what to wear”. And at the same time, we miss that our own culture has clothing rules that also serve to limit women, starting with the fact that most fashionable clothing is extremely uncomfortable and limits movement (I’m reminded of various actresses in dresses into which they had to be sown; or actresses wearing dresses in which they couldn’t sit down). I actually remember the idiotic uproar when there was some special edition barbie in muslim dress, and everybody suddenly whined about the oppressive clothing. As if teetering on the tips of her toes, and wearing clothes that would never permit a real woman any room for movement(if you bend a barbie at the waist, she will occasionally fall out of her western dresses, too), wasn’t already oppressive to begin with!

And the next person who tells me how horrible it is that those poor Muslim women have to go completely covered up in the summer heat will be dragged to Minneapolis on a Friday night in February, to watch women run around in open-toed heels, miniskirts and tank-tops in -20F/-29C weather (an experience very similar to what a friend of mine reported was standard in NY high-schools: you’ll wear “sexy” clothes, no matter how fucking cold it is; also, see women’s Halloween costumes, most of which are not designed for October weather anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon line) As much as I prefer the cold, I’d say the latter is much more likely to be uncomfortable and health-damaging than the former.

And then there’s high-heels, which have well known detrimental effects on health, but are still considered a requirement for femininity. It’s not foot-binding, but the difference is one of degree, not kind.

Anyway, my point is that it doesn’t matter whether women are pressured into wearing more or less, or whether they’re pressured by religion or some other social-pressure mechanism; as long as women are expected to wear certain things, and these things are restricting them, and not wearing them results in social punishment, it’s oppression. And it’s not just “the other” that oppresses with clothing; it’s us, too. We are not the height of enlightenment in this regard, not by a long shot. Especially if you also add economic oppression to this, since a proper “female uniform” costs a lot of money: almost all clothes are more expensive for women than for men, and women are expected to have more clothes (a man can get away with a single formal suit, but a women will earn scorn for always wearing the same fancy dress, or even the same work clothes too often).

The economic part of this has to do with classism, too though. I remember the ridicule heaped on Evo Morales for wearing his sweater all the time. And for what? It’s a fucking sweater, what’s so funny about it? well, it’s obviously that a sweater isn’t the proper uniform for the class of people he was meeting with, all of which tended to show up in formal wear (oh, and it was the same sweater over and over again, compounding the offense of lower-class appearance)

link dump

just some links to stuff that’s relevant to what I’ve been writing about:

• Example of non-voting democratic action, including the “the strident [insert minority here] are ruining it for everybody else!” canard.
• An environmental website that deals excellently with the local vs. global dilemma :-)
• A blogpost that demonstrates the crassly negative effects Toxic Masculinity can have on male-female interaction (AKA Toxic Masculinity ruins it for everyone)
• An article about first steps towards finding an antidote to Toxic Masculinity, and about problems with defining a masculinity that isn’t toxic

and on a completely unrelated note, my blogpost on sex and toxic masculinity is on the 2nd page of google search for toxic masculinity. I’m so awesome :-p

What’s in a name?

I’m currently reading a book which deals a lot with how words shape actions. It’s a bit like Orwell’s description of how the way words work in newspeak makes it impossible to even form seditious thoughts based on the language (since such thoughts are usually verbal rather than visual or mathematical or whatever). The first part of the book dealt with the way translation can change the meanings, and therefore the discussion, understanding, and application of concepts. Basically, all instances of “human rights” ended up being translated as “freedoms of individuals”, which isn’t anywhere near the same*. This narrowing of the meaning of human rights then affects what sort of things are considered within the purview of “fighting for human rights”, and it entirely excludes any claims to positive rights, as well as collective rights/freedoms.
Similar problems with the meaning of words are everywhere. The fight over the word “believe” should be pretty well known to everybody even remotely involved in the evo-creo wars, so is the meaning of the word “evolution”**; the “it’s colder here, therefore there is no Global Warming” nonsense; the hideous anti-abortion, anti-euthanasia, anti-disconnect-the-permanently-vegetative-and-the-braindead-from-life-support arguments hiding behind a ridiculously broad and factually meaningless meaning of the term “sanctity of human life”; etc.

Right now, I’m particularly interested in the way the words “politics” and “democracy” are thought of and used, and how they’ve become narrowed and hollowed out in very interesting but damaging ways.

Politics are defined by wikipedia broadly as “a process by which groups of people make collective decisions”, and in this broad definition they’re used to describe all sorts of interactions with others, about all sorts of issues, by all sorts of means, at all sorts of levels within a hierarchy/organization (see: “office politics”); but when it comes to the area from which the term originally came, i.e. issues of state and government, suddenly “politics” ends up being far narrower in meaning, and becomes almost inextricably linked to professional politicians and partisanship, thus creating the absurd notion of “apolitical” social engagement. This is the arena in which NGO’s, charities, community organizations, churches, scientific organizations, etc., as well as members of all of those are supposed to operate. On first glance, this seems like a good thing***, but in reality creating this fictional divide between “political” and “apolitical” social engagement results in a host of problems.
In the book I’m reading, for example, a charity that conducts “civil education” is described as absolutely obsessed with remaining “apolitical” even though they deal with issues of political engagement and decision-making. Because of this, their education attempts become worthless and meaningless, because they cannot address the issues that people actually want to know more about and learn to act about. They end up serving cookie-cutter speeches on highly abstract topics (like the Greek roots of democracy) which have no connection to the real lives and issues of the people who are receiving this education, because those issues are “political” and therefore cannot be addressed. A similar thing happens in American politics. Any entanglement with “politics” is seen as inherently negative (and as breaking the rules of society, by entering the arena of politics when it’s supposed to stay “apolitical”), and entanglement can simply mean having a point of view that closer resembles the stance of one political party on any given issue. And when “reality has a liberal bias”, reality itself becomes either vilified and discarded****, or it gets “balanced out” by a counter-factual view, just to avoid the appearance of taking sides and becoming “political”. Something similar happened with the stupid ACORN drama: simply because “voter registration drives” are something the Democrats support more than the Republicans, and because the people that were being registered were part of the demographic more likely to vote for Democrats, ACORN is being marginalized, vilified and attacked for having crossed the imaginary line between “apolitical” and “political”. And in an extra special case of vileness, the same people who jump on others for being “political” will engage in very similar things, but as long as they can hide them under the umbrella of something (in American society) undeniably “apolitical” and untouchable like religious freedom, they are considered safely “apolitical”. Something similar is happening with the Teabaggers who are claiming the umbrella of libertarian anti-politicism (ha!) to protect themselves from the “taint” they themselves see in those who engage in issues they oppose. It’s hypocritical, and extremely detrimental to real, honest political and social engagement.

Something very similar is happening to “democracy”. It’s supposed to be a political (as per original definition of political) system in which citizens govern their society themselves. One tool of democracy is a republican government, but it is not the only available tool, nor is a republican government the only kind of government a democratic society can have. Recently though, I have begun to notice that “democracy” is now being used almost exclusively to mean “a government you can vote for”. Voting in elections seems to have become the sole meaning of “democracy”. The crassest example of this I remember were the events in Honduras. There’s been an illegal coup followed by martial law and deconstruction of constitutional rights of the people. But the international community seemed not to care about that, and was fully pacified when the illegitimate government staged elections, and claimed that as a “return to democracy”. How absurd! There’s nothing democratic about the situation, but the symbols of democracy have now become its entirety: as long as people get to cast a vote, it counts as democracy. I noticed a similar effect in the USA when in a conversation about state-run healthcare it came up that the Californian government instituted something-or-other (I have only vague recollections of that conversation, sorry), which politicians then fucked up and stripped bare and it didn’t work, and that’s why government healthcare would be a bad idea. Someone from Europe then immediately answered with surprise why there were no protests, no boycotts, no calls for resignation, no outraged citizenry demanding that the situation be rectified. And indeed, why weren’t there? These are essential for a society to continue functioning democratically. But when democracy just means voting, then these other actions don’t occur to people, and in some cases are even seen as undemocratic (calls for resigning are seen like that, but since Americans also often confuse capitalism and democracy, actually democratic actions against businesses can also be seen as undemocratic and unAmerican).

Basically, when you reduce “democracy” to “politics”, you end up taking away a lot of tools for people to actively and meaningfully participate in their own societies, and create false, “balanced” realities that hinder people’s ability to know what to act on.

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*for example, the difference between “the freedom to receive legal counsel” and “the right to receive legal counsel”: the former only deals with the negatives, i.e. that you mustn’t be prevented from acquiring legal counsel; the latter goes further and deals also with the positives, i.e. not just not being hindered from acquiring counsel, but also being provided counsel when you cannot acquire it by your own means

**you know… differences between evolution and The Theory of Evolution, the misapplication of the word to describe the development of stars, the even worse misapplication of the word by creationists to describe All Science That Disagrees With My Faith and their consequent unwillingness to accept the very narrow and unspectacular meaning of the term (i.e. descent with modification), etc.

***an effect of the “ghettoization” of politics as the sole purview of professional politicians and political parties and their often nasty public battles; because of this, politics are seen as something dirty, corrupt, non-grassroots and entirely undesirable, from which it’s good to dissociate oneself

****best example is AGW: it’s science, so it’s supposed to be “apolitical”. But in reality there isn’t such a thing as apolitical, especially since this particular scientific is caused by human actions, and will need more human actions to be rectified. But this fake separation of issues into political and apolitical has resulted in a lose-lose situation in which the science can remain “pure” and “untainted” by politics by not drawing the necessary conclusions and thus failing to solve the problem; or it can commit the sin of becoming “political” by suggesting necessary actions, at which point it becomes tainted, motivated by political agendas, and just another political stance to be accepted or rejected at will.

Toxic Masculinity (part two)

Ok, so this is gonna be finally that essay on Toxic Masculinity and sex that I said I was gonna write.

Sex and Toxic Masculinity are an idiotically complex, convoluted and messy topic. This is because Manly Men are supposed to have lots of sex; in order to do that however, they have to be involved with those horribly deficient and nasty creatures called “women” (because having sex with men is what women do*, and is therefore feminine and therefore must be avoided at all costs by Manly Men). Prolonged exposure to these “women”, and being seen in their company, and worst of all enjoying their company could lead to ball-shrinkage and possible loss of penis, and therefore must be avoided at all costs. So, how do you have lots of sex with women, but still avoid being contaminated by their womenness?

The answer usually is to treat sex as something you take from and do to women, as opposed to something you do with and for them. Once women become the antagonists in the sex-game, sex not only stops being feminizing, but becomes actively masculinizing because it means having men “conquer” and “vanquish” women; when sex happens, it means the man won.

This has several effects on people. For one, the constant need to keep sex antagonistic requires a vast amount of toxic sludge being poured onto women, and relationships with them. Once upon a time, being married was considered a must for a gentlemen and properly established man. Now it’s a trap existing solely for the purpose of “taming” the man-beast, which men are taught to avoid. It still isn’t actually true that men don’t want relationships and commitment, but the culture teaches them that they aren’t supposed to want them, and in the most toxic environments are pressured into either avoiding them completely, or twisting them to their benefit (i.e. reducing the partner to a domestic slave and incubator either verbally or in fact; cheating; pretending that it’s not a relationship, but rather this crazed chick chasing after you).

Two, the interpretation that sex is antagonistic puts rape on a continuum with actual sex. When sex is not ever considered to be actually mutually consensual, but rather something that a man tricks or pressures a woman into doing(learning how to lower her defenses by various means is the premise of this nasty little book, which is a prime example of the antagonistic interpretation of sex), rape simply becomes the most extreme form of “getting sex from a woman”; and the concept of date rape becomes invisible altogether, since without the concept of true consensus, the only difference between sex and rape is physical force.

Three, toxic masculinity shapes the way women who grew up with it learn to interact with men, and with other women. This ranges from a form of self-hatred (similar to the self-hatred exhibited by black kids in the doll tests) and hatred of other women that causes some women to prefer being “one of the guys” rather than make friends with other women, to extreme territoriality in relationships (i.e. if your boyfriend tries to devalue you and your relationship by demeaning you and cheating on you, your only defense becomes keeping your man on a very short leash, and keeping all other women (except those “loyal” and “subordinate” to you) as far away as possible from him; remaining single is not an option), to accepting the role of evil harridan, because it is the only way you can get cooperation out of a toxic male**. IOW, toxic masculinity creates toxic femininity. And this in turn validates and strengthens Manly Men’s low opinion of women. A fucking vicious cycle.

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*no, I have no idea how lesbians figure into this, precisely.

**all of these are situations I got to personally witness in this glorious place called ND. Seems almost the only exception were the religious folks, where the guys treat the women like precious, pure and fragile dolls, and the women acted this angelic role out *facepalm*

Toxic Masculinity (Part One)

boiz r stoopid…

at least as far as birth control goes, apparently. I just read this*, and I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry.

What I’d really love to know is whether this is a uniquely American phenomenon, what with the scarce to nonexistent sex-ed in schools, and zero popular and widespread alternatives, other than rumors spread among teenagers themselves. I have the vague impression that my High-School buddies were significantly better informed than that, but really only because we got the information from the same source, passed around in class under the tables and read religiously during school breaks. And the information in there was actually pretty accurate and often rather explicit, to a level that wouldn’t even be legal in the U.S., nevermind “morally” acceptable. I’ve no idea if this is still the case, since the magazine spawned a bunch of clones, and the original is probably not as widely read as it used to be (plus, I’ve no flaming clue about the current content). But anyway, I’ve never gotten into the weird situations described in that article, but since I never actually, explicitly asked any guys about what they know about birth control, I don’t actually know if they were/are that clueless, too.

The closest Americans seem to have to a resource for teens on sex is Scareleteen, but that’s not as easily findable, shareable, and hidable from potentially too conservative parents as a magazine would be. And resources for adults are… porn and self-help books? the article seems to suggest many men know as adults about as little as they did as teens, so whatever adult resources there are, men don’t seem interested in them, or don’t know they exist.

So anyway, this made me think of a couple different but related arguments about sex and knowledge I’ve had over the years. A lot of the “porn skews how young people think sex is supposed to be like” and “models on the runway and in playboy skew what both men and women think women are supposed to look like” arguments seem dependent on the fact that porn/playboy/model-photos are the only sources of information for how women’s bodies actually look like “in the wild”, and for what sex is, how it’s done, and how to find out what’s fun. So, would a good antidote to the nasty peer and social pressure perpetrated on people by these media sources be more access to information and openness about nudity and sex? No one over 15 thinks romantic comedies are really how people get into relationships, because real relationships are everywhere and they are visible. I’m sure most kids have at least heard from various family members about how they met their significant other, even when they themselves haven’t yet gotten into a relationship.

Especially annoying and intriguing is the problem of young women misjudging how “bad” they themselves look, because of how the women on TV and in magazines look like**. I mean, that a guy may not see that many nude women “in the wild” is believable, but how is that possible with women themselves? Don’t they ever go swimming, or to the gym? or do American women not shower after swimming/going to the gym? I certainly know that the annual trip with my mom to the nude sauna improves my self-image immensely, since being surrounded by unselfconsciously naked women of all shapes, sizes and ages makes me less freaked out about myself. Certainly such exposure can only be good? Is such exposure possible in the States, and other conservative(ish) countries?

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*extra special stupid quote from article: “I feel like girls should tell people.”
dude, girls ARE people! :-/

**I’ve not the faintest clue to what degree the same problem happens with guys. I get the vague impression from snipplets of conversations that at least in the gay community it is, but other than that, I’m clueless. However, the solution would be pretty much the same, right?

Why not?!

a couple examples of how people don’t understand the concept of “happy right now” instead of “happily ever after”:

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conversation at boyfriend’s work, a couple weeks ago:

co-worker: “are you really moving to Fargo with your girlfriend next year?”
boyfriend: “yep.”
CW: “so, does that mean you guys are gonna get married?”
BF: “nope.”
CW: “why not?”
BF: “cuz we don’t want to.”
CW: “uh… ok. so are you guys gonna rent an apartment, or what?”
BF: “nope. I’m actually gonna try to buy a house there.”
CW: ?!?

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conversation yesterday at the coffee-shop, with a person I used to work with there*:

barista: “so how long have you and your boyfriend been together?
me: “about three years? no, about two an a half now.”
barista: “so, when are you guys gonna get married.”
me: “uh… probably not at all actually.”
barista: “why not?”
me: “why would we? there’s really no reason to.”
barista: . . .

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*hey, at least this time it wasn’t the Christian nurse at the OB/Gyn; now THAT was awkward.

Toxic Masculinity (Part One)

This was supposed to be a single post, but then that sex conversation broke out on Pharyngula’s Endless Thread, and issues from that kept invading this as I was writing it. Since it was all rather tangential to my point here, I cut those bits out and will make a separate post about toxic masculinity and sex some other day. This post is about toxic masculinity and environmentalism.

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Toxic Masculinity is one of those “patriarchy hurts men, too” things; the “patriarchy” part is the part where men are better than women; the “hurts men” part is where having your dangly bits between your legs rather than on your chest is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being a man. For that, you must under all circumstances and at all times avoid accumulating women-points by doing or saying things that are considered feminine; best is to do the opposite of “feminine”, which of course then would be “masculine”, and gives you man-points.

Now, what precisely is considered feminine (and therefore having its opposite considered masculine) is almost completely arbitrary, but it’s one hell of a long list. It starts at such relatively harmless things as peeing while sitting down, but it also includes things that have real consequences to men (hence the “hurts men, too” part), like the weird belief that going to the doctor is “girly” unless you’re bleeding to death (and even then, you’d probably get extra man-points if you just sew your wound shut with spiderwire), so men miss out on a lot of preventive care because it’s not manly, and they end up suffering health consequences. This goes double for mental health; men are still more likely than women to commit suicide, and toxic masculinity is a main reason for that.

Toxic Masculinity has other, broader effects as well. Something I hadn’t much considered before, but am starting to notice more because it touches on issues I find important, is that it affects how far and how fast progressive changes to society can be advanced. Toxic masculinity seems always at the forefront of every imaginable backlash to progressive politics, most obviously of course in terms of women’s and LGBT rights (because they clash with the very basis of patriarchal thinking). But it also clashes with efforts to become more environmentally sustainable.

I’ve recently read this article from my free monthly trial of Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture (because I’m dirt-poor, and can’t afford subscriptions to these kinds of things :-p ) about meat consumption and masculinity. It talks about three commercials (this and this, and a third one I couldn’t find on youtube) which show manhood attacked by “chickfood”, i.e. small portions, veggies, tofu, et cetera. “Chickfood” stands in contrast to “manfood”, which in the first commercial are giant slabs of red meat, and in the second one it’s a ginormous, fatty burger. Now, why precisely healthy food is chickfood I don’t know (it’s probably some weird hunter-gatherer pretension where meat=manly, greenery=womanly), but it being “chickfood” means men must avoid it in order to avoid turning into girly-men. Now, the first problem is simply that this manly food is unhealthy, so being forced by the rules of toxic masculinity to eat it or else turn into a girl is already bad for men, on an individual level. On a societal level though, this also means that shifting away from highly processed foods, giant slabs of red meat and other highly inefficient forms of food threatens toxic masculinity, and as such is being actively hindered by this “eating less meat will turn you into a girl” peer-pressure/backlash. At the same time, the words “sustainable” and “organic”, and “vegetarian” are considered essential chickfood labels. And god forbid you actually go to a farmer’s market! On a Saturday morning, when every self-respecting manly man is recovering from a proper hangover!

And the same goes for transportation: the humvee AKA Hummer is most “manly” vehicle; a Honda Civic or a Toyota Prius already makes you pretty girly; a bicycle turns you immediately into a “bike fag”. And for saving electricity (what sort of man doesn’t have a ginormous entertainment center?! or wears a sweater, like that girly-man Carter?!), and for recycling, and for recreation (ATVs are manlier than biking and hiking), and for a whole bunch of other things.

So, the big question is: how do you move forward in creating a healthier, more sustainable society when men are being told that doing so will make their penis fall off?

Toxic Masculinity (part two)

short thoughts

1)There is only one reality. Really. It may be very complex, or hard to understand, or not yet fully understood so that there’s competing and incomplete ideas about it. But really, in the end, there is only one version of it. There’s no such thing as “this is truth for me”. reality just does not work that way. And me saying so does not make me a fascist or a fundamentalist or a bigot. If you’re wrong; learn something from it, don’t go running to mommy because you think I’m being mean to you :-/

2)I’ve finally figured out why, despite probably not having synesthesia, numbers have colors for me: d’oh!. Except that my 4s and 7′s are greenish, not pink/purple. hmm….

3)I watched “Invention of Lying” the other day. funny idea, but it bugged me to no end that for some reason the movie assumes that being always honest makes people shallow and coldhearted and calculating. If you can’t lie, even by omission, then you can’t lie to yourself either, so “social conventions” wouldn’t work, because people would honestly say what bull it all is. And therefore she would have never picked the snooty hot guy over the nice dorky one. She would have told him “you’re hot and I want your babies. But you’re boring and I don’t like you. So, let’s make some babies, and then get lost, please.” That completely ruined what could have been a good movie otherwise.

4)there was something else I was gonna write, but I forgot what. I distinctly remember there being four things I was gonna write about. Crap. Note to self: make more notes to self on paper.

Local vs. Global

Lately, I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about global (top-down) governance versus local (bottom-up, sort of) governance.

Most of it came from reading about the negative effects of the top-down “aid” aimed at developing countries/disadvantaged groups. A lot of it is basically a bunch of privileged people waltzing in and declaring they’re going to do something or other for the disadvantaged group, “for their own good”, whether they really want it or not. The most absurd and blatant examples are boarding schools for Native kids, to expunge their own cultures from them and turn them into little white-people-clones; and wars of aggression under the banner of “democratization”. But other things fall into that category, too: pretty much everything from large national projects that have a negative impact on local population (China being the best known example of this, with their massive dam projects; but they’re not the only ones doing it), to aid programs in the name of some abstraction or another (“democracy”, “freedom”, etc.) that ignore the uniqueness of the situation on the ground and the actual needs of the people that are supposedly being helped, especially the sort of stuff done by IMF and the World Bank, which destroys local economies in the pursuit of free markets, free trade, etc. So, yeah, I totally see how local self-determination, and local decision-making about how, when, where, and what kind of development should take place, and what kind of rules make sense, etc. are essential, and more suited to getting things right than oblivious top-down “helping” and establishment of what’s good, bad, useful, harmful, etc. Locals usually really do know better how to improve and run their own lives and what precisely they need and want.

On the other hand, Jim Crow. Pretty much all of the civil rights battles in the US were settled on the national level, by Supreme Court decisions. So, definitely top-down, definitely “impinging on states rights”, definitely not letting any sort of local self-determination happen. The same goes for legalization of abortion, and it seems to me the same thing will be necessary to finally settle the same-sex marriage debate. And this handling of it is good. It would have been absurd and inhumane to wait until the South would have deigned to desegregate itself. It is absurd that people are voting on the basic right of marriage for others, state by state, and some states aren’t even recognizing the marriages performed in other states, even though the law says that contracts from one state must be considered valid in others. Similarly, the issue of a national school curriculum is one of not letting provincialism take over education boards and school boards and therefore stuff creationism and other dreck like that into schools, thus disadvantaging kids for the future. Or the issues with local court systems being abused by nepotism or, again, the sort of strong in-group/out-group thinking that results in people who are different being abused by the law; or even the question of those New York “Justice Courts”, Ed Brayton was writing about. I want State and Federal oversight over these things, and national rules of how to run them. I also want a nation-wide healthcare with public option, and I don’t give a flying fig whether some state, or some county, or some town, might actually produce a majority that doesn’t want it and doesn’t feel like they need it.

And above that, there’s the international level. The real global level. We don’t even have much at that level, but it’s becoming very obvious to me that something is needed: to prosecute those that break international laws, and do so thoroughly and equitably (i.e. not according to the power and wealth of the perpetrators. American breakers of the Geneva Conventions shouldn’t be treated any different than African ones, just because one of them has all the guns); to have a source of law above the multinational corporations, simply because at the moment, they are literally above the law, since they operate above the national level; to be able to coordinate and enforce globally needed actions, most notably about Climate Change, but also about resource depletion and other problems that concern the whole world, because otherwise we just have to deal with the Tragedy of the Commons, where the thing that’s rational for each nation to do is slowly destroying us as a whole.

Soooo…. yeah. I’ve not the faintest clue how to reconcile those. How do I support local self-determination and self-governance on the one hand, but the banishment of creationism even from schools in creationist communities on the other? How do I support “local people know best what’s good for their community” without running into the Tragedy of the Commons, when the rational and understandable needs of these communities are killing the larger community? How do I support the right for people to determine themselves how to run their village/town/county/state/nation on the one hand, but at the same time feel justified to tell them that no, they don’t get to ban abortion, even if it’s “against their values” to have legal abortion?

This shit is giving me cognitive dissonance and a massive headache. I’m hoping that learning more about it will help me resolve these issues, but so far it ain’t looking good.

I have a blog

I actually had this spot for a while, I just wasn’t using it for anything. I still probably won’t use it for much, but lately, every time I try reading a book, I instead end up with these mind-cluttering monologues that distract from reading. I’m sort of hoping dumping them on here will declutter my head so I can actually concentrate on my reading. Because right now, it takes me over a month to read a single book. At that rate, I don’t even remember what I’m reading, and will never get through my reading list, either.

So. Next time I go reading and end up with a monologue, i’ll write it down and post it here, and then hopefully it’ll go away and I can finish reading in peace.