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Archive for the ‘Words’ Category

Tweetledee

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, Words, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 22, 2023| Leave a Comment »

 

 

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Summertweets, and the Livin’ is Easy

Posted in Miscellaneous, Philosophy, Tyranny, Words, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 21, 2023| Leave a Comment »

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Whores’ Day 2023

Posted in Holidays, Perception, Philosophy, Words, tagged , , , , , on June 2, 2023| 2 Comments »

Today is International Whores’ Day.  It is not “Sex Worker Day”; that is March 3rd.  Today is a day to shamelessly celebrate our shameless history, not a day for sanitized words or concepts; it is a day to fight society’s attempts (via law and police violence) to sanitize the wilder, unrulier, more chthonic aspects of sex.  This is a day for sexual outlaws, not well-behaved “workers”; it is a day to celebrate the triumphs of criminalized human beings against a society that would rather we didn’t exist.  It is a day to oppose censorship, not to engage in self-censorship; a day to honor a means of survival that predates laws and governments by eons; and a day to celebrate a power which will always defeat even the most pernicious attempts to domesticate it.

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Library

Posted in Biography, Miscellaneous, Words, tagged , , on April 20, 2023| 6 Comments »

Since I built my bookshelves three years ago, a number of readers have expressed a desire to be able to peruse their contents.  Then earlier this month, one of my Twitter readers specifically requested I provide some means of doing so, and I realized I could simply take pictures of each shelf, because cell-phone pictures are now high enough resolution to make out the titles.  So here you go; most of the interruptions from alphabetical order are due to the bottom shelves being used for oversized books, though I did notice a few where visitors had apparently taken books down to look at them and then stuck them back in some random place.  This collection is mostly mine, but some are Grace’s and I don’t know where others came from.  Also, there are some books floating around on my nightstand or whatever, and there are several shelves full in my Seattle incall.  So if you don’t see a book you yourself sent me, it’s very likely in Seattle because a disproportionate number of those are sexwork-related.  Oh, and if any of you have some personal objection to some book you see here, I hope you’ll show better sense than to complain about it.


























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Tweets from the Darkside

Posted in Miscellaneous, Philosophy, Words, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 23, 2023| 2 Comments »

 

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More Than a Bathhouse

Posted in Words, tagged , on September 22, 2022| Leave a Comment »

When I first started planning the addition to my house, I was mostly thinking of it in terms of the hot tub and the bathroom, and the guest cottages were sort of separate entities in my mind. But as the plan came together and I realized that the new annex was going to have multiple functions, of which the bathroom and hot tub were the only bath-related ones, I realized that calling it a bathhouse was really a misnomer. But by that point I had already started calling the columns “Bathhouse #X”, and since I’m a creature of habit it just kept on that way for 2 years. But once I was done with the roof, and I could really see the thing as a whole, I started referring to the big open space as the atrium because that’s what it is, an open space at the center of the house (the main house and both cottages open onto it).  So even though I am currently working on the bathroom, I’ve decided it’s time to rename these columns; the whole project amounts to a new wing of my house, an annex, so that’s what I’m going to start calling the columns, starting next week. I’m going to go back and relabel the older ones as well, but I’m not going to change the links because it would just be too much trouble and I’m not trying to memory-hole the history of the project or anything. I just have a thing for accuracy, and though it took a while, it finally overcame my inertia.

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Learning What They’re Taught

Posted in Miscellaneous, Words, tagged , , , on September 12, 2022| 4 Comments »

Last week I was involved in an online discussion about writing ability, and whether it is actually less common among people who majored in STEM fields vs those who majored in the humanities; I explained that, in my experience as a writer, editor, and former teacher and librarian, it isn’t common in either group, but is slightly less uncommon in the humanities.  I used to edit technical papers as a side gig, and they were often so unintelligible I had to get on the phone to the author to ask what in God’s name he was trying to say.

Of course, the problem is a bit more complex than a simple “which group is better”; certain subgroups of humanities majors, most notably those in the “Ideological Studies” ghetto, are taught to write such convoluted, cumbersome gibberish that after graduation most of them can’t stop doing it even when explicitly told not to.  I was once in a working group trying to draft a press release; despite everyone being told we wanted to keep the language concise, simple, and straightforward for the general public, the draft modifications one group came up with were absolutely larded with academic and identity-politics jargon.  We had to ignore nearly all their contributions in the final draft because the additions, prevarications, disclaimers, lists, and semantically-empty garbage they wanted to insert would’ve tripled the length while crippling the meaning.  It’s important to recognize that this was not truly their fault; for their entire academic careers these participants were repeatedly rewarded for crafting ugly, clunky, unreadable rubbish interchangeable with every other statement of its type, the literary equivalent of an East German institutional building.  Writing ability develops with practice; unfortunately, many students of the past several decades have been taught practices that make their writing worse instead of better.  So, I guess the best summary of the situation is:  Most students start as bad writers.  STEM students tend not to improve.  Humanities majors in traditional fields usually improve at least some.  And “ideological studies” majors improve at writing committee-approved ideological garbage.  People learn what they’re taught.  If they’re taught to write properly, they’ll learn that.  If they’re taught to write improperly, they’ll learn that instead.  And if they aren’t taught to write at all, they will learn whatever they are taught.

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Links #635

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Obituary, Tyranny, Words, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 4, 2022| Leave a Comment »

I won’t help you until you help yourself.  –  jail “nurse”

Regular readers know how I feel about abuse of words, especially by government, so this video (called to my attention by Elizabeth N. Brown) really spoke to me.  The links above it were provided by Mike Siegel, Kevin Wilson, Scott Greenfield, Jesse Walker, and Cop Crisis (x3), in that order.

From the Archives

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A Blastocyst By Any Other Name

Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, Words, tagged , , , on August 8, 2022| 5 Comments »

If you don’t have the right to bodily autonomy then you cannot be said to really be free.  –  Kelly Wright

Crypto-puritans in the libertarian tent have definitely become more numerous.  A few weeks ago at Freedom Fest, I attended a panel on the dangerous liberty-violating laws that may result now that Roe has been overturned.  Despite the fact that there was even a “pro-life” person on the panel who eloquently explained why she was just as concerned as the others, stupid mumbling and a few loud belches of “dead babies!” and the like warned me of what was to come during the time reserved for questions: a long line of propagandists at the mike who didn’t have questions, but instead wanted to appoint themselves as members of the panel without invitation of permission.  So I was forced to appoint myself as bailiff and shout “THIS IS NOT A QUESTION!” when it became clear that was the case, except for the idiot who made an “argument” involving Marxism equivalent to, “this plastic bottle is actually a plant because both are green”; for that guy, I shouted “This is pure bullshit!”  Then there was the guy who promised his question wasn’t belligerent, then proceeded to make a statement just as propagandistic as the half-dozen before him.  We were only saved by the organizers ejecting us for the next presentation.  It felt like an Evangelical convention had invaded a Libertarian one.  By the by, most of the panelists thanked me for my anger later; I could do from the floor what they really couldn’t from the stage: confront rude, disrespectful twatwaffles with a taste of their own medicine.

It’s certainly possible for a libertarian to be against abortion for themselves and/or in principle, but the second the state becomes involved, using violence to abrogate women’s bodily autonomy, there is no honest way to describe support for such a regime as “libertarian”.  This recent article by Kelly Wright explains it perfectly; it’s rare that I agree with every point made in a persuasive essay, but this is one of those times.  The article is well worth reading in its entirety and I strongly urge you to do so, but here’s the core of the argument:

Are the lives of hypothetical future babies (blastocysts, zygotes, embryos, and fetuses are not babies) worth more than the lives of actual living breathing pregnant individuals?  Are people with the capacity for pregnancy nothing more than walking, potential incubators?  Even if we concede the argument that a fetus is a person with individual rights, libertarians should still oppose abortion restrictions.  If someone is invading your home, you have a right to repel them, especially if your life is at risk.  It follows that if someone is invading your uterus then you also have the right to repel them as well.  Fetuses hijack blood supplies and even begin to leach the calcium out of the bones of the person whose body they have commandeered.  This may seem like a peculiar projection of agency onto fetuses, but it’s no more peculiar than the rights, interests, and souls projected onto fetuses by advocates of fetal personhood and forced pregnancy.  No one has a right to your circulatory system, and if someone has affixed themselves to your circulatory system against your will, you have the right to use force to stop them from doing so.  One rights-bearing individual does not have the right to the calcium in the bones and teeth of another rights-bearing individual…

There’s an incidental point the author makes that you might not have noticed, so I’ll elaborate.  I’ve never made a big deal about people incorrectly calling anything in a pregnant woman’s uterus a “fetus”, because up to now it wasn’t that important.  However, it certainly has become so.  A developing organism of less than 11 weeks gestational age (which is actually 9 weeks after fertilization due to the practice of counting from the last menstrual period) is not, repeat not, a fetus; it is an embryo.  This is important because there is as real and distinct a difference between the two as there is between a fetus and a baby.  Alas, this won’t make any difference at all to prohibitionist politicians, who think the state has the right to classify a bee as a fish, define pi as “3” or declare that the laws of the State supersede the laws of science in any other way.  But using the word “fetus” in a discussion of, say, ectopic pregnancies (when the developing organism rarely makes it to the fetal stage) helps to extend and worsen the scientific ignorance and confusion that prohibitionism relies upon to thrive.  Using the correct terminology won’t sway religious anti-abortion people in the least, because their position is based in belief, not facts.  But it may help the great majority who can be swayed by argument to understand the absurdity and evil of “from point of conception” abortion bans.

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The Establishment

Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, Words, tagged , , on January 17, 2022| 2 Comments »

Slang terms come and go; sometimes they enter the vernacular on a more permanent basis, but more often the fade away once their season is done, and using them after that time tends to mark someone as not at all “with it”, to use one example from my youth.  But as you might suspect from someone who was invited to a conference of freethinkers, I don’t much care if young people think it’s funny when I use words like “chick”, “square”, and “dig” without a hint of irony (I’ve even been known to occasionally use “groovy”), just like I didn’t much care if adults disliked it when I used them as a kid.  There’s one term from my youth, though, which has pretty thoroughly vanished from popular use despite being as necessary now as it ever was, and perhaps even more so: “The Establishment”.  It was first used in this sense by British journalist Henry Fairlie, who in The Spectator (September 1955) wrote:  “By the Establishment, I do not only mean the centres of official power—though they are certainly part of it—but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised.”  The Establishment, then, includes politicians, cops, bureaucrats, banks, well-connected corporations, institutions, academia, NGOs, the mainstream press…all the interconnected parts of the fascist regimes which act collectively to corral people into easily-managed herds.  Most people nowadays, especially (but not limited to) those in the chattering classes, like to pretend that these institutions either act separately, or can be cleanly divided into “wings”; those who buy into this fantasy think it’s perfectly reasonable to be against “capitalism” without also being against centralized government, or believe that institutions which mouth popular “woke” jargon are truly against the larger institutions which pay their bills, or imagine that a TV news network which airs propaganda for one of the so-called “wings” is different in some substantive way from one which prefers to air propaganda for the other “wing”.  But as I’ve discussed many times, this is nonsense; the machine of authoritarianism is vast, complex, and has many parts which seem separate or even adversarial to shallow thinkers, but in reality all work together (sometimes by design, but more often by necessity) to either reduce all individuals to soulless parts of that machine, or else crush those who refuse to be used thus into pulp.

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