Annoying

Mexual Sorality

Chill Annoying, Evil

eigenrobot (@eigenrobot) / X

I think this is mostly correct. A theory I saw floated elsewhere is that because humans naturally (as in, it is a component of human nature) police one another’s sexualities heavily, since it was no longer permitted to say that gay sex or kinky sex etc. was unacceptable or morally wrong, the “progressives” were now expressing their sexual morality in ways that are easier to quantify. That is, by heavily policing any age gap relationships (even ones as minor as 1-2 years), and any relationship with some “measurable, problematic” power imbalance.

Of course, almost all of that is nonsense, age gap relationships are probably a net benefit — and anyway, why should we police full-ass adults? — while nearly all of the “power imbalance” crap the progs prattle on ceaselessly about is completely fake.

The overarching lesson I think is that humans absolutely are going to attempt to force some sort of sexual morality on one another. We just have to decide how it’ll look. The modern “progressive” implementation of that is no better than the old way and in many ways, it is worse. And worsening all the time.

Bigger Rigor Trigger

Chill Amusing, Annoying

I was reading about some supposedly extremely-difficult Harvard humanities class that people are clamoring to get into these days.

And it turns out they read one book a week. And all the books are in English. I’d not consider that class to have any level of difficulty until you’re at ~5 books a week, or ~3 a week if many of them are non-English.

Otherwise, you’re just goofin’.

What Survives

Chill Annoying

Some of this is true, but this is a painting of the richest area of the wealthiest empire the world had yet seen.

But look at the flower-seller girl huddled against the wall. She’s wearing (for the time) commoner clothes and would’ve been desperately poor. She’s not from that area. She doesn’t belong there and is only tolerated because she has something people want. There were far more of her in the UK at the time — and in the world — than there were the wealthy people depicted in the painting. And most of them lived in tenements and tiny boardinghouse rooms. Or worse.

None of those uninsulated tenement houses were attractive. And none of them survived.

Here’s the reality, from about 1901 in London:

circa 1901: A London slum family with all their possessions in the street following eviction (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Continuum

Chill Annoying, Evil

Claiming that human sex is not binary based on rare exceptions is fucking moronic. It’s just clown-level thinking. I don’t even have any real investment in this except being intellectually rigorous as much as I can. Idiotically arguing that sex is not binary in humans is just obviously wrong, so it bothers me. It is like arguing that stars don’t exist because there are some gas clouds that aren’t stars.

It’s just the absolute stupidest kind of academia-brain nonthinking.

First of fucking all, biologists define sex by gamete type. Anisogamous species have exactly two: small mobile gametes (sperm) and large immobile ones (ova). There is no third gamete and no intermediate one, so the categories have nothing between them. Height, testosterone levels, voice pitch, and body fat distribution are bimodal. Those are sex-correlated traits, not sex. Not the same thing; not even close.

This clown-level thinking has a name, by the way. It’s called the “continuum fallacy.” In short, that means that some people want you to believe that because a boundary has fuzzy or rare edge cases, the categories aren’t real. It’s a way of sneaking propaganda into science.

And if you engage in that fallacy, it demonstrates you should not be doing science. As you are not — you are doing propaganda.

Basic Prude

Chill Annoying, Evil

Prudishness doesn’t just extend to sex and showing some skin, of course. It’s also things like this.

I do not have a cohesive theory for all this, but it just seems like so many people have a squeamishness of dealing with the world as it is. And that’s pretty divergent from how I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s.

To me, it seems like everyone just got fragile in every realm, and unable to handle reality or its depiction.

Creation Myth

Chill Amusing, Annoying

In my creative writing class in high school, a close friend of mine got in trouble for writing this absolutely gonzo story called “Jenky the Wonder Pony.”

It was the only actually creative thing anyone wrote in the entire class, including my own writing. Which tells you something.