Rachel Dolezal, Bruce Jenner, and Political Idiocy

I woke up this morning to discover (among other things) a Morning Mix piece in the Washington Post "summarizing" the Jenner/Dolezal "controversy," which I will now elaborate on, and from which the majority of the essays I will cite are linked. ("Reinventing the wheel" on this would take more time than I have today and in any case on a planet of 7 billion people that's been crawling with H. sapiens sapiens for over 100,000 years "total originality" is a rare thing indeed.)

First I'll paraphrase very closely a sentence from Zeba Blay's recent essay in the Huffington Post: 'Transsexual identity is a concept that allows men to indulge in womanhood as a commodity, without having to actually engage with every facet of what being a woman entails -- discrimination, marginalization, oppression, and so on. It plays into sexual stereotypes, and perpetuates the false idea that it is possible to "feel" a sex.' Note that I am not equating biological sex with psychosocial gender: it is transsexualism that does that, by "forgetting" that it is possible to be a feminine person, and even in some societies assume a "female" social-sexual role, while having male genitals. Note also that among "the left" I am not alone in this: I haven't found, nor could I come up with, a better elucidation of this position than that put forth by the radical lesbian-feminist Janice Raymond in her book The Transsexual Empire.

Properly speaking these linked issues are not left/right matters, but rather (as "right-wingers" are quoted as saying) an issue of objective fact, of simple true/false. Bruce Jenner is in fact not a woman, and Rachel Dolezal is in fact not Black. It's unfortunate that "rightists" are the only people being quoted as agreeing with me, because such willingness to play make-believe does indeed paint those called "leftist" as fools and show how strong the tyranny of "PC" on those who stand "left-of-center" in fact is.

Don't get confused: on the vast majority of other issues involved in the "left v. right" debates the rightists are in my opinion simply wrong. And only an an idiot would deny that rightists have their own version of PC: for example for a rightist to stand with me in upholding the idea of strict separation between church and state and point out that the Consitution of the USA is a strictly secular document would today get someone who claims to be rightist called a "RINO." Republican PC declares that the USA is "a Christian country," and a Republican who "refudiates" that dogmatic assertion would be a long shot indeed.

And I must admit that Rand Paul -- with whom I disagree with on practically every other issue of his campaign -- is in fact correct when he states that among the effects of "the War on Drugs" is in fact to unjustly deprive racial-minority American citizens of the right to vote (and also to hold political and governmental offices, though I haven't yet seen him go that far), which I'm sure will cause problems for his campaign. I believe that if you push most white self-described Republicans hard enough they'll reveal that they do in fact believe "the Negro" is a born criminal, and anyway is not smart enough to be trusted to vote "rationally" (as if most Americans of any race are, which is questionable). Of course one of the right wing's pet crusades -- which to his credit Rand Paul is willing to be "flexible" about, "the Defense of Marriage" -- depends a great deal on the tendency of most Black church-goers and preachers to be heterosexist, but that's an issue for another day. Perhaps it's enough for Senator Paul to be publicly heretical on only one major Republican issue: he clearly needs the support of one of the two "major" parties, because it's a fallacious "truism" that third-party or independent candidates can't win (because nobody with any "sense" will vote for them because the media pundits they let do their thinking for them declare that third-party or independent candidates can't win because nobody will vote for them), and Rand Paul's hunger for power is too blatant to be denied. (As is Rachel Dolezal's, for that matter.)

Anyway. These recent "controversies" concerning Bruce Jennner and Rachel Dolezal baldly show that facts are simple things it's stupid to deny, and that too much of American public political debate from most "major players" consists of self-evident idiocy. And one need not be a rightist to point this out, any more than Rand Paul championing the right of black ex-felons to vote makes him a socialist. It is a good thing that not every rightist can be an idiot all the time.

[Continued from what was initially a Fark comment that turned out to be way too "tl;dr" and tangential to post there.]

profplump: Sean M: Fear of getting hurt / getting caught is what keeps most of us from jumping off roofs or robbing banks.

Roofs, sure. But I am unwilling to live in a world where I must believe that fear of being hurt or caught is what keeps most people from robbing banks.

What do you think is going on in their heads? Respect for private property and love of free enterprise?

You might also note the part of the article where they discuss all the social and personal upsides of not having fear. I suspect there's some compromise that's superior to either extreme; good judgement requires a lot less fear than most people typically provide.

I'd like to believe it's more than just of consequences that keeps me from publicly plighting my troth at LaurenAguillera, but from her nine years in the army I would bet she could hurt me.

Seriously, I find good judgment isn't far behind fear from keeping me from doing Bad Things I'd really like to do. E.g., robbing banks sounds like fun if only I were smart enough to get away with it.

I'll grant you that it's not so much "fear of getting hurt or caught" that keeps me from, say, rape-murdering little boys and old ladies, but there my "good judgment" is allied with hedonism: rape-murdering anybody does not sound like fun. And it sounds so messy.

Okay, my sense of compassion and ethical-political principles has a lot to do with not doing that, but also there's my fear of consequences from my own mighty conscience: the ayenbite of inwyt harasses me endlessly over more trivial transgressions, so imagining what the little voices would put me through if I did rape-murder a helpless victim makes the whole thing sound like too much trouble, too much risk for whatever benefit one can get from such things. Even if nobody ever found out who did it.

I'm quite capable of doing "worse" things that do sound like fun, even if I'd never get hurt or caught, because I don't judge them wrong. If I understand correctly what you mean by "good judgment" that is a factor, but then too the amount of trouble I'd have to go to seems to outweigh the fun I could expect. It costs too much, or I'd have to plan ahead too far, or I'd be away from my dog too long, something like that: something other than what most people intend by the word "wrong."

And as for my mighty conscience, it beats me up over things I doubt other people would care much about. Things like being made "uncomfortable" by a guy's bad clubfoot, or not "making" a half-crippled old lady let me roll her trash bin back from the street. That requires me to (over-?) compensate by going out of my way to do "nice" things, just so I have a few pieces "Yes but!"

The thing is that despite my perhaps eccentric emphases and proportions I'll wager than in general my "good judgment" and morals/ethics are pretty much on par with what we see around us here in "the Western world," that most people whose countries were in NATO before 1990 fear the consequences of badness more than they value rational or religious goodness. And I'll bet that a guy of my age in similar circumstances in Sofia, Bulgaria fears consequences even more than one in Paris or Bonn, because he grew up under an even more fear-based regime.

I'd like to believe otherwise, because for one thing my ideal anarchist society would depend far more on good judgment than on fear of getting hurt or caught, but it does seem that our intellectual evolution ain't quite up to that yet: as my then-17 year old niece came out with once, "people aren't smart enough for anarchy." And I'd like to believe that my reply to her makes sense, that perhaps people will become smart enough with a few generations of education and social engineering, but that might be a pipe dream.

For one thing it requires people with good judgment getting more control over writing and producing popular TV shows, and not only educational sitcoms like the Cosby Show but also fun thrillers like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Until "the masses" are programmed with values appropriate for social democracy -- let alone successful anarcho-syndicalist communes -- the best we can hope for American society is that it doesn't keep going ethically downhill as quickly as it has been in the past few decades (or Presidential administrations, or whatever the major relevant factor is here).

As it is what I foresee is an American society too closely resembling that in the Dryco universe of author Jack Womack: all that really requires is that things keep going as they have been for most of my life. What can one expect of a society where the majority of Americans who vote really seem to believe that Obama is a Marxist Muslim who's out to enslave the white race and take their guns away?

What struck me most about Womack's Random Acts of Senseless Violence when I read it not too long ago is how "contemporary" it seems, i.e. how "prophetic" it was when published in 1993. At the current rate all we need is one more Republican like "Bush II" -- or one more Democrat like Clinton or Obama -- for us to wake up in a "Dryco" world in 2021.

Those who'd remind me that Jack Womack writes speculative fiction get answered with a snort. Who would have dreamed in say 1978 that a (half-) black man like Barack Obama would ever get elected, or that any President with such an obvious center-rightist program would be mischaracterized as a Stalinist gun-grabber? They didn't even say such mean things about Jimmy Carter, and when it comes down to it he was more "liberal" than Obama seems to dream of being.

Imagine today a Southern Baptist President of either "major" party who sincerely believes it's a big sin to "lust in [one's] heart" let alone "murder the unborn" nevertheless regarding it as his duty to uphold Roe v. Wade. Doesn't that sound rather "SciFi" in 2015? Can you picture the Barack Obama of 2012 campaigning on a pacifist, liberal, anti-NSA platform?

Granted though Carter was liberal enough in other ways he did pretty much take a fall to the Reaganites regarding abortion by not publicly defending Roe v. Wade as you'd expect a "Marxist tyrant" to do. I too respect the quality and consistency of his moral thought (though I disagree with him on many things), but his conscientious inability to defend "murdering the preborn" had a lot to do with inflicting this current shiat on today's USA. As it stands we've had 24 years of what amounts to an increasingly demented and hilarious Reaganism. (Thanks a whole lot, Mr. Habitat for Humanity.)

As for Barack Obama, his Administration some decent things (see here), but to regard Obama's record as anything like socialism is just plain silly, as even those wacky Trots at the so-called World Socialist Web Site could tell you (and just did).

Anyway. As previously noted in several places over the past few years I hate this "SciFi universe" you people make me live in, but I'm holding on (with the help of two antidepressants and a lot of caffeine & booze) because one fluffy little dog has made it clear to me that he thinks his life would really suck if I left it. He'll be 10 this summer and given his current good health and the expected life-span of his breed I'll most likely be here in Lexington, KY, through the rest of this decade. After than, or if he should somehow be struck down sooner, it depends on what shape I'm in: if I'm still able to keep crawling along in life well enough I'll move to someplace like Hawaii even if I have to be homeless, but if I'm in bad shape at the time I'll just eat some buckshot and get it over with.

Had I known in 1984 that this life I'm living in the society you give me would turn out to be the best I could ever expect I would have offed myself after a "substances & sluts" binge, probably during the Major Depressive Episode that would inevitably follow such a thing.

Y'all "normal Americans" and your continued inability to even try to show good judgment have really fucked up my life. Of course if I weren't such am emo fruitcake it might not seem so bad to me, but the responsibility ain't mine: I wasn't among those who essentially elected Ronnie Reagan NINE (9) frigging times.

It'll take several decades of "influence over the Media" -- much more than any "true progressives" could ever realistically hope to have -- to get my fellow Americans anywhere near anarchist consciousness. Hell, it'll probably take the majority of today's Millennials 30 more years to figure out what "liberal" means.

But hey. At least I'll have a few more years of bitterness and Schadenfreude to sit here and "prophecize" -- even if I will have to hold my nose and vote "straight Democratic" a few more times. Being able say "See? I toldja so!" is one of the most enjoyable things I'm still capable of in my "declining years." And y'all can be surely be relied upon to give me more chances to do that than I have time or energy to keep up with.

And to refer back to the first topic of this document, yes I myself am nowhere near as good at anarchist consciousness as I'd have to be to survive in my ideal America. But then thanks to American normalcy I'll never have to strain myself anywhere near that hard, will I.

Hope this helps! Have a nice day!