Busy Old Bugger

Google Fit tells me I burned 2198 calories today, ~500 of them walking 6.54 miles in 17,547 steps, not counting the steps I took not carrying the cell phone around, such as ~240 calories pedaling determinedly to nowhere and whatever calories "strength training" burns. I don't think today's caloric intake will exceed 2500 calories, so going by the numbers I might have lost a few grams. Indeed the scale in the men's locker room says my weight's decreased two pounds in the past couple weeks, surely largely because of the dogs' increased need to march me around (Nina in particular seems to have goal of 1.5 miles a day); I'm trying to eat a little less but in that respect my self-discipline will probably always be remiss. ('I have to walk a lot: you've seen me eat.') I might yet make my goal of getting down to 155# by Xmas. (It's ony 3 more lbs., why not be optimistic?)

As to my other physical goals, it seems I'm doomed by inexorable heredity and by age-diminished androgens to never quite "turning into the Hulk," as my baby sister puts it. For one thing my biceps just don't want to get much bigger: I do get stronger but it doesn't look like it, and it's taken 2 years to go from 40# barbell curls to 60# without much pain. (One reason I don't get BDSM: pain is for people I don't like, which naturally rules out me and anybody I put up with more than strictly necessary for my survival.) And I'm still frustrated that my bust ain't increasing enough, though some progress is visible there; yet posted photographs show my upper back develops okay and my shoulders seem a little broader. I should have started this shit like 40 years earlier. But still, for a guy my age in my neighborhood I'm in half-decent shape, like they haven't told me I'm diabetic yet. I'm considering doing a month or so of more intensive body building before too long if my budget allows for buying creatine -- it's usually more fun to buy better liquor -- and, assuming I keep my visceral fat in check, I plan on wiling away part of the depth of winter working on "details" like my abdomen, calves, and gluteals. (Every middle-aged pervert should have a nice firm booty.) I'd rather increasing senescence not involve excessive debilitation, at least. At least not physically.

As for everything else, what is there to say? I hesitate to publicly post my senile sexual fantasies (though those who are interested know how to reach me), and I doubt anybody will really care that this week's reading concerns how the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 played out. (Till Hitler made his worst miscalculation, if Hitler can ever be said to have calculated anything.) There just ain't much about my life that strikes me as anything anybody should give a damn about. Let's face it, I'm boring. Very few people have it in them to care whether I live or die, let alone what's passing through my damaged little brain at any given time. Those few things that happen during my day that aren't (AFAIK) illegal get posted to Facebook, along with whatever my view of whatever current events have been happening happen to be, and the only people I really fear rejection by are those who keep dogs for me to befriend and exercise with. What more can there be? I've got no money for anybody to scheme over, I can't imagine anybody woud ever want to see my senile self naked let alone take advantage of it, and my mindset is still so far beyond the pale that whether I can be a person like other people will always be an open question. (I think of myself as a freak from outer space, and I'm naturally charitable even to myself.)

As for me in general, well, at least I'm no longer old, ugly, crazy, boring, poor, *and fat*. So bite me.

Keep 'Em Marching

[Click photo for larger version.]

By that more complex graphic I'd say the ideal for a society on the scale of "the West" would be #16, libertarian socialism, after a slow (i.e. not Great Leap, maybe 2 generations) progression through social democracy. In general my idea would be closer to the lower left corner, but I don't see any way for the USA to get there from here without a major worldwide population reduction: if our body politic gets proportionally much smaller and if our society gets any nicer to our "broad masses" than say Israel is to its Jewish citizens we'd risk being conquered by a nastier regime with a bigger military, the way the USSR beat the Nazis.

In fact one of my proposals involves a larger standing army & navy, instead of letting so many un- or under-employed Americans become mentally & physically lazy "couch potatoes" who do little every day but overeat, watch TV and consume intoxicants. For one thing, historically it's been the Army Corps of Engineers that led the way in building the infrastructure we have that now needs repair or replacement, and it would probably take something very much like military discipline to get enough people to actually help do it.

In general don't see any better way then gentle compulsion, i.e. giving poor people a much more secure & purposeful life in uniform than out, to keep our people productively occupied now that we have no need for a large industrial or agricultural base. And part of that would be that to advance in grade you'd have to be physically fit and attend academic courses as well as those training & refresher courses directly related to your MOS. I'd also require some kind of national service after high school, for the same reasons those countries that do that do it.

I credit my brother-in-law for this insight: his & my sister's strategy to keep my youngest niece on track was to see that she was too academically and athletically busy to get into the kind of shit I did as a teenager. I thought it was a bit much then, I am an anti-authoritarian at heart, but I must admit now that the kid's almost 21 that their strategy seems to have worked well enough. So, broadening my perspective, I've become convinced that that kind of "benevolent despotism" is necessary to keep America from eating itself.

If nothing else we've at least got to keep the morons marching. Because, as that niece said when she was 17, "people are too stupid for anarchy." Hell, for the past 8 Presidencies we've been too stupid to manage representative democracy.

(Oh hell. This was not originally intended to be more than a quick paragraph. I sure do go on.)

It Lays Like A Rug

It's been so long since I've tried to have a real conversation with anybody that I've lost whatever knack I had for interacting with my family. As if I ever had one: I don't recall ever really hitting it off with anybody I wasn't fucking, which categorically excludes my family (as far as you'll ever know anyway). Yes, that was a joke. "What was?" Oh just skip it. ... It's eight months later than (above). I'm preparing to go visit an old friend or two, one I bored silly on the phone for 6 months in 1981 and one maybe one guy I've known online for 20 years but never met. These two have been my most loyal buddies, if you can call it that, for several years, the others having disappeared or gone into middle management. If there's anybody I can relax and communicate with these two are it: they've both had several periods of social Otherness and they've always been willing to admit being acquainted with me. Ain't that something? Anyway. About this medium: I've never finished even a 10-page very short story because I've always approached writing like an adolescent, waiting till I was required to as in school assignments or till inspiration struck me as in my feeble attempts at poetry. This is not the way one makes significant contribution to the Western Canon. It's not that I have nothing to say, just that I'm remiss at getting out anything but occasional scraps. Perhaps trying to be more "professional" about writing, even scheduling regular times for it, would help; that's worked since last summer for going to the gym at least. We'll see.

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!

La Mission Américaine

Another of my off-topic rants from Fark, reproduced below.

Quantum Apostrophe: Who builds and maintains a social model where everyone has to work despite all the technology and "productivity" we have?

Greedy power-trippers.

But you know the reason the USA can maintain an economy where the numbers of people who are not working or being productive is many times the official "unemployment rate" is super-exploitation of the proles and peasants in "less developed" countries. Sweatshops in Bangladesh, for example. The "major job creators" don't need Americans to grow coffee, sew clothes or dig cobalt; they need us to consume stuff produced elsewhere. And they can sell us lots of cheap stuff because they pay their actual producers so little, while they've got to sell a lot of cheap stuff because there are so many of us to buy it. Unlike former ages where a small group of rich nobles were the primary consumers of most imported and/or nonessential goods (and the poor ate turnips all winter).

As for those Americans employed in "the service sector," do we really need several hundred fast food joints and a few dozen "big box" stores in a city of 250,000 people? For that matter, do we really need cities with 250,000 or more people in them?

If Americans bought fewer cheap imported things and paid more for those goods we do consume the "job creators" would feel less pressure to pay so many actual workers so little, while their profit margins could be maintained by going back to the days of $300 pocket calculators. One problem with that is that instead of paying their workers more to produce fewer goods of higher quality they'd most likely "downsize" immense numbers of workers right into starvation, while squeezing the workers they do keep just as hard as ever; another is that needing fewer of us to buy their stuff means far more of us would be reduced to genuine desperation. Eventually the enlarged numbers of very poor here and overseas would die off from hunger, disease or wars of last resort, while the very rich would stay very rich -- and seem even richer compared to everybody else.

The "traditional" answer was for hoi polloi in "the West" to overthrow the rich and create more equitable societies, which could then reduce the burden on "the colonies" while encouraging revolutions there. But that became a long shot in 1918 when the only revolution to even half-way succeed was in backward and peripheral Russia: the German revolution was crushed by the "Social Democrats," while revolutions failed to even start in the rest of "the West." Which led to Stalinism in the USSR, and hyper-inflation and then the Great Depression in the rest of the "more developed" world; which gave us Hitler, WW2, the Holocaust, and then the Cold War.

In the USA there was potential for revolution in the Great Depression, but the New Deal kept that down and "the Good War" put paid to it. By 1955 revolution was practically inconceivable, and these days -- when everybody's full of junk food and busy twiddling their thumbs on hand-held electronics -- that's just crazy talk.

It's time for a strategic "sea change," a rather drastic one, toward a kinder, gentler imperialism. The "broad masses" in the USA should push our "leaders" toward ever further conquests, liberating one country after another from their local oppressors, the petty warlords, greedy industrialists and "Islamofascists" who do the heavy labor of keeping them down, so that one people after another can join in the global cause -- so that one people after another can share the undeniable benefits of "The American Way." Though the USA is hardly a truly free and democratic society we are much better off then the people in Pakistan, let alone DR Congo; because we owe what we have to the rest of the world we ought to pay them back by raising them up too.

The USA, armed and militant, is irresistible, and the peoples of the world are eager and ready to share what we've accomplished. In which process, by the way, the American people will gain new strength and confidence to push for a better deal and a more just society here in "the homeland" -- which we can then share with our sisters & brothers overseas.

Even a "New World Order" where the whole world is run like the USA currently is would beat the lives that so many millions have now, such as having their hands chopped off for not digging fast enough or being thrown in jail for getting gang-raped. Let's get off our fat asses and stop twiddling our thumbs: it's time we did our part for the rest of humanity.

USA! USA! USA!

Oh Bother. Oh Really.

I really should forget all about Languagehat's blog. Not because it reminds me that I'm a lazy dunce but because it interests & inspires me. It's hard to keep being a vapid airhead with that sort of thing going on. And it's not just his blog but the links he insists on including in it, leading to documents that themselves contain links: of the 13 browser tabs I now have open 11 of them are because of him. Damn him.

Of course the the majority of the linguistics stuff goes stratospherically over my head, I am monolingual and barely literate in that, but some things don't. Such as, oh, How To Do Things With Words (warning: big PDF). As with much of this stuff it's too much trouble to trace back which blog lead me to that, but now that I've got the thing I'll have to actually read it sometime. And perhaps think about it, agree & disagree with parts of it, and let that get to me enough to go get more stuff on the subject. And etc. etc. etc. My poor old brain gets tired just thinking about thinking about it. It's so much easier to play kmahjongg till my half-crippled dominant arm goes numb or until I win one (which can easily kill 2 or 3 hours).

Which is why at 50 I remain a badly self-educated 8th grade dropout still reeking of Unfulfilled Potential. This doesn't usually bother me, it's not hard to be more intellectual & scholarly than most of the people I've encountered in my economically impoverished life, but when I let shit like this happen it can ruin my whole day.

It's even worse that in the intervening couple hours I'd let myself get distracted by a Fark link & discussion that got me so upset that I forgot what I'd meant to say & do here. Whatever it was you can be sure it was staggeringly brilliant, you'd have been so impressed you'd have to send me money and/or tell all your friends about your great new guru, but now there's nothing left to see but the everyday Davy being dazed & abortively crotchety again.

Maybe I'll just take a nap, or have a beer, or one and then the other. Then later, meaning at some unforeseeable point in the indefinite future, I'll come back get all eloquently ratiocinatory & shit and give Languagehat a reason to link to this here thingy. Unless your luck holds out: you really don't want to know how much smarter I am than your average bore, do you.