Eclectic Scribe

I will be keeping a list of books read this year, along with a short review about them, and a rating. The rating is a 1-5 scale: 5: This is one of my new favorite books 4: I would include this book on a list for anyone who asks for a book recommendation 3: I would recommend this book, but it would come with heavy caveats 2: I wouldn’t recommend reading, but I didn’t regret having spent time with it 1: I regretted reading this

Go fuck yourself, Greer. You’d have called her that.

Ezra Klein Podcast Episode 1: “we’re embracing Abundance. we’re deregulating the economy and building infrastructure” Episode 2: “please vote for this Democrat promising to empower unions and regulate Silicon Valley out of existence”

POV: you make everyone pass an AP Gov test before they can vote

I dated a girl once who was *convinced* that you ABSOLUTELY MUST stir tomato sauce with a *wooden* spoon because the tomato sauce will react w a metal spoon and when i pointed out that she had the sauce in a steel pot she got so mad at me 😂 like spitting mad

I come onto Twitter to have fun. Sometimes, I'll post about a specific subtopic where I have a settled opinion as a way of working out my broader thoughts on a more general topic, and someone who's made a brand out of being a culture warrior on the larger topic will want to interrogate every aspect of that topic in a hostile way. And then, when I get bored of the conversation, they'll keep tagging me into more threads and keep adding examples to the same thread while saying surely I just know I'm defending the indefensible and should come to their side of the topic. That is not fun. On trans issues in specific: I think slowly on this topic, and write updates when I have them. I find most conversations around the topic draining, because a lot of people care hugely about it and will repeatedly shout down and look for the worst available readings of anyone who disagrees, while brandishing full rolodexes of decades of grievances. I am not going to lay out a comprehensive, rigorous argument for a framework I am not fully settled on in response to a comments section cross-examination. When I have more to say, I say it. To those of you On Here who come in looking for fistfights and who don't want to take "eh, this isn't really my thing" for an answer, I wish you well and hope you find the brawls you're looking for, but if you'd like to hash things out with me, at least make it fun.

I'm Gay, and that Makes Me "Queer" I was 14 in 2009, when I wrote in my journal that if gay marriage was legalized, "the freaks who think it's good and natural will become even worse than they are." I wrote that they see sex as "PLEASURE. NOT A WAY OF BRINGING PEOPLE INTO THE WORLD, THAT'S JUST AN INCONVENIENCE! JUST A WAY TO HAVE FUN." "What a horrible way of thinking," I wrote. And then I went back to curating my yearning collection of bare-chested tribal werewolves, and thought no more of it. It took me another 8 years before I clued into my attraction to men. In the interim, I fell in love with a Mormon missionary companion and called it inspired companionship, picked attractive and monstrous men every time I could choose a character in a game, and (after I left Mormonism for Purely Intellectual Reasons) began to read a gay furry visual novel for "Chinese language study." I wasn't gay. I wasn't a furry either, of course. Too weird, too sexualized, too queer. I was just an asexual socially conservative guy who happened to like anthropomorphic art. When Don’t Act, Don’t Tell was repealed, I grimaced. When Obergefell passed, I fretted vaguely about the Constitution. Every moment I could have supported the rights I would later rely on, I declined to do so.

It took me a while to accept the label “gay,” but eventually I figured it would be odd to decline it while married to a man. I certainly didn’t accept the culture, though. “Gay voice” bugged me, promiscuity unsettled me, drag put me off. When I saw some queer people criticize Pete Buttigieg as, in effect, “not gay enough,” I felt a thrill of recognition. Yes—that’s me. A Pete Buttigieg, Not Gay Enough sort of gay dude, a military veteran and law student who wanted nothing more than a quiet suburban life with my family, and who happened to want it with a man. Stonewall? Alienating. Queer theory? Drivel. I was proud that when I finally noticed attraction to men in my early 20s, I “came out” quickly and without fuss, kept it as a footnote in my identity that meant very little about who I was, and moved on.

 Two months ago, I realized I still felt a lot of that, and I was also queer. 

I had always preferred the archaic form of the term–at odd angles with reality–but when I looked through the stories and experiences of the lonely “asexual” adolescent I was, the one who I always maintained “suffered no trauma from my faith’s stance on homosexuality,” I realized queer culture accurately essential parts of my own experience that I previously minimized. I noticed how I was perpetually drawn to monstrous characters, then to making the monstrous beautiful. I saw a “problem” I could never name or face directly haunting my journals and making me miserable for a decade. I saw myself drawn again and again to the motif of a wolf in a cage, to the need to escape. 

Appel quotes Halperin’s definition of “queer” as “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.” That’s a dangerous motif to claim normatively — the legitimate often has very good reasons for its dominance. 

But what happens to someone who grew up like I did — someone who subconsciously notices and then buries attraction to men in a world where every authority he trusts and loves treats acting on that attraction as a sin just short of murder?

 A few things. When I’d learned as a child to categorize things as sacred (church, baptism, hymns, forests, Vivaldi) or profane (coffee, theft, alcohol, swearing, queerness), I had at some point categorized my own body and desire itself as profane. I internalized a wordless sense that I was monstrous, broken, and unworthy of love. I spent much of my life declining easy categories, refusing to be normative, insisting on blurring lines. I felt commonality with people who understand what it is like to be attracted to something Wrong. I had to leave my entire culture behind and rebuild a community of outsiders. And I absolutely refuse to be apologetic about who I am. 

And when I realized all of that, I thought “dangit, I get queer theory now” and went and wrote a winding, profane, sacred, filthy, earnest piece of Queer Poetry to get some of my three decades of built-up unspoken feelings off my chest. Look, as far as politics goes, I agree with Appel far more than I do Queers for Palestine or critical theorists. As far as my personal life goes, I’m still eager to live a monogamous, quiet life raising a family with my husband. But “gay, not queer” was, for me, one of the final parts of a decades-long coping mechanism built around a desperate need not to look directly at the monster I was. 
 
And, well, let’s be clear. As a Mormon kid, I thought I was a reasonable centrist moderate, the same as now, who distinguished between sinners and sins and had nothing against gay people and was unjustly hated for my beliefs. And if it had been up to me, never in a million years would Ben Appel have been able to get married or have kids or serve openly in the military or live a quiet life of safety and dignity with a stable gay relationship and the freedom to live an ordinary life. He was another deviant anti-religious sinner threatening the foundations of moral America. I don’t want to be saddled with the actions of extremists any more than Appel does, but I’m also not so liberal I refuse to take my own side in a fight.

 Being queer doesn’t mean thinking that every action taken on behalf of queer people is healthy or sensible, it doesn’t mean overthrowing liberal democracy, national borders, and Enlightenment notions of truth, and it doesn’t mean abandoning moral instincts or a duty to uphold healthy norms. A lot of people might want it to mean that, but they’re not the only ones with a say. It's a term for the kids like me who grew up understanding at their core that something fundamental to them was at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant, no matter how hard they tried to run from it. I can do whatever I want with that information and that experience. But I’m not going to disclaim it in the hopes of making myself more palatable to people who would prefer I never married or worked to have kids with the man I love, and who now rather wish I wouldn’t flaunt it lest decent people get the wrong ideas. 

I did not choose to be queer, and I spent most of my life trying exceptionally hard to choose otherwise. But despite myself, sixteen years after that journal entry, I’m still here, still queer, and finally beginning to get used to it.

being off carbs actually makes you lowkey retarded because why am i daydreaming about bread

You see a blue button and a red button on a cage with ten people in it. Everyone in the world must press a button. If you press the red button, you live. If less than 50% of people press blue buttons, all blues die, alongside all ten people in the cage. Which button?

TWO KINGS. 👑

Indoctrination screens are for the goyim. A drug dealer never consumes their own product.