addendum to question the fourth

I woke up this morning in mid-worry that my response to the fourth anonymous question was unclear, and potentially offensive. I want to try to clear that up, with the full knowledge that I may be only digging a deeper hole.

If someone says, "I am a (woman/man/US citizen/communist/Guinean/etc), I'm honestly not going to know what they mean, what it means to them unless they tell me. I'm very happy to have that dialogue with anyone, and am generally pretty willing to accept any definition anyone wants to apply to themselves, about themselves.

Where I start to have trouble, I think, is if people want to assign their meaning to others, and decided who is and isn't in their group, whether they assent to it or not. I think I'm talking here about what's included in the set X (where X can be anything) other than the most reductive of traits: country of origin, chromosome pairing, skin pigmentation, household income, usw. I think it's the assumption of carried over associations to groups, labels, identities, etc, that start to cause problems (and probably not just for me, I'm just sensitized to some more than others).

Hopefully that's a little more clear.

my minor god political blog love validated, again

Echidne of the Snakes on social and cultural conservatism:

In short, social conservatism is not really conservative. It can be quite radical as the bin Laden example demonstrated. What it always seems to be is hierarchical. The view of the family social conservatives embrace has a father as its boss. The religious organizations are seen as determining how the masses live. The government is worshipped as an authoritarian power. And all these hierarchies use some sort of fixed identifiers: sex, race, age, for deciding who will be on top of the pile and who will support the whole pyramid.


Her writing makes realize that possibly even more than politically or economically (well, OK, maybe not economically), I'm cuturally and socially progressive.

well, crap

Apparently, I come in an hour earlier starting tomorrow, not starting Tuesday.

That's 7:30 AM, folks. Yuck.

more anonymity

What would make you happy? (Both in a "best case" and a "this would be enough" sense.)

Damn, that one's really hard, particularly the pragmatic part.

Ideally, a world in which everyone knows they are loved, in which selfhood is not dependent on otherness of others, in which material goods are consistently valued lower than human life, in which kindness, respect, and tolerance were the default settings, in which strangers on the street don't avoid one another's eyes, but smile warmly and genuinely.

For the "enough"? I'd like a way of fitting into the world of people that didn't hurt, didn't necessitate deception and misrepresentation. As to what it would take for that to happen, unfortunately, I don't know. I'm happier now than I've ever been (really), and I want this to be progressive.