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It is already evident in the early morning that a warming is upon us. We enjoyed about a week of sweet coolness. Even put on the heater a couple of nights. With the warming, Ash prefers to stay outside. Sammy will actually suffer some wintry chill for the thrill of being in the great outdoors.
* * *
Kyle Griffin: "By 2040, about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states. They will have only 30 senators representing them, while the remaining 30% of Americans will have 70 senators representing them."
Of course, the sharp retort is that this is why we have a Senate, to give states equal representation, but it still illustrates the undemocratic structures in our government. It's tricky, though. More direct democracy is not necessarily something that colored people should want when living in a white majority country that still harbors racist attitudes. This particular fact of the Senate is, however, presumably more problematic for liberals and minorities.
[Twitter]
* * *
June 10, 1994
I wonder whether I will soon have to give up books all together. "Coming of Age in the Milky Way" by Timothy Ferris seems to be very friendly for the popular audience. Yet, I get a headache at times while reading it. It feels to me as if neurons, synapses, dendrites and whatever are dying off right behind my very eyes. My vision itself doesn't seem to take in the mere print on the page. It somehow doesn't feel like too much of an exaggeration to say that I am dying.
o0o
I dwelled too much on my decaying and dying. I know. But I guess I didn't have much else happening with me, and I wasn't up to writing anything more challenging.
* * *
Finally, regarding all the sexual allegations and tut-tutting, I see some discussions that get to the heart of the matter, that men are sexual beasts. I'll snag an excerpt:
Through sheer bulk, the string of revelations about men from Bill Cosby to Roger Ailes to Harvey Weinstein to Louis C.K. to Al Franken and, this week, to Charlie Rose and John Lasseter, have forced men to confront what they hate to think about most: the nature of men in general. This time the accusations aren’t against some freak geography teacher, some frat running amok in a Southern college town. They’re against men of all different varieties, in different industries, with different sensibilities, bound together, solely, by the grotesquerie of their sexuality.
Men arrive at this moment of reckoning woefully unprepared. Most are shocked by the reality of women’s lived experience. Almost all are uninterested or unwilling to grapple with the problem at the heart of all this: the often ugly and dangerous nature of the male libido.
For most of history, we’ve taken for granted the implicit brutality of male sexuality. In 1976, the radical feminist and pornography opponent Andrea Dworkin said that the only sex between a man and a woman that could be undertaken without violence was sex with a flaccid penis: “I think that men will have to give up their precious erections,” she wrote. In the third century A.D., it is widely believed, the great Catholic theologian Origen, working on roughly the same principle, castrated himself.
He doesn't go as far as I do. He is obviously optimistic that men can be 'civilized'. I go with the old proposition that you cannot legislate morality. At most, you can selectively enforce it.
[Stephen Marche, NYT]
* * *
Kyle Griffin: "By 2040, about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states. They will have only 30 senators representing them, while the remaining 30% of Americans will have 70 senators representing them."
Of course, the sharp retort is that this is why we have a Senate, to give states equal representation, but it still illustrates the undemocratic structures in our government. It's tricky, though. More direct democracy is not necessarily something that colored people should want when living in a white majority country that still harbors racist attitudes. This particular fact of the Senate is, however, presumably more problematic for liberals and minorities.
[Twitter]
* * *
I wonder whether I will soon have to give up books all together. "Coming of Age in the Milky Way" by Timothy Ferris seems to be very friendly for the popular audience. Yet, I get a headache at times while reading it. It feels to me as if neurons, synapses, dendrites and whatever are dying off right behind my very eyes. My vision itself doesn't seem to take in the mere print on the page. It somehow doesn't feel like too much of an exaggeration to say that I am dying.
o0o
I dwelled too much on my decaying and dying. I know. But I guess I didn't have much else happening with me, and I wasn't up to writing anything more challenging.
* * *
Finally, regarding all the sexual allegations and tut-tutting, I see some discussions that get to the heart of the matter, that men are sexual beasts. I'll snag an excerpt:
Through sheer bulk, the string of revelations about men from Bill Cosby to Roger Ailes to Harvey Weinstein to Louis C.K. to Al Franken and, this week, to Charlie Rose and John Lasseter, have forced men to confront what they hate to think about most: the nature of men in general. This time the accusations aren’t against some freak geography teacher, some frat running amok in a Southern college town. They’re against men of all different varieties, in different industries, with different sensibilities, bound together, solely, by the grotesquerie of their sexuality.
Men arrive at this moment of reckoning woefully unprepared. Most are shocked by the reality of women’s lived experience. Almost all are uninterested or unwilling to grapple with the problem at the heart of all this: the often ugly and dangerous nature of the male libido.
For most of history, we’ve taken for granted the implicit brutality of male sexuality. In 1976, the radical feminist and pornography opponent Andrea Dworkin said that the only sex between a man and a woman that could be undertaken without violence was sex with a flaccid penis: “I think that men will have to give up their precious erections,” she wrote. In the third century A.D., it is widely believed, the great Catholic theologian Origen, working on roughly the same principle, castrated himself.
He doesn't go as far as I do. He is obviously optimistic that men can be 'civilized'. I go with the old proposition that you cannot legislate morality. At most, you can selectively enforce it.
[Stephen Marche, NYT]
