My autism diagnosis was 8 years ago at this point, so the novelty has worn off. In daily life, I do my job and my hobbies. I don’t need to think about being autistic very much. My sister is one of those “being New Age turned me fascist” people, and we don’t talk. I haven’t…
Given the obviously-incoming Charlie Kirk retribution campaign, I’ve gotta say: warning leftists against “trans allyship” was a thankless task. Trans was the ONE issue where the right could argue in good faith and wipe the floor with the other side. Men really can’t be women. The transes basically admitted they had no good arguments, only…
Just because people ON social media said the “No Kings” protests were cringe doesn’t mean they weren’t cringe, that the perception is an EFFECT of social media. On Salon.com, Andi Zeisler tries to cope by making comparisons with WTO 99 and comparing them favorably. Even though she’s apparently 10 years older than me, and I…
It’s a bad sign that anyone listens to Eugene Healey, to the extent that he has thousands of Substack followers (“Considered Chaos”) and his writing appears in The Guardian. His grift is to be the brand consultant who reads Mark Fisher, which is incredibly annoying. I’m a millennial, class of 2001. When I was a…
Dworkin has been having a bit of a moment lately. Her books got reissued. The Right to Sex brought her up a few years ago. There’s Sophie Gilbert’s new book. The first generations raised by internet porn have come of age, and we have problems like “why is my boyfriend choking me?” and Andrea Long…
Erich Fromm’s Escape From Freedom is an interesting book because of the timing. It’s a book about the psychology of Nazism, by a Jewish intellectual, but it’s from 1941, which is just before news of the Holocaust got out, so it doesn’t really emphasize anti-Semitism. Instead, it begins with a history of medieval economic life…
I was skinny to begin with and I take an appetite-suppressing drug on top of that (bupropion, Wellbutrin), so Ozempic hasn’t been at the top of my radar. But this article about it in The Atlantic is quite good. Without making the comparison directly, it presents a strong case that Ozempic is the LSD of…
Apparently this needs to be said: eugenics is bullshit. Evolution doesn’t have an end goal or purpose. “Better” doesn’t exist outside of human values, and the psychology of those values is often bullshit, too: fantasies of superiority and nostalgia for the aristocracies of old in all their sadism, etc. Despite having been completely discredited by…
Stuart Hall’s Who needs identity? (1997) is a perfect time capsule of the academic trends that devolved into the trans movement. There’s the original Judith Butler, embedded in discussions of Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida. If you weren’t a humanities nerd, her writing was intimidating. If you were, her whole project was obvious and derivative: take…
Michelle Goldberg’s latest in the New York Times is about how Nancy Mace is a big old meanie for telling Sarah McBride to GTFO women’s bathrooms. It’s hard to imagine how terrifying it must be to be a trans person, or the parent of one, in America right now. Not really. It’s like being anyone…