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It’s raining this morning!
Which is good.
But apparently, Russia is on the brink of some kind of civil war.
Which is bad.
Sentient cockroaches reading this 247 years after it was written! (Once you’ve finally figured out that human codex.)
This is where your creation myth started to get interesting.
###
I twisted my back yesterday in a moderately uncomfortable fashion. You know when it feels like an electric current is shooting vertically across your lumbar spine every couple of minutes? That.
But I was macho! I scoffed at pain! I went out tromping anyway. And for the first couple of miles could barely move. But after that, for the last three miles, the pain went away and didn’t come back.
Thereby reinforcing my belief that exercise really is the cure for everything.
###
Apart from that, I Remunerated, watched the final four episodes of Industry, and read Andrew Sullivan.
###
Industry is just an astonishingly good show. But it's not for everybody, focusing, as it does, on the lives of two incredibly damaged young women with high-power jobs in the finance industry.
Succession bored the shit out of me—so it’s a bit odd I like Industry as much as I do. I guess that’s because in Succession, privilege is a given, what we economists like to call a cetis paribus, whereas in Industry, money may be the ride on the merry-go-round but privilege is the gold ring all the characters keep snatching after.
Money bores me.
Privilege does not.
###
Andrew Sullivan has done a series of absolutely fabulous articles over the past few weeks about the difference between being gay and being queer.
(And yes, I do have a dog in this fight, liking boys and girls just about equally as sexual partners.)
My own thoughts?
Since I doubt very much that the functional act behind all this (which is to say, the sexual act) is all that different from alphabet category to alphabet category, the categories themselves must be a kind of marketing tool.
What are these categories marketing?
Edge, disruption... relevance.
Relevance is attention, after all, and attention is currency in the strange social sea in which we float these days. Staying relevant is everybody's favorite performance art.
Sullivan makes the excellent point that at the end of every successful revolution or civil rights movement, the differences that gave rise to the movement should become irrelevant because those differences will have entered the mainstream and thus, should no longer exist as significators any more important, say, than a favorite color or a favorite flavor of ice cream.
Using this metric, the struggle for racial equality has a long way to go before it can be deemed successful.
But the struggle for gay rights actually did succeed: The Obergefell decision may have been controversial when SCOTUS first handed it down in 2015, but by 2020, two-thirds of Americans supported same-sex marriage.
Those numbers have been steadily going down.
Are Americans becoming more intolerant?
Or has the LGBTQIA+ contingent become more obnoxious?
Dunno!
###
As a marketing category, LGBTQIA+ is also selling consumer choice.
Like I say, I don’t see a helluva lot of essential variation in the underlying product formula, which I think can be modeled thusly: sexual attraction—>sexual availability—>genital manipulation—>orgasm.
Sexual attraction is the product component with the most room for variations, of course, and it’s those variations LGBTQIA+ is selling.
LGBTQIA+ is rather like Starbucks in that respect. Starbucks became a $115 billion company by peddling 255 variations on the basic caffeinated drink model!
You probably think your consumer choice of caffeinated drink is important!
But honestly?
It’s not.
Which is good.
But apparently, Russia is on the brink of some kind of civil war.
Which is bad.
Sentient cockroaches reading this 247 years after it was written! (Once you’ve finally figured out that human codex.)
This is where your creation myth started to get interesting.
###
I twisted my back yesterday in a moderately uncomfortable fashion. You know when it feels like an electric current is shooting vertically across your lumbar spine every couple of minutes? That.
But I was macho! I scoffed at pain! I went out tromping anyway. And for the first couple of miles could barely move. But after that, for the last three miles, the pain went away and didn’t come back.
Thereby reinforcing my belief that exercise really is the cure for everything.
###
Apart from that, I Remunerated, watched the final four episodes of Industry, and read Andrew Sullivan.
###
Industry is just an astonishingly good show. But it's not for everybody, focusing, as it does, on the lives of two incredibly damaged young women with high-power jobs in the finance industry.
Succession bored the shit out of me—so it’s a bit odd I like Industry as much as I do. I guess that’s because in Succession, privilege is a given, what we economists like to call a cetis paribus, whereas in Industry, money may be the ride on the merry-go-round but privilege is the gold ring all the characters keep snatching after.
Money bores me.
Privilege does not.
###
Andrew Sullivan has done a series of absolutely fabulous articles over the past few weeks about the difference between being gay and being queer.
(And yes, I do have a dog in this fight, liking boys and girls just about equally as sexual partners.)
My own thoughts?
Since I doubt very much that the functional act behind all this (which is to say, the sexual act) is all that different from alphabet category to alphabet category, the categories themselves must be a kind of marketing tool.
What are these categories marketing?
Edge, disruption... relevance.
Relevance is attention, after all, and attention is currency in the strange social sea in which we float these days. Staying relevant is everybody's favorite performance art.
Sullivan makes the excellent point that at the end of every successful revolution or civil rights movement, the differences that gave rise to the movement should become irrelevant because those differences will have entered the mainstream and thus, should no longer exist as significators any more important, say, than a favorite color or a favorite flavor of ice cream.
Using this metric, the struggle for racial equality has a long way to go before it can be deemed successful.
But the struggle for gay rights actually did succeed: The Obergefell decision may have been controversial when SCOTUS first handed it down in 2015, but by 2020, two-thirds of Americans supported same-sex marriage.
Those numbers have been steadily going down.
Are Americans becoming more intolerant?
Or has the LGBTQIA+ contingent become more obnoxious?
Dunno!
###
As a marketing category, LGBTQIA+ is also selling consumer choice.
Like I say, I don’t see a helluva lot of essential variation in the underlying product formula, which I think can be modeled thusly: sexual attraction—>sexual availability—>genital manipulation—>orgasm.
Sexual attraction is the product component with the most room for variations, of course, and it’s those variations LGBTQIA+ is selling.
LGBTQIA+ is rather like Starbucks in that respect. Starbucks became a $115 billion company by peddling 255 variations on the basic caffeinated drink model!
You probably think your consumer choice of caffeinated drink is important!
But honestly?
It’s not.
