A detailed and cogent analysis of the current United States budget situation

What the FUCK America? What are you DOING?
It's half two in the morning, no detailed analysis here right now... Just...
Dear God, America. Do you not... Markets... International... Political...
GAH!

Liberalism 101

Modern Liberalism is quite often confused with Socialism. Mostly by Americans. Liberals... are not socialists. There are quite a few differences there, most notably that a modern Liberal – at least in theory – doesn't care about equality.

I hate the word 'equality' (not the concept, the word), and I'm not going to explain why I hate it right now, but I do. Just know for the moment that I'm referring to equality of outcome. Equality of opportunity* can go sit in the corner for a while to let it's ugly step-sibling take up the attention. A Socialist*** wants everyone to have an outcome which is... roughly equal. Fair, at least. Some might think that effort should be exactly proportional to reward, and that everyone should thus be able to have exactly the same quality of life as anyone else, no matter what awful mistakes they might have made in the past. Some might think that all reward should be equal and thus that everyone should work for the good of the collective, rather than their own selfish ends. Some might think that effort should be based on contribution... there are a lot of Socialisms. But the point is that the outcome should be roughly equal in some way. Noone should be left behind. If anyone is, it'd be because they refuse to do any work. They're probably evil capitalist landowners who live on the sweat of the poor, downtrodden masses, and are incapable of being of benefit to society, like the salt of the earth workers are*****.

Modern Liberals don't, inherently, care about this. This might seem like a rather counter-intuitive statement, since modern liberalism seems to have sprung entirely out of concern for the poor. A large part of the point of the development of modern liberalism was that the 'freedom' of the classical liberals was all very well, but that this freedom might be, for the poorest in society, actually no more than the freedom to starve. It was modern liberalism which brought into being in the UK the beginning of the welfare state, which takes care of its citizens from cradle to grave. But the difference here is illustrated by the ideas of a classical liberal – Hayek (and no, the dates don't matter). He said that what we should have to protect people from poverty is a minimum level of provision – a line which noone would be allowed to fall below. Modern Liberalism carries on this tradition (despite predating Hayek). They care about lifting people out of poverty^††, but not necessarily about how far above 'not in poverty' the top – or even the average – member of society might be. Whilst Socialists care about the range of wealth levels, modern liberals are focused on the minimum.

Of course, the distinction is not always this clear cut. Even in the time of Smith, it was recognised that there were such things as positional goods, goods the utility of which is based upon the position of the rest of society. What is absolutely vital to a modern westerner might be not classify in the same way if you happen to be a Medieval Spaniard – a car, the internet, proper nutrition, etc. And this means that a greater objective level of wealth may be required in some places, times or societies, and for some people, to achieve the same level of utility – giving results similar to a sort-of system of relative poverty, but one with entirely different motives – one concerned about a basic level of utility (or standard of living), one concerned about equality of outcome.

The spread of liberalism also, at least arguably, has a tendency to increase the drive for equality. In a feudal society, a peasant might consider themselves 'wealthy', regardless of falling short of the poorest king, because a king is not measured on the same scale as a peasant, and so the presence or absence of positional goods in the life of a king is not to the same extent an influence on the happiness of the peasant. As social mobility (or at least the perception of it) increases, and society becomes less organised into castes, people start comparing themselves to a larger portion of society. So whilst a peasant might not compare themselves to a king, a worker will compare themselves to their boss in a modern liberal society – and moreso as class mobility increases. So someone who is objectively better off, living further up a much more liberal society, may actually feel worse off than someone who is further down a poorer society, simply because of who they're comparing themselves against.

So Modern Liberals support universalised healthcare, unemployment benefits, and all those myriad other things that prevent someone's life from becoming a hellish living drudge, from which the only escape is death. But their motivation is the extension of freedom, since 'work twelve hours a day or die of malnutrition' is not really freedom. Meanwhile Socialists tend to support far more radical wealth redistribution programmes, and their goal is equality.

So yeah. Modern liberalism is not Socialism. There's a difference – a huge difference. Liberals don't have to be modern liberals, either. And I'm focused on the Liberal side of things here. Being, y'know, a Liberal. Also, the UK isn't socialist. Neither is any of the rest of Europe, but some bits do have more of a Socialist bent than others^††††.

I have run out of things to say. I will now stop typing.

*The good kind of equality, but that's just my opinion**

**And also the correct one.

***As the term I used today in political science, or at least in the kind of political science I've studied.****

****On the USSR, I wrote an essay once on whether they were actual socialists or not. I should update it one of these days.

*****The salt of the Earth is, if I remember my Mill correctly, the kind of intellectual/revolutionary person who massively improves the world, but in small quantities – you couldn't have a society made entirely of that kind of person, in the same way that you wouldn't want to eat salt, but you add a little bit of it to something, and it improves it. I have no idea how this ended up meaning what it does now, but I'm guessing it was probably the Illuminati. It's usually the Illuminati.^†

^†OK, fine, yes, I do also know about the Sermon on the Mount. You should never trust me again. But, honestly, I prefer the version above – which makes sense in a modern context – to continuing to use it in a way which not only doesn't, but which also probably wasn't the way Jesus meant it.

^††Absolute poverty, by the way – not the whole stupid 'relative poverty' thing, where you can lift people out of poverty by causing the right kind of recession, and where people can fall into poverty for no other reason than that even though their lives are actually improving in economic terms, there are some other people hundreds of miles away, whose lives are improving faster.

^†††France. I'm talking about France. In case that wasn't clear.

The Scouring of Greenland (with thanks to HP Lovecraft)

|Well, that 'post early in August' thing worked out! I wrote this story about 18 months ago. I really hope I've improved since then. A lot... ugh.

It occurs to me that possibly I should explain this. I just kinda started writing something else, and got distracted. For a month.
            After the unification of Ireland under High King Conn, and their subsequent annexation of Wales under his son, King Art, an effort was made to avoid a costly war with the English, and alternate means of expansion were sought. Thus it was that the Irish explorer Naos UaDonaill came to discover Greenland, and despite the hostile conditions, a small colony was established. So, when war did come with England upon Art’s death, and defeat seemed certain, a large proportion of the inhabitants of Ireland fled to their colony in Greenland, leaving King Lugaid with only a very small force with which to fight the English. Needless to say, England’s conquest of Ireland followed quickly.

            The relationship between the sudden influx of new settlers and the prior inhabitants of Greenland is far too complex to be briefly documented here. However, suffice to say, that by the time of the Wars of the Americas, their society was remarkably integrated, albeit with  the Irish settlers forming a clear overclass. During the Wars, with the American Continent fully occupied by various separatist factions, it was decided that Greenland would form an ideal staging point for the reinvasion of the North. The government, due to their clear military inferiority, agreed to this, but there were still memories within the country of having been forced to evacuate their homeland, and many factions within the country objected strenuously to allowing such access. Still, historians are puzzled to this day as to how they might have achieved such destruction, and many believe that contemporary sources have misattributed to human action a natural phenomenon, although no credible explanation as to what this phenomenon might have been has yet been proposed.

            My name is Jonathan Smith… Actually, that’s a complete lie. I work for the government of the British Empire. Since noone ever uses my real name any more, it’s really just easier to stick to ‘Jonathan Smith’. I had a wife once, but she left the first time a tentacled aberration the size of a small ship crashed through our wall. It’s a pity – I really cared about her... Where was I? Ah, yes. The British Government. Actually, I’ve never really seen it that way. The job of the British Government is the protection of its citizens (or taking over the world – whichever). Mine is making sure that noone destroys the world. So the way I see it, they work for me.

            Yes, of course. Because when you tell them that leaving Greenland before rebels summon an abomination from beyond time to turn the entire country into obsidian, they do it immediately, don’t they? So there’s no way you might ever have to go traipsing through a frozen waste looking for a cult which you have no idea of how to even start to go about stopping, even if you do manage to find them.

            And I have a voice in my head. I think it’s probably a result of losing my last regular human companion when my wife left, combined with far too much time spent dealing with various creatures from beyond God’s creation. He claims to be one of the Virtues, but I really don’t believe him.

            And as you might’ve worked out from that, I’m currently in the middle of Greenland, looking for a world destroying cult. So, tangent over, back to my story. My name is Jonathan Smith. I arrived in Greenland just over two weeks ago to try and prevent the summoning of Cthroorn. I still remember my first arrival here. The frozen wastes stretched as far as the eye could see. So imagine what it was like when I left the capital city. And when my story starts, I’m on a coach going to a castle in the middle of nowhere. Not even knowing whether or not there’s anything there. I only know about the summoning at all because someone named Kaiwan told me about the cult, their plans and that this was the place to go to find out about it. You might’ve wanted to examine that one a little more closely. He seemed nice, though.

            No. No. No. That’s no way to start a story. Noone wants to hear me talk about the boring details of my job. My name is Jonathan Smith. I fight crime. No you don’t. If you consider causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and undoing God’s creation to be a crime I do. And I do. Anyway, you’re probably wondering why I started my story here. This is where the interesting bit starts. I was approached by someone calling himself Sean. Of course, I know now that that wasn’t his real name. That’s terrible! What kind of despicable person would use a false name? Shut up. Sean asked me why I was travelling to the castle. So I told him that I’d heard reports of strange things happening there, and I was visiting him in order to try and find out about them. In retrospect, that was kinda stupid. Well how would you have gone about finding information? Obviously, though, he said he didn’t know anything about strange happenings in the castle that he informed me he’d never been to before, and I didn’t think anything of it.

            Nothing else of particular note happened in the time between that conversation and our arrival at the castle. Except the deep one. Yes, except that our group was attacked by a deep one. I’m not sure how the thing had got there, but about half of us ended up dead. That was incredibly relevant, thank you for reminding me. Always happy to remind you of your devastating failures. There was nothing I could do. Even with the best reverse engineering available, a musket isn’t going to do much against a deep one.

            Nothing else of particular note which is actually of relevance to my story happened before we reached the castle. When we did reach it, accommodation, at least, wasn’t a problem. I may not be able to end wars, but I do have at least enough influence to get myself a place to sleep. You bribed someone. And you still couldn’t get into the castle itself. Why must you constantly correct me on the most minor of details? In this case, it’s actually important. Although it is true that his interruption might’ve been justified. I was, indeed, forced to take shelter in a small, windowless hut in the village surrounding the castle. The next night, I heard a knocking on my door. It had probably been going on for some time, since I’d tired myself out making sure that the hut was safe for habitation.

            I am not some untrained lordling, who runs across a cult whilst exploring his heritage. I was trained for this. When you’re investigating a world destroying cult, and someone knocks on your door in the middle of the night, the correct response is not to assume that they’ve got the wrong door. I’d put a bullet through the door before I was even fully awake. It’s a good thing you live in the modern day. In the past, you might’ve had to get up in order to commit random murder. It was self-defence, and you know it. So you say. It’s going to be rather embarrassing when you have to tell people you shot your landlord. It is true that, as I now know, the person I had just shot was, in fact, the owner of the place I was staying, as Sean later informed me. At the time, however, I was rather more concerned with the fact that cultists tended to come in swarms. And, indeed, there now seemed to be a mob trying to break down his door. I managed to get off a few more shots before my door gave in.

            Another brilliant invention of the modern age is the socket bayonet. So I did still have a way of defending myself. You didn’t, though. Fighting people when they can fight back? Sounds dangerous. Better to wait until there’s a door between you. Gah! How am I meant to tell a good story with these constant interruptions? There must’ve been about fifty of them. Twenty. Regardless. There were too many of them still standing for me to deal with. And the hut I was staying in didn’t have any windows. They’d probably been planning this. Unfortunately, I was, as I pointed out before, trained for this, and trained rather well. One of the first things I’d been trained to do when I was sleeping in someone else’s house was to make myself an exit that they didn’t know about. With the work I’d already done, it took me less than half a second with the bayonet to make a hole in the wall. I grabbed the bag I’d stored next to it, and was out of the hut before the mob had crossed the room.

            Another fortunate habit I’d managed to developed was sleeping in clothes I could go outside in. It might be rather uncomfortable to try and sleep in a full length coat, but that’s nothing compared to having one’s toes fall off whilst one tries to flee a town. So if you could escape any time you felt like it, why did you have to shoot someone just for knocking at your door? Good point. I should probably explain that. It’s not that I particularly enjoy randomly murdering people who I’ve never even seen. Liar. Quiet. Even if they didn’t know about the hole in the wall, they might’ve surrounded the hut. Besides which, leaving behind the only place I have to sleep and losing most of my possessions into the bargain isn’t exactly convenient. As I was saying, I was able to outdistance the mob, probably aided by the fact that they seem to have paused to burn down the hut. I’d say I wasn’t sure why, but given that most of my important possessions which weren’t in my bag had been hidden in various places, it was probably the best way of making sure they’d destroyed all my possessions. Which is exactly what cultists would do. Or people who’d just seen you murder their friends, and wanted to make life as difficult for you as possible. But they weren’t. They were cultists.

            As I ran, I tried to think of what to do next. I think it’s probably safe to say you made the wrong choice. I haven’t got to that bit yet. I decided that I probably shouldn’t go to the castle for help, since there was a pretty good chance that they were in on this. Because they wouldn’t let you sleep in the castle and laughed at your identification? Wouldn’t that be what most people would do? Do you have to criticise everything I do? As it turns out, I was totally right, so I don’t think you’re allowed to criticise me for that particular call. But it didn’t exactly leave that many choices as to what to do. Fortunately or not I hadn’t really started my investigations yet. I always find it better to have an escape route before I start asking the homicidal maniacs suspicious questions. So the only person I’d told was Sean. Pity you didn’t exercise that level of caution with Sean. Actually, it was a good thing I didn’t. Or I wouldn’t have had any leads. And having leads worked out so well for you. Just let me tell the story. I decided that what I needed to do was track Sean down. Of course, when I got to the coach he wasn’t there. I hardly expected him to be, not when there were actual beds nearby. But I thought I could wait nearby until he came back. Then I saved the day. Then the voice in my head revealed that he knew how to track people. I’m not really sure how he knew that, since I never learned it. Because I’m a Virtue. Why wouldn’t I know how do things you can’t? Or I did learn to do it at some point, and repressed the memory. I’ve seen that kind of thing happen to people in my line of work before. Why is my being a Virtue so hard to believe? Because I have a passing knowledge of theology. Virtues don’t deal with humans. I’ve told you before. My job is to ensure order in the cosmos. I don’t like the idea of things like Cthroorn being on the loose any more than you do. But I’m not allowed to just smite people. So I work with the tools I’m given.

            Anyway. However it happened isn’t particularly important. I was able to track Sean’s footprints, anyway. Excuse me? I was-. I just said it didn’t matter. What does matter is that I tracked them, and they led to the castle. Which pretty much confirmed my ‘the guards are in on it’ theory. Because only a complete idiot would be fooled by Sean. Shut. Up. You’re just trying to rationalise what you did next. What I did next was fine. The lives of two people are really not of that much concern compared to the lives of everyone in Greenland, and many of those outside it.

            There were two guards outside. I had a bayonet, and I didn’t want to be delayed or draw too much attention to myself. So I’m sure I don’t need to draw you a picture. And you’re feeling too guilty about what you did to want to talk about it. I’m not really proud of what I did, I’ll admit it. But it was the right decision, and I’ll stand by it. I was able to do what I had to, and I managed to get into the castle.

            Wherever it came from, my tracking abilities didn’t work inside the castle. Have you ever tried to track someone across a solid stone floor which hundreds of other people have also walked across. You already know I can’t track anyway. But I’m sure an angel would’ve found a way of managing it. I don’t exactly have a lot of experience with humans. Think yourself lucky I got as far as I did. Unfortunately, I do have to agree with him. That particular random ability had just come in rather useful, and it would seem rather ungrateful to complain about losing something I hadn’t even had five minutes ago. So I had to search the castle manually.

            I’ll spare you the description of what, exactly, it was that I found in that place, but suffice to say that there was rather more evidence that there really was something untoward and culty going on here… Surprisingly, the voices in my head seem to agree with me on that one. Anyway, I did manage eventually to find Sean. I didn’t know that I had at the time, since everyone was calling him ‘lordship’ and he was wearing the face concealing black hooded robe that most cultists seem to favour. It makes them harder to identify. And makes it easier to sneak in. Until someone tries to talk to you. Yes, that can be a problem. I ambushed one of the cultists on the way out of the room, and went in to see what they were doing. Clever. Yeah, that might’ve been a mistake, but killing random cultists isn’t really helpful if it turns out that the actual summoning is going on a few miles away, and you don’t have a clue that you just completely failed to prevent the apocalypse. It seemed to work at first, and we proceeded without incident into the room where the summoning ritual was going to take place. You didn’t find it the least bit suspicious that your arrival should suddenly trigger them being ready for the start of the ritual?  And if I had, what exactly could I have done about it? The problem came when Sean called for the sacrifice to be brought forth, and two cultists grabbed me from behind.

            I am, as I have said before, trained for this. The very concept of not having some way of defending myself is alien to me. Unfortunately, even well trained and armed with a bayonet, numbers take their toll. Let alone when it’s someone like you who’s armed with a bayonet. The cultists restrained me, and held me in front of Sean, who lowered his hood, and revealed his identity to me.

            He told me that we hadn’t really been properly introduced, and that his real name was Cu Chulainn. I don’t believe that that’s his real name, any more than Sean is, so I’m just going to stick with Sean. He also explained to me that they’d been expecting me. Like I said, you should really have been less eager to trust Kaiwan.

            Then the ritual started. It was surprisingly painless, although given that it summoned Chthroorn inside of me, and he’s going to burst forth and destroy everything for miles around soon, I suspect that it is unlikely to remain so.

            I doubt anyone will ever find this account, but there’s hardly anything else I can do at this point. And if anyone else ever does hear this... Good luck.

            Jonathan finished his account, and put down the recording device. Like the musket, it was reverse engineered – this had been taken from a Cammora. Unlike his musket had recently proven to be, it was nearly unbreakable, so it would probably survive Chthroorn. Then he waited.

            He had been intending to simply wait for the end to come, but someone came down the hall to visit him. Someone interesting enough to shake him out of his reverie. It was Kaiwan.

            ‘You murderer!’ Jonathan sprang to his feet. ‘Why did you even come here? You’ll end up as dead as everyone else.

            ‘I severely doubt that.’ Kaiwan smiled smugly. ‘Regardless, I had to make sure you didn’t go off track.’

            ‘Sorry?’ Jonathan asked.

            ‘Don’t you recognise me?’ His smile had gone from smugness to downright mockery. ‘I’m your virtue. And now Cthroorn will rise, and it will be glorious.’

            It was Jonathan’s turn to smile smugly ‘No it won’t.’

            Kaiwan’s smile disappeared. ‘Explain.’

            ‘Cthroon’s part of me now. I can feel what it will do. How did you think I knew what its name was? Cthroorn’s not going to rise. It’s going to do what anything would do if it was woken in the middle of the night by an annoying little insect. Smash the annoyance, and go back to sleep. You’re a mass murderer, but if you were looking for the apocalypse, you’ve gone about it all wrong.’ Jonathan closed his eyes, and felt the transformation begin.

            He was right. It wasn’t painless.

Convolvus minor

Still July!

I need to start getting this stuff done faster...


Anyway, my foratting has gotten all screwed up, and I can't be bothered to replace most of it...


I don't think I have anything else to say this...

Oh! The topic of the post!

OK, doubt. I'm big on doubt. I'm agnostic, for a start, and I heartily dislike glib oversimplifications. Things are more complicated than that. Things are always more complicated than that*. Always**. So doubt is a kinda 'me' thing.

In the case of asexuality, it's rather easy to be less than entirely sure of where you stand, especially if you've got fairly used to identifying as straight before you even hear  that you might be something called an 'asexual'. Straight is... kinda the default, it's what you assume. You need some reason to start doubting it, and being a heteroromantic asexual doesn't really lend itself to you getting that kind of push. You don't start getting attracted to people of the same gender as you (which I've always thought must be a definite hint that one is not entirely straight), you just... aren't attracted to anyone. Except you are. You're attracted to those of the opposite sex***, and in a way that you are not attracted to those of the same sex****.­ So that must make you straight, right? Sure, the attraction isn't exactly what you'd imagine sexual attraction to be, since, y'know, it doesn't actually come with any desire whatsoever to actually have sex with anyone, but, well, even if you do ask someone else what sexual attraction feels like, they generally don't have a particularly satisfactory answer for you. Even if (as I did) you have a suspicion that what you feel isn't sexual attraction, it's rather hard to figure out what other options there might be. The distinction between romantic and sexual orientation is really something almost unique to the ace community, and knowing about it can be a huge part of trying to figure out if you're ace or not. Which means that you have to be part of the asexual community in order to figure out that one should be part of the asexual community. It's pretty easy to get stuck in a state of existential doubt, where you really doesn't know what on earth you are. You must be straight... and yet you're kinda not.

If you are lucky, and find out that 'heteroromantic asexual' is a thing (or any other flavour of romantic asexual), then there's still the problem of being sure that you are one. It's easy to determine, for example, polysexuality. At least somewhat. One simply has to be attracted  to people of a variety of genders. Determining for certain the complete absence of something? That's a lot harder, especially if it's something you've never experienced, and which noone can describe to you properly. It's always hard to be sure that something isn't there somewhere, let alone when you don't, technically, actually know what you're looking for. Just ask Nessie. The best you can do is, eventually, to decide that if there was someone you were going to be attracted by, you would have seen them by now. You would have found at least one person you had at least a little attraction to. And you decide that, if there is such a person, and you haven't found them yet, you might as well be functionally asexual. The kind of people you're attracted to are clearly so rare you're unlikely to ever come across them, anyway, and they'd have to be a long way from what is commonly thought of as attractive, or you would have known what your friends were talking about when they said that they found people attractive.

And then you find out about grey-aces and demisexuals. And as far as I know, there is no way of determining that you aren't one of those. Maybe I only get attracted to people I feel a certain way about. Maybe I've never really felt that way about anyone, or maybe the people who I have felt that way about aren't the kind of people I'd find attractive anyway. I mean, people of other orientations aren't attracted to absolutely everyone with whom their orientation is compatible (I don't think). So it would seem rash of me to assume that demisexuals must be*****. I still don't know if I might be, for example, demisexual. I have no idea how I'd go about finding out, really.

And then there's the final piece of doubt. Or the final piece that I'm going to talk about right now, anyway. Which is when you come out, and you are doubted. Generally, this doubt is really not helpful. You get told that you just haven't found the right person yet†. You get told a whole load of things about how you just haven't tried it††, or about how if you're a repulsed asexual, rather than a merely indifferent one, then that means you must be ill†††. None of this is helpful, if you're still not entirely confident in your conclusions. A sexual might not be trying to be at all hurtful when they say something like this. They might genuinely be trying to help. To any sexuals reading? You're really not. The person you're talking to has probably thought of all this. They've probably heard all this from someone else. If they've been out for a while, they definitely have. If you're a close friend, and you know what you're talking about, and you have some specific reason to think they're not asexual, you might go ahead (though remember that if it's something obvious, all their other close friends have probably mentioned it too, and try to be polite about it. For example, it's probably better to assume it's your mistake, and to ask for clarification, than to accidentally come off as a 'Ha! Gotcha!' kinda accusation (and remember that they really do have no obligation to explain this to you - if they do, it's out of politeness).

Obviously, if they're a close friend and they're not coming out, but just telling you, specifically, because they're not sure, you obviously have a lot more leeway to ask questions. And because you're a close friend who they trust enough to tell, you probably won't screw it up. You do still want to be pretty careful, yeah, and think about how they're likely to be feeling right now, but if they came to you, I would hope that you'd be able to deal with it.

Anyway, that's it for now. I have another post I've been working on that should go up in early August, hopefully (I have no idea how these things take so long to write). Seeya!

*To be clear, it's not the fact that something's been simplified that I dislike - I do that all the time myself, after all. It's the denial that this is, in fact, being done. Reducing something complicated into something simple is helpful. Pretending that something complicated is something simple is really downright unhelpful.
**Mathematics often claims to be the exception here, saying that mathematical truths are absolute truth, and thus (at least some of them) are entirely straightforward and simple. I would like to point out to these people that in Principia Mathematica, Whitehead and Russell (two rather intelligent philosophers) spent several hundred pages attempting to prove that two plus two equals four. An attempt in which they were only partially successful. And even this partial success depends on the validity of deductive logic - which, it must be pointed out, is seen to be reliable only on the basis of deductive logic,a level of circular reasoning roughly equivalent to the claim that one knows that astrology is accurate because the stars predict that it will be.
***Whether or not they are the opposite gender is not necessarily something our hypothetical heteroromantic asexual, who is totally not me knows, or has even considered, as yet.
****OK, in my case, I am sometimes attracted to men - cisgendered men - in that way. But it's a lot rarer, and I'm just going to skip over it right now.
*****That is... not actually an entirely uncontroversial statement. Yes, I know about the thing about primary vs. secondary sexual attraction. I'm saying that I don't find the idea of a demisexual who is attracted to some people to whom they have a close enough emotional connection, but not to others, to be a self-contradictory one. In the simplest case, imagine demisexual A is biromantic, but actually only, as it turned out, demi-heterosexual. The primary vs. secondary model does not seem to, in the form I have encountered it, be able to account for it, but it seems to me not to be too absurd, and whilst I'm happy to be shown to be wrong, I'd need to have some fairly compelling evidence that it just doesn't happen at all to discard it as a possibility.
†Any sexual readers: how old were you when you first found someone you were attracted to? I mean at all. Not the first person you fell in love with, the first person you found at all desirable
†† With straight people, of course, it's easy to go with the old 'have you tried gay sex?' thing. And it's not much harder to do the opposite to gay people, if they come out with that. Bisexuals, polysexuals and pansexuals might be harder, but I've never actually come across one who didn't believe me, strangely enough, so I've never had to deal with it. Possibly you should ask them if they've ever tried auto-amputation.
††† Though, curiously enough, the people I've tried this on have been less than receptive to the idea that they must be mentally ill if they're disgusted by having to watch two people of their less preferred gender having sex. I don't know if one has tried this on Dan Savage, but I think most people accept that there are number of people who would actively dislike, and even feel some sense of disgust at sex between two people of their less preferred gender, or even between two people of different genders, at least one of which they are unattracted to, no matter how homo/hetero-phobic they may or may not be. You could argue that the level of disgust is different, but once the general principle is conceded, the rest is really just haggling over the price.

Sex+

NOTE: The formatting on this post might be a bit funny, because I'm using a spare computer, and therefore wrote it mostly in Notepad.

I was ambushed by a wandering gay Pride parade* yesterday! So I joined it, and now I own a nice, colourful gay pride lei. Along with the other assorted stuff that one seems to end up with whenever one is at a Pride event.

You might think that, for an asexual, it would be entirely natural to be in favour of gay pride. Sex is sex, after all, and looking from the outside, there's not really that much difference between various kinds. And it's true that, at least for me, there's really not any significant difference there. I don't, honestly, care much about little things like the gender of the participents. It's like, if you'll pardon the theft, fighting over which end to open a boiled egg.

But that analysis is an analysis that does make one important assumption - that the asexual in question is in favour of sex at all. One may make no distinction between heterosexual sex and homosexual sex, but that does not preclude one from hating them both equally.

And... well, some people do. It's easy to do. I make no secret at all of the fact that sex is something I find disgusting, and personally, I would not be unhappy at all if it just disappeared. The distinction here is betweren sex negative asexuals, and sex positive asexuals. As the terms suggest, sex positive asexuals think sex is a good thing, and that anyone who wants to have sex should be free to have it without prejudice or judgment. Whereas sex negative is, obviously, the opposite - someone who doesn't like sex**.

Being sex-positive isn't limited to asexuals, of course. Sex positive feminism, for example, is a thing. Sex-negativity, too, happens outside the asexual community***. But it's a lot more prominent in the asexual community, simply because there's more of a debate to be had - if you think sex is disgusting, and you're not sure why people are so interested in it, then, looking from the outside, it would be very easy to misinterpret it as an addiction, and then start thinking of it in terms of drug addiction. Or to just be so bloody annoyed by everyone talking about it constantly that one just wants it to go away. Or to look at all the conflict that happens around sex, and decide that it's really doing more harm than good (you'd think that the last one might be the most sensible of the three reasons to be a sex-negative sexual, but no, actually sex-negative sexuals in general tend to be more divisive about different kinds of sex).

I, personally, am sex-positive. Because, for me, not understanding why something is appealing doesn't mean caring whether or not someone else does it. I mean, I'd appreciate it if they didn't do it in front of me, but that's something that happens pretty rarely, especially if you're trying to avoid it. And... well, I'm not (quite) arrogant enough to think that my own personal preference is very relevant here. For me, sex-positivity is mostly bound up with Liberalism, with viewing people as real people, with whom one has no real right to interfere, unless their actions are harmful. I would hate it if someone told me I had to stop playing Settlers of Catan, and I like Catan a lot less than I think most people enjoy sex. 'It disgusts me' is a terrible reason to say anything is bad. If there's any doubt of this, look at this short list of things that can be (and are) opposed on these grounds: Transsexuals, gay people, coleslaw****.

And frankly, I don't really see that much that might make opposition to sex in any way better than opposition to board games. You might argue that there are, indeed, qualitative differences between the two. And I would, to some extent agree with you. I'm not going to get into all that right now. But what differences there are, I would argue, are really mostly irrelevant. Sex compares more closely to Catan than to Cocaine. It's a bit more dangerous than Catan, admittedly*****. But mostly only if you don't do it safely. And I have this wierd bias towards treating people as responsible adults, who can make their own decisions about risk. This is also why I completely fail to be opposed to hang-gliding, cheerleading, drinking, carving beef, and crossing the road. And at least one of those can actually be dangerous†!

As for talking about it all the time... Yeah, it would be nice if the rest of the population could shut the hell up about this already, but... well, freedom of speech and all that. It's really not that different from people talking about football the whole time. Yeah, it might be a little impolite, if you're in a group with someone who is more interested in carpet lint, or who even finds the conversation rather squicky, but... well, at this point you're moving away from being sex-negative, towards being 'politeness-positive'††.


Also, there are all the problems associated with sex. Fortunately, most of them don't come from the sex itself. They come from things like lying, assult, prejudice and all those various other things that just so happen to already be wrong, even without the sex being involved. So attacking consensual sex between two people just because it's vaguely associated with things which are generally condemned anyway? That sounds counter-intuitive. And really rather unhelpful.

Ultimately, then, being sex-positive is about treating other people as genuine people, as human as oneself, whose preferences are as valid as one's own. In other words, not being an arrogant bastard. Which is something that I think a lot of sex-negative aces could be accused of. At least it's not the last reason to be sex negative - that sex is an animalistic, base thing, and therefore bad, that asexuals, not being saddled with this animalistic desire, are less animalistic, and therefore 'more human' or 'more evolved'. Making them inherently superior. Obviously.

Well, at least it's straightforward in its arrogance?

And, I suppose, I'm asexual. So there is some evidence that asexuals are just way better than the rest of the population.

But yeah, I'm honestly not going to dignify that one with a reply. No. Just... no.


*It genuinely surprised me - I thought is was in about a month.
**There's a bit of a double definition here. Sex negative can either mean someone who doesn't like sex personally because it disgusts them, or someone who actively thinks it's a bad thing. I'm sticking with the latter definition because otherwise it would be possible to be sex positive and sex negative at the same time (it still sort of is, but it's a lot harder). Also because 'repulsed' works fine for the first definition.
***It's a lot less popular, of course. Because it's really kinda dumb.
****OK. Fine. It may just be me who hates coleslaw this much. But it shouldn't be.
*****If your games of Catan involve any risk of death, consider the possibility that you may be doing it wrong.
†I'm not sure, but I think it's the carving beef. It lulls you into a false sense of security.
††I would like to take this opportunity to declare myself broadly in favour of 'manners'. Y'know. In general. It's this kind of bold stance on difficult and important issues that's the reason for half my readership.†††
†††I'm really not sure what the other person comes here for.

Quick nameless update

So, I went to see The Tempest on Friday. The play takes place simultaneously over two days and over three hours, and over the course of the play, Miranda and Ferdinand meet and fall in love. Miranda has never seen a man before. Whilst Ferdinand admits that there were other women he was attracted to before Miranda (like Romeo before Juliet). And there is no indication whatsoever in this comedy to say that Shakespeare is intending the audience to disapprove of this relationship. It's treated pretty much entirely positively. I won't go into this too deeply, but I thought I'd mention it, since it pretty much reenforces the argument I made last time.

What else? Um... The leader of UKIP is a bloody moron, but that's nothing new. And I'm pretty sure that anyone who says that immigration is bad for the economy hasn't really looked into the actual economic arguments. Because um... it is really pretty clear cut.

There is a Tumblr on which I was interviewed: http://asexualistic.tumblr.com/. It has cute pictures! It was about 1AM when I did said interview, and I was kinda tired, so it's not the most coherent I've ever been, but still.

I was oing to do a full post but... I just kinda don't want to at the moment. It keeps getting all bitter and angry for no good reason. So I'll just leave it at that*.

*Oh, and I'll include this footnote. Because otherwise it's not really a proper post.

Time's out of joint

Let’s talk about Shakespeare. There are a lot of crazy theories about the man. Some people think he was the Earl of Oxford, for example. That’s utterly ridiculous. Obviously, he was a time traveller.

OK, that might sound a little silly. But it’s a lot less silly than you might think compared to a lot of the other theories. What evidence is there that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare? Two centuries after his death, people decided that someone middle class couldn’t possibly have written something so brilliant. So they’d have to find a much nicer, more upper class, person, who could have done it, due to their superior breeding. That’s it, really. On the other hand, there’s the fact that there are mistakes specifically traceable to things in Shakespeare’s own background (mistakes which, say, the Earl of Oxford, would never have made), the fact that the man was actually pretty well educated (he was pretty much middle class), we know more about the man’s life than about most other writers from the time, the fact that the man co-wrote several plays without, apparently, managing to tip anyone off that he wasn’t what he said he was, and the fact that he was mentioned repeatedly during his life as a genius author, and the fact that his social class was actually mentioned by his contemporaries, in case anyone thought that the ‘Shakespeare’ thingy was just a pseudonym. I could continue, but the point probably stands. If people who knew him for two decades didn’t notice that he was actually someone else, I cast doubt on the idea that it should be obvious to someone who lived more than two centuries after he died.

Given all that evidence, I don’t think it’s much more idiotic to claim that he was a time-traveller than to think that the man was any of the other idiotic options we’ve been given about him. But there is actually some evidence for the man being a time-traveller. Namely, he had no understanding whatsoever of the concept of time. The obvious example here is Hamlet – the conversation between Hamlet and his father’s ghost. During this, they walk a little way along the castle walls, and manage to have a conversation of a little under seven hundred words. Why does this matter? Because it apparently takes them about six hours. The ghost arrives around midnight, and leaves with the dawn. Clearly, the man had no understanding of time on the micro level.

So what about the macro level, then? Well, here I’m going to look at Othello. Mostly, because it’s a play I know pretty well. In Othello, one of the reasons some people have condemned Othello is because of how incredibly fast Othello turns from love of his wife to utter loathing of her. If, they say, he is so quick to condemn his love. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, after all. But at the same time, a lot of Othello works because there’s never really any chance to just sit down and think things through. Or for Othello and Desdemona just to sit down and talk about things. Othello takes place over a few days, right? Act one must take place over the course of a single day, then they leave straight away, the festival in act two has to start the same day they arrive, by act three the day after that, Othello wants Cassio dead within three days, and it really seems that the play takes place over less than a week. Except that in that time, Cassio apparently starts a relationship with Bianca, it becomes serious, he leaves her for a week, and she gets angry with him. So that’s about two weeks. At least. This timeline also fits a lot better with the communications between Othello and Ludovico than the idea of a play of less than a week does – at this time, it took some time to travel between Venice and Cyprus, and Shakespeare doesn’t seem to have much truck with this idea. Almost as though he were  from a time when it didn’t take so long.

OK, no, I don’t really believe that Shakespere was a time traveller. So what is my point? Well, there’s a rather popular little theory that Romeo and Juliet isn’t a love story because of the timeline. They’re too hasty, they fall in love too fast, it would never have lasted, blah, blah. You might be able to guess what I think about that idea. I don’t think Shakespeare really subscribed to the notion that falling in love takes time. In The Taming of the Shrew, the relationship between Bianca and Lucentio is hardly extended, and on Lucentio’s side falling in love based entirely on appearance is apparently entirely fine, and encounters no real problems whatsoever. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, within four days, all the love problems get sorted out, and Demetrius falls in love with someone couldn’t stand just a few days before. Also, the cycle of the moon apparently takes about two days or so. So that’s another bit of time he was a little confused about. Although if we can take a week of Shakespeare to be actually a couple of months, that could actually explain quite a lot. I could go on thinking of examples, but I think I’ve made my point. The evidence is that Shakespeare didn’t really see time spent getting to know one another. Midsummer Night’s Dream is a pretty good parallel here, where the loving couple is completely fine, and, really, Demetrius should just stop being so stubborn, and fall in love with the person who loves him back, rather than pursuing the one who doesn’t (as with how Paris shouldn’t be pursuing Juliet, and how Romeo should give up on Rosaline).

The fact is, Shakespeare was not, I think, writing to be analysed. He was writing plays to be watched – and this is not to say that his plays are in any way shallow, or that there aren’t deep things in them, or that they shouldn’t be analysed. The point is, if there’s a conflict between what you feel  one of his plays is about when you’re watching it, and what you conclude it must’ve been about when you study it later, you should actually probably be trusting the play. Shakespeare’s was, really, quite good at what he did, and with the exception of values dissonance like in Taming of the Shrew, if he creates an emotion, I think it’s probably because he wants to.

And I don’t think he was really worried about the timeline, either. Shakespeare is, in my judgement, a writer. He is not a historian of the fictional. The story is a lot more important than sitting down and thinking ‘does this make logical sense?’. I’ll probably talk about this more if/when I get to Lord Dunsany*, but the events of the play feel true, and they make for a truly engaging and enjoyable play. They don’t have to be representations of things which could actually happen.

*Quickly, though, if you have time, you should read The King of Elfland’s Daughter. It is a very good book, and it’s really not too long. This has been my mandatory footnote for this post.

Reflections on the milk-snatcher

Margret Thatcher. Is dead. I never liked her that much, but I feel pretty sad about it anyway. Here’s a post for her, on the day of the public funeral, to show respect, and not at all because I write slowly and kept getting distracted. So, lets’ get the really obvious thing about how obviously her funeral can’t remain a state funeral, and how it should be privatised, out of the way now, and move swiftly onwards.

So, um, my view of Thatcher is probably a lot different from a lot of British people’s, for two reasons. Firstly, I am very young. I never lived through her time in office – she was gone by the time I was born. Secondly, I have some fairly good links with the ASI. And even though (despite popular belief) the ASI is not really a Thatcherite think tank… well, they ARE pretty pro-Thatcher (I think that it’s become a lot more pro-Thatcher than it was back when she was actually in Parliament). So when I hear people talking about Thatcher, it’s almost always positively, or at least ambivalently. Which means it’s really hard for me to feel the kind of anger a lot of people feel towards her. I disagree with a lot of her policies*. I disagree with a lot of what she said. But I have a really hard time not respecting the woman, and not least because she actually had principles of her own.

A lot of people might be a bit annoyed at me for saying that – there were people who got all angry at Obama for expressing sympathy for her death. And some people seem to be convinced too that not only do they hate her, not should everyone hate her, but, inexplicably, that the entirety of the UK actually does share their opinion. I mean, like, she got about 42% of the vote pretty much consistently*. And a load more people didn’t care enough to vote for a party with any chance of actually winning against her. So no. Not everyone hated Thatcher. And a lot of the people who didn’t hate her aren’t complete raving loonies. It’s easy to pretend things were never bad enough that Thatcherism seemed like an improvement, but… they weren’t. Now, to be fair, a lot of sane and reasonable people hated Thatcher too. I’m not denying that. Nor am I denying that the people who seem to think that everyone loved Thatcher really aren’t just as insane. But Thatcher wasn’t just the province of the mad Tories. People who voted for her failed to vote for Major, and not all of that can be accounted for by mass dying. Reasonable people looked at her, and decided she was the best option.

She also did quite a few things we… kinda needed. All in all, I am, in general, pro-change. Like, I know it doesn’t work this way, but my instinct is that if you change things, you can change back if it turns out that that was a really stupid idea, whereas if you keep everything the same, the chance to try out new things doesn’t arise. The term ‘sick  man of Europe’ has been thrown around a lot lately, but it’s not something that should lose its impact. Twenty percent inflation is generally a sign that things have Gone Wrong. She also introduced secret ballots for unions on strike action. In other words, a union could no longer shut down a factory based on a show of hands. Now, I have very little against unions. I’m not very pro-democracy. But um… a show of hands. No. Just… no. Pre-Thatcher, the challenge was managing the decline of the country. Post-Thatcher, it was keeping its place in the Sun. I’m not a patriot. Not by any means – I think my attitude to the English is one I inherited from the Irish side of the family. But I did have to grow up in this country, and I’d rather prefer the one with consistent electricity, a strong (kinda,  ‘til the last five years or so, anyway, and even now compared to a lot of the world) economy, and inexplicable delusions of grandeur than one with realistic expectations of itself, regular power cuts, and an economy held hostage by insanely powerful (and/or just insane) unions.

Of course, she also did the EU thing. Yeah, massive shock, someone who’s argued for one world government is actually pretty pro-Europe****. You might want to stop reading for a while, to calm down from that kind of a shock. Now, I have to be clear here. The UK has never been pro-Europe. I think we have a kinda Napoleon Complex about the mainland. It’s bigger than us, it scares us, and we’re not going to stand for that, dammit! So it’s hard to tell how far she is actually responsible for the UK’s Euroscepticism. I mean, I would never say anything like ‘without Thatcher we would have integrated ourselves into the EU. But I don’t think she helped. I don’t think we’d be trying to get our way against the entire rest of the EU if Thatcher hadn’t given us the impression that UK-EU relations could work that way*****. And yes, I understand the reasons behind the agreement we eventually came to. But the fact is that Thatcher’s major focus was, I think, patriotic. Like, unquestionably abroad, the UK was her major focus (just compare UK-US relations under Thatcher vs. under Blair), and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, even if I’m instinctively pro-compromise. It’s not neccesarily a good thing, either, since that patriotism led to her opposing the reunification of Germany, and a series of other ways of throwing our enemies and/or rivals under the bus. She understood the need for compromise, and she signed the Anglo-Irish treaty, but she didn’t like it. The South Africa, thing, though, was, I think, pretty much unrelated. The thing is, I think she was a patriot on domestic issues, too. This isn’t too much of a leap, since, y’know, she actually said this, but I still think it bears mentioning that I think her purpose was ‘make the UK great again’. It misses the point, I think, to say ‘poverty increased under thatcher’^†. The point is that the UK became greater.

She was also operating in an era where ‘trickle down economics’ seemed like a reasonable idea. Because another idea that goes back to Smith is that what matters isn’t the size of an economy, but how fast it’s growing. If the economy is shrinking, then wages will be low, people will be unemployed, etcetera, etcetera. If it’s growing, people’s wages will be higher, everyone will be employed, etcetera. This isn’t really that controversial, even today – the idea that ‘recessions are bad’ is hardly high level economics. So, there is a rather seductive logical progression that, therefore, what you need to do is grow as fast as possible, and everyone will be better off. A rising tide will lift all boats. There is a really annoying problem with people basing actual economic policy on economic models that don’t exactly… work. Like, not because their wrong – just because real life doesn’t let you simplify things that way, sadly. Trickle-down economics doesn’t work – it produces too much of a distortion, and the money doesn’t move about enough – but it’s a lot more reasonable to know that today than it is to expect that people should have known it back then. It’s still a bloody stupid mistake to have made, and trickle down had been tried before, in the 19^th century, but it’s a lot more forgivable than it would be if someone tried that one today.

It would be intellectually dishonest not to mention here that inflation was higher when Thatcher left office than when she took it, and that she had slightly lower than average growth. It would also be rather stupid to try and make something of this, since, if you actually look at inflation over time, it’s WAY down after Thatcher’s been in office for a little bit, and hasn’t gotten up to the levels it was at just before and/or just after she took office. Whatever you think of her, I cannot see how you can look at the graphs and say that Thatcher didn’t help with our inflation problem. That’s a misleading statistic. The GDP thing is also kinda misleading, since, y’know, that includes the beginning of her term – if you measure from 1979-1990, she’s slightly below average. Measuring the decade 1981-1990, which seems pretty reasonable to me, she’s way, way above average. You can argue that her entire approach was wrong, and you can argue that she severely damaged the underlying structure of the economy. But it’s pretty clear from the stats that the economic prospects of the country as a whole were rather better after Thatcher. And we’d moved from manufacturing-based economics to a… frothier^††… model. A lot of people complain about that but um… yeah, there’s no way we could have survived with that economic model. The UK cannot produce things as cheaply, or even as well, as other countries can. I’m sorry, no. That just couldn’t work. We pretty much had to move away from that model, because it would be nearly impossible for us to compete.

Oh, one last thing. The joke I made about the state funeral at the beginning? That wasn’t entirely pointless. This is Margret Thatcher we’re talking about. She would have hated the idea of this funeral. She said she didn’t want a state funeral, and even if she hadn’t, I think it would’ve been pretty obvious to anyone that the last wishes of Margaret Thatcher weren’t ‘spend state money’! I mean, this is actually possibly the greatest way of spitting on Thatcher’s grave I can think of, and has a lot more to do with making the government look like Thatcher-supporters than with anything to do with actual Thatcherism. The other thing they wanted to do, having a day in parliament dedicated entirely to praising her, was probably about as bad. No criticism whatsoever. If there’s something you couldn’t really accuse Thatcher of, it’s not allowing argument. I mean, if someone argued with her and hadn’t thought it through properly, or if they wouldn’t defend it with complete fanaticism, she’d demolish them. And she probably wouldn't listen anyway. But she’d at least let people disagree with her. Although, at the very least, I can’t complain that it’s not fair that she got something Atlee didn’t. Because I don’t think he would have wanted one either.

Well, I’ve probably forgotten something. And I’ve skimmed a lot of her. This is a thing that happens with someone who was the most important person in the nation for more than a decade. I mean, I haven’t even really mentioned that she was, in fact, a woman (this is the hard hitting insight for which you read Acanthus, yeah)^††††. Ireland, Africa, America, the Cold War, Chile blah, blah, blah. Some kind of scuffle with Argentina might’ve happened at some point. All of this stuff deserves looking at. But I can’t be bothered right now. So there.

Point is, I agree with David Cameron that Thatcher probably did save this country. It’s just that, as with the man who decides to end the Cold War by carpet-bombing every nation with nuclear capabilities, it might just have been possible to do it better^†††. Just possibly. She hurt a lot of people, and was also a complete lost cause on social issues (or most of them, anyway). But I find it difficult to actually condemn her. She was better than nothing. Economically speaking. Just about. I think.

*On Section 28: Yes. It is horrible. But um… congratulations, American conservatives. You’ve reached the point our UK conservatives were at in the 1980s. I should be furious about that, but I have difficulty mustering anger about homophobia existing three decades ago when worse homophobia still exists today.

**Note for Americans – 42% doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s because you have a two-party system. You might have heard that the UK has a two party system too. We do not. We have a two and a half party system. The third parties get a decent portion of the vote, but the system is pretty much designed to avoid actually letting them get any significant say***. 42% of the vote is really good. Like… landslide good. Our current Prime Minister got 36%.

***This system broke down a bit recently, I believe.

****In principle, anyway.

*****It wasn’t the EU back then. I know. Shut up.

^†Incidentally, people who tell you this will generally use the ‘less than 60% median income’ measure. Which is a stupid measure. What people mean is that inequality increased. Yes, there is an extent to which what people consider to be necessary. That’s been a thing in economics since… well, since economics was a thing. Seriously, Adam Smith mentions it in Wealth of nations. But I reject any system in which someone whose only act is to make some people richer can then be criticised for driving everyone else into poverty.

^††I might have to explain that metaphor. It means a more service based, aesthetic, economy. The idea is that most of the value of a Starbucks coffee is the froth – the bit on the top that makes it look all fancy, and makes it into a status symbol. And so, in this metaphor, the UK economy moved from trying to make coffee, to making the froth on top of the coffee, and doing other stuff which noone really needs, but which is somehow highly valued anway.

^†††In the Cold War case, by the way, it was done better. Obviously.

^††††Briefly – I think it was a bit of a mixed issue. She was pretty good at using anti-feminist stereotypes to get away with things that she shouldn’t have been able to. Like staying in the Heath government because the guy wanted a token woman, and I don’t think it hurt in Europe sometimes. Things like that. On the other hand, obviously she suffered from prejudice too, and I’m completely sure there were people who just wouldn’t vote for a female PM.