Something really striking about the attack on federal institutions like the Treasury and the IRS is that it’s always the same youngsters doing Musk’s work. I was just assuming that they’re bedazzled true believers that Musk can get to work for him cheap. Now Joshua Marshall opens our eyes, yours and mine, a bit more. And it’s ugly. Really, really ugly.
Why these kids? Here’s why: It’s not just that they’re firmly in the cult of Musk, but that they’re young and have all the foresight of kids with a fifth of rum an ounce of pot and a final exam the next morning. Or in other words, they’re willing to do things, very very illegal things, things you wouldn’t want on your resume, that the members of the Musk cult who are older and smarter and way more capable really don’t want to get their fingers dirty with. Yes, Trump has their backs…for now. But as Marshall says tomorrow is a long time and Trump suffers no loyalty to anyone. He may thumb his nose at the courts but the law is still the law in the real world, and those older and smarter members of the cult have careers and a mortgage and a family which might just make them a tad reluctant to just walk in somewhere and do whatever the Reich Musker wants.
But those eager young things over there, like virgins entranced by sugar daddy attentions? Sure…the man who has had 12 kids by three women, and all his older and smarter cult members, will let Them do it. And they’re thrilled to get recognition from The Man.
Funny How They Always Gravitate To White Nationalist Thinkers…
Gavin Kliger…one of Herr Musk’s young minions…seems to have embraced the dark side after feeding from this trough…
And just what would those Some Things be…?
This guy…Ron Unz…who would he be I wonder…
…hmmm…
Musk not only attracts this sort of young male to his following, he gives them power over the rest of us. Tech Bro is the new Brownshirt.
In Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged John Galt announces he’s going to stop the motor of the world, and set about doing that by leading all the Men Of The Mind out on strike, thereby causing the evil socialist altruist American government and great powers of the world to crumble to dust, while the Men Of The Mind secluded themselves safe and sound in Galt’s Gulch raising pigs, growing tobacco, and building super tractors that could cut a farmer’s eight hour day in half.
But poor John didn’t have a chance. One thing that helped lift the kingdom of Rand vail from my eyes was looking at the architect plans for the machinery of death in the Nazi concentration camps. Those guys were Good…they had a problem to solve and they did it with cold blooded sociopathic efficiency. It convinced me: There will always be plenty of Men Of The Mind willing to lend their talents and imagination to the bloody murderous tyrant because they are kindred.
The closest Rand came to admitting this are the characters of Dr. Floyd Farris and more specifically, Dr. Robert Stadler, who I suspect was modeled after Robert Oppenheimer. Compared to Farris Stadler was a pathetic chump and you really wonder how anyone could take seriously that he was supposedly the intellectual equal of Galt who’s only moral failing was succumbing to the dark side of government funded science. Farris was the real thing through and through: and that for my money is Musk and his minions. And there are plenty enough of them to keep the world going just fine and dandy without the likes of anyone in Galt’s Gulch helping out, super tractors or no.
It’s not the mind that makes a person decent, it’s the heart. You can suffer a small mind if it has a big heart attached. But a big mind and a small or nonexistent heart is a dangerous combination.
I saw this one laughing in my face yet again…this time in my Facebook feed from a relative of a good friend. There are family issues going on below the public surface there that I don’t want to butt into so I didn’t respond. But this is one of those zombie bits of homophobic agitprop that pushes my buttons whenever I see it…
This is one from Rick Warren, a devoted homophobe and pulpit thumper. Near as I can tell it was something he put out there in 2013 around the time of President Obama’s second inauguration. Warren, as you may recall, was invited to give the invocation at Obama’s first inauguration, thereby spitting in the faces of all the gay Americans who worked so hard to get him elected over John McCain and the lunatic Sarah Palin. It’s a clever bit of misdirection, begging the question of what the disagreement is all about. It seems so reasonable on it’s surface, but beneath the surface it’s a sewer of shifty morals intended to make bigoted attacks on our lives appear to be reasoned and compassionate. Warren is giving us the motto of someone who can’t see the people for the homosexuals. It is itself the huge lie it purports to stand against.
There’s nothing complicated here: LGBT people don’t have lifestyles, we have lives. Not all disagreements are equal. If your convictions aren’t grounded by verifiable provable truths they are mere conceits. And where love is ruled by empty convictions, and not by sympathy, kindness, charity, and above all empathy, then it isn’t love at all, it’s sanctimony.
This is making the rounds online. The story about the man who sold 100k worth of pianos to Trump’s casino was in the news prior to his getting elected the first time, yet people voted for him anyway. This gives us the perspective of the person working the other end of that small business disaster. Check out what Trump did to her son’s class graduation party…
I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it. -Mark Twain
People like to say the conflict is between good and evil. The real conflict is between truth and lies. -Don Miguel Ruiz
A friend on Facebook posted the notice that she’d died, and my first reaction was, Oh…her… There have been so many others since, but all of those are standing on her shoulders. The damage she did wasn’t merely to cancel that Dade County anti discrimination ordinance, or even to spawn dozens more local fights against The Homosexual. What her campaign did was decisively show republicans that they could us as a way to drive their voters to the polls.
She made herself the face of that campaign. They called it Save Our Children. The dark heart of it was a smear attack, utilizing the trope of homosexuals as child molestors. But we were also sexual predators, psychopaths and disease spreaders. During one appearance Jerry Falwell stood with her in front of the assembled crowd and said “so-called gay folks will kill you as soon as look at you.” That was how they intended to win an election to repeal the anti discrimination ordinance.
By 1977 gay people in south Florida had made progress. Police raids of gay bars were ended, The ’72 Democratic Convention, held in Miami featured openly gay San Francisco political activist Jim Foster who gave a speech on gay rights. We were seen in the local papers more as an oppressed minority than a threat. Still, it was thought the vote would be nail bitingly close. It wasn’t.
The day of the vote, from the apartment mom and I shared in the Washington DC suburbs, I watched all the news broadcasts late into the night for anything about the results in Florida. There were other elections going on that night all across the country, but there was nothing in any of the election reports about the Dade County repeal. We were a people not fit to speak of during family hours. Finally I fired up my shortwave radio and found a BBC broadcast that gave me the news. Her hate campaign won 4 to 1 against us.
For the republicans it was an epiphany. Now they had another tool besides racism to reliably drive their voters to the polls. In some ways it was even more effective than race baiting, which also used the image of the black man as a sexual predator. Decades later that Save Our Children message would work for them during the fight over California Proposition 8. It still works for them.
The day after the vote, as I walked to the store for some snacks and a soda, I counted off 4 people to 1 as I passed them by on the street, still trying to grasp the magnitude of it. All those people I would never know just to look at them, who would vote me and everyone like me out of existence the moment they had a chance. I would have to go on knowing.
And now she’s gone, but the evil she set into motion lives on. What is the profit in winning the world but losing your soul? She won her victory and it destroyed her. The obituaries when they mention her life before the rampage give it little more than a passing notice. She died known more for the hate campaign she waged than for anything else she ever did with her life. That is what hate does. It does not share power within a person. The pop singer became the hate monger, because that was all that hate would allow her to be.
She eventually withdrew from the public spotlight. The singing career was over, which she probably missed. She could have turned it all around with an eventual apology and declaration that gay and lesbian citizens are our neighbors, and that we are all equal in the eyes of her god. She had the entire rest of her life to make amends. But she never apologised for what she did, never moderated her views when asked, and when she died I am certain she regretted nothing about that campaign.
Which is good, but I think we’re (the sane part of humanity anyway) beyond this point even. This came across my Facebook feed the other day…
A good many years ago, after I got my first Internet account and discovered USENET news groups, I got into it with homophobic bigots on one of the ‘alt’ groups created specifically so gays and lesbians and the ‘phobes could have at it with each other. What I quickly discovered was the arguments you got from them were empty of all reason, morality and logic. All they had was a bottomless hate (almost always not just toward us either) that would not suffer self examination and would not be moved. They’d dress it up in religion, thump their bibles, throw out the anti-gay junk science du jour, do it over and over again no matter how often it was debunked, and just not stop. But there was nothing behind any of it more then contempt, loathing, and hate.
I was asked often back then why I bothered arguing with them. But it was a different time and place. You knew there were other gay people watching these arguments and I was doing it for them. I knew I wasn’t going to change any hearts or minds among the ‘phobes. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, a bigot’s mind is like an eye; the more light you shine on it the tighter it closes. There was no changing their minds about us, ever. But I could show the lurkers that the ‘phobes weren’t anything to be afraid of, that they had nothing and especially did not ever have the moral high ground.
That was the middle 1980s and 90s. It’s almost a different world now, at least for LGBT people. The ‘phobes of course, have never changed. And they elected Donald Trump to a second term as president.
With the help of a couple white racist South African billionaires and silicon valley tech bros who think they’re running the world now.
So a bunch of people have ended up over at BlueSky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social) after Elon Musk turned Twitter into a fascist playpen and began babbling about mind viruses. And now that a significant percentage of Americans decided reelecting Trump was what they wanted we are done with arguing with all of them. I mean how do you discuss Anything really, with Anyone who thinks that man is presidential material, let alone anyone who thinks ‘free speech’ means you promote nazis and silence anyone who speaks out against them. And now were hearing complaints from the howling monkey tree that we’re building an echo chamber, which is really rich considering the right wing one they’ve been living in ever since Reagan and Fox News.
This is not about the “low engagement” voters, it’s about the ones that are completely engaged in the politics of it, just immersed in that Fox News cocoon because that’s where they want to live, and if they can’t make the rest of us live there too, they’ll insist that we have to play along. But no. A lot of people now are tired of them. I’m tired of them, and I did my time in USENET.
It’s different now. I don’t see any plus to getting into it with a Trump voter. I see them in the social media comments and I block them. Block block block blockety block. The notion that by blocking and not engaging with them we’re choosing to live in a cocoon is ridiculous on its face, considering all the hostility toward science and the humanities the rest of us have to listen to whenever they open their yaps. By cutting them out of our lives, online and off, we are choosing not to live in theirs.
“The state of mind, the state of society, is of a piece. When we discard the test of fact in what a star is, we discard in it what a man is.” -Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values
There’s a lot of ruminating going on, as you would expect, regarding how the hell this country, which put human footsteps on the moon, managed to elect Donald Trump to a second term in office. I expect we’ll be seeing a lot of it in the months and years to come. Already I’m seeing that it was a woman at the head of the democratic ticket, or that democrats are insufficiently willing to throw hated minorities under the bus, which naturally gives republicans an edge among the voters. Some point to the right wing media cocoon. Others that too many voters simply don’t pay attention. Complaints about billionaire disinformation campaigns are being raised.
I’m sure there is something to all of that. But something more disturbing is developing among researchers who dig deep into the mindset of Trump voters. Yet it’s something we have all seen throughout our lives, and maybe it needs closer looking at, but the frustration factor is so great most of us would rather not even bother with them.
Think of the flat earthers, or the anti-vax nutcases. The ones convinced that the moon landing was faked. That global warming is a hoax. That UFO Aliens are real and walk among us. Every one of us who has had to engage one of these quickly realizes that it’s a mug’s game. Arguing with them is like trying to nail jelly to a wall. Good faith is a good starting point with someone, but you are allowed to see that it isn’t there when it isn’t there.
Trump voters are not all kooks, but we are finding out they all seem to have something terribly rotten in common with kooks, which is Facts Be Damned And I Have A Zillion Ways Of Denying Anything You Tell Me. As it turns out, they were not unaware that they were being fed lies by the republicans. They just didn’t care. If anything, they embraced the lies. The lies validated a choice they were always going to make anyway. They were not ignorant of the facts, they are hostile toward the facts. It is not a healthy skepticism, it is a willful rejection of truth.
You can pour a firehose of facts at this particular subset of the human family tree when it comes to their political notions, and not a bit of it will get through to them. They’ll change the subject. They’ll argue beside the point. They’ll throw junk science at you that both they and you know is bogus but as long as it’s something to throw back at you that’s what you get. You will hear the complete catalogue of informal fallacies out of them but not one single solitary acknowledgement of a fact. And the favorite, You Just Disagree With Me But I’m Entitled To My Opinions. And yet they are not kooks in the sense that they know the earth isn’t flat and leprechauns aren’t breeding intelligent goats to replace mankind. But they have the same exact response to facts that kooks do. It isn’t just simply I don’t believe you, it’s I don’t care if what you say is true or not.
The root of it, of course, goes deeper. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said that a bigot’s mind is like an eye; the more light you shine on it the tighter it closes. De Gaulle said that patriotism is where your country comes first, and nationalism is when hating other countries comes first. There are perhaps many poisonous springs from which this effect comes forth. But they all have that mindless hate at the core, and you can tell which of them is worth spending time discussing politics with…or anything else…and which are not, by the way they play this particular game: If you can’t make me change my mind, I win…if you can’t make me admit I’m wrong, I win.
So…I propose an update to the Voight-Kampff test. Let’s call it version two. It’s still about sifting the humans from the look alikes, but without assuming that just because one Is human, that they haven’t discarded, as Jacob Bronowski said, what it is to be human, whenever the facts offended them.
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
I’ve been thinking lately about “misinformation” since Facebook removed one of my posts about Project 2025 as being false (it wasn’t), and comparing the slippery way Meta is defining “disinformation” with what I and most of us in the gay community have witnessed from the homophobic right over the decades.
I’ve been doing a takedown of Dick Hafer’s horrifically homophobic comic book “Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle”, and I mentioned in the last post I made in that series being stunned at the outright lies I uncovered, simply by following a cite to its source, which was almost certainly something Paul Cameron published.
You dig up various articles about Paul Cameron and you will read that he was either expelled and/or denounced by The American Psychological Association, the Nebraska Psychological Association, and the American Sociological Association for his consistent misrepresentations of psychological and sociological research. But to call what he’s doing “misrepresentations” is itself a misrepresentation of sorts.
I’ll admit that use of that word in regards to Cameron had me bamboozled for a long time. You dig into his cites and you expect to see some sly twisting of the data. But that isn’t it. He straight up lies. He pulls facts and figures out of thin air and presents them as though the study he’s citing says what it clearly does not say, and it isn’t even close. He lies. And lies and lies and lies and lies.
I can appreciate that men and women of science don’t like making declarations that are quite so certain. To work in science is to be well aware of all the areas of uncertainty in the data that you have to navigate on your way to a conclusion. But a decent respect for the human status tells us there have to be limits. When the lies are obvious it does none of us any good to soft peddle that fact, let alone what it says about the person(s) dispensing them.
And if we can’t point out the staringly obvious lies, then how do we deal with the slippery conniving falsehoods hiding behind a lot of word salad?
Hafer’s Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle – A Personal Review (continued…)
Still slogging through chapter one, moving on from lying about Bell and Weinberg’s Homosexualities, now we commence to lying about Kinsey. You knew Kinsey would show up here sooner or later…right? But actually…no. Because the more you dig into Hafer’s “facts” via his cites, the more you find yourself with…a very familiar name that is not Kinsey.
In our last episode, Larry…the sensible middle ground between raving bigot Chester and loathsome Mr. Militant Homosexual Sodomite…was saying that anyone who had the three to five hundred sexual partners in a lifetime obsession with sex that homosexuals do (but which HomosexualitiesDoes Not in fact claim), they’d be considered a pervert. To which Sodomite responds that he can’t help being gay, it’s how he was born.
Notice how deftly Hafer does this. One moment sensible middle ground Larry is throwing out a completely false factoid from the Bell and Weinberg study and in the next panel Sodomite just lets it stand without even addressing its factuality. Of course I have hundreds of sexual partners…it’s a service I provide along with package deliveries… So now the reader will likely go along with it, like Sodomite just did.
You wonder if this really is some sort of mendacity on Hafer’s part, or just the reliable blindness of the bigot mindset. Of course it’s true. Everyone knows homosexuals are perverts. So let’s just move along…
So Sodomite, agreeing without saying so, that having hundreds of sex partners is all just part of being a homosexual, says that anyway he can’t help himself because he was born that way.
“THAT’S A COP-OUT!” shouts middle ground Larry. Because “Kinsey and company”, as Larry/Hafer tells us…
“…made two studies by polling homosexuals in the 1940s and again in 1970. Guess what percentage of them believed THEMSELVES that they were “born that way.”
(the scare quotes are Hafer’s)
“Ninety percent?” offers Sodomite.
“No…ONLY 9%…! The least objectionable answer and only 9 out of 100 could bring themselves to claim it.”
To which Chester asks, “What did they claim as the reason for their deviancy?”
And saying “Look for yourself,” Larry/Hafer provides us with a chart
Early homosexual experiences with adults or peers: 22%
Around homosexual a lot, homosexuals, friends: 16%
Poor relationship with mother:15%
Unusual development (sissy, tom-boy, didn’t get along with own gender, etc) 15%
Poor relationship with father: 14%
Unavailable heterosexual partners: 12%
Social ineptitude: 9%
Born that way: 9%
…all of which adds up to 112% I’m pretty sure that’s not 9 out of 100. But let us pause and take note that even Hafer seems to understand that all the other causes of homosexuality listed in that chart are…objectionable.
Let’s talk about cop-outs. Hafer provides us with two more cites…just not to the source he’s claiming these factoids came from. And I need to point out here how difficult it is to even notice the cites in this book. You have to look closely. Very very closely. The cite numbers are tiny. Probably intentionally so, because they’re only there to add respectability to the bullshit Hafer is shoveling, and the reader is supposed just gloss over them and passively accept what they’re being told.
The first cite is to a paper A.P. Bell, one of the co-authors of Homosexualities, presented at the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation in 1973. If you’re wondering how 1973 can be in the 1940s and also 1970 you are not the target audience of this book. I cannot locate this paper, but the abstract in a subsequent paper by Bell in 1975 might be relevant to this factoid Hafer throws out at us…
Before addressing ourselves to the question “Where do we go from here?” with respect to research in the area of homosexuality, we would do well to take stock of where we have been and where we are. In this regard, I cannot think of a more comprehensive statement than what is to be found in the preface to Weinberg’s and my annotated bibliography of homosexuality. In our summary of the 1265 items which were included in that volume, we pointed out that:
…discussions of homosexuality have consisted primarily of speculations prompted by theoretical models or statements whose constructs have not been tested in any systematic manner…
Studies designed to test these assumptions about the nature of homosexual development have been few, while those which have been conducted have usually included small, biased samples as well as measurements which have been subjectively derived. Little attention has been given to the wide range of homosexual orientation and adjustment; most have viewed homosexuality-heterosexuality as a simple dichotomy…most of their subjects have been those who eschew their homosexual orientation and whose functioning in other areas of their lives has been marginal.
(Emphasis mine)
As I pointed out in the previous installment when Hafer started waving around Homosexualities as some sort of proof that homosexuals were wildly promiscuous, the authors made an effort in the introduction of their study to inform their readers that…
It should be pointed out that reaching any consensus about the exact number of homosexual men or women exhibiting this or that characteristic is not an aim of the present study.
Why? Because for one thing they knew they didn’t, could not, obtain a representative sample. It’s the problem that plagued sex researchers all through the decades. How do you do science, actual, verifiable, reproducible science, on a subset of the human family that is generally terrified of being discovered? Bell and Weinberg had to recruit volunteers from the gay bars and baths because in the early 1970s for most homosexuals, the closet was a matter of survival. How do you reach potential subjects for scientific research that are trying very hard not to be seen? What sorts of subjects does that leave you with? Bell understood that and was warning about it in 1975. He would have known it in 1974.
So there’s Hafer waving this factoid he pulled out of a paper published in 1974, that almost certainly suffered from the same sampling problem that bedeviled Homosexualities, and all those studies Bell is warning about in his 1975 paper. But is Hafer even citing that paper?
It’s a good question because the next cite, tucked away at the bottom right hand corner of that chart above, is this:
Paul Cameron, “What causes homosexuality?” Lincoln NE – Institute for Scientific Investigation of Sexuality, 1984.
That now regrettably named Institute for Scientific Investigation of Sexuality (ISIS) is Paul Cameron’s vanity press. It eventually morphed into The Family Research Council. So that nine percent figure was a Paul Cameron factoid. It did not come from any part of the Kinsey Institute. The figures in that chart are Paul Cameron figures. Hafer is saying they’re from the Kinsey Institute but his cite says they’re from Paul Cameron.
They came in other words, from the same guy who asserted based on reviewing the obituaries in two gay community newspapers, that the average lifespan of a homosexual is just 46 years.
In further words…
In 1984 the Nebraska Psychological Association issued a statement disassociating itself “from the representations and interpretations of scientific literature offered by Dr. Paul Cameron.”In 1986 the American Sociological Association passed a resolution stating, “The American Sociological Association officially and publicly states that Paul Cameron is not a sociologist, and condemns his consistent misrepresentation of sociological research. “This was based on a report from the ASA’s Committee on the Status of Homosexuals in Sociology, which summarized Cameron’s inflammatory statements and commented, “It does not take great analytical abilities to suspect from even a cursory review of Cameron’s writings that his claims have almost nothing to do with social science and that social science is used only to cover over another agenda. Very little of his work could find support from even a bad misreading of genuine social science investigation on the subject and some sociologists, such as Alan Bell, have been ‘appalled’ at the abuse of their work.” In 1996, the board of directors of the Canadian Psychological Association approved a position statement disassociating the organization from Cameron’s work on sexuality, stating that he had “consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented research on sexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism.”
So here is Hafer citing Bell, and then citing Cameron. Most likely why Hafer isn’t actually citing Bell for the chart itself, but Cameron, is exactly because Bell’s work doesn’t get him where he wants to go. So instead he cites Paul Cameron, not Bell who was among sociologists appalled at the abuse by Cameron of their work. But he introduces these “facts” to his readers as if they came from Kinsey.
Which makes it a fair question: Did Hafer get Any of the figures in this book from the sources he claims he is citing, or did he get them all from Paul Cameron?
Every now and then I drop in on my Twitter account (Oh…did I just deadname X? Sorry…not sorry…) to check out the doings in the hate lounge. Actually by now I have a massive block list, so my Twitter feed is probably a lot less fragrant than what others see.
When I opened my feed, the first thing I saw was Ari Drennen’s post as follows…
Forcing trans kids to pretend that they are somebody else until some arbitrary age when their lives are allowed to start for real is not a neutral act either. There are, in fact, no neutral acts in life. Not one second is reversible.
So of course I did what you’re not supposed to do: I looked at the comments. Certain topics are ripe for finding more morons to block, and this one didn’t disappoint. But some of what I saw was, in a way, stunning. Lots of commenters telling her that transgender kids do not exist. And I mean the exact same verbiage which normally leads you, regarding Twitter, to think you’re seeing the activity of bots. But I remember when it was plain to see not all that long ago, and further back on USENET, how some new proverb would get posted to a right wing blog and it was like the bat signal had been given and suddenly everyone was just mindlessly repeating it. But then again you could say those were bots too. Human bots, but bots nonetheless.
And it reminded me of what is so spooky about the wave of winger harassment transgender folks are experiencing now…that it is almost play by play the same exact script they were using not all that long ago to harass gay people: There are no homosexuals, only broken heterosexuals. It’s like they took the script for online gay bashing and just removed all references to homosexual and replaced them with transgendered. Otherwise it’s the same exact script, page for page, play by play, argle bargle, argle bargle, argle bargle.
Nothing ever changes with them. Nothing. Just the names and faces and where the right wing money is coming from.
I Don’t Do Pornography And Especially Not Your Pornography.
This entry today in my website server logs comes from Hohhot, Nei Mongol, China, where Baidu, a Chinese AI company, seems to have pointed to my website with the following search string:
“Pornographic movies of little boys around the world”
What the hell!? Here’s their mission statement:
Our mission is to make the complicated world simpler through technology. Founded in 2000 as a search engine platform, we were an early adopter of artificial intelligence in 2010 to make content discovery on the internet easier. We have also used “Baidu Brain,” our core AI technology engine, to develop new AI businesses.
Today, Baidu is already a leading AI company with a strong Internet foundation. We are one of the very few companies in the world that offers a full AI stack, encompassing an infrastructure consists of AI chips, deep learning framework, core AI capabilities, such as natural language processing, knowledge graph, speech recognition, computer vision and augmented reality, as well as an open AI platform to facilitate wide application and use. We have put our leading AI capabilities into our products and services, as well as innovative use cases.
So it looks like yet another AI scraper, but all they got was my blog link. I’ve no idea why that search string got them my blog but it’s disturbing. Also in a very dark way, amusing, given the puritanical nature of totalitarian states. When you suppress normal, wholesome, sexual expression in people what you usually end up with is a lot of broken sexuality, deranged sexual predation, and depravity. Orwell nailed why totalitarians like to suppress natural wholesome sex in this passage from 1984:
Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was: “When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?”
That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.
So why is it not surprising I’m getting searched for pornography from China? And the worst, most crudest predatory kind of pornography at that. Because this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it coming from that direction. Also from Russia, Singapore, Indonesia, and certain eastern block and middle eastern countries.
There’s nothing porngraphic in my blog or anywhere else on my website, unless you think anything gay is by definition pornographic like homophobes do. So maybe that’s why they think I’ve got some of that here. I’m an openly gay man so of course I must be into that. That’s how bigots think.
I don’t do pornography, let alone child pornography which is evil. I do sexy, and in fact I’m working now on a new set of pages for this website to showcase my pure artwork, apart from the cartoons, only some of which will be beautiful sexy guys. I try to make those drawings playful and joyful. Sex is wonderful. Pornography is sexual junk food. Maybe having some every now and then is fine, but a steady diet of that stuff can’t possibly be good for the soul.
Maybe I should just block everything coming out of China…
Growing Up Straight: What Every Thoughtful Parent Should Know about Homosexuality, by Peter and Barbara Wyden (January 1969). My copy of The Columbia Reader calls it a veritable encyclopedia of homophobia. (“The book draws heavily on the theories of Irving Bieber and other psychiatrists of the mothers-did-it school…”) I did not know about this book, and was just scanning the Reader for anything around the time of Midge Dector’s “The Boys on the Beach” (which I’ve already quoted once in A Coming Out Story) when I found the reference.
I think I have everything I need for the Mirror Episode, but it’s not too late to add some more.
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