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I am almost certainly cis (at least, it’s not a question I lose any sleep over, which in itself is pretty strong evidence) but, for whatever reason, criticism of that “I Am A Transwoman” article fucks me up emotionally

Like, I’m not (I think) defensive of it because of its “thesis,” if it had one, or because it panders to my preexisting opinions, but (I think) because the shape of the personal narrative, with its darkly funny ironies, feels very familiar to me, and the “lmao you’re just Wrong about some stuff and you’ll grow up and figure it out eventually” type responses are also a familiar part of that narrative shape, so it brings out that feeling in me of “yes, this is precisely what happens when one tries to talk openly in this way; it never works; you’re clearly a rhetorical virtuoso and I’ve tried to make myself into one but you can’t make it work that way; it just is never going to work and that’s our lot“

(I don’t actually claim some objective mental kinship between me and the author, but, subjectively, it feels like there is one and that is driving the emotional response)

Lately I’ve been shirking work by long posts for @lapsarianalyst, because when the posts are long and (seemingly) substantial enough, writing them feels like a sort of productivity.  And maybe it is, but it’s not the specific productivity which is required of me in the short term.  So I’m going to ban myself from writing long tumblr posts for a while.  Just short stuff like #quotes and brief comments on reblogs, for now.

Whenever I use siikr to look for something on my blog, I’m always a little unsettled by the number of posts I tend to write on the same subject, often separated by a long span of time – a post in 2016 will express the same idea as a post from 2014 which I’ve forgotten about, and the like.  The tone and texture of my writing is also very consistent, and I get a feeling almost like vertigo or nausea when I see some post from 2013 or 2014 that I might have written yesterday, a post about one of my stock concepts, with the familiar stylistic tics and hedging devices (“it’s almost as if,” “sometimes I wonder whether,” “I don’t really know anything about this, but”)

(One of the recurring topics is, amusingly/worryingly enough, “tumblr may be psychologically bad for me”)

It makes me feel (and this is itself a stock concept in my head by now, which I might well have posted about before) like writing on my tumblr is analogous to making repetitive, compulsive physical motions, like my tics.  The former is just the analogue of the latter on a much higher plane of abstraction.  It’s connected to the fact (itself another stock concept) that writing many words is easy and frictionless for me, almost like taking dictation.

Like many people, I often imagine conversations in my head, but even when I’m not, my internal monologue tends to resemble a one-sided conversation – I work through concepts by composing verbal explanations of them, the verbal flourishes and jokes developing alongside the concepts, rather than serving as a garnish added after the cooking is finished.  The same states of mind that cause me to fixate on a concept also make me generate these monologues more vigorously and encourage stylistic stereotypy, fixations on the verbal level.  Actually typing a post is simply a extension of this internal behavior.  I’d still be “posting” even if I never typed a word into the box; I think in posts.

Thinking about this is a bracing reminder that I post as a internally motivated behavior pattern as well as to communicate, and that I should probably try to notice this behavior pattern and take care that I don’t spend too much of my time pacing in its little circles.

I checked in with Noted Terrible Man Doug Wilson after several months spent hatereading at other pastures (or sometimes, blessedly, not hatereading at all).  And the first nontrivial blog post I find (i.e. the first one that isn’t just him quoting one of his own books, or the like) is about some sort of spiraling internet argument over the Trinity that is really amusingly reminiscent of the sorts of argumentative kerfuffles I see all the time on tumblr (“necrobestialitygate,” etc.)

As many of you know, a controversy with two layers erupted within the last month, having to do with Trinitarian theology and complementarianism. I have provided some links to all this at the bottom of the post here. Theologians like Wayne Grudem have taught that within the Godhead there is an eternal functional subordination, which provides a model for a complementarian approach to marriage. Critics like Mark Jones have maintained that this necessitates three wills within the Godhead and that the orthodox position has always maintained that there is only a single divine will, and that to say anything otherwise is to mess with the divine simplicity. A third set of critics like Tim and David Bayly agree with Grudem as far as it goes, but emphasize that the complementarian world needs to be a lot more robust in its opposition to egalitarianism.

It’s fun to see what these sorts of events look like from the outside.  In particular, it ties into something I was thinking about the other day about tumblr arguments – specifically that they’re often about “important things,” things that in principle have to do with how I conduct my IRL life, yet at the same time the marginal choice to “continue discoursing” as opposed to “stepping away from the keyboard” tends to have negligible effect on my everyday life.  My views might get pushed here or pulled there by internet arguments, a little bit, but ultimately there’s just so much else that determines them – everything I know that doesn’t come from internet interlocutors, everything I’ve internalized from the moment-to-moment texture of experience – that the effect of the arguments barely registers.  Like, there are a lot of arguments in my tumblr sphere about how to relate to other people who are different from you, or about “practical epistemology” (where do you get your information, what kinds of beliefs should you form from it), and this stuff is actually important, but my IRL decisions just follow their own path regardless, mostly.

In this case, the issues (as far as I can make out) is “actually important,” in that its about fundamental issues in these people’s faiths (which are very important to them), and have to do with complementarianism, which is something with direct IRL implications.  Yet I don’t imagine that anyone’s religious or marital practice will shift more than negligibly as a result of this argument.

It’s easy to get sucked into internet arguments by saying to yourself “it’s not like I can just ignore these issues, they really matter for my life, I need to figure them out,” conveniently forgetting that you also have to establish a link between “having the internet argument” and “figuring them out,” when there may well be no such link

Related to bad programming: I remember that even through the end of college, I used to have this weird aversion to any sort of abstraction unless it was being “used to get something done.”

For instance, I believed that one should never write something (a system of equations, say) in matrix-vector notation unless one was going to “do linear algebra to it.”  (Admittedly, it can sometimes be confusing to bundle together quantities into a “math vector” if they don’t transform like a “physics vector,” but my revulsion wasn’t based on that point, which I didn’t clearly understand anyway.)

In some contexts, I would write out vector equations in component form in any situation where I wasn’t going to exploit a vector property – even if exploiting vector properties would be natural in the context, and the fact that I never did so was just an artifact of the particular problem I was solving.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before how I wrote a simple raytracer / physics engine in high school without ever defining a dot product function.  Some of that was because I was a baby who didn’t understand the importance of functions yet.  But even once I’d been made aware of the possibility, writing the function still felt … wrong.  Like the individual multiply-and-add operations were the “real math,” and the dot product formalism was an unclean, arbitrary idea imposed upon them by humans.  (Of course, I now know that it’s closer to being the other way around.)

I don’t think I’ve lost this tendency so much as trained myself out of it in numerous specific cases – it still pops up when it has the opportunity.  I wonder what it means.  (I wonder if it has something to do with this.)

OH I figured out what was probably going on with my mood yesterday (and to some extent today), if you’re curious for some reason

Amateur bullshit “neuroscience” and drug talk under the cut

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Still not feeling quite good enough to do anything but stare and tumblr and think in a loop, so might as well combine the two

Since I was 18 or so, one of the main lenses through which I look at my personal history has been “I was prescribed Risperidone when I was 11, then stopped taking it when I was 16, having essentially learned nothing – no social (or other) skills, no facts except what it took to scrape by in school with lots of parental help – in the intervening 5 years.”  This may be a simplification in some ways, but even if so, it’s like a foundation myth.  It colors my thinking in a way that’s hard to avoid.  Being me is, inevitably, being that guy who lost (or conceives of himself as having lost) the years between ages 11 and 16.

And one thing I remember about coming back to the world at 16, having left it at 11, was how morally unconcerned everyone seemed.  I eventually got used to this, largely – learned that much of it was just a way of speaking, or a coping mechanism for the moral complexity of the adult (or even teenage) world.  But at the time it was startling.  Of course, kids can be complete jerks, or just happily indifferent to others.  But, at least among the kids I knew as a kid, there was this sort of presumptive and weighty moral realism – almost religious in character, though few of us were.  Everyone knew that there was such a thing as being Bad.  The stories we were shown were largely morality tales and none of us wanted to be the bad guys, even if we sometimes were the bad guys through ignorance or complacency.

The world I woke up into at age 16 (remember that I am filling in a lot of gaps here, weaving an origin story that feels true) was a world where people would laugh about doing things that were Bad, where it was assumed that everyone did these things.  They didn’t have the horror (I want to say “the fear of God”) that I was familiar with.  Of course I was to learn later all about the existence of real moral dispute.  And the way that flawed models of what it is to be Bad – of what it means to be the villain in the morality tale – can harm people, and how people may self-consciously take on the Bad (as opposed to bad) role as an act of defiance.  And so forth.

But then also some teenagers (or adults) are just cheerfully amoral.  They all felt that way to me, at the time.  I was very susceptible to lectures about how the youth of today had lost moral seriousness, or fallen to relativism.  (It felt like something was out of balance, and something like that.)  I could have become some sort of Christian, probably, if the right opportunity had presented itself.  When we learned about Stalin and Mao in school, I thought I would have been a very good, loyal “party member” had I lived then and there.

It’s good that I learned about all the problems of moral rigidity as a human practice, the difference between being bad and being Bad.  At the same time, the complex of feelings lingers.  The ones from the old morality tales of childhood have this vast potency for me.  The stuff of kindergarten morality.  Be kind and patient.  Don’t be a bully.  Don’t be quick to judge.  The good kids in the stories were quiet and hesitant, the bullies brash and supercilious.

(Horton Hears A Who is the one I specifically remember treasuring as a kid, and is a good example of the sort of thing I mean.)

None of this is exactly morality per se.  Some of it, taken rigidly and to an extreme, would be hideous.  But I do expect others to have these reflexes, and have not been able to train myself out of this expectation.

It’s not that I think people are always going to be nice in the simple kindergarten way, or that it’s some terrible sin if they aren’t.  (Certainly I’m not always like that.)  It’s that not being so reads as instantly Bad to me, and branding it as actually-OK is always a laborious, conscious, intellectual process.  It’s like eating a very very bitter food.  Maybe you have to eat the food, maybe it is correct all things considered that you are eating it.  Still, it’s bitter, and you would feel odd if no one else recognized that.  If no one else was overcoming an instinct.

This is all a very long-winded way of saying that I think I am bothered by how mean people are on the internet, not just because it is unpleasant (which it presumably is to many), but because I have this habitual worry that I am the only one around who flinches at it as much as I do.  You know this is bitter, right?  Right?  Sometimes it’s correct to eat bitter food.  I know all the arguments forward and back.  But – ow! – *chokes down another bite* – you realize you are being Bad, don’t you?  You’re overcoming a horror of being Bad for some greater end, right?  Right?  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I think “being nice” is the beginning and end of all ethics, I just – please tell me it tastes bitter to you too –

Some sort of awful mood with a definite physical component (illness? medication refill not equivalent? feels like a medication thing) is presumably not helped by the almost uniformly depressing content the glowing internet box has shown me today

How dare Brexit happen on the Year of Luigi, the discourse is ruining Voldemort Day, etc.