Because apparently social interaction of any sort requires a fucking job interview and a fucking purity test these days, and because I’m tired of explaining myself over and over, here’s some stuff about me that might interest other people, that other people might be curious about, or that might be (a) dealbreaker(s) in certain situations.
If anything here differs from something someone else has told you about me, my version of events is truer than theirs. I would be shooting myself in the foot if I lied about any of this and it led to social interactions I didn’t want, after all. I can’t control what other people say, but I can speak up for myself. If you’re not willing to listen, that’s on you.
biography
Born in the mid-1970s in Europe. Three half-brothers: one paternal, two maternal (one of which is now deceased). Married once, divorced once. A son from my marriage and a daughter from a major relationship that occurred after my divorce was final. Everyone basically hates one another and doesn’t speak with one another except currently, my paternal half-brother and I are in touch. Probably he and I are okay. That could change tomorrow.
Ethnicity: Cajun. I took the Ancestry DNA test, and it came back sixtysomething percent French, a percentage which has not changed much despite massive changes in the lesser ethnic contributions in my results. (For instance, I went from something like sixteen percent Scottish down to something like four percent when Ancestry updated their data. Damn it.) All my grandparents spoke French fluently and it was likely their first language in childhood. But I am not crazy about most of the food, and I don’t particularly like Louisiana, and I am a very bad Catholic. Oh well.
Western astrology: Capricorn sun, Leo moon, Aquarius rising.
Chinese astrology: Ox, water element (born too early in the year for Tiger).
Myers-Brigg: I have no fucking idea. Fair bet the first letter is I, however. Never taken the test because I overthink those things.
IQ: Ask my former stepmother. I have no fucking idea and she specifically stated she would not tell me. But once I took this test with a therapist that he said you could multiply the results by 10 to get your IQ, and my score was 14. Given how my life has turned out, fat lot of good it did me. I know most people don’t give a fuck about their IQs, but my whole childhood was in a Smart Kid theme, so I had occasion to think about it now and again.
Education: High school graduate (2.0 GPA… sigh), a very little bit of college. That was so long ago that if I ever go back I’m not bothering with transcripts. I will just start over again from day one. If they let me. I’m sure going to try. If I go back in the first place. My bet’s on “no.”
Religion: I was baptized as an infant, so I probably count as a Catholic, and from what I understand it is very difficult to be removed from membership. I attended Baptist church as a teenager under my own volition, and believed in all that stuff for a long time but I went Neopagan in my late teens, which persisted for about a decade. These days I’m agnostic but generally sympathetic to so-called “pagan” spirituality. Religion still fascinates me. I just can’t really buy into it.
Hobbies: Arguing on the internet, mainly. I need to get the fuck off of here, but it’s the only way I can ever stay in touch with anyone. Bad spot to be in. I love making things and working with my hands; I just need to figure out how to make a living at it. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I couldn’t write, but I’ve never been a storyteller and people think I’m an asshole when I express myself any other way so that’s probably a dead end other than as a mode of self-expression. I love plants and at some point I want a whole mess of orchids, African violets, and herbs. I positively adore cats, but this isn’t a good time in my life to be owned by any. I’m fascinated by old-fashioned tech. I used to be into geek culture to a certain extent, but they’ve collectively gone insane so I’ve kind of backed away. I’m interested in health and wellness too, though I’m definitely not enacting any of what I know right now. I would love to travel, but I’m a Poor. Good thing I already got around some when I was a kid, thanks to Dad’s U.S. Navy career.
Relationship: None. I will go over all that here.
Sexual orientation: Heterosexual. Currently going through a phase of Fed Up With Men’s Shit, see previous item.
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Okay… now for the wordy shit. Try to keep up.
politics
Abortion: I am for abortion in the same way I am for headache medicine or heart surgery. I don’t love it, but it’s health care and can be necessary. If being pregnant distresses you and you really don’t want to be, you should be able to end it and I don’t care why. If ending your pregnancy is necessary to get you healthy or to save your life, you definitely should be able to end that pregnancy and I don’t care why. Abortion should be legal up to the point where getting an abortion is more dangerous to the pregnant woman than completing the pregnancy would be. Every single argument you can come up with about what an “unborn baby” is, I can counter by saying a female person of reproductive age is all those things too — and I value female people of reproductive age more than I value zygotes, embryos, or fetuses. Always will.
Adoption: I’m against it. I am fine with the idea of giving someone besides the parents guardianship of a child if it is necessary. It is wrong to alter a child’s birth certificate, change the child’s name, or lie to the child or to anyone else about where the child came from or who the child’s parents are. Governments should come up with some form of guardianship documentation that is equivalent to a birth certificate but does not replace or falsify the birth certificate. I am tired of people saying biology doesn’t matter. You thought it mattered plenty when you wanted to buy a baby, and you did not get that baby from under a rock.
Bodily autonomy: Abortion = fine. Contraception = fine. Consensual sex = fine. Minor body mod like piercings or tattoos = fine. Getting sterilized = fine if you are an adult and voluntarily seek it out. Having kids = fine under most circumstances if you are an adult, and I am really itchy about setting rules about that, because people in power abuse those rules. Doing things that are 100% guaranteed to cause you disability or other health problems = not fine, should be considered malpractice, should not be legal. If you want to actually harm yourself then you’re mentally ill, not a member of a “marginalized population” (except to the extent mentally ill people are marginalized, but of course you’re in denial about being mentally ill), and you need treatment for said mental illness, not “affirmation.”
Church and state: If there is no valid secular reason to have a law, it should not be a law. And get Christmas off the federal calendar. I don’t know how I feel about taxing churches. I used to be in a Neopagan church, and I suspect that if they’d been subject to taxation they would have had a hard time continuing their work. But, on the other hand, I’m not really sure what their “work” has accomplished. They were one of the early breeding grounds for all the poor social-interaction practices (like cancel culture and the social harassment of “uppity” women) and gender-identitarian fraud we see going on now. They’ve never really helped the homeless or fed the hungry. They were actually a major source of stress for me when I was still with them. And they aren’t even the worst offenders. Lots of Christian churches have used their member contributions to build wealth and support destructive politics rather than help humanity. I feel like we need to revise the requirements for tax exemption. Like, don’t base it on teachings or ideology, but do base it on deeds. If you aren’t running a shelter or a counseling program or a food bank or the like, you can pay taxes to fund the government services that have to make up for what you’re not doing. After all, the original argument for organizational tax exemption WAS that these groups were taking pressure off the government to do these things. That seems to no longer be the case for far too many of them. Enough. Help out or pony up.
Contraception: Everyone who does not want to make a baby when they fuck should be using some sort of contraception when they fuck. Women: If they came up with a contraceptive pill for men tomorrow, you still couldn’t trust that your man would use it appropriately. Men have stupid ideas like “I am not a real man if I don’t make a woman pregnant” and will fetishize “breeding” and no, they will not always warn you beforehand. Take responsibility for your own reproductive capacity. Men: Yes you can feel something. Put the fucking condom on. Bonus: You will never have to have warts frozen off your dick. Did you cringe? There you go. Condom. Now.
Diet: Veganism is bullshit. This topic is so vast and detailed and controversial that I won’t even try to treat it with a blurb here, but just start with that.
Economics: I have come to this weird place for myself where I’m not convinced you have to be socialist to be leftist (see below, “Political orientation”). Capitalism can be and often is abused. But I do not think it is at the root of all our problems. I think that the money economy itself is a much bigger problem. But it’s a bit like what Churchill used to say about democracy. Money is the worst form of economy except all the other ones we’ve tried. Events of the last couple decades have demonstrated to me that the last fucking thing we need is an economy based on social clout. People are egotistical and irrational, and a social-clout system would render people homeless and starving on the basis of absolutely no wrongdoing at all. Soooo… money it is, I guess. But we need a different way of interacting with it, and we needed that centuries ago. Meanwhile, capitalism is basically the only option we have for breaking the link between work and wages if we aren’t going to fund robust social-welfare programs that support people in their old age. Social Security was never it, I’m sorry to say. It was always meant to be a supplement. And now it’s about to go straight into the shitter, so… learn how stocks and bonds and ETFs and REITs and CDs work. Please.
Environment: We’re fucked. We have made such a huge mess that I despair we will ever clean it all up. You may not be aware of how bad it is because you only stay in the clean and wealthy parts of wherever you live. I’ve seen some shit. No one wants to clean it up. No one wants to reverse the destruction process we have started. There are all sorts of reasons for that and I don’t want to be reductive, but the bottom line is there will be no going back to Eden, as it were. And then there’s climate change which, yes, we are contributing to on a massive scale. I don’t know what will happen. My only consolation is I likely will not live to see the worst of it. Incidentally, I hold to the Gaia hypothesis too: not Earth as goddess or mother, but Earth as a larger body we are all a part of. I’m a cell, not a passenger. She’s an organism, not a spaceship. Maybe if we could just come to understand that, we might start to figure all this out, but you people think you’re going to hell if you eat the wrong meat — you aren’t going to throw away ten thousand years’ worth of angry sky fairies just to save one silly planet. Be real.
Gender identity: Human beings cannot change sex. Sex in humans is determined by what gonads you are born with, not on what feelings you think you have. Gender identity is sexist and homophobic, and most of its adherents are racist too (“If a black woman is a woman, then a trans woman [man] is a woman!” How long have white people been accusing black women of being “manly”?). Gender identity leads to the violation of women’s rights and safety, and to the poisoning and mutilation of children and young adults. Female and male are sexes, not gender identities or genders. Woman and man are sex classes, not gender identities or genders. “Intersex” is a misnomer; these people are male and female people who have disorders of sexual development (DSDs). Also, it is nonsensical to answer the argument “humans can’t change sex” with “what about intersex people.” They don’t change sex either. Also, we are not mushrooms or clownfish, neither of which (last I checked) requires the services of a “gender clinic.” The way society is abusing women in particular who speak out about this is fucking appalling. If you have stayed silent or, worse, parroted the party line or supported all this fraud, malpractice, and quackery, you are not a good person nor on the “right side of history.” The number of people buying into this who spout political slogans and concepts lifted straight from the feminist, anti-racist, and DSD activist communities and are not even using those slogans and concepts correctly is just staggering. I don’t believe I have seen this much stupid in one place since I last read a right-wing Christian message board. And these fools sound just like them.
Health care: We desperately need a single-payer system in the United States. I’ve had occasion over the past year to learn more about how health insurance works, and even when you have “good” coverage it is still bullshit. I understand why it is structured the way it is, and I understand that someone with decent insurance will usually wind up spending a lot less on health care than they would have without it, particularly if something catastrophic happens to them. But the point is that there is no way to plan ahead for major medical expenses because you don’t know what is going to happen to you, when it is going to happen, or how much a particular provider or facility will charge you to deal with it. This is insane. If housing needs were this unpredictable and housing prices were this random, we’d all be in the streets burning shit down. We need health care as much as we need shelter. And I don’t particularly care how much of bad health is “earned.” The same people who complain about folks with heart disease or cancer getting any of their health care paid for are sitting on their fat asses chain-smoking and eating garbage and watching sports instead of playing them. Don’t tell me you’re not. I was once lectured about my weight by my alcoholic, type-2-diabetic father. Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Anyway, under a single-payer system the medical providers would get steady paychecks, and so the profit motive would be taken out of whatever they want to do to you. It’d be easier to trust you were getting what you actually needed. Assuming the conservative party didn’t cut their funding. That’s always a risk.
Homosexual and bisexual rights: No one should be treated as inferior or as less deserving of basic human rights because they are not heterosexual. Same-sex marriage should be legal; I’ve lived to see it become so in my country and I am glad. (I have a gay son and a bisexual daughter, but I was for same-sex marriage before I knew that about either of them.) However, we should not ignore biological reality in the name of pretending that same-sex couples are heterosexual couples. Governments should devise documentation for same-sex couples raising children that is equivalent to a birth certificate but does not replace or falsify the birth certificate. Men who behave in sexually risky ways in terms of passing on STIs should face legal and civil consequences for that if they infect someone. I feel the same about straight men, or anyone really, but the mechanics of man-on-man sex spread disease faster, and apparently you’re not allowed to say that anymore.
Israel: Why are we propping up the artificial existence of a theocratic state when literally all we had to do was stop oppressing and murdering Jewish people? I spent some amount of time in Southern Baptist churches decades ago, and they sUpPoRt iSrAeL because they think it will bring Jesus back and end the world. Nobody talks about this in the public sphere. It’s absolutely fucking unreal. And the way Israel treats Palestinian people is horrendous. And every bad thing Israel does, they try to weasel out of accountability with “the Holocaust” this and “anti-Semitism” that. The Holocaust was over more than 70 years ago. Arabs are Semitic people too. It’s fucking gross that we lost Yitzhak Rabin and got stuck with this clown Netanyahu instead. I call him NuttyYoohoo. He’s a dick. He’s a butcher. Stop taking Palestinian territory, put the “settlers” (invaders/thieves) in prison, and SIT THE FUCK DOWN AND TALK. I actually have more thoughts on this subject, but this will be controversial enough. I don’t hold with white supremacists, mind you. But it is not either/or. You can be against this bullshit and be against white supremacism too.
Men’s rights: Men do not have the right to harm women or children. Ever. The end.
Party affiliation: None. I have voted Democrat much more often than not since 1992 inclusive, but these days Democrats don’t know what a woman is and Republicans only want to know what a woman is so they know which people they get to own and control. Fuck all y’all. I’m not voting again until they purge the identitarians and the religious fundamentalists from both parties. I don’t believe in universal suffrage anymore. If you’re going to use your vote as a weapon you shouldn’t get to vote. It’s only a representative democracy if I have a shot at electing someone who represents me. None of those clowns want to represent me. Fine. They don’t get my support then.
Political orientation: Materialist, which makes me leftist. I am not a pure materialist about absolutely everything; I’m human, and we tend to tell stories about things in the name of finding meaning in it all. But I try to keep the political fantasy wish life to a minimum because when you make story more important than reality, you start violating human rights. I don’t give a fuck how you FEEL about what is happening, I care about what IS happening. If it’s clearly causing harm, we should put a stop to it. If we know it helps, we should do it or provide it. This shouldn’t be controversial.
Population: There are too many of us and there were too many of us when the world human population was half what it is now. Which occurred in my lifetime. Quit making women into baby-vending machines and start scaling back. Most of what ails us is down to too many people, frankly. Even the environmental issues. The land is not dead space we can fill up to the edges with people and people’s things. All those animals and plants we’re clearing out supported one another’s existence and kept the biosphere (the living part of the planet) working correctly to in turn keep the atmosphere at the right composition to support human life. You can’t just clear out all the living stuff except us, make our food from chemical labs, and expect we’d have a future here. The atmosphere would become poisonous to us in very short order. “Well, we could fix it with machines.” Dumbass, we haven’t figured out how to make an atmosphere on Mars yet. The fuck makes you think we could fix the one we have here? And you know what would happen if we needed machines for an atmosphere? We’d be depending on the rich to allow us to breathe. We’d have to PAY them for the “privilege.” You don’t want that. Educate girls, which is the single greatest driver of spontaneous birthrate reduction. Quit having so many fucking kids. Ban reproductive assistance. Let grown women get themselves sterilized if they want to — quit it with the “what would your future husband think.” Men can’t look for fertile women to marry? If they’re that stupid, should they even be fathers? Fuck’s sake.
Racism: Is still happening. Moreover, even where white people are being much more tolerant or accepting of people of other races, people of color are still living with the inter-generational effects of all the racist shit done to their parents, grandparents, and ancestors. This is another example of people thinking that feelings should override reality. “I FEEL better about black people, so the only reason they live in shitty neighborhoods is because they don’t care enough to fix them,” meanwhile you have absolutely no fucking clue what redlining is or how property taxes vs. school funding works. This is not a problem that stupid people can or will fix. Smart people need to quit shying away from this and pretending it’s something it isn’t. When the situation is actually causing much higher maternal and infant mortality rates, dealing with this would literally save lives. And that’s before you get into police abuses. And yes, those are still a thing too.
Violence: Is best defined as “the imposition of power-over.” Force and violence are not the same thing, though force is often employed in acts of violence. Me calling you out on your mistreatment of me is not violence, even if I yell or swear in the process. You barring me from friendship, love, or employment because you don’t like my words IS violence, even if you use a soft voice and polite words. People have the right to defend themselves when their safety or health or lives are at risk, but decent people follow rules of engagement and only use sufficient tactics necessary to get themselves or someone else out of immediate danger.
Women’s rights: Feminism is the movement to liberate female people from patriarchy. I don’t usually go around going “I’M A FEMINIST,” but I try to align myself with feminism as I’ve defined it here wherever humanly possible. And when I speak of liberation I do not mean “down to fuck at the drop of a hat.” Summa y’all need some Andrea Dworkin in y’all’s hearts, and you needed her THIRTY FUCKING YEARS AGO. Wake the fuck up. Femalekind is in big, big trouble.
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[Last updated: 15 October 2023]