Title: A Common Misunderstanding; Or, The Spirit of the Staircase (24 January 2009)
Date: 2020-01-01
Category: other
+Tags: personal
Status: draft
-I remember (and the Diary entry helps, too) there was a party/meetup at someone's place down in Sunnyvale, perhaps in honor of Robin being in town. This was back around eight-and-a-half years ago, during the golden age when the Sequences were still being written, when the _M_ and _R_ in _MIRI_ were still an _S_ and an _A_, respectively—before the Eternal September, before everyone was poly, and _long_ before everyone was trans.
+I remember (and the Diary entry helps, too) there was a party/meetup at someone's place down in Sunnyvale, perhaps in honor of Robin being in town. This was back a little less than nine years ago, during the golden age when the Sequences were still being written, when the _M_ and _R_ in _MIRI_ were still an _S_ and an _A_, respectively—before the Eternal September, before everyone was poly, and _long_ before everyone was trans.
-I worked the 0600 to 1500 bookkeeper/customer-service shift at my supermarket dayjob that day. After work, I dropped off the week's bag of redeemed manufacturer's coupons at store #936 (what the company did with them after that, I was never told—perhaps they weighed them), bought a woefully-misnamed espresso medicinal from the hegemon's coffee kiösk there, then drove downtown and parked near the library construction site; I had some time to kill before I was scheduled to rendezvous at University and Shattuck in Berkeley at 1745 with a local genetics blogger with whom I had arranged to give a ride to the party. I walked to Ming Quong and bought a "FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE" button to put on my bag as a replacement for the one I had bought in 'aught-six and lost at some point. I had recently reöutfitted my bag with buttons I had bought from a site I knew because the proprietor occasionally commented on the blog (_the_ blog). My newly-accessorized bag could hardly be complete without a gender pin, and for some sentimental reason I wanted it _before_ taking the geneticist to the social. [narrative optimization note]
+I worked the 0600 to 1500 bookkeeper/customer-service shift at my supermarket dayjob that day. After work, I dropped off the week's bag of redeemed manufacturer's coupons at store #936 (what the company did with them after that, I was never told—perhaps they weighed them), bought a woefully-misnamed espresso medicinal from the hegemon's coffee kiösk there, then drove downtown and parked near the library construction site; I had some time to kill before I was scheduled to rendezvous at University and Shattuck at 1745 with a local genetics blogger with whom I had arranged to give a ride to the party. I walked to Ming Quong and bought a "FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE" button to put on my bag as a replacement for the one I had bought in 'aught-six and lost at some point. I had recently reöutfitted my bag with buttons I had bought from a site I found because the proprietor occasionally commented on the blog (_the_ blog). My newly-accessorized bag could hardly be complete without a gender pin, and for some sentimental reason I wanted it _before_ taking the geneticist to the social. I have a weakness for what you might call _narrative optimization_: doing things not for any real-world utility, but rather because they would seem thematically appropriate if this were a story rather than real life.
-(I still have that "radical notion" pin, but it's no longer proudly pinned to my backpack. Ideology—in the general case—is not my style anymore.)
+(I still have the "radical notion" pin, but it's no longer proudly pinned to my backpack. Ideology—in the general case—is not my style anymore.)
-The party was amazing, as always, but there's one exchange that haunts me to this day, a moment when I was caught off guard by having been _seen through_ in a way that, at the time, I couldn't permit myself to anticipate or understand. I wish I had an actual transcript of it.
+The party was amazing, as always, but there's one exchange that haunts me to this day, a moment when I was caught off guard by having been _seen through_ in a way that, at the time, I couldn't permit myself to anticipate or understand. I wish I had an actual transcript of it, so I could pencil in "corrections" of how it should have gone
-[something about how narrative optimization should be deliberate: you should keep separate track of what actually happened and what _should_ have happened, rather than blurring them together]
+
+Narrative optimization should be deliberate: you should keep separate track of what actually happened and what _should_ have happened, rather than blurring them together.
(rather than the narratively-convenient reconstruction of an eight-and-change-year-old memory and a Diary entry from the Monday after), so that I could pencil in corrections of
>
> —[Greg Cochran](https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/12/12/internal-contradictions/)
-We socially-liberal individualist/feminist people—I _hope_ I'm still allowed to use the first person here, although the reader will ultimately judge that for herself—have this beautiful moral ideal, where we want all human beings to be free to maximize their potential, unencumbered by oppressive cultural traditions specifying roles and destinies in advance. We want everyone to be judged on her or his _own_ merits rather than treated as a representative of their race or sex.
+We socially-liberal individualist/feminist people—I _hope_ I'm still allowed to use the first person here, although the reader will ultimately judge that for herself—have this beautiful moral ideal, where we want all human beings to be free to maximize their potential, unencumbered by oppressive cultural traditions specifying roles and destinies in advance. We want everyone to be judged on her or his _own_ merits rather than treated as a representative of their race or sex.
And _because_ we care about the beautiful moral ideal, we tend to assume that psychological group differences don't exist or are superficial or are socially-constructed,
(This is Worth a Fight?)
> "—but if one hundred thousand straights can turn up, to show their support for the gay community, why can't you?"
>
-> I said wearily, "Because every time I hear the word _community_, I know I'm being manipulated. If there is such a thing as _the gay community_, I'm certainly not a part of it. As it ahppens, I don't want to spend my life watching _gay and lesbian_ television channels, using _gay and lesbian_ new systems ... or going to _gay and lesbian_ street parades. It's all so ... proprietary. You'd think there was a multinational corporation who had the franchise rights on homosexuality. ANd if you don't _market the product_ their way, you're some kind of second-class, inferior, bootleg, unauthorized queer."
+> I said wearily, "Because every time I hear the word _community_, I know I'm being manipulated. If there is such a thing as _the gay community_, I'm certainly not a part of it. As it happens, I don't want to spend my life watching _gay and lesbian_ television channels, using _gay and lesbian_ new systems ... or going to _gay and lesbian_ street parades. It's all so ... proprietary. You'd think there was a multinational corporation who had the franchise rights on homosexuality. And if you don't _market the product_ their way, you're some kind of second-class, inferior, bootleg, unauthorized queer."
>
> —"Cocoon" by Greg Egan
>
> —"The One That Got Away" by Katy Perry
+> He once said, "None of the other Rationals I've ever met have anything but an empty-head for an Emotional. I'm lucky." She had said, "But the other Rationals seem to like empty-heads. Why are you different from them, Odeen?" Odeen did not deny that the other Rationals liked empty-heads. He just said, "I've never figured it out and I don't think it's important that I do. I'm pleased with you and I'm pleased that I'm pleased."
+>
+> —_The Gods Themselves_ by Isaac Asimov
+
----
Less obviously fitting—
---
on a Facebook thread about female-dominated gym classes, a female acquaintance writes, "My class focuses on weightlifting and it's still all women (including one trans, oddly enough)." (You wouldn't say "oddly enough" if you actually believed that trans women are women!)
+
+This is so great http://criticaltheology.tumblr.com/post/159472778625/poem-by-a-jewish-trans-woman-written-in-1322
-CURRENT PUSH (5)—
-There's a Land That I See; Or, the Spirit of Intervention
+CURRENT PUSH—
+Laser 1
+✓ Interlude X (likelihood ratios)
+There's a Land That I See; Or, The Spirit of Intervention
+A Common Misunderstanding; Or, The Spirit of the Staircase (24 January 2009)
+✓ Interlude XI (four lights)
Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes; Or, ...
-Interlude X (likelihood ratios)
The View From Nowhere
-
MAIN SEQUENCE (12)—
Q Time Travel Isn't Real; Or, Yes, the Only Real Trans Woman Is a Transitioned Trans Woman
Q As Well for a Sheep as a Lamb; Or, Charity, Objectivity, and ...
Q Reduce Gender Identities to Gender Goals
The Categories Were Made for Man in Order to Make Predictions
-
NON-SEQUENCE (16)—
Q Memoirs of My Recent Madness, Part II: Friendship Survived
-A Common Misunderstanding; Or, the Spirit of the Staircase (24 January 2009)
Imperfect Trait Measurements Regress to the Mean
Q Review of Nevada
Q I Want to See You Be Brave
Servants of the Egregore; Or, the Joy of Static Analysis
(the story about my name)
of course trans genders are less natural; that's the entire fucking point
-Interlude XI (four lights)
Product Review: Glamour Boutique's Vee-String Bladder
-Laser I
Threnody for the Transhumanism of My Youth
on the poor literary quality of TG captions
Blame Me for Trying
"Love Like You"
Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
-
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff