Category: Other essays

On Facebook:The term “Cancel Culture” is a part of a larger system of domination and, frankly, is used itself to cancel conversation to avoid uncomfortable conversations and accountability. “It was just a joke” is part of that, too. The image below is framed in terms of men, but it’s part of the greater system of…

I used to call myself a libertarian. I used to say that meant that people could do what they wanted as long as it didn’t hurt other people. I used to be the final arbiter of whether my actions hurt people. It’s easy to declare that one’s own actions don’t hurt other people: “My actions…

So, last week, we watched Squid Game. Spoiler alert: Non-specific reference to the ending below. Let me get this out of the way: The program was very well written. I didn’t really find the themes particularly original. The very idea of “bread and circuses” goes back thousands of years, and a glossy production (estimated budget…

A certain libertarian white rich man on HBO thinks there should only be one National Anthem. He’s okay with getting rid of the current one, but we all have to agree on the replacement. The idea of one National Anthem, included in his argument, is founded on the idea that there is one USA. Except…

While I understand the distinction between shame and guilt being between “how I am” vs “what I did”, I feel like this misses what is for me a major component of shame. Shame is often pre-emptive: I feel ashamed of things I want to do, before I’ve even done them. I fear mockery and ostracism….

So, content warning: This is about COVID deaths. Someone tweeted about case counts correlated to Rep/Dem voting patterns by county showing that the GOP was literally killing its constituents, and someone else rebutted that cases aren’t correlated to deaths because only about one in seven people who test positive die. But a proper correlation would…

I don’t want pronouns that tell you I’m nonbinary. I want pronouns that tell you I’m a person. I want pronouns that don’t remind me of my culture’s need to bucket everyone into “man” and “woman” the moment we look at someone. Gender is important, but only because we’ve made it so. We’re obsessed with…

I was watching a Jammidodger video this morning and had a realization that another* problem with the term “transgendered men” (and “… women”) is that it allows for two interpretations. If you believe that transgender men are men, then what does it mean to have been “transgendered”? It would presumably mean that, while you have…

I am the child of a minister. We moved every few years, as my father was assigned to a new church. My father told me this was because the United Methodist church didn’t want any parish to be built around a single minister; it was about the church, not the personality. When I was a…