[NON BLOG] That Was Fun

Last night was definitely a time for meetings and reunions. After I met up with rdi at Timothy's on Church for what I believe to be the first time in more than two years, we proceeded down to the excellent C'est What (67 Front Street East) where we met up with (among other people) the brilliant autopope and feorag, and, of course, my Dread Lord fluffcthulhu. pauldrye and schizmatic also made appearances, along with various other wonderful people.

Great fun was had, particularly a series of fantastic conversations covering topics including American policies in Iraq and their sustainability, safer sex, the serious physical issues with building O'Neill colonies, various writing projects, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the problems of space colonization, Jon Ronson's Them, and genealogies. Oh, and drinking: I really should take better note of types of beer, for my personal edification and training. C'est What has excellent beers, imports and otherwise.

[META] Blogroll Update

My thanks to Patrick Banks for pointing me to his new blog, Keep Your Coils Clean.

[NON BLOG] Being Out

Last night, while chatting over (I think) a Strongbow cider at my end of the table with (among other people) feorag, the conversation somehow turned to the topic of the visibility of GLBT culture and GLBT individuals on the two sides of the Atlantic. I posited that Prince Edward Island might not be a place where being out is very common, but that unlike certain other areas of the North American continent, this low profile isn't a consequence of prejudice so much as it is because the category of non-heterosexual just doesn't exist in traditional Island culture. This void is frustrating and stifling. This void also provides convenient cover for people who can successfully work with it; I mentioned a certain prominent Island politico (who will go nameless) as an example of this.

Someone interjected here, asking what did it matter if certain prominent people were out or not in an ideal world. None of us believed that this is an ideal world. In this world, it made quite a bit of difference after 11:55 PM on the 4th of February, 2002, that I knew people who were out, even removed from me electronically as they were. Had I not known these people, I suspect that my online presence would have ceased sometime in March of that year, as a consequence of my unfortunate and mysterious decision to drown myself in icy Charlottetown harbour. (I had and have no access to firearms, absolutely no idea where to buy or otherwise acquire enough drugs to do the task, and am profoundly opposed as a matter of philiosophical principle to suicide methods which make others unintentional and unwilling accomplices. What else could I do?) It's entirely true, in case you're wondering, what GLBT advocates say about the poisonous and potentially lethal consequences of isolation for people just starting to realize that they're not straight. Before I got replies to my first desperate E-mails, the tension was building up unbearably.

It would be trivially easy, between blogging and USENET, for anyone curious about me to discover my sexual orientation. I'd outed myself on soc.history.what-if back in 2002, after all, and hundred-post USENET threads tend to rank highly for Google's search algorithms. Offline, I think that I'm out to everyone who matters to me. I'd like to think that I'm entirely comfortable with being that out, but I don't think that I am. My uncertainty about what being out actually entails doesn't help matters.

[LINK] No, they aren't

My thanks to schillerium for satisfying my unworthy curiosity.

They started off as a political golden couple, but wound up a wincing example of why you shouldn't date someone from work. "Never dip your pen in the company ink," as one Conservative insider put it. With news reverberating around Parliament Hill of Belinda Stronach's blockbuster bolt from the Tories to the Liberals, the indelicate question was unavoidable: What about Peter MacKay?

Stronach's well-publicized romance with the Conservative deputy leader charmed many of the hard-hearted vote-counters who populate Parliament Hill. Both were photogenic. Both were ambitious. And their relationship could hardly have come to a more disastrous end.

Sources confirmed the pair are taking a "break" from the relationship first made public in January.

"Suffice it to say, I'm very happy and quite smitten," MacKay beamed at the time.

Tory insiders now say he was one of the last to know of Stronach's planned defection.

This has to be excruciatingly painful for the man. While his decision to violate his oath and bring the rump of the old Tories into union with the Canadian Alliance is something I resent, as a fan of the Red Tories, having one's relationship collapse so completely and publically must hurt excruciatingly.

[BRIEF NOTE] Nature and post-humanism

I've recently read Donna Haraway's seminal 1991 essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century". One paragraph-length chunk caught my attention.

By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks--language tool use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures. Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse.

Today, I picked up John Gray's Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals at a scandalously low price. I've only skimmed the book, but the Booklist review seems to be accurate enough.

In a work of thoroughgoing iconoclasm, British philosopher Gray attacks the belief that humans are different from and superior to animals. Invoking pure Darwinism, he savages every perspective from which humans appear as anything more than a genetic accident that has produced a highly destructive species (homo rapiens)--a species that exterminates other species at a phenomenal rate as our swelling numbers despoil the global environment. Gray explains the human refusal to confront the darker realities of our nature largely as the result of how we have consoled ourselves with the myths of Christianity and its secular offspring, humanism and utopianism. Human vanity, he complains, has even converted science (which should teach us of our insignificant place in nature) into an ideology of progress. But neither hope for progress nor confidence in human morality passes muster with Gray, who envisions a future in which the human population finally contracts as a world politics that grows ever more predatory and brutal shatters all such illusions.

As I said, the 21st century is going to be fun.