VirtualExile

We go to bed so early during the work week, 8 or 9pm, often at T's insistence.  Sometimes I'm exhausted and fall asleep quickly.  Other times I stay up for a while, using my laptop and its backlit keyboard after all the other mammals have fallen asleep.  This has long been true, since the long-ago day when I gave up on trying to sleep in the same bed as T.  [We were never compatible at the task of sleeping in the same bed.]

Regardless of when I fall asleep, I usually wake up a few hours later, needing to pee.  Or perhaps I'm shaken awake by a strange or lucid dream.  Often I easily fall back asleep, but just as often I need a while to get back into sleep mode.  Sometimes I'm up for a few hours in the middle of the night before I get sleepy again.

I rarely worry about how much sleep I'm getting, especially now during Quarantine when I never have to be anywhere in the morning.  Even if I have a big meeting in the morning I know that I can sleep until shortly before it begins -- no commute, no need to shower -- or I can go back to sleep after it ends.  It's one of the plusses of Quarantine -- zero stress about getting enough sleep.

So, sometimes I nap in the afternoon, even on a work day.

On weekends at the condo, I'm usually motivated to stay up later so I can continue playing with toys, and/or listening to music, and/or watching TV -- I'm having FUN and want to continue having FUN and there's absolutely nothing I have to do the next morning, except perhaps to go back to the house by lunch time.  This means I'm usually sleep deprived when I return to the house.  I like to nap after I return, and I usually need extra sleep that first night back.

I still don't feel like time at the condo is just "normal", it feels like an escape from normal, with normal being work-chores-pets-T all squished together.  Especially during this second half of Quarantine, sometimes on my second day at the condo I have some lonely feelings, which also doesn't feel normal.  I think if Quarantine were over, I'd be on the hookup apps or making social plans when that loneliness strikes.  So, the loneliness is entirely situational.  I don't attribute it to a personality flaw, I don't "lose hope".  I just need more human touch.

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A person on Reddit told me she'd never heard of the phrase "couples privilege" and that I must have made it up myself.  LOL.  Her comment was downvoted.  She's apparently a huge practitioner of couples privilege, though.  It's funny how defensive we all get in the US when we're accused of having some privilege.  I think the concept can be overdone, and as the word "privilege" has accumulated negative connotations people have become more defensive about it.  But US culture is pretty much defined by privilege, both internally and externally.

I think for me, years of steeping in Left-wing discussions about various intersections of privilege is what led me to my Green Communism ethos -- my moral reasoning suggests to me that as a species we should limit our overall production to what is ecologically sustainable, and then share that production equally among all humans around the world.  To me it is so simple, but I didn't arrive at this conclusion until after living for half a century with other, less "radical" moral reasoning.  I was a libertarian at times.

My belief in or practice of relationship anarchism is another reaction to the various intersections of privilege.  Believing that relationships should be open and egalitarian.  Viewing monogamy as mutual sexual slavery.  These beliefs have also taken decades to evolve.  When I was younger I took part in ostensibly monogamous relationships, and my first long-term polyamorous relationship was an attempt at having a "primary" relationship with its own brand of couples privilege -- feeling like the most important boyfriend was a big deal to me back then.

Certainly living with T has required numerous compromises or diversions from relationship anarchism; my ideal has galloped far ahead of my reality.  And if I have another significant sexual/romantic relationship before I die, it may also require compromises or diversions from an ideal.  But T and I have also come a long way from where we started together.

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Without getting into names and details, there's a well-known editor, author, and essayist who got the boot from his longtime employer in part for referring favorably to a book called The Bell Curve.  I've never read this book, published in 1994 and updated two years later, but it has a horrible reputation on the Left for being racist.  Among certain groups, if you want to destroy the reputation of a public intellectual, all you have to do is say, "He agreed with The Bell Curve."  This book may have been the original Cancel Culture victim.  One of it's authors, Charles Murray, has become synonymous with racism on the Left.  (I don't know why the other, lead author, has escaped the same synonymal fate).

I was curious, in this period of accelerating Cancel Culture, whether Amazon continues to sell this book.  It does -- it's sold as an eTextbook, and from looking at the comments the book is required reading in many college-level courses.

82% of reviews of the book are 5 stars, only 3% are 1 star.  This is weird for a book that remains so controversial on the Left.  Why hasn't it been comment-bombed?

Believing in free speech -- you may recall I also read part of Rachel Dolezal's book and wrote about it in my LJ -- I want to take a look at this book also.  Is it really as bad as its reputation among the Left would have you believe?  Does Charles Murray deserve the everlasting cancellation that's been applied to him?

I worry that our definitions of racism, sexism, transphobia, and such have become way too arbitrary and expansive.  That if one member of an identity group claims that a behavior is offensive, then that behavior must be banned and anybody who partakes in that behavior should be fired or kicked out, their works of art taken down, their books removed from stores, etc.

How do we restore what I thought were the original goals of multiculturalism -- allowing each subculture to flourish in a shared commons -- while avoiding the multilayered oppression field that multiculturalism has generated?  As we opened the door to coexistent multiple cultures, we also allowed each of these culture's taboos to metastasize.  Instead of one set of cultural taboos, now every subculture is empowered to lay its taboos on everybody else.  It's an exponential fractalization of asymmetric taboo proliferation.  Heh, that's a wacky mouthful.

To somebody like me, it feels so retrograde because it was the dominant straight-white-Christian-capitalist-patriarchal culture's taboos that tried to keep homosexuality and polyamory hidden, that tried to keep women in their place, that tried to keep blacks as slaves, hispanics as seasonal/unskilled labor, native Americans on reservations, asians in Asia.

Multiculturalism was supposed to free the rest of us from the dominant culture's taboos.  But now, fueled by social media, multiculturalism is about forcing everybody to honor newly generated taboos from an expanding number of subcultures.

Instead of firing people for being gay, or refusing to hire them because they're not white males, now we have a much more complicated list of non-meritocratic criteria for hiring and firing.  Of course, the meritocracy has bias problems of its own ... but we haven't done away with hierarchy and status, instead we've made achieving and maintaining status much more complicated.

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Even as I feel irate about the lack of due process in kicking people out of their high-status jobs for violating newly generated and retroactive taboos, I also feel Cancel Culture distracts all of us from the more important struggles for ecological sustainability and transnational economic equality.

Somehow it is still not taboo to buy a gasoline car, for example.  Or to accumulate a billion dollar fortune.  Or to conceive a child when we already overpopulate the planet 1,000x.  It's totally fine to spend $500,000 (or more) on a house, if you can afford the mortgage payment, while other humans live on $1/day.  To live in a country that permits child poverty, even though it possesses $800,000 of wealth per household.  To attend highly selective universities that hoard gigantic endowments, while we have no national system to ensure quality primary school education for every child.

Why are tax cuts not taboo when we're running multi-trillion dollar annual deficits?

It's weird.  It's as though the capitalists want to divide us into little warring identity tribes, constantly fighting over whether somebody's behaviors have offended this or that identity tribe, as the capitalists continue to rape the planet and keep more and more of the resulting illegitimate wealth for themselves.