An Argument Against Drag Queen Story Telling For Kids (Say) 10 And Under

They have, I say, an ideological agenda behind them. 

They’re meant to say as subtext that gender is fluid and male and female are easily interchangeable categories, sex notwithstanding. 

I say little kids don’t need such messages and their benefit for outlier kids who are genuinely uncomfortable, so to say, in their own sexual skins is outweighed by among other factors:

(1) the confusion inhering in this message for most little kids who don’t understand gender and are generally at peace who they are as little boys and little girls; 

(2) presenting tempting but rigid and misunderstood categories of being—male female—for unhappy, confused or disturbed kids who may desperately cling to them as  misconceived solutions for emotional problems other than gender dysphoria; 

(3) generally normalizing the emotional imbalance of someone’s sex at odds with their sexual self understanding and self perception; 

(4) rather than the subtextual message of gender fluidity as a boon to dysphoric kids as a justification for such events, better for them to be given a chance normally to outgrow with support and sensitivity any such phases if phases they be and if more than phases then ongoing parental and family sensitivity and positive counselling; and 

(5) Where the ultimate upshot of this messaging is the personal mutilation (starting with puberty blockers) involved in completing the urge to transform one’s self sexually and where as kids get older and may be for varieties of reasons emotionally distraught and see their sexual transformation as the solution to their deep unhappiness, then the invidiousness of this early messaging becomes more readily apparent.

 

Tweet On Film Pig With Nicholas Cage

 Colour me contrarian.

Yikes!

Pig got high marks.

Slow/dreary/bloated/boring/portentous. 

Cage is a caricature of a character.

His hermitic laconicism is mannered, so over the top as to be contrived, inorganic.

His “wisdom’ is banal.

The story is silly: he loves his truffle pig.

Lyric Poetry Isn’t Fiction

Response to an argument that lyric poems are fictions, short stories if you like, and can be assimilated to fictional works: 

————-

Your argument dangles precipitously on the broken thread of conflation of two senses of fiction: fiction as simply what’s made up; and fiction as a distinct genre of literature with characteristics that mark its distinctiveness and differentiate it from lyric poetry, which has its own unique markers. 

So of course there aren’t two types of lyric poems in the forms you propose. What you miss in your mistaken view—that what’s made up = fiction= lyric poems— is that the inspiration or genesis of poems is irrelevant. What counts is the poem itself, its aesthetic autonomy. On your conflation, all genres of literature are fictions. Your argument loses itself in blurring these two senses of fiction.

Lyric poems are expressions of the poet's apprehension of whatever has inspired the poem. It’s the recreation of the inspiration as apprehended, which makes any distinction between real or imagined irrelevant.

Lyric poems as apprehension don’t conform to traditional narrative flow or adhere to strict rules of logic, but this does not make them purely fictional. They attempt to capture a particular emotional state or experience in words, rather than a deliberate fabrication of a peopled world marked by events and characters’ interactions and immersion in those events.

Lyric poems are often written in the first person, but whatever the point of view, they evoke a direct connection between poet's voice and reader, which intimate relationship is qualitatively different from readers’ relationship in most fiction to the thick quality of the whole of events, complexity of the characters, elaborated setting and all their evolving inter-relatedness. 

Poems are the articulation of instants of experience, real or imagined. Poets use their creative license to embellish or transform these instants into the poetic, marked by a kind of inward thrust. Lyric poems drive in on themselves to a theme that synthesizes form and meaning, which can be approximated by a concise paraphrase. Fictions project worlds. They go outwards in their relative expansiveness.

To expand on these differences, the genre of literary fiction is characterized by a strong narrative structure and the projection of a beginning, middle, and end, even if not always presented in that order. Plots are often complex, with multiple storylines and characters, and may involve developed themes of conflict, resolution, and character development as embedded in the stories. Lyric poetry focuses on expressing emotions and ideas, with a less narrative-driven approach.

In fiction, characters are often complex and multi-dimensional, with distinct personalities, motivations, and flaws. They may undergo significant changes over the course of the story, and their actions and decisions have consequences for the plot. Lyric poetry doesn’t have these elements. 

Fiction is rich in characters’ dialogue, which shows how they are of their worlds and which elaborates on and moves the story. In lyric poetry, dialogue is infrequent. The focus is on the speaker's singular subjective reaction to the source of his attention.

Fiction often has a well-defined setting playing a significant role in the story, both to particularize time and place and to show characters’ relation to them, to show, as noted, how they’re of their world. Poetry goes to the internal landscape of the speaker, which is to say, the  apprehension.  

Lyric poetry tends to use unconventional language, often in syntactically complex ways. Not for nothing is the language of fiction prose, since prose is a gateway to what it describes so as not to obtrude on it. In poetry, language repeats itself in all kinds of ways, is charged and dense, is rhythmic often metric. In a word, in poetry language is, well, poetic. It’s not just a means to what it describes. It’s cardinal in the poem.

Bottom Line On Israel

 Law Professor David Bernstein, author of Classified, puts the bottom line well:

“All I want someone to say is "here is my proposal, but of course it's contingent on the Jews currently being Israel being secure in their rights, here's the plan for how that woudl be ensured, and if it doesn't look like that's going to work, then I'm 'out.'" But almost everyone in the "anti-Zionist" camp is perfectly willing to let the Jewish residents of Israel suffer if that's what it takes, which makes their views anti-human rights, period.”

Dispelling The Illusion That The Self Is An Illusion

Me:

I haven’t read the article or followed the link so maybe I’m missing something.

You said: “ That seems right to me.  I am a necessary illusion. I can know I am mere matter but I can't exist as if I were, and mere matter has seen to it.  The idea has a certain annoying charm.” 

And what seems right to you is, “We imagine something similar behind our own eyes. It’s a necessary illusion, rooted deep in our evolutionary history."  

And then you lastly say, “But to be told that our whole lives are governed by an illusion, that there "really" are no persons, is weird. It is the basis of our whole existence.”

So I take it you think your sense of your self/your person or the self or the person of another is an illusion, however weird. 

Do I have that right?

If I can get that clarified, I’ll try to go on to make a point. 

R:

Yes

Me:

Here’s the point I’m struggling to get clear following your “Yes.”

Dispelling or falsifying a claim that X is an illusion is a necessary condition for X to be so considered. If it’s rationally impossible to dispel or falsify claim X, then it can’t be an illusion in any meaningful sense.

Illusions mean a difference between how things seem and how they really are. So for claim X to be an illusion, we have to be able to show its falsity by evidence or logic.

If we can’t, then the claim fails.

So, to repeat, we can generally say, the possibility of dispelling or falsifying such claim X by logic and/or evidence is a necessary condition for an illusion to be one. That condition lets us separate “real illusions” from simply unfalsifiable claims. 

So then how do we falsify or dispel the claim that the self is an illusion?

R:

Both views are theories, and no-one has been able to falsify either.  

Me:

So on my logic, no illusion?

R:

Can't argue with that.  

Me:

What about with this: “logically, then, no illusion?” 

R:

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Why Is The Trans Issue So Hard?

 Why is the trans issue so hard?  

A reason may be that anyone so driven, so innately impelled, to be opposite of whom they are as between male and female, as to try so radically to transform themselves physically, will feel diminished and insulted to be seen as anything less than whom they feel they fully are.

Hamilton As Middle Brow Emptiness

 Hamilton as middle brow emptiness.

Its music is bourgeois rap: it’s fake rap, co-opted rap, inauthentic rap, however clever. It’s all clever and bright and entertaining but it’s like Taylor Swift rapping or Michael Bublé. If you want the aesthetics of the best rap, urgency, the pounding sound of the street, authentic recreation of a specific time, place and their conditions, Hamilton’s music is not for you. It’s rap via Chat GTP.

I have no objection to brown and black people playing white people. Just I have no objection to white people playing brown and black people, or, generally, anybody portraying someone whom they’re not. I reject the idea of cultural appropriation while I stand against cultural misappropriation. But when people play whom they’re not as a programmatic thing as in Hamilton, I want to know why. I see it there as making a statement that rings about as true as the founding fathers rapping in clever verse. 

Does it jar me into some special insight, let alone an epiphany? No! Does it make some worthwhile point? No! So then what’s with the casting? It seems as something similar to its music. It’s fake daring, fake “Hey, in your face.” And, worst, it’s patronizing ersatz edginess and fake creativity.

The set is great. The cleverness and the craft in the lyrics are impressive, the performances are formidable. So why do I feel like I’ve seen a massive set of special effects all in service of an emptiness, of an aesthetic vacuum, the lack of a there there, a bauble? It’s like costume jewelry. Behind the cleverness and craft and impressive performances is a resounding hollowness that left me unsatisfied and hungry for something simple or complex that is moving and authentic, say Tracy Chapman singing Give Me One Reason or Othello.

Here for me is the essence of Hamilton: it’s a show that aims at being edgy and avant-garde but isn’t, that pretends to be ground breaking and daring but isn’t, that at bottom challenges neither the imagination nor the moral imagination of its audience. It has this quality as well about it: it aims at making people who use the arts to acquire culture as status feel good about themselves.