Checked Out Last night, Checking In Today

 Last night, I checked out. I was even more tired than I am tonight. Instead of doing anything I was supposed to, I read Michael Connelly's Resurrection Walk. I read Connelly in prison - I do not know with his stiff style but he does know how to tell a story. He is neither Raymond Chandler nor Elmore Leonard, but he was a break from research and thinking.

I napped tonight. I'm pretty sure I did the same thing last night. Work is tiring me out, or else it is just getting old. Funny I do not fret any longer about my body breaking down. Fifteen years ago I did - I did not think with COPD and my eyes getting dimmer, I would ever crawl out of the debt I was under. Now, I do not care about the debt, only about winding up my business and dying. There are no more goals than that. Finish as much as I can of what I have started and nothing new. Another reason I do not want to get into the practice of law.

Some older stuff, I have forgotten to mention.

Something I never heard of before, and I wonder who lives like this: The sad, stupid rise of the sigma male: how toxic masculinity took over social media.

The “sigma male” emerged from this primordial testosterone swamp largely thanks to a 55-year-old American science-fiction writer and publisher named Theodore Robert Beale, who blogs under the name Vox Day. A proud Christian nationalist, racist and misogynist, Beale has argued that black men are genetically more inclined to violence than white men, that women should not be allowed to vote, and that feminism was “a seductive but destructive Jewish ideology that was more incoherent than communism, more bloodthirsty than nazism, and more histrionic than fascism”.

In 2010 Beale wrote a blog post in which he attempted to expand the “overly simplistic” division of men into alphas and betas. He came up with his own “sociosexual hierarchy”, with alphas at the top – “the male elite, the leaders of men for whom women naturally lust” – followed by betas, deltas, gammas, lambdas, right down to omegas – “the losers”. Sitting outside this imaginary pyramid of masculinity were sigmas – “the lone wolves”. Beale defined sigmas as “outsiders who don’t play the social game and manage to win at it anyhow” and who “often like women, but also tend to be contemptuous of them”. They were on a par with alphas, but just didn’t show off about it.

“There is very little – if any – convincing science behind the notion that personality types exist or are fixed,” says Debbie Ging, professor of digital media and gender at Dublin City University. “It’s basically a really simplistic, misguided and bio-determinist account of human behaviour, which doesn’t take into account the sociocultural construction of gender identity or the impact of economic and political forces on people’s choices or lack thereof.”

Sony Buying the Drafthouse Is (Probably) Good

Of Borders and Bishops: The “Tavush for the Homeland” Movement in Armenia

These two elements of the aftermath of ethnic cleansing of Artsakh came to a head last month, in May 2024. In late April, as part of the ongoing demarcation of the border between the two countries, the governments of Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed to a “historic” transfer—described as a “return”—of uninhabited villages in Armenia to Azerbaijan. For Armenians in neighboring villages in the Tavush region, this was too much, as they felt the new border would endanger them and cut them off from the rest of Armenia. Many Armenians worldwide felt similarly, and a simmering dissatisfaction with Pashinyan—as the prime minister who presided over the loss of Artsakh, whether or not another course of action or another leader would have been able to change the outcome of the war—began to boil over.

Enter the charismatic Primate of the Diocese of Tavush, Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan. Born in Gyumri in Armenia, educated in England and Canada, and having served as the Primate of the Diocese of Canada, Galstanyan returned to Armenia in 2015 as the Primate of the Diocese where the four villages are located. Archbishop Bagrat, voicing the displeasure of the members of his diocese, came out as a vocal critic of Pashinyan shortly after the announcement of the transfer of the villages. He quickly became the face and voice of the villagers, who were already blocking highways and protesting what they saw as an unjust demarcation process.

By the end of April, the “Tavush for the Homeland” movement emerged, with Galstanyan as its face. At the same time, both denunciations of the Archbishop and slander against him increased. Given that the institution of the Armenian Apostolic Church declined to censure the Archbishop’s political statements, some of this political ire was directed more broadly against the Armenian Apostolic Church. As others have pointed out, the Armenian Apostolic Church in Armenia has often been at loggerheads with the Pashinyan administration, most notably over the question of the potential “removal of religious or Armenian Church history from the curriculum of all public schools” in 2019. In this early phase of the protests, the Church as an institution did not directly enter the fray, though this past history and the decision not to censure Galstanyan led to a general sense that the Church agreed with the criticisms of the Archbishop.

Okay, the debate was horrible. May this help you get over it:

I am going to get to bed early. Have a good one.

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