I am not feeling well today. It certainly has not gone well for me since this morning. My only accomplishment is getting a research job done.
I have only left the apartment to take out some trash. It is raining. Another day of missing Liturgy.
Yesterday was mostly doing the research project and watching a South Korean show on Tubi. I did watch Trump. Since everyone and their brother has commented on the lies and uselessness of the speech, I will keep silent. The upside, the only one, was he did not use up our time threatening Venezuela. Before I decided not to write about Trump demonstrating his incompetence and hatred, I collected a few items that I thought were relevant:
125 workers to be laid off from Muncie manufacturing facility
Many Hoosiers can’t afford Indiana and need state lawmakers to deliver
Truth Social users and callers on right-wing media shows are mad about Trump's comments on Rob Reiner (Rob Reiner was a better person than Trump and deserved better than Trump gave him and his wife.)
Trump’s Appalling Reiner Reaction Is a Sign of Something Deeply Wrong (The National Review!)
I meant to use today reading. This is all that I got done between 1:30 and 4.
A Good Neighbor (Boston Review) discusses some of Marcel Ophuls's films. None that I have seen, but I knew the name Ophuls - not because of him, but his father - and so I read the essay. Now, I wish I had seen his movies. But the following paragraph left me feeling I had seen more evidence of our cultural stagnation.
Ophuls’s intellectualism, his wryness and urbanity, his discerning moral sense—these may have been useful when criticizing a liberal establishment that did not live up to its own ideals. One naturally wonders how useful they are when confronting anti-liberal forces with bad ideals, or none. Ophuls made films at a time when he could count on his viewers’ attention span and the existence of a self-confident liberal establishment, firmly in command and practically begging to be exposed for its hypocrisy. Both are in decline, and the forces that drove Ophuls and his family out of Europe are on the rise again.
Tainted Ladies (Boston Review) I read just because I wondered if it might explain what I do not understand about modern politics; another reminder I need to write up the past three weeks of the group sessions.
Perhaps the same goes for what has come to be called the “anti-gender” movement: a global right-wing reaction against a loose collection of things including women’s rights, trans people, gay marriage, and drag queen story hour. It’s easy to blame the media or the “manosphere,” but it’s worth asking whether there might be anything about liberal feminism that helps to explain its collapse. That does not have to mean that feminism has “gone too far.” It might instead reveal a sense in which our dominant strain of feminism has not gone far enough: too focused on elite representation in the prevailing order, it has failed to advance the interests of women in general and to stand against the things—neoliberalism, austerity, war—that harm women disproportionately. In any case, the present mood does not seem to me to have come out of nowhere. It feels like the fuller-throated expression of a rumbling that was there all along, just below the surface of a superficial consensus that was more grudging, and more fragile, than many realized.
From the group sessions, I get the impression men are constantly fantasizing about what they can do to the objects of their desires, that there is a neo-Victorian moralism requiring sex only within a relationship, and that possession is the object of passion rather than experience. I guess there is misogyny in there, too; towards whom I am not so sure. I feel more certain there is superstition.
The essay points to one instance of superstition.
The proponents of the anti-gender movement are not against gendered norms and roles and distinctions. On the contrary, they are keen to defend a semi-mythical “traditional” order in which boys are boys and girls are girls and nothing troubles this binary divide. Thus, as Butler observes, those who claim to be against “gender ideology” are really defending a gender ideology of their own. As with that other whistle-word “critical race theory,” few who use the term “gender ideology” seem to be quite sure what it means, but they don’t let that stop them—indeed, as Butler also points out, the very vagueness enhances its phantasmic power. They know that it has something to do with a proliferation of pronouns, assorted forms of gender-bending, and corruption of the youth, and that is enough.
But more interesting to me is this:
In that sense, it is right to call what we’re experiencing a backlash, albeit not against feminism at its finest. Rather, as Sarah Banet-Weiser has argued, a “popular feminism” that equates liberation with personal empowerment and zero-sum advancement has found its dark reflection in a “popular misogyny” that promises to do the same for men. Contemporary anti-feminism’s demonization of women as calculating and untrustworthy “hypergamists” might likewise be seen as an inverted image of a feminism that has effectively equated womanhood with depoliticized goodness or righteousness. One expression of this is in the omnipresent demand for increased “representation.” Few who call for more women in power as a demand of justice can resist adding some promissory note about the therapeutic effects that a woman’s touch might bring, to the boardroom and the battlefield as much as to the political party.
But feminism’s achievement of a certain institutional and cultural hegemony, however shallow and however precarious, is a weapon that can be used for good or ill—and since women are not angels but flawed and compromised human beings, it is no surprise to find it used in both ways: as self-defense and resistance against the everyday injuries and indignities that a sexist status quo inflicts; and more cynically, for convenience, advancement, interpersonal point-scoring or petty revenge. The point is not that things have “swung too far in the other direction,” as some would put it. The larger context is still one in which women are systematically disempowered and in which violent misogyny has deep roots, as the current groundswell testifies. Hegemonic feminism appears in this setting as little more than a carnivalesque reversal of the kind that has always been part and parcel of patriarchy (where it goes by disparaging terms such as “hen-pecking” or “wearing the trousers”), but now with a feminist face: a sphere of a limited, cathartic comeuppance playing out within a structure which remains in fundamental respects stubbornly unmoved.
Claiming moral superiority becomes self-righteousness become despotic.
Something to make you feel better this time of the year: Good People Also Get What's Coming to Them: Revisiting The Twilight Zone’s Christmas Episodes (Reactor)
Another sign of our decline? The internet in 2025: Bigger, more fragile than ever - and 'fundamentally rewired' by AI (ZDNET)
And now I am tired. I started three pieces that I thought would be interesting, and got bored too quickly.
I may come back to this: Top Reads | 2025 | Fiction (Granta)
I knocked for an hour and a half before starting up again.
My face and eyes feel feverish without me feeling any high temperatures.
I knocked off the last overs from last night. Probably not wise, the oyster dressing that I tarted up with vegetables kept waking during the night. It was the addition of the jalapeño pepper that was a bit too much. I tried napping around noon, but that didn't really work.
Evening shift, so to speak - high winds and lots of rain right now.
We Love You, Rob Reiner (Crime Reads)
Befitting his lovable, bear-huggy, big-hearted reputation in life, though, onscreen and behind the camera, no matter the genre, he produced powerful, moving, and inspiring stories that center the importance of love, friendship, and family. His movies changed my life. I’m sure they also changed yours
How true.
Maps Mapped: Every State’s Share of U.S. GDP - Well, Indiana is doing better than Kentucky!
Consciousness interests me - why do we have it? That explains my reading Why Consciousness Evolved (Neuroscience), but thinking it's important to us is why I make note of it here.
What is the evolutionary advantage of our consciousness? And what can we learn about this from observing birds? Researchers at Ruhr University Bochum published two articles on this topic.
Although scientific research about consciousness has enjoyed a boom in the past two decades, one central question remains unanswered: What is the function of consciousness? Why did it evolve at all?
The answers to these questions are crucial to understanding why some species (such as our own) became conscious while others (such as oak trees) did not. Furthermore, observing the brains of birds shows that evolution can achieve similar functional solutions to realize consciousness despite different structures.
The working groups led by Professors Albert Newen and Onur Güntürkün at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, report their findings in a current special issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B from November 13, 2025.
***
Albert Newen and Carlos Montemayor categorize three types of consciousness, each with different functions: 1. basic arousal, 2. general alertness, and 3. a reflexive (self-)consciousness.
“Evolutionarily, basic arousal developed first, with the base function of putting the body in a state of ALARM in life-threatening situations so that the organism can stay alive,” explains Newen.
“Pain is an extremely efficient means for perceiving damage to the body and to indicate the associated threat to its continued life. This often triggers a survival response, such as fleeing or freezing.”
A second step in evolution is the development of general alertness. This allows us to focus on one item in a simultaneous flow of different information. When we see smoke while someone is speaking to us, we can only focus on the smoke and search for its source.
“This makes it possible to learn about new correlations: first the simple, causal correlation that smoke comes from fire and shows where a fire is located. But targeted alertness also lets us identify complex, scientific correlations,” says Carlos Montemayor.
Humans and some animals then develop a reflexive (self-)consciousness. In its complex form, it means that we are able to reflect on ourselves as well as our past and future. We can form an image of ourselves and incorporate it into our actions and plans.
“Reflexive consciousness, in its simple forms, developed parallel to the two basic forms of consciousness,” explains Newen.
“IN such cases conscious experience focuses not on perceiving the environment, but rather on the conscious registration of aspects of oneself.”
This includes the state of one’s own body, as well as one’s perception, sensations, thoughts, and actions. To use one simple example, recognizing oneself in the mirror is a form of reflexive consciousness.
This feel shocking, what will come of their research could shake our human vanity, if not more.
In this article, we start from the assumption that consciousness is not the ultimate triumph of human evolution but rather represents a more basic cognitive process, possibly shared with other animal phyla.
In this article, we show that there is growing evidence that (i) birds have sensory and self-awareness, and (ii) they also have the neural architecture that may be necessary for this.
A rejection came in through the email:
Thank you very much for submitting "The Dead and The Dying" to Dzanc Books' Short Story Collection Competition. We received a record number of entries this year, and had a deeply difficult time choosing a first-place collection. Unfortunately, your work was not selected as our winning title; however, we truly appreciate your interest and your patience, and we hope you'll consider us for future works.
The winning submission, along with the long- and shortlist honorees, will be announced Monday, December 22.
Sincerely,
Michelle Dotter
I just remembered I got my meds yesterday. I need to take them. There was a run to Payless, too.
I wonder if this is not a sensible idea, considering the points noted above about feminism: Boys aged 11 to be sent on anti-misogyny courses. It might even prevent some of the behavior I see in the group sessions and read about elsewhere.
Boys as young as 11 will be sent on anti-misogyny courses designed to stamp out violence against women and girls, under government plans.
Pupils who show harmful behaviour will be signed up to “behaviour change programmes” in schools. The courses will be “focused on challenging deep-rooted misogynist influences”.
***
The programmes could cover image-based abuse, peer pressure, coercive behaviour, online harassment and stalking, and the fact that pornography does not reflect real relationships.
Some silliness, but I remember several of these failed TV shows:
Going off to the weeds in more than one way: The Forgotten Crops of North America: The Eastern Agricultural Complex
I tried to make an effort at reading, the planned event of the day. I found The Unreliable Man by Lucien R. Starchild (Short Story Substack) - brilliant. It is meta and funny and also heart-warming. If you saw Stranger than Fiction, it is along the same lines.
I also read Patron Sainting by Ed Ahern. I sent "Thomas Kemp Went Missing" to Underside Stories, and I think I see why they rejected.
I am not sure why Eye Fucking Men Across New York City from “Shapeshifter” by Maggie Love (Electric Literature) disturbs me as much as it does. I think - mostly - it is I do not understand the New York setting, and yet is not entirely without points transferable to out here in the boondocks. It may be that it got me thinking of some people I knew, that it got me wondering what became of their lives these past 20, 30 years - drugs and alcohol taking them down into the ground, or getting to where the air was cleaner and finding a relationship that enhanced their lives, or jumping on the conveyor belt of marriage and kids and a dead-end job lasting until death came for them?
Joe Ely died. That shook me.
Joe Ely is a musician I came to through The Clash. He was one musician I kept listening to even after TJ and I parted ways. Even up to now. I never understood why he never made it bigger, but maybe that is the point of his life. He kept producing work worth listening to, regardless what the world might think.
Where I started with Joe:
This was his last album I bought before my arrest:
I do believe these are from his last album:
And back to the past, I think, to close out:
Maybe it's his dying that made me think of the past so much tonight. Maybe it is just my not feeling well on a dark and nasty night. When I was younger, I attached several of his songs to girlfriends gone. It also now crosses my mind that association stopped about the time depression took ahold of me.
I will close with this video from Leonard Peltier:
We can do better, we need to learn to do better, else we will have no claim for being humane creatures.
Enough.
Keep well, you who read this.
sch
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