On Labels

I wouldn't label myself an empiricist because of ignorance. I haven't tested my theory of what an empiricist is against how I behave in life, my all-too-human predisposition toward confirmation bias suggests to me that more often than not, I'm not an empiricist.

I do as a discipline rather than habit force myself to read shit that contradicts my point of view, and not from tokenistic sources but passionate ones. I would label myself a contrarian, and sometimes I actively try to contradict my own held beliefs, but I wouldn't label myself a 'meta-contrarian' where I try to not follow the people who don't follow the crowd. Those I would perhaps label as 'iconoclasts' because it amuses me to observe that most creative iconoclasts tend to trot out the same old shit that iconoclasts have been trotting out for decades.

No I simply try to find reasons to abandon my beliefs because I believe this is a semi-robust form of empiricism. I'm skeptical of my own knowledge these days. I frequently ask myself 'but what if I'm wrong?'

The starkest and most painful form of perspective taking I ever practiced was buying and attempting to read 'The White Massai' a reference which may be so dated that those who know me might say 'is that when you started appropriating African culture?' but no, I read the White Massai because at the time my recently former partner had followed more or less the exact same decision making process of the protagonist. I never finished it, namely because by chapter 4 or 5 the plan was going as well as I expected it to, and so I was simply feeling validated and saddened - if I'm going to be dumped, I want it not to be for an objectively hair brained scheme.

But I still follow this practice of perspective taking, albeit as we've moved from mass media to curated media, it's gotten harder to even hear of public intellectuals that hold contrary views to mine, even though they generally have hours of keynote speeches all over youtube.

So I found myself watching 'Dear White People' because Netflix promoted it with no algorithmic presumption of who I was and what I'd enjoy, simply because they'd made it and it was new. My visceral response to the first episode's narration told me I wasn't going to like this show. So I force fed myself it,

I came in ignorant, I didn't read reviews or look up what it was about. I didn't read an article on a ezine targeted at my in-group to check whether I should be watching it or not - nor I guess consult what Donald Trump's tweets had to say about it. It was simply on my TV and I watched it. What I learned from 'Dear White People' is probably close to, or akin to, nothing. I suspect the show suffers from the satire trap that Malcolm Gladwell so excellently dissected on his podcast that is much more worth listening to than continuing to read this.

But there's a scene in episode two about the gay black journalist character where he is asked by his sassy gay editor if his assumption that the character is gay is correct and that character says 'I don't really believe in accepting labels blah blah blah' And that was interesting, because I've come across this attitude. Later the same character meets a white guy at a party that identifies or labels himself 'bisexual' but appends virtually the exact same 'I don't really believe in accepting labels blah blah blah' statement to the end.

In fairness there is a character that advises the main gay dude to 'find your label', gentle advice that in hindsight is probably the stance I latched onto, but the premise of a character rejecting labels in what I assume is a quest to speak their truth is what interests me as I have seen this very sentiment play out in life.

However among the curious sensible people I know who have expressed similar 'I don't really define myself that way' etc. I also notice that we human beings are not very consistent on our aversion/embracing of labels. Which is curious.

There appears to be domains where people readily embrace self-labeling, people find it exciting and fun - from the 'which crying breakfast are you?' buzz feed quiz level stupid, to the somewhat vacuous Roman and Chinese zodiac signs, to practically useful personality tests like Myers-Briggs and it's derivatives and allegories (like the indegenous American leadership compass with different totems at the points, or any of the archetypes that Jung obsessed over) In these contexts of labeling people I've never experienced and find it hard to imagine the conversation 'you're an extrovert right?' 'Well I don't really subscribe to the labels of patriarchal western colonialist psychology...' though I can imagine a militant athiest type responding to 'You must be a Gemini' with 'Please don't insult me with that astrological poppycock.'

Indeed in my direct experience it seems limited to questions of sexuality, although I have read at a remove opinion and editorial that expressed a similar desire to reject labels regarding physical disability and mental health issues, and I guess if you go back far enough into the archives questions of sexuality used to be classified as mental health issues.

The most readily accessible empathic space for a labels that push one outside of the mainstream and into otherness that I have is being left-handed. Although the wikipedia page on left handedness has some depressing and heartbreaking statistics, in the era I lived in I really only had some primary school teachers old enough to have a hangover from when you trained kids out of left handedness, and field hockey doesn't do left-handed sticks so I never got into it. Other than that though, my left-handedness is really only salient to me, and like a horoscope I sometimes believe it connects me mystically to prominent lefties of history like Da Vinci. It is not uncommon in my experience to have work colleagues around me for years that never bother to notice that I'm left handed, despite left-handedness making one a minority virtually anywhere but Ned Flanders' 'Leftorium' it is only slightly less rare for being left-handed to be of any practical consequence.

Any empathy I can muster with people whose sexuality deviates greatly from heterosexual, or what it is like to live in our age with a visible disability becomes a thought experiment for me. And while I could conceivably hire a wheelchair and live in it for a day, I'm not going to. Nor am I going to actually put the mental energy into running the experiment in my imagination. It is probably better to just read editorial on disability like the series the New York Times ran last year or the year before, or the japanese comic 'Real' to emphatically identify that way.

Thus my personal experience is devoid of any desire or practical motivation to reject or avoid labeling. In most of the contexts, the spaces I move through, desire to reject a label is bizarre to me. That bizareness is what makes it so fascinating. Sure in my school days (primary and secondary) I can understand that one might want to reject the label of being gay for example but this was most likely a pragmatic question of personal safety, akin to people might wanting to deny their Jewishness in the face of Gestapo inspectors knocking doors in Amsterdam this wasn't the intellectual rejection of a label coupled with an expectation that your community or greater society would carry your own bespoke/couture definition of self.

My understanding, which is not necessarily accurate, is that among those who seek to reject labels is a desire to not have their entire personality defined in the eyes of new acquaintances by what is just one aspect of themselves. Albeit the experience of having a nuanced personality simplified or lumped into one aspect is probably universal, just that there's a heirarchy and it is perhaps more desirable to receive the mainstream treatment of being reduced to your occupation, than reduced to your sexuality.

That I can understand, wrap my head around and indeed respect in the quest for personal dignity and just treatment. One's sexuality has little relevance to a job interview. (although it may be useful to know in sex work, but if Gay porn pays better and you're a gender conformist dude who isn't into dudes but willing to suck a dick for money, it shouldn't be a basis for discrimination, and casting agents should simply evaluate you on your dick size, body fat percentage and ability to sustain an erection)

But when I put myself in the shoes of the Bisexual white dude at the party talking to the gay black dude, or the gay editor talking to the gay black dude in Dear White People, and to be clear I'm just myself a white heterosexual male. How would I respond? Not just invoking my privelege, but let's go a step further and invoke white-male impugnity - I do not expect any real consequences to impact on my life based on what I say or do. So for some reason the question of sexuality has come up and this guy has stated 'I don't really believe in these labels...' to be purely and simply an agitator I would ask 'so you believe in anxiety?' hoping that this dude would bite the hook and allow me to monologue at him.

Given the context we aren't talking questions of personal safety, or professional advancement, but physically intimate relationships. I can't know but I'm pretty convinced that almost everyone in the presence of attraction to somebody experiences a natural degree of anxiety contemplating the possibility of rejection. People feel vulnerable, there's an interesting sideline about anticipatory pleasure - the greater the fantasy of the person attracted the greater the risk of rejection is to them. However I can draw on personal experience from very heterosexual situations that things that stand in the way of attempting to initiate a physically intimate relationship in the face of risk of rejection are questions of ambiguity.

Is the person single or not? They talk a lot about some 'Steve' dude, is that their boyfriend or their brother? are they fixated on someone they cannot obtain? have they processed the grief of their last relationship? Does their filial piety prevent them from dating someone of your ethnicity lest they upset their conservative parents? These are stressful forms of ambiguity that have nothing to do with sexuality, albeit if someone is bisexual the number of Steve-dude characters might multiply.

And in the context of a bar or party or nightclub or even in the context of a workplace conversation that is clearly not professional but interpersonal, the question of a sexuality label is pragmatic. Presuming you like most people are yearning in some part of your soul for the unconditional love of at least one other human being who is not your mother, why would you introduce ambiguity at this point? Somebody in these contexts that asks you 'are you gay?' is for one thing presuming you are familiar with the currency of such a label, and for the most part is asking 'would you put a dick in your mouth for fun?' as preamble to some future riskier question like 'would you like to put my dick in your mouth?' or 'would you like to put your dick in my mouth?' and lest we all forget John Cleese's sex education scene from the meaning of life, there's no need to stampede toward the penis, there's nothing wrong with a kiss. And I guess depending on what that person is searching for or interested in, the question may be preamble to 'would you ever walk along a waterfront hand in hand with me while we tell each other about our day?'

Responding to this question with 'I don't really subscribe to these labels' is a non-answer, which yes, may be diplomatic in a job interview to handle an inappropriate question, but simply leaves the question asked ambiguous in its practical repercussions. And increasing or introducing ambiguity in intimate settings by default will increase the anxiety. This isn't to say my relationship advice is that if you don't 'find your label' you'll never get laid, never be kissed etc. Just that it doesn't help. Only the kind of confidence that sees non-answers as 'well... he didn't say no' will risk making a move on you, and those that have the more reasonable level of confidence that notice 'he didn't say yes' will hesitate maybe try and collect more data, probably take it personally and have a good chance of withdrawing all together.

You may not like that for most people you meet the most interesting thing about you is your sexuality, but it wont change the fact that it is important practical information regarding a question almost everybody is obsessed with. I'm also prepared to to make a value statement and say that any characterisation of yourself that effectively tells people 'I won't tell you if you can ever catch me, but you can keep chasing me' is cruel and self indulgent. I have caught myself enjoying the indulgences of ambiguity - maintaining the interest of people I have no real interest in is a gratifying exercise in my sense of control, but cruel nonetheless. Like a dragon hoarding gold, even though I've never come across a fairytale or work of fantasy where a dragon makes a commercial transaction. Furthermore as a statement of my values, I believe that the kind of people that take an active interest in us, are more important to consider the well-being of than our reaction to the majority of people that take a passing, perhaps voyeuristic interest in us, even if that is more frequent and to our overall detriment.

But labels are more interesting and fascinating source of human inconsistency than questions of whether this will go into that.

Consider the author bio. Information that traditionally might tell us who wrote the opinions we've just read that might be helpful in establishing whether the author has a credible domain of expertise. Here's some info I read in an author bio recently:

"They are a writer, poet, artist, witch, tarot reader, zinester, rebel scholar, and community educator. She is a nonbinary queer bisexual femme, sober alcoholic, and practitioner of trauma magic."

I'm confused by the simultaneous use of 'They' and 'She' and the article was about a persons lived experience, so the only person unqualified to present their opinions on life would not be a person at all but an algorithm, so this might be an example of somebody relishing and enjoying the fun of labels. But for the arguments sake of here and now, let's suppose that this information is supposed to be informative.

Technical aside, in strict formal reasoning, who a speaker is should have no bearing on their argument. If someone as reputably unreliable and uninformed as Donald Trump were to say 'renewable energies offer an opportunity to build a new economy and a better future for those we will leave this earth' we shouldn't suddenly become opposed to renewable energy because he said it.

However, as a counter example let's consider this Author bio information:

"Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. He got his Sc.B. in Cognitive Science from Brown and his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Illinois."

I just pulled this off the second article on psychologytoday.com, today. This information is useful to the reader because the subject matter of the article steps into a domain of expertise. To be clear, formal reasoning permits a non-expert in say, psychology to make valid psychological observations, however our attention is a finite resource, whereby we may wish to employ some criteria as to who to listen to in a marketplace of ideas. Socrates placed an onus on people to put thought and effort into their beliefs in order to hold them, and information in a bio that informs us this person has put effort into formulating their opinions allows us to decide to listen to them, and also may be useful in deciding to defer to them. So the above author bio excerpt focuses on qualifications in broad but defined fields issued by physical institutions. Regardless of what you think on the quality of tertiary institutions, these particular institutions, your skepticism of the validity of psychology, or indeed science - it tells you the specifics of the expertise this author brings to his comments. Thus if he was dispensing financial advice this bio is as good as no bio at all, but if he is describing what marketers actually think and what theories of psychology they are attempting to exploit, he may be particularly insightful on the subject.

Now what about the label 'He' what does that inform me, the reader of his qualifications to comment on what? Nothing, I imagine whoever wrote the bio was simply following a convention of English known as 'gendered pronouns' it informs us that the author is what we might call, 'male' a 'man', a 'guy' a 'dude', a 'douche', a 'bastard' an 'arsehole' etc. Which is not to say that I or you are not subconsciously biased towards male medical practitioners and authority figures. It may well indeed be the case that due to prevalent stereotypes there's an unconscious inclination to consider 'his' advice more reassuring than 'her' advice even if they turn out to be the exact same advice.

I can no longer recall where I heard the anecdote, but apparently there used to be a widely held belief that women couldn't play the violin as well as men. Even though there was a consensus that music was about the sound, it took an apparently very long time before somebody managed to get orchestra's to hold blind auditions where they couldn't see who was playing, and through this innovation women were finally able to get violin chairs in orchestras.

So yes, regardless of Gender, you probably have unconscious bias for and against genders in different contexts. I do, I think. But this doesn't diminish the fact that these bias' are irrational and thus form no basis for accepting or rejecting the intrinsic argument.

So why in the case of the other author bio, is so much information dedicated to labeling a gender identity?

I don't know. And you can probably guess my prejudice against a resume of writer, poet, tarot reader, witch... rebel scholar etc. and if not, it would be my recognition that I hold all those exact qualifications and so do you. Conceding that if they were to inform me that the carpenter was a major arcana of the Ethiopian tarot deck I'd have to go verify, I don't know that off hand.

That sentence made the copy and paste cutoff because it uses 'They' where the next sentence uses 'She' to perform the same grammatical function - adding to the confusion. So what to make of the heady label brew of 'nonbinary queer bisexual femme' this set of labels has no informational value as to whether to pay attention or ignore a formal argument made by the speaker unless the argument is restricted to 'this is what life is like for a nonbinary queer bisexual femme' being the catchall, and I guess any subdivision of.

I'm going to assert something I can't possibly prove. That this author bio, is meant to be informative. That if it was changed to 'He is a writer, poet, artist, tarot reader, witch, zinester, rebel scholar and community educator.  He is a straight male, sober alcoholic and practitioner of trauma magic.' your impression of the article would be changed. Your impression of the rest of the bio would possibly be changed. Furthermore, including the word 'male' becomes redundant as the conventional use of the pronoun 'he' implies that piece of information without any further clarification. I guess in this context though gender role biases might assert themselves and the reader might think 'A witch? He must be a trans-man...'

Both cited author bios effectively relish the same joy of labels, the subtext is 'don't worry reader, they're cool, they are one of us.' They are argumentatively equivalent in that regard. You should listen to them because they have been approved for our target audience.

I would argue my prejudice that there is a meaningful difference between people relishing labels that are distributed and fiercely guarded by bureaucratic institutions, whom administer flawed but quite transparent tests to validate membership to the club, have cumbersome and expensive processes to advance up the tiers of rank and are regulated to ensure that the opportunity to join is ostensibly if not practically open to all versus a collection of like minded people adopting their own lingo and jargon to identify ingroup vs outgroup members and allocating prestige and rank based on how unlike a member is to people they don't identify with.

One is professional, the other cool kids deciding intellectualism is cool.

In 1996 Ewan McGregor's Rentboy character uttered this somewhat accurate onscreen prophecy: "One thousand years from now, there won't be any guys and there won't be any girls, just wankers. Sounds all right to me."

The somewhat inaccurate parts were that it only took 20 years, and 'any'. There are certainly scenes where guys and girls are unwelcome labels because they aren't nuanced enough, they lump gender in with sex, they are very proletariat, like domestic beer in a six pack of aluminium cans. While it may not get you kicked out of a party to be seen with one, it certainly might impact on whether you'll be invited back again.

So? So what if it's a fad or a fashion, let the kids be trendy and enjoy themselves. At the turn of the century the bravados of youth flexed their intellectual muscle by talking at length about religion as a social construct, now they talk about gender as a social construct. Why can't I sit back and let gender queer people enjoy the relative freedom, attention and accommodation of being currently in vogue?

Maybe I can.

Fell In Love

When my psychologist tried to reach me through my avowed influence Miyamoto Musashi, and suggested that I 'sleep with 70 women' in some kind of romantic homage to his battle with the 70 students of the Yoshioka school, I was admittedly dubious.
But she was identifying something well known about myself - that basically since my sexual awakening, I have been looking for 'the one' and as terrible as the advice to go and sleep with 70 different women sounds, removing the face value she was suggesting that I basically form a discipline to act contrary to my habitual behavior in order to empirically test the most theraputic question of all 'how's that working for you?'
Because the simple answer was, that it wasn't. I had been single for something like 7 years when my psychologist suggested this. I didn't lack sex drive or curiosity (I mean, I wasn't compelled to sleep with whomever I could though, so maybe by some definition I did) nor did I lack a social environment with attractive women in it. I just had a tendency to focus on very few women of the general population. Pulling numbers out of my head in an attempt to describe my reality, lets say I would meet around 3 women a year I found attractive, but only 1 woman every 3 years would I want to pursue, sometimes for 3 years.
My best effort to break this mental habit was the one time I asked out a girl trying to objectively and cognitively look for evidence that someone was kind, brave, beautiful, honest ... a true constellation of human qualities that would make for a good partner and happy relationship. This was the only time I ever felt I tried to 'force' the chemistry. In my previous relationships I had dated women simply because I could and generally I had discovered over time that attachment was lacking for me.
I don't know if our chemistry can be out-thought, I would like to think it can because that's really all a person with a history of abusive relationships can do - think, experiment and hopefully discover that they can fall in love with someone their attachment style does not predispose them to for the better.

In my case it didn't work out. I got rejected. I found the process of motivating myself to court someone really exhausting and I basically gave up on the concept and just hoped for the best. I was trying at the time to escape someone I did naturally feel attracted to but all the evidence suggested it was destroying me mentally.

I did eventually escape that someone, through no efforts of my own. A better description was to say that they finally escaped me by starting their own relationship, at which point my instinct is to exit the picture to avoid all temptation to undermine someone else's relationship. In being altruistic I was most generous to myself.

To grieve privately though, a relationship that never really existed is incredibly painful because the grief and sense of loss is real but a community does not tend to acknowledge the heartbreak that can arise from somebody you've never dated. I feel sad as I write about this, but curiously I cannot recall why I was attracted to the person in question, in hindsight the miss match is obvious and while I feel for the predicament of my past self I feel no nostalgia for the prolonged and abortive courtship. I hope it means I have healed whatever wound had me pursue that pain.

I unfortunately next fell in love with someone equally unavailable, but only in the ultimate sense. I realised I loved this long standing friend when she divulged to me she was breaking up with her partner. It sent me into a wonderful panic.

But here is the thing, the kind of women I'm attracted enough to pursue, I'm attracted to because I can conceive of being happy for the long term with them. I have the patience to wait for the real deal. And I certainly had the patience to wait for this friend to go through the necessary grieving of ending a long term relationship. I also possess a strong sense of self, despite my fixation on finding 'the one' I do demand of myself some degree of self respect. Put simply, I need my prospective partners to demonstrate the capacity to be alone. I need them to take a risk on me, which isn't to say that they need to ask me out, the simply need to be put in a position where if I don't pursue them, they don't have an on hand backup plan.

This friend never was able to relinquish the role of being primary caretaker of their former partner. Nor was their any evidence they had stepped out of the role of being girlfriend in all but an official capacity. Eventually, the resumed the relationship officially.

There was a take away from this though, after spending a relatively short 6 months (for me) investing time and energy into this person I love, and that was this 'wanting somebody to change for you is at the direct expense of the person who doesn't need to change to be that person.' That's a bit wordy, and less than succinct but imagine if you were in love with Johnny but wished he would stop lying, putting time and energy into hoping that Johnny would become honest is at the expense of Bobby, who is honest and doesn't need to change at all and may love you too. You are making him wait and yourself by sitting around wishing that Johnny would somehow become Bobby.

Enter Yolanda. I noticed her immediately of course. She showed up at my work one day and her personal style screamed out new-age hippy. So I dismissed her off hand. I more or less make snap judgements like this about everyone. Still there was something about Yolanda that was undeniable, she had this bemused look and refreshingly for me, was engaging. Perhaps the single most attractive quality a human being can have.

We were employed by the same employer but we didn't work the same job. So what was incredibly rare about Yolanda, was that she was willing to engage people that weren't on the foreign language team. She crossed cliques. She would come and sit in the break room at work and complain out loud that everyone on break was just looking at their phones. Entirely through her own efforts I would talk to her, and she was delightful and easy to make laugh.

Yet, I wouldn't say I was attracted to her. I only know I noticed her because I can recall her, and our early interactions. The first to notice I liked her was my colleague Giulia, who has an almost Asperger's like ability to call out what she is thinking with no filter, a quality rare in women and even in Asperger's syndrome bearers over the age of 30.

But I was blocking the doorway while talking to Yolanda about having a nice clipboard. And Giulia said I would rather talk to a pretty girl than consider everyone else trying to leave. This struck me dumb, but I just felt it was one more piece of testimonial evidence that I am often a flirt without consciously knowing it.

And that was it really, because I was mostly preoccupied with the pain that my best prospect for finding lasting happiness in a relationship had decided their former partner was better than the wider world of possibilities that included me. That pain eventually resulted in my being ostracized, cut off. It happened some time just before my birthday, almost 3 years ago.

And so it was that my 31st birthday came and went. It was no exception to my ostracism, and I found most of my cognition dedicated to making excuses for this person I loved to not have remembered my birthday, good reasons for them not to care about me while still allowing them somehow, through my mental efforts to care about me despite the evidence that I'd lost out completely.

There is a point where most people who know me, are officially too late to wish me happy birthday, and that is after Bryce sends me birthday greetings. One of my oldest and most precious friends who is nevertheless reliably, but reliably none the less late to wish me happy birthday.

And so I was literally brooding about how I could no longer make excuses and that if someone had not wished me happy birthday by the time Bryce had then I had to face the fact that they just didn't care when my thoughts were interrupted by 'Happy birthday by the way.'

Which is when I noticed I was in the break room and Yolanda was there, and it hit me like a freight train that Yolanda was the person who I was wishing other women could turn into. It was at her expense that I was brooding.

There are some mysteries in life that I quite aggressively want to remain a mystery and how Yolanda knew it was my birthday is one of them. It was later determined that she didn't know my star sign, and the simplest explanation is that she overheard some colleagues talking about my birthday or perhaps saw someone wish me a belated birthday. But I prefer the mystery.

Frustratingly, having determined that I need to ask this Yolanda out, on a date or even to take a break together, she disappeared from my workplace. I didn't see her anymore, and I had no idea what her name is. In a moment of weakness I asked a supervisor friend to do my dirty work for me, and divulge her last name to me. The moment I did I felt wracked with guilt, my friend saw no problem and gave me the name so I could find her on facebook.

Through which Yolanda accepted me as a friend, and I saw she was performing at a gig. This I knew, and gig's are generally a nice quiet venue where by showing up you can get quality one-on-one time with a person and they really appreciate it. So I went to the gig and instead of being the typical quiet weeknight venue with punters sitting around a band room drinking some beers and quietly paying attention to the performers. I stumbled into what was a huge family picnic day type event except in the evening and attended by the entire Spanish speaking population of Melbourne. I was a very solitary white guy who unlike everyone else had absolutely no connections in the room.

It was the most self conscious I've probably ever felt, and all my instincts screamed out 'LEAVE' but instead I found a plastic cup that I could fill with water and a pole to lean against and I locked my feet up determined to wait it out. Yolanda walked straight passed me and I watched her look at me from the corner of her eye and immediately look straight ahead. I realized I had grossly miscalculated.

And so I laughed at myself, and resolved to simply be a spectator of a show I had paid to see. I was incredibly moved by the music and got to sit through the two sets. Yolanda has an amazing voice, especially for somebody her size. She is incredibly small, something that is easy to forget because her presence for me at least tends to dominate a room.

After the two sets I got to talk to her, to which she exclaimed 'what are you doing here?' and 'You stayed for both sets!' both with incredulity. Her friends and community were incredibly warm and welcoming people. But our brief exchanges had me learn that she was studying spiritual science (anthroposophy) a fact that required reconciliation with my world view, and so I texted my sister and 'she studies spiritual science' to which my sister replied 'you're a match made in heaven! scientifically speaking...' which I feel is one of her best calls.

I walked away from that gig alone, but excited, hyper-active even. I was so full of adrenaline I put Faith No More's 'Motherfucker' on my phone and rode home with more energy than I'd had all day.

The next day I asked her to come with me to the next gig of my favorite band. This fb message was ignored. Perplexed, I found a reason, she'd been in Nepal for the gig.. but not sure if I should risk the harassment of a second ask I ran it by my friend Shona in one of my favorite phone conversations of all time.

I explained the situation and read out the message I'd sent asking her to the Canary gig, Shona concurred that it just sounded like a music enthusiast asking a musician to check out some music. I asked her what I should say to ask her out on a date, given that my only available communication channel was facebook. Shona told me the perfect thing to say. I said 'that's perfect! now what did you just say?' and I got her to dictate to me how to ask her out in a manner that was clear and not creepy.

A week passed and facebook told me she hadn't seen the message. Shona was optimistic. She said it was a good sign, it meant that she would have got an email about the message and she wasn't going to open it on facebook until she was ready for the date.

Then a few days later, the message clicked over to 'seen' and I was ushered into the new world of social media sexual politics by Yolanda.

And so I did the only thing a person not wanting to harass a woman they like can do. I gave up.

6 months passed, and then one day I got a bog-standard invitation to Yolanda's farewell party, on the same night as I had another friends birthday party on the other side of town and I was dogsitting a very high maintenance dog. I resolved that I had to go. First to my friends birthday party, then to Yoli's farewell, as was right and just. I was just too curious.

From there I pulled up my bicycle and locked it to a pole in a very dark street somewhere in Essendon or Moonee Ponds or something but a side of town I rarely visit and a place I'd never been before. I had no idea whether my invitation had been an oversight, and I am aware that from a different perspective having a man who had expressed romantic interest that was not reciprocated turn up at your house is an objectively terrifying prospect for a woman. I know statistically the danger suggested by this situation and I was very self conscious of how potentially unwelcome I could be. I walked up to the front door of the house, my face burning with embarassment and my feet moved by a self-aware determination that at the very least this would make for a great anecdote.

Unfortunately when I arrived the entire party was crammed into the living room, right on the other side of the front door watching video performances of Yolanda's group. I had to step into a space directly next to the TV interrupting absolutely everyone as I entered. I stood there for 5-10 minutes asking myself what I was doing and if I could do this. I just knew it would be more embarassing to chicken out and walk away. So I picked the closest moment to a pause in action to enter the door.

As I was saying 'no habla espaniol' Yolanda from the back of the room cried out 'Welcome!' and my mind plummeted into confusion. I could do nothing but find a place to sit and watch like everyone else. Easy enough to do. Then the video ended and the party broke up into various rooms. Here I became extremely self conscious, it was just like the family-picnic gig except that now there wasn't even a gig to focus my attention on. I was simply standing in her kitchen. Yolanda's friends were and are incredibly caring people. One of them told me I looked really serious and offered me a joint.

This highlights another problem I have in terms of meeting women. I don't do any drugs, whether they be illicit or legal, unless a hospital emergency ward administers them to me. This includes caffeine and alcohol, so at a party I am generally blind stinking sober. For quite some time in my sbriety, I felt that I was more or less screwed romantically by this choice, as I consider it poor form to hook up with someone who is much much drunker than you, particularly when you are completely sober - this I believe is called 'taking advantage' and at any given party dependent on my arrival time I have somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes before someone is too drunk for me to hit on.

It's an aside but what I have learned since though is that I can be confident a woman is interested in me if after finding out I don't do any drugs period, they start talking aloud about how they need to quit, especially sugar, caffeine etc. This is the subconscious process of mapping where a person tries to figure out how to map their life onto the person's they are interested in.

But Yoli eventually spoke to me that night, and I could do nothing but stare at her as we talked briefly wondering what the hell was going on with this girl and why she ignored my message yet was so engaged in our conversation now like it had never happened.

Then she was dragged away to perform. And I simply sat in in the living room listening to her sing to nothing but guitar accompaniment, and that the clock was ticking and I had a high maintenance dog at home that I needed to return to. I was going to have to Cinderella out of there. It was extremely hard, I just wanted to listen to one more song. Knowing that she was getting on a plane the next morning and that was it.

For the second time in 6 months I was just extremely angry with myself that I wasn't who I needed to be to get a woman's attention. I sat there listening to this beautiful music and all I could articulate was 'damn'. Then I had to go. Just accept the failure.

I wrote her the next morning to tell her that she reminded me of the strongest person I know (my ex girlfriend Misaki) and that I'm sure she was going to be fine returning to Spain. It seemed like a nice thing to do that I would appreciate in the reverse.

Perplexingly this was the message she finally chose to reply to, and we had a brief exchange which resulted in her asking me to draw a picture for her, which I offered to send to Spain.

And that was it. Exit Yolanda. My last attempt to find and secure a relationship with 'the one'. I had to come back to that therapeutic question of honestly assessing 'how is it working for you?' from there on, I was resolved to find a new approach to meeting and falling in love with people. The world of women I naturally fall in love with is just too small.

It is hard to imagine though, what it is you are not doing. So I decided it was simply a matter of faith. If I lead the kind of life I wanted, I would meet the kind of people I wanted to be with and they would want to be with me.

That was the theory anyway, but I can't testify as to it working yet. What really changed was taking stock of what I didn't have. I woke up one day and realized that I had no financial obligations, no relationship obligations and no tennancy obligations. I could pack up and leave.

It was the time in my life where I could be completely irresponsible, quit my job and go off to Italy to live in my city, the only city outside of Melbourne I have ever truly loved.

The moment I made this decision, much changed for me. I was no longer interested in 'the one' as suddenly, forming a long term relationship would be a real spanner in the works for my dreams of that city. It was a dream I didn't want to share with anybody.

But suddenly my eyes were open to casual relationships and hook ups with women I was not particularly interested in. Particularly women that I had no long term prospects with, or was not romantically interested in but physically attracted to, and in one case I was happy to oblige someone I wasn't physically attracted to either.

Thus began and quickly ended my experiments with casual sex, something I'd never done before. My brain is too geard towards pattern recognition to recognize that having multiple novel sexual partners was insufficient to make my friends that did so happy. There was significant evidence that it did the opposite. For myself I have had sex without attachment twice, and found them both to be ultimately hollow experiences that I can happily forego for the rest of my life.

None the less, I enjoyed my new open mindedness to short term relationships. I was looking forward to Italy and maybe having a summer fling with a belladonna.

I cannot describe to you how otherworldy living in Italy was to me. Beautiful women were simply everywhere once I learned to venture out of the historic center populated by much less attractive tourists. Where the Italians live and play, one only had to wait minutes if not seconds to see the most beautiful woman you have ever seen.

I developed crushes, particularly retail crushes, but I was also living in the kind of town where if you saw a person you liked enough to notice one day, you would inevitably see them again a few days later. It was much like my hometown Ballarat in that regard, where the thoroughfares were shared.

I was finally at peace with the Good life, I left the confines of that city far less than I expected. I was at the halfway point of my time there before I took my first train down the coast to catch up with my brother and his partner and my nephew. I had expected to become bored of the city I was in before that. Instead I resented having to leave it, even for a day.

I took a trip to Sicily with my sister that will always be a cherished memory we share. She was also the only person I got to share my city with and one of the only people I'm willing to.

I decided though, to get out of town and revisit Barcelona, mostly because the last time I'd been there I'd had kidney stones that prevented me from seeing much of the city, but also because there was Yolanda.

Although I'd been on a few dates, I hadn't actually hooked up with anybody in Italy. I had only just gotten enough of a social life to start meeting the kind of women I could be interested in. But I had a theory.

Yolanda had only started to communicate with me after she left Australia. I was sure I wasn't so deluded in thinking she liked me that I had completely misfired by asking her out. So to reconcile the two facts, I felt that Yolanda was simply not interested in a committed relationship. Therefore it was possible that if I saw her during a brief visit, she might be up for some fun given no threat of a relationship to follow.

I reached out to see if she was around, and she invited me to a catch up. We managed somehow to coordinate a time and day, and on my trip to Spain I managed to get to her town.

She says I was almost unbearably stressed when I arrived. Completely insensitive as to how her own ambiguous behavior might have contributed to my stress.

It is hard for me to talk about that day, because it is so precious to me. I decided it was ours, and that I wasn't going to share it with anyone else. Just that while I had come thinking I was on the same page as her finally, interested in casual relationships and not serious ones, I discovered I was way off the mark.

At some point sitting in her room listening to her talk, I realized with some frustration that this was the woman I would marry. It sounds crazy, and later I would take to refer to her as my 'imaginary wife' but in my first hand experience, I felt I was understanding what old timers say when they say 'when you know you know'.

It was like this one person had swept all the belladonnas of Italy off the face of the earth absent mindedly. In a panic I returned to Italy feeling both incredibly great and incredibly worried that I basically had lost my ability to see all the characters of my Italian adoptive home as I had wanted to portray them in an exhibition prior to leaving for Spain. I felt deep within myself that I had met my wife, in what that means to me, yet couldn't perceive how it would work.

Thus I tried my hardest to force myself back into the headspace of someone who wasn't interested in settling down. The person very happy with single life. I just couldn't do it, despite the best efforts of the beautiful women of Italy.

I wasn't sure what had happened to me or my life, eventually I found a video by Zizek who I generally find interesting but vacuous, but on this point he managed to describe exactly what had happened to me



So I returned to my home town, both full and empty. A piece of knowledge that this person I'd been looking for existed and no idea how to be with her.

here's what I will divulge about our day together. I knew what she was to me, I had no idea if this day, this afternoon even was all I would ever get. Consider that the love of your life is on his/her deathbed, what would you give to have one last day with her? Four more hours even?

This was salient for me. My dog had been put down the prior year (one of the things that left me responsibility free to leave for Italy) and I knew how much the efforts of the vet to let me walk her one more time in a park meant to me. The knowledge that I got just one more walk with her.

It meant everything. And as I walked behind Yolanda, it was very salient - 'Okay, this is her. Who you've been looking for exists, and this might be it so make the most of it. No regrets, just enjoy her company for this afternoon.'

She would later tell me that when we said goodbye, my hug was really intense. I feel she understands that of the two of us, I understood what was at stake. That it might be our last embrace. That afternoon may have been our whole relationship.

The question as to whether all the relationships I'd foregone, the dead ends I'd pursued, the time and money spent to get to that one day in Gelida was worth it, is laughable to me. You cannot possibly underestimate the value of the knowledge that someone like that, for you, exists.

People who manage to climb Everest get to sit on top of the world for a couple of minutes if they are lucky. Take a photograph maybe. Then they have to make the life-threatening descent. It's completely logical. If you are truly present, a moment is a life time.

Upon returning to Australia, I followed my intuition and decided to write Yolanda a love letter. Surprisingly, nothing I've ever done has attracted more voyeuristic interest than this exercise. People I would have assumed would have told me it was a stupid idea wanted to hear daily updates. With some advice from my dear friend Q, I eventually managed to write the kind of letter I felt reflected me. I wrote it and sent it. It took me 2 months of daily efforts, something like 48 drafts.

I sent it and almost on the day she recieved it she contacted me and told me about it. And that was it.

Then my birthday rolled by, and just as at the beginning, she remembered. It was the only birthday wish I cared about, but when I received it, I was struck by just how much that meant to me.

Currently, in part this blog post is procrastination from a process I have been through 9 times. That process is writing personalized invitations to people for my exhibition. I have at least 70 more to write, and I have already written 80. It's an exhausting, draining process that sends me into the depths of depression. Part of what makes it so hard is the asymmetrical relationship I am forced to accept. Of the 80 invitations I have written, 30 people have accepted the invitation and committed themselves, at least nominally to going to my exhibition. Even so, only about 50% have responded in any manner at all.

I am asking people to do me a favor, so I don't believe anybody can create an obligation on the part of another by reaching out to them for help. What i am aware of is that I generally run a large 'caring' deficit in terms of the thought I allocate to my friends versus what I receive back from them. For the most part, my inner circle more than compensates for the negligence of others, and this is more or less how life works - some people do the work of many and most people are passengers in one context or another through their lives.

Thus, it seems like the most simple and insignificant thing, to wish somebody happy birthday. And many people do, even without the assistance of facebook reminders. But Yoli wrote 'happy birthday dear' something not even my favorite ex Misaki has managed for 10 years.

It is hard to describe what literally happens and at the same time not want to paint myself, or accept that I am a tragic figure. At any rate, through her simple action Yolanda relieved the tragedy. It was the best birthday I'd had in a decade, because the woman I love had acknowledged it. Turns out, that is a big deal to me.

Yolanda was slow to acknowledge her attraction or even love of me. I knew you she did, when she spent her New Years Eve on the phone talking to me, had dressed up for me, in a room alone. I know who you spend your New Years with.

Weekly conversations turned to daily, soon I was being carried through the streets of Spain as my Yoli walked to work or ate her lunch. I would wake up to her and go to sleep with her. Somehow in a long distance relationship I'd always been skeptical of. This lasted 4 months, until Yolanda gave up.

Contrary to what you might expect at a time like this, I can only testify that long distance relationships are easy. Particularly if the relationship commences as one, but I've enjoyed talking to Yolanda on a daily basis more than any other aspect of my life of the last 10 years. Perhaps because distance strips a relationship bare of all but what couples spend the most time doing together - conversing, it allows you to focus on the most essential part.

What is hard to the point of impossible to have a relationship with, is anxiety. Self-defeating anxiety. Allow it into a relationship and in my experience, physical distance plays no role in appeasing it's destructive urge to take control of what you fear to lose.

So this is a sad post, maybe, about precisely what it is I live for. And I got it, enjoyed it, had it and am grateful. Getting dumped changes no facts, simply leaves me with a bunch of emotions that for what its worth, I shall honor by experiencing them. I plan to channel it into my forthcoming exhibition to, in my experience enhance the works themselves with the authenticity with which I feel my subject matter, and seize a pretext to re-enter psychotherapy to process my grief.

While daunting to think that statistics suggest I have another 10 years to wait for my next relationship, I nevertheless have faith in my intuition that Yolanda is the one. I'm left with the same mystery as to what this intuition means as when I left Spain and Italy and returned to Australia. The deep sense of knowing she is the one, with a complete lack of understanding as to how that can be, compounded by her desire not to participate in the relationship anymore - which of course means I can't also.

Thus I have nothing to do but live my life as I would live it. With a complete disinterest to the romantic pursuits for now. Until such a time as my feeling is either validated by some reconciliation with Yolanda, or by some heretofore inconceivable person that may prove to evoke an even stronger sense that they are the one. Given that I was completely blindsided by how quickly and deeply I fell in love with Yolanda that afternoon, I have to allow the possibility that even stronger versions of the experience may exist. But that means it may take 20 years to discover somebody able to evoke such feelings in me.

Good thing I wasn't planning on dying anytime soon.

What is Going On?

Sometime last year or this year, I can't be bothered checking I wrote a post called 'On Gaslighting' and for some reason this post generated views in the thousands. I've never written my blog with a concern for hits, viewership etc. and talking about why I write a blog is I've been assured very boring. But post this 'breakthrough' of generating high numbers next to a symbol of an eye whenever I view my posts kind of took off and not randomly. My suspicion is that the post somehow piggybacked off the post by another blog that I linked to somehow. I'm not interested enough to find out how, nor develop even the skills to find out.

But since then the pattern is to my intuitions at least, non-random, when I write about anything that could be considered within the purview of feminism, views steadily increase up into the thousands and any post not on that topic stagnates at around the double digit mark. The danger of which is that I start writing with a mind to what makes a practically arbitrary stat-counter go up, given that my theoretically most popular posts ever have generated a grand total of 0 comments. Having no impact on my life as a result, this phenomena is only interesting in so far as it seems to support some form of confirmation bias, and it also supports a stereotype of feminism/gender studies being largely academic, which is to say most of the efforts of the people interested in these issues is dedicated to reading about these issues.

And that is why my interest in gender is a morbid interest, generally what I'm fascinated by is why when ever I adopt the position of 'fly on the wall' to much of the openly accessible, readily available feminist op-ed on the internet the most negative emotion I feel is that of disappointment and not fear, perhaps fear presumes too much intent on behalf of the writers I'm judging, but there is a curious absence of any real concern that these thinkers pose any real threat to the status quo.

To expound upon the disappointment, let's talk about this abstract and loosely defined concept of 'the patriarchy', the moment I wrote this sentence I realised I need to also point out that 'feminism' is an abstract and loosely defined concept in and of itself, subsequently it is unfair to say that the stated objective of feminism is to overthrow the patriarchy - that's not a dogma that one has to explicitly believe, I believe to identify as a feminist. I would guesstimate that the generally accepted definition is something akin to 'equality between men and women' which even then is problematic but I'll get to semantics and jargon later.

Okay so 'the patriarchy' does it exist? It certainly has existed, there are moments in European history for example where you could point to a male who was openly and un-apologetically the legislative and executive branches of government, un-elected and reinforced by a patrilinial succession plan - their son was literally expected to be the next patriarch and the female members of their family were essentially living breathing property contracts, securities to be traded etc. Thus literal patriarchies have existed, I don't feel that this is a contentious topic in History.

Historically speaking though, if I, and you may want to try this yourself as an English speaking citizen of the commonwealth try to name as many English Monarch's as I can there is Queen Elizabeth the presiding Monarch, then King Henry the VIII, Queen Victoria, Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth the Ist (that Virginia is named for) and King Richard the Lionhearted. Of course there's a trick here in so far as that if King Henry is the 8th of that name I could cheat and name 7 more Monarch's that logically must all have been called Henry, but at the point that King Arthur is more readily recollected by me than other Monarch's that I'm not sure are literary inventions or not, I'm stopping. But I feel, at some intuitive level that the 'big 3' of English history are probably Henry, Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria. 2 out of 3 being women.

Notice that this isn't a denial of the existence of 'the patriarchy' or that men unfairly dominate most societies on earth with respect to power and influence over public policy, law enforcement or the command of resources. My understanding is that succession in the English Royal Family has always been to the eldest son, yet look at how much more successful this rule of succession has been at elevating women to at the very least an undeniably pre-eminent figure head status in society than the world's democracies have. From a purely historical point of view, it seems the odds are much higher that the eldest male heir will be a woman than that a woman would win an election campaign for the highest office.

But what is the shape of 'the patriarchy' in the current day? Surely my female friends, including transwomen do not believe a conscious overt conspiracy of men that all pay homage to a patriarch. It's an abstract concept that might allude to a predisposition of men to cooperate at the expense of women. It doesn't have a geographic location one can go to, I would hope that people don't believe for example that the President of the United States has unlimited power. Nor that Hillary's theoretic occupation of the role would overthrow the patriarchy. Who is 'the Patriarch'? There's no one person at this point in History we can point to and say with any real confidence 'Putin, it's Putin!' or Kim Jong Un, or Donald Trump or even as thought leaders Noam Chomsky (there's just too much evidence his influence on public policy is 0, if not negatively correlated) or public intellectuals like Malcolm Gladwell or Sam Harris, captains of industry like Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Phil Knight or the Coak brothers etc. and in all these non-governmental and governmental fields there are female analogies albeit less of them. (Merkal, Morrison, Rinehart etc.)

There's just a general numeracal advantage of men at the top of various heirarchies, and the more abstract concept of 'privelege' an informal version of a first class citizen that is not ensconced or enshrined in any existing laws in most of the contries liberal enough for feminism to openly take place.

The patriarchy is thus some kind of network in the modern era, analogous to Islam or Quaker beliefs where there is no central living authority at the top of the food chain. There possibly always exists people of ambition that wish to centralize and organize the patriarchary much as it seems there are communities that wish to reestablish a Caliph. Putin may have designs or ambitions that he or his named successor actually be some kind of Emperor etc. These ambitions may be more concievable than whatever 'overthrowing' or indeed 'smashing' the patriarchy may look like.

For me though, I like to consider the historic persons of Ieyasu Tokugawa, and Miyamoto Musashi who lived on the same Earth at the same time and in all probability never met, though one almost certainly affected the other. Both for example were present at the battle of Sekigahara the decisive war that established the Tokugawa Shogunate, the military government that was first to rule over a unified Japan and was a literal patriarchy. Making Tokugawa Ieyasu the patriarch of Japan. Miyamoto Musashi is the most influential thinker of that time and place and culture in respect to shaping my own ambitions though. Ambitions I regard as higher than that of being a patriarch. 

Miyamoto Musashi was free. He lived a life of self-experimentation that culminated in some rich understanding of himself and his human potential. And that's it. He was free to do so, actually spend his life being human. The society in which he was free to do this was a patriarchy and he was free simply by being not only born a man but also into the samurai class. It appears that he was able to practice martial arts and also cultivate land and practice the fine arts of sculpture and illustration. He was neither an indentured servant obliged to cultivate rice in order to feed himself, his family and meet his tax obligations to the government, nor was he at the opposite end of the spectrum where he was Shogun obliged to preside over the administration of the government to manage and nullify all ambitions to shake up the status quo and satisfy the population as insurance against rebellion and overthrow.

This then is my disappointment I feel when reading feminism op-eds. I often share common ground with the authors insofar as we are both disappointed if not horrified at the quality of political leadership, industry leadership and even thought leadership in modern society. My private hope though is that feminists aspire to the office of leadership on a basis of a desire for competent leadership and that they, unlike me might be hungry for it, perhaps for the novelty of being both female AND a competent leader. 

I would simply like to see competent leadership, perhaps to a level that illuminates my own incompetence to lead with would further confirm that my best interest is to not take a role of responsibility in our society and instead just be an artist and live the good life, having successfully delegated the job of removing a person like me's obstacles to doing so to a competent and willing leader. 

Thus I'm disappointed by most of what I read, and don't even find it threatening. In all honesty, I see little behavioral difference between the conspicuous forms of feminism that have sprung up around me in the past decade and how the girls at my high-school used to conspicuously consume cosmopolitan magazine or vogue. The details have changed but the behavior is the same, a pissing contest for displaying one's relative prowess in command of knowledge, designed much like sports to mainly impress one's standing in one's-own-gendered hierarchy. Perhaps more polarizing though because you can generally find male voices critical of how sports is glorified in sporting communities along with female ones.

This is not the case when my morbid curiosity sends me looking for who is being critical of, I must admit mostly progressive concepts rather than strictly feminist ones, but critical of concepts like Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces, Microaggressions etc. and lest it get clunky, let's expand the scope to the most disappointing phenomena of all - 'progressives'. I feel like a formal logic statement might be that 'feminism is progress, progressives embrace progress therefore all progressives are feminists.' may actually hold up. It's just such a vague concept to me that I'm not confident to speak as to progressive dogma, a term progressives would surely reject because dogma doesn't sound progressive. But I would guestimate that if you identify as being progressive you would disavow being sexist, racist, ageist, you know... all the ists. You might be flexible as to whether you are morally obliged to be a vegan, because this is the most progressive dietary lifestyle and to not hold the welfare of animals as equal to that of women, jews and brown people is specist, or something.

The point being, I don't know but I'd be willing to bet that a progressive more or less has to identify as feminist. Even better though is that a white cis-gendered hetero normative male can identify and claim a place in the progressive community and even through demonstrating how 'woke' they are to their privilege hold a place of privilege in the progressive community. If I had to name the public face of being progressive, it would be Jon Oliver. I also see savvy media executives ensuring that other white men like Stephen Colbert can reach this influential sub culture by employing much of the lingo and demonstrating enough self-awareness eg his segment 'Stephen Colbert White-Mansplains Beyonce's Lemonade' I have no idea why they bothered to title this section as such but you can go watch it and see where 'mansplaining' comes into the picture. I couldn't.

Once again clawing back to what I was talking about, progressiveness stands exposed as an ironic name. It's basis appears to be that all people have a moral obligation to be conscious of the latest understandings of everything. Yet, when I observe a phenomena such as trigger-warnings being employed enough morbid curiosity will eventually be aroused to find out what they are.

I've written at length about trigger warnings in this post so skipping basically to the conclusion, trigger warnings are clearly etiquette with an overlaying of rationale, that it is somehow helping people with trauma triggers. However, on the topic of trigger warnings alone, you can objectively identify that the behavior has arisen, spread and sustained itself with no fact checking as to it's potential benefits and harms. It is the intellectual equivalent of being anti-vaccine. Albeit users of trigger-warnings have more likely never checked as to what the health authorities have to say on the usefulness of such a strategy, whereas anti-vaccine advocates (however they characterise themselves) understand quite lucidly in my experience that they are rejecting the authority of medical science. 

From this observation, you get phenomena/ideologies that arise that have the same foundation, ideas I don't really understand and don't find enough merit to not dismiss them off hand out of my own sense of consistency - 'safe spaces' 'microaggressions' and even to an extent 'intersectionality' all of which from my admitedly shallow analysis seem to require that you reject psychology as a valid science.

If I imagined the pressure to conform for a young person arriving in a progressive scene, to play out something like this 'you like progress right?' 'Yeah sure, who doesn't like progress?' 'Well if you like progress then you need to understand that this is what progress is...' blah blah blah, and I can see the new recruit to the cause of progress signing on with no real application of critical thought or fact checking. 

Consider the correlation between being an evangelical Christian and voting for Donald Trump in the Republican primaries. My source of information that this happened is admittedly Donald Trump himself, but it does appear to be one claim that was not fact checked by the media, who focused more or the fact that Donald sighted the phenomena of religious people voting for him as proof that he himself is religious. BUT, while on the one hand it may seem perplexing as to how somebody who makes fun of the disabled, is on trial for fraud and by his own testimony sexually assaults women could be voted for by those who claim to follow he example of Jesus Christ, is it so surprising that people who have dedicated their lives on gaining entrance to an eternal paradise - the details of which are vague and unspecified - voted for somebody who promised to repeal Obamacare and replace it with 'something terrific'? In both directions you are not seeing any scrutiny of what it is exactly that is promised.

I believe people identifying with progressiveness are demonstrating the exact same psychological phenomena. Group think and deference. By some accounts progressives are centered around Tertiary campus life, it is understandable to me that if you come into such a social environment from the outside knowing nothing about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy etc. that it is reasonable to defer to an assumption that academics have done their research. In much the same way as if you'd never used an electric fan before because you lived in say... Northern Alaska and suddenly arrived in South Korea, you may consider that Koreans knew what they were talking about when they insist that fans have a built in timer to prevent fan-death. It appears inconceivable that an entire culture could regulate to prevent a form of death that is physically impossible.

Just-so, I'm entirely sympathetic that somebody emerging from the rigidness and general nature of secondary education into tertiary education would assume that their senior peers know what they are talking about, and don't believe in garbage. It's far easier to stand on the other side of that window and imagine that the probability that a collection of people studying similar subjects all within a 3 year age window have any real understanding of the world, let alone human conscious experience and what is best for it, is near zero even before delving into the details.

Where the question 'what is going on?' gets genuinely curious though, is when I search for dissenting voices and notice a clear pattern in what characteristics the dissenting voices all share. Consider that the most vocal and public dissent comes from people like Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Dave Rubin, Gad Saad, Jonathan Haidt etc. and to me there is something troubling about the fact that it is only predominantly white heterosexual males that are offering dissent or even skepticism. In an effort to 'go looking' for counterexamples and out of suspicion that search algorithms might be fucking up my ability to see female and minority voices of dissent I tried quickly searching for Naomi Klein and Ariel Levy as two female public intellectuals that came to mind, I did eventually find an interview with Camille Paglia whom I've never heard of, but nevertheless appears to be an intellectual and female.

Okay so a few friends of mine was one of the hosts of a collective that ran a local public radio segment called 'Queering the Air'. Those friends of mine are no longer friends for reasons entirely unrelated to any of our respective politics, and to be perfectly honest I don't ever listen to the actual radio show, but if you are unfamiliar with Queering the Air, take a moment to imagine and form expectations as to what demographic Queering the Air would be dedicated to. If you are like me, then Queering the Air would have something to do with same-sex relationships, predominantly and 'Queer' implies it would expand to LGBT issues and representation, if considered in isolation but I at least, can imagine that this radio station might have a seperate chunk of programming specializing in Trans-issues etc. 

But over the past year and a half I would guesstimate, I've noticed from the programs posting to facebook that simply being gay or lesbian is not enough to get on the program for Queering the Air, most of the posts and call outs for contribution appear to me, to be dedicated to Queer persons of colour (QueerPOC) and I also get an impression that being indigenous ads points to being a QueerPOC. 

Which is interesting, because if I had to imagine the most marginalized member in my society it would be a disabled aboriginal trans lesbian struggling with chronic mental illness. Here what is fascinating is to consider that there might be a threshold such that once you are so marginilized from a society that contains people like me (able bodied heterosexual white males) you actually rarely interact with the society I live in through several degrees of separation. Transparently, 'my' society controls all the bureaucratic infrastructure and law enforcement as well as owning almost all the property so you more or less have to interact with it, but perhaps not socially. But the program content of Queering the Air offers my speculation that at some point in the middle you become not spurned but sought after as some kind of moral authority.

Which is of course, logically invalid. Who you are does not lend any weight, strictly speaking, to your arguments. Any individual only really has definitive authority to report their subjective experience. Provided somebody wanting to design policy is willing to listen to the reports of other people's subjective experience, they can design good policy whether they are a QueerPOC or a Straight White Male. I'm happy to concede that there is reason enough to believe that Straight White Males are less likely to have done the requisite listening before designing policy, both historically and contemporarily speaking, including myself.

Consider this article posted to fb by Queering the Air moderators. I find it so jargon heavy I find it hard to follow despite it including the phrase "I’m not a scholar, so occasionally I get left behind by academic terminology used to define my identity." if somebody writing an article that contains a term like 'intersectionality' in it's title and quotes the scholar that possibly coined the phrase or defined it says this, I can only laugh at their pretensions to non-scholarship. 

While I'm rolling on terminology, I just want to point to a basis of my impression that much of feminism behaves in compliance with fashion trend behaviors. Seasonality, buzzwords and a need to keep up. A simple hierarchy that demands tribute through adopting the latest terminology, even when that terminology can often be traced back decades to obscure research papers. Last year I had the impression that 'mansplaining' was the designated field of battle for feminists to meet the patriarchy. As of now, I feel like nobody is talking about mansplaining. Out of curiosity I plugged the word mansplaining into Google trends, it's fallen off by two-thirds since roughly this time last year. Compare that to 'intersectionality' it's spike in the zeitgeist was much more recent, co-inciding I suspect with the women's march, and when mansplaining was enjoying its hey-day it was barely spoken of at all. Of course, everything is too recent, and neither display the sheer spike and drop off in interest of Pokemon Go, if you wish to look in google trends and see a real bona-fide fad. 

Now, the importance of Jargon here cannot be overstated by me, because I don't feel that mansplaining has gone away because of some decisive victory. That the vigil can be relaxed because no future generation of man, nor man walking the earth will dare ever again to explain to a woman what it means to be a woman, nor in broader definitions of the term speak to a woman in a condescending tone while explaining some shit. I feel that the thunder of those women riding high on the moral crusade against mansplaining was stolen away by whatever issue came next. 

There's a Miles Barlow's Review (little known ABC comedy program, look it up if you must) episode where Miles reviews vanity, and depicts a process whereby Miles captures all the attention of partygoers by bringing a pet piglet that he cradles in his arms, only to be outdone by a couple with their newborn baby. As a result, Miles goes through the process of adopting his own baby so as to win back the attention of the scene. Though satire, I suspect that feminist and progressive thought leaders are subject to a similar competitive pressure to command the attention of the scene. There are others waiting in the wings to get their specific gripe on the agenda and improve their standing.

Progressives, do not look like Martin Luther King Jr's civil rights movement nor Gandhi's civil disobedience movement because there's no clear cut organisational hierarchy and no clear cut objectives and strategies where resources are mobilized to methodically achieve clear cut concrete goals, be it riding buses, attending schools, making salt or ending British occupation. 

Instead we have articles about 'Microagressions' and I can only testify personally, but in my media environment these highly specialized complaints are more visible than articles about sexual assault. What do I mean by 'highly specialized?' I'm glad somebody asked. As far as I know, one's race, gender, sexual orientation and sexual preferences are relatively independent of eachother, so consider the proportion of the population that would ever need to use the information contained in an article about enduring microaggressions from your white same-sex partner. You have to multiply a racial minority, by a sexual orientation minority, by a statistical minority of the phenomena of interracial relationships (I'm making an assumption that that is the case). So you have a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the population that at any given time could find this info useful. 

Yet in many ways the smallness of the effected population means that such specialised information is thus incredibly valuable, if you are the target market. The question is, why do I know it exists? Well simply because I'm a voyuer, and this indeed was where I learned the terminology of 'microaggressions' and most usefully, there's within an article a flow chart that explains microagressions. And where we come full circle to the importance of semantics in rejecting the science of clinical psychology.

And that's crucial because that is where 'progressive' as a statement of political orientation is almost certainly a misnomer. There are meaningful and accepted definitions of 'trauma' for example, or 'depression' or 'anxiety' and recommended ways of dealing with such that are backed by quite a large amount of empirical evidence including clinical practice. Almost all matters regarding mental health and well being are matters of a spectrum. There are few binary examples of mental health issues - hearing auditory hallucinations or not are one that comes to mind that you either do or you don't. 

However there is a large and meaningful difference between being a Sudanese refugee who was tortured by the police and now faced with the trouble of integrating into a culture where there is some measure of rule-of-law, vs the son or daughter of Chinese immigrants that arriving at University is asked by a white or black person 'where are you from?' Or a trans woman on a road trip that is asked by a store attendant 'why are you dressed like a woman?'

I am not qualified to say which of those incidents qualify for any clinical definition of trauma as opposed to less severe human emotions like embarrassment, indignation and mere offense eg. 'I take offense to that'. but chances are, neither are the authors of articles and diagrams about microaggressions. In fact of my experience there's a flagrant disrespect for clinical psychology excelled only by Scientology and Alternative Medicine. 

Do a quick search of microagressions on Psychology Today, and you'll find qualified psychologists with a dedicated column to microaggressions in everyday life. You will also find dissenting voices by qualified psychologists that argue in respect to cognitive behavioral therapy. Nobody is denying the phenomena, just the severity of its impact and whether or not it needs to be addressed. Even the column dedicated to identifying the phenomena 'Microaggressions in everyday life' does not propose any kind of activism beyond raising awareness. 

So let me once again indulge my martial mind. Allow me to hypothetically concede that a person might be traumatised by being asked where they are from by a white person. The best that I can say of a campaign to stamp out microaggressions is through consciousness raising, pointing out to the patriarchy that they are hurting the wellbeing of individuals it is assumed they care about. 

In which case, microaggressions might be a sensible strategy because you are shattering the illusions of people that profess to care about you or see you as equals. The very fact that people push back on these issues rather than accepting them indicates that people care about what the complainants think of them.

What if they don't? What if they enjoy their privilege and seek to oppress? What if there was a real patriarchal drive out there in some loosely networked sense? Well you are telegraphing a degree of fragility that is frankly laughable. You are also alienating your closest allies by shattering their illusion that they share the same values as them. Identifying well meaning people as your enemy.

This is a principle that I observe falls out along gender lines, a seemingly non-shared intuition. Us/Them divisions favor the oppressor. The privileged or dominant class benefit by having a wall drawn around their membership. Thus shoring up those walls between Us/Them is reinforcing the patriarchies rule. 

And so let me speak strategically of 'intersectionality' a tale on two hands. On the one hand, it is very logical - you don't want to replace the ruling class with just a different ruling class. An oppressive patriarchy toppled and replaced by an oppressive matriarchy, novel, but as illegitimate as the current status quo. Thus, those who would form the New World Order need to demonstrate that they are competent to address the shortcomings of the system that excludes and marginalizes other groups.

This is what I intuit intersectional-whatever to be about. What good is it to get women in power if only white women can rule? what good is it to get women in power if only heterosexual women can rule? what good is it to get women in power if only able bodied women aspire to the pinnacle? Hence LGBT has in just a few years grown to LGBTIQA+ and I haven't looked up the A yet, and I'm sure the + will not prevent further letter growth as right now, a campaign is being waged to get another letter affixed to the movement. (I couldn't resist and just looked it up, there is now a P on the end before +)

Tactically speaking, purely, sociopathically, amorally speaking in pure tactics, this Intersectionality reminds me of the rational logic puzzle the 'Pirate Game' it relies on all the players being rational, rather than emotional and stipulates strict rules but it can illustrate how gross inequality can arise counter to our intuitions. When pirates are proposing how to divide up the loot, with failed proposals resulting in being thrown overboard. Please just click the link and read yourself up, it's better than anything I've written in descriptive power. However my intuition is that if you are the Pirate Captain, or Pirate A, you would have to offer everyone an equal share of 100 coins, so 20 coins each for the proposal to be accepted on grounds of fairness. However it turns out you have Pirate A getting 98 coins, B gets 0, C gets 1, D gets 0 and E gets 1. 

It's not realistic, nor historically accurate. Typically the Pirate captain got something like a 2 share, the first mate and navigator 1.5 share and everyone else a 1 share or something. You can find the pirate charters, Pirate ships were also some of the first functional democracies in the modern sense, so who knew.

But where the Pirate Game is relevant is that the person closest to power is robbed of their power by the person under them, and so forth down the chain to pirate E who is truly in every simulation, powerless. Thus can you envision, in the abstract how the patriarchy, able bodied straight white males get to enjoy most of the worlds resources and sleep soundly knowing that their women are under attack by women of colour, who in turn may be under attack by queer women of colour, who may in turn be under attack by disabled queer women of colour. 

the implication being, that there are so many canaries in the cage for the patriarchy, which first has to have it's tyrannical values and ideologies overthrown within an incredibly marginalized group in order to validate the trust and support of an even more incredibly marginalized group. Just imagine being an indigenous physically-disabled lesbian, who has to first champion the rights of a indigenous physically-disabled lesbian with chronic mental illness before you are free of the charge of hypocrisy to fight against your own oppression. 

My intuition would be, that if white women got rid of white men, then the world would be an incrimentally better place for everyone except white men. Now, it may be that this places white men in the best position to overthrow the new order, that depends on how much prejudice the patriarchy is terminated with. 

Which brings me to the greatest tactical oversight I perceive, I can only perceive it because I'm Miyamoto Musashi, not Tokugawa Ieyasu, I have no motivation to put down the rebellion but I can ridicule its execution. Anyway that is the employment of 'privilege' as an ad hominem attack. Which is to say, dismissing dissenting views because they come from people with privilege. 

Imagine that you wake up tomorrow to hear the inevitable media recap of presidential tweets and one of them was 'catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion, I'm concerned talk of microaggressions is symptomatic of this distorted thinking.' this would be amazingly coherent for the president, but just because it A) disagrees with you and B) comes from a privileged individual does not render it an invalid argument. Because it comes from Trump, you would probably want to fact check it, and find out that yes, catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion often treated with CBT, and that by the definition of catastrophizing believing that a microaggression may traumatize a person leaving them psychologically scarred for life, would seem to fit. But you can't just assume that an argument is invalid because one of the most privileged people to ever live said it. Much less the many reasonable things that people with relative privilege utter all the time. 

This tactical error is no more apparent than when you watch a panel of leading scientists gathered for some massive event. Where giants of the industry sit around a stage like Bill Nye, Neil De Grasse Tyson, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins ... we know why the leading public intellectuals are all men - privilege. However we have to also concede the Matthew effect and indeed Halo effect, that imaginary advantages can and tend to translate into real advantages over time. Men of this age were educated in a system that excluded women and for the most part people of colour. The best funded and leading educational institutions on earth were almost solely located in the United States, the wealthier nations of the Commonwealth and Europe. Thus the odds that the world leaders in any scientific field would wind up being white men were very heavily stacked in their favor. 

Crucially this does not invalidate that they are the leading experts in their fields. It doesn't mean that Bill Nye is not a competent engineer, or that Lawrence Krauss and Neil De Grasse Tyson are not competent astrophysicists. Nor does it mean they have any desire to maintain the status quo and only have male successors. 

One of the most fascinating statements I've heard all year was (and I paraphrase) 'many women don't like evolutionary psychology because they find it condescending to women' I cannot empathise with the experience of hearing a description of evolutionary game theory in which an evolutionary psychologist says 'male or small sex cell organisms have less sexual investment and female or large sex cell organisms have more sexual investment and so they have to be selective. Hence males are going to tend towards focusing on their ability to command resources in order to be selected by females...' I do not know what it feels like to hear such a theory of gender roles and not like it. But what takes the teeth out of feminism is a suggestion that upon hearing lines of inquiry they don't like, they simply ignore it. 

I'm of the martial opinion that strength and weakness do not so much matter intrinsically so much as your ability to accurately appraise it. The concepts of advantage and disadvantage are pretty fluid if you can stand far enough of an emotional remove to incorporate the lay of the land. To concede that a position of privilege is not arbitrary, but may have a long history behind it, is not the same as conceding that it is just, fair, legitimate or ethical. 

I feel I've said everything I have to say on gender and progressive politics, feminism in general. This should tie me over for a few months at least. In conclusion, when I close my eyes and imagine that I am 'the man' sitting in my palace and hearing reports from my scouts as to the state of the rebel forces opposing the patriarchy, nothing I see or hear calls for any countermeasures to be enacted. Hubris perhaps, but that's how I'd bet.

On Consistency

Inconsistency fascinates me. Ever since I read a book called something like 'Secrets of Ninja Mind Manipulation' which I remember little of, except that it stated at the core of Ninja mind manipulation was an understanding that human minds desired consistency and this was the secret to unraveling it I've managed to find intellectual consistency to be a conspicuous behavioral trait albeit seldom achieved. And I should add the caveat that, for fear of ninja mind fucks, I don't personally aspire to be rigidly consistent, the side effect of which has been the delightful discovery that if mid-argument you simply change sides with mind boggling speeds it infuriates people more so than if you had bludgeoned them to death with rational debate.

Now that I have a feel for issuing challenges, here's just a small list of oft-correlating positions on otherwise independent issues that I feel place an onus of reconciliation to achieve consistency:

Easy:
Reconcile Gun control and Drivers Licenses

Medium:
Reconcile Abortion rights and Capital Punishment

Hard:
Reconcile Misogyny and Islamophobia
Reconcile Young-Earth Creationism and Astronomy, Geology, Chemistry etc. (for the record, I don't believe that Ken Hamm has managed to do it. If you find his arguments compelling I would be delighted to hear why.)

My difficulty ratings should suggest that I have in part done the thought exercise to reconcile my positions on all the above issues. So I'm not going to run through a reconciliation for all but what is immediately juiciest and most morbidly fascinating to me. Which is having to reconcile my position on misogyny and 'Islamophobia' - but although I've rated it as 'hard' this is my general observance that people who tend to be anti-misogyny tend also to be anti-Islamophobia, and I'll disclose I am anti-misogyny, and I chose this language because I feel it is easier to define than a term like 'feminist' of which I don't identify, it also clarifies that one need not identify as a feminist to abhor violence against women in general. As I've stated before here, there are probably definitions of feminist broad enough to include me, but to err-cautiously on the side of honesty, I don't identify as a feminist and frankly speaking my experience of men that do is that of pure lip-service in the interests of getting their end into a meat market that validates their status aspirations with the literal sole exception of a trans-man I have met, who struck me as actually willing to pay a price to support feminist causes. This is not my experience of male-feminists in general.

'Islamophobia' is a meme that earns its scare quotes because it's grammatically and psychologically invalid. 'Islamophobia' is not akin to Arachnophobia, Agoraphobia, Aquaphobia and so on through the alphabet of psychological conditions that have practical meaningful definitions and describe real psychological phenomena. Homophobia doesn't get scare quotes from me because it is much more likely that there are people with irrational fears of homosexual activity, for whatever reason. I'd concede that this might be true of a concept like Islam, for example, the existence of a person who is afraid to touch a copy of a Koran and knows this fear to be irrational... but in general parlance this is not the specific behaviors 'Islamophobia' refers to.

Thus let's delve into the nitty gritty, for example if you feel an argument like 'not all men' (which I currently understand to be a man refusing to take ownership of violence, discrimination etc. perpetrated disproportionately by men.) as invalid this would describe my position too.

Namely it is a bog-standard response to a complaint to avoid responsibility through blaming or deflection etc. It also falls under the purview of an informal fallacy known as the 'No true Scotsman' fallacy, though not quite. Given that 'not all men' is consigning a pattern of behavior to statistical insignificance, or denying a masculine culture that is problematic etc. It is an invalid argument insofar as it does nothing to actually deny the existence of a pattern of violence correlating strongly with gender and/or sex. Thus, when faced with criticism of male behavior such as sexual assault or physical assault on women and the prevalence of it, pointing out that it is not universal is invalid strictly unless it's in the face of some universal preventative measure like a 'man-ban' executive order.

As to the question of owning a problem, my position is that we should aspire to responsibility and thus the best thing to do when someone comes to you with a problem, regardless of the problem is respond 'what can I do?' and not in an imploring rhetorical answer that implies we both know the answer is nothing. However I do defend the right of people not to care about shit, and while not as admirable by far, I would respect someone who responded 'I don't care' in a way that I don't respect somebody who clutches at an argument like 'not all men'.

Now you can watch Ben Affleck's high rating attack outburst, you only need to watch a minute or two before the 'not all men' argument is made. One does not have to search the internet long or deeply to find examples of the No True Scotsman fallacy touted. It's a fallacy all human beings are intuitively prone to. Lest you think that attaching the word 'informal' means that it's no biggie, the distinction between formal and informal fallacies, to my understanding is that 'formal' fallacies are like Mathematical equations, 'If all Mercedes drivers are rich, and Bill Gates is rich, Bill gates must drive a Mercedes.' etc. however to commit an informal fallacy does not make your argument any less invalid.

Thus it would seem that if you are going to call on men to own and acknowledge the problems of misogyny, the consistent thing to do would be to call on Muslims to own and acknowledge the problems of Islam.

To be honest, I was very surprised the first time I came across criticisms of Islam being characterized as racist. I live in a by and large secular society, and move in social circles where non-agnostic /atheistic beliefs are rare. It is still my view that in my social environment the correct opinion a member should have on Islam is in fact, no opinion. The impact of Islam on our lives is negligible to non-existent. Most people in Melbourne know far more about Islam than they will ever need to, with respect to not believing that Islam is the true religion and faith in Islam is the only path to salvation or whatever.

My opinion does not reflect reality, the prevailing attitude among my peers is that people for reasons unexplained need to be informed about Islam. Junkee media are a recent phenomena that are 0/2 of the two videos I've seen shared on social media produced by them, one of which is this video for which I want to apologise in advance - I punched into youtube's search engine 'junkee sharia law' and found the closest to the original video shared on social media was this, and although the video is unedited the description in the bio appears to be an ad-hominem attack to suggest Yassmin is some kind of stooge and therefore her expressed views in the video should be dismissed or discounted.

Ad hominem is another form of fallacy which suggests that you can't dismiss an argument as invalid based on who the speaker is. Eg. If Donald Trump says 'China is artificially suppressing its exchange rate' you can't dismiss the claim based on the fact that it was said by Donald Trump.

But you do have every reason and right to be skeptical, and an argument should be accepted and rejected on its intrinsic merits. You would also be perfectly rational to think that Donald Trump is not likely to come up with a workable solution to China's artificially suppressed exchange rates should the claim prove to be true.

So to, even knowing little of Islam, I find Yassmin's video intellectually vacuous. So much so, it's hard to know where to begin. And if you are interested in investing time and energy into convincing yourself that you have good reason not to convert to the faith of Islam, I'm sure youtube and the internet at large have plenty of material for you. I would also before moving on suggest that before sharing another Junkee video, ever, you should check out their webpage for a lesson in basic fact checking as it turns out Junkee are more or less a merciless force of marketing and advertising.

It's circumstantial evidence at best, but the impression Junkee's website left me with is that they are quite cynically on board with progressive issues by and large, and knowing that market research budgets often dwarf actual research budgets it seems to support my intuition that people who hate 'not-all-men' defenses tend to employ 'not-all-muslim' defenses.

Let's get back on point. Every theist, which is to say, every believer has their own onus of reconciliation/consistency best articulated, perhaps for all time by Samuel 'Mark Twain' Clements: 'The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.' which is why I'm surprised that people feel they have an obligation to learn, understand and defend Islam.

I know very little, but I have no inconsistent thinking to reconcile. I believe in an indifferent Universe populated by no personal Gods. Thus I don't have to figure out why the testimony of one Prophet is valid and another Prophet's can be ignored. I don't have to conceive of a way in which the true faith could be delivered to one isolated community of humanity and a completely different true faith could be delivered and endure for generations, indeed civilizations to another isolated community of humanity etc.

I'm convinced by evidence sufficiently accessible to me, that the events described in Genesis did not occur. I'm confident enough to defer to archeological scientists that the events described in the book of Exodus did not transpire. Beyond that, when entertaining claims that a person was the son of God, or received the direct word of God and didn't bother to invalidate the claims of Genesis and Exodus as I would expect from a historical figure that had unprecedented insight into the creation of the Universe, that the claims of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Mormonism become increasingly unlikely to be untrue.

'What's going on?' I hear you say, did you move onto reconciling creationism with the physical sciences? Let's breathe and reorient.

I was surprised the first time I heard a friend conflate criticism of Islam with racism. This is because, criticism of religion is so commonplace. It seems most logically consistent that if you spent highschool with the cool kids saying 'I don't think Jesus even existed, it all bogus' I would have assumed the consistent thing to do is apply this same mindset to any religious belief you were presented with.

I am only for religious freedom in so far as I don't believe in thought crimes. I don't for example believe religious freedom extend to exempting someone from hate-speech for example, or that it might exempt them from the local legal system in any capacity. I myself hold many superstitions with the conviction that they are completely irrational but nonetheless exert some kind of placebo effect on my psychological life. I would hate to be persecuted for being superstitious. I would extend this freedom from persecution to people who believe with conviction that they have knowledge of the divine or supernatural etc.

What though, is a religious belief? Do you for example believe that being a Christian means anything you want it to mean? Practice suggests that it does. But most of us would assume that at bedrock it means you believe that Jesus was the son of god, that the 10 commandments were the word of God and that after you die your soul goes to heaven or to hell give or take a belief in purgatory. A belief in Judaism might at the very least necessitate that Jesus was not the son of god, and at some point the king messiah will be born to restore the chosen people to the holy land and blah blah blah. Does Islam require you to believe that there is no god but Allah, and that the name of his prophet is Mohammed, the last prophet and that the Koran is the perfect word of God? I genuinely don't know.

I don't know if Yassmin would say that the Koran is the figurative word of God subject to interpretation. I also don't know if she possesses any real authority to say so. Or any of the things she claimed in that video.

In this case, I have a right to say 'I don't care.' I'm not particularly concerned about my immortal soul, or about terrorism. I'm fairly committed to not hurting anyone in an act of physical violence and I would risk my life to protect a stranger from physical harm provided I am in the immediate vicinity. I do not for example dedicate much effort to preventing infant deaths in foreign countries by donating to mosquito net charities, so I'm less concerned about the moral implications of these acts of omissions wherever I'm a bystander.

While I would not apply an ad hominem fallacy to religious texts, and find them as likely as any other literature to contain wisdom and useful instruction, I find all theism basically indefensible, which is why I am not a theist.

I would expect that if you nod along and like content that suggests 'not all men' is a ridiculous dodging of responsibility, you would do the same for this dodge in all its manifestations.