hello again by the way. ive talked to many of you under the cover of anonymity (my alt) in the interim.

id love to read it if you're somebody who circulates drafts!

altho i think reframing this question which could be about desire-individuation in terms of causal explanations might be more indicative of my idiosyncrasies than the nature of desire lol

i am mostly disinclined to believe someone who 1: claims that gender doesn't structure their sexual desires at all and 2: maintains a consistency in the gender of the people they're attracted to that would be very surprising otherwise (as in, more than a handful of cases of attraction in their life)

if we are taking gender as something as thin as category membership, divorced from engaging in gendered practices/behavior, i think it's basically trivial that that does next to none of the explanatory work for *anyone's* attraction. on the construal that includes all that gendered activity, though,

congrats!! looks super cool, very excited to read it!

ohhhh i completely forgot that he was married to carole hooven

Rural hospitals and small colleges have kept many small towns lights on. Both are being eliminated with this budget bill

but he never told me what he would do as mayor to combat the joker

i do think inasmuch as we are thinking of ourselves as pundits i don't have much sympathy for the "it's not a death sentence" line — the stakes are more important there because
trans kids are not gonna get their hopeful messaging from CNN or the NYT or whatever. good to circulate it in-community tho

was talking about this a bit yesterday, bsky.app/profile/deus..., but im not very optimistic about us running all our language through a test of whether or not we think it would work if we're pretending we are pundits. not that we don't have to sometimes speak to the ~public~ but tbh most of us dont

it is all context dependent, though. not a cop out to point that out! ofc there's still work to be done to elaborate what kinds of things make sense in what contexts, but i suspect the rhetorical moves that work will be visible through their operation, rather than being pre-planned by committee here

in his time running the paper, he was a cruel and authoritarian boss, and really pumped out the pro-iraq-invasion propaganda. he is mostly remembered for his mishandling of the jayson blair plagiarism scandal, but he's much more interesting as an example of 21st century liberal journalism in general

howell raines is an interesting guy because of how much he prefigured what's up with the "liberal media" now. as the editorial editor of the times he really changed its trajectory towards what we see today, and coasted off of a hack literary brand of "southern authenticity," a liberal JD Vance type.

often think about how the tombstone of abe rosenthal (who is the man most responsible for the times' horrible mishandling of the aids crisis) has an epitaph reading "HE KEPT THE PAPER STRAIGHT." i don't have a similarly ironic/infuriating anecdote about judith miller, howell raines, etc. though.