Traverse Fantasy

Oh my God. That’s her. How about a double feature, baby? Black Athena It’s hard to explain to people how fucked the field of Classics is. There’s a guy who almost exclusively writes articles about how the Metamorphoses does not depict rape on the part of the gods and is actually about art and how it captures its object (uhh). There’s an article from I think 2015 which goes back and forth about whether we should see Greece/Rome as exceptional or not, because they obviously are (mhm), but it’s not woke to say that; and it’s written by a guy who argued that the Greek alphabet was invented (i.e., modified from Phoenician) specifically to record Homer’s poems. I was grateful to have had professors in college who weren’t freaks and saw that corner of the ancient world not as exceptional but as prototypical, and not because our “civilization” originates from them, but because they dealt with the same problems and questions as us—as did other people throughout the world at different points...

I followed an independent tech journalist for a while because I don’t trust most big news firms to report on technology (or, really, most things) without falling in lockstep with the demands of the spectacular economy—that is, to manufacture demand because someone needs to buy all this shit to keep the lights on. And I liked this particular one since frankly I trust women in the field far more than men. Vocal fry has a disarming effect on me. But over the past few months, I noticed how she became increasingly cagey towards so-called artificial intelligence. Even in a video about how LLM firms are starting to target women, because the adoption of a technology by women is a sign of its adoption by wider society (which LLM firms had thus far failed to attain), she awkwardly gestured towards the poor average consumer who just uses LLMs to search and summarize online information, and that this is a genuine use-case which LLM firms prey upon (sure, why not?). I like to think of pop punk ban...

Sorry in advance for shooting from the hip. This is a ramble. My friend Ènziramire shared with me a quote by some liberal economist or philosopher—can’t find it, so bear with me—that Marxist critics and politicians alike have all failed to consider the question of freedom, except for Marx himself. I said then that I would take the L on that because, yeah, [Mr. Liberal] got me there. But then we were talking about Reconstruction. There was a certain abolitionist, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, who at first sided with the Radical Republicans in hastening emancipation, but during Reconstruction began siding with the Liberal Republicans because she believed that southerners should not have been deprived of their rights. Then the Compromise of 1877 hit, and Dickinson was so dismayed by the South’s reactionary barbarism that, even when she had gained the right to vote as a female citizen in 1919, she chose never to vote. It’s the basic bitch question of liberalism: how much freedom should be sa...

Last night, Instagram showed me a reel by @roseistheart : btw, the b*blical Adam & Eve story was taken from the ancient Sumerian myth, the tale of Enki & Ninhursag around 2000 BCE. the man eats the forbidden fruit and was told NOT to by the goddess. they flipped it around when adding it to abr*hamic books to push a patriarchal agenda, turning powerful goddesses & sacred serpents into villains, and a goddess who HEALED his rib into a woman made from his rib instead. Eve wasn’t the problem or secondary. she was the *superior* main character. Rose links to a World History Encyclopedia article about the goddess Ninhursag which goes into more detail about her myth with the god Enki and its confluence with the myth found in Genesis 2–3. The former is a very interesting one. If I may paraphrase the article: Enki fucks Ninhursag who gives birth to Ninsar; then Enki fucks Ninsar who gives birth to Ninkurra; then Enki fucks Ninkurra who gives birth to Uttu; then Enki fucks Ut...

There was a viral comedian set where this nepobaby guy does microaggressions at a clocky trans woman who reveals she works at a defense contractor but is also a self-identified leftist who was radicalized by working as a barista (but no, not at Starbucks, you bigot; it was at a local coffee shop). I've seen discourse transform over the last few days from "fuck you bitch", to "that cishet guy has no right to criticize a trans woman for something he wouldn't criticize another cishet man about", to "pointing out hypocrisy is a mark of privilege against marginalized people without a choice" (the woman in the video even says she sold her soul, as if her only choices were to work at the coffee shop or the defense contractor—has she tried applying to Starbucks?). If that sounds fucking exhausting, it is. I wanted to talk about how frustrating it is that 'leftist' discourse—mind you, I don't even self-identify as a leftist because I think most ...

A friend forwarded me an email from a prominent left-Catholic journalist asking Texans, or perhaps by implication left-leaning Christian Texans, to contact her to chat about the recent ascension of James Talarico as senatorial candidate. I really thought about it—but then I was like, well, I’m shy, and I’m kind of a non-representational freak, and I don’t want to waste this journalist’s time. But I did want to reflect on it! So I’ll waste your time instead. The Republican Party is the only one of two national parties with a vision of governance; only, that vision sucks shit. A veteran comrade advised against referring to MAGA as a fascist movement because, unlike historical fascist movements which saw the national financial bourgeoisie revolt against the globalized financial bourgeoisies of Britain and the United States, MAGA is more like a revolt of our national industrial bourgeoisie against our globalized financial bourgeoisie. Still, I think there are deeper confluences between MA...

Okay. They slapped me on the wrist at work for saying in an email thread which CC’d my boss’ boss’ boss that I hadn’t (past tense!) used AI on a project. They apparently spent all of $10 for me to have a license. I was told I came across as “political”, which I couldn’t tell if they meant in the sense of me commenting on the political dimension of AI (I wasn’t; I can be much worse ) or just that I seemed insubordinate in not using it (though, again, past tense). Anyway, aren’t I supposed to be flexible and open to new approaches or whatever? Fuck it. I had my $10. Why not see how well it could perform? I installed Claude and started it off with a dumbass math problem. It got it. I figured I was being a little harsh so, after safely committing my repository so it wouldn’t totally wreck my shit, I started asking it honest questions about implementation that I would’ve otherwise researched on Google and Stack Overflow. Very computationally expensive, I know—with the single benefit that i...

I’d like to be so bold as to suggest that we have a problem. Trans-females are obviously having a moment in political discourse, and their characterization has shifted in emphasis over the years: from stealthy homosexuals trying to deceive heterosexual men, to perverse straight men masquerading as lesbians to infiltrate women's private spaces. Both of these notions have existed for a while. As Julia Serano notes in her seminal manifesto Whipping Girl , these stereotypes in fact mutually construct each other, and were also reified in Blanchard’s transsexualism typography as the heterosexual transsexual versus the autogynephile. However, the latter has become a convenient angle for fascists, whose self-avowed motive is often to protect women from various masses of predators in the forms of black men, Muslims, and (in this case) trans women. 1 Each case yields baseless accusations and demands proactive retribution. But what happens when the benefit of the doubt serves as a cover for...

When you meet a Puerto Rican, the first thing they tell you is that they're Puerto Rican. The second thing they tell you is that they're an American citizen by birth. Even amongst each other. It's not out of pride for the imperialist captor, but one gets the same impression as when the Apostle Paul is about to be flogged by a mob and says, "Wait! I'm a Roman citizen!" Then the mob is like, shit, we can't touch that guy. But, of course, the Roman state eventually beheads him. Bad Bunny got me in my feelings. I had missed the live-streamed concert a few weekends ago, and finally found a rip of the whole thing on YouTube. I loved it, my cat loved it. I had been feeling a little bitter towards Bad Bunny because (I try not to worship celebrities but...) despite his outspokenness about the colonial occupation of Puerto Rico by the United States, I felt it was somewhat neocolonial for him to make a pact with the devil Amazon to stream his concert in exchange for...

Before I broach this topic, I must perform a little social ritual. Hail Charlie Kirk! I ask this saint of free speech, wherever he is, to intercede on my behalf while speaking my mind. This isn’t about him, but about his alleged assassin: the 22 year-old Tyler Robinson whose alleged motives have eluded political identification and thus disturbed partisan media (liberal and conservative), to the extent that both sides are starting to reach for the new “nihilistic violent extremist” label despite this alleged act being anything but apolitical. So, how do we understand it? Robinson’s alleged crime is the third in a series over the past year which have challenged the liberal–conservative dichotomy (which we know is bunk, but they don’t). First, Luigi Mangione : the alleged assassin of health insurance firm CEO Brian Thompson, a software engineer and philosophy bro who didn’t like Biden or Trump but seemed to be interested in AOC, RFK, and Ted Kaczynski. The “far-left”, anti-corporate dime...

Feminism has a metaphysics problem. This isn't specific to feminism: it's just that feminism is a label applied to a variety of discourses which all claim to have the same political premise or subjective vantage, while differing in both respects—usually this is visible when describing white feminism, bourgeois feminism, liberal feminism, cishet feminism, in contrast to some idealized black feminism, proletarian feminism, radical feminism, trans feminism. It's a hall of mirrors no matter where you look. But I'm interested in the discursive function of "essentialism": a theoretical term which encapsulates a critique of naïve materialism, that one can't reduce social phenomena to a superficially materialist basis, which became a cudgel against any materialist analysis in general. "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Simone de Beauvoir in  The Second Sex  first distinguished between sex and gender, not as objective scientific reality versu...