Belle Waring

Plain People of Crooked Timber: can’t see why you’re drafting us in here so often after leaving us out in the cold for five years or whatever, we are busy people with our own lives and so on.

Me: but I love you and you’re the best!

Plain People of Crooked Timber: well if you’re going to resort to flattery, I suppose it’s alright but you should probably give it a rest for a bit after this.

Me: OK, is it immoral to convince people they hold immoral beliefs, despite knowing they may commit immoral actions as a result? Should I troll people into being bad people?

Plain People of Crooked Timber: those are daft questions and the answers are obviously yes and then no.

Me: OK, but hear me out. Anti-abortion believers’ stated views are that fertilised embryos are people (with souls) even when they haven’t implanted into the uterine wall. Blastocysts too. This entails regarding IVF as a grotesque parade of murder. Multiple embryos are produced, several implanted due to the staggering cost of a single round, and then the number often brought down via selective abortion since who wants to have triplets sweet Christ not to speak of quadruplets, and one is usually not thriving as much, so it’s easier to make a decision. Well, easy; I have never been in this position and many people probably find it far from easy, and perhaps even agonising, who am I to say, and I am deeply sorry for people in this difficult situation, which may be the worst of their lives. I retract the whole easy concept I am being ignorant and even unkind. BUT all of this is completely moral at every stage and every level and I am cheering on everyone who does this, best of luck, I hope this works for you and you have all the children you wish for. I love mine and everyone who wants children should be able to have them, just as people who don’t want children should be able to not have them.

The remainder lie forever in stasis like the astronauts of some commercial venture the Weyland-Yutani Corp has deemed unprofitable, or are destroyed, with fewer than five percent adopted by some other couple. I hope that changes if people want it to, I hope they all get used and people get to pay less for what is an unreasonably exorbitant procedure. Carry on! Also, if they were not used, kept in stasis, or discarded, that would also be moral and right and not murder under any conceivable definition of murder.
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I read reddit. Yeah, I know.
Plain People of Crooked Timber: “why would you go and do a thing like that when you could sit on the kitchen floor and watch your packet of English muffins slowly pass its sell-by date and develop that unpleasant sour flavour you usually don’t notice until it’s too late and the thing is dripping with butter, and you experience one of life’s trivially grand disappointments. Because that would be a more profitable use of your time.”
Me: “But see, I’m arguing with misogynists and annoying ‘just asking questions about white culture’ people till they rage-quit!”
Plain People of Crooked Timber: shake heads with eyes closed and lips pressed into a single line. “Honestly.”
Me: “There are actually good subreddits too, like about how to write query letters.”
Plain People of Crooked Timber: “You are spending 90% of your time on Am I The Asshole why do you try and lie to us like this?”
Me: “OK, but listen, I’ve decided to read twitter instead!”
Plain People of Crooked Timber: “Oh, you’ve picked a fine time for it, haven’t you?”
Me: “Right, now now I’m arguing with all these RETVRN white marble statue pfp dickwads about Latin, it’s way better!”
Plain People of Crooked Timber: glare loftily.
Me: “No, for real, the best thing happened to me the other day. One of these guys who sucks you in by seeming just to want everyone to learn Latin, which I also want–”
Plain People of Crooked Timber: “Why in God’s name do you want that?”
Me: “Well, there’s lots of fun stuff to read, but not, like, the Aeneid because its a thing of crystalline beauty and also super-boring. But learning Latin would be morally improving or something.”
Plain People of Crooked Timber:”So you agree with him!”
Me: “No, no, it’s different. Anyway. They suck you in by seeming merely to want everyone to learn Latin, and then one second later its DEVS VULT, like, damn, son, I want some transition time where you hate North Africans or something under the guise of the Punic Wars. Wait. Maybe I guess, just skip to the crusades, actually, scratch that. So he’s exhorting his followers to, I don’t know, reclaim the Holy Land or whatever (but in the singular) and he calls out, invokes as it were, them–as a singular friend–whom he calls amicus. Yeah that’s right, the nominative. But as he’s calling to them, it should be the vocative, this happens rarely, and then it’s a second declension noun it’s literally the only time you ever have a form for vocative that’s different from the nominative. I just responded *amice and BOOM I got blocked by nine people, some big accounts. It was great.”

So, I just want you all to know I’m keeping busy, useful person and so on. Actually I write for hours every day and if I produce 2,500 words I can dork around on the loserweb as I please, save that it is injurious to the spirt. If I want to spend time slowly becoming confused and faintly judgmental about people who have a fiancé and two kids…like what’s holding you up? People should do as they please but you need important legal protections in case he leaves you or you die, just go to the courthouse. How is he ‘not ready’? You have a two and a four year old, he’s ready for producing whole-ass human beings who will suffer existential crises in the ink night of the soul, children who will be rejected by friends in the seventh grade and experience pain no adult can bear to remember, that they erase from life for self-protection, people who will someday get so drunk they puke and, having had soup before, get a pea stuck in their nose, and there’s no way to get it out? Even the following bile that they vomit up, futile, burning from emptiness, won’t wash it away? This, all this, but he’s not ready to get married? Who is this joker? Many places offer marriage-like benefits to unmarried parents, that’s sensible, but these people live in America. I wonder if learning Latin would help him learn manly virtue and get it together. Maybe I should get into an argument with the OP about how her “‘”fianc锑” (and I use the term very loosely) needs to get a copy of Wheelock for his first-date anniversary.

OK guys, here’s the deal. Last night I had a decently long dream in which Vishnu appeared to me personally, blue but golden with godly light and so on, to explain to me that he was real, and that I should worship him but not necessarily his avatars, more just him, (though I objected that Rama and Krishna are more approachable). And further that he was indeed the Mahavishnu, i.e. supreme deity, like, the Trimurti is a heresy and he and Brahma and Shiva are not coequal in a tripartite god relationship. Also, I should brush up on my Sanskrit so I could read devotional texts. I vaguely agreed, I mean, he’s an incomprehensible being of supreme power. So far so good. But then I woke up.

And I went to tell my mom, ‘you will not believe the dream I had last night, this is so crazy, my dreams are wilding out, should I start worshipping Vishnu? Because this is crazy.’ And in the gauzy spiderweb in the bitter-smelling boxwood outside the window I saw the outline of a bird, as if one had flown darting onto it and then vanished, and that’s when I remembered my mother has been dead for years now. At that point I turned to her, because I always love to see her like this, and hugged her once until she fell through my arms, and then I woke up, in the smallest bedroom of my house, where I have been staying with my sister. There is a big tree out the window beside the bed here, and a loud window A/C unit there partially blocking the view, but you can see it, the blue of the morning sky almost just the same as the blue paint in the room, which is tiled with paintings and photographs. Bishop Johnathan Mayhew Wainwright is a little forbidding there at the bottom of the bed.
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Henry James: girl, you are so cool and smart, and well-dressed, and beautiful. And I mean this in the least-sexual, but not sassy-gay-best-friend way, exactly, but more like just, your good friend who is also gay? And do you know, that guy is the worst. The worst. I feel like someone should leave you a ton of money but you’re not too sad he died, either? But then, like, never get involved with this guy. Him either. I don’t even now why you attract these people. Gorl, I’m serious, just look at him. I’m embarrassed to be a dude right now, except that I don’t even feel a kinship with these guys who are tbh wildly unlikeable. I don’t know how they keep getting in my novels when I’d rather just sit here with you on this sofa, which has olive green, cut-velvet chevrons, with pillows of pale chintz, and there are flowers gleaming out in the dusk, and collections on the wall of birds and books and shells–it’s pretty cute actually, but what I’m saying is that I’d rather hang out with you, you’re great. You’re fine! I’d rather hang out with Undine Spragg than these guys, actually, and she’s not even my person. People say she’s awful but I’m just like, get that bag! I’m not just for women’s rights, I’m here for women’s wrongs!

This devastatingly accurate portrait of Henry James speaking to his female characters is brought to you by Belle Waring. Now please enjoy this video by Chris Fleming. If you don’t watch at least three-quarters of the way through I will come to your home and personally draw a small circle on one of your interior door jambs with an industrial-strength sharpie. It will never come off. If you own your house, then you will have to paint and the colors won’t match even if you saved some of the original paint for this purpose (though, well-played). If you rent then too bad for you, I guess.

Why is this the wrong size? I don’t know and I can’t fix it either. I tried for minimum 38 seconds to do something but it didn’t work. I guess it’ll just jonk up the sidebar for a short time, sorry gang.

Do you all experience flow? Or rather, as I think everyone does at times, do you experience it often? Obviously I have written plenty of words in my life, but this is not generally something you experience when writing blog posts unless you are maybe excoriating someone in an unnecessarily profane way that is–fundamentally–unfair. Like, I hear from other people that this is a thing that might happen, I personally would never stoop to such levels, not even if I were blogging about J.D. Vance.

So, painting something, not a wall, that lets you achieve flow. Maybe even a wall, truly! I paint things with tiny details, sometimes setting the stork scissors to gnaw at the smallest sable brush till only a few hairs remain, fit for the fishscale mail on a lead orc figurine. Not lately, though. No, because I have been WRITING whole-ass NOVELS. Now, you will hear of my speed and think, huh, those must all suck because that is some Danielle Steele shit and first of all, how dare you. How dare you! Danielle Fernandes Dominique Schuelein-Steel has written 190 books, have you? Separately, her books do actually suck.
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I did something both awesome and ill-timed. Well, first I should back up and remind you of something I told you before at some nebulous time in the past, and that is that I am an immersive daydreamer. I said that I was a maladaptive daydreamer but I didn’t even think that was right, because I was just having a great time. I have spent countless hours—wait, no, first I should back up further and say, remember the Belle Waring Unified Theory of American Political Life: Fuck You, It’s Racism Again? Looking pretty prescient now, hmm, isn’t it?

Plain People of Crooked Timber: Lovely to see you and everything, Belle, but haranguing us about racism with ever-more-extravagant uses of profanity is not actually the thing we miss about you.
Me: That’s hard cheese, brother.

Getting back to the plot, I have spent my life making up thrilling stories for an audience of one, usually; of two, for my brother starting when I was six and he three, and going up until I was thirteen and called it off, to his agony; of three, when I played “talking games” with the girls, the last round played when my elder was nineteen. My brother and I just called it “talking,” but with a significant accent, and it may have saved my life. We lived in Georgetown in D.C., in a narrow brick house. I was upstairs in my brother’s room having a sleepover so we could “talk,” for what would be the very last time, when someone broke in through the basement door into the room where I would have been sleeping. The fact that the man [makes unfair sexist generalization about burglary] was an idiot who only stole a lot of Indian-head nickels and was then scared away by the cockatiel is not evidence that he might not have hurt me, because people who commit that crime are desperate, violent morons.
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O Kali’s feet are red lotuses wherein lie heaps of holy places. 
All sins are destroyed by Kali’s name as heaps of cotton are burnt by fire. How can a headless man have a headache?
I am irresponsible, cruel and arrogant,
I am the king of the great upheaval,
I am cyclone, I am destruction,
I am the great fear, the curse of the universe.
I have no mercy,
I grind all to pieces.
I am disorderly and lawless,
I trample under my feet all rules and discipline!
I am Durjati, I am the sudden tempest of ultimate summer,
I am the rebel, the rebel-son of mother-earth!
Say, Valiant,
Ever high is my head!
—Kazi Nazrul Islam
[Translation: Kabir Chowdhury] 

We can think of two versions of The Ministry of The Future, each of which invites us to imagine a world in which we make difficult, creative choices to mitigate the effects of climate change, and ultimately prevail. In the first book, a whirl of technological, sociological and financial solutions are attempted. Some are cautious science, some desperate acts of brute force, such as filling the atmosphere with particles to rival the cooling effects of the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption (and indeed, scientists are seriously considering this, which I have always thought would be the first true action on climate change). In the second book, a careful ruthlessness prevails. People still use container ships? They are sunk in spots to create new reefs. Billionaires have gotten rich on carbon fuels, and have no plans to stop? They are brutally stabbed to death in their own beds before their companions can even grasp what’s happening. But, which of these two books above has Kim Stanley Robinson written? Having written the first seems to say he can’t write the second, and yet can he still have written both? [click to continue…]

So, this rich pedophile/trafficker in the rape of minors guy killed himself in what is ambiguously federal-run, NY-local jail. One imagines he did this to avoid the agony of his revolting crimes being discussed in court, inability to conceive 45 years in prison, the real kind where you don’t get to check out for half the day, and a craven fear of facing the victims of his innumerable rapes (said by a number of credible sources to amount to three a day.) Now, it’s true that Trump has accused a president of being responsible, and that by strict and iron rules of the Republican law “it’s always projection,” he himself is guilty. And it’s also true that he or some flunkie in the federal justice system (cough Barr) are the only people capable of kicking Epstein out of suicide watch just eleven days after a suicide attempt.

Epstein had so many contacts with so many powerful or influential or intellectually prestigious people (like, just so, so randomly, Murray Gell-Mann) that’s it’s very tempting to imagine someone must have taken him out. BUT, we have to consider how much this jail sucks, and how little the guards give a crap about anyone, and how particularly they probably don’t give a crap about child molesters. They didn’t follow even their own lame procedures, taking him off suicide watch after only eleven days, placing him in a cell without a fellow inmate (who is meant in part to warn guards and in part to talk the other inmate out of being depressed (?)), and failing to check on him every 30 minutes as required. These places are notoriously under-staffed, in addition to which there are almost twice as many inmates in the facility than what it was built for.

I have a friend who’s been under both failure mode direct observation and well-run direct observation. For…reasons, but she’s fine now. In failure mode D.O. they just look in on you from time to time, let’s say half-hourly, having made sure at the beginning that there’s nothing in your room that you can ever hurt yourself with, but actually failing on this front because you can hurt yourself on the very construction of the room/shower/sheets etc. Successful D.O. is when they watch you literally every second, and if you so much as glance at a paper clip they are on your ass like white on rice. You can’t go to the bathroom by yourself. It’s so draining that they do it in four-hour shifts, around the clock. You know what that must be? Expensive. So expensive. You could do it somewhat more cheaply with panoptical clear cells, and by deputizing other inmates as guarded guards.

Inmates on suicide watch are generally placed in a special observation cell, surrounded with windows, with a bolted down bed and no bedclothes, the official said. A correction officer — or sometimes a fellow inmate trained to be a “suicide companion” — is typically assigned to sit in an adjacent office and monitor the inmate constantly.

Robert Gangi, an expert on prisons and the former executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, said guards also generally take shoelaces and belts away from people on suicide watch. “It’s virtually impossible to kill yourself,” Mr. Gangi said.

Was this too expensive? Did he get crowded out? Were there not enough guards to run the suicide watch centre? Were the officers just sick of him whining about his private island full of child rape victims? I guess we’ll find out, but the answer is going to be some combination of the previous and some further, mundane poorly-run federal jail problem that hasn’t occurred to me. Or, I mean, I guess it could be some high-up in the DOJ had him taken off suicide watch and then murdered! But, you know, almost certainly not. Now what’s necessary is to give his accusers something equivalent to the day in court they have been cheated of, with the most thorough investigation of all time, of his finances, contacts, records, co-conspirators, Alan Dershowitz, and who all else ever went to those fancy parties. Like every other Democrat I’ve ever met, I don’t care what side of the aisle anybody is from. Let justice rain down like waters. Alternately, burn it all down.

[Belle, why not mention the former president in question by name? Google search trending fans the flame of conspiracy theories even when the intention is to debunk them.]

UPDATE: sure, convince me of your conspiracy theory. I am not entirely unpersuadable on this front.

What would the world be like if women were unable to withdraw consent with regard to sex? You would be living in North Carolina, is what. Now, as an aside, I would totally live in North Carolina (please don’t tell my dad I would live in the wrong Carolina.) It’s lovely. But boy howdy does it have some terrifying rape laws and legal precedent. I mean, would I let my daughters live there?

Some cases are more difficult than others, especially if the initial act began with consent.

In 1979 the Supreme Court of North Carolina that once a sex act begins, a woman cannot withdraw her consent.

The court wrote that: “if the actual penetration is accomplished with the woman’s consent, the accused was not guilty of rape, though he may be guilty of another crime because of his subsequent actions.”

DA Welch called this a “troubling precedent.”

“I feel like you should be able to withdraw consent at any time,” Welch said. “If you have consented to one act, to me it doesn’t mean that act can keep going as long as necessary.”

“However, again it comes back to juries and how they view consent.”

“You will see someone who is consenting to a particular act, and all of a sudden it gets rougher than what they bargained for, or they change their mind, and we’re stuck,” Welch said. “If it goes from one act to another I don’t feel that that law apples, but you still have to deal with that issue in front of a jury, and that’s going to be very hard to convict.”

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This will hopefully be less contentious than my two previous posts, unless someone loathes and abominates Sure Sure for some reason. But why would they, Sure Sure is great! I listened to this song on repeat on a four mile walk today up hill and down dale in lovely West Virginia.

Vampire Weekend, still having it all going on! Actual video as well. (You should read the lyrics because they are a little bit incomprehensible.)

This article is posted on Slate but is not, in fact, #slatepitchy, but rather, informative! NY recently passed a law banning revenge porn. Which is great! But it has a flaw. A loophole so big you could take the trouble of dynamiting a tunnel below some Alpine pass and then float a loaded container ship through it on a shallow, glassine stream. Because, you see, if the person non-consensually uploading pornography has the “intent to cause harm to the emotional, financial or physical welfare of another person,” then it’s a crime, and the victim can bring suit on the grounds that the perpetrator shared images of her “with the purpose of harassing, alarming, or annoying” her. But…

…[U]nfortunately, most cases of nonconsensual sharing of sexual images wouldn’t necessarily fall into the category of harassment, nor does the individual distributing the photos always want to cause some kind of distress to the person depicted.
Take the case of the 30,000-member Facebook group Marines United, which was outed in 2017 for hosting hundreds, potentially thousands, of explicit photos of female Marines and veteran service members without their consent. The creators and users of that group likely weren’t sharing images of unclothed female Marines in order to harm them [?!!!]. They were sharing the photos for their own entertainment. The group’s members probably didn’t even want the women to know their photos had been posted in the group. Under the New York law, those women wouldn’t have much recourse. According to a 2017 study conducted by the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit that works on policy and helps victims of nonconsensual pornography, 80 percent of people who share private and sexual images of someone without consent aren’t trying to harm anyone….

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So this article (Autistic Sex Offenders Often Don’t Realize They’ve Broken The Law. Should That Matter?) was on the front page of Slate yesterday, and I thought, “this is so Slatepitchy that I should blog about it! Tomorrow though, because the Investigation and Discovery channel has it’s 4,000th show in a row about some brutal murder in Indiana, which I must watch, and also my mania requires me to clean the side of the stove that’s 1/2″ away from the kitchen counter, by forcing paper towel soaked in bleach spray down there with a boning knife and really leaning into it, and also I’m fundamentally a failure as a human being and can’t accomplish the most trivial of tasks.” (To be scrupulously fair, when I was nearing the end of the stove thing I said to myself, “self? Self old buddy old pal old frienderoo? Maybe just put the knife down and back away, because by the pricking of my thumbs, you’re going to be going at something with Q-tips any time now, and it’s already midnight.” (Ironically, this would have been good advice for the murderer as well.) “Also, if you’re so obsessive about these things, why isn’t the house cleaner generally? Could it be that you’re a failure as a human being?” And then I went to sleep lmao I had insomnia.

However, comma, I’m blogging about it now, better late than never, my life is a long series tasks before which I quail in needless fear as if they were copperheads looking at me with their glittering eyes, etc. This article has passed beyond #slatepitch to genuinely disturbing. And this is the reason that they took it off the front page altogether, and it can now only be found using google. [Update: I clicked on an article and this appeared in the sidebar. It was definitely not on the front page this morning.] The premise is that autistic people should get preferential treatment when they commit sex offenses such as stalking or possessing child pornography, because they don’t really know what they are doing. It’s as insulting to autistic people, really, as it is to common sense and basic morality.
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The Geto Boys Bushwick Bill died Sunday night of pancreatic cancer at 52. The Geto Boys were a band I didn’t much listen to when they were at their peak, although my brother was a huge fan. I was turned off by their misogynistic lyrics, which were extreme. My bro finally convinced me of how awesome they were, easing me into it with “My Mind’s Playing tricks on Me,” their best-known song. I just learned that their iconic cover for “We Can’t Be Stopped” was shot for real in the hospital when Bushwick Bill had been shot in the eye, declared dead, and then hyped up to shoot the cover. Which is insane. As a group they are kind of just nuts, honestly, but in an amazing way–and I would say this craziness helped them introduce the craziness of Southern hip-hop to the world. Not to say the South itself is crazy, ha ha fooled you, it is. My beautiful home state of South Carolina is almost incomprehensibly, baroquely crazy. When there’s one copperhead in the yard, you have to not only shoot it but wait around to shoot the other one, because they’re like Sith Lords and there’s always two of them, and they might bite one of the several pit-bull mix mutts you definitely have! Having to shoot a shark you caught off the edge of the boat because you don’t want a shark thrashing around in the bottom of the boat, and it’s a good thing you had a handgun on your damn boat! Actual voodoo! Anyhoo.

And the song from which the chorus is sampled is also awesome (strangely quiet at link liked bootlegged uploads often are, but correct speed:

It took me so long to find this quote. I remembered that it was Solovki, yes! And that Maxim Gorky was the visitor! And the tortures with the logs, and being staked out for the mosquitoes, and rolling the prisoners down the stairs, and the brave boy who told all, all! to Gorky and was left behind to be shot the moment Gorky’s ship left the horizon empty and barren! And the tarps. But could I find the quote? I damn sure could not. I was in the position of Edward Gorey’s Mr. Earbrass who starts up in the night having thought of the perfect lines for an epigraph: “His mind’s eye sees them quoted on the bottom third of a right-hand page in a (possibly) olive-bound book he read at least five years ago. When he does find them, it will be a great nuisance if no clue is given to their authorship.”

I had to read before and after many instances of the mention of Gorky I will tell you what. But virtue prevailed! The Solovetsky Archipelago is almost certainly what the name of the Gulag Archipelago comes from, as Solzhenitsyn considered it the mother of the Gulag, and the primary site before the cancer metastasized. The Soviets, eager to show that the camps are actually rather nice if you think about it sent Maxim Gorky to investigate. He was newly-returned to the Soviet Union and probably disinclined to rock the boat which currently supplied him with some vast apartment and a dacha (irrelevantly, haven’t we all sort of wanted a dacha? They sound great. Perhaps Trump will get one eventually.)

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