Sunday, November 11, 2018

Welcome Back

Hi everyone.

And by everyone, I mean the no one who has read this blog in forever. Indeed, I am writing this more or less for posterity than anything else.

I started this blog years ago with the... Need? Drive? Desire?... I don't even know what term to use. I started this blog simple because. I felt that my words should be out there, no matter how half-baked they may have been. I am happy that most of what I wrote I am not ashamed of. By the time the Internet started holding onto everything, I was past my days of blithe racism, sexism, and prejudice. Not entirely past them, mind you. Indeed, you can still find a few posts from the first years of this blog where I describe myself as fundamentally conservative.

My how times have changed. I am now aggressively progressive. I am not conservative in any way. I think the reason why I liked the idea of being "socially liberal, economically conservative" - the label beloved by so many libertarians - is that it let me feel good about myself. So much of conservative psychology is rooted in protection of the ego.

Of course, a great amount of progressivism is the same thing. People vote for gay rights at least partially because it makes them feel good and self-rigteous. But when the progressive eye is cast upon them, they have a fit. We have an excellent example of the school district in Connecticut, strongly Democratic, where the students were assigned an essay expounding on how white privilege had helped them. The parents of the children lost their minds.

Progressive indeed.

I am racist. I am sexist. I cannot escape this poison. It was injected into me from the moment I was born. And as a tall, white, straight, cisgendered male, the poison tastes good. My life has been, for many years, dominated by a quest to expunge that delicious toxin from my corpus. How successful I have been, I don't know. All I do know is that I am better than I was before.

As such, if you are reading something I posted years ago and think to yourself "man, this dude is an asshole," just know, I'm very different today. I am far more aware of how unaffected I am by the injustices of the world. I am far more aware of the gulf that exists between me and those who are not so lucky.