Sophie Jane @ghost_bird@mythago.space

Developer who failed to distinguish themself during the trash fire a couple of weeks ago has produced an incident report that gets both the cause and the solution significantly wrong. Since I diagnosed the former and provided the latter I can’t really let this slide... but it feels a bit mean :-/

Good morning. Woke up cross again but the High Priestess in today’s draw is suggesting stillness and contemplation, so I’ll try to practice that.

And on uk politics in general, for that matter. There’s been a bit of slippage on that today.

Okay, so, can I get a ukpol CW on the stuff about the BBC?

“It is good and important to have a basis of understanding of the philosophical tenets of Queer Theory. It informs much of who I am to know that society constructs boxes to put people in and I am working to dismantle those boxes and create more freedom. And also, my daily life as a queer and non-binary person doesn’t often involve actively thinking about how something I’m doing is related to the tenets of Queer Theory. I just…am. That’s where the freedom is.”

https://captainawkward.com/2020/10/28/1296-gender-may-be-made-up-but-its-still-messing-with-me/

Good morning. I slept better last night and feel better today, which is good. Grey and rainy outside, but it’s nice to watch through the window.

Anyway.

“It is not very difficult to see that this idea is rooted in the fear of progress. If there is nothing new under the sun then the future when it comes will be something familiar... Particularly comforting to reactionary thinkers is the idea of a cyclical universe, in which the same chain of events happens over and over again. In such a universe every seeming advance towards democracy simply means that the coming age of tyranny and privilege is a little bit nearer”

“...But the claim that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ is one of the stock arguments of intelligent reactionaries. Catholic apologists, in particular, use it almost automatically. Everything that you can say or think has been said or thought before. Every political theory from Liberalism to Trotskyism can be shown to be a development of some heresy in the early Church. Every system of philosophy springs ultimately from the Greeks...”

“ Looking through Chesterton's Introduction to Hard Times in the Everyman Edition... I note the typically sweeping statement: ‘There are no new ideas.’ Chesterton is here claiming that the ideas which animated the French Revolution were not new ones but simply a revival of doctrines which had flourished earlier and then had been abandoned...”

Secondly, though... why was the Church sanctifying same sex relationships and why did they stop? My speculation is that it was a move to claim marriage - a civil and economic institution that existed long before Christianity - as a religious matter by making it about sacred love and not the worldly matter of dowries and family alliances.

A couple of notes. First, and less interestingly, it’s useful to understand that when Catholics write about historical same-sex marriage it’s to make a claim that this is not new. It’s not necessary to believe there are no new ideas if you’re a Catholic but it’s a useful move in apologetics and a good way not to have to think critically about doctrine.

Thinking about this again, on early Catholic gay marriage:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n11/james-davidson/mr-and-mr-and-mrs-and-mrs

Tried to go for an evening walk, but it started to rain about three minutes in so I turned back. I still managed to see a fox though - an orange streak with a flash of white tail tip heading across the road and up a side street at considerable speed.