I Know You Are, But What Am I?

I really am sick to death of the current popular childish obsession with people’s genes and genitalia.  The majority of modern Westerners appear completely fixated in a kindergarten level of ad hominem; their default criticism of anyone is to use some obvious feature of a target as an insult, just as young children resort to “fatty”, “four-eyes”, etc.  Now, of course there have always been bigots and racists and bullies; the difference is that we’re going through one of the benighted periods of history in which that kind of nonsense is accepted as adult discourse, and dressed-up versions of “cooties” and “yo mama” are presented as the serious rhetoric of serious thinkers, even in academia.  Anyone who has given more than the most cursory consideration to sociology and psychology understands that small-minded people are often upset by the mere existence of others who are different from them, and that racism, sexism, prohibitionism, anti-queer bigotry and other forms of collectivist hatred are all noxious fruit of the same poison tree rooted in a very dark, primitive part of the brain.  The neurological “us vs. them” program may have helped our distant ancestors survive in lean times, but it is now dangerous evolutionary baggage which we should be incinerating rather than enshrining in law or embracing as some kind of intellectual profundity.  Pseudo-intellectualism of this sort is hardly unusual in decadent cultures, but that doesn’t mean I need to like it or accept it.  And as anyone familiar with my work already knows, I’m sure as hell not going to tolerate it in silence.