First days of summer and temperatures here in Sydney are up and down like a bouncing ball. The system is increasingly unstable, and one can ponder how many joules must be pumped into it before it starts to get shaky and unpredictable. Ten to the power of what?
It’s similar to the old marshalling yards where a worker would move a carriage with a long lever. The carriage would move ever so slowly at first, but with each action of the lever on its wheels, it gathers up speed until the brakes need to be applied to prevent the carriage from becoming runaway. Same thing for the climate: keep allowing the system to gain energy, and change will, at some point, become unstoppable by human intervention. Whatever.
Having finished writing a book and with the cover art done, all that remains is formatting for publication. I’m thinking about my next project. Another book is a strong contender, as is a comic strip; both major undertakings and the logistics required for completion are not established, so lately I’ve been thinking about putting together something I can do under my present circumstances. A reflection on AI is possible; it’s certainly of public interest today, when here in Australia, the discussion is more about regulation than other aspects of this new technology. In a CNN article about the Australian social media ban for under-sixteens, they noted that Australia is traditionally fond of regulation. It’s long been true, here in Australia, social problems are addressed with political opportunism resulting in more laws, and where legal kits already existed, with harsher penalties. Laws, as anyone with half a brain would see, are often knee-jerk reactions at best because they are rarely, if ever, based on solid, unbiased research. Some laws here are supposed to protect the community from undesirables, and effectively remove freedom of thought, the cornerstone of democracy, and that’s forever unless a later parliament modifies the regulation.
Looking for a manageable subject, questions deriving from the trial of Oscar Wilde came to mind. I’d read the transcripts of the trial itself, including the witness statements. Oscar, today, would have copped twenty years. Why did he get two, and at a time when homosexuality attracted a life sentence? How many Oscar Wilde fan boys know Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’) had an older brother? That the older brother was killed in a ‘hunting accident,’ that Victorian euphemism for ‘murdered.’ Even at the time, most people questioned this all-too-convenient accident. Was Queensberry a mad, violent, homophobe, or a father desperate to protect his second son from those untouchable gentlemen? Under the law of the time, and that of today, Wilde was guilty, no doubt there, but was he the fall guy? The witty buffoon who could be sacrificed to protect big reputations from public scrutiny? You could say Epstein was just such a disposable little party boy.
The fact that Wilde became a martyr to the LGBTQIA+ is interesting because of this apparent case of what’s called willful ignorance. Everything is there, on record. The question follows: Is LGBTQIA+ a construct? It started as the GLF, gay liberation front. A movement that grew out of working-class activism, and not forgetting the rent boys of Stonewall. Women signed up, and it became the GLBT, once transsexuals and bisexuals were included. The women got upset that the G was coming before the L, and so, under their insistence, it was flipped. Social acceptance was increasing; it became nearly fashionable to come out of the closet, so the upper class joined in, took over, and sought to remodel the community into something acceptable to their straight social peers. Marriage, gays in the military, the gay couple, same as anyone else, standing in a manicured garden with a white picket fence. When a gay billionaire gave a commencement speech that included his debt to the ‘men and women of Stonewall’, he was avoiding saying the rent boys of Stonewall. Maybe he really, really believes in fairy tales?
Where this line of thought ended was in human systems, those that are part of Universal law. Homosexuals are part of a system that is designed to do one thing primarily, and that is the continuation of the species. Homosexuals must play an essential role in that, but is its expression marching down a street in a jockstrap waving a flag? Or is that a breakdown of the system?