St. Thomas, Rum And The Telos Of Sex

We're in the USVI, St. Thomas to be exact, and I'm escorting wife kitteh and wife's best friend kitteh (WBFK), so blogging and commenting will be light as I'll be their chauffeur, chef and entertainment. I've got two scuba dives scheduled, so I'm hoping to get some video to share as well.

In this post, I'll try to reply to Ohioan's and Tim's excellent comments here, but I make no promises. Once the girls are up and about, the party will start and the keyboard will have to be discarded.

First, a photo from our VRBO.

The view from our balcony.

I've now been here for 18 hours, so I'm an expert and can pronounce on all things USVI while looking over my pince-nez at you. St. Thomas is a lot like SoCal. It's coastal desert, not jungle. The higher elevations, such as they are, have more growth, but it's not the wet side of Maui.

When the wind is just right, or just wrong, rather, there's a dreadful smell, possibly from rotting seaweed. We got whacked with that yesterday afternoon, but it went away as time and the winds changed. Maybe it's something temporary. The people are lovely, but their accent is a bit difficult to understand. 

We had a change of planes in ATL with a 3-hour layover. ATL being the South, we made a dozen or more new best friends while we waited at the gate. It was great to be back in Dixie, even if it was only for 3 hours.

On The Internet, Pedophilia Is Rampant

Dealing with the topic from the previous posts comes this news documenting how massive pedophilia rings have been discovered operating in plain sight on Instagram.

A comprehensive investigation by the Wall Street Journal and the Stanford Internet Observatory reveals that Meta-owned Instagram has been home to an organized and massive network of pedophiles.

But what separates this case from most is that Instagram's own algorithms were promoting pedophile content to other pedophiles, while the pedos themselves used coded emojis, such as a picture of a map, or a slice of cheese pizza. 

I'd bet the farm that the pedophile rings were not stamped out because they overlap strongly with the Pride activists. You can easily do the research yourself and find oceans of pedophilia from this month's Pride parades, "family-friendly" drag queen events where children were taught to twerk and undoubtedly many other searches as well.

Like all the rest of us, normal gays have been slow to react to the massive perversion cancer that has metastasized all around us. One of my best friends is a gay man and we've been roommates on several weekend retreats. He's told me about how he feels and what it's been like working through his feelings. We haven't discussed the Pride or drag monstrosities, but I'm certain he's nauseated by it.

Drag, at least the drag that goes on directed at children, is not a clown costume. It's sexual degeneracy. It's grooming at the least and predation at worst.

Forms And Meaning

Here's the gist of Ohioan's comment:

I think you’ve missed your own point. You said that they ‘ understand the forms, but not the purpose or meaning of what they're doing.’ I could not disagree more. Yes, they know the forms, but they also know the purpose and meaning of what they are doing.

Religion is a description of the world as it is.

(I)t's a holistic system of beliefs which describe the world as it is. I'm probably cadging the definition of another phrase, "worldview" perhaps? Oh well. 

Catholicism unites philosophy, science and faith. So does Islam. So does atheism. Agnosticism lays down on the couch, hoping it will all go away.  How about this as a definition of religion:

The selection of one of a set of competing hypotheses about the nature of reality.

After all, since you can't prove the existence or nature of God the way you can work out thermodynamics equations, they all require faith. No one knows which one is true. You can only make an educated guess with more education giving you more accuracy.

Your religion, whether it's Catholicism, Rastafarianism or atheism, is the source of meaning in life. It existed before you and it will exist after you. It existed before the Universe. The Law of Gravity is part of it. Gravity was discovered, not invented and gravity doesn't care if you deny its existence and live as if it wasn't there. 

Sex is no different. Sex makes babies. That is its meaning, its telos. You can act as if it didn't have that meaning, but the Universe doesn't care. Sex still has that meaning. Since babies need a bonded mom and dad, another telos of sex is to deepen that bond. That's it.

That dude is dressing as a woman because his sexual drive is disordered. Ain't no babies coming out of that. For whatever reason, he feels more comfortable presenting as a woman or he is aroused by it or both. If you spend any time at all doing the searches I recommended above, it's hard not to conclude that this is almost certainly a fetish.

A man acting out a disordered fetish in front of children at Disneyland is pretty far from the telos of sex. He understands the forms of sex, but not its meaning. Women wear makeup and pretty dresses because they want men to find them attractive. Yes, they do it for each other as well, but even that is a way of letting the other women know that they can be attractive to men. In those cases, the women are showing that they understand both the form and the meaning of the act.

The meaning of sex is not defined by the person. It existed before the Universe. You can invent your own reality and climb into it, but existence doesn't care. That's all make-believe. It's no different than pretending that gravity doesn't exist.

And now I'm off to deal with a key fob whose battery died. Ugh. Without a car, buying the local rum for the evening cocktails will be difficult.