Cafe Zoo

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and confused others,

I pretty much called the outcome of this election. I was not really predicting a landslide by the Democrats because I think that the Democrats were still a little bit overconfident about the outcome of this past election. I think that they have been overestimating how other people in the country really react to that orange guy.

To understand how the orange guy actually came into power, it would be easier to talk about the mistakes of the Democrats over the past generation.

First, I am going to talk about my own politics. I am "liberal" in the sense that I am generally open-minded, but I also respect the authority of mainstream scientific research. This is complicated by the fact that I tend to have a passion for esoteric or intellectual fringe ideas, and some of those esoteric or intellectual fringe ideas are actually highly controversial, even if they are accepted generally--or at least not outright rejected--by professional scientists.

Unfortunately for me, there was a large branch of "liberal" politics that had come to rely on political echo-chambers, and many of the people in those echo-chambers have developed an exaggerated idea of how homogeneous people outside those echo-chambers actually are. As far as they are concerned, those people are nothing but mindless robots that sit half-drunk at home watching Fox News. In other words, if I did not want to speak to them in a narrowly defined language that was accepted by their little echo-chamber, then they assumed that I inherently had very few thoughts in my mind whatsoever. The people in those political echo-chambers were not open to intellectual diversity.

This has driven many people who would otherwise have relatively liberal views to developing a "red-pilled" outlook, where they have come to think that all politically liberal sentiments, on a certain vein, constitutes a dementalized recitation of an established liturgy. They therefore blast misogynistic or transphobic drivel wherever they don't get automatically banned for doing so, not because they believe it but because they resent not having a right to say it if saying it is what pleases them.

Mysteriously, liberals claim that they support the rights of people with disabilities, and they are especially sympathetic toward children with autism; however, they don't seem to care that many adults with autism are very prone to flubbing attempts to ask someone out on a date.

I have been kind of privileged, there. If you are gay and socially not very competent (whether because of a disorder or a troubled background), your sex life is still kind of easy: if you are socially incompetent, then "play the puppy" with an older man: he's experienced and confident enough he probably will not call the cops on you if you don't understand social boundaries, and you're probably the 25th young socially unlettered QTpi he's reamed with his baseball-bat sized penis in the past quarter. He gets you stoned a few times, and you pick up a few basic social skills. When he gets tired of you, he sets you up in a relationship with someone closer to your own age, makes sure you're happy enough that you won't annoy him again later, and then goes to pounce on the next adorable clown that looks half his own barely legal (if that) age.

However, straight people that have social deficiencies of any kind have a serious problem, and they tend to lose most of their sympathy from the liberal wing of politics once they have become sexually fully mature and physically imposing enough to actually be a threat to somebody. When those men have become large enough to physically overpower a woman, it is no longer so "cute" if a man takes the most autistically logical route to getting laid. All of a sudden, the social flubs that looked cute when they were being done by a sexually immature child look very scary from the perspective of a paranoid and previously traumatized woman. All of the sympathy they once had is gone. Nobody cares a flying rat's ass about heterosexual autistic adults. Nobody, except maybe experts in the field.

Ironically, then, feminist echo-chambers can unwittingly become extremely ableist without really meaning to. The reason why is that they have made a false assumption that those people that threaten them are all socially perfectly competent but just also infested with entitled misogynistic beliefs. They have developed a widespread assumption that "misogynistic men" are not just socially competent but also cunning manipulative geniuses that must have pristine and almost perfect social acumen, regardless of mountainous evidence that they are blundering incompetent idiots that have repeatedly gotten themselves into trouble.

There would be fewer "incels" and "MGTOWS" out there if more women would recognize that a person that comes across as "creepy" is probably genuinely disabled, and they would try to find a way to help those people get better at doing things the right way instead of leaping to judgment. Those were enemies they did not really have to make, but they did anyway.

As the cultural divide, in this country, deepens, it gets harder and harder to really belong in its subcultures. You cannot really say the right things, in order to fit in with these liberal echo-chambers, unless you have been indoctrinated on the right things to say from a young age, and it is more and more complicated to really fit in with their communities.

In other words, liberal politics have been failing to attract the kinds of numbers they would superficially seem to warrant because they have made it harder and harder and harder, over the past generation, to actually fit in. They have become rigid in their expectations, and even though they are half a century ahead of mainstream conservatives, they have become living fossils that happen to have ossified more recently than the other one. They have developed an impenetrable lack of flexibility, and this is alienating toward young people in a society that is constantly evolving.

Nevertheless, liberals continue to believe that the non-liberals constitute a political monolith, and they tend to think treat anybody that does not think as they do as if they were dementalized robots. They tend to have a sort of delusion that, if you are not their particular flavor of liberal, you must have been abducted at some point, put through some sort of mind-wiping machine, reprogrammed, and left thoroughgoingly incapable of saying anything besides what you were programmed to say.

If you are a zoophile with generally liberal views, then you might already have an idea of what I am talking about, here, if you have attempted to fit in with mainstream liberals. They tend to believe that if you do not share their rigid and not particularly informed views about "consent," then you are a brainwashed ultra-right-wing Republican zombie that sees animals and women as soulless objects you can do anything you want to with. What they assume is that you must be sitting at home stone drunk and putting out cigarettes in the eyesockets of your animals while giggling at whatever bozo is currently popular on Fox News. Not only will they refuse to believe that you are really a lot like them in the most important respects, but they are also certain that you cannot possibly be very different from other people that they hate.

I am certain that liberal-minded gun-owners are often in the same situation. If you live in a poor area, then you might have suffered from a home-invasion before. People that have never lived in a profoundly problematic area do not understand what it's like to live under constant threat of a home invasion. It's not just something off of a movie for those people, but it's just their annoying pissing off everyday existence. I can give you one of many example scenarios (there are many). The poor have to buy things from thrift stores and pawn shops, and what happens is that people that have drug problems will pawn off their most beloved worldly possessions in order to obtain money to support their habit. Because their drug problem has addled their wits so badly, they will develop a delusion that their neighbors who have come into possession of those things, must have stolen or borrowed those things from them, so they will muscle their way into their neighbors' homes and take back what they believe belongs to themselves, often injuring someone in the process. Instead of feeling guilty, they spread rumors about their neighbors being thieves and invest an unfathomable amount of energy in smearing their reputations. People get tired of being victims, and they get tired of feeling powerless. It hurts to feel powerless, and having even a totem symbol of power jumping around in their hands makes them feel a little bit less horrible.

However, those people that come from such devastatingly poor communities are the same "working poor" that the liberals are attempting to market themselves to. How can you expect to win over the working poor when you are belligerent in your stereotypes about one of the totems that the working poor tend to turn to for comfort? Whether liberals like it or not, many members of the working poor have a totemic attachment to guns as things that might help protect them from from the evils of their existence. Guns have come to take the place of antediluvian household gods for those people.

Unfortunately, many of these liberal echo-chambers will only accept you if you adhere to their doctrinaire beliefs about guns, and if you have not been thoroughly enough indoctrinated into their beliefs, then they just completely reject your authenticity. They will not even believe that you are slightly liberal or deserving of the sympathy of liberals.

The Democratic establishment's echo-chamber approach to political engagement has led to them making enemies as fast as they possibly can, and they are just digging themselves deeper.

In general, I am a supporter of the Democratic party, but that's because those are the only people that have the political ability to defend my interests or even my basic safety. They are the only ones that have the political wherewithal to stop the sodomy laws from coming back: under those horrifying laws, I was not merely inconvenienced, but I lived in fear of getting violently arrested by some homophobic cop, getting my wrists broken as he put cuffs on me tighter than the law allows, and then stabbed to death in prison by an equally homophobic person that thinks I am the same thing as a violent child molester. Until the early 2000's, that was a serious problem in my life, and if the Democrats keep losing, that could again find itself on my list of problems.

Because I depend on the Democrats so much for my very safety, though, their self-defeating behavior makes me want to beat them with a cudgel while swearing at them at the top of my lungs.

The Democrats did not get a "blue wave" this year because they are still making enemies when they do not really have to.

Liberals, stop relying on political echo-chambers to get things done. Use a different strategy. Develop a more inclusive and less exclusive approach to getting things done. Bring back the big tent, so you can at least protect the basic safety of your constituents that would be in the most mortal and immediate danger if you lose.

You might not agree with the more horrible things that some people do with animals, for instance, but you can try making friends with zoophiles that care about animal rights and who defend the idea of animal rights within the zooey community. You might not think that everybody needs an AR-27 or AK-15, but you can stand to show more compassion toward traumatized people that are clinging to a totemic symbol of protection. Maybe women should not be called liars for trying to defend themselves from abuse, but you can try to show greater understanding toward a heterosexual autistic punk that flubbed an attempt to ask someone on a date.

The reason why the Democrats did not get the landslide victory that I desperately needed them to get, this year, was that they have screwed up over and over again, and it is pissing me off.

We can fix this.


With love,
Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

There is a big election coming up. There is no need for me to say whom I voted for. The secret ballot is one of the pillars of western democracy. Most people that know me can probably guess my political leanings, but the principle remains an important one.

As many zoos know, I like to use the LGBT community's past as a historical parallel. I think that I tend to generate some degree of confusion when I do this without clear explanation. It is a fact that LGBT and zoophiles have unmistakable differences, but so also do heterosexual women and LGBT.

In the 21st Century, we have grown comfortable with the idea that women and LGBT are natural allies, and for the most part, this is currently true. Women of all political and cultural backgrounds have tended to be leaders in promoting a higher degree of comfort, in society, with LGBT. Homophobic women exist, but for the most part, it is accepted in society that gay rights and women's rights are intrinsically intertwined.

The rise of women's liberation was really not a pleasure cruise at all, but at one time, the idea was considered to be controversial, even among women. As bizarre as this sounds today, there were many women that were concerned that it could upset the natural balance of society if women were to revolt against their natural roles in society and in the household. They also saw the "masculinization" of women as perverted and disgusting. Surprisingly enough, the hardest people to persuade, in regard to the pursuit of women's liberation, could actually be women. Those women believed that they had ample cause to be afraid. They understood the necessity of social stability to maintain a safe household for raising their children, and throwing society into a blender, they believed, would leave their children all but abandoned. Even up into the 1980's, women spoke often about "latch-key kids" who came home to empty houses because both of their parents were out at work: women's lib groups are trying to address this problem now by improving the availability of day care services in or near their places of work. However, there are still women that believe that society might have been better off if women had embraced a comfortable established existence as people that children could count on to be there to act as protectors and nurturers. This is discounting the lack of realistic economic viability for such a lifestyle, and cultures where this lifestyle is still considered to be obligatory tend to suffer from economic hardships due to the under-utilization of their workforce. This sort of lifestyle was only realistic during a time-period when the management of a household was profoundly complex, and the canning, drying, and processing of food and the cleaning of a household all had to be done manually based on raw materials and primitive tools. As those needs have disappeared with the ongoing advancement of technology, women's labor was inevitably left under-utilized.

However, society was also undergoing a transformation in their perceptions of children. At one time, children were expected to go to work at about the same time that they became physically capable of sexuality. At the same age when boys would meet with other boys to talk about sexuality for the first time in their lives, they were also finding that their labors were needed in their communities. It was not considered out of the ordinary at all for a pre-teen boy to be asked to help out at the local mine. The mine had usually been first established by his grandfather, and helping with the extraction was just considered to be a part of the chores that helped keep the community running. As society became more centralized and industrialized and as the jobs in society became more complex, there came a similar need for children to stay in the education system for a longer period of time. Therefore, society was looking upon people that were actively sexual as still being "children," rather than "young men and women," for the first time in human history.

There was, however, a certain amount of resistance against the idea of transitioning over to keeping children in the education system longer. This was especially problematic in traditional mining communities, which protested vociferously against being asked to sacrifice the labor that they needed for mineral extraction. They fought tooth-and-nail against being asked to take their children out of the mines and start relying instead upon hired labor, which was growing increasingly educated and therefore increasingly determined to believe in such ideas as "minimum wage" and "safe working conditions" and "pension plans." It was hard on these communities, so implementing the transformation in what young adults (suddenly being deemed as "children") were expected to be responsible for was really very hard on these communities.

Well, a strange combination of conditions were emerging. For the first time, women were coming under an expectation to be employed outside their homes, and for the first time, young people were still perceived as "children" at a time in their lives when they were also becoming actively sexual. Many people in society were profoundly unprepared for this.

Some people in the LGBT community were very slow to adjust, and many of them continued to have archaic beliefs about what sort of behavior was appropriate. For instance, the old underground homosexual community had long considered it to be profoundly normal for young men (defined as boys that were just barely old enough to figure out they were gay) to seek out instruction and guidance from older men (not usually by actually having sex with them but usually by mentoring them and "teaching the birds and the bees," which is a duty their fathers would have otherwise fulfilled if they had been straight), and this made sense to them because they themselves remembered being confused about their unusual sexuality. This type of "pederasty," which was usually a teaching relationship and not really a directly sexual one, was really the only way that gay youth could figure out how to cope at all in pre-industrial and even early industrial societies. Some members of the LGBT community were swift to embrace the idea that they could no longer allow this sort of behavior, but others were not.

At the same time, people were living closer and closer and closer together, so keeping this sort of relationship as a secret was no longer as viable as it used to be. Anything you did, suddenly, was extremely visible to others, and if people did not understand what you were doing or why, they were afraid of it.

Consequently, unattended minors, who were newly regarded as "children," were seen accompanying older men, and those boys were later found out to be homosexual. The way that a confused society interpreted this behavior was that those men were indoctrinating "little boys" (who would have once been called "young men") into homosexual behavior, and this caused an extreme moral panic in society. Women who had to work at regular jobs were in an extreme dilemma because their dual lives, as both mothers and industrial workers, made it very hard to keep their "children" under the watchful eye that a "child" deserved. Yes, I am putting "child" into quotes PRECISELY because of the fact that boys once were expected to take on responsibilities as men at an earlier age: socially, they WERE men, and they were expected to be rough and tough and to know how to fight with a knife and smoke tobacco. That was no longer normal in the first "Leave it to Beaver" style suburban neighborhoods, and by the way, shows like "Leave it to Beaver" were largely responsible for normalizing this way of life in a country that once had regarded it as weird. The moral panic was almost inevitable.

At one time, progressives thought about changing the way we treated children in the same way that they now think about our relationship with the planet and with animals. "Protect the children, and keep them in schools" was a progressive battle cry, and the feet-draggers at the time were people from more archaic communities that were reluctant to sacrifice child labor as a part of how they supported those communities.

Therefore, there was no such thing as a progressive homosexual movement. If you would openly engage in homosexual relationships, especially where impressionable children could see you, then you were seen as a "living fossil." You were called a "pederast" that had failed to realize we no longer lived in ancient Greece. If you were "openly gay," then you were intentionally creating an inhospitable environment for the rearing of children, and you were acting selfishly and recklessly. Holding hands with another man in public was regarded as the equivalent of walking through a grocery store without a mask in the middle of a pandemic. Openly gay men were not seen as victims of oppression, but openly gay men were seen as selfish and reckless thugs.

Therefore, there was a time when trying to champion gay rights could get you attacked by progressives because you were seen as trying to appropriate the progressive agenda in a way that really undermined it, which meant that there were sections of society where hostility against homosexuals was regarded not only as acceptable for a progressive-minded person but almost as progressive by definition.

We therefore need to remember that, at one time, being openly gay inherently meant, in the minds of the most progressive Americans, that you were hostile toward the rights of children. The cry "Think of the children!" as an objection against gay rights crusaders, really originated in a progressive stream of thought.

Right now, we zoophiles are clashing with progressives that are reacting to our changing relationship with animals, and as a matter of fact, I believe that I am absolutely justified in regarding the situation that we are in as similar to the situation that LGBT once were in.

We zoophiles will need to do as the LGBT community once did, regardless of how hard it might be for some of us to see how we and they are alike. The principles at work are really the same: we need to change with society, rather than resisting that change. We will need to grow up and recognize the need for us to adapt our behavior in accordance with changing times. It's not just the society around us zoophiles that needs to change, but it is we that need to change, just as the gay community once changed. It is currently critical for us zoophiles to start grooming, in ourselves, a model for animal spousehood that is marketable in modern society. It has never been done before because nobody has ever lived in this kind of society before, but here we are: we need to come to grips with what we need to do in order to become leaders in that change, rather than its victims. Learn how to lead, or you will be led like cattle to the slaughter. Wake up.

It would be unfair for us to ask society to bend for us if we are not also prepared to bend in turn. Society is changing, and for us to survive, we must embrace that change and become a part of it.

Regardless of which political leaders you voted for this year, I hope that you will believe that I chose the leaders that I chose because I care about the zooey community. Even if I disagree with you, I will have faith that you likewise made your decisions in the best of faith. What we really need to have in common is that we make the choices that we make out of love for ourselves and our community. That is all I really need to know about you, and I think that is all you really need to know about me.


FORWARD TOGETHER!
Sigma.

Dear zoos, zooey allies, interested others, and confused passers-by,

I am one of those zoophiles that believes there is much more to zoophilia than just sex with animals, but to me, zoophilia constitutes a belief about human and animal nature. I believe that humans are no less animal than other animals. I believe in the capacity of animals for agency, and I even believe that animals raise and cultivate us as much as we raise and cultivate them.

The evolutionary race between humans and the neanderthals was not just about humans and neanderthals, but it was also about the dogs that accompanied us throughout that long journey through time. Dogs trained humans to herd. Dogs farmed out the dirty work, of closing the kill upon large and dangerous game, to us humans.

However, even our cattle raised humans as much as we raised them. The bull knew that humans, who could store and process grain from abundant seasons and use it later, kept his cows fat, healthy, and plentiful, so grazing near humans was rational behavior for the bull. Their herds grew larger and fatter because of humans. This was what the bull wanted to know.

Our animals are not merely chattel, but our animals have been our allies from the beginning of our long journey starward. We have coevolved with those animals, and they have been a part of us from the beginning.

Since prehistory, love between the species has been known, although ancient memories of that love have often been preserved as a means of portraying ancient cultures as animalistic and less evolved than that which was dominant at the time. It does not escape my attention how much of a focus even modern education about the ancient Olympian religion puts on human acquaintance with animals, but those ancient faiths were in truth not much unlike modern ones. However, I believe that that love was really beautiful to those that had the compassion and the vision to see that beauty.

If the stars do not have dogs and horses in them, then I will stay right here at home!

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

This was going to be the first week in the entire year that I was just going to decide to blow off the blog rather than just posting the darn thing late, but the week has been saved by one excellent coworker and equipment that abruptly started working again! Oh, joy!

*flies about in a joyful circle*

Let's legalize all drugs!

No, instead, let's talk about one of my favorite authors! David Brin had an amazing idea, in his Uplift Universe, although he had totally non-zooey motives in the storyline that I happen to agree with.

The storyline is that all of the sapient alien races across five galaxies are totally convinced that it is impossible for any species, apparently besides their fabled "Progenitors," to achieve full sapience and the capacity for intergalactic travel. They acknowledge that so-called "wolfling" races can achieve seemingly high technology, but their theory is that those rare wolfling races are inevitably destined to bring about their own self-destruction before they have become advanced enough to really succeed at establishing their independence among intergalactic civilization.

Intergalactic civilization's remedy for this wolfling propensity for self-destruction is to intervene long before they have become advanced enough to really hurt themselves by adopting them as "client races," which they proceed to put through a sort of "sapience school" where they are gradually altered and shaped and molded according to the designs and intentions of their "patron race." Through this slow, centuries-long process, a new race is thereby borne into intergalactic civilization! Yippee!

But...humans turn out to be a sort of anomaly because WE ARE JUST THAT SPECIAL, BRO. We just happen to be living on a planet that has been ignored by intergalactic civilization for so long (because we are really NOT even slightly important to the five galaxies until we happen to trespass on their turf and get attacked by these intergalactic Republicans called Hoons). By the most amazing random Cosmos-sized chance, we somehow manage to stumble our way into surviving for just long enough to figure out interstellar travel on our own.

For one thing, this incident makes the rest of intergalactic civilization feel very dumb for assuming that our little planet is literally the least important thing in the entire Cosmos. Apparently, the whole reason why we had not met any extra-terrestrials yet was that the rest of intergalactic civilization was of the opinion that nothing significant would ever emerge from our useless redneck backwater, least of all something as unusual as a "wolfling" species or a highly valued and sought-after "client species."

For another thing, us dumb redneck humans have the totally unfair advantage that our species has not had a chance to get brainwashed into the false beliefs that are harbored by the rest of the universe. Because we are doing everything from scratch, we are also not as badly pinned down by million year old traditions that have really been holding intergalactic civilization back.

Therefore, our own client species, which are dogs, dolphins, presumably horses (I hope), apes, and all of the other species that are possible candidates for eventually ascending to sapience are put on an abnormally accelerated journey to having just as sarcastic of a sense of humor as humans if not moreso!

Also, dolpins are apparently amazingly proficient at flying through wormholes because it's not all that much different for them from navigating oceans! Soon enough, we have dolphins flying their own almost entirely dolphin-crewed starship through intergalactic space!

The point of the series seems to be this: when we treat people we have authority over as if they were not capable of being anything special unless we teach it to them, we really end up holding them back. When we treat them with greater dignity and respect, then there is sometimes a lot they have to teach us.

I am learning this with a new coworker. This guy is amazing. He learns new skills almost immediately. It's once-and-done. Once you have shown him or explained to him how to do something, then he just knows how to do it. He applies logic and critical thinking naturally. I honestly feel like I have to live up to this guy, but I am also glad to have him around because it's actually a matter of life-or-death, in my occupation, if someone makes a mistake. I need someone like him as a coworker, or I could literally get killed. It's a matter of saving my own life to get the best out of this guy that I possibly can.

However, this brings me around also to my opinions about service animals of all kinds. Working animals still play a big role in human life, although they have been getting phased out as animal labor has been gradually taken over by machines that exceed them. Nevertheless, we still depend on service animals for helping people with disabilities and for helping us in police work. I am also convinced that animals can do a lot more than we have ever imagined to help us in our national defense needs.

If you are not willing to even acknowledge that a dog has the capacity to consent to sex, though, then how do you reconcile that with the same dog guiding a blind person through a dangerous city full of thousands of hazards, street crossings, or even muggers? If you cannot trust a dog to consent to sex but would also put the life of a disabled human being into that dog's paws, then how does that work?

Dogs taught humans how to herd. Humans are not naturally herders. We are masterful at imitation, though. We can learn extremely well based off of imitation. Sometimes, we happen to imitate animals. I think that dogs might have also taught us how to take better care of our children: I think that it was a dog intervening to stop a human child from wandering away that taught primitive nomads to believe their children were precious and deserved a higher investment. I believe firmly that dogs uplifted us.

I think that herd animals may have done us similar favors by teaching us about the value of friendship and family. They might hav even taught us civilization itself: I think that humans came to believe that it was worth it to build the first cities and the first empires and the first democracies because our ancestors saw herd animals stampeding through their natural environment and understood the message that, while those animals may have looked like dumb beasts standing alone, they looked like a tsumami when they were moving together.

The letter "A" comes from the ancient Semitic letter aleph, which is descended from an ancient Egyptian heiroglyph of the head of an ox. The Muslim word for God, Allah, comes partly from the same root, similar to the El in El Shaddai from the scriptures they share with Christians and Jews. In ancient times, el did not just refer to a god, but el could also refer to a revered ancestral king. In the ancient world, the bull was associated with power and with leadership. Maybe we still honor the ancient image of a bull, with its position as the first letter in our alphabet, because it was a bull that taught us what it means to lead.

I think that our animals lifted us up, not just the other way around.

While it might be a little bit different from what Brin had in mind, I think that us zoophiles have a historic opportunity to start reminding the world that our animals are something more to us than just animated baby dolls, but they have minds. Their minds might not work exactly the same way that ours does, but they have minds. They form opinions. They are capable of judging us. Us zoophiles have an opportunity to tell the world that if they don't think that animals can consent to something as simple, beautiful, and innocent as sex, then the world really thinks a lot less of their animals than they should.

The world is pointing its finger at us zoophiles and telling us, "You need to change!"

The peril of attempting to change others is that you are thereby predestined to be changed by them.

Us zoophiles are going to change, alright. We ourselves still have a lot left we need to figure out. Us zoophiles have as long of a way to go as the whole rest of the world. We have many lessons yet to learn. We will indeed change, but world, we are going to drag every single one of you along with us.

And if you will not have us as your equals, world, then you will have us as your masters.


Until next time,
Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

In keeping with tradition, I am dating this for the previous Sunday, since life and my brain are too chaotic for me to ever be sure I am going to get this out on the day that I am supposed to get it out.

We are nearing the zooiest of all holidays, which is Halloween!

My opinion is that Halloween is the last holiday we have that has preserved most of its innocence. This is one of the great ironies of our culture. We put up images of ghosts, cadavars, zombies, skeletons, mummies, and other icons of the holiday, and for some reason, this turns us into candy-hungry cosplaying children, no matter what age we are. It seems like the facile ridiculousness of the holiday has, in a way, helped to protect its soul.

I am convinced that the religious origins of Halloween go back at least to the ancient Orphists. The cult of Orpheus was one of many ancient Greek religions, and it might have been the predecessor of Pythagoreanism. If you have read or at least read a plot summary of The Argonauts and the Quest for the Golden Fleece, which you may start doing right now if you have not (you fucking philistine), then you remember Orpheus as the guy with that electric guitar. Pretend it was an electric guitar because, at the time, that was what it meant if you were the kind of person that went around with a lyre slung over your shoulder.

And Orpheus took out his mighty guitar, and as he stood boldly on Argo's bow, he began to blast magic power chords at the Sirens! For a while, Orpheus and the Sirens played together, and a shower of sparks flew between them! However, Orpheus played more excellently and more loudly than the Sirens, and the Sirens said, "You've outdone us, bro! We concede that you are excellent. Live excellently!"

*air guitars demonstratively*

Regardless of what parallels you find to your liking, it helps to keep in mind that this story was not always ancient history, but there was a time when it was fresh, new, and bold. It had never been done before as far as anybody knew, and there was no other story like it in human literature. It had not yet become a part of stodgy literary tradition, but it was controversial. Its champions had to fight for its acceptance.

Therefore, when I am trying to understand the hymns that were produced by the followers of the legendary hero Orpheus, I like to keep in mind that music was literally a part of these people's religion.

One of the finest of the Orphic hymns was the goddess Hecate, whom I regard as being sort of like the goddess of Halloween. She is both a spirit of the dead and the spirit of providing nurture to children. She is partly a goddess of the dead, but because the Orphists believed in reincarnation, they also believed that the spirits of the dead were coming to rejoin them again every year as newborn babies. Therefore, the Orphists did like to talk about the dead, but they also loved kids! After all, your kid might also be a revered ancestor if you are an Orphist. By the way, Hecate loved the colors orange and yellow, which she showed by wearing a saffron gown (specifically a type of gown called a peplon, which they made by folding over the top part of the garment to create an optical illusion that they were wearing a cute barely decent miniskirt or tunic while actually being clad a lot more modestly, so it was made to tease). The color saffron also might refer to the color that the leaves turned in mid-autumn. Furthermore, the Orphists loved music, and they therefore loved to dance. In my opinion, you therefore have all of the ingredients in there for one truly entertaining Halloween party.

Orphism was also a somewhat zooey religion in my opinion. The Orphists believed that you could be reincarnated as any species of animal, which is why the Orphists practiced vegetarianism. After all, if your grandpa had been nice enough to come back to you as a bull so that he could help you plow your fields, then maybe it's not very respectful to cook him and eat him. However, if they did believe that animals were people, then it could not have possibly made very much of a difference to them if you happened to be sleeping with a person that happened to be living one of their animal lives. Therefore, I would argue that at least some Orphists might have been zooey...zooey in the most benevolent sense where we respect our animal partners as much as we would respect any human being. The Orphists loved their dogs instensely, and they even argued that their dogs were listening to their bedtime prayers so that they could go and tell those prayers to Hecate when they went to join her in Heaven.

To me, the hymn to Hecate therefore comes across to me as both quaint and spiritually uplifting. I sing it with a sense of cheer and good humor because I suspect that this is how it was meant to be sung. The singer would have actually been expected to be a little tipsy but also just sober enough to be respectable at a party where there could also be small children present.

Now, here is the Reuchlinian transliteration of the ancient Greek hymn, but keep in mind that any transliteration must inherently be imperfectly. For instance, the "upsilon" is sometimes transliterated as a "v," but it is unlikely, from my point-of-view, that the Greeks used the labiodental fricative for the upsilon very often. I suspect that it might occasionally come across as a mixture between a bilabial fricative and a closed front-rounded vowel in some instances, but my suspicion is that if this ever did occur, then it would have been related to a paucity of surrounding consonantal sounds that thereby resulted in a stronger than usual closure. Therefore, I would still pronounce the "eu" diphthong as it is pronounced in "Europe" but merely allow greater bilabial vibration as some scholars might believe that the ancient Greeks did. Also, I think that someone writing ancient Greek hymns would have drawled out a diphthong exactly when doing so sounded good with music, so just like I think they probably did, I choose to take some artistic license with them when I am doing recitations.

Einodíïn Ækátin klíizoh, triodítin, ærannín, 1​

Crossroadwalker Hecate, I call you, forked-path-dweller radiant​

​

ouraníin, khthonían tæ, kai einalíin, krokópæplon,​

Sky, earth, both, and the sea, a flowing saffron gown
​

tymvidíin, psykhais nækýohn mǽta vakkhévousan,​

At funerals, spirits of our bodies celebrating as if with wine​

​

Pǽrseian, philǽrimon, agallomǽnin æláphisin,​

Daughter of Persis, you love solitude, whispering with deer​

​

nyktæríin, skylakítin, amaimákæton vasíleian, 5​

You love the night-time and puppy dogs, disarming Lady​

​

tavropólon, pandós kózmou kliidoukhon ánassan,​

Divine to all peoples of the world, you rein as their Empress​

​

iyæmónin, nýmphin, kourotróphon, ouræsiphítin,​

Commander of brides, children are fed plenty, Mountain Queen​

​

lissómænis kourin tælætais osíaisi pareinai​

Pray maiden, upon our rituals may your blessing fall​

​

voukólo evmænǽousan aei kækharióti thymó​

Our herdsmen be graced by you always coming to rejoice in our incense​

Now, some notes on how I choose to translate this and why:

The word agallomǽnin is one that I insist ought to be translated as "whispering." I am almost certain of this. For one thing, most surviving uses of the term are from early Christian literature, and the early Christians use it to mean "expressing joy." What I think they most likely meant was something more like being "dumbstruck." Another argument, which I think might or might not hold water, is that I suspect that it comes from the same origin as the Latin word gallus, which refers to shouting or crying out (like the Gauls that lived in the Alps and apparently liked to holler), and the negation of that would be "not shouting," which could mean "murmering" or "whispering" or otherwise talking secretively.

The word amaimákæton comes across to me as possibly referring to the negation of a word related to agon, which refers to "fighting" or "being prepared to fight." Therefore, I think that they are trying to suggest that Hecate is a disarming sort of person, which is a part of what gives her so much power when she chooses to use it. You don't resist her because she makes you not want to resist, sort of how puppydogs with their big, soft, soulful eyes can boss us around without them saying even a word.

Also, vasíleian is being translated to "Lady" in the capitalized aristocratic sense.

I choose to translate tavropólon as "divine" because I suspect that any reference to bulls might actually refer to the association between bulls and divinity in the ancient world. The Muslim word for the Judeo-Christian-Muslim god "Allah" really comes from El, which is derived from Aleph, which refers to "bull" or "ox," and this referred to divinity and also to supposedly divine kings.

The word vakkhévousan really strikes me as a reference to Bacchus, which would indicate that the Orphists were referring to the types of celebrations that were had with wine. These would have been occasions for much dancing and stomping of feet and clapping of hands, and I suspect that the cheap dates at occasions where this hymn was being sung would have been singing grievously and hilariously off-key. In other words, I think that the Orphists might have been people that did their funerals in a similar way to how they traditionally do in New Orleans, which is with a properly mournful affair that is followed by lot of singing, drumming, dancing, cosplay, and drunken antics.

I also choose to translate ouræsiphítin as "Mountain Queen" because mountains were very important in ancient Greece. They represented divinity, and they were associated with untouchable royalty. Mountains had both spiritual and political significance. I think that they would have envisioned a mysterious queen that rules from a mountaintop, and while many have never seen her, she is felt everywhere.

I also deviate in other ways from more official translations you will find, but I am not doing so out of ignorance. Instead, I am doing so out of somewhat educated disagreement, and I do not regard my own opinions as being above dispute or beyond reproach.

Anyhow, when you are dancing at a Halloween party with your pals on Zoom or Twitch or whatever app you are using for your safe socially distancing social needs, keep in mind that great Halloween parties might be an older idea than most people know, and they were always done for those of us that are kids or kids at heart.

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

I am about to teach you how to profile potential allies based on their personalities, based on the NEO-PI-R. I am going to LINK you to a list of the facets, here, but in case the link stops working, the information is available from JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT, 1995,64(1), 21-50.

NEO Facets Table

If you are a persecuted outgroup, I would caution against calling someone an "asshole" as insult. According to a study that I read about, based on the Dictator Game, you should really be afraid of people that are trying too hard to be nice (termed as "agreeable" in the game)...they apparently tend to only really be nice to people that are in their own kin-group, and they can even be quick to betray their allies (termed as "collaborators" in the game).

The study can be found inPersonality and Individual Differences Volume 51, Issue 3, August 2011, Pages 216-221, buuuuuuuut here is a link that might stay up for a while:

Altruism and the Dark Side of Agreeableness

After reading skeptics thoughts on the moral quality of the Big Five trait agreeableness, I began thinking and digging and here is what I’ve found. The construct of the trait certainly sugges…

staffanspersonalityblog.wordpress.com

The behavior of people possessed of agreeableness was an inverted U with a leftward slant, and what that means is that, according to the dictator game, people that had extremely unpleasant personalities again turned against outgroups, even compared with how they treated allies, so profoundly malicious bastards might actually take vicious delight in something like a witch-hunt led by fearful demagogues, possibly just for the predatory thrill of it, not because they themselves are fearful but BECAUSE THEY ARE EVIL. Super-low agreeableness is not really a good thing because it's an inverted U. Outright scum don't help anybody. In very small sub-mean doses, agreeableness is a good thing, but from there, it can turn quickly into tribalism.

In other words, you want to find someone that has a somewhat "dirty" personality but only to the extent that they can pass for "ugly but honest." Rascals can really be good friends if they are not in your kin group.

Neuroticism was also an inverted U, but it had a rightward slant, which means that people that tend to question themselves readily and tend to have a high degree of skepticism about THEMSELVES, including possible reservations about their appearance, tend to be oddly charitable toward non-kin groups, but this phenomenon reverses you get to the level I will call "unbridled self-loathing." In the Dictator Game, remember always that it's an "inverted U" trait, so a little bit of hand-wringing is a good sign if you are outside that person's kin-group. Just avoid people that routinely threaten to harm themselves because, once they start truly freaking out to a point of getting hysterical, they will turn against you. The kind of person that you are looking for is the mild hypochondriac that has a list of self-diagnosed mental illnesses, probably including bipolar disorder, but has never really had to be involuntarily committed and probably doesn't really need intensive psychiatric care. It can be adorable in small doses but should worry you if you find it coming in large and overwhelming doses.

However, traits that are possible good reasons to MAYBE try testing the waters with someone that is not in your kin-group are both conscientiousness and extroversion, and both of these traits are awesome.

On the surface, the "extroverted guy" sounds like the "agreeable guy," but...not really. The difference between an extroverted person and an agreeable person is that the extrovert is someone who is cheerful and confident and open to making new friends. People that are highly extroverted actually tend to play EXTREMELY well with people they deem as allies, "collaborators" in the study. They have brisk, chatty personalities, and they can be a little bit hyper. Unlike the agreeable person, they can be pushy, overbearing, and rude like that really friendly horse that also likes to nip and head-butt you.

Therefore, what would someone with high extroversion but moderately low agreeableness and moderately high neuroticism actually LOOK like?

*grins*

Barbara Streisand! Yes, Barbara Streisand can be a neurotic bitch, but she has a cheerfully outgoing temperament in spite of her slight neuroticism. This is why she's such a fag hag but also said some hilariously insensitive things about gay sex. She has three of the "good ally" personality traits going for her.

What Barbara Streisand might lack is high conscientiousness unless she also happens to live up to what she was talking about in her song, "Putting it Together," but she really sang that as a cover. If she took that to heart, then maybe she is in good ally territory. Nonetheless, "Putting it Together" is what the next good news trait is all about: conscientiousness matters, y'all!

A conscientious person is also a type of person that cares about keeping promises, sticking to agreements, and trying to stick to actual truth. The conscientious person, even if that person is a dick or maybe especially so, will acknowledge that it matters if you cited a peer-reviewed scientific journal that supports that what you are saying is actually valid. A conscientious person keeps a tidy workspace, IS EMPLOYED, shows up to things on time, and probably has a fat bank account and plenty of money in a well-diversified stock portfolio.

Conversely, someone that has an incredibly low level of consciousness might ALSO be willing to be an ally because this trait is a sort of right-side-up U that bottoms out in the middle. I would just caution against trying to make people with low conscientiousness into allies because they tend to be gossips. They tend to say things they did not mean to say. They do not keep secrets well. Bless their little pea-picking hearts, but low conscientiousness people can be douchebags, even if they don't mean to be. Do not be fooled by the fact that they seem like they are going to be good allies, at first: they are notoriously unreliable in every possible respect.

Let me list the traits and their facets, here with my notes:

IPIP	What to look for:
Neuroticism	Moderately above-mean
Anxiety	< -- Maybe more willing to question established norms or beliefs if anxious
Anger	< -- Probably a problematic trait
Depression	< -- Might be problematic in high doses
Self-Consciousness	< -- Might be more capable of introspection and examining the negative consequences of their own decision-making, even toward out-groups
Immoderation	< -- Might understand what it's like to feel overwhelming desires
Vulnerability	< -- More likely to ask for help from an ally
Extraversion	Extreme highs probably good
Friendliness	< -- A smile is usually a good sign
Gregariousness	< -- A high level of sociability, good sign
Assertiveness	< -- Someone that is willing to tell you their true opinion to your face, even if it is injurious to you, is good news. It's a good starting point for reasoning with someone, actually
Activity Level	< -- I can't see much use for it except if that person is actively helping an ally by spreading propaganda that supports that ally's cause, in which case, I welcome it
Excitement-Seeking	< -- Probably more likely than usual to see "dangerous" or "forbidden" things positively
Cheerfulness	< -- Unlikely to be easily influenced into pessimistic thinking patterns
Openness To Experience	Not found relevant in the study
Imagination	< -- Even though it was not pointed out in the study, I also think that it takes a certain amount of imagination to be able to think about a world where benevolent expressions of once altogether forbidden things are accepted
Artistic Interests	< -- Even though it was not pointed out in the study, I would WANT an ally on my side that makes really good music and art, to be honest
Emotionality	< -- Not sure where this fits
Adventurousness	< -- Come to think of it, I would actually be concerned about a taboo-seeker
Intellect	< -- Even though it was not in the study, I think that a person that has a higher than usual intellectual bent is more likely to be interested in knowing what a scientist has to say
Liberalism	< -- Remember, this is not the same as political "leftism," but it could refer to "libertarian" or "anarchist" leanings or any kind of anti-establishment thinking. I think that this one might actually be helpful for social outgroups, even though it was not in the study
Agreeableness	Look for moderately low
Trust	< -- I honestly prefer someone that is willing to approach me with a sense of skepticism at first, but I also feel positively toward people that grow on me over time. Someone that is immediately too trusting is troublesome...they tend to turn just as quickly, so I really like the slow-growing plant the best
Morality	< -- Someone that is skeptical about the authenticity of conventional morality is generally good news if you are a widely maligned social outgroup, but I have a few caveats, here: I think that honesty and truth really should matter as part of someone's moral compass.
Altruism	< -- I think that nothing is ever really free, not even really altruism. Gifts of money or even an excessive willingness to come and pay you a visit, even if they are supposed to be free, tend to come with strings attached. The strings tend to be an obligation to subscribe to the beliefs of their kin-group, and if you obviously do not subscribe to those beliefs, then you get rejected from potentially becoming a part of that kin-group, so there are always strings attached to any favor, even when you don't see them
Cooperation	< -- I think that people that have high levels of cooperation tend to be more likely to betray non-kin allies when their kin-group makes them believe they are expected to do so, and I therefore see this as a risky and treacherous trait. However, a little bit of pig-headedness and argumentativeness might be good...but an unwillingness for someone to face the truth even when confronted with a large amount of evidence is not so good, and I have no respect for a bad faith debater
Modesty	< -- I really don't trust people that are too modest. People that are too modest tend to be susceptible to group-think and tend to have too little willingness to contradict their kin-group. However, I again see this as a true "inverted U' trait because someone that is so narcissistic that they will not accept a truth that is outside their preconceived prejudices is bad news. If someone started out with a prejudice, then a time must come when they realize that they were indeed wrong and should change
Sympathy	< -- I think this can be a very dangerous trait, actually, because a person that is very tender-hearted toward perceived victims might also incorrectly perceive someone or something that you affect in your life as a victim and therefore might treat you as an enemy. On the other hand, I see how this could definitely be an "inverted U" trait because I would also hope that someone would eventually be sympathetic toward me once it was really proved that I deserved that sympathy, so complete heartlessness is still bad news
Conscientiousness	The extremes, but highs are better for you
Self-Efficacy	< -- I think that people that have high self-efficacy also tend to have a higher sense of self-confidence that they should and can think for themselves, so I think that this is a very positive trait; however, a low self-efficacy person might be easy to temporarily influence, but remember, they can be influenced the other way, too
Orderliness	< -- I think that someone that understands order will also be more prepared to read and understand legitimate peer-reviewed scientific research
Dutifulness	< -- In my opinion, someone that has a perceived sense of duty to follow the facts is really good news, and they are more likely to read a peer-reviewed scientific paper in its entirity before rendering an opinion
Achievement-Striving	< -- I think that a sense of ambition also tends to go with someone not really having enough time on their hands to harass people that are not really in the way of those ambitions
Self-Discipline	< -- Again, I want to hear that someone can read and understand a scientific study and comprehend what that study means, and self-discipline goes with the territory
Cautiousness	< -- I really would not trust someone that leaped to my side too quickly, and I would actually be comforted if that person wanted to spend more time getting to know me and understand my motives before committing to a point-of-view.

The notes above on individual facets are just my own observations about how I think that the typical "ally personality" tends to line up with how people behave in my practical experience.

I see the "inverted U" in many of these traits, and I think that the reason why we see that "inverted U" is that the ally personality is not a person that is genuinely low in ally traits but really just slower to express how they really feel. For example, let's take the trait of trust: someone that develops trust over time as a part of a long-term relationship that is a consequence of getting to know you and to understand your motives is actually very useful to you. That person eventually does trust you and trusts you deeply but only because you have proved yourself over time. It's not really a lack of the capacity for trust, but it's a need for you to prove that you deserve that trust. They are not going to trust you just because you superficially seem to have something in common with them, such as being a distant relative or having the same politics, but no matter who you are, your chance is as good as that of any jerk. No matter who you are, you have to prove yourself.

Honestly, I see now why J. Michael Bailey might be an ally, in the long-run. He is conscientious about reporting what he genuinely perceives as truth, and I think he is also just enough of an trouble-maker that he might take a certain amount of pranksterish delight in overturning the status quo. I think that some of the seemingly unpleasant aspects of his character really make him, in his way, a better person. You cannot tell people a truth they don't want to hear if you cannot bear to offend people, and it actually helps if you take an impish sense of delight in offending them. I am of the school of thought that thinks that being just a little bit of a trouble-maker can often help you do the right thing. People that are afraid to upset people don't tell the truth, and they often lie if it makes them come across as nice people: the one that tells the truth is the one that is also not afraid to offend you and might actually take some gleeful pleasure in baiting you "enough to make you think."

I think that there is promise in the usefulness of personality models for helping people like us zoophiles learn how to profile potential allies. It might not be a perfect heuristic because no heuristic is perfect, but I think that this kind of a model could help mitigate risk and save time.


Thank you again for listening to me carry on,
Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

Yesterday, I and some local zoos met up together, and we got along pretty nicely.

If you are planning on organizing local meet-ups, a helpful skill is to recognize that you are not going to be interested in all of the same things that other zoos are, but two other zoos will often have the same interests and find some common ground, which helps keep them coming to meet with you and hang out with you.

Two of my zooey friends are fascinated with firearms, which currently seem to be popular in the zooey community. Sometimes, I get asked why I don't want to have a gun in my life, and the answer is simple: they're just not me. Although I was exposed to more guns than I could ever want during my upbringing, they just never found their way into my identity. However, I was also glad that my two zooey friends hit it off so well, regardless of why.

To me, they may as well have both been interested in making homemade Slovenian dormouse stew, which would have held more interest for me because of my cat-like tendencies. Because of the fact that guns are such a politicized topic, I think that it's hard for some people to understand a sincere lack of interest in them, either way. The mainstream view is either, A) you must get one now before the government starts taking them away, hurry! or B) make them illegal now because people are dying, don't you realize this is serious?! I don't hold mainstream views on much of anything. That actually is a large part of my identity. Anytime that there is a big herd following for any given point-of-view and that I am only allowed to speak if I rubber-stamp that point-of-view, I feel that my individuality is being erased.

I really feel the same as a person that is on the transgender continuum.

By the way, I really am. I have experimented with HRT drugs and enjoyed them. Estradiol made me feel like a six-breasted eight-armed blue-skinned hermaphroditic god. I have found less costly herbal products that make me feel the same way, and I use them parsimoniously but routinely as a part of my lifestyle, ceasing use seasonally. At the dosage that I use, I am in substantially less danger than someone that uses kava root inappropriately, but it sure feels damn good. I like my reckless elective use of herbs as much as a gun-nut loves his AR-15. You will pry them out of my cold, stiff, dead fingers. I am a witch. Leave me to my cauldron, or I will turn you into a watch beetle.

I often feel that I am looked upon, within the transgender community, with askance because I am not afraid of scientific theories about transgender people that are not parallel with the mainstream transgender community's political narrative. There are many different things about me, not just the fact that I am on the transgender continuum, and one of those things about me is that I can read a peer-reviewed scientific periodical. At one point, I could make a graph based on an equation, and if I needed to, I could pull down Early Transcendentals off my bookshelf and do it again. What matters is not what the conclusions of a study say but how well the study was done. I do not ask a scientist to merely rubber-stamp a political message. Scientists do not want to study people that ask them for a mere rubber-stamp. The transgender community has therefore heavily set their cause back by attacking scientists for not merely giving them a rubber-stamp, and they have stampeded into a morass of self-defeating constructionist rhetoric. I am many things besides transgender. I will not give up my individuality just to be accepted by the rest of the transgender community. I am not that desperate for shallow bee-swarm acceptance.

I am a fearless person. This is why I am so good at my job. I am a kind of person that you can have faith will leap into the task of saving the life of a horse that is getting strangled to death in wire or who is seriously injured and needs to be led in to keep from getting more injured. Horses that get overexcited during rain storms will sometimes charge around their paddocks for several minutes while they figure out that the easiest way to get to the stable is to let me put a halter on them, which is a small detail about their lives that they eventually remember, and I will stand in the middle of them as they spray me with mud. Anybody else besides me would panic and try to jump out of the way, but this would just make the horses more nervous and thereby increase how long it took to get them to calm down and also increase the chances of an unfortunate incident. If you are working around excitable herd animals, then a cool head will literally save your life, and I am not even close to exaggerating. Unpredictable behavior around herd animals will get you killed, so being fearful does not really make you safer.

Fear itself really endangers you. This is why horses are so valuable as therapy animals: what you need to know in order to not get killed around them requires you to get over the very fear that can hold you back from getting well. I do not say "be fearless" to encourage you to behave recklessly, but I say "be fearless" to stop you from behaving recklessly. Recklessness itself is an expression of fear: it is the other side of the coin from paralysis, but the coin is made out of the same worthless pyrite. To learn what I mean by this, I suggest going to spend a while around horses under the instruction of somebody that teaches people about horses for a living. You are taught caution and patience but also to not be afraid. While soundly advised precautions and equine etiquette can help you to stay safe, fearful behavior around a horse can get you seriously hurt.

I am not afraid of people that have interests that I have not even thought about before. I have got other zooey friends that are enthusiastic about off-road adventures, and one of them owns a jeep that can literally crawl up the side of a mountain. One of my other friends lives out of an RV, loves the RV lifestyle, and deliberately stays in a job that keeps him traveling so that he can see more of the country.

I also have another local zooey friend who is on the transgender continuum like me.

I am finding a rich diversity of different kinds of people among those members of the zooey community that are willing to come out and see me and other zoos, and the one thing that they have in common that makes me intensely like them is that these are people that are not motivated based on fear.

Here are Roosevelt's original words about fear, speaking from the standpoint of someone that was also a survivor of the polio epidemic that had left the majority of those that had been infected with the disease unwilling to even try anymore to advance themselves:

"So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days."​

​

FDR was influenced to an extreme by his experience of living with the lifelong paralysis and infirmity that was caused by his experience with polio. He had seen other survivors whither away and die early, tragic deaths because they had just given up. He saw how a creature that has given itself over to fear dies first on the inside and then withers slowly away on the outside..

My local friends are meeting together Platonically as neighbors, and if you were to hear our conversations together in the public places where we meet, you would not know that we were zoophiles. We do not need to talk very much about the fact that we are zoophiles. This is something we already know we have in common. This is established. We want to know whatever else there is to know about each other because meetings between people that could become new friends are about a lust for new knowledge about each other. You can literally drop in and not be known by anyone around you to be a zoo.

A community cannot be tied together by only one common thread, but it must be tied together by many that support that central thread. A community cannot tie itself into society based on a single thread, but it must be tied into society based on many other threads that bind it into the wider mesh of society.

Because of that need, though, you must not be afraid of people that are not always interested in only the same things as yourself. Instead, be glad if they can find common ground between each other. Bringing a community together takes an open mind and a willingness to get to know many different kinds of people that may have a broad spectrum of different interests, views, and elements about themselves.

The community is coming slowly together. Our diversity is our strength.


Your fearless zooey blogger,
Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

This is the blog that is dated for Sunday and actually released on Wednesday. Let me tell you why: I know myself too well. As soon as I start moving official release dates around, it goes downhill from there, and it's a crapshoot if I'll ever release one again.

This past weekend, though, I got to hang out with one of the zooey community's leaders, a gray-muzzle from way back when the only in-person meet-ups going on happened in SoCal, and a local zoo that is turning out to be a very warm and pleasant human being, and I found out that kengals really do smell almost exactly like buttered popcorn. I am now a raving fan of the kengal breed.

My local zoos are getting a lot more interested in coming out to events. It's been a long journey to spark off the initial interest, but I think that, once we have had our first handful of get-togethers and cook-outs, we might be able to work on establishing a biweekly sort of event. Before you get any imaginative sorts of hopes up, it's completely platonic, and we hardly talk about zoo at all. The idea behind the group is one of common identity and getting to know each other as people. A fellow zoo is not necessarily a better person to know than any other stranger, but we are not worse, either.

We have a vested interest in getting to know each other just based on the fact that we are fellow zoos, though, because you are living in a society that wants to force upon you a narrative of what kind of person you are if you are a zoophile, which acts as a sort of gaslight because you have nothing in your life that clearly contradicts that narrative, and while you might suspect deep in your guts that you can't possibly be the only zoophile that is not really like that, the anxiety stays with you until you have seen for yourself how false that narrative really is. Therefore, maybe your fellow zoo is not inherently a better person to have in your life than any other stranger, but no matter how imperfect that stranger is, that stranger can help you to slay that beast in you that causes you to doubt even your own sanity.

This does not mean that zoophiles should be the only people in your life because that would defeat the purpose. To really defeat the idea that zoophiles are really all that different from other people, you need reference points. An art class, a shooting club, a yoga group, a vegetarian organization, a potluck, a jogging group, all of these different kinds of things can link you with other human beings for different reasons. Be social. Learn what kinds of people your fellow human beings are.

Society between people that are linked by common threads is one of the pillars of democracy, and all of those threads together, interlocking and intermingled, are what build up the community fabric of the kind of nation that can stand up against the kind of tyranny and ochlocracy that would divide us against ourselves. Even though these common threads seem like they are only a small part of us, those small threads are really all that we are made of.

Our local community is finally starting to take off, though, and I am excited for the future.


Your zooey neighbor who turns out to be just as quirky and deranged as everyone else,
Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

Again, late, but I had a good reason. I always do, but you might care about this one. Over the weekend, I was trying to finish playing my role in getting out the latest episode of Zooier Than Thou!

Even though I myself am non-binary, I do not think that I will ever understand most of the transgender community, and maybe the reason why is that I have always hanged out in online communities that were just naturally positive toward transgender and non-binary people. Furries but not just any furries, the educated sci-fi-addicted mildly anarchist computer programmers that hanged out on IRC in the 1990's.

In my experience with online communities, I have mostly encountered people that were either generally friendly toward my hermaphroditic character or attracted to hir. I never once ran into somebody that challenged me on the fact that my character was non-binary. It was always like this was something that just was. It was never discussed or questioned. It was like people like me had always existed from when the world was born, and it was just as natural for me to be as I was as it would have been to be either binary sex. I never felt like I had to be anything special, but I just had to be me in the raw, natural, unprocessed, rBST-free, proudly made with GMO. It was always a relaxed, very natural part of my life.

However, I guess that being spoiled in this way has left me unprepared for dealing with the fact that transgender people are controversial in most of human society.

I just cannot understand why, though. It just does not make sense. I have been in communities where being gender non-binary was a natural, accepted part of life. It is easy. It is fluid. It is oddly uninteresting, really. When a community gets it right, then being gender non-binary is not something that divides your attention, but it's boring. It fades into the background. It's just a part of how you live, just like it's a part of how you live that your accelerator and brake in your car are usually foot-operated: they did not have to be, but they are. You just accept it the way it is because you have better things to do than argue with the manufacturer. You have to get to work. You have a girlfriend or wife and things to get done. You have a life. Arguing about how things in your life are made is not something that you have time for.

All of this talk that makes being gender-nonconforming sound complicated really does not make all that much sense to me, and it is really outside my experience.

What is not being said in the podcast, which I believe now that I should have said, is that dealing with this subject is really easy. It is really easier than falling out of your bed.

You just take people at face value. A child can do it.


Thank you again for sticking with me,
Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

Something I want to talk to you all about is a phenomenon called "autogynephilia." This term can be upsetting to many transgender people, but it's not their fault. This still needs to be corrected.

The term "autogynephilia" has frequently been weaponized against transgender people to try to drive a narrative that transgender people are "sexual perverts," and this narrative has even been used to justify anti-transgender legislation. The word has been woven into the myth that transgender women are really just perverted heterosexual men that get off on dressing in women's clothing, and the actual existence of some people that appear to fit this description has been used to drive closed-minded women to a sense of alarm or even to witch-hunt hysteria.

However, autogynephilia is a real aspect of the human condition, and in scientific studies, it has been associated with lower thalamic volume, putamental structural differences, and higher gray matter volumes in the right angular gyrus, the frontal portion of the superior temporal gyrus, and the inferior frontal cortex. You would find this corroborated by Ivanka Savic, Stefan Arver, Sex Dimorphism of the Brain in Male-to-Female Transsexuals, Cerebral Cortex, Volume 21, Issue 11, November 2011, Pages 2525–2533. Therefore, such people do exist, and the way that their brains look on scans is observably different.

The causes behind autogynephilia are absolutely different from what causes someone feeling, desperately, like one is in the body of the wrong sex, which is more closely related to the development of the right fronto-occipital tract as measured by fractional anisotropy. This is discussed in more detail in Burke, S.M., Manzouri, A.H. & Savic, I. Structural connections in the brain in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation. Sci Rep 7, 17954 (2017). Nevertheless, even though it is a different experience, there is no justification I can think of for treating autogynephilia as a less valid experience.

Most transgender people are terrified of the idea that autogynephiles exist, and almost everybody else regards them as either ridiculous or threatening. Everybody that does not ridicule them is afraid of them in either one way or the other. They only have allies among the transgender community if they stay in the closet about how they really feel inside, and while the transgender community tolerates them as long as they remain silent, they know that the transgender community is really embarrassed of them and quietly resents them.

Does this sound a little bit like your experience of being a zoophile in communities that looked, on the surface, like they just might accept you because, on the surface, they looked thematically similar? Younger zoophiles might have found that furries will quitely tolerate their existence as long as they remain invisible and as long as they submissively tolerate the public erasure of them by the furry community. However, they eventually find that their very safety really depends upon them remaining invisible.

I think the zooey community should try to be welcoming toward all transgender people, but most particularly, I think that we ought to take the lead on honoring autogynephilia as a unique and benevolent sexuality that helps to enrich the diversity and beauty of all human sexuality, just as zoophilia does.

I think that we and other marginalized sexualities ought to stick together.


Thank you for sticking with me,
Sigma