Welcome to Dudely House

First Thoughts

nothing he believes about himself, good or bad, can possibly be legitimate

...

The important thing is, you talked to us about it. And you always can, you know

Greaves does a great job of using detail sparingly in here. When I see folks talking about Dorley online, they're usually reacting really personally to something in the book that they relate to, which is incidentally one of the great parts about writing this all up so far. But I didn't realize it was going to be such well constructed prose because people don't mention that part.

I really like the dramatic irony that Greaves is using, I like the way she's lightly torturing Christine, I like her characterization of these people quite a lot, and I think it's a great twist that the murderer is like, the least shitty dude in the basement.

Honestly Martin and Christine have a fair amount in common - one accidental fuckup of tremendous proportions and they're both secondary characters in The Sisters of Dorley.

This had a little less of a cliffhanger for me, but I suspect that's partially due to the "Don't feminize me until I've had my coffee" logo at the top of the page. We're set up to expect and root for Stef to cross the threshold, after the call to adventure took her personal autonomy from her and dragged her into the hero's journey, so we get what we want

I think I'll probably be slipping on my schedule, or else writing follow-ups to these chapter posts. I know I'll have more to say about chapter 5 after the morning run, but I don't have time to think about it right now.

Recap

The Cuckoo's Nest

First off, we get another Stef vignette.

Stef meets the other inmates, who are a probably a pretty decent slice of young manhood (might've missed some, it's been a long day):

Will ("woke jail")
Aaron (probably an incel?)
Adam (Westboro)
Martin (the drunk driver)
Raph (a womanizer, in the more traditional sense of the term)

Turtles all the Way Down

We learn a bit about Christine's familial dysfunction - some kind of abuse, some antipathy towards her mother for staying.

We hear about Grandmother, who is, allegedly, the founder. The names here are great stuff -- that crunching sound is popcorn.

Pippa struggles with her immediate affinity for Stef. That anger recalls Christine's own memories of deep anger living as a boy. Maybe that's why Christine worried about Pippa as a sponsor?

Anyway, Pippa has a really good bit of empathy in the moment after her outburst:

It was like… you ever make a joke that’s in questionable taste, like a dead baby joke or something, and then it turns out someone in the room had a miscarriage, and they’re trying to hide it but you can tell they’re really genuinely upset, and you feel like the worst person in the world? It was like that.

What a good metaphor for what Stef must've been going through in that moment. I wonder if the methods Dorley House has for breaking down resistance will be flatly redundant or actively counterproductive with someone who's already somewhat sympathetic to the core concept.

2019-10-15

Jesus Christ, Christine really did do something unconscionable to Stef.

There's this thing in eipstemology called a Gettier Problem. The canonical one is, a person sees the image of a barn on a hill. In fact, what they see is merely an image of a barn, a fake barn. But, there's a barn behind the fake barn.

The question is, "does the person know that there is a barn on the hill?" And that's an avenue of critique to the idea that knowledge is Justified True Belief.

So Christine is in a moral Gettier case. Now, that presupposes the possibility of moral knowledge, but I'm comfortable so doing; YMMV. I'm also bringing my own epistemic bias to this, and maybe over-concerned with Chrstine's immortal soul, but bear with me

Mercifully Brief Aside About Gettier Cases

Gettier cases are underspecified
The person does not know that there is a barn on the hill, and if you asked them a specific enough question you would know that they didn't know.
They are justified in a related false belief that there is a barn on the hill

Was Christine justified in bringing Stef here?

Absofuckinglutely not.

This was an act of pretty clearly premeditated selfishness with a lot of almost necessarily contingent cruelty.

Was it true that Christine should bring Stef here?

Yeah, it seems like it?

Stef isn't wealthy, isn't in an obviously supportive family for a trans person. She will, by the time she graduates, have some kind of compound Germano-Psycho-Linguistics career, and that has opportunities that go with it in some of the less TERF-y jurisdictions in the EU as I understand it, but immigration is difficult.

I don't know much about the Republic of Ireland on trans issues, but in any case "get into Trinity for grad school" is perhaps not a great life plan.

Since we're just talking about truth, not justification, I think we can discount the idea that Stef would washout, given what we know about her.

So, Stef will be able to achieve her self-determination as a result of Christine's terrible decisionmaking. The doubt I have is more around the grimness of the program and what it might do to a genuine innocent.

Did Christine think it was Right to Bring Stef Here?

Doesn't seem like it. Mistakes leading to one thousand mistakes, in roughly her words.

That all Said

Of course, Stef does want to stay, at the end of the chapter.

Good Men Don't End Up Here

I like the menagerie of shitheads that Greaves gives us and also the irony of "Good men don't end up here," especially for Stef.

Obviously Stef isn't a good man, because she's not a man, and hated living as a man.

I'll be curious to see what Will did to be here. I might've missed it ("One Chapter per Day" he said, like a dolt,) so I apologize if so. Calling it "Woke Jail" is genuinely a little funny, and I wonder if he's just a broccoli-haired little gym twerp, or if he did something darker.

Similarly, I'm surprised that Martin is an inmate. I was kind of surprised that Greaves included a man dying a martyr, which is sort of the highest pursuit for manhood per yesterday's _Hedgehog Review. I get a spidey-sense that there's some subtext I'm missing there - is alcoholism a trope for people before they transition?

I hope to Christ that you're supposed to hate Aaron, because otherwise I'm so without a compass that I don't know anything about anything. "Stacy"s is just such a loser thing to say with your actual meat-machine-mouth. As is "paragon points", frankly. And yet, if he's just a hateful little shit, than his social violence might not amount to much in comparison to these cheaters, womanizers, abusers.

Raph I get being here, naturally. I think a lot of people go through a free love phase that basically amounts to a total emotional recklessness and willfull negligence towards their obligations to their sexual partners. I don't know if these are each supposed to be illustrating "this is a kind of closeted trans person," but Raph is definitely a kind of guy. I'll say, not necessarily a permanent kind of guy, I think people tend to get a few scratches and bruieses of their own and stop being horrible along that dimension.

Stray Thoughts

Reject the Mean Speed Theorem, Return to Sun Dial

ISO8601 is the only morally acceptable way to refer to a date.

Bland Men

It's interesting how little the men's appearances come into play except in the vageuest terms here. I wonder if that represents Stef's alienation from (at least these) men, or something about the masculine-default that so much of our language has?