Two amazing essays, thank you....

...SR, I veer between intense identification (shaking my fist and shouting yes! and I mean that literally) and vehement dissent (you can't mean that!). I did not see a reaction from kit. I of course was not around at the time, and I don't know his history. Have you and he ever tried to work out a set of principles on which you agree? I suspect I, and perhaps others, would find that an interesting project. I think the term ideology deserves the prominence you give it. I approach political issues (including boylove) from a Buddhist perspective, and my understanding of ideology and how it works is much influenced by Tom Pepper. Pepper's essay in a book called Cruel Theory / Sublime Practice, a product of a critique of Western Buddhism mounted by a small group of scholars under the rubric of Speculative Non-Buddhism, interrogates ideology (via Althusser and Badiou) and concludes: The mind is not in the brain but in systems of symbolic communication, which must always take place between multiple individuals. (56) This is a formulation that truly challenges any ideology -- whether liberal feminist or, I might suggest, capitalist -- a "key tenant" of which is, as you put it so incisively, "absolute individual autonomy." hugzu ;-p