Actual anthropology, yet another minor function of the functioning harem.

It all started with her asking me "why would they make a toaster with a cancel button ?"

Because indeed, the toaster has a cancel button on it, and because indeed her training makes her mind free to wander, and to inquire, and to follow things to their conclusion, and to thereby gain and improve and... you may say it's remarkable that lifetime slavery is the necessary ingredient of freedom. Such notions are the necessary byproduct of your never having considered the matter at all, because if you stop and think about it a moment it readily comes into focus as the obvious necessity it always was.

I tended to my soupⁱ and she continued, "Apparently toasting bread is an anxious activity for most people these days..."

It's not, said I, there to cancel anything, you realise. It's there to assuage the hallucinatory worldview of the contemporary moron, these schmucks that go about trying to pretend as if whether "they signed up for this" matters in the slightest. They constructed this conceptually broken image of the world where things can be "cancelled", unhappened, and the button is there to make the toaster mentally digestible to them. How bad can it be, right ? Yes it's an actual, physical, pussy-grabbing, bullying, animal torturing, women hating, non-queer and cis-binary toaster, it's true... but at least it has a cancel button. It's somewhat app-aware, it's the next best thing to it having a "Code of Conduct" affixed. The amusing part in all of this being that there's entirely no difference between these idiots and any other cultish clique. They herp and hurr about "rational" and "scientific", but when push comes to shove the muslim's "ins'allah" stamped toaster is entirely the same item as the fundamentalist xtian's toaster built with a sin forgiving button, or the calvinist xtian's toaster with its "cancel" buttonⁱⁱ that doesn't cancel anything.

She was evidently very impressed at all this interesting new learning, because yes, that's a large part of why my presence is entirely irresistible -- there's this something, like a wind blowing around me, that tends to re-arrange the everything into fascinatingly ordered shapes and structures. Most thinking people find it irresistible ; and because I like her I took the trouble to even go on a furthering detour.

This is why, said I, people like Boas are so thoroughly ridiculous and entirely outside any possible scholarship : they say patent nonsense like "In some cases I can guess what is wrong but I had rather have you correct it than use my own uncertain knowledge of Kwakiutl", and in general defer to the participants of a culture as if those were somehow better informed, or in a better position to understand their own participation or the thing they're participating to. This is absolutely wrong and strictly ridiculous, endless generations of the morons that produced the toaster with the cancel button could have looked upon it as a "toaster" rather than understand, and certainly rather than say "look at us morons, we're making amen toasters now!" Understanding is strictly the empire of the understander, who is generally the powerful, the structured, the priviledged, and generally not the experienced. Certainly nude experience puts the experiencer in no better position whatsoever than he was before having it, which is why the "you could never understand for not having been there" nonsense so regularly spews out of the sort of mentally nil mammies that manage to navigate through their own history like ducks through water, without getting in the slightest wet of it ; whereas scholarship puts the scholar in the position of understanding abundant classes of experiences he's never had, which is why subatomic physics and gedankenexperiments are a thingⁱⁱⁱ.

You see ?

Do you ?

What do you see ?

1. Which she had made, through the process of attempting to copy something we had at a restaurant -- except with her own hands (that I own) in her own kitchen (that I own), using for one thing our own ingredients (which she buys by intricate criteria I have instilled, starting many years ago with an absolute ban on buying anything she's not personally seen me buy and refined over the years to a deep, subtle understanding of what may be eaten and what's not fit for being in my house) and (more importantly) using sane processes that she similarly acquired. This had the remarkable (but, through insistent recurrence in practice, unsurprising) result of producing such a delicious copy that not only it far outstrips any merits of the original but also costs the restaurant its direct driver of business. Once she's done copying what we liked we still go there by pity as it were. We condescend to go even though we could really make it better at home. What can you do ? [↩]
2. 'Cause they're "moderate", see, the calvinists, in the specific sense of doing things halfway. Can't even get a proper sin forgiving button put in, they're so dedicated to pretending they're not religious fuckwits they miss out on all the robes, chanting and incense and gain ~nothing for all their trouble. [↩]
3. A thing the mammies haet. [↩]