06 December 2016

End of a blog

During the time I was recovering from surgery, and fixated on the coming election, one of the most interesting blogs on my reading list came to an end -- Faye Kane's Mating Instinct.  Her last entry there, a final comment, was posted September 25.  Her reason for giving up blogging was deteriorating eyesight, which made typing ever more difficult.  She had actually announced the end some time earlier, but had kept coming back to address reader comments.

Faye Kane is probably the most unusual and difficult-to-assess personality I've encountered in the blogosphere.  By her own account she is autistic and cannot feel, or empathize with, some conventional emotions -- making the experience of dealing with "normal" people generally unpleasant.  She is highly intelligent, and knowledgeable about several technical subjects, notably astrophysics.  Some of her views on sexuality and race are not only shocking and disturbing, but at odds with scientific reality.  But she often had unusual insights and expressed uncomfortable truths with savage honesty.  Sometimes she came up with ideas I wouldn't find elsewhere and couldn't have thought of on my own, and that's one of the things I most value in a writer.

She developed a sort of metaphorical quasi-religion using the black monolith from the film 2001 to represent the evolutionary process which has made the modern human a tangle of thrilling but dangerous instincts ridden by an inadequate and flickering intelligence.  A few examples of her posts:

On how things fail, using the Titanic as an example.

On rules for life.

On aging and evolution, and what the end might look like.

On the evil of unregulated capitalism.

The further back into the past you go, the worse things get.

To her state's Republican Governor who rejected the Obamacare Medicaid expansion.

"Life never ends.  It just doesn't stay in one person very long."

On what went wrong with the left, originally posted at Daily Kos, which got her banned there.

Pwning a prude's book review on Amazon.

On the Cuban missile crisis.

On the Republican party and its strategy since the 1990s.

Pwning a religious nut.

The blog is now locked but still exists with years' worth of material, sometimes disquieting, never uninteresting.

I hope she eventually finds treatment for her eyesight, even if none is available right now.

6 Comments:

Blogger Kevin Robbins said...

She had some very interesting posts. It's tragic that she won't be able to continue. I'll join you in wishing for a cure for her blindness.

She's more mavericky than McCain could ever hope to be.

06 December, 2016 10:10  
Anonymous NickM said...

I have clicked over to Faye and she is interesting but... I do find A C Clarke's quasi-religious stuff pants. I always have done. Yes, it is true that any tech so far ahead is effectively magic - of course it is. That is the point. It is a statement of the obvious. It is one of the reasons (sort of) I get grief from lots of people for not being an atheist. I take this Lenovo back a hundred Years and it's the Divil's magic picture box. It is though tragic that tech advances so unevenly so as to not sort her eyes even if it means I can do x,y or z that my father (73 and admittedly a technophobe) can't imagine. Scary isn't it? But then being scared is good. That is why I got into science. If the future doesn't scare you it ain't that futuristic really. Or cool. Also, I guess, if you are not scared (thrilled?) are you the best person to comment? Bravery cannot exist without fear.

07 December, 2016 09:52  
Blogger Infidel753 said...

Kevin: She's one of a kind. I'm glad all the past material she wrote is still there.

Nick: I think her view of the monolith is basically just a metaphor for evolution, rather different from Clarke's ideas. As for future technology, I've never been afraid of it -- I'm afraid of it not arriving fast enough.

07 December, 2016 17:44  
Anonymous nonnie9999 said...

Thanks for the link, infidel. I read a few of her posts, and she is very insightful. I will have to read more when I have more time.

One of her pictures she used to illustrate one of her posts inspired me to dust off Photoshop. Hope you will stop by.

08 December, 2016 19:49  
Anonymous Felicien said...

I too was very sad to see her go - she had been a weird corner of the blogosphere under several iterations for decades. I don't think it mattered that lots of her ideas were completely off the wall and many obviously just plain wrong. She waved her prejudices around for all to see and they sometmes revealed all sorts of psychological insights - I was never sure how much of her relational problems were a result of autism and how much from simply having a completely messed up upbringing. The internet is duller without her - we need more ecccentrics like that.

05 January, 2017 01:15  
Blogger jim said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

23 April, 2017 23:36  

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