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.