So part of the significance of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is how our society has responded to it, and for a truly deep dive (that I’m in the process of going through, myself), check out the Lolita Podcast by Jamie Loftus which begins with the story of how Daniel Handler (that is Lemony Snicket) suggested Lolita to Jamie when she was still a kid looking for book recommendations.

Also as noted by Jamie, both the 1967 Stanley Kubrick film adaptation and the 1997 Adrian Lyne adaptation portray the story with Humbert Humbert as a sympathetic character (with James Mason and Jeremy Irons playing Humbert, respectively.)

So yeah, the story simultaneously invites the reader to walk a razor’s edge between sympathizing with a child predator and watching the story unfold the way one looks at an automotive collision, watching a monster deeply past the moral event horizon justifying his behavior.

Lolita doesn’t play out as a love story. Delores isn’t precocious or mature nor is she mentally equipped for an adult relationship, and yet Humbert insists his pursuit of Delores is proper and justified, despite not only Delores’ age and minor status, but also the power relationship, with Humbert the legal guardian of Delores. The story is psychological horror.

And the story plays out showing in older Delores the psychological consequences of child sexual abuse. This is not a story of a May / December couple in love living happily ever after. Despite Lolita being described as an Erotic Novel by critics and literary indexes.

But then, in the 1980s, one in three American women surveyed were victims of child sexual abuse. Also in 1987 Suzanne Vega put out the song Luka highlighting a long standing culture that whatever happens in your house is none of my business (🐸☕), and before the Satanic Panic and the SRA scares, CSA was not an oft-prosecuted crime (it was assumed incest laws covered them) and the believe was kids who were victimized not by drunken daddy were instead victimized by strangers in white vans offering candy (rather than say, John Wayne Gacy, who held frequent neighborhood barbecues, or the coach of girls’ physical education). Only in the 1990s and the new century have we taken CSA and human trafficking of children seriously, and then, not very, considering how some US states are letting kids work in hazardous conditions and letting children marry. So it doesn’t really surprise me that Lolita is thought of as romantic or erotic even when it is the testimony of an abuser.

Sexy times are not for everyone, I admit.

Queer is forever.

But I do like this:

Vlad is the one with the beard.

I only smile in the dark
My only comfort is the night gone black
I didn’t accidentally tell you that
I’m only happy when it rains
– Garbage

This to me, feels like a cute proposition for sex (as in getting freaky).

If there are higher dimensions, say the extra seven asserted by String Theory, then we have breadth (thickness?) along each axis that is non zero. The higher-order string theory dimensions (which communicate particle information like gravity) are tightly rolled up.

Brian Greene uses the metaphore of an ant on a wire who can move along the wire freely, but can’t go far laterally. They may be so small that our quantum bits can’t drift anywhere, so our liver doesn’t abandon us drift along a high-level axis.

If there are flat higher level dimensions, then either a force or some kind of membrane would have to exist to keep our blood from leaking.

That said, when we have pure elements, or even pure minerals or chemicals, they retain the same density (mass to volume, sometimes affected by temperature) which suggests nothing is hiding away in other dimensions whenever we take measurements. If there is room along higher axes for unseen activity, it doesnt bug us enough to work out consistent properties.

I remember uneven wealth distribution was a bad thing even in pro-capitalism Economics 101 (macroeconomics), like this is the thing that will collapse your economy and cause death, disasters without response and eventually popular uprising.

FOX NEWS has, for decades now, been showing us our oligarchs don’t care.

For most of us (like around 88% of the US population) you’re closer to being homeless than you are to ever owning a home even a crappy apartment in the waste shadow of an industrial zone.

None of the girls were willing to be the one that wore green lipstick.

That’s why cat ears are mandatory when you’re computer hacking.

So far! no-one has ever died from loaded halloween candy. (The few incidents have all been inside jobs, like a parent poisoning their own kid).

The fentanyl candy scare came from brightly colored Oxy tabs that looked like packed-powder candy such as Sweetarts. It was a non-issue, but made for a scare piece to frighten conservative people who believe in teen rainbow parties.

So my take is I should put a Croc on my dog’s head and will be enlightened?

Is the guy in the second panel Quasimodo?

To be fair, Jesus’ message (some of it, scripture is not univocal) is that divine power is within the grasp of us mere mortals. That everyone who follows him would be able to do miracles like his.

(Apologists suggest he was referring to just the apostles to explain why the rest of us are bound by naturalism, but there are implications that’s not what he meant.)

Note that Gospel Jesus was big on direct evidence.

That said, the cross was made of wood, and Jesus wasn’t the only convict tasked with carrying one. The gravity is in being willing to die for one’s principles which all of these characters would do unflinchingly.

This is why you have to run when you find a goose among your ducks.

I thought up Goose as a superhero for a street level setting, essentially she’s a tough scrapper, easy to underestimate, and is really good at blending into crowds or workstaff. Mistique without the mutant shapechangey stuff.

I assumed I was already being spit-roasted.

Inside me are two ranchers. I’m still trying to figure out a viable configuration for a third.

To me, Sea Lions are cute and have a tendency in San Francisco to block rich people from their fancy boats by coming en mass to warm themselves on the gangways.

So even though I can’t pet them (it’s illegal and they will fuck a man up) i have nothing but love for sea lions.

We need to make a society where people cannot wield that much power over others.

The problem is we haven’t figured out the how, even how we move in that direction from here. As a species we made a faustian bargain twenty five thousand years ago when we started experimenting with agriculture. We migrated less, then not at all. Not everyone had to be a hunter/gatherer, and we could specialize. Societies went from dozens to hundreds to tens of thousands to hundreds of millions far faster than our capacity to govern ourselves, so authoritarianism – government by force – became then norm. And when the common proletariat were tired of abuse and distrusted the promise of heaven, they the ownership class fed them promises of upward mobility.

Now there isn’t a future we could depend on. Curiously, our industrialist plutocrats are not even interested in the future of their own children, driven to feed their greed the same way a brown warbler is driven to feed a cuckoo chick that co-opted its nest. (I suspect it is, in fact, a fixed action pattern from an instinct of assuming hard times are perpetually imminent). And that greed, what informs the tragedy of the commons, will destroy our societies as we know them, and may well be the great filter we fail to navigate.

But I totally agree with you that rushing to war is no solution. In fact, I am in the choir.

I just don’t know what is the solution, and while mutual aid organizations work in that direction they do so very slowly, and US law enforcement is already catching on and seeking to disrupt those efforts. The US may not last a year before descending into one-party autocracy, and we’re already evacuating islands in Panama from sea level rise. And the world is noticing record heatwaves aren’t waiting until July, but hitting in June.

My point was descriptive: I’ve noticed the dialog is changing as per Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. I’ve noticed content creators and pundits who’ve been notoriously more cautious talk more about how we really are running out of time and non-violent options, and it really does appear that our industrialist masters plan to keep on making life worse for the working class, and are trying to actively push non-workers out into the summer heat.

It’s not mine to say. I watched in Iran, fascinated how the death of Masha Amini by morality police brutality brought men out shouting and tipping Imam covers, and women came out without hijab unwilling to take it any longer. When the fundamentalists insisted, news started talking of Molotov cocktails and massacres of gunfire (and notably, a phase when the hardliners were poison-gassing girls’ schools, which I can’t understand how they imagined that was a good look.)

I have no illusions that violence is a solution. Typically violence leads to a string of brutal autocracies until everyone left is close to someone who died in conflict, and elections and public serving policy are just a means of preventing the next outbreak. But I’ve also notice the ownership class pushes unrelentingly, and violence goes from being unthinkable to being inevitable inside an hour. So it may be a fixed action pattern.

I remember a description of suicide as being like victims of tower fires who jump to their death because the alternative was burning to death. And I wonder if that is when the people are going to erupt into pogroms and massacres, when the choice is between doing that, or watching our kids die, whether shoved, hungry into the freezing cold, or packed onto the cattle trains.

It doesn’t matter which. That does seem to be the way we’re headed, whether this election season or when the global food supply infrastructure collapses.