Oana Mateescu: The Romanian family referendum: Or, how I became a sexo-Marxist

This is my day not to read the news, since all the forces in play in the election in the U.S. are now immovably set, and there is nothing I can do but stress. I learned my lesson in 2016, when I kept assuring A. that there was no way Donald Trump was winning, since at the last minute vote counts would adjust to what everybody knew. That was a year after, I believe, I grandly predicted that Brexit was a flash in the pan, no way the UK was going to break away from the EU. So my predictor of what the masses - at least the masses of voters - will decide is somewhat out of synch with what they, after being sorted out by racist laws and administrators who go the extra mile to preserve Jim Crow, decide. And as to the Jim Crow, the lack of urgency on this issue by the Democratic party is an astonishment that -- I won't go on about.

Rather, today I am going to read analyses of the Romanian referendum on marriage. I was unaware that rightwing groups - the usual drooling orthodox churches, the evangelicals, the fascists - had worked long and hard, in conjunction with the ruling party, to put the anti-gay legislation to a vote. I was heartened that they lost, since less than 30 percent voted. I was also heartened that the new denigratory term in Romania is Sexo-Marxism - that is, any questioning of the "natural" Christian order. This long reort by Oana Mateescu is definitely worth a read. Lately, I've been reading Jeff Love's book about Alexandre Kojeve, The Black Circle, and thinking about Kojeve's crazy view of History as a sort of real force, which closes on itself at some point (after Jena? After Stalin?) and leaves us all outside of history - in post-history. I'm going to review that book for Willett's. Though I don't agree with it, the Viconian idea of historical cycles has always fascinated me. If we are in a cycle now, it is hard not to think that it is a vast cycle of imbecility, in which we - that is, a goodly number of human beings - have deliberately turned against what we know, or have learned, in every field, from the humanities to the hardcore sciences. This hypothesis depends, however, on a silly assumption - that to know is a listing function, so that x becomes the object known, in no relation to y, another object known, and so on. Epistemic listing is a misleading way of accounting for that always philosophical modal verb, to know. Still, to remain with this pov for a second, one of the great beliefs of the liberal era was that once we know something, we can't go on denying it. The crime against the intellect is a crime against the very self, which is bound to knowledge the way Odysseus was bound by ropes to the mast of his ship so he could withstand the song of the sirens. The liberal era could countenance every perversity, it could even countenance sacrifice - that ultimate act against self-interest - but not the deliberate choosing of ignorance. And then, here we are...
Read Oana Mateescu's article. Here:

Oana Mateescu: The Romanian family referendum: Or, how I became a sexo-Marxist: “By the way, Russia had the first sexual revolution. Lenin was a big homosexual; as for Karl and Marx, I think they were together. But they realized on their own it was going nowhere.” — 3 milioane1 On 6 and 7 October 2018, in what has become known as the family referendum, some Romanians voted on changing the definition of…