#gwern

Please take a look at these statistics and understand the anxiety you’d have trying to date or feel attractive to other people. Especially dating interracially.

Please take a look at these statistics and understand why many black women do not feel protected, cherished, and accepted — even by our own.

This post is in no way to say I am not proud to be black, because I am very much so. It’s when my blackness feels like a barrier that I feel insecure.

I wanna hear some opinions....

"What the fucking did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch?| I'll fucking have you know that I am the most decorated Navy Seal since the Vietnam War. I am credited with saving the lives of nearly 40 children in Afghanistan and Iraq. I am certified in the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program and hold black belts in tae kwon do, kajukenbo, and kali/escrima.

My sense of hearing is so keen that I can detect my enemy's movement by the sound of his blood pumping through his veins. I can smell the sweat of my enemy as he holds his breath in my presence. My physical endurance is so extreme that I can swim 100m, with full combat gear, underwater, with 60lbs of weights strapped to my ankles in 52 seconds.

My eyes are so precise I can shoot a laser from my eyes. I can see dust particles that are smaller than the head of a pin from a mile away. My grip is so powerful I can crush boulders and destroy trees with a flick of my wrist. My IQ is off the charts, so if you have a weak stomach you shouldn't stand too close to me.

My rage is so extreme that it cannot be matched in any man. You can flee a M1A1 Abrams main battle tank in 6 directions, but you can't run from me. I have never lost a fair fight and I've won plenty. I have an 8 pack, but not the kind you find in magazines. No, mine is harder and better. My abs are literally harder than diamonds.

I can't be seduced by beautiful women because I have a mirror in my bedroom that shows me the truth.

My rage and strength are so incredible that my every action has the force of 1,000.

I am the protector of my friends. I am the bringer of justice. I am America's fucking vengeance. My fist is on a hair trigger and I am not afraid to use it.

I have been to the depths of the abyss and I am not afraid to face it. In fact, I welcome it. I am a real man. You are merely a weak boy.

I have been running 25 miles every day, pushing a military spec Humvee in front of me. I know of your ways and I am not impressed. You think you can scare me? You think I won't fight back? You are WRONG.

I don’t regret the time I spent on tumblr; I wrote some pieces which I’m mildly proud of and which other people seem to have enjoyed. But I no longer endorse everything I’ve written - some past pieces on the philosophy of mathematics leave me with a twinge of embarrassment at my naivety. Even so, I’ve decided to leave everything here. I’ve had fun and learned a lot from some people here; all of you know who you are, and thank you.

Today I happened to stumble across Joe Queenan’s review of The Know-It-All, about A. J. Jacobs and his quest to read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. Some called the review mean-spirited. Regardless of how uncharitable Queenan was, there was something he pointed out which rang true to me:

The animating idea of this misguided endeavor is that corralling a vast array of unrelated facts will, in and of itself, make a person more interesting. This is idiotic. Facts absorbed without context merely magnify the intellectual deficiencies of the autodidact, because a poorly educated person does not know which facts are important. . . 

Jacobs's biggest problem isn't that he doesn't know much; it's that he doesn't realize how much educated people do know. There's just no two ways about it - people who read Marcel Proust and Bertrand Russell instead of Entertainment Weekly actually do learn stuff.

Tumblr played two roles for me - it gave me a platform to write, and I learned quite a few unrelated facts. Now that I’d like to be more systematic in my life, it’s no longer suitable for either of these functions. Calvino puts it far better than I could:

. . . for some time now my first need has been to “de-journalistize” myself, to get myself out of the stranglehold that has dominated these last few years of my life, reading books to review immediately, commenting on something even before having to time to form an opinion on it. I want to build a new kind of daily program for myself where I can finally get into something, something definitive (within the limits of historical possibility), something not dishonest or insincere (unlike the way today’s journalist always behaves, more or less). 

For that reason I make several plans for myself: … to maintain my contacts with reality and the world, but being careful, of course, not to get lost in unnecessary activities; and also to set up my own individual work not as a “journalist” any more but as a “scholar,” with systematic readings, notes, comments, notebooks, a load of things I’ve never done; and also, eventually, to write a novel.

Yes.