Critical Race Theory as Ideology

The word theory signifies proposed knowledge that is not merely subjective sentiment or belief that is being prescribed or advocated as an ideology; the purpose of a theory is rather to explain. Only in terms of better understanding is the implication that a better world could result (i.e., from the enhanced understanding). Even though a theory does not constitute established knowledge, that ideologues have seized on the label as a way of legitimating their respective cherished ideologies should come as no surprise because ideology sells better in the guise of knowledge even though a theory has yet to gain sufficient support epistemologically to be recognized as established knowledge. The epistemological subterfuge—a Trojan horse of sorts—also hides the fact that the ideologue seeks to persuade or advocate rather than primarily explain. Under the patina of a knowledge-claim lies quite another instinctual urge. Nietzsche’s claim that the content of a thought is none other than an instinctual urge of sufficient power to burst into consciousness—a manifestation of the will to power—provides an explanation for why the slight of hand is so easy for ideologues to make in sliding over to present the veneer of knowledge-claims even though such claims do in fact differ qualitatively from ideological claims. I contend that critical race “theory,” as well as the related interactionist “theory,” is in its very substance ideological in nature, rather than knowledge or even a theory.

The full essay is at "Critical Race Theory as Ideology."

Turkey on Gay Obscenity

On 8 April, 2026, eleven leaders of a Turkish gay-rights group faced a judicial trial on charges of “obscenity” and “violating the protection of the family.”[1] These charges are of course heavily subjective and even controversial, especially well into the twenty-first century by which time gay and lesbian couples were raising children in family units so the issue in Turkey could be said to be which type of family warrants protection. The obscenity charge had to do with the fact that two men or two women kissing romantically in public still made a significant proportion of people uncomfortable in Turkey. Turkish authorities had deemed photos showing gay couples kissing and put on social media to be obscene. That homosexuality was not illegal there at the time rendered the trial perplexing to many in the gay community in Turkey and elsewhere in the world. Perhaps even more perplexing is the fact that the constitution of Turkey contained an article on protecting family values and that gay couples raising children were exempted from even being deemed families.

The gay association claimed that the trial was “an attack on freedom of expression and freedom of association.”[2] In particularly harsh terms, the group also called the trial “a form of dehumanization.”[3] Whereas expression and association are jurisprudential terms, dehumanization evokes human rights being severely violated. I contend that none of these claims gets at the underlying issue, which is that, just as in climate change wherein some regions (e.g., the poles) have been warming faster than others (e.g., the equator), in any society some parts change more than others, such that the latter can be expected as a matter of human nature to resist surges in the former. Whereas people in a gay bar in San Francisco were used to seeing men kiss each other, the same cannot be said in many cities in Turkey. Both being accustomed and being uncomfortable are valid human reactions to the fact that change does not happen at the same rate across a given society. In a healthy society, the gays who are on the forefront in displaying their homosexual affection in gay neighborhoods naturally tone down the visuals  in other neighborhoods, and heterosexuals not used to such displays try to tolerate them under the correct supposition that culture changes. In an unhealthy society, gays intentionally push their homosexuality where they know it is not as accepted, and people unaccustomed to the visible gay affection seek to punish the gays for what is only natural affection for gays.

A man can fall in love with another man, and a woman can fall in love with a woman. Bisexual men and women who have falling in love with people of both genders attest that the love is the same in substance. Also, falling in love with a personality is not the same as lusting after a particular sexual organ; indeed, people fall in love before having had sex with the beloved. In fact, anyone who has falling in love would acknowledge that the sex pales in comparison with the strong emotional attachment being felt. Selfless, or other-focused love is possible in human nature itself, and thus whether the person being put first is of the same or the other gender does not alter the qualities of the love because it is oriented to personality, not to sexual organs (though having access to preferred organs is no small matter). 

Furthermore, a gay couple can truly love a child being raised because the parent-child love is the same, regardless of what the parents are doing sexually (at least one would hope the two are separate!). Just as a heterosexual step-father or step-mother can come to love a nonbiological child of the wife or husband, a gay spouse can love the biological child the spouse. That is to say, gay couples can indeed form genuine families, and the love therein is what the Turkish constitution could ideally have promoted and protected were love itself valued over hate by the government officials behind the trial.

That which should arguably be excoriated is not homosexuality per se, but the sordid elements culturally that can render the gay “community” as anything but warm and fuzzy. I am referring to the privileging of anonymous sex, even in imposing "open" relationships with separate sex with or without emotional attachment, as if monogamy were anti-woke and toxic. Lying, in cheating on a boyfriend or husban sexually, eclipses emotional intimacy and trust that could otherwise embrace gay couples and render them as more legitimate from the standpoint of heterosexuals. Also problematic is the utter slicing ruthlessness with which gay men reject other gay men not only sexually, but also emotionally. The narrowness of a hypertropic sex drive be exaggerated by an enabling cultural norm in the gay "community" that it is fine to "block" online or "flake" on showing up for sex as soon as a "hotter" guy is found for casual sex (i.e., "hooking up"). 

In short, responsibility, which is required for any genuine romantic relationship, may be a recessive value in the gay "community" whereas the primacy of momentary pleasure is privileged beyond its worth at the expense of emotional intimacy or connection. It may be that for too many gay men, the act of gay sex is more important to them than emotional intimacy and establishing trust and connection. Moreover, it may be that for too many gay men, "falling in love" is sex-centric rather than based on personality. I suspect that gay culture has been tacitly undergirding this toxic misordered concupiscence. If so, I would not be surprised if loneliness has been rife in the gay "community." 

My point is that rather than thrown “obscene” and anti-family charges at homosexuality itself, genuine romantic love that a same-sex couple can have can be distinguished from the more primitive gay lifestyle. Societies that make this distinction would be able to relegate Turkey’s approach to punishing gay people as utterly crude and primitive, which are labels I would apply to the gay men who use sex to obviate commitment as if the sexual urges of gay men are such that those urges are different or stronger and thus cannot be resisted. The belief that such urges should not be resisted, even if doing so evicerates the integrity of intimate romantic relationships, is more troubling not only because people, whether gay or heterosexual, who live out that belief are functioning as animalistic primitives rather than as responsible adult-humans. Perhaps one day Christopher Robin of Winnie the Pooh lore will finally grow up, and associate intimately with other humans rather than only or primarily with more primative animals that enable his childishness. Perhaps Christopher will move on from his trophy animals, or perhaps he is naively their trophy. 

Turkey’s approach of lashing out against gay visuals in 2026 was itself jejune, and thus did not evince sufficient maturity to facilitate the maturation of humanity’s homosexual population as it was shifting from informal relationships and the privileging of anonymous sex to the emotional intimacy that is only possible romantically in sustained relationships, including but not limited to marriage. 

---

1. Gavin Blackburn, “Turkey Puts 11 Leaders of LGBTQ+ Rights Association on Trial for ‘Obscenity,’” Euronews.com, 8 April, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

Retail Intimidation amid Romantic Fear: Emotional Intimacy Eclipsed Culturally in San Francisco

Visuals are an important ingredient in consumer marketing, so it is surprising to come across retail managers who are so purblind as concerns the latent yet obvious passive aggression in some of the visuals that those managers themselves approve in the name of security. The espoused, yet utterly fake claim that customer experience is improved by the added sense of safety—the actual underlying motive lies in loss prevention—is typically outweighed by the very human negative experience from being intentionally intimidated by passive-aggressive visuals. It may be that such managers, frustrated by high rates of in-store petty theft (i.e., “shoplifting”), are unconsciously taking their latent aggression out of the customers as a group. Even if not, the lack of judgment is palpable from the visuals themselves. It is no wonder that an increasing number of customers prefer shopping online. 

The full essay is at "Retail Intimidation amid Romantic Fear."

Global Warming Accelerating

When I took calculus in my first college-degree program, the graduate-student instructor didn’t bother to tell the class that a derivative signifies changes in the rate of acceleration. A derivative is not the rate itself, but, rather, the change in the rate—something much more difficult to detect empirically, as in watching an accelerating car. Formulae were the instructor’s focus, as if they constitute ends in themselves. By the time the climate numbers for 2025 came in, scientists could confidently say global warming was accelerating. The rate itself may have been increasing (i.e., a positive derivative), but attention to that by the media would have taken an educational reform as to how calculus was being taught. We think in terms of speed and acceleration. In this respect, we may be deficient in climate change itself as it has been unfolding. More decades than I care to admit had passed by 2025 since I had that course in calculus; only now can I say that I have used the math, albeit theoretically rather than via formulae.

Looking at the numbers for average global temperature for 2023, 2024, and 2025, Robert Rohde, the chief scientist at the Berkeley Earth Monitoring Group, said in early 2026, “The last three years are indicative of an acceleration in the warming. They’re not consistent with the linear trend that we’ve been observing for the 50 years before that.”[1] A linear trend represents no acceleration, so the rate of acceleration only became positive in 2023. Relative to the prior years, the averages for 2023, 2024, and 2025 “seemed to jump up,” said NOAA climate-monitoring chief Russ Vose.[2] The average for 2024 was 1.6C degrees above pre-industrial levels, hence slightly above the internationally agreed-upon limit of 1.5C degrees, and the averages for 2023 (1.48C above) and 2025 (1.47C above) were essentially tied so close to 1.5C that the average of the three years is above 1.5C. Even though the “leap” from the previous years since at least 2015 instantiates an acceleration, more years may be needed to assess whether the rate of the acceleration was increasing (mathematics majors would know this). At the outset of 2026, the three preceding years appeared as a plateau rather than evidence of continued acceleration, but a plateau could exist within a trend even of a positive derivative. My point is that we should have been more focused on changes in the rate of acceleration, for if the rate itself was increasing, then it would not be long until the threshold of 1.5C is surpassed and more extreme symptoms of climate change occur.

One of the weaknesses of democracy is that such symptoms may have to be experienced and seen before electorates treat climate-change as an important issue in voting. Human nature itself, a product of natural selection, still prioritizes the immediate over the long-term, especially in regard to threats. Instant gratification too is “hard-wired” in us all, which is why we tend to vote to keep gas prices low rather than to cut off the further manufacture of gasoline-powered cars. Whereas these contributory drawbacks in our nature, inherited from the gradual process of natural selection in evolution (mostly in the hunger-gatherer period of our species), have been associated with the lack of sufficient political will in the world since 2016 at Paris to keep the average global temperature from surpassing 1.5C above the pre-industrial level, our cognitive impairments that are also contributory are less well-known. This is the idea.

In addition to difficulties in conceptualizing and keeping attuned to what the derivative represents (i.e., change in the rate of acceleration, rather than the rate itself), our arrogance of pride in what we think we know also holds us back from grasping the magnitude of the human contribution to climate change. Just days before writing this essay, a man aged 75 declared to me that climate change is “just the natural cycles.” I don’t know whether that person had gone to college, but I do know that he was not a scientist. So the man’s declaration itself rang out as being out of place, given his actual level of knowledge on climate science. Similar to how we tend to focus on acceleration rates rather than changes in those rates, most people would be attuned to the content of the man’s statement—that climate change is merely part of a long-term natural cycle that will eventually reverse itself—rather than to the declaratory form of speech with which he made the statement. It is too difficult for us to grasp changes in rates of acceleration and focus on the presumption of entitlement that can be detected in the way a person makes a statement, whether it is written or verbal, and yet we tend not to realize that we have trouble with both. As one consequence, we understate the severity of climate change.

Lest anyone needs a refresher, “Rohde said nearly all of the warming is from human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases. . . . Samantha Burgess, strategic climate head of the Copernicus service, said the overwhelming culprit is clear: the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.”[3] Lest it be conveniently assumed that the burning has been going on somewhere in nature away from humans, Burgess doesn’t mince words: “Climate change is happening. It’s here. It’s impacting everyone all around the world and it’s our fault.”[4] Climate change is not just from a natural cycle that would be occurring even if there were no homo sapiens species.

So, Joe the plumber, a person let’s say who barely graduated from high school, would not only be incorrect in declaring that climate change is just part of a natural cycle; he would also be presumptuous in slighting the contradicting knowledge of climate scientists, whose years of study are indeed superior to Joe’s opinion. Like arrogance on stilts during a flood, Joe’s self-love issuing out in puffed up “knowledge” may one day be underwater if he happens to live on a coast when enough of the polar ice has melted to rise the level of oceans appreciably. That Joe would likely react angrily to being corrected even though his declaration of knowledge actually has no foundation is yet another indication of the presumptuous that may be endemic to the human mind but seems to be more salient in uneducated people. Formerly known in Western civilization as the sin of pride, which Augustine and Paul set as the worse (and thus intractable) sin, treating one’s own opinion as a fact of knowledge can be added to the list of the deficiencies in our nature that may wind up causing the extinction of our species as the Earth’s climate approaches a new equilibrium sooner rather than later. How much sooner depends at least in part on whether the relevant derivative is positive.

---

1. Seth Borenstein, “Scientists Call Another Near-Record Hot Year a ‘Warning Shot’ of a Shifting, Dangerous Climate,” APnews.com, January 14, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid. Italics added for emphasis.