stuff I don't understand

I agree with you. Race doesn’t have any solid meaning, like species does, it’s a word different people use in different way. After writing my last entry I was looking through my turn of the century geography book, and they had the three main ‘races’, and then there were those indeterminate races in the Australian area. The way they used the term seems like they meant in the way of species, but surely they knew that we could all interbreed. I think maybe we would all be better off if we just abandoned the term.

Though it’s still used in the census and it seems like every application you fill out has that section. It is the sort of thing we liberals seem to like, so that we can make sure things are shared equally between the various ‘races,’ but mostly I think it is pretty meaningless, and probably something we would be better off without.

But did I read you correctly where you want to keep this categories because people who breed dogs and livestock, use similar descriptive terms? I suppose if we bred people to have certain characteristics we might use terms on them, but we don’t, so I don’t see much practical use in taking the term race seriously.

Is there a case where a species was divided into two groups and later they were brought back together and each side tried to extinguish the other? I have never heard of such a thing.

I think there are several conditions that have a genetic predisposition, alcoholism, homosexuality, schizophrenia, probably some others, but mostly it’s a tenuous thing, like if your twin brother has it, you have a ten percent better chance of getting it then if he wasn’t. But it’s a weak link, and they have never been able to pin it down to a particular set of genes so I don’t know how much it means.

There is that weird thing where men go into prison, or into the navy, have sex with other guys for the first time in their lives and continue to do that until they get out and then they go back to being straight. Then of course there were the Greeks and the Zulus, and probably some other people who have this warrior culture where the rules are that you get buggered as a boy and as a man you get to bugger. But despite all that buggering they all have wives and children. And I don’t know if you’ve heard about this down low thing, where perfectly straight guys go on the down low where they go to certain locations where similar guys go and have sex with each other and bring their vd or aids back to their wives. I’ve read it goes on, but I don’t understand it.

Some people say that instead of having this thing where you are either gay or straight, there is this sort of continuum where you are maybe 100 percent gay, or maybe 45 percent, or maybe 0 percent gay in which case you are 100 percent straight. I don’t know.

Have you heard about Alan Turing? He was a brilliant scientist/mathematician, cracked the German enigma code that helped us defeat the Krauts and did a lot of work on computers, invented the famous Turing test. But he was gay, and back in that day it was completely frowned on, and even though he had helped win the war and done all this brilliant work, when he was caught in an affair with another man he was in deep do do. They made him take female hormones (chemical castration) to stay out of prison, and in 1954 he committed suicide probably because of that. And this was all the law, they probably thought they were doing him some kind of favor, maybe he even thought they were doing him a favor, and now it sounds so primitive, barbaric, and yet it was only sixty years ago.