Welcome to Resilient Constructs, the blog with the pretentious name!

This is one of my little corners of the Internet. It’s not the first and not likely to be the last. Here, my intention is to discuss and analyze current events–politics, economics, culture, science, and so forth. What makes me such an authority? Well, nothing, really. I just read and think a lot. If you don’t like what I have to say, I’m sure you can find something more to your liking elsewhere. It’s a big Internet.

This isn’t tumblr, but I believe that one’s background and experiences deeply shape and inform their expression and opinions. I’m a straight white cisgender male–I know, another one. I work as a software engineer, though that is not likely an important detail. It pays the bills and it is occasionally interesting to me.  Generationally, I am a millennial and, as millennials do, I have some feelings about that, and those will surely come across at some point. Politically, I am unabashedly progressive. I believe in an egalitarian future, but recognize that the culture we live in abounds with deep structural flaws. To avoid coding it further: I believe racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression are prevalent, and so thoroughly woven into our society that they often go unrecognized and unremarked. I have no doubt that I will make many posts on those issues, as anti-racism and anti-sexism are central to my political identity.

My economic philosophy runs toward socialism, though I am far more negotiable on economics than on race- and gender-based oppression. Ultimately, I want a world where people in need do not go without, work is an obligation for those who are able but it is not a way of life, and human dignity is placed before profit and economic efficiency. Those are the broad strokes, anyway.

My interests run far and wide, and culminate in the name of this blog. What are “resilient constructs”? They are all around us. Our conceptions of race, of gender, of religion, of culture–these are all resilient constructs. To go down to basics, a construct is an idea based on abstract, subjective concepts. It is not an empirical, objective fact. However, it is a common mistake to claim that constructs aren’t “real.” They can be very real in terms of their consequences, as the histories of race, religion, and gender can attest. What does it mean to be resilient, then? Resilient constructs resist our attempts to deconstruct, demolish, or even alter them. Most of us know, for instance, that treating people differently based on the color of their skin is wrong, and yet even the most well-meaning of us frequently make decisions on the basis of unconscious racial biases. Thus, the construct is resilient, and affects us no matter how much we might wish it didn’t.

I have only just scratched the surface here, to give a taste of what I plan to talk about in forthcoming posts. I anticipate making new posts daily, though there will surely be gaps from time to time when other obligations get in the way. This site should be overall considered a work in progress, as each of us, and the world around us, always are.

Let’s find out just how resilient these constructs are.