The time is 16:33 on 18 October, 2011 AD. In a fraction of a second after I click “save”, this comment will be readable by you- someone whom I have never met and who may be on the other side of a planet living in a country which I’ve only heard of from a Wikipedia article or brief mention on the BBC.
This comment will have travelled thousands of kilometres within a second of clicking save. Within minutes, it will be picked up by electronic spiders which comb the internet for new content and index it. Within an hour you should be able to google the first sentence of this paragraph and see my comment, within a day it should be on every search engine online.
If this comment goes viral, millions of people will be viewing it simultaneously and it will be rehosted many hundreds or thousands of times. You don’t know my name or anything about me, but you’ll have countless platforms to read the words I’ve written.
In a year, those same websites will still exist. The indexed passage will still exist. You can google the first sentence of this paragraph and find my comment. Within a decade every cell in my body will have recycled itself and I will effectively cease to exist as the same creature I am now, but these words will stay exactly as I wrote them. In under a century my cells will stop recycling and I’ll stop existing altogether, but these words will stay exactly as I wrote them.
As long as the data exists on some server in some data centre within some country on whatever planet we have colonised, my great-great-great grandchildren will read this comment as I wrote it more than a century before. Their great-great-great grandchildren, though they will have no idea who I was, will be able to read this comment as I wrote it in an age so barbaric that they can’t fathom living in it.
This comment will last as long as computers last, whether it gets one upvote or a thousand upvotes. If we don’t blow ourselves up before we leave Earth, we can assume that it will exist for thousands, if not millions, of years. Beings which are augmented through technology and natural evolution, so advanced that they’re an entirely different species than me, will either translate older languages or learn to speak my monkeytongue and read this comment in an environment I cannot possibly imagine.
It’s now 16:53, 18 October, 2011 AD, in Chicago, Illinois. I stopped halfway though this to get a drink. Water is still relatively clean and plentiful, and looking up the sky was a pale blue and free of smog. I’ll probably never leave this planet, let alone the solar system in which I’m writing this comment, and whoever and wherever and whatever and whenever you are you will have seen a perfect snapshot of this moment in time, one that was heard around the globe within a second and preserved for all eternity within a day. If the rest of this thread survives as well, you’ll have 477 other snapshots to read through as well- each of them perfectly preserved for as long as we remain civilised.
But seriously, true immortality is your own wikipedia page 😉
But the easiest way to understand how original appropriation cannot be justified within a conservative/libertarian framework is by focusing on the idea of opportunity costs. When an individual declares perpetual ownership of some piece of unowned land, every other human being on earth suffers an opportunity cost: their opportunity to use that land has now disappeared. Opportunity costs are real economic harms.
To be concrete about this, consider an example. The piece of land down by the river is owned by no one; so everyone can use it. Sarah declares — on whatever property theory she prefers — that the piece of land by the river now belongs to her exclusively. But, wait a minute. The previous ability of others to use the land by the river has now vanished! They have been hit with opportunity costs. If one of the dispossessed were to say “this is silly, I do not consent to giving up my pre-existing opportunity to use the land down by the river,” Sarah uses violence (typically state violence) to keep the dispossessed out.
Unless unanimous consent exists, the original grabbing up of property results in violent, non-consensual theft from others. It is really just that simple. What follows from that conclusion is that the conservative/libertarian positions that depend on the sanctity of property rights are totally bogus. For instance, you cannot complain that taxes violently take material resources from you without your consent when property itself is predicated on just that. You cannot claim your enormous wealth was gotten fairly when the ownership of that wealth is predicated upon the non-consensual violence just discussed.
This basically skewers the “homesteading principle” which is at the core of most, if not all, right-libertarian property rights. The only thing (I am aware of) that tried to tackle this, is the Lockean proviso, which has its own, very significant failings in regard to the loss of freedom from such enclosed lands.
Αυτή είναι μια μετάφραση απο αυτό το άρθρο, κάτι που μια συντρόφισα απο το reddit μου ζήτησε να κάνω | This is a translation from this article, something that a comrade asked me to do for her.
Σήμερα στην Ελλάδα, χιλιάδες πήραν τους δρόμους σε μια γενική απεργία, πολεμόντας το ίδιο αντι-δημοκρατικό πρόγραμμα των κοινωνικών περικοπών και διάσωσης τραπεζίτολαμόγιων που πολεμάμε στην Wall Street. Σήμερα ο λαός διακόπτει όλη την Ελλάδα.
Η κίνηση Κατάληψη της Wall Street (Occupy Wall Street) στέκεται σε αλληλεγγύη με τον λαό της Ελλάδας, και είμαστε όλοι εμπνευσμένοι απο το θάρρος και την ανθεκτικότητά τους. Δεσμευόμασε την φιλία μας και την κοινή υποστήριξη με όλους τους ανθρώπους σε όλο τον κόσμο που πολεμάνε για δημοκρατία και οικονομική δικαιοσύνη. Σε μια παγκόσμια οικονομία, η πάλη των 99% είναι αναγκαστικά μια παγκόσμια πάλη.
MRM of course stands for “Men’s Rights Movement”, something composed entirely of self-titled MRAs, who don’t actually do any activism, except troll and harass feminists online. Case in point, this article of mine, which unfortunately caught the attention of an MRAs who promptly called forth a troll brigade. And for the last few days, I’ve been receiving increasingly inane comments, such as:
I never cease bemusement at the fact that you paranoids keep lying about your fantasy world of so-called rape culture, replete with the overwhelming abundance of so-called rape jokes (none of which I’ve ever heard). You’re always gonna protect women from being raped, despite the fact that no man in his right mind would ever have sex with you, especially forcible sex. Get the help you so sorely need, will ya?
The immediate assumption that I’m female nonwithstanding, it is completely nonsensical in every way. Even if I was a female, what does not having sex have to do with protecting women from being raped? Only an MRA knows.
No one has said that rape is not serious, but I’ll go ahead and do that. A famous feminist once said that men can learn from being falsely accused of rape. Well, I throw that right back, that women can learn from being raped
This comment just takes the cake. That person then continued posting shit, but presumed to also start posting links to various MRA crap, which I promptly deleted.
The way you write tells us you’re a woman, clamato, and a bad liar to boot!. It’s especially evident the way you imply you’re not a woman … without specifically denying it in print.
There was a weird certainty from the invading MRAs that I’m female. Which is perplexing since I have a gallery full of my ugly bearded face.
one thing you apologists for false rape accusers are forgetting………….is that when the law becomes unwilling to protect men from false rape allegations, there WILL become a time when the law is going to be unable to protect false accusers from their victims
Ah yes, no MRA trollvasion would be complete without this classic canard. “Just you wait” whispers the sexually frustrated neckbeard between clenched teeth “Soon there will come a reckoning when us nice guys refuse to stay virgin and take matters into our own hands.” Or something like it, I’m sure.
And lets not forget the actual forum post. I tried to parse what the original poster was saying, but the replies were in some kind of MRA code language and I couldn’t understand what the hell “ES&D you lameass!!” and “LSOS! Go to hell!” are supposed to convey. I guess “Eat Shit & Die” is the first, but I have no idea how that is a valid argument.
Anyway, the trollvasion is currently going strong, as every reply in the forum pushes the topic up, allowing new MRAs to see the link and come here to vomit their opinion all over the place. I’m not worried though, these things tend not to linger. Kinda like an early cold.
Incidentally, with a name like Divide By Zer0 this guy is probably a socially awkward programmer or computer science student who thinks he will help his chances with women by betraying his own gender. I’ve met a few dipshits just like him in real life, one of whom is pushing 40 and still hasn’t learned anything.
After a few introductory words which addressed minor things (Note: saying that something is “not half bad” is a figure of speech. Not to be taken literally), Stefan presented his first argument basically arguing that “You cannot say that the initiation of force is virtuous. Thus Non-Aggression is virtuous”.
My contention is not whether the initiation of force is virtuous. The contention is on what exactly constitutes intiation of force, or more explicitly – violence or threat of violence. Yes, of course aggression is not virtuous, but this does not mean that the Non-Aggression Principle becomes suddenly useful as a moral guideline. Yes, aggression is bad and not aggressing is good. Murder is also bad. Not murdering is also good. But we do not create a basis for our entire ethical system out of “Thou shalt not murder”. Not only does one need to first define “murder”, but it is just far too limited a guideline to base one’s entire sociopolitical system on.
The reductio ad absurdum that Stefan attempts, might prove that you cannot have Aggression as a moral guideline, but it does not logically follow from that, that Non-Aggression is a useful moral guideline instead.
Further to that, Stefan makes a huge logical leap: From arguing that Aggression cannot be a virtue, to concluding that “Property Rights are the only thing that can work”. This is not at all evident from the arguments put forth and is blatantly begging the question.
Stefan then goes on a tangent, explaining how Self Ownership leads to property rights. I understand that this is what right-libertarians tend to accept, but it is largely irrelevant to the subject at hand, especially given that I reject “Self Onwership” as an internally contradictory concept. Nevertheless, the reason this is brought up, is to show that one is responsible for one’s actions, and therefore that “theft is theft, is because you’re stealing someone’s time”.
This is the main thrust of the argument here I believe, but “Self-Ownership” was not required to make this point, so I’m unsure why it was brought up. Nevertheless, I’ll take the time to address this argument from “theft of time”.
The idea presented is as such: When someone puts forth labour to create something, and someone comes around and takes that thing away, then that person can be assumed to have stolen all the time required for creator to make it, which is similar to slavery.
This argument looks solid at first glance, but unfortunately, when one challenges the premises behind it, it shows that it is on very shaky ground based on assumptions of specific property rights.
The most basic counter-argument I would make against this concept of “theft of time” is: Who says that whatever you put labour into creating, belongs to you automatically? Ownership is a split gradient ((By which I mean that the various types of ownership differ by a degree, but there is a hard split in the middle, between possessive ownership and “sticky” ownership” systems because those two are incompatible)) which can take many forms based around social agreement on what constitutes a valid claim or disposal. It is not a universal law. What happens here, is that the type of ownership that Stefan prefers, is assumed into the argument. But as soon as one challenges the premise of what you can own and how you come about owning it, things become much less solid.
Do you own something you created out of the commons? Stefan would say yes, I would say yes as well, with stipulations. My stipulations of course being that you only own whatever you created as long as you keep using it. As long as you do not, it goes back into the commons for anyone else to use. Stefan would have no such stipulation however. Whatever you create, no matter if it came from the commons or not, belong to you forever.
So if Stefan makes something out of the commons and doesn’t use it anymore, and I come and use it in the meantime, for Stefan that amounts to slavery for I have “stolen his time”. Were that to be enforced however, Stefan would have in effect enclosed the commons. An immediate split forms on what is ethical in this case. I do not recognise Stefan’s right to enclose the commons and he does not recognise my right to steal his time. Who is rights is an argument for another day, but suffice to say that “theft of time” only works if you look at it from a propertarian perspective, which is not something everyone will or should do.
Furthermore, Stefan’s argument ends up with some telling conclusions when in mind of his larger worldview as well. The larger worldview of course being Capitalism which is naturally permeated by wage slavery. In this world, taking someone’s labour is just fine as long as it’s voluntary. A wage slave toils all week but does not get to own the product of his labour at all. Rather, they end up with a price for the creation that is lower than the market value of such a creation. In Stefan’s worldview this is a clear “theft of time”, but it’s OK because as it’s voluntary. That is, as long as the wage slave agreed to be one. This naturally leads us to the conclusion that Slavery is OK as long as it’s voluntary.
I’m sure the argument will be put forth that working for a wage is nothing like being a slave so this is not an apt comparison, to which I will counter that in a similar vein, “theft of time” is nothing like slavery either. You can’t have it both ways and I won’t even bother to argue on whether voluntary slavery is AOK either.
Finally, I’ll just make the most obvious counter to this argument. Stefan says verbatim: “The reason that theft is theft, is because you’re stealing someone’s time”. But this is just a tautology and doesn’t really tells us anything. Theft is theft because you’re stealing? Yes, of course. Perhaps he meant to say that “Theft is wrong because you’re stealing someone’s time” which only makes marginally more sense as it ends up telling us that “theft is wrong because it’s theft”. Circular reasoning.
The argument only “works” at first glance, because Stefan is basing himself on intuitive assumptions and biases from the audience, which is expected to already believe that theft is bad within a specific framework of ownership rights. As soon as those premises are missing, as soon as the audience does not share Stefan’s conclusions, this conclusion becomes baseless. Theft of time is wrong *why* exactly? This needs to be argued, not simply asserted. And it is in the process of arguing “Why is Theft of Time bad?”, where all the nuances and exceptions and outright mistakes will be pointed out and addressed.
After this brief overview of the “theft of time” argument, Stefan concludes that it’s not arbitrary to not-aggress, or respect private property. This, again, does not follow. Those two are still subjective. The non-aggression principle remains a moral guideline, all of which are subjective (and there’s nothing wrong with that), but as I explained before it is comparatively useless on its own. The stateless propertarian framework is normative as well as it’s put forth as a superior socioeconomic organization (And there’s nothing wrong with that either). It is not a science like physics as Stefan likes to imagine. Defining “aggression” within the stateless propertarian framework, which not everyone accepts, is what is arbitrary and that is wrong.
Next Stefan addresses the difficulty of figuring out what constitutes initiation of force within a propertarian framework, admitting that shooting trespassers is not acceptable and so on. However he misses my point. He ends up discussing how “degree” (degree of what? violence?) is not as important as morality. I.e. it’s not as important to figure out how to deal with something bad, as it is in defining that something is bad in the first place. And I agree with that. Societies of the future will find their own ways to deal with aggressors. But the reason I pointed out the impossibility of intuitively defending against violation of private property rights is to point out that given differing expectations of ownership, the non-aggression principle coupled with private property ends up excusing actual violence against non-violent people. The degree is not important either. The fact is that if I start working on land you are not using, you will have to aggress against me (likely with literal violence) in order to stop me.
To give you a contrast within a possessive ownership framework, If you started using land I am already using for myself, you can have either of two purposes: Co-operate or Violate. If you co-operate with me, then we can share the fruits of our labour, thus benefiting us both. If you violate my work, then you are being visibly destructive and threatening to my livelihood. You are aggressing against me and thus literal violence is then justified to stop such destruction.
The point thus, is that the “Non-Aggression principle” does not help us understand or resolve the former case in the slightest. The point is that both parties can have differing understanding of what constitutes “aggression”. The problem is in declaring that it’s the owner of the private property that decides what is aggression.
Finally Stefan makes the argument that all these issues on attempting to see how the NAP can be useful in the real world, are inconsequential because people work these things out intuitively and organically. And here’s the funny part, I absolutely agree. The difference is that Stefan assumes that people would work out things in such a way as to allow private property to flourish, and this is not just untrue, it’s ahistoric. The example of “tailgate parties” that he brings up is a perfect example of this. I doubt in any of those parties you see people taking up more space than they can personally use. If anything, the temporary ownership setup in those parties is possessive, i.e. claims based on occupancy and use.
It is precisely because societies naturally organize themselves according to possessive and communal ownership, that capitalism requires a state to support it. Because private property is not common sense and it is not an acceptable arrangement by the dispossessed. A society “working these things out naturally” and ending up with some people owning vast tracts of land and factories, while others own just the clothes on their back and live day to day on subsistence is unrealistic in the extreme. The people on the lower scale would absolutely take the first opportunity to use the unused land, reclaim and re-institute the commons and expropriate their productive means. Or do you think that someone working on subsistence on a mega-farm is going to “work it out” with the landowner who owns it? No, the farmers would expropriate the land the first chance they got, while the landowner would declare aggression and bring in their private state defence company to restore order.
To think that such arrangements will be upheld naturally is wishful thinking. There has never been a single society or community where anything remotely like this wasn’t upheld by force. Not one.
So yes. Aggression is likely to be absent from a free society, but not because people morally adhere to a stale moral guidelines such as the NAP, but rather because people absent oppression tend to work out things via possessive rights, making “aggression” primarily about violence, which is dealt with intuitively.
And if people can work things out intuitively even in a propertarian framework, it seems to me the NAP remains unnecessary. It seems to me, that the only purpose of the NAP is to give an ideological excuse to private defence companies to…”reform” individuals who somehow just can’t seem to work out Capitalism naturally with the capitalists and landowners . Those silly people.
Ever since 2010 I’ve been one of the moderators in reddit’s /r/anarchism. Due to the nature of reddit, I was also one of the most “untouchable” ones, meaning that I couldn’t be demodded by almost nobody else, except one other person above me. I got so high up this technological hierarchy of sorts, because I was one of the most known and suggested people around the Great Shitstorm of 2010 and was simply the second one who was added.
I’ve been planning to demod myself since the start of 2011, both for my own emotional calm (since we seem to be having persistent drama around /r/@) and to allow others to step up without me being seen as a “leader”. Unfortunately I felt compelled to stay for various reasons, primarily the common unilateral actions from other mods and the heavy-handed and ban-happy rhetoric that I saw many people asking for.
Today however it was suggested to me by another mod that we both stand down and I guess it just clicked. It’s been long enough, I have implemented two succesful initiatives in /r/anarchism: the tendency icons and the Confederation of Anarchist Reddits so I think my tenure has been succesful. There’s also no drama or shitstorm currently unfolding, so my stepping down won’t be spinned into something it’s not.
I won’t be leaving the decision-making process or the community of course, but I’ll be doing it on the same equal footing as the rest of the “plebs”. And we’ll see how it goes.
One part of my mind is very wary that the banhappy crowd will take over and democratic decision making will go the way of the Dodo, as already a lot of decisions are being taken in a knee-jerk reaction rather than through consensus or democratic agreement. Another part, fully expects that I will be banned on some flimsy excuse by the few mods that openly hate me (because I reverse unilateral actions too much and thus I am a “reactionary liberal”).
laughing at/telling rape jokes is a pretty clear indicator of how little you can personally identify with the very real consequences of a very real act, just like laughing at/telling lynching jokes is a pretty clear indicator that you’re so so so white, and have never known and will never know somebody who was lynched (though you might know somebody who did the lynching).
So, here is my challenge for those who want to tell rape jokes:
Ask every woman in your life if she has been sexually assaulted. Ask her to tell you her story. This means your mother, your sister, your girlfriend, your grandma.
Once you have heard all their stories, go watch a movie with a rape scene in it. One you didn’t mind before. One you thought people were overly offended by.
If anyone ever doubted rape culture exists, this whole incident is the proof. Talking about an experience of being raped leads to being critisized in the harshest terms and accused of being a faker. Posting proof of the rape leads to walls of text with upvotes about how the real issue in all this is false rape accusations. And then there are massively upvoted posts after the fact about how she basically deserved that response for even bringing it up.
That is rape culture. Where rape jokes are considered funny, actually being raped is your own private shame, and any attempt to talk about rape with either lead to harsh criticism, or a shift of the discussion towards false rape accusations. Reddit shows a window into a fundamentally rape-friendly society.
I won’t go into the details of this story as Manboobz and Jezebel have already analyzed it and provided the appropriate link. I’ll just say that this is par for the course for the larger Reddit community. It’s only funny because how much redditors think they’re some enlightened class, somehow above sexism.
Redditors insist that being accused of rape is just as bas or worse as being raped
I had a discussion on this issue again on reddit. I thought I’d repost my comments here. Unfortunately the person I was talking to deleted their comments, but I’ve quoted a part of it. Basically that person claimed that they had both been raped and been falsely accused of rape and both scarred them deeply. They were using their personal experiences to argue that false rape accusations can be just as bad as being raped. So I wrote…
Were you convicted? Same thing can happen for being convicted of murder, or any other serious crime.
Not to mention that this is not necessarily what happens to all who are accused of rape. Much of the time, the rape victim is not believed at all, their tale trivialized, or they are victim-blamed.
Yes, it sucks to be considered guilty for something you didn’t do. If there’s enough evidence to convict you, it can totally ruin a life and nobody deserves that. But accusing someone of rape is nothing compared to being raped.
Simply being falsely accused does not always lead to anything bad happening. Being raped always leaves permanent scars.
The basic point is that the results of fale accusation and rapes always vary. Some victims might take it better than others. But rape, on average, has far far worse results and occurs with far higher frequency.
Finally, within the current system there is a kind of zero sum effect between false rape accusations and actual rapes. We’re still at a point in time where many kind of rapes are not considered “rape-rape” (as some clueless media personas have called it) and there’s still a huge amount of rapes that don’t see justice because the victim was afraid to come out for fear of being accused and victim blamed. By making the culture more focused on false-rape accusations (i.e. more skeptic towards accusations of rape), is just going to make victim blaming even worse and thus more women are unlikely to even come out.
There is no perfect solution within the sociopolitical system we live in (which is why, and others, are rather radical about the change we need to have). But until then, I find it absurd to compare something that happens to something like 0.5% (or was it 0.05%? fairly small anyway as it only affects around 2%-8% of rape accusations) of males and has on average very little consequences, to something that happens to 15%-25% (statistic vary, but it’s a fucking lot) of females, causes horrible psychological damage, and is so permeating that it affects the lives of all females, without it ever happening to them, simply due to the fear that it might.
They replied to that comment with parts I quoted when I responded.
sad but true that an accusation is basically the same as a conviction in the eyes of everyone around you when it comes to rape
That’s just not true. I guess it depends on who you hang out with but this attitude is definitelly not generic.
I’d say that the SOCIAL consequences of a false accusation are at least as bad if not worse as those of being raped, and the potential exists for someone’s life to be destroyed just as fully if not moreso (thanks to the lack of support/resources) as someone who was raped.
Again, that’s just not true and I haven’t seen any study showing that this is anywhere near common.
OTOH, there’s never a loss for cases of rape accusations (true of false) where the accused didn’t have any problems from it.
Yes, the potential is there, but having a potential for a false rape (or murder, or theft) accusation to turn out horrid is not a guarantee. But every rape turns out on a scale of horrid.
How do magnets work? What makes the sky blue? What are the Olay seven signs of ageing? These are just a few of the questions science has yet to answer. But by far the biggest mystery of all is feminism. What is it? Who subscribes to it? And what does it portend? Until comparatively recently science had no answers to these difficult questions. But now, thanks to the combined collective wisdom of reddit, its Byzantine intricacies have been unravelled. In this thread, I will present the sum of reddit’s expansive knowledge on feminism. And as you might expect, most of the quotes below are indeed from the people who talk about feminism more than any other group on earth: mens rights advocates!
The results are hilarious, and not at all surprising for anyone who has spent a minuscule amount of time arguing from a feminist perspective on reddit. And don’t think that the quotes themselves are hard to find or anything. According to the OP, it took a couple of hours to create this huge-ass compilation of redditry, just by doing a fairly simple search for the “feminism” keyword. This is because it’s MRA that like to talk about the term itself, while actual feminists discuss the actual sociopolitical issues.
Some choice quotes to give you an idea:
Misandrist feminists want gender based apartheid, and the male population culled to lest than 10%
They sure do love their homosexuals, those feminists…
Feminism will not fight for men because its very purpose is to fight AGAINST men. How much more evidence do the men here need that feminism hates you?
Feminism IS the system
Feminism has ALWAYS been about promoting the needs of women above those of men.
feminism taken to it’s logical conclusion: Oppression everywhere you look. Paranoia and suspicion about every word you hear. The patriarchy is out to get you. Women are oppressed by evil men with impunity. Big Father is watching you. Big Father will rape you. Your only function as a woman in this “patriarchy” is to be raped and killed. Women have been so brainwashed by the patriarchy that they can never be free. The only solution – the final solution – is to remove the male from the planet and cut out the cancer before it kills you. Do you want to be free? You’re not free. You’ll never be free. The only path to freedom is to destroy the male that keeps you down. 77 cents on the dollar. 1 in 4. Rape, rape and more rape. Everything, everywhere is rape. Rape is around every corner. Sexism spews from the mouths of everyone around you. Look what men have done to you. Look how they hold you back. There’s not enough female electrical engineers because the patriarchy holds them back. You could rule the world. You DESERVE to rule the world. If women ruled the world there would be no war, there would be no sickness, there would be no pollution, there would be no discrimination, the would be no hate. If women ruled the world all the problems would be solved – forever! Doesn’t the world deserve better than what MEN can give it? Don’t you see how men everywhere are nothing more than a disgusting cancer rotting our world from the inside out? Don’t you see it makes sense that men and masculinity should be destroyed? Don’t you??!!
And that’s just the tip of the penis iceberg. Take a gander yourself and laugh your heart out.
/inb4 MRAs tell me how they find nothing funny or questionable about these quotes.
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