Category: Pondering Infinity

A Taste of my mind. Anything from Sociopolitics to Religion to Philosophy in general goes.

APOC VS Food Not Bombs

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Is Food not Bombs unwittingly harming the POC communities it helps? Some seem to take it a step further than that.

A meal being served by Food Not Bombs

This article just came to my attention, and it’s just…wow ((Note: I realize that this is just one APOC who does not necessarily repressent the feelings of the whole movement. I just needed a title)).

I am not very familiar with the “race” tension in the US (I use “scare quotes” because I can’t really consider skin colour a race) but some of the things the author says don’t make sense to me. White privilege does not equal white supremacy. Someone may be ignorant on how their privilege display and use is harming poc, but that’s a far cry from claiming that they are part of a movement aiming to dominate people of colour. This is without pointing out that FNB does not operate just in black neighborhoods as far as I understand.

The next thing that perplexes me is that the author asks FNB people to give away the food to the communities that need it and go away. But this presumes that there are people in those communities who are up for running a kitchen, or distributing it, or whatever. But if those existed, wouldn’t they have set up their own FNB (or something similar) in the first place, therefore making the existence of a second FNB org moot? And if nobody is there to actually do this, then what? Not do it at all? Not try and help people in your communities with your own time and effort?

The author seems to be unwittingly supporting a kind of class division, in the way that they say: “I flip a finger to all you white college kids and middle-class punks hiding in drop-out culture, get your fucking privilege out of my face.” But aren’t people of all classes supposed to co-operate? Shouldn’t it be expected by better-off anarchists to use their privilege for good rather than evil? Of course it is privilege that these people have the time, money and energy, to setup FNB chapters, but I don’t see how it’s a privilege that reinforces oppression. Rather, I would think that it’s the kind of privilege use, that battles itself, by letting people know that they can  do the same thing, regardless of their skin colour or wealth.

I could be simply ignorant here. There could be specific circumstances in POC neighborhoods that primarily white FNB chapters inflame somehow, but the author does not deem it necessary to go into detail. The best I understand is that FNB dumpster diving might be affecting those who dumpster dive themselves outside of FNB. But that would be a class privilege rather than white privilege and something that I would expect the people actually affected to oppose. Is there any such opposition from people that cannot dumpster dive anymore when FNB comes around?

Unfortunately, the author does something I’ve seen many other times within radical circles, which is, use privilege as an excuse and a cudgel in order to promote something which has nothing to do with it. In this case, the author seems to just want white people out of black neighborhoods, regardless. The argument seems to be basically: FNB is white supremacist because privilege.

But I would expect a bit more explanation than that. I can imagine a few scenarios, such as FNB disturbing the dynamics of poc dumpster divers, or trying to take some kind of white charity role, or being a gentrification front. But without at least some clarification, it’s impossible to know what exactly, and how to avoid doing it in the future, while continuing to be of help to the rest of your community. But simply wishing that white people stop trying to provide mutual aid because they’re white, with no further explanation or nuance whatsoever, seems simply wrong.

Anyway, as I said, this is coming from my own, non US-centric perspective. If any POC are willing to perhaps educate a clueless European like me, or at least provide me with some places I can educate myself, I’d appreciate it.

EDIT: I just noticed that this is an old post, there’s been follow-ups here and here

In which I am told that women in the Dark Ages were not oppressed.

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Population advantage clearly proves who holds the power. Which is why the poor have it best of all in life.

Ah MRAs, the group that must be in some of the most startling degrees of denial ever experienced in the human race. I did the mistake of getting into a discussion with such a fine young man, who gladly informed me that women can’t be oppressed because they compose 52% of the population and as such, the numerical superiority proves that it’s impossible for them to have truly been oppressed. When I inquired deeper into the subject of whether women of 500 years ago were not oppressed either (since, after all, they still had similar numbers), I was informed…

Depends on how we want to define “oppression”. Were there gender roles? Oh hell yes. Did both genders have roles? Yes. But if we want to define “oppression” as a relative or comparative term, then no. The average woman had a better life than the average man since… well since recorded history at least.

Right. I have been enlightened.

You hear that females? Ignore such things as not having the right to talk or even participate in discussions or the fact that female abuse (AKA “moderate correction”) was accepted and even enshrined by law. Since you held the majority of the population, clearly that was what women intended to have to improve their life. Not only had we had true equality as far back as the Roman Empire, but things were clearly skewed in your favour.

And now, all this 3rd wave feminist crap has made things even more skewed and the poor ole men need all the help they can get.

Authority from your enemies does not justify Authority coming from you.

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You cannot oppress yourself to freedom. You cannot war yourself to peace.

Predictably, my last piece got the attention of the Angry Marxists who reacted with a focused polemic on myself, trying desperately to paint me as the enemy because I oppose their tactics. Given that they consider their own tactics as the  only means to freedom for the oppressed, naturally they would call me a “liberal counterrevolutionary”.

There’s so much disingenuousness with this piece that it becomes humorous. From calling me the “chief moderator” of /r/anarchism ((Blatantly untrue. I exercise as much, if not less, power than the other mods and I limit it to what mandates I have receive)), to claiming that their group knew “what needed to be done to fix /r/anarchism for the marginalized groups” ((completely ignoring all the other members of marginalized groups that outright and strongly contradicted them in larger numbers)), to claiming that now that they are gone, /r/anarchism has discussions on if marginalized groups are human ((Blatant lie. We have no such arguments in /r/anarchism, nor had we ever. While nobody can prevent an obscure discussion between two people in some deep thread that nobody noticed, this is far from saying that “entrenching the rights of misogynist men, capitalists, homophobes, cissupremacists, and racists there, turning it into a place where the voices of the oppressed are always being overpowered by the same tired arguments about whether or not we are human“. This is just a complete and outright lie, which is unfortunately quite common from this group)), to linking to my own post about questionable tactics and claiming that I “defend the rights of fascists” ((which even a cursory reading would show that is about tactics and means, and not “rights”.))

But I’m not doing to go into so much trouble in deconstructing their usual dishonest interpretations as I do have a salient point to make, which they brought up by saying the following.

“Banning,” so his argument goes, its malignant subtext brought clearly to the foreground, “is authoritarian. Let us ignore the authoritarian violence that oppressed people face every day and the million ways in which they are pushed further out into the cold by the strong arm of privilege.

This is a prime example of everything that is and was wrong with these people and why I was calling them authoritarian when they proclaimed themselves as “anarchists”. They consider that because authoritarian violence is being used against oppressed people every day, this somehow justifies authoritarian violence (or other means) from our side as well but not only does this not follow, but it goes against everything anarchism is about! Just because your opponent using some specific means, does not justify those means! This catastrophic flaw in their reasoning is exemplified with the very next phrase.

Authority is only unacceptable when it is turned against the oppressor

They attribute this as a quote, one assumes to me, which only further proves my point about their egregious dishonesty, given that I’ve never uttered any such thing. It’s obvious that they have completely misunderstood what I’m saying and put their own words into my mouth to prove their point, but in the process they only manage to betray their own ideological mistakes.

Authoritarianism is unacceptable always. Not only when it’s turned against the oppressors, or the oppressed. The fact that I would have to state this clearly to someone who self-identified as an anarchist for 10 years just shows that someone was very confused for a long time.

You will not dismantle authoritarianism with more authoritarianism, any more than you would oppress towards freedom!

I hate to repeat myself but “This is Anarchism 101 people!“. Your tactics colour your end results. If your tactics are authoritarian, then naturally the end result will not be anarchism. It might be state “socialism” that would oppress the whole working class on behalf of a new bureaucratic ruling class, or something else to that extent. If your tactics are all about violence and killing those you deem to be your enemies, then your end result will be a violent society (will it be socialistic? Who knows. Perhaps in name but probably it would end up as simple warlordism).

It is no wonder than a self proclaimed “anarchist” who loved to advocate authoritarianism and unchecked violence as the solution to oppression, would end up having an eventual break with anarchism. No shit. They never understood anarchism to begin with ((Btw, I love how they say that they don’t have a problem with all Anarchists and they have some Anarchist friends. Reminds me of the “I have a black friend” argument in all its cringeworthiness.))! How some can go for 10 years calling themselves anarchist and never understanding (never mind advocating) actual anarchism is beyond me.

It is precisely because these people have a complete misunderstanding of what fighting against oppression requires that points out the bankruptcy of their ideology. When you have declared that the only possible solution is to kill your opposition, anyone who would check yours tactics is an opponent and needs to be killed (which is incidentally why the Angry Marxists are chock full of violent rhetoric). When you have declared that the only possible solution is to oppress the “reactionaries”, anyone who disagrees with this tactic is a reactionary that needs to be oppressed. It’s a self-perpetuating circle, with those who self-proclaim themselves the most radical at the top, controling the state violence and labeling people as counter-revolutionaty deserving a bad end. In sort, soon enough you’ll be repeating the Soviet Union purges of the early 20th century.

And this is why Anarchism gets so much hatred from the Angry Marxists and other Authoritarians like them. Because even though we agree on the end result and we are struggling to bring about the liberation of all oppressed classes (by the classes themselves), we do not support the same tactics. And not supporting the same tactics for an Angry Marxist is the pinnacle of betrayal. For the Angry Marxist’s tactics have been declared the only liberatory ones, therefore not following those tactics is not liberatory, therefore you are supporting the continued oppression, therefore you are a reactionary, therefore you need to be “shot in the neck and thrown in a ditch”.

It is for this reason that they misunderstand the anarchist call for appropriate tactics as a “constant call to restrain ourselves, to hold back, to wait, to watch our tone, to focus on the ballot, to put aside any thought of revolution.” It is easy to use rhetoric like  this but it is untrue. Nobody wants to police your tone or make you hold back, but people are pointing out that your tactics are flawed. They will not bring about the end of oppression, they will reinforce it. They will not bring about the end of violence, they will perpetuate it. If I say to an anarchist “Don’t kill that politician, it will not bring about a revolution”, it is not the same as telling them to “put aside any thought of revolution”, anyone with a modicum of integrity can see the difference in these two sentences. But for some reason, dogmatic authoritarians seem incapable of making the distinction.

Anarchists do not want to police your tone, or focus on the ballot, or make you wait until after the revolution or any such nonsense (in fact, it is Marxist who have a history of making these requests), but they do ask that you consider using tactics that are compatible with Anarchism to achieve your goals. Authoritarians like the Angry Marxists think that they need to oppress in order not to be oppressed, and naturally they find the anarchists against them. They then use this as proof to claim that they prevented from throwing off their own oppression, when in reality it is just opposition to them oppressing others.

You're not an underdog fighting "political correctness". You're just a bigot.

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Movebob succintly explains why the idea of being “Politically correct” is a tool used by those who want to be bigots.

MovieBob makes a great case against all those who spew oppressive shit and then hide behind free speech by labeling all those calling them out on their bigotry as “politically correct”.

If you’ve ever spent any time arguing identity politics, then you must by now hate the term “politically correct” as much as I do, so this video was a breath of fresh air.

People seem to think that the concept of free speech is a shield that allows them to spew bigotry and hate without repercussions. Any criticism of said hate speech is treated as an assault on free speech itself which is patently absurd since one is using free speech in their criticism. No, calling out bigotry and asking people to be more considerate (i.e. stop being jerks to marginalized classes) is not “censorship” or “fascism”. I simply exercise my own rights to free speech to point out bigots, and call out for others to enforce peer pressure on them to change their bigoted ways.

Free speech does not mean “No consequences for your speech” anymore than Free Religion means that all religions need to be “respected”. If what you say (or believe) is hateful and hurtful, then you will rightly be called out on it and should expect people to take direct action against you. What that action is, depends on how much harm your free speech causes but those people have as much right to take action to hurt you, as you took action to hurt them.

For fuck's sake, No! Being falsely accused of rape is not not NOT as bad as being actually raped!

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And no, false rape accusations are not an epidemic either.

[Trigger warning for rape on all links]

What the fuck is wrong with these people? I keep seeing the same argument again and again and again and again , the idea that being accused of rape is not simply as bad as being raped but often worse. I honestly can’t believe how people can be so fucking dense so as to think this is true.

Note that I am not saying that being falsely accused of rape is not bad and can utterly damage your life, but it just does not even compare to the experience of being raped. Yes, both are subjective damages but the overwhelming anecdotes we have of rape survivors show psychological damage of such extent that it can never be repaired or avoided. Being falsely accused of rape on the other hand is only as bad as being falsely accused of many other very socially unacceptable crimes such as drug dealing and murder. The effect reach only as to the extent of people who know about your crimes and consider them bad enough.

A person falsely accused of rape (and convicted of course) may, at the worst case scenario lose friend and family and have their career ruined, but given time they can find new friends who will believe them and repair their social circle, even while hindered by the state. Many times they even clear their names eventually (otherwise we wouldn’t have such a nice influx of False Rape Accusation news stories for the Men’s Right crowd to cheer around). But apparently for some, even the short term damage of a false rape accusation that a male was eventually cleared from, compares to being actually raped.

Here’s the difference though, a rape victim most likely will never escape the damage of the event. Once the deed has been done, the scar will stay forever, no matter if the perpetrator is punished. You cannot undo the rape. You cannot restore the lost trust. You cannot wipe the memory triggers. Any story from rape victims that I’ve heard is magnitudes worse than most false rape accusation stories. And while a the occasional rape victim might take it better than others and survive with less emotional scars, on average the damage is far more severe.

It truly shames me as a male that I have to even point this out to others of my gender.

Many use the excuse that because the aftereffects are subjective, no comparison can be done. Well I disagree vehemently. Due to empathy we can easily grasp the relevant magnitude of each event, much like we can easily see the difference in suffering between having your face slapped, having your tooth pulled out and having acid thrown in your face. These are not all equally bad just because the suffering they cause is subjective. But somehow this comparison fails when it comes to rape doesn’t it?

Much of it I believe comes from lack of empathy. For males, especially those active in the “Men’s Rights” movement which repeats stories of false rape accusations and child custody gone wrong stories, find it far easier to empathize with the male who has been falsely accused. As a male, this is an actual fear they face, even if they wildly blow it out of proportion. In fact I’d go as far as to say that the fear of being falsely accused in the closest thing some males will come to understanding what kind of fear our rape culture creates for females. It’s easy to intuitively empathize with the kind of emotional pain that losing your friends and family can have.  It is not as easy to empathize with rape because most men do not fear it at all. There is no common experience, no horror stories told among friends and family, no victim blaming seen on mainstream media, to even give them an idea that comes even close to how damaging rape can be and on top of that, they have a wealth of rape jokes told by other males which will further trivialize any such empathy they may develop. Naturally then they feel that False Rape Accusations are far worse than actual rape. They just empathize more strongly with the former.

Doesn’t make it correct though.

The even more frustrating things is that the fear of false rape accusations is being used to perpetuate the rape culture. The idea is promoted that a false rape accusation is bad enough even if it falls through in a court of law, due to the psychological “lynching” by friends and family. The implicit idea then is that people should treat rape accusers with distrust because otherwise you unjustly harm the accused who might be innocent after all. This of course reinforces the culture of victim blaming where the search for justice for rape victims is itself so emotionally taxing and with such a high chance of failure, that most of them do not even bother to even try.

Then the Blackstone formulation will be conveniently trotted out to show that it’s better for 15 rapists to go free than for 1 innocent  to be convicted which is so frustrating because it looks at the issue in isolation. A more accurate formulation would be to ask: Is it better for 1 in 200 males to be falsely convicted of rape ((About 8% of rape accusations are dismissed. This does not mean that 1 in 15 males is falsely accused, but from all the males that are accused, 8% are cleared. Iirc, the number in the full male population comes down to around 0.5%)) or for 1 in 6 females to be raped? Of course this is also flawed since those two statistics don’t have to be in competition ((It’s a sad fact of the flawed justice system we use that they are but challenging the adversarial justice system itself is even more unthinkable for most)). Unfortunately those who bring up the false rape accusations and paint them as an epidemic of some sort, will simply push for more stricter investigations completely ignoring what effects this has on women trying to report rape and find justice.

Fact of the matter is that compared to the frequency of actual rape, the number of false rape accusations is a drop in a bucket. To put weight into tackling those few false rape accusations without first tackling the actual epidemic of rape is a travesty, which becomes even worse when one considers that the way some males want to tackle the false rape accusations would actually reinforce the rape culture.

That does not mean I am opposed to reducing the false rape accusations while we’re at it but for crying out loud, get your priorities straight first and only then, look for ways to address it that don’t make the raped women even more marginalized. Unfortunately I think that the current court system and laws are inherently flawed and it’s a sad fact that the heavy handed statist response to the rape epidemic can’t address it without causing some harm elsewhere. One would hope this would make people rethink their premises, but unfortunately this doesn’t happen.

Finally, let me suggest an idea to make males who dismiss the idea of the rape culture while simulataneously railing against false rape accusations. It might give them an idea of how it feels to be a woman in a rape culture. Ask them, if 0.5% of males being falsely accused is a horribly large amount, how they would feel if the percentage was 18%. Would this scare them of having relationships? Ask them how they would feel if they could be easily falsely convicted without any court proceedings. Would this terrify them? Ask them how they would feel if they could be instantly falsely convicted of rape without court proceedings by their wife, their friends, or their aunts, while walking their dog, while sleeping over at a friend’s party, while drinking at a bar. Would this isolate them in horror? Ask them how they would feel if they could be easily falsely convicted of rape by many females who acted in coordination and backed up each other’s story. Ask them how they would feel if the state, their family, their friends all told them that the only way to avoid being falsely convicted of rape without a trial was to constantly use a voice recorder or a camera to record everything that happens around them. Would they think this is a sensible solution? Ask them to imagine that all of these were true at the same time and imagine how it would feel to live their whole life in such an environment.

And then remind them that this is how all women feel currently, only with worse psychological damage to boot.

PS: Bonus link (big big big rape trigger warning). Show them this gut-wrenching story and then remind them that this counts as part of the false rape accusations statistic.

Feminists don't think all men are rapists. Rapists do.

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A brilliant quote succintly explaining why rape jokes are harmful.

Via chickwithmonkey I have discovered this excellent comment from Time Machine explaining just how rape jokes are harmful. Quoted here in it’s entirety, for truth, justice and the ‘murican way FUCK YEAH and because the original thread is 1000+ comments deep and takes ages to load.

[Note: Many people on Reddit have expressed the sentiment that while they agree with the substance, they have a problem with the condescending tone. This is because the comment I’m reposting was on a blog post and was made in response to a guy who was actually arguing that it’s okay for him to make rape jokes with his friends. While it starts by addressing all men, it’s coloured by the reaction to that particular guy.]

To all those who don’t think the rape joke was a problem, or rape jokes are a problem.

I get it, you’re a decent guy. I can even believe it. You’ve never raped anybody. You would NEVER rape anybody. You’re upset that all these feminists are trying to accuse you of doing something or connect you to doing something that, as far as you’re concerned, you’ve never done and would never condone.

And they’ve told you about triggers, and PTSD, and how one in six women is a survivor, and you get it. You do. But you can’t let every time someone gets all upset get in the way of you having a good time, right?

So fine. If all those arguments aren’t going anything for you, let me tell you this. And I tell you this because I genuinely believe you mean it when you say you don’t want to hurt anybody, and you don’t see the harm, and that it’s important to you to do your best to be a decent and good person. And I genuinely believe you when you say you would never associate with a rapist and you think rape really is a very bad thing.

Because this is why I refuse to take rape jokes sitting down-

6% of college age men, slightly over 1 in 20, will admit to raping someone in anonymous surveys, as long as the word “rape” isn’t used in the description of the act.

6% of Penny Arcade’s target demographic will admit to actually being rapists when asked.

A lot of people accuse feminists of thinking that all men are rapists. That’s not true. But do you know who think all men are rapists?

Rapists do.

They really do. In psychological study, the profiling, the studies, it comes out again and again.

Virtually all rapists genuinely believe that all men rape, and other men just keep it hushed up better. And more, these people who really are rapists are constantly reaffirmed in their belief about the rest of mankind being rapists like them by things like rape jokes, that dismiss and normalize the idea of rape.

If one in twenty guys is a real and true rapist, and you have any amount of social activity with other guys like yourself, really cool guy, then it is almost a statistical certainty that one time hanging out with friends and their friends, playing Halo with a bunch of guys online, in a WoW guild, or elsewhere, you were talking to a rapist. Not your fault. You can’t tell a rapist apart any better than anyone else can. It’s not like they announce themselves.

But, here’s the thing. It’s very likely that in some of these interactions with these guys, at some point or another someone told a rape joke. You, decent guy that you are, understood that they didn’t mean it, and it was just a joke. And so you laughed.

And, decent guy who would never condone rape, who would step in and stop rape if he saw it, who understands that rape is awful and wrong and bad, when you laughed?

That rapist who was in the group with you, that rapist thought that you were on his side. That rapist knew that you were a rapist like him. And he felt validated, and he felt he was among his comrades.

You. The rapist’s comrade.

And if that doesn’t make you feel sick to your stomach, if that doesn’t make you want to throw up, if that doesn’t disturb you or bother you or make you feel like maybe you should at least consider not participating in that kind of humor anymore…

Well, maybe you aren’t as opposed to rapists as you claim.

This is a perfect example of how social norms are insidiously perpetuating acts you might not expect. Just from a seemingly harmless activity like laughing as a rape joke, a sexist joke, a racist joke and so on.

PS: Protip (for chickwithmonkey). You can find a permalink to a Disqus comment under the date of the comment (Where it says something like “1 day ago”.) Same with Intense Debate that I’m using here.

This is what rape culture and male privilege looks like

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Should rape victims deserve to be accused of lying? Should males be praised for not dumping their girlfriends after they were raped? You tell me.

A woman made an IAmA/AMA ((For those not in the know yet, IAmA/AMA stands for “I Am A [insert trait, description, experience here], Ask Me Anything)) about her experience with being raped, keeping the child and her current boyfriend staying with her and marrying her eventually. The story of how it happened was quite interesting to read since for a change it does not come from a “Western Nation” but rather from a “Developing Country” which has still quite backward social norms. And one of those that immediately jumped out at me was the crass rape culture that exists.

The 5th day, I finally called the police. I live in an asian country. You have to understand that the culture is different here and that when a woman accuses a man, the police always assume that the woman was lying. Except in my case, I wasn’t. They came, I told them what happened and the police was less than helpful.

This whole part of the story is in fact quite interesting in a horrifying sort of way in giving us a glimpse into the post-rape mindframe of a rape victim. How she was feeling so guilty and unsure that it took her 5 days just to report it and by then, much of the evidence is gone and the rapist has enough time to secure an alibi. And then, the police will immediately assume you’re lying. This isn’t just “too much” for the victim of a type of assault that completely destroys you emotionally, It is overwhelming. Is it any wonder why so many rapes go unreported? If it takes a week, or even a month to get emotionally stable enough to even speak about the event, who wants the first reaction to it to be an accusation of lying and victim blaming?

As a privileged person (male and have not been raped), I can’t even begin to feel what it must be like but even the thought of having to deal with such a traumatizing event and then have the whole world distrust me because of it, downright horrifies me.

This is what a rape culture looks like and the immediate distrust of rape survivors coupled with victim blaming is why rape is still so widespread. And this particular point, the fostering of distrust of the experiences of victims of rape is why I especially despise those who align themselves with the “Men’s Rights” movement which continuously agitates on the platform that false rape accusations are frequent and that being  falsely accused is just as bad as being the victim of rape (Yes, this was an actual position someone stood by).

The Men’s Rights crowd will of course claim that they only want the “guilty until proven innocent” doctrine be used, but in practice this boils down to treating anything the victim claims as lies until conclusive evidence is presented in court. When someone points out that treating rape survivors as liars at worst or dishonest at best is not exactly the best way to foster an attitude where rape victims can come forward, they strawman your argument as you are pushing for a “guilty until proven innocent” doctrine. A ridiculous strawman setup just to shut down any discussion by enraging their opponent and then derailing due to that.

That’s the first point, the second point I wanted to talk about can be seen by looking at the comments of the reddit post. Go look at them and tell me if you can see it. I’ll wait.

Done? Good. Did you see anything troubling?

Well, let me put it out clearly: Of the 15 best comments in the post ((“best comments” being the default sorting algorithm that reddit uses)), 10 are praising the male. Of the best 3 comments, all 3 are about praising the husband. To put this into context:

In a post about the personal story of a rape victim who ended up getting pregnant because of it and her husband decided to stay with her, 2/3rds of the responses are all about praising the male.

Does it seem just a bit odd to you that in a story about the rape of a woman who opens her heart and allows for some Q&A, a male who is not even there would be getting praises in large amounts, just for being a decent human being?

This is what male privilege looks like. The fact that so little is required of you due to your gender, that even basic human decency is grounds enough for gushing adulation. It’s the sheer mentality of “I could act like a dick if I wanted to, but if I don’t, then goddamnit you’d better recognise it and give me the appropriate praise“. And this permeates everything. Woman doing the housework all week? No big deal. Man cleaning the toilet over the weekend without being asked to explicitly? OMGWTFBBQ Best. Husband. Ev4r!

In this case it just really really irked me the wrong way. Here we have a woman who had one of the most traumatic experiences a human can go through and ended up in a life changing situation (being pregnant). She nevertheless had the courage to report it, even though she knew she would be treated with distrust by those who were tasked with “protecting her”. She went through hell and came out alive and the boyfriend deserves all the praise for not dumping her on top of it?! I’m sorry, I just can’t wrap my head around this mentality. The sheer fucking absurdity of it…

It could be in part due to how much the woman herself is promoting her husband as deserving the lion’s share of the praise for sticking with her during these bad time, but for fuck’s sake people, this is the time to point out that most of the credit belongs to her. For being courageous enough to report it. For managing to overcome crippling psychological damage enough. For not taking her own life! She is the strong , wonderful person in the story here and she doesn’t seem to know it, given on how she attributes her whole recovery on her husband. You shouldn’t be reinforcing this. You should be pointing out that she is putting herself down far too much.

Argh!

Related articles

Incentives and how the environment affect human behaviour

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Can we radically change the attitude of a whole community by simply giving an incentive which rewards it?

A "Kudos" candy box.
Image via Wikipedia

I’ve recently gotten back into Heroes of Newerth (AKA HoN) and as it always happens when my interest is focused on something particular, I’m getting a lot of ideas for improvements. And one of the things that seriously needs improvement in HoN is the community behaviour. You see, at the moment HoN has rightly conquered the top of the food chain of games with the most shitty community, even bypassing the champions like Halo and Call of Duty with just how much abuse you get to hear in every game from your own team. To give you an idea of how bad it looks, there’s practically no thread in reddit’s /r/gaming (a community of 300k people) about HoN, which doesn’t have at least 1/3 of the people mentioning how bad the community is and how one should keep away from it for this reason. In the official fora, you get “the community is bad” posts almost daily. I was posting about this stuff 2 years ago and things are just as bad now as they were then.

The reason why the community is so bad is practically because of the rules of the game and the kind of mentality it breeds. As one of the community managers explained:

Fact of the matter is, every game in HoN is fought tooth and nail, and most of the time it is simply economically efficient to just try and carry a bad team yourself than it is to try and coach them while playing. HoN is a very fast paced game and ‘playing two heroes at once’ is no easy feat, especially when most of the time when you coach people in-game they wont improve anyways, and will sometimes even get mad at you for trying to help them.

Which is fairly accurate even though I could mention a lot of other stuff that adds to the problem (such as stat tracking). This is fact is a prime example of how the environment of a situation, breeds a certain kind of behaviour from the people in it. In this case, unfortunately it’s complete intolerance of even the slightest failing and rampart elitism. It’s pretty bad in-game but it also heavily spills out in other areas such as the fora or in reddit, making the whole experience require a very thick skin to say the least.

However recently with the 2.0 update, a new exciting feature has been added and that is a form of currency called “goblin coins” and a store where you can redeem those for some aesthetic purchases (new skins, models, avatars, that sort of thing). Now this is the first form of actual incentive the game has that is not directly tied to winning games or achieving some particular task within the game. The fact that the goblin coins are abstracted from gameplay (even though they’re normally awarded because of it) means that they can also be awarded for other reasons, and as the person who pushed for them notes, it allows the HoN devs to use them as an incentive for so much more.

Given correct implementation, goblin coins have the capacity to finally provide an incentive for people in the HoN community to stop being dickwads in or outside the game. It will once again modify the environment so as to mold the human behaviour within it.It is a good first step, but it could be so much more.

Talking with the community manager today, the idea came to me that while goblin coins can be used as an incentive to improve the community attitudes, they are still primarily tied either to winning games (therefore still giving an incentive to be an asshole in-game, if it [appears to] provide a competitive advantage at winning games) , or with IRL currency. These two dilute the effectiveness of using goblin coins as an incentive for any other purpose since it fairly easy for someone to continue being a dick as they can make up for it by simply winning more games, or by just being richer than others in real life.

In fact, this little fact of market economies IRL is one of the main reasons why rich people can afford to be bigger assholes than everyone else since it all comes down to money and we have tied so much of human accomplishment and wellbeing to how wealthy one is. Of course this is not the whole picture but I digress anyway.

This means that it would be far more effective if there was a particular incentive for good behaviour which could not be bypassed by other means and the idea came to me of just how much more effective a secondary currency would be that not only was not tied to the skills of one in-game, or the money they have IRL, but that the only possible way to receive it was by good behaviour in game. Lets call this new currency “Kudos” as a tribute to the Algebraist 🙂

So how could this Kudos economy affect the community? Lets take a theoretical setup. We assume that one can only receive Kudos from other people, you can give Kudos to someone after a match by clicking on their name, or you could give Kudos to someone in the fora for making a good and thoughtful post. There is no other way to receive Kudos. In other words, one cannot buy them with real life money as this would defeat part of the purpose, allowing trolls and dickwads to achieve rewards for good behaviour while not having any.

Now lets also assume that Kudos can only be used in a special shop which sells distinct rewards from the Goblin shop. At the moment, HoN’s goblin shop sells alternative skills and models, avatars and icons and even different announcers voices. Now imagine that the Kudos shop sold stuff that not only you could not find in the Goblin shop, but that complemented any purchases you did from the Goblin shop. For example, while one could buy new models via Goblin coins, you could only buy new skins or accessories via the Kudos shop, so someone who wants to completely “pimp out” their favourite hero, needs not only to be a good player, but also a good player. This can be expanded further with one selling custom avatars, while the other sold custom titles. Stuff like that.

The end result would be a distinct incentive that pushes people to try and be well liked by other players enough to receive Kudos which they can then exchange for something only such people can have. It is not the best incentive one can have since it’s still all based on some sort of an “e-peen contest” in the end, but we are in an imperfect system so we have to do the best we can within it. What this system would achieve is that people would still be trying to fulfil their ego with shiny digital toys, but the actions they use to do that would have a positive effect rather than a negative. This would then create a cascading effect of making the community more welcome to new player and therefore more successful, subconsciously conditioning players to use and expect good behaviour and ultimately for them to abhor and punish bad behaviour.

All this, by simply modifying the environment slightly so that the incentives push for a different behaviour. This is a similar idea as expressed by Human iteration, with the difference is that this is actually feasible in the very short term and we can then actually empirically observe the results in the microcosm of a gaming community. I believe that from an memetic perspective this makes a lot of sense and will be a very exciting experiment to see.

Unfortunately, I doubt S2 (the publishers of HoN) would go through the effort of implementing anything so drastic but one never knows. There is certainly a lot of pressure on them to improve the community behaviour and perhaps the constant and loud outcry on this subject will make them bold enough to try.

For Parents: Another reason why piracy is the better choice

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Adverts targetted at children are some of the most sexist stuff around. Allowing children to see them constantly is a goddamn crime.

I just saw this video about advertisement targeted to children and I couldn’t agree more.

This kind of stuff simply disgusts me. If advertisements are is bad enough when targeted at adults, they’re even moreso when targetted specifically to pre-teen children who are far too moldable to external expectations and input. Having to deal with the question of whether I should let my future children watch TV and be indoctrinated by this shit, or act as an authoritarian and forbid TV altogether is one decision I do not look forward to.

Fortunately I hope by the time I have to decide, the question will not be relevant anymore. Hopefully entertainment will have primarily moved to a more interactive model such as gaming and the children will be allowed to choose the kind of things they like to play with, without feeling pressured by society’s expectations to like what “good little boys” and “nice little girls” should like in the most manipulative manner (meaning: even more than the gender-targeted shows do, eg He-Man for boys, Little Pony for Girls).

For those of you who have to make this decision now however, there is always an alternative: Switch to downloading the actual shows your children want to see directly, as a way bypass the averts they would be bombarded with on TV. This will provide you with a far vaster library in which you can find the shows of higher quality (as opposed to whatever the brain-dead schedule TV channels decide to throw at you), and if your children are peer-pressured at school to watch the same stuff all the cool kids are watching, then you can simply download those directly and avoid the unnecessary indoctrination around them.

The empathetic poor

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Why do the lower classes seem to be the more kind, even though popular media routinelly paints them as uncouth violent criminals?

The good Samaritan
Image by twoGiraffe via Flickr

US. Americans like to pride themselves on their hospitality  and  generosity and I’ve heard many visitors to the US back this impression up so there must be a truth to it and I do not doubt that towards more “trustworthy” people, as are for example white, middle-class European tourists, Americans will go out of their way to take care for them. However, things are radically different when one is talking about lower class people, immigrants and PoC. This story from reddit is quite enlightening on this respect. Here’s a quick quote-summary ((Btw, the above are not the best parts, just the parts that convey the main point I’m trying to make. I won’t spoil the whole comment and you should really read it in full to get the whole emotional impact of it.)):

This past year I have had 3 instances of car trouble. A blow out on a freeway, a bunch of blown fuses and an out of gas situation[…]

Anyway, each of these times this shit happened I was DISGUSTED with how people would not bother to help me. I spent hours on the side of the freeway waiting, watching roadside assistance vehicles blow past me, for AAA to show. The 4 gas stations I asked for a gas can at told me that they couldn’t loan them out “for my safety” but I could buy a really shitty 1-gallon one with no cap for $15. It was enough, each time, to make you say shit like “this country is going to hell in a handbasket.”

But you know who came to my rescue all three times? Immigrants. Mexican immigrants. None of them spoke a lick of the language. But one of those dudes had a profound affect on me.

He was the guy that stopped to help me with a blow out with his whole family of 6 in tow. I was on the side of the road for close to 4 hours. Big jeep, blown rear tire, had a spare but no jack. I had signs in the windows of the car, big signs that said NEED A JACK and offered money. No dice[…]

So, to clarify, a family that is undoubtedly poorer than you, me, and just about everyone else on that stretch of road, working on a seasonal basis where time is money, took an hour or two out of their day to help some strange dude on the side of the road when people in tow trucks were just passing me by. Wow…

This isn’t of course just to rant against the US. Most, if not all primarily middle-class countries in the world behave like this. I do not think that Germans or Englishmen would be more willing to stop to help than the Americans. Hell, the Germans had to implement laws which make it illegal not to stop to help during a car accident, just to prevent everyone just driving by.

Things vary of course, depending on how society is formed, along with their traditions and the incentives the system creates, where small economic variables can have a very big impact ((Example: Having to pay for health or an ambulance to come will make people involved or watching accidents have a significantly altered reaction compared to countries where all health care is free. I still remember the story about a guy in Switzerland passed by a motorcycle accident with an unconscious cyclist. He called out an ambulance to the scene which was turned back by the cyclist who had woken up by then. Since ambulance call-outs are charged there and the cyclist refused service, they tracked down the original caller and charged him. Now what incentive would that give you?)) but there is an obvious correlation to social class and how much your “good samaritan” feelings extend. To me, it looks like one’s mutual aid tends to focused towards their own social class or and higher, which of course why the rich (which have the smallest numbers) seem to be meaner on average than the rest of us.

I’m not a scientist and especially not  sociologist so I can only state my impressions on this of course, but I see various interlocking psychological and material effects taking place here to form this reality, from the monkeysphere, to tribalism, to class warfare, and all of them together form this reality and this is just yet another emergent phenomenon from the existence of inequality. It is exactly these kind of emergent effect that simple logical assumptions and rationale (such as the favourite right-libertarian defence of inequality as “harmless”) cannot predict or combat.

Until  we achieve global equality, such phenomena as the above will always exist and the most oppressed classes will be always the most altruistic while the ruling elite and all kinds of managers will act the most crassly and egoistically to the detriment of everyone else. All the pleading in the world for a more empathetic “first world” will continue falling on deaf ears, because it’s not that these citizens of the rich nations willfully become this way, but rather that any existence of inequality, will affect the psychology of people to make them act this way. And unfortunately, it’s not possible for everyone to receive the kind of life-altering event, as the redditor above.

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