Category: Pondering Infinity

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

Follow up on Japanese Sexism

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A commenter expands on the subject of Japanese Sexism.

japanese white rabbit…
Image by colodio via Flickr

On my post about Sexism in Japanese culture, one commenter left a reply that I thought was far to interesting to let it delve in obscurity. So I’m posting it here to give you perhaps a deeper understanding on what goes on there.

Having lived in Japan for a while and having married a Japanese woman, I’d say that’s you’re fairly correct in your assumptions. In general, the progressive image of Japan comes under a lot of heat in many areas when viewed from the inside-out.

Japan has never truly had a woman’s revolution. I visit corporate clients on a daily basis and find that the majority of women are still used in a 1960s-ish ‘coffee secretary’ role. I’ve been told directly by more than a few clients that they tend to hire women solely for having them around the office to meet male workers, marry them, get pregnant, and leave the workplace so they can get new, younger women in the office.

The idea behind this is that it helps Japanese male employees meet women (which they’re fairly near utterly incapable of doing on their own sometimes) and don’t have the free time to usually pursue because of long work hours. In this way, it keeps Japan from extinction.

On the other hand, sexual harassment is the norm, and there doesn’t exist much currently to combat such things. I’ve seen female employees treated like complete garbage by men who have never had to confront the word ‘equality.’

So has the oppressing hand of man kept women down and successfully prevented a woman’s revolution?

Not Exactly….

In Japan, the workplace is traditionally the domain of men and the home is the domain of women. While men puff out their chests in public and can show dominance over their spouses there, they are normally completely at a loss to control ANY home issues.

The woman handles all money and the man readily gives her his monthly paychecks. She normally doles out a pittance to the man to buy a bit of lunch, and dictates all monetary issues.

I know many a man that I can deflate upon asking why they can’t come out for a drink.

“My wife only allows me 500 yen (5 dollars) a day for lunch.”

In this way, there’s a bit more under the carpet than can be easily seen.

I’d argue that a woman’s revolution has never occurred because the majority of Japanese woman are quite happy with the status quo and don’t feel the need for work when they can dream of being a house wife that holds out her hand to collect her husband’s money.

I liken it to some people on welfare in America/Australia that don’t bother getting jobs because life’s already basically paid for, but many Japanese woman seem quite comfortable with the arrangement. Perhaps they don’t know better, or perhaps it just IS better (I often wonder what life would be like if I could just collect a spouses money and maintain the house all day)

Of course, there are a minority of woman who want to achieve a life where they can manage companies and advance in their line of work/careers, and these women truly get the shaft and have to endure a barrage of men trying to put them back in their place.

I often get angry at it, but Japan is a place where you accept roles and stick to those roles. It’s not going to change overnight.

It IS changing slowly, extremely slowly. Men today seem to have lost a bit of their old ways and are slowly emerging in home life. Some would argue that women’s control has actually increased due to a weaker man.

I loved your post, totally agree, would love to see change, but am cognizant of the fact that I’m viewing the whole situation from a different cultural standpoint and perhaps could be wrong.

-Craig

EDIT: Just to make it clear since the comment above can be taken to apologize for the rampart patriarchy of Japan (Although I do not think that was Craig’s intention) when it says stuff like:

So has the oppressing hand of man kept women down and successfully prevented a woman’s revolution?

Not Exactly….

I believe it has been absolutely the oppressive hand of man that kept women down. I do not see the role of the woman in such a society as having any power but rather as having internalized their oppression and trying to use the position decided for them by the patriarchy to its full extent. As Sitakali wrote in the comments (and I agree wholeheartedly):

I find excuses like the one presented here to be good examples of why cultural relativism can be dangerous. Just as Sharia Law is not acceptable, regardless of the cultural history of Islamic nations, so is this separation of “duties” along gender lines unacceptable and unfair.

PS: This is the reason why I like blogging my thoughts on things like this, even if they’re not so well educated. So often will you find people that are able to provide a thoughtful and new perspective on something you’re thinking of, correct your preconceptions and generally ecpand your understanding.

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Management Consultants or Court Magicians?

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If Managers are the new nobility, Management Consultants are their Court Magicians.

Japanese-born American poet and critic Sadakic...
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I just read this very interesting opinion piece from The Independent where it is shown how Management Consultancy is the largest legal scal of the 20th century. In the piece, the author is quite surprised how time after time various big firms will fall for the same scam with disastrous results and how come the bad reputation of such Consultancy firms has not yet caught up to them.

This immediately made sense to me, for the truth is that the Management are absolutely incapable of telling what is a good or bad result, since they themselves are more likely than not, as incompetent in management as the consultants they are hiring. In the past, I’ve likened the Management and the paths they use to achieve such positions, to the Nobility of old and this latest article nicely allows me to extend this analogy.

If Management is the new nobility, then the Management Consultants are the Court Magicians.

Much like a court magician, they do not have any knowledge or skill in making decisions for other people, not to mention whole organizations. In the past, those court magicians used cantrips, displays of mysticism, cold and hot reading and simply psychology, to make the Nobles believe that they had powers of foresight and Intuition. Management Consultants instead use complex excel sheets, alchemical algorithms, free market drivel and orthodoxy and raw bluff.

Court Magicians were used as advisors to Kings and Lords in important decisions. Their advise, when not simply reinforcing the opinion of the ruler as a form of sycophancy, were nothing but random. Much like current management, Court Magicians relied on the fact that a King or Lord had no more an idea on how to rule other humans and were gunning for that 50% of random chance success, while and padding it up with the cognitive biases of the nobility. Management Consultancy can’t even get a 50% success rate but they rely on the fact that current Management is so desperate in times of crisis that they would be even willing to believe in astrology or alchemy if it promised a way out.  Of course, those two disciplines have been severely discredited by actual sciences while in the field of business, marketing is king. And Management Consultancy firms can afford a lot of Marketing.

In fact, I think that if Management firms hired actual court magicians, they might actually have better success, since at least they wouldn’t be mired in the orthodoxy of  “Cut 30% of Staff no matter the circumstances”.

The more one looks at this insane system we’re living in, it truly starts to resemble some kind of neo-feudalism more and more. The incompetent are born into their positions of power, and are then advised by the more cunning incompetent on how to rule everyone else.

Now I just need to figure who the court jester is…

Now this is interesting…

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The Pirate Party turn the system’s tools against it. Lets see how the system will respond.

The Pirate Party
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Apparently the Pirate party of Sweden decided to take thing one step further and has announced the world’s first Pirate ISP which will be focused on protecting their user’s privacy and take the MAFIAA and the rest of the gang head on. I assume it’s going to be protected via the governmental immunity the parliamentary members have so it’s going to be much more difficult to shut down, although the US copyright industry will definitely focus all their political muscle in order to nip this in the bud. Remember how they managed to have the Swedish authorities raid the Pirate Bay Offices even though they were legal under Swedish law.

I find this a very good example of turning the state’s weapons against it, but ultimately I don’t know how successful it will be (but naturally I hope to be proven wrong). Of course this doesn’t mean that “The system works” since they’re in effect trying to combat the system in the first place. No. Rather what is happening is that they’ve found a loophole in the system which allows them to use it in a way the ruling elite didn’t plan to. This is a very good way to use the system actually but the problem is ultimately that the power still relies on the ruling elite. And when the new material circumstances make previous rules work against them, then they will make sure that the previous rules are modified enough to suit their interests.

At the moment, I can foresee a few ways they are going to go around shutting this down or neutering it

  • Change the law to make this illegal. Perhaps they will disallow parliament to be involved in business. Perhaps they will stop political immunity from affecting businesses run from parliamentary members. Sure, this may harm the already established interests but given how much the IP lobby (and remember, the US is practically surviving on IP at the moment) is set to loose if this idea starts to spread to other countries, they might be willing to compensate those who will be harmed by new laws handsomely, so that this particular tactic becomes impossible. Certainly the parliamentary members might try to fight this on constitutional grounds but seeing as how easy it was to find biased judges to oversee the Pirate Bay case, and how important this decision will be, this is certainly going to be stacked against the small amount of people behind the Pirate party.
  • Create a moral panic about child porn. Someone (planted or not) is going to start sharing child porn through the Pirate ISP which will then force the pirate party in a very precarious political decision. Either it will be seen as supporting or covering child porn and other nasty stuff, or the Pirate Party will have to start keeping logs and other tracking measures, which can then be used by law enforcement to track down file sharers. Perhaps they will attempt to provide the info only for child porn and not for piracy, but that’s how it always starts anyway.
  • Disconnect the Pirate ISP from the Internet. I don’t know how possible this is, but it could be possible that the anti-pirate outfits as well as the USA and its nation-bitches will attempt to block any connection coming from the IPs assigned to the Pirate ISP. This would not require a legal precedent but it will require a lot of logistics and coordination of many nations, which might in turn make in unrealistic or simply impossible given the distributed nature of the net. This means that the US could by itself try to protect its IP interests by blocking its own people from accessing the Pirate ISP addresses but what they’re most interested in – extracting the wealth from the developing nations though IP – will be severely harmed as the poor people will simply route via the Pirate ISP for the piracy fix.
  • Try to muscle Sweden into compliance via Trade Sanctions. They WTO might allow others to embargo Sweden in order to put them into a very bad imports/exports situation, therefore creating civil unrest and hopefully blaming this on the Pirate Party and their ISP and attempt to kick them out of parliament.

I can see the second point being used in conjunction with the first point for the most effect. If those two fail, it will be the 3rd and 4th one, as they do not require the compliance of the Swedish people. Whatever happens though, once again the system will have to reveal its true nature (protecting the plutocracy at the expense of the will of the people) and will once again show how using the state’s tools cannot work if it’s creating too many headaches for the ruling elite.

Of course, I might be wrong and the Pirate ISP will be a success, nothing will be able to take it down and in one fell swoop, Sweden will be liberate file-sharing,  which will in turn trigger a chain reaction in the other nations and their own Pirate Parties. But given how much is at stake here, I truly believe we’ll see all the weapons against harmful reformism come into play. It will be interesting to watch, no doubt.

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Will Mortal Kombat: Rebirth survive its transition to a profit motive?

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The Mortal Kombat: Rebirth short film was nothing short of awesome. I’m worried however that moving to the big screen, will take away all that did make it awesome.

MKDL
Image via Wikipedia

In case you missed it, a few days ago the most amazing short film emerged based on the re-imagination of the Mortal Kombat franchise. I think every MK fan in the world must have seen it by now so I won’t embed it again. However today I read this intereview from the guy who made it and it didn’t strike me as a great surprise to find out that the short film was made out of love for the MK theme and through the donation of time and equipment of people with similar vision.

The result was a short film made of pure awesome. Something which (for me at least) brings the vision for an MK movie to what it really should have been from the start. Gritty, Brutal and Horrific. Something truly made for adults and not children. The short film was created in order to sell the idea of an MK reboot to Warner Brothers and therefore make a whole movie and given the reaction it has received, there’s no reason to expect this will not go through.

However this also nicely fits in with what we’ve discovered bout human motivation which is that what humans do out of an interest to achieve a quality result and via self-management is always of higher quality than what is created in order to make money. This short film was created in exactly the same way. It’s director knew he was not getting paid for it. The people volunteering knew it as well. They had the right motivation and thus the result is excellent.

What will happen though when they try to translate this vision to the big screen? When their main drive will be profit and corporate management will take away much of the self-management of the staff in order to make the film sell more? What will happen when they make it PG-13 in order to tap into the teenage audience? When they start trying to just pile more and more special effects for the “Wow factor” that Holywood is so obsessed with. When the various IP pendlers intervene and try to get a cut (which is already happening).

Speaking of IP, this is also an excellent sampla of how such concepts prevent creativity rather than create it. The Director created something awesome out of the ideas that came before him. He didn’t do it to get a new piece of IP as the idea behind the laws would have you believe. He made it because we wanted to create something awesome. In this case, copyrights and trademarks are only going to delay and take money out of production rather than promote creativity. I.e. they will fulfill their classic role of delaying creativity.

But I digress.

I hope that I’m proven wrong and hopefully at least, the first film made out of this concept will be as awesome as the short trailer. The sequels, if The Matrix is anything to go by, will not be anywhere near as good anyway.

Είδωμεν…

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Your democracy is built on totalitarianism

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Is your society free when it’s building components are unfree?

I wonder how people can still think they are living in a Free Democratic Nation™ when their whole live revolves around profoundly undemocratic institutions save for a few hours ever few years where they get to pick among those choices predefined for them. How can you call your life anything democratic when your jobs resemble state socialism, your schools resemble prisons and your army resembles totalitarianism. How can people seriously consider themselves free when they only have the choice between unfree options?

Seriously, I read this article about boot camp (h/t Broadsnark) and how much people are conditioned within to accept the most totalitarian institution. How all semblance of individuality is wiped out and replaced with unthinking collectivism and sheer killer instict. How can a free society claim that it requires an unfree institution to survive? Does not compute.

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Quote of the Day: There's no good cops

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Where oh where art the good cops?

Breathalyzer
Image by JOE MARINARO via Flickr

Hamakua skewers the classic police apologetics that “therey’re not all bad” in a very amusing way

Honestly? Fuck that. I am judging them all by the apathy of the many. I agree with the earlier post, and I believe every single fucking cop should stand up and strike every time one of these rare (yeah fucking right) bad apples “steps” out of line.

I have cop friends too, with cop families, and cop dinner tables, … with you know what? Fucking cop stories… I have heard them and I can observe the attitudes, of not just the cops, but the family, the friends, the other co workers…. It’s like a bunch of racists… except remove “race” and replace it with “us” and “them”. Meaning cops and non-cops.

Don’t give me any crap about how you have cop friends. You aren’t fooling anyone singing their defense or their praise. They should be held to a higher standard, and in fact are held to a much lower one… and you make excuses for the good ones? There are no good ones, there are apathetic ones and bad ones.

Forgive the rant, but I hate apologists.

And fucking don’t forget, they weren’t drafted, or forced to become cops, they CHOSE to become cops… it’s not like a color of skin, or ethnic background, it’s a fucking power grab.

That’s exactly it people. If there are good cops out there, they fail to publicly display it. They fail to condemn the action of their colleagues. They fail to stand up to abuse being dished out in front of them. How many times have you seen a video of one police officer getting putting his body between a police officer and his hapless victim, even forcing them away if needed? How many times have you seen a suspect being released from a questionable arrest due to the actions of another officer? How many strikes and marches by police officers have you seen against police corruption?

Perhaps such incidents exist, but they are not simply the minority, but such an overwhelmed minority that they might as well not exist. If police officers really showed that they were willing to fight on the side of the people, perhaps those people (who are not servile apologists of power) would fear them less and respect them more. And then, those few good cops, who have proven their goodness, might even be allowed in an anarchist cafe if they are sufficiently known.

But until then, it’s safe to assume that the cop you see in front of you, is as rotten as the rest of his peers. It’s not that good cops may not exist, it’s that the good ones don’t become cops, leave the force or stop being “good” eventually.

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To Serve and Protect…

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The largest and most brutal street gangs are those paid by your taxes.

Here’s something to challenge your paradigm in case you still believe the police are there to serve and protect you

Watch the second and third part as well (not to mention the whole thing). Especially the last story (starting at the end of part two and the whole of part 3)  is gut wrenching in the callous and inhumane behaviour of the police, not to mention how the state naturally protected its hired thugs from legal backlash.

And then you wonder why Anarchists feel threatened by police presence and want them nowhere near them.

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Slavery is not "Self-Control", it's control by others.

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Are humans self-domesticated or did something force us to act like slaves in our productive life?

I just read a very misguided post over at Overcoming Bias ((Funny note: A commenter informed me that I had referred to them initially as “Overwhelming Bias” which is quite an interesting Freudian slip to make 🙂 ))which surprisingly seems to be getting everything wrong and coming to the conlcusion that humans are naturally “self-domesticating themselves” for the benefit of production. I just had to take a stab at it as some of the thing I read there were just so wrong.

First of all, “self-control” here is used not as self-management but rather as self-restraint; as willingness of humans to voluntarily submit to slave-like conditions. It is a very misguiding term that implies voluntary submission to rigid organization when the truth is that the control comes from external forces, from managers and bosses and masters. Looking at it this way, makes it obvious that it’s a form of slavery.

The basic argument rests on the discoveries of economists (who else) that slave-driven production and rigid organization was “more effective” than self-managed organization and therefore “free-labour” farms had to copy this kind of organization to compete. We are also told that because firms and factories could more efficiently wield the carrot and stick, it provided a bigger incentive which eventually led to city bred humans to choose such positions while their more free brethren in the countryside starved rather than submit.

There are a lot of important things here which really throw a spanner in the way the argument has been constructed.

First of all, the carrot and stick leading to greater productivity and therefore production methods that perfected it out-competing free labour conflicts with actual Science which has shown us that the carrot and stick doesn’t work except for the most menial and repetitive jobs, of which farming isn’t. Experience has shown that self-managed (note, not “self-controlled” as the author defines it) are far more productive than managed ones.

Second, the economists doing the comparisons, as is common with economists, don’t really mention anything else of the surrounding circumstances. Why where free farmers “less productive”? Could it be that they didn’t require that they overworked themselves for the benefit of a rich white man who could then sell all that extra product on the market for his own benefit? No. Lets not get caught in the details shall we?

Third, the absurd point that:

This dramatically illustrates the huge self-control innovations that came with industry. School, propaganda, mass media, and who knows what else have greatly changed human nature, enabling a system of industrial submission and control that proud farmers and foragers simply would not tolerate – they would (and did) starve first.  In contrast, industry workers had enough self/culture-control to act as only slaves would before – working long hours in harsh alien environments, and showing up on time and doing what they were told.

This is a blatant and common reworking of history by those who would like it to say something positive about brutal and inhumane production methods. That societies somehow “evolved” towards factory production as those who did not accept it where out-competed. This ignores the very significant violence enacted from the state, the theft of a genocidal size of the common lands of farmers, forcing them to either become proletarians or starve. People did in fact NOT starve when not following factory production. They were quite capable of living “inefficiently” through their free labour. This is why they had to be forced out of it, as they would not do it voluntarily. Who would discard Self-management in favour of wage-slavery?

Finally the conclusion that workers voluntarily chose to become wage-slaves because the rewards were bigger is goes contrary to the history of the labour movement and basic psychology. Not only do humans value self-management and freedom far more than they value extra money but we have a very clear history which shows us how violence and terror was required for workers to “choose” to become wage-slaves and how, further to that, the state was all too willing to attack them when they tried to resist this process or improve their lot. There is no need to theorize randomly based on economic nonsense and lack of context. We know why humans “chose” to become wage-slaves and it definitely wasn’t for the money.

In conclusion, humans are only “self-domesticated” to the extent that those who “domesticated” humans via violence and coercion are also human. But there’s nothing voluntary in there and the sooner we discard such propaganda and realize the true history and extend of our oppression, the sooner we can get rid of it.

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Is Anarchism collectivism or individualism? The answer is neither, and both.

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Anarchism is rather a fusion of the two: Stigmergy.

A beautiful ant colony on College Campus in Mu...
Image via Wikipedia

The latest post from Kevin Carson, while very good on its own as always, just introduced me to a term I’d never head before: Stigmergy. And reading about it, as trite and annoying as it may be, made me want to declare: THIS.

This seems to fit in perfectly with my understanding of how an anarchist society might develop around chaotic principles and emergent order. I always understood however that such a society would include both strong individualism and powerful collective action. However those terms are usually demonized or assaulted by statists and propertarians respectively and you end up with endless ad hominems and misunderstanding (“LOL isn’t Libertarian Socialism an oxymoron LOL”) which make us lose endless time trying to unschool people out of.

It’s very good to know that there’s a term which precicely describes how an anarchist organization would look like and does not imply strawmen of Bolsheviks or Randroids.

The more interesting thing is how such a term is primarily related at the moment to animal organizational forms, particularly those of insects such as ants and their swarm intelligence. And if one considers how ants are arguably the most productive and industrious species of the planet, it really paints some interesting possibilities in case a species which has far more power and intelligence in one unit than a whole ant colony (i.e. humans) embraces a stigmergic social organization.

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On the heterosexual male's love for the cock

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Blue Linchpin shows us how to skewer the pro-rape position.

Quoth Blue Linchpin (on the pro-rape position of Eivind Berge)

Let’s get this straight: it’s not exactly a revelation that women’s bodies are traded for wealth. This is the general model for how society expects relationships to work. It is, however, just that: a model, a social construct. Male sexuality has no worth in society because those it is of no worth to those in power, ie men. Eivind, as a heterosexual male (aha! So that’s why his link specified heterosexual society) has no desire for cock. He is not willing to pay for it, or make any effort for it, and he would surely cry crocodile tears if it were forced upon him. Would he change his mind if the cock in question were attached to a wealthy business owner, and he were a single father in need of cash? Quite possibly. Does this mean Eivind’s only worth is as a sex object? After all, Eivind is just as capable of being valuable in other ways.

Check the rest of this awesome post btw. It’s very nicely skewers the bullshit arguments made by this very very misguided person.

On a related point: One has to wonder how it comes to be that s0 many right-libertarians end up being misogynists or supporting sexist positions (and then end up wonder why there are so few womyn in their movement). I’m guessing it has to do with the fetishism of market theory, making them try to apply it in every possible situation. If one ignores the social circumstances around one exchange, then it’s not difficult to reach such absurd conclusions. If one simply starts from the basis where women’s worth is in their vagina, it’s not difficult to end up with absurdities such as the pro-rape argument of our Norwegian libertarian above. By refusing to look on why a womyn’s worth rests is their vagina in the first place (hint: it’s because of the patriarchy), you can only start from wrong premises.

Oh, and if you’re up to it, do link to Blue Linchpin’s blogpost about the pro-rape position of Eivind Berge by menioning his name in the link anchor, so that her post get some nice Google juice and people looking for his name can see what he stands for.