“steve jobs turned apple around by turning liberal humanism into a huge marketing gimmick and selling it to hipster college students. he disguised market relations as social relations and made dumb 20-somethings think that the role of seller/consumer is some kind of intimate social bond as long as the company has commercials that appeal to their generic liberalism. this is why a bunch of people are acting like when some CEO billionaire who sold them a product died it was like they lost a personal friend”
Truly, I was always amazed at the kind of rabid following that Apple has achieved and the borderline cult of personality that has formed around Steve Jobs. I can understand people blindly following leaders, but a billionaire CEO with a sad streak of (attempted) authoritarianism?
I shudder to think what would have happened were we to replace Microsoft with Apple. The top down absolute control they demand for their products, on software AND hardware and the way they abuse the patent and trademark system in order to stiffle competition would have choked the free software movement by locking down hardware control as much as possible, and going after people who sought to bypass it.
I have really no sympathy for the man. As much of an icon of our age as he was, his company’s business practices did and continue to do immense harm in our culture. The rabid following he and apple have for having shiny products and a strong marketing section, is really sad in my eyes.
Battlefield 3 fans are raging against reviews that gave the game just 9 out of 10. I explore possible reasons why.
Battlefield 3 is going live tomorrow and already the “Day 0 reviews” are hitting the net, and as is usual with these kind of things, the battlefield 3 fanbois are furious. Furious I tell you, that the game received only a…9 out of 10 on one review site which game Modern Warfare 2 a far better score back in the day.
Following that incident, there’s not only been quite a lot of flak thrown IGN’s way ((Disclaimer: I don’t have much love for IGN myself, for being a sold-out advertisement mouthpiece. This is an attitude I’ve had regardless of whether they are praising my favourite games or not. As a matter of fact, I would think that a 9/10 is very good, if I thought such numerical scales are a good way to rate games.)) but also a flood of review scores are hitting the front pages, celebrating the high score or denouncing the dirty rotten reviewer who dares to rate it lower than expected. Valid low points of the game, such as the campaign being far too trite, small and linear are trivialized (“BF3 was never about single player, why are you surprised”) and every high review score is upvoted to prominence.
The whole phenomenon is interesting to me because of how similar it is to behaviour of fans of sports teams who agonize for their placement in the league, for how many games they’ve won or lost and take it as an almost personal insult when someone badmouths their team. And yet, video gamers tend to snub their nose at sports fans for their obsession with their teams, as if their own behaviour is better.
On the average however it isn’t. Time and again, reviewers not only get lambasted by the fans of a particular game when they rate it low, but there have been more than a few cases of threats and wishes of physical violence against such reviewers for doing such an unthinkable thing.
But reviews are generally directed at people who are undecided about a particular game, so why are those who are already convinced of its superiority upset about a low score or obsessed with achieving as many high scores as possible?
At a base level, I think this is because of the Illusion of Asymmetric Insight combined with Choice Supportive Bias. That is, the people already convinced of the quality or superiority of a particular game, either because they are long time fans, or because they have already put a significant portion of their disposable income towards it, tend to start thinking themselves in that group. When someone puts down their choice ((compared to their expectations that is, because giving a game a 9/10 instead of a 9.5/10 is not a big difference)) then the first explanation put forth for this event, is that the people doing it are in the out-group or stupid: They are biased, they are sold out, they are unprofessional and so on.
Thus if IGN rates the Battlefield 3 worse than Modern Warfare 2, then the most logical explanation is that they are playing for the another team, at which point the Illusion of Asymmetric Insight comes into play.
But further than this, we see a much greater obsession with scoring in reviews than almost everything else. In no other product will you see such praise or anger towards review scores from large publications, than you will see in video game circles. Sure, Android and iPhones, MS Windows and GNU/Linux, Vim and Emacs, they all get their own share of fanboi wars, but from what I’ve seen there’s just not this amount of bitterness created by such conflicts and when it happens, it’s usually because of the choice supportive bias such expensive gadgets create.
Now to be accurate, not all games create such a rabid protectionism in their followers. Games like Red Orchestra 2 for example, which are similar enough, never had such an extreme reaction to bad reviews. So there’s obviously some factors that drive up the fanboysim.
One of the most important ones I believe is that focus on multiplayer that a game has. The more multiplayer focused a game is, the more people you want to have playing it, so that you have a robust community with a lot of choices for the players. A bad review can cause people who are on the fence pass the game and thus reduce the community size, which will can indirectly impact the multiplayer experience of those who really like the game (i.e. nobody wants to find only empty servers). A good review on the other hand can make more people join the fun, and thus the incentive to promote and praise such reviews.
Incidentally, I’ve also seen the exact opposite result against games the majority didn’t like. A recent example is Brink, which for various reasons disappointed a lot of those expecting it. Personally I found the game great but in those initial days of its release, I found it practically impossible to find a positive review of it upvoted in reddit. Such articles were almost immediately downvoted and thus buried from eyesight, by those who felt they got burnt from the game. Why did so many people felt the need to prevent others from discovering a game they didn’t like? I’m guessing they thought they were preventing others from getting burnt as well, but could it also be that allowing the promotion of such a multiplayer game would in a sense “steal audience” from all the other multiplayer games?
The second reason I feel promotes fanboyism is when there’s active competition. Both Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 come out within weeks of each other. They are the most widely anticipated releases of the year and they compete for practically the same audience. Realistic looking modern warfare multiplayer FPS experience. There has always been a simmering comparison between these two, much like back in the time, there was comparison between Starcraft and Total Annihilation, even though they had significantly different playstyle. But the fact that both were Sci-Fi RTS that came out around the same time, gave rise to the inenvitable comparison between the two.
Today, in the eyes of many, the underdog that has been the Battlefield series, attempts to finally dethrone the leading champion that is the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series. Many still enjoy both just as much, but the marketing force of EA certainly pushes the comparison in the eyes of the audience ((See for example how they close some of their trailers with a quote of “Beyond the Call”, which is a direct jab at the Call of Duty series)). So even if many players are prepared to enjoy both franchises, not only do the companies behind those games prefer a direct competition, but many of their fanboys see it this way as well, and will lose no opportunity to put down the opposition.
Which, unsurprisingly, is what a bad review becomes. The opposition. Treason.
Finally a lot has to do with the intended audience as well. The sheer popularity of those games and their target audience of teenage boys and young adult males means that those more impressed by the marketing and word of mouth, will also tend to be fairly impulsive and immature (Just take a look here and see how many references to male masturbation you can find). This is likely to exaggerate asymmetric insight and choice selection bias, thus further stoking flames against those badmouthing their newest favourite game.
I will admit, I’ve also noticed that I’ve fallen victim to a lot of the above biases. I too catch myself upvoting positive aspects of the game and downvoting mentions of negative. I check myself to avoid it, but it’s notoriously difficult to control one’s subconscious impulses. It is precisely because I see how much this drive to belong and support “my team” is affecting my behaviour, that I decided to write this post and explore the reasons behind it.
Personally I think review scores are irrelevant and that most major publications are sold out anyway, so there’s little reason to trust their reviews, whether those are negative or positive towards the game. I have a different idea on what constitutes a useful review in a findamentally subjective experience such as a video game, but that’s a subject for another day.
Today I leave you with another another lovely post by my equally lovely wife.
This is a good example for how deep you can maneuver youself into knee-deep crap, by trying to show how much better you are than others. The story happened in our summer vacation. The victim is my beloved husband, db0.
Db0 holds up a small electric hand-held coffee shaking device, the wrong way around. “How does this work? Gruuaaaah!” (tries to do the Barbarian)
Me: “Hold it into the glass. Now turn your hand around.”
Db0: “Aaaah! Sometimes I wonder how things are so obvious. I’m having a silly phase: For you it was totally clear, but for me it just didn’t ‘click‘…”
Me: “Oooch! Mabe you’re just a bit slow this morning… my poor darling!”
DbO: “What are you already expecting me to say? Mmm?”
Me: “What?”
DbO: “The oregano!” (To explain what this means: I was standing right in front of the oregano bottle a few weeks ago, which was basically poking into my eye and still couldn’t see it, insisting that we didn’t have any, until he pointed out to me)
Me: “You know, you always remember the oregano story and remind me of it when you did something silly, and want to point out that it happens to me as well. I think you must have used this one story, like three or four times by now!”
DbO: “Ach, I’ve used it at least ten times by now!” (puffing his chest)
Me: “So you, Mr. ‘I-am-with-silly’, don’t understand that this one story had to be told several times, as compensation for your own stupidity, now? And you didn’t even ‘get it’ when I pointed it out to you, but rather proudly made it ten times? I’ve just owned you!”
In Germany we have a saying: “If you don’t know shit, just shut the fuck up” (Wenn du keine Ahnung hast, einfach mal Fresse halten). I think that applies nicely here 🙂
Db0 here. Story is true. I did self-pwn myself. To my defense however, I can never remember all the times she’s screwed up, so I always fell-back to the oregano story which was close to my memory. Oh well 🙂
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.
Now tell me a joke.
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