sophiaserpentia | Entries tagged with cannibal

I haven't thought for a while about the ethics of taking, but it's on my mind today. A couple of connected developments this week:

Zerlina Maxwell, a feminist writer, made the comment to Sean Hannity that maybe we should put more energy into telling men not to rape. Hannity retorts that such an approach is useless because "criminals won't listen." Since appearing on the show, Maxwell has faced a wave of death threats and other violent, angry responses.

A couple of high school football players are convicted of rape, setting off a wave of commentary in the media expressing sympathy for... those two poor rapists whose lives are now ruined. The survivor gets death threats; two girls were arrested just today for threatening to kill her. Her identity has of course been revealed by the press, despite guidelines meant to prevent this.

By now most of you have probably heard of "rape culture," which is what happens when you combine the "abuser planet" phenomenon with misogyny. Our cultural narrative inherently sides with the bully, with the abuser. They are the one whose lives and thoughts are clear to us, whose justifications we buy into without question. "Look what she drove me to do!" "She was asking for it." "She's responsible too." Say any of these things and people will nod knowingly. Say them and you automatically recruit at least half of all observers into co-conspirators. "She's just saying it for the sympathy" (only true if by "sympathy" you mean death threats).

The ethics of taking have something to say about this, and provide a counter-narrative. As I described it before, "this ethic would require us to consider what the costs are of taking anything that we feel free to take." Even if overtly offered, because offering is not always an act of free will. I originally applied it to resources, but it could just as easily apply to our relationships with other human beings.

A while back I commented on the connection between Empire and starvation: the Empire keeps us all starving because we are more pliant that way and less likely to look up from our struggles to apprehend the bigger picture.

This is the first thing I thought of when a friend on FB linked to this story:

With nearly 14 million unemployed workers in America, many have gotten so desperate that they're willing to work for free. While some businesses are wary of the legal risks and supervision such an arrangement might require, companies that have used free workers say it can pay off when done right.

"People who work for free are far hungrier than anybody who has a salary, so they're going to outperform, they're going to try to please, they're going to be creative," says Kelly Fallis, chief executive of Remote Stylist, a Toronto and New York-based startup that provides Web-based interior design services. "From a cost savings perspective, to get something off the ground, it's huge. Especially if you're a small business."

In the last three years, Fallis has used about 50 unpaid interns for duties in marketing, editorial, advertising, sales, account management and public relations. She's convinced it's the wave of the future in human resources. "Ten years from now, this is going to be the norm," she says.

from Unpaid jobs: The new normal?

So, basically, we can expect more and more that companies will string people along without pay for as long as they're willing to go along with it, because they're disposable and replaceable and there's someone else starving and desperate waiting in line for the opportunity. They will hire just enough of these people to make it seem like other than a con.

Fortunately at present there are still laws protecting people from being used like this. Wanna bet that's going to change in the next two years?

Mark Morford has me thinking this morning about the pull of temptation. It is a very old moral dilemma; the defining dialectic of Christian (and perhaps Judeo-Christo-Islamic) society; the worldly vs. the pure, participation in the 'world' versus the path of virtue and holiness.

I do not see the world this way, though the culture around me does, and this creates a dissonance. For me, the dilemma is between privilege and lack, and the gap created by people who act with disregard to the ethics of taking. I've described this before, but put simply, my assertion is that we have an ethical obligation to consider the cost of taking something, even something that appears to be freely available to us or willingly offered.

Consider, for example, a couple where the female partner does more of the housework than the male partner. How does this common pattern come to be? In my experience when a man and woman live together as a couple they fall into this pattern without it ever being discussed. And all the while the woman's resentment builds slowly at the fact that she is doing more than her fair share around the house until it erupts into argument, at which point the man pleads innocence. "I never asked you to do all that," he might say. And it's probably true, on the face of it, that he did not specifically ask her to do everything she does.

The system of ethics we are taught in the United States tells us it is wrong to take what does not belong to us. However, it is okay without reservation to take what is due to us. And it is quite amazing when you contemplate it how much the average US citizen considers his or her due. Even better to take that which is offered to us or freely available.

In movies and on TV we see 'noble yet primitive' Indians giving thanks when they hunt and kill. There are so many things that could be said about this, but what is relevant to this post is that this strikes me as a relic of awareness that not all people have the same ethics of taking as we are taught in the US. There is in this the tacit admission that, well, yeah, it would probably be better to consider at least for a moment the animals we kill and eat, but, we've moved beyond such quaint spiritual values. We are a nation of 'the world.'

This brings me back to the point I was making at the outset: the dialectic between 'the worldly' and 'the virtuous.' Christian virtue is often presented as a package deal (you're either in or out, no in-between) and once a person has already decided they are not going to participate, then it becomes that much easier to dismiss the 'loftier' parts of it, especially in the absence of anyone to call them out. "You're a better person than me," someone might say, before shrugging and taking what is their 'due.'

When you say, "Don't take someone for granted," it is understood that this is generally a crappy thing to do. Or "Be respectful or considerate," it is understood that these are generally good things to do. But they are shunted off as virtue, as a detached abstract value that can be easily and safely shelved (though maybe with the occasional vague abstract sense of guilt about it), rather than considered as actual ethical obligations.

The difference between a spiritual virtue and an ethical obligation is that the latter does not go away because you decide not to adhere to a religious belief. Ethical obligations reflect the material consequences of actions, and the fact that humans are smart enough to see them in advance much of the time.

Behold the architecture of privilege.

It is privilege not to consider what something costs. Only that which has a price tag has cost, right? How very convenient it is that expenditure of effort, or even more invisibly, silent sacrifice, are not viewed as things of "cost," because there is no one to stick a monetary price tag on them. There are those who dismiss, with a smirk even, the hidden cost of performing tasks, because pain, fatigue, resentment, what are these, they are ephemeral, they are unseen, keep them unseen and give me my due.

So, going back to my example of the couple above, while the male partner may not have specifically asked his gf/wife to do more of the household stuff than he does, he also didn't object or say anything when she did. Since he materially benefited from it, he was by my perspective ethically obligated to consider what it means to accept the gift of her labor. We could get into things like, maybe her standards are higher than his, unreasonably high, etc., but this is an aside from the larger issue because this goes way beyond household chores. It concerns the conduct of humankind as a whole.

It goes to things like humankind eating a plentiful species into extinction, or strip mining whole mountain ranges, or dumping so much trash there's a continent of floating plastic in the ocean. This is not driven, organized evil; simply the collective result of a million decisions made by individuals with little or no thought given to the ethics of taking what can be taken. Just a few pesky nags like me complaining, and we are easily enough ignored. Whether or not we could have known, or even should have known, that such things can result from our collective decisions, we can't afford as a species to forever react in hindsight to consequences. We're smarter than that.

Mea culpa.

I was commenting to

cowgrrl the other day about how it seems like there aren't any major corporations that are in business to just simply make a product and sell it to people; they all have a business model that requires sticking it to customers in every inventive way possible. I couldn't actually think of an example (well, there's Ben & Jerry's, I suppose). But for just about every company I could think of, I can recall reading of ways in which those companies have done what they could to to stick it to their customers, competitors, and employees.

Is this 'just human nature'? "Caveat emptor" is clearly not a modern innovation; if anything, the paltry constraints of law and regulation to reign companies in and made them do at least roughly what they say they're going to do is the modern innovation. But are people born this way? Is this a side to human nature we just have to cope with? I've read that apes are born with an innate sense of fair play and know when they've been cheated, and people get a dopamine boost from doing good deeds. It seems more like cooperation and generosity are natural instincts, where deception and two-timing are learned behavior. So much for "that's just the way people are;" I don't believe that, and I think it's time for people to expect better from one another.

But then, Socrates argued in The Republic that the one who profits most is the unjust man who succeeds at convincing everyone else that he is ethical and upstanding. If this is true, than we can expect people with this ethic to be the most financially successful, and therefore to gravitate to the center of the business world, where they force everyone else to emulate their model just to compete. As justifications go, "we have to stay competitive" has the benefit of having some truth to it, if at the downside of being circular.

What companies are all afraid of is that if they were to unilaterally de-asshole-ify their business model, their costs would go up, causing their profits to drop, in turn causing stockholders to rebel and hire a new board of directors who will just turn around and re-asshole-ify the business model. What we more typically see is that businesses will partially de-asshole-ify their business model, sometimes under penalty of law, trumpeting this in ads as proof of their honesty and trustworthiness. A company like Wal-Mart, which we're used to thinking of as an evil behemoth, has the power to do great good simply by virtue of its influence by making a single decision, such as for example lowering the price on generic drugs they sell or declaring they will hold toy suppliers to a new standard.

Research on what would happen if every major company all around the world simultaneously de-asshole-ified their business models is scant. For one thing, academic economists refuse to admit the business world has an ethics problem. If they can claim they are within the law and playing by all regulations, what's the problem? (This leaves unasked the question of just who wrote those laws and regulations and what they allow.) Even those sorts of asshole business that are outside of the law are usually covered by plausible deniability ("Hey, we had no idea our suppliers had 7-year-old kids doing 13-hour shifts! We're innocent!"). And as the last resort, when the deception and exploitation can no longer be denied, we're told it's the only thing that makes the benefits of modern life affordable (if by "benefits" you mean cheaper products that wear out in 3 years instead of 20). But, really, how do we know that?

What we do know is that few of us would choose to live in a world with so much deception and exploitation if we had any real say in things. The human race will probably never live in a utopia of honesty where the asshole business model does not exist. But I do think it is possible to chip away at it, with coalitions (cooperatives and mutual aid societies) and with more & better ethics training starting in childhood (interfering with our society's tendency to sympathize with takers: bullies and winners-at-any-cost). If people are taught to be this way, they can taught to be another way.

ETA. I've speculated in the past on how neat it would be if we redefined the idea of "profit" to mean not just a positive difference between revenue and cost, but to reflect a socially holistic idea of utility. Maximizing profit in that scheme would mean maximizing not just one's own revenue while minimizing one's own costs, but also maximizing the social benefit while minimizing the social cost. A change in perspective along these lines would move us away from the asshole business model.

Maya Arulpragasam, also known as M.I.A., released a new video, a short movie around her song "Born Free." The music is not my usual speed, but the video is striking (and graphically violent). I watched it last night, and reflecting on it this morning realized I had rarely seen anything like it.

Usually, in American media, whenever you see depictions like this -- stormtroops rounding people up, killing them for fun -- Mel Gibson is there. Or Bruce Willis. Or Sly Stallone. They'll fight back and win, or run away, survive, and get revenge. Our sense of reality is shaped around the idea that the bad guys won't really get away with anything so heinous. World War Two is proof of that, right? The Nazis tried to pull that stuff, and boy did they get handed their asses. If there weren't heroes in real life, Hollywood can just invent some when they tell the story. And even if heroes don't make sense in a narrative, God and nature will set the slaughterers straight.

Maybe this is the nature of narratives. People who participate in overwhelmingly one-sided slaughter don't tell their stories about it. Neither do the ones who are slaughtered. So I suppose the only narratives we have about genocide are from those who survive being slaughtered, or their children.

It's easy to say, "Well, stories with no hero, with no one acting righteous, are just depressing. Who wants to watch that? Who would be enriched by it?" The problem is, though, as I see it, that we've become so used to just assuming that a hero will come along and the bad guys won't win that we've become unable to process reality, because bad guys do win quite a lot of the time. Almost always, I would even say. And since they are winners, certain other aspects of our cultural discourse kick in and we even sympathize with them. The hero stories, though, enable us to side with bullies and abusers even while pretending we don't. It is, unfortunately, a bucket of bull-hockey.

( M.I.A. & Romain Gavras, 'Born Free', NSFW )

I'm still a bit mildly stunned by the moment yesterday of fully grokking, as if all at once, that the real essence of the writings of the Marquis de Sade was not sexual deviation, but the rich doing whatever they want to poor people without any sort of consequence or accountability. (Well, okay, I was helped along to this epiphany by Grant Morrison.)

It is fascinating that the class aspect of these seminal writings rarely ever comes up at all in modern discourse about sadomasochism. Not surprising, but fascinating.

Does the very existence of nation-states require the oppression of minorities, women, and the poor?

This is a dangerous question, because it calls into question the doctrine of many religions (namely, that those in charge are favored by God) along with the fundamental tenet of post-Renaissance political theory (namely, that legitimate authority to govern is given by consent of the governed).

But it's hard to avoid the question, when looking at just how universal an issue institutional and ideological racism is, and keeping in mind the words of Incite! regarding the state and its law enforcement agencies as a major source of violence against women of color (and just this morning

ginmar made a post with an example close to her circle of friends). It's also in my mind seeing the utter panic beginning to spread among American white supremacists as they contemplate the prospect of someone "not like them" becoming president of the US (h/t

redslime for the video) (and the violence and threats which are starting to brew as a result).

At first i thought it was just empires that operated this way -- playing off one minority against another, the way Stalin did so well (just look at the legacy of this approach still in use today). Is there any way to demonstrate that nation-states are not just little empires in this regard?

Related question: why has every historical example of a spontaneous egalitarian revolution (like, for example, anarchist Catalonia (h/t

sammaelhain) or the Paris Commune) been undermined by the bourgeoisie?

I know there are a number of presumptions in the way that i'm framing these questions, and they, like the questions themselves, are fair game...

It shouldn't really be such a rare occurrence that my president says something i agree with, that it causes me to do a double-take and exclaim with surprise. But that's what happened a little while ago when i read Bush saying that the government should not bail out failed banks.

But, i should have known that with politicians of all stripes there's a vast difference between what they say and what they do, and lo and behold, the Federal government is going to bail out two of the biggest banks of all. This, after the Fed has already ~~printed money indiscriminately~~ extended a special line of bottomless credit to certain kinds of institutions.

But of course, these banks are "so big" "we can't afford for them to fail." The loss of capital, savings, and jobs would be too big a hit. And yeah, they're right; we can't afford to have major parts of the economy evaporate.

Here's the story so far. Millions of mortgages were given out to folks who, the old rules said, couldn't have gotten a loan, because their incomes are just not stable enough to handle it. The new rules said, go ahead and give them a loan, we've thought of a way to spread out the risk so that no one takes too bad a hit. We'll plan on having a certain number of losses and just take "loan debt" as one package deal.

The whole thing depends on there being many more good loans than bad, so that the losses are covered by the gains. Problem was, when too many of the subprime loans went into default, there was a cascading failure because the fractional reserve banking system relies on enough people paying their debts for lenders to remain solvent. Once the losses became big enough, there wasn't enough money on hand even to make prime loans happen.

As has happened before, the government is talking about - and will - come to the rescue of banks under the argument that it is more harmful in the long run to let them fail.

In the long long run, maybe it's more harmful to create a moral hazard that encourages capitalists to behave recklessly.

The fact that it's happening twice in the space of two decades will hopefully be enough for some Americans to form an understanding of what is really happening here. When i took macro-economics in college, we were told that the essential moral underpinning of capitalism is that entrepreneurs deserve to make a profit because they are taking risks. Many ventures fail, so under capitalism things can happen that might not otherwise.

What happens to that moral underpinning when it turns out that a big enough risk can be shrugged off onto taxpayers, while profit remains in private hands? If it happens with regularity, it starts to look less like a "natural business cycle" and more like a huge fucking swindle.

Who ends with the profits and the assets? Lenders. Who ends up with the debts, the broken lives, the drained-out savings accounts, and a sham of a government assistance program? The middle class. Who winds up paying the bills and sweeping up the mess? Taxpayers. Dare i point out the racial dimension of the crisis as well?

It's not the way capitalism is "supposed" to work. But it's probably the way it's designed to.

cowgrrl and i saw Persepolis on Sunday, and found it to be engaging and moving. The flow of storytelling has been tweaked a bit from the graphic novels on which they are based, but the substance of it is still the same.

I'm not really sure how to comment on it. It doesn't really require much comment; the movie (and the autobiographical graphic novels by exiled Iranian Marjane Satrapi on which they were based) speak well and plainly for themselves.

What struck me most was the way the movie illustrates, by giving anecdotes of day to day life in an authoritarian society, how irrelevant ideology really is to the practice of authoritarianism. It is at its heart, at every level of interaction -- from the personal and interpersonal to the institutional -- a system that gives bullies almost free reign.

I think, too, in portraying the simple human desires of the people around her, she exposes the flaws in the common conception that the Iranian people are somehow fundamentally more barbaric than Westerners -- the underlying attitude that by having a more brutish nature they subtly invite authoritarianism or prevent a more egalitarian society from taking hold. She invites the American or British viewer (without beating her over the head with a stick) to examine the ways in which her own governments have intervened in the political shape of Iran to push it towards authoritarianism. The name she chose for the work, "Persepolis," must have been chosen to invite us to contemplate the long history of Iranian civilization.

If you haven't seen the Yahoo!/60 Minutes video segments on the ship breaking industry in Bangladesh, i recommend you do.

At one point in the series of segments, a commentator says something like, this is capitalism at its most raw and gritty. A beach drenched with dumped oil, chemicals, asbestos, debris, and who knows what else. A wealthy Bangladeshi buys the ships as-is from Western companies, who would otherwise have to pay expensive disposal costs in their own countries, and sails them right up onto the beach where laborers, many of them children, tear them down rivet by rivet. They have no training or protective gear and about 50 die every year in accidents; and goddess only knows how many more die from inhaling smoke and other chemical exposures.

But you know? It's too easy to blame capitalism. Yes, this particular instance is the result of a capitalist mechanism. But it's not as if we haven't seen environmental disasters and poor working conditions in socialist countries, either. No, the underlying mechanism here is racism, classism, and neo-colonialism, and the way to fix it lies in deeply re-examining our ethics of taking -- and in this case, our ethics of dumping.

Clogging the arteries of discourse about racism (and sexism, though for the specifics here i'm going to stick to racism) is this notion that people who work against racism, by bringing it up, are preventing us from having a "truly color-blind society."

Here's a couple of examples.

The first stems from a recent incident in Arlington, Texas. Silk Littlejohn was hit with a two-by-four by one of her white neighbors, who also spray-painted racist slurs on her garage door. While she's in the hospital recovering from the attack, neighbors began to ask her husband, Roland Gamble, to paint over the racist graffiti. Their comments include things like, "Everyone knows what happened. They get the drift. It's time to take it down.", and "We understand that someone got hurt, and we understand that someone's feelings got hurt. But our kids don't necessarily have to be exposed to it."

The second example is seemingly disconnected. Ron Paul, who has been a member of Congress off and on for over 30 years, was the only one who voted against a 2004 measure recognizing and honoring the 40th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. LewRockwell.com praised him as "heroic" for doing so.

There was a lot i could say in response to Paul's justification - and i have a long entry on this in the works. But for now, what i want to draw attention to is this: "The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society."

What these examples share in common is a fundamental misperception among many (all?) white people that discourse about racism is, at heart, an intellectual or ideological undertaking. We whites don't feel racism in our gut; we don't deal every day with the exhausting effects of racist trauma or the health effects of economic disadvantage. We can walk away from thinking about it and our lives will go on just as they have.

And so even if we say something like, "We understand that someone got hurt," we don't really understand the depth and breadth of it.

From that mistake, it's easy enough for white people to think that the solution is just simply creating a world where "race doesn't matter," which in turn is simply a matter of declaring it so, holding a few parades touting equality and giving black people a federal holiday named after one of their activists -- and then aferwards accuse anyone pro or con who discusses race of perpetuating the problem.

Fighting racism takes more than simply declaring it to be over. It requires more than talking about racism. It requires material measures to stop the violence - including the weapon of mass destruction known as poverty - and right the economic inequalities. Racists have to be held accountable. Real, tangible things in the world have to be done, on large scales, for a long time.

The neighbors of Silk Littlejohn and Roland Gamble got a teensy-itsy-bitsy taste of how persistent and invasive racism is, by having to see a reminder of it every time they drove down their street - and their immediate response was to demand that it be hidden away so they and their kids don't have to look at it anymore. "Don't make us face this!" But what are people of color supposed to do when they don't want to face it anymore? They don't have the privilege of removing reminders of it from their lives by simply repainting a garage door.

(For more on this, i refer you to my earlier post the bizarro-world of misappropriation.)

So the War on Christmas nonsense is continuing this year, and, as if this wasn't enough, here comes National Review editor Jonah Goldberg with a doozie: Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, which sheds light on the intellectual link between modern American progressivism and European fascism.

What do the War on Christmas, Intelligent Design, and Liberal Fascism have in common? A mega "WTF!?" factor. I mean, seriously, i can only scratch my head in wonder at all of this energy being spent tilting at windmills on the Right. There is NO "war on Christmas." Intelligent Design is NOT real science. The white man is NOT the "Jew" of Liberal Fascism. Statements promoting these ideas are hyperbole to the tenth degree and sound like unfunny parodies.

My first response is to breathe a sigh of relief that at least they've taken a pause in dishing out accusations against gays and Mexicans as threats to Western civilization. But its really unsettling. What the hell does it mean that they are flooding our cultural discourse with this boxing at shadows gobbledygook?

It's got me worried, actually. Is this what happens next? The next phase in the war on meaning? Nonsense words get more and more airplay until real discourse and real science have no more room, no more funding, no more political support? Is it "crazy-making" writ large?

This "War on Christmas" crap is all fun and games until people actually start getting beaten. Soon, "liberal fascists" will start getting beaten, too. All in the name of "freedom."

It seems to me that most of the people appalled by this trend are loathe to legitimize this crap by challenging it, trusting people to see it for the crap it is. Unfortunately, i don't think we have the luxury of ignoring it and hoping it will go away.

Economists speak of the business cycle as if it were a natural pattern of events. They've even given it a name: "business cycle."

But i've been paying attention to recessions and expansions since i started to become economically aware, and i think really that there's nothing natural about the business cycle at all.

Look at what precipitated the last recession in 2001. Sept. 11 had something to do with it, but really wasn't the cause. Recall, there were several major examples of corporate misbehavior that year - Enron, MCI Worldcom, Global Crossing, Arthur Andersen. The engineered energy shortages in California. Numerous financial swindles were uncovered in the insurance and banking industries as well. Lots of capital evaporated as the dot-com house of cards imploded.

Look at what is happening this time. The housing bubble, adjustable-rate mortgages which are essentially baloon notes, lending to anyone with a pulse regardless of credit-worthiness; and the wal-mart-ization of risk via bundling loans into securitized parcels.

I'm willing to bet that similar patterns preceded every recession and panic.

Frankly, it looks like the "business cycle" is simply a way for economists to gift wrap greed, unscrupulousness, lack of perspective, and plain arrogance and stupidity, and tie a flashy bow on top.

So, why doesn't malfeasance and misbehavior remain isolated? Why can't investors and bankers who have lived through previous recessions and who know poor business plans when they see them, learn from past mistakes and avoid them the next time around?

When it's the biggest players on the block who are leading the way off the straight and narrow, and making money hand over fist, then smaller companies have very little choice but to adopt similar strategies or go out of business. Their stockholders will not have much patience when, for two or three years, the "risk" remains only risk on paper, and meanwhile competitors are raking in dough and grabbing a larger portion of market share.

And so, the greed-stupidity spiral feeds itself like a cyclone.

But there's another dimension to this as well. The people at the top will rarely truly suffer in all this. Occasionally one or two will be ruined, commit suicide, spend 18 months in minimum security; but it's much more likely that they'll make it through with their yachts and Aspen cabins intact. Many of them will probably even avoid having a smudge on their reputation. It doesn't really matter to them, even though a recession means grueling hardship for millions of people.

I wrote a few months ago about the stock market decline of 2001 as a huge swindle of the middle class by the upper class. The middle class are essentially petty capitalists - owners of home equity and a few shares of stock or mutual fund. But every business cycle, the small bits of worth that the middle class is able to build up for itself is farmed off the top, leaving the middle class without that which it had spent 7-10 years working to save up.

For each of the millions of families now being foreclosed upon and kicked out of their home (let's not overlook the racial dimension of this, it's important!) when they can no longer afford payments on their adjustable-rate mortgage, there's a speculative vulture who will swoop in, buy the house for cheap off the bank who no longer wants it, and hold on to it until the market goes back up. That family's crisis is a money-making opportunity for someone else.

And so it goes.

The Gap has gone into full PR-damage control mode after it was revealed that one of their vendors was selling them clothing made by literal child slaves.

They have plausible deniability of course, because they buy from vendors who hired subcontractors to make their clothing. And they probably are actually appalled by the problem itself, not just by the criticism they're facing. They never told anyone to purchase children as slaves... they just gave their business to whoever could come up with clothing at the lowest price.

The Marxian term for the process at work here is commodity fetishism, which is a distortion in social priorities brought about by putting price tags on things. It's a distortion which blinkers us to the causal effects of our decision-making, the long-range or distant ethical ramifications of continuous cost-cutting and profit-maximization.

One aspect of this distortion is the devaluation, and subsequent discarding, of children.

In the agricultural and pastoral economy, children are a boon and blessing; in the urbanized economic model, they are (economically speaking) a burden. It is not a simple matter of children working on farms and ranches but not working in markets or factories - throughout most of history (including the present), children have occupied a place in the urban division of labor. No, the real issue is that in an urban economy people are separated from the wealth they create. They make things or perform services, for which they receive a wage which is not - which is never - equal to the average revenue product of their labor. What that means, in plain language, is that a person is never paid a wage equal to the value their labor creates.

That extra value is sucked up by the upper class. This is how it is that the gap between rich and poor tends to grow, and this is part of what i have, for two years now, referred to as slow-motion cannibalism.

Simply by virtue of existing in an urbanized society, an individual wage earner can statistically expect their net value to decrease over time. Some people manage to improve their lot; for every one who does, there are two or three who sink further into the whole. This is reflected in our financial life by perpetual debt; unless one owns property and capital, one is in debt forever to landlords and to banks. And to a poor family which has little of worth to give a child upon their birth, a child is an economic drain from the instant she or he is born.

It is a drain that people are willing to bear because of love. But being in debt makes you vulnerable. And a family that starts out with a margin of zero is on very thin ice indeed. Any kind of mishap - an illness, a drought, an inopportune death, and suddenly the unthinkable becomes the inevitable.

There are certain realities that are not altered by economic or political philosophy, and one of these realities is that the survival and caretaking of an individual human child represents a tremendous investment, of time, energy... even of love.

However, because of the way commodity fetishism works, this investment is not recognized as such. It is not recognized as an undertaking which creates value, even though it does. Viewed through dollar-sign-colored-glasses, the investment of raising a child is invisible, contrasted with the investment of buying a new piece of factory equipment.

When bankers run into problems, other capitalists and the government rush to prop them up. But when parents run into problems, they are on their own, a problem exacerbated by the urban breakdown of the extended family. On their own, with no prospects of aid or rescue, a desperate family will turn to horrific measures to survive - selling a child into slavery, or prostituting them, or killing them.

As an alternate vision, imagine a society that does recognize and give value to the investment of child-raising. Imagine a society where parents who run into difficulty are able to draw upon assistance based on the capital of their investment in the future. This would have to be a society where people ask, "How does this benefit us?" instead of, "How does this benefit me?"

We are only a state of mind away from it.

Senator Larry Craig of Idaho is not resigning, after all. He's going to stay in Congress for another 14 months so he can, among other things, continue to vote against GLBT people.

On the face of it, it is absurd that a man can be arrested and convicted for Disorderly Conduct for waving his hands at the person in the next restroom stall and bumping his foot. It's gross, yes, but he wasn't caught actually doing anything sexual with someone. Yet his former allies in Congress are acting as if he had.

As

lady_babalon put it when we discussed this a while back, he's being hoisted on his own pitard. Thing is, it's because of people like Larry Craig that gay men are so hated that someone can even be arrested for doing those things. He brought it on himself.

I have no doubt whatsoever that he was cruising for sex. Sometime in 1990 i was at a shopping mall with my fiancee and a gay friend. He and i went into the men's room (i was still male-identified then) and i didn't notice anything unusual at all. Afterwards he told me the men's room we'd just been in was being cruised. How could he tell? "Oh, guys who are cruising do little things, like sniffing noises or coughs, or tapping their feet, that kind of thing." How do you know it's cruising and not someone with a cold? "You just can."

After he pointed it out to me, i began to notice it. He's right, when you're alert to it you can tell the difference between guy-with-a-cold sniffing noises and guy-who-will-blow-you sniffing noises.

What Larry Craig did was actually on the blatant side. He was also much more persistent than i ever personally saw - it reads like the nonverbal-cruising version of "not taking no for an answer." Most of the cruising signals i saw were so subtle i was not really sure i had interpreted them correctly. Bumping your foot against the guy in the next stall? Beyond forward.

Many gay and bi men confine their sexual outlet to anonymous encounters like this as a way of locking it away and not facing it. A man can have sex with literally thousands of men that way over the years, and after every time come out of the bathroom and rejoin their wife and kids and keep their veneer of heterosexual respectability like none of it ever happens.

Get elected to Congress and vote against gay people? The perfect cover, no one will ever suspect! But it is more than just "self-loathing;" homophobia it is a way to make it easier for "straight" men to sexually prey on other men.

To me, feminism is much more than a set of concepts and ideas about society. Actually, i'd even say that concepts and ideas are not even the biggest part of what it is about. The biggest part, in my opinion, is praxis - outward and inward action.

The inward part is probably the hardest. I mean, things like working at a DV shelter or a rape crisis hotline or doing outreach activism isn't easy, but it connects you with other people and you can sometimes tangibly see your results. That outward stuff is not as hard as the parts that you have to do alone. The parts that have no reward. The parts that involve facing things inside you that you don't want to face. Things done to you, things you've done, things you want to do or don't want to do, and how they fit into the overall pattern of oppression. Putting your thoughts out there and having them be challenged. Listening to someone's anger without storming off, and finding the voice of your own anger.

To me, feminism is at its core an intensely personal thing. And each of us only has a finite capacity for it. There's more work to do than we have the resources or energy for.

So feminists need each other. We rely on each other to hold us when we're quaking from the trauma. We rely on each other to back us up when everyone's against us. We rely on each other to call us on our shit and nudge us forward towards greater understanding. We rely on each other to listen and to be respectful, because at least then we know that someone will.

Feminist space is coalition space, not a safe space. So you will sometimes get angry there, sometimes sad, sometimes triggered. But there's no way around it, there's no other way to face the demons of internalized misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia.

At the Network La Red we've been nurturing a variation on this theme called "accountable space," so named to call attention to the need for being accountable to yourself and others while working to root out the tendrils of oppression in your own mind. It's a space where you are allowed to make mistakes, but to know that your mistakes will be pointed out. This is why coalition space can be such a scary, threatening place sometimes; because you don't always know when you're going to offend someone or be offended.

Nowadays you don't hear so much about consciousness-raising groups, and this is a big omission from modern feminism. Therein you talk about the 'mundanities' of your life, and others can help you to see the way your life choices, even down to the smallest things, are shaped or distorted by oppression. There's no other way to really grok how it works. You can't read in a book, you can't be told what to think, the light bulbs have to go on in your own head.

It *should* go without saying that in a feminist accountable space there has to be some sense of trust. You don't have to like the people you do this work with, but you have to know that they wouldn't sell you out at the end of the day. But unfortunately it *has* to be said because the closest most of us have to CR groups today are online feminist forums. And online, people do things they wouldn't do even in person.

None of us are perfect, so there should be latitude given for mistakes. But there are some actions that just cross the line. In a feminist accountable space, misogynistic behaviors like shaming should not be tolerated. This is one of the ways women are broken -- by being shamed, slut-shamed, shunned, ostrasized, etc. -- or by doing this yourself while knowing that as a participant you are safe from being the target.

Oppression is the business of traumatizing other people for your own gain. The goal and purpose of shaming is to traumatize. Therefore if you participate in the shaming of a woman, any woman, for any reason, you are being misogynist and anti-feminist.

Period.

I'm not saying it's okay to do this to a man, but especially it should not ever be done to a woman in the name of feminism. I don't care if she comes in wearing the emblem of the KKK and chanting poems about white supremacy - if you respond by shaming her you are no better than she is.

Now, i went on about "accountable space" because i want to be clear that i'm not saying that errors should go unchallenged. But one has to find ways to call someone on their privilege while still maintaining the goals of healing the wounds of oppression.

It's hard. It takes courage to respond with compassion to something that makes you boiling mad. It's easier to lash out and cause harm. But that's what got us into this mess in the first place, and every instance of it counts. There is no easy-mode radicalism.

Boston's Big Dig. The NYC steam pipes. And now a freaking highway bridge in Minneapolis.

Forget terrorists. I'm afraid of our crumbling infrastructure. Each of us is far more likely to be killed by collapsing bridges, falling ceiling panels, or exploding steam pipes than any terrorist.

Let's go further back and include the Katrina response in this, because it, too, reflects a similar lack of focus.

And, let's expand outwards and include ethylene glycol in toothpaste and melamine in pet food. Because all of these things are connected by a central theme... which is, ironically, the lack of anything resembling a common focus or vision.

We don't have any kind of meaningful common focus in our decision-making as a society. So many of the quandaries we're in -- from global warming to the oceans dying to resource depletion -- happen because millions of developers, politicians, investors, and laborers are each doing our own thing, with little or no regard to anything resembling a big picture.

We're winging it, and we can't do that anymore. Luck runs out.

Part of this problem has been described in economic discourse as the Tragedy of the Commons. But beyond the obvious difficulties of overuse and depletion, these problems are a tangible result of the dearth of meaningful discourse regarding economic problems and solutions.

Politics has become an advertising-driven enterprise. Campaign consultants talk about their candidate's image as a "branding" concern, and they judge the success of their efforts by what kind of emotions people have when they think of their client. They focus-group test sound-bites and slogans and key phrases which are designed to worm their way into your brain and install an emotional pushbutton so you respond the proper way when they press it. Meaning is driven from the process because meaning is unpredictable. If any candidate comes along who says something really meaningful, it could throw the whole scheme off, and everyone's jobs in the campaign-industrial complex would be threatened. The consultants, whose job it is to win elections, not solve society's problems, distrust meaning. And the media, of course, plays right along, encouraging this trend and helpfully marginalizing any candidate who threatens to bring in too much meaningful discussion. Because for them, too, meaning is dangerous.

This sounds like an abstract problem, but it isn't because people are dying as a result of this, and those of us who haven't been killed by it are seeing our quality of life be affected.

"Boring" things like routine maintenance and food inspections and disaster preparation -- you know, the stuff that should be a no-brainer -- gets de-funded and de-prioritized because it's easier to get a photo op standing in front of something new, bigger, shinier. The result is mile after mile after mile of empty shopping centers, brownfields, urban blight, crappy schools, decaying neighborhoods.

This isn't a call for a political solution, BTW. This problem can develop in a Communist nation (cf. Chernobyl) just as easily as it can happen in a capitalist nation. The real issue is lack of involvement. Lack of discourse. Lack of contemplation and consideration.

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

Last week i wrote about an issue close to my heart - the crisis facing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth.

But i only told half the story, and left out perhaps the most important part; the part which is more difficult to talk about because it is shrouded in secrecy. That half of the story is this: who it is that actually commits the violence.

We know who the survivors are, by their scars, by their determination to move on, by their lives in the perpetual spotlight of being marked as Other. But so little is ever said about the ones committing the violence. We hear about who is assaulted and think we know all we need to know about the perpetrator. A woman was attacked? Probably done by a man. A gay man was attacked and peppered with slurs? Probably done by a straight person.

But this is far from the whole story, because most men have never attacked anyone, and most straight people have never attacked someone queer. What do we know about those who actually commit acts of violence or harassment, and why do they do it?

It was very easy to research the entry i wrote about the prevalence of homophobic and transphobic violence, exploitation, and harassment. But it is very difficult to find any information on the web about why people commit violence. I may have to actually — oh the horror! — go to a brick-and-mortar library for any answers.

Some time spent this weekend searching for a first-hand account of what was going through someone’s mind when they assaulted someone was fruitless. It’s possible that many perps even block this from their own conscious mind. Or its possible that the simplest reason of all applies — they did it because, straight up, they wanted to, and figured the relatively small risk of official sanction was worth it.

Psychologist Karl Jung claimed that we attribute our “undesirable” feelings and motivations to a part of our mind he called the Shadow, so that we can mentally detach ourselves from them and pretend they are not a part of us. Many people still attribute these feelings and motivations to the Devil. A while back i wrote in my LJ about the othering of perpetrators; it’s likely that many perps do this even to themselves in their own mind. “It was like someone else doing it through me,” or “i don’t really know why i did that, it’s not like me.”

That may account for the lack of personal accounts of committing violence; but it still doesn’t address the question of what is going through someone’s mind before they do it.

Criminal science and criminal psychology seem to mostly deal with finding out who has committed crimes. Even profiling does not seem to deal so much with what leads people to attack as it does with identifying characteristics which are likely to distinguish those who commit attacks. A criminal profile parses people into a list of things to look for, bits of demographic information and pieces of behavior, the kind of analysis that erases whole people from direct attention.

Google “criminal psychology” and mostly what you see are accounts of unusually heinous criminals: serial killers, sadistic kidnappers, that sort of thing. Not much on run-of-the-mill attacks like insulting and intimidating the queer kid every time you find him near his locker.

Serial killers appear to lack the part of the brain, which the rest of us have, which makes it possible to empathize with other people. So, they cannot conceive of the “thing” they subject to torture and murder as a conscious person who sees and feels the way they do.

But unless we’re prepared to believe that a fifth to a fourth of the population is psychotic and lacks the most basic ability to empathize, we need a better answer to why so many people set aside their empathy and lash out when they see the queer kid at his locker.

ETA. Even appeals to neuro-psychology are incomplete and unsatisfying. Why should lack of empathy lead to sadism? It does not logically follow that a missing or disordered part of the brain should lead to thoughts and actions being added. And why should the drives and desires which appear be those of aggression? Despite the stereotype of the ‘crazy person,’ people who are neuro-atypical tend to be in much more danger from others than they themselves represent.

The lack of satisfactory explanation is what drives feminists to conclude that acts of violence are primarily acts of will, driven by opportunity (”i can do that and get away with it”) and entitlement (”i have the right to do what i want, no matter who is put out in the process”); and furthermore, that they reflect a prevailing paradigm of silent, unspoken encouragement to violence against the out-class.

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

A few days ago i described the amazing energy i feel whenever i’m around young queer people. There’s a vibrancy there that brightens the day and gives me hope.

But i’m also very worried because queer youth are in deep trouble. If you’re young, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, you’re in crisis. I’m especially concerned about young people of color in our community.

Statistics. They never tell the whole story, but pretend i’m writing about real people here:

83% of queer youth experience damage to their property, personal attacks, or verbal insults. (83%? Just pretend this refers to every young queer person you meet and you would basically be right.)
40% of queer youth experience physical harassment.
26% are forced out of their homes due to conflicts with parents and family over sexual identity. That’s one in four. I’m sure that’s what Jesus really wanted, right — your kid on the streets?
Between 25-40% of homeless youth are queer. Since queer people make up somewhere around 5% of the population, this means that a queer young person is five to eight times as likely to wind up homeless than a straight young person.
Homeless queer youth are often prostituted, and face discrimination in the shelter system. Only a few small shelters have been designed to meet the needs of homeless queer youth.
The hate-murder rate of transpeople may very well outpace the per-capita rate of all other hate killings. Most of this is happening to young adult transpeople of color.

A few sources:
Health toll of anti-gay prejudice
Southern Poverty Law Center: ‘Disposable People’
Gender PAC: 50 Under 30
Transgendered Youth at Risk for Exploitation, HIV, Hate Crimes
After Working the Streets, Bunk Beds and a Mass (NYTimes, reg. req.)

Here in Massachusetts, there was some “controversy” last year over Youth Pride. I put “controversy” in quotes because, unless you are ex-Governor Mitt Romney, Brian Camenker of MassResistance, or some other reactionary Republican or Catholic, you can either see the need for Youth Pride (see the above if you have any doubts) or it doesn’t put you out very much.

Mitt “i’ll be a more effective champion of gay rights than Sen. Kennedy” Romney thought it would look good for his 2008 presidential campaign to take this class of exploited, abused kids and add his own kick for good measure. He moved first to kill (that didn’t work), then to gut, the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth.

This after using his line-item veto to kill (the very meager) state funding for AIDS programs and GLBT domestic violence programs in Massachusetts.

Kicking someone when they’re down. Mmm, very compassionate.

(Connected to this was the decision of 39 commissioners, advisors and past members of the Governor’s Commission on Sexual and Domestic Violence to express “no confidence” in Lt. Governor Healey as the head of that Commission.)

As you might guess, i have a problem with people who can look at a class of vulnerable people who are being routinely harassed, beaten, kicked out of their homes, prostituted and otherwise exploited, and killed, and think that the compassionate thing to do is to treat them like a political football, to point a finger at them and talk about what is wrong with them.

Of late i’ve been finding my perspective shifting much more towards the situation young people are in. For those of us who are over 35, our job really is to pave the way for them and to not screw up their lives. They’re not just “the future,” they’re the world. And those who lead our society should be deeply ashamed at how low they have prioritized the needs not just of young queer people, but of young people in general.

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

At Boston Pride i tabled for the Network La Red for a couple of hours. A Latino fellow came by at one point and said he’s against domestic violence too — and hinted (i don’t remember his exact words) that he was obliquely referring to INS raids and similar anti-Latino actions of the US Government.

But it’s all connected, really. Oppression of a minority by a government is much the same thing on a bigger scale. The mechanisms in prevailing ideologies and institutions which make it easier for someone to get away with battering their partner also enable and justify official racist violence. These webs of abuse interweave, for example when a woman is brought into the United States as a domestic worker and then turned into a sex slave; the people holding her threaten to reveal her undocumented status to the INS as a way to keep her compliant.

Personal, first-hand experience can be unreliable; but it’s also the only thing we have that cannot be taken away from us. The messiness of our lives under oppression, the various survival strategies which “coincidentally” do not fit on religious moralistic laundry lists, make it more difficult for anyone to sympathize with us. That we live in a society that teaches us to compare other peoples’ lives to ideological checklists makes it easier for us to stay divided as well.

Understanding the way the world works, the way our laws and doctrines and “common sense” and logic and language have been constructed in order to maintain privilege for those who have it, is an important part of working for justice. But, just as “upholding the law” is taught to us as the way we know justice has been done, upholding ideology is taught to us as the way we know we’re right.

Which is why it’s significant and subversive to say “the personal is political.” Those of us who live, inconveniently and untidily enough, outside the lines like a stray crayon mark can give direct personal testimony to the wrongness (or at least incompleteness) of an ideology. This is true even when the ideology is radical; and the results can be disastrous for the unity of the radical community.

For example, during the 1970’s and 1980’s a prevailing ideology throughout much of the feminist movement was that “women are good and nurturing while men are bad and abusive.” (For the record, it’s worth noting as an aside that Andrea Dworkin, often cited as a gender essentialist, took a lot of grief for taking a vocal public position opposed to the idea of “natural female superiority”.)

In that climate, women who came forward seeking shelter because they were being abused by their lesbian partners were quite often silenced. Battered women’s shelters had been set up on a “female victim, male abuser” model and women who had been beaten by women were inconvenient and unwelcome. When they did gain admittance to shelters they had to deal with homophobia from staff and other survivors.

Lesbian abusers, like battering husbands, used prevailing misogyny to frighten their partners. But they could use the threat of outing to keep their victim in line. They could use their partner’s lack of knowledge about lesbianism to keep them in the dark about the abusive nature of their relationship (”This is what lesbian love is like,” etc.) They knew, too, that their partners would not find sympathy within the women’s shelter network. Ideology, institution, and abuse woven together in a web keeping women down — and the experience from the survivor’s point of view is quite similar whether their batterer is a man or a woman.

Lesbian (and gay) abuse survivors were also silenced by the gay and lesbian activist community, seeking to establish an image of our community as “clean and upright.” They were afraid that seeing us discuss things like gay or lesbian partner abuse would place ammo in the hands of homophobes. Abuse survivors would just have to “take one for the team.”

Now, fortunately, there is some recognition of the issue, and movement in some areas, even though it is still largely uphill.

The thing is, anyone who silences another person on the basis of a prevailing ideology is doing the work of domination. Why is not as important as what. That is a part of what we are saying when we say the personal is political.

I think we should make it a kind of radical oath that we must resolve to hear what people say about their experience before ideology. It’s hard — it’s very hard. I see myself violating this all the time.

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The Serpent's Wisdom

Eat of this fruit; your eyes shall be opened, and you will be as Gods.

Entries tagged with cannibal

rape and the ethics of taking

yet another glimpse into how empires feed on starvation

how convenient that 'virtue' can be ignored

the grabbing hands grab all they can

how the hero narrative distorts our view of crimes against humanity

"about", part 2

a mostly-rhetorical question to ponder

privatized profit, socialized debt

persepolis

(no subject)

the "color-blind society:" last refuge of racism-apologists

the right wing: tilting at windmills, or up to something?

the "business cycle" - just another name for greed + stupidity

it's all about the way we define our society's priorities

hoisted on his own pitard

no easy-mode radicalism

tyranny of the quantitative

visible victims, invisible perps

have you hugged a young queer person today?

the personal is political

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December 2021

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