Women, stop being sympathetic!

The Sexist relays to us a list of “tips” from a police department’s sexual assault prevention page, the worse list of tips ever. Some highlights:

The three main reasons women make easy targets for random acts of violence are:

* Lack of awareness (you MUST know where you are & what’s going on around you.)

* Body language (keep your head up, swing your arms, stand straight up)

* Wrong place, wrong time (DON’T be walking alone in an alley, or driving in a bad neighborhood at night)

Women are always trying to be sympathetic: STOP IT, it may get you raped, or killed.

If you don’t have a cell phone, shame on you.

The comments from The Sexist blogger are pretty funny too.

The Video The USA Army Doesn’t Want You To See (Watch At Your Own Risk)

Corraling love as a personal concept.

To most people, love is a purely personal concept, which has absolutely nothing to do with how a society should be organized. While they’ve heard of maxims like “love your enemies,” they cannot possibly understand what this actually means, because of the way we are indoctrinated to think of love as being strictly personal. In fact, even the Bible, from which people get “love your enemies,” actually says that you should help your enemy so he will suffer even more:

Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. On the contrary:
“If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”
Romans 12:19-20

In their view, life in society is a competition in which the strongest wins. Therefore, the only worthwhile reason to express any kind of love towards your fellow competitors is to help nudge them out of the race; using fake compassion as a weapon that one uses to bolster oneself, much like one might use fake guilt or fake powerlessness to paralyze opponents into inaction. To this kind of people, “love your enemies” can’t possibly be taken literally, because that would be an insane principle, since they believe that one can only love people romantically. What sort of an insane person would “love their enemies”?

Now, let’s look at the expression of love in the personal and relational spheres, and the expression of love in the social sphere.

Love as personal and relational:
* self-love
* self-esteem
* “romantic” love
* filial/motherly love

Love in the social:
* acceptance of others
* sharing of creativity
* compassion for people- not only those we approve of, but also those we disagree with: criminals, the poor, “terrorists,” etc.

A person indoctrinated in our society would accept the first list, but certainly not the second. Accepting others? Why should I do that when I know for a fact that people are evil? Sharing creativity? Why should I have to share with people I can’t trust? Compassion for criminals? Criminals need to be beaten down, not helped. Compassion for the poor? The poor deserve to be poor. And so on.

To us, the fact that both lists are about the same thing is not obvious, because we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that the second list actually does not exist. Love means you love yourself, you love someone else, you get married, that’s it. You might love some hobby or object, but that’s considered trivial. Every other possibility is simply impossible.

This constant delimitation of “love” is nowhere stronger than when we look at the heteronormative hatred for most forms of love. If we look at the faggots who run our society and the faggots who support them, they hate all relationships which are not heteronormative, not out of any particular consequence, but precisely because they are not heteronormative and therefore not within the margins of discourse that they have set. The love between a man and another man is not and cannot be love, not out of any specific observation of criterion, but precisely because it is not heteronormative.

In this view, love is not a natural phenomenon and a natural principle: it is a legal concept which exists as the law books and the rhetoric define it. This is extremely depressing. If people can’t recognize that a man can love another man, or that a woman can love another woman, then they can have no hope of recognizing other, more diffused forms of love, and we have no hope of being able to show them.

This is of course also part of the incapacity to introspect for most people. People who have not experienced love in their childhood cannot be expected to recognize love when they get older. What else but the accepted models of behaviour can they rely on?

Why is this so important? Because love is the only way out. Capitalism cannot be eradicated by refusing to accept people’s greed. Governments aren’t toppled by people hating them enough. Democracy isn’t broken down by voting for the right people. These methods have no known record of success, and a long, shameful record of failure. Neither can the system of things be chipped away by shoplifting or breaking windows, although these things have their time and place.

What is actually effective is the ability to free people and to display compassion towards all. What works is the law of love. But following it requires people to put themselves on the line. It’s not an easy law to follow. But by doing so we are able to create alternate methods, alternate systems, alternate lifestyles, alternate viewpoints, alternate beliefs. By creating this alternative, these safe spaces for people to exist in, these areas where the person can get used to some small degree of freedom, we are creating the future we want to see happen.

The insanity of utilitarianism…

Our friendly opponents over at Marginal Revolution are good cases in point of the absolute insanity of utilitarian ethical thinking, and the insanity of bean-counting ethics in general…

Tyler asks, following philosopher Alastair Norcross, whether it could ever satisfy a cost-benefit test for one person to die a terrible and tortured death in order to alleviate the headaches of billions of others by one second. Tyler begs off with “a mushy mish-mash of philosophic pluralism, quasi-lexical values” and moral conceit. I will have none of this. The answer, is yes.

The clearest reason to think that we should trade a terrible and tortured death of one in order to alleviate the headaches of billions is that we do this everyday. Coal miners, for example, risk their lives to heat our homes and to generate the electricity that drives this blog. We know that some of them will die horrible deaths but few of us think that we are morally required to give up electricity.

This whackjob would seriously force a person to “die a terrible and tortured death” in order to alleviate people’s headaches for one second. Talk about complete cuckoo. This is where bean-counting with people’s LIVES leads you.

Coal mining is also not a good example: in any sane society, we’d be trying to make their jobs safer, not glorify them as sacrificial lambs. We are “morally required” to not participate in someone’s unwilling death, even if it is for our own interests. The sense of capitalist self-importance (“well, I won’t give up ELECTRICITY for the life of a mere coal miner!”) is insufferable. However good he is as a marginalist economist, he is a horrible human being.

The Love of Trees (Stuart Wilde)

What the fuck.

An Open Letter to Glenn Beck, from AK Press

An Open Letter to Glenn Beck from the AK Press Collective

Hi Glenn.

How’s it going? Since Forbes magazine says your annual earnings are in the ballpark of $32 million, we’re guessing that it’s going pretty well. You can’t put a price on defending the little guy, right?

We are the AK Press collective. In case the word “collective” throws you, it means people who work together toward a shared goal in a democratic manner, without bosses or leaders, and with everyone having an equal say in each decision. For us, that shared goal is publishing and distributing books. If you want, you can learn more about us here: http://www.akpress.org/about/aboutakenglish.

We’re thrilled that you featured our book We Are an Image of the Future: The Greek Revolts of 2008 on your May 3rd show. We were, however, a little confused by your description of the book, and the way that it fit into the overall argument you made.

Okay, to be honest, we weren’t sure what your argument was. We watched the clip on YouTube a dozen times, but it was beyond us. Of course, you’re the guy with television, radio, publishing, and Internet empires. We probably spend too much time thinking about rent, food, and health insurance to fully understand the big picture you’re painting.

We do, however, know a few things. We’re anarchists and we publish books about anarchism. We Are an Image from the Future is one of them. Now, we assume that you actually read the books you talk about on your show. Yet you somehow managed to claim that a book written by and about anarchists was “written by communist revolutionaries.” “They are not anarchists,” you claimed, “but they will use anarchy to their favor.”

As you made clear earlier in your show, you know the difference between Communism and Anarchism. We don’t want to split hairs by bringing up the complex history of communism (with a small “c”), which includes both democratic and nasty authoritarian versions. So we’ll stay on your page here and say, yes, when Communists take state power it’s always ugly. But, as you must know, anarchism has always opposed state Communism. State Communism is the ultimate “big government.” You won’t find an anarchist on this planet in favor of that. Not to mention that, historically, when Communists get in the driver’s seat, anarchists are usually the first to face the firing squad. The capitalists usually get cushy managerial positions.

So we asked ourselves: What could account for this guy waving around a book written and published by anarchists, while never quoting a single word from it, and then going on to associate the book with political groups—like the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Workers World Party—that no one in the book, or associated with the book, would endorse? How could he miss something so obvious?

Then it dawned on us: you’re afraid of anarchists. You’re not afraid of the fake media portrayal of anarchists as bomb-throwing maniacs: that’s your bread and butter. You’re afraid of real anarchists, the actual ideas they espouse, the real work they do.

We don’t blame you, Glenn. When we sift through your rants, we realize that there’s a lot of overlap between you and anarchists. The difference is that anarchists are more honest, aren’t part of the same elites they criticize, and they make a lot more sense. They see you, and raise you one.

Like you, we believe that people’s lives would be much better off without government intervention. Centralized power suppresses individual and community initiative and keeps people from achieving their full potential. Like you, we don’t think the solution to our current economic crisis lies in socialized industry or new layers of well-paid government bureaucrats. And, like you and many of your tea party pals, we agree that bankers and fat-cat corporate elites aren’t exactly concerned with our best interests. As you put it, it’s time to take down the folks who “line their pockets with wealth gained from enslaving a whole group of people.” And, although you seemed a bit confused on this point, that means putting “people before profits,” which is pretty much the central concern of the protesters in Greece right now. And we mean all people, regardless of income, race, gender, sexuality, or immigration status.

You’re right: we’re revolutionaries. But aren’t you? Remember the part of the Declaration of Independence that says that when a government starts screwing with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it”? As anarchists, we’re dedicated to the idea of abolishing the state and capitalism altogether. We believe that without the coercive relations and competition imposed by governments and markets, people would be free to create a more just society in which resources are controlled collectively and decisions are made by the people who are affected by them. We don’t want a government (revolutionary or otherwise); we want a society based on cooperation and common sense instead of arbitrary power and exploitation.

From what sense we can make of your show, you seem happy with “altering” rather than “abolishing” a screwed-up system. For you, replacing the old boss with a new one (Sarah Palin?) is good enough. We understand that you’re confused–these are confusing times. But, deep down, you and the tea partiers know that you can’t trust any politician, or banker, or corporate hack, or union bureaucrat…or anyone who makes their living sucking power and profit from ordinary people. Which, unfortunately, probably includes multi-millionaires like you.

So, Glenn, we’re guessing that’s why you’re so afraid of us. We don’t fit neatly into your black-and-white formula. You simply borrow some of the best ideas from our 150-year-old anti-authoritarian tradition. We take those same ideas and not only run with them, but improve on them. We follow the logic to its ethical conclusion. And we include corporate media moguls like you in our Hall of Infamy.

But we’re reasonable folk. We understand that you find it scary to think about what will happen when ordinary people realize that they actually have the power to make their own decisions and take control of their own lives. So, here’s what we suggest:

Just admit you’re afraid of us. Admit that your passionate and convoluted rants are a nervous dance around your inability to support real freedom (anarchism) over unbridled power (Communism and capitalism). And then use your massive wealth and power for the forces of good.

Yours,

The AK Press Collective