The director of the first Human Centipede film – the one about a psychopathic doctor who sews three unwilling and unwitting captives together mouth-to-anus to make a sort of “centipede” — proudly declared that his film was “100% medically accurate.” That is, he found a doctor who was willing to say that if one were indeed to create such a centipede, the second and third segments (i.e., people) would be able to survive, provided that you supplemented their rather dismal diet with IV drips to give them the nutrition they were lacking.
This dubious claim to 100% accuracy came to mind today as I perused a post by the blogger who calls himself Dalrock, a manospherian nitwit with a penchant for pseudoscientific defenses of old-fashioned misogyny. In a post with the whimsical title “We are trapped on Slut Island and Traditional Conservatives are our Gilligan,” Dalrock argues that the best “solution” to out-of-wedlock births is some good old-fashioned slut shaming.
Here’s how he breaks down the (imaginary) numbers in a post that is “100% mathematically accurate” – which is to say, not accurate at all:
Assume we are starting off with 100 sluts and 30 alphas/players. The sluts are happily riding on the alpha carousel. Now we introduce slut shaming. It isn’t fully effective of course, but it manages to convince 15 of the would be sluts not to be sluts after all. This means an additional 15 women are again potentially suitable for marriage. This directly translates into fewer fatherless children. This also makes the next round of slut shaming easier. Instead of having 99 peers eagerly cheering her on her ride, each slut now has 15 happily married women shaming her and only 84 other sluts encouraging her. After the next round this becomes 30 happily married women shaming the sluts, and only 69 other sluts cheering them on, and so on. This process continues until all but the most die hard sluts are off the carousel. You will never discourage them all, but you can do a world better than we are doing today.
Why not shame the fathers as well, while we’re at it? Dalrock explains that this just doesn’t make good mathematical sense:
Start with the same base assumption of 100 sluts and 30 players. Now apply shame to the players. Unfortunately shame is less effective on players than it is on sluts, so instead of discouraging 15% of them (4.5) in the first round, it only discourages three of them. No problem!, says the Gilligan [the social conservative], at least there are now three fewer sluts now that three of the evil alphas have been shamed away, and all without creating any unhappy sluts! But unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. The remaining 27 players are more than happy to service the extra sluts. They are quite maddeningly actually delighted with the new situation. Even worse, the next round of player shaming is even less effective than the first. This time only 2 players are discouraged, and one of the other 3 realizes that his player peers are picking up the slack anyway and reopens for business. This means in net there are still 26 players, more than enough to handle all of the sluts you can throw at them.
Well, there’s no arguing with that!
Seriously, there’s no arguing with that, because it is an imaginary construct with only the most tenuous connection with how things work in the real world. “But … MATH!” doesn’t really work as an argument here, since human beings don’t actually behave according to simplistic mathematical formulas.
Film critic note: While the first Human Centipede film offered little more than a workmanlike treatment of a fantastical idea, the recently released sequel, which details the attempts of a deranged Human Centipede superfan to take human-centipeding to the next level, is actually sort of brilliant. If you like that sort of thing.
You’re all literally Hitler! Each and every one of you!
Admit it!
The short answer, dsc, is that I meant “goverment without the state” in the context of that being a common anarchist phrase implying that anarchy is not “everyone running around with pointy sticks killing each other”- But for quick example, you can have governance inside an organization – That’s not a state. 🙂 As in any political/social movement, terms take on meanings specific to that movement – Again, see privelege and phobia.
http://infoshop.org/page/AnAnarchistFAQ
infoshops basic anarchist faq is better at the 101 questions than me. But please, ask when I seem unclear or playing fast and loose.
Although I’m entirely in agreement with the idea that Slavey is an ignorant fool who doesn’t understand or support the ideology that he claims to subsribe to, I also am growing weary of the constant “the State is bad, very bad” comments. I have neither the time nor the patience to argue about why I don’t agree with anarchism, other than to point out what part of the reason why I feel that way is having spent most of my childhood outside the First World – you’ll find that most people who’ve spent any period of time actually outside the umbrella of State protection think anarachy is a horrible idea, because we don’t trust people to be nice or good, having seen the way they behave when the state is nor forcing them to control their tendency to be selfish assholes.
I will point out, though, that most schools of feminism are fundamentally statist in that many of them are descended from either socialism or liberalism, and that a lot of the anti-State comments here play right into the thought processes of people like NWO who want to argue that feminism is bad because it supports state intervention. I know that you think that you’re undercutting his arguments via pointing out that what he wants isn’t actually libertarian, but you’re also supporting his fundamental idea that state protections for vulnerable people are a bad thing at the same time.
It’s growing tiresome.
Ami, I’m sorry you’re not feeling well right now. *hugs Ami*
Spearhafoc | November 20, 2011 at 11:24 pm
You’re all literally Hitler! Each and every one of you!
Admit it!
I’m illiterally Hitler.
Hey Ami, I don’t really know you very much at all and I’m not involved in the conversation at hand, but I get what you’re saying about feeling raw and I just wanted to say I’m sorry to hear that :(. For what it’s worth, I don’t think anyone is attacking one another (or you!) there are just some differences of opinions.
Anyway, this one is an oldie but a goodie so maybe you’ve seen it:
Meller: Nobody will “constrain” or “forbid” them a lifestyle of their choice–and nobody will protect them from its consequences either. They, and other women like them, will be given up to businesses/ agencies whose specialty is the entertainment and the pleasure of men.Virgins are protected, and so are sexually “enterprising” women!
Everyone is happy!!
Except the women.
And they are still not free, in your paradise. They are, “given up to businesses,”? By whom? Who has the power to bind one person over to another as a slave?
In DKM’s universe, women obviously don’t know when they *should* be happy, else they never would have left the house! 😛
I prefer hetero-sexism to homophobia to begin with, but it’s rather more like if a feminist completely fucking forgot that as a matter of fact, not everyone knows feminist theory, and wasn’t prepared to at least point out that this isn’t the everyday use of the term….
…Except this isn’t a new use for an old term. It’s divorcing an old term from it’s old meaning entirely, or more accurately, rhetorical sleight of hand. When feminists use the word “Privilege”, it’s not supposed to be in opposition to the old definition, but a new way of understanding this old definition. This… not so much.
Seeing as Sweden is me and my girlfriend’s current fallback if we can’t get into Canada, I’d like to avoid that.
Sure, why not?
*Deploys giant robots. And bishounen flowers*
Cassandra says, I’m sorry. All of you, I’m sorry. I have a thread in the manboobz forums started by politically different Manboobz anarchist blackbloc – called “The left libertarian politics thread” If you have questions for me, please ask them there. I’ve had a hard time getting back to serious political questions about my beliefs because this month has been so busy, and I’m sorry if my troll playing got on your nerves. I’m not going to duck any questions you have, run away, or move goalposts, but I can’t deal with a passionate debate on these issues right now. I’m an activist, sure, but I’m a real person going through a lot.
If you want me to back off the troll playing or take a different tack, I’m happy to oblige. Please speak up so I know that I am tiring you. But of course at the end of the day I’m still an anarchist, and am likely to remain so. And I don’t mind standing up for my version of politics any more than you mind standing up for yours. So please, come, ask. I’m not moving goalposts, I’m not hiding, I’m not afraid. But the manboobz comment threads aren’t a forum and it’s hard for me to keep up here. If you would all like me not to play with the trolls here anymore, that’s fine, too. I got a lot on my plate anyway, and it would free up a lot of time. 😉
Meller: He is entitled to his opinion, and Heaven knows, he isn’t the only one nowadays, but it still sounds odd to me! VERY odd, indeed!
Which is because (as you’ve admitted) you have no fucking clue what military service (much less combat) is like.
Hell, you don’t even realise that 1: fighter pilots are the only person in the plane, and 2: women are doing the job even now (and have been flying fighter aircraft since WW2)
And by play with trolls, I really mean try to attack NWO, Meller, and others on their own claimed expertise.
Your own link, within the very firsts few pages, uses “government” and “state” interchangeably:
One of tons of examples:
There are a lot of other nonstandard term uses in their without deliniating the claims made or the reasons for conflation (historically, many users of the identifier “libertarian socialist” were not anarchists, to give one example).
Sorry, I missed zhinxy’s last comment before posting…
DSC – it’s okay, though you did make me notice something – They rewrote that damn 101 page since last I went there, dang anarchists. It’s like there’s no damn law and order anymore… 😉
Actually, I am literally Hitler. I feel much better now that I’ve come clean about that.
If you can find a way to do it without implying that the existance of a state is inherantly bad, go for it. If you keep making state-is-bad comments, though, then a. the trolls are just going to take that as a sign that they’re right to hate feminism because most feminists prefer to work with the state and b. we’re going to get bogged down in lots of (unresolveable) debates about why most of us think that a state is necessary.
All I’m going to say about that lat part is that you clearly have a lot more faith in human nature than I do.
Stoner: “A look at history might help illustrate what I am talking about. In World War Two, it is a fact that only 15-20 percent of the soldiers fired at the enemy. That is one in five soldiers actually shooting at a Nazi when he sees one. While this rate may have increased in desperate situations, in most combat situations soldiers were reluctant to kill each other.
SLA Marshall’s study (Men under fire) is interesting and has a singular flaw. I fails to account for situational conditions. Subsequent studies showed that people under direct threat, and those under no real threat, were more likely to shoot than those who were in imminent; but not direct, threat.
Also, those who could see comrades being attacked were more likely to engage.
So yes, in any given firefight, as few as 15 percent might be firing, but that didn’t mean it was the same 15 percent in the next engagement.
This is one (not the only one) of the flaws in Grossman’s, “on killing”.
zhinxy: If you want to talk about Grossman’s book, drop me a line, offline, and I’d be happy to share my opinions. I think he suffers from a couple of important fallacies, not least is some egregious post hoc reasoning, and a decidely untestable hypothesis.
This is why as much as I love the idea of a society free of government, the state, whatever…that’s the main thing that’s keeping me from believing it will ever be possible. Human nature is not so great.
Its sort of similar to how I feel about quotas. I dont like the idea of them, I wish they didn’t have to exist, but given the history of discrimination against certain groups of people, they are needed. At least for now.
@ Quackers – This is what I mean when I say that growing up outside the First World is probably influencing my thinking on this. For some people (NWO and Meller being perfect examples), all that’s really keeping them from abusing the people around them is the threat of government intervention. And they’re people living relatively cushy lives without much in the way of external sources of stress.
I think that humanity as a whole only appears to be basically compassionate and good when people are relatively comfortable and not under much stress. As soon as conditions get hard, people do awful things to each other. Even when conditions are good, some people will of course still want to do awful things to each other, but a government can constrain their ability to act on those impulses to a certain degree. I think it’s easy to forget how much the threat of goverment intervention is contraining people’s worst impulses until you take a look at a society where that pressure from above no longer exists. What happens generally isn’t pretty.
Best comment juxtaposition ever.
Yeah, I agree. I’d love the idea of a society where people combine based on mutual benefit and not on force or coercion, but I can’t even organize my roommates to take out the trash on a regular basis, much less an entire proper society.
Hold on now. I don’t think you can just say “BECAUSE NATIONALISM” like that describes everything. Ideas are meaningless outside a wider social context, and in France during this period that context includes a comparatively sophisticated system of repression and surveillance. Any discussion of what “the nation” meant to the French at the time needs to take this into account: many French people may have opted into this system, but the system as a whole remained coercive, both for the French and for France’s satellite kingdoms.
Meanwhile, Napoleon was only an ambassador for nationalism outside France either as a cynical move or despite himself: the Poles believed he would restore their state, but he didn’t, while the nationalist revolts during the war (as in the German states and Spain–although I’m not sure you could really call the guerillas “nationalist”) were against his regime. The British and the Russians experienced groundswells of nationalist feeling brought about by fighting against Napoleon, rather than modeling themselves after his state.
Don’t worry, guys, I’m used to being confined to the “crazy zone” of the political spectrum, I never planned on converting anybody to anarchism here. 😉
I think they (or at least Ozy and Cassandra) would just rather have an explanation of why your ideas make sense to you.