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.
Especially in a context where the answer to the question “why wouldn’t anarchism work?” appears to be “because people like NWO exist”.
Pecunium,
I’ll add this, I did read On Killing, found it interesting and disturbing but also had some issues with it that I didn’t state above…..
It did seem like he was trying to sell an ideology–one of the chapters talked about the harm of video games. I don’t think video games are harmful, of course I don’t have a degree in psychology and I doubt anyone takes me seriously…. It felt similar to some of the anti-porn people like Roger Jensen. I don’t think looking at a Playboy is gonna turn someone into a rapist…. Also, way before violent media, people were doing awful things to each other. I did find the point that he discussed the psychological impact of killing which I had never seen before.
I also read The Gift of Fear recently, another one that was interesting but it really seemed that he was selling an ideology. In fact, I think Gavin DeBecker has a working relationship with Mr. Grossman:
https://www.gavindebecker.com/threat_assessment_training/bio/dave_grossman/
I had strangled someone in self defense and that is as close as I’ve come to killing someone–that has lead me to going to great lengths to avoid physical confrontation. I’ll match words all day long but I’ll do almost anything I can to avoid fists. Interestingly enough, there seems to be a certain type of guy who’ll throw his weight around and only back off when I threaten to fight. It seems I’ve been able to know when to tell people to fuck off and when to get out of a situation.
Well, nobody would be forcing any community that forms to adopt NWO! But why anarchy makes sense to me, and what I mean by anarchy, which may be very different from what you envision, is something that – because I’m necessarily on the fringes of politics, with weird ideas, and odd terminology, and very little respectability or easily pointed to examples, takes a long time to talk about in a serious conversation. It took me a long, long time to get here, somewhere I certainly once thought I would never, ever be.
All I can say at the moment, is that it’s something that I love talking about, but also need a great, great deal of available spoons to do a full grounding on. So please, all of you, I feel horrible that I can’t get back to all of you, right here, right now, with a complete manifesto that you are under no obligation to believe – But if you post you questions and issues in the Left Libertarian Politics thread, then I swear to you, when I get the spoons in my hand, you get the answers from the anarchist. 🙂
Isn’t looking at the system they were in as if they’re divorced from the ideas and movements that enabled them kinda context-less too?
Anyway, you’re right that I did simplify it too much. But that was, IIRC, the part that threatened other realms’ internal stability; the part where he, you know, used that support to levy armies that actually conquered shit is a problem, but it’s not the same reason why he still raised concerns after his death.
If I recall correctly, regardless of whether Napoleon actually had any plans to help non-Frenchmen out or not was completely irrelevant to Metternich and others; nationalist sentiment can be bad for multi-ethnic states, especially ones who’s peasants that still feel like a completely different country, and Napoleon made those ideas popular. It doesn’t matter whether Napoleon actually cares about any other group.
What’s a good excuse to murder an unborn child who has never committed even the slightest offense to anyone?
Begs the question. The abortion is defined as murder.
Since abortion isn’t murder (one may argue about it being killing, but it’s not murder), the question is invalid.
Pecunium – Thankyou so much for offering your thoughts! I’d love to get them from you after I read it.
I don’t think you’re crazy zhinxy, you’re the first Libertarian I’ve come across online who isn’t a complete tool who goes on about freedom unless it also applies to someone else (namely women)
zhinxy, if what you mean by anarchism isn’t what the word is commonly understood to mean, then you need another word (preferably one that doesn’t already have an established, and conflicting, meaning).
“What’s a good excuse to murder an unborn child who has never committed even the slightest offense to anyone?
Begs the question. The abortion is defined as murder.
Also suggests that NWO believes that murder is OK as long as the person you’re murdering did something you consider offensive. But we already knew that.
I think this is an important distinction: the massive armies were raised not only through popular support but also by conscription, in many cases of non-French subject peoples (unless I am mistaken, more than half of the poor bastards who went to Russia were not French), while the reason he raised concerns after his death as a symbol is nationalism.
And I still see most of that popularity as stemming from popular perceptions of the French Revolution, not Napoleon. Or not only Napoleon. Look at Germany: nationalist sentiment during, say, the time of the Battle of the Nations is a complicated mixture of admiration for the French Revolution, reaction against the French Revolution, admiration for Napoleon (if not Napoleon as such then at least the idea of a strong leader or a “great man”), and hatred of the Napoleonic occupation. There’s a lot of things going on here, and I still have problems with a simple “Napoleon = nationalism.”
Stoner: Grossman took the failing in Marshall, and treated it as if only 15 percent of people were capable of killing. This isn’t supported by other studies.
Having decided this, he then took secondary things (the training the US Army uses to make shooting more reflexive than cognitive in combat situations) and married it to his pet theory on the innate lack of desire of people to kill.
He didn’t, for example, take the circumstantial differences between an ordered firing at a static target; with no “buck fever” from being shot at, and then the effect of adrenal reactions (there is a reason deulling pistols shoot low. People under stress shoot high) and the problem of smoke on the ability of troops under pressure being able to accurately level weapons when the thing they are working on is speed; in part because the weapons they have aren’t more than passing able to hit a man sized object when properly aimed).
But he didn’t treat the two conditions as separate events. He argued that, since a controlled firig showed devatating effect, and an actual firefight didn’t, that some huge number of soldiers weren’t willing to kill.
That sort of glossing (and some unsupported ideas about positive conditioning; linked to some problematic use of racially tinged examples) makes me less sanguine about his theories. They look good, but when examined in a way which tests the underlying research the conclusions are weak.
VoiP: As I recall the non-French regiments weren’t conscripts. They were either present by hegemony (i.e. “lent” to Napoleon), or they were actual volunteers, who expected/thought they were going to be independent as a result of alliance/aid to France.
Which is a large part of why the antipathy to Napoleon (as opposed to simple politics) was so strong. In the same way (but for different reasons) as Revolutionary France threatened the extant structure of Europe, so to did Nappy.
Well, yeah, but popular support makes a conscript policy a hell of a lot less painful to carry out, autocracy or no. It’s not just about enlistment. Like I said, the system has a context too.
But, yes, I see now what happened. I also mis-spoke, and what I was thinking was “Why he worried people [i]after he died[/i]” and failed to communicate that particular qualifier (It’s sort of a relevant one).
Well, yeah. I think the problem is that I still speak too much in the tropes I grew up with… namely Great Person history. If I’m not giving something my undivided attention and watching what I say I go back to speaking in what I grew up with, which leaves me looking like an idiot because I’m not putting the time in to proofread and get what I understand actually out. My bad =.=
From 1806 onward, the Confederation of the Rhine had to furnish troops to France, and they did this through a system of conscription modeled on the French system.
Except for the Poles, I don’t recall a whole lot of popular feeling in French satellites on this subject. The rulers of many French satellites were under the impression that they would be rewarded after victory, but that’s not the same thing. In the autobiography of Jakob Walter, for instance, there is not a breath of concern for the Kingdom of Westphalia, and only one or two glimpses of a concern with the wider context of his actions at all.
It’s OK. Please don’t feel bad; I didn’t mean to speak so strongly.
You didn’t really speak strongly; I just fucked up. Probably because I’m distracting myself too much while trying to talk srs bsns, which is probably not the best habit.
Also, you were half correct. The Hundred Days is a perfect example of popular feeling for Napoleon.
NWO:
Try and understand: women, just like men, are individuals with their own morality, their own their own sense of ethics and their own views of politics, even within feminism. You, and most MRAs seem to have problems with this idea and seem to think that women are all clones or something equally stupid. Women are not carbon copies of one another. This being the case I’m sure that there have been women, past and present who have goaded men into going to war, just as there were men who goaded others into it. The “White Feather” movement was a case in point, but I doubt very much that they were trying to either get the men killed or sent them off to get goodies for them. Women were quite capable of understanding the politics behind whatever war their country was fighting. Are you seriously suggesting that the women who sent their husbands and sons off to WW1 and WW2 did so for totally selfish reasons? Do you have the vaguest idea what life was like in Britain, for example, during WW2? They were under direct threat and the women were running the country, maintaining the factories, building the weapons, growing the food. They weren’t kicking back, drinking champers and dreaming about all the lovely things their men were going to bring home for them. They were busy working for their country. Only someone who has never even spoken to someone who was there would have come to the kind of daft conclusion that you have.
It might also be worth pointing out that there were women who fought. The Nightwitches have already been mentioned and I know there were female pilots in Britain too, because my great aunt was one. With a few exceptions, however, women were not permitted to fight on the front lines, even if they wanted to. And in many places they still aren’t, although that is changing.
Your little fantasies about women and war are really just laughable and I suggest you either do some reading or actually talk to someone who was there.
NWO can talk to my grandmother, who went to work in a factory during the war even though she had a small child. She can tell him all about how cushy things were on the homefront then.
Unfortunately our resident delusional asshole can’t talk to my grandfather, since he never came back from that war. What have you ever sacrificed for your country, or done for anyone other than yourself, NWO? You don’t get to claim the sacrifices of other, far braver men as your own just because you share similar genitalia.
CassandraSays:
I’m sure my parents would be delighted to talk to him as well. They both lived through it and both lost relatives and friends, both to the blitz and on French battlefields. This is why I find NWOs attitude so distasteful. Speak this way about my grandmothers and my great aunts, who suffered through this, is really vile and a character assassination of strong, brave and decent women.
NWO:
You know, the point at which a fetus becomes a person is entirely arbitrary. Some people say it’s at conception, others say implantation, others when the notocord appears, yet others when it becomes sentient or it’s nervous system is complete. Totally arbitrary. Nobody has the slightest authority to talk about “ensoulment” with any certainty and many people don’t believe in the soul at all and to them your argument means nothing at all.
One thing most people do knew (in our culture at least), is that the woman carrying it is a person and she has control over her own body. That means that if she has something in it that she doesn’t want there, be it a cancer, a fetus, a parasite or whatever, she can have it removed. Self determination is a basic human right and the right to abortion is part of that.
Also childbirth is a dangerous business. It always was and it still is. Women die or are permanently disabled by it everyday. It changes your body permanently and the only person who should make such a decision is the person taking the risk. It’s not up to me to make a dangerous, potentially disabling decision concerning their own body. I shouldn’t be making it, doctors shouldn’t be making it and nor should the law. The only person qualified to make it is the person taking the risks.
I haven’t fully read over all of zhinxy’s comments, and I don’t consider myself an anarchist or anything like that, but I did write an essay on anarchism for politics last semester, and I got an A (:D), so I just wanted to mention:
When anarchists describe “the state”, they mean something which is sovereign, monopolistic, compulsory and distinct, and it’s usually one or more of these elements which they object to. So when anarchists say that they still support government, they usually mean government which is not those things (for instance, states are compulsory in that it’s pretty difficult to opt out of living under a state; in an anarchist world, you could pretty easily opt out of living in a governed community and go off on your own). There are different ideas about what exactly government would mean without a state, and of course some anarchists are completely opposed to government, but government is not actually necessarily incompatible with anarchism.
Which brings me to NWO, and his bizarre belief that we need a state to justify killing. Hmm. NWO, have you heard of a guy named Hobbes? He was not a feminist, don’t worry. He described the “state of nature” as “a war of all against all.” His feeling was that, if we didn’t have rules, society, government, etc., we would all kill each other all the time. The idea is that, if someone could harm you at any time with no repercussions, then you must be constantly on your guard, and maybe even get them before they get you first. In other words, in the state of nature the number one rule is not, “Don’t kill,” but rather “Do unto others before they do unto you.”
This is why anarchists are so concerned with government even though they don’t like the state. This is why liberals are in favour of the “nightwatchman” state, which exists to protect us from one another and so allow us to co-operate and thrive.
I guess what I’m trying to explain to you in far too many words, NWO, is that it is ONLY with the State, or some similar form of government, that killing is prohibited. I’m not saying I think killing is awesome, but I am saying that in the wild it is a reality. Hamsters don’t have a state and it’s already been explained in this very thread that they eat their own young. So how on Earth can you think that humans will only kill if the state gives permission?
“It would be a hoot to actually hear just what slaughtering the unborn sounds like. It’s not like it’s a, “sacred moment” or anything. Hey, now there’s an actual 1 in 4 stat feminists can tell the truth about. 1 in 4 babies don’t make it past the abortion slaughterhouse.”
Your ignorance is as painful as a head-desk.
@Cupcake Exactly. So if NWO is one of the “opt outers” I have a question for the almighty “I WANT EVERYBODY TO THINK AND DO WHAT I WANT”
In theoretical hypothetical no-state community world:
Would you be happy living in an MRA community where people couldn’t divorce, couldn’t abort. and couldn’t have gay relationships, (and other ppl can opt out and leave), and all over the world other ppl were being gay, transitioning and having abortions? :3
Like, my very EXISTENCE seems to bug you. You get angry at Ozy ALL the time. You want abortion banned. xD So it sounds like you’d be angry if all over the world but in your little restrictive commune, everybody is busy enjoying their personal freedom. But, that’s what you want right? Or DO you basically just want to replace the current “state” w/ your own state b/c after all, if there was NO state, other communities wouldn’t share your idea of abortion, and there WOULD be abortions. What then?
I predict his answer is something like that everybody would want to live in his cave except the freaks like us who would die off in the wilderness from the mutant cowwolves xD