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.
Helping the disabled is bad? That is just pathetic DKM even for you.
Every one of the rights that I have cited benefits EVERY American, regardless of race, gender, sex “orientation”, age, and so on…
How about the right to get the scare quotes taken off an important part of your identity?
It doesn’t matter what Paul’s personal views are, any more than it did for Johnson or Bush(es).
It’s his policies, and he’s said that he’s down with business, and communities, excluding people, “just cause they feel like it.”
Which means his policies are “neutral” the way that sleeping under bridges is forbidden to the rich, as well as the poor. Which is why I said Paul’s vision (the one that you endorse) is one where the poor are exploited, and the rich aren’t, with racism/sexism and hate of any available out-group as icing on the cake.
As a heterosexual, I cannot think of any way I benefit from same-sex marriage (I’m not counting philosophically, because that’s a circular argument).
Indeed, it really doesn’t affect me at all, which is why I can’t see my way clear to preferring a system in which an arbitrary category of couples is denied the right to wed to one in which that is not the case.
I’m not sure why “how does it benefit you” is a better question than “how does it hurt you”. What do you propose be done about issues that don’t affect me at all.
Well, as an Appalachian, there is a special place in my heart for Lyndon B. Johnson, despite his terrible foreign policy decisions (because running water, electricity, and basic medical care are fucking awesome). However, everything awesome that he did are things that Meller and Paul are patently against, so I fail to see how bringing him up furthers Meller’s point.
[email protected]:
Are you kidding? Of course it’s a good thing if everybody benefits from particular initiatives being passed into law but, to my mind, the measure of a decent society is in how it treats minorities and protects them.
Who besides pregnant women benefits from abortion? Those non-pregnant women living in fear of a pregnancy that could kill or maim them; their families; those non-pregnant women who could not support a child if they fell pregnant; society, in that it limits the number of people needing it’s support; the environment, because we are overpopulated as it is and any children we have should be wanted and planned for. Contraception is great but it sometimes fails. People benefit in huge numbers of ways when women have access to abortion.
And gay marriage? I, for one benefit because I want my gay friends to be able to marry if they choose to do so, because I care about them and don’t want their relationships to be seen as inferior to my own. I want to know that I live in a society that doesn’t discriminate against people who are different or punish them for it as long as they aren’t harming anyone else.
Another quick note, Meller, (I'[m still sick, and up taking care of sick family members, and high on FDA approved snake oil)
For heaven’s sakes – Single Payer is the current actually POSSIBLE to get right now option that is most fiscally responsible and least statist, Meller. FFS. Yes, I believe radical free market health care can happen and I want it to, but let’s work on it while we’re healthy. Jezum Crow. It’s far less wonky and state-corporate than Obamacare ended up being.
http://c4ss.org/content/1526
“It’s interesting, don’t you think, that all the professed enemies of “big government” and friends of “our free market system” objected to the public option of all things.
Lieberman and others explicitly said that competition to “private” insurance companies was what they couldn’t abide. But holding up taxpayers and forcing them to buy insurance at gunpoint, at whatever price the insurance companies choose to charge, with no competition–why, that’s not “big government” at all. Because the insurance companies are businesses, you see, and anything that benefits business is part of “our free market system.”
Whenever you see a Republican or beltway “libertarian” talking about “our free market system,” remember that they’d have been using the same rhetoric about Krupp and I. G. Farben if they’d lived in Nazi Germany.”
Quoted for fucking truth.
I am “ignoring your reasons for people not supporting” Ron Paul, Zhinxi. And you have been ignoring my reasons for other people supporting him!
No, I know why people support him. Not just you, but people that are acutally knowledgable and sane and decent and good libertarians and human beings. I have yet to fully respond to you.
It is your notion of rights which is exclusive and group specific. How do non-pregnant women, much less men, benefit from abortion rights (assuming that there is an actual right to kill an innocent baby inside the womb).
Also, we are libertarians, People are ends and not means. We do not ask how their freedom “benefits us”. Go back to libertarian kindergarten. You’re embarrassing yourself. If you want to make arguments about how some freedoms should be lower priorty or limited, you do not make them on “what’s in this for ME” – Jesus Christ on a cracker, I think I’ve just run into somebody who could be morally improved by a re-reading of Galt’s Speech.
What’s in individual rights for MY GROUP, is “GROUP SPECIFIC” rights notions.
Are you this dense?
Since my kid is puking again, I might as well double back and talk to the mentally younger Meller – We ask in rights arguments how an individuals liberty harms others. And by harm, we mean a violent attack or aggression on their own individual rights. Only then can it be limited. We do not ask how other groups, or other individuals, benefit, in granting individual rights (Though we may and should and must explore and discuss and celebrate this in making our case). Ends and not means. This is so basic, that you really have to be fucking gone to think “What’s in right x for group y” is not a “group specific rights notion” much less a libertarian argument. Even a greedy, vulgar, corporate libertarian argument. Even a fucking rand-republican argument.
Seriously, I meant that about Galt’s Speech, for fucks sakes. I can’t fucking stand Objectivism, but if you go out and adopt it right now, you have actually gone about nine hundred steps up the moral and consistent libertarian (or any kind of libertarian, or any kind of moral, or any kind of consistent) staircase
“I swear by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, but I shall ask all who are not real men how they live for me, those selfish bastards and bitches. Get in line! Society needs you! It’s fucking libertarianism up in this bitch!”
“I swear by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, but I shall ask all who are not real men how they live for me, those selfish bastards and bitches. Get in line! Society needs you! It’s fucking libertarianism up in this bitch!”
-partial credit for “Meller as Galt” reluctantly to Ayn Rand, and happily to Ami Angelwings.
So basically zhinxy is drunk commenting, but with meds instead of booze?
Want to go poke MRAL for a while? He’s back in “I have a high IQ” mode again.
hah. yEAH, on and off. But there’s some alcohol inthe cough syrup I think, and then there’s my trazodone and… Oooh, where is he… I’ll find him..
So libertarianism is to be evaluated primarily by what Ron Paul, or his supporters think about killing a child inside the mother’s womb (abortion)?
Was the People’s Republic of China a LIBERTARIAN role model because free abortion on demand was available to its Chinese female subjects to comply with their odious One Child per Family policy?
Was Hitler a great libertarian spokesmen because he and the NSDAP advocated abortion as one way of controlling the growth of “unfit” non-Aryan races in the third reich? At a time when abortion was ILLEGAL in the USA (except, sometimes, to save the life of the mother)?
Was the USSR a haven of liberty and justice when THEY, for some years after the Bolshevik takeover, also guaranteed a “woman’s right to choose (baby killing)”? Later on, I believe in or around 1936, the Father of the Peoples, decided that too many young soviets were not being born, he was concerned about falling birthrates, and he reversed the previous policy, until Krushchev again made abortion available in the 1950’s? What LIBERTARIANS! I am so ashamed–here I support an America first peaceful foreign policy, the greatest possible Constitutional extension of civil liberties and rights (AS WRITTEN), the strongest possible protection of one’s rights to justly acquired private property, honest and sound money, and laissez faire capitalism (NO!! NOT the corrupt crony-corporatism/kleptocracy that we are cursed with now),and yet, because I have some moral doubts, as does Ron Paul, about the deliberate and premeditated killing of a living,breathing, PERSON in the mother’s womb, even defining it as a “right” no less, WE Paulsters are somehow LESS libertarian then you followers of the most totalitarian and rights-denying governments in history?
Nice company you left “libertarian” feminist baby killers keep, aren’t they?
Real libertarians, including Ron Paul, NEVER describe the corrupt corporatist kleptocracy of the USA as “free market” in any way shape or form! They–and I–do our best, on the contrary, to cite the immense DIFFERENCES which prevail between a free market. laissez faire society and the current NWO/Corporatist/Globalist monstrosity, combining many of the worst features of both socialism and capiitalism, that we all suffer from now!
No Meller, Libertarians should not be evaluated primarily by what Ron Paul, or his supporters think about abortion, because Ron Paul and his supporters are not the only Libertarians in existence, nor do they speak for all Libertarians.
If individual Libertarians have problems with his policies, they are not obligated to support him simply because he is Libertarian. This is not a complicated concept.
Meller: I, as a person, value personal autonomy. I value it more than gold, or a free market (not that there are such things, as Adam Smith said). I value it as I value my life.
People are means, not ends. A blastocyst, an embryo, even a fetus, is not a person. To strip a person’s rights, in the interest of a non-person is not a libertarian thing to do. To compel another, is not a libertarian thing to do.
Paul would do those things. That means (to me) he is not a good libertarian.
When I look at his ideas on economics, social justice, etc., he is not anyone I would be willing to vote into any office which deals with people’s rights, nor public moneys.
When I look at the political choices he has made (to remain in, and support; both actively and tacitly, the Republican Party), in light of the second and third order effects of those choices, I don’t thin he is morally fit for any public office.
And no amount of blather on your part, about how he is in favor of things he’s taken no risk, staked no piece of effective, nor visible, part of the political landscape to make happen, is going to convince me that a man I think unfit to be on the public payroll in any capacity ought to be president.
So libertarianism is to be evaluated primarily by what Ron Paul, or his supporters think about killing a child inside the mother’s womb (abortion)?
No it is not. I told you I have yhet to respond on ron paul. My opint was not your particular positions, but that the arguments YOU made for them were not libertarian arguments. I have quarrels with paul, but as I said, I know many who support him who are good, fine, honest, moral, consistent human beings and fine libertarians. Your arguments agaisnt abortion are not libertarian argumetns. Your argumetns for the other positions were not libertarian arguments.
I know libertarians disagree on this issue. But you aren’t disagreeing on libertarian grounds.
So stop speaking of “we paulsters” – and throwing china at me. There are plenty of fine paulsters. My posts were about you.
So libertarianism is to be evaluated primarily by what Ron Paul, or his supporters think about killing a child inside the mother’s womb (abortion)?
Adding to
No it is not. (which is not to say that this should not be highly important in a pro-choice person’s evaluation, of course. I myself told you that Paul’s immigration stance was more of a deal breaker for me than his stance on choice. This also does not mean libertarianism is primarily to be evaluated on immigration.) As I said, I havent had the time to get back to you on Paul (so stop acting like I did).
But I will say quickly that the many things I suppose I “like” about Paul’s platform, I can’t see any chance in hell of him actually doing anything about. ON the other hand, most of the things I DON’T like about Paul’s platform, he dovetails enough with the current Republicans that he COULD do something about them. And as I said, the fact that there is no new world order he alone can stop is allowed to factor into my decisions.
And really, stop using the “royal libertarian we” to refer to paul supporters. I told you, I know PLENTY of Paul Supporters. When it’s about YOU, it’s about YOU.
Just missed this. Oh, dear – Real libertarians, including Ron Paul, NEVER describe the corrupt corporatist kleptocracy of the USA as “free market” in any way shape or form! They–and I–do our best, on the contrary, to cite the immense DIFFERENCES which prevail between a free market. laissez faire society and the current NWO/Corporatist/Globalist monstrosity, combining many of the worst features of both socialism and capiitalism, that we all suffer from now!
-Meller, did you read that article? Even the quote? You know it was written by a libertarian, right? Do you understand what it was getting it?
Wow … Meller is snapping XD
Zhinxy has made history… this isn’t Meller over the top facetious “i’m just mocking you” this is pissed off angry Meller as his belief system crumbles around him XD
WE Paulsters are somehow LESS libertarian then you followers of the most totalitarian and rights-denying governments in history?
What ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? xD No srsly… what are you talking about? xD
I’m not a supporter of ABORTION Meller, I’m a supporter of body autonomy and the right of people to their own bodies. e_e I support people having kids too. So do you! However, I don’t support people being FORCED to have kids. xD I support people having sex! I don’t support rape. (I’m speaking for myself, who knows about you at this point xD )
You notice how unlike you, I don’t need to be selective and have bizarre justification logic that looks like it came out of Pipe Dreams xD I support people’s rights to their own bodies.
I THOUGHT that was the Libertarian way. At least… that would be the logical progression from the whole “personal freedom” thing right? xD
Or has Zhinxy led me astray? o: Tell me O Mellertron, speaker of Libertarianism. XD
We don’t have an abortion law in Canada. And guess what that means? xD ABORTION IS DE FACTO LEGAL, because abortion laws only exist to restrict or ban abortions. xD The State “legalizing” abortion is only b/c they criminalized it in the first place.. Without any law governing it AT ALL, people are able to do it.
Forget Libertarianism 101, I thought this was “basic everything” 101.
@Darksidecat: Re: LBJ. Damn straight–and remember he knew by signing the Civil Rights Act that he was losing the South to the Republicans for at least a generation (and boy did he call it). LBJ wouldn’t be elected in Texas today–so I refuse to accept that whatever he did at a completely different period of time is any reason for approving any Texas presidential politician today.
Nobody knows what Ron Paul could or could not accomplish if he was elected President! It cannot even be intelligently speculated upon, because he, and we, are all in uncharted terrritory! Nobody has ever turned a degenerate crooked, and vicious kleptocracy/fascism/ corporate State; itself with no real analog to previous polities (although several very smart people have looked at parallels with ancient Rome c. 330-450 AD)–into a prosperous, soundly free market, private property based politically free Consitutional republic with firm safeguards at both the Federal and State level for personal and economic liberty!
There are so many unknowns, and I’m leaving out a lot here!
Can Ron Paul ignite a widespread ‘prairie fire” to reconsecrate and uphold the Constitution and Bill of Rights throughout America?
Can Ron Paul’s Presidential campaign stimulate an interest in Austrian Misesian economics, both among academics and the general public, given the failures of the absurdly statist Keynesian/ Marxist paradigms of the XX century?
Can enough people be made to see how the current ills and disasters are directly related to the public policies, especially economic and banking policies, pursued so single-mindedly over the past century? Upon realizing it, can enough people channel this realization to support President elect Paul’s policies and recommendations?
Can the support given him, and his Presidency, continue even if the NWO criminals–who have everything to lose, murder him (and perhaps as many of his influential supporters as they can get their hands on)? Can such assasination conspiracies be forestalled or prevented effectively without destroying what remains of our civil liberties?
Can enough of us keep our heads, and keep planning and organizing for ourselves and our communities, even when Obama and the criminal class in DC and Wall St. “never let a good crisis go to waste” in former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s infamous words?
Is the Military prepared to defend the Constitution, or are they (both enlistees and officers) going to “just follow orders” in the wake of impending, or ongoing, bankruptcy of the United States? If there is a split, how many will be wise enough, and patriotic enough to see Ron Paul as our only hope?
Will enough people be alert to “false flag” operations like the twin towers attack or the attack on the USS Liberty by Israel in 1967–which LBJ wanted to blame on Egypt–to avoid being stampeded as we were in Vietnam after “Gulf of Tonkin” destroyer “incident” or 9-11 inside job/ terrorist blowback? We probably won’t be fooled again, but nobody can be sure!
Will the repeated bailouts, subsidies, “loan guarantees” and other privileges granted the elites, while tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of us are going bankrupt and homeless, FINALLY convince the majority of us idiot SHEEPLE that the government, and its primary institutions ARE NOT accountable to us, are not our “representatives”, that this is no more a “democracy”–still less a Constitutional Republic–then were the Third Reich or the USSR Bolshevik regime, and that any loyalty to, or compliance with, those criminal elites is NOT patriotism, it is suicideal folly on our part! Just as importantly, will enough people understand Ron Paul, and his supporters,, as the alternative that they are?
Nobody knows the answers to the above questions. Nobody can even guess. The available facts are unknown now, and will remain so for many months yet to come. Ron Paul is running for the Presidency with many opportunities (can you spell “internet”?) and many challenges (can you spell New World Order) that never existed before–at least never in anything like their current form–and will affect this election, along with public opinion in ways that cannot even be glimpsed today!