When we first met Spearhead commenter Rmaxd, he was raving about how our technological society had rendered women obsolete. He’s back, this time taking on, well, women again, and welfare, and declining birth rates, and, well, it’s all a little bit hard to follow.
Let’s start with Rmaxd’s basic premises:
Women are serially monogamous or hypergamous & are infertile for the majority of their lives
While men are polygamous, & FERTILE for the majority of their lives
Marriage has always been used as the earliest form of birth contraception, limit the amount of children a fertile male can have, by forced mating with a single infertile woman for the rest of his life.
We are off to a bad start here. Is there anything in all that that’s correct? Among other things: marriage is most decidedly not a particularly effective form of birth control. (The show Eight is Enough was based on a real family, and I suspect we’ve all met people with enough siblings to fill a bus.) But let’s continue; Rmaxd is on a roll:
As the government can no longer force this sort of mating on infertile womens, especially in the lower moronic, under educated peasantry states,
As women want alphas,
Obviously sluts & whores, are simply mimicing infertile women, as only infertile dried up vaginas, can afford to sleep around with hundreds of men
This is why we have sluts & promiscuity, marketted to young girls today, imitate infertile women, imitate their habits, destroy your fertility, destroy your youth
A childhood of std’s & yeast infections
Yeah, I’m not even going to try to parse all that.
In any case, as Rmaxd argues, these “infertile” ladies somehow still manage to pop out a few kids when they’re young, and the evil welfare state rewards them for it:
It’s essentially birth control by sponsoring infertile women, most women have a couple of kids, basically enough to live off the welfare & free housing
As we all know, single mothers live lives of untold luxury and indolence.
What we have here is essentially welfare for infertile women, as they’re no longer able to siphon cash from enslaving men into walking wallets & their magical vagina’s a pit of std’s & warts
In the past, you see, women could enslave men by marrying them. Now they can’t get dudes to stick around, so instead they enslave men by not marrying them, raising their kids on their own with the help of welfare money. It’s all very devious.
Rmaxd would prefer that the welfare money go to the fathers:
If we had welfare for men who had kids, with different women, we would have a healthy birth rate, instead of the declining birth rate we have now … this is all about rewarding & protecting a womans sexuality over a mans sexuality
It all leads to what Rmaxd calls:
The new another dark age of female fanatical male hate,
sponsored & policed by the church of radical feminist mangina, & government
The dried up vagina, as a tool of the state & population control
This barely coherent spew of woman-hatred – and it’s even less comprehensible without my edits and annotations – still managed to draw a few upvotes from the regulars, proving that internet misogynists will upvote pretty much anything so long as it contains the requisite level of anti-woman vitriol.
In case you’re feeling especially bored this lazy Sunday, the whole Spearhead thread is a trainwreck of misogyny and racism – including some fairly obnoxious discussions of black “Welfare Queens” and Mexican immigrants from a fellow called Keyster. Does that (fake) name sound familiar? You may know him as a fairly regular contributor to A Voice for Men and the producer of the AVfM internet radio show.
Oh, man. Guys, on a totally unrelated note, did you know that David’s great grandfather looks like a total fucking badass?
IT’S TRUE
http://www.futrelle.com/
David, I am officially jealous of you having cool ancestors. Mine, as far as we can tell, were just minor politicians/never made anything more creative than cabinets.
Hey now, Molly! Cabinets are really important.
As for how to implement it, the best answer, I would say, is to form co-operatives, credit unions, homesteading groups, trade networks, labor shops, and mutual aid organizations, but again, anarchist, that’s how we roll with the mutual aid this mutual aid that. And above all to unionize. REALLY unionize, in a way that makes them quake.
Right. Eh… Hmm… Well… Hmm… Em, yeah… I got nothing. This guy is clearly an idiot.
Sarah: They are, but you can’t impress people at parties by telling stories about ’em. 😉
MollyRen – I would totally chill by the punch and listen to the tales of your ancestors and cabinets.
Zhinxy: Yep, I was agreeing and adding my own thoughts. 🙂 I definitely agree about the importance of creating alternatives to regular capitalism– I don’t think that corporations necessarily need to disappear, but they’d be far weaker if there was a coop down the street and a kibbutz across the way, for those who felt the desire to work that way. And a stronger social safety net so that if the only jobs available are ones that disgust you morally or destroy your quality of life/health/whatever, you don’t have to take them.
I do think most people want to work, in the sense of wanting to Do Something that Contributes To Society. They just want, you know, meaningful, interesting, fulfilling, socially valued work that doesn’t eat up their entire lives. And, you know, a meaningful, interesting, fulfilling, socially valued job that doesn’t eat up their entire lives should be the norm, not the exception.
Ozy – Eek, sorry, meant to link to
http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Political-Economy-of-Waste.pdf
which is a very good overview of the problem and potential solutions as seen from a mutualist, broadly libertarian socialist perspective –
“Historically, given land of normal fertility, a work-week averaging twenty hours over the course of
a year was sufficient to support a family of subsistence producers on those rare occasions when they
were not overburdened with taxes and rents. Naturally, it has been a central aim of privileged classes
throughout history to prevent this state of affairs from occurring.
The Times of November 1857 contains an utterly delightful cry of outrage on the part of a West-Indian
plantation owner. This advocate analyses with great moral indignation—as a plea for the re-introduction of
Negro slavery—how the Quashees (the free blacks of Jamaica) content themselves with producing only
what is strictly necessary for their own consumption, and, alongside this ‘use value’, regard loafing
(indulgence and idleness) as the real luxury good; how they do not care a damn for the sugar and the fixed
capital invested in the plantations, but rather observe the planters’ impending bankruptcy with an ironic grin
of malicious pleasure, and even exploit their acquired Christianity as an embellishment for this mood of
malicious glee and indolence. They have ceased to be slaves, but not in order to become wage labourers, but,
instead, self-sustaining peasants working for their own consumption.”
1
To prevent such outrages, the propertied and employing classes have resorted to all sorts of artificial
property rights and artificial scarcities to control producers’ access to land and capital, so that in return
for access to the means of production and subsistence they would be compelled to work to support
someone else in addition to themselves
…
Also, read Marx’s Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land, chapter 27 in Capital, if you haven’t yet. 😉
Ozy: but then how would cheap clothes and electronics get made? *lolsob*
I do think most people want to work, in the sense of wanting to Do Something that Contributes To Society. They just want, you know, meaningful, interesting, fulfilling, socially valued work that doesn’t eat up their entire lives. And, you know, a meaningful, interesting, fulfilling, socially valued job that doesn’t eat up their entire lives should be the norm, not the exception.
YES YES YES YES YES, and the whole sick notion that we DON’T, when all we don’t wanna do is toil at shit jobs we don’t see the benefit of, is one of the best lies we get fed.
As for the social safety net, this is one of the things where you get into unnecessary arguments with people unless you’re very careful – I want one. I want one so thick it’s not even a fucking net, it’s a tarp, a waterproof tarp, and under the tarp, then maybe you have another tarp. I just don’t think the current nation-state system can give us a good one.
Ozy: but then how would cheap clothes and electronics get made? *lolsob*
Molly – REPLICATORS!!!
…Okay, that’s kinda what I actually believe. XD
An ancestor of mine was involved in the Salem witch trials. On the accusing side. So… yeah. There’s that.
Molly: I personally go with the ROBOTS! solution. Because, honestly, is there anything in the average factory that couldn’t be done (with perhaps a few more decades of technological development) by robots and some repairpeople for when the robots break?
Zhinxy: Yeah, that whole idea that we really want to just laze around all day and relax… I dunno about you guys, but I want to laze around all day for about four hours tops*, and after that I start getting tetchy and craving something to do.
*Except for when I’m depressed, but that’s a different issue, I think.
“Zhinxy: Yeah, that whole idea that we really want to just laze around all day and relax… I dunno about you guys, but I want to laze around all day for about four hours tops*, and after that I start getting tetchy and craving something to do.
*Except for when I’m depressed, but that’s a different issue, I think.”
…
That – And you know, yeah, there’s some shit that needs to get done, be it toilet cleaning, toenail clipping, garbage disposal but the fact that we can get that over with without it becoming the focus of our existence remains.
But the whole notion of a genuinely lazy humanity is pretty much bullshit.
Molly: I personally go with the ROBOTS! solution. Because, honestly, is there anything in the average factory that couldn’t be done (with perhaps a few more decades of technological development) by robots and some repairpeople for when the robots break?
…
Another thing is micromanufacture these days – YOu don’t really NEED large scale factory production if you can transmit the plans over the internet to a small local shop that can fit the parts together. And when shipping subsidies and other chicanery are factored out, the large scale centralized model, robots or not, seems a lot less competitive.
One of my ancestors founded Van Nuys California. Home of all that porn!
One of my ancestors… stole a lot of cows…
One of my ancestors was SPENCE MONROE, PRESIDENT JAMES MONROE’S BROTHER, WHO WAS NOT PRESIDENT BUT DID DO REVOLUTION STUFF AND WAS NAMED SPENCE! Not Spencer, Spence. Because he was Colonial Hip.
You can’t just end the story there!
This is one of those times when I wish I knew more about economics, but I like this better than robots. How do we know the companies won’t just hire a lot of robots and leave the rest of us out of work? 😛
I’ve heard from my fair share of anti-feminists who literally seem to believe that women go through menopause around age 30.
Molly – There’s a really great book on this called The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, about how we can build a micromanufacturing future that avoids that very problem. http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com/
Although I really, really love saying something like “We Demand Control of the Robots of Robot Production! ” as a slogan.
Amanda Marcotte – “I’ve heard from my fair share of anti-feminists who literally seem to believe that women go through menopause around age 30.” – And automatically begin not only to wrinkle, but to literally DECAY.
Molly: That’s basically the story! My dad’s side of the family has spent the last thousand years doing things related to cows, theft, and theft of cows. Inexplicably, in the last generation, they have taken up journalism, condo management, and the law, all of which seem remarkably lacking in cows.
My great-grandfather Harvey Rickard was a bootlegger that Al Capone once threatened to murder, though, which is pretty cool. He ended up fleeing for his life and abandoning his family, which starved all through the Great Depression and was one of the first families in the country to be on welfare. We’ve been Democrats since. 🙂