A tiny group of gallant men (and “their women”) go underground to fight the evil gynocratic overlords. Is this the plot of a terrible dystopian potboiler from 1971, or a description of how most MRAs see themselves, and the world, today?
Turns out it’s both. I found this pic in the Blue Pill subreddit, and now I really, really want to read this book.
Here’s a book review from someone who did.
I’m annoyed that the mum seems to be the one being held in judgement for her sex having ways when the reservation men are the ones cheating on their wives with a woman who had no idea what the local culture considered appropriate. Not just by the characters but by the narrative.
And really it is pretty iffy that the people of the reservation are portrayed as complete barbarians but the white boy they raised is a noble, articulate savage. Yes even when your parents were intellectually barren, shallow products of an assembly line culture, Mighty Whitey is still in effect.
Really John had no chance of developing a rounded view of sex and love, look at his role models. His mother swung wildly between loathing him as a symbol of her shame and the traumatic experience of childbirth, made worse by her ignorance of the process, and clinging to him as her sole source of comfort. She was raised to view herself and others as economic commodities and the men in the village treated her as a sex object (come to think of it, it’s pretty weird she only had one kid all those years) to be used and thrown away to face punishment.
His other role model, is Shakespeare, who wrote a play so sexist that even 16th century audiences often found it repulsive. That kid was doomed.
Here’s a thought what would they do with a naturally born kid in the World State?
@Dvärghundspossen
As a recovering addict I think about the free will issue a lot. In rehab we talked about the extent to which an addict can have free will when it comes to relapse. Interesting stuff, but in the “real world” (aka not rehab) people seem to treat drug addiction as a problem of being weak-willed. I don’t think I’ve made up my mind yet as to what I think. There’s a lot of shame involved.
Yeah, there’s loads written on addiction from a philosophical standpoint as well. It seems plausible that there is such a thing as being weak-willed, but that raises loads of questions of what the difference is between being compelled and being weak-willed.
Sometimes I think people with an interest in philosophy and theory of mind need to sort of segregate their thoughts in order not to walk around in an existential crises. Every time I try comprehending the Many Worlds theory I keep going weird. Probably shouldn’t be writing a story about it then.
Hey guys! I have a poll going for my next upcoming writeathon picking the theme! It’ll open next weekend, and I’d love to have you guys express your opinion. Anon comments are fine, for those who can’t fill out the poll.
RE: Zolnier
Is there any science fiction society where child rearing is handled collectively but not abjectly dystopian?
*raises hand* I write one! The Dead-Carrier Beetles! They’re a social insect species, and so they have “brood mothers” who give birth to ALL the other members, fertile males that mate with those brood mothers, and then sterile females who make up about 90% of the group and do all the other work… including raising the children. Obviously, their methods of child-rearing are very different from ours. They’re not human in their thinking or ethics, but they’re generally nice people who worship death and dying.
Also, their gender system, such as it is, would give most humans a headache, because they divide down the functional roles I mentioned above, rather than ‘male’ or ‘female.’ The biology between a brood mother and a sterile worker is pretty wildly divergent, even if they’re both female! A sterile male is the closest to “gender-transgressing” their society has; they have no role for him! I need to write a story about how they cope with that situation when it comes about. Maybe I’ll get lucky and someone will prompt me for it some writeathon.
@Dvarghundspossen: I am agnostic both on the subject of a Supreme Being and regarding Free Will — I believe there are some questions that are beyond our ability to answer, at least at the current state of human knowledge. I only feel that in order to live a livable life you need to believe that you can make choices and that it matters what choices you make (at least those that affect others).
I had to revise my ideas somewhat on the old nature-nurture debate after meeting my biological half-sister several years ago. Although we are only half-siblings (different fathers), met for the first time when we were both in our 50s, and had vastly different educational opportunities (she was a high-school dropout who was pregnant on her 16th birthday and I got an Ivy-League education), we are so much alike in the way we speak that my daughter-in-law calls us “The Twins.” Also, after raising 4 children, I have learned that children have at least the rudiments of a personality right from the start, and you have to avoid the delusion that what worked on one child will work equally well on the next one. I used to come down strongly on the side of nurture, but I’ve been forced to reconsider.
I think this was the thread where someone posted a tumblr image with a “quote” from The Amazing Atheist where he appeared to suggest that lowering the age of consent to 12-13 years should be a big priority of MRAs. It appears this quote was a fabrication. Assuming it doesn’t get taken down, you can read about this in the comments on Pharyngula. Basically, the worst they can associate with TAA is one quote (not the one that appears with the image) talking about lowering the age of consent, which he has since disavowed and says he never meant to include adults & children. He also claims that the rumor that he dated a 14-year-old girl when he was in his 20s is not true.
FWIW. There is abundant evidence that TAA is an asshat and all-around reprehensible human being, but there appears to be no evidence that he actually said the words in the quote attributed to him on that fedoramancer tumblr.
There were some nice, real-life utopias in the 1800s. The Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Massachusetts is one of my favorites. Work there was allocated on the basis of “this needs to be done” and “I’m willing to do it.” Nobody was coerced into any particular role, but instead took on whatever role they liked based on their predilections and what needed doing.
There was, as a consequence, a not-insignificant amount of cross-gender work, in which a man would do “women’s work” or a woman would do “man’s work.” It was quite shocking and scandalous to the people of the day. The Northampton Association didn’t last very long (only about 4 years) but the failure was by circumstance and not necessity.
Ugh, yes, this is confusing for me too. I felt like I didn’t really have a choice when I was drinking, but if I didn’t have control over it, then how was I able to stop? I’m always afraid that someone will take the fact that I got sober as proof that I was actually in control the whole time.
I’ve thought a lot about the free will issue ever since learning about Calvinist theology in college. As a callow young soon to be ex-Catholic, I found the idea of predestination appalling – God has already decided on the fate of my soul, and there’s nothing I can do about it? Dang. The idea that my actual actions are somehow not my own choice – the meat puppet model – is almost as disturbing, but if there is no ‘me’ in a philosophically meaningful way, it’s hard to dismiss. I can choose to do or not do, but was it actually a ‘free’ choice, and what does free mean in that context? If we could answer those questions, it would be science and not philosophy.
Regarding Brave New World, one detail that nagged at me after my second reading was this. In a discussion between John Savage and Mustapha Mond, the latter explains that the World State needs Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons because Alphas and Betas would be driven to extreme crankiness by doing the scut work. In a different part of the *same conversation*, he explains that they can’t automate the scut work, because then the Gs, Ds and Es would have nothing to do. I couldn’t figure out if that was the character being so indoctrinated that he couldn’t see the contradiction, or the author being so culture-bound that he didn’t.
My favorite dystopia is Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day. There are no classes, just one big Family run by Uni, the World Computer. The protagonist finds out what’s going on behind the scenes, and it is much more plausible than such revelations usually are. My favorite bit was how violence was considered the ultimate obscenity, and the vilest thing you could call someone was ‘brother-fighter’.
Enh, I’ve never been particularly concerned with free will. Our brain is totally okay with pulling the plug on me for certain actions if it means the system survives; it’s part of how I survived the Bad Years. My brain just decided that I could be as miserable as I wanted, I just couldn’t kill myself on purpose.
I was pretty mad about it, both during and after, since I was aware I was being manipulated. But you know what, it kept us alive, so there’s only so much I can complain. Better than the alternative, right?
Claudiah, thanks for the update. That makes me feel marginally better.
I had this weird brainstorm about free will and fate, recently. After obsessing over whether I’ve got the ability to chose my own destiny or if I’m just inevitably falling towards a certain course of actions, I realized my fate only matters if I actually know what it is. The catch is that there’s really know way I could ever know what my destiny is, if it exists, because I’m human, I’ve got finite capacity for knowledge. I can never be 100% certain that a certain action or desire will lead to a specific outcome, and anyone who tells me they do could either be wrong or lying.
It sounds kinda simple now, but it really put a lot of things in perspective for me.
“Maybe I’ll get lucky and someone will prompt me for it some writeathon.”
Please write more about the dead carrier beetles! Particularly if you can work in M.D. annoying Biff, that’s always good for a laugh! (Raige hating Biff is super extra bonus points 🙂 )
“I found the idea of predestination appalling – God has already decided on the fate of my soul, and there’s nothing I can do about it? Dang. The idea that my actual actions are somehow not my own choice – the meat puppet model – is almost as disturbing”
I found the former far more disturbing, but ymmv obviously. The idea of a supposedly loving god creating people he knew would go to hell just did not sit well with me. If I’m a meat puppet by a quick of science…well, it bothers me less to think that consciousness is a quirk of biology and the idea we have free will is just a magic trick science plays, than it bothers me to think that we have no free will because some sort of creator made it so, and then is willing (or even quite desiring) to punish us for things we had no choice in.
Sentence structure, I fail at it! Hopefully that still made sense.
Argenti, ditto about predestination in the sense Calvin used it. The whole idea’s grotesquely cruel.
Did you see that pillock Ken Ham is busy saying there’s no point in space exploration because if there are any aliens, they’re all going to hell anyway? What a lovely fucker of a deity he believes in, or claims to.
Actually the best take I’ve seen lately on the idea of the cruel dirtbag deity would have to be this Oglaf about Sithrak.
I believe that the theory of predestination is not that god arbitrarily decides to send some people to heaven and some to hell, but that since god is omniscient it knows before you are born whether you will be godly or a sinner.
It gets worse. Calvin promoted the doctrine of total depravity, meaning that humans are incapable of good on their own — any good they do comes from god. Some of Calvin’s intellectual descendants believe that it is wicked for people to try to do good, because since only god can do good, a person who tries to do good is guilty of the deadly sin of pride.
Many Christian groups talk about “man’s sinful nature”, but if we do have a sinful nature there are only two possible explanations: (1) god deliberately created us with a sinful nature so that it could take pleasure in subjecting sentient beings to an eternity of torture, in which case god is itself wicked, or (2) it intended to create us with a non-sinful nature but botched the job, in which case god is not omnipotent; in that case, god would be torturing us for its failings, which is also clearly wicked. Therefore if you believe in “man’s sinful nature”, you must also believe that god is wicked.
Theology is always in danger of disappearing up its own asshole. The argument I’ve made here is (I think) a valid one, but of course no theologian can permit himself to make it and expect to hold on to his job. Of course, almost anyone who steps back and looks at things rationally quickly realizes that hell is a concept designed by humans to scare people into behaving as they wish therm to behave. Over time most religions have allied themselves with the dominant political power and become part of the social control mechanism of the state. It is not a marriage made in heaven.
I should have said, “if you believe in “man’s sinful nature” as grounds for sending people to hell”
And I would also comment that it does not seem to have been Jesus’ belief that doing good to others was a bad thing, but then Jesus was not a theologian, so what would he know.
LOL!
I can’t abide Calvin in any respect, religiously or politically. I have long-standing biases when it comes to the wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (ie. the Wars of Religion and the English Civil War).
The idea that anyone would make billions of beings just to let them suffer forever (and we won’t even get into Ken Ham’s “aliens aren’t Christian” idiocy) just makes no sense to me. It’s not just the cruelty, it’s the absurdity of it.
But of course all is really explained by Ceiling Cat, whom I should emulate, given it’s nearly 2am here!
Did you see that pillock Ken Ham is busy saying there’s no point in space exploration because if there are any aliens, they’re all going to hell anyway? What a lovely fucker of a deity he believes in, or claims to.
Uwhughbuhuh? The what now?
To paraphrade Charles Babbage: ” I’m unable to properly understand the confusion of ideas that statement represents”
I… Well look, wouldn’t that actually make space travel way more important? On account of all those aliens whose souls need saving and wait hang on I just got an idea for the worst space opera ever.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been a bad Christian movie about space missionaries yet.
Thank you all for the interesting little snippets about feelings and free wills inbetweem our normal haranguing of people too free with their willies feelings.
Utopias are interesting, in that they tend to run headfirst into the metaphysical constraints of the writer’s belief. I’d respond more but i’ running out of battery here. I’ll get back later.
As far as my religious beliefs I am a very liberal Christian with mystic leaning and a dash of native american thoughts. It’s a very personal thing, which is how I believe God intended all religion to be. I would love to share it in detail with you all but I don’t have the time nor do you. If any of you are ever in Buffalo and really want to know let me know, we can have lunch and talk. This all ties it to my thoughts on free will too.
As far as utopias go what I always found interesting is that by their very nature, My utopia being implemented automatically means someones utopia never will be. There will always be something in a utopia that makes it not a utopia for someone,
“I can’t abide Calvin in any respect, religiously or politically. I have long-standing biases when it comes to the wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (ie. the Wars of Religion and the English Civil War).”
If I were a Christian, I would say that Calvin brought more souls to his master Satan than any other person in history.
I’m convinced that we have freedom of religion in the US Constitution because the Founders were painfully aware of how destructive and pointless (even in comparison to wars in general) those wars were.
@GrumpyOldMan
Unfortunately, I believe those war would still have happened. To be sure religion got the foot soldiers into the fight but to quote The Boss ” a King ain’t satisfied till he rules everything.”Religion in my view did not so much cause those wars as grease the gears of war..