Dissent is the Sincerest Form of Patriotism

May 11, 2017 //
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What does it mean to be a patriot? Obviously loving your country is the baseline from which we must work, but what form ought that love need embody? Frequently this love is merely blind obedience. For instance, while disastrous foreign intervention is often portrayed as bumbling or ridden with mistakes, and the methods may be challenged, the actual right to intervene is never questioned. The patriotic state is morally infallible, even if its arbiters are only human in their expression of that impossibly righteous doctrine. Those who claim the highest degree of patriotism often have the strongest distaste for the elites of their country, despite them representing the very mechanisms for how that country operates. This contradiction illuminates that patriotism can represent a disturbing level of authoritarianism, as even if the masters of society are held in contempt, their deeds and motivations at their core are ultimately indisputable. Patriotism as a guise for authoritarianism is not built on a foundation of love but one of control, so clearly that option must be discarded.

If not obedience, why not disobedience? John Stuart Mill said, “Laws never would be improved, if there were not numerous persons whose moral sentiments are better than the existing laws.” Moral infallibility is certainly not the property of any state, which means that the people are the ones responsible to hold it to account. Participating in the system is quite often nothing more than a concession to the very nature of that system, which means that disobedience is possibly one of the few ways to hold those in power to account, as is our responsibility. Consider these quotations from anti-suffragettes. Emma Goldman, the radical feminist and anarchist, said:

The history of the political activities of man proves that they have given him absolutely nothing that he could not have achieved in a more direct, less costly, and more lasting manner. As a matter of fact, every inch of ground he has gained has been through a constant fight, a ceaseless struggle for self-assertion, and not through suffrage. There is no reason whatever to assume that woman, in her climb to emancipation, has been, or will be, helped by the ballot.

Helen Keller, yes, that Helen Keller, was a socialist dissident who also believed that enfranchisement was the wrong direction to take:

Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee . . . You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice?

These women were not creating objections based on misogynistic ideas of a woman’s place in society, but were objecting based on the principle that the country belongs to its citizens rather than the ruling class. The idea of political disobedience is never disobedience for disobedience sake, but rather to improve the state of the world so that the lives of the people are improved along with it. It is an ideology of communal unity, where the bond of the people is driving forward the mechanisms of change. This is a patriotism of love. This is a patriotism that believes the state can be improved because the people within it deserve the best of all possible worlds. Dissent is not a rejection of the nation; it is its embrace, believing it can do better because it deserves to be the best. We are our nation. We deserve the best.

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Categories Politics, Social Criticism

The Disposable Gender

May 7, 2017 //
4

Sometimes I like to peruse opinions that don’t align with my own. For example, I recently searched on Breitbart to see how ardent Trump supporters viewed his glaring and impeachable conflicts of interest. The comments mostly centered on the Clinton Foundation, and how if Hilary did it then it must be okay(?). I guess they forgot that they were chanting to lock her up just a few months ago. It was adorable. However, there is the odd occasion where oppositional opinions can make solid points. It was one such video from a Men’s Rights Activist on Youtube that brought together a lot of issues I have been mulling over into one cohesive package that really stuck out to me. It was the idea of the disposable male.

Men make up 95% of all victims of police shootings. For a point of reference, according to the US Department of Justice, 86% of all sexual assault victims are women. Black Lives Matter should in theory partner with MRAs to address police shootings, but somehow I don’t think they will. MRAs would have to admit that fighting for social equity makes them quite literally “Social Justice Warriors,” and BLM would have to admit that victimhood lies beyond their narrowly-defined spectrum. In any case, as far as gendered crime is concerned, this would seem to be a significant issue. However, in reality, it’s not a significant issue and mostly gets ignored. Men dying is essentially inconsequential.

Think of how we describe war. There are many tragedies in war, and when our side loses someone, it is described as the death of a soldier, or a loss of our troops. When tragedy befalls others, its victims are women and children. Despite their majority presence in war (men make up 98% of military deaths in the US), men seemingly do not exist in conflict. At best, soldiers are defined as boys or our sons, hoping to infantilize them to the point where sympathy becomes possible. Emily Cousens in my first hyperlink there describes the impact of intersectionality within masculinity, as men of colour become more hidden in the language of war casualties. We will at least hear about terrorist attacks in Brussels or Paris, whereas the ones in Arab countries are harder to find… unless of course an inordinate number of women and children are killed.

The expectation for men to be soldiers, with all that implies, carries over back home. Canadian men make up 72% of homicide victims and 87% of homicide accused. Men make up the majority of non-sexual victims of violent crime, and though my source doesn’t specify, I can reasonably assume the perpetrators are mostly male as well. These “bad” soldiers must be dealt with, and so men make up 85% of those suffering under the criminal justice system. Given that they were bred to be disposable in the first place, it is downright encouraged to discard them when they prove to be defective. Or rather, the wrong kind of effective since we’re essentially teaching boys to become this type of man in the first place.

There is more than just the obvious examples of crime and war statistics. In the US, men make up 92% of fatal workplace injuries while in Canada it’s 95%. Even in the workplace, it is just assumed that men ought to die for their employer. Men take up 73.6% of beds in homeless shelters in Canada, the very personification of being discarded. Even absurdities like having to be the one in a relationship to kill the spider or to investigate the weird noise at night shows that when faced with a threatening situation, the man is the one who has got to face it and bear any and all consequences from that encounter. Women typically seek a powerful partner to ensure as best as possible that when he is inevitably forced into a disposable situation, he comes back, but he is still expected to enter that situation.

How does one construct a disposable man? The best way to do so would be to deaden his connection to other people; the less attachment he has to others, the more he is willing to give up. bell hooks goes so far to describe the socializing of men as criminally neglectful, as the world rejects the boy’s emotional advances until he learns to avoid expressing them at all. Platonic human touch, one of the most powerful ways of expressing human connection, is forbidden to men which causes intense psychological damage. Since connecting to others is gradually beaten out of them, male friendships tend to decline as they age, completing their isolation.

Men must put on a mask of invincibility because that is the only way they can be respected as men. They must be seen to be able to survive their disposability. This means avoiding treatment for physical and mental well-being, avoiding help of any kind, even when it is clearly needed. It means acting reckless to prove they can endure any danger. However, feeling disposable and isolated means that a chip in the facade can throw men into a chasm of vulnerability. Vulnerable men join the discarded, and men in this pit make up the majority of drug addicts and suicides. Why seek help when you are inherently worthless? Why be vulnerable when depression is a weakness of character? Instead we must be pretend immortality.

The video that ultimately sparked this article advocated abolishing feminism in order to redress these issues, but fortunately this is where we part ways. Men’s rights have been fought for long before third-wave feminism was even around to be abolished: unions to improve working conditions, prison reform to rehumanize our discarded, or the anti-war effort to stop sending men to their pointless deaths. All of these could be considered examples of a Men’s Rights movement because they all promote the well-being of men against a system that treats them as worthless cogs and cannon fodder.

I think we need to look at abolishing feminism too. Not as a serious solution since identifying problems in masculinity does not negate any of the problems in femininity, but why people would even suggest that in the first place. I think part of it comes from feminism’s cry for equality, even though that is clearly a bad idea. Do women want to give up their friendships and spend more time in jail? Somehow I doubt it. It shows the picking and choosing of privileges, leading some to believe that women are gaining at a cost to men. This is why I argue that feminism isn’t about equality but about abolishing gender roles. Unfortunately, not everyone is me, so a lot of men who feel isolated and disposable are insulted by women who refuse to acknowledge and occasionally even deny that damaging and dangerous issues could even exist for men. They then become alienated from progressive gender movements, and become radicalized into your typical MRA misogynist.

We must love boys even as they grow into men, and allow them to love us in return. We must allow the mask behind which men hide to come off. We must abandon the oppressor and oppressed binary that clouds how we perceive men’s problems. We must allow our men to be who they are, whoever they choose to be.

Post-Script: I have seen several criticisms that since men are the ones predominantly perpetrating violence against other men, then the conversation must be discarded since only homogeneous collectives can be responsible for oppression, and the social whole is blameless: whites oppress black, men oppress women, and so on. This  mentality would interpret my blog as suggesting that if two men get into a fight, only the one who loses was disposable. The entire premise of being disposable is what started the fight in the first place, and victory is irrelevant. Soldiers don’t stop being soldiers if they manage to come back from the war. That’s not how it works. Social forces drive disposability, and we are all a part of that machine.

Consider the high rate of black-on-black crime that right-wing propagandists like to spout off on. They’re really the only ones talking about it, and they use it as evidence for the inherently violent nature of black people, since, you know, racism. However, the Disposable Male theory predicts this, since intersecting race with masculinity would create hyper-disposability in this population, which, when internalized, would lead to increased violent behaviour.

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Categories Gender and Sexuality

Feminism As Socialism

Apr 29, 2017 //
1

I have a general distaste for puns, though I do maintain two exceptions: sexual innuendo for those prime “That’s what she said!” moments, and puns which are communist themed. For example, pet names based on communist ideologues are one of the few acceptable uses of a play on words: Karl Barx, Fidel Cat-stro, Meow Zedong, Pol Pup, and Kim Jong Gill for all the fish aficionados. With this in mind, I find there to be absolutely zero hypocrisy when I had a socialist epiphany in the form of a pun: “I don’t see how you can be a feminist and not be a socialist. You are literally demanding control over the means of production.” This originally started out as one of the rare examples of a hilarious pun, and… it is a good one. I mean, consider the follow up that if you do not have control over the means of production, you become alienated from your labour. The puns basically write themselves. However, the more I thought about how brilliant and hilarious I am, the more I realized that the similarities between feminism and socialism are quite abundant.

Let’s first spell out a basic feminist premise. Women ought to have control over their reproductive rights. She ought to have a say in the conditions within which that reproduction takes place (eg. consent is important), and she ought to be able to have direct control over the reproduction itself (eg. birth control or an abortion). From here it is a simple matter of replacing reproduction with production; after all, producing something with her hands compared to producing something with her uterus is only superficially different based on what part of the body is doing the production. If she crafted a perfect AI, indistinguishable from human consciousness and passing anything Alan Turing could concoct, the differences would become even more minute.

The quality of the product is not important. Whether the woman begets the next brilliant physicist or endures a tragic stillbirth, it is the means of that production that she has the rights to; the outcome is irrelevant. Similarly, if she handcrafts an AI brain-chip or merely pushes a button to have a machine do it for her, she is still producing something, be it the action of pushing the button or the brain-chip itself. Regardless of how menial the labour, she still ought to have a right to direct control over the conditions of her production and the nature of that production itself.

Now hold on, you might say, the person pressing the button shouldn’t have the same rights in brain-chip manufacturing as the person who designed it. There is a huge production process with each person contributing something different with scaling value regarding the finished product. The designer has contributed more energy than the button pusher. And you’re absolutely right, but that still doesn’t disprove the initial point, it just adds more people to the process. Each person has their own right to their individual labour, but production is a collective action, which is why collective ownership over the means of production is literally the definition of socialism. It’s simply applying democratic principles to labour rather than autocratic ones. Dads don’t contribute very much to the production of a child, but typically they want a say in how the baby is raised.

There are going to be critics who say that the person who puts the money upfront for production ought to have the lion’s share of control. Except that person is not generally a person but a bank, and banks usually recuse themselves once the money has been repaid. We’ve already established that the idea for a product and its production doesn’t negate the necessity for worker ownership since everybody is contributing collectively, so the foundation of a company really ought not to bear on its collective ownership. It’s like a judge saying that they have the right to decide how women ought to reproduce since they are the ones dictating the legal recourse for rape. That’s apparently how it works in our current system, but that doesn’t mean that that is the most morally righteous way of doing things.

Perhaps there are libertarians out there who believe that ownership of personal production is great, but that production can be contracted out to companies willing to pay for it. My first response is that this immediately puts the two in conflict; the contractor will try to get as much from the company for as little as possible, while the company will do the same with the contractor. If they were willing to work cooperatively rather than against each other then they would be socialists, so the conflict stands. This also puts our contractor in a predicament, since they are likely to need the job to eat and keep a roof over their head, and so desperation would negate any bargaining equality between the two. It’s the premise behind and the counter-measure to strikes. Each side is waiting for the other to run out of enough money to become desperate enough to agree to a biased deal.

My second response is that we started out this article by comparing production to reproduction, and we already have a slur for the women who contract out their reproduction: whore. Personally I believe that if everything else is commodified, and the woman has control over her production of sexual pleasure, then there are no problems since a service job is a service job. However, many people still feel that prostitution is a cheapening act. Perhaps this is no different from classical liberal philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt’s criticism that every instance of renting one’s labour is a cheapening act:

“…man never regards what he possesses as so much his own, as what he does; and the labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits…In view of this consideration, it seems as if all peasants and craftsman might be elevated into artists; that is, men who love their labour for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character, and exalt and refine their pleasures. And so humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, though beautiful in themselves, so often serve to degrade it…But, still, freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition, without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human nature, can never succeed in producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness…

…we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.”

So there you go. Not only do you have to dabble in anarchism to be a feminist, but it turns out that socialism is necessarily required as well.

Post-script: If I’m equating feminism to socialism, I think feminist ideologues ought to have an equal right to pet names, like Mary Woofstonecraft, Simone de Bow-wow, Emma Goldman Retriever, and maybe bell hoofs if you’re lucky enough to get a pony.

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Categories Gender and Sexuality, Politics
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