Anarchoblogs

The Global Sociology Blog has posted many Venn diagrams of the intersection between government and corporations. It’s all in one image and very long, so I won’t post it here, but go over here if you want to see it.

Shaenon on man boobz expanding on the proposition that women don’t really rule the world after all:

You forgot all the movies and TV shows that celebrate women’s sexual adventures, with the men treated as handsome but anonymous notches in their bedposts… the countless annoying movies and TV shows where a plain, chubby comedienne is paired with a model-sexy dude or an aging actress with a fresh-faced guy one-third her age… male actors being pressured to go full-frontal and then being taken less seriously as actors if they do… portrayals of male orgasm being so rare that showing a man enjoying sex automatically earns a movie at least a hard R… the long, lingering shots of gorgeous men’s bodies in pretty much all visual media… ads using the promise of sex with hot men to sell everything under the sun…

…the rarity of video games where you can play a male character who wears more than a codpiece and doesn’t have a giant bulge… literary critics heaping praise on every novel about the sexual obsessions and steamy affairs of a dumpy middle-aged female academic suspiciously similar to the writer… that crazy Batman relaunch where the entire first issue is just Batman striking sexy poses and then having sex with a dominant, heroic-looking Catwoman…

…the entire PUA community devoted to advising women on how to pick up men for “pump and dumps” while tearing down their sense of self-worth so they won’t demand anything in bed… male strip clubs and female-centric porn stores on every corner… all that female-centric porn online, from semi-classy sites like Suicide Boys on down… the growing online jane culture, with forums full of women reviewing male prostitutes like merchandise (see Cherry Brown’s recent critically-acclaimed graphic novel, Paying for It, about her experiences hiring maybe-legal teenage rent boys, whom she draws only from the neck down)…

…dating and marriage manuals that assume men don’t enjoy sex and shouldn’t expect sexual pleasure in a relationship as long as they get the emotional support they really need… religious fetishization of male virginity, including oddities like fundie Christian churches pressuring teenage boys to pledge their chastity to their mothers… the whole idea that men should be ashamed if their “number” is too high (I believe there was a crappy romcom about that a couple of months ago, about a guy determined to marry one of his ex-girlfriends so he wouldn’t have to have sex with another woman and be considered a slut)… the “dicks or GTFO” attitude on so many online forums (remember that 15-year-old boy just a few weeks ago who posted a photo of himself holding a book on an atheist forum and got dozens of leering, inappropriate comments from adult women?)…

…really, the normalization of the female gaze throughout Western culture, and the assumption that everyone in the world is a straight woman…

I can see where that would get tiring.

Nah, never mind. I want to live in that alternate universe, or at least visit on weekends.

I know I’m using the same title as this Slog entry, but I couldn’t think of anything more descriptive. They really nailed the head on that one. This really illustrates the difference between telling the truth about the patriarchy and being PC about “women’s choices,” many of which are the result of patriarchal indoctrination.
(Mullins is the NPR host, Haddad is the writer)

MULLINS: When you make the distinction between yourself and the other women who, for instance, wear the veil, just to put it very basically, inherent in that argument is the idea that [women who wear the veil] are trapped, that they cannot think for themselves, that they don’t think for themselves, that they don’t choose to wear the veil, when you know that there are women who do.

HADDAD: I’m quite convinced, and I can say it in a very extreme way, that I know they don’t. Because either it’s the result of a brainwashing that makes them think it is their choice, or they have so much dignity that they don’t want to admit that it has been forced on them. But you can only talk about choice and freedom of choice when you have alternatives. You can not talk about freedom of choice when, if you don’t wear the veil, you’re going to be either harassed or beaten up or killed or whatever.

Finally someone recognized my hard work and called me a Feminazi! I was waiting for that to happen. Maybe it’s not as commonly used as it was in the past, or maybe people shy away from applying it to a man, but Cassy from conservative and misogynist blog Victory Girls has finally done it.

Okay, it’s time for my daily goose-step… Heil Daly! Heil Dworkin! Heil Murphy!

From Shortpacked!.

Philanthropic Antinatalism does a quite thorough analysis of the line “well, life isn’t fair!” that parents serve to children, like a tepid bowl of mushy oatmeal. The entry is so good, I wish I had written it.

They are saying, in effect, “there is no justice in this universe where I have created you, I cannot provide it, and so no matter what I may say to the contrary, my loyalty does not lie with you, and cannot lie with you, but rather with the life I have brought you into”. How can their true loyalty be expressed otherwise, if by the statement they mean in any literal sense that life is essentially amoral? This overlooked meaning is the most significant of the meanings, for it gets to the reason parents have children in the first place. It is from a loyalty to life and a biologically imparted love of the species that children are brought into the world, not from individual love…

This loyalty of parents to life, rather than the child, is eloquently expressed in the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, which mirrors the performative act “well, life is unfair”. Today we like to think that we are more enlightened and would never engage in child sacrifice. But “well, life is unfair” expresses the extent to which the natalist attitude and worldview must sacrifice the child’s interests on the altar of unchanging circumstances, personified as “life”, and the way in which it does so through a symbolic replay of human sacrifice.

Pretty much what it says. Here is a link where you can read about, and buy, a phone app called Phone Story, which is a stylized version of how cell phones get made and the “collateral damage” of such production.

Many young workers at Apple’s supplier factory in Shenzhen, China committed suicide. The cause? Working as long as 36 hours nonstop without overtime pay, earning poverty wages, facing humiliation by company managers and being denied independent union representation.

The solution? Foxconn installed anti-suicide nets on its buildings. The problem was seen as one which involved stopping the suicides after the jump, not at the root of the problem — the whole system itself.

Shenzhen is in a “special economic zone” in which the normal protections of labor law do not readily apply. These zones tend to be among the most impoverished areas in a nation whose poverty level is already staggering. The promise of finding work is often met, but the work is low wage, intensive, and precarious. With little or no protection, workers can be fired for no reason, unions are not allowed to form, and only the lowest paying jobs are available for the indigenous population. All the money extracted from the labor of the workers stays with the company.

When you buy a gadget, you aren’t only buying the sleek image the companies advertising team worked so hard to create, you are also buying the whole line of production used to create it.

What? Did you read that right? Yes. Yes you did. Female-targeting megablog Jezebel has a new sex advice columnist, and she wants you to stop thinking about feminist principles when you have sex:

I understand there are complex emotions involved in sex, so everything isn’t always black and white, but I also think that sometimes girls’ brains become so clouded by bullshit “feminist” ideals — “thou shall not be treated like an object,” “thou shall always be offended by men’s pervy remarks” (as if we are not equally adept at dismissing them, and dishing them out) — that we spoil our own fun.

Hat tip to Jezebel for making the bold statement that women should accept being treated like an object in the name of sex. My wife remarked that this veers dangerously in “lie down and just enjoy it” territory. Maybe next they’ll publish an entry stating that women should stay in the kitchen so their men will fuck them more.

Furthermore, if we can’t use “bullshit feminist ideas” when evaluating sex, how can we know what rape is? The identification of rape, after all, is the result of applying feminist ideas to sex; and yes, I know rape is not about sex, but again, how would you know that if you’re busy not thinking about such a “bullshit feminist idea” as rape because it spoils your “fun”?

Here are some other thoughts about this from Feminist Current.

Oh, and this new columnist’s personal blog is called Slutever. Ooooh, that’s so edgy. Will cynical woman-haters keep targeting women forever? Or will women finally wake up and realize what junk they’re being fed?

Nice.

When you live in a rational society, where men are free [to think and] to trade, you receive an incalculable bonus: the material value of your work is determined not only by your effort, but by the effort of the best productive minds who exist in the world around you.

When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing.

The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics’ Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for [a thinker]? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from [those who choose not to sweat, but to think].

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

So you’re saying that the individual’s production is only a margin on everyone else’s production. Gee, that’s exactly what we’re saying… Given that fact, how could you possibly justify making more money than anyone else?

Oscar Moralde takes a look at the stratification in skill and power in the show My Little Pony.

In fact, most of the stories written by Faust and her staff, although ostensibly about the power of friendship, also happen to be about the allocation of scarce resources (“Ticket Master”), correcting inefficiencies in the organization of labor (“Winter Wrap-Up”), or averting famine in the city of Ponyville (“Swarm of the Century”). Several of the threats in the series—the prospect of eternal night, an infestation of locust-like pests, and a blanket of dragon’s smoke over the town—are presented in the context of permanently crippling Ponyville’s economic productivity. Unlike The Smurfs, which proposed a fantasy world centered on a collectivist community, Equestria has a market economy through which a wide variety of goods and services are bought and sold. And in this economy, there is an equivalent to industrial technology: unicorn magic…

The pegasi can perform functions that the unicorns cannot, such as repositioning clouds to create rain or flying to guide migratory birds. But where does that leave your proletarian earth-pony? It certainly wouldn’t be as co-equal participants in the economic life of Ponyville. There are rudimentary stabs at the development of mechanical technology by earth-ponies, as seen in the character of Pinkie Pie. In fact, Pinkie Pie is the best representation of the tension between the show’s strong feminist themes and its questionable economic foundation; although she appears to be the ditzy party animal of the group, she also displays considerable skill in science and engineering. She devises a technical solution to Ponyville’s infestation problems in a scenario where magic has failed, and in the episode “Griffon the Brush-Off” she channels Leonardo da Vinci and builds a flying machine in order to keep up with the pegasus Rainbow Dash. However, Pinkie’s flying machine is smashed by a jealous griffon, showing that technology can be destroyed or expropriated more easily than innate magical ability can.