Artwork by Ekhi Guinea (and thanks to Eric Smith for sharing it on Facebook)

I ‘like’ this piece of art: not the insidious social phenomenon that it is portraying, but rather its astute observation and encapsulation of the vicarious apathetic ‘enjoyment’ of the virtualised ‘entertainment’ of the current geopolitical predicament of mass ecological degradation on planet earth caused by humans (under the global capitalist mode of production). It is an apt social commentary of this insidious social phenomenon.

In liking this art-work picture, I don’t like that the world is messed up in myriad ways and (even) being destroyed, but that it – this art-work – is a poignant and pertinent social commentary of the apathy and indifference (and even the sickening vicarious entertainment value) of the current geopolitical predicament

It has parallels with the song Vicarious by Tool, with the lyrics given below:

 

Eye on the TV
‘Cause tragedy thrills me.
Whatever flavour
It happens to be like:
“Killed by the husband”,
“Drowned by the ocean”,
“Shot by his own son”,
“She used a poison in his tea”,
“And kissed him goodbye”.
That’s my kind of story.
It’s no fun ’til someone dies.

Don’t look at me like
I am a monster.
Frown out your one face
But with the other.
Stare like a junkie
Into the TV.
Stare like a zombie
While the mother
Holds her child,
Watches him die
Hands to the sky,
Crying, “Why, oh, why?”

‘Cause I need to watch things die from a distance.
Vicariously I live while the whole world dies.

You all need it too.
Don’t lie.

Why can’t we just admit it?
Why can’t we just admit it?

We won’t give pause until the blood is flowing.
Neither the brave nor bold
Will write us the story, so,
We won’t give pause until the blood is flowing.

I need to watch things die from a good safe distance.
Vicariously I live while the whole world dies.

You all feel the same.
So, why can’t we just admit it?

Blood like rain come down.
Drum on grave and ground.

Part vampire, part warrior.
Carnivore and voyeur.
Stare at the transmittal.
Sing to the death rattle.

La, la, la, la, la, la, la-lie. [4x]

Credulous at best, your desire to believe in angels in the hearts of men.
Pull your head on out your hippie haze and give a listen.
Shouldn’t have to say it all again.

The universe is hostile, so impersonal.
Devour to survive.
So it is. So it’s always been.

We all feed on tragedy.
It’s like blood to a vampire.

Vicariously I live while the whole world dies.
Much better you than I.

 

https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/tool/vicarious.html

Thanks to meshuggah for adding these lyrics.
Thanks to COCHISE, French Miller, thel33tn3ss, underwater_volcanoes, mazimuz for correcting these lyrics.

 

What We Can Learn from Trump’s Victory

In the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Trump was the victor over H.Clinton (‘Clinton’). Any presidential campaign election contest is complex and multi-faceted. However, in extracting significance, we can say that Trump more successfully appealed to the rage of the U.S. white male working class and its nationalist sentiments.

Trump played to the prejudices of the North American white working class¹, whilst the white working class – particularly those without a college degree – were suspicious of Clinton’s campaign contributions from ‘the rich liberal establishment’. They were further suspicious of Clinton’s elitist rhetoric in her leaked emails, with Clinton falling ‘victim’ to and as exposed by Wikileaks activist hackers.

Trump captured the anti-establishment and conservative vote, appealing to their rage at so-called ‘globalist’ liberals, who are seen as undermining U.S. sovereignty, the very design of the republic as intended by its founding fathers and its constitution.

The State of the Nation, Pre-Election

Pre Trump’s election as President of the U.S., the country was virtually bankrupt, with a national debt at an all time record of $19.57 trillion. Furthermore, the U.S. was gutted of its manufacturing industry with its domestic manufacturing base unable to compete with state capitalist enforced sweat shop labour abroad. Without domestic tariffs on importing goods from other countries, giant multi-nationals are better able to profit from off-shore ‘havens’  of cheap sweatshop labour in industrial manufacturing jobs and industrial sectors at large. Furthermore, importing goods that can be made domestically is utterly insane from a valid global environmental perspective. This is because it wastes resources and contributes unnecessarily to the anthropogenic climate change crisis.²

This national debt blowout was caused by and the result of, primarily, the derivatives bubble and the ensuing bailouts of unaccountable financial institutions and banks. For the vast majority of the U.S. populace, this bailout, to many, was nothing less than a treasonous act of ‘corporate socialism’. The implicated financial institutions initiated an irresponsible barrage of toxic and unsustainable paper assets they called ‘financial derivatives’. These paper assets resembled not reasonably and tangibly much of the real world economy, neither the domestic U.S. economy, nor the international economy at large. Financial assets hold legitimacy, only in that they represent tangible real capital capable of productivity from which everyone can and should benefit and enjoy, or so the finance investor capitalism theory goes. Here it’s necessary to paint the latter as lesser of two evils: regular and less abstracted financial assets are a lesser evil when compared with the fictitious and highly abstracted paper assets that are financial derivatives.

They – unaccountable finance oligarchs, created a panic atmosphere and intimidated congress. Allegedly they were ‘too big to fail’.  To many, this is an insult to free-market ideology, and the principle of taxation only with representation upon which the U.S. was founded.

If they weren’t bailed out, they threatened that the entire U.S. economy would collapse, and that there may even be martial law instituted.

Some commentators have labelled this behaviour, as a form of financial terrorism.

The bailout has been estimated to be $16.8 trillion by certain sources.

Campaign Promises & Rhetoric

Clinton, insofar as her campaign promises, was by far the better candidate on most issues – on climate change, workplace equity (profit-sharing for employees), the corporate tax rate, college fees/debt, pro-choice for women, and was/is generally, less inflammatory and more sensible with her rhetoric than Trump. However, Trump may have been less inflammatory regarding U.S. relations with Russia.

But could the U.S. populace, and the global populace at large really be certain that Clinton would hold true to her promises? After all, Obama did a 180 on most of his campaign promises including tax hikes on middle income earners, the undertaking not to use signing statements to subvert congress, expanded the so-called ‘Patriot’ Act inaugurated by Bush Jnr and filled his administration with finance and Wall Street oligarchs.

Cogswell further deconstructs and dispels the myth of Obama:

“Obama addressed the issues that concerned the American people, promised to restore law to government, close Guantanamo prison camp, to end the war in Iraq, to stop torture as a U.S. policy. But once he got into office he appointed prominent Wall Street and financial industry kingpins to most of his cabinet posts, and one by one turned his back on most of the promises he had made during the campaign. As his campaign promises collapsed, it increasingly looked to those who had supported him and believed in his call for change, that the power that rules America had not changed hands at all. The same financial elite that created the conditions that led to a collapse were put in charge of managing during the collapse. The country went into what became glibly referred to in the mass media as a “jobless recovery,” which meant that Wall Street’s profits recovered quickly and were soon soaring, as the companies that were bailed out by taxpayers lavished giant bonuses on banking system insiders, and an increasing number of mainstream Americans lost their homes, their jobs, their pensions…Obama became the perfect right wing enabler, the perfect foil.”³

This raises the issue of differing types of democracy. I allege that capitalist representative democracy lacks political accountability. Our evolution is based on person-to-person social accountability in small tribes. Elected politicians in capitalist representative democracy are too far removed from the lives and livelihood of voting citizens, and are thus unaccountable, especially considering the powerful lobbying groups which have amassed great wealth. The citizens’ right to impeach an elected president or prime minister if they breach their campaign promises, which must become a form of legal contract with their electorates, simply must be mandated and legally enforced.

President Obama’s stance on healthcare was refreshing from a left-liberal or democratic socialist perspective, and the battle for socialized healthcare for North Americans still rages on. The right criticized Obama for insurance company corporatism and was fearful of “big government” ‘top-down’ healthcare calling it “Obama-Care”. Were Obama’s healthcare reform proposals excessively ‘corporatist’ with excessive kickbacks to the health insurance companies?

Somewhat alarmingly, Clinton is a member of the unelected capitalist elitist think-tank Council On Foreign Relations (‘CFR’), which is a non-democratic organisation of political, finance, and big-business oligarchs. (See https://www.cfr.org/event/hillary-rodham-clinton). Could we really believe that Clinton was and/or is a woman of the people? Ultimately, where do her allegiances lie? Is real political policy being developed covertly here without input and representation of all democratic stakeholders? The CFR is certainly excluding the voice and interests of small business and unions in its membership representatives and thus in its political representation. I am not alone in believing that this organisation is serving the narrow economic and political interests of the globalist ruling elite, using the U.S. and its foreign-policy as a political spearhead, despite the flowery-language adopted in its publications and discourse.

Trump appealed to the general sentiments amongst a large portion of the U.S. population that the invasion of Iraq was wrong. Trump’s argument was that this invasion fueled the spread of ISIS. This is a valid reason for opposing the invasion. A better reason for opposing the invasion, is, however, that the war killed over one-hundred and fifty thousand innocent civilians⁴. Trump also alleged that the ‘early’ withdrawal of troops from Iraq was a further geopolitical mistake.

Trump somewhat audaciously promised he would build a wall at the U.S. southern border with Mexico. Ab initio, this seems a red flag to those who are socially minded. However, it is not necessarily a bad idea, as long as the U.S. takes in a responsible number of peoples genuinely fleeing persecution in their native countries, through conducting robust and proper background checks on would-be immigrants and asylum seekers. It seems an expensive endeavour, and one that may really not be worth the amount of taxpayer money spent on it? Why not at the Canadian border also?

Clinton Versus Sanders

Sanders contested Clinton in the Democratic Party Presidential Primary in 2016.

Sanders was streets ahead of both Trump and Clinton with his genuine social-democratic stance on economic issues and was more progressive on environmental issues than Clinton.

On environmental issues, I would add that good environmental policy should be incrementalist in nature: i.e. firstly, the government should implement financial incentives for renewable energies, before more drastic measures are made. This is to prevent economic and industrial meltdowns and collapse, that would come about through implementing too drastic environmental policy too quickly. Many people were sceptical of Sanders, seeing his environmentalism as extremist.

However, Sanders had real potential to appeal to the rage of the working class, especially since his campaign contributions did not come from rich political donors.

Sanders also has a good track record of standing up to Wall Street, and sticking up for Main Street. He has done this from a left leaning perspective, in contrast with the free-market Republican congresspeople like Ron Paul who have challenged unaccountable financier factions in both major parties, but for different ideological reasons.

Sanders is attacked by voters on the right (and sometimes on the left) on his stance on gun control. However, Sanders is merely for universal background checks, and the banning of assault rifles. The right to bear arms for citizens of any country is an important right, which acts as a deterrent to centralized police forces and paramilitary policers that have been given exorbitant authorization(s) in the wake of draconian ‘anti-terror’ legislation, all across the world. The so-called ‘Patriot Act’ in the U.S., is one such alarming example of this insidious phenomenon. The right to bear arms should not be granted unequivocally but rather to citizens 25 years or older. Current scientific research shows that the brain does not reach full biological maturity until the mid-twenties, with women’s brains maturing faster than men’s. I allege that blanket bans on the right to bear arms, is currently one of the many blind-spots of some on the left. Countries with stricter licensing protocols on the sale of and right to bear arms have much less gun violence than in the U.S..

Weapons must be mandatorily locked away in safes, so that children, teenagers, and young adults cannot access them. Furthermore, there should be restrictions on the types of fire-arm weapons that can be purchased by matured responsible adults.

Sanders is also attacked by many on the right for vying to introduce tax increases on the middle class. In my view, much of the middle class is underprivileged as many middle-class individuals do not own their own house or piece of land outright, and instead may only own these as couples with families. We should be cautious of increasing taxes on the middle class, as it is the richer classes which have much larger systems and mechanisms of wealth leveraging which can lead to more passive forms of income generation which points to a direct exploitation of the labour of others.

On Granting Privacy to Election Candidates & Public Officials

Arguably, Clinton’s leaked emails by Wikileaks, were inflated in importance and taken out of context in many ways. The damage done to her campaign by those leaked emails may have been unfortunate.

However, without socially and legally instituting direct democratic structures into the political system in the U.S. and in all other countries, the use of activist hacking by social justice advocates, may have some political expediency, to reveal and expose, in particular, Manchurian and otherwise corrupt political candidates.

After we succeed in implementing direct democratic controls (which, of course, requires a mass movement: a critical mass of well-enlightened, politically engaged peoples), with the populace being allowed to vote more on ‘ideas’ rather than on demagogic personalities, the lesson is that we should learn to respect people’s right to privacy and judge politicians on the policies they stand for in public rhetoric and political praxis. Just like, or similarly, one should judge a philosopher on their formally published works – formally published ebooks, books, journal articles, magazine articles, blog-posts and formal corrigendum – the works, in these ways, that they intend to publish themselves!

The lesson here is that Clinton would be right in alleging that stateswomen and men (as well as citizens generally) can ‘vent’, adopt different ‘personas’ in interaction with different and diverse people and stakeholders in intersubjective exchanges and more privately, in your private life, including private emails. But, at the same time, concurrently enact humane social discourse-dialectics and performance for citizens, and humane political dictates in executive decision-making, and legislative enactment for politicians and public officials.

There are different modes of intersubjective social interaction: public, quasi-public, semi-public and semi-private, and private. These intermix with different forms of socially-reified expression in (human) communication: written communication and verbal face-to-face communication, as well as mixed-types such as engaged-videos of people reifying auditory and visual communications (which entails additional-utilizing kinesic and paralinguistic forms of (human) communication).

Clinton’s actions, in regards to her emails, are further validated in that politicians, in order for efficacy and proper discharge of their public duties, must be diplomatic in negotiations with campaign donors and different power interest blocs – the graceful art of political compromise in political negotiation – to (help) maximise the public (and social-political) good.

And, there is unnecessary damage done in breaching privacy of any citizen (stateswoman/man or not), especially since leaking these is to, in some way, take them out of their private context.

This is why many working people have disclaimers at the end of their emails.

I argue, there is an implied disclaimer in any email – that it is inherently intended for recipients in the mind of the sender. And thus the burden is on any recipient (genuinely intended (by the sender) or otherwise) to reasonably discharge their obligation to the sender to keep that email private.

Conclusion

As well as implementing direct democracy, we have to eschew and overcome the reactionary stance that just because rich people support something, or that a candidate is wealthy, that it automatically follows that their political praxis is bad or precludes good political praxis! Are they politically supporting the working class and redistributing their own wealth (excess) to economically less fortunate peoples?

1. Naureckas, Jim 27 November 2016, ‘Appeal to the Working Class? Don’t Bother, Says Krugman’, Common Dreams, last accessed 9 December 2024, http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/11/27/appeal-working-class-dont-bother-says-krugman ↩︎
2. In these ways, the capitalist unfettered economics’ doctrines of absolute and comparative advantages, in particularly informing laissez-faire free-market trade between nation states, seems to me to fail to fully factor in environmental costs and concerns as negative externalities in its appraisals of economic efficiencies; further to this is in the failing to factor-in the territorial humanizing qualities and wide-reaching benefits of edifying and instituting domestic and localized production as a guiding environmental, economic, (culturally) diversifying and political principle; comparative advantage is “the ability of an individual or group [or nation/country] to carry out a particular economic activity more efficiently than another activity [compared with another person, group or country]”; absolute advantage is “the ability of an individual or group [or nation/country] to carry out a particular economic activity more efficiently [using less resources] than another individual or group [or nation/country]”. Oxford Languages, last accessed on Google 9 December 2024. These economics’ concepts are independently reputable and politically durable – immortal scientifically rigorous principles and truisms if you like, just not in the narrow ideological deployment serving capitalist free-trade agreements that tend to undermine nations’ capacities for more autonomous domestic and localized productions. ↩︎
3. Cogswell, D and Butzer, C 2012, Unions For Beginners, For Beginners LLC, Hanover, New Hampshire, pp. 155-156. ↩︎
4. Iraq Body Count, last accessed 9 December 2024, https://www.iraqbodycount.org/ ↩︎

Recently I took a uni course called Gender and Crime. It was a very eye-opening and informative course, with lots cutting edge humane gender and sociological theory.

I was exposed to anti-carceral feminism, which proposes the abolition of prisons. It – anti-carceral feminism (and the prison abolition movement in general) – seeks replace the practice of imprisonment with its ensuing restorative and rehabilitative (as opposed to retributive) model of justice: it seeks to replace the ‘prison industrial complex’ with a restorative model of justice, tied to localized community resolution and restorative approaches to dealing with crime and socially aberrant behaviour(s). The ‘prison industrial complex’ is in fact a direct outgrowth of capitalism (and its colonialist predecessors), where not only do private corporate contracted interests profit from incarcerating and imprisoning people, but the large proportion of crime we see today is a result of socio-economic exploitation inherent to the capitalist mode of production itself: incarceration of peoples is ‘needed’ to perpetuate socio-economic inequality.

The difference between a saint and a serial killer is environment (as Fresco has found/postulated). Here we see the retributive model of crime and socially aberrant behaviour(s), as an extension of the primitive urge to punish rather than to rehabilitate, unless the threat of legally sanctioned punishment acts as a successful to crime. In retribution we seek not to understand the complexity of social behaviours (the environmental causative factors of crime) but instead deploy a reductionist and reactionary view of ‘an eye for an eye’. Thus ‘retributive ‘justice’’ is, largely I argue, not taking responsibility for the nuanced socially deterministic causes of crime itself.

The resource based economy (‘RBE’), with high technical efficiency and a collaborative technical approach to problem-solving, would see humanity into a humane and truly civilized future. Relative abundance of goods and services, and automation of rote and dangerous labour (as a guiding economic principle), would allow for the Marxist mantra “from each according to her/his ability, to each according to her/his needs” to be built into the social design itself. The weakness of Marx’s approach is in not sufficiently outlaying nor (sufficiently) scaffolding in enough detail just how a post-capitalist society would work and develop, and, importantly, how to transition (in detail) from the (now current neoliberal) capitalist economic model. We need both a detailed and comprehensive approach to how a post-capitalist social order would operate and how to transition to this socially sophisticated and humane order (in human affairs and how we relate to other sentient species, and the environment at large).

I propose a political transition to a certain kind of RBE, which would structurally dissolve crime: from regulated capitalism, to social democracy (‘third way approach’), dissolving big business by capping businesses’ employees to a maximum of 50 employees (‘fourth way approach’), introducing income capping (on individuals) to put an upper ceiling on greed, the implementation of market socialism, the instituting of participatory economics (in the vein of Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel’s theories of political design and direct political participation), and finally – a RBE. A RBE surpasses the need for money, entailing the freeing up of socially constructive and socially beneficial incentives to contribute without profit or monetary exchange. All monetary systems elicit social corruption or social sub-optimality.

The late Jacque Fresco, the philosophic founder of a RBE held: “the smarter a person’s children are, the richer my life” (2020, p. 53). Fresco was self-taught and was incredibly insightful for a person without academic qualification. His circular (efficient) city design has won a sustainability award from the U.N. See my blog post on the social reflexivity in meeting the social demand for goods and services with the monitoring of needed specialised skills and labour wherein people cooperatively elect to perform these skills and labour as needed, to meet human need and the needs of other sentient species: gaps to be filled according to reflexive information generation about what skills need to be developed and deployed in the economy.

To a large extent, Fresco’s approach truly surpasses the need for imprisonment and incarceration. He wrote:

“If we want to reduce the crime rate, we must alter the environmental factors responsible for it…Today, our efforts to deal with socially offensive behavior are both inadequate and inappropriate. Eventually it will be realized and understood that most forms of so-called criminal behavior, which will fill jails well into the twenty-first century, have been generated by the scramble for money and property in an age of often-contrived scarcity…Four out of five of the prison population in New York come from seven of the lowest income areas in that state” (Fresco 2018, p. 105)

It is this mandate which propels us into the social responsibilitation for people’s behaviours at the socializing macro level of social structure, institutions, and system dynamics. A core tenet of a RBE is the deliberate reproduction of relative abundance so as to deliver social inclusion and not social stratification and not artificial scarcity.

You can learn more about the Venus Project, which advocates a RBE with high technical efficiency, at https://www.thevenusproject.com/

The Venus Project (or ‘socio-cyberneering’) is essentially a highly technical form of anarcho lib-com, with high environmental concern – not just human well-being. Its founders – Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows, have gone very far to distance themselves from regimes identifying as ‘communist’. I agree with them and with Michael Albert, that these regimes have reproduced class (workers versus planners), have been or are mired by political corruption, and these ‘communist’ regimes are really state capitalism not (libertarian) communism.

Fresco failed to account for one thing: gender competition. Just like there may be ‘class war’ based on shared circumstances of groups of people, there is ‘sex war’ based on shared biological and social conditions. The triad of sex class is female, trans (non-binary through hormones and/or surgery), and male. These sex classes have differing gendered strategies of power consolidation, and, overall, are finding they have more in common with fellow members of their sex class than in forging deep alliance(s) with members of the differing sex classes. Gender competition is here whether we like it or not and will only become more acute over time, as men and women organize to their conflicting interests. Intra-gender alliance in gender commonality and consciousness raising on this commonality phenomena will increase, particularly as reproduction and/or cloning surpasses the need for biological pregnancy, where women will not need a sexual encounter or a visit to a sperm-bank to become pregnant in order to reproduce. The myth that men and women are more similar than different, and that sex is merely a free-field of renegotiation against a rigid so-called ‘biological determinism / essentialism’ was and is exploded by the gendered experiment on chimpanzees:

“[Y]oung female monkeys in captivity have been known to favor dolls as playthings, while their male counterparts prefer “boy” toys like trucks” (Handwerk 2010)

A gendered individual may therefore find that they have far more in common with fellow members of their own sex class, and thus forge deep and sometimes subconscious intra-sex class solidarity, alliance and extensionality.

Thus, from this angle (and other angles), we arrive at the truism that all women are indeed feminists in one way or another. Furthermore, for all the contradictions of feminism, women are entitled to a collective identity. This is legitimating feminism as a form of gendered belonging and assertion of their interests as individuals and as a collective. It follows, then, that men (and trans!) have this same right!

Consequently, gender equity is the middle-ground in the gender competition impasse, and we should work very hard at this worthy endeavour to prevent the otherwise fall-out from unabated gender competition.

So, let us canvas some potential real dangers emanating from ‘sex war’ without setting up humanizing deterrents to crime emanating from this ‘battle’ (of the sexes):

Some women, in a pledged will to power to themselves, have gender competition incentives to really kill off the alpha males who are best at reasoning, to assert dominance of their gender. As a contingency, the women who make it their mission to be with an alpha male, may, upon the frustration in their mission, default and attempt to enslave masculinity in cooperation with other women. This spurs a legitimate fear of, at least, some women – even if only acknowledged in the subconscious minds of men. If women or a woman cannot emotionally neutralize an alpha male, they may resort to violence, which is a reason for setting up a deterrent to violence – i.e. penalties for violent transgression(s). Thus, we should very reluctantly set up a system of legal rules for which their breach would sanction penalties to act as a deterrent to violent behaviour(s).

And, then there are those trans people (some trans people) who want to universalise transgenderism and abolish the cisgender-hetero binary majority. In this some try to brainwash young children into choosing underage transitioning to trans in the education system(s), which should be outlawed. In addition to these kinds of tactics they may resort to violence against cisgender people who exclude them in the realm of legitimate choice and discretion in sexuality – merely exercising their innate right to choose their sexual orientation (when that sexually excludes trans people). Whilst I am pro the right of adult individuals to transition to transgenderism through hormones and/or surgery, choosing to adopt a gendered embodiment outside the cisgender binary majority is something which should need mature-age consent – i.e., the prerogative of adulthood. This is because these courses of action elicit such a dramatic change to the body, which, in turn, affects, drastically, identity. Remember, the human body and brain is born very altricial, meaning it takes persons a long time to biologically and socially mature. Whilst I am tentative to support adolescent hormonal intervention and/or gender re-assignment surgery/surgeries – for approval thereof – multidisciplinary boards could be constructed to facilitate and authorize certain kinds of these adolescent transgender interventions. Appointed to these multidisciplinary boards in socially sanctioning these gender and/or sex interventions could be neuroscientists¹, geneticists (particularly cytogeneticists who study chromosomes), epi-geneticists, medical scientists, medical doctors, behavioural and developmental psychologists, and social scientists who are well versed in gender theory. As a gendered principle, we should teach love of one’s body.

So, the undisputed goal is to have no-one in prison – no-one at all. And, in the face of potentially extreme gender competition, we must setup some legally sanctioned deterrents to aberrant behaviour(s). In being successful, all prisons would be empty, and this could be sustained with careful and sophisticated social engineering and socialisations. We will need a punitive justice system to act as a deterrent for particularly inter-gender violence. Let us look at the core penalties for socially aberrant transgressions.

A necessary finding of criminality and thus penal deterrent justice for murder, manslaughter, grievous bodily harm, rape, cuckolding, property damage, and theft. Murder, manslaughter, and causing grievous bodily harm, should attract at least a 40-year sentence. Rape and sexual cuckolding should attract a sentence of 5-20 years depending on severity of these criminal acts, with a threshold of objective tests for a finding thereof. For a fair and reconciled objective threshold test for rape see https://www.henrywilloughbyssocialjusticeblog.com/2021/01/02/on-rape-culture-allegation/

On ‘Rape Culture’ Allegation

Sexual cuckolding is an extreme form of emotio-sexual humiliation even though it is usually done with consent of the victim(s). It is often framed, by liberal hedonist ideology, as a part of ‘kink’. Against over-moralising the liberal conception of consent, we should focus on the harm done to the victim, which can be extreme, and thus needs social redress and accountability. An objective test for criminal sexual cuckolding would be the wearing, by a victim, of a penis-clamp or device designed to prevent a man or woman from being able to participate in sexual activity as a part of a humiliation; forced or coerced bi-sexuality intended to be humiliating within sexual power-dynamics between participants in sexual activities; penis size shaming a victim; psychological abuse along with sexual subordination and/or humiliation where the victim is not allowed to be an equal participant in sexual acts. Sexual cuckolding becomes most severe when it is technologically recorded and published on porn-sites for the reverse-‘panoptic’ sexual surveillance of anonymous viewers for a socially perverse and predatory sexual pleasure.

There should be non-criminal penalties for BDSM, physical assault without causing severe physical injury which should engender mandated sincere apology and community service. BDSM is the fetishization of removal of sexual agency of a person or persons. Furthermore, providing drugs to a minor should attract non-criminal penalties.

Some important defences to crimes should extreme provocation and self-defence. As Nietzsche formulated, we may take another’s life if there is due cause: i.e. extreme provocation:

“Prevention of suicide. – There exists a right by which we take a man’s life but none by which we take from him his death: this is mere cruelty.” (Nietzsche 2012, p. 48)

This should constitute an exemption to criminality.

In the not-so-distant future, there will be developments in nano-technology allowing for nano-tech cameras and microphones which could record a person’s sensory information relaying this to a private off-site clouds, which could be used in legal proceedings as admitted potentially incontrovertible proof of innocence, unless these video evidences are in fact deep-fakes presented to courts. This kind of evidence may be redacted, and there should be no ability for prosecution nor defence to injunct this information as evidence for nor against a crime.

Bibliography

Fresco, J 2020, Do You Speak Future? Book of Insights, The Venus Project, Florida, p.53.

Fresco, J 2018, The Best That Money Can’t Buy. Beyond Politics, Poverty and War, The Venus Project, Florida, p. 105.

Handwerk, B 22 December 2010, ‘Chimp “Girls” Play With “Dolls” Too – First Wild Evidence, National Geographic, <https://nationalgeographics.com/travel/article/101220-chimapnzees-play-nature-nurture-science-animals-evolution>

Nietzsche, F 2012, Human, All Too Human, Cambridge University Texts, New York, p. 48.

1. Neuroscientists are integrally needed to determine, particularly, the size of the Bed Nucleus of the Stria Terminalis (‘BNST’), and the size and activity of other brain regions, as they related to subjective gender identity. ↩︎

Gender competition is pronounced in our species due to our unique socially symbolic performative features. There is a gendered endowment of a conflicting reproductive strategy between women and men or female and male; transgender borrows from both female and male and perhaps outside an ancient sexually reproductive gender binary and dimorphism. The ancient male reproductive strategy is sexual polygamy to relieve paternal angst whereas the ancient female reproductive strategy is emotional polygamy to enlist male cognitive and athletic power to help raise her offspring.

Paternal angst is the angst experienced by men, or males of other species, that eventuates from the uncertainty that a female sexual partner’s offspring is from their sperm and not another man’s. Human males have a high paternal angst because ovulation in females of reproductive age, now being trumped socially by legal age for sexual intercourse, is not visible nor discernible to a male sexual partner or partners. This is in contrast to chimpanzee females, for example, which have their buttocks become swollen and grow redder when ovulating – an overt display and signal to the males. Thus, sexual polygamy was a gaming strategy of males to solicit the most reproductively successful sexual intercourse as a way to mitigate their paternal angst. Contrastingly, a female of reproductive age carries her offspring when pregnant, and thus knows with much greater certainty than a male partner that it is hers – from her biogenetic lineage. It is worth noting, that men would like to know for certain when a woman is ovulating both if trying to solicit an impregnation/fertilisation or equally trying to avoid a pregnancy from purely intended non-reproductive recreational sex.

It follows that the only reconciliation to this gender-impasse between these two ancient conflicting reproductive strategies is a culture of monogamy and sexually regulated / moderated polyamory. Monogamy is at its strongest when reified and consecrated in loyal marriage. Herein, the woman attains emotional connection loyalty from a man, a man attains sexual loyalty from a woman. A further secondary humane progression and impetus is where a woman also enjoys sexual loyalty from a man and a man also enjoys emotional loyalty from a woman, as actuating from the precondition of fulfillment of the primary reproductive strategy of each. This latter phenomenon can be understood as mutual enjoyment of the other’s dimorphic opposite reproductive strategies. I have written on a reconciled template for a workable polyamory at https://henrywilloughbyssocialjusticeblog.com/2021/02/03/the-ideal-of-monogamy-the-ideal-of-polyamory-the-choice-is-yours-rejecting-polygamy/. In a nutshell, phallic penetrative sex could best be enjoyed, I contend, with the protection and prerogative of monogamous emotional and sexual loyalty. This is informed by the archetype of reproductive sex which is phallic penetrative, as being close to genetic reproduction of the self and thus highly charged emotionally and sexually.

The Ideal of Monogamy? The Ideal of Polyamory? The Choice is Yours! Rejecting Polygamy

Currently there is strong intra-gender competition as well. We have not transcended the mammalian tendency to establish preferential mating rights to the opposite reproductive sex as far as women and men go. We can see capitalism as a somewhat type of reactionary socially symbolic extension of this mammalian impetus in intra-species competition, which is really a form of hyper-competition severely fracturing our species along class disparity lines. As we technologically and socially free ourselves from this animalistic gender-practice, which has already become more socially symbolic under capitalism as compared with other mammals who are less socially symbolic. Symbolism is a feature of human sociality due to our species’ penchant for language and technology.

As intra-gender consciousness increases through feminism, transism, and masculinism, cooperation within the genders will slowly replace intra-gender competition – i.e. replacing men competing against men and women competing against women, with women and men competing with each other as groups with differing sex-class commonalities across these sex-categories. Greater gender reflexivity entails increasing intra-gender alliance. Accordingly, we must carefully select for cooperative behaviour(s) between the genders in relations which will pay the greatest social dividends: mutual emancipation, not gender enslavement.

As a foregrounding, it is incumbent to map out some of the relevant features to this blog post of an ‘anarcho’-socialist economy – predominantly decentralized political power but with a small socialist state to uphold truly moral law(s) and private property (including freehold and indefeasible land ownership). This will need domestic police forces within and given executive powers by nation states, as nation states must become the genuine sites of proletariat power. Under small state ‘anarcho’-socialism there is no money: money invariably leads to centralisation of political power through capitalisation and hence results in social corruption instead of selecting for genuine liberty and equality. Furthermore, acting as a break on any form of potential centralisation of political power is the right to bear (small) arms for mature adults 25 years of age and older, through strict licencing acquisition protocols, in ‘anarcho’-socialism. All work is voluntary, utilizing intrinsic motivators and cooperative generalist and specialist knowledge and labour in individually assigning socially relevant work in demand enriching the resource (non-monetary) based economy. This assigning responsibility of work, befalling on an individual in reflexively making informed choice of their own kinds of contributory labour, is to negotiate a specialisation demanded by consumer and citizen needs and wants in terms of knowledge, goods and services. For theory supporting the untapped power of intrinsic motivation as backbone of a resource based economy, see Dan Pink’s pertinent work in the following YouTube video:

And the RSA Animate embellishment YouTube video:

Under anarcho-socialist relations of production, to ensure ongoing egalitarian cooperation between the genders, we must carefully craft decentralized security agencies comprised of volunteers with equal representation of women and men within these institutions. This can be facilitated by enacting gender quotas, ensuring an equal number of women and men as workers within these institutions. Transgender workers could comprise a workers’ membership reflecting their proportion of the total populace – region by region. These workers – in mixed-gender teams – would conduct regular consumption and labour audits to ensure workers are not accruing nor developing weapons which could be used to intimidate large populations of people, such as nuclear weaponry, nanotech weaponry or bioweapons such as woman/man-made viruses. Records of details of consumption choices could be kept electronically through a barcode system and a store entry system for all personally acquired products, and receipts for services rendered to individuals. Individual proof of labour can be actuated similar to pay-slips and tax-returns like we are familiar with in liberal capitalist economy. This would entail hours of work and details of the social benefit(s) of the specifically undertaken specialised labour. This proof of type of labour can actuate and have efficacy in the form of personally generated and peer-reviewed reports thereon: individual, interpersonal and social authentication of these documents.

This form of gender security in anarcho-socialism means we all share in the best possible cooperative gendered relations. This entails strong positive externalities and a strong social and solidarity dividend paid to all its social members / agents.

From a masculinist perspective let us examine whether a male individual or all males collectively used military grade weapons to enslave femininity. I allege this would be in contradiction with the innermost masculine gender ideal, which is in service of the neo-utilitarian imperative – maxiimizing the net positive aspects of sentience in the world, as a kind of power consolidation, through individual rights. Thus, one makes self-sacrifices for this ideal. For the feminine ideal, she can adopt and be nourished by or reject this utilitarian ideal, on her power-quest, at any given time or moment – her capacity for what Žižek terms her radical negativity. She can also adopt this kind of utilitarian power-ethos in a partial way and a partial rejection thereof also. For women, power is contextual – not governed wholly by a universal morality – not solely substantiated by adherence to a universal morality unless a woman has faith-based piety and following God’s law in fear of punishment and reward for stipulated ‘good’ behaviour. In explanation Žižek argues against sex as a free-field where people can continually renegotiate identities. Žižek disagrees (‘a bit’) with Butler (Judith) that “questions of feminine identity…[and masculine identity]…or sexual difference can be solved simply by a different positioning or by a restructuring of your identity” (Žižek in Olson and Worsham 2001, p. 252). Identity can be restructured to an extent, yet reflects an embodied gendered truth: women’s and men’s bodies and brains are biologically different in many ways. This restructuring of identity is bounded by biological sex, but we should also eschew crude biological determinism / essentialism where it is not subtly reconciled. An example of crude biological determinism is that ‘due to women’s differing biological form as compared with men would mean women’s labour should be confined to the home’ – Aristotelian functionalism on women. However, there is much humane difference and diversity between the genders: an old friend believes that women and men are so radically different so as to constitute different species from each other. Žižek explains his theory of gendered radical negativity as a a dimension of femininity. This could be because we experience truth in the terms of the other – the other gender here- as fleeting states of consciousness. These fleeting states of consciousness are where one’s own ideal becomes a mask to itself, due to the power of the other which may become truthfully overwhelming at a given point in time. A corollary is that the feminine may, in fleeting states of consciousness, experience masculine truth in the terms of masculinity, thus disrupting and causing their truth to be dimensional as a result. This would seem to support Žižek’s thesis on the dimensionality of the radical negativity embodied in femininity. Women can radically negate utilitarian reason of males, without experiencing alienation from their expansive gendered ideal, to the degree to which this male reason is not comprehensively reconciled and advanced, through women’s emotional and/or sexual power. Thinking and formulating detachedly and objectively, it is incumbent upon us to conceive of and appraise women’s gendered ideal, as not being constrained by neo-utilitarianism, as being a power-quest beyond good and evil, in a quasi-Nietzschian synthesis. This extra (expansive) capacity for radical negativity is an ultimate compliment to women, and respect for their difference in gendered ideal is absolutely integral and paramount.

An interesting quote from Nietzsche is in point. Some commentators will say his formulations on gender were a product of the times he was philosophising in. Even if these observations on gender by Nietzsche were historically placed and not immutable, there still exists some carry over into today’s world where gender sub-optimality is still running rife on our social worlds (but with real progress in places):

“420. Who suffers more? – After a quarrel between a man and a woman one suffers most at the idea of having hurt the other, while the other suffers most at the idea of not having hurt the other enough, from which the heart of the other is to be made heavy even after the quarrel is over.” (Nietzsche 1996, pp. 155-156).

Here Nietzsche is getting at a ruthless capacity of women to be emotionally aggressive (in his opinion and experience), and uses this in her arsenal expedient to her will to power. Emotions and their regulation in females tend to be more flexible and adaptive than in males due to empathic streamlining of the female brain (see Saniotis and Hennebergy 2016, p. 130). Specifically, a larger and more active anterior cingulate gyrus in the female brain may account for the discrepancy in empathy between females and males in the human species with women / females having more empathy than men or males (Saniotis and Henneberg 2016, p. 130). Here we should take care to divorce and disentangle the phenomenon of empathy with the phenomenon of compassion.

Men on the other hand, in the realm of empathy, have less than in women since the male brain is more developed for processing fight and flight responses from evolving around hunting in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation. This stems from the ‘larger amygdala embedded in the limbic system’ (Saniotis and Henneberg 2016, p. 131).

How did I, Žižek, and Nietzsche seemingly randomly or arbitrarily manifest this gender difference in ideals? Well, it is rather unverifiable. But take for instance women’s courting gaming strategy – she will generally seek to be with wealthy men who split masculinity through exploiting male workers. That’s only one observation, probably unconvincing on its own. And, better explained by and attributed to insidious avarice in capitalist social relations? From observation, there’s the feminine ability to swiftly switch between logical type (Bateson 1972, p. 180) and subverted meanings in human communication, using her streamlined empathic brain powers (Saniotis and Henneberg 2016, p. 130) and virtues exerting power over men – often exploiting men through these evolved and socially honed abilities. They deploy and use their emotional agility to increase their power, congruent with their reproductive strategy and its now more symbolic attributes, in their own interests, naturally. Whereas, it is alleged, men are too weak to radically negate their anti-flexist uni-morality (Žižek in Olson and Worshom 2001, p. 252) even if they may alienate themselves from it. In short, male alienation from their morality is self-flagellation for them.

So, it would seem we have a gendered split in differing capacities for physical aggression and emotional aggression. Indeed, emotional manipulation is more difficult to detect, at least initially. Where is this emotional agility socially directed? Whilst women irrevocably have being-for-men (see Sartre 2003, p. 658), as a part of their being-for-others, they have more altruism, when non-alienated from their ideal, with other members of their own gender.

Do women want to enslave men? If so, what would this look like?

Do men want to enslave women? If so, what would this look like?

Gendered food for thought! Let me know if you agree or disagree with any points I and others have made, and why!

I propose a new genre – gender dystopian fiction!

The presence of a different ideal in women is based on observation and reflexive of interaction with them in daily life. Arriving at this truth phenomena, Nietzsche, Žižek and I concur on this theory of a different embodied feminine ideal. What are your thoughts and experiences in relation to this? Are they resonating with your thoughts and experiences on the matter, or do you think this ideal is more mythic than truthful?

One thing is for sure: the genders have a lot of positive virtues to offer each other in the right environments.

There is a dire need for the creation and sustaining of masculinist collectives, along with the feminist collectives. All the genders have the prerogative for a collective identity based on their sex/gender taxonomic belongings, and to advance it within their own interests and in negotiation with each other. This increase in the collective power of masculinity, femininity, and trans-gender will enhance social relations through a strengthening of all the genders.

I have a number of books published with humane gender mind-technologies therein if I have whetted your appetite for further syntheses on gender.

Cheers!

Bibliography

Bateson, G 1972, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, p. 180.

Henneberg, M and Saniotis, A 2016, The Dynamic Human, Bentham Books, Sharjah, pp. 130-131.

Nietzsche, F 1996, Human. All too Human, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 155-156.

Olson, G and Worshom, L 2001, ‘Slavoj Žižek: Philosopher, Cultural Critic, and Cyber-Communist’, JAC, Spring, Vol. 12, No. 2, p. 252.

Sartre, J-P 2003, Being and Nothingness, Routledge, London and New York, p. 650.

The first half of my life has been mired by social insecurity, a lack of independence and (a lack of) holistic social and philosophical guidance. I pledge to you (and myself) that the second half of my life will be of high(er) ethical rigour and praxis, guided by a refined and well reconciled and thoroughly holistic prowess in philosophy and knowledge across the board.

It is a requisite part of social justice that we hold ourselves to a high standard of social accountability to all those people who were are a part of and enter our lives on a daily and everyday basis. We were best at this social imperative and endeavour in the ‘hunter gatherer’ period where small scale social accountability in tribes aligned and coalesced with political accountability.

I intend to mend all social relationships afflicted by a comparative lack of streamlining in ethics, in all its far-reaching aspects.

Two applicable songs spring to mind, which I will quote from in a bid to offer my social accountability to all where my knowledge of ethics was not commensurate with the high(er) ethical standard I wish I was previously endowed with but have subsequently attained. Here are their lyrics:

Trouble by Coldplay

Oh no, I see
A spider web is tangled up with me
And I lost my head
And thought of all the stupid things I’d said

Oh no, what’s this?
A spider web and I’m caught in the middle
So I turned to run

And I, I never meant to cause you trouble
And I, I never meant to do you wrong
And I, well if I ever caused you trouble
Oh no, I never meant to do you harm

Oh no, I see
A spider web and it’s me in the middle
So I twist and turn
Here am I in my little bubble

Singing out, I never meant to cause you trouble
And I, I never meant to do you wrong
And I, well, if I ever caused you trouble
Oh, no, I never meat to do you harm

They spun a web for me
They spun a web for me
They spun a web for me

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Christopher Anthony John Martin / Guy Rupert Berryman / Jonathan Mark Buckland / William Champion

Trouble lyrics © Capitol CMG Publishing, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group

The Reason by Hoobastank

I’m not a perfect person
There are many things I wish I didn’t do
But I continue learning
I never meant to do those things to you
And so, I have to say before I go
That I just want you to know

I’ve found a reason for me
To change who I used to be
A reason to start over new
And the reason is you

I’m sorry that I hurt you
It’s something I must live with everyday
And all the pain I put you through
I wish that I could take it all away
And be the one who catches all your tears
That’s why I need you to hear

I’ve found a reason for me
To change who I used to be
A reason to start over new

And the reason is you
And the reason is you
And the reason is you
And the reason is you

I never meant to do those things to you
And so I have to say before I go
That I just want you to know

I’ve found a reason for me
To change who I used to be
A reason to start over new
And the reason is you

I’ve found a reason to show
A side of me you didn’t know
A reason for all that I do
And the reason is you

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Chris Hesse / Daniel Estrin / Markku Lappalai / Doug Robb

The Reason lyrics © Wb Music Corp.

We must heal together, inclusively, with reconciliation in good faith, not in a reductionist way, but including necessarily, inescapably, peremptorily and imperatively – the spill-over and overlap (mutually inclusive) of everyday social interactions into political praxis and comprehensive social justice – not to punish but to rehabilitate and enact restorative forms of (social) justice.

In concluding, I’d like to quote from Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human. I’d like to invoke Nieszsche on justice/injustice here, as may be applicable, or partially applicable, as experiencing universally. Importantly, an injustice canvased herein is (structurally) inclusive of the politically exclusionary economic and social aggression, currently¹, of most of the persons in the upper class(es) in capitalism by not opposing it and as moored to their class hyper-privileged positions – namely, these (classed) individuals not explicitly supporting the need to transition to a genuinely progressive post-capitalist society:

“It is foolish to act unjustly. ­– An injustice we have perpetrated is much harder to bear than an injustice perpetrated against us (not precisely on moral grounds, nota bene – ); the actor is always the actual sufferer, if, that is to say, he [or she] is accessible to pangs of conscience or has the insight to see that through his [or her] action he has armed society against him [or her] and isolated himself [or herself]. That is why we ought, purely for the sake of our inner happiness, that is to say so as not to lose our ease and quite apart from the commandments of religion and morality, to guard ourselves committing injustice even more than against experiencing injustice: for the latter carries with it the consolation of the good conscience and hope of revenge and the sympathy and applause of the just, indeed of the whole of society, who live in fear of the evil-doer. – There are not a few who understand the unclean art of self-duping by means of which every unjust act they perform is reminted into an injustice done to them by others and the exceptional right of self-defence reserved to what they themselves have done: the purpose being greatly to ease the weight of their own burden.”²

1. This blog post was first conceived of and published in May 2018. ↩︎
2. Nietzsche, F 1986 [1878], Human, All Too Human, Volume II, ‘Assorted Opinions and Maxisms’, aphorism 52, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 226. ↩︎

Caveat:

The dates attached to blog posts don’t reflect the times they were each uploaded / published in this WordPress web-page blog.

Rather, they reflect a relevant sequential order, in terms of meaning (and synthesis).

I currently cannot economically afford the extra feature WordPress plugin that would allow ordering of blog post entries irrespective of the time each blog post entry was uploaded.

Bear with me. I’m working on it!

Please disregard the time dates attached to each blog post, for now at least!

Signing off,

H-man