Death Is Bad

I found this video the day after I saw the official Blurred Lines video. I’ve previously said I’m unsure if Blurred Lines is really sexist. Before I watched the parody I thought “Yay! Now men can be just as objectified and everything is equal.” Except – it really isn’t, is it? Because it isn’t about objectification, it’s about power. And not individual face-to-face power, but rather nation-devouring Leviathan power.

There’s a reason that the N-word is such an emotionally-loaded word, but that any racial pejorative used for white people ends up sounding silly and lame. Honkey, whitey, cracker. No matter how much hatred is in the voice, the words themselves are flaccid things. N*****, on the other hand, is such a charged word I don’t even feel comfortable typing it out when I’m trying to talk about why it’s bad. And the reason is power. The person calling you a cracker may attack you or kill you, but he is only one man. He will face retaliation from society. The term “n*****” carries with it a promise that if you do not defer to the whims of the aggressor you can be pulled from your home and killed (yes, I’ve linked that article before, it’s a good one), and there will be no consequences. The state will not defend you, it will not prosecute your attackers, it may even support them. You have to fear the wrath of Leviathan if you even try to defend yourself, while they can act with impunity. You are helpless. And even if you don’t care about your own life, they can (and will) go after your loved ones instead. The word is a reminder of the terrorism you live under.

The same is true of words like Faggot (vs Breeder) and Cunt (vs Prick). In all cases the group holding the leash of Leviathan is the one with the Words of Power.

An individual person can be prejudiced. Your sister can detest all men. But she can’t be reverse-sexist because sexism is a society-wide phenomenon, not an individual one. Sexism flows in the direction of power – Leviathan cannot serve two masters.

And that’s why the parody video isn’t really the same. The men are objectified, sure. But objectification can be fun and consensual. Those men aren’t ever in danger of being abused by those women, told by their friends that they were asking for it, and having the power of the state protect their attackers from retaliation.

Now in fairness, that wasn’t literally the case in the first video either – the actresses were there by choice in a safe environment and seemed to be having fun. But the scenario is possible, and in some places all too common. You cannot simply swap the sexes in the video and have them be analogous when the alignment of social power is unchanged. There is no way to say “See, here’s a similar video for the ladies, so it’s fair now.” It’s more likely to result in men saying “Well heck, that ain’t bad at all! I’d love to have women checking me out like that!” than to convey the discomfort that the original video provoked.

Recently Lavabit, which lets people send secure private emails via encryption, was shut down by the government. Why?

“we offered secure storage, where incoming emails were stored in such a way that they could only be accessed with the user’s password so that even myself couldn’t retrieve those emails. And that’s what we meant by encrypted email.  That’s a term that’s sort of been thrown around because there’s so many different standards for encryption.  But in our case it was encrypted and secure storage because as a third party I didn’t want to be put in a situation where I had to turn over private information, I just didn’t have it, I didn’t have access to it.  And that was sort of, may have been the situation that I was facing.”

Because it makes blanket spying on everyone very hard. Feels like a pre-emptive strike by the totalitarians, no?

I’m pro-Radical Transparency. I’m up for opening all my communication – but only if it goes both ways. A one-way window is not transparency, and I’ll open my communications if the government opens theirs. Which begins with a full pardon for Manning and Snowden and the prosecution of the people who tried to hide what those two revealed. What sort of government punishes our heroes and protects the villains?

There’s a link to the Lavabit legal defense fund from their homepage, here: http://lavabit.com/ We can’t fight The Powers if we don’t combine our efforts. Individual humans are weak, united we are strong.

In a previous post I recanted from my position of “I don’t care if the government knows who I call”. I had held that because it was a step closer to my ideal of Radical Transparency – under that ideal everyone who be able to see who you called, but in return you’d also be able to see who’s looking, and see everyone that the looker has called. It was pointed out to me that advancing one half of that equation (the watchers can watch everyone) without advancing the other half (everyone can watch right back) leads away from what I want, as the watchers gain more power and have less reason to return transparency. The only winning move is to hold on tightly to secrecy and only trade it in fair exchange. Simply giving it away may look like its closer to Radical Transparency on the surface, while actually moving to Totalitarianism (the polar opposite of Transparency) in reality.

While I support many Libertarian ideals (not all… some I think are downright dangerous), it seems to me that Libertarians are doing the same thing all the time. They want to end government welfare, which currently supports both the ultra-rich in the form of corporate welfare and the poor in the form of plain old regular welfare. They will often vote with parties and interests who strip welfare from the low income population to move towards this ideal. But those parties and interests never move to strip welfare from the rich, and in effect the libertarians end up supporting a system which strengthens an unproductive ruling class that siphons off wealth. Deregulation often follows a similar track, wherein the only regulations that are repealed are those that protect the weak at the expense of the powerful, and never the other way around.

I know enough libertarians to know this is not what they want. The goal is an equal playing field, which the government may referee but never give preferential support to any one entity over another. They are being promised their ideal, with the politicians they vote for promising to level the whole field, starting at this side and moving across over time. One has to start somewhere, after all. But by “leveling” only one half of the field they are giving even MORE preferential support to the side who isn’t being focused on. It’s not a coincidence that the side left unmolested is the rich and powerful, the oligarchs and mega-corps. Allowing them to accrue all this excess power during the leveling process will make it much harder to reign them in when the time comes. And, call me cynical, but I doubt that there was ever any intention to level the other side anyway. I think the libertarians are being manipulated just as much as I was being manipulated.

The only way to advance without being exploited into strengthening your enemies is to demand both fronts are pushed at the same time. For everyone increase in our transparency to the government, we must demand an equal increase in government transparency to us. For every reduction in populace welfare, there must be a proportionate reduction in corporate welfare. Anything else is a losing move.