Death Is Bad

Here’s the thing about bastards like the Westboro Baptist Church, or Richard Spencer – they LOVE freedom of speech right now. But I’m willing to bet that if they ever came into power (true power – control of govt, much of the populace behind them, etc) they would quickly forget all about their love of free speech and quickly get to the business of silencing their opponents.

I used to think that’s what made my side different. When we came into the majority, we would continue to uphold and protect the principles of civility that we were so enraptured with when we were the oppressed. More and more, it seems that this isn’t the case.

There’s probably people that really do believe in certain principles. Principles like freedom of speech, and that violence should not be used as a tool. They will continue to extend freedom of speech and protection from violence to their opponents, even when they come into power and no longer have to. Even opponents they really hate, even when it would be easy not to. As far as I can tell those people are in the minority. It’s easy to say your are pro-free-speech when free speech shields you. It is hard to be for it when you are in power, and you must expend effort and lose allies (and friends!) in an effort to shield people who are disgusting. All because of something as stupid as a principle.

But the weak! The weak will always hide under those principles, because they don’t have much strength of their own. The allies they can recruit from the Establishment, who believe in the principles, will lend them a fair bit of strength. The strong, on the other hand, don’t need the principles. They are already in control of the establishment. And so the principles are always the refuge of the weak.

Look to who is invoking principles, such as freedom of speech, to defend themselves. These are usually the weaker in a conflict.

I am tired to sheltering reprehensible people. I almost wish for a time when my beliefs were the oppressed minority, because then the people I agree with – the GOOD people – would be the ones I’m supporting when I stand for freedom of expression. I have a number of people who I can’t call friends anymore, because they see me giving aid and shelter to reprehensible people.

But dammit, I’d rather have people who believe in principles as allies than those who simply agree with me on things like who’s the “better” person. Principles are impartial and firm. They protect everyone equally. People can turn on you in an instant if you don’t sufficiently agree with their current political crusade.

II.

Y’all can stop reading now unless you want personal info, this is the diary part of the blog post.

Early today Republican House Whip Steve Scalise was among five people shot at a congressional baseball game, where a bunch of Republican law makers were playing. He was shot by someone described as a passionate Progressive. I was surprised not to see anything about it in my Facebook feed, as generally its full of politics, and even moreso when a shooting is involved. The only thing I saw all day was one person posting that violence is never acceptable without referencing exactly what happened.

Several months ago, when Richard Spencer was assaulted in the street, I got into a bit of a dust-up with a few friends as to what the problem with this was. With the silence in the wake of this shooting, I asked “Can any of my friends who posted approval for violence when it’s punching people explain why they are against violence when it’s shooting people in the hip? I was told more than once that the purpose of political violence was to make reprehensible people scared to say reprehensible things in public. Since hip-shots are probably more effective at that, is violence only acceptable as a tactic when it’s not very effective?”

All the answers I got essentially boiled down to “Its OK to silence people with the threat of a small amount of violence. It’s not OK to silence them with the threat of a large amount of violence.” Someone drew the comparison between a mugging and a serial killer, saying they weren’t remotely on the same scale.

I found this incredibly depressing. No, they’re not on the same scale. The serial killing is far worse. But I’m still of the opinion that mugging is ALSO bad. How is this an argument for the people who are for small-amounts-of-violence? Comparing your position to that of a mugger doesn’t seem like it should be a winning move.

Another person claimed that frightening people into not doing bad stuff is one of the most beloved, rousing forms of extralegal law. Again, I was dejected to discover that there are people on the “good” side – liberal, progressive, pro-equality, etc – who are in favor of and speak highly about “extralegal law”! What in god’s name is my side coming to?

I was told (again) that violence against Nazis doesn’t count as bad, because Nazis are people who’s sole motivation and explicit purpose is violence. I responded that the same was said of Communists once, and this was used to destroy the lives of many people who weren’t actually Communists because their opponents found it useful to label them as such. I was told that this was a false equivalency because Not All Communists are violent, and Yes All Nazis are. I declined to say Not All Nazis, because I know a stupid rhetorical trap when I see one (though why it doesn’t count when someone says Not All Communists I don’t know) and merely pointed out that this didn’t address my concern about creating a sub-human category of person that it’s OK to subject to violence, which I believe is wrong on principle, and the fact that some people will be labeled as that category by their enemies simply as a convenient tool. The conversation ended abruptly. (Tho to be fair, the person I was speaking to said I was misrepresenting their opinion, and didn’t believe it was worth taking the time/effort to correct me)

So yeah. I feel like I was very naive in thinking that certain useful principles matter for most people past the point where they are useful to them. This is distressing to me. :(

I recently found a new insight into SJW worldview that has caused me to radically update a few of my beliefs. This may take a wee bit of set-up, the impatient can probably skip to Part III.

I.

The Austin Alamo Drafthouse is holding an all-women showing of Wonder Woman on Tuesday (5 days after the movie is released). I love this idea! In large part because I grew up in the Xena fandom, which was dominated by women, and I know how important that sort of thing can be. Also, because Wonder Woman has long been a feminist icon. This is a genius idea on aesthetic, thematic, and cultural reasons. And finally, because I’m a strong support of freedom of association. If people want to have all-christian showings of Passion Of The Christ, or all-black showings of Get Out, or anything like that, they should be free to do so. Mad props all around.

Surprising no one who’s been on the internet for more than a week, sexist trolls made disparaging comments on the Alamo’s facebook page. Everyone shrugs and moves on, in the alternate universe were people are sane. In this universe, various Media Dragons turn it into a major event and tell the left how much we should hate these people. A bit of an overreaction, but whatever.

Aaaaaaand then a friend posts one of the particularly awful articles, that highlights a number of these comments and then attributes them to an entire class of human – in this case “men online.” Through a series of unfortunate events, I get sucked in.

II.

Articles that take instances of shitty individuals being shitty, spotlight them, and then spin the headline and article to strongly insinuate that everyone who shares a hated characteristic with the perpetrators are vile. This is a large driver of racism, religion-ism, sexism, hell… most group-prejudices. I wouldn’t have as much of a problem with an article like this one, that singles out “Sexist Trolls” in the headline. At least then it’s putting the blame directly on a group that is defined by their ACTIONS – making sexist, trolling comments. Those sorts of people really are awful. It’s like an article that speaks of “Murders” or “Arsonists” – those groups are identified by what they did. An article that identifies a group by a characteristics that has nothing to do with the action and is present in a large group who are mostly innocent, such as skin color or gender, is an evil article that promotes group-hatred.

Objections mostly took the characteristic of “The articles are only showing actual bad things that were done. Everything within them is accurate. These statements were made, and they were made by men. What is the problem?”

One can always find people who did bad things and share a characteristic, then publish a list of them, and imply that everyone with that characteristic is as bad as they are. That’s literally what all these prejudices – racism, sexism, religion-ism, sexual-orientation-ism – have in common. “Gay Men Are Pedophiles” “Blacks are Criminals” “Muslims Are Terrorists.” And with a large sample size and careful picking, it’s easy to do. Google found me this article that looks to be a direct parody of those “Men Are Going Crazy Over Wonder Woman” articles – Alamo Drafthouse is Doing a Women Only Screening of Wonder Woman and Chicks Are Very Mad – that does the same thing only for women. With nearly 2000 comments (last I checked) it’s easy to find 10 that make a group look bad. I bet one could, with a little extra work, easily write “Alamo Drafthosue is Doing a Woman Only Screening, and Muslims Are Very Mad” with the exact same wording as those other articles, but selecting only comments by Muslim commenters.

In fact, this is exactly what Donald Trump is doing to spur hatred of immigrants. He has ordered the weekly publication of crimes committed by illegal immigrants. Everything in these reports is accurate. It is a list of real crimes, that were actually committed by illegal immigrants. Wherein is the problem?

The problem is the implication that the crimes were committed BECAUSE of the characteristic that is being highlighted. And thus outside parties can draw the inference that anyone who shares that characteristic is also likely to commit those crimes. It’s the difference between “Arsonist burns down church” and “Jew burns down church.”

III.

This did not sit easy with a number of people, several of whom are friends. I wanted to find out why.

In my mind, a principle is valid or it isn’t. Either the principle “A group X should not be tarred by the actions of individuals that share (non-causative) characteristic Y with that group” either is valid for all values of X and all values of Y. There is no special exception “unless that group is Jews” or “unless that characteristic is having a tattoo.” So when I gave the previous example and I was told I can never make that comparison, doing so was wrong, and I should apologize, I was confused. Why is it wrong in the case of Immigrants/Criminals, but not Men/Sexists-Commenters?

Hoping to start with common ground I asked – “Why is prejudice wrong?”

I expected an answer based on the injustice of judging a person due to outward characteristics or group membership, rather than due to their individual actions and the content of their character. Instead I was told:

“Because in many cases it hurts people by denying them the privileges experienced by others.”

IV.

This was an authoritative answer, based on years of schooling while securing a masters in Sociology.

Unpacking this in my mind took a long time.

First – everyone has some privilege. Undeniable. And between any two given individuals, it’s overwhelmingly likely that their levels of privileges across all domains aren’t identical. Given that, it’s plausible that we could label one person as more privileged than another.

Second – certain characteristics bring more privilege with them on an aggregate level. White people suffer less discrimination than black people, on the whole. The rich have an easier life than the poor, on the whole. Men have various advantages in many fields over women, on the whole. This is, again, undeniable.

But these privileges aren’t really “granted” or “denied” on a personal level. They are societal-scale issues. Attacking individual sexists on the internet is not going to change anything. It can’t. Perhaps you can change the actions of the men targeted, or onlookers who see the attack, but the vast edifice of privilege is unmoved.

So, Lesson One – my first mistake was thinking that sexism was something that an individual does. If that’s the case, it makes sense to separate those who show sexist behavior from those who do not. But sexism is a thing that a society does. In which case there’s no point in focusing on individual behavior, or differentiating between guilty individuals and innocent individuals.  It was never about individual action or how those actions hurt other people.

Also, Lesson Two – this is why it is important that entire groups are attacked. Privileges are assigned based on group membership. To make the world more just and less oppressive requires the remove or lessening of that group’s privilege. Therefore the actual intent of these attacks is exactly what my principles scream against – tarring a whole group. Even if that means highlighting the despicable actions of a few people and drawing attention to their membership in the target group.

Third – let’s focus on the “denying them the privileges” part. How is it that someone is denied privileges? It’s certainly not due to any individual’s actions, because it’s not about the individual. I cannot deny anyone a privilege. No single person can, privilege is inherent in society. That’s what it means to be a privilege! So someone isn’t “denied the privilege” of being male by anything a male does, they are denied it simply by being non-male. Therefore the more-privileged group deserves to be attacked purely due to the fact that it is privileged. It denies others privilege by virtue of its privilege existing at all.

And now the claim that tarring all men via selective reporting is incomparable to tarring all immigrants by selective reporting makes sense. Men have privilege. Immigrants don’t. Ergo, the two cases are not comparable, and trying to draw comparisons is abhorrent. The principle isn’t “Judge individuals fairly”, it’s “Judge groups by their privilege.”

V.

This does raise the question of “What Is To Be Done?” Just a few days ago I posted about the unfairness of not everyone having equal talent. It’s nobody’s fault. No one can be blamed for not having enough talent, and no one can claim that having lots of talent is due to some intrinsic deservingness. Some people just have it, and it’s damned unfair, but what can be done about it? All I can really do is feel sad and wish things were more fair. You can’t transfer talent from the more talented to the less talented. The most you could do is, like Vonnegut’s story Harrison Bergeron, cripple the talented in proportion to their talent, so everyone is equally bad off.

Oohhhhhh….

Now suddenly the Oppression Olympics makes much more sense. The more Oppressed you are, the less you will require crippling. Obviously everyone will want to portray themselves as maximally oppressed, to avoid those hammer blows.

And privilege isn’t something you can control via your actions. Individual merit and effort don’t matter. Being personally anti-racist or anti-sexist doesn’t matter, if you still have privilege. Remember that prejudice is bad because it “denies people privileges.” Having privilege denies it to others, so if you have it you are morally culpable for its denial to oppressed groups. Of course you want to play up every possible morally good/oppressed group you can lay claim to, and play down any morally bad/oppressor groups you might be associated with. One is morally good or morally bad not due to their own actions, but due to accident of birth.

And so we have come full circle.

VI.

To clarify, my friend is a kind and wonderful person, and wouldn’t endorse the conclusions I’ve drawn from that statement. They simply bought deeply into the standard privilege narrative without really digging into its implications and real-world results, IMHO.

With apologies to my friends who are, or are planning to, get married.

One of the most reprehensible lies we still tell children is that marriage is what you do with someone that you love. You marry them because you love them. You marry them to show your love. And to demonstrate that love publicly.

Love does not require anything like that. And marriage does not accomplish it. You stay with someone and live your life together because you love them. You support and care for each other to show love. You demonstrate that love every single day with your actions–publicly when you are in public.

Marriage is none of those things. Marriage is a legal contract, with terms that most of the people entering into it are completely unfamiliar with. If they were familiar with them, and they weren’t fed lies all their lives about how marriage shows love, they would be aghast at what this contract entails, because it is morally repugnant.

The marriage contract is a claim on resources. And an unconscionable one at that.

It is a claim on past resources. If either party owned assets prior to the marriage, 50% of any increase in that assets’ value from the time of marriage goes to the other party. Say (to use a personal example) you own a small two-bedroom townhome that you rent out on the side. You do all the required maintenance, you pay for the upkeep and the taxes, you incur any losses while it is vacant, and you do the labor of renting out and managing the place. Should it increase in value from $120,000 to $140,000 in one year, you better set aside $10,000 to give to your spouse.

If you owned 100 shares of stock you bought before the marriage, forgot about it, and after a year those 100 shares could be sold for $20 more per share than you bought them for, be ready to pay out $1000 for the privileged of holding onto those stocks. If you don’t, you are denying your partner their rightful share of the marital assets.

It is a claim on present resources. Everything earned by either party is considered joint property of both. In practice, this means that the person who earns more is effectively transferring any income earned to the person who earns less until the two of them are at parity, automatically at all times. This is perhaps the best-known and therefore least-offensive aspect of the marriage contract. Most people are fine with it. But be aware of what this entails:

* You cannot hold property separately. Even holding separate bank accounts is merely childish play-acting — both parties have full rights to all accounts. A pre-nup *might* allow you to divide up some income the way you wish to, in *some* states. Check your local laws. But for the most part, your wishes don’t matter. The state has declared that all your assets and incomes count as one, and trying to keep them separate is a foolish game.

* All debts accrue to both of you. You may think you have an agreement to split the rent. But what happens when your partner simply doesn’t pay their half? It’s your debt. The court will be confused as to why this is even an issue. You never had separate incomes or accounts, regardless of what you thought! There is only marital income and marital assets and marital debts.
** All this time you’ve been paying marital debts with marital income. Your marital assets might be in multiple bank accounts, but they all belong to the marriage, and they will be seized to pay marital debts. There is no You, there is only the Marital Income, and the court looks very disfavorably on some individual human trying to withhold some of the Marital Income because of something as non-nonsensical as which individual name is tagged to which portion of the Marital Income stream.

**** this is the most important thing to remember about marriage, and the most morally repugnant. There is NO INDIVIDUAL PERSONHOOD anymore. There is only this Frankenstein Abomination called The Marriage. I hope you weren’t too attached to that bodily autonomy thing you had going.

****** I mean that “bodily autonomy” crack literally. You can be forced into labor against your will, for the marriage. Up until a few decades ago, if you were a woman you were required to perform sexual services to the man in the marriage, and failure to do so often enough (as decided by the courts) was cause for at-fault termination of marriage. You did not get to decide what to do with your body, sexually or otherwise, if The Marriage disagreed.

(as an aside, spouses can’t testify against each other in court. There’s some rational justifications that can be made for this, but the simpler and oft-used excuse is that The Marriage is a single mashed-up person, and a person cannot be compelled to testify against themselves in a court. You are not individual people anymore.)

* You cannot loan money to each other. There are no individuals in a marriage. There is only The Marriage, and The Marriage cannot loan money to itself. That’s just as nonsensical as someone moving cash from one pocket to the other and claiming it’s changed ownership. Don’t even bother trying to help your partner out by covering their car repairs or helping with their studio rent for a few months while they get back on their feet. They already have full claim to any assets you have. You aren’t helping them at all, any more than “allowing” someone to take vegetables from their own garden is “helping” them. Their thanks, and assurances that they’ll pay you back as soon as possible, are just as incoherent.

It is a claim on future resources. Once you decide to go your separate ways you aren’t done yet. The Marriage continues into a zombie afterlife. Did you think you were doing a nice thing for your spouse, in supporting them after they got laid off while they pursued their dream job? I hope you like doing nice things, because you’ll continue to do that one well into the future regardless of your wishes.

This is the really insidious aspect of Marriage. It incentivizes being callous. From a stand point of personal fiscal responsibility, you should never allow this sort of income disparity to occur. You should demand your spouse gets another job as quickly as possible, making as much as they made previously, regardless of how miserable it makes them. Regardless of the potential for future joy and earnings if their dream-job idea works out. Because the courts will look at the years that you supported your spouse and say “They have grown accustomed to being kept in that lifestyle during The Marriage. The Marriage Zombie will be kept up to similar standards for the next X years.” Whereas if you had both kept steady, middle-income jobs the courts will say “Yup, all fair here, go about your business.” You can’t even loan your spouse money for a few years while they pursue their dreams, due to the inability for The Marriage to loan money to itself, discussed above.

This grows worse if the party that earns more ever pays for greater than 50% of anything. You may have thought it was only fair that, as the person who earns more, you pay for insurance for both of you, and cover all the costs of going out whenever you go out. That is again used to penalize you at the dissolution of The Marriage.

Every Single Kind Act You Ever Did Will Be Used As A Weapon Against You.

Without fail. So don’t be kind to your spouse. (Or just don’t get married, and feel free to continue being kind instead!)

But What About The Benefits?

Like what? Tax benefits? If you both draw any sort of income, there’s no real benefit there. If one of you doesn’t draw income, the one who does can claim a non-spousal dependent on their taxes. Marriage is not a requirement. (Although be wary about doing so, it could be used against you in the future as a claim on resources, and very likely is NOT worth the $4000 credit). And the spouse who makes little/nothing loses access to all sorts of benefits that are only available to people with limited income.

Are you worried about the children? That’s sillier than trying to loan money to each other. The courts will enforce child support regardless of whether you married or not. In fact, don’t bother putting anything about children in any pre-nup (be it about child support, child custody, or otherwise). Courts immediately discard all such provisions and make their decisions independently, regardless of what you agreed to. Such things are too important to be left to individual agreements, they are matters of public policy.

Visitation rights at a hospital? Just lie. I’ve never had to produce a marriage certificate when visiting a spouse in a hospital, nor have my spouses.

End-of-life planning and estate decisions? Write a will. Give your partner power of attorney. (actually important for everyone, especially as they get older)

Health insurance? Most workplaces now cover domestic partners, and marriage is not required. However this may set up the same sort of precedent as joint-filing taxes, so should also be avoided if possible. It’s probably the most legitimate reason for actually getting married in the USA. Which is an indictment of our fucked-up healthcare system. Our method of rationing healthcare is so awful that we use threats against the life and health of someone’s lover to force them into the outrageously immoral marriage contract.

What Is It Good For?

If you want to conspire to commit a crime, and not have to worry about testifying against each other, maybe marriage will be useful. Aside from that – Absolutely Nothing. Every thing you may want to do as a loving couple (or triad, or more) you can do via personal agreement, without marriage.

One might say “But marriages don’t have to be like this! The couple can agree to keep separate accounts! The couple can voluntarily give up all rights on the assets of the other when they dissolve the marriage! They can voluntarily decline maintenance. They can split the debts in an equitable way, and keep track of loans on their own, and pay each other back.”

Yes, they can. But they can do all that without getting married as well. That’s the real kicker. Everything you want to do to make a marriage fair and equitable and not a moral abomination, you can do without getting married in the first place. If you do get married, you have to take extra steps to do the things you agreed are fair, to prevent marriage law from perverting them.

BUT! But if you DID get married, now a spouse has the option to defect and make a resource grab against the other. That option was made possible by signing the marriage contract.

That option was the only thing that the marriage contract brought to the relationship.

In short, marriage doesn’t promote any public good for any honest person. It incentivizes callousness, and strips humans of individual personhood and bodily autonomy. It served a purpose in the vile dystopia that is our past, when half the population had no property rights or any legal way to make an income. In the present, its only purpose is to enable fraud that the courts will uphold. If someone loves you they will want to spend their life with you, at least for a while. But if they want to take advantage of you, they will seek the aegis of the marriage contract. Proposing marriage is a hostile act.

Small Concession – Due to the mythology we’ve built around marriage, and the extreme ignorance most people have as to the reality of marriage, they may not realize what it is they are asking for when they hint at marriage. It might be an innocent mistake. But every such proposal should be viewed with extreme prejudice, and anyone who suggests marriage to you should be flagged as a potential enemy.

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added: a reader pointed out another potential good reason to get married: visas. If you want to get someone from Country A to Country B, and let them stay in country B, a marriage visa can be, depending on the country, one of the more effective ways of accomplishing this.