In a sane world, no one would give a flyspeck what a professional moralistic scold like Ross Douche-Hat has to say on any subject. But this is not a sane world. In the lunatic reality we inhabit, Douche-Hat has his every flacid thought published in the New York Times - America's Paper of Record - as if they were pearls of wisdom from a sage elder with unique insight. Which means that we are forced to confront Ross's self-important edict on the subject of "incels" and redistribution of sex which I TOLD YOU YESTERDAY TO STOP WRITING ABOUT, DOUCHEY!
(Remember, kids. they can't refute your argument if they're distracted by boobies!)
One lesson to be drawn from recent Western history might be this: Sometimes the extremists and radicals and weirdos see the world more clearly than the respectable and moderate and sane.
Okay, sure. Sometimes the radicals and weirdos are Nazis, or Stalinists, or al Queda, or Scientologists, but sure. It never hurts to hear them out.
All kinds of phenomena, starting as far back as the Iraq War. . .
Woah, woah, slow down there!You're going ALL THE WAY BACK to the Iraq War? We didn't all major in ancient history, you know!
(editor's note: Hmm, maybe little Douche-Hat was a little to young to be made an op-ed columnist. Maybe we should have gotten someone wirth a bit more perspective on things like Davis Broo - -oh, right. Never mind.)
All kinds of phenomena, starting as far back as the Iraq War and the
crisis of the euro but accelerating in the age of populism, have made
more sense in the light of analysis by reactionaries and radicals than
as portrayed in the organs of establishment opinion.
Or, in simpler language, the hippy liberals have always been right but never been listened to. And the spewers of "establishment opinion" are never penalized for having been wrong. Every cheerleader for Bush's ill-conceived, ill-planned, ill-advised, illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq is still being invited on the Sunday talk shows and the 24-hour news networks as if they have some rare and valuable acumen that simply must be shared with the general public while when's the last time you've seen Micheal Moore or Janeane Garofalo on Meet the Press?
For those more curious than martial, one
useful path through this thicket is to look at areas where extremists
and eccentrics from very different worlds are talking about the same
subject. Such overlap is no guarantee of wisdom, but it’s often a sign
that there’s something interesting going on.
Which brings me to the sex robots.
Okay, now you've got my attention!
Well, actually, first it brings me to the case of Robin Hanson, a George Mason economist, libertarian and noted brilliant weirdo.
Oh come on!
**Sigh** Fine. Let's talk about Hanson. I'm sure that will be just as interesting as "sex robots."
Commenting on the recent terrorist violence in Toronto, in which a self-identified “incel”
— that is, involuntary celibate — man sought retribution against women
and society for denying him the fornication he felt that he deserved,
Hanson offered this provocation: If we are concerned about the just
distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for
some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous? This argument was not well received by people closer to the mainstream than Professor Hanson, to put it mildly.
But Hanson’s post made me immediately think of a recent essay
in The London Review of Books by Amia Srinivasan, “Does Anyone Have the
Right To Sex?” Srinivasan, an Oxford philosophy professor, covered
similar ground (starting with an earlier “incel” killer) but expanded
the argument well beyond the realm of male chauvinists to consider
groups with whom The London Review’s left-leaning and feminist readers
would have more natural sympathy — the overweight and disabled, minority
groups treated as unattractive by the majority, trans women unable to
find partners and other victims, in her narrative, of a society that
still makes us prisoners of patriarchal and also
racist-sexist-homophobic rules of sexual desire.
STOP IT! Stop trying to make it seem as if there is some basis for compelling any person to have sex with any other person. You're not gettin' any because you're overweight or you're a minority person trying to score with racists? I feel for you. That sucks. But you know what? It also sucks that I wasn't tall enough to play in the NBA. And it also sucks that I never had the manual dexterity to be a musician. Life is unfair. But no one is trying to suggest that the Warriors be forced to make room on their roster for me or that Bob Weir should be forced to jam with me. That's not how it works. Some unfairnesses can be fixed, others can't. And it is not a good idea to humor those who lash out with violence when they feel that life is too unfair.
Now can we PLEASE talk about sex robots?
. . . By this I mean that as offensive or utopian the redistribution of sex
might sound, the idea is entirely responsive to the logic of late-modern
sexual life, and its pursuit would be entirely characteristic of a
recurring pattern in liberal societies.
NO IT WOULDN'T!
Because sex is not a commodity. You can't just go down to the sex orchard and pic a bushel of sex and hand it out to the sex-deprived. Redistributing sex would require forcing women to have sex against their will or, at best, a massive prostitute-hiring WPA-type program that just seems really impractical.
First, because like other forms of neoliberal deregulation the sexual
revolution created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace
the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in
new ways and relegating others to new forms of loneliness and
frustration.
Oh, spot on, Douche-Hat! As everyone knows, prior to the sexual revolution, there was really no advantage to being beautiful or rich. Or socially adept. Everyone was just assigned a mate on their 21st birthday and whether you were handsome or ugly, homely or gorgeous, a witty raconteur or a retiring wallflower, everyone lived happily ever after and everyone had exactly the same amount if sex. Oh, why did those damn hippies have to ruin everything?
Second, because in this new landscape, and amid other economic and
technological transformations, the sexes seem to be struggling generally
to relate to one another, with social and political chasms opening between them
Right, and prior to this dismal modern era, men and women understood each other perfectly and always got along famously!
(I know you're maybe too young to remember the golden times of male-female harmony, may I suggest you Google "Lysistrata?")
When do we get to the sex robots?
In the case of sexual liberation and its
discontents, that’s unlikely to mean the kind of thoroughgoingly
utopian reimagining of sexual desire that writers like Srinivasan think
we should aspire toward, or anything quite so formal as the
pro-redistribution political lobby of Hanson’s thought experiment.
But
I expect the logic of commerce and technology will be consciously
harnessed, as already in pornography, to address the unhappiness of
incels, be they angry and dangerous or simply depressed and despairing.
The left’s increasing zeal to transform prostitution into legalized and
regulated “sex work” will have this end implicitly in mind
NO!
No, no no! The "left's" zeal to legalize sex work is not aimed at appeasing potentially violent MRA's by helping to get them laid. The point of legalizing sex work is to make it less dangerous FOR THE SEX WORKER. Do you really not understand this? I don't know how to explain this, but not everything is about you. Not everything is done with an eye toward making pathetic men feel undeservedly better about themselves. Sorry to have to be the one to break it to you.
. . . the libertarian (and general male) fascination with virtual-reality porn and sex robots
will increase as those technologies improve — and at a certain point,
without anyone formally debating the idea of a right to sex,
right-thinking people will simply come to agree that some such right
exists, and that it makes sense to look to some combination of changed
laws, new technologies and evolved mores to fulfill it.
No we won't. We "right-thinking" people will not come to that conclusion. Our position will be then what it is now. You have the right to have sex with anyone who is willing and is an adult. You have the right to watch virtual-reality porn or regular two-dimensional porn as long as everyone involved in making it did so voluntarily. And you absolutely have the right to spend your money on a sex robot.That's it. You don't have any claim on another person's body. And you never will. And by promoting the fiction that someday such a right will be recognized, you are only feeding in to the pathology of these "incels" increasing their belief that they are "owed" sex and making it more likely that they will act out in violent ways when this proves again to not be the case.
Stop it.
Stop humoring these people.
I know you don't actually believe in any right to sex. You believe that everyone should have to live their lives by the dogma of the Catholic Church. If it were up to you, there would be no sex outside of reproduction. You're only humoring these man-boys because your misogyny is outweighing your aversion to human sexuality. You need to stop. This won't end well.
I saw this on Twitter the other day attributed to a professor at George mason University:
One might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income,
No, one mightn't.
Lack of access to sex is annoying. It's frustrating. It's discouraging. It really isn't comparable to worrying whether you will be able to make the rent. It isn't really akin to having to choose between food and medicine. Lack of sex will not result in homelessness or malnutrition. They aren't similar.
. . . and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity,
to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly
threaten violence if their demands are not met.
WHAT????
What the hell? Redistribution? And you're positing this as if it is part of a reasonable worldview? You can not be serious.
As with income inequality, most folks concerned about sex inequality
might explicitly reject violence as a method, at least for now, and yet
still be encouraged privately when the possibility of violence helps
move others to support their policies.
What? Seriously? You think that violence "helps move others to support their policies?" You think that when some pissed-off virgin drives a van into a crowd trying to kill as many women as possible that normal people see this and think "gee, that vile little murderer makes a good point?" I mean, do you think that Tim McVeigh helped bring new recruits into the anti-government militia movement? You think a lot of people converted to Islam after 9/11? Acting out violently when things don't go your way is pretty much the worst way imaginable to get people to see things from your point of view. As it should be.
. . . the possibility of violence helps move others to support their policies.
(Sex could be directly redistributed, or cash might be redistributed in
compensation.)
Cash might be. . . um, that's called prostitution and I don't know how to break this to you, but that's already a thing.
You ever see these ladies?
That's what they're doing. They're getting cash redistributed to them in exchange for redistributing sex to some sad loser. It's a valuable public service and it goes on in every town in the world. This isn't an idea you invented.
Strikingly, there seems to be little overlap between those who express concern about income and sex inequality.
Wow, that is so odd! How can that be? How can people care about something that makes life extremely fraught for a lot of people and not care about something that is annoying and could be solved with a quick personality transplant, a call to an escort service, or a bottle of Jergen's and a box of Kleenex? It's mystifying!
Strikingly, there seems to be little overlap between those who express
concern about income and sex inequality. Among our cultural elites, the
first concern is high status, and the later concern low status. For
example, the article above seems not at all sympathetic to sex
inequality concerns.
Yeah! Imagine that! Because one concern can literally be life and death, the other is a bunch of whiny little man-boys who think that it's completely unfair that women would rather date attractive men. Or smart men. Or men with decent personalities. Or men who don't live in their moms' basements. Or men who don't have facial hair that belongs in Whoville.
Or even men who are not under the impression that a certain amount of hours put in as a "nice" guy entitles them to vagina access.
Okay, I seem to have gotten a bit off-track. Where was I going with this?
Oh, right.
I assume that Professor Robin Hanson probably doesn't really agree with the "incels" about sex re-distribution. Although, he is someone who looks like this:
so I could see where he might feel a certain kinship with them. But that's not the point.
The point is, we have to stop humoring these kind of people. We have to stop pretending that people like this might have some kind of point. We for some reason decided to humor the gun nuts post-Brady Bill, telling ourselves that maybe they had legitimate concerns and not to dismiss their feelings out of hand and now we have a bunch of Dale Gribbels strutting around Target stores with assault rifles and gun massacres are just a part of the fabric of everyday life in the good ol' USA.
We* decided to humor the Teabaggers. We decided to pretend that they were just concerned about government overreach and taxation rates, and sure they might be a bit misguided and misinformed and racist as hell, but that doesn't mean they don't deserve to air their grievances in public. Now we have King Birther in the White House steadily dismantling every positive aspect of out Federal system.
This shit needs to stop. When you have maladjusted men who think that a reasonable response to being turned down for a date is to murder a bunch of women, the last thing we need is a tenured professor putting a pseudo-academic spin on their rage and trying to make it seem as if they might have some sort of point. Remember during the GW Bush administration, when everybody was worried that any word coming out of a Democrat's mouth was going to "embolden the enemy?" Robin Hanson is emboldening the enemy. And this shit needs to stop. Now.
*and by "we," I mean American society in general, not you and I, dear reader.
All right, you do have me curious, though. Let's hear it.
What’s bad for the gavel is good for the pen.
What is that even supposed to mean?
Never mind, let's just plow through.
What’s bad for the gavel is good for the pen. The Republican Party is in
the midst of a cataclysmic transformation. But all the political
turmoil is creating a burst of intellectual creativity on the right.
Ahahaha. . . oh, good one. "Intellectual creativity!" "On the Right!" Ahahahahaha!!!
Young, fresh writers are bursting on the scene: Sohrab Ahmari, Helen
Andrews, Charles Cooke, Mollie Hemingway, Jason Willick, Michael Brendan
Dougherty, Gracy Olmstead, James Poulos, Oren Cass, Matthew Schmitz and
many others.
And the one thing they all have in common? That no one has heard of any of them. Meanwhile the op=ed pages are still populated by the same right-wing schmucks they have been filled with for years - your George Wills, your Charles Krauthammers, your David Brookses. . .
Other conservatives are rising to defend that order, including National
Review’s Jonah Goldberg, who later this month comes out with his epic
and debate-shifting book, “Suicide of the West.”
.
Yeah. . .no. Nothing that has ever been produced by Jonah freaking Goldberg has ever been realistically described as "epic" or "debate-shifting."
"Stupid" and "shitty," yes. "epic" and "debate-shifting?" not so much.
Goldberg points out that for eons human beings were semi-hairless
upright apes clumped in tribes and fighting for food. But about 300
years ago something that he calls “the Miracle” happened. It was a shift
in attitude. For thousands of years, societies divided people into
permanent categories of race or caste. But, Goldberg writes, “the
Miracle ushered in a philosophy that says each person is to be judged
and respected on account of their own merits, not the class or caste of
their ancestors.”
WHAT?!?!?
Three hundred years ago?
Three hundred. . . so the early 1700's.
Goldberg's thesis is that in the early 1700's, mankind decided to stop judging people by their background or heritage and instead evaluate each individual on his own merits. In the 1700s.
When slavery of African people was at its peak. When European aristocracies held sway. When every nation on Earth was ruled by a monarch whose entire claim to authority was that he was the descendant of his ancestors. This was when the "Miracle" happened. Seriously.
So humankind decided to end tribalist conflict in the early 1700s. The era in which the Hapsburgs and Stuarts were fighting over the thrones of the United Kingdom. When Louis Quatorze was trying to exterminate the Hugenots in France. When Catholics and Protestants were slaughtering each other all over Europe, that was the time that the human race outgrew primitive tribalism.
Somehow, even though in the early 18th Century, humanity had decided to judge each individual on his own merit, not by the group to which he belongs, the Holocaust still happened. And the Armenian genocide. And Jim Crow. And lynchings. And the Yugoslavian civil war. And the Tutsi-Hutu war in Rwanda and all the other horrible atrocities of the 20th Century that can all be flung, bloodied and disfigured, onto the doorstep of unrelenting tribalism.
I am the child of privilege -- or so I am being told. I am white, I am
male. Put them together and you would think I've been sitting on a trust
fund -- unearned, unappreciated and unjustified. There are people who
think that being male has historically been an unalloyed privilege. The
many dead of our national cemeteries suggest otherwise.
Oh my God! Did you know that if you are a white man, even the whitest of white men, you can still die? I has no idea! And here I was thinking how lucky I was to have been born white and male. What a fool I was!
Also, yes. That is exactly what the concept of white privilege and male privilege is. It's an assumption that every white male is a spoiled ingrate trust-fund kid, and if any white men are not born with a silver spoon in their mouths the entire concept is proven to be invalid. Well played, Cohen!
Let me concede right at the top that it was always better to be white in
America than black. Let me further stipulate that in the workplace, it
has usually been better to be a man than a woman. Let me further
stipulate -- or possibly assert-that the situation is finally, belatedly
improving. Hallelujah.
Okay, usually? In what instance was it ever preferable to be a woman in any workplace? And also, are we seriously going to pretend that the only facet of life in which men are granted an unfair advantage is in the workplace? The fact that I can walk through a dark alley at night knowing that the worst case scenario is I am relieved of my wallet says to me that I have it better than any woman in everyday life. The fact that I can travel to any country in the world and not have to worry that I might be arrested for having my hair or skin exposed speaks volumes about the ways in which men have it better than women in multiple facets of life. And the fact that I will never have to worry that a bunch of religious fanatics may decide that they know better than I what kind of medical procedures I might need. . . well, you get the idea.
My first real job was with the New York office of a national insurance
company. Sexual harassment was a problem, for sure. But the term did not
yet exist and the problem was not formally recognized.
We had no acknowledged diversity problem, either. In fact, we simply had
no diversity. African-Americans, Hispanics -- you name it: None. Our
office was exclusively white and not by accident. When I asked my boss
why we had no black employees, he told me directly that it was his
policy not to hire any. And when once, by accident, a temp agency sent
over an Asian file clerk, she made the mistake of using the common
ladies room. Women from the office next door demanded she be fired. She
was.
I'm not really sure what point you think you're making here. Are you saying that because newsrooms can no longer overtly refuse to hire black people or fire Asian ladies for Asianing up the restroom, that privilege is a thing of the past?
When my mother died, I wrote that had she been born in a later era, she
could have been president of the United States. Her competence was
awesome and her drive was remarkable, but she was kept in her place by
discrimination and tradition. Now her place has been taken by my sister.
If Donald Trump is limited to one term, it will be because my sister
has organized most of New England to oppose him. When it comes to
warnings, Paul Revere has nothing on her.
So I didn't know who Richard Cohen's sister is. I decided to Google her to see if she was someone famous. This is what I got:
So when Cheeto Mussolini fails to win re-election, it will not be due to his stunning incompetence, his remarkable level of corruption or his astonishing lack of mental acuity, it will be because of Richard Cohen's sister who is either Peewee Herman, a burly bearded black man, or Eric Clapton. Hell of a family tree!
Although I'm not sure how much credit we should give the woman who is organizing the #Resistance in New England which went almost entirely for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
So why bring up your mom and sister anyway?
All this is by way of saying to women: I'm on your side. But when I see
op-eds, such as the one recently in The New York Times that states in
the headline that the Metropolitan Museum of Art should not have
appointed "yet another white, male director," I recoil. That's just
another way of saying that white and male is a disqualification.
Oh my God, no it isn't!
Saying "hey, you know what, every director you've ever had has been a white male, maybe give someone else a shot at it" is not the same thing as saying "you should not hire any white males. White males are bad." You have to know this. You can't possibly be dumb enough to not know this.
Diversity in the workplace is an overdue goal, but it can amount to a
quota by another name. Choose a woman because she's a woman and you've
eliminated a man because he's a man.
Oh Heaven forbid!
Heaven forbid a man should possibly not get a job!
You know, just a paragraph ago, you were saying:
When I went into journalism, it was mostly a guy's thing. It was rare
for a woman to be a foreign correspondent, rarer still for one to cover a
war. My career surely benefited from that. There are women around today
that I am glad I didn't have to compete against when I was starting
out.
So you acknowledge that you happily took advantage of the bias against women to advance your career, but God forbid that a woman might get a similar break (although in the real world, there are no quotas and women are still less likely to be offered prestigious jobs.) It's fine for you to do it, but if a hypothetical woman were to hypothetically do the same thing, well that would just be grossly unfair!
It's not that anyone is fooled by obfuscation. Some of the resentment in
the white, male electorate is based on the conviction that the deck is
suddenly stacked against them. That's Trump's constituency, right there.
(He got about 63 percent of the white male vote.) Someone has to tell
those guys how deceived they are, how they have benefited all these
years from being male and white. Forgive them, if they do not
understand.
I'm sorry. Do you think this column is helping? Do you think your pitiful whining about white men being disqualified on the basis of white man-ness is helping to disabuse them of this false notion? Do you think that complaining " Choose a woman because she's a woman and you've
eliminated a man because he's a man.
Once I was passed over for a newsroom position I very much wanted. "We
needed a woman," an editor told me. I said nothing, although I seethed.
Seriously? You didn't see the irony in that? You didn't see the karma? You got to where you were by being favored over women, then once ONCE! a woman gets favored over you and you seethe? (That's if I believe you. I can't imagine an editor would open himself up to a lawsuit by being that candid about hiring/promotion practices.)
I said nothing, although I seethed. In short order, I was made a
columnist, so I didn't even get a chance to cry. But the instant rush of
utter unfairness lingers. The woman chosen was qualified, but her
qualification had nothing to do with her sex. I was told she was just a
needed statistic.
Waaaah!!! It's so uinfair! That mean qualified lady got the promotion and all I got was this lousy job being an extremely well-paid columnist for America's most prestigious newspaper which has made me rich and famous and makes people take my dumb opinions seriously! Waaaahhhh!!
The way women have been treated in the workplace is wrong -- everything
from pay disparity to sexual harassment to outright discrimination. But
the past does not obliterate the solemn obligation to treat people as
individuals, not primarily as members of a sex or race. Fairness demands
it. Democracy requires it
Okay, so. . . first of all, you're saying that pay disparity, sexual harassment and discrimination are in the past? Try saying that to any working woman with a straight face. I dare you!
And also you're saying that in that benighted past when workplaces used to be hostile/unfair/unwelcoming to women (whew! Glad that's over!) we weren't a democracy?
Or are you just saying that you know, it was not really cool for women to be discriminated against, but let's forget about that, it's ancient history. Now that whiny little douchebags like Richard Cohen think that they might somehow be the ones getting the short end of the stick, that NOW all forms of discrimination must be eliminated post haste!
Congratulations, Richard Cohen, You are the douche of the day!
Seriously, check out the letter. It's a pdf, so I can't cut and paste any excerpts and the screenshots are getting screwed up, but click on the link and you'll see I am not making this up!
Hillary Clinton: Charged with having paid for oppo research.
Hmm, weird.
I guess they decided to give her a pass on murdering everyone in Benghazi! Benghazi!! BENGHAZI!!!
Anyway, there are very serious charges levied against everyone on the list, including "lacking candor" and a thing that some nutter on FOX claimed that Loretta Lynch did.
I don't know which is a more disturbing possibility. That these eleven menebers of Congress - not 11 guys standing on milk crates with bullhorns on Los Angeles street corners, but eleven actual, honest-to-God members of Congress -- The US Congress!-- actually believe in their Alex-Jones-addled brain-like objects that Comey, Clinton, et al are actually guilty of these made-up "crimes," or that these eleven members of Congress are so committed to turning the United States of America into a tin-pot dictatorship that they are actively trying to drum up spurious charges against anyone they perceive as one of Il Douche's political enemies. Either way, it's awfully frightening.
Here is the list of the eleven either super-corrupt or super-crazy reps who signed this insane letter.
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