Bribes and Punishments
If this manifesto is ever widely read, there will be a large number of men who will be bewilderingly infuriated by it. Whenever masculinity is threatened, dark knights of chauvinism will immediately race to its aid. They will attack with the kind of fury normally reserved for traitors, murderers, terrorists and other enemies to the nation’s safety and security. Why? Because when masculinity and manhood are attacked, men who are insecure in their masculinity get scared. They are scared because that is not the deal that they got into when they agreed to go along with the whole thing. They thought the deal was that penis equals masculinity. To say that penis does not equal masculinity, that even heterosexuality and attraction to women does not equal masculinity, that masculinity is a farce, is a terrifying proposition. They’ve given up their connection with their families, healthy relationships with the men and women in their lives, physical contact with people other than their wives, and much of the time that they have on this earth in order to prove their masculinity. If I say that they can never prove their masculinity, because the whole thing is bullshit, they have wasted everything. That’s a lot to give up for a system of oppression. Why would they do it?
Schoolyard Bullying
In schoolyards around the nation, in backyards, and in living rooms, boys are teaching masculinity to other boys through physical violence. The inspiration for these malicious beatings are myriad, but the notion that a boy who doesn’t fight back is somehow derogatorily feminized (hereafter “feminized”) is practically universal. The notion that feminization is bad cannot be better emphasized than with physical violence. The notion that those who fail to repel their attackers are not masculanized enough immediately instills terror in those who are unsure of their own masculinity. Masculinity is the oppressed man’s only means of defense. The irony is that in attacking others (and thereby feminizing these third parties) they can prove their manhood for moment. Like using an air conditioner to combat global warming, they are making themselves more safe from masculinity, while aiding masculinity generally. The schoolyard bully is created from a constant fear of being feminized ourselves and is constantly reinforcing.
Eventually we become oppressed men and the haunting ghost of the schoolyard bully hangs over us for the rest of our lives. Eventually, the words, “pussy” “fag” and “bitch” become linked in our heads with the brutal beatings and tauntings we received at the hands of those who were not comfortable with their masculinity. Meanwhile, there are those who learn their lessons too well. Some literally beat men who are too feminized. Their victims, who are not manly enough, threaten their belief that penis equals masculinity, and leads these men to unspeakable violence and even murder. Tragically, even as they prove their own masculinity and relieve their fear at being feminized, they strengthen the link between feminization and violence by victimizing those who they fear they will become if the link between penis and masculinity is ever severed.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Manifesto To Eliminate Masculinization (Part One)
Men are caged by fear, suffering and unhappiness. Suicide rates, self-destructive behavior, and neurotic violent tendencies belie this fact. This group must consciously support the quiet and radical revolution already under way. We must free men!
The women’s liberation movement cannot succeed until men too are freed from traditional gender’s tyrannical grip. Only a concerted effort to liberate men will provide significant race and national origin equality. Anti-gay bigotry, above all other kinds of prejudice, is rooted in the maniacal maintenance of traditional masculinity (hereafter “masculinity”). Therefore, the next logical step in the continually progressing civil rights movement must be the liberation of males from masculinity.
The women’s equality movement has begun to liberate men, kicking and screaming, but only with a more concentrated effort on the destruction and reconstruction of masculinity can we advance the freedom of men. Likewise, without a full frontal assault on masculinity, women’s is ended, and will not be able to progress, because women and men are intimately connected. Many women share their most intimate relationships with men, and so long as a man is suffering, so too will any person of empathy who loves that man. Suffering is the root of all fear, and fear is responsible for paralysis and retreat. When suffering does not bring about fear, it brings anger. Men should be angry that they are suffering at the whim of improbable oppression. However, all too often, that anger irrationally becomes violence against those who most desire to end their suffering. Too often, that same suffering is turned into violence that is used to make sure that other men suffer. This society can end the suffering of men. Society must direct its anger at masculinity itself and, finally, after millennia of the most insidious and malicious oppression, we must liberate ourselves.
In the next couple of weeks, this blog will publish a manifesto of freedom for men and all persons who have ever had any relationship with men. Acknowledging that if men are freed, it is due to feminist and critical race thinkers, this writing is not a work of academics, but a work of punditry and passion at best. In the next entry, the nature of the Masculization process will be shown to be a cycle of violence filled with bribes and punishments. After that, different specific functions of masculinity will be highlighted for elimination, from capitalism (an inherently masculine and violent method of societal interaction) to the male eviction from the home.
The women’s liberation movement cannot succeed until men too are freed from traditional gender’s tyrannical grip. Only a concerted effort to liberate men will provide significant race and national origin equality. Anti-gay bigotry, above all other kinds of prejudice, is rooted in the maniacal maintenance of traditional masculinity (hereafter “masculinity”). Therefore, the next logical step in the continually progressing civil rights movement must be the liberation of males from masculinity.
The women’s equality movement has begun to liberate men, kicking and screaming, but only with a more concentrated effort on the destruction and reconstruction of masculinity can we advance the freedom of men. Likewise, without a full frontal assault on masculinity, women’s is ended, and will not be able to progress, because women and men are intimately connected. Many women share their most intimate relationships with men, and so long as a man is suffering, so too will any person of empathy who loves that man. Suffering is the root of all fear, and fear is responsible for paralysis and retreat. When suffering does not bring about fear, it brings anger. Men should be angry that they are suffering at the whim of improbable oppression. However, all too often, that anger irrationally becomes violence against those who most desire to end their suffering. Too often, that same suffering is turned into violence that is used to make sure that other men suffer. This society can end the suffering of men. Society must direct its anger at masculinity itself and, finally, after millennia of the most insidious and malicious oppression, we must liberate ourselves.
In the next couple of weeks, this blog will publish a manifesto of freedom for men and all persons who have ever had any relationship with men. Acknowledging that if men are freed, it is due to feminist and critical race thinkers, this writing is not a work of academics, but a work of punditry and passion at best. In the next entry, the nature of the Masculization process will be shown to be a cycle of violence filled with bribes and punishments. After that, different specific functions of masculinity will be highlighted for elimination, from capitalism (an inherently masculine and violent method of societal interaction) to the male eviction from the home.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Today's Ridiculous Thought
When I protested the war in Afghanistan, I was accused of being anti-American by the New York Post and Lynn Cheney because I had the dastardly opinion that war with Afghanistan would not lead to Osama Bin Laden's capture, and might just contribute to islamophobia and racism already running rampant throughout the country. Now, these same accusers are disrupting democratic meetings and shouting other people out of debates merely because others disagree with them. What is anti-American? I wouldn't be able to say. Murder definately is anti-American. Beer drinking definately is American. Expressing an opinion (that turned out to be true)? Preventing others from expressing opinion by shouting them down in a meeting?
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Corporations Are Incompetent
What is being left out of this health care debate (if you can call the vitriol coming out of the right a debate) is the utter incompetence of most corporations. It is not an accident that corporations are incompetent, in fact the entire legal entity of a corporation is designed to encourage incompetence. It is tantamount to national suicide to continue to permit corporations to have anything whatsoever to do with health care, a fact which is being debated between the moderates and the left, but which the right wing ignores in their adulation for everything corporate. Yet we all know that corporations are horrible at what they do.
Corporations are Unsustainable
We see everyday that corporations are unsustainable. Just this year, the U.S. Government, and the many other governments throughout the world, have had to swoop in and bail out thousands of corporations which were failing. The U.S. Government, in substantially the same form that it stands today, has outlasted almost every corporation in the world, and has done so with such amazing success that even today there is no threat (despite what Glen Beck may desire) that the U.S. will not be a beacon of hope and freedom for huddled masses throughout the world. Meanwhile, corporations are constantly going into bankruptcy and folding into one another, or merely liquidating and disappearing. If we rely on corporations for necessities like health care, we will are relying on some of the most fragile organizations on earth. The moment that a corporation stops making enough profit (that means more than just profit, but profit mixed with greed), the corporation will raise its prices or merely leave the market. That is the job of a corporation; maximizing profit at the expense of its customers, its government, and all moral and ethical considerations.
Corporations are Unaccountable
We all know that corporations don't want to listen to their customers. Although corporations make it out to seem as though their customers are their friends, in fact corporations and customers are necessarily opposed. As competing entities entering into one contract, each party necessarily attempts to get as much out of the contract as it can. Verizon and Comcast cable seem like they are on your side when they lobby congress to implement fewer controls on internet distribution, but they have ultimately charged more in the United States for broadband internet than in any other country in the world, including island nations with limited resources. That is because the position of customer to corporation is naturally hostile. The fact that they have to woo you in order to ensure that you buy from their corporation is meaningless because advertising does the wooing and advertising is purposefully misleading.
Of course, corporations are supposed to be unaccountable. It's impossible to make any serious money unless the corporation treats the customer as though they are used, spent and discarded goods. If the corporation sells a service, then it will attempt to cultivate the customer, like a neglected house plant that you hope doesn't die. Occasionally, and for a short amount of time only, a corporation will make a good faith effort to hire enough customer service staff and offer the best product at the best possible price. The corporation gets some word of mouth, and attains incredible loyalty for merely making the least bit of good faith effort, for merely showing up at the party. But eventually, the economy must contract and the corporation has to do something to cut costs. Maybe the first two or three economic down turns the corporation rides the wave, maybe eventually it cuts services or stops taking as many risks. But at some point, the shareholders (who are lean and anxious for profits) vote in a new board of directors, who vote in a new president (often in a hostile takeover situation) and the new president is desperate to keep his (usually male) job. In order to keep his job, he must appease the board immediately, and the board must appease the shareholders, so the new president must make cuts and raise profits and pull dividends immediately. The fastest way to do that is to cut from the customer service budget. With each computerized telephone answering service, and redirection to India, and separating out of phone rooms between offices, cities, states, countries, and continents, the service gets cheaper, slower, and less responsive and OH SO PROFITABLE that Donald Trump gets turned on just thinking about it!!!!!!!
The Beginning of Corporations: The End of Competence
We all know intuitively that corporations are incompetent. We have all been on hold for hours attempting to fix a typo made by a data entry professional in India that the corporation refuses to accept was a typo. This is how profits are made. Hopefully, the customer will eventually give up and pay instead of risking having their credit ruined after months of playing three hour long phone tag with the behemoth on the other end.
The corporation is designed to be incompetent. The corporation is a legal construct that does one thing. It makes it (very nearly) impossible to hold shareholders responsible for the losses of the corporation, and if shareholders aren't responsible (and they are the only ones with any power) than no one is responsible. It means that shareholders can invest $500 and the only thing that they may lose is that same $500, while potentially earning much much more. The shareholders hire the board of directors and the board hires everyone else. In the modern world, the shareholders are usually corporations themselves who are equally unaccountable and incompetent. The shareholders are large banks that vote on behalf of their own customers. The banks have a DUTY to make as much profit as they can for their customers. In order to do that, they have an OBLIGATION to find board members that ruthlessly chase after profits. That is a legal obligation. If they don't do that, they can actually be sued. The board is REQUIRED to hire a president and staff who all are interested in only one thing... net profits.
Nobody is accountable to anything except for profits, regardless of how they make profits. The only thing that is standing in the way of all that money is the customer. Thus, a corporation that knows that asbestos or the Pinto is killing people is legally obligated to decide whether or not it should continue to kill people based solely on the cost of litigating the wrongful death suits versus the cost of changing the design of the Pinto or recalling asbestos. Thus are corporations murderers, murdering solely for profit. In America, we would execute a person that killed hundreds of people motivated solely by profits, but yet Ford continues to exist because it is a corporation and thus all the shareholders, the bosses of the bosses of the bosses, are entirely protected for their homicides.
Get Corporations Out of Health Care
The only way to make health care accountable is to keep corporations as far away from it as possible, and this makes sense. Many of our ancestors died attempting to bring democracy to decision making in the United States, yet the right now wishes to have us remove all democratic decisions from our choices in health care. The truth is that democratic methods are dangerous and scary but they are the best method we have been able to determine to make any kind of good faith society wide decisions. If we admit that health care is a society wide problem then we must admit that health care requires a society wide solution. The only way to have a society wide solution is through democracy, that premise is the one on which America is founded.
Corporations are Unsustainable
We see everyday that corporations are unsustainable. Just this year, the U.S. Government, and the many other governments throughout the world, have had to swoop in and bail out thousands of corporations which were failing. The U.S. Government, in substantially the same form that it stands today, has outlasted almost every corporation in the world, and has done so with such amazing success that even today there is no threat (despite what Glen Beck may desire) that the U.S. will not be a beacon of hope and freedom for huddled masses throughout the world. Meanwhile, corporations are constantly going into bankruptcy and folding into one another, or merely liquidating and disappearing. If we rely on corporations for necessities like health care, we will are relying on some of the most fragile organizations on earth. The moment that a corporation stops making enough profit (that means more than just profit, but profit mixed with greed), the corporation will raise its prices or merely leave the market. That is the job of a corporation; maximizing profit at the expense of its customers, its government, and all moral and ethical considerations.
Corporations are Unaccountable
We all know that corporations don't want to listen to their customers. Although corporations make it out to seem as though their customers are their friends, in fact corporations and customers are necessarily opposed. As competing entities entering into one contract, each party necessarily attempts to get as much out of the contract as it can. Verizon and Comcast cable seem like they are on your side when they lobby congress to implement fewer controls on internet distribution, but they have ultimately charged more in the United States for broadband internet than in any other country in the world, including island nations with limited resources. That is because the position of customer to corporation is naturally hostile. The fact that they have to woo you in order to ensure that you buy from their corporation is meaningless because advertising does the wooing and advertising is purposefully misleading.
Of course, corporations are supposed to be unaccountable. It's impossible to make any serious money unless the corporation treats the customer as though they are used, spent and discarded goods. If the corporation sells a service, then it will attempt to cultivate the customer, like a neglected house plant that you hope doesn't die. Occasionally, and for a short amount of time only, a corporation will make a good faith effort to hire enough customer service staff and offer the best product at the best possible price. The corporation gets some word of mouth, and attains incredible loyalty for merely making the least bit of good faith effort, for merely showing up at the party. But eventually, the economy must contract and the corporation has to do something to cut costs. Maybe the first two or three economic down turns the corporation rides the wave, maybe eventually it cuts services or stops taking as many risks. But at some point, the shareholders (who are lean and anxious for profits) vote in a new board of directors, who vote in a new president (often in a hostile takeover situation) and the new president is desperate to keep his (usually male) job. In order to keep his job, he must appease the board immediately, and the board must appease the shareholders, so the new president must make cuts and raise profits and pull dividends immediately. The fastest way to do that is to cut from the customer service budget. With each computerized telephone answering service, and redirection to India, and separating out of phone rooms between offices, cities, states, countries, and continents, the service gets cheaper, slower, and less responsive and OH SO PROFITABLE that Donald Trump gets turned on just thinking about it!!!!!!!
The Beginning of Corporations: The End of Competence
We all know intuitively that corporations are incompetent. We have all been on hold for hours attempting to fix a typo made by a data entry professional in India that the corporation refuses to accept was a typo. This is how profits are made. Hopefully, the customer will eventually give up and pay instead of risking having their credit ruined after months of playing three hour long phone tag with the behemoth on the other end.
The corporation is designed to be incompetent. The corporation is a legal construct that does one thing. It makes it (very nearly) impossible to hold shareholders responsible for the losses of the corporation, and if shareholders aren't responsible (and they are the only ones with any power) than no one is responsible. It means that shareholders can invest $500 and the only thing that they may lose is that same $500, while potentially earning much much more. The shareholders hire the board of directors and the board hires everyone else. In the modern world, the shareholders are usually corporations themselves who are equally unaccountable and incompetent. The shareholders are large banks that vote on behalf of their own customers. The banks have a DUTY to make as much profit as they can for their customers. In order to do that, they have an OBLIGATION to find board members that ruthlessly chase after profits. That is a legal obligation. If they don't do that, they can actually be sued. The board is REQUIRED to hire a president and staff who all are interested in only one thing... net profits.
Nobody is accountable to anything except for profits, regardless of how they make profits. The only thing that is standing in the way of all that money is the customer. Thus, a corporation that knows that asbestos or the Pinto is killing people is legally obligated to decide whether or not it should continue to kill people based solely on the cost of litigating the wrongful death suits versus the cost of changing the design of the Pinto or recalling asbestos. Thus are corporations murderers, murdering solely for profit. In America, we would execute a person that killed hundreds of people motivated solely by profits, but yet Ford continues to exist because it is a corporation and thus all the shareholders, the bosses of the bosses of the bosses, are entirely protected for their homicides.
Get Corporations Out of Health Care
The only way to make health care accountable is to keep corporations as far away from it as possible, and this makes sense. Many of our ancestors died attempting to bring democracy to decision making in the United States, yet the right now wishes to have us remove all democratic decisions from our choices in health care. The truth is that democratic methods are dangerous and scary but they are the best method we have been able to determine to make any kind of good faith society wide decisions. If we admit that health care is a society wide problem then we must admit that health care requires a society wide solution. The only way to have a society wide solution is through democracy, that premise is the one on which America is founded.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)